Paradiso (The Divine Comedy series Book 3)

by Dante

  103–105. These other “loving spirits” (we note that both Seraphim and Cherubim are here associated, along with the Thrones, with loving [see the note to vv. 109–111]).

  This tercet is problematic. But see Torraca’s solution (comm. to this tercet): The causal clause does not clarify the reason for the name “Thrones” (as most assume), but relates to God’s having completed the first triad of angels when He created the Thrones. Bosco/Reggio (comm. to verse 105) uneasily accept this saving understanding of what they consider an “infelice terzina” (infelicitous tercet). [return to English / Italian]

  104. The Thrones convey the judgments of God below, as Dante has explained in Paradiso IX.62. It seems possible that Dante thought of these first three orders as being particularly related to the Trinity, Love, Knowledge, and Divine Judgment, related to, in order, the Spirit, the Wisdom, and the Power of God. On the other hand, like the Trinity itself, each of the Persons (and each order of angels) has a triune identity along with its individual primary characteristic. There were in fact quite elaborate systems available relating each of the three main groups of angels to each of the three Persons of the Trinity.

  Carroll (comm. to vv. 97–105) has a different understanding of the first three orders: “The Thrones are, as they are called elsewhere, ‘mirrors’ (Par. IX.61–63) by which the Divine judgments are flashed throughout the universe. These judgments, however, descend to the Thrones through the Seraphim and Cherubim, that is, through love and knowledge. The Thrones, therefore, are the terminus, so to speak, of the love and knowledge of God issuing in judgment. ‘The Seraphim,’ says Bonaventure, ‘contemplate the goodness of God, the Cherubim the truth, the Thrones the equity’ (Compend. Theol. Veritatis, II.12; St. Bernard, De Consideratione, V.4–5); and this equity contains the goodness and truth, the love and light, which flow down through the two higher Orders.” [return to English / Italian]

  105. The past definite tense of the verb terminare here is used in a dialectal form (as is vonno, with which it rhymes, in verse 103). In De vulgari eloquentia (I.xiii.2), Dante had disparaged this (Pisan) dialectal form of the past definite ending (-onno), as commentators (beginning with Andreoli [comm. to vv. 104–105]) have taken pleasure in pointing out. While both these words are forced by rhyme with (the apocopated form of possono) ponno, it seems evident that Dante enjoyed being forced into this “ungrammatical” posture (i.e., presenting himself as employing a surprisingly low vernacular). See the note to Paradiso XVII.127–129. [return to English / Italian]

  106–108. Now all three comprising the highest angelic triad are identified, not with love for, but with knowledge of, God. [return to English / Italian]

  109–111. This tercet offers apparent aid and comfort to those who propose a “Dominican” Dante, one who values knowledge over love. However, here the poet is saying that knowledge precedes love temporally, not that it is better than it. Clearly, we are meant to understand that, in a Christian soul, they work together. If not, the poet would have found a way to present the Cherubim as the highest order of angels. [return to English / Italian]

  112–114. See Grandgent (comm. to verse 114): “These are the ‘steps’: Grace begets good will, Grace and good will constitute desert, desert determines the degree of sight, and sight is the source of love.” He goes on by referring the reader to Paradiso XXIX.61–66 and Thomas, ST, I, q. 62, a. 4. [return to English / Italian]

  115–126. Where six tercets were lavished upon the first triad, the second two (Dominions, Virtues, Powers; Principalities, Archangels, Angels) receive only four altogether. [return to English / Italian]

  115–120. For a celebration of Dante’s wildly innovative use of metaphor in this passage, see “Un esempio di poesia dantesca (il canto XXVIII del Paradiso),” in Contini (Cont.1976.1), p. 213. [return to English / Italian]

  116–117. Unlike earthly springtimes, condemned to experience the mortal cycle when Aries becomes a constellation of the night sky in autumn, signaling the end of fruitfulness for the agricultural year, this “spring” is everlasting. [return to English / Italian]

  118–120. Scott (Scot.2004.2), p. 384, cites Bemrose (Bemr.1983.1), p. 85, n. 20, for the observation that, as far as he has found, no one before Dante had apparently ever joined the nine ranks of angels to nine particular spheres. [return to English / Italian]

