16 Paradiso 1–2
CHAPTER 16
Paradiso 1–2
Now we move beyond the earthly paradise into Paradiso. As we read the third canticle, we find that Dante uses a Ptolemaic structure of the cosmos. For him, as for Ptolemy, the earth is at the center of the universe—unmoved, immobile—and there are seven planets that circle around it: the moon is thought of as a planet, Mercury, the sun (also thought of as a planet), Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Beyond that there is the heaven of the so-called fixed stars, the Prime Mover in the ninth sphere, and beyond that the Empyrean, the heaven of fire. From the Prime Mover all motion begins, from it time starts. Out there at the edge is really where the roots of time are found, stretching out into the finite world; so that we find ourselves in the shadows of the leaves of time, which are always falling and being replaced. Such is the layout of Dante’s Ptolemaic cosmos.
Another thing we have to keep in mind in Paradise is that Dante links each of the planets with one of the liberal arts, a propensity of his mentioned previously. He begins with grammar in the moon, and so you have to expect that you will find there the language of grammarians and a very wide definition of what grammar can be. It includes poetry. It includes history. It even includes some rhetorical tropes. And then there’s the heaven of Mercury, tied to dialectic (which means logic here), and so you find the language of dialectic deployed throughout the canto. The heaven of Venus is linked with rhetoric, probably the least surprising connection, that of eros and rhetoric. They have an old kinship, and they seem to entail each other. Then Dante couples the heaven of Mars, the god of war, with music, in the persuasion that music is a harmony made of discordant parts. As a result, there is a kind of simultaneous attraction and strife within this heaven. Then there’s geometry, linked with the temperateness of Jupiter, and then astronomy and Saturn. The heaven of the fixed stars, at least in Convivio, is tied to physics and metaphysics, and the Prime Mover is associated with ethics. Finally, the heaven of the Empyrean is the heaven of metaphysics and theology, a sign that Dante has changed his mind since writing the Convivio, where he had claimed that ethics was the first and most important of the arts, the discipline to which all other arts are subordinated and toward which they all point. When Dante writes Paradiso, he acknowledges that you cannot quite separate ethics from a metaphysical theory about the being of the world. Dante will go on back and forth in reconfiguring the relation of those two disciplines.
The other thing that I should mention before we go on is that much of Paradiso is going to come across as a way of teaching. It’s already implied that this should be the thrust of Paradiso by the very idea that there is the disposition of the arts and sciences throughout the canticle. Dante’s inter-planetary journey is an educational voyage: he goes through grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, and so on until he reaches metaphysics and theology. This pedagogical structure is carried out by the focus on teaching that Beatrice will deliver.
In fact, it must also be noted that Dante’s teacher in Paradiso—and this is an innovative, imaginative, and highly unusual move on the part of a poet—is not some kind of abstract matron called Dame Philosophy. It’s not an allegory of nature. You do find some didactic allegories where nature appears as a disheveled woman, wounded, because nature has fallen, teaching the pilgrim about the secrets and the wealth of nature. But there is a far more personal education taking place here. Dante learns from his beloved, to be sure, someone who replaces all the other likely candidates for his instruction, like Aquinas, Boethius, Bonaventure, all figures whom he meets. And yet, it’s a mistake to believe, as some great scholars of Dante have said in the past, that Paradiso is ultimately a journey to be like Beatrice. Why? Because Beatrice will disappear. She will still be within view up to a point in Paradise, but her role ends with Canto 30, after which a historical figure, a mystic by the name of Bernard of Clairvaux, will take charge of Dante’s education.
Some of you may claim that, in spite of the absence of abstract allegory, Paradiso is meant to be an account of a mystical experience, that Dante goes beyond his own self, beyond any idea of a rational understanding of the world. He surrenders his own subjectivity to an insight into the whole of being. But I don’t think that this is what’s happening here. Dante does preserve his rationality and his sense of separation from some kind of cosmological absolute. There is a way in which Dante deploys the language of the mystics, but this is not to be read as a transcription of a mystical experience so that the text then goes on in an approximation of what the mystic “saw” and becomes ineffable. Dante occasionally uses the language of ineffability, but it remains a poetic construction, an imaginative projection into the absolute unknown, into a space no other imagination had really traveled. Those who have traveled there never came back to tell us about it. Dante will play with that. His language battles against the threatening boundaries of silence. Of course, from a Christian point of view, Dante’s defeat at the hands of silence would be a victory, but Dante is suspended between those two poles.
