The Divine Comedy

by Dante Alighieri

  The observation about the ways in which Dante’s poem is an imitation of God’s book brings us to the substance of his revelation in the final cántica. Heretofore we have been concerned with the poet’s stylistic daring, but the daring of Dante the theorist is no less. The entire poem, from the dark wood to the Empyrean, traces the gradually transcendent view of Dante on his own culture, his own country, and even his own family, from the isolated and alienated bewilderment of the pilgrim in the first scene to the soaring view of the eagle in the upper reaches of the universe. It is characteristic of Dante and of his faith that any such transcendence must begin with the self; Dante’s own history occupies the central cantos of the Paradiso in the form of his meeting with his ancestor, Cacciaguida. The encounter is based on Aeneas’ meeting with Anchises, his father, in the sixth book of the Aeneid and has for its principal function the clarification of all of the dark prophecies the pilgrim has received throughout his journey concerning the future course of his life. As early as the sixth canto of the Inferno, he had been warned about future exile and misery in ambiguous terms; in the canto of Cacciaguida it is spelled out for him “not in dark oracles . . . but in clear words”:You will come to learn how bitter as salt and stone

  is the bread of others, how hard the way that goes

  up and down stairs that are never your own.

  In spite of the formal resemblance to an ancient model, the mode of the revelation is distinctively biblical, as the phrase “dark oracles” and the context suggests. As the coming of Christ gave meaning retrospectively to all of history, so the revelation of Cacciaguida, a surrogate for the divine perspective in the poem, gives meaning to all of the prophecies in the poem.

  The essential thing about an oracular utterance is that it contains the truth without revealing it; only in retrospect, after the fact, can its truth be appreciated. At the same time, when those ancient oracles deal with death, their truth can be tested only from beyond the grave, that is, when their truth is too late to be of value to humans. The coming of Christ changed all of this, for Christians, by providing a point of closure, an ending in time within time, an Archimedean place to stand from which the truth in life and in world history might be judged. It was therefore a death-and-resurrection perspective on the oracular utterance, at once an understanding and a survival. This mode of structuring history according to the Christ event forms the basis of Dantesque revelation in the poem: to tell the story of one’s life in retrospect with confidence in the truth and the completeness of the story is somehow to be outside of, or beyond, one’s own life. It is to undergo a kind of death and resurrection, the process of conversion, a recapitulation of the Christ event in the history of the individual soul. The retrospective illumination of Dante’s own life by Cacciaguida is the dramatization of the poet’s self-transcendence, the achievement of a place to stand from which the course of time, its trajectory, may be viewed as though it were completed.

  It was St. Augustine in his Confessions who first drew the analogy between the unfolding of syntax and the flow of human time. As words move toward their conclusion in a sentence in order to arrive at meaning and as the sentences flow toward the poem’s ending in order to give it meaning, so the days of a man’s life flow toward his death, the moment of closure that gives meaning to his life. Meaning in history is revealed in the same way, from the standpoint of the ending of history or Apocalypse, to use the Biblical term. The same analogy is operative in Dante’s poem, which is why the Paradiso is inseparable from the earlier cántiche. As we approach the poem’s ending (and, incidentally, the literal ending of the poet’s life), the closure that gives meaning to the verses and to the life that they represent, so all of history is reviewed under the aspect of eternity, beginning with Adam and ending with an indeterminate triumph of Justice on earth.

  As the dark prophecies concerning the poet’s life are given meaning by the revelation of Cacciaguida, so the dark political struggles which are a counterpoint to the pilgrim’s story throughout his voyage are finally revealed, in a way that no historian today would consider historical. Indeed, the ultimate structure of history, from the perspective of paradise, would seem to be the very opposite of the history we learn from the chronicles. St. Peter’s invective against the corruption of the Church, for example, insists three times on the sacredness of his chair in Rome, which from his perspective appears to be empty, when we know it to have been filled, during the fictional time of the poem, by Boniface VIII, perhaps the most secularly powerful Pope of the Middle Ages. Again, we know that Henry VII of Luxemburg, upon whose entry into Italy Dante had placed so much of his hope for the restoration of the Empire, died rather miserably in 1313, eight years before the poet’s death and the conclusion of the poem. Yet, Dante awards him the very highest place among contemporaries in the heavenly spheres. This is the implication of Beatrice’s remark in Canto XXX as she points out an empty throne:That great throne with the crown already set

  above it draws your eyes. To it shall come—

  before your own call to this nuptial banquet—

  the soul, already anointed, of Henry the Great,

  who will come to Italy to bring law and order

  before the time is ripe to set things straight.

