The Divine Comedy

by Dante Alighieri

  When the hymn has been sung Aquinas speaks again. He has read Dante’s mind and addresses its perplexity, explaining WHY NONE EVER ROSE TO EQUAL SOLOMON’S WISDOM. He concludes with a WARNING AGAINST HASTY JUDGMENT.

  If you would understand what I now write

  of what I saw next in that Heaven, imagine

  (and hold the image rock-fast in your sight)

  the fifteen brightest stars the heavens wear

  in their living crown, stars of so clear a ray

  it pierces even the mist-thickened air;

  imagine that Wain that on our heaven’s breast

  lies night and day, because the tiller’s turning

  causes no part of it to sink to rest;

  imagine the bright mouth of the horn one sees

  flower from the axle star, around which spins

  the first wheel—and imagine all of these

  forming two constellations, each a wreath

  (like that the daughter of King Minos made

  when through her limbs she felt the chill of death)

  and imagine, last, that one wreath has its rays

  inside the other, and that both are turning

  around one center but in opposite ways.

  So might you dimly guess (if mankind could)

  what actual stars, joined in their double dance,

  circled around the point on which I stood;

  though such experiences outrun our knowing

  as the motion of the first and fastest heaven

  outruns the low Chiana’s sluggish flowing.

  There they sang no Bacchic chant nor Paean,

  but Three Persons in One Divine Nature

  and It and human nature in One Person.

  The song and circling dance ran through their measure,

  and now those holy lights waited on us,

  turning rejoiced from pleasure to new pleasure.

  The silence of these numina was broken

  by the same lamp from which the glorious life

  of God’s beloved pauper had been spoken.

  It said: “Since one sheaf has been thrashed, my brother,

  and the good grain of it has been put by,

  sweet love invites me now to thrash the other.

  Into that breast, you think, from which was carved

  the rib that went to form the lovely cheek

  for whose bad palate all mankind was starved,

  and into that the lance pierced when it made

  such restitution for the past and future

  that every guilt of mankind was outweighed,

  as much of wisdom’s light, to the last ray,

  as human nature can contain, He breathed

  by whose power they were clad in mortal clay.

  And, therefore, you were puzzled when I came

  to the fifth light and said no mortal ever

  had matched the wisdom sheathed within its flame.

  Now open your eyes to what I shall say here

  and see your thought and my words form one truth,

  like the center and circumference of a sphere.

  All things that die and all that cannot die

  are the reflected splendor of the Form

  our Father’s love brings forth beyond the sky.

  For the Living Light that streams forth from the Source

  in such a way that it is never parted

  from Him, nor from the Love whose mystic force

  joins them in Trinity, lets its grace ray down,

  as if reflected, through nine subsistant natures

  that sempiternally remain as one.

  From thing to thing to the last least potencies

  the ray comes down, until it is so scattered

  it brings forth only brief contingencies;

  and these contingencies, I would have you see,

  are those generated things the moving heavens

  bring forth from seeds or not, as the case may be.

  The wax of these things, and the powers that press

  and shape it, vary; thus the Ideal Seal

  shines through them sometimes more and sometimes less.

  So trees of the same species may bring forth

  fruit that is better or worse; so men are born

  different in native talent and native worth.

  Were the wax most ready and free of every dross,

  and were the heavens in their supreme conjunction,

  the light of the seal would shine through without loss:

  but nature scants that light in all it makes,

  working in much the manner of a painter

  who knows the true art, but whose brush hand shakes.

  But if the Fervent Love move the Pure Ray

  of the First Power to wield the seal directly,

  the thing so stamped is perfect in every way.

  So once a quickening of the dust of earth

  issued the form of the animal perfection;

  so once the Virgin Womb quickened toward birth.

  Therefore I say that I am one with you

  in the opinion that mankind was never,

  nor will be, what it once was in those two.

  Having said this much, I must yet go on

  or you would ask: ‘How then can it be said,

  no mortal ever rose to equal this one?’

  But to make clear what yet seems not to be,

  think who he was, and what it was that moved him

  to answer when God said, ‘What shall I give thee?’

  I speak these words that you may understand

  he was a king, and asked the Lord for wisdom

  in governing his people and his land,

  and not to know the number and degree

  of our motor-angels, nor if a premised ‘may’

  can ever conclude, in logic, ‘this must be,’

  nor if there is prime motion, nor if in the space

  of a semicircle a non-right triangle

  may be drawn with the diameter as its base.

