19 Paradiso 15–17
CHAPTER 19
Paradiso 15–17
As we reach the midpoint of Paradiso, Cantos 15–17, we move into the heaven of Mars, which is, as you likely know, named for the god of war, and it is also the heaven of music. Dante links Mars and music out of the belief that harmony is the meeting point of discordant elements, a concord reached through discord. The discordant elements can be different sounds, or they can be the passions within us that need tempering. Canto 15 can be read in conjunction with Canto 15 of Inferno. Here Dante encounters his ancestor, Cacciaguida, and so inevitably the reference to Brunetto Latini imposes itself on us. We are compelled to draw parallels and see differences between the two forerunners who make different claims on their intellectual or dynastic descendant, Dante.
You could also look at this canto from many other points of view. For instance, the strongest questions that Dante raises here involve the self and history, a relationship that may be new to us, though history has oft en come up in our discussion. The last time we discussed it was in Canto 6 of Paradiso, where Dante gives a history of Rome, its humble beginnings and the deconstruction and crisis of the empire. And the issue of self is also something we have been discussing for a while, ever since we started the Vita nuova, with the idea of a lyrical self, a self who removes himself from the world of history, the contingencies of time, and the viscous realities of the city, and takes shelter in the chamber of his imagination, in the world of his ideas, dreams, and memories. There he constructs his own true self. Then when we began reading the Divine Comedy, I insisted on an autobiographical focus. This is his story, his unique experience. But now, we are talking about self and history in a new way since Dante’s never quite coupled the two terms before. They become the double focus around which everything moves in these three cantos.
I draw your attention first to the presence of some mythic references and mythological figures whom Dante is evoking. They are very different among themselves, but they’re all a way of reflecting on Dante’s own idea of selfhood, his own relationship to his ancestors, his own private history. Canto 15 begins with musical metaphors, which is not surprising, since we are in the heaven of music: “Gracious will, wherein right-breathing love always resolves itself, as cupidity does into grudging will, imposed silence on that sweet lyre and quieted the holy strings which the right hand of Heaven slackens and draws tight.” But beyond the music, Dante offers up the first mythological reference of the canto: “Nor did the gem depart from its ribbon, but coursed along the radial strip, and seemed like fire behind alabaster. With like affection did the shade of Anchises stretch forward (if our greatest Muse merits belief), when in Elysium he perceived his son.”1 At the very beginning of Inferno Dante made a reference to Paul and Aeneas, disavowing any strict connection with them. Aeneas’s father, Anchises, mentioned then, is now recalled here. The encounter between Anchises and Aeneas stands for a relationship that Aeneas has with history; Aeneas goes to Hades in order to find out what the purposes are for his journeying from Troy toward an unknown land, and from his father he receives the prophetic announcement that he is to be a part of history. One belongs in history as part of a providential pattern, which for Aeneas was a destined empire that he has to found as the point of beginning for a new history. This is the epic account, a myth of one’s own self belonging in the world of history.
As we move on, though, we get a reversal of this conception of the self in history. Dante problematizes the idea of what the self even is. after all, in the Vita nuova the self is a nexus of memories, fantasies, and a will to write poetry. In that sense the text constitutes the subject into a self: I am the author of this text. The text becomes a point of reference, and the poetic image that I give of myself gives you an idea of who I am. It doubles me, it perpetuates me, it’s a poetic version of myself. So, as we read the autobiographical account we don’t know yet what we are to take as a self.
And Dante also questions what history is. In Canto 16, Dante will consider writing a chronicle of the city of Florence, fitting since Florence is famous for its medieval chroniclers. So is history then to be understood as events? Or is to be understood the way Anchises understands it, as a myth that somehow has a paradigmatic value that can regulate and also arrange? Dante will not answer this question directly in Canto 16, but he does talk about all the Florentine families in an elegiac manner. They’re all decayed, finished, and extinct, so what ever value this history may have is an elegiac commemoration of the past. And yet Cacciaguida proves to be elated at the idea that the grandson, the descendant, wants to find out about the past. Questions of history and how to conceive of it linger on.
