Lectura Dantis Paradiso PDF

Lectura Dantis
A forum for Dante research and interpretation
NUMBERS 16-17 SPRING-FALL 1995
Special Issue: Lectura Dantis Virginian
Dante's Divine Comedy
Introductory Readings
III: Paradiso
Edited by
Tibor Wlassics
University of Virginia
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Lectura Dantis Tibor Wlassics, Editor
Special Issue : Lectura Dantis Vi

Dante's Paradiso: Introductory
Paradiso I • Franco Ferrucci 3

Paradiso II • Jo Ann Cavallo 14
Paradiso III • Ruggero Stefanin 30
Paradiso IV • Lino Pertile 46
Paradiso V • Marina De Fazio 68
Paradiso VI • Guy Raffa 9 1
Paradiso VII • Paul Colilli 107
Paradiso VIII • Jean-Pierre Banicelli 1 15
Paradiso IX ♦ Mark Balfour 131
Paradiso X • Gary Cestaro 146
Paradiso XI • Mario Trovato 156
Paradiso XII ♦ Steven Botterill 172
Paradiso XIII • John Took 1 86
Paradiso XIV • Madison Sowell 198
Paradiso XV • Cristina Della Coletta 213
Paradiso XVI • Ricardo Quiñones 229
Paradiso XVII • Marianne Shapiro 246
Paradiso XVIII • Denise Heilbronn-Gaines 266
Paradiso XIX • Zygmunt Barański 277
Paradiso XX • Marguerite Chiarenza 300
Paradiso XXI • Peter Hawkins 308
Paradiso XXII • William Wilson 3 1 8
Paradiso XXIII • Franco Masciandaro 329
Paradiso XXIV • Giuseppe Di Scipio 352
Paradiso XXV • William Stephany 371
Paradiso XXVI • Kevin Brownlee 388
Paradiso XXVII • Peter Armour 402
Paradiso XXVIII • Regina Psaki 424
Paradiso XXIX • Rodney Payton 435
Paradiso XXX • Christopher Kleinhenz 456
Paradiso XXXI • Amilcare Iannucci 470
Paradiso XXXII • H. Wayne Storey 486
Paradiso XXXIII • Rebecca West 504
Editor's Note 519
Lectura Dantis
Editor : Tibor Wlassics (University of Virginia)
Editorial Board 1991-1993: Zygmunt Barański (University of

Reading)', Amilcare Iannucci (University of Toronto)', Lino Pertile
(University of Edinburgh)', Regina Psaki (University of Oregon)',
Ricardo Quiñones (Claremont McKenna College)', William Wilson
(University of Virginia)
Editorial Board 1994-1996: Peter Armour (Royal Holloway

University of London)', Steven Botterill (University of California,
Berkeley)', Franco Ferrucci (Rutgers University)', Deborah Parker
(University of Virginia)', Michelangelo Picone (Universität Zürich)',
Marianne Shapiro (Brown University)
Editorial Assistant 1995: Michael Papio (Brown University )
Lectura Dantis is a refereed journal of Dante research and interpretation.

It is published twice a year, in the Fall and Spring, by the Italian Program,
Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, University of Virginia. The
members of the Editorial Board agree to advise the Editor, for a biennium, on
the contents of four issues. The Editorial Assistant is appointed for a single
issue. Lectura Dantis is an independent publication. Subscription for
1995 is $10 (back issues $10; supplementary volumes $20 each). Requests,
as well as all editorial correspondence, should be addressed to: Lectura
Dantis , 122 Wilson Hall, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA
22903.
ISSN 0897-5280
Printed by Bailey Printing, Charlottesville, VA 22903
Michael Papio on behalf of the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese at the
Front Matter
Source: Lectura Dantis, No. 16/17, Special Issue: Lectura Dantis Virginiana, vol. III. Dante's
"Divine Comedy" Introductory Readings III: Paradiso (SPRING-FALL 1995)
Published by: Michael Papio on behalf of the Department of Spanish, Italian, and
Portuguese at the University of Virginia
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Lectura Dantis
Lectura Dantis
Special Issue: Lectura Dantis Virginian
Dante's Divine Comedy
Introductory Readings
III: Paradiso
Edited by
Tibor Wlassics
Lectura Dantis
Editorial Board 1991-1993: Zygmunt Barański ( University of

Reading)-, Amilcare Iannucci ( University of Toronto)-, Lino Perti
(University of Edinburgh)-, Regina Psaki ( University of Oregon);
Ricardo Quiñones (Claremont McKenna College); William Wilson

University of London); Steven Botterill (University of Calif
Berkeley); Franco Ferrucci (Rutgers University); Deborah Pa
(University of Virginia); Michelangelo Picone (Universität Z
Lectura Dantis is a refereed journal of Dante research and interpr

It is published twice a year, in the Fall and Spring, by the Italian Pro
Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, University of Virgin
members of the Editorial Board agree to advise the Editor, for a bienn
the contents of four issues. The Editorial Assistant is appointed for
issue. Lectura Dantis is an independent publication. Subscription
1995 is $10 (back issues $10; supplementary volumes $20 each). Re
Dantis, 122 Wilson Hall, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA
22903.
ISSN 0897-5280
Printed by Bailey Printing, Charlottesville, VÁ 22903
Lectura Dantis Tibor Wlassics, Editor
Special Issue : Lectura Dantis Vi

Dante's Paradiso: Introductory
Paradiso I • Franco Ferrucci 3

Paradiso II • Jo Ann Cavallo 14
Paradiso III • Ruggero Stefanin 30
Paradiso IV • Lino Pertile 46
Paradiso V • Marina De Fazio 68
Paradiso VI • Guy Raffa 9 1
Paradiso VII • Paul Colilli 107
Paradiso VIII • Jean-Pierre Banicelli 1 15
Paradiso IX ♦ Mark Balfour 131
Paradiso X • Gary Cestaro 146
Paradiso XI • Mario Trovato 156
Paradiso XII ♦ Steven Botterill 172
Paradiso XIII • John Took 1 86
Paradiso XIV • Madison Sowell 198
Paradiso XV • Cristina Della Coletta 213
Paradiso XVI • Ricardo Quiñones 229
Paradiso XVII • Marianne Shapiro 246
Paradiso XVIII • Denise Heilbronn-Gaines 266
Paradiso XIX • Zygmunt Barański 277
Paradiso XX • Marguerite Chiarenza 300
Paradiso XXI • Peter Hawkins 308
Paradiso XXII • William Wilson 3 1 8
Paradiso XXIII • Franco Masciandaro 329
Paradiso XXIV • Giuseppe Di Scipio 352
Paradiso XXV • William Stephany 371
Paradiso XXVI • Kevin Brownlee 388
Paradiso XXVII • Peter Armour 402
Paradiso XXVIII • Regina Psaki 424
Paradiso XXIX • Rodney Payton 435
Paradiso XXX • Christopher Kleinhenz 456
Paradiso XXXI • Amilcare Iannucci 470
Paradiso XXXII • H. Wayne Storey 486
Paradiso XXXIII • Rebecca West 504
Editor's Note 519
Lectura Dantis
Editorial Board 1991-1993: Zygmunt Barański (University of

Reading)', Amilcare Iannucci (University of Toronto)', Lino Pertile
(University of Edinburgh)', Regina Psaki (University of Oregon)',
Ricardo Quiñones (Claremont McKenna College)', William Wilson

University of London)', Steven Botterill (University of California,
Berkeley)', Franco Ferrucci (Rutgers University)', Deborah Parker
(University of Virginia)', Michelangelo Picone (Universität Zürich)',
Lectura Dantis is a refereed journal of Dante research and interpretation.

It is published twice a year, in the Fall and Spring, by the Italian Program,
Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, University of Virginia. The
members of the Editorial Board agree to advise the Editor, for a biennium, on
the contents of four issues. The Editorial Assistant is appointed for a single
issue. Lectura Dantis is an independent publication. Subscription for
1995 is $10 (back issues $10; supplementary volumes $20 each). Requests,
Dantis , 122 Wilson Hall, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA
22903.
ISSN 0897-5280
Printed by Bailey Printing, Charlottesville, VA 22903
Paradiso I
Author(s): FRANCO FERRUCCI
"Divine Comedy" Introductory Readings III: Paradiso (SPRING-FALL 1995), pp. 3-13
Accessed: 17-02-2020 23:01 UTC
Lectura Dantis
FRANCO FERRUCCI
Rutgers University
I
The opening canto of Paradiso shows the contiguity of two
impulses which, at first, could be deemed to be contradictory: a will for
metamorphosis and an urge for order. Their conjunction will shape the
destiny of the third canticle; and Dante's hunger for both reveals the
composite texture of his creative experience. Paradiso is the elaborated
justification of all that has happened up to this point and the luminous
climax of the drama that has been called Comedy . The final act demands
some changes in its very narrative structure, as we proceed from the
search to the attainment, and from a desire to leave (a dominant feeling
in Inferno and Purgatorio) to a desire to possess the new land. From
now on the Poem will be devoted to the unfolding of a most paradoxical
occurrence: a systematic metamorphosis - or an orderly miracle -
summing up the tension between diametrical poles which provides the
main input to Paradiso' s inspiration.
The first speech of Beatrice addresses the theme of universal order,
reaching Dante's highest levels of philosophical poetry (109-1 17):
Ne l'ordine ch'io dico sono accline

tutte nature, per diverse sorti,
più al principio loro e men vicine;
onde si muovono a diversi porti
per lo gran mar de l'essere, e ciascuna
con istinto a lei dato che la porti.
Questi ne porta il foco inver' la luna;
questi ne' cor mortali è permotore;
questi la terra in sé stringe e aduna...
Metamorphosis has already begun its course while Dante is staring at

Beatrice's eyes which are gazing into the sun: «Nel suo aspetto tal
dentro mi fei, / qual si fé Glauco nel gustar de l'erba / che '1 fé consorto
in mar de li altri dèi» (67-69); and is traced by the crucial term of
trasumanar (70), which is the Christian equivalent of the pagan
transmutations described by Ovid in his poem. A segment of mortality
will cross into Immortality, and in the kingdom of the unveiled reality
Dante will be immediately recognized by every soul. The poet himself
is the protagonist of the metamorphosis, since the landscape and the
actors of the divine world have already been transformed into active and
luminous fractions of an immortal arrangement. Dante's metamorphosis
will essentially consist in a deepening of vision;1 his body becomes
almost undistinguishable from his soul and will fly upwards, with the
natural impulse of a descending river or an agitated flame (136-141):
Non dei più ammirar, se bene stimo,

lo tuo salir, se non come d'un rivo,
se d'alto monte scende giuso ad imo.
Maraviglia sarebbe in te se, privo
d'impedimento, giù ti fossi assiso,
com'a terra quiete in foco vivo.
A human bird and a human fire are the first examples of the
assiduous metamorphosis of the self which governs Paradiso1 s narrative
venture.2 In the heaven of Mercury Dante will define himself as
«trasmutabile per tutte guise» ( ParN , 99), which is quite an appropriate
definition for a metamorphic hero. Yet this same hero is never lost in
the new and wondrous landscape: he never misses a localization, he is
always travelling with the ecstatic exactitude of a designer of Heaven. If
the Universe is «somigliante a Dio», Dante's Poem is similar to both
the universe and God in its craving for a composite order.
On the edge of his supreme attempt (entering the House of the Lord
and describing it), Dante is forced to make a choice which is prompted
by the pressure to solve a creative problem. Quite simply, he has to
abolish spatial infinity, which to us appears as a basic requirement in a
religious perception of the world. Infinity is sacrificed on the altar of
representation, because it cannot find its proper place in a Paradise as
firmly constructed as a fortress and as accurate as a precision clock.
Dante's universe seems to be a finished one, as is implicitly asserted in
the first terzina of Paradiso :
La gloria di colui che tutto muove

per l'universo penetra, e risplende
in una parte più e meno altrove. ^
The universe is everywhere visible and explorable, notwithstanding the

different amount of divine light reaching the various provinces of its
extent. Not differently from Hell and Purgatory, Paradise is conceived as
a measurable space and is provided with external and internal boundaries.
One can even surmise that the idea itself of infinity is at odds with the
need for order - since there cannot be representation of order where
there is no possible measurement.4 The notable exception is God
Himself, Who is, at the same time, unmeasurable and perfectly orderly;
in fact, He is the creator of order.5 This paradox is at the heart of
medieval discussions about the nature of the Infinite as a divine
connotation. God's Infinity, after all, is a post-scriptural elaboration,
starting with Plotinus and Pseudo-Dionysius;6 and a God Who is
infinite per essentiam will become a cornerstone of the philosophy of
Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae , 1,7,2), as of Bonaventure and
Albert the Great. Much less evident is the Bible's and the Gospels' and
Saint Paul's stand on this matter, since every reference to God seems to
indicate His formidable latitude of power more than His Infinity.7
The notion of infinity seems also to discredit the human
mythopoieic activity as a profane imitation of God. This may be the
reason why Dante's God has created a delimited universe: otherwise it
would be difficult, if not impossible, to control His «Glory», as is
stated at the beginning of our canto, where Dante meets for the first
time the paradox of a circumscribed infinity . We can proceed on this
path, and observe that even the temporal form of infinity (eternity) is
continuously kept in check and balanced throughout Paradiso. The
eternal means certainly the divine , but without a clear and indisputable
sense of being infinite . In fact, the Divine World has a temporal limit:
the day of the Last Judgment, an idea that outlines the world above as a
reality which is still unfinished. When the bodies are reunited with the
souls, Paradise will be completed and supposedly will live only by itself
without receiving any more contribution from the Earth; and human life
will be only a distant memory from that point on, with no more
Emperors to hope for, and no more Popes to condemn. It will definitely
be a different kind of Paradise from the one visited by Dante, which is
still vibrant with earthly passions and still so rooted in human
temporality. Only Inferno will be there to remind human beings that
they once existed and that they have sinned and have been condemned;
on the other hand, Cacciaguida and St. Peter will have no more need for
passionate speeches against the corruption of the times. Paradise will be
memory-less and silent; and a new poet would be obliged to give us a
somewhat different description from the one provided by Dante.
To sum up: spatial infinity is not mentioned, and temporal infinity
is postponed to a future date. The reason for this is an openly profane
one: artistic necessity. The artist needs to frame and to possess his own
territory. He is limited, but he is competitive vis-à-vis God's creativity,
as Marsyas vis-à-vis Apollo - a mythological dispute evoked by Dante
with the hidden irony of so many similar passages (19-21):
Entra nel petto mio, e spira tue
sì come quando Marsïa traesti
de la vagina de le membra sue. . .
- with the obvious difference that Dante-Marsyas has swallowed

God- Apollo into his own creativity system: obliging Divinity to play
the human game of delimitation.
The anonymous author of the Liber de causis is quoted in the
«Letter to Cangrande», in order to define the power of the «causa
primaria» and the creative influence of divine intelligence. Although
written in the typically clumsy and cursory way of the «Letter», this
passage grasps one important characteristic of the Liber de causis : the
First Being's activity as unfolding through creation 8 - an idea that
will deeply permeate the organism of the third canticle, which is a
constant praise of God's supreme artistic talent mirrored in the talent of
the poet ascending toward Him. Creativity will be one of the propelling
themes of Paradise - God's creativity and Dante's creativity, to be sure;
but also the talent of whoever can present himself as an artistic
performer will be highly praised: including the gracious dance of the
souls in the Heaven of the Sun, masking itself as the rotating
mechanism of a clock; and including the acrobatic transformations of the
Eagle in the Heaven of Jupiter; and the ballet-like diving and swimming
in the eternal Rose. Dante's gamble appears more and more discernible.
To attempt the impossible is what the magicians dare attempt; and
among the magicians we find the poets, as Vergil knew, having been
reputed a magician throughout the Middle Ages; and as Dante knows by
now.
The first canto of Paradiso announces an imminent celebration. T

Easter function of the resurrected poetry is approaching its joyful
and is about to invade a Heaven which is conceived of as an o
cathedral inundated by the light of the Sun. Like a cathedral, Heav
accurately describable, although the main rhetorical device of the can
will endlessly reaffirm that what is presented here is really
describable. The first statement of this kind refers to the human mi
and to its limitations: «appressando sé al suo disire, / nostro intellet
profonda tanto, / che dietro la memoria non può ire» (7-9). In each
these lines we find a term of intense semantic implication: d
intelletto memoria ; and their gathering at this point seems to
topically motivated. We are dealing with three of the main wal
Dante's conceptual building; and the absence of the fourth ter
amore , the master wall of the entire construction - can be explaine
the fact that Love is the implicit reference word for each of these te
the fact that Love is the implicit reference word for each of these terms:
it is their real completion in meaning. Disire , intelletto , and memoria
are all supported by Love, whose foundation rests in God. Desire is in
fact desiderio d'amore? and intelletto is intelletto d'amore ,10 and
memoria is definitely memoria d'amore. Once more following a
neoplatonic theme, such a memory of love is linked to a divine state of
our being before our birth to which we are destined to return, if we
deserve so. Viewed from the perspective of Paradise, human sin is a
refusal to follow the right orders (starting with the rebellious Angel who
has become the Emperor of Evil); it is a disobedience , a soldier's retreat,
cowardice of the soul (viltà); «l'anima tua è da viltate offesa», says
Vergil to Dante at his first vacillation (Inf. II, 45); and he will convince
him to proceed by stating that no less than Beatrice has interceded for
him. He knows how the function of the beloved lady is essential for a
safe return of the stranded knight to the Court of Heaven.
The memory of Love (the memory of divinity which is rooted in
the abyss of our intellect) operates in a twofold way. We are endowed
with an archetypal memory according to which God exists in us even
beyond our will; and we have to retrace it through desire and through
intellect until we can host it consciously in our personal memory.
Revelation and Theology are essential in order to foster this vast human
sediment. But in Dante there is a second kind of memory: the poetic
memory of a journey towards Love which can only be rendered by
writing a book. With the help of this alternative kind of memory Dante
rebuilds the role of the poet as a special explorer of collective memory
and as the Orpheus of a new Christian creativity. We are dealing with
this special kind of memory in the terzina which immediately follows
(10-12):
Veramente quant' io del regno santo

ne la mia mente potei far tesoro,
sarà ora materia del mio canto. 1111
The Vita Nuova had begun with a reference to the «libro della memoria»
which contains the story to be told; and both books tell the story of a
different journey towards Love. While Dante is writing the fourth book
of the Convivio he realizes in a highly epiphanic way that what he
really wants is to perform another journey to the Source Itself of
Love;12 and therefore the Convivio will be soon abandoned, and Beatrice
will replace the «donna gentile», and Theology will supersede
Philosophy.
A special feature of the poetic memory is to be intermittent
(anticipating Marcel Prousťs similar notion, so many centuries later). It
constantly progresses and recedes, and keeps fighting with its own
boundaries, as if the ecstasy of inspiration constantly wavered between
recollection and oblivion. This is already visible in the Vita nuova , as is
shown in the closing lines of «Ne li occhi porta la mia donna Amore»:
«Quel ch'ella par quando un poco sorride, / non si può dicer né tenere a
mente , / sì è novo miracolo e gentile». Poetic memory is certainly
linked to the canons which rule the imagination and the experiences of
the prophets and the mystics and the lovers - and this is not a minor
point of originality on the part of Dante. Nothing basically different
will be affirmed by Vico and by the Romantic theoreticians and poets.
The long and elaborate invocation to Apollo (vv. 13-36) is a request
to be empowered with this special brand of poetic memory (13-15 &
22-24):
O buono Appollo, a l'ultimo lavoro

fammi del tuo valor sì fatto vaso,
come dimandi a dar l'amato alloro...
O divina virtù, se mi ti presti
tanto che l'ombra del beato regno
segnata nel mio capo io manifesti...
Why Apollo, and why a pagan God for such an investiture? Because
there was simply no Christian figure that could take his place. Christian
revelation had no deputy for such a role of the poet. Even Augustine,
the greatest writer of the patristic tradition, had confined within the
Christian God all that is creatively worthy;13 and Dante, so deeply
nourished by Augustine as a writer and as a thinker, would have never
written his poem if he had closely followed such prescriptions - and in
fact his first guide for the journey could not have been Augustine
himself but rather a Latin poet, Vergil, a believer in the «dèi falsi e
bugiardi» (Inf. I, 72) - and one of them is Apollo, whom Dante is now
profusely addressing.
A strictly figurai interpretation of this passage falls short of
explaining the historical proportions of the creative and cultural drama
of which Dante is the stunning protagonist. If Apollo is simply a figura
Dei ,14 the whole introduction to Paradise loses its deepest and most
radical characteristic - a subtle self-interpretation which could not
adequately be included in the scheme provided by the «Letter to
Cangrande».15 After the Christianization of Vergil, Apollo is saluted as
a minor Christian divinity (similar to a Saint not canonically recognized
but equally active and protective). The unrelenting dialogue between
classic and Christian heritages has come to a conclusion which will
mold the cultural panorama of the following centuries and which will
transmit to us Christianity as we have known it from the moment its
artistic expression became as important as its theological dogmas: pagan
enough to describe God's Paradise! Dante knows what he is saying, and
no trace of a blasphemous spirit can be found in his invocation. The
time has come for him to acknowledge that representation and belief are
one thing for the very special kind of believer that he embodies; and to
fully admit that the progress of his Comedy will be exactly parallel to
the one of his faith; and that he will be a true believer only at the end of
the poem, and thanks to the accomplished poem. This would not have
happened without the recreation of the cult of artistic beauty and of the
classic idea of the poet; and, for such a renovation, Apollo (and what he
stands for) has to be deeply praised.16
As a farewell to Canto One, I shall recall its most outstanding
poetic moment - a pearl enclosed in its very heart. It is noon in Eden,
and the angelic concourse that has crowded the Earthly Paradise has
silently and mysteriously disappeared, when Beatrice, almost literally
becomes an eagle staring into the sun: «Beatrice in sul sinistro fianco /
vidi rivolta a riguardar nel sole» (46-47). An eagle, but more than an
eagle, according to the allegorical reason for the beginning of the divine
flight: «aguglia sì non li s'affisse unquanco» (48). 17 For a particle of
time, Dante is able himself to gaze into the sun («e fissi li occhi al sole
oltre nostr' uso», 54); and, in this momentous instant of passage, the
flight has already begun (61-63):
e di sùbito parve giorno a giorno

essere aggiunto, come quei che puote
avesse il ciel d'un altro sole addorno.
A double sun in the skies! At this point Dante turns again towards his
guide; and the Comedy finds two of its unforgettable terzine, as
perilously flashing and mysteriously distant as two gleaming stars
(64-66 & 79-81):
Beatrice tutta ne l'etterne rote

fissa con li occhi stava; e io in lei
le luci fissi, di là sù rimote...
parvemi tanto allor del cielo acceso
de la fiamma del sol, che pioggia o fiume
lago non fece alcun tanto disteso.
It is the astonishing balance that precedes a portent - and in fact

the comparison between Dante and Glaucus will immediately follow
these lines; and metamorphosis will take place beneath a surface of
radiant immobility. Eternity is grasped in that fleeting instant. Even
Dante has rarely reached such a burning tempo.
NOTES
1 «Di cielo in cielo la vista di Dante si fa sempre più acuta e perfetta, pur
senza mutar mai di natura» (Ernesto Giacomo Parodi, «La costruzione e
l'ordinamento del Paradiso dantesco», in Poesia e storia nella «Divina
Commedia », Venezia, 1965 (repr. of 1921), p. 366).
¿E. Gardner {Dante and the Mystics , London, 1913) was the first to notice
that the images used in these lines derive directly from Saint Augustine's
Confessions , XXX, 9: «pondus non ad ima tantum est, sed ad locum suum
. . . ignis sursum tendit, deorsum lapsis . . . aqua super oleum fusa infra oleum
demergitur...».
It has been said that gloria is one and the same thing with God's light; but
in fact the light seems to be only an important manifestation of such a
glory. How can one define the substance, or essence, of glory itself? One
should think of a close equivalent of the Latin word potent ia, which is a
semantic recurrence in the Old and New Testament and in the language of
liturgy. «Glory» would therefore be the divine power made visible and
encompassing the universe. As for the general concept of these lines, see
Convivio , III, vii, 2: «La divina bontade in tutte le cose discende, e
altrimenti essere non potrebbero; ma avvegna che questa bontade si muova
da simplicissimo principio, diversamente si riceve, secondo più o meno, da
le cose riceventi». See also De vulg. eloq.y I,xvi,5: «Simplicíssima
substanti arum, que Deus est, in homine magis redolet quam in bruto
animali; in bruto animali quam in pianta; in hac quam in minera; in hac
quam in elemento; in igne quam in terra».
4The definition of infinity as a «privation» is in Aristotle's Physics , III, 6,
207a: «the infinite turns out to be the contrary of what it is said to be. It is
not what has nothing outside it that is infinite, but what always has
something outside it»; and 208a: «its essence is privation» (I quote The
Basic Works of Aristotle , ed. Richard McKeon, New York, 1941, pp.
266-268). See also De generatione animal i um: «Nature flies from the
infinite, for the infinite is unending, and Nature ever seeks an end» (I,
715b, 15-16, p. 152). As for the First Mover, He «causes a motion that is
eternal and does cause it during an infinite time. It is clear, therefore, that
the first movent is indivisible and is without parts and without magnitude»
Ç Physics , VIII, 10, 267b, 24-26, p. 394). See: Abraham Edel, Aristotle's
Theory of the Infinite , New York, 1934; Rodolfo Mondolfo, L'infinito nel
pensiero dell'antichità classica , Florence, 1956.
^ Ordo is also a key word for the two Christian philosophers so beloved by
Dante and who will dominate with their presence the Heaven of the Sun:
10
Hexaemeron ), and Thomas Aquinas refers to «ordo totius universi» {De
Veritaté). For the belief in a universal order and the human need to conform
to it, see: William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience , London,
1903, chapter IH, «The Reality of the Unseen» (contrary to Dante's
thought, for James such an order remains «invisible»).
"In Plotinus «infinity in the Good is not that of quantity with its endless
extension, but that of power» (Leo Sweeny, S.J., Divine Infinity in Greek
and Medieval Thought , New York, 1992, p. 203). But infinity for Plotinus
is still a synonym of non-being, and this will be a problem to solve for the
13th-century theologians. As late as 1243 Albert the Great, in his
Commentary on Lombard's Sentences , affirms that God is infinite («Deus
est infinitum, id est non finitum») in the sense that no other intellect can
contain Him or comprehend Him or define Him (in I Sent., d.43,C,a2). The
impossibility of defining God had already been forcefully proclaimed by
Pseudo -Dionysius: «ñeque numerus est, ñeque ordo, ñeque magnitudo, ñeque
parvitas, ñeque aequalitas, ñeque similitudo; ñeque stat, ñeque movetur,
ñeque quiescit, ñeque habet po tenti am; ñeque est potentia, ñeque lumen,
ñeque vivit, ñeque vita est, ñeque substantia est, ñeque saeculum, ñeque
tempus ... nec unum, nec unitas, ñeque divinitas» {De mystica theologia ,
V,A,PG,m,1048). Even the infinity of God is a human way to say what He
is not. - In Augustine a real theory of God's Infinity seems to be lacking,
and its very notion is grasped poetically and emotionally in the
Confessions : «tamquam si mare esset, ubique et undique per immensa
infinitum solum mare, et haberet intra se spongiam quamlibet magnam, sed
finitam, plena esset utique spongia ilia ex omni sua parte ex immenso mari;
sic creaturam tuam finitam, te infinito pienam putabam» (VII, 5, 7). See
Pierre Duhem, Medieval Cosmology: Theories of Infinity, Place, Time,
Void, and the Plurality of the Worlds, Chicago, University of Chicago
Press, 1985.
7The only use of «infinity» as a noun in Dante's work is in Convivium , IV,
ix, 3: «la prima bontade, che è Dio, che solo con la infinita capacitade
infinito comprende». Cesare Vasoli, in his commentary to this work,
mentions a passage from Thomas Aquinas's Contra Gentiles (1,69):
«Preterea, Esse Dei est suum intelligere ... Sicut igitur suum est infinitum
... ita suum intelligere est infinitum. Sicut autem se habet finitum ad
finitum, ita se habet infinitum ad infinitum. Si igitur secundum intelligere
nostrum, quod finitum est, finita capere possumus, et Deus, secundum suum
intelligere infinitum, infinita capere potest». - As an adjective,
«infinito» is used six times in the Comedy , and always as a clear synonym
of «immense». As a contrast, «etterno» and its derivatives are extremely
frequent (see Carlo Chirico, «etterno», Enciclopedia dantesca, IV,
761-762).
8 «Et hoc dicitur in libro De Causis quod 'omnis causa primaria plus influit
super suum causatum quam causa universalis secunda...' Et propter hoc
dicitur in libro De Causis quod 'omnis intelligentia est piena formis'. Patet
ergo quomodo ratio manifestât divinum lumen, id est divinam bonitatem,
11
ergo quomodo ratio manifestât divinum lumen, id est divinam bonitatem,
sapientiam et v ir tu tem, resplendere ubique» ( Ep . XIII, 56-61) - The
neoplatonic pitch of such a passage may well be a heritage of Plotinus and
Proclus if not of Plato himself ( Timaeus ); but, if this is certainly true for
the author of the Liber de causis , as for Dante our uncertainty is total. A
somewhat puzzling reference in the «Letter to Cangrande» is the one to
«Dionysius» (a Greek author nowadays known as the Pseudo-Dionysius and
familiar to Dante in a Latin translation). The work Dante is referring to is
De Coelesti Hierarchia , where is outlined the system of celestial «mirrors»
receiving the divine light throughout descending spheres. (Another
reference to this work is to be found in Par. X,1 15-1 17: «Appresso vedi il
lume di quel cero / che giù in carne più a dentro vide / l'angelica natura e 'l
ministero»). One wonders where Dante was acquainted with other books of
the same author (De Divinis Nominibus , De Mystica Theologia ), which
represent the most radical declaration of «negative» or «apophatic»
theology and where God is given as unknowable and unreachable and
ununderstandable. The main point that I am trying to make here is that,
before Dante, both neoplatonists and neoaristotelians share the same view
about the impossibility of representing Divinity and Its world. - Another
instance of neoplatonic thought (via Cicero's Somnium Scipionis , as has
been documented since Benvenuto) is evident in the reference to the
«armonia» of the celestial spheres (78). See: Piero Nardi, «La novità del
suono e il grande lume», Saggi di filosofìa dantesca , Roma, 1930, pp.
79-88; and the long footnote in: L'esposizione di Bernardino Daniello da
Lucca sopra la Comedia di Dante , ed. Robert Hollander & Jeffrey Schnapp,
Hanover, 1989, pp. 322-324. - On Dante's Platonism: Paul Renucci,
L'aventure de l'humanisme européen au moyen-âge (IVe-XIVe siècle ), Paris,
1953; Joseph Anthony Mazzeo, Structure and Thought in the Paradiso,
Ithaca, N.Y., 1958, chapters I and V; Rudolf Palgen, «II Paradiso
platonico», Letteratura e Critica. Studi in onore di Natalino Sapegno ,
Roma, 1974, vol.1, pp. 197-211.
^For the theme of desire in Dante see my book: Il poema del desiderio :
Poetica e passione in Dante , Milano, 1990 (especially the chapter: «La
dialettica del desiderio»). See also the independent observations by Lino
Pertile, «'La punta del disio': storia di una metafora dantesca», Lectura
Dantis , 7 (Fall 1990), pp. 3-28; and «Paradiso: A Drama of Desire», in
World and Drama in Dante: Essays on the Divine Comedy, ed. John C.
Barnes & Jennifer Petrie, Dublin, 1993, pp. 143-180.
În «Donne ch'avete intelletto d'amore» the two terms are tied one to the
other from the very first line. This link will remain constant in all of
Dante's works.
1 * «Et quamvis inde aliquid in memoria teneamus, et quasi per medium velum
et velut in medio nebulae videamus, nec modum quidem videndi, nec
qualitatem visionis comprehendere, vel recordari sufficimus» (Richard of
Saint Victor, Benjamin major , IV, 23, in P.L., 196: Col. 167 B-C). Richard
of Samt Victor is quoted in the «Letter to Cangrande» in order to prove the
12
partial collapse of memory after a vision: «Intellectus humānus . . . quando
elevatur, in tantum elevatur, ut memoria post reditum deficiat propter
transcendisse humanum modum ... Et ubi ista invidis non sufficiant, legant
Richardům de Sancto Victore, ... et non invidebunt» (78-80).
12«Lo sommo desiderio di ciascuna cosa ... è lo ritornare allo suo principio.
E però che Dio è principio de le nostre anime e fattore di quelle simili a sé
... essa anima massimamente desidera di tornare a quello» ( Convivio ,
IV, xii, 14).
For Augustine's reinterpretation of Plotinian ideas on the nature of
beauty, see J.A.Mazzeo, cit., pp. 68-70.
14 As it is stated in some of the best known traditional commentaries to this
canto: Guido Mazzoni, in Letture dantesche , ed. Giovanni Getto, Firenze,
1964, pp. 1354-1356; Cesare Federico Goffis, in Lectura Dantis Scaligera ,
Firenze, 1968, pp. 11-12; Alberto Chiari, m Letture classensi , 5, Ravenna,
1976, p. 64.
lÎn the «Letter to Cangrande» the reference to this passage (86) is almost
discouraging in its flatness: «Deinde cum dicit: 'O bone Apollo', etc., facit
invocationem suam. Et dividitur ista pars in partes duas: in prima
invocando petit; in secunda suadet Apollini petitionem factam,
remunerationem quandam prenuntians; et incipit secunda pars ibi: 'O divina
virtus... '».
l"At the end of the invocation we find a moment of doubtful humbleness:
«Poca favilla gran fiamma seconda: / forse di retro a me con miglior voci /
si pregherà perché Cirra risponda» (vv. 34-36). «I più sono persuasi che
queste miglior voci ... siano di poeti prossimi venturi; i meno, che siano le
voci di beati e d'angeli, destinate a caldeggiare di cielo in cielo la preghiera
del poeta presso lo Spirito Santo, col prestigio delle loro intercessioni per
soli e coro. Non sarebbe la prima volta, se i meno avessero ragione»
(Vittorio Sermonti, Il Paradiso , rev. Cesare Segre, Milano, 1993, p. 14).
1 '«Aquila enim primo est avis magna valde, talis est haec sacra scientia ...
Ad litteram ergo dicit poeta: aguglia sì , idest, tarn firmiter, non gli s'affisse
unquancOy quasi dicat: quod aquila corporalis non tam fixe intuetur solem
corporalem, sicut ista scientia spiritualis solem spirituálem qui Deus est»
(Benvenuti de Imola, Coment um, Florence, 1887, IV, pp. 312-313).
13
Paradiso II
Author(s): JO ANN CAVALLO
Accessed: 17-02-2020 23:02 UTC
Lectura Dantis
JO ANN CAVALLO
Columbia University
II
Exactly 669 years before Neil Armstrong made his giant leap for
mankind, Dante's fictive voyage lands him on the moon - or rather,
inside the moon, since Dante explains that his body has penetrated the
moon's surface. Yet Dante does not want to be linked to any myth about
«the man in the moon». In fact, Paradiso 2 pointedly ridicules such
popular beliefs and notions concerning the moon (in particular the idea
that moon spots were caused by Cain carrying a bundle of weeds across
its surface). Dante presents himself instead as a worthy antecedent of
twentieth-century space travelers cognizant of the most advanced
cosmological conceptions of the time. In Paradiso 2, from the privileged
vantage point of the moon, Dante outlines his particular idea of outer
space. Critics have often remarked that in this canto Dante privileges
scientific and philosophical discourse over poetry. Actually, Dante puts
the poet before the astronomer in a most radical way, that is, he gives a
knowingly distorted view of the cosmos (as he conceived of it) in order
to accommodate it to the demands of his fictional flight.
Before venturing into his celestial scheme, however, it is worth
turning to the warning with which Dante opens the canto. Using a
navigational metaphor, Dante pictures himself in a «legno» covering
uncharted waters, followed by a large number of philosophically
illiterate sailors in a «piccioletta barca» as well as by a more restricted
number of wisdom-seekers in a more sturdy «navigio». Dante warns the
first group to head back to shore lest they lose sight of him and get lost,
while he encourages the second group to follow closely behind and
remain in his wake.
As has been often noted in passing, this division of readership
explicitly recalls the opening of the Convivio which distinguishes
«quelli pochi che seggiono a quella mensa dove lo pane de li angeli si
manuca» (1.1.7) from the larger number of those not versed in
philosophy.1 But the comparison between the two passages merits a
closer look. In the Convivio , these pochi are not only those who in
general dedicate themselves to philosophy, but are also, in particular,
Dante's illustrious predecessors and authorities at whose feet Dante
places himself in order to gather the crumbs of their wisdom: «E io
14
adunque, che non seggio a la beata mensa, ma, fuggito de la pastura del
vulgo, a' piedi di coloro che seggiono ricolgo di quello che da loro
cade». Dante, in turn, passes on these crumbs of wisdom to the miseri
who would otherwise remain deprived: «per la dolcezza ch'io sento in
quello che a poco a poco ricolgo, misericordievolmente mosso, non me
dimenticando, per li miseri alcuna cosa ho riservata, la quale a li occhi
loro, già è più tempo, ho dimostrata» (1.1.10).
The Convivio1 s descent of wisdom from the pochi to Dante to the
miseri constitutes a model that Dante will later apply to the universal
organs in Paradiso 2 («che di sù prendono e di sotto fanno», 123).2
Within this vertical hierarchy, Dante conceives of himself as an
intermediate being on the ladder of knowledge who links those above
(the pochi) and those below (the miseri). The guiding spirit is one of
agape , or benevolence, which in the original Greek appropriately meant
«banquet».
In the new navigational metaphor of Paradiso 2, the downward
movement of imparting knowledge is replaced by an upward (actually,
outward) movement of seeking knowledge. Dante no longer sits at the
feet of others, but is now the lone captain at the helm of a boat
traversing uncharted waters. The pochi are no longer Dante's guides and
authorities, but his followers. They are apparently not considered
competent enough to navigate on their own, since they will only be
able to proceed by remaining close in Dante's wake.
Implicitly placing themselves among the second group of seafarers,
critics tend to incorporate Dante's warning into their own commentaries
of Paradiso 2 in various ways. Sapegno, for example, prefaces his
explanation of the canto's philosophical content with a warning that
retains the distinction between two types of readership, but changes it to
a distinction between Dante's knowing contemporaries and the baffled
modern day readers.3 Singleton echoes Dante's warning: he tells the
reader that before venturing into the canto's philsophical passages, «he
might do well to read Grandgent's paraphrase and exposition of the
whole argument» (which he then duly provides).4 One can only assume
that after this crash course in medieval philosophy - a four-paragraph
quotation - those in their «piccioletta barca» can become part of the
enlightened second group. In a more blatant attempt to make Dante's
metaphor seem less elitist, Irma Brandeis changes the meaning of
Dante's warning to the reader when she tells us that according to Dante:
«if [the reader] has not yet lifted up his neck for bread of angels , he must
wish to try».5 According to Dante, however, it is too late for the
uninitiated to wish to try; they must turn back to shore.6
The critical attention devoted to the metaphor itself generally
15
praises the poetic/aesthetic merits of the passage, points out its relation
to Dante's other navigational metaphors, and/or elaborates on the
comparison that Dante makes between his own voyage and those of
Ulysses and Jason. Critics who have mentioned its function vis-à-vis
the reader generally take the metaphor to be «Dante's perfectly serious
warning».7 Yet if Dante's warning to the reader had had a practical
purpose, it should have come at the very beginning of the poem,
analogous to the inscription at the gate of Hell (Inf. 3. 1-9). 8 (For my
students in «Literature Humanities CI 002», the warning could be
logically placed between the Inferno and Purgatorio , since each year they
read the entire first canticle and then abandon Dante just as he is about
to emerge from Hell because the course requires that they move on to
the Decameron). The last possible place one could reasonably ask a
reader to turn back would be at the outset of Paradiso 1 before Dante's
ascent into the celestial spheres at a speed faster than that of lightning
(Par. 1.91-93). Had it been placed at the opening of the canticle, the
warning could have been applicable to Paradiso as a whole. But to the
reader who finds himself ascending with Dante at lightning speed into
the first celestial sphere, turning back is no longer a viable option.
In the letter to Cangrande (supposing it is of Dante's hand), Dante
divides the Paradiso into the prologue (Par. 1.1-36) and the executive
part. If he had meant for his warning in Paradiso 2 to be taken at face
value, he would have had to include it in the prologue which addresses
and prepares the reader for the canticle which follows. Moreover, Dante
states (following Cicero's Nova Rhetorica) that in a good exordium «the
hearer, namely, should be rendered favorably disposed, attentive, and
willing to learn».9 If Dante, as he goes on to explain, took deliberate
steps to render the hearer (or reader) «benevolum et attentum et docilem»
at the opening of Paradiso 1, it is hardly likely that he would have had a
change of heart at the opening of the following canto.
If the warning cannot be a practical one, then, it is well to question
the rhetorical strategy behind it and its intended effect on the reader. To
anyone who has traversed sixty-eight cantos of the Commedia , with the
experience of having chewed and swallowed several philosophical
passages already, the only real option is to identify oneself with the
pochi that are invited to follow Dante. Once the reader has placed
himself in this élite group, he is given instructions delimiting his mode
of reading (i.e., following close behind Dante). Although he credits the
pochi with intellectual speculation («il pan de li angeli»), Dante
dissuades them from exercising it. The «ideal» reader, it seems, is not
only one who is able to follow Dante's reasoning, but one who restricts
himself to following Dante's reasoning.
16
Dante further inscribes the reader response into the text itself
through his references to the voyages of Ulysses and Jason. It is clear
that Dante has in mind his own version of the Ulysses story given in
Inferno 26, but Jason's story also involves a new version. Dante revises
Jason's story on the spot in order to create a precedent for the type of
reader he desires. While in Ovid's Metamorphoses the natives of Colchis
were amazed, Dante rewrites the tale so that it is the Argonauts, his
fellow travelers, who are amazed.
What is there, then, in Paradiso 2 which causes amazement?
Perhaps it is Dante's claim to have penetrated the moon. He does not
use philosophical speculation to support his claim, however, but asks
the reader to accept it as an article of faith. He does so by creating an
analogy between two bodies occupying the same space and the
Incarnation in which the divine entered into a human body. Although
critics seem reluctant to admit it, this is a false analogy which lacks
logical rigor. The impossibility of two physical objects occupying the
same space does not prove the impossibility of two essences (human
and divine) co-existing in the same body. But the point is this: since
Dante supports his claim with recourse to the mysteries of the Christian
faith rather than providing scientific or philosophical explanation, this
passage can neither lose the uneducated nor amaze those who feed on
philosophical speculation.
The question then needs to be rephrased: what is there in Paradiso 2
which causes amazement in the philosophically mindedl This brings us
to the heart of the canto. Verse 49 begins a question on the origin of
moon spots; the answer will occupy the remaining hundred verses of the
canto. Beatrice is delegated as the voice of authority, taking the place of
the pochi at whose feet Dante placed himself in the opening of the
Convivio , and she proceeds along the lines of a Scholastic argument by
first refuting an erroneous opinion (pars destruens , 64-105) and then
substantiating her own claim (pars construens , 112-48). In this case, the
idea to be refuted is that the spots were caused by the rarity and density
of the body of the moon, an opinion that Dante himself had sustained in
book 2 of the Convivio . In the pars construens , Beatrice's argument
goes beyond the topic of moon spots to discuss the heavenly bodies and
the celestial intelligences who move them, as well as the effects these
bodies have on the sublunar world.
Beatrice begins her argument with the statement that the reason
given for the variance of light on the surface of the moon must also
account for the variance of light among all heavenly bodies. Since the
other stars differ not only in the degree of brightness, but also in their
hue, the answer is to be found in quality as well as in quantity («nel
17
quale e nel quanto», 65) of light.
Beatrice has recourse to both observation and experimentation in
her refutation of Dante's theory of rare and dense matter. If the moon had
layers of completely transparent areas, one would be able to observe the
sun's light shining through these areas during a solar eclipse. If these
so-called layers of rare matter did not traverse the entire body of the
moon, then light would be reflected back at the point in which it
encountered dense matter, and, as her proposed experiment involving a
light and three mirrors would show, the light which traveled farthest
before being reflected back would differ only in size but not in
brilliance.
In the pars construens , Beatrice's discourse jumps from physics to
metaphysics as she provides a spiritual explanation to the different hues
of physical light. She begins by tracing a trajectory in which the
undifferentiated virtue of the Empyrean passes through the Primum
Mobile (9th sphere) and into the Sphere of the Fixed Stars (8th sphere)
where it becomes differentiated as it mingles with each individual star.
Beatrice next more summarily attributes this pattern of differentiation
and transmittal to the rest of the planets, «li altri giron» (1 18-123). She
then approaches the subject from a new angle - now looking to the
active forces behind this celestial relay system. She posits the existence
of Intelligences that govern each heavenly sphere like the soul in the
human body but remain distinct from it. The Intelligences are
responsible for infusing virtues into the rays of light which then pass
through the heavenly bodies of each sphere. Although Dante outlines
the process from the Empyrean to the heaven of the moon, it is
understood that these distinct virtues ultimately reach the earth and
influence the lives of its inhabitants.
In the Convivio , which is also concerned with the heavenly bodies
and the celestial intelligences who move them, Dante acknowledges the
authorities who have provided the philosophical backbone of this
conception of the cosmos: Aristotle, Plato, and the Church fathers (i'
Cattolici). Briefly tracing the principal sources of Dante's synthesis, we
can note that Aristotle posited a cosmos of eight concentric spheres
consisting of the planets and fixed stars, to which Ptolemy added a ninth
(the Primum Mobile) and Christian teaching added a tenth sphere
embracing all the others (the Empyrean). Aristotle attributed the
movement of the celestial spheres to prime movers, which were later
identified by Christian and Arab Neoplatonists as angels who regulated
the various spheres of the cosmos. While Aristotle was concerned
primarily with motion, the Neoplatonists used the ordering of the
heavens to expound an ontological ladder of being based on emanation
18
from the One to the many.10 In the Convivio's explanation of the
heavens and their movers, Dante also cites Pseudo-Dionysius's On the
Celestial Hierarchy {De coelesti hierarchia) and the anonymous On
Causes {Liber de causis ), both of which contain a Neoplatonic
conception of emanation which had found its way into medieval
Christian thinking. The emphasis in these works is no longer on the
movement of the heavens, but on illumination and the reflection of
light. Dante does not claim emanation as a model for the creation of the
universe, which would go against the Christian belief of creation ex
nihilo , but rather he uses the language of emanation and light
metaphysics to explain the continuous descent of virtue from the
highest heaven.
For Dante, as well as for medieval culture at large, the ultimate
destination of these virtues is the earth, and therefore one must add that
astrology, considered part of the science of astronomy in Dante's time,
has a part to play in Dante's view of the cosmos. The virtues passed
down through the celestial bodies influence man's physical body, his
mental faculties, and his general character. Although in Paradiso 2 Dante
does not describe the various kinds of virtues he has in mind, we find as
he passes through each planet that they are principally connected to
classical mythology (e.g., Venus bestows a disposition to love; Mars, a
warlike nature; Jupiter, temperance and justice). In Par. 22.112-17,
Dante attributes his creative genius to the constellation Gemini under
whose sign he was born.
To summarize, one could say that, in the wake of the on-going
synthesizing of philosophy and theology undertaken by his predecessors,
Dante combines a Neoplatonic emanation theory, Christian angelology,
and the «science» of astrology in a fundamentally Aristotelian universeē
So much for Dante's conception of the cosmos. But what does all
of this have to do with moon spots? The concluding lines of the canto
(145-148), spoken by Beatrice, give the impression that all has been
clarified. Indeed, Paradiso 3 opens with Dante's intention to 'confess'
(«confessar corretto e certo / me stesso», 4-5) after Beatrice, «provando e
riprovando» (3), had shown him the truth. It can be therefore easily
overlooked that Dante-author has not yet provided the reader with an
explanation of moon spots. Perhaps Dante-pilgrim had intended to
conclude the discourse on moon spots in his «confession», but just as
he was about to speak, a «visione» made him forget all about his
declaration («di mia confession non mi sovvenne», 9). While the
attention of Dante-pilgrim - and supposedly of the reader - is
absorbed by this new wondrous sight, Dante's declaration as well as the
answer to the original question are forgotten. After all, if Dante-pilgrim
19
is completely satisfied, then so should the reader be who is following
close in Dante's wake.
But Dante seems to have anticipated that some of those pochi who
feed on intellectual speculation would not be satisfied without reaching
the end of Beatrice's line of thought themselves. Inserted in-between the
passage on the hierarchy of the spheres and that of the celestial
Intelligences are Beatrice's following words to the pilgrim: «Riguarda
bene ornai sì com' io vado / per questo loco al ver che tu disiri, / sì che
poi sappi sol tener lo guado» (124-126). As Singleton notes, «'loco' and
'guado' suggest, metaphorically, that Beatrice's disquisition is a kind of
journey or fording to the final truth at which she means to arrive, and
Dante must learn to follow the path of it and later be able to 'ford' it by
himself».11 In other words, it is a variation on the navigational
metaphor that began the canto. Now, however, Dante-pilgrim and, by
extension, any of the pochi who may not be swept away by the vision
in the next canto so as to forget the issue, are invited to follow
Beatrice's reasoning in order to complete the argument.
Some of these pochi have endeavored to provide the rest of us with
Dante's (untold) explanation of moon spots. E. G. Parodi and Enrico
Proto argue that since the moon is the lowest of the planets, all the
virtues of all the superior heavens are assembled there.12 Thus, just as
there is diversity between the light of one star and the next, there is also
diversity of light among the various parts of the moon. Bruno Nardi
comes to a similar conclusion, positing a different possible source: the
Neoplatonist Giamblico, quoted in Simplicius's sixth-century treatise,
De cáelo , rather than Albertus Magnus or St. Thomas Aquinas. Those
who believed to have found the answer seemed satisfied to have located a
possible source. They thereby, albeit unwittingly, obeyed the
instructions of Dante's opening metaphor and remained in Dante's wake.
Subsequent commentators and critics have merely repeated their
«solution» without subjecting it to further investigation. What would
happen if the reader were not content to remain in Dante's wake - not
only with regard to the specific problem of moon spots but with his
entire conception of the cosmos - and wanted instead to stop and take a
better look at the pelago Dante had led him to?
The first difficulty in the theory is due to the fact that Dante
attributes the difference in physical light one observes on the moon's
surface to different spiritual virtues which rain down the heavens from
star to star. The transmission of virtue is not separated from a discourse
on the behavior of reflected light. Beatrice not only bases her refutation
of Dante's theory on the behavior of reflected light in the pars destruens ,
but in the pars construens she goes on to claim that the virtue imparted
20
by the Intelligences is within the light which shines from the heavenly
bodies. Dante had already stated as much in the Convivio : «li raggi di
ciascuno cielo sono la via per la quale discende la loro vertude in queste
cose di qua giù» (2.6.9), and in Paradiso 22 he refers to the stars as
«lume pregno / di gran virtù» (112-13).13 Beatrice's theory (as well as
its continuation by Parodi et al.) should therefore - but will not -
hold up to the same rigorous test to which Beatrice put Dante's earlier
theory of rarity and density in the pars destruens of her exposition.
Beatrice opens her argument with the requirement that what holds
good for the moon, must apply to the rest of the stars and planets as
well. Dante states in the Commedia and elsewhere that each star or
planet has its own particular virtue, and that this different virtue is the
cause of a different hue of light. In the Questio de aqua et terra's
discussion of the diverse virtues poured down by the diverse heavenly
bodies, Dante specifically states that each star or constellation has its
own particular virtue.14 Why, then, should one 'star' only - the moon
- contain different virtues? The simple statement repeated by various
critics that just as the different stars contain different virtues, different
parts of the moon contain different virtues, may constitute a nice image,
but it contradicts Beatrice's own requirement of seeking the same
explanation for the differences in color on the moon and the other stars.
The plot thickens. When Dante tells us that the virtue-filled light
moves from star to star, he gives us the impression of a direct descent.
Moreover, in the Convivio he states emphatically that this virtue travels
exclusively from star to star, and not through the spheres themselves,
which are transparent. This, however, goes against both the scientific
understanding of the behavior of light and the astrological idea of the
influence of the stars. Regarding the physical aspect, how can one
imagine a ray of light that reaches only each subsequent star and does
not filter down through the spheres themselves? The simplest
experiment would show that light emanating from a single source
extends over a great expanse and thus it would be impossible for the
light to reach only the planets without extending into the sphere as
well. Regarding the astrological aspect, Dante claims elsewhere in the
Commedia and in his other works a direct influence of stars on various
aspects of human life. In Convivio 2, for example, the virtue
originating in Venus seems to pass directly to the sublunar world. The
pattern of transmission established in Paradiso 2, however, would
require that this virtue pass through the two lower stars, Mercury and
the moon. Dante tells us in Paradiso 2 that as the virtue of any
particular star passes from one celestial body to the next, it is further
differentiated. If the particular virtue that the Intelligence of the third
21
heaven imparts on Venus is VI, then Mercury will emit V2 as well as
its own virtue, which we could call Mel; the moon will then emit V3,
Me2 as well as Mol. We would then have to expand this model to
include not only all seven planets, but all the stars of the eighth heaven
as well. Critics who have argued that for Dante moon spots result from
the fact that the moon is the depository of all the virtues of the other
stars implicitly accept the final stage of this model. Yet one must accept
or refuse the entire model. If indeed all the virtues of the cosmic
universe are congregated on the moon, then in the celestial body just
superior to the moon, Mercury, there must be congregated all the
heavenly virtues minus one. Yet this is clearly not a feasible working
model. Dante never suggests that any of the other planets present
various hues. On the contrary, as stated above, he insists that each star
has its particular virtue and therefore its particular hue.
As we float around this celestial pelago , we come across yet
another complication. Dante believed that the sun illuminated not only
the moon, but all the celestial bodies as well.15 If we try to visualize
this, we see that the direction of light would be from the fourth sphere
both down toward the earth and up toward the fixed stars. But this would
upset Paradiso 2's picture of virtue-laden light emanating along a ladder
of being beginning with the First Cause. Dante never denies that the
sun lights the universe, and even acknowledges this implicitly in
Beatrice's pars destruens as well as later in the canticle,16 but in
Beatrice's pars construens , Dante is careful to draw attention away from
the sun. Not only does Beatrice insist on a pattern of emanation from
the Empyrean downward («di grado in grado» and «de luce a luce»), she
never mentions any particular role the sun might play in the
transmission of light, grouping it together with all the other planets («li
altri giron», 118). Thus, in the very act of outlining a process of
differentiation of the distinct virtues, Dante pointedly avoids
differentiating the seven planets. To complicate matters further, Dante
believed that the stars and planets (including the moon) not only
reflected the sun's light, but contained their own inner luminosity. One
can therefore legitimately ask the following question: to what extent is
the differentiated light of the moon's surface the result of: 1) reflected
sunlight; 2) the virtue-laden light descending from the higher heavens;
3) the moon's intrinsic light?
Yet the principal problem has yet to be pointed out: Paradiso 2's
model for the celestial spheres is impossible (even) according to
medieval standards. Dante's concept of the transmittal of virtue via
reflected light suggests a linear descent from one heavenly body to the
next; however, this alignment of the planets is a near impossibility, and
22
was certainly not the case in 1300 or 1301. Applying the pattern of
descent outlined in Paradiso 2 to the position of the planets at the time,
one would have to imagine that stars ranging a full 360fi would all emit
virtue-laden light that traveled directly to Saturn, at that time under the
constellation of Leo, and then from there change direction as they head
toward Jupiter under the constellation of Aries, and so on.17 Yet this
accurate picture of the celestial spheres would upset the pattern of
emanation that Beatrice outlines so insistently in Paradiso 2. More
importantly, and this is ultimately the issue at stake, an accurate picture
of the celestial spheres at this point would destroy the narrative of an
individual's direct ascent through each planet to the stars that Dante is
taking such pains to set up. Beatrice's entire discourse on the downward
flow of virtue and light through the heavenly bodies is an extremely
effective preparation for the illusion of Dante's direct ascent through
those very same planets up to the stars.18
In the chapter «Problems in Paradise», Teodolinda Barolini argues
that the arrangement of the blessed souls in the various heavenly
spheres, which Beatrice explains is a representational expedient used by
God to lead Dante-pilgrim to higher truths, is in actuality a
representational expedient used by Dante-author in order to be able to
narrate his story.19 Dante thus attempts to disguise the part he plays as
the fiction's constructor by displacing the responsibility of the
arrangement of souls onto the poem's fictional constructs. Following
Barolini's «detheologized» line of reasoning rather than the wake to
which Dante has tried to confine the readers of Paradiso 2, we can see
that Dante not only arranges the souls in distinct spheres to accomodate
his narrative in time , but he attempts to convey the even more radical
impression that the planets have arranged themselves in a straight line
to facilitate his travel in space.
As Patrick Boyde notes, «we must remember that the whole action
of the Comedy is conceived as an imitation of the Scale of Being, as it
shows the protagonist climbing step by step, canto by canto, encounter
by encounter, truth by truth, until he comes into the presence of
God».20 In Inferno and Purgatorio , the pilgrim's trajectory can be clear
and orderly because Dante's landscape is of his own making. In Paradiso ,
however, he must work with a celestial landscape already set in place on
the authority of Aristotle and accepted with slight modifications by the
Christian church. The Neoplatonic idea of emanation turned out to be
extremely useful in providing a model for gradational movement in this
fundamentally Aristotelian model of the physical universe, and its
narrative usefulness, rather than its theological appropriateness, may
very well be the reason why Dante uses it with such insistence in this
23
canto. Both sections of Beatrice's pars construens describe a pattern of
descent from the Empyrean through the successive spheres, a descent
which is reinforced in the concluding words of each section. The first
conclusion not only presents the concept of gradation («di grado in
grado»), but carries the vertical markers «di sù» and «di sotto» as well
(121-23):
Questi organi del mondo così vanno,

come tu vedi ornai, di grado in grado,
che di sù prendono e di sotto fanno.
This imagined descent of virtue-filled light from planet to planet is then

synthesized in the conclusion of the second section with the phrase: «da
luce a luce» (145) in which «luce» now refers to «lighted planet» or
«star» rather than simply «light». In Neoplatonic and Christian thought,
the descent of the One into the many was the premise for the ascent of
the individual soul back to the One. Thus, the pattern of descent which
structures Beatrice's discourse in Paradiso 2 prepares the reader for
Dante's account of a step-by-step («di grado in grado» and «da luce a
luce») ascent from planet to planet in the following cantos.
Dante employs various rhetorical strategies, both in Paradiso 2 and
in the cantos adjacent to it, that serve not only to prepare a reader for the
narrative of a direct ascent through the spheres but also to discourage the
reader from questioning such a model. In this context, we can see that
Paradiso 2's opening warning was designed to put the reader on the
defensive. When asked to decide whether he is in a «piccioletta barca» or
a «navigio», one is forced to question and then defend his own
worthiness as reader and is thereby less apt to question the text's
accuracy of presentation. Dante did not need a military tactician to tell
him that the best defense is a good offense. But he further conditioned
reader response through his opening indication to remain close to his
wake and his expectation of amazement. The reader is not given the
option of questioning Dante's picture of the cosmos; the «worthy»
reader must simply follow closely behind and be amazed. Later in the
canto, in the middle of Beatrice's pars construens , she suggests that she
will not directly provide the answer to Dante's question on moon spots,
yet this is elided at the end of the canto (145-48) when she gives the
impression that her explanation is complete. This impression is carried
forward in the following canto in which, as noted above, Dante declares
himself to have been completely won over by her argument. The reader
may thereby be expected to feel vicarious satisfaction even without
being able to complete the exposition on moon spots left unanswered
24
by Beatrice. Those pochi who did venture to complete the argument
followed closely Dante's line of reasoning and believed they found a
solution when they discovered a source which they could link to Dante's
argument. They did not, however, go on to question the feasibility of
the «solution» according to Beatrice's (Dante's) own criteria. Perhaps
Dante foresaw that the pleasure that the pochi would derive from
bringing forth the solution would tend to dissuade them from testing it.
But that Dante did his very best to keep the pochi from speculating
too much about the problem can be attested to by the narrative event(s)
which surround Beatrice's discourse on moon spots. In Par . 2 Dante tells
us: «giunto mi vidi ove mirabil cosa / mi torse il viso a sé» (25-26).
Since Dante does not actually see the moon but quite suddenly finds
himself within it, the «mirabil cosa» that draws his attention cannot be
the moon spots. Inexplicably, then, even though there were no visual
stimuli to remind him of the moon spots, the origin of moon spots
apparently becomes so pressing a question that it leads Dante-pilgrim to
forget all about the «mirabil cosa» before his eyes.21 There was even
less reason for Dante-pilgrim to ask the question about moon spots
given the fact that he believed he already knew the answer (59-60).
Yet this very same «mirabil cosa» becomes the «vision» that
causes him to forget all about his answer to Beatrice in which he may
have been expected to continue her reasoning and provide the
sought-after answer. By redirecting attention to the vision, Dante has
picked up the narrative from a point just prior to his question about
moon spots which now becomes a forgotten parenthesis in a voyage of
the marvelous. We can now see that Dante is using this vision as a
deliberate rhetorical strategy: as the readers' curiosity propels them
forward, the problem of the origin of moon spots can fade into the
distance while, however, the image of a hierarchically ordered universe
will remain stamped onto their imagination.
Returning to the analogy to Jason with which Dante opened the
canto, one can note that what caused amazement in the spectators was
not Jason's voyage, but the accomplishment of a seemingly impossible
task: «quando Iasón vider fatto bifolco» (18). The scene to which Dante
is referring is Jason's feat of plowing a field with fire-breathing bulls
(Metamorphoses VII. 104-22). In broader terms, the source of amazement
is Jason's making unpliable material pliable. Dante-author, likewise, is
attempting an impossible feat - to render in the imagination of the
reader the impression of a trajectory that is impossible - not only in
practical terms because man did not have the technological capability to
travel into outer space, but in theoretical terms as well, since, even
following the notion that the planets were arranged in spheres around the
25
earth, Dante would have never found the planets in a position to
accomodate a direct ascent. As Jason domesticated the wild bulls so they
could plow the field, Dante is attempting to domesticate the cosmos so
it can accommodate his imaginary space travel.
The fact that Dante shaped the cosmos to his own poetic needs does
not mean that his concept of the heavenly spheres was vague or
erroneous (given the knowledge of his time). On the contrary, it is
precisely because of Dante's interest in astronomy (which in Convivio
2.13.29-30 he calls the highest of all the sciences) and his superior
knowledge of it which he displays throughout his works, that his
disregard for it in Paradiso 2 is so significant. That Dante is consciously
disregarding - and not ignorant of - the latest scientific understanding
of his day can be seen from the rhetorical strategies he undertakes to
prevent the reader from realizing it. He abandons the fiction of a linear
ascent as soon as the apparatus is no longer necessary to his narrative.
Once he has passed through the seven spheres containing planets and
reached the heaven of the fixed stars, he can safely look down toward the
earth and map out the position of the planets.
Tellingly, he begins with a reference to the very same problem of
moon spots (Par. 22.139-41), indirectly offering the picture that follows
as a corrective to the necessary cosmic distortion carried out in Paradiso
2. Although he does not offer any great detail, we do see that while
Mercury and Venus are near the sun (143-44), Saturn and Mars are on
opposite sides of Jupiter (145-46), and the planets are seen in their
diversity - not only their different size, speed, and distance, but their
different positions as well («in distante riparo», 150). Dante's few
planetary indications prove to be accurate according to the astronomical
calculations provided in Dante's day in a perpetual almanac compiled by
Jacob ben Machir ben Tibbon (b. 1236) that gives the positions of the
sun, moon and planets at intervals of a few days for whole cycles of
years beginning in 1301. M. A. Orr notes that in the Latin translation
of the original Hebrew almanac, all the cycles except for the sun and
Venus begin in 1300, suggesting that Dante may have taken the 1301
positions to correspond to 1300.22 It is, therefore, difficult to map out
with any certainty Dante's conception of the position of all the planets
at the time of his fictional journey. What is certain, however, is that in
Paradiso 2, at the onset of his flight through the first seven spheres,
Dante ignores the various positions of the planets in order to create the
fiction of a direct ascent, and that in Paradiso 22, having reached the
heaven of the Fixed Stars, he can look back and offer a panoramic view
of the planetary positions in conformity with actual astronomical
calculations.
26
Yet for the reader who may chance to notice that for over twenty
cantos of Paradiso the position of the heavenly bodies is distorted, Dante
plants a reminder that his text, despite its illusion of fact, is not to be
read as an account of a factual journey but as a moral allegory of
enlightenment. This reminder, which comes while Dante-pilgrim is still
within the moon, is in reference to Plato's theory, found in the
Timaeus , of the souls inhabiting stars. Of course, Beatrice tells us, for
those that understand this in a literal sense the statement is false. But
those who read Plato literally, misread Plato. When she states that
«forse sua sentenza è d'altra guisa / che la voce non suona, ed esser
puote / con intenzion da non esser derisa» {Par. 4. 55-57), she is
allowing for the truth of Plato's statement on an allegorical level. Dante
may well be implying that, as in the Timaeus , statements in the
Commedia which are discovered to be incorrect on a literal level harbor
instead an allegorical truth.
In the letter to Cangrande, Dante says of his Paradiso: «if in certain
parts or passages the treatment is after the manner of speculative
philosophy, that is not for the sake of speculation, but for a practical
purpose» (paragraph 16). The practical purpose he is referring to here is
that of bringing man to a state of happiness. However, we can now add
that in Paradiso 2 speculative philosophy is at the service of his poetic,
aesthetic aim as well. The poetic challenge that Dante-author set for
himself was to convey the physical reality of the space that
Dante-pilgrim was traversing as though he were indeed a medieval
antecedent of Neil Armstrong, while being faced, at the same time, with
the impossibility of even theoretically imagining such a trajectory. Like
any good writer of science fiction, Dante made use of the latest
understanding of the universe in order to give a sense of concreteness and
reality to his fictive voyage. As Paradiso 2 reveals, however, he was not
adverse to distorting the scientific facts when they would have interfered
with his fictional project. He just did his best to prevent the reader from
noticing.
NOTES
1 Citations from the Convivio are from the critical edition of Maria
Simonelli, Bologna, Patron, 1966. - Works consulted: Andriani,
Beniamino, La forma del paradiso dantesco: il sistema del mondo secondo
gli antichi e secondo Dante. Padua, Cedam, 1961; Barolini, Teodolinda,
The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante , Princeton (NJ), Princeton
UP, 1992; Bemrose, Stephen, Dante's Angelic Intelligences: Their
Importance in the Cosmos and in Pre-Christian Religion. Rome, Storia e
27
Letteratura, 1983; Boyde, Patrick, Dante Philomythes and Philosopher :
Man in the Cosmos. London, Cambridge UP, 1981; Brandeis, Irma, The
Ladder of Vision : A Study of Dante's Comedy , 1960, Garden City (NY),
Doubleday, 1962; Capasso, Ideale, L'astronomia nella Divina Commedia,
Pisa, Domus Galilaeana, 1967; Ghisalberti, Alessandro, «La cosmologia
nel Duecento e Dante», Letture cclassensi, voi. 13, Ravenna, Longo, 1984;
Kay, Richard, «Astrology and Astronomy», in The Divine Comedy and the
Encyclopedia of Arts and Sciences , eds. Giuseppe Di Scipio & Aldo
Scaglione, Amsterdam, Benjamins, 1988; Mazzotta, Giuseppe, Dante's
Vision and the Circle of Knowledge, Princeton (NJ), Princeton UP, 1993;
Nardi, Bruno, Dal Convivio alla Commedia: Sei saggi danteschi, Rome,
Istituto storico italiano per il Medio Evo, 1960; Idem, «Il canto delle
macchie lunari», Lecturae e altri studi danteschi , ed. Rudy Abardo, Florence,
Le Lettere, 1990; Idem, «La dottrina delle macchie lunari nel secondo canto
del «Paradiso», Saggi di filosofia dantesca , Florence, La nuova Italia,
1967; Orr, Mary A. Dante and the Early Astronomers , London, Wingate,
1956; Parodi, Ernesto Giacomo, Il canto II del Paradiso, Florence, Sansoni,
1911; Proto, Enrico, «La dottrina dantesca delle macchie lunari», Scritti
varii di erudizione e di critica in onore di Rodolfo Renier , Turin, Bocca,
1912.
^Citations from the Paradiso follow La Commedia secondo l'antica vulgata ,
ed. Giorgio Petrocchi, Milan, Mondadori, 1967.
3 «Ecco lo schema del suo ragionamento, che risulta difficile in quanto
presuppone tutta una serie di proposizioni che dovevano apparire evidenti
alla coscienza filosofica dei lettori contemporanei».
4In his Commentary to Paradiso , Princeton (NJ), Princeton UP, 1975, p. 45
^Brandéis, p. 212.
"The most radical modification that I have come across occurs in a Spanish
translation which misreads Dante's passage so that the author appears to be
placing himself in the same little boat as the most ignorant reader:
«perdendo me, rimarreste smarriti» is rendered as «perdiéndome yo, os
arrastraría conmigo» [getting lost myself, I would drag you along with me].
Apparently, faced with the daunting task of translating this canto, the
translator couldn't conceive how anyone - even its author - could rank
among the pochi capable of understanding it: La Divina Comedia , tr. E.
Rodríguez Vilanova & F. Sales Coderch, Barcelona, Editorial Bruguera,
1973.
^The words are those of Brandeis, pp. 212-13.
"The Convivio presents such a warning in its introductory section (1.1.12).
^«Epistola XI», tr. Paget Toynbee, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1966, p. 203.
10For a more detailed account of this process, see Bemrose, pp. 29-31.
H In his Commentary to Paradiso , cit., p. 58.
l' ^Compare Parodi, Il canto II del Paradiso , and Proto, «La dottrina dantesca
delle macchie lunari».
l^This convergence of light and virtue is stated more poetically near the end
of Paradiso 2: «la virtù mista per lo corpo luce / come letizia per pupilla
28
viva» (143-44). The letter to Caiigrande is more cautious, using light as a
simile for virtue, not as a means of its transmission: «Hence, mediately or
immediately, everything that exists has its being from Him, because,
inasmuch as the second cause has its effect from the first, its influence on
what it acts upon is like that of a body which receives and reflects a ray»
(«ad modum recipients et repercutientis radium», underlining mine).
Whence it is evident that every essence and every virtue proceeds from a
primal one; and that the lower intelligences have their effect as it were from
a radiating body, and, after the fashion of mirrors, reflect the rays of a
higher to the one below them» («Propter quod patet quod omnis essentia et
virtus procedat a prima, et intelligent ae inferiores recipiant quasi a
radiante, et reddant radios superioris ad suum inferius, ad modum
speculorum», underlining mine), paragraphs 20-21.
14«Unde alia est virtus huius stelle et illius, et alia huius constellationis et
illius» (I quote Opere minori, vol. II, ed. F. Mazzoni, Milan-Naples,
Ricciardi, 1979).
*5 «Nullo sensibile in tutto lo mondo è più degno di farsi essemplo di Dio
che 'l sole; lo quale di sensibile luce sé prima e poi tutte le corpora
celestiali e le dementali allumina» (Conv. 3.12.7; italics mine).
16See Par. 20.1-6 & Par. 32.107-8.
l 'Dante could have found the positions of all the planets in a perpetual
almanac circulating at the time (discussed below). In Par. 21.14, Saturn's
stated position «sotto '1 petto del Leone» is given thematic, rather than
astronomical, relevance.
*°If they take their cue from Dante rather than from astronomy, readers will
naturally tend to conceive of Dante's flight through the spheres as a direct
ascent without any movement in longitude. The illustration used in Musa's
translation (Paradise, Bloomington, Indiana UP, 1984), placed,
significantly, along with his notes to Paradiso 2, is a case in point. The
illustrator arranges the seven planets in an absolutely straight line which
ascends from the earth to the heaven of the fixed stars. This visual aid is
highly inaccurate, but I would argue that it is exactly how Dante would like
us to conceive of the cosmos during his imaginary transit through it. -
Musa notes that the illustration is adapted frpm John S. Carroll, In Patria ,
London, 1971.
l"ln The (Jndivine Comedy , p. 187.
2În Dante Philomythes , p. 131.
It is perhaps to justify in some way Dante's question that Mark Musa
creates his own addition to the narrative in his commentary: «Since the
surface of the moon seems smooth and flawless to Dante as he approaches
it, he becomes curious about the appearance of this surface as it is seen
from earth» (cit., p. 26).
Ôrr, Dante and the Early Astronomers , p. 284. The almanac was edited by
J. Boffito and C. Melzi d'Eril and printed as Almanach Dantis Aligherii ,
Florence, Olschki, 1908.
29
Paradiso III
Author(s): RUGGERO STEFANINI and Ruggero Stefanin
Accessed: 17-02-2020 23:02 UTC
Lectura Dantis
RUGGERO STEFANINI
University of California at Berkeley
III
Beginning and ending in the name of Beatrice,1 the third canto of
the Paradiso is marked by two memorable creations: the character of
Piccarda and the Heaven of the Moon. In its presentation of the «great
Costanza», it also offers an inspired reprise of the celebration of the
Empire and, finally, it touches upon certain theoretical issues of great
importance, such as the true dwelling-place of the blest and the influence
of the stars on the nature and deserts of human beings. But let us take
each matter up in its turn.
Piccarda
It would be a serious mistake to try to grasp the meaning of this

character without undertaking a detailed comparison to the two other
great women of the Commedia , Pia and Francesca. These three
characters exhibit a natural and an ideal affinity that the poet skillfully
varies, adjusting it to the different moral and eschatological levels on
which they figure (damnation, penitence, bliss), while taking care to
leave many threads of style and meaning that knit them together in the
reader's mind. Indeed, we seem to be dealing with three versions
(infernal, penitential, and heavenly) of a single type of woman - a type
that could easily rise to archetype or, just as easily, decline into
stereotype.
To begin with, there are obvious links even in the pagination of
the three episodes. The cantos in which Francesca and Pia appear (canto
V of the Inferno and canto V of the Purgatorio) bear the same number,
and between Francesca and Piccarda there is at least a topographic
similarity (the first circle of hell in the strict sense - the hell occupied
by the damned whom Minos judges - and the first circle of Paradise). If
these three women whom Dante has set on the threshold of the three
realms of the Christian afterlife, with that sense for complementary
exemplification that marks his didactic method (a casuistry with
systematic tendencies), were taken from their habitations in the other
world and restored to the world of the living, they would all occupy
roughly the same ethical and cultural level. Remember that one descends
30
in the Inferno , but ascends in the other two realms, which is why the
souls of the damned that Dante first meets are always the least wicked
(i.e., the least devilish and the most human). For the same reason, the
spirits with whom he speaks on the lower slopes of Purgatory or in the
first heavens of Paradise are certainly the least perfect (i.e., the least
angelic, and yet again, the most human). Think too of the determinism
of that precious «little tear», which essentially decided the soul's final
destination, and against which (not without cause!) the devils of Dante
and Bonvesin raise their bewildered protests.2 Then one will see that
Francesca (damned by intemperance and lack of time), Pia (saved, but
just barely), and Piccarda (blest in the most laggard sphere), despite the
starry distances which seem a definitive barrier between them, are cast
from much the same human mold, halfway between the heights of the
«peaceful oriflamme» (the Marian ideal) and the depths of the «foul
trollop» (the abject pagan prostitute), and that in addition they have
undergone much the same sufferings and misfortunes.
What type or what feminine ideal do these women iterately
exemplify, so «human» and so liminal in their presentation? It looks
very much as if we are already at the origins of the bourgeois concept of
womanhood: Violetta, whose morbid progress will later excite the
machismo of our fathers (not to mention their children), is ultimately a
leaf from the same book. Our protagonists are thus expected to share
certain distinguishing features and, as a matter of fact, if we set aside the
variations required by art and the different contexts in which they are
presented, all three will prove to be gentle , weak , suffering, and humble.
Among these attributes, a dialectical relationship is established, from
which a narrative plot or an exemplary parable immediately emerges. It
begins with a positive quality (gentleness) which is compromised by an
infraction or a fall, itself the result of weakness and the most human of
impulses. This «fatal error» involves suffering that rehabilitates (in the
eyes at least of humans, starting with men) and through which the
gentle lady is due to become the self-conscious, humble woman of the
epilogue.3 This model (gentleness / weakness / suffering / humility),
which stems from hagiographie sources and a thoroughly Christian
matrix (even though elements derived from the classical world are also
present), still shapes our vision of women today, in the wake of the
romantic «boom» that reflected and repeated the image endlessly, both in
opera and in literature.4 It is no accident that our three mal mariées have
enjoyed a prodigious popularity in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, not only among poets, playwrights, and strolling singers, but
also among deeply involved and moved students of Dante (even if
Piccarda, one must concede, fails to measure up to the other two). In the
31
end, the religious vocation that is part and parcel of her being told
against her - one may become a nun, but only after one's misstep (vide
Suor Angelica), not before.
The three women reveal their gentleness, which is composed of
warm charity and exquisite courtesy,5 in a greeting, in good wishes, or
in a thoughtful advice that recurs without fail at the start of each of the
three episodes and forms the first element (A) of this repeated portrayal.
Francesca's greeting (vv. 88-93), rising tenderly and distressfully from a
gloomy pit of damnation, achieves the drama and pathos of a tragic
appeal (in both the Attic and the universal sense of the word) where the
judgment of the Christian God has assumed the role of Greek Fate. It is
always a surprise to read those opening lines: «O animal grazioso e
benigno / che visitando vai per l'aere perso / noi che tignemmo il
mondo di sanguigno, / se fosse amico il re de l'universo, / noi
pregheremmo lui de la tua pace, / poi c'hai pietà del nostro mal
perverso». Entirely inappropriate from a theological standpoint as they
are (a damned soul, as such, is incapable of desiring the peace and
salvation of a living person), these words clearly belong to the
definition of a feminine ideal that judgment and damnation can turn into
a Christian catharsis (not, banally, an example) but which (just for that
reason) they are unable to deface. One can therefore understand why, in
the exegetical tradition, any attack on Francesca's dignity (which is also
evidence of a disconcerting incapability to appreciate the rich sensibility
and complex culture of the poet) is invariably destined to failure and
grotesqueness.6
In Pia's speech, only one verse corresponds to Francesca's elaborate
greeting, and it is, moreover, syntactically well hidden, being only the
second member of a dependent clause (though the reader of the
Commedia is accustomed to culling in precisely these syntactical folds
semantic kernels of great importance): «Deh, quando tu sarai tornato al
mondo / e riposato de la lunga via...» (v. 130f.). Against the
background of the Purgatorio , Pia's loving solicitude, since it is a
quality of the same realm, cannot assume dramatic dimensions, and as a
result, her pathos must renounce the tragic note, descending instead to
the elegiac; and the quietly affecting tone that it produces is in perfect
harmony with the movement of the second cantica. Compared to the
two that preceded it (Jacopo del Cassero and Buonconte da Montefeltro),
the «third spirit» (Pia) is evangelically humble and small , with her
allusive, half-murmured story. Moreover, Dante illumines her with
solitude, that austral morning solitude that blossoms, within Pia, in a
purely psychological dimension. One does not find Paolo's weeping here
[Francesca] or that smile of loving understanding shared with the fellow
32
sisters [Piccarda], nor does it seem there are relatives on earth to whom
it is worth remembering oneself: there is only the companionship of an
infinitely bitter recollection in this forced vigil which knows neither the
commitment nor the comfort of punishment. Rising to the first heaven,
we naturally find that Piccarda too offers an affectionate welcome (vv.
43-45), but in Paradise receptions of this kind, full of smiles and
dignity, are so obligatory, so predictable that they must perforce remain
within the limits of refined ceremonial. Thus, the phrase in which
Piccarda assures Dante how well-disposed she is vibrates with no
particular pathos; rather, it sounds like an elegant explanation which can
at most echo the religious lyricism that pervades the third cantica .
Pursuing the analysis of our pattern, after the greeting, good
wishes, or thoughtful recommendation (A), we find three other
elements: the story (B), the laconic sentence in which it culminates (C),
and the reference to the husband or other responsible relative (D). The
story is told much more fully and concretely in the case of Francesca.
As a damned soul, she after all has nothing else to offer the Pilgrim. In
the circles of the Inferno , Dante certainly cannot imagine himself
listening to the lectures on morality or theology which the spirits of the
Purgatorio and still more those of the Paradiso will lavish upon him. In
the «valley where there is no absolving», he can only be stung and
deterred by disastrous stories of sin and death. Thus, Francesca's story
can be told in two sections (B and B1) neatly articulated within the
structure of the whole episode, since the first section ends with D (the
reference to the husband), while the second ends with C (the suggestive,
climactic sentence).7 And yet, the two sections, though complementing
each other well, are also in thematic and stylistic contrast. B is
paradigmatic - i.e., it proceeds via aphorism or pithy statements -
and synthetically comprises the whole affair (vv. 100-107). B1, turning
to the facts and circumstances (i.e., to the actual narrative), instead
retraces, in the terms of an Ovidian catastrophe,8 the dramatic course of
the episode which is the structural and moral core of the painful story
(between the spontaneous and still innocent awakening of amorous
feelings, on the one hand, and the final execution at the hands of
Gianciotto, on the other, lies the mutual avowal of the two lovers and,
simultaneously, their act of transgression; vv. 121-138). Pia's story is
lapidary, bounded by a single verse (v. 134) and tightened by a double,
syntactic and figurai antithesis. The verse («Siena mi fé, disfecemi
Maremma») is laid out like a pediment, the two halves sharply outlined
by a syntactic inversion: [subject - > proclitic object + verb] versus
[verb + enclitic object - > subject]. The verbal root fare and the
personal pronoun mi are the constants on which the two dramatic
33
variations rest (Siena / Maremma and, at a deeper level, fare / disfare)?
In Paradise, the brutal story of Piccarda has to be drastically
censored - i.e., bowdlerized and abridged. The waters of Lethe have
already cast a merciful obscurity over the crude details, which in any
case the sublime modesty of the holy sister (not to mention the delicate
gentlewoman) would not know how to confide to anyone, far less to her
brother's friend, arriving happily, and so unexpectedly, on a visit to the
convent. Her version of the crisis (vv. 97-108) is so much overshadowed
by the charming monastic prelude (vv. 97-105) that instead of satisfying
the Pilgrim's curiosity, Piccarda seems to stray off into - or better,
barricade herself inside - a standard panegyric to St. Chiara and the
Clarists. The brightening introduction tends, touchingly, to replace the
action of the story, to become itself the story, or non-story, of a person
who had in fact chosen never to leave her spiritual mirror (Purg.
XXVII. 104f.). One could also say that Piccarda anxiously approaches
the matter in a roundabout way. Unable in charity to evade Dante's
request, the girl (so she remained in the poetic memory of the author and
consequently, so she remains for us) eagerly embarks upon the exercise
of an innocent loquacity, as one might seize upon a providential detour,
simply to allow herself to gather enough strength to utter that formal
tercet (vv. 106-108). After the indiscreet and (one would suppose)
unexpected question (vv. 94-96) - which the poet reports to us
discreetly, instead, with a hint of embarrassment, and without resorting
to direct speech as he did in the episode of Francesca (vv. 1 16-120) -
Piccarda's abrupt opening (the narrative introduction is in fact postponed
and reduced to the parenthetical mi disse of the following verse) has
always given me the impression, in its full and dignified relief, of a
heroically disguised effort, of a painful if imperceptible contraction, of a
quick prefatory gulp. The fact remains that the account by which the
Pilgrim set such store (i.e., the actual story [B]) is handled in a couplet,
anything but specific (v. 106f.), that also includes the reference to the
brother and the husband (D) and immediately receives the seal (v. 108)
of the implicit and ultimate statement (C).
In the three stories, i.e., in the three versions of B, we can see the
following thematic progression: in the Inferno , the focus is on the
adulterous relationship , which compromises a pre-existing marriage; in
the Purgatorio , inversely, the focus is on a conjugal bond compromised
by implied adulterous relations; in the Paradiso , one sees instead the
most perfect union between the soul and Christ - the monastic state -
compromised by an improper marriage which is merely hinted.10 The
reference underlying the triptych is the well-known Pauline opinion of
marriage as a state that is superior to adultery but inferior to freely
34
offered virginity.
The laconic sentence (C), that fearful dicere non dicendo in which
the story unfailingly culminates, owns, by its very nature, a certain
semantic flexibility, allowing it to allude in different directions as the
case requires - that is, in accordance with the character and the cantica.
Beyond an undeniable sense of modesty that all three women share at the
moment when they must touch on so intimate a subject, one can also
detect, in Francesca, the torment of memory; in Pia, a trace of sorrowful
bitterness aimed at a husband who has debased and destroyed her (in this
version of the model, the allusion to the husband's or relative's
responsibility is actually absorbed, not into the story [vide Piccarda],
but into the seal of the conclusive sentence). In Piccarda, one encounters
instead a further offering to God of her racking epilogue on earth; in
fact, the subject of sapere , which for Pia, in an unstated polemic, is still
her husband, for Piccarda it is God. By contrast, one feels the spiritual
blockage of Francesca, when noticing that she and Paolo, as
accomplices, remain the subjects of the tragic final note (v. 138).
All three of these women, let us not forget, have been betrayed -
not only in a general but also in a specific Dantean sense. They fell
victim to the deceit of those who should have loved and protected them,
even tried to understand them and forgive them, on occasion. Therefore,
Caina awaits not only Gianciotto Malatesta, but Nello della Pietra and
that amiable brother, Corso Donati. Yet, only in Francesca does the
reference to the husband (defined as killer - «chi a vita ci spense») have
a tone of forceful accusation and pitiless judgment. It is no accident that
only in the infernal version does the element D of the model fail to fuse
with any other (B or C) and stand on its own in plain view and
syntactic independence. Francesca, as one of the damned, is not obliged
to forgive and to extenuate like the other two women, and it is just in
this line (v. 107) that hell in a sense closes upon her again - always
courteously, to be sure, since as curse or invective this anticipation of
divine justice is restrained enough. Pia's painful reticence casts upon her
husband (he, too, evoked periphrastically, but at the center of a festive
nuptial scene) at most the long shadow of her disappointment and
nostalgia. For her brother and for the man who was later her husband
(Rossellino della Tosa), Piccarda reserves instead a generic label, under
which even their armed retainers might be comprehended:1 1 «uomini . . .
a mal più ch'a bene usi». In short, the wicked and the violent, who have
unfortunately always existed in this world and for whose conversion (as
even Ser Ciappelletto zealously protests when he has decided to play the
hypocrite) one must not cease to pray. And therefore, no longer this or
that person or antagonist, but, by an edifying enlargement, a whole
35
category of wretched sinners.
If, after this infratextual exploration of the archetype, we

concentrate on the protagonist of our canto, one quickly perceives that
Dante has intended to represent or, almost, perform her in a counterpoint
of two eminently Franciscan virtues: charity («L'un fu tutto serafico in
ardore»: Par . XI.37) and humility («la mercede / ch'el meritò nel suo
farsi pusillo»: ibid. 1 lOf.). But in the rendering of Piccarda's antecedents
- her history of weakness and suffering, with the contrite reticence that
derives from it - the poet inevitably privileged the muted, pale tones of
humility (the humility of sister water, from which the girl's image seem
to surface without separating itself), rather than the burning hues of
love. So, despite the gleam of a certain seraphic fire (v. 68f.) and the
repeated assurances by the blessed soul of her inherent charity, the
general effect is of a rarefied, languid atmosphere that is not without a
sad sense of neoplatonic deprivation - that same atmosphere which
emanates from so much Franciscan hagiography (/ fioretti) and from the
lyric situations influenced by it (Vita Nuova J.1 2 There is no doubt that
Piccarda shows herself to be full of charity (nor will the other blessed
souls lag behind her in this respect). In fact, she is quite vaga di
ragionare (v. 35); she is pronta (v. 42) and lieta (v. 68) in her answers,
her eyes smile (v. 42), and her face lights up (v. 69). Carità , with the
possessive pronoun that best befits it ( nostra ; cf. Purg. XV. 55-57), is
also the first word she utters, the incipit of her whole discourse. In the
tercets allotted her, the term recurs thrice more (vv. 71, 77, 102) in full
lexical evidence, and «charity» is also the meaning of two learned
periphrases (the piacer de lo Spirito santo [v. 53] and d'amor il primo
foco [v. 69] ) in which Dante develops and varies rhetorically the same
notion, almost retrieving the labored conceits of his «our Father» (Purg.
XI. 1-24). Clearly, one is dealing with a true leitmotif running through
the whole episode. This continual outpouring of charity is accompanied,
in Piccarda, by a trusting self-abandonment to the divine will, which
assumes the accents of a quiet, almost quietistic humility: two spiritual
attitudes (charity and humility) that are easier to reconcile on the
religious level than in a poetic representation caught between images of
soaring flames and the reference to silent sheets of water. Piccarda's
resigned humility, which her smiles of joy and assertions of complete
contentment only render more touching, shows itself at the very outset
in that uncertain, transparent gathering of countenances on a soundless
glass screen. But it is above all at the end, in the elegy of her melting
vanishment, that the imperfect virgin receives her definitive
characterization, indelibly marked by martyrdom, mildness, and love.
36
Let us examine these verses a little more closely. If we take as a
term of comparison, in the next higher heaven, the triumphal exit of
Justinian (VII. 1-6), so extroverted and self-gratulatory, with choral dance
and Latin hymn spangled with Hebrew gems, Piccarda's exit will appear
a hasty, evasive decampment. Indeed, one feels a lapse in consciousness
or presence: an ecstatic rapture unexpectedly reclaims the blessed soul
and abstracts her, already forgetful, from the conversation decreed by
grace and charity. It may seem odd, but one is inclined to remember
Ciacco («più non ti dico e più non ti rispondo»: Inf. VI.90) and his
epileptic seizure, when the coma of his damnation (parodie antithesis of
the beatific contemplation) brutally overwhelms him. Piccarda instead
turns back into the water of the opening image and gratefully
re-immerses herself in her paradise, which is only clean and clear. To the
effect of slowly fading withdrawal contribute both the ecstatic
enjambment (Ave / Maria : v. 121f.) and the inverted syntax of the two
statements (ibid.), with an echoing (or is it a reflection?) of the gerund
(cantando, e cantando : v. 122), till what the rhetoric of speech has
already suggested is directly stated in the final simile of the shape (cosa
grave , without further specification) which falls into the water and
disappears (v. 123). At the very end of the episode, the character of
Piccarda receives its masterful final stamp in the prayer which the poet
has chosen to assign to her. The Ave Maria is not a hymn of rejoicing,
a Gloria , or an alleluia-sequence; instead, it remains the prayer of
someone who, still on earth, doubts and asks humbly to be heard. It is
hard to believe that, as she intones these notes, Piccarda is preparing to
reenter the «giro / pria cominciato in li alti Serafini» (Par. VIII.26f.);
rather, one would say that after dallying at the grating of the parlatory,
she is hurrying to rejoin her fellow sisters who have already assembled
for vespers in the cloister chapel.
We have already noted that Piccarda has been allotted three speeches
(vv. 43-57, 70-87, 97-120). The third is occupied by her story (see
above) and the presentation of Costanza d'Altavilla (see below). In the
first, she identifies herself and straight after introduces (excusado non
petita) the paradox of her bliss, slight and yet - we are guaranteed -
entirely satisfactory. To the explanation of this concept, which has
understandably left the Pilgrim somewhat nonplussed, Piccarda dedicates
the six tercets of her second speech. Edifying excursions meant to clarify
the nature of the punishment and the condition of the souls have already
occurred, it must be recalled, in the great encounters of the Inferno. Take
for example Farinata's discourse on the vision of the damned
(X.94-108), in which the epic confrontation at last achieves resolution,
or the account sighed out by Pier della Vigna (XIII.85-108) - the latter
37
memorable for the pathos which is transferred onto it, after a story too
ornate and too paradigmatic to generate tragic emotions. In the
Purgatorio , in the Forese episode and, in similar terms, in the Guinizelli
episode, Dante had carried out a bold rearrangement of these explanations
(or had he not imposed, at bottom, a variation of the same sort, however
motivated or semanticized, on the «divisions» of the Vita Nuova [ch.
XXXI] as well?). As if seized by an access of Thomism (know first in
order to be able to love afterwards), he moves these didactic sections up
toward the beginning of the episode - before the story (Forese,
Piccarda) or even before the recognition (Guinizelli).13 When they are
entrusted to characters built around biographical events of an especially
dramatic kind, such doctrinal passages can compromise or at least
interrupt the creative process, with negative consequences on the artistic
level. Yet, in defiance of the scholastic Latinisms, Piccarda succeeds in
remaining herself even when Dante puts her in the pulpit - that is, she
succeeds in preserving a tone in which the fervor of vocation (the
character) asserts itself over the undeniable pleasure of demonstration
(the author). Thus, the ample and consoling image of the sea, of which
the Theologian can also be proud, when expressed with such humble and
seraphic solidarity (remember Brother Galdino?), sheds any intellectual
stiltedness and rather sounds as the cherished comparison which, tritely
promoted by a motherly teacher, kept stirring the well-disposed novice
in the Florentine convent.14
Costanza d'Altavilla
Once she has explained and concluded her own story, Piccarda
proceeds - with a sense of relief, one would say, as well as affectionate
solicitude - to present another spirit, with whom the Pilgrim will not
exchange one word, however. This model of narrative coupling and
transmission, initiated among the Prideful of the Purgatorio (Oderisi
- > [Provenzan]) and re-issued in the Heaven of Mercury (Justinian - >
[Romeo]) in the same terms as here, will produce, in the sphere of
Venus, by duplication and overlapping, a richer and more intricate
pattern (Cunizza - > [Folchetto] / Folchetto - > [Raab]). Costanza is
part of a Guelph legendary that had its scriptura aurea and its scriptura
nigra , and to which Dante, in his own family milieu, was exposed from
infancy onward: Matelda, who had governed a mythical Tuscany with
justice and love; Farinata, hated and yet fascinating foe; Sordello, the
venturesome poet who, in spite of his Ghibelline failings, decided in the
end for the just cause of Charles;15 and above all, Frederick the Terrible,
the eccentric, heretical Emperor, born to his own shame and damnation
38
from an aging nun, appropriately enough for the antichrist.16 Later,
Dante had time to revise, in the light of reason and philosophy, the
chronicles of Guelph propaganda. The discovery of the two ends of
human endeavor (eternal bliss and earthly happiness) also revealed to
him «cardinal» values and merits which even hell cannot obliterate and
whose patron and guarantor he soon recognized in the Emperor. If the
poet still cannot manage to save Frederick II (cf. Inf. X.119), he
nonetheless allows himself the pleasure of setting among the blessed
both his benegenitus son Manfred, in open defiance of the Papal Curia,
and his mother Costanza, even though, ironically, he still believes the
old slander that she had taken the veil. Nor has Dante hesitated to
celebrate Frederick's exceptional gifts, damned though he may be. He
has even had the most illustrious of his victims declare him «d'onor sì
degno» (Inf. XIII.75), and he himself has termed the learned Emperor
«loico e clerico grande» (Conv. IV.x.6), representing him, moreover,
along with his well-born son, as champion of nobilitas , rectitudo , and
humanitas (VE I.xii.4). Yet it is here, from the pinnacle of the
sublunary world which by right belonged entirely to him, that Frederick
II now receives the highest tribute: a mighty outpouring of laudes
regiae , a genealogy deployed upon a great swell of biblical poetry. His
panegyricist, unexpectedly inspired (here in effect begins her «trance»),
is Piccarda, the sacrificed sister of a criminally anti-imperial Marcello.
Up here, where the violent oppositions of earth are peacefully resolved,
the empress Costanza, companion in glory and suffering, now shines
benignly at her side.
Costanza d'Altavilla - as Piccarda tells us (v. 1 lOf.) - enjoys the
highest degree of bliss accorded the holy souls of the Moon. A like
primacy seems to be conferred upon Raab, in the Heaven of Venus,
when Folchetto joyously introduces her (IX.llóf.). These differences,
not only between one sphere and the next, but between spirits within
the same assemblage, are perfectly understandable, given that one's
reward (i.e., the depth of one's vision) corresponds to one's strictly
personal deserts. Even in the Heaven of the Sun, there will in fact be
minor lights and more notable splendors, just as is the case in physical
constellations. Costanza's pre-eminence, however, is not to be explained
with that «veil of the heart» of which the. daughter of Roger II, as
Piccarda emphasizes, was never stripped (vv. 115-117). Above all, this
is a compliment that Costanza could have easily returned (we will not in
fact suppose, in the shadow of the cross set up by that dreadful verse [v.
107], that instead the toilettes bought her by a guilt-ridden Rossellin
della Tosa made Piccarda forgetful of the sacred bands). In the second
place, Beatrice explains clearly in the following canto (IV.94-114) that
39
the fidelity of the absolute will is not enough to excuse the offense (the
unfulfilled vow) and consequently that the «veil of the heart», no matter
how painful the nostalgia, can serve neither as amends nor as a specific
merit. Costanza's pre-eminence must be rather understood as Dante's
homage to the imperial lady, as uncontested mistress of the convent;
compare, in this connection, the great crowned throne already prepared
for Henry (Par. XXX.136ff.) despite the neque nubent of Purg. XIX.137
- proclaimed, no doubt, with biased satisfaction for the sole benefit of
the ecclesiastical hierarchy.17
The Heaven of the Moon
In the representation of the first sphere, a curious and, in the last

analysis, a felicitous opposition arises between the theorist and the poet.
While the theorist deploys all his resources to convince the Pilgrim and
the reader (and to this same end Piccarda and Beatrice in turn put forth
their best efforts) that the souls encountered here also themselves belong
to the Empyrean and are therefore blissfully content, the poet instead
works at creating, in close analogy to the two preceding realms, a
liminal, limbo-like milieu to which the transparent visages of the Moon
are touchingly relegated. Besides, in the design of the third cantica , the
author has separated the first heaven quite sharply from those that
follow, making use of distinctions that are either quantitative (narrative
space) or qualitative (type of imagery). It is true that, from a strictly
topographic viewpoint, one enters the Heaven of the Moon at the start
of canto II (vv. 22-30) and leaves it only after the middle of canto V (vv.
88-96), but it is also undeniable that the narrative and poetic dividends
of this first Dasein or Da-er scheinen are entirely contained, apart from a
couple of introductory tercets (11.31-36), in the third canto, which into
the bargain is the shortest in the Paradiso. Already the treatment of the
Heaven of Mercury (milieu and characters), though still modest by the
measure of what is going to follow, spans three cantos (V-VII), without
taking into account the enlargement of tone induced by an excited and
«pindaric» (by flight upon flight) celebration of the Empire.
But the most important and truly indicative fact, in the negative
sense, is that in the Heaven of the Moon Dante has not yet kindled his
fires. Here flames leap up only in some metaphorical phrase (cf. vv. 1,
24, 52, 69, 110) - one cannot yet warm oneself or stand astonished at
literal flames and shining globes. Here the poet seems to linger over a
perfectly acceptable representation of paradise that he has nonetheless
decided to reject and replace with a very different vision, more
quicksilver and coruscant, inherently musical and a great deal harder to
40
express. By contrast, the imagery selected for the Heaven of the Moon
not only produces a more restrained and discreet atmosphere (which is
perfectly appropriate), it also has something déclassé about it, rather like
what happened to the tradition of the locus amoenus , on which literary
Elysiums and Paradises were regularly drawn, but which Dante, in his
choreography, only uses for marginal and subordinate milieus (the
Noble Castle, the Valley of the Princes, the Earthly Paradise), though
wisely reserving the right to break apart the vemal decor of the old topos
and raise its single elements up, on the figurai level, into what will be
his new description or suggestion of true Glory. In the Heaven of the
Moon, the representation of paradise gravitates, in a very particular way,
toward the nacreous and opalescent, toward precious metals polished to a
high gloss, toward the fixity of the mirror and its image. The planet
itself is defined as an etterna margarita (11.34); that is, it is seen as a
macro-pearl. The adjectives which insistently qualify the cloud-effect of
the daring close-up ( lucida , spessa, solida e pulita) also evoke the cold,
heavy splendor of a silver altar-frontal (11.32), and immediately
afterwards (v. 35f.) one encounters the simile of water (clear and still)
with the sunbeam that plays within it. This image (the water-mirror)
will be resumed and developed in the next canto (III) at the moment of
the ghostly emergence of the souls, themselves pale-white and (to return
to the point) mimetically nacreous or pearly (vv. 10-15).
The reference (supplementary and casual as it may seem) to a main
symbol of amorous frustration and unfulfillment (the myth of
Narcissus), although its terms are here necessarily inverted and corrected,
is full of implications - smuggled in, so to speak - for the existential
condition of these naiads who silently crowd to the polished surface of
the spring. One must also consider that the blessed of the Moon
constitute, relative to the other spheres, a very specific category and are
therefore, one would think, rather small in numbers. The fact that only
two deveiled nuns are identified does not prevent us, of course, from
imagining that in their company may be a friar who returned to the
world, or a pious lady who, once she regained her health, offered the
saint she called upon a less generous donation than promised, or a
repentant usurer who after the first enthusiasm haggled over the
dimensions of the reparative chapel. The statement of III. 56f. would
permit us to do so, but less, or not at all, the poet, who only too clearly
intends to consume his representation in this discreet monastic
atmosphere, among the sighs and smiles of a sublimed parlatory whose
grating the sensible reader more or less perceives.18 Furthermore, the
marked specialization of the group and also its definition - expressed
and reconfirmed in purely negative terms (the «vóti vóti» and «negletti»,
41
w. 55-57), not even the reciprocal terms one at least finds in the
Heaven of Mercury (VI.112-117) - work to equate the monastic
Heaven of the Moon with other Limbo-like abodes to which only
certain categories of persons have access. At the beginning of the third
cantica , the little sphere (or pond) of the insolvent nuns seems thus to
join the Castle of the deficient spiriti magni and the Valley of the
Negligent Princes.
One could turn at this point to the question of astral influences that
Dante meant to resolve in the Purgatorio in order to be able to construct
and recount his Paradise on the basis of these mysterious and
inescapable affinities between the Heavens and human beings. The
opinion of Marco Lombardo ( Purg . XVI.73-81) holds true for the
inconstancy of the spirits of the Moon as well, as Beatrice herself will
restate in the terms of an exacting, unyielding justice (IV.73-87),
producing the examples of the Christian martyrs (St. Lawrence) and the
proto-imperial heroes (Mucius Scaevola). Her disciple might have
objected, however, that those born under the sign of the Moon will
always find themselves at a clear disadvantage. In fact, their instability
will have to be combated and neutralized by constant efforts, for one
cannot think of using it to good effect solely by directing it toward the
worthiest causes and objects, as is possible to do with amorous
dispositions (Venus) or warlike energy (Mars). Still less can
inconstancy be simply enjoyed in tranquillity, like, for instance, the
Olympian «joviality» dispensed by the sixth planet. The question,
however one poses it, remains very difficult to square, especially
because astral influences belong to a «scientific» and determinisi vision
of human nature (even the «gentle heart» of Guinizelli, one will not
have forgotten, nascitur, non fit). Reconciling this psycho-cosmic
assumption with the ethical freedom of the philosophers and the merit
of the laboriously militant Christians would therefore be a difficult task
for the logician, had not the artist intervened in the nick of time to
resolve and embody in poetry the unwanted residues and less cogent
ergos of dialectical persuasion. The canto of Piccarda springs from this
fortunate juncture as well.
NOTES
^The two references to the charismatic guide underline the progressive

phases of a rapturous learning-process: the model student, lovingly
nourished with scholastic proof and counterproof (one recalls the blissfully
satisfied young stork of Par. XIX.91-93) passes in fact from a euphoric rush
of gratitude (III. 1-6) to the predictable emergence of fresh hunger and the
42
anticipation of other substantial meals.
M am thinking, naturally, of the furious devil of Buonconte ( Pur g .
V. 104- 108), but also of the most likeable and dialectical medieval devil I
have ever chanced to meet: the unquenchable antagonist of Mary in the D e
Sathana cum Virgine (cf. Bonvesin da la Riva, Volgari scelti / Select
Poems , eds. P.S. Diehl and R. Stefanini, Bern and NY: Lang, 1987, pp. 12
f., 17-32 [English translation], and 281-300 [original text]).
«Humble», one has to state, in a currently Christian, and therefore rather
democratic sense - not in the spiritually aristocratic acceptation in which
the word was used by the stilnovisti. In fact, the most «gentle» lady, just
like the angels (and herein consists her superiority), is joyfully and lucidly
aware of her own creaturely condition and therefore need not experience any
moral discomfitures in order to understand where she belongs: a grateful,
entranced adhesion to the hierarchy in force already places her beyond any
possible temptation.
4If one wished to indulge in a little psychoanalysis, it might also be said
that this narrative pattern reveals a certain charge of masculine sadism.
First, the man gladly profits by a woman's weakness, but then he makes her
suffer and pay for it, with the chance of a final rehabilitation - usually in
extremis. If one objects that the lady of lyric shows herself to be masterful
and self-confident while the enamored minstrel begs and whimpers at her
feet, the reason is that men have traditionally narrated women in a sadistic
vein, but sung them in a masochistic one.
*In effect, the charity that the saved souls (with the unique addition of
Francesca) show when they meet the Pilgrim is expressed in forms of
aristocratic courtesy that seem to evoke the etiquette of castle or palace.
"Above all, it is forgotten how Dante had re-classified lust by explicitly
making it spring from the same root as Charity and by connecting it, via a
charitably Active Life, with Justice itself (cf. Par. VUI-IX, with theses and
exempla , in addition to Purg. XVII. 85-139 and XVIII. 16-75). By restoring
a cursus amoris of Platonic type and origin, Dante in fact resolved a
dilemma which continued to afflict both religious education (lust vs. Amor
/ Charitas) and the lyric tradition (base vs. refined love) with its distressing
dualism. Francesca simply did not know how to proceed in this insidious
curriculum, nor, as a result, can she happily «indulge herself» now, like
Cunizza, who was apparently able to escape from the maze of the early
grades and tum her ardent desire toward worthier objects.
'Piccarda's discourse also is divided into more parts (three to be exact), as we
shall see - except that, in this case, the first two speeches develop
entirely paradisal themes and therefore have nothing to do with the earthly
history of the protagonist.
8The crescendo and the ensuing suspense of the tale («Per più fiate li occhi ci
sospinse», etc.) are of a purely Ovidian stamp («made in the
Metamorphoses »), with more evident and characteristic parallels in the
episode of Ulysses («Cinque volte racceso e tante casso / lo lume era di
sotto da la luna»: XXVI. 130) and in that of Ugolino («Breve pertugio
43
dentro da la muda /... m'avea mostrato per lo suo forame / più lune già»:
XXXIII. 22-25).
^Before Pia, Jacopo del Cassero also named, as two notable sources of
emotion, his own dear birthplace (Fano, v. 71) and the place (hostile,
rather than foreign) of his tragic end (Oriaco, v. 80). In each of the three
episodes, obviously, there are also links and mimicry of a horizontal,
contextual kind, besides the more significant similarities of structure
which tie them together vertically.
l^That Piccarda was able to preserve her virginity, thanks to a skin disease
that disfigured her face, is a legend of hagiographie descent already adopted
by Benvenuto (Comment um, ed. J.F. Lacaita, Florence: Barbera, vol. 4,
1887, p. 367), but which should not color our reading of Dante's text.
Benvenuto charges not only Corso but Forese with the abduction
(Foresius frater eius, ... as suet us.... gulae ; cit., p. 376), whom Dante seems
instead to consider entirely unconnected with the infamous deed.
l^The smile that passes between Piccarda and her companions (v. 67 f.) at
the ingenuous question of the Pilgrim (vv. 64-66) is itself a survival and a
sublimation of the gabbo , a well-known topos , in the lyric, already refined
by Dante in VN XIV.
l^The Pilgrim's question (such explanations are always furnished on request)
might seem indiscreet here, as well as ingenuous - whence the amused and
loving smile that Piccarda quickly exchanges with the other souls (see
above, n. 12). One should bear in mind, however, that Piccarda herself
provoked the curiosity of the visitor (v. 55), who, after the information
provided by an elated Forese («...triunfa lieta / ne l'alto Olimpo già di sua
corona»: XXIV.14f.), might have expected something a little more
exciting (cf. F. Novati, «Golosi in Purgatorio», Freschi e minii del
Dugento, Milan: L.F. Cogliati, 1925', p. 147).
14How appropriate the comparison to the sea is was deservedly underlined
by Benvenuto (cit., p. 373f.): «sicut enim omnes aquae habent ortum a
mari, et revertuntur ad illud et mare non redundat; ita omnia tarn creata quam
generata sunt a Deo, et ad ipsum inclinantur diversimode, sicut patuit primo
capitulo huius Paradisi, et ideo nihil accrescit».
l^Cf. F. Novati, «Sordello da Goito», in Freschi e minii, cit., pp. 133-135.
^Posthumous daughter of Roger II (1095-1154), Costanza d'Altavilla
(1154-1198) married Henry VI (1165-1197) in 1186 (when she was already
thirty-two and her husband barely twenty-one). The couple had a solemn
coronation in Rome in 1191, and three years later, the then forty-year-old
empress brought her son Frederick into the world. The legend collected by
Benvenuto (cit., p. 377f.) makes her the daughter of William the Good (her
brother, in reality), increases the age when she gave birth to fifty-five,
and, confusing history with mythology (cf. the story of Danae), specifies
that her father shut her up in a convent because of a prophecy by Joachim
of Fiore, who «spiritu prophetico dotatus, praedixit Guilelmo filiam natam
Siciliae et Italiae desolationem futuram».
l^The fact that Dante puts the mother of that terribile monstrum (i.e.,
44
Frederick E) above Piccarda disconcerts and annoys Benvenuto, who lacks
pro-imperial tendencies. He immediately begins to relate the reasons (of
which he finds four) why the juvencula tusca ought instead to be «magis
excusanda quam Constantia» (cit., p. 378f.).
l°Thus, we should not be amazed by the fact that Benvenuto,
misunderstanding Dante's classification, takes the Heaven of the Moon for
the place where omnes sanctae virgines (Chiara included!) are assembled.
«Sicut enim sol qui est pater caloris - he explains - facit viros sapientes,
ita luna mater humoris facit mulieres honestas», and those who claim that
these souls have been put «in corpore lunae ex defectu voti ... falso
exponunt» (cit., p. 370).
45
Paradiso IV
Author(s): LINO PERTILE
Accessed: 17-02-2020 23:02 UTC
Lectura Dantis
LINO PERTILE
University of Edinburgh
IV
If we did not know that canto IV of Paradiso is set in the heaven of
the Moon, we could easily imagine it as a dialogue taking place in some
classroom of a medieval Faculty of Theology. Towards the end of the
canto the two speakers turn out to be a woman and a man whose
feelings for each other seem hardly the stuff of everyday classroom
experience. This, however, would be the only unusual detail ruffling
somewhat the otherwise smooth surface of the text.
This is to say that canto IV has, at least apparently, very little
narrative identity of its own. It is part of the long and, on the whole,
uneventful episode of Dante's visit to the heaven of the Moon, the
lowest and slowest planet which circles around the earth in the
Ptolemaic universe. The only event in this section of Paradiso is
Dante's meeting with Piccarda which occupies the whole of canto III.
Before this encounter there is Beatrice's disquisition on the spots of the
Moon (II 46-148), and after it her lesson to Dante in canto IV, which we
are about to examine. This will be followed by Beatrice's discourse on
the commutability of vows, which will cover two thirds of canto V.
The whole episode extends therefore over three and a half cantos -
which is just about the average length for Dante's treatment of any
heaven in Paradiso.
In Inferno there are huge differences in the narrative space allocated
to different topographical divisions: the first three circles occupy one
canto each and the fourth 99 lines only, but the seventh extends over six
cantos and the eighth over thirteen. In Paradiso these differences are
minimal. If we exclude the heaven of the Sun with over four cantos, and
the contiguous heavens of Saturn and of the Fixed Stars with
respectively under two and five cantos, all the other heavens are dealt
with in just under or over three cantos. This difference in the narrative
organization of the two cantiche is due to the fact that, whereas Inferno
is full to the brim of proper names and characters, which need to be
classified and distributed according to their distinctive traits, Paradiso is
very sparsely populated; it is full of doctrinal discussions, and these, as
they are occasioned by the pilgrim's own questions and doubts, can be
spread out in a much more even fashion throughout the cantica.
46
In terms of narrative space this means, perhaps rather crudely, that
the position of preeminence enjoyed by action and characters in Inferno
is taken over in Paradiso by the debate on the pilgrim's doubts. Thus the
didactic purpose of the poem, which in Inferno is fulfilled indirectly by
the exemplary nature of each character, emerges in Paradiso more often
than not in an unmediated and pure form, as though Dante truly believed
that, after the invigorating experience of the previous two cantiche , his
readers were more capable of confronting directly the intellectual
challenges of doctrinal poetry.
As «the canto of Dante's metaphysical and moral doubts»,1 the
fourth of Paradiso offers one of the most sustained examples of doctrinal
poetry in the Comedy. It analyzes essentially two questions: the first
concerns the true seat of the blessed and the relationship between them
and the heavens in which they appear; the second focuses on the role of
the will in relation to the merit or demerit of human actions. As Dante
knew well, these questions had been dissected by Aristotle in the
Nicomachean Ethics (III, 1) and, more recently, systematically
reconsidered by, among others, St. Thomas Aquinas within a few pages
of his Summa theologiae .2 Why raise them again, we may ask.
Ostensibly, the reason is that, as a heavenly dweller, Beatrice is able to
answer them with an authority that no philosopher can ever claim. The
real reason, however, is another: these questions and their answers are
essential for the very existence and legitimation of Paradiso as poem.
This is why, although philosophers might well be better equipped to
interpret this canto, it is not inappropriate that literary critics look into
it too.
* * *
Canto III ended with Dante in a state of perplexity t

intellectual and visual. As Piccarda vanished, unforgetta
acqua cupa cosa grave» (III 123), Dante was left with bur
in his mind which he could not ask, for Beatrice so flas
that at first his eyes could not bear it.3 When the new c
is no longer visually dazzled, but he is so caught betwee
that, unable to decide which one to formulate first, he
remain silent.
This state of indecision is expressed by means of as m
examples of paralysis of the will, three exempla fic
hypothetical situations pertaining to the world of natura
Intra due cibi, distanti e moventi

d'un modo, prima si morria di fame,
47
che liber' omo l'un recasse ai denti;
sì si starebbe un agno intra due brame
di fieri lupi, igualmente temendo;
sì si starebbe un cane intra due dame;
per che, s'i' mi tacea, me non riprendo,
da li miei dubbi d'un modo sospinto,
poi ch'era necessario, né commendo.
Dante feels like a man who, placed between two equally distant and
appetizing items of food, would starve himself to death before he could
decide which one to bring to his teeth first;4 like a lamb paralyzed by
equal fear of two fierce and famished wolves; like a hound unable to
choose which of two does to pursue (1-6).5 Isn't this all too much, we
may well ask. Isn't the situation itself paradoxical, and aren't the terms
in which it is described hyperbolic? Why use three equally incredible
exempla where one would surely be more than adequate? Some ancient
commentators felt distinctly uneasy about this opening, and there are
good reasons - though they may not be the same - for sharing their
unease.6 The poet's mastery as wordsmith, supreme at this late stage of
the poem, is placed here in full view, it is indeed too visible, bordering
almost on the conceit.
The first example occupies exactly three lines, the second two, and
the third one. The first begins with the indirect object («Intra due cibi»)
and ends with the predicate («recasse ai denti»); the reverse applies to the
second and third examples. Thus the three homologous syntagms which
exemplify the pilgrim's present concern - his two equal doubts - are
placed at the beginning of line 1 («Intra due cibi») and at the end of line
4 and 6 where they are underscored by the rhyme («intra due brame» /
«intra due dame»). Lines 4 and 6 are further paralleled by the repetition
of their opening syntagm («sì si starebbe»), and this, combined with
their endings, make them perfectly homologous, if not totally
homophonous. To achieve this balance the poet introduces a hypallage
striding over lines 4 and 5 («intra due brame / di fieri lupi»), even at the
cost of changing the viewpoint, for it is the food (i.e. the lamb) which
paradoxically is now paralyzed between its two potential, ravenous
devourers (the wolves). As Trifon Gabriele noted, the third example
should really come immediately after the first, as the verbs that apply to
it are those of the first, not of the second, example. To these structural
details we may add Dante's insistence on latinate lexicon (intra, agno,
dame) and technical terminology (liber omo , necessario ), and his
conspicuous recourse to assonance (line 1, -anti / - entiē, line 5, -mente
! -mendo) and allitteration (particularly in the crucial line 8), and we
realize that this text speaks beautifully but says little. We begin to
48
suspect that the poet may be marking time, that the plot may be stuck.
In fact, this impasse is itself a vital part of the plot.
Indeed, the first six lines of the canto cleverly enact the meaning
the text strives to express. This becomes apparent in lines 7-9. Like the
free man, the lamb and the wolves of the three examples, the pilgrim is
so torn between his two doubts that he is unable to speak - and it
should be noted that the «d'un modo» of line 8 takes up both the «d'un
modo» of line 2 and the «igualmente» of line 5, while «da li miei
dubbi» matches and explains the three syntagms «Intra due cibi», «intra
due brame» and «intra due dame». More significantly, the indecision that
is being narrated spills over from the praesens narrati to affect
Dante-the-writer who cannot choose even now, in the praesens
narratoris, whether to blame or commend his old self for his silence, a
silence which was «necessario», that is, beyond his will and control, and
for which, therefore, neither blame nor praise can be apportioned.
Opening the third book of his Nicomachean Ethics , Aristotle states
that «praise and blame are accorded only to voluntary actions», and then
he proceeds to define the difference between the voluntary and the
involuntary in the conviction that «this will be of service also to
legislators in assigning rewards and punishments».7 The apportioning
of justice is a major concern in the Comedy , and therefore it is hardly
surprising that the poet should avail himself in this canto of Aristotle's
Ethics. What is interesting is that this intertextual echo should be
audible at this early stage, in advance, that is, of Beatrice's discussion of
voluntary and involuntary actions (100-1 1 1). As we shall see, the whole
canto is imbued with Aristotelean thought and terminology.8
«Io mi tacea» begins line 10, condensing in one sentence what the
poet had already said in the previous nine lines and explicitly stated in
line 7 («s'i' mi tacea»). The new repetition underlines the situation of
narrative impasse reached by linguistic discourse. That is why another
kind of discourse is introduced, a visibile parlar («'l mio disir dipinto /
m'era nel viso», 10-11) which is more intense and effective than speech
itself. Quite simply, Dante cannot speak but his face speaks for him.
The way seems to be open for the resumption of the story; not,
however, before a new simile is deployed, drawn this time from
Scripture (13-15):
Fé sì Beatrice qual fé Daniello,

Nabuccodonosor levando d'ira,
che l'avea fatto ingiustamente fello.
By reading the pilgrim's desire on his face, Beatrice did as Daniel when
49
he appeased the wrath that made Nebuchadnezzar so cruelly unjust
( Daniel , II 1-46). What is striking about this terzina is that its main
verb Fé assumes almost thematic value, as it is given pride of place in
line 13 and then repeated symmetrically in line 15: Fé... fé... H ... l'avea
fatto ...fello. Of course, the word fello, meaning 'felon', 'traitor', has
nothing to do semantically with fare. Nevertheless it happens to
coincide in both spelling and sound with fello, an ordinary form of the
verb fare (i.e. the past historic fé, already used twice in line 13) followed
by the unstressed pronoun lo (with syntactic doubling - Ilo , i.e. fello,
meaning 'made him/iť). This ambiguity is encouraged, indeed forced on
the reader, by the presence of the opposite construction (pronoun lo +
pluperfect of fare) at the other end of the same line: l'ave a fatto ('made
him'). It is quite clearly a pun which the poet could not resist, but its
effect is to divert our attention from what the text says to how it says it,
from language to speech, from the signified to the signifier.
The text says that, by guessing Dante's desire, Beatrice acted like
Daniel, when, inspired by God, he both guessed and interpreted
Nebuchadnezzar's dream and thus relieved the king of the rage that had
made him unjustly fierce (fello ) against his wise men. But the simile,
not unlike the three exempla at the beginning of the canto, is hyperbolic
and distracting rather than illuminating. There is no tyrant here, ready to
commit murderous felony against his sages. Beatrice might reasonably
be compared to Daniel, but the analogy between Dante's tongue-tieing
intellectual anxiety and Nebuchadnezzar's wrath is hardly fitting. The
preeminence of the signifier conceals the simile's partial unsuitability
for the situation at hand; at the same time, however, it underscores the
poet's difficulty in effecting the conversion from the pilgrim's inner
impasse to the open dialogue with Beatrice which is essential for the
resumption of the story.
It is this impasse that Beatrice registers with her first words: «Io
veggio ben come ti tira / uno e altro disio, sì che tua cura / sé stessa
lega sì che fuor non spira» (16-18). Beatrice sees clearly how Dante's
will, equally divided between two desires, cannot express either of them;
how, by being equally pulled in two directions, his inner preoccupation
cannot be converted into words and, as it were, blown out as speech.
She will then do this herself for him. But in order to do so, she will
first have to show that Dante's two desires to know, though they may
well feel to him equally balanced, are in fact substantially different.
Beatrice's discourse is calm, lucid, and systematic. It converts
Dante's self-impeding anxiety into a smooth flow of syntactic units,
each taking exactly one terzina. Having summarized Dante's predicament
in her first introductory terzina (16-18), she articulates his first doubt in
50
the second, giving it the form of a direct question, thus effectively
restoring to the passage the dialogic structure of which the pilgrim's
silence had deprived it (19-21); she then articulates Dante's second doubt
in her third terzina (22-24); in the fourth she concludes, dubbing Dante's
doubts as questioni - a technical term of scholastic philosophy -
which weigh equally ( igualmente , again) on his will ( velie , another
technical term), and announcing that she will deal first with the more
poisonous one («quella che più ha di felle», 25-27).
Beatrice sets out addressing Dante's questions according to the order
of their gravity. This gradatio is reflected even in the number of terzine
she devotes to each question: twelve to the first, nine to the second, and
eight to a third, supplementary question which she anticipates. Thus, by
introducing difference where Dante had reached an arresting equality,
Beatrice restores the forward motion without which the plot could not
continue.^ Being herself compelled to communicate in verbal terms, the
acknowledgment of difference is as essential to Beatrice as it is to Dante.
The constraints of human discourse are at the very heart of Dante's
concern in this canto, and the anxiety which we have attempted to
unveil beneath its opening terzine is due entirely to that concern.
* * *
The first doubt which Beatrice addresses (28-63

Piccarda's appearance to the pilgrim in the heaven of t
seems to confirm to him Plato's notion, as expressed i
that when we die our souls return to the stars whence
we were bom. For Plato the souls live forever in separa
determine the quality of their life when for a shor
imprisoned in the human body on earth. This notion f
the Christian dogma according to which, as Statiu
Purgatorio (XXV 67-78), the soul of each individual is
and directly infused into our bodies when we are still
womb.10 It is heretical and therefore, as Beatrice
poisonous than Dante's other doubt.
At first sight this problem seems to be of a pur
nature; yet, if it were so, it would not need to be
Piccarda has already solved it. In the course of their m
explicitly asked her: «Do you who are happy here desir
that you may see more and become more dear?» (
Piccarda, expanding on a point she had already made (5
the blessed are all perfectly happy where they are as
what they have and thirst after nothing else. «Nay - s
51
the very quality of this blessed state that we keep ourselves within the
divine will, so that our wills are themselves made one; therefore our
rank from height to height through this kingdom is pleasing to the
whole kingdom, as to the King who wills us to His will» (79-84). In
other words, where Dante's human eyes had just begun to see difference,
gradation, and multiplicity, Piccarda stated that there was in fact
sameness, equality and unity. Theologically speaking, her answer had
been full and satisfying, as confirmed by the narrator himself who
concludes: «It was clear to me then that everywhere in heaven is
Paradise, although the grace of the Supreme Good does not rain there in
one measure» (88-90). Why not stop at that then?
The reason why Dante must ask the question again, and do so
urgently, is that, by writing his third canto as he did, he has inevitably
predetermined the shape of all that is to follow. By placing Piccarda or
- if we wish to go along with the fiction of the poem - 'finding' her
in the lowest heaven and portraying her in the third canto of his
Paradiso , Dante realizes, as do we, that he has entered ipso facto into a
recognizable, graduated structure which comprises eight more heavens
for the pilgrim to visit and thirty more cantos for the poet to write. He
has in fact visibly and paradoxically chosen difference and gradation
where Piccarda says that there is sameness and equality. This paradox
demands some explaining. Clearly, however, the problem is
narratological rather than theological, and as such it existed before the
pilgrim met Piccarda as much as it exists now, except that now, with
the completion of the third canto, it has been brought out into the open
and can no longer be put off. The problem is how to fit the theology
into the narrative; how to accommodate in a legitimate way unity with
multiplicity and timelessness with time; how to translate into human
language a «beato esse» (III 79) of which human language itself is a
pale, fallen, and inferior surrogate: indeed, how to convey a state of bliss
from which the very existence of human language is proof that we are
tragically excluded.11
This is why Beatrice's reply is twofold. On the one hand she
relieves Dante of his persistent doubt by making it clear that all the
blessed reside in the Empyrean; on the other she allows for the
hierarchical structure of Paradiso - which actually is already in place -
by explaining that the blessed appear to the pilgrim each in his or her
appropriate astronomical sphere. This works as a full legitimation of
Dante's artistic project, because it allows both for the continuation in
time of the fictional journey - in a dimension supposedly outside time
and space, - and for the highest degree of integrated symmetry between
the three 'geographical' realms as portrayed in the three cantiche.
52
Ultimately, it makes it possible for Paradise too, as for Hell and
Purgatory, to be seen by human eyes and to be translated into words, to
become, that is, the third part of the poem.
Beatrice's reply deserves a fuller analysis. She says that the blessed
- the Seraph closest to God, Moses and the prophet Samuel, both John
the Baptist and John the Evangelist, and even the Virgin Mary herself
- all have their seat in the same heaven, and will enjoy their bliss as
long as those spirits who have just shown themselves in the heaven of
the Moon (28-33). They all live forever in the first circle, but they
possess different degrees of beatitude as they feel with different degrees
of intensity the love that eternally breathes forth from God (34-36). In
other words, residing all in the Empyrean, they are all equally full of
happiness, but the measure of their happiness in fact varies according to
their individual capacity to receive it; they feel all absolutely happy even
if the relative quantity of their individual happiness differs.12 The souls
which Dante has just seen, Beatrice continues, appeared in the heaven of
the Moon not because they were actually assigned to it, but in order to
show sensibly to him that they enjoy the lowest degree of beatitude
(37-39): this is the only way the transcendental reality of Paradise can be
communicated to human intelligence, as it is only through sense
perception that man can grasp that which he then makes fit for the
intellect (40-42). 13
We must pause to consider the implications of Beatrice's
extraordinary discourse for the whole poem. Dante's representation of
what he sees in Hell postulates the existence of a corresponding reality
that is eternal: as it is written on the gates of Hell, «e io etterno duro»
{Inf. III 8). If we believe Dante's account, Julius Caesar stands, still
today, «armato con li occhi grifagni» in Limbo {Inf. IV 123), and Count
Ugolino is still today in Antenora gnawing at the skull of archbishop
Ruggieri with his teeth strong as those of a dog {Inf. XXXIII 78). On
the contrary Piccarda is no longer to be seen in the heaven of the Moon,
for, as we know, she left as soon as her interview with Dante was over.
Indeed it is not at all clear whether she actually ever was in that heaven,
even though the Comedy says that she appeared to Dante there.
If we believe the Comedy , the heaven of the Moon, like all other
heavens below the Empyrean, is empty now as it was before, and
returned to being immediately after Dante's passage. What the poet
describes in Paradiso , at least up to the Empyrean, is a series of unique
events, a «command performance»14 that was put on only once for his
benefit. Consequently, whereas in Inferno it is the pilgrim who moves
on, leaving behind all the souls he encounters on his way, in Paradiso
he is the one who is left behind in time and space as the blessed, their
53
mission completed, are spirited up to an Empyrean which is outside
time and space.15 To be sure, Dante too will eventually make it to the
Empyrean, and there he will see again all the blessed together. But
whereas in the Empyrean he sees them in unity, all at the same time and
all absolutely happy (though still distributed in a gradational space), in
the heavens below he sees them as individuals enjoying comparatively
different degrees of happiness. Thus, whereas his vision of Paradise in
the Empyrean is general and external, the vision he is granted during his
ascent is differentiated and internal in that it is based on the relative
degree of happiness which is felt by each individual soul.
Dante's Paradise is an exceptional manifestation, external,
objective, and sensible - and therefore describable in human language
- of an internal, subjective, and supra-sensible reality that is beyond
human language. «Così parlar conviensi al vostro ingegno», Beatrice
says (40): indeed, the third cantica is not Paradise proper, but Paradise's
own translation of itself into language, an «accommodation of spiritual
reality to human faculties»,16 a compromise between God's superhuman
and immediate system of communication, where sign and referent are
always one and simul, and a human language which is temporally and
spatially constricted.
It has not been noted, as far as I know, that this «condescension»
of Paradise to human faculties ensures that something analogous to the
principle of contrapasso extends also to Paradise, in two ways. Firstly,
at a moral and didactic level, the contrapasso is the mechanism whereby
each soul is exactly allotted in Hell the punishment, and in Purgatory
the penance, it deserves; likewise in Paradise the apparent location of the
souls in different heavens shows that the blessed too receive the measure
of reward appropriate to each of them: venereal souls are in Venus,
martial in Mars, saturnine in Saturn, and so on. Thus God's infallible
justice is done, and is seen to be done, in all three realms of the afterlife.
Secondly, at the narratological level the contrapasso functions as
tragic fulfilment and realization of metaphors, that is to say, as the
conversion to eternal reality of temporal linguistic constructs that in
this life served to describe the inner, spiritual condition of the sinners:
typically, the 'storm' of passion that possessed the lustful is now turned
into a real storm that will forever torment them; the 'mantle' that
figuratively masked the hypocrites in this life is now converted,
following Hugutio's etymology,17 into an eternal cape of lead covered
by a thin layer of gold; the 'divisions' perpetrated by the schismatics are
now actually inflicted forever on their 'bodies', and so on. Likewise, in
Paradise too Dante finds a conversion, but one that works in the
opposite direction, for in heaven the point of reference is not history but
54
eternity. In Dante's Paradise the souls become visible and temporal
conversions of spiritual realities that are eternal, intangible and
ineffable; they become metaphoric enactments of their true selves. To
put it briefly, in Hell metaphors become real; in Paradise reality
becomes metaphoric.18 In either case the overriding rule is - as
Cacciaguida will explain {Par. XVII 124-42) - that what the pilgrim
'finds' must be amenable to linguistic representation.
That the Paradise witnessed by the pilgrim is to be understood as a
form of God's writing is a point which Beatrice goes on to prove by
comparing it to Scripture (43-48):
Per questo la Scrittura condescende

a vostra facúltate, e piedi e mano
attribuisce a Dio e altro intende;
e Santa Chiesa con aspetto umano
Gabriel e Michel vi rappresenta,
e l'altro che Tobia rifece sano.
Scripture, Beatrice says, condescends to human intelligence by

attributing feet and hands to God, and the Church represents in human
forms the archangels Gabriel, Michael and Raphael; but they intend
other things than they say, a reality that in its true form would be
incomprehensible to the human mind.19 Like Scripture then, the parlar
of Paradise, as witnessed by Dante, intends other things than those its
manifestations (i.e. the appearance of the blessed in different heavens)
ostensibly signify: its inner essence is not the same as its outer
appearance. We should pay attention to this difference between
appearance and reality, between expression and intention, for it is a
notion which Beatrice brings to bear immediately afterward in her subtly
ambiguous confutation of Platonic theology (49-63).
What Plato argues in his Timaeus - Beatrice explains - does not
correspond to what Dante sees in heaven {qui si vede), for Plato seems
to hold as true {par che senta ) what he says {come dice)?® What Dante
sees is a fleeting appearance of the souls, each one in its appropriate
sphere; Plato, on the contrary, says {dice) that the souls return to the
stars when their bodies die, believing {credendo) that they come down
from the stars when they are born. This means that for Plato the souls
reside permanently in the stars except for the period they spend on earth
(52-54), which is contrary to the Christian faith.
At this point, however, Beatrice qualifies what she has just
explained suggesting that the link between expression and intention in
the Timaeus may not be as straightforward as it sounds. Perhaps, she
says, Plato's true opinion, his feeling {sentenza), is other than his words
55
( la voce) sound:21 it may indeed have a meaning, an intention
( intenzion ), not to be despised (55-57); if he intends (intende) that only
the honor or the blame of their influence revert to the heavenly spheres
(as Marco Lombardo explained in Purg. XVI 73-78), perhaps his bow
strikes on a certain truth (58-60).22 This 'soft' interpretation of Plato's
theology is carefully bracketed between two 'perhaps' (forse ). Moreover,
the possible disjunction between Plato's inner intention and his outer
voice is underscored by Beatrice's final metaphor with its allusion to the
distance that separates archer from target.23 Beatrice concludes this
section of her discourse adding that this principle of the influence of the
stars, badly understood (significantly, male inteso)t once misled almost
the whole world, so that it went astray giving the stars divine names
such as Jupiter, Mercury and Mars: which proves that, when it is not
properly interpreted, i.e. when it is not interpreted in a Christian
perspective, this same doctrine can lead the world away (i.e. «torcere»,
whence torse) from the truth. Thus Plato is refuted and at the same time
saved.
What is significant throughout Beatrice's speech is the continuity
of the opposition between outer expression (rappresenta, voce, parlar,
dire) and inner meaning (sentenza, intenzion, intendere ), between literal
and allegorical interpretation.24 To sum up: the Paradise experienced by
Dante and narrated in the Comedy, like the divine beings described in
Scripture, and perhaps like Plato's myth of the return of the souls, are
all sensible, anthropomorphic representations of spiritual realities that
are other than they seem. The implication is twofold: Dante's Paradiso
has no ultimate literal validity, it represents an allegorical show which
was divinely commissioned only once for the moral edification of Dante
and, eventually, of his readers; none the less, the language of Paradiso,
which is Dante's own creation, is of the same nature as that of Scripture
and perhaps of Plato's myths.25 Characteristically, it is precisely when
he seems to profess humility that Dante makes his boldest claims
* * *
Having dealt with Dante's more serious problem, Bea

to discuss his less poisonous one (64-90). This concern
of heavenly justice. Why should one - Dante thinks - de
reward for having failed to fulfil a vow because of exter
this case what is at stake is not the orthodoxy of Dante
when heavenly justice seems unjust, Beatrice seems to b
human intellect, unable to understand it, can only react b
faith in it, rather than by embracing heretical depravity.
case of Piccarda and Costanza, however, is one which ca
56
by human intelligence, and therefore Beatrice will be able to answer in
such a way as to satisfy fully Dante's desire to know (64-72).
If violence proper, she goes on, is done when the victim does not
in any way yield to its oppressor, what Piccarda and Costanza suffered
was not violence, and therefore they cannot be excused for not fulfilling
their vows. The will, if it does not want to be, will not be quenched,
but it does as nature does in fire though violence may force it aside a
thousand times (73-78). If it bends much or little, the will gives in to
force; this is what Piccarda and Costanza did when they might have fled
back to their holy places. But if their will had been as absolute and
unbending as that which kept the martyr Saint Lawrence on the grid and
made the Roman hero Mucius Scaevola hold his hand firm on the flame,
that same will, as soon as the pressure of violence subsided, would have
driven them back on the path from which they had been dragged -
though Beatrice admits that a will so firm is rare indeed. Thus, if he has
taken in her words as he should, Dante's reasoning on this matter is
once and for all quashed (79-90).
On the surface, moving from the first to the second of Dante's
doubts, Beatrice seems to have changed subject. The manner and style of
her argumentation seem different too: for example, in the twelve terzine
she has devoted to Dante's first question we find only one conditional
clause, whereas there are six of them in the eight terzine dealing with
Dante's second doubt. Nevertheless, the underlying theme, i.e. the
contrast between appearances and truth, between human and divine
perspectives - the former relative, the latter absolute - is still the
same. The central image is now that of fire. At the semantic level the
image is already implicitly suggested in the verb s'ammorza ('is
quenched') as this verb, which appears only one other time in the
Comedy (with reference to Capaneus's unquenchable pride, Inf. XIV 63),
is normally associated in Italian with fire. When, therefore, the
comparison between the behavior of the will and that of fire is explicitly
made in the following line (77), we are already prepared to take it in, as
we are prepared to see the image of a flame beneath the abstract notion
of the will that bends much or little («s'ella si piega assai o poco», 79).
Not by chance then it is with fire that four lines later Saint Lawrence
and Mucius are shown to prove the steadfastness of their will, the
implication being that Costanza's will, contrary to what her name
signifies, was not of such a nature.
This serves to introduce and dispel Dante's new doubt which
Beatrice intuits even before he has time to convert it into words.
Beatrice had said that the blessed cannot lie (III 31-33). Later, Piccarda
had stated that Costanza kept her love for the veil even after she was
57
forcibly turned back to the world (III 115-17), and this seems to
contradict Beatrice's explanation about the weakness of Costanza's will.
Dante's disturbing conclusion is that either Piccarda lied or Beatrice is
wrong (94-99).
Beatrice's rigorous argument starts this time from a general maxim
based on experience (100-02); she backs it with the authority of an
ancient example (103-05) and brings out its logical implications
(106-08); she then states the general principle (109-11) which she
finally applies to the particular case in hand (112-14). It is altogether an
impressive display of analytical skill. It has happened many times,
Beatrice says, that to escape danger a man has done against his will
something which he ought not to have done, like Alcmaeon who,
killing his mother to comply with his father's prayer, turned pitiless in
order not to fail piety. In these circumstances internal will and external
violence co-operate so that the sins that are committed cannot be
excused. The will, if it is absolute, does not consent absolutely to
wrong, but consents to it fearing that, if it resists, it will fall into
greater harm. Thus, when Piccarda says that in her heart Costanza
always kept her vow, she refers to Costanza's absolute will («de la
voglia assoluta intende»), whereas Beatrice refers to her relative will («de
l'altra [voglia intende]», 113) which made her conform to the violence
that kept her away from the cloister: therefore they both tell the truth
(100-114).
The distinction between absolute and relative will derives from
Aristotle's analysis of voluntary (i.e. free) and involuntary (i.e.
compulsory) actions.27 As Aristotle says, and Dante pointedly implies
apropos of his own silence at the beginning of this canto (7-9), only
free actions can be accorded praise or blame. Now, since Costanza was
forced to break her vow against her will, it seems to Dante that she
cannot be held to deserve less. Beatrice, however, shows that the issue is
less straightforward than her pupil thinks. Costanza's absolute will was
to keep her vow.28 When this will was actually put to the test, she did
not translate it into action, as Saint Lawrence and Mucius did who kept
their «volere intero» (82), their «voglia salda» (87). She did instead what
she felt she could do in the circumstances, thereby yielding to the
violence that was done to her. In so far as she consented, her choice was
not involuntary: she behaved according to her relative, or conditioned,
will. When something of this kind happens, the operation of the will is
'mixed' («la forza al voler si mischia », 107), as in the tragic case of
Alcmaeon who, while wanting to spare his mother's life («voglia
assoluta»), chose to kill her in order to avenge his father of her
betrayal.29 Naturally, Alcmaeon's action cannot be justified, but neither
58
can Costanza's failure be totally overlooked.
For this reason, like Piccarda, Costanza appears now in the lowest
heaven. However, this does not imply that they are somehow punished
by being deprived of a higher form of bliss. It means, rather, that they
find in heaven a degree of happiness commensurate with that which they
were capable of while on earth.30 In other words Paradise does not
change the character of the individual soul, but it enhances and brings it
to fulfilment according to what it was in life.
* * *
Beatrice's discourse is clear, logical, and exhausti

pupil could not wish for a more lucid master. Yet there
persistent, dominating feature of her style which may r
ear of a listener less enraptured than Dante the charact
turn of phrase of the kind which, for instance, Tr
stigmatized as being «più presto da spagnolo che da omo
is to say: baroque, avant la lettre . We have already rema
in line 15: «che l'avea fatto ingiustamente fello». The
other, more straightforward examples of similar rhetori
Beatrice's language: line 67: «Parere ingiusta la nostra
76: «che volontà, se non vuol, non s'ammorza»; line 102:
che far non si convenne»; and above all line 105: «per no
si fé spietato». The rhetorical device visibly deploy
one-line passages is that of repetition of word-stems, bu
negation or antithesis. The resulting sentences are rema
forceful compression and artificial preciosity. The ques
we are to see in them anything more than Beatrice's m
work.
As it happens, the supreme master of this style in t
the infernal character of Pier della Vigna who can constr
very close to Beatrice's in structure, sound, and conten
(Inf. XIII 70-72):
L'animo mio, per disdegnoso gusto,

credendo col morir fuggir disdegno,
ingiusto fece me contra me giusto.
In a little classic of Dante criticism Leo Spitzer describe

involved and twisted lines [...], which bear in themselve
self-torture and self-estrangement, and ultimately
paradoxy».32 Obviously, however, although the same de
by both Beatrice and Piero, their significance must diffe
59
with the radically different contexts in which they are brought to bear.
As Spitzer was quick to observe (p. 95):
if style must express a psychic content, it can do this by adapting the given
devices to the particular situation: repetition in itself is multivalent; its
specific nuance is brought out in the specific situation through a kind of
collaboration between the situation and the devices offered by language -
through an «adhesion» of language to the psychic content.
But what, we may ask, is the specific nuance, if any, brought out in
Beatrice's discourse? The question is rather difficult for the simple reason
that no «psychic content» is involved in Beatrice's philosophical
discourse, at least so long as we take it in isolation. If however we
re-place this discourse within the context of Dante's initial self-impeding
doubts (1-9), we discover that it is indeed a response to that
psychological situation.
As we have noted, at the beginning of the canto Dante is so deeply
involved in his own doubts as to be unable to express himself: as
Beatrice puts it, his «cura / sé stessa lega sì che fuor non spira» (17-18).
The rhetorical devices, then employed in overabundance, were - to
borrow again Spitzer's words - «a sort of linguistic, or onomatopoeic
rendition» (p. 92) of the pilgrim's deeply self-involved anxiety. It is to
this psychic situation that Beatrice's language is designed to «adhere»
and respond. After Dante's tortuous and frustrating copiousness, her
economical style exudes the compelling clarity and intellectual
exhilaration of mathematical theorems. It resolves Dante's psychological
impasse wiping away at a stroke his anxiety, and enabling him to reach
higher than ever before. We are not surprised, therefore, if he reacts in
strongly lyrical terms (significantly, with another repetition) to
Beatrice's apparently arid exposition, thus responding to schoolroom
language with the language of courtly love: «O amanza del primo
amante, o diva» (118).
There is, however, another crafty user of words in Dante's Inferno
of whom we are reminded by Beatrice's discourse. This is Guido da
Montefeltro, a convoluted but logical thinker {löico, Inf XXVII 123),
who can compress his advice in statements such as «lunga promessa con
l'attender corto / ti farà triunfar ne l'alto seggio» ( Inf. XXVII 110-11).
What is interesting is that the image of the upstretching flame, which
envelopes Guido {Inf. XXVII 1-18 and 58-60), returns in our canto
(77-80) as a metaphor of the unquenchable will, the will that does not
bend «assai o poco» (79). Moreover, Guido's case offers a perfect
illustration of the operation of the 'mixed' will {Par. IV 106-08), for,
when he yields to Boniface's veiled threats {Inf. XXVII 106-07), Guido
60
- a friar by then, as Costanza was a nun - «consentevi in tanto in
quanto teme, / se si ritrae, cadere in più affanno» {Par. IV 110-11).
Thirdly and more generally, Guido is undoubtedly the most memorable
example in the Comedy of the gap between inner truth and outer
appearance, between intention and expression,33 and consequently of the
need for interpretation, which underlies the whole of Paradiso IV.
Dante is too much of a conscious artist for us to assume that, since
there is no structural correspondence between the eighth bolgia and the
heaven of the Moon, these intratextual echos are fortuitous or
completely automatic. The least we can say is that they underscore
Dante's constant concern with interpretation at two points of the journey
where signs - be they in the form of human actions, Scripture or
Paradise as the pilgrim perceives it - demand to be interpreted. As
much as that of Guido in the eighth bolgia, the condition of Piccarda
and Costanza in the heaven of the Moon is rooted in this earth, in the
tortuous ways human beings choose to live with one another. All three
of them were compelled to break their vows; yet the friar is now in
Hell, whereas the two former nuns are in Paradise. Scholastic doctrine,
of the kind displayed by Beatrice's discourse, can help us to explain this
paradox. However, the workings of God's justice - that is to say, of
the human mind - remain ultimately unfathomable, and Beatrice
herself, bringing to a close her discussion on vows in the next canto,
will have to defer us for guidance to the New Testament and the Old, and
to the Shepherd of the Church: «let that, she says, suffice for your
salvation» (Par. V 73-78):34
Siate, Cristiani, a muovervi più gravi:

non siate come penna ad ogne vento,
e non crediate ch'ogne acqua vi lavi.
Avete il novo e '1 vecchio Testamento,
e 'l pastor de la Chiesa che vi guida;
questo vi basti a vostro salvamento.
Beatrice's discourse ends, and Dante describes it as the rippling of a

holy stream coming from the fountain whence every truth derives. The
metaphor is biblical,35 but it is more than a mere adornment here, as it
responds to the pilgrim's original «dimandar ... più caldo» (11-12): the
stream of Beatrice's words quenches Dante's thirst to know: it brings
peace where there were two desires that had reduced him to silence
(115-17).
However it is a peace that does not last. Having thanked Beatrice
with all the affection of which he is capable - inferior though this be
to the gift he has received - Dante reverts to the subject of his doubts.
61
«Io veggio ben che già mai non si sazia / nostro intelletto» (124-25).
The formula takes up again both the phrase with which Beatrice began
her discourse («Io veggio ben», 16) and the metaphor of hunger with
which Dante had described his own state of mind before her discourse
(«Intra due cibi», 1). Our intellectual hunger, Dante says, mixing
significantly his metaphors,36 is never satisfied unless it is enlightened
by that truth beyond which no truth can range, i.e. by the divine truth.
We may notice the series of binary structures which, preserving the
peace of «uno e altro disio», balance Dante's speech throughout:
«amanza - amante», «m'inonda / e scalda», «più e più», «grazia per
grazia», «vede e puote», «ver - vero», «illustra - spazia», «giunto -
giugner». The sty leme takes us back to the beginning of the canto with
its «due cibi», «due brame / di fieri lupi», «due dame». The canto's
opening is further echoed in the following simile comparing truth to the
lair where a wild beast goes back to rest. But whereas the wolves and the
dog of Dante's exempla ficta were still in the middle of their search and
unable to proceed, this wild beast is now resting in its lair, secure and
fully satisfied: as in real life a beast can reach its lair, so can we reach
absolute truth, otherwise the desire for knowledge which nature
implanted in us would be in vain («sarebbe frustra», 129).37 Now then
the canto's initial movement comes to full resolution, and we understand
the intensity of the double hunger that paralyzed the pilgrim's tongue at
that stage. Nevertheless, since the truth that our intellect can conquer is
always partial, a new search is kindled out of each stage of our
progress.38
Clearly, Dante's emphasis is on this pursuit and this tension rather
than on the repose following our temporary achievements. The nature of
intellectual desire is such that, when one doubt is conquered, another is
born, like a new shoot springing from the base of a tree. This is how
nature constantly drives us upward, from height to height, until we
reach the summit (130-32). The human mind finds in each stage it
reaches a new stimulus to climb higher; its thirst is never quenched
except with the water which the woman of Samaria begged as a boon
( Pur g . XXI 1-3); its hunger is never satisfied, not even with the angels'
bread by which men live in this world {Par. II 10-12) 39
It is the awareness of this natural law that now gives the pilgrim
the courage to ask a new question in order to reach higher. Contrasting
with the «Io mi tacea» of line 10, the syntagm «Io vo' saper» of line
136 signals that a new desire is, as it were, unbalancing Dante's
intellect. He wants to know now whether there are good works with
which one can make adequate satisfaction for vows that are unfulfilled
(136-38). As she is about to answer, Beatrice gazes at Dante with eyes
62
so full of the sparkling of love that, totally overwhelmed, his power to
see must turn back in retreat and, with eyes cast down, he feels almost
lost.
The ending of canto IV parallels that of canto III, when Beatrice so
flashed on Dante's gaze that at first his eyes could not bear it. The
difference is that here the question is already out, and we can expect the
next canto to begin, as it does, with Beatrice's answer. Between the two
endings there is external analogy but internal difference. At the end of
canto III the balance of two apparently equal doubts threatened to
immobilize both the pilgrim's mind and the poet's narrative; at the end
of canto IV the difference between what the pilgrim has learned and what
he still wants to know allows a forward motion to prevail - which
shows that the existence and articulation of intellectual desire, that is of
difference, is essential for the existence of Paradiso itself.40
Difference, as concrete manifestation of unfulfilled desire, is the
hidden theme that runs through this canto in its entirety: difference
between internal, absolute doubts that are paralyzing, and external,
differentiated doubts which permit, indeed demand, a forward movement;
difference between an internal, absolute beatitude which is impenetrable
and undescribable, and an external, relative beatitude that can be
understood by the senses and portrayed in human terms; difference
between an eternal, absolute and perfect form of communication that
does not need words, and a temporal, relative system that can only
achieve communication by means of conventional words - which,
however, do not necessarily correspond to their referents; difference
between internal, absolute will (and vows), by which only martyrs and
heroes seem to live, and external, relative will which informs the
choices of ordinary mortals and determines forever their destinies;
finally, difference between the relative knowledge that the intellect
achieves in each stage of its tireless quest for truth, and the absolute
truth that can only come through Revelation and contains all truths.
These are also some of the tensions that are at the core of the theology,
the structure, and the poetry of Dante's Paradiso.
Thus this wholly doctrinal canto reveals itself as the true
«grammar» of Dante's Paradiso 41 Contrary to the mimetic literalness
of both Inferno and Purgatorio , Dante's Paradiso articulates and
interprets the distance between the human and the divine, between the
metaphoric and the real, a gap whose existence, paradoxically, is
essential for the existence of the poem itself. In other words the Paradise
that Dante describes tells the drama of approaching, and the desire to
reach, God; but Paradiso as poem is all, and can only be, on this side of
that God; it is a preparation and an approximation to a vision and a bliss
63
that remain unsaid and unrevealed.42 Dante's Paradiso is therefore as
poetically elating as it is philosophically poignant, for it suggests that,
while being commensurate to the pains of Hell and Purgatory» the
human intellect, desire, and will (and their language) are constitutionally
inadequate to reach by themselves the fulfilment to which they aspire
beyond time and space, that is, beyond language.43
NOTES
* Giorgio Varanini, «II canto dei dubbi metafisici e morali», in L'acceso

strale (Napoli: Federico & Ardia, 1984), pp. 136-55; originally in Nuove
letture dantesche 5 (Florence: Le Monnier, 1970), pp. 317-39.
2See ST (= Summa Theologiae), la Ilae, q. 5, art. 2-3 (on degrees of
beatitude; see also Ilia, suppl., q. 93); q. 6, art. 4-6 (on the voluntary, the
involuntary and violence); q. 9, art. 4-5 (on the will and the heavenly
bodies).
3 All quotations from the Commedia are from the edition by Giorgio
Petrocchi, 4 vols (Milan: Mondadori, 1966-67). The English version is
taken or adapted from John D. Sinclair's translation ( The Divine Comedy,
New York: Oxford UP, 1971). Among the commentaries which I have most
frequently used are those by: Charles S. Singleton (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton UP, 1975); Umberto Bosco & Giovanni Reggio (Florence: Le
Monnier, 1979); Natalino Sapegno (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 19853);
Emilio Pasquini & Antonio Quaglio (Milan: Garzanti, 1986); and Bianca
Garavelli con la supervisione di Maria Corti (Milan: Bompiani, 1993).
4This example is disputed by Thomas Aquinas, ST, la Dae, q. 13, art. 6.
^For this third example see Ovid, Met., 5, 164-67; also Seneca, Thy est.,
707-11, and Virgil, Georg., 3, 539-40. The predicament here described by
Dante became known later as that of the Ass of Buridan between two bales
of hay: see Bruno Nardi, Nel mondo di Dante (Rome: Ed. di Storia e
Letteratura, 1944), pp. 297-303.
"For Trifon Gabriele, though they may reflect some truth, Dante's three
examples are so incredible that people could only ridicule them: see
Annotationi nel Dante fatte con Messer Trifon Gabriele in Bassano, a cura
di Lino Pertile (Bologna: Commissione per i Testi di Lingua, 1993), p.
275.
^For Dante's dependence on Aristotle's Ethics in this canto see in particular
Patrick Boyde, Perception and Passion in Dante's 'Comedy' (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1993), pp. 197-205.
8 See also line 59, «l'onor de la influenza e '1 biasmo», where the
Aristo telean formula returns but in a Platonic context.
Ôn this point see Teodolinda Barolini, The Undivine Comedy:
Detheologizing Dante (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992), pp. 183-89, an
analysis to which I am much indebted.
64
^Dante had already discussed at length this question in Conv. IV xxi for
which see V asoli' s invaluable commentary in Dante, Opere minori, 1/2, ed.
Cesare Vasoli and Domenico De Robertis (Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1988).
See De vulgāri eloquent ia, I iii, with Mengaldo's annotations in Dante,
Opere minori , H, ed. Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo et al. (Milan-Naples:
Ricciardi, 1979), and Par. XXVI 124-38 where Dante's earlier views appear
substantially modified.
l^This explanation is fully in line with Aquinas, ST, la Rae, q. 5, art. 2; see
also ST, Dla, suppl. q. 93, art. 2 and 3.
l3This is a common Aristotelean principle which Dante affirms also in
Conv. n iv 17.
14 John Freccero, Dante : The Poetics of Conversion, ed. Rachel Jacoff

