Cato and Statius are Redeemed

Why are these two pagan figures redeemed in Dante's comedy? 

First, grace breaks the power of the law. 

For sin is not to have any power over you, since you are not under the law but under grace. What then? Shall we sin because we are not under the law but under grace? Of course not! (Romans 6:14-15)

So, the work of salvation follows from the fact that only one mortal person has ever lived according to the law. That person's willing submission to both the law and the injustice of his martyrdom created a path for the rest of humanity, which has broken the law to varying degrees, to be saved by grace. This is a mystery, even in our own case, much less in the lives of others. 

Therefore:  Cato is no more a sinner in some way than are any of the rest of us. The grace is not our will, but God's. We do well to submit our will and practice it through a quest for humility.

Second, No rules govern where grace can be dispensed. 

It seems clear that both Cato and Statius are pagans, even if Statius claims to have had a private conversion. Shouldn't the sacraments be a vital part to salvation? We are given examples of the excommunicated and also persons who wait to repent with their last breath. These groups also get saved, so the competition is specifically NOT about earning grace. Grace is a gift that is freely given. The sacraments may help, but since grace is a gift, there is no negotiation of terms.  What about those that don't get grace? This does complicate the matter for Virgil who is without hope, so I yet need to figure out what is going on with hope, is this the reciprocal component of grace? Must one hope to receive grace? Why didn't Virgil get the same grace as did the other classical writers Cato and Statius? Is it possible that Virgil's progress in purgatory foreshadows a peculiar act of grace that will come for him?  Again, he seems to have worked harder by leading Dante through hell and accompanying him in purgatory, so perhaps we are again reminded that there are no rules for grace that submit themselves to our understanding. He can't earn redemption if it is always a gift. 

Therefore: Redemption is a unique gift from Creator to created and implies a special relationship. 

Third, Each one of us has a relationship to God. 

 

I think that this is the main reason that we are given Cato and Statius in Purgatory. 

I) Cato: Cato, for his part, is an icon of liberty. His suicide is more like Japanese seppuku than a suicide of dispair. Cato resisted tyranny and to be captured would have been subordinated in a way that took away his freedom. It could be that Dante is suggesting a parallel with Christ, who refused to yield to a) Caesar b) the Chief Priest c) a display of divine power. By allowing his own death he may have outlined what the ideal notion of liberty is, and Dante might want us to better understand that by comparison to Cato. This kind of liberty is radical and goes against all pragmatic notions of self-preservation. 

II) Statius: Statius wrote the Thebaid which is inspired by Sophocles' work describing the historic myths of Thebes. Oedipus Rex being the most famous of Sophocles' works. Statius, therefore, is working with a sense of liberty and how pride interacts with our fate. By way of doing disservice to the complexity of the story, Oedipus is given a prophesy and thinks that he can overcome his fate. The fact that your fate is larger than your will gives us some interesting questions about how our pride works together with fate to bring about our destruction. 

This could be an interesting commentary on the doctrine of predestination. Since we are at liberty to act, but not at liberty to control the results of our actions, there is a role for something larger than us. The role of prophesy is not a prophylactic against fate (it rather warns us of what is going to occur), so there is a real question about how much of our fate is subject to change. In a Christian sense, cooperation with God's will requires humility. Perhaps humility is a way into changing our fate for the better. In purgatory, perhaps we insufficiently yield our will to God. When our lives are over, we have suffered the results of our pride in our own life, even if that is not enough to prevent us from ultimately being redeemed. We rest in purgatory until our will is conformed, finally, to that of our creator. Only in this sense are we without pride.

III) Combination: This discussion, then, ties Statius and Cato together. The fullest expression of liberty is to surrender the pride that makes us willful. In most presentations of liberty the ability to exercise our will is what we understand by liberty. In this sense, true liberation is freedom from our fate, in a Sopheclean sense. We avoid the TRAP of our will which necessarily ends poorly for us by surrendering our will to God's will. At this point we are perfected in a way where we want what is truly beautiful. When our will's are confirmed, what we get is what we want and we want what we should get. This is a type of liberty that represents non-tragic flourishing, the opposite of Oedipus, but it might only look like liberty to those that can imagine a type of humility that surrenders the will. Since God has a unique plan for all of us, we will flourish to the greatest degree when we surrender to his will. 

Conclusion: 

Dante uses a powerful set of classical influences to unpack a problem of will in purgatory. There is no formula. Each person has to have a relationship of love with their creator. This is possible through fulfillment of the law by grace in Jesus's sacrifice. The particular relationship is only found by surrendering will to something greater than one's self. Dante uses politics and science in purgatory to suggest concern over the movements in history and human knowledge. The lesson seems to be that those temporal concerns that are not subordinated to God's will fail. The same is true in each of our lives. Purgatory is a special place where sinners who do not deserve to be redeemed are redeemed and there are no clear boundaries on how this will play out. We know that everyone in purgatory has hope. We know that purgatory is a place where the will is subordinated. How that looks and what that experience will be for each person seems to be Sopheclean in the sense that it is particular to each soul. When we resist through pride we get what is not good for us, and tragedy is the result. True liberty is aligning one's own will with what the designer had in mind for that soul. Evidence of this might be Dante's poem which resulted in something great that can inspire others to follow the pilgrim's journey and be more like the poet.