Paradiso (The Divine Comedy series Book 3)

by Dante

  46–48. The lengthy opening description of the heavens yields to the first presence and first naming of Beatrice in Paradiso. Her superhuman ability to gaze directly and fixedly at the Sun reflects a tradition insisting on eagles’ ability to do so found in Aristotle among the ancients (De animalibus IX.xxxiv) and in Brunetto Latini among the moderns (Tresor I.v.8). And see Paradiso XX.31–32. As Carroll points out (comm. to vv. 49–64), we probably should not draw allegorical conclusions about Beatrice’s turning leftward (a movement frequently symptomatic, in this poem, of moral deficiency); here her turning in this direction is necessitated by her being in the Southern Hemisphere where Beatrice was facing east; north, where the Sun shone, was thus to her left. [return to English / Italian]

  49–54. This, the first formally developed simile of Paradiso, is in fact double (and that its second element deploys the image of a completed pilgrimage should not surprise us). We may sense an increasing degree of abstraction in the similes of this cantica (but not always—see vv. 67–69, where Dante’s “transhumanation” is cast in physical terms; he is changed as was Glaucus). For the increasingly abstract nature of the poetry of roughly the first two-thirds of Paradiso, see Chiappelli (Chia.1967.3). And for two bibliographies of studies devoted to the Dantean simile, see Sowell (Sowe.1983.1) and Varela-Portas (Vare.2002.1).

  Beatrice’s miraculous (to ordinary mortals) ability to look into the Sun is momentarily granted to Dante, who sees the reflection of the Sun in her eyes and somehow is able to look up into that planet with his returning gaze. When we reflect that, according to Purgatorio IV.62, the Sun itself is a mirror (specchio), Beatrice then becomes a mirror of the mirror of God. [return to English / Italian]

  55–57. Some of the early commentators make the understandable mistake (since “here” obviously refers to the earth) of thinking that “there” applies to the heavens and not the pinnacle of the Mount of Purgatory; however, both Benvenuto da Imola (comm. to vv. 49–57) and Francesco da Buti (comm. to vv. 49–63) comprehend that Dante and Beatrice are still in the earthly paradise, a fact that the title of this new cantica tends to make us forget. [return to English / Italian]

  58–60. Dante is able to make out the corona of the Sun. The reader must assume that his greater sight results from his greater closeness to the Sun at this highest point on the earth’s surface as well as from his regaining the vision of innocence (see the note to vv. 55–57). [return to English / Italian]

  61–63. Venturi (comm. to vv. 62–63) believes that this additional brightness was caused by the sight of the Moon, now grown larger in its appearance because Dante is so much higher. However (and as Lombardi [comm. to this tercet] correctly objects), this cannot be the sphere of the Moon, which awaits Beatrice and Dante in the next canto, but is the sphere of fire, in the outermost situation of the four elements that constitute our earth (water and earth, then air, and finally fire), a solution at first proposed in 1333 or so by the Ottimo (comm. to vv. 58–63). And see verse 115 of this canto (“This instinct carries fire up toward the moon”), where the sphere of fire is apparently again alluded to. [return to English / Italian]

  64–66. The guide and her charge presumably have passed through the (unnamed) sphere of fire that girds the earth just below the sphere of the Moon; Dante’s eyes are guided by Beatrice’s beyond this home of earth’s highest-dwelling element and to a first sight of the heavenly spheres. [return to English / Italian]

  67–72. Glaucus’s transformation, described by Ovid (Metam. XIII. 904–968), is a dazzling rendition of how an ordinary fisherman, chancing upon a magic herb, is metamorphosed into a god of the sea. Dante can sharply reduce the poetic space he devotes to the Ovidian scene because it is so familiar to his readers (at least the ones he most cares about). For the classical history of Glaucus as it comes into Ovid, Dante’s primary source, see Diskin Clay (Clay.1985.1).