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1986), p. 221.
l^See Barolini, pp. 168-71.
1 ^Freccero, p. 223.
12 See Sapegno's note to Inf. XXIII 66.
l°The parallel is meant to be only linguistic, not theological, for whereas
Hell is within creation and under God's authority, Paradise proper is with
God Himself. But with his ingenious expedient Dante saves both the
theological orthodoxy and the narratability of his heavens.
l^See Aquinas ST, la, q. 1, art. 9 and 10, generally quoted by all
commentators. The notion is however a commonplace: see e.g. Gregory
the Great, Moralia in lob , ed. M. Adriaen (Turnholt: Brepols, 1979), 2, 20:
«cum scriptura sacra temporaliter editis loquitur, dignum est ut verbis
temporalibus utatur quatenus condescendendo levet», etc.; see also ibid.,
32, 5 and Expositio in Canticum C antic or um, ed. P. Verbraeken (Turnholt:
Brepols, 1963), 2-3; Richard of St. Victor, Benjamin Minor , 15: «Sed nec
hoc praetereundum, quomodo Scripturae divinae huic speculationi alludant
et humanae infirmitati condescendant. Res enim invisibiles per rerum
visibilium formas describunt, et earum memoriam per quarumdam
concupiscibilium specierum pulchritudinem mentibus nostris imprimunt»
(Migne, PL 196: 10-11).
2Ît is uncertain whether Dante knew the Timaeus, the only Platonic
dialogue available in the Middle Ages through Chalcidius' translation and
commentary. However, he could have known of it indirectly, as it is
mentioned in some of his favorite authors, from Cicero to Augustine,
Macrobius, and Albert the Great: see Sofia Vanni Rovighi, «II canto IV del
Paradiso visto da uno studioso della filosofia medievale», Studi danteschi
48 (1971): 67-82 (pp. 72-75).
This is a literal translation of Isidore of Seville's definition of allegory as
«alieniloquium. Aliud enim sonat et aliud intelligitur», Etymologiarum
sive originum libri XX, I xxxvii 22, ed. W. M. Lindsay (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1911).
2^See Aquinas, ST , la Ilae q. 10, art. 5: the heavenly bodies can affect the
senses but not the human will which is free to decide how to respond to the
stimuli of the senses. See also ST, la, q. 115, art. 4, and Summa contra
65
Gentiles , DI, 85.
^lt should be noted that, as the verb tendere is used in Italian specifically to
signify the drawing of the bow (see e.g. Purg. XVI 48, «disteso l'arco», and
XXXI 17, «la troppa tesa»), there is some measure of semantic
convenientia between intende (58), though its primary meaning here is
'intends', and percuote (60).
^The contrast between expression and inner meaning is central also to
Dante's epistemological project in the Convivio ; see e.g., Conv. I i 18: «E
con ciò sia cosa che la vera intenzione mia fosse altra che quella che di fuori
mostrano le canzoni predette, per allegorica esposizione quelle intendo
mostrare, appresso la littérale istoria ragionata»; I ii 17: «Intendo anche
mostrare la vera sentenza di quelle [canzoni], che per alcuno vedere non si
può s'io non la conto, perché è nascosa sotto figura d'allegoria».
^*On the problem of representation in Paradiso, with particular reference to
Par. IV 28-63, see Giuseppe Mazzotta, Dante's Vision and the Circle of
Knowledge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993), pp. 34-55. This chapter
is a revised version of Mazzotta's «Teologia ed esegesi biblica (Par.
m-V)», in Dante e la Bibbia, ed. G. Barblan (Florence: Olschki, 1988), pp.
95-112.
^"This is how I interpret this difficult and traditionally much-debated tercet
(67-69).
See Boyde, pp. 197-205; Aquinas ST, la Ilae, q. 6, art. 4-6; see also Purg.
XXI 64-66.
2 8 On the etymological link between votum and voluntas and its

develoDment in Par. V. see Mazzotta's illuminatine discussion, dd. 38-42.
^For Alcmaeon see Purg. XII 49-51. The example is deemed absurd by
Aristotle in Nichomachean Ethics, 3, 1, for «there are some actions that a
man cannot be forced to do and he ought to undergo death of the cruelest
kind rather than do them», quoted in Singleton, ad locum. There is
substantial difference between Costanza's and Alcmaeon's cases, in that
Costanza chooses inaction, Alcmaeon action. Indeed, it seems to me that,
by carrying out his father's bidding, despite his devotion towards his
mother, Alcmaeon acts according to his absolute will, like Saint Lawrence
and Mucius, but in Dante's terms his choice is tragic, whereas theirs, or at
least Saint Lawrence's, is «comic». This is not implied in Dante's text
(106-08), which however may be more ambiguous than the traditional
reading would allow.
on
•^See Aquinas, ST, Ilia, q. 93, art. 3, 1:

virtus est ejus vis naturalis. Ergo et don
secundum diversos gradus virtutis naturali
31 Annotat ioni, p. 79, with reference
quand'è ben morta»).
3^Leo Spitzer, «Speech and Language in
my quotations are from the version re
Critical Essays, ed. John Freccero (Eng
1965), pp. 78-101 (p. 92).
66
33 For a reading of the canto in this light see Lino Pertile, «Inferno XXVII»,
Lectura Dantis Virginiana, I: Dante's «Inferno», ed. Tibor Wlassics (suppl.
to Lectura Dantis , 6 [1990]), pp. 351-62; this is a much reduced English
version of Id., « Inferno XXVII: il peccato di Guido da Montefeltro», Atti
dell'Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti , 141 (1982-83): 147-78.
3 4 As Mazzotta has argued, these opening cantos of Paradiso may well
reflect, albeit indirectly, the conflict which developed in the thirteenth
century between theologians and biblical exegetes: see Mazzotta,
especially pp. 34-35.
3 3 See Pompeo Giannantonio, «La poesia dottrinale {Paradiso IV)», in
Endiadi : dottrina e poesia nella Divina Commedia (Turin: Genesi Editrice,
1989), pp. 183-96 (p. 194), originally in Critica letteraria 8 (1980): 3-23;
also in Casa di Dante in Roma, Paradiso. Letture degli anni 1979 -'81
(Rome: Bonacci, 1989), pp. 121-43.
3"See Lino Pertile, « Paradiso : A Drama of Desire», in Word and Drama in
Dante, ed. J. Barnes and J. Petrie (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1993), pp.
143-80 (pp. 155-64).
^The modern reader might well question this assertion; however, for Dante
and his contemporaries it was axiomatic that «God and nature do nothing in
vain»: this sentence belongs indeed to the Auctoritates Aristotelis : De
cáelo et mundo , 18 see my ed. of Trifon Gabriele, p. 280 ad locum ; see also
Aquinas, ST, la, q. 12, art. 1.
For this theory of knowledge as common heritage in Dante's times, see
Vanni Rovighi, pp. 81-82.
39See Conv. IV xii 17-18 and xiii 1 with Vasoli's commentary; see also
Bruno Nardi, Dal «Convivio» alla «Commedia» (Rome: Istituto Storico
Italiano per il Medio Evo, 1960), pp. 75-83, and Maria Esposito Frank,
«La 'concreata e perpetua sete' del Paradiso », Esperienze letterarie 1 8
(1993): 41-55. On the function of doubt in Paradiso see Pertile, «Drama of
Desire», particularly pp. 162-65, and «La punta del disio: storia di una
metafora dantesca», Lectura Dantis 1 (1990): 3-28 (pp. 8-11). - Rather
disappointing is an old and rare «opuscolo» entirely devoted to this theme
by Alfonso Cerre tti, Valore filosofico ed estetico del dubbio nella Divina
Commedia (Città di Castello: S. Lapi, 1931).
4^0n the role of 'difference' in Paradiso see Baro lini, pp. 174 ff.
In linking the seven liberal arts with the seven planets Dante associates
grammar with the heaven of the Moon: see Conv. II xiii 9-10 and, for an
important discussion of this passage in relation to Par. M-V, see Mazzotta,
especially pp. 46-49.
4^See Pertile, «Drama of Desire», p. 172.
43 Among the lecturae of Par. IV not quoted above are those by Giuseppe
Albini (Florence: Sansoni, [1903]; also in Letture dantesche , ed. G.
Getto, vol. III, Florence: Sansoni, 1967, pp. 1389-1409); Luigi Valli
(Turin: G.B. Paravia, 1908); Luigi Pescetti (Florence: Sansoni, 1938);
Francesco Gabrieli (Turin: SEI, 1961); Guido Di Pino, in Lectura Dantis
Scaligera : Paradiso (Florence: Le Monnier, 1968), pp. 93-120.
67
Paradiso V
Author(s): MARINA DE FAZIO
Accessed: 17-02-2020 23:02 UTC
Lectura Dantis
MARINA DE FAZIO
University of Kansas
V
In the account of Dante's ascent with Beatrice to the Heaven of
Mercury, presented in the final section of Paradiso V, the narrator briefly
interrupts the telling of his story with an intriguing remark. After
describing how the planet's already splendid brightness became even
brighter in reaction to Beatrice's joy (94-96), he inserts a comment
(97-99) intended to describe the pilgrim's own reaction to that joy:
E se la stella si cambiò e rise,

qual mi fee' io, che pur da mia natura
trasmutabile son per tutte guise! ^
The polysemous significance of this narratorial remark becomes

apparent once one attempts to answer a simple question: who is the
transmutable protagonist of this specific tercet? At the level of the
fabula , the adjective «trasmutabile» clearly refers to Dante the character,
and points to the instability and variability inherent in his human
nature, «receptabilis», as Benvenuto glossed, «omnis influentiae».2 As
the present tense of the verb that accompanies it indicates, however, the
adjective «trasmutabile» refers also to the metamorphic nature of the
narrator himself. «Trasmutabile son », he declares, thus admitting to the
readers, who so far have entrusted themselves to his words, that his
vantage point in the poem is, after all, no less earthbound and
permutable than the one of its protagonist. Finally, at a metapoetic
level, the adjective ultimately refers, by implication, to the
transmutability of the text that the narrator is producing: the fifth canto
of the Paradiso itself.
The concept of transmutability is, indeed, a central one within the
narrative economy of Paradiso V. It is at the heart of the canto's
doctrinal core: the specific subject of Beatrice's explanation is precisely
the «trasmutar del carco» (55), the permutability of the matter of vows;
the target of her final admonishment is the instability and variability of
the human will, the inconsistent transmutability of men who, «come
penna ad ogne vento» (74), think that they may break their promises to
God and use again what they had offered to Him (32). This concept is
68
also at the center of the areas of the canto that surround Beatrice's
doctrinal speech, and in which the notion of the transmutability of the
protagonist, of the narrator, and of the text itself is foregrounded.
Scholarly contributions have generally focused on the canto's
doctrinal core, and paid relatively little attention to its peripheral
sections.3 I shall pursue instead a reading of the «marginal» areas of
Paradiso V. I shall examine first Beatrice's short proemial explanation,
and discuss it within the context of the final verses of the previous canto
to which it is intimately connected; and then proceed to analyze the
intriguing interventions with which, in the opening and ending sections
of the canto, the narrator interrupts the telling of his story to voice his
post factum comments to the reader. Beneath the surface of this
«marginal» narrative there unfolds a metapoetic discourse that reveals
Dante's concern with two capital issues: the question of love's
problematic status as a privileged object of literary representations and
the question of the nature and purpose of literature itself. While these
concerns are voiced, no permanent answers are offered to the problems
they raise, as the first half of the canto points to a solution that is then
overturned in the canto's second half.
The initial cantos of the Paradiso , dedicated to the Heaven of the

Moon, are dominated by lengthy theological and doctrinal discourses and
animated by a dramatic pattern of desire and fulfillment. As he enters
Paradise, Dante is confronted by things he does not understand, and that
raise many doubts and questions in his mind. His intellectual desire is
fulfilled each time by Beatrice, whose explanatory speeches dispel his
uncertainties and answer his queries. The pilgrim's desire to know is the
propeller of the ascent through the Heaven of the Moon; Beatrice's
answers are its fuel. Each truth that she reveals generates a new question
or a new doubt, that in turn leads to another truth, and so on. This
narrative movement is continued in Paradiso V, where Beatrice's speech
on the nature of vows responds to a question that Dante had posed at the
end of the previous canto.
Between Dante's question in Paradiso IV (136-138) and Beatrice's
answer in Paradiso V (19-84), however, a little interlude takes place,
which temporarily suspends this narrative movement and disrupts the
pattern of desire and fulfillment that so far has driven the story forward,
and the pilgrim upward along his intellectual ascent to truth. Instead of
answering Dante's question about unfulfilled vows, Beatrice responds
with a look so dazzling, that he remains bewildered to the point of
almost «losing himself» (IV, 139-142). This brief scene is resumed
immediately in the proem of Paradiso V (1-12), where Beatrice explains
69
the cause of her fiery look to Dante. In this little interlude a shift has
taken place from the theme of intellectual desire, which has driven the
narrative of the first four cantos, to the theme of love, the cardinal
theme of the poem. Beatrice's speech in the proem begins as an
explanation of her «fiammeggiar nel caldo d'amore», and ends with a
general statement on the nature of love. In the first tercet, she
acknowledges the effect that her look has had on Dante. In the second,
she begins her explanation, saying that her flaming look of love
proceeds from «perfetto veder» (5), which, once it has apprehended the
good, moves toward the good it has apprehended.
This first part of Beatrice's explication brings with it a long-
standing interpretive problem: whose is the «perfetto veder»? This
problem has divided readers, from the earliest commentators to
contemporary critics. For according to some, the «perfetto veder» is to
be attributed to Beatrice; according to others, to Dante.4 In either case,
the following tercet makes it clear that Beatrice's look proceeds from her
realization of the progress Dante has made in the intellectual quest that
has driven him since entering Paradise. In a fundamental passage
(124-132) in the final section of Paradiso IV - where the narrative
movement of these initial cantos is crystallized, turned into a theme, and
presented to the reader of the poem through the perception of its
protagonist - Dante had voiced his recognition of the nature and
purpose of that quest: the journey to salvation is an intellectual ascent
from doubt to truth, from peak to peak, toward the summit of the
ultimate truth. «Io veggio ben», he had begun,
che già mai non si sazia

nostro intelletto, se 'l ver non lo illustra
di fuor dal qual nessun vero si spazia.
Posasi in esso, come fera in lustra,
tosto che giunto l'ha; e giugner puollo:
se non, ciascun disio sarebbe frustra.
Nasce per quello, a guisa di rampollo,
a pie del vero il dubbio: ed è natura
ch'ai sommo pinge noi di collo in collo.
«Io veggio ben», now Beatrice echoes, «come già resplende / ne

l'intelletto tuo l'etterna luce, / che, vista, sola e sempre amore accende»
(7-9), thus confirming the pilgrim's acquisition of that truth and
indicating it as the reason for her dazzling look.
This third tercet of canto V is the pivotal point of Beatrice's
proemial speech, where its subject changes from a specific explanation
of her flaming look of love to a general exposition of the nature of love
70
itself and of its role in the human journey toward salvation. The «etterna
luce», as Beatrice explains to Dante, is the sole source of love; and,
once it has been seen, it and it alone always kindles love. But when
only a trace of the eternal light shines through in the human intellect,
and is ill-recognized, then love may be seduced away from its divine
source by «other» (namely earthly) things. This statement on the nature
of love is one of two in the Commedia that put it in such essential and
clear terms. In Purgatorio XVII, Virgil had explained to Dante that love
is the source of all things, good and evil («Quinci comprender puoi
ch'esser convene / amor sementa in voi d'ogne virtute / e d'ogne
operazion che merta pene» [103-105]). If it is misdirected or misapplied,
it leads not to God, but to sin.5 Here, in Paradiso V, the same
paradoxical nature of love is expressed: love is both the principle vehicle
toward God, and the primary obstacle on the path to salvation.
The episode between Dante and Beatrice in the Heaven of the Moon
is itself an instance of the workings of love. While it resumes the
poem's cardinal theme of love in the universal scheme of damnation and
redemption, Beatrice's speech takes place nonetheless within the more
specific and personal context of the love between her and Dante.
Beatrice's «fiammeggiar nel caldo d'amore» (2), her eyes so full of
sparks of love (Par. IV, 139-140) are directed at Dante, and are a
response to his progress. Within this context, the whole interlude in
Paradiso IV and V can be seen as a new chapter in the unfolding story of
the love between Dante and Beatrice that, begun in the Vita nuova , had
found its first representation in the poem in the final cantos of the
Purgatorio , where the two meet again in the afterworld. The relation
between Dante and Beatrice in this interlude appears radically
transformed. In their encounter in the garden of Eden, Dante, who had
felt the old flame of his ancient love rekindled (Purg. XXX, 48), was
still ensnared in the «antica rete» (Purg. XXXII, 6) of earthly love, and
was sternly castigated by Beatrice, eager to redirect his desire toward the
proper kind of love. In the Heaven of the Moon, by contrast, Dante's
desire appears to be in perfect unison with Beatrice's will; and it is now
Beatrice's own flame of divine love that is kindled.
To add to the complexity of Dante's treatment of the theme of love
in this interlude is the presence of a metapoetic discourse that unfolds
beneath the surface of its narrative and places the notion of the
dichotomy between earthly and divine love within a specifically literary
setting. This discourse is brought to light by the markedly stilnovistic
subtext that underlies the narrative of this passage. Typically
stilnovistic motifs appear in the brief scene that concludes canto IV: the
woman's dazzling look and the lover's inability to sustain it, the
71
destructive effects of that look that produces the lover's loss of identity.
Of Cavalcantian memory is the military metaphor of Dante's vanquished
«virtute» fleeing in retreat at the assault of Beatrice's overpowering
look, which recalls Guido's anguished representations of the «battle of
love» where the lover inevitably concedes defeat {Rime, IX, 9-14 & VII,
9-11):
La mia virtù si partio sconsolata,

poi che lassò lo core
a la battaglia ove madonna è stata:
la qual degli occhi suoi venne a ferire
in tal guisa, ch'Amore
ruppe tutti miei spiriti a fuggire...
Per li occhi venne la battaglia in pria

che ruppe ogne valore immantenente,
si che del colpo fu strutta la mente.^
Stilnovistic echoes resound also throughout the proem of Paradiso V,

not only in line 3 («sì che del viso tuo vinco il valore»), which resumes
the motif of the woman's blinding look and of the lover's defeat, but
also, and again through the mediation of a Cavalcantian echo, in line 7
(«Io veggio ben sì come già resplende») which, as Cesare Gárboli has
noticed, is modeled upon a verse («Io veggio che negli occhi suoi
risplende») from Guido's ballad «Posso degli occhi miei novella dire»
(Rime, XXV, 11). What is the function and meaning of this revisitation
of the stilnovo within the context of this paradisiac «storia d'amore»
(Gárboli, 7)? Is its purpose uniquely to emphasize the difference between
the stilnovistic/Cavalcantian conception of love as fundamentally
unknowable and therefore conducive to error, and the conception of love
that emerges in this canto, and throughout the Paradiso , according to
which love is knowledge and leads to salvation?
The revisitation of the stilnovo in Paradiso V is part of an ongoing
metapoetic discourse within the Commedia regarding the whole
stilnovistic experience, including Dante's own. Initiated in Inferno V,
with Francesca's stilnovistic citation («Amor ch'ai cor gentil ratto
s'apprende» [100]), 7 which brings into the narrative Dante's own poetry
of love, and carried on in Purgatorio XXIV and XXVI, where the
discussion on this poetry is continued in the encounters with
Bonagiunta da Lucca and Guido Guinizzelli, this discourse is Dante's
reassessment of a poetics of love that, within the context of the
Commedia , is presented as flawed by a profound and dangerous
ambiguity.8 A similar point has been recently made by Lino Pertile.
72
Defying widely accepted interpretations of Dante's encounter with
Bonagiunta, which relate the pilgrim's process of redemption to «the
notion of Dante's recuperation of the stilnovo as an ideologically sound
philosophy of love» (5 7), 9 Pertile points to the gap that in fact
separates the poetry of the stilnovo , which «in spite of all its
spirituality and its power of sublimation [...] tends ultimately toward
the active kind of love, in other words, toward lust» (69), and the poetry
of the Commedia , which is «a poetry that saves» (71). In his view,
whenever «the dolce stil nuovo is revisited by the poet of the Comedy ,
[it is] not to recuperate it or to redeem it, but to reveal its limitations
and to transcend it» (70). 10
When considered within the broader thematic context of the role
that the stilnovo plays in the Commedia , the narrative interlude that
unfolds from Paradiso IV to Paradiso V acquires a deeper significance. It
can be read not only as yet another rejection of the love poetics of the
stilnovo , but also as an indication of the new poetics of love that has
replaced it in the Commedia. In it, the ambiguous and morally risky
juxtaposition of earthly and divine love that had marked the poetry of
the stilnovo is dispelled not only in Beatrice's authoritative and
unequivocal explanation of what sets these two kinds of love apart, but
also in the representation of the renewed «storia d'amore» between Dante
and Beatrice. That story had found its first representation in Dante's
stilnovistic libello , the Vita nuova ; and it is in terms of Dante's own
stilnovistic experience that his rejection of the stilnovo within the
Commedia must be considered. In the Purgatorio , that chapter in the
author's exploration of the theme of love is brought to a definite
conclusion. Object of the confrontation between Dante and Beatrice in
the garden of Eden is precisely the story of their past love. In the
account of that encounter, Dante the character appears still projected
backwards in time toward the Beatrice of the youthful libello. References
to time past abound: the time that has elapsed between their last
encounter and this one (XXX, 34-36); the time that Dante has spent
longing for one more chance to see Beatrice (XXXII, 1-2); the time
when he first saw her (XXX, 41-42). Their past love is not only the
object of the conversation that takes place in that encounter, it is also
the filter through which Dante the character still perceives Beatrice. This
can be seen in the account of his reaction at the first sight of Beatrice,
when he «felt the mighty power of old love» («d'antico amor sentì la
gran potenza», XXX, 39); in the words that he intends for Virgil, who
is however gone, and will not hear them (XXX, 46-48); in the
description of Beatrice's smile that draws his eyes to itself with the
power of its «old net» (XXXII, 5-6). In the Earthly Paradise, Dante the
73
character revisits his time past, the time of a love that can now be called
«old», the object of the narrative of the Vita nuova . Beatrice, instead,
wants him to look forward, and to move on to a new kind of love. This
new love is the object of the narrative of the Paradiso. A new chapter in
the unfolding «storia d'amore» between Beatrice and Dante - and in the
author's exploration of the theme of love - begins in the last cantica of
the Commedia.
The representation of this new love in the Paradiso is achieved
mostly through the novel characterization of Beatrice. Reinventing her
is one of Dante's greatest challenges in the «ultimo lavoro» {Par. 1, 13).
The Beatrice of the Commedia presents features that the Beatrice of the
Vita nuova did not possess, and that no other stilnovistic woman had
ever had the privilege of possessing. Unlike the speechless «angiola» of
the libello , whose existence in the narrative is always mediated through
the words of the narrator, and filtered through the perception of the
protagonist (privileged focalizer of the entire narrative), the Beatrice of
the poem exists mostly through her own words. She is the predominant
speaker of the Paradiso , where she has become the «fonte onď ogne ver
deriva», whose «parlar ... inonda / e scalda ... e ... avviva» {Par. IV,
116, 119-120). Not anymore the silent, unlimitedly pliable object of the
lover's desire as in the Vita nuova , she seems now to reject, through her
own words, her former passive role to become the controlling subject of
a renewed relation. She is not just a projection of the lover's mind, but a
self-defining character, whose representation in the poem is often
autonomous from - and at times antagonistically contrasted to - the
still earthbound perspective of the protagonist. The novelty of the
poetics of love in the Commedia resides in the creation of this double
perspective, in which the ambiguous stilnovistic juxtaposition of the
earthly and the divine is dissolved through the transfiguration of Beatrice
into an autonomous and self-defining figure, unequivocal manifestation
of the divine and embodiment of the right kind of love.
While these features define in general the new Beatrice of the
Paradiso in contrast with the stilnovistic Beatrice, an additional feature
is presented in the narrative interlude between cantos IV and V. In it, for
the first time in this «storia d'amore», Beatrice is not anymore the
beloved, but she is herself the lover. With this transformation of
Beatrice who, from being the passive object of Dante's desire, becomes
the dominant subject of a renewed relation, the inversion of the love
poetics of the stilnovo , within the new poetics of love of the
Commedia , seems completed. But Dante daringly carries this
transformation another step further: he has the narrator of Paradiso V
hand the making of the poem over to Beatrice, and declare her the author
74
of this «canto» (16). With this narratological sleight of hand, Dante
makes of Beatrice the textual embodiment of his new poetics of love.
Why does she need to explain the reason for her look to Dante? And
why does she need to add that closing remark on the difference between
earthly and heavenly love? A preliminary answer to these questions is
contained in Beatrice's own speech. The fact that she prefaces her
explanation by telling Dante not to be surprised by her look («non ti
maravigliar...», 4) is a clear indication that Dante was in fact surprised
by it, that he did not understand it, and that his reaction to it was
inappropriate. For all his intellectual progress, Dante is not yet equipped
to interpret the meaning of Beatrice's fiery look of love. He actually
misreads it, and reacts to it in the guise of a typically stilnovistic lover.
Another function of the stilnovistic subtext in Paradiso IV and V is
to reveal that the pilgrim's perception of Beatrice is still clouded by the
risky ambiguity that was at the root of stilnovo love, and that the moral
dangers of erotic desire are still a hazard for Dante the character.11 How
do we otherwise account for the strongly suggestive phrase «e quasi mi
perdei» at the end of canto IV? Or for the otherwise gratuitous insistence
with which Beatrice - after her prolonged and exhaustive exposition in
the final cantos of the Purgatorio - returns, in the proem of canto V,
to the explanation of the difference between earthly love, which is
seduction and error (10-12), and her own heavenly love, which is «di là
dal modo che 'n terra si vede» (2)? Although pleased with the progress of
her charge toward the achievement of the ultimate truth, Beatrice has
also seen in his near losing of himself «i segni de l'antica fiamma»
(Purg. XXX, 48), the «vestigio» (a momentous Virgilian
reminiscence?)12 of the «antica rete» (Purg. XXXII, 6), and proceeds,
with her explanation, to correct and redirect her lover's desire toward the
proper kind of love.
The fundamental errancy of desire, which is at the root not only of
Cavalcantian love poetry, but also of Dante's own stilnovo , is still
present in the Paradiso. In the pilgrim's «transmutable» perspective,
Beatrice is not always the transparent and unambiguous symbol of
divine love, the means through which the ultimate truth is revealed and
explicated to him, she is also a symbol of earthly love, the object of a
not always theologically sublimated desire.13 At the end of Paradiso IV,
caught between these two antithetical modes of perceiving and desiring
his beloved, between the tenacious memory of the Beatrice he had
created out of his stilnovistic imagination and the new Beatrice who
now escorts him through the heavens of Paradise, Dante the character
dangerously wavers. Beatrice's intervention, at the beginning of Paradiso
V, aims at saving him from that danger, at redirecting him from the
75
intricate «selva» of erotic desire toward the «diritta via» of redemptive
love. The conversion from the love poetics of the stilnovo to the love
poetics of the Commedia , as it occurs in this narrative interlude, is not a
smooth transition. While the new Beatrice in the poem clearly points to
the direction of its reformed poetics of love, the unpredictable
«transmutability» of her all too human lover - conveyed by the
presence of a markedly stilnovistic subtext - constitutes a disruptive
thematic and formal counter-current that undermines the new «new
style» of the love poetry of Paradiso V.
Supporting this interpretation, and shedding new light on the

significance of the interlude in Paradiso IV and V, is an additional
parallel that can be drawn between it and Inferno V. What brings them
together is not only the fact that they are both part of Dante's
reassessment of the stilnovo within the Commedia , but also the fact
thai Inferno V itself is present as a subtext in this narrative interlude.14
Echoes from Inferno V resound both in Beatrice's explanation of the
cause of her flaming look in the proem of Paradiso V, and in the
description of Dante's reaction to that look at the end of Paradiso IV.
The phrases that describe Dante's reaction in the final verse of canto
IV - «e quasi mi perdei» and «con li occhi chini» (142) - recall the
similar phrases - «e fui quasi smarrito» (72) and «china' il viso» (110)
- that describe Dante's reactions in the fifth canto of the Inferno to the
procession of illustrious «peccator carnali» (38) and to the first part of
Francesca's story of love and damnation.15 The identity of
psychological and physical signs that both sets of phrases describe
becomes significant once the similarity of the thematic and formal
contexts in which they appear is taken into consideration. Central in
both Inferno V and the interlude in Paradiso IV and V is the fundamental
theme of love;16 and in both, Dante's treatment of this theme occurs
through a revisitation of stilnovistic motifs that reveals his ongoing
metapoetic concern with the problem of literary representations of love.
Concealed behind the identity of the signs that the protagonist manifests
in both episodes, is, however, a significant dissimilarity. This
dissimilarity allows us to read them as two discrete stages along the
major itinerary that marks, throughout the poem, Dante's exploration of
the theme of love. As several readers of Inferno V have pointed out, the
bewilderment that overtakes Dante in the second circle of Hell results
not only from his realization of the fateful consequences of unchecked
erotic desire, but also from his recognition of the moral ambiguity at
the root of the representations of love that characterized a large sector of
the literature of his times, including courtly romances and treatises, the
76
poetry of the Provençal troubadours and of their Italian imitators, the
lyric of the stilnovist poets and of Dante himself. His reaction therefore
cannot be seen simply and generically as that of a Christian Everyman
embarked upon a journey toward salvation, but also, and more precisely,
as the response of a «character-poet», whose present identity as actor of
the Commedia comprises his past literary experience as auctor and
singer of love.17 The phrases «e quasi mi perdei» and «con gli occhi
chini» in Paradiso IV, describe identical psychological and physical
signs. Their subject, however, is not, as in Inferno V, the
«personaggio-poeta» who ponders on the ethical implications of literary
representations of love and is emotionally overwhelmed at the
realization of his responsibility in Francesca's tragedy of damnation, but
a Dante who, as we have seen, appears strikingly similar to the
protagonists of many stilnovistic love poems. In Paradiso IV, the
protagonist of the Commedia appears not, as in Inferno V, in the guise
of a stilnovist auctor , but rather in the guise of a stilnovistic actor.
This substantial difference seems to mark a regression rather than a
progress along the pilgrim's educational journey. An explanation for
this regression may be found once we realize that a major event has
taken place between the two episodes: the definitive entrance of Beatrice
on the scene of the poem, an event that brings into the narrative Dante's
own personal and direct involvement in the experience of love. In the
Heaven of the Moon, Dante's love story with Beatrice resumes, and with
it the errancy of desire that overtakes him and causes his near-losing of
himself.18 Not unlike Francesca who had misread the love lyrics of the
stilnovist poets and the narrative recounting the love between Lancelot
and Guinevere, now Dante misreads Beatrice, whom he still perceives as
the object of the «antico amor» that he had sung in his youthful libello .
With unconscious easiness, he responds to Beatrice's dazzling look by
sliding back into the old role that he had played in that same text, thus
revealing his temporary inability to read Beatrice outside of the
stilnovistic framework into which he had first cast her. To learn how to
read her aright, as a transparent vehicle to divine love rather than as an
object of earthly love, will remain one of the goals of the otherwordly
traveller throughout the heavenly ascent.19
Echoes from Inferno V resound also in the proem of Paradiso V.
They resonate not only in Beatrice's triple repetition, in the brief space
of ten verses (1, 9, 10), of the word «amore», which mirrors Francesca's
famous triple anaphora of the same key word in the last three tercets
(100, 103, 106) of her first speech, but also in Beatrice's «comedie»
exploitation of a distinctively stilnovistic subtext (the Cavalcantian
verse in line 7), which closely parallels, and subverts, Francesca's tragic
77
appropriation and conflation of the verses from Dante's and Guinizzelli's
love poems (100). Beatrice's echoing of Francesca's speech is a
distinctively «corrective» one.20 While Francesca, in seeking a
justification for her fatal action, had quoted verses from those stilnovist
poets who most had exalted the sweetness, nobility, and redemptive
power of love, Beatrice, whose aim is to redirect her charge's desire away
from earthly love, echoes a verse from the most tragic of the stilnovist
poets for whom love is error and its object fundamentally unknowable.
Francesca's misreading is inverted in Beatrice's purposeful manipulation
of Cavalcanti, whose verse she quotes only to turn its meaning in a
markedly anti-Cavalcantian direction. While in its original context the
verse was used to express the concept that love is unknowable and
conducive to error, in the new context of Beatrice's speech the verse is
used to express exactly the opposite concept: that love and knowledge
are inseparable. On the one hand, therefore, Beatrice's «emendation» of
the original text aims at unmasking the error that had flawed the
discourse on love carried on not exclusively by Cavalcanti, but also -
witness, within the fabula of the Commedia , the tragic destiny of
Francesca - by all stilnovist poets. That neither Francesca nor Beatrice
should find it difficult to appropriate these texts, and to turn them each
to her own purpose is an additional authorial pointer to the risky
pliability and ambiguity of the stilnovistic poetics of love. On the other
hand, Beatrice's «corrective» intervention, which is, within its
immediate context, primarily intended as a lesson for her direct
interlocutor, points to his error. Her revisitation of the stilnovo points,
in other words, to the fact that the moral ambiguity inherent in its
conception of love is still a risk for Dante the character who, even in the
heights of heaven, cannot entirely elude his earthbound perspective, the
«modo che 'n terra si vede», the inescapable errancy of desire.
Intimately connected to Beatrice's «authorial» interpolano of the

Cavalcantian verse in Paradiso V, 7, is the additional, and far more
daring, process of metaphorization she undergoes in the first narratorial
intrusion that ends the proem and leads to yet another revealing parallel
with Inferno V. A symbol of Eros, both earthly and divine, Beatrice
becomes in this intriguing passage (16-18) also a symbol of the text
itself:21
Sì cominciò Beatrice questo canto;
e sì com' uom che suo parlar non spezza,
continuò cosi 'l processo santo.
As some recent studies have indicated,22 the first verse of this tercet is
78
not to be read, as the most widely accepted interpretation would have it,
as Dante's «modo ellittico» (Reggio) to mean simply that Beatrice
«cominciò ad esporre il problema che costituisce la materia di questo
canto» (Sapegno). The word «canto» in line 16 has a strictly technical
meaning: it denotes one of the principal structural units into which the
poem is divided. With the same meaning the word appears in three other
narratorial intrusions in the poem: the first in the opening lines of
Inferno XX («Di nova pena mi conven far versi / e dar matera al
ventesimo canto»), the second in Inferno XXXIII, 90 («e li altri due che
'l canto suso appella»), and the last one at the end of Paradiso V itself
(«nel modo che il seguente canto canta» [139]). In all these instances,
the word points to the authorial role of the narrator engaged in the
composition of the poem. What is remarkable about its occurrence in
Paradiso V, 16 is that here the «canto» appears to be the product not of
the narrator's, but of Beatrice's own doing. The formal structuring of
this unit of the poem is, in other words, attributed directly to Beatrice,
who thus appropriates the narrator's authorial role, while the narrator
himself appears to be simply a scribe of her «canto».23 As Teodolinda
Barolini has aptly pointed out, «he is a scribe ... who has resigned not
only the content of his text but even its disposition, its arrangement
into beginnings, middles, and ends» (189-190): it is Beatrice who
«begins» canto V. Dante presents us here with a daring juxtaposition of
narrative levels: the diegetic level in which the events of the journey
occur, and to which Beatrice and the reality of the otherworld belong;
and the primary level in which the narrator's recording of those events
takes place, and to which only the narrator and his narratee belong.24 By
having a character cross the threshold that marks the boundaries between
the two distinct narrative levels in the poem, Dante attempts, within the
fictional universe he has created, a bold conflation of «reality» (the
fictional reality, that is, in which Beatrice exists) and «textuality» (the
exclusively verbal dimension to which the narrator's voice belongs and
in which, we are supposed to believe, the production of the text of the
poem takes place).25
A similar conflation of textuality and reality takes place in Inferno
V. Like Beatrice who, from being an actor in Dante's poem, becomes its
proclaimed auctor , Francesca too, although following an inverted
trajectory, oversteps the boundaries that separate textuality from reality,
literature from life, and, from being a lector of a story about love,
becomes an actor engaged in the real-life reenactment of that story. In
Inferno V, the conflation of textuality and reality leads Francesca to
eternal damnation. In Paradiso V, it is, instead, part of a process
intended to lead to salvation. What «lesson», if any, can then the reader
79
of the Commedia learn from the apparently contradictory message that
these parallel cantos deliver about the relation of literature (and, in
particular, literary representations of love) to life? On the one hand, the
story of Francesca contains a warning to the reader regarding the dangers
inherent in any attempt to recreate in real life what happens in books,
and in particular a warning not to be seduced by literary representations
of erotic love, a kind of love that may lead to error and damnation. As
Susan Noakes observes, Francesca «does not realize that what she reads
is literature and not life, a convention with no necessary and direct
applicability to herself» (47). Beatrice's «canto», on the other hand,
seems to contain an open invitation to its readers (implicitly evoked in
the second person plural pronoun «vostro» of line 10, which addresses
the readers of the poem, no less than the pilgrim) to do exactly the
opposite: to strive to model their existences upon the principles it
expounds, to seek to attain in life the kind of love it represents and that
leads to salvation.
The resolution of this apparent contradiction lies not only in the
obvious difference of content that distinguishes Beatrice's «canto» from
Francesca's readings, and that makes of the first, which advocates the
Tightness of divine love, an unequivocal reversal of the latter, which are
representations of earthly, erotic love. Another, and no less fundamental,
difference sets their texts apart, a difference that concerns opposite modes
of literary representation and antithetical conceptions of the relation that
exists between literature and life. The discourse on love carried on in
Francesca's texts is marked by ambiguity, it is open to multiple
interpretations, and may even be appropriated by readers who, like
herself, can find in its pliable ideology a viable justification for their
own erotic escapades. Delivered from the point of view of eternity,
Beatrice's authorial and authoritative discourse on love is a «processo
santo» (18) that leaves no room for ambiguity. And if the possibility of
misreading Beatrice is, as we have seen, still present, the unreliable
reader is not allowed to persist in error. For Beatrice not only detects the
possibility of misreading, but actually incorporates it in her text in order
to lead the reader toward her intended meaning. In Inferno V, Dante had
passed a judgment on the moral dangers of the love poetics of the
romances and of the stilnovo ; in the Beatrician proem of Paradiso V, he
offers the model of an alternative poetics of love in which all ambiguity
is set aside, in order to guide the reader, just as Beatrice guides the
pilgrim, on the path to salvation.
Paradiso V subverts the conception of the relation between reality
and textuality, between truth and fiction, that both the pilgrim and the
reader of the poem were led to infer from the story of Francesca. As
80
Angelo Jacomuzzi remarks in his fine reading of Inferno V, the episode
of Francesca points to the radical alterity that exists between life and
literature, and is a reminder that the latter is nothing other than a system
of conventions and artifice, «nichil aliud quam fictio» (231). Behind
Beatrice's appropriation of the authorial role that, within the poem, is
the exclusive prerogative of the narrator {qua figura auctoris ), one
detects, on the contrary, Dante's effort to dissolve that alterity, an
attempt to create, through this authorial self-effacing gesture, the effect
that «the fiction» of Paradiso V - one could say echoing Singleton's
well-known formula - «is that it is not a fiction» (62), that the canto
we read is indeed a «processo santo», a true artifact bearing the seal of a
divine author.
In one of his «endpapers», the editor of this journal once proposed

to append an addendum to Singleton's famous tenet, whose reverse, he
argued, is true as well: «the fiction of the Comedy is that it is a
fiction». He explained his addendum by remarking how «great narrators
always knew ... the universal need for suspension of ... belief », and how
«Dante's narrative, as all great narrative, is the result of the tension
between believing and not believing». The presence of this tension in
Dante's poem, he concluded, is precisely what «separates his creation
from God's», what «distinguishes his book from the Bible» (Wlassics,
143). One of the places in the poem in which this tension most clearly
emerges is the first narratorial intervention in Paradiso V. We have seen
how, by having the narrator delegate the ultimate responsibility of the
text to Beatrice, Dante aims at creating the effect that the fiction of
Paradiso V is «that it is not a fiction». In the same intrusion by the
narrator, however, Dante has him remind us that the opposite is also
true, and that the fiction of Paradiso V is that it is indeed a fiction. The
arbitrariness of the daring metaphorization of Beatrice as symbol of the
text emerges, in fact, in the «authorial» gesture of the narrator who, at
the same time as he tells us of the continuity of Beatrice's speech
(17-18), deems it necessary to interrupt that speech with his own
intrusion.26 By overtly interrupting Beatrice's «continuous» text, the
narrator manifestly points to his own authorial practice, to the need of
structuring his canto into well defined sections, and of articulating his
narrative with pauses and variety. One of the functions of this narratorial
intrusion is, in fact, to set aside the initial part of Beatrice's speech -
which is a continuation, as we have seen, of the interlude begun at the
end of Paradiso IV - from its remaining part, which constitutes the
doctrinal core of the canto.
Displaying the same propensity for transmutability that
81
characterizes his diegetic counterpart, the narrator too is caught wavering
between two poles. He plays, in fact, two different and opposite roles in
this canto, whereby he appears at once as a scribe-figure, a mere
transcriber of a text authored by one other than himself, and as an
author-figure, whose presence in the narrative points to his own
authorship of a text that he is not simply transcribing, but actually
creating, shaping, and structuring according to the dictates of his art.
The narrator-author is a subversive counter-function of the
narrator-scribe. The conflation of reality and textuality that marks the
scribe's attribution of the authorship of the canto to Beatrice is in fact
undermined by the narrator's authorial gesture whose effect is precisely
the opposite: that of emphasizing the difference, the gap, that exists
between the «reality» in which Beatrice delivers her continuous speech
and the purely textual nature of his discontinuous rendering of that
speech. And if this gap seems to disappear in the second intrusion in the
canto, where the narrator seals Beatrice's doctrinal speech by
underscoring his faithful transcription of her words («Così Beatrice a me
come io scrivo» [85]), it is only to be reproposed, in a more forceful and
unambiguous way, in the other self-conscious narratorial interventions
that appear in the canto's final section, where the narrator decidedly
abandons his scribal pose and takes on a markedly authorial role.
After Beatrice's long explanatory speech, the narrative of Paradiso
V takes an abrupt turn. Beatrice suddenly falls silent and «trasmuta
sembiante» (88). Her sudden transmutation, which silences Dante's
«cupido ingegno, / che già nuove questioni avea davante» (89-90), is
soon explained to be the visible sign of a spatial transmutation: the
ascent to the Heaven of Mercury, which the two travellers through
Paradise enter with the speed of an arrow that hits its target even before
the bowstring has ceased vibrating (92). Moreover, Beatrice's joy at
entering the Heaven of Mercury magnifies the already splendid
brightness of the planet (97), and causes her lover, «trasmutabile per
tutte guise» (99), to experience, in turn, a transmutation of his own. No
sooner do the two extraordinary visitors enter the planet, than «ben più
di mille splendori» (103), the souls of this heaven, appear and start
drawing toward them. Having built such a high degree of expectation
with the swift unfolding of his narrative of transmutations, the narrator
suddenly and unexpectedly interrupts the telling of his story and directly
addresses the reader to point to his own transmutation and to the
transmutability of his text (109-1 14):27
Pensa, lettor, se quel che qui s'inizia

non procedesse, come tu avresti
82
di più savere angosciosa carizia;
e per te vederai come da questi
m'era in disio d'udir lor condizioni,
sì come a li occhi mi fur manifesti.
Having set aside his humble scribal pose, the narrator takes on in this
address a bold and unambiguous authorial role. He invites the reader to
contemplate the shocking hypothesis of an authorial silence that would
leave this new beginning («quel che qui s'inizia», namely the pilgrim's
new adventure in the Heaven of Mercury) with no middle or end to
follow it. He goes even so far as to envision the reader's distress, his
anguished and baffled desire («angosciosa carizia»), at this unexpected
authorial gesture that would deprive him of his right «di più savere», of
his desire for narrative closure.
The relation between narrator and reader in this address mirrors the
relation between Beatrice and Dante the character in the interlude that
unfolds through the end of Paradiso IV and the beginning of Paradiso V:
both are shaped by the dynamics of desire. We have seen how in that
interlude a thematic shift comes about that marks the passage from the
motif of Dante's intellectual desire to the contrasting motif of his erotic
desire. In the address there comes a similar shift. In order to help his
reader to envisage the pilgrim's desire to know about the conditions of
the souls in the Heaven of Mercury, the narrator asks him to imagine
what his own desire to know more about the story he is reading would
be like, if he were to put a halt to his telling. The effect of the narrator's
address, however, goes far beyond its declared intention, namely the
satisfaction of the reader's intellectual desire for an effective and detailed
account of the events of the story, as it inevitably compels its readers to
reflect not only on the pilgrim's condition, but also on their own
condition as readers, on the nature of their desire for narrative closure,
and on the intricate mechanics and pleasures of the process of reading.
The narrator in this address seems to conduct the readers of the poem
onto a route that leads in the opposite direction, and that takes them, at
least momentarily, away from the events of the story narrated, and
allows them to linger in a sort of textual eroticism. By «almost
roguishly» (Spitzer, 151) pointing to the decisional power he has to
fulfill or baffle, as he wishes, the reader's desire for narrative closure and
actually threatening him with a lectura interrupta , the narrator does not
only succeed in giving an adequate representation of the pilgrim's desire
to know about the souls of Mercury, he also creates, by simply
supposing it (Spitzer, 152), the reader's own desire to go on with the
reading of the story. He seduces, in other words, the readers, by creating
83
in them an awareness of the pleasures of reading. A clever trick of the
narrator's art, the threat is not carried out, and the story resumes.
Clearly, the canto that now draws to its end is not Beatrice's canto
anymore. By formulating the hypothesis of a different unfolding of his
tale, and thus underscoring the conscious choice he has made among
potentially limitless narrative possibilities, by pointing to the reader's
total and inescapable dependence on his narrative choices, the narrator
has powerfully regained his role as author. The canto has returned to the
narrator's paternity.28
The parallel themes of Dante the character's intellectual desire and
of the reader's desire for narrative closure return in the canto's last
tercets. After one of the souls of Mercury (whom we will later know to
be Justinian) invites the pilgrim to satiate his desire to know about
them at his own pleasure (e però, se disii / di noi chiarirti, a tuo piacer
ti sazia» [119-120]), Dante heeds Beatrice's admonishment to speak
securely («dì, dì / sicuramente» [122-123]), and asks the soul about his
identity and his rank in that heaven. The canto ends with the pilgrim's
question yet unanswered, and with the narrator's promise to the readers
of the poem that the soul's answer will be offered to them «nel modo
che '1 seguente canto canta» (139). The narrator-author, master
manipulator of the reader's desire for closure, reappears in this last
intrusion to confirm again the passing of authorship from Beatrice to
himself. The word «canto», which had appeared in the first narratorial
intrusion (16) of Paradiso V, retums here to attest and seal this passage.
Not unlike the previous address to the reader, this «wholly
artificial, metapoetically imposed transition» (Barolini, 264)
re-establishes within the narrative of Paradiso V that alterity between
literature and life that, in the first half of the canto, both the authorial
role of Beatrice and the subservient scribal role of the narrator himself
had attempted to erase. The reformed poetics of Paradiso V, which
Beatrice embodies, appears then to be doubly undercut: not only by the
presence of her transmutable lover, but also, as we have just seen, by
the presence of a no less transmutable narrator. The locus of conflicting
and unresolved tensions - between two kinds of love, two modes of
literary representations, two conceptions of the nature of literature itself
- the fifth canto of the Paradiso is indeed, as Lionella Coglievina aptly
suggested, a «piccola summa» (58) of the Commedia in its entirety.
«Trasmutabile per tutte guise», Paradiso V appears to be at once the
work of heaven (the sacred and authoritative text of a heavenly author)
and the work of earth (the supremely literary artifact of an all too human
author), a canto, in short, «al quale ha posto mano e cielo e terra» (Par.
XXV, 2)
84
NOTES
^The Commedia is cited from Petrocchi's edition. All quotations of the text
in English are from the translation by Allen Mandelbaum.
2 All the commentaries to the Commedia referred to or quoted in this essay
were consulted on the Dante Dartmouth Project (DDP), available via
TELNET through the Dartmouth Library (lib.dartmouth.edu). For the DDP,
see Hollander.
■^For a detailed treatment of the «questione dei voti», see the studies by
Pastore Stocchi (1972), Tartaro (1980), Oliva (1987), and the more recent
contribution by Mazzotta (1993). The only exceptions to this consolidated
critical practice are the lecturae by Cesare Gárboli (1971) and by Lionella
Coglievina (1986) who, although not disregarding the theological
content, direct their attention to other aspects of the canto as well. The
first critic devotes a great part of his essay to a discussion of the renewed
love story between Dante and Beatrice that takes place in the narrative
interlude unfolding through the end of Paradiso IV and the proem of
Paradiso V. The latter concentrates on the intertextual and intratextual
echoes that relate this canto to others in the poem and to other works by
Dante. For previous lecturae of Paradiso V, see Zardo (1903), Sacchetto
(1943), Montanari (1961), Chiari (1964), and Pasquazi (1966).
^For a discussion, see Coglievina, 50. I believe, as she does, that the
«perfetto vedere» is to be attributed to Dante. One additional textual
pointer to the validity of this interpretation - besides the convincing
argumentations of Coglievina - is the passage in Paradiso III, 27-28:
«poi sopra 'l vero ancor lo pie non fida, / ma te rivolve, come suole, a
vóto...». In this passage, the same metaphor of the foot, which appears in
Paradiso V («perfetto veder, che, come apprende, / cosi nel bene appreso
muove il piede»), is used to describe Dante's laborious ascent through the
Heaven of the Moon.
5The continuation of Virgil's discourse in the following canto, where the
explanation of the nature of love turns into a discussion on the
significance of free will, contains a double proleptic reference to Beatrice's
own speech in Paradiso V: «Quanto ragion qui vede, / dir ti poss' io; da indi
in là t'aspetta / pur a Beatrice ch'è opra di fede» «La nobile virtù Beatrice
intende / per lo libero arbitrio, e però guarda / che l'abbi a mente, s'a parlar
ten prende» ( [Pur g . XVIII, 46-48 & 73-75).
"Similarly suggestive with this regard are the following verses by Cino:
«[che già non oso sguardar] la sua cera, / dalla quale esce un ardente
splendore / che toile a li occhi miei tutto valore» (LXXIV, 8-10 [Savona,
110]); and by Lapo: «Allor bassa' li miei / per lo tu' raggio che mi giunse al
core / entro 'n quel punto ch'io la riguardai» (XI, 15-17 [Savona, 183]).
2 See, for all, Contini (43-44): «le terzine dell'anafora amorosa [...] si
aprono su una citazione o parafrasi ad hominem : 'Amor ch'ai cor gentil
ratto s'apprende.' Si dice citazione ad hominem perché, se essa rinvia allo
stesso incipit guinizzelliano, 'Al cor gentil rempaira [...] sempre Amore',
85
coniugato con l'inizio della seconda stanza, 'Foco d'amore in gentil cor
s'apprende', essa può anche rimandare implicitamente, diciamo in secondo
grado, alla citazione della Vita nuova : 'Amore e '1 cor gentil sono una cosa,
/ si come il saggio in suo dittare pone'».
° Commenting on this ambiguity, in his discussion of the stilnovistic
subtext in Inferno V, Gioacchino Paparelli writes: «Il Dolce Stil Nuovo
s'era in fondo alimentato di un'illusione alla cui base stava proprio un
equivoco tra ragione estetica e ragione morale: l'illusione che l'amore, in
quanto sintesi di gentilezza e virtù, non fosse peccato. Idealizzando la
donna e facendone un mezzo di elevazione a Dio e di perfezione morale,
aveva conferito movenze e aspirazioni religiose alla materia 'cortese'
venuta di Provenza. ... Da ciò derivò quel clima di esasperato estetismo (una
vera e propria mitologia dell'amore) in cui gli elementi profani tendevano
continuamente a configurarsi in termini religiosi, l'amor sensibilis a
confondersi con l'amor intellectualis. Or proprio nella reazione a questo
ambiguo estetismo; nella denuncia di quell'equivoco che stava alla base del
concetto di donna-angelo; nel ripudio della poetica cortese ...; e insomma
in una netta distinzione tra amor sacro e amor profano, sta il senso della
conversione di Dante: del lungo itinerario dalla Beatrice della Vita Nuova a
quella del Paradiso» (179-180). An essentially polemical canto, Inferno V
is for Paparelli «il punto di scontro tra la vecchia e la nuova poetica di
Dante» (183). Its stilnovistic subtext marks the «sconfessione della
poetica di amore e cor gentile », and the «denuncia della sua funzione
'galeotta'» (182). - See also Sapegno's gloss to Inferno V, 140: «dal caso
di Francesca e di Paolo [il personaggio Dante] è condotto a riesaminare e
valutare tutta una posizione sentimentale e culturale, della quale anch' egli
ha lungamente accolto le ambigue soluzioni» (emphasis added). In the same
vein, Contini reads the episode of Paolo and Francesca as a going beyond,
within the reformed poetics of the Commedia , of the old poetics of love of
the stilnovo : «Che Dante superi Paolo, e che Beatrice superi Francesca
[...]. vuol dire che è oltrepassato lo stadio dell'amor cortese, della mera
'probitas,' dell'etica mondana, che perdura nello Stil Novo e si prolunga
nella Vita nuova (45).
^Contini, Sanguineti, Sapegno, Bosco are the critics mentioned by Pertile.
luFor further discussions of the moral ambiguity that underlies the love
poetics of the stilnovo , see Barberi Squarotti (1972), and Avalle (1977).
Ôn the basis of the fundamental distinction between Dante the character
and Dante the narrator, on which he bases his argument, Pertile attributes
the rejection of the love poetics of the stilnovo in Purgatorio XXIV to
Dante the narrator only, and contends that this truth is in that episode not
yet grasped by Dante the character, who will appropriate it only later, after
undergoing the purge of fire and confronting Beatrice in the garden of Eden.
Even so, however, Pertile notices how the character's acquisition of this
truth is not a permanent achievement, as proven, for example, by the
episode of the encounter with Matelda (Purg. XXVIII, 70-75), or by the
«troppo fiso!» warning of the divine women {Purg. XXXIII, 9) in the
86
Earthly Paradise.
Ôn the significance of this Virgilian allusion in the Commedia , see
Hawkins, 123.
lÔn the symbolic ambiguity of Beatrice in the Commedia , see Carugati,
116-118.
14 The presence of this subtext in Paradiso IV and V has, to the best of my
knowledge, received little attention from critics. See Coglievina, 64;
Hawkins, 123-124; Noakes, 55.
1^ While some commentators (Singleton, Torraca, Grandgent) have noticed
the similarity between the two phrases in Inferno V, 72 and Paradiso IV,
142, they do not provide any explanation of its significance.
16For a recent and enlightening discussion of this theme and of its relation
to the parallel theme of desire in the Commedia , see Ferrucci.
^Similarly, Jacomuzzi remarks: «La constatazione, angosciata fino allo
'smarrimento', del rovesciamento dell'amore in colpa e dannazione non
emerge dall'osservazione diretta di una situazione esistenziale, non si
esprime unicamente in termini di etica e psicologia, ma si definisce nel
punto d'intersezione fra il dato naturalistico, la notizia di cronaca e la loro
traduzione e trasfigurazione in termini di memoria storico-poetica: la
partecipazione dantesca, proprio nella fitta trama dei segni mutuati alla
tradizione letteraria in cui si dissimula, raggiunge il grado estremo
d'intensità, dalla pietà all'ironia allo smarrimento totale, perché vi è
sollecitata non nella forma generica dell'uomo e del cristiano, ma in quella
specifica del lettore e del poeta, che registra il tragico scarto e le
contraddizioni fra i risultati e le persuasioni della letteratura e il loro
realissimo esito escatologico» (206).
l°In the instant of bewilderment that overtakes him, Dante seems
momentarily to have forgotten not only the dramatic testimony of
Francesca's tragic destiny, but also all that he had learned along his
purgatorial ascent concerning the double nature of love. In two other
important stages along the capital thematic itinerary that I have been
tracing, Virgil first had explained to him the fundamental distinction
between the «buoni e rei amori» ( Purg . XVIII, 66) and had exposed the
falsehood of any doctrine predicating «ciascun amore in sé laudabil cosa»
(Purg. XVIII, 36); Beatrice later had warned him about the vanity of earthly
beauty («le belle membra in ch'io / rinchiusa fui, e che so' 'n terra sparte»,
Purg. XXXI, 50-51) and about the risk of his falling again into the net
(«rete», Purg. XXXI, 63) of erotic love: «e perché altra volta, / udendo le
serene, sie più forte» (Purg. XXXI, 44-45).
For a similar discussion of Dante's misreading of Beatrice in the
Commedia , see Hawkins, 129-130.
20 According to Noakes, Francesca's stilnovistic allusion finds in Paradiso
V, 7-12 not only its «correction», but also its «fulfillment» (55).
21 For a different reading of Beatrice as symbol of the text in the Commedia ,
see Johnson-Haddad.
22ßaranski; Barolini, 189-190. Among the commentators, Porena and
87
Chimenz share this intepretation.
^^The relation between Beatrice and the scribal function of the narrator had
already been brought to our attention in Purgatorio XXXII, when she
enjoins her charge to write what he is about to see, namely the allegorical
transformation of the chariot in the garden of Eden: «Però, in pro del
mondo che mal vive, / al cano tieni or li occhi, e quel che vedi, / ritornato
di là, fa che tu scrive» (103-105). Similarly, and more explicitly, in the
following canto Beatrice bids her charge to set down in writing her obscure
prophecy, thus confirming the scribal mission that awaits him upon his
return on earth: «Tu nota; e sì come da me son porte, / così queste parole
segna a' vivi» ( Pur g . XXXIII, 52-53). In Paradiso V, however, the nanator
is not simply describing what he saw , or transcribing what he heard from
Beatrice. He is actually transcribing a text. Beatrice's own «canto».
^^The narcological definitions of diegetic and primary narrative levels are
taken from Prince. For an extended discussion of narrative levels, see
Genette (1980, 1988).
2^0n the audacity of this tercet, Porena remarks: «Cosa strana è che qui
Dante parli di 'canto' come se la divisione in canti non fosse cosa del suo
racconto, ma ci fosse stata anche nei colloqui riferiti! Qui il sacrificio del
senso al comodo della rima è in verità troppo arditol» (emphasis added).
Similarly, Chimenz observes: «l'espressione, nella sua sintesi, risulta
troppo ardita , attribuendo a Beatrice l'inizio del canto, che ovviamente
appartiene alla struttura formale del poema» (emphasis added).
2°Worth quoting on this line Vittorio Sermonti's amusing commentary:
«Ma se Beatrice non s'interrompe, perché la interrompe Dante, solo per
dirci che non s'è interrotta? ingenerando, oltre tutto, un bell'equivoco, con
quella didascalia sull'inizio del 'canto' ... Come sarebbe? I canti non sono
mica di competenza di Beatrice! Che cosa cerca di raccontarci il nostro, a
questo punto? che, quando parla, la donna teologale sa in che canto e in che
punto del canto sta parlando? che, magari, parla direttamente in terzine?»
(74).
97
^'This analysis of the address to the reader in Paradiso V is the revised
version of a paper on «The Fictionalized Reader as Mediator in the Divine
Comedy », presented at the 1992 A.A.I.S. conference at the University of
North Carolina, Chapel Hill. I wish here to thank Amilcare Iannucci and
Christopher Kleinhenz for their useful comments on that occasion.
For a different interpretation of this address to the reader, see Pastore
Stocchi, 371-372.
WORKS CITED
Alighieri, Dante. La Commedia secondo l'antica vulgata. Giorgio Petrocchi,

ed. 4 voli. Milano: Mondadori, 1966-67. Idem, The «Divine Comedy» of
Dante Alighieri: A Verse Translation with Introduction and Commentary by
Allen Mandelbaum. Berkeley, Cal.: U of California P, 1982.
Avalle, Silvio D'Arco. Ai luoghi di delizia pieni: saggio sulla lirica italiana
88
del XIII secolo. Milano-Napoli: Ricciardi, 1977.
Barański, Zygmunt. «The Poetics of Meter: Terza Rima , 'Canto', 'Canzon',
'Cantica'» (Lecture delivered at the University of Notre Dame, Fall 1993).
Bàrberi Squarotti, Giorgio. L'artificio dell'eternità. Verona: Fiorini, 1972.
Barolini, Teodolinda. The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante.
Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992.
Carugati, Giuliana. Dalla menzogna al silenzio: la scrittura mistica della
«Commedia» di Dante. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991.
Cavalcanti, Guido. Rime. Con le rime di Iacopo Cavalcanti. Domenico De
Robertis, ed. Torino: Einaudi, 1986.
Chiari, Alberto. Il canto V del «Paradiso». Lectura Dantis Romana. Torino:
SEI, 1964.
Coglievina, Leonella. «Strutture narrative e 'vera sentenza' nel Paradiso
dantesco: l'esempio del V canto». Studi danteschi 58 (1986): 49-79.
Contini, Gianfranco. «Dante come personaggio-poeta della Commedia».
Un'idea di Dante: saggi danteschi. Torino: Einaudi, 1970. 33-62.
Ferrucci, Franco. «La dialettica del desiderio». Il poema del desiderio:
poetica e passione in Dante. Milano: Leonardo, 1990. 221-264.
Gárboli, Cesare. «Il canto V del Paradiso». Paragone XXII.262 (1971): 3-19.
Genette, Gérard. «Voice». Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Transi,
by Jane E. Levin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1980. 212-262. Idem.
«Voice». Narrative Discourse Revisited. Transi, by Jane E. Levin. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell UP, 1988. 79-83.
Hawkins, Peter S. «Dido, Beatrice, and the Signs of Ancient Love». The
Poetry of Allusion : Virgil and Ovid in Dante's «Commedia». Rachel
Jacoff and Jeffrey T. Schnapp, eds. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991. 113-130.
Hollander, Robert. «The Dartmouth Dante Project». Dante Today. Amilcare
Iannucci, ed. Quaderni d'italianistica X.l-2 (Special Spring and Fall
Volume, 1989): 35-53.
Jacomuzzi, Angelo. «'Quando leggemmo': note sul canto V dell'Inferno» .
L'imago al cerchio: invenzione e visione nella «Divina Commedia».
Milano: Silva, 1968. 193-231.
Johnson- Haddad, Miranda. «'Like the moon it renews itself': The Female
Body as Text in Dante, Ariosto and Tasso». Stanford Italian Review 11
(1991): 203-215.
Mazzotta, Giuseppe. «Sacrifice and Grammar: Paradiso DI, IV, V». Dante's
Vision and the Circle of Knowledge. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993.
34-55.
Montanari, Fausto. «Il canto V del Paradiso». Letture dantesche. Vol. HI.
Giovanni Getto, ed. Firenze: Sansoni, 1961. 1421-1435.
Niccoli, Alessandro. «Trasmutare». Enciclopedia Dantesca. Roma: Istituto
della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1976. Voi. 5. 699-670.
Noakes, Susan. «Dante's Stories of Reading». Timely Reading: Between
Exegesis and interpretation. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988. 38-67.
Oliva, Gianni. «Paradiso V: codici culturali sulla questione dei voti». Revue
des études italiennes 33.1-4 (1987): 9-18.
89
Paparelli, Gioacchino. «Ethos e pathos nell'episodio di Francesca da
Rimini». Ideologia e poesia di Dante. Firenze: Olschki, 1975. 171-200.
Pasquazi, Silvio. Il canto V del «Paradiso». Lectura Dantis Scaligera.
Firenze: Le Monnier, 1966. Idem. «Dal cielo della Luna al cielo di
Mercurio». All'eterno dal tempo: studi danteschi. Roma: Bulzoni, 1985.
293-320.
Pastore Stocchi, Manlio. «Il canto V del Paradiso». Nuove letture dantesche.
Firenze: Le Monnier, 1972.
Pertile, Lino. «Dante's Comedy Beyond the Stilnovo». Lectura Dantis 13
(Fall 1993): 47-77.
Prince, Gerald. «Diegetic». A Dictionary of Narratology. Lincoln: U of
Nebraska P, 1987. 20.
Sacchetto, Aleardo. «Dottrina e poesia nel cielo della luna». Dieci letture
dantesche. Firenze, 1960.
Savona, Eugenio. Repertorio tematico del dolce stil nuovo. Bari: Adriatica,
1973.
Sermonti, Vittorio. Il «Paradiso» di Dante. Milano: Rizzoli, 1993.
Singleton, Charles. Dante's «Commedia»: Elements of Structure. Dante
Studies I. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1954.
Spitzer, Leo. «The Addresses to the Reader in the Commedia». Italica 32.3
(1955): 143-165.
Tartaro, Achille. «La questione dei voti». Letture dantesche. Roma: Bulzoni,
1980. 107-134.
Wlassics, Tibor, «endpaper». Lectura Dantis 9 (Fall 1991): 142-143.
Zardo, A. Il canto V del «Paradiso». Firenze: Sansoni, 1903.
90
Paradiso VI
Author(s): GUY RAFFA
Accessed: 17-02-2020 23:02 UTC
Lectura Dantis
GUY RAFFA
University of Texas at Austin
VI
/
It is a critical commonplace in studies of Paradiso VI to note the

poet's love of structural symmetry insofar as he places progressively
expansive political material in the sixth cantos of the three canticles.1
Apart from the decidedly negative associations of this mapping of
politics onto the number of the beast, the three sixes of the Commedia ,
Dante's intentions display at least a glimmer of optimism in the
Paradiso. Justinian's «laudatio of the empire» represents, according to
Mazzotta, «the reversal of the vituperano of both city and Italy in
Inferno VI and Purgatorio VI» (180). Less obvious perhaps is the
progression of theological events through these corresponding sections
of the three canticles. In the case of Paradiso VI, Dante seems to raise
the stakes of his poetic mission through a careful elaboration of
Christological material. By dramatizing the evangelical image of the
man-god as the «word made flesh» (John 1:14), the poet underscores the
redemptive possibilities of language, particularly those of the «poema
sacro / al quale ha posto mano e cielo e terra» (Par. XXV, 1-2).
Discussing Paradiso VIII and IX, Barolini maps out a process of
conversion from eros to caritas that is brought to completion in canto
X. Showing how the characters in Venus exhibit a duality between
personal and public concerns (68), she argues that such a dichotomy
points to «an ideal state beyond dualism and dichotomy» (184-85).
Barolini is surely right that the binary elements in these cantos serve to
highlight vestiges of earthly conflict. Her argument, in my view,
applies not only to the celestial spirits in these two cantos but to a
number of features in the nine cantos describing the spheres within reach
of the earth's shadow. Furthermore, just as Trinitarian doctrine lies at
the heart of Dante's ternary architecture, so too an important theological
construct inspires and enriches his binary poetics. The incarnation, the
paradoxical unity of duality in the figure of Christ, simultaneously
human and divine, emerges in the first nine cantos as a corrective to the
fundamental binary conflict between individual and socio-political
concerns, between eros and caritas.
The incarnation, of course, figures in Dante's poetic imagination
both before and after Paradiso I-IX. During the elaborate allegorical
91
pageant in the Terrestrial Paradise, for example, the wayfarer is allowed
an intimation of Christ's mystery in the form of the shifting appearance
of the dichotomous Griffin.2 Addressing the reader, Dante expresses
wonder at seeing the Griffin's reflected image alternate between the eagle
and the lion as the marvelous creature itself remains fixed in its hybrid
form ( Purg . XXXI, 124-26). A primary goal of the celestial voyage is
the unveiling of this allegory. Only in the Commedia! s final verses will
the poet recall and record his direct perception of the interpénétration of
human and divine as the fit between «nostra effige» and one of the
Trinitarian circles. Perhaps the most dramatic incarnational image occurs
in the central cantos of the Paradiso. In canto XIV the poet effects a
transition from two (going on three) concentric rings of dancing
theologians to the martyred spirits making up the flashing Martian
cross. In at least one case, moreover, Dante seems to go out of his way
to introduce a Christological context. At the start of his celestial
voyage, he uses his uncertainty (as to whether he made the journey in
corpore) as a pretext for presenting the man-god image in the lunar
sphere {Par. II, 37-42):
S'io era corpo, e qui non si concepe

com' una dimensione altra patio,
eh' esser convien se corpo in corpo repe,
accender ne dovria più il disio
di veder quella essenza in che si vede
come nostra natura e Dio s'unio.
Appearing here as a theological aside, this Christological image

nonetheless marks the first direct representation of the incarnation in the
Paradiso. The Christian foundational event, however, finds its first
major thematic articulation in the canto of the Empire, Paradiso VI.
Mercury, as one of the spheres touched by the earth's shadow,
presents the souls of the blessed who were characterized by excessive
desire for earthly honor and fame. Although Justinian's speech occupies
the entire canto, a singular textual strategy in the Commedia (Ferrante
267, Mazzoni 132-33), a co-protagonist of this episode is the Imperial
Eagle as it takes the pilgrim and the reader through the course of Roman
history. Discussing his own place in the providential unfolding of this
history, Justinian pointedly dates his belief that Christ's nature was
wholly divine (the Eutychian or Monophysitic heresy) previous to his
great accomplishment, the compilation of Roman law known today as
the Justinian Code: «prima ch'io a l'ovra fossi attento, / una natura in
Cristo esser, non piùe, / credea, e di tal fede era contento» (13-15). Later
in the canto, Justinian again calls attention to Christ, this time by
92
describing the destruction of Jerusalem (under Titus) as revenge for the
crucifixion, itself retribution for original sin (91-93). These two
vendettas - the crucifixion and the destruction of Jerusalem -
represent climactic events within Dante's conception of universal
Christian history. By having his speaker identify these moments with
the Roman rulers of the time, the poet syncretically weaves Judaeo-
Christian and Imperial history into a single providential discourse.
The incarnation, equivalent to Christ's first advent according to the
triplex adventus as conceived by St. Bernard, thus plays an important
role in Justinian's monologue in Paradiso VI. In hhis Sermones de
tempore: in adventu Domini (PL 183.35-56), the Abbot of Clairvaux
characterizes Christ's three comings as «ad homines, in homines, contra
homines» (45.4). In the first advent, Christ came «in carne et
infirmitate»; the second advent describes Christ's presence «in spiritu et
virtute» in the secular lives of the elect; finally, at the end of time, he
will come to judge «in gloria et majestāte» (50.1). While Christ's first
coming as «redemptio nostra» figures prominently in Paradiso VI, the
second and third advents constitute a significant backdrop to the action
of the sixth cantos of the first two canticles. Mark Musa has
demonstrated that Christ's second advent, his daily operation in the
hearts of individuals, inspires the elaborate spectacle of the angels and
the serpent in the Valley of the Princes (Purg. VIII, 85-108). This
episode begins in Purgatorio VI when Virgil and the wayfarer meet
Sordello, and Dante launches into his scathing apostrophe, «Ahi serva
Italia».3 Likewise, Christ's third and final advent (the Last Judgment)
figures in several episodes of the Commedia , most notably Beatrice's
pageant and her rebuke of the pilgrim in the final cantos of the
Purgatorio. The first allusion to the apocalypse, however, immediately
follows Ciacco's disheartening prophecy of Florentine political strife in
Inferno VI. Virgil informs Dante that the glutton will not rise again
until the «suon de l'angelica tromba» (95). Virgil designates this event
as a Christological advent with the verb venire : «quando verrà la nimica
podesta» (96). Hence, the three major Christological moments occur in
reverse order, from last to first, over the sixth cantos of the poem. In
one sense, this reverse chronology might seem contrary to the
increasing scope of the political theme, from city to Empire, over the
same three cantos. Yet such a pattern of correspondences - with two
crucial thematic clusters, civic life and spiritual redemption, moving in
opposite directions (and meeting in the middle) - could be seen as a
quintessential poetic representation of the inextricability of temporal and
spiritual fulfillment.
This inextricability topos is evident in Dante's presentation of
93
Justinian. Here Dante follows the medieval legend that portrayed the
sixth-century emperor as a reformed heretic, one whose great juridical
achievement was seen as a specifically Christian accomplishment. Like
Brunetto Latini before him, Dante ascribes the emperor's turn to
orthodoxy to the intervention of Pope Agapetus I (16-18).4 In point of
fact, however, it was Justinian who held the upper hand in church-state
relations. According to Jeffrey Richards, a historian of the medieval
papacy, Justinian «took imperial interference to its highest level. He
successfully deposed one pope, kidnapped a second, and forcibly installed
a third. He imposed his doctrinal changes with ruthless
single-mindedness» (29). The historical record shows that the emperor
actually took strong stands against the monophysitic heresy, or he at
least tried to reconcile it to orthodoxy (Richards 181). The empress,
Theodora, it was true, firmly adhered to the single-nature doctrine, but
Justinian seems to have devoted more energy attempting to eradicate
Christian heresies than fighting paganism (Wallace-Hadrill 17).
Nevertheless, Justinian's heretical reputation allows the poet to
develop an incarnational aesthetic that yokes together many of the
themes and episodes that occur in the spheres still touched by the earth's
shadow. To underscore the incarnational event in Justinian's canto,
Dante surrounds the emperor's speech with a narrative frame displaying
an unusual emphasis on binary language. This frame results from the
action immediately preceding and following the emperor's canto-length
monologue. Justinian first appears in canto V in a passage that exhibits
the poet's creative flexibility in turning out rhymes for his terza rima. In
the space of twenty verses (110-29), Dante not only succeeds in ending
fifteen of them with the vowel sound i but he creates a rhyme from the
doubling of this vowel (ii) as well as a rima composta based on this
sound. The acoustic effect is dizzying (1 18-123):
«Del lume che per tutto il ciel si spazia

noi semo accesi; e però, se disii
di noi chiarirti, a tuo piacer ti sazia».
Così da un di quelli spirti pii
detto mi fu; e da Beatrice: «Dì, dì
sicuramente, e credi come a dii». ^
The insistent doubling of these rhyme-words eventually forms part of a

larger binary verbal pattern as Dante ends canto V by literally
introducing canto VI: «e così chiusa chiusa mi rispuose / nel modo che
'1 seguente canto canta» (138-39). 6 If nothing else, this highly
self-conscious reference to the next canto, a sort of narrative unveiling,
calls attention to the poem as a literary process. Such metaliterary
94
commentary serves to reify Dante's poetry at the same time that it
suggests the construction of the narrator's «lived» experience. Both the
text and the journey, in other words, follow a sequence, an order in
which language and experience dynamically interact to shape one
another.
Given the elevated themes of the Paradiso , such an emphasis on the
poem's «literariness» aims to further the redemptive mission of Dante's
poetry, its claim to quasi-scriptural truth. In the specific case, I agree
with Dragonetti, another critic interested in Paradiso VI's linguistic
register, that such «double doubling would not be worth noting did not
such language specifically characterize Justinian's long speech» (13). He
goes on to list eight examples of such paired syntactic constructions in
the canto, including two numerical doubles, «cento e cent' anni» (4) and
«i tre a' tre» (39), as well as a pair of striking repetitions from the
emperor's presentation of Romeo toward the end of the canto: «dentro a
la presente margarita / luce la luce di Romeo . . .», «se '1 mondo sapesse
il cor ch'elli ebbe / mendicando sua vita a frusto a frusto , / assai lo loda,
e più lo loderebbe» (127-28 & 140-42). To this list of doubles should
be added the equivocal rhyme falli (98, 102). Consistent with the
political charge of the canto, this rare rhyme word indicates the crimes
of the Guelfs and the Ghibellines combined («lor falli») as well as the
difficulty in determining which group deserves greater blame («è forte a
veder chi più si falli»).
Indeed, the thrust of Justinian's political message in Paradiso VI
derives from a paired verbal repetition applied to the Guelfs and the
Ghibellines. Having revealed his identity to the wayfarer by tracing the
course of the Imperial Eagle from the time of Constantine to his own
rule, the emperor prefaces his expanded history lesson with a bitterly
ironic remark (28-33):
Or qui a la question prima s'appunta

la mia risposta; ma sua condizione
mi stringe a seguitare alcuna giunta,
perché tu veggi con quanta ragione
si move contr' al sacrosanto segno
e chi '1 s'appropria e chi a lui s'oppone.
In this way, the Ghibellines («chi '1 s'appropria») and the Guelfs («chi a
lui s'oppone») stand as the silent accused behind Justinian's 63 verse
account of the eagle's flight, from Turnus' murder of Pallas (Aeneas'
ally, Aeneid X) to Charlemagne's defense of the church against the
Lombard king, Desiderius, in 773. Both political groups, in spite of
their conflicting claims, move against the divinely sanctioned Imperial
95
Eagle, «contr' al sacrosanto segno» (32). Toward the end of his account,
Justinian explicitly recalls this sarcastic condemnation of the Guelfs and
the Ghibellines. He lets his dramatic narration of the eagle's flight
through history serve as the evidence upon which the wayfarer must
judge the sorry state of current affairs (97-102):
Omai puoi giudicar di quei cotali

ch'io accusai di sopra e di lor falli,
che son cagion di tutti vostri mali.
L'uno al pubblico segno i gigli gialli
oppone , e l'altro appropria quello a parte,
sì ch'è forte a veder chi più si falli.
The emperor takes no prisoners: the two major political factions

are equally responsible for all that is wrong in contemporary society.
And while the eagle has undergone a slight transformation from the
«sacrosanto segno» (32) to the «pubblico segno» (100), the Guelfs and
Ghibellines reappear in their dubious roles as those who «oppone» and
those who «appropria» the idea of the Empire. Rhetorically, Justinian's
repetition of the two verbs follows a chiastic order: «appropria ...
oppone» (33) >< «oppone ... appropria» (101). The presence of this
chiasmus in Justinian's canto imagistically calls to mind the cross,
Dante's «sacrosanto segno» per eccellenza. Consistent with the poet's
incarnational aesthetic in Paradiso VI, the Christological sign is formed
from the intersection of Same and Different: two combative political
parties that do considerable (and equal) harm to the Imperial Eagle, the
secular sign of divine justice.
Dante places the exclamation point on his binary linguistic display
immediately following the emperor's canto-length speech. In the
opening verses of canto VII, the poet coins the reflexive numerical verb
adduarsi («to en-two oneself») to describe the action of the spirit's
«doppio lume» (6). A subtle corrective, perhaps, to Justinian's supposed
failure to recognize Christ's double nature, this neologism presents a
formidable challenge for commentators and translators alike.7 A
plausible interpretation of Justinian's «doppio lume» might be found, as
Mazzoni argues, in the iconographical tradition of the imperial crown
inscribed within a halo, «la teoria dell'Imperatore Christomimetes »
(141-42). 8 While, on the one hand, the verb adduarsi expresses the idea
of the incarnation numerically (two natures in one person), as a
neologism it also calls considerable attention to language per se. The
semantic resonance of the word adduarsi , combined with its linguistic
novelty, concisely points to the simultaneous representation of Christ
as man-god and Christ as Word.
96
It is somewhat surprising, I think, that of the numerous allusions
to Christ in the poem - over 70 occur in the Paradiso alone - only
two call attention to his divinity as the word. In the sphere of the Fixed
Stars, Beatrice echoes the evangelical conflation of Christ's
dual-representation by exhorting Dante to shift his gaze from her to the
splendor of «la rosa in che '1 verbo divino / carne si fece» (Par. XXIII,
73-74). But the first allusion to Christ in logocentric terms appears
soon after Justinian's canto-length discourse. In fact, Beatrice's
characterization of the second person of the trinity as «Verbo di Dio» in
Paradiso VII relates directly to the previous canto. Dante yearns to know
how Christ's crucifixion, a just punishment for original sin, could itself
have been «giustamente punita» by Titus' destruction of Jerusalem (VI,
92-93; VII, 20-21). Here, too, Beatrice joins the linguistic sign of
Christ's divinity with the incarnation (VII, 28-33):
onde l'umana specie inferma giacque

giù per secoli molti in grande errore,
fin ch'ai Verbo di Dio discender piacque
u' la natura, che dal suo fattore
s'era allungata, unì a sé in persona
con l'atto sol del suo ettemo amore.
The «grande errore» of humankind, extending from the Fall to the

incarnation, appears here as an enlargement of Justinian's supposed
heresy, his refusal to acknowledge Christ's humanity along with his
divinity.
The Christological content of Paradiso V-VII follows two
interrelated lines. First, the metaliterary commentary in canto V, much
of which points to Justinian's presentation in canto VI, signals the
conflation of spirit and letter in Christ's manifestation as «Verbo di
Dio». This linguistic expression of divinity is poetically represented by
the unique status of canto VI in formal terms: it is the only time in the
poem where each and every word in the canto comes from the mouth of
a single speaker. Dante's textual decision thus offers a theological
corrective to Justinian's alleged heresy insofar as it was common in the
patristic literature to associate heresy with the act of dividing, breaking
or tearing something apart. For example, Peter Lombard links heresy to
division in his commentary on verse 19 of Psalm 21: «diviserunt sibi
vestimenta mea, et super vestem meam miserunt sortem». Peter decries
the divisive effects of heresies not only on the church sacraments but
also on Scripture, the textual record of God's Word: «Sacramenta enim
illius et Scripturae potuerunt dividi per haereses» (PL 191. 235).9
Justinian's undivided speech stands in marked contrast to his mortal
97
error, his divisive heresy.
The second major Christological line derives from the incarnation,
mathematically expressed as the paradoxical unity of human and divine
in one person. Justinian singles out this representation by calling
attention both to his monophysitic heresy, which downplayed Christ's
humanity, and to his interpretation of the crucifixion as a justly
punished vendetta (the subject of canto VII). Ultimately, we could say
that Dante aims to intertwine these two narrative threads - much as
Christ is simultaneously human and divine - by creatively shaping his
verbal medium: rare bipartite rhymes, verbal repetitions, and especially
the neologism adduarsi, all combine to blur distinctions between Christ
as verbo and Christ as dio-uomo. Language and its referents, in other
words, coalesce into an inseparable union.
In medieval theories of representation, this conflation of the sign
with its referent could be expressed as the causal relationship between
names and things, «nomina sunt consequentia rerum». Dante himself
espouses this belief in the Vita nuova when the poet-lover relates the
delights of Love to the word love itself (XIII, 4):
lo nome d'Amore è sì dolce a udire, che impossibile mi pare che la sua

propria operazione sia ne le più cose altro che dolce, con ciò sia cosa che li
nomi seguitino le nominate cose, sì come è scritto: «Nomina sunt
consequentia rerum».
In two essays in the 1920s, Bruno Nardi traced Dante's source for the
Latin phrase to the Corpus iuris civilis , a work containing the
fundamental texts of Roman jurisprudence.10 The compilation of these
legal documents by Tribonius and sixteen collaborators ultimately owes
to the will of the Emperor Justinian in the early sixth century. By the
early thirteenth century, moreover, Accursius' glossa ordinaria , the
definitive edition of Justinian's legal works and their glosses, was a
standard text in European law schools (Kantorowicz 37). By introducing
the Latin phrase in the Vita nuova with «sì come è scritto», Dante
clearly implies an authoritative source, such as Scripture or Justinian's
Corpus iuris (Nardi 178). No wonder, then, that the poet's presentation
of the fame-seeking spirits in the sphere of Mercury seems to derive, in
part, from the etymological associations of his characters' names.11
Justinian, the principal character and sole speaker in Paradiso VI, is
surely a fine choice as spokesman for the story of the Empire's
illustrious history in his capacity as an outstanding ruler. But clearly his
Christian name, which he takes pains to emphasize over and against his
title («Cesare fui e son Iustinïano», 10), must have influenced Dante's
98
decision to select him (and him alone) for the all-important episode.
Indicative of the significance of the emperor's name in the canto is his
two-fold allusion to God as «la viva giustizia» (88, 121). What better
way for Dante to inscribe Imperial history into God's providential plan
than to have Giustiniano pay homage to divine giustiziai We might say
that the two unheeded and unnamed «giusti» alluded to by Ciacco in
Inferno VI, 73, and the many Florentines whom the poet sarcastically
characterizes as having «giustizia in cuore» in Purgatorio VI, 130, now
find their celestial realization in this emperor whose name matches his
deeds.12
Likewise, the selection of Romeo di Villanova as the only other
mercurial spirit presented seems to result from a suggestive
etymological association between the character's name and his story.13
Commentators are quick to point out the relevance of Romeo's sad fate
at the hands of envy - his poverty and voluntary exile - to Dante's
own undeserved banishment.14 Equally important, perhaps, are ways in
which the character's very name expands the personal resonance of the
episode. In the immediate context, the name Romeo provides a spatial
and cultural link to the speaker, for the centerpiece of Justinian's
imperial history is the pax romana (80-81), the necessary political
condition for redemption through Christ's crucifixion and the subsequent
destruction of Jerusalem (82-93).15 And Justinian's summary reference
to Romeo as «questo giusto» (137) further draws the two mercurial
spirits together in one of the Commedia's most extensive portrayals of
the Empire, the temporal manifestation of «viva giustizia».16
Yet the unfortunate set of similarities between Dante and Romeo in
Paradiso VI also fulfills a previous story. In chapter 40 of the Vita
nuova , within a discussion of various types of pilgrims, Dante informs
us that romei are pilgrims who travel to Rome (as opposed to palmieri ,
and peregrini in the strict sense). Significantly, he states that the
pilgrims whom he met in Florence and with whom he thought to share
news of Beatrice via his poetry were indeed romei , pilgrims on their way
to the Holy City. Justinian's description of Romeo as «persona umile e
peregrina» (135), serves to complete the circle begun in the Vita nuova
when Dante sent a sonnet relating the celestial experience of his own
«peregrino spirito» to a group of romei. Now traveling through the
heavens in his (possibly) fictionalized flesh, Dante meets an exemplary
Romeo , a pilgrim who has found everlasting peace in «quella Roma
onde Cristo è romano» ( Purg . XXXII, 102).
The affinities between Justinian and Romeo and those between
Romeo and Dante strongly suggest a comparable relationship between
Dante and Justinian. Relating the word ovra in Paradiso VI -
99
designating both Justinian's juridical project (13) and Romeo's
ministerial service to Raymond Berenger IV (129) - to Dante's ovra
(his poem), Craig Kelly highlights the double-edged consequences of
such a triangular arrangement (6):
By associating both Justinian and Romeo with himself, Dante identifies

with the political-religious harmony manifested in Justinian's work while at
the same time expressing a lament for his own situation of exile, which
shows that the ideal of harmony is not yet realized.
There are, in fact, a number of linguistic and conceptual features of

Paradiso VI that serve to gloss Dante's literary and spiritual itinerary.
Concerning the theme of religious conversion, Kelly perceptively
remarks that Justinian's figurative walk with the Church («con la Chiesa
mossi i piedi», 22) recalls Dante's literal walk behind the «benedetto
carro» in the Terrestrial Paradise ( Purg . XXXII, 28-30) (3). Further,
since spiritual renewal and poetic inspiration are inseparable for Dante,
we should not be surprised to find elements of Justinian's presentation
mirrored in the poet's notorious credo of the «dolce Stil novo» in
Purgatorio XXIV: «I' mi son un che, quando / Amor mi spira , noto, e a
quel modo / ch'e' ditta dentro vo significando» (52-54). In Justinian's
canto, this spiritualized process finds its mirror reflection in the
emperor's obedience to the «voler del primo amor» (11). This divine
love apparently inspires just rulers as well as poets of rectitude: «a Dio
per grazia piacque di spirarmi / l'alto lavoro, e tutto 'n lui mi diedi»
(23-24).
Both poet and emperor, therefore, are literally inspired by a Love
whose dictates they eagerly obey. There is a difference, however.
Whereas the poet describes the process as he presently experiences it
(«mi spira»; «noto»; «vo significando»), Justinian recalls his obedience
to divine inspiration as an accomplished fact («piacque di spirarmi»;
«tutto 'n lui mi diedi»). We are thus reminded that though Dante's quest
is in fieri he is at least on the right track. Yet even now, in the present
time of the wayfarer's celestial journey, Justinian identifies the divine
spirit as the source of his blessed speech. Significantly, he associates
this personal recognition with the incarnation (and crucifixion), figured
in Paradiso VI as revenge for original sin. Justinian editorializes on
Tiberius' glorious role as the emperor under whom Christ was crucified
(88-90):
che la viva giustizia che mi spira ,

li concedette, in mano a quel ch'i' dico,
gloria di far vendetta a la sua ira.
100
Taken together, these three contexts of divine inspiration - the
working poet, the accomplished Justinian Code, and the celestial breath
of «viva giustizia» - demonstrate the dynamic interplay of time and
eternity, of secular and spiritual truth, in the Commedia .
The Imperial Eagle appears as a co-protagonist, or guide, in
Paradiso VI. Its providential role, indicative of God's imprimatur on the
Roman Empire, is signaled by Justinian's reference to the eagle as
«l'uccel di Dio» (4), soon to be synecdochically reduced to «sacre penne»
(7). Here, too, the language of Justinian's speech invites comparison
with the wayfarer's experience, for flight metaphors are ubiquitous in the
poem as a measure of Dante's progress: spiritual, poetic, scientific, or
otherwise. In fact, we could return to Dante's conversation with
Bonagiunta in Purgatorìo XXIV for a paradigmatic expression of Dante's
spiritualized literary mission in avian terms. After the poet from Lucca
attaches the famous «dolce Stil novo» label to Dante's poetic theory, he
continues (58-60):
Io veggio ben come le vostre penne

di retro al dittator sen vanno strette,
che de le nostre certo non avvenne.
Musa has identified these «penne» as «wings», with the possessive

adjective vostre an honorific form indicating Dante alone ( Advent
123-28). According to this interpretation, the phrase «vostre penne»
refers to Dante's wings and thus forms part of the major pattern of flight
imagery in the poem. But even if we insist on the reading of «vostre
penne» in verse 58 as «your (pl.) pens», Justinian's monologue offers a
verbal recall. He emphasizes the magnificence of the eagle's flight when
Caesar crossed the Rubicon as something which «noi seguiteria lingua
né penna» (63). Ultimately, the appearance of both meanings of
«penna» in Paradiso VI attests to the metaphoric intersections of
«flight» (historical, spiritual) and «writing» (revelatory, prophetic) in
Dante's poetic imagination.
Justinian clearly means to draw Dante into his story. Rhetorically,
he achieves this with repeated second person openings: «perché tu veggi
con quanta ragione. ..»(31), «Vedi quanta virtù l'ha fatto degno. . .» (34),
« Tu sai ch'el fece in Alba sua dimora. . .» (37), «E sai ch'el fé dal mal de
le Sabine...» (40), « Sai quel ch'el fé portato da li egregi / Romani...»
(43-44). The emperor not only portrays the wayfarer as an informed
listener but he even involves him in the geography of his history
lesson. Justinian's periphrasis for Fiesole (and its destruction by the
Romans) hinges on Dante's birthplace, since the hill-top town is
101
implicitly identified in relation to Florence: «quel colle / sotto 'l qual tu
nascesti» (53-54). More generally, Justinian's speech serves to
illuminate Dante's experience in the story of the poem, the textual
unfolding of his journey. The presentation of the fame-seekers in
Paradiso VI figures as a monitory story for Dante, whose attempt to
regain the «diritta via» constitutes the impetus of his poem/journey.
This becomes clear when Justinian answers the wayfarer's second
question from canto V, his desire to know why the blessed spirit appears
in Mercury. The emperor's response a full canto later has strong
implications for Dante himself (112-17):
Questa picciola stella si correda

d'i buoni spirti che son stati attivi
perché onore e fama li succeda:
e quando li disiri poggian quivi,
sì disviando , pur convien che i raggi
del vero amore in sù poggin men vivi.
A positive version of Dante's Ulysses, Justinian nonetheless highlights

the dangers of excessive earthly ambition. When such desire goes
off-course («sì disviando»), the brightness of the «raggi del vero amore»
necessarily diminishes.
Justinian also establishes an implicit correspondence between the
planet Mercury, «veiled» because of its proximity to the Sun, and the
spirits who appear there for Dante's edification. These «buoni spirti»,
bright as they are, would appear even brighter and lighter if their mortal
desires had been less earth-bound. The wayfarer previously identified
Mercury as «la spera / che si vela a' mortai con altrui raggi» (Par. V,
128-29), thereby suggesting the paradoxical image of a shadow due to
excessive brightness.17 In this light, John Kleiner's observation that
Justinian is the last celestial spirit referred to as «ombra» in the poem
(Par. V, 107) takes on added significance (6). Justinian is not just any
spirit whose mortal existence determines his celestial placement in a
sphere touched by the earth's shadow, the so-called conical umbra. He is
also, according to medieval tradition, a great emperor whose theological
beliefs once denied Christ his humanity, his possession of a mortal
body capable of casting a shadow. Dante applies a sort of contrapasso by
presenting Justinian, renowned skeptic of the incarnation, as the last
celestial «ombra».
Of course, Justinian's qualified description of the mercurial spirits
- their inordinate desire for fame - implies no diminishment of their
celestial joy. Echoing Piccarda (Par. Ill, 70-87), the emperor affirms that
it is precisely the correspondence between the merits and the awards of
102
the blessed that partially determines their eternal happiness and
acceptance of their place in the celestial hierarchy. With a musical
metaphor, Justinian expresses the positive effect of the different ranks in
Paradise (124-26):
Diverse voci fanno dolci note;

così diversi scanni in nostra vita
rendon dolce armonia tra queste rote.
Once again, the emperor's words create a context that involves Dante,
for «nostra vita» appears in rhyme position only one other time in the
Commedia : «Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita». Justinian's
presentation thus suggests that the movement from time to eternity -
from the «nostra vita» of secular affairs to the «nostra vita» of celestial
glory - requires some restraint on human ambition. Dante himself
articulates his struggle with excessive ambition for fame and glory when
he claims to feel the punishment inflicted on the Proud in Purgatory
already weigh heavy upon him ( Pur g . XIII, 136-38). 18 In the sphere
assigned to spirits who were active «perché onore e fama li succeda» it
should therefore come as no surprise that our poet displays such
affinities with the two celestial representatives. And it is fitting that the
themes of justice and undeserved exile find their linguistic sign in the
Christological pattern of sacrifice and redemption.
NOTES
Ê.g., Giannantonio (108), Kelly (5), Mazzoni (132), Bosco-Reggio (72).

Citations of the Commedia follow Petrocchi's vulgata. Bellomo (9)
provides a long bibliographical note listing most of the twentieth-century
lecturae of the canto.
zBut see Armour (57-63), who views Dante's Griffin as an image of Rome
with no incarnational symbolism intended.
■În fact, one of the poet's harshest remarks in this apostrophe concerns
Justinian's legal reforms: «Che val perché ti racconciasse il freno /
Iustinïano, se la sella è vota? / Sanz' esso fora la vergogna meno» ( Pur g .
VI, 88-90). This brief reference in Purgatorio VI thus anticipates the
emperor's dominant role in Paradiso VI.
Îndeed, for Brunetto, the emperor* s conversion appears both as a condition
for, and a confirmation of, the divinely sanctioned Roman laws: «Et jà soit
ce que il fust au commencement en Terror des hereges, en la fin reconut il
son error par le conseil Agapite, qui lor estoit apostoiles. Et lor fu la
crestienne loi confermée, et fu dampnée la creance des hereges, selonc ce
que on puet veoir sus les livres des lois que il fist» ( Tresor I, ii, 87).
103
^The rare double-vowel rhyme reappears in Paradiso IX, 77-79-81: pii - disii
- ťirunii. The doubling in this canto - the last describing the cosmos still
touched by the earth's shadow - also includes four instances of equivocal
and/or identical rhyme: fermi (16, 18), torna (104, 108), palma (121, 123),
and pianta (127, 129). As in Paradiso VI, these poetic doublings occur in a
rich Christological context.
^Wlassics cites this verse to support his observation that the Commedia «è
anche un laboratorio linguistico per Dante che, pur cantando, non si stanca
di girare e rigirare la parola, di mirarla e ammirarla da ogni lato» (85). This
unusual emphasis on the poem's «textuality» begins earlier in canto V.
Following Beatrice's opening speech, Dante offers a narrative statement
that playfully conflates the experience of the journey with its poetic
representation: «Sì cominciò Beatrice questo canto» (16). Coglievina
explains the self-referential passages in canto V as indications of Dante's
identification with his poetic invention, an identification that extends to
each of his characters (63-64). This observation has particular relevance
for Paradiso VI, where Dante sets up a strong pattern of identification
between himself, Justinian, and Romeo.
'English translations of «sopra la qual doppio lume s'addua» include:
«Twin-lustred with his two-fold luminance» (Sayers); «above whom double
lights were twinned» (Mandelbaum); «Each of a double glory doubles each»
(Fletcher); «With fourfold lustre to its orb again» (Cary); and «twin / lights
fused, en-two-ed into one aureole» (Musa). This last attempt captures
Mazzoni's notion of the imperial crown inscribed within a halo. Other
interpretations include the «double light of natural intelligence and
illuminating grace» (Singleton), «la luce di legislatore e di guerriero»
(Bosco & Reggio), and the emperor and the lawgiver (Sayers).
°Mazzoni's ample discussion of the «dimensione cristologica di
Giustiniano» (143) inspires and reinforces my attempt to highlight
Dante's incamational poetic at work in Paradiso VI.
^Quoted by Stillinger (75) in his discussion of Dante's «divisioni» in the
Vita nuova. I am indebted to Donatella Stocchi-Perucchio for pointing out
the relationship between heresy and division in her paper at the 1992 AAIS
conference in Chapel Hill. North Carolina.
l^Nardi's essays are reprinted in Dante e la cultura medievale , 173-78.
Dragonetti discusses Dante's interest in «the consonance of names and
their meanings» with regard to several imperial figures in addition to
Justinian: these include Frederick II, Constance, and Constantine (3-12).
See Curtius (495-500) for an overview of names in the Middle Ages, and
Cervigni for a discussion of Beatrice's naminc of Dante in Purgatorio XXX.
1 ^Mazzoni (156-57) notes Dante's use of interpretatio nominis - relating
«giustizia» to «Giustiniano» - in the Fiore (sonnet 110).
1^1 follow Bellomo (19-26) in this discussion of Dante's shared
pilgrim-identity with Romeo.
E.g., Scartazzini (705), Bosco & Reggio (99-100), and Musa {Paradise
81).
104
^Characteristically, Dante associates the harmonizing, peace-bringing
fùnction of the empire with Julius Caesar as well as with Augustus: «Poi,
presso al tempo che tutto 'l ciel volle / redur lo mondo a suo modo sereno, /
Cesare per voler di Roma il tolle» (55-57).
^Mariotti hears an evangelical echo in Justinian's description of Romeo as
«questo giusto» (403-04). In Matthew 27:24 Pontius Pilate turns Christ
over to be crucified with the words «Innocens ego sum a sanguine justi
hujus ; vos videritis». More generally, Lenkeith draws an analogy between
Christ and Justinian: «Just as Christ had given his teaching not to destroy
but to fulfil the history of the Jews, the legal codes of Justinian were the
fulfilment of manv centuries of Roman practice» (108).
^Similarly, Dante refers to Mercury in the Convivio as the sphere that «più
va velata de li raggi del Sole che null'altra stella» (II, xiii, 11).
Ôderisi da Gubbio, we recall, associates pride with artistic fame and «la
gloria de la lingua» (98) in his prescient allusion to Dante's supremacy
over the two Guidos, Guinizzelli and Cavalcanti ( Purg . XI, 91-117).
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UP, 1990.
Barolini, Teodolinda. Dante's Poets: Textuality and Truth in the Comedy.
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(1990): 9-26.
Bosco, Umberto, and Giovanni Reggio, eds. La Divina Commedia:
Paradiso. Florence: Le Monnier, 1979.
Cervigni, Dino S. «Beatrice's Act of Naming». Lectura D antis 8 (1991):
85-99.
Curtius, Ernst Robert. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages.
Trans. Willard R. Trask. New York: Harper & Row, 1963.
Coglievina, Leonella. «Strutture narrative e 'vera sentenza' in Par. V».
Studi danteschi 58 (1986): 49-79.
Dragonetti, Roger. «Dante and Frederick II: The Poetry of History». Trans.
Judith P. Shoaf. Exemplaria 1.1 (1989): 1-15.
Ferrante, Joan M. The Political Vision of the Divine Comedy. Princeton:
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Giannantonio, Pompeo. Endiadi : dottrina e poesia nella Divina Commedia.
Florence: Sansoni, 1983.
Kantorowicz, Hermann. «Note on the Development of the Gloss to the
Justinian and the Canon Law». The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages.
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Kleiner, John. «The Eclipses in the Paradiso». Stanford Italian Review
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9.1-2 (1990): 5-32.
Lenkeith, Nancy. Dante and the Legend of Rome. Medieval and
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Klibansky. London: The Warburg Institute, U of London, 1952.
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(1982): 119-59.
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Divine Comedy. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1979.
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UP, 1974; Idem, ed. The Divine Comedy: Paradise. New York: Penguin,
1986.
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1983.
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476-752. London, Routledge, 1979.
Scartazzini, G. A., ed. La Divina Commedia. Rev. G. Vandelli. Milan:
Hoepli, 1920.
Stillinger, Thomas C.. The Song of Troilus : Lyric Authority in the
Medieval Book. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1992.
Wallace-Hadrill, D. S. Christian Antioch: A Study of Early Christian
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106
Paradiso VII
Author(s): PAUL COLILLI
Accessed: 17-02-2020 23:02 UTC
Lectura Dantis
PAUL COLILLI
Laurentian University
VII
Compared to many other cantos, Paradiso VII has attracted a
paucity of exegetical attempts probably because, it would seem, a
number of scholars find it to be lacking in any sort of existential or
dramatic movement. For example, many readings of the canto underline
two particulars: firstly, from the perspective of theological doctrine, it is
probably the most difficult canto of the Divina Commedia ; secondly,
Beatrice delivers her longest speech of the entire poem as her voice and
words occupy one-hundred and thirty of the one-hundred and forty-eight
verses that make up Paradiso VII. The doctrinal arduousness is coupled
with a lack of any sort of «happening». In W. Theodor Elwerťs words,
«Non c'è alcuna azione esteriore, non succede niente».1 To be sure, there
is no reference to place, nor are there any chronological or topographical
signs, just Beatrice and Dante discussing theology. If one were to apply
Croce's points of reference to the canto the conclusion would be that it
is all structure and no poetry.
Yet, with all of this in mind, one is tempted to ask the following
question: is it not true that however philologically faithful one wishes
to remain to the text, hermeneutical will-to-power will inevitably lead
the exegete to disinter some interpretative relic of the text that pther
remains hidden or that has been minimalized to a status 1 of
unimportance? I am purposely using the archaeological metaphòr (the
non-Foucauldian variety) to anticipate the answer: namely, Paradiso VII
is similar to a barren ground (as some critics would have it) where
beneath there rests buried an ancient monument. The ground needs to be
excavated so as to allow the monument to come to light before our very
eyes. Moreover, it is not only a question of digging the ground in order
to see the monument, it is equally a question of deciphering the
meaning that the ancient monument seeks to transmit to posterity.
The figurai monument that rests concealed below the textual
ground of Paradiso VII is characterized by two elements: 1) the
significance of Mercury (in whose heavens the canto takes place); 2) the
logic of Dante's existentialism as implied in Beatrice's long speech.
Beginning with the second point, we should note that the idea of
Dantean existentialism should not come to us as a surprise. One just
107
has to recall Paul Tillich's observations on Dante:
The greatest poetic expression of the Existentialist point of view in the

Middle Ages is Dante's Divina Commedia. It remains, like the depth
psychology of the monastics, within the framework of scholastic ontology.
But within these limits it enters the deepest places of self-destruction and
despair as well as the highest places of courage and salvation, and gives in
poetic symbols an all-embracing existential doctrine of man.^
John Took is convinced that such a view is justified, moreover it sets a

vast expanse of light on places in Dante's poem that might otherwise be
overlooked. In his existentialist reading of Dante, Took stresses that,
everywhere Dante is concerned, not with the notion pure and simple, but
with the totality of this or that individual's experience in terms of which the
idea represents but one pole of consciousness, a lively possibility to be
appropriated or laid aside with correspondingly triumphant or tragic
consequences for the whole. Understanding at every point serves the purpose
either of estrangement or of reconciliation, of catastrophic self-loss or of
glorious homecoming in the pilgrim spirit.^
The key term in this quote is «understanding», for hermeneutics is the

central mode of measurement in any existential analytic, as Heidegger
was to purport some six centuries after Dante.
THE MEANING OF MERCURY
Paradiso VII is a fusion or marriage, so to speak, of hermeneutics and

meditations upon the existential. The canto takes place in the heaven of
Mercury; and the fact that this planet is a figure for knowledge and
discovery has not escaped Dante scholars. Trucchi concludes his 1936
commentary of Paradiso VII by stating:
Così ha fine la descrizione del cielo di Mercurio, in cui il poeta ... ci ha

mostrato l'influsso del pianeta: in Giustiniano, influsso d'attività
scientifica, e in Beatrice influsso d'indagazione di cose segrete,
interpretazione di cose divine.
However, it is no surprise to note that such a reading was undertaken by

Dante's near-contemporaries. In the Anonimo Fiorentino commentary of
1400 we read (with specific reference in this case to Paradiso XXII) that
«la casa di Mercurio ... si è significazione di scritture e di scienzia e di
conoscibilità», thus a direct reference to the hermeneutical properties of
Mercury. Even closer to Dante's own time there is the Lana commentary
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of 1324 where, in reference to Paradiso V, we read:
Vero è ch'elli è da sapere che l'autore perchè intende trattare d'alcune anime
beate, le quali fecero al mondo benefizio in scrittura, si fa menzione d'esse
nel pianeto di Mercurio, lo quale secondo Astrologia ha significazione di
scrittura e di letteratura.
This line of thinking is in consonance with what Dante has to say about
the properties of Mercury in the Convivio. In a discussion that pivots
on how the arts and sciences of the trivium and the quadrivium
correspond to the seven planets, Dante writes ( Conv . II, xiii, 1 1-12):
lo cielo di Mercurio si può comparare a la Dialettica per due proprietadi: che

Mercurio è la più picciola stella del cielo, che la quantitade del suo diametro
non è più che di dugento trentadue miglia, secondo che pone Alfagrano, che
dice quello essere de le ventotto parti una del diametro de la terra, lo quale è
sei milia cinquecento miglia. L'altra proprietade si è che più va velata de li
raggi del Sole che null'altra stella. E queste due proprietadi sono ne la
Dialettica: che la Dialettica è minore in suo corpo che null'altra scienza, ché
perfettamente è compilata e terminata in quello tanto testo che ne l'Arte
vecchia ne la Nuova si truova; e va più velata che nulla scienza, in quanto
procede con più sofistici e probabili argomenti più che altra.
The hermeneutic art and science that Mercury displaces, according to

Dante and the tradition from which he is drawing his insights, is
essentially twofold. It has the smallest body of knowledge because it is
a meta-science as it is primarily concerned with the process of
discovering and inventing rather than with the accumulation of
knowledge. It is the most veiled science. The root of this insight is
found in Graeco-Roman mythology: Mercury-Hermes gives evidence of
exceptional power of invention the very day of his birth. He robs and
hides Apollo's herd, invents the lyre using strings made of cow's gut
stretched across a tortoise shell, and then trades the instrument for
Apollo's herd. Mercury-Hermes becomes the protector of heroes: he is
the god who reassembled Zeus's mutilated body and saves his life from
the monster Typhon, who had taken Zeus's tendons and had hidden them
before Hermes stole them back and succeeded in reattaching them to
Zeus's body. Among his many attributes, Mercury-Hermes is considered
the god of commerce and of theft. Thus Mercury's trick consists in
veiling and unveiling knowledge at the appropriate time.4
Mercury's twofold nature finds its counterpart in the linguistic and
luminescent doubling present in the initial tercets. The first verses are
characterized by linguistic hybridism as Dante fuses Latin with Hebrew
109
(w. 1-3):
« Osanna , sanctus Deus sabaoth,

superillustrans claritate tua
felices ignes hor um malacòth!».
For some scholars the mixture of the two languages represents the ideal
union of Church and Empire, that is the language of the two chosen
people: Hebrew and Latin (cf. the commentaries of Steiner 1921, Del
Lungo 1926, Giacalone 1968). Other exegetes see the linguistic union
as a symbol of the concordance between the Old and the New
Testaments (cf. Trucchi), while some commentaries see it as belonging
to an established liturgical practice of bilinguism (cf. Porena 1946).
Along with the linguistic doubling there is, in reference to
Justinian, also the doubling of light in verse 6 («sopra la qual doppio
lume s'addua»). In his 1373 commentary of this verse, Benvenuto da
Imola writes:
idest, ingeminatur et duplicatur, quia Justinianus fulget duplici gloria in

coelo, sicut in mundo fuit dupliciter gloriosus, scilicet, utili editione legum,
et justa gubernatione imperii reparati viribus armo rum.
Justinian shines twice because on earth he shone for his philological act
and for his ability to establish and preserve political stability.
But what is the link between the linguistic duality and the twofold
light? The duality is a structural displacement of the duality of human
experience; humans participate in the temporality of existence, but they
also have access to the immutability of the Divine. The Latin in the
first tercet points to the events that occur in human time, the greatest of
which for Dante was the political advent of Rome. The Hebrew, on the
other hand, points to the divine essence of Christ, moreover it was
considered a celestial language (cf. commentaries of Venturi 1732 and
Tommaseo 1837). Similarly, the dual light of Justinian points to both
his achievements in establishing order within the context of
temporality, and his work for the divine glory of God.
In fact, the entire canto pivots on the relationship between the
condition humans experience within temporality and the promised state
of redemption in the «paese sincero» (v. 130). A dynamics, I am
suggesting, between the authenticity of the state of grace and the
inauthenticity of fallenness. But before I proceed to explore the logic of
the existential that is buried in Beatrice's long speech, another remark
about the hermeneutical nature of this canto is in order.
In verses 7-9 there is a reference to the celestial dance of Justinian
110
and his companions. Some critics have placed the dance in relation to
the movement of thought. Trucchi, for example writes:
Per San Tommaso la contemplazione in sè è quiete, ma le operazioni del

contemplare sono moto, essendo il moto l'atto del perfetto, sicché «motus
intelligibilum operationum ad ipsam quietem contemplationis pertinet ...»
Il moto circolare appartiene all'atto contemplativo più perfetto, che ha
semplicemente uniformità e consiste in un intuito ... Il moto circolare
distingue l'atto contemplativo più eccelso e appartiene agli angeli come
quelli che uniformemente e incessantemente, senza principio e senza fine,
intuiscono Dio.
Thus, in this canto we will be witness to the thinking and to the

understanding of the highest order. The most sublime contemplation and
the most sublime hermeneutics are necessary for a discussion that deals
with the most essential and the most difficult feature of Christian
theology, namely, the mysteries of Salvation and of the Resurrection.
But not only is the circular hermeneutics the most sublime, it is also
moto , a movement, a 'hodòs', a wandering throughout the mind and the
psyche. The celestial erring finds its counterpart in the notion of the
wandering in human time as a trope for the hermeneutical process.
THE LOGIC OF THE EXISTENTIAL
Having established the centrality of a hermeneutic thrust, we now need

to explain how within the context of such a thrust the dynamics of the
human/divine, authentic/inauthentic are rendered manifest in Beatrice's
speech.
The point of departure for such an investigation is to be found in
the opening tercet of Beatrice's speech (vv. 19-21):
«Secondo mio infallibile avviso,

come giusta vendetta giustamente
punita fosse, t'ha in pensier miso...».
Now in order to contextualize these verses we should observe that the

question that perplexes Dante is this: If Christ's crucifixion symbolizes
appropriate vindication for man's original sin (as Justinian asserted in
his speech in Paradiso VI, vv. 88-90), how is it then possible that
Christ's death exacts just punishment, that is the annihilation of
Jerusalem by Titus (referred to by Justinian in Paradiso VII, vv. 91-93)
and the diaspora of the Jews as retribution for their role in the
crucifixion? Rather than placing these issues into the thorny theological
111
debate to which they belong, I will read Beatrice's long explanation of
this complex problem as an otherness that is concerned with the elusive
yet ever present question of authenticity versus inauthenticity.
We are presented with Beatrice's never-erring judgment and Dante's
state of perplexity; a contrast between the authenticity of a form of
knowing that is only possible in a divine state, and the confusion,
uncertainty, and unpredictability that is typical of existence in human
time. But what are the ontological parameters necessary to undertake a
hermeneutic descent into the existential question of the Divina
Commedia ? In other words, what are Dante's own philosophical givens
that will allow us to conceive of an existential analytic of the poema ?
Under the influence of Thomas Aquinas, Dante understood of being
in relation to its first and second perfections.5 The first perfection of
something entails it solely existing in accordance with the needs of
substantial form; the second perfection rests in the sort of action that
lends itself to its appropriate fulfillment as a member of any given
genera. Following this logic, in Convivio I, xiii, 3 we read:
Onde, con ciò sia cosa che due perfezioni abbia l'uomo, una prima e una
seconda (la prima lo fa essere, la seconda lo fa essere buono), se la propria
loquela m'è stata cagione e de luna e de l'altra, grandissimo beneficio da lei
ho ricevuto.
And in II, xiii. 5-6 of the same treatise we read:
De la quale induzione, quanto a la prima perfezione, cioè de la generazione

sustanziale, tutti li filosofi concordano che li cieli siano cagione... Così de
la induzione de la perfezione seconda le scienze sono cagione in noi; per
l'abito de le quali potemo la veritade speculare, che è ultima perfezione
nostra, sì come dice lo Filosofo nel sesto de l'Etica, quando dice che '1 vero è
lo bene de lo intelletto.
Thus, the ontological structure of human experience is twofold: the

basic production of form denoted by the idea of essere ; the realization of
form by way of its appropriate activity denoted by the word benessere.
But it is precisely on the idea of being as articulated in the notion of
benessere - that someone operates on the basis of choices and is
encouraged by free will with the purpose of moulding the ontological
essence - that our brief exploration into the Dantean ontological
question should pivot.
The hub of Beatrice's entire speech is the movement between the
distortion of benessere and authentic benessere. Returning to verses
19-21, we see the benessere or authenticity as figured in Beatrice's
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never-erring judgement, while the distortion or inauthenticity as
displaced in Dante's perplexed state. We see a similar interplay in the rest of
the canto:
1) The «umana specie inferma» (v. 28) and the «Verbo di Dio» (v. 30) which
descended to heal mankind.
2) The pre-lapsarian human nature («qual fu creata, fu sincera e buona» , v.
36), which was eventually banished from Paradise (vv. 37-39).
3) The clarity with which Dante understands Beatrice's discussion, but his
difficulty in comprehending why God selected such a mode of redemption
(vv. 55-57).
4) The human intellect that has not matured, and the flame of love in which it
is supposed to mature (vv. 58-60).
5) Envy and the Godly Goodness that has banished all envy from itself (vv.
64-66).
6) Sin makes humans unlike the Highest Good «per che del lume suo poco
s'imbianca» (v. 81).
7) The void created by sin and the just amends needed to rediscover the
Divine fullness (vv. 82-84).
This is only a partial list as the entire canto abounds with similar
ontological counterpoints. But what is clear in the canto is that the
correction of any existential distortion or inauthenticity rests in the
nearest proximity to understanding. Beatrice's explanation of how God
decided upon the proper form that redemption was to assume hinges
upon Dante's temporally-bound hermeneutics (vv. 94-96):
Ficca mo l'occhio per entro l'abisso

de l'etterno consiglio, quanto puoi
al mio parlar distrettamente fìsso.
Beatrice asks Dante to direct his mind's eye toward the fathomless
dimension of Divine Truth in order to understand the logic of her
explanation of Christian salvation. What Beatrice hopes that Dante is
able to understand is the moral-existential space that differentiates the
distortion of benessere from authentic benessere. After the fall it became
impossible for humans to atone for original sin; humans lacked the
onto-theological depth needed to be able to envision and to make theirs
the authentic state of benessere (vv. 97-102):
Non potea l'uomo ne' termini suoi

mai sodisfar, per non potere ir giuso
con umiltate obedïendo poi,
quanto disobediendo intese ir suso;
113
e questa è la cagion per che l'uom fue
da poter sodisfar per sé dischiuso.
An existence characterized by fear, dread and despair was all that humans
could expect.
In order to overcome this state of distortion, Beatrice finally
suggests that Dante remember one thing in particular, namely, «come
l'umana carne fessi allora / che li primi parenti intrambo fensi» (vv.
147-148). In other terms, the state of authenticity becomes a very strong
possibility once the hermeneutic act becomes an archaelogical one at the
same time, that is, by excavating and disinterring in the book of human
memory the semiotic traces of the chronologically remote moment
when human experience was first experienced in the authentic
prelapsarian state.
NOTES
^«11 canto VII del Paradiso », Letture dantesche , ed. Giovanni Getto
(Florence: Sansoni, 1964), 1466. Cf. also, for example, U. Cosmo,
L'ultima ascesa (Firenze: La nuova Italia, 1965), pp. 64-69; C. Galimberti,
«Il Canto VII del Paradiso », Lectura Dantis scaligera (Firenze: Sansoni,
1968); B. Porcelli, «Il Canto VII del Paradiso» , Letture del «Paradiso», ed.
V. Vettori (Milano: Marzorati, 1971); G. Padoan, «Il Canto VII del
Paradiso », Nuove letture dantesche (Firenze: Sansoni, 1973); G. Fallani,
«Il Canto VII», Paradiso : Letture degli anni 1979-81 , ed. S. Zennaro
(Roma: Bonacci, 1989).
2 The Courage To Be (Glasgow, 1977), pp. 128-129.
^ John Took, «Dantean Existentialism: An Experimental Reading of the
Commedia », Lectura Dantis 11 (Fall 1992), 54.
4"On the figure of Mercury-Hermes, see Michel Serres, Hermes. Literature,
Science, Philosophy, ed. J. Harari and D. Bell (Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins UP, 1982).
**My reading of the ontological question in Dante follows Took, op. cit.
114
Paradiso VIII
Author(s): JEAN-PIERRE BARRICELLI and Jean-Pierre Banicelli
Accessed: 17-02-2020 23:02 UTC
Lectura Dantis
JEAN-PIERRE BARRICELLI
University of California / Riverside
VIII
From the spheres of the Moon and Mercury, Dante has now risen,
in his Paradisal journey, to that of Venus, the Third Heaven. It is the
last of the three tainted by Earth's shadow, the last in which the poet
may still discourse about those who yielded to Earth's easy temptations,
most notoriously those of love and specifically love marred by
wantonness - «folle amore», or «mad love» (v. 2): carnal love, as in
the troubadour tradition. But the implicit motif of Venus, which
becomes clear in the next canto, is redemptive, in that on it human
passion, cleansed of error and returned to the right track, has been
transfigured. The correction applies to the protagonists of Canto IX:
Cunizza da Romano, the Venetian lady who in her later years repented
her younger and looser life; Folquet, the amorous troubadour turned
bishop of Marseilles; and the biblical harlot Rahab, who saved the lives
of Joshua's two spies after they had slipped into Jericho before the city's
famed walls fell.
But it applies as well - or so he might have wished - to the
protagonist of the Commedia , Dante himself. The wayfarer, who had
fainted out of compassion after hearing Francesca's story of passion in
Inferno V, was all too aware of his own transgressions, and his meeting
here with Canto VIII's protagonist, Charles Martel of Anjou, King of
Hungary, reminds him of the divergent possibilities of the same natural
disposition in human beings. Love may be at once abused and used:
abused as an incentive for immoral excess or used as an inspiration for
moral elevation. Did the mythological goddess Aphrodite stand for
anything else but this ambivalence? Charles, whom the poet had
befriended in 1294 on the former's hailed passage through Guelph
Florence,1 greets Dante by quoting the first verse of his canzone, «Voi
che intendendo il terzo ciel movete»2 (v. 37), and there is more than a
simple friendly recognition in the salutation.
Canto VIII, then, presents several themes which, at first sight, may
appear very loosely, at times even gratuitously, connected: the idea of
the Sphere of Venus, a tribute to his friend Charles, and, since the
Anjou lineage and descendancy reveal questionable traits, the biological
problematic of good seed engendering bad issue (and vice versa). What
115
little time commentators have spent on this canto (it is not one of the
most often discussed) has been devoted to the content: to investigating
the historical and biographical (as well as astronomical) backgrounds of
the canto's site and personae, and to explicating Dante's theory of the
role providence plays with reference to heredity in the fashioning of
human society. All this has been most profitable, for these inquiries
remain fundamental to any reading of this canto. What remains to be
done is to seek the aesthetic devices whereby a sequence of seemingly
gratuitously connected entities are unified in a coherent, artistic
presentation in such a way as to give the themes, which by themselves
may lack the luster of those in many other cantos, an especially
compelling appeal. To do this, we must first review the themes.
Venus. - Just before beginning his descent into Hell, Virgil had lured
the doubting Dante into following him by referring to Beatrice's eyes
that «lucevan ... più che la stella» (Inf. II, 55) - Venus, of course, and
as soon as he had left the dead air of Lucifer's realm and on Purgatory
had contemplated the sky once again, the first thing he had seen was
Venus, «Lo bel pianeto, che d' amar conforta» (Purg. I, 19). However,
any expression of exaltation at having finally reached the fair planet's
sphere in Canto VIII would have been misplaced. In Beatrice's presence
especially - the very lady who had reproached him in Purg.
XXX-XXXI for having pursued worldly interests after her death (apart
from his marriage to Gemma Donati, we are told in the Convivio of the
lure of Lady Philosophy, the donna gentile over to whom Dante had
given himself, not to mention the more earthy Pargoletta and Lisetta
and «Pietra», whatever their possible interchangeability), and who even
before that knew of her lover's escapades with his friend Forese Donati,
recalled in Purg. XXIII, with the gluttons (in this case those hungry for
life), with a sigh of «grievous memory» (vv. 115-117) - the poet
needs to wam us of the ambivalent attractiveness of the goddess who can
be associated with both divine and terrestrial love.
His tone is severe and austere in cautioning us against the
erroneous opinions of the pagans, who had attributed to the stars the
power of influence over man's dispositions: «l'antico errore» (v. 6), the
error that had put the ancients on a false track. Venus' love was
responsible for blinding passion. And the multiple influences had created
a polytheistic universe, making divinities out of what the Christian
world was to identify as Angelic Intelligences, mere ministers of the
One God (vv. 1-3):
Solea creder il mondo in suo periclo
116
che la bella Ciprigna il folle amore
raggiasse, volta nel terzo epiciclo... ^
The allusion may be to Plato's Timaeus , referred to in the Convivio (II,

iv, 4-6 & IV, xxi, 2). and earlier in the Paradiso (IV, 22-29 & 45-54)
where we read of universal Ideas that reside in the moving stars, from
there to descend into mortals and then return to their site. Thus Cupid,
narrates Dante, lowered himself in human form onto Dido's lap,4 the
prelude to her demise.
The reference to Dido, whose tragic experience made her a
forerunner of the love-suffering-death erotology that engrossed the
medieval world of courtly love, including that of Francesca da Rimini,5
and that in modern times has engulfed the lives of Emma Bovary and
Anna Karenina, among many others, serves to mitigate the severity and
austerity of Dante's opening verses. More than compassion, a
sympathetic tolerance creeps affectively into his language, what one
critic calls «an ideal sympathy»,6 almost like another adumbration of
the truth, like many others Dante recognized in his wholistic concept of
human history and thought, provided by the pre-Christian pagans. With
this in mind, the verses (10-12),
e da costei onď io principio piglio

pigliavano il vocabol de la stella
che 'l sol vagheggia or da coppa or da ciglio...,
need not have become the topic of rival interpretations. To be sure,

Dante opens his canto with a reference to «the fair Cyprian», but far
from leaving matters with such an axiomatic platitude,7 he projects a
sense of the myth's spiritual importance to himself, the poet of love
now engaged in writing a poem about the ultimate Love. He is, after
all, not just on the planet but «inside» it («entro», v. 14). 8 In him,
now, the dangerous falseness of ancient myths - the ancients knew
only the name of the star - yields to their imaginative truth. For this
reason, perhaps, even the Sun dances in courtship around Venus.
Dante's arrival in the sphere of this «star» takes place so swiftly
that he does not notice it, as if by virtue of a miraculous collapse of his
mortal experience of time and space, except for the fact that Beatrice
seemed more radiant. This exquisite poetic fantasy, that of her
ever-increasing radiance, will describe his ascent through all the
remaining heavenly spheres, and begins quite symbolically in Venus.
«Donne che avete intelletto d'amore», had said the stilnovista poet over
a decade before when he had invited knowledgeable womanhood to
117
contemplate true beauty. But more cosmologically and metaphysically,
Truth becomes more splendid the closer it moves to its divine origin.
And with even greater celerity, a spiraling host of blessed souls descends
toward Dante, like godly lights in gyrating dances, singing a «Hosanna»
whose loveliness is unknown to mortals (vv. 28-31). The musical
quality, melopoieia , of verses 14-23, built around the alternating voiced
and unvoiced fricatives «v» and «f», prepares with brilliant subtlety the
advent of the transhuman choir.9
Charles Martel: affairs of state . - In no other heavenly sphere

is human affection expressed more openly, more invitingly, more
benevolently than in Venus. Dante's tribute to his friend may easily
revert into a tribute to himself, judging from everyone's ardent desire to
pleasure him: «Tutti sem presti / al tuo piacer, perchè di noi ti gioi...»
(vv. 32-33), «e sem sì pien d'amor, che, per piacerti / non fia men dolce
un poco di quiete» (vv. 38-39). These are the loving words of someone
who will not be identified in the canto, but all references to him,
implied or specific - son of Charles II of Anjou, the Crown of
Hungary (1290), that of Puglie denied his son, that of Provence and
Naples which awaited him, the loss of Sicily due to the bad governance
of Charles I, the avarice of his brother Robert King of Naples - make
it impossible not to point to Charles Martel. He had died at the young
age of 24, in 1295, much to Dante's grief, who might have found in
him a veritable patron, someone whose love would have given him
«more than fronds» (v. 57). Charles represents the love of friendship,
amor amicitiae , and we have every reason to believe that his three- week
stay in Florence while awaiting his father's visit from Provence,
reported sumptuously by Giovanni Villani in the Cronache (VIII, 13),
bonded the two men's mutual admiration. At this point in the poem, and
properly for the sphere of Venus, the prince moves from amor amicitiae
to amor patriae , making Dante aware that, had he lived longer, his
brother Robert's errors (among them possibly the war with the
Aragonese) would have been avoided: «Il mondo m'ebbe / giù poco
tempo; e, se più fosse stato, / molto sarà di mal, che non sarebbe» (vv.
49-51). Indeed, «the bond that exists between friends does not differ from
the one that binds the citizens of a state»,10 as Aristotle had intimated,
referring to the coexistence of friendship and justice among the same
people.
Dante's contemporary reading public knew all about Charles
Martel: grandson of Charles I of Anjou and son of Charles II (the Lame)
and of Mary of Hungary, he was only 1 1 when, in a popular uprising on
Easter Day (1282), the Sicilian Vespers massacred most of the French
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rulers of Sicily - the «ill sovereignty» that «provoked Palermo to cry
out: 'Death! Death'» (v. 75). Provence, the land «bathed by the Rhone
after its waters have mixed with the Sorgue», was to have come under
his rule (vv. 58-60), as also was the triangle of the Kingdom of Naples,
«covered with towns [like] Bari, Gaeta, and Catona» (w. 61-62).11
After the death of his uncle Ladislav IV, he had been crowned King of
Hungary, the land «crossed by the Danube» (v. 65). And Sicily - «the
fair Trinacria» (v. 67) - too would await its rulers through his marriage
to Clemence and through him, the grandson of Naples' king Charles I
and the son-in-law of Rudolph of Hapsburg, had not the House of Anjou
misruled so badly.12
Charles becomes a pointed critic of his Angevin family down to
the present - and Dante, we may note here, never had a word of praise
for them.13 For his brother Robert, who had ascended to the throne of
Naples in 1309 and who, to administer his lands, had hired Catalan
adventurers, known for their greedy and rapacious plundering that
victimized the populace, ought not to add his avarice to that of his own
ministers, but more than that, ought not «load his boat» (vv. 79-81),
meaning the ship of state, by adding the weight of more faults than
those already caused by his father and grandfather. While Charles II had
the reputation of being liberal and bountiful, whatever his
shortcomings, his son Robert - alas - developed a woefully opposite
reputation (vv. 82-84):
La sua natura, che di larga parca

discese, avria mestier di tal milizia
che non curasse di mettere in arca.
The first Charles Martel section thus ends with the noblest of the
Angevins addressing a strong criticism of his family's misrule. As if to
balance the scene with a positive note, Dante returns to the theme of
affection which had surfaced when he had asked the illumined soul who
he was. Charles's original joy in pleasing the mortal Dante here
becomes Dante's joy in exalting Charles's blessed state (vv. 85-90). 14
In other words, Dante's joy is augmented by recognizing that Charles
discerns it clearly, and he also delights in knowing Charles among the
blessed, for, being with God, these souls know how great and true this
kind of joy is. Implicit is the theological doctrine of the perfect
knowledge of the blessed, who read in God the past, present, and future.
The doctrine is enunciated more fully in later cantos, and need not delay
us here.15
What we grapple with here is the question of why the poet's
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thought is so convoluted at this point that it has to be expressed in an
equally convoluted language? Two plausible explanations offer
themselves. The first is the simpler one, namely, a touching case of
«words fail me», the praise one gives through one's inability to express
clear thanks in words. The second is more complex and architectural, a
case of balancing, of parallel structure, which relates to Dante's canzone,
quoted by Charles as he had made himself known earlier to the wayfarer:
«Voi che intendendo il terzo ciel movete». The canzone contains
«subtlety in the analysis of concepts and complex mental states»,16
quite possibly appreciated by Charles when he read the poem in
Florence, and the same subtlety and complexity are to be found in this
passage. Dante is speaking to Charles, then, in a language he had
admired on earth. If this is so, a further parallel device comes into view:
namely, the canzone bridges the Venus section of the canto and the first
Charles Martel section; similarly here, the passage bridges the first
Charles Martel section and the second, the end of the canto devoted to
the theme of heredity.
Charles Martel: heredity . - Since the blessed are in a «knowing

condition» in Heaven, Dante's query to Charles, provoked by something
the monarch said about his family, follows naturally (vv. 91-93):
Fatto m'hai lieto, e così mi fa chiaro,

poi che, parlando, a dubitar m'hai mosso
com' esser può, di dolce seme, amaro.
How could the liberal father Charles II beget the miserly son Robert? In
beginning his explanation, Charles Martel visualizes Dante's ignorance
as a case of not seeing the truth of the matter because he is not facing it:
«S'io posso / mostrarti un vero, a quel che tu dimandi / terrai lo viso
come tien lo dosso» (vv. 94-96). The question aims at the attributes of
heredity and the variances of personal endowment. The reality of
variances seems to contradict St. Matthew in the New Testament
(7:17-18), who in the third part of the Sermon on the Mount quotes
Jesus as saying that good seed can produce only good fruit: « A good tree
cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can an evil tree bring forth good
fruit» (7:18). But Matthew's view coincides with the pure concept of
Providence as linearly directed intentionality. In Dante's symbolic
phanopoieia , the image of the archer's arrow - a divine teleology -
surfaces. God has provided for His creatures' well-being: «quantunque
quest'arco saetta / disposto cade a proveduto fine, / sì come cosa in suo
segno diretta»(vv. 103-105). 17 Hence heredity - natura generata -
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which would make a soldier's son a soldier and a poet's son a poet.
Robert would then possess the same largesse as his father, Charles II.
«Engendered natures», writes the poet, «would forever take the path of
those who had engendered them» (vv. 133-34).
However, such hereditary determinism is offset, fortunately, by
divine intervention («proveder divino», v. 135). Charles's response to
Dante refers to the celestial influences that provide for the existence of
things in various states and that, revolving, direct all things to
unpreordained ends. Heredity's straight-arrowed determinism establishes
the miraculous order in the universe, much as in Newton's Principia and
as alluded to in the Prologue in Heaven in Goethe's Faust , which results
from the teleological harmony of things. But another force, like the
wind that can alter the arrow's direction, makes the targets vary in their
functions, and in this manner, in their revolutions or variations, they
ultimately shape the diversity of human society. Were this not so,
Charles had already advised Dante, God's perfect instruments of
distribution of the stellar influences, the Angelic Intelligences, would err
- and this would be conceptually impossible - and their «effetti / . . .
non sarebbero arti, ma ruine» (vv. 107-108) - the result would be not
harmony but chaos.
Providence, therefore, circular natura , is that conditioning force
acting upon heredity which we do not always perceive, but which
provides needed talents among society's citizens. Therefore, there can be
nothing worse, Charles and Dante agree, than not being a citizen («non
[essere] cive», v. 116). This «needs no proof» (v. 117), avers the poet.
Dante's adamant tone makes us recall his active political involvements
and his corresponding aversion for those not so involved, like the
opportunists on the outer rim of Hell, whom even the damned reject
because of their unaccountability in civic and religious matters, and
among them the hermits who withdraw from society, for example the
presumed Celestine V who had turned down the papacy, that highest
citizenship within the Church. Citizenship, otherwise put, is the sine
qua non of human existence, for only as a citizen can man realize his
goals (Aristotle again: «Man is by nature a social animal» [Politics I, i,
2]) and therefore lend his talents, as we read in the Convivio (IV, iv,
1-2), to the cooperative support network of society.
Society can be promoted only by diversity, and both creating and
created nature provides the means. «No: I deem it impossible that nature
fall short of what she needs» (vv. 113-14). 18 The term «nature» is
always ambiguous, of course.19 Here, to be sure, Dante is referring to
universal nature, for particular nature, as it operates here and there in
various subjects, may leave something to be desired (in the Quaestio de
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aqua et terra [XVIII] we read that «universal nature never deviates from
its goal..., while sometimes particular nature, through unsuitability of
the matter, deviates from the proposed goal»). To persist, society must
see to it that all walks of life are represented and share in its progress.
As «your teacher [Aristotle] writes» (v. 120), «E puoť elli esser, se giù
non si vive / diversamente per diversi offici?» (vv. 118-19). Such
personal endowments, or dispositions, derive direction from Heaven;
they alter the pure course of heredity according to providential forces that
pay no attention to family or house or lineage (v. 129). The poet's son
can become a soldier. Jacob, Charles reminds Dante, turned out quite
different from his twin brother Esau ( Genesis 25:22-28), and legend
converted Romulus' humble family background into descendancy from
Mars (Livy, I, 3). Hence, the endowments of children come not from
their parents but from the heavens. «Engendered nature» (v. 133) yields
to «revolving nature» (v. 127), so that society diversifies: «one is born
a Solon, one a Xerxes, and one a Melchizedek, and another, [a Dedalus]»
(vv. 124-26), in other words, a legislator, a warrior, a priest, and an
inventor. This is the fundamental verity Charles Martel puts to Dante,
who will now see it clearly as if in front of him, whereas he had not
been able to see it with his back turned to it: «or quel che t'era dietro t'è
davanti» (v. 136).
At this point, as Matelda had done before ( Purg . XVIII, 136),
Charles finds it fitting to end with a «corollary» (v. 138), a truth derived
from conclusions reached in the discussion. He has moved from the
personal to the political, from the amor amicitiae to the amor patriae ,
and now - totally within the spiritual drift of the planet of love - he
moves to the universal, to the amor humanitatis .20 In another sense,
Dante has moved his canto from sensuous pagan love to noble Christian
charity. Whatever the case, the poet has Charles Martel modulate from
his kindness to Dante to his respect for humankind. For this reason,
though we know he is talking about his brothers Louis and Robert, he
does not identify them by name in this corollary.
The corollary is simply that if parents force their children into
vocations for which they have no disposition, thus denying them the
possibility of following their talents, the bad results harm both family
and society (vv. 139-148). Louis, who should have been a warrior,
joined the Franciscan Friars Minor and later became an ineffectual
Bishop of Toulouse; Robert, King of Naples, should have stuck to
preaching and writing erudite sermons (we have c. 289 titles),
composing which he neglected matters of state.21 But by not
mentioning either one by name, Charles alludes broadly, with typical
Dantean subtlety, to the two highest of life's institutions, Church and
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State, gone awry. «Onde la traccia vostra è fuor di strada» (v. 148). This
dereliction informs Dante's most anguished lament throughout the
Commedia : «onde sì svia l'umana famiglia» (Par.XXV II, 141), «the
human family goes astray», because man's happiness on earth depends
on the proper functioning of the spiritual and temporal enterprises.
The recognition of man's spiritual and temporal decline had inspired
one of the most melancholy images in the poem: Hell's Old Man of
Crete (Inf. XIV, 103ff), each of whose materials represents an age of
man, progressively deteriorating from the head's gold of the Golden Age
of Innocence down to the cruel iron foot of the Holy Roman Empire and
the fragile clay foot of the Roman Catholic Church. A depressing,
existential quality colors the vision, a feeling that could be experienced
only by a person of integrity whose conscience weeps (the statue is
streaked with flowing tears of woe) in the presence of human injustice.
It stands to reason that Charles Martel, who loved the world and wished
he could have lived longer to spare humankind much pain,
communicates the same sense of melancholy, implicitly rather than
explicitly, in the canto's final words. Dante knows the sorrow of having
followed the trail that has abandoned the correct highway, for he, too,
had strayed away from the «straight road» (Inf. I, 3). The same warning
applies to the opening words of the canto: the pulses and impulses of
the beautiful Cyprian, who wheeled in the third epicycle. Though
Dante's redemptive message permeates the canto through the singing and
dancing of the heavenly host, we must still note that his moral
admonition is stern. Indeed, while aesthetically the canto moves on a
positive note (we are, after all, in Heaven), the existential melancholy
tends to move in an opposite direction, creating what might be called an
epicyclic pull, and therefore an inner tension in the canto's evolution.
For, joyful as it is, it opens with the «mad love» that drives humanity
off the track and closes with the ill-considered «twisting» of talent that
leads humanity off the road. In music, such as in César Franck's famous
Symphony in D Minor , such framing is referred to as cyclic form. And
when all is said and done, it is the canto's cyclic qualities that give it its
special luster.
The metaphoric epicycle . - Clearly, the notion of Love holds the

otherwise disparate elements of Canto VIII together conceptually. These
are intellectual elements, and, we can now say, they are not gratuitously
connected. But Dante was an artist, for whom conceptual connections
would be denied their desired emotional impact unless interrelated
through the power of metaphoric images. For this reason, as at the
outset in his mind's eye he sees the planet's cycle , he introduces the
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aesthetically generating image of an epicycle , accompanied by an
essential word of motion - «volta» («wheeling», v. 3, repeated as if for
emphasis in v. 20 - «muoversi in giro» - as «moving in a circle»).
The device enhances an otherwise dry cerebral discussion by giving the
whole a compelling aesthetic coherence.
In its orbital or cyclic movement around the sun from East to
West, according to the Ptolemaic system, each planet - Venus being
the third - circles in a small epicycle, so that it alternates in traveling
with and against its orbital movement, assuming changing positions
with reference to the sun, whose rays strike the planet at the «nape» and
at the «brow» (v. 12). Now as evening star, now as morning star,
Venus in effect performs an epicyclic dance in its orbit, and through this
allegory we come to understand the otherwise abstruse lines that frame
Charles Martel's speech about heredity: «you will then have / before you
what now lies behind you» (v. 96) and «now what stood behind you
stands in front» (v. 136).
If we analyze the images and the other nouns, verbs, and adjectives
in the canto, we detect the unfolding of a choreography through
logopoieia , the dance of the intellect among words. One section
involves a fixed or linear movement, call it the intention of the blessed,
and one twirls or revolves around it, call it their joy. Abstractly, Dante
is dealing with a spiral circling around an axis, and the choreography,
like the movement of an epicycle, turns out to be allegorically
significant in itself. From their usual location in the Empyrean among
the Seraphim, where they dance eternal joy, a turbinal host of glittering
souls gyrates downward with lightning velocity - so swift is the
eagerness or «thirst» («sete», v. 35) of their love - to greet Dante and
Beatrice. Their trajectory is linear or axial, but their constant dancing
«in turns» (v. 26) makes them twirl in a long, evolving spiral. Since
Dante invites the reader to envision a dance (and if anything counters the
existential melancholy it is the redemptive message inherent in the
dancing) his language focuses on movement. In a similar spirit, but
with heavier intention, he had produced choreographic effects in the
fourth circle of Hell (Inf. VII) with the avaricious and prodigals, who in
opposite directions roll boulders in a «sorry circle», while «wheeling»
and «shouting at each other in chant» as if in a «round dance» and
«joust» in «shameful rhythm» (vv. 24-33). We recall that in that same
canto, Dame Fortune, for Dante an entity of angelic rank, who in the
Middle Ages always held a revolving wheel of Chance, is described as
flitting carefree from human realm to human realm, whimsically
«turning her sphere» as in a dance (v. 96). And in Purg. XXVIII, on the
banks of Lethe, Matilda appears jollily to Dante «stepping and singing
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and gathering flowers» (vv. 40-41), her eyes bright like those of Venus.
In Paradiso VIII, the dance is one of elation and joy: the recurrent verbs
of wheeling, revolving, circling, turning, spinning, and dancing create
an atmosphere too recreative and sportive to be fortuitous.
Having detected this fundamental metaphoric structure of the canto,
we note that other events interconnect to give the whole aesthetic
coherence. Still - significantly - at the beginning of the canto, Dante
introduces two similes that correspond to epicyclic linear/spiral
movement (vv. 16-21):
E come in fiamma favilla si vede,

e come in voce voce si disceme,
quand' una è ferma e altra va e riede,
viď io in essa luce altre lucerne
muoversi in giro più e men correnti,
al modo, credo, di lor viste inteme.
The way tongues of fire envelop an incandescent center, flames dance

around a spark, and, analogously, in the polyphonic construction of
motets, secondary voices keep moving around the primary theme.
Music, after all, translates love and joy into the fullest possible
measures of praise, upon which the tonality of this canto relies. And the
enwrapping flames anticipate the rays of happiness that will conceal
Charles's presence «like a creature swathed in its own silk» (v. 54). In
this manner, Dante perceives other lights, girating around the light of
Venus with greater or lesser speed, according to each's inner vision of
God which persists within them. Arguably, we might also venture to
say that, for those who know the language of the Mass's Sanctus
Dominus Deus Sabaoth , the «Osanna» (v. 29) sung by the Seraphic
host provides a linguistic analogy. For the liturgical words speak in
Latin of the brightness which illuminates the happy fires of the
kingdom, and, like the «spark» by the «flame», the primary language in
the liturgy is surrounded by Hebrew terms: the words «sabaoth»
(«hosts») and «mamlacòth» («kingdoms»),22 together with «Hosanna»
(«Hail, O save») itself, weave in and out of the Latin text, as it were.
The joy of the «Hosanna» chanters is transposed into the same
linear/spiral figure: «Noi ci volgiam... / d'un giro e d'un girare» (vv.
34-35). As in a twofold movement, cycle and epicycle interplay, the
former («giro») like an orbital trajectory, the latter («girare») circling
around it.23 Thus this heavenly company twirls speedily in space, in
circular motion yet in one determined direction - a dance around an
axis. And when Charles Martel detaches himself from the dance to speak
with Dante, he resembles that spark hidden by the happy flames
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bounding about it: «La mia letizia mi ti tien celato / che mi raggia
dintorno e mi nasconde...» (vv. 52-53). The metaphor now has an
established architectural value in the canto.
Not that a general sense of circularity or spiral (incidentally, the
basic abstract figure to represent dream, which all the Commedia is)
does not inform the entire poem. It does. But the intense focus on the
device in Paradiso VIII makes these observations special. It gives
movement to the biographical and doctrinal dissertations involving
Charles Martel. The circling dance of the amorous («il giro», v. 26),
who leave the Empyrean to visit Venus, with whose souls a sense of
spiritual reciprocity exists, and by implication will then return to the
upper realm, is a circular case in point. The ripresa (we may accept this
term musically) of the affection motif between Charles and Dante (vv.
52-57 and 85-90), and the riprese of the erring «off the track/road» motif
(vv. 6 and 148, like being out of step in the choreography), and of the
«behind-and-before» motif (vv. 96 and 136) reinforced by the planet's
epicyclic motion (v. 10), are, through their framing placement, further
cases in point. Given its circularity, the device relates to the central
premise of the canto, which in turn relates to the metaphysical
cosmography of the universe: the idea that through His love all good
departs from God and returns to Him («s'inizia» and «termina», v. 87);
that God sets the spheres in rounded motion and their joy in obeying is
inspirited with music (echoing Paradiso I's «wheel that [He] made
eternal... with harmony», vv. 76, 78); and that in revolving around the
earth the heavens «serve as a seal for mortal wax» (vv. 127-28), in that
they give the human personalities their particular imprints.
Here lies the device's most important function. The wayfarer's
narrative goes as far as it can go, but the poet's inspiration goes beyond
that, making what is being expressed expressible in a superior way. The
logopoieic succeeds in subsuming the melopoieic and the phanopoieic.
By applying the recently elaborated ekphrastic principle, we might
consider Dante's brilliant epicycle an organicist metaphor, imbued with
enargeia , «a vividness that. . . reproduces [the wheeling vision] before our
eyes» to effectuate an experience of both representing the sphere of
Venus and telling of its implications.24 All great poets, we should be
right in arguing, effectuate analogous experiences the moment their
emotion goes beyond mimetic representation. But in Dante's case, as
Canto VIII eloquently demonstrates, the poetic diction coupled with the
organicist vision point - Romantically, Shelley would insist - to a
creative manipulation of words which the post-moderns of our day, who
would deny language's permutability which «opens expressive
opportunities», would be hard put to reject. As a construct shaped by
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time and space, by music and dance, the epicycle gives rise to a special
use of language - special because its source, as Shelley would have it,
lies in the poet's imagination rather than in a mimetic response to an
external object - and this, one theorist would say, must be related to
the Christian metaphor of the Word wherein historical time and
metaphysical space are fused.25 Dante's is ultimate aesthetics, and he
shows how wrong semiotics is in contesting the success of aesthetics in
positing a separate poetic language, a verbal poiesis. Indeed, he leaves
the post-moderns very short tether.
Hence, through a self-consciously aesthetic use of language, the
metaphoric epicycle and its linear/spiral enargeia give visibility, in fact,
tangibility, to heredity's relation to providence. For on the one hand
heredity as engendered nature moves with the directionality of the arrow
when it leaves the archer's bow (tantamount to the cycle's linear
trajectory around the planet26), and on the other hand providence as
revolving nature acts upon it (in its epicyclic spiral motion), aided by
the windage of variance to modify its course.27 Dante's twofold
organicist image could not be more effective. Indeed, his dominating
metaphor has something contrapuntal about it, say polyphonic, in its
heavenly setting continuously enlivened by the antiphonal music of
song and dance.28 Social diversity depends on this divine choreography.
In balletic terms, Dante the poet choreographs the movement of our
thoughts as readers by the way in which one image leads to another and
still another in surprising yet related associative leaps. Without them,
we would experience not a poem but a treatise. In this manner, he has
transformed a page of cold reasoning into an intellectual - let us say
musical - drama valorized by means of a consistent aesthetic vision.
NOTES
* Charles Martel, who had just been crowned King of Hungary four years
before, was to die at age 24, the year following his meeting with Dante, in
1295, thus destroying whatever hope of patronage Dante might have found
in the young, sympathetic, and generous monarch. During his brief,
three-week visit in Florence, while awaiting his parents to join him from
Provence, it is believed that the two struck up a genuine, youthful
friendship. This Charles Martel, son of Charles II of Anjou, must not be
confused with the better-known historical figure by the same name, Charles
Martel, King of the Franks (688-741).
2This canzone is the first one analyzed in Book II of Dante's Convivio (II,
ii, 7). Though the Angelic Intelligences moving Venus are later referred to
as Thrones (Par. IX, 61), according to a suggestion by St. Gregory, here the
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poet ascribes the function in the Third Heaven to Principalities. These
Intelligences are the movers that make the heavens, including that of
Venus, rotate.
^Born in Cyprus, Venus is the Cyprian (Ovid, Metamorphoses , X, 270).
Referred to in the coming verses, Dione is her mother, and Cupid her son.
As in Convivio , II, vi, 9, the «raying» provides the path for the descent of
influences among mortals: «The rays of each heaven are the path whereby
their virtue descends upon things that are here below». Furthermore, not
only Venus moves in epicycle, but also the Moon, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter,
and Saturn. It is the Venus epicycle, however, that Dante uses in its most
metaphoric, poetic way. - All translations in this essay are by the author.
4See Aen.y I, 647ff. Dido is punished among the lustful in Inf. V, 61-62.
^Some have detected a parallel with Hell's second circle - Paolo's and
Francesca's - where «mad love» is punished: Inf. V's «infernal storm» (v.
31) and Par. Vffl's «swift winds» (vv. 22-23); the lustful being blown «here
and there» (v. 43) and the blessed «wheeling around, some more some less
swift» (v. 20); Paolo's and Francesca's leaving the pack to approach Dante
and Charles Martels stepping forth from his dancers to address Dante; Inf.
V's eternal hurricane «that never pauses» (v. 31) and Par. VIII's «brief
pause» (v. 39). This has led one critic to imagine Charles's wife, Clemence
of Hapsburg, alluded to in Par. IX, to be standing at his side, by parallel
implication with Paolo who stands by Francesca (see A. Pézard, «Il Canto
Vni del Paradiso» y Letture dantesche , III: ParadisOy Firenze: Sansoni, 1961,
148). This speculation seems as thinly supportable as it is unnecessary.
"See Pézard, cit., 145.
n
'«ond'io principio piglio» must mean more than the simplistic «with
reference to whom [the Cyprian, Venus] I began this canto».
*In Par. II, 34-36, speaking of the Moon, Dante had explained how Paradisal
visions do not occur in the heavens but inside the planetary body, «just as
water takes in a ray of light while remaining intact». In similar fashion, he
entered the Sun (Par. X, 41).
9 Another device is the insistent use of the high vowel «i» (verses 19-27),
indicative of unreachable light, around which the ultimate canto, Paradiso
XXXIII, is built. The terms melopoieiay as later phanopoieia and
logopoieiay are of Ezra Pound coinage. Melopoieia is the musical property
which directs the bearing and trend of the text's language; phanopoieia is
the casting of images upon the visual imagination; and logopoieia is the
dance of the intellect among words, the aesthetic content which is
peculiarly the domain of verbal manifestation.
l^Rocco Montano (& Ugo Barra), Comprendere Dantey Napoli: G.B. Vico
Editrice, 1976, 412.
Another boundary is «where the Tronto and the Verde reach the sea» (v.
63): where the Liri and Garigliano rivers (today's names) separate the
Kingdom of Naples from the Papal States. Provence, where the Sorgue and
Rhone rivers flow, was the dowry from Charles's grandmother Beatrice. The
Catona, Bari, Gaeta triangle covers the tip of Italy's toe (Catona), the
128
Eastern land (Bari) on the Adriatic, and the Western (Gaeta) on the
Tyrrhenian.
Anjou descendants, Charles complains, would have ruled Sicily, where
volcanic ashes lie on the East between Cape Faro («Peloro») and Cape
Passero («Pachino»). As if to contradict Ovid ( Metamorphoses V), who
ascribes the ashes emitted by Mt. Ema to the anger of the titan Typhoeus
buried under it, Dante interjects a scientific note: not Typhoeus but
«surging sulphur» (v. 70). The reason for this interjection is unclear,
except perhaps to point up another pagan error. In any event, Dante is
scientifically correct, in that inside the mountain's caves, waves create
powerful air currents which, in their movement, ignite the sulphur.
lÎt is true, however, that Dante «saved» Charles I, stingy like his grandson
Robert, by having Sordello point him out to him in Purgatory's Valley of
the Princes ( Purg . VII, 113), because this Angevin had had a good
reputation. Carlo Muscetta concurs with the identification, since Charles II
had been deemed lavish, though he is judged avaricious in Purg. XX, 79-84
and never inspired Dante's good words (inb Lectura Dantis Scaligera:
Paradiso , Firenze: Le Monnier, 1968, 255). But the «other Charles» of
Purg. XX is not an Anjou but Charles of Valois, who was in league with the
detested pope Boniface VID.
l^These verses have confounded critics for a long time; disagreements
abound, and all depends on whether the interpretive stress falls upon the
word «joy» («letizia») or upon the word «welcome» («grata»), the joy at
the encounter with Charles Martel or the welcome at knowing him among
the blessed, and therefore in the company of God. But like all issues of this
sort, nothing will ever be resolved by fine-tuning the semantics. Dante
probably intended both views, given similar complex ambiguities that
mark his love poetry, which ends by saying more than a single point of
view permits.
^We might note that the poetic potential that Dante derives from this
doctrine begins in the sphere of Venus/love.
l"Pézard, cit., 158.
1 'Dante liked the arrow image, which had already appeared in Par., I,
118-19. Sapegno in his commentary (Milano, 1957) gives several
meanings to «nature provedute» (v. 100), suggesting that the perfect
divine Mind has various natures, provedute! prevedute, what they are and
what their talents are, to fill out the roster of world order.
^The notion, dear to the Scholastics, is expressed variously: Plato's
Republic (III, 415); Aristotle's De Anima (III, 14); Dante's Convivio (IV,
xxxiv, 10); De Monarchia (I, x, 1); his Quaestio de aqua et terra (XVIII);
etc.
^Norton correctly points to the variety of meanings the word natura

assumes in this canto (and others). They are summarized in Singleton's last
note (148) to the canto, in his Commentary, vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1975, 160). Quoting Charles Norton ( Paradise , rev. ed, ,
Boston: 1902): «First, in v. 100 natures signify the products of Nature in
129
its generic sense; in v. 114 Nature stands for the personified order of the
created world; in v. 127 'the circular nature' is equivalent to the system of
the spheres; in vv. 133 and 139 nature is used for the individual creature,
though in the latter instance it is held by many commentators to signify
Nature with the same meaning which it has in v. 142, where the word is
employed in its generic and personified sense». But in the long run,
without pedantic refinements, the contexts establish the likely meanings.
^«The love of humanity... is the only way to salvation that Providence can
indicate to souls overcome by the light of the Venus star» (Muscetta, 270).
Dante did not particularly like Robert, who tried to stop the coronation of
Henry VII (in whom Dante had placed considerable hope for improving
Italian affairs) in Rome, and who advocated the strong temporal power of
the Church (which Dante, a supporter of Empire in temporal matters,
vehemently opposed).
79
^See Allen Mandelbaum's note to this passage in his verse translation,
Paradiso , New York: Bantam Books, 1984, 333.
23 Criticism of Paradiso VID has never been abundant, but the little there has
been has never grasped the full aesthetic significance of passages like this
one. See for example - and arbitrarily selected - early this century, John
S. Carroll, In Patria: An Exposition of Dante's Paradiso (London: Hodder &
Stoughton, 1911, 129-144) and later, C.S. Singleton, cit., 147-160.
2^The ekphrastic principle has been presented by Murray Krieger,
Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign , Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1992. The quotation is from page 68.
2*Krieger, cit., 214. He talks of «open expressive opportunities» (168). I
am injecting these few modern theoretical notions to suggest that, while
Krieger must be lauded for any number of insights, the final result of
theoretical speculation of this sort remains limited to the identical extent
that its applicability to an individual text remains relative, and that, unless
we «zero in» on a specific text and author, we keep floating on the vapors
of pleasant ideas.
2°In a celestial context, a cyclic orbital motion may be considered «linear»
in the sense of Albert Einstein's theory of the curvature of space. In any
event, the planet's predetermined orbital course makes its direction linear
in relation to its definitely circular rotation in the epicycle.
2În the terminology of the Quaestio de aqua et terra , engendered nature
might be likened to natura naturata (the order of creation, or heredity) and
revolving nature to natura naturans (God, or providence).
28 Literary scholars frequently misuse technical musical terms. Paradiso VIH,
for example, has given rise to phrases like «polyphonic Gregorian
plainsong». Gregorian chant is not polyphonic; it is monophonie. Dante
was not hearing this Gregorian music when he wrote the canto. Rather, he
was hearing such polyphonic or contrapuntal sacred music, usually
unaccompanied, popular in his day as motets. Also, here song and dance
may be considered as responding antiphonally to each other, though their
actuality was simultaneous.
130
Paradiso IX
Author(s): MARK BALFOUR
Accessed: 17-02-2020 23:02 UTC
Lectura Dantis
MARK BALFOUR
Royal Holloway University of London
IX
Paradiso IX is the second and last canto dealing with the pilgrim's
sojourn in the heaven of Venus.1 The heaven is populated, as Cunizza
da Romano explains, by the souls of those who were overcome by the
light of the star (32-33) and were, as a consequence, disposed to love
excessively while on earth. Not surprisingly, therefore, canto VIII and,
to a greater extent, canto IX explore the difference between right love -
or caritas - and wrong love - «folle amore» (Par. VIII. 2), or that
motivated by cupiditas. As early in the Commedia as Inferno V, Dante
makes explicit the connection between trasgressive sexual desire and
political instability or misrule. In Paradiso IX, the choice between right
and wrong love is related to obedience or resistance to God's appointed
rulers and furtherance or hindrance of the establishment on earth of the
ideal Roman Monarchy. This theme is explored across a wide
geographical area, from the March of Treviso, a region whose
degeneracy and corruption exemplify that of the whole of the «terra
prava / italica» (25-26), to the «discordanti liti» (85) of the
Mediterranean, and finally to the three focal points of Dante's vision: the
Holy Land, Florence, and Rome.
Dante's address to «bella Clemenza» at the start of canto IX serves
partly as conclusion to the pilgrim's dialogue with Charles Martel in the
previous canto. The fact that both Charles's wife and daughter were
called Clemence has led to debate about which of them is being
addressed. The former died in 1295 and could therefore be discounted if
Clemence is to be understood as still alive in 1300, the fictional date of
the poem. Some commentators, however, have pointed out that «Carlo
tuo» would more appropriately designate a husband than a father (Bosco
& Reggio quote Del Lungo's opinion that it sounds «essenzialmente
coniugale»). It is, of course, quite possible that Dante intended the
identity of Clemence to be ambiguous: perhaps it is more important to
note that he opens a canto which contains a sequence of female figures
exemplifying right and wrong love with an address to a woman 'outside'
the poem, whose very name, «Clemenza», and whose description as
«bella», convey the sense of physical beauty and moral virtue.
In its veiled reference to past and future events on earth the canto's
131
opening establishes the principle of past and present sinfulness answered
by future judgement (1-6):
Da poi che Carlo tuo, bella Clemenza,

m'ebbe chiarito, mi narrò li 'nganni
che ricever dovea la sua semenza;
ma disse: «Taci e lascia muover li anni»;
sì ch'io non posso dir se non che pianto
giusto verrà di retro ai vostri danni.
Most commentators agree that «li 'nganni» refers to Charles's brother

