Paradiso (The Divine Comedy series Book 3)
Page 48
120. Frederick is referred to as the third powerful figure in the line of Frederick Barbarossa and Henry VI, the three Swabian emperors. See Grandgent (comm. to verse 119): “The Swabian Emperors are called ‘blasts’ because of the violence and the brief duration of their activity. Frederick I (Barbarossa) was the first; the ‘second wind’ was Constance’s husband, Henry VI; the third and last was her son, Frederick II.” [return to English / Italian]
121–123. Where do these two Constances go after they recede from view? Opinions are divided, some more recent commentators (beginning with Costa in 1819 [comm. to verse 122]) claiming that they head back to the Empyrean (as will, apparently, many souls encountered later in the cantica); others are of the opinion that they go deep into the mass of the Moon (e.g., Benvenuto [comm. to vv. 115–123]: “disparuit in corpore lunae frigido” [disappeared into the cold matter of the Moon]). This is also maintained by Francesco da Buti (comm. to vv. 121–130): “profondò nel corpo lunare” (sank deep into the matter of the Moon). Most, however, do not even raise the question of where Piccarda (not to mention Constance or, indeed, any of their companions) is headed.
This is the last passage in the canto that makes the reader confront the problem of the permanent residence of the souls we see in the Moon (see the note to vv. 29–30). Here, the sense of descent would seem to make the second hypothesis more likely. The fact that, among the early commentators, only Benvenuto and Francesco da Buti tried to assign a destination to their departure makes the problematic nature of the passage apparent. In the later nineteenth century, Scartazzini (comm. to verse 123) and Campi (comm. to this tercet) also draw the conclusion that Costa did, basing it on what the next canto (vv. 28–39) will make clear: The souls are all in the Empyrean and descend from there to manifest themselves in the planets (or so Dante called both Moon and Sun along with those to which we reserve that appellation). However, twentieth-century exegetes preferred to admire the aesthetic attractiveness of the passage rather than apply themselves to this little conundrum. The result is that there is no “official” view of the problem, which remains unsolved. Dante should have shown Piccarda and the others going up, returning to God; he did not, and we have either, like Scartazzini, tried to be more correct than our author or, like Benvenuto, followed our poetic sense to make Dante seem to violate his own rules—at least the rules that he would lay down in the next canto. There is, according to an Italian proverb, always a third way (“C’è sempre una terza via”). In this case, that has proven more popular than the first two, the way of avoidance, whether knowingly chosen or not. [return to English / Italian]
121–122. For the program of song in the last cantica, see the note to Paradiso XXI.58–60. [return to English / Italian]
124–130. In the wake of the disappearance of the two nuns, the poet prepares us for the answers to the questions to which they have given rise. These lines could, without disrupting the reader’s sense of order, have been moved forward into the next canto. As we have seen (since at least Inferno VIII, which opens with the often-noted self-consciousness of the words “Io dico, seguitando …” [To continue, let me say … ]), the reader experiences a sense that there was a kind of willful and arbitrary process at work in the poet’s decisions about how a given canto should begin (or end). That Dante was increasingly amused by this practical poetic problem is evidenced in the growing number of ungainly narrative restarts as we move into Purgatorio. Dante obviously enjoyed playfully challenging our sense of proper beginnings and endings.
