The Divine Comedy

by Dante Alighieri

  There, the baseness and the greedy rage of the watchdog who patrols the burning island on which Anchises closed his long old age; and to make clear how paltry is his case, his entry will be signs and abbreviations that the record may say much in little space.

  And there the filthy deeds shall be set down of his uncle and his brother, each of whom cuckolded a great family and a crown.

  There shall be marked for all men to behold Norway’s king and Portugal’s; and Rascia’s, who lost most when he saw Venetian gold.

  Oh happy Hungary, had she suffered all without more griefs ahead! Happy Navarre were she to make her peaks a fortress wall!

  And every Navarrese may well believe the omen of Nicosìa and Famagosta whose citizens have present cause to grieve

  the way their beast, too small for the main pack, keeps to one side but hunts on the same track.”

  NOTES

  10-12. The eagle, though composed of many souls, speaks as a single entity, so symbolizing the unity of these souls in God.

  15. by wish alone: No soul may earn such glory by its own merit, but only by the gift of God’s grace. (See XIV, 42.)

  18. it: The memory of those who lived in justice and piety.

  25. breathe forth: I.e., speak, but phrased in this way in order to continue the figure of flowers breathing forth their perfumes.

  26-27. on earth . . . no food: Mortal understanding cannot satisfy Dante’s hunger to know the nature of God’s justice.

  28-33. DANTE’S QUESTION ON THE NATURE OF DIVINE JUSTICE. The question is best understood by referring to IX, 61-63. “On high are mirrors (you say ‘Thrones’) and these reflect God’s judgment to us.” “On high” as spoken by Cunizza in the sphere of Venus could mean “in Jupiter” or somewhere higher. Whatever the rendering of this point, Dante is asking for nothing less than an explanation of the nature of God’s Justice. In reply, he is given many particulars by the way, but the sum of it is that God’s Justice is inscrutable and that the question is unanswerable. Not even these enormously elevated souls can know the full answer.

  40-45. THE INFINITY OF GOD’S EXCELLENCE. Great as is God’s creation, the Word (Logos, the creating source) cannot create what it does not Itself infinitely exceed.

  46. the first Prideful Power: Satan. He was first among all created things, yet (as above) infinitely below his creator. His sin of pride was in wishing to equal God (instead of ripening and growing more perfect in His light) and therefore he fell green and sour.

  52. our: Some texts read “your,” but such a reading would imply that only mortals are inferior to God, whereas the eagle’s point is that all parts of His creation (including the angels and the souls of the blest) are infinitely inferior to God. In line 59 the eagle does speak of what would be “your world” (mankind). There it has changed the grounds of the discussion and is explicating the difference between heavenly and mortal understanding—a second infinity of difference that does not invalidate the first.

  65. Halcyon: God. His revelation is the one light. By comparison, the light of the intellect is a darkness and leads to error (the shadow) and to sin (the poison) of the flesh.

  68-69. of which you used to ask so many questions: About the nature of divine justice. See lines 25-33.

  80. a thousand miles away: Is not intended as a map measurement but as a general way of saying “a great distance.” From God, as one may understand. From the man by Indus’ water. And from both.

  82. with me: With the eagle, as the heavenly symbol of God’s justice. There would be endless grounds for doubts and fine arguments had not Scripture set forth all a man need know about Divine Justice.

  91-96. A double long-tail simile: as the stork did, so did the image; as the chick did, so did Dante.

  95. by many wills: By the conjoined wills of all the gemlike souls that make up the image of the eagle.

  97-99. The harmonies and the language of the hymn are beyond Dante’s powers of comprehension. He, like a fledgling stork, gapes up at what is beyond him. And so is it with his grasp of Divine Justice.

  101. stopped: Their circling.

  102-105. Note how adroitly this pause serves to mute the effective but no longer needed image of the mother stork circling its chick, and to sound in its place the majesty of the eagle.

  105. before: By belief in the promised Messiah. after: By belief in the risen Christ. It is by allowing a place in Heaven to what may be called the “Messianic Christians” that Dante can seat such souls as Solomon’s in Heaven.

  106-108. As before Dante rhymes the name of Christ only with itself.

  108. than many who . . . did not know Christ: So in part to answer Dante’s doubts about the virtuous Hindu. All the Virtuous Pagans, to be sure, will be closer to Christ in Limbo than those professing Christians who damned themselves. But since Dante has allowed one pagan (Virgil) to ascend to the Earthly Paradise, it is perhaps his understanding that the Virtuous Pagans will be settled there after the Judgment. Higher, as the eagle has declared in line 104, they cannot go, though in Purgatorio, I, 74-75, Cato of Utica is marked for special blessing in the resurrection.