  Hence you may see that when I spoke before

  of unmatched wisdom, it was on royal prudence

  that the drawn arrow of my intention bore.

  Note well that I said ‘rose’ when I spoke of it.

  Thus you will see I spoke only of kings,

  of whom there are many, though so few are fit.

  Such were my words, and taken in this light

  they are consistent with all that you believe

  of our first father and of our Best Delight.

  And lead weights to your feet may my words be,

  that you move slowly, like a weary man,

  to the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ of what you do not see.

  For he is a fool, and low among his kind,

  who answers yea or nay without reflection,

  nor does it matter on which road he runs blind.

  Opinions too soon formed often deflect

  man’s thinking from the truth into gross error,

  in which his pride then binds his intellect.

  It is worse than vain for men to leave the shore

  and fish for truth unless they know the art;

  for they return worse off than they were before.

  Of this, Parmenides and Melissus bear

  their witness to all men, along with Bryson,

  and others who set out without knowing where;

  so Arius, Sabellius, and their schools

  who were to Scripture like a mirroring sword,

  distorting the straight faces to mislead fools.

  Men should not be too smug in their own reason;

  only a foolish man will walk his field

  and count his ears too early in the season;

  for I have seen a briar through winter’s snows

  rattle its tough and menacing bare stems,

  and then, in season, open its pale rose;

  and I have seen a ship cross all the main,

  true to its cours
e and swift, and then go down

  just as it entered its home port again.

  Let Tom and Jane not think, because they see

  one man is picking pockets and another

  is offering all his goods to charity,

  that they can judge their neighbors with God’s eyes:

  for the pious man may fall, and the thief may rise.”

  NOTES

  1-24. THE DANCE OF THE TWO GARLANDS. The passage, though in Dante’s most elliptical style, presents the basically simple image of the two garlands of souls transformed into twin constellations in the form of two concentric wheels revolving in opposite directions around the point on which Dante is standing.

  To envision the glory of the twenty-four stars (twelve and twelve), the reader is invited to pick the fifteen brightest stars from anywhere in heaven (4-6), to add to them the seven stars of the Big Dipper (7-9), and to add the two bright stars from the mouth of the Little Dipper (10-12).

  All these are to be imagined as forming into the two circles, each like the Corona Borealis, which, according to legend, was made from the bridal wreath of Ariadne (daughter of King Minos) when, abandoned by Theseus, she is found by Dionysus and is taken to heaven to become his wife (13-15).

  Put all these imaginings together and you may glimpse perhaps a shadow of the actual experience, for such things surpass mortal understanding by as much as the speed of the Primum Mobile surpasses the flow of the Chiana, a Tuscan river that, in Dante’s time, wound sluggishly through swamplands that have since been drained (19-24).

  8. the tiller: The Pole. It turns all the stars. Those of the Big Dipper, however, are so close to it that they never set, but lie night and day at the Celestial North Pole (“our heaven’s breast”).

  25. Paean: Specifically a hymn to Apollo, though used generally for any pagan hymn.

  30. pleasure to new pleasure: From the pleasure of praising God to the pleasure of serving Him in an act of caritas.

  31. numina: A numen (pl. numina) is a divine spirit or a god conceived as a person.

  32. the same lamp: St. Thomas Aquinas.

  33. God’s beloved pauper: St. Francis.

  34-36. At the end of XI, Thomas had finished explaining his use of “where all plenty is.” He paused in XII for Bonaventure to give the counterpoint to his Franciscan eulogy and Dominican lament. That first sheaf of understanding, then, has been thrashed (the grains of truth extracted from the straw). Now he is moved by love to thrash the second sheaf, separating from Dante’s error (the straw) the truth about the wisdom of Solomon, and of Aquinas’s earlier words (X, 114) “no mortal ever rose to equal this one.”

  38. the lovely cheek: Cheek, in conjunction with rib and breast, results in a somewhat anatomically strewn figure of speech, but is meant to stand here as a synecdoche for Eve, the part standing for the whole, while specifically referring to the part of her that contained the sinful palate.

  40. and into that: That breast (of Christ).

  47. the fifth light: Solomon. (See X, 109-114.)

  48 ff. THE WISDOM OF SOLOMON. Aquinas proceeds to explain why “no mortal ever rose to equal this one” in wisdom, for Aquinas’s statement had perplexed Dante, who had immediately concluded (as we shall see) that Aquinas was implying that Solomon was wiser than Christ and than Adam, though that could not be.

