Cantando come donna innamorata,
continüò col fin di sue parole:
“Beati quorum tecta sunt peccata!”
E come ninfe che si givan sole
per le salvatiche ombre, disïando
qual di veder, qual di fuggir lo sole,
allor si mosse contra 'l fiume, andando
su per la riva; e io pari di lei,
picciol passo con picciol seguitando.
Non eran cento tra ' suoi passi e ' miei,
quando le ripe igualmente dier volta,
per modo ch'a levante mi rendei.
Né ancor fu così nostra via molta,
quando la donna tutta a me si torse,
dicendo: “Frate mio, guarda e ascolta.”
Ed ecco un lustro sùbito trascorse
da tutte parti per la gran foresta,
tal che di balenar mi mise in forse.
Ma perché 'l balenar, come vien, resta,
e quel, durando, più e più splendeva,
nel mio pensier dicea: “Che cosa è questa?”
E una melodia dolce correva
per l'aere luminoso; onde buon zelo
mi fé riprender l'ardimento d'Eva,
che là dove ubidia la terra e 'l cielo,
femmina, sola e pur testé formata,
non sofferse di star sotto alcun velo;
sotto 'l qual se divota fosse stata,
avrei quelle ineffabili delizie
sentite prima e più lunga fïata.
Mentr' io m'andava tra tante primizie
de l'etterno piacer tutto sospeso,
e disïoso ancora a più letizie,
dinanzi a noi, tal quale un foco acceso,
ci si fé l'aere sotto i verdi rami;
e 'l dolce suon per canti era già inteso.
O sacrosante Vergini, se fami,
freddi o vigilie mai per voi soffersi,
cagion mi sprona ch'io mercé vi chiami.
Or convien che Elicona per me versi,
e Uranìe m'aiuti col suo coro
forti cose a pensar mettere in versi.
Poco più oltre, sette alberi d'oro
falsava nel parere il lungo tratto
del mezzo ch'era ancor tra noi e loro;
ma quand' i' fui sì presso di lor fatto,
che l'obietto comun, che 'l senso inganna,
non perdea per distanza alcun su atto,
la virtù ch'a ragion discorso ammanna,
sì com' elli eran candelabri apprese,
e ne le voci del cantare “Osanna.”
Di sopra fiammeggiava il bello arnese
più chiaro assai che luna per sereno
di mezza notte nel suo mezzo mese.
Io mi rivolsi d'ammirazion pieno
al buon Virgilio, ed esso mi rispuose
con vista carca di stupor non meno.
Indi rendei l'aspetto a l'alte cose
che si movieno incontr' a noi sì tardi,
che foran vinte da novelle spose.
La donna mi sgridò: “Perché pur ardi
sì ne l'affetto de le vive luci,
e ciò che vien di retro a lor non guardi?”
Genti vid' io allor, come a lor duci,
venire appresso, vestite di bianco;
e tal candor di qua già mai non fuci.
L'acqua imprendëa dal sinistro fianco,
e rendea me la mia sinistra costa,
s'io riguardava in lei, come specchio anco.
Quand' io da la mia riva ebbi tal posta,
che solo il fiume mi facea distante,
per veder meglio ai passi diedi sosta,
e vidi le fiammelle andar davante,
lasciando dietro a sé l'aere dipinto,
e di tratti pennelli avean sembiante;
sì che lì sopra rimanea distinto
di sette liste, tutte in quei colori
onde fa l'arco il Sole e Delia il cinto.
Questi ostendali in dietro eran maggiori
che la mia vista; e, quanto a mio avviso,
diece passi distavan quei di fori.
Sotto così bel ciel com' io diviso,
ventiquattro seniori, a due a due,
coronati venien di fiordaliso.
Tutti cantavan: “Benedicta tue
ne le figlie d'Adamo, e benedette
sieno in etterno le bellezze tue!”
Poscia che i fiori e l'altre fresche erbette
a rimpetto di me da l'altra sponda
libere fuor da quelle genti elette,
sì come luce luce in ciel seconda,
vennero appresso lor quattro animali,
coronati ciascun di verde fronda.
Ognuno era pennuto di sei ali;
le penne piene d'occhi; e li occhi d'Argo,
se fosser vivi, sarebber cotali.
A descriver lor forme più non spargo
rime, lettor; ch'altra spesa mi strigne,
tanto ch'a questa non posso esser largo;
ma leggi Ezechïel, che li dipigne
come li vide da la fredda parte
venir con vento e con nube e con igne;
e quali i troverai ne le sue carte,
tali eran quivi, salvo ch'a le penne
Giovanni è meco e da lui si diparte.
Lo spazio dentro a lor quattro contenne
un carro, in su due rote, trïunfale,
ch'al collo d'un grifon tirato venne.
Esso tendeva in sù l'una e l'altra ale
tra la mezzana e le tre e tre liste,
sì ch'a nulla, fendendo, facea male.
Tanto salivan che non eran viste;
le membra d'oro avea quant' era uccello,
e bianche l'altre, di vermiglio miste.
Non che Roma di carro così bello
rallegrasse Affricano, o vero Augusto,
ma quel del Sol saria pover con ello;
quel del Sol che, svïando, fu combusto
per l'orazion de la Terra devota,
quando fu Giove arcanamente giusto.
Tre donne in giro da la destra rota
venian danzando; l'una tanto rossa
ch'a pena fora dentro al foco nota;
l'altr' era come se le carni e l'ossa
fossero state di smeraldo fatte;
la terza parea neve testé mossa;
e or parëan da la bianca tratte,
or da la rossa; e dal canto di questa
l'altre toglien l'andare e tarde e ratte.
Da la sinistra quattro facean festa,
in porpore vestite, dietro al modo
d'una di lor ch'avea tre occhi in testa.
Appresso tutto il pertrattato nodo
vidi due vecchi in abito dispari,
ma pari in atto e onesto e sodo.
L'un si mostrava alcun de' famigliari
di quel sommo Ipocràte che natura
a li animali fé ch'ell' ha più cari;
mostrava l'altro la contraria cura
con una spada lucida e aguta,
tal che di qua dal rio mi fé paura.
Poi vidi quattro in umile paruta;
e di retro da tutti un vecchio solo
venir, dormendo, con la faccia arguta.
E questi sette col primaio stuolo
erano abitüati, ma di gigli
dintorno al capo non facëan brolo,
anzi di rose e d'altri fior vermigli;
giurato avria poco lontano aspetto
che tutti ardesser di sopra da' cigli.
E quando il carro a me fu a rimpetto,
un tuon s'udì, e quelle genti degne
parvero aver l'andar più interdetto,
fermandosi ivi con le prime insegne.
Singing like unto an enamoured lady
She, with the ending of her words, continued:
"Beati quorum tecta sunt peccata."
And even as Nymphs, that wandered all alone
Among the sylvan shadows, sedulous
One to avoid and one to see the sun,
She then against the stream moved onward, going
Along the bank, and I abreast of her,
Her little steps with little steps attending.
Between her steps and mine were not a hundred,
When equally the margins gave a turn,
In such a way, that to the East I faced.
Nor even thus our way continued far
Before the lady wholly turned herself
Unto me, saying, "Brother, look and listen!"
And lo! a sudden lustre ran across
On every side athwart the spacious forest,
Such that it made me doubt if it were lightning.
But since the lightning ceases as it comes,
And that continuing brightened more and more,
Within my thought I said, "What thing is this?"
And a delicious melody there ran
Along the luminous air, whence holy zeal
Made me rebuke the hardihood of Eve;
For there where earth and heaven obedient were,
The woman only, and but just created,
Could not endure to stay 'neath any veil;
Underneath which had she devoutly stayed,
I sooner should have tasted those delights
Ineffable, and for a longer time.
While 'mid such manifold first-fruits I walked
Of the eternal pleasure all enrapt,
And still solicitous of more delights,
In front of us like an enkindled fire
Became the air beneath the verdant boughs,
And the sweet sound as singing now was heard.
O Virgins sacrosanct! if ever hunger,
Vigils, or cold for you I have endured,
The occasion spurs me their reward to claim!
Now Helicon must needs pour forth for me,
And with her choir Urania must assist me,
To put in verse things difficult to think.
A little farther on, seven trees of gold
In semblance the long space still intervening
Between ourselves and them did counterfeit;
But when I had approached so near to them
The common object, which the sense deceives,
Lost not by distance any of its marks,
The faculty that lends discourse to reason
Did apprehend that they were candlesticks,
And in the voices of the song "Hosanna!"
Above them flamed the harness beautiful,
Far brighter than the moon in the serene
Of midnight, at the middle of her month.
