Paradiso (The Divine Comedy series Book 3)

by Dante

  13–15. Dante’s description of the angels, flaming red faces, golden wings, and white “bodies,” is possibly based in biblical texts as well as popular iconography (as found, for instance, painted on church walls). Quite a few biblical sources have been a part of the indeterminate discussion down through the centuries. Perhaps the only sure citation (for the angels’ red faces) is Scartazzini’s (comm. to verse 13): Ezechiel 1:13: “their appearance was like burning coals of fire,” which has quantitatively the most support. A second at least likely attribution is Tommaseo’s (comm. to this tercet), who, for the white, cites Matthew 28:3: the angel who appears at the tomb of Jesus, his vestments “white as snow” (some later commentators join [or substitute] Matthew’s supposed “source,” Daniel 7:9). The gold has several suggestions based in Daniel 10:5, but this is not convincingly chosen, since the gold there described is that found on a belt, not on wings.

  As for the “allegorical” meaning of the three colors, nearly all can agree that the red faces bespeak angelic love. However, the other two are the cause of disagreement. Some, unconvincingly, propose the Trinity (Love, Wisdom [?], and Power [??]); others select various abstractions, not much more convincingly. There is a general understanding that the angels and their colors are perfect in three respects: They love perfectly, fly on immortal pinions, and have “bodies” that are utterly pure. And that is probably enough. [return to English / Italian]

  17–18. In Dante’s lovely transposition, these bees, now having gathered the “pollen” (God’s love) from the hive, bring “honey” back from the hive to the souls: a celestial variant on nature’s apiary artistry. These flowers have a second chance to enjoy their own (now enhanced) sweetness. Dante’s “honey,” like God’s love and their love for Him, is bidirectional.

  As Augustine knew and taught, mortal love can never satisfy or be satisfied: “inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te” (restless is our heart until it finds rest in you—Confessiones I.1). These two words, pace and ardore (“peace” and “love”), can be found together only here in the Empyrean, never in Dante’s world below. [return to English / Italian]

  19–27. The numberless host of the angels, circling God in nine ranks (see the note to Par. XXVIII.25–27), do not hinder in any way either His ray from reaching the saints in the Rose or their ability to make out His splendor (which Aversano [Aver.2000.2], p. 159, particularizes as the Second Person, Christ, irradiated by the Father). Torraca (comm. to vv. 22–24) reminds us that, in Convivio (III.vii.5), Dante had in fact said that the angels were as though translucent (diafani). Indeed, all of them, those who believed in Christ to come and those who believed after the fact, are gazing lovingly on the triune God. [return to English / Italian]

  22–23. See Paradiso I.2 and the note to verse 5, above. Thus Dante, nearing his ending, reflects his beginning, a way of also signaling that the poem is approaching its conclusion. [return to English / Italian]

  25–27. We now see all the saints doing what, as we will learn in the next canto, they always do, looking up, fixing their gaze on God. There is no variety in Heaven, nor is it desired by the blessed.

  We also learn, in that canto, what is intrinsic only to what we see here. There are more Jews in Heaven than Christians. This puzzled some commentators and infuriated others, the first group claiming that Dante could not possibly have meant this, the others believing him only too well. Pretty clearly Dante’s neat division of the Rose into two equal parts, with a few empty seats in the Christian half and none in the Jewish one, is meant to force that conclusion upon a reader. As far as we know, there are only a very few gentiles among the Hebrew group. In fact, we know only that there are two, Cato (there thus should be at least one empty place in the full half, as Cato is still minding Purgatory) and Ripheus (Statius and Trajan were both alive in Christian times). Dante’s point is clear: More Jews believed in Christ without the authority of His presence, as certified by the witness provided by the New Testament, than did Christians, even though they were given the answers before they took the exam. [return to English / Italian]

  28–29. In verse 27 the saints are said to aim their gaze at a single target. Now the poet speaks of that single essence as a “star,” but also as the Trinity, a “threefold Light,” bringing joy to all the blessed who behold it (and they all do). Some of the early commentators are less clear than they might be that this is not an “invocation” or part of the prayer that Dante will address to God in verse 30. This is an example of apostrophe, one of praise, and not part of a request. [return to English / Italian]

