21 Paradiso 24–26
CHAPTER 21
Paradiso 24–26
Now we are going to look at the three cantos in the eighth sphere of Dante’s cosmos, the heaven of the fixed stars. We are beyond the planets, in a sphere where Dante discusses the three theological virtues—so called to distinguish them from the four cardinal virtues that Christians share with the classical tradition, fortitude, prudence, temperance, and justice—of faith, hope, and love (or charity). These are the virtues that deal with the understanding of the divine; they open up this horizon of speculations about the language of God, the way God speaks to us, and the way in which we speak about God. This is the place in Paradise where Dante will focus on the meaning of “basic words,” the words that are foundations of the way in which we come to discover who we are. They are words that we use when we may not even know exactly what they mean, though Dante will try to define them for us here.
The three virtues that Dante will describe are terms that always implicate each other. You cannot explain faith without talking about hope. You cannot talk about hope without explaining faith, and both of them are recapitulated and come together within the virtue of love. They are words that are very mysterious in many ways, but there are degrees of understanding to all of them.
Dante will go through the equivalent of a university examination, a medieval bachelor’s degree. He presents himself to the teacher who is testing him, and he gives an answer to the teacher’s questions according to textbooks. The three teachers here are going to be three of the Apostles. The first is St. Peter, for faith, and that makes sense because his very name stands for the cornerstone on which the edifice of Christian belief is built. The second one is James, for hope. The connection is less obvious, but he among all the Apostles is the one whose death was recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, a true figure of hopefulness in his yearning for a future and the life of eternity. Finally, John the Apostle, who is the beloved of Jesus, tests Dante on love or charity.
Before we delve into the specifics of these examinations, though, I would like to give you some summary ways of trying to understand these virtues. One subtext running through these three cantos, sometimes but not always visible, is the question of exile. Dante is retrieving the language of exile as if these virtues don’t concern the blessed in heaven, as if they only concern us here in time. The blessed in heaven certainly do not need faith or hope, and they don’t really need to know about what love may be. Either they have these virtues or they wouldn’t be in Paradise. So, the language of exile is a constant presence here, in association with the language of time. We are in time, we are fallen, and it’s only through the language of the fall that we can understand exile.
Another element running through this segment of the Comedy, especially in Canto 26, is the matter of language itself. What is the language of God? Are we talking about an entity with a name? And if so, where does Dante fall in the whole debate about the tetragrammaton, the four Hebrew letters that are supposedly the name of God? Is God some kind of reality we can never even hope to name, or are we going to be related and connected to this idea, this knowledge of God by analogical discourse? Dante makes these inquiries and presents various positions on them: the mystical position that denies even our knowledge of the name of God, or the analogical position put forth by Aquinas, that we talk about God analogically and the qualities we attribute to God are not real but represented by what we know in our own lives. In short, Dante asks the difficult question: how do we get to know God?
And with these issues in mind, we can turn to the virtues themselves, the first of which is the virtue of faith. It seems that faith, for Dante, has to be placed within a communal context. Canto 24 begins with a telling apostrophe: “O fellowship elect to the great supper of the blessed Lamb, who feeds you so that your desire is ever satisfied, since by God’s grace this man has foretaste of that which falls from your table, before death appoints his time, give heed to his measureless craving and bedew him with some drops; you drink always from the fountain whence comes that on which his mind is set.”1 He wants to stress the metaphor of a banquet. We’re really dealing with two metaphors here: one is exilic, referencing the manna in the desert, the falling of dew on the Jewish wanderers; and the other is the eschatological banquet. In both cases, food is part of the experience of a community.
This discussion is not going to address the profession of faith. It’s really more a prefiguration of the great debate between two figures of the Renais sance called Erasmus and Luther. They argued at length about the meaning of a text written about a century earlier, around 1440, by Valla, a great humanist: On Free Will. Erasmus maintains that Valla had defended the existence of free will. Free will, a gift of God, is something that has been given to us, and therefore we have to come to know God through the ac-know ledg ment of his authority because the freedom that Valla is talking about actually comes from Him. It is by free will that we come to know the existence of the divinity. Luther instead had very radical ideas about the question of freedom. He claims that there is no such thing. Rather, the universe is a world of absolute faith, and faith is freedom because it releases us from all obligations, frees us from all constraints, and makes us understand that our own relationship to the Creator is without any intermediary forces. It’s a radical, theological claim of freedom and faith together.
