Paradiso (The Divine Comedy series Book 3)

by Dante

  100–102. We have been made aware of the wonder of those in beatitude at the obtuseness of mortals at least since we first observed the angel finding the plight of Dante at the gates of Dis of absolutely no interest (Inf. IX.100–103). [return to English / Italian]

  103–141. Beatrice’s response fills the rest of the canto, with the exception of its final line of narrative. It is divided into three parts. In the first (vv. 100–126), she deals with Dante’s puzzlement as to his upward inclination, given his mortal condition; in the second (vv. 127–135), she admits that fallen human nature is prone to being drawn downward, away from this true inclination; in the third (vv. 136–141), she avers that Dante is now proof against such wrong directionality because he has been freed of sin. [return to English / Italian]

  103–105. While hardly answering Dante’s question directly (vv. 98–99: How can his heaviness pass through lighter zones in the atmosphere above the earth?), Beatrice begins her discourse on the nature of the universe, the formal disposition of which is ordered, in resemblance of its Creator. [return to English / Italian]

  106–108. In the structure of the created universe, where the divine form first became manifest, angels (and humans?) possess the capacity to understand that form. The Scholastic word “form” is akin to the Platonic term “idea,” a spiritual essence inhering in its physical manifestations. [return to English / Italian]

  109–120. Beatrice now presents the components of the universe’s order: All things in nature, whether nearer to God or farther, have a natural inclination toward the good. While their destinations differ, each responds to its own inborn impulse in finding its goal, whether fire (guided toward the lunar sphere), the sensitive soul in irrational creatures, the force of gravity in inanimate things—and not only irrational things (animals, inanimate nature), but angels and humans as well. Both these classes of being possess not only intellect, but love; the latter, as Bosco/Reggio point out (comm. to verse 120) in the sense of “capable of willing,” as in Purgatorio XVII.92–93 (“amore … d’animo” [love, whether natural or of the mind]). [return to English / Italian]

  109–111. For a possible poetic precursor to Dante’s formulation of the laws of gravity, see Ovid (Metam. I.29–30), as pointed out by Rossini (Ross.2000.1), p. 172. The passage was first noted by Daniello (comm. to this tercet): “Densior his tellus, elementaque grandia traxit et pressa est gravitate sua” (the earth was heavier than these [the elements of fire and air], and, drawing with it the grosser elements, sank to the bottom of its own weight [tr. F. J. Miller]). And see the note to vv. 91–93, above. [return to English / Italian]

  112–117. Reverting to nautical metaphor (see vv. 67–69) for the life-journeys of all created things, whether capable of willing or not, the poet equates the purposes of inanimate and one kind of animate life with voyages toward various ports, the ends for which God has ordained these of His creations. This impulse is exemplified in three kinds of being: a light element (fire) with its inherent “desire” to rise to its own sphere (see the note to vv. 61–63); creatures possessed of an animal (but not a rational) soul; and a heavy element (earth) with its obedience to the law of gravity, expressed as a “desire” to become compacted (the opposite impulse from that of fire). [return to English / Italian]

  118–120. We now realize, if we did not at first, that “mortal hearts” did not refer to those of humans, in whom hearts are bound with immortal souls, guided by intellect and by choice in their loving (their will), but to the inclinations or instincts of animals, guiding their actions. [return to English / Italian]

  121–126. It is God’s plan that the Empyrean, bathed in His light, is unmoving, peaceful, while the uppermost and neighboring heaven, the Primum Mobile, itself most agitated, imparts motion to the other spheres below. It is humans’ eventual goal to be drawn toward God. [return to English / Italian]

  127–135. Dante, aware of our awareness that not all creatures possessed of immortal souls tend toward the good, explains why not all arrows hit their target. The fault is not in the archer (God), but in the material (Beatrice switches metaphoric equivalence in mid-metaphor, moving from archery to the production of artifacts): Some of the craftsman’s work is faulty because of the innate shortcomings of his material. It is a paradox that God’s more noble creatures may swerve in their movement while the lesser follow more predictable paths; that paradox results from the unique gift of the freedom of the will to humans and to angels (see Par. V.19–24). [return to English / Italian]

  136–141. Having offered the necessary philosophic background, Beatrice now more or less answers Dante’s question: His natural inclination is to move upward. To be sure, his quandary (vv. 98–99) was how he, as an object possessing mass and weight, could penetrate matter, and this concern is not, strictly speaking, answered in her remarks so much as it is bypassed for a higher degree of abstraction.