  30. The poet then addresses God, praying that He look down at the “storm” afflicting mortal lives on earth. Is there an implicit further request to be understood here? Most of the commentators think so. And all of them who are of this opinion believe that Dante is asking God to intervene on behalf of storm-tossed mortals. However, it seems at least as likely that he means no such thing. Rather, as the reference to Florence (verse 39) might also suggest, God ought to look down at the spectacle of human sin with grim recognition of the lostness of those living now on earth, almost all of them beyond redemption. Apparently the first to offer so point-blank a negative reading was Roffarè (Roff.1968.1), p. 1107. What stands in the way of accepting this pessimistic interpretation is the highly possible presence of a citation of a passage, first cited by Tommaseo (comm. to vv. 28–30), in Boethius’s Consolatio (I.m5.42–48): “O God, whoever you are, who joins [sic] all things in perfect harmony, look down upon this miserable earth! We men are no small part of Your great work, yet we wallow here in the stormy sea of fortune. Ruler of all things, calm the roiling waves and, as You rule the immense heavens, rule also the earth in stable concord” (tr. R. Green). Also germane is Monarchia I.xvi.4, first cited by Torraca (comm. to vv. 28–30): “O human race, how many storms and misfortunes and shipwrecks must toss you about while, transformed into a many-headed beast, you strive after conflicting things” (tr. P. Shaw). This last is part of the bitter conclusion of the first book of that treatise, and would not encourage one to believe that, if Dante were thinking of it here, he foresaw any sort of divine aid coming to the human race. On the other hand, see the prophecy concluding Paradiso XXVII, which does predict God’s positive intervention in the affairs of men (similarly presented as a storm at sea [fortuna]—see the note to Par. XXVII.142–148). It is thus difficult to decide what the author intended us to gather about the nature of his request for God’s attention. [return to English / Italian]

  31–40. In this lengthy simile the poet compares barbarians, probably coming, in times of peace, from northern Europe to Rome, seeing the imperial buildings of the city before Constantine gave those buildings to the papacy just after his conversion in 312, to himself, moving in the opposite direction, “south” to “north,” from Florence to the New Jerusalem above the heavens.

  The magnificent church of St. John Lateran was destroyed by fire in 1308. Making things worse, Henry VII, denied a coronation in St. Peter’s by Pope Clement, was crowned in the ruins of that church in 1312, nearly exactly one thousand years later, and died the next year (see note to Paradiso.XVII.82–84).

  For a discussion of the various notions of what exactly Dante meant by the reference, see Costa (Cost.1996.1), pp. 65–66. [return to English / Italian]

  32–33. Callisto was exiled by Diana from the “nunnery” of chaste forest maidens for her affair with Jove, which resulted in her giving birth to Arcas. “The ‘zone’ that is always ‘covered by Helice’ is the North. The nymph Helice or Callisto was transformed into the constellation of the Great Bear, and her son Arcas or Boötes into the Little Bear: Metam. II.496–530, especially 515–517; cf. Purg. XXV.131. The Bears, or Dippers, are close to the North Star” (Grandgent, comm. to vv. 31–34). [return to English / Italian]

  37–39. The phrase “a people just and sane” is the third and last in a series of parallel pairs, with the parallelism inverted in the third term: good/bad, good/bad, bad/good. See Paradiso XVI.152,
where Florentines in “the good old days” were portrayed in much more positive terms. Now things have changed, and Florentines are those left behind in order for Dante to associate with such people as they once were, now found only in Heaven. [return to English / Italian]

  39. This is the fifteenth and last time we hear the word Fiorenza in the poem; we first heard it in Farinata’s voice (Inf. X.92). While in fact Florence had replaced Rome as the greatest city of Italy, Dante here reverses that equation, making old Rome the type of the celestial city, while new Florence is portrayed as the city of the lost. [return to English / Italian]

  43–48. The second simile in a series of three dedicated to the theme of pilgrimage (see the note to vv. 103–111), this one presents Dante as a traveler to a shrine, a journey he has vowed to make. For the pilgrimage motif in the entire poem, see Holloway (Holl.1992.3).

