20 Paradiso 18–22
CHAPTER 20
Paradiso 18–22
In Canto 18 Dante is initially still in the heaven of Mars. There he lists a number of warriors, souls who are heroic figures like Cacciaguida. He mentions the biblical figures Joshua and Judas Maccabeus and then he names several medieval figures. First in line is Charlemagne, as Dante is clearly retrospectively justifying the whole issue of the Crusades in which Cacciaguida took part. It can really be brought back to Charlemagne’s experience in France and Spain against the Muslims. Of course he also names Charlemagne’s paladin, the great, Achilles-like, seemingly invulnerable Roland, who died at Roncevaux because of the hubris that characterized his life, in that case the hubris of not wanting to blow the horn that would have been heard by Charlemagne so that his leader could have come to his rescue. That scene became in the Western imagination a most traumatic experience because it showed that the myth of invincibility of Christian Europe was simply that, an illusion to be turned to rubble by the victorious invading armies. Then Dante refers to a few figures of the Second Crusade, like Godfrey of Bouillon and Robert Guiscard.
With all these names Dante develops a clear thematic thread between the previous cantos and this canto, involving the question of what a heroic life is. The heroic life can even involve a defeat, as in the case of Roland. Still, there is a typology that runs from the epic biblical stories to contemporary history. For Dante a heroic figure is not necessarily a figure who would unify and cut across barriers and divisions. On the contrary, Dante is indicating that there’s a possible heroic life in giving of oneself to a cause much larger than oneself.
What I would stress, though, about this particular scene is that Dante is really aware of divisions, of the need to separate what is his from what is not his, what is ours from what is not ours, and so on. He seems to be perpetuating an idea that some might find objectionable, that this separation is dangerous and in itself both caused by war and a cause of wars. And this is not the only time that Dante has established such divisions. For just one example, over the past few chapters, for instance, Dante has also drawn lines on the map, between countries and continents. He always goes out of his way to mention this idea of separation, so there are many divisions in the Comedy.
And yet, he seems to believe that Rome and the history of Rome really escape this logic of separation. In effect, as previously mentioned, in the Monarchia, the political tract that Dante writes, he does stress the fact that Aeneas is a true Roman. He cannot be thought of as an Asian, which he was, nor can he be thought of as a European, even though there is a sort of universalizing impulse in him, in the measure in which he married three women from three different continents. Dante has to distinguish between two kinds of history, one that transcends barriers and another that maintains them, like that of the people who fought in the Crusades.
An underlying problem in Cantos 15–17 that becomes more central in the heaven of Jupiter in Cantos 18–20 is a very abstract question: namely, what is a place? In Canto 15 Dante had tried to determine whether his history could be reduced to the boundaries of his native town and decided that it was no longer possible because he is an exile. In Latin, exile means “being out of one’s own soil,” so in the Middle Ages they never really thought of exile as more than a physical condition. Dante changes this meaning of exile by making it into a spiritual condition, the precondition for his writing poetry in the first place. But in these later cantos the question becomes broader: what is one’s own soil, one’s own place? What are the terms in which we can define place?
In Canto 18, he moves into the heaven of Jupiter, a heaven of white light that he links with geometry. Geometry is a very complex science that allows for the measurement of the whole earth, according to its etymology. And it implies the presence of perspective within it, since geometry is what regulates the arrangement of space and permits the measure ment of depth. It has a profoundly intimate linkage with ethics, as seen in the rule of the counterpart or contrapasso in Inferno 28, when Dante has to establish the relationship between crime and punishment. It could not be an even, one-to-one relationship. You cannot simply pluck out someone’s eye because someone has plucked out your eye—that’s not necessarily justice. There should be some kind of proportionality. The idea is that geometry is related to ethics because its extension always implies a point that is the beginning of a geometric reflection, that always indicates the existence of other points. Geometry and ethics allow for the establishment of a just system of relations.
