The Divine Comedy

by Dante Alighieri

  and the man so roused does not know what he sees, his wits confounded by the sudden waking, till he once more regains his faculties;

  so from my eyes, my lady’s eyes, whose ray was visible from a thousand miles and more, drove every last impediment away;

  in consequence of which I found my sight was clearer than before, and half astonished, I questioned her about a fourth great light

  near us, and she: “In that ray’s Paradise the first soul from the hand of the First Power turns ever to its maker its glad eyes.”

  As a bough that bends its crown to the wind’s course, and then, after the blow, rises again uplifted by its own internal force;

  so did I as she spoke, all tremulous; then calmed again, assured by a desire to speak that burned in me, beginning thus:

  “O first and only fruit earth ever saw spring forth full ripe; O primal sire, to whom all brides are equally daughters and daughters-in-law;

  speak, I beg, devoutly as I may. You know my wish. To hear you speak the sooner I leave unsaid what there is no need to say.”

  An animal, were it covered with a shawl and moved beneath it, would reveal its motion by the way in which the cloth would rise and fall;

  in the same way, that first soul let me see through the motion of its covering, with what joy it moved in Heaven to bring joy to me.

  Then breathed forth: “Without any need to hear what you would say, I know your wish more surely than you know what you take to be most clear.

  I see it in the True Mirror, Itself the perfect reflector of all things in Its creation, which nothing in creation can reflect.

  You wish to know how many years it is since God created me in the high garden where she prepared you for these stairs to bliss;

  and how long my eyes enjoyed the good they prized; and the true reason for the great rejection; and the tongue I spoke, which I myself devised.

  Know, my son, that eating from the tree was not itself the cause of such long exile, but only the violation of God’s decree.

  Longing to join this company, my shade counted four thousand three hundred and two suns where your lady summoned Virgil to your aid.

  And circling all its signs, I saw it go nine hundred and thirty times around its track during the time I was a man below.

  The tongue I spoke had vanished utterly long before Nimrod’s people turned their hands to the work beyond their capability,

  for nothing of the mind is beyond change: man’s inclination answers to the stars and ranges as the starry courses range.

  That man should speak is nature’s own behest; but that you speak in this way or in that nature lets you decide as you think best.

  Till I went down to the agony of Hell the Supreme Good whose rays send down the joy that wraps me here was known on earth as EL;

  and then was known as JAH; and it must be so, for the usage of mankind is like a leaf that falls from the branch to let another grow.

  On the peak that rises highest, my total stay, in innocence and later in disgrace, was from the first bright hour of my first day,

  to the hour after the sixth, at which the sun changed quadrant, being then at meridian.”

  NOTES

  12. the power . . . Ananias’ hand: Ananias cured the blindness of St. Paul by the laying on of hands. Acts, ix, 10 ff.

  16-18. The gist of this passage is that the love of Beatrice (Revelation) is identical with the love of God. Beyond that gist, almost every commentator has his own interpretation. “The Good” is clearly God, the joy of heaven’s cloister, and the Alpha and Omega of all scripture. But is scripture to be taken as specifically Holy Scripture, as all that Christian Love has been able to read of God’s intent, or as both together? And is “light and heavy stress” to be taken poetically to signify “both accented and unaccented feet” (i.e., reading every last syllable), or to signify “both the more and the less important messages,” or (again) some combination of the two?

  19-66. THE EXAMINATION OF LOVE. In lines 4-9 St. John had called on Dante to discourse on love (the love of God, Christian love, caritas) assuring him in lines 10-12 that Beatrice (Divine Revelation) would restore his sight. Dante replies that he will await her pleasure since it was through his eyes that she first brought him the fire of love with which he burns. He then adds the generalized and elusive comment of lines 16-18. Now St. John calls Dante to a more searching examination and a more detailed answer. So to the first question of the examination proper: by whose hand (by what means) was the bow of his intention aimed at such a target as love?

  26. from here: Heaven. The authority from Heaven is Scripture.

  26-63. THE SOURCES OF LOVE. Dante answers that the knowledge of God’s goodness inevitably leads to love and that the sources of that knowledge are, jointly, human reason and divine revelation. St. John, however, presses Dante to speak of the intensity of love and of his other promptings to it. So pressed, Dante cites the existence of the world as the creation of Divine Love, his own existence, the death Jesus took upon Himself, and the hope that is common to all faith.

  37. That truth: That God is the Supreme Good and Supreme Love. he: Possibly Plato. “The Symposium” identifies love as the first of all the eternal essences. But more likely Aristotle, who argued a single God of Love as the first principle of creation, the “unmoved mover” of “The Metaphysics” which is “the object of desire.”

