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The Poetry of
Dante’s Paradiso
Lives Almost Divine,
Spirits that Matter
Jeremy Tambling
The Poetry of Dante’s Paradiso
Jeremy Tambling
The Poetry of Dante’s

Paradiso
Lives Almost Divine, Spirits that Matter
Jeremy Tambling
London, UK
ISBN 978-3-030-65627-0 ISBN 978-3-030-65628-7 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65628-7
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Preface and a Note on the Text
I began research for this book—which as it is intended as a close reading

of a text will benefit most from being read alongside a copy of Paradiso—
when on holiday in Lodève in 2010. After publication of my book
Dante in Purgatory: States of Affect (Brepols, 2010), which itself was
started in 2003 on holiday in Pernes-les-Fontaines, I began earnest work
by reading the canto-by-canto commentaries on Paradiso edited by Allen
Mandelbaum, and following that with the Tibor Wlassics introductory
readings to Paradiso (University of Virginia Press, 1995). Both these volumes,
and their authors therein, and Robert Hollander’s edition of Paradiso
(2007), were invaluable starters. But this book is less a sequel to work on
Purgatorio than new ideas coupled with thinking about Paradiso which go
back to my doctorate, and my book Dante and Difference: Writing in the
Commedia (Cambridge University Press, 1988), and to work which has
appeared since in journals.
Thus, material on cantos 8 and 9 greatly revises and develops a paper:
‘The Violence of Venus: Dante in Paradiso’ (Romanic Review 90 (2000),
93–114), while a draft of material on canto 11 appeared as ‘Dante and St
Francis: Shaping Lives: Reshaping Allegory’ in Walter S. Melion and Bart
Ramakers (eds.), Personification: Embodying Meaning and Emotion
(Leiden: Brill, 2016, 73–94). I am grateful for permission to reprint.
Further, I wrote before on cantos 21 and 22 in ‘Getting Above the
Thunder: Dante in the Sphere of Saturn’ MLR 90 (1995), 632–645, and
incorporated some of it into my Dante in Purgatory. An unpublished draft
of material on canto 6 was given to a Medieval and Renaissance Literature
v
vi PREFACE AND A NOTE ON THE TEXT
seminar at Queen Mary University, November 2012; thanks to Adrian

Armstrong for organising that. An early draft of some of canto 10 appeared
in an unpublished paper for a conference on Isidore of Seville in Manchester
University, 2012, and part of material which appears here on canto 33 was
delivered at a conference on ‘Forgotten Books’ at National Taipei
University of Technology, Taiwan, May 2016. An early version of the
work on the Cacciaguida cantos was read to the Oxford Dante Society on
9 November 2016, and I am grateful to Nick Havely for arranging this
and to the Society for hosting me. Material relevant to canto 9 was read to
a seminar at King’s College London in 2018 and I am grateful to Michael
Silk for arranging that. Two papers given at St Andrews, on Purgatorio 4,
and Convivio 3, stimulated my interest in Dante’s astronomy: thanks to
Robert Wilson and Claudia Rossignoli for the invitations. While writing, I
turned some undergraduate lectures into a book, Histories of the Devil
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), and much thinking for that book has gone
indirectly into this.
Thanks to Peter Such, whose edition of the Poema de mio Cid stimu-
lated interest in Dante and Spain. I thank him and Rich Rabone for letting
me see their translation of the Poema de Fernán González in manuscript
and for discussion of medieval Spain. During writing, I recall a good con-
versation with Patrick Boyde. Thanks are due to Dennis Walder for
encouragement; to Spencer Pearce, Priscilla Martin, Terry Bird, Peter
Crickmore, John Pickering, David Wells, and Louis Lo, for conversations
and especially for doing the diagram; and to Jo Rose, for ‘mastering’
everything as it’s called, to do with the manuscript.
I could not have written this book at all without consistent encourage-
ment and loving support from Pauline. Any dedication must go to her.
The book was finished in a week when Emil, a second grandchild, was
born; he joins Kirsten and Simon, Frances, and Felix, as part of a circle
which makes this writing an act of hope as much as an attempt at
scholarship.
A note on Bibliographies: Dante has received so much attention that it
is not possible to keep abreast. I have referenced work which I have used;
Bibliographies add other work consulted, but not necessarily mentioned
in the text or notes.
Jeremy Tambling
Abbreviations and References
Dante’s Commedia comprises three cantiche—that is, Inferno (Inf.),

Purgatorio (Purg.), and Paradiso (Para.). Quotations, by canto and
line numbers (e.g. Para. 20.13), come from the three-volume edition
of Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1999–2001).
Equally useful, and cited are:
Bosco/Reggio—the three volumes edited by Umberto Bosco and
Giovanni Reggio (Florence: Le Monnier, 1979)
Sapegno—the three volumes edited by Natalino Sapegno (Florence: La
Nuova Italia, 1968).
It is to be assumed that reference to the name is to the relevant passage of
the poem being discussed.
Dante’s minor works are cited from the Opere minori, 2 vols, ed. Domenico
de Robertis, Gianfranco Contini, and Cesare Vasoli (Milan: Ricciardi,
1979). Here appear references to VN (i.e. Vita Nuova), Con. (Convivio),
DVE (De Vulgari Eloquentia), and Mon. (Monarchia)
Other editions of Dante referred to by abbreviations are as follows:
Frisnardi—Convivio trans. Andrew Frisnardi (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2018).
Durling and Martinez—The Divine Comedy trans. Robert M. Durling and
Ronald L. Martinez.
Inferno (1996), Purgatorio (2003), Paradiso (2011) (Oxford: Oxford
University Press)
Hollander—Paradiso edited and translated by Robert Hollander and Jean
Hollander (New York: Doubleday, 2007).
vii
viii ABBREVIATIONS AND REFERENCES
Kay—Monarchia trans. Richard Kay (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of

Medieval Studies, 1998).
Lansing—Convivio trans. Richard Lansing (New York: Garland, 1990).
Rime—Kenelm Foster and Patrick Boyde, Dante’s Lyric Poetry 2 vols
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967).
Pharsalia—Lucan, Civil War trans. Susan H. Braund (Oxford:
O.U.P., 1992).
Ryan—Dante’s The Banquet ed. Michael Ryan (Saratoga: CA: ANMA
Libri, 1989).
Reynolds and Sayers—Hell and Purgatory trans. and ed. Dorothy Sayers,
and Paradise trans.
Dorothy Sayers and Barbara Reynolds, and ed. Barbara Reynolds
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1949–1962).
Shaw, Monarchia trans. Prue Shaw (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995).
Toynbee—Dante, Dantis Alagherii Epistlolae ed. Paget Toynbee, 2nd edi-
tion ed. Colin Hardie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966).
Shapiro—De Vulgari Eloquentia: Dante’s Book of Exile trans. Marianne
Shapiro (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990).
Singleton—Commedia ed. and trans. Charles Singleton (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1970–1975).
Translations from Italian are mine but with much dependence upon edi-
tions given above which show on every page.
Other authors and titles:

Aquinas—Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologia 9: Angels. trans. Kenelm
Foster (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode 1963).
Boethius—Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy in The Theological
Tractates trans. S.J. Tester (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1973).
City—Augustine, City of God—trans. Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1972). Quoted by book and chapter.
Confessions—Henry Chadwick, trans. Augustine: Confessions (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1991).
De Anima—Aristotle, De Anima, trans. Hugh Lawson-Tancred
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986).
ED—Enciclopedia Dantesca ed. Umberto Bosco, 6 vols. (Roma: Istituto
della enciclopedia italiana, 1984).
DS—Dante Studies
ABBREVIATIONS AND REFERENCES ix
GL—Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints,

trans. William Granger Ryan, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1993).
Heroides—Ovid, Heroides trans. Grant Showerman rev. G.P. Goold
(Cambridge Mass.: Harvard U.P., 1977).
Lansing—Richard Lansing, Dante Encyclopaedia (New York:
Garland, 2000).
Life—Stephen Bemrose, Stephen, A New Life of Dante (Exeter: Exeter
U.P., 2009).
Metaphysics—Aristotle, The Metaphysics, trans. Hugh Lawson-Tancred
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004).
Met.—Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller and G.P. Goold
(Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1977).
Fausti—Ovid, Fausti trans. J.G. Frazer, rev. J.G. Goold (London:
Heinemann, 1966).
Ars Amatoria—Ovid, The Art of Love and Other Poems trans. J. H. Mozley
(London: Heinemann, 1959).
Heroide—Ovid, Heroides and Amores trans., Grant Showerman (London:
Heinemann, 1971)
Plotinus—Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna, introduction
by John Dillon (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991).
Physics—Aristotle, Physics trans. Robin Waterfield, Oxford: O.U.P., 1996.
Timaeus—Plato, Timaeus and Critias, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford:
O.U.P., 2008).
Virgil, Virgil, 2 vols, Loeb Classical Library trans. by H. Ruston Fairclough
revised G.P. Goold (London: Heinemann, 1967).
Quotations from the Bible come from the King James (1611) version,
sometimes corrected from the Revised (1881) version.
Contents
1 Introduction: Reading Paradiso Out of Time 1
2 Within the Shadow of the Earth 29
3 Dancing in the Sun: Paradiso—Cantos 10–14 91
4 Mars, Jupiter, Saturn: History and Its Reversals141
5 Fixed Stars, Diasporic Times: Paradiso 22–27193
6 Angels: Paradiso 28 and 29233
7 The Ultimate Vision: Paradiso 30–33271
Index307
xi
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Reading Paradiso Out of Time
If one had to expound the doctrine of antiquity with utmost brevity … it

could only be in this sentence: ‘They alone shall possess the earth who live
from the powers of the cosmos’. Nothing distinguishes the ancient from the
modern man so much as the former’s absorption of a cosmic experience
scarcely known to the later periods. Its waning is marked by the flowering of
astronomy at the beginning of the modern age. Kepler, Copernicus, and
Tycho Brahe were certainly not driven by scientific impulses alone. All the
same, the elusive emphasis on an optical connection to the universe, to
which astronomy very quickly led, contained a portent of what was to come.
The ancients’ intercourse with the cosmos had been different: the ecstatic
trance. (Benjamin 1996: 486–487)
Walter Benjamin hints at problems in approaching Paradiso. For the

modern to know the ‘cosmos’ means going ‘to the planetarium’. The
older contact with the cosmos—including Dante’s—was different. It was
ecstatic: the self was taken outside the self. We remain separated from the
cosmos, knowing it objectively by ocular perception. Seventeenth-century
Baroque texts mark the break with the ecstatic. The planets are at a dis-
tance, known only by ‘optical connection’, even though:
A man that looks on glasse,

