Beatrice's "awkward" digression - Paradiso 29

To perceive means to immobilize... we seize, in the act of perception, something which outruns perception itself. - H. Bergson

Paradiso 29 covers a lot of ground, and seems designed to perplex. It runs a crooked path through vastly different tonal registers and material. Moving at maximum speed at the edge of created reality, Beatrice's discourse shifts from a placid account of the Creation to a sardonic tirade against bad readers -- Schoolmen and Churchmen whose inventions and misreadings debase the Word -- with a kind of ontological shudder.

The interest here is precisely in this destabilizing turn -- not what we were expecting just now, when some triumphal closure might be what the Commedia ordered. Instead, at this "end of the world" we hear about the Beginning. Then Beatrice turns, with some agitation, to the unfinished business of a flock inflated with hot air purveyed by con artists.

There is some symmetry, however. The twilight of the canto's opening does balance the twilight of Inferno 1. From that moment to this, despite all revelation and grace, humans remain in between darkness and dawn, uncertain, wondering what's coming, like the angels before they resolved their choice.

Within the paradigm of perfect balance with which the canto begins -- an image of the Earth, Sun and Moon poised between day and night, spring and fall -- are two modes of where and when.

The 12-line passage begins with the quando of astronomical time -- the movement of the sun and earth generating days, hours, seconds -- the continuous, ceaseless forward motion of temporality. The moment of perfect "balance" lasts no time at all. Parallel to and reinforcing this missing "when" is the tale of Latona, who has conceived divine offspring, but has no where (ubi) to bring forth her twins.

The passage ends with the second mode: the gaze of Beatrice, contemplating Totality, takes in every ubi and every quando, in a changeless present beyond the Primum Mobile.

As the tipping moment between these two quandos, Paradiso 29 is by turns serene and convulsive. The apparent symmetry of its lovely opening passage is belied in a twist -- its end is not its beginning. The first quando, the Italian vernacular, is of the passing time of Nature; the last quando, its Latin cognate, is of eternity. The latter happens to look just like the Italian vernacular, but it belongs to another linguistic realm. The first quando attempts to seize a moving point before it disappears in the stream of human time; the final quando names the point-lessness of eternal presence (no "when" when all is "now"). The passage moves from one to the other, but does not make a circle or a return. Between quando (it.) and quando (lat.) lies a break rendered invisible (eclipsed) by similarity of form.

The circular, symmetric structure of the passage is broken, and this rupture continues through the canto to its final asymmetry, the shattered mirror. To show this will require a far longer post than was first intended - apologies in advance.

Precisely the same opposition between human and divine modes of time and space can be seen in Beatrice's account of the Angels. They don't need memory, she explains, because they are, as it were, hard-wired to the totality of past, present and future:

però non hanno vedere interciso
da novo obietto, e però non bisogna
rememorar per concetto diviso;

Hence they have not their vision intercepted
  By object new, and hence they do not need
  To recollect, through interrupted thought.  (79-81)

Human perception and understanding, intimately intertwined with the sensory realm of space and time, here have the structure of something coming between (interciso) knower and knowable. Like an eclipse, mediation occludes as it reveals. Angels see Totality pure -- without concepts, language, or representation. Their field of vision will never be eclipsed by anything new (and, unlike us, they'll never feel curiosity, thirst to learn, or the joy of discovery).

When Beatrice turns from angelic intelligence to human fallibility, we see her at her most acerbic. Of interest to us close readers is that her word for reading -- leggere -- appears twice as she pivots from the consistorio of perfect beings to the sons of Adam:

Ma perché 'n terra per le vostre scole
si legge che l'angelica natura
è tal, che 'ntende e si ricorda e vole,

ancor dirò, perché tu veggi pura
la verità che là giù si confonde,
equivocando in sì fatta lettura.

 But since upon the earth, throughout your schools,
  They teach that such is the angelic nature
  That it doth hear, and recollect, and will, 

More will I say, that thou mayst see unmixed
  The truth that is confounded there below,
  Equivocating in such like prelections.