I think Canto 17 is where we begin to unravel this whole issue of history and the self. It begins in a peculiar manner, with a long periphrastic construction, a long turn of phrase, for the pilgrim to describe himself in terms of Phaethon, the famous figure from classical myth who challenges Apollo. We saw him before, in the corresponding Canto 17 of Inferno. Phaethon was uncertain of his ancestry, unsure that his father was Apollo, so he had to reassure himself. This allusion is in the canto of Cacciaguida for a reason. Dante is asking what is the real relationship that joins him to this noble heroic figure of whom he is very proud. He’s happy to reaffirm this genealogical line, so history now becomes no longer a chronicle, but a genealogy: “Such was I, and such I was perceived to be both by Beatrice and by the holy lamp which already, for my sake, had changed its place.”2 And yet the figure of Phaethon is a tragic figure because he introduces the possibility of what makes fathers wary of their sons all the time, the idea that the son wants to outdo the father, and the idea of tragic transgression that can breach that line of continuity across the generations. That’s what this second myth tells us of history and the self.
Canto 17 goes on discussing, among other things, yet another way of understanding history. I think Dante says it much more sparingly and simply better than anybody else can: “Contingency, which does not extend beyond the volume of your material world, is all depicted in the Eternal Vision.” The world of contingency can be subsumed within a larger transcendent paradigm, and that seems to be the order of necessity; the contingent world is linked to the volume where all things are present in the eternal vision. But is there some autonomy to this contingency, or are things determined by an order of necessity downstream from the point where our little ships are set afloat? The musical lexicon appears once more as Dante explains, “Therefrom, even as sweet harmony comes from an organ to the ear, comes to my sight the time that is in store for you.”3 I enjoy very much the implicit connection between time and music, music becoming the metaphor that makes time itself audible. Time is constitutive of music, of course, but it’s really an acoustic translation of the silent arrow of time here.
And then we get a third mythological reference. This time Cacciaguida announces exile as the fatality that is hovering over Dante and for which he has to prepare himself: “As Hippolytus departed from Athens, by reason of his pitiless and perfidious stepmother”—Phaedra—“so from Florence must you depart.” Dante is not quite Aeneas, since he’s not out to establish an empire; he’s not quite Phaethon, since he does not want to outdo, at least literally, his father; so perhaps Hippolytus is a closer match. Exile implies a necessary detachment from one’s family, one’s country, all the possible lines that tend to join us and to limit us. Cacciaguida continues, “So is it willed, so already plotted, and so shall be accomplished soon by him who ponders upon it in the place where every day Christ is bought and sold.” Note the difference between “willed” and “plotted,” the order of eternal destinies vs. the order of contingency and the infernal maneuvers against the pilgrim. And to really spell it out, Cacciaguida describes exile in all its painful reality, “You shall leave everything beloved most dearly, and this is the arrow which the bow of exile shoots first. You shall come to know how salt is the taste of another’s bread, and how hard the path to descend and mount by another man’s stairs.”4 Here the translator makes a mistake because Dante is very careful about the word order: down and up, not up and down, following a naturalistic logic. For him to go up is really a descent, lowering and degrading himself. It’s a very interesting line, acknowledging a sense of gratitude, a sense of the spiritual ascent being inevitably at first a descent into the self.
To go back to this idea of self, the story of Hippolytus is the story of a stepmother who is trying to seduce her stepson, Theseus’s child Hippolytus, who is forced to run away. The destructive desires within that family force him to leave, and he dies away from home. You have to wonder why Dante is thinking of this tragic figure to compare to himself as an exile. The potentially devastating and tragic consequences that befall Hippolytus could also be Dante’s fate, or so he suggests. At any rate, this is the last of the three great mythological images through which Dante is contemplating what the self is and how the self can be determined in the world of history.
This series of comparisons is really the same extraordinary burden of a text that I have mentioned many times in this book: The Confessions of St. Augustine. That text is also about the question of how the self is related to history, but here Dante disagrees with Augustine. For Augustine, the self is one that takes refuge in its own interiority. Only at the time of the conversion can he rejoin history, and while that is one way Dante sees of entering history, his own stance is far from identical. The idea of self that he is going to have is not really Augustine’s; it’s that of a man who can belong to the history of the world by writing a poem, this poem. Dante understands the fundamental quality of the exilic experience of human beings, and that’s simply not Augustine’s stance. No disrespect is meant to Augustine with this contrast; it’s just a different experience.
The prophecy of exile with which Canto 17 ends gives an entirely different twist to the self’s relationship to history. The other model Dante has is Cacciaguida, who goes on to sacrifice himself for the benefit of a larger cause, the cause of the Christian Crusade in Jerusalem. But this model, like The Aeneid and all the others, is rejected. Dante says we all inevitably belong in history. There is no other way for the self to exist if not by measuring oneself with the pressures of historical realities. The political world is going to be his way out of the maze. It’s the exilic self, an idea of the self as an art of dislocation from the world of history.
