The Divine Comedy

by Dante Alighieri

  And she: “You will certainly come to know your view

  is steeped in falsehood. If you listen well

  to the counter-arguments I shall offer you.

  The eighth sphere shines with many lamps, and these

  may be observed to shine with various aspects,

  both in their qualities and quantities.

  If rare or dense alone could have produced

  all this, one power would have to be in all,

  whether equally or variously diffused.

  Diversity of powers can only spring

  from formal principles, and all but one

  would be excluded by your reasoning.

  Now if rarity produced the marks you mention,

  then the matter of this planet must be transparent

  at certain points, due to its rarefaction;

  or it must be arranged like fat and lean

  within a body, as, so to speak, a book

  alternates pages. But it may be seen

  in an eclipse that the first cannot be true,

  for then the sun’s light, as it does in striking

  rare matter of any sort, would pass right through.

  Since it does not, we may then pass along

  to the second case, and if I prove it false,

  I shall have shown that your whole thought is wrong.

  If this rare matter is not spread throughout

  the planet’s mass, then there must be a limit

  at which the denser matter will turn about

  the sun’s rays, which, not being allowed to pass,

  will be reflected as light and color are

  from the leaded back of a clear looking glass.

  Now you may argue, in Avicenna’s track,

  that the ray seems darker in one place than in others

  since it is being reflected from further back.

  From such an instance (if you will do your part)

  you may escape by experiment (that being

  the spring that feeds the rivers of man’s art).

  Take three clear mirrors. Let two be set out

  at an equal distance from you, and a third

  between them, but further back. Now turn about

  to face them, and let someone set a light

  behind your back so that it strikes all three

  and is reflected from them to your sight.

  Although the image from the greater distance

  is smaller than the others, you must note

  that all three shine back with an equal brilliance.

  Now, as the power of the Sun’s rays will strip

  the wintry ground on which the snow has lain

  of the cold and color that held it in their grip,

  so you, with mind stripped clean, shall I delight

  with such a radiance of the living truth

  that it will leap and tremble in your sight.

  Within the heaven of peace beyond the sky

  there whirls a body from whose power arises

  the being of all things that within it lie.

  The next sphere, that which is so richly lit,

  distributes this power to many essences

  distinct from itself, yet all contained within it.

  The other spheres, in various degrees,

  dispose the special powers they have within

  to their own causes and effects. All these

  great universal organs, as you now know,

  proceed from grade to grade. Each in its order

  takes power from above and does its work below.

  Now then, note carefully how I move on

  through this pass to the truth you seek, for thus

  you shall learn how to hold the ford alone.

  The motion and the power of the sacred gyres—

  as the hammer’s art is from the smith—must flow

  from the Blessed Movers. It is their power inspires.

  And thus that Heaven made loveliest in its wheel

  by many lamps, from the deep mind that turns it

  takes the image and makes itself the seal.

  And as the soul within your mortal clay

  is spread through different organs, each of which

  is shaped to its own end; in the same way

  the high angelic Intelligence spreads its goodness

  diversified through all the many stars

  while yet revolving ever in its Oneness.

  This varying power is variously infused

  throughout the precious body that it quickens,

  in which, like life in you, it is diffused.

  Because of the glad nature from which it flows,

  this many-faceted power shines through that body

  as through the living eye the glad soul glows.

  From this source only, not from rare and dense,

  comes that by which one light and another differs—

  the formal principle whose excellence,

  conforming to its own purposes, makes appear

  those markings you observe as dark and clear.

  NOTES

  3. of my great ship: See Purgatorio, I, 1-2. There Dante refers to “the little bark of my indwelling powers.” For the present voyage nothing less than a great (God-inspired) ship will do.

  7-9. No poet has ever undertaken any such subject as Dante now sings. Poetically, therefore, he is embarking on waters no man has ever sailed. Apollo will guide his helm by the rules of poetry, but it is Minerva, goddess of wisdom, who must fill his sails, and the Muses who must be his navigators. nine new Muses: Dante says, simply, “nove Muse”. But “nove” may mean either “nine” or “new.” the Pole: Dante says “the Bears”. (Ursa Major and Ursa Minor. The North Star is in Ursa Minor but its position in the sky is usually located by first identifying Ursa Major, the stars of Ursa Minor being dim.)

  11. the bread of angels: The knowledge of God. It is by that, Dante says, that we are able to live, but no mortal man can grasp enough of it to become satisfied, the Divine Mystery being veiled from man.

  13-15. The few who have sought the knowledge of God are described as having keels. Hence they sail in something more seaworthy than the little skiffs of the others. Those few may dare the voyage, but note how closely they must follow Dante—they must stay in the very furrow of his wake, ahead of the waters that flow back to close it. Clearly, Dante means that he must be followed with the most scrupulous attention if the truth of his poem is to be grasped.