Dante’s position in this debate is to remove the question from stances of either radical subjectivity or radical faith, aware that there may a flip side to it. Dante focuses on the communal experience, as previously discussed with the banquet. And then Dante emphasizes the individuality of the private faith. At the end, it’s really about his own self
One interesting thing that I want to point out at the outset are Beatrice’s words to Peter. She appeals to him to examine Dante, but she does so in a peculiar way: “O eternal light of the great man with whom our Lord left the keys”—this is canonical, part of the iconographic representation of Peter with the two keys—“which He bore below, of this marvelous joy, test this man on points light and grave, as pleases you, concerning the faith by which you did walk upon the sea.”2 This is an allusion to a passage in the Gospels when Peter walks on water out of an act of faith, because Jesus asks him to do so. A key thing about this reference is that Peter did not want to walk on water. It is a moment of a crisis of faith. He was teetering on the brink of the abyss, struggling, but he does finally manage to go on. This is a poignant moment, and Dante is clearly stressing that there are degrees of faith, and that a crisis of faith must not be seen as a denial of faith. On the contrary, there is a sort of dialectical movement between a profession of faith and doubts about owning that gift of faith.
Beatrice’s request is swift ly met. Dante uses the language of the university and academic life, as if this were really an academic test. The bachelor of arts, baccalaureatus, arms himself with the weapon of knowledge. And the master, magister, “propounds the question—in order to adduce the proof, not to decide it.” These issues always require the open-endedness of argumentation and a setthng of a point. So, Dante prepares himself: “while she was speaking, I was arming myself with every reason, to be ready for such a questioner and for such a profession.”3
And the exam begins: “Speak, good Christian, and declare yourself.” This is a knowledge that will make him visible, a knowledge that does not keep him hidden. It brings him into existence. What is faith? That’s the question that Peter asks. And the answer is: “‘May the grace that grants me to confess to the Chief Centurion,’ I began, ‘cause my conceptions to be well expressed.’ And I went on, ‘As the veracious pen of your dear brother’”—an allusion to Paul—“‘wrote of it, who with you, father, put Rome on the good path, FaiThis the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen.’”4 Here Dante is questioning an authority, and authority is attained only by those who are worthy of faith. The teacher is not inherently worthy of faith. You can question the opinions of the teacher and reject the questions asked by him or her. There’s a distinction between the master and the author, so Dante quotes Paul in order to provide a canonical answer. For Dante, as for Paul, faiThis literally the foundation, that which underlies all things.
The most famous formulation of faith in the Middle Ages comes from Tertullian, who says he believes because it is absurd, so that faith becomes a consequence and extension of the absurdity of all things. What one believes has in itself an idea of going beyond reason, and therefore it is absurd. Faith exceeds the law of reason and thus can never quite be an object of knowledge.
Dante does not pursue that line of thought because he tries to show that faith and reason belong together. This is the true sense of the whole metaphorical pattern of the university context, to illustrate that knowledge and faith implicate each other. They are not the same thing because if you could know everything of what you believe, then there would be no reason for belief; faith becomes necessary as a way of acknowledging the limitations of what one knows. But linking knowledge and faiThis not simply a way of saying that reason can know some of the content of what Dante believes. At a deeper level, Dante is saying that faith itself is a mode of knowledge. Its modalities are going to be different, because with philosophy, for instance, that knowledge submits to the rules of the rationality, but faith opens your eyes and shows you something about the world that reason alone cannot.
Then the examination continues: “I heard, ‘Rightly do you deem, if you understand well why he placed it among the substances and then among the evidences.’ And I thereon, ‘The deep things which grant to me here the sight of themselves are so hidden to eyes below that there their existence is in belief alone, upon which the loft y hope is founded; and therefore it takes the designation of substance. And from this belief needs must we reason, without seeing more: therefore it receives the designation of evidence.’”5 Now there is a caesura between belief and what we are—the evidence of things not seen. The paradox remains, so there are things visible here in the heaven of the fixed stars and not available to those of us who are in time and in the fallen world. This passage is a gloss on the medieval theological lexicon that Dante has been deploying.
