23 Paradiso 30–33
CHAPTER 23
Paradiso 30–33
In the last chapter, we saw the context of Dante’s experience, the way he moves in the cosmos, the tale he’s telling about this extraordinary experience he has had. He described the materiality and the spirituality of two hemispheres placed in one universe, with the Empyrean as the threshold and limit of the physical cosmos, the way of entering into the spiritual cosmos. Now, Dante moves straight into the Empyrean. This is the end of the road for him. Here there will be a changing of the guard. How is Dante going to say farewell to Beatrice? For the role of Beatrice as a guide will come to a close with Canto 30 of Paradiso, which is quite fitting, since she first appeared in Canto 30 of Purgatorio.
Dante is forced to move from Beatrice to a historical figure, Bernard of Clairvaux, who was a famous French monk who had written treatises on contemplation and mystical visions. Appropriately, he is the one who will pray to the Virgin Mary that she may in turn pray to her son, causing a chain of mediations that permits the beatific vision to be granted to Dante in Canto 33.
We are going to find out the difficulties that Dante has in seeing and, above all, in recalling and recollecting this experience. The poem will end up registering the unavoidable defeat of memory and the importance of forgetfulness. We are going to discover in Canto 33 a further twist to the metaphor from Canto 33 of Purgatorio, when Dante was immersed ritually into the river Lethe and then into the river Eunoe, one the river of forgetfulness, the other the river of memory. Dante emphasized that he was at the point where the two streams were originating from the same source, as if memory and forgetfulness were born from the same material. Dante was already preparing what will now move to center stage in Paradiso 33, namely the notion of a forgetful memory, the two forces brought together. It’s not a mystical proposition that he advances; it’s actually a way of justifying his whole poem, but we’ll come back to that defense when we arrive at Canto 33.
To begin with Canto 30, though, Dante is entering into the Heavenly Jerusalem, which is both a garden and a city. It will be described as an amalgam of settings, first of all as a amphitheater, a fixture of urban culture: “So above the light round and round about in more than a thousand tiers I saw all that of us have won return up there. And if the lowest rank”—drawing on the image of the theater as an auditorium, with tiered setting—“encloses within itself so great a light, how vast is the spread of this rose in its outermost leaves!”1 The second image that is used here to describe the Heavenly Jerusalem is of a mystical rose, a flower plucked from an otherworldly garden. This rose comes straight from a thirteenth-century French poem called The Romance of the Rose, which Dante had translated into a sequence of sonnets as a young man, part of his experimentation with various poetic forms.
But this metaphor is also deeply altered because The Romance of the Rose was a satirical poem, a compendium of all knowledge that dealt with the connections between nature and reason, but also a story with a sexual theme. Dante takes the language of The Romance of the Rose and spiritualizes and reverses it. But the resonances of the original poem are still there, so that you are forced to think of the Heavenly Jerusalem as having some kind of materiality within it. You cannot just take an image, place it in a different context, and hope that the residue of that original image are going to be completely effaced. It’s all part of Dante’s strategy of intimating that spirituality and materiality are converging here. That’s the archeology, let’s say, of this image of the rose.
The spectacular display continues: “Into the yellow of the eternal rose, which rises in ranks and expands and breathes forth odors of praise unto the Sun which makes perpetual spring, Beatrice drew me as one who is silent and wishes to speak, and she said, ‘Behold how great the assembly of the white robes!’”2 This is a procession and the whole of Paradise is a theatrical performance. Whenever we think of a theater, we understand that it implies the reduction of the world to a spectacle. The world is something to be seen, an optical phenomenon, a representation. And we become spectators. We can really watch this world and see it in its totality, just as Dante is seeing the whole of the universe, the totality of the blessed. Furthermore, the theater is an image of multiple perspectives, but Dante wants to say that he’s enjoying an overall perspective. He can see the whole of reality. He’s not seeing something isolated or disconnected from the rest of the world. This is, to him, what legitimizes a claim to be a visionary poet. To be truly a visionary poet, you have to be able to see the whole of reality, not just your own image like Narcissus.
