Earth in view: Ars Amatoria I

Our next few weeks will be devoted to an amor somewhat less all-encompassing than that of Dante's Commedia. We'll be looking at Ovid's Ars Amatoria. As we already have an Ovid blog, posts devoted to that reading will appear there.

So far over there, there's just a note about translations. While the poetic matter might rather quotidian, nothing about Ovid is obvious or dull; he pushes genre rules and stylistic experiments to extremes, and can turn from an excursus upon Roman losers' foot hygiene to a visionary processional of Dionysus on a dime.

Difference in toto: Paradiso 32-33

Top: Birth of Dionysus Below: Triumph of Dionysus

ἢ ὥσπερ Σαπφώ, ὅτι τὸ ἀποθνῄσκειν κακόν·

οἱ θεοὶ γὰρ οὕτω κεκρίκασιν· ἀπέθνησκον γὰρ ἄν.

As Sappho says, death is a great evil

and the gods have judged it so: for they do not die

While reading Paradiso 32 I floated the idea that the two final canti of the Commedia stand in relation to each other, in their poetics as well as in other ways, in much the same manner as the Old Testament to the New:

Canto 32 is unadorned and fails to have an ending because it stands in relation to Paradiso 33 as the Old Covenant to the New. (Wounds of Time)

The thrust of canto 32 is toward the particular and unique. Each unbaptized infant has its own place, and all had been fixed before time began. We are given assorted proper names, individuals, but no clear sense of why these and not others. It displays the seemingly arbitrary predilection that the Old Testament God shows for his chosen people.

As we have seen, Paradiso 33 reaches a crescendo of polymorphic figuration teetering on open-ended linguistic arbitrariness. But there's more.

Canto 33 begins with Bernard's prayer, an act chosen in that moment to pray for Dante's accession to the totality. As when she chose in turn to consent to the wish conveyed by Gabriel, so Mary here chooses to consent to Bernard; Beatrice and all of heaven support the petition.

The freedom of the acts is fundamental: Dante's "wings" carry him upward, his gaze penetrates into the final vision, because they're propelled by the volition of the community of the saved. For one who had lived a life of exile, this vote of communal acceptance brings him into the longed-for fold.

Canto 33 dramatizes inclusion. In contrast, canto 32 has Bernard tracing all the differentiating walls and excluding fissures of divine providence,  the features and fixed destinies of the innocents. It's a discourse chilling enough in its precise fixities to evoke the immobilized denizens beneath the frozen lake of Satan's tears.

The possibility of Canto 33 issues from the Virgin's consent to the divine wish depicted in canto 32. The act of choice links the two canti, and it is choice that enables Dante ultimately to have his desire (il mio disio) moved with the will ('l velle) as the sun and the other stars (Barolini) are moved by l'amor. 

The full assertion of both singularity and totality, I believe, lies behind the charged syntax of the difficult tercet discussed in the previous post about canto 33. The insistence of differentiating oneness is never negated or subsumed -- in fact it betrays a certain trauma, even a frisson of sublime horror, as it beholds the totality:

ma per la vista che s'avvalorava
in me guardando, una sola parvenza,
mutandom' io, a me si travagliava. (112-114)

The vision of a gloria that moves all, yet chooses to allow piu e meno, subtends the Commedia from end to end.

==========

There is no end to what one could say about this poem. I'll append one suggestion that seems relevant. Dante often echoes ancient myths solely in order to differentiate the nature of his world from that of the ancients. 

For example, the figure of wings recurrent in Paradiso both relates to his name -- ali-ghieri -- and to the power of heaven. The classical myth of Ganymede is all about desire and force -- the boy is so beautiful he's rapt by Zeus to serve the table of the gods.

Ganymede's will is negated in his trip to Olympus. He is prey. Dante has wings because we have will.

Yet that will is insufficient to reach the godhead.

When Dante the pilgrim and the alta fantasia of the poet cannot get there, 

ma non eran da ciò le proprie penne:
 se non che la mia mente fu percossa
 da un fulgore in che sua voglia venne.

The fulgore comes from the other, yet its power fulfills the voglia of Dante.

Yet another myth brings us to a defining irony of the Commedia: When Zeus promised Semele her heart's wish, it meant the fulgore of her own destruction. From that insemination came the god of Tragedy, the anti-Apollo, the obliterator of difference.

The true story for this poet has it otherwise: Mary asks nothing of God. Courtly Gabriel asks her consent to bear the Son of God, and after a bit of questioning, she chooses to say yes. The absolutism of mythic power is not here.

Obliterating all trace of its origin, the fulgore grants a wish that Dante's wings couldn't actualize under their own steam. With the same respect for the other that was apparent at the Annunciation, the illimitable power leaves room for the comedic persistence of a certain Florentine, b.1265 - d.1321.

Paradiso infinito

A while ago, our group began reading Dante's Paradiso aloud and discussing it -- the first post on this blog, entitled "A few notes on how the Paradiso begins," came on November 1, 2015.

Today, April 11, 2018, we read the final lines of Paradiso 33. As one of our group said, the experience leaves one thinking the thing to do is turn to canto 1, and perhaps read it for the first time.

Our plan isn't to go down to our piccoletta barca and once again pursue Dante's flight. But one thing we've learned is that the poem, rich at the level of the word or line, is also rich if one steps back and looks from a middle distance, and doubtless richer still if one were to attain some Archimedean point from which to see it whole.

Our thought is to have one more session, to look at cantos 32 and 33 as a unit, and I'll suggest we bring in Paradiso 1 as well, as we noticed today how much the last canto is intertwined with the first -- consider simply the relation of the first and last lines of the entire canticle:

La gloria di colui che tutto move (1.1) 

l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle. (33.145)

In a sense, the poem is a meditation on motion. On what it can mean -- to move and, or, be moved -- in a universe seemingly bound by eternal laws.

