The Divine Comedy
Page 106
O Light Eternal fixed in Itself alone, by Itself alone understood, which from Itself loves and glows, self-knowing and self-known;
that second aureole which shone forth in Thee, conceived as a reflection of the first—or which appeared so to my scrutiny—
seemed in Itself of Its own coloration to be painted with man’s image. I fixed my eyes on that alone in rapturous contemplation.
Like a geometer wholly dedicated to squaring the circle, but who cannot find, think as he may, the principle indicated—
so did I study the supernal face. I yearned to know just how our image merges into that circle, and how it there finds place;
but mine were not the wings for such a flight. Yet, as I wished, the truth I wished for came cleaving my mind in a great flash of light.
Here my powers rest from their high fantasy, but already I could feel my being turned—instinct and intellect balanced equally
as in a wheel whose motion nothing jars—by the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars.
NOTES
1-39. ST. BERNARD’S PRAYER TO THE VIRGIN MARY. No reader who has come this far will need a lengthy gloss of Bernard’s prayer. It can certainly be taken as a summarizing statement of the special place of Mary in Catholic faith. For the rest only a few turns of phrase need underlining. 3. predestined turning point of God’s intention: All-foreseeing God built his whole scheme for mankind with Mary as its pivot, for through her He would become man. 7. The Love that was rekindled in thy womb: God. In a sense he withdrew from man when Adam and Eve sinned. In Mary He returned and Himself became man. 35. keep whole the natural bent of his affections: Bernard is asking Mary to protect Dante lest the intensity of the vision overpower his faculties. 37. Protect him from the stirrings of man’s clay: Protect him from the stirrings of base human impulse, especially from pride, for Dante is about to receive a grace never before granted to any man and the thought of such glory might well move a mere mortal to an hubris that would turn glory to sinfulness.
40. the eyes: Of Mary.
50. but I had already become: I.e., “But I had already fixed my entire attention upon the vision of God.” But if so, how could Dante have seen Bernard’s smile and gesture? Eager students like to believe they catch Dante in a contradiction here. Let them bear in mind that Dante is looking directly at God, as do the souls of Heaven, who thereby acquire—insofar as they are able to contain it—God’s own knowledge. As a first stirring of that heavenly power, therefore, Dante is sharing God’s knowledge of St. Bernard.
54. which in Itself is true: The light of God is the one light whose source is Itself. All others are a reflection of this.
65-66. tumbling leaves . . . oracles: The Cumean Sybil (Virgil describes her in Aeneid, III, 441 ff.) wrote her oracles on leaves, one letter to a leaf, then sent her message scattering on the wind. Presumably, the truth was all contained in that strew, could one only gather all the leaves and put the letters in the right order.
76-81. How can a light be so dazzling that the beholder would swoon if he looked away for an instant? Would it not be, rather, in looking at, not away from, the overpowering vision that the viewer’s senses would be overcome? So it would be on earth. But now Dante, with the help of all heaven’s prayers, is in the presence of God and strengthened by all he sees. It is by being so strengthened that he can see yet more. So the passage becomes a parable of grace. Stylistically it once more illustrates Dante’s genius: even at this height of concept, the poet can still summon and invent new perceptions, subtlety exfoliating from subtlety.
The simultaneous metaphoric statement, of course, is that no man can lose his good in the vision of God, but only in looking away from it.
85-87. The idea here is Platonic: the essence of all things (form) exists in the mind of God. All other things exist as exempla.
88. substance: Matter, all that exists in itself. accident: All that exists as a phase of matter.
92. these things: Substance and accident.
109-114. In the presence of God the soul grows ever more capable of perceiving God. Thus, the worthy soul’s experience of God is a constant expansion of awareness. God appears to change as He is better seen. Being perfect, He is changeless within Himself, for any change would be away from perfection.
130-144. The central metaphor of the entire Comedy is the image of God and the final triumphant in-Godding of the elected soul returning to its Maker. On the mystery of that image, the metaphoric symphony of the Comedy comes to rest.
In the second aspect of Trinal-unity, in the circle reflected from the first, Dante thinks he sees the image of mankind woven into the very substance and coloration of God. He turns the entire attention of his soul to that mystery, as a geometer might seek to shut out every other thought and dedicate himself to squaring the circle. In Il Convivio , II, 14, Dante asserted that the circle could not be squared, but that impossibility had not yet been firmly demonstrated in Dante’s time and mathematicians still worked at the problem. Note, however, that Dante assumes the impossibility of squaring the circle as a weak mortal example of mortal impossibility. How much more impossible, he implies, to resolve the mystery of God, study as man will.
The mystery remains beyond Dante’s mortal power. Yet, there in Heaven, in a moment of grace, God revealed the truth to him in a flash of light—revealed it, that is, to the God-enlarged power of Dante’s emparadised soul. On Dante’s return to the mortal life, the details of that revelation vanished from his mind but the force of the revelation survives in its power on Dante’s feelings.
So ends the vision of the Comedy, and yet the vision endures, for ever since that revelation, Dante tells us, he feels his soul turning ever as one with the perfect motion of God’s love.
Considered Italy’s greatest poet, DANTE ALIGHIERI (1265-1321) was the scion of a Florentine family who mastered the art of lyric poetry at an early age. His first major work, La Vita Nuova (1292), paid tribute to Beatrice Portinari, the great love of his life. Dante’s political activism resulted in his being exiled from Florence, and he eventually settled in Ravenna. It is believed that The Divine Comedy—comprising three canticles, The Inferno, The Purgatorio, and The Paradiso—was written between 1308 and 1320.
JOHN CIARDI (1916-1986), a distinguished poet and professor, taught at Harvard and Rutgers universities and served as poetry editor for the Saturday Review. He was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He won the Harriet Monroe Memorial Award in 1955 and the Prix de Rome in 1956.