The sin of synecdoche

A good deal of the story Beatrice tells in Paradiso 7 plays off of the question of direct versus indirect similarity, or proximity, or causality, of man to God. Before they sinned, Adam and Eve were good copies, or translations of God, she explains:

Goodness Divine, which from itself doth spurn
All envy, burning in itself so sparkles
That the eternal beauties it unfolds. 

Whate'er from this immediately (sanza mezzo) distils
Has afterwards no end, for ne'er removed
Is its impression when it sets its seal.

Whate'er from this immediately (sanza mezzo) rains down
Is wholly free, because it is not subject
Unto the influences of novel things.

The more conformed thereto, the more it pleases;
For the blest ardour that irradiates all things
In that most like itself is most vivacious. 

With all of these things has advantaged been
The human creature; and if one be wanting,
From his nobility he needs must fall.  

'Tis sin alone which doth disfranchise him,
And render him unlike the Good Supreme,
So that he little with its light is blanched,

And to his dignity no more returns,   (Par. 7.64-78)

Twice the passage uses the phrase sanza mezzo, i.e., without mediation, directly. It reappears a third time nearly at the end of Beatrice's speech:

But your own life immediately (sanza mezzo) inspires
Supreme Beneficence, and enamours it
So with herself, it evermore desires her.

The relation of immediacy made Adam and Eve similar to God in that they were free and immortal. But similarities can be deceiving.

God Envy

When the clever men of Greek mythology envied the Gods, they tried to steal their ambrosia, sleep with Hera, or defeat Death. They all ended up with signal eternal punishments in Hades.

With Adam, the fall is instantaneous: the moment the creature envied the Creator, he ceased to resemble that Being who, Beatrice says, doth spurn all envy. Enviously trying to assert his likeness, Adam proved his unlikeness; instead of a judicious translation of God, he produces a botched copy.

The similarity to God, it seems, veiled a vast difference -- a radical otherness. Instead of creating a perfect double of God, man discovers parody, and loses his standing, his dignified place in the universe. He goes into exile, a fallen creature in a fallen world. But unlike Tantalos or Sisyphus, he doesn't have to stay there.

Beatrice now tells of another translation, of divine Word into human flesh. It's not a simple story.

Ficca mo l'occhio, says Beatrice,

Ficca mo l'occhio per entro l'abisso
de l'etterno consiglio, quanto puoi
al mio parlar distrettamente fisso.

Fix now thine eye deep into the abyss
Of the eternal counsel, to my speech
As far as may be fastened steadfastly!

Man in his limitations had not power
To satisfy, not having power to sink
In his humility obeying then,

Far as he disobeying thought to rise;
And for this reason man has been from power
Of satisfying by himself excluded.

We need to be very attentive to Beatrice's words, her parlar, here.

Man's attempt to rise to the level of the Supreme made it quite clear that he had no concept of the Being whom he presumed to equal. The word "power," used three times, balefully intones the absence of any human power. Man doesn't even have the chops to lower himself to anything like the depth that would correspond to the absurd height to which he strove, in his follia, to rise. No amount of mere obedience will ever offset his egregious disobedience.

Yet the mistake the creature made is one we make all the time - the sin of synecdoche. Seeing that part of him was senza mezzo from God, he dreamt he had the power to become the whole - a total error of totalization. Man not only couldn't translate himself into the Divine; by presuming to try, he fell into an abyss deeper than any a human could create.

This abisso, Beatrice seems to say, is now to be found in her speaking. To listen to her is to see into that abyss, which in fact is where we always are.

Or where we would be, had God not found a way out. Man alone cannot excuse his transgression. God could forgive it - just cut him some slack - but that would not do justice to the dignity of the creature. And what Beatrice and Dante more than anything else are about in this canto is Justice, and God's other "way," mercy.

Therefore it God behoved in his own ways
Man to restore (riparar) unto his perfect (intera) life,
I say in one, or else in both of them. 

But since the action of the doer is
So much more grateful, as it more presents
The goodness of the heart from which it issues, 

Goodness Divine, that doth imprint the world,
Has been contented to proceed by each
And all its ways to lift you up again; 

Nor 'twixt the first day and the final night
Such high and such magnificent proceeding
By one or by the other was or shall be; 

For God more bounteous was himself to give
To make man able to uplift himself,
Than if he only of himself had pardoned;

And all the other modes were insufficient
For justice, were it not the Son of God
Himself had humbled to become incarnate. (Par. 7.103-120)

The doubleness of "such high and such magnificent proceeding" is truly a hall of reflecting mirrors (a mise en abyme, as the French say). 

God's problem is that his creature has to raise himself, even though man is clearly unable to do that without divine help. To merely act as God and grant a pardon would give the creature no part in his own rehabilitation. It would not accord any being worthy of recovery with the dignity of playing some role in that process.

