Sun dogs? Adam's reticence in Paradiso 26

. . . out of Norse mythology and archaic names (Danish: solhunde (sun dog), Norwegian: solhund (sun dog), Swedish: solvarg (sun wolf)), . . . constellations of two wolves hunting the Sun and the Moon, one after and one before, may be a possible origin for the term. Sun Dog

As soon as Adam begins to speak in Paradiso 26, he wields a very fancy, learned Greek term, twice: parhelion -- image, copy, equal -- of the sun:

Indi spirò: Sanz' essermi proferta da te,
la voglia tua discerno meglio
che tu qualunque cosa t'è più certa; 

perch' io la veggio nel verace speglio
che fa di sé pareglio a l'altre cose,
e nulla face lui di sé pareglio."

Then breathed: "Without thy uttering it to me,
Thine inclination better I discern
Than thou whatever thing is surest to thee; 

For I behold it in the truthful mirror,
That of Himself all things parhelion makes,
And none makes Him parhelion of itself.  (Par. 26: 103-108)

His claim to knowledge is exactly like that of Cacciaguida, Beatrice and others in Paradise - "I know your thoughts better than you do," because the interlocutor is looking directly into the mind of God - the mirror that cannot be mirrored.

Photo of an actual parhelion - or "sundog"

The use of parhelion -- such a showy word -- is arresting. First, it's Greek, and might remind us that Adam's doppelganger, Ulysses, would not even respond to someone who spoke to him in a tongue other than his own. The question of language is already in play before Adam addresses it in his answers to Dante's four questions.

There is nothing hackneyed in Dante's presentation of the first Man. No one else would have approached Adam in this way. First, the insistent recurrence of "firstness" - primaia - marks this passage as concerned with the question of what it means to be "number one" - how to us humans, it is simply unacceptable to be number two. At the root of Adams trapassar, there is this moment of negation - YOU are not number one, I AM. Milton runs endless variants upon Satan's negation, and Adam's.

Dante quietly raises the issue within an allusive passage that begins with the sun and parahelions. Whatever else one might make of this word here, two things are true - this is a hapax legomenon, except it isn't, because the rare word is used twice in two lines. Its eye-catching uniqueness is immediately undercut by the duplicity of its doubling repetition.

Dante is mimicking the sad lack of language -- the power of ontological origination does not lie within it or us. In the text of medieval astrology, the parhelion was equated with mock suns, also known as sun dogs. These mirrors of the sun were bright, but nothing in comparison with the real deal. We and our words are paltry doppelgangers, mockeries of a Maker whose variety infinitely exceeds our imagination.

If one asks where this deflation of duality occurs in Paradiso 26, the best reply might be, "once Adam opens his mouth -- everywhere." He's a dud. Far from the rhetorical power of Ulysses of Inferno 26, who with a very brief speech ignited an exhausted team to the ends of the Earth (devil take the hindmost), Adam sorts out the difference between gustar del legno and trapassar del segno, echoing his Greek descendant's decision to go beyond the segno of Hercules.

To trapassar il segno is to enter a world of conventional, un-Adamic language:

ché l'uso d'i mortali è come fronda
 in ramo, che sen va e altra vene.

Echoing our ineluctable mortality from the greatest poets -- Homer, Virgil, Horace -- links language not to Prometheus's stolen fire, but to the negation of it. To be human is not to be like Adam's words -- but to be true children of an ephemerality indistinguishable from them.

The shortcoming of the father of our species is as clear, and as powerful, as the structural ironies visited upon Francesca, Ugolino and other denizens of hell. Adam's transgression brought him the gift of counting. The proportions of Edenic bliss to earthly existence to time in Limbo are not only curiously precise, but tacitly comical. Mosquitoes live longer than Adam in Paradise. "Congratulations on toting that up -- you traded immortality for that?" Something of this grimaces over the scene.

In view of this, the reader needs ask: where is the recuperation of Adam? Where is the theology of the fortunate fall?

