Seizing Rifëo: The defiant poetics of Paradiso 20

"The whole story of Ripheus is nothing less than outrageous," says Robert Hollander, with complete justification. 

With the introduction of this Trojan warrior-turned Christian believer before the Christ event, Dante deliberately strains credulity. Why single out this obscure character from a pagan epic and turn him into a unique example -- one seized with such loathing for paganism that he finds the true savior, apparently, by imagining an alternative to all the gods he knew?

That Ripheus could, through his own unparalleled sense of justice, reach a higher vision is a pattern we have seen elsewhere. It fits with the motif that what is not able to be seen or grasped can offer more significant evidence than that which is visible. That we are unable to see and know everything argues that our roots lie beyond what is available to the senses, as noted in the Eagle's statement in Paradiso 19.

Ripheus is at that breaking point between the inner imaginings of his heart and the complete failure of his pagan world to reflect what he believes is true. But Dante could have singled out other ancients for this role -- why choose obscure Ripheus? A few suggestions are below.

As usual, it's revealing to look at the entire context of Dante's allusion to Ripheus in the Aeneid. He appears only in Book II, and is named three times in the course of Aeneas's tale of the Trojan Horse and the end of Troy. More particularly, Ripheus is part of a band of Trojans who have donned Greek armor and were successfully killing many Greeks, until one of their group, Coroebus, sees Cassandra being dragged from the temple of Minerva. As one who loved her, he cannot stand by, and loses his life in seeking to save her. Ripheus joins in, and dies too, along with several others:

         cadit et Ripheus, iustissimus unus
qui fuit in Teucris et servantissimus aequi
(dis aliter visum);  

then Rhipeus fell;
we deemed him of all Trojans the most just, 
most scrupulously righteous; but the godsgave judgment otherwise.  (Aeneid II: 426-28)

The first mention of Ripheus comes as he is among a group of fellow Trojans whom Aeneas rallies with an argument built upon despair:

My men, hearts vainly valiant, if your desire is fixed to follow me in my final venture, you see what is the fate of our cause. All the gods on whom this empire was stayed have gone forth, leaving shrine and altar; the city you aid is in flames. Let us die, and rush into the midst of arms. One safety the vanquished have, to hope for none!" (Aeneid II: 348-353)

This is the code of the Roman warrior who is confronting the darkest moment of his existence. A moment earlier, Aeneas, had recalled the words of Panthous, a priest of Apollo, telling him that all is lost:

"It is come -- the last day and inevitable hour for Troy. We Trojans are not, Ilium is not, and the great glory of the Teucrians; in wrath Jupiter has taken all away to Argos; the Greeks are lords of the burning city." (Aen. II: 324-327)

“Venit summa dies et ineluctabile tempus
Dardaniae: fuimus Troes, fuit Ilium et ingens
gloria Teucrorum; ferus omnia Iuppiter Argos
transtulit; incensa Danai dominantur in urbe."

The belief that Troy has been abandoned by the gods doesn't paralyze Aeneas, but it colors the entire scene with Ripheus and Coroebus that follows. The crisis of faith here is double -- the priest of Apollo can no longer believe in the survival of Troy because, he believes, the gods themselves no longer believe in, or care about, the city that once was the darling of the Olympians.

The crisis leads to Aeneas's rhetoric of despair -- "nothing left to lose" -- and they soldier on.

The salient points of the text where Ripheus appears are thus deeply relevant to the viability of faith and hope in the face of total annihilation. Dante's selection of Ripheus as the pagan baptized by the theological virtues brings this dark moment of Virgil's poem into view precisely as the mention of the three virtues at the right wheel of Beatrice's car reminds us that that is the last moment Virgil appears in the Commedia. The point is well made by Teolinda Baronlini:

Dante picks as his messenger of hope a character who, necessarily, because of his provenance in the Aeneid, brings with him not just hope but complicated feelings of loss and exclusion. Dante manages the story of Ripheus in such a way as to implicate both the author of the Aeneid, Vergil, and the memory of the character, Virgilio, a virtuous but unsaved pagan whom we last saw viewing the very same theological virtues involved in Ripheus's baptism. 

By plucking Ripheus, whose death is not even described in the Aeneid (wearing Greek armor, he loses his life as he tries to help Coroebus rescue Cassandra), from Virgil's poem and raising him to the eyebrow of the Eagle, Dante is doing something extraordinary. It is a plucking, a seizing, of this "iustissimus" character from a pagan poem, elevating him to a very high place. Indeed, it is almost a kind of savaging -- as an eagle might swoop down, grasp, and raise up some prized prey.

