Lana, in his discussion of Inferno xiii offers this explanation for the punishment of the souls here based on an Aristotelian model of the soul:
Or fa tale trasmutazion Dante per allegoria, ch’elli dice: l’omo quando è nel mondo è animale razionale, sensitivo e vegetativo: quando ancide sé stesso, el conferisce a cotale morte solo la possanza de l’anima razionale e sensitiva, e però c’hanno colpa di tale offesa son prive di quelle due possanze, romanigle solo la vegetative; sí che di uomini si tramutano in arbori che sono animali vegetativi solo.52
[Now Dante makes this transformation allegorically; so that he says: man when he is in the world is animal, rational, sensible and vegetative: when he kills himself, he consigns to death only the rational and sensitive power of the soul, and since the suicides are guilty of such an offence, they are deprived of
52 Lana, I, p. 411. A similar explanation is found in Benvenuto’s comment on Inferno xiii, though with rather strange reasoning: ‘Modo isti non possunt dici habuisse animam rationalem, quia ratio semper fugit mortem…’ [But they cannot be said to have had a rational soul, because reason always flees from death…] (I, p. 424).
those two powers, only the vegetative is left to them; so that from men they are transformed into trees which are vegetative creatures only.]
Lana is given to some imprecisions, and it is not clear that ‘per allegoria’ is the right mode in which to read this, but the explanation does make partial sense. Where there is a problem, which he seems not to notice, is that the rational soul does not die with the body, and that is the essential nature of the punishment of the suicides, the removal of the sensible element, the body, so that the rational is imprisoned in a vegetative form. The text of Inferno xiii does not describe the condition of these souls in Aristotelian or scholastic terminology, but Thomas Aquinas in Paradiso xiii does outline the order and hierarchy of creation in his lengthy speech to Dante:
‘Quindi discende a l’ultime potenze giù d’atto in atto, tanto divenendo, che più non fa che brevi contingenze;
e queste contingenze essere intendo le cose generate, che produce
con seme e sanza seme il ciel movendo’. (Par., xiii. 61–66)
[Thence it descends from act to act down to the last potencies, finally becoming such that it makes only fleeting contingencies: and by these contingencies I mean the things that are generated, which the heavens produce, with seed and without seed, by their motion.]
This takes us back again to Pier whose soul is rained down like a seed into the wood of the suicides where it then grows into a plant (Inf., xiii. 94–100).
Here Paradiso xiii sheds some light on what is happening in Inferno xiii, though there is no link with Purgatorio xiii.
Il pruno
Although Pier is often casually referred to as being a tree (we can see the term
‘arbori’ in Lana’s commentary) Dante uses the term ‘pruno’ [thornbush], when he reaches out to break off the twig, ‘e colsi un ramicel da un gran pruno’ [and [I] plucked a small branch from a great thornbush] (Inf., xiii.
32), and when Pier himself talks about the resurrection of the body and reveals that the bodies of the suicides will hang on the bushes ‘ciascuno al prun de l’ombra sua molesta’ [each on the thornbush of the soul that harmed it] (Inf., xiii. 108). The word ‘pruno’ is used by Dante only four times
in the Commedia, twice here, once in Paradiso xiii, and, unfortunately, not in Purgatorio at all but in Paradiso xxiv.53 This final instance is so suggestive that we might be forgiven for momentarily stepping outside of our allotted cantos to have a look.
‘Se ‘l mondo si rivolse al cristianesmo’, diss’io, ‘sanza miracoli, quest’uno
è tal, che li altri non sono il centesmo:
ché tu intrasti povero e digiuno in campo, a seminar la buona pianta
che fu già vite e ora è fatta pruno’. (Par., xxiv. 106–11)
[‘If the world turned to Christianity’, said I, ‘without miracles, this one miracle is such that the others are not a hundredth of it: for you came into the field poor and hungry to sow the good plant, formerly a vine but now become a thornbush’.]
This is during the examination on faith by St Peter in the Heaven of the fixed stars. Dante is talking about the Church, which should have been a vine but instead is a thornbush. The souls in Heaven, the ‘alta corte santa’
[the high and holy court] (Par., xxiv. 112), so another court, this time high and holy unlike the envy-ridden court which led to the downfall of Pier (Inf., xiii. 64–69), praises God for Dante’s statement. The description at Paradiso, xxiv. 111 encapsulates almost perfectly the situation of Pier della Vigna, once a vine now a thornbush. This example is a reminder of the particular difficulty for the vertical readings confronted with the wide-ranging infra-textuality of the Commedia, which does not rigidly follow its own well-defined schemata.