Robert's usurpation in 1309 of the kingdom of Naples from Charles's
son, Carobert, which act received approval from Pope Clement V. It is
also generally agreed that lines 5-6 refer to the battle of Montecatini in
1315, at which Robert's brother and nephew died. Dante's condemnation
of Robert of Naples, so central to the previous canto, is here continued.
In a wider sense the word «inganni» points to the recurrent examples in
Paradiso IX of the trickery and deceit which characterize the
power-struggles of Dante's Italy, and which are implicitly contrasted at
the end of the canto with a biblical example of «holy» deception.
Moreover, Dante indicates with his following apostrophe that the
majority of people on earth are themselves «anime ingannate» (10),
self-deceived in their preoccupation with empty vanities.
Charles Martel returns to the light from which he emerged and
another soul draws near. In what proves to be her only intervention in
Paradiso IX, Beatrice sanctions Dante's desire to converse with this new
soul. She communicates this through her eyes, and her silence accords
with a connection that can be traced within the canto between the
relative status of a female figure and her silence. Cunizza da Romano, a
character drawn from recent Italian history, is one of the heaven's main
speakers; Rahab, a character from the sacred text of the Old Testament,
remains silent; and the Virgin Mary, the culmination of this series of
female figures, although present at an exemplary level at the canto's end,
is not even named by the text. The more idealized and susceptible to
allegorization or typological interpretation the female figure becomes,
the more the possible trace of a potentially disruptive female voice is
removed from the text. Informing the canto throughout is the idea of
woman as either site and origin of trasgressive desire or object of true
caritas . As will be seen, Cunizza, Rahab, and Mary are all presented as
women who have chosen, or rather, have been chosen to serve God's
purposes on earth.
Cunizza begins with a description of her locus natalis , the March
of Treviso, defining it as «quella parte de la terra prava / italica che siede
132
tra Rialto / e le fontane di Brenta e di Piava» (25-27). The adjective
«prava» is applied to Italy in general, with the March a microcosm of
the nation, the depravity of part symptomatic of that of the whole. Its
boundaries are defined entirely by the topography of rivers and sea and
this is a feature of all such geographical description in the cantoē Thus,
the people of the March are «la turba [...] / che Tagliamento e Adice
richiude» (43-44) and Treviso is the place «dove Sile e Cagnan
s'accompagna» (49), while Folquet de Marseille employs a long, watery
periphrasis to indicate his place of birth (82-90). This continual
reminder of the boundaries fixed by the topography of God's creation
throws into relief the violent struggles of a divided and rebellious
humanity, which are consequently depicted in terms of pollution,
particularly pollution of waters, and destruction of the natural world.
Thus Ezzelino da Romano is described by his sister as «una facelia / che
fece a la contrada un grande assalto» (29-30), where «contrada»
represents both the country and its people; the blood of the Paduans who
resist the authority of the Imperial Vicar, Cangrande della Scala, will
stain «l'acqua che Vincenza bagna» (47); and Marseilles «fé del sangue
suo già caldo il porto» (93), similarly resisting imperial authority in the
person of Caesar during the Roman Civil War. Indeed, Paradiso IX
reaffirms a constant feature of the Commedia : any description of the
geography of this fallen world almost inevitably contains traces of the
bloody events of human history.
Commentators have drawn attention to similarities in structure
between Cunizza's speech and that of Folquet. In fact, the two speeches
are almost parallel in structure and can be divided into five distinct
sections:2
1) Self-introduction, commencing with geographical periphrasis and

culminating in the revelation of their name (25-32; 82-95).
2) Explanation of why they are in the heaven of Venus (32-33; 95-102).
3) Explanation of the present condition of souls in Venus in relation to their
past sinful life on earth (34-36; 103-108).
4) Introduction and praise of another soul, in Cunizza's case Folquet, in
Folqueťs, Rahab; reference to that soul's continued fame, and implicit
criticism of those who fail to follow their example (37-42; 109-126).
5) An explicit indictment of earthly wickedness ending with prophecy
(Cunizza's speech also containing an affirmation of the justice of what she
has said) (43-63; 127-142).
At the center of each speech is a striking statement concerning the

radical difference that exists between celestial and earthly perspectives.
Whilst acknowledging their prior sinfulness, Cunizza and Folquet are
133
able to look back at their past life from a paradisical, and therefore
comic, point of view.3 As Cunizza explains: «lietamente a me medesma
indulgo / la cagion di mia sorte, e non mi noia; / che parria forse forte al
vostro vulgo» (34-36).
Cunizza supplies little in the way of autobiographical detail and it
remains difficult to say with any accuracy how much Dante knew about
her life.4 Bom around 1 198, she was the sister of the infamous Ezzelino
and Alberico da Romano. She married Rizzardo di San Bonifacio in
1222, from whom she was abducted by Sordello, possibly with her
brothers' connivance, and lived with the troubadour for a while as his
concubine. Cunizza is mentioned by several poems dating from the
beginning of the thirteenth century and originating from the court-circles
of Treviso.5 These include a poetic exchange between Peire Guilhem de
Lusema and Uc de Saint Circ in which the former states that «sa beltatz
iesplan / E sos ricx prez seignoreia» (w. 4-5) and promises to defend her
from her detractors with his sword. Uc replies that Cunizza's recent
actions have led to her eternal damnation (vv. 1-6), ironically
prophesying that Peire will die defending her (13-20).6 Sordello's liaison
with Cunizza occasioned satirical comment by at least two poets, Joanet
d'Albusson and Reforsat de Trets, and it is also referred to in two
versions of his Occitan vida . After Sordello, Cunizza had at least one
more lover and three more husbands, before ending her days in Florence.
Various commentators have speculated concerning her possible
reputation for piety at the end of her life, even suggesting that Dante
could have seen or heard about her, an old and saintly woman, in his
childhood. However, there is no real evidence, literary or historical, to
confirm her latter reputation, save for the record of her having freed the
family slaves in 1265. The only real «evidence» for Cunizza's
conversion is the Commedia itself. Although Dante's knowledge of
specific texts is open to question, he would arguably have been aware of
the portrayal of Cunizza in vernacular poetic discourse and would almost
certainly have known of her adulterous relationship with Sordello. Her
presence in the heaven of Venus must therefore be interpreted in the
context of Dante's continual critique of literary representations of love.
Her conversion entails a transcendence of her role as object of
trasgressive desire; she becomes, instead, the vehicle through whom
God's judgment is pronounced upon a sinful people.7
Most commentators on this canto have noted the passage in
Purgatorio XVI where Marco Lombardo laments the passing of courtly
values from that part of Italy where the March of Treviso is located: «In
sul paese ch'Adice e Po riga, / solea valore e cortesia trovarsi, / prima
che Federigo avesse briga» (115-117). Although Dante may look back
134
to that time with nostalgia, recognizing the courtly culture that
flourished around Treviso to be of vital importance to the poetic
tradition of which he is a part, he nevertheless makes it quite clear that
even then the region was contaminated by violence.8 Cunizza's
description of the March of Treviso culminates with the destructive
«facelia» of her brother, Ezzelino da Romano, its ruler from 1223 to
1259.9 A successful crusade was proclaimed against him by the Papacy
which led to his death; if this were remembered by Dante's audience,
Ezzelino's name would effectively introduce the canto's crusading
theme.10 Ezzelino was infamous for his cruelty and frequently depicted
in diabolic terms by contemporary chroniclers. Dante places him among
the violent against others in the seventh circle of Hell, submerged up to
Iiis eyebrows in a river of boiling blood as one of the «tiranni / che dier
nel sangue e ne l'aver di piglio» {Inf. XII. 104-105). In Albertino
Mussato's EceriniSy his Senecan tragedy written in 1314, Ezzelino and
Alberico are quite literally the devil's children, although Mussato does
also make the point that Ezzelino is partly a «creation» of the people of
the March.11 Although we cannot be sure that Dante knew the Ecerinis ,
it is quite probable that he knew of it and was aware of the legendary
material that had accumulated around Ezzelino.12
Dante would also have been aware that Guelf propaganda in Padua
and elsewhere depicted Ezzelino as a forerunner of the new Ghibelline
«tyrant», Cangrande della Scala: indeed, Mussato's play makes this
comparison explicit. After the death of Henry VII of Luxembourg, the
emperor whom Dante had hoped would re-establish the Monarchy,
Cangrande came to occupy a central place in Dante's political vision:
indeed Cacciaguida's prophecy in Paradiso XVII intimates that
Cangrande is himself ordained to become Roman emperor (76-90). In
Paradiso IX, much of which may well have been written while Dante
was lodged under Cangrande's protection, Dante distinguishes between
the destruction brought by Ezzelino's tyranny and the bloodshed which
results from the region's present degeneracy. Indeed, he implies that it is
those who refuse to acknowledge Cangrande's imperial authority and the
stability which his rule would bring who are the true successors of
Ezzelino.13 Cunizza prophesies three future events: the Paduans'
defiance of Cangrande and subsequent defeat by the Ghibelline army
outside Vicenza in 1314; the murder in 1312 of the proud and despotic
lord of Treviso, Rizzardo da Camino;14 and the betrayal in 1314 by the
bishop of Feltre, Alessandro Novello, of three Ghibelline refugees from
Ferrara who had placed themselves under his protection. The second and
third prophecies pick up the canto's theme of «inganni»: a net is spread
for Rizzardo; the bishop deceives those under his care. Whereas one
135
tercet is allocated to each of the first two prophecies, three are devoted to
Alessandro Novello. Cunizza explains that his actions define those of
the region as a whole, the generosity of «questo prete cortese» a
typically infernal inversion of the «cortesia» that was once to be found
there. The canto's use of liquid imagery is also given a new twist with
the picture of the «bigoncia» holding «il sangue ferrarese» (55-56), a
juxtaposition of grape-harvest and blood that possibly alludes, again
ironically, to biblical prophecy concerning God's destruction of the
wicked (Joel 3. 13). Cunizza finishes by reassuring the pilgrim that her
words, although harsh, are in fact a revelation of God's justice,
knowledge of which is mediated to the souls in Venus by the
«Thrones», the angelic intelligences who move the sphere of Saturn.
Then, like Charles Martel before her, she rejoins the celestial dance, and
it is Folquet's turn to speak.
Cunizza had described Folquet as «questa luculenta e cara gioia»
(37), and this strand of imagery is picked up again with Dante likening
him to a «fin balasso in che lo sol percuota» (69). The balas ruby is, as
one would imagine, a stone highly appropriate to Folquet: a symbol of
ardent love, it was also supposed, at least by some lapidaries, to have
the property of diminishing or curing lustful thoughts.15 As with
Cunizza, the pilgrim asks Folquet to satisfy his longing for knowledge.
His address contains three Dantean neologisms: «tuo veder s'inluia »
(73), «s'io m'intuassi , come tu ťinmii » (81). Not merely rhetorical
ornament or stylistic elevation, these verbs describing the unity between
souls in Paradise and God, and their intimate understanding of Dante's
hopes and desires, are a celestial counterpoint to the language of
eroticism in which sexual union is depicted in terms of the joining of
two souls. (The punishment suffered by Paolo and Francesca, joined as
one for eternity, is an infernal literalization of this imagery).
Folquet's self-introduction furnishes a little more biographical
detail than Cunizza's.16 Again the early commentators fill in the
background, often paraphrasing the Occitan vida , which dates from the
second half of the thirteenth century. His life on earth is divided into
two distinct parts and lends itself to interpretation as an example of
conversion from wrong to right love. Born circa 1 160 in Marseilles, he
was the son of an Italian merchant. He became a troubadour, writing
highly rhetorical and elaborate love poetry from which the vida
imaginatively extrapolates details of his illicit love affairs.17 He ceased
to write poetry when in 1200 he entered the Cistercian order. In 1205 he
became Bishop of Toulouse, in which capacity he supported the
foundation of the Dominicans and was one of the main preachers of the
Albigensian Crusade. In contrast with Cunizza's speech, Folquet's is
136
studded with classical allusions: the image of Marseilles's bloodied
harbour taken from Lucan ( Phars . III. 572-573); «discordanti liti» (85)
translating the Virgilian «litora litoribus contraria» ( ken . IV. 628); and
the three exempla of foolish love, Dido, Phyllis, and Hercules, derived
primarily from Ovid's Heroides , although informed by other texts.
The last two allusions need some comment. Jacopo della Lana,
together with other early commentators, explains «discordanti liti» as
meaning «li abitatori di questi luoghi ... discordanti in fede, legge e
usanze», the geographical detail pointing to the crusading theme
developed later in the canto.18 The original context of the Virgilian
allusion, however, has not yet been explored. When Dido awakens to
discover that Aeneas is planning his departure, she calls upon her own
Tyrian people to carry out her revenge upon his descendants,
prophesying the advent of Hannibal and the Punic wars ( Aen . IV.
622-629). She concludes: «litora litoribus contraria, fluctibus undas /
imprecor, arma armis: pugnent ipsique nepotesque». Aeneas's love for
Dido represented a diversion from his providential mission to found
Rome and throughout the Commedia Dido is emblematic of misdirected
or wrong love. Dante's allusion to Dido's curse, therefore, underlines the
far-reaching consequences of Aeneas's illicit love, for the conflict
between Islamic East and Christian West is, for Dante, a continuation of
the enmity between Carthage and Rome.1^ Dido is also the first of the
three classical figures to whose foolish and ultimately self-destructive
loves Folquet likens the desires of his youth. Dante's choice of three
characters from the Heroides owes much to its conventional
interpretation in the Middle Ages as a text written to condemn amor
stultus (usually exemplified by Phyllis) and amor illicitus , whilst
praising the legitimate or conjugal love exemplified by the chaste
Penelope.20
Folquet is last in the series of troubadours encountered by the
pilgrim in the Commedia and the only one to be found in Paradiso.
Barolini notes that he «serves as a kind of summary» of the Occitan
poets the pilgrim has already met: «not only is his political engagement
forecast by Sordello and his love poetry by Arnaut, but he was in life a
good friend of Bertran de Born's, who should have emulated him in
directing his energies toward holy rather than secular wars».21 Folquet's
«Tan m'abellis l'amoros pensamen» is cited in the De vulgāri eloquentia
(II. vi. 6), its incipit providing the main intertext for the first line of
Arnaut Daniel's Occitan speech (in Purg. XXVI. 140-147). Moreover,
Picone and especially Rossi have argued for a dense intertextual
relationship between Folquet's poetry and his representation in Paradiso
IX and it is important to note that while a troubadour, Folquet wrote at
137
least three chansons de croisade which, if known to Dante, would have
strengthened his case for being chosen to proclaim the crusade in
Paradiso 22 The main reason for his being so chosen is likely to be his
preaching of the Albigensian Crusade while bishop of Toulouse.23 In
all the early illuminated manuscripts of the Commedia , Folquet is
depicted not as troubadour, but as bishop, with mitre and crozier.24 That
is to say, he was understood to have appeared to the pilgrim in his
post-conversion guise, having abandoned the world and with it his
poetry. Despite the uneasiness of some modern commentators, it is
evident that the crusade waged against the Cathar heretics of the
Languedoc would certainly have been perceived as legitimate by Dante,
whose condemnation of intellectual heresy and political and religious
schism is fierce.25 Indeed, later in the cantica Bonaventure praises St.
Dominic's efforts in the Languedoc in no uncertain terms: «ne li sterpi
eretici percosse / l'impeto suo, più vivamente quivi / dove le resistenze
eran più grosse» {Par. XII. 100-102). Those who would characterize the
Albigensian Crusade as somehow being a perversion of the crusading
ideal are largely subscribing to an anachronistic viewpoint. Indeed, the
war against the Cathars was consistent with papal crusading practice
from the twelfth century onwards.26 Moreover, the extent to which the
Albigensian Crusade was criticized at the time has been exaggerated;
only a few of the troubadours in the Languedoc make any reference to it
and there is evidence that they fought on both sides in the conflict.27
In Paradiso IX Folquet's focus is the crusade to the Holy Land. He
criticises the Papacy for failing to follow the example of Rahab, as he
explains why she was the first soul harrowed from Hell to be raised to
the third heaven (121-126):
Ben si convenne lei lasciar per palma

in alcun cielo de l'alta vittoria
che s'acquistò con l'una e l'altra palma,

pérch' ella favorò la prima gloria
di Iosiiè in su la Terra Santa,
che poco tocca al papa la memoria.
Dante here draws upon the conventional typological interpretation of the

biblical story of Rahab. In return for her having sheltered the Israelite
spies, Joshua (Jesus Christ) saved the prostitute Rahab (the Church
drawn from the Gentiles) from the destruction of the city of Jericho (this
world / eternal death), her house distinguished from those around it by a
red thread (the blood of Christ).28 The victory won with both palms is
both the overthrow of Jericho, accomplished through prayer, and
Christ's death on the cross. Rahab, as type of Ecclesia , is obviously an
138
appropriate example with which to shame the Papacy. (Her hiding the
spies, which led to the city's destruction but ensured her own salvation,
is a wonderful example of a holy «inganno»). In crusading discourse
Joshua frequently appears as a figura crucesignati , a type for the
crusaders to follow, and Dante reflects that typology not only in
Paradiso IX, but also by placing Joshua among the heroes in the cross
of Mars (Par. XVIII. 37-39). Rahab is described as a «palma», and this
is normally interpreted to mean a 'victory palm': that is, she is a sign in
the heaven of Venus of the salvation made possible by Christ's
crucifixion. I would suggest that Dante is also likening Rahab to the
Jericho palms brought back by the crusaders as a token of their armed
pilgrimage, thereby establishing a typological connection between
Christ's Harrowing of Hell and crusade.29
Dante locates a call for crusade in the heaven of Venus and links it
thematically to the question of right and wrong love, thereby reflecting a
central theme of crusading discourse: from the very beginning crusades
were represented by those preaching them and by the literature that grew
up around them as an act of love - love first of all for God and then for
one's fellow-Christians.30 Rahab stands as an alternative to the female
figures in crusade poems, love for whom is sometimes represented as
being in direct opposition to the service of God in the Holy Land.31 It
would be no exaggeration to state that crusade is an integral part of
Dante's political vision. The liberation of the Holy Land by the divinely
elected Roman emperor would be necessary for the establishment of a
worldwide Monarchy. However, the spiritual benefits that distinguished
a crusade from other kinds of warfare could not be proclaimed by the
emperor, whose authority was restricted to the temporal realm. It was
rather the responsibility of the Papacy, whose authority was spiritual, to
proclaim and preach a crusade. Hence Dante's criticism of Boniface VIII's
misuse of crusade against the Colonna cardinals (Inf. XXVII. 85-90) and
Cacciaguida's assertion that the Holy Land remains in 'Saracen' hands,
«per colpa d'i pastor» (Par. XV. 142-144).
In a powerful piece of polemic, Dante has Folquet demonstrate that
the Papacy's failure to remember the Holy Land results from cupidity,
engendered and nurtured by the city of Florence (127-138):
La tua città, che di colui è pianta

che pria volse le spalle al suo fattore
e di cui è la nvidia tanto pianta,
produce e spande il maladetto fiore
c'ha disviate le pecore e li agni,
però che fatto ha lupo del pastore.
Per questo l'Evangelio e i dottor magni
139
son derelitti, e solo ai Decretali
si studia, sì che pare a' lor vivagni.
A questo intende il papa e ' cardinali;
non vanno i lor pensieri a Nazarene,
là dove Gabriello aperse l'ali.
The play on words between «Fiorenza» and «fiore», «fiorire», etc, was a
frequent feature of Tuscan literature in the thirteenth and early fourteenth
centuries. It derived from the etymological origins of the city's name,
various explanations for which were proferred in medieval Florentine
chronicles.32 Positive examples exist of this word-play: in the
Tesoretto , for example, Brunetto Latini states that, «Lo tesoro comincia
/ Al tempo ke fiorença / Fioria e fece frutto» (113-115: referring to the
Florence before the battle of Montaperti in 1260). 33 But the word-play
could also be used in a negative sense; Guittone d'Arezzo's «Ahi lasso,
or è stagion de doler tanto», written after Montaperti, traces the city's
decline with its successive references to the city first as «l'alta Fior» (5),
then as «la sfiorata Fiore» (16), and finally, ironically, as «Fiorenza,
fior che sempre rinovella» (93). 3^ For Dante, the period when Florence
truly flourished had nothing to do with growth in the city's population
or expansion of its mercantile interests: indeed he sees those very things
as having contributed to its degradation. Rather it was the «buon tempo
antico» of Cacciaguida when great and noble families like the Lamberti,
«fiorian Fiorenza in tutť i suoi gran fatti» (Par. XVI. 111). In Paradiso
IX Dante rewrites Florentine mythology: the 'flourishing' city was
planted by Satan, and the florin, the coin which bolstered and
symbolized Florence's growing wealth and influence, is in reality an evil
bloom which changes shepherds into wolves.3^
The cupidity that has metamorphosed the shepherds of Christ's
flock causes them to neglect the Gospels and Church Fathers, and to
devote their time instead to the writings of the decretalists, in the hope
of increasing wealth and power.36 Once again Folquet rebukes them for
failing to remember the Holy Land, but this time it is not the wars of
the Old Testament he recalls, but rather «Nazarette, / là dove Gabriello
aperse l'ali». It might seem surprising that Nazareth is chosen, rather
than Jerusalem, the city where Christ was crucified, where he rose again
and to where it was believed he would return - the focal point of
crusading discourse. There are, however, two important reasons for
Dante's choice of Nazareth: the etymology of its name and the
momentous event that took place there. Of all the commentators on this
canto only Rossi, so far as I am aware, has noted the etymology of
Nazareth as «fios», citing Bernard of Clairvaux's De laude novae
140
militiae : Dante need not have known this text, however, since the
etymology was conventional in his day.37 Instead of the florin («il
maladetto fiore»), the Papacy's desire should be for the 'flower' of
Nazareth. It is also possible that Nazareth is here meant to be seen as an
anti-Florence.38 The representation of right and wrong desires in terms
of good and evil flowers also plays with the conventions of medieval
love poetry, where the beloved object of desire is likened to or
allegorized as a flower. The reference to the Annunciation supplies the
canto's last and perfect example of a woman who was herself depicted in
terms of a flower (lily, rose in Jericho), a female object of true and holy
desire whose own act of right love, prefigured by that of Rahab, enabled
God's redemptive plan to succeed.
The canto ends with a prophecy and there can be little doubt that
this refers to the political savior, the «veltro» {Inf. I. 100-105) or
«cinquecento diece e cinque» ( Purg . XXXIII. 40-45), whose coming is
promised several times in the Commedia (139-142):39
Ma Vaticano e l'altre parti elette

di Roma che son state cimitero
a la milizia che Pietro seguette,
tosto libere fien de l'avoltero.
Before Jerusalem can be liberated, the Papacy must be freed from

spiritual adultery, from the desire for temporal power that causes it to
oppose the establishment of the Roman Monarchy which has as its goal
«the universal love on earth which will transform mankind into the
image of God».40
NOTES
4n addition to commentaries stored on the Dartmouth Dante database, I have

consulted the following readings of the canto: Roedel, Toja, Bergin,
Vallone, Picone, Pasquazi. Picone's in particular is an important and
suggestive reading. All quotations from the Commedia are taken from the
edition by Petrocchi as used in the edition of Bosco and Reggio.
^Picone, pp. 62, 78, assigns a tripartite structure to each speech. See also
Vallone, pp. 52-53.
3See Jacoff (1980), pp. 119-120, on the theme of «looking back» in the
ninth canto of each cantica.
4On what follows see, especially, Coletti.
^Folena, pp. 58-77; Picone, pp. 55-61.
^Bertoni, pp. 275-277 (text and Italian translation), pp. 523-524
(commentary).
141
2 On the representation of women in troubadour lyric, see the excellent
article by Burns.
^Folena (1990), pp. 78-83, on «Treviso e le "Corti d'Amore"». Dante's view
of the Hohenstaufen court, praised in De vulgāri e loque nt ia, I. xii. 4, for
nurturing the Sicilian precursors of Dante and his contemporaries, is
similarly tempered by the Commedia 's representation of Frederick II as
heretic and Manfred as excommunicated schismatic.
^For what follows, see especially Arnaldi and Raimondi (1966).
^Housley (1982), p. 167, describes it as «The Italian crusade which most
insistently reminds one of the crusades in the Holy Land, both in the
enthusiasm with which it was greeted and followed and in the atmosphere of
religiosity which enveloped it». See also pp. 54-55, 168-169. Mussato
refers to the crusade in the Ecerinis , 1. 405.
H Ecerinis, 1. 169. For an introduction to the Ecerinis , see Raimondi
(1970).
l^The image of the «facelia», for instance, may well owe something to the
story, cited by Pietro di Dante, of Ezzelino's mother's dream that she had
given birth to a burning torch.
13 See Hyde, pp. 252-282, for a clear account of the historical background.
^Rizzardo had set himself up as rival to Cangrande for the position of
Imperial Vicar under Henry VII; Hyde, p. 255.
^Cioffari, pp. 152-153.
l^The best introduction to Folquet's life and works remains that of Stronski.
Suitner provides an excellent study of Dante's Folquet; see also Zingarelli,
although many of his more fancyful arguments have since been refuted.
Stronski, pp. 61-68, demonstrates that the story of Folquet's amorous
adventures is «une pure fable sans aucun fondement historique» (p. 64).
l^See also Roedel, pp. 186-187.
lÎn Par. VI. 49, Dante refers to Hannibal's Carthaginian troops as «li
Arabi».
^Heinrichs, pp. 62-68, discusses medieval accessus to the Heroides. See

also Ghisalberti. On Dante's use of the exempla , see Rossi.
^Barolini, p. 185.
^Numbered X, XVIII, and XIX in Stronski's edition. The razo to «Hueimais
no y conosc razo» (XIX) likens it to a sermon (prezicansa ).
23 Suitner, p. 631, argues that although Dante would not have had a minute
knowledge of Folquet's role in the Crusade, neither would he have been
ignorant of it altogether. See Stronski for sources, including Vincent of
Beauvais (pp. 102-103) and John of Garland (pp. 107-108) which mention
Folquet's preaching of the Crusade.
24ßrieger, Meiss & Singleton, I, p. 189, and II, pp. 450-453. It is worth
pointing out, however, that in illuminated Italian songbooks containing
his poetry, it was also conventional to portray him as bishop; Kendrick, p.
110.
25 For an example of such critical uneasiness, see Picone, p. 86. Lambert,

pp. 105-146, provides a clear introduction to the Cathars. See also Balfour
142
(1993) regarding Dante and crusades against schismatics.
2°Villey, pp. 222-225; Housley (1985).
27Siberry (1985), pp. 158-168.
Auerbach, pp. 482-484; see also Daniélou, pp. 244-260. Rahab also
appears in the New Testament as an example of faith (Hebrews 11:31) and,
seemingly in contradiction, as an example of justification by works (James
2:25).
2În Purg. XXXin. 77-78 Dante is likened to a pilgrim to the Holy Land,
«che si reca il bordon di palma cinto».
^See Riley-Smith's fundamental article on the subject.
31 Rahab can possibly also be seen as analogous to the figure of the
converted Saracen princess in the chansons de geste' see Balfour,
forthcoming.
32Villani, I. xxxviii (p. 62) summarizes various explanations, including the
following: «in quello luogo e campi intorno ove fu la città edificata sempre
nasceano fiori e gigli. Poi la maggiore parte degli abitanti furono
consenzienti di chiamarla Floria, siccome fosse in fiori edificata, cioè con
molte delizie [...] Ma poi per lungo uso del volgare fu nominata Fiorenze:
ciò s'interpreta spada fiorita». See also Rubenstein.
33 See Armour (1991), for Brunetto's poem written in exile, «S'eo sono
distretto jnamoratamente», and the reference to Florence as «lo bianco
fioreauliso».
34Contini, pp. 206-209; see also in the same volume Chiaro Davanzati's,
«Ahi dolze e gaia terra fiorentina», partially modelled on Guittone's poem
and which uses the same imagery; pp. 414-416.
35 For a eulogy of the florin by Dante's contemporary, Remigio de'
Girolami, see Davis pp. 206-207n (also, p. 74).
3Â parallel passage is found in Dante's Epistola XI, 15-16.
3 'Rossi, pp. 77, 93n. Delcorno, p. 185n, for instance, refers to a sermon
delivered in Florence in 1305 by Giordano da Pisa which makes use of this
etymology.
3®Wessley examines a fascinating application of Nazareth's etymology by
Joachim of Fiore and the Florensian community.
39See, for example, Vallone, p. 169; Bergin, p. 141. Roedel, p. 193,
interprets this as a reference to Boniface VIII's death in 1303.
Ârmour (1989), p. 178. Armour outlines the importance of love to Dante's
conception of the Roman Monarchy, in connection with the symbol of the
Griffin in the Earthly Paradise; pp. 176-179.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Armour, Peter: Dante's Griffin and the History of the World (Oxford, 1989);
«The Love of Two Florentines: Brunetto Latini and Bondie Dietaiuti»,
Lectura Dantis , 9 (1991), 11-33.
Arnaldi, Girolamo: «La Marca Trevigiana "prima che Federigo avesse briga"
e dopo», in V. Branca and G. Padoan, eds, Dante e la cultura veneta
143
(Florence, 1966), pp. 29-37.
Auerbach, Erich: «Figurative Texts Illustrating Certain Passages of Dante's
Commedia '», Speculum , 21 (1946), 474-489.
Barolini, Teodolinda: Dante's Poets : Textuality and Truth in the «Comedy»
(Princeton, 1984).
Balfour, Mark: «"Orribil furon li peccati miei": Manfred's Wounds in
Purgatorio , HI», Italian Studies , 48 (1993), 4-17; «Moses and the Princess:
Josephus's Antiquitates Judaic ae and the chansons de geste », Medium
Aevum (forthcoming).
Bergin, Thomas Goddard: «Paradiso IX», in idem, A Diversity of Dante (New
Brunswick, NJ, 1969), pp. 112-142; also in the same volume, «Dante's
Provençal Gallery», pp. 87-111.
Bertoni, Giulio: I Trovatori d'Italia (Rome, 1967).
Brieger, Peter, Millard Meiss and Charles S. Singleton: Illuminated
Manuscripts of the Divine Comedy , 2 vols (Princeton, 1969).
Brunetto Latini: Il Tesoretto , ed. and trans., Julia Bolton Holloway (New
York and London, 1981).
Burns, E. Jane: «The Man behind the Lady in Troubadour Lyric», Romance
Notes , 25 (1985), 254-270.
Cioffari, Vincenzo: «Dante's Use of Lapidaries: A Source Study», Dante
Studies , 109 (1991), 149-162.
Coletti, Fernando: «Cunizza da Romano», in Enciclopedia dantesca (Rome,
1970-1971), IV, pp. 1025-1028.
Contini, Gianfranco, ed.: Poeti del Duecento , I (Milan-Naples, 1960).
Danielou, Jean: From Shadows to Reality : Studies in the Biblical Typology
of the Fathers (London, 1960).
Davis, Charles T.: Dante's Italy and other essays (Philadelphia, 1984).
Delcorno, Carlo: Giordano da Pisa e l'antica predicazione volgare (Florence,
1975).
Folena, Gianfranco: «Tradizione e cultura trobadorica nelle corti e nelle città
venete», in idem, Culture e lingue nel Veneto medievale (Padua, 1990), pp.
1-137; also in the same volume «La presenza di Dante nel Veneto», pp.
287-308.
Ghisalberti, Fausto: «Medieval Biographies of Ovid», Journal of the

Warburg and Courtauld Institutes , 9 (1946), 10-59.
Heinrichs, Katherine: The Myths of Love: Classical Lovers in Medieval
Literature (University Park, PA, 1990).
Housley, Norman: «Crusades against Christians, their Origins and Early
Development, c. 1000-1216», in Peter W. Edbury, ed., Crusade and
Settlement (Cardiff, 1985), pp. 17-36; The Italian Crusades : The
Papal- Angevin Alliance and the Crusades against Christian Lay Powers,
1254-1343 (Oxford, 1982).
Hyde, J. K.: Padua in the Age of Dante (Manchester, 1966).
Jacoff, Rachel: «Transgression and Transcendence: Figures of Female Desire
in Dante's Commedia », Romanic Review , 79 (1988), 129-142; «The
Post-Palinodic Smile: Paradiso VIII and IX», Dante Studies , 98 (1980),
144
111-122.
Kendrick, Laura: The Game of Love: Troubadour Wordplay (Berkeley and Los
Angeles, 1988).
Lambert, Malcolm: Medieval Heresy , 2nd edition (Oxford, 1992).
Mussato, Albertino: Ecerinis , in Emilio Faccioli, ed., Il teatro italiano, I,
Dalle origini al Quattrocento , ii (Turin, 1975), pp. 293-333.
Pasquazi, Silvio: «Il canto IX del Paradiso », in idem, D'Egitto in
Ierusalemme. Studi danteschi (Rome, 1985), pp. 157-180.
Picone, Michelangelo: «Paradiso IX: Dante, Folchetto e la diaspora
trobadorica», Medioevo Romanzo, 8 (1981-3), 47-89.
Raimondi, Ezio: «Dante e il mondo ezzeliniano», in V. Branca and G.
Padoan, eds, Dante e la culture veneta (Florence, 1966), pp. 51-69; «Una
tragedia del Trecento», in idem, Metafora e storia: studi su Dante e Petrarca
(Turin, 1970), pp. 148-162.
Riley-Smith, Jonathan: «Crusading as an Act of Love», History , 65 (1980),
177-192.
Roedel, Reto: «Il canto IX del Paradiso », in G. Getto, ed., Letture dantesche ,
III (Florence, 1964), pp. 171-193.
Rossi, Albert L.: «ME pos d'amor plus no*m cai": Ovidian Exemplarity and
Folco's Rhetoric of Love in Paradiso IX», TENSO : Bulletin of the Société
Guilhem IX, 5 (1989), 49-102.
Rubenstein, Nicolai: «The Beginnings of Political Thought in Florence»,
Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes , 5 (1942), 198-227.
Siberry, Elizabeth: Criticism of Crusading 1095-1274 (Oxford, 1985);
«Troubadours, trouvères, minnesingers and the crusades», Studi Medievali ,
29 (1988), 19-43.
Strayer, Joseph R.: The Albigensian Crusades (Michigan, 1992).
Stronski, Stanislav: Le troubadour Folquet de Marseille (Cracow, 1910).
Suitner, Franco: «Due trovatori nella Commedia (Bertran de Born e Folchetto
di Marsiglia)», Atti della Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei , Memorie , Classe
di Scienze morali, storiche e filologiche , ser. VIII, vol. XXIV, fase. 5
(Rome, 1980), 579-645.
Toja, Gianluigi: «Il canto di Folchetto da Marsiglia», Convivium , 34
(1966), 234-256.
Vallone, Aldo: «Il canto IX del Paradiso », in Nuove letture dantesche , VI
(Florence, 1973), pp. 45-68.
Villani, Giovanni: Cronica , ed. by F. G. Dragomanni (Florence, 1845).
Villey, Michel: La Croisade. Essai sur la formation d'une théorie juridique
(Paris, 1942).
Wessley, Stephen: «Female Imagery: A Clue to the Role of Joachim's Order
of Fiore», in Julius Kirchner and Suzanne F. Wemple, eds, Women of the
Medieval World (Oxford, 1985), pp. 161-178.
Zingarelli, N.: La personalità storica di Folchetto nella Commedia di Dante
(Bologna, 1899).
145
Paradiso X
Author(s): GARY P. CESTARO
Accessed: 17-02-2020 23:02 UTC
Lectura Dantis
GARY P. CESTARO
De Paul University
X
The elaborate architecture of numbers upon which Inferno and
Purgatorio are erected casts a mere shadow in this region of Paradiso .
For Dante, that Roman numeral X means, of course, perfection and new
beginnings. Thus as Inferno has its upper Hell and Purgatory its
Antepurgatory, so Paradise has imaged forth, in its opening nine cantos,
three heavens of «defective» beatitude: the heaven of the Moon, whose
souls neglected to fulfil their vows; the heaven of Mercury, whose souls
performed virtuous acts because driven, at least in part, by desire for
human glory; and the heaven of Venus, whose souls had, at least for a
time, mixed a potentially perilous concoction of charity and lust.
Cosmologically, the Earth's conical shadow extends only to the third
heaven (see Paradiso IX, 118-19). With canto X and the ascent to the
fourth heaven, the heaven of the Sun, we are in complete light, utterly
free of even the shadow of earthly imperfection. Thus as in Inferno X we
enter the city of Dis, and as in Purgatorio X we enter Purgatory proper,
so in Paradiso X we leave all shadow behind to begin, as it were, anew.
But the most intriguing aspect of this structural rigor regards the
gradual dissolution of structure that is to some extent Paradiso' s theme
throughout; at this crucial juncture (the very Roman numeral says
«crossroads»), the problematics of paradisiacal signification gain
particular poignancy. Consonant with the poetics of the «pearl upon a
milk-white brow», the architectural and poetic lines of canto X signify,
but ever so delicately.1 There is no great stone battlement to demarcate
one zone from the next, no nor even a wall of fire. The line we are asked
to contemplate has no physical substance at all: a shadow ends. This
moment in the poem nicely recapitulates Paradiso1 s poetics of barely
discernible difference, of ever lower relief soaring towards the ecstasy of
tabula rasa. It gently recalls the difficult lessons of canto IV: that all
souls have their proper and eternal seat in the divine mind/will that is
Empyrean; that none of the divisions of Paradiso has any more than a
metaphorical, which is to say re-presentational, reality; that all of the
Paradiso - text and «realm» - is in this sense a shadow of the only
true, invisible reality. From this perspective, even the pure sunlight of
the fourth heaven will be outdone, as we know, by more intense
146
varieties of light; thus, a kind of terrestrial and textual shadow will
endure (as it must if there is to be any visible reality for the pilgrim and
a legible poem for us) well beyond canto X and the heaven of the Sun.
After all, the poet has let us know from the start that Paradiso can
only hope to exist as the reflection of a shadow («l'ombra del beato
regno / segnata nel mio capo»: Paradiso I.23-24).2 That he should again
draw our attention to the problematics of signification upon entering the
heaven of the Sun is only appropriate, inasmuch as the sun represents
for Dante the ultimate signifier: that word in the text of the created
universe that we humans can barely, and only indirectly, contemplate;
the preeminent representation of God in Nature; a perfect sign of the
distance and possibility that lie between the human capacity to read and
the divine capacity to signify. Dante discusses the sun's signifying
privilege in Convivio III.xii.7 and reminds us of the sun's extraordinary
semiotic status here in Paradiso X (see 43-54) and back in Paradiso I,
where the pilgrim's direct, if momentary, contemplation of the sun in
imitation of Beatrice played center stage (see in particular 43-66).
The poetics of sunlight constitute only one of many instructive
parallels that invite comparison between our canto and the first. In canto
X, the poet wants to signal new beginnings. As such, this canto
(particularly in its opening 63 verses) replays in a solar key, if you will,
many of the basic motifs sounded in canto I (X.l-6):
Guardando nel suo Figlio con l'Amore

che l'uno e l'altro etternalmente spira,
lo primo e ineffabile Valore
quanto per mente e per loco si gira
con tant' ordine fé, ch'esser non puote
sanza gustar di lui chi ciò rimira.
Above all, we are called upon to remember Beatrice's lecture on the

perfect ordering of the world («Le cose tutte quante / hanno ordine tra
loro...», I. 103ff) and the mystical diversity that such an ordering
comprises (1.109-1 14):
Ne l'ordine ch'io dico sono accline
tutte nature, per diverse sorti,

più al principio loro e men vicine;
onde si muovono a diversi porti
per lo gran mar de l'essere, e ciascuna
con istinto a lei dato che la porti.
The «diverse sorti» and «diversi porti» echo strongly the earlier «diverse
147
foci» through which the sun rises on its annual gyre between the
Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, and upon which Dante focuses our
attention at the very beginning of the Paradiso' s narratio (I. 37-42):
Surge ai mortali per diverse foci

la lucerna del mondo; ma da quella
che quattro cerchi giugne con tre croci,
con miglior corso e con migliore stella
esce congiunta, e la mondana cera
più a suo modo tempera e suggella.
The pilgrim has now reached this point in his itinerary: the
cosmologically propitious vernal equinox, the point that joins four
heavenly circles (horizon, celestial equator, ecliptic, equinoctial colure)3
to form, somehow, three crosses, all united in the single image of a
rising sun (X. 28-34):
Lo ministro maggior de la natura,

che del valor del ciel lo mondo imprenta
e col suo lume il tempo ne misura,
con quella parte che sù si rammenta
congiunto, si girava per le spire
in che più tosto ognora s'appresenta;
e io era con lui...
And if Dante looked up and saw the sun as Nature's privileged signifier
for God, there can be little doubt that he was captivated by that same
sun's springtime positioning upon the enigmatic merger of three crosses
and four circles as Nature's brilliant representation of the Trinity : one in
three, three in one, the central mystery of Christian experience. The poet
thus invites us in the very opening verses to contemplate the
intellectual challenge that is the Trinity and, shortly thereafter, to
consider a visible manifestation of the same in the book of Nature: the
contrary, revolutionary harmony of celestial equator and ecliptic.4
Continuing our comparative analysis of canto X with canto I,
however, it is surely also the case that this opening contemplation of
the Trinity, and of spiratio in particular, amounts to no less than a new
invocation This time the poet appeals to no mythological
accommodation of poetic inspiration as he had at the beginnings of
Inferno and Purgatorio by calling on the Muses generally and then the
epic Calliope in particular; nor does he even allow for the shadow of
ambiguity that somewhat confused mythological accommodation and
Christian revelation in Paradiso I, where he had called for inspiration
148
(«Entra nel petto mio e spira...», 19) on the Muses and Apollo, the sun
god, whom he characterized in verse 22, in decidedly Christian terms, as
«divina virtù». That Dante wants the reader to recall the logic of poetic
inspiration at the opening of canto X should be dramatically clear to any
who have read Purgatorio XXIV. 52-54, Dante's manifesto of properly
inspired poetry («I' mi son un che, quando / Amor mi spira, noto...»).
Here at the opening of Paradiso X, in a radically different context, Dante
again casts the capitalized, personified Love and the key verb «spira» in
high profile at the end of the initial two verses. If back in Purgatorio
XXIV, however, the evocation of transcendent inspiration in a courtly
context made for a certain tension between conflicting concepts of love,
here in Paradiso X all conflict has disappeared. The poet now gazes
directly (though not yet face to face) on the true source of all genuine
inspiration.
He invites us to gaze along with him, as he had been invited by the
studious souls of the fourth heaven (7-12):
Leva dunque, lettore, a l'alte rote

meco la vista, dritto a quella parte
dove l'un moto e l'altro si percuote;
e lì comincia a vagheggiar ne l'arte
di quel maestro che dentro a sé l'ama,
tanto che mai da lei l'occhio non parte.
This is, after all, the heaven of the «sapienti», of wisemen, professors
and scholars. These souls made a profession of intellectual
contemplation or consideration;6 their lifelong ambition is configured in
an upward gaze upon the stars; the mental puzzle of equator/ecliptic and
Trinity constituted their daily bread. Here in a kind of paradisiacal
contaminano, pilgrim and reader are asked to feast on this bread.
Dante's language thus grows increasingly academic; it is the
language of professional students. God is a magister who eternally
contemplates the perfection of his «arte». We readers are students at our
desks, challenged by our master-poet to consider the necessity and
sufficiency of contrary oblique circles (see vv. 13-21) and a God in
whom one equals three (22-27):
Or ti riman, lettor, sovra '1 tuo banco,

dietro pensando a ciò che si preliba,
s'esser vuoi lieto assai prima che stanco.
Messo t'ho innanzi: ornai per te ti ciba;
ché a sé torce tutta la mia cura
quella materia ond' io son fatto scriba.
149
At this stage of the poem's development the teacher-poet has no time for
gradual pedagogy. To adopt a popular medieval grammatical metaphor,
he no longer has time to nurse us along from milk to bread crumbs to
solid food: such great distances must be covered!7 He has laid the table
and we can either consume with adult appetite and digestion or grow
weary and resigned. Dante the voyager eats with gusto (see vv. 55ff:
«Cor di mortal non fu mai sì digesto...»); Dante the poet is completely
taken up with his role as conduit and relator of divine reality, a human
scribe of transcendent inspiration (and we recall Purgatorio XXIV).
Now the bread metaphor boasts an illustrious academic past, from
Plato's Banquet to Dante's own Convivio. But here in Paradiso X the
true and final object of that intellectual hunger and thirst has been
revealed. The virtuous intellects that encircle Dante and Beatrice now
realize that the superficial philosophical differences that separated and
even opposed them on Earth - and Thomas and Sigieri constitute only
the most dramatic examples - all participated to varying degrees in the
same inspired movement that aims to know divine will. They can now
look back in palinodie amusement on the sometimes tortuous
particulars of their syllogistic argumentations and recognize there so
many material manifestations - visible signs - of a common
invisible desire.8 Each followed his own specific gravity, that which
Augustine considered the «weight» of his love.9 Indeed, the quasi
oxymoronic notion of an intellectual or spiritual «fattening» informs
the metaphorical structure of the entire canto and will be particularly
evident in Thomas's self-presentation as one of the Dominican herd, «u'
ben s'impingua se non si vaneggia» (96), a verse upon which poet and
pilgrim will dwell in the following canto.
Much of the poetic energy of canto X goes to revealing the larger
teleology of these souls' desire for intellectual satisfaction; that is to
say, of these souls' «studiousness», from the Latin «studeo»: to desire,
to be eager or zealous for, to be enthusiastic about, to be a partisan
for.10 Dante would have us participate in that specifically intellectual
love or zeal («comincia a vagheggiar ne l'arte / di quel maestro che
dentro a sé l'ama», 10-11). He hopes to convey the intensity and
immediacy of what might appear to most a difficult, even obscure
pursuit. We discover that intellectual «studiousness» simply represents
one of the myriad, diverse reflections of that innate universal appetite to
rejoin divinity. It is as urgent as hunger for bread, thirst for water, and
- as we shall see in extraordinary language at the canto's end - even
erotic desire. In these powerful physical images, Dante communicates to
the common mortal reader something of the primal energy that can drive
intellect: this is perhaps the most significant definition of
150
accommodation in the canto. Moreover, this is a canto whose images
aggressively rehearse Paradis&s underlying semiotic scale, from the
unity of pure white silence that is divinity in essence, to the
«anti-shadows»11 that plot light against light, to somewhat more
concrete astronomical bodies, to scenes from everyday life on Earth,
down to the most basic physical drives. Canto X pushes us up and down
this chain of accommodation. The pilgrim becomes aware of his ascent
to the fourth heaven only after having arrived (34-36). The
philosopher-poet recalls the joy of spontaneous intellectual discovery, of
being surprised without warning by the presence of a thought or idea
already full-blown. Such a mental experience would have been familiar
to the philosopher-souls who inhabit this heaven.
Only Beatrice can guide us at these lofty heights. She exists
outside of time and yet she moves, for our sake, from heaven to heaven,
from vague shadow to sunlight, «di bene in meglio, sì subitamente /
che l'atto suo per tempo non si sporge» (38-39). She bridges time and
eternity, visible and invisible, and is a crucial medium in the poet's
continual focus on differences in light. The souls of this heaven
outshine the sun itself (40-42), just as the pilgrim's momentary
participation in pure divinity eclipses even Beatrice (59-60). ^
At this point in the canto the poet begins to step further down the
ladder of signification as the crown of souls finally appears (64-69):
Io vidi più folgór vivi e vincenti

far di noi centro e di sé far corona,
più dolci in voce che in vista lucenti:
così cinger la figlia di Latona
vedem talvolta, quando l'aere è pregno,
sì che ritenga il fil che fa la zona.
In literal cosmological condescension, the poet moves from sun to

moon the better to speak to our senses: we shall soon (at least
metaphorically) be on Earth again. But first Dante reminds us of the
accommodational character of all his images and particulates the central
semiotic truth of the canticle (70-75):
Ne la corte del cielo, onď io rivegno,

si trovan molte gioie care e belle
tanto che non si posson trar del regno;
e 'l canto di quei lumi era di quelle;
chi non s'impenna sì che là sù voli,
dal muto aspetti quindi le novelle.
151
Our report of Paradise is delivered as if by a mute; signification proceeds
from silence.
Now the circular dance of stars can come into focus. The
philosophical garland wraps Dante and Beatrice three times before
pausing to address the pilgrim. Metaphorically, Dante juxtaposes and
conflates the most abstruse of astronomical images (the slow-moving
stars around the celestial fixed poles) with the graceful human figures of
a popular Florentine dance (76-81). The poet intervenes to stop the
dance midstep, to freeze the frame and suspend the harmony for one
extraordinary moment in order to give the pilgrim and us, mortal
readers, the opportunity to glimpse and perhaps even comprehend in
some degree that transhuman situation.13
The soul who speaks is the Italian Saint Thomas Aquinas
(1226-74): author of the monumental Summa theologica , professor of
theology at Cologne, Paris, and Naples, the imposing voice of authority
for Dante on all matters Aristotelian and divine. Thomas continues the
nutritional metaphor in order to cast the pilgrim's intellectual curiosity
in terms of the inborn existential gravity that informs all things in the
universal scheme: «qual ti negasse il vin de la sua fiala / per la tua sete,
in libertà non fora / se non com' acqua ch'ai mar non si cala» (88-90).
The attuned reader picks up echoes, once again, of canto I Paradiso
(136-38) and, somewhat more remotely, of Marco Lombardo' s discourse
on free will in Purgatorio XVI. Not to satisfy the pilgrim's right-minded
desire would constitute a violation of free will: a violation, that is, of a
will free to follow a pre-programmed desire (cf. Purgatorio XVI.80:
«liberi soggiacete»).
Thomas reviews the garland of studious souls with measured
efficiency as these contemplators become themselves the object of
contemplation: first his own colleague and teacher, Albertus Magnus
(1193-1280); Gratian, author of the famed Decretum (ca. 1140) and
father of canon law; Peter Lombard (d. 1164), master of theology and
author of the hugely influential Sententiae. Proceeding on this journey
back through intellectual history, Thomas then leaves the
twelfth-century theologians to start at the beginning with Solomon,
poet, lover, and author of the Old Testament Song of Songs, whose
sometime lustful language of mystical love will be echoed at the canto's
end. Now the Middle Ages misattributed a number of important
Christian Neoplatonic writings from the fifth century (foremost among
which was a treatise on the angelic hierarchies, De coelesti hierarchia) to
the first-century martyr and bishop of Athens, Dionysius the
Areopagite, whom Saint Paul converted to the Christian faith (see Acts
of the Apostles 17:34). All historical confusion aside, Thomas moves
152
from Solomon to Dionysius, and thus from Old Testament to New,
before pressing forward to the Church Fathers on back to the twelfth
century and his contemporary and professional rival, Siger of Brabant.
The cryptic identification of the soul after Dionysius (118-20) has
left readers puzzled across the centuries. From a structural perspective, it
is most important to recognize a figure from early Latin patrology,
whether this be Saint Augustine's spiritual mentor and bishop of Milan,
Saint Ambrose (340-97); or the fourth-century rhetorician and translator
of Plato, Marius Victorinus; or the fifth-century Spanish church
historian, Paulus Orosius.14 Thomas then singles out for extraordinary
attention (121-29) the soul of Boethius (ca. 480-526), wrongly accused
victim of capricious political Fortune and author of the fundamental
Consolation of Philosophy . Dante's depiction of Boethius as «martyr»
and «exile» betrays his deeply personal attachment to this particular
thinker. We next step briskly through the seventh and eighth centuries
en route back to the twelfth: Isidore (d. 636), bishop of Seville and
author of the Webster's Unabridged / Encyclopedia Britannica of his day,
the Etymologiae ; the Venerable Bede (674-735), author of a history of
the English people; and Richard of Saint Victor (d. 1173), prior of the
famous monastery near Paris and major exponent of mystical theology.
Thomas thus completes the harmony of this philosophical circle
by identifying (seated at his right hand) his ideological enemy in life,
Siger of Brabant: he, too, master of theology in Paris, and leading
partisan of that dangerously heretical strain of Averroistic
Aristotelianism whose central tenets were denounced by Bishop Tempier
of Paris in the 1270s. The poignancy of this heavenly reunion -
dramatized by the two souls' contiguous proximity in the ballet-like
circle - is Dante the poet's masterstroke. Now distant from the mental
torture of academic discourse, Thomas and Siger rejoice in the
commonality of appetite that could have united them on Earth.
The truncated violence and heavy phonetic density of verse 138
(«silogizzò invidiosi veri») gives way to the ethereal sweetness and light
of divine harmony as the garland renews its cosmic circling and celestial
song in the canto's final tercets. The concluding image (139-48)
compares the souls' dance to the intricate workings of a mechanical
clock, whose chiming awakes the bride that she may sing matins to her
groom. This complex simile functions on several levels at once and
thus brilliantly recapitulates the gesture of accommodation in relation to
divine mystery that has in many ways been canto X's primary concern.
The revolving garland - which of itself recalls the difficult harmony of
equator/ecliptic and Trinity that was the canto's earlier focus - mirrors
the elaborate interaction of the gears in a mechanical clock working
153
together towards a single purpose: chime, music, song. The clock
simile alone moves nicely from the arduous intellectual realm of
philosophy to the affective realm of poetry. As canto X has
demonstrated from the start, complex mental action must resolve in
simple joyous harmony. But Dante goes beyond to bring the concept of
philosophical love down to Earth. Philosophical love participates,
ultimately, in that same affective movement that leads the Church to
proclaim her love for Christ (and here we recall the Song of Songs), that
causes the lover to sing the praises of the beloved, that brings lovers
together in perfect physical harmony.15 Intellectual, liturgical, lyrical,
and physical in its various earthly forms, the impulse that carries souls
to their perfect end has been revealed in its singular essence. Dante thus
leaves it to us readers - professors, lovers, poets, priests - to
recognize that common aim in the difficult, diverse harmony of the sun
and stars.
NOTES
êe Paradiso 111.14. For an introduction to the poetics of the Paradiso , see
John Freccero, «An Introduction to the Paradiso », in: Dante: The Poetics of
Conversion , ed. Rachel Jacoff (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard
University Press, 1986), pp. 209-20. The translation «pearl upon a milk
white brow» is John Ciardi's and was cited by Freccero in the original
version of his introductory essay to The Paradiso , trans. J. Ciardi (New
York: The New American Library, 1970). In The Poetics of Conversion, on
canto X specifically see: «The Dance of the Stars: Paradiso X», pp. 221-44.
In addition to Freccero 's essays and the commentaries of Sapegno (La
Divina Commedia , vol. III, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1983) and Singleton
(The Divine Comedy , vol. Ill, pts. 1/2, Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1975), I have also consulted the following lecturae : W. W. Vernon,
Readings on the Paradiso of Dante, vol. I (London: Methuen, 1909), pp.
329-63; K. Vossler, Mediaeval Culture , trans. W. C. Lawton, vol. II (New
York: Ungar, 1929); L. Fassò, «Il Canto X del Paradiso» in Letture
Dantesche, ed. G. Getto, vol. III (Florence: Sansoni, 1961); F. Forti, «Il
Canto X» in Lectura Dantis Scaligera , vol. III (Florence: Le Monnier,
1968), pp. 349-86; K. Foster, «The Celebration of Order: Paradiso X»,
Dante Studies XC (1972), pp. 109-24; P. Dronke, «The First Circle in the
Solar Heaven», in Dante and Medieval Latin Traditions (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 82-102; T. Barolini, «The Heaven
of the Sun as a Meditation on Narrative», in The Undivine Comedy:
Detheologizing Dante (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp.
194-217.
2 All citations of the poem are from the critical text of G. Petrocchi.
154
^For a thorough explanation of these cosmological structures, see P. Boyde,
Dante Philomythes and Philosopher : Man in the Cosmos (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 132-71 and in particular the
diagrams on pp. 150 and 155.
^For more on the interpretation of this image, see Freccero, «Dance of the
Stars», and J. Kleiner, «The Eclipses in the Paradiso », Stanford Italian
Review IX (1990), pp. 5-32 and in particular pp. 12-13. Freccero has
suggested that Dante conceived as metaphorical parallels the two motions
of the heavenly spheres and the two intratrinitarian motions of sp irat io and
filiatio alluded to in the opening verses (and again in verses 49-51).
**For earlier examples of Dantean invocatio, see Inferno II.7-9, Purgatorio
1.7-12, and Paradiso 1.13-36.
"On the etymological resonance of «contemplado» and «considerado» as
related to this canto, see Freccero, cit., pp. 226-27 and n. 10.
'Cf. Beatrice's words to the pilgrim back in Paradiso V.34-39. The metaphor
of gradually increased digestive power was widespread in medieval
grammatical and philosophical texts. For one particularly elaborate
example, see Eberhard the German's Labor intus (esp. 175 and following) in
Les arts poétiques du XII et du XIII siècle: Recherches et documents sur la
technique littéraire du moyen âgey ed. E. Farai (Paris, 1924; repr. 1958);
and of course the opening pages of Dante's own Convivio.
°On the structure of the palinode in this general region of Paradiso , see R.
Jacoff, «The Post-Palinodic Smile: Paradiso VIII and IX», Dante Studies
XCVIII (1980), pp. 111-22.
^See Augustine, Confessions XlII.ix; cf. Paradiso 1.115-26.
l^For a fuller discussion of the conflation of knowledge and love in this
canto, see Dronke, pp. 82-90.
Freccero coined the term «and-image» in «Introduction to the Paradiso» ,
p. 212.
li¿For a sustained consideration of the structure of the eclipse in the
Paradiso . see Kleiner.
l^This circling group of souls will of course be joined in canto XII by a
second crown circling in the opposite direction, a configuration surely
intended to reflect the contrary circular harmony of eclipdc and equator. For
a thorough consideration of possible antecedents to such imagery in a
variety of Neoplatonic texts, see Freccero, «Dance of the Stars».
14 For a broader review of interpretations, see Sapegno and Singleton, ad
loc. In support of Orosius, see Forti, p. 374n. and Dronke, p. 95.
lÎt would be difficult to overlook the physical, even erotic, suggestion of
such verbs as «tira», «urge», «turge» (from the Latin «turgeo», to swell,
become distended), and of course «gioir», widely attested in medieval
Italian love lyric; see the Grande dizionario della lingua italiana , ed. S.
Battaglia (Torino: UTET, 1970) and, for the Latin, DuCange, Glossarium
Mediae et Infimae Latinitatis (Nort: L. Farre, 1887), s. v.
155
Paradiso XI
Author(s): MARIO TROVATO
Accessed: 17-02-2020 23:04 UTC
Lectura Dantis
MARIO TROVATO
Northwestern University
XI
Paradiso XI opens with a pessimistic view of human behavior.
Contrary to his own vertical flight toward the Supreme Good, the poet
envisions humans as «downward flying», moving toward their own
individual, selfish goals. The sight from heaven makes the pilgrim
express his exultant satisfaction at being not only physically, but
morally distant from the earthly community (1-9):
O insensata cura de' mortali,

quanto son difettivi silogismi
quei che ti fanno in basso batter l'ali!
Chi dietro a iura e chi ad amforismi
sen giva, e chi seguendo sacerdozio,

e chi regnar per forza o per sofismi,
e chi rubare e chi civil negozio,
chi nel diletto de la carne involto
s'affaticava e chi si dava all'ozio...
In the exclamative sentence of the first three lines, the emphatic phrase
«o insensata cura de' mortali» is designed both to determine the quality
of the common goal of various categories of people, and to associate
these categories in one large human family whose flight is
«insensato», like the Ulyssean «mad flight» («il folle volo»).1 The
métonymie phrase, «difettivi silogismi», standing for an imperfect
philosophical science, connotes the nature of an ethical code which is
«false» («difettivo») because it is based on the «useful» («utilitade»).
This kind of ethics enforces the «downward flight of mortals» («in
basso batter l'ali»).2 The anaphoric polysyndeton (six «e»
conjunctions) vividly portrays the conjunction of different professions
in one activity having the same «insensate» goal.
Obviously, the pilgrim's flight is supposed to be determined by an
aim which makes it «sensato». To reach Beatrice, however, is not
Dante's task; she is only the channel through which the divine fuel -
the «honest», divine science - energizes the wings - intelligence and
will - of the protagonist's soul flying toward the Supreme Good, the
ultimate end of human activity: «da tutte queste cose sciolto, / con
156
Béatrice m'era suso in cielo / cotanto gloriosamente accolto» (10-12).
This exordium , therefore, portrays a dramatic social situation,
represented by two different groups of people, two different activities
(the down ward- flying and the upward-flying), and two different goals.
However, the propositio or theme, stated by St. Thomas («u' ben
s'impingua» and «nacque il secondo», 25-26), seems to break the
logical tie with the previous structure. First of all, the speaker
pre-announces a complex subject which will be developed in this canto
and the next two; moreover, Thomas's topics, rather than focusing on
the deviant society, seem to restrict the social issue, suggested in the
exordium , to the deviation of religious orders from their commitment
to the Church. In point of fact, both the narratio (28-117), and the
conclusio (118-139) of canto XI present a theme which is primarily
religious: respectively, the mystical marriage between St. Francis and
Lady Poverty and the straying of the Dominican Order. In canto XII,
the panegyrist St. Bonaventure eulogizes St. Francis's «colleague», St.
Dominic, and ends his discourse by blaming the unfaithful
Franciscans. Finally, the second part of the propositio, regarding
Solomon's wisdom, is discussed in canto XIII and appears to be a mere
theoretical question: the explanation of why Christ and Solomon were
both perfect and what constitutes the limit of Solomon's wisdom.
Hence, one wonders, what is the purpose of the exordiuml Is it a mere
reflection complete in itself and therefore unrelated to the canto, or is it
a regular exordium connoting the meaning foreshadowing the
propositio and shown through the narratiol What, then, is the thematic
epicenter of this canto and, I would say, of the three cantichel Is it the
value of Poverty or is it political activity in the Church?
I believe that at the center of cantos XI, XII, and XIII there is the
representation of the universal Ecclesia , the human-divine bride of
Wisdom Incarnate. She is introduced by the metonymical (not
allegorical) name «Donna Povertà» and presented in her twofold
aspects, contemplative, represented by St. Francis (canto XI), and
active, represented by St. Dominic (canto XII). The Bridegroom of
Lady Poverty, however, happens to be the direct source of political
power, represented by Solomon, who must be committed to the
guidance of universal human society to its proper end (XIII).3 I will
restrict my analysis to the first canto of the trilogy; I will argue that
the poet is not portraying the allegorical virtue of Poverty, but, by
using «Povertà» as the qualifying attribute of the real «Donna», he sets
two churches face to face: the «insensata» which «vaneggia», that is,
runs after vanities - composed of jurists, the religious («priests»),
political leaders, thieves (simoniacs and grafters), and philosophers; and
157
the real bride of Wisdom Incarnate, whose authenticity is certified by
her original status: the poor Widow of Christ, who became the poor
Spouse of the «alter Christus», St. Francis.4 Hence, the panegyrist's
conclusion, which is Dante's, is a statement which confirms that only
in the true Church may healthy food be found («impingua»); this
Church is the one Dante names the «poor Lady», married by Christ,
the poor, and re-married by the Saint of Assisi.
To represent poetically his ideology, which runs through most of
his works,5 Dante, as usual, resorts to the historical documents
available to him. Being in the heaven of Sun, the habitat of those who
honored divine Wisdom, the poet chooses three characters, Francis,
Dominic, and Solomon, whom, each in his own capacity, he
considered strictly related to divine wisdom. Dante, of course, selects
appropriate biographical material, suitable to reveal both the history of
the personages and his religious-political ideology. Just because the
author picked Francis's love for poverty as the main characteristic of
his life, the majority of criticism reflects the conviction that Dante
wrote this canto to represent the allegorical virtue of poverty. Thus
critics have attempted to discover the sources of St. Thomas's discourse
on the mystical marriage between Francis and Lady Poverty in order to
establish the connection between Dante's thought subtending the
allegorical marriage and the notion of poverty as it was reported in the
historical or legendary biographical material regarding St. Francis.
From Mestica, Cosmo and Barbi to Bosco and Ulivi,6 the main
concern of studies has focused on the similarities and differences
between Dante's poetical biography and historical, legendary, or
pictorial biographies, like the anonymous Sacrum commercium beati
Francisci cum domina Pauper tate , Thomas Celano's Vitae , St.
Bonaventure's Legenda Major, Ubertino da Casale's Arbor vitae , and
Giotto's frescoes. The conclusive result of these historical studies may
be summarized by Auerbach's statement: «The biography expounded by
Thomas contains very little of all those marvellous and extremely
concrete details preserved by the Franciscan legend».7 Obviously, the
poet was not interested in re-writing a poetical biography, which, like
a fresco, should show the most characteristic details of the Saint's life.
He drew only what fitted his general, poetical plan. Dante's
intepretation of Francis's Lady Poverty appears to be more profound
than the notion of poverty shown by the contemporary historians and
authors of legends. Raoul Manselli has convincingly demonstrated that
cantos XI and XII reflect in an unequivocal way Dante's view of the
Church as it was promoted by the Franciscan Peter of John Olivi.8
Indeed, in canto XI «Lady Poverty» is not an allegorical figure
158
similar to those of the «carmi allegorici della tarda antichità»
(Auerbach, cit. p. 224). Lady Poverty is a metonym standing for the
«Donna» of Christ, the «mystical body of Christ which is the society
of the saints» as defined by the speaker, Thomas, in his Summa
Theologiae («corpus Christi mysticum, quod est societas sanctorum»,
III, 80, 4). This biblical and theological vision of the Church as «one
mystical body» having «one head» constitutes the nucleus of Boniface
VIII's Unam sanctam. Dante would have accepted the contents of the
Bull excepting one paragraph which reads: «Therefore, the one and only
Church has one body, one head (not two heads, like a monster);
namely, Christ and his Vicar Peter, and the successor of Peter; for the
Lord said to Peter himself, "Feed my sheep" (John 21: 17)». The
politician-poet concedes that the Head of the universal Ecclesia is one,
the incarnated Persona- Wisdom, who, however, operates through two
natures: human and divine. In the Convivio , in fact, the poet envisages
human-divine nature as two different organs of the Head: respectively
the «eyes» and the «smile». The Head communicates with other
members of the «mystical body» through the «eyes» (Ratio) and
«smile» (Fides). On this theological doctrine, the poet grounds his
political theory, according to which the divine authority, flowing from
God, «bifurcates» («biffurcatur», Epist. V, 17). There is one authority,
the Head of the Persona- Wisdom, who operates through two distinct
organs: the «Eyes» (Rational Power = Emperor) and the «Smile»
(Supernatural Power = Pontiff). Two distinct authorities, two
principles of activity, rational and spiritual; two directions leading,
however, to the same end: human-divine perfection. Consequently, the
relationship of the Pontiff with the «mystical body» is essentially
spiritual and constitutes the «spiritual Church» which is the place «u'
ben s'impingua».
For Dante this is the real Church which turned out to be an
«abandoned widow» after Christ's death. The poet's pessimism about
the historical situation of the Church reveals his profound conviction
that at the origin of the ecclesiastical corruption there is «Constantine's
dowry»9 Qnf. XIX, 115-117). The poet settles the chronological terms
within which the real «bride» of Christ was not only widowed, but
«dispetta» («despised») and «scura» («obscure»). He seems to be in
agreement with the Cathars and Waldenses who saw Pope Sylvester
(314-335), the receiver of the donatio , as the anti-Christ (64-66): 10
Questa, privata del primo marito,

millecenť anni e più dispetta e scura
fino a costui si stette sanza invito.
159
These lines recall Letter XI written to the Italian cardinals: «Quomodo
sola sedet civitas plena populo! . . . Quasi vidua domina gentium». Here
Dante identifies the «vidua» with Rome, the Holy See of both Peter
and the Emperor. Dante makes the supreme pastoral activity of Peter
derive essentially from his love for Christ. He stresses that only after
Peter had reaffirmed his love three times did Christ address him with a
specific order: «Peter feed my sacred sheepfold». The letter goes on to
say that the city of Rome, confirmed by Christ as the universal
Ecclesia and consecrated by the blood of Peter and Paul, has turned out
to be an «abandoned widow».
Dante's interpretation of the historical Church, the true Bride of
Christ, seems to be grounded on three main points: 1) the «sheep»
belong to Christ («oves meas»); 2) Christ entrusts his sheep to Peter
on the condition that Peter, through love, becomes one with Christ; 3)
it follows that Peter will love the sheep as Christ did. By affirming
that «millecenť anni e più ... / fino a costui si stette sanza invito», the
poet implies that since Constantine's donation the Church has changed
its nature: it is no longer the poor Church, originating from the Cross
of «Him who, with loud cries, espoused her with the blessed blood»,
and entrusted to Peter. The Lady has been replaced by the Apocalyptic
Whore. The tie linking Pastor and sheep is carnal rather than spiritual.
In accord with the movement of pauperism, Dante sees Francis as the
«alter Christus» who re-established the true nature of the relationship
existing between the Caput , the Pastor, and the corpus Ecclesie , the
Church.11
At this point, we wonder what the real meaning of the attribute
«poor» is? What, according to Dante, makes the Church to be the
«Donna» of Christ? In the Monarchia , he writes: «Forma autem
Ecclesie nichil aliud est quam vita Christi, tam in dictis quam in factis
comprehensa: vita enim ipsius ydea fuit et exemplar militantis
Ecclesiae, presertim pastorům, maxime summi, cuius est pascere
agnos et oves» (III, xv, 3). In interpreting Christ's life, Dante's
emphasis falls on the fact that Christ has given up His life for the
«sheep» without demanding anything in return. Indeed, the invectives
in the Commedia are addressed against those prelates whose priority
was their own well-being {Inf. XIX, 55-57):
Se' tu sì tosto di quell' aver sazio

per lo quai non temesti tórre a 'nganno
la bella donna, e poi di farne strazio?
160
And so too does Peter attack the Popes who outrage «la bella donna»
by leading her astray (Par. XXVII, 40-42):
Non fu la sposa di Cristo allevata

del sangue mio, di Lin, di quel di Cleto,
per essere ad acquisto d'oro usata. . .
It follows that the Bride of Christ must be loved with unselfish

love. The spiritual meaning of poverty is strictly related to this kind of
love. In fact, the word 'poverty' connotes a lack of material wealth. In
the Platonic theory of «escape» from material things, voluntary
poverty was considered an essential condition for growing intellectually
and spiritually. In the New Testament poverty is an imperative
prerequisite for being a disciple of Christ («none can be my disciple
unless he gives up his possessions», Lk. 14: 33). In the Biblical
context, to be poor does not imply the rejection of riches, but rather
the estimation of the spirit above them («you cannot be the slave both
of God and of money», Mi. 6: 24). Dante is in line with the biblical
meaning of poverty. For him the notion implies a modus vivendi
whose purpose is determined by a value («onestade») which directly
opposes «the insensate care of mortals» («utilitade») and asserts its
identity with caritas , that is, the unselfishness of an individual whose
priority is love for divine Wisdom in Itself as well as in Its mystical
body. Hence, the word 'poor' signifies a person empty of worldly
matter and full of Divine Wisdom. Consequently, the character of Lady
Poverty encompasses all those («la gente poverella») who are strictly
related to Christ- Wisdom. Within this light, we can understand the
lines: «dove Maria rimase giuso, / ella con Cristo pianse in su la
croce».12 1 believe that here Dante is indirectly referring to the biblical
distinction between blood-relationship and spiritual link. When Jesus
affirmed: «Anyone who does the will of God, that person is my brother
and sister and mother», He was simply accentuating the true, spiritual
notion of love, which is even above maternal love. Thus, Dante's Lady
Poverty or the spiritual Church is linked to Christ with a tie which is
more divine than a natural one.
In fashioning the character of Francis, however, Dante does not
subordinate it to his thesis; he has undoubtedly read documents
regarding the Saint of Assisi and interpreted them within the light of
history. The artistic result is a character made in part by history and in
part by a personal interpretation of history. In canto XI, the function of
Francis's character is both to show the nature of the tie linking the
Saint to «Donna Povertà», and, at the same time, to represent the true
161
lover as opposed to the selfish lover. The contrasting lovers and their
respective beloved ladies will exactly represent Dante's theological
conviction that in his contemporary Church the relationship existing
between Pastor and sheep was an inversion of the real relationship
which should exist between Wisdom Incarnate and Its mystical body.
Hence, the poet introduces a historical Saint Francis who was
providentially predestined to correct the contemporary religious
confusion. The exordium of the panegyrist (28^42) evidences the divine
concern, which is Dante's, regarding the misdirection of the Church.
As all commentators note, Dante draws the story of the two divina
signaculay Francis and Dominic, from the Franciscan tradition. Each of
the two, however, has a specific task which defines their respective
lives (37-42):
L'un fu tutto serafico in ardore;

l'altro per sapienza in terra fue
di cherubica luce uno splendore.
De l'un dirò, però che d'amendue
si dice l'un pregiando, quai ch'om prende,
perch' ad un fine fur 1' opere sue.
Neither form nor content of these two tercets is contradictory; both

express distinction and conjunction, but on two different accounts: the
first tercet defines the two characters by their respective differentia
specifica («l'un ... serafico in ardore», «l'altro per sapienza... di
cherubica luce»). The second tercet does not deny the difference between
the two, but focuses on the different activity of each in his respective
relationship to the same end.13 As St. Francis is the providential
instrument designed to rejuvenate the contemplative life of the Church,
so St. Dominic is the device ordered to revitalize the practical activity
of the Church: the sapiential (theological-philosophical) teaching.
These activities are both directed toward a common final, spiritual
goal. In the Convivio , Dante writes: «Le quali due operazioni
[«contemplazione» e «vita attiva»] sono vie espedite e dirittissime a
menare a la somma beatitudine, la quale qui non si puote avere» (IV:
xxii, 18). «Serafico in ardore» is the attributive phrase qualifying the
character of Francis;14 the seraphic ardor is the inner spring moving
Francis's activity within Dante's episode: he is 1) a divine Messenger,
the Apocalyptic Angel (43-54); 2) a revolutionary character who moves
in a direction which was considered absurd, being diametrically opposed
to that of all his contemporaries whose earthly «care» held the priority
over the spiritual «care» (55-60); 3) a faithful and caring husband
(61-117).
162
As De Lubac has shown, in writing biographies the medieval
historians reported facts as interpreted in the light of final causes to
convey a moral message.15 Dante follows this methodology; the
background of St. Francis's portrait reproduces a geographical landscape
which is seemingly predetermined ab aeterno to be the Saint's
birth-place. It is commonly noted that Dante draws from St.
Bonaventure's Legenda , which identifies Francis with the Apocalyptic
«Angel rising where the sun rises, carrying the seal of living God»
(Rev. VII, 2). The two words the poet plays on are «Orient» and
«Ascesi» (53-54: «rising where the sun rises»): he constructs an image
suggesting that Francis has been generated from the same source as the
divine sun.16
To present the revolutionary personality of Francis, Dante exploits
the Bonaventurian episode telling of the inflexibility of the protagonist
against his father's mentality. Within the context of the canto,
however, the Dantean episode (55-63) acquires a new semantic value.
Peter Bernardone is not only the real father of the Saint, but he
personifies the abstract category of the «insensate care of mortals» and,
as the 'father', he is responsible for the deviation of his son. The
allusion is obvious: the opposition between son and father raises the
episode from a level of common domestic conflict to a level of a social
and religious differentiation. The contrast is between two opposite
orders of ideas regarding the real «Donna»: for Francis the true
«Donna» is the one «a cui, come a la morte, / la porta del piacer
nessun disserra»; for his father the real «Donna» is she who satisfies
human concupiscence. Dante's interpretation of the Bonaventurian
source (the dispute between father and son and the consequent victory
of the son over the father) as a document foreshadowing the victory of
the real Church over the Apocalyptic Whore is evidenced by the
description of Francis's first operation generating from the Saint's solar
«gran virtute» which was designed to bring «conforto» to «all the
earth» (55-57):
Non era ancor molto lontan da l'orto,

ch'el cominciò a far sentir la terra
de la sua gran virtute alcun conforto.
To portray Francis as a faithful and caring husband, Dante presents

him as a lover who holds his Donna in high esteem; the protagonist is
aware of her intrinsic values; he knows that she is «la sposa di colui
ch'ad alte grida / disposò lei col sangue benedetto» (32-33); therefore,
Francis's Donna appears to represent the supreme value on earth, who,
163
contrary to his paternal view, will be the «strength» of people (73-78).
Francis will marry her to be not only her lover but the promoter of her
values within the limits of Christianity (79-90) as well as outside of
these limits (100-105). A.A. Bialas defines the mystical or spiritual
marriage as «a figure to denote the state of a human soul living
intimately united to God through grace and love».17 Dante describes
the mystical marriage in a more realistic way; in the episode, the poet
seems to reflect what the panegyrist Thomas wrote in his Summa (III,
Suppl. 44, 2): A marriage involves three things: 1) wedlock
(«coniuncüo» = «coniugium»); 2) betrothal («desponsatio»): «dinnanzi
a la sua spiritai corte / et coram patre le si fece unito» (61-62); 3)
offspring («proles»): «sen va quel padre e quel maestro / con la sua
donna e con quella famiglia / che già legava l'umile capestro» (85-87).
Dante's realism pictures the mystical marriage with images drawn
from the real one. The recent article of Marguerite Chiarenza («Dante's
Lady Poverty», cit., p. 168) confers a spiritual meaning on Auerbach's
«grottesco-carnale»18 interpretation of the «porta del piacere» and
presents it as an «imagery of consummation» of Francis's mystical
love of Poverty. Nevertheless, by representing his own poetical
version of the mystical marriage between St. Francis and Lady
Poverty, Dante's intention was not to compete with Giotto. I would
agree with Auerbach who affirms that St. Francis's marriage is a
«figura capovolta», representing the marriage of Christ and the Church;
but I would prefer to define it as a bifacial historical figuraģ. one face
looks back (the marriage of Christ and His «Donna»), the other looks
forward and represents a situation contemporary to the poet: the fight
of Francis against paternal authority may prefigure the fight of a new
Francis [Dante] struggling against political and religious authority in
order to defend the real Church he loved with all his heart («La Chiesa
militante alcun figliuolo / non ha con più speranza», Par. XXV,
52-53) against the Church motivated by the «insensata cura».
According to this view, Joachim's prophecy foreshadowed not only
Francis, but Dante himself.
The narrative structures of the whole canto are so co-ordinated that
if we cut St. Thomas's discourse from the introductory lines and from
the conclusion, Francis's biography loses all its significance and
becomes a metahistorical biography. The character would then appear
to be an abstract, surrealistic hero torn from the real world; but,
ironically, the Saint has been destined ab ortu and through his life to
capture the world and redirect its path.19 The Dantean biography of the
Saint of Assisi seems to be designed to present neither a superman nor
a «Lady Poverty» as an allegorical figure of the homonymous virtue.
164
On the contrary, the poet portrays his protagonist as a human hero
who, wounded by the love of Christ's «Donna», dismisses his own
father, who intended to interfere with his love. The protagonist marries
her, becomes one with her and, at the same time, succeeds in
transforming others' opinions about the Lady, who, undesired at first
by all («sanza invito», 66), turns out to be an attractive heroine. The
activity between the two lovers evolves like a metamorphic process
activated by the power of love: the transfixing power of love,
performed by «Donna Povertà», turns a man into a hero of poverty,
whose recta ratio or wise judgment will act no longer according to the
earthly code of values generating and justified by «insensata cura», but
to an eternal law. Moreover, the man, transfixed by the loving Lady,
does not remain passive, but, through a loving interaction, he acts on
his partner and makes her, «dispetta e scura» (65), turn into an
attractive Lady («ignota ricchezza», «ben ferace», 82).20 Within the
context of the canto, the marriage between «lo sposo» and «la sposa»
represents a new institution, a new conjugal link betwen two juridical
persons, rather than a person (Francis) and an abstract allegory
(«Povertà»).21 In other words, Francis does not marry «Povertà» but
«donna Povertà», who, within this context, is the «bride» of Wisdom
Incarnate; she is the poor, that is, the Spiritual Church contrasted with
the wealthy and worldly Church. The nature of the conjugal link is
specified by a love which must necessarily be interpreted as unselfish,
pure love; in fact, the «Donna» is qualified with three adjectives
(«dispetta», «scura», and «povera») which portray her as a distasteful,
repugnant «donna», an object of love which is absolutely unrelated to
any of the human senses.
I doubt that Auerbach's question may be justified; the critic
wonders why Dante, who meets the personages of history throughout
the Commedia , avoids presenting the most famous hero of the
thirteenth century and talking with Francis face to face? Indeed, St.
Francis appears in Inferno XXVII (1 12-120), defeated by a «logician»
black Cherub; moreover, he is only mentioned in Paradiso XIII (33)
and XXII (90), and finally reappearing at the end of the poem among
the other saints of the New Testament, within the white rose (XXXII,
35). Auerbach has no answer for this question, and concludes that this
way of introducing St. Francis is a mistake. On the contrary, I would
restate my conviction that in constructing this canto, designed to show
those who were related to Divine Wisdom, Dante envisioned the
Church, the mystical Spouse of Wisdom Incarnate, in its historical
process: the Bride of Christ («la sposa di colui ch'ad alte grida / disposò
lei col sangue benedetto», 132-133), the widow («privata del primo
165
marito», 64), and the neglected Lady («stette sanza invito», 66), and
finally the Bride rejuvenated by the heroes Francis and Dominic. With
the marriage of Wisdom Incarnate, the mystical spouse has become the
source of truth ( the «columna et fundamentům veritatis»), destined to
feed each member of the Christian body spiritually. Nevertheless,
through its historical process, the Church has been misguided by those
representing the Head of the Body. The function of Francis and
Dominic, therefore, was instrumental, in that they were destined to
help the Church move toward its proper finality.
Cantos XI and XII are not the cantos respectively of St. Francis and
St. Dominic, but rather the cantos of the Church rejuvenated by both
Saints. The two characters are inseparable from the same Lady Poverty,
who happens to be represented through another well known biblical
image, «la barca di Pietro». Throughout the Commedia , the poet has
shown himself to be an exceptional expert at portraying himself
talking with, and interviewing directly, other characters; this time,
however, his portrait is supposed to represent the liberation of the
Church, passing from her previous state of misery to her original and
spiritual dignity. For this purpose, the poet assigns a role to two
theologians, St. Thomas and St. Bonaventure, to add authority to his
vision of the real Church and its relationship with politics. A direct
meeting with St. Francis, therefore, would have stressed too much the
presence of the Saint and would have observed the main representation
of the portrait: the revival of the bride through a spiritual, rather than
sensual marriage. Hence, the discourse is shaped as a panegyric, which
by definition is an oration in praise of a person who usually is not
present; but at the same time the discourse incorporates biographical
data of the absent person, which are essential to construct a strong
argument in favor of the poet's vision of the Church. For the same
reason, the poet avoids a direct meeting with both St. Dominic and
Solomon.
The conclusion of St. Thomas's discourse brings us back to the
structures of the canto; in fact, it shows quite clearly how the
hypothetical proposition: «U' ben s'impingua» [«se non si vaneggia»,
X, 96], links together the incipit and the narratio. The meaning of the
conditional phrase, «se non si vaneggia», poses as an absolute
condition for «a good fattening»; if this condition fails, people «stray»
and will be unhealthy. The canto develops both situations; it has been
composed in a chiastic form: by revealing his self-consciousness of
flying towards a goal which opposes various goals sought by earthly
people flying «downward», the pilgrim, from his altitude, sees the
present world in action and describes human activity as a dissipating
166
energy going astray, in that it deviates from («vaneggia»), rather than
converges on its proper goal. Instead, the main sentence, «u' ben
s'impingua», is illustrated by Francis's biography. The panegyric
reproduces the dramatic historical process of the Bride from the
marriage with Christ on and, then, with Francis; from her widowhood
following the death of Christ to that following the death of the Saint
of Assisi. Thus, the poet shows once again his insuperable ability in
representing a poetical-historical synthesis; here we have the history of
the Church within a span of time which goes from Christ to St.
Francis to Dante. Dante is the new Francis in whom God, through
Mary and Beatrice, has vested both a spiritual and a political authority
(Paul's and Aeneas's authority) in order to restore the contemporary
world.
The conclusion of the panegyric presents itself as a confirmation of
what is the cause generating the «gloom of hell, or night bereft of
every planet» on the earth. In Purgatorio XVI the pilgrim had Marco
Lombardo tell him why (58-60):
Lo mondo è ben così tutto diserto

ďogne virtute, come tu mi sone,
e di malizia gravido e coverto.
Marco's answer focused on the «libero voler», on the «miglior natura»,

that is, the divine origin of human nature, and, consequently, on the
divine goal of its activity. The conclusive answer was peremptory:
«Però, se '1 mondo presente disvia, / in voi è la cagione, in voi si
cheggia» (82-83). Here, in the Paradiso , the same problem -
humanity going astray - is represented as opposed to humanity going
on the right path to its proper goal. The rhetorician exploits the well
known principle, opposita iuxta se posita magis elucescunt (opposites
juxtaposed become more apparent): the two divergent lines on which
human activity runs («impingua» and «vaneggia») are juxtaposed in
order to show more clearly what the cause of the present «vaneggiare»
is. In Purgatorio , the ultimate reason («la cagione») determining the
deviation of the world was ascribed to the absence of light, which once
«made visible both the one road and the other»; instead now, the poet
continues, «the one [sun] has quenched the other»; the spiritual power
is turned into a temporal power; hence «la gente, che sua guida vede /
pur a quel ben fedire ond' ella è ghiotta, / di quel si pasce, e più oltre
non chiede» (100-2). In Paradiso , the ultimate cause of the «insensata
cura de' mortali» seems to be ascribed to the unfaithful inheritors of
Francis's «Donna». The conclusions of Cantos XI and XII suggest that
167
the two Orders, Franciscan and Dominican, betrayed their mandate and
followed the ambitious plans of the Pope. As far as the Franciscan
Order is concerned, Dante strongly disagrees, as Raoul Manselli has
documented,22 with both Ubertino da Casale and the cardinal Matteo
ďAcquasparta; the former «contracts» («coarta») the Franciscan
tradition, the latter «shuns it» («la fugge»). I believe that, in the
context of canto XI, the implicit disagreement between Dante and the
two representing, respectively, one the Spirituals' movement
(Ubertino), and the other the politics of the Papacy, is grounded on the
following lines (109-114):
Quando a colui eh' a tanto ben sortillo

piacque di trarlo suso a la mercede
ch'el meritò nel farsi pusillo,
a' frati suoi, sì corn' a giuste rede,
raccomandò la donna sua più cara,
e comandò che l'amassero a fede.
Dante rejects both Ubertino's and Matteo d'Acquasparta's attitude

towards the Pope; for him both positions were considered as
contradictory to the spirit of Francis: Francis's love for the «Donna»
would never have allowed him to fight against the sovereign authority
of the Pope, and to declare the Pope an anti-Christ, as Ubertino did.23
At the same time, the religious politician cannot accept the Cardinal's
standing: in his historical position, the cardinal, as a Franciscan and
consequently as an inheritor of the «Donna», should oppose, rather
than compromise himself and tolerate the «insensata cura» of the Pope
who was pursuing «dominion by force and craft». The episode of the
Franciscan («cordigliero») Guido da Montefeltro is partly the
representation of Dante's judgement regarding the contradiction existing
between the original purpose of the Franciscan Order within the
Church, and its actual behavior. Guido's weak resistance to Boniface is
a paradigmatic case of the connivance of Franciscans in the wrongdoing
of the Pope.24 Hence, the ultimate reason of the «insensata cura de'
mortali» turns out to be, not only the Pope, but the infidelity of both
the Franciscan and Dominican Orders to their mother, the Bride of
Christ and of Francis.
In concluding my commentary on Purgatorio XVI, I wrote25 that
Dante's drama in the Commedia derives mostly from his vision of the
contemporary Ecclesia , seen as the humana universitas in its historical
process; this drama, however, is not as bleak as it seems: faith and
hope in the power of poetry dominate it. The medieval Dante believes
in the traditional creed that poetry is a kind of natural (not supernatural)
168
revelation shared by God among poets. Here in canto XI of Paradiso ,
the flying self takes a picture of human society from heaven. This
picture is not less pessimistic than the others described in the previous
realms; it reveals the poet's anxious concern about the sanctity of his
Church which was involved in earthly matters. However, the pilgrim,
through whom the poetry of faith and hope will reach other humans,
looks at contemporary society as a hero fulfilling the double duty of
Paul and Aeneas. He, like a new Francis, will use his rhetorical and
poetical genius to fight against his father, and against others who
follow the «insensata cura» - in order to promote the object of his
own «cura», the truth.
NOTES
1 Vincenzo Valente interprets the adjective «insensato» as «privo di senso di

ragione», sub voce, ED.
^Within the context, the notion of «difettivi silogismi» brings the reader
back to the Convivio , where the author repeatedly focuses on the
distinction between «onestade» and «utilitade». Referring to the Stoic
philosophers, Dante reports Cicero's definition of honestas : «quello che,
sanza utilitade e sanza frutto, per sé di ragione è da laudare» (IV.vi.10).
■^«[Eius bonitas ] a quo velut a puncto biffurcatur Petri Cesarisque potestas»
(Epist. V,17).
^The Spirituals were convinced that St. Francis was the «Angel» of the Book
of Revelation , the «alter Christus», prophesied by Joachim of Floris
(1132-1202) as the promoter of the third age. This age, according to the
author of the Expositio in Apocalypsim , ought to be started about the
second part of the 13th century, when Christ would return to the earth to
defeat the Antichrist and have the Holy Spirit lead people to the
contemplative life. During this third status, the Church would be guided by
«viri spirituales». For the relationship between Dante and the Spirituals,
see Charles T. Davis, Dante and the Idea of Rome , Oxford, The Clarendon
Press, 1957, esp. 229-35; Raoul Manselli, «Dante e l'"Ecclesia
spiritualis", in Dante e Roma , Firenze, Le Monnier, 1965, 115-135; Idem,
«II concetto di povertà in Dante», in ED, v. IV, 630-34; Idem, «Dante e gli
Spirituali Francescani», in Letture Classensi , XI, Ravenna, Longo, 1982,
47-61; Dabney G. Park, «Povertà», in ED, s.v.' Bruno Nardi, «La "Donatio
Constantini" e Dante», in Nel mondo di Dante , Roma, Storia e Letteratura,
1944, 109-159; Paolo Brezzi, «Dante e la Chiesa del suo tempo», in
Letture dantesche di argomento storico-politico , Napoli, Ferraro, 1983,
186-216; Antonietta Bufano, «La polemica religiosa di Dante», in Letture
Classensi , XI, Ravenna, Longo, 1982, 25-46.
^Charles Davis, Raoul Manselli, and most critics believe that Dante's
concern about Ecclesia pervades his masterpiece; it is my conviction that
169
his solicitude is strongly present also in the Convivio , which is the first
fruit of the teaching absorbed by the young philosopher listening to the
lectures at Santa Croce.
^Giovanni Mestica, «S. Francesco, Dante e Giotto», in Nuova Antologia 27

(1881), 3-39; Umberto Cosmo, «Le mistiche nozze di Frate Francesco con
Madonna Povertà», Giornale dantesco 6 (1898), 49-82; Michele Barbi,
«Sulle fonti della vita di S. Francesco», in Problemi di critica dantesca,
prima serie , Florence, Sansoni, 1934, 323-57; Umberto Bosco, «S.
Francesco», in Dante nella critica d'oggi , ed. U. Bosco, Firenze, Le
Monnier, 1965, 600-14, rpt. in Dante vicino , Caltanissetta, Sciascia,
1972, 316-41; Ferruccio Ulivi, «San Francesco e Dante», in Letture
classensL XI, Ravenna, Longo, 1982, 9-24.
Êrich Auerbach, «Francesco d'Assisi nella Commedia », in Studi su Dante ,
Milano -Roma, Feltrinelli, 1974^, 223.
^Raoul Manselli, «Il canto XII del Paradiso », in Nuove letture dantesche ,
Firenze, Le Monnier, 1973, 107-128. By the same author, cf. «Domenicani
e Francescani», in L'Europa medievale , II, Torino, UTET, 1979.
^For Dante's limited knowledge about the inauthenticity of the donatio
Costantini , see Bruno Nardi, «La "Donatio Constantini" e Dante», cit.
l^Nardi, «La "Donatio Constantini" e Dante», cit., p. 131.
Hßy stressing the abandonment of the Church and her widowhood, Dante
does not infer that, from the second century on, the ship of Christ is
without a pilot. In all his works, the writer declared his devotion to the
authority of the Pope: «veggio in Alagna intrar lo fiordaliso / e nel vicario
suo Cristo esser catto» ( Purg . XX, 86-87). Dante's concern is about the
object and finality motivating the Pope's behavior. The Pope must be
linked to the spiritual, rather than temporal, corpus Ecclesie.
^Commenting on these lines, Bosco writes: «È anche questa, hanno
mostrato eccellenti studiosi, immagine tradizionale; ma bisogna pur notare
che Dante la esaspera abolendo la giustificazione addotta dalle fonti
francescane (propter altitudinem crucis) e conferendole la plasticità della
sua fantasia». I believe that through this expression the poet stresses the
difference between sensory and spiritual relationship.
In regard to these lines, Teodolinda Barolini has a view different from
mine. She writes: «The form points to difference while the content denies
it, insisting that to speak of one is to speak of two, that one can be two»
(The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante, Princeton, Princeton UP,
1993, p. 200). I do not see the contradiction, in that Dante considers the
two as the organs (contemplative and active) of the same body, the Church.
^Marguerite Chiarenza («Dante's Lady Poverty», in Dante Studies , CXI
(1993), 153-175) has already pointed out Bosco's negative comment on
this phrase which, he believes, «non avrà sviluppi» («San Francesco»,
Dante nella critica d'oggi , cit., p. 602). I agree with Chiarenza that
«serafico in ardore» is the foundation on which Dante builds the whole
episode.
^«Conception de l'histoire», in Exégèse médiéval : les quatre sens de
170
l'écriture , II, Paris, Aubier, 1959-64, p. 469.
16For the genesis of this tercet, sees U. Bosco, «San Francesco», cit., p.
620.
^The Catholic Encyclopedical Dictionary. New York, Macmillan, 1958, p.
170.
l^This definition belongs to U. Bosco, «San Francesco», cit., p. 604.
iyF. Ulivi attempts to investigate the impact of Franciscan history on the
poet. For him Dante has cut the ties between Celano's Lives and his own
biography. The Dantean version of St. Francis's portrait corresponds,
according to Ulivi, to the author's proper moral historical law: the Saint of
Assisi is a transcendent character. «Gli affetti appena disegnati, decampano
nel valore trascendentale. Le sue virtù rispondono alla consumata
consapevolezza di chi sa di essere chiamato ab ortu, da Dio, a un destino
incomparabile» («San Francesco e Dante», cit., p. 23).
2^This metamorphosis of a man into «Donna Povertà» and «Donna
Povertà» into «ignota ricchezza» presents some elements in common,
mutatis mutandis , with the transformations performed in canto XXV of the
Inferno. I am referring especially to the metamorphosis which occurs
between Francesco Guercio de' Cavalcanti and Buoso; the result of this
infernal metamorphosis turns into a horrific effect: a man becomes a
serpent which is ready to transform others into its own shape. In Paradiso
XI the metamorphosis of the two lovers is directed towards transforming
others into spiritual lovers.
Contrary to my view, Ulivi, following the traditional interpretation of
«Povertà» as an allegorical figure, comments on 82-84: «E qui affiora in
piena luce (qualunque sia il giudizio che poi se ne dà) la connotazione in
chiave allegorica delle mistiche nozze del santo con la Povertà» («San
Francesco e Dante», cit., p. 19). My point of view focuses on the «sposa»
who, in the context, is «Povertà», equated, however, with the «sposa di
colui ...».
2În his «Dante e gli Spirituali Francescani», cit.

Z:)Manselli. «Il canto XII del Paradiso», cit. p. 120.
2^Referring to Guillaume de Saint- Amour's De periculis novissimorum
temporum, Giuseppe Mazzotta explains that the attack focused on
identifying Franciscans with «the new Pharisees, who connive with popes
under the habit of holiness to deceive the believers», Dante's Vision and
the Circle of Knowledge, Princeton, Princeton UP, 1993, p. 71.
25 «Purgatorio XVI», in Dante's Divine Comedy : Introductory Readings, II:
Purgatorio , ed. T. Wlassics, suppl. Lectura Dantis 12 (1993), pp. 235-247.
171
Paradiso XII
Author(s): STEVEN BOTTERILL
Accessed: 17-02-2020 23:04 UTC
Lectura Dantis
STEVEN BOTTERILL
University of California at Berkeley
XII
For all its seductive plausibility as a means of facilitating the
reader's approach to an extraordinarily challenging text, all too often, in
Paradiso , the lectura Dantis simply does not work. Interpretation of the
Commedia1^ third, climactic cantica should not - arguably, cannot -
be constrained by its merely formal divisions, for the obvious reason
that those divisions correspond to neither the narrative movement nor
the thematic development of Paradiso as an organic whole. It usually
makes better sense, in fact, to approach Paradiso in terms of groups of
cantos arranged around a dominant theme that is articulated through the
speeches of the various heavenly personages and their interaction with
their mortal visitor Dante (as well, in most cases, as being introduced,
given direction, and commented upon by Beatrice), rather than
pedantically respecting the boundaries of each canto and attempting to
identify some single stylistic feature, outstanding individual character, or
prevailing concern characteristic of that canto and no other. Such an
approach helps (not least powerfully, be it said, as a pedagogical
strategy) to deal with the notoriously static quality of the cantica1 s
narrative - based as it is on recapitulation and complementarity,
circling around issues and individuals and moving in an upward-tending
spiral rather than proceeding directly from «start» to «finish» - as well
as to highlight the way in which Dante's interest in and practice of
narrative technique itself seems to have undergone modification,
deliberately or otherwise, during the course of the Commedia1 s
composition.1 By the time the (sequential) reader reaches Paradiso XII,
the poem has come far indeed from the simplistic one-episode-per-canto
structure of the early stages of Inferno ; and the exegetical techniques that
were so revealing back then - the traditional Boccaccian lectura Dantis
foremost among them - may no longer be entirely adequate to their
allotted task and its awesome responsibilities.
This canto has, indeed, traditionally been seen as the second
element of a diptych whose first panel is Paradiso XI, and many a
modern edition pays implicit tribute to the indissoluble linkage and
obvious parallelism between the two cantos by not even bothering to
equip Paradiso XII with introductory matter of its own.2 Nor is this
172
unjustified: not only do the two cantos plainly have their substantially
hagiographical subject-matter in common, not only does the allocation
of speeches in them clearly reflect a conscious and deliberate patterning
(so that the Dominican Thomas Aquinas praises Saint Francis and
criticizes his own Order in canto XI, while the Franciscan Bonaventure
repays the compliment for Saint Dominic and speaks against his own
brethren in canto XII), but the text itself repeatedly calls attention, at the
level of verbal detail, to the symbiotic relationship between the «canto
di Francesco» and the «canto di Domenico», and close analysis of the
cantos' rhetorical organization reveals the extent to which sapient
manipulation of the possibilities offered by an essentially binary
principle - comparison, contrast, prospection, retrospection,
symmetry, asymmetry, chiasmus - governs their structure.3
What happens in Paradiso XII is, in short, conceived as a response
to, and a fulfillment of, what has already happened in Paradiso XI; and
reading of the canto gains immeasurably in conviction and force if the
reader's (ideally, recent) experience of its predecessor is kept constantly
in mind. Furthermore, a thoroughly satisfactory interpretation of these
almost literally geminate cantos would require seeing them in the
context of the whole Heaven of the Sun, since a continuity of narrative
progress and thematic preoccupation links each purely formal segment
of this extended episode into a coherent whole, no one part of which can
be interpretatively self-sufficient. You might as well try to pass
judgment on a vintage claret by eating a bunch of grapes.
The first words of Paradiso XII stress the immediacy with which its
opening follows on the closure of canto XI. As soon as Thomas
Aquinas's denunciation of his fellow Dominicans' moral failings ends in
his quotation of the sardonic aphorism of XI, 139, his audience - made
up of the dazzling lights in which are animate the souls who are
presented to Dante personaggio in this particular celestial sphere -
reacts with a joyous outburst of movement and song. As it does so, it
forms another of the striking visual (and aural) patterns in which the
text of Paradiso consistently images the order and harmony, dependent
on God's indwelling in the universe that is His creation, which are the
governing principles of both its poetry and its theology, and which are
offered, above all, as a positive counterpart to the selfishly disordered
chaos of Hell - and of human life on Earth (1-9):4
Sì tosto come l'ultima parola

la benedetta fiamma per dir tolse,
a rotar cominciò la santa mola;
e nel suo giro tutta non si volse
prima ch'un'altra di cerchio la chiuse,
173
e moto a moto e canto a canto colse;
canto che tanto vince nostre muse,
nostre serene in quelle dolci tube,
quanto primo splendor quel ch'e' refuse.
But the text of Paradiso XII does not remain content with its
characteristically forthright assertion of the sheer incommensurability of
heavenly experience with any other kind available to mortals (other than
in circumstances as exceptional as those of the mystical raptus of a
Saint Paul or a Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, or of Dante's journey itself);
instead, it proceeds to render that experience comprehensible through
comparison with familiar terrestrial reality (a note already struck, if
unobtrusively, in the «mili» imagery of line 3), in an extended simile
whose verbal precision and rhythmic elaboration generate an almost
ecstatic intensity, and whose typically Dantean grounding in a fusion of
classical and Christian cultures reveals for the umpteenth time the extent
to which the «poema sacro» relies for the communication of its
prophetic, Christian message on a lexicon and a symbolic code inherited
directly from its own pagan predecessors (10-21):
Come si volgon per tenera nube

due archi paralelli e concolori,
quando Iunone a sua ancella iube,
nascendo di quel d'entro quel di fori,
a guisa del parlar di quella vaga
ch'amor consunse come sol vapori,
e fanno qui la gente esser presaga,
per lo patto che Dio con Noè puose,
del mondo che già mai più non s'allaga:
così di quelle sempiterne rose
volgiensi circa noi le due ghirlande,
e sì l'estrema a l'intima rispuose.
What should not be forgotten, as the culturally alert reader

luxuriates in this marvelously eloquent intermingling of Ovid and
Genesis, is that the simile's function is, in the strict sense, realistic:
Dante is describing, through a self-consciously literary elaboration in
mythological and Biblical terms, a meteorological phenomenon - the
double rainbow - and is relying on his reader's acceptance of this
image, rare and spectacular as it is, as being, none the less, a scientific
reality , whose attested existence in earthly experience helps to make
plausible the literally incredible scene that this passage is seeking to
evoke. Here as so often elsewhere in the Commedia , Dante's habitually
174
close attention to the sensuous particularities of life in this world is
exploited both to represent the otherwise unthinkable possibilities of
being in the next, and to cast a retrospective light on mundane reality
itself by drawing disparaging parallels (in Inferno) and contrasts (in
Purgatorio and Paradiso) with the life of the world to come.
Furthermore, within the overall context of the paired cantos XI and
XII, precisely the stress here on doubleness and mutuality («paralelli e
concolori»; «nascendo di quel d'entro quel di fori»; «e sì l'estrema a
l'intima rispuose») has the effect of reinforcing that very aspect of the
twinned speeches of Thomas and Bonaventure and the mutually
reflective presentations of Francis and Dominic. The comparison of the
moving, singing souls to a double rainbow implicitly reminds the reader
that doubleness is of the essence here, and suggests that the coming
canto will be called upon to complete a (representational and expository)
process that the preceding canto could only begin.
As the souls' festive circling and chant die away into stasis and
silence, a new phase of the canto's narrative is initiated with the
appearance of an as yet anonymous speaker, one whose voice, for all
that he himself (and thus any other clue to his identity) is hidden by the
celestial effulgence in which he is swathed, has on Dante personaggio
the compelling effect of the polar star on a compass-needle (22-3 1):
Poi che 'l tripudio e l'altra festa grande,

sì del cantare e sì del fiammeggiarsi
luce con luce gaudiose e blande,
insieme a punto e a voler quetarsi,
pur come li occhi ch'ai piacer che i move
conviene insieme chiudere e levarsi;
del cor de l'una de le luci nove
si mosse voce, che l'ago a la stella
parer mi fece in volgermi al suo dove;
e cominciò [...]
Still prevalent here is the stress on mutuality of action and

expression («luce con luce»; «insieme a punto e a voler quetarsi»;
«conviene insieme chiudere e levarsi»), but now, replicating a narrative
movement that frequently takes place at the beginning of a new episode
or encounter within the Commedia , an individual emerges from the
faceless, univocal collectivity and undertakes on its behalf the supremely
important task of speaking. For the moment, as so often, the voice
itself goes unidentified; its words are, for now, more important than
their speaker's name, and the attention of Dante personaggio and reader
alike are clearly intended not to be distracted at this point by
175
extra-textual considerations of the speaking character's historicity or
qualifications for his role, or of Dante poeta* s putative understanding of
these matters.5 Indeed, the image of Dante turning to hear the speaker
like a needle swinging toward magnetic North declares as much: the
compulsive force and immediacy of his reaction allow for no indulgence
in speculation of this kind. It is the speaker's words alone that compel
him.
From the start the newcomer's speech harks back to that of Thomas
Aquinas in canto XI, making explicit once again the connection between
the cantos. More interesting, perhaps, are the terms in which the central
comparison between the two cantos' subjects is drawn (31-45):
e cominciò: «L'amor che mi fa bella
mi tragge a ragionar de l'altro duca

per cui del mio sì ben ci si favella.
Degno è che, dov' è l'un, l'altro s'induca:
sì che, com' elli ad una militāro,
così la gloria loro insieme luca.
L'essercito di Cristo, che sì caro
costò a riarmar, dietro a la 'nsegna
si movea tardo, sospeccioso e raro,
quando lo 'mperador che sempre regna
provide a la milizia, ch'era in forse,
per sola grazia, non per esser degna;
e, come è detto, a sua sposa soccorse
con due campioni, al cui fare, al cui dire
lo popol disviato si raccorse.
The central metaphor in this passage is, of course, military

(«essercito di Cristo»; «riarmar»; «'nsegna»; «milizia»); and, although
there is nothing especially original to Dante in the conception of the
Church as an army fighting for its divine Emperor under the generalship
of Christ, the vocabulary of these lines helps to define a tone that will
pervade most of the rest of canto XII, and will help to distinguish it
sharply from its closely-related predecessor. In Paradiso XI, the story of
Francis of Assisi is recounted in language suffused with the languid
grace and ardent emotion that underlie the presentation of the saint as the
spouse of Poverty, aflame with the passion of a (courtly) lover: «Ma
perch' io non proceda troppo chiuso, / Francesco e Povertà per questi
amanti / prendi oramai nel mio parlar diffuso. / La lor concordia e i lor
lieti sembianti, / amore e maraviglia e dolce sguardo / facieno esser
cagion di pensier santi...» (73-78). The subject of the discourse
announced in XII, 37-45, however, is clearly more soldier than lover,
176
more wedded to the military aspect of the chivalric ideal than the
amorous;6 and even though the text insists on the identity of his role
and Francis's («con due campioni»), and even refers directly back to
Thomas Aquinas's speech in canto XI («come è detto»), just in case we
have missed the point, the keynote of canto XII's essay in hagiography
is unmistakably established in these lines. This «campione» is a true
son of the Church Militant, his weapons will have sharper edges than
the loving words of Francis, and even when he becomes «amoroso» (55)
- of the Christian faith, be it noted (56), not of Francis's beloved
Poverty - he will be not a «sposo» but, once more in military vein, a
«drudo», called not just to love and to serve but above all to defend (55).
Even while drawing, indeed highlighting, the parallels between the two
heroes of cantos XI and XII, the text of Paradiso still subtly but
repeatedly insists on their difference.
There follows, as in the earlier canto, a lengthy biographical
account of the forebears, geographical origins, early life, and mature
achievements of the individual chosen as the Church's champion, who is
now, for the first time, revealed to be Saint Dominic (46-70):
In quella parte ove surge ad aprire

Zefiro dolce le novelle fronde
di che si vede Europa rivestire,
non molto lungi al percuoter de l'onde
dietro a le quali, per la lunga foga,
lo sol talvolta ad ogne uom si nasconde,
siede la fortunata Calaroga
sotto la protezion del grande scudo
in che soggiace il leone e soggioga:
dentro vi nacque l'amoroso drudo
de la fede cristiana, il santo atleta
benigno a' suoi e a' nemici crudo;
e come fu creata, fu repleta
sì la sua mente di viva vertute
che, ne la madre, lei fece profeta.

Poi che le sponsalizie fuor compiute
al sacro fonte intra lui e la Fede,
u' si dotar di mutiia salute,
la donna che per lui l'assenso diede,
vide nel sonno il mirabile frutto
ch'uscir dovea di lui e de le rede;
e perché fosse qual era in costrutto,
quinci si mosse spinto a nomarlo
del possessivo di cui era tutto.
Domenico fu detto [...]
177
There is much here that is conventional in late medieval
hagiography (above all the prophetic dream of Dominic's mother
[64-66], a universal narrative topos if ever there was one), an
comparatively little that seems to emerge from a specifically Dantean
interpretation of the importance of Dominic's life and career (though
note the chivalric resonance of the «scudo» [53] - emblem of the king
of Castile - under whose protection the future miles Christi was born
Indeed, many twentieth-century critics have found Paradiso XII
intellectually less substantial and artistically less achieved than Paradi
XI, and have not infrequently suggested that this is because Dant
himself was less interested in, or knowledgeable about, Dominic than
Francis, and that there is, as a result, a kind of undernourished,
insufficiently heartfelt, quality about his presentation of the Spanish
saint.
This is, of course, dangerous ground for the modern interpreter: if,
on the one hand, there is ample evidence outside these cantos for Dante's
acute and perennial interest in, and sympathy with, Francis and (some
brands of) Franciscanism, it would still be absurd to suggest that a
writer so clearly and profoundly influenced by Dominican thought
(Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas) could have been so indifferent to
the historical status and symbolic connotations of those thinkers'
archetype (and their Order's founder) as to settle for a merely mechanical
and formulaic depiction inserted for no better reason than to achieve a
purely structural balance with the depiction of Francis. On the other
hand, it is hard to deny that, here and elsewhere, Dante's engagement
with ideas and images emerging from a strictly Dominican context
seems somehow less intense than his corresponding involvement with
the Franciscans; he is not completely insensible to the traditional
association of the two saints, and their Orders, with two very different
approaches to their common faith: the highly emotional spirituality of
the Franciscans versus the Dominicans' austere intellectualism.
Although neither of these characterizations is, of course, always and
everywhere valid, there is in them a grain of truth that seems to have
borne fruit in Dante's general understanding of the individual founders
(as courtly lover and chivalric champion, respectively) and of the
collective character of their Orders as socio-religious phenomena
(mystics and doers of good deeds versus teachers and preachers).7
The naming of Dominic in line 70 inspires a passage sustained on
the one hand by a new metaphorical vision of him as individual, and on
the other by the hagiographer's typical interest in the revelatory
messages encoded in personal names (70-81):
178
Domenico fu detto; e io ne parlo
sì come de l'agricola che Cristo
elesse a l'orto suo per aiutarlo.
Ben parve messo e famigliar di Cristo:
che '1 primo che 'n lui fu manifesto,
fu al primo consiglio che die Cristo.
Spesse fiate fu tacito e desto
trovato in terra da la sua nutrice,
come dicesse: «Io son venuto a questo».
Oh padre suo veramente Felice!
oh madre sua veramente Giovanna,
se, interpretata, vai come si dice!
Dominic is so called because he belongs to the Lord ( Dominicus

- the «possessivo di cui era tutto», 69); his prodigious infancy, with
its manifest signs (76-78) of his election (72) to Christian mission,
makes his father truly happy and his mother truly full of grace, as their
names would imply - if, adds the speaker with a scruple more
theological than philological, it be legitimate to interpret the names in
this etymological fashion. More individually Dantean, perhaps, is the
metaphor of Dominic as Christ's gardener («agricola»).8 This
metaphoric connection of Dominic with organic wholeness, natural
processes of growth and conditions of health, will be maintained
throughout the remainder of Dante's miniature biography, acting as
piquant counterpoint to the basic presentation of Dominic the armed and
militant champion of the faith (82-96):
Non per lo mondo, per cui mo s'affanna

di retro ad Ostiense e a Taddeo,
ma per amor de la verace manna
in picciol tempo gran dottor si feo;
tal che si mise a circüir la vigna
che tosto imbianca, se 'l vignaio è reo.
E a la sedia che fu già benigna
più a' poveri giusti, non per lei,
ma per colui che siede, che traligna,
non dispensare o due o tre per sei,
non la fortuna di prima vacante,
non decimas, quae sunt pauperum Dei ,
addimandò, ma contro al mondo errante
licenza di combatter per lo seme
del qual ti fascian ventiquattro piante.
This skillful, if partisan, summary account of Dominic's adult
179
career interestingly fuses the two key images of him in Paradiso XII: the
agricola Christi (compared, in another characteristic piece of minute
realistic observation, to the astute viticulturist taking good care of his
vines, 86-87), and the heroic knight demanding «licenza di combatter»
against an errant world (94-96). Also pertinent here is the evident,
though implicit, direct parallel with Francis, based on Dominic's own
rejection of the material goods of this world and the contrast between
this just and morally healthy attitude and that of a corrupt and deviant
papacy (88-94). Indeed, Dominic is seen not just as custodian of the
garden of this world, entrusted to him by Christ, but as himself a force
of nature, acting with devastating force against the (heretical) growths
with which the garden is afflicted (97-105):
Poi, con dottrina e con volere insieme,

con l'officio appostolico si mosse
quasi torrente ch'alta vena preme;
e ne li sterpi eretici percosse
l'impeto suo, più vivamente quivi
dove le resistenze eran più grosse.
Di lui si fecer poi diversi rivi
onde l'orto católico si riga,
sì che i suoi arbuscelli stan più vivi.
The metaphorical knight-gardener is thus transformed into a torrent,

forcefully sweeping aside the entangling undergrowth of heresy and then
directing its headlong flow to irrigate and nourish the healthier plants in
the «orto católico». Here again, imagery and vocabulary alike
(«percosse»; «impeto»; «vivamente»; «resistenze») stress the centrality
of rightly-directed and morally justifiable militancy in Dante's
conception of Dominic: whether the metaphors applied to him be of
human or meteorological origin, their essential violence is the same,
and contrasts dramatically with the more pacific language and imagery
consistently applied in Paradiso to Francis.
The final section into which the canto's narrative falls begins from
that ineluctable comparison with the Christian faith's other great
«campione», and restores to prominence the now-familiar military
metaphor. Dominic is now seen as one of the wheels of a chariot
supported on the other side by Francis and used by the Church to
conquer her internal enemies (106-11 1):
Se tal fu l'una rota de la biga

in che la Santa Chiesa si difese
e vinse in campo la sua civil briga,
180
ben ti dovrebbe assai esser palese
l'eccellenza de l'altra, di cui Tomma
dinanzi al mio venir fu sì cortese.
Once again the canto's metaphor-laden language reiterates its stress

on duality of function and the ideal of mutual co-operation - the
excellence of one wheel implies that of the other, and the chariot would,
of course, not be able to function without making equal and
simultaneous use of both. But the (still anonymous) speaker, like
Thomas before him, has come to bury, not praise, the Order to which he
himself belonged (1 12-120):
Ma l'orbita che fé la parte somma

di sua circunferenza, è derelitta,
sì ch'è la muffa dov' era la gromma.
La sua famiglia, che si mosse dritta
coi piedi a le sue orme, è tanto volta,
che quel dinanzi a quel di retro gitta;
e tosto si vedrà de la ricolta
de la mala coltura, quando il loglio

si lagnerà che l'arca li sia tolta.
Once more, images of natural process and organic growth are called
upon, but this time to express not health but decay: the tracks left by
one at least of the chariot-wheels are abandoned (1 12-1 14), while those
who once followed them so faithfully have headed off in the opposite
direction (115-117). But this metaphorically expressed failure of the
Franciscan Order to persist in the arduous way laid down by its founder
is not the worst of it. Barrel-mold («muffa») and tares («loglio») are the
only living organisms in the Franciscan garden, the day of reckoning
(«la ricolta de la mala coltura») is at hand (118-120), and there is no
competent gardener yet in sight - though mutually hostile aspirants to
the role, each claiming unique fidelity to the Order's founding principles,
have already presented themselves (121-126):
Ben dico, chi cercasse a foglio a foglio

nostro volume, ancor troveria carta
u' leggerebbe «I' mi son quel ch'i' soglio»;
ma non fia da Casal né d'Acquasparta,
là onde vegnon tali a la scrittura,
ch'uno la fugge e altro la coarta.
This brief passage brings Dante (and his speaker) directly into the
context of late medieval Franciscan history and the power-struggle that
181
gripped the Order at the turn of Duecento and Trecento. The
symptomatic place-names «Casal» and «Acquasparta» are obvious
references to two leading Franciscan controversialists of the period,
Ubertino da Casale and Matthew of Aquasparta, who here come to
represent the opposing tendencies - toward (what Dante seems to see
as) undue laxity and undue austerity in interpretation of the Franciscan
rule - that were and are commonly associated with the division of the
Order into «Officiai» and «Spiritual» factions. Paradiso XII chooses the
via di mezzo : neither the «Spiritual» Ubertino nor the «Officiai»
Matthew is in the right, neither the liberals nor the rigorists have
correctly understood Francis's original «scrittura» (125), for the former
avoid its implications («uno la fugge») while the latter apply it all too
strictly (« altro la coarta»). Though there are still those whose adherence
to Francis's ideal is genuine (121-123), they need to be sought for, and
are not to be found among the Order's most vocal or visible
representatives. From this passage's almost chaotic welter of scarcely
compatible metaphors - chariots, barrels, harvests, books - emerges,
in fact, even at the risk of iconographical incongruity, a sharp and
urgent sense that the Franciscan Order is deeply, perhaps fatally,
compromised, and that time is running short for its salvation.
By now the inexperienced reader of Paradiso XII must certainly be
wondering who this eloquent hagiographer of Dominic and outspoken
critic of the Franciscans can be, and whence he derives the authority that
so clearly supports his confident attributions of praise and blame. At
this point, however, his long-preserved anonymity at last comes to an
end, initiating a whole series of namings that grows to include
identification of the other lights that shine in this «corona de' beati»
(127-145):
Io son la vita di Bonaventura

da Bagnoregio, che ne' grandi offici
sempre pospuosi la sinistra cura.
Illuminato e Augustin son quici,
che fuor de' primi scalzi poverelli
che nel capestro a Dio si fero amici.
Ugo da San Vittore è qui con elli,
e Pietro Mangiadore e Pietro Spano,
10 qual giù luce in dodici libelli;
Natan profeta e 'l metropolitano
Crisostomo e Anselmo e quel Donato
ch'a la prim' arte degnò porre mano.
Rabano è qui, e lucemi dallato
11 calavrese abate Giovacchino
182
di spirito profetico dotato.
Ad inveggiar cotanto paladino
mi mosse l'infiammata cortesia
di fra Tommaso e '1 discreto latino;
e mosse meco questa compagnia».
With Bonaventure's belated self-disclosure, much falls into place.

The parallel with Paradiso XI is now complete: the most authoritative
Franciscan author of his generation has now appeared in the role
adopted, in the former canto, by the most authoritative of his
Dominican contemporaries.9 Like Thomas's, his discourse in praise of
the rival Order's founder is accompanied by condemnation of the failings
of his own. Moreover, in Bonaventure's case that condemnation acquires
a particular definitiveness from the circumstances of the historical
Bonaventure's career: Dante's mouthpiece is able to condemn the rigorist
and liberal wings of the Franciscan Order so effectively because that had
been precisely the position taken by the Bonaventure of history. And so
the Bonaventure of Paradiso XII is accompanied by other figures who,
like him, represent Franciscanism in its pristine state (130-132),
representatives of a time when even a General of the Franciscan Order,
raised to archiépiscopal rank and thence to the cardinalate, could still
justly claim (128-129) that he had always treated worldly goods with the
indifference they deserved. The disdainful contrast with the practice of
contemporary Franciscanism could scarcely be clearer, as the text insists
on the poverty central to the religious ideal of the first, and greatest,
Franciscans («ne' grandi offici / sempre pospuosi la sinistra cura»;
«primi scalzi poverelli»).
Alongside Illuminato and Augustin, however, appear a number of
other «luci» less closely connected, or not connected at all, with
Franciscanism and its ideals, and the canto ends with an enumeration of
these. All that they have in common - though it is much - is that
they represent, in diverse ways, the tradition of Christian thought:
indeed, their diversity itself seems to be the vital point of their presence
alongside Bonaventure, offering as it does an occasion for the text to
celebrate the richness, variety, durability, and sheer truth-bearing power
of intellectual activity within the tradition of Christianity.
A mystic like Hugh of Saint Victor, a historian like Petrus
Comestor, a logician like Petrus Hispanus, a grammarian like Donatus,
a preacher like John Chrysostom, a Mariologist like Rabanus Maurus, a
theologian like Anselm, even an Old Testament prophet like Nathan -
all can join in the celebration, for what is important from the celestial
perspective is not the manner or even the matter of their intellectual
183
labor but the fact of its very existence; less important than what they
thought or how they expressed it is the simple fact that they chose to
place their supremely human gifts of reasoning and language at the
service of the (Judeo-)Christian message. In Paradise all divergences and
discrepancies among individual thinkers, or individual ideas, are resolved
in the light of the one great truth, given voice in the Word that is God,
and so all these exemplary spokesmen for Jewish prophecy and
Christian thought can find a fulfilling place in the symbolic patterns
that move ecstatically across the heavens for Dante's - and our -
benefit.
Such images of celebration, reconciliation, and harmony are, of
course, a staple of the whole episode of the Heaven of the Sun, and have
already been exemplified with the similar group of Christian thinkers
presented in canto X, in ways that can now clearly be seen to presage
this analogous movement in canto XII (which brings us back to our
initial dissatisfaction with the lectura of a single canto, as an exegetical
instrument applied to Paradiso ). And just as, among the glittering lights
surrounding Thomas Aquinas, there was one (Siger of Brabant,
X, 133-138) whose historical counterpart's record of rivalry with,
dissension from, and opposition to the celestial spokesman made of
him, at first sight, a kind of specter at the feast, so too in canto XII
appears a figure of whom the historical Bonaventure thoroughly
disapproved, and whose pernicious influence on thirteenth-century
Franciscanism he spent considerable time and energy opposing: the
«calavrese abate Gio vacchino» (140), the impassioned mystical writer
Joachim of Fiore. But the point of Joachim's apparently anomalous
presence, and of Bonaventure's remarkable admission (141) that Joachim
was indeed «di spirito profetico dotato», is, of course, precisely that the
rivalries, dissensions, and oppositions of (Christian) intellectual life on
earth do not carry over into the life to come; in heaven all can recognize,
at last, the validity of their fellow-thinkers' (and fellow-writers') chosen
path toward the truth.
In keeping with one of Paradiso1 s most profoundly formative
assumptions, that the full worth and meaning of an individual's life can
only be understood when he or she is seen in the context of the utterly
transformed communal reality that is eternal bliss, the individuals in the
Heaven of the Sun set aside what divided them in life and celebrate what
unites them in eternity. Saint Paul had already told the Galatians (3:28)
that in Christ «there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor
free, there is neither male nor female, for ye are all one in Christ Jesus»;
now Dante makes it plain that in Paradise - though not yet, alas, on
Earth - there will be neither Dominican nor Franciscan, neither
184
philosopher nor theologian, neither discord, dissent, nor disputation -
only an endless ecstatic celebration of mutuality and truth.
NOTES
^Two indispensable (if very different) reference-points for consideration of

Dante's narrative technique are Tibor Wlassics, Dante narratore : saggi
sullo stile della « Commedia » (Florence: Olschki, 1975), and Teodolinda
Barolini, The Undivine «Comedy»: Detheologizing Dante (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1992). Barolini's brilliant reading of cantos
XI and XII (pp. 194-217) sees the episode, in the words of her
chapter-title, as being above all a «meditation on narrative».
^The edition of Umberto Bosco and Giovanni Reggio (Florence: Le
Monnier, 1988) is a convenient but by no means atypical example.
^For detailed schemes of this kind see Barolini, p. 217; Bosco, p. 206.
^Citations from the Commedia reproduce the critical text established by
Giorgio Petrocchi, first published as La «Commedia» secondo l'antica
vulgata (Milan: Mondadori, 1966-67).
^For this reason it is regrettable that so many modern editions identify this
and other paradisiacal speakers (Bernard of Clairvaux in canto XXXI is
another egregious example) at the moment of their entry into the text
rather than at the point at which they themselves declare their identity; to
do so is to sabotage a carefully constructed narrative design that may be
attributed to authorial intention or simply to actually existing textual
structure, but that deserves to be respected in either case.
"I hope it will be clear that I am not suggesting any incompatibility
between the two images, or that either suffices alone to exhaust the
potential range of Francis's or Dominic's symbolic meaning or meanings,
or even that Dante himself feels or expresses more sympathy for the one
than the other. Throughout this episode, in fact, and indeed in the
presentation of Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure themselves, elements
of both images are present; but they do not always carry equal weight, and
the preponderance , in the cases of Francis and Dominic, seems to me to be
as described here.
'Due attention should also be paid to Bosco's suggestion (p. 179) that the
differences in Dante's approach to the two saints can be attributed, above
all, to the fact that the late Duecento had generated a considerable amount
of biographical and devotional material connected with Francis, while
Dominic's fortuna was, as yet, nothing like so extensive.
°Bosco and Reggio, p. 199, point out that the metaphor is also used of
Dominic by Guittone d'Arezzo; but Dante's elaboration of it goes far
beyond anything attempted by his oft-disdained predecessor.
Ôn Bonaventure's importance to Dante outside the confines of Paradiso
XII, see most recently Edward Hagman, «Dante's Vision of God: The End
of the Itinerarium Mentis », in Dante Studies , 106 (1988): 1-20.
185
Paradiso XIII
Author(s): JOHN TOOK
Accessed: 17-02-2020 23:04 UTC
Lectura Dantis
JOHN TOOK
University College London
XIII
Taken in isolation and considered from the point of view of its
general economy - from the point of view of the functionality of the
parts within the whole and of the balance subsisting between them -
Canto XIII seems to be one of the less satisfactory cantos of the
Paradiso. Perfectly intelligible in respect of its individual emphases,
these emphases somehow fail to yield a coherent whole, a discourse
marked by the kind of uniformity and self-sufficiency characteristic of,
say, the other cantos in the heaven of the sun sequence. There is, to
begin with, something oddly extravagant about the opening lines of the
canto, as, in what amounts to one of the most complicated astronomical
analogies in the whole of the poem, Dante attempts to establish in the
mind of the reader an adequate impression of the two concentric circles
of light by which he and Beatrice are now surrounded. The mechanism,
which involves the reader's selecting and rearranging in a new and more
regular pattern the fifteen stars of greatest magnitude in the sky plus the
seven stars of Ursa major plus the two brightest stars of Ursa minor
(twenty-four in all), is nothing if not taxing on the imagination. The
effort required of him, prompted and sustained by the insistent imagini
of lines 1, 7 and 10 (not to mention the «ritegna l'image ... come ferma
rupe» of lines 2 & 3), seems out of all proportion to the relative
simplicity of the task in hand.
Then, in lines 28-111, comes Thomas's curiously lengthy
explanation of his own remarks in Canto X (109-14) to the effect that
the fifth light in the first circle, the biblical Solomon, was second to
none in respect of wisdom and understanding («a veder tanto non surse il
secondo») - «curiously lengthy» in that this too seems to be out of all
proportion to the relative weight of the point being made. The point at
issue is, after all, straightforward enough: given that all the light
conceded to man was present in those most immediately a product of
divine creativity - or, more precisely, of divine creativity in the case of
Adam and of divine immanence in the case of Christ - then how is it
possible to speak of Solomon, noted certainly for his wisdom, as being
second to none in point of understanding? His, surely, relative to that of
Adam as fashioned immediately by God and to that of Christ as God
incarnate, must be a qualified wisdom, a more modest perception and
186
insight. But again Dante's procedure is strangely roundabout -
majestic, certainly, but indirect in approach. First comes the
cosmological phase of the argument, recognizably Neoplatonist in
character with the Areopagite (probably of the Divine Names) to the fore
among Dante's auctores . Everything that is in the world, he says, is
primarily in the mind of God as the first principle of all being. More
exactly, everything that is in the created order is simply a reflection of
the Idea generated in love by the Father from all eternity. Preceding
from the Father, the light of the Idea is variously reflected by the nine
orders of separate substances in the heavenly hierarchy, and, entirely
without prejudice to its original unity, is differentiated and individualized
to issue at last in the «brevi contingenze» (63) of the world here below
- where the term «brief contingencies» denotes the products of
secondary causality subject to the processes of generation and decay.
This essentially emanationist pattern of thought is already present in the
Convivio (at III. vi. 4-6), where, in keeping with the prominence of
proximate causality in Dante's cosmology generally, the angels
themselves are said to be «makers» in respect of whatsoever precedes
from them,1 and it is there in Paradiso VII, where it is developed as a
corollary to Dante's theology of atonement. Here in Paradiso XIII,
however, it is unfolded with an exquisite sense of the rhythmic
procession of being from God, of the way in which, inaugurated in an
ecstasy or flowing forth of light and love, everything in the world issues
in a measured fashion from the One whose being is eternally undivided
(52-66).
But the procession of being from God is qualified by the state both
of the causal agent and of the matter upon which it acts, with the result
that the individual members of a species will differ one from another in
respect of their disposition and «fruitfulness» (71). Some are more
perfectly representative of the species to which they belong than others.
Nature especially, as the efficient cause of whatever exists here below,
works, Dante says, with a trembling hand, with the result that, in point
of proper perfection, her handiwork relates only approximately to the
original idea. This, at any rate, is the meaning of lines 67-78, concerned
with the element of contingency at work within the procession of being
from God.
With this, Dante goes on, it is possible to appreciate how it is that
humanity as instantiated in Adam as the immediate creation of God and
in Christ as God incarnate lacked for nothing. In neither case was it
compromised by the fallibility of Nature and thus by the mere
approximation of the artefact to the idea. Solomon's wisdom, therefore,
if set alongside that of Adam as the first man and of Christ as the new
187
man was very definitely a qualified wisdom, a wisdom hedged about by
the remote character of his creatureliness. But this, Dante has Thomas
say, is not what he, Thomas, means, for the wisdom of Solomon is
that, not of man as man, but of man as wise ruler. It is the wisdom
proper to the discreet counsellor and to the just governor. It does not
stretch, Thomas says, to matters, say, of cosmology or of metaphysics
or of dialectics. It was not up to Solomon to pronounce on, for
example, the number of heavenly movers, or on whether there is a
prime mover in the universe, or on whether a contingent premiss
coupled with a necessary premiss yields a necessary conclusion, for all
this was beyond his competence. Rather, his was the wisdom
appropriate to a specific order of responsibility, to a particular vocation.
It was the wisdom of «kingly sufficiency» («acciò che re sufficiente
fosse») that Solomon sought and received from God (88-108).
In pursuit, therefore, of the truth on this issue, Thomas insists, a
distinction has to be drawn between wisdom in itself, in its generic
totality, and the kind of wisdom specific to this or that particular
calling. Relatively speaking - relative, that is to say, to his specific
undertaking - Solomon's wisdom was second to none. As a king, but
only as a king, he was wise beyond compare.
Now, however, the argument takes a new turn. Standing back from
its substance (the nature of Solomonic wisdom), Thomas turns now to
its form , to its properties as an argument. He turns, more exactly, to the
role of distinction in the pursuit of truth. For the pursuit of truth always
requires care in relation to the processes of affirmation and denial,
negligence in this respect at once paralysing the act of understanding.
This, as Dante learned from Aristotle,2 and as he notes in the Monarchia
(III. iv. 4), was the trouble with Parmenides and Melissus, whose error
as metaphysicians lay in their failure to categorize correctly in respect of
the substance of their argument and to syllogize correctly in respect of
its form. The same applies to the Euclidean mathematician Bryson (also
subject to refutation in Aristotle), and, in the theological sphere, to
Sabellius in respect of his antitrinitarianism, to Arius in respect of his
denial of the consubstantiality of the Son and of the Father, and to the
many others who, as a more or less direct consequence of logical
indiscrimination, reflect in a distorted fashion the deep and abiding truth
of Scripture. Indifferent to the basic principles of careful thought, each
in his way was guilty of intellectual dereliction, of heedlessness in
respect of what it is to form a sound proposition (1 12-129).
But it is here, as Thomas develops further his thoughts concerning
the need for careful distinction in the framing of propositions, that we
sense once more a certain disproportion in the canto as a whole, a
188
certain anomalousness in tone and manner; for having stated and
illustrated his point relative to the folly of indiscriminate predication, he
now proceeds to its imaginative elaboration in the form of an injunction
to the people at large to be similarly leaden-footed (112) when it comes
to the business of evaluation. Do not be hasty, Thomas says, addressing
himself now to the commonalty (the «donna Berta and ser Martino» of
line 139), in making judgements, for «I have seen an apparently barren
briar produce a rose in spring, and I have seen a ship negotiate the open
sea only to flounder at the harbour mouth». Appearances deceive, and
the truth on any issue has to be prized out through careful enquiry and
deliberation (130- 142).3
How, then, is Canto XIII of the Paradiso to be interpreted?
Once located within the perspective of the sun cantos generally of
the Paradiso , the anomalies of Canto XIII, if not eliminated, are to a
great extent assuaged; for having celebrated in the first three cantos of
this sequence the diversity of wisdom in its historical manifestation,
Dante now comes, in this fourth canto, to explore its dialectical form,
its proper mechanism as specifically human wisdom. And this he does
in a way which testifies to his appreciation of one of the most
fundamental structures of, in particular, Thomist discourse - its
dependence on analogy as a means of correlating the discrete elements of
human experience and thus of interpreting it in its totality. Indeed, it is
not too much to say that what we witness here in Paradiso XIII is an
exercise on Dante's part precisely in analogy as a means of affirming
unity in the context of diversity, a means of affirmation fundamentally
dependent for its efficacy on the capacity of the subject to discern and to
invoke significant distinctions. In this sense, the various
«disproportions» of the canto, especially the central disproportion of
Thomas's attempt to explain how it is that, relatively speaking,
Solomon's wisdom was second to none, serve the purpose - precisely
in their disproportion, in their scrupulous observance of argumentative
propriety - to illuminate the how (as distinct from the what) of human
wisdom, its intimate discursive structure.
Let us begin, then, with the general perspective of the sun cantos
as a whole, and, in particular, with the opening lines (1-21) of Canto X.
In lines as sonorous in tone as they are strategic in importance, Dante
straightaway confirms the ultimate object of speculative concern in
man: the triune principle of being from which all being flows in love.
The Father, Dante says, contemplating the Son in the love which each
eternally breathes forth, inspires over and beyond Himself the order
which characterizes the created realm as a whole and which in turn
speaks of the orderliness of the Godhead. Implicit in the spectacle of
189
order here below is an invitation to the spectator to lift his eyes towards
the first principle of that order and to exult in its ecstatic
self-perpetuation, in the self-ardour (Par, VII. 65) whereby God is said
radically and independently to subsist (Par. XXIX. 13-15).
Straightaway, then, the first and final cause of human wisdom -
God Himself in His threefold aspect - is confirmed in its unqualified
status as the primary object of meditative and speculative concern in
man. Each narrative detail hereabouts in Canto X of the Paradiso
underlines the exclusiveness of this concern, the absolute character of its
claim to attention. The reader, Dante says, must for the time being feed
himself, for he, Dante, is all bent on his theme (X. 25-7). Indeed, even
Beatrice herself is momentarily eclipsed as the pilgrim-poet yields to his
divine forgetfulness, to his rapt oblivion as one in receipt of
extraordinary grace (55-60). Both substantially and psychologically,
therefore, - in respect both of the object and of the mood of concern -
the emphasis is absolute. The beginning and end of all wisdom, Dante
maintains, lies in the contemplation of its Author, in man's spiritual
assimilation (as he has it in Convivio III. xiv. 2-3) to the One in
whom wisdom is as of the essence.
But this is only the first phase of the argument, for what comes
next introduces into this context of absolute concern the idea of variety,
of the manifold character of human wisdom in its historical
manifestation. For all of a sudden - with the breaking in upon him, in
fact, of Beatrice's smile - Dante's divine forgetfulness gives way to a
sense of multiplicity, to an awareness of the many lights now gathered
around him. Unity gives way to diversity («lo splendor de li occhi suoi
ridenti / mia mente unita in più cose divise», X. 62-3), and Dante the
author embarks now on the way of distinction, on a celebration of the
many and of the other. Indeed, this celebration of the many and of the
other constitutes one of the most striking features of these sun cantos of
the Paradiso y for the speculative citizenry of heaven as presented here by
Dante is nothing if not varied. Alongside the theologians and
philosophers, those most obviously given to the pursuit of wisdom in
its pure form, are lawyers, grammarians, dialecticians, historians and
rulers of the people. First, then, come Thomas Aquinas and Albert the
Great, representative between them of the new Christian Peripateticism,
and the canon lawyer Gratian, responsible (if Pietro di Dante's gloss on
X. 104 is anything to go by) for the integration of ecclesiastical and
civil law. Next come Peter Lombard, whose Libri quattuor sententiarum
quickly became a fundamental text in dogmatic theology, and, following
him, Solomon, son of David, and author-poet of (in addition to the
Sapiential texts of the Old Testament attributed to him) the biblical
190
Song of Songs interpreted in the Middle Ages as a celebration of the
mystic union of Christ and his Church. His, Thomas says, is the most
exquisite light in the garland of elect spirits now gathered around the
pilgrim poet. The loftiness of his mind and the depth of his wisdom are
unprecedented and unparalleled among them (109-1 14).
Next to Solomon is Dionysius the Areopagite, the Neoplatonizing
mystic theologian of the fifth century identified in Dante's time with
Paul's convert in Acts 17:34, and, along with the author of the Liber de
causis , one of Dante's principal authorities in this area of his own
theological sensibility. Then comes a light who, if not St. Ambrose or
Marius Victorinus (both of whom answer to some extent to Dante's
formula in X. 118-20), is probably Paul Orosius, advocate of the
superior civility of Christian times in respect of the pagan era, and
another of Dante's auc tores in, this time, the historical sector. Then
comes the massively important figure as far as the shape and substance
of Dante's thought as a moral philosopher are concerned, Boethius, a
victim like himself, Dante believed, of political injustice. And finally,
as far as this first circle of learned spirits is concerned, come Isidore,
grammarian, theologian and encyclopaedist; Bede the Venerable, noted
for his history of Christianity in the British Isles; Richard of St.Victor,
the twelfth-century mystic theologian and psychologist of spiritual
ecstasy; and (at first sight curiously, given Thomas's erstwhile
opposition to him) the radical Aristotelian philosopher Siger of Brabant.
Before ever we reach cantos XI and XII, therefore, - between them the
most sustained study in Dante of spiritual otherness, - a primary
emphasis falls here in Canto X on diversity, on the intimate
differentiation of wisdom as a function and property of human
experience in time and space.
The otherness of Cantos XI and XII is the otherness of Francis and
Dominic as God's response to the waywardness of the Church as
redeemed through Christ's blood. Here, as in his identification at the
beginning of Canto XII of yet a further company of speculative spirits,
difference remains the keynote of Dante's discourse. What interests him
is the endless variety of temperament and vocation among those most
eagerly inclined to espouse God's purposes. At every point Francis and
Dominic relate alternatively, by way of qualitative difference. Francis is
«all seraphic in ardor» (XI. 37) while Dominic is a «splendor of
cherubic light» (XI. 39). Francis is the embodiment of evangelical
simplicity while Dominic is a «holy athlete gracious to his own but
pitiless to his enemies» (XII. 56-7). Francis proceeds by way of
example, Dominic by way of disputation. Francis's was an invitation to
likeminded spirits to embrace the way of humble renunciation, while
191
Dominic's was an indictment of the heretics, a fulmination which
«struck most vigorously where resistance was most stubborn» (XII.
100-2). Each alike was moved by a common concern for the well-being)
of the Church Militant, but in terms of the substance and style of their
historical existence each stood over and against the other as a
complementary but utterly distinct presence. And the same applies to
the select spirits of the second circle of learned souls. Standing over and
against the Angelic Doctor, Thomas, as spokesman for the first circle,
is the Seraphic Doctor, Bonaventure, himself not untouched by the
Aristotelian learning of the day but representative in the round of the
accumulated wisdom of the Augustinians and Victorines. Then, among
others, come Hugh of St. Victor, responsible for the propaedeutic
Didascalicon' Petrus Comestor, another Victorine compilationist; Peter
of Spain, a dialectician noted for his Summa logicales ; the mystical and
dogmatic theologian Anselm; the fourth-century grammarian Donatus;
the biblical exegete and encyclopaedist Rabanus Maurus; and (again at
first sight curiously, given Bonaventure's former hostility towards him)
the prophetic spirit of Joachim of Flora.
At every point, therefore, Dante's emphasis falls on the variety of
Christian contemplation and erudition in its historical outworking. His
preliminary emphasis in Canto X on the nature of God as the first and
unspeakable power («lo primo e ineffabile Valore», X. 3) from which
all being flows at once gives way to a complementary emphasis on the
diversity of cognitive discipline and temperament whereby this order is
known and contemplated among men. Thus the theologian knows and
celebrates the original order of things from the point of view of one
seeking formally to elucidate the contents of faith (Thomas and Albert),
while the philosopher knows and celebrates it from the standpoint of
empirical observation and of reasonable inference (Siger and the radical
Aristotelians). The historian knows and celebrates it as revealed in the
event as testifying to the guiding hand of providence (Orosius and Bede),
while the grammarian and the dialectician know and celebrate it as
confirmed in the structures of language and of orderly predication
(Donatus and Peter of Spain). The lawyer knows and celebrates it as
reflected in the institutions of man's collective existence in time and
space (Gratian), while poet-philosophers and prophets know and
celebrate it as a principle of comfort in adversity and under the aspect of
eschatological resolution (Boethius and Joachim). Each of these
disciplines, Dante is suggesting, offers a way into the original truth of
things. Each in its way initiates the mind in a sense of the design which
informs and sustains them all. And it is the «in its way» that matters
here, for what, fundamentally, Dante is setting out to demonstrate in
192
this, the speculative realm par excellence of his Paradiso is the way in
which each discipline, be it theological, philosophical, historical,
ïalectical, mathematical, legal or whatever, though in one sense a mere
shadow of the wisdom first and foremost in God as the author of all
wisdom, none the less aspires to a proper perfection, to - in the hands,
at least, of the master and of the pious spirit - a proper sufficiency.
Absolutely speaking, a partial and fragmentary representation of the
original wisdom of God, relatively speaking - or rather (for we are
speaking here of the kind of indeterminate proportion said by the
theologian to exist between the finite and the infinite) analogously
speaking - it has about it its own incomparable light.
We need, perhaps, by way of clarification, to dwell a little on the
notion of analogy, and to examine briefly how it works in Thomas
himself as Dante's chief spokesman in these cantos.4 Analogy, as a
property of significant discourse, figures most prominently in Aquinas
in the context of his ontology or philosophy of being.5 Thomist
ontology, which introduces into the metaphysical question as conceived
in his time an existential dimension entirely absent from the
Aristotelian metaphysic which it presupposes, turns on the notion of
being (esse), as distinct from essence (essentia), as the decisive property
of whatever is in the world, of whatever impinges on the consciousness
of the beholder as existent or as being there (the German Dasein). Thus
form, which enters into union with matter to determine the essence of a
thing, is, for Thomas, in further potential to the act of existence (esse)
whereby that thing is said actually to be in a historically verifiable
manner.6 Now being in the sense of existence (esse) is in one sense
participational, for whatever exists determinately (as this or that object
of perception) in the historical order merely shares in the indeterminate
existence of God, in whom existence is of the essence.7 But at the same
time existence as verified historically is open to an analogical
interpretation in the sense that whatever exists in the world exists
relative to its specific form fully and incontrovertibly. In its way - by
which we mean in a way determined and circumscribed by the properties
of form - it exists as fully and incontrovertibly (though not as
necessarily) as God Himself, this precisely being the purpose of God's
original creative intention, of the scriptural let it be. By virtue, in other
words, of the kind of analogy whereby whatever proceeds from
something else preserves in a proportionate but none the less substantial
fashion the properties of that from which it proceeds, everything which
proceeds from God as original being (as the scriptural I AM) has about
it, «secondo alcuna proporzione» (the phrase is Dante's in the Vita
nuova: XXV.4), the property of being, the status of standing out
193
existentially ( ex-sistere ) over and against that which is not - a pattern
of thought which, even in the context of total quantitative difference,
secures the possibility of ontological affirmation in respect of the
created order.
Now the Thomist analogy of being plays no part in Dante. The
terminology, certainly, is there, as are elements of the creationism
presupposed by a specifically Christian philosophy of existence;8 but in
the round, Dante's philosophy of being is unfolded in terms of a species
of emanationism determined in its main lines by his reading in the Liber
de causis and in the Pseudo-Dionysius.9 But this should not be taken to
imply unfamiliarity with, still less indifference to, the notion of
analogy as a principle of significant discourse. On the contrary, it is
precisely in terms of analogy that he develops in Paradiso XIII his
account of the nature of human wisdom in its innate viability and proper
fullness. For in one sense the wisdom of man is merely participational,
with all this implies by way of partiality and provisionally. Wisdom,
absolutely speaking, is in God as its first principle. He Himself is
wisdom, for wisdom pertains to Him as of the essence, which means
that any creature disposed to share in this wisdom does so secondarily,
discontinuously and fragmentarily. This at any rate is the sense of
Convivio, where Dante's task is precisely that of showing how, in his
pursuit of philosophy, man is made over again in the image of God.10
Here, then, is the participational aspect of the question. We, as
men, are wise to the extent in which we share in God's wisdom. But in
the Paradiso - and by way of acknowledging not only a first principle
of careful thought but a first principle of careful thought as deployed,
supremely, by Thomas11 Dante procedes by way of analogy, by way
of the kind of distinction apt even within the context of radical difference
to enable an affirmation of equality; for given that, absolutely speaking,
wisdom, as wisdom, is first and foremost in God as the alpha and omega
of all wisdom, none the less wisdom as determined in this or that
discipline may properly lay claim, among the adept, to perfection.
Relatively speaking - relative, that is, to the proper concerns of this or
that discipline or calling, - wisdom among men aspires to a
completeness of its own, and the wise man to a unique form of
blessedness.
It is, therefore, along these lines that we have to interpret this, in
some ways, most recalcitrant of cantos. Paradiso XIII, for all its
apparent disproportion and, in respect of its incipit and explicit ,
diseconomy, is the true point of arrival for the sun cantos in general; for
here, having celebrated the range and diversity of human wisdom as
instantiated historically, Dante looks beneath the surface of that wisdom
194
in one at least of its most characteristic forms - the form represented
by, or rather consequent on, specifically scholastic ratiocination - to
disclose and to rejoice in its basic mechanism. True, a point is being
made, a point to do with the incomparability of Solomonic wisdom, and
in this sense Dante is taking the opportunity to reply to a longstanding
debate on the question of Solomon, his skills as a ruler and his eternal
destiny. But what matters here, and what accounts for the
«disproportion» of Thomas's discourse in this canto, is not only -
perhaps not even primarily - the substance of what is being said, but
its method , its how as distinct from its what. For Dante's overriding
aim in this final canto of the sun sequence in the Paradiso is to confirm
what he himself understands to be the sine qua non , the necessary
condition and guarantee, of properly human wisdom, namely its
dependence on the capacity of the would-be seeker after truth correctly to
frame his argument. Few things are reducible to, but everything
presupposes, this, namely the capacity of the enquirer to pursue the
argument with due dialectical care, for to fail here is to enslave the
intellect and to reduce understanding to mere opinion (1 12-120):
E questo ti sia sempre piombo a' piedi,

per farti mover lento com' uom lasso
e al sì e al no che tu non vedi:
che quelli è tra li stolti bene a basso,
che sanza distinzione afferma e nega
ne l'un così come ne l'altro passo;
perch' elli 'ncontra che più volte piega
l'oppinïon corrente in falsa parte,
e poi l'affetto l'intelletto lega...
Only on the basis of sustained vigilance, Dante maintains