Ultimately, this third and final canticle is a poem about beauty, in the sense that here Dante will try to understand what beauty really is. Plotinus says that it’s the visibility of being, that the whole of life becomes visible only because we have perceptions and images of it. Dante’s trying to see that, but he is also exploring what it is that lies beyond what we see. He knows beauty is not skin-deep, although one of the dangers of focusing on beauty is that it can be seen as no more than the surface of things. Dante will inhabit a space between appearances and the idea that there are essences lying beyond them.
With that introduction to Paradiso in mind, let’s get into Canto 1. It begins, “The glory of the All-Mover penetrates through the universe and reglows in one part more, and in another less.”1 The rhythm and even the syntactical structure of the poem shifts here. At the beginning of the other canticles, the poet immediately casts himself in the role of the agent: “in the middle of the journey of my life I found myself” (Inferno) and “to course over better waters the boat of my genius now goes and I will sing” (Purgatorio). Not so in Paradiso. Here the first tercet seeks to bracket the idea of the self and subjectivity. It emphasizes instead the question of God, who becomes the agent here. So God is the one who moves all, and all then becomes one, “the universe” in the next line. The tercet presents God through a circumlocution, not a God who is visible through His effects but a God who appears as a cause.
But we also see the effects in the form of the glory that is his light. Dante ushers in a change in the history of the word glory. That’s what poets do; they invent and reinvent language. “Glory,” in the classical era and all the way down to the Re nais sance and the Romantic age, means fame. It’s the power we have to survive, to have a posthumous life because of whatever noble deeds heroes may have achieved. For Dante, though, glory means light, which is now linked to two verbs, penetrates and reglows. So, the first tercet presents God in a cosmological role that is double: one of motion and one of light, a combination of an Aristotelian idea of God as the Prime Mover, and a Neoplatonic idea of God as the principle of light. In both cases, God participates in, is part of, creation, and the natural world is part of the supernatural world. There is not just a causality that begins all things and then somehow retreats into a sort of invisible and unknown nonspace of its soul.
The other element of this first tercet that I want to emphasize is the principle of hierarchy. Light shines “more and less.” This is really a great problem for Dante in other parts of the poem. Differences are very crucial for Dante because they allow us to know things that can be known only through differences. That’s the value of hierarchy. It is a structure that unifies all differences according to the principle of degree and yet keeps individualities intact. And here God is diffused throughout the entirety of the hierarchy.
However, as I said in the last chapter, Dante is not a mystic. Subjectivity is not erased. So now, Dante introduces the subject, saying, “I have been in the heaven that most receives of His light”—that is to say that Dante is in the Empyrean, as close to God as he could possibly be—“and have seen things which who so descends from up there has neither the knowledge nor the power to relate.”2 And no sooner does Dante introduce his subjectivity and this intimacy with the beatific vision than he also has to cast himself as a visionary, for he “had seen things.” All of Paradiso is about the refinement of sight. Dante has an internal vision, not like Homer, who is blind and therefore sees everything with his inner eye, but in the sense that Dante can see things as a whole. That’s the difference between the ear, which only allows you to hear in a linear way so that things can come from all sides but you only catch one thing at a time, and the eye, the organ that gives you the chance to see totalities. The expansiveness of Dante’s vision enables the infinite scope of his poem.
He goes on to explain the status of his poetic language vis-à-vis this vision: “As it draws near to its desire, our intellect enters so deep that memory cannot go back upon the track.” The intellect longs for the objects that it desires, but forgetfulness intervenes; so, Dante may have intuition and insight into things, but he cannot quite recall them. “Nevertheless,” he continues, “so much of the holy kingdom as I could treasure up in my mind shall now be matter of my song.”3 Whatever he’s going to tell us is literally a shadow of things he manages to remember. It makes sense that he should not remember because one of the paradoxes of this poetic construction is the impossibility of retaining in his mind a finite sight of the infinite. How could that be rendered poetically if not through vestiges and shadows? How can memory, a metaphor of time by definition, hold that which is without time? Paradiso becomes a poem of paradox from its outset.