Here's one suggestion. With the number play in this canto, Adam is always clear about his, and language's, non-primacy. He might be an animal coverto, but he's hiding nothing.

"Nel monte che si leva più da l'onda,
 fu'io, con vita pura e disonesta,
 da la prim' ora a quella che seconda,
come 'l sol muta quadra, l'ora sesta.”

"Upon the mount that highest o'er the wave
  Rises was I, in life or pure or sinful,
  From the first hour to that which is the second,
As the sun changes quadrant, to the sixth."

Adam's loss of immortal bliss occurred shortly after the sixth hour of his Day 1, at the moment the second quadrant of the sun's journey begins. His exile occurs at the first hour of the second quadrant -- the one that followed  -- "seconda" -- the prim'ora of his bright nativity.

That this echoes the hour of the sun's journey in which the crucial Good Friday act of his (and Dante's) redemption began remains unspoken. Adam omits the inexplicable act of caritas that took him and us beyond the segno of mortality. The father of language has no words for that. One can charitably ask whether any Ulyssean encomium could more adequately convey the primal power of the Word than Adam's reticence.

Beast beneath the cover: Dante's Adam

πολλὰ τὰ δεινὰ κοὐδὲν ἀνθρώπου δεινότερον πέλει

Many things are singular, none moreso than man

Told that the fourth light that has joined Peter, James and John is Adam, Dante speaks first: 

 E cominciai: “O pomo che maturo
 solo prodotto fosti, o padre antico
 a cui ciascuna sposa è figlia e nuro,

divoto quanto posso a te supplìco
 perché mi parli: tu vedi mia voglia,
 e per udirti tosto non la dico.”

Talvolta un animal coverto broglia,
 sì che l'affetto convien che si paia
 per lo seguir che face a lui la 'nvoglia;

e similmente l'anima primaia
 mi facea trasparer per la coverta
 quant' ella a compiacermi venìa gaia.

And I began: "O apple, that mature
  Alone hast been produced, O ancient father,
  To whom each wife is daughter and daughter-in-law,

Devoutly as I can I supplicate thee
  That thou wouldst speak to me; thou seest my wish;
  And I, to hear thee quickly, speak it not."

Sometimes an animal, when covered, struggles
  So that his impulse needs must be apparent,
  By reason of the wrappage following it; 

And in like manner the primeval soul
  Made clear to me athwart its covering
  How jubilant it was to give me pleasure.  (Par. 26:91-102)

To step back: Dante was blinded when, thanks to a false rumor, he tried to see the earthly body of John, the Bible's final inspired voice, the author of Revelation. When the pilgrim's sight returns, and judgment saves him from a kind of panic attack, the new lume turns out to be the first man -- the original first edition human to whom we owe exile from Eden, labor, suffering, sin and death, the entire aiuolo that Dante, when looking back on it, had to add, "that makes us so fierce."

Finding our general sire here, with the three apostles most loved by Christ, the pilgrim clearly is moved. Likening the first man, the prime template of anthropos, to a struggling covered animal comes out of a strange place. In a sense, to see Adam is to see us all, and more. In the image and likeness, says the Word, of the Creator, are we fashioned.

In fact the simile is complex (there's much more than what this post can address). Nicola Fosca offers a prose paraphrase that seems mostly on target:

Accade talvolta che un animale coperto (coverto) si agita (broglia), in modo che ciò che sente dentro di sé (l'affetto) appare di necessità all'esterno (convien che si paia), perché l'involucro che lo copre (la 'nvoglia) asseconda (per lo seguir che face) i movimenti del suo corpo (a lui); similmente l'anima del primo uomo (primaia), per il tremolio della luce che la copriva (per la coverta), mi faceva trasparire quanto essa fosse lieta (quant'ella... venía gaia) di soddisfare la mia richiesta (a compiacermi). Una similitudine molto strana . . .

