Binding incisions: Paradiso 32 (Part III)

The arc of the Paradiso has been a movement from the particular to the universal, moving towards the primo amore -- the source of all Being. We are brought up short in Paradiso 32 as we encounter, rather than a higher level of synthesis, a highly limited directory to 18 specific figures in the lineage from Adam through Christ to the present.

After establishing this curiously partial portrait of the Rose, the canto turns to the providential disposition of the innocent. Teodolinda Barolini has an insightful blog post about Bernard's disquisition on more and less excellent innocents, and why and how their places in Paradise, or Limbo, were determined by "the king" of this realm:

I find it extremely impressive that Dante manages to have a dubbio, that he can still be dubitando, even this high up in paradise, at the very threshold of the beatific vision.. . . His concern in Paradiso 32 relates to the justice inherent in diversity of grace, with respect to placing the infants in a hierarchy: how can it be just to order them hierarchically, when they did not live long enough to have any merit? 

The final dubbio of the Paradiso is essentially its first, and exhibits the same preoccupation with unequally proportioned grace that has troubled the pilgrim throughout his ascent. But the issue has never been more starkly raised than here, because never before has individual merit been totally excluded from the equation . . .

Two points here. First, we have noted the curious erasure of individual traits occurring in this canto as the 18 figures are named. Now we have this crucially difficult question: how can eternal damnation or its opposite can be justified without the innocent soul having any part in it?

Bernard is about to address this. But just now, as the pilgrim and the reader are suspended in doubt, we consider the innocent sons of Ugolino, locked in the tower, offering their bodies to stave off their Father's starvation. The horrific deaths of those innocents -- echoing Christ's words in their care for the father whose deeds consumed their lives and perhaps their bodies -- can only be reconciled with a sense of divine justice if in fact, while Ugolino gnaws the nape of Archbishop Ruggieri, his children sit among the glorified.

Bernard says:

Dunque, sanza mercé di lor costume,
locati son per gradi differenti,
sol differendo nel primiero acume.

Bastavasi ne’ secoli recenti
con l’innocenza, per aver salute,
solamente la fede d’i parenti; 

poi che le prime etadi fuor compiute,
convenne ai maschi a l’innocenti penne
per circuncidere acquistar virtute; 

ma poi che ’l tempo de la grazia venne,
sanza battesmo perfetto di Cristo
tale innocenza là giù si ritenne. 

Without, then, any merit of their deeds,
  Stationed are they in different gradations,
  Differing only in their first acuteness. 

'Tis true that in the early centuries,
  With innocence, to work out their salvation
  Sufficient was the faith of parents only. 

After the earlier ages were completed,
  Behoved it that the males by circumcision
  Unto their innocent wings should virtue add; 

But after that the time of grace had come
  Without the baptism absolute of Christ,
  Such innocence below there was retained. (Par. 32.73-84)

There are two different stories apparently being told here. One traces human history and finds it articulated in three segments. At first any child whose life was cut short could enter Paradise if his parents believed in the true God. With the Covenant with Abraham, a new contract superseded that arrangement: a literal wound -- the cutting of the penis -- opens the way to heaven. (Whether one goes with Mandelbaum* and others who believe line 80 should read pene, (penis), not penne (wings) doesn't change that literal circumcision is in question.) Then, with the arrival of the "time of grace," innocents who died without the baptism of Christ are no longer eligible for eternal salvation.

It is troubling to this reader to learn that the coming of the man/god whose sacrifice opened Paradise also rewrote the contract to eliminate innocents who died without his Baptism, but there it is. The fact, the effetto, faces every reader as it faced the poet. One might infer that Dante himself somehow came to terms. How?

Here's one thought: the effect of this state of affairs is to make the possibility of eternal life for our children dependent upon others, especially parents. This would make the bonds of love and family a constituent element of the binding (Lat. religare) that Augustine among others saw as the etymological root of the word "religion."

Such an interpretation works quite well with the evidence before our eyes. Religious duty is a means of forming a community, not of making it into the Hall of Fame. The binding that falls on the parent makes it possible to say that if Ugolino did fulfill his duty, he made possible his sons' salvation.