Battaglia Ricci (Batt.1989.1), p. 29, cites with approval Marti’s argument (Mart.1964.1), p. 1385, for the circular movement of the canto, from Beatrice as Sun to Beatrice as Sun. (Dante is in the first case rewarded with an understanding of the dark places in the Moon; in the second he is promised an answer [if in rather disquieting terms] to the two questions that his interview with Piccarda has given rise to in him. Marti characterizes the first Beatrice as the “sun of love” and the second as the “sun of knowledge.”) [return to English / Italian]
PARADISO IV
* * *
1–9. This three-part opening simile is not so much difficult as it is puzzling. The residue of the confusion resulting from what he has seen and heard in the previous canto, it prepares the ground for the protagonist’s two-pronged question for Beatrice about human liability. (1) How can a person not be guilty of a sin who wills to live the good life but somehow comes up short of doing so? (2) Where will this kind of saved soul be located in the afterlife? While readers are probably eventually able to make sense of the relationship between the tenor and the vehicle(s) of the simile, not a few nonetheless wonder about Dante’s practice here. To deal with the tenor first, the prose sense of what is at stake is simple. The protagonist is so eager to have answers to both of his questions (and so afraid of what the answers might be) that he simply cannot decide which one to ask first and, instead of speaking, he is silent (vv. 7–9). As for the vehicles, to some only the first seems necessary, while the second may initially seem otiose, and the third redundant, since it only seems to repeat the substance of the first. [return to English / Italian]
1–3. Bruno Nardi (Nard.1944.1), pp. 301–3, has argued that the widespread notion that these lines are a recasting of Buridan’s famed paradox (starving donkey between two equally distant piles of straw) should be rejected. As Nardi and others have shown, the more certain source lies in the Summa theologica (I–II, q. 13, a. 6): “If any two things are absolutely equal, a man is not moved to the one more than to the other; just as a starving man, if he has food equally appetizing in different directions and at an equal distance, is not moved to the one more than to the other” (English text as found in Carroll’s commentary to Par. IV.1–9). Further, and as Fallani (in his comm. to these verses) points out, Buridan’s ass was posterior to Dante’s Paradiso. Beginning with Lombardi (comm. to this tercet), and continuing into the twentieth century, one finds insistence on Thomas as source, neglecting Aristotle, for example, Tommaseo (comm. to this tercet); Andreoli (comm. to this tercet); Scartazzini (comm. to vv. 1–2); Poletto (comm. to vv. 1–6); Carroll (comm. to vv. 1–9), etc. The first commentators to put the two together, as is in our day fairly commonplace, were apparently Tozer in 1901 and Torraca in 1905, both in response to this tercet. However, if one reads farther in Thomas’s passage, it is striking, as Sapegno points out (comm. to vv. 1–9), citing Nardi (Nard.1944.1), pp. 297–303, that Thomas has proposed this paradox only to refute its relationship to practical reality—as might any sensible person. Zeno’s arrow and Buridan’s ass (and Thomas’s starving man, as Thomas himself insists) are the sorts of logically developed paradoxes that “philosophers” enjoy creating and that poets generally enjoy mocking. Here Thomas, Dante’s “philosopher,” rejects philosophical nonsense while Dante, our poet, seems to sponsor it. [return to English / Italian]
4–5. The second vehicle of the simile seems, from what one may find in the commentary tradition, not to have a discernible source anywhere. If that is true, what we have here is pure Dantean invention, a post-Scholastic paradox added to Thomas’s. Whereas in the first tercet Dante the questioner is likened to a hungry man unable to decide between two equally tempting foods (so long a time that he will, undirected by external agency, die), in these two lines he becomes the potential victim of his lupine questions, unable to decide which one to run from, since each looks equally fierce. While this part of the extended comparison surely seems askew, given the fact that Dante must choose which question to ask rather than which to avoid, the passage does impart something that will later be brought back into play (at verse 27): These questions are potentially destructive, and thus like (or at least not unlike) ravening wolves. And so, after initial puzzlement, a reader must admit that the apparently otiose comparison does pay its passage in the greater scheme. Angiolillo (Angi.1986.1) complains about the “incongruity” of this comparison, since it portrays immobility, not indecision; passivity, not aggression. But this is to miss Dant
e’s point: Solutions of his two doubts seem equally attractive and, potentially at least, the concerns that give rise to each of them are equally destructive. For a hypothesis relating to Dante’s own broken vow, which may account for the poet’s “overkill” in this simile, offering a sense of what makes the questions both attractive and dangerous, see the second paragraph of the note to vv. 139–142. [return to English / Italian]
