by Dante
Even a veteran reader is startled each time he or she begins rereading the third cantica of this “theological epic.” For here the usual accoutrements of poetic narrative are downstaged by the language of Scholastic discourse and, finally, of mystical devotion. Dante’s Paradiso is surely one of the most daring poetic initiatives we have—perhaps it is simply the most daring. Its extraordinary popular success (in December 2002, Roberto Benigni recited and discussed its final canto before an Italian television audience reported to be more than 12 million in number) is testament to Dante’s stubbornness and to his genius. Its at times endless-seeming theological disquisitions, to be sure, have addled many a reader; one finds few who will claim (or admit) that it is their favorite cantica. At the same time, the poetic technique found in it reflects a supreme confidence and, in its greatest moments, attains a sublimity that sweeps all cynicism before it. It is perhaps worth the effort to report on one’s own experience in this regard. The writer has twice offered graduate seminars on Paradiso at Princeton (in 1980 and 1986). In both of these, the same thing happened. His students found the going difficult (as did he). They did not look forward to breaking their heads each week over the niceties of Scholastic distinction and other arcana. Nonetheless, once each seminar began, it was as though all present became a single instrument working toward a common understanding (perhaps in unconscious imitation of the speaking eagle in the heaven of Jupiter). Rarely have seminars flown by so quickly for all involved (or so it was reported even by the students), and rarely have students taught their teacher quite so well. Paradiso is certainly the most challenging part of the poem, but may also be the most rewarding for those who give themselves to it and let it do its work on them.
(2) A Poem of the Stars.
This poem about a journey through the heavens has little to do with our own notions of astronomy. (For Dante’s astronomy see, in English, at least Moore [Moor.1903.1], pp. 1–108; Orr [Orr.1914.1]; and Cornish [Corn. 2000.2]). Measured in the time that the protagonist is absent from the earth, the Paradiso seems to take a little more than twenty-four hours, although the temporal indications are less precise than they have been in the first two cantiche. He zooms up from the garden of Eden at noon on Wednesday, March 30 (or April 13, depending on the view of the matter accepted by the reader’s favorite discussant of the problem—see the notes to Inf. I.1 and Inf. XXI.38) and returns to earth sometime during the evening of the next day. This return is the only temporally unmarked portion of his reported voyage to the three realms of the afterworld, but the rough indications found in crucial passages late in the cantica encourage us to believe that the completed adventure, which ostensibly ends with the undescribed reentry of the protagonist, has taken one week, Thursday evening to Thursday evening. Giovanni Agnelli (Agne.1891.1), Table XI, has tried to demonstrate that the time consumed by Dante’s trip through Paradise takes exactly twenty-four hours (with some timeless time allowed for the visionary final four cantos). But even a rough calculation of the duration of time as presented in the text itself would seem to show that the time Dante spent in the heavens, as measured by earthly duration, is somewhat more than twenty-four hours (see the note to Par. XXVII.79–81). The first twenty-four hours were spent on earth and began Thursday evening (Inf. I and II); the next full day was consumed exploring Hell (Inf. III–XXXIV.69); and the next in the ascent to see again the stars (Inf. XXXIV.70–139), which brings us to 6 pm on Sunday evening Jerusalem time, or 6 am Sunday morning at the Antipodes, where begins the three-and-one-half-day trip up the mountain (what we call Purgatory) that ended with our hero in the earthly paradise at the propitious time of noon.
The heavens, conceived by Dante and the astronomers of his time as a series of concentric circular spheres, nine in all, surrounding the center of the universe, this our paltry earth, are formed by transparent crystal bodies, the first seven of which each mounts a single gem. These for Dante are the planets: Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. (In Dante’s eyes, they all shine with their own light alone.) The eighth sphere contains all the other stars (shining with reflected light, once again precisely reversing the understanding of our time). The ninth, the Primum Mobile or Crystalline Sphere, contains no other physical body besides itself, but, by loving God, propels the movement of the entire universe. Strictly speaking, Dante’s physical universe contains only these nine spheres. Surmounting it, existing beyond time and space and yet containing all space and time, is the home of God, of the angels, and of the souls of the saved (with seats reserved for those few yet to come). This placeless place is known as the Empyrean. As we will learn in Cantos III and IV (and the learning is not come by easily), no soul whom we meet in the eight lower spheres actually has a home in them, but has only appeared in a particular sphere to give Dante instruction of a certain hierarchical bent, for while all the blessed are equally blessed (as all the damned are equally damned), there is nonetheless here, as there was in Hell, an order of rank among those present. All the blessed are equally blessed, only some are less blessed than others—or, perhaps better put, some have fewer apparent credentials for salvation than others (e.g., Piccarda the traduced nun, as compared with St. Benedict; or Folco the former lover and poet, with St. John).