Beatrice then directs Dante’s gaze: “See our city, how wide is its circuit!”3 It has been described in terms of a rose and a garden, but now it’s a city. That’s an interesting shift for a number of reasons. The whole poem now appears as a journey from the wilderness, not to the garden, but to a city or to a garden that is also a city. It is a way of encompassing the whole movement of the poem within these two images, a firm and total reintegration. It is a way of seeing the world as a whole, of which Dante wants to be a part, and his way of being part of this whole is to write this political poem. The idea of the city always implies some human contact, some involvement with the polis, the political reality of the people. We also have a compression of images from the pastoral tradition; in pastoral literature one usually finds a division between the urban and the rustic. There is almost a hint of a schizophrenic existence to the world. What Dante is doing is shattering the distance between the two modes. In an eschatological perspective, a perspective that is at the end, the city and the garden come together. They are not two divergent modes of the imaginatio; they cohere within one. No matter what Dante is touching with his imagination, all the oppositions, all systems of contrarieties, he always tries to bring them together in a kind of concordance. Dante aims at harmony.
But then there is another image that complicates the problem: “See our seats so filled that few souls are now wanted there!”4 This line is really strange because it’s implying that for all of us latecomers there is no room, not even standing-room-only seats. The places have all been taken already. Very few individuals are going to be saved. Based on these implications, one could say that Dante is having what we can call an apocalyptic vision. Only a few seats are available because the end of the world is near. But I don’t think that Dante really has an apocalyptic vision here, in the sense that he is not proclaiming the imminence of the ending of history. A man who keeps thinking as he does about the renewal or the corruption of institutions, about the hope that some intervention will come from other human beings, from history, or from the world of grace, cannot really have a sense of the imminent consummation of history. He wouldn’t be so worried about renewing institutions if he believed the world was at the brink of extinction. This line is meant to suggest, I would argue, that the scene comes from the perspective of eternity. In terms of the totality of time, relatively few seats remain, but only because so much time has already passed by.
A haunting image comes next that sheds further light on whether Dante has an apocalyptic imagination or not: “And in that great chair whereon you fix your eyes because of the crown that already is set above it”—an empty seat where a king is meant to sit, a portrait of royal absence—“before you sup at these nuptials shall sit the soul, which on earth will be imperial, of the lofty Henry.”5 This refers to the emperor, who died in 1313, whom Dante was hoping would come down to Italy from the Holy Roman Empire in order to set Italy straight. Dante believed Henry could placate the violence between the cities and affect the whole history of Italian communes. Sadly, however, he died prematurely, and here he is expected in heaven. There is a way in which the emperor is beatified, his seat in heaven assured, and yet his blessed state allows the violence in history to be, for the time being, continued and prolonged. Once again, therefore, political interests, Dante’s fantasies of political renewals, temper all views that Dante may have, of an apocalyptic imagination.
If Canto 30 is a farewell to apocalyptic ideas, Canto 31 is a farewell to a much-beloved figure in Dante’s life, his most recent guide, Beatrice. Dante writes,
I, who to the divine from the human, to the eternal from time had come, and from Florence to a people just and sane, with what amazement must I have been full! Truly, what with it and with the joy, I was content to hear naught and to stand mute. And as a pilgrim who is refreshed within the temple of his vow as he looks around, and already hopes to tell again how it was, so, taking my way upwards through the living light, I led my eyes along the ranks, now up, now down, and now circling about. I saw faces all given to love, adorned by the light of Another, and by their own smile, and movements graced with every dignity. My look had now taken in the general form of Paradise as a whole, and on no part as yet had my sight paused; and I turned with rekindled will to ask my lady about things as to which my mind was in suspense.6
We have here a revision of the scene of Virgil’s disappearance when Beatrice was just about to appear. Dante was so stricken by tremors at the approaching of Beatrice that he turned around to try to get comfort from Virgil, but Virgil had vanished.
