22 Paradiso 27–29
CHAPTER 22
Paradiso 27–29
In Cantos 27, 28, and 29 of Paradiso, Dante constructs and puts forth a theory of creation and cosmology, which are not quite the same thing. Beatrice explains the shape of the cosmos, a very difficult task, and Dante’s dealing with two forms of the universe, a spiritual one and a physical one. Though they are not identical, they are not really all that distinct. There is a very tenuous, thin line separating the two of them.
Where are we, first of all? We are somewhere in the celestial spheres. Dante has now gone past the heaven of the fixed stars. Here in Canto 27 Dante continues in their afterglow, but the focus is still on St. Peter, who had been examining Dante. But now Peter launches into a prophetic denunciation, lambasting the collusion between the papacy, instituted because of him, and his successors. In his great attack, he says, “It was not our purpose that one part of the Christian people should sit on the right of our successors, and one part on the left; nor that the keys which were committed to me should become the ensign on a banner for warfare on the baptized; nor that I should be made a figure on a seal to sold and lying privileges, whereat I oft en blush and flash.”1 This declaration is imbued with the fire of prophecy, without a doubt, but it’s also, retrospectively, a reference to the attack against Boniface, who in the parallel Canto 27 of Inferno is shown to be colluding with Guido da Montefeltro. There is a clear symmetry between the two cantos.
After this outburst by Peter, Beatrice and the pilgrim move on to the next heaven, the so-called crystalline heaven, the so-called Prime Mover, which is still material, at least according to Beatrice’s cosmological description of the universe. They are at the boundary of the material universe; it’s a very thin materiality, almost but not quite purely spiritual. It’s called the Prime Mover (or Primum Mobile) because it’s here in this heaven that we discover origins, the origin of time, the origin of space. Dante is at the edge of the cosmos (not an actual edge, since the universe here is a sphere, but the boundary, the end of the world), and Beatrice tells him to look back and measure the distance he has traveled from the earth. He does what she asks and says, “From the time when I had looked before, I saw that I had moved through the whole arc”—the language of the sphere: an arc, part of a circle—“which the first climate makes from its middle to its end; so that on the one hand, beyond Cadiz, I saw the mad track of Ulysses.”2 From the edge of the universe, Dante pinpoints that little place where Ulysses trespassed the boundaries of the world, an act for which he has been damned in Canto 26 of Inferno.
Why does Dante focus on Ulysses once again? Ulysses is clearly still part of this fascination that exerts an incredible power on the imagination of the poet and the pilgrim. Am I—he asks—like Ulysses? Am I going to be lost now like Ulysses? At the same time, it’s a way of hinting at how much he has exceeded Ulysses’ adventure. Ulysses only went past the Pillars of Hercules; he, Dante, is now at the outermost boundary of the universe, so there’s a way in which a bit of detachment is attached to this constant interest.
At the other end Dante also sees “nearly to the shore where Europa made herself a sweet burden.”3 This line refers to the eastern part of the known world, Europe, via the rape of Europa by Jupiter. With it, we can thus add an erotic transgression to Ulysses’ intellectual transgression, as if the two are once again intertwined. In Dante’s vision, knowledge and desire really have to coincide. He’s coming to the point where the beautiful and the good are one, the point where all of the great distinctions that we have been pursuing have to converge.
Dante then moves farther into the Prime Mover, “the swift est part of heaven,” the place where all motion begins. Dante is moving from what would seem to be an ethical scene, Peter’s denunciation of the abuses within the Church into the heaven of metaphysics. Dante refers to it, as many did, as Aristotle referred to it, as the “first philosophy.” They called it first because it reigns supreme among all the arts and all the sciences. It’s the most important of their number. It’s the point of arrival of all knowledge. It’s also called first philosophy because it explains questions of origins, and thus the language of origins abounds here: the origin of time, the origin of space, creation itself, the beginning of the world, causes, foundations. The interesting thing is that Dante has to connect metaphysics with physics. They really go hand in hand, since one tries to explain the physical world, while the other addresses the theoretical. They aren’t so different, but the point is that there is a science for Dante that deals with causes and beginnings.
