17 Paradiso 3–10
CHAPTER 17
Paradiso 3–10
In Paradiso 3, Dante meets two women, the empress Constance (the irony of the name is a little bit obvious among the inconstant spirits) and Piccarda, who had joined a cloister and taken the name of Sister Constance, as well. She was later forced to leave the cloister on account of her brother Corso Donati’s political maneuvers, however. He wanted her married to an ally of his.
In Canto 4, Dante returns to this issue, which is really the issue of the will. What is the will? How can somebody else’s force on me compel me to do things for which I am subsequently held accountable? The other primary question in Canto 4 has to do with Dante’s wonder about the souls in the various stars. They are arranged among the various planets, and he considers whether they may be in Plato’s paradise. Was Plato right to believe that at death souls return to the stars, to the place of origin?
I will try to explain how the two questions are related, for their juxta-position is far from arbitrary. There is a sort of link between these concerns. Canto 4 begins with a rather strange formulation about the nature of the will and the freedom of the will. Dante has to clarify what the will is, so he starts with a statement that seems to suggest that the will is inert. The will, given the opportunity to choose between two contradictory objects of desire, can’t quite move one way or the other. You need the intellect, the argument that forces the will to make a decision. As Dante explains, “Between two foods, distant and appetizing in equal measure, a free man would die of hunger before he would bring one of them to his teeth. So would a lamb stand between two cravings of fierce wolves, in equal fear of both; so would a hound stand still between two hinds. Wherefore, if I was silent, urged in equal measure by my doubts, I neither blame nor commend myself, since it was of necessity. I was silent, but my desire was depicted on my face, and my questioning with it, in warmer colors far than by distinct speech.”1 There seems to be a kind of will that joins human beings and animals, such that choices paralyze the will. Thus it is possible that when we speak about the freedom of the will we are really speaking about the freedom of the will in the intellect. The multiple metaphors here introduce Dante’s own doubts and perplexities, since he has two questions; each of them seems more compelling than the other, so he does not know which to ask first. Dante is indeed talking about the limitations of his own will from an Averroist position, a radical interpretation of Aristotle, in order to make broader statements about free will in general. Namely, he establishes a hierarchy of the intellect over the will.
Beatrice gets to the heart of Dante’s conundrum: How can it be that Piccarda, who was forced to act by somebody else’s will, appears in the lowest berth of beatitude, on the moon? Why should she be so undeserving of a closer intimacy to God? That’s actually Dante’s question, according to Beatrice, along with the equally pressing perplexity “that the souls appear to return to the stars, in accordance with Plato’s teaching.” Beatrice’s solution: “I will first treat that which has the most venom.”2 Interestingly, the language of venom or poison, this idea of which is the more dangerous of the two questions, is not applied to the question about the will. The question that Beatrice deems more precarious is the question that deals with representation. What is the mode of appearance of the souls in heaven? Do the souls inhabit the stars? Is it a fiction, pyrotechnics if you wish, wherein once the night is over, then the souls return to the proper abode, which or may not be visible to the pilgrim? Is this a theatrical per for mance, and if so, why should that be a question that has more poison in it? What’s so dangerous about representation?
It is the poetics of Paradiso, by the way, that confronts us with these questions. What is the mode of Dante’s representation in Paradiso? Beatrice tries to shed further light on the matter: “Of the Seraphim he who is most in God, Moses, Samuel, and whichever John you will—I say, even Mary—have not their seats in any other heaven than these spirits which have now appeared to you, nor have they more or fewer years for their existence; but all make the first circle beautiful, and have sweet life in different measure, by feeling more and less the eternal breath. These showed themselves here, not because this sphere is allotted to them, but to afford sign of the celestial grade that is least exalted.”3 In other words, these souls enjoy a lower degree of beatitude than the other souls, so they appear here for the benefit of your understanding. Thus, the whole of Paradise, its representation here, is fictional, and once the pilgrim disappears so too will the souls. They will return to the bosom of Abraham, according to biblical accounts.