This is a kind of intertextuality one doesn't often see. Dante returns to his human poet-guide, but instead of being guided, he rewrites the ethos of soldierly courage and speaks of a soul who, despite all that anyone could dream of, envisioned another kind of courage. Ripheus is taken from Virgil in an act that re-creates our entire sense of him -- one that his own author couldn't have dreamt of. The imaginative leap of Ripheus is not unlike that of a poet, dreaming of something beyond what his experience has given him. (It is not by chance that in the pupil of the Eagle may be found David, the poet/warrior/king.)

All this is done through arbitrary fiat - nothing leads anyone to expect it, including Ripheus himself. It is the unbelievable in its pure state -- the sort of thing that rational people think of as foolery, or folly, much as the first apostles seemed idiots to the philosophically sophisticated gentiles.

One additional point: Perhaps there's another clue besides context to help us understand what the Commedia is doing here. Here's how Ripheus is introduced:

Chi crederebbe giù nel mondo errante
che Rifëo Troiano in questo tondo
fosse la quinta de le luci sante?

Who would believe, down in the errant world,
That e'er the Trojan Ripheus in this round
Could be the fifth one of the holy lights?

If the seizing of Rifëo seems more an act of creation than of derivation or mere allusion, it very much is. It's taking liberty in an almost violent way with a belief system that would find it more credible to think that a fallen city was abandoned by the gods. Rather than concede that only the absence of hope remained and could be a source of strength, Dante re-makes Rifëo into one helped by a kind of capricious grace. To re-make in Italian is rifare, which obviously bears a resemblance to Rifëo. The word appears in the opening lines of the canto:

lo ciel, che sol di lui prima s'accende,
subitamente si rifà parventeper molte luci,
in che una risplende; (Paradiso 20: 4-6)

The sky here, instead of going dark with the sun's setting, brightens with the many lights that reflect the sun's sole light (with a similar wordplay of sol and sol).* This brightening is expressed as "making itself reappear." This reappearance of the sun, not as itself, but in the form of its many star reflectors, remakes the sky. This making is a form of poesis that goes beyond mimesis. Rifëo Troiano is remade as the fifth light in the brow of the Eagle, even as the word for remaking appears in the fifth line of the canto, which is about reappearing lights.

Whatever else this is, it's a mode of intertextuality that plays havoc with normal notions of allusion and reference. To remake Rifëo is to recreate the poetry of Virgil. Ripheus's name echoes the act of making new:

The violence to the corpus of Virgil returns when the Eagle speaks to the quiditate of the exaltation of Ripheus:

Regnum celorum vïolenza pate
da caldo amore e da viva speranza,
che vince la divina volontate:

'Regnum coelorum' suffereth violence
From fervent love, and from that living hope
That overcometh the Divine volition;

For Dante, the act of faith is a creative leap beyond reason, fueled by lively hope. It is acted out here in the mode of poetic arbitrariness. Far from mimicking Virgil's portrait of Rifëo Troiano, Dante catachretically re-creates and sublimates him. As we've seen at other moments, Paradiso defies mimesis, adopting a poetics that violates and transforms nature via the powers known as the three theological virtues.

*Hollander points out that Dante does not name the sun after Paradiso 10, yet here, speaking in periphrasis about the sun -- sol -- he uses the homonym sol, i.e., "only." The wordplay is not unlike that of rifare and Rifëo.

The torque of Pride

When Dante crosses the threshold into Purgatory proper and hears the door swing shut, he speaks of the one thing that could never be excused - looking back:

Poi fummo dentro al soglio de la porta
che 'l mal amor de l'anime disusa,
perché fa parer dritta la via torta,

sonando la senti' esser richiusa;
e s'io avesse li occhi vòlti ad essa,
qual fora stata al fallo degna scusa? 

When we had crossed the threshold of the door
Which the perverted love of souls disuses,
Because it makes the crooked way seem straight, 

Re-echoing I heard it closed again;
And if I had turned back mine eyes upon it,
What for my failing had been fit excuse?   (Purg. 10.1-6)

No possible excuse for someone who has been advised not to look back, no matter how strong the temptation. Dante, the new Orpheus, passes the threshold safely and successfully. This is only one of several thresholds, however - instead of assuring the safe return of his Eurydice to mortal life, obeying the order to not look back gives Dante hope of seeing his Beatrice at some future moment, when he is fit to experience her transhumanized form.

