Beatrice bids him look down through the spheres they have mounted, to the earth, whose “vile semblance,” viewed from this height, makes him smile. She next commands him: “Behold the hosts of the triumph of Christ.” Her own countenance is aglow, “her eyes so full of gladness that I must needs pass it by, undescribed.” Visible before them are “thousands of lamps, encircling the sun,” the redeemed encircling Christ the Redeemer. The Divine Light, so powerful that Dante cannot endure it, is, as he knows, the blinding ray of wisdom that opened the way between heaven and earth. Beatrice, understandingly, has him turn his gaze upon her, “upon what I am”; for she is not only Divine Wisdom but also his beloved. Altogether, she is Paradise, and “figuring Paradise,” Dante says, “the sacred poem must make a leap ... It is no voyage for a little barque.”
Dante is made to see the Virgin Mary, “the greatest flame,” who “drew all my mind together.” To her descends the Archangel Gabriel, who crowns Mary with a circle of torches; and she rises out of sight. It is a rhythmic ritual serving to prepare Dante for the ultimate vision. The sacred process continues with the arrival of a group of caroling lights, out of which there shoots a “blissful flame” that circles Beatrice three times, “wherefore,” Dante confesses, “my pen leaps, and I write it not (non lo scrivo).” The flame is Saint Peter, Keeper of the Keys of Heaven, and his purpose is to test Dante’s credentials for admission to the highest realms. He subjects Dante to a celestial oral examination, questioning him on the meaning of “faith.” Dante answers by quoting Saint Paul: faith is the substance of things hoped for. Dante is quizzed about his own faith, and in reply he recites his version of the Christian creed, beginning “I believe in one God, sole and eternal,” citing Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms as sources of his belief, going on to the Trinity, and concluding“This is the spark which dilates into a living flame, and like a star in heaven shineth in me.”
Like a schoolmaster wholly pleased with a student’s performance, Saint Peter embraces Dante, his light encircling him three times, singing words of blessing.
On a personal level, it has been a strenuous self-examination, Dante’s investigation into what he truly and honestly believes. By means of it, he has arrived at a full articulation of his acceptance—and the terms of his acceptance—of central Christian doctrine. He is, as a result, a genuinely changed man, and this is palpable at the opening of Canto xxv in an address, as it were, to the awaiting world. Should it happen that the sacred poem on which he has spent so many difficult years might overcome the cruelty that bars him from Florence, thenwith a changed voice ... shall I return,
and at the font of my baptism
shall I assume the laurel crown.
In ensuing moments, Saint Peter is joined by James and John, the three of them—we are told obscurely—repre—senting the cardinal virtues of faith, hope, and love. Dante strains to see John’s body as well as hear his voice, strains so hard that he is temporarily blinded. John admonishes him, “Why do you dazzle yourself to see what has no place here? My body is earth, in the earth, and will remain there until the eternal purpose is complete.” Dante, one feels, was working his way toward a clear understanding of the question of the resurrection of the body. In Paradiso xiv, responding to a query about the use of the sense organs in heaven, Solomon had spoken of the “sainted flesh” being resumed and the human person being therefore more acceptable to God by being all complete. In Canto xxii, Dante had asked Saint Benedict if he might ever see him with “uncovered visage,” in corporeal form. Benedict tells him in a kind voice that his desire will be fulfilled but only in the “last sphere, where all the rest have their fulfillment.” Mary and Jesus, alone among those born on earth, have ascended to heaven with their bodies. In all of this, it is the poet and dramatist as much as the wondering Christian who speaks. The literary artist needs corporeal beings for his songs.
There is time for one more diatribe by Saint Peter against the greedy popes in Rome, his evil successors, “ravenous wolves”—Beatrice even blushes at the violence of his language (there is political rage in heaven, Dante wants us to know, as well as on earth)—before Dante is scooped up to the last sphere. This is the Primum Mobile, the First Mover, the source of all space and all time, the starting point of the universe in Beatrice’s phrase. Dante, turning, perceives a point of light so intense that his vision cannot contain it. A circle of lights engirds the great light, and that circle by another, till there are nine in all. Dante is in the presence of the light of God himself, surrounded by the nine angelic orders. This is the ultimate reality that Beatrice has led Dante upward to look upon. The divine truth, Dante says, “had been revealed by her who imparadises my mind”; the poet’s inventive phrase is “che ’mparadisa la mia mente. ” He worships her as the truth of God and loves her more intensely than ever as Beatrice. Gazing at her, he sees the same “beautiful eyes with which love had made a noose to capture me” when he was nine years old.