Peter accepts this answer but replies, “Now the alloy and the weight of this coin have been well enough examined; but tell me if you have it in your purse?” All of a sudden, the question of faiThis placed in the realm of money. Dante responds, “‘Yes, I have it so shining and so round that in its stamp nothing is doubtful to me.’ Then issued from the deep light that was shining there, ‘This precious jewel whereon every virtue is founded, whence did it come to you?’”6 The language is from the plenteous reign of the Holy Spirit, and that metaphor of money as faith has a way of lingering in our minds. What is the connection? One connection is to indicate the preciousness of the faith one holds. It is really as rare and valuable as beautiful jewels can be. That’s one thing, but clearly there is more, because the word for money that Dante uses in Italian, moneta, comes from the Latin form meneo, meaning a warning. It admonishes that the coin is not a counterfeit, that it is really pure, so that’s a subtler way of referring to the purity of this faith, its authenticity, so to speak. Another trait of money is that money circulates. Faith has that same power, that virtue that puts everything into motion, and therefore questions and establishes the values of everything around us. Fourth, Dante wants us to think about the resonance of profanation that is in the language of money and to link it with the purity of faith. Faith belongs to the world of time and can be profane, and yet it still manages to put things into circulation. The ambiguity of this metaphor of money is the strongest sign that while Dante is being examined regarding these virtues, he is also examining them in all their complexity for us.
Let us turn now to the question of hope that comes to light in the next canto, with the examination by St. James. The Greeks never thought of hope as a virtue. Hope is one of the entities in Pandora’s Box, which was opened, allowing all of the evils of the world to come out, save for one, hope. It’s a view that casts hope as a form of evil or a delusion, and in fact, for the Greeks the idea of hope is always a term that indicates the delusion of exiles, those who lose their land and are left with nothing but hope. It’s a radical illusion.
Dante does not follow that route for hope. He finds in the Bible a different horizon for rethinking the way in which hope can be viewed. Hope, first of all, is a virtue of time. It’s a virtue specifically of the future. If I have hope, I can’t really hope about the past; that would fly in the face of all logic. Hope then is linked to temporality.
But it’s not only a virtue of time. It’s the most realistic of virtues. The Greeks would have argued that if you hope, it’s because you are really desperate. You hope because you have no rational, realistic reason to believe that things are going to go the way that you wish they will go. Dante disagrees, arguing that hope is the most realistic of virtues because it tells us that nothing is ever really over. The negation of hope, its opposite, would be despair, as embodied in Cantos 8 and 9 of Inferno, with the encounter with the Furies and Medusa. Medusa can turn you into stone, so that you remain caught either in the particular reality that you have at that moment, or an idea of yourself as you think you have been, in an idea of the past. Hope, instead, is a virtue of the future that can change the past.
In that sense, it affects the past. It tells us that the past may not be what we thought it was. What ever disaster you may have had, what ever disappointment you may have suffered in the past, that disappointment or disaster may contain seeds that will reappear in the future. They may be preparing a future that will surprise you. This is a different understanding of time that Dante presents, and it’s an understanding of time that fulfills the previous virtue of faith. You cannot go on hoping for something unless you have an act of faith. Dante explains it all in existential terms and ties it to his own hope of returning to his homeland.
Canto 25 begins with what we call an optative, a statement that “I wish” that things were going a certain way: “If ever it come to pass that the sacred poem”—remember that Dante always uses the word sacred in a double sense, never reducible or localizable in one object only or in one particular place—“to which heaven and earth have so set their hand”—an incredible moment of prophetic self-awareness, with Dante saying that he is writing but knows that without God he would not be able to do so—“that it has made me lean for many years should overcome the cruelty which bars me from the fair sheepfold where I slept as a lamb, an enemy to the wolves which war on it, with changed voice now and with changed fleece a poet will I return, and at the font of my baptism will I take the crown; because there I entered into the Faith that makes souls known to God; and after-ward Peter, for its sake, thus encircled my brow.”7 Writing is an ascetic l abor of the soul. It makes Dante lean as if he were fasting, undergoing the rituals of the commitment to a particular labor, the ascetic labor of the soul. He labors away, as the metaphor of the city as a sheepfold reveals in the language you expect to find in The Eclogues of Virgil, the language of the pastoral tradition. Dante is in an idyllic world, the heaven of hope, and now he’s thinking about the last ceremony of Peter, who blesses him three times. It is as if faith and hope are converging. The two virtues are brought together.