  40-42. See Exodus, xxxiii, 19.

  43-45. “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty” (Revelation, i, 8).

  50-57. teeth: Urgings, promptings. It is not by accident that the Apostle of Love uses such a figure and that Dante repeats it. A softer figure would detract from the ardor necessary to the love of God, about which there can be nothing bland.

  52. Christ’s Eagle: St. John.

  61. the living knowledge mentioned before: That God is the Supreme Good.

  63. by the true: By the sea of true love.

  64-66. The Eternal Gardener is, of course, God; His grove, the world; its leaves, mankind. Heretofore Dante has discussed only Love of God. Here he adds Love of Others. Men are worthy of love to the extent each is loved by God. (Cf. Inferno, XX, 26-30, where Virgil scolds Dante for the impiety of pitying those whom God has justly damned.)

  70-72. In simplest gloss: “As a bright light wakes a sleeping man.” But how does the light reach the man’s consciousness when he is asleep? Dante follows medieval authorities, Albertus Magnus among them, who posited a “visual spirit,” an essence of man’s nervous system which rises to respond to the light penetrating the layers of the eyelid and eye. Albertus Magnus theorized that this visual spirit rose from the vapors of certain delicate foods.

  78. drove every last impediment away: The power of Beatrice’s thousand-mile ray having penetrated the lids (of blindness) that covered Dante’s eyes after the dazzling vision of St. John, rouses Dante’s visual spirit and he is able to see again, more clearly than before. The figure will seem strange to present-day physiologists but the moral is clear: only as one loses his mortal senses can he endure the enlargement of revelation.

  83. the first soul: Adam.

  91. only: Eve might be thought to be such a fruit but Dante must have thought of her as part of Adam. Genesis, ii, 22-24 would have given him ample scriptural authority for such a view.

  97-102. Not Dante’s most felicitous figure. It hardly honors the First Father to be compared to an animal under a cloth, the cloth representing his enshrouding radiance. Adam, moreover, is in not under the radiance. Yet the figure does convey a sense of how things are perceived in Heaven.

  109-114. Dante’s first wish is to know the date of Adam’s creation. (the high garden: The Terrestrial Paradise. she: Beatrice.) His second is to know how long Adam remained there. His third, to know the exact cause of God’s wrath. His fourth, to know what language Adam invented for himself.

  Adam answers not in the order in which he finds these q
uestions in Dante’s mind, but in the order of their importance (a fine subtlety in portraying the heavenly souls) beginning with Original Sin.

  118-120. this company: Of elected souls. suns: Annual, not daily. Were daily suns intended the time would amount to less than twelve years. And any possible ambiguity is resolved in line 121 where Adam speaks of the sun turning through all the signs of the zodiac. where your lady summoned Virgil: Limbo.

  121-123. all its signs: Of the zodiac. nine hundred and thirty: Adam’s age at death is so given in Genesis, v, 5. below: on earth.

  124-132. In De vulgari eloquentia, I, 6, Dante had claimed that Adam’s original language was used by all of mankind up to the time Nimrod and his people were stricken at the Tower of Babel; and that it was still spoken thereafter by the Hebrews. As a mortal theorist, Dante was speculating there, as he is here. As the master builder of his own great metaphor, however, this touch in which revelation cancels the earlier error of human reason is a superb detail. answers to the stars: To the influence of the stars. What we call the stars do not vary notably in their courses, but the moon and the planets (stars to Dante) wander all over the face of the heavens causing ever shifting conjunctions.

  133-138. EL . . . JAH: Dante has Adam speak these syllables as “J” and “EL,” the “J” being a form of “Y.” In that order “Y” or “YEH” or “JAH” followed by “EL” may suggest some primitive form of JAHVEH or JAHVEL. Such an interpretation is conjectural, however, and I have transposed the two syllables for rhyme purposes.

  139-143. Adam declares that his whole sojourn in the Terrestrial Paradise was six hours (and perhaps part of the seventh). His time was from the dawn on the day of his creation, to the hour that follows the sixth. The total circuit of the sun is 360°, which divides into four quadrants of 90° or six hours. Assuming the time of Adam’s creation to be at the vernal equinox, when day and night are each twelve hours long, the first hour of light would be from six to seven A.M., the end of the sixth would be at noon, and the hour after the sixth would be from noon to one P.M. Adam says “from the first hour . . . to the hour after the sixth.” He does not say how far into that hour he remained, but it would be native to Dante’s mind and style to intend Adam’s expulsion to fall exactly at high noon. Half an allegorical day is about as long as any man can stay innocent.