In the Primum Mobile, Dante discovers, all when is now and all where is here. Human individuals arriving there, consequently, are invested with the angelic power—it is one of the most attractive medieval doctrines, emphasized by the Angelic Doctor, Thomas Aquinas—of seeing everything at once. They also possess the angelic capacity for bilocation, of being in two places at once—in the planet Mars, for example, and in the Empyrean.
Dante and Beatrice have now entered the Empyrean, “the heaven of pure light,” in Beatrice’s words, “light intellectual full-charged with love.” The beauty of Beatrice now transcends all bounds. Dante is more overcome by it than any poet, comic or tragic, ever could have been. But it is still the young woman on Via del Corso whom he acknowledges, even as he abandons the theme:From the first day in this life I saw her face,
until this sight, my song ceased not
pursuing her.
But now his “tracking” must come to an end, “as at its utmost reach must that of every artist.”
“The soldiery of Paradise” is what Dante looks upon in the Empyrean, the tenth and final realm: the redeemed of the earth in their eternal home. The military image prepares for the notice by Beatrice of the place being saved “for the lofty Henry”—Henry VII of Luxembourg—“who will come to set Italy straight, before she is ready for it.” Dante, writing in 1320, knew that the late Henry’s efforts had dwindled and failed; and he does not miss the occasion to denounce those who thwarted the efforts, Popes Clement V and Boniface VIII, who are envisioned as being thrust down to the lower depths of Hell.
The redeemed are arranged as the petals on a vast rose. Angels, like a swarm of bees, fly back and forth between them and God, bringing both utter peace and passionate love, Dante’s two ideals of perfection. Seeing this, Dante reflects on the distances he has traveled, “from the human to the divine, from time to the eternal, from Florence to a people just and sane.”
His last guide appears: Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, twelfth-century monk and mystic, founder of monasteries, special devotee of the Virgin Mary. He is a complete person, his eyes and cheeks filled with gladness, gesturing kindly. Bernard tells Dante that Beatrice is now in the “third from the highest rank, where her merit is assigned her.” Dante offers a farewell prayer to her who had drawn him from slavery to power. Bernard urges Dante to raise his eyes to the remotest circle, where the poet sees more than a thousand angels glowing and dancing, and amid them, “smiling at their sport, and their songs, a beauty that was gladness in the eyes of all the other saints”: the Virgin Mary.
In the concluding canto, Bernard beseeches the Virgin Mary to permit Dante to look upon God. Dante’s sight is purged, and he looks into the ray of light that is the very light of Truth. The poet resorts to a necessary game with himself, now saying that it is impossible to describe the divine light—“my vision almost wholly fails me”—now challenging his memory to restore the vision, and begging God for help:“Give my tongue such power
That it may leave at least a single sparkle of your
glory
> For people to come;
By returning a little to my memory somewhat,
and with a little something in these verses,
your victory will be complete.
So it is. With a scarcely controlled voice, Dante can tell us that he united his glance “with the Infinite Worth.”
And within its depths, I saw ingathered,
bound by love in a single volume,
the scattered leaves of all the universe.
As his vision fades, Dante rejoices, in a last hymn of praise, that his own being is moved by the same love that moves all the planets he has mounted through.
My desire and will
like a wheel that spins with even motion
were revolved by the love
that moves the sun and the other stars.
The Paradiso closes with an invocation of the stars, as in the Inferno and Purgatorio: l‘amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.
