The Fractured Rose: Paradiso 32 (Part II)

Paradiso 32 comes across as dry and devoid of embellishment when compared with the cantos immediately preceding and the stunning final canto 33.

Numerous critics have noted its "wooden," coldly depersonalized affect. "It is a plan which must seem to us pedantic and unimaginative and out of keeping with the visionary rapture of this part of Dante's pilgrimage," notes John D. Sinclair. And G.L. Bickersteth describes the focus on the construction of the edifice of the Rose as "an intellectual process resulting in a static formal image, mercilessly formal in its absolute symmetry, a mere geometrical design, lifeless . . .."

We might ask ourselves why, at this penultimate moment when all is tending upward toward the light, toward love and synthesis of the Alpha and Omega, we are treated to a set of names, familiar figures from the Testaments and from Church history, but here like icons in niches, more inert than the figures on along the paths of Purgatorio which the poet beautifully calls visibile parlare.

None who are named speaks, none is described, or has anything of the vivid individuality and animation of souls met throughout this journey. Something besides their historical personhood is of concern here. When Benedict promised Dante that he would see the blessed con imagine scoverta, little did we think this unveiling would drain their presence to a set of letters spelling their names.

The effect is skeletal, as if we are experiencing not the plenitude of the Rose, but rather the barest bones of Scripture inscribed in the Rose. The names have a somber, distanced air -- as if chiseled on a gravestone.

The Rose, all ebullience in the previous cantos, is now dissected by Bernard. The order he limns marks the breaking points of the strange interface between terrestrial man and his Creator: Those Before and After Christ; the matrilineal line, or wall, from Eve to Christ -- itself a jagged line that crosses boundaries of ethnicity and nationhood, and women without children, and women who killed kings. Then, three classes of innocents.

The one person from the Old Testament whose words - "miserere me" - we hear quoted by Bernard is David, the king who took another man's wife, and arranged that man's death. David not only committed a grave sin, for which he sang many a penitential psalm. With Bathsheba he fathered Solomon.

We're moving toward the close of the Commedia. That the final canto is coming is certain. Before we arrive, one last walk through a valley of wounds, balm, and the deepest doubt. What a remarkable artistic calculation: the poet has us with him, no one is going to stop reading his poem now. We've experienced some of the lowest and highest characters, tales and perils a reader could wish for. But Paradise is not only about God's sacred totality. It is also about the wounds, sins, and sorry history of the creature whose eternal life was purchased at horrific cost.

The face of heaven is broken, not unlike the broken god that provided human access there. The geometry of the Rose is disfigured by these markings of difference, this wall of nurturing, devious mothers, one assassin, and the horrors of sin issuing from the original piaga opened by Eve.

Piaga - "wound" - is given high prominence by Bernard - so high it is striking:

La piaga che Maria richiuse e unse,
quella ch'è tanto bella da' suoi piedi
è colei che l'aperse e che la punse.

Preceding even the name of Maria, la piaga opened by Eve, closed by Mary, stains the canto. The geometry of the Rose is crossed by lines of human error that disfigure it. The face of Heaven bears the sutures of a care incomprehensibly extended in the wake the nightmarish incisions of human history. To approach heaven without having contemplated this agony, this unaccountable rescue; without having confronted still more troubling doubts is not to approach this poet's sacral place at all.

The canto next turns to a last, deepest doubt: what of the children who died before their choices had authority to decide their fates? Doubts accompanying the pilgrim since he was lost in the wood.

This will be next.

Just a few quick questions: Paradiso 14

Paradiso 14 provokes questions - here are just a couple:

The canto unfolds in two segments of 33 lines each. The first segment has Beatrice asking a question Dante didn't even know he had, and the wheeling followers of Francis and Dominic dancing joyously. All is clear, circumscribed -- it even opens with a lovely simile of water in a vase, moving along radii from center to circle and back.

That first segment ends, followed by a new voice -- one who answers Beatrice's question, which concerns the resurrection of the body. That speaker, not named but presumed to be Solomon, is introduced this way:

E io udi' ne la luce più dia
del minor cerchio una voce modesta,
forse qual fu da l'angelo a Maria,

 And, in the lustre most divine of all
  The lesser ring, I heard a modest voice,
  Such as perhaps the Angel's was to Mary,  (14.34-36)

The "modest" voice might be mild, but as the voice of the Annunciation, it's uttering words that spoke of Word becoming flesh. Mild voice, large impact.

The canto offers various images that seem disproportionate - later, the vast motions of lights on Mars will be compared to specks of dust in a sliver of sunlight. These similes are working in a different way, one that will deserves some attention and interrogation.

In the second 33-line segment, the new voice speaks to the pilgrim of how grace, ardor, vision and brightness each increase the other -- using a perfect chiasmus to display a system of mutual strengthening that itself will be made more potent when the saved souls - substances, now dressed in light - will once again wear their resurrected flesh.

The segment thus begins with the Incarnation and speaks of the final Resurrection of the body, compressing two events, beginning and end, that are mutually intertwined -- the word of the angel putting in motion the sacrifice that conquered death.

The word for overcoming and conquest -- vincere -- appears four times in the canto -- but this militant conquest is tied intimately to the Word.

Interestingly, there appears to be no self-contained third 33-line segment in the canto. At line 99, where the third segment would end, we're in the middle of a simile that involves the Galassia -- the Milky Way; the pattern breaks to an open-ended vista -- one so vast it that makes wise men doubt.

We've moved beyond the clear and distinct ideas of the men of the Sun into a murkier realm -- harder to see, to know. Lots of questions.

An unusual wall painting in Pompeii.

As we've often alluded to the complex relationship of the worldview of the Greeks to that of the Hebrews -- here's a painting found at Pompei that suggests at least an awareness of the Old Testament wisdom books among 1st Century AD Romans:

According to Theodore Feder, the painting depicts the scene of Solomon in judgment, and the two women each claiming to be the mother of an infant, and how he decided that case. Feder says it's quite likely that the two figures on the far left, observing the scene, were meant to represent Socrates and Aristotle, thus bringing Hellenic philosophy into the chambers of Israel's wisest king.

Interestingly, Socrates's posture here is not unlike that of a satyr, which is interesting in light of a tradition stemming from Plato's Symposium. In that dialogue, Alcibiades compares Socrates to Silenus, an ugly old satyr to all appearances, but one who contains invaluable riches within. Feder's article is here. More on Silenus on the Ovid blog here.

(Thanks to Arline for the pointer to Feder's article.)