This animal is agitated, says Fosca - Longfellow has "struggles." This sense of tumult appears to be a secondary meaning, though. The dictionaries suggest that the first meaning is "intrigue, fraud." The lines certainly convey strained movement, something working under duress, and the hint or coloration of fraud might deepen this first glimpse of Man, a covered creature, one whose dark workings might agitate his cover, but also conceal something we can't quite make out.

Dante uses coverto twice: this is an animal that is covered by something other than its own native coat. The non-naturalness adds to the strangeness.

If ever a son had reason to have mixed feelings for a long lost father, it would be this poet, whose entire life has been a profound study of Adam's threshing floor.

If we consider, for a moment, the parallel here of Adam, the ill-fated trier of fruit, with Ulysses, his infernal counterpart who could talk anybody into anything, including the mad flight to know a mondo sanza gente - well, isn't that the literal "knowledge" that Adam acquired as he stepped out of Paradise into a world without people?

The figure of Ulysses as the Greek striver, actor, liar, hero (recall how, within his flame in Inferno 26 there's a struggle for language to come forth) is enriched by this parallel. In the garden, Adam had everything except the knowledge that he had everything. That came with the awareness that he was uncovered, before exiting Eden into a world of lack.

Robert Hollander notes that Ulysses and his small crew "are the first mortals to see the mount of purgatory since Adam and Eve left it." To Ulysses, the empty garden is what the empty world beyond Eden was for Adam and Eve. Almost full circle.

Just prior to Adam's appearance, the pilgrim spoke to John of the leaves - fronde - that in this fallen world he can and does love, to the extent they are good:

"Le fronde onde s'infronda tutto l'orto
de l'ortolano etterno, am' io cotanto
quanto da lui a lor di bene è porto.”

Adam will speak of leaves and language, and men and death. Consider what might well up in a man who has seen the depths of human depravity, as well as the perfection of Eden, were he to confront his father, the prime mover of our fallen threshing floor. With this encounter, the pilgrim's talk of loving the fronde of the fallen world is put to the test.

The "strange simile" -- which some commentators judge harshly, while others approve -- returns us to the same ungrounded suspense that Dante described earlier, in comparing the return of vision to an awakening. Both moments in this canto bring us face to face with something not yet descried. With the covered animal we don't know what to expect -- it could be a monster, a wild beast, a madman. That moment of uncertainty is Dante's apprehension of something about our nature -- a quizzical, unruly, secretive, wild, insistent thing like nothing so much as what we find in Sophocles' ode to man: δεινὰ -- strange and wondrous, extravagant and wily, stubbornly doing things his way -- all suspended in the unknowing vehicle of the simile -- before resolving into Adamic bliss:

How jubilant it was to give me pleasure. 

quant' ella a compiacermi venìa gaia.

The oedipal moment passes, but this poet knows himself and us far too well not to sing, in the interval between tenor and vehicle, likeness and thing, our truth.

With these late cantos it's hard not to write long. The last part of this enigmatic canto seems unlikely to provide smoother sailing.

"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.

Paradiso 26 and undemonstrative enigmaticity

Our group meets every other week, but our progress in Paradiso has slowed. The cantos of the theological virtues might seem simpler than some of the earlier, more complexly plotted and allusive work we have already encountered, but no. They are devilishly closely written -- the poet has not lost any steam, or poetic "chops."

A poet who can write a tercet like this is clearly all there:

"Le fronde onde s'infronda tutto l'orto
de l'ortolano etterno, am' io cotanto
quanto da lui a lor di bene è porto.”

Longfellow tries, but is sensible enough to not attempt the intricate echoes:

"The leaves, wherewith embowered is all the garden
Of the Eternal Gardener, do I love
As much as he has granted them of good." (Par. 26:64-66)

It's tempting to see these cantos as somewhat didactic, or pedantically subservient to biblical texts that form the doctrinal elements of the pilgrim's encounters with Peter, James and John. But each canto offers much more than catechetic tedium. The poem, as we've argued here before, never simply states its burden. It acts out its import.