  Bosco/Reggio (comm. to verse 141) set into relief the paradox that underlies these two terzine. While Dante’s voyage through the heavens is itself miraculous in any terms, his upward tendency, which seems paranormal to him, is utterly natural; that he was called to witness, as was Paul, is a mystery that only God can explain; that, once called, he rises through the spheres is explained by the merest science, the result of a spiritual force of gravity, as it were. [return to English / Italian]

  142. The final verse of the canto, returning to the narrative mode, describes Beatrice’s renewed contemplation of Heaven, to which she is obviously pleased to return, having had to lower her intellectual powers in order to explain what to her is intuited and obvious to such an auditor as Dante, with his as yet necessarily lesser capacity to experience and to understand the highest truths. [return to English / Italian]

  PARADISO II

  * * *

  1–18. For the Ovidian resonances in this passage, so marked by classical motif (the poem as voyage across a sea, the poet as inspired by gods and/or muses) and allusion (Jason and the voyage of the Argonauts), see Picone (Pico.1994.1), pp. 191–200. [return to English / Italian]

  1–6. The canto begins apparently by discouraging the “average reader” from attempting to understand it. As we shall shortly discover, only some of us are welcomed to the attempt (vv. 10–18). We may be put in mind of the similar gesture near the beginning of Convivio (I.i.2–6). That passage continues (I.i.7): “Blessed are the few who sit at the table where the bread of the angels is eaten, and most unfortunate those who share the food of sheep” (tr. R. Lansing). See O’Brien (Obri.1979.1) for a strong differentiation of the references to the “bread of angels” in these two passages, the first accommodating secular knowing, this one based on faith and the Scriptures. For the differing audiences sought for Convivio and Paradiso, see Vincenzo Placella (Plac.1995.1). [return to English / Italian]

  1. Despite the distraction of an address to the reader, we realize that, beginning with the opening of this canto, we are in the sphere of the Moon. There is only one other occasion in the ten heavens when the entrance to a celestial realm coincides with the beginning of a canto: Paradiso XXI (Saturn). Those who are overwhelmed by the organized quality of Dante’s mind might like to be aware of its “disorderly” side as well.

  The “little bark” inevitably reminds readers of the “small bark” (navicella—Purg. I.2) that represents Dante’s intellect at the beginning of Purgatorio. His capacities, we may infer, have increased in accord with his nearness to God; his ship, we understand by implication, is now a mighty craft; ours is the “little bark.” [return to English / Italian]

  2. For only the second time in the poem (see Inf. XXII.118), Dante addresses his readers as listeners, as Aversano (Aver.2000.2), p. 10, points out. [return to English / Italian]

  3. The phrase “ship that singing makes its way” once again capitalizes on the equation ship = poem (see Purg. I.2). The word legno as metaphoric expression, the material of construction being referred to as the thing itself, has a classical heritage and a heavy Dantean presence. While i
n Purgatorio it appears four times without once having this meaning, in Inferno it had appeared ten times, in fully seven of which it denotes “ship” or “boat.” Now in the last cantica it is used six times, twice (here and in Canto XIII.136) with the meaning “ship.”