We also learn that each of these heavens, which are “ruled” by one of the nine orders of angels (about which see notes found in Canto XXVIII), is associated with a particular virtue: faith, hope, and love, respectively, in the first three spheres (Moon, Mercury, Venus), but each of these theological virtues in an imperfect form (see Ordiway [Ordi.1982.1]). The next four planetary spheres (Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn) present in turn the four cardinal virtues: prudence, fortitude, justice, and temperance. In the Starry Sphere we encounter the three theological virtues in their perfected form; in the Primum Mobile the nine ranks of angels, reflecting each of the nine virtues over which each of their orders presides.
As even this brief description indicates, Dante’s celestial bodies are less important for their physical traits (which are, nonetheless, duly noted) as for their influence on the character of a given human soul. Dante’s astronomy is thus, to us today, a curious blend of consideration of the physical characteristics of the heavens and of their influence on human life (see Kay [Kay.1983.1 and Kay.1994.2]). It is at once both astronomy and astrology, but an astrology “cleaned up,” drained of its deterministic elements, an astrology that would pass muster with St. Augustine, who cried out so eloquently against it (e.g., Confessions VII.vi). The notion that our actions are determined by the stars is simply anathema to Christian theologians, for whom the resultant pleas (e.g., “I was born under Venus; how could I resist the call of sexual pleasure?”) were the early version of the dog-ate-my-homework defense. Thus Dante’s age combined Ptolemaic astronomy and what we would rightly call astrology in such ways as to maintain the doctrine of Free Will. The stars, we will learn from Charles Martel in Paradiso VIII.97–148, predispose us toward certain abilities (thus explaining why we become either warriors or poets, for example) but in no way control our moral choices. And it is these that prepare us for our eternal lives, whether in Heaven or in Hell.
(3) The Drama of Paradiso.
This drama is not nearly so much moral, as was that described in the first two cantiche, as it is intellectual. Inferno and Purgatorio are both centrally moral in the reactions that they summon in the reader. This pertains at least through Purgatorio XXVII; once we arrive in the earthly paradise, we can feel the ground moving beneath our feet, compelling us to take a more historical and religious direction. Turning the corner into the heavens, we are soon aware of a more theological (indeed Scholastic) dimension to the poem, one that is, if not altogether a surprise, dramatically different. Here is another way in which the third cantica differs from the first two. The motivation of much of the discourse in the canticle comes from Dante’s puzzled questions, the result of his shaky understanding of God’s justice. Beatrice, given the role that one waggish commentator has characterized as re
sulting from her having been forced to act the part of St. Thomas in drag, takes over the role of guide from Virgil. And while she fields most of Dante’s questions, there are others who do so as well. It is quite a cast of teachers that he is privileged to have, including four eventual saints of the Church: Thomas, Bonaventure, Benedict, and Bernard.
And who is the protagonist of this bildungsroman? Pertile (Pert.1998.2), p. 19, describes him as follows: “A Florentine excluded from his city, aristocrat deprived of means, fervent Christian and unswerving anticlerical, politician constrained to stand on the sidelines, partisan without a party, layman swept up in his own religious mission, intellectual déclassé, Dante is a microcosm of all the tensions and contradictions of his time.” And now, when he has reached the final portion of his journey, the traces of his worldly identities and cares are, if anything, even more pressing, even more visible.
While the first actual presence of Beatrice in the poem, in the earthly paradise, puts her in the role of moral preceptor rather than that of guide to revealed truth, once we enter Paradiso, that becomes precisely her role. It is no wonder that Romantic readers insist that they find her less attractive than Francesca. (And, in the wake of De Sanctis and Croce, there follow many others who try to turn the poem into something it simply refuses to be.) Dante’s heavenly preceptor sounds like a Doctor of the Church, exactly as Dante wanted her to. Her role, some have argued, is to supervise the correction of Dante’s intellect. In such a formulation, Virgil supervises the correction of Dante’s will in Inferno and the perfection of his will in Purgatorio, while Beatrice has a similar role in the correction of Dante’s intellect in the first nine heavenly spheres, and Bernard presides over the perfection of Dante’s intellect in the Empyrean (see Hollander [Holl.1976.2]). That role makes the gamut of Scholastic distinctions that she forces Dante (and us) to run through seem only a reasonable course. It is probably true that no one has ever poeticized theology at such length and with better art than Dante has done in Paradiso.