  109. Ethiopian: Used as a generic term for all pagans.

  110. when the two bands: At the seat of Judgment when the sheep and the goats are set to Christ’s right and left hand.

  112. Persians: Another generic term for pagans.

  115. Albert: Albert I, Emperor from 1298 to 1308. He is the “German Albert” of Purgatorio, VI, 97 ff. He invaded Bohemia in 1304. As of 1300, therefore, the pen must wait four years before it moves to record his deed.

  118-120. the Seine: For France, generally, that debaser of the currency: Philip the Fair (v. Purgatorio, VII, 109, and note; and XX, 85-93, and note). He debased the coinage to finance his wars and brought misery to France. Dante, it is well to remember, punished counterfeiters (Inferno, XXX) not out of love of money, but because a sound coinage was an essential principle of social order. death . . . in a pig’s skin: In 1314, in the course of a royal hunt, a wild boar ran under Philip’s horse. Philip was thrown and died soon after of his injuries. Dante certainly relishes such a way of bringing down the mighty and evil.

  121-123. greed: For more land. Scot . . . Englishman: The Scottish and English kings in their endless border wars.

  124-126. the Spaniard: Probably Ferdinand IV. the Bohemian: Probably Wenceslaus IV (v. Purgatorio, VII, 102, note). With or without specific identification, Dante’s general point is clear.

  127-129. cripple of Jerusalem: Charles II of Anjou, known as Charles the Lame. (v. VIII, 82, note; Purgatorio, VII, 124-129, and Purgatorio, XX, 79, note.) He was King of Jerusalem only by the act of giving himself that title. In the Book of Judgment his virtues will be marked by the number 1 and his villainies by the letter M (a thousand).

  131-132. the watchdog: Frederick II of Sicily (v. Purgatorio, III, 115). burning island: Sicily. on which Anchises: He died at Drepanum, modern Trapani.

  133. paltry: So paltry a man could not be allowed much space in the book of the Recording Angel, but his life was so evil that his sins will have to be written down in signs and abbreviations in order to squeeze them all in.

  137-138. his uncle and his brother: King James of Majorca, brother of James I of Aragon; and James II of Aragon, son of James I. Each disgraced the crown he wore; both disgraced the house of Aragon. cuckolded: They disgraced their family and their kingdom from within, as a wife does when she cuckolds her husband.

  140. Norway’s king: In 1300, Hacon VII. Portugal’s: Dionysus. Rascia’s: Orosius II. Rascia was part of Serbia. Orosius seems to have altered the metal content of Venetian money on a substantial scale. lost most: His falsifying of the currency would slate him for a meeting with Master Adam in Hell (v. Inferno, XXX).

  142. Hungary: Andrew III, a good king, ruled in 1300. Hungary had endured many ruinous wars. If only her sufferings were all behind her, as of course they are not.

  143-144. Navarre: The ancient kingdom of what is now southern France
and northern Spain. Joanna of Navarre married Philip the Fair of France in 1284 but remained sole ruler of Navarre. After her death in 1304, her son Louis inherited Navarre, and when his father died in 1314, he became Louis X, king of France and Navarre. So Navarre passed under French rule, the bitterness of which they were to learn in full. Hence, they would have been happier had they armed the mountains around them (the Pyrenees) as fortress walls for keeping out the French.

  145-149. Nicosìa and Famagosta: The two principal cities of Crete. their beast: Henry II of the French house of Lusignan was king of Cyprus in 1300, a man given to debaucheries for which the people paid dearly. Every Navarrese would have done well in 1300 to have taken him as an example of French rule and of what Navarre would suffer when it passed under the French crown. the main pack: Of the bestialized kings of Christendom, Henry is too small a beast to run in the main pack but he runs along to one side of it on the track of the same bestialities.

  Canto XX

  THE SIXTH SPHERE: JUPITER

  The Just and Temperate

  Rulers

  The Eagle

  THE EAGLE PAUSES briefly and the spirits of the blest sing a hymn, not as one symbolic entity, but each in its own voice. The hymn ended, the Eagle resumes speaking in its single voice, and identifies as the chief souls of this sphere those lusters that compose its eye. In order they are: DAVID, TRAJAN, HEZEKIAH, CONSTANTINE, WILLIAM OF SICILY, and RIPHEUS.

  Dante is astonished to find Trajan and Ripheus in Heaven, both of whom he had thought to be pagans, but the Eagle explains how by the special grace of God Ripheus was converted by a vision of Christ a millennium before His descent into the flesh, and Trajan was returned from Limbo to his mortal body long enough to undergo conversion to Christ and to allow his soul to mount to Heaven.

  So once again for Dante’s doubts about the virtuous Hindu and God’s justice, for who can say how many more God has so chosen to his grace? The Eagle concludes with a praise of God’s predestined justice, rejoicing even in the limitation of its own knowledge, resting in the assurance that the unknown consequences of God’s will cannot fail to be good.