But how are we to understand this dislocation? Is dislocation a way of actually removing oneself altogether? Or is it just saying that one is out of place and out of time, that somehow one has a relationship to history that is perhaps polemical? With other details from the same three cantos, we can come up with an answer. Let’s start with Canto 15, where this relationship to Cacciaguida is also played out etymologically. Dante is constantly punning with the metaphor of wings, ali in Italian, as in Alighieri, the “bearers of wings.” For example, “I speak to you, thanks to her who clothed you with plumes for the loft y flight,” or a little later, “I turned to Beatrice, and she heard before I spoke, and smiled to me a sign that made the wings of my desire increase,” and a third time, “Will and faculty in mortals, for the reason that is plain to you, are not equally feathered in their wings.”5 He clearly aims to emphasize the etymology of his genealogy.
The main element of his actual exchange with Cacciaguida, though, is a focus on the Florence of old, an invocation of the golden age of the city, a kind of utopian construction. Dante writes, “Florence, within her ancient circle from which she still takes tierce and nones”—these are the times of the day rung by the bells of the nearby church—“abode in peace, sober and chaste. There was no necklace, no coronal, no embroidered gowns, no girdle that was more to be looked at than the person. Nor yet did the daughter at her birth cause fear to the father, for the time and the dowry did not outrun due measure on this side and that. Houses empty of family there were none, nor had Sardanapalus arrived yet to show what could be done in the chamber.”6 First of all, Florence is evoked within a closed circle of self-sufficiency called “her ancient circle.” The circularity of the city implies both plentitude and a boundary. Dante does not have an idea of an expanding city; he projects a city held within its own perimeter, “from which she still takes tierce and nones,” so that the language of space and time follows, as if everything could be both measured and interrelated. Then Florence is metaphorically linked to a sober, chaste woman, suggesting that here at least he believes in the famous image of the so-called body politic. We’ve discussed it before, the notion of the organic structure of the city as made up of interdependent parts, just as space and time indicate the interdependent coordinates within which the life of the city can be recalled. This is followed in turn by a sequence of anaphoras, all negatives, “no necklace, no coronal,” and so on. People in the Middle Ages sometimes thought of cosmetics as bad rhetoric, perverse forms of seduction by means of which one could disfigure the natural continence and beauty of the human form. So Dante, by repeating these negatives, literally strips the woman of all the superfluities, all these complications, and brings the city back to the simplicity of its original chastity. This is clearly the golden age of Florence.
But does Dante really believe in this myth of the golden age? There is a rhetorical phrase for this sort of move, praising the bygone times: laudatio, which means “praise of the past,” and is more of a rhetorical strategy to denounce the imperfections of today. In effect, Dante has a radically polemical view of the utopian spirit. He maintains this idea of a perfection that we push back into the past because it’s no longer with us, though we want to fantasize about it nonetheless. He preserves it because utopia can become a normative idea by means of which we can alter the configuration of our own contingencies, our own history. Utopias don’t exist, and many interesting figures in the history of ideas claim that they are dangerous constructions because they f0ment illusions about who we are, and yet they become necessary for Dante because in the light of those ideas, we can then alter what we perceive as the degradations of our own times.
Of course, this myth of a Florence of the past literally disintegrates when seen in contrast with the reality of Dante’s life as an exile, which is going to await him in the future. So, it’s exile that offers a realistic perspective of his being in history. It’s not a punishment, though it induces suffering. It becomes a virtue. Furthermore, in effect, it will become a paradigm in which we can all recognize ourselves.
In Canto 16 this myth is extended, with an allusion to the idea that they lived in peace. Whenever I hear the language of peace, I hear an echo of Jerusalem, the city of peace, and that’s what makes this reference so interesting. It’s a typology of another city, another golden age of the past. Many prophets would recall the peacetime of Jerusalem as what the Jews had lost, hence their need to continue commemorating it in their history. What makes this conjunction particularly strong in Canto 16 is that Dante also repeatedly refers to chronicles, which are a different mode of historiography. One place where you can find modalities of history is in Boethius, who writes The Consolation of Philosophy, at the center of which he figures the Wheel of Fortune. A kind of historiography that derives from this Boethian insight is that of writing the lives of families that ascend and descend, as opposed to the historiography of the fall of empires witnessed, for instance, in Augustine. With the chronicle genre, Dante goes to yet another historiographic model, the idea that history is reducible to the local events and circumstances of one’s own life. He recalls all the families to the joy of his grandfather, who is experiencing the pleasure of memory. He shuttles back and forth in memory, between one item and another, recalling everything, but Dante soon discovers that he does not quite belong, that that kind of history does not really account for who he is and who he wants to be above all. Somehow, therefore, his definition of the self will depend on a certain idea of the future rather than the past.