I turned me round, with admiration filled,
To good Virgilius, and he answered me
With visage no less full of wonderment.
Then back I turned my face to those high things,
Which moved themselves towards us so sedately,
They had been distanced by new-wedded brides.
The lady chid me: "Why dost thou burn only
So with affection for the living lights,
And dost not look at what comes after them?"
Then saw I people, as behind their leaders,
Coming behind them, garmented in white,
And such a whiteness never was on earth.
The water on my left flank was resplendent,
And back to me reflected my left side,
E'en as a mirror, if I looked therein.
When I upon my margin had such post
That nothing but the stream divided us,
Better to see I gave my steps repose;
And I beheld the flamelets onward go,
Leaving behind themselves the air depicted,
And they of trailing pennons had the semblance,
So that it overhead remained distinct
With sevenfold lists, all of them of the colours
Whence the sun's bow is made, and Delia's girdle.
These standards to the rearward longer were
Than was my sight; and, as it seemed to me,
Ten paces were the outermost apart.
Under so fair a heaven as I describe
The four and twenty Elders, two by two,
Came on incoronate with flower-de-luce.
They all of them were singing: "Blessed thou
Among the daughters of Adam art, and blessed
For evermore shall be thy loveliness."
After the flowers and other tender grasses
In front of me upon the other margin
Were disencumbered of that race elect,
Even as in heaven star followeth after star,
There came close after them four animals,
Incoronate each one with verdant leaf.
Plumed with six wings was every one of them,
The plumage full of eyes; the eyes of Argus
If they were living would be such as these.
Reader! to trace their forms no more I waste
My rhymes; for other spendings press me so,
That I in this cannot be prodigal.
But read Ezekiel, who depicteth them
As he beheld them from the region cold
Coming with cloud, with whirlwind, and with fire;
And such as thou shalt find them in his pages,
Such were they here; saving that in their plumage
John is with me, and differeth from him.
The interval between these four contained
A chariot triumphal on two wheels,
Which by a Griffin's neck came drawn along;
And upward he extended both his wings
Between the middle list and three and three,
So that he injured none by cleaving it.
So high they rose that they were lost to sight;
His limbs were gold, so far as he was bird,
And white the others with vermilion mingled.
Not only Rome with no such splendid car
E'er gladdened Africanus, or Augustus,
But poor to it that of the Sun would be,—
That of the Sun, which swerving was burnt up
At the importunate orison of Earth,
When Jove was so mysteriously just.
Three maidens at the right wheel in a circle
Came onward dancing; one so very red
That in the fire she hardly had been noted.
The second was as if her flesh and bones
Had all been fashioned out of emerald;
The third appeared as snow but newly fallen.
And now they seemed conducted by the white,
Now by the red, and from the song of her
The others took their step, or slow or swift.
Upon the left hand four made holiday
Vested in purple, following the measure
Of one of them with three eyes m her head.
In rear of all the group here treated of
Two old men I beheld, unlike in habit,
But like in gait, each dignified and grave.
One showed himself as one of the disciples
Of that supreme Hippocrates, whom nature
Made for the animals she holds most dear;
Contrary care the other manifested,
With sword so shining and so sharp, it caused
Terror to me on this side of the river.
Thereafter four I saw of humble aspect,
And behind all an aged man alone
Walking in sleep with countenance acute.
And like the foremost company these seven
Were habited; yet of the flower-de-luce
No garland round about the head they wore,
But of the rose, and other flowers vermilion;
At little distance would the sight have sworn
That all were in a flame above their brows.
And when the car was opposite to me
Thunder was heard; and all that folk august
Seemed to have further progress interdicted,
There with the vanward ensigns standing still.
Echoing Guido Cavalcanti (see the note to Purg. XXVIII.43-48), the poet begins this canto by returning to the situation that we found early in the last one: Dante thinking that a beautiful young woman was in love with him. Now the poet himself seems to confirm this. We, nonetheless, probably realize that the song Matelda sings is once again utterly different from the sexually charged pastorella and is indeed once again a Psalm 31:1 (32:1): 'Blessed are they whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered.' As Singleton (comm. to verse 3) points out, St. Paul (Romans 4:3-8) interprets this Psalm as indicating God's reward for just humans. However, this is not, in short, to 'fuse' the 'theme of profane love' with that of 'charity, love of a higher order' (comm. to verse 1), but simultaneously to include and supersede it. Matelda is a very different sort of 'shepherd girl' from the one we found in Cavalcanti; that seems to be Dante's main point. She does indeed love the protagonist, but she is not in love with him, as he at first believed. The word that describes her affective state, innamorata (touched by love), here appears for the first time in the poem. It seems to collocate itself in the Cavalcantian world of sexual love. However, as a graduate student at Princeton, Sheila Colwell, pointed out in the spring of 1984, the verb innamorare, in an inflected form or as a past participle, will be used eight more times in Paradiso, always to indicate, as we may realize either now or retrospectively, heavenly affection. (See Par. VII.143, Par. XIV.127, Par. XX.64, Par. XXIII.70, Par. XXV.44, Par. XXVII.88, Par. XXXI.5, Par. XXXII.105).
Why are these two groups of nymphs made part of the simile, when Dante and Matelda are moving near one another and in the same direction? Benvenuto (comm. to vv. 4-9) glosses the tercet simply. In the old days some nymphs wanted to leave the shade for the sun, while others desired to leave the sun for the shade. Beginning with Tommaseo (comm. to these verses) some commentators have suggested a relationship with Virgil's two bands of nymphs (Georgics IV.383), one hundred guarding the woods, another one hundred guarding the streams ('centum quae silvas, centum quae flumina servant'). Neither the gloss nor the citation, however, answers the question, above, that has bothered many commentators, none more than Porena (comm. to vv. 4-7), who posits a lost classical source to explain our puzzlement but has not convinced others of this hypothesis. It would seem that Dante wishes to express only the thought that, just as in the distant (classical) past nymphs would move purposefully from one place to another in the forest, so did he and Matelda move from where they had been standing to go somewhere else. However, the brightness that they shall soon find would seem intrinsically to associate them with those nymphs who move from shade to sunshine.
Since the stream normally flows east to west but now makes a 90o veer to the north, Matelda, followed by Dante, heads south for fifty paces until it makes a second 90o bend, and they are once again heading due east. Why the poet wanted to have this bend in the river, which accomplishes the removal of Dante and Matelda to a point some fifty feet south of where they had been and from which they resume movement in an easterly direction, has not been clear to the commentators.
Matelda's addressing Dante as 'frate' (brother) reminds him (and the reader) of his earlier misunderstanding of the nature of her affection for him (see Purg. XXVIII.43-45).
The lustrous presence is so bright that the protagonist, forgetting his recent and abundant instruction by Matelda on the absence of 'real' weather here (Purg. XXVIII.85-126), at first takes this shining for lightning, until its duration makes it clear that it is something altogether other. In this way the poet builds suspense for the pageant yet to come.
It is probably not without purpose that, near the beginning of each of these cantos (XXVIII and XXIX), in which his will is finally integral and good (see Purg. XXVII.140 and the note to Purg. XXVII.139-141), the poet reveals that the protagonist's problems now center in his weak understanding. Thus this second part of the poem anchors itself in the program of the correction of his intellect, which will last until Paradiso XXX.
The protagonist hears a melody (we will be allowed to know its lyric component at Purg. XXIX.51) so beautiful that righteous indignation causes him to condemn Eve for depriving him of immortal life in this beautiful garden.
The veil that she would not accept is variously glossed, from the first commentators onward, either as being negative (ignorance) or positive (obedience), and some (e.g., Grabher [comm. to vv. 19-30]) have believed that it has both valences.
The primizie (first fruits) are the first fruits of God's eternal love as these are found here in Eden, 'this foretaste of eternal bliss,' promising the joys of eternity.
This second reference to the growing intensity of this son et lumière again whets the reader's appetite to know what lies just ahead (see Purg. XXIX.21).
This is the fourth of the Commedia's nine invocations (see the note to Inf. II.7-9). The first to identify the nine invocations of the Comedy correctly was apparently Fabio Fabbri (“Le invocazioni nella Divina Commedia,” Giornale dantesco 18 [1910], pp. 186-92). See also Hollander (“The Invocations of the Commedia,” Yearbook of Italian Studies 3 [1976], pp. 235-40). Singleton (comm. to these verses) is in error (but has much company in this) in referring only to the first six of these.
