But I want to ask, is Virgil (or any human being) strictly speaking “apart from God’s grace”? I’ve always loved the integrative vision of Dante when it comes to the interrelationships of the Orders of Nature and Grace. Dante takes “common grace” and the divine institution of the Natural Order very seriously. And just because the Natural Order has fallen into sin doesn’t mean that it wasn’t established by God and is not still maintained by the gracious gift that is called Nature, including human nature.

In other words, for Dante it seems that conscience, reason, and the deep desire for moral virtue are common graces that God has instilled in the human race. And Virgil, more than anyone else in the poem (except perhaps Cato), has chosen these Natural gifts of grace as his highest goods. Dante shows him to have been right in doing so, and also tragically wrong. Because Virgil, like everyone else in the poem, is allowed to possess the good that he has chosen; he enjoys the fulfillment of what he had most yearned for in life: the rational vision of moral virtue (along Aristotelian lines, no less!). He chose in life, and he therefore instantiates, the commitment to natural reason and natural human goodness. Even if the moral virtues can only be renewed by the Grace available through Christ in the Church, nonetheless they will still be natural virtues: good citizenship, good parenting, the functions for which human nature is formed.

But there was of course a higher good and a higher source for the very reason Virgil loved, which he did not choose. You might ask how he could be judged for this when he did not know of the Christian God. But I think this is answered by his great poem, in which the epic poet turns his back on love and chooses civic duty, in the person of his hero who abandons Dido…. It isn’t only Aeneas who abandons Dido; the poem and the poet abandons her. You remember that in Confessions, Augustine identified himself with Dido, scanning the heavens for mercy in her despair, and said that he too was lost and apart from his true Beloved, beseeching the heavens for grace. Not Virgil. The highest good Dante’s Virgil ever saw or desired was rational virtue. The whole realm of something exceeding reason lay utterly beyond him.

What Virgil remained aloof from was Love. Not fatherly love or the love of the teacher, of course, which he has in spades, but passionately intense love for the Beloved. (In this Dante may not have been entirely fair to the profound sense of loss of the actual poet Virgil in his epic.) And perhaps this will sound, superficially, shocking, but I believe that for Dante, Virgil had had a chance and had refused it, when he had failed to identify himself with Dido as Augustine had done. He refused to yearn for something, as Dido did, that this world could never give to him, or her. He refused pity. He refused to be vulnerable, like a woman lamenting for the loss of love….

When Augustine experienced the loss of an earthy lover, it drove him to seek to love One who would never forsake him. But Virgil chose earthly fame and civic duty and good reputation over a passionate self-abandonment. (What would he have thought of a God who gave Himself over to such a suffering and extremity, I wonder? Dante’s Virgil always thinks of God as Judge and justice-giver, doesn’t he?) So Virgil had refused the Beatrician experience; the piercing of the heart by a glimpse of a worth beyond anything merely of this world…. Some critic or another has said that when Statius reaches the top of the mountain, he wouldn’t see Beatrice. He would see a Forest! Because as a pastoral poet it would have been the forest landscape that had been for him the Christ-event, just as the nine-year-old girl had been for Dante. Somewhere Virgil had had a chance too, and had turned away. (Or would have turned away, which amounts to the same thing….)

Each of the three sections of the poem are about persons receiving what they most desired. What they DESIRED, not what they earned. Virgil desired the blameless life of civic duty, Roman virtue, human nobility (like the Stoic Cato who greets the pilgrims at the foot of MT Purgatorio). Both these pagans had desired what amounted to a return of the human race to the Garden of Eden before the fall, and had rationally understood the nature of virtue and of vice, as Aristotle also had. But because Virgil had rationally understood, desired, chosen, “the good of reason,” however, doesn’t mean that he had fully achieved it in his own pagan life. I think that Dante presents him as able to “guide” Dante as Reason through the vices and the virtues and all the way to the top of the mountain of restoration, but the problem of course for the Thomist is the WILL, not the reason, and the actual pilgrims who are cleansed of the effects of sin and restored to soundness of WILL as they ascend the mountain have all passed through those initial red, white, and black steps whereby they enter into the Holy Church. (Virgil, to our grief, is not ascending to the Garden….)