On it may stay his eye;
Or if he pleaseth, through it passe,
And then the heav’en espie. (‘The Elixer’, Herbert: 188)
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
J. Tambling, The Poetry of Dante’s Paradiso,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65628-7_1
2 J. TAMBLING
Paradiso imagines the ecstatic trance, but knows it is doing that, being
in process of understanding the cosmos it describes as an allegory. But
while it is on both sides of the ancient/modern argument, it believes that
the cosmos is a finite entity, described as such by Ptolemy (c.100–170
CE), through the Latin version of the Arabic astronomer Alfraganus
(ninth century), who had translated Ptolemy’s Almagest. Ptolemy had paid
tribute to Hipparchus (c.150 BCE). Further, Dante knew the universe as
described in the Timaeus, the only document of Plato (427–347 BCE),
which the Medieval world possessed.
Dante’s is not our world. We are out of its time, and reading a text of
the past cannot mean escaping into past certainties to be comfortable in
them, taking an aesthetic refuge in a past world where we can lose sense of
our own more relativist modernity. We cannot assume a privileged access
to Paradiso claiming a shared theological understanding, or even as wish-
ing to possess Dante’s certainties. We cannot even assume entry into the
same meanings as are in Dante; hermeneutics means that we cannot read
across from his work to our world, save by an act of mental translation,
however much, and however usefully, we equip ourselves with relevant
knowledge. It may be even harder to read Dante now than during the
modernism of Eliot, Pound, Joyce, and Beckett; the Dantean assumptions
that lay like fragments before those writers are yet more dissipated another
hundred years on. Yet reading Dante’s Commedia and, specifically,
Paradiso remains relevant, not because it gives access to a world whose
assumptions we cannot share, but because it is untimely, and the best
meditations are untimely, and all thinking has to be anachronistic, as
Dante is, plentifully.1
The difficulties affect texts prior to Shakespeare and the ‘Early Modern’.
Later writing is haunted by the sense of the ‘nothing’ (le néant), which
comes forcefully into critical and philosophical thinking with Shakespeare
and beyond, with the absence of a universe of which spiritual authority can
speak affirmatively. Present writing demands ‘tarrying with the negative’
as Hegelian discourse puts it: accepting that there may be nothing, or no-
thing, out there, no grounds for saying that language affirms meaning
(Hegel 1977: 19). This contrasts with the affirmativeness and joy of
Paradiso, though there is a wager involved in arguing that earlier writing
did not have such vertiginousness: it may even be an undertow within
Paradiso. There is a bigger difficulty for readers of Inferno, which holds
the attention, continually challenging readers’ assent to, or fascinated dis-
agreement with, judgments passed on people, concepts, and historical
1 INTRODUCTION: READING PARADISO OUT OF TIME 3
moments. Purgatorio is also a text that can be taken with a certain

immediacy; it is instantly attractive. Paradiso, however, seems to have an
unsympathetic discarding of material human bodies in favour of the reality
of a spiritual world, which threatens to make it an alienating text; more-
over, there is little that is easy in it.
This book, which started by wanting to confront these issues, offers an
advanced introduction to Paradiso to those who would like it and argues
that here is one of the great European texts that should not be left to a
professionalism in criticism which only disputes competing critical
positions, nor assumed to be the province of theology, nor confined to a
historicising which assumes that Dante’s cultural contexts are knowable
and definitive for reading. We cannot read outside contexts such as those
given by psychoanalysis, by deconstruction, or a modernist Marxism—all
three inform the reading here—to do so is to put a brake on reading, pre-
tending to know less than we either do—or ought to do—and it assumes
a too determinate knowledge of Dante. While noting the alterity of the
text from our own assumptions, reading should not isolate Dante within a
medieval context, but see him within a history of the creation of the mod-
ern subject, to be read as medieval, and with traces of the modern.2
Paradiso: The Cosmos

I start in introductory mode, by mapping the poem.
Paradiso has a narrative simplicity. Dante’s editors and translators,
Durling and Martinez, propose Friday, 8 April 1300, as when Dante enters
Inferno: that is, around the spring equinox, when the sun was in Aries in
its annual journey through the Zodiac (note to Inf. 1.37). As for Chaucer,
beginning The Canterbury Tales, ‘the yonge sonne / Hath in the Ram his
half cours yronne’ (CT 1.7, 8). Being at the equinox, the sun is on the
celestial equator, which encircles the outermost heaven of the universe.
Paradiso 1 sees Dante and Beatrice leaving the Earthly Paradise where
they were at the end of Purgatorio at noonday; thereafter they are out
of time.
Dante’s universe comprises a sphere, its core the round earth. The two
pass through seven planets, whose name-associations—classical-pagan and
mythological, astronomical and astrological—are exploited, and show a
tendential dualism in the poem’s values. And Dante’s angels are vestiges of
what pagans called Gods and Goddesses, to whom temples were built and
about whom poets like Virgil testified (Con. 2.4.6–7): Pallas, or Minerva,
4 J. TAMBLING
Vulcan, and Ceres—spirits of wisdom, fire, and grain. These planets have
a chiasmic, echoing order. The Moon’s nuns (in the first heaven) corre-
spond to Saturn’s monks (in no. 7). Mercury (2) corresponds to Jupiter
(6) through the image of the eagle, which is first spoken of as Roman,
then seen as a sign. Venus (3) corresponds with Mars (5), with the equiva-
lent hot energies of love and war. The Sun stands central as the fourth
of seven.
Within the first three heavens, examined in Chap. 2, political failure
shows in every body of power. Femininity, the subject of the Moon, in the
third heaven becomes an active force, giving character to violence, and
creating the poetry of courtly love, rescinding nothing of the alliance of
poetry and fin’ amor, which was foregrounded with Francesca in Inferno
5, nor of the alliance of desire and an innovatory modern poetry within
Purgatorio 26, where all the lustful are poets. Between, Mercury speaks of
history and empire. These planets orbit within the shadow the earth casts
(Para. 9.118, 119). Indeed, for Dante and the Medieval world darkness
meant only the conical shadow cast by the earth:
Since the sun moves and the earth is stationary, we must picture this long,
black finger perpetually revolving like the hand of a clock; and called “the
circling canopy / Of Night’s extended shade” (Paradise Lost 3.556–557).
Beyond Venus there is no darkness. (Lewis 1962: 111–112)
Darkness beyond the earth is a post-Copernican conception. It sepa-

rates Dante as the poet of light from baroque awareness of darkness—
Giottesque brightness from Caravaggio—where darkness includes the
‘nothing’. Darkness means loss of a centre and an origin: Paradiso, how-
ever, moves from light to greater light. Souls in the shadow of the earth
are closest in character to those in Purgatorio. Something of the earth
clings to them. We hear of imperfect motivations; we see souls, as after
Venus we cannot.
The Sun, in canto 10, gives a change in intensity.3 Here, and in Mars,
Jupiter, and Saturn are heavens that, answering loosely to cantos 9–26 of
Purgatorio, adopt the four cardinal virtues of Prudence, Fortitude,
Justice, and Temperance. Here appear the most intense encounters with
Paradisal lives, which redefine the meaning of Paradise, not limiting it to
the afterlife. They re-define the present, as souls in Inferno continue in
fuller form the hell they lived on earth, while souls in Purgatorio refine
lives that on earth were singular instances of virtues and vices together
and that continue to activate dualities within them. In Chap. 3, the
heaven of the Sun, we see the wise and encounter four modern theolo-
gians. Aquinas the Dominican (canonised 1323) speaks of Francis of
Assisi (canonised 1228), and Bonaventura the Franciscan (canonised
1482) gives the life of Dominic (canonised 1234). Francis is no less than
Christ refigured, manifest as a human miracle present in urban Italy a
hundred years earlier than Paradiso (Foster 1985: 480–496). In Mars,
where imminent violence and hatred requires peaceful citizenship, and
exile necessitates poetry, Dante is commissioned to write the Commedia.
Saved lives, contrasted with excoriated contemporary rulers, appear in
Jupiter, in canto 20 (37–72), and again with Saturn’s contemplatives,
where lives are stripped down to the utmost simplicity, being on the
threshold between time and eternity. These contemplatives write the
lives of others, lives as marvels, completing a pattern discernible through-
out, in the spirit of such saints’ lives as are recorded in The Golden
Legend—where, amongst its 153 lives,4 Francis, Dominic, and Bernard
appear, in what Jacques Le Goff (2014) calls sacred time.
Politics throughout these heavens is pan-European, and strains at
Europe’s limits. Chapter 5 examines the Fixed Stars and makes concen-
trated reference to Rome as an imperial and Papal centre. Chapters 6 and
7 go beyond, for whereas Timaeus made the Fixed Stars the eighth out-
most sphere, Dante adds the Primum Mobile or the Crystalline Heavens
as a ninth, counting out from the earth. This makes a complete diurnal
East-West revolution round the earth, moving because it is attracted by
the abode of God, in the unmoving Empyrean (not, actually, a Dantean
word). Dante’s Epistle 10.26 explains why: anything moves ‘because of
something which it has not, and which is the terminus of its motion’.
Desire and motion are inseparable. As if emboldened by the language of
Neo-Platonic deification, canto 33, in the Empyrean, is the most concen-
trated in willing to see God, as both the utterly immaterial, who is, none-
theless, manifest in Christ, ‘nostra effige’, and thus material. The text tries
to unite loyalties to the material and the immaterial, by seeing them tied
in a single ‘nodo’, at the risk of language, sanity, and life. Throughout,
there has been little resolution of the dualist vision that moves between
desire for the spiritual, the virginal, the angelic, and the world of light, and
the other world, material, and corrupt; treated with alternating anger
and love.
6 J. TAMBLING
Writing Paradiso
Dante acknowledges difficulty from the beginning. In canto 2.1–18, three
terzine (the three-line stanzas in which the cantos are written) tell read-
ers—who are poised like sailors in little boats—not to venture out into the
ocean, that is, not to read any further. If they lost Dante, voyaging out-
wards, they would remain lost:
L’acqua ch’io prendo già mai non si corse;

