Difference in toto: Paradiso 32-33

Top: Birth of Dionysus Below: Triumph of Dionysus

ἢ ὥσπερ Σαπφώ, ὅτι τὸ ἀποθνῄσκειν κακόν·

οἱ θεοὶ γὰρ οὕτω κεκρίκασιν· ἀπέθνησκον γὰρ ἄν.

As Sappho says, death is a great evil

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yet that will is insufficient to reach the godhead.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Candid Raptor: The Poet as Ganymede in Par. 18

To briefly review: Paradiso 18 begins with the poet hesitant, uncertain, seemingly adrift in the echoing world of words and ambivalent symbols that mirror and point, obstruct and paralyze. He needs a guide but a guide as beautiful as Beatrice threatens to content him right where he is.

Beatrice points him away from herself - he sees the fervid face of Cacciaguida and hears a roll call of heroes before being carried upward to Jupiter. As this transition occurs, he finds the eyes of Beatrice again:

e vidi le sue luci tanto mere,
tanto gioconde, che la sua sembianza
vinceva li altri e l'ultimo solere.

 And so translucent I beheld her eyes,
  So full of pleasure, that her countenance
  Surpassed its other and its latest wont.  (18:55-57)

Among other things, this is a subtle reminder that Jupiter is the jovial planet, the temperate silver sphere. We've left the fiery passion of Mars behind, and will encounter the cold meditative realm of Saturn ahead. The expansion experienced in the next tercet's simile is an expansion of mind, heart, and ethical awareness:

E come, per sentir più dilettanza
 bene operando, l'uom di giorno in giorno
 s'accorge che la sua virtute avanza,

sì m'accors' io che 'l mio girare intorno
 col cielo insieme avea cresciuto l'arco,
 veggendo quel miracol più addorno.

 And as, by feeling greater delectation,
  A man in doing good from day to day
  Becomes aware his virtue is increasing,

So I became aware that my gyration
  With heaven together had increased its arc,
  That miracle beholding more adorned.  (18:58-63)

There's a speed, a kind of expanding upward fall, that foreshadows the figure of the eagle and other birds in motion that will resonate in this sphere. But the poet is not flapping arms or imitation wings, like some wannabe Daedalus. This upward gyration (reversal of his ride to lower hell on Geryon) owes itself to another. Something is powering him and Beatrice up and outward -- it is not unreasonable to think here of Ganymede, plucked from Earth by Jove in the form of an eagle, because his beauty seduced the god.

After the poet has construed, or conceived, the letters, words, and figures of M, Lily, and Eagle, he's read the text of Wisdom - an imperative - and it spurs him to a complex apostrophe:

 O dolce stella, quali e quante gemme
 mi dimostraro che nostra giustizia
 effetto sia del ciel che tu ingemme!

O gentle star! what and how many gems
  Did demonstrate to me, that all our justice
  Effect is of that heaven which thou ingemmest! (18:115-117)

The between heaven and our justice on earth is at stake. As the spirits of Jupiter have spelled the words, and as the words are from a mind that has no guide, because it guides all things, so Dante's text, repeating the words spelled out, is speaking not his own mind, nor the spirits' minds, but Mind. (Besides other readers' suggestions such as "monarchia," this "emme" -- the central letter of Dante's alphabet - could also stand for "mente.")

Like the pure eyes of Beatrice, the text speaking is not merely Dante's text, but the pure instance of Wisdom :

26 For she is the brightness of eternal light, and the unspotted mirror of God's majesty, and the image of his goodness.

26 candor est enim lucis aeternae et speculum sine macula Dei maiestatis et imago bonitatis illius. (7:26)

The candor of Jupiter is the lucidity of a figure and text that doesn't hide, or mislead, or turn and try to pass itself as a god - for that is folly:

15 For they have esteemed all the idols of the heathens for gods, which neither have the use of eyes to see, nor noses to draw breath, nor ears to hear, nor fingers of hands to handle, and as for their feet, they are slow to walk. 

16 For man made them: and he that borroweth his own breath, fashioned them. For no man can make a god like to himself.

 15 quoniam omnia idola nationum aestimaverunt deos quibus neque oculorum visus est ad videndum neque nares ad percipiendum spiritum neque aures ad audiendum nec digiti manuum ad tractandum sed et pedes eorum pigri ad ambulandum 

16 homo enim fecit illos et qui spiritum mutuatus est is finxit illos nemo enim sibi similem homo poterit deum fingere

Wisdom, among other things, knows the difference between what is truly divine, and what is man-made imitation. Only fools worship idols sans eyes, ears, nose, fingers, or breath. In the joviality of clay feet "slow to walk" is laughter that springs up, uncontrived, when confronted with mortals' folly.

The poet thus has had an encounter with something that is not figural, not mimetic, not idolatrous, but the literal candor of the word. This motion from letters into words that form the parts of speech that form the sentence that speaks Mind is an act of clear reading. Dante's text scrupulously repeats, combines and makes intelligible what was there, which now transforms into the raptor of Jove.

If we try now to "see" what's happened to the poet in this canto, he too has metamorphosed. Like the virtuous man who suddenly feels the dilettanza of his good works, his ambit grows as he reaches a tempered vision of the mind of god. And not just vision, because to see "what God means" is to be summoned in a way that one cannot refuse, a summons which is more like being caught up, rapt from one's own thoughts, one's own life, to act. Like Ezekiel who ate the scrolls, or Jonah, or Isaiah.

The underlying thesis here -- a submerged thread of this series of readings of the Commedia for some time -- is that Dante's poem does more than speak. It acts. The poet here reads what is inscribed against the whiteness of Jupiter and turns to address the source of that inscription:

Wherefore I pray the Mind, in which begin
  Thy motion and thy virtue, to regard
  Whence comes the smoke that vitiates thy rays;

So that a second time it now be wroth
  With buying and with selling in the temple
  Whose walls were built with signs and martyrdoms!

O soldiery of heaven, whom I contemplate,
  Implore for those who are upon the earth
  All gone astray after the bad example!

The poet first addresses Mind, then the milizia del ciel - the power of heaven which he is contemplating as he speaks. Poet and pilgrim - he who saw the soldiery then, and who contemplates it now, are contemporaneous in contemplating Wisdom. In calling upon those he addresses, Dante is reiterating Cacciaguida's roll call on Mars, when to name the heroes of Christendom was to move them to action.

Then the poet turns to the Pope. I'll address that third apostrophe in one last post.