Thoughtful commentaries by Teodolinda Barolini for these three canti are here:

Paradiso 1                  Paradiso 32                   Paradiso 33

Barolini and Gassman on Paradiso 33

Two quick references to supplement our reading of Paradiso 33:

In "Paradiso 33: Invisible Ink", Teodolinda Barolini brilliantly outlines the architecture of the canto as well as a lively sense of how the final 100 lines present

three circular waves of discourse (like the rippling motion of water in a round vase that is compared to waves of spoken speech at the beginning of Paradiso 14): three circulate melodie, three “jumps” by which the poet zeroes in on his poem’s climax. He approaches and backs off, approaches and backs off again, and finally arrives.

And for the sonority of the language, see Vittorio Gassman's impassioned recitation. He introduces the reading for four minutes, then begins. This link begins with the actual recitation.

The intro and index to Barolini's blog are here, entitled Commento Baroliniano.

Wounds of time: Paradiso 32 -> 33

προαιρεῖσθαί τε δεῖ ἀδύνατα εἰκότα μᾶλλον ἢ δυνατὰ ἀπίθανα

What is convincing though impossible should always be preferred to what is possible and unconvincing. Aristotle, Poetics, 1460a

A final thought -- more like a trial balloon -- on Paradiso 32, in an effort to put this enigmatic canto in some "light" that takes note of its critical place in the Commedia.

The absence of voice, song, and light (luce appears not at all, and lume appears once in the canto - each word appears five times in canto 33) sets it apart from what we've been used to in the canticle.

Bernard carefully delineates the divisions that run like cicatrices through the Rose, but no systematic explanation for this order rather than any other is revealed. Historical facts are presented, but not illuminated by reason (logos). Also, the finite detail of these 18 beings stands in stark contrast to many precedent scenes of illimitable constellations of angels and souls.

Women from Eve down through the Old Testament form the wall, bracketed by Mary, linked through the piaga, the opening wound marking the genesis and inscription of human history upon flesh. The stories from the Old Testament involve love, wiles, violence, seduction, willingness to take heroic risks, and merciful, healing care.

Grandgent and others have noted that the "seating" in the Rose has no apparent order. Mary is clearly the solar pinnacle of the Rose; next comes Eve; the series continues, but disobeys categories such as historical or ethnic order. One can say that the persons in this wall (except Mary) are women whose names are found in the Old Testament.

Readers seeking rational closure will pull out their hair asking "why these people and not these people?" Bernard is a subtle and sophisticated interpreter of the Song of Songs and other Old Testament texts. But, when he says . . .

Ne l'ordine che fanno i terzi sedi,
siede Rachel di sotto da costei
con Bëatrice, sì come tu vedi.

Within that order which the third seats make
  Is seated Rachel, lower than the other,
  With Beatrice, in manner as thou seest. (32: 7-9)

. . . perhaps we've not learned to take him literally enough. If i terzi sedi make the order, then the third seats are the third seats because they are the third seats. There is no cryptic mystery here, no arcane interpretive decoding. Rather, the order is sì come tu vedi - such as you see. No point in asking why Ruth or Judith are listed. They are what you see because they're what you see.

The series of Old Testament figures stubbornly defeats neat ordering schemes, just as the history of the stiff-necked Jews is a broken tale, rich in promise, failure, disaster, and unforeseeable rescues. We are left with an incomplete, seemingly arbitrary, unspeaking, dimly lit congeries of names and events, which we call the word of God.

τούς τε λόγους μὴσυνίστασθαι ἐκ μερῶν ἀλόγων, ἀλλὰ μάλιστα μὲν μηδὲν ἔχειν ἄλογον, εἰ δὲ μή, ἔξωτοῦ μυθεύματος, 

so far as possible there should be nothing inexplicable, or, if there is, it should lie outside the story. Poetics 1460a.

The first and culminating figure in the wall, Mary, enjoys a pivotal place in the scheme of things. She is described -- not with mimetic sensory depiction, but with elation that suspends gravity:

Io vidi sopra lei tanta allegrezza
 piover, portata ne le menti sante
 create a trasvolar per quella altezza,

che quantunque io avea visto davante,
 di tanta ammirazion non mi sospese,
 né mi mostrò di Dio tanto sembiante;

On her did I behold so great a gladness
  Rain down, borne onward in the holy minds
  Created through that altitude to fly, 

That whatsoever I had seen before
  Did not suspend me in such admiration,
  Nor show me such similitude of God.   (32: 88-93)

With the affetto of this allegrezza, the silence of the canto turns to music. Courtly Gabriel gracefully enacts the anomalous grace of the Annunciation, bringing an unthinkable choice to receive the divine seed, logos spermatikos.

Zeus is not bearing off a bull-beguiled Europa; Apollo is not frustrated by unwilling Daphne; Hades is not dragging the virgin Persephone into the Underworld. The pivotal moment of human history hangs in this suspension, waiting upon the free consent of a young girl.

Nel ventre tuo si raccese l'amore,
 per lo cui caldo ne l'etterna pace
 così è germinato questo fiore.  (Par. 33:7-9)

When in the final canto Bernard echoes Gabriel's greeting, he puts into narrative form the betrothed virgin's's unforced assent to plant that seed in her ventre, grounding the fiore of immortal life in history.

What divine power would allow the fall, the damnation and so much suffering to flow from one couple's decision in a garden, then provide his beloved own son as sacrifice so that the species of those who killed him could accede to the possibility of a seat in heaven? You couldn't make this up --- it lies "outside the story."

As we stand with the pilgrim in the Rose, the realization of this order is self-evident, because we know what imposed that meaningful order from without -- ἔξωτοῦ μυθεύματος.

This is not what sensible people like Aristotle would describe as probable (mimetic) behavior. The twists and turns of the Jewish people, the story of the Virgin and her son and the entire history of Creation achieve intelligibility only if we accept an ebullient suspension, a wounding rift in the logic and conventions of history. It breaks into two covenants, one before, one after, Mary's assent.

So here's my trial balloon: Canto 32 is unadorned and fails to have an ending because it stands in relation to Paradiso 33 as the Old Covenant to the New. The literal features of canto 32 -- the obvious lack of poetry -- stripped of imaginative fire, of light, of sonority -- lend a forbidding aspect to this bewildering tale that arrives at no conclusion.