(perfectly obedient in this sense at least to the example of Thomas), will
the truth on any issue emerge untarnished and unprejudiced, and only on
this basis will man's God-given capacity for significant enquiry emerge
triumphant. Care in division and composition is all. And with this we
return to the «oddly extravagant» image, as we called it, of the opening
lines of the canto, where even by medieval standards ingenuity seems to
teeter on the edge of preciosity and longueur. For what, we may ask, is
involved here if not an exercise in division and composition, in the
dismantling and reconstruction of a familiar object of sense impression
for the purposes of a new and more glorious insight? As usual in Dante,
the image is intrinsically functional.
195
NOTES
^Conv. III. vi. 6: «quelle menti angeliche che fabbricano col cielo queste
cose di qua giuso». - On primary and secondary causality in the Paradiso
see, in addition to XIII. 52-78, VU. 124 ff and XXIX. 10 ff. A useful
summary of the whole question is in S. Bemrose, Dante's Angelic
Intelligences , Rome, 1983. On the Neoplatonic shape of Dante's
cosmology, see B. Nardi, «La dottrina dell'Empireo» in Saggi di filosofia
dantesca , 2nd ed., Florence, 1967, 167-214.
L M etap h . I. ix (Thomas ad loc., n. 142); Phys. I. iii; De coelo III. i (for
Parmenides and Melissus). For Bryson, Anal. post. I. ix, Soph, elench. xi.
^For the historical Thomas on intellectual presumption (though he has in
mind probably not so much the commonalty as those philosophers of
Pythagorean inspiration inclined to interpret the world in terms of sense
impression, In metaph. IV, lect. 8, n. 637; lect. 9, nn. 661-2; X, lect. 2, n.
1959; XI, lect. 5, n. 2224), ScG I. v: «Sunt enim quidam tantum de suo
ingenio praesumentes ut totam naturam divinam se reputent suo intellectu
posse metiri, aestimantes scilicet totum esse verum quod eis videtur et
falsum quod eis non videtur». Dante offers a version of this passage at
Conv. IV. xv. 12.
4On analogy in Aquinas, H. Lyttkens, The Analogy between God and the
World, Uppsala, 1952; R. M. Mclnerny, The Logic of Analogy: An
Interpretation of St. Thomas, The Hague, 1961. Aquinas himself on
analogy and the divine names, ST la, 13 («Nomina de Deo et creaturis
dicta, non univoce nec pure aequivoce, sed analogice dicuntur, secundum
analogiam creaturarum ad ipsum», ibid. art. 5 conc.) and ScG I. 32-4
(probably more familiar to Dante).
^See in addition to the many general accounts of Thomism and Thomist
metaphysics (De Wulf, Gilson, Copleston etc.), G. Phelan, «The
Existentialism of St. Thomas», Proceedings of the American Catholic
Philosophical Association 21 (1946), 25-40; J. Maritain, Existence and
the Existent, New York, 1956 (1948); E. Gilson, Being and Some
Philosophers , Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto, 1952;
idem, L'Etre et l'essence, 2nd edn., Paris, 1962; P. T. Geach, God and the
Soul, London, 1969 (especially 42-74); C. Fabro, «Il nuovo problema
dell'essere e la fondazione della metafisica», in St. Thomas Aquinas,
1274-1974 : Commemorative Studies, ed. A Maurer, C.S.B, 2 vols.,
Toronto, 1974; J. Owens, The Doctrine of Being in the Aristotelian
«Metaphysics»: A Study of the Greek Background of Mediaeval Thought,
3rd ed., Toronto, 1978.
6ST la, 3, 4 resp.: «esse est actualitas omnis formae vel naturae ... oportet
igitur quod ipsum esse comparetur ad essentiam, quae est aliud ab ipso, sicut
actus ad potentiam»; ibid. 8, 1 resp.: «Esse autem est illud quod est magis
intimum cuilibet, et quod profundius omnibus inest; cum sit formale
respectu omnium quae in re sunt»; Qu. disp. de anima, aa. 6 & 7 etc.
So, for example, ST la, 45, 5 ad 1: «quodcumque ens creatum participai, ut
196
ita dixerim, náturám essendi; quia solus Deus est suum esse»; De potentia 1,
2 ad 9 etc.
°Par. VII. 135-7, XXIX. 10-36. A. Mellone, La dottrina di Dante Alighieri
sulla prima creazione, Salerno, 1950; idem, «Il canto XXIX del Paradiso »,
in Nuove letture dantesche ( Casa di Dante in Roma), VII, Florence, 1974,
193-213; idem, ad voc. «Creazione» in Eric. dant. II, 251-3; J.A. Mazzeo,
«The Analogy of Creation in Dante», Speculum 33 (1957), 706-21.
^B. Nardi, «Citazioni dantesche del Liber de causis», in Saggi di filosofìa,
cit., 81-109; A. Mellone, «Emanatismo neoplatonico di Dante per le
citazioni del Liber de causisi», Divus Thomas 54 (1951), 205-12.
10«Ché, se a memoria si reduce ciò che detto è di sopra, Filosofia è uno
amoroso uso di sapienza, lo quale massimamente è in Dio, però che in Lui è
somma sapienza e sommo amore e sommo atto; che non può essere altrove,
se non in quanto da Esso procede. È dunque la divina Filosofia de la divina
essenza, però che in esso non può essere cosa a la sua essenzia aggiunta ...
E così si vede come questa è donna primamente di Dio, e secondariamente de
l'altre Intelligenze separate, per continuo sguardare; e appresso de l'umana
intelligenza per riguardare discontinuato» ( Conv . HI. xii. 12-13 & xiii. 7).
11 See especially K. Foster O.P., «St. Thomas and Dante» in The Two
Dantes, London, 1977, 56-65, worth quoting at length for his particular
(and particularly Dominican) combination of precision and perspicacity on
this question: «these cantos [Paradiso X-XIII] sum up all that Dante
personally owed to Aquinas . . . they present him as the image and synthesis
of a special kind of saintly intelligence - the saintliness of the good friar
in the Dominican way of being a friar - and the intelligence of the good
theologian according to the way of doing theology that gives full place and
honour to reason. The motif of sanctity appears especially in Thomas's
tribute to St. Francis (reciprocated in Bonaventure's to St. Dominic in
canto XII) and in his critique of unworthy Dominicans, in XI. 40-139;
while the motif of intelligence appears in Thomas's being the spokesman
of the first circle of Christian scholars and sages (X. 91-138), but more
particularly in the recurrent stress - evidently intended as characteristic -
in his three discourses on the need for and the beauty of rational
discrimination, measure and sobriety of judgement ... Thomas speaks all
through as a "logician and a great clerk", because that is how Dante saw
him and the value of his example» (63); idem, «The Tact of St. Thomas» in
God's Tree, London, 1957, 141-9.
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Paradiso XIV
Author(s): MADISON U. SOWELL
Accessed: 17-02-2020 23:04 UTC
Lectura Dantis
MADISON U. SOWELL
Brigham Young University
XIV
This Canto ... is a gentle breath of seraphic poesy.
W. W. Vemon quoting Angelo De Gubernatis^
Questo quattordicesimo Canto è un caso tipico del lato

scabro, volutamente impervio della poesia dantesca;
questo è uno dei momenti in cui il poeta tace e parla il
gran dottore da una ideale cattedra.
Mario Vinciguerra^
Prologue
Caveat lector : readers who prefer their Dante «detheologized» would

do well to skip both Paradiso XIV and this lectura.
Dante's Paradiso thrives on theological discourse and flows with
elevated verse. Abounding in philosophical speculation and sublime
poetry, the final canticle brilliantly fulfills a promise nascent in a
technical term in the distant prologue to the entire Commedia - «per
trattar del ben ch'i' vi trovai» (Inf. 1.8, emphasis mine here and later).3
The verb trattar carries with it the distinct connotation of a
philosophical tractate or treatise in prose, even though it appears as an
accented (and, consequently, emphasized) word in a line of verse.4 The
premise of the Commedia is that a poetic tractate - a fusion of poetic
expression and religious thought - is possible, desirable, and the
highest form of Christian art. However, inspired possibly by Crocean
distinctions of poesia and non poesia , some readers, such as the sharply
critical Vinciguerra, tend to view the third canticle's cantos as falling
primarily into one category or the other: poetry or theology.
I suppose a case can be made for such readings. Paradiso IV, for
example, does present a highly pedantic Beatrice responding at great
length to the pilgrim's queries on the location of the saved souls and the
nature of the human will. She even employs the technical verb trattare:
«tratterò quella [questione] che più ha di felle» (27). In the eyes of some
critics, therefore, the canto becomes one of those moments when the
poet is presumably silent and «parla il gran dottore». Paradiso XXX, by
contrast, captures the ascent to the Empyrean in the loftiest poetry
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imaginable (cf. 61 ff., «E vidi lume in forma di ri vera / fui vido di
fulgore ...», or 124 ff., «Nel giallo de la rosa sempiterna, / che si
digrada e dilata e redole / odor di lode al sol che sempre verna ...»).
Poetic expression appears to be paramount.
Such schemata supposedly serve to isolate and highlight some of
the poem's chief theological and poetic concerns. But from my
viewpoint this vision of a dyadic Paradiso ultimately obscures too many
of its rich complexities. Readings that emphasize such dichotomies tend
to gloss over the fact that theology and poetry are strands invariably
intertwined in the third canticle, even in the cantos cited. This is true
because the theological sections, whether lengthy or brief, are always
interspersed with metaphorical, highly literary, or visionary passages.
The resulting tapestry encourages the attentive reader to deal with the
juxtaposition or fusion of theological treatise and visionary poetry. In
cases where a significant section of a canto is devoted to theology we
must ask, «Wherein lies the organic wholeness or the artistic unity?».
Or, to use Jeffrey Schnapp's apt vocabulary, «How is the dyad
'linked'?».5
Paradiso XIV offers an excellent case study in how Dante marries
ostensibly mismatched partners, achieving a masterly fusion of the
theological and the poetical. In the end, whether judged as «intentionally
inaccessible» («volutamente impervio») because of a double dose of
Thomistic doctrine and medieval iconography, or exalted as «seraphic
poesy» because of exquisite figures of speech and sublime spectacle, this
particular canto invites the reader to reflect on the process of Dante's
supernal poeticizing. Precisely because at first glance the canto appears
structurally, narratively, and even visually bipartite6 - beginning in the
solar sphere of the Wise (arranged in concentric circles) and ending in the
Martian sphere of the Soldiers of the Faith (arranged in a cross) - we
ponder one central question throughout this lectura : How does the divine
poet achieve unity of thought and vision in a canto invariably dubbed
«transitional»?7 While previous lecturae have searched for coherency in
Paradiso XIV via an examination of such aspects as its images of light
and circularity or the figure of Beatrice, this reading attempts to focus on
rhetorical figures that pervade the canto. I shall attempt to connect
stylistic aspects of the first part with the dominant iconographie image
of the second.
Divisions and Transitions
Paradiso XIV contains an odd (as opposed to an even) number of

verses - 139, to be exact. While the number 139 carries numerological
significance in and of itself as a reflection of the unity of the Trinity
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(whose mystery is alluded to in 28, «Queir uno e due e tre ... »),8 it
also means that the canto has a central verse with an equal number of
verses before and after: 70 («E sì come al salir di prima sera»). Although
this verse serves as the first line of a simile describing the spirits in the
third concentric circle of the Wise, it does not mark the canto's most
significant transition, which is the movement between the two spheres.
Therefore, ancient commentators and modern-day critics have focused on
dividing (and subdividing) Paradiso XIV in other (less symmetrical)
ways, the largest and roughest division always being made between the
events occurring in the sphere of the Sun and those transpiring in the
sphere of Mars.
What is intriguing is that the line of demarcation between the
spheres varies, more than one might expect, according to the
commentator. Benvenuto da Imola, for example, includes 1-84 in the
first part and sees the declaration in 85 («Ben m'accors' io ch'io era più
levato ...») as the opening line of the second part. Bosco and Reggio,
on the other hand, regard 1-78 as constituting the initial part and have
the latter section begin with the description of Dante's guide in 79 («Ma
Béatrice sì bella e ridente ...»). But the actual movement from one
sphere to the next occurs in the second hemistich of 83 («e vidimi
translato»), which means that the movement transpires in the middle of
a tercet (82-84). Dante raises his eyes in 82-83 («Quindi ripreser li occhi
miei virtute / a rilevarsi») while still in the solar sphere, and only after
having done that is he «translated» (i.e., transported) to Mars. Perhaps
for this reason Buti saw in 82 the start of the second section. The
different opinions over where exactly the canto should be divided for
purposes of exegesis is important in that it points to the somewhat
blurred or shifting boundaries between the first and second parts of the
canto and suggests that there may be significantly more overlap between
the two parts than immediately meets the eye.
The chief subdivisions of the canto are these: 1-18, Beatrice reveals
to the Wise a question Dante has not verbalized (Will the light radiated
by the blessed spirits continue after they receive their resurrected bodies
and, if so, how will their eyes tolerate the brightness?); 19-33, the Wise
respond eagerly with joyous song and circular dance; 34-60, «la luce più
dia» (Solomon) answers Dante's query (The light will both continue and
increase, and the glorified bodies - strengthened by increased grace -
will be capable of withstanding the greater light); 61-66, the two circles
of the Wise voice their approbation of Solomon's words with an Amen ;
67-81, a third circle of the Wise appears and Beatrice responds with a
smile; 82-90, Dante gazes upon Beatrice and is transported with her to
Mars; 91-126, the blessed Soldiers of the Faith appear in the form of a
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cross; and 127-39, Dante is in ecstasy.
Given the doctrinal topics and the spatial territory covered, Paradiso
XIV is undoubtedly, on more than one level, a canto of transition. First,
it dramatically marks both the end of the sphere of the sun (cantos
X-XIII) and the entry into the sphere of Mars (cantos XV-XVII and first
part of XVIII). The drama unfolds in two framing events, each of which
defeats Dante's memory: the marvelous appearance of the third circle of
spirits (67 ff.), which leads the poet to apostrophize «Oh vero sfavillar
del Santo Spiro!» (76), and the revelation of the cross of fighting saints
(97 ff.), which causes him to lament, «Qui vince la memoria mia lo
'ngegno» (103). By definition, what occurs between these threshold
events is telling, for «the passage of the threshold is a form of
self-annihilation» that leads to greater knowledge.9 The self-annihilation
in this case is the failure of Dante's powers of recall and the total
contrition of his heart. His memory of the third circle of spirits «tra
quelle vedute / si vuol lasciar che non seguir la mente» (80-81); likewise
the flaming cross «lampeggiva Cristo, / sì ch'io non so trovare
essempro degno» (104-105). The Paradiso succeeds as a poem in large
part because the poet openly acknowledges the ineffability of the
experience even as he musters all his genius to describe it.
What occurs in the liminal space between the sfavillar of the Holy
Spirit and the venerable sign of the cross is Dante's «translation». The
use of the Latinate term «translato» (83) greatly heightens the notion of
a major transition in the pilgrim's experience. It does so because the
term clearly echoes the New Testament notion of «translation» as
salvation in the kingdom of light. This terminology is found in
Colossians 1:12-13 (Vulgate): «...gratias agentes Deo Patri, qui dignos
nos fecit in partem sortis sanctorum in lumine: qui eripuit nos de
potestate tenebrarum, et transtulit [translated us] in regnum Filii
dilectionis suae». Dante's whole Paradise is a kingdom of «translation»
and light, and more than one commentator has focused on the light
imagery that abounds in Paradiso XIV - from the brightness of
Solomon and the circles of the Wise to the radiance of the scintillating
spirits who make up the cross of Christ.10 The «translation» in the case
of the pilgrim in Paradiso XIV, however, is not from darkness to light
but from lesser light to greater light. The greater light in this case is
brought about by the epiphany of the cross.
Chiasmus and the Cross
The rhetorical figure of chiasmus in the first part functions

metaphorically to presage the presentation of the cross in the second.
201
Chiasmus links the first and second parts of the canto in a way that
provides a unity of vision not previously demonstrated. Poetry and
theology will reveal themselves as coexistent in Dante's conception of
art. Referred to as antitesi in modern Italian and such terms as
commutatio in medieval grammatical handbooks, chiasmus derives its
name from the Greek letter chi (i.e., a cross or a cross-over) and the
Greek verb chiazein (to mark with an X). The figure in its simplest
form consists of two parallel clauses in which the order of words in the
first is inverted in the second, the inversion giving the pattern ab:ba. A
chiastic figure may extend to many more elements and assume the
pattern «abc ... x ... cba». In Latin it can also refer to the inversion of
cases, rather than exact words, such as the opening lines of Venantius
Fortunatus's hymn, alluded to by Dante in Inferno XXXIV: «Vexilla
regis prodeunt / fulget crucis mystérium». Here the pattern of
nominative, genitive, verb in line one is inverted to become verb,
genitive, nominative in line two.11
Chiasmus is fairly common in antiquity, both in the scriptura
paganorum and in the liber scripturae. John W. Welch cites, for
example, a study listing 1257 examples of chiasmus in Livy («che non
erra», Inf. XXVIII.12), 211 in Sallust, 365 in Caesar, 1088 in Tacitus,
and 307 in Justinus, and then notes that «Vergil's use of chiasmus is
perhaps one of the more ingenious aspects of his style».12 Numerous
examples can be found in the Bible, both in the Old Testament and in
the New Testament.13 Two verses found in the tenth chapter of
Matthew offer a particularly fine example for my purposes because they
juxtapose Christ's cross to a chiastic device. Matthew 10:38 introduces
the image of the cross (Douay-Rheims): «And he that taketh not up his
cross, and followeth me, is not worthy of me». Dante alludes indirectly
to this verse in Paradiso XIV (106) when he refers to «chi prende sua
croce e segue Cristo», even though Dante's line actually translates
Matthew 16:24. The biblical verse quoted above, with its connection of
worthiness and the cross, establishes a key context for what I have to
say not only about chiasmus in Paradiso XIV but also in Matthew
10:39, which reads (Douay-Rheims): «He that findeth his life, shall lose
it: / and he that shall lose his life for me shall find it». In the Vulgate
version known to Dante, the chiastic nature of this particular verse
comes through in the same way: «Qui invenit animam suam, perdei
illam: / et qui perdiderit animam suam propter me, inveniet earn». In
truth, the rules of chiasmus are flexible enough to allow the phrase
«animam suam» to count as a unit. This means that the pattern here is
really abc: cba. The point to be made is that the biblical pronouncement
of the centrality of the cross to Christian discipleship is sustained
202
rhetorically by the chiastic arrangement. One verse narratively introduces
the concept of the cross; the next contains a rhetorical figure that
mirrors the cross.
George S. Tate, in his brief but penetrating essay on «Chiasmus as
Metaphor», avows that the Greek letter chi , «along with its Latin
counterpart (X), was associated throughout the Middle Ages with the
Cross and with Christ».14 Citing such eminent authorities as Isidore
(«X littera ... figura crucem significai»), Alcuin, Hrabanus,
Angelbertus, and others, Tate argues convincingly «that even though in
the [medieval] rhetorical manuals the figure does not bear its more recent
name, chiasmus, it was perceived an an X-pattern and was used
frequently as a structural metaphor celebrating Christ».15 If we accept
the medieval metaphorical implications of chiasmus, the rationale for its
abundant use in the canto under discussion becomes much clearer.
Paradiso XIV opens with a wonderfully simple and technically
perfect chiasmus (1-9):
Dal centro al cerchio , e sì dal cerchio al centro

movesi l'acqua in un ritondo vaso,
secondo eh e percossa fuori o dentro:
ne la mia mente fé sùbito caso
questo ch'io dico, sì come si tacque
la gloriosa vita di Tommaso,
per la similitudine che nacque
del suo parlare e di quel di Beatrice,
a cui sì cominciar, dopo lui, piacque.
The poet speaks in the present tense («questo ch'io dico») of the
pilgrim's experience in the past («ne la mia mente fé sùbito caso»). The
reverberating image is intended to capture, not only metaphorically but
also visually, the enthralling interaction between Beatrice, who (along
with Dante) is at the center of two concentric circles of the Wise, and
Aquinas, who occupies a place in one of those circles.
Although Vinciguerra criticizes the image for being «poco
accessibile», an English translator has labeled it, somewhat more
sympathetically, as «the homely image of the water in a bowl rippling
between the centre and the rim».16 What apparently has escaped all the
commentators is the effect of the X-like figure of chiasmus (obviously
intended to capture and echo the radiating lines from the center to the
circumference and from the circumference to the center) superimposed on
the image of the round bowl. The chiastic image of the opening verse
overlays the image of circularity to produce a variation on the cruciform
nimbus. Because the blessed in the concentric circles move in a circle
203
dance, the lights that they project towards the center - where Beatrice
and Dante stand - are like the spokes of a wheel. To employ for a
moment the language of the opening lines of Paradiso XIII, «let one
imagine» ( imagini ) that a cruciform nimbus is rotated at a fast speed.
The effect would parallel the experience that Dante and his guide have in
the first part of Paradiso XIV. They are, in effect, in a double nimbus
that becomes a triple halo just before they depart for the sphere of Mars.
The sign of the cross in a circle was first introduced in the
Commedia in Virgil's description of the harrowing of Hell, when «un
possente» (i.e., Christ) descended «con segno di vittoria coronato» {Inf,
IV.54). The sign is clarified, indeed defined, in Paradiso XIV. 101-102
as «il venerabil segno / che fan giunture di quadranti in tondo». This
sign of the cross, made up of the Soldiers of the Faith, flashes forth
Christ (104-105): «quella croce lampeggiava Cristo, / sì ch'io non so
trovare essempro degno». But it is presaged not only by the opening
tercet of Paradiso XIV but also by at least two other examples of
chiasmus in the first part of the canto.17
A second chiasmus, this one of two verses and of a more complex
pattern {abcde : edcba ), presents the Trinity (28-29):
Quell' uno e due e tre che sempre vive

e regna sempre in tre e 'n due e 'n uno ,
non circunscritto, e tutto circunscrive ...
Peter Dronke, in addressing these admittedly enigmatic verses, raises the

question, «why first the ascending order, then the descending one?». He
even ventures to ask the unthinkable: «Is it a meaningless
conundrum?»18 The answer is found most readily in the rhetorical figure
itself, for chiasmus may mirror more than the cross of Christ. Tate cites
three examples - two from the Old English-Latin Exposition
hymnorum and one from Chaucer's Troilus - as evidence that
«Chiasmus is also a fitting figure for presenting the Trinity or the
relationship between Father and Son».19 What is intriguing is, once
again, the image of the cross in the context of a (metaphorical) circle. In
the example cited it is achieved by the chiastic presentation of the
Trinity followed by the paradoxical «uncircumscribed circumscribing».
The triune godhead, though itself uncircumscribed, circumscribes or
encircles everything.
In classical literature chiasmus quite frequently occurs, undoubtedly
for rhetorical effect and perhaps as a mnemonic device, in speeches.
Certainly the most complicated chiasmus, not only in the canto under
discussion but perhaps in the entire Commedia , occurs in the heart of
204
Solomon's speech in the following four tercets (40-51):
La sua chiarezza séguita l'ardore;

ťardor la visione , e quella è tanta,
quant' ha di grazia sovra suo valore.
Come la carne gloriosa e santa
fia rivestita, la nostra persona
più grata fia per esser tutta quanta;
per che s'accrescerà ciò che ne dona
di gratuito lume il sommo bene,
lume ch'a lui veder ne condiziona;
onde la vision crescer convene,
crescer l'ardor che di quella s'accende,
crescer lo raggio che da esso vene.
The emphasized words pair up chiastically in this manner: a. chiarezza;

b. l'ardor; c. visione; d. grazia; e. fia rivestita; f. la nostra persona; e.
grata fia; d. gratuito; c. vision; b. l'ardor; a. raggio. This pairing
emphasizes the phrase la nostra persona , which lies appropriately at the
center of Solomon's chiastic discourse on the resurrection of the body.
The emphasis results in no small part from the series of words or
images that frame it. But these verses also contain smaller criss-crossing
patterns within the larger framework outlined above. Worthy of note are
these: chiarezza-l'ardore-l'ardor-visione (40-41); ne dona-lume-lume-ne
condiziona (46-48); visïone-crescer-crescer-l'ardor (49-50). In all the
cases of chiasmus in Solomon's speech, the rhetorical figure underscores
the centrality of Christ's redemption on the cross even as it anticipates
the flaming forth of the cross later in the canto. In addition, the chiastic
figures in 40-51 join with those of the opening verse and 28-29 to
present compelling evidence that Dante is intentionally using a poetical
device to make a theological statement, one that will be expanded upon
in the second part of the canto when the Soldiers of the Faith arrange
themselves (chiastically) in a bold iconographie presentation (104,
«quella croce lampeggiava Cristo»).20 The image of the cross links the
two parts of the canto in an imaginative way that stresses the croce' s
centrality for Christianity.
Similes
In part because of a longstanding fascination with the Dantean

simile,21 1 cannot conclude this reading without reflecting on the use in
Paradiso XIV of this rhetorical figure as well. This canto is, after all,
the only canto in the entire Commedia to employ the term similitudine
205
(7). Though used in a generalized sense of «likeness», the term,
appearing at the beginning of the third tercet, nevertheless calls attention
to the similitudini in the canto. Because these figures appear in both
parts of the canto and function in similar ways, they also stylistically
and conceptually link the various sections of Paradiso XIV.
Dante in the Paradiso and Milton in Paradise Lost faced a similar
problem and shared the same solution. Milton in the composition of his
epic had to deal with the problem of describing prelapsarian events in
after-the-fall terms and images. He had to use seventeenth-century
English vocabulary to narrate happenings that took place millennia
earlier. He could not easily and naturally include in his text such items
as hammers and saws or robbery and death, for these were things
brought about by the Fall and by the introduction of sin into the world.
But neither could he realistically and successfully recount the epic
struggle between good and evil in general or non-specific terms. Milton
solved this problem by introducing scores of epic similes into his
narrative. Therefore, although earthly battles did not exist before the
Fall, the poet could depict and anticipate them. A fine example of this
occurs in Paradise Lost 10.272-85:
So saying, with delight he [Death] snuff d the smell

Of mortal change on Earth. As when a flock
Of ravenous Fowl, though many a League remote,
Against the day of Battle, to a Field,
Where Armies lie encampt, come flying, lur'd
With scent of living Carcasses design'd
For death, the following day, in bloody fight.
So scented the grim Feature, and upturn'd
His Nostril wide into the murky Air,
Sagacious of his Quarry from so far.
Then Both from out Hell Gates into the waste
Wide Anarchy of Chaos damp and dark
Flew diverse, and with Power (thir Power was great)
Hovering upon the Waters.
The «Both» in verse 282 refers to the personifications of Death and Sin.
The prelapsarian excursions of these two foreboding characters move the
reader about the Empyrean at an accelerated pace and require a suspension
of disbelief. But the Miltonie simile serves here and throughout the
poem to slow down the acceleration and to provide the readers with
needed touchstones with the real world.
In the Paradiso Dante also takes us on flights through the
Empyrean at amazing speeds, and he encounters a problem that
206
anticipates Milton's: how to depict extra-terrestrial sights convincingly
with this world's language and imagery. At times he claims, as in
Paradiso XIV, that the feat is beyond him (105, «non so trovare
essempro degno»). But more often he finds, like Milton centuries later,
that his best recourse is in the form of the similitudine. That is why the
Paradiso has more similes than either the Purgatorio or the Inferno', the
more aethereal Dante's subject matter the more he needs this world's
images to describe or approximate the unseen. Unlike Milton, Dante is
not restricted to similes alone for the depiction of after-the-Fall objects
because the Italian epic treats the Christian (not Adamie) dispensation,
which would naturally include postlapsarian imagery. But Dante is like
Milton in that both poets must describe the supernatural and that which
is beyond time with the natural and that which is in time. In each case
the simile - and often it is the extended simile - seems to be the best
approach to handling the problem of how to make the unknown known
and the unseen seen.
In the case of Paradiso XIV, a review of five extended similes will
reveal the process by which Dante attempts to express the ineffable
while stylistically and imagistically connecting various paradisiacal
episodes. The first is the simile of the delighted round dancers, who are
compared to the two revolving and exulting circles of the Wise (19-24):
Come, da più letizia pinti e tratti,

a la fiata quei che vanno a rota
levan la voce e rallegrano li atti,
così, a l'orazion pronta e divota,
li santi cerchi mostrar nova gioia
nel torneare e ne la mira nota.
This comparison follows a stately, classical, balanced form

( come-così ), with the comparandum in the first tercet and the
comparatum in the second. The holy circles reveal their increased joy
«nel torneare», which refers to a circle dance popular in the Middle
Ages, and «ne la mira nota», which alludes to their marvelous singing.
The emphasis here is on harmonious joy, happiness that is enlivened
from time to time but that remains within decorous bounds. The image
of the circle - captured in such words and phrases as «vanno a rota»,
«li santi cerchi», and «torneare» - will become a motif by the end of
the canto.
The second extended simile follows the pattern of the first (si
come-così). It is evenly distributed in two tercets, and occurs in
Solomon's speech on the faculties of the resurrected body (52-57):
Ma si come carbon che fiamma rende,
207
e per vivo candor quella soverchia,
sì che la sua parvenza si difende;
così questo folgór che già ne cerchia
fia vinto in apparenza da la carne
che tutto dì la terra ricoperchia . . .
Here the commonplace image of a hot burning coal, a white form

visible within its own flame, is compared to the effulgence of the
resurrected body, whose brightness will surpass that of the spirit body.
The image of light, so prevalent in this canto, shines through such
expressions as «fiamma», «vivo candor», and «folgór». Once again, the
poet attempts to make comprehensible that which is beyond human
comprehension, and his tool is the similitudine. It is important to note
that this highly poetic form occurs in a presumably «theological»
discourse.
The third simile (sì come-parve ), also in two tercets, compares the
stars that appear at twilight to the third circle of the Wise who join the
first two circles just before Dante's ascent to Mars (70-75):
E sì come al salir di prima sera

comincian per lo ciel nove parvenze,
sì che la vista pare e non par vera,
parvemi lì novelle sussistenze
cominciare a vedere, e fare un giro
di fuor da l'altre due circunferenze.
This comparison addresses the ineffability of the experience through the

tentativeness of its assertions in both the vehicle («la vista pare e non
par vera») and the tenor («parvemi ... / cominciare a vedere»). Also, the
ubiquitous motif of the circle appears in both the description of the third
group as «un giro» and in the reference to the first two groups as «l'altre
due circunferenze». Dante's brilliance reveals itself in his ability to help
the reader imagine the unimaginable by introducing a daily phenomenon
- the appearance of heavenly lights between twilight and dusk - and
then comparing it to what the pilgrim witnessed.
The next simile comes from the second part of the canto and is
similarly celestial in its orientation. With a structure identical to the
similes in the first part (come-si) and consisting of two terzine , it
compares the stars of the Milky Way to the souls found in the sphere of
Mars who form themselves in a Greek cross (97-102):
Come distinta da minori e maggi

lumi biancheggia tra ' poli del mondo
208
Galassia sì, che fa dubbiar ben saggi;
sì costellati facean nel profondo
Marte quei raggi il venerabil segno
che fan giunture di quadranti in tondo.
This comparison subtly blends both the image of light - «minori e

maggi / lumi», «biancheggia ... / Galassia», and «quei raggi» - with
the figure of the cross in a circle («il venerabil segno / che fan giunture
di quadranti in tondo»). Its balanced pattern echoes that of the first three
similes; and its images, though describing an event in a different sphere,
sustain and reinforce those introduced earlier.
The final similitudine , of the viol and harp, describes the
harmonious melody that the cross of spirits chimes (1 18-23):
E come giga e arpa, in tempra tesa

di molte corde, fa dolce tintinno
a tal da cui la nota non è intesa,
così da' lumi che lì m'apparinno
s'accogliea per la croce una melode
che mi rapiva, sanza intender l'inno.
In this case the perfectly balanced structure of this two-tercet simile

( come-così ) seems to mirror the sweet harmony emitted by the
hymn-singing souls. Notions of sweetness («dolce tintinno»), light
(«lumi»), the cross («la croce»), and ecstasy («mi rapiva») combine to
prepare the reader for the pilgrim's ecstatic state in the concluding verses
of the canto.
Conclusion
The image of the viol and harp, both strung with so many cords
and yet capable of chiming together in an inspiring melody, captures the
harmony that I see between poetry and theology in this canto and in
Dante's conception of Christian art. Just as the extended similes in the
two parts of Paradiso XIV mirror each other in terms of structure,
balance, theme, tone, and purpose, so poetical and theological concerns
work in concert in this and all of Dante's cantos. Paradiso XIV proves
inaccessible only when the reader insists on divorcing its poetry from its
theology. To assume that the canto is only «a gentle breath of seraphic
poesy» would be as much an injustice as to agree that it is one of those
moments when the poet is silent and only the theologian holds forth.
209
NOTES
1 William Warren Vernon, Readings on the «Paradiso» of Dante (London:

Methuen, 1909), I, 456. The entire quotation reads: «De Gubernatis
remarks that this Canto is woven throughout of the most minute and
delicate threads, and is a gentle breath of seraphic poesy». The word
seraphic calls to mind the description of St. Francis in Paradiso XI. 37
(«L'un fu tutto serafico in ardore»).
^Mario Vinciguerra, Il canto XIV del «Paradiso» (Torino: SEI, 1959), 5. The
quote contained in the epigraph is not isolated. Vinciguerra presents a
variety of surprisingly negative judgments on Paradiso XIV: «Il Canto si
apre con una similitudine poco accessibile» (8); the simile of the Milky
Way is seen, «dal lato dell'arte, ... mal congegnata e complicatasi per via»
(15); the entire second part of the canto «è artisticamente priva di un centro
organico» and is filled with «zone di incertezza e, diciamo pure, di assenza
di fantasia» (16). Vinciguerra justifies the supposedly unimaginative
second part by concluding that it is not «un episodio, ma un prologo» (17)
to the truly grandiose episode of Cacciaguida. This lectura , perhaps the
most widely diffused in Italy, has even been anthologized for students: «La
Divina Commedia» nella critica, III:«// Paradiso », ed. Antonino Pagliaro
(Messina: G. D'Anna, 1971), 187-91. See also Questioni di critica
dantesca , ed. Giorgio Petrocchi & Pompeo Giannantonio (Napoli:
Loffredo, 1972, 5 ed.), 685-90.
3 All quotations of the Comedy come from the text established by Giorgio
Petrocchi. Any translations of the poem, unless otherwise indicated, are
taken from Charles S. Singleton's texts (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1970-75).
^Cf. Emst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages ,
trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973),
222: «Tractare is a technical term in medieval philosophy and means 'to
treat philosophically'. We find the word at the beginning of the Divine
Comedy : 'ma per trattar del ben ch'io vi trovai ...'. The final result of
'philosophical treatment' is the 'treatise' ( tractatus ). This, for example, is
what Dante calls his Monarchia». The term trattare also appears in the
concluding chapter of Dante's Vita nuova , when he records his significant
decision to write no more of Beatrice «infino a tanto che io potesse più
degnamente trattare di lei».
^Jeffrey T. Schnapp, The Transfiguration of History at the Center of Dante's
«Paradise» (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 5-6.
"For a concise presentation of the bipartite nature of Paradiso XIV, see
Dante Alighieri, La Divina Commedia , a cura di Umberto Bosco e Giovanni
Reggio (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1985), 221: «Nella prima parte del canto è
proposto e risolto un dubbio di Dante circa la luminosità dei beati dopo che
avranno rivestiti i loro corpi (1-66); poi si assiste all'apparizione,
all'esterno delle due corone concentriche di spiriti precedentemente
apparse, di uno sterminato numero di luci, cioè di altri 'sapienti' (67-78).
210
Siamo sempre nel cielo del Sole. Nella seconda parte del canto (79-139) il
poeta, salito nel cielo di Marte, ha la visione di beati, combattenti e martiri
per la fede, che si dispongono in forma di croce nella quale balena Cristo»
(emphasis mine). Even more recently, Luigi Blasucci, in «Discorso
teologico e visione sensibile nel canto XIV del Paradiso », La rassegna
della letteratura italiana 95, No. 3 (1991): 5, refers to Paradiso XIV as a
«canto, si direbbe, di transizione», even though he finds a rhetorical unity
of the two parts that is achieved by the canto's pervasive similes.
'Previous lecturae of Paradiso XIV include, in chronological order, the
following: Carlo Steiner, Il Canto XIV del «Paradiso» letto nella Sala di
Dante in Orsanmichele (Firenze: Sansoni, 1912) and La «luce più dia» del
Canto XIV del «Paradiso» dantesco e l'episodio del cielo del Sole (Padova:
Randi, 1913); Luigi Calvelli, Intorno al S. Giacomo del «Paradiso»
dantesco : nota al Canto XIV, 13-96 (Firenze: Picini, 1913); Luigi
Pietrobono, Saggi danteschi (Torino: SEI, 1954), 261-73; Mario
Vinciguerra, Il canto XIV del «Paradiso», cit; Giuseppe Berretta, «Il canto
XIV del Paradiso », Filologia e letteratura XI (1965): 254-69; Edoardo
Soprano, «Il Canto XIV del Paradiso», in Lectura Dantis Scaligera (Firenze:
Le Monnier, 1968), III, 479-504; Gaetano Marcovaldi, Due letture
dantesche (Roma: Multigrafica, 1968), 39-93; Ettore Bonora, «Struttura e
linguaggio nel XIV del Paradiso », Giornale storico della letteratura
italiana, a. 86 (1969): 1-17; Umberto Bosco, «Domesticità del Paradiso
(Lettura del canto XIV)», in Studi in onore di Alberto Chiari (Brescia:
Paideia, 1973), 217-34; Giovanni Fallani, Il canto XIV del «Paradiso», in
Nuove letture dantesche (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1973), 7-62; Peter Dronke,
«'Orizzonte che rischiari': Notes Towards the Interpretation of Paradiso
XIV», Romance Philology XXIX (1975): 1-19; Salvatore Accardo, «Canto
XIV del Paradiso», in Capitoli danteschi (Roma: Bonacci, 1976), 131-54;
Gabriele Muresu, «La 'gloria della carne': disfacimento e trasfigurazione
(Par. XIV)», La rassegna della letteratura italiana 91 (1987): 253-68; Enzo
Esposito, «Il canto XIV del Paradiso», in Casa di Dante in Roma, Letture
degli anni 1979-'81 (Roma: Bonacci, 1989), 381-95; and Luigi Blasucci,
«Discorso teologico e visione sensibile nel canto XIV del Paradiso », La
rassegna della letteratura italiana XCV (1991): 5-19.
8The poet's meditation on the numbers 1,3, and 9 is well known, and a key
passage is found in Vita nuova, XXIX, 3: «Lo numero del tre è la radice del
nove, però che, sanza numero altro alcuno, per se medesimo fa nove, sì
come vedemo manifestamente che tre via tre fa nove. Dunque ... lo tre è
fattore per se medesimo del nove, e lo fattore per se medesimo de li miracoli
è tre, cioè Padre e Figlio e Spirito Santo, li quali sono tre e uno ...».
^Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1968), 91.
l^Cf. Blasucci, 16: «Se la luce è la condizione permanente del Paradiso
dantesco, essa trova nel XIV una possibilità di condensazione e una
ricchezza di sviluppi, che la promuovono a tema principe del canto».
Esposito, 394, cites Paradiso XIV as the «Canto della resurrezione, della
211
luce, della danza, della croce, e anche degli affetti familiari».
AAFor this example from Venantius Fortunatus as well as the concept of
chiasmus as metaphor that follows, I am indebted to a former professor and
current colleague: George S. Tate, «Chiasmus as Metaphor: The 'Figura
Crucis' Tradition and 'The Dream of the Rood,'» Neuphilologische
Mitteilungen LXXIX, No. 2 (1978): 122-23.
^«Chiasmus in Ancient Greek and Latin Literatures», in Chiasmus in
Antiquity: Structures, Analyses, Exegesis , ed. J. W. Welch (Hildesheim:
Gerstenberg, 1981), 259, 261. Welch's examples from Virgil's writings
refer not only to single chiastic lines in the Aeneid but also to Proteus's
65-line speech in Georgics 4: 453-527.
A3See Chiasmus in Antiquity , ed. John W. Welch, 50-168, 211-49.
A4Tate, 115.
15Tate, 118.
16 John D. Sinclair, trans., The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri:
UT.Paradiso (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977 [first published,
19391), 209.
Schnapp astutely observes that Paradiso XIV's «syntactical
criss-crossings» are themselves narratively anticipated: «Prefigured by two
important criss-crossings in the heaven of the sun - the cosmological
chiasmus of Paradise X.7-9 (the 'chi' in the sky formed by the intersecting
ecliptic and equator) and the chiastic narrative of cantos X-XIII with its
alternation between Thomas and Bonaventure, Francis and Dominic -
these further point us towards the awaited sign [of the cross] and hint at its
identity» (67).
l^Dronke, 7.
l^Tate, 118. Tate does not point out that the Troilus passage he quotes (V,
1863-64) was directly inspired by Dante's tribute to the Trinity in Paradiso
XIV. 28-29. See Howard H. Schless, Chaucer and Dante: A Revaluation
(Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1984), 101 and 146, for a review of the
proof for this attribution.
711
711 ^The presence of so many chiastic patterns in Paradiso XIV that extend
beyond a single verse would seem to run counter to the assertion made by
Francesco Tateo in the Enciclopedia dantesca (Roma: Istituto della
Enciclopedia italiana, 1970-78), 1:958, that chiasmus «ricorre a volte, ma
assai di rado, indipendentemente dai limiti del verso».
21 See Madison U. Sowell, «A Bibliography of the Dantean Simile to
1981», Dante Studies 101 (1983): 167-80.
John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose , ed. Merritt Y. Hughes
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-M errili, 1975), 412-13.
212
Paradiso XV
Author(s): CRISTINA DELLA COLETTA
Accessed: 17-02-2020 23:04 UTC
Lectura Dantis
CRISTINA DELLA COLETTA
XV
Dante critics present a united front in considering Canto XV of
Paradiso 1 a fragment of the Cacciaguida trilogy.2 Placed at the center of
the third cantica, the Cacciaguida episodes depict a striking historical
tableau, unfolding from the rosy hues of a remote idyll, lingering on the
somber shades of present tragedy, and expanding into a prophetic
panorama of a future shaped by providence and divine justice. Within
this tableau, Dante reveals the transcendental significance of historical
progress, clarifies the reasons for his own destiny and exile, and glorifies
his mission as scriba Dei . In spite of the dramatic scope of the
Cacciaguida triptych, canto XV features a formal unity of its own. The
canto frames a moral imperative that transposes history into myth, and
personal autobiography into universal exemplum. Within the circular
closure of a canto whose ending echoes its beginning, Dante stages his
suspenseful encounter with Cacciaguida, his ideal father-figure and the
originator of the Alighieri family. In canto XV, the man of war who
fought and sacrificed his life for the glory of Christianity bends down to
greet the man of letters, for whom writing has become another, albeit
no less powerful, form of moral and political engagement.
It has been argued that Cacciaguida is merely a mirror image of
Dante himself, an alter ego whose function is to give dramatic flair to
what remains, essentially, Dante's very personal monologue.3 Although
Cacciaguida's ideology verbalizes Dante's own, his function in Paradiso
XV transcends the purely duplicatory. Dante and Cacciaguida engage, on
Cacciaguida's cue, in a rhetorical exchange in which the ideal knight and
epitome of the man of action reveals himself to be a polished orator
whom Dante must emulate by summoning all his poetic skill. By doing
so, Dante stages himself anew, directing his existing poetic persona to
play yet another role - that of the second Alighieri crusader, the
authoritative mediator of the languages of sacred love and martial ardor.
The Comedy becomes both Dante's weapon and the source of his
martyrdom in a quest for renovatio through teaching, reformation and
open prophecy. It is not without a reference to this episode that, in
Paradiso XXV, Beatrice describes Dante's life as a form of engaged
activism (52-57):
213
La Chiesa militante alcun figliuolo
non ha con più speranza com' è scritto
nel Sol che raggia tutto nostro stuolo:
però li è conceduto che d'Egitto
vegna in Ierusalemme per vedere,
anzi che '1 militar li sia prescritto.
Like his great-great-grandfather Cacciaguida, Dante presents himself as

one of the true inheritors of Christ, the man-god who joined the power
of Words and the value of Deeds in one all-encompassing mission of
salvation.4 Canto XV sings the rallying cry for the poet's enlistment in
the Christian militia , giving him a new Holy Sepulcher to reclaim, a
second Holy Land to conquer, and another personal holocaust to endure.
When Dante ascends into the sky of Mars at the end of canto XIV,
he contemplates the shining icon of Christ, the visible sign of His
passion and resurrection, and a symbol of triumphant self-sacrifice: the
scudo crociato of those who chose to die for the glory of God. These
souls' sweet and joyful melody, modulated by what Dante refers to as a
«dolce tintinno» of «giga» and «arpa», accompanies a sternly aggressive
hymn climaxing in the «Resurgi» and «Vinci» (118-9 & 125) of
Christ's victory over death. As the enthralling yet martial music
reverberates through the closing lines of canto XIV and the opening of
canto XV, so does the disquieting contrast between the mellow harmony
of the celestial instruments and the forbidding tone of the opening
tercets. Against the background of the «dolce lira» and the «sante corde»,
Dante expresses with Manichaean finality the stern opposition of good
and evil, the insurmountable chasm between those who follow «giusto
amore» and those who pursue instead the love that passes and fades away
(1-12, emphasis added):5
Benigna volontade in che si liqua

sempre l'amor che drittamente spira,
come cupidità fa ne la iniqua,
silenzio puose a quella dolce lira,
e fece quietar le sante corde
che la destra del cielo allenta e tira.
Come saranno a' giusti preghi sorde

quelle sustanze che, per darmi voglia
ch'io le pregassi, a tacer fur concorde?
Bene è che sanza termine si doglia
chi, per amor di cosa che non duri
etternalmente, quello amor si spoglia.
This exordium orchestrates a severe confrontation between moral
214
extremes. The rigor of the comparison (line 3) draws the line between
two opposing camps: «il diritto amore» rises against «quello delle cose
mondane, cioè cupidigia» (Ottimo)6 just as «benigna volontade»
emerges as the foil of its antonym, «iniqua». The finality marking these
verses reiterates the black-and-white logic of infernal contrappasso ,
according to which eternal sorrow rightly awaits those who succumb to
the sweet siren of ephemeral pleasure.
Dante's doctrinal incipit sounds as a jarring chord in the paradisiacal
symphony that connects the two cantos, an intrusive solo that does not
harmonize with the instrumental accompaniment of the piece. Yet
Dante's assertive, even righteous tone is meant to stand out, as it
emulates the words with which Cacciaguida concludes the tale of his
earthly life, which Dante reports at the end of canto XV (145-148,
emphasis added):
Quivi fu' io da quella gente turpa

disviluppato dal mondo fallace,
lo cui amor molt' anime deturpa;
e venni dal martiro a questa pace.
Canto XV opens and closes, mirror-like, by condemning the love

of transitory things. Why does Dante feel the need to reiterate a concept
he approached as early as his encounter with Paolo and Francesca in the
second circle of Hell, translated into doctrinal tones in Virgil's
exposition of love in Purgatory XVI, and fully addressed in his intense
meeting with Beatrice in the garden of Eden? While the dogmatic
boundaries of canto XV place the evocation of ancient Florence and the
poet's encounter with Cacciaguida in an idealized moral landscape, and
thus justify one of the most mundane episodes of Paradiso , they also
reflect Dante's effort to provide an ideal synthesis of an aesthetic,
theological, and political journey that he placed under the sign of Love.
In a seminal essay on the Cacciaguida cantos, Attilio Momigliano
maintained that in them Dante utters «i discorsi più gelosi della Divina
Commedia , quelli che toccano più addentro in lui l'uomo, il cittadino, il
poeta: [Dante] parla, o ascolta, della Firenze d'un tempo, di ora, del suo
esilio, della sua missione di giudice» (33). Momigliano's statement is
partially misleading, because it is only within the dogmatic justification
of the superiority of transcendental to secular love that Dante inserts the
municipal and familial digression of the Cacciaguida episode. Within
this digression, the theme of the concrete terrestrial homeland becomes
most vivid only as long as it is de-historicized, sublimated, and clarified
in mythical terms.7 As the Vita nuova had marked the metamorphosis
215
of earthly Beatrice into «una cosa venuta / da cielo in terra a miracol
mostrare»,8 so Paradiso XV presents the transformation of Florence as
historical fact into Florence as poetic idea. In the name of Beatrice,
Dante embarked on a spiritual journey leading from the diffusive love
for the world's creatures to the exclusive love for their creator; in the
name of Cacciaguida, he sublimates a political passion born from a
first-person involvement in the strife of communal Florence into a
philosophical affection for an ideal urbs and civilitasy a poetic
construction molded in the crucible of nostalgia, remembrance, and
desire. In the context set out by the doctrinal frame of canto XV, Dante
demonstrates having understood Virgil's lesson of Purgatory XVII in
political terms: «mentre ch'elli è nel primo ben diretto, / e ne' secondi sé
stesso misura / esser non può cagion di mal diletto» (97-99). Setting
aside the enticements of the earth also means repudiating an overly
secular engagement in local factional unrest. The doctrinal beginning
seals off a temptation that Dante has already overcome in «sentimental»
terms, and that he is now ready to conquer in political terms. Ephemeral
love and political passion are shaped, together, in the orderly itinerary
for the trip from earth to heaven, from women as transitory temptation
to Woman as mediator between time and eternity, and from ideological
partisanship to the mythicizing of a historical scheme circumscribed by
two ideals: the bittersweet dream of old municipal Florence, and the
triumphal utopia «di quella Roma onde Cristo è romano» ( Pur g . XXXII,
102).
It is surprising that a canto reinscribing the law of transcendental
Love should strike, as remote reverberations, some distinct dolce stil
novo notes. «Le dolci rime d'amor ch'i' solia / cercar ne' miei pensieri /
convien ch'io lasci...», Dante declared as early as the Convivio .9
Despite this programmatic announcement, the stilnovo experience
survives in the sinews of the Commedia , and beats in the very heart of
Paradiso. In canto XV, Dante evokes the «sweet love rhymes» of his
youthful poetry in order to embroider the martial canopy of the sky of
Mars. While Dante poetically constructs an ideal myth around the
historical figure of his great-great-grandfather, and by extension around
the Alighieri lineage, he also orchestrates all of his earlier literary
experiences within a newly created poetic persona, armed with a higher
moral commitment, and empowered by a better-stocked stylistic arsenal.
After staring into the mesmerizing spectacle of the shining cross, Dante
turns toward Beatrice (32-36):
poscia rivolsi a la mia donna il viso,

e quinci e quindi stupefatto fui;
216
ché dentro a li occhi suoi ardeva un riso
tal, ch'io pensai co' miei toccar lo fondo
de la mia gloria e del mio paradiso.
Since Niccolò Tommaseo's commentary, critics have pointed out that

these lines echo the «me parve allora vedere tutti li termini de la
beatitudine» of the Vita nuova (Donadoni 1643, Binni 622). Exactly as
in the libello , the stilnovistic topos of diletto entering through the
poet's eyes to reach his heart is translated into mystical terms («grazia»
and «paradiso»). However, unlike that in the Vita nuova , canto XV's
language of mysticism maintains, surprisingly, a very private accent
through the repetition of the possessive «mio». Dante's very exclusive
paradise, evoked by Beatrice's smile, has nothing to do with the
nostalgic, earth-bound «disiato riso» referred to by Francesca in Inferno
V (133), and shares little in common with Beatrice's «sacramental» and
«absolutive» smile of Purgatorio XXX.10 Rather, it evokes the
«affocato riso» that greeted Dante's entrance into the heaven of the
warrior god. This connotation of love marks the shift, in canto XV,
from the figure of Beatrice to that of Cacciaguida, and designates a kind
of love that, while fundamentally being «al primo ben diretto», creates a
closely personal bond between Dante and his great-great-grandfather, a
love so familial and so distinctive that it justifies pushing Beatrice to
the margin of the heavenly scene.
After meeting Farinata degli Uberti in Dis, Virgil told Dante:
«quando sarai dinanzi al dolce raggio / di quella il cui beli' occhio tutto
vede, / da lei saprai di tua vita il viaggio» {Inf. X, 130-132). Dante
himself had confided to Brunetto Latini: «ciò che narrate di mio corso
scrivo, / e serbolo a chiosar con altro testo / a donna che saprà, s'a lei
arrivo» {Inf. XV, 88-90). The change in Dante's plan and the
substitution of Beatrice with Cacciaguida may be ascribed, albeit
sottovoce , to such unpoetic and trivial reasons as mere sbadataggine , or
infelicitous forgetfulness. More interesting is Dante's desire -
highlighted since the commentaries of Landino and Benvenuto - to
establish a parallel between Aeneas's encounter with Anchises in Hades
and Dante's meeting with Cacciaguida in Heaven, in what is interpreted
as a process of Christianization of classical antecedents (Schnapp 1991,
147). I believe there are other reasons that justify Dante's correction.
The dolce stil novo is present in canto XV as the marginal reminder of
an initial aesthetics of love that must be reshaped to accommodate, in
the martial cantica of Cacciaguida, a new «sentimental» experience that
expresses neither secular affection nor mystical ardor, but militant love.
This passion binds Dante and Cacciaguida to the Christian militia led by
217
St. Peter and St. John, respectively «alto primipilo» (Par. XXIV, 59)
and «alto preconio» (Par. XXVI, 44), and inspired by God, «sommo
duce» (Par. XXV, 72) and «sanctus Deus sabaoth» (Par. VII, 1). This is
the passion that inspired the crusades, whose spirit Dante saw
disappearing in his age.11 It blessed the once happy marriage of the two
institutions - Church and Empire - charged with guiding humankind
to salvation, and elevating power politics into the indisputable ideology
of faith.
* * *
The musical charm that mesmerized the poet

the heaven of Mars wanes into a silence fu
This intense pause dramatizes the suspense prec
anticipates a mysterious epiphany. The Ovidian
following the swift course of a falling star and
the skies, introduce a shift from auditory fasc
a choreographic display of light moving wit
inhabit the heaven of Mars align themselve
holy cross. A flame descends along the right
the cross to meet Dante, who looks up in rapt
tale dal corno che 'n destro si stende
a pie di quella croce corse un astro

de la costellazion che lì resplende;
né si partì la gemma dal suo nastro,
ma per la lista radiai trascorse,
che parve foco dietro ad alabastro.
In harmony with the sacramental aura and Virgilian sottofondo that

set the atmosphere and tone for the encounter, Cacciaguida's speech
begins in Latin, mixing classical echoes with ecclesiastical and mystical
notes.13 Cacciaguida's Latin lines are a skillfully contrived exordium,
an oratorical tour-de-force, and an intertextual patchwork (28-30):
O sanguis meus, o superinfusa

gratia Dei sicut tibi cui
bis unquam celi ianiia reclusa?
This rhetorical alto volo , soaring up from the solemn invocation,

initiates a swift succession of tropes: hypotyposis (celi ianiia) after
metonymy (gratia Dei ), after synecdoche (sanguis meus) M A piece of
stylistic bravura, Cacciaguida's incipit , - and particularly the
218
expression sanguis meus with its double Virgilian and New Testament
echoes, - proves that the martyr of the sword anticipates, here, his
poetically gifted descendant. By filtering the classic authors through the
colander of Christian thought, Cacciaguida shares Dante's literary and
moral mission. Moreover, by representing the Christian counterpart of
the pagan figure of Anchises, Cacciaguida suggests that Dante may
incarnate the Christian metamorphosis of Aeneas. In this way
Cacciaguida champions the right that both he and Dante have to pen the
adjective holy before the noun war , in literal as well as literary terms.
There are, however, other implications to Cacciaguida's Latin
debut, as it occurs on a stage which, apparently, shuts history outside
its curtain. Cacciaguida's Latin is a language blocked in its timeless
classic perfection and the patrimonio comune of the ideal community of
scholars. Beyond its geographical determination and historical
definition,15 Latin is the very language that the Provençal troubadour
Sordello, in an emotional encounter with Virgil, could allow himself to
define as «nostra» {Pur g. VII, 17). Yet, with a cunningly Dantesque
sleight of hand, Cacciaguida's Latin is at the same time a linguistic
beacon from the past piercing the darkness of present history, expressing
Dante's demagogic faith that «l'Italia nuova si innestava sull'antica; e
che la poesia e il pensiero e la storia nostra erano una magnanima
ripresa, non un oscuro incominciamento» (Donadoni 1641).
A similar function is performed by the multiple Latinisms
interspersed throughout canto XV. Generally speaking, as in the whole
of Paradiso , Latinisms and archaisms elevate and ennoble the style.16
Here they provide the exemplary linguistic medium for a legendary and
remote figure whose elegant and complex syntax (as well as stylistic
choices) add severity and authority to his message (Momigliano 36). At
the same time, as echoes of specific literary and linguistic bases, the
canto's Latinisms create a carefully planned mélange of classical,
biblical, liturgical, and mystical sources.17 They reflect a legacy that
can be literarily and historically pinpointed and yet, in its new
combination, becomes ideal, thus furnishing an ideological, ethical and
linguistic compendium : the heritage of a classical and Christian past
crushing an undeserving present.
Cacciaguida's elevated style forces Dante to raise his own
(Momigliano 37). Dante achieves this stylistic ascension by repeating
and developing his ancestor's metaphors. The «grato e lontano digiuno»
(49) followed by «asseta / di dolce disiar» (65-66) opens a metaphorical
range that, rather than marking a plunge into everyday colloquialism,
introduces an excursion into biblical symbolism: the metaphorical field
of spiritual drinking and eating that derives from the New Testament
219
symbol of the supper.18 Expanding on the metaphor that also inspired
the title and situation of the Convivio , Dante replies to Cacciaguida's
prompt by asking Cacciaguida to make him «sated of his name» («del
tuo nome sazio», 87). The first half of canto XV, in its different
dimensions of the direct speeches by Cacciaguida and Dante, and the
poet's a posteriori narration, creates a composite metaphorical net in
which the «convivial» metaphor is interlaced with the heavenly images
of light and precious stones and, specifically in this canto, images of
flight19 and the genealogical tree.20 Arguably, the metaphorical
interplay between Dante and Cacciaguida furnishes a figurai rendition of
the kind of ontological oneness Dante attempts to establish with his
ancestor. Metaphor - a similitudo brevior , as Quintilian defined it -
is a semantic transference between two different terms that share a
common intermediate element. In other words, identity within difference
is what triggers the metaphorical procedure. The relationship between
Dante and Cacciaguida is, by extension, a metaphorical one. Dante's
«invention» of Cacciaguida responds to a need for unity, continuity, and
recurrence. It establishes an underlying pattern of similarities and
identities within a world marked by movement and decline. This pattern
resists the superficial flow of linear time, and exorcises the tyranny of
change and the specter of difference. The canto's metaphors act as the
linguistic foundation for an atemporal paradigmatic unity that
«poetically» alters the syntagmatic scheme of historical becoming and
diversification.
Supersensible wholeness, however, still eludes Dante, who
experiences Cacciaguida's otherness, and is unable to understand his
ancestor's words (37-42).21 The esoteric and extralogical language of the
mystics (Donadoni 1643), the unity of «intelletto» and «senno», is
untranslatable into human terms.22 Pure thought does not need
linguistic mediation, as it is grounded in the paradox of absolute
hermeticism combined with the purest transparency. Whether
Cacciaguida is directly addressing the divinity (Momigliano) or is
praising Dante by anticipating his glorious mission (Donadoni), the
sequence has a dramatic effect, as it stresses the difference between
human and superhuman ontologies. Cacciaguida emerges here as God's
chosen, the angelic soul rather than the father and soldier. He is among
the elect who can read the «magno volume / du' non si muta mai bianco
né bruno» (50-51), the possessor of the supersensible language that does
not unfold in succession and linear time, but exists all at once. It is this
language in which the anti-history of Paradise is written, the
all-encompassing oneness in which «tutti li tempi son presenti» (Par.
XVII, 18), the very unity that Dante will fully experience only at the
220
end of his trip, in his vision of God (Par. XXXIII, 85-7):
Nel suo profondo vidi che s'interna,

legato con amore in un volume,
ciò che per l'universo si squaderna.
Dante's response to Cacciaguida voices the poet's sorrow for an

existential situation marked by separation and division, in which he is
entrapped in the rift between «affetto» and «senno», «voglia» and
«argomento» (73, 79). The adversative conjunction «ma» (79)
stylistically underscores the separation between mortal and immortal
dimensions. This separation, as well as the desire to exorcise it, is
visually rendered by two opposite images of movement in canto XV.
The flight metaphor, recalling by means of contrast Ulysses's «folle
volo» of Inferno XXVI, presents Dante's impatience with the pace of his
own transumanar (Par. I, 70), and his desire to immediately achieve,
both intellectually and emotionally, the celestial status of his ancestor.
Conversely, Cacciaguida's descent from the top of the cross dramatizes
his urge to establish closer contact with Dante, in Dante's own human
terms. In this sense, the impassioned connection between Cacciaguida
and Dante is an exquisitely religious experience, in the etymological
meaning of the word «re-ligare», meaning «to bind again».
However, the gap between earth and heaven is a difficult one to
close. While Cacciaguida masters, in a few tercets, Latin, the language
of mysticism, and a refined volgare , Dante is forced to admit the
inadequacy of his words: «non ringrazio / se non col core a la paterna
festa» (83-84). Dante's first response to Cacciaguida provides what
Walter Binni defines as a «mimesi faticosa» (623). Dante attempts to
emulate Cacciaguida through what emerges as a piece of artificial
oratorical virtuosismo , cloaking the poet's simple and authentic desire to
justify his insufficiency, thank the spirit's benevolence, and inquire
about his identity.
Although Cacciaguida's speech continues in Italian, it does not
descend into colloquialism, but remains solemn and syntactically
complex. Cacciaguida's elevated eloquence contributes to the creation of
a fabled character: the protagonist of a noble and holy histoire de gestes ,
the ideal courtier and Christian hero doubly removed from the present
because he lives in the past and the transcendental (Momigliano 46-7). It
is only in canto XVI that Cacciaguida fully reverts to the archaic
Florentine of his earthly existence («non con questa moderna favella»,
33), thus prompting Dante to act as the privileged «inheritor» and
«translator» of his discourse (Schnapp 1986, 233). I believe, however,
221
that before using the archaic Florentine of canto XVI, which requires
Dante's editorial tailoring, Cacciaguida employs a volgare which is
elevated and rarefied enough to fit into the general tone of Paradiso 23 It
is, in other words, the language that, in De vulgāri eloquentia, Dante
defines as illustre , cardinale, aulicum et curiale , the idiom that
synthesizes the best of all of the Italian vernaculars. Cacciaguida's
plurilinguism reproduces, linguistically, his descent from the crossbar of
the cross. In canto XV Cacciaguida stops halfway, stressing his
mythical stature: a synthesis of all that is best in human nature and a
shining figura Christi , he urges Dante to reach upwards, and emulate
him.
Cacciaguida's self-portrait, as well as his description of ancient
Florence, reveals the sentimental legend which lies under a thin
historical crust, and narrates a heavenly fable inspired by a past colored
with melancholy and nostalgia. Noble descendant of the «sementa santa»
described by Brunetto Latini (Inf. XV, 76), Cacciaguida limits
genealogical and familial references to a minimum: his son Alighiero,
residing in Purgatory, his two brothers Moronto and Eliseo and his
wife, who came to him from «val di Pado» (Par. XV, 137). Similarly,
Cacciaguida encloses his earthly existence within the fences of a fistful
of notable ritual experiences: his birth in the name of the Virgin Mary;
his baptism, sealing his Christian identity («insieme fui cristiano e
Cacciaguida», 135); his marriage, originating the Alighieris' cognomen ;
and his final martyrdom, once again in Christ's name.
In Cacciaguida's speech the family's tale is strictly tied to that of
Florence, thus providing a poetic rendition of the ideal unity between
family, city, and ultimately, monarchy and Empire proposed in the
Convivio (IV, 4). The significant moments of Cacciaguida's life have
their counterparts in the meaningful places in the exemplary topography
of ancient Florence: the old circle of the walls, the tower of the Badia
that «humanizes» time around the communal experiences of the
beginning and ending of the working day,24 and the Batisteo , center of
Florence's social and religious life.
The ancient city exists as the antithesis of fourteenth-century
Florence. The anaphoric crescendo of the nine repetitions of the word
«non» pounds the beat of the tragic decline of human history, and
underscores the separation of the present from the time when Florence
embodied civil perfection. These negations divide exterior wealth from
true selfhood and inner worth, mundane excess from Franciscan thrift,
social fragmentation from familial unity (100-1 1 1):
Non avea catenella, non corona,
222
non gonne contigiate, non cintura
che fosse a veder più che la persona.
Non faceva, nascendo, ancor paura
la figlia al padre, che 'l tempo e la dote
non fuggien quindi e quinci la misura.
Non avea case di famiglie vote;
non v'era giunto ancor Sardanapalů
a mostrar ciò che 'n camera si pote.
Non era vinto ancora Montemalo
dal vostro Uccellatolo, che, com' è vinto
nel montar sù, così sarà nel calo.
Modern Florence becomes the nest of the very cupidity that Dante curtly
dismisses at the beginning of canto XV. Cacciaguida's speech verbalizes
Dante's nostalgia for an irrevocable wholeness, and expresses the poet's
melancholia at the discovery that all that is left now is loss,
fragmentation, and disarray. «Peu de gens devineront combien il a fallu
être triste pour entreprendre de ressusciter Carthage!» argued Flaubert in
a letter discussing his novel Salammbô.^ Dante's canto XV of Paradiso
anticipates the same emotions: resuscitating ancient Florence can be
done only by means of contrast, and the harmony of the past can be
experienced only vicariously through Cacciaguida's eyes and courteous
words. Caught between the wholeness of a world that time has swept
away and the fullness of a future that is still a promise to be fulfilled,
Dante's present exists as a state of crisis, and as a fracture between the
conflicting drives to anticipate what is to come or regress into what
once was.
Rather than a laudator temporis acti , Dante is a Utopian thin

and his Florence represents the seduction of «another history» fou
on wish-fulfillment and constructed by the logic of poetic
transfiguration. The reiterated «vid' io» that Cacciaguida employs in his
description of Florence carries a documentary force (Binni, 629) which,
together with the real characters and geographical places, grants the
city's historical foundations without hindering its poetic
metamorphosis.26 City of Cities, and earthly préfiguration of Paradise
(Consoli 420), Florence is a myth frozen in the perfection of its golden
age, its order reflecting the supreme harmony of heaven («Le cose tutte
quante / hanno ordine tra loro», Par. I, 103-4). It is, in other words, a
Florence sub specie aeternitatis , the antithesis of the city viewed as the
mundane daughter of Satan (Par. IX, 127-8), 27 and the foil of the
chaotic «nave sanza nocchiere in gran tempesta» (Pur g. VI, 77) with
which Dante associated the whole of the Italian peninsula. Florence's
walls encompass the absolute purity of a single people with similar
223
elemental desires, and protect this Utopian sanctuary from the flow of
change. City of yearning, «il bello ovile ov' io dormi' agnello» (Par.
XXV, 5) is the home of recurrence, continuity, stability, and
harmonious concordance, the exact opposite of the city that undoes in
mid-November what was spun in October (Purg. VI, 143-44). It is a
soothing maternal space constructed to satisfy an aristocratic and
escapist fantasy, peopled with ideal figures endowed with refined
feelings: «le donne e ' cavalier, li affanni e li agi / che ne Svogliava
amore e cortesia» of the famous lines by Guido Del Duca (Purg. XIV,
109-10). Florence's women are the literary descendants of those Roman
matrons who, with their ancillae, «domum servavit , lanam fecit» (Del
Lungo 9), and they are entrusted with the oral transmission of the
legendary «Florentine cycle» built side by side with the Trojan and
Roman models.28 These women carry the «maternum linguagium»
(Benvenuto da Imola), 2^ another of the universal idioms to which canto
XV refers, the atemporal language of natural affections and parental
love, the same «parlar petèl» that poet Andrea Zanzotto refers to more
than six centuries later.
There is no place for war within Cacciaguida's Florentine utopia.
Cacciaguida's militant spirit flourishes outside the city limits, beyond
the lands of the baptized. In the last tercets of canto XV, the perfect
citizen changes into the Christian soldier who fought with Conrad III of
Swabia during the second Crusade, was knighted by this emperor, and
probably died in the siege of Damascus in 1147. Just like the biblical
and epic heroes parading at the end of canto XVIII, Joshua and
Maccabeus, Charlemagne and Roland, Duke Godfrey and Robert
Guiscard, Cacciaguida concludes his heroic military mission by
assuming the laurel of «quella pace che non aspetta mai guerra né
remore» (Landino).30
By presenting himself as the emperor's civis , Christ's miles , and an
accomplished clericus , Cacciaguida is no longer a historical character but
the embodiment of Dante's ideal. He represents the father who greets
Dante within the walls of his ideal city, tinting the poet's experience of
a fatal predestination. The continuity Dante establishes with Cacciaguida
and, by extension, with the other men embodying the dream of a sober
past,31 exorcises the negative course of linear history, inserting it into
the perfect circularity of a canto which reinstates the harmonious unity
of the created world. The ideal continuity between Dante and Cacciaguida
exemplifies the fusion of acts and words which characterizes «the
Christian construct» (Schnapp, 1986, 218). The material sword
becomes, then, a discursive one, while eloquent crusaders and
poets-in-arms join forces in the «essercito di Cristo» (Par. XII, 37), and
224
dispatch a martial bulletin written in the sweet love rhymes of
self-sacrifice leading to resurrection and peace.
NOTES
1 Among the works I have consulted are the early and modern commentators
(Guido da Pisa, Benvenuto da Imola, Ottimo, Pietro di Dante, Anonimo
Fiorentino, Tommaseo, Sapegno, Momigliano, Singleton, etc.). I have also
consulted the following: Alfredo Amendola, «I tre canti di Cacciaguida»,
Gymnasium 39 (1963-64): 219-227; Walter Binni, «Il canto XV del
Paradiso», Cultura e scuola 4 (1965): 615-633; Dino Cervigni, «I canti di
Cacciaguida: Significato della storia e poetica della lingua», in Dante
Alighieri: 1985 , eds. Richard Baum and Willi Hirdt, (Tübingen: Stauffenburg
Verlag, 1985): 129-140; Andrea Ciotti, «Il canto XV del 'Paradiso'», Nuove
letture dantesche 6 (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1973): 163-186; Domenico
Consoli, «Il canto XV del 'Paradiso'», in Paradiso: Letture degli anni
1979-81 (Roma: Bonacci, 1989): 397-422; U. Cosmo, L'ultima ascesa
(Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1965): 169-202; Stelio Cro, «Cacciaguida e
l'utopia evangelica del 'sanguis meus'», Esperienze letterarie 14.4 (Oct.-Dec.
1989): 9-36; Terence Paul Logan, «Virgil in Dante's Fifth Heaven»,
Kentucky Romance Quarterly 15 (1986): 157-166; Eugenio Donadoni, «II
canto XV del Paradiso», in Letture dantesche: Paradiso , ed. Giovanni Getto
(Firenze: Sansoni, 1962): 1637-1657; Fernando Figurelli, «I canti di
Cacciaguida», Cultura e scuola 4 (1965): 634-661; Fiorenzo Forti,
Cacciaguida , in Enciclopedia Dantesca , I: 733-39; Enrico Maria Fusco,
Dante e Cacciaguida (Bologna: Vighi e Rizzoli, 1965); A. Garsia, «Dante e
Cacciaguida», Il giornale di politica e letteratura 3 (1927): 1-16; Angelo
Jacomuzzi, «Considerazioni sopra i canti di Cacciaguida», in L'Imago al
cerchio: Invenzione e visione nella Divina Commmedia (Milano: Silva,
1968): 155-191; Attilio Momigliano, «La personalità di Dante e i canti di
Cacciaguida», in Dante, Manzoni, Verga (Firenze, Messina: D'Anna, 1965):
33-57; Rocco Montano, «Il Paradiso di Dante e l'episodio di Cacciaguida»,
Delta 11-12 (1957): 30-60; André Pézard, «Les trois langues de
Cacciaguida», Revue des études italiennes 3 (1967): 217-238; Giovanni
Pischedda, «Introduzione ai canti di Cacciaguida», in Tecnica e poesia in
Dante (L'Aquila: Japadre Editore, 1970): 71-77; Manfredi Porena,
«Cacciaguida», Conferenze e letture dantesche 5 (Milano: Hoepli
1898-1944): 29-51; and «La lingua di Cacciaguida», Questioni e
questioncelle dantesche (Roma: Accademia d'Italia, 1962); Raffaello Ramat,
«Il canto XV del Paradiso», Lectura Dantis Scaligera : Paradiso (Firenze: Le
Monnier, 1971): 507-525; Jeffrey Schnapp, «Sì pia l'ombra d'Anchise si
porse: Paradiso 15.25», in The Poetry of Allusion , Jeffrey Schnapp &
Rachel Jacoff, eds. (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991): 145-156; and The
Transfiguration of History at the Center of Dante's Paradise (Princeton:
225
Princeton UP, 1986); Alfredo Sisca, «La trilogia della nobiltà di Dante nel
cielo di Marte», Letture dantesche (Messina-Firenze: D'Anna, 1960):
172-188; Aldo Vallone, «Il canto XV del Paradiso», Studi su Dante
medievale (Firenze: Olschki, 1965): 247-266; Vittorio Vettori, «Il centro
del Paradiso», Letture del Paradiso (Milano: Marzorati, 1970): 167-186; A.
Viscardi, «La favella di Cacciaguida», Cultura neolatina II (1942): 311-355.
2 Alfredo Sisca considers cantos XV, XVI and XVII as a trilogy, for both their
unitary development and their dramatic quality. These cantos originate «una
specie di prologo e tre atti successivi» with Dante as the main actor and
Cacciaguida as the personification of ancient truth and virtue (173).
Similarly, Raffaello Ramat deems canto XV to be a mere fragment, which
must be evaluated in context with two other fragments, canto XVI and XVII.
Together, Ramat explains, these cantos form a meeting point of the
structural forces of the entire Commedia (508). Although Walter Binni
concedes an «unità particolare» to canto XV, he nevertheless contends that
this canto cannot be isolated as a «lirica a sé» (616): it exists as an integral
part of the complex unity generated by the Cacciaguida trilogy, which
sublimates the contingent episodes of municipal history and personal
autobiography into the universal and absolute poetry of Paradiso (616-617).
Âccording to Momigliano, Cacciaguida is a «sdoppiamento del nipote...
Dante che si consiglia con Cacciaguida è, veramente, Dante che si consiglia
con la sua coscienza» (34). See also Bruno Maier's comments on the «pieno
processo di identificazione» between Dante and Cacciaguida: «Ci troviamo
di fronte a un Dante-Cacciaguida o a un Dante che tramite Cacciaguida si
abbandona alla più ampia confessione, esplicazione, trascrizione
autobiografica che egli si sia mai concesso» (127).
4On the relationships between «natural and supernatural genealogy» in the
Cacciaguida episode see Schnapp (1991, 148-151).
^Note, however, that the celestial instruments are played by «la destra del
ciel», a metaphor expressing the idea of justice.
"Quoted from Biagi, La Divina Commedia nella figurazione artistica e nel
secolare commento (Torino: Unione Tipografica Torinese, 1924-39): III,
335.
'See also Donadoni (1638) and Binni (616).
^Vita nuova , XXVI, 6 (w. 7-8).
^ln Canzone Terza (IV, 1-3).
l"See Ruggero Stefanini, «Purgatorio XXX», Dante's Divine Comedy:
Introductory Readings , II: Purgatorio , Tibor Wlassics ed., supplement to
Lectura Dantis 12 (Spring 1993): 453.
H In Paradiso IX Dante claims that greed is all that preoccupies the Church,
which has abandoned the defense of the Holy Land: «A questo intende il papa
e ' cardinali; / non vanno i lor pensieri a Nazarene» (136-37).
l2Met. II, 321-322.
1^«0 sanguis meus» echoes the Virgilian line «Proice tela manu, sanguis
meus» (. Aen . VI, 835) of Anchises's appeal that Julius Caesar end Rome's
civil wars. On the manipulation of the Virgilian source, see Donadoni
226
(1962), Binni (620), Ciotti (171-172), and Schnapp (1991, 147, 152-3).
Cacciaguida's «grafia Dei» recalls God's answer to Paul: « Sufficit tibi gratia
mea» (2Cor., XII, 9). Echoes may be found also in the second letter to the
Corinthians (XII, 1-4) where Paul describes his ascension to Heaven. All of
this witnesses Dante's synthetic ability to shape and revise an enormous
reservoir of images and texts, and his will to combine the classical legacy
with Latin and medieval Christianity (Ramat 509). The «sanguis meus»,
Schnapp observes, is «rich in liturgical associations» (1991, 153), as it
recalls the words with which Jesus instituted the sacrament of the Eucharist:
«hic est enim sanguis meus novi testamenti» (Matt. 26:28).
^See also Pézard, 229. Pézard defines this opening as «une éloquence latine
trop spéciale et savante, presque artificieuse» (229).
ADSee Pézard 229, Sisca, 177, and Cervigni 132.
i0See H. Gmelin, «I Latinismi del Paradiso », trans. E. Bonora, Antologia
della critica dantesca , M. Fubini and E. Bonora eds. (Torino: Petřini, 1968):
518-27.
* 'Among the Latinisms of canto XV: « liqua » (1), «magno» (50), «mei» (55),
« gaudioso » (59), « turba gaia» (60), « pandi » (63), « decreta » (69), « turpa »
(145).
l°Dante exploits this metaphor to its fullest in Beatrice's prayer in Paradiso
XXIV: «O sodalizio eletto a la gran cena / del benedetto Agnello, il qual vi
ciba / sì, che la vostra voglia è sempre piena» (1-3). Another example occurs
in Paradiso V, when Beatrice suggests to Dante: «convienti ancor sedere un
poco a mensa, / però che '1 cibo rigido c'hai preso, / richiede ancora aiuto a
tua dispensa» (37-39).
l^Dante echoes and amplifies Cacciaguida's flight metaphor («alto volo»,
54) with his references to «ali» (72 & 81).
2UThe metaphor of the tree and its roots also has biblical origins: «Et
egredietur virga de radice lesse et fios de radice eius ascended» (Is., 11. 1).
21 The Vita nuova is also echoed in Dante's response to Cacciaguida, when the
poet explains that Cacciaguida spoke words he could not understand. Dante's
«sì parlò profondo» (Par. XV, 39) recalls «io no lo intendo, sì parla sottile»
(10) of «Oltre la spera che più larga gira» in Vita nuova (See Jacomuzzi,
166).
22 As Binni observes (621), here Dante is manipulating St. Paul's text:
«audivit arcana verba quae non licet homini loqui» (2Cor., 12. 4).
2^For other interpretations of Cacciaguida's language see s.v. in Enciclopedia
dantesca and, more specifically, the studies by Pézard (225) and Maier (125).
2Âs Venturi suggests, «in quella parte della città v'era ancora l'oriuolo
pubblico, da cui dipendeva, secondo il regolamento delle ore sue, la
spedizione delle preci solenni e dei pubblici affari» (quoted from Biagi,
350).
2* Charles Car lut, La Correspondance de Flaubert (Columbus: Ohio State UP,
1968): 192.
2^ Dante artfully mingles history and legend in canto XV. The reference to
Bellincion Berti, for instance, not only recalls the story of his daughter, the
227
«buona Gualdrada» (Inf. XVI, 37), the heroine of a historically inaccurate
tale of virtue (I. Del Lungo, Women of Florence , trans. Mary Steegmann,
London: Chatto and Windus, 1907: 11-12). It also further supports Dante's
glorious descent, as one of Cacciaguida's sons, Alighiero I, was married to
one of the daughters of the same Bellincion Berti (G. Petrocchi, Il Paradiso
di Dante , Milano: Rizzoli, 1978: 7-8). The legend of the city is interlaced
with family history, and both are raised into the ordered realm of myth.
2 'On the mythical foundation of Florence, see Donadoni 1653 and Maier
128. «La Firenze di Cacciaguida [trascende] i limiti della piccola storia, la
storia che non dura, per divenire segno di una verità senza tempo» (Consoli
414).
¿°On Cacciaguida's Florence as a «piccola Roma», a «perfect scale model of
Augustan Rome», see Schnapp 1986, 42.
^Quoted from Biagi, 352.
30Idem, 365.
3*Not only Bellincion Berti and «quel d'i Nerli e quel del Vecchio» (Par. XV,
115) represent the ideal of a sober past, but also Guglielmo Borsiere (Inf.
XVI), Marco Lombardo (Pur g. XVI) and Guido del Duca (Purg. XIV).
228
Paradiso XVI
Author(s): RICARDO J. QUINONES
Accessed: 17-02-2020 23:04 UTC
Lectura Dantis
RICARDO J. QUIÑONES
Gould Center for Humanistic Studies
Claremont McKenna College
XVI
It is not possible to reach probable truths on great
subjects without making use of large speculations.
Plutarch, On the Passing of the Oracles
Canto XVI is the centerpiece of the most imposing suite of cantos

in the entire Commedia. Extending from XIV, 82 into the opening
section of canto XVIII, these cantos occupy the full center of the
Paradiso , containing and capping many of the internal energies and
issues of the poem - including a dominant plotline - and forming in
themselves a vast lyrical meditation on historical change.1 To be in
these cantos means to be caught in history, and at the same time to have
found some liberation and even redemption.
Poesie dei ricordi , il culto delle memorie .2 The sources of these
cantos derive from the same impulses that prompted the
youthful-minded and eager Dante of Inferno VI to ask of Ciacco the
whereabouts of the great figures of the previous generation, and to
declare in canto XVI to some of these same souls that they are his
heroes, that they comprise the center of his communal, mythic
consciousness. Dante is engaged in large-scale rescue work. Like Proust
he is the recording-secretary of a society in dissolution, but unlike
Proust, more than an internal émigré, he is a genuine exile. More like
Joyce, then, Dante is the ever faithful heir of his city, the true son of
memory, suffering external expatriation, but always harkening back,
internally repatriated. It is as if Dante were a survivor of World War II,
surveying a landscape of ruin and abomination, and yet remembering a
more integral world, a simpler one, to be sure, yet one possessing a
higher degree of civility, one that even serves as a stay and support in
the midst of degeneration. Among the many causes of the continued
appeal and unsurpassed reputation of Dante in the second half of the
twentieth century (and surely this is a judgment as astonishing as it is
beyond dispute) this must figure prominently: his varied and compelling
capacity to show the effects of massive historical change not only on
the lives of individuals but on entire groups of people, to show history
229
to be real and events significant and from the greatest personal
involvement and pain to recall a lost world, to know the blessing of a
personal confirmation while cherishing the hope of a public restoration.
Indicating that the sweep of Dante's imagination had long passed
beyond the confines of the individual canto, these cantos press on with
their own dramatic rhythms, composing something of a trilogy in
themselves; the so-called «idyllic» of canto XV (which phrase will
obviously come in for some revision), the tragic of XVI and the record
of vigorous restoration in XVII.3 Radiating from within the planet
Mars, but more significantly bearing the stamp of its powers and
responsibilities, the suite commences with the only act of sacrifice in
the Paradiso and completes itself with Dante's full consummation as the
martyr-hero of his own visionary and bold outspokenness.
These cantos complete the grandest triptych in a poem of many
such parallel arrangements.4 At the center of each canticle, Dante
conceives an encounter with great father-figures; with Brunetto Latini in
Inferno XV (but beginning with the old man of Crete and the stages of
historical decline that he epitomizes in canto XIV, and including the
companion canto XVI where Dante encounters the great Florentine
heroes of a prior generation); then in Purgatorio XIV and XVI with the
combined presences of Guido del Duca and Marco Lombardo, and here in
the Paradiso , with Dante's own great-great-grandfather (but not going as
far as canto XXVI, where Dante devises the larger mythic return to the
more primal father in the ancient garden - importantly not located in
the urban context of these earlier encounters). These cantos are
remarkable for their projections of vast historical and even mythic
import, told in the midst of a most familiar colloquy. They are even
more remarkable when we recall Zingarelli's poignant remark that
Dante's own father seems to have passed silently into history .5
Ever in quest for a father, Dante reaches beyond history into myth
to undergird these cantos; he goes back to the magisterial Book VI of
the Aeneid but even more deeply communicating a wish that that
magical book conveyed of yet again holding converse with one's father.
Normally to dream of the father is to dream of insufficiency, of falling
short, even of accusations of imputed and real or imagined betrayal
(hence Hamlet and all that it imparts about failing to answer the call).
But in Dante's case there is no such taint, and this should tell us much
about his purposes in these encounters: the reestablishment of
genealogical connection is itself an indication of a larger faith and
validation, its very historical consciousness reaching out to a fuller
communal identification.6
All of these interviews communicate a special order of information:
230
they tell of time and change in relation to place, that is, they embody
the voice of history. But these are histories of decline and deterioration,
and of personal wounding, information such perhaps as the father
communicates to the male heir. They communicate messages from the
father's domain; they tell us that history is real, that events occur. We
must recall that contrary to the ever-ascending (with the exception of the
Inferno) moral unfolding of the Commedia (what Jenni has termed «la
nota linea ascendente») the plot of the poem is one of disruption,
separation, severance and wounding.7 But the genealogical link indicates
the possibilities of restoration and reconstitution. And thus it is that the
resolution of the series of dire announcements of future harm coming
Dante's way is achieved at the heights of the Paradiso when he has
already acquired the fullest means for coping with the ghastly blow.
Telling of a terrible wounding, the voice of the father also tells of
courage and resolution and independence.
To achieve such full communication requires extraordinary effort on
the part of the son. While it is the father who has moved away, who has
departed, it is the son who must undertake the journey. And his journey
is to recover the father, but this means a self-recovery in regard to place,
a voice in regard to history. The journey to the father in effect means
that one does not stand alone, but has in fact a history, an identity, a
faith and a purpose. While the whole point of exile is to dispossess the
individual of these constitutive parts of community, the movement of
Dante's poem is toward the restoration of those elements of which he
had been deprived. The voice of the father is a bulwark against such loss
of faith and purpose. It is here that Dante recovers the fullest voice of
his own story, his own history: «Voi siete il padre mio; / voi mi date a
parlar tutta baldezza; / voi mi levate sì, ch'i' son più ch'io» (16-18).
While there are these similarities within the mythic pattern, there
are also great differences, each of the great canticles having its own
dispensations, which attention to parallel arrangements serves to reveal.
Brunetto Latini, whose own return from exile helped initiate the
remarkable florescence of communal culture in the late Duecento, was
the intellectual mentor to an entire generation of young Florentines,
instructing them in the ways of civic humanism, the culture of
engagement. But as the canto so memorably recollects Dante's poetic
and cultural indebtedness, so it also records the experience of
supersession. It is Latini's very local attachment, his dedication to the
values of the homeplace without any higher vision, that provides no
support for Dante in surviving the bitter blow of physical exile. He
must encounter the higher calling of spiritual exile, of estrangement and
231
alienation. This is of course the master process so typical of the
Purgatorio , where amidst Brunetto Latini's own heirs, the members of
his own generation, such as Nino Visconti and Forese Donati, Dante
both learns and reveals the lessons of disaffection. If Brunetto Latini is a
marred exemplar, destined to be superseded by his spiritual heirs, this is
also because his own Guelph attachments are more limited, unpossessed
of that larger ideal vision to which both Beatrice and Virgil move Dante.
It is thus fitting that in the very canto XV so dominated by pedagogic
motif Dante should turn to the Imperial Virgil for better instruction in
the ways of coping with Fortune, and it is even more fitting that
Cacciaguida should have achieved both knighthood and martyrdom in the
service of the Emperor engaged in what was for Dante the higher
unifying purpose of a Crusade.
But the insufficiency of the model does not invalidate the mold, the
paternal form of the encounter. Better gain, higher vision is obtained
from the combined meetings with Guido del Duca and Marco Lombardo,
one representing the voice of melancholic decline and the other of gruff
no-nonsense resoluteness and freedom (both aspects that are joined
together in Cacciaguida). In Purgatorio XIV where Dante commiserates
with the Romagnuolo - in this sense Tuscany and the declined
Romagna are one - Guido's lament concerns the degeneration of an
aristocratic culture (109-111):
le donne e ' cavalier, li affanni e li agi

che ne Svogliava amore e cortesia
là dove i cuor son fatti si malvagi...
Such admiration for nobility of heart and sentiment - elegiacally

invoked - is always part of Dante's poem and works, seen in his praise
of the house of the Malaspina and coordinately of souls like Nino
Visconti's daughter or Forese's wife, who seem able to withstand the
downward trend of all things, the large-scale dystrophy of human
society. In the Purgatorio we have examples of such gestures of
nobility, the holdouts and intransigents so dear to Dante's poetic
imagination and his own self-conceiving, great-hearted souls who seem
to throw up resistance against simple acceptance of the flow of things.
His interlocutor in Inferno XVI inquires if «cortesia e valor» (67) are
still extant in Florence, and in Purgatorio XVI Marco avows his
dedication to «quel valore» (47) that seems to have been abandoned.
Greatness of soul and the commitment to rare virtues are signal qualities
of Dante's exemplary figures. And these same qualities as virtues are
resplendent in the central cantos of the Paradiso.
232
If in Purgatorio XIV Dante through Guido bemoans the loss of an
aristocratic culture, in Paradiso XV-XVII he returns home in more ways
than one. His interlocutor is not a spiritual father but a real, biological
one. His place is not the site of his wanderings, but the real community
of Florence. This tells us many things. By reaching farther back into his
own past, his own roots, Dante is able to rise higher. That is, the heroic
properties of his poem are made more manifest the closer they get to his
own home and line. This is incarnationism epitomized. It is as if both
the heroic humanism of Dante's idealism and the validity of the divine
creation could not be vitiated in Hell or even deferred in Purgatory. They
must be realized. He could not rest content with even the consolations
of the Purgatorio , noble and wise as they might be. Estrangement must
be superseded by reintegration, even by vindication, if not triumph.
Consequently even Guido's evocation of a past aristocratic culture must
be replaced by the recollection of the commune of more than a century
earlier. This recollection has been called «idyllic» and «Utopian».8
Actually it is neither. Dante is not randomly engaging in collective
nostalgia nor is he projecting a future «nowhere» zone. This is a real
community, a living past that he is evoking. Its material simplicity
does not conceal the fact that in his opinion it attained a higher level of
civilization than that of the Florence of his day, with its own
population explosion, and its people, richer, and more aggressively
mobile (for whom the uprooted Ulysses is the suitable figurehead). It is
superior in culture, consciousness and civility. As his
great-great-grandfather represents a genuine biological source for Dante's
own qualities, so the civilization he recalls represents the better values
of a culture, and the basis of his social faith.
These are the more mythic patterns into which canto XVI and its
cohorts fit. But in itself, as an example of Dante's extraordinary and
complex artistry, it is a canto of immense and yet subdued presences, of
layer upon layer of unfolding powers, to such an extent, that one can
speculate that while occurring in the Paradiso , the germ of these cantos
may have been part of Dante's earliest conception of the poem - how
else explain the predominant Virgilian imprint, well after the Roman
poet had been officially excised from the poem.9
Canto XVI is marked by ever greater intensities of forces and
concepts, those of nobility of house, of human effort and fame, of Time
and of Fortune. As we focus more pointedly on poetic form, we can see
that buried within the structure of the canto, vestigially present, overlaid
and subdued but still powerfully available are two motifs dear to
medieval imaginations, the de casibus Fall of Princes and the literature
233
of Triumph, and in fact, largely responsible for the canto's heightened
address, they come together and are conjoined.
Although submerged they still make their presence felt
dramatically. We should note that each of these motifs poses an
aesthetic problem - they share a tendency to yield to passive
description, that is to become mere inert lists and litanies, and to be
monochromatic. By submerging them, by rendering them less palpable
and obvious, Dante transforms them and imposes upon them his own
imprint of a poetic and dramatic world, one bristling with vivid, vying,
and powerful bodies. Hence the Fall of Princes is not a simple litany of
decline, but rather a story of replacement, as houses and figures that are
in decline are being contested by newly-emergent houses. This is in
keeping with Dante's socially dramatic imagination present throughout
the poem. For instance, in Virgil's sustained description of Fortuna in
Inferno VII, the propelling force of Fortune is not an external
mechanism but is instead provided by all the waves of newly emergent
peoples struggling to find their places in the sun. The very process that
brought a people into prominence is the same one that will push it to
the side of its own life. This same drama of replacement recurs in
Purgatorio XI, where poetic reputation itself is described as a process of
emulation, with each new generation and their reigning figure forcing
out the preceding figure. As Febo Allevi writes, in perhaps the fullest
and most insightful commentary on canto XVI, «la natura contiene in se
stessa il germe dell'incessante e perenne trasformazione delle cose...».10
Dante's poetic and social world is dramatic, on the move and dynamic,
with new forces always working to supplant those in decline.
This is why then the motif of the Fall of Princes coincides so fully
with what will later under Petrarch's influence be termed «triumph
literature», that is, the well-heralded series of contests between the
aspirant and questing human spirit and its ever expanding system of
supporting values and reliances.11 As the glories of an aristocratic
house are threatened by time, so fame and cities themselves are swept
away: when Dante ponders what Fortune has done to cities he will not
be surprised to hear «de li alti Fiorentini / onde è la fama nel tempo
nascosa». Such echo of the trionfi is so persistent because the motif
itself indicates a contest, or better yet, a war, thus revealing its own
origins in the ancient Roman custom whereby victorious military
leaders would bring back captives in triumph. In Dante's poem, vehicle
and inspiration are separated. The vehicle of the triumphal chariot
appears in Purgatorio XXIX, where indeed the provenance is given: the
carro pulled by the griffin is «triunfóle» (107) but this one, bearing the
possibilities of the Church Triumphant, is superior to that in which
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Rome in its day would honor a Scipio Africanus or a Caesar Augustus.
But while suggesting the vehicle, this triumph does not contain the
impulse and the habit of mind that gave rise to triumph literature. That
occurs here in canto XVI, which shows the substantive attributes of
triumph literature: the heightened address, the contest of superior forces
and values, the catalogue of names, the rhetoric of enumeration itself
(and indeed some of the implied criticisms that this mode of poetry
almost necessarily calls forth).12 In Petrarch's Triumphs the two -
vehicle and habit of mind - are brought together. What this motif can
bestow on literature, particularly in the hands of a receptive artist like
Dante, is a dramatic world, where one is in need of ever more potent
forces to rescue one from illusory or faulty reliances. This should also
tell us that its favored proscenium is the fourteenth century, where
humanistic values are powerfully emergent, but where also the
withering specters of Death, Fortune, and Time cast their daunting
shadows and where the perspective of Eternity is needed to salvage the
diminished human project.
The canto's opening address to «poca nostra nobiltà di sangue»
shows that the last infirmity of the noble mind for Dante (unlike for
Milton), is nobility itself. To be sure, Dante indulges his own
susceptibilities to nobility of bloodline, when he thrills at the revelation
that his own great-great-grandfather was knighted for his services to the
Emperor. But such reliance is itself shown to be tragically vulnerable
when pitted against the destructive force of Time. When we trace the
first stirrings of the modern notions of Time, as The Renaissance
Discovery of Time did, we are obligated to use Burckhardt's ever-ready
phrase, «as usual, our first witness is Dante».13 Long before illustrators
of Petrarch's Triumphi mistakenly joined Chronos and Kronos (as Erwin
Panofsky memorably demonstrated), Dante (and, we have just seen, with
very good reason) has already provided Time with a deadly instrument -
the force - that cuts away at any cavalier reliance on aristocratic
origins.14 The very opening tercets thus reveal an immensely dramatic
world, bristling with human challenge.
As elsewhere throughout the Paradiso , Dante's procedure is by
interrogation, but here he refers to his queries as «blandimenti» (30),
that is, questions of affectionate concern raised by a native son. Dante's
questions are: Who were your ancestors? When did you live? What was
the population of Florence in your time? and Who were the families of
greatest note? Cacciaguida answers the second question first, presumably
out of some decorous modesty, and then coyly dismisses the first
question while suggesting an appropriate response, uses the third
question to expand on the sociological and political reasons for
235
Florence's decline, and then in response to the fourth query replays the
previous answer but at a greater length and in larger philosophical
perspective, giving us not only a roll-call of the greatest families as
Dante had requested, but rather a larger temporal tableau of families
fallen from their former greatness but also of newer families coming
into the light. That is, his story is not only a de casibus refrain of how
the mighty have fallen, but a strong drama of rising and falling, of the
dynamics of social replacement.
We sometimes forget that Dante, the first intellectual of Europe -
that is, the first poet and lay philosopher who presented a large synoptic
vision of Europe - was also the first European intellectual: he was the
first poet who found it necessary to locate all events distinctly in
history. There are very few introductions to major characters and events
in his poem that are not provided with location in time. History, not so
much as event, but as circumstance, become part of the definition of a
person, part of his makeup. To be sure, we live sub specie aeternitatis ,
but even more clearly, sub specie saeculi. But this history is never
established by simple date alone - in fact it never is in Dante's poem
- but rather by the confluence of forces present at the historical
moment. So, in response to the second question as to when he lived,
Cacciaguida provides a temporal siting where three areas converge: the
Annunciation (the Florentine year commenced with the Incarnation,
March 25th), as the great divide and starting point, zodiacal
configurations, or the great universe of recurring nature, and the material
world (33-39). From the birth of Christ until that of Cacciaguida, Mars
visited the Lion in the heavens 580 times, which figures out to setting
his birth in 1091. His birth is described in the most physical terms
(«parto in che mia madre, ch'è or santa / s'alleviò di me ond' era
grave...»). This reminds us of the other description of his birth in canto
XV: despite being called to the life of a citizen in the most hospitable of
communities, his birth was still an agony - his mother calling on
Mary in «alte grida», as Christ also called out at his Crucifixion. The
drama of the material world is always present in Dante's poem, and yet,
involved in all of these vast processes and burdened with the heaviness
of the flesh (as Christ was «umiliato ad incarnarsi», Par. VII, 120), his
mother is now a saint. The intervention of the world of grace into the
world of matter, occurring under the abiding influence of the circling
planets, this is the stage for the human drama of redemption in time.
In his response to Dante's third query - concerning the population
of «l'ovil di San Giovanni» (25) - Cacciaguida (46-72) evidences again
the canto's general tendency to push toward higher principles of
understanding. He gives the then much smaller commune's geographic
236
limits, stretching from the statue of Mars at the southern end by the
river to the Baptistery of John as the northern limit. Such spatial limits
indicate spiritual coordinates: the character of the Florentines may be
told by the competing claims of such rival patrons. While John is
always and only described in endearing terms (with the possible and
disputed exception of Inferno XIII. 143- 144), it does seem that at crucial
moments the Florentines revealed a remarkable tendency to turn away
from John and to revert to the ancient god of war and vengeance (who,
by the way, was also a tutelary protective deity). This points to the
decisive and culminating moment of the canto, that turing point of
Florentine history, when the assassination of Buondelmonte will be
described as a sacrifice made to Mars. But this presents us with an
anomaly: if the turning toward Mars was so disastrous, why should this
entire drama of Florentine history, from its earlier and simpler model of
civility, through its painful historical devolution, to the clear
pronouncement of Dante's exile as well as his justification, all take
place from within the planet of Mars and its governing spirit? A proper
understanding of the Commedia , in fact, of the nature of the Florentines,
and preeminently Dante's own character, fortune, and mission, must
show why both aspects of Mars are true, both disaster and regeneration
deriving form the same inclinations of character.
The actual number of citizens inhabiting the earlier commune (by
modern calculation, probably not exceeding six thousand) is less
important than the sense that they were a more cohesive unit and that
they seemed to comport themselves in a simpler and more orderly way,
that is, they seemed to be more in touch with the ruling principles of
their communal life. Increased size brought with it a mixture of peoples
that dissipated civic coherence. But once again the response seems eager
to go beyond the immediate point (which was size of population) to
larger principles, those offering philosophical and historical
understanding of why it is a city declines. They develop the largely
sociological explanations offered in the parallel cantos, Inferno XVI and
Purgatorio XVI. In the former, the companion canto to that where
Brunetto Latini is remembered (and he had his own humanistic
understanding of the divisions in Florence and why Dante, the heir of
the first Roman settlers, would be hounded), Dante responds to a not
very hopeful question as to whether «cortesia e valor» continue to reside
among its citizenry, by crying out prophet-like against «la gente nuova
e i sùbiti guadagni» that have generated «orgoglio e dismisura» (73-75).
To this more localized understanding, Marco Lombardo offers a larger
historical explanation: in the valley of the Po «valore e cortesia» used to
abound until the Emperor Frederick experienced his troubles caused by
237
the Papacy. As it turns out, in the fuller picture of Paradiso XVI, the
two explanations, the social-economic and the political are intimately
connected in the degradation of Florence.
Make no mistake: as a historian, Dante does not accept
historicism. History is made up of turning points, and these yield
consequences. It is perfectly possible then for events to take a bad turn.
The driving force of history is not simple succession, but rather
essential principle, or in this case, deviations therefrom. Of the two
major defections invoked in Paradiso XVI the first is the loss of simpler
civic coherence due to «mixture» of peoples. This is not a racialist
explanation, but continues Dante's earlier understanding that Florence
suffered from an influx of people who did not live up to the codes of the
earlier commune, and that moreover, some being warlords of Germanic
descent and others from the more economically-motivated peasantry,
they seemed destined to be at odds with each other. But the second
interpretation, while related to the first, seems more extensive: the
unruly forces had been obliged to abandon the countryside because the
local offices of authority, those appointed by the Emperor, had been left
vacant. The resulting lawlessness is thus attributed to the Papal
intrusion in the political affairs of the Empire. «Se la gente ch'ai mondo
più traligna / non fosse stata a Cesare noverca, / ma come madre a suo
figlio benigna...» (58-60). If the Papacy had not behaved as the
notorious stepmother to the Emperor, but had instead regarded the
secular office spiritually allied and related, then the Cerchi, the
Buondelmonti and others would not have fled to Florence. One notices
the same dramatis personae , and how these events of the very early
thirteenth century continued to yield bad fruit for Florence. One also
notices that habitually when Dante wishes to express the desirable
relationship of those great powers of medieval society, Church and
State, he has recourse to metaphor, as if so subtle and delicate is the
relationship that it simply eludes precise theoretical formulation. One
also notices that the Papacy has behaved toward the Emperor, the way
Florence behaved toward Dante: as a «noverca».
The narrative response to Dante's fourth question (lines 73-147) is
a replay in a much greater theater of understanding of the issues and even
some of the protagonists, for instance, the Cerchi and the
Buondelmonti, that have already been presented. Dante asked who were
the people of the greatest note, but Cacciaguida proposes to reveal
massive historical change - how houses are undone («come le schiatte
si disfanno», 76). Such larger production requires greater address, so
lines 73-87 go beyond sociology and history into a more universal
understanding of the role of Fortuna in human affairs. This exposition
238
completes the line of disclosure that was initiated in Inferno VII and that
was utilized most dramatically in Dante's response to Brunetto Latini.
Here he comes into possession of the larger understanding that was
promised by Virgil in canto XV.
This marvelous musical prelude to the litany of mutability and
decline represents more than an enlargement of awareness; it represents a
heightening of sentiment, where Dante enacts his sense of the tragic,
that is, the fall of houses is told against the larger tableaux of the
disappearance of cities. This was the first basis for the introduction of
tragedy into the literature of the fourteenth century (one that Chaucer,
Dante's great English heir, fully appropriated in his Troilus and
Criseyde). Individual passingness is elevated to the level of universal
processes. Like Homer, like Chaucer, like Tolstoy, like any great
writer, Dante is fixed on the tensions that exist between caring and not
caring, between his involvement in the levels of history, politics, and
ethics, and the distancing that comes from perceiving larger patterns in
time. To be sure, changing demographic growth, new people, fast
money, the chaos created by lapse of Imperial power and the political
intrusiveness of the Papacy hold his attention (and will always do so),
but his vision also rises in true Augustinián fashion to a consideration
of the essential weakness and collapse of all earthly cities. In fact, the
vision moves out from its location in the city and human history, to
anticipate the more fundamental perspective of Adam in canto XXVI:
«nullo effetto mai razionabile, / per lo piacere uman che rinovella /
seguendo il cielo, sempre fu durabile» (127-129). Even the arguments
are similar, calling on the sheer and absolute appearance of new peoples
with different interests (operating under the influence of the heavens)
that simply overwhelms and buries all that goes before. The penultimate
triumph of Time is here apprehended, massive, cosmic, requiring,
pointing to the need for the last triumph, that of Eternity, if any human
enterprise is at all to be redeemed, or even preserved.
It would be otiose to offer a simple lectura of this canto without
confronting the serious aesthetic problems raised by its enlistment in
the rhetoric of triumph, its catalogue of names appearing in the
procession of history, the march of time. It is important to note that the
same criticisms raised here are those offered against Petrarch's Triumphs,
and that we are dealing with a more substantial quarrel with a once
prevalent aesthetic mode that has since declined in favor. Invariably, in
Dante's case, comparison is made with canto XV, to the subsequent
canto's disfavor. Attilio Momigliano, one of our century's truly notable
commentators, remarks that Cacciaguida adds nothing that is poetically
essential in canto XVI, that it is «una cronaca irta di puri nomi ... la
239
più lunga e la più arida pagina di cronaca di tutto il poema». 15 And one
can see why he renders this judgment. In canto XV the actual names
seem less important than the moral qualities they represent; that is,
while the names have been obscured the poetic quality of the
presentation is clear to any understanding («vita affettiva», «interesse
poetico» - these are qualities that Momigliano regards as persisting in
the drama of the encounter). Canto XVI seems to be quite different.
From verses 88 to 141, approximately thirty-nine family groups are
mentioned directly or by allusion.
This is a massive parade of names, and part of the triumphal
rhetoric of enumeration. While each name is important, what is more
important are the larger processes of decline and deterioration that the
combined force of the names communicates. In its message of decline,
this is a kind of anti-history triumphant, and certainly not the kind of
triumphant and processional sweep, such as in one of the certain sources
for Dante we saw Anchises recall for Aeneas in Book VI of the Aeneid ,
even with its warning signals. Nevertheless, one still is called to
participate in higher processes, to observe massive historical change.
Anti-history though it might be, it is still history on the grand scale.
Of all the lines of defense this seems to be one that is most
effective against Momigliano's direct and valued critical judgment (that
is, barring the possibility that Momigliano is after all right and that
Dante had miscalculated). This is the argument made by Febo Allevi,
and which might simply be called that of the rhetoric of mutability. It
would say that one does not need to know too much about the various
names, although their import is clear, because they assume their parts in
the larger music of mutability, and give expression to the tone and
impulse of Triumph literature (p. 29):
Dall'alto d'un cielo purissimo, a contatto di pure trasparenze luminose, la

considerazione della realtà terrena, delle espressioni più significative del suo
divenire, delle sue trasformazioni ambientali si carica d'un afflato lirico che
il dramma di ogni singola famiglia raccoglie intorno ad un nudo semplice
nome, flatus vocis , fantasma lontano ed evanescente, e come tale privo di
chiaroscuri e di umani addentellati che richiederebbero singoli quadri poetici
per un loro adeguato sviluppo sentimentale.
A book of names. A medley of names. Brave presentations of human

endeavor, and yet all the more pathetic and fragile because simply a
«breath». Names that once were so powerful, forces to be reckoned with,
clans and tribes of consortial powers and alliances, and now almost
forgotten, unknown. Perhaps history in playing havoc with the names
that even in Dante's day continued to have some prominence has
240
abundantly, albeit unwittingly, fulfilled the artistic and moral purposes
of his canto.
Within the more manageable confines of urban history the program
of change that Dante presents is one of decline and deterioration. The
offending Cerchi now reside where once the Ravignani did, with their
great leader Bellincion Berti; the Chiaramontesi have been disgraced by
one of their clan who falsified the salt measures; while the haughty
Uberti and the Lamberti have only themselves to blame, there are other
aristocrats, the Visdomini and the Tosinghi, who profit from the vacant
bishopric and the Adimari, who are brave so long as they are not
opposed. Giano della Bella was a descendant of those knighted by Count
Ugo, but his «popular touch» is scorned as being ingratiating.
While these instances certainly stand out (Allevi is right in
indicating that these historical descriptions are «sempre pieni di interesse
per chi sa coglierne il significato»), nevertheless the overall aim of this
panorama is to promote the sense of shocking, startling, overwhelming
change. This is brought home by the rhetorical devices of Triumph
literature, in particular the repetition for emphasis of key phrases. In the
first six lines (88-93) where eleven family names are listed, Dante uses
«io vidi» or simply «vidi» three times. In thirty-three verses
commencing with line 100, the word «già» is used seven times, to be
sure, communicating a kind of emphasis and historical similarity,
engaging them all in the same process, but also indicating a kind of
cinematic stop time, holding in a historical freeze frame the large
instances of this enormous panorama. These are passing instances, but
the power and startling nature of their eclipse are conjured up in special
momentous pictures, captured as it were in a moment of time, to
emphasize their ultimate disappearance.
The panorama is too large (what with the lessons of Paradiso VI
behind us) to rest on partisan bases. Guelph and Ghibelline are
intertwined, old history and current types (Cerchi and Giano della Bella),
aristocratic families undone by their own arrogance (lending
confirmation to Inferno X) as well as arriviste families who have no
sense of the civic culture that once prevailed. It is as if in the elevation
of the rhetorical pitch, in the startling sweep of the transmutations
brought by Fortune, Dante was eager to get at more fundamental causes.
This he does in the culminating and longest section, lines 133-147
(these fifteen lines forming a dramatic and fitting counterpoise to the
fifteen lines of melodic address with which Dante introduces the lengthy
response to the fourth query) where he describes the decisive event of
Florentine history, the one that gave a tilt to all future developments,
the Buondelmonte murder. Contemporary chroniclers had already
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recognized this assassination to be a great divide in the city's affairs -
all future troubles seemed to flow from this event. But Dante does more.
He takes it out of its contemporary involvements, even its larger
political ramifications, and makes it mythic, a reenactment in Florentine
dress of an ancient event, the sacrifice of the other for the supposed
preservation of the state.
Since I have already written abundantly of this event and its
importance for Dante's poem (first in this journal and then more fully in
Foundation Sacrifice in Dantes «Commedia») ,16 I limit myself only to
some major points. Far from being a suspect refugee from
anthropological criticism, foundation sacrifice enters most deeply into
our understanding of politics and religion. It may even be a theological
concept, particularly when acceptance of the contradiction imposed by
foundation sacrifice becomes a hallmark for the earthly city. The earthly
city is based upon this event, where sacrifice of the other is legitimized
as a means for preserving the self and the state. Christian belief exists in
strong opposition to such acceptance, in fact, as it does in Dante's
poem, converting it into an anti-myth, one which is understood and
understood in order to be rejected. Foundation sacrifice proposes itself as
a means of accommodation, whereby accelerating violence is curtailed
by the death of the other, which is supposed to put an end to the cycles
of retributive response. This was at the basis of Mosca dei Lamberti's
prevailing counsel («capo ha cosa fatta»). This act, supposed to bring an
end to further hostilities only led to further disaster, including, fittingly
the extinction of his own line («e morte di tua schiatta»). The drama
becomes Aeschylean, as Dante shows the fatal propensity of Florentines
to have recourse to an extremity of response, thus making a pact with
Mars, and making impossible any enduring social compact. The drama
is thus mythic, imparting a revelation of character that looms perennial.
Would to God that the Buondelmonti had been drowned in the river
Ema before being allowed to cross into Florence. The absolute
unadorned simplicity of the language, home-grown, heart-felt, part of
the down-to-earth soldierly quality of Cacciaguida himself, breaks
through to our attention and derives its strength from the force of the
ensuing historical disaster. But it was not to be, and the «ma» (145) of
the next tercet indicates that it was much more suitable for the
Florentines to make a sacrifice to the God of War. The truncated
equestrian statue is presented as a suitable symbol of the rancorous
round of murderous activity such sacrifice would bring to the city. If we
recall the words of Caiaphas in Inferno XXIII («consigliò i Farisei che
convenia / porre un uom per lo popolo a' martìri», 1 16-1 17) we begin
to see that this event that stands at the origins of the disastrous
242
developments of what for Dante was modern Florentine history was the
same event (as well as counsel) that prevailed in the crucial moment of
sacred history.17
Indicating the heightened rhetorical value Dante places on
Cacciaguida's extraordinarily varied and complex discourse, he provides
it with a peroration, as if indicating that we have come not only to the
end of the presentation but to the end of the historical events as well;
what is in front of it will not be tragedy, but the entire complex
measure of Dante's personal fortune and his vindication. The peroration
summarizes the two cantos, harkening back to the time of urban peace,
with people that were at once «glorioso» and «giusto», in marked
contrast to the present time of ignominious defeat, where the lily of
Florence is dragged through the ground, or has changed its color to that
of blood, brought on by its political divisions. In short, the actions of
both Mars and John have been perverted; in military combat the new
Florentines are not courageous and in peace they are not conciliatory.
But the fundamental problem is that the sacrifice to Mars and the
subsequent rounds of accelerating violence do not show the fullest role
of Mars, who after all was the putative guardian of the bridge and in
Roman mythology the protector of the fields. If, as a rival power to the
tutelage of John the Baptist, the sway of Mars indicates a predisposition
to extremity of response, here in the central cantos of the Paradiso the
same primitive qualities are now transformed into the very qualities -
when fully directed from within the favoring sign of the cross - that
typify outspoken defenders of ideal principle; that is, Mars becomes the
welcoming sign for martyrs.18 The new emphasis is on those who
assume the risk, who take on the burden, and who consequently must
suffer the consequences. It is for this reason that in the canto of Mars,
Dante learns from his knighted and martyred Crusader
great-great-grandfather of the terrible blow heading toward him - toward
him who was not the false son, the overreacher, the Icarus, or the
Phaeton, but rather the Hippolytus, the unjustly accused. To be sure,
Dante, as a thoroughly modern hero is not Aeneas, is not Paul, nor is
he the god-man tragic warrior, Gilgamesh or Achilles, or the more
modern Parzival or Roland; he is not even Cacciaguida, the gruff
warrior-citizen from a simpler, and more civilized time. But he
participates in all of these efforts, and by a miracle of miracles, the
message he has to send, the changes he himself undrgoes, transforms
this thoroughly modern man - whose outset was unassuming and even
unpromising - into the hero of his own poem and of our time.
243
NOTES
borrow the phrase from F. Montanari, in the introduction to his edition of

the Commedia (Brescia: La Scuola, 1951), III, 179.
^From Febo Allevi, «Il canto XVI del Paradiso », Lectura Dantis Scaligera
(Firenze: Le Monnier, 1965), p. 10.
^See Giambattista Salinari, Il canto XVI del Paradiso (Torino, SEI: 1975),
pp. 21-22.
^See E. G. Parodi's always useful comments on Inferno XV, Letture
dantesche , ed. Giovanni Getto (Firenze: Sansoni, 1962), pp. 285-86.
^See N. Zingarelli, Dante (Milano, 1914), p. 22.
"See Allevi, cit., p. 8.
^ See my small appreciation published in this journal, «Adolfo Jenni and the
Purgatorio» (forthcoming).
"While Salinari has called canto XV «idyllic», Jeffrey T. Schnapp in his The
Transfiguration of History at the Center of Dante's «Paradise» (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1986) has termed the picture of Florentine life
«Utopian».
^These are irresolvable but highly intriguing and engaging speculations,
speculations that reveal a true aesthetic sense. See Parodi, cit. above. He
refers to the «genialissima simmetria ... nella quale forse si manifesta la
poderosa organizzazione d'una mente che fin dall'inizio aveva, di così
vasto e molteplice poema, disposto armonicamente tutte le fila ... Chi sa?
Forse gli episodi di Brunetto e di Cacciaguida sono fra quelli che prima
balenarono alla mente di Dante e intorno ai quali, come intorno a fermi
poli , s'avvolse e si svolse tutta l'azione della Divina Commedia» (pp.
286-87). This insight strikes one with the force of a sudden illumination
that throws open large prospects. We pay very little attention to the
compositional procedure of Dante's poem, and yet here is a very engaging
hypothesis, one that makes some sense. At the center of the aesthetic
conception of the poem, in Dante's mind are figured the great
confrontations between the newer Florence and the older Florence, between
his master and his ancestor, with primal roots in an ancient Florence, each
of them heavily modified by the presence of Virgil. It might be erroneous,
however, to suggest that Dante's own conception did not undergo some
revision. For instance, later we shall be indicating the dimensions of
triumph literature present here in canto XVI. One such dimension is the
catalogue of names, the rhetoric of enumeration. These exist in a genuine
sense in cantos IV ( Triumphus Famael) and V (Triumphus Cupidinisl) and
here in XVI. As the poem developed, Dante seems to have modified that
older and, shall we say, more primitive practice, and he became more
interested in individual stories, rather than the more distancing catalogue
of names.
* See Allevi, cit., p. 44.
For the literature of Triumph, see Aldo Bernardo, Petrarch , Laura and the
«Triumphs» (Albany: SUNY Press, 1974); Marguerite Waller, Petrarch's
244
Poetry and Literary History (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,
1980) and most recently, and most fully, Petrarch's Triumphs, Allegory and
Spectacle , eds. Konrad Eisenbichler and Amilcare Iannucci (Ottawa:
Dovehouse, 1990), a remarkable collection of essays, particularly where
devoted to the «poetics» of Triumph and to the rhetoric of enumeration. I
make the distinction between the «vehicle» and the habit of mind.
Obviously one can have the vehicle (as in Purgatorio XXIX) without the
habit of mind, and here in canto XVI, the impulse without the physical
chariot. Umberto Bosco has pointed out that already in the Africa Petrarch
had acquired the triumphal habit of mind, indicating the consecutive
victories, of Death, Fame, Time and Eternity. See Francesco Petrarca (Bari:
Laterza, 1968), pp. 227-28.
1¿The same criticism leveled by Momigliano (see below) against Dante is
rendered by Morris Bishop and Thomas Bergin against Petrarch's similar
procedure in the Triumphs. «The endless parade of classical figures bores
us...» (Eisenbichler and Iannucci, cit., p. xiii). Bergin sees the
enumeration of names as serving an encyclopedic function, one that has
long ceased to be necessary: the catalogue is apparently «interminable».
The criticism also reveals a difference. In canto XVI, Dante presents a list
of only modern figures who have risen to the level of historical. In
Petrarch's poems, with the exception of the modern poets who are captives
of love (Dante included), all the figures are from the classical world. (Laura
and Robert of Sicily are major exceptions).
Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy , trans. S. G. S.
Middlemore (London: Phaidon, 1955), p. 87; R. Quiñones, The
Renaissance Discovery of Time (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1972).
lÎn his essay, «Father Time», in Studies in Iconology (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1939).
15In his commentary to Paradiso (Firenze: Sansoni, 1965), pp. 680 and
685. Parodi, for his part, refers to Cacciaguida's discourse as «uno stupendo
pezzo di poesia», with only a few verses as «dead leaves».
16See «Foundation Sacrifice in Florentine History: Dante's Anti-myth»,
Lectura Dantis (Spring, 1989); Foundation Sacrifice in Dante's
«Commedia» (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,
1994).
l^For a fuller argument, see Foundation Sacrifice in Dante's «Commedia»,
cit., pp. 31 ff.
^See Schnapp, The Transfigurations of History, cit., p. 216 and passim.
245
Paradiso XVII
Author(s): MARIANNE SHAPIRO
Accessed: 17-02-2020 23:04 UTC
Lectura Dantis
MARIANNE SHAPIRO
Brown University
XVII
Canto XVII confronts questions that can be answered only in the
transcendental future and through a paradisiacal understanding, yet they
are the questions of a living man.
Here the personal drama of one man's destiny under God challenges
the idea that the present world order within whose bounds poet and
pilgrim both reside - is even now moving toward its telos. However,
the canto is often read with only the transcendental imperative in mind.
Cacciaguida's exalted rhetoric encourages us unilaterally to elevate and
dignify the progressive didacticism of the poem as if it had already
established for the pilgrim a new life in the sublunary world. This
dignification occurs at the grave expense of understanding: for the
Dante-persona, even as the pathos of the Cacciaguida cantos seems to
embrace both him and his author in one sweep, is nonetheless
irretrievably separate, at the moment of the encounter with Cacciaguida,
from the poet. There is indeed no gainsaying the splendor of
Cacciaguida's prediction and stern advice. However it is precisely in
deference to the seriousness of the pilgrim's own quandary that readers
must withdraw from the attractions of a relentlessly optimistic pilgrim's
progress to evaluate the crucial relationship of this canto to the context
of the poem as a whole.
The pilgrim has already heard Farinata's and Brunetto's dire
predictions (whose veracity cannot be refuted despite the infernal status
of the speakers). In addition, Forese Donati's evocation of his and
Dante's rootless and raffish mode of life ( Purg . XXIII) was already
couched as a reminiscence of past misbehavior. Nonetheless, the pilgrim
asks now for an amplificano , and the reason he gives is that «saetta
prevista vien più lenta» (27). The metaphor has been appositely glossed
by a text from Aquinas which quotes Gregory's words, «jacula quae
praevidentur minus feriunt», and goes on to say that we endure the evils
of the world more easily if protected by the shield of foreknowledge.1
But as usual, Dante emends his «source». It is no cavil to distinguish
between minus feriunt , or «wound less », and vien più lenta , «come
more slowly », which betokens a postponement rather than a mitigation.
The time element means that the pilgrim cannot desire Cacciaguida's
246
explanation because an awaited calamity is lighter to bear. He has
already heard about it in unequivocal terms, both in hell and in
purgatory, so that his inquiring voice conveys inevitable apprehension;
and he knows (against all hope) that clarification will not come to
denial. The need to hear and understand {intender, line 26) interposes
itself as a retarding device between time's arrow and its mark.
Habituation is of course a part of learning, and nowhere more so
than in the case of bad news. In addition, the pilgrim needs to hear the
details from one in whom he may place complete trust as an avatar of
his spiritual family. He can expect Cacciaguida to be the first of the
Comedy's «fathers» who cannot fail him in any respect.
These factors notwithstanding, the pilgrim hopes that the words to
be spoken may ward off an impact that the poet causes to occur in the
poem cyclically, not once and for all. Beatrice is made to underscore the
fact that foreknowledge is not only hers but to some extent the pilgrim's
(and certainly the poet's, 7-12):
Per che mia donna «Manda fuor la vampa

del tuo disio», mi disse, «sì ch'ella esca
segnata bene de la interna stampa:
non perché nostra conoscenza cresca
per tuo parlare, ma perché t'ausi
a dir la sete ...»
Beatrice seems simply to be referring to her own and Cacciaguida's

paradisiacal intuition which functions with no need of words. But this
instance of the topos of silent understanding particularly stresses the
living man's primary thirst for speech, even in and of itself. It also
thematizes the fact that only the discursive act of Dante's poem stands
for the pilgrim's future in the world.
Each earlier instance of exile-prediction has been gathered up and
propelled in spiroform to the central cantos of Paradiso. Granted that
every time is the first, still both prior and future times have to be
implicitly accounted for in an itinerary of the mind to God which must
remain incomplete precisely because the pilgrim will return to the world
and set about the work of recording the journey. It is apposite, therefore,
for the interaction and rivalry between linear and cyclical time (that were
implicit in the very invention of terza rima itself) to reach its crisis
point at the center.
Knowing what he knows, the pilgrim asks whether there is a
purpose or a pattern in his history that can serve him as a beacon of
God's love and care: yes, even at this juncture in Paradise. And the
moment was chosen with a critical acumen and relentless logic that
247
conceal themselves superbly. If Dante's declaration of purpose - at
least that of bearing witness to and of the world - had occurred at the
beginning of the Comedy , he would not have been able (other things
equal) to class himself among martyrs without sacrificing the surprises
vouchsafed to readers by means of the poem's linear organization.
Moreover, the Dante-persona could not easily have been presented as yet
ignorant of the exile to come; and the worldly exile could easily have
preempted (by reification) the force of the totalizing metaphor of the
dark wood. If, again, the self-statement had come in Purgatory, the
interlocutor, and paragon for Dante, would have been by definition a less
perfect soul than the martyr Cacciaguida. If the pilgrim had been made
to meet his ancestor at the beginning of Paradiso , the centrality of the
episode would have been lost. This last is crucial, and so is the
placement of the episode at the culmination and conclusion of the chain
of invectives, upbraidings, lambastings, and exhortations addressed to all
who represent the political entity Dante comprehended within his
conception of Italy.
As is well known, Boethius's De consolatione philosophiae enters
into dialogue with every Dantean evocation of the fallacious world (cfr.
Par. X, 124-129, where Dante brings the «martyrdom» of Boethius into
alignment with the complex trope of exile). But the pilgrim and his
poet manifestly repudiate the markedly antihistorical position Boethius
instantiates. The world of deceptions, Dante recognizes, is the only
world in which the poem will function upon its completion, and it is
only through an entirely private, internally directed and hence
incomprehensible speech act that transcendental theory and earthly
practice would be aligned. The part of Cacciaguida's own paradisiacal
speech that the pilgrim could not interpret {Par. XV, 38-39) and the part
that only he among mortals can interpret together with whoever among
the blessed wishes to listen (XVII, 91-93) belong in different degree to
this privileged, splendidly abstracted speech.
Now the pilgrim wonders: is the incomprehensible, halting series
of dire events oriented toward a goal? Does it indeed configure the
progressive unfolding of a divine plan whose nature he can hope even
partially to understand? How can the contingencies of earthly injustice,
as they rain upon a man who still has the next half of his life to live, be
recognized on earth as manifesting God's design? And then to what
extent should the remainder of the pilgrim's life reflect his singleness of
purpose, so that its own discontinuous stages become ordered into that
harmonious pattern? These questions, central to the poem (insofar as
they strike at its conceptual core) are ready to be extrapolated from
Cacciaguida's answers. To ask them so late in Paradise - so long after
248
the discussion of the weak-willed in Paradiso IV and V, for instance -
means that all the foregoing terrors and pageantry, instruction and
admonition, all the materia of the preceding eighty-three cantos,
suddenly appear «contingent» insofar as they have not taught the
pilgrim to bear his wrongs, once returned to earth.
As has been pointed out, the text bespeaks a Boethian stoicism that
mandates indifference to passing events on earth. Dante evokes the
moment in De consolatione philosophiae (prose IV.6 ) when Lady
Philosophy distinguishes between Providential, simultaneous
foreknowledge and the human limitation whereby we take things in only
serially and partially. This caveat, aside from the stipulation not to
inquire into divine mysteries in general, usually suffices to turn the
pilgrim's attention and dissipate any incipient rebellion.
In Paradiso XVII, however, further poetic means are marshalled in
the service of the climactic assault on the pilgrim's demurrals, fears, and
misgivings. One of the most important of these means is that of
spatializing time. Geometrical figures come to play more important
roles as one ascends in Paradise; and while the formations of lights have
always received their due scholarly tribute, critics have paid less
attention to the geometric images of this canto in particular.
First, the pilgrim explicitly analogizes Cacciaguida's
foreknowledge of contingencies to the knowledge, shared by living
persons, that no triangle can contain two obtuse angles (14-15). The
contrast between fallible human knowledge and Cacciaguida's foresight
thus contracts triadic and Trinitarian associations. In turn, these work
poetically to redound to the pilgrim's discredit. To understand fully the
purpose of the geometric principle stated here, learners need to ask what
sort of figure does indeed comprise two obtuse angles. A parallelogram
having two obtuse and two acute angles then projects itself into virtual
existence. Whether the sides are equal or not in length, the two obtuse
angles make equilibrium practically impossible: the figure cannot stand.
That the unbalancing rhombus or rhomboid is obviously very different
from the equilibrated triangle is nothing new; but a further contrast
needs to be made between that parallelogram and the kind of figure the
pilgrim knows he should eventually resemble, «tetragono ai colpi di
ventura» (24). For Dante's contemporaries a «tetragon»was a closed and
compact cube, assumed to be the exemplum of perfect stability; yet the
pilgrim has been acting more like an obtuse-angled, precariously
balanced parallelogram, displaying directed equivalences but unable to
stand firm when pushed.2 It should be underscored in turn that the cross
in which Cacciaguida appears is not the cross of the Passion but the
equal-armed symbol of quaternity, the «venerable sign traced in a circle
249
by the quadrant-bars». If and when the pilgrim comes to be like a
tetragon, he will thereby also reveal himself to be a genuine militant of
Cacciaguida's true lineage. To stand firm, of course, means for the poet
to tell the whole truth as the pilgrim has experienced and heard it, in
defiance of the machinations of enemies and of the dreary deceptions that
perenially litter any path to advancement and security - not to speak of
rehabilitation. It is only by bearing witness in his turn that «Dante»
may yet be numbered among the martyrs and prophets.
In addition to making geometry prominent, another means whereby
Dante imposes symmetry upon the unequal status of poet and pilgrim
- and even of poet and Cacciaguida - is to centralize the temporality
of the episode by placing it so that the pilgrim's life may be seen to
look both backward and forward to «exiles» of different degree: back to
the selva oscura , forward to the loss of citizenship. That Dante
recapitulates the pilgrim's voyage twice in canto XVII, like a kind of
refrain, contributes little to the narrative information but does much to
solidify the gravity of the episode by repetition and development. The
passage (19-23),
mentre ch'io era a Virgilio congiunto

su per lo monte che l'anime cura
e discendendo nel mondo defunto,
dette mi fuor di mia vita futura
parole gravi...,
has an apparent echo in another passage, which actually recapitulates and

develops its message (1 12-17):
Giù per lo mondo sanza fine amaro,

e per lo monte del cui bel cacume
li occhi de la mia dorma mi lev aro,
e poscia per lo ciel di lume in lume,
ho io appreso quel che s'io ridico,
a molti fia sapor di forte agrume...
The first passage refers to bad tidings about Dante's «future», the second
to bad news the public will hear from his own mouth and for which it
will condemn him. Note also that while the first passage gives us a
hysteron proteron , reversing the order of the worlds from purgatory back
to hell, the second passage takes us forward again, so that retraversing
the same ground always brings us back to the central point (17-18)
where we stand «now» with «Dante».
And what of that «punto», in which «all times are present?» This,
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too, can only remain a geometrical reality, and of an infinitely receding
size; and the temporal dimension, to which it is simultaneously applied,
only complicates matters by wiping out the conventional measurement
of time. It is only in the mathematical imagination that Dante's
humanity can be fitted into divine centrality. And if we compare it with
the other spatio-temporal «punto» by which Paolo and Francesca were
vanquished {Inf. V, 132), the plea implicit in Francesca's narrative -
for sympathy in her confusion - seems to express the predicament of
her readers: was the turning point the one that witnessed the kiss? the
rcognition of mutual passion? the slaying by Gianciotto? was it
Francesca's unwitting index of God? Transferred to Paradise, the moment
that conquers is always and only imaginary, always «before» or «after»
to human comprehension.
The directional and temporal strategies that organize the canto (and
indeed, the whole of the Comedy ), scrupulously seeming to differentiate
between a human time that we know and a divine time we cannot know,
can all too easily obscure our awareness as readers that Dante's work of
prophecy here is already history, though newly present to every reading.
While still prey himself to the «contingencies» of earthly life, Dante
posits a Cacciaguida in command of foreknowledge and implies his own
likeness to the ancestor; yet this character - no less than infernal
Farinata or Brunetto - predicts, of necessity, only what has already
occurred by the time it is written: that Dante's life, victim to insidious
plots, will turn to alienation and exile, that his food will taste of
charity's bitter bread and salt, that his living will depend on the kindness
(or caprices) of hosts not necessarily as kind as the Scaligeri. The steep
stairs, a «duro calle» to be continually climbed and descended, could be
seen to mock the directionality of the greater, otherworldly journey.3
That Dante's history now appears as a prediction underscores a
fundamental pathos present in all autobiography. But the paradisiacal
premise of Cacciaguida's seeing as through God's eyes increases the
pathos by evoking the whole contrasting pattern of negative analogies
to failed or interrupted journeys like those of Phaeton (or Ulysses or
Daedalus or Moses's lost people).4 The exordium of the canto
immediately asks the question of whether Dante is worthy of claiming
Cacciaguida to be his true father, and if so, must his poetic voyage end
like Phaethon's if he flies too close to earth, that is, if he returns there
to relay terrible truths to the world? This contrast with the much-evoked
flight of Icarus and Daedalus guides Dante's present choice: Phaeton ends
in disaster because he flies too low {Met. II. Iff.). With the simile of
Phaethon Dante's decision to transfer to Mars some of the Sun's main
functions gains a particular aptness to describe his personal situation. In
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Ovid, the Sun objects at first to his son's request, for what he asks is
not for mortals («non est mortale, quod optas», 56). The Sun describes
the perils of the journey as three troublesome stages characterized by
levels: the first part steep («ardua prima via est», 63), the second, so
high as to cause even the Sun to tremble («medio est altissima cáelo, /
unde mare et terras ipsi mihi saepe videre / fit timor et pavida trépidât
formidine pectus...», 64-66), the last is precipitous and requires certain
control («ultima prona via est et eget moderamine certo», 67). The
course contains lurking dangers and fierce forms of beasts («per insidias
iter est formasque ferarum», 78). The Sun urges Phaethon not to take
the straight road through the five zones of the heavens; the path he
recommends is slanted and curved, and is also the middle road (130-137).
Phaethon among the predicted dangers, can neither seize the reins nor let
them go, with much of the sky behind him, but more yet to come
(«multum caeli post terga relictum, / ante oculos plus est», 187-188).
And at the last, it is the destruction Phaethon causes in the world - not
within the routines of the immortals - that compels the Father to hurl
his thunderbolt. Then will Dante destroy himself in like fashion? As is
easily seen, Dante conserves the analogy of his poetic voyage to
Phaethon's although the metaphorical ground moves to Mars. This
move further enables Dante to depict in one image both the otherworldly
mystery of concordia discors and its lagging, worldly analogue rooted in
human history, since both find their source in Mars.
In the Convivio (11.13.20) Dante had already written that as the
fifth planet, Mars «è lo mezzo di tutti» at the vertical midpoint of the
heavens. Reading the passage in reverse shows next that this planet
exemplifies for Dante the most beautiful numerical relationship
(i relazione ) because it remains central among the others whether one
counts from the bottom or the top: «annumerando li cieli mobili, da
qualunque si comincia o da l'infimo o dal sommo, esso cielo di Marte è
lo quinto... ». For the reading of Paradiso XVII, this makes Mars a
particularly appropriate vantage point from which to count time
backwards and forwards, «up» and «down», and always get a perfectly
balanced result close to the «punto / a cui tutti li tempi son presenti»
(17-18).
The link with Convivio is unproblematic, for Dante never abjures
it, and other speaking evidence reinforces it. Continuing the passage in
reverse produces the information that the beauty of balanced relation,
together with the fiery planet's heat and color, make the heaven of Mars
comparable to music: «lo cielo di Marte si può comparare a la Musica
per due proprietadi...» (11.13.20). Now turning back to Paradiso XVII,
we read how Cacciaguida interprets the terrible fortune that awaits his
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descendant through his privileged understanding of the real ratio between
contingency and necessity. Because he is secure in this knowledge,
Cacciaguida can smile at the comparative triviality of the bad news he
has to impart. But Cacciaguida draws a further and far more explicit
connection, «da indi» (43), between this happy certainty and his sight
(«a vista» [45]) of the pilgrim's ultimate end, which comes to him
synaesthetically «sì come viene ad orecchia / dolce armonia da organo»
(43-44). Music, which for the author of Convivio «inflames» all things
with reason and harmony remains a special property of Mars in the
Comedy . Accordingly, the position of Mars at the center of Paradise
acquires symbolic and multisensory power as a temporal vantage point
where sweet music, always connoting the harmony of the spheres, may
accompany harsh words without conceptual contradiction. Remember,
though, that it is Cacciaguida who alone has heard this music and says
so, not the listening pilgrim.
Dante's meditation on music throughout the heaven of Mars
assimilates music to his ideal of political concord, and extends this
relation to an entire cosmological model. Boethius's De institutione
musica , accordingly, receives Dante's characteristic treatment of sources:
emendation and critique. Displacing the musical attributes of the Sun to
Mars, with all this implies about the martial ground of concordia
discors , results in the superimposition of an added mystery to a music
that is already mysterious: and how to listen to a harmony born of loss
and strife? The pilgrim is vouchsafed only a hint, an avant-gout, of this
music - enough, it seems, to emphasize his difference from its
symmetry, enough to make even plainer the dissonances of history in
which he still lives. Note how Cacciaguida's discourse itself, despite the
«chiare parole» and «preciso latin» of his speech on contingency
(34-35), swings in and out of intelligibility, showing how tenuous and
«relative» is the pilgrim's hearing by comparison with Cacciaguida's
musically balanced reading of the divine text. The hermeneutic value of
Cacciaguida's prophecies is therefore intermittent at best: Dante's future
appears to him in stark clarity, without «ambages» (31), but when it
was «necessary» («né per elezïon mi si nascose, / ma per necessità»,
XV, 40-41) Cacciaguida had uttered «cose / ch'io non ... 'ntesi» (XV,
38-39). Cacciaguida is synonymous with «amor paterno», yet the same
moment makes him both «chiuso e parvente» (XVII, 35-36), absent and
present, hermetic and open. Thus the pilgrim is raised to a higher
understanding by a transfigured soul, but he himself is not transfigured.
For the space-time coordinates of his present existence impose an
insuperable cognitive barrier to the synoptic view he seeks.
The word tempo , used four times in this canto, is divided between
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the two speakers and their two different understandings of it. Again, at
an analogous remove, the pilgrim sees Cacciaguida gazing (mirando) on
the point to which all times are present (18). But for the pilgrim trapped
in contingencies, tempo , both proximate and distant, is only to be
feared. The first, an enemy warrior, already «spurs itself» towards him
(«sì come sprona / lo tempo verso me, per colpo darmi» [106-107]).
Here we have yet another directional reversal, for traditionally Time
chases after us with Death in its wake:
La vita fugge e non s'arresta un'ora,

E la morte vien dietro a gran giornate,
E le cose presenti e le passate
Mi danno guerra, e le future ancora,
writes Petrarch, on that order (Rime, 272). But Dante chooses an image
that posits the clash of Time and himself as the new warrior. The choice
is, of course, in keeping with the martial themes of the canto but more
specifically with the analogy between Dante and Cacciaguida, making
present the general sense of martyrdom as an act of speech and of speech
as symbolic action. And if the pilgrim does not answer this challenge in
a manner and degree worthy of this ancestor, then, judging himself in
the full capacity of a poet-prophet, he will lose fame - even life itself
(«perder viver») - in the minds of those who will think one day of
present times as ancient (1 19-20). As the problem is articulated, eternal
life in Paradise is not now uppermost in the pilgrim's mind. In defiance
of all he has learned about the capriciousness and impermanence of
reputation in the world, at this moment only earthly fame is present to
him, despite the lesson of Purgatorio XI that fame is brief and
capricious.
Time flowing or time enduring - both concepts are somehow
inaccessible to the pilgrim, not to speak of the need to reconcile them.
As soon as he ceases to consider time in the abstract, as free from all
content, and directs his attention to things which exist in time , he sees
those things ceaselessly altering themselves. Permanence in change -
which Cacciaguida advocates - may be predicated only of an existent
that is centered in itself, and how is the self-centeredness of a conscious
human subject to be anchored?
Under the rubric of meditation on the mystery of time the canto
brings together discussions of fame, chance, and necessity, of durations
and endings. The antinomy of transformation and duration, and with it
the ambiguity of time itself, emerges as a form of experience and not
merely the product of abstract reflection. If reason finds itself caught in
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the contradictions of time, it is because life itself is already thus
entangled.
A longstanding controversy among readers has posited that in order
to conform to the Comedy's plan, Dante's narrating voice must either
reject or overcome the desire for fame. Exegesis of Inferno XXV and
Purgatorio XI attests to the creation, care, and feeding of this problem.5
At the least, any reader who denies the insistent demand of the
poet-pilgrim for earthly justice neglects the perennial moral fallibility
that surely attaches to every living human being. Immodest statements
from the pilgrim - those appearing in quotation marks - can be
discounted as preliminary to the fruition of the learning process, but
what of the voice of the poet who has been to Paradise and is now
returned to earth? The text repeatedly displays variation in his states of
mind. Florence has behaved towards him as a «perfida noverca» (47), but
eight cantos later Dante will renew his hope of laurel-crowned return to
that city, once again the «bello ovile» of his childhood (XXV.5).
On one side, Dante has been taxed by critics with lapses into
vainglory. Others counter by finding for these exceptional moments the
function of «dramatizing» a defect of character that will be healed in the
course of the narrative. Both sides overlook the cumulative weight of
reference and return borne by the narrative voice, which is that of a man
still enmeshed in the world's desires and intrigues - one for whom even
to speak of his selva oscura is difficult and painful (Inf. I, 4). If, as
canto XVII teaches, foreknowledge is not to be equated with
determinism, why should that lesson carry less force when applied to the
projected future of the pilgrim and to the poet's present time of
composing?
New life in memory is a living desire to which nearly the whole of
this canto attests. Dante confers this privilege on his patrons, the
Scaligeri, as well as on Cacciaguida (whose lineage, the Elisei, connects
him even in terms of a polite sound-reference with Aeneas's father in the
Elysian fields). The wish for rebirth in memory extends even to Empire
itself, precisely because the Veronese sojourn - by means of which
Dante connotes a last vision of imperial glory - has by now come to a
close. Within a context that accommodates both desire and
transcendence, Dante evokes the passage from Convivio I, in which he
had decried those who blamed him for his own misfortunes. The word
grido in its first appearance echoes the same meaning it had in the prose
passage when Cacciaguida warns the pilgrim: «la colpa seguirà la parte
offensa / in grido, come suol» (52-53).
The second and final appearance of grido assimilates Dante's poem
to a biblical prophet's «cry», climaxing a solemn investiture of dignity
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(133-35):
Questo tuo grido farà come vento,

che le più alte cime più percuote;
e ciò non fa d'onor poco argomento.
This time grido refers to the actual poem, conceived as a symbolic

action and instrument of redemption. And certainly the «honor» that
accrues to the cry of a true prophet cannot be reduced to that sought after
by either poets or their patrons, at least partly because neither group is
naturally or necessarily committed to bearing true witness. Cacciaguida's
soldierly metaphor is in the line of congratulatory statements that will
eventually rise to sacred legitimation by St. Peter himself (Par. XXVII,
64-66). The canto makes peace with the negatives attaching to the
pursuit of fame by pointing to its necessity in order that the poem's
redemptive message may reach its mark.
But the narrator's gaze, though not Cacciaguida's, is actually
focused retrospectively. The past and present have to look like a
prediction that parallels the prophetic work of the poem as a whole.
Cacciaguida's function, in fact, is to direct him to do that work. At the
moment of the encounter with Cacciaguida, Cangrande della Scala (b.
1291, as it happens, therefore nine years old at the posited time of the
journey) is still too young to merit much notice (79-81):
Non se ne son le genti ancore accorte

per la novella età, che pur nove anni
son queste rote intorno di lui torte...
Here the language evokes Dante's own New Life and the early
manifestation of Beatrice at nine years of age. Cacciaguida promises that
the time will come, moreover, when even his enemies «non ne potran
tener le lingue mute» (87), a development that would stand in marked
contrast to the general effect of the lady («ogne lingua devien, tremando,
muta», Vita Nuova , sonnet 26). The praise of the patron seems to
comprise another, independent «book of the memory» within the canto,
as Cacciaguida «prophesies» in further Vita Nuova terms. Even the
hermetic aspect is to be found here, as Dante alludes to secrets only
those present were told (91-93):
E portera'ne scritto ne la mente

di lui, e noi dirai; e disse cose
incredibili a quei che fier presente.
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There is surely no textual intention to feminize Dante's patron (in Mars,
of all places!), or to spin an extended analogy to Beatrice. What we do
have in this cluster of reminiscences is a return to certain modes of
praise in which Dante delighted as lyricist and «trovatore» ( Vita Nuova
III), with their attendant promise of renewal and beneficent
transformation - but again, the object of praise is actually viewed in
the recapitulating memory, making free of temporal directionality. The
effect, especially as it accumulates, is to underscore the centrality of the
(unfathomable) «point».
By the «future» time, which is that of writing, Cangrande will
have come into his full powers, with good potential for the Heaven of
Mars: «per lui fia trasmutata molta gente» (89), in accord with the
power of Mars registered in Convivio 11.13.22: «l'accendimento di questi
vapori significa morte di regi e transmutamento di regni». In fact, his
generosity will be such as to reverse the order of «fare» and «dire»; like
Virgil in hell and both Cacciaguida and Beatrice in Paradise, he will
anticipate the wants of his suppliant on earth (74-57). Again, the now
familiar capacity of anticipation, proper in general terms only to
Beatrice and other souls in Paradise, functions as a trope for the
spatio-temporality of the canto's poetics. Dante's hope of political
redemption by the agency of the Holy Roman Emperor is dead by this
time, no less than the concrete reality of Beatrice in the world, no less
than Virgil's failed wonderchild, Marcellus. What endures and is expected
to live on in honorable fame is Dante's bearing of witness to these and
further-reaching hopes in indestructible poetry. Indeed, independence
from the concrete referent (which is ever subject to the flux and
cacophony of history) emerges - as it did in the Vita Nuova , though
now in its maximal extension - as not only favorable but necessary to
the intention of his text. In each case the removal of presence by death
or loss foretells a poetic second coming. Undoubtedly, the reminiscences
of earlier texts draw them into the orbit of the Dante-persona's directed,
linear development. Yet they also show, in their freewheeling - and
often reversed - order of retrieval and adaptation, how Dante's poem, as
it advances, also turns on its own axis and how in so doing it gains
momentum and force.
At the moment of fear, the pilgrim has in mind the dangers he will
incur from the highest ecclesiastical and secular powers. By the time of
writing these have already been realized, the risks once taken have
yielded up their results, and the statements of mission are belated, the
mandate to speak the truth nearly accomplished, so that Cacciaguida's
«prophecy» constitutes the Comedy's apologia for its own existence and
form.
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Gossip and malicious rumor, the more humble acceptance of grido ,
play no less portentous a role than the deserved and righteous epic fame
the Comedy will win for its poet. In God's eye as projected here, fama
includes every nuance from the latest silly chatter to the inscription of
an enduring historical name. There is no inconsistency between
Cacciaguida's explanation that the pilgrim has been shown only
«l'anime che son di fama note» (138) and the actual variety of the
provenance of characters in the poem. (From the outset it is obvious
that Dante does not deal with the rich, the famous, or the infamous
exclusively. Many of the souls are famous, if at all, only because they
turn up in the Comedy). Among the approximately 250 characters who
come from among the poet's near-contemporaries, no occupation or
origin is too humble for a person to be projected by the poem's
dynamism into one perspectivai focus with the great names of the Old
and New Testaments and of classical antiquity.
Cacciaguida has seemed to be saying that only characters of renown
will produce the rhetorical effect of examples sufficient to draw readers
into acquiescence with the poem's message. However, if one interprets
fama on the Virgilian scale, the discrepancy melts away.6 Public
knowledge - that of potential readers of Dante's volgare - is the
memorial desired even by those individuals and groups in the Comedy
who are identifiable only for their sins and wretched shortcomings. But
recognition can come from the chronicles of Villani, from municipal
court records, from rumor and reinvented stories, and need amount to
little more than the gasps that would have attended the Comedy's first
public readings. The souls in Paradise are in the main indifferent to
fame, but the poet's choice confers it upon them volens nolens. Paradiso
contains proportionally more magnificent names than do the other two
canticles, yet the total scheme rejects a restricted meaning for fama
(rather than giving Dante the lie) - and analogizes fama to the two
instances of gridoy which means both rumor and the prophet's «cry».
As often, Dante pursues «fame» to its final implication. Such
recourse to first principles as he understands them means that, for
example, he exemplifies the Papacy with St. Peter. Analogously, Dante
has gone directly to Cacciaguida, saying nothing of his own father, to
ask if he, Dante, is in the spirit of the crusader's lineage. For he has
endured slanders like those suffered by Hippolytus from Phaedra, his
own «perfida noverca»; only Dante's wrongs are more general and
diffuse, covering the spectrum from judicial accusation to muttered
insults, all sources of unwanted «fame». Dante's apologia pro poema
suo draws here from contrast as well as comparison with the ancient
precedent: the poet can still only hope and aspire to be reborn like
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Hippolytus / Virbius. Placing himself in Cacciaguida's succession
makes the past argue for the future.
However, even proleptically bypassing the bitter period of exile
«predicted» by Cacciaguida, it is difficult to make precise what Dante
imagines might follow, together with the punishment of his
compatriots' perfidies. Note that while Cacciaguida has claimed only to
«gloss» the hard words of others («chiose / di quel che ti fu detto»
[94-95]), the narrating voice says that he has crossed the warp with the
woof, which usually signifies the weaving of the main text: «tacendo, si
mostrò spedita / l'anima santa di metter la trama / in quella tela ch'io le
porsi ordita» (100-102). This is to suggest, at least, that canto XVII
«rewrites» much of the previous journey - in retrospect. But the
pilgrim continues nonetheless in a state which commingles desire and
fear of what he desires («come colui che brama, / dubitando» [103-104]).
He knows that what he has to impart about the journey to Hell,
Purgatory, and Paradise will bring a «sapor di forte agrume» (117) to
many of the powerful indicted there. Cacciaguida reassures him that time
will turn this sourness to «vital nodrimento» (131) when it is well
digested. As is often noted, Dante brings to bear the message of Lady
Philosophy in the Consolatio : «Talia sunt quippe quae restant, et
degustata quidem mordeant, interius autem recepta dulcescant» (De cons.
phil. 3, prosa 13-14). Yet the bitter «pane altrui» (59) of exile will not
taste better to the pilgrim in the world. When is the transformation into
sweet and nutritious substance to occur, if not in the memory of future
ages, when the poet is well and truly a part of «that Rome where Christ
is a citizen»? (Purg. XXXII, 102).
The Comedy never abjures the hope of return to Florence, but how
is the necessary righting of Florentine wills to occur if not via the
«Stepmother's» forgiveness? (As is known, one of Dante's epistles
rejects the terms of a putative amnesty).7 But Paradiso XVII, well in
advance of more explicit hopes for a triumphant «poema sacro» (XXV,
1), at least suggests that the poet's voice will cease to be molesta to his
compatriots during his lifetime. For readers to make light of this
conflict is either careless or disingenuous. The flexibility and
oscillations of the narrator's stance should rather be understood as
instantiating one of the major «contingencies» to which the living man
remains subjected. To face them down, to suffer Florence's indurated
opposition - as his poet well knows - the pilgrim, once returned to
earth, will need all the courage he can remember from the Heaven of
Mars and Cacciaguida's tetragonal certainty.
Among untold other possibilities, Dante could have made
Cacciaguida temper his exhortation of fortitude with a caution to
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exercise prudence, another cardinal virtue. This choice would not
necessarily have made him stray from the moral universe otherwise
limned by the Comedy ; it is entirely appropriate, then, for the pilgrim
to go on invoking the advantages of compromise even when the fearful
outcome of bearing full witness has been made perfectly clear to him.
But the character of Cacciaguida is constructed so as to reject summarily
any trait that smacks of the mercantile trade or of the fawning
functionary. The tradition he reestablishes poetically is not that of a
former, more benevolent Florence but rather that of a renewed imperial
Rome. Accordingly, he translates his hopes from the city where «Christ
is bought and sold every day» («dove Cristo tutto dì si merca» [51]) to a
repository of unyielding permanence, to be actualized when Dante's
poem achieves its full effect.
But that terminus ad quern is projected into an indefinite moment,
however greatly desired. The former Florence (evoked in canto XV) and
the future one (still awaited by the poet) bracket the present
contingencies of political life and worldly revenge. The poem's impact
is to burst like a butterfly out of the chrysalis of chronicle, history,
hearsay, and partisanship. To raise the Florentines - not to speak of
the «double» papacy and the declining power of Empire - from the
state of misery to that of blessedness seems now more than ever a
bootstrap operation.
To accomplish this mission symbolically, the ship of the poem
must not be carried downstream by the current but must cleave its way
through the tossed waters of the mind (40-42):
necessità però quindi non prende

se non come dal viso in che si specchia
nave che per torrente giù discende.
Contingency is «depicted» («tutta è dipinta» [39]) in divine speculation

but must not be equated with necessity. This latest spur to free will
means that the poet must know himself - as gazing spectator - as
distinct from both ship and sea («de la vostra matera» [38]), and that his
act of watching is to be linked analogically to God's observation of the
workings of the universe. Only such an analogy, however audacious or
distantly related its terms might be, can work to reverse his spiritual
fortunes against crushing odds that include both the fear of temporal
succession and the incomprehension of time as stasis.
Note the resemblance of the ship headed downstream - loaded with
traditional attachment to the endeavors of poets - which returns us to
the image in the first canto of a stream falling from a mountain's
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height, where Beatrice remarks (Par. 1, 136-138):
Non dei più ammirar, se bene stimo,

lo tuo salir, se non come d'un rivo
se d'alto monte scende giuso ad imo.
In both cases the text plays the contextual optimism of both images
against the downward pull of the waters; both cases posit a nonactive
human spectator; both take the downstream direction as typically
natural, if not inevitable. The two images describe divine marvels, but
in articulating them, Beatrice and Cacciaguida are allowed to carry a
freight of human perplexities as well. This, too, is at least occasionally
a part of paradisiacal truth-telling.
Indeed, to see and to speak the truth devoid of the circumlocution
and equivocation of pagan oracles, and also the ambages pulcherrimae of
poets before the advent of Christ is a privilege Dante transfers to his
ancestor so as to claim it legitimately for himself. Dante's use of
«gente» does double duty to signify both ancient and contemporary
«heathens», in the sense of «Gentile». His present-day vocation will
also stand in steadfast opposition to the perennial commerce between
papacy and temporal rulers, which is ever attended by verbal hypocrisy
and base evasions. It is only to the degree that worldly danger can be
neutralized by the act of bearing witness that the «ship» of the Christian
epic can navigate against the current to safe haven.8 Cacciaguida, like
his descendant, shows himself a clear speaker as well as a warrior. It
might otherwise seem paradoxical for him to bid the pilgrim farewell as
something of a musician: «mostrommi l'alma che m'avea parlato / qual
era tra i cantor del cielo artista» (Par. XVIII. 50-51). The passage
reactivates Dante's prior association of Mars with music, and
Cacciaguida, again like his descendant, distinguishes himself as an
«artist» even among heavenly singers.
The Convivio passage (11.13.23) which analogizes Mars and music,
in that each occupies a central relation (with respect to other heavens,
other arts), goes on to posit the likeness of music to (Martian or
earthly) fire: «esso Marte dissecca e arde le cose... E queste due
proprietadi sono ne la Musica, la quale è tutta relativa, sì come si vede
ne le parole armonizzate e ne li canti, de' quali tanto più dolce armonia
resulta, quanto più la relazione è bella». Dante's emphasis shifts from
the patterning of notes in themselves to language, or signifying sound.
As in De vulgāri eloquentia , music appears chiefly as a part of song or
poetry. Accordingly, Cacciaguida's special expertise in music makes
him a better poet, in complementary relation to his effect on the
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pilgrim, which makes him a better warrior.
And yet, where Italian history is concerned, evidence abounds that
this instrumental blend of noble qualities is being knowingly put in the
service of a lost cause. Cacciaguida's Florence is a myth ilio tempore ;
Cangrande della Scala retains the title and function of imperial vicar
although the pope, John XXI, has refused to recognize either of the two
candidates to the succession. The seventeenth canto of Paradiso
juxtaposes the praise of Cangrande to the denunciation of the church for
having finally betrayed the last emperor and analogizes that betrayal to
that by Florence of her poet.
Although progress from the time of the false and lying gods has
changed everything so that circuitous blandishments (in other words
ambages) should no longer signify, the order of salvation history, or at
least its pace, remains mysterious. The consistency of foreknowledge
with free will remains, in the apt words of De Sanctis, «non una
concezione, ma una visione, uno spettacolo».9 Yet it is exactly in the
terms of poetic endeavor that the mystery of time seen as from God's
eye is to be imaged forth and the trace of Dante's vision preserved.
Consider, among his reordering of events at every level so as to
emphasize spatio-temporal centrality, the temporal inversions Dante
wrought on the Phaeton legend (which have been well studied). In direct
contrast to the Dantean journey, Phaeton's was a wild ride, unpowered
by any higher authority, and ended fatally. Again, on the level of
narrative succession, the whole of the Phaeton comparison running
through the seventeenth canto of each of the three books delineates a
major reversal of Ovid's sequence. In Dante, the fall comes first and
Ovid's beginning - Phaeton approaching Clymene - last. Whereas
Phaeton came to his mother to question her about his past, Dante
confronts his «father», Cacciaguida, to consult him about his future,
well within the paradigm of one who will fall but do so in order to rise.
The temporal reversal of respective events in the two stories would have
no place in a logical exposition - but in the new context, aligned with
other reversals, it underscores the heroic effort to see in God's eye. And
the reversal, emphasizing the centrality in which both directions
coincide, and the radiation of all events from one point, is echoed within
the canto itself: first the pilgrim summarizes in solemn cadences the
sequence of his journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise (112-115),
then Cacciaguida retraces the path: «queste rote», «monte», «valle
dolorosa» (136-137), in what would look like a palinode if the two
speakers, «Dante» and Cacciaguida, were not so unequally placed.
Dante's exemplary life would lack this highly significant tension
without the great concession to cyclical temporality, part and parcel of
262
any testamental first-person narrative («I saw, that I might write, that I
saw, that I might write, etc».) which is expected to end only
simultaneously with the course of earthly life. If he were not immersed
in the common predicament of «nostra vita», and in the imperfections of
human nature, Dante's profession of that life itself as a guarantee of true
intent would be bereft of exemplary value. It is well to remember that
his purgation and ascent are still symbolic of a desired event, that they
do not constitute that event itself; for Dante, the heaven of those who
gave the utmost devotion of their minds (as perhaps he has «already»
done) displays itself as subordinate to the more pragmatic heaven of
those who were moved by the same devotion to shed their blood.
So far the finality, for the pilgrim, that he must poetize from the
margins of the polis and not from within, seems nearly unbearable. So
far, fame and fortune matter, although implicitly - and mostly
implicitly - they may yet submit to and merge with a true
«olocausto», the martyr's complete offering of himself. Dante is not
given to pedestrian rehearsals of the metaphysics of absence;
accordingly, he slights neither the tensions nor the alliances of poetry
and politics.10 Nor does he make light of the difficulties besetting the
entire plan of recording the data of true memory. The themes of the first
paradisiacal canto return - harmony, fire, divine intuition, all by way
of showing us the contrast, rather than the likeness, between now and
later. And the themes of the final canto are foreshadowed here as well:
Cacciaguida's admonition that contingency does not extend «fuor del
quaderno / de la vostra matera» (37-38; emphasis added), the «volume of
your material world», looks forward to the moment when, through sheer
force of will, Dante will align these two in triumphant balance, imaging
forth a hope of simultaneity that readers pursuing a linear reading cannot
yet reproduce mentally (Par. XXXIII, 85-87; emphasis added):
Nel suo profondo vidi che s'interna,

legato con amore in un volume ,
ciò che per l'universo si squaderna.
The canto is illuminated by a hope of eventual understanding of real,

concrete duration, expressed as an abiding coexistence of past, present,
and future, and in the foursquare terms that show the likeness of a
«quaderno» to a «tetragono». But the poet knows the in medias res
ambiguity of his present stance. He has had to double himself, into a
being who cannot be «resolved» into one as long as he lives, and Dante
as good as says so in a confession of fallibility that is for the depth and
breadth of its honesty the most splendid of his «confessions».
263
NOTES
^Summa theologiae H.ii. qu. 123, art. 9, following which St. Thomas takes
up the question of martyrdom. Paradiso XVII contains both parts of the
quotation: the arrow at 27 and 56, the «forewarned is forearmed» aspect at
107-108. For this reading, where I discuss Mars and music I have benefited
from Jeffrey T. Schnapp, The Transfiguration of History at the Center of
Dante's Paradise (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986).
^Sapegno's Paradiso , p. 217, points out that the image of the cube as perfect
stability goes back to Aristotle, N. Ethics I 101 and is illustrated by St.
Thomas Aquinas: «tetragonum nominat perfectum in virtute ad
similitudinem corpus cubici, habendis sex superficies quadratas, propter
quod bene stat in qualibet superficie. Et similiter virtuosus in qualibet
fortuna bene se habet».
3 As noted by Giorgio Melloni, a student in my Dante seminar, the «scale»
might be a specific and veiled allusion to his patrons; the wordplay would
then suggest a certain ambivalence in Dante's recollections of it.
^Marguerite M. Chiarenza, «Time and Eternity in the Myths of Paradiso
XVII», in Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio: Studies in the Trecento in Honor of
Charles S. Singleton, ed. Aldo Bernardo and Anthony L. Pellegrini
(Binghamton: SUNY Press, 1983), pp. 133-150, has studied the Phaeton
analogies in the light of the topos of death and rebirth afforded by Servius's
commentary on the Aeneid , a source for Dante of Hippolytus's rebirth as
«Virbius» ( bis - vir , or «twice a man»). See also Kevin Brownlee,
«Phaeton's and Dante's Ascent», DS, 102 (1984), 135 -144, which details
the inversions Dante wrought upon the legend throughout the Comedy ,
with special attention to parallels among the seventeenth cantos of each
canticle.
*For examples, see Richard Terdiman, «Problematical Virtuosity: Dante's

