by Dante
52. “That which does not die” resolves into God, the angels, the heavens, prime matter, and the human soul; “that which must [die]” refers to all corruptible things (see Par. VII.133–141 and the note to vv. 124–138). [return to English / Italian]
53–54. All that God makes, eternal and bound by time, is made radiant by reflecting the Word (Christ as Logos) made by the Father (Power) in his Love (the Holy Spirit). [return to English / Italian]
55–60. The first step in this procession of God into His universe is for the Trinity to be reflected in the nine orders of angels (see the note to verse 59). See Moevs on these six verses: “The Trinity evoked in the [preceding] tercet is evoked again [in this one]: the Word-Son is a living light … which flows from the source of light ( … the Father), but is not other than … its source: both are a power of love, … which ‘en-threes’ itself with them” (Moev.2005.1), p. 121. [return to English / Italian]
57. Dante’s coinage intrearsi (literally, “to inthree oneself”) represents a form of linguistic boldness to which the reader has perhaps become accustomed. See, for example, the verb incinquarsi (literally, “to infive oneself”) in Paradiso IX.40. [return to English / Italian]
59. This is the first appearance (see Par. XXXIII.115; and see Par. XXIX.15 for the shining angelic substance announcing itself in the Latin verb Subsisto) of the Scholastic-flavored noun “subsistence,” that is, existence as purely related to God’s nature as is possible, here, in the nine orders of angels. Compare Paradiso XIV.73 and the note thereto. And see Alfonso Maierù, “sussistenza,” ED V (1976), pp. 493a–494b, who cites Boethius, in De duabus naturis, referring to “a being, which, in order to be able itself to exist, has no need of any other being.” See also Tozer (comm. to vv. 58–59): “These are called ‘subsistences,’ because this is the Scholastic term for that which exists by itself, and not in anything else; cp. Aquinas [ST I, q. 29, a. 2].” Among the earliest commentators there is a certain hesitation in choosing between angels and heavens (e.g., Jacopo della Lana [comm. to vv. 55–60]). Benvenuto (comm. to vv. 55–60), however, is definitive in seeing the angels here (“idest in novem ordines angelorum”). The dispute meandered along until Scartazzini’s magisterial review (comm. to this verse) of that errancy and his interpretation fixed the identification (Benvenuto’s) for nearly all later discussants: the nine orders of angels. Scartazzini invokes passages in Dante’s own texts: Epistle XIII, Convivio II.v and III.xiv, and most particularly Paradiso XXIX.142–145. Today one cannot find a discussant who has not benefited from Scartazzini’s gloss, whether directly or indirectly; at the same time one can find no commentator (at least not among those included in the DDP) who even mentions him, although Singleton (comm. to this verse) does cite two of the Dantean passages that he cited. [return to English / Italian]
60. The presence of Christ, Itself three-personed but unitary, is reflected by myriads of angels in nine groups. [return to English / Italian]
61–66. The second stage of God’s progression (for the first see the note to vv. 55–60) is into that part of the universe created out of the four elements and, not directly by God, but indirectly and by various agencies. Lombardi (comm. to vv. 55–63) refers the reader to Paradiso II.112–141 for an earlier exposition of this process. The light of the Word (verse 55) blends its creative power with the angelic presences in each heavenly sphere, moving downward “from act to act” and reaching the elements, until it finally interacts with the most short-lived perishable things, brevi contingenze (brief contingencies). According to Scholastic philosophy, contingent things have the potential either to be or not to be, depending on the presence or absence of a conjoined formal property. Those perishable things that are shaped by form are, if produced from seed, animal or vegetable; if not, mineral. [return to English / Italian]
67–78. To explain the principle of difference, the results of which are so noticeable to any observer of any species, Thomas, wanting to avoid imputing to God a causal relation with mortality, ugliness, and/or failure, puts the blame for such things on Great Creating Nature. Thus the angel-derived powers of the planetary spheres are seen as waxing and waning, and the resultant creations (e.g., human beings, horses, zucchini, and garnets) variable.
