So we speak and laugh and shape


The tears and the sighs of our breasts,


As they echoed on the mountain of purification.

Quindi parliamo e quindi ridiam noi;


quindi facciamo le lagrime e 'sospiri


che per lo monte aver sentiti puoi.

(Purgatorio XXV, 103-105)

For Dante, it is challenging, and perhaps even impossible, to think about humans without using physical terms.

Even in the afterlife, Dante insists on the physical nature of infernal torments, cleansing penance, and heavenly joys.

That a body is required in order to endure the torments of hell is comparatively intuitively understandable.

But it is only in the Purgatorio and there in these relatively late verses that we begin to understand the relational necessity of embodiment.

Our three-line, which reproduces an utterance of the Statius, forms the end of a lengthy theoretical exposition on

ombra

, the body of air, within the text. Statius' speech about the formation and animation of the fetus before birth and the formation of the air body after death, which literary scholars have long understood as a rather bulky and unnecessary digression, is of fundamental importance when it comes to understanding Dante's poetics, but above all to understand the central aspects of his ethics. The air body is a constitutive mechanism for the continuation of our human personhood after death, just as the embryonic body and the soul given into it are constitutive for our human existence at birth. The possibility of temporal and timeless expansion of personhood into Dante's afterworlds is based on the function of the air body to open up the ability for gestural and affective relationships.

Joyfully share suffering with others

However, this is not the first attempt in the poem to explain more precisely what this body of air is and - more importantly - what purposes it serves. Virgil had already said in the third chant of the Purgatorio that these bodies were there to suffer physical torments. However, it becomes painfully clear that Virgil does not fully understand the nature of the body of air or the full range of its possibilities. According to his presentation, they form the prerequisite for suffering and their essence cannot be fathomed with the powers of the mind. Statius revised this true but limited view 21 chants later. The Statius, purified of vices and standing in the full state of grace, can adequately explainwhat the air body and its wonderful abilities are and how it relates to the fetal body and soul.

According to his representation, the main task of the air body is to enable speech and gestures and thus communication.

He relates to others through words, smiles, tears and sighs.

Air bodies should not primarily cause suffering, their main task is to joyfully share the suffering with others, because as the purification process shows, the torments taken as penance do not isolate the sufferer from others, but bring him together with his neighbor.

Enriched forms of togetherness

The air body or “ombra” should not imitate the earthly body in a direct (and certainly not recognizable) way. It does not ensure distinctness through physical characteristics. Rather, it should enable the sociability and relationality of talking, laughing, crying and sighing. The air body makes wishes and feelings for other neighboring souls visible and takes on the full relational form of the adult soul, which has always been and is embodied and this could not be otherwise. The divine and natural humanity given to us before birth continues into death. Even at the moment of death, the meticulously described unity of the fetus remains, since the soul continues to be the bearer of the human and divine powers, which, once united,can no longer be separated from each other.

In the pandemic-induced isolation, I find it particularly encouraging to see Dante's Purgatorio as the place where “L'umano spirito si purga” (“Here the striving of the human spirit is purified”, Purg. I, 5), and thus as a huge laboratory to consider the relationality in which penitents find ways to live in their air body in order to redesign, enrich and develop their forms of being together with others.

In a way, this is the same work we all face today.

Heather Webb

teaches Italian at Cambridge and wrote, among other things, “Dante's Persons - An Ethics of the Transhuman” (Oxford University Press).

Translated from the English by

Michael Bischoff

.

All previous episodes of

our series can be found at www.faz.net/dante.