Paradiso (The Divine Comedy series Book 3)

by Dante

  55–57. The experience of seeing God face-to-face (1) is ineffable, not describable, and (2) the vision cannot be remembered in any of its details anyway (these twin disclaimers were made at the outset [see Par. I.7–9]). All that remains is the awareness of having had the experience. [return to English / Italian]

  57. For the word oltraggio as expressing Dante’s version of the excessus mentis of the Christian mystical tradition, see Pertile (Pert.1981.1 [repr. Pert.2005.2]). [return to English / Italian]

  58–66. Given our previous experience reading in the Paradiso, we expect here exactly what we get. Moving into an area of heightened experience, which challenges his expressive powers (as it had challenged his perceptive powers), Dante has inevitably moved to simile. After, in the last tercet, understating the fact that he saw God, he now turns not to one simile, but to three of them, in order to express the nature of his loss. This is perhaps the only time in the poem that he deploys three similes back-to-back; in any case, the Trinitarian nature of what he has looked upon (which will be made clear to us before long) is perhaps reflected in their number.

  These are the penultimate similes in a poem that turns to them more often than we might have expected, and surely his use of the technique reflects his sense of the classical Latin epic simile, so familiar to him, particularly from the pages of Virgil. And the last of these three will be unmistakably Virgilian. [return to English / Italian]

  58–63. The first and fullest of the three similes is one of a class defined by Tozer (see the note to Inf. XXX.136–141) as “drawn from mental experiences.” [return to English / Italian]

  58. The present tense of the verb in the simile seems natural to us, since Dante usually bases his similes in the world of our present experience. We do not, however, expect to hear the narrative voice speaking in the present tense—but if we look ahead to verse 61, we find the poet speaking to us now, from his writing table back on earth. He won’t stay there (see vv. 133–138, a parallel structure, in which the poet compares himself to the geometer and then says “such was I”), as we will see, but that is where he presents himself as being now, at least for the moment. [return to English / Italian]

  61. Switching from the experience itself to writing about his recording of the experience, the poet speaks in the present tense, which comes as a surprise, since we have not heard him use that tense in the Empyrean, and not since Paradiso XXX.34. [return to English / Italian]

  62–63. Benvenuto (comm. to vv. 58–63) says that Dante is claiming that even now he still tastes just a drop of this immense joy (adhuc sentio aliquam stillam, idest, guttam illius immensae dulcedinis). [return to English / Italian]

  62. This is the sixth and final appearance of the word visione, used here for the first time for the poem itself. It was apparently from here that the many writers who referred to the work as the Visione (perhaps wanting to avoid the embarrassing [to some] title, Commedia) took their cue. And see the note to Paradiso XVII.127–129. [return to English / Italian]

  64. Benvenuto (comm. to vv. 64–66) says that this is a fitting simile, because “the human mind, weak and infirm, loses the form of its phantasy’s vision beneath the heat of the Eternal Sun.” This second comparison is apparently not “literary” in its inspiration. There is in fact no citation of any text of any kind for this verse among the commentators gathered in the DDP. [return to English / Italian]

  65–66. When we read her name, we may wonder why we have not heard it before now; it is as though Dante were holding her in reserve for his hundredth canto (as we will see, that number is three times associated with her in the main passage involving her in the Aeneid). The Sibyl, we may sometimes fail to remember, was merely the conduit for Apollo’s messages. Thus, and as Benvenuto (comm. to vv. 64–66) says, both the Sibyl and Dante lost track of a communication from a divinity. If we recall the first two cantos of this canticle, with their insistence on Apollo as God’s “stand-in” (Par. I.13; II.8), we can see why Benvenuto makes them companions in losing track of the truth revealed by “Apollo.”