This is a variant of that same vanishing act:
One thing I purposed, and another answered me: I thought to see Beatrice, and I saw an elder [the aforementioned Bernard of Clairvaux], clad like the folk in glory. His eyes and cheeks were suffused with benign gladness, his mien kindly such as befits a tender father. And, “Where is she?” I said at once; whereon he, “To terminate your desire Beatrice urged me from my place; and if you look up to the circle which is third from the highest tier, you will see her again, in the throne her merits have allotted to her.” Without answering I lifted up my eyes and saw her where she made for herself a crown as she reflected the eternal rays. From the region which thunders most high no mortal eye is so far distant, were it plunged most deep within the sea, as there from Beatrice was my sight. But to me it made no difference, for her image came down to me unblurred by aught between. “O lady, in whom my hope is strong, and who for my salvation did endure to leave in Hell your footprints, of all those things which I have seen I acknowledge the grace and the virtue to be from your power and your excellence. It is you who have drawn me from bondage into liberty.”7
The great theme of liberty in the Comedy is sealed here in the presence of Beatrice.
You may remember that Canto 29 ended with Beatrice very worried that Dante has been expounding too much. Beatrice got upset because the whole issue seemed to her to be a way of thinking more about the appearance of things rather than the truth of things. She attacked the human beings on earth who do nothing else but go after false appearances. Dante now goes back to these questions of appearances, and says to Beatrice that her image is exactly what he is going to preserve of her. He’s telling her that we are always in a world of images and that the image is somehow the locus of sacredness, though the image also has a fleeting quality. The journey of Dante is thus to go between images and essences. He’s preparing for the final leap, for Dante’s journey was not a voyage to Beatrice but a voyage to God. Beatrice is simply the stepping stone for the pilgrim’s entering the experience of the beatific vision.
In fact, toward the end of Canto 31, Dante writes, “As is he who comes perchance from Croatia to look on our Veronica, and whose old hunger is not sated, but he says in thought so long as it is shown, ‘My Lord Jesus Christ, true God, was then your semblance like to this?’ such was I, gazing on the living charity of him who, in this world, in contemplation tasted of that peace.”8 Veronica is an allusion to one of the pious women who, during the Calvary ascent of Jesus, is said to have wiped his face. The face of Jesus remained imprinted on her veil, so that the name Veronica was also understood in the whole of the Middle Ages as vera icona, a phony but accepted etymology. Dante is here evoking the pilgrims who went to Rome to see the true image on the veil of Veronica. And Dante himself is like one of those pilgrims; he sees the image, but he wants to move beyond images, to see what lies behind them. The journey of the Divine Comedy is no more and no less than that very journey betwixt and between appearances and essences, spelled out in tercets.
With that conception of the text in mind, we are ready to enter Canto 33, the final canto and the final vision. There are a number of dramas that are going to unfold in this canto. The first drama is that of the pilgrim who wants to see the face of God, to preserve his wit so that he can be able to come back and retell the story. He wants to be able to write the poem as a witnessing to the vision he has had. It’s a way of thinking about the relationship between vision and language, in broad terms. Another drama is: how is Dante going to remember what he sees? And still more dramas are wrapped up in the question of what it is that he really sees. There are clearly a number of problems that he faces.
Canto 33 begins with a prayer to the Virgin Mary, and it’s going to be constructed through a series of paradoxes, like calling the Virgin Mother the daughter of her son. A paradox can be about time or about reversals of the natural order, as when Mary is referred to as “humble and exalted more than any creature,” challenging the rational understanding of the world as we typically encounter it.9 In other words, we are intended to see that this account is not going to be a rational representation of what Dante sees.
Dante moves from this paradoxical prayer to that motif of birth that we have discussed since Inferno 1. The idea of birth as an image of beginning and an image of nature becoming a historical event is explicitly rendered in Paradiso 33: “In thy womb was rekindled the Love under whose warmth this flower”—meaning the whole of the mystical rose that he has just seen—“in the eternal peace has thus unfolded.”10 This image of the womb is another representation of the immense sphere of the mystic realm, within which the finite and the infinite come together. The immense sphere whose center is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere, is the way that Dante is understanding and explaining this motif of the Incarnation.
What is crucial about this image is, first of all, the humanization of the divine. The divine becomes human because it enters history and experiences all that human beings experience on earth. The other element, I think, that Dante is putting forth is the feminization of the divine, in the sense that here the divine has become the child of a woman, and the woman is therefore part of the divinity. It’s a theology of a feminine element in God.
