A few notes . . . concluded (more or less)

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

Part 1     Part 2     Part 3    Part 4     Part 5

Paradiso 4 begins with three hypothetical exempla -- a man, a lamb, and a dog, each confronted with a need to choose one of two options. The needs are rooted in instincts -- hunger, self-protection, hunting -- but since the options offer no clue as to which is to be preferred, the ending in each case is death.

Why does Dante place this depiction of impasse, or undecidability, here? I can think of two reasons (both equally good, of course):

1. In cantos 1 to 3, Paradiso has followed a program that "ungrounds" the usual supports of intellect (as derived from the Greeks and scholastics). Perception, substance, and the modalities of space and time are not destroyed, but confidence in their use and verity is suspended. The pilgrim repeatedly has difficulty deciding whether what he is dealing with is here or there, or not here at all, or both here and there. Canto 4 will complicate that still further.

2. Taking a broader view, it can be seen that the pilgrim has developed from the soul lost in the selva oscura of Inferno 1 to the man who has been guided through Hell and Purgatory by one of the most learned classical minds, who releases him from his tutelage in Purgatorio 27 thus:

"Non aspettar mio dir più né mio cenno;
libero, dritto e sano è tuo arbitrio,
e fallo fora non fare a suo senno:
per ch'io te sovra te corono e mitrio.”

"Expect no more or word or sign from me;
Free and upright and sound is thy free-will,
And error were it not to do its bidding;
Thee o'er thyself I therefore crown and mitre!"

Dante's schooling is not complete, but he has followed Virgil as far as one can via nature alone; his will is perfected. Having entered Purgatory as one who, Virgil tells Cato, liberta va cercando - "goes in search of liberty," Dante is now free to govern himself. 

It's this freedom that is found at an impasse at the opening of Paradiso 4:

Intra due cibi, distanti e moventi
d'un modo, prima si morria di fame,
che liber' omo l'un recasse ai denti;

Between two viands, equally removed
And tempting, a free man would die of hunger
Ere either he could bring unto his teeth.

The hungry man, poised exquisitely between equal feasts, cannot choose because he cannot tell which to prefer. His power to choose, though free, lacks traction -- dare we say because any methodologies of discernment have been subtracted from it.

Along with the loosening of the underprops of knowledge, there has been a concurrent concern in Paradiso 3 with will, illustrated in the stories of Piccarda and Costanza. What constitutes a vow, when is it effective, and what happens when one's intention to maintain a vow confronts a force that compels the one who wills to do other than she wills? The stories of the nuns, told in canto 3, are discussed and illuminated by Beatrice in canto 4.

St. Lawrence

Of course the predicament as described that the free man (and lamb and dog) is found in is not literally the case, but rather an analogy of the situation that Dante is actually confronting: two doubts assail him at once, making it impossible for him to speak, to ask Beatrice about one or the other:

da li miei dubbi d'un modo sospinto,

he is immobilized.

Both doubts involve reading. One has to do with whether the experience he's just had with souls in the Moon can be understood to support a literal reading of Plato's Timaeus. The other has to do with how to read the tales of those souls, Piccarda and Costanza -- to understand what they are saying about vows kept and broken. 

Beatrice's response to Dante says that to take the Timaeus literally, with its cyclical vision of souls determined by their planetary point of origin and return, would be a grave error -- indeed, it's the error that led to pagan polytheism, she avers. 

She contrasts such a literal reading of Plato with the statement that what Dante just experienced in canto 3 is a kind of sign. The souls appear and converse, but this is how Paradiso and Scripture fa segno -- make signs, which accommodate themselves to our limited faculties that depend upon the senses to arrive at knowledge.

So instead of being literal, the experience of the pilgrim is figural. Beatrice is unequivocal in setting up such a relation:

Souls in Paradiso : Pilgrim ::  Scripture : Human Reader*

Here the poem is making a meta-statement about its own reading.