As noted earlier, Bernard tells not one, but two stories by way of helping Dante understand the fate of innocents. The other begins earlier:

e però questa festinata gente a vera vita non è sine causa intra sé qui più e meno eccellente.  

Lo rege per cui questo regno pausa 
in tanto amore e in tanto diletto, 
che nulla volontà è di più ausa 

le menti tutte nel suo lieto aspetto creando, a suo piacer di grazia dota 
diversamente; e qui basti l'effetto.  

E ciò espresso e chiaro vi si nota ne la Scrittura santa in quei gemelli che ne la madre ebber l'ira commota.   

Però, secondo il color d'i capelli, di cotal grazia l'altissimo lume degnamente convien che s'incappelli.  

Dunque, sanza mercé di lor costume, locati son per gradi differenti, sol differendo nel primiero acume. 

And therefore are these people, festinate
  Unto true life, not 'sine causa' here
  More and less excellent among themselves. 

The King, by means of whom this realm reposes
  In so great love and in so great delight
  That no will ventureth to ask for more,

In his own joyous aspect every mind
  Creating, at his pleasure dowers with grace
  Diversely; and let here the effect suffice.

And this is clearly and expressly noted
  For you in Holy Scripture, in those twins
  Who in their mother had their anger roused.

According to the colour of the hair,
  Therefore, with such a grace the light supreme
  Consenteth that they worthily be crowned.

Without, then, any merit of their deeds,
  Stationed are they in different gradations,
  Differing only in their first acuteness. (32: 58-75)

There's a lot here, more than there's room to address. Barolini notes the principle of differentiation, of più e meno (more and less) harks back to the first tercet of Paradiso 1:

La gloria di colui che tutto move 
per l'universo penetra, e risplende 
in una parte più e meno altrove. 

We are about to enter that glory, but first we must learn that even the saved innocents are graded in an order of excellence, according to the "color" of their grace. Dante's daring conflation of hair color with divine favor points up the unavoidable fact that such differentiating of more and less even among embryos seems to us to be purely arbitrary.

Without going into all the curious turns in the tale of Esau and Jacob, note that the referenced story offers at least three relevant details: the color of the hair, present before birth, becomes a figure for the predetermined bestowal of grace; that Jacob is second in birth order, but supplants his brother's right of firstborn, fits the Scriptural pattern of last becoming first - temporal order is not the only order. And that Jacob surpasses Esau through his and his mother's wits underscores the final word of the entire passage:

Dunque, sanza mercé di lor costume, 
locati son per gradi differenti, 
sol differendo nel primiero acume. 

Without, then, any merit of their deeds,
  Stationed are they in different gradations,
  Differing only in their first acuteness.

Acume - the power to penetrate to the heart of things - turns out to be a clue to the differentiation with regard to grace. Rather than simply being as arbitrary as hair color, what is arbitrary is that some humans are sharper than others. The acuteness that cuts through appearances -- more than just intellect, heart as well is involved -- enables one such as Jacob to surpass another, who would seem to have advantages of precedence, wealth, class, etc.

Sharpness creates another form of separation -- leading me to restore the very individuality I earlier said was erased in the seemingly arbitrary differentiation of innocents. For Dante, the acumen to know one's right hand from one's left; to see through the glitter of princes and popes -- this is a grace that cannot be taught. Many of the learned do not have it; many a peasant has it in spades. This grazia, whether or not its owner has opportunity to exercise it in her or his life, results in the gradations of the innocenti.

We should note that acume appears as the last word of line 75, placing it at the very center of Paradiso 32.

This suggests a brief afterthought: For Dante, the journey to the beatific vision began in the moment he first saw Beatrice. He of course had no idea what it was about her that seized his heart and mind. Over the course of his journey, he discerns more and more about Beatrice, sees more of her beauty, and more of the reality to which she points. Beatrice is both mediatrix and sign of something more than herself. Dante's Commedia is the elaboration of a reading that began with a chance encounter with a sign, and ends in a realm where there is no possibility of chance. In Dante's lexicon another word for the tenacious rigor of such a reading might well be acume.