Minerva spira, e conducemi Appollo,
e nove Muse mi dimostran l’Orse. (2.7–9)
(The water which I take was not already ever crossed; Minerva [i.e.
wisdom] inspires or fills the sails, and Apollo [i.e. poetry] leads me, and
nine Muses point out the Bears.)
Dante’s barque sounds like the ship of fools, despite these splendid
guides. The Bears are Ursa Major and Ursa Minor. Ursa Major was
Callisto, Ursa Minor Arcas, her son by Jupiter. These constellations indi-
cate the pole star. Though he says he is being guided, he knows he is doing
something new; hence he addresses those readers who want wisdom. They
must follow his boat’s wake, or furrow (solco) ‘dinanzi a l’acqua che ritorna
equale’: before the water that returns evenly (15); catching each momen-
tary epiphanic insight that the writing opens up before the sea closes over
it. Dante wants fellow-travellers (2.1–18) despite pretending to dissuade
people from following.
The ship and its wake return in canto 33, when Dante thinks of the
shadow (l’ombra) of the Argo—Jason’s ship, Jason the fabled first mari-
ner—furrowing the sea. For now, we see that canto 2 makes Dante Jason:
Que’ glorïosi che passaro al Colco

non s’ammiraron come voi farete,
quando Iasón vider fatto bifolco. (2.16–18)
(Those glorious ones who passed to Colchis did not wonder as much as
you will do, when they saw Jason become a ploughman.)
This evokes Ovid (Metamorphoses 7.100–120), where one test imposed

on Jason was to plough with wild brazen oxen. Dante re-invokes the fur-
row Jason created when he used the refractory and difficult oxen to open
up the field, furrowing it, like the wake the ship creates. In Inferno 2,
Dante was afraid to start his journey. Purgatorio 1.1 speaks of sailing over
better waters. Now he embarks on what exceeds Jason or the crazy voy-
age, ‘il varco / folle’ (Paradiso 27.82–83) of Ulysses, the unforgettable
voyager of Inferno 26. In attempting something new, many literary prec-
edents are brought in, because the poem comes out of a tradition that
Dante modifies, actively.
This God-wards journey is offset by Dante’s experience of exile from
Florence in 1302. The text divides between growing enablement and
deepening sense of loss. Politically, Paradiso is more urgent than Inferno
and Purgatorio. Needing less to speak of their condition, past or present,
in self-justifying or self-adjusting, Paradisal lives speak of others and reflect
on current political states. Separated from time, they are absolutely
engaged with time, as eager to advise on earthly affairs as Dante is to hear
them. It seems that at the same time, Dante was writing his treatise on
world-government, Monarchia, that is, in 1316–1317 (Hollander 2001:
148–167, but for an earlier date, c.1312, see Davis 1957: 263–269).
Paradiso was concluded in Ravenna, where Dante was the guest of the
Guelf-leaning Guido Novello da Polenta, and visiting Verona, Mantua,
and Venice.5 He had left Verona in 1318, and the Ghibelline Cangrande
della Scala, with whom he had stayed—with intervals in Lucca—for per-
haps six years. Petrocchi holds that half of Paradiso was in progress by
1318, including, perhaps, the tribute to Cangrande in Paradiso 17
(Bemrose 2009: 190). The Epistle to Cangrande (Epistle 10), which most
Dante commentators accept was written either in part or fully by Dante as
an official letter in Latin, dedicating the work to Cangrande, and as a self-
exegesis of the first canto of the poem, accompanies the work.6
The Epistle’s Paragraph 7 declares the poem ‘polysemous’, having four
senses derived from Biblical exegesis: literal, allegorical, moral, and ana-
gogical—these last three being allegorical: ‘different (diversi) from the
literal or historical, for the word “allegory” is so called from the Greek
alleon, which in Latin is alienum (strange) or diversum (different)’. The
work may be seen as ‘allegory’, however, in a less literal, or rigid (some
might say reductive) sense than in Epistle 10, and I will try to show some
rethinking about allegory below. As poetry, Paradiso’s statements neither
reduce to discursive utterance, nor to prose paraphrase. However formally
committed to distinctive points of view, the utterance discovers more con-
flictual significances. Arguments proving Paradiso’s orthodoxy, which
seem increasingly fashionable, especially in America, mean that the
8 J. TAMBLING
intention (as this is assessed, with heavy dependence on Epistle 10) con-
trols how the poetry is read. Criticism may include interpretation, but is
not reducible to that.
At this point, I will indicate one way into the poem.
Mary and Beatrice

Paradiso is full of a poetry deriving indirectly, perhaps not always con-
sciously, from the place given to Mary, and the Annunciation (Luke
1.26–38), an event that was coming into a new visibility in Dante’s time.7
The Annunciation reverses order: the angel takes the subordinate place to
the woman. Georges Didi-Huberman, studying Fra Angelico, notes how
Aquinas had insisted on the newness ‘that an angel had bowed down
before an earthly woman’. He mentions Albertus Magnus (c.1200–1280),
to comment on Gabriel’s exalting of Mary, the angel by this making him-
self—superior, coming from above—appear embodied, human, below
Mary. Didi-Huberman sees in the Annunciation-images something dou-
ble, demanding a figural reading, beyond the ‘literality’ of the representa-
tion in art. Its presentation of the Incarnation and of the Trinity, which lie
concealed in the Annunciation-image, exists in ‘dissembled’, concealed
form within the pictorial image.
Several points emerge here, beginning with the place given to the
woman, whose materiality is complex. As Purgatorio noted instances in
Mary’s life as exempla for Purgatorial figures, so Mary is exalted through-
out Paradiso, implicitly in the place given to nuns’ virginity in the Moon;
seen as a glory in the Heaven of the Fixed Stars (canto 23); seen physically
in the Empyrean (31.115–138 and canto 32); addressed and responding
in canto 33.1–45. Mary was, historically, the theme of such men as
Bonaventure (canto 12), Peter Damiani (canto 21), and Bernard of
Clairvaux (cantos 31–33). Her distinction was to be Mother of God
(Theotokos: declared so in Ephesus in 431 CE) and perpetual virgin, who
had made a vow of virginity before the Annunciation (so Gregory of
Nyssa, c.335–395), her virginity declaring her singleness and sincerity
(Ambrose). She was a figure of the Church (so Isidore of Seville: canto
10). She was sister of Christ and of the angels. Franciscans said she had
taken a vow of poverty. Bernard of Clairvaux said she had been bodily
assumed into heaven.8 Peter Damiani considered Mary’s womb to be the
house in the phrase ‘wisdom hath builded her house’ (Proverbs 9.1).
Dante says her womb, ‘fu albergo del nostro disiro’ (the hostelry of our
Desire, 23.105); this idea reappears in Bernard’s prayer to the Virgin
(33.7–9). Her womb makes her body’s materiality pure, not needing to be
touched by any other spiritual force that would redeem materiality. In
Peter Damiani’s words, ‘the all-chaste womb of the holy maid becomes
heaven’ (Gambero 2005: 97).
This poses complex problems for feminism. Women within patriarchy
are characteristically victims of contradictory double demands: required to
be objects of beauty yet chaste; subjected to different and harder codes as
regards the materiality of their bodies than those given to men; having to
respond to the demands of men yet needing to find a place in patriarchy
which they may claim as their own even though it may have been pre-
scribed for them. The choice of virginity has engendered endless contro-
versy as being repressive and disabling, in disregarding the materiality
of women’s bodies. Yet it may have been positive in giving a separate space
though one not free from male violation, as canto 3 shows. The material-
ity of bodies, and of women’s bodies, problematic in modernity no less
than in medieval Christianity, appears throughout Paradiso.
Further, another woman speaks in the Commedia: Beatrice, who had
died in 1291, aged 23, who as an allegorical figure partially derives from
Wisdom in the Jewish Bible (Proverbs 8), and from Philosophy in
Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy. Philosophy as a woman derives from
Athena, from Thetis, and from the idea of the nurse—Odysseus’ nurse
Eurycleia—as well as from the classical Muses (Crabbe 1981: 237–274).
In Convivio 2.16.12, the ‘donna’ Dante loves after Beatrice’s death is
Philosophy. These women and goddesses, like Mary, supplement the
woman’s value in Dante’s poetic tradition, the dolce stil nuovo. Paradiso’s
claims for Beatrice go as far as they can; Dante in the Empyrean exalts
Beatrice, seen in her appointed place, remote from him:
Da quella regïon che più sù tona

occhio mortale alcun tanto non dista,
qualunque in mare più giù s’abbandona,
quanto lì da Beatrice la mia vista;
ma nulla mi facea, ché süa effige
non discendëa a me per mezzo mista.
‘O donna in cui la mia speranza vige,
e che soffristi per la mia salute
in inferno lasciar le tue vestige,
10 J. TAMBLING
di tante cose quant’i’ ho vedute,

dal tuo podere e da la tua bontate
riconosco la grazia e la virtute.
Tu m’hai di servo tratto a libertate
per tutte quelle vie, per tutti’i modi
che di ciò fare avei la potestate.
La tua magnificenza in me custodi,
sì che l’anima mia, che fatt’hai sana,
piacente a te dal corpo si disnodi.’
Così orai …. (31.73–91)
(From that region which thunders most high up, no mortal eye is so
distant, not one that is lost deepest in the sea, as was my gaze from Beatrice,
but that did not matter, for her image did not descend to me mixed with
any medium. ‘O lady in whom my hope is strong, and who suffered, for
my salvation, to leave your footprints in hell, in all the things which I have
seen, I recognise the grace and the strength, from your power and your
bounty. You have drawn me from slavery to freedom by all the ways, by all
the modes that you had the power to use. Keep your generosity towards
me so that my soul, which you have made whole, may, pleasing to you
untie itself from the body’. Thus I prayed ….).
The distance from earth to the highest part of the atmosphere is aug-
mented, as the distance from the region of thunder to the sea’s bottom,
the place of silence. This intensification gives the clue, for Dante sees
Beatrice’s image without material interruption (mezzo) across the
Empyrean. Perspective, which distances things from the privileged sub-
ject’s viewpoint, is not involved. He sees what she is, which his prayer,
which is salutation, unfolds. Praise begins with Beatrice as the image of
hope that imprints itself in hell. That impress of the immaterial upon the
material substance of Hell, that is, Limbo (Inf. 2.52–108), sums up what
the following terzine amplify: what Beatrice has done since the Vita Nuova
days. Her trace (vestige) applies to everything when, though absent, she
was drawing him from slavery to freedom of the will (in that way Dante
reads his life and gives a reading of the substance of Paradiso). The last
terzina expounds his ‘hope’: he desires her ‘magnificenza’ to continue to
his death. ‘Magnificenza’, which includes in it the sense of ‘fortitude’ as
one of the cardinal virtues, is a rare word in Paradiso: applied only to
Cangrande (17.85), and Mary (33.20). Is Beatrice a material or immate-
rial presence? Is her ‘trace’ a third thing, not material, but questioning
immateriality, because something real?
Beatrice’s visibility is also absence. He sees her as an ‘effige’: as an