What other poet would do what Dante does here? At the portal to the godhead, Canto 32 remembers the human experience of being in the dark. When, like Ugolino, we are imprisoned, groping in darkness, discovering to our horror that we are stumbling on the bodies of our children whose death is our paternal legacy, the canto leaves one thing left to do: To act, to pray with all one's affetto.

E cominciò questa santa orazione:

Canto 32 is to Paradiso 33 as the Old Testament is to the New, or as the dim human realm is to exorbitant splendor and sweetness of the Rose. One turns, as the Creator did, to the Virgin and asks for help.

Note there are no male heroes named in 32. No Joseph, no Abraham. Moses and David get a sideways glance. The wings of this poet are powered by the oriafiamme. Cherchez la femme.

Cold discretion: Paradiso 32: 1-57

By the standards of USian hero movies, Paradiso 32 ought to be the victory lap. Entering the stadium having passed every test, the Hollywood hero is invariably greeted with an ecstatic applause and adulation. Instead, the canto falls on this reader with a forbidding strangeness and baleful silence.

Bernard has directed Dante to look up.

The saint then assumes the role of dottore, and presents a lecture full of words signifying division, or separation: dirimendo, parton, cerna, discrezioni. He's focused on tracing the major structuring separations within the Rose -- which seems odd, as we keep trying to remind ourselves that in the Empyrean, space and time are no longer supposed to operate as important categories.

Bernard begins by tracing the line of Hebrew women from Mary down -- a line he calls a wall -- il muro / a che si parton le sacre scalee ("the wall by which the sacred stairs are divided" (20-21)). He then describes the location of those who lived before Christ to the left of Mary, and those who lived after to her right. This Rose, we come to realize, is structured like Biblical human history. But the people named -- major figures of Hebraic and Christian faith -- do not speak, or move. Their names -- 18 of them -- stand in spectral isolation from their living being.

It's as if, in this place beyond space and time, Bernard is fixated upon denoting specific features of space, time, and individuals not for their own sakes, but for where they fit into some larger matrix.

The effect is more strange coming as it does after Paradiso 30-31, where we experienced plenal joy, light, and motion unified via the fluent master metaphors of flower, bees and sun. To go from that delightful innocence of sweetness and light to Bernard's stark isolating list -- a paltry series of names which seems trivially incidental to his lecture. For Bernard, who is intensely focused on Mary such that the first word of the canto is Affetto, this lack of affect with regard to these particular souls seems odd.

What's missing here? Instead of animated motion and sound, instead of the kind of balance and symmetries we've been accustomed to from the divine architecture all along this journey, we have several bare names and periphrases, and hints of a crazed order within the Rose. It feels dislocating. The pilgrim will in a moment experience profound doubt.

C.H. Grandgent senses this, I think. He contrasts our puzzlement here with the clear categorization of souls in Inferno and Purgatorio, and the divine justice that caused them to be where they are:

In the rose itself we are informed of the great vertical and horizontal divisions, and the position of a few of the souls; and we may infer that proximity to Mary or to John the Baptist is a sign of honor. Beyond that, all is mystery.

However, this "mystery" is not bathed in the lush wonderment and erotic and epistemological suspense that often accompanies the word. Grandgent goes on to make this clear by failing to convince us of his next point:

Gazing upon this vast assembly, Dante finds satisfaction of the desire expressed in Canto XXII, ll. 58-60, to behold the Elect uncovered.

Turning to that passage, in which Dante and St. Benedict speak of the fulfillment of the highest sphere, it indeed seems highly relevant:

E io a lui: “L'affetto che dimostri
 meco parlando, e la buona sembianza
 ch'io veggio e noto in tutti li ardor vostri,

così m'ha dilatata mia fidanza,
 come 'l sol fa la rosa quando aperta
 tanto divien quant' ell' ha di possanza.

Però ti priego, e tu, padre, m'accerta
 s'io posso prender tanta grazia, ch'io
 ti veggia con imagine scoverta.”

Ond' elli: “Frate, il tuo alto disio
 s'adempierà in su l'ultima spera,
 ove s'adempion tutti li altri e 'l mio.

Ivi è perfetta, matura e intera
 ciascuna disïanza; in quella sola
 è ogne parte là ove sempr' era,

And I to him: "The affection which thou showest
  Speaking with me, and the good countenance
  Which I behold and note in all your ardours, 

In me have so my confidence dilated
  As the sun doth the rose, when it becomes
  As far unfolded as it hath the power. 

Therefore I pray, and thou assure me, father,
  If I may so much grace receive, that I
  May thee behold with countenance unveiled." 

He thereupon: "Brother, thy high desire
  In the remotest sphere shall be fulfilled,
  Where are fulfilled all others and my own. 

There perfect is, and ripened, and complete,
  Every desire; within that one alone
  Is every part where it has always been;

Bernard's lecture so far has given us something less than Benedict's promise:

"There perfect is, and ripened, and complete,
Every desire . . ."

Of course he's not finished -- he will go on to make clear to Dante that the very criteria for the eternal salvation of children shifted three times in human history -- from parents to circumcision to baptism -- and then he'll cap it off with:

Dentro a l'ampiezza di questo reame
casüal punto non puote aver sito,

Nothing here is by chance. All fits:

                             giustamente
ci si risponde da l'anello al dito;

                           so that closely

The ring is fitted to the finger here.

This "fit" - however matrimonial the image - seems far from the exuberant promise of Benedict (pace Grandgent), and equally far from the joyous harmony of cantos 31-32. 

Bernard, the impassioned devotee of Mary, here seems intent to eke out certain fissures defining an order. But instead of leading us to an accession of philosophical insight or mystical vision, his lecture suggests an incessant and trivial fitting of something to something else more typical of obsessive compulsive disorder.

So far, canto 32 sets itself apart from everything we might have anticipated from what we know of Paradise. The poem's power to surprise is intact. There is in this canto a disconcerting absence of meaning, of totality -- a squinting concern with races and gender and accidents of time and lineage that in fact are the fully intended results of Providence. The effect is cold, spectral, unheimlich. 