A second stylistic theme here is repetition, the iterative mode. We see, for instance, “In thee is mercy, in thee pity, in thee munificence, in thee is found what ever of goodness is in any creature.”11 What is the point of this iterativeness, of anaphoric style? I think the main reason is that a language that is falling upon itself has a way of giving consistency to itself. The poem at this point is really dealing with vanishing traces, things that cannot quite be pinpointed or placed within logical propositions, and therefore the language becomes incantatory in an effort to create a more solid reality through the mood induced by these iterations.
At any rate, the prayer of Bernard continues, “This man, who from the lowest pit of the universe even to here has seen one by one the spiritual lives, implores thee of thy grace for power such that he may be able with his eyes to rise still higher towards the last salvation. And I”—Dante strays so far from the temptations of mystical writing, which ends up always evoking representable identities by distinguishing very carefully between “I” and “he,” allowing for individualities in this Paradise of Dante’s imagination—“who never for my own vision burned more than I do for his, proffer to thee all my prayers, and pray that they be not scant, that with thy prayers thou wouldst dispel for him every cloud of his mortality, so that the Supreme pleasure may be disclosed to him.” Then he prays directly to the Virgin: “Further I pray thee, Queen, who canst do what ever thou wilt, that thou preserve sound for him his affections, after so great a vision.” The prime danger to the pilgrim is that he may literally lose his mind. The vision of God may obliterate his powers of rational thought. Bernard knows Dante will need divine succor: “Let thy protection vanquish human impulses. Behold Beatrice, with how many saints, for my prayers clasping their hands to thee.”12 The whole of the cosmos is praying for Dante to survive the beatific vision unscathed, and Bernard is merely vocalizing this shared wish.
Up to now the poem has been called so many things: a poem of hope, a poem of peace, a poem of exile, a poem of desire, and a poem of love and longing. The prayer here is the representation of this longing. In prayer, you address someone you don’t see, hoping that you can be heard and that your prayer can be answered. Prayer implies a desire for a response, which is really the mode of Dante’s theology. At the heart of his theological universe, there is a constant sense of not quite being where he wants to be, and this dislocation coincides with one’s own religious consciousness. But very soon the language of Dante will change from desire to enjoyment, as he finally starts to get a sense of sweetness and an idea of the fullness of his pleasures: “I, who was drawing near to the end of all desires, raised to its utmost, even as I ought, the ardor of my longing. Bernard was signing to me with a smile to look upward, but I was already of myself such as he wished; for my sight, becoming pure, was entering more and more through the beam of the loft y Light which in Itself is true.”13 Dante is at long last attaining his hopes and dreams.
And yet, this is also where we find his first major defeat, as Dante starts recording the forgetfulness of this experience: “Thenceforward my vision was greater than speech can show, which fails at such a sight.”14 How is he going to make a failure become a success? The fact that he is not going to be able to see will become a mode of its own, not in the sense of being a form of humility because it would actually be a success in terms of the pilgrim’s own humility, but in terms of the writing of the poem. It offers a different way of understanding the poem, not just as a representation of the plenitude of vision, but a statement of a longing for a vision that may or may not come.
The memory too fails in such excess. An excess is an overreaching that provokes outrage in the face of its hyperbolic nature. Dante will not be left with much: “As is he who dreaming sees, and after the dream the passion remains imprinted and the rest returns not to the mind; such am I, for my vision almost wholly fades away, yet does the sweetness that was born of it still drop within my heart.”15 All that remains to him is this sweetness that gathers in the chamber of the heart. This journey to God has truly been a journey of the heart, a journey of the mind as well, but primarily a journey of the heart. You have to come to know God through the heart, or not at all.
Then he continues, “Thus is the snow unsealed by the sun.” This image is one of the liquefaction of shapes, the loss of form, water that had been crystallized and now just dissolves. It is followed by another image of dissipation, one that brings us back to the third book of The Aeneid: “Thus in the wind, on the light leaves, the Sibyl’s oracle was lost.”16 When Aeneas goes to the Sibyl’s cave to find out about his future, as the Sibyl opens the gates, the wind comes and scatters all the leaves in the cave. It’s the impossibility of reading and deciphering the actual leaves. It’s the messiness and confusion. That’s exactly the state of mind in which Dante seems to find himself.
