Chronicles II of Dante:
The Reflection of Life
Events of Man.
Part II of Tale Two
Jimmy Loong
27/7/21 to 11/8/21
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purgatory_(Dante)
Part
Five (Second segment of Dante’s Purgatory Adaptation)
Introduction
and Notes to the last passages of Tale I (Dante’s Purgatory Adaption).
Purgatory, the
condition, process, or place of purification or temporary punishment in which,
according to medieval Christian and Roman Catholic belief, the souls of those who die
in a state of grace are made ready for heaven.
In general, the origins of purgatory may be
sought in the worldwide practice of praying for the dead and caring for their
needs. Such ministrations presuppose that the dead are in a temporal state
between earthly life and their final abode and that they can
benefit from the generosity or transferred merit of the living. Purgatory answers
the human need to believe in a just and merciful cosmos, one in which ordinary
people, neither hardened sinners nor
perfect saints, may undergo correction, balance life’s accounts, satisfy
old debts, cleanse accumulated defilements, and heal troubled memories. Since
these are universal concerns, there are parallels to the Christian conception
of purgatory in many religious and cultural traditions.
In general, the origins of purgatory may be
sought in the worldwide practice of praying for the dead and caring for their
needs. Such ministrations presuppose that the dead are in a temporal state
between earthly life and their final abode and that they can
benefit from the generosity or transferred merit of the living. Purgatory
answers the human need to believe in a just and merciful cosmos, one in which
ordinary people, neither hardened sinners nor
perfect saints, may undergo correction, balance life’s accounts, satisfy
old debts, cleanse accumulated defilements, and heal troubled memories. Since
these are universal concerns, there are parallels to the Christian conception
of purgatory in many religious and cultural traditions.
All
Souls’ Day, established as a liturgical feast in the early 11th century by
the Benedictine abbey of Cluny, encouraged popular devotion to the
souls in purgatory and contributed to the rise of folk customs that
were analogous in some respects to the Chinese Ghost Festival,
including English mumming plays, soul cakes (cakes offered in
exchange for prayers for the dead), and bonfires for the dead. A parallel
development in Judaism is the mourner’s recitation of
the Kaddish prayer sanctifying God’s name. The practice arose in the
12th century among Ashkenazim of the Rhineland, who kept lists of
their dead in Memorbücher and recited the Kaddish to help the dead
through the interim period of purification after death.
According
to the French historian Jacques Le Goff, the conception of
purgatory as a physical place dates to the 12th century, the heyday
of medieval otherworld-journey narratives, and pilgrims’ tales
about St. Patrick’s Purgatory, a cavelike entrance to purgatory on a
remote island in Northern Ireland. As late as 1220, however, Caesarius of
Heisterbach, a Cistercian monk and preacher, thought that purgatory could be in
several places at once. With his Purgatorio, in which the “second kingdom”
of the afterlife is a seven-story mountain situated at the antipodes to
Jerusalem, Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) created a poetic synthesis of
theology, Ptolemaic cosmology, and moral psychology depicting the
gradual purification of the image and likeness of God in the human soul. Other
works of literature in which purgatory themes loom large
are Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1603), the traditional British folk
ballad “A Lyke-Wake Dirge,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of
the Ancient Mariner” (1797–98), John Henry Newman’s “The Dream of
Gerontius” (1865), and the entire European ghost-story tradition,
most notably Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.
(https://www.britannica.com/topic/purgatory-Roman-Catholicism)
1/8/21
One
of the challenges of doing this write is the adaption of the infamous tale,
into one of mine. I am to present this for different readers in a different
era, hence I need to refine my contents here to adjust for that. Dante’s
Purgatory was not researched widely or adapted unlike Inferno and that gave me
more to find and read to frame my contents. And unlike Inferno, I am
interpreting more of the translated works and applying my plots to the flow,
altering the appearances and events.
And
it’s fun.
At
7000 words now with Canto XIV.
11/8/21
Done.
Canto XVIII at 20,977 words.
To publish here
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