Courtney Cahill (Cahi.1996.1), pp. 256–65, discusses this passage at some length (in a portion of her study subtitled “The Limitations of the artista in Thomas’s Discourse on Creation”). Among other things, she puts forward the telling argument (p. 268, n. 25) that Thomas’s initial presentation of Nature as perfect maker of God’s creation is intentionally contradicted here, in order to account for the difference we find all around us in the world. She also finds that the image of the artist’s trembling hand reflects that of Daedalus, as portrayed by Ovid (Metam. VIII.211), citing Hollander (Holl.1992.2), pp. 229–30, for an earlier and identical observation. See also Hollander (Holl.1983.1), p. 135n., for the suggestion that this passage may also reflect Aeneid VI.32–33, recounting Daedalus’s double fatherly failure as artist to portray in gold his son’s fall from the skies.
As opposed to her performance in God’s direct creation, Nature, when she is working with the “wax” of secondary creation (i.e., not the first man, Adam, but his descendants; not the first apple, but the succeeding “generations” of the fruit, etc.), is always defective, coming up short of the archetype. [return to English / Italian]
77. For the word artista and its four appearances in the poem (here and Par. XVI.51; XVIII.51; XXX.33), see Hollander (Holl.1992.2), p. 217; Cahill (Cahi.1996.1), p. 257. [return to English / Italian]
79–87. Once again the Trinity is referred to—Spirit, Son, Father (in that order)—in order to distinguish between direct creation, under God’s unshared auspices, as distinct from the natural secondary creation of which we have just heard. Thus twice in history human beings were made outside the natural process, with the creation of Adam (as well as Eve, now not referred to by Dante, perhaps, but we can hardly forget that she was indeed remembered in vv. 37–39) and of Jesus marking the limits of human perfection, well beyond the otherwise unmatchable king of Israel. [return to English / Italian]
88–96. Without further explanation, Thomas says, Dante might still remain dubious; if he only considers who Solomon was and what moved him to ask for wisdom, he will understand. See III Kings 3:5–12, in which passage God appears to Solomon in a dream and promises to grant him whatever he asks for. Solomon responds by saying that God has made His servant into a king, but a king who has need of a knowing heart to judge his people. God, pleased by his answer, replies (in the passage quoted in Par. X.114 [and see the note to vv. 109–114]) “dedi tibi cor sapiens et intelligens, in tantum ut nullus ante te similis tui fuerit nec post te surrecturus sit” (I have given you a wise and an understanding heart; so that there was none like you before you, nor after you shall any arise who is like you [III Kings 3:12—italics added]).
According to Toffanin (Toff.1968.1), p. 453, Dante’s veneration of Solomon the king is the high point of his Ghibellinism. [return to English / Italian]
97–102. Thomas now contrasts practical kingly wisdom with typical Scholastic speculations, drawn from the following four fields: speculative theology (How many are the angels?), dialectic (Will a mixture of a necessary and a contingent premise ever yield a necessary conclusion?), natural science (Must we grant that motion had a beginning?), and geometry (Can a triangle be constructed in a semicircle in such a way that it not contain a right angle?). (All four answers are negative, beginning with the fact that, according to Dante, the angels are not numerable.) In Dante’s view, Solomon’s practical wisdom trumps all such formal intelligence. However, for a far different appraisal of Solomon’s kingly wisdom, see Carroll (comm. to vv. 88–111): “The real difficulty is that, history being the witness, all Solomon’s wisdom did not make him ‘sufficient as a king.’ The outward brilliance of his reign was but a veil which hid for the moment the slow sapping of his people’s strength and character through his luxury a
nd licentiousness, his tyrannies, exactions, and idolatries. He sowed the wind, and his son reaped the whirlwind when the down-trodden people rent the greater part of the kingdom out of his hand. Whatever Dante may say, Solomon as a king was perhaps the wisest fool who ever lived. In saying this, I am quite aware that I may be incurring the censure on hasty judgments with which Canto XIII closes.”
