what earthly man was more worthy of signifying Christ than Cato? Surely none." The second reason for Cato's special favor is that he was a great lawgiver and this mountain is ruled by the Law of God. With his bifurcated beard and glowing face, Cato is reminiscent of Moses, the great Biblical lawgiver, who is himself a figure of liberty for leading his people out of bondage and into freedom. This motif is reinforced in the second canto with the arrival at the island of the boatload of souls who are singing the psalm "in exitu Israel de Aegyptu", the very psalm for which Dante had provided the four-fold allegorical reading in the famous letter to Can Grande. Since the historical exodus of the Jews allegorically signifies Christ's redemption, the individual's spiritual conversion, and his personal salvation, they could not be singing a more appropriate song. (For these same allegorical reasons, the psalm had been used since the sixth century in the last offices of the dying and in the liturgy of the burial of the dead, and it is still so used in the liturgies of many monastic communities.) One of the souls on shipboard turns out to be an old musician friend of Dante's named Casella. At the poet's request he sings one of Dante's canzoni that he had set to music, thereby attracting the other souls, until Cato suddenly reappears, scolds them, and sends them scattering up the mountain like doves. This canzone, from the third tractate of Il Convivio, was addressed to Lady Philosophy and allegorically signified Dante's purely intellectual search for a solution to the human dilemma. As such, the song is at least the waste of time Cato says it is compared to the significance of the Exodus psalm with which the canto began. There has indeed been a "new Law" (nuova legge, 1. 106), one that profoundly changes aesthetic, as well as moral, values. In canto 3, the poets come upon the first of two groups not yet inside the gate of heaven, both of whom rem...