But we're barely at line 57.

Unmasking heaven: Paradiso 30

It's often remarked that the late canti of Paradiso are redolent with Virgilian echoes, prompting commentators to ponder why, since Virgil ceded his guiding role to Beatrice in Purgatorio 30, his text seems to return with such sonorous and imagistic presence 30 cantos later.

An indirect approach might help. I'll break it into three parts - the critical impasse that the pilgrim experiences, and moves beyond, in Paradiso 30; the presence of some of Virgil's most far reaching passages in the canto, and finally an effort to read Dante's juxtaposition of his own poetic impasse with Virgil's tale of Orpheus's defeat and Aristaeus's renewal in the Fourth Georgic.

As noted previously, Paradiso 30 seems to partake more intimately of music than of statement, description, or question and answer. The muted opening scene of earth's shadow bowing to the sun is a sort of preludium that modulates into the equally quiet confession that the man who loved Beatrice since he first saw her perhaps half a century earlier, who would follow her still, cannot keep up -- she has risen to a level beyond his art.

ché, come sole in viso che più trema,
così lo rimembrar del dolce riso
la mente mia da me medesmo scema.

For as the sun the sight that trembles most,
  Even so the memory of that sweet smile
  My mind depriveth of its very self. (30.25-27)

The poet is about to have his power of sight strengthened to a point of being able to look unhindered at anything. But before that, just the memory of the changed Beatrice is overpowering -- it blots out the mind in the act of remembrance. Remembering dismembers.

The poem is interweaving antinomic extremities: On one hand, the poet says he's split, divided from his own memory, from his muse, from his mimetic powers as poet -- as his voyage brings him ever closer to that Reality which exceeds the realism of his artistry.*

Yet at the same time, in the very moment of this decisive defeat, his powers of vision are expanded and strengthened:

“Sempre l'amor che queta questo cielo
 accoglie in sé con sì fatta salute,
 per far disposto a sua fiamma il candelo.”

Non fur più tosto dentro a me venute 

queste parole brievi, ch'io compresi 

me sormontar di sopr' a mia virtute;

"Ever the Love which quieteth this heaven
  Welcomes into itself with such salute,
  To make the candle ready for its flame."

No sooner had within me these brief words
  An entrance found, than I perceived myself
  To be uplifted over my own power,   (30:52-57)

Led by Virgil to the top of Purgatory, the pilgrim there was crowned and mitered over himself (Purg. 27). Here the words of Beatrice enter the poet and empower a self-surmounting, a rising above oneself. Then,

e di novella vista mi raccesi
tale, che nulla luce è tanto mera,
che li occhi miei non si fosser difesi;

And I with vision new rekindled me,
Such that no light whatever is so pure
But that mine eyes were fortified against it. (30:58-60)

As extraordinary as this novella vista is, however, it merely permits the pilgrim to see foreshadowings (umbriferi prefazi) -- the river, the sparks and flowers. To see that which is foreshadowed by these figures, he still must "drink" of this light to cure a lack in himself.

Up to this point, one could argue that Paradiso has been accommodating itself to the Pilgrim's limitations. His vision is strong, but he's still seeing illusion, a mask.

After his eyelids drink in the river's light, the mask is removed, and the pilgrim beholds the glorious courts of heaven. We are now in the throes of the paradox built into the canto: coming from nature, we do not have the poetic means to extricate and explicate what lies behind the appearances of nature. Yet that apparent dead end has an unanticipated twist.

A look into the return of Virgil's text seems necessary here.

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*For a very helpful distinction between the poetics of realism vs. the nature of reality, see the fine commentary, Dante and Reality / Dante and Realism (Paradiso) by Teodolinda Barolini. 

II. Virgilian echoes

The sense of intuiting divinity without being able to speak it is Virgil's limit -- he intimates a numinous reality within the natural world, but lacks the revelation to be able to speak it.

This sense of something looming behind is present from the richly Virgilian echoes in the canto's opening:

quando 'l mezzo del cielo, a noi profondo,
 comincia a farsi tal, ch'alcuna stella
 perde il parere infino a questo fondo;

When the middle of the heavens, to us profound,
  Begins to make itself such that here and there a star
  Ceases to appear so far down as this depth,

This is a modified form of Longfellow's translation - the original is here: Par. 30:4-6. The link of cielo . . . profondo prompts many commentators to point to a passage that seems to have its own profundity in Virgil's fourth Georgic:

His quidam signis atque haec exempla secuti  220
esse apibus partem divinae mentis et haustus
aetherios dixere; deum namque ire per omnes
terrasque tractusque maris caelumque profundum.
Hinc pecudes, armenta, viros, genus omne ferarum,
quemque sibi tenues nascentem arcessere vitas;  225
scilicet huc reddi deinde ac resoluta referri
omnia nec morti esse locum, sed viva volare
sideris in numerum atque alto succedere caelo.

Led by these tokens, and with such traits to guide,
Some say that unto bees a share is given
Of the Divine Intelligence, and to drink
Pure draughts of ether; for God permeates all—
Earth, and wide ocean, and the vault of heaven—
From whom flocks, herds, men, beasts of every kind,
Draw each at birth the fine essential flame;
Yea, and that all things hence to Him return,
Brought back by dissolution, nor can death
Find place: but, each into his starry rank,
Alive they soar, and mount the heights of heaven.

Bees exemplify the kind of sign that lends credence to a reading of the world as instinct with divine motion through all things, leaving no place for death. Such passages make Virgil much more than the singer of Roman history and conquest.

Virgil had used the same phrase in the Fourth Eclogue:

Adgredere o magnos—aderit iam tempus—honores,
cara deum suboles, magnum Iovis incrementum!
Aspice convexo nutantem pondere mundum,         50
terrasque tractusque maris caelumque profundum!
Aspice, venturo laetentur ut omnia saeclo!

Assume thy greatness, for the time draws nigh,
dear child of gods, great progeny of Jove!
See how it totters—the world's orbed might,
earth, and wide ocean, and the vault profound,
all, see, enraptured of the coming time!

