Preparing to go beyond the sun: Par. 13

As the cantos of the Sun come to an end with Paradiso 13-14, the density and richness of the text seem to grow exponentially. There is simply not enough time to get into the close detail that would do justice to canto 13. For now, a few observations that perhaps will help appreciate what seems to be a major transition that takes place between the clarity of the Sun and the distinctly indistinct realm of Mars that begins with canto 14.

First, as many note, the five cantos of the Sun have many instances of the x-shaped crossing (or ring structure) of chiasmus. One can only appreciate this patterning after completing all five cantos, of course. Indeed, one could say that appreciation of chiastic form, especially on the level of larger segments of text, always requires that the reader look back, and remember what has come before, in order to identify the pattern.

For example, the command to imagine, repeated thrice at the opening of canto 13, balances Thomas Aquinas's insistence on being attentive and holding things in memory at the end of canto 11, introduced by three "if"s:

Or, se le mie parole non son fioche,
se la tua audïenza è stata attenta,
se ciò ch'è detto a la mente revoche,

Now if my utterance be not indistinct,
If thine own hearing hath attentive been,
If thou recall to mind what I have said,  (11.133-35)

Thomas is talking about the pilgrim's understanding of his discourse, but the "if"s hold true for the reader as well -- turning the leaves of a book, the reader is taking in the words, which are like seeds. But the work of reading involves more than just taking in -- it involves remembering, reflecting, and attending to patterns to mill and bake and eat the bread of the angels.

So canto 13 beings with a fascinating passage too complex to explore here. But we can note that the reader is now invited to do more than remember; one is to imagine what the poet describes : 15 of the brightest stars from all over the night sky, plus the 7 of the Wain (the Big Dipper), plus two at the mouth of the horn (the Little Dipper) -- moving from a process of selection by brightness to a selection by form to a selection of part of a whole, anchored in the North Star -- all adding up to 24 stars.

The poet is giving the reader an exercise in pattern recognition, a kind of rebus or puzzle that makes us work across different kinds of patterns before reaching a totality of 24, which equals the number of teachers revolving in two wheels around the poet and Beatrice, as well as the number of lines it takes the poet to provide us with the opening movement of canto 13.

The passage of course is more complex -- once we shape the images we've been told to imagine -- we then must imagine those stars turning into two wheeling signs like a doubled crown of Ariadne:

aver fatto di sé due segni in cielo,
qual fece la figliuola di Minoi
allora che sentì di morte il gelo;

To have fashioned of themselves two signs in heaven,
Like unto that which Minos' daughter made,
The moment when she felt the frost of death;

Our envisioning of the key stars in charting the navigation of the seas -- signs used by Ulysses and all mariners -- is metamorphosed into new signs, like those of the girl who helped Theseus navigate his way into and out of the lethal Daedalian labyrinth of Crete.

And, after we've done all this at the poet's behest, we learn that our imagined vision relates to the reality Dante experienced the way the Chiana, a sluggish Tuscan stream, compares to the fastest celestial sphere, the Primum Mobile.

Chiana, we note, contains "chi," and the entire 24-line passage is a chiasmus that begins with the promise that our imagining will give us "who desire to well understand what the poet saw" something verisimilar to the reality, and ends with the deflating assurance that our mental image is about as close to the truth as night is to day.

The irony of making us work so hard for what is very small is undeniable. There's also death here, coming with a cold shock. One could (and should) explore the ramifications of a passage from navigational clues -- constellations -- to circling signs that are "like" the figure made in the sky by the daughter of Minos. Interwoven here are Ulysses and Theseus, two of the ancient questers who, by the light of their culture's wisdom, were successful.

Throughout the Commedia, the pilgrim/poet has been both like and unlike these heros (as well as Aeneas). Are we reminded here of how those questers in fact failed? We recall Ulysses' own tale (in Inf.26) of leaving behind the North Pole, and the vortex that consumed his ship. And Theseus, who owed his conquest of the Minotaur to the clues of Ariadne, left his guide behind, to be claimed by Dionysus, who constellated her crown at her death.

Here that single circle of stars is doubled, yet is still called a sign. It's a new sign, a double dancing "true constellation" that is not visible to sailors on Earth, but to questers who read and remember the visions and histories and allegories of the 24 teachers, grouped according to their leanings toward Francis and Dominic.

We return to the two wheels of the chariot/Church, also the two wheels of the Ark, but now they are likened to a doubled crown put in the sky by Dionysus.

This reference to the God of wine and ecstasy should, as Thomas A. says, be kept in mind. We're about to get a comprehensive lesson from Thomas about creation, which will treat in some detail the imperfections of "wax" that cause diversity and flaws in Nature. It turns out that form, here below the moon anyway, is always compromised, never without contingency and dross:

Se fosse a punto la cera dedutta
 e fosse il cielo in sua virtù supprema,
 la luce del suggel parrebbe tutta; 

ma la natura la dà sempre scema,
 similemente operando a l'artista
 ch'a l'abito de l'arte ha man che trema.

If in perfection tempered were the wax,
  And were the heaven in its supremest virtue,
  The brilliance of the seal would all appear;
But nature gives it evermore deficient,
  In the like manner working as the artist,
  Who has the skill of art and hand that trembles.  (13.73-78)

At this moment in the lesson of the Sun, Thomas acknowledges that Nature is inherently errant, like the hand of a master artist that trembles. (Hollander and others convincingly refer to Ovid's Daedalus building the wings that will enable him to escape from Crete, but at the cost of Icarus: "The father's hands trembled," (Metam. 8.211)). Greek genius always involves loss, just as the forms of Nature always involve dross. The limits of the visible, of image and form, are being driven home in canto 13.

The last lines of canto 13, suggesting the generous capacity even the wisest men have for error, chiastically reflect the opening of canto 11, the insensata cura of mortals and their vain syllogisms. As we leave the Sun, the limits of the Apollonian -- of realizable pattern and hence formal knowledge -- are being demarcated.

The question of how do we go on -- by what signs to navigate once we've crossed beyond the solar light of logic, history, science, philosophy and wisdom -- is taken up in canto 14.

Fortune's sons: Francis and Caesar in Paradiso 11

We look at Francis's Povertà and see lack, vacancy. As when we try to look at the logic and conclusions of Providence:

La provedenza, che governa il mondo
con quel consiglio nel quale ogne aspetto
creato è vinto pria che vada al fondo,

The Providence, which governeth the world
With counsel, wherein all created vision
Is vanquished ere it reach unto the bottom, (11.28-30)

Every attempt to see the totality of the consiglio of Providence is overcome. Not defeated by logical argument, but vinto, overwhelmed like Ulysses's ship. Every created eye founders before fathoming the counsel employed by the governor of the world.

What makes Francis the solar force he is has to do neither with his teaching, nor with his lovely Canticle of the Sun. It lies in his power to move men.

Thomas says of Francis and his lover:

La lor concordia e i lor lieti sembianti,
amore e maraviglia e dolce sguardo
facieno esser cagion di pensier santi;

tanto che 'l venerabile Bernardo
si scalzò prima, e dietro a tanta pace
corse e, correndo, li parve esser tardo.

Their concord and their joyous semblances,
The love, the wonder, and the sweet regard,
They made to be the cause of holy thoughts;

So much so that the venerable Bernard
First bared his feet, and after so great peace
Ran, and, in running, thought himself too slow.

Francis's joy in Emptiness caused people to pursue him. Such was the alacrity of his ardor for Povertà that those overcome by it had to learn to run. He occasioned holy thoughts in them. As Robert Hollander notes, the past tense of si scalzò changes to a narrative present as the dactyls (scalzasi . . . scalzasi) pick up the pace:

Oh ignota ricchezza! oh ben ferace!
Scalzasi Egidio, scalzasi Silvestro
dietro a lo sposo, sì la sposa piace.

O wealth unknown! O veritable good!
Giles bares his feet, and bares his feet Sylvester
Behind the bridegroom, so doth please the bride!

The speed of Francis's motion, and his power to move men, to turn the love of Nothing into the fertile (ferace means "fertile," pace Longfellow) source of holy thoughts is underscored by an astonishing parallel, found in the tale of Amyclas. The curious allusion to Lucan's story tends to be read as a straightforward, simple analogy: Amyclas is like Francis, and his story affirms the freedom of Poverty from fear and the enchantments of power and desire,

But does one really need Amyclas to exemplify a happy freedom from fortune? A closer look at this tale (see here for ease of reference) shows us a simple fisherman, to be sure. But in Lucan's scene, Amyclas is the one with a boat, a home, food and a fire. Caesar comes to unabashedly beg from him.

Caesar, known for his power to move men, and for his astonishing speed, comes alone to the poor fisherman's shack in dire need. Amyclas offers many sound and prudent reasons as to why taking to the stormy seas just then would be very risky. He says:

"The billows tumble. Judged by clouds and sky
'A western tempest: by the murmuring deep
'A wild south-eastern gale shall sweep the sea.
'Nor bark nor man shall reach Hesperia's shore
In this wild rage of waters." (Pharsalia 5)

That's just for starters. Amyclas goes on for quite a while, describing all the potential dangers. It is Caesar who, free from fear, says to the fisherman:

"Scorn the threatening sea,
Spread out thy canvas to the raging wind;
If for thy pilot thou refusest heaven,
Me in its stead receive. Alone in thee
One cause of terror just-thou dost not know
Thy comrade, ne'er deserted by the gods,
Whom fortune blesses e'en without a prayer.
Break through the middle storm and trust in me."

Overriding all the practical fellow's objections, Caesar has Amyclas embark on seas blasted by hurricane winds - to which Lucan's hyperbolic description does full justice. Indeed, so powerful is the storm that Caesar confronts the possibility of his own death:

" . . . if to the deep the glory of my fall
Is due, and not to war, intrepid still
Whatever death they send shall strike me down.
Let fate cut short the deeds that I would do
And hasten on the end: the past is mine."

Who here is less a thrall to Fortuna?* Is it difficult to see some of Lucan's Caesar in the man from Assisi? A little further on in Thomas's story, Francis, embarking on a boat fraught with danger not just to him, but to the political and religious tensions in the world at that time, heads across the sea to convert the Sultan. Nothing could be less like Amyclas.

Francis, like Caesar, is a kind of loose cannon -- neither man shrank in the face of more than human danger -- both were free from terror that would stop most men cold.

This seems relevant to the complex figuration of Francis as Sun. The heat of ardor, divorced from the light of contemplative reason, can pose a threat, even a danger, to established order. Francis's ecstatic love of Povertà threatened to turn the social and economic orders of the 13th century upside down. The man was a political force -- he had people, increasing behind him, who loved him, as the common Romans did Caesar. This might seem a far-fetched parallel, but we might keep it in mind as we consider it in tandem with Paradiso 12, which delicately mirrors and balances this canto.

Dante frames Francis by having Thomas Aquinas, the brilliant rationalist, tell his story. It's as if one invited a thoughtful writer -- Dorothy Kearns Goodwin or Bertrand Russell -- to narrate a "life" of Donald Trump.

To look ahead: The chiastic structures at work in cantos 11 and 12 -- the interplay of Thomas/Francis and Dominic/Bonaventura and many reflecting elements -- serve as one way a poet writing beyond the sun will use a musical architecture to speak about the sun, the earth, and the "Chi," the harmonious and fertile fusion of heat and light that gives life where otherwise nothing would be.

The dissonant twist that exchanges properties of St. Francis and Caesar packs a surprising punch that we have seen before in Paradiso. It breaks all rules, defies all normative expectations. We'll never get used to it, but that's how it should be. We might call it a poetics of surprise.

*(The commentator known as the Anonimo Fiorentino (14th c.) summarizes the story, noting that Caesar offers Amyclas a way out of poverty: Rispuose Cesare: Se tu mi farai questo servigio, io ti provvedrò sì che tu non avrai bisogno d'andare a tale servizio; e trarrotti di questa povertade. Cited in Toynbee.)