  In the last phrase, “before the time is ripe,” Dante almost casually points up the difference between fallen time and the fullness of time that is the Christian eternity. Henry’s death seems the merest accident of history, in no way affecting its meaning, as the presence and continued existence of a powerful Pope, Dante’s bitter enemy on earth, is inconsequential under the aspect of eternity.

  One of the last figures used by Dante in order to describe his transcendent view of universal history and of his own life seems particularly contemporary in an age when the view from the stars is no longer a poetic dream but a reality. In the heaven of the fixed stars, as the poet looks down from his constellation, Gemini, he describes the entire terrestrial surface:And turning there with the eternal Twins,

  I saw the dusty little threshing ground

  that makes us ravenous for our mad sins,

  saw it from mountain crest to lowest shore.

  Then I turned my eyes to Beauty’s eyes once more.

  The convulsions of war and cataclysm are contained and almost domesticated by the figure of the threshing floor on which the winnowing is a contained violence with a purpose: the separation of the wheat from the chaff, the traditional Biblical figure for judgment. At the same time, the pronoun “us” strains to have it both ways: the pilgrim is elevated far enough beyond human concerns to give him a perspective that seems supernatural, but the pronoun involves him in the fate of the whole human community so that even in the starry heaven he is not alone. This integration of the pilgrim into the human family, after the isolation of the dark wood, points to an essential feature of this poem and to the central paradox of the faith to which it bears witness: the Incarnation.

  The last stages of the poem prepare the way for the final resolution of all paradoxes in terms of the paradox of the Incarnation. First of all, it should be observed that the final revelation that comes to the pilgrim is not simply Beatific Vision, but a vision of the principle that renders intelligible the union of humanity and divinity in the person of Christ. This mystery forms the basis, in Dante’s view, for all of the “concrete universals” involved in the story as well as in the poem itself. It explains (to the pilgrim, if not to us) how an individual man, Dante Alighieri, can at the same time be all men, without any compromise of his identity. It also helps to explain, retrospectively, how an apparently chance encounter of a boy and a girl in medieval Florence on an exactly specified day could at the same time contain within it the pattern of universal salvation, without any surrender of historicity to a vague realm of ideas. Finally, perhaps most importantly for the modern reader, the vision of the Incarnation coincides with the coming together in the poem of the pilgrim and the author and narrator who has been with us from the beginni
ng of the poem. It is as if the abstracted, confident voice of Dante-poet were an all-knowing principle of intelligibility and the figure of Dante-pilgrim were a flesh-and-blood reality, for that very reason struggling to understand his own meaning. When pilgrim and poet meet at the last stage of the journey, the circle is squared, to use Dante’s figure, the poet’s word joins the flesh of his experience and, in a sense that is at once paradoxical and exact, the poem is born.

  At the beginning of this essay, I suggested that Dante could think of himself as a new Jason, returning with the Golden Fleece of his vision and of the poem that we read. In the last canto of the poem, this is in fact the figure that he uses:Twenty-five centuries since Neptune saw

  the Argo’s keel have not moved all mankind,

  recalling that adventure, to such awe

  As I felt in an instant . . .

  The perspective of Neptune, from the bottom of the ocean looking up to witness man’s first navigation, is our perspective on the poet’s journey, a celestial navigation, of which the “mad flight” of Ulysses’ journey is the Promethean antitype. The figure completes the navigational imagery with which the Paradiso began. At the same time, the perspective from the depths is the poet’s as well, who, like all prophets worthy of the name, has returned to tell us all. This didactic intent is finally what separates Dante’s vision from its more romantic successors or from its heroic predecessors. The final scene is not an apotheosis of the self in splendid isolation, but a return to the darkness of this world for its own good and a reintegration of poetry into society. There is a precise syntactic moment that marks his return in the final verses:Here my powers rest from their high fantasy,

  but already I could feel my being turned—

  instinct and intellect balanced equally

  as in a wheel whose motions nothing jars—

  as by the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars.

  The restless drive of Dante’s verse reaches its climax and its repose with the word “Love” in the last verse, just as the desire that is in human terms insatiable finds its satisfaction in the Love of God. What follows after the word represents a fall to earth, which is to say to us, after the ecstatic moment. Dante’s personal fulfillment of his own most intimate desires is perfectly harmonized with the Love that is the motive force of the entire universe, of the Sun and the other stars. Spatially, to speak of the Sun and stars is to return to our perspective, looking up at the heavenly bodies which had long been surpassed by the pilgrim’s journey to the Empyrean. The word “Love” is therefore the link that binds heaven to earth and the poet to his audience, containing within it the substance of the poem.

  —JOHN FRECCERO

  Canto I

  THE EARTHLY PARADISE

  ASCENT TO HEAVEN

  The Invocation

  The Sphere of Fire

  The Music of the Spheres

  DANTE STATES his supreme theme as Paradise itself and invokes the aid not only of the Muses but of Apollo.