A clear example is how all is going well in Paradiso 25, until St. John appears. There's a haunting, uncanny moment of cessation of all Paradise -- likened to a ship whose oarsmen suspend their work. The pilgrim turns to Beatrice only to see he has been blinded by John's revelatory brighness. The canto ends with the pilrim's disorientation and fear. The mettle of his soul's hope is being tested.

Before looking at a couple of passages from Paradiso 26 in detail, it might help to spend a few words tracing a pattern that recurs when reading certain non-obvious parts of this poem.

It seems to me that much of the Commedia - certainly the Paradiso - is written "slant," as Dickenson might say. Certain cantos conjoin elements that, prima facie, have no business going together.

To get to the "fruit" (or frui) within the somewhat dry integumentum of these passages, it never seems to hurt to ask childish questions. This is not a task that the poem marks by drawing attention to itself. Unlike the famous appelli ai lettori (addresses to the reader) that direct us to read beneath the versi strani (Inf. 9.63), a canto like Paradiso 26 at first might not seem enigmatic. It takes a while just to notice its several parts don't quite hang together in ways that, from reading the poem, we have come to expect.

In 26, for example, how is it that some derivative platitudes about the Good and love are interspersed with extraordinary similes (a couple of which we'll look at below)? Of all people, what is Adam doing here? Why does Dante encounter him precisely here, after the pilgrim has "passed" his oral exams and experiences renewed, stronger sight? For that matter, what's with all the numbers and quantitative language in this canto? What does caritate - the greatest of the virtues - have to do with Adam, the fall, the length of time he spent on earth, his language and reflections on it, and the duration of his innocence before being sent into exile? Why are there echoes of Cacciaguida in Adam's conversation, and why does our general father open with one of the poem's strangest hapaxes -- parhelion (107-108) -- a double singularity if you will?

Dante was surely doing something other than showing off, or spinning wheels, or filling space before the big finale. When we come across a canto that seems to lose its thread, or veers to an unexpected close, or combines thematic materials from disparate and seemingly unrelated topoi, it's a good idea to ask why. As the imagination works on the question of how these seemingly unrelated elements connect, the result can be a sudden falling into place, acceding to a perspective from which all these disparate elements suddenly swim into signifying focus, often with an unexpected comic "pop."

The "empirical" pattern of such a reading might go something like:

1. naive first reading
2. childish questions
3. noting unusual linguistic features
4. attending to concurrent motifs through the canto

Now if all this is going well, but the text still seems a bit aimless or dispersed, that's pretty much how we felt after spending two entire sessions on 26, without even discussing the last several tercets in any detail. Of course along the way one consults the commentators, who often proffer excellent clarifications and suggestions. But most important is to stick with it:

5. careful re-reading

At some point -- usually thanks to the more unusual (often seemingly gratuitous) passages, images, or motifs -- something we'd not fully taken into account, something not properly weighed, or now seen from a different angle, moves into view. Often it's a connection between a highly leaned theme on one hand, and a very basic human, vernacular reality, common to all. The connection can be epiphanic, uncoiling with the impact of comedic surprise.

To attempt to pin down whether we're dealing with a specific genre, or mode, would take us far afield. Let's give it a simple name for now: Wisdom literature. Writing that draws upon all manner of indirection in order to challenge the reader, to drive us to our own hard-won "eureka moments" would be the sign and pleasure of this mode. It might not sing in epic tones, or seduce with lyric music, but it is always working on something that, when finally reached, yields a potent reward.

We'll look next at some moments in Paradiso 26.

Mothers, suns, and figural leaps in Paradiso 23

The stunning figure of the bird that opens Paradiso 23 speaks of ardent expectation - of light, which will enable this mother to see the aspetti disiati, the longed-for sight, of her nestlings, and then have visibility to go find food for them.

The overall thrust of the passage lies in the anticipation, through the long night "that hides things from us," of the enabling light. The bird will not be given food,;she will be given the sight of her newborns, and sufficient light to find food for them.