  While Dante leaves the particular shrine he may have had in mind shrouded in silence, the early commentators variously suggested the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, St. Peter’s in Rome, and St. James of Compostella in Galicia (Spain), the three most important destinations for pilgrims in his day. [return to English / Italian]

  48. The Tuscan word for “now” (mo) was first heard at Inferno X.21 and leaves the poem after a dazzling three uses in a single line (and the twenty-third through twenty-fifth in all), perhaps underlining Dante’s desire to be considered a vernacularizing poet even at the sublime height of the Empyrean. The effect of the triple presence of the word accents the eager nature of his glance, unable to move quickly enough in taking in every aspect of the place he has so long desired to see, the goal of his pilgrimage. Verse 54 describes Dante’s similar hurried and eager glances cast around the Rose in the attempt to take it all in. [return to English / Italian]

  49–51. What the protagonist sees, faces, reminds us that it was only the first few souls whom he saw in the heavens whose human features he could make out (see the note to Par. III.58–63). Now he is seeing, as Beatrice promised he would (Par. XXX.44–45), the souls as they will look when they are reincarnate. [return to English / Italian]

  51. The word onestade has only two occurrences in the poem. The last time we heard it was in the poet’s description of Virgil when he was running up the slope of Mount Purgatory (Purg. III.11) after Cato chastised the souls who listened, charmed, to Casella’s song. There Virgil is seen as having lost his dignity; here the souls in the Rose are seen by the protagonist as having theirs. [return to English / Italian]

  52–54. The mood is quiet, preparing us for a transition, moving from the general to the specific. [return to English / Italian]

  55–58. Compare the similar scene in Purgatorio XXX.43–54, when the protagonist turns back to speak to Virgil, only to find him gone. This scene, clearly reflective of that one, is much briefer and in an altogether different key. That one is three times as long, and in the tragic mode. Here, the disappearance of Beatrice has a quite different tonality. Among the differences is that she disappears from the “floor of the arena” only to reappear in her place in the Rose (see verse 71). [return to English / Italian]

  56–57. What were the questions Dante still wanted Beatrice to answer? Are we supposed to wonder? Or is this mere “realistic detail” (i.e., are we merely supposed to reflect, “Of course, anyone would have a lot of questions during a first visit to Paradise”)? Some commentators, however, try to ascertain what questions Dante wanted to ask. For example, Jacopo della Lana (comm. to vv. 55–57): Dante wants to know the identities of those seated in the Rose; or Benvenuto (comm. to vv. 52–57): Dante wants to know where Mary and Beatrice are seated. Poletto (comm. to vv. 52–57) loses patience with such attempts, urging us not to seek what the poet has chosen not to reveal. Francesco da Buti (comm. to vv. 43–57) had solved the riddle acceptably, if obviously and unprofitably: Dante had questions about Paradise.… Steiner (comm. to these verses) has the wisest response: These lines refer to the questions that St. Bernard will eventually respond to, reading them in God. In fact, this is a rare occasion on which almost everyone is essentially correct. Bernard does answer Dante’s voiced question (Where is Beatrice? [verse 64]) and one unvoiced one (Where is Mary? [verse 100]). He also in the next canto names a good number of souls seated in the Rose, as Jacopo suggested he might and as Bernard says he will (vv. 97–99). [return to English / Italian]

  58–60. In place of Beatrice, he finds, near him on the “floor” of the Rose, an “old man” (it will turn out to be Bernard, but we do not know that yet), looking like the other blessed souls. [return to English / Italian]