Equivocation destabilizes meaning. Here below, we are either riddled with errant beliefs, or worse, pretend to believe in order to perpetuate utter rubbish ("fake news"):

sì che la giù, non dormendo, si sogna,
credendo e non credendo dicer vero;
ma ne l'uno è più colpa e più vergogna.

 So that below, not sleeping, people dream,
  Believing they speak truth, and not believing;
  And in the last is greater sin and shame.  (82-84)

Some of her strongest condemnatory language is reserved for those who knowingly perpetrate fraud in preaching, or with false indulgences:

per cui tanta stoltezza in terra crebbe, 
che, sanza prova d'alcun testimonio, 
ad ogne promession si correrebbe. 

Di questo ingrassa il porco sant' Antonio, 
e altri assai che sono ancor più porci, 
pagando di moneta sanza conio.

 For which so great on earth has grown the folly,
  That, without proof of any testimony,
  To each indulgence they would flock together. 

By this Saint Anthony his pig doth fatten,
  And many others, who are worse than pigs,
  Paying in money without mark of coinage. (121-126)

Conio is used of whores in Inferno 18.66 (panderers / seducers). The sellers of fake indulgences (compared to slugs, blank coins) will soon be joining the counterfeiters in the tenth bolgia of the eighth circle, last seen in Inferno 29-30, symmetrically enough.

Money without official marking is faceless; it can be anything, or nothing. Its blankness is an equivocation, eclipsing any determination. Beatrice offers us a lesson in reading blankness when she speaks of how commentators have filled volumes debating whether the moon ran backward, or the sun dimmed itself, at the Crucifixion.

Non ha Fiorenza tanti Lapi e Bindi 
quante sì fatte favole per anno 
in pergamo si gridan quinci e quindi:  

sì che le pecorelle, che non sanno, 
tornan del pasco pasciute di vento, 
e non le scusa non veder lo danno.

Florence has not so many Lapi and Bindi
  As fables such as these, that every year
  Are shouted from the pulpit back and forth, 

In such wise that the lambs, who do not know,
  Come back from pasture fed upon the wind,
  And not to see the harm doth not excuse them. (103-108)

Fake food, fake coin, fake salvation: Where the Gospel is mute, jackanapes rush in, filling Florence with words, instead of contemplating even silences within the Word.

The irony here is quite complex. The Gospel is silent about the causes of the eclipse that occurred during the Crucifixion, which itself seemed to be the eclipse of God. One might give one's attention to the fact that at this moment, it got dark* -- that there was, at Christ's death, a terrifying blankness that would have shaken the faith of a Job, a Peter, a James, a John. To speculate on the "science" behind the event would miss precisely everything.

More than that: To infer that God has been defeated, or that Jesus was either an imposter or a madman, would be a peremptory act of interpretive closure -- a misreading of epochal proportions. Unlike Satan, who could not wait for light, the followers of Christ spent 36 hours in shock and incomprehension -- what they had seen with their own eyes defied everything they believed. Only after living the intensest imaginable loss did the apparent closure of Christ's life turn out to be something else. Anyone taking the advice of Job's wife would have missed the navicella.

For Beatrice, this too is reading -- and it is consequential. As Augustine noted, when reading a psalm we are amidst a temporal event whose full meaning, subtending the syllables unfolding in time, will not be revealed until the last syllable is spoken. Understanding -- of our lives, as well of Nature and Scripture -- requires a patience. Closure on Earth is fake, and nothing is more attuned to that insight than Beatrice's peppery vernacular. Here is someone who has no patience with some fulsome and false facade of an ending to her pilgrim's journey. Nothing ends here in this portrait of error, larceny, and fraud -- we are scolded, with caustic love, into becoming better readers.

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. . .siam digressi assai, says Beatrice, "we've digressed quite a bit," not unlike all on Earth who do nothing but miss the true path:

Voi non andate giù per un sentiero 
filosofando 

Below you do not journey by one path
  Philosophising;  (85-86)

Those made uncomfortable by Beatrice's sharp words, those who find it aesthetically awkward, might at least consider that she has her reasons -- as did the poet -- for this digression. What matters here is how the final movements of the Commedia are to be read. Beatrice has reminded us in every possible way of our limitations, and of the dangers of premature closure.