Dante then turns to a mythological history of Florence, speaking of those “who at that time were there, between Mars and the Baptist.”7 Not only does one recount stories of families, one also has to recount stories of the predominant sovereignty of the mythologies that control one’s own self-understanding. We tend to understand ourselves in the light of presiding imaginative myths, so here we get Mars, who was the god of Florence before John the Baptist replaced him. This is an account of the shifting mythology of the city, told with a chronicler’s precision.
The language then shifts from myth to mixture—“the citizenship, which is now mixed with Campi, with Certaldo, and with Figline”—which later becomes confusion. When Dante has to give a diagnosis of the crisis of the city, he points to the confusion caused by this amalgamation: “The intermingling of people was ever the beginning of harm to the city, as to you the food which is loaded on is to the body.”8 Once again he’s talking about the malaise of the city through the connection between bodies and cities. Cities grow and decay and get sick like bodies do. Also, he called the mixture confusion, which is another name for Babylon. So the two myths of the city that Dante has in mind for Florence in this scene are those of Jerusalem and Babylon. The two model cities are not antithetical; they are both possible within the same body politic. Florence can look like Jerusalem or like Babylon, according to the way in which the moral life of the city is lived out.
Dante preserves this ambiguity as a sign that the political world is reshaped all the time. There is no definite metaphor or emblem to define a particular city. A city can constantly change its identity. And we are involved in the city’s history because we describe it according to our own aspirations and ideas; we share in the shaping and construction of the city. This perspective is no longer that of the chronicler, but that of a poet. It’s a critique of the inadequacy of the chronicle’s view of what history could be.
Then, in Canto 17, with the image of Phaethon Dante questions his true relationship with Cacciaguida, who is directing him and unveiling for him what he can expect from the future. Here we get the famous description of Dante’s exile, which has already been cited in this chapter: “You shall leave everything beloved most dearly, and this is the arrow which the bow of exile shoots first.” The harshness of exile could not be crystallized in sharper terms than these. The severance of the self from the family is apparent as a punishment at this point. He continues, “You shall come to know how salt is the taste of another’s bread.” Some feel that Dante is providing mild comic relief here by mentioning the fact that in Florence they do not use salt in their bread, but I don’t think it’s all that comical. Bread is the most sacramental of foods. It’s not just a metaphor, and in one of the next lines Dante makes a further etymological reference to it: “That which shall most weigh your shoulders down will be the evil and senseless company.”9 The word company maintains the reference to bread because it means a “sharing of bread with others,” so bread truly adjoins and brings about the unity of the body politic.
This “prophecy” is, obviously, a genuine reflection of Dante’s own life. He went into exile in the year 1302, and for a number of years he was plotting along with his fellow exiles to return to Florence and vanquish the enemies who had banished them. It was a revenge plot in order to restore what they saw as justice. Dante came to understand, however, that this path was only a route to absolute destruction, so from then on he moves like a shabby derelict. He represents himself limping at the beginning of Inferno, and that is really the way we are asked to imagine him as he goes through life in exile. It was not a matter of living in isolated splendor in some court or other. Exile entails going from place to place begging, so this is absolutely intended as a form of punishment for him.
Sadly, he is an exile even to other exiles. Both the Guelphs and Ghibellines distrust him and take their distance from him, “but, soon after, their brows, not yours, shall redden for it. Of their brutish folly their own conduct shall afford the proof, so that it will be for your fair fame to have made you a party by yourself.”10 How astonishing, to be absolutely on your own, “a party by yourself.” This is mildly perplexing, to say the least, seeing as the Divine Comedy begins with the representation of the neutral angels, those angels who wanted to be neither for God nor against Him, but rather by themselves. I have pointed out that for Dante this was the most despicable of conditions and choices, though it seems to be a nonchoice. One is really choosing anyway, even when one is choosing “not to choose,” and to Dante’s thinking it’s despicable not to take sides, to sit on the fence. And yet here he seems to attribute that very condition to himself. He has to be by himself, but is that really a kind of neutrality he’s imagining? I think that he’s actually describing the destitution and loneliness involved in his separation from others.
But in a certain sense the exile is still part of the community. Dante brings about a transformation of the idea of exile from what seemed to be a punishment into a virtue. The language with which Dante presents the world to come for him, his future, suggests that history is understood as, above all, futurity. We are oriented to the future, the only real time that we have. We don’t have it yet, but it’s the time of one’s projects, the time in which one can really define oneself. I have some contact with the past, through my memories, but sometimes a catastrophe occurs, and only the future can define me then.
