by Dante
Is this more than a slight dig in the ribs for Peter? See the notes to vv. 22, 39, 52–57, 62–63, and 108. The reader would do well to turn immediately to Monarchia III.ix.1–19, a diatribe against Peter as a stand-in for the papacy. Discussing the context of the passage in Luke 22:38, which was among the biblical texts that the hierocrats used to assert papal authority over the emperor, Dante has this to say about Peter’s intellectual capacity: “Peter, as was his habit, answered unreflectingly, only considering the surface of things” (Mon. III.ix.2); later (III.ix.8) he adds that, had Peter actually said what the hierocrats claimed he did, Christ would have reproached him for that remark about the two swords “as He did reproach him many times, when he replied not knowing what he was saying.” Dante continues in a similar vein (III.ix.9): “And that Peter was in the habit of speaking without reflecting is proved by his hasty and unthinking impulsiveness, which came not just from the sincerity of his faith, but, I think, from his simple and ingenuous nature.” Finally, having listed a whole series of Peter’s inadequacies, both as thinker and as loyal follower of Jesus, Dante moves toward his conclusion: “It is helpful to have listed these episodes involving our Archimandrite in praise of his ingenuousness, for they show quite clearly that when he spoke of the two swords he was answering Christ with no deeper meaning in mind” (all these translations are from P. Shaw’s edition). According to Carroll, this passage may serve as a partial retraction of those views. The reader has, nonetheless, to wonder why Dante should, if more circumspectly than in the anti-Petrine diatribe in Monarchia, be chipping away at the veneer of authority lodged in the man whom he considered the first pope. Is it possible that his widely represented distrust of particular popes prompts him to protest any emerging sense that a pontiff, because of his tenure in the highest ecclesiastical office, is necessarily without doctrinal error? See Bennassuti’s unintentionally amusing insistence (comm. to Inf. XI.8) that Dante could not have condemned Pope Anastasius II as a heretic because the poet believed in papal infallibility (Bennassuti, as a priest, should have known better, since this did not become a doctrine of the Church until his own nineteenth century); as a result the reader is to understand that demons put that inscription on the tomb for Dante to read. This is perhaps one of the most extravagant misreadings of the text of the poem and of Dante’s intentions in a commentary tradition that is not deprived of amusingly wrongheaded insistences on what Dante supposedly would never do. [return to English / Italian]
130–132. Bosco/Reggio (comm. to this tercet) interpret what has proven to be a surprisingly controversial line as having two focal points, the love on God’s part for His creation, the love on its part for Him. We have followed them in our translation. [return to English / Italian]
134. For Dante’s distinction between physics and metaphysics here (and the relation of this passage to discussions found in Convivio II), see Alfonso Maierù (Maie.2004.1), especially his concluding remarks. [return to English / Italian]
136. This verse repeats, nearly verbatim, Luke 24:44, as was pointed out by Tommaseo (comm. to vv. 136–138). Jesus speaks: “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.” [return to English / Italian]
137–138. See Tozer’s paraphrase of these lines: “voi, &c.: St. Peter and the other apostles, who derived the inspiration of their writings from the descent of the Holy Ghost at Pentecost.” [return to English / Italian]
139–147. Dante recites his credo in the Trinity. He goes on to say that his proofs for God’s trinitarian nature are Scriptural, without specifying where these appear. Somehow it does not come as a surprise that Scartazzini (comm. to vv. 143–144) was the first to offer such a list: Matthew 28:19; John 14:16–17; II Corinthians 13:14 [see, instead, 13:13]; I Peter 1:2; and I John 5:7. [return to English / Italian]