“O Light Supreme,” Dante now shifts to another mode on his own, a sequence of prayers, “that art so far uplifted above mortal conceiving, re-lend to my mind a little of what Thou didst appear, and give my tongue such power that it may leave only a single spark of Thy glory for the folk to come.”17 This prayer asks that somehow language may triumph over the threat of forgetfulness. What Dante is saying is that his poem is meant for the future, that, in effect, he’s envisioning a future. This is not a poem written for him, or for his contemporaries, but a positing of a time yet to come. For Dante, a work of art invents and prepares a future, more than acting as a remembrance, and the poem will thus be a prolepsis, or a movement forward.
So, why do I insist on discussing memory when Dante seems to be becoming more utopian? Because that’s the answer: he talks about retrieving the memory of what he has seen because he can only write his poem, he can only have some authority for his voice, if he remembers what he has seen. In order to ground the poem in the notion of the vision of God that will permit him to say all of the things he has been saying about the living and the dead, the powerful and the not so powerful, the historical figures and the cultural figures of the past, it’s crucial for him to remember. Memory becomes the actual foundation of his representation, forward-glancing though it may be.
For this reason, he’s forced to go on remembering, and yet he cannot. Where does his authority actually come from, then? “I remember,” he says, “that on this account I was the bolder to sustain it, until I united my gaze with the Infinite Goodness.” Then, once again breaking the narrative and turning it into a sort of meditative prayer, begging that the divine reveal itself and remain with him, he continues, “O abounding grace whereby I presumed to fix my look through the Eternal Light so far that all my sight was spent therein. In its depth I saw ingathered, bound by love in one single volume, that which is dispersed in leaves throughout the universe: substances and accidents and their relations, as though fused together in such a way that what I tell is but a simple light.”18 The cosmos is once more represented as a book, as a kind of allegory wrapped up in words. Volume was the same word that Dante had used for Virgil at the beginning of the poem. Here, therefore, it serves as a way to give continuity to his quest. Virgil’s book becomes a prefiguration of the poem and of the book of the cosmos that Dante now sees bound together.
This is the moment of the recovery of a state of joy that excludes absence: “The universal form of this knot I believe that I saw, because, in telling this, I feel my joy increase.”19 Desire has to be replaced by joy because desire always entails a lack. We long for what we do not have, at least at that moment. Joy is instead tied to an experience of plenitude. And Dante finally has it all, at least for now.
All the dialectics of memory and forgetfulness come together in a mythological metaphor: “A single moment makes for me greater oblivion than five and twenty centuries have wrought upon the enterprise that made Neptune wonder at the shadow of the Argo.”20 Time doesn’t exist here. It exists in Dante, since Dante is still human, he still has time, and his life can only be measured by time, but he’s in the presence of the eternal instant. That single instance made him forget more than what we have forgotten in the twenty-five centuries since the Argo sailed the seas, an allusion to the Argonauts, another mythological counter to Dante’s own journey. Something else in that story of the Argonauts, as Dante retrieves it, is that the god is down below, Neptune is in the depths, and Dante is thus thinking of the divine as being also caught in its own unreachable, unfathomable depths. And yet it is also found at such great heights that there are two different perspectives presented as one. More importantly, Dante sees Neptune wondering at the daring of man, and the implication is that he too has had this kind of daring, and God may be wondering at Dante’s own achievement in the same way.
So, language fails him, memory fails him, and now speech fails him, too: “Now will my speech fall more short, even in respect to that which I remember, than that of an infant who still bathes his tongue at the breast.” The word infant, which we usually take to refer to any child, literally means a child who cannot speak. Dante continues in this vein, emphasizing the failings of his fickle tongue: “Not because more than one simple semblance was in the Living Light wherein I was gazing, which ever is such as it was before; but through my sight, which was growing strong in me as I looked, one sole appearance, even as I changed, was altering itself to me. Within the profound and shining subsistence of the lofty Light appeared to me three circles of three colors and one magnitude; and one seemed reflected by the other, as rainbow by rainbow, and the third seemed fire breathed forth equally from the one and the other. O how scant is speech, and how feeble to my conception!”21 Speech is unable to contain the abundance of what he sees. Vision exceeds language, for there is more to Dante’s experience of the world than what he can put into words. Not everything is reducible to the syllables of our language.