The tone carries prophetic power -- the foresense of a child whose birth will shake the fixed contours of earth and sea and sky, leading to a paradisal new epoch.

Dante is summoning these heightened, luminous moments in Virgil's text, moments in which something shines through a teeming world filled with tears, violence, and war. At the end of the Fourth Eclogue, the poet calls upon a child and its mother to smile, because in this mutual smile he sees the sign of a better future. Juxtaposed with the smile of Beatrice, along with the Virgin and Child, these lines might have struck Dante as harboring an extraordinary premonition, that of a seer doomed never to know what his prescience so vividly foretells. 

If Dante shared the then-common view of Virgil's poetry as vatic, its profundity was in the mode of the pilgrim's novella vista of the river, sparks, and flowers -- a realm of umbriferi prefazi beneath the mask of nature.

When that mask is removed, as occurs after the pilgrim, like a famished infant, "drinks" from the river, there is no longer a translucence of something discerned obliquely in the depths. Taking off a mask is an instantaneous act in which the veil is not seen through, but lifted away -- a literal act of revelation:

Poi, come gente stata sotto larve, 
che pare altro che prima, se si sveste 
a sembianza non süa in che disparve,  

così mi si cambiaro in maggior feste 
i fiori e le faville, sì ch'io vidi 
ambo le corti del ciel manifeste. 

Then as a folk who have been under masks
  Seem other than before, if they divest
  The semblance not their own they disappeared in, 

Thus into greater pomp were changed for me
  The flowerets and the sparks, so that I saw
  Both of the Courts of Heaven made manifest. (91-96)

The moment in a plot when a key player is unmasked often pivots the tale. It can "turn into" a comedy, if the "boy" desperately in love with the male protagonist turns out to be a beautiful woman; it turns tragic if the honest friend turns out to be Iago. Moments of unmasking are moments of truth. Depending on that truth is the determination as to what genre of literature, what sort of story, we have.

For readers of the Commedia, the unmasking of heaven is that moment. The pastoral world of Virgil's Elysium -- that pregnant dream -- is peeled back, replaced by a maggior feste beyond his Roman guide's ken.

Virgil's text here suffers a destiny much like the starry night at the canto's opening -- its lights are dimmed by a divine light that doesn't move through the world, but rises from a place beyond, dispatching the stars into the depths of a brightening sky.

e come vien la chiarissima ancella
del sol più oltre, così 'l ciel si chiude
di vista in vista infino a la più bella.

And as advances bright exceedingly
  The handmaid of the sun, the heaven is closed
  Light after light to the most beautiful; (30:7-9)

This has already become too long. The third part will be in a subsequent post. 

Parabasis in Paradiso 30

Forse semilia miglia di lontano
ci ferve l'ora sesta, e questo mondo
china già l'ombra quasi al letto piano,

Paradiso 30 does not reveal all its audacity at once. Its gentle opening gives no hint of what's to come. Strangely, it puts us squarely back on Earth -- questo mondo -- at dawn. We have been moving at accelerating speeds through the highest realms of stars and the crystalline sphere. Now, curiously, we're back on terra firma, watching the stars "lose their appearing" as the eastern horizon brightens.

The presentation of this dawn is literally down to earth -- we have no warrior gods or mutual titanic destructions of Night and Day, as Sophocles gave us in the gorgeous first ode of Women of Trachis. Indeed the bending, or bowing, of the shadow of night has a plainspoken quality. Today anyone can look into the heavens before sunrise and see the mezzo, the "middle" of the sky, gradually absorb the stars into profound depths, and think that this passage tells it just as it is.

The mode is heightened a bit by the figurative ancella del sol, but a handmaid is hardly cut from the cloth of the high style. The sense of granular gradation as the night's starry points vanish in morning light is meditative, calm, simple.

This is not what we might have expected, at this crucial transition from the maggior corpo of the Primum Mobile to the pura luce of the Empyrean. All sorts of dazzlement might not have seemed out of place here as we accompany the pilgrim on the final stage of his journey. The canto will soon touch themes of triumph and various kinds of overpowerings. In short order the pilgrim will abandon all hope of describing his guide; he'll be emblazoned in a blinding light that empowers him to see anew; he'll stand at the pool of light within the rose, whose layered tiers, soaring to unimaginable heights, mirror each other vertically as well as horizontally, and he'll hear Beatrice's final words as she tracks Pope Clement's damned soul's plummet into questo mondo, where gravity and momentum conspire to plunge the shaky ankles of Boniface VIII deeper into the bowels of hell.

The canto's puzzlingly erratic shifts in tone and styles of speech, and its rich phonetic effects, seem to work more as music than as any linear mode of statement. 

Erich Auerbach often marvels at Dante's command of a robust style that manages to encompass a lively vernacular while drawing upon a sublimity without seeming strained or resorting to empty rhetorical artifice. One might ask what other poet has ever sought to combine all these stylistic levels into a mere 148 lines. Who other than Alighieri would dare modulate from the humble prose of earth to the sublimity of the milizie -- the Courts and armies of the Heavenly rose -- only to leap from such glory into the low comic farce of papal simoniacs reaming new depths under Satan's towering shadow?

This audacity acquires a comic aspect when we consider that the poet also chooses this canto to admit artistic defeat:

Da questo passo vinto mi concedo
più che già mai da punto di suo tema
soprato fosse comico o tragedo:

Vanquished do I confess me by this passage

  More than by problem of his theme was ever

  O'ercome the comic or the tragic poet;

If the stars were overpowered ever so gently by dawn's entrance, the poet here steps out of his usual narrative mode in a kind of parabasis, and speaks openly, nakedly, of being overcome by his theme. Indeed he doesn't stop there - he goes on for 15 lines acknowledging with a craftsman's practicality that the job has now exceeded his tools and wit, before proceeding to tackle the series of astonishing poetic acrobatics I've just described.

That this congeries of disparate levels of materials works is due in part to the fact that we do not see it for what it is. The art hiding art here is in full view, in the form of the artist taking off his mask and telling us he lacks the artistry to keep up with deep change in both his theme and his mediatrix.