  16-17. Those heroes: The Argonauts. Jason led them to Colchis to get the Golden Fleece. The Colchian King offered to give Jason the fleece if he would subdue two fire-breathing brass-hooved bulls, yoke them, plow the field of Ares with them, sow the field with dragon’s teeth, and then defeat the army of warriors that would spring up from the teeth.

  19. connate: Dante says “concreata.” The thirst for God is born in the instant the soul is formed.

  20-21. almost as swiftly as the sight: Dante and Beatrice soar upward at almost the speed of light.

  23-24. The bolt of a crossbow would leave the bowstring so rapidly that human sense could not measure the rate of change. Hence, the figure means “instantly.” But Dante has deliberately reversed the motion, a daring hysteron-proteron. Prof. John Freccero cites it, in the best interpretation known to me, as an example of Dante’s “retrospective technique.” Bear in mind that Dante is looking backward at the world and sees earthly actions in reverse. See XXII, 109, for another such usage.

  26. drew my entire attention: As noted in line 22, Dante’s attention had been fixed on Beatrice.

  29. to the first star: The “first star” is the Moon. Dante has reached the first sphere of the Ptolemaic system.

  32. dense and smoothly polished as a diamond: Dante finds the surface of the Moon to be diamond-smooth and highly polished (the telescope that was to reveal the jagged surface had not yet been invented).

  35. the eternal pearl: The Moon.

  37-42. THE UNITY
OF GOD AND MAN. Dante is dealing here in the mysteries of faith. On Earth two bodies, being conceived as solids, cannot occupy the same space (“one dimension cannot bear another”). Yet, as light is received by water with no change in its self-unity, so Dante enters into the substance of the Moon, and this miraculous unity with which he enters the Moon-substance without disrupting it sends his mind soaring to the mystery of the incarnation of God, and to the ultimate reception of the good man into the ineffable Logos. that Essence: Christ as the Man-God.

  44. not told by reason: Reason is only the handmaiden of faith. With his final purification in the Earthly Paradise, Dante passed beyond reason to the greater way of knowing. Virgil’s last words to Dante were: “Lord of yourself I crown and mitre you.” With his subsequent purification Dante achieves the state in which every effort of the will and of the intellect cease. Yet the understanding grows, for now the soul perceives as self-evident what had seemed incomprehensible to mere reason.

  49-51. dark traces . . . Cain? In Dante’s Italy what we call the Man in the Moon was fabled to be Cain with a Bush of Thorns. Recall that Dante has just described the lunar surface as being diamond-smooth and polished: such a surface would not show dark traces.

  52-57. Sense: No wonder men fable falsely when they have no sensory evidence on which to base their reasoning. Even in matters about which firm sensory evidence is available to them they do not always reason correctly.

  64-66. The eighth sphere: The Sphere of the Fixed Stars. lamps: Stars. qualities and quantities: Coloration and intensity. The phrasing of Beatrice’s disquisition is characteristically Scholastic: one can only repeat the admonition of the first six lines of the present Canto and hope the willing reader will accept the invitation of lines 10-18.

  68. power: The influence of the stars upon the earth and upon the lives of men.

  71. formal principles: Scholastic teaching distinguishes two principles in all bodies: the material, which is to say, the first matter, which is the same in all; and the formal, which is to say the substantial form that produces the various species and innate abilities of living forms. The formal principle is active; the material principle, passive. Dante’s reasoning is false in that it would reduce all to a single principle.

  73 ff. BEATRICE’S EXPLANATION OF THE MARKINGS OF THE MOON. In Il Convivio, II, 14, Dante had attributed these traces to differences in the density of the lunar matter, whereby the body reflected the light unequally. In this he followed Avicenna. (The reference to Avicenna in line 91 is not explicitly in the original text, but it is clearly implied.) Now, with Beatrice as his revelation, he refutes his earlier belief, having her first show that such a belief leads to impossible conclusions, and then having her assign the true cause to the special power diffused by the Primum Mobile. That power, though itself indivisible, dispenses itself with varying intensity according to the different bodies it permeates—as the soul, for example, permeates some parts of the body more intensely than it does others.

  Beatrice’s argument is a curious one, Scholastic, pragmatic, and mystical by turn. She begins by demonstrating that Dante’s belief involves a true dilemma (an either/or) and proceeds to reduce either term to an absurdity, offering in evidence practical observations of an eclipse and an experiment she suggests to Dante. As noted above, she then explains the phenomenon by the mystic nature of the Primum Mobile.

  93. reflected: Dante says “rifratto” (refracted). The physics of his time did not distinguish between reflection and refraction.

  94. instance: A technical term (“instanza”) of Aristotelian and Scholastic logic signifying “counter-proposition.” Dante’s figure treats the instance as a trap from which one must escape with the aid of experiment.

