The experience is a challenge beyond reckoning to the poet’s resources of language and image-making; no one had ever attempted it before, as he tells us at the outset:In that heaven which receives most of God’s light
have I been, and have seen things that no one,
descending from up there has the knowledge or
power to retell.
Even so, whatever of that holy realm he was able to treasure in his memory “shall be the matter of my song.” It is a statement of justifiable pride in his poetic self; and with it comes a warning—to those who have sought to follow him in their “little boats.” “Go back to your own shores; don’t commit yourself to the open sea.”
Important truths about the nature and the locale of blessedness are disclosed to Dante almost at once, through his meeting with Piccarda Donati and afterward. The encounter takes place in the Moon. (Dante and Beatrice do not walk upon these planets; they enter them.) Piccarda is the younger sister of Dante’s friend Forese Donati, and of the masterful and terrible Corso. She had taken the veil and was in the process of fulfilling her vows when Corso dragged her back into the world. He forced her to marry one Rosso della Tosa, with whom Corso was then seeking an alliance. (The two later fell out, and Corso went to his death trying to flee Rosso’s henchmen.) Piccarda did not long survive the demands of worldly life. She had taken her place in Paradise, along with Francesca da Rimini in the Inferno and Pia Tolomei in Purgatory, as the victim of a murderously bad marriage.
Dante is charmed by her but puzzled by her obvious contentment with her place in the lowest sphere of heaven. He asks her:But tell me, you whose blessedness is here,
do you not desire a higher place, and to see
more,
and make more friends?
The question has a vibrantly contemporary—almost an American ring. The word for “more,” più, is repeated three times in the tercet: più alto loco ... più vedere ... più farvi amici. Dante assumes the natural Florentine desire to want more of everything. But Piccarda explains that the very essence of the blessed state is to be happy in whatever sphere of Paradise is assigned. Dante grasps the point and generalizes eloquently, “Then it was clear to me that everywhere in Heaven is Paradise.” Piccarda Donati follows with the finest single line in the Paradiso (iii 85): “His will is our peace.” It is a line that seizes the mind at once and repays long meditation: “la sua voluntade è nostra pace. ”
The meeting with Piccarda has raised another question for Dante, which he puts to Beatrice. If an individual’s desire for good is strong, how can another person’s wicked violence lead that individual to a lesser reward in heaven? Beatrice smiles, then answers that these spirits have revealed themselves here, not because this is “the sphere allotted to them,” but as an indication of their degree of blessedness. All the blessed are in the final sphere, the Empyrean, but resting there they “feel more and less the eternal breath.”
Beatrice concludes this phase of Dante’s tutelage with a discourse on free will, “the greatest gift God made to his creation.” The two are then flown effortlessly to the second realm, the planet Mercury, where Dante amid “a thousand splendors drawing near” identifies Justinian, the immensely active Byzantine emperor (from 527 to 565), whose lasting contribution to human welfare was his exhaustively devised legal code. It was Justinian’s military commander Belisarius who wrested control of Italy from the Ostrogothic successors of Theodoric. Like Theodoric, Justinian beautified Ravenna with monuments and mosaics (like the stunning adornments of the Basilica of San Vitale); but Dante honored him even more for the just peace which he brought to the empire.
The whole of Canto vi is given to Justinian’s learned survey of Roman history from Julius Caesar, down through Constantine the Great in the fourth century, to himself two centuries later, and Charlemagne two hundred years after that. Dante made a special note of Caesar’s coming down from northern Italy to “issue forth from Ravenna and leap over the Rubicon,” to initiate a civil war with Pompey.
The visiting lights sparkle and dance and sing, and then fade. Beatrice, after a pause, says to Dante, “Listen to me, for my words shall put before you a great doctrine.” She proceeds to lecture Dante on the Incarnation: on Adam and the fall of man, on the long ages when “the world was sick down there,” until it pleased God to send his son to live on earth and to atone for the sins of humanity through his crucifixion. The occasion for the theological lesson is not clear at first, but Dante’s sequence is, as always, entirely cogent. We have simply moved from history—Justinian’s talk—to the meaning of history. For Christian believers it was exactly the Incarnation that gave meaning to history.