Many critics hear echoes of Paolo and Francesca -- of the disiato riso they were reading about; of the lovers now endlessly in flight, but coming at a call like a bird to her nest. John Freccero pointed out that for the damned lovers, there was no nest, no point of closure. Unlike the lovers, the bird of the simile will return to the nest, but only after having garnered food. She is giving life, as mothers do.

There's a more chilling echo here, perhaps less noted. Through the night, this mother cannot see the faces of her chicks, who are hungry. This blindness is temporary, unlike the hunger-blindness of Ugolino, when, after he and his starving sons hear the tower door nailed shut, he gropes in the dark, saying nothing to the children who beg him to eat them so he might live.

===============

Beatrice is the bird, ardent even before she sees the light that sets her face aflame. The sky lightens, and she tells him what is coming:

                            “Ecco le schiere
del trïunfo di Cristo e tutto 'l frutto
ricolto del girar di queste spere!”

There are schiere, bands or ranks of troops -- and the fruit harvested (ricolto) from the wheeling of these spheres. Here, we have no idea what Beatrice is actually seeing, but her figures bring together the instruments of triumph and of triumphal procession, and the image of a bountiful harvest.

The harvest builds upon the imagery of millstones, threshing floors, and bread woven throughout the canticle, prefiguring this moment. When the poet, at Beatrice's word, turns to see, we get more similes -- at first the bright sun making all the stars shine:

vid' i' sopra migliaia di lucerne
un sol che tutte quante l'accendea,come fa 'l nostro le viste superne;

Saw I, above the myriads of lamps,
  A Sun that one and all of them enkindled,
  E'en as our own doth the supernal sights,

We might recall that on Jupiter, this figure of the sun illuminating the stars appeared at the opening of Paradiso 20. But now it's not a simile, yet it is still a figural sun brightening the starry sphere. This Sun not a "real" sun; this shining substance (lucente sustanza) too powerful for the poet's eyes is emanating from Christ, and the harvested fruits are souls. Are they also, here in the starry sphere, stars?

The fact that this light, as powerful as it is, is not the actual vision of Christ is underscored by the simile that introduces it - the "Sun" is introduced figuratively as the moon -- as Trivia, linked with Diana, accompanied by shining nymphs:

Quale ne' plenilunïi sereni
 Trivïa ride tra le ninfe etterne
 che dipingon lo ciel per tutti i seni,

As when in nights serene of the full moon
  Smiles Trivia among the nymphs eternal
  Who paint the firmament through all its gulfs,

Beatrice describes what Dante is not able to look at as "a power (virtù) from which there is no shelter." This is the power, and wisdom, acting in human time,

ch'aprì le strade tra 'l cielo e la terra
 onde fu già sì lunga disïanza.”

that opened the roads between heaven and earth
for which of old there had been such long desire.

To connect roads that had been blocked, broken, cut off implies that at one time the way was intact. Before the Fall, heaven and earth were linked, and now, thanks to Christ, the road is restored. The introductory figure of Trivia now becomes legible in a new way: just as the goddess Hecate linked the three realms (Tri-via) of the pagan world (as Cynthia, Diana, and Persephone), so Christ acted in time to open the way for the children of men to return to their true home.

To bring together disjunct realms within sacred history is much what poets do with metaphor: they unite, though the exchange of attribute, disparate entities. The poetic function of figure, whether simile, metaphor, or other trope, yokes unlike things. If David the singer of Psalms was the archetypal poet-ruler, Christ is the new David, re-joining earth and heaven in his incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection.

===============

What's remarkable is that after speaking of this irresistible power that restored a path for men to go from earth to heaven, the poet undergoes a metamorphosis. He can't remember it, but he knows it took place because he is stronger. Without trauma, he looks at Beatrice, who is smiling.

He then goes on to say how, had he the inspirations of all the muse-suckled poets who ever sung, he could not begin to describe the beauty of Beatrice's smile, and, since this is the case, he is at an aporia with regard to "picturing Paradise."

 e così, figurando il paradiso, 
convien saltar lo sacrato poema, come chi trova suo cammin riciso.