Dante goes on to explain why this allegorization is needed: “It is needful to speak thus to your faculty, since only through sense perception does it apprehend that which it afterwards makes fit for the intellect.”4 Paradiso is literally an accommodation of varieties, of realities that far exceed the powers of our mind and therefore must condescend to it. The souls deign to show themselves in a way that makes sense to us. Dante had been talking about the limitations of the will, and now he’s talking about the limitations of the intellect, so the two issues are brought together in Canto 4, and each seems to need the other and be made stronger in the light of the other.
Dante further elucidates this mode of representation, which he says is true not only for Paradiso, but also for the Scripture, for all the iconography of the churches. It’s necessary to speak in a way that accommodates itself to our limited faculties, that “condescends to your capacity, and attributes hands and feet to God, having other meaning,” which is the very definition of allegory.5 The Bible includes this anthropomorphic trope, though God has neither feet nor hands, and these body parts mean something else. They refer to the power and majesty of God. The sequence of examples is meant to suggest that there is a language of representation even in the Bible, and the idea legitimizes and authorizes Dante’s own presentation of Paradise.
Now we move to the distinction between the biblical allegory just presented and the Platonic metaphor. Dante writes, “What Timaeus argues about the souls is not like this which is seen here, for seemingly he holds what he says for the truth.” That’s already one basic difference: what for the Bible is a metaphor becomes true in the context of Timaeus. Then we get a description of Plato’s view on these concerns: “He [Plato] says the soul returns to its own star, believing it to have been severed thence when nature gave it a form. But perhaps his opinion is other than his words sound, and may be of a meaning not to be derided. If he means that the honor of their influence and the blame returns to these wheels”—if by returning to the stars he implies that at the fall of the souls, the souls are touched by the various stains of the planets and then return to the planets from which they originated—“perhaps his bow hits some truth. This principle, ill-understood, once misled almost the entire world, so that it ran astray in naming Jove and Mercury and Mars.”6 With this, Beatrice has resolved the first question for the pilgrim and for us. She’s distinguishing between biblical theology and philosophical allegory, the language of metaphor in the Bible and the language of metaphor and truth in Plato. Dante is clearly legitimizing his own use of metaphor, for the whole poem we read is indeed a metaphorical journey whereby Dante is simultaneously both biblical and philosophical. He’s locating the common ground, the metaphorical language that both the Bible and Plato will use, and then applying it in his own work.
But why is representation considered so dangerous in the first place? representation has the power to erase the world of references that it represents. representation has the power to make appearances and simulacra the only reality that we manage to see. By virtue of the representation, we may end up in the predicament of believing that that’s all that there is. We may make the mistake Dante made of believing that these souls actually live on the moon and, therefore, that we are in a Platonic otherworld where the souls go back to this planet. The journey of Dante is the journey between images themselves and testing what these images may mean, finding out whether behind these images there is some kind of substance, essence, or reality. Dante moves between the two worlds and tries to join them. Hence, representation is a key issue here.
Furthermore and finally, this discourse of allegory gives us an idea why Dante has labeled this the heaven of grammar. You may recall that each planet seems to deploy one of the liberal arts, and the heaven of the moon is associated with grammar, according to Dante’s schema. This is how Dante can connect grammar and the moon in the text: allegorical discourse is a grammatical issue.
The other problem that Dante raises in Canto 4, the less poisonous one, is the question of the will. Beatrice explains why it is less problematic: “The other perplexity that troubles you has less of poison, for its malice could not lead you away from me elsewhere. For our justice to seem unjust in mortal eyes is an argument of faith.”7 It’s an easier issue for Dante because he distinguishes between a conditional will—what we will whenever we are beset by circumstances that force resolutions upon us—and an absolute will—the will of martyrs, for instance, of those who are unwavering and unfaltering in their confrontation with particular experiences. The souls of Piccarda and Constance were really exercising their own conditional will, not their absolute will, and thus their heavenly status. It’s an interesting distinction, but like Dante, we’ll leave it at that.