So the WILL requires the supernatural aid of the sacramental life for the efficacy of the journey of renewal and the return to the state of human goodness represented by Adam and Eve’s Garden at the top. (Virgil is always a rational guide, not always a volitional guide; when pressed, he motivates Dante with the reminder of Beatrice! And when Dante will not pass through the gate of the City of Dis, which is to choose to open himself to the Nether Hell of his own heart, a divine messenger must accomplish the feat. REASON in its role as divine gift to the human race can see and understand the essential nature of evil and goodness and can envision the journey to moral soundness, but the WILL must be empowered, and so the actual ascent of the mountain is identified with the special graces available to Christians.

What’s really important here is that getting back to the Garden of Eden isn’t the goal of the Christian life. If we all achieved the perfect moral virtue that Adam and Eve lost, it wouldn’t mean a thing unless we had Love. The Mystery of the Church, the mystical Body of Christ, the “being blessed with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Him” is represented only in the third section of the poem. And all of that is entirely out of Virgil’s purview, because it is the realm of joy that is rooted in the divine suffering and passion; it is the ecstatic Romance of Christianity; it is everything that even Adam and Eve in the Garden did not know and did not possess — intimate union with God through Christ.

So it makes sense to me that the Inferno and the Purgatorio ultimately are concerned with human nature as instituted and maintained by common grace within the Order of Nature. The virtuous pagans put Christians to shame with their rational insight into the nature of the good life and the perversions of the good, the crimes against the state and the family and so on. And with the commitment of the best of them to the rational vision of moral virtue, as seen in the best of Stoicism or in Aristotelian ethics. Natural Reason and the Good as Reason knows it are naturally the guides to the descent of the human person into sin and the strivings of the human conscience toward natural virtue. Why should these be denied to the non-Christian?

Aquinas’s definition of God’s love is that He desires to fill each of His creatures with what is good, to the limit of its own capacity, and by this definition Virgil isgreatly loved by God. Virgil appropriately — from a Thomistic framework — presides over the journey of the human mind into deeper knowledge and understanding of the nature of sin and the corresponding nature of the virtues. He represents the goodness of the natural world in its own right as created and maintained by God despite the fall, and the goodness of human nature, too. He represents and speaks for “the good of reason” — and he does not desire a good beyond the very high good of reason. It is sufficient for him.

So I think Dante finesses the problem of how a human being could achieve genuine moral virtue without the supernatural aids of the Church, because it is not depicted that anyone has ever returned to the garden except by entering through the Church for that ascent. But the virtuous pagans had certainly longed for the return of the Golden Age and had clearly understood the nature of moral perfection. Cato and Virgil in the Purgatorio remind us of the virtuous pagans and shame us with their commitment and with their genuine moral achievements, but they have not ascended the mountain and returned to the Garden, but only lit the way. That journey in actuality is left to the Christian. But finally, the pursuit of moral virtue is not the essentially spiritual and Christian life. Morality belongs to the natural world and human nature as it was fashioned in the beginning. Morality therefore must be negotiated by the Christian, but it’s not an end in itself. Virgil and Cato belong to that mountain for more than the pilgrims toiling up its slopes, because for Virgil and Cato it is the ultimate end, the extent and limit of their vision.

The literal level of the Comedy is the least important — i.e. the fictional journey through the putative realms of the afterlife. But as a depiction of the human journey in this life, it is staggeringly impressive, I think. In one sense, as a journey of the understanding, the first two sections deal with the Order of Nature and the third alone with the Order of Grace (Revealed truth). In another sense, as a journey of the Will, the Inferno deals with the Order of Nature and the Purgatorio and Paradiso deal with the believer’s supernaturally empowered journey toward God. I think Dante meant that we are all enacting the actions of all three Canticles at once, in our daily lives — always again descending into hell, new convictions of sin, the struggles of sanctification, the joys of communion and union with Christ.