The two travelers are now transported in an instant to the planet Venus. “I had no sense of rising to enter it,” Dante records, “but my lady gave me full faith that I was there.” He sees glowing torches moving about in a circle and then, to his amazement, hears one of them chanting the opening line of his own canzone “Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete. ” It is a proper greeting, for Dante has arrived at the terzo ciel, the third heaven. More than that, Venus is the last of the planets in Dante’s heaven that is still shadowed by earth: that is, still populated by the spirits of those who in some manner had failed in their moral duty. Making part of this throng are those who failed because of erotic passion. Dante’s poem, we recall, tells of being torn between his love for the lost Beatrice and his attraction to the “window-lady” (later and temporarily transformed into the type of philosophy). The spirit singing Dante’s poem is Charles Martel (c. 1271-1295), a great warrior given to wantonness; and, as John D. Sinclair nicely puts it in the notes accompanying his prose translation of the Comedy, Martel is saying to Dante, “You are one of us.” Dante accepts the designation, and the two engage in the exchange about the supreme value of being citizens that we have rehearsed above.
The ascent to the Sun is so swift and silent that it occurs before Dante is even aware of it. It serves him as a metaphor for Beatrice: it is Beatrice “who leads up from good to better with such suddenness that her action does not occupy time.” He is now among the upper planetary spheres, and the demands on his poetic powers have become nearly intolerable. As the great master of language recognizes, it is the challenge to his word-summoning capacities. As to the Sun, “Though I should call up genius, art, tradition, never could I so express it as to make it imaged.” Here, as in the higher realms, words volubly fail him. And he is doing what he says no human poet can do: he is evoking the very look and sound and texture of heaven.
In this ethereal setting, Dante provides one of his most vivid episodes. He recalls seeing a great many glowing lights moving toward him, alive and strong, circling and singing, and they were “sweeter in song than shining in appearance.” And when these “singing, burning suns” had circled him three times, a voice comes from the midst: “I was of the flock that Dominic leads on the way.” The speaker names a spirit on his right: “This was brother and master to me, Albert of Cologne. I am Thomas of Aquino.”
Thomas, who was born around 1225 in Roccasecca, some sixty miles southeast of Rome, joined the Dominican order at eighteen and went on to study in Paris with the theologian Albertus Magnus. It was Albertus who introduced Thomas to the recently discovered moral, political, and metaphysical works of Aristotle. Thomas’s philosophical and theological work, rooted in Aristotle, was unparalleled, culminating in the greatest work of theology in medieval culture, the Summa theologica. Thomas died in 1274.
“Thomas of Aquino” offered the most nourishing mind that Dante had met up with in his studies. For present purposes, what may be stressed—beyond countless particular considerations—was the appeal to Dante of Thomas’s Christian humanism. There is a hint of this in Thomas’s first words, an allusion to “the ray of grace whereat true love is kindled.” In the work of salvation, Dante’s ultimate subject in the Comedy, the Thomistic and Dantean outlook may be summarized in the formula “Grace does not destroy nature but perfe
cts it.” Grace enkindles, elevates, perfects. The opposite view, entering medieval culture from the powerfully appealing works of Saint Augustine, is that man can do nothing toward his own salvation; that, in effect, his human nature, with all its sinfulness, is wiped out and beatitude bestowed by divine grace. This view has been represented in our time, for example, by T. S. Eliot, counseling the individual, as in Ash-Wednesday, to remain motionless and let grace do its work: “Teach us to care and not to care,/ Teach us to sit still.”