What she then shares, with the same serenity she possessed before her digression, is a vision of Questa natura as something without number or determinable limit. Beatrice calls this unbounded field of light-filled beings "nature." In this instant, when Dante is told to see something that is not neither possible nor conceivable in the natural world -- something of infinite extent, and therefore not only unearthly and uncountable, but inherently asymmetric and unending -- it's an extraordinary touch that Beatrice simply says "questa natura."

Only after telling us it has no known number, and that each individual being is unique thanks to its particular mix of conception and affect, does Beatrice invite us to actually look:

"Vedi l'eccelso omai e la larghezza
de l'etterno valor, poscia che tanti
speculi fatti s'ha in che si spezza,
uno manendo in sé come davanti.”

"The height behold now and the amplitude
  Of the eternal power, since it hath made
  Itself so many mirrors, where 'tis broken,
One in itself remaining as before."

A different model is counterpoised to the binary equilibrium of Latona's world. Here a god has not only conceived, but has also created place, time, and free will to an unquantified amplitude. Mirrors, each a being whose life began the moment it said "subsisto," break apart the One whom they reflect. Unlike gods destroyed by the many who wish to devour them, this god/father remains, beyond all mutation, all shattering, One in itself remaining as before.

The shattering (spezza) of the totality into infinite self-subsistent pieces renders impossible any mirroring, any specular symmetry. This is not classical equilibrium, not the closed physics of matter and energy. In fact it's not possible to imagine this open-endedness -- neither the One we do not see nor the broken infinitude that generatively re-in-flects it. Beatrice invites us to look. The science of this vision will be left to others.


*Remarks of Louis Martorella in our Classics group were very helpful with this passage.

Saturn's crystal: Paradiso 21 and 22

Cantos 21-22 of Dante's Paradiso are in some ways rather forgettable. Not much happens, nor is there any especially heightened poetic imagery or drama -- at least not until the poet, addressing the reader from his new vantage point in the stars, turns and looks back upon his journey through the seven planetary spheres, down to the aiuola -- the threshing floor -- where his readers try to live.

The immediate effect of Saturn is of a cold, stark, almost frozen place -- canto 22 will open with the poet in a kind of shock -- Oppresso di stupore. The highest planetary sphere seems to partake of the realm of ancient gods and eld -- a place nearly forgotten, yet a place of origin, as Saturn is father to all the other Olympian deities.

A few notes on cantos 21 and 22:

Saturn

The sphere is called cristallo (21:25). We learn in retrospect that silvery Jupiter tempers the heat of Mars, where all had a reddish hue, and the cold of Saturn. I take cristallo here to mean transparent -- i.e., no color. This would be in line with the absence of sensory cues here -- as the sphere lacks sound and music, it also lacks color.

It's probably more accurate to say whatever sounds it may have, the pilgrim cannot hear them. He's too close to the sacred to not need a shield, some sort of protective mediation, which suggests that the minimalist bent of Saturn works to imply, by its very paucity, something too large to take in.

That proximity to what, if apprehended, would shock or destroy the one who apprehends, is made explicit early when Beatrice explains why Dante will not see her smile. It's a motif often seen in Ovid -- think of Actaeon, or Semele:

                           ". . . s'io ridessi,”
 mi cominciò, “tu ti faresti quale
 fu Semelè quando di cener fessi:

ché la bellezza mia, che per le scale
 de l'etterno palazzo più s'accende,
 com' hai veduto, quanto più si sale,

se non si temperasse, tanto splende,
 che 'l tuo mortal podere, al suo fulgore,
 sarebbe fronda che trono scoscende.

                                    "If I were to smile,"
  She unto me began, "thou wouldst become
  Like Semele, when she was turned to ashes.

Because my beauty, that along the stairs
  Of the eternal palace more enkindles,
  As thou hast seen, the farther we ascend,

If it were tempered not, is so resplendent
  That all thy mortal power in its effulgence
  Would seem a leaflet that the thunder crushes. (21:4-12)

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Bi-polar

Saturn lies at the outermost edge of the planetary spheres -- the highest such sphere from Earth, named for the most ancient God, father of Zeus.