  Canto XXVII

  THE EIGHTH SPHERE: THE FIXED STARS

  Denunciation of Papal Corruption

  ASCENT TO THE PRIMUM MOBILE

  ST. PETER GROWS RED with righteous indignation and utters a DENUNCIATION OF PAPAL CORRUPTION. All Heaven darkens at the thought of such evil. Peter’s charge, of course, is that the papacy has become acquisitive, political, and therefore bloody. Having so catalogued the crimes of the bad Popes, Peter specifically charges Dante to repeat among mankind the wrath that was spoken in Heaven.

  The triumphant court soars away and Dante is left with Beatrice who tells him to look down. Dante finds he is standing above a point midway between Jerusalem and Spain, and having seen earth (and all its vaunted pomps) as an insignificant mote in space, Dante once more turns his thoughts upward as Beatrice leads him in the ASCENT TO THE PRIMUM MOBILE, discoursing en route on the NATURE OF TIME (which has its source in the Primum Mobile). The TIME OF EARTH’S CORRUPTION, Beatrice tells Dante, is drawing to a close.

  “Glory to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost”—a strain so sweet that I grew drunk with it rang from the full choir of the heavenly host.

  I seemed to see the universe alight with a single smile; and thus my drunkenness came on me through my hearing and my sight.

  O joy! O blessedness no tongue can speak! O life conjoint of perfect love and peace! O sure wealth that has nothing more to seek!

  The four great torches were still burning there, and the one that had descended to me first began to outshine all else in that sphere.

  As Jupiter might appear if it and Mars were birds and could exchange their glowing plumes—such it became among the other stars.

  The Providence that assigns to Heaven’s band the offices and services of each, had imposed silence there on every hand

  when I heard: “You need not wonder that I change hue, for as I utter what I have to say you shall see all these beings change theirs, too.

  The usurper of the throne given to me, to me, to me, there on the earth that now before the Son of God stands vacant, he

  has made a sewer of my sepulcher, a flow of blood and stink at which the treacherous one who fell from here may chuckle there below.”

  With the same color I have seen clouds turn when opposite the rising or setting sun, I saw the sweet face of all heaven burn.

  And as a modest lady whose pure bearing is self-secure, may blush at another’s failings, though they be only mentioned in her hearing;

  so Beatrice changed complexion at a breath, and such eclipse came over heaven then as when Supreme Might suffered mankind’s death.

  Then he continued speaking as before, his voice so changed, so charged with indignation that his appearance could not darken more:

  “The bride of Christ was not suckled of old on blood of mine, of Linus, and of Cletus to be reared as an instrument for grabbing gold.

  It was to win this life of blessedness Sixtus, and Pius, and Calixtus, and Urban let flow the blood and tears of their distress.

  We never meant that men of Christian life should sit part on the right, part on the left of our successors, steeled for bloody strife.

  Nor that the keys consigned into my hand should fly as emblems from a flag unfurled against the baptized in a Christian land.

  Nor that my head should, in a later age, seal privilege sold to liars. The very thought has often made me burn with holy rage!

  From here in every pasture, fold, and hill we see wolves dressed as shepherds. O hand of God, mankind’s defender, why do you yet lie still?

  Gascons and Cahorsines are crouched to drink our very blood. Oh excellent beginning, to what foulest conclusion will you sink?

  Yet the high Providence that stood with Rome and Scipio for the glory of the world will once again, and soon, be seen to come.

  You, son, who must yet bear around earth’s track your mortal weight, open your mouth down there: do not hold back what I have not held back!”

  Just as the frozen vaporings sift down out of our earthly atmosphere when the horn of heaven’s Goat is burnished by the Sun;

  just so, up there, I saw the ether glow with a rising snow of the triumphant vapors who had remained a while with us below.

  My eyes followed their traces toward the height, followed until the airy medium closed its vast distance on my upward sight;

  at which my lady, seeing me absolved from service to the height, said: “Now look down and see how far the heavens have revolved.”

  I looked down once again. Since the last time, I had been borne, I saw, a length of arc equal to half the span of the first clime;

  so that I saw past Cadiz the mad route Ulysses took; and almost to the shore from which Europa rode the godly brute.

  And yet more of this little threshing floor would have been visible but, below my foot, the sun was ahead of me by a sign and more.

  My mind, which ever found its Paradise in thinking of my lady, now more than ever burned with desire to look into her eyes.

  If nature or art ever contrived a lure to catch the eye and thus possess the mind, whether in living flesh or portraiture,

  all charms united could not move a pace toward the divine delight with which I glowed when I looked once more on her smiling face.

  In one look then I felt my spirit given a power that plucked it out of Leda’s nest and sent it soaring to the swiftest heaven.

  From its upper and lower limits to its center it is so uniform, I cannot say what point my lady chose for me to enter.