The Paradiso was completed at some time in 1320, and began to circulate immediately. In the time following, Dante enjoyed himself with his literary associates in Ravenna and in jaunty poetic exchanges with Giovanni del Virgilio in Bologna. Then, in the spring of 1321, he was called upon once more to perform a public service. Ships from Venice and Ravenna had, apparently, run into one another in the Adriatic waters, and the two groups of sailors had engaged in violent fighting. The furious doge of Venice, Giovanni Soranzo, connived with the lord of Forlì and other neighboring rulers in an attempt to bring Ravenna to her knees. Guido da Polenta hastily dispatched Dante and several other envoys up to the lagoon city to sue for peace.
The beguiling legend has come down to us that the Venetians were so in awe of Dante’s powers of oratory that they refused to let him address the meetings. The story suggests the extraordinary reputation Dante had achieved, with the circulation not only of the Comedy but also of the De Monarchia and other political writings and letters. In any case, the mission was successful enough to ensure a follow-up delegation that settled peace terms in September.
Coming back to Ravenna, Dante decided to make part of the journey by land. His route carried him across the marshes, and here he contracted malaria, even as Guido Cavalcanti had done twenty years earlier in a western Italian marshland. Dante died in Ravenna on the night of September 13—14, 1321, at age fifty-six.
His body, crowned with the laurel wreath, was brought to the church of San Francesco in Ravenna. Starting a century later, the Florentines—who now claimed Dante as their own sommo poeta—began a series of forays to seize the bones and bring them south. In 1519, an emissary showed up with authority from Pope Leo X to take charge of the remains and deliver them in Florence to Michelangelo, who was more than ready to construct a glorious tomb. But the crypt was empty; Franciscan monks had taken them away for safekeeping. They were secretly removed again by the Franciscans in 1677 and this time were not rediscovered until 1865, when construction workers, remaking an adjacent chapel, happened upon them by accident.
Dante now rests in San Francesco, in a dignified sepulchre created in 1485 by Pietro Lombardo and adorned with a bas-relief of the poet. The epitaph, written soon after his death, speaks of his wanderings and his songs, and of his exile from his “unloving mother,” Florence. The sepulchre is enshrined in a small beautiful temple built in 1780 by Camillo Morigia.
John Ruskin would say of Dante that he was “the central man of all the world.” In Dante, “the imaginative, moral and intellectual faculties” of man could be seen at their highest and in perfect accord with one another. Dante, Ruskin held, gave the finest expression ever recorded of the search for ultimate truth. The words (in The Stones of Venice, 1851-1853) are splendidly apt and worth long pondering. But by “the world,” Ruskin had in mind primarily the Western world, in particular England and the European Continent. And it has become increasingly evident with the passage of years that Dante is the universal presence in literature around the globe, to a degree matched only by Shakespeare.
Testimony to this is the Museo Dantesco, situated in the Church of San Francesco in Ravenna and presided over by the learned, cosmopolitan, and hospitable Fra Enzo Fantini. The museum, within recent memory, has held conferences and readings from Dante in Russian, Turkish, Romanian (a big affair), Portuguese, Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese, as well as in English (Allen Mandelbaum reading from his translation of the Inferno) and Italian. It is evident from the attendant commentary and displays that these worldwide readers appreciated the interplay of Dante’s faculties no less than Ruskin.
Dante, of course, has been everywhere in Italian culture. Witness Michelangelo, probably the most ardent Florentine since Dante himself, a man who was said to have most of the Divine Comedy in his head, and whose work over a lifetime—we need to think only of his LastJudgment (1541), the most muscular and harrowing of the many panoramic spectacles that have come out of the Inferno —is rife with Dantean images and echoes.
Dante, meanwhile, has been “the defining presence in Italian literature,” writes Jonathan Galassi, “the first to move the language out of the shadows of its classical past.” The remark occurs in the afterword to Galassi’s exemplary translation of the Collected Poems 1920-1954 of Eugenio Montale, the greatest Italian poet of the twentieth century and Nobel Prize laureate in 1975. Montale’s entire career, Galassi observes, was a creative struggle with Dante. “The book against which Montale can be said to work in his middle years is the Vita Nuova,” with Montale likewise piecing together discordant love poems into a kind of novel. In the climatic period of La Bufera (The Storm), Montale’s poetry, ever more allegorical, “is increasingly haunted by the Commedia.”