Dante repeatedly deploys the language of geometry in these cantos. For instance, he introduces the notion of God the geometer in Canto 19: “The primal Will, which of itself is good, has never moved from itself, which is the Supreme Good. All is just that accords with It; no created good draws It to itself, but It, raying forth”—ray, which in Italian is a ray of sunlight but also the radius of a circle—“is the cause of it. As the stork circles”—shapes—“over her nest.”1 Or as soon Dante enters the heaven of geometry in Canto 18, we come across a plane, a divine spectacle, a sacred theater where God speaks to human beings by using the souls of the blessed. He writes, “I saw in that torch of Jove the sparkling of the love that was there, trace out our speech to my eyes; and as birds, risen from the shore, as if rejoicing together at their pasture, make of themselves now a round flock”—another geometric image—“now some other shape, so within the lights holy creatures were singing as they flew, and in their figures made of themselves, now D, now I, now L.”2 Within the heaven of geometry, even the letters of the alphabet are considered to be drawings of geometrical lines, the semicircle of the D, the two perpendicular lines of the L, and the vertical line of the I. We discover that the beauty of geometry underlies the rigor of the alphabet.
But more importantly, we discover that these souls that dispose themselves in letters are really God’s way of speaking to us. The language that God uses is the language of human beings. We are the syllables, we are the letters disposed in order to convey what ever God’s message may be. Dante continues, “They displayed themselves then, in five times seven vowels and consonants; and I took note of the parts as they appeared in utterance to me. DILIGITE IUSTITIAM . . . QUI IUDICATIS TERRAM.”3 They spell out a verse from the Book of Wisdom: love justice, you who judge the Earth. That’s another reference to the actual ultimate measurement of geometry, the earth itself. Geography, in a certain sense, is geometry.
But the other crucial concern in these cantos has to do with justice. How will Dante bring justice and geometry together? In Canto 19, he’s hungry to know what divine justice is: “Well do I know that if the Divine Justice makes another realm in heaven Its mirror, yours does not apprehend It through a veil. You know how eagerly I prepare myself to listen; you know what is that question which is so old a fast to me.” An ea gle responds, “He that turned His compass round the limit of the world, and within it marked out so much both hidden and revealed, could not so imprint His power on all the universe that His Word should not remain in infinite excess.”4 This image of God the geometer clearly echoes two biblical texts. One is Job 38, a famous passage, “Where were you when I drew the boundaries of the Earth?” That’s the geometrical matrix of this metaphor of God the geometer. And the other one is in the Book of Wisdom: “I was there with him and I was His delight when He was drawing the circle around the deep.” Those are two biblical passages that insist on the idea that the shapes of the world are really representations of the perfection of God’s geometry. And then Dante refers to “infinite excess,” two words that are slightly redundant together because excess means something that is measureless. The language of measure, of accounting, and of limits is set against this idea of something not finite, something that escapes the logic of geometry altogether. In fact, I find the phrase deliberately redundant; it’s an excessive idea of the infinite, just to drive the point home. Even the word universe is geometrical because it implies a turning. You come to the end of the line, and you turn, drawing a geometrical figure. It’s one turning of the sphere, and the two hemispheres make the universe. Dante’s quest for justice has been answered with a number of geometrical references.
But it is in the proofs of this mathematical passage that justice really comes to light. The ea gle continues, “This is certified by that first proud one”—Lucifer—“who was the highest of all creatures and who, through not awaiting light, fell unripe; from which it is plain that every lesser nature is too scant a vessel for that Good which has no limit and measures Itself by Itself. Thus your vision, which must needs be one of the rays of the Mind with which all things are replete, cannot of its own nature be of such power that it should not perceive its origin to be far beyond all that is apparent to it. Therefore the sight that is granted to your world penetrates within the Eternal Justice as the eye into the sea; which, though from the shore it can see the bottom, in the open sea it sees it not, and none the less it is there, but the depth conceals it.”5 The idea here is that we can see justice only when we have a very superficial understanding of it, just as we see the bottom of the sea when we are near the shore, but otherwise we don’t. God’s justice is as imponderable and unfathomable as the sea floor can be out in open waters. Dante gets his answer at last.
But then Dante complicates the issue a little bit by asking where this justice can be found. Is justice limited to a place, to a continent, to the economy of Christian Europe? And how is it related to other places? These days we have a notion of what we call alterity, of “the Other,” but this notion was certainly not alien in the Middle Ages. People then had an idea of otherness, and it always involved acknowledging the particular difference between oneself and the Other. Up to this point, there has not been any substantial deviation on the part of Dante from the myth and examples of the heroic life, the lives of those who established boundaries and within those boundaries managed to live according to the fullness of their virtues. But now Dante asks what that boundary is. He understands that divine justice is impenetrable but then he asks the extraordinary question of where it can even be found, what its border is. In sum, he asks once more, what is a place?