One way of understanding a constitutive difference between the canticles, then, could be one's relation to hope:

Inferno:       hope forever lost.
Purgatorio:  hope actively propelling one ahead
Paradiso:     hope substantiated

This small scheme will be subject, of course, to our reading of the Paradiso, which is about to begin. I want to bring up one other thing about the Purgatorio as we get to that new threshold, and it's contained in the snippet quoted above.

che 'l mal amor de l'anime disusa, 

perché fa parer dritta la via torta,

 the threshold (soglia) . . .

that souls' bad love disuses
because it makes the crooked path seem straight.

Entering the terrace of Pride, the poet lays down an apparent law of the human condition: when we desire wrongly, that causes us to see as direct what is in fact crooked, or indirect.

The narrator here posits a turning, or torque, of the soul by which what it sees, and how it sees - cognition - is skewed by what (and how) it wants. Where Plato's soul just needed to be turned around and ascend to see the Good in order to want it, this offers a more Augustinian view. One cannot see straight until one's love (will) has turned toward the Good. The will is what is bound, imprisoned, and the terraces of penitence are about liberating it from its false and deviant loves.

The complex path of discipline, edification, and challenge that the pilgrim goes through before Virgil can "crown and mitre" him as a freely willing self over himself should be kept in view as one enters Paradise.

It's a path with its own complications. I'll just briefly point to one. In the same canto (10) of Purgatorio, before they encounter the Proud souls bearing their pedestals, Dante and Virgil see three narratives depicted on the terrace wall, famously described as visibile parlare: The three tales are the Annunciation, the story of Uzzah and David and Michal, and the tale of Trajan and the widow.

Contemporary commentators including Robert Hollander and Nicola Fosca have noted some complications of the tales -- for example, that the angel's appearing to Mary, which bears the hope of salvation to everyone born after Christ, carries a sense of doom to Virgil, the poet of the 4th Eclogue, whose prophecy of a savior to be born did not save him from Limbo.

Hollander also wonders whether the Proud souls, crushed under the weight of their stones, can even see these storied walls - are the walls inclined so one can see from a very low angle, he and others ask.

Another point that seems relevant is that the first sin, the one upon which all other sins feed, requires those carrying their pedestals to read from their low and oblique angle, over and over again, three tales that, in a very real sense, defy easy understanding. One might quite easily see an image of the Annunciation, but does that mean that one in fact understands it? What would "understanding" mean here?

And if the Annunciation is problematic, the tale of Uzzah poses its own difficulties. Here's a guy leading the oxen that are bearing the Ark of the covenant, and the Ark totters, seeming about to fall. He reaches out his hand - one can easily presume it's an automatic reflex - and is struck dead for presuming to do something he was not tasked to do. Is this readily comprehensible? Or must one go round the mountain several thousand times before it begins to make sense? This is of course about the automatonic nature of our drives, desires, and thoughts - these things we are persuaded we simply control.

The tale of Trajan also runs counter to common sense (as does, of course, the spectacle of David) and all military protocol.

If we gloss over these tales (as I'm doing here), it could be at our peril. If we presume we have read them aright, we might be submitting our qualifications for spending a good amount of time on this very terrace.

Why point this up with emphasis? Let's remember that these works, Dante avers, are produced by an Artist that surpasses Polycletus and Nature itself - making the question of distinguishing real from fake, fact from fiction, a real, not a rhetorical, question. And let's remember that the basic element of Pride is in fact to think something is straight that is not. The torque of Pride and the torque of simplistic reading are not, in this canto, unrelated. In a very real sense, Dante has engaged the full web of rhetoric, the textual deviousness of tropes, mimesis, figuration and narration, in his analysis of Pride. To sin is to be trapped in trope. The presumption of reading -- in the sense of some unmeditated, direct apprehension of a text -- puts one fairly far along the path of error.

One can hope that the challenges of Paradise, however daunting, leave us less prone to tie ourselves in knots.

A fine resource for readers of Dante

My friend Peter D'Epiro (whose translations we have often made use of here) has reminded me of an online source I'd forgotten about: The Dartmouth Dante. Check the link to see it -- it's a project developed by Robert Hollander, whose commentaries on the Commedia are the most thorough and learned we have in English.

Not only is all of Hollander's commentary available, but so are dozens of others, going back to the earliest commentaries by at least one of Dante's sons and Boccaccio.

The basic search page for the site is here. It's a remarkable contribution to all who now need not travel to a major university library or rare books collection to explore 800 years of readings of Dante's poem.