by Dante
34. In a single verse Dante culminates his long and varying experience of Beatrice in this recognition of what her guidance has meant and where it has finally led him. When she came to him as mediatrix, one whose being was imprinted by Christ in order to lead him back to his Savior, he was often uncertain. Now the identity between them is finally sensed on his pulses, and he is properly grateful. This is a line that many readers find themselves greatly moved by, without perhaps being able to verbalize the reasons for their emotion. It was amazing, he must reflect, that she had faith in such as him.
For an essay on the relationship between Beatrice and Virgil as Dante’s guides, see Punzi (Punz.1999.1). For the sense that Dante, here and elsewhere, has totally revised his earlier and earthly sense of Beatrice, see Paolo Cherchi (Cher.2004.1): “This is the true praise. Beatrice loses nothing of her physical beauty; indeed, she remains the most fair among the fair. However, the ‘diseroticization,’ so to speak, comes … from Dante, who comes to understand, at a certain point in his narrative, that the lady whom he desires is truly ‘venuta da cielo in terra a miracol mostrare’ ” (come from Heaven to earth to reveal a miracle—VN XXVI.6).
Masciandaro’s lectura of this canto (Masc.1995.1) demonstrates the importance of aesthetic concerns throughout this particularly beautiful canto. [return to English / Italian]
35. For the only other use of the Provençalism sobranza (overwhelms), see the note to Paradiso XX.97. [return to English / Italian]
37–39. Beatrice’s discourse leaves little doubt but that she and Dante are gazing on Jesus Himself. See I Corinthians 1:24, Paul’s description of Christ as “the Wisdom of God.” [return to English / Italian]
39. It was 4,302 years that Adam waited for Christ to harrow him from Limbo. See the note to Paradiso XXVI.118–120. [return to English / Italian]
40–45. The third simile of the canto compares the swelling lightning bolt, escaping from the cloud that can no longer contain it, and falling, against its nature, downward, to Dante’s mind, swelling with its rapt vision of Christ, escaping from its “container,” and becoming other than it had been.
Dante’s meteorology (for this phenomenon Steiner [comm. to vv. 40–42] cites Albertus Magnus, Meteor. I.iv.7) held that lightning resulted when contention between fiery and aquatic elements within a cloud resulted in the fiery part becoming too large and bursting the edges of the aqueous envelope, as it were. Theorists of the phenomenon were hard pressed to explain why this excess of fire should, only in this instance, fall downward rather than follow its natural inclination up. [return to English / Italian]
43. The noun dape (Latin dapes, viands), a hapax in the poem, shows Dante’s hand once again being forced by rhyme. Lombardi (comm. to this verse) refers to the hymn composed by St. Ambrose, describing a saintly man who thus “dapes supernas obtinet” (obtains supernal food). [return to English / Italian]
45. It seems clear that the author wishes us to understand that the protagonist, blinded by Christ, has had a Pauline (or Johannine) raptus. [return to English / Italian]
46–48. Dante’s vision has now readied him, if not to see Christ in His splendor, then at least to be able to have a version of that experience with respect to Beatrice. Heretofore, she has made herself his mirror (e.g., Par. XVIII.13–18); now she invites him to see her as herself; in the previous sphere (Par. XXI.4–12, XXI.63, XXII.10–11) he was denied her smile (which he last saw in Mars [Par. XVIII.19]). Now he possesses the capacity to behold her true being, since his experience of the Church Triumphant under Christ has raised his ability to deal with such lofty things.