This mode of "condescension" -- which, for example, attributes hands and feet to God and angels -- revises what the pilgrim has experienced -- both in canto 3 and throughout his voyage. Those angels he saw in Inferno 9 and throughout Purgatorio? We and the pilgrim "saw" them with human attributes, but now we learn that they were signs, i.e., figural accommodations to our limitations. We and the pilgrim have been experiencing allegory without being aware of it. 

If we thought we were on thin ice before, we are now in vertiginous territory. Looking back, we can no longer "see" those angels the same -- looking ahead, we are armed with the insight that all that we will experience will be other than what it truly is. If we were not told this, could we ever have discovered it for ourselves? Let's hold that question for now. The task of reading proceeds in this new "light."

This post is already longer than intended. A couple of quick observations relating this complex web of themes to certain poetic effects.

1. Intellect and Condescension. Condescension invites us to consider a mode of signification that is not rooted in nature. That is to say, when the power of the Lord is compared with mighty thunder, we are well within the tropes of the sensory, cognitive mirroring of the natural world. But when the Lord is given feet to walk in the Garden of Eden, or a mouth to speak with, there is no necessary natural link between the signifier (foot, mouth) and signified (Lord). From our perspective, as Beatrice says, such images are necessary to help our limited powers of apprehension; but from the perspective of what they "represent," they may be entirely arbitrary. We are faced with signs that neither depend on the senses nor can yield knowledge of what they signify by way of scientific experiment, logic, or any other mode of attention to their appearance. We are beyond mimesis leading to the question of how, given our limited intellects, such signs are to be read.

2. Will and Choice. In Canto 5, Beatrice will call the will's liberty the greatest gift (lo maggior don) that God made in creation. One can easily take the opening of canto 4 as an expression of crisis -- the will is paralyzed, the intellect is of no use, the hungry man dies. Following as it does from shocks to our abilities to be certain of what we know, it seems to put in question the very point of free will. For if it is impossible to decide what's better than what, our freedom comes to resemble that of the couch potato who has 500 channels, none of which offers discernible value -- meaningful difference -- over the others.

At root here is the nexus of knowledge and power, intellect and will. To have one without the other is to have nothing. One needs both power and a sense that can penetrate discerningly the intricacies of Nature, a mind that can accede to whatever lies beyond. 

Beatrice makes this all or nothingness clear with a play on words: 

li nostri voti, e vòti in alcun canto. (Purg. 3.67)

A vow (voto), if broken, is void (vòto). Humans act when performing promises, vows, which only exist so long as the will that made them is intact. We are in the realm that can perhaps benefit from an understanding of performative speech acts, in which meaning, being, and action may coincide.

If action without the guidance of intellect is chaos, and intellect itself is compromised by limits to our senses and understanding, and if signs no longer can be reliably interpreted to mean what they appear to be, the resulting paralysis might well lead to terminal frustration. As an aside, this can be linked with modern crises of faith, and post-modern gestures of futility. As we saw with Belacqua in Purgatorio 4 and now again with the "free man" who dies of hunger in Paradiso 4, Samuel Beckett's ghost is likely hiding under a nearby rock.

But in fact Paradiso 4 isn't riled by the sturm und drang issuing from these affronts to will and intellect. The pilgrim, so tied in knots by his dubbi as to be unable to speak, is resolved and restored to an energetic plenitude through the ministrations of Beatrice.

Nebuchadnezzar

This is not to say the tragic dimensions of this crisis of knowledge and will are absent -- they are there, embedded for example in the allusions to Nebuchadnezzar and Alcmaeon -- powerful kings, trapped by signs.

The tales of foretold events relate to the asymmetry of intellect and will. Nebuchadnezzar wishes to know what his portentous dream means, and puts his interpreters to the test. Amphiaraus wishes to control events in light of a future event -- his own death, and imposes his will upon his son:

• Nebuchadnezzar cannot understand his dream, but knows it portends something big about his future. In his frustration at being unable to decipher it, he demands that his soothsayers not merely interpret his dream, but first tell him what he dreamed, under pain of death if they fail -- an interpreter's nightmare if ever there was one.