6. While in the actual world two deer are capable of accomplishing more damage to a single dog than Dante’s text allows, it is clear that the third vehicle of the simile displays exactly the same relationship as the first: hungry Dante between two equally tempting viands. Here some commentators do suggest a source (see Bosco/Reggio on this verse: Ovid [Metam. V.164–167], first suggested by Pietro di Dante and then by Daniello, and/or possibly, if Mattalia is correct, Virgil [Georg. III.539–540], as was first suggested by the author of the Codice Cassinese). Angiolillo (Angi.1986.1) proposes the passage from Ovid, and then adds another from Seneca’s drama Thyestes, 707–711. Whatever the source, what seems puzzling is the fact that our usually orderly and rigorous poet (or so we like to conceive him) here seems to have allowed himself an unnecessary repetition. It seems fair to say that, while detractors of the poet’s inclusion of the second piece of business (see the note to vv. 4–5) have failed to take the point behind it, the several expressions of discomfort with the third part of the simile have not had sufficient response. However, experience teaches that Dante knows his business far better than we; if we fail to fathom his purposes, that does not necessarily require that he was without them. A possible solution is to suggest that the three-part simile mirrors the process of the protagonist’s actual inner thoughts, moving from philosophical eagerness to fearful worry and then back to the first eagerness. [return to English / Italian]
13–15. The simile puts into parallel Beatrice (placating Dante’s anxiety) and Daniel (stilling Nebuchadnezzar’s wrath). It thus also necessarily puts into parallel Dante and Nebuchadnezzar, a relation that at first seems to make no sense at all. The poet has already visited this text in the Bible (the second book of the prophet Daniel), the king’s dream and the prophet’s interpretation of it (see Inf. XIV.94–111 for Dante’s version of that dream, embodied in the representation of the veglio di Creta). Here he fastens on its perhaps strangest aspect: the new king’s desire to kill all the wise men in his kingdom of Babylon who could neither bring his forgotten dream back to mind nor then interpret it—about as unseemly a royal prerogative as anyone has ever sought to enjoy. Thus it seems natural to wonder in what way(s) Dante may possibly be conceived of as resembling the wrathful king of Babylon. The entire commentary tradition observes only a single link: Nebuchadnezzar’s displeasure and Dante’s puzzlement are both finally relieved by (divinely inspired—see Trucchi on these verses) external intervention on the part of Daniel, in the first case, of Beatrice in the second. Why should Dante have cast himself as the tyrannical Babylonian ruler? That is a question that has stirred only the shorelines of the ponds of commentaries and has never had an answer. If one looks in the Epistle to Cangrande (77–82), however, one finds a gloss to Paradiso I.4–9 that is germane here. And apparently, in any discussion of this passage, only G. R. Sarolli, in his entry “Nabuccodonosor” (ED IV [1973]), has noted the striking similarity in the two texts, going on to argue that this similarity serves as a further proof of the authenticity of the epistle. In that passage Dante explains that his forgetting of his experience of the Empyrean (because he was lifted beyond normal human experience and could not retain his vision) has some egregious precursors: St. Paul, three of Jesus’ disciples, Ezechiel (their visionary capacity certified by the testimony of Richard of St. Victor, St. Bernard, and St. Augustine); and then he turns to his own unworthiness to be included in such company (if not hesitating to insist that he had been the recipient of such exalted vision): “But if on account of the sinfulness of the speaker [Dante himself, we want to remember] they should cry out against his claim to have reached such a height of exaltation, let them read Daniel, where they will find that even Nebuchadnezzar by divine permission beheld certain things as a warning to sinners, and straightway forgot them” (81—tr. P. Toynbee). Dante, like the Babylonian king, has had a vision that was God-given, only to forget it. And now he is, Nebuchadnezzar-like, distraught; Beatrice, like the Hebrew prophet, restores his calm. Thus the typological equation here is not idle; Dante is the new Nebuchadnezzar in that both he and the wrathful king, far from being holy men (indeed both were sinners), had access to visionary experience of God, only to forget their vision. The king enters this perhaps unusual history, that of forgetting a divine revelation on the part of those who were less than morally worthy, as “the first forgettor”; Dante, as the second (see Hollander [Holl.2005.1]). [return to English / Italian]