image and the trace of Christ in his descent to Limbo, harrowing hell,
and, in ascending from earth, leaving his footprints (GL 1.292). ‘Vestige’
recalls the poet Guinizelli, purging his lust in fire, telling Dante that his
words to him leave a ‘trace’ (vestigio, Purg. 26.106). The words of Dante
affect Guinizelli’s afterlife but are to Guinizelli memories from his life
(giving memories before events). In following Guinizelli’s poetry, Dante
adds a trace to the earlier poet’s work, deepening its meaning. The ‘ves-
tige’ means that readers must enlarge their conventional chronology of
first this poet followed by that. The afterlife of poetry vivifies its chrono-
logically earlier moment of writing. Miri Rubin (2006: 169) notes that
St Clare, who followed St Francis’ teaching, desired to be the ‘footprint’
of St Francis, by following Francis’ manner of life, but she adds that
Clare was historically called ‘a footprint [vestigium] of the Mother of
God’ (199). Clare, the trace of another, brings Mary into further visibil-
ity as her trace. Piccarda tells Dante that Clare, who is above her in
heaven, and Piccarda’s model, is followed on earth by nuns, whose desire
is to the Bridegroom (Para. 3.97–101). Clare, wanting to be the trace
of Mary and Francis, gives way to the Bridegroom whom Francis fol-
lowed, who existed in time as the son of Mary; the trace enlarging the
significance of the other. Beatrice, who left her footprints in hell, supple-
ments Paradiso’s Christianity, adding to heaven and to orthodoxy by
guiding Dante, leaving her trace that makes her absent, and present,
smiling, a spirit that matters.
Angels, Immateriality, and Prime Matter

The other figure in the Annunciation is the Angel. If angels enjoy a special
place in Paradiso’s cosmos, Dante is paralleled by Modernism, for example
by Benjamin, whose ‘Angel of History’ attempts, perhaps impossibly,
communication within history. If angels are messengers, their medium
language, there is an analogy between angels and the immateriality of
poetry. Angels are substances without matter (‘sustanze separate da mate-
ria’, Convivio, 2.4.2), immaterial. Yet, after Beatrice has died, in the
Vita Nuova:
In quello giorno nel quale si compiea l’anno che questa donna era fatta de li
cittadini di vita eterna, io mi sedea in parte ne la quale, ricordandomi di lei,
disegnava uno angelo sopra certe tavolette … (VN 34.1)
12 J. TAMBLING
(On that day in which was completed a year since this lady [Beatrice]
had become a citizen of eternal life, I was sitting in a place where, remem-
bering her, I was designing an angel on some wooden boards …)
Dante’s Trauerarbeit takes the form of expressing, on the anniversary of

Beatrice’s death, another form of life, drawing an angel. That is analogous
to writing poetry. The angel is not Beatrice, though it may be her trace,
Beatrice here becoming even more an immaterial spirit. Drawing an angel
on a wooden tablet, or panel, is creatio ex nihilo; bringing into visibility the
invisible, as art does, since ‘painting celebrates no other enigma than that
of visibility’ (Merleau-Ponty 1993: 127). What is visible is a riddle, as an
image of what is invisible and only conceptual, questioning the difference
between the visible and the invisible. What is seen is never the whole, and
something permits visibility that is not visible, though it is inherent within
it. Drawing an angel says that what the woman is or was cannot be brought
into vision, and only what is not visible is worth seeing. Levinas calls it the
il y a—the ‘there is’—which is nothing in the sense that it is no thing
(Tambling 2004: 351–372). Writing must be fascinated by it; it ensures
that nothing is wholly visible. Paradiso finds it so potent that it sacrifices
the visible for it, as the ‘trace’ that is, still elusively in this poem, God.
Angels by their understanding move the heavenly spheres, to quote the
incipit to Dante’s canzone, ‘Voi che ‘ntendendo il terzo ciel movete’: com-
mented on in Convivio Book 2, cited in Paradiso 8.37. Convivio Book 2,
fascinated with angelic intelligences, and their spheres is Paradiso’s seed-
plot. Kenelm Foster and Patrick Boyde find that this canzone shows Dante
turning to allegory (Convivio 2.1; see Rime 2.161). Angels and allegory
connect, and if the language describing/evoking angels is allegorical, alle-
gory becomes a dualistic mode, the literal describes the immaterial, or
spiritual. Angels contemplate God, and have no unrealised ‘potential’ in
their knowledge. They need no language, though they may speak (see
Para. 14.35, 36). Their immateriality puts them outside sexuality; angels
being, psychoanalytically, ‘the most ambitious attempt in our civilization
to establish a world in which identity is not based on sex’ (Schneiderman
1988: 17). They are opposite from the problem of ‘prime matter’, some-
thing ghosting Paradiso. What ‘prima materia’ is was a critical crux for
Dante (Convivio 3.15.6, 4.18), not soluble by his dual allegiance to the
philosophies of the Dominicans or the Franciscans. It will be discussed in
Chap. 6. Here we can say that Aristotle held that the universe had not
been created; it was eternal, as is matter. In what, then, lay the work of
creation, which, being ‘in the beginning’, inaugurates time (according to

Augustine)? Did creation work on existent prime matter, or had God cre-
ated ex nihilo? If so, what is the status of unused prime matter?—which is
also il y a.
The tensions in this debate, lasting through disputes and condemna-
tions in the University of Paris in 1370 and 1377, took various forms onto
which were mapped a problematic dualism between spirit and matter. The
Neo-Platonic tradition from Proclus held that prime matter was not cre-
ated by God, matter being eternal; but this made matter antagonistic to
God. Followers of Aristotle’s Arab commentator, Averroes (1126–1178)
believed that matter’s elements were created by the heavens, not by God,
a view Bishop Tempier condemned in Paris in 1277. According to Bruno
Nardi (1884–1968), Siger of Brabant, seen in the heaven of the Sun,
accepted this.9 Boethius of Dacia, teaching at Paris, believed that philoso-
phy could prove that creation could never have had a beginning, even
though faith taught the opposite. This compelled belief in something like
a ‘double truth’—that something could be true and false together, depend-
ing on the system of thought used—and meant that there was always
something slipping away from proof, resisting the firmness of faith
(Boethius of Dacia 1987: 36–37, Introduction, 9–19). Whether there was
matter that God created which lacked form, or whether matter was always
there, haunting the primacy of God’s creation had been a crisis-point for
Augustine with the Manichees, whose dualism made matter and God’s
purity irreconcilable. This, questioning whether everything can be brought
into God’s system, haunts, perhaps troubles Paradiso. Angels symbolise a
desire for a pure knowing uncontaminated by matter, but the Annunciation
implies the value of a virginal, pure-womb-like materiality.
Here we must address allegory as the medium for expressing
‘immateriality’.
Allegory
Paradiso gives converse with jewel—or flame—or flower-like lights within
light, supplementing light by reflecting light, as human eyes do, but dis-
embodied, which the spirits feel as a loss (see canto 14.37–66). The only
body visible is Beatrice’s, who escorts Dante. In the Moon, she explains
the non-literality of the heavens they are passing through. None of the
beings encountered in the Moon are there, they only appear there. The
staging-posts of the different heavens are only apparent: hence ‘chiaro mi
14 J. TAMBLING
fu allor come ogne dove / in cielo è paradiso’ (3.89–90: it was clear to me

then how everywhere in heaven is Paradise). The souls in the Moon are
actually in the Empyrean. They are like the highest Seraphim who most
‘s’india’ (4.28)—most sinks himself in God.10 Beatrice names Moses and
Samuel, Jewish prophets, and writers of sacred texts (see Jeremiah 15.1).
She then names two Johns, saying Dante can choose either the Baptist, ‘a
man sent from God whose name was John’ (John 1.6), or the Gospel
writer, the beloved disciple John (13.23), who stood by Mary at the foot
of the cross (John 19.26). John was a virgin, and Peter Damiani said he,
like Mary, was assumed bodily into heaven, though Dante’s John denies
that in canto 25 (Gambero 2005: 87). All, says Beatrice, are equally within
the Empyrean, whatever their capacity to feel, ‘più e men’, the eternal
breath.11 But they appear for Dante’s benefit, in these other, lower,
heavens:
Qui si mostraro, non perché sortita

sia questa spera lor, ma per far segno
de la spiritüal c’ha men salita.
Così parlar conviensi al vostro ingegno,
però che solo da sensato apprende
ciò che fa poscia d’intelletto degno.
Per questo la Scrittura condescende
a vostra facultate, e piedi e mano
attribuisce a Dio, e altro intende;
e Santa Chiesa con aspetto umano
Gabrïel e Michel vi rappresenta,
e l’altro che Tobia rifece sano. (4.37–48)
(They have shown themselves, not because this sphere is assigned to

them, but to make a sign of the spiritual sphere, which has the less ascent
[the Moon]. It suits that they speak thus to your intellect, which only
from the senses apprehends what it then makes worthy of the intellect. For
this reason, Scripture condescends to your capacity, and attributes feet and
hands to God, and means something else, and Holy Church represents to
you Gabriel and Michael with human aspect, and that other [Raphael]
who made Tobias whole.)
The souls in the Moon have descended, appearing as if in a masquer-

ade. They make the Moon a sign, of weakness of the will. David Gibbons
finds more metaphor in Paradiso than in Inferno or Purgatorio.12 Perhaps
this indicates that presentations in Paradiso move towards the intellect by
way of something visible. In reaching the non-sensual through the sen-