  96. art: Learning. See Inferno, XI, 97-105. In Dante “art” signifies the skills, the crafts, and all the methods by which man understands and wins control over nature. It is always distinct from the higher knowledge of faith.

  97-105. THE EXPERIMENT. Dante assumes in this experiment that the heavenly bodies are highly reflective surfaces. Thus by shining a light into three mirrors, two equidistant from him and one further back, and noting (though the size of the remoter image is smaller) that the brightness of all three is equal, he seems to argue that light of equal intensity is equally brilliant from whatever distance it is reflected. The argument is ingenious but any reader interested in the rudiments of science will be able to offer his own refutation of the experiment when its conclusions are applied to heavenly bodies at astronomic distances as seen at varying angles through a varying atmosphere.

  108-109. cold and color: Both the cold and the whiteness are removed from the ground. so you, with mind stripped clean: So Dante, the cold and color of error stripped from his mind, will be flooded with the living light (like the fructifying light and heat of returning Spring) of the truth.

  112. the heaven of peace beyond the sky: The Empyrean. I have had to take liberties here. A literal rendering would be: “within the heaven of the divine peace.”

  113. a body: The Primum Mobile. Since the Empyrean (which lies beyond) is beyond space, the sphere of the Primum Mobile contains all of the universe. Taking its power from the all-encompassing Godhead (the Empyrean), it gives rise to all being.

  115. the next sphere: Of the Fixed Stars.

  120. to their own causes and effects: Each sphere to those causes and effects influenced by its particular powers.

  123. takes power from above: From God. and does its work below: Ultimately upon man (the influence of the heavens upon mortal lives) but intermediately some of the work of each sphere must be to transmit certain powers (undiminished) to the spheres below.

  124-126. Beatrice, as ever, is acting as Dante’s teacher. Here, in a military figure, she instructs him to take careful note of how her argument proceeds through the next point, that by her example Dante may learn how to defend the ford (the crossing to the truth) by himself.

  127. gyres: Circlings.

  129. the Blessed Movers: The Angels, Powers, Principalities, and Intelligences who influence each sphere.

  130. that Heaven made loveliest . . . by many lamps: The Sphere of the Fixed Stars.

  131-132. from the deep mind: Of God. The Sphere of the Fixed Stars receives its power from God (through the Primum Mobile) and taking His image from above, makes itself the seal that impresses that image on the spheres below (as a seal impresses its given image upon wax).

  135. shaped to its own end: As the eye to sight, the ear to sound, etc.

  140. the precious body: Of the Sphere of the Fixed Stars, here compared to the human body, because its unity comprises so many varied organs.

  142. the glad nature: Of God.

  147. formal principle: (See also note to line 71.) The power of the Divine and Angelic Intelligence is the intrinsic and substantial cause which produces the effect of dark and clear according to the various ways in which it enters into conjunction with the stars.

  Canto III

  THE FIRST SPHERE: THE MOON

  The Inconstant

  Piccarda, Constance

  AS DANTE IS ABOUT TO SPEAK to Beatrice he sees the dim traceries of human faces and taking them to be reflections, he turns to see what souls are being so reflected. Beatrice, as ever, explains that these pallid images are the souls themselves. They are THE INCONSTANT, the souls of those who registered holy vows in Heaven, but who broke or scanted them.

  Among them PICCARDA DONATI identifies herself, and then identifies THE EMPRESS CONSTANCE. Both, according to Dante’s beliefs, had taken vows as nuns but were forced to break them in order to contract a political marriage. Not all the souls about them need have failed in the same vows, however. Any failure to fulfill a holy vow (of holy orders, to go on a pilgrimage, to offer special services to God) might place the soul in this lowest class of the blessed.

  Piccarda explains that every soul in Heaven rejoices in the entire will of God and cannot wish for a higher place, for to do so would be to come into conflict
with the will of God. In the perfect harmony of bliss, everywhere in Heaven is Paradise.

  That Sun that breathed love’s fire into my youth

  had thus resolved for me, feature by feature—

  proving, disproving—the sweet face of truth.

  I, raising my eyes to her eyes to announce

  myself resolved of error, and well assured,

  was about to speak; but before I could pronounce

  my first word, there appeared to me a vision.

  It seized and held me so that I forgot

  to offer her my thanks and my confession.

  As in clear glass when it is polished bright,

  or in a still and limpid pool whose waters

  are not so deep that the bottom is lost from sight,

  a footnote of our lineaments will show,

  so pallid that our pupils could as soon

  make out a pearl upon a milk-white brow—

  so I saw many faces eager to speak,

  and fell to the error opposite the one

  that kindled love for a pool in the smitten Greek.

  And thinking the pale traces I saw there

  were reflected images, I turned around

  to face the source—but my eyes met empty air.

  I turned around again like one beguiled,

  and took my line of sight from my sweet guide