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.

Truth, desire and doubt in Par. 4

In Paradiso 4, Beatrice has just completed a subtle explication of will -- its elemental power, its potential to collude with violence. She clarifies how one who submits to coercion is nonetheless culpable by choosing not to escape from submission should the opportunity offer.

Dante is grateful, and, taking in her explanation, he finds another dubbio, a doubt that leads to another question.

He introduces it this way:

Io veggio ben che già mai non si sazia
nostro intelletto, se 'l ver non lo illustra
di fuor dal qual nessun vero si spazia.

Posasi in esso, come fera in lustra,
tosto che giunto l'ha; e giugner puollo:
se non, ciascun disio sarebbe frustra.

Nasce per quello, a guisa di rampollo,
a piè del vero il dubbio; ed è natura
ch'al sommo pinge noi di collo in collo.   

I see well that our intellect is never satisfied unless the truth enlighten it beyond which no truth can range.

In that it rests as soon as it gains it, like a beast in its lair; and it can gain it, else every desire were vain.

Doubt, therefore, like a shoot, springs from the root of the truth, and it is nature that urges us to the summit from height to height. (Sinclair trans. Par. 124-132)

Here the intellect reflects upon its own activity. The fact that intellect non si sazia - never satisfies itself -- assimilates the mind's effort to know the truth to desire, appetite, to a restless urge. The only thing that will bring the mind to rest is if it is illuminated by a truth outside of which no truth can range (si spazia).

The mind and truth here are in erotic tension -- the only thing that can satisfy the craving of the mind is a truth beyond which no truth can be found. Spaziarsi connotes wandering, playfully enlarging one's walk, one's passegiare, because it's enjoyable (see spassare).

Like sparziarsi, "di fuor dal qual" offers a spatial figure: outside of which no truth can range suggests there is a limit, although what is intended has no limit. Finite space is invoked to annihilate finite truth.

The blandness of the spatial figure is curious. To render a notion of the ultimate truth, the poet could have offered a riot of images relating to sublime totality, to the godhead, to the absolute in its infinite grandeur. Instead, we get a kind of limiting illumination, setting a border beyond which, simply, no truth can play. In the context of erotic play of mind and truth, to suggest that truth is that which limits the play of truth has two possibilities: either truth is so satisfying that it is like the ultimate beloved whose presence obliterates all others, or truth kills the play of difference, otherness, in its sober, self-contained precision.

The passage speaks of the truth about truth, but offers us a teasing ambiguity about its nature - is it sublimely beyond all bound (then how can it be distinguished from falsity?), or is its exacting correctness so binding as to end all speech? The first opens the door to the plenitude of the infinite; the second shuts it within cold tautology that brooks no argument -- the only thing one can say about the ultimate truth is that it is the ultimate truth: A = A.

A fine line: Is truth unending erotic bliss, or is it the All as baleful punctum?

Such balanced equivalence, or ambivalence, does not seem typical of this work. This is a poet who is never willing to leave something undecided -- especially something as urgent as the nature of ultimate truth. Of course it's the character Dante, not the author, who makes this articulation.

But this is the canto that began with a hungry man facing an undecidable choice between two perfectly equivalent objects of desire. There it was a simile employing a series of hypotheses; here, though, the pilgrim is describing to Beatrice, the source of truth, the plight of the intellect in the act of pursuing truth. What if truth is both infinite plenitude and aloof inarguability?

At this critical moment, on this blade's edge, the passage turns from the nature of truth to finding nature in our pursuit of it. One astute commentator is struck by the metaphors drawn from nature that now appear. Benvenuto da Imola, whose fine commentary was composed around 1375-80, thinks the figure of the intellect which can repose in the truth "like a beast in its lair" is especially fine:

come fera in lustra; et est optima metaphora: sicut enim fera diu vagatur et venatur per sylvam, et post omnes labores requiescit in antro; ita intellectus in mundo diu speculatur et contemplatur, et numquam quiescit nisi in ipso fine suo;

In this bold metaphor something that strikes a chord for Benvenuto that resonates back to the very start of the Commedia -- a beast wandering, hunting in a forest (sylvam) -- both the pilgrim and what he encountered in Inferno 1, louring images of his own intellect, lost, hungry, frustrated in the selva oscura. (Also resonating: Apollo, muse of the Paradiso, racing through the forest in hot pursuit of Daphne.)