And it is in the heart of a realm of beginnings that Beatrice starts discussing cosmology, commencing with the sphericity of this space: “The nature of the universe which holds the center quiet and moves all the rest around it, begins here as from its starting-point”—the language of begin-nings—“and this heaven has no other Where than the divine mind.”4 The real beginning, the real universe for that matter, is in God’s mind. Dante distinguishes two worlds, the physical world we see and the spiritual world in God’s mind. In a way, then, Dante is journeying into the mind of God. Bonaventure, whom you have met before in this text, wrote a book called The Journey of the Mind into God, which offered a way of trying to enter mystically the deity’s mind. Dante doesn’t do it in a mystical way; he simply tries to understand what’s beyond the physical world.
A more complex description of the shape of the universe follows: “Light and love enclose it in a circle, as it does the others, and this engirdment He alone who girds it understands.”5 This Prime Mover is a kind of curve that envelops all the other heavens. It’s not only a boundary, since Dante also views it as the threshold for the spiritual universe, but in terms of its physical shape; it is somehow simultaneously convex and concave, a semicircle, perhaps, or the spiral of a shell, or more aptly, since Dante thinks of the cosmos as a book, a parchment rolled up within itself. Ancient parchments were all rolled up around a stick and then held together by a ring—that’s really the shape of Dante’s cosmos. So, the physical universe consists of spirals, one following the other, and next to it there is a spiritual universe, which we’ll discuss later.
Beatrice then explains how time works here: “Its motion is not determined by another’s, but the others are measured by this, just as ten by its half and its fifth. And how time should have its roots in such a flower-pot, and in the others its leaves, may now be manifest to you.”6 Even time begins here. Dante sees that there is a sort of tree of time growing from part of eternity. He does not understand time in a linear way, with a beginning and an end, nor as a wheel, like the wheel of becoming, a Platonic idea of time, where all things are contained. Dante thinks of time instead as a tree, the roots of which are in the pot of eternity while its foliage reaches into our own world. We are in the shadow of the tree of time. We only see leaves that will fall, allowing for our idea of the dispersion and passage of time. Beatrice has now made sense of time and space, both for Dante and for the reader.
Canto 28 steps outside the bounds of the universe and deals with the angelic hierarchy. We are still in the Prime Mover, but Dante starts seeing into the other universe, the spiritual one. He sees a realm adjacent to the physical universe inhabited by angels. It corresponds to our world in that there are nine planets—seven planets plus the fixed stars and the crystalline heaven—and there you have the nine orders of angels, arranged in three triads: angels, archangels, and thrones. This language comes from the Bible, the Old Testament, apparently drawing on Persian apocalyptic sources; and Dante’s direct sources regarding the angelic hierarchies were Pseudo-Dionysius and Gregory the Great. The two universes are also linked by their shared spherical shape: “And when I turned and my own eyes were met by what appears in that revolving sphere whenever one gazes intently on its circling, I saw a point which radiated a light so keen that the eye on which it blazes needs must close because of its great keenness.”7 Once again, we find a series of revolving spheres. More accurately, though, this universe is not the projection of the other universe; they are separate and adjacent. They are two hemispheres.
Dante takes a moment to acknowledge that his ordering of the angels is very different from that of Pseudo-Dionysius: “These orders all gaze upward and prevail downward, so that toward God all are drawn, and all do draw. And Dionysius with such great desire set himself to contemplate these orders.”8 Pseudo-Dionysius had written about the same angelic hierarchy, but Dante wants us to know that his idea of angels is a little different from Dionysus’s and from Pope Gregory’s. Dante has Beatrice finish the description of this sacred order of angelic intelligences. According to her, their function is to impart motion to the spheres, to move between the divinity and human beings. They are the messengers. They keep everything in motion. In doing this, Dante makes a clear statement of his intellectual independence, both in terms of the theologian and in terms of an ecclesiastical authority.