148–150. A source for this vehicle of the concluding simile, which seems to be based on a particular scene as described in some previous work, has escaped the commentators. However, see Aversano (Aver.2000.2), pp. 113–14, suggesting that two passages in St. Luke may be conflated in Dante’s text, Luke 19:17 and (somewhat more convincingly) 15:20–32, the parable of the Prodigal Son. As Aversano admits, the connections may seem a bit tenuous; however, as he points out, Dante’s gerund gratulando may pick up Luke’s two uses of congratularsi in this chapter (15:6 and 15:9), according to him the only two uses of that verb in the Gospels. (He has overlooked one other, also in Luke [1:58].) [return to English / Italian]
151–154. St. Peter now “laureates” Dante in Faith. While the phrase tre volte (three times) occurs on seven other occasions in the poem, its first and last appearances are the only ones that occur in the final four verses of a canto, here and in Inferno XXVI.139. It would seem possible that this use remembers in bono that first occurrence, in which the ship of Ulysses spins around three times before it sinks. Here Dante is not being punished for his presumption, but rewarded for his faith. [return to English / Italian]
PARADISO XXV
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1–9. This passage is surely one of the most personal statements Dante makes in the entire poem. However, it tends to cause disagreement, the central issue of which is whether Dante presents himself as vigorous in his hope for laureation or as sardonic about its likelihood. As representative of the first school of thought, which has its roots in Jacopo della Lana (comm. to verse 1) and, more vociferously, in the Ottimo (comm. to vv. 1–12), one might choose the recent treatment of Scott (Scot.2004.2). His “optimistic” reading (and it is a reading at least apparently in keeping with Dante’s “hopefulness,” the subject on which he is being examined by St. James) is found both in Scott’s translation and paraphrase of these lines. In the first, he supplies the following (the square brackets are in his text): “If it comes [and may it come] to pass that the sacred poem to which both heaven and earth have lent a hand …” (p. 98); in the second, he offers his eventual sense of the passage (p. 295), intrinsically denying to Dante a proper Christian sense of the contingency of all earthly things. Scott considers the two subjunctives in vv. 1 and 4 optative, expressing “what the exiled poet longs for with all his being, a burning desire that opens the canto dedicated to the theological value of hope.”
On the other hand, see, among others, Sarolli (Saro.1971.1), pp. 384–89, Chiarenza (Chia.1983.3), pp. 147–48, and Chiavacci Leonardi (Chia.1988.2), p. 268, for appreciations of the contingent nature of Dante’s hope for laureation in Florence, which they find in the passage. Such an attitude is typified by a resigned tone rather than the hopeful one that most readers, like Scott, assign to him. A playful paraphrase in tune with this second view of the passage might run as follows: “Should it ever fall out [even if it seems most unlikely to do so] that I return to Florence [but those bastards will never allow me to come back home] and then [perhaps equally implausibly] that those fools decide to give me the laurel [which Giovanni del Virgilio has already offered me if I write a Latin poem for those sharing his dreadful Bolognese taste in poetry] ….” In such a view, where the first two verbs are circumspectly (and correctly) dubious, and thus in the subjunctive mood, the last two are triumphantly (and illogically) indicative (“I shall return,” “I shall take”). (The subjunctive in a dependent clause almost necessarily causes a reader or a listener to expect the conditional [“I would return,” “I would take”].) Indeed, in one sense Dante already has crowned himself (he allows St. Peter to be the agent of his heavenly “laureation” at the conclusion of Canto XXIV, an “event” he refers to in verse 12). In this reading, the desired but improbable hometown laureation is represented as being both totally unlikely and as inescapable, were the world (and particularly Florence) only honest; thus the truculently aggressive tone of the indicatives. To summarize, to those of this persuasion, Dante seems to be saying, “Well, I do not think it is really likely to occur but, if I do make it back home, I’m going to take the laurel (sinc
e I deserve it).” It is notable that Dante, on both occasions on which he considers the prospect of his own laureation (see Par. I.26, coronarmi [crown myself]), imagines the wreath, not as being bestowed upon him by some benevolent figure, but as being taken by himself. (For this appreciation, see Mattalia [comm. to verse 9].)