What is Dante saying about his hometown at the beginning of this canto? He’s casting Florence in pastoral language, as a sheepfold. And he’s alluding to a Messianic time when the peace would be restored, when the factions, the wolves—the Guelphs, in an etymological pun—and the lambs, will lie together. It’s an impossible time. Then Dante adds as part of his hope that he would be acknowledged as a poet on the font of his baptism, referring to the Baptistery in Florence, where he actually was christened, according to records that we have. Why would he use this particular metaphor? The baptism is the time when a community is constituted, and the baptismal font is clearly a space that has that same value. It also has a textual and historical element related to the sacrament that takes place there, which is a ceremony that reenacts Exodus. When a child is baptized, he is told that he is re-creating the crossing of the Red Sea in Exodus.
So Dante is asking: how does a poet come home? The answer, initially, is one of hope, hope for a homecoming where everybody will be at peace. There will be a feast and a festive mood. It is his great fantasy of the winner’s return. Yet, he’s also using this language of a baptismal font, as if he were saying that the poet could only come home in order to tell his community that he has to get out again. He has been punished, and exile itself is the only message that his poetry can convey to the community from which he has been exiled. He is convoking the whole community around the baptismal font to tell them that this is where they belong—in exile, or at least in the language of spiritual exile, a language that implies a kind of re-making and rethinking of oneself.
Beatrice’s presentation of Dante to St. James reveals that Exodus is a predominant influence on this canto: “And that compassionate one, who had guided the feathers of my wings to such loft y flight, anticipated my reply thus, ‘The Church Militant has not any child possessed of more hope, as is written in the Sun which irradiates all our host; therefore is it granted him to come from Egypt to Jerusalem, that he may see, before his term of warfare is completed. The other two points which are asked, not for sake of knowing, but that he may report how greatly this virtue is pleasing to you, I leave to him, for they will not be difficult to him, nor of vainglory.’” This statement from Beatrice demonstrates that Dante’s whole journey can be glossed through one biblical referent, namely Exodus. Dante’s journey is described here as a voyage from Egypt to Jerusalem, which is the master plot of the Hebrews’ exile from bondage to freedom, with exile, of course, as the master figure of the poem. Dante is therefore linking exile and hope, and I think I have already indicated to you that this idea of writing in the mode of exile involves the whole of history. History has to be seen from the standpoint of exile. Near the end of the canto, Dante says that hope “is a sure expectation of future glory, which divine grace produces, and preceding merit. From many stars this light comes to me, but he first instilled it into my heart who was the supreme singer of the Supreme Leader.”8 With this allusion to David, who, to Dante, is the greatest of poets, Dante brings together past and future, history and hope.
And now we can move on to the last virtue, love or charity. There is a progression: faith, hope, and then charity, and you have to know all of these virtues before the beatific vision can even be a possibility for you. You have to understand what it is that these virtues do to you and produce in you. Aiming to understand, we come to love, but if we are looking for a definition of it as a kind of formula, like those given in Cantos 24 and 25, we are seeking it in vain. There’s no definition of love, and it’s clear that Dante really thinks that love is the word. Love is the key word that seems to escape all possible definitions. In a variety of ways, we understand it, and yet we cannot quite confine it and define it, and to define it would really just be a way of reducing its impact and its value. It’s such a basic word that Dante says in his treatise on language, the De vulgari eloquentia, that the word love is the only residual term from the past that shows that language is a way of bringing us together. So, love escapes any particular definition, and yet it’s the culmination of the theological virtues.
Love’s meaning for Dante, as a linguistic unifier, becomes clearer at the end of Canto 26, when Dante meets Adam. This scene is a confrontation with the beginning, with the arch poet, because Adam is the one who names the world and thereby brings it into existence. That’s really what we mean by poet, “maker.” That’s what we’re expecting poets to do. To begin, Dante addresses Adam: “O fruit that were alone produced mature.”9 What a strange way of addressing someone! There were many theological debates as to whether ripeness is an element of grace or a description of grace for Dante. According to this metaphor, you are ripe when you have received and been touched by grace. But was Adam created in a natural state, or was he already created in a state of grace? How long was he in the earthly paradise before he fell? If he was in a state of grace, why did he fall? If he was in a state of grace, why could he commit this sin of transgression? Is it a transgression that he commits by eating of the fruit of the tree? Dante, when he calls him ripe, implies that Adam was, in fact, in a state of grace.