16–18. We are now reminded that all the fuss (vv. 1–12) over Dante’s paralyzed will, rendering him unable to choose which question to ask, was eventually in vain, since Beatrice can read his thoughts in God anyway. The poem, of course, needs to hold our attention and thus make Dante’s choices important, even when they are technically unnecessary. His development, as sinner gradually being made worthy of the visionary experience of God and thus of salvation itself, is the major strand of the narrative of the cantica. And thus the poet may at times allow himself a certain latitude with the rules of his own game, making his work the richer for it. [return to English / Italian]
19–27. Beatrice addresses the nature of Dante’s questions. The first concerns the apparent fact that even a person who never ceases willing the good, and who ceases doing good only by virtue of the force of others, is in some way responsible for that failure. The second, zeroing in on a problem that we frequently encountered throughout the previous canto (see the note to Par. III.29–30), concerns the ultimate abode of the blessed: whether or not they return to dwell forever in the stars that most shaped their personalities. This is the more pernicious of these two dangerous questions and will thus be addressed first, if at lesser length, vv. 28–63 (Beatrice’s answer to the first question will be found at vv. 64–114). [return to English / Italian]
19–21. Beatrice makes the need to deal with Dante’s first question seem even more pressing by revealing that for him it has a personal interest: It is he who wonders if his own merit might be diminished through no fault of his own. [return to English / Italian]
24. Beatrice refers to Plato’s teaching as it is found in his Timaeus. See the note to vv. 49–54. Torraca, in his comment to this verse, the phrase “secondo la sententia di Platone,” cites Thomas’s Summa contra gentiles (II.83), “secundum Platonis sententiam.” Bosco/Reggio posit the possibility that, if Dante did not know the text of the Timaeus directly, he might have been acquainted with key portions of it through St. Augustine, St. Thomas, Albertus Magnus, Cicero, or Macrobius. This is the position, assumed tentatively, by most students of the question; some, however, take it that Dante did have direct knowledge of at least this one Platonic text. For Dante’s knowledge of Plato in general and the Timaeus in particular, see Edward Moore (Moor.1896.1), pp. 156–64. The great British Dantist makes a sound case for Dante’s direct acquaintance with Chalcidius’s text of the Timaeus (41 D and E, 42 B, p. 157) in the relevant passages of this canto and Convivio IV.xxi.2 and II.xiii.5, although on one occasion he admits to a reasonable doubt in that respect, offering a near disclaimer in the clause “in whatever form it found its way to Dante” (p. 160). Margherita de Bonfils Templer (Debo.1987.1), building on her previous investigations (see p. 90, n. 5 for these), makes her case for Dante’s use of the glosses to the Timaeus of Guillaume de Conches. And see her study of Platonic gnoseology in Convivio (Debo.1987.2). More recently, see Giuliana Carugati’s investigation (Caru.1994.1) of Dante’s reliance on Proclus in Convivio II and III. For a view counseling caution in attributing direct knowledge of the Timaeus to Dante, who refers to the work by name only once in Convivio (III.v.6) and then here, see Marta Cristiani,
“Timeo,” ED V (1976), pp. 604–5. See also her entries “Platone,” ED IV (1973), pp. 546–50, and “platonismo,” ED IV (1973), pp. 550–55. [return to English / Italian]
25–27. Both of the protagonist’s questions reflect a dangerous uncertainty on his part about the nature of free will, which will be the subject of Beatrice’s urgent lecture at the beginning of the next canto. If he believes that compromise in making vows is possible or that our souls’ choices are controlled by the stars that govern our natures, he is in heresy. The second doubt, since it would destroy the notion of free will utterly (and not just partially), is the more dangerous, which is why Beatrice chooses to address it first. As Trucchi, discussing this tercet, points out, Plato’s notion that souls return to their formative stars, embraced by some early Christians, was finally condemned at the Council of Constantinople in the year 540. [return to English / Italian]
25. Dante’s use of the Latin infinitive as a noun is not without precedent in the work: See Paradiso III.79, esse (to be [as substantive, “being”]); Paradiso XIX.2, frui; and, more interestingly in this context, Paradiso XXXIII.143, where velle (to will [as substantive, “the will”]) itself reappears, once again rhyming with stelle (stars). That only other recurrence of this Latin word may be more programmatic than has been noticed. Plato’s apparent doctrine, rejected here, receives a final disapproving glance in the last lines of the poem, in which Dante has his final vision of the universe as it truly is, and not as Plato’s Timaeus (and Dante’s Convivio [IV.xxi.2]: “Plato and others maintained that they issued from the stars and were more or less noble according to the nobility of their star”—tr. Lansing; and see also Conv. II.xiii.5) might have us believe.