If so, then the canto's promise hinges on the capability of its own reading. Beginning in the most off-putting way, Bernard ignores the "big picture" to pick at nits. Yet each nit is from Scripture or the Church, and the lines of separation that he descries should give one pause. Why after all of human time are we still bothering with the slightest discretionary differences between one embryo and another? It's not a question to address here except by means of a question: without the differences that make each human being inescapably, knowably, unique, is community, communion, possible? If not, then are the scars on the face of heaven binding its fragments in glory?

*Mandelbaum's rendering of the passage:

In early centuries, their parents’ faith
alone, and their own innocence, sufficed
for the salvation of the children; when
those early times had reached completion, then
each male child had to find, through circumcision,
the power needed by his innocent
member; but then the age of grace arrived,
and without perfect baptism in Christ,
such innocence was kept below, in Limbo. 

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.

========

*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.

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.

=====

. . .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.

Jarring note, asymptote: Par. 29

The last canto before the Empyrian presents artistic as well as interpretive challenges. Paradiso 29 opens in a heightened moment, right before the pilgrim and his guide leave the Created world. And it speaks of some of the highest things, as well as several of the lowest.

If one steps back from the interpretive musings of the commentators, the canto exhibits odd choices on the level of style and narration. It deals with weighty matters, including

• how, when, and why Creation occurred;
• the first moment of the angels' existence;
• the fall of Satan and his followers, and 
• the relation of grace and merit, intellect and affect, with regard to the angels who didn't fall. 

Each of these moments could have filled its own canto (or more, if you're Milton). Instead, this extraordinary matter is stated in summary form by Beatrice in a calm, authoritative manner. The sublime opening of Genesis is elided, none of the acts of creation, pride and fall are dramatized. Dante chose to move quickly and in summary fashion through this material, instead lavishing poetic exuberance on the image of equilibrium that heads the canto - the myth of Latona and the lights in our sky.

One needs to consider the reasons for such a choice. Recall the rich creation of the beasts in Paradise Lost. Surely Dante entertained such potent options, but in the end seems to have preferred a kind of askesis -- sacrificing poetic sublimity for something else. Why, and what something?

In terms of narrative arc, a problem loomed. If he took the time and space here to dazzle us with the way it all began, there'd be precious little room for the Empyrean. Plus, a heightened account of the Creation could weaken the impact of that final climactic scene. Narrative art necessitated something modest here, though the content involves big things.

There might be another reason as well. Throughout this canto (excluding the opening image), Beatrice is the sole speaker. If one were to graph her tone, a curious change would be noticeable. The descriptions of Creation and the angels' first moments are presented in a serene mode that bears none of the emotional or intellectual excitement of human witness. Beatrice is recounting what she has been given to see in the divine vision for a long, long time. Interestingly, Dante the pilgrim, who often describes his craving for knowledge as physical need - thirst, desire, etc. -- is silent. It's as if he's reaching the capacity to take in - to see -- what Beatrice sees, and to do so calmly, deeply, completely. Speaker and auditor share the wonders of origin in dispassionate, apodictic tranquility.

Suddenly, that spell gives way. Beatrice launches into a far more engaged diatribe against, among other things, poor readers, showy, self-aggrandizing preachers, fanciful and bogus interpretive curlicues performed for the sake of local adulation, and profound acts of fraud perpetrated by porcine churchmen in the act of peddling fake indulgences, which acts exploit and encourage the ignorance of their flocks.

She ticks off vivid examples of presumptuous readers spinning elaborate explanations of events told in the Gospels:

One sayeth that the moon did backward turn,
  In the Passion of Christ, and interpose herself
  So that the sunlight reached not down below; 

And lies;                (29:97-100)

A palpable gasp runs through the commentaries at this take-down of revered teachers: Dionysus, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas. It's suggested that mente in Italian of the day might just have meant "erred." Still, it's a barb, and rather acute.