We move now instead to the heaven of Canto 6, the heaven of dialectics, Mercury. Why is Mercury the god tied to dialectics or logic, which are not exactly the same thing, though Dante does use them interchangeably? Mercury, or Hermes, is the psychopomp, the god who brings messages to the realm of shades and who carries the souls to Hades. He is also the deity of laws, the bearer of messages of the gods to human beings, and the god of the marketplace, though this last role may have less of a particular resonance in this canto. Ultimately, Mercury seems to relate more to logic than dialectics, but Dante has the planet fulfill this heavenly role all the same.
What is dialectics, exactly? It’s one of the arts of the classical trivium, and it is the art that provides a method to distinguish between truth and falsehoods. If dialectics is the science of the power to distinguish between falsehood and truth, it’s also a rational discipline, the discipline that follows the rule of reason by means of which one can go on making such distinctions. Interestingly enough, Dante is really talking about laws here, so perhaps that’s the tie to Mercury, and actually here he meets the great theorist, the emperor Justinian, who is usually acknowledged as the one who favored the real organization of Roman law in Byzantium, where he lived. Dante not only meets Justinian, but the emperor also tells the story of Rome, so it’s a canto about history. The question is: what is the rationality of Roman history, if there is rationality to it? What kind of justice was there in its laws?
The canto begins with the story of Constantine, who is famous for the Donation of Constantine, about which we already know a few things. It’s the famous alienation of imperial property to the Church as Constantine’s token of gratitude to Pope Sylvester, who had cured him of leprosy. This alleged transaction gave rise to a famous debate, and Dante dismisses the donation, views it as no less transgressive, no less tragic and disruptive of the order of the world, than Adam’s sin. It’s of the same cosmic proportion because it mixes together the sacred and the profane. It makes the pope a temporal ruler, and doing so is the ultimate degradation of the exercise of moral authority from Dante’s viewpoint.
So, he alludes to the donation again, but the reference to Constantine has a slightly different sense in this case. “after Constantine,” Justinian says, “turned back the Eagle counter to the course of the heavens which it had followed behind the ancient who took Lavinia to wife, a hundred and a hundred years and more the bird of God”—the ea gle, the emblem of the empire—“abode on Europe’s limit, near to the mountains from which it had first issued; and there it governed the world beneath the shadow of its sacred wings, from hand to hand, until by succeeding change it came into mine. I was Caesar, and am Justinian”—here, once again, the use of that shift of verbs from the past to the present—“who, by will of the Primal Love which I feel, removed from among the laws what was superfluous and vain.”8 This is really a definition of dialectics, making the distinction between what was “superfluous and vain” and what was essential.
The first allusion here is to Constantine’s moving the seat of the empire from Rome to the east, Byzantium. This is seen as the violation of a metaphor of history, a paradigm of history, which was called translatio imperii. In the Middle Ages people spoke constantly of translation, the translation of studies, the translation of the empire. They had an idea that the whole of history is patterned on the movement of the sun from east to west, and thus when the empire reaches the westernmost point of the map, that’s going to be the end of history, history’s sunset. Constantine, by turning back this translation, this movement, actually delays the apocalyptic denouement, the end of time and the end of the day, and for Dante this is a major violation of the economy of history.
The other allusion in the passage is to Aeneas with whom the empire had started to move westward after the fall of Troy. He, the husband of Lavinia, had begun the process that Constantine reverses. This is one of the first times that Dante starts using geographical coordinates, a geo graph i cal description of Europe. He has really not done that in Inferno and Purgatorio. He’s asking what kind of messages can come from this historical Europe that are still valid today. He does distinguish, however, between Rome and Europe, in the sense that the history of Rome, he will say in the Monarchia, is different from the history of Europe. The emblem for Rome’s distinctiveness is to be found in Aeneas’s experience of marrying three wives. He marries Creusa, as we read in The Aeneid; he marries Dido, though it’s a marriage of convenience, so to speak; and then he marries Lavinia. Dante explains that the three wives Aeneas marries are from Asia, from Africa, and from Europe, respectively, so Aeneas’s whole experience encompasses what at the time was thought of as universality, the three known continents. And yet there is a European context, for from Justinian we have what seems to be a celebration of the Roman Empire. This is Canto 6, after all, and like Canto 6 of Inferno and Canto 6 of Purgatorio before it, the canto’s focus is political, but this time the politics are not just those of the city or of Italy, but those of the whole empire.