  Aquinas parses the question in meticulous Scholastic detail in order to clear Dante’s misconception, explaining, in essence, that though Adam and Christ-the-man were wiser than Solomon, containing more of the light of God, they were direct creations of God, whereas Solomon was a secondary creation, arising from Nature. Thus, Solomon sprang from the earth (“rose”), whereas Adam and Christ-the-man sprang directly from God and were apart from mortal creation.

  53. Form: The Platonic Form. Idea.

  55-58. the Living Light: The Son, as the Wisdom of mankind. the Source: The Father as Creator. the love: The Holy Ghost.

  59-60. nine subsistant natures: The nine orders of angels that attend the heavenly spheres.

  61-63. thing: Actuality. (It. atto.) The Scholastic term for “that which actually exists.” potency: That which does not exist but that has the power of coming into being. contingency: What could exist (what could have actuality) but does not.

  66. from seeds or not: See Purgatorio, XXVIII, 69, and 109-120, and note, for Dante’s theory of wind-sown generative “virtues.”

  67-69. the wax: The matter that is available for the formation of contingencies. The term is used here metaphorically. It is not part of Scholastic terminology. the powers that press: The influences of the heavens. “Press” continues the “seal-in-wax” metaphor. the Ideal Seal: A metaphoric equivalent of the Ideal Form of Plato, here, the Divine Concept. It is perfect and unchangeable but, descending through the constant changes of the Spheres to the flux of matter, it is transmitted and received in a necessarily diminished way. Thus the Divine Idea shines through all things, and through some more than through others, but never perfectly.

  79-81. The rendering of the original lines is much disputed, but their general sense is clear. Secondary creation, as Aquinas has explained, is never entirely perfect. Direct creation, on the other hand, is necessarily so. In lines 52-60 Aquinas explained direct creation as the ray of the Father and of the Son conjoined in Trinity. Here the force of the periphrasis is to cite all the Trinity in One, the Fervent Love being the Holy Ghost, the Pure Ray being the Son, and the First Power being the Father.

  83. the animal perfection: The perfection of animal existence (as contrasted, perhaps, to angelic existence). In its ideal form this perfection was embodied in Adam and in Christ-the-man, as direct creations.

  86. in the opinion: Which Aquinas has read in Dante’s mind.

  87. those two: Adam and Christ-the-man.

  90. this one: Solomon.

  91. but to make clear what yet seems not to be: Aquinas knows everything that passes in Dante’s mind. Thus, he not only instructs but knows instantly how much of the instruction has registered; the perfect, if supernatural, teacher.

  93. ‘What shall I give thee?’: After Solomon went to Gideon and offered up a thousand burnt offerings, the Lord appeared in a dream and asked what gift he would choose. Solomon asked for the wisdom with which to rule his people. I Kings, iii, 4-14.

  97-102. THE WISDOM SOLOMON DID NOT SEEK. Aquinas cites a number of propositions that engaged medieval learning. motor-angels: The angels that moved the spheres. How many they were, and of what degree (e.g., Principalities or Thrones) provided the subject of many disputations. may . . . this must be: Any qualification of the premise must, logically, be reflected in the conclusion. The premise “x may be” can never lead to the conclusion “x must be,” but logicians kept trying in ingenious ways to derive a “must be” from a “may be.” if there is prime motion: Prime motion would be uncaused motion. The learned question here would be whether or not such motion can exist. semicircle . . . non-right angle: Euclid demonstrated that any triangle whose base is the diameter of a circle and whose apex is on the circumference of that circle must be a right triangle. Medieval mathematicians, however, tried to theorize a non-right triangle to these specifications.

  Hence, all these examples are of the wisdom required for playing abstract and learned games, as opposed to the wisdom Solomon sought in order to deal justly with God’s people.

  Earlier in his life, Dante himself had sometimes been drawn to metaphysical hair-splitting. Here he is renouncing all such, as he had earlier renounced his overreliance on natural philosophy, in order to seek the greater truths of faith.

  103-108. The reference here is, once again, to X, 109-114: “No mortal ever rose to equal this one.” Aquinas is explaining that the “arrow of his intention” was sighted only upon the qualities of royal prudence. It was in that order of wisdom (and not, for example, in metaphysical speculation) that Solomon was unequaled.

  And that specific intent, Aquinas adds, Dante may see for himself if he will recall tha
t Aquinas had said “rose” to equal. That usage could apply only to kings, one gathers, since only kings may be said to “rise” above the masses of mankind. In another sense, neither Christ-the-man and Adam, being direct creations, could have “risen.”