Fallani (comm. to vv. 37-38) rightly explains that 'the marvelous vision is entirely contained in the poet's memory' and that Dante now requires aid only in finding the correct words to express it. (See the note to Inf. XXXII.10-12 in response to a similar second invocation in the first cantica.) In other words, he now requires aid from holy Muses to express in poetry the deeper truth of what he has seen in the pageant representing the Church Triumphant. For the increasing importance of the notion of a prior 'conception' of God's truth to Dante's evolving self-presentation as poet, see the note to Inferno XXXII.1-9 and Hollander (Dante: A Life in Works [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001]), p. 59.
Two authors stand behind this passage, as has been variously understood in the commentary tradition. The first is St. Paul (II Cor. 11:27): 'in labor and hardships, in many a vigil, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness.' Paul tells us of his trials and tribulations that prepared him for his visionary rapture, when he was taken up into the third heaven (II Cor. 12:2). The first commentator to make this connection, which now seems fairly obvious, was apparently Torraca (comm. to vv. 37-39). See also Grandgent (comm. to verse 38), Sapegno (comm. to verse 38), Fallani (comm. to vv. 37-38), and Singleton (comm. to vv. 37-38). The context fits: we are about to witness a Pauline vision (one which happens, however, to be more Johannine in nature, as we shall see). However, there is another source, a much less apparently appropriate one, given the religious context of the entire scene: Virgil's invocation in his seventh book (Aen. VII.641): 'now, goddesses, cast Helicon forth and move your song.' 'Helicon, celebrated range of mountains in Boeotia, sacred to Apollo and the Muses, in which rose the famous fountains of the Muses, Aganippe and Hippocrene. Dante (perhaps through a misunderstanding of Aen. VII.641; Aen. X.163) speaks of Helicon itself as a fountain' (Toynbee “Elicona” [Concise Dante Dictionary]). (He may, on the other hand, be indicating all the sources of poetic expression by their common site.)
This invocation in Virgil's poem marks the transition to the 'Iliadic' military second half of the epic. That might not seem particularly promising as a parallel here. On the other hand, just as Virgil, some 600 lines into the second half of his martial epic places another invocation, so does Dante, some 185 lines into the second half of his theological epic, insert one of his. For the first notice of the Virgilian reference see Tommaseo (comm. to vv. 40-42). See also Scartazzini (comm. to verse 40), Poletto (comm. to these verses), Grandgent (comm. to verse 40), Casini/Barbi (comm. to verse 40), and almost all the recent commentators starting with Sapegno (comm. to verse 40). For the meaning of the word merce (translated as 'reward'), we follow the reasoning of Bosco/Reggio (comm. to verse 39), who argue that the more common understanding ('aid' or 'help') is countered by the rhetoric of the tercet, in which Dante presents himself as having suffered for the Muses and as now claiming what is due him.
As for Urania, here the highest of the Muses and their leader (where Calliope, muse of epic, had held that role in Purg. I.9-12), as the muse of astronomy, of 'high things,' she is needed to give the poet fit words to convey the conceptual truth of the pageant to come. Dante has seen it, but now, coming to write of it, he requires an understanding of its theological meaning in order to give it proper expression.
The thoughts behind the verses are 'hard' because of their exalted and difficult subject – allegories of the Bible – according to Marina De Fazio (“Purgatorio XXIX,” in Dante's “Divine Comedy,” Introductory Readings II: “Purgatorio,” ed. Tibor Wlassics [Lectura Dantis (virginiana), 12, supplement, Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1993]), p. 435.
Like Matelda, who also seemed other than what she finally comes to mean to the protagonist, the seven candlesticks (verse 50) are perceived first and erroneously by him as seven trees. Carroll (in his lengthy comm. to vv. 64-150) comments upon them as follows: 'They represent the seven “gifts of the Spirit,” as named in the Vulgate of Isaiah 11:2-3, namely, Wisdom, Intellect, Counsel, Fortitude, Knowledge, Piety, and Fear of the Lord.' Dante discusses them in Convivio IV.xxi.11-12.
The 'common object' is a technical term derived from Scholastic discussions of sense perception. Strictly speaking, it refers to things that can be perceived simultaneously by more than one of the five senses (e.g., taste and touch and perhaps smell for something in one's mouth; or sight, smell, and hearing [an animal in a field]) and are thus more likely to be misperceived. For instance, one might have a pebble in one's mouth and smell a clove and think the pebble is a candy; or one might be looking at a horse in the distance in a cow pasture and smell manure, thus taking horse for cow. Dante discusses the term as the sensibile comune (that which is perceivable by several senses) in Convivio III.ix.6.
Dante here has two senses in play, sight and hearing. He was thus at first unable to make out what is being uttered (see Purg. XXIX.36) nor what is present at the uttering. By now he realizes that the 'trees' are candlesticks and the song 'Hosanna.' Dante is, strictly speaking, 'cheating,' in that it is not the combination of confused senses that caused his problem, but merely distance, in each case.
The word Osanna, an untranslatable expression of joyous praise, is Dante's most frequent Hebraism in the Comedy (see the note to Purg. XI.11). It derives from the salute to Jesus offered as he enters Jerusalem (Matthew 21:19 ['Hosanna in altissimis']; Mark 11:10 ['Hosanna in excelsis']).
The candlesticks, now seen as a single shape, are all flaming at their tips, brighter than the full moon at its apex in the sky on a clear night. This image, and many that are to follow, reflect passages in the Book of Revelation (here Apoc. 4:5), the seven lamps burning before the great throne of Judgment, 'which are the seven spirits of God,' as was first noted by Pietro di Dante (comm. to verse 50).
For a useful discussion of the meaning of stupore (amazement) see Marina De Fazio (“Purgatorio XXIX,” in Dante's “Divine Comedy,” Introductory Readings II: “Purgatorio,” ed. Tibor Wlassics [Lectura Dantis (virginiana), 12, supplement, Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1993]), pp. 436-45. She considers this passage alongside its precursor, with which it has evident similarities (Purg. XXVIII.139-148), in which Statius and Virgil smile at the revelation that this place, the earthly paradise, was what they understood as Parnassus. Now Dante seeks only to see the reaction of Virgil to the pageant of Revelation and finds that his guide is amazed as are those who cannot understand, for all their wonder and reverence, what they are gazing at. Thus, for her, Dante's ammirazione and Virgil's stupore have different valences. For this to be Virgil's final observed behavior in the poem shows Dante's desire to control his admiration for his auctor. Botterill (“Purgatorio XXVII,” in Dante's “Divine Comedy,” Introductory Readings II: “Purgatorio,” ed. Tibor Wlassics [Lectura Dantis (virginiana), 12, supplement, Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1993]), p. 405, on the other hand, argues that in these verses, for the first and only time in the poem, Dante and Virgil are 'on a footing of absolute equality.' On stupore as the sign of Virgil's incomprehension, see Hollander (Il Virgilio dantesco: tragedia nella “Commedia” [Florence: Olschki, 1983]), p. 133n. See Dante's own gloss on stupore (Conv. IV.xxv.5), where it is read as stordimento (stupefaction, bewilderment).
The reference to the modest gait of newly wedded brides as they leave the church to go to their husband's house introduces the theme of the wedding ceremony to the procession and to the poem, where it will reappear in a number of guises, including parody, throughout the rest of the scenes in the earthly paradise.
Matelda calls Dante's and our attention to what will be, at that moment, the theological high point in the poem, the pageant of the Church Triumphant. For useful studies of the entirety of the scene that follows, see Edward Moore (Studies in Dante, Third Series: Miscellaneous Essays [Oxford: Clarendon, 1968 (1903)]), pp. 178-220, “The Apocalyptic Vision”; Sergio Cristaldi (“Dalle beatitudini all'Apocalisse: Il Nuovo Testamento nella Commedia,” Letture classensi 17 [1988], pp. 23-67); Lino Pertile (La puttana e il gigante: Dal Cantico dei Cantici al Paradiso Terrestre di Dante [Ravenna: Longo, 1998]), pp. 23-42 (for the particular relevance of the Song of Songs). For the artistic sources of this procession, particularly those found in mosaics in and near Ravenna, see Bosco/Reggio (introductory note to this canto). For the iconography and meaning of the symbolic elements in it, see Joan Isobel Friedman (“La processione mistica di Dante: allegoria e iconografia nel canto XXIX del Purgatorio,” in Dante e le forme dell'allegoresi, ed. M. Picone [Ravenna: Longo, 1987], pp. 125-48). And see Lansing (“Narrative Design in Dante's Earthly Paradise,” Dante Studies 112 [1994], pp. 101-13) for the way in which Dante has designed the earthly paradise as an 'eighth terrace.' For the notion that the arrival of the pageant marks a change from the 'horizontal' nature of the Old Testament model for the poem in the Exodus to a New Testament's 'vertical' expression present in the Transfiguration, see Jeffrey Schnapp (“Trasfigurazione e metamorfosi nel Paradiso dantesco,” in Dante e la Bibbia, ed. G. Barblan [Florence: Olschki, 1988], pp. 273-92).