But this sort of learned misreading bothers Beatrice less than the "fables" (favole) spewed forth from the pulpits, filling the preachers' flocks with wind:

Now men go forth with jests and drolleries
  To preach, and if but well the people laugh,
  The hood puffs out, and nothing more is asked.

But in the cowl there nestles such a bird,
  That, if the common people were to see it,
  They would perceive what pardons they confide in, 

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.

Beatrice here is working up a lather -- the endless varieties of deforming the Word, using it to get laughs, or nice meals, or money -- exercise her in a way that seems out of place. Consider the context: We're nearly at the edge of time and space, and instead of looking back with some cumulative, totalizing gaze -- as we saw the pilgrim do twice, in cantos 22 and 27 -- we get a sardonic lambasting of hypocritical scumbags. It feels jarring.

Dante (the poet) never seems anything but sure-handed. One can look at virtually any scene, any tercet in the entire Commedia and find a mature artist who knows exactly what's called for at every metric step. Yet here, as the pilgrim is about to exit the created world, that masterful balance seems to be jolted. We've dashed through some of the biggest questions of existence, then excoriated a bunch of Boccaccian scoundrels at nearly the last instant before the pilgrim is ripped Marsyas-like from the sheath of his muscles, tendons, and skin.

Within the larger movement of the narrative, something seems off. Where is the reassuring sense of closure, the triumphal achievement, the anticipatory excitement that one might expect here at the asymptotic edge? Has Dante finally missed a beat?

Or, is this disequilibrium, this apparent loss of total control -- both on the part of Dante's serene mediatrix, and of the text itself -- precisely the right thing? Nothing is more obvious in terms of tone and style than that this canto began with the most exquisitely balanced series of binary oppositions -- a polished classical vision of a totally symmetrical system in the moment of ineluctable eclipse. But we're leaving that, and doing so in jangled, heated discord. What if that apparent dislocation of tone and control, from a certain angle, is entirely the point?

One thing seems clear: the magnificent picture of equilibrium that opens this canto is not the model Beatrice follows. She herself calls her tirade a digression, pulls up short, and returns us to a contemplative moment that deserves more attention than it perhaps has received. She turns us from the fat fraudulent friars to consider the relation of "the act of conception" to love and sweetness:

 Onde, però che a l'atto che concepe segue
l'affetto, d'amar la dolcezza 
diversamente in essa ferve e tepe.  

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.” 

Hence, inasmuch as on the act conceptive
  The affection followeth, of love the sweetness
  Therein diversely fervid is or tepid. 

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."     (29:139-145)

Another post will consider the resonance of this last image in light of the extraordinary gamut run by this canto, its tranquility and febrile censoriousness, and ponder whether that seeming lapse in decorum and control might serve an unexpected artistic purpose.

The trajectory of furtive eros: Paradiso 27

Aside from an external preoccupation that's consumed a lot of my time recently, internal properties of the text have slowed our ascent to the higher reaches of Paradise. In the past six weeks, we've managed to eke through Paradiso 27 and have made it less than halfway through 28. It's the poet's fault.

The poem unfolds a series of thresholds bringing together so many textual skeins -- so many echoes, motifs, layers, metamorphoses and transitions -- that reading becomes excavation. Two weeks ago we read the opening of canto 28 -- the simile of the mirror and the doppiero. The other day we reread it, and found it new -- more richly complex than it had first seemed.

The notion of coming to the "end" of the Commedia is but a prospect, a hypothetical limit to which any reading is asymptotic. In a sense, the reading is the hunt, the caccia, for an elusive prey that was there before any reading came to be, and will always yield more than any single interpretation, however masterly and comprehensive. The totality of the text in relation to our reading might be proportioned as the originary luce e amore is to the pursuing creation striving to accede to it.

The notion of the hunt, the quest, with the desire to capture and possess the object of pursuit, runs throughout the text. In cantos 28 and 29 it will reach extraordinary scale. I want to note a few ways in which it's present in Paradiso 27.