There are many large theological and philosophical subjects addressed by Beatrice. (In Convivio, Dante might have referred to the passages containing them as digressioni [digressions]—and in Paradiso XXIX.127, he again uses that word.) This is not to consider those offered by Justinian, Charles Martel, Thomas Aquinas, Cacciaguida, or still others. Beatrice’s topics include the following: the paradoxical nature of heavenly “gravity,” drawing one up and not down (Par. I); the spiritual reason for the spots on the Moon (II—another refutation of arguments found in Convivio [II.xiii.9]); the information that saved souls do not return to their star but proceed directly (once they have finished their purgation, if they have had to pass through that realm; at least some saints and most or all martyrs apparently did not) to the Empyrean (IV); the relation between the absolute and the conditional will (IV); the repayment of broken vows and the freedom of the will (V); the primo mobile and the roots of time (XXVII); the ranks of the angels (XXVIII); the nature of and reason for God’s creation of the universe (XXIX); the fallen angels (XXIX); those members of religious orders who teach false doctrines (XXIX); the numberless ranks of the angels (XXIX).
Given this array of subjects, we may be excused if we wonder what Dante expected in the reader of Paradiso by way of education. We are puzzled by the always interesting and surely difficult question of the writer’s intended audience. To have garnered the respect and popularity he apparently did within a short period of time, his audience would have had to understand many at least recondite allusions and be able to follow some fairly sophisticated theological disquisition. How broad an audience could Dante have had that fully appreciated his achievement? (We should not forget that there also sprang up an enthusiastic illiterate audience for the work, memorizing the text from the recitals of others, a tradition that has continued into our own times (see Ahern [Aher.1982.3]). Obviously, it had to be literate, which we may safely assume means that he had a small audience to begin with (but for the growth of that potential audience from the tenth century on and the development of an “intellectual elite,” see the classic study of Le Goff, Les intellectuels au Moyen ge [English ed., Lego.1957.1]; and for laymen’s interests in and knowledge of formal philosophy, see Imbach [Imba.1996.1], pp. 1–128). That audience is expected to be conversant with all the disciplines on which Dante relies to convey his thoughts, not only theology, not only the so-called liberal arts (divided into two parts, the trivium and quadrivium [see below]), but with developing issues in what we would refer to as philosophy and natural science. This was not the nineteenth century, when there were numerous readers of a professional preparation (doctors, lawyers, and others whose schooling included literature at a fairly advanced level in liceo) who entered into debate in the Giornale dantesco or other literary periodicals over some of the poem’s finer points in a kind of “official amateur” role. There were, in the fourteenth century, perhaps no more than a happy few with such preparation. The educated readers to whom Dante addresses his poem had perhaps surprisingly similar educational backgrounds, having been subjected to the seven liberal arts: grammar, rhetoric, dialectic (roughly what is covered less cogently by preparation for what is measured by the “verbal” portion of the Standard Achievement Tests, familiar to American high school students); arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy (disciplines that were all associated with mathematics, and thus something like the preparation for the SATs in math). The most educated were mainly priests; they had also studied theology, the “highest science,” the only field for the “PhD” in most medieval universities, on the model of Paris, where Thomas Aquinas taught. And so, while we may feel challenged by any or all of the “fields” that are represented in the poem, the educated elite probably could manage to understand a lot more of it than we, as is evidenced by the early commentaries, which produce a good deal of lore regarding what we would call astronomy, biology, geology, and physics.
(4) Language and Style in Paradiso.
Most of the diction of Paradiso is solemn, but some is surprisingly lighthearted (Canto V.139: “il seguente canto canta” [the next song sings]), exalted, but also giddily playful (Canto V.122–123: “Dì, dì … a dii” [Speak, speak … in gods]); and, at times, colloquial and salty (Canto XVII.129: “e lascia pur grattar dov’ è la rogna” [and let the one who itches scratch]). If the low comic speech we heard so much of in Inferno and a good smattering of in Purgatorio is less often present in Paradiso, the fact that it is there at all tells us something about Dante’s determination to keep that low comic thread present in the fabric of the last canticle. It is probably correct to say that Purgatorio is the more “churchly” of the last two cantiche, while Paradiso is the more “Scholastic.” Nonetheless, the very presence of a few low-vernacular moments determines our sense of the linguistic range that defines the enterprise. Jean Racine, who was grandly alert to such problems, once wrote that one cannot have a character say the word mouchoir (handkerchief) in a tragedy (because it violates the stylistic register of the genre). In even the most exalted parts of Paradiso, Dante keeps the low-mimetic present, as for instance in the last canto (Par. XXXIII.7) when he refers to Mary’s womb, not in a Petrarchan and noble and politely metaphorical way (as one commentator thought he should have, by saying virginal chiostro [virginal cloister]), but by the unvarnished plainness of ventre (“womb” or “belly”).