God's solution: humble himself "to become incarnate." Translated into a man, the Verbo di Dio is humbled beyond measure -- even without the power to measure, one can see that this descent of God is at least equal to, and therefore a successful mirroring translation of, Adam's fatuous self-elevation of yore. 

At this point in Beatrice's story, we understand why Justinians's conversion from Monophysitism is deeply relevant, and we are now able to discern the subtle adequation of the balance of Justice. When the Word became flesh, it made Adam's abortive parody into something no longer absurd. Since God here is now double -- both God and a real man who teaches, is punished and killed -- He has, through sacrifice of Self, given the creature both the ownership of undergoing punishment and the dignity of playing a role in his own reparation. God doubles as man in order that man might accede to a dignity he lost when he tried to double as God. 

Are we satified?

Listening to Beatrice's parlar, we hear about the satisfaction of a debt, one that comes by surprise. A debtor satisfies his indebtedness thanks to his creditor's both assuming his debt and undergoing harsh pains to pay it off.  The question is, does this tale of satisfaction satisfy? If yes, then we're no longer in the abisso. 

If no, then why not? Is it that Adam's follia is here matched by the madness of God? The Greeks, who thought they knew gods, would probably think so. What god -- even the unknown one that Paul, on the Areopagus, said they acknowledged at Athens -- would contemplate such a thing? 

Paradiso 6 and 7 present a double account of history and of justice. From the Roman perspective of Justinian we gain insight into the workings of empire and its justification in the divinely orchestrated punishment and redemption of man. Beatrice's beatific vision takes us into the depths of that transaction. Either she persuades us to be satisfied with a surprising accounting -- an intricate juridical, ontological, and literally linguistic exchange that translates humanity into something more than a banished bad joke -- or, if we're not satisfied, leaves us at the brink of an abyss that could be nothing, or the lair of a mad god. We might not want to stare too long.

Doing Justice to the word: Paradiso 6-7

Paradiso 7 might present some interpretive difficulties, but there can be no argument that its opening tercet offers a song, sung by Justinian, that speaks in two tongues:

“Osanna, sanctus Deus sabaòth,
superillustrans claritate tua
felices ignes horum malacòth!”

Interestingly, it's common among translations of this canto to keep these lines as they appear in the original, rather than translate them. Translations are offered in footnotes - here's Grandgent's version:

"Hail, holy God of hosts, doubly illuminating with thy brightness the happy fires of these kingdoms."

As with many other poetic effects throughout the Commedia, a reader here has to work to bring out the sense, translating from two languages. We will want to ask why, at this point in the poem, Dante chooses to force us to become translators. What is it about translation that makes it relevant here?

Before getting to that, we might note that the first words of Justinian in Paradiso 6 speak of Constantine's transfer of the capital of the Roman empire to Constantinople -- a move that in Justinian's view went contro' al corso del ciel -- "against the course of the heavens."

The words speak of two different things: moving backwards, from West to East, reversing a course that tracks the actual sun in the sky as well as going against the the will of Heaven, which was interpreted to endorse a westward path of the Roman people from Troy to Italy.

Benvenuto da Imola, writing around 1380, offered this:

Justinianus narrat tempus sui imperii, conversionem et opera: et primo vult dicere quod romanum imperium jam steterat in Graecia ducentis annis et plus post translationem factam per Constantinum quando pervenit ad manus suas.

Justinian tells the story of his reign, conversion and deeds: and he first wishes to say that the Roman empire had already been located in Greece for more than 200 years after the transfer (translationem) made by Constantine when the empire came into his hands.

Benvenuto uses the term that was both proper and customary to describe what Constantine did. The noun form, translatio, derives from the verb transfero: "to carry over, carry across." However, it took on a broader meaning, as both the online etymological dictionary and Wiktionary note:

trānslātiō f ‎(genitive trānslātiōnis); third declension Translation, in the broadest sense: the process of transferring or carrying something over from one thing to another; in particular:

1. Translation of text from one language to another

1. A transfer from a literal to a figurative meaning; a metaphor (compare the Ancient Greek μεταφορά with the same senses)

The use of "translation" for the relocation of Constantine was common enough that Gibbon and other English writers spoke of "the translation" of Rome. And Justinian is clear from the outset that Constantine's act was a mistranslation -- "Rome" did not easily, or successfully, translate into Constantinople.

We have remarked before upon how the Commedia often does, through its poetics, something analogous to what it is saying, or an acting out of its thematic statement. Here the poem seems to be reinforcing through these cues the suggestion that, at this moment of the Paradiso's development, translation is deeply relevant. What Justinian does in canto 6 is to find the workings of Justice in history. But also in his own life, the decision to give coherence to Roman Law came after he abandoned Monophysitism, the belief that Jesus had a single nature that was either purely divine, or a synthesis of human and divine:

And ere unto the work I was attent,
One nature to exist in Christ, [una natura in Cristo esser] not more,
Believed, and with such faith was I contented.

