Dante’s Conversion of Statius and the Limits of Earthly Knowledge

 In the Purgatorio, both Dante the pilgrim and readers of Dante’s Commedia are repeatedly surprised by apparent violations of the “rules” of orthodox medieval Christianity, including those forbidding the salvation of suicides, pagans, and excommunicates. Perhaps most shocking of all, just after an earthquake shakes Mt. Purgatory, Dante encounters the shade of the epic poet Statius, who turns out to have been a secret Christian; moreover, Statius tells Dante that he converted to Christianity and to virtuous behavior through (mis)reading Virgil’s pagan poetry rather than by reading Christian scriptures.

       In this paper, I argue that Dante’s repeated allusions to Statius’s Thebaid and Achilleid in the Inferno lead his readers to believe that Statius, like Virgil, may have a permanent place among the damned.  Thus, Dante’s decision to portray Statius among the saved souls in Purgatorio not only overturns a reader’s previous knowledge about the Roman poet, but also presuppositions encouraged by Dante himself.  In portraying Statius as spiritually saved by reading Virgil’s Aeneid and Fourth Eclogue, Dante radically adapts the model of “conversion by book” provided by St. Augustine’s Confessions, in which Pauline moral precepts had inspired Augustine to renounce licentiousness and embrace God.  Furthermore, Statius’s hermeneutics and pneumatology in the Purgatorio contain other interesting echoes of Augustine.   Finally, as Dante’s Purgatorio traces the transformation of Statius from pagan poet to  Christian convert to purged spirit expounding the mystery of the incarnation of the individual human soul, the poem meditates on the limits and imperfection of earthly knowledge.