A few notes . . . (part 4 with minor changes)

This is the fourth in a series of posts about the opening movement of Dante's Paradiso.

Part 1     Part 2     Part 3    Part 4    Part 5

After Beatrice tells Dante in Paradiso 4 that Piccarda and all souls in Paradise "make beautiful the primal circle," that is, they are always with the Empyrean, she continues:

Qui si mostraro, non perché sortita
sia questa spera lor, ma per far segno
de la celestïal c'ha men salita.

They showed themselves here, not because allotted
This sphere has been to them, but to give sign
Of the celestial which is least exalted. (Par. 4. 37-39)

The reason the souls show themselves is to give a sign (far segno) and Beatrice likens this sign making to something Scripture does. It condescends.

Così parlar conviensi al vostro ingegno,
però che solo da sensato apprende
ciò che fa poscia d'intelletto degno.

Per questo la Scrittura condescende
a vostra facultate, e piedi e mano
attribuisce a Dio e altro intende;

To speak thus is fitted to your mind,
Since only through the sense it apprehendeth
What then it worthy makes of intellect. 

On this account the Scripture condescends
Unto your faculties, and feet and hands
To God attributes, and means something else;  (Par. 4. 40-46)

She goes on to say that the same holds true of how Scripture depicts the angels. The radical voiding -- not merely of orientation in space, but of space itself -- is linked to the figurative condescension of the language of Revelation, which conviensi al vostro ingegno, i.e., "thus fitted to your mind."

The mind -- that seat of faculties that brought the ancients to the godlike feat of systematically understanding the universe -- the pride of Plato, Aristotle, and all those in Limbo, is here brought down to the level of a severely compromised, blind actor, like Tobit -- noble, trying to do the right thing, but clueless that the guiding helping hand of Raphael is there, unasked for, within reach.

e Santa Chiesa con aspetto umano
Gabrïel e Michel vi rappresenta,
e l'altro che Tobia rifece sano.

And Holy Church under an aspect human
Gabriel and Michael represent to you,
And him who made Tobias whole again. (Par. 4. 46-48)

While a physical universe seems to appear in Paradiso, the actual model, Beatrice says, is that of a text. Space and time do not hold, presence is meaningless, anthropomorphism is a child's tale: Abandon all trope ye who enter here.

Tobias, Tobit and Raphael

Condescending to Marsyas

An attempt to sum up might go something like this: Paradiso is structured the way Scripture makes signs. Unlike similes, metaphors and other cognitive tropes that are rooted in the senses (using aesthetic properties and relations of likeness, difference, part/whole, contiguity, etc.), Scripture uses real things to "mean something else," and this altro may be beyond all imagining.

If Paradiso is structured like a text, what does this mean for us readers? Dante has already warned those seeking to follow in little boats to take care -- his boat will leave no track, though it is all the trace we have.

By the end of canto 4, the confident, scientific clarity of Beatrice's mirror experiment of canto 2 has been upended with the advent of a potentially limitless indeterminacy.

The usual faculties of the human intellect -- the tools and faculties of science -- are placed alongside another mode of signification unlike what we can safely say we know. A mode that gives hands and feet to all that is radically indeterminate and outside of earthbound space and time through a sign-making that, says Beatrice, condescends (condescende). 

Beatrice's empirical experiment might carry little weight as an example of antiquated science, but it has force in putting the claims and ambitions of intellect -- whether applied through experimental inquiry or logic -- into play. These claims are not negated, but reduced, compromised and complicated within a text that attempts to embrace and encompass both hard science and Scriptural revelation. Tensions in this and build, as the stakes mount up.

Flaying of Marsyas, Antonio de Bella

We might now relate this to Dante's choice of Marsyas as the name and figure both for the experience of Paradiso and for the song of that experience. To be drawn from the sheath of one's members is not just to leave behind an earthly husk: it is to have everything one has always used to see, hear, measure and know stripped away. After this, nothing will be what it seems, and when something seems to be what it seems, it's likely to be quite other. We very well might just be out of our senses.

Lewis Carroll had nothing on this.

To be continued . . .

Tales told by Socrates and Raphael

As has been mentioned before, Verity's notes to Paradise Lost, some of which are available online, are quite sensible and useful. His notes to Books 5 and 6 can be accessed here.

Of the Father's 16-line decree that begins on line 600 announcing the Son, his rule, his power of mediating the Father's glory, word and will, the editor wisely begs off, saying, "upon the particular theological bearing of this passage it would, I think, be out of place to comment," confining his note to scriptural sources, of which there are several.