This thread -- of duality, of two, not one -- marks the figure of Justinian, seen for the last time after his dual-lingual song:

Così, volgendosi a la nota sua,
fu viso a me cantare essa sustanza,
sopra la qual doppio lume s'addua;

In this wise, to his melody returning,
This substance, upon which a double light
Doubles itself, was seen by me to sing. . .   (Par. 7. 4-6)

Justinians's song is double, and sings of double illumination. At the same time, the two languages are musically harmonious, and fit the rhythmic and rhyming scheme of Dante's terza rima. As he said towards the end of his speech in Canto 6:

Diverse voci fanno dolci note;
così diversi scanni in nostra vita
rendon dolce armonia tra queste rote.

Voices diverse make up sweet melodies;
So in this life of ours the seats diverse
Render sweet harmony among these spheres  (Par. 6. 124-26)

Justinian says here that diverse voci (voices, but can also mean words, vows) and scanni (seats, positions, hierarchic statuses in the Empyrean) produce harmony in, of, and by the heavenly spheres (music as formal proportion is a subset of Justice). But to say as much is merely to allege. To clarify that just translation can in fact take place, is another thing. This performance occurs in canto 7 when Justinian incorporates two languages into the structure of a third, Dante's Italian terza rima:

“Osanna, sanctus Deus sabaòth,  

superillustrans claritate tua  

felices ignes horum malacòth!”

Note that in accomplishing this harmony, Justinians's song preserves the differences between Latin and Hebrew. The poem acts out, formally on the plane of language, what is at stake, theologically and politically, in the speech of Justinian in canto 6:

Theologically: Each tongue retains its integrity, like the two natures of Christ, yet they harmonize into a single intelligible poetic structure. 

Politically: The Hebrew words have to do with order, an order more militant than natural: sabaòth signifies "armies," and malacòth, "kingdoms" -- a vision of different and distinct kingdoms and powers, but under one God. 

Formally: The poetic accomplishment occurs in bringing Latin and Hebrew under the control of Dante's form -- his Italian syntax and the rhythm and rhyming structure of his terza rima. 

==

We might even suggest a historical analogue, as the Old Testament and Roman tongues are carried over into Italian as the inheritor of the two peoples chosen by God to bring about the central act of redemption.

And it is here that the entire burden of translation is brought to bear. When Justinian and his cohort vanish like velocissime faville, it is left to Beatrice to describe the descent of the Verbo di Dio:

fin ch'al Verbo di Dio discender piacque 

u' la natura, che dal suo fattore
s'era allungata, unì a sé in persona
con l'atto sol del suo etterno amore. 

Till to descend it pleased the Word of God

To where the nature, which from its own Maker
Estranged itself, he joined to him in person
By the sole act of his eternal love.   (Par. 7. 30-33)

The salvific act of history is a translation performed by the Word of God. The Trinity - Verbo/Fattore/Amore - is at work here in this atto, culminating not so accidentally with line 33. The duality of the man-God both is a carrying over of God into man and an opening of a way for man to cross back over to God. But as both Justinian and Beatrice strive to make clear, this elaborate transference not only must be just; it must do justice to be a true translation.

To see that this is the case, it execution must in turn be translated, i.e., read. Dante's doubt has to be dispelled through a clarity that sees how the sacrifice of Jesus was both just and unjust. Those executing him justly in his dual nature in turn had to be punished with the destruction of Jerusalem and the diaspora of the Jews. The Good News of the crucifixion, harrowing of Hell, and resurrection has a residue, an after-echo, that is bad news for the formerly Chosen People.

==

To translate is a sacrificial act of liberation. To break old bounds while yet preserving them; a disruption that frees so that something impossible, just now, can be, and can be spoken. The new, as in the New Adam, is the Old Adam carried over. A new tongue.

The sparks and fires of this scene should recall the tongues of flame of Pentecost. Fire descends, contrary to its nature, bringing with it a power of translation in which the Word becomes intelligible to all tongues.

The Commedia approaches this central redemptive act of human and divine history through the double lenses of Justice and Translation, at work in the dual kingdoms of Jerusalem and Rome. It is in the act of interpreting how Justice is rendered that the singular complexity claimed for the Redemption becomes intelligible. But how intelligible is it, as of yet?

Dante, Justinian, and Beatrice might feel that the destruction of Jerusalem, like the fall of Troy, was the necessary co-efficient of just human salvation. If some readers are left with an unsettling sense of something not quite square about this judgement, some frayed or still trembling loose end that occasions reiterated harrowing acts of injustice throughout human history, this would not come as a surprise. Doubt asserts itself. Further work is needed if one is to possibly get it right. To translate well, in the end, is to find le mot juste. I don't know about anyone else, but I'm not there yet.