This canto has to be one of the more astonishing ones simply in terms of sheer range of matter. Beginning with Dante facing the same four figures -- Peter, James, John and Adam -- we watch Peter grow red with anger at the degradation of his earthly succession. The entirety of heaven, which had seemed a moment before to smile, takes on the bloody hue. Beatrice's coloration clearly evokes Ovid's tale of naked Diana, surprised while bathing on Mt. Cithaeron, turning scarlet before the startled gaze of Actaeon (Metamorphoses 3). The goddess and Dante's guide turn . . .

the same colour which, through sun adverse,
  Painteth the clouds at evening or at morn,

Di quel color che per lo sole avverso
 nube dipigne da sera e da mane, (Par. 27: 28-29)

Peter continues fulminating that his keys and his own self have been degraded to mere figures on escutcheons and seals used by Boniface and others to wage war on the flock, or, as lies to be sold. That he who served as the very basis of the Church on Earth emits such blunt, unfettered rage and human frustration is itself striking, but Peter goes on, echoing Cacciaguida, to make sure the poet has his marching orders:

                                  "open thy mouth;
 What I conceal not, do not thou conceal."

                                      "apri la bocca,
 e non asconder quel ch'io non ascondo.” (65-66)

At this point, the entire host of heaven falls upward like snow in warp drive, and Beatrice directs Dante to take another look at Earth. The last time he'd done this, he had just arrived to the stars from Saturn (22: 133-154).

This new sight shows him the same threshing floor, aiuola, but from a different angle:

Since the first time that I had downward looked,
  I saw that I had moved through the whole arc
  Which the first climate makes from midst to end;

So that I saw the mad track of Ulysses
  Past Gades, and this side, well nigh the shore
  Whereon became Europa a sweet burden.

And of this threshing-floor the site to me
  Were more unveiled, but the sun was proceeding
  Under my feet, a sign and more removed.

Da l'ora ch'ïo avea guardato prima
 i' vidi mosso me per tutto l'arco
 che fa dal mezzo al fine il primo clima;

sì ch'io vedea di là da Gade il varco
 folle d'Ulisse, e di qua presso il lito
 nel qual si fece Europa dolce carco.

E più mi fora discoverto il sito
 di questa aiuola; ma 'l sol procedea
 sotto i mie' piedi un segno e più partito. (27:79-87)

The passage cries out to be compared with the earlier backward look, which took place right after he arrived in the stars. The planets with their pagan gods are gone. Now Dante sees two things: one is the eastern beginning and western edge of the European quest, from the moment of Europa's seduction to the mad pursuit of Ulysses. The other is his realization that the sun has traveled one quarter of its trip around the Earth since last he looked.

The bracketing of Dante's visit to the starry sphere by these two backward looks is pointed and calls for comment. The aiuola seemed closer in the first look, which retraced Dante's own voyage through the spheres of Paradise. The second spans the bounds of recorded history of the West, ending on a mad ship moving into the open sea, seeking it knows not what.

Why mark the origin of this wayward career with Europa? Of course she names the continent that is Dante's frame of reference. But perhaps there's a suggestive clue in Ovid's tale -- there usually is. The seduction of Agenor's daughter, the sister of Cadmus, begins like this:

Iamque deus posita fallacis imagine tauri
se confessus erat Dictaeaque rura tenebat,
cum pater ignarus Cadmo perquirere raptam
imperat et poenam, si non invenerit, addit   5
exilium, facto pius et sceleratus eodem.
Orbe pererrato (quis enim deprendere possit
furta Iovis?) profugus patriamque iramque parentis
vitat Agenorides Phoebique oracula supplex
consulit et, quae sit tellus habitanda, requirit.

(Meta. 3.19)

Now Jupiter had not revealed himself,
nor laid aside the semblance of a bull,
until they stood upon the plains of Crete.
But not aware of this, her father bade
her brother Cadmus search through all the world,
until he found his sister, and proclaimed
him doomed to exile if he found her not;—
thus was he good and wicked in one deed.
When he had vainly wandered over the earth
(for who can fathom the deceits of Jove?)
Cadmus, the son of King Agenor, shunned
his country and his father's mighty wrath.