To answer this complex question, Dante offers up a world tour in the rest of Canto 19. First, he says, “A man is born on the bank of Indus”—in Asia—“and none is there to speak, or read, or write, of Christ, and all his wishes and acts are good, so far as human reason sees, without sin in life or in speech. He dies unbaptized, and without faith. Where is this justice which condemns him? Where is his sin if he does not believe?” Then he continues circling these issues, and we have a return to Europe. The ea gle, the symbol of Rome, is mentioned in that particular context: “after those glowing flames of the Holy Spirit became quiet, still in the sign which made the Romans reverend to the world,” with allusions to the Romans as if Rome to Dante has become an idea of universality. The ea gle also notes: “To this realm none ever rose who believed not in Christ, either before or after he was nailed to the tree. But behold, many cry Christ, Christ, who, at the Judgment, shall be far less near to Him than he who knows not Christ.”6 The Ethiopians in Africa are mentioned, as are the Persians in Asia. The three continents demonstrate divisions of belief that will soon seem to lose all consistency, however, because you may be a European, but there is also moral alterity within Europe. Alterity is not just a question of geographic disposition. Someone who is a Persian is clearly Other to me, but in terms of the moral life, the same kind of otherness exists within Europe. Europe is not uniform.
To illustrate such local diversity, Dante starts with a kingdom of Prague, which “shall be made a desert,” and then moves to France, where “shall be seen the woe which he who shall die by a boarskin blow is bringing upon the Seine.” One could make a game out of counting all the countries in this canto. He continues, “There shall be seen the pride that quickens thirst, which makes the Scot and the Englishman mad, so that neither can keep within his own bounds.” There is a history of violence that transgresses boundaries:
It will show the lechery and effeminate life of him of Spain, and him of Bohemia, who never knew valor nor wished it. It will show the Cripple of Jerusalem, his goodness marked with an I, while an M will mark the opposite. It will show the avarice and cowardice of him who has in ward the Isle of Fire [Sicily] where Anchises ended his long life; and to give to understand how paltry he is, the writing for him shall be in contractions that will note much in little space. And plain to all shall be revealed the foul deeds of his uncle and his brother, which have dishonored so eminent a lineage and two crowns. And he of Portugal and he of Norway shall be known there, and he of Rascia, who, to his harm, has seen the coin of Venice. Oh happy Hungary, if she no longer allow herself to be mistreated! and happy Navarre, if she arm herself with the mountains which bind her round! And all should believe that, for earnest of this, Nicosia and Famagosta are now lamenting and complaining because of their beast who departs not from the side of the others.7
This is now the history of the whole of Europe, in the same way that Dante gave the history of the Roman Empire earlier. But this is a history of desolation and moral dereliction. The terms become questions of what is “here” and what is “there”? What is within and outside of an economy of redemption? The answer is that we do not know. We do not know how salvation is going to work out. No one can claim, therefore, to decide what exact moral boundaries exist between one place and another. Dante tempers, therefore, both the notion of political boundaries and that of moral boundaries. He distinguishes the two issues and thereby emphasizes cultural divides rather than geo graph i cal or religious ones.
One way of understanding what Dante is doing here is to turn to a little story from the Histories of Herodotus, a great Greek historian. He writes the story as a warning to the Greeks about to invade Egypt of the dangers they may face as they violate their boundaries. It makes a strong argument in favor of such boundaries.
Once upon a time the king of Egypt, Candaules, who was not a very bright man, had a beautiful wife, and was so taken with the beauty of his wife that he wanted everybody to know about it. But he can’t just tell everybody, so he tells his advisor, a prudent man, who responds, “Sire, your majesty, I don’t want to know. I believe you, but please don’t tell me anymore about this.”
But the king was insistent, “You’ve got to know. In fact, not only do you have to hear it, I also want you to see the naked beauty of my wife. It’s beyond belief, and I want you to see it because human beings tend to trust their eyes more than their ears.”