Scott (p. 296) observes that the vello (fleece) in verse 7 aligns Dante, as well as with Jason, with the biblical prophet John the Baptist, that patron of Florence and figure celebrated by its Baptistry, who wore camel skins as his garment in the wilderness, his fleece. For the only slightly more widely recognized reference here, to Jason’s search for the Golden Fleece, see Sarolli (Saro.1971.1), p. 401, and Pohndorf (Pohn.1965.1), p. 189, the latter in particular supported by Hollander (Holl.1969.1), pp. 223–24. (It is a perhaps surprising fact that no commentator in the current version of the DDP seems to have associated this vello with Jason, although their connection here seems obvious.) [return to English / Italian]
1. We may do well to remember the offer made to Dante by Giovanni del Virgilio, that he should follow his vernacular Commedia with a more worthy instrument of procuring the laurel (see the note to Par. XV.28–30), a Latin poem with a political subject. If the hypothesis shared by John Carroll and Lino Pertile is correct (see the note to Par. XXIII.130–132), Dante composed his answering eclogue soon after he was writing that canto. It is inviting to think that this insistence on his poem’s being, on the contrary, dedicated to sacred things, is a defiant answer to that invitation, even if that may stretch chronological possibilities a bit much. However, for Dante’s sense of a recent (1315) Italian laureation and its impact on him, see the note to Paradiso IX.29–30. And see Hollander (Holl.2003.2), pp. 54–55, for the poet’s handling of the temptations of fame.
Villa (Vill.2001.1) considers both the term poema sacro and the related phrase “sacrato poema” at Paradiso XXIII.62.
This is the only presence in the poem of the verb contingere. For the occurrences of the noun contingenza (Par. XIII.63; XIII.64; XVII.37) and the participial adjective contingente (Par. XIII.99; XVII.16), see the entries for those terms, both prepared by Alfonso Maierù, ED (II [1970]). [return to English / Italian]
2. In response to this challenging verse, Pasquini (Pasq.2001.1, pp. 145, 147) moves away from the traditional exegesis, which has it that the words cielo and terra both refer to what God has created, the twin subject of the poem, as it were, heaven and earth. That is, he realizes that the verse is not about the subject of the poem but about its heavenly agency. However, while an improvement in one respect, his reading seems deficient in the main one. For what may seem a radical (but perhaps only a necessary) view of the matter, see Hollander (Holl.1997.1) and, for a similar view, Baranski (Bara.2001.2), pp. 393–94. Such a reading of this line has it that Dante insists, however covertly, that the poem has two makers, God (the divine “dictator”) and himself (the human “scribe”). The notion that he thus portrays his own hand writing the poem finds support in Rime CXIV.8, Dante’s answer to a sonnet from Cino da Pistoia, in which he portrays his tired fingers grasping the pen with which he writes his own responsive sonnet. [return to English / Italian]
3. For the sense of this verse, Benvenuto (comm. to vv. 1–9) looks back to the fami, freddi o vigilie that Dante claims to have suffered on behalf of his poem. See Purgatorio XXIX.37–38: “O sacred Virgins, if fasting, cold, or sleepless nights / I’ve ever suffered for your sake.…” [return to English / Italian]
4. For fuor mi serra (locks me out), see the envoy of Rime 116, the so-called Montanina: “My mountain song, go your way. Perhaps you will see Florence, my city, that shuts me out from her [che fuor di sé mi serra], void of love and stripped of compassion” (tr. Foster and Boyde). The self-citation was first noted by Tommaseo (comm. to vv. 4–6). [return to English / Italian]
5–6. The figurative speech is oversimplified and dramatic: Florence as “sheepfold,” youthful Dante as “lamb,” his enemies (Black Guelphs, others) as “wolves.” [return to English / Italian]
7. altra voce … altro vello: lit., deeper voice and facial hair or gray hair (see Dante, Eclogue I.42–44) of the mature man; metaphorically, with prophetic speech and this book, written on vellum (?); in addition, new “golden fleece” (see Ovid, Metam. VI.720: “vellera,” and Dante, in his first Eclogue [II.1]: “Velleribus Colchis” [Colchian fleece])—Dante as Jason (cf. Par. II.16–18; XXXIII.94–96). [return to English / Italian]