The career of the West begins with furta, theft performed by the Lord of gods and men. Given the degree of calculated deception that went into the theft, translator Tony Klein's "deceits" is entirely justified. That humans cannot "fathom" the tricks of gods is a theme recurs throughout the Metamorphoses. The theft of Europa opens the story of the Minoan world of Crete and, through Agenor's order to his son, the world of Greece through the wanderings of Cadmus and founding of Thebes. The West was able track itself back to Phoenicia because writing, they say, was brought to Greece by Cadmus, who never did find his sister.

Cadmus, Harmonia and the Ismenian Dragon

Canto 27 interweaves motifs questing and hunting throughout, as well as the seductive snares of the gods. In addition to Europa carried off by Zeus and hunted by Cadmus, there is the horrific reversal that follows Diana's reddening -- Actaeon the hunter becomes the conscious prey his dogs tear apart.

In a moment, after the pilgrim turns back from regarding nearly the whole of Europe, the pilgrim will rise to the Primum Mobile. The sun has shifted one quadrant, or six hours, from his last look, so Dante's time in Gemini matches Adam's entire unfallen life in the garden. Adam lost Paradise shortly after noon, which happens to be the same time of day that Actaeon stopped his hunt, walked into the wood, and angered a naked divinity at a spring. It would not have been lost on Dante that Actaeon's tale repeats that of his ancestor, Cadmus, who, searching for Europa on the same Mt. Cithaeron, followed the heifer that led him to the spring where his men were attacked by the Ismenian dragon.

The enchanted world of the Metamorphoses where unassuming mortals are lured, seduced, transformed and destroyed by encounters with devious sacred beings stands behind Dante's text in meaningful juxtaposition. Dante has just finished speaking to Adam, who is fully conscious that his act of eating of the tree was a conscious choice:

Or, figliuol mio, non il gustar del legno
 fu per sé la cagion di tanto essilio,
 ma solamente il trapassar del segno. 

Now, son of mine, the tasting of the tree
  Not in itself was cause of so great exile,
  But solely the o'erstepping of the bounds. (Par. 26. 115-117)

When the pilgrim turns back from the aiuola to Beatrice, he is captured in a way Europa would have perfectly understood:

And if or Art or Nature has made bait
To catch the eyes and so possess the mind,
In human flesh or in its portraiture,

All joined together would appear as nought
To the divine delight which shone upon me
When to her smiling face I turned me round.

e se natura o arte fé pasture
da pigliare occhi, per aver la mente,
in carne umana o ne le sue pitture,

tutte adunate, parrebber nïente
ver' lo piacer divin che mi refulse,
quando mi volsi al suo viso ridente.  (27: 91-96)

All the beauty of all the lures the world holds are nothing to these eyes, this smile that charmed him so long before, and set him aflame.

The poet's own experience of Eros in the world is one way he knows that the ancients and their poets were on to something important. More important is that he show how different the result of the hook (amo) of Amor can be. It might be a power, a trap, but it isn't necessarily a doom.

The virtue that her look endowed me with
From the fair nest of Leda tore me forth,
And up into the swiftest heaven impelled me.

E la virtù che lo sguardo m'indulse,
del bel nido di Leda mi divelse
e nel ciel velocissimo m'impulse. (97-99)

The entire physical universe, which he is about to leave behind, is here summed as the bel nido di Leda. He is literally torn from it by the virtù gazing at him. The ancients knew that nest as the cradle of noble, beautiful, tragic demi-gods and mortals. On the same night Leda slept with her husband King Tyndareus, she was fertilized by a divine dissimulator. 

Some say Zeus impersonated a swan and took Leda; others say Venus pretended to be an Eagle pursuing Zeus in his fake swan persona; some say he pretended to fall into the lap of Leda (others say Nemesis) and swooned there in her protection until she fell asleep -- myths speak of divine beings, but have the waywardness of mortals. 