The presence of Dante in English and American literature over the past two hundred years has been so ubiquitous and so energizing that we can do no more than list some of the chief writers who belong to his progeny. On Shelley, and for all Shelley’s antipathy to Dante’s doctrinal ideas, the influence of Dante was overwhelming. Prometheus Unbound (1820), the last act of which—with its invocation to “weave the mystic measure/of music, and dance, and shapes of light”—comes straight from the Paradiso. The Triumph ofLife(1822) is a revisit to the Inferno, in brilliantly managed terza rima, with Rousseau performing as Virgil. Byron’s The Prophecy of Dante, a product of his residence in Ravenna, depicts Dante in his own Ravenna days but as a far gloomier figure—“on the lone rock of desolate despair”—than the Florentine actually was. Browning’s poem “Sordello” (1840), as we have said, relates with tantalizing ambiguity to the character Dante meets on Mount Purgatory. These writers and their contemporaries drew largely upon the Divine Comedy; Dante Gabriel Rossetti led the way back to the VitaNuova, to Dante’s canzones and other lyrics, and to the love for Beatrice that inspired them. He brought his Victorian sweetness to the dolce stil nuovo poetry that he translated and collected in a volume eventually called Dante and His Circle (1874).
In America, Emerson in his journals (spring 1846) spoke of Dante as “the central man” even before Ruskin deployed the phrase; though for Emerson, Dante was one of several icons—along with Socrates, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and Jesus—who variously comprised the archetypal persona whose features have “stamped themselves in fire on the heart.” Longfellow came upon the Divine Comedy, in the original, in Rome in 1828, when he was twenty-one years old (he may have previously seen one of the first English translations, by Henry E Cary, which had appeared in 1814). Several decades later, after lecturing on Dante at Harvard for a number of years, Longfellow set about translating the epic. Working at times with his literary friends James Russell Lowell and Charles Eliot Norton, Longfellow completed the task in 1867: a work, says Newton Arvin, Longfellow’s judicious biographer (1965), that despite occasional flaws is “almost Elizabethan in the range and freshness” of its unrhymed blank verse. In 1882, Longfellow inaugurated the Dante Society, a select affair that met at the poet’s house on Brattle Street in Cambridge, and of which Howells was a faithful if sometimes intimidated member.
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br /> Coming closer to our own time, we find Ezra Pound thoroughly versed in the whole of Dante, including the De Vulgari Eloquentia. His magnificently ragged epic The Cantos, written over fifty years, dealt with the material (so he said dryly, late in life) “that wasn’t in the Divina Commedia,” and is a gorgeous miscellany of borrowing and inversions of Dante’s poem.
T. S. Eliot’s mind and imagination were infested with Dante over a literary lifetime. In a talk at the Italian Society in London in July 1950, called “What Dante Means to Me” (he had previously published a long essay on Dante in 1929), Eliot reported that he had first come upon the Divine Comedy in a prose translation during his senior year at Harvard (where Dante was still held in reverence) in 1909, and that now, forty years later, he still regarded Dante’s poetry “as the most persistent and deepest influence upon my own verse.” He cited particular borrowings, aimed at arousing “in the reader’s mind the memory of some Dante-esque scene, and thus establishing a relationship between the medieval inferno and modern life”: for example, in The Waste Land, “the vision of my city clerks trooping over London Bridge from the railway station to their offices evoked the reflection ‘I had not thought death had undone so many,’” from Dante’s image of “the trimmers” early in the Inferno. And we recall Guido da Montefeltro’s hissing speech, which served as the epigraph for “Prufrock”: “Si’ credesse... ”
He goes on to remind us that in “Little Gidding,” the last of the Four Quartets in the 1940s, he had inserted a long passage, written in tercets and intended “to present to the mind of the reader a parallel by means of contrast, between the Inferno and the Purgatorio, which Dante visited, and a hallucinated scene after an air-raid.” It is the passage beginningIn the uncertain hour before the morning
Dante: A Life (PENGUIN LIVES) Page 15