Depiction of the Thieves {Inferno XXIV-XXV)», DS, 91 (1973), 27-45,
esp. 44: «The poet's irrupting virtuosity and his triumphant pleasure in it
... create a crucial tension, as the personal here threatens to escape
necessary subordination to the theological». Also David J. Baker, «The
Winter Simile in Inferno XXIV», D S , 92 (1974), 77-91, which refers to
Dante's «poetic smugness [sic] and gratuitous display» (79); and Peter S.
Hawkins, «Virtuosity and Virtue: Poetic Self-Reflection in the Commedia »,
DS, 98 (1980), 1-18, which claims (2) that Dante «is using his own voice
and activity as poet to dramatize the demonic possibilities open to poetry:
the self-serving demon of 'Literature' ...».
®Fama as story and rumor is common in the Aeneid ; 11.17: «votum pro reditu
simulant, ea fama vigatur»; VII. 392-393: «fama volat, furiisque accensas
pectore matres / idem omnis simul ardor agit ... »; III.55 1-552: «hic sinus
Herculei, si vera est fama, Tarenti / cernitur».
^ Le opere di Dante , ed. Edward Moore (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1924), Epistle IX, p. 416: «Ecce igitur quod ... significatum est mihi ...
super absolutione bannitorum, quod si solvere veļiem certam pecuniae
264
quantitatem, vellemque pati notam oblationis, et absolvi possem et redire
ad praesens. In qua quidem duo ridenda et male preconsilata sunt . . .
°For prophetic language in Par. XVII, see: N. Mineo, Struttura e temi
profetico-apocalittici in Dante dalla Vita Nuova alla Divina Commedia
(Catania: Università di Catania, 1968); G. Sorni, «Spirito profetico
dantesco», Letture classensi , 13 (1984), 49-68; and esp. Isaiah VII.2: «Et
commotum est cor eius et cor populi eius sicut moventur ligna silvarum a
facie venti»; and Timothy IIA: «Praedica verbum, insta opportune,
importune; argue, obsecra, increpa in omni patientia et doctrina ... ».
"Francesco De Sanctis, Dante (Perugia: Università per stranieri, 1930), p.
68.
I® For additional references to Dante's continued engagement with politics
and the resulting tension within Par. XVII, see also Tobia R. Toscano,
«Memoria storico e progetto politico nei canti di Cacciaguida (XV-XVIII)».
in M. dell'Aquila et al., Lectura D antis Potenza (Potenza: Congedo, 1990),
pp. 95-114.
265
Paradiso XVIII
Author(s): DENISE HEILBRONN-GAINES
Accessed: 17-02-2020 23:09 UTC
Lectura Dantis
DENISE HEŁBRONN-GAINES
Northern Illinois University
XVIII
The opening tercet of Canto XVIII marks the end of Cacciaguida's
prophecy, which occupies most of Canto XVII and sheds light on Dante
the pilgrim's future and on his mission as a poet (XVII.37-142). Falling
silent Cacciaguida rejoices in his thought (verbo) while Dante «tastes»
his own, tempering the bitter with the sweet. The important terms that
describe this moment of mutual inwardness, verbo on the one hand,
temprando and dolce on the other, though on the surface they simply
refer to the reflections of Cacciaguida and Dante on the words just
spoken, have acquired expanded meanings in the linguistic and musical
context of the preceding Cacciaguida cantos. As the Cacciaguida episode
extends into Canto XVIII, these terms prepare for the thematic
developments of the sixth sphere and play an important role in the
transition from Mars to Jupiter.
Generally the commentators take verbo to mean speech, an interior
concept or thought (Thomas Aquinas, Sum. theol. 1.34.1), although
Buti concedes that it can also be understood as «God» («Altramente si
può intendere che quello spirito 'si godea solo' del suo concetto, che è
Iddio...»).1 Not unreasonably the term verbo may be associated with the
second person of the Trinity, Christ, the divine Word. In this connection
the reader may recall Dante's vision of Christ in the cross of Mars,
scarcely had he ascended to the fifth heaven. The description of that
sudden illumination takes up just five lines including a triple rhyme on
Cristo (XIV. 104- 108). These brief verses deal with individual salvation
for all those who take up their cross and follow Christ. Looking ahead
in the narrative instead of backwards, the reader will find another triple
rhyme on Cristo in the sphere of Jupiter (XIX. 104- 108 - the same
location as in the earlier occurrence). In essence the five lines in Canto
XIX concern the salvation of all humanity through faith in Christ:
neither before nor after the crucifixion could anyone be saved without
Christ as mediator («né pria né poi ch'el si chiavasse al legno»,
XIX. 105). These verses point up the mystery of divine justice towards
those whose circumstances of birth kept them ignorant of Christ, a
subject that takes up much of Canto XIX.
Clearly the term verbo, appearing as it does shortly before the
266
pilgrim ascends from Mars to Jupiter, has a pivotal function in the
transition. It directs the reader's attention to Christ the Word, and at the
same time to the word as language. Looking back, we see the
multi-faceted theme of human speech deployed throughout the
Cacciaguida cantos, culminating in a mandate aimed at Dante's own
truthful use of the word (his «parola brusca», «voce», «grido») for the
spiritual nourishment of those who hear him (XVII.124-142).2 Whereas
verbo refers retrospectively to the many aspects of the spoken word
(from the singing of the blessed to Dante's poetry), prospectively the
presence of that particular term in the first verse prepares the way for a
purely visual representation of language as written sign in the
eighteenth canto. In both cases the importance of language for the
salvation of mankind becomes evident.
The musical theme is closely related to the linguistic one. In fact,
poetry may be thought of as a form of music (St. Augustine's treatise,
De musica , deals with the metrics of classical Latin verse as a branch of
music). When the pilgrim «tempers» the knowledge of bitter future
experiences with thoughts of the «sweet», the idea of mitigation is
expressed musically. The terms temprare and dolce bring with them
from the Cacciaguida cantos their precise musical significance. In a
simile that compares the song coming from the cross of Mars to
instrumental music, the two terms appear in close association as they do
in XVIII.3: «E come giga e arpa, in tempra tesa / di molte corde, fa
dolce tintinno ...» (XIV. 1 18-1 19). Each instrument produces
harmonious sounds {dolce tintinno) because of the exact tension and
perfect tuning {tempra) of its many strings.3
Used metaphorically, dolce can describe a state of the human soul.
Cacciaguida introduces his prophecy by explaining its origin in the
divine mind musically (XVII.43-45):
Da indi, sì come viene ad orecchia

dolce armonia da organo, mi viene
a vista il tempo che ti s'apparecchia.
The term organo of the simile refers to vocal polyphony where two or
more voices carry several independent melodies that produce a
harmonious whole.4 It is a fitting image for Dante's future with its
many interweaving strands, whose dolce armonia implies that his will,
though his life be harsh, is certain to be in harmony with the will of
God, the «sweetness» of his life consisting precisely in that harmonious
attunement. When thus concordant with the divine will, the soul can be
an «instrument» in the hand of God, as is the whole complex of souls
267
in Mars. The concord of their will with the divine will takes the form of
silence (XV. 1-9):
Benigna volontade in che si liqua

sempre l'amor che drittamente spira,
come cupidità fa ne la iniqua,
silenzio puose a quella dolce lira,
e fece quietar le sante corde
che la destra del cielo allenta e tira.
Come saranno a' giusti preghi sorde

quelle sustanze che, per darmi voglia
ch'io le pregassi, a tacer fur concorde?
Dante's soul too will be a well-tempered instrument because, as a poet,

he will not be silent. His life is ordained to show forth the kind of
artistry that the martyr's life of Cacciaguida exemplifies. Having
previously spoken of the demands of Dante's calling, Cacciaguida
demonstrates its rewards as he takes leave just before the pilgrim enters
the sphere of Jupiter (XVIII.49-51, emphasis mine):
Indi, tra l'altre luci mota e mista,

mostrommi l'alma che m'avea parlato
qual era tra i cantor del cielo artista.
Jupiter takes on its defining characteristics by virtue of the two

words, tempra and dolce , that appear in the first tercet of Canto XVIII
with their musical subtext, for it is called both «la temprata stella» and
«dolce stella» (68, 115). Not to rule out the established interpretation
based on Convivio II.xiii.25 (the star is temperate in that it is neither
hot nor cold), the musical connotations of «temperament» and
«sweetness» cannot be ignored. Jupiter harbors the souls of the Just, and
justice is defined musically as consonance of the human with the divine
will («cotanto ë giusto quanto a lei [la prima volontà] consuona»
(XIX. 86, 88).5 The underlying concept of such musical metaphors is
that of musica mundana or world harmony, arising from the balanced
turning of the celestial spheres. They are moved by God and embrace the
angelic choirs and redeemed humanity, imparting their influence to the
world below (115-117). In this downward hierarchical movement the
cosmos, like the individual soul moved by God, is a musical
instrument.
The idea of motion as an element of music first presents itself in
the above-quoted tercet of Cacciaguida's farewell (49-51). His soul
moves to its place in the cross of Mars, «mota e mista» among the
268
other blessed souls. The latter term means literally that Cacciaguida
mingles with his companion warriors. Beyond that, however, mistura
(Latin mixtura ) with its variants also defines musical consonance (cf. «il
dolce mischio», Par . XXV.131).6 The more important term in the
context of Jupiter is mota , for it contributes the idea of motion as an
integral component of music and at the same time serves as a signpost
to guide the reader towards the visual aspect of the spectacle to be
presented in Canto XVIII, where moto, once the pilgrim is in the sixth
sphere, almost invariably accompanies canto (the only exception is in
98-99, to be considered below).7
The transition from Mars to Jupiter begins with a brief prelude
even before Cacciaguida departs from the scene. A gradual shift of
emphasis from hearing to sight, from auditive to visual representation
takes place, preparing for the consideration of language as writing rather
than speech. When Cacciaguida presents to the pilgrim his roster of
great warriors, from Judas Maccabeus to Robert Guiscard, he does not
commemorate their heroic deeds. There are eight heroes in addition to
Cacciaguida himself. In rapid succession they are named, they move as
lights along the arms of the cross, they are followed by the pilgrim's
eye. In five tercets references to sight (two forms of vedere ; mirare ,
vista, sguardo, occhi ) occur six times (34-48). Once Cacciaguida rejoins
his companions not another word is spoken in Canto XVIII.
The first tercet of the actual transition confirms the substitution of
visual for auditive forms of language (52-54):
Io mi rivolsi dal mio destro lato

per vedere in Beatrice il mio dovere,
o per parlare o per atto, segnato...
Here speech is opposed to gesture (parlare, atto), and both are «signs»
that communicate. Indeed, Beatrice does not speak but displays to the
pilgrim her greater luminosity and joy (55-57). As is customary in the
Paradiso , increasingly acute vision marks the ascent from a lower to a
higher sphere.
Nevertheless, in the last two tercets of the transition the auditory
sense once again comes into play, not through quoted speech or similes
or a descriptive passage but through the versification itself (64-69):
E qual è '1 trasmutare in picciol varco

di tempo in bianca donna, quando 'l volto
suo si discarchi di vergogna il carco,
tal fu ne li occhi miei, quando fui vòlto,
per lo candor de la temprata stella
269
sesta, che dentro a sé m'avea ricolto.
These lines contain an equivocal rhyme ( volto / vòlto), an etymological

figure ( discarchi / carco), some alliteration on the hard c and g, and
several enjambments (il volto / suo, varco / di tempo, la temprata stella
/ sesta). Most noticeably in the last example a rhythmic irregularity
emerges as the enjambment forces the reader to pause between two
words that ordinarily would flow smoothly one into the other. This is
only the beginning of a series of rhymes that draw attention to
themselves through unusual rhythms. The next two tercets rhyme on lì
era / rivera / schiera (71-75). The central three-syllable word, rivera, sets
the triple syllable-count of the other rhyme-words: lì era cannot be
compressed through elision without destroying the hendecasyllable, but
the stress on era causes lì to lose its normal emphasis (or creates a clash
between two adjacent stresses); in schiera the diphthong wants to break
up (but does it?) to form a third syllable matching rivera and lì era. The
following two tercets introduce the rhyme faciensi / moviensi / taciensi
(77-81). Are these words to be pronounced faciènsi etc. (as in moviensi /
pensi / spensi, Inf. XII.29, 31, 33), or faciensi (as Singleton suggests,
Commentary). ® Perhaps the ambiguity of the meter, the rhythmic
playfulness that seems to be at work in these tercets, is meant to
highlight the rhyme-words - or words (verbo) as such - illustrating
their intrinsic fickleness (but also their malleability in the poet's hand).
The limitations of human language deriving from an imbalance between
expression and understanding, the desire to express and the means to do
so, signum and res, were amply demonstrated in the Cacciaguida episode
(XIV.103-105, 120-126; XV.37-42, 79-84).9 In the sphere of Jupiter,
by way of contrast, the focus is on authentic and unambiguous
expression that is fully comprehensible. It appears visually to the
pilgrim in the form of a text written through the instrumentality of the
souls but coming nonetheless directly from God. The process of
sign-making and image-making, of writing and reading, of the visual
transmission of speech therefore is clearly shown and at the same time
validated in Canto XVIII.
In the second half of the canto the souls of the Just rise up
collectively like a flock of birds to form a sequence of letters, each
replacing the previous one, spelling out words. As the souls shape
themselves into individual letters, song and motion coincide: volitando
cantavano; cantando, a sua nota moviensi (77, 79). Equally conjoined,
once the souls are poised in a decipherable vowel or consonant, are
silence and motionlessness: s arrestavano e taciensi (81). The absence of
song and motion in effect underscores the letters, setting them apart as
270
visual signs. The alternation of song/motion, silence/stasis, repeats
itself (as Dante's poem tells us) thirty-five or five times seven times
(88-89). Thirty-five times the souls move and sing, fall silent and freeze
in the shape of a letter. The letters, though individually meaningless,
form words - nouns and verbs - that together finally compose a
biblical text. The interplay between song and motion, silence and stasis
that the pilgrim watches and the poet minutely depicts can only be
described as an elaborate dance choreographed by God to convey his
unambiguously intelligible message. As in pantomimic dance, motion
culminates in static poses that can be read «one by one like words in a
sentence or glyphs in an inscription».10
By describing a written form of communication Dante deviates
from his definition of language in De vulgāri eloquentia , or rather he
broadens it, for the treatise breaks off in the midst of dealing with lyric
poetry and does not include a discussion of narrative or other prose
forms. According to the treatise, in order to communicate their thought
human beings need a rational and sense-perceptible sign: rationale
signum et sensuale. This sign is sense-perceptible inasmuch as it is
sound: sensuale quid est in quantum sonus est (I.iii.2-3). The dance-like
writing in Jupiter clearly shows that the sense-perceptible element of
language need not be sound but can equally well be a visual image, a
written sign.
The divine writing in Canto XVIII is purely sensualis , consisting
of the component parts of dissected words (the letters) and sentences
(verbs and nouns). It does not become rationalis until, once the
five-word phrase is complete, all the signs have been gathered together
in the pilgrim's mind and memory and only the final letter remains
visible to the eye. This final letter M then transforms itself in an
exuberant display of sound, light and motion into the image of an eagle
figuring collective human justice. The souls, God's instruments, have
written (and afterwards painted) directly in the beholder's intellect as the
scribe does on parchment or paper. The completed written word together
with its meaning exists in the reader's mind as the original concept does
in the writer's. The divine writer and image-maker needs no guide to
convey his thought, unlike the human poet, whose intellect and
memory may be inadequate to the task (7-12, 109-1 1 1).
For help in describing the formation of the divine text the poet
solemnly invokes the Muse, «O diva Pegasea...» (82-87). The
invocation names no individual Muse, nor is the artist identified except
generally as an «intellect» (ingegno). Dante's appeal specifies only that
the Muses give long life and glory to intellects, cities, and kingdoms, a
focus that seems strangely disconnected from the topic at hand, for
271
Dante is not about to undertake a literary epic.11 Instead, the poet asks
the Muse to preside over his effort to represent the divine writing that
literally (letter by letter) took shape before his eyes, consisting of a
sequence of figures that enabled him to form a mental concept. The
process resembles dictation: «notai / le parti sì, come mi parver dette»
(89-90) and comes close to the poetic process described in Purgatorio
XXIV.52-54: «quando / Amor mi spira, noto, e a quel modo / ch'e' ditta
dentro vo significando». In the case of the celestial writing, however,
rather than poetic inspiration Dante is describing the way in which
knowledge of the divine can be instilled in the human mind by means of
visual signs, the raw material for constructing the written text. The text
that Dante the pilgrim reads and the poet reproduces is DI LI G IT E
IUSTITIAM QUI IUDICATIS TERRAMy the incipit of the Old
Testament Book of Wisdom , which claims and was believed to have
been written by Solomon.12
The attributes of wisdom described in Solomon's book (see
especially 7.22-8.8) prepared the way for the trinitarian theology of New
Testament writers. St. John (, John : 1; 3.16-17; 5.20) and St. Paul (Col.
1.15-16, Hebr. 1.3) were inspired by this text when they formulated
their doctrine of the Verbum : Christ is the incarnate Word and the
Wisdom of the triune God. Christian tradition has almost always
identified the Wisdom of this Old Testament text with the divine
Verbum , as the writings of Isidore of Seville, Rabanus Maurus, and St.
Bonaventure attest.13 All three of these exegetes are among the Sapienti
in Dante's sphere of the Sun (X.131; XII. 139, 127-129). By their
presence there they form a direct link between the souls of the Wise in
the Sun and the souls of the Just in Jupiter, for Christ, as they wrote, is
the Wisdom of God and His Word (Rabanus: «Pater enim ipsam
sapientiam dicit ut Verbum eius sit», col. 702A; Isidore: «Liber ...
Sapientiae nominatur, quia in eo Christi adventus, qui est sapientia
Patris, et passio eius evidenter exprimitur», Etym. VI.ii.30). The third
and most important connection between the Wise and the Just is
Solomon, for his soul is in the Sun and his writing in Jupiter.
The Book of Wisdom clearly associates wisdom with justice.
Wisdom teaches all the virtues: temperance, prudence, justice, courage;
wisdom is the source of justice, and justice means the totality of all the
virtues.14 Thus by spelling out the opening verse of the Book of
Wisdom , Dante has fused the three elements of a single constellation:
Wisdom, Justice, the Word. These identify Christ, Who is at the center
of the heaven of Jupiter as mediator in bringing divine justice to
mankind and teaching men to live justly. Furthermore, Scripture is
shown to be an authentic and direct means of communication between
272
God and man.
In fact, whereas in Paradise God can transmit truths directly to the
pilgrim through His elect, in this world Scripture is the more reliable
medium of communication with the living. As a living man the pilgrim
repeatedly experiences difficulty in comprehending the spoken word or
song (language as sonus ), so that the antithesis intendere / non intendere
is a recurrent theme in the early Cacciaguida cantos (XIV. 120, 123, 126;
XV.39-42, 46). Cacciaguida's prophecy on the other hand, seen directly
in the divine mind and pronounced in order to fulfill the pilgrim's desire,
is perfectly intelligible. His «chiare parole» and «preciso latin»
(XVII. 34-35) contrast with the obscure speech {ambage) that ensnared
the «gente folle» of pre-Christian times (XVII. 31). In Jupiter the
auguries of «li stolti» who read visible signs in the sparks of burning
logs are set in similar opposition to the unambiguous signs written and
painted by God (XVIII. 100- 102). But even in Jupiter there are moments
when language as sonus fails to communicate clearly: when the souls
alight on top of the letter M, halting their motion while continuing to
sing, the pilgrim can only approximate their meaning (97-99):
E vidi scendere altre luci dove

era il colmo de l'emme, e lì quetarsi
cantando, credo, il ben ch'a sé le move.
Whether credo expresses a supposition or a firm belief, the «text» of the

souls' song is not self-evident. Only when the eagle speaks in the
following canto (like Cacciaguida delivering the divine message directly
to Dante) will audible speech again come into its own.
But first it is the visible image of the eagle and not his speech that
teaches the pilgrim a fundamental lesson by way of demonstration:
human justice is an effect of the heaven that Jupiter, «la dolce stella»,
adorns, and the heaven's motion and power originate in the divine mind
(115-119). This realization provokes the outburst in the last six tercets
of Canto XVIII against the corrupt clergy and Pope John XXII in
particular.15 With his apostrophe the writer steps out of the framework
of the fiction and into his contemporary reality, demonstrating the
power of his own words and his ability to carry out his responsibility as
a poet.
The apostrophe arises directly from the themes of the canto it
concludes. It balances poetic condemnation with the poetry of praise by
juxtaposing the injustice of corrupt spiritual leaders to the justice of
virtuous secular leaders, the heroes enumerated in the first section of the
canto.16 Among the other heroes, Cacciaguida excelled in the art of
273
living wisely. The apostrophe functions mainly by way of contrast. The
profanation of the metaphoric temple of the Church may be opposed to
Judas Maccabeus's restoration and purification of the temple at
Jerusalem, whose sanctity he defended (I Afacc.iii.4.36-51). The divine
miracles and the sufferings of the martyrs («segni e martiri», 122-123),
the building blocks of the Church that is being defiled, exemplify the
ultimate divine sign-language and the highest human justice. The pope
writes only to cancel out, nullifying his message, in contrast to the
celestial writing just witnessed where letters cancel each other out to
produce a text. The «birds» that spell out the text are well fed (74),
whereas the pope, instead of feeding his flock, takes their bread away
(128-129). By depriving the Christian people of their spiritual bread the
pope wages an unjust war, the antithesis of that fought by Cacciaguida
and the other warriors for the faith (127).
Finally the dance returns in the leaps of Herodias's daughter. Her
salti (135), instrumental in the Baptist's martyrdom, have always
exemplified unholy behavior. For some writers her shameless twistings
stand in opposition to David's dance before the ark, a mystical symbol
of movement that pleases God.17 In De finibus , a work known to
Dante,18 Cicero defines wisdom through his spokesman Cato of Utica
as the art of living wisely, an act that engenders virtue and moral
integrity. Just so in the Book of Wisdom the virtues, especially justice,
are «the fruit of her [Wisdom's] labors» (8.7). Cicero aligns wisdom
with dancing, expressing intellectually a comparison that Dante
develops visually through the imagery and action of his poem. Thus
Dante's Sapienti rotate and sing in their circles (X. 139- 148; XII. 1-6,
19-27; XIII. 10-28), and the souls of the Just sing and dance their
pantomime. Cicero considered dancing (, saltado ) and acting collectively
to be those among all the arts that most resemble the art of living
wisely, an art comprised of «rightly performed actions»,1 ^ or those
actions that in the context of Jupiter can be called just. The mere
mention of salti and the Baptist's martyrdom in Dante's apostrophe
suffices to bring together the main themes and images of the canto
through the allusi veness of harsh irony.
NOTES
4 quote Guido Biagi, La Divina Commedia nella figurazione artistica e nel

secolare commento , voi. 3, Paradiso (Torino: U.T.E.T., 1939), ad loc. The
Comedy is cited from the critical edition of Giorgio Petrocchi, La
Commedia secondo l'antica vulgata (Milano: Mondadori, 1966-67).
^For two among many discussions of the subject, see Dino S. Cervigni, «I
274
canti di Cacciaguida: significato della storia e poetica della lingua», in
Dante Alighieri 1985: In Memoriam Hermann Gmelin , eds. Richard Baum
and Willi Hirdt (Tübingen: Stauffenburg- Verlag, 1985), pp.129-140; Claire
Honess, «Expressing the Inexpressible: The Theme of Communication in
the Heaven of Mars», Lectura Dantis , 14-15 (1994): 42-60.
3 See my «Concentus musicus : the Creaking Hinges of Dante's Gate of
Purgatory», Rivista di Studi Italiani , 2 (1984): 1-15 (esp. p. 4) on the
concept of «sweetness» in music.
throughout the Middle Ages the plural organi or Latin organa refers to the
musical instrument, the organ, whereas the singular organo or Latin
organum means vocal polyphony. See Rafaello Monterossi, «Organo»,
Enciclopedia dantesca (Rome: Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana,
1970-1978).
^Dante's definition is the established one and coincides with that in the
«Jerusalem Bible». See La Sainte Bible traduite en français sous la direction
de l'École Biblique de Jérusalem (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1955), p.870
(note a] to the first verse of the Book of Wisdom): «Par 'justice' il faut
entendre le plein accord de la pensée et de l'action avec la volonté divine».
"«Consonanti a est acuti soni gr av isque mixtura, suaviter uniformiterque
auribus accidens»: Boethius, De musica libri quinqué , I.ix {PL
63.1167-1300: see col.1176).
^ln St. Augustine's definition of music, Musica est scientia bene modulandi
(«Music is the science of mensurating well»), mensuration {modulatio)
means movement or «a certain skill in moving ... For we can't say that
anything moves well unless it keeps its measure» {De mus. 1.2).
Mensuration is proper to music when considered as song and dance (Book
I), and to music as the rhythm and meter of poetry (Book Uff.). For the
above translation see Saint Augustine, On Music , R.C. Taliaferro, tr., in
Writings of Saint Augustine (New York: Cima, 1947), vol.2, 151-379.
"Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy , translated, with a commentary, by
Charles S. Singleton, vol. Ill: Paradiso , parts 1 & 2 (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1975); second printing, with corrections,
1977. Does Singleton's placement of the stress lead to the remote
possibility of a rima sdrucciola (fa-cì-en-si )?
^See Cervigni, cit., p. 136; Teodolinda Barolini, The Undivine Comedy:
Detheologizing Dante (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992),
pp. 218-220. Barolini writes of the «eccentricity of language», p. 208.
^ J ame s Miller, Measures of Wisdom: The Cosmic Dance in Classical and
Christian Antiquity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), p. 228
(in reference to Plotinus, Enneads 4.4.33).
When considered collectively the Muses may be imagined as dancing
around the fountain of Helicon, created by Pegasus's kick (cf. Miller, cit.,
28-31); or telling the story of their victory over the Piérides to Minerva
(Ovid, Metam. V, 250ff). In this case associations with the themes of
Canto XVIII do exist: dancing (the Muses); wisdom, warfare (Minerva);
speech (the Piérides). The ingegni could be rulers as well as poets, and
275
cities and kingdoms may be associated with just government.
lÔn the canonicity of the Liber Sapientiae and its influence on early
Christian thought see «Sagesse», Dictionnaire de théologie catholique
(Paris: Letouzey, 1939), vol. 14, pt. 1; and the «Bible de Jérusalem »,
introduction, pp. 868-869. The early ecclesiastical writers generally
affirmed its canonicity although Origen and St. Jerome expressed some
doubts, and the book continued to keep its place in the canon of Sacred
Scripture throughout the Middle Ages.
Îsidore of Seville, Etymologiarum sive originum libri XX , ed. W.M.
Lindsay (Oxford: Clarendon, 1911), VI.ii.30; Rabanus Maurus, Comm. in
lib. Sap. libri III , in PL CDC. 67 1-762; St. Bonaventure, Expos, in lib.
Sap., in Opera (Quaracchi, 1893), vol. 6.
™ «Bible de Jérusalem », Sagesse 8.7 and note e, p. 877.
l^The tu (130) of the apostrophe, as most commentators agree, is John
XXII, 1316-1334, pope at the time when Dante was writing and not at the
fictitious date of the Comedy .
l"The heroes of epic poetry, according to Isidore of Seville ( Ety m .
I.xxxix.9), are worthy of heaven because of their wisdom and fortitude.
1 'Gregory of Naziansus, Oratio 5.35, cited in Miller, cit.„ p. 389. Dancing
itself was not universally condemned, although some of the early Church
Fathers held the art in great contempt (for example Origen and St. John
Chrysostom): see Miller, p. 403, 412.
^Thomas Bergin, Dante (Ñ.Y.: Orion Press, 1965), p. 62.
19 De finibus 111.23-24, cited and discussed by Miller, cit., pp. 163-164.
276
Paradiso XIX
Author(s): ZYGMUNT G. BARAŃSKI
Accessed: 17-02-2020 23:09 UTC
Lectura Dantis
ZYGMUNT G. BARAŃSKI
University of Reading
XIX
As befits the grave importance of its subject-matter, human
salvation, Dante adorns Paradiso XIX - the central canto of three
dealing with the fundamental issue of the interrelationship between
divine justice and the processes of redemption, and hence of the nature of
the contacts beween God and His creatures - with a lengthy and
sophisticated proœmium which stretches as far as the pilgrim's plea for
«food» to satisfy his «hunger» (22-33). 1 All this introductory part of
the canto, which reaches an obvious dramatic climax in the «gran
digiuno / che lungamente m'ha tenuto in fame» (25-26), serves not just
to contextualize narratively, but also to provide an ideological backcloth
to the eagle's momentous and varied pronouncements on the links
between God and humanity (40-148). Thus, lines 1-33 are dominated by
a striking array of technical terminology and culturally significant
references, all of which are connected to the matter of salvation and are
picked up elsewhere during the course of Paradiso XIX.2 These allusions
range from the Bible to the Aeneid , from poetics (7-9) to exegesis (30),
from mysticism (2-3, 19-27) to natural science (4-6), from grammar
(11-12) to historiography (16-18), and from psychology (9) to the
lapidaries (4). For instance, simply in the first terzina («Parea dinanzi a
me con l'ali aperte / la bella image che nel dolce frui / liete facevan
l'anime conserte») we find three semantically loaded locutions: image ?
dolce ,4 and/ru/.5 Furthermore, to emphasize their gravity, and as a
pointer to the canto's overall dependence on the vocabulary and ideas of
the dominant discourses of its day, the three terms are packed into a
single line and are preceded by an overt echo from the famous canticum
which Moses intoned at the end of his life: the eagle «con l'ali aperte»
is modelled on the «aquila» which «expandit alas suas» (Deut. XXXII
H).
Paradiso XIX thus communicates in a complex manner. It deals, on
three separate but interrelated levels, with the main repercussions of the
human encounter with the divine which lies at the basis of redemption.
First, within the narrative of the Commedia , the pilgrim's encounter
with the eagle constitutes an especially significant moment of his
personal path to God. Second, this same encounter presents a symbolic
277
and thereby universalizing enactment of the drama of salvation: it both
embodies the human mind, while alive, striving to catch a fleeting
glimpse of «la mente / di che tutte le cose son ripiene» (53-54), and
prefigures the inevitable face-to-face meeting, after death, between every
human being and the Supreme Judge, the outcome of which will depend
on how well the creature has been able and ready to appreciate what it
saw of its Maker. Third, by means of the «polysemous» force of his
poetic «letter»,6 Dante investigates the ideological implications of the
celestial action he describes by making reference to the intricate
historical, cultural, and epistemological ramifications of trying to «see»
the «invisible» (52-63). For instance, by alluding to the aquila of
Deuteronomy, the first of many Scriptural citations in the canto, Dante
hints at the primacy of the Bible in yielding a sense of the divinity,
thereby confirming the eagle's claim that «certo a colui che meco
s'assottiglia, / se la Scrittura sovra voi non fosse, / da dubitar sarebbe a
maraviglia» (82-84). Despite the limitations of our earthly state, the
means to acquiring the knowledge necessary to save our souls are made
available to us thanks to the intercessions of a just and loving God.
Indeed, it was unanimously acknowledged in the Middle Ages that the
vox Dei reached people not just through the Bible, but by means of a
variety of different channels, whose communicative efficacy differed
depending on their relative proximity to the divine, though all of them
were united, via the archetype of the Verbum , to «linguistic» forms of
textuality and hence to exegesis.
Knowledge and salvation, as Paradiso XIX underlines, are thus
inseparable. And probably the principal reason why Dante introduced the
question of the salvation of pagans at this juncture of the Commedia
was to underscore this fact. The whole focus of his presentation is on
the Indian's lack of knowledge: «quivi non è chi ragioni / di Cristo né
chi legga né chi scriva» (71-72). At the same time, precisely because he
lacks enlightenment through Christ, the «man born on the banks of the
Indus» (70-71) does not believe, and, as a result, cannot reach Heaven:
«A questo regno / non salì mai chi non credette 'n Cristo» (103-4); and
the eagle's repetition of the key terms ( Cristo-credere-non ) in both the
exemplum and the general premise renders self-evident the logical links
between its two statements. IgnorantiaJ whether voluntary or
involuntary, was another quaestio which taxed medieval reflection on
salus , and hence must needs find space in our canto.
As the prologue to Dante's most sustained and wide-ranging
analysis of redemption, Paradiso XIX 1-33 is necessarily made to bear a
heavy load (hence the multilayered intricacy of its composition). Dante's
poetry, in these lines, as I have already mentioned, is technical and
278
allusive; however in no way do its technicality and allusiveness lapse
into obscurity, or even the kind of erudition which is the special
preserve of those who sail in the «piccioletta barca» (Par. II 1). For
instance, Moses's «song» and the connotations associated with the
concepts of «imagery», «sweetness», and «delight» all enjoyed an
extremely wide diffusion during the course of the Middle Ages. It was a
schoolroom notion that «omnibus quoque metris [heroic metre] prior
est. Hune primům Moyses in cantico Deuteronomii longe ante
Pherecyden et Homerum cecinisse probatur».8 Similarly, «image» was a
basic notion of «symbolic» thought; «dolce» was to be found
everywhere: in the language of the mystics, the poets, and the
commentators; while «frui» was a standard technical term to describe
paradisiacal beatitude.9
Dante's strategy is quite clear. The matters dealt with in Paradiso
XIX 's prologue, and which are repeated and further exemplified during
the whole course of the canto, are too important and close to the very
essence of human earthly existence to be concealed beneath the
enigmatic forms of the trobar clus or the refined disquisitions of the
doctores. Indeed, a striking tension exists between what, unfashionably,
may be called the canto's form and its content. Regardless of the artistic
sophistication and originality of Paradiso XIX's opening (it is enough
to note its typically Dantean lexical plurilingualism or its rich mix of
tropes and similes), and beyond the unique narrative situation described
therein (7-9), its proemial tercets are basically constructed out of a series
of clichés. Cliché, in fact, is only a partially satisfactory term here,
since it does not accurately describe the full cultural significance of
Dante's choices. In the Middle Ages, phrases, quotations, terms, images
became commonplaces, and thereby «authoritative», because they were
deemed to be especially revelatory, and thus highly successful at
communicating important truths (and it is no surprise that the Bible
should have provided the greatest storehouse of auctoritates ).10 As a
result, topoi were valuable not just because they were immediately and
widely accessible, but also because they were a highly effective route to
knowledge. From this perspective, their use by Dante in Paradiso XIX
is unexceptionable. In imitation of the vox Dei , by means of which God
makes His will known to the whole world, the poet, by drawing on
commonplaces (many of which have the Divinity as their ultimate
auctor ), declares as unambiguously as possible that the implications of
salvation affect us all, while concurrently offering us the means with
which to reflect upon our immortality. Each of us, inexorably, will
come face to face with «il giudicio etterno» (99), and so salvation is a
question upon which we should constantly be meditating. Dante
279
describes this concern via the highly popular commonplace which
coupled together food and knowledge (25-27, 33). When the poet
stresses the intensity of his salvific deliberations, he is making an
important point whose positive inference Dantists have generally failed
to grasp.11 They tend not to appreciate that the eagle does not condemn
the pilgrim for posing the question of the fate of the good Indian
(70-75), namely, for thinking about salvation. It condemns him,
instead, quoting his own words back at him, for casting doubts on the
fairness of divine justice, which is a different matter all together: the
Indian (76-81), according to the viator's sinful musings,
muore non battezzato e sanza fede:
ov' è questa giustizia che '1 condanna?

ov' è la colpa sua, se ei non crede?
Or tu chi se', che vuo' sedere a scranna,
per giudicar di lungi mille miglia
con la veduta corta d'una spanna?
Scholars, like the pilgrim, have become mesmerized, and for

perfectly understandable reasons, by the bewildering and moving
question of the otherworldly destiny of the unbaptized.12 Yet, as is
obvious from the eagle's speeches, this is simply one of the issues
relating to salvation, and not even among the most pressing.13 It is
crucial to remember that «la benedetta imagine» (95) places its answer
to this specific «dubbio» (33) inside a wide-ranging cornice. Before
answering the pilgrim's question (70-81), the eagle deals (40-69) with
the relationship between the Prime Mover and creation, with the limits
of creaturely understanding and hence the essential «unknowability» of
God and his justice, and with the divine sources of human knowledge.
Then (82-90), having addressed the dubbio , it moves on to the authority
of Scripture, to human presumption, and to the perfection of heavenly
justice. Finally (97-99, 103-48), it closes its lesson with allusions to
the mystery of «il giudicio etterno» (99), to the impossibility of
redemption without faith in Christ, to the Last Judgment, and to earthly
virtue and sinfulness. In fact, the eagle touches on all the basic topics
relating to salus ; and these constitute Paradiso XIX's fundamental
purview. The fate of pagans, on which so much critical ink has been
spilled, is, at best, an exemplum of a particular type of ignorando or of
the need always to keep to the forefront of our attention the question of
our salvation; at worst, it represents the kind of intellectual obsession
which leads us away from the «diritta via» into the «selva oscura» (Inf. I
3, 2) of error and of questionable «doctrines».14 To achieve Paradise
280
means to follow those forms of knowledge (82-84) which most closely
echo the Verbum , and which thus can provide the insights necessary to
facilitate salvation.
Given that Paradiso XIX totally revolves around the connections
between salvation, textuality, exegesis, and knowledge (the key
ideological system of the Christian Middle Ages), it is a complex,
demanding, and difficult canto. «Difficulty», in fact, could be proposed
as its defining hallmark: the difficulty of writing the poem, the
difficulty of understanding God, the difficulty of comprehending the fate
of the good pagan, the difficulty of interpreting the eagle's sibylline
prophecy regarding the situation of the «Etiope» (109) and the «Perse»
(112) at and after the Last Judgment, and, finally, the difficulty which
human beings find in living well. Something of the difficulty of
Paradiso XIX does begin to unravel, however, when one considers the
ways in which Dante presents and explores specific instances of the
broad problematic of salvation in the single threads which intertwine to
fashion the finely woven tapestry of the canto. Paradiso XIX' s raison
d'être is entirely in the interplay between, on the one hand, the great
general divine doctrines it preaches and the large epistemological
questions it raises, and, on the other, the details of its particular Dantean
poetic invention. Fittingly, the topos , which in its concise (formal)
uniqueness connotes a large set of ideas, stands as an appropriate
determining figure for the canto.
There is no greater cliché in Paradiso XIX than the eagle which
dominates its proœmium. Equally, none of the canto's other
commonplaces are submitted to such a thoroughgoing re-presentation as
the «bella image» (2). Eagles could be found flying in every corner of
medieval culture.1^ It was the divine bird par excellence , identified with
Rome, John the Evangelist, poetry, and a host of other key figures and
institutions; its characteristics too - such as the acuity of its vision
and its soaring flight - were equally impressive. In Paradiso XIX,
when Dante fashioned his eagle, he repeated and drew on these standard
associations and qualities. His «aguglia», for instance, is «benedetta»
(95), it is the «segno / che fé i Romani al mondo reverendi» (101-2),
and, as it instructs the pilgrim, it insists on the advantages of seeing
clearly (52-63). It is specifically modelled on Scriptural eagles - not
just Moses's, in fact, but also the apocalyptic bird espied by St. John,
the Biblical author with whom it was most intimately allied. Yet,
despite his debts to Deuteronomy, Dante is careful to give his own
imprint to the eagle with «outstretched wings» (1). If, in the canto's
opening line, he is faithful to his source, subsequently, he transforms
the Old Testament eagle into a stork, fuses the original simile's vehicle
281
and tenor into a single new image, and transfers the eye of the eagle to
the viator. The differences and similarities between the two passages are
obvious and suggestive: «Sicut aquila provocans ad volandum pullos
suos, et super eos volitans, / expandit alas suas ...» (Deut. XXXII
10-11); compare (91-96):
Quale sovresso il nido si rigira

poi c'ha pasciuti la cicogna i figli,
e come quel eh' è pasto la rimira;
cotal si fece, e sì levai i cigli,
la benedetta imagine, che l'ali
movea sospinte da tanti consigli.
We have here, in a nutshell, evidence of Dante's ambition to rework the

commonplaces of his culture, so as to give them new life and thus make
them effective for his world.16 And his skilled inventio becomes even
more apparent when we consider the relationship between Dante's bird
and St. John's. It is a critical commonplace to point out that «io vidi e
anche udi' parlar lo rostro» (10) echoes «vidi, et audivi vocem unius
aquilae volantis per medium caeli dicentis voce magna» (Apoc. VIII 13).
By drawing on the Evangelist, Dante is careful to reassure his readers
that his fabulous talking bird is indeed a divine mirabile and not a poetic
fiction, and that, therefore, his account of the eagle's discussion of
salvation is trustworthy. But what of its equally fantastic composite
nature? To what extent can this be said to be «authoritative»? If we turn
to the Glossa ordinaria , the best-known of all the commentaries to the
Bible, we read the following gloss to Revelations VIII 13: «Aquila
omnes praedicatores, qui mente longinqua conspiciunt, et Ecclesiam
circumeuntes, praedicendo futura, muniunt: hie omnes unus, quia ad
idem tendunt».17 The more potentially unbelievable his account (7-9),
so Dante takes greater care to «fortify» it with well-known Scriptural
details which would attest to its truthfulness. By recognizing the origins
of his verse we can also appreciate his originality. No other textual
eagle speaks at such length and on such weighty matters as Dante's; no
other eagle is the product of such a magnificent metamorphosis as that
described in Paradiso XVIII; and no other eagle embraces the souls of
such great men as those evoked in Paradiso XX. A notable aspect of
Dante's genius and modus operandi is apparent here: he allows us to see
with new eyes what we already know. In a move of considerable
ingenuity, the poet manages to remind us of the primary and lasting
importance of the vox Dei while displaying his own artistic prowess.
This is a fundamental point, especially in the light of Paradiso
XIX' s preoccupation with salvation. Dante makes it very clear that
282
«authoritativeness» does not lie with him, but that it resides firmly in
God. As His «scribe», he simply gives form, thereby underlining their
communality of purpose and origin, on the one hand, to what the
Divinity has proffered to him individually and, on the other hand, to
those things which belong to humanity in general - hence that
synthesis, which characterizes this canto, of personal memories of the
afterlife and Biblical auctoritates. However, in itself, the «letter» of
Scripture was commonly deemed only to present a very limited picture
of God's will. It was through interpretation, through the exegetical
efforts to understand its other «senses», that better insights were
achieved.18 This, in fact, is one of Paradiso XIX 's main points.
The reference to the Glossa ordinaria which lurks behind Dante's
eagle recalls the fact that, beneath the words of the Bible, lie other, more
important truths which need to be excavated. The same emphasis on the
value of exegesis is present in Paradiso XIX's other Scriptural
intertexts. Time and again, it is the commentary tradition on an
auctoritas rather than the auctoritas itself which elucidates the reasons
for Dante's choice of a particular Biblical quotation. By granting a
position of privilege to the hermeneutic insights of the exegetes, the
poet, in line with a practice that went back to St. Paul, affirmed that it
is the «spirit» and not the «letter» of Scripture which «saves». 19 Thus,
a major reason why Dante chose to open Paradiso XIX with an allusion
to Deuteronomy was because of the Book's conventional links with
divine justice.20 The exegetical tradition to Moses's eagle also provides
a range of more specific elements which bear upon Paradiso XIX. The
bird, «secundum mysticum sensum», signifies Christ the Saviour and
his resurrection, as well as the Christ who chooses between the saved
and the damned (cp. Par. XIX 91-1 II).21 In addition, it is the
commentators on the aquila who, in part, suggest the comparison
between the souls and the «rubinetto» (4), the choice of the word
«rostro» (10) to refer to the eagle, and the equation between the sea and
sight.22 The function of the commentaria is so crucial in Paradiso XIX
that the very form into which Dante translates certain lines of Scripture
cannot properly be appreciated unless we assume the mediation of the
gloss. For instance, scholars assert that «le genti lì malvage /
commendan lei, ma non seguon la storia» (17-18) calques «Populus hic
labiis me honorât: cor autem eorum longe est a me» (Mt. XV 8); yet,
this claim only becomes probative if we add that commendare belongs
to the exegesis on the line: «Vel exteriorem munditiam commendando,
interior et quae vera est, in eis non est».23
The emphasis on interpretation, which is the activity to which the
eagle obviously refers when it states that the Indian does not have «chi
283
ragioni / di Cristo né chi legga né chi scriva» (71-72), powerfully turns
the attention to the problem of how we know, and, specifically, of how
we can know God. In order to underscore the special character of our
earthly comprehension, Dante alludes to the divergence between a
properly spiritualized form of knowledge, our reward if we are saved, but
hints of which we can enjoy on earth by turning our attention to those
things which lead to God, and the type of knowledge which is
besmirched by the flesh. He does this «poetically» by mixing his
metaphors to present the character's intellectual perplexity regarding the
salvation of pagans. Dante evokes the «suon» (21), which is
transformed into song (39, 97-98), and which emerges from the
sweet-smelling «perpetüi fiori / de l'etterna letizia» (22-24), whose
scent/sound - «solvetemi, spirando, il gran digiuno» (25) - can
satisfy his «fame» (26) «in terra» (27). In his choice of imagery, the
poet skilfully recalls one of the principal contemporary tropes by means
of which distinctions in understanding were presented. For instance, in
his commentary to Song of Songs II 12-13 («Flores apparuerunt in terra
nostra. / Tempus putationis advenit; / Vox turturis audita est in terra
nostra; / Ficus protulit grossos suos; / Vinae florentes dederunt odorem
suum. / Surge, amica mea, speciosa mea, et veni»), Hugh of St. Victor
assessed the relative cognitive value of each of the senses, while
describing the condition of the Bride slowly approaching her celestial
goal.24 Like Hugh, Dante similarly relegates earthbound knowledge, via
the metaphor of food, to the sphere of the «physical» senses, while
contrasting this to the pure knowledge of «odori» (24) and sounds; he in
fact underlines how, paradoxically, terrestial food often cannot even
assuage hunger: «non trovandoli in terra cibo alcuno» (27).
Dante develops his analysis of earthly and heavenly knowledge by
openly distinguishing between the viator's and the souls' types of
cognition. At the same time, like the Bride, and in keeping with his
human state, the pilgrim, thanks to his encounter with the eagle, is
given, de lonh , a sense of the «eternal joys» enjoyed by the inhabitants
of Paradise. The blessed communicate directly with their Maker: «Ben
so io che, se 'n cielo altro reame / la divina giustizia fa suo specchio, /
che '1 vostro non l'apprende con velame» (28-30). On the other hand,
the pilgrim, trapped within his bodily prison can solely espy the things
of God through a «veil»; the living are only able to perceive divine
justice indirectly as a «memoria» (16) or a «segno» (101), which, as
occurs in the sacra rappresentazione of the canto, is filtered to them
through a divine «image» (2). Furthermore, precisely because such a
signum only offers an indirect expression of the thing in whose stead it
stands, it needs to be interpreted if information about the original is to
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be gleaned. Equally, as Hugh notes, it is our responsibility to seek out
those signs which most clearly reveal the invisibilia . The crux of
salvation is basically all here - in our struggle, to use Paul's famous
image, to see «per speculum in aenigmate» (I Cor. XIII 12); or,
changing the metaphor to another which also enjoyed wide currency in
the Middle Ages, the dialectic of redemption may be found in the
complex and inescapably problematic efforts of God and humankind
trying to «speak» to each other in this life. And since this life is no
more than a preparation for the next, it becomes imperative that the
«giustizia sempiterna» (58) effectively communicate Its will to
humanity (16-17, 40-45, 82-84), and that, despite the distance separating
them (40-45, 49-63, 97-99), humanity hear and understand God's voice
(16-18, 82-84, 103-5), since He is the only source of truth and beatitude
(25-30, 64-69). At the same time, given the immeasurable gulf, so
graphically evoked by Dante's maritime simile (58-63), between the
Creator and His creatures, this intercourse is anything but
straightforward. As the eagle observes: God «non poté suo valor sì fare
impresso / in tutto l'universo, che '1 suo verbo / non rimanesse in
infinito eccesso» (43-45).
Signs, therefore, are our means to salvation;25 and the most
important source of signa is God. At the same time, the indirect manner
in which we acquire information about God is not unique; all our
knowledge, because of the barrier erected by our body, is gained in a
similar manner. Dante succinctly presents our predicament and its
solution in the De vulgāri eloquentia (I iii 1-3). The poet fills Paradiso
XIX with references, or rather clichés, which enshrine our dependence on
semiosis. The canto is almost a dictionary of terminology belonging to
the medieval reflection on signs: «image» (2, 21), «voce» (8, 11),
«concetto» (12), «memoria» (16), «suon» (21), «specchio» (29),
«velame» (30), «voglia mostrando» (36), «segno» (37, 101),
«impresso» (43), «verbo» (44), «creatura» (47), «imagine» (95), segnare
(128, 129), «scrittura» (134), «lettere» (134). It also indicates some of
the best-known signs which human beings have fashioned: language and
grammar (8, 11-12), writing and letters (8, 116, 134-35), numerals
(128-29), money (119, 141), and boundaries (123). God is most
frequently presented in the standard guise of the Deus artifex («Colui che
volse il sesto / a lo stremo del mondo», 40-41), the auctor of three
«books», of three collections of signa: «l'universo» (44), «la Scrittura»
(83), and «quel volume aperto / nel quai si scrivon tutti suoi [of the
«regi»] dispregi» (113-14). These are texts which need to be read both
allegorically and literally («dentro ad esso [the world] / [God] distinse
tanto occulto e manifesto», 41-42), since the Creator leaves vestigia of
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Himself in His works: «la mente / di che tutte le cose son ripiene»
(53-54).
In addition, Dante conventionally recalls that divine history, too, is
a kind of «book».26 We need to interpret the occurrences that constitute
it, since these embody evidence of God's will. Salvation history is thus
a series of symbolic vignettes, as the poet underlines by mentioning its
most famous and densely symbolic moment, the crucifixion: «né pria né
poi ch'el [Cristo] si chiavasse al legno» (105); and these great events are
commemorated through time in two ways: in the sacraments (76) and in
books, namely, in yet new systems of signs. The two references to the
history of justice help to define more precisely this textual character of
time. Dante remembers the providentiality of Roman power: the «segno
/ che fé i Romani al mondo reverendi» (101-2), as well as all the
instances when justice appeared on earth: «in terra lasciai la mia
memoria / sì fatta, che le genti lì malvage / commendan lei, ma non
seguon la storia» (16-18). Inevitably, by hinting at these matters, the
poet raises the question of how we know about them. The phrase «ma
non seguon la storia» does not primarily mean «trascurano di imitarne
l'esempio tramandato»27 - as commentators normally claim - but,
quite literally, means «they do not follow history», as is clear if we
integrate these lines with the standard medieval definition, «historia est
narratio rei gestae, per quam ea, quae in praeterito facta sunt,
dinoscuntur» (Isidore, Etym. I xli 1-2). Human beings sin, because they
do not read and interpret their history books properly. In keeping with
the densely allusive character of this canto, Dante, in lines 16-18,
manages to talk about the exemplary role of divine justice in history,
the sources of historical knowledge, and the semiotic and ethical
character of history - its responsibility to teach utilia (Isidore, Etym. I
xliii 1). The central position accorded to history in Paradiso XIX serves
as a reminder that salvation can only be achieved in time; it also
confirms the strict relevance to the canto, which critics have not
infrequently questioned, of the catalogue of contemporary corruption
which acts as its coda. The «kings», the traditional subjects of history
(Isidore, Etym. I xliii), who are among those most responsible for
overseeing the proper development of human affairs according to the
dictates of God, are in fact those who most obviously fail «to follow
history». They neither reflect on the divine signa nor offer themselves as
good signs from which others can learn.
Given the importance of history for salvation, great responsibility
weighs upon the shoulders of historical authors. During the course of
Paradiso XIX, Dante deepens his historiographical analysis by
introducing further hints to the basic discussions de historia. By
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mentioning the creation of the world and the fall of Lucifer (40-48), he
recalls the historical «authority» of Scriptural ductores , since
«Historiam autem apud nos primus Moyses de initio mundi conscripsit»
(Isidore, Etym. I xlii 1). Nevertheless, to claim, in the Middle Ages,
that the Biblical littera recounts providential history was extremely
ordinary fare. What is much more interesting is Dante's suggestion that
Roman history, too, was sacred (101-2); and hence that pagan
historians, rather than simply the chroniclers of ethically useful events
(Isidore, Etym. I xliii), could also be «divine» authors. As far as Dante
was concerned, among non-Christian writers, this holy status was to be
accorded primarily to Virgil and his «divina fiamma» ( Purg . XXI 95),
the Aeneid which records Rome's God-given origins. It is thus
extremely appropriate that, along with its many Scriptural debts,28
Paradiso XIX should also be dependent on Virgil's great epic. In fact,
just about all its borrowings from the Aeneid are taken from a highly
significant section of Book VI, whose concerns fit in precisely with the
subject-matter of this canto. Lines 724-85329 present Virgil's view of
the life-principle of the Universe and its relationship to the Romans
whose responsibility it will be to establish the glory of their city. On
the one hand, Virgil's belief in the Platonic anima mundi (724-51)
reminds us, in keeping with one of the canto's main preoccupations,
why he cannot be saved; at the same time, however, there are suggestive
links between his «Spiritus intus alit totamque infusa per artus / Mens
agitat molem et magno se corpore miscet» (726-27) and Dante's «la
mente / di che tutte le cose son ripiene» (53-54), showing how
tragically close he had come to believing in the one true God, and
explaining in part why the pilgrim should have been so troubled by the
otherworldly state of virtuous unbelievers. On the other hand, the parade
of Roman heroes (756-846) and the epigrammatic proclamation of
Rome's special duties (847-53) underscores his authoritativeness as the
scriba of providential Roman history. Virgil, too, like the memorable
encounter with Statius had illustrated, saves; or rather his signa have an
illuminating role to play in the mystery of redemption.30
Cacciaguida had recently and starkly recalled {Par. XVII 124-42)
that his great-great-grandson has been chosen by God to play a direct
role in the scheme of salvation. Thus, if Dante were to fail to explain to
the «mondo che mal vive» {Purg. XXXII 103) the demands of the divine
purpose, this would mean that he had failed as a poet, and hence failed
the salvific plans of Providence. Paradiso XIX does not just describe an
actual crisis, the pilgrim's chastening by the eagle for his intellectual
praesumptio which stems directly from his rational limitations, but also
raises the spectre of another, potential crisis, one whose origins also lie
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in the feebleness of the human mind (7-9). However, the fact that this
latter crisis, unlike the former, remains in potentiam - the poet
overcomes the difficulty of his ineffable topic (7-12) by fashioning a
language fit for Paradise and writes the poem we are reading -
highlights the extent to which the auctor is the beneficiary of the divine
lessons learnt and retained by the viator. One of the effects of the poet
finding an orthodox way out of the impasse of «talking» about the
«unspeakable» («Nel ciel che più de la sua luce prende / fu' io, e vidi
cose che ridire / né sa né può chi di là sù discende», Par . I 4-6), is, of
course, to confirm his status as God's messenger. Thus, the flow of
Dante's life as presented in the Commedia offers a telling example of
how, by listening to God's word, we can be sure to fulfil our divinely
ordained obligations. In addition, by creatively absorbing into his own
verse the works of his illustrious divinely inspired predecessors, Dante
shows himself to be their worthy successor, and further guarantees the
authenticity and authoritativeness of his particular account of
providential history.
Dante displays his divine credentials in the fabric of his verse. He
ensures that he successfully completes his universal mission of reform,
which involves him in making his eschatological experiences accessible
to an earthly audience, by having recourse to the communal
«authoritative» memory of his culture. At the same time, he revives
what is old and worn by cloaking it in the resplendent new mantle of his
Commedia. Clichés contain fundamental nuggets of truth. However, as
is clear from the reference to «le genti lì malvage» (17) and the
catalogue of obsessive contemporary wrongdoing with which the canto
closes (115-48), familiarity seems to have blunted the force of their
wisdom. It is therefore the responsibility of a poetic language modelled
on the artistic practices of the Deus artifex (40-45) to give them back
their original sharpness; and it thus also becomes clear why, in order to
revitalize the known, God should have chosen a poet to act as His
messenger. Similarly, from this perspective, the apparent tension, in
terms of the rhetorical rules of convenientia , between Paradiso XIX 's
novel style and its recourse to commonplaces is resolved. Providential
history - as the examples of Francis and Dominic in Paradiso XI and
XII demonstrate - involves a continual variano on certain basic
celestial decrees which humankind cannot ignore if it wishes to be
saved. Thus, when the Commedia creatively reworks topoi , it once
again reveals both its links with the heavenly auctor , and its
effectiveness, thanks to the skills of its se riba , at offering an
eye-catching «imprint» (43) of God's will. In the same vein, the poet
also employs other formal features in Paradiso XIX which recall the
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Deus artifex and His artistry. In order to suggest the miraculous
visual-verbal character of divine art, God's «visibile parlare» ( Purg . X
95), Dante introduces an acrostic based on the word lue into his
catalogue of sinful princes (115-39)31 and, in general, relies on
anaphora to give his verse a recognizable visual patterning (1-16, 31-33,
77-78, 142-43). Ultimately, however, it is the canto's heavy dependence
on metaphor and simile which most resembles God's «style», since it
imitates the overwhelming symbolic qualities of his «books».
And this is Paradiso XIX 's cardinal point: its stress that salvation
revolves around a mediated semiotic knowledge of the Divinity. The
canto, on one level, is a great celebration, as well as a thoroughgoing
investigation of the symbolic; indeed the Heaven of Jupiter as a whole,
with its «artistic» souls whom the Deus artifex «dipinge» (Par. XVIII
109) as letters, Scriptural phrases, a heraldic lily, and finally a bird,
confirms this fact. Paradiso XIX both highlights the variety and efficacy
of signa , and recognizes their epistemological limitations. However,
despite these limitations, the canto also makes it quite clear that
symbolism represents the best path to reaching a sense of God in this
life. The simple fact that the Commedia as a work of salvation is based
so expressly on the semiotic-exegetical forms evolved by the Creator is
evidence of this. Like the Bible and the Aeneid , it is an inspired work
into which God has poured something of Himself; like the writings of
the mystics, which Paradiso XIX recalls in some of its imagery,32 the
«poema sacro» (Par. XXV 1) records its author's paradisiacal experiences
per analogiam , namely, indirectly by means of the semiotic
approximations provided by reality and language.33
Dante's clear cut declaration of faith in symbolism and exegesis is
not without its problems. To come out so strongly in the second decade
of the fourteenth century in favour of signa meant taking a stand against
the other dominant ideology of the day. As is well known, the latter part
of the Duecento and the beginnings of the Trecento were marred by a
bitter epistemological struggle between, on the one side, the
«philosophers» and the «theologians» and, on the other, the «exegetes».
To confuse matters further, the «philosophers» and «theologians»,
despite their shared Aristotelian provenance, were also at odds with each
other. In very simple terms, the basic dispute was between a rationally-
and «scientifically»-founded epistemology riven with internal divisions
and a rather more homogeneous Scripturally-based symbolic theory of
knowledge.34 I do not have the space here to explore the implications
for Dante's intellectual history, especially for his supposed
Aristotelianism, of his support for semiotics. Suffice it to say, first,
that this is a position which Dante took up time and again during his
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career and, in particular, when he wrote the last two cantiche of the
Commedia ; and, second, that, in Paradiso XIX, he not only made his
preference for signa perfectly explicit, but also overtly criticized
rationalist epistemologies.35
Significantly, Dante's critique of rationalism revolves around the
canto's most memorable detail: the question of the salvation of pagans,
which becomes a kind of test case for assessing the intellectual
effectiveness of different epistemologies. This problem is dealt with in
two separate, but obviously interlinked, moments, both of which
highlight the superiority of Scriptural symbolism over rational
epistemologies. The first concentrates on the pilgrim's «doubt»
concerning the Indian (25-33, 67-85); the second deals with the fate of
the Ethiopians and the Persians (103-1 14). Let us examine each of these
in turn.
The pilgrim informs the eagle that he has been unable to find
earthly food to satiate his intellectual hunger concerning the fate of
virtuous pagans (27). This is a crucial admission. It raises the question
of which doctrines he had sought out on earth to help him resolve his
problem. The viator's use of alimentary metaphors to describe his
unsatisfied condition immediately reveals, in line with the kind of
exegesis offered by Hugh of St. Victor, that these ideologies had to be
of a tainted, unspiritual type. Without going into specifics (there were
in fact various different solutions circulating as regards the issue of the
salvation of pagans),36 the eagle clarifies that the doctrines preferred by
the pilgrim on earth were rationally-based («quanto ragione umana
vede», 74), the product of scholastic culture: «Or tu chi se', che vuo'
sedere a scranna,37 / per giudicar di lungi mille miglia / con la veduta
corta d'una spanna?» (79-81). The aquila then goes on to state that, in
addition, these doctrines were not based on Scriptural authority, because,
if they had been, they would have provided Dante-character with an
answer to his query: «Certo a colui che meco s'assottiglia, / se la
Scrittura sovra voi non fosse, / da dubitar sarebbe a maraviglia» (82-84).
What the eagle makes plain is that the pilgrim could have found a
solution to his «dubbio» «in terra». The motive he did not was because
he elected to listen to the siren songs of reason, rather than try to
interpret the divine signs of the Verbum 38
While the first part of the blesseds' disquisition on the salvation of
pagans, by emphasising the perfection of divine justice as evidenced by
the authority of Scripture (86-90), deals with the issue somewhat
tangentially, its second part is much more to the point. It provides hard
proof of how a correct reading of the Bible will offer solutions to our
intellectual predicaments, especially as regards salvation (103-1 14):
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«A questo regno
non salì mai chi non credette 'n Cristo,
né pria né poi ch'el si chiavasse al legno.
Ma vedi: molti gridan "Cristo, Cristo!",
che saranno in giudicio assai men prope
a lui, che tal che non conosce Cristo;
e tai Cristian dannerà l' Etiope,
quando si partiranno i due collegi,
l'uno in etterno ricco e l'altro inope.
Che poran dir li Perse a' vostri regi,
come vedranno quel volume aperto
nel quai si scrivon tutti suoi dispregi?»
The eagle begins by clarifying, in keeping with the lessons of

Scripture, why belief in Christ is the necessary prerequisite for
redemption, thereby implicitly confirming that limbo constitutes an
eternal condition.39 It then goes on to describe a situation at the Last
Judgment Ethiopians and Persians, both of them pagan peoples at the
beginning of the Trecento, will read in the Book of Justice and concur
with the divine judgment. As a result, they will necessarily be counted
among the saved, since only the chosen, by being at one with God, are
able to read the «volume» (113) and «damn» (109) the damned. This
vignette has been the source of considerable critical perplexity and
ingenuity among Dantists; for instance, some have cited it as evidence
that the poet intended all good pagans to be elevated to Paradise at the
end of time. This is a view with which I cannot concur, although I do
believe that the poet wished to suggest that some good Ethiopians and
Persians would in fact be saved. A solution to this apparent riddle does
exist: it is to be found in the tenses40 and logic of the poet's
presentation and, more importantly, it is to be found in the Bible.
No contradiction need exist between lines 103-5 (on salvation
through Christ) and the future blessed condition of some members of the
two pagan nations (109-13). Let us examine the eagle's words, which
can conveniently be divided into three main interlocking segments, (i)
Lines 103-5 describe the situation which holds good in Heaven at the
moment of the eagle's speech, as is patent from the use of past tenses
(«salì», «credette», «chiavasse»). The absoluteness of the claim also
suggests that it is to be taken as a general premise regarding the basic
condition for salvation (a fact which is confirmed by the stories of
Trajan and Ripheus in the next canto).41 (ii) Lines 106-8 refer both to
contemporary living Christian sinners and virtuous pagans, hence the
use of the present indicatives («gridan», «conosce»), and to their
respective future positions in eternity. The reason why, at the Last
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Judgment, good non-believers will be («saranno») closer to God than
bad believers is that the former will find themselves in limbo, while the
latter will be cast further down the pit of Hell. These lines confirm that,
while salvation without Christ is impossible, a purely perfunctory
acknowledgement of Christ is also not enough to guarantee salvation,
(iii) Lines 109-114 bring together the «due collegi» (110) introduced in
the preceding two tercets. However, while the damned continue to be
personified by sinful Christians, the saved now seem to be represented
by «pagans». This is, of course, impossible, as (i) and (ii) both make
clear. For the Ethiopian and the Persian to be among the «eternally
rich» (111), they must have led not just good lives, but good lives in
Christ. Surely, Dante's pronouncement regarding their salvation has to
be pure fictio , a rhetorical ploy at most? By what authority could the
poet envisage Christian Ethiopians and Persians? The answer is
straightforward: by the authority of Scripture, of course, as the eagle had
already stated (82-84) and as Paradiso XIX as a whole reiterates. Thus, it
was not just a Biblical and exegetical commonplace that the Church had
a global mission,42 but, more specifically, on the basis of various
passages taken from the Book of Revelations - one of our canto's
principal intertexts - an hermeneutic tradition emerged which claimed
that, in the period leading up to the Last Judgment, all the peoples of
the world would convert to Christianity.43
The Ethiopians and the Persians evoked by the eagle, both of
whom are closely associated with this momentous final event and with
the future (note the verb tenses tied to them), belong to the universal
earthly Church to come. The rational problems posed by the aquila' s
words dissolve before a proper reading of God's signa. Once again,
Dante reveals his ideological allegiances; and such allegiances are no
matter for levity, since our salvation is inextricably linked to the
epistemologies we decide to embrace. In this instance, the eagle's
presentation of future history pushes Dante into the arms of the
apocalypticists (Joachimites, Franciscans, and even some Dominicans)
who, in the late Middle Ages, had developed, via a rich metaphorical
sense, the most impressive exegesis of the «final times».44 And Dante
confirms his sympathies for this intellectual current at this point of his
poem, by drawing directly on Joachim of Fiore when depicting the
metamorphoses undergone by the souls of the just.45 With the
apocalypticists, we are in the very depths of the medieval symbolic
jungle: a very long way from the rational structures of the
Aristotelians.46
By fusing salvation so closely with signa , and both of these with
his own poem, Dante leaves little doubt as to his ideological
292
preferences. These are extremely weighty matters, and not just as regards
the precision of the image of Dante the Aristotelian which scholars have
painted. The overwhelming emotive, ethical, and intellectual burden of
salvation has a tremendous impact on the Heaven of Jove. However
much the meeting between Cacciaguida and the viator may constitute
the core of the Commedia 's «biographical» preoccupations, Paradiso
XVIII-XX, and canto XIX in particular, by focusing on salvation, serve
as the ideological fulcrum of the poem's «universalizing» message. The
salvation of one individual, or even of one city, is understandably
dwarfed by the salvation and damnation of the «due collegi» (110) and
by the wonder of Providence (40-48, 101-5). Indeed, the Commedia as a
whole, in line with all the major currents of Christian thought, reveals
from its very first canto («A te con vien tenere altro viaggio, /[...]/ se
vuo' campar d'esto loco selvaggio», Inf . I 91, 93), that saving one's
soul, by heeding God's word, is our most basic and fundamental human
responsibility. Given its intimate interconnections with the life-giving
matter of salvation, Paradiso XIX, to put it simply, cannot but beat as
the ideological heart of the Commedia .47
NOTES
Ipart of the research for this lectura was done thanks to a grant from the
Leverhulme Trust. I am extremely grateful to the Trust for its generous help.
I should also like to thank my great friends, Giulio Lepschy, Lino Pertile,
and Tibor Wlassics for the generosity of their advice on an earlier version
of this article. All quotations from and references to Dante's works are
taken from the following editions: De vulgāri eloquent ia , ed. P. V.
Mengaldo, in Dante Alighieri, Opere minori , 2 vols (Milan-Naples:
Ricciardi, 1979-88), II, 1-237; La Commedia secondo l'antica vulgata , ed.
G. Petrocchi, 4 vols (Milan: Mondadori, 1966-67).
2Within the confines of Paradiso XIX, and thereby underlining its
importance, lines 1-33 function like a conventional rhetorical proœmium
to a complete work and yield a sense of the canto as a whole.
3 See R. Javelet, Image et ressemblance au douzième siècle , 2 vols (Paris:
Letouzey & Ane, 1967).
4See J. Chatillon, «Dulcedo, Dulcedo Dei», in Dictionnnaire de spiritualité
ascétique et mystique , eds M. Viller et al. , (Paris: Beauchesne, 1957), HI,
1777-795; S. Heinimann, «Dulcis. Ein Beitrag zur lateinisch-romanischen
Stilgeschichte des Mittelalters», in Studia Philologica. Homenaje ofrecido
a Dámaso Alonso por sus amigos y discípulos con ocasión de su 60°
aniversario , 3 vols (Madrid: Gredos, 1961), I, 215-32; C. Villa, La
« Lectura Terentii» (Padua: Antenore, 1984), pp. 39-42.
^See P. Agaësse & T. Koehler, «Fruitio Dei», in Dictionnnaire de spiritualité
293
ascétique et mystique , eds M. Viller et al. (Paris: Beauchesne, 1962), V,
1546-69. The concepts of «sweetness» and «delight» were frequently
linked together in mystical authors; see the reference to Guillaume de Saint
Thierry in footnote 32. Dantists normally cite passages from Aquinas,
which omit references to dulcedo , to explain the poet's use of frui' this is
almost certainly erroneous, since it ignores the evident mystic character of
Dante's phrase.
"See G. Contini, Un'idea di Dante (Turin: Einaudi, 1976), pp. 119-20.
'See O. Lottin, Psychologie et morale aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles , 6 vols
(Louvain: Abbaye de Mont César-Gembloux: J. Duculot Editeur, 1942-60),
III, 9-96.
"Isidoři Hispalensis Episcopi, Etymologiae , 2 vols, ed. W. M. Lindsay
(Oxford: at the Clarendon Press, 1911), I, xxxix, 11.
^See notes 3, 4, and 5.
l"See A. J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship (Aldershot: Scolar
Press, 1984), pp. 10-12, and see «Index of Latin Terms», s.v. auctor and
auctoritas.
Among the studies which I have consulted the following may be exempted
from such criticism: E. Sanguineti, «Dante, Paradiso XIX [1964]», in II
realismo di Dante (Florence: Sansoni, 1980^), pp. 103-32; A. Jacomuzzi,
«Il canto XIX del Paradiso », L' Alighieri, 14/ii (1973), 3-24; K. Foster,
«The Son's Eagle: Paradiso XIX», Dante Studies , 94 (1976), 47-60, and
now reprinted in The Two Dantes (London: Darton, Longman & Todd,
1977), pp. 137-55; V. Russo, « Paradiso XIX: similis fictio numquam facta
fuit per aliquem poetam », Dante Studies , 101 (1983), 87-110 (which makes
several useful stylistic observations); A. Battistini, «"Se la Scrittura sovra
voi non fosse...". Allusioni bibliche nel canto XIX del Paradiso », Critica
letteraria , 16 (1988), 211-35.
^Teodolinda Barolini has written important pages on the narrative
strategies which Dante employs to make us become emotionally involved
with the question of Virgil's damnation; see «Q: Does Dante Hope for
Vergil's Salvation? A: Why Do We Care? For the Very Reason We Should
Not Ask the Question», MLN, 105 (1990), 138-44, 147-49. On Dante's
treatment of the problem of the salvation of virtuous pagans, see at least T.
Bottagisio, II Limbo dantesco. Studi filosofici e letterari (Padua:
Antoniana, 1898); F. Ruffini, «Dante e il problema della salvezza degli
infedeli», Studi danteschi , 14 (1930), 79-92; G. Busnelli, «La colpa del
"non fare" degl'infedeli negativi», Studi danteschi , 23 (1938), 79-97 ; M.
Frezza, Il problema della salvezza dei pagani ( da Abelardo al Seicento)
(Naples: Fausto Fiorentino, 1962), pp. 15-20; F. Mazzoni, «Saggio di un
nuovo commento alla "Commedia": Il canto IV delPTnferno"», Studi
danteschi , 42 (1965), 29-206 (pp. 33-35, 69-93, 101-4, 130-36); G.
Padoan, «Il Limbo dantesco», Lettere italiane , 21 (1969), 369-88, and now
reprinted in II pio Enea, l'empio Ulisse (Ravenna: Longo, 1977), pp.
103-24; Foster, The Two Dantes , cit., pp. 137-55, 168-89, 208-53; S.
Abbadessa, Trame e ragioni dantesche (Bologna: Patron, 1982), pp. 9-136;
294
M. Allan, «Does Dante Hope for Virgil's Salvation?», MLN, 104 (1989),
193-205; N. Iliescu, «Will Virgil Be Saved?», Mediaevalia , 12 (1986 [but
1989]), 93-114; M. Picone, «La "viva speranza" di Dante e il problema
della salvezza dei pagani virtuosi. Una lettura di Paradiso 20», Quaderni
d' italianistica, 10/i-ii (1989), 251-68; M. Allan, «Two Dantes: Christian
versus Humanist?», MLN, 107 (1992), 18-35; M. Allan, «Much Virtue in
Ma: Paradiso XIX, 106, and St. Thomas's Sed contra », Dante Studies , 111
(1993), 195-211.
lÔn salvation, see A. Michel, «Salut», in Dictionnaire de théologie
catholique , ed. A. Vacant & E. Mangenot, 18 vols (Paris: Letouzey et Ané,
1935-72), Tables Générales, III, 3980-82; see also the studies cited at
footnote 36.
l^See Z. G. Barański, «Dante's Signs: An Introduction to Medieval

Semiotics and Dante», in Dante and the Middle Ages , eds. J. C. Barnes & C.
O'Cuilleanain (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1995), forthcoming.
lÔn medieval eagles, see J. Chierici, L'aquila d'oro nel cielo di Giove
(Rome: de Luca, 1962); F. Salsano, Enc. dant I, 338-39. For a typical
bestiary entry on the eagle, see Hugonis de S. Victore, De bestiis et aliis
rebus , in Migne, PL, 175, 53-55.
l"See, for instance, Z. G. Barański, «"Primo tra cotanto senno": Dante and
the Latin Comic Tradition», Italian Studies, 46 (1991), 1-31.
^'Glossa ordinaria , in Migne, PL, 114, 726.
On the medieval allegorical tradition, see C. Spicq, Esquisse d'une
histoire de l'exégèse latine (Paris: Vrin, 1944); B. Smalley, The Study of
the Bible in the Middle Ages [1952], third edition (Oxford: Blackwell,
1983); M. -D. Chenu, La Théologie au douzième siècle (Paris: Vrin, 1957);
H. De Lubac, Exégèse médiévale , 2 vols (Paris: Aubier, 1959-64); A.
Strubel, «Allegoria in factis et Allegoria in verbis », Poétique , 23 (1975),
342-57; Le Moyen Age et la Bible , ed. P. Riche & G. Lobrichon (Paris,
Beauchesne, 1984); J. Pépin, La Tradition de l'allégorie de Philon
d' Alexandrie à Dante (Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1987).
19«Sed sufficientia nostra ex Deo est: qui et idoneos nos fecit ministros
novi testamenti: non littera, sed Spiritu: littera enim occidit, Spiritus
autem vivificai» (II Cor. HI 5-6).
^Rupert of Deutz, in the prologue to his influential commentary, elucidates
this point: «Liber iste Deuteronomium, id est secunda lex , inscribitur.
Brevissime autem, in cantico eiusdem Deuteronomii cuneta ab exitu Israhel
de Aegypto numerantur et ponderantur. Cur hoc? Videlicet quia iudicium
Domino praeparatur, et eis qui ante tribunal eius staturi et per legem
iudicandi sunt, eis, inquam, immo contra eos qui per legem arguentem non
audiunt, testimonia sufficientia providenda sunt». Ruperti Tuitiensis, In
Deuteronomium , in CC, Continuado Mediaevalis, 22, 1014.
^Rabani Mauri, Enarrationis super Deuteronomium libri quatuor , in Migne,
PL, 108, 974-75; Glossa ordinaria , in Migne, PL, 113, 489.
^Rabani Mauri, Enarrationis , 974-75: «Nam sicut aquila acuti intuitus est,
ita ut super maria immobili penna sublata, nec humanis apparens
295
aspectibus pisciculos de tanta sublimitate natantes videns in pelago».
^ Glossa ordinaria , in Migne, PL, 114, 138.
^Hugonis de S. Victore, De assumptione Beatae Mariae , in Migne, PL, 177,
1217-219: «Et videtur magna quaedam gaudia hic commendare in floribus,
et odore et cantico. Nam haec tria solum commemorata sunt: flores, et odor
et canticum. Et seimus quod flores ad speciem pertinent, odor ad
fragrantiam, canticum ad jucunditatem. Species autem ad visum refertur,
fragrantia ad olfactum, melos ad auditum. Quare ergo hi soli prae cunctis
sensibus electi sunt, et nominati? Nam habent singuli voluptates suas, et
poterant interna gaudia etiam gustu designari [...]. Ideo flores
commemorantur, et odor, et canticum, et in omnibus dulcedo illa bonorum
invisibilium et jucunditas designatur [...]. Ideo adhuc gustu non percipitur,
neque tactu attrectatur, sed tanquam eminus constitutum auditur, odoratur, et
cernitur. [...] Aeterna itaque gaudia floribus, et odore, et cantico
designantur. Et diximus quod idcirco de gustu taciturn est, quoniam voluit
demonstrare, quod de longe adhuc erant, et needum ad ea sponsa pervenerat,
sed invitabatur ut veniret, et demonstrata sunt ei ut videret et concupisceret
et properaret. [...] Cum enim sint quinqué sensus corporei, duo, id est táctus
et gustus, magis sordibus appropinquat, et subjacent atramini, unde nec
sinceram refectionem habere valent, sed quae purgatione egeat et
defaecatione. Tres vero reliqui meram trahunt dulcedinem, et suas delicias
magis ad jucunditatem animi convertunt, non enim ad necessitatem
reficiunt, sed ad delectationem. Magna itaque rerum similitudo est, nec
poterant invisibilia signis evidentioribus declarari. Sicut enim oculus
rerum specie sine coinquinatione pascitur, et sicut auris vocum suavitate
sine corruptione delectatur, sic, gaudia ilia aeterna suavitatem infundunt, et
corruptionem non adducunt».
^The bibliography on medieval symbolism is enormous. Some important
studies are A. Michel, «Signe», in Dictionnaire de théologie, XlV/ii,
2053-61; Chenu, La Théologie , cit.; J. Chydenius, The Theory of
Medieval Symbolism (Helsinki: n. p., 1960); B. D. Jackson, «The Theory
of Signs in St. Augustine's De doctrina Christiana », Revue des études
augustiniennes , 15 (1969), 9-49; R. Simone, «Semiologia agostiniana»,
La cultura , 7 (1969), 88-117; Settimane di Studio del Centro l'aliano di
Studi sull'Alto Medioevo, Simboli e simbologia nell'alto medioevo , 2
vols (Spoleto: presso la sede del Centro, 1976); G. B. Ladner, «Medieval
and Modem Understanding of Symbolism: A Comparison», Speculum , 54
(1979), 223-56, now reprinted in Images and Ideas in the Middle Ages , 2
vols (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1983), I, 239-82; J. B.
Friedman, Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 108-30; A. Maierù, «Signum dans la
culture medievale», in Sprache und Erkenntnis im Mittelalter , ed. J. P.
Beckmann et al ., 2 vols (Berlin-New York: De Gruyter, 1981), I, 51-72;
Archéologie du signe , ed. L. Briand' Amour & E. Vance (Toronto: Pontifical
Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1983); M. Colish, The Mirror of Language.
A Study in the Medieval Theory of Knowledge , second revised edition
296
(Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1983); Semiotica ,
63/i-ii (1987), special issue on «Semiotica Mediaevalia», ed. J. Evans. See
also G. Manetti, Le teorie del segno nelV antichità classica (Milan:
Bompiani, 1987); and the works cited at footnote 18. For a more complete
list of references, see Barański, «Dante* s Signs», cit.
2°On medieval notions of history, see de Lubac, Exégèse , cit., I/ii, 425-78;
B. Guenée, Histoire et culture historique dans l'Occident médiéval (Paris:
Aubier, 1980).
2 'Dante Alighieri, La Divina Commedia , ed. N. Sapegno, 3 vols, third
revised edition, III, 242.
2^See Jacomuzzi, «II canto XIX», cit., pp. 10-17; Battistini, «"Se la
Scrittura"», cit. Neither of these scholars pays attention to the influence of
Scriptural exegesis on the canto.
29Compare Par. XIX 40 : Aen. VI 850; 40-66 : 724-37; 71 : 794; 102 :
851-53; 109 : 796. See also 103-4 : 719-20. It is also noteworthy that
both Virgil's catalogue and Dante's are constructed around verbs of seeing.
30See R. Hollander, Il Virgilio dantesco (Florence: Olschki, 1983).
See D. Santoro, «Due acrostici nella Divina Commedia», Giornale
dantesco , 12 (1904), 21-24; K. Taylor, «From superbo Ilion to umile
Italia : The Acrostic of Paradiso 19», Stanford Italian Review , 7 (1987),
47-65; T. Barolini, The Undivine Comedy (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1992), pp. 126-30.
^Compare, for instance, Par. XIX 2-3, 22-24 and Guillelmus Abbas S.
Theodorici prope Remos, Expositio altera super Cantica Canticorum , in
Migne, PL, 180, 595-6. On the use of the image of the eagle with
widespread wings and its young of Deuteronomy in the mystical tradition,
see Anon., Vitis mystica , in Migne, PL 184, 651.
Ôverall, there have been few specific studies of Dante's semiotic ideas,
and most of these, in my view, need to be approached with considerable
caution, since they underestimate the complexity of the problem. See H. F.
f Dunbar, Symbolism in Medieval Thought and its Consummation in the
Divine Comedy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1929); E. Lugarini, «II
segno in Dante: ipotesi sul primo libro del De vulgāri eloquentia », in
Psicanalisi e strutturalismo di fronte a Dante , 3 vols, ed. E. Guidubaldi
(Florence: Olschki, 1972), III, 79-86; A. Lanci, «segnare», in Enc. dant .,
V, 127; D. Consoli, «segno», in Enc. dant., V, 127-30; M. Rak,
«significanza - significare - significazione», in Enc. dant., V, 242-45; M.
Corti, «La teoria del segno nei logici modisti e in Dante», in Per una storia
della semiotica: teorie e metodi, eds. P. Lendinara & M. C. Ruta, Quaderni
del circolo semiologico siciliano, 15-16 (1981), pp. 69-86; M. Corti, La
felicità mentale (Turin: Einaudi, 1983), pp. 139-41; Colish, The Mirror,
pp. 152-220; S. Noakes, «Dante and Orwell: The Antithetical Hypersign as
Hallmark in Literature and Politics», Semiotica , 63/i-ii (1987), 149-61; G.
Gorni, Lettera nome numero: l'ordine delle cose in Dante (Bologna: Il
Mulino, 1990); M. Corti, Percorsi dell'invenzione (Turin: Einaudi, 1993),
pp. 51-74, 86-87. See also E. G. Gardner, Dante and the Mystics (London:
297
Dent, 1913); A. Marigo, Mistica e scienza nella «Vita Nuova» di Dante
(Padua: Drucker, 1914); I. Brandeis, The Ladder of Vision (London: Chatto
& Windus, 1960); F. Mazzoni, «Purgatorio XXXI», in Lectura Dantis
Scaligera , 3 vols (Florence: Le Monnier, 1965), II, 1139-184; A. Mellone,
«L' esempi arismo divino secondo Dante», Divinitas , 9 (1965), 215-43; V.
Branca, «Poetica del rinnovamento e tradizione agiografica nella Vita
Nuova », in Studi in onore di Italo Siciliano , 2 vols (Florence: Olschki,
1966), I, 123-48; G. Farris, Dante e «Imago Dei» (Savona: Sabatelli,
1985); A. Battis tini, «L'universo che si squaderna: cosmo e simbologia del
libro», in Letture Classensi 15 (Ravenna: Longo, 1986), pp. 61-78; M.
Colombo, Dai mistici a Dante: il linguaggio dell'ineffabilità (Florence: La
Nuova Italia, 1987); J. G. Demaray, Dante and the Book of the Cosmos
(Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1987); J. Ahern,
«Dante's Last Word: The Comedy as a liber coelestis », Dante Studies , 102
(1984), pp. 1-14.
^4The bibliography on this dispute is vast. Important studies are those,
quoted in note 18, by Spicq, Smalley, De Lubac; also: M. Grabmann, «II
concetto di scienza secondo S. Tommaso d'Aquino e le relazioni della fede e
della teologia con la filosofia e le scienze profane», Rivista di filosofìa
neo-scolastica , 26 (1934), 127-55; E. Gilson, History of Christian
Philosophy in the Middle Ages (London: Sheed and Ward, 1980 [1955]),
pp. 325-485; A. Ghisalberti, Medioevo teologico (Bari: Laterza, 1990),
pp. 85-145.
^^See G. Mazzotta, Dante's Vision and the Circle of Knowledge (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1992); Z. G. Barański, «Dante fra
"sperimentalismo" e "enciclopedismo"», in L' enciclopedismo medievale ,
ed. M. Picone (Ravenna: Longo, 1994), pp. 373-94; «Dante commentatore
e commentato: riflessioni sullo studio dell' iter ideologico di Dante», in
Letture Classensi 23 (Ravenna: Longo, 1994), pp. 135-158. See also L.
Pertile, «"La punta del disio": storia di una metafora dantesca», Lectura
Dantis , 7 (1990), 3-28; «L'antica fiamma: la metamorfosi del fuoco nella
Commedia di Dante», The Italianista 11 (1991), 29-60; « Paradiso : A Drama
of Desire», in Word and Drama in Dante , eds. J. C. Barnes & J. Petrie
(Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1993), pp. 143-80.
3"See E. Dublanchy, «Eglise», in Dictionnaire, cit., IV/ii, 2108-224 (cols
2155-174); S. Harent, «Infidèles (Salut des)», in Dictionnaire de théologie ,
cit., Vil/ii, 1726-930; L. Capéran, Le Problème du salut des infidèles , 2
vols, rev. ed. (Toulouse: Grand Séminaire, 1934), vol. 1 in particular;
Frezza, cit., pp. 5-35.
3 ' «Sedere a scranna: salire in cattedra, ergersi a giudice. Scranna è appunto
il seggio del giudice o del maestro» (Dante Alighieri, La Divina Commedia ,
eds. U. Bosco & G. Reggio, 3 vols [Florence: Le Monnier, 1979], III,
324).
Thomas Aquinas 's solution to the question would belong fairly squarely
among those criticized by the eagle. On Thomas's views regarding the
salvation of pagans, see Foster, The Two Dantes , cit., pp. 153-54, 171-73,
298
176, 251-52.
•^Despite the clear statements to the contrary in the Commedia (e.g., Purg.
HI 40-44), some Dantists insist that good pagans will ultimately be raised
to Heaven.
40For an interesting analysis of the tenses of lines 103-11, see Iliescu,
«Will Virgil Be Saved?», cit., pp. 109-11.
4^«D'i corpi suoi non uscir, come credi, / Gentili, ma Cristiani, in ferma
fede» (Par. XX 103-4; but see all this part of the eagle's explanation of the
salvation of Trajan and Ripheus, 11. 100-29).
4^See, for instance, I Tim. II 4 and Rabani Mauri Enarrationis super
Deuteronomium , in Migne, PL 108, 973D.
4^See D. Burr, Olivi' s Peaceable Kingdom : A Reading of the Apocalypse
Commentary (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), pp.
182-3, 189-94.
44See The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages , eds. R. K. Emmerson & B.
McGinn (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 51-102
(essays by Lerner, Daniel, and Burr); Burr, Olivi' s Peaceable Kingdom , cit.,
pp. 182-3,. 190.
4^See M. Reeves, Joachim of Fiore and the Prophetic Future (London:
SPCK, 1976), pp. 64-66; H. Grundmann, «Dante und Joachim von Fiore»,
DDJ , 14 (1932), 210-56; R. Manselli, «Dante e l'"Ecclesia Spiritualis"»,
in Dante e Roma . Atti del Convegno di studi (Florence: Le Monnier, 1965),
pp. 115-35; N. Mineo, Profetismo e Apocalittica in Dante ([Catania:]
Università di Catania, Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia, 1968); R. Morghen,
«Dante profeta», in Letture Classensi 3 (Ravenna: Longo, 1970), pp.
13-36; M. Reeves, «Dante and the Prophetic View of History», in The
World of Dante , ed. C. Grayson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp.
44-60.
4În the Monarchia (II vii 4-5), too, Dante cites the authority of Scripture as
the only one able to resolve the question of the salvation of good pagans.
4Ôn the relationship between Dante's attitude towards the good inhabitant
of the Indus region and contemporary beliefs in Christian Indians
converted by Thomas the Apostle and related mirabilia , see B. D.
Schildgen, «Dante and the Indus», Dante Studies , 111 (1993), 177-93. A
number of other studies have focused on the Heaven of Jove's stress on
signs and signification, though none of these tries to contextualize
Dante's poetry in terms of medieval thinking on signa ; see J. Freccero,
Dante. The Poetics of Conversion (Cambridge, MA-London: Harvard
University Press, 1986 [1970]), pp. 212-15; Foster, «The Son's Eagle»,
cit.; J. Leavey, «Derrida and Dante: Differance and the Eagle in the Sphere
of Jupiter», MLN , 91 (1976), 60-68; J. T. Chiampi, «Dante's Pilgrim and
Reader in the "Region of Want"», Stanford Italian Review , 3 (1983),
163-82; J. Tambling, Dante and Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988), pp. 32-66.
299
Paradiso XX
Author(s): MARGUERITE CHIARENZA
Accessed: 17-02-2020 23:09 UTC
Lectura Dantis
MARGUERITE CHIARENZA
University of British Columbia
XX
E quel che mi convien ritrar tes teso,
non portò voce mai, né scrisse incostro,
né fu per fantasia già mai compreso. ^
If traditional critics have often underplayed the Eagle's impossible

nature, treating Dante's statement as little more than a rhetorical boost
to his poetry, modern ones have focused precisely on the paradoxical
nature of the events in the heaven of Jupiter. Recent definitions of the
Eagle, such as a «non representation of its own reality»,2 a «paradigm
of the self consuming artefact»,3 or a «nonfigure that figures»,4 reflect
our heightened interest in Dante's attempt to devise an image that
corresponds to no possible reality. On the one hand, what the pilgrim
sees is not an eagle at all, heraldic or natural, but a group of spirits. On
the other hand, it is not the group of spirits either, for their identities
disappear in the sign they form to express their shared meaning. Like
other images in the Paradiso , the Eagle strives to be rather than to
represent that of which it is a representation. But, besides being a
particularly good example of what critics have come to call the
Paradiso1 s anti-images, this literally animated sign has characteristics
peculiar to itself and worthy of attention for their own sake.
Dante not only tells us that his creation in the heaven of Jupiter is
unimaginable, he also elaborates on the specific way in which it defies
the imagination (XIX, 10-12):
ch'io vidi e anche udi' parlar lo rostro,

e sonar ne la voce e «io» e «mio»,
quand' era nel concetto e 'noi' e łnostro'
What astonishes the pilgrim is that the Eagle, whose voices are many,
speaks in one voice that miraculously moves up through the throat and
out of the beak. Just as physical laws determine the kind of sound made
by a musical instrument, so the hollow space surrounded by the spirits
composing the Eagle's throat determines the sounds that come out of its
beak as words (XX, 22-29):
300
E come suono al collo de la cetra
prende sua forma, e sì com' al pertugio
de la sampogna vento che penetra,
cosi, rimosso d'aspettare indugio,
quel mormorar de l'aguglia salissi
su per lo collo, come fosse bugio.
Fecesi voce quivi, e quindi uscissi
per lo suo becco in forma di parole...
This means that the souls speaking to the pilgrim do not simply
compose an image; they actually become the anatomy of a single being
who expresses their meaning with one voice. This being is both
singular and plural, both abstract and organic. Our experience of signs
cannot include this mode of significance. It is, as Dante stated, both
unprecedented and unimaginable.
Despite Dante's careful wording, the Eagle's unity has often been
taken to be a kind of cooperation, or metaphorical unity, such as is
desirable in a nation or a society. Ken elm Foster was not satisfied that
such an explanation accounted for the paradoxical way in which the poet
describes the souls' unity, which he explained through the single and
transcendent object of their shared fruition. The explanation of the nature
of the souls' unity was theological and to be sought in its supernatural
source.5 While Foster, in contrast to many others, at least addressed the
problem of the oneness of the many souls in Jupiter, I find his answer
unsatisfactory, for it does little more than state that souls' unity is not
merely political. Perhaps, in order to understand the nature of the
miracle the pilgrim witnesses, we must begin with a very simple
definition of the Eagle. Composed of the spirits of men who lived with
justice, emblematic of the Roman Empire and of the justice of
Providence's design for it, it speaks of divine justice and of its pale
reflection in human justice. The Eagle can be defined as justice itself.
Justice, however, is an attribute, not a substance. Like charity or
prudence or any other attribute, it is the same in everything it
characterizes, but it is not found anywhere as itself. We can know it
only through its manifestations, through the just actions, like those of
the souls composing the Eagle, that we witness or hear about. That
which makes justice the same every time it is practized is not a thing
unto itself; it is an abstraction. And yet, in Dante's fiction, the pilgrim
sees a real presence, in the creature that moves like a bird and speaks
with one voice. The many spirits whose lives each manifested justice
partially, come together in a literal, not a metaphorical, unity to express
the virtue itself. They become their message and, since they are really
there, their message is also a real presence.
301
The opening of Paradiso XX suspends for a moment the
miraculous vision of the essence Of justice to show us and the pilgrim
its relatively more imaginable counterpart, the many souls whose lives
manifested that virture. Like the stars whose different lights are not
visibly present while the sun is in the sky but which shine again when
night comes, so the souls return briefly to be themselves before
disappearing again into the speaking sign of them all (1-7). As they
regroup, the pilgrim hears a murmuring like that of a river rushing over
rocks (19-21). The probable source of this image is in the Aeneid (XI,
296-99), where a similar image describes Latinus's subjects responding
to Diomedes's message urging them not to fight against the invincible
and pious Aeneas. When the crowd's confused sounds die down, Latinus
speaks in favor of peace with the divinely protected Aeneas and,
therefore, with the unchangeable will of Providence. Appropriately or
ironically, depending on the critic's point of view, a Virgilian image
prepares the climax of the Eagle's response to the problem that is at the
heart of Virgil's drama in the poem: how can a just God punish good
men for not embracing a faith of which they knew nothing?
The revelations of Canto XX demonstrate that the Eagle's message
is as incomprehensible as its nature is unimaginable. The Eagle
introduces to the pilgrim six souls of special value to its composition,
the six who form its eye. But, in seeming contradiction to its earlier
statement that no soul can be saved except through belief in Christ, two
of these souls are pagan. As Foster points out, the presence of pagans
should not surprise us per se , since medieval theologians frequently
speculated on the possibility of the salvation of the pagans.6 Especially
noteworthy was St. Thomas' discussion of implicit faith,7 whereby a
soul could be saved through faith in those manifestations of Providence
or of God that were available to him, even if Christ's word were not.
But it should surprise us in this context, as it does the pilgrim («Che
cose son queste?», XX, 82), because the Eagle has just affirmed the
opposite of the doctrine of implicit faith, and, as well, because no such
doctrine is ever invoked in the Divine Comedy. Foster finds this
omission surprising in view of the fact that the distinction between
explicit and implicit faith, which stemmed from important principles of
Christianity, was fairly widespread in Dante's time. I agree with Foster
that the omission is glaring, but I do not agree with his apparent
assumption that it was made out of ignorance rather than by choice.8
But Robert Hollander takes a very different view indeed, for he interprets
the question of salvation of the pagans in general and this episode in
particular as if the teachings on implicit faith were part of the poem's
theology. Hollander's especially noteworthy and well argued view is that
302
the presence of other pagans in heaven is part of the evidence that Dante
assigned some relative guilt to Virgil, some failure by him to embrace
what he could have known of the true God.^ Whatever our views, the
Eagle's presentation of its eye must be seen as Dante's final word on
Virgil's placement in Limbo and, therefore, as particularly significant
for our interpretation of Virgil's role in the poem.
The six souls are presented with the refrain «ora conosce»
accompanying the introduction of each. The knowledge that these souls
«now» possess is implicitly contrasted to what they knew on earth or,
more precisely, to what they or anyone could have known on earth.
These souls know something, although not all, of the unfathomable
mystery of divine Providence. David (37-42) and William (61-66) now
know how God judged them as individuals, independently from their
effectiveness in life, the one more effective than he deserved, the other
less effective. Constantine (55-60) knows what evil his good intentions
led to, but he also knows that God measured him by the authentic good
will of those intentions, not by their effects, which he could not have
foreseen. The other three, however, have learned something beyond the
lesson that true worth is measured truly only in eternity; they have seen
God change the unchangeable laws of time and make possible that
which is impossible. Hezekiah's inevitable death, veritably prophesied
by Isaiah, was delayed by God, Who had Himself ordained it (49-54). 10
Powerful beyond His own laws, He was said to have turned the sun dial
back fifteen years, extending the repentant Hezekiah's life beyond what
was to have been its natural end. In the well known story of Trajan's
conversion (43-48; 106-1 17), in answer to Pope Gregory's prayers, God
broke another of His and nature's unbreakable laws by bringing back to
life a man who had been dead for centuries. Trajan died a Christian,
although he had already died a pagan.11 The last, and the most
incredible, of the six is the Trojan Ripheus (67-72; 118-129), to whom
the word of Christ arrived a thousand years before it had arrived on earth.
Ripheus is undeniably the most significant inclusion in the list.
Dante's knowledge of Ripheus was entirely based on three lines in
the Aeneid : «cadit et Ripheus, iustissimus unus / qui fuit in Teucris et
servantissimus aequi / (dis aliter visum)» (II, 426-428). All Dante knew
of him was that Virgil, or rather Aeneas, described him as possessing
exemplary righteousness ( iustissimus unus). Of course, Dante did not
miss the editorial note following the brief description, «the gods
thought otherwise» ( dis aliter visum ).12 Dante realized that Ripheus
was an expression of Virgil's bitterness that the Stoic order which
protected the universe and even steered history cared nothing for the
individual. Despite Ripheus' goodness, no power watched over him or
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protected him from his untimely death on the battlefield. The irony of
the inclusion of Ripheus is that God thought like Virgil, not aliter , not
differently from him. What this means is that Virgil was both
completely wrong about God and completely right about Ripheus. The
difference is, and this is the main theme of the Eagle, that it was in his
power to make a good judgment of Ripheus's actions, but it was not,
and could not have been to do so with God's. Nor was Virgil bound by
the trust in God that binds the Christian, at least not judging from the
Eagle's words (XIX, 82-84):
Certo a colui che meco s'assottiglia,

se la Scrittura sovra voi non fosse,
da dubitar sarebbe a maraviglia.
If the inclusion of Ripheus reflects on the poet of the Aeneid , it does so

positively, for it shows that he was as right as he could have been.
The problem addressed by the Eagle is the same problem raised by
the figure of Virgil in the poem, and it is intended to be an
unanswerable one: if justice is promised by Christ, how can it be
promised only to those fortunate enough to have heard His word? It is
hard enough to accept injustice in this world. How can the Christian
accept it in the next and perfect world as well? However, if he does not
accept this, then does the essential value of Christ as the Savior not
collapse? How can Christ be the only way to salvation if there are also
other ways? I mentioned earlier that the possibility of salvation of
virtuous pagans was not excluded by medieval theologians. But Dante
either disapproved of such rationalizations, ignored them or chose to
ignore them in his poem. The problem the pilgrim brings to the Eagle
should be taken as a humanly unsolvable one and the Eagle's response
to it as a contradiction to human logic.
All of the six souls who form the Eagle's eye could reasonably be
used to make a case for Virgil's salvation. David, Constantine, and
William are all rewarded for their own good will. They are explicitly
immune from judgment concerning what was not within their control.
And yet, Virgil is excluded precisely because of what he had no way of
changing. The other three, who all demonstrate God's unforeseeable
power to supersede His own laws and to make possible that which is
not possible, call out attention even more to God's seemingly uncaring
treatment of Virgil. Virgil's drama is based on the contingency that he
died just nineteen years before the birth of Christ. If God could extend
Hezekiah's life by fifteen years, why did He not extend Virgil's by little
more? It was said that St. Paul, moved by the beauty and wisdom of
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Virgil's poetry, prayed at the poet's tomb for his salvation.13 If God
could answer Gregory's prayers for Trajan, why did He reject the similar
prayer of the great St. Paul? How could a very minor figure in Virgil's
poem have caught the attention of God, while Virgil himself failed to?
Although Virgil is never mentioned in the heaven of Jupiter, no
reader should miss the irony of which he seems to be the victim. It is
this irony that leads Hollander to the conclusion that this episode is
final proof that Dante represented Virgil as undeserving of salvation
because of some more personal guilt than that of original sin.14 It
would seem that, through the Eagle, Dante has made it clear that God
does reward the just and that it is possible for pagans to be saved. If
Virgil is not included, then he must be personally at fault and we must
seek the reasons in his writings or in his character as Dante presented it.
As I read the passage, however, such an interpretation, by presuming
that we can find the reason that God did not make an exception for
Virgil, misses the Eagle's repeatedly stated point that we cannot
understand divine justice. What Dante actually submits to us is that no
soul, including the one God chose to lead his pilgrim to salvation, can
be saved except through Christian conversion and, at the same time, that
there are some souls in heaven who could not have known Christ. In
other words, he presents God's ways as contradicting our logic. The
inclusion of the pagans, and especially of Ripheus, should not make it
easier for us to rationalize divine justice, but rather more difficult. For,
if before we had to accept that, although worthy, a pagan could not be
saved, now we must accept that this can be and not be at the same time.
The primary function of the unexpected presence of Ripheus in
heaven is to prove to the pilgrim, who still has doubts about Virgil's
fate, that he cannot second-guess divine Providence. Its workings are far
beyond our imagination, but, and this is the most positive aspect of
Ripheus' message, they are equally beyond our hopes. Ripheus, a
symbol of despair in the Aeneid , is represented as a symbol of hope.
Had Virgil seen what the pilgrim sees, his tragic pagan vision,
condensed in Aeneas' rebellious words about the uncaring gods, would
have evaporated.15 The pilgrim's grief over Virgil, analogous to
Aeneas's over Ripheus, is answered by the miraculous and triumphant
presence of the righteous Trojan soldier who seemed to have been left
unrewarded. The Eagle, by proving the Roman poet's despair to have
been founded on his lack of understanding of the divine will, shows the
pilgrim's to be equally shortsighted. It demonstrates that, although God
cannot be rationalized or made to fit the human terms of logic or
predicted according to natural laws, He is nevertheless to be trusted. He
fails to meet our expectations only because He is so much greater than
305
they are. The «soave medicina» (141) that the pilgrim receives includes
the consolation to him over Virgil's loss. He must continue to believe
that Virgil's very great worth cannot save him but, at the same time, he
must have no further shadow of a doubt that God Who was with
Ripheus all along commits no injustice.
Virgil could not have accepted Ripheus' fate as he understood it,
but the Christian can and must accept Virgil's. If the pilgrim mistakes
understanding for faith, he cannot be cured by the Eagle's message that
all things are answered in God's mind and all things are possible to
Him. The Eagle even offers a glimmer of hope for Virgil himself: «voi,
mortali, tenetevi stretti / a giudicar: che noi, che Dio vedemo, / non
conosciamo ancor tutti li eletti...» (133-135). Perhaps St. Paul's prayer
is still to be answered. Perhaps, had it been answered too soon, Virgil
could not have fulfilled his role in the pilgrim's journey or carried the
weighty message of Providence's mystery in the poem. And then again,
perhaps Virgil is in Limbo forever. Dante's readers are not expected to
know the answer that the saints themselves do not know. They are
simply asked to consider the relativity of even the clearest human
understanding.
To imagine the Eagle and to hear its message requires the denial of
the senses and even of the fundamental principles of logic. It requires
imagining that what is plural can be single, that what is abstract can
live and speak, that the past can be changed, that the future can already
have been, and that he who does not know Christ can be saved through
faith in Him. If the Eagle's paradoxes point to the restrictions our
understanding cannot escape, this is not to discourage the pilgrim but
rather to reassure him that the solutions he cannot see are not absent;
they are merely beyond his understanding. Only by clearly perceiving
his own shortsightedness can the pilgrim finally be consoled by the
baffling image of divine and perfect justice (139-141):
Così da quella imagine divina

per farmi chiara la mia corta vista,
data mi fu soave medicina. ^ ^
NOTES
1 Par . XIX, 7-9. The Italian text reproduced here is Petrocchi's (1966).
^John Freccero, «Introduction», The Paradiso , trans. John Ciardi (N.Y.: The
New American Library, 1970), p. 15.
■'Peter S. Hawkins, «Dante's Paradiso and the Dialectic of Ineffability», in
Ineff ability : Naming the Unnameable from Dante to Beckett , ed. Peter
306
Hawkins (New York: AMS Press, 1983), p. 14.
4 John Leavey, «Derrida and Dante: Difference and the Eagle in the Sphere of
Jupiter», MLN 91 (1976), p. 67.
^Kenelm Foster, «Paradiso XIX», Dante Studies XCIV (1976), pp. 71-90.
"Foster, pp. 84-85.
7 Summa Theol. II, ii, 2, 7.
"Foster, pp. 84-85: «the odd thing is that he [Dante] seems to know nothing
of all this; for does not his question here assume ... that there is not
alternative to explicit faith? This, and not any ł audacity', is what I find
surprising in the question».
^Robert Hollander's discussion of Virgil's exclusion from salvation is
ongoing through several of his works, especially «The Tragedy of
Divination in Inferno XX», in Studies in Dante (Ravenna: Longo, 1980)
and II Virgilio dantesco : tragedia nella «Commedia» (Florence: Olschki,
1983). For Hollander, the irony of the salvation of the pagans in the
Eagle's eye is confirmation of Virgil's un worthiness. Of the Eagle's speech
he says: «La risposta di Dante alle dure parole dell'aquila è di rinunciare
finalmente al suo desiderio di fare della sua ammirazione per la cultura
pagana la fonte di una persistente convinzione dell'innocenza di questa» (Il
Virgilio dantesco , p. 99).
1"A. C. Charity points out the similarity of the words of Hezekiah - «In
dimidio dierum meorum vadam ad portas inferi» (Isa. 38.10) - to the
opening of the Divine Comedy : Events and Their Afterlife: The Dialectics
of Christian Typology in the Bible and Dante (Cambridge, 1966), p. 230.
If Hezekiah can be seen as a figura of the pilgrim, the emphasis on his
sinfulness or his miraculous salvation despite his sins adds further to the
seeming irony in regard to Virgil.
In speaking of Trajan's salvation, St. Thomas explicitly extends the
possibility to others (Summa Theol. Ill suppl. q. 71, a. 5, cd. 5).
l^See my article «Boethian Themes in Dante's Reading of Virgil», Stanford
Italian Review , ID (1983), pp. 25-35.
l^See Domenico Comparetti, Virgilio nel Medioevo (Florence: La Nuova
Italia, 1937), vol. I, p. 121; Nancy J. Vickers, «Seeing is Believing:
Gregory, Trajan, and Dante's Art», Dante Studies 101 (1983), p. 72;
Charles T. Davies, Dante and the Idea of Rome (Oxford: Clarendon, 1957),
pp. 103-104.
14// Virgilio dantesco , pp. 97-105.
l^ David H. Higgins's note to this effect: «The line of Virgil "yet the gods
regarded not his righteousness" must, by its solemn pagan negativity,
have tempted Dante to give it the lie, vindicating a new dimension of
divine love that antiquity could not have conceived» (The Divine Comedy ,
transi. C. H. Sisson, comm. D.H. Higgins, London: Pan, 1981, p. 661).
16 A shorter version of this essay is to appear in the forthcoming Lectura
Dantis Californiana. I am grateful to the University of California Press for
permitting pre-publication of this work.
307
Paradiso XXI
Author(s): PETER S. HAWKINS
Accessed: 17-02-2020 23:09 UTC
Lectura Dantis
PETER S. HAWKINS
Yale University
XXI
Paradiso 21 opens with a surprise. After spending two and a half
cantos in the sphere of Jupiter, in a consideration of the inscrutable
justice of God and the mystery of divine election, both pilgrim and
reader are ready for the next step. Up until this moment, arrival in each
successive height of heaven has been signalled by the sudden growth in
Beatrice's beauty or by a new burst of paradisiacal music; each has been
increasingly difficult to recall and describe. Paradiso 21 seems disposed
to fulfill the expectation for more of the same by preparing us from its
opening lines for a continuation of this pattern: from the outset Dante
has his attention already focused on Beatrice («Già eran li occhi miei
rifissi al volto / de la mia donna»).1
What happens, however, is something else: Beatrice withholds her
smile and the «dolce sinfonia di paradiso» (59) falls silent. Both are
«tempered» in order that the pilgrim not be overwhelmed by the
supernatural abundance of the seventh heaven - lest Dante, like
Semeie, be turned to ash by a thunderbolt of unveiled divinity. In a
variation on the poem's theme of ineffability, we are led into the sphere
of Saturn through the absence of what we have come to expect. Less
bespeaks more, and a disruption of procedure implies a leap into a
higher realm. It is through quiet and restraint, therefore, that we enter
the heaven of the contemplatives - the heaven of Saturn.
Saturn is named here by periphrasis as the crystal «che '1 vocabol
porta /. . . del suo caro duce / sotto cui giacque ogne malizia morta»
(25-27). This evocation of the Golden Age, renowned not only for moral
innocence but for the radical simplicity of its lifestyle, introduces a
number of antitheses that are developed throughout Paradiso 21 and 22:
the contrast between then and now, austere beginnings and subsequent
decadence, founders and descendants.
The souls in the sphere signify themselves for Dante by means of a
formation of lights similar to the Cross of Mars or the Eagle of Jupiter.
In this case we are shown a ladder, shining like a sunbeam on gold,
from whose height a host descends: the cascade is such that Dante thinks
«ch'ogne lume / che par nel ciel, quindi fosse diffuso» (32-33). The
figure originates in Jacob's dream at Bethel (Genesis 28:12-13),
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subsequently spoken of by the Book of Wisdom (10:10) as the means
by which Jacob was shown the kingdom of God and given knowledge of
the holy («ostendit illi regnum Dei et dedit illi scientiam sanctorum»).
This same emblem adorns the dress of Boethius's Lady Philosophy, to
show that Wisdom prompts us to climb ever higher, «gradus ab
inferiore ad superius» ( Consolation 1, prose 1). At least since the Rule
of St. Benedict, moreover, the ladder was commonly associated with
contemplation, and in particular with the way of humility:
Unde fratres ... actibus nostris ascendentibus scala illa erigenda est quae in
somnio Jacob apparuit, per quam ei descendentes et ascendentes angeli
monstrabantur. Non aliud sine dubio descensus ille et ascensus a nobis
intelligitur, nisi exaltatione descendere et humilitate ascendere. Scala ver
ipsa erecta nostra est vita in saeculo, quae humilitato corde a Domino
erigatur ad caelum. ^
Peter Damian also has the scala in mind when in Dominus vobiscum he
praises the hermit's life as a Jacob's ladder, a «golden way» by which to
return to one's true home in heaven: «Tu via aurea, quae homines
reducis ad patriam» (PL 145: 248).
Dante glosses this received emblem of the contemplative life with
a simile: he asks us to imagine the blessed spirits descending the ladder
as if they were a flock of jackdaws «al cominciar del giorno». In early
morning the birds rise together as a flock; but then as the day warms,
they fly off in their different directions: «altre vanno via sanza ritomo, /
altre rivolgon sé onde son mosse, / e altre roteando fan soggiorno»
(37-39). While a more exotic bird might well have been chosen for the
simile, the poet opts instead for the lowly jackdaw, as if to reinforce the
emphasis on humble simplicity celebrated throughout these cantos. It
has been assumed generally in the commentary tradition that Dante
intends this figure to represent the various paths followed by the great
contemplative monastics, some of whom never left the cloister, others
of whom moved out to work actively in the world, while still a third
group left and then returned «to whence they had started». Such an
interpretation accords with readings of Jacob's vision offered by Bernard,
Bonaventure, and Peter Damian, where the angels ascending and
descending the heavenly ladder are seen to express the complexity of a
religious calling that led many religious alternatively in and out of
monastic seclusion, «ad contemplativam operationem, et ad
ministrativam».3
Whether or not the simile itself presses for such an interpretation,
it is clear that Dante's celebration of the contemplative life in these
cantos is not undertaken at the expense of the active. On the contrary, he
309
seems to value precisely the reciprocity between the two. From the
beginning of the canto, when we enter the sphere of Saturn «sotto 'l
petto del Leone ardente» (14), the poet is at pains to show how in the
kingdom of heaven opposites complement one another. Just as the fiery
constellation of Leo combines its influence with that of the «cold
planet» of Saturn, so among the contemplative spirits we are to find
ardor joined to serenity, fierce activity to silent meditation. In the
heaven of the Sun, the contrasts betwen Francis and Dominic served to
make a common harmony between «l'uno e l'altro»; here Dante also
draws attention to unity within diversity not as it might exist between
religious orders (as in Par . 10-12), but as it might be found within the
monastic vocation itself. As dramatized through the life stories of those
represented in this heaven - Peter Damian and Benedict - an ardent
concern for the world is by no means separate from a vocation to prayer
and solitude. Rather, as shown in Paradiso 21 and 22, the contemplative
makes a contribution to the mission of the church that extends beyond
the walls of any monastic enclosure. And not only to the church:
Dante's chosen contemplatives are also builders of the larger society.
As if to exemplify this point, the single light that interacts with
Dante throughout Paradiso 21 personifies just such a diversity of
calling, a dialectic between withdrawal and engagement. Descending to
the bottom step of the ladder, much as Cacciaguida made his way to the
foot of the Cross in Paradiso 15. 20, is the spirit of Peter Damian
(1007-1072). As abbot of the Benedictine Camaldolese monastery at
Fonte Avellana, he reorganized that community so as to combine the
ideals of hermit and monk, solitude and community; in doing so, he
claimed to be following the «mind» of St. Benedict, who respected the
eremitical life but rejected it himself. At the behest of Pope Stephen IX
in 1057, Peter left Fonte Avellana to become (much against his will)
bishop and cardinal. Dedicated to the reform of monasticism and a return
of the church to its first principles («ad instar primitivae Ecclesiae»), he
travelled through France and Germany working tirelessly to this end.
But he did not conceive of reform as only entailing the church: rather, he
saw renewal as a joint project between papacy and empire, and one that
required that he function as diplomat between the curia of Pope Gregory
VII and the imperial court of Henry III. In addition to these various
forms of active engagement, he also produced an extraordinary number
and range of writings that led to his reputation as one of the major Latin
stylists of the Middle Ages: letters, sermons, saints' lives, treatises, and
minor works of both prose and verse. The latter include epigrams,
prayers, hymns, liturgical offices, and carmina sacra. Among his poems
is a «Hymnus de gloria paradisi», as well as a hymn written in praise of
310
St. Benedict, which celebrates the founder of western monasticism as
one of the stars in heaven, as a fire lighting up God's «aurora aurea»:
Gemma coelestis pretiosa Regis,

Norma justorum, via monachorum,
Nos ab immundi, Benedicte, mundi
subtrahe coeno.^
After these varied activities in the world, he renounced the honors

previously given him and returned as a common monk to Fonte
Avellana - like one of the jackdaws in Dante's simile, who after flying
about «wheel to whence they had started».
From the moment of his appearance, which is kept anonymous
until line 121, Peter Damian dominates the canto. His interaction with
the pilgrim, moreover, is divided into three distinct speeches or sermoni.
In the first of these (43-72), he resolves Dante's double uncertainty over
the initial silence of this heaven and the nature of the love that impels
his descent from the ladder's height. In the second (73-102), he responds
to the pilgrim's question of why he alone was chosen for this particular
«condescension». Finally in the third (113-135), the saint reveals his
name, the story of his vocation, and his perspective on the corrupt (not
to say corpulent) «modern pastors» (131) of Dante's own day. This last
speech, which mirrors the diatribe against clerical decadence in Peter's
own Liber gomorrhianus , is followed by an unexampled uproar from the
other spirits. No doubt this «grido di sì alto suono» (140) is a common
cry of indignation, a call for divine deliverance that will also be echoed
in the canto to follow (22: 94-96). Confronted with a sound which is as
mysterious as the silence that greeted his entrance into the seventh
heaven, the pilgrim is left to await the clarifications (and thematic
continuities) of canto 22.
It has been argued that the writings of Peter Damian constitute one
of Dante's «sources» not only in this canto but in the larger structures
of the poem - for example, the disposition of the nine circles of hell,
the punishment of the simoniacal popes, even the itinerary of the
voyage to the three realms of the afterlife.5 While the extent of this
indebtedness has been the subject of debate, there is little doubt
concerning the bond of sympathy that unites the poet to this 11th-
century saint. Damian's zeal for the integrity of the church, his
veneration for the monastic life, his positive affirmation of the imperial
power, and his readiness to denounce corruption wherever he encountered
it - these convictions and responses are all to be found in the
Commedia y from the denunciations of the papacy in Inferno 19 to the
stinging rebukes delivered by St. Peter in Paradiso 27 and Beatrice in
311
Paradiso 29. In the historical Peter Damian, Dante found a warrant for
his own convictions, a model for fury over ecclesiastical corruption.
But as if to prevent any undue preoccupation with Peter Damian
the man - let alone Dante's indebtedness to this or that of his writings
- the pilgrim is told quite plainly in his first exchange with the saint
that there was no particular bond or affection that impelled him to first
descend the «scala santa» (64). Quite the contrary: when Dante asks the
reason for the saint's mission to him, presuming a special connection
between them, he is gently disabused (67-72):
né più amor mi fece esser più presta,

che più e tanto amor quinci sù ferve,
sì come il fiammeggiar ti manifesta.
Ma l'alta carità, che ci fa serve
pronte al consiglio che '1 mondo governa,
sorteggia qui sì come tu osserve.
Damian's reply constitutes another lesson in the «mind» of paradise.

With his emphasis on heaven's «deep charity» rather than on individual
affection, he recalls Piccarda Donati's declaration in Paradiso 3 about the
resolution of each soul in God's rule, «and in His will is our peace»
(85). Damian also shows a similar acceptance of his place in the divine
hierarchy of vision, confessing without complaint that there are loves
higher than his own. In the rarefied atmosphere of the seventh heaven,
whose height above the other spheres is noted more than once, this
modesty is perhaps even more impressive than was Piccarda's in the
heaven of the moon.
If the contentment of the blessed in whatever God wills is a theme
played throughout Paradiso , its presentation here in the context of
predestination marks a significant variation. In what amounts to the
doctrinal, as well as literal, center of the canto (73ff), the pilgrim asks
why it was Damian in particular who was predestined to first speak to
him. Even before the question is fully expressed, the saint is whirled
like a wheel in response to the «luce divina» in which he is centered,
and wherein, as Peter himself says, «I enwomb myself» (84: «in ch'io
m'inventro»). After offering one of Dante's most striking neologisms,
the saint then makes his reply; but in the manner of the Paradiso at
large, what is given with one hand is taken away with the other. For
while Peter Damian assures the pilgrim that he looks directly at the
«somma essenza» (87), that he burns clearly and brightly with eternal
vision, he is nonetheless blind to the inner workings of that ultimate
reality. Nor is he any different in this regard from any other of the
blessed (91-102):
312
Ma quell' alma nel ciel che più si schiara,
quel serafin che 'n Dio più l'occhio ha fisso,
a la dimanda tua non satisfarà,
però che sì s'innoltra ne lo abisso
de l'etterno statuto quel che chiedi,
che da ogne creata vista è scisso.
E al mondo mortai, quando tu riedi,
questo rapporta, sì che non presumma
a tanto segno più mover li piedi.
La mente, che qui luce, in terra fumma;
onde riguarda come può là giùe
quel che non pote perché '1 ciel l'assumma.
These lines recall earlier passages in the poem: Virgil's remorseful

«Be content, human race, with the quia» in Purgatorio 3; Solomon's
warning against human presumption in Paradiso 13; the numerous
charges to return to earth with the wisdom garnered in heaven (most
proximately in the words of Cacciaguida in Paradiso 17); and, more
immediately still, the discussion of predestination in the heaven of
Jupiter ( Paradiso 19-20). Rather than take up again the topic of God's
election of the blessed, however, the poet here shows he is more
interested in providence than predestination. For the question posed to
Peter Damian has nothing to do with salvation; it pertains, rather, to
what goes on within God's counsel; why one of the blessed is chosen to
enact the divine will in any given way; why, for example, Peter Damian
should welcome the pilgrim into the company of the contemplatives
instead of the spirit one might have expected to meet first - Peter's
predecessor and «mentor», St. Benedict.
This kind of knowledge is not available to the blessed, be they
human or angelic, much less to the mortal mind not yet «imparadised».
And so the pilgrim finds himself standing before Damian at an impasse,
just as he will be once more in the following canto, when he asks to see
Benedict's face unveiled and is told that such a vision awaits the
Empyrean. Here, however, the limitation placed on knowledge is
eternal, a sign of the unbridgeable gap between creature and Creator.
While the pilgrim acknowledges himself «curbed» in his questioning,
having been «prescribed» by Damian's words of correction (103:
«prescrisser»), he is in no way discouraged from asking more. Drawing
back from presumption, he changes the altitude of his direction and
humbly asks who the light was .
Peter's reply forms his third sermone. As with the biographies of
Francis and Dominic, the life story begins with geographical siting. But
313
whereas the great founders of the Mendicant Orders were grounded in
their place of birth, Peter Damian points to the Fonte Avellana
hermitage just below mount Catria - his spiritual home both before
and after his engagement in the world. He tells the pilgrim that this
beloved retreat, «which once was wholly given to worship» (111: «che
suole esser disposto a sola latria»), is not far distant from the poet's own
homeland (107: «patria»). And yet, with Cacciaguida's prophecy of exile
still fresh in memory from canto 17, the very notion of Dante's having
a stable home - patria is juxtaposed here with Catria and latria -
underscores the irony that runs throughout Damian's speech. In terms of
geography alone, moreover, Ravenna, which was Dante's place of exile
while writing these cantos of the Paradiso , is as close to Peter's former
hermitage as is the Florence that exiled him.
Speaking of life in his beloved hermitage, Peter Damian says that
he was «content in contemplative thoughts» (117) - a line which in
syntax and alliteration («contento ne' pensier contemplativi») suggests
the happy enclosure of the eremitical life itself. Like the apostles Peter
and Paul he lived simply, with olive oil his only spice; like them too,
he was barefoot and lean, learning in heat and frost alike to become
«firm» (114), no doubt alluding thereby to the rootedness of the
Benedictine votum stabilitatis. In the midst of this recollection,
however, his thoughts turn abruptly away from then to now, from the
Fonte Avellana he remembers to the infinitely diminished reality Dante
might encounter in its stead (1 18-120):
Render solea quel chiostro a questi cieli

fertilemente; e ora è fatto vano,
sì che tosto convien che si riveli.
The same cloister that used to render souls to God, and in doing so to
forge a link between our earth and the heaven represented by this
company of contemplative spirits, has become a wasteland: «ora è fatto
vano». The monastic garden enclosed is now a desert, its paradise of
prayer and work become yet another version of paradise lost.
The prophecy of disclosure and retribution contained in line 120
provides a transition to the remainder of Peter's sermone. In it we find
the kind of invective characteristic of the Saint's Liber gomorrhianus
merging with Dante's own indictment of the present day: together they
mete out heaven's judgment before it is otherwise revealed. But the poet
does not use Peter Damian to be nostalgic about a purity that never was;
the saint also refers to an 11th-century church in which the curial hat
also passed from bad to worse (126: «di male in peggio si travasa»). But
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if the church's hierarchy was corrupt in Peter Damian's time, which was
itself already apostate from the era of the apostles Peter and Paul, how
much greater is the falling off among «moderni pastori». In some of the
broadest humor to be found in the Commedia , the successors of «lean
and barefoot» disciples almost beggar description (130-135):
Or voglion quinci e quindi chi rincalzi

li modemi pastori e chi li meni,
tanto son gravi, e chi di rietro li alzi.
Cuopron d'i manti loro i palafreni,
sì che due bestie van sotť una pelle:
oh pazienza che tanto sostieni!
Sapegno suggests that out of this grotesque portrayal of tottering

excess - of a hierarchy barely in the saddle and sorely in need of
propping up - we are «indirectly» given Dante's own ideal of a good
prelate: «a man mature in ascetical practices, rich in apostolic zeal,
wholly dedicated to his spiritual mission and disdainful of honors and
worldly comforts: a Peter Damian or a Bonaventure».6 Such a reading
may well be possible, and yet the overwhelmingly direct impression left
by these lines is utterly negative. Damian etches in vitriol a church
hierarchy become the «beast»; but instead of the apocalyptic vision
afforded in Purgatorio 32 (where we find an actual transformation along
these lines), Paradiso 21 scores a homiletic tour de force. Peter Damian
fights the good fight with mockery.
The appeal to God's «patience» at the end of this discourse is in
reality a call for reparation - a mysterious «vendetta» soon to be named
as such (Par. 22.14), shortly to be anticipated, but (like the «soccorso»
prophesied by Benedict in the next canto) never to be explained. «Oh
pazienza che tanto sostieni!» is also the last line spoken by Peter
Damian, who suddenly resumes the spinning motion noted earlier in
lines 80-81, when he was first «embosomed» in the divine light. This
time, however, he is joined by a host of other souls, who like him are
made more beautiful with every turn (138: «e ogne giro le facea più
belle»; 139-142):
Dintorno a questa vennero e fermarsi,

e fero un grido di sì alto suono,
che non potrebbe qui assomigliarsi;
né io lo ntesi, sì mi vinse il tuono.
Thus the canto ends abruptly, with what Mark Musa's commentary
reminds us is «the loudest noise made in the Comedy». Lacking an
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exact earthly likeness for this incomparable sound, Dante falls back on
thunder to describe how the cry of the blessed overcame him. Once again
we return to the theme of Jove and Semeie, a narrative of transformation
that, as Kevin Brownlee has shown, continues to be reworked in the
cantos that follow.7 At the outset of Paradiso 21 the pilgrim was told
that Beatrice withheld her smile so that he not become like Semeie
when she was burned to ashes at the unmediated disclosure of a god, or
like the bough of a tree shattered by lightning (12: «che trono
scoscende»). Having seen the pilgrim spared divine thunder at a time
when he was not able to bear it, we realize now that he has grown in his
capacity to witness (if not fully to understand) its power. We watch
him, so to speak, become a contemplative.
Indeed, our awareness of the pilgrim's maturation of vision - his
contentment in «pensier contemplativi» - is subtly enhanced by the
peculiar quality of his interaction with Beatrice. When she tells him
initially to make himself a mirror to all he sees, he rejoices in his
obedience to her command (19-24). Likewise, when subsequently he
burns with desire to address the light of Peter Damian descending to the
foot of the ladder, he holds his speech and waits upon Beatrice for
indication of when he should speak and when be silent (46-48). A
similar situation occurs in Paradiso 22.25-27, where Dante stands before
the soul of Benedict «like one who in fear of being forward does not dare
to ask a question». This emphasis on obedience to a master, and on the
need to discern the proprieties of speech and silence, recalls the Rule of
St. Benedict, «De taciturnitate»: «it becomes the master to speak and
teach, but it is fitting for the disciple to be silent and to listen». ^ In this
sphere of Benedictine saints, it comes as no surprise to find their rule
observed.
In the heaven of Saturn, therefore, Dante learns the difficult lesson
of silence, together with the art of prayerful «speculation». Without
doubt, he is portrayed as a novice in both regards, breaking through the
barrier of his own prudent hesitation to pose impossible questions about
providence and (in Paradiso 22) to ask for what can only be glimpsed in
the Empyrean. At best he is shown to be an imperfect disciple of these
contemplative masters. Yet the fruit of his time spent in this cloister of
contemplatives is soon to be made manifest in canto 23, with its vision
of the Church Triumphant, as well as in the «vista nova» that concludes
the poem. Peter Damian mourns the loss of monasticism's abundant
harvest, but in Paradiso 21-22 Dante provides the reader with his own
golden ladder to heaven.9
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NOTES
^he text of the Commedia is cited according to Petrocchi's vulgata ; the

English translations are taken from The Divine Comedy , trans, with
commentary, by Charles S. Singleton, 3 vols, in 6 parts, Bollingen Series
80 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970-75). - For readings of
this canto, see P. Brezzi, Nuove letture 7 (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1974), pp.
15-33; F. P. Luiso (Firenze: Sansoni, 1912), pp. 5-68; G. Mesini, Letture
classensi 3 (1970), pp. 323-346; M. Pecoraro, Lectura Scaligera 3
(Firenze: Le Monnier, 1968), pp. 733-784; A. Seroni, Da Dante a Verga
(Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1972), pp. 28-38. - For a consideration of Par. 21
and 22 together, see my essay, «"By Gradual Scale Sublim'd": Dante's
Benedict and Contemplative Ascent», in Monasticism and the Arts , ed. T.
G. Verdón (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1984), pp. 255-270.
^The Rule of Saint Benedict , ed. and trans, by J. McCann (Westminster, MD:
Newman Press, 1952), pp. 38-39: «Wherefore, bretheren ... then must we
set up a ladder by our ascending actions like unto that which Jacob saw in
his vision, whereon angels appeared to him, descending and ascending. By
that descent and ascent we must surely understand nothing else than this,
that we descend by self-exaltation and ascend by humility. And the ladder
erected is our work in the world, which for the humble heart is raised up by
the Lord unto heaven».
^The cited phrase is from Bonaventure. See Bosco & Reggio (Florence: Le
Monnier, 1985), 3: 346.
^Peter Damians «Carmina sacra et preces» are found in PL 145: 917-986;
the quote from «De Benedicto abbate, hymnus, ad vésperas» is found in col.
957. See also O. J. Blum, New Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: McGraw
Hill, 1967), 11: 214-215, and M. Lokrantz, L'opera poetica di S. Pier
Damiani (Göteborg-Uppsala, 1964).
^ Arsenio Frugoni surveys this material in his entry on Peter Damian in the
Enciclopedia Dantesca (Rome: Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana, 1973),
4:491.
"N. Sapegno, in his comm. to the Commedia (Firenze: La Nuova Italia,
1973), 3: 270: «Indirettamente, il poeta lascia trasparire il suo ideale del
buon prelato; un uomo maturato nelle pratiche ascetiche, ricco di
apostolico zelo, tutto dedito alla sua missione spirituale e sprezzante di
onori e agi mondani: Pier Damiano o Bonaventura».
'K. Brownlee, «Ovid's Semeie and Dante's Metamorphosis: Paradiso
21-22», in The Poetry of A llusion.Vir g il and Ovid in Dante's Commedia,
ed. R. Jacoff and J. Schnapp (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991),
pp. 224-232.
°«Nam loqui et docere magistrům condecet: tacere et audire discipulum
convenit» (op. cit., pp. 36-37).
^This essay is scheduled to appear in the forthcoming Lectura Dantis
Californiensis.
317
Paradiso XXII
Author(s): WILLIAM WILSON
Accessed: 17-02-2020 23:09 UTC
Lectura Dantis
WILLIAM WILSON
XXII
The abrupt twists and turns in the Comedy that so immediately
defy interpretation - when the guide «puts his head where his feet had
been» (Inf. XXXIV, 79), when an earthquake shatters a conversation
among poets (Purg. XX, 141) - generally occur at moments of sudden
transition in the story. In Paradiso XXII, where we leave the entire
world of becoming to enter that of pure being, I count at least four such
events. As Canto XXI ends, contemplatives on Saturn give a deafening
cry of prophetic judgment which leaves Dante, heretofore maturing in
the ecstasy of Heaven, calling for Beatrice like a child for his mother
(1-6); the pilgrim is bidden for the first time to look down, not up
(127-29); for the first time Dante asks to see a soul in his straight
human form (58-60); and Beatrice, as she announced in Canto XXI, will
not smile (10-12). One way to get a fast grip on these scenes is to recall
Jacques Maritain's thirty-two year old essay on the «innocence» of
Dante.1 By innocence Maritain does not intend the strict theological
meaning of a general ignorance about our fallen state in the created
order. He means the more general sense of a childlike mind that springs
from immediate delight, fear, unchecked curiosity, and the like. His
essay is a masterful case for the elusive presence of this category
throughout the Comedy. For instance, Maritain shows that the pilgrim's
delight in the simple order and clarity of philosophical argument, not
the scholarly rigor of the case itself, alone accounts for Dante's ability
to get away with what no other poet can - didacticism.
In Canto XXII, of course, Dante's innocence is obvious: the blunt
request to see the humanity behind the poetic dress is almost an
invasion of privacy; and he cowers to learn of the wrath of ascetics. But
it is also employed in subtle ways. In the examples of the refusal of the
smile and the request that Dante look down, innocence is at work as a
negative. Dante loses it in both of these events. He must see grace at
work in some way other than in the beloved's smile of eros redeemed.
He must see it in a direct gaze at the «threshing floor» of Earth.
The action of Canto XXII begins at XXI, 28-30, when Dante sees a
golden ladder rising and vanishing into the sphere of the fixed stars and
beyond. In her celebrated study of the Comedy , The Ladder of Vision,
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Irma Brandeis notes that the higher into paradise the pilgrim proceeds
«the more the literal journey thins away into the airiest remnant of
concreteness». He enters directly into the body of the moon; he is
unscorched by the sun. Nothing «meets the eye but souls and soul
formations... and there is no anchorage in the home world of solid
things».2 The eye of the reader must move from heaven's own «solids»,
the social harmony of lights as garlands, crosses, eagles and the eyes of
eagles, so that the act of straining-in-brilliance-to-see will be an aspect
of straining-in-truth-to-£nöw. Here again innocence is powerfully
employed. We accept the truth of the lessons taught in these spheres
through the simple delight, fear, or curiosity in which Dante learns
them. We are (increasingly) affected too, that is, by their mere order and
clarity; and this order and clarity is depicted by the poet in these celestial
forms of social harmony which present the lessons, and by their
increasing «airiness», stretch the mind toward «thinner» abstractions.
But though Brandeis cites the ladder in the title of her book, she fails to
note that this object breaks the pattern. Here we do have a «home
world» solid, and it is not made up of soul-lights. We have a ladder, and
up and down it the souls move (XXI, 29-32). But innocence is still at
work. It can be found both in the fact that the poet has selected a
«homely» object to splice Being to Becoming, and it can be found in
the pilgrim's ready acceptance of the ladder's presence. This readiness is
underscored by the fact that the biblical story of «Jacob's Ladder» (XXII,
70-72) is the source of the standard medieval symbol for the virtue of
Saturn, contemplation. At this point the poetry is so condensed that it
is almost impossible to unravel. For the moment we must simply note
that as Dante, though he is going higher into Heaven, is getting closer
to his return to earth when he will write the poem, so the innocence
through which we accept the poem is equally taking a turn homeward.
He will soon be back in the real dark valley of Italy, and if he is to do
his job he must lose his innocence. To be sure, his «alta fantasia»
(XXXIII, 142) must fail him.
Richard of St. Victor notes that, whereas «thinking crawls» and
«meditation marches», contemplation «circles around with marvelous
quickness ... and when it wishes suspends itself in the heights».-* So
Dante has the contemplatives moving down the ladder in the playful
flight of jackdaws (XXI, 34-39). There is no single formation - no
possibility that contemplation could be rendered in a single figure as is
justice or wisdom or love. The mind of the contemplative by-passes all
finite analogies. The birds are united as a «flock» only, as a direction of
movement before and after the individual «strut», the «certo grado»
(XXI, 42) of each soul. Since the ladder is the chosen object around
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which this playfulness occurs, the movement is up and down.
Contemplation stays the same whether it ascends higher or soars
homeward. This two-fold direction is always prior to the shape or the
teaching it renders.
The teaching toward which this symbol of the ladder focuses the
mind is simply that of divine grace itself. There is no punctuation
between divine condescension and human uplifting. This teaching
pervades the entire poem and the pilgrim specifically learns it in
Paradiso XIX. In questioning whether the ways of predestination are
simply capricious, Dante is taught not the logic of God's decrees - he
is not shown the causal joint between election and inspiration; rather he
is taught the nature of the single reality which makes such a response
nonsensical (88-90):
Cotanto è giusto quanto a lei consuona:

nullo creato bene a sé la tira
ma essa, radiando, lui cagiona.
The reality is ladder-like. Whatever accords with divine will (whatever is

uplifted) is a result of God's having caused such goods (is a result of
God's condescension). Human agency is a coordination of divine and
human wills in the single direction of the action.
This is not to say that there is no moral logic to the doctrine.
Piccarda speaks to the issue in Cantos III-IV. Though she is seen by
Dante in the lowest sphere of Heaven, she does so only because the
«dirn» brilliance of her beatitude is all the new arrivals in Heaven can
bear. Accordingly, she is perfectly placed for the salvific work she must
do. And this means that she is equal to all others in Heaven who have a
special task to perform and dwells as an equal with them in the
Empyrean where history's pilgrimage is over. Though she is low (better
to say, because she is low), she is as good as exalted (IV, 34-42).
In other words the moral logic of grace must be artificially split
into two directions if it is at all to be analyzed. This entails a further
point: the split moral logic points out the split poetic logic. In Canto I,
Dante realizes that he is unable to put his vision of Heaven into words
(4-9), and so he prays for a second breath of inspiration (13-17) to render
the vision through the glass of poetry. He renders his unsayable vision
by having all that he sees come down to him in Piccarda's way to
accommodate his sight so that he may rise to the full reality of this
prevenient grace. This also means that every metaphor or simile - and
every «formation» of souls - artificially divides (divides by an artifact)
this one dispensation of grace. The ladder then, as the figure of the unity
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of the directions, is behind every formation Dante devises. When he
confronts the real object, as he does in Canto XXI, he is telling a tale of
a poet's triumph over stiff literary odds. When he mounts the ladder in
XXII, 100-101, he climbs the solid metaphor behind his own poetry.
Climbing the ladder also brings to a head two themes in the
Paradiso . One of course is divine election. The poet who had to be a
pilgrim and write his way to the end of vision, gains, through grace, his
goal. The other is more elusive though closely related. Throughout the
poem salvation signals a discovery of vocation. To be among the elect
requires the ecstasy of knowing that a task will employ the will's entire
freedom. Piccarda is in the Empyrean because she has it within her to go
and meet the pilgrim who is, as it were, squinting. And the theme is
explicitly stated by Charles Martel in Canto VIII, 97-148. Every person
is given, when created, he says, an inherent set of talents, and creation
will not be complete - salvation will not be realized - until these
talents are put to work in some concrete activity to fit the entire
providential scheme. To become what one is, then, is to fall into the
story of a prior providential will at work for the good of all, as it is at
work for the concrete good of each.
The mystery of the cooperation of divine and human wills, seen in
the doctrine of election, is in fact heightened in the tale Charles Martel
tells. What could be more «improvident» than a man who holds the
political hope of the future being cut down in his youth, only to be
replaced by a brother who is totally unfit for the post? This foreboding
note about providence is repeated in several places. We see it in
Cacciaguida's prophecy: though Dante will be a poet, his career will
take place in exile (XVII, 55-66). We see it in Justinian's statement that
the fall of Jerusalem was just vengeance for the crucifixion (VI, 92-93).
And we see it again in XXII. The contemplatives' deafening shout of
execration is directed at God's providential people, the Church itself.
By implication, Dante is shocked not only by the severity of the
contemplatives' wrath. The vision of swirling jackdaws is hardly a
preparation for extreme anger; nor does such ire square with the general
conception of the monastic life. The outcry was a prophecy (which
Dante was too deafened to hear), and this is a clue to how the passage
should be understood. Prophecy was always considered in the Middle
Ages to be a gift of the ascetic life. Contemplano: one who practices
the virtue is aware and focused in a special way to see the coinherence of
past, present, and future. In the Summa Theological St. Thomas
explicitly links the ascetic life with the powers of the prophet.
Contemplation, he says, leads to a concern to what God does in the
world, and the power of contemplation, in turn, is a result of construing
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worldly actions to see how they might fit a plan made by a just and
merciful God. But this entire sequence remains puzzling for the fact that
none of this explanation (or any other) is given. After lengthy analyses
of everything in Paradise - the spots on the moon, the nature of vows
and sacrifice, the idea of justice, the mystery of election - no word of
explanation is offered here. In the land of contemplation where a direct
insight into God's ways is offered, the very nature of the life is left a
puzzle. As Dante pulls himself together, he is asked to go speak to an
approaching soul almost as if this might be a useful way to while away
his time on a planet he by happenstance does not fathom (19-21):
Ma rivolgiti omai inverso altrui;

ch'assai illustri spiriti vedrai
se com'io dico l'aspetto redui.
We will see that the reason the Poet does not give an explanation for
these unexpected events is that the life of contemplation is attained more
by grace and experience than by learning and understanding; and the
experience is that of losing innocence - and winning a vocation.
Before reaching this conclusion, however, we must examine one of
the other puzzles we have noted earlier. Beginning in Canto XXI, where
we first ascend to Saturn, Beatrice does not smile and Dante is not
allowed to hear the music of the spheres. Beatrice explains the refusal by
reminding Dante of the story in Ovid when Semeie asks to see Jupiter
in his pure divinity, without the incognito of his worldly appearance.
Like Semeie, Dante would be reduced to ashes if he were granted his
request to behold what human eyes cannot bear (4-6). Commentators
often contend that the tale is used to draw a distinction between the
pagan and Christian powers over the vainglorious soul. One grants the
wish, the other frees the will by denying the (ostensibly) free choice.
But whatever we might make of such an explanation, it does not address
the central problem: throughout the Paradiso the smile of Beatrice, the
music of the spheres, the degrees of light reflected by the soul, are all
exactly «measured», as we have seen, to accommodate the eyes and the
ears of the pilgrim. Why then should the poet reverse the order and make
the very method Heaven uses to safeguard the soul a liability?
As we did above, we can scout out the sources for a preliminary
answer. St. Thomas argues that since contemplation and prophecy are
the highest attainments of humankind (are the final virtues before
attaining the realm of pure being), they must be accompanied by a new
and more profound act of revelation. Prophetic contemplation, he says,
is the result of a direct revelation, one which takes effect without the
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mediation of natural objects. Human faith or wisdom or knowledge,
however much they may be availed of grace, share a life with what the
mind may attain by nature. But «knowing by God's light alone», St.
Thomas says, «defines prophecy».5
On Saturn, then, a new mode of revelation is needed: revelation by
degrees. Light, smile, and music accommodate , add by an increasing
planet by planet infusion, a knowledge that uplifts and perfects the
natural mind of the pilgrim. Grace works on nature, but the continuum
of knowledge is one. There are no punctuation marks between the two.
Thus on Saturn, Dante must devise a different metaphor for revelation
and knowledge by way of grace; put another way, the smile of Beatrice
on this planet does not accommodate, and the lesson which he hears (the
cry of anger at the state of the Church with its prophecy of vengeance)
shatters him and cannot be understood. This also explains the switch to
a planetary emblem which is not composed of accommodating souls and
formations, but which has its own life and source of illumination, and
upon which souls themselves must ascend and descend. As we have
seen, the ladder represents in one symbol the unity of two-directional
grace, one action that condescends as it uplifts, something which can be
seen either as going up or going down.
Confused, and longing to see the smile of his beloved, Dante is
ushered away to meet a soul just down from the ladder. As Dante is too
timid even to ask his own mind's question (25-27), the soul approaches
to help without request. In the Convivio , Dante says that true grace is
clearly seen in those actions which bring aid faster than the request. This
implies that the «grace-bringer» comes incognito, as one unexpected, as
one whose real mission is other than the stated one, the stated one being
but a pretense. The soul in this scene says that he comes to satisfy
Dante's (unstated) longing to know who he is, but what he offers, as we
should expect from unbidden grace, is something entirely different. What
he offers in fact is a discourse on the unity of grace.
This unity is already figured in the idea of the bringer coming
disguised. What is more powerful than the soul in need, what can bring
aid, comes in the cloak of humble help. We see this throughout the
Comedy , in the three ladies, the guiding angels on the terraces of
Purgatory, in Vergil himself. But this soul does not simply figure the
unity or point it out, rather he offers himself to be the reality itself. In
answering the unasked question about his identity, he says (40-42):
e quel son io che sù vi portai prima

lo nome di colui che 'n terra addusse
la verità che tanto ci soblima.
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His single identity is given in a series of directions in which a
downward motion immediately implies its opposite. He is the one who
carried up to a peak the name of another who came down with a truth
that brings up all those who hear it.
Whether Dante intended the reference, this passage recalls St. Paul's
citation of the ancient «hymn to Christ» in Philippians 2: 6-11. It is a
recollection not only of a similar two-fold structure, but of a structure
that likewise signals a single identity. St. Paul says that the hymn is
the very «mind of Christ» ( The Jerusalem Bible):
His state was divine

yet he did not cling
to his equality with God
but emptied himself
to assume the condition of a slave,
and became as men are;
and being as all men are,
he was humbler yet,
even to accepting death
death on a cross.
But God raised him high
and gave him the name
which is above all other names
so that all beings
in the heavens, on earth and in the underworld
should bend the knee at the name of Jesus
and that every tongue should acclaim
Jesus Christ as Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
The sign of divinity is a choice to become humble, humble to the point

of ignominious death. And when this is seen in its true exalted form, it
will be registered in the uplifting of those who bend their knees.
Dante's response to this soul's strange avowal of identity will be
equally scriptural. The entire evangelical response to the resurrection of
Christ preserved the sense of this ancient hymn by proclaiming that,
though Jesus now appears in a resplendent glory and a body suited for
eternal life «at the right hand of the Father», his identity as the humble
carpenter's son remains. In the terms of the Comedy , the way in which
Christ came to accommodate the lost, this «form of a servant», is not
simply poetry, is not simply a means of suiting the unready eyes of
new pilgrims. Rather, the means of accommodation, because it is
humble, signals exactly the exultant reality it represents. In a manner of
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speaking, we need at this point neither the motif of Beatrice's smile nor
a suggestive formation of graceful souls. As the ladder represents the
unity of directions in Grace, so the shining soul coming down to give
unrequested aid is quite enough. To come down or to go up, it matters
not the least. The two are the same.
Another way of saying this is that Dante is leaving the land of his
poetry, the land of his artifact, for his own destination as poety the
destination he will attain when he climbs the ladder and finds himself on
his astral point of birth among the fixed stars, Gemini. The point of
transition is marked in Dante's striking request to the soul he has met
that he be allowed to see unveiled his human face (58-60). As we have
seen, Dante has never made this request before. Until this point, he was
content with the accommodating revelations of the souls who came with
grace to see him. But now he desires to see them in their true human
reality. The soul he wishes so to see is St. Benedict, the first of the
great western ascetics, who established his order on Monte Cassino
(who «carried up» what the Son «brought down»). In commenting on
this scene, Peter Hawkins6 argues that in asking the radical question the
poet is beginning to anticipate the final beatific vision of the Comedy
when he will look upon God Himself face to face. The single power of
the true contemplative, which Dante is beginning to exercise in canto
XXII, will be at the end the virtue that will sustain him. His alta
fantasia will fail him. Citing Buti's commentary, Hawkins says that the
contemplatives contemplate the Creator by a direct vision of the
creature, made in the Creator's image.
Thus when the beatific vision is attained in its fullness in Canto
XXXIII, one circle will bear «our image». Long before this though,
Dante has prepared for this reversal, begun in XXII. Most notable is the
illumination of the Rose caused by the river of light reflecting off the
upper surface of the Primum Mobile, the «dome» of the created order
(XXX, 100-108). Heaven does not here reflect light onto creatures, as
has been the case throughout the Comedy ; now the created order reflects
it onto Heaven. Even more bold is Dante's complete reversal, at XXIX,
15, of Exodus 3. The creature says to the Creator in this passage (not
the other way around as the scripture has it), «subsisto». Just as the
freedom of divinity is revealed, best revealed, by the extent to which it
will accomplish its mission, so the soul of the creature is a living
embodiment of that freedom. And if the poet proposes this veil designed
to reveal, in the very act of concealment by a narrative, that something
natural (say the erotic smile of the beloved) can slowly, canto by canto,
be redeemed in a pilgrimage towards a vision of God, then the poet is a
contemplative. If his business is, as Allen Tate said years ago, to
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«conduct an action through analogy of the human to divine ... of the
low to the high ...», then the working hypothesis of the poet is that the
high is also like the low; and therefore that a story about the low
seeking the high will also be one about the high seeking the low.7
Dante says as much in canto XXII when he lets us see his
whirlwind flight up the golden ladder (100-102) by moving his narrative
spotlight down to earth: «S'io torni mai, lettore, a quel divoto / triunfo
per lo quale io piango spesso / le mie peccata e 'l petto mi percuoto...»
(106-108). What he discovered in Canto I (that he would have to write
his way through to the end of the vision), is coming to a close. Earthly
poet and otherworldly pilgrim are again becoming one. When he gains
the top of the ladder he will attain his vocation, and then be able, as St.
Benedict promises (61-63), to look truly on the face of a fellow human
being.
This unity between the majestic written poetry and the tough
reality actually seen is the clue to the unity between the disinterested
contemplation and stern prophecy. At the outset of the canto, Beatrice
almost seems amazed that the pilgrim should be so shaken by the
prophetic outcry of those descending the ladder: «Non sai tu che tu se' in
cielo / e non sai tu che '1 cielo è tutto santo / e ciò che ci si fa vien da
buon zelo?» (7-9). Not yet fully attuned to the full contemplative mind,
still innocent, the Pilgrim is unable to hear the righteous echo of the
stern cry of outrage at the state of the Church. His request to St.
Benedict that he be allowed to see his true human form is a sign that the
influence of the planet is beginning to take over. Upon the request
Benedict says, «Frate, il tuo alto disio / s'adempierà in su l'ultima spera,
/ ove s'adempion tutti li altri e '1 mio» (61-63).
To desire to look straight at flesh is a «high desire»; and this high
desire is a result of the unusual identification - the identification by
restating the double directions of grace - the saint has given. This
along with a triumphal flourish on how at Monte Cassino he was able
to redeem corrupted worship and morals (44-45), is sufficient to cause
Dante to say (52-57):
L' affetto che dimostri
meco parlando, e la buona sembianza

ch'io veggio e noto in tutti li ardor vostri,
così m'ha dilatata mia fidanza
come '1 sol fa la rosa quando aperta
tanto divien quant' ell' ha di possanza.
Not only is the identification and the effect to which Benedict bears
witness sufficient to cause Dante to believe the promise, but the grace
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by which he now believes is itself a figure of the fulfillment. Dante's
confidence is expanding like a rose blessed with sunlight, and it will be
within the great Rose, as we will see in Canto XXXII, 35, that the
promise is kept and Dante sees Benedict take his rightful place among
the elect.
But the poet not only anticipates this scene with the metaphor of
the rose; he points to it directly by having Benedict say that when the
vision is granted it will be in a place where every desire is «perfetta,
matura e intera» (64). He is speaking, of course, of the Empyrean, the
final sphere beyond the created order where everything is in no «where»
and thus all is in place and in time. Here, I would allege, is a supreme
instance of the poet's supreme genius (the «ingegno» he will in a
moment ascend to discover). These elusive and highly suggestive lines
depict univocally the timelessness of Paradise. To see a single soul
straight, a rose in full blossom, a saint in his place on it, is a kind of
witness to an ascent to being oneself in all one's interconnections.
Poetically, then, this means that the contemplative/prophet can see
through a low estate, something which for all others would be a veil
(say a Church gone derelict), to the exalted decree that will judge it.
Seeing it straight is all of a piece with divine will. These souls know
what Beatrice will tell the shattered pilgrim, «everything in heaven is
holy». And as she continues to say, in an otherwise enigmatic line (one
we have not yet considered, 16-18):
La spada di qua sù non taglia in fretta

né tardo, ma' ch'ai parer di colui
che disiando o temendo l'aspetta.
God's judgment comes on time for the contemplative. Just as

Christ in the form of a servant reveals himself sub contrario , so the low
estate of humanity reveals the higher glories of the Father. Coming
down the ladder the vision sounds like a cry of outrage; going up , as
Dante will discover, it sounds like the music of the spheres. Put another
way, when Dante is where (as Benedict has said) all desires are perfect,
ripe and mature - when he is where will and desire are one and what
one ought to want is wanted and what one ought to receive is received,
the sword of wrath will be desired in its divine righteousness, and
received like any gracious gift.
When Dante is escorted to the ladder and swirls upward, he says
that never here below, where up and down follow nature's rules, was
there motion as swift as his (103-105). The «ascent» transcends nature's
«directions». Thus, when he is at the «top» he gains his vocation by
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looking «down». He sees the heavens now all together, and least of all,
on the horizon, the «little threshing floor» of Earth (151). As a poet
who has gained his genius, he is hung between seeing our world clearly,
for what it is, something with a «vii sembiante» (135), and something
out of which he could make the Comedy : «poscia rivolsi li occhi a li
occhi belli» (154). He is the poet about to write again about the
redemption of eros as the brightening smile of a lady.
The action of Canto XXII is simply that of a poet discovering the
embedded structure of his own verse and rising to it. But the drama of
these particular verses goes from the absence of his beloved's smile to
its reappearance. He will not see her smile again until the next canto,
but any reading of XXII must include these lines. For Beatrice smiles
again when Dante is granted a vision of Christ himself ascending to the
Empyrean. Christ is the new «ladder»: the condescension of God in the
uplifting of the flesh of humanity. As Dante faces the vision, he feels
his inspiration to be tantamount to lightning descending (XXIII, 40-45):
Come foco di nube si diserra

per dilatarsi sì che non vi cape
e fuor di sua natura in giù s'atterra,
la mente mia così, tra quelle dape
fatta più grande, di sé stessa uscio,
e che si fesse rimembrar non sape.
Dante's pen must take a leap over another abyss. When it comes to
describing the indwelling of God in the incognito of flesh, his «alta
fantasia» fails, as it will when God Himself is seen directly, in the final
heaven.
NOTES
1 The Ladder of Vision, Garden City, N.Y., 1962, p. 214.

