After the warning of a mis-shaped spiritual life vs. the full fruition of a healthy and aligned ascent, Dante points to the nature of superbia again – this time showing us the similar cases of distortions with or without the spiritual present.
The warning here is prescient longer term: the spiritual can quickly be contained in strictly rational frameworks and thus result in the same condition: effectively a loss of connection to the transcendent. This is a constant temptation in our minds and psyche. Choosing own constructs over openness and receiving from the bigger picture and eternal transcendence.
Dante writes:
Di che l’animo vostro in alto galla,
poi siete quasi antomata in difetto,
sì come vermo in cui formazion falla?
Roughly: “Of which spirit of yours are you floating in high, so you are almost insects in defects, yes just like worms in which the formation fails?”
The insects are thus the restricted, contained condition of a spiritual life, compared to the “worms” of a life where the spiritual has not yet even started. And again: these are pointing to internal dynamics at the anagogical level. We have these inclinations within ourselves, to reject or to contain the bigger picture – and assuming a cosmology of one’s own constructs instead.
In some ways the main wisdom here is longer term, the gradual process of capturing one’s own spiritual life. And Dante himself probably met many people in this condition, during his own conversion somewhere between 1300 and 1308. Opening the spiritual as in Purgatory 10 and the Gate is a first small step, however gigantic it feels at that moment. Once through it, a new life begins with infinite richness but also new temptations, for decades to come.
So all three conditions are there in us: the self-contained insect, the unstarted worm, or, with work and gradual transformation, the angelic butterfly.
In short: Dante plants a little flag right at the start. The spiritual path is now open, but notice the inner impulse for containment. It might once again put oneself in a different “dark forest”, and block the real opening into fuller Reality and into the Heavens.
The image of progressing from worm to insect to butterfly, yet discovering that the insect state might be the most insidious trap of all… che profondità! We construct our rational containers precisely because they feel like achievement, like mastery, when in truth they become another dark forest of our own making. Perhaps this is why the spiritual journey demands not just courage to begin, but a perpetual vigilance against our mind’s temptation to domesticate the infinite, to reduce transcendence into something we can possess rather than something that possesses us?
Absolutely. Dante reminds us constantly. He gives us experience, then analysis, then a reminder: the fullness is still bigger.