Purgatory is the Suffering Church

Dante's comedy can be rendered into three parts that correspond to various notions of the church and the kingdom of God. 
  • The Church Militant  - Earth
  • The Church Penitent - Purgation 
  • The Church Triumphant  - Heaven (Communion of Saints)
The church militant is the church overshadowed by Mars. In Canto 2 of purgatory the white fog is illuminated by the rising sun and Mars is on the horizon obscured in its redness by the fog and the light. 

And behold! Right there, in the mists of the morning,
Like Mars’ glowing red through the fog
And suspended low above the sea’s western edge [...] -- Translation by Mark Scarbrough 

In this passage Mars is mentioned, the reference is obscure, but some credence is given to the idea that Mars represents the church Militant here by reading the unfinished Convivo by Dante (Scarbrough). 

This made me think that the three things being mentioned here might be a compass point for understanding the transition from Inferno to Purgatory and the vision of where this journey is leading toward paradise. 

Dante's Architecture

The architecture of this poem is set up to help us reflect on our own pilgrimage toward heaven. It is notable in Dante's geography that both hell and purgatory are on this earth. The geography of hell is one of distance from God and making that take place under the crust of the earth (and even the center of the earth) helps to reinforce that distance. This passage in canto II of purgatory, upon reflection, makes me think more about how inferno is a trip behind enemy lines. What we see there is the church militant, but we see the battle from behind enemy lines. We see that the participants that have left the ranks of the Church Triumphant bear the scars of this betrayal. The devils are twisted angels as much as the souls of the damned are twisted versions of created beings. 

To ascend to purgatory is not to cross the enemy lines and begin the battle from the other side. It isn't a war in that sense. The battle injuries we saw in inferno are self-imposed. There is no opposing side that is aimed at hurting the others. In purgatory souls are becoming cleansed. The souls are way to focused on that task to worry about what the sinners are doing. The battle lines are totally in the heads of those that are without hope and beyond the threshold of this mountain. 

As we see Dante walk up to the slopes of the mountain of purgatory, we observe that Mars (the God of war) is being completely obscured by the fog. This fog cannot completely obscure Mars and its redness, so the fog must tell us something about purgatory. The souls that still bear the residual scars of sin are still able to be influenced by these sins and self-inflicted wounds. The love of God which will restore each person to a state without scars will make it possible to completely remove this influence. The process of obscuring the church militant beings in purgatory and the church penitential is preparing the way for that progress. 

At the top of the mountain we return to that state of being before the fall. In a way this has brought the pilgrim full circle. This is where man would be had the scars of sin never imposed limits on being in communion with God. The church on earth reaches this state by approximation through holy communion, but only with the merest tangent kiss. When the job of church penitent is complete, then too the church triumphant will obscure the need even for this suffering. The souls embrace suffering in this way in order to end suffering. They fully enter into the example of Christ whose suffering was necessary in order to transcend and eliminate all suffering in the end. 

This is the role of the rising sun in canto II, as I see it. The light that is just now rising allows for the progress of souls. With progress comes a promise of entering in heaven. The souls in hell are stuck where they are. The obsessively gravitate toward their own sin and cannot let it go. The souls in purgatory are bound for heaven and embrace only the suffering that will remove the scars of sin. The sun is the light that allows for this process and therefore the sun represents in this scene the light of heaven. The higher the sun goes, the more the mists of purgatory will obscure Mars. The geography is set up to return us to the church Triumphant through clarity, truth, and singular focus on the divine. 

The structure

Dante is careful to give us a way of seeing our lives on this earth as being caught between the desire to make it to heaven and the desire to rely on our own reasoning. The church Militant fights all sorts of sin, but does so by pointing at the truth. We see our sin and feel the injuries that the light of heaven imposes on what we had opportunistically justified and had rationalized. Standing next to truth we see that sin has deformed us. The only way to eliminate this pain is to start to heal. We have to correct the bad habits and return to the world with fresh minds and fresh hearts that are no longer corrupted. This is hard. At that point, however, we start to see that there is a goal and we want to pursuit it with greater vigor. This honest assent of the mountain of purgatory is both release from hell, and a source of the pain felt by people without hope and without grace that have not yet turned away from the celebration of the sin of this world. The church is there to help us progress, but it is still full of those that have been deeply deformed by the scars of their own sin. 

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