For Aristophanes, parabasis was a moment when theatrical illusion was dropped, and the chorus addressed the audience (as George Burns and Bertolt Brecht would do) as if they were sitting at a bar, outside of the mimetic world of the play, talking about things entirely irrelevant to the fiction being enacted. (For the New Testament, parabasis was a kind of error, a violation and break from the moral order.)

Dante comes at his parabasis from two sides: First he breaks the continuity of the forward motion of his journey to speak of his lifelong love for this woman. Then, as poet, he confesses that he's outclassed, and no longer can hope to represent the new state of her beauty.

Dal primo giorno ch'i' vidi il suo viso
 in questa vita, infino a questa vista,
 non m'è il seguire al mio cantar preciso;

ma or convien che mio seguir desista
 più dietro a sua bellezza, poetando,
 come a l'ultimo suo ciascuno artista.

From the first day that I beheld her face
  In this life, to the moment of this look,
  The sequence of my song has ne'er been severed;

But now perforce this sequence must desist
  From following her beauty with my verse,
  As every artist at his uttermost. (28-33)

Vidi . . . viso . . . vita . . . vista . . .the play of abiding and changing consonants mirrors on the level of sound how something so formally similar can become so radically other as to disrupt the ability of art to make anything of it.

He speaks of questa vita, as he spoke of questo mondo, at the very moment he is moving beyond "questo" entirely. He's speaking to us from a place that is neither the location of the pilgrim who is outside space in the mimesis of the poem, nor of the poet making that mimesis. This speaking is placeless and timeless -- a voice that is "in" the text, but breaks with the mimetic illusion to offer a meta-comment about an absence in the text -- to admit that nothing in his powers can represent Beatrice, who was his mediatrix -- his mezzo -- up to this point. For the remainder of Paradiso 30 we hear Beatrice, but don't see her (we'll get another view of her in a later canto), just as we here read the poet's words that spell the end of the mimetic mode we have experienced up to now.

It's as if the persona, or mask, of the pilgrim has fallen away, and poetic technique has failed, leaving only this pointing to a thisness spoken by one who can only speak of this life, this world, because he is neither alive nor in this world.

We'll look at a second occurrence of parabasis in Paradiso 30 in the next post.

Uno intendëa, e altro mi rispuose: Bernard in Par. 31

Mankind is engaged in a continual conversation with tradition - Hans-Georg Gadamer.

Part of the work of the Commedia lies in its interaction and conversation with prior texts. These range from Virgil's earliest works to the late Latin poets, through Old and New Testaments to the doctors of the Church, the works of saints like Francis of Assisi and Bernard of Clairvaux.

To encounter a figure in Dante is to encounter the text of that figure, and a reading of that text. Bernard, as he takes up the mediating role of Beatrice, presents a vast spectrum of life and work. Late in Paradise he appears as one more human exemplar -- in this case, a man whose life encompassed action as well as contemplation. In both, his powers of persuasion were consequential. A few links below may be of use.

Saint Bernard and the Duke of Aquitaine, by Marten Pepijn

Bernard of Clairvaux

Britannica

Catholic Encyclopedia

Cistercian

Twilight intelligence in Par. 29:1-12

(One paragraph was revised on 10.1.17, as noted)

Paradiso 29:1-12

Quando ambedue li figli di Latona,
coperti del Montone e de la Libra,
fanno de l'orizzonte insieme zona,

quant' è dal punto che 'l cenìt inlibra
infin che l'uno e l'altro da quel cinto,
cambiando l'emisperio, si dilibra,

tanto, col volto di riso dipinto,
si tacque Bëatrice, riguardando
fiso nel punto che m'avëa vinto.

Poi cominciò: “Io dico, e non dimando,
quel che tu vuoli udir, perch' io l'ho visto
là 've s'appunta ogne ubi e ogne quando. 

                              . . .  

At what time both the children of Latona,
Surmounted by the Ram and by the Scales,
Together make a zone of the horizon,

As long as from the time the zenith holds them
In equipoise, till from that girdle both
Changing their hemisphere disturb the balance, 

So long, her face depicted with a smile,
Did Beatrice keep silence while she gazed
Fixedly at the point which had o'ercome me.

Then she began: "I say, and I ask not
What thou dost wish to hear, for I have seen it
Where centres every When and every 'Ubi.'

Alison Cornish does a marvelous job explicating this passage in her article entitled "Planets and Angels in Paradiso XXIX: The First Moment." The elaborate spatial architecture is both an image of balance and a figure of instantaneity -- of the nothing that is the nevernow between one instant and the next.

Cornish sorts out the ambiguities and equivalences arising out of the astronomy, then with great perspicacity relates the passage to what comes after it -- the account of the creation of the angels and their fall. The nature of time as it derives from celestial motion turns out to be integral to a long and significant interpretive tradition of the timing and manner of that fall.

Augustine and Aquinas grappled with the question of the first instant of the angels' existence, and how it came to pass that these first creatures both became self-aware and, seemingly without delay, exercised their will once and for all either to remain faithful to their Creator, or to turn away.

Cornish teases out her reading with formidable learning and delicacy. Without straying from her analysis, she provides insights into Augustine and Aquinas' somewhat abstruse thinking about time and angelic consciousness. Indeed, the question of how long the rebellious angels remained unfallen seems to require Aquinas to distinguish angelic time from celestial time. The essay is a tour de force.

I'll try to add a couple of "grace notes" to Cornish's interpretive work, deriving from two elements built into the passage that were not her focus: the classical resonances of the figure of Latona, and Dante's structuring use of quando, which begins and ends the passage.

The passage paints an image of equilibrium that's a mini-summa of the ancient world. The embattled mother of Apollo and Artemis, the zodiacal references, the symmetrical structure of the equinox, the crepuscular moment between day and night, the thresholds of spring and autumn are all rooted in the world of Aristotle and Virgil, a Cosmos precariously poised between opposing forces that seem equally matched. Libra invokes the balance of Justice and judgment -- think of Zeus holding the scales above the world of men --  as well as the delicacy of Euripides' Sophrosyne, the sound self-control of the well-balanced soul.