  The self-consciously “literary” language continues that strain from the first 36 verses of the opening canto in less lengthy but similar behavior in the first 18 of this one. And see Paola Allegretti (Alle.2004.1) for a consideration of the opening passage of this canto (II.1–15) as the centerpiece between two other important passages involving ships, Purgatorio II.10–51 and Paradiso XXXIII.94–96, with ample consideration of classical sources, in a revisitation of Curtius’s often-cited essay, “The Ship of the Argonauts” (Curt.1950.1). [return to English / Italian]

  4–6. The warning sounds “elitist,” even scornful (and see the note to vv. 13–15). But if we think about what is at stake, nothing less than our salvation, its exclusionary nature seems only necessary. Did Dante really mean that those of us who have no Christian upbringing either cannot be saved or at least cannot be saved by reading Dante’s poem? The latter is what the passage apparently asserts, for if we lose track of him, we may lose track of God. It is perhaps necessary to remind ourselves that the voice we hear belongs to an unsuccessful, exiled Florentine, with one completed work longer than a single canzone (Vita nuova, some twenty years behind him), who has banked all that he is and has on this text that he will barely manage to finish before his death. The intervening centuries have allowed Dante an authority only doubtfully accorded him by his early commentators, who by and large manage to avoid paying sufficient attention to this amazing claim, with possibly the single exception of Benvenuto (comm. to vv. 5–6), perhaps the sole interpreter to put the potential failure of Dante’s readership in specifically Christian terms: “quia cum vestro parvo ingenio non possetis intelligere meam profundam materiam, et possetis errare a via rectae fidei” (lest, with your limited understanding, you fail to understand the depth of my material, and wander from the path of the true faith [italics added]). Benvenuto goes on to cite Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, not the Consolation of Philosophy, but the specifically Christian treatise, The Trinity Is One God Not Three Gods. [return to English / Italian]

  7–9. For a discussion of the triune God, see Canto I, note 13. And for the “triune Apollo,” see Di Scipio (Disc.1995.1), pp. 258–59, who offers a passage in Alain de Lille’s Anticlaudianus as a potential source for Dante’s Christianized Apollo. For the presence of a text of Alanus in another context, the river of light in Paradiso XXX, see the note to Par. XXX.61–69. [return to English / Italian]

  7. Familiar by now (e.g., Inf. I.22–24, Purg. I.1–3) is the watery expression for nonaqueous spaces. The assertion that the poet is the first to report his travel over such “seas” is essentially true; for an exhaustive discussion of the topos of novelty in the Commedia, see Ledda (Ledd.2002.1), pp. 57–86. [return to English / Italian]

  9. Benvenuto (comm. to vv. 7–9) thinks that Dante’s “nove,” not only indicating the number “nine,” is more subtly construed as a form of the adjective nuovo (new), and believes that the poet felt the need for new muses since he was writing of the Christian God, not the pagan divinities. While that argument probably needs to be more accommodating (since the phrase “nine Muses” is bypassed only with considerable difficulty), it should have alerted readers to the unlikely presence of pagan goddesses at this height in the poem’s development. Suffice it to say that such concerns were expressed from time to time in the commentary tradition, but have never won the day, so that there results a certain unsureness of exactly how to deal with this verse. Scartazzini (comm. to this verse) has a useful review of such puzzlement, but does not attempt to solve the riddle himself. However, possibly the most compelling gloss to this verse was written by Giovan Battista Gelli halfway into the sixteenth century, and not in response to this verse, but to Inferno II.7–9: “Ma perchè io mi persuado che il Poeta nostro, per trattar di quelle cose divine, le quali son veramente divine, e non fabulose come quelle delle quali trattano quasi tutti gli altri poeti, abbia in tutte le cose ancor concetti molto più alti e più profondi di loro, dico ancora io (ascendendo con lo intelletto più alto, …) che le Muse, propiamente e divinamente parlando, significano quelle intelligenze, o sieno anime o sieno motori, che muovono e guidano le nove sfere celesti, cioè quelle de’ sette pianeti, quella del cielo stellato e quella del primo mobile” (However, since I am persuaded that our poet, in order to treat of things divine—indeed truly divine, not the stuff of fable, such as almost all other poets deal with—had in all things ideas both more lofty and more profound than they do; and I say further, ascending higher with my intellect, that the Muses, properly and divinely speaking, signify those intelligences, whether they be souls or movers, that move and direct the nine heavenly spheres, that is those of the seven planets, that of the Starry Sphere, and that of the Primum Mobile.) See Hollander (Holl.1993.3), p. 227, for a highly similar solution without, however, reference to Gelli. If the verse is read in this way, the discomfort of Benvenuto is addressed without twisting the literal sense of the line. It is the nine heavens that are referred to as “muses”; they are the sign of God’s creating power and lead Dante’s mind to port. (Several commentators, beginning with Vellutello, refer to the Muses in this context as Dante’s bussola [compass], but only one [Campi, comm. to vv. 7–9] sees that metaphor in a Christian conceptual frame, i.e., that these are not the classical Muses.) [return to English / Italian]