And therefore, representing figuring Paradise,
  The sacred poem must perforce leap over,
  Even as a man who finds his way cut off;

In becoming able to see his guide fully, the poet has become stronger, but this very strength enables him to see his weakness -- the inadequacy of his ability to represent her smile. He has more than that to "figure" -- there is il paradiso. For that, the poem must "leap," like a man whose path is cut off. The poet does not have a way to do what he must do, what the savior did -- convey us, in figure, to il paradiso. Yet Beatrice tells him to turn from her and see:

Quivi è la rosa in che 'l verbo divino
carne si fece;

There is the Rose in which the Word Divine
Became incarnate;

The "battle of the feeble brows" begins again - and he begins to figurar il paradiso.

What form does this figuration of Paradise assume? When he turns from Beatrice, the poet resorts to simile: sunlight breaking through clouds, rendering vibrant a meadow; so far, it's a simile "like" his actual experience of Matilda in Eden. But then, he sees a Rose that is a living star, the mother of Christ, regina coeli. Is he now seeing Mary in her glorified flesh?

Certainly brilliant readers do see it this way. Instead of dwelling on it, however, the poet speaks of how this could occur: It's possible, he says, because Christ has "leapt" up far enough -- a distance so vast that the poet is no longer blinded by his light.

O benigna vertù che sì li 'mprenti,
 sù t'essaltasti per largirmi loco
 i li occhi lì che non t'eran possenti.

O power benignant that dost so imprint them!
  Thou didst exalt thyself to give more scope
  There to mine eyes, that were not strong enough.  (23:85-87)

The sacrato poema proceeds because the Sun recedes. If in sacred history Christ advanced to restore the road, here he allows the sacred poem to jump the aporia by retreating. He performs a sacrifice of light that empowers vision rather than annihilating it.

This ought to alert us to read the next passage with particular care. The poem has made a leap. If we take it "at its word," then something other than the customary tropes could be at work. We'll see.

Processing similes and prophetic speech in Paradiso 12

Dante devotes five cantos to the Sun - Paradiso 10-14. We've looked at the first three to some extent (here, here, and here), and the remaining two will add to or alter our sense of the place of the sun in Dante's Creation.

Over the course of the 5 cantos, the chariot (biga) of the Bride of Christ, the church, is assembled through what might be described as the poesis of Paradise. Dante, Beatrice and the reader see a complex image composing itself: it starts with one wheel, adds a second, and, though it's supposed to be a surprise, we can disclose that a third mystery wheel appears before the travelers leave the Sun for Mars.

The composition begins with the appearance of one group of flashing lights (10.64) like ardent suns; a second circling group appears in 12; both groups become millstones, which are then transformed into the wheels of the biga as they are explicitly identified with Dominic and Francis:

Se tal fu l'una rota de la biga
in che la Santa Chiesa si difese
e vinse in campo la sua civil briga,

ben ti dovrebbe assai esser palese
l'eccellenza de l'altra, di cui Tomma
dinanzi al mio venir fu sì cortese.

If such the one wheel of the Biga was,
In which the Holy Church itself defended
And in the field its civic battle won,

Truly full manifest should be to thee
The excellence of the other, unto whom
Thomas so courteous was before my coming. (12.106-111) 

Francis and Dominic, it is argued, balance each other. The direction of the Church, spatially, temporally, administratively, takes its guidance from the interaction of the mendicant orders they founded.

To be balanced, however, the wheels should be equal -- whether one considers that by some measure of power, wisdom, zeal, or something else. But are they? We already know that these wheels are very different -- like East and West, heat and light, nature and culture.