  The history of the commentators’ response to this Virgilian reference is strange, beginning with the mistake of Francesco da Buti (or his scribe), who identifies (comm. to vv. 55–66) the source as being in Aeneid V, when he clearly means Aeneid III. All the other earlier commentators, beginning with Pietro (Pietro1, comm. to vv. 58–66), and including Benvenuto, John of Serravalle, Daniello, and Venturi, refer only to the appropriate passage in Aeneid VI. However, beginning with Lombardi (comm. to vv. 64–66), every commentator but two refers only to the passage in Aeneid III (443–451), which is the one in which the usual scattering of her leaves is described; the second passage, while also referring to that usual result, has Aeneas convincing the oracle to speak, and not write, her expression of Apollo’s response. However, it is probably helpful to have both scenes in mind; the only two commentators in the DDP to refer to both passages are Oelsner and Singleton (comms. to these verses).

  The passage in the Aeneid (VI.42–155) describing the Sibyl’s cave is both long and full of arresting “Dantean” detail. The cave possesses one hundred mouths and one hundred gates (VI.43); Aeneas requests that the Sibyl not write her “poems” (carmina) on leaves to be scattered by the wind, but recite them aloud (VI.74–75); the hundred gates open and their breezes carry her reply (VI.81–82); Virgil (VI.99) typifies her utterance as “horrible enigmas” (horrendas ambages), a phrase that Dante has picked up in Paradiso XVII.31; Aeneas asks (VI.108) the Sibyl to bring him into his father’s sight (ad conspectum cari genitoris), while Dante hopes to see his Father. (While there are other resonances in Dante’s poem of the last four dozen verses, they are not relevant to this passage.)

  If the obvious references to Virgil have been recognized, but not all that well exploited, there is also possibly a reference to Augustine, which has only rarely been noticed and not exploited at all. It is found in chapter xxiii of Book XVIII of De civitate Dei, a text vengefully hostile to Virgil for his prideful view of Rome’s continuing and sempiternal hegemony (especially now that the city has been sacked in the year 410). Augustine says that the Sibyl (not the Cumaean [Virgil’s] but the Erythraean—if he later hedges by saying it may have been the Cumaean) had, in a poem, prophesied the coming of Christ and ought to be considered as inhabiting the City of God. What led Augustine to make such claims may have been a desire to roast Virgil, either for not heeding his own Sibyl (who, after all, presides over the fourth Eclogue) or for choosing to sponsor the wrong one. Here is a portion of what he sets down in his lengthy analysis of this poem: The first letters of each successive line in the Greek Sibylline pronouncement spell out, Augustine reports: “ ‘Jesus Christ the Son of God, the Saviour.’ And the verses are twenty-seven, which is the cube of three. For three times three are nine; and nine itself, if tripled, so as to rise from the superficial square to the cube, comes to twenty-seven. But if you join the initial letters of these five Greek words, … they will make the word ikduj, that is, ‘fish,’ in which word Christ is mystically understood, because He was able to live, that is, to exist, without sin in the abyss of this mortality as in the depth of waters” (tr. M. Dods). Notice of this passage in St. Augustine is not a frequent feature of the commentaries. However, see Benvenuto (comm. to these verses), who points to it at some length. He is followed apparently only by Campi (comm. to these verses). Hollander (Holl.1983.1), pp. 146–50, while suggesting this connection, neglected his two precursors (when he could have used all the help he could find).

  For an article by Philippe Verdier on the Sibyl’s appearance to Augustine at Ara coeli in Rome, see Mélanges de l’École française à Rome 94 (1982): 85–119. And for a collection of studies of the Sibyl’s antique and medieval presence, see Allevi (Alle.1965.1) as well as Bouquet and Morzadec (Bouq.2004.1). Allevi discusses this passage on pp. 443–48. [return to English / Italian]

  66. On the Sibyl’s leaves, see Boitani (Boit.1978.1), taking them as a starting point for his lectura of the can
to. [return to English / Italian]

  67–75. The word concetto (conception, conceiving) is the linchpin of this passage, occurring in verses 68 and 75 (on the latter occasion as a verb). Dante, in this last of his nine invocations (see the note to Inf. II.7–9), asks God to make His reality “conceivable” by mortals. If He requites Dante’s request, the poet promises, that will be the result. A scaled-back request, the poet insists, is all that he makes, underlined by the repetition of the phrase “un poco” (one small part).

  This is the fourth time in the poem that the word concetto is connected with an invocation (see the notes to Inf. XXXII.1–9 and 10–12; Par. XVIII.82–87; and, for a survey of all the presences of concetto in the poem, see the note to Par. XXXIII.127). It surely seems to be involved in Dante’s sense of what the human agent needs from a higher source, not the mere substance of his vision, but its shaping conceptual formulation. And that is precisely what, the poet will tell us, he was granted in the lightning bolt that resolves all his questions in verses 140–141. [return to English / Italian]

  67. The poet here addresses God as source (O somma luce), not as what He irradiates, but as the fonte (spring, font) of everything. [return to English / Italian]

  76–84. The protagonist had entered the raggio (ray) in verse 53. Now he has issued from it and approached the source. Having uttered his ninth invocation a few lines earlier (vv. 67–75), he does not invoke the Deity. He does not need help to see Him any longer; he has accomplished that goal. And so he gives thanks for His grace in allowing this final vision, which he is about to unfold before us. See discussion in Ledda (Ledd.2002.1), pp. 313–14 and n. [return to English / Italian]

  77. For the past presence of the adjective smarrito in the poem, see the note to Paradiso XXVI.9. [return to English / Italian]

  85–93. For a most suggestive and yet concise reading of this passage, the universe explained and put into relationship with its Creator in three tercets, see Moevs (Moev.2005.1), pp. 78–79. God creates all things as unity. He is the ground of all being. And Dante, seeing the universal diversity as unity, experiences it as God saw it in creating it, as a simple yet “limitless and dimensionless reality” (Moevs, p. 78). [return to English / Italian]

  85–90. On the various dimensions of this passage, from medieval book production, in which a writer took his individual quartos (quaderni) to have them conflated and sewn into a “book,” Ahern argues that Dante’s poem reflects the “book” of God’s created universe, even to its Trinitarian structure. For bibliography on the concept (God’s “two books,” the Bible and His creation), see Güntert (Gunt.2002.2), p. 511n. [return to English / Italian]

  85–87. Chiarenza (Chia.1972.1), p. 80, says that this tercet is “inspired by the doctrine of the double existence of creation, separate in the universe and unified in its Creator’s conception.” [return to English / Italian]

  91–93. Güntert (Gunt.2002.2), p. 508, hopes to convince us to see “three Dantes” in this tercet: the narrator (credo), the narrator speaking of the protagonist in the past tense (i’ vidi), and the “post-vision protagonist” (mi sento … i’ godo), a being somehow differentiated from the narrator in Güntert’s view (see the similar argument advanced by Picone [Pico.2000.3], pp. 18–21). However, it is difficult to understand how his separation of the first and third voices can be supported, since they both use the present tense and surely seem to be the standard voice of the io narrante rather than two different voices, speaking from different times. Since it is not logically possible for one of those times to be post-writing, it must then fall between the vision and the writing, and thus in the past. To put this another way, had Dante had such a plan in mind, he needed to deploy a better-conceived tactic in order to make it effective. As it is, we have two moments in the poem. One is stable, the protagonist’s voyage during a week in the spring of 1300, in which he does change over that time; that is then. The other is always in fact shifting between circa 1307 and circa 1321, but is treated without temporal distinction as the authorial now, if it has in fact finally reached its farthest point. The author who looks up at us from the pages of Inferno XXXII.71–72 to tell us his discomfort in winter’s cold occupies the same moment as this one, as far as we can see from his text, which offers no temporal divisions of the writerly present except for the ones we may happen to supply. Proust would later choose to dramatize the subject of the author’s mortal change through time; all times in which Dante, on the other hand, looks up at us from his writing table are equally “now.” All that has changed is that he is finishing his book; in Hollander’s formulation (Holl.1969.1, p. 227), “The Pilgrim he was has become the history of the Poet he is.”

  For the similarities between Dante’s “deification” here and that of Glaucus in Paradiso I.67–79, see Hollander (Holl.1969.1), pp. 228–29. See also Longen (Long.1975.1) and Migliorini-Fissi (Migl.1982.1).