On Solomon’s song as leading to truthful (and not seductive, deceiving) love, see Chiarenza (Chia.2000.1). [return to English / Italian]
97. For Dante’s own thoughts on this question, see Convivio II.iv.3–15 and II.v.4–5, Paradiso XXVIII.92–93 and XXIX.130–135. The angels are “quasi innumerabili” (all but innumerable [Conv. II.v.5]). [return to English / Italian]
98–99. For a helpful guide through the maze of medieval logical procedures, see Oelsner (comm. to vv. 97–102): “It is a general principle that no limitation that occurs in either of the premises can be escaped in the conclusion. Thus, if either of the premises is negative you cannot get a positive conclusion; if either of them is particular you cannot get a general conclusion; if either is contingent you cannot get a necessary conclusion. For instance, from ‘The man on whom the lot falls must be sacrificed,’ and ‘The lot may fall on you,’ you can infer: ‘therefore you may be sacrificed,’ but not ‘therefore you must be sacrificed.’ Ingenious attempts to get a necessary conclusion out of a necessary and a contingent premise are exposed by the logicians, e.g. ‘Anyone who may run from the foe must be a coward; some of these troops may run from the foe, therefore some of them must be cowards.’ The fallacy lies in the ambiguous use of ‘may run from the foe.’ In the first instance it means, ‘is, as a matter of fact, capable of running away’; in the second, ‘may, for anything I know, run away.’ So that the two propositions do not hang together, and the conclusion is invalid.” [return to English / Italian]
100. That is, whether one can accept the notion that there existed a first motion, preceding all other motion. Benvenuto (comm. to vv. 97–102), after saying that, according to Aristotle’s Physics [VIII.1] motion is eternal, insists that theologians find that it, like the world, has a beginning, and goes on to cite Genesis 1:1: “In the beginning God made the heavens and the earth.” That was the First Mover’s first motion; before that nothing moved. [return to English / Italian]
101–102. See Euclid, Geometria III.31: All triangles inscribed in a circle, if the line bisecting that circle is used as their base, will have a right angle at their apex. [return to English / Italian]
103–105. And so, rounding off his oratory, Thomas insists that kingly prudence is to be valued more highly than speculative philosophy (a position that coincides with that put forth in the Epistle to Cangrande [Epist. XIII.40–41], where Dante says that the branch of philosophy that the Comedy embraces is ethics, since the project of the poem is not speculation, but action). [return to English / Italian]
106–108. For Dante (or Thomas) to insist that what was said of Solomon earlier (Par. X.114) corresponds to what is said now strains credulity, and not a little. If Dante had offered something to the effect that neither Adam nor Christ had to “rise,” since they were made differently from all other mortals (except for Eve, conveniently lost from sight in all discussions of this passage), since they were directly produced by God, without intermediation (a tactic attempted by both the Ottimo [comm. to vv. 103–108] and Benvenuto [comm. to vv. 103–108]), then we might see the problem as resolved. However, the text rather pointedly fails to offer any such limitation.
If one examines the commentaries to Paradiso X.114, hardly anyone before the twentieth century thinks that the reference is to Solomon as king. For one who did, see Benvenuto (comm. to Par. X.109–114), who says that the phrase means that he has “no equal among kings.” Benvenuto, perhaps the most competent reader of poetic text among all the earlier students of Dante, had likely remembered the addition found in this later passage, even if he does not refer to it. Scartazzini (comm. to Par. X.114) also makes this point, referring to the later passage and interpreting it in Thomas’s way. But this may be said of few others before 1900 (twentieth-century readers of Paradiso X nearly all do look ahead to this passage). In fact, the biblical text that lies behind both passages (III Kings 3:12) does not qualify Solomon’s excellence by reference to a “peer group,” that is, that text represents him as the wisest among all humans, not only kings. Thus we once again have a sense that the text of Paradiso, in comparison with its predecessors, was left in a relatively unfinished condition at Dante’s death; he could have handled the issue better when he introduced it. [return to English / Italian]
109–111. With the distinction added in the preceding tercet (Dante’s wording almost gives away the fact that no such distinction was intended in his first utterance on the subject), the protagonist can understand how Solomon was first among the wise kings without infringing upon the primacy of either Adam (the “first father”) or of Jesus (the “One we love”). [return to English / Italian]
112–142. The final thirty-one lines of this canto, a text that has, on the authority of none other than Thomas Aquinas, just established Solomon’s kingly wisdom as a defining part of Dante’s theocratic view of the world’s affairs, nonetheless offer a warning to all of us who tend to rush to judgment, whether in relation to matters philosophical or theological. As we shall see (vv. 133–138), there is an autobiographical component to this plea.