But with his next breath, Dante turns to the god of poets, Apollo, and casts himself in a passive mode, as a vessel, one who receives. It’s the language of restraint. In a sense it’s the classical commonplace of asking the muse to breathe through us. Specifically, Dante requests that Apollo “for this last labor make me such a vessel of your worth as you require for granting your beloved laurel.”4 He recalls the story of the god chasing Daphne, the object of his desire whom he cannot truly have. He can only obtain the young maiden in the form of a metaphor, the laurel crown. So the possession of the object becomes dislocated, not quite what the god himself wanted, and this introduces an idea of Dante’s own journey in Paradiso.
And yet, Dante will shortly contrast this passivity with an image of violence. Although in humble language, he says, “Thus far the one peak of Parnassus has sufficed me, but now I have need of both, as I enter the arena that remains.” There’s a struggle now. In the arena battles are fought, a reality emphasized by Dante’s next demand: “Enter into my breast and breathe there as when you drew Marsyas from the sheath of his limbs”—an echo of the struggle between the poet and the god. Dante does not actually want to be like Marsyas, because the latter, out of presumption—so that you will soon understand Dante’s language of restraint and withholding—had tried to outdo Apollo, who defeated and flayed him. This passage is about the fear of the battle for the description of Paradise, the fear that he may be usurping God’s role, the fear that he may be transgressing and violating that which is the sovereign claim of the divinity. This fear of blaspheming is on full display as he continues: “O divine Power, if you do so lend yourself to me that I may show forth the image of the blessed realm which is imprinted in my mind, you shall see me come to your beloved tree”—of laurel—“and crown me with those leaves of which the matter and you shall make me worthy. So rarely, father, are they gathered, for triumph of caesar or of poet—fault and shame of human wills—that the Peneian frond ought to beget gladness in the glad Delphic deity whenever it causes anyone to long for it. A great flame follows a little spark.”5 Dante is struggling to be able to describe the heavens fittingly, but he is constantly aware of and aiming to prevent the possibility of hubris in such an attempt.
Throughout, Dante is moving. He thinks he’s on earth but he soon discovers that he’s actually in the heaven of the moon. Here he describes a self-transformation that occurs as a result of this motion: “Beatrice was standing with her eyes all fixed upon the eternal wheels, and I fixed mine on her, withdrawn from there above. Gazing upon her I became within me such as Glaucus became on tasting of the grass that made him sea-fellow of the other gods.”6 It’s a story of the pilgrim shifting into another level of experience and being. Dante references another Ovidian account, this time of Glaucus who becomes immortal and lives in the sea after tasting some magical herbs. Dante indicates that a similar change has occurred in his case, placing emphasis on its internal nature with that little preposition “within.” The transformation occurs from within himself, not in some external fashion.
Then Dante will have another encounter with the divine. He writes, “Whether I was but that part of me which Thou didst create last, O Love that rulest the heavens, Thou knowest, who with Thy light didst lift me.”7 This is a reference to the Second Letter to the Corinthians, where St. Paul tells the story of his being rapt to the third heaven. What happens to Paul there? In the Middle Ages, what was meant by the third heaven was the third mode of vision. There are levels of vision that they emphasized: a literal, worldly level, an imaginative level, and the ecstatic level that Paul experienced. Paul went to the third heaven and had a beatific vision, and when he returned, he could not speak about it because what he saw had to be kept wrapped in silence. The whole of Paradiso is about limits and the impossibility of establishing clear limits, so Dante will do what Paul himself could not do. Paul believed that the silence was the proper language of his sublime experience, but Dante will go on speaking until he really has forgotten everything that he has seen. Dante is establishing his own poetic powers somewhere between two different modalities: he doesn’t want to go as presumptuously far as Marsyas did, but he also does not want to retreat as Paul did.
To truly understand Dante’s perception of his poetic powers, however, we will step briefly outside of the poem. While living in Ravenna, Dante decides to send the first ten cantos of Paradiso to the so-called Cangrande, the “great dog” of Verona, who had been his patron for a number of years, and he introduces those ten cantos with a letter now referred to as the “Letter to Cangrande.” In this letter Dante references Aristotle, Ezekiel, Richard of St. Victor, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Daniel in order to justify his possibly transgressive descriptions of a visionary experience in Paradiso. The poem, like the letter, invokes a number of models in the contemplative philosophical tradition. Again, Dante is not a student of the prophetic tradition, but he makes the prophets and the philosophers agree here. Readers of the Bible may argue, he notes, that there is no necessary link in the Bible between the mystics, those who have visions, and prophets. But for Dante these are not different experiences or different states. Dante thinks that the two go hand in hand. You have to have vision in order to speak, and that’s the sense of poetry that Dante invokes here at the beginning of Paradiso.