The suggestion of savagery -- the beast can rest in its lair now because it's dined well upon the truth, or raped it -- hangs over this passage, which, unlike the beast, does not come to rest. Rather the pilgrim Dante asserts two things:

1. Intellect can join with the truth (giunto from giungere: "unite, couple with," noting that if it could not so conjoin, desire itself would be in vain), and,
2. At the moment the mind and truth join, new doubt springs up at its foot like a rampollo (seed, offshoot, or a natural spring of water).

The passage eludes being transfixed by the undecidable nature of truth by finding the truth of nature:

                                       . . . è natura
ch'al sommo pinge noi di collo in collo.   

As Benvenuto says, whatever else Nature is or does, it impels us (ad summam veritatem et felicitatem impellit nos). Our nature is to desire, desire spawns a quest until it kills what it desires; from that death spring new quests. We leap from peak to higher peak. This is the motion of a vibrant, active entity, a mind that is not spoon-fed, but freely hunts; a mind that's not reduced to abashed silence by knowledge, but is ever seeking. Doubt spurs us to conquer doubt.

Beatrice had said it is natural to rise and that we are part of nature. There is nothing especially noble about the quest for truth -- every flower turns toward the sun. Here Paradiso asserts its relevance and place in the quest of every human being, not just those gifted with divine revelation. We'll see this canticle proceed by leaps and bounds.

Encountering myth and naturalism in Philoctetes

This is long and in part goes back over lines already discussed, but from a different angle, trying to clarify something. Feel free to ignore.

In his fine essay on the Philoctetes in The Wound and the Bow, Edmund Wilson notes how isolating the three main characters on a lonely island helps Sophocles get away from the "barbarities, anomalies and absurdities" of the old myths.

"The people of the Philoctetes seem to us more familiar than they do in most of the other Greek tragedies," he writes. The thought echoes that of H.D.F. Kitto who found the language of the play more naturalistic, more consonant with the familiar notes of humans suffering rage, hope, pain and despair. (Greek Tragedy.)

The bleak Lemnian setting amplifies our attention to the words spoken, the nuances of the dialogue. Nonetheless it's not as if Sophocles chooses to do away with the old myths -- he's working with the givens of a highly specific story that features prophecies of old, not unlike the ancient tablet Heracles uses to foresee his future in Women of Trachis.

Wilson seems to find that Sophocles' late work exemplifies a movement toward greater realism accompanied by a downplaying of mythic matters -- as if the playwright were moving towards some sort of 20th century stylistic mode. But is that in fact the case? It might be best to begin by simply observing the co-presence of these two very distinct elements: a direct pathos of human emotion on one hand, and elements taken from high story: a fabulous war of heroes, a sacred bow, a fateful set of conditions that must be met in order for the Greeks to conquer Troy, on the other.

Sophocles succeeds in integrating the naturalistic style with these fraught props -- not an easy task. But he did choose to tell this story, and these ingredients, while mostly in the background, are essential to it.

Why this story? For one thing, it offers something very important to the playwright -- a dramatic discrepancy between agent and effect. As we saw in the Antigone, the plot pivots on a surprise triggered by an immense gap between the proximate cause of the central action and its ultimate effect. A handful of dust sprinkled by a young girl upon her brother's corpse leads inexorably to the obliteration of the house of Creon. Similarly Women of Trachis presents us with the strongest man who ever lived, portrayed in his feeblest moment. Yet in that moment he manages to be an agent of major change while orchestrating his own last rites.

The spectacle of frail human means coupled with fiery gumption and impact beyond the individual fascinated Sophocles. In Philoctetes' story he found yet again a tale that put the bow of Heracles - this mythic agency of historical change - in the arms of a sick, abandoned man who is likened to a stumbling child without a nurse. This joining at the hip of the very small and frail with something very big and powerful forms a pattern in the plays of Sophocles, and the pattern requires for its potency the material of "the old myths" just as much as it does the vocal texture and realism of human vulnerability.

