whose sacred eyes grew radiant as she smiled.
“Are you surprised that I smile at this childish act
of reasoning?” she said, “since even now
you dare not trust your sense of the true fact,
but turn, as usual, back to vacancy?
These are true substances you see before you.
They are assigned here for inconstancy
to holy vows. Greet them. Heed what they say,
and so believe; for the True Light that fills them
permits no soul to wander from its ray.”
So urged, I spoke to those pale spirits, turning
to one who seemed most eager, and began
like one whose mind goes almost blank with yearning.
“O well-created soul, who in the sun
of the eternal life drinks in the sweetness
which, until tasted, is beyond conception;
great would be my joy would you confide
to my eager mind your earthly name and fate.”
That soul with smiling eyes, at once replied:
“The love that fills us will no more permit
hindrance to a just wish than does that Love
that wills all of Its court to be like It.
I was a virgin sister there below,
and if you search your memory with care,
despite my greater beauty, you will know
I am Piccarda, and I am placed here
among these other souls of blessedness
to find my blessedness in the slowest sphere.
Our wishes, which can have no wish to be
but in the pleasure of the Holy Ghost,
rejoice in being formed to His decree.
And this low-seeming post which we are given
is ours because we broke, or, in some part,
slighted the vows we offered up to Heaven.”
And I then: “Something inexpressibly
divine shines in your face, subliming you
beyond your image in my memory:
therefore I found you difficult to place;
but now, with the assistance of your words,
I find the memory easier to retrace.
But tell me, please: do you who are happy here
have any wish to rise to higher station,
to see more, or to make yourselves more dear?”
She smiled, as did the spirits at her side;
then, turning to me with such joy she seemed
to burn with the first fire of love, replied:
“Brother, the power of love, which is our bliss,
calms all our will. What we desire, we have.
There is in us no other thirst than this.
Were we to wish for any higher sphere,
then our desires would not be in accord
with the high will of Him who wills us here;
and if love is our whole being, and if you weigh
love’s nature well, then you will see that discord
can have no place among these circles. Nay,
the essence of this blessed state of being
is to hold all our will within His will,
whereby our wills are one and all-agreeing.
And so the posts we stand from sill to sill
throughout this realm, please all the realm as much
as they please Him who wills us to His will.
In His will is our peace. It is that sea
to which all moves, all that Itself creates
and Nature bears through all Eternity.”
Then was it clear to me that everywhere
in Heaven is Paradise, though the Perfect Grace
does not rain down alike on all souls there.
But as at times when we have had our fill
of one food and still hunger for another,
we put this by with gratitude, while still
asking for that—just so I begged to know,
by word and sign, through what warp she had not
entirely passed the shuttle of her vow.
“The perfection of her life and her great worth
enshrine a lady hereabove,” she said,
“in whose rule some go cloaked and veiled on earth,
that till their death they may live day and night
with that sweet Bridegroom who accepts of love
all vows it makes that add to His delight.
As a girl, I fled the world to walk the way
she walked, and closed myself into her habit,
pledged to her sisterhood till my last day.
Then men came, men more used to hate than love.
They tore me away by force from the sweet cloister.
What my life then became is known above.
This other splendor who lets herself appear
here to my right to please you, shining full
of every blessedness that lights this sphere,
understands in herself all that I say.
She, too, was a nun. From her head as from mine
the shadow of the veil was ripped away.
Against her will and all propriety
she was forced back to the world. Yet even there
her heart was ever veiled in sanctity.
She is the radiance of the Empress Constance,
who by the second blast of Swabia
conceived and bore its third and final puissance.”
She finished, and at once began to sing
Ave Maria, and singing, sank from view
like a weight into deep water, plummeting
out of my sight, which followed while it could,
and then, having lost her, turned about once more
to the target of its greater wish and good,
and wholly gave itself to the delight
of the sweet vision of Beatrice. But she
flashed so radiantly upon my sight
that I, at first, was blinded, and thus was slow
to ask of her what I most wished to know.
NOTES
1. That Sun: Beatrice. It was she who first breathed love’s fire into Dante’s youth. (See also Purgatorio, XXX, 40-42 and Paradiso, XXX, 75.)