Less abstractly, Dante is still trying to find out what is happening to him. He thought he was on earth, in the earthly paradise, but now he seems to be on another planet. Beatrice dismisses some fantasies of his about these strange circumstances: “You make yourself dull with false imagining, so that you do not see what you would see had you cast it off. You are not on earth, as you believe; but lightning, fleeing its proper site, never darted so fast as you are returning to yours.” Dante has been traveling at the speed of light to go from the earthly paradise to the moon, so quickly that it was beyond perception. But the questions do not end with this explanation. “If by these brief words which she smiled to me I was freed from my perplexity,” Dante says, “within a new one I became the more enmeshed; and I said: ‘I was already content concerning one great wonder; but now I marvel how it can be that I should pass through these light bodies.’”8 Paradiso un-folds via a narrative economy in which the pilgrim experiences perplexities and doubts that Beatrice clarifies, and in turn those responses go on triggering new doubts. It’s an unending process of the mind enlarging itself, though it always remains filled with wonder.
What is this wonder? It is, first of all, a definition of the aesthetics of Paradiso. “Wonder” is a translation of the Latin admiratio, a term that in the Middle Ages meant nothing less than the sublime. It’s a Greek notion of indicating that the mind is overwhelmed with the spectacle of things that dwarf it. Those things that the mind cannot quite comprehend, they are the sublime. They can be the sublime in nature; they can be the sublime in art; they can be other forms of the sublime. Dante’s mode of Paradise thus involves an oscillation of a mind that is opening up, full of doubts, subjective, critical, and then the experience of the sublime overwhelming that open mind.
This idea of the sublime introduces the way in which Beatrice will deliver an image of the universe to Dante. With a sigh and a glance that labels Dante as akin to a misguided child, Beatrice offers Dante his first picture of the universe. We will find that this picture is subsequently refined in a number of ways, but this initial image is what he can understand now. Beatrice tells him that “all things have order among themselves, and this is the form that makes the universe like God.”9 The picture that Beatrice evokes for Dante is one of beauty, which in turn implies vision, because beauty is defined as that which is seen giving one pleasure, at least according to Aquinas. Here Beatrice steps beyond the subjective immediacy of Aquinas’s conception of beauty and thinks, as Aquinas also does with his notion of beauty as a transcendental, of an objective order of the world. Beauty usually implies a self, a personal taste, a very rich medieval understanding of the aesthetic experience, but there is also an objective idea of the whole universe laid out in order, shape, and clarity. These proportions and arrangements are the attributes of this cosmological beauty, so perfect that the universe even resembles God! This seems to be such a nice way of thinking about the universe, but if you really think about it, it could easily be seen as a heretical proposition. If the universe is like God, what are we to make of the evil that there is in the universe? Is there continuity between God’s transcendence and God’s immanence? Fortunately, Beatrice will soon clarify this stance.
This talk of how the universe resembles God is only the beginning of Beatrice’s discourse on the natural order of things. She continues: “The high creatures behold the imprint of the Eternal Worth, which is the end wherefore the aforesaid ordinance is made. In the order whereof I speak all natures are inclined by different lots.” We all have our own specific gravity. We’re all drawn by our desires. There’s a kind of natural instinct, a natural movement, in the way in which a stone, if you drop it, always falls to the ground because of its specific gravity, and the fire, if you light a candle, always moves upward. This specific gravity is also a spiritual gravity, enacting movement on the soul, for “not only does this bow shoot those creatures that lack intelligence, but also those that have intellect and love”—meaning humanity, in an expansion of his earlier great poem about “women who have intellect and love.” But we are not necessarily always guided by this instinct. Beatrice explains, “To be sure, even as a shape often does not accord with the intention of the art, because the material is deaf to respond, so the creature sometimes departs from this course, having the power, thus impelled, to swerve toward some other part; and even as the fire from a cloud may be seen to fall downwards”—lightning, for instance, is fire moving downward rather than upward—“so the primal impulse, diverted by false pleasure, is turned toward earth.”10 In other words, within her description of the order of the cosmos, Beatrice goes on to say that human beings are the odd figures, who somehow have the power to deviate from this pattern of order. We can undo. We have a paradoxical freedom that allows us either to stay within a particular idea of what God may have meant for us or to breach that particular order. Human beings are the absurd elements in this otherwise ordered portrait of the universe, and with this statement of freedom, Dante eschews a deterministic idea of the cosmos, which would render the text heretical.