With that we move to Canto 29, where the language of cosmology shifts to the language of creation in an extraordinarily interesting way. Beatrice has been talking nonstop, probably with a touch of playfulness, about the angelic orders, and then she moves almost without catching her breath to talking about creation. The canto begins, “When the two children of Latona”—the sun and the moon—“covered by the Ram and by the Scales, make the horizon their belt at one same moment, as long as from the instant when the zenith holds them balanced till the one and the other, changing hemispheres, are unbalanced from that belt, for so long, her face illumined with a smile, was Beatrice silent, looking fixedly at the point which had overcome me.”9 He starts with a reference to the children of Latona, that is to say Apollo and Diana, which thus incorporates mythical language. But then he also uses scientific language: the constellations the Ram and the Scales, “a belt of the horizon,” an Arabic word meaning the boundary of the heavens, “the zenith.” The mixture of science and myth requires a balance as fleeting as it could ever be, but that’s precisely the point that Dante aims to make, that there was a moment of silence, but he could almost not even tell that there was a break in Beatrice’s speech.
When we speak, things seem to be continuous, and just as between every syllable, between one sound and another, there is always an interval, so there was in the language of Beatrice. That interval, to him, is the idea of creation. The opposite of creation would be the eternity of the world, something with no beginning and no identifiable break. If the universe is eternal, it contains no differences inside it, while Dante wants to say that the universe seems to involve continuous extension, but you can identify breaks in it. However minute it may have been, there is a break between Beatrice’s exposition about the angelic orders and her exposition about creation.
A rare equilibrium of this sort disappears quickly, and sure enough, Beatrice will swift ly continue speaking, this time on the theory of creation. She says, “I tell, not ask, what you wish to hear; for I have seen it there where every ubi and every quando is centered”—a point where space and time coincide. “Not for gain of good unto Himself, which cannot be, but that His splendor might, in resplendence, say, ‘Subsisto’—in His eternity beyond time, beyond every other bound, as it pleased Him, the Eternal Love opened into new loves.”10 I take this word opened to be part of a sexual language, with a new love that engenders by opening itself into further new loves.
Beatrice continues, “Nor before, as if inert, did He lie, for neither before nor after did the moving of God upon these waters proceed.” This is an allusion to Aristotle’s Physics, where Aristotle has to define time and says it’s the measure of motion in regard to a before and an after. Dante says that before the time of creation there was no such thing. Before and after could not be distinguished prior to the beginning of the universe in Genesis, which is described with a vaguely sexual metaphor: “Form and matter, conjoined and simple, came into being which had no defect, as three arrows from a three-stringed bow.”11 The question of creation is a coming together here, a conjunction. Creation takes place as an act of love, as passion. It’s as physical as possible in terms of the language of natural production and reproduction. Creation is that which introduces the possibility of distinguishing between a before and an after, a unity that introduces a difference.
Beatrice proceeds with form and matter, united and separate, pure and conjoined. She says, “As in glass, in amber, or in crystal, a ray shines so that there is no interval between its coming and its pervading all, so did the triform effect ray from from its Lord into its being, all at once, without distinction of beginning. Therewith order was created and ordained for the substances; and those in whom pure act was produced were the summit of the universe. Pure potentiality held the lowest place.”12 The idea is that there is a universe of creation that seems to be very much like the physical world. It’s described in physical terms, the terms of the moon and sexuality, the cosmological language and scientific terms. And yet, there is a difference. Without creation we would not have differences. We would not even have origins.