^«Dante's Innocence and Luck», The Kenyon Review, XIV (1952).
Î quote from The Mystical Ark , New York, Paulist Press, p. 263.
4 Summa , Da Ilae, 171, 1.
*Here I am using the new translation and arrangement of the Summa by
Timothy McDermott, London, Methuen, 1991, p. 446.
"«Dante's Benedict and Contemplative Ascent», Monastic ism and the Arts ,
Timothy Verdón, ed., Syracuse, Syracuse University Press, pp. 261-262.
'«The Symbolic Imagination», The Kenyon Review, XIV (1952), p. 261.
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Paradiso XXIII
Author(s): FRANCO MASCIANDARO
Accessed: 17-02-2020 23:10 UTC
Lectura Dantis
FRANCO MASCIANDARO
University of Connecticut
XXIII
And we, with our unveiled faces reflecting like mirrors the brightness
of the Lord, all grow brighter and brighter as we are turned into the
image that we reflect ; this is the work of the Lord who is Spirit.
(2 Cor 3:18)
Beauty as light, or that which «dances as an uncontained splendor

around the double constellation of the true and the good»,1 together with
love and vision to which it is bound inextricably, is the principal idea
that informs Paradiso XXIII. While this is a distinctive feature of the
canto, often described as one of the most beautiful of the Commedia , it
also characterizes the third cantica and, more generally, the entire
poem.2 The highest form and paradigm of beauty is the splendor of God
as manifested through Christ, to whom, according to Saint Thomas
Aquinas and the various Patristic sources that had come down to him,
the name «Beauty» is most fittingly attributed.5 In Paradiso XXIII
Dante represents the creative power of divine beauty - in the cosmos,
in human history, and in his own spiritual journey - through the
triumph of Christ and through the actions that are an integral part of
this theo-drama.
Reflecting the classical and medieval idea of beauty based on
consonando, according to which, as Dante wrote in the Convivio , a
beautiful thing is one whose parts appropriately correspond to one
another, creating a harmony that gives delight,4 these actions at once
point to the revealed and concealed beauty of Christ as to their necessary
end and first cause. My approach, dictated in part by the predominantly
theatrical form of Paradiso XXIII,5 is essentially dramatistic.6 By
focusing on the sequence of scenes and the rupture or caesura2 marking
the point where one scene intersects another, I shall attempt to
reconstruct the «tragic vision» provoked by the «tragic rhythm» that
these scenes engender. My argument is grounded in the Burkean
definition of «tragic vision» as that moment of understanding and
transcendence arising in the agent after «suffering» an opposition in the
unfolding action, which he has «organized» through his own act and in
cooperation with other agents and the various elements connected with
or surrounding his act, such as scene and motivation.8
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Toward the end of Paradiso XXII (124-132), Beatrice announces to
Dante the imminent revelation of a divine drama in the form of a
triumph, thus setting the stage for the scenes and actions represented in
the next canto. The pilgrim has just entered the heaven of the fixed
stars, at the point of the constellation of Gemini, under whose influence
he was born. In order to prepare himself for the final blessedness of the
vision of God, and, specifically, for the spectacle that is about to be
played out under the vault of the ninth heaven - as a foreshadowing of
«l'ultima salute» (124) - he must purify and sharpen his vision by
gazing upon the world below. Thus his heart, Beatrice tells him, will be
made joyful in a way that will be somewhat consonant with the
gladness of the triumphal throng («sì che 'l tuo cor, quantunque può,
giocondo / s'appresenti a la turba triunfante / che liela vien per questo
etera tondo», 130-132). This joy will result both from the pilgrim's
realization of how far from the earth he has ascended and from his vision
of the order and beauty of the universe, or, to use St. Thomas's famous
criteria of beauty, from his perception of its integrity , proportion , and
clarity ?
The pilgrim's retrospective gaze provokes in him only an imperfect
joy, as he notes what seems to be an irreconcilable opposition between
the order and beauty of the universe and the adulterated beauty of the
earth. As he looks upon the sweeping vista of the seven spheres and
corresponding planets (133-153), he momentarily focuses on the distant
globe that they encircle. Its «vii sembiante» provokes an ironic smile
that suggests a contemptus mundi (134-135). Yet, moments later, when
the earth is seen as «l'aiuola che ci fa tanto feroci» (151), and thus as the
cause of our savagery, it also reveals its place and participation in the
order of the universe, and implicitly its beauty. As Dante surveys the
number, magnitude, and speed of the planets («tutti e sette mi si
dimostraro / quanto son grandi e quanto son veloci / e come sono in
distante riparo», 148-150), he in fact sees the earth in its totality and
integrity («tutta m'apparve da' colli a le foci», 153). Thus, the poet
presents us with a conflictual double vision: the order and beauty of the
earth can only be seen as beauty and order that have been marred by our
sin.
This opposition constitutes what Kenneth Burke has termed the
«motivational force of the scene»,10 which dialectically calls forth -
as, for example, the condition of exile calls forth the nostalgia for one's
homeland - the hope for and perhaps even the faith in the resolution of
that opposition, and hence the hope for a restoration of what may be
dimly perceived as an original proportion and harmony between the
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beauty of the earth and the beauty of the universe. But how can such
restoration or redemption take place? And how does the cosmic scene
itself, which provoked the pilgrim's tainted joy, prepare him for the
forthcoming triumph announced by Beatrice?
Answers to these questions begin to take shape as soon as we turn
our attention to* some of the scenes in the poem that the present scene
clearly echoes. The one that first comes to mind is inscribed in Paradiso
I, 103-105, where Beatrice tells Dante of the likeness that binds the
universe to God: «Le cose tutte quante / hanno ordine tra loro, e questo è
forma / che l'universo a Dio fa simigliarne». We may also remember the
first scene of creation and its beauty evoked by the poet in Inferno I,
37-41, which, before the threatening presence of the «lonza»,
temporarily transformed the pilgrim's fear into hope. Following the
trajectory of the line marked by these scenes into the space outside the
poem, we encounter a similar scene in the Book of Wisdom (11:21,
22-25):
You ordered all things by measure, number, weight ... In your sight the
whole world is like a grain of dust that does not even tip the scales, like a
drop of morning dew falling on the ground. Yet you are merciful to all,
because you can do all things and overlook mens sins so that they can
repent. Yes, you love all that exists, you hold nothing of what you have
made in abhorrence, for had you hated anything, you would not have formed
it.1 1
This passage, which must be added to those usually adduced by the

commentators as Dante's probable sources (Cicero's De re publica VI,
xvi, 16; VI, xx, 21-22; and Boethius' De consol, philos. II, vii, 1-6), is
especially relevant because, unlike these, it speaks not only of the
relative insignificance of the earth, if compared with the vastness and
beauty of the cosmos, but also of God's love of all that exists , including
the grain of dust that is our world, and the sinners who inhabit it. We
may now have a better understanding of what is implicit in the cosmic
scene viewed by the pilgrim and, more importantly, of how, secretly and
imperceptibly, it may contribute to the perfecting of his sight, so that
he may be ready for the divine drama that awaits him. Yet, in a way that
is somewhat commensurate to the pilgrim's inner action, «ch'è moto
spiritale, e mai non posa / fin che la cosa amata il fa gioire» ( Pur g .
XVIII, 32-33), 12 this understanding can only be tentative, needing (and
seeking) elucidation and fulfillment in the actions and scenes that
follow.
The closing verse of Paradiso XXII (154) speaks of a significant
moment that at once advances and arrests the action: «poscia rivolsi li
331
occhi a li occhi belli». The turn of the pilgrim's gaze from the seven
planets circling below his feet, and, specifically, from «l'aiuola che ci fa
tanto feroci» to Beatrice's beautiful eyes, may at first be interpreted as a
sign of the pilgrim's total detachment from and indeed negation of our
«aiuola» and the whole visible universe.13 Yet, in the light of the
preceding remarks, it seems at least plausible that, at a certain level of
his consciousness, and if only obscurely, he is aware of the proportion
between the special creative force of the beauty of Beatrice's eyes and
that of the beauty of the universe. In short, the turning of his gaze from
the order and beauty of the world that gave him an imperfect delight to
the beauty of Beatrice's eyes that suggests the perfecting of that delight,
while stressing an upward movement of transcendence, still constitutes
an action that, dialectically, calls forth the counter-assertion of a
downward pull toward our world. Needless to say, in this moment of
suspense, which at once joins and separates the end of Paradiso XXII and
the beginning of canto XXIII, as the pilgrim gazes into the beautiful
eyes of the beloved, thus arresting the preceding upward thrust of his
glance, the opposition between time and eternity, and heaven and earth,
is still hidden and only dialectically implied by the sequence of scenes
that have led to the present one.
The opening scene of Paradiso XXIII (1-12), evoked by the vehicle

of the augello simile, as it both announces and interprets the actual
scene described by the tenor, of Beatrice's expectant gaze fixed upon the
Zenith, represents an important first solution and transcendence of this
opposition, and hence, for the pilgrim and the reader, a luminous
moment of «tragic vision» (1-12):
Come l'augello, intra l'amate fronde,

posato al nido de' suoi dolci nati
la notte che le cose ci nasconde,
che, per veder li aspetti disiati
e per trovar lo cibo onde li pasca,
in che gravi labor li sono aggrati,
previene il tempo in su aperta frasca,
e con ardente affetto il sole aspetta,
fiso guardando pur che l'alba nasca;
così la donna mia stava eretta
e attenta, rivolta inver' la plaga

sotto la quale il sol mostra men fretta...
We now experience a sudden return to the familiar world of nature, with

its order and beauty. The pilgrim's perspective, as he fixes his eyes on
332
the eyes of Beatrice, is abandoned by the poet in his attempt to give
form to the present paradisal scene. In sharp contrast to «l'aiuola che ci
fa tanto feroci», at least a part of this insignificant and violent world is
now portrayed as significant, harmonious, and beautiful, in and of itself,
but also significant in the larger sense of pointing, by analogy, to the
ultimate, transcendent reality, with its order and beauty, as well as its
mystery. This sudden shift of focus that the narrator shares with his
reader is especially remarkable, if we recall that he, more than the
pilgrim who responded with a bitter smile, expressed his disdain for our
globe's «vii sembiante» («e quel consiglio per migliore approbo / che
l'ha per meno...», Par. XXII, 136-137).
Yet, as we follow the development of the action represented within
the space of the vehicle, we observe that, charged as this action is with
symbolic force, whereby we may see our human condition reflected in it
(signaled, for example, by the pronoun ci in «la notte che le cose ci
nasconde»), it manifests and reasserts the heavenward movement.
Significantly, it does this not by negating but rather by affirming both
the order and beauty of the world and its spiritualization. This is clearly
expressed by the phrases «amate fronde», «dolci nati», «aspetti disiati»,
«ardente affetto», and especially by the emphasis on the bird's desire to
see the longed-for faces of its fledglings and the long-awaited sun. Here,
the anticipation of what is to come coincides with the anticipation of
the delight in seeing the radiance or beauty of the good inherent in the
objects of the bird's love: its fledglings and the sun.
As soon as our attention is directed to Beatrice, we are drawn into
the scene of the pilgrim whose gaze is fixed on his beloved:
«veggendola io sospesa e vaga, / fecimi qual è quei che disiando / altro
vorria, e sperando s'appaga» (13-15). The focus is now on the dramatic
transformation brought about in the pilgrim by his mimetic response to
the beloved's act of longing expectation: now he experiences at once the
desire or love for something that is not present and the satisfaction in
hoping for its manifestation. Thus he experiences faith, which is «the
substance of the things we hope for, and the evidence of things not
seen», as he will affirm in Par. XXIV, paraphrasing Heb 11:1, in
answer to St. Peter's question, «what is faith?». Here emphasis is also
given to the universal human condition of longing expectation, as the
pronoun quei clearly expresses («fecimi qual è quei. . .»).
Once again, the poet has cast a glance toward our world as he
interprets the secret transformation that has now occurred within the
pilgrim: the opposition between the perverted beauty of «l'aiuola che ci
fa tanto feroci» and the beauty of the universe, which earlier he had
«organized», is now transformed into the expectation of that which will
333
resolve it - an expectation that we saw adumbrated as a «motivational
force» in the scene that represented that opposition.
The shift from expectation to vision is almost instantaneous,

suggesting the transcendent nature of the faith (and hope) implicit in
that expectation and of God's answer to it (16-21):
Ma poco fu tra uno e altro quando,

del mio attender, dico, e del vedere
lo ciel venir più e più rischiarando;
e Beatrice disse: «Ecco le schiere
del triunfo di Cristo e tutto 'l frutto
ricolto del girar di queste spere!».
This scene marks the beginning of the second segment or act of the
canto (16-45), which contains the vision of Christ's triumph.14 As it
introduces this vision, it reveals the intimate relationship between light
(and hence beauty), which is what the pilgrim first apprehends, and the
good (of what is described as «troops» and «fruit») that Beatrice unveils
to Dante. As the action of this vision unfolds, we observe that beauty as
light is at once the source and goal for the beholders, as well as the
source and goal of the poetic representation. And within the economy of
this representation, it is once again Beatrice who, with her heightened
beauty, mediates between that source (and goal) and Dante, protagonist
and poet (22-24):
Pariemi che 'l suo viso ardesse tutto,

e li occhi avea di letizia sì pieni,
che passarmen convien sanza costrutto.
As Beatrice's transfigured face and joyful eyes mirror Christ's radiance

and the radiance of the blessed souls, they reveal through beauty the
paradoxical hidden revelation of the Incarnation and its fruitfulness in
human history.
The revelation of this mystery can only be experienced through
faith. If we glance back to the pilgrim's tacit faith underlying his
expectation intensified earlier by Beatrice's concealment of the name of
Christ, as she announced the coming of a «turba triunfante», we must
observe that this faith finds its fulfillment in the pilgrim's present
vision of Christ who has come, revealing and concealing, in Eliot's
words, the reconciliation of the «impossible union / of spheres of
existence...».15 The special fruitfulness of this faith lies in the fact that
it both is elicited by and is a response to Christ as the Incarnate God as
334
well as to all the blessed saved by their faith in him.16 The faith
represented in Beatrice, as she gazes into the radiant Christ whom she
has longingly awaited, is revealed by her growing brighter and brighter
as she is transformed into the image she reflects. Thus, she is no longer
only a mediator or a sign that points to Christ and the mystery of
Incarnation, and, correspondingly, to the mystery of faith, but has
become herself an ineffable source and goal of Dante's vision, to a
degree that surpasses all previous manifestations of her mysterious
goodness and beauty, including her equally mysterious salvific effect on
Dante, as lover and poet (which can be traced within the Commedia and
also back to the Vita Nuova).
In perfect consonance with the pilgrim's experience of the mystery
of faith as manifested through and in Beatrice, the narrator «leaps» into
silence, which is paradoxically expressed by his declaration that he
cannot speak of this experience. As we turn our attention from the
pilgrim's vision of Beatrice's transfigured face to his vision of Christ's
triumph, which the poet introduces with the famous Trivia simile, we
experience with the pilgrim the paradoxically creative empty moment or
caesura which, although unutterable, at once reveals his inadequacy to
fathom the mystery of Beatrice's heightened beauty and the inner
transformation arising in him at the sight of that beauty, which enables
him to gaze into the new, spiritual sun that shines above him. This
movement from radiance to greater radiance, and from beauty to greater
beauty thus occurs in a timeless moment of both blindness and insight
that the narrator «represents» through his utterance of the necessity to
speak of it «sanza costrutto». Reflecting the theological aesthetics of
vision and rapture embodied in the words of St. Paul cited at the
beginning of this lectura , here Dante is transformed by the object of his
vision. This scene thus represents the corrected version of his dream of
the «femmina balba», at the opening of Purgatorio XIX (7-33), in
which, parodying the sun's and love's creative power, with his gaze he
transforms the repulsive, stammering woman into a beautiful siren, who
sings the alluring promise of satisfying every desire («e qual meco
s'ausa, / rado sen parte; si tutto l'appago!», 23-24).
Suddenly, the narrator's voice turns from the declaration of
ineffability to fabulation (25-30):
Quale ne' plenilunïi sereni

Trivia ride tra le ninfe etterne
che dipingon lo ciel per tutti i seni,

viď i' sopra migliaia di lucerne
un sol che tutte quante l'accendea,
come fa '1 nostro le viste superne.
335
If one of the striking features of this passage is the disproportion and
lack of logical relationship between vehicle and tenor, for Christ as a
sun is here compared with Trivia the moon;17 and if these features are
part of an appropriate mimesis or «figure» of the pilgrim's extraordinary
experience as a spectator of the theo-drama of Christ's triumph, it does
not necessarily mean that the function of this figure «is purely
emotional, and as such not only successful, but among the most
'convincing' in the poem...», or (citing the same critic) that «the finer
level of Dante's communication with the reader . . . .is not the objective
level but the sentimental one».18 This response - obviously rooted in
the Romantic fallacy - is not consonant with Dante's representation
and its underlying medieval aesthetics. Contrary to the sentimental
notion of aesthetic contemplation as merely a kind of heightened
emotion and lyricism, this aesthetics is based on the idea that beauty is
primarily connected with knowledge.19 While undoubtedly not absent
from our passage, sentiment or emotion is rather of an intellectual kind,
being more the delight of vision, the inner radiance or, as in St.
Thomas, the «aesthetic visio» which «comes to birth as the culmination
and completion of intellectual knowledge at its most complex level».20
As we return to our passage, we witness the interplay of the
knowledge of beauty and the knowledge of the truth and the good
inherent in the Incarnation, with beauty now leading the way to this
good and this truth, and now appearing as their manifestation and
splendor. In the vehicle of the Trivia simile the poet foregrounds the
beauty of creation as the splendor experienced by humankind beholding a
moonlit night. From this perspective, the moon appears as a goddess,
whose beauty is manifested through her smile, and the stars are seen as
nymphs who share that smile. The special force of this metaphor,
because of its pervasive presence in Dante's poetry - from the Vita
Nuova to the Commedia - is too well known to review here. It will
suffice to recall this passage from the Convivio (III, viii, 11-12): «E che
è ridere se non una corruscazione de la dilettazione de l'anima, cioè uno
lume apparente di fuori secondo sta dentro?».21 Thus, we may see the
smiling Trivia as the embodiment of the spiritualization of all creation
through beauty: the beauty of the moon and of the stars and the beauty
of the human soul by analogy are represented and experienced as one,
while remaining distinct. Does this point to the mystery of the
Incarnation represented in the tenor? For the moment it appears only as
a possible, veiled suggestion that may or may not be strengthened by
the analysis of other features of the vehicle.
One of these is that the moon, which is traditionally identified with
336
the impermanence of temporal existence, in Dante's cosmology is also,
like all celestial bodies, everlasting (in Par . II, 34, the poet calls it
«etterna margarita»). Another significant feature is that, as full moon,
and thus at the height of its perfection or integritas , and therefore its
beauty, it appears as a source of light that, like the sun, shines upon the
other stars, which are identified with eternity (as «ninfe etterne»). This
dual nature or «role» of the moon, symbolically reconciling time and
eternity, the human and the divine, resembles the disproportion and
paradox mentioned above as the form that characterizes the relationship
between the vehicle and the tenor in the Trivia simile. The paradoxical
union of opposites marks not only this relationship, but is evident in
the vehicle itself, in a manner that more secretly embodies the form, and
hence the beauty that helps to bring to light the beauty of the
Incarnation.
A close reading of the very texture of the Trivia simile brings out
the same pattern of consonant disproportion, first within the vehicle
itself, and then between the vehicle and the tenor. The former has already
been brought to light, without however being linked to the mystery of
Incarnation inscribed in the tenor, by Mario Fubini.22
The luminosity of the first term of the comparison (closely
dependent on darkness and the nocturnal blue sky) is not described, in
contrast with the second («vid'i' ... un sol...»), but is directly presented
by the poet and immediately experienced by the reader as a content that
lies within the form, at the moment of performance . The perception of
the luminous /'s, in harmonious contrast with the dark m's and the blue
e's, coincides with our inner vision of the luminous Trivia and the
attendant nymphs. In fact, as we pronounce the verses, the sequence of
¿'s - lengthened by the enjambements and the diaereses - become for
us a thread of light that brightens us as we, like Trivia, smile. This
«corruscazione de la dilettazione de l'anima» reminds us of the
spiritualization and beauty of creation identified above as a significant
feature of the vehicle, which points to Christ as the new, spiritual sun
represented in the tenor. Dante has thus given form to Christ's descent
to the world and to the effect of his redemption in the world.
In the tenor of the Trivia simile the pilgrim appears as a confident
beholder of Christ as a sun. The narrator in fact likens this to the
familiar, universal experience of seeing the sun here on earth.
Remembering that in the preceding canto Dante had for the first time
sustained the vision of the physical sun {Par. XXII, 142-143), we can be
more certain of such confidence. Yet, this confidence suffers a sudden
reversal. As Dante faces the spiritual sun, his vision lacks the power to
sustain it: «per la viva luce trasparea / la lucente sustanza tanto chiara /
337
nel viso mio, che non la sostenea» (31-33). Here the poet has
constructed an image of light on light, the first symbolizing the radiance
of the blessed, through which the second light or glory of Christ's
resurrected body appears to the pilgrim. Significantly, it is the light of
Christ's glorified body that, surpassing the other light, Dante's eyes
cannot sustain. Thus, while the stress here is on the beauty of Christ's
humanity, this is, paradoxically, beyond human comprehension. In this
paradox we are now tacitly invited to identify the disclosure of the
pattern of consonant disproportion that characterized the Trivia simile.
Hence, what at first appeared incongruous or disproportionate, in
relation to the event of Christ's appearance, now seems cogent and
consonant to the representation of the concealed revelation of the
mystery of the Incarnation.
By virtue of this mystery and in its presence the pilgrim
experiences, accordingly, the creative paradox of blindness and insight.
Once again, through the tragic opposition that he has helped organize,
he attains tragic vision (34-39):
Oh Beatrice, dolce guida e cara!

Ella mi disse: «Quel che ti sobranza
è virtù da cui nulla si ripara.
Quivi è la sapienza e la possanza
ch'aprì le strade tra '1 cielo e la terra,
onde fu già sì lunga disianza».
The pilgrim's empty moment of failure and the corresponding rupture in

the action are filled by the narrator's exclamation, which like a prayer
seems to express the pilgrim's faith and hope in Beatrice's intercession.
Yet this comes not as a demonstration or an unveiling of a truth, but
rather as an act of faith, which prompts Dante to continue gazing, with
faith equal to that of his guide, into the mystery represented by the
triumph of Christ. Meanwhile, in the light of Beatrice's words, the
pilgrim and the narrator should, if only tacitly, experience the
transcendence of tragic vision, seeing resolved the previously organized
opposition between heaven and earth. They can no longer smile
disdainfully at the earth's «vii sembiante», nor can they view it with
despair or detachment as «l'aiuola che ci fa tanto feroci», for Christ is
identified by Beatrice with the wisdom and the power that, as God's
response to humanity's lunga disianza (as interpreted by the «augello»,
and by Beatrice and Dante in the first scenes of the canto), opened the
roads between heaven and earth.
But what is this wisdom and this power of which Beatrice speaks,
paraphrasing St. Paul? And how are they part of the mystery of
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Incarnation, and, correspondingly, of the problem of faith? The answers
may be found in the passage from which these words are taken (1 Cor
1:22-25):
And so while the Jews demand miracles and the Greeks look for wisdom, here
are we preaching a crucified Christ; to the Jews an obstacle that they cannot
get over, to the pagans madness, but to those who have been called, whether
they are Jews or Greeks, a Christ who is the power and the wisdom of God.
For God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God's weakness is
stronger than human strength.
These words shed light on the pattern of paradox that so far informed
Dante's representation of Christ's triumph. But, again, like Beatrice's
words, theirs is not the light of demonstration of the truth and the good
of the Incarnation, for they only re-present it as mystery, whose
concealed and revealed truth and goodness can be encountered through an
equally mysterious faith.23 Dante represents this encounter, in the
passage that immediately follows Beatrice's words, through contrasting
images of darkness and light, and through metaphors that seem to echo
the mystical terminology of Richard of St. Victor's Benjamin Major ,
namely the dilatatio and excessus mentis 24 (40-45).
The moment of fruition of this experience, which may be identified

with Richard of St. Victor's sublevado mentisi emerges suddenly,
without solution of continuity, with these words that Beatrice addresses
to Dante: «Apri li occhi e riguarda qual son io; / tu hai vedute cose, che
possente / se' fatto a sostener lo riso mio» (46-48). Dante's encounter
with the Incarnate God and all the faithful has made him, like the
blessed «lamps», capable of reflecting Christ's splendor, and thus His
«possanza». Beatrice, in fact tells Dante that he has now become
«possente» in order to gaze upon her being («riguarda qual son io»)
through the radiance of her smile. In the general economy of Dante's
journey, his erotic quest finds its fulfillment in the contemplation of the
beloved's spiritual beauty, as he, after the «decenne sete» he has endured,
can finally sustain the vision of her «mirabile riso», of which he spoke
in the Vita Nuova (XXI).26 Within the economy of the Commedia , this
is the epiphany (which foreshadows the final epiphany of Beatrice's
beauty of Par. XXX, 19-33) of the action whose prologue was
represented in Purgatorio XXX, 73, where Beatrice addressed Dante with
these words: «Guardaci ben! Ben son, ben son Beatrice».
Unlike Paolo-as-Lancelot, who experienced the fatal ambiguity of

wishing carnally to possess Francesca-as-Guinivere's «disiato riso» {Inf.
339
V, 133-136), Dante is now beyond such ambiguity of masking fol amor
with fin amor, as he beholds the divine beauty of Beatrice's soul. Nor
does he risk sharing Semele's fate, (Ovid, Met. Ill, 287-315), evoked by
Beatrice in Paradiso XXI (4-12), for his «mortai podere» {Par. XXI, 1 1),
which earlier would have been shattered if Beatrice had smiled, has now
been transformed into a new power that is both human and divine
through his vision of Christ's splendor and the splendor of the blessed
throng.27 Similarly, here the pilgrim appears as the corrected, Christian
version of another Ovidian figure from classical mythology, Actaeon
{Met. III, 141-249).28 The Diana of the classical myth, who punishes
Actaeon for having beheld her naked beauty, has been transformed by
Dante into the smiling Trivia and the smiling Beatrice, whose beauty
constitutes not a destructive but a creative force that mirrors that of
Christ's radiant beauty.
But Dante's vision of his beloved's smile is ineffable (55-63):
Se mo sonasser tutte quelle lingue

che Polimnïa con le suore fero
del latte lor dolcissimo più pingue,

per aiutarmi, al millesmo del vero
non si verria, cantando il santo riso
e quanto il santo aspetto facea mero;
e così, figurando il paradiso,
convien saltar lo sacrato poema,
come chi trova suo cammin riciso.
Paradoxically, however, while admitting defeat, the poet sings Beatrice's

smile and radiant face by calling them holy, and by the incantatory
power of the iteration of this word, whereby the transcendent reality of
her beauty is appropriately rendered; and he does represent Paradise, as
reflected by her beauty, through the daring image of the sacred poem that
leaps over an obstacle, thus continuing its journey.
The creative force of this image is then expanded as the poet
presents himself to the reader at once as a wayfarer who trembles under
the weight he carries and as an unsparing helmsman who crosses the
ocean's treacherous waters with his audacious prow (64-69):
Ma chi pensasse il ponderoso tema

e l'omero mortai che se ne carca,
noi biasmerebbe se sott' esso trema:
non è pareggio da picciola barca
quel che fendendo va l'ardita prora,
né da nocchier ch'a sé medesmo parca.
340
As we follow the movement of the action represented here - from the
eminently tragic passion of trembling (and hence fear) to the daring élan
of the poet-helmsman - we ask: wherein lies the secret cause of this
transformation? We may answer (as we tremble and yet dare attempt the
dangerous crossing of interpretation with our «picciola barca») that if an
unbridgeable gap separates the pilgrim's power to endure the sight of
Beatrice's smile and the poet's power to represent this beauty, there must
also be some proportion between these two powers, for both have their
source in God's «sapienza» and «possanza». In fact, Dante calls his
poem sacrato , suggesting that it is both a human and divine creation (cf.
Par. II, 7-8: «L'acqua ch'io prendo già mai non si corse; / Minerva spira,
e conducemi Apollo»). The poem's leaping across the obstacle of
making the invisible visible is at once a sign of failure and victory, for
as verba , not unlike Christ the Verbum (as manifested in history and in
the present paradisal scene), at once conceal and reveal the transcendent
res.
Another sign that points to the secret cause of the poet's «leap»
from fear and trembling to his audacity to continue representing Paradise
is given by his identifying himself with the daring helmsman who does
not spare himself, and is therefore like one who imitates Christ, heeding
His words, «Anyone who wants to save his life will lose it; but anyone
who loses his life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save
it» (Mk 9:35-36).2^ The figure of Dante the poet now appears as one
who, resembling Christ and the pilgrim, is also possente. In fact, in the
words of St. Paul echoed by Beatrice (37-39), this is the power (and
wisdom) of self-renunciation, of the Crucified Christ. Imitating this
supreme paradigm of creative self-renunciation, the author's creative
power, like the power to see the beauty of the Other (as the pilgrim sees
the beauty of Beatrice), also coincides with self-surrender. Significantly,
this self-surrender is bound indissolubly to showing humanity the way
to salvation, as Dante, pilgrim and poet, as well as the sacred poem
itself, imitates Christ's «opening roads between Heaven and earth», for
He is «the Way, the Truth and the Life» (Jo 14:6). By virtue of the
debita proportio or consonantia with its theme, we may experience the
beauty of the poet's representation of Paradise mirrored by Beatrice's
ineffable smile, provided that we also, with self-renunciation, if only
approximately, be th & figura that the poet has portrayed.30
But the poet will not allow us to rest in our fruition of this figura
of Paradise, fearing that, like the pilgrim, we may succumb to the allure
of a single vision. He forces us, along with the pilgrim, suddenly to
shift focus, as he constructs this scene, which marks the beginning of
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the fourth segment of our canto (70-78):
«Perché la faccia mia sì t'innamora,

che tu non ti rivolgi al bel giardino
che sotto i raggi di Cristo s'infiora?
Quivi è la rosa in che '1 verbo divino
carne si fece; quivi son li gigli
al cui odor si prese il buon cammino».
Così Beatrice; e io, che a' suoi consigli
tutto era pronto, ancora mi rendei
a la battaglia de' debili cigli.
By virtue of the break in the action, the pilgrim is forced to recognize

the limits of identifying Paradise with Beatrice's beauty and,
correspondingly, with his love of this beauty.31 As he suffers the
opposition he has helped organize, between what appears to him as
Paradise and the Paradise that Beatrice now discloses, he transcends his
earlier view and experience, not by denying Beatrice's beauty and its
power to reflect Paradise, but by seeing it as part of a greater beauty: the
«bel giardino» of all the blessed who participate in Christ's splendor, in
whose midst stand out Mary as a rose and the Apostles as lilies.
But wherein lies the new beauty of the «garden» to which the
pilgrim must now turn his gaze, and which will increase his love? And
what are some of the formal elements that the poem offers us so that
through them we may share the pilgrim's vision, and ultimately see as
the poet sees? Finally, how does this beauty represent the splendor of
the true and the good inherent in the object of Dante's vision? We may
first answer, in general terms, that here, as in the preceding scenes,
beauty shines forth in the space that at once separates and unites the
thing seen and the thing named, attaining its epiphany when the two
converge into a single vision. This beauty, or splendor formae , as the
radiance of the thing-in-itself, is also the radiance of a mystery , which is
experienced together with the radiance of intelligibility, before our
complete surrender to the secret, silent delight in the beautiful.3^
The pilgrim witnesses the manifestation of the mystery of
Incarnation and the mystery of faith as represented by the blessed, the
Apostles, and especially Mary who as the Rosa Mystica soon will
emerge as the central figure in the ensuing scenes of Dante's theo-drama.
Significantly, here Beatrice's role is that of a co-creator of the divine
spectacle, as she transforms the blessed lamps into flowers by simply
naming them as she points to them («Quivi è la rosa ... quivi son li
gigli»). Similarly, Christ is not like a sun, but is a sun, as she speaks
of His rays («i raggi di Cristo») that make the garden blossom. The
342
deictic form of her discourse, which echoes and parallels the one used
earlier when she pointed to Christ («Quivi è la sapienza e la possanza»),
underscores the importance of looking at the scene directly, without
commentary or interpretation, so that the beholder may experience the
delight of apprehending the beauty or splendor of a rose, lilies, and all
the other flowers in a garden, as he sees the divine spectacle of lights,
simply because these beautiful things are there, for «the beautiful
fulfills itself in a kind of self-determination and enjoys its own
self-representation».33
Since this beauty is universally recognized, eliciting at least a tacit
assent, and hence the faith in its legitimacy or truth,34 Beatrice's words
and the images they evoke are thus the appropriate, consonant
representation of the experience of faith, the human response to God's
revelation through the Incarnation. These remarks by Hans Urs von
Balthasar on the interrelatedness of the beautiful and faith may be useful
to our reading: «The quality of 'being-in-itself which belongs to the
beautiful, the demand the beautiful itself makes to be allowed to be what
it is, the demand, therefore, that we renounce our attempts to control and
manipulate it, in order truly to be able to be happy by enjoying it: all of
this is, in the natural realm, the foundation and foreshadowing of what
in the realm of revelation and grace will be the attitude of faith».35
This is preeminently true of Mary, in whom the natural and the
supernatural, the human and the divine are mysteriously joined through
her faith in the Word («I am the handmaid of the Lord ... let what you
have said be done to me», Lk 1:38). Beatrice's words, «Quivi è la rosa
in che '1 verbo divino / carne si fece» (73-74), capture the full force of
the beauty of the mystery of Incarnation and faith that the pilgrim must
attempt to fathom, by suggesting that in Mary this mystery is not
merely reflected on a spiritual level, as it is in Beatrice (and in all the
blessed), but rather is experienced both in the depth of her soul and her
body. Hers is not only the spiritual communion of a creature with the
Creator, for in her the Word became flesh («carne si fece»). Through
Mary, therefore, the beauty of Paradise is manifested both as an earthly
and transcendent garden, whose unutterable reality, as witnessed by the
pilgrim, at once encompasses and surpasses the one he saw reflected in
Beatrice's «santo riso». Mary's special beauty is expressed by the
identity of the rose with the womb. Significantly, Mary's womb as a
symbol of Paradise was announced, in another garden entered by the
pilgrim, that of the valley of the negligent princes, which, as evening
falls, is guarded against the serpent by two angels who come from
Heaven («Ambo vegnon del grembo di Maria», Purg. VIII, 37).
While Beatrice's words help the pilgrim bridge the chasm between
343
the natural and the supernatural, the human and the divine, as they again
turn his gaze to the drama he is witnessing («ancora mi rendei / a la
battaglia de' debili cigli»), they cannot, however, enable him to fathom
the mystery of Incarnation by beholding Christ's splendor. It is Christ
Who helps him win the battle of his feeble brows, bringing him to the
threshold of this mystery, by withdrawing into the Empyrean («O
benigna vertù che sì li 'mprenti, / sù ťessaltasti per largirmi loco / a li
occhi lì che non ťeran possenti», 85-87). This power, adumbrated earlier
in Beatrice's words, is the power of self-renunciation, which,
paradoxically, coincides with Christ's exaltation as he ascends to the
Empyrean.
As Christ disappears, the pilgrim focuses his attention on Mary
(who has now become «lo maggior foco»), his mind totally absorbed by
the object of his vision: «Il nome del bel fior ch'io sempre invoco / e
mane e sera, tutto mi ristrinse / l'animo ad avvisar lo maggior foco...»
(88-90). The creative force of language as symbolic action lies in the
fact that what moves the pilgrim, drawing him out of himself, is Mary
as mirrored at once in her name and the image of the rose (the «beautiful
flower» par excellence). Like Beatrice, he now participates in the divine
creation of the present drama by naming the object of his vision. The
depth of this creative power of the word is also revealed by the narrator's
conjoining in a single image and a single act his invocation of the name
«Mary» and the name «rose» - which marks his temporal existence («e
mane e sera») - with the pilgrim's paradisal vision of Mary's splendor.
The poet's words are thus a figura and foretaste of the Eternal Now in
which time and eternity converge into a single transcendent moment.
Significantly, the name «Mary», and hence the ineffable reality it
evokes, is experienced by the narrator, pilgrim, and reader (their word
becoming one in the moment of performance), in secret, for,
paradoxically, it is not named, and is manifested only by being
concealed by the image of the rose which in turn is hidden in the words
«bel fior»36. With these simple yet profound words, the poet has
captured the simplicity traditionally identified with Mary and the
unfathomable depth of her mystery, bound indissolubly to the mystery
of Incarnation, and hence to the mystery of salvation through faith. An
earlier example of the mysterious salvific power of faith through Mary
(whose fiat mihi represents the archetypal act of faith), and through the
invocation of her name, is the figure of Buonconte, who, at the last
instant of his life, as he is losing sight and speech, is saved by uttering
the name of Mary («Quivi perdei la vista e la parola; / nel nome di
Maria fini'...», Purg. V, 100-101). Equally illuminating is this passage
from the Vita Nuova (XXVIII, 1-2): «Io era nel proponimento ancora di
344
questa canzone, e compiuta n'avea questa soprascritta stanzia, quando lo
segnore de la giustizia chiamoe questa gentilissima a gloriare sotto la
insegna di quella regina benedetta virgo Maria, lo cui nome fue in
grandissima reverenzia ne le parole di questa Beatrice beata».
The ensuing verses (91-111), constituting the last portion of the
canto's fourth segment, contain the central action of Mary's triumph,
which sub specie aeternitatis reenacts the Annunciation. Beginning with
Gabriel's descent through the sky, what characterizes the scenes of this
theo-drama is their extraordinary dynamism. This is the dynamism of
event, the event of the Word's Incarnation. In response to this
mysterious revelation of God's love, the poet conjures up a spectacle of
light's continuous transformation. Significantly, as they mirror this
spectacle, the eyes of the beholder have themselves become lights
(«ambo le luci», 91). Light, unchanging, changes from a torch into a
circle resembling a crown, which becomes a lyre, whose ineffable music
is finally woven into song, Gabriel's «circulata melodia» («Io sono
amore angelico, che giro...», 103). Similarly, Mary, the object and
center of this luminous wheeling of God's messenger - his words (and
the Word) joined to the fiery circular line of the music and the dance -
is transformed from the beautiful flower (the rose) to the beautiful
sapphire, which has «ensapphired» the brightest heaven («il bel zaffiro /
del quale il ciel più chiaro s'inzaffira», 101-102).37 At the conclusion of
the «circulata melodia», the name of Mary, until now revealed and
concealed by symbols, attains its epiphany as it is sung by the blessed
lights: «la circulata melodia / si sigillava, e tutti li altri lumi / facean
sonare il nome di Maria» (109-1 1 1).
The last segment of Paradiso XXIII (1 12-139) contains the final act
of the divine play of Christ's and Mary's triumph: Mary's ascension to
the Empyrean, followed by the blessed throng as she follows her Son.
Here the most striking image is that of the «fantolin», to which each of
the blessed «flames» is compared (121-126):
E come fantolin che 'nver' la mamma
tende le braccia, poi che 'l latte prese,

per l'animo che nfin di fuor s'infiamma;
ciascun di quei candori in sù si stese
con la sua cima, sì che l'alto affetto
ch'elli avieno a Maria mi fu palese.
Like the beauty of a flowered meadow, or of a rose, the beauty of an

infant delights the beholder, eliciting the assent - often accompanied
by the «corruscazione de la dilettazione de l'anima» - that one is gazing
345
at the beautiful pure and simple. This assent to the beautiful, as noted
earlier, is similar to the assent of faith. Dante's image of the «fantolin»
with arms stretched upward toward its mother clearly embodies such
faith. Portrayed here as being one with the ardor of love, this faith, like
the beautiful, has the quality of disinterestedness, for it manifests the
trust and longing that transcend the necessary but «utilitarian»
nourishment that the infant has just received. This scene represents the
fulfillment of the scene of longing expectation and implicit faith
expressed, at the beginning of the canto, in the scene of the «augello»
awaiting the sun «con ardente affetto». At the same time, it brings to
light what remained concealed in that scene, the longing and faith
experienced by the fledglings towards their mother.
Another significant moment of delight in beauty coincides with the
blessed's celebration of Mary and of her Son's Resurrection through their
song of the Easter hymn, Regina coeli, a delight that binds heaven and
earth, for it still lives in the poet (127-129). The canto ends with a
dramatic shift of perspective - from the recounted events as experienced
by the pilgrim to the narrator's present response to those events. This
response is Dante's act of faith made in the here and now of our life's
journey. The powerful directness of this act is made immediately evident
by the deictic form of his discourse, which echoes the one we have
already noted: «Quivi si vive ... Quivi triunfa...» (133, 136). The
special significance of this act is that it reaffirms the faith that Dante -
poet, narrator, and pilgrim (of course, each from a different angle of
vision) - has encountered as a witness of the theo-drama which has just
ended. More importantly, as it points to exile as the condition of
suffering through which salvation is won («Quivi si vive e gode del
tesoro / che s'acquistò piangendo ne lo essilio / di Babillòn... »,
133-135), it constitutes an answer or counter-assertion to his bitter
smile (as pilgrim and narrator) at the sight of «l'aiuola che ci fa tanto
feroci». That smile suggested not the pilgrim's spiritual lapse (for he
has tasted Lethe's and Eunoe's waters and cannot err) but a temporary
detachment or disdain for a world that - as he played his «role» in the
unfolding drama - appeared to him hopelessly remote (or exiled) from
heaven.
A final creative answer to the hopelessness and lack of faith (and
love) - momentarily «interpreted», by Dante, pilgrim and narrator -
regarding the fate of our aiuola , is in the implied image of the garden
cultivated by the good workers here on earth («che fuoro / a seminar qua
giù buone bobolce!», 131-132). This is not the «bel giardino» that with
the pilgrim we have just encountered in the heaven of the fixed stars;
nor is it the «prato di fiori» once disclosed to Dante by a ray of sun.
346
Rather, it closely resembles the original garden in which God placed
Adam («Yahweh God took the man and settled him in the garden of
Eden to cultivate and take care of it», Gn 2:15-16). This lost paradise,
regained through the sowers faithful labor in the exile of our mortal life,
is the figura and foretaste of the celestial paradise whose ineffable reality
and beauty have been revealed (and concealed) to the pilgrim as God's bel
giardino..
NOTES
^Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord : A Theological Aesthetics ,
I, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, ed. Joseph Fessio S.J. and John Riches
(San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982), p. 18.
^Cf. Joseph Anthony Mazzeo, Structure and Thought in the «Paradiso»
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1958), pp. 1-2: «The Divine Comedy is, from
one point of view, an anatomy of love ... It is also an anatomy of beauty,
beauty which takes as many analogous and corresponding forms as there
are loves. The universe of the poem is finally entirely reduced in the
Paradiso to the interplay of love and beauty, beauty which ... is primarily
manifested as light and through vision. The two - love and beauty as light
- constitute the very structure of the universe and do so functionally: they
are not merely architectural elements but the basic concepts in terms of
which the poem is articulated and through which it conveys its meaning.
They make the journey possible and determine its nature».
St. Thomas, Summa Theol. I, 39, 8c. For a discussion of this passage see
Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism and the Frontiers of Poetry , trans.
Joseph W. Evans (New York: Scribner's, 1962), p. 31. Cf. Umberto Eco,
The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas , trans. Hugh Bredin (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1988), p. 122: «It was no accident that
Aquinas's fullest account of the three criteria of beauty (Summa, I, 39, 8c)
should occur in the question in the Summa which deals with beauty in its
highest form, the beauty of God. God is beauty in a preeminent sense of the
term, and the attribute known as species' belongs especially to the Son of
God. Beauty therefore attains its most complete realization in the Second
Person and possesses in him a preeminent and paradigmatic existence». In
Convivio III, ii, 17-18, citing Boethius' De cons, philos., 1. 3, m. 9, 6-8,
Dante addresses God with these words: «Tutte le cose produci da lo superno
essemplo, tu, bellissimo, bello mondo ne la mente portante».
^Cf. Convivio I, v, 13-14: «Quella cosa dice l'uomo essere bella cui le parti
debitamente si rispondono, per che de la loro armonia resulta piacimento.
Onde pare l'uomo essere bello, quando le sue membra debitamente si
rispondono; e dicemo bello lo canto, quando le voci di quello, secondo
debito de l'arte, sono intra sè rispondenti». I am quoting from G. Busnelli
and G. Vandelli's edition, Il Convivio, 2nd ed., pt. I (Florence: Le
347
Monnier, 1964), p. 35. Here they note, ad loc., that this definition
corresponds to the one given by St. Thomas, Summa 2. 2., q. 145, a. 2, of
debita proportio as one of the essential attributes of beauty, citing also
Cicero's De qfficiis , 1. 1, c. 28, 98, and St. Augustine's De civitate Dei , 1.
22, c. 19.
^Cf. Michelangelo Picone, «Miti, metafore e similitudini del Paradiso : un
esempio di lettura», forthcoming in Studi danteschi: «Quale che sia l'azione
svolta in questo canto [Par. XXIII], essa ci viene comunicata non con mezzi
narrativi, ma con mezzi descrittivi e visivi: più che esserci raccontata, essa
ci viene sceneggiata». I am grateful to Professor Picone for generously
allowing me to read his article in manuscript form.
"Cf. F. Masciandaro, Dante as Dramatist : the Myth of the Earthly Paradise
and Tragic Vision in the «Divine Comedy» (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1991).
'Cf. Friedrich Hölderlin, Werke und Briefe , ed. Friedrich Beißner (Frankfurt:
Insel, 1969), p. 730, cited by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe in «The Caesura of
the Speculative», trans. Robert Eisenhauer, Glyph 4 (1978): 83: «The
transport of tragedy is, in itself, empty and the most unconnected.
Thereby, in the rhythmic succession of representations in which the
transport is portrayed, that which in prosody is called the caesura , the pure
word, the antirhythmic interruption, becomes necessary, in order to
embrace the onrushing alternation of representations, at its crescendo, in
such a way that it is no longer the alternation of representations, but rather
the representation itself which appears».
°Cf. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (New York: Prentice Hall,
1945), pp. 39-40: «We can discern something of the 'tragic' grammar
behind the Greek proverb's way of saying 'one learns by experience': 'ta
pathemata mathemata' , the suffered is the learned ... If the proverb were to
be complete, at the risk of redundance, it would have three terms: poiemata ,
pathemata , mathemata , suggesting that the act organizes the opposition
(brings to the fore whatever factors resist or modify the act), that the agent
thus 'suffers' this opposition, and as he learns to take the oppositional
motives into account, widening his terminology accordingly, he has
arrived at a higher order of understanding». See also, by the same author,
Language as Symbolic Action (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1966), p. 95.
^St. Thomas, Summa , I, 39, 8c: «For beauty includes three conditions:
integrity or perfection , since those things which are impaired are by that
very fact ugly; due proportion or harmony, and lastly, brightness or
clarity, whence things are called beautiful which have bright color». From
Basic Writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, ed. Anton Pegis (New York:
Random House, 1945).
l^Burke, p. xx.
lÂll citations from the Bible in English are from The Jerusalem Bible
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966).
l^Cf. Francis Fergusson's introduction to Aristotle's « Poetics », trans. S. H.
348
Butcher (New York: Hill and Wang, 1961), p. 8: «One must be clear, first of
all, that action (praxis ) does not mean deeds, events, or physical activity:
it means, rather, the motivation from which deeds spring ... It may be
described metaphorically as the focus or movement of the psyche toward
what seems good to it at the moment - a 'movement-of-spiriť Dante calls
it».
This, to cite one example, is Ch. S. Singleton's reading, in his

commentary to Paradiso (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1975), n. 154, p.
370: «Dante's turning away from the whole visible universe to Beatrice's
eyes implies an upward gaze now that rejects and negates all the rest. The
beautiful eyes reflect a spiritual universe that is immeasurably more
important».
1^1 am adopting the canto's segmentation proposed by M. Picone.
l^T.S. Eliot, «The Dry Salvages», Four Quartets (San Diego: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1943, 1971), p. 44.
l°Cf. Par. XXIV, 106-111, where Dante, examined on faith by St. Peter,
paraphrases St. Augustine's argument: «This one great miracle is enough
for us: that the whole world has believed without miracles» (The City of
GodXX n,5).
l^See, for example, Aldo Scaglione, «Imagery and Thematic Patterns in
Paradiso XXIII», in From Time to Eternity: Essays on Dantes «Divine
Comedy», ed. Thomas G. Bergin (New Haven: Yale UP, 1967), p. 162; and
Lino Pertile, «Stile e immagini in Paradiso XXIII», The Italianist , 4
(1984): 23.
Scaglione, p. 163; and Pertile, p. 22, who, while recognizing the
cognitive function of lyric poetry, as he states that «se questa lirica non
impegna l'intelletto, essa viene tuttavia impiegata come mezzo di
penetrazione della verità», adds that this is a «penetrazione affettiva e
sentimentale, più che logica e razionale, di una verità che nella sua ultima
essenza, ormai così vicina al personaggio, elude l'umana ragione».
l^Cf. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, «Medieval Theory of Beauty», in
Coomar aswamy: Traditional Art and Symbolism , ed. R. Lipsey (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton UP, 1977, 1989), p. 215.
2ūEco, p. 200.
Cf. Convivio IH, viii, 8-10: «E però che ne la faccia massimamente in due
luoghi opera l'anima - però che in quelli due luoghi quasi tutte e tre le
nature de l'anima hanno giurisdizione - cioè ne li occhi e ne la bocca,
quelli massimamente ,adorna e quivi pone lo 'ntento tutto a fare bello, se
puote ... Li quali due luoghi, per bella similitudine, si possono appellare
balconi de la donna che nel dificio del corpo abita, cioè l'anima».
2^Mario Fubini, Metrica e poesia, lezioni sulle forme metriche italiane , I,
Dal Duecento al Petrarca (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1966), p. 22. See also
Scaglione, pp. 145-146.
2^Cf. Balthasar, p. 153: «Christ is recognized in his form only when his
form has been seen and understood to be the form of the God-man, and this,
of course, at once demands and already presupposes faith in his divinity.
349
The figure which Jesus presents to the beholder is such that it can be 'read'
as a figure at all only when what appears of him is . . . what should we say
here: 'seen as' or is it 'believed to be' the emergence of the personal (triune)
depths of God?».
2^Cf. Manuela Colombo, «L'ineffabilità della 'visio mystica': il XXIII canto
del Paradiso e il 'Benjamin Major' di Riccardo da San Vittore», Strumenti
critici , 51 (May 1986): 225-239.
^Colombo, p. 230.
^"Picone: «Il punto focale di tutta la rappresentazione è formato dalla terza
sequenza [11. 46-69]: gli spettatori del trionfo paradisiaco, Beatrice e
Dante, recitano qui la scena culminante della loro avventura esistenziale,
ripetono per l'ultima volta il gesto fondatore della loro quête erotica,
rispettivamente elargendo e usufruendo il 'riso'».
2'Cf. Kevin Brownlee, «Ovid's Semeie and Dante's Metamorphosis:
Paradiso XXI-XXIII», MLNt 101 (1986): 154: «Having been transformed,
transfigured, by his exposure to Christ ... Dante emerges as a fully
corrected, redeemed Semeie».
28 Picone: «Mentre il mito ovidiano si chiude con il castigo dell'atto
sacrilego di Atteone, con la trasformazione del cacciatore in preda, in cervo
che viene subito sbranato dai suoi cani; il mito dantesco si chiude invece
con la trasformazione dell'io in Dio ... Rispetto all'eroe mitologico, l'eroe
cristiano del Paradiso può vedere pienamente manifestata la bellezza
spirituale di Beatrice ( vs la bellezza sensuale di Diana), può assorbire il
'riso' dell'Oggetto del suo desiderio».
29See also Mt 10:39; Lk 9:24-25, 17:33-34; Jn 12:25.
3^Cf. Convivio IV, X, 10-11: «Poi chi pinge figura , [Se non può esser lei ,
non la può porre]. Onde nullo dipintore potrebbe porre alcuna figura, se
intenzionalmente non si facesse prima tale, quale la figura esser dee». See
Coomaraswamy, p. 226: «If, as Dante says, he who would portray a figure
cannot do so unless he be it, or as we might express it, unless he lives it
(cf. Sum. Theol. 1.27.1 ad 2), it is no less certain that he who would (and
«Judgment is the perfection of art», [Sum. Theol.] II-II.26.3 ff.) appreciate
and understand an already completed work, can only do it subject to the
same condition,, and this means that he must conform his intellect to that
of the artist so as to think his thoughts and see with his eyes. Acts of
self-renunciation are required of all those who aspire to 'culture,' that is, to
be other than provincials».
•^Cf. Par. XVIII, 20-21: «Volgiti e ascolta; / che non pur ne' miei occhi è
paradiso».
^2Cf. Maritain, p. 28: «By 'radiance of the form' must be understood an
ontological splendor which is in one way or another revealed to our mind,
not a conceptual clarity ... To say with the Schoolmen that the form is in
things the proper principle of intelligibility , is to say at the same time
that it is the proper principle of mystery. (There is in fact no mystery
where there is more to be known than is given to our comprehension.) To
define the beautiful by the radiance of the form is in reality to define it by
350
the radiance of a mystery».
■^Hans-Georg Gadamer, «The Relevance of the Beautiful», in The Relevance
of the Beautiful and Other Essays , trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1986), p. 14.
3^Cf. Gadamer, p. 15: «Plato describes the beautiful as that which shines
forth most clearly and draws us to itself, as the very visibility of the ideal
[, Phaedrus , 250d]. In the beautiful presented in nature and art, we experience
the convincing illumination of truth and harmony, which compels the
admission: This is true.'» For an elaborate discussion of the (indirect)
influence of Plato's Phaedrus on Dante's idea of love and beauty, see «Dante
and Phaedrus Tradition of Poetic Inspiration», by Mazzeo, pp. 1-24.
^Balthasar, p. 153.
360n the significance of naming Mary, see Maristella De Panizza Lorch,
«Paradiso XXIII: To Read the Human Condition», in Count er cur rents , ed.
and intr. Raymond A. Prier (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1992), pp.
248-249.
^For a close, illuminating analysis of this passage, see Pertile, pp. 18-19,
and Picone.
351
Paradiso XXIV
Author(s): GIUSEPPE C. DI SCIPIO
Accessed: 17-02-2020 23:10 UTC
Lectura Dantis
GIUSEPPE C. DI SCIPIO
Hunter College
XXIV
The last verses of Paradiso XXIII present St. Peter triumphantly
amidst the multitude of the blessed who have been singing in praise of
Mary. The apostle Peter is identified through a periphrasis which
conveys his merit and the high office he occupies earned by uttering his
unshakeable faith in Jesus as the Messiah (136-139):
Quivi triunfa, sotto l'alto Filio

di Dio e di Maria, di sua vittoria,
e con l'antico e col novo concilio,
colui che tien le chiavi di tal gloria.
The evangelical passage alluded to in these verses is rather significant as

a prelude to Dante's figuration of St. Peter in canto XXIV, namely as
the viator's examiner on faith, an examination which will conclude with
the pilgrim's own confession of faith in verses 130-147. The passage in
Matthew states (16:13-18):
Now Jesus, having come into the district of Caesarea Philippi, began asking
his disciples, saying, «Who do men say the Son of Man is?» But they said,
«Some say, John the Baptist; and others, Elias; and others, Jeremias, or one
of the prophets». He said to them, «But who do you say that I am?» Simon
Peter answered and said, «Thou art the Christ, the son of the living God».
Then Jesus answered and said, «Blessed are thou, Simon Bar-Jona, for flesh
and blood has not revealed this to thee, but my Father in heaven». ^
Peter, therefore, received the knowledge of the Christ as the Messiah

through revelation and for this reason Jesus confers on him the power of
the two keys, as the evangelical text states subsequently (16:18-20).
And with this authority Peter perforce must be the principal character in
unlocking the door for the viator's access to the final vision, which can
only occur after the latter's acknowledgment of that same faith in Christ
inspired or breathed into him by the Holy Spirit which the poet
describes metaphorically as «la larga ploia / de lo Spirito Santo»
(XXIV, 91-92).
In Dante's characterization of Peter as «colui che tien le chiavi di
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tal gloria», there is, as in many loci of the Commedia , the author's
attempt at mimetic adaptation of evangelical syntax as well as his own
self-absorption into the figure of Peter and as a new Paul, for Paul is the
authority on faith whom Dante quotes. The pilgrim-Dante, therefore,
can become Peter's mouthpiece, as the latter was Christ's spokesperson,
and prophetically record St. Peter's invective against the corrupt Church.
In canto XXVII, in fact, the poet-pilgrim is charged with speaking out
as an Old Testament prophet: «e tu, figliuol, che per lo mortal pondo /
ancor giù tornerai, apri la bocca / e non asconder quel ch'io non
ascondo» (XXVII, 64-66).
The closing verses of canto XXIII emphasize the eighth heaven
with the anaphorical repetition of «quivi» (133,136) as a place of true
joy after the earthly exile, and of glory for those who, like St. Peter,
through their apostolate and martyrdom, were instrumental in bringing
to completion the mission of the Incarnation and, above all, Mary's role
in it. The blessed, in fact, sing the Regina coeli in praise of Mary and
her coronation, the first of many liturgical «songs» that will be sung in
these cantos.2 The pilgrim is so delighted and touched by the effusion of
love and warmth in their singing of that melody as to record its timeless
boundaries phrased syntactically, in such a way that the reader feels that
it lasts eternally: «' Regina celť cantando sì dolce, / che mai da me non
si partì '1 diletto» (128-129).
With this preamble the incipit of Paradiso XXIV records Beatrice's
prayer to the Apostles, on behalf of the pilgrim, as a continuation of the
joyous mood which leads to the contemplation and knowledge of God
through the full comprehension and internalization of the Christian
virtues of faith, hope, and charity. In essence, what the pilgrim needs to
achieve is the full view «face to face», for he has been seeing «darkly, as
in a glass», as the Apostle Paul stated (1 Corinthians 13:12-13). The
pilgrim, according to Beatrice (1-9), has such a tremendous thirst for
divine knowledge which needs to be quenched that she begs the apostles
to «bedew him somewhat» (6-9)3: «ponete mente a l'affezione immensa
/ e roratelo alquanto: voi bevete / sempre del fonte onde vien quel ch'ei
pensa». The initial three tercets set the tone of the canto as an invitation
to a supper. They are replete with food terminology and metaphors
whose cornerstone is Christ, Agnus Dei , as the bread of life, «Ego sum
paniš vitae; qui venit ad me non esuriet» (John 6:35). The apostles have
been selected to partake of a great supper: they will never suffer hunger
again (Apocalypse 19:9). The «convito» and the «vivanda» administered
in this canto represent a fulfillment of the ones in the Convivio. This,
however, is a mystic table, whereas the earlier one was philosophical or
based on worldly erudition.4
353
The word «sodalizio» itself suggests a gathering at a table, as
Pietro di Dante indicates, «qui fuerunt sodales, quasi simul sedentes ad
mensam cum Christo».5 The pilgrim, therefore, has been invited to
taste this food, or what falls off this table, - another figurai
completion of the passage in Convivio , I, i, 10: «a' piedi di coloro che
seggiono ricolgo di quello che da loro cade», - much before the
pilgrim's physical death. Moreover, he needs to be inebriated with the
water these blessed receive directly from God. The shift in metaphors,
food to water, is brought about by the food-drink duality present in
evangelical and liturgical language. Apocalypse 7:16-17, for example,
says that the blessed who are facing God's throne, «shall neither hunger
nor thirst anymore, neither shall the sun strike nor any heat». It is, in
essence, the language of the Eucharist of which Paul speaks in
ICorinthians (10:16-17; 1 1:23-30) and the language derived from Jesus'
statement to the Jews, who in disbelief, hear him speak of eating his
flesh and drinking his blood, as reported in John 6:53-58.6 From this
«food and drink» the pilgrim feels «affezione immensa», and therefore
Beatrice urges the blessed to share with the viator the knowledge they
obtain directly from the fountain : «voi bevete / sempre del fonte onde
vien quel ch'ei pensa» (8-9).
One must note that the poet says «del fonte» (of or at the
fountain), which implies a greater vicinity to or immersion of the
blessed in the spring , so that the pilgrim's «affezione immensa»
conveys Beatrice's desire to shift this discourse toward caritas as the
main theme of the three cantos.7
These two verses, however, are ambiguous and perhaps they should
remain such,8 the prevalent thesis being that «quel ch'ei pensa» is not
what God thinks, but that the blessed gazing upon God «see the very
origin of this man's thoughts».9 I believe that this is justified by the
biblical qualifications of God a s fons vivus , whereby it becomes clearer
that the flow of the water enraptures the human being. The origin of
one's thought flows from the spring as water. The metaphor of God as a
fountain is found in Psalm 35:10, «Quoniam apud te est fons vitae». In
Jeremiah 2: 13 God is said to be «the source of living waters». In Baruch
3:12 God is «the fountain of wisdom». In John 4:14 Jesus says to the
Samaritan woman: «but the water that I will give him shall become in
him a fountain of water, springing up unto life everlasting».
Beatrice's prayer on behalf of Dante the pilgrim is answered with a
sense of sacrality and liturgy. Only later, in verse 28, will St. Peter
speak. The joyous souls arrange themselves in many circles, turning
like spheres revolving on their axes (10-12), «fiammando, volte, a guisa
di comete». Dante employs the word «cornets» only to express
354
luminosity. Moreover the example of the clock becomes essential in
suggesting the different speed of each of the blessed and in turn it reveals
the degree of beatitude each of them enjoys (13-17). The word «carole»
confirms the meaning of the «spere» as circles since «carola» is a
circular dance, «ballo tondo» (Buti).
From one of these precious carole Dante notices a fire approaching
Beatrice and circling around her three times while chanting as in liturgy.
The song is so lofty, sweet and divine that the poet's pen lacks the
power and imagination to express it, and in fact was unable to record it.
It appears that Dante employs the technical language of painting to
convey meaning and imagery, because our imagination lacks the art to
portray such fine nuances and our speech is far «too gross», too
materialistic, to paint the subject appropriately. Jacopo della Lana,
commenting on these verses offers a technical explanation on how the
painter uses a less brilliant color when painting «pieghe».10
When finally St. Peter addresses Beatrice, acknowledging that it is
because of her «ardente affetto» that he has moved out of the «bella
spera», he refers to her as «santa suora mia», dismantling in one stroke
all the cogent symbolic representation of her as «donna gentile», «loda
di Dio vera» (Inf. II, 94 & 103). Charity has now levelled everyone; and
Beatrice will address Peter in the familiar form, a form that Dante
himself will use as the episode unravels (62). 11 This familiarity,
undoubtedly based on the theology of love (see the initial cantos of the
Paradiso ), is also transmitted and conveyed by the type of language
employed. It is the «linguaggio medio», not the erudite one. This is
found throughout the canto even though Dante is dealing with the
highest theme, theology, which requires the high style. There are a
number of words and phrases that might be considered almost «popular
speech» or at least linguaggio medio. I shall point out detailed examples
connected to the presence of St. Peter whose simple speech and character
distinguishes him from some of the other apostles, in spite of the fact
that Peter will use some technical or learned scholastic terminology.
In verses 1-32 one finds a mixture of technical, learned and popular
terminology such as: «cerchi in tempra d'orioli» (13), «carole» (16),
«mi facieno stimar» (18), «pieghe» (26), «suora» (28), «lo spiro» (32);
latinisms such as «roratelo» (8) and «carezza» (19), from «ros» (dew)
and «caritia» respectively. Dante has the great artistry to be able to
imitate «plebeian» speech to create a desired effect. The word «orïuoli»
of verse 13 is, for example, a Tuscanism which undoubtedly determines
the rhyme, as Pagliaro maintains.12 The linguistic register he is
employing, therefore, is the one theorized in De vulgāri eloquentia ,
II, vii, 5: «Sola etenim pexa yrsutaque urbana tibi restare videbis, que
355
nobilissima sunt et membra vulgaris illustris». 1 shall return to this
argument later as Peter's speech and his dialogue with the viator
intensifies.
Beatrice, then, proceeds to ask St. Peter to test the pilgrim on the
principal and cardinal theological virtue, faith, without which St. Paul
had said one cannot be saved. It is a long rhetorical opening, comprising
four tercets (34-45). In these she employs a clear refined speech
dominated by solemnity and an ability succintly to mention St. Peter's
biographical characteristics as champion of faith, his qualifications as
Christ's chosen keeper of the keys of heaven, and finally Dante's own
qualifications as a Christian, which, however, must be tested and
affirmed to demonstrate his intimate knowledge of faith and his
theological preparation. The latinism «viro» (34) determines the usage
of «gaudio miro» (36), another significant adjective.13 Though in its
totality, the Commedia may fall under the aegis of the sermo humilis ,
as Auerbach maintains, there are different registers of this low style and
Peter's is one of them. He would be speaking like a fisherman, not as a
senator or orator, as Augustine states and Auerbach points out.14
As some commentators have remarked, it is almost absurd that
Dant t-viator should state his thoughts on faith when Beatrice herself has
stated, «S'elli ama bene e bene spera e crede, / non t'è occulto» (40-41),
and St. Peter addresses him as «buon Cristiano» (52), but it is because
the celestial kingdom is populated by people who have made themselves
true citizens of it by way of «verace fede». Beatrice's statement,
therefore, is of pivotal importance for the definition of faith in its truest
essence. It is necessary that the pilgrim affirm this faith with words, in
order to glorify it and in order to become a true citizen of this kingdom
(43-45). What is being suggested is that there is a difference in «amare,
sperare, e credere» «bene» and in becoming a citizen of this kingdom
«per la verace fede». The degree of faith is determined by the adverb
«bene» and the adjective «verace», the former being faith according to
the flesh, the latter according to the spirit. It implies that grace is
operating in the pilgrim and it produces the transformation which the
Greek Fathers called theosis , the deification of human life. The faith
Dante had was imperfect, it was an intellectual belief which lacked the
total personal commitment to God and humanity. It is found in Paul's
statement (Romans 10:9-10): «For if thou confess with thy mouth that
Jesus is the Lord, and believe in Thy heart that God has raised him from
the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart a man believes unto
justice, and with the mouth profession of faith is made unto salvation».
This process begins with the hearing ( akoe ) of the word (logos) and ends
with the hypakoe , the obedience or total submission and commitment to
356
the logosi
It appears that the same distinction between «bene» and «vero»
recurs when the pilgrim faces the examination on hope and charity: «sì
che, veduto il ver di questa corte, / la spene che là giù bene innamora. . .»
(Par. XXV, 43-45). On the discussion on charity, the terms bene and
vero are not employed, but in canto XXVI they are replaced by a sign:
the viator has lost his eyesight (9: «la vista in te smarrita e non
defunta»), and its reacquisition is connected to the pilgrim's
verbalization of his degree of knowledge of caritas itself. One must note
that the poet says «cotale amor con vien che in me si 'mprenti» (27),
«such love must needs imprint itself on me». Dante soon after employs
the word «vero» (XXVI, 37-39):
Tal vero a l'intelletto mio sterne

colui che mi dimostra il primo amore
di tutte le sustanze sempiterne. ^ ^
Dante as the doctoral student, «baccialier», arms himself with all

his knowledge in order to be ready to define faith and satisfactorily pass
the 'exam' in front of such an examiner, «querente» (46-51). 17 Peter
speaks in very simple words and wants the pilgrim to do the same. It is
the sermo humilis in the Auerbachian sense, even though we are dealing
with theology. The only erudite or technical words St. Peter uses are:
«sustanze, argomenti (69); dottrina, ingegno di sofista (80-81); l'antica e
la novella proposizion, divina favella» (97-99). And then when St. Peter
is actually pointing out to the viator that he is using a circuitous
argument, or in philosophical terms «petizione di principio», the
language is extremely simple: «Dì, chi t'assicura / che quell'opere
fosser? Quel medesmo / che vuol provarsi, non altri, il ti giura»
(103-105). On the contrary, the viator is the one who uses most of the
learned language: «concetto», «sustanza», «argomento», «parventi»,
«quiditate», «parvenza», «credenza», «intenza», «silogizzar» - and
many more in verses 9 1-96. 18 Dante began with a learned or at least
elegant metaphor, «perch'io spandessi / l'acqua di fuor del mio interno
fonte» (56-57), a water and fountain image which he derives from John
(7:37-38). He proceeded by using a military term, «primipilo» (59),
equating Peter, as head of the militant Church, to a high ranking Roman
military officer, though in reality not very high. Then he appeals
immediately to this same «fountain» of Divine Grace so that he can
express his thoughts well, concisely and with beauty of speech: «faccia
li miei concetti ben espressi». ^
In defining faith, which Dante extracts directly from Paul's Epistle
357
to the Hebrews, Dante stresses the Apostle's true pen, «verace stilo»,
(61) and turns to another suggestive and ornate metaphor, «che mise
teco Roma nel buon filo» (63). 20 But it seems to me that Peter is
testing the pilgrim on the degree of faith he possesses, and pays little
attention to the language which he implicitly wants concrete and
simple. Yet Dante's desire to achieve the highest form of artistic
propriety in uttering his definition of faith is part of that self-praise
motif he expresses in verses 55-57, for he does not dare make any move
without Beatrice's assent and now he has been elevated to a high degree
of dignity. This is not a simple examination, but, as Getto says, «il rito
di una investitura di carattere profetico».21
To St. Peter's question, «what is faith», Dante answers cogently,
by first mentioning the great authority on this subject, St. Paul, and
recalling how the Apostle to the Gentiles and Peter himself were not
only the theoreticians of faith, but also its living proof through their
martyrdom. They with their example set Rome on the right path, «che
mise Roma teco nel buon filo».22 «Filo» which does mean «path»,
also evokes the sword of martyrdom which decapitated Paul.23 Faith is
the substance of eternal beatitude, of future paradise. It is the primary
principle on which hope of eternal life is based and it is the
«argomento», the proof of what is hidden to us mortals. This, says the
pilgrim, appears to me to be its essence, «quiditate», which Aquinas
labels «intellective knowledge».24 Does this «pare a me» convey
uncertainty on the part of the pilgrim regarding the whole question of
faith? I would agree with Barolini that in this entire episode, particularly
when Peter points out the circularity of the argument, Dante «has
implicitly demonstrated his awareness of the inherent logical frailty of
all guarantees of divine inspiration».25 For the moment, however, St.
Peter's comment is, «Dirittamente senti» (67), where sentire means: to
fully comprehend intellectually why Paul had placed faith first as
substance and then as proof.2** It would appear that Dante might be
ready to finalize the relationship between faith and reason, for in verses
52-78 he deals strictly with the question of faith. For him as viator,
who begins his journey in Hell, faith needs to be reconfirmed. The
question immediately arises as he meets Virgil, who says that he
worshipped «li dèi falsi e bugiardi» (I, 72). Inferno II, 30 states that
faith is «principio a la via di salvazione» and later baptism is said to be
«porta de la fede» (IV, 36). In Paradiso II, 43-45, the poet says
somewhat in a mystical way that there in heaven one will see that
which was held as faith:
Lì si vedrà ciò che tenem per fede
358
non dimostrato, ma fia per sè noto
97
a guisa del ver primo che l'uom crede.
Nevertheless, what humanity believed and took as faith required the

aquiescence and intervention of reason, «del ver primo che l'uom crede».
As Gilson points out, Dante's political doctrine owed much to the role
of reason on the conception of faith.
While for Aquinas reason was the handmaid of faith and philosophy
the handmaid of theology, in Dante, reason and philosophy can serve
faith by demonstrating its credibility, «manifesto è che questa donna, col
suo mirabile aspetto, la nostra fede aiuta».28 Moreover philosophy
ennobles humanity with its moral beauty (Conv. Ill, viii, 20), and faith
shows that reason can only hypothesize or guess (Conv . Ill, xv, 6) for
both faith and reason emanate from God's fountain of light.
In Paradiso XIX God is said to be that «serenity which is never
clouded»: «Lume non è, se non vien dal sereno / che non si turba mai;
anzi è tenèbra / od ombra de la carne o suo veleno» (64-66). While faith
and reason have their individual realm (Monarchia II, vii, 4), which,
translated into political philosophy, means that the Emperor is separate
and independent of the Pope, each one has an essential role in obtaining
earthly and divine beatitude. We achieve the latter through «philosophica
documenta», the former through «documenta spiritualia» (Monarchia
III, xvi, 8). Thus on earth one syllogizes without having any proof,
«senz'altra vista», therefore faith is also called an evidence, because
reason lacks proof. But reason has an essential role in understanding the
Scriptures so that Dante can claim that faith is proven by the inspiration
of the Holy Spirit suffused and transmitted to the writers of the Old and
New Testament, «in su le vecchie e 'n su le nuove cuoia» (XXIV,
93). 29 Accepting these facts and the belief in these writings and in the
«larga ploia» (91) of the Holy Spirit, renders null and void any kind of
argumentation based on reason alone, «ogne dimonstrazion mi pare
ottusa» (96). It indicates that Dante firmly believes and adheres to
Aquinas' teaching that faith assumes rational evidence as if it were a
sensible object. The fusion reason-philosophy with theology- faith is
expressed in verses 133-138 in which Dante affirms that he has not only
physical and metaphysical proofs, but also Scriptures and revelation.30
Once the pilgrim has satisfied Peter that he does possess faith
(86-87) and whence he derives it (88-96), he can state the proofs
(97-1 14) and profess his credo (1 15-147). Again in this canto we note a
peculiar linguistic register as we look into the exchanges between the
pilgrim and the Apostle. St. Peter, in enhancing Dante's replies and in
prodding additional comments from the viator , employs colorful forms
359
of speech - almost a mercantile vernacular. He begins by using the
verb «s'acquista», adding with sarcasm that if all one learns on earth as
doctrine were so understood, there would be no place for the sophists'
cleverness: «Se quantunque s'acquista / giù per dottrina, fosse così
'nteso, / non lì avria loco ingegno di sofista» (79-81). The verb
«s'aquista» is a prelude to a series of words and phrases totally
inappropriate for the «Chief Centurion» of the Church Militant, engaged
in a theological discussion. Dante, therefore, is undermining the whole
structure of philosophical and scholastic demonstration operated by
means of a learned language, which he himself employs but which is
rejected by the Apostle of faith. St. Peter speaks of faith as of a coin,
employing numismatic metaphors which the viator will in turn adopt
and employ in his own reply with words such as lega, peso, borsa,
conio (82-87). 31 I would suggest that in this exchange one hears the
unambiguous echo of trading faith as with Judas' betrayal of Christ
(Matthew 26:14; 27:3-10) and Peter himself who three times denied his
Master (Matthew 26:69-75).
When St. Peter wants to know from where the respondent derived
his faith the metaphor is no longer a coin but a «precious jewel whereon
every virtue is founded» (89-90). The pilgrim replies by elevating the
metaphorical language but still remaining within the confines of
concrete vernacular speech; the inspiration proceeding from the Holy
Spirit is called a «larga ploia» («plenteous rain») and the Scriptures are
called «le vecchie e ... le nuove cuoia» («parchments» or «hides»). This
kind of language intends to provide in its «humility» an intellectual
equivalent to the force and efficacy of the «argomento» provided by the
Holy Spirit and the Scriptures as the proof and certainty of faith which
needs no sensible, rational demonstration. The dialogue or the scenario
is built with a low form of speech as a vehicle to convey the certainty
of faith which the high style, or language of reason, of ornate speech
and rhetoric cannot convey as clearly and concisely. Peter even utters the
word «divina favella» to characterize the Scriptures as a reminder that
God's speech is clean and simple, unstained and unburdened by sophistry
(97-99). At the same time this is an invitation to fall into a trap, for
Dante's reply will consist of a circuitous argumentation as he states that
those writings are proven to be truthful by miracles that nature cannot
accomplish by itself for it has neither the means nor the ability. But the
metaphorical language persists with the topos of nature as fabbro, thus
transposing it to God as artifex, or God as smith, as it has been recorded
already in Purgatorio (X, 97-99).32
Dante's answer regarding the veracity of the sacred texts is
supported by authorities such as Augustine and Aquinas: the world
360
converted to Christianity without the proof of miracles recorded in the
Bible; this in itself is more of a miracle than all the other since they are
not worth the hundredth part of it (108).33 In verses 109-111 we
witness a continuation of that sermo humilis as Dante employs the
metaphorical language of the evangelical parables, to praise the
simplicity of the early disciples described as sowers of good seeds which
in turn produced a good vineyard that presently has become wild and
withered.34 Although one school of thought interprets «povero e
digiuno» as «poor and fasting» in the literal sense, it is hard to ignore
the meaning which relies on the figurai sense: these are unlearned people
who lack doctrine and erudition. The combined meaning enriches the
portrait, for they are people whose riches were the simplicity of their
faith.
As Dante the pilgrim completes this part of his exam with a strong
and suggestive affirmation of Peter's own merits in caring for Christ's
vineyard, the blessed in unison sing the Te Deum laudamus. This is not
an interruption in the examination, as some contend, but part of the
ritual set up by Dante in this triad of cantos. It is also an obligatory
reaction to the criticism of the corruption of the Church as well as the
notion that the blessed people praise God for Dante's firm faith in the
Scriptures and in Revelation.35 Moreover, as is usually the case with
Dante, one cannot overlook the whole text of the hymn being sung: the
Te Deum is a confession of faith as well as a praise of God.36 The
hymn is appropriate to the moment especially because the pilgrim,
prodded by St. Peter to verbalize what he holds as faith, will burst into
his own credo (106-147). The latter is the summation of the whole
examination, the conclusion, as in a hymn, of all he has stated in the
form of doctrine on his own faith.37 The episode, therefore, is
concatenated in a natural flow and progression of joy: the Te Deum ,
Dante's Credo , St. Peter's benediction and expression of joy. Dante's
declaration of faith is rewarded with a ritual crowning of the
journeyman, three times, just as the «light of the Apostle» crowned
Beatrice in verses 22-24. It is, then, a sequential and harmonious episode
tightly joined as a hymn of glory, which indeed it is, when faith is
expressed with such power and fire (145-47).
As one resumes reading from verse 115, one cannot fail to observe
that the language and the metaphorical images belong to the humble
style while in contrast they elevate the subject matter. St. Peter is
referred to as baron , not so much because it is a high title of nobility,
for Peter is the highest in the court of the Emperor {Par. XXXII,
124-126), but because in the Italian medieval tradition Christ and the
saints bore feudal titles, for instance James also will be referred to as «il
361
barone / per cui là giù si visita Galizia» (XXV, 17-18).38 Dante
employs arboreal metaphors converting his examination on faith into a
tree of faith (1 15-1 18):
E quel baron che sì di ramo in ramo,

essaminando, già tratto m'avea,
che a l'ultime fronde appressavamo,
ricominciò ...
In fact, Christ, on whom Dante's faith is based, is the tree of life

symbolically, as in Apocalypse 2:7: «He who has an ear, let him hear
what the spirit says - Him who overcomes I will permit to eat of the
tree of life, which is the paradise of the Lord». And in Apocalypse
(22:2) the tree of life is said to bear twelve fruits. Conversely the cross,
«il legno» {Par. XIX, 105), the tree on which Christ died, bears eternal
life. Paradise is compared to a tree that always yields fruit and never
sheds leaves (XVIII, 28-30): the image brings to mind the tree of life,
earthly and divine, of Purgatorio XXXII.39 Dante's arboreal images may
have been derived from Hugh of St. Victor's Arbor Virtutum found in
the latter's De fructibus carnis et spiritusů In Hugh's diagram the root
of the tree of virtue is Humilitas {radix virtutum ), its main branches are
the seven virtues. Indeed the first chapter of De fructibus is entitled «De
tribus virtutibus theologicis et quatuor cardinalibus ex humilitate
nascentibus». The illustration shows the lower branches, Prudentia ,
lustitia , Temperando, Fortitudo , each one bearing seven leaves. Between
the first two branches {Prudentia and lustitia) and the second two
{Temperando and Fortitudo) there is an area labelled Dextera, because
pride leads to the left, the practice of humility leads to the right.41
Humility is the first step the mystic must take in order to begin the
contemplation of the Godhead. Humility leads to charity and in fact
equals charity in St. Bernard, who will soon replace Beatrice as final
guide.42 More than in any other instance the history of salvation is
unfolding here, on a personal yet universal level, as Dante the pilgrim
humbles himself to be able to sustain the examination on the three
virtues. This too is connected to the linguistic register employed in the
canto.
In Hugh of St. Victor's Tree the area separating Temperando I

Fortitudo and the first two theological virtues is labelled Hierosolyma,
Paradise. The seventh leaf of Temperando, in fact, which is called
contemptus saecud leads, through the utilization of reason, to the love
of the eternal: «Contemptus saeculi est ex intuitu caducorum ratione
inductus amor aeternorum».43 The area separating faith and hope is
362
called Fructus Spiritus above which is Charitas and out of the whole tree
is born the novus Adam. Note that Dante the pilgrim after having met
with three apostles will meet with Adam in Paradiso XXVI and the
viator himself is reborn as a Novus Adam. The theological conception,
therefore, is totally Pauline (Romans 5:12-14), both the one adopted by
Hugh of St. Victor and Dante's own.44 In Hugh's diagram, moreover,
while each of the six virtues (Prudentia, Iustitia,Temperantiay
FortitudOy Fides , Spes) hold seven leaves, the sublime virtue Charitas
- upon which Dante built his poem - has two branches with five
leaves each (1+10). The total numerological structure yields the number
sixty. According to Isidore the number sixty means all the saints, while
Rabanus Maurus adds to this the meaning of «omnium perfectorum
sacramentum» (Matt. 13).45 The number sixty is employed in the
parable of the sower in Matthew 13:8-23. This passage contains the
linguistic echoes, the same imagery and terminology that Dante uses in
describing Peter: «che tu 'ntrasti povero e digiuno / in campo, a seminar
la buona pianta» (109-1 IO).46
One might consider also part of sermo humilis the verb «donnea»
(«la Grazia che donnea / con la tua mente, la bocca t'aperse», 1 18-119).
Divine Grace as a woman is in perfect amorous communion with the
pilgrim's intellect and has opened his mouth appropriately. Again the
verb employed is most significant, for while it belongs to the vernacular
usage it is most sublime in conveying the union and bliss of the
pilgrim's mind and will with Divine Grace.47
Now Dante must state his credo and he does so with a mixture of
colorful vernacular and sublime images. As a homage to St. Peter,
Dante exaggerates by saying that Peter believed so much in Christ's
divinity that he ran to the sepulcher of Resurrection faster than John. It
is a distorted allusion to the evangelical passage in John 20:1-9 which
states that both John and Peter left together, but John «ran faster than
Peter, and came first to the tomb». They saw and believed: «for as yet
they did not understand the Scripture, that he must rise from the dead.
The disciples therefore went away again to their homes».4**
As the viator prepares to verbalize his credo he recurs to learned
theological language (127-132):
tu vuo' ch'io manifesti
la forma qui del pronto creder mio,

e anche la cagion di lui chiedesti.
E io rispondo: Io credo in uno Dio
solo ed etterno, che tutto 'l ciel move,
non moto, con amore e con disio...
363
«Forma» and «cagion», essence and cause, are terms with which
Aquinas engages (in Summa la, 11, 3) the physical and metaphysical
proofs of God's existence. Strangely Dante continues his direct discourse
as if there is a silent pause of a rhetorical nature, during which Peter has
nodded affirmatively. This affirmation of belief is solemn, sermo
sublimis , and dismisses any physical or metaphysical proofs, but relies
on and accepts the Scriptures as Revelation and lists them as in the
classical repartition: Pentateuch, Prophets, Psalms, the four Gospels,
and the Instrumentum Apostolicum (Acts, Epistles, Apocalypse).
Lastly the text alludes to the descent of the Holy Spirit on the
congregated Apostles: «voi che scriveste / poi che l'ardente Spirto vi fé
almi» (137- 138).4^ The «ardente Spirto» is the means by which Dante
himself has been chosen to write his poem and to return to hoping to
receive his poetic laurel at the font of his baptism. 50 That ardent spirit
has breathed fire into those men who spoke out to record Christ's
teaching and made them «almi» (lofty, inspired, revered, or better in
Tommaseo's definition, «alimentatori, propagatori, nutritori della fede
del mondo»). If «almi» is directly connected to the idea of fire as «those
who fed the world with faith», its relationship to the images of verses
145-147 is much more cogent, for there we encounter words such as
«favilla, fiamma . . . vivace» and the verse «e come stella in cielo in me
scintilla».
This powerful verse - a poetic and theological summation of
Dante's profound self-examination - explodes with the image of faith,
an abstract and undefinable word, which contains the fertile ground for
the other virtues, as St. Paul teaches, and shines in its pure luminosity
as a star in heaven. This is the brightest star, Venus, «la lucente stella
Diana» of Guinizzelli: the morning star that so much captured the
vision of the stilnovistic poets. It has now achieved its purest
transformation or metaphorical sublimation. It is the star corresponding
to Rhetoric and the one nearest to prophecy.We have here, in essence, a
symbiosis of the two Venuses, «serótina» and «matutina», Lucifer and
Hesper.51 In the subsequent lines the reader is forced to note how the
belief in the Trinity is rhetorically and strategically expressed as in a
sequence (139-141): «credo in tre persone etterne, e queste / credo una
essenza sì una e sì trina, / che sofferà congiunto 'sono' ed 'este'». This
represents a perfect mixture of sublime and colloquial: «essenza, trina,
sofferà, este».
At the very end of the canto Dante the poet-narrator boasts, and
with good reason: «sì nel dir li piacqui» (154). Yet the whole episode
hinges on the simile, whereby the topos of humility reappears as the
pilgrim compares himself to the servant, while Peter is the Lord
364
(148-150). St. Peter crowns the pilgrim three times, bestowing on him
the well deserved praise: faith is not an empty word in the heart of the
wayfarer, but the essence of his being. Thus he can praise himself and
not be a «fool».52 Some commentators have thought that Dante, afraid
of having been labelled a heretic, wanted to express his orthodoxy with
the hope of returning to Florence. It would seem that at the time of the
composition of Paradiso XXIV Dante had already lost any hope of
returning to the «dolce ovile», though he expresses such a wish in the
following canto. But that might well be a projection for the future, a
prophetic metaphor of the theologus poeta. In this canto the pilgrim's
credo and its passionate expression are real and convincing.53
NOTES
1 Dante's text is quoted from La Commedia secondo l'antica vulgata, ed.

Giorgio Petrocchi, Milan, Mondadori, 1966-67. Citations from the Bible in
English are from The Holy Bible , Boston, St. Paul Editions, 1963 (3rd ed.).
The Latin text of the Vulgate is from the Biblia Sacra iuxta Vulgátám
Clementinam , Madrid, Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1965 (4th ed.). I
have consulted the following studies and commentaries: La Divina
Commedia , ID: Paradiso , eds. Umberto Bosco & Giovanni Reggio, Florence:
Le Monnier, 1986; Italo Borzi, «Il canto XXIV del Paradiso », in Paradiso,
letture degli anni 1979-81 , Rome, Bonacci, 1982; Adolfo Jenni, «Il canto
XXIV del Paradiso », in Letture dantesche, Florence, Sansoni, 1964; Mario
Marcazzan, Il canto XXIV del «Paradiso», Florence, Le Monnier, 1966;
Giovanni Getto, Il canto della fede, in Letture Classensi, Ravenna, Longo,
1966, pp. 83-108; La Divina Commedia, ed. Manfredi Porena & Mario
Pazzaglia, Bologna, Zanichelli, 1966; La Divina Commedia, HI: Paradiso,
eds. Emilio Pasquini & Antonio Quaglio, Milan, Garzanti, 1989; La Divina
Commedia, HI: Paradiso, ed. Natalino Sapegno, Florence, La Nuova Italia,
1984; La Divina Commedia, testo critico della Società Dantesca Italiana ,
eds. Giovanni Scartazzini & Giuseppe Vandelli, Milan, Hoepli, 1958); The
Divine Comedy, «Paradiso», ed. & trans, (with commentary) Charles S.
Singleton, Princeton, Princeton UP, 1975. - I have made use of the
Commentary of Benvenuto da Imola and of the Ottimo commento della
Divina Commedia through the Dartmouth Dante Project.
2On liturgical songs in the Purgatorio see the comprehensive study of
Erminia Ardissino, «I canti liturgici nel Purgatorio dantesco», in Dante
Studies , CVIII (1990), 39-66.
3The Ottimo commentary says «e roratelo, cioè bagnatelo di rugiada». This
indeed recalls Dante's own cleansing with the «dew», as prescribed by Cato
in Purg. I, 121-129, another symbolic representation or rite connected to
humility and rebirth. Benvenuto comments, «irrigate et profundite ilium
rore, qui exigitur ad extinguendam eius sitim».
365
^See Convivio I,i,ll-12; Jenni observes, «ora si tratta di un convito mistico e
non più semplicemente dotto o addirittura razionalista» (p. 1833).
^The Ottimo indicates that «sodales son li compagni in mensa, sodi in
battaglia, comités nella via, collegae nelli offizii». Benvenuto says, «nam
sodalis proprie est socius in mensa».
"Psalm 16:5, «O Lord, my allotted portion and my cup, you it is who hold fast
my lot». On the drinking of the blood, as against Jewish traditions and
principles, and on the last supper as «one of the most astonishing
transformations»; see Gillian Feeley Harnik's The Lord's Table ,
Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981 (esp. chapters four
and five).
'Marcazzan speaks of the idea of love as «il sigillo del poema». On the
supremacy of love see also my volume, The Presence of Pauline Thought in
the Works of Dante , Lewiston, N.Y., Mellen, 1995, esp. chapter V, Part
Three. Dante's «affezione immensa» is really a «voglia immensa», as
Benventuto describes it.
°I share Tibor Wlassics's view that ambiguities ought to remain ambiguous;
see, «Ambivalenze dantesche» in Studi e problemi di critica testuale , III
(1972), #5, pp. 15-32. The simplest explanation is Benvenuto's rendering
of «onde vien quel ch'ei pensa», «quia et iste desiderat bibere de ilio fonte».
^This is Singleton's rendering, p. 384, note 8-9. Porena's interpretation is
stimulating for he believes that the phrase «voi bevete / sempre del fonte
onde vien quel ch'ei pensa», means «voi leggete in Dio il suo pensiero, e
sapete quel che egli desidera» (p. 832). Both the possessive adjective suo
and the personal pronoun egli , refer to the viator , meaning that the blessed
souls read in God's mind Dante's thoughts. Bosco & Reggio states that God
is «fonte da cui (onde) deriva quel nutrimento intellettuale, a cui Dante
rivolge il suo pensiero, cioè, il suo desiderio» (p. 398, note 9). «The simile
is almost the sole means available for visual articulation of reality», Richard
H. Lansing, From Image to Idea : A Study of the Simile in Dante's
«Commedia», Ravenna, Longo, 1977, p. 154.
Îacopo della Lana is quoted by Marcazzan, cit., to stress technical language
and the poet's precision in conveying the image (14). Barolini's chapters on
the Paradiso and particularly the concept that the «the sacred poem is forced
to jump» are subtle and correct. While Dante provides many answers for
himself and the readers in his journey, more questions are raised even
regarding the irrationality of faith. Thus, the theology remains along with
an absolutely correct and legitimate «detheologizing», both being the
essence of the poet's inspiration in ascending Mount Parnassus. See
Teodolinda Barolini, The Undivine Comedy, Detheologizing Dante ,
Princeton, Princeton UP, 1992.
lÎn the encounter with Cacciaguida, the pilgrim at first uses «tu» {Par.. XV,
85: «Ben supplico io a te, vivo topazio»); then «voi» («Voi siete il padre
mio», Par. XVI, 16), for reverence as the Romans used with Caesar
triumphant (XVI, 10: «Dal 'voi' che prima a Roma s'offerie»), and then again
«tu» («O cara piota mia che sì t'insusi», XVII, 13). This strategy levels off
366
humanity and points out the vanity of such formal linguistic distinctions.
This is part of that «evangelical utopia» of which Stelio Cro speaks in his
«Cacciaguida e l'utopia evangelica del 'sanguis meus': Paradiso XV, 28», in
Esperienze letterarie , XIV (1989), 9-36.
Ântonino Pagliaro, Ulisse, ricerche semantiche sulla Divina Commedia,
Messina, D'Anna, 1967, llěm pp. 597ff. Erich Auerbach had pointed out
Dante's usage of the «sermo remissus et humilis» in the Commedia as a
strategic means that the poet had employed in the Epistle to Cangrande.
However, one agrees with Auerbach when he concludes, «There is no doubt
that the stylistic intent in general is to achieve the sublime. If this were not
clear from Dante's explicit statements, we could sense it directly from every
line of his work, however colloquial it may be. The weightiness, gravitas , of
Dante's tone is maintained so consistently that there can never be any doubt
as to what level of style we find ourselves upon» (Mimesis The
Representation of Reality in Western Literature, tr. W. R. Trask, Princeton,
Princeton UP, 1953, p. 184). For comments on Dante's styles, see also
Bosco & Reggio, cit., p. 227.
^The Latinism «miro» is an adjective used only in the third cantica (XIV, 24;
XXIV, 36; XXVIII, 53; XXX, 68) as «mirabile», mir us. Of «gaudio miro»,
Benevenuto says: «id est, istius aeternae felicitatis et laeti regni» (XXIV,
34-36).
l^See E. Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity
and in the Middle Ages, tr. R. Manheim, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993, p.
43 (esp. ch. 1, «Sermo humilis», pp. 25-66, which concludes with a
definition of Dante's Commedia as «the greatest document of ... Christian
sublimity». On the language, see also Borzi, pp. 654-655. In the City of
God (Book XIII, 49) Saint Augustine says, «He chose disciples, whom He
also called apostles, of lowly birth, unhonored and illiterate, so that
whatever great thing they might be or do, He might be and do in them»
(trans. M. Dods, New York, Random House, 1950, p. 660). On the questions
of the styles see also Rinaldina Rüssel' s «Oratoria sacra e i tre gradi dello
stile nella Divina Commedia», in Forum Italicum, XXI (1987), 197-205.
^Jerome Biblical Commentary, ed. R. E. Brown, J. A. Fitzmyer, & R. E.
Murphy, Englewood, Prentice Hall, 1986, pp. 820-821.
l^Thus the pilgrim learns the «truth», at this paradisiac level from «him»
who shows him the first love of all eternal substances. Who this «colui»
might be is another crux of the Commedia. Singleton opts for Aristotle,
Bosco & Reggio agrees that it is a philosopher, though not necessarily
Aristotle. Donadoni and Getto believe that it is a Scriptural authority.
Sapegno cites Aquinas and states that this notion derived from Scholastic
writings through neoplatonic texts. Others say that it is found in the
pseudo- Aristotelian De causis or in Albert's De Causis since Dante maintains
the same opinion in Convivio III, ii, 4. Romans 5:1-9, however, speaks of
«God's own proof of his love toward us us». I believe that while it is
probably a philosophical voice adopted by Scholasticism, the word «colui»
would seem to indicate a specific person, but it remains intentionally
367
ambiguous.
^ 'On the «maestro-discepolo» relationship and the idea of a scholastic
examination, see Marcazzan (pp. 16-17) and Jenni who points out that the
questions are more concise than the answers (p. 1833).
Again here comes into question what Barolini labels «the mode of
«disugualianza» and the pointed question of the «divina favella» (pp.
230-231).
^Dante the pilgrim cannot avoid using the ornate language that slips «from
profane parabolism into theological allegory», as Edgar De Bruyne states in
his The Esthetics of the Middle Ages, trans. E. B. Hennessy, New York,
Ungar, 1969, p.78.
2^0n «m'armava» see Pietrobono (p. 835) and Marcazzan, who agreeing with
the former affirms that this verb intends to recall «alla memoria gli
argomenti intorno alla questione propostagli, per approvarla, per addurre le
prove necessarie alla dimostrazione, e non per terminarla, perchè il
risolverla non spetta a lui» (p. 18). This is a cogent argument to be applied
to the whole canto and to Dante's intentional strategy of posing questions
even if unanswerable or insoluble.
^Getto, p. 219: and see Marcazzan, d. 18.
99
^St. Iraeneus in his Adver sus H aer eses, IB, i,l confirms a tradition in which
Peter and Paul were the only evangelizers and founders of the Church in
Rome. See also «Paolo» in the Enciclopedia dantesca , IV, p. 272.
2*1 consider the word «filo» ambiguous and allusive to related meanings,
«filo di spada» (the edge of the sword), «mettere a filo di spada» (to execute.
Benvenuto states: «darum enim est quomodo Petrus et Paulus praedicaverunt
in urbe et reduxerunt muitos ad vitam rectae fidei, pro qua receperunt
martyrium sub nequissimo Nerone» (24:61-63).
24 Summa TheoL, 2a,2ae.4,l, resp. On form as quiditas, see Umberto Eco, Art
and Beauty in the Middle Ages New Haven, Yale UP, p. 41.
25 Barolini, p. 231. It would seem to me that Dante the pilgrim accepts and
provides the orthodox view on faith, while Dante the intellectual projects an
ongoing question.
^^This is a type of knowledge, «conceptual comprehension», not unlike the
visio of the blessed: «those in heaven who see God as he is» (lJohn:3,2).
The technical term for this is comprehensores from ICorinthians 9:2, but it
does not mean «that the beatific vision comprehends God as he comprehends
himself». See «Glossary», p. 169 of Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae,
ed. T. Gilby, Blackfriars Edition, New York, McGraw Hill, 1966, vol. 45.
On this see also la,2ae.4,3 and la,2ae.27,l.
«In this indeed, we hope to be blessed: that we will openly see that truth
which we adhere by faith» ( Summa 2a,2ae.4,l).
2% See Convivio, III,vii,16. See also «Fede», Enciclopedia dantesca, II,
820-821.
^Marcazzan, p. 21.
^Could this mean that the «colui» of Par. XXVI, 38 might be Aristotle?
-Ôn the metaphor of the coin see also Purg. XI, 125-127. Benvenuto
368
observes: «Et hic nota quod autor metaphorice assimilât fiden pecuniae in
auro, quae omnes sua spartes in liga, pondere et cunio».
Ôn Pur g. X see Giuseppe Mazzo tta's chapter, «Allegory: Poetics of the
Desert», in his Dante : Poet of the Desert , Princeton, Princeton UP, 1979,
pp. 227-274. On the topos Deus artifex see also, Ernst Robert Curtius,
European Literature, cit., pp. 544-5466. See also Hugh of St. Victor in PL
176, col. 745D cited in Curtius. The latter also cites Himerius Dubner as
giving the topos «God as the great sophist in heaven» (p. 546). Besides
Purg. X, Par. II, 128-129 has the image of the «fabbro».
Âugustine, De civitate Dei , XXII, 5, pp. 815-816. At one point Augustine
exclaims: «And if the world has put faith in a small number of men, of mean
birth and of the lowest rank, and no education, it is because the divinity of
the thing itself appeared all the more manifestly in such contemptible
witnesses. The eloquence indeed, which lent persuasion to their message,
consisted of wonderful works, not words». And see Thomas Aquinas, Contra
Gentiles , 1,6.
Acts 3:6; ICorinthians 2:1; 1:22. Scartazzini cites Fra Giordano, Predica
VIH of the Credo in Dio (p.832).
35 Bosco & Reggio, HI, 406.
36«Te Deum» at one point sings: «Tu Patris sempiternus / es Filius. / Tu ad
liberandum suscepturus hominem, / non horruisti Virginis uterum. / Tu
devicto mortis aculeo, aperuisti /credentibus regna coelorum. / Tu ad
dexteram Dei sedes, in gloria Patris. / Iudex crederis esse venturus»
( Messale Romano Quotidiano , tr. S. Bertola & G. Destini, Padova, Lice,
1962 (reprint), pp. 411-415.
3'Marcazzan, p. 25.
3^Bosco & Reggio, note 115, p. 406. «Barone» was commonly used in the
Middle Ages as an honorifc title for the saints. See Boccaccio's Decameron
VI: 10, «baron messer santo Antonio»; in his Teseida Boccaccio labels the
hero «il gran Teseo, magnifico barone» (I, 49). The word is from the French
baron , Frankish baro , which meant free man, warrior.
3^The «lignum vitae» as a symbol of wisdom and immortality is found
throughout the Bible. Proverbs 3:18 states: «Lignum vitae est his qui
apprehenderit earn». See also Proverbs 11:30, 13:12, 15:4. Very significant
for Par. XIX and for this canto Ezechiel 47:12: «Et super torrentem orietur in
ripis eius, ex utraque parte, omne lignum pomiferum; non defluet folium ex
eo, et non deficiet fructus eius; per singulos menses afferei primitiva, quia
aquae eius de sanctuario egredientur: et erunt fructus eius in cibum, et foliam
earn ad medicinam».
40Hugh of St. Victor, PL 176, cols. 998-1006.

41Ibid., col. 1002.
42 As Mazzotta reminds us, it is from humility that the pilgrim starts his
ascent in Purgatory (237-238). On humility see also St. Bernard's De
gradibus humilitatis in PL 182, and Etienne Gilson's La Theologie Mystique
de Saint Bernard , Paris, Vrin, 1986, particularly chapter III, «Schola
Charitatis», pp. 79-107. Humility is necessary for attaining the truth and
369
for knowing oneself, which in turn leads to charity and union with God.
43 PL 176, col. 1003.
44Di Scipio (1994), pp.261 ff.
4^For both Isidore and Rabanus Maurus the number sixty means «omnes
sanctos», see PL 83 and 111, respectively. Both refer to the sexaginta
reginae of the Canticle of Canticles. Dante uses sixty ladies, the ninth being
Beatrice, in Vita Nuova VI and quotes «sexaginta sunt reginae» from the
Canticle in Convivio , II, xiv, 20. In the Talmud the number sixty means
«ripe age» since that is the numerical value of the Hebrew word. See Vincent
Hopper, Medieval Number Symbolism, New York, Cooper Square, 1969, p.
63.
4^Hugh of St. Victor's text, «De fide et eius comitibus», cap. XVI of De
fructibus carnis et spiritus , might be a useful corollary to Dante's discourse
on faith in Paradiso XXIV. Hugh is a source for symbolic representation in
Dante's Purgatorio.
4 'Commentators indicate that the word «donnear» is found in Provençal
poetry, «domnejar», and was adopted by Italian poets. Dante himself uses it
in the canzone «Poscia ch'Amor del tutto m'ha lasciato» (LXXXIII, 52), and
again in Par. XXVII, 88, «la mente innamorata che donnea».
4°John 20:3-10; also Monarchia HI, ix, 6.
4^See Luke 24:44; Acts 2:1-4; Monarchia , III, iv, 9.
3®See Par. XXV, 1-9. Note that Dante declined in 1319 the laurel crown
proposed to him by Giovanni del Virgilio. And in his eclogue of 68 lines he
expresses his desire to seek glory with the Commedia , on whose third
cantica he was at work. Was he still hoping to be crowned in Florence?
3 ^Convivio,, II, xiii, 13-14. See Singleton p. 396.
^Cesare Vasoli's note to Convivio I, ii, 3 (p. 14) registers a quote from the
Disticha Catonis (H,6) which reads: «Nec te conlaudes, nec te culpaveris
ipse: / hoc faciunt stulti quos gloria vexa inanis». See Vasoli's ed.
oïConvivio, in Opere minori , tome I, part II, Milan and Naples, Ricciardi,
1978.
^3Though I tend to agree with Barolini's analysis of Dante's «stuttering», I
believe that canto XXIV, more than any other, shows Dante's mortal
disagguaglianza stylistically and theologically.
370
Paradiso XXV
Author(s): WILLIAM A. STEPHANY
Accessed: 17-02-2020 23:10 UTC
Lectura Dantis
WILLIAM A. STEPHANY
University of Vermont
XXV
In Paradiso 25, St. James examines Dante on hope, second of the
three theological virtues on which he is tested in cantos 24-26. James
initially asks Dante three questions about hope: what is it, to what
degree does he possess it, and where does he get it from (46-48); 1 and
subsequently a fourth question, what is it that hope promises to him
(86-87).2 This dialogue has an additional focus, for in answering St.
James's questions, Dante also demonstrates his understanding of, and
readiness for, the poetic mission with which Cacciaguida had charged
him at the end of canto 17. In that canto, Dante-Pilgrim had been the
interrogator, asking Cacciaguida first to clarify the intimations of exile
presented by souls encountered on the journey and then, given that exile
is inescapable, asking what kind of poetry he should write. Canto 25
reverses Dante's role: rather than asking the questions, the Pilgrim here
answers them, and in his responses demonstrates that he has internalized
Cacciaguida's perspective about his future both as pilgrim and as poet.
As a result Paradiso 25 plays a central role in the overall program
of cantos 22-27, those set in the celestial sphere of the fixed stars, in
each of which Dante self-consciously calls attention to aspects of the
task to which he claims to be called. As he enters this sphere, he
invokes his birth sign of Gemini, as the source of his «ingegno»,
whatever it might be (22.1 13-1 14), and canto by canto the speculations
about poetry continue. In canto 23, he laments that, since his «sacrato
poema» cannot figure paradise, it must make a leap as one who finds his
road cut off; that his mortal shoulder trembles under the poem's weighty
theme; that the metaphorical voyage on which his little bark has set out
requires a daring prow and a committed pilot (23.61-69). The next canto
echoes the first of these figures of speech in asserting that his inability
to describe St. Peter's song causes his pen to leap (24.23-27). Later in
this canto the Pilgrim, reframing the figure of speech which Statius had
used earlier to discuss his indebtedness to Virgil (Purg. 21.94-98),
claims faith, instead of the Aeneid , as the spark which ignited his poetic
flame (24.145-147). Near the end of Paradiso 26, Adam discusses the
original human speech and the relative values of various languages
(124-138), and before Dante leaves the fixed stars, St. Peter provides
371
the ultimate authority for his poetic condemnation of Papal venality,
commanding him, in a refinement of Cacciaguida's final advice in canto
17, that when he returns to earth he should not conceal from others what
Peter has not concealed from him (27.64-66). Paradiso 25, then, plays a
structural role not only as one of the three cantos of theological
examination, but also as one of the cantos set in the fixed stars, all of
which deal with the nature of poetry.
Before Dante can begin to answer any of James's original three
questions, Beatrice intervenes, and it is she who, in answer to the second
of these questions, affirms the unsurpassed quality of Dante's hope
(52-54):
La Chiesa militante alcun figliuolo

non ha con più speranza, com' è scritto
nel Sol che raggia tutto nostro stuolo...
This is a shrewd piece of rhetoric on the part of the poet, since Beatrice
is thereby made to claim, from within the terms of the poem's own
fiction, an unchallengeable and infallible authority for her assertion:
since she alleges that the superiority of Dante's hope is written in the
Empyrean, any attempt to prove the assertion would be redundant.3 If it
is so «written» in the eternal present, it is beyond speculation. It simply
is. This figure of speech, «com' è scritto», anticipates Dante's
subsequent use of textual referents in his answers to James's questions,
and it also provides one of this canto's many recollections of canto 17.
There, in establishing the unchallengeable nature of his view of Dante's
future, Cacciaguida had differentiated between the book of human
contingency - the «quaderno / de la vostra matera», where, by
implication, time's current page perforce conceals the unturned leaves of
the future - and the eternal vision in which, since all contingency -
past, present, and future - is dipinta , painted, it is immediately and
simultaneously available to the eye (17.37-39).4
In fact, Beatrice continues, it is because of the unparalleled degree
of his hope that Dante has been granted this privileged journey, a
journey which she describes in terms of the anagogical sense of Exodus
(55-57):
però li è conceduto che d' Egitto

vegna in Ierusalemme per vedere,
anzi che 'l militar li sia prescritto.
Beatrice here incorporates into her answer another of this canto's main
thematic concerns, the implied contrast between exile and Exodus. She
372
cites the Pilgrim's fictional presence in the celestial Jerusalem before the
end of his prescribed tour of duty in the church militant as ipso facto
evidence of her assertion about the quality of Dante's hope.^ At the end
of Purgatorio , Beatrice had similarly used an implied syllogism in
identifying Dante's amnesia about his intellectual infidelity as evidence
of its sinfulness: memory of sin is washed away in the Lethe; memory
of the infatuation with Philosophy is washed away in the Lethe;
therefore . . . ( Purg . 33. 95-102).
And yet, her adaptation of Exodus typology here to assert Dante's
theological hope seems to invite contrast with the twelve-line exordium
at the beginning of this canto, where the Poet seems to express the
more earthly hope that the Commedia could become the means to
overcome his exile from Florence. The contrast is only apparent,
however. As Gian Roberto Sarolli has argued,6 the significance of this
canto's first sentence is to be found, not in the dependent clause, «Se
mai continga», but in the main clause: «con altra voce omai, con altro
vello / ritornerò poeta, e in sul fonte / del mio battesmo prenderò '1
cappello» (7-9). As a subjunctive (if it should ever happen), continga
expresses not so much an expectation of return (perhaps not even a
desire for return), as a statement about how different his condition would
be from what it was when he departed, if it should ever happen («se mai
continga») that he did return: he would return as a poet different in kind
from what he had been prior to his exile. He will be known for writing,
in an «altra voce», poetry in the mode of Biblical prophecy, poetry of
the very sort which Cacciaguida had commissioned at the conclusion of
Paradiso 17. As such, the canto's beginning in the poet's voice and the
Pilgrim's answers to James's questions - the subject of the rest of this
lectura - make a similar point about Dante's life and his poetic
vocation.7 Whether the historical Dante was ever able «really» to
redefine the plot of his life as comedy is moot. Within the plot of the
Commedia , especially of the Paradiso , this implied felix culpa is the
Poet's defining rhetorical stance: exile from Florence is the essential
precondition to the Pilgrim's spiritual homecoming.
Beatrice's «infallible» testimony on Dante's behalf makes the same
assertion: the important trajectory in Dante's life is not exile - a forced
movement away from Florence - but exodus, a grace-guided movement
toward the Celestial Jerusalem, the kind of spiritual journey of which
pilgrimage is both re-enactment and emblem. Other references to
pilgrimage enter into this canto both directly and indirectly. For
example, when Beatrice first identifies James, it is as a saint whose
most famous church and putative place of burial is a major pilgrimage
site (25.17-18). The first dialogue between James and Dante begins,
373
moreover, by alluding to Psalm 120 (121), a text associated with
pilgrimage. Before addressing Dante, whose eyes are cast down as
defense against the Saint's radiance, James commands him: «Leva la
testa e fa che t'assicuri», and the Poet informs us, «io levai li occhi a'
monti» (34, 38). This is a recollection in bono of Inferno l's mountain
and Dante's failed attempt to climb it without a guide: «guardai in alto e
vidi le sue spalle / vestite già de' raggi del pianeta / che mena dritto
altrui per ogne calle» (16-18). By contrast, Dante's journey to the stars
has been a guided one; Beatrice is «quella pía che guidò le penne / de le
mie ali a così alto volo» (49-50). The pun is common in the poem: she
is guide to his penne , both to the metaphorical feathers by which he
flies through the heavens, and to his pens, a guide, that is, to both
Pilgrim and Poet.8
The failed climb of Inferno 1 and Dante's response to James's
command in Paradiso 25 both recall Psalm 120, which begins: «Levavi
oculos meos in montes, / Unde veniet auxilium mihi» (I have lifted my
eyes to the mountains, from which comes my help).9 This is the second
of the fifteen so-called psalms of ascent or gradual psalms, songs which
were composed apparently during the Babylonian exile and subsequently
grouped together to serve a liturgical function in the second temple.
Perhaps they were pilgrims' songs, to be sung during the ascent of Mt.
Zion; perhaps they were to be sung, one psalm each, on the fifteen steps
of the temple itself.10 In either case, the echo is an appropriate one for
our Pilgrim, moving «di grado in grado» toward the goal of his
pilgrimage, and a model for our Poet, who will write a similarly
celebratory song of ascent.
* * *
Each of the answers which Dante himself prov

questions is presented in part, directly or indirectly, th
as the fruits of Dante's reading. In his answer to the fir
is hope, he translates directly into Italian Peter Lom
definition: «Spene ... è uno attender certo / de la glori
produce / grazia divina e precedente merto. . .» (67-69).
enters indirectly in his responses to James's other two
which interrelates a pair of Biblical allusions. As so of
the Commedia , allusions, especially when they point to
passages, provide a kind of shorthand reference to embedded
mini-narratives which, when recovered, help illuminate Dante's master
narrative either by reinforcing its meaning, by clarifying it, or
ironically, by contrasting with it.12 The Biblical passages Dante here
cites in his answers all illuminate concepts central to this canto.
In answering James's fourth and final question, what is it that hope
374
promises to you, Dante-Pilgrim reiterates the point implied earlier in
Beatrice's answer to the second question: hope promises a return from
exile in the world's Egypt to the celestial land of promise. He makes
this point by means of a double allusion, to passages from both the Old
and from the New Testaments (88-96). The first allusion is to chapter
61 of Isaiah: «Dice Isaia che ciascuna vestita / ne la sua terra fia di
doppia vesta» (91-92). At first glance, Dante might here seem to be
expressing a hope for return from political exile, since Isaiah's interest
at the historical level is to speak in consolation and to offer hope to the
Jewish exiles during the Babylonian captivity. In their land, Isaiah
promises, they will receive a double portion, the inheritance reserved in
ancient Judaism for the first born. However, Dante follows the medieval
exegetical tradition in turning this double portion into a double garment,
in making the exile typological, and in interpreting the «terra sua» to
which the exiles will return not as the earthly, but as the celestial,
Jerusalem: «e la sua terra è questa dolce vita» (93), namely this sweet
life which James and the other saints enjoy. This revelazion , Dante
continues, is made manifest more explicitly in the Apocalypse (3:5,
7:9-17), where James's brother John «tratta de le bianche stole» (95), the
white robes emblematic of the resurrected bodies of the saints.13 Dante's
hope, in other words, «the certain expectation of future glory», is that
the period of exile in our earthly life will be completed in a celestial
homecoming. James, Peter, John, and all the carole of saints join in
singing «Sperent in te», to acknowledge the aptness of Dante's answer:
this is indeed what one should hope for.
St, James's third question - what is the source of Dante's hope -
gives rise to the Pilgrim's longest answer, one in which he cites specific
Biblical texts to define a dynamic of reading and writing which has
previously been implied at several points in the poem (70-78): 14
Da molte stelle mi vien questa luce [hope];

ma quei la distillò nel mio cor pria
che fu sommo cantor del sommo duce.
'Sperino in te', ne la sua tëodia
dice, 'color che sanno il nome tuo':
e chi noi sa, selli ha la fede mia?
Tu mi stillasti, con lo stillar suo,
ne la pistola poi: sì ch'io son pieno,
e in altrui vostra pioggia repluo.
The passage presents a complex mixed metaphor, combining light and

water, in which Biblical authors and their texts are stars pouring the
light of hope as if drops of rain into Dante's heart until it is in turn so
375
full that Dante pours the shower forth again upon others through his
own writing. 15The verbal play in this final terzina' s repetition of
cognates embodies the process it describes. Dante says to James, «Tu
mi stillasti, con lo stillar suo», you distilled in me along with his
(David's) instilling, that is, the Psalm was itself one of the Apostle's
sources and enters into his epistle, «e in altrui vostra pioggia repluo»,
and onto others I rerain your (David's and James's) rain.1** The lines
posit a model of verbal mediation in which first James's text and then
Dante's mirrors the intermediary functioning of the stars themselves,
receiving from above and transmitting below.
As such, this passage may indicate why Dante chose the fixed stars
as the venue for an ongoing concern with the poetic process: verbal
mediation is analogous to the transmission of light in the heavens. As a
prelude to asking his three questions, James says that God has allowed
Dante to come to the stars so that he might encourage hope in himself
(as Pilgrim) and in others, in altrui (as Poet), the same expression Dante
repeats in this passage. The process of heavenly mediation described
earlier in the Paradiso has God transmitting his creative light to the
prime mover, which in turn transmits it through the fixed stars where it
is altered and then transmitted in turn through the varying planets, each
of which modifies it «di grado in grado» on the way to its eventual
destination on earth.17 The literary process here described is analogous.
God fills the writers of holy writ, and they transmit the message of
hope, altered through their individual idiom and circumstance, through
their texts to Dante, who in turn assimilates it and passes it on to his
readers. The purpose of Dante's journey is the poem describing it; the
purpose of the poem is to enable and encourage analogous spiritual
journeys «in altrui». Dante's text is both a description of a process and
its enactment: we fulfill the canto's dynamic in the very act of reading
about it.
Both of the Biblical passages cited in verses 70-78 offer hope to
people enduring earthly suffering such as the Pilgrim will soon endure,
and both demand that the sufferer communicate that hope to others.
Since this is also the goal of the Commedia , this passage describes what
within the poem's fiction is the poem's genesis. The first of the two
texts alluded to here, what is referred to as David's «tëodia», is «Sperino
in te ... color che sanno il nome tuo», the pilgrim's vernacular
translation of verse 11 of Vulgate Psalm 9 [10]. The relevance of the
poem to the exiled Dante's situation seems self-evident at the literal
level. The Psalm expresses confidence that God will sit in judgment and
vindicate the speaker against the injustices of his enemies, punishing
them and offering him consolation, in return for which the Psalmist
376
will sing God's praises. The two biblical verses which immediately
flank verse 1 1 seem to describe a process of mediation identical to the
one described in the figurative language of Dante's passage: the Psalmist
will receive grace from God (verse 10) and transmit it to others through
his song (verse 12). Verse 10 reads: «Et factus est Dominus refugium
pauperi, / Adiutor in opportunitatibus in tribulatione» (And the Lord is
made a refuge for the poor, a helper in due time in tribulation), words
which might well offer consolation to a poor exile such as Dante, in
need both of a refugium and of an adiutor in his tribulatione. Verse 12,
meanwhile, is a command to sing God's praises to others: «Psallite
Domino qui habitat in Sion; / Annuntiate inter gentes studia eius»
(Sing to the Lord who dwells in Zion; declare his ways among the
peoples).18 Dante's song of praise, the text through which he makes
this evangelizing gesture, is the one that we are reading at this moment
of fictional dialogue.
The specific words which Dante translates from this psalm,
however, seem remarkably flimsy in themselves to bear the weight that
this passage in Paradiso 25 imposes upon them, words which are used
to define the literary genre, tëodia, within which Dante places his own
poem. «Sperino in te ... color che sanno il nome tuo» seems too much
a Christian truism to feel adequate at such a climactic moment in
Dante's poem. The key to understanding the passage - and its
significance to Dante as poet of exile - is the second half of this
clause: «color che sanno il nome tuo» [qui nover unt nomen tuum]. The
commentary tradition has typically offered minimalist glosses of this
line, usually settling for identification of Biblical source and
paraphrase.1^ Its significance, however, may require a recollection of the
central role God's nomen plays in the Exodus account, particularly given
the centrality of Exodus typology in the Commedia. In his magisterial
gloss on this psalm,20 Augustine specifically refers in discussing verse
1 1 to the exchange which took place between Moses and the Lord at the
burning bush: «Again the Lord says to Moses: I AM that I AM, and
you shall say to the children of Israel I AM has sent you» [EGO SUM
qui SUM; et dices filiis Israel: Misit me qui EST] (Exodus 3:14).
Augustine uses this reference to God's name to speculate on the nature
of hope, differentiating between the hope for eternal reward and the hope
for material recompense, in a passage that makes exactly Dante's
distinction between exile and exodus, and so could stand as readily as a
gloss upon Paradiso 25. Augustine begins his ennaratio on verse 11 in
words which, though general, are particularly pertinent to the question
of the exiled Dante's relationship to his «homeland»:
377
And let them who know your name hope in you when they will have ceased
hoping in wealth and the other enticements of this world ( cum destiterint
sperare in div it i is et in aliis huius saeculi blandimentis). For indeed the
knowledge of God's name rescues the soul which is seeking where to fix its
hope ( ubi figat spent) when it is torn away ( avellitur ) from this world.
It is specifically God's name, which provides the soul with an

alternative to this world's material rewards. For Augustine concludes his
gloss on verse 11 by using the name of God, EGO SUM qui SUM , as
the basis for a distinction between time and eternity:21
«Let them», then, «who know your Name, hope in you» that they may not
hope in those things which flow by in time's revolution [temporis
volubilitate ], having nothing but «will be» and «has been» [nihil habentes
nisi erit et fuit]. For what in them is future, when it arrives, straightway
becomes the preterite; it is hoped for with desire, it is lost with pain
[exspectatur cum cupiditate, amittitur cum dolore ]. But in the nature of God,
nothing «will be» as if it is not yet; or «has been» as if it is no longer: but
there is only that which is, and this is eternity. Let them cease then to hope
in and love things temporal, and let them devote themselves to hope eternal
[Desinant igitur sperare et deligere temporalia, et se ad aeternam spem
conférant ], those who know His Name who said «I AM that I AM»; and of
whom it was said «I AM has sent me». Those who seek this do not also seek
the transient and mortal [moriturus]: for no one can serve two masters.
Augustine's reading is sensitive to the Psalm as a whole, which is

structured around a contrast - to use the Vulgate's distinction -
between events undertaken «in finem» and those undertaken «in
aeternum ».22 It is apparently for this reason that, when Dante specifies
later in the canto, via the passages from Isaiah and Apocalypse, that his
hope is in the double garment of eternity rather than in the things of
this world, in a spiritual Exodus rather than, for example, in political
rehabilitation, the souls in the carol chant in unison «Sperent in te ,
acknowledging that he is indeed one of those who know God's name -
and its significance.23
The Biblical text which the Pilgrim cites in tandem with « sperino
in te » is the Epistle of St. James, another citation whose aptness seems
not to have been sufficiently appreciated in the commentary tradition,
which typically cites a few passages as possible parallels, but generally
without explication.24 I would argue that the reference to the Epistle of
James, like so many others in the Commedia , is thematically relevant
to the context in which Dante cites it. The beginning and ending of the
Epistle seem especially to re-engage questions raised both by Psalm 9
and by Dante's treatment of hope in this canto, namely the sense of
378
earthly existence as exile from the spiritual patria and the mediational
functioning of texts. The Epistle begins by emphasizing the
paradoxically beneficial nature of suffering; in the plot of Paradiso , this
echoes the predictions of canto 17. There, Cacciaguida had foretold the
Pilgrim's exile, but what was «predicted» in the poem's fictional date of
1300 had already occurred by the time of its composition.25 Words
which there seem to foretell the future in fact present a staged
life-review: the evaluation is retrospective and it is Dante-Poet, not
Cacciaguida who proclaims the years after 1300 as a «dolce armonia»
(17.44).
Like Cacciaguida's reassurances, like the citation from Psalm 9, the
beginning of the Epistle of St. James, seems to offer encouragement to
one who, like Dante-Pilgrim, will suffer in this world (or one who, like
Dante-Poet, has already suffered in this world), but who maintains hope
in the next. The Epistle begins with an assertion of the spiritual value
of earthly suffering (1:2-4):
My brethren, consider it entirely a joy when you shall fall into temptations,
knowing that the testing of your faith works patience. And patience has a
perfect work that you may be perfect and entire, failing in nothing. 2
Scattered throughout the Epistle's first and especially second chapters, is

an ongoing contrast between the rich man and the poor, with the rich,
who lacks the poor man's advantage of being tested, likely to wither as
does the grass. By contrast, blessed is the man who endures temptation,
for when he has been proved, he shall receive the crown of life which
God has promised to those who love him [accipiet coronam vitae, quem
repromisit Deus diligentibus se] (1.12).
As Dante had affirmed in his earlier definition of the virtue, hope
implies an ethical imperative insofar as the «precedente merto» (69)
serves as necessary precondition to hope's fulfillment. Similarly,
chapters 1 and 2 of the Epistle of James insist on the need for active
witness in the world, concluding in Chapter 2's celebrated summary
verse, «even as the body without the spirit is dead, faith without works
is dead» (2:26).27 The end of the Epistle's first chapter is particularly
relevant to Dante's situation as poet, for like Psalm 9, it seems
specifically to engage the mediational nature of the written word. James
commands: «Be ye, therefore, doers of the word, and not just hearers»
[ Estote autem factores verbi, et non auditores tantum] (1.22). The
general admonition to be a doer of the word, however, may have a
specific meaning for a poet because of the semantic range of the Latin
word factor as doer and maker. In Dante's «factory», the raw materials
379
from which he claims to produce his poem, particularly insofar as it is a
tëodia , are the words of texts such as the Epistle of James itself: the
author of a «poema sacro» would seem to be uniquely positioned
simultaneously to be maker and doer of the word, to write poetry as a
way of enacting a Christian imperative.
For one to have become auditor of the word without becoming a
factor verbi , chapter 1 concludes, is to be self-deceiving and narcissistic
and to forget what manner of man he was (1.23-25):
Quia si quis auditor est verbi, et non factor, hic comparabitur viro
consideranti vultum nativitatis suae in speculo: consideravit enim se, et
abiit, et statim oblitus est qualis fuerit. Qui autem perspexerit in legem
perfectam libertatis, et permanserit in ea, non auditor obliv iosus factus, sed
factor operis: hic beatus in facto suo erit.
If we consider the various forms of facere as squinting between the

meanings «do» and «make», the last of these sentences is particularly
complex. As a universal admonition to all believers the Epistle
proclaims that a person who has persisted in the perfect law of liberty
has not been made (factus) a forgetful hearer, but a doer (factor) of the
work who will be blessed in his deed (facto). In the more specific
meaning applicable to a poet, however, one who has been made (factus)
a maker (factor) of the work will be blessed in his making (facto ), a poet
blessed in his poetry. The reciprocity here seems continuous with the
reraining which defines the process of the tëodia : the factor is formed
spiritually by Biblical texts and reciprocates in turn by producing texts.
In Dante's poema sacro , he confesses his own Exodus experience in
order to enable thereby the conversion of his readers, to distill the truth
in them so that they in turn can pour it forth to others in a chain of
verbal transmission.28
The fifth and final chapter of James' Epistle sums up many of that
Book's earlier ideas and also engages ideas found both in David's
«tëodia» and in Paradiso 25. The chapter begins with a lament for the
miseries which await the rich and encouragement to those who are
suffering that they should await the coming of the Lord - an
encouragement, in other words, to maintain hope. The fulfillment of
hope, moreover, is characterized in this last chapter of James as a divine
rain: «Be patient, therefore, brethren, until the coming of the Lord.
Behold the husbandman waits for the precious fruit of the earth:
patiently enduring till he receive the early and latter rain».29 In the
spirit of its first chapter, the Epistle's last then goes on once again to
encourage individual good works: healing the physically and spiritually
ill through anointing and prayer.
380
The Epistle concludes (5.17-20) with the example of the prophet
Elijah, particularly in his ability to control rainfall, and the
encouragement of the faithful to help those spiritually in need:
Elias was a man passable like unto us: and with prayer he prayed that it
might not rain upon the earth, and it rained not for three years and six
months. And he prayed again: and the heaven gave rain, and the earth
brought forth fruit. My brethren, if any of you err from the truth, and one
convert him: he must know that he who causes a sinner to be converted from
the error of his way, J shall save his soul from death, and shall cover a
in J
multitude of sins.
The lines seem addressed directly to Dante's position in attempting to

locate himself as an author with a mission within a prophetic tradition.
Elijah, the archetypal prophet, was a man «similis nobis passabilis», a
sufferer like us, and his control of the rain is specifically a part of his
mission to heal a corrupt political system - the court of Ahab and
Jezebel - and the sinful people of Israel who had lapsed into idolatry.
Without transition, James's Epistle then shifts from the historical to the
personal, from the exemplum of Elijah to a summons to all believers to
try to convert sinners from the error of their way, exactly what Dante
claims as his function in writing the Commedia?^
* * *
I would like to conclude by turning to a final Bibli

which, though not specifically alluded to, seems prese
Dante may imply that he is, like Jesus, a prophet rej
city. In Chapter 4 of Luke's Gospel, immediately afte
the wilderness and the devil's three temptations, Jesus
and the beginning of his public life. In Nazareth, he g
on the Sabbath and when he rises to read is given a co
unrolls the scroll until he comes to Chapter 61, the v
Dante cites in canto 25 in identifying what it is that h
Jesus reads that chapter's first two verses: «And when
book, he restored it to the minister, and sat down. And
the synagogue were fixed on him. And he began to sa
day is fulfilled this scripture in your ears».32 Je
ministry as the fulfillment of Isaiah's Messianic p
people, hearers, rather than doers of the word, scoff, «
of Joseph» («Et nonne hic est filius Ioseph »),
generalize, in words that echo in the beginning of ou
dico vobis, quia nemo prophetus acceptus est in patria
say to you, that no prophet is accepted in his own coun
381
If Jesus begins his first recorded public discourse by reading Isaiah
61, he concludes it exactly as the epistle of James concludes with a
reference to the story of Elijah and the widow, and his miraculous
control of rain «In truth I say to you, there were many widows in the
days of Elias in Israel, when heaven was shut up three years and six
months, when there was a great famine throughout all the earth»
(4. 25). 33 Jesus implies that his fellow citizens have received a
comparable grace through him, but their response is to expel him from
the city and attempt to kill him: «And they rose up and thrust him out
of the city; and they brought him to the brow of the hill, whereon their
city was built, that they might cast him down headlong. But he passing
through the midst of them went his way» (Luke 4:29-30).34 The
parallel to Dante's perception of his situation is clear: Dante, too, was
thrust out from his hometown by citizens who subsequently sought his
death, and he, too, went his way to fulfill his poetic-prophetic ministry.
Jesus provides a model for Dante both as poet and as pilgrim: like
the poet, he models prophetic speech in reraining to his townspeople the
Biblical texts with which he had been filled; like the pilgrim, Jesus
enacts a private Exodus in his wilderness experience. Finally, as with
Beatrice's argument from circumstance, Dante's premature presence in
heaven establishes the intensity of his hope - in his poetic
self-fashioning and self-authorizing, perhaps exile from Florence in
itself establishes his claim. If it is true that «nemo prophetus acceptus
est in patria sua» (and Jesus himself proclaims this), then Dante's
rejection may be the inevitable price to be paid for the gift of prophecy.
Exile, rather than being something Dante hopes his poem will end,
becomes a circumstance that enables and provides authority for his
poem's prophetic vision.35
NOTES
l«dì quel ch'eli' è, dì come se ne 'nfiora / la mente tua, e dì onde a te venne».

