Dante: Pilgrimage, Purgatory, and Instant Pudding

Today, May 9, 2022, I begin my pilgrimage in Saint Jean Pied de Port with the intent of walking the approximately 476 miles to Santiago. A pilgrimage. Me, the agnostic. What am I nuts? Over the past few weeks, I have been asking myself what on earth possessed me to make such a commitment.

It all began innocently enough. About ten years ago, while cycling with my friend Robert, we talked about the Camino de Santiago. Of course, we discussed the movie The Way that had been released the previous year. After promising to make the trip together, I promptly forgot the commitment but continued envisioning myself on the Camino once I retired. I told people that if I retired on a Friday, I would be on the Camino the following Monday. Then amid the Covid lockdown, growing disenchanted with my work, I decided to end my career in the software industry to pursue my passion, writing. Although not technically retired, the change gave me the freedom to take on the Camino. So, I began to train and plan.

It was during this planning that I asked myself the most obvious question. Why? When I first discussed this with Robert, it sounded like a neat idea, a cool thing to do. However, as the Camino evolved from a neat idea to a reality, I realized I had better come up with a better reason than just being a cool thing to do. The time. The training. The expense. This was a real commitment. So, I had to give the question “why” a good think.

At dinner parties – I knew I was a grownup when I started going to dinner parties – when asked why I would say I was doing penance for all the sins I had committed throughout my career. I would add that when you consider all of the things I have done, a five-hundred-mile walk is a pretty good deal. That would get a good laugh. My flippant remark, however, revealed a works-oriented view of salvation. If I do this or that for God, he, in turn, pays me for my work with salvation. This wrong way of thinking (see the book of Romans for detail) is but one end of a spectrum of ideas concerning salvation.

The other end of the spectrum is what I refer to as Instant Pudding Salvation. I have always liked tapioca pudding. When I was a boy[1], if I wanted tapioca pudding for dessert, I would ask my mother the evening before or at least that morning. She needed time to make it, heating and blending the ingredients, letting it stand to thicken, and putting it in the refrigerator to cool. During this process, the elements that comprised the pudding made something wholly new. Something greater than the sum of its parts. Something with a unique texture and flavor.

I recently mentioned this to my wife, who, being the good wife she is, tried to recreate what my mother had done. Being a product of our time, she whipped up a batch from a box in minutes. Although I appreciated her efforts, I wouldn’t say I liked it. It tasted artificial, nothing like what my sainted Sicilian mother once made. The flavor was kind of the same, but there was something plastic about it. The texture was smooth, maybe a little bit too smooth. So while I certainly appreciate my wife’s efforts, it wasn’t real pudding.  

There is a way of looking at salvation that reminds me of that instant pudding. It is where all you need do is say, “Dear Lord Jesus, please come into my life as my personal Lord and savior,” and poof, you are in. Your name is written in the book of life. You need not worry about anything. You are in the kingdom. The thing is, like instant pudding, it just doesn’t taste the same. We all know the taste of instant pudding salvation. It has become such a cliché that I am hesitant to mention it. How often have we met Christians filled with hate who can’t wait to say something evil about their neighbors, who see sin even when there is none? They may attend church regularly, receive the sacraments, and even run around doing good works, but there is no inward manifestation of Christian love. So while one may write this off as an anti-Christian trope, there is a reason that non-Christians say there is no hatred that burns so hot as the hatred labeled Christian love.

For salvation to be real, there needs to be a putting off of the old man, to quote Paul. If we are to unite with the Holy God, we must be holy. There must be a transformational process. If a person has spent their life behaving or seeing the world in a certain way, a simple little fourteen-word prayer will not transform them. It is a process that can quite often be long and difficult.

This brings us to Dante. In The Divine Comedy, there are two Dantes. First, there is Dante the poet, who wrote the greatest work of western literature. Then there is Dante the pilgrim, the man about whom the poem was written. Dante, the poet, could have only written The Divine Comedy by first being Dante, the pilgrim. Through this pilgrimage, Dante was able to develop this proper perspective. Understanding this, we see that Dante’s journey is the epitome of pilgrimage.

Although Wikipedia is much derided, it provides a good definition of pilgrimage. It says; a pilgrimage is a journey, often into an unknown or foreign place, where a person goes in search of new or expanded meaning about their self, others, nature, or a higher good, through the experience. It can lead to a personal transformation, after which the pilgrim returns to their daily life. I would also add to this description that a pilgrimage is more than just a vacation. It is something which is difficult, uncomfortable, and tests us.

This is precisely Dante’s journey through the afterlife. In addition, embedded within The Divine Comedy, Dante provides an account of the pilgrimage that other souls take, Purgatory. Unfortunately, most people quickly lose interest after The Inferno, the first canticle of The Divine Comedy, missing out on Dante’s vision of Purgatory.

Before reading Dante, like most people, I thought of Purgatory as kind of a mini hell. It was the Residence Inn of perdition, long-term but not permanent torment for those who did not quite make the cut. Dante presents us with another picture. He describes Purgatory as part of heaven. To enter Purgatory proper, one must pass through heaven’s gate, where an angel sits with the keys given to Peter. Once inside the gate, the process of change, of putting down the old man, begins.

Dante describes Purgatory as a mountain with seven terraces. On each terrace, a soul ascending the mountain to heaven undergoes a process to reshape their inner selves. At first glance, we can misunderstand these experiences as punishments similar to those experienced by the damned in hell. However, what the souls experience in Purgatory greatly differs from what is experienced in hell. In hell, as we know from the quotation above the gate, there is no hope for those who have entered. What they experience in hell is the natural result of their sinful behavior. In Purgatory, it is the exact opposite. In Purgatory, it is all hope, hope in God’s love, hope in the transformational power of God’s grace. It is the heating, stirring, and chilling of the pudding to remake the soul into something new, something holy, something that can come into union with God.

The agnostic in me is quick to emphasize that pilgrimage is not something solely owned by religion or the religious. The objective of a pilgrimage is to gain a new perspective, experience growth, and receive enlightenment. We seldom take note of the world around us in our daily lives. The people and things we see every day become so integrated into our conscious we barely notice them. How many husbands have failed to notice when their wife does something different with their hair? The demands of work and family life leave us little time to contemplate who we are, where we have been, and where we are going.

The difficulty of a pilgrimage is the heat the transforms us. It is in testing that we build faith. By going to an unknown or foreign place, we are forced to notice even the most minor things around us. Freed from the regular social connections, we establish new bonds with people who are most probably different than those we know in our normal daily lives. We are given the luxury of quiet to contemplate the world and our role in it. We are allowed to re-evaluate and forge a new who we are through these changed perspectives.

So, I have an answer to the why question. Growth. While I am an agnostic, I am open to change, open to meeting God along the way. While I look forward to my time alone, time spent in my own head, I am also anxious to meet other pilgrims from other places and professions. While I am a bit frightened about walking through a country where I don’t speak the language or have my normal support systems, I am ready to have my faith tested.

To put it more succinctly, I hope to die on the Camino. I hope that the old man I am dies to be reborn into a better man than I am today.

Buon Camino

To read more about Italian and Italian-American culture read my book, Italianità: The Essence of Being Italian and Italian-American.

[1] I have noticed the older I get, the more frequently I find myself saying “when I was a boy.” Slowly an old curmudgeon is taking over my mind and body. Soon I expect to find myself in the front of my house shouting “you gosh darn kids! Get off my lawn.”