sual, Dante is akin to the Gothic mentality of the Cistercian Suger
(1081–1151), Bernard of Clairvaux’s contemporary. Bernard refused
church ornamentation, but Suger justified the Gothic ethos of his new
Abbey buildings at St-Denis, proclaiming the ‘anagogical’ nature of
Gothic images: all art within it figures divine reality, because Mens hebes ad
verum per materialia surgit—‘the dull mind rises to truth through that
which is material’ (Panofsky 1970: 164).
Suger—and Gothic art—worked from the Syrian pseudo-Dionysius the
Areopagite (c.525 CE), the Neo-Platonist influenced by Proclus
(412–488) whom Plotinus (c.204–270) influenced, and the saint whom
Suger’s Abbey church honoured. Pseudo-Dionysius stylised himself after
the Pauline convert, the Athenian Dionysius who lived in the atmosphere
of the worship of ‘the Unknown God’ (Acts 17.16–34). He appears in
canto 10.112–114, and canto 28.130 evokes him as instructed by Paul,
who had been in Heaven. The Celestial Hierarchy was translated into Latin
by John Scotus Eriugena (c.860), the Irish poet at the Carolingian court
of Charles the Bald (823–877).13 He believed in a ‘hierarchy’—his neolo-
gism; it appears in Para. 28.121—of knowledge, ascending towards the
hidden, though God also descends to matter hierarchically (Rorem 1993:
30). ‘Anagogical’, Panofsky’s word in discussing Suger, means ‘mystical,
spiritual, having a secondary spiritual sense’ (OED), being one of the four-
fold senses of Scripture discussed in Dante’s Epistle to Can Grande, deriv-
ing from such patristic sources as Origen, Cassian, St Jerome, and Eucharis
of Lyons (d. c.449).14 Fourfold interpretation gives the Bible literal, alle-
gorical, topological (or moral), and anagogical meanings. In anagogy,
pseudo-Dionysius reads symbols as a way of returning towards God. It
implies an uplifting: moving from the perceptible to the intelligible,
towards contemplation or theoria, as angels contemplate (Rorem 1984:
55, 114).15
The necessity for metaphorical/allegorical terms expands in canto 4.
Scripture anthropomorphises the immaterial God, giving him a foot, or
hand, for allegorical speech ‘altro intende’ (4.45). It means something
else. The Church permits visual representations of Gabriel, or Michael, or
Raphael as humans though they are immaterial spirits. Such humanising
individuates, as art does. The angel who made Tobias whole comes from
the Apocryphal Book of Tobit, 3.17: Raphael ‘scaled away the whiteness of
Tobit’s eyes’, an action allegorical of healing spiritual blindness (a refusal
to read spiritually/allegorically). The material angel (a contradiction)
16 J. TAMBLING
allegorises a spiritual work, but Dionysius had spoken of ‘dissimilar simi-

larities’ within Biblical symbols for angels, or God (Rorem 1993: 54–56).
‘Dissemblance’ disallows reading images for their apparent sense: the vis-
ible dissembles the invisible. This resembles Paradiso, whose literal heav-
ens have allegorical features, their spheres not housing their spirits.
This presentational mode, comprising dissimilar similarities and non-
reality, was not Dante’s mode in Inferno or Purgatorio. There, souls were
literal, within literal spaces. With Paradiso, the cosmos becomes allegori-
cal. Beatrice in canto 4 explains the poem’s method: finding sensuous
equivalents to the cosmic spheres. Philo of Alexandria (15 BCE–45 CE)
saw the cosmos as embellishing the divine idea, as allegories. The cosmos
means ‘the universe’ and ‘ornamentation, embellishment’: for example,
the stars as ornaments (Fletcher: 70–145, Radice: 131–135). Hence the
cosmos is not intelligible ‘scientifically’ but allegorically: ornamental jew-
els flash back within it, adding to it. The Convivio compared the planets’
sequence to that of the Trivium and the Quadrivium.16 With that ‘scien-
tific’ order ghosting Paradiso’s sequence, Dante creates the heavens in
poetic terms. In canto 4.43–48, the Scriptures, and Church practices, jus-
tify Paradiso, according with Dante’s mode of creation. The later text
makes earlier ones, declared divine, accord with it. The poet works with
his own absolute creation, though he presents this as an order vouchsafed
to him; for, returning to canto 2.7–9, the waters his boat crosses were
uncrossed before, but Minerva, Apollo, and nine Muses—Dante’s essen-
tial number—show him the Bears. These constellations are co-ordinates
for him, as the only nameable entities with a reality or a shape outside
these uncrossed seas. As, historically speaking, mythic realities produced
an ancient impulse to find them imaged as cosmic patterns, which, though
fictional designs, gave viable indications for navigators, so with the fic-
tional realities created in each heavenly sphere. Fictionally charged pagan
constellations point out the way for writing Paradiso. Dante’s inspiration
within looks for pagan-classical and allegorical-fictional inspiration with-
out which points him on; and his heavens generate new constellations.
Origin, Dissemination, and Hierarchy

Dante’s heaven shows increasing light without shadow, harmony without
disharmony. The stress on returning to God as the origin divides him from
present modern critical theory. Teodolinda Barolini, I think rightly, shows
disquiet with the implications of the statement that Dante has ‘unease and
suspicion in the presence of multiplicity’. She is quoting Patrick Boyde,

who locates the source of that ‘unease’ in Dante’s keen relationship to
Neo-Platonism, this being marked in Monarchia 1.15.1–3, wherein Dante
opposes plurality to a unity that seems closer to the origin: ‘the best is that
which is one as much as possible’. What falls short, ‘falls short of being
one, and therefore good’ (Barolini 1992: 173, 181). Boyde writes that,
with this Neo-Platonism, Dante ‘seems to have entertained misgivings
about the goodness of a universe which could not be perfect because it
was neither “simple” nor “one”- as it should be’ (Boyde 1981: 219). But
Dante’s thought shows doubleness. It desires and seeks throughout
Paradiso an original, and immaterial, unity, but is attracted to materiality,
which includes multiplicity, and fascination with numbers, and is inher-
ently dualist, while ‘sinning is nothing else than scorning unity and mov-
ing away from it towards multiplicity’.17
Pseudo-Dionysius made creation a precession from God; creation
stands still before him, and returns to him. There may be plural possible
cycles of creation. This view, though the Christian framework does not
affirm it, haunts the thought that external reality is layered hierarchically,
as if it could be taken away (Schäfwe 2006: 65). In pseudo-Dionysius’ fol-
lower, Maximus the Confessor (580–662), who influenced John Scotus
Eriugena’s Periphyseon (c.864), this return to God is to Christ, for
Maximus identifies creation with Christ himself, speaking of the Incarnation
as threefold: in the cosmos, that is, in creation, in the Scriptures, and in
Christ. The soul returns to God. Maximus calls ‘deification’ the destiny of
the human, invoking 2 Peter 1.4, where Christians are ‘partakers of the
divine nature’, and I John 3.2, ‘now are we the children of God, and it
doth not yet appear what we shall be’. Lives will be more than almost
divine, for God’s intention—his divine love—was to be creator and sav-
iour of the cosmos.18
Dante is akin to Maximus, drawing on Neo-Platonism in making every-
thing return to a ‘proprio sito’ (Para 1. 91–93), making diverse elements
‘accline’ towards their common ‘principio’ (1.109–111). Everything must
be spoken of in allegory, whether the allegory of poets, or of theologians,
since language is always, necessarily, ‘other’.19 In Philo of Alexandria’s ten-
dential Neo-Platonism, allegory draws its power from inability to speak of
divine mysteries literally, and from the idea of transmuting material into
spiritual reality. The outer, literal meaning of Scripture was the body, the
inner, allegorical meaning, the soul: reality is veiled behind the empirically
seen (Whitman 1987: 62, 65). If writing allegory in Paradiso means
18 J. TAMBLING
rejecting the material (as with angels) and the literal—it bears repeating
that it is not Inferno’s mode—that necessitates accepting multiplicity,
because speech as ‘other’, plural, exfoliates within material images.
Dante knew the Neo-Platonism emanating from Plotinus’ Enneads
(Ennead means ‘nine’—for the six divisions of the text include nine books
each). Plotinus’ disciple Porphyry, incidentally, recorded in his biography
that he ‘seemed ashamed of being in the body’ (quoted Plotinus: cii).
Plotinus indeed considered matter to be evil (Ennead 1.8.3). His influ-
ence reached Boethius (480–524). A follower of the Plotinian Proclus
wrote the ninth-century Liber de Causis, which Aquinas commented on,
and which Dante quotes, in Convivio 3.4, and in Epistle 10, paragraph
21.20 God is known within a hierarchy, emanating downwards in light, and
in and through angels, and, since an angel is a messenger, in language.
Such emanations, pluralising themselves, are interrupted by materiality, a
point Convivio 3.7 emphasises. The brightness of the cosmos and scrip-
tural language unite. The association of light’s rays with language is
implicit in Dante’s chilling phrase ‘the sun was silent’ (Inf. 1.60). No light
means no language, no poetry: death. Knowledge returns upwards, with
the anagogical power of the symbolic: ideas from the senses convey higher,
non-sensuous realities. For Plotinus, the Divinity inheres within three
hypostases: the One, the Divine Mind, and the All-Soul. Emanations pro-
cessing from the One are revealed in what the Divine Mind displays: Real-
Beings, Intelligences, and Powers, all nameable as the spiritual universe.
They are ‘closely like Dante’s conception of the circle of angels and blessed
spirits gathered in contemplation and service round the throne of God’,
while the All-Soul is ‘the eternal cause of the existence, eternal existence,
of the cosmos’ (MacKenna in Plotinus 1991: xxxiii, xxxiv). We can hardly
distinguish between God and the hierarchy of being; just as Maximus the
Confessor deified Christ, the cosmos, and redeemed creation. Such think-
ing virtually de-centres God by overthrowing separate categories of
thought. The distinction between spirit and matter comes into question.
The dissemination, and the downward fragmentation of light and lan-
guage, weakens the possibility of distinguishing literality and allegory in
the Commedia—but it should be axiomatic that reading language ‘liter-
ally’ already requires interpretation. Language is figural, and allegorical,
and literality is a sense derived from language’s several significations. The
literal is only that in being part of the ‘letter’ of ‘literature’.
Dionysius’ ‘mystical theology’, from Philo, Gregory of Nyssa, and
Proclus, contends that knowing God means entering ‘the darkness of
unknowing’, a phrase from Exodus 24.15, where God appears in the