Those dressed in the white of faith in Christ to come (we will soon find out that they represent the Hebrew Scriptures) are presented as followers of the seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit or of the seven spirits of God (Apoc. 4:4), not as the leaders they surely were on their own terms. Simone Marchesi (“A Rhetoric of Faith: Dante's Poetics in the Transition from De vulgari eloquentia to the Commedia” [Doctoral dissertation, Princeton University, 2002]) argues that Augustine's discussion of biblical hermeneutics in De doctrina christiana (II.7) helps to define more precisely the nature and role of the seven candlesticks in the procession. Augustine, prescribing a spiritual discipline for biblical interpreters, patterns his instruction on the seven spiritual gifts (Isaiah 11:2-3). These gifts are the spirits of wisdom, intellect, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of God (sapientia, intellectus, consilium, fortitudo, scientia, pietas, and timor Dei). Just as in Dante's procession the candlesticks precede the pageant of the canonical books and cover them with their sevenfold light, so in Augustine the discussion of the seven gifts is preliminary to his treatment of the biblical canon in De doctrina and frames that discussion.
Dante, facing east, has the stream to his left, as he has all along, and sees the pageant approach him on the far side of the narrow water.
That the poet emphasizes his left side so strongly may indicate his sense of his mortal unworthiness to look upon such wonders.
The candlestick-paintbrushes leave streaks above the entire procession, as the sun colors the rainbow and the moon (Delia, Diana, born on the island of Delos) its halo.
These banners form, as it were, a canopy over the entire procession. The ten paces that separate the two outer ones are sometimes allegorized by commentators. On the other hand, they may simply imply the triumphal perfection of the procession, since ten is known as the number of God's perfection (as is 100, 1,000, etc.), since 10 = 1.
The twelve ranks, two abreast, dressed in white (see vv. 64-66) and crowned with white lilies, are the twenty-four books of the Old Testament. In the Book of Revelation (Apoc. 4:4) there are twenty-four elders, clothed in white, seated around the throne of Judgment. They are sometimes interpreted as representing the twelve tribes of Israel and the twelve apostles. Here they clearly represent the books of the Old Testament according to St. Jerome's accountancy in his Prologue to his Latin translation of the Bible. (Pietro di Dante [comm. to vv. 82-84] cites Jerome's discussion of the books of the Old Testament in his Prologue to the Book of Daniel.) It is clear also that Dante is in this part of the procession referring to books and not authors, for these would be fewer (e.g., Moses was 'author' of five of them). He will change tactics when he comes to the New Testament (see vv. 133-144).
The faith in Christ to come of the Hebrew scriptures is indicated by the elders' salute to Mary as mother of Christ. See Luke 1.28: 'Blessèd are you among women.' Mary does not appear in the procession.
The four creatures clad in the green of hope are the representations of the four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, traditionally portrayed, respectively, as angel (or man), lion, ox, and eagle. These identifications derive from Ezechiel (10:4-14) and the Book of Revelation (Apoc. 4:6-8).
The six wings are found in the Apocalypse (Apoc. 4:8) but not in Ezechiel (1:6), where they are four (see verse 105). The reference is to the hundred eyes of Ovid's Argus (see Metam. I.568-723). Jove chose Io as a victim of his desire. When jealous Juno came near them, he changed Io into a heifer, but Juno remained suspicious and sent Argus, with his hundred eyes, to watch over Io. Jove despatched Mercury to slay him, which he did after telling a long tale that closed his eyes in sleep. Juno put those hundred eyes into the feathers of the peacock.
Dante's reference intrinsically distinguishes between the eyes of dead Argus and these living visionary eyes that have loftier purpose than guarding pretty heifers. For a study of the resonances of the Io narrative in the following cantos see Jessica Levenstein (“The Pilgrim, the Poet, and the Cowgirl: Dante's Alter-Io in Purgatorio XXX-XXXI,” Dante Studies 114 [1996], pp. 189-208).
This is the fifth address to the reader in this cantica. For the poet's insistence on the constraints on his ability to expand his verse, see Purgatorio XXXIII.139-141 and the note to Purgatorio XXXIII.136-141.
Dante refers us to the lengthy passage in Ezechiel (see the note to Purg. XXIX.94-96) for the details of the appearance of the four gospel beasts.
Lombardi (comm. to vv. 104-105) is perhaps unique in his understanding of why Dante preferred John's six to Ezechiel's four. Bishop Primasius, he says, the student of St. Augustine, commenting on the fourth chapter of the Apocalypse, said that the beasts have six wings because six is the number of the sixth and final age, after which we will come to the fullness of time (plenitudo temporum). There is nothing like consensus on a solution for this problem, but Lombardi's thesis is, if nothing else, original.
Dante's claim here mirrors the pretext of the entire poem; his experience of the otherworld is to be treated as actual and not as imagined. As a result, his authority as teller of the tale is absolute, and even biblical testimony is secondary to his own. Lucia Battaglia Ricci, in her essay “Polisemanticità e struttura della Commedia” (in her Dante e la tradizione letteraria medievale [Pisa: Giardini, 1983 (1975)]), pp. 92-95, saw that this phrasing insisted on the historical footing of Dante's experience of the pageant. In the same year, Hollander had made a more pointed observation (if mistakenly referring it to the griffin rather than to the four gospel beasts), which he repeated soon after (“Literary Consciousness and the Consciousness of Literature,” Sewanee Review 83 [1975], p. 123; “Dante Theologus-Poeta,” Dante Studies 94 [1976], p. 112; “Dante's Poetics,” Sewanee Review 85 [1977], pp. 406-7). See the second of these passages: 'Where does authority lie here? In the primacy of the author's vision. A writer willing to accept a fictional pretext for his work would never have written so prideful a statement, would have been content with the more “honest” and humble “And here I follow John.”' Several other American Dantists now seem committed to this view (e.g., Hawkins, Barolini, Kleinhenz). It is also true that at moments in the commentary tradition there has been an awareness of a certain self-consciousness in Dante's locution. See Jacopo della Lana (comm. to vv. 103-105): 'the vision, similar to mine, of John the Evangelist.' But the far more common response is fairly represented by the paraphrase found in the Anonimo Fiorentino (comm. to vv. 100-105): 'I agree with John.' Among more recent commentators perhaps only Poletto (comm. to vv. 100-105) seems to be aware that Dante has seized more authority than he really should have. Poletto is reminded of someone whom he knew who, involved in a discussion of Dante, announced to those assembled that 'even Vellutello agrees with my opinion.'
The chariot, as will become evident, represents the Church, an opinion for which there is essential consensus. Its two wheels, however, are variously interpreted. Do they represent the two Testaments (but these are fully represented in the pageant, as Bosco/Reggio [comm. to verse 107] rightly object)? Wisdom and Love? The active and the contemplative life? We probably need to understand literally that Dante wanted his chariot to look like something, not a four-wheeled ox-cart, but a two-wheeled Roman triumphal chariot. It may be better to leave allegory to one side. Scartazzini (comm. to vv. 106-120) offers a scathing review of the attempts mentioned above and still others.
