Early perceptions can almost by nature be mistaken – on the spiritual path.
After the empty plain in the beginning of Purg X:19-21, a new image is presented of the outlook for the Pilgrim and Virgil: a path, a void on the one side, and a wall that rises and rises on the other.
And this center path could further measure the human body in three “turns”.
Da la sua sponda, ove confina il vano,
al piè de l’alta ripa che pur sale,
misurrebbe in tre volte un corpo umano;
The literal meaning is simply describing the narrow path when the spiritual journey begins. But in an anagogical sense, the symbolism is much richer.
One can think of this as three conditions of the spiritual life, or three approaches for the soul, towards the spiritual realm. One is avoidance (the void), another is the fruitful path (which they now enter), and the third is the insurmountable wall, only rising and rising upwards.
But what we are also shown here is how this dynamic appears for the untrained or undeveloped soul itself. The wall could thus be the effort to apprehend the spiritual life “overall” without any building of capacity and experience beforehand. It will simply become a vertical “wall”, impossible to climb. The path might also look very narrow, as only “three bodies wide”, and the void might simply look like empty nothingess.
But once the spiritual capacities are built later, however, these three aspects can appear very differently.
The “wall” is simply a misperception for the untrained soul. The void seems like a “nothing”, but is in reality an infinite loss of richness, livingness, participation in fuller reality, and also loss of infinite joy and meaning. And the “narrow path” is not narrow at all. The “three times” of the measurement of a “human body” might even refer to the mystery of incarnation: the spiritual life can measure the human being as spirit, as matter, or as the unity of spirit and matter; the incarnated spirit operating in the earthly but connected with the Heavens. And in that sense the size of the fruitful path is indeed enormous, if not infinite in potential.
So as the first look at the forthcoming journey to repair the inner perceptions and structures, we see first the untrained vision – but with hidden layers of the fuller vision.
Dante also follows this up with the next tercet: “and to the extent my eye could draw out wings, now to the left, now to the right, this ledge/context appeared like this“. So Dante literally uses the phrase “parea cotale” to indicate the difference between true reality, and his limited perception ability at this starting point.
And a little comment in general for the readers: these anagogical layers in Purgatory are to some extent only possible to see and experience after the whole journey in Paradiso is completed, which also confirms and shows a deeper point: the infinitely recursive wealth of insight once the soul is purgated and starting to align more with the Divine Light, and the patterns of Reality.