  118. The word sberna we have translated as “sings” because to do it justice would have taken several words. It has been used in the last canto (Par. XXVII.141) with a slightly different spelling and where it means “unwinters,” as it also does here, but with the further latent sense of “to sing like birds welcoming the springtime.” [return to English / Italian]

  121–123. The second triad, composed of orders that have feminine nouns representing them in Latin and in Italian (Dominions, Virtues, Powers) are referred to as dee (goddesses). [return to English / Italian]

  124–126. The third triad (Principalities, Archangels, Angels) terminates this catalogue. [return to English / Italian]

  127–129. All these angelic orders look up; nonetheless, they have their effects below, all created things being affected by them. [return to English / Italian]

  128. The first commentator to object to the standard understanding of the verb form vincon as being not from vincere (conquer) but from vincire (bind) was apparently Torraca (comm. to vv. 127–129). Most contemporary commentators, if not all, accept his reading, as do we. [return to English / Italian]

  130–135. Dante had perhaps followed Gregory (Moralia XXXII.48) indirectly by following the version (Seraphim, Cherubim, Powers, Principalities, Virtues, Dominions, Thrones, Archangels, Angels) found in Brunetto Latini, Tresor (I.xii.5). (Oelsner [comm. to verse 133] was apparently the first commentator to discuss Dante’s reliance here on Brunetto.) Gregory, in the Homiliae (XXXIV), had only two orders at variance from Dionysius’s, the order Dante employs here. See Tozer (comm. to verse 130): “Dionysius the Areopagite, the convert of St. Paul at Athens (Acts 17:34), was the reputed author of the De Caelesti Hierarchia, … In reality that work seems to have been written in the fifth or sixth century. It was translated from the original Greek into Latin by John Scotus Eriugena (Cent. IX), and became the textbook of angelic lore in the middle ages. The names of the Orders were derived from Scripture, for five of them, viz. Thrones, Dominions, Virtues, Powers, and Principalities, occur in St. Paul’s Epistles (cp. Romans 8:38 [Vulg.]; Ephesians 1:21; Colossians 1:16), and the remaining four, viz. Seraphim, Cherubim, Archangels, and Angels, in other parts of the Bible; but the system which Dante here gives was due to the work just mentioned.” For Dante’s own earlier version, which is probably much more on the poet’s mind than Gregory’s, see Convivio II.v.7–11. This is a large “oops!” that has Dante laughing at himself even more than Gregory might be imagined as doing.

  For an essay in English on the importance of Dionysius for Dante, see Gardner (Gard.1913.1), pp. 77–110. For the commentary to this canto that is fullest in terms of reference to the actual texts of Dionysius, see Aversano (Aver.2000.2), pp. 135–41. [return to English / Italian]

  131. Aversano (Aver.2000.2), p. 138, points out that Dante’s use of this term, contemplar, which surely has no need of any particular “source,” nonetheless reflects Dionsysius’s frequent use of it as a “technical term” for the highest form of contemplation. [return to English / Italian]

  133–135. Seem (Seem.2006.1), p. 79, points out that Isidore, who appears conjointly with Solomon in the heaven of the Sun, must similarly be laughing at himself, for he had expressed the opinion that Solomon was damned (PL XLII, p. 459). [return to English / Italian]

  135. Has Dante forgotten himself again? (See the note to Par. IX.119–123.) Porena (comm. to vv. 130–135) thinks Dante has nodded here. Bosco/Reggio (comm. to vv. 134–135) deal with the problem by claiming, less than convincingly, that the poet really meant Heaven in general, and not the Primum Mobile. The only way around the obstacle is to insist that Gregory, passing through this heaven o
n his way to his seat in the Rose, saw the image of the nine angelic orders present on this sphere as Dante did (see the note to vv. 13–15); however, this seems a forced argument. Are we faced with another inconsistency that the poet would have cleared up had he lived long enough? [return to English / Italian]

  136–139. Beatrice concludes her lengthy speech, begun at verse 61. If, she advises Dante, it was a mortal, Dionysius, who informed humankind of these things, we earthlings should remember that he got his information from St. Paul (see Acts 17:34), who had himself been here. For the significance of Dante’s preference for Dionysius over Gregory (the authority of Pauline direct experience as told to a truthful scriptor as opposed to later gatherings of an encyclopedic kind), see Picone (Pico.2002.7), pp. 437–38, and Moevs (Moev.2005.1), p. 162. [return to English / Italian]