Rather than look at the theology (we did, somewhat, in our last session, finding it more subtle, cryptic and complex than its austere brevity lets on), I want to suggest that the shape of Raphael's story might offer some interesting parallels and contrasts with Plato's cave allegory, which Socrates tells in Republic 7. The reasons for the comparison should become clear.

In the Republic, Socrates describes the human condition as essentially benighted. We are bound, like prisoners, fixed in the darkness, compelled to look at shadows of stage props. The props are behind us, between our backs and the fire that projects their images on the cave wall.

The story tells how one of these turns his neck and sees the two-dimensional props, and immediately understands that he's been seeing something of less substance than these. He's then dragged out of the cave into the bright light of day, where he is at first blinded, then gradually becomes accustomed to the sun's illuminating actual things. Socrates assures us that if this fellow were to return to tell his fellow cave dwellers what he saw, they would take him for a madman. But the shape of the story is clear: it's a journey through space, a paradigm of the eye and of light. It moves from darkness and servitude to light and freedom, from illusion to truth, from a kind of dreamworld to a stable, clear and serene upper world where one can contemplate things as they really are. So far, Plato's tale can be said to correspond to the pervasive solar imagery of dawn in Book 5 -- a process of gradual illumination.

If we turn to the story Raphael tells Adam and Eve, we find an parallel ascent, from Nature, the garden, the flower that turns to the sun, upward along a dynamic scale of being which follows the sublimation being described by the Angel as all things are consumed, transformed and refined. At a certain point, prompted by Adam's questions, Raphael has to pause and make clear that he is about to speak of warring spirits and high matter beyond the reach of human experience:

how shall I relate
To human sense th' invisible exploits [ 565 ]
Of warring Spirits; how without remorse
The ruin of so many glorious once
And perfet while they stood; how last unfould
The secrets of another World, perhaps
Not lawful to reveal? yet for thy good [ 570 ]
This is dispenc't,

He is, then, going to speak in allegory, in figure -- we must be wary of taking what is said too literally, it will require interpreting:

and what surmounts the reach
Of human sense, I shall delineate so,
By lik'ning spiritual to corporal forms,
As may express them best, though what if Earth
Be but the shaddow of Heav'n, and things therein [ 575 ]
Each to other like, more then on earth is thought?

One might be tempted here to find a suggestion of Platonism -- the spiritual world is to the physical world as Plato's Forms are to the shadowy figures on the walls of the cave.

But the story Raphael goes on to tell is anything but a journey that ends in gradual, eye-opening enlightenment. Instead we are carried back in time to a prime moment before our world was made. And we hear, rather than see, an act of power. God decrees the rule of his Son, and almost instantaneously Satan conceives malice, revolts, and launches the cataclysm of Book 6. Instead of a tranquil contemplative conclusion, Raphael's tale rises to a moment of perfect order; at God's Word, heavenly order shatters.

Raphael's story is but a beginning -- an enigmatic opening of a story still unfolding. He will go on to speak of Satan's rout and fall, which brings us back to the opening of Book 1. But is this a purely cyclical structure? With the creation in Book 7, another chapter begins; it will encompass another fall, then all of human history, then look beyond history.

The shape of Milton's story strongly diverges from Plato's. Where the cave dweller begins in dark servitude and ascends to brilliant plenitude, the tale of the angel and the poet begins in sweetness and light, and falls into disorder and harsh history. In Plato, knowledge, gained by toil and struggle, is the goal and liberating end of education; for Adam and Eve, knowledge will neither be the goal, nor the means of leaving or repairing the fallen world. Still, the Greek world's highest literary form was tragedy, where the culture of Milton and Dante finds its fullest expression in the comic.

Constituting happiness

Latent in Milton's rendering of Paradise in PL V is a richly imagined understanding of the world, humanity, the creator, and the purpose/meaning of this inaugural state. Clearly we were meant to be happy; the beauty of the world carried significance; as fallen descendants, we must turn back to understand our present through an imagined glimpse of the world before all went astray.

A few snippets from a multi-faith conversation about pursuing happiness (from Krista Tippett's On Being) might be relevant.

Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks: The definition of a Jew, Israel is as it says in Genesis 34, one who struggles, wrestles, with God and with humanity and prevails. And Jacob says something very profound to the angel. He says, "I will not let you go until you bless me." And that I feel about suffering. When something bad happens, I will not let go of that bad thing until I have discovered the blessing that lies within it.