However, what begins as a celebration of the Roman Empire in effect becomes also a critique of the ideology of empire. Dante follows two models here, and they are two models that contradict each other. We have the Virgilian model, which is really a commendation of the empire’s origins with Aeneas, the account told in The Aeneid, and a vision of what is to come. But then there is Augustine’s City of God, a fierce condemnation of the empire. The empire has fallen by the time Augustine writes, the claims of the eternity of the empire turn out to be false, and to Augustine the empire is nothing more than another episode in a long history of predatory politics of imperial possessions and violence. The Roman Empire as an empire is no better than all the other empires that have long since vanished, vanquished. Clearly, the two models are markedly opposed, and Dante oscillates between them throughout the canto.
The very language that Dante uses is Augustinian. At one point Dante says, “You know that it [the ea gle] made its stay in Alba for three hundred years and more, till at the end, when the three fought against the three for it still”—a reference to the Curatii and Horatii, two sets of three brothers who fought each other in a duel. “And you know what it did, through seven kings, from the wrong of the Sabine women down to the woe of Lucretia, conquering the neighboring peoples round about.”9 These are all phrases that come straight out of Augustine’s City of God. They are used by Dante as cases of exemplifying the libido and power of Rome. They are stories of erotic violence: Lucretia, who has been raped; and the Sabine women, who have been kidnapped by the bands of Romulus and Remus. All these references point to the idea that the empire was born under outlaws.
Dante is using the perspective of Augustine on the aberrant policies of the empire, but at the same time, all the rest of what he says in Canto 6 is really Virgilian. This is the moment when Virgil and Augustine are shown to disagree quite strongly with one another. Why does Dante do this? What is his reason for bringing together two contradictory sources of historical thought? Is he in favor of the empire or is he against it? One thing is clear, that Augustine, who loves Virgil, still decides that the empire is an abhorrent reality in his own history. It’s already falling apart, and he has no use for this decay. In his theological vision, the question that he raises is: what do I care who governs me, provided that they do not make me sin? Reality is internalized, found in the interior life of all of us, and what are empires, if not great thefts?
But we still must ask ourselves where Dante stands between these two poles. He makes a shift in focus that holds the answer. Toward the end of the canto, he writes, “Now you may judge of such as I accused but now, and of their offenses, which are the cause of all your ills. The one opposes to the public standard the yellow lilies, and the other claims it for a party, so that it is hard to see which offends the most. Let the Ghibellines, let them practice their art under another ensign, for this one he ever follows ill who cleaves justice from it. And let not this new Charles strike it down with his Guelphs, but let him fear talons which have stripped the hide from a greater lion. Many a time ere now the sons have wept for the sin of the father; and let him not believe that God will change arms for his lilies.”10 The canto all of a sudden seems to turn into a replica of Inferno 6 with its discussion of the civil war between Guelphs and Ghibellines. The civil war is the perspective from which Dante can take his double view on the history of the empire, standing up both to the stance of Augustine and to that of Virgil. What he really seems to be saying is, yes, Augustine you are right, the empire has been a negative force in history, and reality is, as you say, an internalized reality of our own peace and the internal will that we can placate. At the same time, he says to Virgil, but you’re also right in your valorization of the empire because the empire has brought order and laws into the world. Against Augustine he says, if there were no laws of the empire, then there would be no way of sheltering each and every unrest in cases of civil war. What makes the argument for the necessity of the empire is the reality of the civil war, which demands the presence of a transcendent institution that will manage to contain the violence of human beings. So, he agrees with Augustine and disagrees with Augustine. He agrees with Virgil and disagrees with Virgil. Virgil leaves no room for the inner experiences of Christians. Augustine leaves no room for the necessity of an outside structure that could order the appetites of human beings. On these terms Dante establishes his middle ground.