  PARADISO XXIX

  * * *

  1–6. Alison Cornish (Corn.1990.1 [repr. Corn.2000.2, pp. 119–41]) has furnished a bravura performance on this opening simile, connecting its consideration of a single moment separating two very different states (balance/imbalance) to the moment separating God’s creation of the angels from that of their first choices. See also Moevs (Moev.2005.1), pp. 151–60. [return to English / Italian]

  1–3. Cornish begins her treatment of this moment with the following observation: “We have no way of knowing whether the planetary configuration that opens [this canto] describes dawn or dusk” (Corn.1990.1), p. 1. In the first three centuries it was a rare commentator (but, for exceptions, see Francesco da Buti [comm. to vv. 1–12] and Vellutello [comm. to vv. 1–9]) who did not assume that Dante presented the Sun as being in Aries, the Moon in Libra. After Vellutello there is a period in which everyone gets this “right”; in fact, among the Italians it is only in the twentieth century with Steiner (comm. to verse 2) that the old error returns (until Bosco/Reggio [comm. to vv. 1–9] restore the better reading; but see Chiavacci Leonardi [Chia.1997.1], p. 797, who reverts to the discredited interpretation). Among Dante’s English-writing commentators, however, only Oelsner (comm. to these verses) understood that Dante leaves it absolutely opaque as to whether it is the Sun or Moon that is in Aries (the Ram) or in Libra (the Scales). The reference to the Sun’s being in Aries at the Creation in the first canto of the poem (Inf. I.39–40) has, understandably perhaps, been the controlling factor for such readers. [return to English / Italian]

  1. For discussion of Latona’s role in the poem (she is also named at Purg. XX.131, Par. X.67, and XXII.139), see Aversano (Aver.2000.2), pp. 141–42, suggesting that her maternal role may have seemed to Dante reminiscent of Mary (in particular in her having given birth to Apollo, treated several times as Christ [see the notes to Par. I.13–15, 13, 19, 25–27]). He continues by suggesting that Dante also was drawn to the figure of Latona by her exilic condition, particularly as this was presented by Ovid (Metam. VI.186–191), and by her eventual stability, shared by the former wandering isle, Delos, in a sort of pagan version of eternal peace and light. [return to English / Italian]

  4–6. The Sun and the Moon are described as being momentarily balanced (an instant immeasurably brief because both are always in their orbital motion); their being “out of balance” is recognized after a certain duration, when both are perceived as having changed position, moving away from (the one above, the other below) the horizon. Strangely, Cornish (Corn.1990.1), p. 7, believes that Porena was of the opinion that this instant also corresponds to that of a total lunar eclipse. Porena, in fact, first in his earlier article (Pore.1930.1) and then in his commentary (to vv. 4–6), “dismisses the eclipse as an accident” (the words are Kleiner’s [Klei.1994.1], p. 166, n. 14). Porena is in polemic against those of Dante’s commentators who take his scientific lore too seriously. [return to English / Italian]

  7–8. Some (incorrectly) believe that what is described as being of immeasurably short duration is Beatrice’s smile (see Payton [Payt.1995.1], p. 439): “The longer it is thought about, the smaller the exact instant is.… How long did Beatrice smile? How brief a moment can you conceive?” Payton has not digested Cornish’s explanation (Corn.1990.1, pp. 6–7), not of Beatrice’s smile, but of her silence, which is the issue here: “For Aristotle an instant (or the ‘now,’ as he called it) is the temporal equivalent of a point on a line; yet time is no more made up of these ‘nows’ than a line is composed of geometrical points” (p. 7). She points out that Porena before her had correctly characterized the temporal nature of Beatrice’s silence (see his comm. to vv. 4–6) as indeed having measurable duration. Porena suggests that the amount of time for half the rising or setting Sun or Moon to rise completely above or to sink completely below the horizon is a little more than a minute, certainly a measurable time. Cornish might have observed that Bosco/Reggio (comm. to vv. 1–9) had supported Porena’s thesis. [return to English / Italian]

  9. For the poet’s contrastive inner reference to Francesca’s words (Inf. V.132, “ma solo un punto fu quel che ci vinse” [still, it was a single instant overcame us]), here and in Paradiso XXX.11, see Hollander (Holl.1993.5), pp. 7–8, nn. 18–19, citing Contini (Cont.1976.1), p. 206, as having preceded him in pointing out this parallel. But see also Chiampi (Chia.1981.1), p. 66. And now see Moevs (Moev.2005.1), p. 157. [return to English / Italian]