Dante’s prophecy doesn’t end simply with mention of exile, though:
“Your first refuge and first inn shall be the courtesy of the great Lombard [a gentleman of Verona who hosted him for a while, and who was the older brother of Cangrande, whom we encountered earlier and is mentioned below] who bears the holy bird upon the ladder, and he will have for you such benign regard that, in doing and in asking, between you two, that will be first which between others is the slowest. With him you shall see one [Cangrande] who, at his birth, was so stamped by this strong star, that notable shall be his deeds. Not yet have folk taken due note of him, because of his young age, for these wheels have revolved around him only nine years; but before the Gascon deceives the loft y Henry, some sparks of his virtue shall appear, in his caring naught for money or for toils. His magnificence shall hereafter be so known, that his very foes will not be able to keep silent tongues about him. Look you to him and to his benefits. By him shall many folk be changed, the rich and the beggarly altering their condition. And you shall bear hence written of him in your mind, but you shall not tell it”; —and he told things past the belief even of those who shall see them. Then he added, “Son, these are the glosses on what was said to you; behold the snares which are hidden behind but a few circlings. Yet I would not have you envious of your neighbors, since your life shall be prolonged far beyond the punishment of their perfidies.”11
The glosses mentioned here come from Inferno 15, of course, when Brunetto told Dante that his future exile would be glossed by another person, whom Dante has been thinking would be Beatrice, though it turns out to be his forefather. The language that accompanies this prediction is the language of the ethics of exile. Exile brings about and needs hospitality in order to be bearable and tolerable. Courtesy, gratitude, and giving—it’s a new ethics from the perspective of Dante’s exilic experience.
Then Dante concludes with a passage that I think seals what I have been saying. It begins: “I see well, my father, how time spurs toward me to give me such a blow as is heaviest to whosoever is most heedless; wherefore it is good that I arm myself with foresight,’” which is another virtue of exile. Foresight is another way of saying prudence, which is the human counterpart of providence. They have the same etymology, a seeing in advance, trying not to predict but to forestall the slings and arrows that come our way, “so that if the dearest place be taken from me, I lose not all the rest by reason of my songs.” He continues:
“Down in the world endlessly bitter, and upon the mountain from whose fair summit my lady’s eyes uplift ed me, and after, through the heavens from light to light, I have learned that which, if I tell again, will have for many a savor of great bitterness; and if I am a timid friend to the truth, I fear to lose life among those who shall call this time ancient.” The light wherein was smiling the trea sure I had found there first became flashing as a golden mirror in the sun, then it replied, “A conscience dark, either with its own or with another’s shame, will indeed feel your speech to be harsh. But none the less, all falsehood set aside, make manifest all that you have seen; and then let them scratch where the itch is. For if at first taste your voice be grievous, yet shall it leave thereafter vital nourishment when digested. This cry of yours shall do as does the wind, which smites most upon the loftiest summits; and this shall be no little cause of honor. Therefore only the souls known of fame have been shown to you within these wheels, upon the mountain, and in the woeful valley; for the mind of him who hears rests not nor confirms its faith by an example that has its roots unknown or hidden, nor for other proof that is not manifest.”12
What Dante will take as a palliative, at least, or a remedy to his exile, is writing. The writing of the poem becomes the act by which he, an exile, can survive his utter dislocation from his city, from his family, from his habits. The work is the way in which the self enters and shapes history. It’s not Aeneas, it’s not Phaethon, it’s not Hippolytus, it’s not even Cacciaguida’s account of his own grandiloquent connection with the world of history. The way in which Dante’s self enters history is through the power of poetry.
Dante goes beyond the misconception about poetic language that it’s but a faint symbol divorced from reality. What Dante is saying is that words are things in themselves, that words are food for thought. Being things, they have a kind of solidity and a truth-value in and of themselves. Dante bends the language to define himself in a relationship to his future project of writing the poem, and that project of writing the poem is his way of establishing his place in a utopian history. I say “utopian” because it doesn’t have to be understood in any local sense. Dante corrects the classical idea, which survived in medieval times, that the value of the self is decided by the place one occupies within the economy of the city. Dante says that’s not the way it works, that he is the project of writing his poetry, and even through poetry written in exile, outside of the city, he can reenter the world of history. Talking as a man who has been touched by a vision of what justice ought to be, Dante sets a unique path for himself: writing of writing as his own way to join the self and history.