The griffin has only recently become a cause for controversy, even though for six hundred years it was assumed to signify Christ (e.g., Pietro [Pietro1, comm. to this verse], for whom 'Gryphon... figurat Christum' [the griffin figures Christ]). Beginning with Scartazzini (comm. to vv. 106-120), commentators point to Isidore of Seville's description (Etym. XII.xxii.17) of the griffin as being half lion and half eagle, and then going on to say that Christ is like both lion and eagle. Sergio Cristaldi's neglected and useful study (“'Per dissimilia.' Saggio sul grifone dantesco,” Atti e memorie dell'Arcadia 9 [1988-89], pp. 57-94) of the griffin helps to address a number of crucial questions. Taking issue with the 'English school' of rather fanciful interpretations of the biform beast, he gives reasons to disregard the opinion of Colin Hardie (“The Symbol of the Gryphon in Purgatorio XXIX.108 and Following Cantos,” in Centenary Essays on Dante by Members of the Oxford Dante Society [Oxford: Clarendon, 1965]), p. 123, for whom the beast should be read as 'a symbol of Dante's own nature restored, i.e., of his two “souls,” animal and spiritual,' and that of Peter Dronke (“The Procession in Dante's Purgatorio,” in Cambridge Readings in Dante's “Comedy,” ed. Kenelm Foster and Patrick Boyde [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981 (1978)], pp. 114-37), who thinks the griffin represents the daimón that Neoplatonists saw as guiding the soul. And Cristaldi's main discussion answers the central objection to the standard view of the griffin as emblem of Christ posed by Peter Armour (how can a hybrid symbolize Christ?) before Armour (Dante's Griffin and the History of the World: A Study of the Earthly Paradise [“Purgatorio” XXIX-XXXIII] [Oxford: Clarendon, 1989]) made it, showing that Dante was employing the method embraced by Dionysius the Areopagite, as cited by Thomas Aquinas (Summa I.i.9): 'It is more fitting that divine things be put forward in Scripture in the figurations of vile bodies than in those of noble ones' and goes on to point out (p. 90) that Dante deals with matters propounded in the next article of the Summa in Paradiso IV.43-48. Cristaldi also cites (p. 70) Richard of St. Victor on the legitimate comparisons of Christ both to lion and to lamb. Christ was also, we might reflect, at times referred to as a worm, in a tradition reflecting Job (25:6: 'How much less [is] man, that is a worm? And the son of man, that is a worm?' Bildad's mournful view of humankind is ransomed by St. Gregory the Great (Moralia in Iob, Patrologia Latina LXXVI, col. 560), who also cites Psalms 21:7 (22:6): 'But I am a worm, and no man' in order to make these words fit Christ, as had, indeed, St. Augustine before him (Enarrationes in Psalmos, PL XXXVI, col. 137), and see pseudo-Augustine, Sermones suppositii de tempore, CLI.4, PL XXXIX, col. 2038: 'Christus in cruce vermis....' [Christ on the cross a worm]). Such a comparison makes the griffin seem, by comparison, noble indeed. And now see Lino Pertile (La puttana e il gigante: Dal Cantico dei Cantici al Paradiso Terrestre di Dante [Ravenna: Longo, 1998]), pp. 143-62, whose arguments in favor of the griffin as symbolizing Christ seem difficult to counter.
The griffin's enormous wings go up, one on either side of the central pennon made by the fourth of the seven candlesticks' flaming paintbrush, so as not to disturb the canopy in any way.
His mixture of immortal gold in the part of him that was eagle and the more 'human' red-and-white parts of the lion would surely seem further to identify him with Christ.
This chariot is not only more splendid than those awarded either to Scipio Africanus (185-129 B.C.), conqueror of Hannibal and destroyer of Carthage, or to the great Augustus himself (63 B.C.-A.D. 14), the emperor at the 'fullness of time,' when Christ was born in a world at peace under the rule of Augustus. Dante goes still further: this chariot makes the sun, become a chariot for Phaeton's wild misadventure (Metam. II.47-324), seem a poor thing by comparison. It is striking that this third chariot involves a tragic event – Phaeton's death – while the first two are used to glorious purpose. We are reminded of God's mercy and of his justice.
That the most significant element in the procession is a triumphal chariot makes it difficult not to see that this pageant represents the Church Triumphant, i.e., the Church as it shall be in eternity. It is only in Purgatorio XXXII that we shall observe a representation of the Church Militant. There is a resemblance in this rhythm to that which we have experienced on all the seven terraces, namely exempla of the opposed virtue preceding those of the vice to be purged. Here the perfected Church precedes its temporally prior and persecuted self in all its tribulations. For this observation, see Richard Lansing (“Narrative Design in Dante's Earthly Paradise,” Dante Studies 112 [1994]), pp. 106-8.
This part of the allegory escapes no one: the three ladies represent the three theological virtues, charity (red), hope (green), and faith (white). They stand at the right wheel of the cart, its better side. Faith, necessary to a proper form of love, first leads their dance; then it is the turn of Charity, necessary to a proper form of Hope.
At the left wheel we find the four cardinal virtues, associated with Roman virtue by their purple robes, temperance, justice, fortitude, and prudence (represented by the three-eyed lady, since she is knowledgeable about past, present, and future).
We now come to the second Christian section of the pageant, those who came after Christ. We recognize Luke as the doctor he was, author of the Acts of the Apostles; Paul as the sword-bearer (see Ephesians 6:17), where Paul speaks of the sword of the spirit, that is, the word of God). And, as Singleton points out (comm. to vv. 139-140), the sword also represents Paul's martyrdom.
Here Dante uses the authors of New Testament texts to represent their works, and not vice versa, as he had done for the Old Testament. See the note to Purgatorio XXIX.83-84.
The writers of the lesser Epistles (James, Peter, John, and Jude) are followed by the Apocalypse, its author John depicted as sleeping the mystic sleep of vision.
These seven authors or books all are typified not by the white of faith, as was the Old Testament, but by the red of love (for Christ come).
On the word brolo (which we have translated 'garland') see Moore (Studies in Dante, Third Series: Miscellaneous Essays [Oxford: Clarendon, 1968 (1903)]), pp. 216-18, arguing that, since the unusual word seems to have a sense of rough wooded land, of thickets, it thus emphasizes the thick, luxuriant character of the flowers that these elders wear upon their heads.
Gian Luca Pierotti (“La filia solis di Bonaventura e i cambiamenti di colore in Par. XXVII,” Lettere Italiane 33 [1981], p. 220 (n. 12) has offered the following census of the pageant:
1) 24 books of the Old Testament
2) 4 gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John
3) 1 griffin
4) 3 theological virtues (love, hope, faith)
5) 4 cardinal virtues (prudence, fortitude, temperance, justice)
6) 2 'authors' of Book of Acts & major Epistles: Luke and Paul
7) 4 'authors' of lesser Epistles: Peter, James, John, Jude
8) 1 Apocalypse: John
Total: 43
Canto XXX will add 100 angels and Beatrice to bring the number to 144, the mystical number (144,000) of the Church Triumphant. See Revelation 7:4, 14.1, 14:3.
The canto ends with the thunderclap, arresting all, from the front to the back of the procession, as they await an obviously momentous event.
Commentary text is copyrighted and reproduced by permission.
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Cantando come donna innamorata,
continüò col fin di sue parole:
“Beati quorum tecta sunt peccata!”
E come ninfe che si givan sole
per le salvatiche ombre, disïando
qual di veder, qual di fuggir lo sole,
allor si mosse contra 'l fiume, andando
su per la riva; e io pari di lei,
picciol passo con picciol seguitando.
Non eran cento tra ' suoi passi e ' miei,
quando le ripe igualmente dier volta,
per modo ch'a levante mi rendei.
Né ancor fu così nostra via molta,
quando la donna tutta a me si torse,
dicendo: “Frate mio, guarda e ascolta.”
Ed ecco un lustro sùbito trascorse
da tutte parti per la gran foresta,
tal che di balenar mi mise in forse.
Ma perché 'l balenar, come vien, resta,
e quel, durando, più e più splendeva,
nel mio pensier dicea: “Che cosa è questa?”
E una melodia dolce correva
per l'aere luminoso; onde buon zelo
mi fé riprender l'ardimento d'Eva,
che là dove ubidia la terra e 'l cielo,
femmina, sola e pur testé formata,
non sofferse di star sotto alcun velo;
sotto 'l qual se divota fosse stata,
avrei quelle ineffabili delizie
sentite prima e più lunga fïata.
Mentr' io m'andava tra tante primizie
de l'etterno piacer tutto sospeso,
e disïoso ancora a più letizie,
dinanzi a noi, tal quale un foco acceso,
ci si fé l'aere sotto i verdi rami;
e 'l dolce suon per canti era già inteso.
O sacrosante Vergini, se fami,
freddi o vigilie mai per voi soffersi,
cagion mi sprona ch'io mercé vi chiami.
Or convien che Elicona per me versi,
e Uranìe m'aiuti col suo coro
forti cose a pensar mettere in versi.
Poco più oltre, sette alberi d'oro
falsava nel parere il lungo tratto
del mezzo ch'era ancor tra noi e loro;
ma quand' i' fui sì presso di lor fatto,
che l'obietto comun, che 'l senso inganna,
non perdea per distanza alcun su atto,
la virtù ch'a ragion discorso ammanna,
sì com' elli eran candelabri apprese,
e ne le voci del cantare “Osanna.”
Di sopra fiammeggiava il bello arnese
più chiaro assai che luna per sereno
di mezza notte nel suo mezzo mese.
Io mi rivolsi d'ammirazion pieno
al buon Virgilio, ed esso mi rispuose
con vista carca di stupor non meno.
Indi rendei l'aspetto a l'alte cose
che si movieno incontr' a noi sì tardi,
che foran vinte da novelle spose.
La donna mi sgridò: “Perché pur ardi
sì ne l'affetto de le vive luci,
e ciò che vien di retro a lor non guardi?”
Genti vid' io allor, come a lor duci,
venire appresso, vestite di bianco;
e tal candor di qua già mai non fuci.