Most Rev. Dr. Katharine Jefferts Schori: There's this ongoing tension between seeing happiness as joining with God, as communion with God, that's only possible in the afterlife, and the insistence that human beings are created to be happy, that happiness is possible in this life. There's the particular piece of Christianity that insists that sometimes suffering is a root to happiness for the larger community. That kind of suffering may not be chosen, but it contains blessing within it. The sense that our goal is this fully restored creation at right relationship with all that is and sometimes the journey there requires us to enter into suffering and to demand, to insist, that there is blessing in the midst of that, wrestling with the angel. It must be there. You have created us to be happy, you have created us to be good, now show us. Show us the way through this. Show us the possibility for which all that is is created.

Professor Dr. Seyyed Hossein Nasr: First of all, in the Arabic language, the word for beauty and virtue is the same, and goodness, all three. In the Islam — Muslim mind, they're not separated from each other. In the deepest sense, goodness — in the ordinary sense, these were external actions. In a deeper sense, virtue is within us. Beauty can deal also with external forms and it can deal with beauty of the soul, beauty of the spirit, within us. But beauty in a sense is a more interiorizing. Beauty is what draws us directly to the Divine, to the Divine reality.

The Dalai Lama: I always believe and also share with the people, the very purpose of our life is for happiness. Those nonbeliever also they felt that religion — religious faith is a — brings a lot of sort of complication. So without that, they feel the easier to achieve happy life. So I think the very purpose of our existence is for happiness. So that mentioned, your constitution. And then also is equally their right. You see, happiness not come from sky, but we must make a happy life. So we have a responsibility. The government cannot provide happiness. Happiness must create within ourselves and our family. So ultimately, our own responsibility, isn't it?

At the point we are in Milton's idea of humankind's trajectory, Adam and Eve need not wrestle with the angel. See Dore's image here.

Falling through time

A few images about the fall - more here, including works of Cranach, Chagall, Tintoretto, Brueghel and Poussin.

Eve persuades Adam

Hugo van Goes

Raphael

Gossaert

Spring in Botticelli and Milton

 then with voice 

Milde, as when Zephyrus on Flora breathes,

It's possible Milton saw Botticelli's Primavera while in Italy. He surely was familiar with Poliziano's Rusticus -- a poem of country life described as an updated version of Virgil's Georgics and Hesiod's Works and Days -- with which it is often associated. 


Botticelli's painting is understood to be allegorical, with sundry interpretations (here's one interesting example). It's also a literal anthology, with "500 identified plant species depicted," including 190 different flowers. If Emily Dickinson placed flowers and plants amid the leaves of books, Botticelli seems intent on naming Flora, or Chloris, through sheer abundance of example.


Similarly Milton will reel off a litany of floral names, and here, in Book V, the poem is permeated with the names and scents of flowers and herbs, and sounds of birds and water and gentle breezes:

 th' only sound 

Of leaves and fuming rills, Aurora's fan,

Lightly dispers'd, and the shrill Matin Song

Of Birds on every bough; 

For a stupendous virtual reproduction of Botticelli's Primavera, go here. The image is so rich it takes a while to load, then can be zoomed to a remarkable level of detail. A right-click of the mouse allows a full screen image, which itself can be zoomed in and out, or scoured from one edge to the other.

The opening of Paradise Lost V is imbued with the dawn and with spring. Perhaps it's mere coincidence that Hermes makes a cameo appearance both in Milton's garden and in Botticelli's painting. In the Primavera, the god appears on the left. His right hand holds the cadeceus that reaches the clouds; his left rests on his hip inches from his sword handle. 


In P.L. V, he's woven into the initial description of Raphael:

A Seraph wingd; six wings he wore, to shade

His lineaments Divine; the pair that clad
Each shoulder broad, came mantling o're his brest

With regal Ornament; the middle pair [ 280 ]

Girt like a Starrie Zone his waste, and round

Skirted his loines and thighes with downie Gold

And colours dipt in Heav'n; the third his feet

Shaddowd from either heele with featherd maile

Skie-tinctur'd grain. Like Maia's son he stood, [ 285 ]

And shook his Plumes, that Heav'nly fragrance filld

The circuit wide

If nothing else, both Raphael and Hermes traditionally are messengers connecting heaven and earth. The conversation between Adam, Eve and the angel will, among other things, depict an intricate and coherent account of that linkage. 

Reflection of contradiction

Raphael, Transfiguration

"Here is the reflection of eternal contradiction, the father of things. (ist hier Widerschein des ewigen Widerspruchs, des Vaters der Dinge.)" Birth of Tragedy, Sect. 4.