Aquinas, meanwhile, points to other theological spirits in his company, as Dante’s vast learning comes again into play. Especially notable are the first-century thinker known as Dionysius the Areopagite, and Boethius, for whose unjust punishment Dante had a fellow feeling. Thomas the Dominican then delivers a stirring eulogy of the founder of the Franciscan order, Saint Francis of Assisi. It is cast in the form of an old-style romance, perhaps an early Dantean canzone, as Thomas tells of the affair in which young Francis was passionately caught up, with a lady “bereft of her first husband, despised and obscure for eleven hundred years” until Francis found her. Thomas then provides the key. “Francis and poverty are these two lovers.” Preaching and the care and comfort of the poor are the features of the new order.
The stigmata received by Francis are then described:in that harsh rock between Tiber and Arno,
from Christ he received the final imprint,
which his limbs but two years carried.
The Italian has a kind of somber harshness, suitable to the subject:nel crudo sasso intra Tevere e Arno
da Cristo prese l’ultimo sigillo,
che le sue membre due anni portarno.
The event took place in 1224 at the rocky summit of a desolate mountain in the Casentino, in a hidden site reached by a plank between two boulders. Francis’ hands and feet were pierced, like Christ’s on the cross, and there was a wound in his side, similar to that given Christ by a spear. The saint died in 1226.
Following the spiritual biography of Francis, Thomas delivers a scathing rebuke to his fellow Dominicans for their uncontrollable lust for material things, in a dark contrast to the previous tale of the love of poverty. Now a second circle of lights approaches, singing sweetly and surrounding the first circle. It was a “great high festival dance,” Dante writes, “of song and flashing lights, gladsome and benign.” From among them, Saint Bonaventura, the Seraphic Doctor who became minister general of the Franciscan Order in 1257, gives a tribute to the founder of the Dominicans. Dominic (his life ran roughly from c. 1170 to 1221) was “a mighty teacher,” Bonaventura declares, “a noble wrestler with the heresiarchs, a holy athlete.” Dominic appears as a force rather than a clearly distinct human individual; the two eulogies, of Francis and Dominic, sound between them the paired themes so central for Dante—love and war.
Thomas talks knowingly for a spell about different church doctrines. Each member of the Trinity is hymned and exalted by the circling lights. Dante is then abruptly translated to the planet Mars, the very smile of which seems to Dante to have brought them up. Within the planet, Dante sees a cross formed by sparkling and moving lights, all chanting a hymn that thrills Dante though he cannot understand a word of it. The lights fall silent; one of them darts along the cross from the right side to the upright and down to the foot. It greets Dante with the words Anchises used to greet his son Aeneas in the underworld, “O blood of mine!”
It is Cacciaguida, the early twelfth-century warrior and crusader who initiated the clan into which Dante was born. He holds Dante’s fascinated attention through Cantos xv, xvi, and xvii, with accounts of Dante’s ancestry, of the sources of Florence’s factional misery, and with colorful predictions about Dante’s exile and tribulations after 1300.
Cacciaguida and his forebears were born where runners in the annual Florentine race cross into the last sestiere, San Piero Maggiore. The warrior speaks of his wife, who came from the Po Valley, “and from whom there comes your surname,” Alighieri. Their son, Alighiero I, still roams the first terrace of Purgatory, where Dante has met him. “He is your grandfather’s father.” The Florence of those ancient days was a better place, populated by simple, pious, hardworking folk, only a fifth of its present size (perhaps sixteen thousand people). Cacciaguida names some of the old families that gave the city its great strength and simplicity—Catellini, Greci, Sacchetti, Giuochi, Caponsacco (the family of Beatrice’s mother)—and he remarks that one of the gates through which one entered the city in the old wall-circuit was named for the extremely modest family of della Pera (it was near the amphitheater; a plaque at the corner of Borgo dei Greci and Piazza San Firenze identifies it). But family enmity and greed led to the “glorious just city” being dyed bloodred by division; and he recites the epitaph for Buondelmonte, slain on Easter morning in 1216:To that mutilated stone which guards the bridge
it was fitting that Florence should give a victim
in the last hour of peace.