Throughout the cantos of Saturn, the pilgrim is made to intimate a sense that something lies between that which is available to his senses, and that which would destroy him if he were to see or hear it. It's as if there were a membrane, stretched very thin, between the absence of Beatrice's smile, the silence of no music, and something other which would be too much to bear. The austerity of Saturn is a an inverse sign of something intolerably powerful almost within reach. Just up the stairs.

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Contemplation - I

The poem seems to verge on some entropic limit. Beatrice instructs Dante to turn the mirrors of his eyes to see the figure - figura - in the crystalline mirror of Saturn. The staircase is the logical image here -- it ascends and descends, but in fact, it's the same at every step -- a mise en abyme.

To contemplate is be always seeing yourself seeing.

With Peter Damian, this is linked to a kind of light that lifts him up out and up:

"On me directed is a light divine,
  Piercing through this in which I am embosomed,

Of which the virtue with my sight conjoined
  Lifts me above myself so far, I see
  The supreme essence from which this is drawn.

Hence comes the joyfulness with which I flame,
  For to my sight, as far as it is clear,
  The clearness of the flame I equal make.

“Luce divina sopra me s'appunta,
 penetrando per questa in ch'io m'inventro,

la cui virtù, col mio veder congiunta,
 mi leva sopra me tanto, ch'i' veggio
 la somma essenza de la quale è munta.

Quinci vien l'allegrezza ond' io fiammeggio;
 per ch'a la vista mia, quant' ella è chiara,
 la chiarità de la fiamma pareggio.  (Par. 21: 83-90)

Peter Damian falls upward -- luce divina penetrates the light in which he is "enwombed." Unlike Semele, he's not destroyed. Like Dionysus, he's lifted up and out by the power of that light, joined with his seeing, "so that I may see the highest essence from which this light is milked"*

The result is a fusion of his elevated sight and the flame in which he spins -- each is made equal to the other, or, put another way, the flame mirrors the vision that is the mirrored fusion of divine light and human eye.

*"Milked" is apparently the root sense of munta, < mungere. Hollander cites this paraphrase of Paradiso 21: 83-90 from Bosco/Reggio:

“The light of grace descends on me, penetrating the light that wraps me round, in whose womb I am enclosed, and its power, conjoined with my intellect, lifts me so far above myself that I can see the supreme essence, God, from whom this light bursts forth. From this sight comes the joy with which I shine, since the splendor of my flame is as great as the clarity of my vision of God.”

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Ornithological

The silence of Saturn comports with the standard idea of contemplation. But then Dante introduces, in describing Peter Damian's cohort, the crows. We've just come from the figure of the Eagle on Jupiter, composed of the Just who sing in multiple voices, but which suddenly speaks in the first-person singular, subsuming all into one large, uncanny speaking entity. Here, instead of some even more solemn or seductive avian image, crows:

And as accordant with their natural custom
  The rooks together at the break of day
  Bestir themselves to warm their feathers cold;
Then some of them fly off without return,
  Others come back to where they started from,
  And others, wheeling round, still keep at home;
Such fashion it appeared to me was there
  Within the sparkling that together came, (21:34-41)

Here the image stresses the gaggle, the individual groups, each doing its own thing. If the eagle is the image of royal power, majesty, and top-down rule, these crows seem fairly common, independent, and unruly -- not unlike the actual creatures. Crows are also raucous, inharmonious, and have long been associated with bad news -- as in Ovid's tale of Apollo and the crow:

According to the mythological narration, Apollo sent a white raven, or crow in some versions to spy on his lover, Coronis. When the raven brought back the news that Coronis has been unfaithful to him, Apollo scorched the raven in his fury, turning the animal's feathers black. That's why all ravens are black today. (WP)

Crows are linked to secrets and baleful signs. They bring intelligence which may disconcert. One encounters them, as in Twa Corbies or Poe's "Raven," with foreboding.

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Dissonance

If Saturn offers Dante's portrait of contemplation, rich in somber quiet and sober reflection, why the crows? And why the extraordinary grido - the unintelligible shout from those "crows" surrounding Peter Damian at the very end of Paradiso 21?

