The Divine Comedy

by Dante Alighieri

  Thus, various sequels flow from one event:

  God and the Jews concurred in the same death;

  for it the earth shook and the heavens were rent.

  You should no longer find it hard to see

  what is meant in saying that just vengeance taken

  was afterwards avenged by just decree.

  I see now that your mind, thought upon thought,

  is all entangled, and that it awaits

  most eagerly the untying of the knot.

  You think: ‘I grasp the truth of what I hear.

  But why God chose this means for our redemption—

  this and no other—I cannot make clear.’

  No one may grasp the hidden meaning of

  this edict, brother, till his inborn senses

  have been made whole in the sweet fire of love.

  Truly, therefore, since so many sight,

  and so few hit, this target, I shall now

  explain exactly why this means was right.

  That Good, which from Itself spurns every trace

  of envy, in Itself sends out such sparks

  as manifest the everlasting grace.

  Whatever is uttered by Its direct expression

  thereafter is eternal; His seal once stamped,

  nothing can ever wipe out the impression.

  Whatever is poured directly from Its spring

  is wholly free; so made, it is not subject

  to the power of any secondary thing.

  The Sacred Fire that rays through all creation

  burns with most joy in what is most like It;

  the more alike, the greater Its elation.

  All of these attributes endow the nature

  of humankind; and if it fail in one,

  it cannot help but lose its noble stature.

  Sin is the one power that can take away

  its freedom and its likeness to True Good,

  whereby it shines less brightly in Its ray.

  Its innate worth, so lost, it can regain

  only by pouring back what guilt has spilled,

  repaying evil pleasure with just pain.

  Your nature, when it took sin to its seed,

  sinned totally. It lost this innate worth,

  and it lost Paradise by the same deed.

  Nor could they be regained (if you heed my words

  with scrupulous attention) by any road

  that does not lead to one of these two fords:

  either that God, by courtesy alone,

  forgive his sin; or that the man himself,

  by his own penitence and pain, atone.

  Now fix your eye, unmoving, on the abyss

  of the Eternal Wisdom, and your mind

  on every word I say concerning this!

  Limited man, by subsequent obedience,

  could never make amends; he could not go

  as low in his humility as once,

  rebellious, he had sought to rise in pride.

  Thus was he shut from every means himself

  to meet God’s claim that He be satisfied.

  Thus it was up to God, to Him alone

  in His own ways—by one or both, I say—

  to give man back his whole life and perfection.

  But since a deed done is more prized the more

  it manifests within itself the mark

  of the loving heart and goodness of the doer,

  the Everlasting Love, whose seal is plain

  on all the wax of the world was pleased to move

  in all His ways to raise you up again.

  There was not, nor will be, from the first day

  to the last night, an act so glorious

  and so magnificent, on either way.

  For God, in giving Himself that man might be

  able to raise himself, gave even more

  than if he had forgiven him in mercy.

  All other means would have been short, I say,

  of perfect justice, but that God’s own Son

  humbled Himself to take on mortal clay.

  And now, that every wish be granted you,

  I turn back to explain a certain passage,

  that you may understand it as I do.

  You say: ‘I see the water, I see the fire,

  the air, the earth; and all their combinations

  last but a little while and then expire.

  Yet all these were creations! Ought not they—

  if what you said of them before is true—

  to be forever proof against decay?’

  Of angels and this pure kingdom of the soul

  in which you are, it may be said they sprang

  full-formed from their creation, their beings whole.

  But the elements, and all things generated

  by their various compoundings, take their form

  from powers that had themselves to be created.

  Created was the matter they contain.

  Created, too, was the informing power

  of the stars that circle them in Heaven’s main.

  From the given potencies of these elements

  the rays and motions of the sacred lamps

  draw forth the souls of all brutes and all plants.

  But the Supreme Beneficence inspires

  your life directly, filling it with love

  of what has made it, so that it desires

  that love forever.—And from this you may

  infer the sure proof of your resurrection,

  if you once more consider in what way

  man’s flesh was given being like no other

  when He made our first father and first mother.”

  NOTES

  1-3. The hymn sung by these spirits as they depart is addressed to the God of triumphant armies (the God, as Dante believed, who led the Roman Eagle) and is compounded of Hebrew and Latin, the two languages of Heaven (though malachoth—“kingdoms”—should properly be mamlachoth) and may be rendered: “Hosannah, holy God of Sabaoth [of the armies], lighting from above with Your luster the blessed fires of these kingdoms!” The blessed fires (felices ignes) are the souls of heaven.