For Dante to have used so much poetic space on so apparently simple, even banal, a topic tells his readers how keenly he felt involved in the problem. Once again we sense how, as he looks back over his intellectual development from the vantage point of the making of this great work, he realizes how self-centered some of his earlier attitudes were (see Hollander [Holl.2003.2]). [return to English / Italian]
112–114. We have seen how slowly the hypocrites made their way forward in Inferno XXIII, in their leaden capes. Just so should we approach affirming or denying the truth of matters we have not fully examined. [return to English / Italian]
115–120. A rush to judgment is, unsurprisingly, condemned. In the last verse, Dante’s genial understanding of the way we humans tend to fall in love with whatever opinion we contrive to form rescues the passage from banality. If there is one passage in the last four cantos in which the voice of Thomas, usually so fully “captured” by the poet and so distinct from his own, seems to be indistinguishable from Dante’s, it is found in these six lines. [return to English / Italian]
121–127. The metaphor for the search for truth moves to fishing. We hear first of three Greek philosophers of the fifth century b.c., then of two heretical thinkers of the early Christian era. Each of these groups is represented as standing for many another thinker who also lacks rigor. [return to English / Italian]
121–123. Within the metaphor, the fisherman without the necessary skills of his craft not only returns home without a catch, but tired (or worse) from the voyage; outside of it, the thinker who lacks the proper intellectual tools not only fails to arrive at the truth, but enmeshes himself in failure. [return to English / Italian]
125. The founder of the Eleatic school of philosophy and his pupil, Parmenides and Melissus, are both mentioned in Monarchia III.iv.4 as, according to Aristotle, using false premises and invalid syllogisms. Bryson, a less-known figure living in the same fifth century, was criticized by Aristotle for using invalid methods in his attempts to square the circle. [return to English / Italian]
127. Sabellius and Arius, Christians of the third and fourth centuries, respectively. Longfellow characterizes them as follows: “Sabellius was by birth an African, and flourished as Presbyter of Ptolemais, in the third century. He denied the three persons in the Godhead, maintaining that the Son and Holy Ghost were only temporary manifestations of God in creation, redemption, and sanctification, and would finally return to the Father.
“Arius was a Presbyter of Alexandria in the fourth century. He believed the Son to be equal in power with the Father, but o
f a different essence or nature, a doctrine which gave rise to the famous Heterousian and Homoiousian controversy, that distracted the Church for three hundred years.”
Aversano (Aver.2000.2), p. 59, points out that both of these thinkers were confused about the relationships among God’s substance and his persons, and suggest that Dante may have been led to his thought by a sentence attributed to Athanasius by Alain de Lille (PL CCX.749): “Neque confundentes personas, ut Sabellius, neque substantiam separantes, ut Arius” (Neither confounding the Persons, as did Sabellius, nor putting asunder His substance, as did Arius). [return to English / Italian]
128–129. Sabellius, Arius, and their ilk are compared to swords in which human faces are reflected in distorted ways; just so were they to Scripture distorting mirrors of revealed truth. This comparison has disturbed many recent readers, to whom it seems either forced or unintelligible. The early commentators, however, were apparently more at ease with it, as though they thought of faces reflected on the irregular surfaces of shiny sword blades as a matter of course. Lombardi (comm. to these verses) at the close of the eighteenth century loses control of himself when confronting Venturi’s continuance of that tradition. Swords, he shouts, were metaphorically the instruments of heretics who mutilated Scripture to make it accord with their nefarious purposes. For a while his intervention ruled in Italy (at Harvard, Longfellow just mentioned the two interpretations and took no side). Then Scartazzini (comm. to these verses) took Lombardi’s argument apart (e.g., the language in the passage really does speak of mirroring rather than destruction), as did Poletto (comm. to vv. 127–129). Still, the debate continues into our own day, with the older position holding the edge, but not without challenge.