All the speakers overheard by us, eavesdropping at Dante’s shoulder, are saved. This fact understandably colors the intonations that we hear. The more academic and abstract subjects normally addressed by Beatrice and by those Dante meets in the heavens would seem to call for different stylistic registers, and indeed we do hear a lot of Scholastic discourse, most notably from St. Thomas and from Dante’s three apostolic examiners, Peter, James, and John, on the theological virtues. Nonetheless, we catch the inflection not only of that speech appropriate to such discourse, but also of Franciscan narrative (see Canto XI), with plenty of room left for a Christian version of Old Testament propheti
c rage in the various denunciations of earthly behavior we hear in the first nine heavens. As Fredi Chiappelli (Chia.1967.3) suggested, in moving to Paradiso we encounter, at first (and as we might expect), a much greater degree of abstraction, both linguistic and conceptual, than we have become accustomed to in the earlier parts of the poem. However, and as Chiappelli points out, starting in Canto XXII the poet begins to move back to the concrete. This paradox is surely allied to the Incarnational basis of the Christian faith as well as of the poetics of the Commedia.
On the overall newness of the treatment of the subjects in the final canticle, see E. H. Wilkins (Wilk.1961.1), p. 3: “Certain differences between the Inferno and the Purgatorio on the one hand and the Paradiso on the other may be noted briefly. In each of the first two cantiche the number of lines that are spoken is a little less than half the total number of lines in the cantica: in the Paradiso considerably more than half of all the lines are spoken. In each of the first two cantiche the number of spoken passages is about three hundred and fifty; in the Paradiso it is about one hundred and fifty. In each of the first two cantiche the spoken passages average about six lines in length: in the Paradiso they average about twenty lines in length. In each of the first two cantiche the number of individual speakers is somewhat more than fifty: in the Paradiso it is less than twenty.” Wilkins’s census confirms what readers probably generally feel without extensive reflection: the third cantica is essentially different from the first two because of the sharp reduction in the amount of narrative it deploys. If, indeed, we examine the speeches of the twenty or so speakers in Paradiso, we quickly realize not only that Paradiso is characterized by having fewer speakers with more to say, but that very few of these speeches are devoted to narrative. In Inferno and Purgatorio, for Virgil to hold forth on the nature of sin (Inf. XI) or for Marco Lombardo to explain the nature of love (Purg. XVI) seemed unusual. We had become enthusiastically accustomed to the experience of sinners and penitents revealing their histories through riveting narratives. Even Beatrice’s reproofs to Dante in Purgatorio XXX–XXXI generally took a narrative form, a retelling of the dark side of the protagonist’s emergent new life. In the third cantica, on the other hand, embedded narratives are few and far between. To be sure, the poet will continue to tell how the protagonist moves from place to place in brief descriptions. What is comparatively absent, however, is narrative, narrative deployed in those self-revealing tales told by the souls whom the protagonist encounters in the first two canticles. (These are so prominent a feature of Dante’s writing in the Commedia that they may seem to be its single most defining characteristic; witness their effect on Robert Browning.) Ugolino’s self-narrative, for instance, runs 72 verses (Inf. XXXIII.4–75). The eleven speakers in Paradiso who tell their own stories, ranging from Piccarda in Canto III (through Justinian, Charles Martel, Cunizza, Folco, Thomas, Bonaventure, Cacciaguida [perhaps, as Dante’s ancestor, unsurprisingly the longest-winded, at 19 verses], Peter Damian, Benedict) to Adam in Canto XXVI, tell all eleven of these in some 150 verses scattered over twenty-four cantos (there are none in the first two cantos, exactly as we might expect, nor in the last seven, a fact that may surprise us, until we reflect that the extinction of self-consciousness is one hallmark of the shared behavior of all the saints in Heaven). In short, the total number of verses devoted to self-narrative in the third cantica is barely more than double that allotted to a single speaker, albeit the most loquacious one, in Inferno.