The canto comes to an end with a little bit of semi-autobiographical poetry, involving an emperor who praised a counselor who has now fallen into disgrace: “Within this present pearl shines the light of Romeo”—Romeo Villeneuve, a Provençal courtier who held the role of counselor for the prince—“whose noble and beautiful work was ill rewarded; but the Provençals who wrought against him have not the laugh, and indeed he takes an ill path who makes harm for himself of another’s good work. Raymond Berenger had four daughters, each of them a queen, and Romeo, a man of lowly birth and a pilgrim, did this for him. And then crooked words moved him to demand a reckoning of this just man, who had rendered him seven and five for ten. Thereon he departed, poor and old, and if the world but knew the heart he had while begging his bread morsel by morsel, much as it praises him would praise him more.”11 It is an oblique representation of Dante himself, who also ends up begging in poverty for a morsel, as a result, he believes, of the selfishness of political powers.
The final question raised here is one that I think underlies this whole canto: what is the relationship between dialectics and history? Why in the heaven of logic does Dante have to talk about history? I think that the idea is that history itself is an encomium that ends up being not quite mitigated. There is a reason for the empire, and yet this reason doesn’t quite justify all that the empire perpetrated in history. From this perspective Dante is also forcing on us some perplexities about the nature of logic as an instrument of power, as one that could justify all possible powers. So, there is also a critique of dialectics as much as there is a critique of history.
Here we omit a discussion of the heaven of Venus and we move to the heaven of the sun, which is the heaven of arithmetic and numbers. In this section Dante talks about a model of the Trinity that I will describe to you in a moment. Here he encounters two wheels of saints, two garlands of wise old men who hold each other’s hands, dancing around the sun. It is the dance of wisdom. You can also refer to this heaven as a reorganization of the encyclopedia. I used this metaphor at the beginning of the book, this idea that the Divine Comedy tries to repropose a new circle of knowledge, a way in which things can really be known, and the encyclopedia represents the journey of education, which is circular because the mind moves through the various arts and sciences, and then returns to what it already knew from a different viewpoint. That’s how you learn, and that’s what we find in the heaven of the sun.
Dante begins Canto 10 with a Trinitarian representation, the Father and the Son joined together by the breath of love: “Looking upon His Son with the Love which the One and the Other eternally breathe forth, the primal and ineffable Power made everything that revolves through the mind or through space with such order that he who contemplates it cannot but taste of Him.” That was the idea of the Trinity, as a unity, an arithmetical paradox of theological fecundity. God is an image of love generative of itself, within His own unity. Then Dante turns to his readers for the last time and tells us to be stargazers. He urges our eyes upward: “Lift then your sight with me, reader, to the loft y wheels, straight to that part where the one motion strikes the other; amorously there begin to gaze upon that Master’s art who within Himself so loves it that His eye never turns from it. See how from there the oblique circle which bears the planets branches off, to satisfy the world which calls on them.”12 He directs our eyes to an intersection, the cosmic equator and the ecliptic, a term that describes the diurnal and annual movement of the sun. With this astrological crossroads in our sights, Dante asks the reader to ponder his description of the Trinity.