Of course the "balance" is eternally elusive. Cornish rightly notes that the "when" of the passage has no duration in time, any more than a point has any extension in space. Dante has painted an elaborate image that extends through time to speak of a quando ("when") that has no measurable time at all.

The classical model is a symmetrical system of binary oppositions whose mirror-like ambiguity is thorough and undecidable. As Cornish, Hollander and others point out, it's impossible to tell which child of Latona is under which sign. If Apollo/Sun is found under Aries (Montone, interestingly, seems to be a wether rather than a ram) Spring is dawning in Rome. At the exact same moment, with the Artemis/moon under Libra, Fall is deepening into dusk in the antipodes. (If the Sun is under Libra, all this is reversed.) Total equilibrium is both a model of specular symmetry, and in this celestial configuration, the precise moment of eclipse.

From Cornish, "Planets and Angels"

Why Latona?

As already noted, the latter part of Cornish's essay addresses the theology of the angels' creation and fall, and it is very rich. But the classical elements of the passage (which, by the way, is not a simile, but a portrait of a celestial position used to elicit the duration of Beatrice's "painted" smile) are not mere window dressing. Why is this story invoked here?

Leto or Latona is the goddess of motherhood, who undergoes extremities of parturitive labor. Jealous Hera decrees that the modest goddess, impregnated by Zeus before Hera became his spouse, will not be allowed to bring forth children on earth or sea. Latona seeks a refuge where she might safely bring her children into the world. The myth spares nothing in detailing her search:

Apollo protects Leto from Tityus

In her wanderings, Leto came to Crete, to Athens, to the island of Aegina in the Saronic Gulf, to Athos in Thrace, to Mount Pelion in Thessaly, to the Aegean island of Samos off the western coast of Asia Minor, to the island of Peparethus north of Euboea, to Mount Ida, to the city of Phocaea in Asia Minor which is between the Elaitic and the Hermaean Gulfs, to the island of Imbros in northern Aegean Sea, to Lemnos, to the island of Lesbos in the Aegean Sea opposite the coast of Asia Minor, to the island of Chios off the coast of Ionia in Asia Minor, to Mount Mimas opposite Chios, to the rock Corycius on the coast of Asia Minor in Cilicia, to Clarus near Ephesus, to the promontory Mycale in Ionia on the mainland opposite Samos, to Miletus in Caria, to Cos off the southwestern coast of Asia Minor, to Cnidos, Naxos, Paros, and many other lands, looking for a place to give birth.

The floating island of Delos, neither earth or sea, eventually becomes the sacred locus, the opening for Latona to give birth to her twins.

It's hardly by chance that this tale of labor, persecution and escape is evoked here, just before an account of serene divine creation that takes "place" outside of time, space, pregnancy, and labor. When contemplated together, the manifold differences between these two accounts are mutually illuminating.

Both treat of divine making, and the "children" in both accounts are immortal. The tale of Latona stresses the delay, the impedance blocking her infants from coming forth at the natural time. According to the logic of the passage, inhibiting the twins' birth would be nothing less than the simultaneous eclipse of both sun and moon!

Beatrice's description of the creation of the Angels couldn't be more different. There is nothing of labor there, nothing of embryonic development and birthing, no mechanism or natural process to account for the act. A"splendor" is put into the world from a place outside of the world -- a speaking, self-aware being:

Non per aver a sé di bene acquisto,
ch'esser non può, ma perché suo splendore
potesse, risplendendo, dir 'Subsisto,'

Not to acquire some good unto himself,
  Which is impossible, but that his splendour
  In its resplendency may say, 'Subsisto,'  (Par. 29:13-15)

The first act of this new, limitless legion of unique beings is an act of intelligence: each enunciates its being. The creature does not say "I am happy," or "I love corned beef," or "I vote for Satan." The first moment is not seeing, or loving, or desiring, or willing. It's the act of saying subsisto.

In Italian, sussistere seems to suggest simple being: to exist in oneself. The Latin form, subsistere, tends to a wider range of meanings, including but not limited to: to take a stand, to stay, to subsist, to withstand, to stand firm, to sustain, to halt, to oppose, to exist under some larger entity. The prefix "sub" seems to promote a sense that one's standing, or remaining, is in relation to something else. Not just standing, but withstanding.

The distinctive feature of a reflection is precisely its derivative nature: entirely dependent upon an other, it doesn't speak, let alone demonstrate intelligence of existence. Here, each splendor, complete with vocabulary, grammar, syntax, phonemes and voice, speaks. Saying "I am" presumes articulation. A direct intuition of existence might need nothing -- it can exist in itself (sussitere). But to be able to speak this knowing presumes features of grammar, syntax, phonemes -- a complex, shared set of rules that it uses but does not create. In saying "I am," a knowing being puts itself instantly into the world. But something other than itself is inextricably necessary to that self-positing.  (This paragraph was revised 10.1.17.)

As an aside: The "when" of the angels' choice to stand or fall is understood to be distinct from this moment. Citing Aquinas, Cornish says this distinction might be not temporal, but logical. The point here is simply that Beatrice is quite clear that in this prime moment, a being is articulating its being. This "precedes" (logically or ontologically) all else, including light. As we'll see in a moment, it happens on the cusp, in twilight, the exquisitely poised balance between day and night upon which the Latona passage turns.

Beatrice moves seamlessly from this originary moment to the threefold creation of the world:

così 'l triforme effetto del suo sire
 ne l'esser suo raggiò insieme tutto
 sanza distinzïone in essordire.

So from its Lord did the triform effect
Ray forth into its being all together,
Without discrimination of beginning. (29:28-30)

The highest sustanze, pure act, are put there totum simul with mere matter (pure potentiality) and the world of matter and form (what we see). In that raggiò, the whole scala of creation was given, from formlessness through the physical universe to quadrillions of sustanze saying "subsisto." 

The text's description of a total, instantaneous act gains power from contrast with the nearly unending labors of Latona, whose difficulties don't cease even after she's given birth.