With this question in mind we'll look at the initial appearance of the second wheel in Paradiso 12. It's a memorable apparition, presented through an enigmatic procession of nested similes and allusions that are sufficiently complex to call out for attention:

Come si volgon per tenera nube
due archi paralelli e concolori,
quando Iunone a sua ancella iube,

nascendo di quel d'entro quel di fori,
a guisa del parlar di quella vaga
ch'amor consunse come sol vapori,

e fanno qui la gente esser presaga,
per lo patto che Dio con Noè puose,
del mondo che già mai più non s'allaga:

così di quelle sempiterne rose
volgiensi circa noi le due ghirlande,
e sì l'estrema a l'intima rispuose.

And as are spanned athwart a tender cloud
Two rainbows parallel and like in colour,
When Juno to her handmaid gives command,

(The one without born of the one within,
Like to the speaking of that vagrant one
Whom love consumed as doth the sun the vapours,)

And make the people here, through covenant
God set with Noah, presageful of the world
That shall no more be covered with a flood,

In such wise of those sempiternal roses
The garlands twain encompassed us about,
And thus the outer to the inner answered. (Par. 12.10-21)

The question here is what is the relation of the first wheel to the second. Not in the sense of spatial arrangement this time, but as a matter of priority: what do firstness and secondness convey here -- is there in fact a primary wheel and a secondary one -- in which case, the bearing of the Biga might not in fact be quite balanced?

Warning: Some will consider this excursus anathema to jouissance du texte.

The simile begins by comparing the two wheels to two rainbows that originate in a command, an order given by Juno to her servant girl (ancella), sending Iris the messenger on a mission. In a tender cloud, two parallel and similarly colorful rainbows appear. Their parallelism makes them equal, yet the outer arc is born of the one within -- just as, and here begins a simile within the simile -- the speaking (a guisa del parlar) of "that wanderer" -- quella vaga (Echo) -- whom love consumed as vapors are consumed by the sun.

The mythological burden of the second simile is a surprise. The idea of one rainbow birthing another was a natural explanation provided by the science of Dante's time. Why bring in the myth of Narcissus -- one of the major myths from Ovid's book of changes -- to complicate that simple parent-child order of primacy?

Indeed, the myth of Echo is often read as a tale of secondariness: the origin of a voice from a love that is entirely fixated upon another - the other in turn being fixated by the love of his own image. While Echo wastes away, so does Narcissus, and in fact his love of his face, and her love of him, are in no way distinguishable -- in both cases, there is the utter fixation upon the face one loves. Narcissus's love is not more "primary" because he happened to fall in love with his own face -- indeed, he didn't know it was his own face until after he'd fallen in love with it.

Ovid's subtle tale makes clear that while Echo echoes the words of Narcissus, in speaking them her words take on new meanings. 

He runs from her, and running cries ‘Away with these encircling hands! May I die before what’s mine is yours. 

She answers, only ‘What’s mine is yours!’ (Metamorphoses 3)

The story plays on ordinary notions of firstness and secondness, and about how they can be reversed, putting in doubt any order of priority. 

Also, the mythological realm of Echo and Narcissus is not secondary to the natural scientific language of rainbows birthing rainbows. Let's remember that the first rainbow is there because it is Iris, Juno's messenger, whom Juno sent to be there. Myth preceded science in this simile. 

The first rainbow is a messenger speaking under command of the God. Unlike Echo she is not a vaga - a wandering being - because she is an ancella whose duty it is to convey the message of the God. In effect: Iris's speech is secondary, derived from the words of the Goddess whom she is echoing, while Echo's transformative echoes of Narcissus express the truth of her own primal love.

The structure is a procession of three similes: The wheels are like Iris, a rainbow which generates its own image in cloud and sun; this second rainbow is like the voice of Echo, born of self-consuming love, who vanishes like vapor consumed by the sun, and with it, the rainbows. What remains after this tale of self-generation and self-consumption is the voice, the invisible double that tells the tale.

If that were all, we would already have enough to at least make a case that the two wheels are in fact parallel, and that the apparent temporal priority of the inner rainbow is rendered less secure by its being likened to a tale in which firstness and secondness are reversed, or suspended. 