Citations from the Commedia follow Petrocchi's critical text, as reproduced
in the edition of Charles S. Singleton.
2«ed emmi a grato che tu diche / quello che la speranza ti 'mpromette».
3The concluding terzina of this speech (61-63), in which Beatrice provides
the rationale for her intervention on Dante's behalf, is also a cagey piece of
rhetoric. She claims that James's other two questions will be neither
difficult for Dante (as, by implication, would have been his honest
comparative evaluation of the degree of one's hope), nor will they provide
cause for boasting (as this evaluation might seem to do). However much
this might protect the Pilgrim from the appearance of presumption, it can
382
scarcely be said to perform an analogous function for the inventor of
Beatrice's words.
4There are many such recollections of canto 17. Cacciaguida predicts that
Dante will have to seek hospitality in various courts starting with that of
the Scaligeri, and in Paradiso 25 Dante is «ne l'aula più secreta ... di questa
corte» (42-43). Dante will come to know «come sa di sale / lo pane altrui»
(17.58-59), while Peter and James' praise «il cibo che là sù li prande»
(22-24). James asks his final question of Dante because it is so willed by
the love which he says «avvampa» within (82), while Beatrice initiates the
exchange with Cacciaguida by urging Dante: «Manda fuor la vampa / del tuo
disio» (17.7-8). The flame of desire at canto 17's beginning with
Cacciaguida's urging at its conclusion that Dante's voice strike the
powerful like the wind (133-134) frames the canto with Pentecostal
imagery, while at the beginning of canto 25, Peter is the primizia ,
first-fruit, of the Papacy (14). The prediction that Dante will come to know
«come è duro calle / lo scendere e '1 salir per l'altrui scale» (59-60) may also
be recalled in canto 25's allusion to Psalm 120, one of the gradual psalms,
a discussion of which follows in this paper.
^The most self-conscious example of Dante's using the groundrules of his
poem to establish its credibility is his swearing on the notes of his
Comedy to the reality of Geryon, the truth that has the face of a lie {Inf.
16.124-128). In a reciprocal rhetorical gesture, Beatrice concludes her
valedictory by asserting not just that Boniface VIII will spend eternity in
hell, but specifically in the third bolgia {Par. 30.142-148), implying, at a
time when we have been assured that we are beyond «ombriferi prefazi»
(30.78), that Dante's construct of the otherworld has an ontological reality
outside of the poem's fiction.
"«Dante's Katabasis». My understanding of this canto has also been shaped
by several other excellent recent readings, including those of Teodolinda
Barolini, Kevin Brownlee, Anna Chiaviacci Leonardi, Peter Hawkins,
Robert Hollander, and Giuseppe Mazzotta.
7
'The generalized conclusion in the Bosco & Reggio introduction to
Paradiso25 is insightful, not only for its analysis of the relationship of
these lines to the rest of this canto, but also because of its sense of its
relationship to the figurative language of Paradiso 17: «L'eventualità che il
poema possa ottenergli la revoca del bando, è desiderata, non sperata ...
Dante non si aspetta veramente la corona dai governanti di Firenze: si
corona da sè; da sè esalta la sua poesia. ... I versi iniziali sono, sì, collegati
col resto del canto, ma per contrasto. Al perdurare del dolore della
lontananza dalla patria e soprattutto dell'ingiustizia, all'improbabilità che
l'uno e l'altra potessero aver fine, Dante oppone la certezza del
ristabilimento, nell'aldilà, della felicità e della giustizia: La ferita prodotta
dallo strale dell'esilio, impallidita ormai ogni speranza terrena, sarà lenita
dalla tanto più certa e grande speranza della gioia eterna» (411-412). This
is essentially the argument of Niccolò Rodolico, as well. Sarolli's reading,
however, makes the passages rather more analogous than contrastive.
383
8The «alto volo» for which she here serves as guide contrasts with the
unguided «folle volo» of Ulysses. See John Freccero's essays, «The
Prologue Scene», (1-28, and esp. 15-28) and «Dante's Ulysses: From Epic
to Novel» (136-151).
9 All Biblical citations in Latin are from the Vulgate Bible, with English
translations from the Rheims-Douay version which I have sometimes
modified for reasons of style or clarity.
l^These 15 psalms are alternatively known as «cantica ascensionum» or
«cantica graduum».
* 1 «Est enim spes certa expectatio futurae beatitudinis, veniens ex Dei gratia
et meritis praecedentibus» (Sententiarum libri quatuor , III, xxvi, i, in PL
198). This source is identified as early as Benvenuto da Imola. All
references to the commentary traditions derive from the database of the
Dartmouth Dante Project.
l^See Jacoff, «Models», for an exploration of Dante's intertexuality.
1,3The best gloss on the passage is internal within Paradiso 25: later in the
canto Dante goes blind staring at St. John to see whether he is present in
body as well as in soul, and John uses this very Figure of speech to affirm
that only Jesus and his mother have the privilege of being in heaven with
«due stole» (25.127). For an analysis of the traditional exegesis whereby
Isaiah's double portion became identified with the double garments of soul
and resurrected body, see Chiavacci Leonardos insightful analysis of
«bianche stole». She argues that Dante is unusual in insisting on the soul's
anticipated joy in reunion with the body.
l^For example, as early as Inf. 2's description of the «chain of grace»
whereby words urging conversion pass from Mary to Lucy to Beatrice to
Virgil to the Pilgrim and thence from Poet to readers. (See Jacoff and
Stephany, 5-15).
l^Peter Hawkins makes the point in his MLA paper «Self- Authenticating
Artifact». The conclusion of the process in Dante's reraining «in altrui»
recalls a reference earlier in this canto where James asks Dante to answer
his questions so that he can «comfort» (conforte») the truth of the
heavenly court, «in te e in altrui», presumably through this poem
describing the pilgrim's experience.
l^See the note in Bosco & Reggio: «Si noti la presenza, in questa terzina,
delle replicazioni (stillasti, stillar , pioggia , repluo ), che danno a questi
versi una particolare altezza stilistica».
l^The most specific description of this process comes in Beatrice's
explanation of the sources of the moon spots (Par. 2.112 ff.).
l°This aspect of the Psalm is established from its beginning: «Confitebor
tibi, Domine, in toto corde meo; Narrabo omnia mirabilia tua. Laetabor et
exsultabo in te; Psallam nomine tuo, Altissime» (2-3).
Ânonimo Fiorentino, to cite a fourteenth-century example, comments,
«quasi a dire: ogni fedele cristiano non ignora il nome di Dio». To cite
twentieth-century examples, Trucchi comments: «chiunque ha questa fede,
la fede di Dante, non può non sperare», while Singleton glosses solely
384
with the reference to the scriptural verse and its translation.
20See/>L 36.116-131.
2*He makes much the same point, but in extended form in Confessions
Book 11.
22The way that Augustine plays with verb tenses in this passage to suggest
the temporality of language itself is also familiar from the Confessions..
See Peter Hawkins, «Dante's Paradiso », for an analysis of the vision which
Augustine and Monica share in Ostia in relation to the Paradiso.
2Âs Kevin Brownlee argues: «Not only does the Italian citation of Psalm
9:11 precede the Latin in Dante's text, but it also is given in its entirety -
in contrast to the abbreviated (even fragmentary) Latin citation of the same
verse. It is as if the Latin were (paradoxically) presented as a
"translation'of the Italian» (599).
2^The Bosco & Reggio gloss is typical in emphasizing the indefiniteness
of this reference: «In essa [l'Epistola],... ci sono alcuni passi, in cui si parla
del premio eterno che Dio promette a chi vince le tentazioni ( ¡äc . I 12), ai
poveri (II 5), agli umili (IV 7-10), ecc., anche se, in realtà, non c'è in essa
un'esplicita trattazione del tema della speranza: ma Dante infatti parla solo
di stille». To me there seem to be a good deal more than «stille» in this
text.
9^ ŁJ
ŁJ Dante coyly elects not to repeat any predictions about Can Grande that
would extend beyond the date of the poem's composition (17.92-93).
^«Omne gaudium existímate fratres mei, cum in tentationes varias
incideritis: scientes quod probatio fidei ves trae patientianv operatur.
Patientia autem opus perfectum habet: ut sitis perfecti et integri in nullo
deficientes».
2^«Sicut enim corpus sine spiritu mortuum est, ita et fides sine operibus
mortua est». The comparison in this passage may also have its resonance
in the canto's insistence on the reunion of soul and resurrected body in
eternity, the point which, in Chiavacci Leonardi's argument, Dante claims
as the end of hope.
^Chapter 1 of this Epistle also affirms God as the origin of the grace which
descends from above, specifically as «the Father of lights, with whom
there is no change, nor shadow of alteration», a notion compatible with
the dynamics of Paradiso 25 and with Augustine's understanding of Psalm
9: «Omne datum optimum, et omne donum perfectum desursum est,
descendens a Patře luminum, apud quem non est transmutado, nec
vicissitudinis obumbrado» (1:17).
2^«Patientes igitur estote, fratres, usque ad adventům Domini. Ecce agricola
exspectat pretiosum fructum terrae, patienter ferens donee accipiat
temporaneum et cerotinum».
30«Elias homo erat similis nobis passabilis: et oratione oravit ut non
plueret super terram, et non pluit annos tres, et menses sex. Et rursum
oravit: et caelum dedit pluviam, et terra dedit fructum suum. Fratres mei, si
quis ex vobis erraverit a veritate, et converterit quis eum: scire debet
quoniam qui converti fecerit peccatorem ab errore viae sue, salvabit animam
385
eius a morte, et operiet multitudinem peccatomm».
"^^The phrase «ab errore viae suae», of course, re-engages the poem's most
fundamental constitutive metaphor, the «cammin di nostra vita».
«Et cum plicuisset librum, reddidit ministro, et sedit. Et omnium in
synagoga oculi erant intendentes in eum. Coepit autem dicere ad illos: Quia
hodie impleta est haec scriptura in auribus vestris».
3 3 «In veritate dico vobis, multae viduae erant in diebus Eliae in Israel,
quando clausum est caelum annis tribus et mensibus sex: cum facta esset
fames magna in omni terra».
34«Et surrexerunt, et eiecerunt ilium extra civitatem: et duxerunt ilium ad
supercilium montis, super quern civitas illorum erat aedificata, ut
praecipitarent eum. Ipse autem transiens per medium illorum, ibat».
-^For a discussion of Dante's self- authorizing rhetoric, see the essay by
Albert Ascoli which summarizes his own earlier work on the subject and
provides a useful bibliography of the work of others.
WORKS CONSULTED
Ascoli, Albert Russell. «The Unfinished Author: Dante's Rhetoric of

Authorization in Convivio and De vulgāri eloquentia , in The Cambridge
Companion to Dante , ed. Rachel Jacoff. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993:
45-66.
Augustine. Ennarationes in psalmos. PL 36.
Bambeck, Manfred. «Paradiso XXV,91ff.: 'Dice Isaia...' oder das
Doppelgewand der Seele», in Dante Alighieri 1985. In Memoriam Hermann
Gmelin. Ed. Richard Baum und Willi Hirdt. Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag,
1985: 217-228.
Barolini, Teodolinda. Dante's Poets: Textuality and Truth in the Comedy.
Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984: 269-286; The Undivine Comedy:
Detheologizing Dante. Princeton, Princeton UP, 1993.
Biblia Sacra juxta Vugata Clementinam. Nova Editio. Madrid: Biblioteca de
autores cristianos, 1953.
Bosco, Umberto and Giovanni Reggio, eds. La Divina Commedia. Paradiso.
Firenze: LeMonnier, 1988.
Brownlee, Kevin. «Why the Angels Speak Italian: Dante as Vernacular Poeta
in ParadisoXXV», Poetics Today 5:3 (1984): 597-610.
Camilucci, Marcello. Il canto XXV del Paradiso. Lectura Dantis Romana.
Torino: SEI, 1959.
Chiavacci Leonardi, Anna. «'Le bianche stole': Il tema della resurrezione del
Paradiso », in Dante e la Bibbia. Atti del convegno internazionale promoso
da «Biblia», Firenze 26-28 settembre 1986. Ed. Giovanni Barblan.
Firenze: Olschki, 1988: 249-271; «I canti del cielo stellato», in Lectura
Dantis Modenese. Modena, 1986: 201-230.
Fattori, Bruno, «canto XXV», m Letture del «Paradiso». Ed. Vittorio Vettori.
Milano: Marzorati, 1970.
Freccero, John. Dante : The Poetics of Conversion. Ed. Rachel Jacoff.
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Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1986.
Getto, Giovanni. // canto XXV del Paradiso. Lectura Dantis Romana. Torino:
SEI, 1965.
Hawkins, Peter. «Dante's Paradiso and the Dialectics of Ineffability», in
Ineffability : Naming the Unnamable from Dante to Beckett. Ed. Peter S.
Hawkins and Anne Howland Schotter. New York: AMS Press, 1984: 5-21;
«Self- Authenticating Artifact: Poetry and Theology in Paradiso25». Read
at the annual meeting of the Modem Language Association of America, San
Francisco, CA, Dec. 29, 1991.
Holy Bible , Translated from the Vulgate. Reprint of the Rheims and Douay
Editions. Baltimore: John Murphy, 1914.
Hollander, Robert. Allegory in Dante's Commedia. Princeton: Princeton UP,
1969.
Jacoff, Rachel. «Models of Literary Influence in the Commedia» , in
Medieval Texts and Contemporary Readers. Ed. Laurie A. Finke and Martin
B. Schichtman. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1987: 158-167.
Jacoff, Rachel and William A. Stephany. Lectura Dantis : Inferno II.
Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1989.
Margiotta, Giacinto. Il canto XXV del Paradiso. Firenze: LeMonnier, 1966.
Mazzotta, Giuseppe. «Dante and the Virtues of Exile», Poetics Today 5:3
(1984): 645-667.
Musa, Mark. Advent at the Gates : Dante's Comedy. Bloomington: Indiana
UP, 1974.
Porena, Manfredi. La mia Lectura Dantis. Napoli: Guida, 1932: 365-392.
Rodolico, Niccolò. Il canto XXV del Paradiso. Società Dantesca Italiana.
Firenze: Sansoni, 1904.
Sarolli, Gian Roberto. «Dante's Katabasis and Mission», in The World of
Dante. Ed. S.B. Chandler and J.A. Molinaro. Toronto: U of Toronto P,
1966: 234-278. Reprinted in Prolegomena all «Divina Commedia».
Firenze: Olschki, 1971: 381-419; «Giacomo (Iacopo) il Maggiore», in
Enciclopedia dantesca 2,147-148.
Singleton, Charles S., ed., comm., & trans. The Divine Comedy. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1970-1975.
Tartaro, Achille. «Certezze e speranza nel XXV del Paradiso», Alighieri 24.1
(1983): 3-15.
387
Paradiso XXVI
Author(s): KEVIN BROWNLEE
Accessed: 17-02-2020 23:10 UTC
Lectura Dantis
KEVIN BROWNLEE
University of Pennsylvania
XXVI
Paradiso 26 is structured around two encounters. The first (vv.
1-66) is between Dante and St. John; it constitutes the third and final
stage of the pilgrim's «celestial examination on theology» (Singleton),
as the Apostle question him on Charity. The second encounter (vv.
80-142) is between Dante and Adam; here, it is the pilgrim's questions
that are answered. A brief «interlude» (vv. 67-79) serves to link these
two major episodes. Within this symmetrical, indeed, specular, structure
(see Barlozzini and Mengaldo), the canto's two principal themes are love
and language. Both are treated in terms of the key question of authority.
Dante's status as theologus is thus very much at issue, as is his identity
as poeta and his notion of a vernacular poetics embodied in the
Commedia. Finally, the canto involves a particularly suggestive set of
references to St. Paul and to Virgil, linked to a programmatic treatment
of certain earlier works of Dante.
From the very beginning of Par. 26, Dante is presented as still
blinded as a result of having (at the close of the preceding canto, vv. 1 18
ff.) stared too long and intently into the brightness surrounding St. John
(first introduced in Par. 25.100) in a vain attempt to discover whether
the latter had been raised to Heaven in the body as well as in the spirit
(as a popular medieval legend had it). This blindness will last
throughout the examination on Charity that constitutes the first major
episode of Par. 26 and is directly compared, by St. John himself, to St.
Paul's preconversionary blindness on the road to Damascus (in Acts 9,
where it is narrated in the third person). More specifically, St. John
evokes the moment at which St. Paul's sight is restored by the touch of
the disciple Ananias (Acts 9:17-18), by comparing the power of
Beatrice's look to that of Ananias's hand: «la donna che per questa dia /
region ti conduce, ha ne lo sguardo / la virtù ch'ebbe la man d'Anania»
(vv. 10-12).
Several points should be noted in this context. First, this striking
presentation of the experience of Dante the pilgrim in explicitly Pauline
terms functions as part of a program that had begun in Inf. 2.28-30,
with a negative comparison (see Jacoff/Stephany). Dante's famous
double denial in Inf. 2.32 has long been read as a kind of self-definition,
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for by declaring to Virgil that «io non Enea, io non Paulo sono», Dante
is in effect affirming that he is both Aeneas and Paul. That is to say, his
journey will be modeled on theirs: he will be a new Aeneas and a new
St. Paul. In the opening canto of the Paradiso , this Pauline model for
Dante's journey to Heaven is clearly set in motion with Dante's
first-person rewriting {Par. 1.73-76) of the famous passage in 2 Cor.
12:2 where the Apostle declared his uncertainty about whether he made
his heavenly voyage «in the body or out of the body» (see Brownlee,
1990).
Second, the curing of Paul's blindness in Acts 9:17-18 is
immediately preceded by God's explicit designation of the future Apostle
as His vas electionis [chosen vessel] and is immediately followed by
Paul's baptism, both of which now inform Dante's experience in Par.
26. In addition, Dante's final episode of blindness (in Par. 30.46) will
again recall this same moment in Paul's conversion narrative, as
recounted in the first-person by the Apostle himself in Acts 22:4-16
(and again in Acts 26:9-18). Dante's final «baptism» in the river of light
is thus presented in Pauline terms, and functions programmatically in
conjunction with the opening scene of Par. 26. Finally, the salvific role
assigned to Beatrice-as-Ananias is made to extend all the way back to
Vita Nuova 2, as Dante recalls the very first time he saw his lady: «al
suo piacere e tosto e tardo / vegna remedio a li occhi, che fuor porte /
quand' ella entrò col foco ond' io sempr' ardo» (vv. 13-15). The
appropriately magnified role of Beatrice in connection with the
examination on Charity is thus emphasized, as is the link between
Dante's earthly, historical love of Beatrice and the true Christian Charity
he now expounds. In addition, the presentation of Beatrice as a «fiamma
di caritade» in Vita Nuova 21 is highly relevant here (as Mengaldo
notes), as is St. Paul's privileging of Charity among the three
theological virtues in 1 Cor. 13:1-13.
The examination itself involves a series of three questions and three
responses. It thus follows the same basic format of the medieval
disputado as the two preceding examinations: that on Faith, by St.
Peter {Par. 24.52-147) and that on Hope, by St. James {Par. 25.40-96).
Because of the nature of Charity, primarily a matter of will rather than
of intellect (Singleton), Dante is not asked for a definition, as he had
been in the case of the two other theological virtues.
St. John thus begins his examination by asking what Dante loves:
«dì ove s'appunta / l'anima tua» (vv. 7-8). The answer, of course, is
God: «Lo ben che fa contenta questa corte, / Alfa e O è di quanta
scrittura / mi legge Amore o lievemente o forte» (vv. 16-18). It is
important to note that Dante's response to St. John makes use (v. 17) of
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the latter's own words, taken from the Book of Revelation (1:1, 21:6,
22:13), for the Middle Ages considered the fourth gospel and the
Apocalypse (as well as the three Johannine Epistles) to have been
written by the same person.
St. John's second question concerns the cause of Dante's love of
God: «dicer convienti / chi drizzò l'arco tuo a tal berzaglio» (vv. 23-24).
Dante's answer is twofold: human reason, as embodied in philosophy,
and divine authority, as embodied in scripture. A condensed scholastic
«proof» (vv. 28-36) demonstrates the necessity for God to be the first
and highest object of love. This is attributed to an unnamed philosopher
(vv. 37-39), taken by most commentators to be Aristotle (or the
pseudo-Aristotelian Liber de Causis , as Cremona notes). Philosophical
speculation is thus in harmony with, but subordinate to, revelation, «la
voce del verace autore» (v. 40), which is cited directly (v. 42) by means
of an Italian rendition of Exod. 33:19, in which God speaks to Moses.
To this Old Testament authority, Dante adds that of St. John himself,
from the New Testament: «Sternilmi tu ancora, incominciando / l'alto
preconio che grida l'arcano / di qui là giù sovra ogne altro bando» (vv.
43-45). Most commentators take this to be a reference to the opening of
the Johannine Gospel (1:1-14), which proclaims the Incarnation of the
Word. Moore (and others) also adduce John 3:16, which announces the
Redemption.
The use of the word arcano in the rhyme position (v. 44, a hapax
in the Commedia) to designate St. John's message is suggestive because
of its Pauline resonances: in 2 Corinthians 12:4, the Apostle describes
his heavenly journey in terms of arcana verba which he was not
permitted to utter once he had returned to earth. An implicit contrast is
suggested between St. Paul's silence and St. John's speech with regard
to the «experience» of heaven that is particularly relevant to the canto's
presentation of Dante as a St. Paul figure. What is emphasized is a key
difference: in contradistinction to his Pauline model (and like St. John)
Dante-poet articulates, cries out (grida) the mystery (arcano) he
experienced during his celestial journey.
In this context it is interesting to note the explicit comparison
between Saints Paul and John in Scottus Eriugena's Homily on the
Prologue to St. Johns Gospel (i.e., John 1: 1-14). This important work
by the Latin translator of the Pseudo-Dionysus (attributed, however, in
the surviving Italian manuscripts to Origen) describes St. John's
attainment of divine truth through «theological» contemplation as an
exaltation «by the mind's ineffable flight, up to the mysteries (archana)
of the single Principle of all things» (1.16-17). For Eriugena, not only
did St. John's (contemplative) raptus take him higher than St. Paul's
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third heaven, but it is John's «heavenly journey» rather than Paul's
which is associated with arcana (cf. 10.29-34). In addition, the Homily
stresses the contrast between St. Paul who heard a multiplicity of words
(«verba», 4.10) which he was not allowed to speak with John who heard
the single word («unum verbum») which he was permitted to articulate
(«illud verbum dicere», 4.13-14).
In Par. 26. 46-48, St. John responds to Dante by summarizing the
latter's answers to the first two questions, before going on to ask the
third, demanding additional motivations for Dante's love of God: «Ma dì
ancor se tu senti altre corde / tirarti verso lui, sì che tu suone / con
quanti denti questo amor ti morde» (vv. 49-51). Dante's answer (w.
55-66) is a brilliant and lyrical «personalization» of theology: the
existence of the world and of the self combined with the redemption of
both through Christ's sacrifice and the pilgrim's consequent hope of
salvation have drawn him «del mar de l'amor torto, / e del diritto m'han
posto a la riva» (vv. 62-63). This evocation of the first simile of the
Commedia (Inf. 1.22-27) is both gloss and self-revelation. The
figurative language of the earlier simile is here redeployed to signify
explicitly Christian truth; it is thus rendered at once more literal and
more spiritual. At the same time, the master figure of the Exodus that is
written into both passages is here fulfilled in the moral sense: in the life
of the individual Christian, through the mediation of Christ. Finally,
the Divine Comedy itself, both as plot (as the pilgrim's trajectory) and
as language, is presented simultaneously as the record and the proof of
Dante's salvation. The linguistic element is most strikingly embodied in
the final terzina of the entire examination (vv. 64-66):
Le fronde onde s'infronda tutto l'orto

de l'ortolano etterno, am' io cotanto
quanto da lui a lor di bene è porto.
This passage has, of course, a clear theological meaning: the proper

Christian love of the world is as God's creation; in loving the creation
we love the Creator (see Bosco & /Reggio, who cite Peter Lombard, and
Gmelin who adds St. Thomas). At the same time, the garden imagery
evokes a «corrected» Eden, an Eden correctly loved. In this context, there
is, I think, the further suggestion of Dante as a new, «corrected» Adam,
which would serve as preparation for the immanent arrival of the
original (in vv. 80ff.). In addition, this terzina constitutes a vernacular
gloss on and expansion of a famous Johannine image: «Ego sum vitis
vera, et Pater meus agricola est» (loan. 15:1; see Getto, Sapegno, etc.;
Daniello brings another Johannine text - whose central concern is
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caritas - to bear on this passage: 1 loan. [3:16-18, 4:9-11, 4:20]).
Finally, the language of the terzina clearly foregrounds its own dense
rhetorical and phonetic patterning. The repeated paronomasia and
assonance call attention to themselves as such and thereby highlight the
poetic status of the language of the Commedia. Thus at the culmination
of Dante's triumph as theologus within the context of the story line, his
identity as vernacular poeta (which had been explicitly established in
Par. 25.1-12; see Brownlee, 1984) is dramatically emphasized. Indeed,
these two components of Dante's identity are presented as fused,
inseparably commingled at the level of his language: a theologically
inspired poetic discourse in the vernacular.
All of this is dramatized in the heavenly chorus of praise (v. 69)
that celebrates Dante's successful completion of the examination on
Charity: «Santo, santo, santo!». This striking vernacularization of a
canonical Latin text ( Sanctus , sanctus , sanctus ) works first of all to
establish a frame with the Dio laudamo of Par. 24.1 13, with which the
heavenly chorus had celebrated Dante's success in the examination on
Faith. It is important to note that the triple santo is, among other
things, an Italianization of the words of praise cried out {proclamant ) by
the heavenly hosts in the hymn Te Deum laudamus. At the same time
we have a vernacularization of the language of Biblical prophecy in
which the Old and New Testaments are, as it were, conflated. For, as
many commentators have observed, both the Seraphim of Isaiah's vision
(Isaiah 6:3) and the four animals of St. John's vision (Apocalypse 4:8)
begin their song of praise around God's throne with the thrice-repeated
sanctus. In this context it is also important to stress (as do Bosco &
Reggio) the triple Sanctus of the Ordinary of the Mass.
It is at this point (vv. 70-80), beginning with the central terzina of
the canto, that Dante's sight is restored by Beatrice's gaze. Benvenuto da
Imola here draws an interesting parallel between the splendor of
Beatrice's eyes (vv. 77-78), which cures Dante's blindness (both physical
and intellectual), and the non-corporeal splendor of St. John
(fulgentissimus inter apostolos ), which had caused this blindness. The
Pauline resonances of this moment, already established by the language
of St. John's earlier prediction, are here reinforced by the word quisquilia
(«mote», v. 76), recalling the Latin squamae of Acts 9:18 (see
Mengaldo and Bosco & Reggio). As in Par. 23, where Dante regained
his sight after having been temporarily blinded by looking at the
descended Christ, the restitution of sight here also means an increase in
visual power (v. 79).
It is with his newly restored and reinforced vision that Dante first
sees Adam as an unnamed «quarto lume» (v. 81) among the three
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Apostles who have just examined him. In answer to his question,
Beatrice identifies this new arrival as the «anima prima / che la prima
virtù creasse mai» (w. 83-84). The pilgrim's reaction is described with
an elaborate simile (vv. 85-89) in which he compares himself to a
fronda (v. 85) bent by the wind which then si leva (v. 86) again to its
original position. This use of synecdoche («[leafy] branch» {fronda ] for
«tree», as Bosco and Reggio convincingly point out, in
contradistinction to Porena and Pietrobono) highlights the word fronda,
especially when the simile is read against its epic «source» ( Thebaid
6.854-57, see Gmelin) which clearly names the «cypress tree»
(i cupressus ).
Dante's address to Adam (vv. 91-96) begins with a double vocative
in which Adam's uniqueness as father of the human race is emphasized
in two seemingly paradoxical circumlocutions: «O pomo che maturo /
solo prodotto fosti, o padre antico / a cui ciascuna sposa è figlia e nuro»
(vv. 91-93). The first seems to evoke Eden and the Fall, now made good
in the very heavenly presence of Adam (who will next be seen in the
Celestial Rose [Par. 32.120], along with Eve [Par. 32.3-5]). The second
vocative (as Mengaldo observes) evokes the Cacciaguida episode (and
especially, Dante's address to his ancestor as «il padre mio» in Par.
16.160). The form of Dante's request to Adam reflects the pilgrim's
extreme eagerness: in order to save time, he requests that his questions
be answered without being articulated, since Adam (qua celestial being)
has already perceived what they are.
Adam's response to his interlocutor is introduced by an extended
simile (vv. 97-102). The joy of the anima primaia (v. 100; cf. the
anima prima of v. 83) is compared to the movement of an animal
coverto (v. 97). The specific animal in question here has long been
debated, and extremely diverse solutions have been proposed. The most
ingenious, in my opionion, is that of André Pézard: a mettlesome war
horse covered in chain mail. This is something of a false problem,
however, since the simile functions in part precisely by referring to a
«generic animal». Much more important in terms of the poetics of the
canto is the way in which this image evokes one of the best known
medieval figures for the relationship between language and truth: the
body which is truth is both covered and revealed by the clothing of
language. In addition, the play between animal and anima reflects the
double (and peculiarly human) identity of Adam at the moment of his
creation. At the same time, the fact that this animal is unnamed recalls
contrastively that it was Adam who first gave names to all the animals
(Gen. 2:19-20). In Giuseppe Mazzotta's suggestive phrase, the Dantean
Adam functions in part as «the archetypal poet». And this component of
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Adamie identity is of fundamental importance to Dante's
self-presentation throughout the canto as a new Adam.
Adam's long speech (vv. 103-42) begins with an affirmation of his
perfect knowledge of Dante's unarticulated questions, which he sees
reflected in God, the «verace speglio» (v. 106), a periphrasis that recalls
Dante's description of God as «verace autore» earlier in the canto (v. 40).
Next, in a kind of inversion of the examination format, Adam himself
states (vv. 109-114) the four questions that Dante wishes him to
answer: 1) how much time has elapsed since God created him in the
«eccelso giardino» (v. 110); 2) how long did his stay in Eden last; 3)
what was the true nature of Original Sin; 4) what language did he speak,
that is, what was «l'idioma ch'usai e che fei» (v. 1 14). The formulation
of this last question is particularly important: the verbs employed by
Adam seem to imply that his own linguistic practice was not directly
God-given.
Most commentators agree that Adam answers the questions in the
order of their importance. It is thus question number three that is
answered first (vv. 1 15-17):
Or, figliuol mio, non il gustar del legno

fu per sé la cagion di tanto essilio,
ma solamente il trapassar del segno.
Theologically speaking, this is straightforward Thomism: Adam's

fundamental sin was pride rather than gluttony ( Summa theol.
2.2.163. Iff.). The striking Dantean formulation trapassar del segno
(echoing and elaborating St. Thomas's supra suam mensuram) has
important implications within the poetic context of the Commedia as a
whole. On the level of plot (as Figurelli points out) Ulysses's
trasgressive voyage in Inf. 26 is being evoked, afolle volo (v. 125)
beyond Gibraltar, where Hercules «segnò li suoi riguardi / acciò che
l'uom più oltre non si metta » (vv. 108-09, emphasis added). On the
level of composition, what is at issue is the enterprise of the Divine
Comedy itself, as Peter Hawkins (1979) very suggestively explains.
With the linguistico-theological claims Dante makes for his poem, he
risks becoming a new Ulysses and thus duplicating Adam's sin. This is
all the more relevant in light of the explicitly Pauline context of Par.
26. For it is clear that the entire Paradiso involves a daring articulation
of what the post-visionary Apostle considered «arcana verba, quae non
licet homini loqui» (2 Cor. 12:4).
Next (vv. 118-23), Adam answers Dante's first question, explaining
that he spent 4,302 years in Limbo after having lived for 903 years on
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earth, making a total of 5,232 years between Adam's creation and the
Harrowing of Hell, and a grand total of 6,498 years from the time of
Creation to the time of Dante's journey (see e.g., Sapegno). These
figures involve standard medieval practice, Adam's lifetime being
established in Gen. 5:5 and the temporal relation between the Creation
and the Crucifixion being established by Eusebius's Chronicles and by
Petrus Comestor's Historia scholastica. At the same time, many
commentators have noted that Dante's use of «volumi / di sol» (w.
119-20) to designate «solar revolutions» seems to echo Ovid in Met.
2.70-71, where Apollo uses a similar locution as he tries to disuade
Phaeton from attempting his disastrous celestial journey.
What is most striking in this passage, however, is the periphrasis
Adam uses to designate Limbo: «Quindi onde mosse tua donna
Virgilio» (v. 118). This is the last time that Virgil is explicitly named
in the entire Commedia , rhyming - significantly - with the word
«exile» ( essilio, v. 116). It is worth noting that essilio appears in the
rhyme position only once in each of the first two cantiche and that in
each case it is paired with Virgilio {Inf. 23.126 and Purg. 21.18), the
third rhyme in every instance is concilio. The only other time that
essilio is found in the rhyme position - again, paired with concilio -
is in Par. 23.134, where Virgil has been «replaced» by Christ («figlio»,
Par. 23.136).
In terms of the preoccupations of Par. 26, what is being represented
here is a fundamental shift with regard to the ultimate authority
underwriting the entire poetic enterprise of the Divine Comedy. The
Virgilian «authority», first established in Inf. 1.85 (when Dante
addressed his Latin predecessor as «my author» [7 mio autore]), is here
replaced by God's «authority», when Dante refers to God as the «true
Author» [verace autore] {Par. 26.40) (see Barolini). These are the only
two instances of autore in the Commedia. A parallel contrast between
Virgil and God as auctores , as «authoritative authors», is suggested by
the Commedia 's use of the word volume : this privileged term for an
author's production is employed by Dante only with reference to the
Aeneid {Inf. 1.84) and to God's Book (in Paradiso) (see Hollander,
1968). Similarly, the term autorità! autor itadi in Par. 26 is twice used
(vv. 26, 47) to designate divine as opposed to human authority, i.e., the
Biblical revelation of God's truth as opposed to philosophical or rational
truth. The only other time autorità appears in the Comedy {Inf. 4.113),
it designates the virtuous pagans in Limbo. The poem's final mention
of Virgil in Par. 26.118 emphasizes the Latin poet's return to Limbo (to
«exile»), at the same time as it evokes the very beginning of the
Inferno , thus picking up the verbal evocations of Inf. 1 in the first half
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(w. 62-63) of Par. 26. In both cases an important contrast is at issue
vis-à-vis Dante the protagonist in the «present» of Par. 26. Furthermore
(as Getto and Figurelli note), Adam's circumlocution for Limbo (the
incomplete, «pagan» Eden) also works in tandem with his earlier
circumlocution for true Eden: «l'eccelso giardino, ove costei / a così
lunga scala ti dispuose» (vv. 1 10-1 1). Both places are described in terms
of the role they have played in Dante's journey (as protagonist) and in
the poetic text that presents itself as a record of this journey: from the
beginning of Inferno to the end of Purgatorio we are given an overview
(from the perspective of Paradise) of the pilgrim's trajectory as a true
«journey to Beatrice». Finally, because Adam's periphrasis for Eden
stresses precisely the moment when Beatrice replaced Virgil as Dante's
guide, Virgil's disappearance as character (in Purg. 30) is here linked to
his «disappearance» as name.
Par. 26 closes as Adam answers Dante's second question by
explaining (vv. 139-42) that he spent barely seven hours in Eden before
the Fall: from sunrise of the day he was created to just after noon. Dante
here chooses the shortest of the various authoritative medieval opinions
concerning this matter, that of Petrus Comestor ( Historia scholastica
24). This time period also corresponds to Dante-protagonist's own stay
in Eden, from sunrise (Purg. 27.133) to just past noon (Purg.
33.103-05) on Easter Wednesday. Adam's statement thus in part
functions to recall contrastively Dante's successful overcoming of sin in
Eden through the mediation of Beatrice/Christ, and the canto closes with
another implicit presentation of Dante as a new Adam figure. This
important textual reminiscence is reinforced by the fact that the final
triple set of rhyme words in Par. 26 (fronda , onda , seconda , w. 137,
139, 141) echoes that at the end of Purg. 33 (seconda, onda, ronda , w.
140, 142, 144).
Adam's third answer (v v. 124-38, to the fourth question) is the
longest and the most innovative in terms both of medieval tradition and
of Dante's own earlier works. The vernacular poetics on which the
Commedia is based are here made into an integral part of the poem
itself. In this context, the conjoining of Adam and the three Apostles
who had examined Dante becomes clear. For Adam is the ultimate
human authority on the origin and status of human language, and as
such is analagous to Saints Peter, James, and John who are the ultimate
human authorities on the three theological virtues (see Getto). And
Adam's explanations in Par. 26 involve a radical reversal (and
«correction») of Dante's own position as expressed in the De vulgāri
eloquentia 1.6.5-7 (see Dragonetti and Nardi [1949]). In his earlier work,
Dante had accorded an absolute linguistic primacy to Hebrew as the
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language of Grace, identifying it both as the language of the
pre-lapsarian Adam and that of the incarnate Christ. This primacy is
now denied by Adam himself in a linguistico- historical context: «La
lingua ch'io parlai fu tutta spenta / innanzi che a l'ovra inconsummabile
/ fosse la gente di Nembròt attenta» (vv. 124-26). This deprivileging of
Hebrew means that all human languages are «equal» with regard to their
potential, both for expressing theological truth and for
grammatico-poetic enrichment. All are equally vernaculars which can be
«illustrated». By implication, therefore, Dante's Italian is not
qualitatively inferior to Hebrew or Latin.
This point is elaborated as Adam's palinode of the DVE continues
with the affirmation that every language - including his own
pre-lapsarian speech - is a human creation: «Opera naturale è ch'uom
favella; / ma così o così, natura lascia / poi fare a voi secondo che
v'abbella» (vv. 130-32). Next comes an explicit correction of DVE
1.4.4 where Dante had said that the Adamie word for God was El. Adam
now states, on the contrary, that (vv. 133-36):
Pria ch'i' scendessi a l'infernale ambascia,

/ s'appellava in terra il sommo bene
onde vien la letizia che mi fascia;
e El si chiamò poi.
Hollander (1975) suggestively remarks on the phonetic and orthographic

correspondances between this first (Hebrew) vocable and the first-person
singular pronoun in Dante's Italian vernacular: /'.
It is in his final enunciation of linguistic principle that Adam
implicitly reformulates the DVE1 s opposition between the vernacular
and Latin ( gramatica ): «e ciò convene, / che l'uso d'i mortali è come
fronda / in ramo, che sen va e altra vene» (vv. 136-38; emphasis added).
With this third appearance (cf. vv. 64 and 85, as well as the verbal form
s'infronda , v. 64), fronda emerges as one of the key words of Par. 26,
where it is used more frequently than in any other canto. What emerges
is the suggestion that the canto is a kind of «verbal garden» - a
provisional, celestial Eden - thus reinforcing the contrastive links with
the earthly Eden of Purg. 27-33 and the true celestial Eden of Par.
30-33. The obvious subtext for this part of Adam's speech is Ars
poetica 60-62, where Horace speaks of the historical evolution and
open-endedness of Latin in order to justify his own (and Virgil's, v. 55)
linguistic innovations (trans. Fairclough):
ut silvae foliis pronos mutantur in annos,

prima cadunt: ita verborum vetus interit actas,
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et iuvenum ritu florent modo nata vigentque.
[As forests change their leaves with each year's decline and the earliest drop
off: so with words, the old race dies, and, like the young of human kind, the
new-born bloom and thrive].
Thus, Adam, in the Italian vernacular, recalls Horace, in Latin, treating

Latin as if it were a vernacular - in need of linguistic enrichment, of
«illustration». The implications of this corrective rewriting of the De
vulgāri eloquentia in the second half of Par. 26 (which contrasts
significantly with the reaffirmation of the Vita nuova in the first half of
the canto, vv. 13-15) are quite far-reaching. For the ultimate
linguistico-poetic enterprise outlined in Dante's earlier, uncompleted
Latin treatise here becomes feasible in specifically theological terms.
The conflation of the existential authenticity of the Italian vernacular
with the «systematic» authority of gramatica , of latinitas - if
successfully achieved - can thus claim to be, by Adamie definition, the
ultimate human linguistic vehicle when infused with, inspired by Faith,
Hope and - most particularly - Charity. Redeemed, «Adāmie» speech
(insightfully viewed by Roger Dragonetti as fundamentally «poetic») is
thus no longer an historically approachable but unobtainable ideal, as it
was depicted in the DVE. On the contrary, Adam himself here authorizes
Dante's Christian vernacular poetics in the most explicit terms possible.
By way of conclusion, I would like to situate the thematics of
desire and language treated in Par. 26 within two different but
complementary structual patterns in the Divine Comedy. The first is
«vertical» and involves a set of striking parallels among the three cantos
numbered 26, one in each cantica. A complex «dialogic» reading is thus
suggested. In this context it is particularly important to note the
extreme relevance of Purg. 26 to the central thematic concerns of Par.
26. There, on the Terrace of Lust, Dante meets Guido Guinizelli, his
«father» («il padre / mio», vv. 97-98) in the context of vernacular love
lyric, whose verse is praised in terms that anticipate Adam's Horatian
characterization of all human languages in Par. 26. When Guido asks
why Dante holds him so dear, the pilgrim replies: «Li dolci detti vostri,
/ che, quanto durerà l'uso moderno, / faranno cari ancora i loro incostri»
(vv. 112-14). Similarly, Adam's affirmation of linguistic multiplicity in
Par. 26 seems to be anticipated by the incorporation of Arnaut Daniel's
Provençal into the very linguistic substance of Dante's illustrious Italian
vernacular at the end of Purg. 26 (vv. 140-47) - in the single longest
citation of a «foreign» language in the entire Divine Comedy. Indeed,
Daniello points out that Adam's use of abbella (Par. 26.132) is a
Provençalism, employed by Arnaut in Purg. 26.140. The linguistic
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concerns of Inf . 26 - i.e., the seductive dangers of Ulysses's
«humanistic» rhetoric - are also relevant here (as Mazzotta notes).
Second, Adam's intervention at the end of Par. 26 may now be seen
to function in conjunction with the entire theological examination that
Dante undergoes in the Eighth Heaven, with his definitive
self-presentation as theologus. For Adam's authoritative, «revisionist»
linguistics provides the final key component in the establishment of
Dante's identity as a Christian vernacular poeta . The ultimate authority
for the Commedia's new kind of poetico-theological treatment of love is
the very highest: in Par. 26, Dante's love of Beatrice is authoritatively
reaffirmed as caritas ; Virgil as auctor is finally displaced by -
subsumed under - God as auctor. It is Dante's ultimate human «father»
(Adam) who effects this displacement of Dante's ultimate «poetic» father
(Virgil, the character most frequently designated by this epithet in the
entire poem). All of this is celebrated - in Dante's new, illustrious
venacular - at the beginning of Par. 27, as the Gloria Patri of the
liturgy is sung by all of Paradise in Italian , to celebrate the
poet-protagonist's success in his theological examination considered as a
whole (vv. 1-3):
'Al padre, al Figlio, a lo Spirito Santo»',

cominciò, łgloria!' tutto 'l paradiso,
sì che m'inebriava il dolce canto.
The thematics of Par. 26 thus epitomize the relationship between

the the Divine Comedy 's ultimate «content» - the love which is also
the motivation for the writing of the poem - and its linguistic «form»
- the «means» by which this love is articulated. In both cases, a
narrative is involved, that is both literary and biographical. The starting
point is located at the beginning of Dante's literary-biographical past:
the erotic desire and the poetic language of the Vita Nuova (later
«inadequately» theorized in the De vulgāri eloqueniia). By Par. 26, erotic
desire has become caritas and poetic language has become theology. But
neither eros nor poetry has been displaced, or even transcended: rather,
both are represented as «fulfilled», as «redeemed», within the context of
what must be seen as Dante's incarnational poetics. For it is the
Incarnation, the central fact of both Christian theology and Christian
history, which simultaneously epitomizes and underwrites Dante's
global literary enterprise as articulated in Par. 26. The Incarnate Christ,
the Word made Flesh - the highest fusion of desire and language, of
love and speech - both inspires and authorizes Dante's extraordinary
claim to a «redeemed» poetic practice.*
399
♦This essay is a modified version of a lectura originally written for the
California Lectura Dantis. I would like to thank the University of California
Press for permission for its prepublication here. Citations of the Commedia
are from Petrocchi; scriptural quotes from the Biblia sacra iuxta vulgátám
clementinam nova editio. 7th ed. Eds., A. Colunga and L. Turrado. Madrid:
B. A. C., 1985.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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1984. - BENVENUTO de Rambaldis de Imola. Comentum super Dantis
Aldigherij Comoediam. Ed. J.P. Lacaita. 5 vols. Florence: Barbera, 1887. -
BOSCO, Umberto and Giovanni Reggio, eds. La Divina Commedia , Vol. III.
Florence: Le Monnier, 1979. - BROWNLEE, Kevin. «Trasumanar: Pauline
Vision and Ovidian Speech in Paradiso I» in The Poetry of Allusion: Virgil
and Ovid in Dante's «Comedy». Eds. Rachel Jacoff and Jeffrey Schnapp,
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991; «Why the Angels Speak Italian:
Dante as Vernacular Poeta 'm Paradiso XXV», Poetics Today 5 (1984),
597-610. - CALO, G. «Il canto XXVI del Paradiso », Rassegna Nazionale 1
(1914), 549-578. - CARINCI, N. Dante e il suo credo nell'esame sostenuto
innanzi a tre santi. Chiavari, 1953. - CREMONA, Joseph. « Paradiso
XXVI» in Cambridge Readings in Dante's Comedy, eds. Kenelm Foster and
Patrick Boyde. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981, pp. 174-190. - DAMON,
Philip. «Adam on the Primal Language: Paradiso 26.124», Italica 38 (1961),
60-62. - DANIELLO, Bernardino. L'Espositione di Bernardi in] o Daniello da
Lucca sopra la Comedia di Dante. Eds. Robert Hollander and Jeffrey Schnapp,
with Kevin Brownlee and Nancy Vickers. Hanover: University Press of New
England, 1989. - DI SCIPIO, Giuseppe C. «Dante and St. Paul: The
Blinding Light and Water», Dante Studies 98 (1980), 151-57. -
DONADONI, Eugenio. «Il Canto XXVI del Paradiso» in Letture dantesche:
Paradiso , ed. Giovanni Getto. Florence: Sansoni, 1961, pp. 527-550. -
DRAGONETTI, Roger. «La Conception du langage poétique dans le D e
vulgāri eloquentia de Dante» in «Aux frontières du langage poétique»,
Romanica Gandensia 9 (1961), 9-77. - ERIUGENA, John Scottus. Jean
Scot. Homélie sur le prologue de Jean. Ed. and trans. Édouard Jeauneau. Paris:
Cerf, 1969. - FAIRCLOUGH, H.R., trans. Horace. Satires, Epistles and Ars
Poetica. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1961. - FALLANI, Giovanni.
«Analogie tra Dante e S. Paolo, come introduzione agli aspetti mistici del
Paradiso» in Lectura Dantis Mystica. Florence: Olschki, 1969, pp. 444-60.
- FIGURELLI, Fernando. «Il Canto XXVI del Paradiso» in Nuove letture
dantesche , VII. Florence: Le Monnier, 1966. - GETTO, Giovanni. «Il
Canto XXVI del Paradiso », Lectura Dantis Scaligera. Florence: Le Monnier,
1966. - GMELIN, Hermann. Die Göttliche Komödie. Kommentar. III: Das
Paradies. Stuttgart: Klett, 1957. - HAWKINS, Peter S. «Trespassing on the
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Word: God's Book and Ours», Journal of the American Academy of Religion
47 (1979), 47-53; «Virtuosity and Virtue: Poetic Self-Reflection in the
Commedia, Dante Studies 98 (1980), 1-18. - HOLLANDER, Robert.
Allegory in Dante's Commedia. Princeton: PUP, 1969; «Baby talk in Dante's
Commedia », Mosaic 8 (1975), 73-84. - JACOFF, Rachel and William A.
Stephany. Inferno II: Lectura Dantis Americana. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1989. [See esp. ch. 3, «Pilgrim and Poet: Definition by
Dialectic».] - MANDELBAUM, Allen, trans. The Divine Comedy of Dante
Alighieri. A Verse Translation. Paradiso. Berkeley /Los Angeles: U of
California P, 1982. - MAZZOTTA, Giuseppe. Dante , Poet of the Desert:
History and Allegory in the Divine Comedy. Princeton: PUP, 1979. -
MENG ALDO, Pier Vincenzo. «Appunti sul canto XXVI del Paradiso» in
Linguistica e retorica di Dante. Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1978, pp. 223-46. -
MOORE, Edward. Studies in Dante. First Series. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1917. Rept. 1968. Pp. 43-45, 115-16. - NARDI, Bruno. «Il linguaggio» in
Dante e la cultura medievale , Bari: Laterza, 1949, pp. 217-47; «Perché 'Alfa
ed O' e non 'Alfa ed Omega'» in Saggi e note di critica dantesca.
Milan/Naples: Ricciardi, 1966, pp. 317-20; Dal Convivio alla Commedia.
Milan/Naples, 1967. - PETROCCHI, Giorgio, ed. Dante Alighieri. La
Commedia secondo l'antica vulgata. IV: Paradiso. Milan: Mondadori, 1967.
- PÉZARD, André. «Adam joyeux (Dante, Paradis XXVI, 97-102)» in
Mélanges... Roques. Paris: Champion, 1953, pp. 219-35. - PIETROBONO,
Luigi. La Divina Commedia di Dante Alighieri, commentata da Luigi
Pietrobono , 3a ediz. (1st 1924-30). Torino: S.E.I., 1946. - PORENA,
Manfredi. La Divina Commedia di Dante Alighieri commentata da Manfredi
Porena. Bologna: Zanichelli, 1946-48. - RIZZO, Stefano. «Il De vulgāri
eloquentia e l'unità del pensiero linguistico di Dante», Dante Studies 87
(1969), 69-88. - SAPEGNO, Natalino, ed. La Divina Commedia , 3rd ed.
Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1985. - SAROLLI, Gian Roberto. Prologomena
alla «Divina Commedia». Florence: Olschki, 1971. [See esp. «La visione
dantesca come visione paolina», pp. 113-19.] - SINGLETON, Charles S.
Commentary to «Paradiso». Princeton: PUP, 1975. - ZEN ATTI, A. Lectura
Dantis: II canto XXVI del Paradiso. Florence: Orsanmichele, 1904.
401
Paradiso XXVII
Author(s): PETER ARMOUR
Accessed: 17-02-2020 23:10 UTC
Lectura Dantis
PETER ARMOUR
Royal Holloway
University of London
XXVII
In canto XXII of the Paradiso , Dante had entered the Heaven of the
Fixed Stars, in his own birth-sign of the zodiac, Gemini, and had looked
back down through the lower heavenly spheres - Saturn, Jupiter, Mars,
the Sun, Venus, Mercury, and the Moon - to the sublunar earth, the
motionless centre of the created world. He had seen the size, velocity,
and intervening distances of the spheres and had smiled at the lowly
appearance of this globe as seen from the eternal stars, with the dry land
inhabited by war-mongering humans, «L'aiuola che ci fa tanto feroci»,
entirely revealed to him from east to west (Par. XXII, 133-54). Then he
had seen assembled the souls of all the blessed, dominated by Mary, the
mother of Christ, who had been assumed beyond his sight up to the
distant inner surface of the ninth Heaven, the Heaven beyond the stars,
the Primum Mobile (Par. XXIII). Dante had been examined in Faith by
St. Peter, in Hope by St. James, and in Charity by St. John before
meeting Adam, the father of the human race (Par. XXIV-XXVI).
Canto XXVII is clearly divided into two main sections: the
conclusion of the episode of the Heaven of the Stars; and the opening of
Dante's experiences in the Primum Mobile. In both parts, there is a
progression from the heavenly to the earthly, from the ecstatic
experiences of Paradise to the tragic theme of human wickedness down
below. The canto thus occupies a transitional position in the narrative,
which Dante conveys by the device of structural parallelism, with
dramatically contrasting alternations of themes and of three principal
linguistic registers, for in each section the language of rapture gives way
to the language of intense invective which culminates in the enigmatic
language of prophecy.1
Following and confirming Adam's answers to Dante's unspoken
questions, the whole of heaven sings the doxology, the most important
Christian hymn in praise of the Trinity: «Glory be to the Father and to
the Son and to the Holy Spirit». Dante postpones the first word, thus
opening the canto with the three Persons of God - «Al Padre, al
Figlio, a lo Spirito Santo» - and climactically isolating the word
«gloria!» in line 2 by means of what could be called a syntactic
402
enjambement , between the narrative verb «cominciò» and its subject,
«tutto 'l paradiso». The sweetness of this music brings Dante
inebriation - an ecstasy beyond reason and words - through his sense
of hearing, which is then matched by inebriation through his sense of
sight. What he sees appears to be «un riso de l'universo», as the
increased light of the souls of all the saved reveals the whole of creation
shining more brightly in the expression of its inner, invisible joy: «E
che è ridere se non una corruscazione de la dilettazione de l'anima, cioè
uno lume apparente di fuori secondo sta dentro?» ( Conv . III. viii. 1 1).
This double «inebriation» of Dante the pilgrim's two senses
inspires a series of ecstatic exclamations from the poet who is
remembering and reflecting upon his journey (7-9):
Oh, gioia! oh ineffabile allegrezza!

oh vita integra d'amore e di pace!
oh sanza brama sicura ricchezza!.
With the anaphora of the exclamatory «oh», Dante here summarizes the
essence of Paradise itself: its indescribable joy; its eternal life in love
and peace; and the fact that these treasures of heaven are true wealth,
under two aspects: wealth possessed «sanza brama», and wealth which is
«sicura».
In this one line, «oh sanza brama sicura ricchezza!», Dante
encapsulates an ideal which then acts as an implied contrast with what is
to become a major theme of this canto, as it is of the Comedy as a
whole, that of cupidity, greed. In Dante's discussion of wealth in the
Convivio , Book IV, he identifies one imperfection and danger of earthly
riches in the fact that their increase brings avarice: «Che siano vili
appare ed imperfette, / che, quantunque collette, / non posson quietar,
ma dan più cura» («Le dolci rime d'amor ch'i' solia», 56-58). Riches
bring the «sete di casso febricante intollerabile» for more: «Sì che
veramente non quietano, ma più danno cura, la qual prima sanza loro
non si avea» (Conv. IV. xii. 4-5). In his canzone «Doglia mi reca» also,
Dante presents the miser as always restless: «Corre l'avaro, ma più
fugge pace» (69). Another negative element of earthly wealth is that it
causes a perpetual fear, day and night, sleeping and waking, of losing it
and even one's life for it (Conv. IV. xiii. 11-13). One day indeed, every
miser must face death, the moment when he will have to abandon all the
earthly goods which he has spent his life in amassing: «da sera e da
mane / hai raunato e stretto ad ambo mano / ciò che tosto si rifà
lontano» («Doglia mi reca», 82-84). In contrast with earthly wealth, one
of the principal objects of human cupiditas , the treasure of Paradise
403
brings complete contentment, with no restless desire for more («sanza
brama»), and it can never be taken away («sicura»).2
The next passage (10-18) is, to the careful reader, one of the most
dramatic in the poem. The heavenly ideal, both auditory and visual, of
the ecstatic music and the cosmic smile is replaced by St. Peter's change
of color, from white to red, and by the silence which God's Providence
now imposes, in unison, upon the whole of heaven. The visual
transformation is conveyed with a strange experimental image in which
the reader is asked to imagine a doubly hypothetical and impossible
event: St. Peter's «trascolorar» was the same as if, first, the planets
Jupiter and Mars were to become birds and then as if they were to
exchange their feathers. This extraordinary challenge to the reader's
interpretative powers, requiring an imagination which can restructure the
whole universe, is not untypical of Dante's Paradiso , with its constant
urge to find comparisons with which to express the inexpressible.3
Alternatively, perhaps the names of the two planets here are an elided
metonymy for the souls in those Heavens: what occurs is the opposite
of Beatrice's change from red to white when Dante ascended from Mars
to Jupiter, where the souls were, in fact, immediately compared to birds.
Moreover, Dante's simile there of the lady who, after blushing, goes
pale again is applied in reverse in this canto to Beatrice's change of
color, back from white to red (31-34; see Par. XVIII, 64-78).4
In more specific terms, the allusions to the planet of justice
(Jupiter), with its white light, and to the red planet of war (Mars)
indicate the transition from perfect joy and justice to the darker color of
passion, particularly anger. The early commentators saw here a
combination of prelate (Jupiter) and anger (Mars); thus St. Peter, the
first Pope, here becomes an angry prelate of the Church. The transition
may also be interpreted in a more allusive and polysemous way, for red
is also the color of love, of shame (blushing), and of blood. St. Peter's
anger here is inspired by love, the love of justice, resembling Christ's
just and zealous anger when he purified the Temple in Jerusalem by
driving out the merchants, money-changers, and sellers of animals and
doves (John 2: 14-17; Matt. 21: 12-13; Mark 11: 15-17; Luke 19:
45-46); it is also connected with his shame, which is shared by the
whole of heaven (31-33, 54); and the shedding of one's blood for Christ,
which had been the identifying characteristic of the souls in Mars, is the
fundamental principle upon which St. Peter, the holder of the keys to
the treasure of the Church Triumphant (Par. XXIII, 133-39), proceeds to
launch his devastating condemnation of his successors in the leadership
of the Church Militant on earth.
The two terzine of St. Peter's invective against Boniface VIII, the
404
Pope then reigning in the year 1300, express above all his anger
(22-27). Boniface is a usurper of the papal office; if he is the vicar of
Christ in the eyes of the world and even of Dante himself ( Purg . XX,
87), he is not so in the sight of Christ; and since «vaca» is the technical
term for an interregnum between Popes, the Church's condition in 1300,
viewed from Heaven's perspective, is sede vacante. Boniface's corruption
has turned the martyred St. Peter's own burial place, Rome, into a sewer
of blood (violence) and filth (uncleanness), so that the Christian religion
has become, in effect, a placatory worship and propitiation of Satan
himself. Jacopone da Todi too had addressed Boniface as a modern
Lucifer: «Lucifero novello a ssedere en papato».5
With St. Peter's words, all the saints turn to glowing red, the color
which, at evening and morning («da sera e da mane»), the sun casts on
clouds in the opposite part of the sky (28-30). Beatrice too changes
color, in what is a reversal of the simile describing her change from red
to white in Paradiso XVIII, 64-66. Here the comparison of her to a
virtuous lady blushing at the faults of another introduces the element of
shame, whilst the magnitude of the change, as when the sun went dark
at the crucifixion, alludes to the further theme in the color red, that of
blood and sacrifice, indeed Christ's supreme sacrifice when he founded
the Church with his blood and provided the model of sacrifice for his
followers (Purg. XXIII, 73-75; Par. XXXI, 3; XXXII, 128-29) (31-36).
With a changed voice and appearance, that is, presumably, no longer
angry but full of shame and regret (37-39), St. Peter then contrasts the
first followers of this model with those who have abandoned it,
opposing the ideals of the early Church to its corruption in the present
and then, through a further contrast, to its certain, promised future.
Taking up his earlier words on the evil blood which now fills the
sewer of Rome, corrupting his own place of martyrdom and burial, St.
Peter starts by evoking its antithesis: the nourishing blood which was
shed on behalf of the Church, the Bride of Christ, by the first Popes -
Peter himself, Linus, and Cietus - for the sake not of earthly gold but
of spiritual treasures, the eternal life of Paradise; for this other Popes
too, Sixtus, Pius, Callixtus, and Urban, suffered persecution and shed
their blood. The opening antithesis of «Non fu ... / ma» in the first two
terzine (40-45) is followed by the anaphoric series of the next three,
«Non fu [...] né [...] né [...]», condemning the distortion of the
martyred Popes' intentions by subsequent Popes, those of Dante's own
time and, again, in particular by Boniface VIII (46-54). First, with a
parodie and evil anticipation of the future Judgement, when Christ will
come again, his vicars on earth, the Popes, have unjustly divided
Christendom itself into sheep and goats: the «saved» Guelphs to their
405
right, the «condemned» Ghibellines (and presumably White Guelphs,
like Dante) to their left. Secondly, the keys of spiritual and juridical
power given to St. Peter by Christ have now become the emblem on
the papal banner for waging internecine war within Christendom; in
particular, the power of the keys has been abused by the proclamation of
two crusades, with indulgences, against fellow-Christians: Nicholas Ill's
against the Aragonese occupiers of Sicily and Boniface VIII's against the
Colonna Cardinals and their Spirituali supporters, such as Jacopone da
Todi, in the very heart of the Church itself {Inf. XXVII, 85-90). Finally,
St. Peter's own image has been profaned by simony, by being used on
the papal seal for the selling of false privileges, offices, benefices,
indulgences - a cause of shame and anger now to the exploited saint as
he looks down from heaven and sees what is being done in his name on
earth: «onď io sovente arrosso e disfavillo» (54). As a result of these
divisions, wars, and greed, the present Church is a total reversal of the
original ideal committed by Christ to St. Peter with the words, «Feed
my sheep» (John 21: 15-17): wolves disguised as shepherds now scour
the pastures of the Christian flock. St. Peter appeals with a rhetorical
question to God for his intervention: «O difesa di Dio, perché pur
giaci?» (55-57).
St. Peter's speech now moves into the prophetic mode in relation
to the year 1300: the first two Avignon Popes, the Gascon Clement V
(elected in 1305) and the Cahorsin John XXII (elected in 1316), are
already preparing to drink the martyrs' blood, standing in the wings of
early fourteenth-century time, waiting for their opportunity greedily to
exploit their high office in the Church. With an intense rhetorical
exclamation, St. Peter apostrophizes the Church's origins in poverty and
sacrifice, contrasting its founding ideals in the past with the ignoble end
into which it is destined to decline in the imminent future: «o buon
principio, / a che vil fine con vien che tu caschi!» (59-60). This
degeneration will, however, mark the end of the decline. The «difesa di
Dio» will not sleep forever (57) but will awake, and God's Providence,
which had once defended («difese») the glorious Roman Empire through
the victory of the general Scipio Africanus (Major) over Hannibal,
«soccorra tosto», will soon come to rescue and, implicitly, reform the
Christian world (61-63).
This so-called «Scipio prophecy» takes its place in the line of
prophecies of a future messianic saviour of Rome and thus of the world,
an opponent of avarice and avenger of ecclesiastical crimes: the Veltro in
Inferno I, the 515 in Purgatorio XXXIII. There is no point in trying to
identify this heir to Scipio; by the time Dante wrote this canto, Henry
VII had been dead for some years, and the supreme temporal regime too
406
was effectively in a state of imperio vacante with regard to Rome and
Italy. Like all authentic prophecies, this one too proposes an intensely
desired heavenly program but is vague and unspecific in its details.
Theoretically it could refer to the advent of a virtuous reforming Pope,
but the allusions to Scipio and to Rome as «la gloria del mondo» make
it much more likely that St. Peter is here prophesying the advent of a
future Emperor, the 515, perhaps even projected forward as the last
Emperor who, in contemporary prophecies, would reign in the days of
the millennium before the final tribulations and the Judgement. The
Church's opposition to the Empire, its defrauding of the poor, and the
nepotism of its pastors are subject to God's judgement, whilst those
who are truly zealous for the Christian faith silently look forward to
help from Christ himself («Salvatoris nostri [...] succursum») {Mon. II.
X. 2-3). Ultimately, all such hopes and predictions are eschatological,
projecting the future reform as a préfiguration, or even the reality, of the
millennium when Christ or his representative will rule again before the
end.
The evocation of Scipio, a hero of the Roman Republic, does not

contradict this interpretation of the prophecy in terms of Dante's doctrine
of the Roman Empire. For Dante, God had achieved his plan for the
temporal regime through the Roman people in its rightful acquisition of
its imperium or world-jurisdiction, which was transferred to the single
Prince in preparation for the birth and death of Christ {Mon. II), and
Scipio, alongside Cato, is cited most frequently in Dante's works among
the heroes of free republican Rome who thus proved that God's hand was
working in its winning of its Empire {Conv. IV. v. 18; Mon. II. ix. 18;
Par. VI, 52).^ Subsequently, of course, Rome, the seat of Aeneas's
Empire, had become the seat also of the Papacy {Inf. II, 20-27). As with
the 515, therefore, the future deliverer will be both the renewer of
Rome's world -imperium and the chastiser of the corrupt spiritual
leadership of the world, the «advocate» of the Church in the true sense
- not merely the subordinate, secular arm of an evil Papacy but the
instrument of God's punishment of it. Then, as Beatrice had done after
uttering the prophecy of the 515, so too now does St. Peter authorize
Dante to reveal this future event openly in his words and in his poem,
putting him in line with biblical prophets in proclaiming the
eschatological message as a weapon of present reform, «in pro del
mondo che mal vive» {Pur g. XXXII, 103) (64-66).
The saints ascend upwards, and to describe this Dante uses a natural
comparison: of snow falling in winter, when the sun is in the sign of
Capricorn (67-72). Here, however, he requires the image to be reversed:
while our mere air («aere») is filled with flakes («fiocca») of frozen
407
vapors («vapor gelati») moving downwards («in giuso»), there the
heavenly atmosphere («etera») has flakes («fioccar») of lights of the
Church Triumphant («vapor trïunfanti») moving upwards («in sù»).7
They ascend so high that Dante's sight cannot follow them, cannot step
over («trapassar») the vast distance (73-75).
On Beatrice's instructions, Dante looks back down to the earth
again, as he had on his arrival in the Heaven of the Stars (76-87). Now,
however, he has moved with the stars across the second half of the first
climate, the latitudinal division of the earth; in other words, he is now
90° further to the west and can see beyond the Gades straits - the
westernmost boundary of Europe - into the Atlantic, where Ulysses
had presumptuously sailed,8 and eastwards across the Mediterranean to
the coast of Phoenicia, from where Europa was carried by Jupiter in the
guise of a bull. Since in the meantime the sun has moved more than
one sign, that is, more than 30°, he cannot see any more of the «quarta
habitabilis», the «aiuola» of the inhabited part of the earth ( Quaestio , II
[§9]; Par. XXII, 151). All that is visible to him now is Europe, the
misgoverned continent, and the seas over which Ulysses rashly dared to
sail, thus repeating Adam's sin of «il trapassar del segno» (Par. XXVI,
117), of overstepping limits set by God on human reason and the
human will.
This time, Dante does not smile at the insignificance of the earth
but is more detached from what is below and, moved by the dominating
power of his love, he turns his eyes back to Beatrice. With a
universalizing hyperbole which elevates the image towards the
inexpressible, he develops the physiological metaphor for the process of
love which his own earlier love poetry had inherited from the Sicilians.
Here the visible beauty, the «piacer», of the lady, which passes through
the eyes and awakens love in the heart, is heightened to little short of
infinity, as Dante creates a summa of all earthly examples of beauty,
real (in the flesh) or artificial (in paintings), united together to delight
the eyes and enter into the heart. All these, however, are surpassed -
«parrebber niente» - by the beauty of Beatrice, for hers is indeed a
reflection of infinite beauty, «lo piacer divin» (88-96). The sight brings
the power which impels Dante instantaneously from Gemini in the
Heaven of the Stars to the ninth of the heavenly spheres, the Crystalline
Heaven or Primum Mobile which, with a divine joy which matches her
divine beauty («ridendo tanto lieta, / che Dio parea nel suo volto
gioire»), Beatrice explains to him (97-105).
The basic doctrine of the Primum Mobile, in its relationship to the
lower spheres and to the Empyrean above, had been expounded by Dante
in Book II of the Convivio. Whilst Aristotle had thought that there were
408
eight heavens, a ninth, which according to Ptolemy revolved from east
to west in approximately 23 14/15 hours, had been added in order to
account for the movements of the stars ( Conv . II. iii. 6-11):
lo nono è quello che non è sensibile se non per questo movimento che è
detto di sopra; lo quale chiamano molti Cristallino, cioè diafano, o vero
tutto trasparente. Veramente, fuori di tutti questi, li cattolici pongono lo
cielo Empireo, che è a dire cielo di fiamma o vero luminoso; e pongono esso
essere immobile per avere in sé, secondo ciascuna parte, ciò che la sua
materia vuole. E questo è cagione al Primo Mobile per avere velocissimo
movimento; che per lo ferventissimo appetito ch'è 'n ciascuna parte di quello
nono cielo, che è immediato a quello, d'essere congiunta con ciascuna parte
di quello diviníssimo ciel quieto, in quello si rivolve con tanto desiderio, che
la sua velocitade è quasi incomprensibile. E quieto e pacifico è lo luogo di
quella somma Deitade che sola [sé] compiutamente vede. [...] Questo è lo
soprano edificio del mondo, nel quale tutto lo mondo s'inchiude, e di fuori da
quale nulla è; ed esso non è in luogo ma formato fu solo ne la prima Mente, la
quale li Greci dicono Protonoé.
Later, in his allegorical exposition of the connection between the

heavenly spheres and the various branches of human knowledge, Dante
compares the Primum Mobile to Moral Philosophy, which, according
to St. Thomas, «ordina noi a l'altre scienze», and which for Aristotle
was «la giustizia legale» which orders those sciences which need to be
learned and commands us not to abandon them but to learn and master
them. The reason for this parallel is that the Primum Mobile orders the
movement of all the other Heavens and the reception and transmission
of their influences and is thus the cause of time, the life of animals and
plants, and ultimately the order of the universe {Conv. II. xiv. 14-17):
lo detto cielo ordina col suo movimento la cotidiana revoluzione di tutti li

altri, per la quale ogni die tutti quelli ricevono [e mandano] qua giù la vertude
di tutte le loro parti. Che se la revoluzione di questo non ordinasse ciò, poco
di loro vertude qua giù verrebbe o di loro vista. Onde ponemo che possibile
fosse questo nono cielo non muovere, la terza parte del cielo [stellato]
sarebbe ancora non veduta in ciascun luogo de la terra; e Saturno sarebbe
quattordici anni e mezzo a ciascun luogo de la terra celato, e Giove sei anni
quasi si celerebbe, e Marte uno anno quasi, e lo Sole centottantadue dì e
quattordici ore (dico dì, cioè tanto tempo quanto misurano cotanti dì), e
Venere e Mercurio quasi come lo Sole si celerebbe e mosterrebbe, e la Luna
per tempo di quattordici dì e mezzo starebbe ascosa ad ogni gente. E da vero
non sarebbe qua giù generazione né vita d'animale o di piante: notte non
sarebbe né die, né settimana né mese né anno, ma tutto l'universo sarebbe
disordinato, e lo movimento de li altri sarebbe indarno.
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Already, in Paradiso XXIII, the Primům Mobile had been briefly
described as: «Lo real manto di tutti i volumi / del mondo, che più ferve
e più s'avviva / ne l'alito di Dio e nei costumi», that is, as the Heaven
enclosing all the other «volumi», the revolving spheres, and the closest
to God's power and the order he has established in the world (112-14).
Here in canto XXVII these qualities of the Primum Mobile are explained
in greater detail. It is «velocissimo», with uniform parts, and, since it
has no planet attached, it has no distinction of place («ch'i' non so dire /
qual Beatrice per loco mi scelse»). It is the source of the essential nature
of the whole world, with the eight lower spheres revolving around the
stationary earth in the centre. It exists in the «mente divina» (the
«Protonoé» of the Convivio ), the love of which causes its revolution
and from which descends its «virtù» to be transmitted to the spheres
below. It is known only to God, in the all-enclosing Empyrean, a circle
of light and love (Par. XXX, 40: «luce intellettüal, piena d'amore»)
which encircles the Primum Mobile as it encircles the other spheres.
Finally, and most importantly in the structure of this canto, the
Primum Mobile has no distinction of time. «Time», according to
Aristotle, «is the measurement of motion», but there is no other
heavenly body with which to measure the divinely driven motion of this
Heaven. On the contrary, it is itself the source of time, allotting
measured motion to the other spheres in their sequence, and thus, as in
the Convivio , it is the ultimate cause of hours, days, weeks, months,
and years. The measurement which it bestows is as exact as the
arithmetical fact that five and two are the factors of ten. This complex
doctrine of the invisible Heaven whose existence and perfect operation
are deduced from the motion of the visible spheres is summarized by
Beatrice in the striking, everyday metaphor of the plant of time. In the
Primum Mobile, as in the plant-pot, the unseen roots of time are
nourished, producing its visible effects, time's leaves and flowers, in the
other heavens from which all human astronomical calculations and
temporal measurements are derived (106-20).
With what appears to be a sudden change of subject and tone,
Beatrice passes from the imparting of this knowledge of the heavens
into moral meditation, recalling Dante's parallel, in the Convivio ,
between the Primum Mobile and the universally ordering science of
Moral Philosophy. From the higher Heaven of the Primum Mobile, the
source of time, she condemns the power of greed and laments the decline
of mortal men on earth from good beginnings to evil conclusions, thus
repeating at the universal level St. Peter's earlier words on qhe
degeneration of the Church: «o buon principio, / a che vil fine convien
che tu caschi!» (59-60).
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Beatrice opens with an apostrophe to «cupidigia» as a sea in which
all mortal men are immersed and drown, unable to lift their eyes towards
the true harbor of life - happiness, both earthly and eternal (121-23).
Cupiditas is constantly presented by Dante as the source of the world's
going astray: «cupidity is the root of all evils» (1 Tim. 6: 10). Not only
has it infected the Church, but it is the chief adversary of love and
justice in society as a whole, which can only be restored under the
guidance of an Emperor who alone can be free from all cupidity (Mon. I.
xi. 11-14). Indeed, Beatrice's image of the sea echoes that in the final
chapter of the Monarchia , in which no men or very few - and they
only with the greatest difficulty - can reach the harbor of earthly
happiness unless «the waves of seductive cupidity have been calmed»,
and the Roman Prince has brought peace to «this little threshing-floor
(areola) of mortal men» (Mon. III. xv. 11). In the absence of an
Emperor holding the bridle of the law, the leadership of the Church has
turned to greed for earthly goods and temporal power, and as a result
every «anima semplicetta» and the whole human race follow it into evil
(Purg. XVI, 82-129).
The process of the degeneration of the human «anima semplicetta»
because of greed is conveyed by Beatrice in a series of terzine (124-38).
First, there is a rustic image taken from plum-growing: the human will
produces a good flower, but the constant rain withers and rots the fruit.
Then three (or perhaps four) terzine take up St. Peter's theme of decline,
emphasizing its tragic rapidity: human degeneration from a good start to
a vile outcome takes no longer than the time between childhood and
maturity. Here the child is by no means the father of the man, for the
faith and innocence of «parvoletti» have been abandoned by the time
their facial hair has grown and they have entered manhood. In two
terzine the same process is expressed in terms of language, with the
anaphora of «taie, balbuzïendo», the lisping of the child beginning to
emerge from «in-fancy», contrasted sharply with the adult who has the
full power of articulation and speech («la lingua sciolta», «loquela
intera»). The little child keeps the fasts; the adult devours any food at
any time of the year. The little child loves and obeys his mother; the
adult wants her dead and in her grave.
The loss of «fede» and «innocenza» and the ignoring of the
Church's fasts suggest that the principal features of this decline are
visible in the area of religious virtue and practice, and it is possible that
the final image, the stark antithesis between the child's love and the
man's hatred for his mother, also alludes to the Church which, ideally at
least, is the Mother of good Christians. This would support those who
interpret the «bella figlia» as the Church in the following terzina , one of
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the most impenetrable in the entire poem (136-38):
Così si fa la pelle bianca nera

nel primo aspetto de la bella figlia
di quel ch'apporta mane e lascia sera.
The image takes up not only St. Peter's words on decline but those of
St. Benedict in the Heaven of Saturn, concerning the «buon
cominciamento» of the Church under St. Peter, of the Benedictine Order,
and of the Franciscans {Par. XXII, 91-93):
e se guardi '1 principio di ciascuno,

poscia riguardi là dov' è trascorso,
tu vederai del bianco fatto bruno.
The most obvious explanation of the obscure terzina takes «Così»

as marking a continuation and summary of the preceding imagery of the
young maturing into wickedness: as the beard grows, as language is
acquired, as their white skin darkens under the rays of the sun. Buti
obtained the same general meaning by identifying the daughter of the
sun as the moon, whose surface goes dark during an eclipse. The most
common allegorical reading, linking the possessive «de» with «pelle»
rather than with «aspetto», is that the sun's daughter is human nature,
which progresses from purity to corruption. From Lana, with allusions
also in the Ottimo and in Benvenuto (who argues against it), the «bella
figlia» has been identified as the Church, the Bride of Christ, who is the
Sun, with a possible allusion to the words of the sister-bride in the
Song of Songs, 1: 4-5: «I am black, but beautiful [...]. Do not think of
me in that I am dark, for the sun has discolored me [...]».9 The main
problem with this interpretation is that line 138 - «di quel ch'apporta
mane e lascia sera», repeating the two terms of the sun's daily journey
(«sera» and «mane») from line 29 - is no longer a reference to the real
sun but a periphrasis for Christ. The two opposing concepts, «mane»
and «sera», echo the dramatic antithesis of «bianca nera» in line 136 and
so suggest a transition from light to darkness, and whilst it could
certainly be said that Christ the Sun brings morning - light, grace,
hope, life, redemption, resurrection - it is difficult to find any
theological or allegorical meaning in the idea that he necessarily also
leaves evening behind when he sets. It is as if Christ regularly abandons
his «bella figlia», the Church. Moreover, unlike the bride in the Song
of Songs, who is both black and beautiful together, the Christian
Church, as St. Peter has already made clear, can no longer be described
as «bella» at all. In short, since line 138 apparently refers to the real
412
sun, the most natural interpretation of the terzina is, in fact, the most
banal: a man's soul darkens with his skin; as time passes, he is
corrupted by the sins of the world, and particularly, in this context, by
cupidity. In this last respect, another solution which has been proposed
is that the periphrasis stands for Circe, the daughter of Helios, the Sun,
and a symbol of the love of earthly goods which turns men into beasts
(cf. Pur g. XIV, 40-42). 10 In this reading, the terzina comes to contain a
typically Dantesque classicizing allusion which acts as a closure to the
speech on greed and which, moreover, gives full value to the otherwise
somewhat redundant «bella», for seductive beauty is the chief
characteristic of Circe, of sirens in general, and of the goods of this
world.
Beatrice ends her analysis of human degeneration by pointing to its
cause: it is the lack of a governor or helmsman which has led human
society astray. She does not specify whether it is the lack of a Pope, the
spiritual leader, or of an Emperor, the temporal leader, or even of both,
but in the context of cupidity and the vacancy of St. Peter's place on
earth, the prime cause of the degeneration of the world is clearly, as
Marco Lombardo had explained in Purgatorio XVI, the evil leadership of
the Church corrupted by temporal power.
Like St. Peter, Beatrice now moves immediately into the prophetic
mode, predicting that, «before January leaves winter altogether», the
heavens will achieve a complete reversal of the decline: the long-awaited
destiny - or, for others, storm («fortuna») - will turn the ships
completely around and put the fleet back on its true course; and the good
flower, produced by the human will, shall this time bear not rotten but
true fruit (142-48). Taken with the prophecy of the new Scipio earlier in
the canto, as well as with those of the Veltro and the 515, this too
looks forward above all to the renovation of Rome's Christian imperial
destiny as the universal guide to earthly happiness and as God's chosen
instrument for the reform also of the Church. The image of human
society as a ship steered by the Emperor on its true course to a proper
harbor had been applied by Dante to the perfect state of the world under
Augustus when Christ was born (Convivio IV. v. 8); in the earthly
Paradise, this image had been replaced by that of the griffin drawing the
chariot (which was itself compared to a ship) and achieving the renewal
of the tree of Adam whose flowers, as in the simile of Christ as the
apple-blossom, were the presage or figura of heavenly fruit.11 Taking
up the theme of the great human voyage and correcting the earlier image
of the failed flower of the plum-tree, Beatrice's message, expressed not
in concrete but in generalized and metaphorical terms, predicts the
heavenly certainty of the future redirection of human society towards its
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proper harbor, and the reflowering of the human will as the prelude to
its bearing of the fruit of eternal life.
Dante's language in Paradiso XXVII reflects that of the cantica as a

whole. First, it is, as one would expect, rich in scriptural and
ecclesiastical allusions. The opening «Gloria» is used constantly in the
Church's liturgy, especially to conclude the singing of psalms. The
metaphor of ecstasy as drunkenness («m'inebriava», «ebbrezza») is
biblical.12 As most commentaries notice, St. Peter's triple use of «il
luogo mio, il luogo mio, il luogo mio» echoes Jeremiah 7: 4,
«Templům Domini, templům Domini, templům Domini est»,
replacing the word «est» with «vaca». The context of Jeremiah's words
is also appropriate, for the whole phrase reads: «Do not trust in lying
words, saying: This is the Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord,
the Temple of the Lord»; the Lord's house has become a den of thieves,
whilst Shilo, God's original true «place», is the example of how he
punishes wickedness (Jer. 7: 4, 11-12; cf. Matt. 21: 13; Mark, 11: 17;
Luke, 19: 46). The Popes' division of Christendom into two parts is, as
has been noted, a parody of the Last Judgement when Christ will
separate the sheep from the goats, the saved from the damned (Matt. 25:
31-46). The image of the Church as the Bride derives principally from
the ecclesiological interpretations of the Song of Songs (cf. also Eph. 5:
23-33), whilst that of St. Peter's keys alludes, of course, to Matthew
16: 19, where Christ appointed him as the first Pope, the holder of
supreme spiritual and juridical power in the Church. The metaphor of
shepherds, wolves, and pastures has a long biblical history, including
the triple appointment of St. Peter to feed the flock (John 21: 15-17)
and these words from the sermon of St. Paul to the Ephesians (Acts, 20:
28-29; cf. Jer. 23: 1; 50: 6; Ezek. 34: 2-6; Mau. 7: 15):
Attend to yourselves and to the universal flock over which the Holy Spirit
has set you as bishops to rule the Church of God which he won with his own
blood. I know that after my departure rapacious wolves will enter among
you, not sparing the flock.
St. Peter's appeal to God, «perché pur giaci?», echoes Psalm 43: 23-24:
«Rise up, why do you sleep, O Lord? Rise up, and do not reject us at
the end. Why do you turn your face away and forget our need and
tribulation?» (cf. Purg. VI, 120: «son li giusti occhi tuoi rivolti
altrove?»). His command to Dante, «e non asconder quel ch'io non
ascondo», also recalls God's words to Jeremiah, «preach and do not
conceal», where the message concerns the future destruction of Babylon
414
by a people from the north and the fact that the flock of God's people
has been led astray by false pastors and left to wander among the
mountains (Jer. 50: 2, 6, 44-45). The image of the good flower and
rotten plums is a variation on the biblical image of the vineyard,
particularly that described by Isaiah, planted and well defended: «and I
expected it to produce grapes, and it made wild grapes» (Isa. 5: 1-2; cf.
Joel, 1: 12). Beatrice's antithesis between the lisping child and the
corrupt grown-up recalls the presentation of childish innocence in the
Introit for Low Sunday («Quasi modo geniti infantes»: «Just as
new-born infants [...], you must seek the milk rationally and without
deception»), in Psalm 8: 2 («From the mouths of infants and of
suckling babes you have perfected praise»), cited by Christ after he had
cast the merchants out of the Temple (Matt. 21: 12), and Christ's own
instruction to let the little ones («párvulos») come to him, «for of such
is the kingdom of God. Amen I say to you, whoever does not receive
the kingdom of God like a little child shall not enter into it» (Mark, 10:
14-15). The variant reading of «ruggiran» for «raggeran» in line 144,
which appears in the early commentaries, echoes numerous biblical
texts which use this image for God's impending punishment: «The Lord
will roar from on high, and will give voice from his holy dwelling;
roaring, he will roar over his beautiful creation. [...] Howl, pastors, and
cry out; and sprinkle yourselves with ash, O leaders of the flock. [...]
The voice of the shouting of the pastors and the howling of the leaders
of the flock, for the Lord has laid waste their pastures» (Jer. 25: 30-36;
cf. Hosea, 11: 10; Joel, 3: 16; Amos, 1: 2; 3: 8). Indeed, Jeremiah,
prophet and lamenter, may have been Dante's main role model in the
composition of this canto.
As is common particularly in the Paradiso , Dante draws also on
Latin and Latinized Italian forms to elevate his language in this canto.
Thus he borrows or creatively assimilates words such as: «integra»,
«vice», «dicenď io» (as a form of ablative absolute), «cloaca»,
«avverso», «nube», «mane», «fleto», «signáculo», «vessillo»,
«concipio», «assolto», «pondo», «etera», «indulse», «precinto»,
«loquela», «meta», «testo», «reperte», and «classe». Apart from the
references to Jupiter and Mars and the Ovidian description of the red
light of the rising or setting sun, he inserts learned periphrases taken
from classical mythology: the myth of Europa to denote the coast of
Phoenicia; the nest of Leda to designate the sign of Gemini, her two
sons by Jupiter disguised as a swan; and perhaps the circumlocution of
the daughter of the sun for the seductress, Circe. Also learned, of course,
is the scientific vocabulary for describing the Primum Mobile, with the
concepts of nature, position («dove»), circularity, motion, and
415
measurement, culminating in the arithmetical exactitude of the parallel
in line 117. Contrasting with this is the coarse, even plebeian word
«puzza» and, later, the rustic Tuscanism «bozzacchioni», for which
some critics even cite a current farmer's jingle: «Quando piove la
domenica di Passione, / ogni susina va in bozzacchione».13
The condemnatory biblical, classical, and prophetic language of
this canto has remarkable parallels with Dante's Epistle of 1314 to the
Italian Cardinals, sede vacante , following the death of the Gascon
Clement V:
We [...] - for whom and for whose salvation three times the question about
love was asked and it was said: «Peter, feed the sacred flock» - are
compelled to mourn for Rome, now widowed and deserted - Rome, whose
world -imperium, after the splendor of so many triumphs, Christ confirmed
by both word and deed and which was consecrated as the apostolic see by the
same Peter and by Paul, the preacher to the Gentiles, with the shedding of
their own blood. Ah, what grief it brings [...] that perhaps the Powers that
rebelled against the defending angels ascribe this to their own deceptions.
The Cardinals have led the Church, the chariot of the Bride, to the edge
of the abyss; they are selling doves in the Temple, bartering things
which cannot be measured in prices; they have married cupidity, the
mother of impiety and iniquity: «O, most pious mother, bride of Christ,
who beget your sons in water and the Spirit to your blushing shame!
Not charity, not Astraea [Justice], but the daughters of the bloodsucker
have become your daughters-in-law [. . .]».14 Rome, which should be the
object of love, has been shamefully abandoned and eclipsed, and Dante
addresses Cardinal Stefaneschi who, in order to show how he has grafted
Boniface VIII's anger onto himself, has acted as if Carthage had never
been defeated in his opposition to «the patria of the illustrious Scipios».
The Epistle too ends with an exhortation and a prophecy of the
restoration of Rome:
Yet it shall be corrected, [...] if in unanimity all of you who have caused this
loss of the path fight manfully for the Bride of Christ, for the Bride's see,
which is Rome, for our Italy, and - to speak fully - for the whole city
making its pilgrimage on earth; so that, with the battle already begun on the
training-field, watched from the shores of Oceanus on all sides, you may
offer yourselves with glory and shall hear, «Glory in the highest»; and so
that the shame of the Gascons who, burning with such dire greed, strive to
usurp the glory of the Latins may be an example to posterity for all the
centuries to come.
The parallels with Paradiso XXVII are numerous: St. Peter is the
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shepherd of Christ's flock; the Roman world -imperium was acquired by
victories and willed by God; Rome was consecrated as the seat of the
Papacy by the shedding of blood by St. Peter and St. Paul; the present
state of Rome may bring pleasure to Lucifer and the other rebel angels;
the Church is Christ's Bride but is now given over to bartering in the
Temple, to cupidity, injustice, shame, the sucking of blood; the city of
the Scipios is being treated as if they had never lived and fought for it;
and action is urgently needed to restore Rome's glory throughout the
whole world and to administer exemplary punishment to usurping
Gascons. In the intervening years between the Epistle and the
composition of Paradiso XXVII, not only had there been a disputed
election to the Empire but the Cardinals had proceeded eventually to
elect John XXII, from Cahors, a town whose name was synonymous in
the Middle Ages with usury, and he has already been presented by Dante
as a devotee not of Rome's martyred saints Peter and Paul but of the
Florentine gold florin bearing the image of St. John the Baptist (Par.
XVIII, 130-36). The deliverance invoked in the Epistle had not occurred;
Rome remained abandoned, and the Church had declined even further
towards its ignoble end. In Paradiso XXVII, it is revealed to Dante, and
he is again commissioned to reveal, that a new Scipio shall come and
that a complete reversal has already been decreed in the Heaven above the
stars.
What brings together all the elements in this canto is Dante's

presentation of the theme of time. This theme has already been
introduced at the end of canto XXVI, where Adam had seen in God's
mind that Dante wished to know four things but had answered these
questions in a different order. After explaining that the cause of the first
sin was «il trapassar del segno», Adam's remaining answers all involved
time. First, he had said that he had waited in Limbo for 4302
revolutions of the sun («volumi di sol»), and had seen the sun pass
along its path through the zodiac 930 times before that, during his life,
thus giving a total of 5232 years between his creation and the death of
Christ, the new Adam. Then he recounts how the first language, his
own, had disappeared before the building of the tower of Babel, and /,
the first word for God, had been replaced by EL because everything
created by the human mind and will changes and passes away as the
heavens revolve, that is, with time, just as leaves die and are replaced
every year on the branch of a tree. Finally, Adam says he lived in
innocence and virtue in the Garden of Eden from the first hour to the
hour following the sixth, according to the movement of the sun through
90° from one place to another («come '1 sol muta quadra») (Par. XXVI,
115-42). Adam's last three answers were thus concerned with time as it
417
is measured by the double movement of the sun, defining the year and
the day, and with time as the bringer of change in all human creations,
such as language, as well as in Adam's own almost immediate loss of
original innocence. Paradiso XXVII explores these two aspects of time
more closely.
The canto opens with an implied expression of Paradise time, or
rather timelessness, according to the unsung continuation of the Gloria :
«as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, in saecula
saeculorum , world without end». Life in Paradise is eternal («vita
intégra»). In the course of the canto, moreover, Dante ascends from the
Stars to the Primum Mobile, which is directly moved by love of the
divine mind and is the invisible source of time, giving measure to the
motion of all the other spheres and therefore the earthly measurement of
hours, days, weeks, months, years.
References to the measurements of earthly time recur frequently
throughout the canto. The day is measured by the sun's diurnal
revolution («per lo sole avverso [...] da sera e da mane»), the season of
winter (when «il corno de la capra del ciel col sol si tocca») by the sun's
annual progression through the stars of the zodiac. Dante's movement
with the Stars is measured by reference both to the earth's latitudinal
divisions, determined by the sun's annual movement between the tropics
(«per tutto l'arco / che fa da mezzo al fine il primo clima», viz. 90°) and
to the sun's daily movement («'l sol procedea / [...] un segno e più
partito», viz. 30°). Any time of the year is expressed as any month,
measured by the revolution of the moon («qualunque luna»); and finally,
again, the revolution of the sun («quel ch'apporta mane e lascia sera») is
seen as the measure of the day.
Throughout the canto, however, earthly time is linked with the
apparently inevitable decline into corruption: from the «buon principio»
to the «vil fin»; from the good flowers («ben fiorisce») through the
«pioggia continiia» to the end result of the «bozzacchioni»; from the
innocent «parvoletti» to the adolescents with «le guance [...] coperte»;
from the children who speak «balbuzïendo» to the adults who have the
«lingua sciolta» and «loquela intera»; and from the «pelle bianca» to the
«pelle nera», on which Buti commented that «ogni cosa si muta in
tempo».
Present time in the canto is, of course, the year 1300 whose future
will bring, initially, a further decline: the wolf-like shepherds are already
in the world («si veggion»), and the Gascons and Cahorsins are getting
ready to appear («s'apparecchian di bere»). But future time will also
bring correction: as St. Peter prophesies, the «difesa di Dio», which
operated triumphantly in the past («con Scipio difese»), will come to
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the rescue in the imminent future («soccorra tosto»). Dante's future too
will be to return to earth («giù tornerai») with this prediction to reveal.
Finally, Beatrice's prophecy opens with an enigmatic reference to a
month («gennaio»), a season («si sverni»), and a tiny fraction of earthly
time («la centesma ch'è là giù negletta»), contrasted with the eternally
revolving heavens («questi cerchi superni») which will bring about a
long-awaited reversal («la fortuna che tanto s'aspetta»), expressed in a
series of future tenses: «raggeran», «volgerà», «correrà», and «verrà»,
leading to the complete correction of the degeneration of humanity
caused by greed and lack of guidance, when what is promised will be
fulfilled, when the flower will produce true fruit, when at last - maybe
at the very last - the good beginning will have a happy end.
In Purgatorio XXXIII, Beatrice had prophesied that the eagle of the
Roman Empire will not be without an heir for all time («Non [...] tutto
tempo»); in fact, the conjunction of the stars is already near and certain
and, as the «Naiads» of the facts will reveal soon («tosto»), the arrival
of the 515 is imminent ( Pur g . XXXIII, 37-51). St. Peter likewise has
just prophesied that God's providence will come to help mankind soon
(«tosto»). In contrast, here Beatrice uses a tortuously enigmatic
temporal clause to establish the time of the fulfilment of her prediction:
«Ma prima che gennaio tutto si sverni / per la centesma ch'è là giù
negletta» (142-43). What on earth - or rather what in heaven - does
she mean? Will the reform of the world occur «tosto» or only after the
vast span of time to which her words, taken literally, seem to allude?
As all the commentaries explain, Beatrice's «centesma» is the
hundredth part of a day by which the sun's tropical year, that is, the
period it takes to return from one spring equinox to the next, is short of
365 days 6 hours. In the Julian calendar, whilst the addition of the extra
day in February every four years accounted for the six hours, the
missing few minutes meant that each century the sun was entering into
each constellation approximately a day earlier. In fact, although in their
notes to lines 67-69 Sapegno and Bosco & Reggio point out, quite
correctly, that the sun is in Capricorn from 21 December to 21 January,
they fail to notice a fact of which some of Dante's contemporaries -
and undoubtedly Dante himself - were well aware, namely, that from
Christ's birth to the fourteenth century the winter solstice had already
slipped back to 12 December, the shortest day being traditionally the
feast of St. Lucy (13 December), and that therefore the seasons, and the
feasts of the Church, were on the move through the calendar months. ^
In 1267 Roger Bacon, calculating that the spring equinox then fell on
13 March, had asked Clement IV to correct the anomaly by reinstating it
on 21 March and by suppressing four leap years every 500 years.
419
Dante's early commentators worked out that, in Beatrice's prophecy, it
would take 4,500 (later corrected to 9,500) years for the January sun to
leave the winter sign of Capricorn, and 18,262 years for the winter and
summer feast days to change places entirely, for Christmas Day to fall
on the feast of St. John the Baptist, in June, and vice versa. At first,
there was some confusion, and it was thought that, in time, January
would become an autumn month, whereas in fact the opposite would
have happened, and January would have become the month in which the
sun entered the spring sign of Aries and thus would certainly have left
winter altogether.
The source for Dante's use of the word «centesma» is obscure.
According to Ptolemy, who was certainly known to him, the shortfall
was 1/300 of a day, a «trecentesma»; for Albategni (al-Battani), whom
he probably did not know, it was approximately 1/100 of a day; and in
the Alphonsine Tables it was 1/134, which is the closest to the reality
of 1/128, or just over eleven minutes. In Dante's time, 1 January fell 84
days before Julius Caesar's spring equinox (25 March, which was also
the first day of the year in calendars, such as that of Florence, which
calculated ab Incarnatone), 80 days before the Church's official date of
21 March, fixed by the Council of Nicea in 325 for the computation of
Easter, and 71 days before the actual equinox on 12 March. On the basis
of the latter number, the equinox would move out of January after
21,300 years (Ptolemy's calculations) or 9,514 years (Alphonsine
Tables) or 7,100 years (Albategni and Dante himself, if «centesma» is
taken literally). Of course, Dante's «centesma» may well be less definite
than any of these, a poet's approximation for a tiny fraction of daily
time which even so was already multiplying over the years and
centuries.
At all events, Beatrice is clearly referring to a great span of
thousands of years in the future; and yet, surely, she too means «soon».
Not so long as all those centuries and millennia will pass before the
world is changed; in other words, by litotes, only a tiny part of that
time will elapse. Both Benvenuto da Imola and Vellutello (citing
Petrarch) explained this as a common figure of speech: «for all day long
we frequently say: "I shall have my revenge on so-and-so before a
thousand or ten thousand years have passed"; and yet by this number I
understand and want others to understand a very short time»
(Benvenuto); «quando vogliamo dimostrar ad alcuno la cosa inaspettata
dover tosto avenire, molte volte diciamo cosa simile, come Ma prima
che passin cento, o mille anni tu lo vedrai, o tu ne sarai chiaro»
(Vellutello). A similar hyperbole occurs in the locution «mi pare mille
anni di vederlo» or, in English and with exactly the opposite sense, «not
420
in a million years». Beatrice is saying, in effect, «indeed and certainly
- well within a million years», and her prophecy, set in the centenary
year 1300, takes on a manifestly millenarian tone. In eschatological
prophecy, moreover, aimed at reforming the present, the millennium is
always close at hand.
The obscurity of Beatrice's temporal reference, with its litotes,
becomes clear when one considers the entire context of the canto with
its opposition between Paradise timelessness and earthly time with its
apparently - but only apparently - never-ending moral decline. The
point is not whether Dante means literally one hundredth part of a day
but that this tiny bit of heavenly time is, like everything else on earth,
«negletta». The human calculation of earthly time by means of the
calendar year is imperfect, mutable, and increasingly erroneous in
relation to the perfect, providentially ordered movement of the heavenly
spheres through the zodiac. Dante and Beatrice have ascended to the
Primum Mobile, the invisible source of time itself, which measures the
others with perfect exactitude, «sì come diece da mezzo e da quinto», and
where this fractional earthly miscalculation is totally unimportant
relative to the certain future which will be transmitted to the spheres
below to achieve. Whether the period of time is vast or short in earthly
terms, it is all the same in the Primum Mobile. Some day, as humans
measure time, the heaven-sent millenarian reform will certainly come,
after which time itself will end, and all the flowers, the earthly figures,
will be fulfilled in the fruits of the tree of life in Paradise for all eternity
(Rev. 22: 2).
NOTES
^For the early commentaries to this canto, see Jacopo della Lana, ed. L.
Scarabelli (Bologna, Regia, 1866), III, 398-418; the Ottimo Commento
(Pisa, Capurro, 1829), III, 581-602; Pietro di Dante (Florence, Piatti,
1845), 706-12; Benvenuto da Imola, ed. G. F. Lacaita (Florence, Barbèra,
1867), V, 387-405; Chiose sopra Dante (Florence, Piatti, 1846), 665-72;
Francesco da Buti, ed. C. Giannini (Pisa, Nistri, 1862), III, 710-28; the
Anonimo, ed. P. Fanfani (Bologna, Romagnoli, 1874), III, 478-98;
Cristoforo Landino (Florence, Nicholo di Lorenzo della Magna, 1481); and
Alessandro Vellutello (Venice, Marcolini, 1544). See also the lecturae of F.
Romani (Florence, Sansoni, [1904]); A. D'Ancona, in his Scritti danteschi
(Florence, Sansoni, [1923]), 447-93; G. Petronio, in Annali delle Facoltà
di Lettere-Filosofìa e Magistero dell'Università di Cagliari , 25 (1957),
401-30; R. R. Bezzola, in Letture dantesche: Paradiso , ed. G. Getto
(Florence, Sansoni, 1961), 549-66; M. Sansone, in Lectura Dantis
421
Scaligera: Paradiso (Florence, Le Monnier, 1968), 961-98; D. Consoli, in
Nuove letture dantesche , 7 (Florence, Le Monnier, 1974), 151-73; and the
commentaries of N. Sapegno (2nd edn, Florence, La Nuova Italia, 1968),
HI, 334-47, and of U. Bosco and G. Reggio (Florence, Le Monnier, 1979),
m, 440-57.
2See Matt. 6: 19-21; Luke 12: 15-21; and, on the whole subject, see P.
Armour, «Gold, Silver, and True Treasure: Economic Imagery in Dante»,
Romance Studies (1994) (forthcoming).
-^Romani, 11 (the simile reflects «la vasta arcana unità di tutte le cose»),
though for D'Ancona, 453, «si complica con una non necessaria bizzarria».
4D 'Ancona, 460, maintained that Beatrice turns pale (cf. Conv. IV. xxv. 7,
where the color of «pudore» is either «palido» or «rosso»), but, as Bosco
and Reggio note (p. 441), this does not fit the allusion to darkening in the
following reference to the eclipse.
^«O papa Bonifazio, molt'ài iocato al mondo», line 51; Consoli, 157.
"R. Hollander and A. L. Rossi, «Dante's Republican Treasury», Dante
Studies , 104 (1986), 59-82 (pp. 63, 65-66); P. Armour, Dante's Griffin and
the History of the World (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1989), chapters 2
(«SPQR») and 3 («Monarchia»).
7
'Romani, 35, and Consoli, 167, adduce a parallel with the «pioggia di
manna» in «Donna pietosa e di novella etate», lines 58-59 (VN, 23).
"Throughout the Middle Ages, the western limit of Europe was defined by
Spain and the Pillars of Hercules, known as the «fretum Gaditanum» from
the Gades islands believed to exist just beyond the straits in the
all-encircling Ocean. See Dante, Quaestio de situ et forma aque et terre , XIX
(§54); also, for instance, Pietro di Dante, 236-37 (on the Ulysses episode),
707.
^L. Pertile, «"Così si fa la pelle bianca nera": l'enigma di Par. XXVII,
136-38», Lettere italiane , 43 (1991), 3-26.
^D'Ancona, 490, knew of this interpretation, normally attributed to Barbi;
see Sapegno, 346; Consoli, 171; Bosco & Reggio, 456.
^See Armour, Dante's Griffin 112-15 and chapter 6 («The Griffin and the
Tree of Justice»).
l^See D'Ancona, 451-52; VN, 3 («presi tanta dolcezza, che come inebriato
mi partio da le genti»), but also «Ciò che m'incontra», line 7 (VN, 15). For
various biblical echoes in this canto, see Consoli, 157, 162-66, 172. All
references here are as in the Vulgate Bible.
13Sapegno, 345; Bosco & Reggio, 455; Consoli, 170, however, had picked
up another version: «Se piove il giorno dell'Ascensione, / le susine vanno
in bozzacchione».
l^Prov. 30: 15: «The bloodsucker [or horse-leech] has two daughters, who
say: "Bring, bring"». On the Epistle in this context, see also Armour,
Dante's Griffin , 281.
^Sapegno, 341; Bosco & Reggio, 456. On the whole question, see M. A.
Orr, Dante and the Early Astronomers (2nd edn, London, Allan Wingate,
1956), 125, 129, 175-76; G. Buti and R. Bertagni, C ommento
422
astronomico della «Divina Commedia » (Florence, Sandron, 1966),
199-201; id., «calendario GIULIANO e GREGORIANO», in the
Enciclopedia dantesca (Rome, Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana,
1970-71); B. Andriani, «La centesima negletta», Studi danteschi , 48
(1971), 83-103; id., Aspetti della scienza in Dante (Florence, Le Monnier,
1981), 76-80. In the former article, 102, Andriani incorrectly cites
Vellutello as putting 1500 years between Julius Caesar (or the birth of
Christ) and Dante. In fact, Vellutello sets this at 1300-1320 years, with
1500 up to his own time, by when the problem had become worse. Indeed,
he ends his commentary to Paradiso XXVII with the following appeal to the
Pope: «Hora trattando 'l Poeta in questo luogo de la negletta centesma, mi
dà cagion, Santissimo padre, di ricordare a tua Santità che laudabile et a
tutto 'l mondo utile opera sarebbe se quella si degnasse di voler una volta
rimediare a questo non piccolo inconveniente, veduto massimamente esser
per farsi ogni dì maggiore. Et il rimedio più facile e meno alterabile
giudicherei che fosse questo, che essa tua Santità comandasse a tutto '1
popolo Christiano che per XV anni continui il mese di Genaro, o qual si
voglia altro che sia di XXXI dì, si facesse di trenta, e così sarebbe rimediato
al passato, ciò è a li XV dì di che diciamo esser per la negletta centesma
scorsi inanzi, e per remediar a l'avenire ordinasse che ogni centesimo anno,
cominciando dal DC sopra mille, al qual noi camminiamo, il bisesto, che
sempre nel centesimo viene, non si facesse, ma che il mese di Fevraro, che
per cagion di tal bisesto lo facciamo di XXIX dì, non lo facessimo che di
XXVIII» (1544 edn, slightly repunctuated). Republished by Francesco
Sansovino together with Landino's commentary (Venice, Sessa, 1578),
Vellutello's suggestions were superseded only four years later by the
Gregorian reform of 1582, when ten days were dropped from October, thus
making the spring equinox of 1583 fall on 21 March, and the leap year was
eliminated in three out of four centenary years.
423
Paradiso XXVIII
Author(s): REGINA PSAKI
Accessed: 17-02-2020 23:10 UTC
Lectura Dantis
REGINA PSAKI
University of Oregon
XXVIII
This canto, which stages in the Primům Mobile the pilgrim's first
vision of God and of the angels circling Him, retreats surprisingly from
the euphoric tone of the previous canto (XXVII.7-9):
O gioia! oh ineffabile allegrezza!

oh vita integra d'amore e di pace!
oh sanza brama sicura richezza!
Avoiding the possible traps of excess, inadequacy, or bathos, which

threaten a poetic representation of the divine, the poet clamps down on
the heightened emotional states - ecstasy, invective, prophecy - of
XXVII, to offer a serene and controlled presentation of the Deity
encircled by rationally ordered hierarchies of angels. This canto describes
the order of the noumenal world as an inverted but parallel version of
that phenomenal world which the pilgrim has just traversed to its border
in the ninth heaven. Unlike the cantos surrounding it, XXVIII is purged
of agitation and diatribe (Taddeo, 169); unlike Par. III-XXVII, it features
no dramatized meeting between the pilgrim and the celestial citizenry
(Spera, 543); unlike Par. XXIX-XXXIII, it enacts a pause in which the
pilgrim is momentarily an impassive observer, less swept up in the
vision than questioning, attempting to understand it.
Canto XXVIII divides into four sections, which alternate between
vision and gloss, observation and instruction. The pilgrim's vision of
the divine point and the angels circling it, first reflected in Beatrice's
eyes and then face to face (1-39), is followed by Beatrice's gloss on what
he is seeing, his bewilderment at its unlikeness to earth, and her
explanation (40-78). His doubt resolved, the pilgrim sees the angels
sparkle and intone in joyous affirmation (79-96); Beatrice then names
the angelic hierarchies in their proper order, and describes how Gregory
the Great, upon reaching this sphere, smiled at his own earlier erroneous
ordering (97-139). The action of the canto is thus extremely attenuated;
the only occurrence in narrated time is the dialogue between the pilgrim
and Beatrice, and the angelic flash at her description (Taddeo, 167). The
canto's subject-matter, on the other hand, is quite broad: it concerns the
424
mediating role of Beatrice (and thus of Dante the poet) in this vision;
the means by which the angels in their uninterrupted contemplation turn
the spheres; the inverted relation of the «model» to its «copy»1; the
error in human reasoning unchecked by Scripture or by Revelation; the
calm, ecstatic dynamic between reason and revelation, between vision or
intellection, and love; and the poet's own authoritative testimony. I
shall discuss each of these topics in the order in which the canto
addresses them, that is, following the exposition of the canto itself.
Beatrice's exposition, in the previous canto, of human life on earth
- «'n terra nòn è chi governi; / onde sé svia l'umana famiglia»
(XXVII. 140- 141) - is recapitulated in the opening of Par. XXVIII, and
is followed by the crucial vision of the point (1-3):
Poscia che ncontro a la vita presente

d'i miseri mortali aperse 'l vero
quella che 'mparadisa la mia mente...
The poet moves into an involuted simile which both recalls and
surpasses Paul's familiar image of faulty human comprehension: «nunc
videmus per speculum in aenigmate, tunc autem facie ad faciem» (I
Cor.l3:12). He claims that he saw, reflected in Beatrice's eyes, a vision
which he quickly turned to verify (4-9):
come in lo specchio fiamma di doppiero

vede colui che se n'alluma retro,
prima che l'abbia in vista o in pensiero,
e sé rivolge per veder se '1 vetro
li dice il vero, e vede ch'el s'accorda
con esso come nota con suo metro...
Unlike the Pauline formulation, however, the vision seen i

of Beatrice's eyes conforms perfectly to its original, an
adequate to it. Thus the canto opens, as Contini notes, w
reference to truth (2, 8), as it will close (136, 139); sim
begins with an allusion to St. Paul, so it will close (138-139).
Beatrice's mediati ve function, the metaphysics of presence, and the
truth-value of the poet's account are with these first lines set up as
governing concerns in this canto and the next.
It is clear that Beatrice is here, as globally throughout the Paradiso ,
the medium through which the pilgrim attains his vision of the
divinity. Earlier scholars made her out to be an ambulatory «theology»
(Vandelli, 575; even Taddeo, 164); Singleton stolidly, and determinedly,
aligns her with «sapienza». Dante, however, is much more daring in his
425
use of this figure than such a unilateral assignment of value would
allow. Dante uses allegory in such a way that all of Beatrice's possible
meanings prevail simultaneously, even the incompatible ones; thus
Beatrice's erotic attraction for the pilgrim is upheld here as one of the
elements which enable his vision of the divinity:2 «io feci riguardando
ne' belli occhi / onde a pigliarmi fece Amor la corda» (10-12).
The reluctance of Dantists to accept a polysemous configuration of
Beatrice which might include a sexual valence is clear from the almost
universal condemnation of these two lines as banal, trivial, and out of
place in this context. The conviction that even in Paradise there can be
no truly redeemed eroticism, and thus that Beatrice must necessarily be
an asexual, «purified» force in Dante's salvific itinerary, creates the
perception that these lines are incongruous placed next to the vision of
God. The fact that the image of the cord permeates the Commedia , and
that its use here is thus neither incongruous nor casual, cannot override
the belief that Beatrice's «emparadising» of the poet's mind should by
now have surpassed any contamination with the personified «Amor» of
lyric convention.
What the pilgrim sees in her eyes, in fact, is a poetically ingenious
solution to the representional challenge of portraying God and the angels
who mediate between His love and the material world. The infinite
magnitude of God is here represented as a mathematical point,
infinitesimally small but overwhelmingly bright; the smallest star in
the night sky, the poet says, next to this point would seem a moon.3
Around the radiant point whirl nine fiery circles which diminish in speed
and brightness the farther they are from the center. The poet enumerates
the individual circles, guiding the reader's eye over them (Taddeo, 165),
and with obvious symbolic weight dedicates a full terzina to the first
circle and the seventh (25-39):
distante intorno al punto un cerchio d'igne

si girava sì ratto, ch'avria vinto
quel moto che più tosto il mondo eigne;
e questo era d'un altro circumcinto,
e quel dal terzo, e '1 terzo poi dal quarto,
dal quinto il quarto, e poi dal sesto il quinto.
Sopra seguiva il settimo sì sparto
già di larghezza, che '1 messo di luno
intero a contenerlo sarebbe arto.
Così l'ottavo e '1 nono; e ciascheduno
più tardo si movea, secondo ch'era
in numero distante più da l'uno;
e quello avea la fiamma più sincera
426
cui men distava la favilla pura,
credo, però che più di lei s'invera.
The poet notes («credo») what the pilgrim at that moment could not,
that is, that the nearest sphere is bright and fast in proportion to how
much it «en-trues» itself in the spark, participates in its truth.4
The careful enumeration of these circles, and the answering
enumeration of the nine categories of angels later in the canto (98-126),
have more than any other element provoked critical dismissal of this
canto as excessively «structural», theological, and didactic. Vandelli's
rueful hypothesis that the exposition of such intractable subjects, «tutte
intellettuali e razionali, non possa divenire interamente arte e poesia,
nemmeno se ... il poeta si chiami Dante» (571), no longer I think
governs readings of the Commedia .5 We need not even make the case
that it is Dante's achievement to make poetry out of structure; this
would be to accept the Crocean dichotomy, merely contesting its
aesthetic evaluations. For the Middle Ages, for Dante, music itself is
numerical, and numbers are music; the structure of the invisible world
is, without any conscious reconciliation on the poet's part of opposing
impulses, the best matter of poetry.6 Where Vandelli hears a
«martellare insistente e monotono» (578) in these lines, I hear a
mathematical lyricism, or lyrical mathematics; this stately music
resounds as well in Beatrice's «magniloquent enunciation of the
scriptural nouns» (Kirkpatrick, 171), with the angelic names in
themselves lyrical, incantatory, hypnotic, ecstatic, guarantors of
truth-value.7
In the next section of the canto (40-78), Beatrice paraphrases
Aristotle's Metaphysics , substituting the radiant point for the principle
which the philosopher had posited as the foundation of the universe
(«Ex tali igitur principio dependet caelum et natura», Metaphysics XII,
7, 1072b]): «Da quel punto / depende il cielo e tutta la natura» (41-42).
The pilgrim wonders at the model set before him because the material
world, whose structure he knew intimately even before his putative
journey through it, is precisely the opposite: there the spheres, he says,
are more divine (and thus, by extension, faster) the farther they are from
the center. If it is the angels who turn and govern the spheres, why is
the copy organized differently than the model? Beatrice's answer,
somewhat surprisingly, does not point immediately to the fact that this
vision, unlike the material world, has not the earth but God at its center;
given the careful distancing and devaluing of the earth in the pilgrim's
glimpses backward at it (Par. XXII and XXVII), this would have been a
simple and resonant response. Instead, she points to the difference
427
between the spheres' apparent size («la parvenza / de le sustanze che
ťappaion tonde», 74-75) and their actual virtue. If the pilgrim considers
the latter, he will see the relation as one of correspondence
(«consequenza», 76) rather than inversion. The trajectory which had up
to that point seemed centrifugal, a journey to the edge, is now seen to
be centripetal, a journey to the center.8
The brief third section of the canto (79-96) expresses the pilgrim's
resolved doubt with the simile of a sky swept clean from all impurities
by the northwest wind. This extended image has commanded attention
both because it is slightly recherché, and because of its unusual rhymes
«roffia» and «paroffia» (82, 84). The extended simile closes with a
briefer one, «come stella in cielo il ver si vide» (87); Beatrice's true
gloss has the bright visibility of a heavenly body. The innumerable
angelic «sparks» («scintilla», 91) flash each in its circle, and sing
«Hosanna» to the fixed point at their center. Even this brief «action»
comes accompanied by an explication of the angelic nature; in one
terzina the poet establishes that the angels have always existed in a
hierarchy and will always remain so, even after the end of the world
(94-96):
Io sentiva osannar di coro in coro
al punto fisso che li tiene a li ubi ,

e terrà sempre, ne' quai sempre fuoro.
The numberlessness of the angels, their function, their past and their
future, are by now established;9 in the fourth and final part of the canto
the poet moves to a question of angelology on which venerable sources
did not always agree - their ordering.10
Beatrice responds to the pilgrim's unstated «pensier dubi» (97) to
describe the order in which the angels, which she here names, wheel
around the point. The Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones form the
«primo ternaro» (98-105); their love of God moves them to imitate Him
to the extent that they can, and Beatrice describes their activity in terms
of the priority of vision and intellection before love in attaining
beatitude (106-1 11): 11
e dei saper che tutti hanno diletto

quanto la sua veduta si profonda
nel vero in che si queta ogne intelletto.
Quinci si può veder come si fonda
l'esser beato ne l'atto che vede,
non in quel ch'ama, che poscia seconda...
428
To the first triad are devoted six tercets, to the second three, and to the
third only one, underscoring their relative nobility. The second triad is
described as flowering «in questa primavera sempiterna» (a
much-admired paradox) «che notturno Ariete non dispoglia» (an equally
admired periphrasis), and said to sing «perpetüalemente» (115-123). The
third triad is expeditiously named, and linked with dance and play
(124-126).
Of all three orders, Beatrice says (127-129): «Questi ordini di sú
tutti s'ammirano, / e di giù vincon sì, che verso Dio / tutti tirati sono e
tutti tirano». The angels, each yearning upward and exerting influence
downward, pulling Godward the orders below them, offer a clear model
for the activity of Beatrice; Contini notes the familiarity of this parallel
from the dolce stil novo (1009). While the angels have no «benevolent,
custodial, or comforting function» vis-à-vis humans in general or the
pilgrim in particular (Taddeo, 163), Beatrice clearly does perform this
function for him: striving upward and prevailing downward, she pulls
the pilgrim toward God. This angelic parallel extends of course to the
poet, who negotiates between his vision of the otherworldly truth and
us, the readers. The poet's role as intermediary brings us back to the
problematization, in the last ten lines of the canto, of the truth-value
what he purveys, as Beatrice recounts Gregory's smiling recognition of
his error.
When she concludes her exposition of the angelic hierarchies,
Beatrice notes that Dionysius12 had understood these correctly, but that
Gregory had not. This anecdote, it is well known, constitutes a palinode
of Dante's own account of the angelic hierarchies in Convivio II. 5; but
this fact does not by any means exhaust its significance within the
economy of the single canto or indeed of the Commedia as a whole. The
Gregory episode offers not only a graceful, human moment, or a humble
retraction of an error perpetuated in the poet's own earlier work; most
importantly it serves to exalt the poet's own present eyewitness account
(Padoan, 188), aligning it with the correct version which Paul - the
beneficiary of divine revelation as Dante purports to have been - is said
to have given to Dionysius (138-139). The crucial distinction which the
poet proposes here is between «eschatological truth sanctioned by
revelation and transmitted by the Scriptures» and «error» - the
unauthorized, merely rational search for doctrinal truth (Spera, 542).
This latter will become in Par . XXIX the focus of Beatrice's pointed
diatribe against those who preach nonsense («ciance»); even the
conclusions of such holy figures as Gregory and Jerome (XXIX.37-42)
are subject to revision in light of the poet's lofty vision (Spera, 543).
Juxtaposed with this nexus of good- and bad-faith errors is the
429
poet's disingenuous attribution to Beatrice of these lines (58-60):
«Se li tuoi diti non sono a tal nodo
sufficienti, non è maraviglia:

tanto, per non tentare, è fatto sodo!».
As Mellone energetically notes, the circling wheels of fire are Dante's

own invention (740); how then can others be said to have neglected to
try to understand the relation between them and the natural world? Even
if we understand the question to refer more generally to the relation
between the visible and invisible worlds, the poet's claim to resolve
problems which philosophy seldom engages serves to foreground the
local issues of truth-value and authority which engage him throughout
this heaven. The poet audaciously establishes a network of allusions to
human overreaching, while maintaining through Beatrice that his own
truths here portrayed are authorized. This authorization derives both from
the legitimating force of his eyewitness experience (Padoan, 188), and
from the divine grace which granted him that experience; in XXIX.65-66
we are told that «ricever la grazia è meritorio / secondo che l'affetto l'è
aperto». We are meant in other words both to question the poet's
authority over and against Gregory and Jerome, and then to accept his
answer that we must class him rather with Paul and Dionysius, that is,
with those who receive revelation and rely on Scripture. The pilgrim's
disclaimer in Inf. II that he is not Paul has been superseded by a series
of rhetorical moves which align him precisely with Paul, and lend him
Paul's weight.
It is in a similar light that I read the syntactic and conceptual
parallel between Beatrice's claim that «Da quel punto / depende '1 cielo e
tutta la natura» (41-42), and Christ's response to the Saducee in
Matthew 22. Intending to trap Christ, the Saducee asks which is the
greatest commandment of the law; Christ answers that the first is to
wholly love God, and the second, «simile», is to love one's neighbor as
oneself: «In his duobus mandatis universa lex pendet, et prophetae»
(Matthew 22.40). While Beatrice's formulation derives recognizably
from Aristotle, it also evokes the words of Christ. More importantly, it
does so in a parallel context: just as Christ declines the trivial legalistic
games of the Saducee and goes directly to the ethical center of Scripture
and prophecy, so does Dante claim to bypass the choplogic of
angelological speculation and go directly to revelation and Scripture (in
this case, his own as well as the originals).
Dante invokes the human fallibility of Dionysius, Kirkpatrick
notes, in order to thematize the «importance of submission to an
430
authoritative voice», which is indeed the «response that he expects here
for his own deliberations» (167). If, however, «one seeks the warrant of
Dante's own authority in the canto, it is again to its style and structure
that one must look...» (168). In articulating his vision of God and the
angels the poet masterfully delimits and concentrates the action of the
canto, as we have seen, and the semantic fields in play. We note the
heavy concentration of words indicating truth, vision, light, joy, song,
circles, beatitude; Contini notes the predominance of «vero» and
«vedere» in various forms, which clearly vehicles Dante's valorization of
the truth of his own revealed vision.13 Taddeo remarks that «la
struttura del canto consist[e] nel rapporto fra una condizione di serenità
(...quiete, immobilità, letizia nella contemplazione), serenità letterale in
quanto figurativa, e simbolica in quanto pertinente alla sfera dell'angelo,
e una serie di tensioni concettuali, palesi o dissimulate, fra verità ed
errore, fra divino ed umano» (173-74). Taddeo defines these «tensioni
intellettuali» as the controversies over the angelic order, the theory of
beatitude, the representation of God as a point, the movement of the
heavens, and the angels' history and future (170-73). I would add only
that it is in precisely these areas that Dante is attempting to impose an
authoritative voice and vision, to claim a knowledge which supersedes
the limited vision of humanity, «in a glass, darkly».
Contini's analysis also focuses on the heightened intensity of
individual words in this canto; an unusual concentration of neologisms
imparadisa , s'invera , sinmilla , s'interna ), Latinate forms (sberna, ubi ,
vimi , alo , igne , miro , soblimi , circumcinto , rape ),14 and rare or
regional forms ( vonno , terminonno, roffia, paroffia). Taddeo confirms
that an extraordinary proportion of these irregular etyma are hapax,
words which occur only here in the Comedy (all the neologisms;
osannar , circumcinto , rape , sběrna , ternaro , soblimi , alo , vonno ,
terminonno , r of fia, par of fia, colloca, gerarcia, perpetiialemente,
splendido, scintilla). This «sforzo intenzionale di differenziazione», says
Contini, is due to the fact that «resta a Dante poco spazio per colpire, e
dunque dovrà crescere la concentrazione e quasi l'ostentazione degli
strumenti» (1014, 1011). I would add that this heightened intensity is,
like the paradoxes which punctuate the canto, at the service of claiming
and displaying mastery of difficult and arcane material, material which it
costs the reader some little effort to assimilate. The inverse relation
between the noumenal and the phenomenal worlds; the infinitesimal
point as a fittingly unlike sign of God's infinite magnitude; the
«primavera sempiterna» of paradise; the unexpected perfection of the
mirrored vision at the canto's opening; these paradoxes and the
roughnesses of Dante's language keep the reader struggling to keep up.
431
Dante's language and poetic strategies, while frequently ludic, are
not an end in themselves. Contini reads Dante's deliberately prickly
verbal surface thus: «Qui la poesia di Dante rompe i confini del 'piano' e
ritrova una misura irrazionale; un canto di aspetto tanto 'pianificato'
porta così all'ineffabile, irrompendovi, si dica pure, con la violenza»
(1026). Taddeo, for his part, concludes that «con l'innalzarsi della
materia ... il linguaggio è sollecitato verso la zona più eletta» (178).
The textual articulation of Dante's inventive vision or invented
revelation, with its rough spots, Latinate forms, neologisms, paradoxes,
involuted and extended images, unexpected euphonies, concentrated and
delimited semantic fields, periphrases, alliterations, incantatory names
and numbers, lexical clusters, authoritative allusions, palinodes - all
serve a distinct purpose, a distinct agenda, here. They serve to maintain
the poet's textual control and his role as mediator between the readers
and a truth which he expounds. He invokes the figures of the fraudulent
preachers shrewdly to keep himself from seeming one who «per apparer
... s'ingegna e face / sue invenzioni» (XXIX. 94-95); this author
expressly aligns himself with the angels, «che verso Dio / tutti tirati
sono e tutti tirano».
NOTES
1 Scrivano examines in detail the controversial assignment of meaning to

«essemplo» and «essemplare», which are frequently used interchangeably
in medieval Latin; he notes that they are Bonaventure's terms, and should
be glossed accordingly (277).
2 For a compatible reading see Marguerite Waller, «Seduction and
Salvation».
■^Mellone notes that while the point is an appropriate choice to represent
God, as it is immaterial, indivisible, unquantifiable, and unalterable, this
smallest of entities seems unsuited to express the fullness of divine life.
The fact that it is the source of a blinding light seems to compensate for
this paradoxical choice (737).
^Contini thus describes the force of this kind of neologism, verbs formed by
combining nouns or adjectives with the suffix -in and an infinitive ending:
«movimentano metaforicamente la descrizione ontologica [del soggetto],
senza propriamente cadere nell'azione» (1011).
^See Padoan's discussion of the superseded poetry-structure model (186-87).
°In fact, lines such as «che solo amore e luce ha per confine» (54) and «che
notturno Ariete non dispoglia» (117) have been much admired as very
poetic. Taddeo notes that both are relative clauses, both the third line of a
terzina, both syntactically subordinate but lyrically intense, and both,
since they repeat information already given in full, bear minimal literal
432
content and maximal poetic potential (183). This confirms that, for
Croce's generation of critics, poetry should express feeling rather than
Vandelli's «materie ... intellettuali e razionali», and privilege form over
descriptive or ethical freight.
'Taddeo agrees that «quei nomi proprio non sono pura didascalia:
semanticamente nobili, sillabicamente molto estesi, producono lentezza di
ritmo, quindi gravità sacrale» (182).
^C.S. Lewis' explanation of this inversion is still elegantly vivid: «The
Empyrean is the boundary of space ... in the sense that it is the point at
which the spatial mode of thought breaks down. To reach the end of space
is to reach the end of spatiality. Dante makes this vivid to us by an
astonishing tour de force. He cannot of course make the spaceless
imaginable in the strict sense. What he does is to show us space turning
inside out; that teaches us pretty effectively that spatial thinking, as we
ordinarily know it, has broken down. [...] The point is an exposition of
God; the nine ... planets are the nine angelic hierarchies and you see that
this is our universe inside out. In our visible world the circumference, the
Primům Mobile, moves quickest and is nearest to God; the Moon moves
slowest and is nearest what we call the Centre - i.e. the Earth. But the true
nature of the universe is exactly the opposite. In the visible and spatial
order Earth is centre; in the dynamic, invisible order the Empyrean is
centre, and we are indeed 'outside the city wall' at the end of all things»
(62).
În Par. XXIX, the nature of the angels as pure intelligence, substance
without matter («puro atto», XXIX. 33), and as «without passion or memory
or language» (Taddeo, 170), will be expounded.
l°The nine names Dante will adduce all occur in Scripture, but the Bible does
not indicate that any particular hierarchy governs them.
Critics commonly note that here Dante upholds distinctly the via
rational is rather than the via mistica here (e.g., Contini 1009).
Dissenting, Scrivano offers a polemical and well-argued account of how
canto XXVIII in fact abandons philosophy for mysticism and mystical
knowledge. He makes pointed reference to Bonaventure as an authority for
Dante in this canto, and concludes that «la distinzione tra via razionale e
via mistica è dunque da attenuare perché non l'intelletto consente la
visione, ma la grazia divina» (28, my emphasis). The inverted vision of
the noumenal world, and Dante's privileging of the revealed vision, would
seem to bear out his claim.
l^To Dionysius were attributed a body of works, including the De caelesti

Hierarchia referred to here, which are now attributed to one or more
Neoplatonic writers of the fifth or sixth century. He is named in Par. X as
he who «più a dentro vide / l'angelica natura e 'l ministero» (116-117).
l^Contini's analysis is backed up by Taddeo's inventories of these semantic
fields: he counts seven occurrences of «vero», fourteen of «vedere»,
forty-seven references to vision, and twenty-seven to mental operations
(174-176). In addition, I note twenty-three references to circles,
433
twenty -five to light, nine to love, nine to song, and ten to joy and/or
beatitude.
^Mellone has exhaustively cross-checked Alfragano's Liber de

aggregationibus scientiae stellar um and Sacrobosco's Sphaera , and located
sources for Dante's language; thus the choice of the Latinate «rape» («che
tutto quanto rape / l'altro universo seco») seems to derive from «primus
[motus] omnes alias sphaeras secum impetu suo rapii» (, Sphaera 1.33, cited
in Mellone, 738).
WORKS CONSULTED
Contini, Gianfranco. «Paradiso XXVIII». Lectura Dantis Scaligera (Firenze:

Le Monnier, 1968), 1001-1026.
Cosmo, Umberto. «I ministri dell'ordine nell'universo», in L'ultima ascesa :
introduzione alla lettura del Paradiso (Bari: Laterza, 1936), 355-71.
Frattini, Alberto. «Il canto ventottesimo del Paradiso». Lectura Dantis
Romana (Torino: SEI, 1960), 5-35.
Guardini, Romano. «La gerarchia celeste», in Studi su Dante (Brescia:
Morcelliana, 1986), 89-95. Trans, from German by M.L. Maraschini and
A. Sacchi.
Kirkpatrick, Robin. «The Organisation of the Canto in the Paradiso », in

Dante's Paradiso and the Limitations of Modem Criticism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1978), 151-177.
Lewis, C.S. «Imagination and Thought in the Middle Ages», in Studies in
Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1966), 41-63.
Mellone, Attilio. «Il canto XXVIII del Paradiso». Lectura Dantis Romana
(Torino: SEI, 1981), 731-754.
Padoan, Giorgio. «Il canto XXVIII del Paradiso». Nuove letture dantesche.
Voi 7. (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1974), 175-192.
Scrivano, Riccardo. «Paradiso 28». Quaderni d'italianistica , 10 (1989),
269-285.
Spera, Francesco. «La poesia degli angeli: lettura del canto XXVIII del
Paradiso». Lettere italiane , 42 (1990), 537-552.
Taddeo, E. «Il canto XXVIII del Paradiso». Giornale storico della letteratura
italiana , 153 (1976), 161-185.
Vandelli, Giuseppe. «Il canto XXVIII del Paradiso». Letture dantesche
(Firenze: Sansoni, 1961).
Waller, Marguerite. «Seduction and Salvation: Sexual Difference in Dante's
Commedia and the Difference It Makes». In Donna: Women in Italian
Culture , ed. Ada Testaferri (Ottawa: Dovehouse, 1989), 225-243.
434
Paradiso XXIX
Author(s): RODNEY PAYTON
Accessed: 17-02-2020 23:10 UTC
Lectura Dantis
RODNEY PAYTON
Western Washington University
XXIX
Canto XXIX is the central section of the long final lecture which
Beatrice began in canto XXVIII in answer to the pilgrim's question
about the nature of the arrangements of creation around the point which
is God. The lecture does not end until the conclusion of XXX with the
final condemnation of the corruption of the papacy, Beatrice's last words
in the poem. The pilgrim does not speak after his question in canto
XXVIII, although there is «discourse» of a sort since Beatrice perceives
his unformulated questions and answers them. Beatrice's sustained and
intense speech, covering more than two cantos, surpasses anything of
its sort in the Comedy and is probably the favorite passage of few
modern readers of Dante, given its intense scholastic flavor. Yet, the
central theme of Beatrice's address, the angels, is a fascinating topic. At
least subconsciously, a reader must have been anticipating the eventual
appearance of the angels and now here they are, even if it might be that
Beatrice's lecture about them is not quite what one might expect.
The organization of the canto is complicated by the fact that it is a
part of a larger whole, Beatrice's entire final speech. Even so, as an
independent entity, its sectioning is most musical and complete in
itself. It consists of an introit , the simile of the «daughters of Latona»
which, like an overture, hints at the major motivic issue of the canto:
the perfection of God beyond time and space. The first section, vv.
10-66, places the motive in the context of a theme, the nature of the
angels and their relationship to human affairs, and introduces a secondary
theme, the correction of human errors. The second section (vv. 67-126),
Beatrice's «digression», is a development of thematic issues from the
first section: it begins with angels, but diverts that concern into a much
stronger and unexpected invective against human error. The unexpected
harshness of this attack seems subtly out of tone with paradise and, of
course, therefore sets its content in relief as a discourse of major
importance. The digression concluded, Beatrice's speech returns briefly
again to the thematic issue of the first section, angels, and in a final
metaphor, raises once again the overriding motive of the oneness and
self sufficiency of God which was present in the introit.
The text of canto XXIX can be illuminated three ways. The first is
435
through an observation made by Frances Yates several years ago that the
Comedy is a gigantic memory theater, an observation which Dantists
have been slow to exploit.1 The second is that Dante's text in Paradiso
has strong relationships to the thought of St. Bernard of Clairvaux who
replaces Beatrice as guide in the final cantos, a relationship which has
only just begun to be examined by modern Dantists in any detail
although the mystery of the role of St. Bernard is obviously
compelling.2 The third factor is a simple observation, that the
corrections of human error found in canto XXIX are part of the pattern
of corrections of other texts found throughout the Comedy which
constitute one of its strongest claims to authority.
First of all, Frances Yates's work helps to explain why there is so
much conceptual concentration at this place.3 Her Art of Memory
asserts that Dante's Comedy would have been seen at once as memory
theater by its intended audience. The technique of the association of
concepts with locations, the better to embed them in the mind and make
them available to memory through a subsequent mental «visit», seems,
to the modern mind, to add a totally unnecessary step to memory, since
you have to remember not only the item you wish to recall, but also the
place where it is «stored». Yates said she never tried actually to perform
the trick herself; it was a relief to her to find thai Cicero (the main
source of the technique) could see how people might find the process a
bit complex (Yates, p. 9). It is possible, however, for a Dante scholar to
get a sense of how it worked by imagining yourself preparing to lecture,
for instance, on Inferno XVI and XVII and mentally placing yourself at
the top of Geryon's waterfall, seeing in your imagination the scene as
described by Dante. Automatically, the conceptual issues addressed
around that location come to mind in the features of the landscape. You
can freely discourse on the division between violence and simple fraud,
which is located on the cliff itself. The significance of usury is found on
Dante's solo visit to the usurers. The cord, Geryon himself, and the
mounted pilgrims on the beast, all cue points of your lecture which can
be repeated at any time by a subsequent mental visit. Frances Yates
herself intended to study the memory aspects of the Summa of San
Gimignano as a guide to her own explication of the Divine Comedy
(Yates, 95 note). This intention was never fulfilled, but her lead into the
connection between memory and landscape can help in a consideration of
Paradiso XXIX (and many other cantos).
In Paradiso , the place-memory implications of the text are
straightforward as long as the locations we consider really are material
places, as are the spheres of the planets and the fixed stars. Here,
though, in the Primum mobile we are «no-place», or in a place beyond
436
place and this shift in the nature of place itself seems linked to the
meaning of the canto. In Paradiso XXVII (109-111) Beatrice prepares
our understanding of the where of the Primum mobile 4: «questo cielo
non ha altro dove / che la mente divina, in che s'accende / l'amor che '1
volge...». A few lines later (114), she acknowledges the difficulty of
comprehending place without location by granting that «He alone who
girds it understands». It is not only the concept of «place» which shifts
towards the metaphysical here, but also time, which has its origin in
this motion in the mind of God (116-121):
Non è suo moto per altro distinto,

ma li altri son mensurati da questo,
sì com diece da mezzo e da quinto;
e come il tempo tegna in co tal testo
le sue radici e ne li altri le fronde,
ornai a te può esser manifesto.
This transition from place as understood in human experience to

place beyond experience and time is not only a necessary preliminary to
the transcendent experience of the being of God which is to come
shortly, but also the poet's definitive resolution of a crux in scholastic
cosmology concerning the infinity of the universe. Edward Grant
explains:5
In Aristotle's physics, the place of a body was defined as the innermost,

motionless surface of the containing body in direct contact with the
contained body. From this definition and a reasoned conviction that no
material body could exist beyond the world [used here in the sense of
universe] to serve as its container, Aristotle concluded that the last sphere,
or sphere of the fixed stars, could not of itself be a place ... the outermost
sphere which contained the world was not itself in a place.
Providing a place for the last sphere results in both an infinite regress of
useless containing spheres and an infinite universe both of which were
felt to be repugnant. Yet some sense of being for the last sphere of the
fixed stars seemed desirable and the «perfect» immobile Empyrean filled
that need for those who could overlook the fact that, strictly speaking, a
sphere must rotate to achieve its perfection. The Primum mobile, which
moves slightly in response to the Empyrean, transmits its motion to
the other spheres. The poet, in a way which is characteristic of his
poetry in these last stages of Paradiso, cuts through all the cosmological
and philosophical confusion by Beatrice's definitive statement placing
the last sphere in the mind of God. This has three results amenable to
437
Dante's purposes. One, it does establish an absolute limit on the
material by giving it a definite boundary (for Dante, matter is finite and
the struggle to overcome it, and its metaphor sin, is a finite struggle);
two, it allows Dante to again make his frequent point about the limits
of human language and conception («He alone who girds it
understands»), preparing for the effort required to comprehend the vision
of the Trinity; and three, it is a resolution of a human uncertainty, a
definitive message from a traveller to heaven of the reality he found
there. Dante's journey, if it is to be valid, must contain definitive
revelations about things we could not otherwise know.
At the beginning of canto XXIX we are in this place, the primum
mobile , which has no connection whatever with places as we know
them save that it provides an Aristotelian place for all the other spheres
and that its motion within the mind of God generates the sea of time
within which our perceptions function. It is the last place which can
possibly be thought of as having a connection with the «places» of our
experience, and Beatrice's contemplation of the point of light
foreshadows the momentous transition to the Empyrean which we will
make in canto XXX. Here we are in the final term of all locations, at
the very junction between matter and spirit. Given that the
knowledgeable among Dante's original readers would have been
following the memory theater of the Comedy , they would expect great
issues to be addressed at the crucial location when the places ceased to be
physical just as a marker is automatically expected by the reader at the
divisions of hell.
This is a reason why Beatrice's intense lecture is where it is. The
grandiose introit to the canto introduces Beatrice's explanation of some
of the most profound mysteries of Heaven; profound conceptions are
clustered around a profound location. In canto XXVIII Dante began his
contemplation of the point of light, which is God surrounded by His
circling angels. He cannot look upon it, but only contemplate its
reflection in the eyes of Beatrice. The astronomical figure beginning
XXIX is of a type similar to several of the introits of Paradiso , and here
lasts for nine lines:
Quando ambedue li figli di Latona

coperti del Montone e de la Libra,
fanno de l'orizzonte insieme zona,
quant'è dal punto che '1 cenìt inlibra
infin che l'uno e l'altro da quel cinto,
cambiando l'emisperio, si dilibra,
tanto, col volto di riso dipinto,
si tacque Beatrice, riguardando
438
fiso nel punto che m'avëa vinto.
John Ciardi, who was apparently not much moved by the passage,
explained, «Gist of this passage, "Beatrice looked up for a moment in
silence"».6 In truth, at first glance the metaphor is reminiscent of the
long «empty» villanelle of Inferno XXIV about the peasant frightened
by the hoarfrost which, to some, seems to say only «Virgil frowned and
then he smiled»,7 but here the content is «imparadised» sublimity itself.
Rather than the confusion of infernal triviality, it is an instant of
supreme clarity and universal logic. The trivial confusion of hell is not
a part of paradise. The figure describes a perfect Spring equinox in a
place with a perfect horizon when the sun rises just as the full moon
sets. For an instance, they are in equipoise, both perfectly bisected by
the horizon. For just as long as that instant of equipoise, did Beatrice
smile silently. How long did Beatrice smile? Early commentators
understand this to be a very short time - Buti says «breve spazio.8 It
is, in fact, a very short time indeed. We must hang on to the image and
think it through; the question is recursive. The longer it is thought
about, the smaller the exact instant is. Human speech is inadequate to
describe the Absolute as Dante reminds us several times in the various
invocations of the Comedy. The philosophers touch this in their
mystical mathematical contemplation of the perfect sphere on the perfect
plane: Where do they touch? The very definition of the sphere, a
continuously curving away from the point of contact no matter how
small the subdivision of the sphere itself, denies the actual existence of
contact. Similarly, this infinite subdivision of time in the manner of
Zeno's paradoxical treatment of distance means that the point of
equipoise in Dante's figure always is to be, to be, to be - and then
was. How long did Beatrice smile? How brief a moment can you
conceive? An awareness of the artificiality of the concepts «now» as
well as «here», of the artificiality of human language when speaking of
absolute things, of the strictly human perception of time itself, is the
first sounding of the primary motive of the canto: thought must advance
to a new level of abstraction. Beatrice's glance is both infinitely short
and infinitely long as time simply cannot comprehend what is
happening here. Neither is Beatrice's location conceptual.
In Inferno II, Beatrice explains her mission to Virgil, telling him
how she, from the blessed choir, can come to hell (86-93):
"Da che tu vuo' saver cotanto a dentro,

dirotti brievemente", mi rispuose,
"perch' i' non temo di venir qua entro.
Temer si dee di sole quelle cose
439
c' hanno potenza di fare altrui male;
de l'altre no, ché non son paurose.
I' son fatta da Dio, sua mercé, tale,
che la vostra miseria non mi tange,
né fiamma d'esto 'ncendio non m'assale...".
This hard-hearted statement is a blow in «la guerra ... de la pietāte» (Inf.

II, 4-5) and shakes our conceptions of heavenly justice and pity at the
very beginning of the journey through hell. But in heaven,
understanding can go further. In the heaven of the moon, the pilgrim
learns that the appearance of the blessed to him is an accommodation to
his understanding. Piccarda and Constance are not simply in the moon
(Par. IV, 37-42):
Qui si mostraro, non perché sortita

sia questa spera lor, ma per far segno
de la celestial c'ha men salita.
Così parlar conviens i al vostro ingegno,
però che solo da sensato apprende
ciò che fa poscia d'intelletto degno.
And further light on the place and state of the blessed comes in Paradiso
XXX when the pilgrim himself explains his ability to see in detail all
of the heavenly rose in spite of its vastness (118-123).
La vista mia ne l'ampio e ne l'altezza

non si smarriva, ma tutto prendeva
il quanto e '1 quale di quella allegrezza.
Presso e lontano, lì, né pon né leva:
ché dove Dio sanza mezzo governa,
la legge naturai nulla rileva.
What pertains to the pilgrim on his visit to heaven applies to the

blessed also, so that Beatrice's distance from God in her visit to hell in
no way diminishes her joy, «no flame of this burning assails me» and,
we learn in XXXI, 22-27, the distance itself is nonexistent for those
who have achieved blessedness, no matter how «real» it is to Virgil:
ché la luce divina è penetrante

per l'universo secondo eh 'è degno,
sì che nulla le puote essere ostante.
Questo sicuro e gaudioso regno,
frequente in gente antica e in novella,
viso e amore avea tutto ad un segno.
440
The secure joyfulness of the folk comes precisely from their knowledge
that their joy can never be diminished. Beatrice in hell is as blessed as
she always was and ever will be. How long did Beatrice look at the
point of light and smile? Beatrice, since her ascent, has always looked at
the point of light in the eternal moment. Infinity minus Beatrice's
lifetime is infinity. So long has she smiled. Place, time and distance not
only do not exist for Beatrice, they are irrelevant even as concepts except
that she speaks to the Pilgrim whose moment is encompassed in her
eternity. The introit then requires that we elevate our normally
time-and-place-bound perceptions to a divine abstraction.
Poetically, Beatrice's discourse in the first section, vv. 10-66, is all
background. There are no details in the intensely scholastic lecture
which follows. There is no gesture, no warmth of expression, save that
directed against human error. The timeless moment simply persists, the
pilgrim gazes at Beatrice's eyes which reflect God and the angels. The
suspension of the pilgrim's moment merges with the timelessness of
Beatrice's experience as this transition between place and placelessness
does its work. The only hint of foreground is in Beatrice's manner of
speaking, «Io dico, e non dimando» (10). She is imperious, her speech
reflects her moral distance from the pilgrim as her speech in hell, «your
suffering does not touch me and no flame of this burning assails me»,
indicates her moral distance from Virgil. Beatrice's riso is regal and
distant.
That God is beyond time is a fact which we have been brought to
by the puzzle of the introit and we will face it again in Beatrice's lecture.
Yet the peculiar pleasure brought about by the contemplation of the
sheer otherness of timeless being is hardly diminished by several
reiterations. This time, the otherness of God's being arises in questions
in the pilgrim's mind, but unformulated, much less spoken, by him.
Beatrice begins by answering the Pilgrim's unasked questions. These
questions, though answered, are not stated until vv. 46-48: «Or sai tu
dove e quando questi amori / furon creati e come: sì che spenti / nel tuo
disio già son tre ardori». Where, when and how were the Angels created?
These are the Pilgrim's unstated questions. Beatrice reads the Pilgrim's
mind. In Hell, Virgil seemed to read Dante's unspoken thought, but that
is mere appearance. In truth, the supremely logical Virgil reasoned to
what the Pilgrim must be thinking.9 Beatrice does know Dante's
thoughts, but not directly. She knows because she has «seen it there
where every ubi and quando is centered». In short, she knows because
she has access to the only «there» which is real and absolute. The
question does not exist in its fully conceptualized form in Dante's mind,
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but only in the mind of God himself. In Dante's particularity the
question is reflected, but unformed. His state of mind, as far as he
knows consciously, is one of being «overcome» by the point which he
sees (9).
Beatrice's answer begins with the «how». Here we can follow her
easily as the answer is the familiar medieval principle of plenitude: The
Being which cannot be added to, the «Eternai Love», opened into new
loves - adding to being out of the absolute joy He has in being itself.
In the middle of this explanation is the «when» answer which repeats
again the paradox of God's timelessness. «He creates in His eternity
beyond time, beyond every other bound». This point is most important,
and Beatrice insists on it yet again as if to head off any possible
misconception: «Né prima quasi torpente si giacque; / ché né prima né
poscia procedette / lo discorrer di Dio sovra quest' acque» (19-21). This
series of repeated explanations of this point now concludes in a simile
(25-30):
E come in vetro, in ambra o in cristallo

raggio resplende sì, che dal venire
a l'esser tutto non è intervallo,
così 'l triforme effetto del suo sire
ne l'esser suo raggiò insieme tutto
sanza distinzione in essordire.
The triform effect is matter such as earth, without form; the Angels,
form without matter and combinations of form and matter like men and
the heavenly spheres.
The effect of all this, from the implications of the introit through
the series of Beatrice's explanations which develop the motive, is to
bring the reader through a crisis of thought, the paradox of being
without duration, of act without beginning, of place without place, to a
resolution of that conceptual dissonance in the metaphor of glass, amber
and crystal. Dante's poetic intent is certainly that the moment of
understanding, in so far as the conceptions under consideration can be
understood at all, should strike the reader in the metaphor of glass,
amber and crystal. The enormous difficulty of imagining being without
duration, of place without location, is solved for us, on the human
level, in the metaphor.
Poetry thus makes the unthinkable conceivable and helps us in our
spiritual struggle. Figures, concrete images, may not be as profound as
the imageless heights of the contemplations of the true and expert
mystic, but unlike ecstasy, images can be communicated to others. The
Dutch historian Johan Huizinga commented on the humble image, far
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more useful than a private epiphany:10
Without metaphors it is impossible to express a single thought. All effort to

rise above images is doomed to fail. To speak of our most ardent aspirations
only in negative terms does not satisfy the cravings of the heart, and where
philosophy no longer finds expression, poetry comes in again. Mysticism
has always rediscovered the road from the giddy heights of sublime
contemplation to the flowery meadows of symbolism. The sweet lyricism of
the older French mystics, Saint Bernard and the Victorines, will always come
to the aid of the seer when all the resources of expression have been
exhausted.
Huizinga further notes that the sacraments and the liturgy have
essentially the same function of giving reliable form to the ineffable as
does the well chosen image.
In the same way that the liturgy can always provide a bridge
between the material and the spiritual, Dante's figure of glass, amber and
crystal can always provide the sense of God's timeless creation. Ronald
Herzman correctly notes that Dantists have not reflected enough on
Dante's debt to monastic affective spirituality,1 1 and it seems to me that
that Dante's use of the metaphor is a case in point. The issue of the cord
in Inferno suggests Dante's ties to the monastic tradition and the cord
episode comes, as Hollander insists, just at the moment when the
«truth» of the Comedy is asserted.12 St. Bernard understood that the
contemplative monk would certainly prefer, left to himself, a mystical
contemplation which led to the intoxification of wordless ecstasy. In
one of the sermons on the Song of Songs , Bernard's monk says, «My
heart became hot within me; as I mused the fire burned». And Bernard
explains, «since the abundance of love shows he has clearly begun to
live in that state of good and salutary intoxification, he is not unjustly
said to have entered the wine-cellar».13 But this holy drunkenness of the
will, the formless and imageless ecstasy of which Huizinga speaks, is
not the only way, nor is it, for God's purposes, sufficient. In Bernard's
thought there is another ecstasy, not of the will, but the intellect. «Holy
contemplation has two forms of ecstasy, one in the intellect, the other
in the will; one of enlightenment, the other of fervor; one of knowledge,
the other of devotion». Intellectual ecstasy has a didactic purpose, not
for the mystic himself who has been granted an epiphany, but for his
brothers who can benefit from his experience only if it can be
communicated. Bernard explains in the familiar language of light
metaphysics which are themselves so much a part of Paradiso (Bernard,
III, sermon 57:8, p. 102):
443
When this fire has consumed every stain of sin and the rust of evil habits,
when the conscience has been cleansed and tranquilized and there follows an
immediate and unaccustomed expansion of the mind, an infusion of the light
that illuminates the intellect to understand Scripture and comprehend the
mysteries - the first given for our satisfaction, the second for the
instruction of our neighbors - all this means that his eye beholds you . . .
The instruction of neighbors is accomplished through the construction

of images, a process which is itself explained in metaphor, in Bernard's
«flowery meadows of symbolism», as the work of the companions of
the Bridegroom to adorn the neck (the intellect) of the bride. This
passage, from the great symbolic exegesis of the 41st sermon on the
Song of Songs , could be taken as a gloss on all of Dante's figures and
on the role of the poet in making divine truths apparent to the earthly
intellect (Bernard, II, sermon 41:3, p. 206):
We should take note of the kind of pendants they [the companions of the
Bridegroom who is Christ] offer her: they are made of gold and studded with
silver. Gold signifies the splendor of the divine nature, the wisdom that
comes from above. The heavenly goldsmiths to whom this work is
committed, promise that they will fashion resplendent tokens of the truth
and insert them in the soul's inward ears. I cannot see what this may mean if
not the construction of certain spiritual images in order to bring the purest
intuitions of divine wisdom before the eyes of the soul that contemplates, to
enable it to perceive, as through puzzling reflections in a mirror, what it
cannot possibly gaze on as yet face to face.
These spiritual images are so adapted to the transcendent reality that «in
their shadow the utterly pure and brilliant radiance of the truth is
rendered more bearable to the mind and more capable of being
communicated to others» (Bernard, 207). Communicated to others, then,
as metaphors such as the simile of glass, amber and crystal.
In this section of Paradiso XXIX, I think we have an aspect of
Dante's poetic method, possibly directly related to St. Bernard's
teaching, which is a reason why Dante is the first of the modern poets.
His method is to begin with the clear understanding that what he
proposes to describe is ineffable. This is frequently symbolized by the
confusion or blindness of the Pilgrim. Then, through logical
explanation by his guide, we are brought to a metaphor which holds the
abstract concept for us, but only because we are always conscious that
we have by logical means made a symbol. That is, we escape our
confusion into the metaphor. This is the opposite of the purely mystic
procedure which is to escape from the metaphor (mundane being itself)
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into imageless, and private, ecstasy.
The mystic method works for some people, some of the time.
Dante's method is more reliable for more people more of the time and
this is why we read Dante and not Eckhart. Dante encourages us to see
the universe through the human capacities which God has given us.
Important among those capacities is poetry and its ability to construct
concrete images of the transcendent with our intellect, which is a
supreme gift of the Holy Spirit, fully engaged, knowing that we are
making images of the ineffable.
Beatrice's discourse proceeds through the scholastic distinctions
ordering the created universe, pure act, pure potential and the middle
term, potentiality bound with act, which is the spheres, but also man.
Singleton's commentary cites Thomas here. Man's intellect «is possible
or 'potential,' that is to say, we know potentially much that we do not
know actually, and (in another but allied sense) are potentially thinking
and feeling many things that we are not actually thinking and feeling;
whereas the whole potentialities of an angel's existence are continuously
actualized» ( Summa theol. I, q. 50, a. 2; Singleton, p. 470).
This describes the pilgrim's state of mind, whose questions exist
only potentially until Beatrice moves them to act by finding their
actuality in the mind of God. Beatrice's final comment in this series, on
the when of the creation of the angels, is likewise concerned with
human knowledge which could be actual if human perceptions were not
clouded by error. The passage introduces the subsidiary theme of the
canto, the corrections of authority. The poet, through Beatrice, corrects a
father of the church, St. Jerome.
The Divine Comedy throughout is a dialog between texts in which
the poet takes upon himself the correction of ancient authors. A good
example from Inferno is the correction of the story of the founding of
Mantua in Aeneid in canto XX, and there are many others. Robert
Hollander and John J. Guzzardo have produced complementary work on
this issue.14 Hollander points out that when the poet corrects an
authoritative text, such as Virgil's, the authority of that text then
becomes that of the Divine Comedy. The Comedy becomes the
authority and thus the Christian poet triumphs over the antique world.
Guzzardo explains further that this is a metaphor of conversion, the past
of mankind is «converted», i.e., corrected, even as a man must correct
his own past. Here Dante begins with a correction of St. Jerome. Now
clearly the correction of a Christian saint and father of the church is a
much more weighty act than the correction of a pagan fiction such as
Virgil's poem. But this is heaven, and truth, not fiction, is proper to
heaven even as fiction was proper to hell. The Divine Comedy makes
445
claims to authority and truth as a part of God's continuing revelation and
thus there must be corrections and clarifications resulting from the new
knowledge gained on the journey. Even so, Dante is careful always to
preserve a strict orthodoxy about really important issues. As visitor to
the afterworld, following the steps of St. Paul, Dante must possess
answers and yet, since the Comedy itself is fiction, no matter how
elevated the purpose it has, the corrections it presents must be delicately
chosen. Here, the correction of Jerome on the moment of the creation of
the angels is such a delicately chosen issue. Dante corrects Jerome and
assumes thereby his authority, but only on this issue which has
theological, but not dogmatic, implications.
In an appendix to the Summa la, q 50-64, the section on angels,
Kenelm Foster discusses how little the theology of angels influences
church doctrine.15 The existence of angels is assumed, but not
specifically revealed. What is essential, the covenants, both old and new
and the unique Savior are specifically revealed and, says Foster, «angels
are involved in all this, but as if were 'on the side'». Not being
specifically revealed, angelology can be a subject to free speculation
subject to only three authoritative statements, extant in Dante's time,
which touch on angels. The first, from the Council of Nicaea declares
God to be the «maker of all things visible and invisible». The second
from Pope Leo the Great (447 A.D.) states that «God made nothing that
was not good». The third from the 4th Lateran Council of 1215, declares
that God is «creator of all things visible and invisible, spiritual and
corporeal; who by his almighty power, together at the beginning of
time, formed out of nothing the spiritual creature and the corporeal
creature, that is the angelic and the terrestrial: and then the human
creature, composed of both spirit and body» (Foster, p. 303). St.
Thomas is equivocal on the issue of the moment of the creation of the
angels, granting that the more probable opinion is that God created
everything at once, which is what Beatrice says, but that the opinion of
Jerome, that there was a long interval, ought not to be merely dismissed
given the authority of Jerome's sources ( Summa theoL I, q 61, a 3).
Dante takes advantage of the free character of this issue and has Beatrice
cut through this equivocation and speak authoritatively, thus making his
own claim to «authority». The similarity of this authoritative resolution
of controversy to the provision of a place for the primum mobile can
easily be seen.
Yet even if speculation about angelology is relatively free, it is not
unimportant. Thinking about angels is valuable because to do so at all
requires an effort to elevate thought to the spiritual. Of course, that shift
of focus is precisely what the transition which this canto represents at
446
this critical location is about, raising our thinking above that which is
place and time bound. Man can only contemplate the invisible things of
God through the study of that which God has made and the angels are
made, but invisible (Bernard, I, sermon 5: 5-7, pp. 28-29).
Contemplating the relationship between men and angels immediately
raises the question of human salvation and damnation to a cosmic
context since the angels, too, share in the fall and await fulfillment as
Bernard teaches: «without you their full number cannot be restored, for
as you all know, when Satan and his myrmidons fell from heaven, the
number of the heavenly host was greatly diminished. Thus all things
await their consummation from you» (Bernard, IV, sermon 77: 4, p.
125). The drama of salvation thus is not merely a human affair.
This enlargement of scope is part of the purpose when Beatrice
goes beyond the pilgrim's unformulated questions about the where,
when, and how of the creation of angels to address their fall and some
other considerations of their nature in vv. 49-81. We might assume that
these issues also are dimly present in the pilgrim's mind since they, too,
are common scholastic concerns. The first question, about the interval
between the creation of the angels and Lucifer's sin, is answered in a
way that relates it to the interval between the creation of Adam and his
expulsion which was given by Adam himself in canto XXVI, 139-142:
Nel monte che si leva più da l'onda,

fu' io, con vita pura e disonesta,
da la prim' ora a quella che seconda,
come '1 sol muta quadra, l'ora sesta.
Fewer than six hours, again giving a definitive answer to a debated (but
not dogmatic) issue, even as the poet has «resolved» the issue of the
time of the creation of the angels by correcting St. Jerome and the
question of the place of the spheres. Probably the brief span of both
intervals, the angelic and the human, was chosen to make the linkage
between human evil and cosmic sinfulness. Beatrice's next comments
are dogmatic, and she is strictly orthodox; Lucifer fell from pride, those
who remained loyal did so because they recognized their being from
God, and thus being open to Him received illuminating grace, gratia
illuminationis , which made them meritorious and thus perfected their
will (58-63):
Quelli che vedi qui furon modesti

a riconoscer sé da la bontate
che li avea fatti a tanto intender presti:

per che le viste lor furo essaltate
447
con grazia illuminante e con lor merto,
sì c'hanno ferma e piena volontate...
St. Bernard's sermons explain that created things, men and angels,
can touch the minds of other created things only through the mediation
of a body. We hear a sermon and are inspired or we read a text, or we
respond to nature. Even the angels lack the power to influence one
another without the mediation of bodies. (Bernard, I, sermon 5: 8, p.
30).16 Only God «does not require an ear to hear or a mouth to speak».
Yet, even though God could illuminate the angels directly, they receive
illuminating grace through their eyes, the medium of their bodies. This
scriptural reference used by Bernard is Psalm 19, 8: «The commandment
of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes».
Here again we are at a point where Bernard's mysticism can
explicate Dante's poetic method. The action of the intellect leads to the
act of the will which is the loving of God. This understanding of
process which leads to the love of God is that of Bernard and Dante, as
well as Thomas Aquinas (Singleton, Paradiso , p. 457). It is the point of
canto XXVIII, where Dante is speaking of the Thrones (106-1 14):
e dei saper che tutti hanno diletto

quanto la sua veduta si profonda
nel vero in che si queta ogne intelletto.
Quinci si può veder come si fonda
Tesser beato ne Tatto che vede,
non in quel ch'ama, che poscia seconda;
e del vedere è misura mercede,
che grazia partorisce e buona voglia:
così di grado in grado si procede.
«That which loves» is the will which is activated by vision. Bernard

uses a different metaphor, that of the body of the bride whose neck is
«as jewels» (Bernard, II, sermon 41: 1, p. 204):
Here we must call upon the Holy Spirit ... so it may reveal to us the spiritual
mystery of the neck. And to my mind, for I can only say what I think,
nothing seems more credible or probable that that the word neck signifies
the soul's intellect. I feel that you too will support this interpretation when
you examine the reason for the comparison. Do you not see that the function
of the neck somehow resembles that of the intellect, by which your soul
receives its vital spiritual nourishment, and communicates it to the inward
faculties of the will and the affections?
The angels' vision of God moves their will to love and thus they
448
continue in grace. For humans deprived of the direct vision, an
intermediary step is required and that is the image.or sign, as Bernard
explains in the passage already cited (II, sermon 41:3, p. 206):
We should take note of the kind of pendants they offer her: they are made of
gold and studded with silver. Gold signifies the splendor of the divine nature,
the wisdom that comes from above. The heavenly goldsmiths to whom this
work is committed, promise that they will fashion resplendent tokens of the
truth and insert them in the soul's inward ears. I cannot see what this may
mean if not the construction of certain spiritual images in order to bring the
purest intuitions of divine wisdom before the eyes of the soul that
contemplates, to enable it to perceive, as through puzzling reflections in a
mirror, what it cannot possibly gaze on as yet face to face.
These spiritual images are so adapted to the transcendent reality that «in
their shadow the utterly pure and brilliant radiance of the truth is
rendered more bearable to the mind and more capable of being
communicated to others» (Bernard, 207). It should be noted that the gift
of these images, while useful to others, is not what is truly desired by
the contemplative, and they impose a duty on their possessor. «So now,
too, the bride, as she is eagerly enquiring to learn where her Beloved
pastures his flock and rests at noon, is given instead ornaments of gold
studded with silver, gifts of wisdom and eloquence, and committed to the
work of preaching» (p. 208). From this, if Dante is following Bernard,
comes the duty of the poet and the ultimate cause of the great poem.
The next section, lines 67-128, Beatrice's «digression» as she
herself calls it, develops the thematic issues exposed in the introit and
the first section. Because she speaks passionately in it, condemning
human failures of reason or the sinful distortion of the gospels
themselves, the disdainful character which was the only hint of
foreground at the beginning of the canto now becomes much stronger.
Her castigation of error is, here in this last term of locations, the major
part of the final act of condemnation of human error which has occupied
so much of the Divine Comedy. Her digression begins: «Ornai dintorno
a questo concistorio / puoi contemplare assai, se le parole / mie son
ricolte, sanz' altro aiutorio» (67-69). An assertion which, given its
choice of terms, contemplare, concistorio , is redolent of the monastery
and of St. Bernard who, as we will read in canto XXXI, 110-111, «in
this world, in contemplation tasted of that peace».
Yet, man does not «contemplate» and Beatrice undertakes his
correction, specifically, addressing two issues: the first a question of
right reason as taught in the schools, the second of scriptural
interpretation as it is preached. Do the angels have understanding,
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memory, and will? These characteristics are what the human soul carries
into the afterlife ( Pur g . XXV, 85), but, says Beatrice, given that the
will of the angels is full (60) and a perfected will requires a perfected
intellect, then clearly angels have no need of memory. This is so clear
that there ought not to be any debate, but «down there men dream while
awake». Those who preach other than obvious truths, such as this, may
believe themselves correct; some know their error, but are so attracted
by love of show that they are carried away. Outright lies are worse than
incorrect reasoning, but the worse is the willful distortion or disregard of
scripture for self aggrandizement, ignoring the terrible cost in blood of
placing truth in the world in the first place. Specifically, preachers
extend themselves on issues when the Bible is silent (94-102):
Per apparer ciascun s'ingegna e face

sue invenzioni; e quelle son trascorse
da' predicanti e 'l Vangelio si tace.
Un dice che la luna si ritorse
ne la passion di Cristo e s'interpuose,
per che '1 lume del sol giù non si porse;
e mente, che la luce si nascose
da sé: però a li Spani e a l'Indi
come a' Giudei tale eclissi rispuose.
This definitive correction of the fancy of preachers actually corrects both

Dionysius the Areopagite and St. Thomas and asserts the position of St.
Jerome, who was himself subject to correction just above. The issues
are summarized in St. Thomas ( Summa theol. 3a, q 44, a 2) in the
question, «whether it was fitting for Christ to work miracles concerning
the heavenly bodies». That Christ did do so is indicated by the passage
in 2 Corinthians t 13, 4: «There was darkness over the whole land until
the ninth hour; and the sun was darkened». On this issue, St. Thomas
exerts himself at a peak of scholastic logic and intricate care. It is
understandable that he did so, since he begins with the important
Aristotelian premise that the divine order of the heavens is by nature
indestructible and unchangeable. To admit miracles in the heavens is to
open the door to the full range of nominalist thinking, yet the scripture
must be accounted for. The argument he puts forth is so scholastically
wonderful that the editors of the particular volume of the Summa
containing it note that «even a curious student of theology may skip the
following reply», a note, the like of which I doubt occurs anywhere else
in the Blackfriars' Summa . It's true that a student of theology can skip
it, but students of Dante must pursue it in fearless search of where the
angels tread.
450
Thomas summarizes Dionysius who «saw it all through the eyes
of faith», and explains an elaborate alteration of astronomical motions
which allowed the moon to perform an eclipse of the sun even though it
was not in the right position to do so. The eclipse was backwards, east
to west, and the moon retreated in the same direction from which it
came, reversing direction, and returned to its proper place so that time
was not disturbed. Chrysostom adds to this that the eclipse lasted three
hours, much longer than a natural eclipse. Further, says Origen, pagan
astronomers didn't notice the eclipse and attributed the darkness to other
causes, because, since the moon was in the wrong place for an eclipse,
they weren't looking for one. Against this, Thomas puts Jerome's
simple (and poetic) explanation. «It would seem as though the greater
light withdrew its rays, lest it look down upon our Lord hanging on the
cross, or provide light for the godless blasphemers».
Thomas's decision is for Dionysius who, after all, witnessed it
through the «eyes of faith». Beatrice is unkind about the issue, but a
true Occamite before the fact, cutting through the scholastic
pretentiousness, «and he lies», she asserts, meaning Dionysius (or the
preachers who speak the lie) for the very good reason that Christ's
universal significance had to be announced all over the world and all the
earth must be everywhere dark. The Gospel is silent about the details,
but reason must lead to the correct conclusion if vainglory did not
interfere.
The perfidy of all this leads Beatrice, fully aroused, to one of those
magnificent invectives against human error in all its forms which
punctuate the work. Here in accord with the spirit of the rest of this
canto, there is a simplification and a cutting through needless
complexity. The truth was given in the Gospels; it is corrupt preachers,
clerics, who distort the truth, playing the congregation for laughs with
jests and buffooneries and seeking by their oratorical skills to enhance
their reputation. In hell we saw Francesca, Pier delle Vigne and Ulysses
whose silver tongues help lead them to eternal torment. Genius in the
use of language, Dante's own genius, is a special gift to be used only
for the highest good. This is a foundation theme throughout all of
Dante's work; it figures in the sinfulness of the pilgrim as well as in his
message to Everyman. Hence it is proper that it be integral to the final
invective: «Ora si va con motti e con iscede / a predicare, e pur che ben
si rida, / gonfia il cappuccio e più non si richiede» (115-117). Here in
heaven is condemned, not the sophisticated and subtle corruption of
language as that of Ulysses, Francesca, Farinata, Pier delle Vigne,
Ugolino and others in hell, but the crude jests of the popular preachers!
The entire invective is so much the thought of Dante that the poet
451
might have put it in his own voice in an address to the reader as well as
in the mouth of Beatrice. Further, this descent to the consideration of
the corruption of the mob might seem disjunctive when Beatrice's cool
discourse, to this point, has been leading us to transcendence. Yet,
placing the speech in the mouth of Beatrice is necessary since the
message of the poet, from the most sublime aspect down, is heaven's
message and here heaven acknowledges that fact, and the unified
character of the poem, in which the interrelated relevance of all things is
central, is thus demonstrated.
There is a problem in the digression, though. It seems to say that
forgiveness, or any sacrament, administered by one of these corrupt
preachers is invalid. A demon lurks in the priest's cowl and if the people
saw it they would not trust his ministrations: «Ma tale uccel nel
becchetto s'annida, / che se '1 vulgo il vedesse, vederebbe / perdonanza di
ch'el si confida» (118-120). Of course if the people thought that the
corruption of the priests invalidated the sacraments, chaos would result,
since priestly corruption was so very wide spread and so highly visible.
The church always had to be on guard against such a conclusion by the
laity and it was addressed many times, most pertinently for our concerns
by St. Thomas who devotes considerable attention to it (Summa theol.
3a. q 64). A summary of his argument is that the sacrament works
through the intention of the church, not necessarily the priest. A priest
who makes errors in a sacrament, but whose intentions are in accord
with the church, does not invalidate the sacrament. A priest whose
intentions are knowingly not in accord with the church surely sins
himself, but his subject does not unless that person participates in the
priest's twisted intention as in the case of willingly participating in the
services of a heretic. However, ignorance is sometimes an excuse (ibid.):
The power of administering the sacraments falls under spiritual character

and, as is clear from our arguments above, this is indelible. Hence the fact
that an individual is suspended, excommunicated, or unfrocked by the church
does not itself mean that he thereby loses the power to confer the
sacraments. What he loses, rather, is his license to exercise this power. It
follows that while he does indeed confer the sacrament, he nevertheless sins
by the very fact of doing so. The same applies to the person receiving the
sacrament from him. And this is why such a one fails to attain to the reality
signified by the sacrament unless perhaps his behaviour is excusable on
grounds of ignorance.
Actual suspension or excommunication is not necessary for a priest

with perverse intentions to sin, but again, the innocent petitioner is
protected (ibid.):
452
A perverse intention perverts the performance of the actual person
entertaining it, but not that of another. Hence the effect of a perverse
intention on the part of a sacramental minister is to pervert that which is
performed in the sacrament but not in so far as it constitutes the action of
Christ whose minister he is. It is just as though someone's servant or
minister were to carry out with a wicked intention an order to give alms to
the poor which his master had given with a good intention.
But note that, according to Thomas, ignorance is not an invincible

excuse. Indeed, only invincible ignorance, that which cannot be helped,
will pardon the petitioner. «However, if a man cannot possibly know
something he cannot be called negligent. This type of ignorance is
called invincible because it cannot be overcome even with effort. Since
such ignorance cannot be conquered by human means it is neither
voluntary nor sinful» ( Summa theol. la 2ae. q 76, a 3). Further,
culpability is limited by the rationality of the subject: «a man is capable
435of virtue and of sin only to the extent that he is rational». Imbecility
does exclude sin, but obviously is not an excuse available to many.
«Ignorance implies a lack of knowledge which one ought to have. One
is obliged to know certain things because if he does not know them he
cannot carry out his duties. Thus all men are obliged to know the basic
truths of faith and the general principles of right and wrong, while each
man is obliged to know the duties of his state in life» (, Summa theol. la
2x. q 76, a 2.)
It seems likely that the «Lapos and Bindis» of Beatrice's invective,
those whom she refuses to excuse on the basis of their ignorance, «not
seeing the harm does not excuse them», are those whose ignorance is
vincible, who encourage the preacher's japes and don't bother to inquire
about the validity of his claims, who «flock to every promise», not
requiring «proof of any testimony». On vincible credulity the pigs of
St. Anthony fatten.
«We have digressed enough», not in the sense of «we have strayed
from our subject long enough», but rather, «since we have sufficiently
treated the issues», the last invective of the Divine Comedy ends.
Beatrice immediately returns to the issue of angels. The last section of
the lecture, vv. 127-145, is like the extended coda of a classical
symphony which refers to the major thematic material and provides a
thumping conclusion. As in the works of Haydn and Beethoven,
however, such summation does not preclude further development which
here hints at the grander conclusion of the entire Comedy yet to come.
Beatrice's resumption of her angelic discourse after her digression is
reminiscent both of Farinata's resumption of his discourse after
Cavalcante's interruption in Inferno X and the invective (in Purg. VI
453
which the poet also calls «digression») which follows Sordello's joy at
identifying Virgil. In the case of Farinata, the interruption is truly a
dissonant passage in a discordant symphony: Farinata's sarcastic verbal
combat with the pilgrim simply clashes with Cavalcante's confused
despair. In Purgatory , the digression is discordant, but the contrast
between the civic antagonism it depicts and the healing nature of the
fellowship of Sordello's greetings make the contrasting sections into an
antecedent and consequence; one is the healing of the other so there is a
kind of resolution which is missing in the example of Farinata. Here
Beatrice's counterpoint is more complex still. Surely, we are to reflect
on the clarity and elevated conceptions proper to heaven and their
contrast with the mundane confusion of earthly thought, but unity is
preserved within the form by the very message of Beatrice's invective,
that scripture gives a means, sufficient for earthly understanding, by
which an image of heaven proper for earthly existence can be achieved in
this life.
The question of the number of the angels, infinite, is revealed by
Daniel, «look at what is revealed» (133). Thus though human
knowledge is limited and uncertain, it does form a continuous whole
with heavenly truth if human vainglory does not disrupt the continuity
even as God's eternity contains and does not contradict man's sense of
time. Beatrice's admonition, «turn your eyes now to the true path, so
the way be shortened with the time» (127-129), is the remedy. This
«dritta strada» is synonymous with the «dritta via» of Inferno I from
which the Pilgrim first wandered. Keeping one's eyes on the true way
will shorten the way and the time, but now we understand that both the
distance and the time are material impediments which, properly
considered, merge with the timelessness and placelessness of God in
which they are rooted. The important technical issue of the
enlightenment of the will by the intellect is recapitulated in a final
metaphor which fixes it, as the timelessness of creation was fixed in the
metaphor of glass, amber and crystal, in the image of the Primal Light
reflected in the mirrors of the infinite angels. And the canto concludes,
bringing back the motive of the introit, the unity of all things, ubi and
quando , time, place, and motion in God whose oneness is reflected to
the traveller in Beatrice's eyes and through her smile.
NOTES
^Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,

1966).
454
2 S te ven Botterill has undertaken some of this work in his «Bernard of
Clairvaux in the Trecento Commentaries on Dante's Commedia », Dante
Studies , 109 (1991), pp. 89-118.
-^Silvio Pasquazi has noted that the scene of canto XXIX is a very special
location, but he has not done so in relation to Yates's work. Silvio
Pasquazi, II canto XXIX del Paradiso (Firenze: F. Le Monnier, 1966).
^Quotes from the Commedia follow Petrocchi's critical text; translations are
taken from Ch. S. Singleton, The Divine Comedy (Princeton, Princeton
Univ. Press, 1975).
Êdward Grant, «Cosmology» in Science in the Middle Ages (ed. David C.
Lindberg, Chicago, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 272.
^ Paradiso , trans. John Ciardi (New York: Mentor, 1961), p. 322.
'Tibor Wlassics has treated the debate over this villanelle in «The villanello
{Inferno XXIV 1-15)», Lectura Dantis, 1 (1987), pp. 55-65.
"Francesco da Buti, Commento sopra la Divina Comedia (Pisa: Nistri,
1862), p. 760.
^Robert Hollander, «Virgil and Dante as Mind Readers», Medioevo
Romanzo, 9 (1984), 85-100.
^ Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages , trans. J. Hopman,
Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1954), p. 223.
Ü Ronald Herzman, «Let Us Seek Him Also», Homo, Memento Finis
(Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1985).
12«Dante Theologus-Poeta», Dante Studies, 94 (1976), pp. 91-136.
^Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Song of Songs III , sermon 49:3, trans.
Kilian Walsh (Spencer, MA: Cistercian Publications, 1971), p. 24.
^Robert Hollander, «The Tragedy of Divination in Inferno XX», in his
Studies in Dante (Ravenna: Longo, 1980), pp. 131-218; John J. Guzzardo,
«Misreadings in Inferno XX and Purgatorio XXI», Textual History and the
Divine Comedy (Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico: Universidad de Puerto Rico,
1989), pp. 14-30.
^ Kenelm Foster, OP, «Angelology in the Church and in St. Thomas», in
St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae , vol. 9 (London: Blackfriars,
n.d.), pp. 301-305.
In this sermon Bernard says that the exact nature of angels, in this case
how they assume and use bodies, is beside the point. «All these are
questions which I prefer that you should not ask me. The Fathers seem to
have held divergent views on the problem and I must confess that I cannot
come to a decision about the view I might be justified in teaching. But I am
of the opinion that knowledge of these matters would not contribute
greatly to your spiritual progress».
1 'Pasquazi discusses the meaning of Beatrice's signal of the end of the
digression.
455
Paradiso XXX
Author(s): CHRISTOPHER KLEINHENZ
Accessed: 17-02-2020 23:10 UTC
Lectura Dantis
CHRISTOPHER KLEINHENZ
University of Wisconsin-Madison
XXX
In the late twentieth century we do not, generally speaking, think
too much or too long about Heaven. Not that this concept is foreign to
us intellectually or literarily; rather, in our materialist, secular society
such thoughts are simply not in the forefront of our consciousness.
However, for the Middle Ages in general and for Dante in particular,
thoughts and opinions about heaven were quite common, not to say
everpresent, and these teachings and views were reinforced from the
pulpit and through artistic and literary works. Today, we often hear and
use a number of expressions involving paradise or paradisiacal
phenomena, expressions whose meaning, while perfectly clear, no
longer reflects their original spirit and intention. Extraordinary things
happen once in a «blue moon», and we go into rapturous visions of
«my blue heaven». Yet, some things do unfortunately «smell to high
heaven», and some movers and shakers would gladly - and perhaps
ruthlessly - move «heaven and earth» to get what they want. When we
are happy, we may say that we are on «cloud nine» or perhaps in
«seventh heaven». (For Dante, of course, the seventh heaven is that of
cold, contemplative Saturn, a not terribly hospitable place for our vision
of happiness!) Finally, in «Pippa Passes» Robert Browning noted what
has become for many of us a wonderfully concise summary of the
ordered and orderly universe: «Goďs in his heaven - / All's right with
the world».
This sort of complacent, unquestioning acceptance of the way
things are was, of course, the farthest thing from Dante's mind when he
wrote the Divina Commedia. Indeed, for Dante God was in his heaven,
but all was not right with the world; and that is perhaps the primary
motivating force behind the composition of the poem. After witnessing
the allegorical representation of the vicissitudes of the Church in
Purgatorio XXXII, Beatrice charges Dante to be a strong moral voice for
change and regeneration in the social, political, and ecclesiastical order:
«Però, in pro del mondo che mal vive, / al carro tieni or li occhi, e quel
che vedi, / ritornato di là, fa che tu scrive» (vv. 103- 105). 1
Ideas and notions about heaven, its construction and components
are frequent in early literature and vary in size and perspective, from
456
Paul's very spare account of his rapture to the third heaven to the
elaborate discussion of the celestial hierarchy by Pseudo-Dionysius. In
his ordering of the heavenly spheres, Dante follows the traditional
Ptolemaic model. He describes their harmonious operation and austere,
pristine beauty, and is continually reminded by the souls of the blessed
that their happiness derives from the union of their will and that of God
so aptly formulated by Piccarda: «E 'n la sua volontade è nostra pace»
(Par. Ill, 85). However, in the first half of the thirteenth century we find
a more popular view of paradise contained in the well known sonnet by
Giacomo da Lentini:2
Io maggio posto in core a Dio servire,

com'io potesse gire in paradiso,
al santo loco ch'aggio audito dire,
o' si mantien sollazzo, gioco e riso.
Sanza mia donna non vi voria gire,

quella c'à blonda testa e claro viso,
che sanza lei non poteria gaudere,
estando da la mia donna diviso.
Ma no lo dico a tale intendimento,

perch'io pecato ci volesse fare;
se non veder lo suo bel portamento
e lo bel viso e '1 morbido sguardare:

che.l mi teria in gran consolamento,
veggendo la mia donna in ghiora stare.
The paradise envisioned by this poet is one in which the senses reign.
Sensual desire prompts the lover to serve God, for in this way he may
be admitted to Paradise, which appears to be the abode of all earthly
delights («sollazzo, gioco e riso»). However, for him, the proverbial
bottom line is «no lady, no paradise», for if he were to be in heaven
without his lady, there would be no joy. The poet quickly adds that his
fervent desire is not to enjoy carnal pleasure with his lady in Heaven,
but only to gaze upon her corporeal perfection. His interest in heaven
remains at the most fundamental level: Paradise is a garden of worldly
delights where satisfaction and happiness are attained without recourse to
spiritual means.
Dante has none, or at best very little of this in his paradise. Indeed,
some critics and commentators have lodged what in retrospect could be
read - or misread - as mild complaints about the unrelenting
«medievalness» of the Paradiso. Grandgent notes, for example, that
457
«The permanent charm of Dante's Paradise abides solely in its power to
satisfy our craving for pure beauty and for purely religious emotion».3
Yet, it is precisely this powerful celebration of order and harmony, this
bold struggle to express the inexpressible in poetry that distinguishes
the Paradiso from the other canticles and leaves us in awe of Dante's
poetic achievement. Indeed, the idea of order that is present in the
operation of the universe and that emerges from this third and final
canticle is inspiring and produces in the attentive reader a great sense of
uplifting, of transcendence, of supreme happiness.
I am often amused when I hear colleagues say that a particular
canto is crucial to our understanding of the canticle or of the poem as a
whole (and I readily admit to having made some foolish statements to
this effect). I am amused because in the last analysis each and every one
of the one hundred cantos of the Commedia are crucial to our
understanding of the poem as a whole and in its particulars. We cannot
do without any one of them. Certainly some cantos may be perceived as
being less immediately valuable to the whole than others, but that is
another story. Canto XXX of Paradiso - number 97 in the inexorable
progression of canti guaranteed by the linear plot line and metrical
pattern - is pivotal in many respects: it marks the Pilgrim's ascent
into the Empyrean, the seat of the celestial rose, the abode of God, the
angels, and the blessed; canto XXX summarizes many of the themes and
images in the poem; it contains the last words of Beatrice; and it begins
to prepare both Dante the Pilgrim and the reader for the final beatific
vision.4 In a very real sense we - the readers and the pilgrim - begin
the final ascent in this canto: we pass beyond the physical universe of
time and matter and enter into the world of eternity, of pure light and
spirit. The imagery reflects this highest and most sublime realm. The
Pilgrim's movement toward and beyond human limits - «trasumanar»
- noted in the first canto of Paradiso is now completely realized in the
passage to the Empyrean. The Pilgrim's assumption into the tenth
heaven is constructed to be parallel both lexically and imagistically to
the blindness of Paul on the road to Damascus.5 In direct imitation of
the Pauline passage («Subito de coelo circumfulsit me lux copiosa; cum
non viderem prae claritate luminis illius», Acts 22:6), Dante describes
his own situation (vv. 49-51):
così mi circunfulse luce viva,

e lasciommi fasciato di tal velo
del suo fulgor, che nulla m'appariva.
The identification made in this canto between Dante and Paul thus
458
completes and corrects the negative analogy offered by the Pilgrim in
Inferno II (v. 32): «Io non Enea, io non Paulo sono». The completion
of the figurai relationship with Paul follows the earlier identification of
the Pilgrim with Aeneas in Paradiso XV-XVII, where Cacciaguida
welcomed him with words (Par. XV, 28-30) whose opening vocative
recalls the salute of Anchises to his son Aeneas in the Underworld
(«Proice tela manu, sanguis meus», Aen. VI, 835):
«O sanguis meus, o superinfusa

gratïa Dei, sicut tibi cui
bis unquam celi ianiia reclusa?».
This theme of «completion» or «fulfillment» within the poem may

also be observed in those passages where in the course of his ever
upward journey through the celestial spheres Dante looks back to earth.
On these occasions the Pilgrim is reminded through contrast with the
spacious beauty of Heaven of the petty and inconsequential nature of
earthly things; for example, once Dante has ascended to the Heaven of
the Fixed Stars, he looks earthward (Par. XXII, 133-135):6
Col viso ritornai per tutte quante

le sette spere, e vidi questo globo
tal, ch'io sorrisi del suo vii sembiante.
In Paradiso XXX these alternate backward and forward looks find

dramatic resolution in Beatrice's final words that condemn once and for
all the excesses of human greed (vv. 139-141):
La cieca cupidigia che v'ammalia

simili fatti v'ha al fantolino
che muor per fame e caccia via la balia.
The theme of transformation is central to the entire canticle; yet, it

is only in cantos XXVIII-XXX that we can see and understand the
importance of this idea that concerns the very nature of the universe. In
canto XXVIII Dante presents the symbolic representation of the universe
with God as the point of light surrounded by the nine choirs of angels
depicted as circles of flame. This «essemplo» he sees reflected in the
eyes of Beatrice, and the «essemplare» or the material universe is a
reverse, imperfect copy of this sight. Through this symbolic
representation, the celestial hierarchy provides as it were a reverse mirror
image of the order of the Ptolemaic universe with the nine celestial
spheres circling around the motionless earth. It is precisely in the
459
movement of the Pilgrim from the ninth to the tenth sphere, from the
Primum Mobile to the Empyrean, from the earth -centered physical
universe to the God-centered spiritual universe, that we experience one
of the most marvelous transformations in the entire poem. In his ascent
through the celestial spheres the Pilgrim's vision has been constantly
adjusted to ever-increasing degrees of light and commensurate higher
degrees of understanding. Thus, at this crucial juncture in the journey
when the Pilgrim is poised to pass beyond the realm of the physical and
temporal and enter into the realm of the spiritual and eternal, he must
necessarily receive the additional grace that will allow him to see and
comprehend the highest of mysteries: the vision of God, the angels and
the blessed in their true form - no longer seen as through a glass
darkly but face to face.7
The sort of reading of canto XXX that I propose does not conform
to the usual «lectura Dantis», but rather is intended to provide a
consideration of three particularly important moments in the canto and
their relationship to other parts of the Commedia and to other of Dante's
works. This investigation will attempt to demonstrate how certain
themes and threads converge in this canto and how in this confluence
they achieve their proper completion and definition. Before proceeding to
these three points, I would like to note briefly the overall structure of
the canto.
There are, grossomodo , six separate but interrelated episodes or
moments in canto XXX: (1) vv. 1-15: the disappearance of the symbolic
lights representing the spiritual universe; (2) vv. 16-33: praise of
Beatrice; (3) vv. 34-60: the passage to the Empyrean and the momentary
blinding of the pilgrim; (4) vv. 61-87: the initial, imperfect perception
of the light as a river; (5) vv. 88-123: the second, true perception of the
light and its formation of the celestial rose; and (6) v v. 124-148:
Beatrice's last words in the poem.
Point One: The Problem of the Artist
The passage into the Empyrean is accompanied, as before in the

movement from sphere to sphere, by an increase in Beatrice's beauty;
and consequently, the poet is once again presented with the problem of
describing what is ineffable, of attempting to elevate his praise of
Beatrice to even greater heights. This time, however, Dante places his
remarks within a larger historical perspective: all that he has said about
her would be insufficient in the present circumstances (vv. 16-18):
Se quanto infino a qui di lei si dice
460
fosse conchiuso tutto in una loda,
poca sarebbe a fornir questa vice.
Recapitulating the entire trajectory of his enamorment, the poet notes

how he has been able, up to now, to capture it in verse (vv. 28-30):
Dal primo giorno ch'i' vidi il suo viso

in questa vita, infino a questa vista,
non m'è il seguire al mio cantar preciso.
Now, however, he declares himself unable to describe her present form

properly and adequately (vv. 31-33):
ma or convien che mio seguir desista

più dietro a sua bellezza, poetando,
come a l'ultimo suo ciascuno artista.
Having reached the limit of his abilities, the artist/poet has no choice
but to pass on to other arguments and to leave her description «a
maggior bando / che quel de la mia tuba, che deduce / l'ardüa sua matera
terminando» (vv. 34-36).
This is, however, not just another in the long series of statements
concerning the difficulty of the artist and his inability to express the
inexpressible. Previously, problems of this nature were resolved by an
invocation to the Muses. For example, in Inferno II the Muses are
invoked in typical epic fashion to assist the poet achieve his goal. In
Inferno XXXII the problem the poet faced was to find «le rime aspre e
chiocce, / come si converrebbe al tristo buco / sovra 'l qual pontan tutte
l'altre rocce» (vv. 1-3), and he indeed did find them even while
professing his inability to do so. In Purgatorio I the poet enlisted the
help of the Muses to aid him in the resurrection of the «morta poesì»
(v. 7), and in Paradiso I the Muses are invoked to assist Dante in this
final challenge, one that goes far beyond the scope of previous poet s. At
this particular moment in Paradiso XXX Dante asks for and receives the
special grace that will enable him to recount his experience (vv. 97-99):
O isplendor di Dio, per cu' io vidi

l'alto triunfo del regno verace,
dammi virtù a dir corn' ïo il vidi!
God Himself is invoked, and God Himself responds instantaneously in

the form of divine grace, the light - the lumen gloriae - that makes
visible «lo creatore a quella creatura / che solo in lui vedere ha la sua
461
pace» (vv. 101- 102).8 Once his eyes are bathed and purified in the light
of glory, Dante is able to see all things clearly and to describe them
appropriately. The difference between this and earlier appeals for poetic
inspiration is that here there are no intermediaries, no Muses to aid his
song, only the direct and sufficient effluence from God.
Point Two: The River of Light and the Celestial Rose
The wondrously surreal vision presented in the Empyrean is a

fitting climax to the carefully crafted images seen in the lower spheres:
the wheels of lights in the heaven of the Sun; the luminous cross in
Mars; the progressive transformation of the final M (of TERRAM) to
lily to eagle in the Heaven of Jupiter; and the ladder in Saturn. Just as
Dante remarked his limited abilities as a poet with the pregnant phrase
- «come a l'ultimo suo ciascuno artista» (v. 33) - so does he here
play upon the other and more immediate meaning of the term «artista»
in his «outdoing» of his earlier images drawn from the figurative arts
(vv. 61-69):
e vidi lume in forma di ri vera
fulvido di fulgore, intra due rive

dipinte di mirabil primavera.
Di tal fiumana uscian faville vive,
e d'ogne parte si mettien ne' fiori,
quasi rubin che oro circunscrive;
poi, come inebriate da li odori,
riprofondavan sé nel miro gurge,
e s'una intrava, un'altra n'uscia fori.
The sparkling display of sight, color, perfumes, and movement is a

veritable banquet that appeals to and involves all of the senses stretching
their capacity to the limit. Despite this sensory overload, everything
that the Pilgrim 'sees in this scene, as Beatrice will make clear, is but a
dim foreshadowing of its true nature (vv. 76-78):
«Il fiume e li topazi

ch'entrano ed escono e '1 rider de l'erbe
son di lor vero umbriferi prefazi».
Dante immerses his head in the river of light and is immediately able to
see the Empyrean and its inhabitants in their true essence (vv. 88-99):
e sì come di lei bevve la gronda
462
de le palpebre mie, così mi parve
di sua lunghezza divenuta tonda.
Poi, come gente stata sotto larve,
che pare altro che prima, se si sveste
la sembianza non sila in che disparve,
così mi si cambiaro in maggior feste
li fiori e le faville, sì ch'io vidi
ambo le corti del ciel manifeste.
O ¿splendor di Dio, per cu' io vidi
l'alto triunfo del regno verace,
dammi virtù a dir com' io il vidi!
The veracity of the vision is underlined by the threefold repetition of the

verb vidi in vv. 95, 97, and 99. Indeed, this canto and those following
are especially replete with verbs denoting sight and seeing. The use and
repetition of the preterit vidi in this instance focuses on the
incontrovertible nature of the truth of what the Pilgrim saw. And it
should be noted that, with the exception of Cristo that always rhymes
only with itself, this is only the second time in the Commedia that
Dante has a triple rhyme with the same word.9
Following the manner of the invocation to the Muses found earlier
in the poem, Dante asks and, we should note, receives the special grace
to describe what he saw. This vision - facie ad faciem , face to face -
is clear, direct, and powerful. The river of light has been transformed
into a circle, a round lake of light that becomes the celestial rose (vv.
103-117):
E' si distende in circular figura,

in tanto che la sua circunferenza
sarebbe al sol troppo larga cintura.