If we consider the attributes normally found in discussions of the sublime, this becomes less surprising. Thunder, high craggy mountains like those where Peter Damian went to live in solitude, discordant aesthetic effects all accompany the sublime, whether in Longinus or in Kant's Critique of Judgment. Indeed, the Paradiso might helpfully be informed by a reading that would see it as a movement from delightful forms and harmonies associated with beauty to these austere heights haunted by the unimaginable, terrifying power of sublimity.

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Stupor

What would link contemplation - in Dante's sense - to the sublime? For one thing, when two mirrors face each other, the result is a form of infinity. The sublime erupts when the mind, which is used to the framed world of finite beauties, encounters what exceeds its grasp:

però che sì s'innoltra ne lo abisso
 de l'etterno statuto quel che chiedi,
 che da ogne creata vista è scisso.  

Because so deeply sinks in the abyss
  Of the eternal statute what thou askest,
  From all created sight it is cut off. (21: 94-96)

Rudolf Otto writes about the blank stupor - a kind of paralyzing dread that accompanies apprehension of the other, in connection with Chrysostom's reading of a psalm:

When he gazes down into the immeasurable, yawning Depth of the divine Wisdom, dizziness comes upon him and he recoils in terrified wonder and cries : . . . "Thy knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, above my power (I am too weak for it: LXX)." The dizziness and the unique feeling of the uncanny, which we have called stupor and tremor, are here clearly noted by Chrysostom. (The Idea of the Holy Appendix 1)

"This is the voice not of the Platonist or Neo-Platonist ; it is the voice of antiquity itself," adds Otto.

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Dizziness

I remember my first glimpse of mirroring mirrors -- it was in a barbershop, and when the phenomenon of endless iteration dawned on me, it was disorienting. One feels one could fall in. The golden stairs of Saturn, rising beyond mortal sight, disappoint the expectation of arrival -- instead of getting to a place, they simply repeat, step after step, no end visible.

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Contemplation II

The empowered light of Peter Damian would appear to have the power to see far. But right after describing his joy, he unveils its limit, in response to Dante's question about predestination.

Ma quell' alma nel ciel che più si schiara,
quel serafin che 'n Dio più l'occhio ha fisso,
a la dimanda tua non satisfara,

però che sì s'innoltra ne lo abisso
de l'etterno statuto quel che chiedi,
che da ogne creata vista è scisso.

But that soul in the heaven which is most pure,
That seraph which his eye on God most fixes,
Could this demand of thine not satisfy;

Because so deeply sinks in the abyss
Of the eternal statute what thou askest,
From all created sight it is cut off. (21:91-96)

If the binding of luce divina and Peter's own seeing lifted him up, it also enables him to apprehend the deep abyss. Infinite height reflects an abyss without end. That the abyss is a "eternal statute" (etterno statuto) removes it from the realm of nature altogether. The statuto is there because a fiat -- a speech act -- decreed it there.

Human sight is scisso -- cut off -- or cut out -- here. It can apprehend, but not comprehend.

Peter is speaking in answer to Dante's question, "why you?" -- Why is it that Peter Damian greets Dante at this moment of his journey? Of course the question could be turned around; Peter could, with greater justice, reflect it back to Dante:"Why you, Ser Alighieri?" Peter's response -- that not even the highest Seraph knows -- provides the same absence of an answer for both.

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Fat prelates

Peter's penetrating eye might not see why he's where he is, or Dante is where he is. But he sees through the opaque massiveness of the modern shepherds (moderni pastori). The layers of flesh and cloth try the patience of one whose life has been devoted to that virtue;

Cuopron d'i manti loro i palafreni,
sì che due bestie van sott' una pelle:

The victims of his caustic vision are mirror images of Peter's fusion of divine light and human eye, which lifts him up out of himself. Here the shepherds and their palfreys merge beneath a giant added "skin."

Suddenly, myriad little flames release a cry to which no earthly sound, even thunder, can be compared:

Dintorno a questa vennero e fermarsi,
 e fero un grido di sì alto suono,
 che non potrebbe qui assomigliarsi;
né io lo 'ntesi, sì mi vinse il tuono.