  59. See Bosco/Reggio (comm. to Par. XXXII.40–75), who point out that by portraying Bernard as an old man (sene), Dante is violating a commonly understood ground rule of Paradiso, that all souls are, in their perfected beings, of the age of Christ in His last year on earth, when he was thirty-three. (This is sometimes given as thirty, thirty-three, thirty-four, or even thirty-five.) Why Dante chose to violate this “rule” is not clear. Bosco/Reggio opt for an artist’s rebellion against a view that would inhibit his artistic virtuosity, an old Bernard being more believable than one in his renewed youth. And see Carroll (comm. to Par. XXXII.1–48), discussing the babes seated in the lower half of the Rose: “Further, as we saw in the case of Bernard himself, Dante appears to ignore the doctrine of Aquinas that in the Resurrection the saints will rise at the age of thirty. Bernard, himself an old man, draws his attention to the child faces and voices of the lower ranks (Par. XXXII.46–48). Each soul, apparently, wears the form proper to the age it had attained on earth, freed of course from weakness and defect of the flesh. Dante evidently felt that there would have been something incongruous in making babies, who had never exercised true choice, appear full-grown in the flower of life. (Augustine thought otherwise: infants would receive ‘by the marvellous and rapid operation of God that body which time by a slower process would have given them’ [De civ. Dei, XXII.xiv].)” [return to English / Italian]

  63. Bernard is Dante’s last “father” in the poem. For a listing, see the note to Paradiso XVI.16. [return to English / Italian]

  64. See Scartazzini (comm. to this verse), reminding the reader of the Magdalen’s remark to the resurrected Jesus, whom she mistakes for a “gardener,” upon not seeing Jesus where she expects to see Him, in His sepulcher (John 20:15): “Si tu sustulisti eum, dicito mihi ubi.…” (If you have carried Him away, tell me where.…” [italics added]).

  These are Dante’s first spoken words since Paradiso XXVIII.57. See the note to Paradiso XIV.88–96 for a considerably longer silence on his part. [return to English / Italian]

  65–69. Bernard’s first words answer Dante’s most pressing concern, the whereabouts of Beatrice, who, he points out, is in the third row from the top. For a similar scene, see Inferno II.109–112, where Beatrice tells how Lucy came to her exactly where we see her now and got her to leave this seat in order to go into Limbo to enlist Virgil’s aid. Just so has she now enlisted Bernard’s help on Dante’s behalf and then reassumed her place. [return to English / Italian]

  70–72. Dante sees Beatrice literally in glory, resplendent with the light of God. [return to English / Italian]

  71. For Beatrice’s crown and Aquinas’s discussion of the additional aureola accorded especially favored saints, see the note to Paradiso XXIII.95 and Scartazzini (comm. to vv. 71–72). [return to English / Italian]

  73–78. From the highest point in the earth’s sublunar atmosphere to the deepest seabed was not so far as Dante found himself now from Beatrice; and yet he could see her as though there were no appreciable distance between them. The poet has already explained (Par. XXX.121–123) that in the Empyrean, the usual physical laws that we know on earth are suspended.

  In a sense, Dante here “disinvents” the as-yet-to-be-discovered technique of perspectival representation that would distinguish Italian painting of the next century. [return to English / Italian]

  77. See Scott (Scot.2002.1), p. 485, for this striking w
ord (effige), which is used only here and in Paradiso XXXIII.131, thus further associating Beatrice and Christ. [return to English / Italian]

  79–90. Apparently, the first commentator to pay any conscious attention to the protagonist’s switch from the honorific voi, in addressing Beatrice, to the affectionate tu, was Grabher (comm. to vv. 70–93), if he does not make much out of it. Porena (comm. to vv. 79–90) also notices the change, but has quite a strong sense of what it signifies, only appearing to be a closing of the distance between them, but being in fact a distancing, because it is the tu addressed to a saint, or that is proffered both to God and to Mary. Indeed, both God and Mary, in Christian theology, have the unique gift of being divine and human simultaneously—as does Beatrice. Nonetheless, Chimenz (comm. to vv. 79–84) admires Porena’s formulation. Giacalone (comm. to vv. 79–84) is also in their camp. A different view is advanced by Singleton (comm. to verse 80), one that proposes that the guide has become the individual soul of Beatrice (Singleton retains his sense that the guide is “allegorical,” while the individual is not, a judgment that some would dispute in its first instance, others in the second). Bosco/Reggio (comm. to vv. 82–84) also support Porena’s thesis.