Admitting this inability, Dante still soldiers on in his impossible description, now placing emphasis on the inner closure or circularity of the divine: “This, to what I saw, is such that it is not enough to call it little. O Light Eternal, who alone abidest in Thyself”—a divinity caught within itself and self-contained—“alone knowest Thyself, and, known to Thyself and knowing, lovest and smilest on Thyself!”22 The words keep repeating and falling back on themselves to convey the idea of the self-enclosed nature of God, the result of which is that there is always something that escapes Dante’s grasp here. For all of the diffusiveness of God in the creation there is an element of the divine that is absolutely self-transcendent, that transcends itself completely.
Dante is awed by this image of the divinity, aware of its unknowability, and yet he manages to find a way to relate to it. He says, “That circling which, thus begotten, appeared in Thee as reflected light, when my eyes had dwelt on it for a time, seemed to me depicted with our image within itself and in its own color.”23 It is important to note that he doesn’t say “my image.” His is a poem, therefore, that seems to want to retrieve the commonality of the human likeness that we all share. What he sees is the Incarnation, the human image within God, because in God there is also the human. We are creations of God, created in His image, so therefore there’s also something human within the divine.
And then Dante continues, “As is the geometer who wholly applies himself to measure the circle, and finds not, in pondering, the principle of which he is in need, such was I at that new sight. I wished to see how the image conformed to the circle and how it has its place therein; but my own wings were not sufficient for that, save that my mind was smitten by a flash wherein its wish came to it. Here power failed the loft y phantasy.”24 The first part of this passage references a famous mathematical surd in the Middle Ages, meaning one of the impossible paradoxes involving questions like how one squares a circle, and medieval geometers spent much time reflecting on these concerns. The science of measure ment stumbles against this paradox that the geometer posits and it fails. So, from science Dante moves to fantasy. Fantasy here is the highest form of the imagination, with which almost anything is usually possible, and yet it too fails here.
However, the poem ends on a more positive note than all these failings would suggest: “But already my desire and my will were revolved, like a wheel that is evenly moved, by the Love which moves the sun and the other stars.”25 Dante is finally coming to understand the Prime Mover, not the way he did at the beginning of Paradiso 1, but as Love. The Aristotelian-Thomistic definition of God as simply the Prime Mover seemed to have a limitation for Dante, since the Prime Mover moves the universe, and that act somehow simultaneously disengages Him from it. Now Dante sees that primal motion as a motion of love, the universe as a universe of love, with God, who transcends and yet is part of the world, holding it together and preventing it from falling apart. His power of love prevents chaos; it moves the sun and the stars and all things, but it is also the only stable thing, the only thing that makes it all cohere.
Of course, love is not the only word that matters at the end of the poem. This canticle, like the first two, ends with the word stars. Dante uses the same word symmetrically at the end of Inferno and at the end of Purgatorio. So when Dante says that love moves the sun and the other stars, what he’s really doing is placing himself immediately right back on earth, back at the beginning of his quest. He’s here with us looking up at the stars. It’s the line that allows him to shift away from the moment of this vision that he has, a vision that is ultimately the vision of the Incarnation. All he sees, all he remembers, is our own likeness among the stars, and then he comes back down to earth. And the line also means that Dante places himself back in Inferno 1, allowing for the story of the poem to begin again and to be written.
We have been reading an account of the experience of a pilgrim who goes from the dark wood to the beatific vision and then comes back to tell us about it. But we are now also discovering, thanks to the circularity of the poem, that by the end of the poem Dante is telling us that only now is his journey really starting. The real journey was the poem itself we have finished reading and are invited to read again. By that last line, we are caught in the circle of Dante’s telling, in the drama of Dante’s story. It’s a witty way for Dante to say that this poem will hold you, that it’s meant to hold you in its spell, the poem endlessly revolving between the story of a journey and a journey in itself, beautifully mirroring the ceaseless movement of the sun and the other stars.