• Alcmaeon's father, Amphiaraus, foresaw his own death at Thebes, and imposed his will upon his son Alcmaeon: the impious killing of Alcmaeon's mother, Eriphyle, as soon as Amphiaraus's foreseen end took place. 

These nightmares of  violent madness and vengeful matricide trace the tragic potential of the "free man's" predicament in Paradiso 4. Such extremes are certainly implicit, but in the manner of distant tales, or islands seen safely from a seaworthy ship. The poet of the Paradiso wants his readers to be mindful of the darker implications of the crisis of intellect and will, but those resonances do not dictate the tonality of the song. The semantic and tonal complexity at work here might be compared to the burgeoning polyphony of the 14th century.

Near the end of canto 4, the pilgrim is inebriated with the light of Beatrice's teaching.

"O amanza del primo amante, o diva,”
diss' io appresso, “il cui parlar m'inonda
e scalda sì, che più e più m'avviva,

"O love of the first lover, O divine,"
Said I forthwith, "whose speech inundates me
And warms me so, it more and more revives me,

The "free man" of the start (aka Buridan's ass) is now seen more as a cartoon than as a doomed, tragic king. We might not yet know why we are firmly in the comic mode, but, in this reviving warmth, we know we are.

*John Freccero formulated it this way in a lecture many years ago.

Milton's God and Wagner's Wotan

Anyone who subscribes to the New York Review of Books should have a look at Stephen Greenblatt's piece, "The Lonely Gods." Here's the beginning of the article from the NYRB site:

When James Levine’s tangled halo of white hair was picked up by the spotlight shining down over the orchestra pit at the May 9 performance of Die Walküre, at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the audience roared with pleasure and relief. With good reason. Levine’s bad back and other health woes had forced him to pull out of multiple events he was scheduled to conduct, including one recent performance of this opera, the second in the Ring cycle. But there were no signs of diminished vigor or control on that evening.

Greenblatt eventually gets to something important regarding the visions of divine power and human freedom as found in Paradise Lost and Die Walkure, but the full article is behind a paywall. Thanks to Jutta I have a print-out and will be happy to share. Here's a comment on it from a listserv. By all means have a look, especially if you happened to catch the recent Met Opera performance of Wagner's opera.

Polkinghorne Interview

… a dark

Illimitable ocean without bound,

Without dimension; where length, breadth, and highth,

And time and place are lost; where eldest Night

And Chaos, ancestors of Nature, hold

Eternal anarchy, amidst the noise

Of endless wars, and by confusion stand.

Those intrigued by Milton's effort to grapple with the question of scientific authority within a theological frame that posits free will might be interested in this interview with John Polkinghorne, a particle physicist and Anglican theologian.

From the transcript:

If working in science teaches you anything, it is that the physical world is surprising. And I was a quantum physicist, and the quantum world is totally different from the world of every day. It's cloudy, it's fitful, you don't know where things are, if you know what they're doing. If you know what they're doing, you don't know where they are.

And:

20th-century science has seen the death of a merely mechanical and merely clockwork view of the world. It came first of all through quantum theory. At the subatomic level, quantum events are not precise and determinate. They have a certain randomness to them. They have a certain cloudiness to them, so that that process isn't clockwork.

. . . So the world is certainly not merely mechanical. And I think, actually, we always knew that because we have always known that we are not mechanisms. We are not automata. We have the power to choose, to act in the world.

. . . 20th-century science has loosened up our view of the physical world. It's no longer a piece of gigantic cosmic clockwork. It's a world in which we can conceive ourselves as the inhabitants and acting in it and helping to bring about the future.

