A few notes . . . part 2

This is the second in a series of posts about the opening of the Paradiso. 

Part 1     Part 2     Part 3     Part 4     Part 5

The somewhat detailed look into Paradiso 2 in the most recent post served to interrupt the effort to trace a pattern begun a few days earlier, but it was quite helpful. How so should become clear if we go slightly ahead.

Let's look again that scene in Paradiso 3 where Dante says he made an error opposite to that of Narcissus, thinking the faces appearing to him in the moon were specchiati sembianti - mirrored semblances. Turning around to see the source of the images, he says, e nulla vidi - and I saw nothing.

The error here is not simply the opposite of that of the boy who fell in love with his own image; it is also the exact reversal of what happens in at sunrise in Purgatorio 2: Dante, expecting to see Virgil's shadow next to his own, and seeing nothing, turns to where Virgil should be, and in fact still is. Virgil reproves him for mistrusting -- he doesn't cast a shadow because he is one. 

Io mi volsi dallato con paura
d'essere abbandonato, quand' io vidi
solo dinanzi a me la terra oscura; 

e 'l mio conforto: “Perché pur diffidi?”
a dir mi cominciò tutto rivolto;
“non credi tu me teco e ch'io ti guidi?

Unto one side I turned me, with the fear
Of being left alone, when I beheld
Only in front of me the ground obscured. 

"Why dost thou still mistrust?" my Comforter
Began to say to me turned wholly round;
"Dost thou not think me with thee, and that I guide thee?

These scenes in the third canto of each canticle set up mini-paradigms that resonate with the nature of each world the pilgrim is experiencing. For Dante in Purgatorio, it is a matter of trust -- submitting to an authority that is not immediately visible but which, from past experience, one knows to be reliable. (This is also why the Muses in Purgatorio are led by Calliope -- they are on a mission to rhetorically demolish false guides.)

Here in Paradiso 3, the mode is no longer the shadowy realm of expectation, belief, or trust, but of increasingly brilliant surprise. The seemingly mirrored semblances are not images or shadows, but in fact the very beings they appear to be.* The substance of things hoped for is given before it can be hoped for, and this is "revealed" as becomes clear in the nothingness (nulla) the poet turns to see.

This surprise reversal has the structure of hysteron proteron, as used by the poet in the image of the arrow that strikes the target in canto 2:

e forse in tanto in quanto un quadrel posa
e vola e da la noce si dischiava,

And in such space perchance as strikes a bolt
And flies, and from the notch unlocks itself

This figure that reverses cause and effect, completion and beginning, is the challenging narrative trope of Paradiso -- "challenging" because it violates the sequential order of ordinary quest narrative. It also reverses the prefigurative mode in which the Christian Middle Ages read the Bible. The Old Testament was read, as in the superb title of a book on Milton, as "shadowy types" that prefigured the truth (logos) of the New Testament. Once revealed, the Word obviated quest.

If one looks at the three cantos 3 from the perspective of poetics, we can add to the order of the three canticles we began once before:

Inf: hope forever lost                                    -- the letter: "abandon all hope"
Purg: hope actively propelling one ahead       -- shadowy types: guide to truth
Par.: hope substantiated                                -- truth

One could go on ticking off attributes of each canticle that fall into something of this order, but the last thing I want is to overschematize the Commedia. The poem complicates itself as it goes along, and that's more interesting.

How does canto 2 help with the effort to discern a pattern? Consider what we found: When Dante the pilgrim enters the moon, he bogs down his journey by asking Beatrice about the man in the moon, a fabled figure dreamed of by men who can't see him face to face.

But even as Dante is asking Beatrice about this shadowy type, he is himself a man in the moon incarnate. In Par. 3.43-45, the poet explicitly relates the co-joined human and moon to the Incarnation, which will be self evident when we finally get to see it.

Lì si vedrà ciò che tenem per fede,
non dimostrato, ma fia per sé noto
a guisa del ver primo che l'uom crede.

There will be seen what we receive by faith,
Not demonstrated, but self-evident
In guise of the first truth that man believes.

The "spirit" of this scene, its wit, playfully gives us a lunatical misdirection of a quester who asks about distant spots and signs when he in fact is the very thing (a sort of loony λόγος) about which he is asking. This bewilderment tickles, and Beatrice's smile conveys full awareness of what fools these mortals be. Within this frame, laughter can be relaxed and even medicinal -- to see one's own error, even among the wise, will now and again occasion a cathartic spasm of self-debunking laughter.

While the poem is registering esprit on several comedic levels, it never loses sight of the reader, whom it warned about venturing too far out to sea. Dante's bark (legno) is heading for the deepest waters, and those who fail to see their own folly are most at risk of becoming the drowned man the poet of Inferno 1 nearly was.

*This point will be looked at in more detail when we discuss canto 4 in the continuation.

This is the sec in a series of posts about the opening movement of Dante's Paradiso. Here are the other parts: 

Part 1     Part 3     Part 4   

to be continued . . .