The counselor, ever prudent, says, “No, sire, this is really too much trouble. I cannot disobey you, but you are forcing me to insist that this is not a good idea. I believe you completely. You can go right on telling me all about her beauty. But I don’t want to see it.”
The king ignores him. “Nonsense,” he says, “I’m arranging this.” And he contrives a little plot. Every night the wife bathes in a room next to the bedroom. And the king leaves the door ajar to allow her to come into the bedroom when she’s done. That night, while she’s out of the room, he allows the counselor to hide in the shadows, in a little corner. The queen comes in and undresses, so the counselor sees her naked. Then, very quickly and stealthily, he walks out, hoping not to have been seen.
But the next morning the queen, a sharp woman, calls him into her office and says, “I saw you. Tell me what you were doing there.” The counselor has no choice but to admit that the king asked him to come and pay witness to her naked beauty.
The queen says, “I imagined that was what happened, but at this point two of you is one too many. The idea that I have been seen naked by two men is unbearably shameful to me. So you must either kill the king or kill yourself.”
The counselor does what I’m sure all of you would do, and thus he becomes the new king. The king was a fool. He had no prudence. He had no sense of the difference between the private life and the public need. He had no idea that there are things that you keep to yourself and don’t share with others. In other words, he didn’t know his limits. He violated crucial boundaries and as a result, he lost his crown, his wife, and his life.
Herodotus is clearly warning us to understand that there is always a limit that we have to set up and protect between what is mine and what is yours. I do not know that Dante would completely agree with Herodotus in these cantos, but what he has been doing is setting up cultural difference as equally necessary. Cultural differences allow for a moral circulation of ideas. What he is taking on there would seem to be what we call, in medieval terms, a Pelagian stance. Pelagian is an adjective that comes from the name of a British monk of roughly the time of St. Augustine, the fifth century, who maintained that through good works and living according to principles of nature alone, human beings can be saved. There seems to be such an emphasis on the ability of human beings to live rationally in this idea that the demands of grace and the demands of faith are somewhat bracketed and a little dim. Nonetheless, I believe that they are present; it’s just that Dante is talking as a philosopher in these cantos.
In fact, Dante is really asking for a conversation between philosophy and theology, within reason and faith. He understands that philosophy without theology ends up in a sort of labyrinth of its own constructions and may lose its way. Theology, without philosophy, may end up in mere opinion, which has no validity at all for people who believe in the power of reason. And this potential combination is an extension of the problem of exile. An exile, which requires a sense of the problematical qualities of a place in the world and the relationship that we have with ourselves and with our own ideas, has allowed Dante to see both the theologian and the philosopher within himself.
The philosopher-theologian continues his journey in Cantos 21 and 22, moving to the heaven of Saturn, which is the heaven of contemplation. The myth of Saturn is the myth of time devouring everything that it engenders. Time is the first cannibal in history, eating what it produces, the minutes that are absorbed and wasted. This last planet is also the heaven of astronomy, so Dante is forcing on us the idea of contemplation. Here he finds the contemplatives, and among them there is the soul of a found er of monasticism by the name of Benedict.
Canto 21 begins with another mythological reference as Dante contemplates contemplation: “Already my eyes were fixed again on the face of my lady, and with them my mind, and from every other intent it was withdrawn; and she did not smile, but, ‘Were I to smile’ she began to me, ‘you would become such as was Semele when she was turned to ashes; for my beauty which, along the steps of the eternal palace, is kindled the more, as you have seen, the higher the ascent, were it not tempered, is so resplendent that your mortal powers at its flash would be like the bough shattered by a thunderbolt. We have risen to the seventh splendor which beneath the breast of the burning Lion rays down now mingled with its power. Fix your mind after your eyes, and make of them mirrors to the figure which in this mirror shall be shown to you.’”8 This is the myth of Semele, the young woman who fell in love with God. It could be an extraordinary spiritual story, but Ovid tells it as a very carnal tale. Semele wants to love Jupiter, and Jupiter agrees to love Semele back on one condition, that she never ask the god to show himself forth for what he is. She has to accept the god’s disguises. Love does not want to be seen for what it is and demands simulacra and deceptive figures to cover its essence. Of course, Semele is in love, and love impels curiosity, so she wants Jupiter to reveal himself for what he is, mindless of the danger of death that Jupiter had predicted. In the end, he reveals himself, and Semele, unable to bear the astonishing beauty of the god, is reduced to ashes.