The angels' choice to stand or fall is given a thorough going-over by Cornish. I will just note an interesting intratextual gloss that comes earlier in the canticle, as it relates suggestively to the "when" of the Latona passage: In Paradiso 19, the Eagle is expatiating on the theme that no degree of perspicacity will enable creatures to see all, and says:

E ciò fa certo che 'l primo superbo,
che fu la somma d'ogne creatura,
per non aspettar lume, cadde acerbo;

And this makes certain that the first proud being,
Who was the paragon of every creature,
By not awaiting light fell immature. (Par. 19:46-48)

This can only be the moment that Beatrice has been speaking of, here played out with the figure of Satan, who -- in the precarious twilight before he could know whether what was coming was the darkness or the light -- didn't wait to see, and so fell into eclipse without end. It's also the moment in which Paradiso 30 begins.

The figure of Niobe, disdainer of Latona, is treated in the following post.

Convien saltar: Leaping past mimesis in Par. 23

“Tu se' sì presso a l'ultima salute,”
cominciò Bëatrice, “che tu dei
aver le luci tue chiare e acute; 

e però, prima che tu più t'inlei,
rimira in giù, e vedi quanto mondo
sotto li piedi già esser ti fei;

sì che 'l tuo cor, quantunque può, giocondo
s'appresenti a la turba trïunfante
che lieta vien per questo etera tondo.”

"Thou art so near unto the last salvation,"
  Thus Beatrice began, "thou oughtest now
  To have thine eves unclouded and acute; 

And therefore, ere thou enter farther in,
  Look down once more, and see how vast a world
  Thou hast already put beneath thy feet; 

So that thy heart, as jocund as it may,
  Present itself to the triumphant throng
  That comes rejoicing through this rounded ether." (Par. 22:124-132)

This is the moment in Paradiso 22 when Beatrice explains to Dante why he must look back and take in all that he has experienced up to this point, at the threshold of the stars. Before you "in yourself further," (tu più t'inlei), she tells him, his eyes must be clear and sharp, so that having looked back upon all below, Dante's heart can present itself to the coming throng "as jocund as it may" -- quantunque può, giocondo.

The pilgrim's look back, then, is related to the capability of his heart to be giocondo as he turns to the joyous throng coming towards him. Giocondo suggests happiness, light-hearted ease. Its etymology goes back to a mixture of something that is both helpful and delightful - a playful lightness of being:

The poet describes the world beneath his feet as his vision gathers it in -- it seems one vast organism. When he turns back to the oncoming joyous throng, his vision again fails him. It's only when the "sun" (Christ) removes itself to a great distance that Dante begins to see. What is is about to see is the human mother of God. But it is a curious sort of seeing:

Il nome del bel fior ch'io sempre invoco 
e mane e sera, tutto mi ristrinse 
l'animo ad avvisar lo maggior foco;  

e come ambo le luci mi dipinse 
il quale e il quanto de la viva stella 
che là sù vince come qua giù vinse,  (23:88-93)

 The name of that fair flower I e'er invoke
  Morning and evening utterly enthralled
  My soul to gaze upon the greater fire. 

And when in both mine eyes depicted were
  The glory and greatness of the living star
  Which there excelleth, as it here excelled,

The poet doesn't say "Maria" here, but describes what the "name of the beautiful flower" does: it constrains him to gaze intently at "the larger fire." His experience of beginning to see Mary proceeds from her name, which, we learn, he invokes every morning and evening. The power of this word is such that "the quality and quantity of that living star, that conquers up there as it did down here, depicted itself upon both my eyes."

The strangeness of what's happening here bears noting. We have depiction - the greater fire's quality and quantity paints itself upon both his eyes. We could simply "see" this as another quaint flourish of poesy, but if we look closely, it's harder to say what's going on with this inversion. Instead of the poet's eyes, "unclouded and acute," presenting what is before him, that which is before him represents itself upon both (ambo) his eyes. The commentators appear to agree that what the poet "means to say" here is that his eyes reflect (rispecchiare, i.e., "mirror") what is before him. But if that's so, then we ought to be able to say what is being reflected. Here we are somewhat at a loss. Is it a beautiful flower, a greater fire, a living star, or . . .? Our commentators seem better prepared to state what the poet means to say than they are able to say what his saying actually means.

Instead of a mere reflection of a thing, we have something painting (dipinse) itself upon the eyes. Whatever else this suggests, it reverses the act of representation -- displaces the copyist, painter, or mirror from the eye, mind, memory and poetry of Dante to that which is standing before him. If anything, his eyes, rather than unclouded windows, are now the canvas, slate, or page upon which something is representing itself. And that's not the worst of it. That something in front of Dante could be fire (maggior foco). Fire is the necessary enabling condition of depiction, but what would it mean for fire to depict, i.e., re-present, itself? I'm sure I'd forego the risk of fire representing itself upon both my eyes.

Verisimilitude -- realistic or probable resemblance to any thing or act we can visualize or imagine -- here fails. The only actual thing the passage indisputably gives us is an indirect reference to a sound, the name of Mary. What appears upon his eyes unfolds from a name. The rest is figuration - but upon what ground?

Ground is missing here. Part of the lightening of being, the condition of giocondità, is the jettisoning of gravity.

We have been prepared for this. Dante told us earlier in the canto that his poem has to make a leap to even begin to speak of what's coming in the final ten cantos of the Paradiso:

e così, figurando il paradiso, convien saltar lo sacrato poema, come chi trova suo cammin riciso. (23:61-63)

Mere representation, mimesis, is out of the question. What's coming cannot be described, painted, represented. His first apprehension of the mother -- the human being who became the queen of heaven -- presents us with this impossibility via a passage so strange and difficult to read as to defy mimetic interpretation. And, being Dante, this undoing of representation is performed through the the language of mimesis:

The word depinse is used here not to depict anything, but to turn representation inside out.

Nothing is quite what it seems here amid the stars. Vision is made possible by the removal of light. Properties of entities -- il quale e il quanto -- paint themselves. One's finger burns before it's put into the flame. Nothing comes before or after; representation and presence intermingle. Fire leaps up, pursuing a greater fire.