L'acqua imprendëa dal sinistro fianco,
e rendea me la mia sinistra costa,
s'io riguardava in lei, come specchio anco.
Quand' io da la mia riva ebbi tal posta,
che solo il fiume mi facea distante,
per veder meglio ai passi diedi sosta,
e vidi le fiammelle andar davante,
lasciando dietro a sé l'aere dipinto,
e di tratti pennelli avean sembiante;
sì che lì sopra rimanea distinto
di sette liste, tutte in quei colori
onde fa l'arco il Sole e Delia il cinto.
Questi ostendali in dietro eran maggiori
che la mia vista; e, quanto a mio avviso,
diece passi distavan quei di fori.
Sotto così bel ciel com' io diviso,
ventiquattro seniori, a due a due,
coronati venien di fiordaliso.
Tutti cantavan: “Benedicta tue
ne le figlie d'Adamo, e benedette
sieno in etterno le bellezze tue!”
Poscia che i fiori e l'altre fresche erbette
a rimpetto di me da l'altra sponda
libere fuor da quelle genti elette,
sì come luce luce in ciel seconda,
vennero appresso lor quattro animali,
coronati ciascun di verde fronda.
Ognuno era pennuto di sei ali;
le penne piene d'occhi; e li occhi d'Argo,
se fosser vivi, sarebber cotali.
A descriver lor forme più non spargo
rime, lettor; ch'altra spesa mi strigne,
tanto ch'a questa non posso esser largo;
ma leggi Ezechïel, che li dipigne
come li vide da la fredda parte
venir con vento e con nube e con igne;
e quali i troverai ne le sue carte,
tali eran quivi, salvo ch'a le penne
Giovanni è meco e da lui si diparte.
Lo spazio dentro a lor quattro contenne
un carro, in su due rote, trïunfale,
ch'al collo d'un grifon tirato venne.
Esso tendeva in sù l'una e l'altra ale
tra la mezzana e le tre e tre liste,
sì ch'a nulla, fendendo, facea male.
Tanto salivan che non eran viste;
le membra d'oro avea quant' era uccello,
e bianche l'altre, di vermiglio miste.
Non che Roma di carro così bello
rallegrasse Affricano, o vero Augusto,
ma quel del Sol saria pover con ello;
quel del Sol che, svïando, fu combusto
per l'orazion de la Terra devota,
quando fu Giove arcanamente giusto.
Tre donne in giro da la destra rota
venian danzando; l'una tanto rossa
ch'a pena fora dentro al foco nota;
l'altr' era come se le carni e l'ossa
fossero state di smeraldo fatte;
la terza parea neve testé mossa;
e or parëan da la bianca tratte,
or da la rossa; e dal canto di questa
l'altre toglien l'andare e tarde e ratte.
Da la sinistra quattro facean festa,
in porpore vestite, dietro al modo
d'una di lor ch'avea tre occhi in testa.
Appresso tutto il pertrattato nodo
vidi due vecchi in abito dispari,
ma pari in atto e onesto e sodo.
L'un si mostrava alcun de' famigliari
di quel sommo Ipocràte che natura
a li animali fé ch'ell' ha più cari;
mostrava l'altro la contraria cura
con una spada lucida e aguta,
tal che di qua dal rio mi fé paura.
Poi vidi quattro in umile paruta;
e di retro da tutti un vecchio solo
venir, dormendo, con la faccia arguta.
E questi sette col primaio stuolo
erano abitüati, ma di gigli
dintorno al capo non facëan brolo,
anzi di rose e d'altri fior vermigli;
giurato avria poco lontano aspetto
che tutti ardesser di sopra da' cigli.
E quando il carro a me fu a rimpetto,
un tuon s'udì, e quelle genti degne
parvero aver l'andar più interdetto,
fermandosi ivi con le prime insegne.
Singing like unto an enamoured lady
She, with the ending of her words, continued:
"Beati quorum tecta sunt peccata."
And even as Nymphs, that wandered all alone
Among the sylvan shadows, sedulous
One to avoid and one to see the sun,
She then against the stream moved onward, going
Along the bank, and I abreast of her,
Her little steps with little steps attending.
Between her steps and mine were not a hundred,
When equally the margins gave a turn,
In such a way, that to the East I faced.
Nor even thus our way continued far
Before the lady wholly turned herself
Unto me, saying, "Brother, look and listen!"
And lo! a sudden lustre ran across
On every side athwart the spacious forest,
Such that it made me doubt if it were lightning.
But since the lightning ceases as it comes,
And that continuing brightened more and more,
Within my thought I said, "What thing is this?"
And a delicious melody there ran
Along the luminous air, whence holy zeal
Made me rebuke the hardihood of Eve;
For there where earth and heaven obedient were,
The woman only, and but just created,
Could not endure to stay 'neath any veil;
Underneath which had she devoutly stayed,
I sooner should have tasted those delights
Ineffable, and for a longer time.
While 'mid such manifold first-fruits I walked
Of the eternal pleasure all enrapt,
And still solicitous of more delights,
In front of us like an enkindled fire
Became the air beneath the verdant boughs,
And the sweet sound as singing now was heard.
O Virgins sacrosanct! if ever hunger,
Vigils, or cold for you I have endured,
The occasion spurs me their reward to claim!
Now Helicon must needs pour forth for me,
And with her choir Urania must assist me,
To put in verse things difficult to think.
A little farther on, seven trees of gold
In semblance the long space still intervening
Between ourselves and them did counterfeit;
But when I had approached so near to them
The common object, which the sense deceives,
Lost not by distance any of its marks,
The faculty that lends discourse to reason
Did apprehend that they were candlesticks,
And in the voices of the song "Hosanna!"
Above them flamed the harness beautiful,
Far brighter than the moon in the serene
Of midnight, at the middle of her month.
I turned me round, with admiration filled,
To good Virgilius, and he answered me
With visage no less full of wonderment.
Then back I turned my face to those high things,
Which moved themselves towards us so sedately,
They had been distanced by new-wedded brides.
The lady chid me: "Why dost thou burn only
So with affection for the living lights,
And dost not look at what comes after them?"
Then saw I people, as behind their leaders,
Coming behind them, garmented in white,
And such a whiteness never was on earth.
The water on my left flank was resplendent,
And back to me reflected my left side,
E'en as a mirror, if I looked therein.
When I upon my margin had such post
That nothing but the stream divided us,
Better to see I gave my steps repose;
And I beheld the flamelets onward go,
Leaving behind themselves the air depicted,
And they of trailing pennons had the semblance,
So that it overhead remained distinct
With sevenfold lists, all of them of the colours
Whence the sun's bow is made, and Delia's girdle.
These standards to the rearward longer were
Than was my sight; and, as it seemed to me,
Ten paces were the outermost apart.
Under so fair a heaven as I describe
The four and twenty Elders, two by two,
Came on incoronate with flower-de-luce.
They all of them were singing: "Blessed thou
Among the daughters of Adam art, and blessed
For evermore shall be thy loveliness."
After the flowers and other tender grasses
In front of me upon the other margin
Were disencumbered of that race elect,
Even as in heaven star followeth after star,
There came close after them four animals,
Incoronate each one with verdant leaf.
Plumed with six wings was every one of them,
The plumage full of eyes; the eyes of Argus
If they were living would be such as these.
Reader! to trace their forms no more I waste
My rhymes; for other spendings press me so,
That I in this cannot be prodigal.
But read Ezekiel, who depicteth them
As he beheld them from the region cold
Coming with cloud, with whirlwind, and with fire;
And such as thou shalt find them in his pages,
Such were they here; saving that in their plumage
John is with me, and differeth from him.
The interval between these four contained
A chariot triumphal on two wheels,
Which by a Griffin's neck came drawn along;
And upward he extended both his wings
Between the middle list and three and three,
So that he injured none by cleaving it.
So high they rose that they were lost to sight;
His limbs were gold, so far as he was bird,
And white the others with vermilion mingled.
Not only Rome with no such splendid car
E'er gladdened Africanus, or Augustus,
But poor to it that of the Sun would be,—
That of the Sun, which swerving was burnt up
At the importunate orison of Earth,
When Jove was so mysteriously just.
Three maidens at the right wheel in a circle
Came onward dancing; one so very red
That in the fire she hardly had been noted.
The second was as if her flesh and bones
Had all been fashioned out of emerald;
The third appeared as snow but newly fallen.
And now they seemed conducted by the white,
Now by the red, and from the song of her
The others took their step, or slow or swift.
Upon the left hand four made holiday
Vested in purple, following the measure
Of one of them with three eyes m her head.
In rear of all the group here treated of
Two old men I beheld, unlike in habit,
But like in gait, each dignified and grave.