But prior to the imparting of all this information on the part of Beatrice, Dante experienced a fleeting moment in the alignment of the stars, and a question lingers: why this metaphor? I think it is an allusion to Francesca, from Canto 5 of Inferno. Dante says, “Beatrice [was] silent, looking fixedly at the point which had overcome me.” Francesca said that only a point was what overcame her and Paolo. So, cosmology was linked to Ulysses, and now creation is tied to Francesca. Why is Dante alluding to these two infernal figures and framing his discussion of the heavens with them? Why refer to these transgressors, one who wants to trespass the boundaries of the world in order to know, and another who exceeds the norms of what is allowed on love’s account. Knowledge and love somehow come into play but in their infernal versions—why? What Dante is doing is allowing us to see the world of Inferno in a new light. We previously saw it only as a world of the rejected, as a world of evil and horror, but now, all of a sudden, it is retrieved as the best exemplar of what we may come to know of the spiritual world. It is an imaginative redemption of Hell. Dante is implying that as one goes back to the beginnings of the universe, the journey has to be seen as redemption of order that has been falling away. There can be no such redemption unless the whole of evil is overcome and destroyed, so that even the world of Hell now appears all as part of what we get to know about the ultimate structure of the universe. This seems to me to be the real lesson, the underlying and powerful message that Dante is sending with his references to Francesca and Ulysses in these three cantos in the heaven of metaphysics.
It’s especially interesting that Dante should bring up the image of Ulysses in Canto 27. He probably realizes how different he is from Ulysses, but he maintains a kind of retrospective fascination with the traveler from Ithaca. He’s looking back and pinpointing the tragic moment of the rise of Ulysses’ madness because it implies that this man had violated limits, including the limits of reason, in his pursuit, his philosophical investigation of the world. Dante may be equally mad, but he knows he’s at least a little safer because he’s in the hands of Beatrice. He trusts Beatrice, and for that reason I could even see an element of relief on the part of Dante. There is also relief in the fact that his own adventure diminishes that of the Greek epic hero, who really did very little in the end, just venturing beyond the Pillars of Hercules.
We could stop there. It happens though, retrospectively, that we can also see the story of Ulysses as the story of a metaphysician. Dante is in the heaven of metaphysics, after all. Metaphysics deals with space and time, and thus we can understand why going from place to place is the metaphor that seems to distinguish Ulysses in these cantos. Ulysses is a failed metaphysician, but we understand that he was trying to go to the absolute, to boldly go where no one other than Dante and Paul before him have gone before.
But metaphysics also deals with time. Dante is attempting to understand eternity and origins, and in so doing he makes the mistake of trying to localize time. Beatrice reminded him of a point of joy that overcame him. Maybe he’s alluding, because the language is that of Francesca, of lust, to a kiss they shared that he remembers. The context is very spiritualized, since Dante is never vulgar. But it is certainly possible that he’s alluding to a kiss they had exchanged, or perhaps just the will, the desire, the longing to kiss her now. One thing is clear: he’s thinking of Francesca as a kind of metaphysician, too. What is her metaphysics? It’s a metaphysics of desire, which is metaphysical by its own definition, in the sense that it’s always moving beyond the objects it gains because it burns through them. Today I want this book, then I want another book, then I want the whole library, and so on; that’s the infinite movement of desire. And not only is she a metaphysician, she lives in time, so she’s a complementary figure to Ulysses. Ulysses is all about place: Ceuta, Seville, and so on. Francesca instead says how difficult it is to remember the joys of the past; she is another failed metaphysician, but one of a different stamp. Both Francesca and Ulysses would have liked to arrive where Dante is currently, able to witness a conjunction of space and time, ubi and quando, to see the point where all things cohere.
Such a stance on these recurring figures makes it possible to think of Paradiso as Dante’s admission of schadenfreude. His joy, it’s possible to argue, is increased by the thought of those who are suffering; seeing someone who wanted what he now has being punished could reveal to him just how lucky he is. I don’t think that that’s Dante, though. He’s talking about cosmology and creation, the order of everything, how this order is an order of love and how he’s coming to know this order of love because knowledge is love and love is knowledge. What he’s really saying is that he is now able to see how things work, but sinful people on earth, those who live in the shadows of time, were trying to do the same thing and were simply not lucky enough to succeed, to reach the heights he has attained. But they could because he has. I could push this line of thought to the point of absurdity, to say that if this is true, Dante is also saying that the suffering sinners in Hell may still get to where he is, after all. They may be taken and placed into the bosom of Abraham where all the blessed dwell. Is this just wishful thinking on my part? I grant you, it probably is, but there is absolutely a theology of redemption in the Comedy.