3. proving: Her views, the truth. disproving: My views, error.
9. my confession: Of the error Dante now recognizes (concerning the markings of the moon).
13. a footnote of our lineaments: The figure seems oddly out of context but its intent is clear: Dante is suggesting that the image is related to the face as a footnote is related to the text.
15. a pearl upon a milk-white brow: The brow would have to be death-pale as marble, but perhaps Dante intends these spirits to be chalky-white.
16. THE INCONSTANT. All these spirits registered vows in Heaven and then either broke or slighted them. Both of those cited took vows as nuns and were then forced to break them against their own wishes. One must assume, however, that the same category would include not only monks and priests who similarly gave up holy orders, but all who offered up a vow of any sort and then failed to observe it strictly.
They are “assigned here” (line 30), which is to say they appear on the moon (the inconstant planet), but each has his throne in the Empyrean (see IV, 23). All the souls of the blessed, whatever their rank in Heaven, experience as much bliss as they are capable of and cannot wish for more. Within the divine order each seeks and finds its proper place.
18. the smitten Greek: Narcissus. His error was in taking a reflection (his own) to be a real face. Dante’s opposite error is in taking real faces to be reflections.
32. the True Light: God.
33. permits no soul to wander: So Dante’s phrasing, but it should be understood that filled as these souls are by the True Light, their inability to stray from its ray (contrast Dante’s situation in line 27) is not a prohibition but a choice of their own perfected volition. They are not capable of error.
44. that Love: God, as the essence of Caritas.
46. virg
in sister: A nun.
49. Piccarda: Piccarda Donati was the daughter of Simone Donati and sister of Forese (Purgatorio, XXIII, 48) and of the war-leader, Corso (Purgatorio, XXIV, 82 ff.). Forese was Dante’s friend. Dante was married to Gemma Donati, who also had a brother named Forese, but Piccarda’s family was grander than Dante’s in-laws.
Piccarda was already a nun and living in her convent when her brother Corso, needing to establish a political alliance, forced her to marry Rossellino della Tossa of Florence. Various commentators report that Piccarda sickened and soon died as a consequence of having been so forced against her will and vows.
52-54. THE BLISS OF THE BLESSED. Every soul in Heaven, whatever its station, is entirely happy because it is entirely identified with God’s plan and has no joy but in being formed to His will. The essence of God is love, i.e., caritas, the love of others. With caritas as the essential mood of the Paradiso, no soul can help but rejoice in the joy of all about it. Contrast the state of things in the Inferno: the infernal souls have all refused to accept and to identify themselves with the Divine Love; each, therefore, is closed into itself, and no soul in Hell can derive any comfort from any other (see Inferno , V, note to line 102). Joy finds its increase exactly in being freely given to others. As Piccarda soon makes clear to Dante, that joy is expressed in Heaven in no way but in the complete identification with God’s love.
63. easier to retrace: A desperate simplification of Dante’s untranslatable “m’è più latino” (literally: “it is more Latin to me”). Learned men of Dante’s time used Latin naturally and gracefully. Thus to make a thing “more Latin” was to facilitate it. An opposite form of a similar idiom is our still current “It’s Greek to me.”
66. to make yourselves more dear: To God.
69. the first fire of love: Could variously be taken to mean God, the Moon (the first lit sphere of the Universe, which is Love), or the bliss mortals feel in the fire of newly awakened love. On the narrative level the last seems most likely, but the other meanings could function along with it.
95-96. warp . . . shuttle: The vertical strings of a loom are the warp. Across them the shuttle draws the woof. Not to draw the shuttle entirely through is to leave the weaving unfinished, hence her vow unfulfilled.
98. a lady: Saint Clara of Assisi (1194-1253). Born Chiara Sciffi, she became a disciple of St. Francis and, under his influence, founded in 1212 an order of nuns. hereabove: Higher in Heaven. Probably in the Empyrean, but Dante does not mention her again.
101. that sweet Bridegroom: Christ. He is so-called several times in the New Testament.
102. all vows . . . that add to His delight: Only those vows that conform to His love are acceptable. A vow to perform a trivial or an evil action would have no standing.