  For the suggestion that this image of a ship, filled with armed men and headed for battle, underlines the poet’s desire to associate his Christian poem with classical martial epic in this final reference to the world of men, see Hollander (Holl.1989.1), p. 85. [return to English / Italian]

  94–96. This tercet has called forth equal amounts of admiration and distress, admiration for the beauty and scope of its conception, distress at the indubious difficulty of its highly compacted literal sense. First things first. What does the tercet mean? Perhaps because of the difficulty of understanding why Dante might have wanted to present himself as forgetting the greatest insight he (or practically anyone) has ever had, there has been some attempt to understand letargo not as “forgetting,” but as a form of visionary experience. However, most now think that the former meaning is far more likely here, as, obviously, do we. If all can agree (and that is to assume a good deal) that the term, in Dante’s Italian, refers to oblivion, forgetting, that still leaves a deal of difficulty.

  A good place to begin one’s study of this tercet is with the extensive gloss of Scartazzini, not because he solves its mysteries (he almost certainly does not), but because he so thoroughly indicates what these are. Francesco da Buti’s discussion of this tercet (a part of his comm. to vv. 82–99) makes a point based in mythographic history that stands as a helpful understanding even today. He (uniquely) offers a striking version of the classical background: Neptune had longed to see his “kingdom,” the sea, “inhabited” as was the land. Therefore, he took great joy in seeing the first ship ever to bring men to his “territory,” the sea, and has been painfully “forgetting” it (in the sense that he longs to see it without satisfaction every day) for twenty-five hundred years ever since. And thus Dante can say that his one moment of awareness of the final mystery of the Trinity, how humanity and divinity share the same being, now being lost, is more painful than Neptune’s far longer period of experiencing oblivion. See Tozer’s similar paraphrase (comm. to this tercet): “ ‘[O]ne single moment is greater oblivion to me (letargo, lit. lethargy, dullness), than twenty-five centuries have been to the enterprise which caused Neptune to marvel at the shadow of Argo.’ In other words: ‘I forgot in a single moment more of what I saw … than men have forgotten, in twenty-five centuries, of the Argonautic expedition.’ ” Needless to say, there are other views. For instance, Chimenz (comm. to this tercet) believes that the twenty-five centuries are marked by remembrance, not by forgetting. However, others have noted that the structure of the passage simply forces the reader to accept the negative understanding (i.e., the view advanced by Tozer). And if the poet goes on to describe the vision in great detail (the main point put forward by those who read the text “positively”), he also will insist on its fleetingness, as Carroll (comm. to this tercet), objecting to Scartazzini’s “positive” interpretation, rightly argues. Lombardi had offered, in addition to the classical modern statement later found in Tozer, two important additions to the sum of commentary knowledge: The word letargo derives from Greek lethe (forgetfulness), and the years between the voyage of the Argo and 1300 are, acc
ording to Dante’s authorities, either 2,523 or 2,570. Tommaseo (comm. to this tercet) supports the first of these dates, which has now become “canonical” among the commentators. Either one is a promising date, since both sector the “history of sea voyages” in an arc of twenty-six centuries, 1223 (or 1270) b.c. to 1300, with its approximate midpoint in the Incarnation (as Hollander [Holl.1969.1], pp. 231–32, has argued). The voyage of the Argonauts, preceding the Trojan War, was the first important event in the Greek portion of universal history. (See Gmelin [Gmel.1957.1], p. 572, for an examination of Dante’s Argonautical chronology.) [return to English / Italian]

  94. See Jacomuzzi (Jaco.1965.1), p. 10, discussing the tension in this canto between letargo (forgetting) and the frequent presence of verbs for seeing. And see Picone (Pico.1994.1), pp. 200–202. [return to English / Italian]

  95. The word impresa (undertaking, enterprise) has an interesting history in the poem. See Hollander (Holl.1969.1), pp. 230–31, pointing out that, in Inferno II.41 and 47, the word refers to Dante’s journey and that, in Inferno XXXII.7, it represents Dante’s poem about that journey; here, on the other hand, it would seem to refer both to the journey and to the record of that journey, for the first is in process of becoming the second. [return to English / Italian]