cloud and Moses goes into it. Thus in ‘Midnight’ by Henry Vaughan
(1975: 290): ‘There is in God (some say), / A deep, but dazzling dark-
ness’. True language about ‘the unknown God’ must deny qualities of
God, using such negating words as ‘invisible’, ‘infinite’, and ‘ineffable’
(Routh 1989: 45; Rorem 1993: 47–90, 183–236). God must be defined
in negatives (apophatically). The Bible’s symbols for God are those that
are unlike him; they exist in the realm of ‘dissemblance’ (Didi-Huberman
1995: 45–60). This theology makes knowing less a loving than an intel-
lectual principle, though description of what the soul knows or sees must
be in the realm of the unlike—and multiple, neither singly spiritual, nor
material.
On one side, everything speaks, as with Purgatorio’s annunciating angel
(10.34–40), so realistically carved that he seems to be saying Ave. He is
messenger and message. Aquinas thought that when immaterial angels
assumed a body this ‘had a symbolic character: it signified the future
assumption of a human body by the Word of God’ (Aquinas 1968–1969:
1a.50–64, p. 37). Gabriel is allegorical, like his visibility, where his mien
embodies his immaterial word; he is a speaking work of art. Mary, respond-
ing, ‘avea in atto impressa esta favella / Ecce ancilla Dei’ (had in her bear-
ing stamped this speech, Behold the handmaid of the Lord, 10.43–44).
Language, its Latin foregrounding it, is stamped into Mary’s carved pos-
ture, her body, as if she needed not to speak.
On the other side, language fails. Paradiso notes gaps in memory, creat-
ing discontinuities within the self, the loss of a reference-point within the
subject. One example, discussed in Chap. 5, comes in canto 23, when
Dante cannot describe Beatrice’s smile. Memory fails, and the writing self,
which would think in single continuous terms, loses itself. Commentators
often divide Dante the pilgrim from the poet writing, separating the par-
tial insight the traveller possesses from the knowledge possessed by the
writing subject (a random instance: Murtaugh 1975: 277–284, note 8). If
this was possible it would allow autobiographical writing, where finality,
centredness, and completion characterises the writing self, beyond the ear-
lier self, which has partial knowledge. But the distinction is unsustainable.
The Dante who travels with partial knowledge is a textual creation of his
present writing which cannot distinguish the two. Nor can there be a
return to a past original experience, for present writing cannot guarantee
the purity of a past event, because it writes within its own present. Not
only may memory not have registered experience, as happens in Paradiso,
20 J. TAMBLING
so that it cannot know what it did not know; in saying ‘I’, there cannot be
a self with full presence to itself. The present self has not self-presence. It
cannot distinguish itself from the past save by assertion, nor can it claim a
separate time for narration putting itself outside the past. These points
complicate thought of an origin, of a determinate single knowledge that
the subject is acquiring.
Lives Almost Divine, Spirits That Matter

Paradiso may be a desire for pure speech, unstained by anything of mate-
riality, as with Mallarmé, where speech moves beyond immediate sensuous
auras as if wanting to be analogous to the angelic state, pure language that
removes from it the conventional associations borne in poetic language.
But Dante’s poetry is driven by the referentiality of what it has left behind,
as with its politics, voiced by those within the paradisal and contemplative
state, but excited by earthly sensuous reality. Even angels have a desire:
contemplation being for them desire of God (Pertile 1997: 148–166).
Mary, Beatrice, angels, and the absence of bodies in ever-brightening light
witness to a desire for the immaterial, just as resurrection-bodies will not
be sexed (Matthew 22.30), yet this is not a single drive. Hence the subti-
tle: Spirits That Matter. This plays on the book-title to Judith Butler’s
Bodies that Matter (1993), where ‘matter’ means ‘that which materialises’
or ‘which become matter’ or simply ‘which is important’. In how it ‘mat-
ters’, spirit contrasts with any theoretical discourse of the body. And spirit-
lives are individual, rich, and complex, and that, in Paradiso questions
distinctions between the material and the non-material, and the visible and
invisible. Paradisal lives are no less vivid than those of Inferno or Purgatorio;
one prompting to start this study was noticing how many lives—whether
offstage, and alluded to (outstandingly, Francis), or whether visibly,
onstage—come before Dante in Paradiso, with histories that matter.
The full subtitle, Lives Almost Divine, Spirits That Matter explores what
it means that Paradiso works by allegory, by figural language, however
much affirming the reality of what has happened. Dante writes:
Nel ciel che più de la sua luce prende

fu’ io’ (1.4, 5)
(I have been in the heaven that receives most of his light.)

‘Fu io’ is deliberate; it summons up St Paul’s mystic vision (compare

Inferno 2.28–32, 2 Corinthians 12.2–4, Para. 1.73–75). Dante desires the
immateriality and perfection of the Paradisal world, as in such a figure as
the Virgin, or angels. Allegory, enforcing dualism between the spiritual
and the literal, is essential. The external, material secular world, whose
multiplicity problematises thought of an origin, makes everything threaten
to shade into the contradiction of equally valid opposites, including the
dualism of this Christian heaven. Inferno has been found questionable, at
least since the time of Chaucer’s reception of it, on account of its punish-
ments and its pain, which souls feel in their ‘bodies’, but Paradisal souls
lack bodies, though desiring them, so making Paradiso an unfinished
state, poised between spirit and matter. The desire for one state while
engaging with another is symptomatic of split sympathies materialising
throughout the text, and within Christian discourse. And there, as Caroline
Walker Bynum shows, matter is unignorable. It discloses the divine, with
its own strangeness, or foreign quality stubbornly inherent within it. A
certain wonder clings to creation, haunts created things, and, for the
Middle Ages, associates with the exotic homeliness of saints’ miracles,
fuzzing the boundaries between visible and invisible, material and imma-
terial, obeying chronology or not.21 It is with these conflictual states that
the following chapters proceed.
It is hard now to think of a text comprising a unity: such could only
exist at the level of conscious intention, and apart from unconscious inten-
tions—which it is disingenuous to say we can know nothing of—we know
that language makes such purity of intention impossible. Further, criticism
has the task of seeing how intentions are realised. But we are in the after-
life of the text. Walter Benjamin distinguishes between reading for the
‘material content’ and the ‘truth content’. While much outstanding work
has been done on interpreting Dante’s ‘material content’, it is insufficient;
criticism must, more elusively, note a ‘truth content’ growing within the
reading of the text, in proportion as the potential for taking it in its own
terms recedes, as the text becomes out of time (Benjamin 1996: 297–298).
The ‘truth content’, however non-definable, is what in the text speaks to
present modernity as the text separates itself from this. The purchase of
this in Benjamin is the need to redeem the past; to count nothing lost to
history, to let past lives matter in the present, to upturn a history that
simply says the past is gone. We may not accept Dante’s scheme of
salvation—possibly it is not as unified and self-consistent as is claimed for
22 J. TAMBLING
it, and as it claims to be—but we may follow Benjamin’s sense that salva-
tion of the past is essential for a future: the point activating the importance
of reading Dante, who speaks always with the dead, and whose concern is
always redemption.
Notes
1. I refer to Nietzsche’s Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen (1876), variously
translated as ‘Untimely Meditations’ or ‘Thoughts out of Season’, literally
thoughts in ‘unmeasurable time’ outside chronological history.
2. I defend here, implicitly, my Dante and Difference (Tambling 1988); see
Robey 1990: 116–131.
3. This corresponds to Inferno 10, when Dante was inside the city of Dis, and
to Purgatorio 10, when he and Virgil reach the first cornice of Purgatory
(Castellani 1981: 221–223). Both moments in those cantiche underlie this
one, as if forming its unconscious.
4. For 153, see John 21.11. It is 17 × 9; 17 is the seventh prime number, so
special, as 9 is (see Chap. 6).
5. See Anderson 1983: 238–241, Life: 206–220. A recent biography by
Santagata 2016, finds Dante at his loneliest in Ravenna, downplays Beatrice
(being affirmative about Gemma Donati). It downplays Verona’s signifi-
cance for the Paradiso, and Cangrande, whom Santagata considers not the
Veltro (see chapter 5). It doubts Dante’s authorship of Epistle 10. It assigns
Monarchia to the Henry VII period, and thinks that the Commedia was
begun in Florence before 1302 as a Guelf work; and that Dante might have
been epileptic. Negatively, it effectively gives no reading of the Commedia’s
significance; it lacks attention to its theology and puzzles the reader to
know why Santagata thought Dante wrote.
6. See Curtius 1953: 221–225, Toynbee 1966: 160–211. Though not men-
tioned as Dante’s until Filippo Villani’s commentary at the beginning of
the Quattrocentro, the Epistle, analysing the opening of Paradiso 1, seems
to have been a source for commentary throughout the Trecento. See Luis
Jenaro-MacLennan 1974. On the commentary tradition, see Parker 1993:
25–49; and the entry on Epistle 10 by Albert Russell Ascoli, in Lansing;
and Minnis et al. 1988: 439–519. A case against authenticity on the
grounds of the disparity between it and the poem comes from Barański
1991: 26–55. He notes no sense in the Epistle of ‘plurilingualism’, a term
from Contini, discussing it in Carlo Emilio Gadda. Indeed, the literal
meaning is ‘the state of souls after death’; the allegorical: ‘man according
as by his merits or demerits in the exercise of his free will he is deserving of
reward or punishment by justice’ (para. 8). Some readers will indeed find
this a narrowing down, thinking these ‘literal’ and ‘allegorical’ senses