The bow of Heracles never misses its intended target, and its arrows, dipped in Hydra bile, always kill. That is, there is nothing contingent or iffy about this bow - it executes with no element of chance - it is pure necessity. Yet the fact that Philoctetes has the bow appears purely a matter of chance, doesn't it? He happened to encounter the hero building his own funeral pyre. This chance encounter is described in the choral ode that begins with Axion's tale, where the chorus goes on to say,

I have heard a rumor, but never seen with my eyes, how the man who once approached the bed of Zeus was bound upon a [680] swift wheel by the almighty son of Cronus. But of no other mortal do I know, either by hearsay or by sight, that has encountered (συντυγχάνω) a doom so repugnant as this of Philoctetes.

Philoctetes happened to meet Heracles and his own repugnant doom at the same moment - the verb συντυγχάνω contains the word τῠ́χη, chance, fortune, personified as Τυχη, or Fortuna. Philoctetes does what Heracles asks - sets the pyre ablaze, and receives the bow that cannot miss its mark. The tension of the story, however, lies in how not just the arrows, but the bow itself went astray, thanks to the misfortune of Chryse's serpent's bite. That seemingly chance encounter puts the bow and repellent Philoctetes so far outside the theater of war, the calculus of any military strategy, as to be nearly obliterated.

The action of displacing or misplacing the bow is what creates the dramatic tension of the story. (Think of the story as a bowstring being pulled back.) When the Greeks are reminded that Philoctetes and his bow are necessary to victory, they go to recover him, fully aware that they have alienated him completely.

The choral ode actually recounts three meetings. The first is that of Philoctetes and Heracles. The second is the fortune of "coming to meet" Neoptolemus -

But now, after those troubles, he will attain happiness and heartiness in the end [720] because of his meeting (ὑπαντήσας) with this son of a noble race,

ὑπαντήσας connotes an intentional encounter - one "comes to meet" another person - the emphasis is on an intentional act, not a chance meeting.

The third encounter is that of Heracles' apparent apotheosis:

in that very land where, above Oeta's heights, the hero of the brazen shield approached [πλάθω approached, drew near] the gods, illuminated by his father's divine fire.

ἵν᾽ ὁ χάλκασπις ἀνὴρ θεοῖς πλάθει πατρὸς θείῳ πυρὶ παμφαής, Οἴτας ὑπὲρ ὄχθων.

This encounter, if that's the word, is not framed as complete; it takes place outside human space and time. Heracles "drew near" something that humans may not approach. The passage has been remarked on for the fact that Heracles is described as the man with the brazen shield - not the familiar iconography of the lion's skin, bow and club. Heracles seems a bit more like any soldier, any man, requiring a shield to be safe.

With παμφαής - all-radiant, all-brilliant - we onlookers encounter a dilemma. Are we witnessing through the chorus's words transcendental light, or the quite literal fire set by Philoctetes to consume the agonized flesh of Heracles? Is this the fated, necessary, divine illumination of mythic transcendence (not unlike Ixion's eternal wheel of fire), or the natural searing combustion of Oeta's trees? Hard to tell, since this light, all-brilliant, blinds the human eye.

The three encounters of the ode cover the range of possible ways meetings can occur: one appears random, yet sets up the tale we are watching; one seems intentional, and the third, bathed in light, really doesn't appear - if an encounter with the gods does take place, it occurs beyond our ability to see it for ourselves.

And here might lie a clue as to why we might not be correct in seeing Sophocles' "naturalism" as in some way a retreat, or turning away, from myth. Certainly the play's expressive pathos seems more in line with modernity. But instead of resulting from a diminution or demystification of mythic power, it stands in strong tension to it. The chorus begins:

λόγῳ μὲν ἐξήκουσ᾽, ὄπωπα δ᾽ οὐ μάλα, 

I have heard a tale, but never saw with my very eyes,

A moment later it repeats the opposition:

ἄλλον δ᾽ οὔτιν᾽ ἔγωγ᾽ οἶδα κλύων οὐδ᾽ ἐσιδὼν μοίρᾳ 

But of no other mortal do I know, either by hearing or by sight, a doom . . .

Our eyes can take us to the furthest edge of nature. But all of that "realism" gathers force by being set against what we have heard -- the ancient tales of humanity's encounters with the gods. Whether random, intended, or inscrutable, the aural realm of myth with all its "barbarities, anomalies and absurdities" is what gives the sharply observed style of Sophocles' naturalism its curiously modern force and sense.

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