  4-6. its own harmony: The harmony of the blessed voices. two lights: May stand, perhaps, for Justinian’s double glory as Emperor and Lawgiver. appeared to me: Note, throughout the Paradiso, how Dante’s phrasing suggests not that he saw the things of Heaven with his own senses, but that they were manifested to him by the blessed spirits as an act of love.

  10 ff. DANTE’S DOUBT. Dante is torn between his thirst to know and his reluctance to ask. The question that fills him is “How can a just revenge be justly punished?” As usual, Beatrice (and her action in all such cases is certainly an allegory of her character as Divine Revelation) knows his wish before he can speak it and grants it before he can ask.

  13-15. Intent of these lines: “But, as ever, the awe that overcomes my being if I hear so much as part of her name, made me unable to raise my head to speak and I kept it bent down like the head of a man who is dozing off while in an upright position”.

  25-51. THE CRUCIFIXION. Beatrice argues that the death of Christ was just because he had taken upon Himself both the nature and guilt of mankind. His expiation was just because the sin of His human nature was great. But since He was also a God, the pain inflicted upon His divinity was a sacrilege and demanded punishment. So ran the Scholastic argument Dante follows here.

  26. the man who was not born: Adam.

  29. the Word of God: Christ.

  31-33. Eternal Love: The Holy Ghost. His own person: Christ, the Son. that other nature: Man. Maker: God the Father.

  40. considering this: Considering what I have just said of the guilt of human nature and of the fact that Christ willingly assumed that guilt in His own person.

  48. earth shook . . . heavens were rent: See Matthew, xxvii, 11-15.

  66. grace: Dante says “beauty.” The Scartazzini-Vandelli commentary offers the following interpretation of this
tercet: “The Divine Goodness, which rejects from Itself every trace of envy, being in Itself a single ardent flame, scintillates so that it shoots forth from Itself, like sparks, part of its Eternal Beauty, and by these (sparks) makes beautiful Its creatures. One must say part (of Itself) because a finite creature is not capable of the Infinite.”

  67-72. Dante is distinguishing here between “direct” (Godly) and “secondary” (angelic and human) creation. What God creates directly is eternal because nothing can wipe out the impression of His seal, and it is free because secondary creations have no power upon it. The point is further made in lines 130-144 below.

  76. all of these attributes: The three Godly gifts are named above: immortality (lines 67-69), freedom (lines 70-72), and resemblance to God (lines 73-75). It follows that to lose any one of these attributes is to fall from the first-created nobility (Adam’s original state).

  81. it shines less brightly in Its ray: Since God’s fire rays forth most brightly in that which is most like God, and since sin makes man less like God, sin makes man shine less brightly in God’s ray.

  85-86. seed . . . totally: The seed is Adam. By his sin, all mankind fell from its first innate worth and lost Paradise.

  97. Limited man: Man is limited by his mortal means. Within them, no depth of humility to which he could descend could be proportionate to the height he had sought in his rebellious sin. For man’s sin was in seeking to become God, and there is no equivalent depth to which he could sink in recompense, for in sinning he had already damned himself to Hell.

  104-105. by one (way): Mercy. or both: Mercy and Justice. Since man could not save himself, God could have forgiven him outright as an act of mercy. Or he could have created a man so perfect that he was capable of just expiation (that would have been the way of Justice). But in giving Himself through His own Son, He chose the double way that was both divine mercy and human justice. In the tercets that immediately follow Dante celebrates this choice as the supreme act of all eternity. his whole life and perfection: Because through Christ’s redemption he could once more be received into Heaven and the whole life from which Adam’s sin had excluded him.

  114. on either way: On the way of mercy or on the way of justice. 122. explain a certain passage: Lines 67 ff. There Beatrice had explained that whatever God utters as His direct expression is eternal.

  124-125. water . . . fire . . . air . . . earth: These were believed to be the four elements of which all things were compounded. Hence, they and their combinations make up all the material creation. These elements (seen as phenomena of the matter they contain, the matter itself being directly created) are the effects of certain directly created powers in nature, not as direct effects of God. As secondary effects, therefore, they are corruptible, whereas the soul of man, a direct creation, is eternal.

