72. the moral meaning: The form of the tree symbolizes its essential nature. Interpreted in the moral sense (as distinct, for example, from the allegorical narrative, or anagogical senses) the two main facts of the tree’s form (its great height and inverted crown) express how far above and beyond man is the final understanding of Good and Evil. Hence the justice of God’s interdict in forbidding man what lies beyond his grasp.
74. turned into stone: As if by Elsan waters. so darkened: As was the mulberry.
77-78. as pilgrims wreathe their staffs with palm: The palm grows in the Holy Land. Returning pilgrims wreathed their staffs with palm to prove they had been there.
86. what school you followed: The school of philosophy, whose error lies in placing its dependence on reason as an end, and which cannot, therefore, comprehend the mysteries of faith.
89-90. the heaven whose swiftest wheel . . . : The Primum Mobile, uppermost of the nine spheres. Since all the spheres turn together, the outermost must move most swiftly.
91-102. BEATRICE’S LAST REPROACH. Dante protests that he has no recollection of ever having been estranged from Beatrice, despite the fact that he had relied more heavily on human philosophy than on divine love. Beatrice, smiling, points out that he has just drunk the waters of Lethe, whose powers wipe away all memory of sin. Since they have wiped out the memory of his estrangement, it follows that the estrangement was sinful.
But Beatrice cannot mean that he sinned in following Virgil, for she herself sent him to Dante. Dante’s sinful estrangement must have happened before he met Virgil. And since it was from the three beasts of worldliness that Virgil rescued Dante, setting him on the road to the mysteries of faith, worldliness (or the overexaltation of philosophy as his guide) must be the sin that estranged Dante from Beatrice. (See note to XXX, 124-126.)
103. brighter flame and slower pace: To an observer the sun seems brightest at its noon height and seems to move most slowly then. (Its slowness is an illusion, as is the speed with which it seems to set once it has touched the horizon, but its brightness can be accounted for by the fact that its rays travel a vertical, and hence shortest, course through the atmosphere at noon.)
105. varies round the world from place to place: In one sense, the sun is always at the meridian: it is always noon somewhere on the earth.
113. Tigris and Euphrates: The Tigris flows through Turkey and Iraq (ancient Chaldea) to join the Euphrates, which rises in Armenia and flows into the Persian Gulf. Genesis, ii, 10 ff., identifies the Euphrates as one of the four rivers of Eden, all of which rise from the same source. The rivers of Dante’s Earthly Paradise are Lethe and Eunoë. They “seem to rise” as if they were Tigris and Euphrates rising from a single spring.
117. parts from itself to either side: The two rivers flow off in opposite directions, just as their powers, rising from one source, work in opposite ways to achieve one good.
122-123. Lethe certainly could not have washed that memory away: There being nothing sinful in it.
142-146. Dante ends each canticle with the word “stars,” a fixed architectural device, and one that any rendition must preserve at whatever cost. Unfortunately for English renditions, the cost of forcing a rhyme for “stars” is great, and I have had to take considerable liberties. More closely rendered, these lines read: “I came back from that holiest wave [flood] made new like new trees renewed with new foliage, pure and prepared to mount to the stars.”
THE PARADISO
For Connie—
as all things draw to what they most are.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I must thank Professor Mark Musa and especially Professor John Freccero for reading and commenting on this version of the Paradiso. I am not a Dante scholar; I have undertaken what I hope is poet’s work. The learning of these good men has saved me from some of the gaps in my own. At times I have not followed their suggestions, feeling that the points raised, though important to scholars, might interfere with the pleasure of a beginning student reading in translation. If I have been wrong in so deciding, the responsibility is mine. Their suggestions have been invaluable, and I owe them a most grateful thanks, gladly offered.
INTRODUCTION
Dante’s claim for the Paradiso, the last cántica of his poem, is as daring as it is clear: “My course is set for an uncharted sea.” History has in fact granted him the unique place that he claimed with that navigational metaphor, both as pilgrim and as poet. Just as, within the fiction of the poem, the pilgrim’s course is privileged beyond the aspiration of ordinary men, so in its final course the poem accomplishes what no other poet had ever dared. Throughout the Divine Comedy, the metaphor of the ship serves to describe both the pilgrim’s journey and the progress of the poem: on both counts, Dante can refer to himself as a new Jason, who returns with the Golden Fleece that is at once the vision of God and the poem that we read.
For the twentieth-century reader, the fiction of the story requires a great effort of the imagination—few of us still believe in a paradise in any form, much less in the possibility of reaching it in this life. The claim of the pilgrim to have reached the absolute seems to us even more fantastic than the fiction of the Inferno, where at least the characters, if not the landscape, are quite familiar. For this reason, the Paradiso is often thought of as the most “medieval” part of the poem. This reputation should not, however, obscure for us the sense in which, as poetry, it remains daring and even contemporary. By attempting to represent poetically that which is by definition beyond representation, this cantica achieves what had scarcely seemed possible before (even for the poet of the Inferno and the Purgatorio) and has remained the ultimate aspiration of poets ever since. The quest of Romantic poets and their successors for “pure poetry” has for its prototype the Paradiso.
The poetry of the Paradiso represents a radical departure from that of the Purgatorio, as the latter represented a departure from the poetry of the Inferno. The changes may be thought of as a gradual attenuation of the bond between poetry and representation, from the immediacy of the Inferno to the dreamlike mediation of the Purgatorio to the attempt to create a nonrepresentational poetic world in the last cántica. This refinement of poetic representation perfectly matches the evolution of the pilgrim’s understanding within the story: he learns first of all from his senses, from the sights and sounds of a hell that seems actually to exist, now and forever, thanks to the celebrated mimetic power of Dante’s verses in the In f erno. As the pilgrim depends upon his senses in his travels, so the reader seems to be with him in a world which exists autonomously, almost as if it had not been created by an act of the imagination.
In the Purgatorio, on the other hand, the major revelations come to the pilgrim subjectively, as interior events in what Francis Fergusson has called a “drama of the mind.” The dream-vision is the primary vehicle for this illumination; Dante refers to the power which receives it as the imaginativa (Purgatorio, XV). According to medieval psychology, this is the same power that enables poets to create a totally new world from the fragments of sense experience and memory, so that in Dante’s view, the poetic power that created the poem is the same power that is illuminated within the pilgrim during his ascent of the mountain. The poet’s imagination, hidden by its own concreteness in the first part of his poem, becomes the focus of his attention and of ours in the Purgatorio. Thus, the landscape is suffused with mist, the tone is nostalgic, and the reader is called upon to respond with his imagination to both the sensory and the emotional suggestiveness, to imagine “visible speech” in the bas-reliefs, to hear the music of familiar hymns, to recall the lessons from the Sermon on the Mount. The substantiality of this part of the poem resides in the subjectivity of the pilgrim and in our reaction to it more than in an explicit architectonic creation of the poet.
In the last part of the poem, the pilgrim’s vision is transformed until it no longer has need of any representational media whatever in its communication with the absolute. The technical problem involved in finding a
stylistic correspondence to this transformation reaches insoluble proportions by the poem’s ending, for it demands straining the representational value of poetry to the ultimate, approaching silence as its limit. Insofar as the Paradiso exists at all, therefore, it is an accommodation, a compromise short of silence, as Dante suggests in the first canto:How speak trans-human change to human sense?
Let the example speak until God’s grace
grants the pure spirit the experience.
This sense of compromise, of poetic inadequacy for the ultimate experience, is what accounts for the poignancy of much of the cántica, but particularly of the last cantos, where both memory and fantasia fail the poet, who can describe only the sweetness distilled within his heart.
The prodigious achievement of the poet is that he manages, within the limits of this compromise, to represent nonrepresentation without falling either into unintelligibility or into silence. Within the story, this accommodation takes the form of a “command performance” of all of the souls of the blessed for the exclusive benefit of the pilgrim. In the fourth canto, Beatrice tells him that all of what he sees in the heavenly spheres of the Moon, the Sun, and the planets is there only temporarily, until he is able to behold all of Paradise without any such “condescension”:So must one speak to mortal imperfection,
which only from the sensible apprehends
whatever it then makes fit for intellection.
One might incidentally extend the principle to include a justification of the effort to translate into English what at first appears to be this least translatable of all poems. As the pilgrim’s experience is out of the reach of his powers of expression, so is the original poetry out of the reach of the average reader of English, who requires the “accommodation” of a translation; in the case of a superb translation, such as this, the “accommodation” is also a work of art, dependent upon an original experience for its inspiration, but autonomous in terms of literary value for those to whom the original is out of reach.
To return to the fiction of the descent of the souls to the various spheres for the sake of the pilgrim, the extraordinary implication of Beatrice’s remark is that the whole of the Paradiso, at least until the crossing of the river of light toward the poem’s ending, has no existence, even fictional, beyond the metaphoric. When the souls return to their home in the Empyrean, the last heaven beyond time and space, they leave the spheres, presumably forever, and no subsequent voyager will ever see them again as the pilgrim saw them. If the Inferno may be said to have a fictionally autonomous existence and the Purgatorio a subjective substantiality, paradise and the poem are co-extensive, like the terms of a metaphor and, even within the fiction of the story, neither can exist without the other.
The metaphoric quality of the story has a stylistic counterpart in some of the distinctive features of the poetry, the most startling of which may be referred to as anti-images. One of the most memorable occurs in the first heaven (III, 15), where spirits appear within the Moon and are described as “a pearl upon a milk white brow.” The comparison is obviously self-defeating as far as its function to convey information is concerned: we are told simply that the poet saw white upon white. The point is of course the difference, which we are unable to see, yet within which all of the reality of the Paradiso is contained. The juxtaposition of the pearl and the brow, in their concreteness, serve in a negative way to block the attempt to leave the confines of the text, defying us, as it were, to find more than a shadow of reference to the real world.
It cannot be coincidence that the comparison is found in a section of the poem where the Moon spots are discussed at great length in what at first seems to be a superfluous digression. Its point becomes apparent when we realize that for Dante the spots on the Moon were visible only from the earth, while the heavenly body shone with a uniform radiance on the side closest to the Sun. The spots are therefore also shadows, in a sense an accommodation of God’s light to the eyes of mortal men below, gradations within a unity which might not otherwise be perceived. Finally, the literary significance of the complicated interplay becomes clear when one recalls the terms with which Dante had set forth his ambition in the prologue of Canto I:O power divine, but lend to my high strain
so much as will make clear even the shadow
of that High Kingdom stamped upon my brain . . .
The experience of the pilgrim, like the experience of pure whiteness or, for that matter, the experience of the divine light, remains out of reach to mortal minds, which can proceed to unity only analogically. It is in difference that meaning is born, like the difference between two phonetic sounds, unintelligible in themselves, yet constituting meaning when linked together. So with the poem, which manages to approach its conclusion and silence by the gradual dissipation of all difference between light and light, and yet remains as the shadow of all that the experience is not, as irreducibly literary as “a pearl upon a milk white brow.”
There was a whole corpus of writings in the Middle Ages which dealt with the subject of “light metaphysics,” an adaptation of light imagery, considered literally as the connecting link between God and the cosmos. These writings are obviously of doctrinal relevance to the study of the Divine Comedy; the point I wish to make here, however, is the poetic function of the interplay of light and shadow as a figure for the poem itself. Dante’s ascent through all of the heavenly spheres provides him with excellent occasions for modulating his poetic effects to suit the cosmic context. We have already seen the correspondence between poetic imagery and the specific nature of the Moon. Mercury’s proximity to the Sun is an occasion for fugitive effects, Venus’ shift in the sky suggests the dramatization of a didactic passage in terms of a solar “illumination,” from behind and before the pilgrim, the heaven of the Sun calls forth zodiacal imagery and a dance of the hours, Mars colors even Beatrice with its ruddy glow, and so on; in each of the successive spheres, astronomical imagery contributes its color and its geometry to lend to the poem such concreteness as it possesses.
Perhaps the most daring of all sequences in the poem, again at the stylistic level, occurs in the heaven of Jupiter. I have already described what I have called an anti-image in the sphere of the Moon; Jupiter provides us with an anti-image which might almost be referred to as an anti-character: the figure of the eagle. In Canto XVIII, Dante sees the souls of the just and temperate rulers as so many lights that gradually arrange themselves in order to form the first sentence from the Book of Wisdom: DILIGITE IUSTITIAM, QUI IUDICATIS TERRAM—“Love righteousness, ye that are judges of the earth.” The last letter of the Latin sentence, as it is spelled out, is gradually transformed into the shape of an eagle, the symbol of Justice, which then speaks to Dante of its universal history. Mr. Ciardi remarks quite rightly in his notes that, as image, it must have seemed unprecedented in Dante’s time, while we, who are used to “spectaculars” and flashing billboards have no trouble imagining such a display. In terms that were set forth at the beginning of this essay, those of poetic representation, the figure is as astounding now as it ever was, for it seems to make a series of references beyond itself, yet the series is perfectly closed and self-contained, in effect leading nowhere beyond itself. In this dramatic sequence, there is no reality that is not a sign, pointing to another level of meaning: the words of the poem point to men of history, the men are lights that are the words of a text from the Bible, which in turn unfolds to its meaning, the eagle. But the eagle also points beyond itself to the words of the text we read, where the series began. Just as there is no concrete reality which may be distinguished in its own right as irreducible, not even the lives of men who serve as the signifiers of God’s Providence, so there is no ultimate reality signified beyond the text itself. The eagle, as unlike an eagle as can be imagined, stands as a figure for the poem itself, a nonrepresentation that is its own reality.
If the logical series of references in the episode turns back upon itself, giving the eagle a purely literary meaning, independent of th
e natural world or extant eagles, it is also true that at the farthest remove from the text in that logical series there is another text: Diligite Iustitiam . . . , a Biblical verse. The Bible was considered by the Middle Ages to be the exemplar of all books, possessed of a totality to which mortals could only aspire with their books, for God was taken to be its Author. Moreover, it is this sense of the universe as a symbolic book, of which the Bible was the concrete manifestation, that gives to everything its quality of sign, pointing beyond itself to its Maker. So it is in Dante’s poem, where the ultimate reality is seen precisely as a book:I saw within Its depth how It conceives
all things in a single volume bound by Love,
of which the universe is the scattered leaves . . .
The aspiration of the pilgrim throughout the poem is to pick up the scattered leaves of God’s book, but as he achieves that in the last canto of the Paradiso with his vision, the vision escapes him: “On the wild wind that bore the tumbling leaves/the Sybil’s oracles were scattered so.” His own book, the poem we read, is an attempt to reconstruct the archetypal book and it is in this sense that it may be said, in Charles Singleton’s words, that Dante “imitates God’s way of writing.” For the twentieth-century reader, whatever his beliefs, the inference to be made is that the ultimate reality and coherence is that represented by the written word.
The Divine Comedy Page 70