  Dante and Beatrice are in THE EARTHLY PARADISE, the Sun is at the Vernal Equinox, it is noon at Purgatory and midnight at Jerusalem when Dante sees Beatrice turn her eyes to stare straight into the Sun and reflexively imitates her gesture. At once it is as if a second Sun had been created, its light dazzling his senses, and Dante feels the ineffable change of his mortal soul into Godliness.

  These phenomena are more than his senses can grasp, and Beatrice must explain to him what he himself has not realized: that he and Beatrice are soaring toward the height of Heaven at an incalculable speed.

  Thus Dante climaxes the master metaphor in which purification is equated to weightlessness. Having purged all dross from his soul he mounts effortlessly, without even being aware of it at first, to his natural goal in the Godhead. So they pass through THE SPHERE OF FIRE, and so Dante first hears THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES.

  The glory of Him who moves all things rays forth

  through all the universe, and is reflected

  from each thing in proportion to its worth.

  I have been in that Heaven of His most light,

  and what I saw, those who descend from there

  lack both the knowledge and the power to write.

  For as our intellect draws near its goal

  it opens to such depths of understanding

  as memory cannot plumb within the soul.

  Nevertheless, whatever portion time

  still leaves me of the treasure of that kingdom

  shall now become the subject of my rhyme.

  O good Apollo, for this last task, I pray

  you make me such a vessel of your powers

  as you deem worthy to be crowned with bay.

  One peak of cleft Parnassus heretofore

  has served my need, now must I summon both

  on entering the arena one time more.

  Enter my breast, I pray you, and there breathe

  as high a strain as conquered Marsyas

  that time you drew his body from its sheath.

  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,

  and you shall see me come to your dear grove

  to crown myself with those green leaves which you

  and my high theme shall make me worthy of.

  So seldom are they gathered, Holy Sire,

  to crown an emperor’s or a poet’s triumph

  (oh fault and shame of mortal man’s desire!)

  that the glad Delphic god must surely find

  increase of joy in the Peneian frond

  when any man thirsts for it in his mind.

  Great flames are kindled where the small sparks fly.

  So after me, perhaps, a better voice

  shall raise such prayers that Cyrrha will reply.

  The lamp of the world rises to mortal view

  from various stations, but that point which joins

  four circles with three crosses, it soars through

  to a happier course in happier conjunction

  wherein it warms and seals the wax of the world

  closer to its own nature and high function.

  That glad conjunction had made it evening here

  and morning there; the south was all alight,

  while darkness rode the northern hemisphere;

  when I saw Beatrice had turned left to raise

  her eyes up to the Sun; no eagle ever

  stared at its shining with so fixed a gaze.

  And as a ray descending from the sky

  gives rise to another, which climbs back again,

  as a pilgrim yearns for home; so through my eye

  her action, like a ray into my mind,

  gave rise to mine: I stared into the Sun

  so hard that here it would have left me blind;

  but much is granted to our senses there,

  in that garden made to be man’s proper place,

  that is not granted us when we are here.

  I had to look away soon, and yet not

  so soon but what I saw him spark and blaze

  like new-tapped iron when it pours white-hot.

  And suddenly, as it appeared to me,

  day was added to day, as if He who can

  had added a new Sun to Heaven’s glory.

  Beatrice stared at the eternal spheres

  entranced, unmoving; and I looked away

  from the Sun’s height to fix my eyes on hers.

  And as I looked, I felt begin within me

  what Glaucus felt eating the herb that made him

  a god among the others in the sea.

  How speak trans-human change to human sense?

  Let the example speak until God’s grace

  grants the pure spirit the experience.

  Whether I rose in only the last created

  part of my being, O Love that rulest Heaven

  Thou knowest, by whose lamp I was
translated.

  When the Great Wheel that spins eternally,

  in longing for Thee, captured my attention

  by that harmony attuned and heard by Thee,

  I saw ablaze with Sun from side to side

  a reach of Heaven: not all the rains and rivers

  of all of time could make a sea so wide.

  That radiance and that new-heard melody

  fired me with such a yearning for their Cause

  as I had never felt before. And she

  who saw my every thought as well as I,

  saw my perplexity: before I asked

  my question she had started her reply.

  Thus she began: “You dull your own perceptions

  with false imaginings and do not grasp

  what would be clear but for your preconceptions.

  You think you are still on earth: the lightning’s spear

  never fled downward from its natural place

  as rapidly as you are rising there.”

  I grasped her brief and smiling words and shed

  my first perplexity, but found myself

  entangled in another, and I said: