From geometry to rapture: Paradiso 14

Paradiso 14 begins with a geometric structure, captured in the rhetorical pattern known as chiasmus. The word pattern is reflecting, or mimicking, the echoic pattern of water moving in a round vase - from center to circumference, or vice versa, depending upon where something strikes it:

Dal centro al cerchio, e sì dal cerchio al centro
movesi l'acqua in un ritondo vaso,
secondo ch'è percosso fuori o dentro: 

From centre unto rim, from rim to centre,
In a round vase the water moves itself,
As from without 'tis struck or from within. (Par. 14. 1-3)

The geometry is not only exact, it is also ineluctable -- the water (or a light, or a sound) will always behave this way. The structure of the circle is such that it will produce the same result each time something either strikes it on the outside, or drops from above.

Such patterns and their identification belong to the work of pattern recognition, which Dante draws our attention to (as we saw a few posts back) with regard to the patterns found in the night sky, and in the sphere of the sun. The reliability of knowledge, we learned, depends upon our capacity to detect formal patterns in nature as well as in language.

Sophie Germain

Some patterns occur in ways that are easily explicable. Others occur quite reliably, but seem less easily explained. Chladni plates (named for Ernst Chladni, whose research explored the invisible interface between sounds and visual patterns) offer evidence of relationships between grains of sand (or couscous) and different frequencies which manifest in distinct patterns at different vibrations. The relationships turn out to be mappable by equations (worked out by Sophie Germain and others) that describe wave dynamics:

Beyond the Sun

This pattern of pattern recognition is violated in Paradiso 14 right after Solomon explains how, after the Resurrection of the body, the souls will still have their glowing light, but now they will have their senses, newly strengthened and able to experience all things new.

No sooner does Solomon end his resonant (and very chiastic) account of this event (at line 66) than we hear Ed ecco -- behold! -- something new and unexpected occurs:

Ed ecco intorno, di chiarezza pari,
nascere un lustro sopra quel che v'era,
per guisa d'orizzonte che rischiari. 

E sì come al salir di prima sera
comincian per lo ciel nove parvenze,
sì che la vista pare e non par vera, 

parvemi lì novelle sussistenze
cominciare a vedere, e fare un giro
di fuor da l'altre due circunferenze. 

Oh vero sfavillar del Santo Spiro!
come si fece sùbito e candente
a li occhi miei che, vinti, nol soffriro!

And lo! all round about of equal brightness
Arose a lustre over what was there,
Like an horizon that is clearing up.

And as at rise of early eve begin
Along the welkin new appearances,
So that the sight seems real and unreal,

It seemed to me that new subsistences
Began there to be seen, and make a circle
Outside the other two circumferences.

O very sparkling of the Holy Spirit,
How sudden and incandescent it became
Unto mine eyes, that vanquished bore it not!  (14.70-78)

The moment is mysterious -- a third circle, but not quite stable, begins to surround the other two. It glimmers like faint lights flickering at dusk, then suddenly becoming blindingly incandescent, overpowering the pilgrim's eyes, which had so far supported the potent rays of the Sun.

Joachim of Flora

Commentators have pondered he meaning of this third circle at length, relating it to the other circles as the Holy Spirit to the Father and Sun, and to prophecies of the Calabrian Joachim of Flora and the dawning of a third age.

What we can say for sure is that in this gloaming nothing is sure: The nove parvenze, or novel appearances, are said to "appear to begin to be seen,"

Si che la vista pare e non par vera,  

So that the sight seems real and unreal.

The canto moves from a realm of regular and predictable order (like the geometry of a vase of water) to a place where appearances are such that they suspend, put into question, our apprehension of pattern. This cognitive predicament, known to psychologists as apophenia, has been described as "the human tendency to perceive meaningful patterns within random data." To find a man or a face in the moon is a common example. The article goes on to note:

Apophenia has come to imply a universal human tendency to seek patterns in random information, such as gambling.

Paradiso 14 is quite clear in breaking with patterns it has produced. It's at line 67 for example that we expect to find another set of 33 lines reiterating the first two, whose clear structure was noted by early commentators like Benvenuto da Imola.

This moment of sunset takes place just as Dante and Beatrice, before they even know it, leave the sun and with it the confidence owed to its clarity. In this darkling moment nothing is certain. If the new circle contains dottori, learned authors, it's unclear how many authors, let alone who they might be. It's all indistinct, says Benvenuto:

non tamen plene et manifeste sicut primae, sed confuse, quia hic erat maximus numerus doctorum quos autor non poterat nominatim numerare, sicut fecerat superiores, nec distincte; sed sub involucro comprehendit omnes.

A new circle appears to appear, and the passage puts stress not upon the solid form of a new circumference, but rather seems to find astonishment that what had been the circumference seems surpassed (sublated, i.e., cancelled and transcended)  by a new circumference -- yet one whose borders remain vague, with the possibility of containing millions of sussistenze in its sparkling (sfavillar). 

The challenge of not knowing is not trivial. It's at this moment that Dante and Beatrice are translated to the sphere of Mars, and now the pilgrim seems to fall back upon his own powers. He raises his eyes, and, as he does so, he and Beatrice are raised up; he now performs a sacrifice in his breast. He is doing these things unprompted and undirected. The action brings results -- a glowing redness in the new sphere appears to answer and approve his internal holocaust.

Close attention to the remainder of the canto will show that the language of action, of performative utterance, supplants the descriptive language of pattern. As the vast galaxy within Mars appears, the vision seems boundless, open-ended, and what the pilgrim begins to experience are, not patterns, not meanings that are understood, but potent beauties that seize the soul:

E come giga e arpa, in tempra tesa
di molte corde, fa dolce tintinno
a tal da cui la nota non è intesa,

così da' lumi che lì m'apparinno
s'accogliea per la croce una melode
che mi rapiva, sanza intender l'inno.

And as a lute and harp, accordant strung
With many strings, a dulcet tinkling make
To him by whom the notes are not distinguished,

So from the lights that there to me appeared
Upgathered through the cross a melody,
Which rapt me, not distinguishing the hymn. (14.118-123)

Three times in quick succession we hear that something is non intesa -- not understood. To go from the Sun to Mars is to go from an aesthetic of beauty to that of the sublime. Perhaps nothing makes this more "clear" than the simile that juxtaposes the vast armies that seem to move along the flashing crossbeams to specks and motes moving at random in a sunbeam. The beam shines through an artificial shade devised by human cunning and art to shield us from the harsh sun. Ingenio e arte provide a glimpse of what was always there, unseen in the full light of day:

così si veggion qui diritte e torte, 
veloci e tarde, rinovando vista, 
le minuzie d'i corpi, lunghe e corte, 

moversi per lo raggio onde si lista 
talvolta l'ombra che, per sua difesa, 
la gente con ingegno e arte acquista.

Thus level and aslant and swift and slow
We here behold, renewing still the sight,
The particles of bodies long and short,

Across the sunbeam move, wherewith is listed
Sometimes the shade, which for their own defence
People with cunning and with art contrive. (14.112-117)

The random specks are not caught up in some Chladni pattern - they remain random. And, of course, they are tiny, compared to the galassia and the giant cross, and the figures moving along its beams. This is perhaps as Miltonic as Dante gets -- vast and small, order and unforced happenstance, equated in a heightened moment of sublime apprehension -- not of pattern, rather a new rapture, potent and uncircumscribed by finite meaning.

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.

Non Bacco, non Peana: Glimpsing Par. 14

A brief look back at the Sun, and a quick look ahead to Mars.

The main story of the five cantos of the Sun delineates in great detail the solar force of the Church. It composes itself before our eyes as a series of layers, creating a complex image of a chariot of the Sun. Like the actual sun, it nurtures life through heat and light. But these attributes of the Church are not merely physical, nor do they rest upon philosophical first principles. From the first, the cantos of the Sun debunk the power of logic as the arbiter of judgment and basis of wisdom.

Rather than axioms, the true first principles of the Church are individual lives -- specifically, Francis and Dominic -- they are at one point called principi, and are the living embodiments of primal ardor and intellect. They are the wheels of the Church's solar chariot at work in historical time, and their 24 disciples actively extend their powers (even those who preceded them chronologically, apparently).

As the set of five solar cantos concludes, we see even more clearly how pattern recognition, which is basic to knowledge, is both insisted upon and shown to be utterly imperfect as a model or sign of the truth. The necessary imperfection of the sublunar world is the way things are, and nothing the human mind can construct or imagine will offer more than an approximation. The 24-line opening of canto 13 ends with:

poi ch'è tanto di là da nostra usanza,
quanto di là dal mover de la Chiana
si move il ciel che tutti li altri avanza.

Because it is as much beyond our wont,
As swifter than the motion of the Chiana
Moveth the heaven that all the rest outspeeds.

In discussing, we didn't address what immediately comes after this awareness of the sketchiness of our awareness:

Lì si cantò non Bacco, non Peana,
ma tre persone in divina natura,
e in una persona essa e l'umana.

There sang they neither Bacchus, nor Apollo,
  But in the divine nature Persons three,
  And in one person the divine and human.  (13.25-27)

The canto opened, we recall, with numbers -- the 15 stars, the 7, the 2 -- we combined them to get the sum of the disciples of Francis and Dominic. This is arithmetically coherent. But now, here's a new math, in which three persons can be one, which in turn can be two. The austere, rigorous system elucidated by every mathematician from Euclid to Fibonacci is scrambled. Our rational capacity to count is broken.

The Trinity was evoked by Thomas, but here it seems to mark a rupture with everyday reality. Not Apollo, not Dionysus. A song beyond anything the ancients imagined, Revelation outside number, beyond ecstatic dream.

Canto 14 will conclude the enlightenment of the Sun with an account of the resurrection of the body, after which Dante and Beatrice will be translated (translato - used at 14.81 for the only time) to the next realm of Paradiso, to a vast red galaxy that sweeps us into the sublime:

Come distinta da minori e maggi
lumi biancheggia tra ' poli del mondo
Galassia sì, che fa dubbiar ben saggi;

Even as distinct with less and greater lights
Glimmers between the two poles of the world
The Galaxy that maketh wise men doubt . . .

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.

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,)

Torrential cultivation: Dominic in Paradiso 12

In Paradiso 12, a second wheel appears, encircling the first. We do not yet know who belongs to this group, and the other day we had difficulty with the question of the relative turnings of these wheels. Do they move together, as one? Or in opposite directions? Or even at an angle to one another?

At least one sensitive commentator, John Carroll, thinks the second wheel moves opposite to the first. Nicola Fosca quotes his observation:

. . . two circles go in opposite directions, partly because of the figure which, I think, was before Dante's eyes. He pictured the two circles very much, if I may use a mechanical illustration, as if they were two cog-wheels, the teeth of which fitted into and drove one another in opposite directions. 

Carroll has a thoughtful explanation as to why this oppositional relation would work in this context:

The teeth are the rays which each had, says Dante, 'within the other.' When we remember that they are the rays in the one case of knowledge, in the other of love, we will not wonder at their contrary movements. In this world, at least, head and heart often seem to move, even in religion, in opposite directions, to have different methods of work, and to arrive at conclusions hard to reconcile. In the world above, the great reconciliation takes place: . . . If this interpretation is correct, nothing could better show Dante's conviction that these two types of theology belong together and complete each other - their rays fit into one another, and their apparent contradictions produce that swift movement which means intense yearning for a still deeper knowledge and love of God.

It is clear that Dante is devoting two cantos here to two very different "champions" of Christ: Francis the wild lover, Dominic the disciplining teacher, each helping define the heart and head, the heat and light, of the nurturing solar power of Christian faith.

But the figural system of this canto might offer an even richer imaginative structure that satisfies Carroll's thesis equally well, if not better. 

The first tercet makes clear that to the circle of dancing ladies -- the garland, the ardent suns of canto 11 -- one now, at the beginning of canto 12, must add la mola, the millstone:

Sì tosto come l'ultima parola
la benedetta fiamma per dir tolse,
a rotar cominciò la santa mola;

e nel suo giro tutta non si volse
prima ch'un'altra di cerchio la chiuse,
e moto a moto e canto a canto colse;

Soon as the blessed flame had taken up
The final word to give it utterance,
Began the holy millstone to revolve,

And in its gyre had not turned wholly round,
Before another in a ring enclosed it,
And motion joined to motion, song to song; (Par. 12.1-6)

As millstones, these wheeling theologians interact. Their weighty masses transform grain into flour by rubbing against one another. There are various configurations of millstones; what's essential is that they are exquisitely balanced to grind the fruits of the Earth into fine powder.

Flour mill stones

It is precisely in the oppositional interaction between these wheeling forces -- whether it's Thomas Aquinas and Siger, or Bonaventura and Joachim, or Francis versus Dominic, as different as ardent action and coolly radiant thought --

due campioni, al cui fare, al cui dire

that the living faith, the bride of Christ, is husbanded.

The process of the mill as rendered here remains central to the canto just as both heat and light are necessary to the nurturing power of the Sun.  Shortly the 24 figures of the two circles will become metaphorical plants, surrounding the seed that Dominic seeks to protect. He didn't go to the Pope seeking some crooked means of cheating the poor, according to Bonaventura.

Instead,

addimandò, ma contro al mondo errante
licenza di combatter per lo seme
del qual ti fascian ventiquattro piante.

He asked for, but against the errant world
Permission to do battle for the seed,
Of which these four and twenty plants surround thee.

The point for Dominic is to fight for the seed, which Christ himself said is the "word of God" (Luke 8.11).  The seed (lo seme) is that from which germinate champions like Francis and Dominic and the 24 who encircle Dante and Beatrice -- these groups of thinkers and doers are one one hand the sources of grain, and on the other, the very millstones that grind it.

Mill stones

This metaphorical structure of the mill then supports an entire heroic vision -- fighting for the Word, which is sown, grown, threshed, and milled into the stuff of life. Dante takes this a step further by turning this hero, this champion of l'esercito di Cristo (the army of Christ) into the agricola, the laborer (not the boss) in the vegetable garden (orto) who works to grow the fruits of the earth. Then the poet takes it another step by transforming Dominic into the element that makes all life possible: 

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)

There's much more to Paradiso 12 -- will try to get to a bit of it in an additional post. But at this point, it's worth pausing to contemplate the marvelous architecture of Dante's figuration, as he goes from millstones to grain, to seed and gardening and water, all feeding one of the most basic figurative fields of the Western tradition -- the act of cultivation, the work of culture. If Francis was a natural force, Dominic is a champion in an army that is tilling fields, sowing seeds, irrigating -- at times with torrential militant force.

It fits that Dominic was born in the West, cooled by the temperate Zefiro, the "sweet West Wind":

In quella parte ove surge ad aprire
 Zefiro dolce le novelle fronde
 di che si vede Europa rivestire,

Within that region where the sweet west wind
Rises to open the new leaves, wherewith
Europe is seen to clothe herself afresh,

Rising in the East, burning with love for Povertà, Francis removed his clothes in the midst of the city. Out of the West, Dominic clothes the Bride, and nourishes the novelle fronde -- leaves authored by a new army of teachers and defenders of the faith.

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.)

Amyclas and Caesar

This scene from book 5 of Lucan's Pharsalia is placed here for ease of reference for the discussion in this blog post. It's the story of Amyclas and Caesar that is alluded to in Paradiso 11. 

Fortune for his guide,
Alone he passes on, and o'er the guard
Stretched in repose he leaps, in secret wrath
At such a sleep. Pacing the winding beach,
Fast to a sea-worn rock he finds a boat
On ocean's marge afloat. Hard by on shore
Its master dwelt within his humble home.
No solid front it reared, for sterile rush
And marshy reed enwoven formed the walls,
Propped by a shallop with its bending sides
Turned upwards. Caesar's hand upon the door
Knocks twice and thrice until the fabric shakes.
Amyclas from his couch of soft seaweed
Arising, calls: ' What shipwrecked sailor seeks
'My humble home? Who hopes for aid from me,
' By fates adverse compelled? ' He stirs the heap
Upon the hearth, until a tiny spark
Glows in the darkness, and throws wide the door.
Careless of war, he knew that civil strife
Stoops not to cottages. O! happy life
That poverty affords! great gift of heaven
Too little understood! what mansion wall,
What temple of the gods, would feel no fear
When Caesar called for entrance? Then the chief:
' Enlarge thine hopes and look for better things.
' Do but my bidding, and on yonder shore
' Place me, and thou shalt cease from one poor boat
' To earn thy living; and in years to come
' Look for a rich old age: and trust thy fates
' To those high gods whose wont it is to bless
' The poor with sudden plenty.' So he spake
E'en at such time in accents of command,
For how could Caesar else? Amyclas said,
''Twere dangerous to brave the deep to-night.
' The sun descended not in ruddy clouds
' Or peaceful rays to rest; part of his beams
' Presaged a southern gale, the rest proclaimed
' A northern tempest; and his middle orb,
' Shorn of its strength, permitted human eyes
' To gaze upon his grandeur; and the moon
' Rose not with silver horns upon the night
' Nor pure in middle space; her slender points
'Not drawn aright, but blushing with the track
' Of raging tempests, till her lurid light
'Was sadly veiled within the clouds. Again
' The forest sounds; the surf upon the shore;
' The dolphin's mood, uncertain where to play;
' The sea-mew on the land; the heron used
' To wade among the shallows, borne aloft
' And soaring on his wings-all these alarm;
' The raven, too, who plunged his head in spray,
' As if to anticipate the coming rain,
And trod the margin with unsteady gait.
But if the cause demands, behold me thine.

Defective premises: Francis in Paradiso 11

The five cantos of the Sun (Par. 10-14) open with the Trinity, and with the chiastic (X-shaped) intersection of the celestial equator and the ecliptic.

These moments offer another ground, a new beginning that has consequences for the poet's strategy, his poetics. As he explains in Paradiso 10, no one has ever been able to look at the sun, so to describe anything brighter than it is not within our powers:

Perch' io lo 'ngegno e l'arte e l'uso chiami,
sì nol direi che mai s'imaginasse;
ma creder puossi e di veder si brami. 

E se le fantasie nostre son basse
a tanta altezza, non è maraviglia;
ché sopra 'l sol non fu occhio ch'andasse.

I, though I call on genius, art, and practice,
Cannot so tell that it could be imagined;
Believe one can, and let him long to see it. 

And if our fantasies too lowly are
For altitude so great, it is no marvel,
Since o'er the sun was never eye could go.

In part, this means we get to hear more than we see. We hear the learned dottori of the Church speak and sing. They are lucid and aware enough of the limits of their understanding to sing from the same hymnal, as it were.

In Paradiso 11, there's another new jumping off point -- having brought up the "invidious" syllogisms of Siger near the conclusion of Paradiso 10, the new canto opens with a critique of practical logic:

O insensata cura de' mortali,
quanto son difettivi silogismi
quei che ti fanno in basso batter l'ali!

O Thou insensate care of mortal men,
How inconclusive are the syllogisms
That make thee beat thy wings in downward flight! (11.1-3)

The passage proceeds to describe various human pursuits, some based in books (law, medicine, priesthood, sophistry), some in crime (theft), some in ambition (politics), some in pleasure.

The idea that human beings and their choices are driven by a kind of logic susceptible to being faulty is quite Aristotelian. One can invent such syllogisms as:

Power is good
Political leadership brings power
I will pursue political leadership.

Ghirlandaio, Sassetti Chapel, Santa Trinita

The problem is that the first principles of these practical logical arguments are often difettivi. Longfellow's rendering of difettivi as "inconclusive" might miss the target here -- in the example just now, equating political leadership with power begs the question of whether all modes of power are good. Without first demonstrating that, the reasoning can be called defective. That is, it certainly leads to a conclusion, it just happens to be an erroneous one, as anyone following politics these days can affirm!

Basing life choices on defective logic can cause wings, which normally help the soul defy gravity, to fly in basso.

This knowledge of how logic errs precedes Aquinas's tale of St. Francis -- a man whose cura might not take the form of a syllogism, but whose ardor qualifies him as a solar being. It's a tale of a son choosing to love Povertà, who is anathema to his wealthy merchant father. The son removed the fine silk attire that brought financial security, and stood unclothed before his father and the city.

Povertà becomes Francis's cura, his first premise -- a highly vulnerable premise of owning, having, positing, nothing. His life will unfold with the unique logic that flows from such a principle.

To be continued . . .

Paradiso 10: Mai da lei l'occhio non parte (3)

One is lost in conjecture as to the motive which impelled Dante, the admirer of Thomism, to place in the mouth of St. Thomas Aquinas the eulogy of Siger of Brabant, the apostle of Averroism. -- Catholic Encyclopedia.

After Dante returns from his momentary oblivion (mente unita), he and Beatrice see and hear 12 learned doctors of the Church, singing and turning around them.

It's a fair bet that anyone who's ever studied even a little of Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, Peter the Lombard or Richard of St. Victor has not reflexively thought of them as dancing ladies. The audacity of the figure - one out of a profusion of tropes that serially proceed from one another in this scene - has been both admired and criticized.

Poi, sì cantando, quelli ardenti soli
 si fuor girati intorno a noi tre volte,
 come stelle vicine a' fermi poli, 

donne mi parver, non da ballo sciolte,
 ma che s'arrestin tacite, ascoltando
 fin che le nove note hanno ricolte.

As soon as singing thus those burning suns
  Had round about us whirled themselves three times,
  Like unto stars neighbouring the steadfast poles, 

Ladies they seemed, not from the dance released,
  But who stop short, in silence listening
  Till they have gathered the new melody.

Museo Archaeo Cagliari

Charles Singleton points to an Italian scholar's description of a ballata, a dance song:

He represents the customary manner of dancing to a
ballata, in which the lady who leads the song recites the
first stanza [the ripresa or ritornello], standing still;
when she has done this, the entire group of dancers moves in
a round dance, repeating the stanza, and when finished,
stops; then the lady of the song [i.e., who first began the
song], again standing still, sings the next stanza, which
ends rhyming with the first whereupon the group again does a round dance, singing again the stanza called ritornello.

Dante's dancers, let's bear in mind, are blazing suns. They are singing and circling, then they pause -- not released from the dance, but for a moment silent, suspending their motion; they listen, gather the nove note, the new notes, and begin again.

It might be a small point, but it seems to me the "ladies" of Dante's dance are not pausing to hear one of their own sing a known song. Rather, they all pause, in silence, listening, until they gather the new notes. These circling suns are giving themselves not to something they already know. They are silently attending to something new.

Is it too fanciful to see these dancers as listening to new notes of music, which then dictate the dance? In this way, they are replicating the pattern above, when Dante wrote several terzine about turning wheels, then paused, telling us to pause and attend to them, while he turned to listen to new words to write down in his role of scribe?

From guardando, the first word of the canto, on, the contemplative act -- looking at and listening to the Other, then noting (pensando dietro), writing, singing, dancing what is heard -- has been a unifying motif of canto 10. The poet tells us to vagheggiar ne l'arte - to contemplate with love the art, the turning heavens:

tanto che mai da lei l'occhio non parte.

The Maker's "eye" never parts from his Creation; later, Thomas Aquinas will say that one who listens well delights to see every good in the false world:

Per vedere ogne ben dentro vi gode
 l'anima santa che 'l mondo fallace
 fa manifesto a chi di lei ben ode.  

By seeing every good therein exults
The sainted soul, which the fallacious world
Makes manifest to him who listeneth well; (10.124-26)

To find such good, to hear something genuinely new, one has to attend with care to what is there and stop listening to oneself (Paradiso 10 a manifesto of close reading?). How does this motif, binding everyone from God to the poet to the lettor, play out with the dancers?

Aquinas introduces a considerable variety of authors who were also readers -- an historian, a mystic interpreter, a natural scientist, logicians, allegorists, philosophers, and even Siger de Brabant, whose rigorous Averroism put him at odds with his contemporary theologians, including Aquinas.

Aquinas begins his list with his "brother and master" Albertus, but even before Albertus we hear of Dominic, the shepherd whose flock contained the lambs called Thomas and Albertus. The strong sense of an obedient community and the bonds of a worthy teacher-student pair begin the list, which then broadens into a more diverse group spread across centuries and different lands, ending with Siger, whose contentious Averroism got him condemned by the Inquisitor of France.

Once again, Dante's staging provokes palpable surprise. The author of the "Siger" article in the Catholic Encyclopedia can't for the life of him understand what would prompt Dante to include an Averroist among these ardent suns. But perhaps there's a clue in that very article:

Siger was the adversary of Albertus Magnus and of St. Thomas Aquinas, "contra praecipuos viros Albertum et Thomam". His principal work (De anima intellectiva) called forth St. Thomas's treatise on the unity of the intellect (De unitate intellectus contra Averroistas). Siger in fact supported all the beliefs of the Averroist philosophy — the monism of the human intellect; one intellectual spirit for all men, separate from the body, is temporarily united with each human organism to accomplish the process of thought.

For sober theologians, the inclusion of Siger comes dangerously close to an endorsement of heretical thought. The author fully anticipates their surprise. But here in the canto of the Sun, we have diverse minds in motion, singing to each other harmonies that surpass their light:

più dolci in voce che in vista lucenti (10.66)

Something other than the intellect as source of declarative statements of truths is at work here. Consider this delicious irony: One of the salient points of Siger's thought was the unity of intellect. His assertion that we all share one immortal mind is a key reason others, including Aquinas, attacked him. The doctors of the Church, as learned as they were, spoke truth as they saw it, and apparently were least able to unite intellectually when it came to the question of intellectual unity.

Then there are the remarkable closing words of Aquinas's speech, again apropos of Siger:

"silogizzò invidïosi veri.”

"did syllogize invidious truths"  (10.138)

Dante, Beatrice, Siger and other Sapienti

Several translators and commentators (but not Longfellow or Sinclair) render this as "enviable truths." This sounds conciliatory, but makes no sense. If Siger's truths were enviable, what were those of Thomas or Boethius? We might say instead that his truths themselves were invidious -- not the thinker, but the thoughts. Siger is acknowledged as one whose truths wrought disharmony, dissonance within the Schoolmen and throughout the Church intelligentsia.

If so, this might help us see what is truly uniting Paradiso 10: not whether someone is narrowly, pedantically correct in what he states as truth, but rather whether the truth is offered in the contemplative spirit, and how, in that spirit, differences -- twists, inflections, conflicts from one point of view to another -- are generative of new, fertilizing insights. The temperate torque (torta) of the heavens is replicated in the turnings of the mind, arguing and doubting in the quest for truth whose depths exceed its furthest reach. Yes, the folle volo of Ulysses resonates here, but instead of heroic folly, lambs that grow fat as they quest.

The final simile transforms the music of the 12 turning sapienti into the inner workings of a clock. pushing and pulling, counting the hours, and awakening the Bride of God:

Indi, come orologio che ne chiami
ne l'ora che la sposa di Dio surge
a mattinar lo sposo perché l'ami,

che l'una parte e l'altra tira e urge,
tin tin sonando con sì dolce nota,
che 'l ben disposto spirto d'amor turge; 

così vid'ïo la gloriosa rota
 muoversi e render voce a voce in tempra
 e in dolcezza ch'esser non pò nota
se non colà dove gioir s'insempra.

Then, as a horologe that calleth us
What time the Bride of God is rising up
With matins to her Spouse that he may love her,

Wherein one part the other draws and urges,
Ting! ting! resounding with so sweet a note,
That swells with love the spirit well disposed,

 Thus I beheld the glorious wheel move round,
  And render voice to voice, in modulation
  And sweetness that can not be comprehended,
Excepting there where joy is made eternal.   (Par. 10. 139-148)

The concatenation of music, mechanical action, time and lovemaking is the final surprise of the canto, and it returns us to the moment when we readers first were told to raise our eyes to the wheeling stars. There we saw not just the oblique angle of the ecliptic, but considered the virtue it imparts, rendering Earth fecund. In the X of the wheeling heavens lies the call and response of the sources of life -- water, light, heat, song, love, both human and divine, joy -- then foretasted, now right on time.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Paradise 10: Mai da lei l'occhio non parte (2)

Between the address to the reader in Paradiso 10 and the next line, which begins

Lo ministro maggior della natura

The greatest of the ministers of nature, (10.28)

the poet realizes that he is already in the Sun, without having sensed motion or time. He "sees" the Sun as a minister, that is, as one who carries out the commands of a ruler. In imprinting the world and measuring time, the minister is performing tasks assigned to him:

che del valor del ciel lo mondo imprenta
e col suo lume il tempo ne misura

Who with the power of heaven the world imprints
And measures with his light the time for us,

Unlike earlier evocations of Nature as an elemental force, e.g., fire's indomitable upward tendency, Nature here seems closer to a royal court.

In figuring the Sun as a subordinate, Dante might be taking a leaf from Ovid's tale of Phaethon in Metamorphoses 2, whose father is a god, but one with a job, a sort of bureaucratic functionary charged with keeping control of his chariot's horses, so that light, heat, and time keep their measured courses.

Beatrice's words make clear to the poet that this Sun, for all its brilliance, is but a visible servant of another. And this triggers a remarkable bit of playfulness, which hits us when we realize that the usual cliche, the blinding of the human eye that looks at the Sun, is missing from this canto. One would expect it to at least be alluded to at the moment of arrival in the sun, but it isn't:

E Bëatrice cominciò: “Ringrazia,
ringrazia il Sol de li angeli, ch'a questo
sensibil t'ha levato per sua grazia.”

And Beatrice began: "Give thanks, give thanks
Unto the Sun of Angels, who to this
Sensible one has raised thee by his grace!"

 And then, it is:

Cor di mortal non fu mai sì digesto
 a divozione e a rendersi a Dio
 con tutto 'l suo gradir cotanto presto,

come a quelle parole mi fec' io;
 e sì tutto 'l mio amore in lui si mise,
 che Bëatrice eclissò ne l'oblio.

Never was heart of mortal so disposed
To worship, nor to give itself to God
With all its gratitude was it so ready,

As at those words did I myself become;
And all my love was so absorbed in Him,
That in oblivion Beatrice was eclipsed.

Instead of having his eyes extinguished by the physical light of the sun, the poet is blinded by a twist, or trope: Beatrice is "eclipsed" when she speaks his being raised by the grace of il Sol de li angeli. Dante is flooded by grateful love of God, and Beatrice, who is brighter than the visible Sun, for an instant is blotted out.

Note that it's Beatrice's speaking that brings about this oblio. She speaks, he hears, and in hearing, experiences love. That her word inspires the poet with love echoes the first tercet of the canto, where the Father and the Son (Word) mutually breath love.

And it is her laughing eyes that return the poet to the multiplicity of things from the obliteration of what he calls the mente unita:

                                    ma si se ne rise
che lo splendor de li occhi suoi ridenti
mia mente unita in più cose divise.

                                    but she smiled at it
So that the splendour of her laughing eyes
My single mind on many things divided.  (10.61-63)

In the poet's education in Paradise, this split-second supersensory eclipse is a foretaste of a something greater, beyond the senses, to come. It will urge him on, just as he told us readers that our contemplation of the heavenly wheels would provide us with a foretaste of joy.

This brings us back, in a way, to the preliba, the "foretaste" the reader was told he will experience if he really paid attention to the wheeling skies above. Can the reader be said to have foretasted joy, as Dante assured him would happen? Has that promise been fulfilled? Perhaps not yet. There's the rest of the canto to attend to.

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Part 2
Part 3

Paradiso 10: Mai da lei l'occhio non parte (1)

Paradiso 10 begins a new moment in this canticle. We are in the Sun, and no shadow from Earth reaches this far -- as such, it is a place of absolute lucidity, and we readers are directly told to raise our eyes and look at the circling heavens - the celestial equator and the ecliptic.

When we do so, he notes, we are not seeing a parallel, symmetric, or perpendicular alignment. One wheel is torta -- twisted, turned 23.5 degrees (axial tilt) -- with respect to the other.

Vedi come da indi si dirama
l'oblico cerchio che i pianeti porta,
per sodisfare al mondo che li chiama. 

Che se la strada lor non fosse torta,
molta virtù nel ciel sarebbe in vano,
e quasi ogne potenza qua giù morta; 

e se dal dritto più o men lontano
fosse 'l partire, assai sarebbe manco
e giù e sù de l'ordine mondano.

Behold how from that point goes branching off
The oblique circle, which conveys the planets,
To satisfy the world that calls upon them;

And if their pathway were not thus inflected,
Much virtue in the heavens would be in vain,
And almost every power below here dead.

If from the straight line distant more or less
Were the departure, much would wanting be
Above and underneath of mundane order. (Par. 10. 13-21)

The axis of Earth remains oriented in the same direction with reference to the background stars regardless of where it is in its orbit. Northern hemisphere summer occurs at the right side of this diagram, where the north pole (red) is directed toward the Sun, winter at the left.

Dante is drawing the reader's attention to an astronomical fact. He had already written about this in Book 3 of the Convivio, citing Albertus Magnus and Lucan, as well as the ancient astrologers, as sources. Here's the prose account:

. . . the sphere of the Sun revolves from west to east, not directly aligned counter to the diurnal movement of day and night, but obliquely to it; so that this ecliptic, equidistant between the poles of its sphere, on which the body of the Sun is situated, cuts the celestial equator between the celestial poles, into two opposing regions, that is at the first point of Aries and the first of Libra, and diverges from it along two semicircular arcs, one towards the celestial north and the other towards the south. The points marking the centres of these arcs are at equal distances from the celestial equator on each side, and at an angle of twenty three and a half degrees to it; the one point is the first point of Cancer, and the other the first point of Capricorn. 

Ecliptic red, celestial equator blue

The apparent motion of the Sun along the ecliptic (red) as seen on the inside of the celestial sphere. Ecliptic coordinates appear in (red). The celestial equator (blue) and the equatorial coordinates (blue), being inclined to the ecliptic, appear to wobble as the Sun advances.

Note that this 23.5-degree angle explains the variation of the seasons regardless of whether one envisions the Earth or the Sun at the center of the solar system.

The two circles form the Greek letter Chi, or X -- something which was noted at least as early as the Timaeus, where the Craftsman (demiurge) joins two parts of his prepared matter:

he divided lengthways into two parts which he joined to one another at the center like the letter X, and bent them into a circular form, connecting them with themselves and each other at the point opposite to their original meeting point; (Timaeus 36)

If any classical text posits a benign Creator, it's the Timaeus, which Dante either had read directly or as carried over in other works. As soon the demiurge completes his work, Timaeus says,

When the Father and Creator saw the creature which he had made moving and living, the created image of the eternal gods, he rejoiced, and in his joy determined to make the copy still more like the original; . . . wherefore he resolved to have a moving image of eternity . . . and this image we call time. For there were no days and nights and months and years before the heaven was created, but when he constructed the heaven he created them also. (Timaeus 37)

The poetic version in the Commedia doesn't speak of the X, upon which later Christian thinkers superposed Christ and the cross. But it goes beyond simply describing the astronomical situation when it offers an interpretation leading to a strong inference. To whit: were it not for the twist (torta) or oblique angle of the ecliptic vis a vis the celestial equator, Earth's seasons would not exist -- extreme temperatures would make Earth inhospitable to life.

All of this forms part of the elaborate 21-line apostrophe to the lettor, the reader, who is directly called upon twice -- the only time this occurs in the 21 times the reader is addressed in the Commedia, according to Hollander. We receive three commands from the Poet:

1. Leva, dunque, lettor, all'alte ruote . . . la vista: Raise then with me, reader, to the lofty wheels your sight . . .
2. Vedi come da indi si dirama: See how from there branches the oblique circle that carries the planets . . ..
3. Or ti riman, lettor: Remain now, reader . . . 

Here's the last part:

Or ti riman, lettor, sovra 'l tuo banco,
dietro pensando a ciò che si preliba,
s'esser vuoi lieto assai prima che stanco. 

Messo t'ho innanzi; omai per te ti ciba;
ché a sé torce tutta la mia cura
quella materia ond' io son fatto scriba.

Remain now, Reader, still upon thy bench,
In thought pursuing that which is foretasted,
If thou wouldst jocund be instead of weary. 

I've set before thee; henceforth feed thyself,
For to itself diverteth all my care
That theme whereof I have been made the scribe. (Par. 10. 22-27)

As readers, we need to ask, what is this meal? Is there another Convivio, a philosophical banquet, of which we just had a foretaste? This foretaste links thought with taste, much as in line 6 above, the contemplation of the art of the Trinity is linked with the enjoyable taste (gustar) of the godhead. How, when, and why will we become jocund (lieto) by "thinking behind" (dietro) what we've been given to attend to?

Before we can ask these questions, the poet peremptorily tells us to feed ourselves; his cura is turning him back to his theme. Longfellow uses "diverteth," which is accurate in sense, but Dante's word is torcere, the same verb whose past participle, torta, earlier described the angle of the ecliptic.

Imagine a scroll being unrolled: The poet is telling the reader to think about what he's just read, even as he himself is being turned, torqued to move on and attend to the materia of which he is the scribe. The poet's experience of Paradiso is dictating, and Dante as scribe is at his bench, writing it down, even as he is addressing us. Or more consequentially, if he's a scribe, who -- or what -- is addressing  us?

We'll look more closely at the relation of this address and its commands of looking up, attending, following, in relation to Paradiso 10 as a whole. We are tracing a unifying motif -- one that comes with a twist. Think Möbiusly.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3