  135. powers that had themselves to be created: Angels. God, of course, is the one power that did not Itself have to be created.

  139-141. The four elements that give form to all matter (the matter being itself God-created and eternal but itself formless) derive their potencies from fixed (and first created) principles of nature which are ruled by angels. The stars in their courses then work upon these potencies and draw from them the sensitive and vegetative souls of beasts and plants (but not man’s soul, which is God-created).

  145-149. THE PROOF OF THE RESURRECTION OF THE FLESH. “From this,” says Beatrice—from the principle declared in lines 67-68 that everything directly created by God is eternal, and from the fact that Adam and Eve were directly created by God—“you may infer the sure proof of your resurrection.” There seems to be no explanation of Beatrice’s reason for saying “your” (rather than “the” or “our”) resurrection. As a co-descendant of Adam and Eve, she must herself expect the resurrection of her flesh on Judgment Day.

  Canto VIII

  THE THIRD SPHERE: VENUS

  The Amorous: Charles Martel

  DANTE AND BEATRICE reach the Sphere of Venus, the Third Heaven. Instantly, a band of souls that had been dancing in the Empyrean descends to the travelers. These are the souls of the AMOROUS. As we learn in Canto IX, many of them, perhaps all, were so full of the influence of Venus that they were in danger of being lost to carnality. Through the love of God, however, their passion was converted from physical love to true caritas, and thus do they rejoice in Heaven.

  Their spokesman is CHARLES MARTEL OF ANJOU. He identifies himself and prophesies dark days for the Kingdom of Naples because of the meanness of King Robert, his brother. Dante asks how it is that mean sons can be born of great fathers, and Charles answers with a DISCOURSE ON THE DIVERSITY OF NATURAL TALENTS, a diversity he assigns to the influence of the stars, as God provided them for man’s own good as a social being, for only by diversity of gifts can society function. God had planned all these variations to a harmonious end. It is mankind, by forcing men into situations not in harmony with their talents, that strays from God’s plan.

  The world, to its own jeopardy, once thought

  that Venus, rolling in the third epicycle,

  rayed down love-madness, leaving men distraught.

  Therefore the ancients, in their ignorance,

  did honor not to her alone, but offered

  the smokes of sacrifice and votive chants

  to Dione and to Cupid, her mother and son,

  and claimed that he had sat on Dido’s lap

  when she was smitten by love’s blinding passion.

  From her with whom my song began just now

  they took the name of the star that woos the Sun,

  now shining at its nape, now at its brow.

  I reached it unaware of my ascent,

  but my lady made me certain I was there

  because I saw her grow more radiant.

  And as a spark is visible in the fire,

  and as two voices may be told apart

  if one stays firm and one goes lower and higher;

  so I saw lights circling within that light

  at various speeds, each, I suppose, proportioned

  to its eternal vision of delight.

  No blast from cold clouds ever shot below,

  whether visible or not, so rapidly

  but what it would have seemed delayed and slow

  to one who had seen those holy lights draw nigh

  to where we were, leaving the dance begun

  among the Seraphim in Heaven on high.

  And from the first who came, in purest strain

  “Hosannah” rang; so pure that, ever since,

  my soul has yearned to hear that sound again.

  Then one of them came forward and spoke thus:

  “We are ready, all of us, and await your pleasure

  that you may take from us what makes you joyous.

  In one thirst and one spiraling and one sphere

  we turn with those High Principalities

  to whom you once cried from the world down there:

  ‘O you whose intellects turn the third great wheel!’

  So full of love are we that, for your pleasure,

  it will be no less bliss to pause a while.”

  I raised my eyes to the holy radiance

  that was my lady, and only after she

  had given them her comfort and assurance,

  did I turn to the radiance that had made

  such promises. “Who are you?” were my words,

  my voice filled with the love it left unsaid.

  Ah, how it swelled and grew even more bright,

  taking increase of bliss from my few words,

  and adding new delight to its delight.

  So changed, it said: “My life there among men

  was soon concluded; had it lasted longer

  great evils yet to be would not have been.

  The ecstasy that is my heavenly boon

  conceals me: I am wrapped within its aura

  as a silkworm is enclosed in a cocoon.

  You loved me much, and you
had reason to,

  for had I stayed below, you would have seen

  more than the green leaves of my love for you.

  The left bank of the land washed by the Rhone

  after its waters mingle with the Sorgue’s