  For Dante’s Glaucus (along with Marsyas) as figures of Dante’s own divinization, see Rigo (Rigo.1994.1), pp. 109–33. For the theme of deificatio in St. Bernard’s De diligendo Deo as clarifying Dante’s notion of “transhumanation,” see Migliorini-Fissi (Migl.1982.1), who indeed sees traces of Bernard’s work throughout the poem, as does Mazzoni (Mazz.1997.1), especially pp. 178–80, 192–230. [return to English / Italian]

  68. For Glaucus’s “tasting” of the grass that transforms him as “reversing” Adam’s “tasting” of the forbidden tree (Par. XXVI.115), see Rigo (Rigo.1994.1), p. 113. (The notion of Glaucus as Adam in his refound innocence goes well with that of Dante in his: See Carroll’s observation in his note to vv. 49–64.) We observe here a conflation of Ovid’s Heroides XVIII.160, a verse (cited by Rigo.1994.1, p. 114) referring to Glaucus: “reddidit herba deum” (whom a plant once deified—tr. H. C. Cannon).

  The two major classical myths evoked in this canto, Apollo and Glaucus, along with the associated references to arrows and the ingestion of food, indicate the two main ways to understanding that we will hear about all through the cantica, intellectual penetration and a more passive reception of the truth.

  That Dante has turned to Ovid for three major myth/motifs in this canto (Apollo and Daphne/immortality; Apollo and Marsyas/being drawn out of one’s bodily limits; Glaucus/transhumanation) would almost seem to indicate that, for Dante’s purposes, Ovid’s poem about the gods, transmogrified by Dante’s Christian intellect into shadows of a higher truth, is a more adaptable source than Virgil’s martial epic for this more exalted and final component of the Comedy. If, after our encounter with the first cantos of Paradiso, we are of that opinion, we are not altogether incorrect. However, if we believe that Virgil’s text is no longer a valued source in the poem’s most Christian precincts, we will eventually be disabused of this notion, particularly in Cantos XV and XXXIII. [return to English / Italian]

  70–72. For Dante “transhumanation” is the passing beyond normal human limits by entering into a state at least approaching that enjoyed by divinity.

  Chiarenza (Chia.1972.1), p. 83, holds this passage up to Hugh of St. Cher’s comparison of the difficulty of conveying one’s “intellectual vision” to someone else to the difficulty of describing the flavor of wine to one who had never tasted it.

  See Migliorini-Fissi (Migl.1982.1), pp. 41–44, for St. Bernard’s relevant concept of deificatio. [return to English / Italian]

  70. Dante’s claim is lodged in self-conscious language that, in a single verse, includes an Italian neologism (trasumanar), literally “to transhumanate,” an intransitive verb signifying “to become more than human,” and a Latin phrase, per verba (in words). [return to English / Italian]

  73–75. This tercet reflects the three Persons of the Trinity, one per verse (Power, Knowledge, Love); we also learn in a single line (75) how Dante and Beatrice move upward: drawn instantaneously by God Himself, not propelled gradually by themselves. [return to English / Italian]

  73. This citation of II Corinthians 12:3 has not escaped many commentators. There Paul is not certain as to whether he was in body or not in his ascent through the heavens. For his phrase “third heaven” as meaning, not the heaven of Venus, to which the phrase would ordinarily refer in Dante, but the highest part of God’s kingdom, see St. Thomas, Summa Theologica II–II, q. 175, a. 3, r. to obj. 4 (cited from the online edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia [www.newadvent.org/cathen/]): “In one way by the third heaven we may understand something corporeal, and thus the third heaven denotes the empyrean (I Tim. 2:7; Cf. I, 12, 11, ad 2), which is described as the ‘third,’ in relation to the aerial and starry heavens, or better still, in relation to the aqueous and crystalline heavens. Moreover, Paul is stated to be rapt to the ‘third heaven,’ not as though his rapture consisted in the vision of something corporeal, but because this place is appointed for the contemplation of the blessed. Hence the gloss on 2 Cor. 12 says that the ‘third heaven is a spiritual heaven, where the angels and the holy souls enjoy the contemplation of God: and when Paul says that he was rapt to this heaven he means that God showe
d him the life wherein He is to be seen forevermore.’ ”

  On the Pauline stance of the poet here and elsewhere, see Mazzeo, “Dante and the Pauline Modes of Vision” (Mazz.1960.1), pp. 84–110. (And see his earlier book Structure and Thought in the “Paradiso” [Mazz.1958.1] for a wider consideration of the poetics of this cantica.) See Paradiso XXVII.64–65, where St. Peter finally makes it plain that Dante is present, ascending through the heavens, in the flesh. Bosco/Reggio (comm. to vv. 73–75) make the point that, since Dante eventually allows us to believe that he went up in body (they cite Par. XXI.11 and 61, passages that are perhaps less decisive than that in Par. XXVII), all this coy uncertainty has a main purpose: to give himself Pauline credentials, since Paul himself either cannot or will not say in what state he was during his rapture. Gragnolati (Grag.2005.1), pp. 162–74, joins those who believe that Dante contrives to make us see that he wants to be understood as having made the final ascent in the flesh. [return to English / Italian]

  74. For Dante’s phrasing describing God’s love as manifest in His creation, commentators beginning with Scartazzini (comm. to this verse) have suggested the resonance of Boethius (Cons. Phil. II.m8.15), “coelo imperitans amor” (love governing the heavens). [return to English / Italian]

  75. God is portrayed as drawing Dante upward through His beam of light; whether the protagonist possesses physical weight or not, it is a spiritual force that lifts him, not a physical one. [return to English / Italian]

  76–81. If God loved the universe in creating it, it loves him back. These two tercets create a picture of the totality of God’s spheres. Having created them in time, He also made eternal (sempiternal, as Dante rightly says, i.e., having a beginning but not an end) their desire to reunite themselves with Him. [return to English / Italian]

  78. The reference is pretty clearly to the “music of the spheres,” that harmony created by the movement initiated by the love of the spheres themselves for God. As early as the Ottimo (1333; comm. to vv. 76–81), students of the poem attributed the notion of the harmony of the spheres (as do other early commentators) to Macrobius’s commentary to the Ciceronian Somnium Scipionis (for a brief overview of the vexed topic, the extent of Dante’s knowledge of this early-fifth-century neoplatonist, see Georg Rabuse, “Macrobio,” ED III [1971], pp. 757–59 [Rabuse enthusiastically supports the view that Dante knows both the Somnium Scipionis and the Saturnalia well]). Among the moderns, since Lombardi (1791 [comm. to vv. 76–78]), commentators have suggested the dependence here upon that concept, and, closer to our own time, Bosco/Reggio (comm. to vv. 76–77) point out that it is clear that Dante refers to the so-called “music of the spheres.” Such music is a pleasing notion, but all of Aristotle’s three greatest commentators—Averroës, Albert the Great, and Thomas Aquinas—quash its possibility. Dante, as poet, seems to like the idea well enough that he is willing to be its sponsor despite such firm and authoritative opposition. Bosco/Reggio go on to point out that this reference to the music of the spheres is the only one found in Paradiso, where all later music will be in the form of the singing of the saved and of the angels—less suspect musical forms, we might conclude. [return to English / Italian]

  79–81. Perhaps because humans are accustomed to seeing no measurable space-consuming object more vast than a lake or a sea, the poet compares the extended fire he saw in the sky to a watery body. How we are to understand the exact nature of the phenomenon at which he gazed is not clear, although some believe (see the note to vv. 61–63) it is the fiery ring that surrounds the sphere of the Moon, a common fixture of medieval astronomy that would otherwise have remained unmentioned in the poem. But there is simply no certainty on this matter. [return to English / Italian]

  82–84. Both the beautiful sound (the music of the spheres? [see the note to verse 78]) and the brilliant and extended pool of light (the sphere of fire between the earth and Moon? [see the note to vv. 61–63]) increase Dante’s intense desire to know their realities. It will at least seem that Beatrice’s answer (vv. 88–93) does little to answer either of Dante’s questions in ways that we, earthlings like him, would consider satisfying. However, it certainly does seem that the poet means us to be aware of our unslaked curiosity about the identity of these two heavenly phenomena. An attractive hypothesis is that he means us to draw exactly these conclusions without having left himself tainted by incredible claims (e.g., “I passed through the sphere of fire and listened to the music of the spheres”). [return to English / Italian]

  85–87. We learn definitively that Beatrice truly reads the protagonist’s mind, a capacity that Virgil at times claimed but was rarely, if ever, capable of demonstrating (see the notes to Inf. XVI.115–123; XXIII.25–30; Purg. XV.133–135). Her lips open in response before Dante’s question has been voiced.