Fassi di raggio tutta sua parvenza
reflesso al sommo del mobile primo,
che prende quindi vivere e potenza.
E come clivo in acqua di suo imo
si specchia, quasi per vedersi addorno,
quando è nel verde e ne' fioretti opimo,
sì, soprastando al lume intorno intorno,
vidi specchiarsi in più di mille soglie
quanto di noi là sù fatto ha ritorno.
E se l'infimo grado in sé raccoglie
sì grande lume, quanta è la larghezza
di questa rosa ne l'estreme foglie!
From a flowing river - the symbol of time - the light has become a
463
circle - the symbol of eternity.
Point Three: Praise and Condemnation
Beatrice's last words in the poem conclude canto XXX and provide
(1) a grand presentation of the heavenly city, (2) a bittersweet homage to
Emperor Henry VII, and (3) a fearful denunciation of the corrupt papacy.
She begins her final speech by asking Dante to look at the celestial city
and the souls of the blessed who appear, for this occasion, dressed in the
raiment they will wear on the Day of Judgment: «Mira / quanto è 'l
convento de le bianche stole! / Vedi nostra città quant' ella gira» (vv.
128-130). She then alludes to the fact that seating in the amphitheater is
limited, that it is indeed already so full that only relatively few places
are left: «vedi li nostri scanni sì ripieni, / che poca gente più ci si
disira» (vv. 131-132). One conclusion we may infer from the few seats
that remain unoccupied is that there are very few virtuous people left on
earth who will eventually reside in the Empyrean. Another possible
conclusion is that the Poet was commenting on what he viewed as the
rapidly approaching end of time. While the number of the elect is
known only to God,10 the fact that only a few seats remain to be filled
suggests a certain millenarial aspect in Dante's thought, which is also
disclosed in Convivio : «noi siamo già ne l'ultima etade del secolo, e
attendemo veracemente la consumazione del celestiale movimento» (II,
xiv, 13).11
Beatrice then shifts her attention to one empty seat in particular,
the throne prepared for Henry VII (vv. 133-138):
«E 'n quel gran seggio a che tu li occhi tieni

per la corona che già v'è sù posta,
prima che tu a queste nozze ceni,
sederà l'alma, che fia giù agosta,
de l'alto Arrigo, ch'a drizzare Italia
verrà in prima ch'ella sia disposta».
Henry's premature death at Buonconvento on August 24, 1313, signaled

the tragic end to Dante's hopes for the restoration of Empire during his
lifetime. One constant theme in the Commedia is the strife between
Empire and Papacy, which began with the Donation of Constantine and
had disastrous consequences for human society. In Purgatorio XVI (vv.
106-112) Marco Lombardo spoke forcefully about the confusion of the
two powers:
«Soleva Roma, che '1 buon mondo feo,
464
due soli aver, che l'una e l'altra strada
facean vedere, e del mondo e di Deo.
L'un l'altro ha spento; ed è giunta la spada
col pasturale, e l'un con l'altro insieme
per viva forza mal convien che vada;
però che, giunti, l'un l'altro non teme».
We admire the striking and audacious image of the two suns - no

longer the traditional reference to the sun and moon12 - with which
Rome once guaranteed a judicious balance of power between Emperor
and Pope, and we understand how the usurpation of imperial/worldly
prerogatives by the Papacy has led to the present miserable condition.
In the bolgia of the simonists (Inf. XIX) Dante the Pilgrim,
outraged at the crimes of Nicholas III, launches into a well-deserved
diatribe against Constantine (vv. 1 15-117):
Ahi, Costantin, di quanto mal fu matre,

non la tua conversion, ma quella dote
che da te prese il primo ricco patře!
In her last words Beatrice decries the corrupt state of human society,
brought to such a pass by the lack of temporal leadership and the «blind
greed» of the clergy, typified by popes Boniface VIII and Clement V
(vv. 139-148):
«La cieca cupidigia che v'ammalia

simili fatti v'ha al fantolino
che muor per fame e caccia via la balia.

E fia prefetto nel foro divino
allora tal, che palese e coverto
non andera con lui per un cammino.
Ma poco poi sarà da Dio sofferto
nel santo officio: ch'el sarà detruso
là dove Simon mago è per suo merto,

e farà quel d' Alagna intrar più giuso».
The connections made between these words and the punishment of the
simonists in Inferno XIX draw together all the various threads in the
multifaceted discussion of the need for strong temporal leadership and of
the deleterious effects of the corrupt papacy.
The final point I would like to suggest concerns Dante's
appropriation of Christian imagery for his «word painting» in the poem.
Beatrice's discussion and description of the throne prepared for Henry VII
in the Empyrean has for many years seemed to me to evoke the motif
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found in Byzantine art of the «empty throne» (the Hetoimasia ), which
derives in part from the description in the fourth book of the Apocalypse
of the throne in heaven. The empty throne can represent the invisible
God, the Second Coming, or the Trinity, depending on the rest of the
decoration.13 Although not common in Italy, the motif of the empty
throne is found in certain key locations: e.g., in the sanctuary arch
mosaic in Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, in the Last Judgment mosaic
in the cathedral at Torcello in the Venetian lagoon, and in the cupola
mosaics of the Orthodox and the Arian Baptisteries in Ravenna. It
should be noted that the presence of this motif in Ravenna - the Poet's
final home in exile - may have particular relevance to the shaping of
Dante's visual imagination in the Paradiso .14 In the example from the
Arian Baptistery the empty throne surmounted by the bejewelled cross
represents the throne that has been prepared for the Second Coming of
Christ; the twelve processional figures - Peter, Paul, and ten apostles
- carry crowns.
While not suggesting that Dante was using this motif in exactly
the same sense, I do believe that he was consciously drawing upon its
physical features to suggest that Henry VII possessed certain Christ-like
qualities that would have made him an excellent Christo-mimetic
Emperor. The Epistles Dante wrote on the occasion of Henry's descent
into Italy are replete with allusions to Christ, such that Henry becomes
a messianic figure, the savior who would heal the wounds of Italy, one
for whom the heavenly throne is prepared.15 In his seventh epistle
addressed to Henry («Sanctissimo gloriosissimo atque felicissimo
triumphatori et domino singulari domino Henrico...»), Dante compares
the Emperor's arrival in Italy as like the rising of the much desired sun
(«Titan, preoptatus exoriens») for which «nova spes Latio seculi
melioris effulsit» (VII, 5) and speaks of the Italians as those who sang
with Virgil about the reign of Saturn and the return of the Virgin
(«Tunc plerique vota sua prevenientes in iubilo tarn Saturnia regna quam
Virginem redeuntem cum Marone cantabant», VII, 6), an obvious
reference to the Fourth Eclogue and its presumed prophecy of the
coming of Christ. A few lines later in this letter, Dante states his firm
belief in and support for Henry: «in te credimus et speramus,
asseverantes te Dei ministrům et Ecclesie filium et Romane glorie
promotorem. Nam et ego qui scribo tarn pro me quam pro aliis, velut
decet imperatoriam maiestatem benignissimum vidi et clementissimum
te audivi, cum pedes tuos manus mee tractarunt et labia mea debitum
persolverunt. Tune exultavit in te spiritus meus, cum tacitus dixi
mecum: 'Ecce Agnus Dei, ecce qui tollit peccata mundi'» (VII, 8-10).
Henry VII becomes in Dante's rich imagination a Christ figure.
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The importance Dante attaches to Henry, and more generally to any
Emperor who would emerge as a potential savior to heal the wounds of
Italy, may be measured in part by the high honor of the heavenly throne
prepared for him. The mosaic decoration present in the two Baptisteries
in Ravenna have a particular relevancy to this episode in the Commedia ,
for they present both the baptism of Christ and the empty throne,
together with twelve processional figures - Peter and Paul plus ten
apostles bearing crowns. Beatrice's words refer both to Henry's throne
and crown and to the punishment of the simonists who, as we recall, are
reversed, upside-down in openings reminiscent of the baptismal fonts in
San Giovanni in Florence, and who will receive the infernal perversion
of the baptismal sacrament - fire - on the soles of their feet. As has
been well documented, much of the force of Inferno XIX rests on its apt
use of familiar Christian iconography.16 And I would argue that
iconographie considerations enhance the drama and meaning of this
episode as well.
And so the canto concludes with Beatrice's savage denunciation of
the dire consequences of human greed - the world down there (and the
term giù is twice repeated in these closing verses for emphasis) is in a
terrible predicament - no Emperor and no spiritual guidance from the
Church. God's in his heaven, but all is not right with the world.
However, Dante through the writing of the Divina Commedia will
attempt to set things right. Justice will prevail, the guilty will be
punished. This is the message of canto XXX and, indeed, of the entire
«poema sacro / al quale ha posto mano e cielo e terra».
NOTES
^ All passages from the Divine Comedy are taken from Dante Alighieri, La
commedia secondo l'antica vulgata , 4 vols., ed. Giorgio Petrocchi, Società
Dantesca Italiana, Edizione Nazionale (Milan: Mondadori, 1966-1967).
2The text follows Roberto Antonelli's edition: Giacomo da Lentini, Poesie
o
(Rome: Bulzoni, 1979).
^ln Dante Alighieri, La Divina Commedia , ed. C. H. Grandgent, rev. ed.
Charles S. Singleton (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), 625.
^ Among the numerous studies on Paradiso XXX the following are
particularly valuable and well informed: Walter Binni, «Canto XXX», in
Lectura Dantis Scaligera: Paradiso (Florence: LeMonnier, 1971),
1061-1092; Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi, «Il canto XXX del Paradiso» ,
Paragone 308 (1975), 3-34; Peter Dronke, «Symbolism and Structure in
Paradiso 30», Romance Philology 43 (1989), 29-48; Robert Hollander,
«Paradiso XXX», Studi danteschi 60 (1988), 1-33; Edward M. Peters, «The
467
Failure of Church and Empire: Paradiso 30», Mediaeval Studies 34 (1972),
326-335; Albert Rossi, «'A l'ultimo suo': Paradiso XXX and Its Virgilian
Context», Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History , n.s. 4 (1981),
39-88; Fernando Salsano, «II canto XXX del Paradiso », Nuove letture
dantesche , VII (Florence: LeMonnier, 1974), 215-234; J. A. Scott,
«Paradiso XXX», in Dante Commentaries : Eight Studies of the «Divine
Comedy », ed. David Nolan (Dublin: Irish Academic Press; Totowa, NJ:
Rowman and Littlefield, 1977), 159-180; and Prudence Shaw, « Paradiso
XXX», in Cambridge Readings in Dante's «Comedy», ed. Kenelm Foster
and Patrick Boyde (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981),
191-213.
^With reference to the lexical recall through the verb circumfulgere , Dronke
suggests that the more «pertinent» biblical moment would be that «of the
shepherds keeping watch on the night of the Nativity that Luke (2:9) says
'and the brightness of God flashed round about them' {et claritas dei
circumfulsit ilio s )» («Symbolism and Structure», 37). I prefer the
traditional interpretation. See also Giuseppe C. Di Scipio, «Dante and St.
Paul: The Blinding Light and Water», Dante Studies 98 (1980), 151-157.
"Other backward looks describe the small and insignificant nature of the
earth and its events: e.g., «L'aiuola che ci fa tanto feroci, / volgendom' io
con li etterni Gemelli, / tutta m'apparve da' colli a le foci» {Par. XXII,
151-153), and «sì ch'io vedea di là da Gade il varco / folle d'Ulisse, e di qua
presso il lito / nel quai si fece Europa dolce carco» {Par. XXVII, 82-84).
'The reference is, of course, to 1 Corinthians 13:12: «Videmus nunc per
speculum in aenigmate: tunc autem facie ad faciem».
°On the nature of the lumen gloriae , see, among others, Charles S.
Singleton, «The Three Lights», chapter 2 of Dante Studies 2: Journey to
Beatrice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), 15-38.
^The only other occasion is in Purgatorio XX, where Hugh Capet's ironic
repetition of the phrase per ammenda in rhyme position (vv. 65, 67, 69)
provides a sarcastic commentary on the enormity of the numerous outrages
committed by the House of France, thus heightening the total effect of the
episode.
l^Cf. the words of the eagle in Par. XX (vv. 130-135) concerning the
mystery of Divine Justice: «O predestinazion, quanto remota / è la radice
tua da quelli aspetti / che la prima cagion non veggion total / E voi,
mortali, tenetevi stretti / a giudicar: che noi, che Dio vedemo, / non
conosciamo ancor tutti li eletti».
^The text of the Convivio follows the edition of Cesare Vasoli, in Dante
Alighieri, Opere minori , tomo I, parte II (Milan-Naples: Riccardo
Ricciardi, 1988).
12Basing their arguments on the text of Genesis (1:16-18) in reference to
God's creation of the two great luminaries, theologians and decretalists
consistently used the images of the sun (= the Papacy) and the moon (= the
Empire) in their writings to demonstrate their greater and lesser powers and
the dependency of the latter on the former. In De Monarchia (III, iv) Dante
468
refutes arguments of this nature, but does not take the bold step of
proclaiming the existence of «two suns» as he does in Purgatorio XVI.
^For a general discussion of this theme see H. Leclercq, «Étimasie», in
Dictionnaire d'archéologie chrétienne et du liturgie , ed. Fernand Cabrol and
Henri Leclercq (Paris, 1922), 5:1, 671-673. For its presence in Italian art
see James Hall, A History of Ideas and Images in Italian Art (New York:
Harper & Row, 1983), 94-95.
^See, among others, Christie K. Fengler and William A. Stephany, «The
Visual Arts: A Basis for Dante's Imagery in Purgatory and Paradise », The
Michigan Academician 10 (Fall, 1977), 127-141; and Jeffrey T. Schnapp,
The Transfiguration of History at the Center of Dante's «Paradise»
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), especially pp. 170-203.
lÎn his fifth letter («Universis et singulis Ytalie Regibus et Senatoribus
alme Urbis...»), Dante alludes to Henry as the «sun that will rise in peace»
(«Titan exorietur pacificus», V, 3) and continues: «Letare iam nunc
miseranda Ytalia etiam Saracenis, que statim invidiosa per orbem videberis,
quia sponsus tuus, mundi solatium et gloria plebis tue, clementissimus
Henricus, divus et Augustus et Cesar, ad nuptias properat. Exsicca lacrimas
et memoris vestigia dele, pulcerrima, nam prope est qui liberabit te de
carcere impiorum; qui percutiens malignantes in ore gladii perdet eos, et
vineam suam aliis locabit agricolis qui fructum iustitie reddant in tempore
messis» (V, 5-6). The text follows the edition by Arsenio Frugoni and
Giorgio Brugnoli, Epistole , in Dante Alighieri, Opere minori , Tomo II
(Milan-Naples: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1979).
l"The punishment of the simonists is to be thrust head-first into an opening
in the rock of Hell and to have their exposed feet burned with fire. When
Dante and his guide Virgil are conversing with the upward turned and wildly
kicking legs of Pope Nicholas III, the scene so created is virtually identical
to that of Peter and Paul standing next to the fallen Simon Magus. In
addition to the episode in the Book of Acts (8:9-24) where Simon Magus
attempts to purchase divine power from Peter and is soundly rebuked, we
have the more fully developed account in the apocryphal Acts of Peter , in
which Simon Magus issues a series of challenges to Peter. In the last of
these Simon's flight over the city of Rome aided by demons comes to a
quick end because of Peter's prayers: Simon falls to the ground and breaks
his shank in three places. Simon Magus's name has come to indicate all
those who would traffic in sacred offices, and through this presentation
Dante calls upon his readers to recall the standard iconography of this
episode in the life of Peter and, thus, to enhance their appreciation of the
present scene. For a full treatment of this episode, see, among others,
Charles S. Singleton, «Inferno XIX: O Simon Mago!», Modern Language
Notes 80 (1965), 92-99, and Ronald B. Herzman and William A. Stephany,
«'O miseri seguaci': Sacramental Inversion in Inferno XIX», Dante Studies
96 (1978), 39-65.
469
Paradiso XXXI
Author(s): AMILCARE A. IANNUCCI
Accessed: 17-02-2020 23:10 UTC
Lectura Dantis
AMILCARE A. IANNUCCI
University of Toronto
XXXI
The Commedia is an episodic work held together by Dante's story.
This story is a complex one, but it is possible to distinguish in it at
least three main plot lines. These are Dante's relationship with Beatrice
(a love story); Dante's political vicissitudes, with exile as a central
concern; and Dante's intellectual history, focusing particularly on his
evolution as a poet. This last plot line is less visible than the other
two, since it is played out mostly at the intertextual level. However,
from time to time, it too surfaces and takes center stage, as it does in
Dante's encounter with the great poets of antiquity in Limbo. This
episode is an exquisitely metaliterary affair in which Dante dramatizes
his relationship with his classical sources.
Dante's story (or stories) is told in bits; it is adroitly interwoven
into the fictive narrative of the pilgrim's journey through the three
realms of the afterlife. How this is done has yet to be adequately
described. Indeed, although the autobiographical dimension of the Vita
Nuova has received considerable critical attention (see Picone), the
same cannot be said of the Commedia. Freccero's superimposition of
an Augustinián conversion model on the poem is too limiting to
account for Dante's elaborate deployment of autobiographical materials
in the poem. It tells us little of how Dante carefully constructs his
story as the narrative of the otherworldly journey gradually unfolds.
Alan Charity (227-56), extending Auerbach's figurai method, locates
the poem's autobiographical dimension in the typological level of
Dante's allegory. This approach offers a more supple framework for
investigating the problem, but the whole question needs to be explored
further. In Paradiso 31 the various strands of Dante's story are gathered
in and fulfilled. This canto is also the culmination of other key
elements - both formal and thematic - of the Commedia which are
more tenuously linked to Dante's story. However, his story is so
pervasive and so completely integrated into the material of the poem
that it is not always easy to disentangle it. By adopting the perspective
of eternity - the poem is written sub specie aeternitatis , from the
«punto / a cui tutti li tempi son presenti» (Par. 17. 17-18) - and a
typological mode of signifying, Dante manages to collapse universal
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history into his own story.
The Commedia is composed of essentially two kinds of episodes
which I have called, rather inelegantly, «local» and «structurally
determining» episodes. A local episode is one whose meaning is
largely (if not entirely) exhausted within its local context. On the other
hand, a structurally determining episode is one whose meaning extends
far beyond its immediate surroundings. I was thinking primarily of key
episodes in the Inferno , like the prologue, Limbo, the Paolo and
Francesca and the Ulysses episodes, which resonate throughout the
poem. These episodes are the source of patterns and issues fundamental
to the poem's design and significance. I would now like to make a
further distinction. There is another kind of structurally determining
episode, one which does not so much produce meaning as gather it in.
These episodes are to be found in the Purgatorio and the Paradiso , and
usually at structurally significant places like the beginning, middle, or
end of a cantica.
A prime example of this type is the Earthly Paradise. It closes the
first two cantiche which together develop an elaborate historical
metaphor whose structure is clearly revealed in the highly stylized
allegorical drama - a kind of play within a play - which unfolds in
the lush landscape at the top of Mount Purgatory. And this section of
the poem ends as it began, with a prophecy of future redemption. The
Veltro and 515 prophecies frame the poem's historical metaphor. The
Paradiso opens a new metaphor - an anagogical one. Indeed, for the
pilgrim to penetrate the third realm he must «transhumanize». But
much else of what has happened in the poem so far is gathered in and
completed in the Earthly Paradise, starting with the garden motif itself.
The bleak landscape of the «selva oscura» - an image of paradise lost
- has been finally redeemed. And one could go on: it is here that
Virgil's salvific mission (on behalf of Dante) and the story of his own
tragic eschatological destiny are both completed. Like Dante's, Virgil's
story is not confined to a single episode, and after Dante's it is the
most compelling and structurally significant. The Earthly Paradise is
also the place where Dante's story comes to a head, especially the love
component of that structurally binding narrative. Beatrice's speech in
Purgatorio 30 and 31 lays bare for the first time the main elements of
the plot - it is a story of betrayal, abandonment, loss, remorse, and
return - and acts as an implicit commentary, from an auto=
biographical perspective, on the poem's opening scene of Dante
groping in despair in a dark wood. In this sense, the prologue and the
Earthly Paradise are parallel episodes.
The Earthly Paradise is certainly one of the poem's nodal points
471
where significance converges and is fulfilled, or at least partially
fulfilled. But the ultimate summative episode is the Empyrean, which
stretches over the last four cantos of the poem. Here, beyond space and
time, all meaning is gathered in and consummated. However, it is
Paradiso 31 which carries the burden of this responsibility. The
previous canto marks the passage from the Primum Mobile, the largest
material object, to the Empyrean, the heaven of pure light, and focuses
on the transformation of the river of light into the yellow of the rose.
Canto 32 provides a detailed description of the position of the blessed
in the rose. The last canto is, of course, given over to the prayer to the
Virgin and the vision of God, with its final, fleeting flash of
understanding. This leaves canto 31 with the task of gathering in the
various themes and patterns of the «poema sacro». The dunque of the
opening verse and the fragmentary nature of the canto betray its
structural role.
The splendid opening tercet distills the imagery with which Dante
had described paradise and the elect at the end of the previous canto
(100-132): «In forma dunque di candida rosa / mi si mostrava la milizia
santa / che nel suo sangue Cristo fece sposa...». No single source can
account for Dante's representation of paradise as a rose. It may have
been suggested to him by the lofty rose windows of medieval
cathedrals or the roselike depictions of heaven in early Italian art (Di
Scipio), or by the fact that the Virgin Mary, who is celebrated at the
end of the canto (1 18-142), was called a rosa sine spina since she was
free of original sin. (Mary closes the wound of original sin opened by
Eve, the «thorn» [Par. 32. 4-6]). But the rose was also associated with
Christ's passion, the Church, and the faithful Christian soul, as a
passage from Albert the Great (cited by Grandgent) brings into focus
nicely: «Et nota, quod Christus rosa, Maria rosa, Ecclesia rosa, fidelis
anima rosa». All of these symbolic associations are packed into the
densely allusive initial tercet in which the very existence of the rose is
tied to Christ's passion, through which He wedded the Church - «la
milizia santa» - made up of the white-robed elect. Dante achieves this
simply by translating a passage from the Acts of the Apostles (20.28),
where most (if not all) of the elements figured by the rose are present:
the passion, the Church, and the blessed.
The whiteness of the rose is probably dictated by another Biblical
reference, this time from the Apocalypse. There St. John speaks on
two separate occasions of the white garments of the elect (Apoc. 3.5
and 7.13). Dante picks up this image. In the end, the Celestial Rose is
white because it is made up of the elect who are draped in white - «le
bianche stole» (Par. 30. 129; cf. Par. 25. 95). Another possible source
All
for the white robes, although somewhat further removed, is the stolas
albas of the A text of the Descensus Christi ad inferos (1 1.1), which is
one of Dante's privileged subtexts in the first cantica . In this passage,
the reference is to the white togas that the souls «harrowed» by Christ
from hell receive after being baptized in the River Jordan. The context
here is especially suggestive because the river of lights (Par. 30.
61-63) out of which the rose emerges may be seen as the anagogical
fulfilment of the River Jordan. White, of course, was the color of
purity and faith; the symbolism makes sense. However, Dante's
«candida rosa» also, obviously, stands for divine love in contrast (and
the cultural reference is certainly willed) to the red rose of the Roman
de la rose, a symbol of earthly love. In fine, Dante's sweet-fragranced
white rose is a summative image, gathering up not only the elect but
also an array of cultural references both sacred and profane, and, finally,
all of the poems floral imagery, starting with the stupendous flower
simile with which the prologue ends and the salvi fie voyage begins
(Inf. 2. 127-132).
In the next seven tercets (to verse 24), Dante turns his attention to
Paradise's «other host», the angels, thus completing his description of
the «forma general di paradiso» (52). The imagery he uses to represent
the angel is essentially biblical, although the angelic iconography of
his time may also have come into play. However, the most striking
feature of Dante's angelic portrait is the apian simile: «sì come schiera
d'ape che s'infiora / una fiata e una si ritorna / là dove suo laboro
s'insapora» (7-9). Several sources have been put forward for this
passage, including one from St. Bernard (Sapegno), but the simile is
ultimately of Virgilian extraction. Virgil may have disappeared from
the narrative but his text continues to nourish Dante's poem. His
presence is especially strong in this canto, in which there are at least
four more Virgilian reminiscences. The clearest and most important
appropriation is the one from Book 6 of the Aeneid , where Virgil
compares the virtuous shades hovering about the River Lethe in the
Elysian Fields to bees in the summertime which «light on many-hued
blossoms and stream around lustrous lilies» (707-709). By invoking
Virgil's Elysium at this point, Dante both acknowledges the major
stylistic source of his paradisical imagery and underscores that his
Empyrean is the ultimate fulfilment of all paradises, including the
pagan one figured in his poem in the locus amoenus of Limbo.
Dante's Empyrean is a rose first of all, but it is also a garden.
Indeed, Dante refers to it as such later in canto 31 («vola con li occhi
per questo giardino» [97]), and then again in the next canto (32.39).
And as a garden, it recalls all the other gardens in the poem, from the
473
anti-garden of the prologue, to the green meadow of Limbo, to the
Valley of the Princes, and finally the Earthly Paradise itself. It should
be noted that all of these episodes are structurally determining, as are
the Ulysses and Cacciaguida episodes where the garden motif lurks in
the background. Ulysses's ship sinks before the island-mountain of
Eden; Dante's encounter with his great ancestor in Paradise is shot
through with Elysian reminiscences (see esp. Par. 15. 25-30). Dante
the poet has given the garden motif an important structural role. The
major way stations on the pilgrim's journey through the afterlife are
set in garden-like places, and usually bring into focus a structurally
defining spiritual condition: paradise lost and regained, or about to be
recovered. The little sacra rappresentazione in the Valley of the Princes
takes place, within the liturgical time frame of the poem, on the night
of Easter Sunday, at the very moment when, in the night sky, the three
stars representing the theological virtues replace those standing for the
four cardinal virtues. The impoverished Elysian imagery of Limbo, on
the other hand, suggests the extent to which man can recover Eden
using reason alone in that graceless period of time between the fall and
the redemption. This elaborate pattern is finally consummated in the
Empyrean.
Dante's Empyrean is a rose first, and then a garden, but it is also a
city. Beatrice refers to it as such in Paradiso 30. 130-32: «Vedi nostra
città quant' ella gira; vedi li nostri scanni sì ripieni, / che poca gente
più ci si disira...». Thus the metaphoric terminus of Dante's
pilgrimage is not only the heavenly garden but also the celestial city.
Behind the image of Paradise as a city lies the medieval topos of the
Christian as an exile, which we find, for example, at the beginning of
St. Augustine's De civitate Dei. It is the Christian's existential
condition to be in via , striving to return to his celestial homeland, the
heavenly Jerusalem from which he has been exiled. Dante, as a
Christian exile, journeys from the type of the earthly city (Babylon),
full of chaos and disorder, injustice and division, to the type of the
heavenly city (Jerusalem) where order and peace, justice and concord
prevail.
It is no coincidence that the first real sinner Dante encounters in
Hell is Semiramis, «imperadrice di molte favelle» (54), Queen of
Assyria and Babylon, who changed the law in order to justify her illicit
passion: «A vizio di lussuria fu sì rotta, / che libito fé licito in sua
legge, / per tórre il biasmo in che era condotta» (Inf. 5. 55-57). Inferno
5, situated as it is at the beginning of the Hell of personal sin,
occupies a structurally privileged position, and Dante uses it to
associate Hell from the outset with Babylon. The figure of Semiramis,
474
the first example of the «peccator carnali / che la ragion sommettono al
talento» (38-39), is crucial in this operation. Dante's principal source
for Semiramis, as all of the commentators point out, is Paulus
Orosius (Hist. lé 4. 7-8), but there are two other sources which are
equally important from our point of view. One is Ovid's allusion to
her in the story of Pyramus and Thisbe (Met. 4. 58), recalled explicitly
in De Monarchia (2. 8. 3-4). This reference, coming as it does so close
to Ovid's telling of the adultery of Venus and Mars, locates the
Assyrian queen within the context of the structural pattern of love,
death, and war which underpins Inferno 5 (see Iannucci,
«Forbidden. . .»). The other source is Augustine's De civitate Dei 18. 2,
and is even more significant for our purposes. Here Semiramis is seen
in terms of the contrast between the city of man and the city of God.
Augustine attributes to her (as does Orosius) the restoration of
Babylon, the archetypal corrupt earthly city. In this symbolic scheme
Dante's Semiramis comes to represent the civitas mundi , the corrupt,
degenerate society which Augustine opposes to the civitas Dei. Thus,
Dante's Hell, containing all the generations of the unrighteous,
becomes the typological fulfilment of the earthly city of Babylon,
represented synecdochically in Inferno 5 by the realm's first named
sinner.
In contrast, Dante's Paradise is the typological fulfilment of
Jerusalem. It is populated by a «popol giusto e sano» (39). The
language here echoes that of Augustine, who throughout the De
civitate Dei refers to the heavenly city as one where justice and peace
triumph (Gilson). Dante does not cite Augustine's City of God directly
in the Empyrean, but it as well as the paradigm of pilgrimage and of
the two cities are as present at the end of Dante's poem as they are at
the beginning. However, while retaining these paradigms, Dante
radically alters them, and he does so in terms of his own life, or,
perhaps more accurately, in terms of the story he tells about his life.
Dante's pilgrim is not just an abstract figure of the exiled Christian
soul, nor do his two cities belong solely to moral and spiritual
categories as Augustine's do. Dante's pilgrim is modelled on the
historical Dante, the exiled Florentine poet. This casting sustained by
typology allows him to reconfigure the traditional Augustinián
representation of the two cities. They too acquire a more precise
historical identity, determined in great part by the political vicissitudes
of Dante the poet and pilgrim. They become Florence and Rome
(Charity 237-45; Ferrante). In other words, Dante's own exile
reinforces the idea of the Christian soul's pilgrimage back to his
celestial homeland, which becomes the main narrative vehicle to
475
represent his life's journey (Inf. 10. 132). Through this vehicle Dante
can interpret and confer meaning not only on his own life, but also on
contemporary and, indeed, universal history.
Dante's own exile is resolved not on the historical plane (he never
returns to Florence) but on the anagogical plane. This idea is brought
into dramatic focus in Paradiso 31 in a series of three similes (31-40,
43-48, 103-111) in which Dante the poet compares his pilgrim's
wonder (stupor) on beholding the celestial city to that of an earthly
pilgrim to Rome. The similes become progressively more specific
(Lansing 136-40), passing from the contemplation of the city to the
church of the pilgrim's vows and finally to the Veronica preserved in
St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. Dante also remembers this famous relic
at the end of the Vita Nuova : the pilgrims passing through the desolate
city of Florence (desolate because of Beatrices death) are travelling to
see «quella imagine benedetta la quale lesu Cristo lasciò a noi per
essemplo de la sua bellissima figura» (40. 1). This and other allusions
to the end of the youthful libello are undoubtedly willed and part of the
summative project of the last cantos of the poem. This will become
especially apparent in Dante's farewell prayer to Beatrice.
The shrine of the pilgrim's vows in the second of the three similes
is not specified, but given that this second simile is framed by similes
where Rome is the precise destination, it is legitimate to conclude that
Dante's pilgrim in Paradiso 31, like the pilgrims in chapter 40 of the
Vita Nuova , is a romeo. The first of the three similes, certainly the
most important in terms of the story of Dante's exile, is prefaced by an
invocation to God to turn his attention to the storm-tossed world
below: «guarda qua giuso a la nostra procella» (30). Coming after the
description of the angels' flight from the rose to God, this entreaty has
the effect of redirecting our sight toward the earth and anticipating
Dante's last and most bitter reference to Florence (Singleton), which is
the climax of the simile that follows (31-40):
Se i barbari, venendo da tal plaga

che ciascun giorno d'Elice si cuopra,
rotante col suo figlio onď ella è vaga,
veggendo Roma e l'ardlia sua opra,
stupefaciensi, quando Laterano
a le cose mortali andò di sopra;
io, che al divino da l'umano,
a l'ettemo dal tempo era venuto,
e di Fiorenza in popol giusto e sano,
di che stupor dovea esser compiuto!
476
Within the logic of the simile the celestial city is definitively
associated with Rome. And the Rome that is evoked is not the corrupt
contemporary Rome of the popes (which at times is, in fact,
metaphorically linked with Babylon [Davis]), but imperial Rome,
Rome before the barbaric invasions, when the city was at its most
magnificent. The barbari of the simile, who were overwhelmed by the
sight of «Roma e l'ardüa sua opra», probably refer to those barbarians
who served in the Roman army as auxiliary soldiers and others who
went to the city before it was destroyed by them. The heavenly
Jerusalem has become the celestial Rome: «quella Roma onde Cristo è
romano» ( Purg . 32. 102). Dante thus revises the Augustinián paradigm
of the two cities in yet another important way: he dissociates Rome
from Babylon and assimilates it to Jerusalem. In this metaphoric
context, it is not surprising that the Empyrean holds a place for the
emperor Henry VII, vanquished on earth by papal treachery (Par. 30.
133-48).
The focus of the passage is not, however, the celestial Rome, but
the terrestrial - indeed the infernal - Florence. The concrete word
Florence comes at the climax of a crescendo of abstractions and is
further highlighted by the fact that it stands at the beginning of the
verse and is in a strong chiastic relationship with the preceding
antitheses (Bosco & Reggio). In this setting, Florence is compared to
the uncivilized, barbaric north and contrasted with the celestial Rome,
composed of a «popol giusto e sano». By implication, Florence is
«unjust and divided», and indeed this is the way Dante's native city is
presented from the start. In Inferno 5 Hell is generally associated with
Babylonian chaos; in the very next canto this imagery is transferred to
Florence. Six is numerologically a timebound number, and Dante, as
commentators have observed, reserves the sixth canto of each cantica to
discuss political matters, beginning with the fierce political situation
in his own city. In Inferno 6 Florence is described as «la città partita»
... by «tanta discordia assalita» (61-63). Moreover, it is a place where
there is little or no justice: «Giusti son due, e non vi sono intesi»
(73). Its people, once «glorioso e giusto« in Cacciaguida's words (Par.
16. 151-52), are now driven by pride, envy, and avarice (74). Brunetto
Latini reiterates Ciacco's charges against the Florentines: «gente è
avara, invidiosa e superba» (Inf. 15. 68). Unjustly forced to leave his
city, Dante is the innocent victim of this corrupt state of affairs.
From Inferno 6 to Paradiso 31 Dante returns repeatedly (with
variations) to this theme. In the Inferno he systematically identifies
Florence with sinfulness, not only explicitly (as in the words of
Ciacco and Brunetto), but metaphorically as well, by extending the
477
imagery used to represent a particular sin to the offending city. Thus in
the Ciacco episode the imagery of gluttony is applied to it: «La tua
città, eh è piena / d'invidia sì che già trabocca il sacco» {Inf. 6. 49-50).
In the Brunetto episode Florence is represented as a new Sodom, and
the imagery of sterility which dominates the canto is transferred to it.
Dante, who belongs to the «sementa santa / di que' Roman» {Inf. 15.
76-77), is one of the few fertile elements in the sterile desert of
Florence overrun by those of ignoble Fiesolan extraction («le bestie
fiesolane»). Perhaps the best example of this procedure is found in
Inferno 13 where the idea of suicide is extended from the individual to
the polis. The Florentine suicide at the end of the canto {Inf. 13.
130-51) represents figuratively the whole city. He identifies himself
not by name but through an elaborate paraphrase, as one who comes
from the city which replaced Mars with John the Baptist as its patron.
Because of this, Mars, whose broken (divided) statue still stood at the
foot of the Ponte Vecchio in Dante's time, afflicts the city with his art
- the art of war, here, civil strife. Thus, Florence usurps Babylon's
place as the symbol of the corrupt earthly society. And Dante's exile
becomes the chief symbol of its injustice. The Florentine material
comes to a head in the Cacciaguida episode - one of those nodal
points in the narrative - but it is not entirely resolved there. This task
belongs to the Empyrean and it is accomplished dramatically and
economically in a single word, «Fiorenza». Its unexpected appearance
has the effect of parading the Florentine material before our eyes one
last time before it is finally put to rest. There is no further mention of
it in the poem. The exiled Dante has returned home: the theme of exile
is resolved anagogically.
From verse 52 on, the canto deals with the passage from Beatrice
to St. Bernard, and is considered «l'episodio centrale e più poetico del
pur poeticissimo canto» (Bosco & Reggio). All the commentators
compare this scene to a similar one in the Earthly Paradise where
Virgil gives way to Beatrice as Dante's guide {Purg. 30. 40-57). They
note, however, the difference in tone between the two passages. The
first is pervaded by sadness, a sentiment accentuated by the stark
economy of the scene. Dante turns to Virgil, as is his wont, to explain
his reaction to Beatrice's appearance, but Virgil is no longer there.
Dante bursts into tears. Unmoved, Beatrice chastises him and proceeds
to reprove him for his wayward past: «Dante, perché Virgilio se ne
vada, / non pianger anco, non piangere ancora; / che pianger ti conven
per altra spada» {Purg. 30. 55-57). The situation in the Empyrean is
identical but the tone is quite different. In this case too Dante turns
toward his guide to discover that she is gone: «Uno intendëa, e altro mi
478
rispuose: / credea veder Beatrice e vidi un sene / vestito con le genti
gloriose» {Par. 31. 58-60). But there are no tears here: Beatrice has
returned to her place in the celestial rose - «nel terzo giro / dal
sommo grado» (67-68). Despite the immense distance that separates
Dante from Beatrice, he can see her perfectly (70-78). Indeed, he can
now contemplate her and reflect (in his prayer of thanks) on her role in
his salvation and, inasmuch as he represents everyman, on her role in
the salvation of mankind (79-90). Beatrice smiles at him before
returning her gaze to God - «l'etterna fontana» (91-93).
There is yet another difference between the two scenes, one which
Steven Botterill (64-115) has recently brought into focus. We know
from the beginning that Beatrice will replace Virgil and that this will
occur before she leads Dante into Paradise {Inf. 1. 121-126). As the
event gets closer we are reminded of its imminence (see, for instance,
Purg. 27. 52-54). What makes Virgil the character's exit from the
poem so poignant is that we know that he has returned to Limbo,
where, with his fellow virtuous pagans, he is forever excluded from
salvation: «sanza speme vivemo in disio» {Inf. 4. 42). His sudden (but
not unexpected) departure concludes the story of Virgil's tragic
eschatological destiny, a destiny we have known from the start {Inf. 1.
121-129). But this knowledge does not lessen its impact - Virgil's
loss is permanent. On the other hand, the appearance of St. Bernard in
the Empyrean comes as a complete surprise {Par. 31. 58-60). Nothing
in the narrative to this point has prepared us for his sudden
materialization. The fact that his presentation unfolds in two distinct
stages and that in the first {Par. 31. 52-69) he is identified simply as
«un sene» (59) increases the suspense. To be sure, in the first stage
Dante the pilgrim (and the reader) are not so much interested in the
newcomer (although the poet dedicates a terzina to describing his
gracious and kindly features [60-63]), as in the whereabouts of Beatrice.
«Ov' è ella?» (64), Dante asks anxiously, and when the elder explains,
the pilgrim lifts his eyes immediately towards his beloved and beholds
her in glory: «Sanza risponder, li occhi sù levai, / e vidi lei che si facea
corona / reflettendo da sé li etterni rai» (70-72). Dante's prayer of
gratitude to her follows (73-93). Only at this point do we return to the
«santo sene» (94), who finally reveals his name in verse 102. It is in
this second phase (94-1 17) that St. Bernard lakes over and establishes
his authority as guide. The Saint presents himself as a devotee of the
Virgin Mary: «la regina del cielo, onď ïo ardo / tutto d'amor, ne farà
ogne grazia, / però ch'i' sono il suo fedel Bernardo» (100-102). And
indeed St. Bernard's chief role in the poem is to invoke the Virgin
Mary to intercede on Dante's behalf for the necessary grace to behold
479
God directly. This St. Bernard does at the beginning of canto 33, but
already at the end of canto 31 he directs Dante's eyes toward the «regina
/ cui questo regno è suddito e devoto» (1 16-1 17). The canto concludes
(118-142) with a celebration of the Virgin around whom swarm more
than a thousand festive angels: «Vidi a lor giochi quivi e a lor canti /
ridere una bellezza, che letizia / era ne li occhi a tutti li altri santi»
(133-135).
Why must Beatrice yield to St. Bernard in the Empyrean? Why is it
St. Bernard who replaces her? Much of the critical literature on this
canto focuses on these two related questions, especially the second. The
prevailing view is summarized by Bosco & Reggio in their gloss to
verses, «A terminar lo tuo disiro / mosse Beatrice me del loco mio»
(65-66). They write: «come il passaggio da Virgilio a Beatrice significa
il passaggio dalla ragione alla scienza divina, . . . così ora alla scienza
divina ... sottentra... l'ardore contemplativo e infine il soccorso della
Grazia ... Ma più probabilmente la scelta di S. Bernardo per ottenere
l'intercessione di Maria è dovuta al fatto che il santo è il 'Fedele' di lei,
ed è oratore mellifluus...». It is not my intention to revisit these
issues: Botterill treats them amply in his richly documented new book.
Instead, I would like to consider the passage from Beatrice to St.
Bernard from a slightly different perspective, namely, in terms of the
determining structural role of Paradiso 31 within the Empyrean and the
Commedia as a whole.
The scene gathers in and brings to a conclusion the other two
narrative threads in Dante's story. Let us start with the metaliterary
dimension - the story of Dante's writing of the poem. From this
perspective the transition from Beatrice to St. Bernard in Paradiso 31
recalls not only the similar shift from Virgil to Beatrice in Purgatorio
30 but also the first appearance of Virgil in the poem (Inf. 1. 61-90).
All three of these episodes are played out at both the narrative and the
intertextual level. In them Dante displays his sources, revealing the
dominant influences shaping his poem at that moment. The case of
Virgil is the clearest. As Virgil the character enters the narrative, so do
the works (especially Aeneid 6) of Virgil the author at the intertextual
level. Robert Hollander has recently noted that about one-fifth of the
Virgilian quotations in the Commedia occur in the first five cantos of
the Inferno . In the beginning Dante's poem is distinctly Virgilian in
character. Virgilian citations outnumber even those from the Bible, and
by a large margin. When Virgil the character leaves the poem in the
Earthly Paradise Dante again draws our attention to Virgil the author
and his debt to him. There is a flurry of references to Virgil, including
a direct citation in Latin (Purg. 30. 21, cf. Aen. 6. 883) and the literal
480
translation of another passage ( Purg . 30. 48, cf. Aen. 4. 23)ē Virgil's
disappearance from the narrative does not mean that Dante stops
tapping his works, but his influence in the Paradiso is much
diminished. However, Virgil's intertextual presence is especially strong
in Paradiso 31, i.e., in a context that recalls his narrative exit from the
poem. There are at least five Virgilian allusions in this canto (there are
several in Paradiso 30 as well [Hollander 337-38]), including the apian
simile (Par. 31. 7-9, cf. Aen. 6. 707-709) through which Dante clearly
acknowledges his debt to Virgil's Elysian imagery.
The passage from Virgil to Beatrice marks a shift in subject matter
and dominant influences. Dante dramatizes this. He retrieves the style
and imagery of the Vita Nuova in which he had first celebrated Beatrice
in order to present her in the Earthly Paradise. Beatrice is a woman first
- the real woman Dante loved and continues to love. But it soon
becomes apparent that Beatrice also represents theology, and speaks its
language. At the intertextual level, Beatrice's discourse in the Paradiso
is sustained by a distinct theological and especially Thomistic
substratum, softened somewhat by the imagery and stylistic
mannerisms of the stilnuovo. In the Empyrean, theology must yield to
mystical contemplation. Enter St. Bernard. The choice is unexpected
and highly problematic. Save for a reference to his De consideratone in
the Letter to Cangrande (Epistole 13. 28) whose authorship is in
dispute, there are no other clearly identifiable - philologically
demonstrable - references to his works. Bosco & Reggio lay bare the
situation in their short but dense introduction to Paradiso 31 (507):
Molte sono le reminiscenze bernardiane additate da commentatori: alcune

sono probabili, nessuna certa, nel senso che non essendo derivato
testualmente da Bernardo, ognuno dei passi (e ciò si può dire per tutti,
anche per quelli contro la corruzione della Chiesa, per i quali il santo gli
avrebbe offerto modelli in abbondanza) può essere derivato in Dante da
fonti benedettino-francescane o in genere mistiche o anche ... di
ispirazione gioachimita.
In a long paper entitled «San Bernardo e la 'visione' poetica della

Divina Commedia », which will appear in the proceedings of the first
International Dante Seminar (held in October 1994 at Princeton),
Francesco Mazzoni reviews the many «loci paralleli» between St.
Bernard and Dante identified by the commentators and suggests others.
He argues, for instance, that Dante knew as early as the writing of
Inferno 2 St. Bernard's Sermo XLII as well as the third book of the
Littera aurea by St. Anselm, which Dante may have believed to be by
St. Bernard since it circulated under his name in some manuscripts.
481
Although Dante does not cite from Bernard's works directly, he does
turn to them for images, situations, concepts, and structural
suggestions. Mazzoni concludes that Dante's choice of St. Bernard as
his final guide is dictated primarily by Dante's long familiarity with
the Saint's works and by the influence they exerted on him. Certainly
Dante's presentation of St. Bernard in Paradiso 3 1 suggests a privileged
relationship between them, one based on long familiarity, as it were,
rather than simply the reputation of the Doctor mellifluus for
eloquence and his devotion to the Virgin. This bond between Dante and
St. Bernard, like those with Virgil and Beatrice is autobiographical in
nature, or so argued Alberto Vecchi many years ago (190). I agree, and
suggest that Bernard's sudden appearance in the narrative is designed to
draw our attention to his importance in Dante's intellectual life, an
importance we might otherwise have overlooked since his influence is
not as clearly visible as that of other major sources (Virgil, for
instance) because it operates at another (supertextual) level. His
appearance also signals that from this point onward the dominant
influence will be mystical, if not specifically Bernardian.
Just before Dante enters the Empyrean, he is completely
overwhelmed by Beatrice's ineffable beauty, which, for an instant,
becomes the subject of his poetry {Par. 30. 16-45). This is not
unusual: throughout the Paradiso there are many such passages, but
this one has a kind of definitive, summative quality. It consciously
takes us back to the Vita Nuova , to the very first time Dante saw
Beatrice, and then quickly moves us to the present culminating
moment: «Dal primo giorno ch'i' vidi il suo viso / in questa vita,
infino a questa vista» (28-29). It also retrieves from the libello the
theme of praise: even if all the passages in praise of Beatrice from the
Vita Nuova to the Paradiso were bundled into one single loda , this
glorious song of praise would still not be enough to express Beatrice's
unutterable beauty at the threshold of the Empyrean (16-18). With this
passage Dante begins the process of bringing the love portion of his
story to an end. The burden of this task falls to Paradiso 31. Here
Dante sets aside the ineffability topos and does give us a loda of
Beatrice, one focusing not on her beauty but rather on her significance
in his life. Dante owes his salvation to her (79-90):
O donna in cui la mia speranza vige,

e che soffristi per la mia salute
in inferno lasciar le tue vestige,
di tante cose quant' i' ho vedute,
dal tuo podere e da la tua bontate
riconosco la grazia e la virtute.
482
Tu m'hai di servo tratto a liberiate
per tutte quelle vie, per tutť i modi
che di ciò fare avei la potestate.
La tua magnificenza in me custodi,
sì che l'anima mia, che fatť hai sana,
piacente a te dal corpo si disnodi.
The explicit reference (80-81) to her descent into hell seals the analogy
between Christ and Beatrice that Dante first fashioned in the libello and
then carefully elaborated in the poema sacro , from Inferno 2 to the
Empyrean (see Iannucci, «Beatrice in Limbo»). In fact, the qualities
that Dante assigns to Beatrice here can only be attributed to Christ.
They are attributed to her through a process of metaphoric
displacement. With this final exaltation of Beatrice, Dante fulfills the
promise that he made at the end of the Vita Nuova : «di dicer di lei
quello che mai non fue detto d'alcuna». To be sure, there is one last
fleeting reference to Beatrice in Paradiso 33. She, along with the other
blessed, joins St. Bernard in invoking the Virgin to intervene on
Dante's behalf so that he may behold God directly: «vedi Beatrice con
quanti beati / per li miei prieghi ti chiudon le mani» (38-39). But here
Beatrice has «merged into the chorus of exulting spirits»
(Mandelbaum). The real closure to Dante's extraordinary love story -
which unfolds both in heaven and on earth comes in his own prayer of
praise and gratitude to Beatrice in Paradiso 31.
In conclusion, Paradiso 31 has a structurally determining role in
the Empyrean episode and in the poem as a whole. It gathers in and
completes meaning. The various strands of Dante's story - the
poem's autobiographical dimension - are worked out here. But other
elements of the poem come to a head in Paradiso 31: for instance,
although the language of mysticism dominates the final cantos of the
poem, Dante never completely abandons himself to mystical rapture
(Petrocchi, «Il canto», 241; cf. «Dante e San Bernardo», 143-44),
except perhaps on the final page. In Paradiso 31 in particular, he seems
anxious to display the other major sources which have shaped his
poem, i.e., to affirm the literariness of his work. As commentators
sensitive to the intertextual dimension clearly demonstrate (Sapegno,
Mattalia, and Bosco & Reggio), this canto is rich in citations and
allusions to the Bible, St. Thomas, Virgil, and Ovid, who replaces
Virgil as the dominant classical auctoritas in the Paradiso (see Picone,
«L'Ovidio»). The Ovidian allusion embedded in the barbari simile
(32-33) demonstrates nicely how Dante uses Ovid's pagan
metamorphoses to suggest spiritual transformation. Like Callisto
Dante is lifted into the sky by divine intervention, except that his
483
heaven is the true heaven - the Empyrean. It is only when St. Bernard
takes over at the end of the canto that the retrospective, summative
orientation comes to a halt. The last bit of the canto - the triumph of
the Virgin (118-42) - begins the push to the final vision.
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Paradiso XXXII
Author(s): H. WAYNE STOREY
Accessed: 17-02-2020 23:10 UTC
Lectura Dantis
H. WAYNE STOREY
Fordham University
XXXII
It is in this heaven of the Celestial Rose that the Paradiso and the
Commedia itself will conclude after a final episode which spans four
canti {Par XXX-XXXIII). Once Dante enters the Empyrean, the Tenth
Heaven of Paradise, the structuring device of the canto itself becomes
less effective. Beatrice's final words which close Paradiso XXX, an
invective aimed squarely at the papal corruption of Boniface VIII, go
without comment in canto XXXI. Rather the poet begins Paradiso
XXXI by returning to and reiterating the thematic context of the «rosa
sempiterna» {Par XXX: 124), first identified by Dante only a few verses
before simply as «questa rosa» (117), textually established before
Beatrice's final remarks {Par XXX: 128-48): « Informa dunque di candida
rosa / mi si mostrava la milizia santa / che nel suo sangue Cristo fece
sposa» {Par XXXI: 1-3). 1 On first reading these final canti, Paradiso
XXXII might seem even superfluous. In vv. 52-54 of canto XXXI,
Dante tells us that by this point he had already taken in the entire
general layout of Paradise without studying any one part carefully. As
we remember, in the next part of the canto, Bernard, who has now
replaced Beatrice as guide, leads Dante's eyes up through the Rose to
help prepare the Pilgrim for the divine vision: «vola con li occhi per
questo giardino; / che veder lui t'acconcerà lo sguardo / più al montar per
lo raggio divino» {Par XXXL97-99). As canto XXXI ends, Dante's eyes
come to rest upon the resplendent happiness of Mary at the summit of
the Rose, a gaze intensified by Bernard's own contemplative ardor
(139-142):
Bernardo, come vide li occhi miei

nel caldo suo caler fissi e attenti ,
li suoi con tanto affetto volse a lei,
che ' miei di rimirar fé più ardenti.
Recalling Dante's earlier gaze fixed on Beatrice in Earthly Paradise

(«Tant' eran li occhi miei fissi e attenti / a disbramarsi la decenne sete»,
Pur g XXXII: 1-2), these verses perform two important episodic
functions. First of all we see the spiritual effect of Bernard's loving
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contemplation of the Virgin Mary which reintensifies Dante's own
visual intensity soon necessary for the close examination of the Rose in
Paradiso XXXII. Secondly these verses anticipate and establish the
structural parameters for the «digressive pause» of Bernard's lessons
which will extend almost the entire length of the next canto.
Interestingly, our passage from Paradiso XXXI could easily have
introduced the beginning of Paradiso XXXIII, Bernard's supplication to
the Virgin on Dante's behalf, which produces an equally reciprocal
intensification of visual communication: «Li occhi da Dio diletti e
venerati, / fissi ne l'orator, ne dimostrare / quanto i devoti prieghi le son
grati» (40-42). Instead Paradiso XXXII introduces itself within the
context of Bernard's intense contemplation of the Virgin («Affetto al
suo piacer, quel contemplante...», v. 1) and concludes with the Saint's
direction to Dante to follow his example of devotion («e tu mi seguirai
con l'affezione», 149), linking the entire canto to that moment of
Bernard's great «affetto» in Paradiso XXXI: 141.
If Dante, then, is already well on his way in his final preparation
for looking upon the «divino raggio», why does Bernard undertake the
additional, and seemingly ill-timed if not extraneous, lessons of Paradiso
XXXII? While others have explained quite well the canto's final
doctrinal aspects, few have examined the surprisingly multiple motifs
and techniques of Paradiso' s penultimate canto as an episode of religious
and political clarification, integration, and summary of the Commedia' s
most vital themes.2 It is here, between the revelation of the Celestial
Rose of Paradiso XXXI and the beatific vision of Paradiso XXXIII, that
Dante takes final stock of his narrative's most pivotal trajectories,
constructing - in addition - a concluding, rigidly architectural gloss,
or commentary, before the final splendor of the divine light. Thus we
should consider Paradiso XXXII less a doctrinal digression than a text
which clarifies the Empyrean's hierarchy and closes the long path of the
Pilgrim's «altro viaggio», opened in Inferno II and unified by the «tre
donne benedette» to whom the poet returns in this next-to-the-last canto
of the Paradiso. Here before the revelation of canto XXXIII's ineffable
profundity of the «forma universal di questo nodo» (91), Dante seems to
stall the narrative sweep of the final episode to review concepts as
intricately related as justice and compassion, happiness, and inscrutable
grace while recalculating - and revising - the relationship of beatitude
and authority. Bernard himself recognizes this sense of suspension, as
well as the limits of the Pilgrim's time of reflection and preparation,
near the end of his lesson ( Par XXXII: 139-40). Yet it is also a canto of
exceptional technical contrast, which helps define the didactic nature of
this final commentary.
487
As we have already noted, the canto's opening terzina immediately
establishes the link between Bernard's ardently devote gaze at the close
of Paradiso XXXI and the beginning of Paradiso XXXII. Yet the initial
tercet also marks off the shift from the previous canto's focus on
Bernard's contemplation to his freely assumed role as teacher in Paradiso
XXXII: «Affetto al suo piacer, quel contemplante / libero officio di
dottore assunse, / e cominciò queste parole sante...» (1-3). This is not
to say that Bernard abandons his contemplation of the Virgin to instruct
the Pilgrim.3 For, as we shall see, most of his teaching consists of
systematically pointing out the personnel of the Rose in relation to the
Virgin. The third verse further delineates the canto's area apart from the
narrative movement of the final canti, setting off the Saint's instruction
in conjunction with the uniquely similar verse which closes the canto
and introduces Bernard's prayer to the Virgin in Paradiso XXXIII («E
cominciò questa santa orazione», Par XXXII:151). Even the summary
language Bernard adopts at the end of the canto (145-50) will
demonstrate the sense of this canto's closed space and reflective
commentary.
Thus the space of Bernard's «teaching» is established as an extended
narrative pause, not unlike those of - for example - Inferno XI and
XVIII, during which the Pilgrim and the reader have the chance to recall
and to prepare.4 The pivotal figure of this recollection and preparation is
Mary, the beloved object not only of Bernard's constant visual
meditation but of all the souls in the Rose. In fact, the entire structure
of the canto revolves around the Virgin. Bernard's first verse of
instruction describes Eve in terms of Mary's role in the salvation of
mankind (4), while his last lines explain the devotion (< affezione ) with
which the Pilgrim must pray to Mary for her final intervention
(147-48).
Mary's central role in the canto is, of course, a powerfully allusive
structural and thematic element which unifies the sequence of Paradiso
XXXII's four essential parts. As we noted, she is the object of Bernard's
intense contemplation in the transitional opening terzina. And, as we
shall see, she is the referential apex of the first and second architectural
descriptions of the Rose in what we will call Part la (vv. 4^48) and Part
lb (vv. 115-38). The two «internal pauses», or interruptions, dedicated
to the Pilgrim's final auxiliary questions in Part II address respectively
the salvation and distribution of the innocents from the earliest age of
humanity to the time of baptism and Christ (Part IIa = vv. 49-84) and
the nature of the angel Gabriel in relation to the Virgin Mary (Part lib =
vv. 100-14). These two questions surround or, perhaps more precisely,
buttress the central figure and theme of preparation in the canto: the
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hymn of supplication to the Virgin («la faccia che a Cristo / più si
somiglia», 85-86) sung by the entire congregation of the Rose in Part
III (vv. 85-99). In the final part of the canto, Bernard gives his final
instructions to the Pilgrim on readying his prayer and heart for Mary's
necessary intervention to help him look upon and penetrate - as much
as his mortal condition can allow - God's light (Part IV = vv.
139-50).
The introduction of Bernard's additional role of dottore , which he
generously and spontaneously assumes (v. 2), colors our understanding
of Part I and most of the canto. Since the term usually refers in Dante's
opus to an intellectual or spiritual guide of great erudition, one might
expect Bernard's lessons to be rich in Scholastic content and argument.5
Yet the Saint's instruction is shaped by the systematic but simple
precision of a more poetic voice, varied in its register and consonant
with Bernard's expositions. Throughout Part I there is a structural
insistence in Bernard's carefully directed tour as he builds layer on layer
of the Rose's composition. In the first 39 verses (4-42) of Part la
(4-48), Bernard reiterates with no less than 19 constructions or technical
expressions the architectural features of the Rose, often in terms of the
downward movement of the Pilgrim's eye away from the Virgin Mary
as he examines each level of venerated seats or - in the language of the
metaphor - the petals and their occupants. Verses 13-18 provide a
sampling of Bernard's emphasis on location, direction, and division:
puoi tu veder così di soglia in soglia

giù digradar , com' io eh 'a proprio nome
vo per la rosa giù di foglia in foglia.
E dal settimo grado in giùy sì come
infìno ad esso , succedono Ebree,
dirimendo del fior tutte le chiome...
This emphatic precision is bolstered by rare Latinisms ( intercisi [25J

and, later, sili [49]) and architectural vocabulary (from the simple muro
[20] and scalee [21] to semicirculi [26]) which contrast with the simple
poetic and iconographie metaphor of the rose («Da questa parte onde '1
fiore è maturo / di tutte le sue foglie», 22-23), as the poetic and
religious overtones of foglie give way to the imperial and authoritative
scanno / scanni of vv. 28 and 29, clarifying the order and arrangement of
these upper echelons of the Rose.6 At the same time, we cannot fail to
notice that the dramatically poetic opening of Bernard's lesson is
formulated by the poet as a rare hy stero n pro te ron , by which the natural
order of events is reversed, in an equally rare syntax («La piaga che
Maria richiuse e unse, / quella ch'è tanto bella da' suoi piedi / è colei
489
che l'aperse e che la punse», 4-6).7
Bernard's attention to order and arrangement, as well as the directive
precision of his language, clearly establishes the importance of the
relationships of the elect personnel of the Church. The line of Hebrew
women, descending in the Rose from Mary and Eve to Rachel, Sarah,
Rebecca, Judith, and Ruth, whose presence not only divides the seats in
the Rose between those who believed in the Christ to come (souls of
the Old Testament) and those who believed in the Christ who came to
redeem mankind (souls of the New Testament and after), but also - in
good Isaiah fashion (11:10 «In die ilia radix lesse, qui stat in signum
populorum) - reiterates the relationships of the house of David,
recalling in conclusion «colei / che fu bisava al cantor che per doglia /
del fallo disse 'Miserere meť»( 10-12). 8 When Bernard's structured
lesson moves, always through the Marian optic, to the other side of the
Rose to John the Baptist and then vertically through St. Francis, St.
Benedict, and St. Augustine, the Pilgrim begins to see more distinctly
not only the hierarchy of the Church and its faithful evolving in the
Saint's discourse but particularly the visible demonstration of the «alto
proveder divino» (37) which distributes the blessed in Paradise and will
fill it - we soon learn - in the very near future.^
The second section of the Saint's lesson on the hierarchy of the
Rose (Part lb: vv. 115-38) will complete our understanding of
Bernard's, and Dante's, presentational strategy at this late stage of the
canticle. But before concluding this spiritual map of the Rose, Dante
suspends the narrative sequence of Bernard's visual tour with three
interruptions. And as we have seen in other parts of the Commedia ,
recalling here among many instances only Inferno X, Dante is the
master of suspended discourse, not only coaxing from the pause a
heightened sense of dramatic anticipation and that uniquely realistic -
and Dantesque - pace of human interaction which mercifully spoils
stilted monologues, but also extending an alternate but related narrative
space in which he develops tangential concepts and information
auxiliary to his «delayed text».10 But has Dante become the distracted
traveler so close to the end of his journey? As we examine these three
intervening sections, we will note that, especially for the Pilgrim's two
questions, Bernard's responses and statements only seem less than
essential to the Pilgrim's final preparation (Part IIa & b). I would
propose that the poet's clearly indicated digressions to Bernard's
«doctrine», that is his authoritative teaching («Così ricorsi ancora a la
dottrina», 106), will supply on several levels additional authority to his
depiction of the Empyrean.
Throughout these good lessons, the Saint's gentle commands
490
signal a shift of attention and direction in the Pilgrim's gaze («Or
mira», 37; «E sappi che», 40; and later «Ma vieni omai con li occhi»,
115). It is only after Bernard has introduced in v. 40 the theologically
problematic placement of the innocents in the Rose (the «spiriti asciolti
/ prima ch'avesser vere elezioni», 44-45), as he redirects the Pilgrim's
visual and aural attention («Ben te ne puoi accorger», 46) to the young
voices and faces, that the rhythm of his lesson shifts, halting on and
repeating the Pilgrim's condition (49-51):
Or dubbi tu e dubitando sili;

ma io discioglierò 'l forte legame
in che ti stringon li pensier sottili.
Of course, part of the problem rests perhaps with Bernard's teaching

method, as his seemingly incalculable and doctrinally ambiguous
descriptions («per nullo proprio merito si siede» [42] and «con certe
condizioni» [43]) have triggered the Pilgrim's doubt. But the principal
mover of Dante's difficulty is, as Bernard points out, the Pilgrim's
reliance on refined, analytical reasoning («pensier sottili»), which forces
him («stringon») into a philosophical «knot» («forte legame»).11
Bernard's language recalls precisely the formula which Dante has used
throughout the Commedia to describe the Pilgrim's mind entangled in
uncertainty, or confusion, to be solved by his guide's explanation.12
But here we should recall the earlier clarifying prose of Convivio III viii
2-3, in which Dante, discussing the inscrutable wisdom of God and -
important for the end of Paradiso XXXII - the limitations of human
wisdom proclaimed in Ecclesiasticus 3:22, proposes to clarify, or
untangle, the «knot» as much as his comparatively frail human intellect
can manage:
«Più alte cose di te non dimanderai e più forti cose di te non cercherai; ma
quelle cose che Dio ti comandò, pensa, e in più sue opere non sie curioso»,
cioè sollicito. Io adunque, che in questa terza particola d'alcuna condizione di
cotal creatura parlare intendo, ... non sicuro comincio, intendendo, e se non
a pieno, almeno alcuna cosa di tanto nodo disnodare.
Bernard's explanation of the inscrutable workings of God's justice

and judgment immediately assumes both the reasoned language of
scholastic argument with its rare Latinisms («pausa» [61, as a verbal])
and technical expressions («sine causa» [59, Petrocchi's italics]), and the
common logic of the proverb («ci si risponde da l'anello al dito», 57) to
assure the Pilgrim that all he sees taking its place in Paradise is
sanctioned by the eternal law of divine wisdom. Yet all reasoning falls
491
short in explanation of Goďs works; nothing can penetrate divine reason
(61-66):
Lo rege per cui questo regno pausa

in tanto amore e in tanto diletto,
che nulla volontà è di più ausa,
le menti tutte nel suo lieto aspetto
creando, a suo piacer di grazia dota
diversamente; e qui basti l'effetto.
Reinforced by the language of absolute authority («rege», «regno»,

and earlier «glorioso scanno» [28] and «reame» [52]) which satisfies all
wills, the diversity of grace given by God can only be accepted not
reasoned. And so too, we should add, must we accept Dante's
representation. Bernard's sapiential solution can, in his own words, only
be «expressed», «made clear» («espresso e chiaro», 67), not argued by
logic, and then exemplified by Scripture in the story of Esau and Jacob,
sons - precisely - of Rebecca (Genesis 25:25-26), where the
«reason» for God's favor is simply inexplicable («di cotai grazia
l'altissimo lume / degnamente convien che s'incappelli», 71-72).
Without having presented a true argument to resolve the Pilgrim's
doubt, Bernard concludes his anti-philosophical demonstration on the
inscrutable in a terzina (73-75) which scholastically summarizes the
issue of difference among the blessed children («Dunque ... / locati son
per gradi differenti») as a matter of predestined intensity of grace at birth,
turning pointedly on the term difference itself {differenti / differendo ).13
Though important for our understanding of Dante's engagement of even
theological issues of his day, the poet's contribution to current thinking
on infant salvation is far less critical than the overall sense of authority
supplied by these narratively digressive versi disnodanti Rather it is
the authority of the discourse, as well as of its present discussant and
contemplative devotee of the compassionate Virgin (later «colui
ch'abbelliva di Maria», 107), which Dante ultimately establishes,
concluding the Saint's response with a rapid history of infant salvation
from the criteria of innocence and parental faith in the earliest epoch, to
circumcision in the time of Abraham and then baptism after the advent
of grace through Christ's act of redemption.
The last two lines of Bernard's history finalize the discussion by
recalling the destiny of infants without Christian baptism («tale
innocenza là giù si ritenne», 84). However, our recollection of that by
now seemingly distant canto IV of Inferno, among those in Limbo who
did not sin («non basta, perché non ebber battesmo, / eh 'è porta de la
fede che tu credi», 35-36), is quickly extinguished by Bernard's next
492
imperative (Part III) to look upon the face most similar to the face of
Christ (85-87):
Riguarda omai ne la faccia che a Cristo

più si somiglia, ché la sua chiarezza
sola ti può disporre a veder Cristo.
The Saint turns Dante's attention away from his doubt, by now
«resolved», and back toward the primary issue of this pause: the
Pilgrim's final preparation for looking into the divine light. Bernard's
insistence on their return to this preparation resounds in the three
rhymes in «Cristo». But the vehicle of the Saint's renewed lesson
remains the figure at the pinnacle of the Rose and the constant object of
his contemplation: Mary. As Dante gazes intently upon the Virgin, he
discerns the elements of her «chiarezza» (86) which rains down as a
mixture of splendorous light, beatitude, and absolute happiness
(«allegrezza», 88) brought upon her by the angelic intelligences («menti
sante», 89), which were created to fly in these highest heavens between
the blessed of the Rose and God to transmit Providence's glory.
The depiction of Gabriel descending, singing «Ave, Maria, gratia
plena» and spreading his wings before the Virgin («di Dio tanto
sembiante», 93), in an act which simultaneously honors the supremacy
of her faith in the Rose and reenacts the scene of the Annunciation,
ultimately converts to a grand, splendid canvas on which we see and hear
with unusual detail («sì ch'ogne vista sen fé più serena», 99) the choral
glorification of the Virgin.15 Bernard has effectively returned the
Pilgrim's rapt attention to the panorama of the Rose as its souls
venerate the mother of Christ in song and contemplative vision. The
Saint seems well on his way to completing his description of the
Celestial Rose, when Dante again delays the narrative with his second
question regarding the identity of the angel Gabriel, whom he has not
recognized apparently since the angel seems «afire with love» (105) for
the Virgin.
As we have noted, Dante himself announces Bernard's second
teaching digression (Part lib) as the Saint beams with Mary's radiant
glory and happiness («Cosi ricorsi ancora a la dottrina / di colui
ch'abbelliva di Maria / come del sole stella mattutina», 106-8). But
Bernard's rapid six verses of identification (109-14) dispense with the
Pilgrim's error of perception or, better, recognition by reiterating the
angel's historical role in the transmission of beatitude and his
annunciation to Mary that she would bear the son of God: «elli è quelli
che portò la palma / giuso a Maria, quando '1 Figli uol di Dio / carear si
493
volse de la nostra salma» (1 12-14). The intensity of Bernard's doubled
description of Gabriel's confident joy and the syntactic concentration of
its singular verbs («Baldezza e leggiadria / quant' esser puote ... / tutta è
in lui», 109-11) suggest a response designed to «speak the Pilgrim's
language» of poetic and chivalric virtues.16 Doctrine is no longer an
issue. The Saint answers with effective brevity. At the same time,
Dante instills even here in Bernard's swift explanation profoundly
allusive iconographie details from the pictorial tradition of the
Annunciation, such as the «ali distese» (which we saw in v. 96) and the
victorious «palma» (neither of which appear in the description in Luke),
which Dante would have known.
Bernard himself now seems more urgently intent upon finishing
his lesson on the Rose, concluding ultimately - as we have already
noted - in his cautionary «ma perché '1 tempo fugge» (139), as he
abruptly shifts the Pilgrim's attention from Gabriel to the patriarchs and
the remaining important women he will point out (1 15-20):
Ma vieni omai con li occhi sì com' io

andrò parlando, e nota i gran patrici
di questo imperio giustissimo e pio.
Quei due che seggon là sù più felici
per esser propinquissimi ad Agusta,
son d'està rosa quasi due radici. . .
In this second and final section of the mapping of the Rose, Bernard
retums to his language of precise location and direction (our Part lb: vv.
115-38): «propinquissimi», «lungh' esso, e lungo l'altro» (130).
Significantly, however, the predominant directionality of this mapping
changes from the downward movement of Part la («fin qua giù di giro in
giro», 36) to the upward direction of Bernard's instruction («seggon là
sù»). Moreover, in this second installment, the language becomes more
rapidly and intricately allusive not only to the imperial authority of the
Church (the «bella sposa», 128), by which Mary is now referred to as
«Agusta» (a title reserved for the wife or mother of the Roman emperor)
of this «imperio giustissimo e pio» and Moses as its «duca», and the
symbols of that authority (especially the «chiavi»), but also to the very
cause and progress of the Pilgrim's journey from Inferno I to this
penultimate canto of Paradiso
As Bernard courses through the positionings of Adam and Peter
(unnamed until the latter is used as a point of reference in v. 133), John
the Evangelist (127-29), Moses (130-32), Anna (133-35), and Lucia
(136-38), we note continually the centrality of Mary (from «colui che
da sinistra le s'aggiusta» [121] to Anna who is «tanto contenta di mirar
494
sua figlia» [134]) in determining the eight «points» of the Rose's
hierarchy: the three most blessed souls from the age of the New
Testament (Peter, John the Evangelist, and Lucia) and the three from the
Old Testament (Adam, Moses, and Anna), charted in this second section,
plus the two representatives who bridge the Old and New Testaments
(Mary and John the Baptist), located for us earlier by Bernard in Part
la.18
It is in this final segment of Bernard's lesson on the hierarchy that
we hear and see the integration of the canto's motifs and the
harmonization of its language with its rapid-fire themes. Describing
Adam in paraphrase, the poet isolates the essence of the «first father's»
difficult inheritance passed on to humanity by contrasting the first
man's «ardito gusto» for the forbidden fruit, which became so bitter to
humankind, with the same word root gustare : «è'I padre per lo cui ardito
gusto / l'umana specie tanto amaro gusta» (122-23). Again in
paraphrase, Bernard's depiction of Peter is founded almost exclusively on
the single icon of the «keys», or «chiavi», given by Christ to the «padre
vetusto / di santa Chiesa» (124-25; renamed in 126 in the language of
the prevailing metaphor of the Rose as the «fior venusto»). ^ in both
cases, the schematic symmetry of Dante's Rose persists. Closest to
Mary (Agusta), and happiest («più felici»), are the hierarchical, rather
than the spiritual, «roots» of the Church: the Old Testament «padre»
(122) of our sin sits on the opposite side of the New Testament «padre»
(124) responsible for the institution of our salvation through Christ.
The fruit and keys of the first two sacred souls are mirrored by the
lance and nails and the manna associated with the next two figures,
again from the New and Old Testaments: John the Evangelist and
Moses. Yet as the Pilgrim's eye moves away from the Virgin,
seemingly examining both sides of the Rose at the same latitude
(evident in the construction of v. 130), John's physical proximity to
Peter is reasserted by the continuation of the central theme and icon of
Peter's description: the «Santa Chiesa», now the «bella sposa», and the
«chiavi» (127-32):20
E quei che vide tutti i tempi gravi,

pria che morisse, de la bella sposa
che s'acquistò con la lancia e coi chiavi,
siede lungh' esso, e lungo l'altro posa
quel duca sotto cui visse di manna
la gente ingrata, mobile e retrosa.
Here John's principal relationship to the Church is his vision («vide»)

of the Apocalypse, that is - as suggested in readings by Joachim of
495
Fiore and Peter Olivi - the vision of the seven historical tempora , or
42 generations (recalled in Bernard's «tempi gravi»), in the age of the
Church.21 Thus, most of the iconographie elements in the paraphrase of
John actually refer to Christ and the Church (the latter the subject of
«s'acquistò»); John's only attribute is his vision. This close linkage of
Christ and the Church between Peter and John is reinforced, I believe,
by Dante's repetition of «chiavi», using a technique similar to the
devices of repetition and rhyme proximity he has used throughout the
canto.22 The second instance of the now rarified equivocal rhyme
«chiavi», or «nails» (clarified in its combination with the iconographie
lance of Longinus), ties together the experiences of the advent of the
Church, first under Christ and then under Peter, with the ages of its
history by concentrating the reader's attention on the interpretation of
the «chiavi».23
Across from Peter («Di contr' a Pietro»), who sits to the Virgin's
right, among the venerated souls of the Old Testament sits Mary's
mother Anna, whose eyes do not stray from her daughter even as she
sings her praises (133-35). Yet it is the second female figure among the
New Testament souls, directly opposite Adam in the Rose, which draws
our attention: «contro al maggior padre di famiglia / siede Lucia, che
mosse la tua donna / quando chinavi, a rovinar, le ciglia» (136-38).
While the previous important stations in the Rose have referred to
Mary, Christ, and the Church, this final terzina of Bernard's instruction
represents the fusion of the Pilgrim's long journey with the just
authorities of the Empyrean. Bernard recalls explicitly Lucia's
intervention with Beatrice (Inf 11:97-108) at the worst moment in the
poet's moral crisis as well as the implicit intervention of Mary («Donna
è gentil nel ciel che si compiange», Inf 11:94), Vergil's consolation and
guidance at Beatrice's request (/n/II:58-74), and Beatrice's own reunion
with and guidance of the Pilgrim (cf. Inf 1: 121-23). Equally powerful is
the fact that Bernard's language in v. 138 («chinavi ... le ciglia»)
remembers exactly the Pilgrim's condition in Inferno I as he at first,
with great hope but little understanding of the state of his own faith,
looked upward toward the mountain of happiness («guardai in alto», Inf
1:16) and then later lost all hope of reaching that height («perdei la
speranza de l'altezza», Inf 1:54) and hurried back to the lower ground
(«Mentre ch'i' rovinava in basso loco», Inf 1:61, clearly cited in the
«rovinar» of Par XXXII: 138).24 Near the end of his mission which was
made possible by the love and compassion of Mary, Lucia, and Beatrice,
the Pilgrim, now in his final preparation to look upward toward the
divine light, is reunited with the «tre donne benedette» in their «corte del
cielo» (Inf U: 124-25).
496
This final linkage between Dante's journey and the Empyrean is
not, however, a moment of casual nostalgia, nor a simple conclusion to
a rapid overview of the top echelon of the Rose. Bernard's pointed
lesson on the hierarchy of the Empyrean also responds to Beatrice's final
invective against the papacy of Boniface VIII in Paradiso XXX by
«correcting» what had become an iconographie tradition in the Middle
Ages: the depiction of the once inaccessible Virgin Mary together with
the pope and the elect of Heaven to solidify papal authority often in the
realm of the religio-political.25
Throughout the canto, the poet has molded Bernard's instruction so
as to focus on two objectives: i) to give a clear visual map of the elect
who populate the highest levels of the Rose, and the Church hierarchy,
insistently guiding the Pilgrim's eyes (from «puoi tu veder» [13] to
«vieni ... con li occhi» [115]) in preparation for the Pilgrim's final
vision («ti può disporre a veder Cristo» [87]); and ii) to establish the
final authority of Dante's own text by revising key iconographie
elements related to divine justice and the inceptive concept of the
Church. In each of the three parts of Paradiso XXXII we have noted the
Saint's treatment of traditional icons and authority. At the center of his
treatment, especially in Part la and b, has been a corrective
reestablishment and extension of the tree of Jesse, from the «radix lesse»
(«et fios de radice eius ascendet» [Isaias 11:1]), recalled in the two roots
- or «radici» - of the Rose, to demonstrate the absence of secular and
political Church figures, such as popes, from this most important
lineage out of the house of David.26 Utilizing the clarified icons and
authority of their visual language, as well as the mediated authoritative
language of the imperial hierarchy and of scholastic discourse, Bernard
essentially produces a new canvas, a didactic illumination which glosses
and authenticates the authority of Dante's Commedia and its lesson on
justice.
With the same succinct alacrity with which he has forged his
revision of the Empyrean's hierarchy Bernard seems to conclude his
teaching, measuring - with a proverbial simile - his portion of the
time allotted to Dante's vision like the cloth of a tailor. He now directs
the Pilgrim toward his final objective, the «primo amore» (139-44):
Ma perché '1 tempo fugge che t'assonna,

qui farem punto, come buon sartore
che com' elli ha del panno fa la gonna;
e drizzeremo li occhi al primo amore,
sì che, guardando verso lui, penetri
quant' è possibil per lo suo fulgore.
497
The tone of the Saint's directions seems colloquial and thus his
recognition of the limitations of Dante's time in his still imperfect
vision of the Empyrean must be interpreted in the same tonal light.22
In addition, however, the authoritative parallel with the writer of the
Apocalypse («quod vides, scribe in libro») cannot escape us in Bernard's
use of the verb assonnarsi , especially in relation to the common
iconography of John asleep («cecidi ad pedes eius tanquam mortuus»
[Apoc. 1:17]) and «in spiritu» usually beneath the depiction of the Son
of Man in many manuscript illuminations of the Middle Ages.28 The
parallel authority of Dante's text is, nonetheless, restricted by the
Pilgrim's human condition, which will allow him to see and penetrate
the divine light only «quant' è possibil».
The last verses of the canto now link the limited human authority
of Dante's text with the image of absolute compassion, and the central
figure of Paradiso XXXII, Mary. The Pilgrim's human condition now
leaves the Saint doubting («forse») the power of the Pilgrim's spiritual
«wings». His final preparation for asking for such grace to see the
divine light must include a prayer to the Virgin for her own helpful
grace. The Saint begins his closing instructions with the summary
Latinate verum (often used to resume after a digression or to introduce a
new topic), followed by the Latin negative ne (Petrocchi's italics;
145-50):
Veramente, ne forse tu t'arretri

movendo l'ali tue, credendo oltrarti,
orando grazia conven che s'impetri
grazia da quella che puote aiutarti
e tu mi seguirai con l'affezione,
sì che dal dicer mio lo cor non parti.
The «Veramente» introduces the Pilgrim's final preparation founded on

his need to pray for two «graces» (« orando grazia conven che s impetri /
grazia»). The Pilgrim only has hope of receiving the first if he prays for
the latter, the Virgin's interceding grace. And here the Pilgrim's
assignment is simple: follow the Saint in his prayer to Mary with
heartfelt devotion.
NOTES
1 Unless otherwise noted, I cite Petrocchi's antica vulgata (Milano:

Mondadori, 1966-67). Dante's other works are cited from the national
editions reprinted in the Enciclopedia Dantesca , Appendice (Roma: Istituto
498
dell'Enciclopedia Italiana, 1978). Biblical citations are from the Vulgate.
Unless noted in the text, all italics are my own.
^See, for example, Antonio Russi, «Il canto XXXII», Lectura Dantis
Scaligera, Paradiso (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1968), pp. 1135-90; Vincenzo
Pernicone, «Il canto XXXII del Paradiso », in Lectura Dantis Romana
(Torino: S.E.I., 1965); and Fausto Montanari, «Il canto XXXII del
Paradiso », in Nuove letture dantesche , voi. VII (Firenze: Le Monnier,
1974), pp. 255-63.
■^More difficult readings of «Affetto al suo piacer», for example those which
would limit the time of Bernard's contemplation of the Virgin («After
having fulfilled his contemplation» or even the Ottimo commentary's
reading of «satisfatto al suo piacer» [in Guido Biagi, Giuseppe Lando
Passerini, Enrico Rostagno, eds. La Divina Commedia nella figurazione
artistica e nel secolare commento : Paradiso , vol. III [Torino: U.T.E.T.,
1939), n. ad loc.]), account for neither the timelessness of Bernard's fixed
adoration of Mary nor the terzina' s necessarily simple stylistic context. At
the beginning of the canto XXXII, Bernard is still «intent upon the beauty»
of his beloved Mary.
4Guido Di Pino («II canto XXXII del Paradiso », in Letture dantesche,
Paradiso , ed. Giovanni Getto, 3rd ed. [Firenze: Sansoni, 1964], pp.
2001-18) also posited the idea of Paradiso XXXII as a «canto di pausa
preparativa», but with greater emphasis on the pause's dramatic
heightening of Bernard's prayer to the Virgin in the final canto. For the
parallels of the narrative pause in Inferno XVIII, see my «Mapping Out the
New Poetic Terrain: Malebolge and Inferno XVIII», in Lectura Dantis 4
(Spring 1989): 30-41, especially pp. 30-31.
^See Sebastiano Aglianò's brief but instructive entry for «dottore» in
Enciclopedia Dantesca , vol. II (Roma: Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana,
1970), pp. 589-90.
"More than a simple «seat», scanno is used almost exclusively throughout
the Commedia to indicate the authority and dignity of the positions, or
«seats», in the Empyrean. In inferno 11:112, Beatrice refers to her «beato
scanno» in the Rose («con l'antica Rachele», Inf II: 102). We should note
also the approximate doubling and repetition in rhyme which Dante uses
throughout the canto (for example: scanno - scanni [28, 29], capelli -
s'incappelli [70, 72], gusto - gusta [122, 123]). Additional examples of
the numerous directional, divisional, and locational markers in Part I
include: «da' suoi piedi» (5), «di sotto da costei» (8), «si parton» (21),
«quinci» (28), «di contra» (31), «fin qua giù di giro in giro» (36), and «a
mezzo il tratto le due discrezioni» (41).
^ Pasquini and Quaglio ( Commedia . Milano: Garzanti, 1987, p. 1117, ad
loc.) read the rhetorical device's reversal of verbs ( richiuse e unse / che
l'aperse e che la punse) as linguistically symbolic of original sin's
anticipation of redemption.
"For the ordering and arrangement of the Celestial Rose and its significance,
see Giuseppe Di Scipio 's study The Symbolic Rose in Dante's «Paradiso»
499
(Ravenna: Longo, 1984). His work is particularly helpful not only for its
clarification of the actual positions of the venerated souls but also for its
suggestions regarding the stages of Bernard's visual mapping of the Rose.
^Pointing out also Convivio II, xiv, 13 («Che dal cominciamento del
mondo poco più de la sesta parte è volto; e noi siamo già ne l'ultima etade
del secolo, e attendemo veracemente la consummazione del celestiale
movimento....») and especially Paradiso XXX: 131-32 («vedi li nostri
scanni sì ripieni, / che poca gente più ci si disira»), both evidence - in my
estimation - of the poet's Joachimist formation, Sapegno believes that
vv. 37-39 reflect Dante's belief that the end of the world was near {La
Divina Commedia , ed. Natalino Sapegno, vol. IH [Paradiso] [Firenze: La
Nuova Italia, 1957], ad loc.).
10This is still, to my mind, one of the most important lessons of
Auerbach's 1953 reading of Inferno X («Farinata and Cavalcante», in
Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature , tr. by
Willard Trask [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968], pp.
174-202): Dante's ear for the realistic rhythms of the human voice in
exchange with other voices.
11 Here Dante's potentially negative use of sottile reflects the problematic
interpretation of the term throughout his work, both with regard to his
poetic antecedents, such as Guittone d'Arezzo and Cino da Pistoia
(especially in his definition of «qui dulcius subtiliusque poetati vulgariter
sunt» in De vulgāri eloquentia I x 4), and the philosophical discussions of
his day (see Francesco Bruni, «Semantica della sottigliezza: Note sulla
distribuzione della cultura nel Basso Medioevo», Studi medievali , NS XIX
[1978]: 1-36; and H. Wayne Storey, «The Poetry and Literary Culture of
Monte Andrea da Firenze», diss. Columbia University [N.Y.], 1982, pp.
52-60).
l^See, for example, Paradiso VIL52-54 («Ma io veggi' or la tua mente
ristretta / di pensiero in pensier dentro ad un nodo, / del qual con gran disio
solver s'aspetta») and the problematic nodo of Purgatorio XXIV:55-60,
discussed most recently by Lino Pertile, in «Il nodo di Bonagiunta, le
penne di Dante e il Dolce Stil Novo», Lettere italiane XLVI (1994): 44-75;
to which I would add my own brief observations both in Transcription and
Visual Poetics in the Early Italian Lyric (N.Y.: Garland, 1993), pp. 57-58,
n. 68, and in «Revision and Vision in Purgatorio XXXI», Lectura Dantis
14-15 (Spring 1994), p. 39, n. 9. Benvenuto's gloss of «legame»
(«nodum difficilis quaestionis») also suggests the common linkage with
these other passages.
l^This point of predestined grace was already established by Bernard, but
unquestioned by the Pilgrim, in his description of John the Baptist, via
Luke 1:15 («et Spiritu sancto replebitur adhuc ex utero matris suae»
[John's]), as «sempre santo» {Par XXXIL32). On the question of the
«differences» among the elect in Paradise, see Teodolinda Barolini's
systematic narratological study of Dante's poetics of disagguaglianza and
its opposite, the «circulata melodia», in Dante's Undivine Comedy
500
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 229-56.
Ôn the issue of the relationship among Bernard's letter «De baptismo» to
Hugh of St. Victor, Dante, and the doctrine - essentially going beyond
Bonaventure and Aquinas - of the effectus per accidens , whereby «divine
providence will assign the different degrees of grace», see Steven
Botterill's «Doctrine, Doubt and Certainty: Paradiso XXXII, 40-84»,
Italian Studies XLII (1987): 20-36.
l^See not only Luke 1:26 («missus est angelus Gabriel a Deo»), 1:28 («Et
ingressus angelus ad earn [Mary] dixit: Ave gratia pleta»), and 1:38 («Dixit
autem Maria: Ecce ancilla Domini»), but especially Dante's own recreation
of God's intaglio of the scene of the annunciation in Purgatorio X:34-45,
for Dante's own visual antecedents of the episode.
l^For the fusion of two nouns in the action of a single verb, see Franca
Brambilla Ageno, 1 1 verbo neW italiano antico (Milano-Napoli: Ricciardi,
1964), pp. 172-76; and D'Arco Silvio Avalle, Sintassi e prosodia nella
lirica italiana delle origini (Torino: Giappichelli, 1973), pp. 40-48. We
should note, however, that the stylistic interpretation of this syntactic
device (a singular verb with plural subjects) in Dante's Commedia (see also
M/XIIL43-44 and Pur g XXXI: 16-17) should be tempered by the fact that
the usage is found in early Italian poetry as a standard grammatical form.
Thus, the unification of baldezza and leggiadria in a singular verb reflects,
in fact, not an innovative manipulation of the rules of syntax but a
grammatical option with which the poet could magnify the angel's perfect
embodiment of joy.
1 The telegraphic velocity of Dante's verses is perhaps most evident in
lines 131-32, where the poet summarizes and concentrates the entire story
of Moses and his leadership of the Israelites (Exodus 16) in the brilliant
ordering of three adjectives: «quel duca sotto cui visse di manna / la gente
ingrata , mobile e retrosa».
l°For the arrangement of these eight souls in the Rose, I refer the reader to
Di Scipio 's Symbolic Rose in Dante's « Paradiso », especially pp. 170-71.
The rare form of the Dantean hapax s'aggiusta to indicate proximity to the
Virgin («le s'aggiusta» in v. 121) helps to concentrate the reader's
attention on Mary's authoritative centrality. On aggiustarsi (from the
adverbial juxta ), see Giovanni Nencioni's «Note dantesche», Studi
danteschi XL (1963): 30-42.
^Significantly both terms, «padre vetusto» and the «fior venusto», would
be applicable to any number of church figures without the single clarifier of
«keys».
2^1 use «chiavi» in v. 129 instead of Petrocchi 's preferred «davi». The
substitution is discussed below.
For an introduction to Joachim's systematic reading of the Apocalypse,
see E. Randolph Daniel, «Joachim of Fiore: Patterns of History in the
Apocalypse», in The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages , eds. Richard K.
Emmerson and Bernard McGinn (Ithaca and London: Cornell University
Press, 1992), pp. 72-88; and Richard K. Emmerson and Ronald B.
501
Herzman, «The Apocalypse and Joachim of Fiore: Keys to the Medieval
Apocalyptic Imagination», in their Apocalyptic Imagination in Medieval
Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), pp.
1-35. Still one of the most important works for understanding the
influence of Peter Olivi on Dante and 14th-century medieval culture is
Raoul Manselli's La «Lectura super Apocalipsim» di Pietro di Giovanni
Olivi: ricerche sulť escatologismo medioevale (Roma: Istituto Storico
Italiano per il Medio Evo, 1955). Again we should note the strong evidence
of Dante's Joachimist reading.
^We recall, for example, the repeated uses in rhyme of «Cristo» (vv. 83,
85, 87) and note again, with Pasquini and Quaglio (op. cit., pp. 1123-24),
the linguistic and thematic coordination of the rima ricca between
«capelli» (70) and «s'incappelli» (72).
23 Petrocchi 's selection of «clavi» (see both his Introduzione , vol. I, p.
440, § 24, and the apparatus ad loc. in vol. IV) seems based exclusively on
the «better manuscripts» («codici eccellenti»; that is, principally, the
Cortona manuscript, the Laurentian Gaddiano 90 sup. 125, and Trivulziano
1080) against the strong - and yet possibly trivialized - tradition of the
majority of the manuscripts. In other loci requiring editorial preference,
these same manuscripts are not always as privileged by Petrocchi.
For the linguistic motif of «guardare in alto» in relation to «chinare le
ciglia» as a primary thematic element in the Commedia , see my reading of
Purgatorio XXXI in Dante's Divine Comedy: Introductory Readings II:
Purgatorio , ed. Tibor Wlassics, Lectura Dantis , 12 suppl. (Spring 1993),
pp. 465-66, and especially p. 474, n. 3. Discussing the same motif,
Francesco Mazzoni suggests «un luogo comune della tradizione patristica,
scolastica e letteraria, che proprio nella umana capacità di "guardare in
alto" vedeva un segno biologicamente distintivo dell'uomo, natura
spirituale, nei confronti degli altri esseri animati che guardan proni la
terra» (see his «Il canto XXXI del Purgatorio », in Lectura Dantis Scaligera.
Purgatorio [Firenze: Le Monnier, 19711, p. 1160-61).
2^For a general introduction to this tradition, see Marina Warner, Alone of
All Her Sex : The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (N.Y.: Vintage
Books, 1976), pp. 107-13.
2 ^ For the origins of the iconographie tradition of the Tree of Jesse, an
illuminated motif strongly associated with the Psalter, see Arthur Watson,
The Early Iconography of the Tree of Jesse , Oxford, 1934. James R.
Johnson's more detailed study of Chartres («The Tree of Jesse Window of
Chartres: Laudes regiae », Speculum XXXVI [1961]: 1-22) is also helpful in
assessing the regional applications of the motif. Among illuminated
manuscripts, three pre-Dantesque examples are of particular note: the
Lambeth Bible (London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 3, f. 198r) and the
Huntingfield Psalter (New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, M. 43, f. 33v
[but see also f. 27v]), both reproduced in Otto Pacht' s Book illumination in
the Middle Ages , trans, by Kay Davenport (London: Miller, 1986 [German
ed. Buchmalerei des Mittelalters Eine Einführung , Munich, 1984), figures
502
132, 133. Most interesting, however, for our theme here is Figure 1 in
Marina Warner's study (op. cit., after p. 100), listed without shelf marking
as: «A Biblical leaf juxtaposing Luke's account of the Visitation with the
Old Testament story of King David's arrival in Jerusalem. Canterbury or St.
Albans (?), twelfth century. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York»
(Warner's italics).
2 'See Nencioni, op. cit., pp. 50-56; and Delia Vottis Cupaiolo, «A
proposito del verso di Dante "Ma perché il tempo fugge che t'assonna" ( Par
XXXII, 139)», in Miscellanea in onore del preside Gaspare Caliendo
(Napoli: Federico & Ardia, 1960), pp. 158-66.
2° Examples of the «John asleep on Patmos under the Son of Man» motif
appear in: London, British Library MS Add. 28107, f. 234r, and Dijon,
Bibliothèque municipale MS 2, f. 470v (both of which are reproduced in
The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages , eds. Richard K. Emmerson and Bernard
McGinn [Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992], pp. 114,
115), and Vatican Library, Latino 39, f. 156r (reproduced in the facsimile
edition: Neues Testament: Codex Vaticanus Latinus 39 , eds. Giovanni
Morello and Ulrich Stockmann [Zürich: Belser, 1984]).
503
Paradiso XXXIII
Author(s): REBECCA WEST
Accessed: 17-02-2020 23:10 UTC
Lectura Dantis
REBECCA WEST
University of Chicago
XXXIII
The best reading of the last canto of the Comedy would perhaps be
just that: a reading, out loud, by someone capable of bringing to life th
semantic and sonoric splendors of this exquisite finale. How can th
words of any commentator, any critic, any teacher, even begin t
approach the beauty of these closural lines? I think: let us read it , agai
alone, together, silently or aloud, rather than yet additional inadequat
scribblings on it. This crowning moment of an already dauntingl
genial work instills humility and awe (or should) in critical readers (just
as its author no doubt intended), but it also stimulates a desire to seek t
express even «un poco» of our response to its greatness, as all things o
beauty do. Dante himself has told us many times throughout the poem
of the importance of recording our responses, our visions, and ou
understanding for the benefit of «future folk», no matter how radicall
limited our means to do so. Like the little child being urged to «b
brave» and to dive into the seemingly bottomless deep end of the poo
for the first time, then, I hesitate fearfully on the edge, murmuring t
myself «I'll do it, I'll do it», and then I plunge in.
An inevitable (for me) part of my training for the dive into a
lectura is a nonstop rereading of the entire poem. Rereading any belove
work is a complex emotional and intellectual experience, akin in some
ways to meeting up from time to time with a beloved old friend who i
not often seen but who is, due to longstanding and profound ties, alway
«around». Our response will depend in part on our memories of th
person (and the book), which are layered - some factual, some fictiona
- and in part on the surprises that re-encounters always hold (ah, I'd
forgotten that tic, this metaphor; this gesture, that rhyme); and, of
course, the meaning of the re-encounter will have as much (more?) to d
with who we are, where we are in our own cammin della vita as with
the «actual» ontology of the person or text once more before us. It often
seems to me as I peruse various pieces of critical and theoretical writing
on the poem that I am also reading mini-autobiographical profiles; one
critic reveals a great stake in unity, another sees cracks through whic
doubt and barely concealed despair lend dark shadows even to the mos
luminous moments of the poem, and yet another favors the political
504
agenda of Dante's vision. Until very recently, scholars were reluctant to
admit to anything short of absolute objectivity and dedication to the
abstract ideal of the advancement of understanding and knowledge, nor
am I suggesting that critical neo-impressionism is inherently superior to
erudite and rational discourse. I merely wish to highlight something that
we all already know: that the best scholarly response is based not only
on objectified erudition, but also on a lived and felt connection with the
texts about which we are writing. For me, this connection is reaffirmed
first through the act of rereading the entire poem in a nonstop sweep (or
at least as continuous as doorbells, empty coffeecups, and other
mundane distractions permit). I then feel ready to read (and reread many
times) the canto in question as well as to dig into the critical work on it
by others with at least the illusion that the «big picture» is with me as
the analyses zoom in on textual, historical, theological and other
disparate elements. And, as I hope is already implicitly obvious, I do
not exempt my own words that follow from the «self-revelatory» quality
that I perceive in the work of others. I can only hope that my concerns
may be of some interest to you.
I emphasize overall rereading of the poem primarily because I think
that it provides an appreciation of the Comedy quite distinct from
fragmentary or interrupted readings of separate cantos. This may appear
to be an odd pronouncement in this context of a series of lecturae , but I
am not condemning the time-honored practice of the lectura. My point
is additive rather than substitutional; that is, I am suggesting that we
also reread the whole poem from start to finish from time to time even
as we work on necessarily partial and particular passages or issues. In
1984 Giorgio Manganelli published a piece in the Corriere della Sera in
which he wrote: «In the last two months I happened to do something
that I had had in mind for a time, something that certainly many have
done, but at least as many others have not. I read the Divine Comedy . . .
For the first, irrepeatable time I put myself to reading the entire Divine
Comedy from the first line of the inferno to the last line of the Paradiso
without a break. ...[This reading] gave me a never-before- experienced
sensation, which I can only compare to listening integrally to a long
symphony, à la Mahler, or to an endless sonata». The writer goes on to
elaborate a «musical» reading of the poem, in which he calls the Inferno
«operatic», the Purgatorio «an adagio», and the Paradiso «a fugue», and
he concludes: «From the first line ... to the last we listen to an
uninterrupted process: the instruments are [gradually] pared down,
[while] the forms are infinitely complicated. At the end, in the
paradisiacal fugue, geometric vertigo dazes us, and the sonoric threshold,
by now fragile, trembles. And the not forgotten allegro of the Inferno
505
ensnares us. So suiting: just as we suspected».1 This eccentric
description of the Comedy (along with an earlier piece in which
Manganelli argues against Dante's topicality, stating that he has a
strong personal attachment to the idea that the poet is completely
«un-up-to-date» in the sense that he is «painted as if on the background
of some uninhabitable place, in a time that we do not know past or
future: something we can only graze but that we shall never be able to
subject to the laborious and vile manipulation of our 'consumption'»2
reminds us that the poem is precisely an «uninterrupted process», just as
is the journey it portrays; that its «music» changes tenor and tonality
from canticle to canticle (and even from canto to canto); and that we can
best capture ( not «consume») some sense of both the continuous
process and the shifting tones only by refreshing our experience of the
whole work from time to time.
My plunge into an overall rereading was also motivated this time
by the fact that endings of necessity draw us to beginnings and middles.
How to write of the last canto not only of the third canticle but of the
whole poem without having in mind something like a fresh and
close-to-the-surface experience of that wholeness? Furthermore, there is
always something privileged and especially highlighted about endings;
in literature as in speech, closure is what is best remembered, and, as
Victoria Kirkham has written regarding Boccaccio's last tale (but equally
applicable, I believe, to Dante's last canto), «an author's ending is the
point of greatest poetic emphasis». She also reminds us that Dante
restated Cicero's advice in this regard in the Convivio where he wrote:
«the speaker must always keep for last that which he most wants to say;
for that which is said last remains most in the soul of the listener».3
Like a reader of the Comedy , Dante also had to «remember» the entire
poem as he undertook to close it in an appropriately memorable way:
two different but interrelated memories are thus brought into play, one
retrospective, one prospective, as the poet caps the entire poem that has
come before and looks to providing for us that which will remain most
in our souls, that which we shall best remember. (I am assuming that
Dante wrote the last canto last, which of course is highly debatable. He
may well have written it before having completed the preceding cantos,
but this would not in any way cancel out the problematics attached to
its final position).
Immanence and memory, presentness and pastness, hereness and
thereness, are, of course, conditioning factors of the entire poem, but
they are felt most acutely in the last canticle and especially in the last
canto. Added to the already complex temporality dramatized in the poem
- the pastness of the journey and the urgency of making that pastness
506
present in the service of a living re-creation of it - is its built-in
futurity, as the poem's dynamism is maintained in looking ahead
narratively to what is in fact already known. This aspect of the Comedy
might be called the «remembered future» of Dante poet, as contrasted to
the vivid present of the unwinding journey in which the pilgrim is
involved. In order to juggle the disparate temporal balls of his
spectacular act, the poet had to take on the attributes of a schizophrenic,
of a radically divided self. In all of his work, John Freccero (among
some others) has always focused our attention on the way in which
conversion provided Dante with the Archimedean point from which he
could look at the «Dante who was», the lost and confused wanderer of
the beginning of the poem, as a self separate from the «Dante who is»,
the poet who returns from the final vision in order to write of his own
ascension to the light. These two selves come together in the last canto
as the linear trajectory of the journey is subsumed into the circular
consideration (as Freccero has noted, con-sideration literally means
«moving with the stars») of the face of the Divine. The end of the poem
is, then, paradoxically its beginning, for it is the Dante who returns
who is in the position to remember the trip and to record it for
posterity.
My comments on the last canto will pertain to the many ways in
which it highlights the poem's temporal, existential, and stylistic
emphases on what I'll call, for want of a better phrase, poetic tension,
which seems to me to be at the heart of its astonishing achievement.
There is the tension among past, present, and future to which I have
already alluded; there is the tension between pilgrim and poet; there is
the tension between immanence and transcendence; and between
experience and memory. Subtending all of these there is also the
supreme tension between vision and the means by which it is expressed
or, in other words, between what Dante thinks, imagines, and knows,
and what language can capture of those thoughts, imaginings, and
cognitions. I concentrate on three issues (the trinitarian bent is
unintentional, but perhaps inevitable given the poem in question!): the
rhetorical figure, oxymoron; the broader critical issue of memory's role
in poetic creation; and the meaning of the mother understood both as
language and as life-giver, all elements which I see as interconnected.
Closure is generally thought to depend on the resolution of tensions;
Herrnstein Smith writes in her still useful study, Poetic Closure , that
«varying degrees or states of tension seem to be involved in all our
experiences, and the most gratifying ones are those in which whatever
tensions are created are also released» (3). Because, however, the ending
of the Comedy is also its beginning - the pilgrim has «seen» it all,
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and the poet is now ready to remember and to write it all down - poetic
tension is both resolved and not resolved. It is this apparent «paradox»
that I will explore, among other things, in my comments on the last
canto.
Oxymoron is a figure that yokes together elements that would

logically remain separate. It thus generates a tension between opposites
that it does not resolve; in fact it is precisely in their logical
irreconciliability that the figure is born and lives. Joan Ferrante (among
many others) has explored the words and images of Paradiso by which
«Dante attempts the impossible and succeeds in reaching it», and she
concludes that «not only the final lines, but the entire canticle describes
the vision of God, which took place in an extratemporal dimension, to
which cannot be adduced the normal rules of logic and of grammar».4
Similarly, the normal rules of logic cannot be used to explain
oxymoronic meaning, except insofar as they are defied. Lausberg defines
oxymoron as an «intellectual paradox» that results from various kinds of
tensions produced between opposite qualities brought together, or by
means of the affirmation of the simultaneous existence and
non-existence of something; he cites as example of the first Milton's
«darkness visible», and of the second Shakespeare's «This love feel I,
that feel no love in this».
Although technically oxymoron is not a figure heavily used by
Dante (it has its heyday in the Baroque and in our century's lyric), and is
classically considered a mala affectatio or a rhetorical excess,5 I want to
go beyond a purely technically rhetorical definition and to speak of an
oxymoronic tendency or what could be called a «running intellectual
oxymoron» that informs the Comedy and especially the last canticle.6
The entire poem is the assertion of simultaneous existence and
non-existence and of yoked opposites, in the sense that Hell is a
«lacuna» or a vast lack of God's presence, yet filled with lost souls and
eternal suffering; Purgatory is a fixed place of transition , which is
constant in its ever-changing population; and Paradise is the abode of
undifferentiated difference , in that all of the souls are equally static in
their blessedness and eternally saved condition, yet can only be revealed
to Dante and to us by means of a spatially and temporally conditioned
presentation. And encompassing the entire poem is the fundamental
oxymoron of embodied incorporeality, of fleshless souls who
nonetheless suffer, speak, sing, smile, and signify to the pilgrim's
senses as well as to his intellect and emotions. Paradise is intensely
oxymoronic in its own display of the dramatic paradox it is: a spectacle
put on for the mortal eyes of the pilgrim. It is also oxymoronic in its
existence as poetry, as language, for the poet himself tells us in the first
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canto of the third canticle that he saw things «che ridire / né sa né può
chi di là sù discende» (5-6), and he reiterates his inability to capture in
words what the pilgrim saw many times throughout the canticle, all the
while, of course, while capturing in words what he, the poet, «saw» in
his extraordinary creative vision. As Rachel Jacoff has succinctly put it,
«paradox, in fact, is constitutive of the Paradiso both theologically and
poetically», as the «central paradoxical mysteries of Christian faith» are
dramatized and explored in diverse moments of the canticle, and as the
poet also indulges in the «suspension of natural law» vis-à-vis
«linguistic practices and poetic freedoms»7 which raise language to new
heights.
The opening lines of the final canto are a prayer to the Virgin in
which her oxymoronic essence is highlighted. She is the daughter of her
son; she is the most humble and exalted of all creatures; she answers
prayers and gives comfort before any prayers are made or comfort asked
for. She is the concentrated core and fixed goal («termine fisso») of
Christian faith that centers on the paradox of incarnation, of God made
man. While Bernard's prayer does not in any sense resolve the paradox
of such radically oppositional and logically impossible mergings, its
simplicity of language and profound equanimity of tone lend it a power
of persuasion that far exceeds the most elaborate and sophisticated of
logical arguments. It is all the more effective coming as it does at the
end of a canticle that has demanded strenuous intellectual engagement, a
canticle that has expounded complex logical and theological arguments,
that has put the pilgrim (and us) through tests, that has stretched both
our minds and our imaginations to the limit. The prayer maintains the
tension of the «running oxymoron» of the poem, then, but in its turn to
simple syntax and language, it «naturalizes» paradox, and makes it
much less estranging than complicated logic often is. We have in it, for
example, the rhyme «amore-fiore» that Saba called «la più antica
difficile del mondo»; we have unadorned, essential phrases such as
«l'umana natura», «l'etterna pace», and «l'ultima salute», and universal
substantives and attributes such as «madre», «figlia», «figlio»,
«benignità», «caritate», «bontate». We might say that the supernatural
miracle of Mary - and, by extension, of the Christian God's infinite
love for mankind as embodied in his Son - is domesticated by this
exquisitely simple and accessible language, while, nevertheless, none of
the profoundly «illogical» and paradoxical (and therefore anything but
domestic; rather, ultimately alien to the human realm) essence of
beatitude is cancelled out. This is the first specific example in this canto
of what I mean by «poetic tension», whereby opposites (in this case,
simplicity and complexity) are not resolved, nor do they openly clash,
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but rather they synergistically interact in a sort of oxymoronic
synchronicity.
If what is emphasized in the prayer to Mary is a theological
paradox, a more specifically linguistic and poetic kind of paradox or
«running oxymoron» permeating the final canto might be described in a
condensed manner by the phrase «inexpressible expression». Readers of
Dante have consistently pointed to the intensification of the poet's
assertions of language's incapacity to describe the final vision, all the
while that he does instead succeed in describing it. While I agree that the
poet's goal is to describe what he saw (as is true throughout the poem),
I want to segue into my second topic - the role of memory in poetic
creation - by reminding us of T. G. Bergin's assertion that «many of
Dante's similes do not so much make us see what he sees as feel as he
feels» (286-287). Much of Tibor Wlassics' work as well has explored
the techniques by which Dante makes us «feel as he feels», not only by
means of simile but by a variety of rhetorical, grammatical, and
figurative devices.8 Now, the final canto is a moment of extraordinary
vision, but also (and perhaps even more so) of intense emotion.
Memory is evoked here, in its infinite power as well as in its radical
limitations, both as the site of things seen and things felt, and both the
sights and the feelings must somehow be brought back to the present if
past experience is to be captured in words. The «inexpressible
expression» that marks the end of the poem is, at least in part, Dante's
straining after the means by which to portray in words the heart of
memory, which is abstractly emotional and not concretely visual.
(Incidentally, Nobel Prize winning neurobiologist Gerald Edelman,
whose current work centers on understanding the human brain, «abhors
the postulation that the brain warehouses a remembered scene in some
neuronal vault as if it were a roll of celluloid to be brought back later,
threaded into the mental projector, and replayed. ... A memory is not so
much a rerun as a re-creation». The New Yorker article goes on to say
that Edelman's speculations «have led observers ... to note that
Edelman 's theory is not only built upon the heritage of Darwinism and
the rigors of physical science but imbued with a touch of poetry. It even
helps explain poetry: flights of metaphor and their evocations can be
seen as the result of reentrant processes»).9
The deeply emotional aura that envelops this canto is first
generated in the ardor of Bernard, who is «one of the great poets of the
affective tradition» (Jacoff, 219). Bernard says that he «burned» for his
vision of God and now burns equally for Dante's, and the repetition of
the word «pregare» (in lines 29, 32, 34, 39, and 42) emphasizes the
urgency of intensely felt supplication. Bernard also prays to the Virgin
510
that Dante's «affetti» be preserved safely after he will have seen so much
(34-36), and Dante comes onto the scene immediately after the prayer as
one who is «drawing near to the end of all desires» and who is therefore
intensifying desire's ardor to its utmost («E io ch'ai fine di tutť i disii /
appropinquava, sì com'io dovea, / l'ardor del desiderio in me finii»
[46-48]). As the pilgrim's sight reaches more and more into the Light,
both language and memory concede defeat («cedere»), for neither can
come up to «tanto oltraggio» (57), to so much excess of sight and
feeling. However, in the great comparison that follows, in which Dante
likens himself to «collii che sognando vede», I find it immensely
important that what the poet underlines so exquisitely in this portrait of
the dreamer is that, although what was seen in the dream disappears, «la
passione impressa / rimane» (59-60). Feeling thus moves completely to
the forefront, and it is the now again present «sweetness» («ancor mi
distilla / nel core il dolce»), the remembered and relived emotion, rather
than the sight («che quasi tutta cessa / mia visione») that permits the
poet to depict, even if in his «corta favella», something of what he
experienced. I have literally underlined «now again present» for it is in
that move from past tense to present tense («cotai son io») and in that
little word «ancor» that the role of memory in poetic creation is
fleetingly captured. Poetry is born when a memory is felt and lived as
presence.
I want to linger a bit with the word «ancora». It means «still»,
«even now», «once again», and I find it to be one of the most
emotionally resonant words in any language (or at least in the few I
know). The word defies time and difference, bringing into the present
what is in fact past, claiming a sort of eternity of unchanging affect. It
is affective memory's word. Dante uses it at various moments
throughout the poem to indicate the persistence of an intense emotion.
In the «comedy of the devils», for example, in which the pilgrim feels
particularly fearful, Dante writes of the frog-like sinners perched around
the pit of pitch, but withdrawing under its boiling surface as the demon
Barbariccia approaches. One sinner is not fast enough to escape another
demon, Graffiacan, and the poet writes: «I' vidi, e anco il cor me
n'accapriccia, / uno aspettar così, com 'elli 'ncontra / eh' una rana rimane
e l'altra spiccia» ( inferno XXII. 31-33). The memory is so alive to the
poet emotionally that he has heart palpitations then and there as he
writes it down! Another infernal example is Dante's recollection of the
sighting of Bertran de Born, who is holding his own head as if it were a
swinging lantern: «Io vidi certo, ed ancor par ch'io '1 veggia, / un busto
sanza capo andar sì come / andavan li altri de la trista greggia» ( Inferno
XXVIII. 1 18-120). Here we have what has become a topos of the horror
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genre, whether in fiction or in film: the moment when the hero, safely
back home, gathers his tremulous family about him to tell them of the
monstrous sights he has been exposed to and, as he tells, his fear retums
and he exclaims: «I can still see them, as if they were right here before
my very eyes!». Perhaps one of the most memorable for me of the
various ancora* s in the poem is the one used in Purgatorio II, when
Dante meets up with his old friend Casella and asks him to play some
of the soothing music of yore. Casella obliges with a rendition of
Dante's very own canzone, «Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona», and
Dante writes: «cominciò egli allor sì dolcemente / che la dolcezza ancor
dentro mi suona» (1 13-1 14). Fear, horror, and intense aesthetic pleasure
are not only remembered and described in these lines, but they are refelt
as the lines are written (or at least this is what the poet would have us
to understand, in his efforts to «make us feel what he feels»). He did not
just feel these emotions in the past, but he still feels them as he
remembers the experiences that first generated them, and, further, it is as
if the experiences can be best re-created and described in words precisely
when the emotion attached to them comes alive again in all of its felt
urgency.
Thus it is in the final canto of the poem: even if the vision itself
has melted away like snow under a hot sun and has been scattered and
lost on the wind like the Sibyl's leaves, the essence of it remains in the
«sweetness» that still trickles drop by drop into the poet's heart. I
cannot help but remind us of another supremely beautiful poetic version
of this persistence: Shakespeare's Sonnet V, in which we read: «Then,
were not summer's distillation left, / A liquid prisoner pent in walls of
glass, / Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft, / Nor it, nor no
remembrance what it was. / But flowers distill'd, though they with
winter meet, / Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet».
Memory is thus emotion that is again, once more, and always felt (not
exactly «recollected in tranquillity», which is to me too purely
intellectual and does not take into account the bodily quality of memory
in poetic creation), and poetry is born out of the revived emotion that in
turn revives the visual and other experiential stimuli of that emotion.
The tension between past and present is concentrated in the infinitely
resonant «ancora» or «still» by which so much poetry (as well as so
many of our own intensely felt utterances of persistent emotion) is
marked.
This brings me to my third topic, which is the «mother element»
in the poem and specifically in its closural moments. I say (rather
awkwardly) «mother element» rather than simply the mother, because I
am not going to talk about Dante's mother or any other specific
512
mothers, terrestrial or transcendental. Rather, I want to discuss the ways
in which «mother», understood as a linguistic and existential principle
of origination, nurturance, and identity, permeates the poem and
pervades its ending. My consideration of memory brings me to this
topic in part simply because it is more or less generally believed that
our earliest memories (and our sweetest, if we are lucky enough to have
good real mothers) are tied to our mothers. Our native languages are also
«mother tongues», to which we maintain a deep and intimate tie, and
through which we feel that we can express our truest selves. It might be
said that memory itself (and therefore personal identity, for who are we
without our memories?) is maternal, and that our language is the matrix
of our being.
In my preparatory readings of critical work on the poem and on this
last canto, I have discovered that many scholars have written
illuminating words on the mother. Specialists of Dante are no doubt
already well acquainted with the work on the feminine in Dante by
Rachel Jacoff, Jeffrey Schnapp, Joan Ferrante, Marianne Shapiro, and
others.10 My brief comments serve mainly as reiteration and
reinforcement of many of their subtlely argued insights concerning the
ways in which Dante inscribes the maternal, conceptually, stylistically,
and philosophically, into his poem. I nonetheless believe that repeating
some of these elements now is not without value. First, there is the fact
that Dante chose to write the Comedy in Italian, rather than Latin: in
his mother tongue, that is, rather than in the authoritative «father
tongue» of the classical epic tradition which he held so dear, or of the
theological and philosophical auctores who shaped his doctrinal and
intellectual convictions. In attempting to answer the difficult question,
«Why Did Dante Write the Comedy ?», Robert Hollander responds by
thinking not so much about «why» but about «how he conceived his
task», and highlights the poet's choice to write in the vernacular: «while
devoted to classical example, [Dante] would nonetheless set himself
apart from the lofty style by embracing the lowly language of mothers
and nurses, the sermo humilis that is more significantly attuned to the
example of Christ's speech in Scripture than perhaps to anything else»
(25). Whether for this reason or others, Dante's choice to write in the
language he learned as a small child («at his mother's knee», so to
speak) is alluded to one last time when the poet moves into the
concluding section of the canto in which he gives us the Final Vision.
At line 106, the inadequacy of his speech («favella») is compared to that
of a nursing child («un fante / che bagni ancor la lingua a la
mammella»), and thus the union of language and mother is implicitly
underscored in the rhyme words. (Earlier examples of the felt connection
513
between the maternal and the linguistic are found in Paradiso XV, when
the poet is describing the good Florence of old where «L' una vegghiava
a studio de la culla, / e, consolando, usava l'idioma / che prima i padri e
le madri trastulla» [121-123], or in Paradiso XXVII, when the
degeneracy of humankind is denounced, a variety of which is embodied
in the person who «balbuzïendo, ama e ascolta / la madre sua, che, con
loquela intera, / disia poi di vederla sepolta» [133-135]). Dante's
attachment to his mother tongue is one of the most basic of the
maternal elements from which the poem originates and to which the
poet returns as a repository for these and many other images and
examples throughout the Comedy.
That the last canto is under the sign of Mary is, of course, not
accidental. It was Mary who moved Lucy and Beatrice to provide sorely
needed aid to the pilgrim lost in the dark wood at the opening of the
poem, and it is Mary to whom Dante arrives at the threshold of the end.
Her presence in the poem is circular, then, and it literally envelops the
Comedy , much as a mother encircles her child as nurturer both before its
birth and after. The circle is the geometric figure of perfection, but it is
also the shape of the egg, of the womb, and of the cyclical, all of which
are understood as feminine in essence. Is it entirely farfetched to suggest
that as the pilgrim gazes into the «circulazion» in order to fix upon «la
nostra effige» within it, he is gazing at the «womb» of the universe (and
going back into it) from which all of humanity was, is, and will be
born?11 I cannot «prove» that the final vision is deeply conditioned by
what I have called the «maternal element» that pervades the entire poem,
but I feel it to be so. Another way of trying to express this intuition is
to say that Dante perhaps sees God as a matrix, as a sort of womb or
«incubator» for «la nostra effige», both as it is incarnated in the
Word-Made-Flesh of Christ and as it is born again and again in every
living human. If this is so, then the poem is one of the most
life-affirming of artistic visions the world has ever seen and, in
contemporary theoretical parlance, it expresses avant la lettre a
philosophy very much akin to that which is seeking to elaborate the
concept of a «maternal symbolic order».12 The tension that informs the
final vision is in the oxymoronic portrayal of an end that is not an end,
textually, metaphysically, and humanly. That is, the end of the poem
takes us back to its beginning; the reunion with God after the end of life
on earth takes us back to true life; and the «human effigy» at the core of
the Divine takes us back to our shared and ever ongoing humanity as
life is continuously re-created on earth. Tapping deeply not only into his
learning and his artistic mastery, but also into his affective memory, the
poet creates a «dream» the sweetness of which still fills readers centuries
514
after its creation. Dante's genius may well reside, at least in part, in his
ability to recognize the human, philosophical, and poetic profundity of
one of humankind's (and not only humankind's) most essential bonds,
that one based on the bodily connection between mother and child: a
union unlike any other we shall ever experience in this life. The afterlife
in a Heaven of perfect and eternal reunion with the matrix of all being
we leave to the «sommo poeta».
NOTES
^The original passages are as follows: «Negli ultimi due mesi mi è accaduto
di fare qualcosa che da tempo avevo in animo, che certo molti hanno fatto,
ma almeno altrettanti non hanno mai fatto. Ho letto la Divina Commedia
... per la prima, irrepetibile volta mi sono provato a leggere tutta la Divina
Commedia dal primo verso dell'Inferno all'ultimo del Paradiso, senza
soluzioni di continuità ... La lettura continuata ... mi ha dato una
sensazione inedita, posso paragonarla soltanto all'ascolto integrale di
lunga sinfonia, alla Mahler, o di una sterminata sonata ... Dal primo v
dell'Inferno all'ultimo del Paradiso ascoltiamo un processo ininterrott
semplificano gli strumenti, si complicano infinitamente i disegni.
fine, nel fugato paradisiaco, la vertigine geometrica ci abbacina, trem
soglia sonora, ormai fragile. E ci insidia l'allegro non dimenticato
dell'Inferno. Così congeniale: come sospettavamo» («Dante: Divina
Commedia» in Laboriose inezie , 92 & 94).
2«Sono personalmente affezionato all'idea che egli sia inattuale, campito in
un luogo inabitabile, in un tempo che ignoriamo se sia passato o futuro:
qualcosa che possiamo solo sfiorare ma non potremo mai sottoporre alla
manipolazione laboriosa e vile del nostro 'consumo'» («Dante» in
Laboriose inezie , 96. )
În her discussion of the Griselda story, Kirkham concludes that «the
brigata' s journey has an ascensional direction» and «further, by the
precepts of Ciceronian rhetoric, which Boccaccio knew well and practiced,
the end is always reserved for what is most important». She provides us
with the original words of Dante as they appear in his Convivio II 8,2:
«sempre quello che massimamente dire intende lo dicitore sì dee riservare di
dietro; però che quello che ultimamente si dice, più rimane ne l'animo de lo
uditore» (264).
^Non solo i versi finali, ma l'intera cantica descrive la visione di Dio, che è
avvenuta in una dimensione fuori del tempo, cui non si addicono le normali
regole di logica e di grammatica» («Parole e immagini nel Paradiso :
Riflessi del divino», in Studi americani su Dante , 219).
^Lausberg's definition of oxymoron is on page 212 of his Elementi di
retorica ; mala affectatio is described on page 66 as «il vitium per eccesso»
515
whereby «l'intenzione artistica non è guidata dal iudicium e si compiace,
oltre la misura dell 'aptum, di superare l'attività della virtus tanto da
degenerare in vitium». Although Dante was always guided by good
judgment, it is also true that these terms having to do with poetry that is
«excessive», «beyond appropriate measure», and that «goes beyond» are
particularly appropriate to the Paradiso in both its visionary and its
linguistic reach.
°I have here «plagiarized» my own past thought on oxymoron in Montale's
poetry; I wrote regarding the «Mottetti» words that I think applicable as
well to Dante: «Throughout the series the tone captures the poet's
vacillation between confidence in the efficacy of his stylistic adventure and
his constant awareness of the fragility of a purely poetic reevocation of
what was once lived experience. It is this 'running intellectual oxymoron'
rather than the specific rhetorical figure of the same name that creates the
fundamental ambiguity and tension that inform these lyrics» {Eugenio
Montale: Poet on the Edge , 46). The phrase «running intellectual
oxymoron» was taken from Almansi and Merry, 79.
'I am quoting from Jacoff's «Shadowy prefaces: an introduction to
Paradiso », (221) which I strongly recommend for its clarity, sensitivity,
and deep insights into the canticle.
°I am thinking primarily of Dante narratore : Saggi sullo stile della
« Commedia », a mine of insights into the poetry of the Comedy (and into
poetry generally).
9 Science and poetry are not opposites, of course, and it is good to be
reminded of their interconnection in this magazine of more or less general
consumption. Having reread Proust recently reminded me, as I read the
piece on Edelman 's work, of how the writer also knew that memory is not a
«rerun» but a «re-creation». As the narrator of Combray probes the intense
experience of the petite madeleine , he writes: «Chercher? pas seulement:
créer. Il est en face de quelque chose qui n'est pas encore et que seul il peut
réaliser, puis faire entrer dans sa lumière».
A few of these pieces are listed in «Works Consulted».
Hin his «Antropomorfismo dantesco», Wlassics writes: «Perfino arrivando
all'ultima méta, al divino dall'umano, al termine della visione egli
percepisce ancora una volta 'la nostra immagine' anche nell'arcano
spettacolo della triuna divinità, - ritornando, si può dire, dal 'divino'
ancora una volta all' 'umano'» ( Dante narratore. 163).
1^1 am referring to the work of the «Diotima» group of women philosophers
based in Verona. Luisa Muraro and Adriana Cavarero, among many others,
have written on the «symbolic order of the mother», wherein the primal
and absolutely fundamental bond with our actual mothers, who are
life-givers and language-givers, is reactivated in the refounding of thought
and social practice both. This is not the place to attempt a full description
of their work; I can only suggest that interested readers begin with
Muraro 's L'ordine simbolico della madre and Cavarero 's Nonostante
Platone.
516
WORKS CONSULTED
Alessio, Gian Carlo & Robert Hollander, eds. Studi americani su Dante.
Milan: Franco Angeli, 1989;
Dante Alighieri. La Commedia secondo l'antica vulgata (4 vols. ). Ed.
Giorgio Petrocchi. Milan: Società Dantesca Italiana, 1966-68; The Divine
Comedy (3 vols.). Tr., with a commentary, by Charles S. Singleton.
Princeton: Princeton UP, 1973-75;
Almansi, Guido & Bruce Merry. Eugenio Montale: The Private Language of
Poetry. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1977;
Barolini, Teodolinda. The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante.
Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992;
Bergin, Thomas G. An Approach to Dante. London: The Bodley Head, 1965;
Caesar, Michael, ed. Dante: The Critical Heritage 1314 (?)-1870. London &
New York: Routledge, 1989;
Casella, Mario. «II canto XXXIII del Paradiso» in Getto, ed. : 2021-2038;
Cavarero, Adriana. Nonostante Platone: Figure femminili nella filosofìa
antica. Rome: Ed. Riuniti, 1991;
Cervigni Dino S., ed. Annali d' Italianistica: Dante and Modem American
Criticism , vol. 8, 1990;
Ferrante, Joan M. «Parole e immagini nel Paradiso : Riflessi del Divino» in
Alessio & Hollander, eds. 203-219; «Why Did Dante Write the Comedy?».
Dante Studies CXI (1993): 9-18;
Freccero, John. Dante: The Poetics of Conversion. Ed. with an
introduction, by Rachel Jacoff. Cambridge, Ma. & London: Harvard UP,
1986;
Getto, Giovanni, ed. Letture dantesche, (vol. 3). Florence: Sansoni, 1964;
Herrnstein Smith, Barbara. Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End.
Chicago & London: University of Chicago P. , 1968;
Hollander, Robert. «Why Did Dante Write the Comedy!». Dante Studies CXI
(1993): 19-25;
Jacoff, Rachel. «Shadowy prefaces: an introduction to Paradiso». The
Cambridge Companion to Dante , Rachel Jacoff, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 1993: 208-225; «God as Mother: Julian of Norwich's Theology of
Love». Denver Quarterly : The Rhetoric of Feminist Writing. Vol. 18, no. 4
(Winter 1984): 134-139;
Kirkham, Victoria. The Sign of Reason in Boccaccio' s Fiction. Florence:
Olschki, 1993;
Kirkpatrick, Robin. Dante's «Paradiso» and the Limitations of Modern
Criticism: A Study of Style and Poetic Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1978;
Lausberg, Heinrich. Elementi di retorica. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1969;
Levy, Steven. «Dr. Edelman's Brain». The New Yorker (May 2, 1994):
62-73;
Manganelli, Giorgio. Laboriose inezie. Milan: Garzanti, 1986; «Dante:
Divina Commedia» in Laboriose inezie , 91-94; «Dante» in Laboriose
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inezie , 95-97;
Mazzotta, Giuseppe. Dante's Vision and the Circle of Knowledge. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1993;
Muraro, Luisa. L'ordine simbolico della madre. Rome: Ed. Riuniti, 1991;
Schnapp, Jeffrey T. «Virgilio madre e Beatrice ammiraglio: generi
grammaticali e letterari nella Commedia». Alessio & Hollander, eds.:
221-242;
Shapiro, Marianne. Woman Earthly and Divine in the «Comedy» of Dante.
Lexington: The UP of Kentucky, 1975;
West, Rebecca J. Eugenio Montale: Poet on the Edge. Cambridge & London:
Harvard UP, 1981;
Wlassics, Tibor. Dante narratore: Saggi sullo stile della «Commedia» .
Florence: Olschki, 1975.
518
Editor's Note
Author(s): tw
"Divine Comedy" Introductory Readings III: Paradiso (SPRING-FALL 1995), p. 519
Accessed: 17-02-2020 23:10 UTC
Lectura Dantis
Editor's Note
This third and last installment of LD's major undertaking, the «first
multivoice 'American' lectura» of Dante's Divine Comedy, follows the
intentions and characteristics of its 'infernal' and 'purgatorial' predecessors,
the LD special issues respectively for Spring 1990 and Spring 1993. Like
our Introductory Readings to the Inferno and Purgatorio, this Paradiso
volume «claims to present a cross-section of 'anglophone' Dante
scholarship, while endeavoring to represent all major critical approaches»
to Dante.
Like the two earlier volumes, this paradisiacal issue maintains LD's
practice of allowing any coherent system of bibliographic notation.
Quotations from the Comedy are given in Italian and follow the readings of
Giorgio Petrocchi's antica vulgata. The collection is addressed, again, «to
the reader who, though not necessarily fluent in Italian, will keep a bilingual
Comedy handy while perusing the essays».
Two of the thirty-three lecturae are reprinted from regular issues of LD.
They are: chapters XXI (from LD 11, pp. 42-51: «Dante's Lesson of Silence:
Paradiso 21») and XXVI (from LD 6, pp. 46-59: «Language and Desire in
Paradiso XXVII»). Chapter III appears here in its author's English version of
the Italian original (LD 11, pp. 26-41: «Piccarda e la luna: Paradiso EI»).
In announcing the volume (in the «endpaper» of the olive issue, Fall
1991), we affirmed that once the Paradiso readings are published «the
primary function of this journal may be considered fulfilled». The vague
wording alarmed some readers. Of course the journal, in its regular function
as a refereed «forum for Dante research and interpretation», already plans to
celebrate 2021 (and 2065?). Some articles on hand may in fact come out in
the anniversary number...
A propos. «Thank you for your patience», writes an overseas
Contributor (author of chapter IX: look it up), echoing the feelings of this
much harrassed editor. «There will be, I am sure, a terrace of academic
Purgatory (or, more probably, ante- Purgatory) reserved for those who were
excessively slow in sending promised articles» [or in printing accepted
ones]. «You will find me there», Contributor concludes, «resting under the
shadow of a stack of library books» and, may we add, sipping white wine -
to celebrate 2121...
tw
519
Lectura Dantis
Editorial Board 1991-1993: Zygmunt Barański ( University of

Reading)-, Amilcare Iannucci ( University of Toronto)-, Lino Perti
(University of Edinburgh)-, Regina Psaki ( University of Oregon);
Ricardo Quiñones (Claremont McKenna College); William Wilson

University of London); Steven Botterill (University of Calif
Berkeley); Franco Ferrucci (Rutgers University); Deborah Pa
(University of Virginia); Michelangelo Picone (Universität Z
Lectura Dantis is a refereed journal of Dante research and interpr

It is published twice a year, in the Fall and Spring, by the Italian Pro
Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, University of Virgin
members of the Editorial Board agree to advise the Editor, for a bienn
the contents of four issues. The Editorial Assistant is appointed for
issue. Lectura Dantis is an independent publication. Subscription
1995 is $10 (back issues $10; supplementary volumes $20 each). Re
Dantis, 122 Wilson Hall, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA
22903.
ISSN 0897-5280
Printed by Bailey Printing, Charlottesville, VÁ 22903

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Lectura Dantis

A forum for Dante research and interpretation

NUMBERS 16-17 SPRING-FALL 1995

Special Issue: Lectura Dantis Virginian

Dante's Divine Comedy

NUMBERS 16-17 SPRING-FALL 1995

Special Issue : Lectura Dantis Vi

Paradiso I • Franco Ferrucci 3

Editor : Tibor Wlassics (University of Virginia)

Editorial Board 1991-1993: Zygmunt Barański (University of

Editorial Board 1994-1996: Peter Armour (Royal Holloway

Editorial Assistant 1995: Michael Papio (Brown University )

Lectura Dantis is a refereed journal of Dante research and interpretation.

Printed by Bailey Printing, Charlottesville, VA 22903

NUMBERS 16-17 SPRING-FALL 1995

Special Issue: Lectura Dantis Virginian

Dante's Divine Comedy

Editor : Tibor Wlassics (University of Virginia)

Editorial Board 1991-1993: Zygmunt Barański ( University of

Editorial Board 1994-1996: Peter Armour (Royal Holloway

Editorial Assistant 1995: Michael Papio (Brown University )

Lectura Dantis is a refereed journal of Dante research and interpr

Printed by Bailey Printing, Charlottesville, VÁ 22903

NUMBERS 16-17 SPRING-FALL 1995

Special Issue : Lectura Dantis Vi

Paradiso I • Franco Ferrucci 3

Editor : Tibor Wlassics (University of Virginia)

Editorial Board 1991-1993: Zygmunt Barański (University of

Editorial Board 1994-1996: Peter Armour (Royal Holloway

Editorial Assistant 1995: Michael Papio (Brown University )

Lectura Dantis is a refereed journal of Dante research and interpretation.

Printed by Bailey Printing, Charlottesville, VA 22903

Ne l'ordine ch'io dico sono accline

Metamorphosis has already begun its course while Dante is staring at

Non dei più ammirar, se bene stimo,

La gloria di colui che tutto muove

The universe is everywhere visible and explorable, notwithstanding the

- with the obvious difference that Dante-Marsyas has swallowed

The first canto of Paradiso announces an imminent celebration. T

Veramente quant' io del regno santo

O buono Appollo, a l'ultimo lavoro

e di sùbito parve giorno a giorno

Beatrice tutta ne l'etterne rote

It is the astonishing balance that precedes a portent - and in fact

Questi organi del mondo così vanno,

This imagined descent of virtue-filled light from planet to planet is then

It would be a serious mistake to try to grasp the meaning of this

If, after this infratextual exploration of the archetype, we

The Heaven of the Moon

In the representation of the first sphere, a curious and, in the last

^The two references to the charismatic guide underline the progressive

Canto III ended with Dante in a state of perplexity t

Intra due cibi, distanti e moventi

Fé sì Beatrice qual fé Daniello,

The first doubt which Beatrice addresses (28-63

Per questo la Scrittura condescende

Scripture, Beatrice says, condescends to human intelligence by

Having dealt with Dante's more serious problem, Bea

Beatrice's discourse is clear, logical, and exhausti

L'animo mio, per disdegnoso gusto,

In a little classic of Dante criticism Leo Spitzer describe

Siate, Cristiani, a muovervi più gravi:

Beatrice's discourse ends, and Dante describes it as the rippling of a