Having thus explored the bigger picture, in Canto 2 Dante can examine his new surroundings more closely. He begins by discussing a commonly known fable of the moon and its spots. There was a medieval legend explaining why, if you look at a full moon, you see dark spots. The legend was that Cain, riding away from the knowledge of the murder of his brother, had actually, with the help of God, been removed from the earth. He had taken refuge on the moon, and whatever we see there is thus the imprint of Cain. Dante dismisses this fable and engages in a scientific discourse with Beatrice. Do we see shadows on the moon simply because there’s a density of matter? Or is it because light has a way of going through this matter of the moon? Or is it because there’s a different way in which light is distributed here? The solution that Dante gives through Beatrice is that we see the shadows on the moon simply because there is a different source of light. But in broader terms, he is saying that the natural cosmos has to be understood according to its metaphysics as well. The physics can only be understood in terms of the metaphysics, so that Dante always sees the natural and the supernatural as going hand in hand. They are not two separate dimensions. They are simply two different ways of looking at the same thing.
Dante’s own sense of this new realm and how far he has come spurs him to address the readers who have accompanied him on this journey. He says, “O you that are in your little bark, eager to hear, following behind my ship that singing makes her way, turn back to see again your shores. Do not commit yourselves to the open sea, for perchance, if you lost me, you would remain astray. The water which I take was never coursed before.”11 This message gives poignancy to the little bark in spite of the fact that the language of humility is now suspect in the face of the trope of sublimity that Dante has brought into focus in this canticle. It’s a little bark that is doing something so mighty; Dante is aboard it on a magnificent, extraordinary adventure.
So he’s urging his readers to turn back, but then he limits the agents that he is addressing: “You other few who lifted up your necks.” He makes a reductive apostrophe, aimed at only the crème de la crème of his readership, a select group who are truly interested in the mysteries of the most esoteric, arcane sciences that he’s going to navigate now. In full, he says, “You other few who lifted up your necks betimes for bread of angels”—for knowledge—“on which men here subsist but never become sated of it, you may indeed commit your vessel to the deep brine, holding my furrow ahead of the water that turns smooth again. Those glorious ones who crossed the sea to Colchis, when they saw Jason turned plowman, were not as amazed”—once again the language of admiration and the sublime—“as you shall be.”12 The metaphor of the journey by water to describe an aerial journey indicates that Dante is clearly thinking of a similar metaphoric compression that we saw with Ulysses. The sailing that became a mad flight is now a flight that becomes a sailing. Dante recognizes that he is guiding us, so he feels a sense of responsibility to turn us back, unlike Ulysses, who led his companions astray. But we dispose of that mythic resonance fairly quickly, for what he’s really saying is that the journey we’re undertaking, which is the reading of this book, can become extraordinarily dangerous as he travels over water that leaves no wake behind it. This is what I would call the danger of seafaring. In seafaring, you have no preestablished routes. There is no way, no road, no path that can be fixed and easily found, so although Dante is inviting us to keep very close to him, we might still lose him.
Then finally, he alludes to Jason, the hero of the Argonauts, who goes looking for the Golden Fleece. It’s an image that also appears at the end of Paradiso 33, where Dante has the god Neptune from the depths wondering at the extraordinary power of the human imagination and the human will as expressed by the heroics of Jason. Neptune can’t quite believe what he sees. It’s an allusion to what Dante himself is going to do by seeing God face to face and then returning to the earth. However, in Canto 18 of Inferno, we find Jason punished among the flatters and seducers because he is famous for seducing Hypsiphyle and then abandoning her. Thus Dante is positing an interesting distinction between the ethical judgment of Jason, who is suffering in Hell, and the imaginative aesthetic value of the adventure itself. Is he saying therefore that the good and the beautiful are really two distinct things? He’s warning us about the dangers of conflating them, and we’ll see his ideas on the value of images versus the ethics of images play out over the course of Paradiso.