  When the sun, from which the whole world takes its light, sinks from our hemisphere and the day fades from every reach of land, and it is night;

  the sky, which earlier it alone had lit, suddenly changes mode and reappears in many lights that take their light from it.

  I thought of just that change across night’s sill when that emblem of the world and of its leaders had finished speaking through its sacred bill;

  for all those living lights now shone on me more brightly than before, and began singing a praise too sweet to hold in memory.

  O heavenly love in smiling glory wreathed, how ardently you sounded from those flutes through which none but the holiest impulse breathed.

  When then those precious gems of purest ray with which the lamp of the sixth heaven shone let their last angel-harmony fade away,

  I seemed to hear a great flume take its course from stone to stone, and murmur down its mountain as if to show the abundance of its source.

  And as the sound emerging from a lute is tempered at its neck; and as the breath takes form around the openings of a flute—

  just so, allowing no delay to follow, the murmur of the eagle seemed to climb inside its neck, as if the neck were hollow.

  There it was given voice, and through the bill the voice emerged as words my heart awaited. And on my heart those words are written still.

  “Look closely now into that part of me that in earth’s eagles can endure the Sun,” the emblem said, “—the part with which I see.

  Of all the fires with which I draw my form those rays that make the eye shine in my head are the chief souls of all this blessed swarm.

  The soul that makes the pupil luminous was the sweet psalmist of the Holy Ghost who bore the ark of God from house to house:

  now, insofar as he himself gave birth to his own psalms, he is repayed in bliss, and by that bliss he knows what they are worth.

  Of the five that form my eyebrow’s arc, the one whose glory shines the closest to my beak consoled the widow who had lost her son;

  now he understands what price men pay who do not follow Christ, for though he learns the sweet life, he has known the bitter way.

  The next in line on the circumference of the same upper arch of which I speak, delayed his own death by true penitence;

  now he knows that when a worthy prayer delays today’s event until tomorrow, the eternal judgment is not altered there.

  The third, to give the Shepherd sovereignty, (with good intentions though they bore bad fruit) removed to Greece, bearing the laws and me;

  now he knows the evil that began in his good action does not harm his soul although it has destroyed the world of man.

  And him you see upon the arc beneath was William of that land that mourns the life of Charles and Frederick, as it mourns his death;

  now he knows how heaven’s heart inclines to love a just king, as he makes apparent by the radiance with which his being shines.

  Who would believe in the erring world down there that Ripheus the Trojan would be sixth among the sacred lusters of this sphere?

  Now he knows grace divine to depths of bliss the world’s poor understanding cannot grasp. Even his eye cannot plumb that abyss.”

  Like a lark that soars in rapture to the sky, first singing, and then silent, satisfied by the last sweetness of its soul’s own cry—

  such seemed that seal of the Eternal Bliss that stamped it there, the First Will at whose will whatever is becomes just what it is.

  And though my eagerness to know shone clear as colors shining through a clearest glass, I could not bear to wait in silence there;

  but from my tongue burst out “How can this be?” forced by the weight of my own inner doubt. —At which those lights flashed in new revelry.

  And soon then, not to keep me in suspense, the blessed emblem answered me, its eye flashing a yet more glorious radiance.

  “I see that you believe these things are true because I say them. Yet, you do not see how. Thus, though believed, their truth is hidden from you.

  You are like one who knows the name of a thing whose quiddity, until it is explained by someone else, defies his understanding.

  By every living hope and ardent love that bends the Eternal Will—by these alone the Kingdom of Heaven suffers itself to move.

  Not as men bend beneath a conqueror’s will. It bends because it wishes to be bent. Conquered, its own beneficence conquers still.

  You marvel at the first and the fifth gem here on my brow, finding this realm of angels and gift of Christ made beautiful by them.

  They did not leave their bodies, as you believe, as pagans but as Christians, in firm faith in the pierced feet one grieved and one would grieve.

  One rose again from Hell—from whose dead slope none may return to Love—into the flesh; and that was the reward of living hope;

  of living hope, whose power of love made good the prayers he raised to God to bring him back to life again, that his will might be renewed.

  And so the glorious soul for whom he prayed, back in the flesh from which it soon departed, believed in Him who has the power to aid.

  Believing, he burst forth with such a fire of the true love, that at his second death he was worthy of a seat in this glad choir.

  The other, by that grace whose blessings rise out of so deep a spring that no one ever has plumbed its sources with created eyes,

  gave all his love to justice, there on earth, and God, by grace on grace, let him foresee a vision of our redemption shining forth.

  So he believed in Christ, and all his days shunning the poisonous stink of pagan creeds, he warned the obstinant to change their ways.