As Brownlee points out (Brow.1991.2), pp. 230–31, this marks the completion of the “Semele program” in bono, Dante’s being able to look upon his “goddess” in her true nature. [return to English / Italian]
49–51. The tercet, while offering a simple comparison rather than, strictly speaking, a simile (see, e.g., Par. XXII.2–3, 4–6 for like phenomena), continues the similetic tonality of the canto. Here we find another comparison involving a state of mind (see the note to Inf. XXX.136–141). We may be reminded both of Dante’s final vision of Beatrice in Christ in Vita nuova XLII and (if we have already read this poem at least once) of the final vision in Paradiso XXXIII. In both those cases, as here, there is at stake a visione that cannot be brought back to consciousness. In all three cases we are speaking of what is clearly presented as a true vision, not a dream, even if here this is compared to an ordinary dreamer’s attempt to revive in himself the experience of the dream from which he has awakened. Our task as interpreters of text is not made easier by the fact that in Dante’s Italian both ordinary dreaming and privileged sight of the highest kind may be signified by the same word, visione. For an attempt to demonstrate how carefully Dante developed and deployed necessary distinctions in his vocabulary of seeing as early as in his Vita nuova, see Hollander (Holl.1974.1).
In the last tercet the poet has used the verb vedere to register Dante’s vision of Jesus, the “sun” that is too bright for him as yet to take in; Beatrice invites him to look upon her as she truly is (if he cannot yet sustain a vision of Christ). He had never before enjoyed, in the narrative of her presence in the Commedia, from Purgatorio XXX until right now, such beholding of Beatrice “face-to-face.” However, it seems probable that we are meant to consider that she was present to his vision in an at least approximately similar manifestation in the last chapter of the Vita nuova. And thus this moment is meant to draw that one back to mind. There, too, Beatrice was a living soul in the presence of God. [return to English / Italian]
50. Poletto (comm. to vv. 49–54) notes that this hapax, the Latinism oblita (forgotten, faded from memory) is deployed in the Epistola a Cangrande (XIII.80). The context of that passage is perhaps remembered here: “This again is conveyed to us in Matthew, where we read that the three disciples fell on their faces, and record nothing thereafter, as though memory had failed them (quasi obliti). And in Ezekiel it is written: ‘And when I saw it, I fell upon my face.’ And should these not satisfy the cavillers, let them read Richard of St. Victor in his book On Contemplation; let them read Bernard in his book On Consideration; let them read Augustine in his book On the Capacity of the Soul; and they will cease from their cavilling” (tr. P. Toynbee). Perhaps unsurprisingly, some of these texts (particularly those of Richard of St. Victor and of Bernard) have been before our eyes in notes to the last contemplative heaven. This portion of the Epistola (XIII.77–84) is a fairly lengthy commentary on Paradiso I.7–9. The context is supplied by the extramundane experiences of Paul and Dante, those uniquely favored humans who had seen God in their ascent to the Empyrean. [return to English / Italian]
52–53. Beatrice’s “offer” to let Dante see her face-to-face, as she truly is, that is, blessed in the company of the elect, is the greatest gift she has ever bestowed on Dante. Among other things, it promises his own blessedness to come, for how would God sanction such a vision to a mortal bound to perdition? [return to English / Italian]
54. The language here, too, puts us in mind of the Vita nuova, now of the opening reference (VN I.1) to Dante’s libro della mia memoria (book of my memory), in which Beatrice’s significant presences are recorded. Strangely enough, because the self-citation does seem obvious, surprisingly few (ten) commentators to Paradiso XXIII refer to the Vita nuova as being focally present behind the phrasing of verse 54. Once again the first is Scartazzini (comm. to vv. 52–54). [return to English / Italian]
55–59. Not even if all the most inspired (pagan) poets, inspired by all the Muses (led, in this consideration, by the one associated with sacred song, Polyhymnia), should come to Dante’s aid, would that serve to reveal more than a tiny bit of the Christian truth he now saw in Beatrice.
There happen to be in the poem nine invocations (no more than five of them addressed to traditional Muses) and nine references to the Muses; see Hollander (Holl.1976.2), n. 3, who also offers an account of the inaccuracies of Muse-counting from 1896 to 1973, f
rom Scartazzini to Singleton. Since we have known for a long time of the importance of the number nine to Dante, such failed accounting is surprising. But see Hollander’s belated discussion (in his later version of this article [Holl.1980.1], p. 32, n. 1a) of Fabio Fabbri (Fabb.1910.1), p. 186, who lists the nine invocations correctly.