There's a very interesting scientific insight which says that regions where real novelty occurs, where really new things happen that you haven't seen before, are always regions which are at the edge of chaos. They are regions where cloudiness and clearness, order and disorder, interlace each other. If you're too much on the orderly side of that borderline, everything is so rigid that nothing really new happens. You just get rearrangements. If you're too far on the haphazard side, nothing persists, everything just falls apart. It's these ambiguous areas, where order and disorder interlace, where really new things happen, where the action is, if you like. And I think that reflects itself both in the development of life and in many, many human decisions.

Satan Leaving the Court of Chaos

Guarding the issue: Divine Children and their defenses

In a preceding post, ("The Air Jordan of English Poetry") we looked somewhat closely at an instance where a poetic hairball of allusions seems to have gone astray, and asked:

Has a bastardization of myths taken place here? ... The divine stories have wandered, or gotten torn from, from the original springs of inspired speech. They've gotten polluted, contaminated; there's no clear stream.

I don't want to convey the impression we're accusing Milton of nodding, although the blind poet might readily be forgiven if he did happen to slip on one or another bit of arcana. But moving from a description of the passage to an initial effort at interpretation, I wish to argue that Milton knows very well what he's doing here, and that the "mash-up" of gods, mortals and fabled gardens from various literary tributaries here suggests larger thematic and poetic concerns. After all, consider what's at stake: the stable continuity of divine and royal houses through the survival of the children.

Look at where in the text this happens: Milton is about to describe our and Satan's first view of our forebears in Paradise. Before getting to this, we go on a detour through four major ancient myths involving divine or royal children protected or unprotected by gods or kings: Proserpina, Daphne, Dionysus and the Ethiop line of Abassin Kings.

The series begins with the daughter of Demeter who was raped by Hades -- the god of the Underworld, brother of Zeus, took her, made her his queen, and later allowed Demeter to share her -- accounting for the birth of the diversity of seasons. Daphne was about to be raped by Apollo when she became a laurel. Dionysus, born of a woman then re-born of Zeus, had to be hidden from the wrath of Hera; of the Abassin kings, we have no myth, just the tale of their high secret garden at the headwaters of the Nile.

In other words, we are reminded at this crucial juncture of a world in which helpless children must be hidden, concealed, protected -- from other gods as well as from men and beastly predators. Dynasties are fragile, and children in this world are defenseless unless a wise and nurturing divinity, or a concealment or strategic defensive position, protect them from harm.

We've seen that Paradise is also a high place, protected by thorns and bramble, but the dangers here are not those of overpowering force. Adam and Eve are not defenseless babes. They are lordly, serene, and, though naked, fully capable of defending themselves, like David before Goliath, or Daniel in the lions' den. They are unexampled among pagan children of gods, since they were made to take care of themselves: sufficient to have stood, tho' free to fall. Angels surround them to ward off bad spirits, but bad spirits can and will gain access. The entire burden of defense is placed upon the children of God, because they have free will.

In light of Milton's portrait of the first couple, the preceding fables of hidden gods, including Ammon and Zeus himself, serve a key function. They offer a vision of a contrasting fallen world, in which even the highest deities and royal progeny are subject to the vicissitudes of force and desire. Only here in Paradise are found first-born children who are equipped to handle all comers. The ancient fables, Milton's web of allusions suggests, spoke of a world of mere nature, a Hobbesian dog-eat-dog and devil-take-the-hindmost world, in which the linear order of generations goes astray, bloodlines and families are muddled or disrupted, and nations share (or blend) gods as children share crayons. The series of allusions end in fruitless confusion when, at the very secluded (and very legendary) source of the Nile, we are driven to question the purity of our sources, the authority of their genesis. For Milton, so much depends upon beginnings. The passage turns out to concern the purity of the memory of origins and of poetic filiation as well as royal and biological generation.

Unlike the pagan fables, Milton's tale will sing of how the devil took the foremost. But not without the understanding that it didn't have to be that way.