If canto 27 is haunted by tales of divine abductions and elaborate ruses and rapes, there is reason. The potent charms of Beatrice don't simply engage his devotion -- they uproot him from the beautiful nest because his actual origin is elsewhere. The verb describing this rooting, divellere, is quite strong -- it suggests a total tearing up, wounding, forcible dismemberment:

The word could describe what happened to Actaeon, or to Marsyas, or to Pentheus, another scion of Cadmus who at the end of Metamorphoses 3 is shredded by Bacchantes let by his mother. All these divine acts of destruction in Ovid occur within the nest of Leda. But the uprooting that happens to Dante here tears him out of that nest, beyond Gemini, beyond all location. As the new Actaeon, the new Ulysses, the new Icarus, the new Orpheus, the new Europa, the poet makes sure we know how much those tales of Eros meant to him, and to us.

We've not yet even mentioned the latter portion of canto 27. Its ambit is wide.

"Those bites of love": Enter Adam

E come a lume acuto si disonna 
per lo spirto visivo che ricorre 
a lo splendor che va di gonna in gonna,  

e lo svegliato ciò che vede aborre, 
sì nescïa è la sùbita vigilia 
fin che la stimativa non soccorre; 

così de li occhi miei ogne quisquilia
fugò Beatrice col raggio d'i suoi,
che rifulgea da più di mille milia:

onde mei che dinanzi vidi poi;
e quasi stupefatto domandai
d'un quarto lume ch'io vidi tra noi. 

And as at some keen light one wakes from sleep
By reason of the visual spirit that runs
Unto the splendour passed from coat to coat,

And he who wakes abhorreth what he sees,
So all unconscious is his sudden waking,
Until the judgment cometh to his aid,

So from before mine eyes did Beatrice
Chase every mote with radiance of her own,
That cast its light a thousand miles and more.

Whence better after than before I saw,
And in a kind of wonderment I asked
About a fourth light that I saw with us.   (Par. 26:73-81)

At the center of Paradiso 26, the canto of love / caritate, Dante's vision returns - he sees "better after than before."

What preceded this moment with its showy simile has been the catachetical Q and A with John, the eagle of Christ, about love. Dante has just spoken of "those bites" - quei morsi - that turned his love towards God. They are some of the most beautiful lines in the Commedia, and speak of the fallen world, its devouring of our being, as a giant Edenic garden whose fronde - leaves - Dante avers he loves:

"quanto da lui a lor di bene è porto.” (66)

"As much as he has granted them of good."

"quanto . . . è porto": Proportion and number proliferate in this canto of love. Somehow caritate and our ability to see even our fallen world as Edenic seem to be bound up with quantity.

"He" of course is the ortolano etterno. The world we have -- our being and time -- has teeth that strangely turn us toward the garden's maker.

Dante's vision (vista) was consunta in trying to see the material body of John. Are we on earth devoured in our mad flight to grasp something we cannot possibly imagine, let alone experience?


Enter Adam

The loss of Eden surely is factored into those morsi. If we stand back a bit, we note that the entire sphere of the stars is bracketed by two moments. In both, Dante looks back upon Earth, upon the entire course of his journey. We've spoken of the first, in canto 22. In another post, we'll compare it with the latter retrospective gaze in 27.

The point now is, between these two moments of closure, of taking "it all" in (each time the "all" is, paradoxically, more) - Dante has this return to vision. He likens it to an awakening from unconsciousness that begins with the terror of total absence of judgment, of stimativa - a word that surely conveys the power of measure, estimation, as well as judgment.

More precisely, can we call it "vision" when we see nothing that our minds can make sense of? Dante is dramatizing a moment that isn't so much vision as a sort of blind seeing - he experiences a sensory datum devoid of any intellectual or cognitive dimension, and it provokes fear.

As Beatrice, with a radiance that shines more than mille milia, clarifies his sight, Dante realizes that the three figures of theological virtue have been joined by a fourth light. Beatrice's words introduce the first man:

E la mia donna: “Dentro da quei rai
vagheggia il suo fattor l'anima prima
che la prima virtù creasse mai.”  (26:82-84)

The primacy of Adam is underscored. Another eye-catching simile likens the pilgrim to a fronda - again a leaf or branch, in any case an offspring of a tree - being bent by wind, that now springs back by its own virtù:

Come la fronda che flette la cima
nel transito del vento, e poi si leva
per la propria virtù che la soblima,

The pilgrim reels, amazed - stupendo - but he gathers himself, burning with questions for Adam, questions he knows he need not ask.