Dante ventures to ask about his own future, having heard disturbing hints about it—“heavy words” is his phrase—from others. Cacciaguida replies that Dante will be driven from Florence; this is already being plotted by the pope. He will abandon everything. His fellow exiles will come to seem mad and impious until he makes himself a party of one. He will seek refuge with the lords of Verona, Bartolomeo della Scala and, later, Can Grande. Cacciaguida then issues his celestial instructions: “Make your vision manifest. Tell of what has been shown you in these wheels of Paradise, upon the mount, and in the dolorous valley.” Complete your poem and circulate it.
Other saintly warriors are named, as their lights glimmer and skim along the cross. With Beatrice, whose smile seems to him more lustrous than ever, Dante is taken magically in a great sweeping arc up to the sixth sphere, the planet Jupiter. It is the abode of the just and merciful kings, and its motto is spelled out in successive letters by flickering lights. Dante finally puts it together: “Love righteousness, you who are the judges of the earth” (from the Wisdom of Solomon). After meditating on the thought for a time, Dante arrives at a bothersome question about just judgment.
What of the virtuous heathen? he asks. The query is addressed to a cluster of flickering lights taking the form of an eagle, a soaring emblem of justice. The eagle’s beak makes answering sounds that “Never voice did convey, nor ink write, nor fantasy comprehend.” He persists in his inquiry. A man is born in a place where there is no one to teach him about Christ, where no one can read or write. All his desires and his actions are good; he leads a sinless life but dies unbaptized. “Where is the justice that condemns him?” The eagle’s beak, wheeling and singing, answers by telling the poet in effect to stop talking. “Who are you that would pass judgment on God, the source of all justice? No one who did not believe in Christ has ever risen to this realm.”
The voice adds ominously that many who do profess to love Christ end in the depths of hell and adds what Sinclair calls a “royal black list,” a catalogue of bad kings down through Philip the Fair of France. In the course of the listing, a covert Dantean judgment is conveyed to the reader. The initial letters of the nine stanzas three times spell out LUE: a medieval Italian word (lue) meaning plague or, more precisely, a contagious disease like syphilis. Sinclair remarks on this, adding that the letters mean that or they mean nothing, and “In Dante, nothing means nothing.”
In the following canto, xx, the eagle softens, confiding to Dante that quite a few good pagans have been saved. He mentions, as an example, the Roman emperor Trajan (died A.D. 117), a warrior of large public concern and human appeal; he was admitted to heaven—Thomas Aquinas is the source of the legend—through the prayers for him, almost five centuries later, of Pope Gregory I.
The martial music gives way to an enveloping silence, symbolic, Dante comes to realize, of his new setting and its inhabitants. He is now in the “seventh splendor,” as Beatrice calls it: the planet Saturn, the abode of the contemplative. A representative here is Saint Benedict, the sixth-centur
y founder of the monastery at Monte Cassino. Dante becomes aware of a ladder “erected upward so high that my sight could not follow it.” It is the ladder to heaven that Jacob dreamed of; Dante sees “splendors” ascending and descending it. Benedict and his followers are gathered up it “like a whirlwind,” and Beatrice, with a brief gesture, has Dante “thrust” after him, on the ladder. “Never was motion so swift.”
It is a brilliantly imaged moment. In the spiritual ascension, Dante has arrived beyond the planets at the realm of the Fixed Stars: beyond the vast groups of the individually redeemed—beyond the contemplatives, the lawgivers, and the warriors, the theologians and philosophers—and those, lower yet, who were tainted by the wordly passions or were tardy in their vows.
As Dante conceives it, he has in a sense risen up to his own. For he finds himself, in this astral domain, in the constellation of Gemini, under whose sign he was born. Within the zodiac, Gemini was believed to incite the literary and intellectual powers of its progeny; and Dante, a fervent astrologist, salutes the constellation as the “glorious star, from whom I draw all my genius, whatever it may be.” Gemini was in the ascendant between May 18 and June 17, “when I first felt the air of Tuscany.” It is a climactic passage in Dante’s voyage of self-discovery, and it is our source for calculating his date of birth.
Dante: A Life (PENGUIN LIVES) Page 14