Let me be very clear. Dante never says explicitly that the entire world of creation is redeemable. It becomes part of a conscious articulation on his part; he makes it a clear theme, but he never says it outright. There are really two implications that I’m drawing on in order to be able to make that kind of statement. The first is the very idea of the cosmos as a sphere, which means that wherever you are going as you are going toward God, you are also going back to the beginning. Everything can therefore go back to the start because that’s the form our universe takes. The other reason is that there is such a thing as redemption. The whole cosmos can be restored to its original form. In the overt sense of the poem, there is a theology of redemption, which could entail a return to the beginning for everyone and everything.
If we look once more at the famous image of the two children of Latona at the beginning of Canto 29, we can learn a bit more about this theology of redemption. In the Italian, the first word is quando, “when,” and the last word in line 12 is also quando. Going back to the first line, the last word in that line is “Latona,” the first two letters of which, la, are also the first two letters of line 12. That’s a chiasmus. And if were to draw lines to make the cross formed by this poetic structure, they would meet exactly at the word “hemisphere.” That’s the center of this design. I think Dante’s placing us at a cosmic crossroads. He is locating us, he’s telling us where we are, but he’s also telling us that this universe has very occult and very secret laws that govern it. The poem is regulated by these same secret rules. And one such tacit regulation could involve a radical redemptive theology. Dante is making an allowance for a possible absolute purification of evil. The universe may return to its previous pristine purity.
How would this come about? The Incarnation is the redemptive event that would allow it to occur. A new Adam comes into the world, and that new Adam, through his sacrifice and through the gift God gave, allowed the Incarnation because human beings on their own would not be capable of doing so. That’s the root of theology of redemption: human beings on their own would not be able to save and redeem themselves, so an intervention from God, through his Son, was rendered inevitable in order to reconstruct and reproduce the original order of the cosmos. Nonetheless, this should not obscure the fact that there is a paired juxtaposition between the physical description of the world and the spiritual description of the world. There are two hemispheres, and yet they are connected. The spiritual experience of creation is really the way of positing a difference in the universe, dramatically affecting the theory that the physical world is eternal. These were two conceptions of the world’s duration, operative in the Middle Ages. One comes from Aquinas, who argues in the Summa contra gentiles that the theory of the eternity of the world, held by the Greek philosophers, the idea that there was no moment of creation, could be philosophically demonstrated. It could also be philosophically repudiated. Philosophy can argue one side of it, and he goes on asking the oldest objections in the book, questions like, “Who created the Creator?” However, there is a view of creation made possible on account of faith, which is tied to freedom. Bonaventure picks up some of these ideas, which were hotly debated in Paris in the thirteenth century. Bonaventure says no, this idea of the eternity of the world is untenable. If the world were eternal, then we would have no succession of generations. There would be endless people who had lived before us, and there’s no evidence for this. Thus, he upholds the idea of creation.
Dante intervenes in this debate and says that the physical world and the spiritual world are effectively united and continuous. They’re complementary to each other. And yet a difference lingers. The difference is the same difference that he finds in Beatrice’s speech, that little intrusion of time that distinguishes between one sound and another sound. The spiritual universe originates in the world of nature as a natural production and reproduction, emerging from God’s love, and the physical world operates in exactly the same way. There is a kind of symmetry to their origins, and they remain adjacent to each other for this reason, separate but equal and joined at their edges. This is not Plato’s inverted universe, though it resonates with Neoplatonic strains of emanationism. It is as if Dante discovers that there are simply more dimensions to the world that we see than cosmologists before him had imagined.