One showed himself as one of the disciples
Of that supreme Hippocrates, whom nature
Made for the animals she holds most dear;
Contrary care the other manifested,
With sword so shining and so sharp, it caused
Terror to me on this side of the river.
Thereafter four I saw of humble aspect,
And behind all an aged man alone
Walking in sleep with countenance acute.
And like the foremost company these seven
Were habited; yet of the flower-de-luce
No garland round about the head they wore,
But of the rose, and other flowers vermilion;
At little distance would the sight have sworn
That all were in a flame above their brows.
And when the car was opposite to me
Thunder was heard; and all that folk august
Seemed to have further progress interdicted,
There with the vanward ensigns standing still.
Echoing Guido Cavalcanti (see the note to Purg. XXVIII.43-48), the poet begins this canto by returning to the situation that we found early in the last one: Dante thinking that a beautiful young woman was in love with him. Now the poet himself seems to confirm this. We, nonetheless, probably realize that the song Matelda sings is once again utterly different from the sexually charged pastorella and is indeed once again a Psalm 31:1 (32:1): 'Blessed are they whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered.' As Singleton (comm. to verse 3) points out, St. Paul (Romans 4:3-8) interprets this Psalm as indicating God's reward for just humans. However, this is not, in short, to 'fuse' the 'theme of profane love' with that of 'charity, love of a higher order' (comm. to verse 1), but simultaneously to include and supersede it. Matelda is a very different sort of 'shepherd girl' from the one we found in Cavalcanti; that seems to be Dante's main point. She does indeed love the protagonist, but she is not in love with him, as he at first believed. The word that describes her affective state, innamorata (touched by love), here appears for the first time in the poem. It seems to collocate itself in the Cavalcantian world of sexual love. However, as a graduate student at Princeton, Sheila Colwell, pointed out in the spring of 1984, the verb innamorare, in an inflected form or as a past participle, will be used eight more times in Paradiso, always to indicate, as we may realize either now or retrospectively, heavenly affection. (See Par. VII.143, Par. XIV.127, Par. XX.64, Par. XXIII.70, Par. XXV.44, Par. XXVII.88, Par. XXXI.5, Par. XXXII.105).
Why are these two groups of nymphs made part of the simile, when Dante and Matelda are moving near one another and in the same direction? Benvenuto (comm. to vv. 4-9) glosses the tercet simply. In the old days some nymphs wanted to leave the shade for the sun, while others desired to leave the sun for the shade. Beginning with Tommaseo (comm. to these verses) some commentators have suggested a relationship with Virgil's two bands of nymphs (Georgics IV.383), one hundred guarding the woods, another one hundred guarding the streams ('centum quae silvas, centum quae flumina servant'). Neither the gloss nor the citation, however, answers the question, above, that has bothered many commentators, none more than Porena (comm. to vv. 4-7), who posits a lost classical source to explain our puzzlement but has not convinced others of this hypothesis. It would seem that Dante wishes to express only the thought that, just as in the distant (classical) past nymphs would move purposefully from one place to another in the forest, so did he and Matelda move from where they had been standing to go somewhere else. However, the brightness that they shall soon find would seem intrinsically to associate them with those nymphs who move from shade to sunshine.
Since the stream normally flows east to west but now makes a 90o veer to the north, Matelda, followed by Dante, heads south for fifty paces until it makes a second 90o bend, and they are once again heading due east. Why the poet wanted to have this bend in the river, which accomplishes the removal of Dante and Matelda to a point some fifty feet south of where they had been and from which they resume movement in an easterly direction, has not been clear to the commentators.
Matelda's addressing Dante as 'frate' (brother) reminds him (and the reader) of his earlier misunderstanding of the nature of her affection for him (see Purg. XXVIII.43-45).
The lustrous presence is so bright that the protagonist, forgetting his recent and abundant instruction by Matelda on the absence of 'real' weather here (Purg. XXVIII.85-126), at first takes this shining for lightning, until its duration makes it clear that it is something altogether other. In this way the poet builds suspense for the pageant yet to come.
It is probably not without purpose that, near the beginning of each of these cantos (XXVIII and XXIX), in which his will is finally integral and good (see Purg. XXVII.140 and the note to Purg. XXVII.139-141), the poet reveals that the protagonist's problems now center in his weak understanding. Thus this second part of the poem anchors itself in the program of the correction of his intellect, which will last until Paradiso XXX.
The protagonist hears a melody (we will be allowed to know its lyric component at Purg. XXIX.51) so beautiful that righteous indignation causes him to condemn Eve for depriving him of immortal life in this beautiful garden.
The veil that she would not accept is variously glossed, from the first commentators onward, either as being negative (ignorance) or positive (obedience), and some (e.g., Grabher [comm. to vv. 19-30]) have believed that it has both valences.
The primizie (first fruits) are the first fruits of God's eternal love as these are found here in Eden, 'this foretaste of eternal bliss,' promising the joys of eternity.
This second reference to the growing intensity of this son et lumière again whets the reader's appetite to know what lies just ahead (see Purg. XXIX.21).
This is the fourth of the Commedia's nine invocations (see the note to Inf. II.7-9). The first to identify the nine invocations of the Comedy correctly was apparently Fabio Fabbri (“Le invocazioni nella Divina Commedia,” Giornale dantesco 18 [1910], pp. 186-92). See also Hollander (“The Invocations of the Commedia,” Yearbook of Italian Studies 3 [1976], pp. 235-40). Singleton (comm. to these verses) is in error (but has much company in this) in referring only to the first six of these.
Fallani (comm. to vv. 37-38) rightly explains that 'the marvelous vision is entirely contained in the poet's memory' and that Dante now requires aid only in finding the correct words to express it. (See the note to Inf. XXXII.10-12 in response to a similar second invocation in the first cantica.) In other words, he now requires aid from holy Muses to express in poetry the deeper truth of what he has seen in the pageant representing the Church Triumphant. For the increasing importance of the notion of a prior 'conception' of God's truth to Dante's evolving self-presentation as poet, see the note to Inferno XXXII.1-9 and Hollander (Dante: A Life in Works [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001]), p. 59.
Two authors stand behind this passage, as has been variously understood in the commentary tradition. The first is St. Paul (II Cor. 11:27): 'in labor and hardships, in many a vigil, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness.' Paul tells us of his trials and tribulations that prepared him for his visionary rapture, when he was taken up into the third heaven (II Cor. 12:2). The first commentator to make this connection, which now seems fairly obvious, was apparently Torraca (comm. to vv. 37-39). See also Grandgent (comm. to verse 38), Sapegno (comm. to verse 38), Fallani (comm. to vv. 37-38), and Singleton (comm. to vv. 37-38). The context fits: we are about to witness a Pauline vision (one which happens, however, to be more Johannine in nature, as we shall see). However, there is another source, a much less apparently appropriate one, given the religious context of the entire scene: Virgil's invocation in his seventh book (Aen. VII.641): 'now, goddesses, cast Helicon forth and move your song.' 'Helicon, celebrated range of mountains in Boeotia, sacred to Apollo and the Muses, in which rose the famous fountains of the Muses, Aganippe and Hippocrene. Dante (perhaps through a misunderstanding of Aen. VII.641; Aen. X.163) speaks of Helicon itself as a fountain' (Toynbee “Elicona” [Concise Dante Dictionary]). (He may, on the other hand, be indicating all the sources of poetic expression by their common site.)
This invocation in Virgil's poem marks the transition to the 'Iliadic' military second half of the epic. That might not seem particularly promising as a parallel here. On the other hand, just as Virgil, some 600 lines into the second half of his martial epic places another invocation, so does Dante, some 185 lines into the second half of his theological epic, insert one of his. For the first notice of the Virgilian reference see Tommaseo (comm. to vv. 40-42). See also Scartazzini (comm. to verse 40), Poletto (comm. to these verses), Grandgent (comm. to verse 40), Casini/Barbi (comm. to verse 40), and almost all the recent commentators starting with Sapegno (comm. to verse 40). For the meaning of the word merce (translated as 'reward'), we follow the reasoning of Bosco/Reggio (comm. to verse 39), who argue that the more common understanding ('aid' or 'help') is countered by the rhetoric of the tercet, in which Dante presents himself as having suffered for the Muses and as now claiming what is due him.
As for Urania, here the highest of the Muses and their leader (where Calliope, muse of epic, had held that role in Purg. I.9-12), as the muse of astronomy, of 'high things,' she is needed to give the poet fit words to convey the conceptual truth of the pageant to come. Dante has seen it, but now, coming to write of it, he requires an understanding of its theological meaning in order to give it proper expression.