But why does Dante think of the Trinity in the heaven of the sun in the first place? For a potential answer, we turn to a passage from Pseudo-Dionysius, a mystic whom Dante mentions. Pseudo-Dionysius wrote on the mystical hierarchy of divine names, including a semimystical idea of the Trinity, an idea that knowledge has to be love, which Dante will take up. His is a solar theology, a theology that has to be understood as the life of the sun itself. In The Divine Names, he says:
Think of how it is with our sun. It exercises no rational process, no act of choice, and yet by the very fact of its existence it gives light to what ever is able to partake of its light, in its own way. So it is with the Good. Existing far above the sun, an archetype far superior to its dull image, it sends the rays of its undivided goodness to everything with the capacity, such as this may be, to receive it. . . . Such beings owe their presence and their uneclipsed and undiminished lives to these rays. . . . They abide in the goodness of God and draw from it the foundation of what they are, their coherence, their vigilance, their home. Their longing for the Good makes them what they are and confers on them their well-being. Shaped by what they yearn for, they exemplify goodness and, as the Law of God requires of them, they share with those below them the good gift s which have come their way.13
God, or the Trinity as a given, is depicted as a fountain here, eschewing the Aristotelian or Thomistic idea of causality. We think of God as the one who imparts a cause or a motion to things, and then there is a teleology, there is an effect. The idea of the Trinity here, on the contrary, is one of an inexhaustible source that keeps giving to all, and we’re all part of this gift. Dante is getting this solar theology from Pseudo-Dionysius, who appears as one who behind the rationalist facade of his thinking is aware of depths and other ways of thinking that are not those of the rational mind.
Next Dante sees these two garlands of saints and meets Aquinas, who will give an encyclopedic list of the names of the sages around him. He says,
I was of the lambs of the holy flock which Dominic leads on the path where there is good fattening if they do not stray. He that is next beside me on the right was my brother and my master, and he is Albert of Cologne, and I Thomas of Aquino. If thus of all the rest you would be informed, come, following my speech with your sight, going round the blessed wreath. That next flaming comes from the smile of Gratian who served the one and the other court so well that it pleases in Paradise. The other who next adorns our choir was that Peter who, like the poor widow, offered his treasure to Holy Church. The fifth light, which is the most beautiful among us, breathes with such love that all the world there below thirsts to know tidings of it. Within it is the loft y mind to which was given wisdom so deep that, if truth be true, there never rose a second of such full vision.14
That fifth light is Solomon, described through a circumlocution. In numerical symbolism, five is the natural number for the things of the earth, which is to say that Dante presents a very difficult, dangerous proposition: namely, the idea of Solomon as naturally perfect, as having a perfection of the intellect. The intellectual virtue of Solomon consists in the fact that he knew what to ask for when he had to govern his people. He was the perfect king for this reason. Why would this be a dangerous idea? If you believe that there is a perfection of the intellect within the natural immanence and order, then it means that there’s no need for the Revelation. There is no need for intermediaries or Redemption. If the natural intellect is capable of ascending as is claimed here for Solomon, then the whole redemptive apparatus will collapse. Dante himself does not believe in this perfection, and Aquinas will step back dramatically from this position in Canto 13.
For now, though, Aquinas continues his list: “At its side behold the light of that candle which, below in the flesh, saw deepest into the angelic nature and its ministry”—Augustine—“the body from which it was driven lies down below in Cieldauro”—Boethius—“and he came from martyrdom and exile to this peace. See, flaming beyond, the glowing breath of Isidore, of Bede, and of Richard [of St. Victor] who in contemplation was more than man.” The word Dante uses in the Italian (considerar) is not actually contemplation, but rather consideration, and it’s a key word for Dante, since its etymology means “moving with the stars.” The mind is at its most perfect when it imitates the circulation and circularity of the stars. And finally, “this one from whom your look returns to me is the light of a spirit to whom, in his grave thoughts, it seemed that death came slow. It is the eternal light of Siger who, lecturing in Straw Street, demonstrated invidious truths.”15 The last one whom Aquinas points out in this circulation of wise spirits is a so-called heretic by the name of Siger of Brabant, an Averroist condemned for his Averroism. What ever canonized knowledge we may have of these figures, Dante places in heaven individuals who have been judged unworthy of knowledge or heretical or wrong, and now are redeemed. The idea of knowledge is one that keeps changing. The canon of knowledge is always expanding, growing to include voices that had previously been rejected.