Except that's not all, because this entire little tale is contained in a parenthetical tercet between the rainbow ordered by Juno, and the third tercet's rainbow ordered by Noah's god. The rainbows are now "like" the rainbow that was given as a sign "to people here" that God would never again send a flood to destroy all life on Earth. (A big deal to someone like the poet, who nearly drowned in Inferno 1!)

With this new rainbow as permanent, unevaporable promise, the question of precedence is irrelevant. As promise, it stands outside of time and decay: it is an act, a signature that ratifies a covenant between Maker and man. The sign in the sky makes man presaga -- able to say before, to prophesy -- a future truth for all time. 

To prophesy is the opposite of the banal sense of an echo as a mere repetition of a prior sound. At this point, the question of primacy is undone. The inner circle might be the parent to the outer, as inner rainbow to encircling arc, but the outer has become a speech act that doesn't re-present something prior. Rather, it already "knows," or posits, something that has yet to be given the possibility of being known. Its speaking is its own primacy.

- Apology for this excursus -

An exercise such as this one rather laboriously unpacks what Dante's own unparalleled sense of story coiled within some allusions and similitudes, and might seem to go against the idea of reading as the pleasure of the text, the enjoyment one receives from simply "experiencing" the poet's language. And according to certain notions of "experience," that's true! But with a text like the Commedia, one enters a resonant work of imagination that is both telling a new story and engaged in active combat with the tales of prior potent texts. Dante read and loved Ovid, Virgil, Lucan, and the other poets named in Inferno 4, but in creating his tale of eternal life, he often evoked their works as grist for his own mill, his powerful reading of how they got it wrong. Poets aiming at truth are always, on some level, having dogfights. Like Dominicans.

Domini cani

The simile of the rainbows suggests that, just as in nature a parent precedes a child, so divine speech makes it possible to speak of a thing before the thing exists. Messengers of the gods share that knowing with mortals, and Dominic, whose embryonic mind was powerful enough to make his mother dream omens, appears to be one those messengers:

Ben parve messo e famigliar di Cristo: (12.73)

As such a messenger, Dominic was a torrential flood, destroying the arguments, the theological gardens of sundry heretical sects. But he remained true to the sign in the sky, and his flood was tempered:

Poi, con dottrina e con volere insieme,
con l'officio appostolico si mosse
quasi torrente ch'alta vena preme;

e ne li sterpi eretici percosse
l'impeto suo, più vivamente quivi
dove le resistenze eran più grosse.

Di lui si fecer poi diversi rivi
onde l'orto catolico si riga,
sì che i suoi arbuscelli stan più vivi.

 Then with the doctrine and the will together,
  With office apostolical he moved,
  Like torrent which some lofty vein out-presses; 

And in among the shoots heretical
  His impetus with greater fury smote,
  Wherever the resistance was the greatest. 

Of him were made thereafter divers runnels,
  Whereby the garden catholic is watered,
  So that more living its plantations stand.   (12.97-105)

The cantos of Dominic and Francis are balanced in detail. Each man gets 33 tercets of narrative of his life. The parts of their narratives balance each other in turn. If the passion of Francis knocked the sandals off his followers, Dominic nurtured his disciples and raised them in the light of deeply disciplined knowledge.

The construction of Dante's work is uncanny. Perhaps by chance, the central line of Dominic's canto is that defining description cited a moment ago:

Ben parve messo e famigliar di Cristo: (12.73)

The center of Francis's canto, perhaps by chance, evokes the ferocious constancy of Lady Poverty:

né valse esser costante né feroce (11.79)

In the interaction of these utterly dissimilar men (and their orders) -- a sort of nuclear fusion -- lie the potent love for and defense of the reinvigorated Bride.

The wheels balance and move as one. Perfectly. As two eyes move at a whim:

pur come li occhi ch'al piacer che i move
conviene insieme chiudere e levarsi;

(Even as the eyes, that, as volition moves them,
  Must needs together shut and lift themselves,)