For this trope (nursing Muses) as it is developed in the (only slightly?) later Eclogues, see Heil (Heil.2003.1). And see Cestaro (Cest.2003.1), pp. 139, 162, 166, for the Muses as nourishing in Purgatorio and Paradiso. [return to English / Italian]
55–57. It has become fairly usual (beginning with Tommaseo [comm. to this tercet]) for commentators to cite Aeneid VI.625–627, for example, Poletto (comm. to vv. 55–60): “No, had I a hundred tongues, a hundred mouths, and voice of iron, I could not sum up all the forms of crime, or rehearse all the tale of torments” [tr. H. R. Fairclough]. The Sibyl is here reacting to what she and Aeneas might have seen had they entered Tartarus instead of proceeding to the Elysian Fields. Since we are seeing the inhabitants of the Christian version of those “fields,” the passage in the Aeneid seems doubly apt. [return to English / Italian]
56. Polyhymnia is mentioned as one of the nine Muses by all the early commentators; most of them go on to identify her with memory rather than a specific artistic form, as she is in handbooks today (with the sacred hymn). The first commentator to associate her with hymns was Andreoli (comm. to vv. 55–57), etymologizing her Greek name; with him she becomes, for the modern commentary tradition, the Muse “of many hymns.” [return to English / Italian]
61–63. Read as literally as it probably should be, Dante’s remark indicates that his poem right now is “representing Paradise,” and doing so for the very first time. That is why he required a preparatory invocation (Par. XXII.121–123) for this portion of the poem (now combined with an at least equally attention-summoning “non-invocation,” vv. 55–63). True Paradise is found only, one may respond, after Paradiso XXX.90, once Dante begins to see the courts of Heaven as they are. However, singularly and strikingly, it is here, in the Fixed Stars, that he is allowed to see those who dwell there, whom he will see again once he himself has reached the Empyrean. In this vein, among many, see Goffis (Goff.1968.1), p. 826, referring to this canto as beginning the “second part” of Paradiso. However, see Benvenuto da Imola, for the kind of misapprehension that dogs him whenever Dante represents himself as having looked upon reality. Here is Benvenuto’s response to this tercet: “figurando il paradiso, that is, representing poetically, figuratively; for this passage does not represent real things.…”
Scartazzini (comm. to verse 61) documents the confusion caused by these lines: If “figurando il paradiso” means “representing [true] paradise,” that is, the Church Triumphant, citizenry of the Empyrean (and that is not everyone’s understanding, if it seems to be a just one), then why does the “sacred poem” indeed “have to make a leap”? There is a fairly straightforward interpretation: The poem “overleaps” an intervening heaven, the Primum Mobile, in finding its subject matter in those who inhabit the Empyrean. It is in that sense that he is like a man “who finds his path obstructed” and has to leap over the impediment.
Tommaseo (comm. to this tercet) puts it into relationship with Inferno XXXII.9, where Dante is concerned with the difficulty of describing the bottom of the universe (here, with the top of it). There we find, immediately following this expression of concern, an invocation; here, immediately preceding an expression of similar difficulty, a non-invocation. [return to English / Italian]
61. In the Commedia the word paradiso has only a single presence outside the cantica that bears its name (Purg. I.99). Its first clear reference to the Empyrean (rather than to the celestial regions in general) perhaps occurs only in its sixth appearance, in Paradiso (XV.36). [return to English / Italian]
64–66. This is an “indirect address to the reader,” as it were; for the extent of the real kind in the poem, see the notes to Inferno VIII.94–96 and Paradiso X.22–27.
Daniello, Lombardi, Tommaseo, Scartazzini, Torraca (all in their comments on this tercet) cite Horace’s much-quoted passage (“sumite materiam”) from his Ars poetica (vv. 38–41): “Take a subject, you writers, equal to your strength, and ponder long what your shoulders refuse, and what they are able to bear. Whoever shall choose a theme within his range, neither speech will fail him, nor clearness of order” (tr. H. R. Fairclough). Torraca reminds the reader that Dante had earlier cited this passage in De vulgari eloquentia (II.iv.4).