  10–12. By now a most familiar claim of Beatrice’s: She reads Dante’s thoughts in the point (God) where all space (Latin for “where”: ubi) and time (Latin for “when”: quando) most purely and truly exist. [return to English / Italian]

  13–18. We are in the highest part of God’s creation in time, a mixture of form and matter, the heavens. This sphere, we remember, is governed by the Seraphim, the highest order of angels, dedicated to loving God. Dante has asked a most difficult theological question: If God is self-sufficient, if He has no “needs,” why did He bother to create anything at all? The answer that Beatrice offers is simplicity itself: He created because He loves and wanted the angels to enjoy His love in their being, loving Him in return.

  For consideration of Dante’s reflections on the Creation, see Boyde (Boyd.1981.1), pp. 235–47. On the canto as a whole, see Nardi’s lectura (Nard.1956.1). For Dante’s recasting in it of the relatively anthropomorphic view of creation found in Genesis for a more abstract and philosophical one, see Boitani (Boit.2002.1). Boitani further maintains (p. 95) that Dante’s rescripting of Genesis goes far beyond what is authorized by the Bible in portraying the creation of the angels, a subject about which Scripture is silent. [return to English / Italian]

  15. The Latin verb form subsistere is used here, as Bosco/Reggio point out, voluntarily (Dante had used the Italian form of the noun substantia [sussistenza] at Paradiso XIII.59 and easily could have used sussisto here, which rhymes perfectly with visto and acquisto). And so we may conclude that he wanted the Scholastic flavor that the Latin term affords. See verse 12, where the parallelism with the Latin word ubi causes the reader to realize that a perfectly usual Italian word quando is there a Latin word. [return to English / Italian]

  17. The Italian dative pronoun “i” (gli in modern Italian) is used some eight times in the poem, but this is the only time it refers to God after Adam informs us that “I” was the first name that human speakers used to address Him, and that Adam was the first to use it. See the note to Paradiso XXVI.134. [return to English / Italian]

  19–21. Two major issues are touched on here. If our sense of the history of the world begins with Creation (i.e., Genesis 1:1), what was God doing before then? (Attributed to St. Augustine is the retort, “preparing a Hell for the inquisitive” [see Carroll, comm. to vv. 19–30].) Dante’s point is that whatever He was doing, He was not lazing about, even if there was, strictly speaking, no time before the Creation.

  The second problem is of a different order. What exactly does “God moved upon these waters” mean? Precisely what “waters” are referred to? The obvious reference is to Genesis 1:2. The first commentator (but hardly the last) to point to the work of Bruno Nardi was Porena (comm. to
this tercet). Nardi had shown (see Nard.1944.1), pp. 307–13, that one traditional medieval interpretation of this biblical text was that these waters are above the rest of the heavens (the Primum Mobile was also referred to as the “acqueous sphere”). As Bosco/Reggio (comm. to this tercet) point out, Dante’s use of the demonstrative adjective “queste” (these) makes that solution even more attractive, since Dante and Beatrice are currently in the Primum Mobile. [return to English / Italian]

  22–36. Boitani (Boit.2002.2), p. 446, adduces Paradiso VII.64–66, with its sense of God’s creation being motivated by love, as lying behind this passage. For the distinctions between forma and atto and between materia and potenza, see Bemrose (Bemr.1983.1) and Baranski’s rejoinder (Bara. 1984.1), pp. 298–99. [return to English / Italian]

  22–24. From the fourteenth century onward, commentators (e.g., the author of the notes to the Commedia found in the Codice Cassinese [comm. to verse 22]) have entered into the question of what exactly Dante envisioned when he thought of “pure matter.” The author of that early commentary resorts to Plato’s term ylem [“hyle”], for primordial matter without form, the “stuff” of the four elements to which God would give shape in creating the physical world. See O’Keeffe (Okee.1924.1), pp. 56–57, for why this is not the same as the “prime matter” of Averroës. And, for a recent discussion in English, taking issue with Nardi’s various pronouncements that would make Dante less orthodox than even he probably wanted to be perceived, see Moevs (Moev.2005.1), pp. 40–45. For instance, Moevs believes that Dante’s ideas about materia puretta accord with Thomas’s views.