hardly adequate. The restricted signification of the definition of ‘tragedy’:
‘at the beginning is admirable and placid, but at the end or issue is foul and
horrible … foul like a goat as appears from the tragedies of Seneca’ and of
comedy: ‘a rustic song … comedy begins with sundry adverse conditions,
but ends happily, as appears from the comedies of Terence … tragedy is
high-flown and sublime, while [the style of language] of comedy is unstud-
ied and lowly’ are not the bases for understanding the text. Nor the reason
for it being called a comedy ‘for if we consider the subject-matter; at the
beginning it is horrible and foul, as being Hell; but at the close it is happy,
desirable, and pleasing, as being Paradise. … the style is unstudied and
lowly, as being in the vulgar tongue in which even women-folk hold talk’
(paragraph 10). Kelly rejects the Epistle’s authenticity for its definitions of
tragedy and comedy; for additional reasons he cites Dronke 1986:
103–111, a thesis developed by Hall and Sowell (1989, see further, cor-
respondence with Teodolinda Barolini, in 6 (1990), 140–144). Kelly
debates Hollander 1993 in Kelly 1995: 61–115.
7. Didi-Huberman 1995: 180, taking ‘dissemblance’ from Pseudo-Dionysius.
Muir Wright 2006: 76, considers Simone Martini’s ‘Annunciation with
Two Saints’ (1333), as the earliest example where the Annunciation was
the subject of the entire altarpiece (76). See for the history, Robb 1936:
480–526.
8. Gambero 2005: 157, 191, 376, Pelikan 1990: 122, 144; for the
Assumption, 33–35, 206–212.
9. Bruno Nardi, ‘Se la prima materia de li elementi era da Dio intesa’, in
Nardi 1983: 197–206. The doctoral thesis of Nardi, one of Dante’s best
twentieth-century readers, was on Siger of Brabant and Dante: see Falzone
2013: 357–373.
10. The neologism implies the loss of a subject/object distinction. Brenda
Deen Schildgen (1989: 101–119) notes 26 neologisms in Paradiso; com-
pare Luzzi 2010 and Ferrante 1983.
11. ‘Più o meno’ (more, or less) as a formula connoting acceptance of hierar-
chical order (see 1.103–104, 109), marks Paradiso; see 1.3, 1.111, 2.69,
4.36, 8.20, 28.65, 77, 32.60; see Barolini 1992: 166–193.
12. Gibbons 2002: 39; and see 39–116, on metaphors in Paradiso. Lansing
1977: 148–168 has excellent discussion of the simile in Paradiso.
13. For more on Eriugena, see Chap. 4. As author of the Periphyseon (c. 860)
he is well inside the neo-Platonic tradition which implicitly accepted
apokatastasis.
14. See Caplan 1929 and Smalley (1931: 60–76), who distinguish between
Augustine’s insistence on the allegorical and Aquinas’ on the literal, as
preceding an allegorical understanding. See Smalley 1952.
24 J. TAMBLING
15. For Dante and Pseudo-Dionysius, see Prandi 2009: 3–29, especially foot-
note 15; see Patch 1929, for Boethius, and his derivations from Plotinus,
139, that is, the speech of Cosmos in Enneads 3.2.3., Patch compares
Para. 4.49ff.
16. Verdicchio 2010 follows this through, using Convivio 2.13.9–2.14.21. See
Paterson 1995: 331–354 for connections between the heavens and the sci-
ences (forms of knowledge), in Convivio 2, chapters 13–14.
17. Monarchia 1.15.3. Reviewing Dante’s sources, Kay cites Boethius’
Consolation of Philosophy 3, prose 11, to demonstrate that the one and the
good are equivalents, as Dante holds.
18. For Maximus, see Berthold 1985: 10–11 for ‘deification’, and Tollefsen
2008: 66–67.
19. These forms of allegory are discussed in Convivio 2.1, and which form
Dante writes has been discussed from Singleton onwards.
20. For the Liber de Causis, a Greek-Arabic text translated in Toledo by
Gerhard of Cremona (c.1167–1187) and thought by Albertus Magnus
(but not by Aquinas) to be by Aristotle, see D’Ancona 2014: 137–161.
21. Caroline Walker Bynum 2001: 267–286. I assume the relevance of
Bynum’s work on Christ as feminine: and the relevance of her book Jesus
as Mother (Bynum 1982) on Christ as feminine. That material objects can
become fetishised is obvious from the case of Chaucer’s Pardoner’s relics.
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CHAPTER 2
Within the Shadow of the Earth
Paradiso 1: Light, Apollo, the Sun, the Zodiac

In canto 1, Dante declares he has been in the heaven ‘che più de la sua luce
prende’—which receives most of God’s light (line 4).
Light. Four glosses may be given on this. As ‘la gloria di colui che tutto
move’ (1.1), it comes from Aristotle’s ‘unmoved mover’ (Metaphysics
12.7: p. 171); it pierces (penetra) and shines back (risplende, 1.2.).1 The
universe resembles God (Para. 1.105), by being successive mirrors pass-
ing light down and up, a Neo-Platonist Plotinus-derived conception deriv-
ing from the Liber de Causis and Pseudo-Dionysius. For ‘everything that
exists produces an image or likeness of itself, which it directs into its sur-
roundings’. Light is what God is, and radiates outwards (Lindberg, 10,
quoting Enneads 5.1.6).
Albertus Magnus, in De Intellectu et Intelligibili, followed the Liber de
Causis, considered then as an Aristotelian sequel to the Metaphysics Convivio
3.7.1–5, which illustrates Albertus’ Neo-Platonism. God, the One, had cre-
ated, in an emanation, the ‘first created thing’: being (esse), or Intelligence,
or Intelligences. Creation, indirectly proceeding from the One, returns to
him. Some parts of the created universe shine back with a gold-like bright-
ness, supplementing the light on them; some are diaphanous: some are like
earth, reflecting little or nothing back. Light shines ‘più e meno’, more,
where there is something in the precious stone that once touched emits
light, or fire; here, light exceeds its source. Convivio 3.7.6–7 argues
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 29

Switzerland AG 2021
J. Tambling, The Poetry of Dante’s Paradiso,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65628-7_2
30 J. TAMBLING
something essential for considering the woman, whom Dante calls

Philosophy: in the universe’s intellectual order, the uninterrupted flow of
light as goodness is almost continuous, unimpeded, between angel and
human, and human and animal. Some humans may seem animals; some are
so ‘nobile e di sì alta condizione che quasi non sia altro che angelo’ (‘noble,
and of such exalted condition that they are hardly any different from angels’)
(3.7.6). Following Aristotle’s Ethics 7.1145a, they may be called divine:
e cotale dico io che è questa donna, sì che la divina virtude, a guisa che
discende nell’angelo, discende in lei. (Convivio 3.7.7)
(And so I say that that is what this woman is, that the divine virtue
descends into her as into an angel.)
If that is the case with this woman, Philosophy, Paradiso’s intuition is

that human lives may be almost divine. Acknowledgement of such divinity
in the Convivio tests both Aristotelianism and Christian orthodoxy, which
requires redemption of the soul and the material body.
Light. It is, classically, the sun-god, Apollo, whom Dante invokes (13–36)
asking his ‘valor’ (14) to let him make manifest ‘l’ombra del beato regno’
(the shadow of the blessed realm, 23), to display what is on the inside. He
asks for annihilation of the self, as the lyre-playing god entered Marsyas, tak-
ing over, possessing him, breathing within him, making him the flute he had
played (Metamorphoses 6. 362–900)2 The arena Dante enters shows his readi-
ness to go under, like Marsyas, the figure of a martyred saint, like Bartholomew.
Surrendering is inseparable from the desire for ecstasy in poetry; willing
metamorphosis: canto 1 gives precedents in Marsyas, Daphne, and Glaucus,
the last metamorphosed into divinity. Ecstasy, like Marsyas, spilt out of his
body’s casing, breaks down inside/outside distinctions in the self.
Interpenetration and inversion show the will to be possessed by poetry, in
another address to Apollo: ‘O divina virtù’. He wants the laurel, which
Apollo had loved, and would give (15). The laurel, an apotropaic against
lightning, being instinct with fire, associates with the laureola, and the golden
aureole around a saint’s head, his outburst of fiery glory. Dante would come
to the tree and crown himself with the leaves of the desired Daphne, but the
tree manifests divinity, trembling in his presence, possessing Apollonian life:3
Sì rade volte, padre, se ne coglie

per trïunfare o cesare o poeta,
colpa e vergogna de l’umane voglie,
2 WITHIN THE SHADOW OF THE EARTH 31
che parturir letizia in su la lieta

delfica deïtà dovria la fronda
peneia, quando alcun di sé asseta.
Poca favilla gran fiamma seconda:
forse di retro a me con miglior voci
si pregherà perché Cirra risponda. (1.28–36)
(So few times, father, is there gathered of it for the triumph either of
Caesar or of poet, fault and shame of human wills, that the Peneian leaf
should bring forth gladness in the joyful Delphic deity [Apollo] when
someone is set athirst for it [i.e. the laurel]. A great fire follows a small
spark; perhaps behind me with better voices prayer will be offered so that
Cyrrha may respond.)
Daphne, metamorphosed into laurel, was daughter of Peneus, the river

god. The sun-god (fire) pursues the opposite (water), making the tree of
poetry arise; this, and the laurelling Dante wants, which identifies Dante
with Daphne, will excite Apollo’s joy, making the god—Cyrrha, and the
spirit of Delphi, the prophetic oracle—give birth as Marsyas issuing forth
in a new birth. The woman enwrapping Dante and Apollo’s joy are equiv-
alents. The prayer metamorphoses into asking Apollo to become fire, tak-
ing over the universe; the muse of fire producing a second sun (63).
Light. It is the sun (1. 38, 47, 54, 63, 80; compare Aeneid 3.637).
Beatrice’s gazing at the sun makes her eagle-like, the eagle being a solar
symbol, associated with lightning as Jupiter’s bird, indeed Jupiter itself
(Wittkower 1939: 293–325). Dante too gazes at the sun, sparkling ‘com’
ferro che bogliente esce del foco’ (like iron that boils forth from the fire,
1.60). Metamorphosis follows:
Nel suo aspetto tal dentro mi fei,

qual si fé Glauco nel gustar de l’erba
che ‘l fé consorto in mar de li altri dèi.
Trasumanar significar per verba
non si poria; però l’essemplo basti
a cui esperïenza grazia serba. (1.67–72)
(In looking on her such within I became as made Glaucus in eating the
grass which made him the consort in the sea of the other gods. To signify
by words passing beyond the human is not possible, therefore the example
is enough for whom grace keeps back the experience.)
32 J. TAMBLING
He has transcended earth, hearing divine harmonies. Surpassing the

human he has entered the sphere of fire, like the sea wherein Glaucus
plunged after eating the grass that gave him such a desire that the sea-gods
made him one of themselves (Met. 13.917–963). The man whose name
means ‘bluish-green’, eats green grass, and enters the blue sphere as a god.
These Ovidian metamorphoses differ from Inferno or Purgatorio, where
journeying was strenuous, physical, corporeal: here movement changes
inner states, while passing beyond the human recalls Christ’s transfigura-
tion (Matthew 18.1–13; see Epistle 10, paragraph 28). Marsyas, Daphne,
and Glaucus undergo transhumanising experiences. Everything moves
around Dante, passing through the music of the spheres:
parvemi tanto allor del cielo acceso