109. This other splendor: The Empress Constance (1154-1198). As the last of the line of Norman kings who took southern Italy in the eleventh century, she was Empress of the Two Sicilies (Sicily and Naples). She married the Emperor Henry VI in 1185 and became the mother of Frederick II. Dante follows a legend, for which there was no basis in fact, that she had become a nun and was forced to leave her convent to marry Henry.
109. lets herself appear: Dante says, “who shows herself to you.” Clearly, the souls in Paradise can make themselves visible or invisible at will (i.e., Heaven reveals itself of its own love). At the end of the conversation the whole company withdraws from sight.
119. THE THREE BLASTS OF SWABIA. These are the three great princes whose origins were in Swabia (in Germany). Frederick Barbarossa was the first. His son, Henry VI, was the second. To Henry, Constance bore the third, Frederick II.
Canto IV
THE FIRST SPHERE: THE MOON
Beatrice Discourses:
The True Seat of the Blessed
Plato’s Error
Free Will
Recompense for Broken Vows
PICCARDA HAS TOLD DANTE that she inhabits the sphere of the inconstant Moon because she broke her vows against her will. Dante is torn by doubts that could lead to heresy. Was Plato right in saying souls come from their various stars preformed, and then return to them? If so, what of FREE WILL? And if Heaven is Justice, how have these souls sinned in being forced against their wills? And if Heaven is truth, what of the contradiction between Piccarda’s statements and Beatrice’s?
Beatrice resolves all of Dante’s doubts. When she has finished Dante asks if men may offer OTHER RECOMPENSE FOR BROKEN VOWS.
A man given free choice would starve to death
between two equal equidistant foods,
unable to get either to his teeth.
So would a lamb, in counterbalanced fear,
tremble between two she-wolves and stand frozen.
So would a hound stand still between two deer.
If I stood mute, then, tugged to either side,
I neither blame myself, nor take my doubt—
it being necessary—as cause for pride.
I did not speak, but on my face, at once,
were written all my questions and my yearnings,
far more distinctly than I could pronounce.
And Beatrice did as Daniel once had done
when he raised Nebuchadnezzar from the wrath
that made him act unjustly in Babylon.
“I see full well how equal wish and doubt
tear you two ways,” she said, “so that your zeal
tangles upon itself and cannot breathe out.
You reason: ‘If the will that vowed stays true,
how can another’s violence take away
from the full measure of bliss that is my due?’
And I see a second doubt perplex that thought
because the souls you see seem to return
to the stars from which they came, as Plato taught.
These are the questions that bear down your will
with equal force. Therefore, I shall treat first
the one whose venom has more power to kill.
Choose the most God-like of the Seraphim—
take Moses, or Samuel, or take either John,
or even Mary—not one is nearer Him,
nor holds his seat atop the blessed spheres
in any heaven apart from those you saw;
nor has his being more or fewer years.
All add their beauty to the Highest Wheel,
share the sweet life, and vary in it only
by how much of the Eternal Breath they feel.
They showed themselves here not because this post
has been assigned them, but to symbolize
that they stand lowest in the Heavenly host.
So must one speak to mortal imperfection,
which only from the sensible apprehends
whatever it then makes fit for intellection.
Scripture in like manner condescends,
describing God as having hands and feet
as signs to men of what more it portends.
So Holy Church shows you in mortal guise
the images of Gabriel and of Michael,
and of the other who gave back Tobit’s eyes.
For if Timaeus—as seems rather clear—
spoke literally, what he says about souls
is nothing like the truth shown to us here.
He says the soul finds its own star again,
from which, as he imagines, nature chose it
to give form to the flesh and live with men.
But it may be the words he uses hide
a second meaning, which, if understood,
reveals a principle no man may deride.
If he means that the blame or honor due
the influence of each sphere returns to it,
his arrow does hit something partly true.
This principle, misunderstood, once drove
almost the whole world to attach to planets
such names as Mars and Mercury and Jove.
The other doubt that agitates your mind<
br />
is not as venomous, for not all its malice
could drive you from my side to wander blind.
For mortal men to argue that they see
injustice in our justice is in itself
a proof of faith, not poisonous heresy.
But since the truth of this lies well within
the reach of your own powers, I shall explain it,
just as you wish.—If violence, to begin,
The Divine Comedy Page 74