How does Dante go about justifying the salvation of an alleged heretic, though? Canto 10, from this point of view, is retrospectively one that sheds light on Canto 10 of Inferno, where we also saw, you may remember, the Averroists and the Epicureans, like Guido Cavalcanti, those who believed that love and knowledge never interact with each other, that rationality is darkened and dimmed by the infusions of passions, and that the mind is one that receives ideas from the outside, the notion of both the inertia of the will and the divisions within the mind itself. Dante is now correcting some of those views. He gives the address of this man, the Street of Straw in Paris, the Rue de Fouarre (now known as the Rue Dante, a sign that Parisians are mindful of this passage), and tells us that Siger lectured, a word that had a certain value in the university lexicon of the time. Lecturing was an activity that implied glossing of texts. Dante sets Siger on the road by giving us his address, informing us that Siger’s thinking, which produces his lectures, takes place while he is on the road. Philosophy always understands itself as a journey, a method, an exodus, to reach the ultimate truths about God. Dante is a poet on the way to theological certainty, theological truth, and theological knowledge, and Siger “demonstrated invidious truths” to him.
What are these invidious truths? Dante indulges in etymology by calling the truth that Siger pursued “invidious,” which etymologically means those truths that cannot be demonstrated or seen. Philosophy appears as an art of speculation that takes us on the path to a truth that it cannot quite access. In the specific case of Siger of Brabant, these truths include the immortality of the soul, about which Aristotle was very doubtful. He also tried to determine the origin of the world. Siger believed the universe to be eternal, an argument that engaged many medieval thinkers and theologians, with Averroism on one side and on the other those like Aquinas, who maintains that philosophically you can show that the universe is eternal, but out of faith you continue believing in creation, that things have a beginning. If you don’t think that things have a beginning, then there’s never a possibility of rooting the idea of your freedom, your innovations, the possibility that things can be different for you from what they were before. These are ideas Siger was challenging with his invidious truths.
The reason why Dante rescues Siger of Brabant is to make a statement that what ever we believe is knowledge is never definite. We are literally on the way, rethinking things and making them an object of our own self-critique. This is not the only place where Dante is rethinking himself. Very soon, around the notion of the Trinity, Bonaventure will have to change his mind about a man we’ve mentioned before, Joachim of Flora. We are going to have Canto 11 balancing off Canto 10. For now, however, the canto ends, “Then, like a clock”—mechanical clocks were a recent technological invention in the late thirteenth century—“which calls us at the hour when the Bride of God rises to sing her matins to her Bridegroom, that he may love her, in which the one part draws or drives the other, sounding ting! ting! with notes so sweet that the well-disposed spirit swells with love, so did I see the glorious wheel move and render voice to voice with harmony and sweetness that cannot be known except there where joy is everlasting.”16 Dante is describing the songs of the eternal blessed souls in erotic terms, so that what seems to be a canto of pure knowledge ultimately becomes a love song too, and this is the whole trajectory of Canto 10.
In Canto 10 a poetic break takes place. Dante literally moves us beyond the sunlight, the ordinary natural daylight, into a world that is his own, where he starts raising the issue of knowledge, as if to say that a new way of thinking is now necessary. Once you move beyond the ordinary boundaries of the universe you have to start asking yourself what kind of knowledge you need there. He’s rethinking, therefore, the whole relationship between heresies and knowledge, the canonical certainties that Aquinas seems to possess, though he now makes a mistake about the fate of Solomon, in opposition to the alleged heresy of Siger of Brabant. Dante is forcing on us a different way of thinking that begins with a redefinition of nothing less than the Trinity. It would be inconceivable that something as imponderable as the Trinity could just have one formula to account for it, but Dante adds onto it that first definition of the Trinity as a unity of love, which I think is a mystical definition. Love and learning, philosophy and theology, are all brought together as Dante redefines himself, his world, his knowledge, and his poem in Canto 10.