  10–12. The handful of Christian readers who will be able to navigate the third canticle are marked by long devotion to the study of religious truth (not necessarily demonstrating, as several commentators urge, a more general philosophical interest). For the distinction, see Attilio Mellone, “Pane degli angeli,” ED (IV [1973]), p. 266, contrasting what is conveyed by the expression “bread of angels” when it is used in Convivio (I.i.7) to its meaning here; there it covers all kinds of knowing, but here only revealed truth.

  The opening tercet looks to the Bible and to Dante’s Convivio, as Singleton points out (comm. to Par.I.1–6 and 10–11). While the biblical phrase (Psalms 77 [78]:25, Wisdom 16:20) is clearly theological in meaning, the passage from Convivio (I.i.7) is not: “Blessed are the few who sit at the table where the bread of the angels is eaten, and most unfortunate those who share the food of sheep!” (tr. R. Lansing). It seems likely that the author of the Comedy would look back upon these words with a shudder, noting this hostility to the most Christian of images, the faithful as a flock to which Jesus is shepherd. [return to English / Italian]

  10. “Voi altri pochi” (you other few): This is the fifteenth address to the reader in the poem. See the note to Inferno VIII.94–96; and see Ledda (Ledd.2002.1), pp. 117–58, for a full discussion of Dante’s addresses to the reader (nineteen in all, according to him [pp. 119–21]), as part of the poet’s larger authorial strategies. [return to English / Italian]

  11. For the meaning of the Eucharist in the liturgy for the Wednesday after Easter as informing this scene (which just happens to take place on the Wednesday after Easter, the day that Beatrice ascends with the protagonist), see O’Brien (Obri.1979.1), pp. 99–100. The offertory verse from the mass for that day, O’Brien reports, quoting the Roman Missal, contains the phrase “the bread of angels” in the following exalted context: “The Lord God opened the gates of Heaven and rained down manna upon them (the disciples in company of the risen Jesus) so that they might eat; He gave them heavenly bread; and, hallelujah, man ate the bread of angels (panem Angelorum manducavit homo).” [return to English / Italian]

  12. Christians on earth will never be able to attain angelic understanding of the doctrine that nourishes them; for that they must await their afterlife in Paradise. [return to English / Italian]

  13–15. We are warned that even a Christian reader, losing track of the ship that is Paradiso, may get lost in these precincts. The daring of these lines, far
beyond approaching what in Yiddish is referred to as chutzpah, is perhaps not imaginable in any other poet. [return to English / Italian]

  16. The “famous men” are the Argonauts who accompanied Jason on the first voyage made on a ship, in the thirteenth century b.c., to Colchis, a voyage already referred to (Inf. XVIII.86–87) and that will furnish the matter for the ultimate “historical” reference in the poem (Par. XXXIII.95–96), a final look at the voyage of the Argo.

  Dante refers to Colchis by the singular form of the adjectival noun of place, “colco.” [return to English / Italian]

  17–18. In order to gain the Golden Fleece, Jason, aided by Medea’s herbal concoctions, performs wondrous deeds in Colchis (Metam. VII.100–158). In Ovid, however, it is not Jason’s shipmates who stand amazed at what they witness of Jason’s astounding feats (e.g., plowing a field by means of the iron-tipped horns of two bulls, turned upside down and serving as Jason’s plow, and seeding it with serpents’ teeth, with a resulting harvest of soldiers), but the onlooking Colchians (“mirantur Colchi” [Metam. VII.120]). Dante is here not nodding, but “rewriting” the classical text in order to make it more worthy of bearing a Christian message, as Picone is aware (Pico.2002.2), p. 47. [return to English / Italian]