de la fiamma del sol, che pioggia o fiume
lago non fece alcun tanto disteso.
La novità del suono e ‘l grande lume
di lor cagion m’accesero un disio … (79–83)
(it seemed to me that the heaven seemed aflame with the fire of the sun
that rain nor river never made so extended a lake. The newness of the
sound and the great light lit in me a desire for their cause …)
The fire makes him burn, as he moves up like fire (92–93, 115). In
canto 4 (76–78) fire figures the constantly moving upwards ascent of the
soul, as characterised by a firm will; when fire moves towards the moon
(115), fire is desire. He is moving to his ‘proprio sito’ (92), like the
‘pelegrin che tornar vuole’ (51—the pilgrim, or falcon, that wills to
return). Love, driving everything towards its origin, returns him to his
appropriate sphere. In Purgatorio 18.70–75, Virgil discoursed of loves,
which arise of necessity in the human, but says there is a noble power
(‘nobile virtù’) to restrain, which Beatrice understands as ‘libero arbitrio’.
Cantos 4 and 5 pick up Beatrice’s hint: free will is their subject.
Light. It is the sun rising: Christ and the material sun together. Dante’s
astronomy makes the cosmos a divine image. It joins four circles in three
crosses (1.37–42). The horizon is one circle; another is the celestial equa-
tor, within the celestial sphere, where the Fixed Stars are. A third is the
Zodiac, that band of constellations in the celestial sphere, crossing the
celestial equator at an angle of 23 degrees, shown in Fig. 2.1. Chapter 3
describes how the sun moves through the Zodiac, or the ecliptic; but for
now, we remember that the Zodiac intersects the Equator as it passes
THE REALM OF
THE CELESTIAL SPHERE
NORTH
CELESTIAL POLE
Equinoctal
colure
ancer
stial C
Cele
b a
c
d Celestial E
quat
or
e `
Summer
Winter EARTH Solstice
_
Solstice f
^
i orn
g apric
Tropic of C
ZODIAC SIGNS
SOUTH
CELESTIAL POLE
^ _ ` a
Aries Taurus Gemini Cancer
b c d e
Leo Virgo Libra Scorpio
f g i
Sagittarius Capricorn Aquarius Pisces
Fig. 2.1 Dante’s universe: the poles, the equator, the Zodiac, and the colures
34 J. TAMBLING
between the tropics (Cancer and Capricorn). The sun spirals West-East
through that band, being now at Aries, the Ram, a ‘miglior’ (better) star-
sign as Chaucer’s ‘colerike hoote signe’ (The Squire’s Tale 51). It is vigor-
ous; the sun now marks the world, the earthly wax, in its own warm mode
(1.127–129).
The fourth circle is the equinoctal colure (Orr: 271–272). This, as a
circle, connects the North and South poles of the celestial sphere, going
through Aries and Libra (March 21, September 21). The solstitial colure
(not alluded to here) connects the poles, and the places when the sun is at
the solstices: Cancer (June 21), and Capricorn (December 21). The sun
comes over the horizon and makes a cross with the other three circles: a
‘harmony of opposites’ as Joan Ferrante (1984:255) calls it, seeing
Paradiso as the description of an ideal society.
Dante’s Astronomy: The Moon

In Plato’s Timaeus, the Demiurge creates the material cosmos, that is, the
body of the world, unique, uniformly spherical—the perfect shape—rotat-
ing on its axis, unchanging (33b). This contrasts with the soul of the cos-
mos (34c), comprising Existence (ousia), the Same, and Difference, within
a unity (Timaeus 2 35b, 20). The Demiurge marked the soul, a pliable
strip, with a series of subdivisions, whose numbers create musical harmony
(36). The Demiurge cut the strip down the middle, placed them crosswise
to form the letter X, and bent both into two circles, the Same, correspond-
ing to the sidereal equator (in the Fixed Stars), and the Different, corre-
sponding to the seven heavens seen in relation to the Zodiac, and moving
in an opposite, East-West direction. Timaeus 36 adds that the creator
inserted the material world inside the soul, which ‘entered as a deity upon
a never-ending life of intelligent activity, spinning within itself for all time.
The soul is invisible … and … characterized by reasoning and harmony’.
The cosmos, the World Soul, combines Reason and Harmony (36e), and
contains the material cosmos.
Its motions, and its numbers, are moving images of eternity, forms of
time whose measurable cycles imitate eternity (37d). Cornford (1937:
103) stresses that the Greeks thought of time as turning in a circle. Days,
nights (measured by the stars in the constellations of the Fixed Stars),
months (measured by the moon), and years (measured by the sun) are
‘aspects of time as it imitates eternity and cycles through the numbers’
(38a). Eternity, then, is ‘precisely this remaining always selfsame, the heav-
enly bodies always circle back to the same’: that being time (Sallis 1999:
83). Plato’s Demiurge ignited the sun ‘to enable … creatures to become
numerate by studying the revolution of identity and sameness’ (39b). But
time is allegorical; it works inside the creation but has no meaning
outside it.
Dante follows Plato on the turning of the spheres wherein the planets
move, in canto 2, discussing the markings on the moon. If the moon as a
sphere is ethereal in make-up (22.132); whence come its ‘segni bui’, dark
marks, or signs (2.49)? They recall the folk-belief that it might be Cain’s
dwelling-place, who committed the first murder. The moon is called Cain
in Inferno 20.124, where it is the guide to time passing. Beatrice contra-
dicts Dante’s sense-informed view that the moon comprises bodies ‘rari e
densi’ (60–66). That was what Genius, the priest-like figure, told Nature,
in the thirteenth-century poem, Le Roman de la Rose, when Nature com-
plains how earthly things, meant for good, have gone awry. She describes
creation, the progress of the heavens, and the planets, and the light and
dark parts of the moon in ways like Dante’s Averroist view in Convivio
2.13.9.4 Nature demonstrates that the moon has dense and rare qualities,
because the planets form a unity in creating entities out of the four war-
ring elements, and if they are not good, ‘it is because of the defect in their
materials’ (Roman 16974).
Paradiso rejects this dualism. Beatrice says that the eighth sphere, of the
Fixed Stars, possesses different qualities and quantities (76), and that plu-
rality implies different virtues, originating from purposive ‘principi for-
mali’: formative principles. ‘Matter’ for Beatrice is explicable through that
which is spiritual. The Primum Mobile turns inside the Empyrean, and
everything within the eight spheres turns, following its diffused virtue.
The Fixed Stars, the sphere closest to the Primum Mobile divides up this
virtue amid ‘diverse essenze’ (116), that is, angelic beings within it. The
spheres below, that is, the seven heavens, direct the distinctive qualities
emanating from there, as organs of the body of the universe (see lines
133–135), distributing what came from above and passing it down, step
by step. Beatrice then goes in reverse, from the planets back to the Fixed
Stars and the Primum Mobile:
Lo moto e la virtù d’i santi giri

come dal fabbro l’arte del martello,
da’ beati motor convien che spiri,
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The Poetry of Dante's Paradiso: Lives

Almost Divine, Spirits that Matter 1st

The Poetry of Dante’s

ISBN 978-3-030-65627-0 ISBN 978-3-030-65628-7 (eBook)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021

incamerastock / Alamy Stock Photo

I began research for this book—which as it is intended as a close reading

seminar at Queen Mary University, November 2012; thanks to Adrian

Dante’s Commedia comprises three cantiche—that is, Inferno (Inf.),

Kay—Monarchia trans. Richard Kay (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of

Other authors and titles:

GL—Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints,

1 Introduction: Reading Paradiso Out of Time 1

2 Within the Shadow of the Earth 29

3 Dancing in the Sun: Paradiso—Cantos 10–14 91

4 Mars, Jupiter, Saturn: History and Its Reversals141

5 Fixed Stars, Diasporic Times: Paradiso 22–27193

6 Angels: Paradiso 28 and 29233

7 The Ultimate Vision: Paradiso 30–33271

Introduction: Reading Paradiso Out of Time

If one had to expound the doctrine of antiquity with utmost brevity … it

Walter Benjamin hints at problems in approaching Paradiso. For the

A man that looks on glasse,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

moments. Purgatorio is also a text that can be taken with a certain

Paradiso: The Cosmos

Darkness beyond the earth is a post-Copernican conception. It sepa-

L’acqua ch’io prendo già mai non si corse;

Que’ glorïosi che passaro al Colco

This evokes Ovid (Metamorphoses 7.100–120), where one test imposed

Mary and Beatrice

Da quella regïon che più sù tona

di tante cose quant’i’ ho vedute,

Beatrice’s visibility is also absence. He sees her as an ‘effige’: as an

Angels, Immateriality, and Prime Matter

Dante’s Trauerarbeit takes the form of expressing, on the anniversary of

creation, which, being ‘in the beginning’, inaugurates time (according to

fu allor come ogne dove / in cielo è paradiso’ (3.89–90: it was clear to me

Qui si mostraro, non perché sortita

(They have shown themselves, not because this sphere is assigned to

The souls in the Moon have descended, appearing as if in a masquer-

way of something visible. In reaching the non-sensual through the sen-

allegorises a spiritual work, but Dionysius had spoken of ‘dissimilar simi-

Origin, Dissemination, and Hierarchy

suspicion in the presence of multiplicity’. She is quoting Patrick Boyde,

unknowing’, a phrase from Exodus 24.15, where God appears in the

Lives Almost Divine, Spirits That Matter

Nel ciel che più de la sua luce prende

(I have been in the heaven that receives most of his light.)

‘Fu io’ is deliberate; it summons up St Paul’s mystic vision (compare

this a narrowing down, thinking these ‘literal’ and ‘allegorical’ senses

Within the Shadow of the Earth

Paradiso 1: Light, Apollo, the Sun, the Zodiac

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 29

something essential for considering the woman, whom Dante calls

If that is the case with this woman, Philosophy, Paradiso’s intuition is

Sì rade volte, padre, se ne coglie

che parturir letizia in su la lieta

Daphne, metamorphosed into laurel, was daughter of Peneus, the river

Nel suo aspetto tal dentro mi fei,

He has transcended earth, hearing divine harmonies. Surpassing the

parvemi tanto allor del cielo acceso

Dante’s Astronomy: The Moon

1 Introduction: Reading Paradiso Out of Time 1

2 Within the Shadow of the Earth 29

3 Dancing in the Sun: Paradiso—Cantos 10–14 91

4 Mars, Jupiter, Saturn: History and Its Reversals141

5 Fixed Stars, Diasporic Times: Paradiso 22–27193

6 Angels: Paradiso 28 and 29233

7 The Ultimate Vision: Paradiso 30–33271