7–9. Tommaseo (comm. to this tercet) was perhaps the first to point to a passage in Dante’s first Eclogue, which is addressed to Giovanni del Virgilio, who had made a conditional invitation that he come to Bologna to receive the poet’s crown there. In that poem Dante says (vv. 42–44): “Nonne triumphales melius pexare capillos, / et, patrio redeam si quando, abscondere canos / fronde sub inserta solitum flavescere, Sarno?” (Were it not better my triumphant locks should hide beneath the green their hoariness, erst auburn-glowing, by the ancestral stream, should ever I return to deck them there, of Arno? [tr. Wicksteed and Gardner]). It seems evident that either this passage is reflected in that one—unless, as seems less likely, this one was written after that one. In any case, it seems clear that Dante was much involved with thoughts reflecting both Mussato’s laureation in 1315 and his own desire for that reward, whether before Giovanni’s goading offer or after it. See the note to verse 1. [return to English / Italian]
8. In this use of the word poeta, we have the closest Dante ever comes to calling himself “poet” outright, though he has been issuing statements that all but said as much as early as Vita nuova XXV. No vernacular writer of lyric had ever used this term for himself before; it is traditionally reserved for the classical (Latin and Greek) poets. [return to English / Italian]
9. Exactly what Dante means by this word has been a matter of some dispute. See Rigo (Rigo.1994.1), pp. 135–63, for a complex meditation on possible meanings of the poet’s putting on the cappello (“crown,” according to her, in the sense of “reward for accomplishment in poetry”), in which she advances the theory that it refers most significantly to Dante’s desire to be given back his Florentine citizenship. [return to English / Italian]
10–12. Whatever we make of the first nine verses (e.g., do they present Dante’s hunger for a not truly Christian poetic immortality or his shrugging it off?), this tercet says the “right” things about the “right” kind of immortality. He wants to be “crowned” in the Baptistry because it was there he entered the Catholic faith. His belief in Jesus Christ has just now (Par. XXIV.152) been celebrated when his temples were thrice circled by St. Peter, named for the first time since his appearance in the last lines of Canto XXIII. [return to English / Italian]
13–15. While James is never named, he is clearly identified (the same will be true of John at the end of this canto and in XXVI).
The spera (circle) referred to is surely that most precious one among those making up the Church Triumphant (see Par. XXIV.13–18 and note), the one containing at least some of the apostles. For primizie (first-fruits), see James 1:18: “Of his own will he brought us forth by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of first-fruits of his creatures.” James is speaking of all the apostles; here Dante uses his word in the singular to refer to Peter alone. [return to English / Italian]
17. For the term barone, see the note to Paradiso XXIV.115. [return to English / Italian]
18. “St. James, to whose tomb at Compostella, in Galicia [Spain], pilgrimages were and are still made. The legend says that the body of St. James was put on board a ship and abandoned to the sea; but the ship, being guided by an angel, landed safely in Galicia. There the body was buried; but in the course of time the place of its burial was forgotten, and not discovered again till the year 800, when it was miraculously revealed to a friar” (Longfellow, comm. to verse 17). Compostella, after Rome, was the most popular goal of pilgrims inside Europe’s borders. See Dante’s divisions of pilgrims into three groups in Vita nuova XL.7: “palmers” (to the Ho
ly Land), “pilgrims” (to Galicia), “romers” (to Rome).
What was Dante’s knowledge of the distinctions between the two saints named James? Historians distinguish between James the Major (son of Zebedee) and James the Minor (son of Alpheus). For the undeveloped claim (and death has deprived us of such development) that Dante here deliberately conflates the two James, see Karl Uitti (Uitt.2005.1), p. 650n. [return to English / Italian]
19–24. See Shoaf (Shoa.1975.1), who argues for the presence of a “dove program” in the poem, moving from the damned sinners Francesca and Paolo in Inferno V.82, through the muddled saved souls on the shore, unable to distinguish between wheat and tares in Purgatorio II.125, to these brotherly apostles, redeeming earthly affection by turning it toward heavenly nourishment (see Par. XXIV.1–2, “the elect invited to / the glorious supper of the blessèd Lamb”), thus tacitly rebuking the careless eating habits of the freshly saved souls on the shore of Purgatory. There are only these three presences of doves in the poem, each in a carefully turned simile, one to a canticle; it is difficult to believe Dante was not paying close attention to their distribution and significance. [return to English / Italian]