Round about this one came they and stood still,
  And a cry uttered of so loud a sound,
  It here could find no parallel, nor I
Distinguished it, the thunder so o'ercame me.

If music in the lower spheres interweaves in perfect rhythm with teachers and paragons of justice, this screech brings no beauty, or understanding, or closure. Paradiso 21 ends in a dissonance more disconcerting than the caw of crows.

Kant says the sublime can be painful, because it marks the moment when that which is apprehended exceeds what we may comprehend. He notes that when we find sublimity in the ocean, it's at the moment we are detached from what we know. The eye of the mind goes dark, and the sensory eye sees merely what strikes it:

if it (the ocean) is at rest, as a clear mirror of water only bounded by the heaven; if it is restless, as an abyss threatening to overwhelm everything. (Analytic of the Sublime #29.)

The pilgrim experiences the grido as the overwhelming shock of mere sound -- né io lo 'ntesi -- "nor did I understand it."

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Stupor II

Suppose one looked at the staircase with the same uncomprehending eye that Kant says sees the sublimity of the ocean. One would simply see a series of gradations extending upwards as far as that eye can see. Nothing beyond it, no destination, just stairs, stairs, stairs.

The staircase has been the structuring core of the Commedia. The entire arc and argument of the poem would have it mean something that we descend to the center of the created world, but then turn and ascend, higher and higher, through Purgatory, through the spheres, through the stars to the final destination, the alpha and omega. To have no beginning or ending, but just stairs -- this is the nightmare of nihilism -- perhaps the single most terrifying image of the poem: Horror vacui.

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Contemplation III

Benedict muses in Paradiso 22 upon what looks all too much like fate:

The flesh of mortals is so very soft,
  That good beginnings down below suffice not
  From springing of the oak to bearing acorns.
Peter began with neither gold nor silver,
  And I with orison and abstinence,
  And Francis with humility his convent.
And if thou lookest at each one's beginning,
  And then regardest whither he has run,
  Thou shalt behold the white changed into brown. (22:85-93)

Longfellow translates tracorso as "run" - Sinclair offers "strayed," which seems a better fit -- wherever one looks, promising starts don't last, even when initiated by the likes of Saints Peter, Benedict, and Francis. The lapse Adam begat seems the one ineluctable pattern this contemplative can discern.

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Melancholia

Benedict's vision of human life, at this crystal threshold before the poet is whisked high to the stars, earns every ounce of the term "saturnine." This ancient crack in God's once perfect world -- we heard about the old man of Crete in Inferno 14, himself cracked and weeping -- appears irremediable. The contemplative sees more clearly; there's much he can do to nurture i fiori e ' frutti santi. But true contemplation is contemplation of truth; this baleful, bottomless, abyssal errance of human intent seems inevitable, as well as impossible to un-see.

Beatrice is about to whisk him up beyond all the planets. He looks back. Down through the multiple layers of ancient gods and planets and powers in all their variety. One thing at its heart.

The poet calls it as he sees it:

L'aiuola che ci fa tanto feroci,

The little threshing-floor that makes us so fierce (Sinclair trans.)

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Taking it in

The necessity of this terror, this congealed sense of everything coming to the same failed end, could account for Saturn's melancholia. Nothing mirrored in Saturn's crystal is quite what one hopes to see. Dante can sense the love Benedict and Peter bear him, but not why, nor why they in particular are there. Seeing even their faces is deferred -- yet to come, like the destination promised by all that he's experienced. Saturn feels incomplete because it is, especially if nothing lay beyond the stairs. This discordant ancient sadness and lack of closure is also of the sublime.

But Dante is already beyond the stairs when he looks back upon his odyssey to this point from the stars of Gemini. He's able to see the aiuolo with clearer vision than he's ever had. Paradiso 22 ends not with apprehension, but comprehension, as the poet takes in the scalar multiplicity of the planets -- take them in, as a whole, with crow-like wanderings.

And all the seven made manifest to me

How great they are, and eke how swift they are,

And how they are in distant habitations.

e tutti e sette mi si dimostraro

quanto son grandi e quanto son veloci

e come sono in distante riparo.