  The reason for the agitation experienced by the protagonist is explained by verses 82–84. [return to English / Italian]

  88–90. Beatrice avers that, were only Dante thinking in an otherwordly way, he would not have asked his two questions. He thinks of what his senses are experiencing as though it were sensed on earth. Her point is that it is precisely his earthly home that he has left behind and is indeed racing from as quickly as lightning flies. This response apparently does not satisfy readers’ inquisitiveness much better than it satisfies the protagonist’s. On the other hand, Benvenuto da Imola suggests (in his comm. to Par. I.91–93) that the sounds of celestial harmony could not be heard from earth (“audit sonum coeli, non quia sit ibi factus de novo, sed quia dum staret in terra non poterat ipsum audire”). Thus Beatrice is intrinsically answering Dante’s first question; his earthly ears confounded the reality (the music of the spheres) of what they heard. As for the second, commentators, beginning perhaps with Lombardi (1791 [to verse 92]), have understood that Dante’s allusion is to the sphere of fire that circled the earth above the other elements, near the Moon; in other words, that Beatrice’s words “lightning darting from its place” contain a specific reference to the sphere of fire, as is now recognized in most discussions of this tercet. [return to English / Italian]

  91–93. For a study devoted to the paradoxes that flow from Dante’s combined corporeal heaviness and lightness, see Simon Gilson (Gils.2004.1), pp. 170–73: Beatrice’s words gather up and redeploy Aristotle’s statements concerning the rapid and violent movement of celestial bodies (De caelo II.2 and Meteora II.9), combining them with the views of St. Augustine (Confessions XIII.9) on the pondus amoris, the downward-tending direction of earthly affection and the liberating fire of love for God. (Both Sapegno [1955, comm. to vv. 124–126] and Singleton [1975, comm. to verse 116] cite this passage from the Confessions to make a similar point.) Dante’s rational soul is returning to its “birthplace” in the heavens, where God breathed it into the being he was to become, his characteristics set by the Fixed Stars, as we learn, for instance at Paradiso VIII.94–114. [return to English / Italian]

  94. Dante has conflated his two previous questions as one, since they have both been answered in the same way. [return to English / Italian]

  95. Beatrice’s smiling words (sorrise parolette) here contain the first reference to smiles and smiling that run through this canticle. There are roughly twice as many references (two dozen) to smiling in Paradiso as there were in Purgatorio (see the note to Purg. II.83). [return to English / Italian]

  96–99. Dante’s new question probably does not refer to a concern that will arise later (if he is in the body, as he plainly seems to believe he is): How can he pass through the matter of the planetary spheres? See Par. II.37–45 and the accompanying note; rather, it more likely relates to his surprise that he in his bodied state can rise above not only land and water back on earth, but, far more puzzling to him, the lighter elements of air and fire. In the view of the author of the Codice Cassinese (comm. to verse 99), the reference is to two of the four elements: “scilicet. aerem et etherem, qui leves sunt respectu aliorum duorum corporum gravium ut est terra et aqua” (that is, air and fire,
which are light in comparison to those other two bodies [elements] that are heavy, as are earth and water), a formulation that shows us a fourteenth-century commentator using the word corpo not to refer to the material heavenly spheres (as some modern commentators believe it must), but to the four elements. For the identity of ether and ignis, see Guido da Pisa (comm. to Inf. XIV.52–60). [return to English / Italian]

  97. While rhyme may have forced the Latin verb requïevi (I was content), Dante surely enjoyed Latinizing his own speech as a character in his own poem (for the first [and last] time since his first word in the poem [Inf. 1.65, Miserere]). He is, as his bibliography attests, a writer in vernacular and in Latin. [return to English / Italian]