)
Piccarda then tells the moving story of her life, how as a girl she
entered the order of St. Clare, only to be torn from the nunnery and
given into marriage.
"A perfect life and merit high in Heaven
A lady o'er us," said she, "by whose rule
Down in your world they vest and veil themselves,
That until death they may both watch and sleep
Beside that Spouse who every vow accepts
Which charity conformeth to his pleasure.
To follow her, in girlhood from the world
I fled, and in her habit shut myself,
And pledged me to the pathway of her sect.
Then men accustomed unto evil more
Than unto good, from the sweet cloister tore me;
God knows what afterward my life became."
(III, 97.)
Certain questions interesting to a seeker of truth grow out of
Piccarda's statement and these Beatrice proceeds to solve for the
edification of Dante. The first question asks whether in the assignment
to the lowest sphere of souls who violated their vows, there is divine
Justice; the second concerns Plato's teaching that souls really come
from the stars and return thither; the third is about the loss of merit
through coercion of the will, as exemplified in the case of Piccarda.
The solution of these difficulties need not detain us if only we
remember Dante's view that "the theories maintained by him in the Heaven
of the Moon are intended to manifest," as Gardner and Scartazzini point
out, "the moral freedom of man and to show that no external thing can
interfere with the soul that is bent upon attaining the end for which
God has destined it.
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