Nevertheless, a return to the cantos xiii, and Paradiso, does have an interesting thread to pick up. In Thomas’s final piece of advice to Dante, not to jump to conclusions or make premature judgements, we find the third use of the term pruno. This is the conclusion of the canto:
53 Most of the lecturae of Inferno xiii do not mention these verses in Paradiso xxiv. The verses are briefly noted by Villa in her lectura of Inferno xiii (p. 191), and in more general studies of Pier, such as Anthony K. Cassell, ‘Pier della Vigna’s Metamorphosis: Iconography and History’, in Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio: Studies in the Italian Trecento in Honor of Charles S.
Singleton, ed. by Aldo S. Bernardo and Anthony L. Pellegrini (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1983), pp. 31–76 (pp. 35–36); and Muresu, pp. 77, 82–83.
‘Non sien le genti, ancor, troppo sicure a giudicar, sì come quei che stima
le biade in campo pria che sien mature;
ch’i’ ho veduto tutto ‘l verno prima lo prun mostrarsi rigido e feroce, poscia portar la rosa in su la cima;
e legno vidi già dritto e veloce correr lo mar per tutto suo cammino, perire al fine a l’intrar de la foce.
Non creda donna Berta e ser Martino, per vedere un furare, altro offerere, vederli dentro al consiglio divino;
ché quel può surgere, e quel può cadere’. (Par., xiii. 130–42)
[And let not people be too sure to judge, like one who appraises the oats in the field before they are ripe: for I have seen all the previous winter long the thornbush appear rigid and fierce, but later bear the rose upon its tip, and I have seen a ship run straight and swift across the sea for all its course, only to perish at last when entering the port. Let not dame Bertha and messer Martin believe, because they see one stealing, another offering, that they see them within God’s counsel, for that one can rise up, and this one can fall.]
The final verse might well sum up the life of Pier and also the final repentance of Sapia. Although this could apply so generally to the Commedia as to encompass all souls in Inferno and Purgatorio, both these characters include quite detailed accounts of aspects of their earthly lives, a spectacular fall from grace in Pier’s case, and a very blunt confession of sin by Sapia, albeit a vice not yet fully purged and which for some readers seems to exert its influence as she speaks.54 If we read the Paradiso xiii examples more closely they can connect with the two characters; the ‘prun’ which brings forth a rose might well suggest that Pier’s suicide was a hasty misjudgment and not an end to his problems. If he had indeed been ‘giusto’ [just] and not made himself ‘ingiusto’ [unjust] (Inf., xiii. 72) perhaps he would have been destined for the ‘candida rosa’ [white rose] (Par., xxxi. 1) in which Dante is
54 Conte mentions Sapia’s ‘aggressività urtante, bellicosa’ [provocative and belligerent aggressiveness] (Conte, p. 139). Volpi finds Sapia to be the only soul in Purgatorio to offer a confession of this kind, ‘a narrare con tale precisione la propria vicenda’ [to tell her own story with such precision], making her seem more like the souls in Inferno (Volpi,
‘Dante tra superbia e invidia’, p. 389). On the other hand, Wingell argues for a more sympathetic interpretation of Sapia (Wingell, pp. 137–38).
shown the souls of the blessed. Some commentators, including Benvenuto da Imola, describe Pier as a sort of anti-Boethius, and Boethius himself happens to be numbered among those in the Heaven of the Sun, though not in our canto xiii (Par., x. 124–29).55 The other example of hasty judgement which Aquinas mentions, the ship sinking in port, might be linked to the concluding verses of Purgatorio xiii, though perhaps much less obviously in this case. There Sapia delivers a criticism of ‘li ammiragli’ [the admirals]
(Purg., xiii. 154) who have placed their hopes in money-making ventures which will come to nothing. The purchase of the sea port of Talamone and the search for the Diana, an underground stream, to provide Siena with sea access at least has a general nautical connection with the second example of the ship apparently safe in port.