Why would Dante recall this story here? Dante does so because he’s aware of the dangers of visionary claims. Beatrice is telling him that he has to endure the limitations of his human nature, and that this trait of his mortality, seeing through images, cannot yet be given up. He does this as he enters the heaven of the contemplatives, who themselves were longing to see God, but accepted this longing as the sign of God’s presence and gift to them. Dante indicates the risk of thinking of contemplation as the condition that could bring about the vision of God. Such a vision, Dante is saying, is not going to be possible while we are here on earth.
Dante may or may not be a mystic, but I think that he is definitely a contemplative in the true sense of the word. The word contemplation translates a Greek theory of turning the mind toward essentials. The word comes from templum, the Latin word for “temple,” but also from tempus, or “time.” These words have the same origin; they both come from the Greek word temno, which means “to cut.” Saturn, time, cuts with a scythe. The contemplatives cut a piece of time and space and privilege it, cut it off from the flow of history and the flow of profane place, and make it the ground for turning minds to the consideration of higher things.
One such space may be found at the end of Canto 22, where Dante has reached the periphery of the planetary system. Now he will go into the stars, into the heaven of the fixed stars. Beatrice speaks of his position, “You are so near to the final blessedness . . . that you must have your eyes clear and keen.” Here Dante will deploy the language of visionariness, which will start with an emphasis on purifying and refining one’s eyes and one’s eyesight. Beatrice continues, “Therefore, before you enter farther into it, look back downward and behold how great a world I have already set beneath your feet, in order that your heart may present itself, joyous to its utmost, to the triumphal throng which comes glad through this round ether.”9 It’s one of two invitations from Beatrice for Dante to turn his eyes back and have a moment of contemplation.
“With my sight”—Dante is now engaged in this retrospective glance down to the earth—“I returned through all and each of the seven spheres, and saw this globe such that I smiled at its paltry semblance.” This perspective comes from outer space. I wouldn’t call it infinite space, but certainly a vast distance of space stands between Dante and his home planet. Dante’s notion of the universe is not that it’s infinite; rather, it is a bounded but vast enclave. From this distance, Dante is able to give us a brief astronomy lesson: “I saw the daughter of Latona”—the moon—“glowing without that shade for which I once believed her rare and dense. The aspect of your son, Hyperion, I there endured, and saw how Maia and Dione move around and near him”—meaning Mercury. “Then appeared to me the tempering of Jove between his father and his son, and then was clear to me the varying they make in their position. And all the seven were displayed to me, how great they are and swift, and how distant each from other in location.”10 So, we are presented with astronomy here in the heaven of astronomy, but it’s intriguingly an astronomy indicated mythically and through a process of affiliation. It’s the daughter of Latona, the son of Hyperion, and so on, a sequence of connections as if the universe has followed the logic of generation and production, producing and reproducing itself.
And then Dante turns from astronomy to astrology: “The little threshing-floor which makes us so fierce was all revealed to me from hills to river-mouths, as I circled with the eternal Twins.”11 Dante is giving his horoscope indirectly here, for the Twins are the sign under which he was born. It doesn’t really imply any astrological lapse on his part; it’s just an allusion to his birth sign. He abolishes the differences between astronomy and astrology, but in doing so he belongs fully to his time, when there was no intrinsic conception of astrologists as practicing mere superstition versus the inarguable science of astronomy.
What I truly want to draw your attention to in this passage is the pronoun us. For all the distance implied by this poetic fiction, Dante ought to be as distant from the earth as he ever was. But the pronoun strains to have it both ways. On the one hand, Dante asserts the claim of a perspective of eternity on the world, but on the other hand, he does not want to surrender his place in time and history. He is part of humanity, part of “us,” so at the end of this great gyration through the universe, Dante claims and reclaims for himself a place within our ranks. The synthesis of the two, the claim of eternity and the sense of contingency of the self in time, is the ultimate goal of the poem and the ultimate goal of the pilgrim’s journey. That synthesis will be, as we shall see in upcoming chapters, the very vision of the Incarnation: the immutable structure of history and the process of time will come together.