Revising the Man in the Moon: Paradiso 2

Our detailed look at Beatrice's language in Paradiso 2 the other day made clear that Dante wasn't kidding when at the opening of the canto he told folks following his wake in little boats to turn back for fear of getting smarriti. As in Inferno 1.3, smarrito means lost, but here, on the vast sea of being, hopelessly so.

The address to the reader makes reading this canticle, and recursively this canto in particular, a journey fraught with peril. To err here - to miss the tracks that lead the way -- could set one adrift without a guide.

If this caveat lector seems a bit hyperbolic, it's in keeping with a certain aura of irony in Paradiso 2. Barely has the pilgrim reached the moon before he's deep into moon spots, mirrors and, ultimately, a vision of an intelligent universe, all conveyed through the interplay of light, medium, and eye. To anyone expecting solemn anticipations of the Beatific Vision, the oddly mundane "science" of moon spots has to be slightly jarring.

Take that sense of being jarred a bit further. When one is expecting one thing but gets another, that defeat or surprise can occasion consternation. It can also be the source of comedy. Dante is amazed by the violation of earthly physics that allows him to co-occupy the same "place" as the moon. It doesn't seem that the moon penetrates his body, yet somehow his body and the moon's body are conjoined.

He goes on to ask Beatrice about the moon's spots, alluding in passing to the figure of the Man in the Moon, fabled (favoleggiare) in Italy to be Cain carrying a bundle of thorns (the thorns appear in the Commedia's other reference to Cain, in Inf. 20.126ff):

Ma ditemi: che son li segni bui

di questo corpo, che la giuso in terra 

fan di Cain favoleggiare altrui?  

But tell me, what are the dark signs on this body which make men on earth below tell the tale of Cain? (Par.49-51)

The question will provoke Beatrice's quite elaborate thought experiments in which both razor-sharp logic and the appeal to empirical experience are employed to present a very literal argument (about light and mediating substances) leading to what she confidently sees as a demolition of any hypothesis that "sees" variations in the heavens as rooted in mere degrees of material density.

But is there not also some playfulness here? First, the pilgrim asks not about spots, but about segni - signs - and says such signs make people tell fables of Cain. I.e., these fabulists are misreading signs and coming up with wild notions in which the second human born to Eve (in some traditions, Cain was not the son of Adam, but of Satan) forever carries a bundle of thorns, on the moon alone, unable ever to return to the community of men.

For men on earth, Cain is "the man in the moon," and this is a wildly inaccurate idea of the actual moon that springs from seeing signs (spots) and inventing a story that holds the place of a hypothesis -- it purports, however playfully, to explain what the signs mean. It is a humorous errant reading of these signs, possible in part due to the great distance between human eyes and the moon's spots.

The joke gets better: Dante has just told us that at this very moment, he was literally "in" the moon -- we have an actual (if literary) man in the moon alluding to the fabulous fictional man in the moon, and he's basically saying, "since we're here, can you help me see what these signs really are?"

We then get the tortuous proof of what they are not -- the display of logical reasoning is difficult, dense, and borders on a parody of scientific reasoning -- but the negative power of the insight leads to a change of mind which Beatrice (smiling throughout) foretells via this marvelous simile:

"Or come ai colpi delli caldi rai

della neve riman nudo il suggetto

e dal colore e dal freddo primai

cosi remiso te nell'intelletto

voglio informar di luce si vivace

che ti tremolera nel suo aspetto."

"Now, as smitten by the warm rays, the substance of the snow is left bare both of its former color and its cold, so I want to inform you, left thus bare in your mind, with a light so alive that you'll scintillate in its view." (Par. 2. 106-111)*

Beatrice gives us the metamorphosis of phase change as metanoia. The limpid waters of the mind will then be in- or re-formed by living light enabling a vision of the universe as divine intelligence self-explicating by gradations:

così l'intelligenza sua bontate

multiplicata per le stelle spiega,

girando sé sovra sua unitate.

so the Intelligence unfolds its bounty, multiplied through the stars, itself wheeling on its own unity.

An intelligence like a scintilla of joy in the pupil of an eye:

Per la natura lieta onde deriva,

la virtù mista per lo corpo luce

come letizia per pupilla viva.

By the joyous nature from which it springs, the mingled virtue shines through the body as joy through the living pupil. (Par. 2. 142-44)

Beatrice has erased Dante's misreading of the signs on the moon, which turns out to have been quite as aberrant as the fables of the people about Cain. She's replaced that materialist fable with a new vision that revises both what one can see, and how one sees.

Note that she does not use the word "angel" at any point. The word only appears in the phrase "pan delli angeli" in line 11. To "informar" our unfrozen minds, she employs words that speak of power (virtu) and joy, eyes and light -- simple human words. The argument is crucial to the project of the Paradiso. For what replaces the lunatic screed of Cain and dense and rare is the image and seal -- l'image e . . . suggello -- of the mente profonde. (131-32).