The next simile is itself stupendous. It will be the incipit for the next 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.

Quanto mondo: Dante's backward look

If Paradiso 22 is the stark, solitary realm of thunder and sublimity, canto 23 is another realm altogether. It is necessary to appreciate the artistic cogency with which the poet articulates all that is implicated in this move from the staircase of Saturn to the stars.

This begins at 22:100, when the pilgrim, at one sign (cenno) from Beatrice, suddenly accedes to the starry sphere. The use of hysteron proteron underscores the rapidity, and also does away with the tyranny with which time and causality are always linked (first cause, then effect), and seeing is distinct from being. Addressing the reader he says,

tu non avresti in tanto tratto e messo 
nel foco il dito, in quant' io vidi 'l segno 
che segue il Tauro e fui dentro da esso.

Thou hadst not thrust thy finger in the fire
And drawn it out again, before I saw
The sign that follows Taurus, and was in it. (22:109-111)

The simultaneity here signals a different temporal order, as well as a different mode of presence. Note that he sees and is within the sign of the Twins -- the sign (segno) no longer just re-presents the constellation, rather it is it.

Along with the erasure of temporality comes an almost casual sense of plenitude. No longer is there one star, one planet - there are migliaia - an immeasurable amount.

This is marked poignantly when, at Beatrice's direction, the poet turns back for one final look at where he has come from, taking in the entirety of creation beneath the stars:

I with my sight returned through one and all
  The sevenfold spheres, and I beheld this globe
  Such that I smiled at its ignoble semblance; 

And that opinion I approve as best
  Which doth account it least; and he who thinks
  Of something else may truly be called just.

I saw the daughter of Latona shining
  Without that shadow, which to me was cause
  That once I had believed her rare and dense. 

The aspect of thy son, Hyperion,
  Here I sustained, and saw how move themselves
  Around and near him Maia and Dione. 

Thence there appeared the temperateness of Jove
  'Twixt son and father, and to me was clear
  The change that of their whereabout they make; 

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. 

The threshing-floor (aiuolo) that maketh us so proud,
  To me revolving with the eternal Twins,
  Was all apparent made from hill to harbour!
Then to the beauteous eyes mine eyes I turned.  (22:133-154)

The repeated forms of "appear," "see," "manifest," "all" (tutto), "how great," "how swift," and "all apparent," coupled with the insistence on the genealogy of the gods, parents and children, with the highest three -- Mars, Jupiter, Saturn -- forming a pagan trinity, produces a totality completely in sync with the nature of the sub-starry universe. Planet-gods wander solitary through heavens; they have parents, they have children, they have stories, and all converge at the deepest point, the threshing floor where daughters and sons of gods/God make choices that determine their immortal ends.

A single gaze is able to represent this totality only because it is superliminal -- it speaks from the vantage point of the stars. Nature, in which individuals hash out their histories and die, giving rise to succeeding generations, here reaches its boundary. When Dante looks down from the stars, his mind is not overwhelmed by the vastness of Being, or by the turbulence of history, or the multiplicity of orbits and habitations. He is neither awed nor dizzied nor dazzled. His retrospective gaze has the serenity of a being taking it all in, with that smile --

io sorrisi del suo vil sembiante;

I smiled at its ignoble semblance;  (22:135)

-- a retrospective smile not unlike those on graves.

Hirst: "For the love of God"

Dante's Odyssean journey through Nature is ended. The ability to look back and take it all in is the ability of the narrator who has survived -- it's the moment when Odysseus can tell his tale in the court of Alcinous, and Aeneas can represent himself at Dido's palace.

Homer and Virgil's heroes of course had much more to see and do after their autobiographic moments, as does Dante's pilgrim. From this point on, the Christian poet will struggle with how to figurar that which is beyond Nature.