The altogether possible pun on Homer’s name, unrecorded in the commentaries, in Dante’s rephrasing of Horatian humerus (shoulder) as òmero mortal (mortal shoulder), since Omèro is Homer’s name in Italian (see Inf. IV.88), was noted in the 1970s by Professor Janet Smarr, while she was a graduate student at Princeton. That Dante may have for a moment thought of himself as the “Italian Homer” would not come as a surprise. If he did, the profoundly famous Homer (see Horace, Ars poetica 401: insignis Homerus), by any stretch of the imagination “immortal,” has an Italian counterpart in the very mortal Dante. For Dante’s earlier reference to a Homeric being seeming like a god (and thus immortal), see Vita nuova II.8. [return to English / Italian]
67–69. This tercet, recapping the nautical imagery that shapes the beginnings of each of the last two canticles of the poem, allows us to realize that, in some real sense, Dante put forward this canto as a liminal space, at the border of the infinite, as it were. In that perspective, the text that follows directly after this one is the final third of Paradiso XXX, where we are again in the direct presence of Eternity.
These verses pick up various thematic elements from earlier in the poem. For the “little bark” with its unworthy readers, see Paradiso II.1; for the Commedia as a legno, see Paradiso II.3; for the angelic steersman as celestial nocchiero, see Purgatorio II.43. We have progressed to that point at which the poet has himself become the pilot who will not spare himself in guiding us to our heavenly destination.
Is this tercet a boundary stone for a “fourth part” of the Commedia, consisting in Dante’s experience of the Empyrean, begun here, only to be interrupted by six more cantos that take place in the last two spheres? [return to English / Italian]
67. The word pareggio has caused difficulty. Its other use in the poem (Par. XXI.90) has not seemed problematic to the commentators (it is a verb form meaning “I match” or “I equal”). Here, on the other hand, where it is a predicate nominative, it has caused traffic jams. The value of the word in its two most favored forms (there have been as many as seven candidates at one time or another) is close enough that one may say that the difference is not worth a large investment of effort: Some sense of a voyage over an extensive piece of sea is what most think is meant, however they arrive at their conclusion. [return to English / Italian]
70–75. That the protagonist is looking upon the Church Triumphant is beyond question, despite occasional shilly-shallying about how many of the saved are represented as having come down to be seen by Dante (since Beatrice’s words at verse 20 make it plain that all are here). The question that remains is why the poet engineered this extraordinary scene. The commentators have not ventured an opinion, perhaps because they do not fully take in what an extraordinary moment this is. It is simply amazing to find that all the blessed have appeared in space and time, that is, in the Starry Sphere and before we enter the Empyrean. One might counter that this is similar to their appearances through the spheres. But there they came as “emissaries” of themselves; now they are themselves (without, of course, their flesh), and are arranged as they shall be for eternity. For a precise understanding of the difference, see Borzi (Borz.1989.1), p. 644: “Il Canto XXIII del Paradiso segna il passaggio dalla rappresentazione dei beati distribuiti, per ragioni didattiche, nei sette cieli, alla visione di un Paradiso còlto nella realtà teologica della sua unità” (Canto XXIII marks the passage from the representation of the blessed souls distributed, for didactic reasons, through the seven heave
ns, to the vision of a Paradise caught in the theological reality of its oneness). [return to English / Italian]
71. The word giardino (garden), absent from the poem since Purgatorio VI.105, where it was used in the phrase “the garden of the empire,” now, referring to the members of the Church Triumphant, reappears. It will do so again at Paradiso XXVI.110, where it refers to the garden of Eden, and then in XXXI.97 and XXXII.39, where it will signify the Empyrean, Eden regained. [return to English / Italian]
73–75. We hear that there are at least two kinds of flowers in this “garden” (verse 71). The single rose, by common consent, is Mary; the lilies, if with slightly less unanimous support, represent the apostles, leading humankind toward salvation in Christ (along “the right way”). See Jacopo della Lana (comm. to verse 74) on three reasons for identifying the lilies with the apostles: (1) because lilies are white (signifying faith), vermilion in their inner petals (signifying incorruptibility and charity), and fragrant (signifying preaching and hope). [return to English / Italian]