Dante asks Adam to help him to resolve some of these questions, and Adam responds at length. First he says, “Now now, my son, that the tasting of the tree was not in itself the cause of so long an exile”—even the Fall was a state of exile, exile from the garden, a fall into the wilderness where Adam had to transform the wild landscape into a garden, with work as the means to regain that which he had lost—“but solely the overpassing of the bound.”10
This is Canto 26 of Paradiso, and this Canto 26 is symmetrically connected with the other two Cantos 26, including the canto in Inferno of Ulysses, who also trespasses boundaries, who is a metaphysician of sorts, who is dealing with space and who doesn’t know where on earth he is going. There seems to be a contrast between Ulysses’ form of knowledge and Adam’s form of knowledge, though both involve an overstepping of boundaries. As Dante elucidates here, it’s not the tasting of the tree that was the sin; the sin was that he abolished all boundaries. It’s clear that Dante thinks that Adam’s act of eating of the tree was good—it was a felix culpa—for that act was actually the discovery of a knowledge that managed to elevate Adam and all who followed him. Ulysses’ problem is that he doesn’t even know where he is going, even in purely metaphysical terms. He had no directions; it was a gratuitous quest. In the case of Adam, this is not an issue. In fact, Dante says, maybe real knowledge is always going to be tied to an act of making discoveries, maybe even transgressions.
How are we to understand the loss of boundaries, then? It was the kind of knowledge that made Adam see that he could be divine; that was his problem. God’s imposition of the boundary between the human and the divine was a way of letting Adam know that he had to be aware of his limitations. But Adam wanted to grow in knowledge, and in so doing he discovered that he could also be divine, defying God’s imposed limits. For him to fall, then, would be a way of reestablishing that boundary, which is actually a growth in self-knowledge. If you really know who you are, you have grown. It’s that simple. Dante’s changing the sense of what the fall of man is, limiting it to the problematic belief that humans can, through knowledge, become divine. The whole poem is trying to convey to us that this notion is a steady temptation that human beings seem to have, so we need to be reminded, especially when we hear it from God himself and still don’t quite believe it, that we have to grow into a recognition of boundaries between ourselves and something that we aspire to but have not yet attained.
Then Dante turns to the central topic of his discourse, language: “The tongue which I spoke was all extinct before the people of Nimrod attempted their unaccomplishable work”—the building of the Tower of Babel that would not be finished—“for never was any product of reason durable forever, because of human liking, which alters, following the heavens. That man should speak is nature’s doing, but whether thus or thus, nature then leaves you to follow your own pleasure.”11 Language is the key now, and retrospectively we come to understand the language of theology. We get answers to the questions: What are the properties of theological language? What are the properties, beyond that, of all words?
Adam continues, “Before I descended to the anguish of Hell the Supreme Good from whom comes the joy that swathes me was named I on earth”—the letter, not “I” in the sense of the subject—“and later He was called El.”12 Dante is using two Hebrew words, or at least what he takes to be Hebrew words, for the name of God. One of my students once pointed out to me that if you read these names backwards, they spell out the word Eli, which is a word that we could acknowledge nowadays as a word for an appeal to God. Adam is changing the account that Dante had given in the De vulgari eloquentia, which is a story about the origin of words, where he had claimed that Hebrew, Adam’s language, remained unchanged throughout history because it was inconceivable that Jesus would be using a language other than the primal language, certainly not the corrupt language of human beings. Here, instead, Adam’s language had suffered alterations in the Garden, where the names of God keep changing. This, I think, is key. This is the whole question of theology, then, the idea that there is no proper name for God. We only have words or languages that keep changing according to our own historical circumstances, and Dante even continues changing his paradigmatic account about the status of the sacred language. He says there is no such a thing as a persistent sacred language in history. What comes out is that language is the mark of our own distance from the divine, that language is a part of our own exilic predicament, and therefore all the language of theology that Dante has been describing is part of this exilic longing of human beings.
And so we conclude the story of the virtues found in Cantos 24, 25, and 26. Dante uses theology and examination of theology only to place us back in this world, where we go on believing, hoping, and loving. We come to realize that these are all mysterious terms, which can only function together, and each is understood in terms of the other, for there is no love without faith in an ongoing circulation. Where we have hope as the realization of faith, and love as the realization of hope, the meaning that mysteriously escapes us no longer matters.