Instead of marks, spots, Cain, or signs that indicate material density, the heavens regard us with mind, peace, joy. There is a gleam in the pupil which, recursively, shines in Beatrice's eye, reflected in Dante's eye. 

Paradiso as poetic enterprise stands or falls depending upon whether we in our little boats come to experience this happy peace, this regard. Our reading, our standing, our falling. 

A few notes on how the Paradiso begins

First in a series of posts about the opening movement of Dante's Paradiso. 

Part 1     Part 2     Part 3     Part 4     Part 5

The first tercet of the Paradiso puts into play three ways that la gloria manifests:

La gloria di colui che tutto move

per l'universo penetra, e risplende

in una parte più e meno altrove. 

These modes are in tension. One might think of gloria as light, but it is also power. It has three attributes: it moves all, it penetrates all that exists, and it shines back in some parts more, less in others.

It will take Dante the rest of the canticle to fully work out the implications of this tercet. A few notes:

As all authors must, Dante has to establish early on the sources of his authority and set out the scope of his argument. Paradiso offers the eyes and voice of Beatrice, and the inspiration of "Apollo." Canto 1 makes clear that the poet's experience is compromised severely: he can't actually remember more than a shadow of this voyage. Unlike the old Ulysses, not only will this new seafarer among the stars not have a simple tale to relate; he also can't be sure to what extent what he does relate represents what he experienced.

In Canto 2, Beatrice offers an experiment** to help Dante see that the variations in the visible universe cannot be explained by a simple materialist model with one differentiating principle, i.e., density.

The use of a replicable experiment along with the logic of her argument seems to provide some grounds for hope that mankind may possess some reliable knowledge of the heavens.

But this apparent clarity will be challenged in the first circle. In Canto 2.37-39, he finds himself in the moon -- somehow his body (corpo) and the Moon occupy the same point in space:

S'io era corpo, e qui non si concepe

com' una dimensione altra patio,

ch'esser convien se corpo in corpo repe,

If I was body, (and we here conceive not

How one dimension tolerates another,

Which needs must be if body enter body,)

And, if he can't quite understand his body's relationship to the moon, it gets more complicated.

In Canto 3 he meets Piccarda, one of several faces that appear in the moon's pearly . . . one can't quite say surface, since he and they are less "on" the moon than in it. The faces at first seem a kind of mirror image of Beatrice's mirror experiment from Canto 2. They seem reflections (3.10-15):

Quali per vetri trasparenti e tersi,
o ver per acque nitide e tranquille,
non sì profonde che i fondi sien persi, 

tornan d'i nostri visi le postille
debili sì, che perla in bianca fronte
non vien men forte a le nostre pupille;

Such as through polished and transparent glass,
Or waters crystalline and undisturbed,
But not so deep as that their bed be lost,

Come back again the outlines of our faces
So feeble, that a pearl on forehead white
Comes not less speedily unto our eyes;

But the faces turn out to be not reflections (risplende) but rather, like Dante, somehow have penetrated (penetra) the moon (3.16-24): 

tali vid' io più facce a parlar pronte;
per ch'io dentro a l'error contrario corsi
a quel ch'accese amor tra l'omo e 'l fonte.

Sùbito sì com' io di lor m'accorsi,
quelle stimando specchiati sembianti,
per veder di cui fosser, li occhi torsi;

e nulla vidi, e ritorsili avanti
dritti nel lume de la dolce guida,
che, sorridendo, ardea ne li occhi santi.

Such saw I many faces ready to speak,
So that I ran in error opposite
To that which kindled love 'twixt man and fountain.

As soon as I became aware of them,
Esteeming them as mirrored semblances,
To see of whom they were, mine eyes I turned, 

And nothing saw, and once more turned them forward
Direct into the light of my sweet guide,
Who, smiling, glowed in her holy eyes.

In a marvelous, delicate allusion (3.16-18), the poet tells us that his dis-covering that the images are not images - turning around to see the source of the reflections, he sees nothing (nulla)* - was an error the precise opposite of that which ignited Narcissus's love.

Can we see a pattern developing here? What do the scientific rigor of Beatrice's mirror experiment and the entire question of the man in the moon have to do with the pilgrim's profound corporeal and spatial disorientation in Canto 3, and with perhaps more fundamental indeterminacies opened up in Canto 4?

to be continued . . .

This is the fourth in a series of posts about the opening movement of Dante's Paradiso. Here are the other parts: 

Part 1     Part 2     Part 3     Part 4

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*Note that the pilgrim's mistake in Paradiso 3 can productively be read in relation to a different mistake made by him in Purgatorio 3, which we examined in some detail here and here -- the moment when he doesn't see Virgil's shadow, and infers (falsely) that his guide has abandoned him.

**Thanks to Paul Johnston for sharing this representation of Beatrice's thought-experiment from Mark Musa's Paradise: Commentary. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004. p. 23.