The thoughts behind the verses are 'hard' because of their exalted and difficult subject – allegories of the Bible – according to Marina De Fazio (“Purgatorio XXIX,” in Dante's “Divine Comedy,” Introductory Readings II: “Purgatorio,” ed. Tibor Wlassics [Lectura Dantis (virginiana), 12, supplement, Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1993]), p. 435.
Like Matelda, who also seemed other than what she finally comes to mean to the protagonist, the seven candlesticks (verse 50) are perceived first and erroneously by him as seven trees. Carroll (in his lengthy comm. to vv. 64-150) comments upon them as follows: 'They represent the seven “gifts of the Spirit,” as named in the Vulgate of Isaiah 11:2-3, namely, Wisdom, Intellect, Counsel, Fortitude, Knowledge, Piety, and Fear of the Lord.' Dante discusses them in Convivio IV.xxi.11-12.
The 'common object' is a technical term derived from Scholastic discussions of sense perception. Strictly speaking, it refers to things that can be perceived simultaneously by more than one of the five senses (e.g., taste and touch and perhaps smell for something in one's mouth; or sight, smell, and hearing [an animal in a field]) and are thus more likely to be misperceived. For instance, one might have a pebble in one's mouth and smell a clove and think the pebble is a candy; or one might be looking at a horse in the distance in a cow pasture and smell manure, thus taking horse for cow. Dante discusses the term as the sensibile comune (that which is perceivable by several senses) in Convivio III.ix.6.
Dante here has two senses in play, sight and hearing. He was thus at first unable to make out what is being uttered (see Purg. XXIX.36) nor what is present at the uttering. By now he realizes that the 'trees' are candlesticks and the song 'Hosanna.' Dante is, strictly speaking, 'cheating,' in that it is not the combination of confused senses that caused his problem, but merely distance, in each case.
The word Osanna, an untranslatable expression of joyous praise, is Dante's most frequent Hebraism in the Comedy (see the note to Purg. XI.11). It derives from the salute to Jesus offered as he enters Jerusalem (Matthew 21:19 ['Hosanna in altissimis']; Mark 11:10 ['Hosanna in excelsis']).
The candlesticks, now seen as a single shape, are all flaming at their tips, brighter than the full moon at its apex in the sky on a clear night. This image, and many that are to follow, reflect passages in the Book of Revelation (here Apoc. 4:5), the seven lamps burning before the great throne of Judgment, 'which are the seven spirits of God,' as was first noted by Pietro di Dante (comm. to verse 50).
For a useful discussion of the meaning of stupore (amazement) see Marina De Fazio (“Purgatorio XXIX,” in Dante's “Divine Comedy,” Introductory Readings II: “Purgatorio,” ed. Tibor Wlassics [Lectura Dantis (virginiana), 12, supplement, Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1993]), pp. 436-45. She considers this passage alongside its precursor, with which it has evident similarities (Purg. XXVIII.139-148), in which Statius and Virgil smile at the revelation that this place, the earthly paradise, was what they understood as Parnassus. Now Dante seeks only to see the reaction of Virgil to the pageant of Revelation and finds that his guide is amazed as are those who cannot understand, for all their wonder and reverence, what they are gazing at. Thus, for her, Dante's ammirazione and Virgil's stupore have different valences. For this to be Virgil's final observed behavior in the poem shows Dante's desire to control his admiration for his auctor. Botterill (“Purgatorio XXVII,” in Dante's “Divine Comedy,” Introductory Readings II: “Purgatorio,” ed. Tibor Wlassics [Lectura Dantis (virginiana), 12, supplement, Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1993]), p. 405, on the other hand, argues that in these verses, for the first and only time in the poem, Dante and Virgil are 'on a footing of absolute equality.' On stupore as the sign of Virgil's incomprehension, see Hollander (Il Virgilio dantesco: tragedia nella “Commedia” [Florence: Olschki, 1983]), p. 133n. See Dante's own gloss on stupore (Conv. IV.xxv.5), where it is read as stordimento (stupefaction, bewilderment).
The reference to the modest gait of newly wedded brides as they leave the church to go to their husband's house introduces the theme of the wedding ceremony to the procession and to the poem, where it will reappear in a number of guises, including parody, throughout the rest of the scenes in the earthly paradise.
Matelda calls Dante's and our attention to what will be, at that moment, the theological high point in the poem, the pageant of the Church Triumphant. For useful studies of the entirety of the scene that follows, see Edward Moore (Studies in Dante, Third Series: Miscellaneous Essays [Oxford: Clarendon, 1968 (1903)]), pp. 178-220, “The Apocalyptic Vision”; Sergio Cristaldi (“Dalle beatitudini all'Apocalisse: Il Nuovo Testamento nella Commedia,” Letture classensi 17 [1988], pp. 23-67); Lino Pertile (La puttana e il gigante: Dal Cantico dei Cantici al Paradiso Terrestre di Dante [Ravenna: Longo, 1998]), pp. 23-42 (for the particular relevance of the Song of Songs). For the artistic sources of this procession, particularly those found in mosaics in and near Ravenna, see Bosco/Reggio (introductory note to this canto). For the iconography and meaning of the symbolic elements in it, see Joan Isobel Friedman (“La processione mistica di Dante: allegoria e iconografia nel canto XXIX del Purgatorio,” in Dante e le forme dell'allegoresi, ed. M. Picone [Ravenna: Longo, 1987], pp. 125-48). And see Lansing (“Narrative Design in Dante's Earthly Paradise,” Dante Studies 112 [1994], pp. 101-13) for the way in which Dante has designed the earthly paradise as an 'eighth terrace.' For the notion that the arrival of the pageant marks a change from the 'horizontal' nature of the Old Testament model for the poem in the Exodus to a New Testament's 'vertical' expression present in the Transfiguration, see Jeffrey Schnapp (“Trasfigurazione e metamorfosi nel Paradiso dantesco,” in Dante e la Bibbia, ed. G. Barblan [Florence: Olschki, 1988], pp. 273-92).
Those dressed in the white of faith in Christ to come (we will soon find out that they represent the Hebrew Scriptures) are presented as followers of the seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit or of the seven spirits of God (Apoc. 4:4), not as the leaders they surely were on their own terms. Simone Marchesi (“A Rhetoric of Faith: Dante's Poetics in the Transition from De vulgari eloquentia to the Commedia” [Doctoral dissertation, Princeton University, 2002]) argues that Augustine's discussion of biblical hermeneutics in De doctrina christiana (II.7) helps to define more precisely the nature and role of the seven candlesticks in the procession. Augustine, prescribing a spiritual discipline for biblical interpreters, patterns his instruction on the seven spiritual gifts (Isaiah 11:2-3). These gifts are the spirits of wisdom, intellect, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of God (sapientia, intellectus, consilium, fortitudo, scientia, pietas, and timor Dei). Just as in Dante's procession the candlesticks precede the pageant of the canonical books and cover them with their sevenfold light, so in Augustine the discussion of the seven gifts is preliminary to his treatment of the biblical canon in De doctrina and frames that discussion.
Dante, facing east, has the stream to his left, as he has all along, and sees the pageant approach him on the far side of the narrow water.
That the poet emphasizes his left side so strongly may indicate his sense of his mortal unworthiness to look upon such wonders.
The candlestick-paintbrushes leave streaks above the entire procession, as the sun colors the rainbow and the moon (Delia, Diana, born on the island of Delos) its halo.
These banners form, as it were, a canopy over the entire procession. The ten paces that separate the two outer ones are sometimes allegorized by commentators. On the other hand, they may simply imply the triumphal perfection of the procession, since ten is known as the number of God's perfection (as is 100, 1,000, etc.), since 10 = 1.
The twelve ranks, two abreast, dressed in white (see vv. 64-66) and crowned with white lilies, are the twenty-four books of the Old Testament. In the Book of Revelation (Apoc. 4:4) there are twenty-four elders, clothed in white, seated around the throne of Judgment. They are sometimes interpreted as representing the twelve tribes of Israel and the twelve apostles. Here they clearly represent the books of the Old Testament according to St. Jerome's accountancy in his Prologue to his Latin translation of the Bible. (Pietro di Dante [comm. to vv. 82-84] cites Jerome's discussion of the books of the Old Testament in his Prologue to the Book of Daniel.) It is clear also that Dante is in this part of the procession referring to books and not authors, for these would be fewer (e.g., Moses was 'author' of five of them). He will change tactics when he comes to the New Testament (see vv. 133-144).
The faith in Christ to come of the Hebrew scriptures is indicated by the elders' salute to Mary as mother of Christ. See Luke 1.28: 'Blessèd are you among women.' Mary does not appear in the procession.
The four creatures clad in the green of hope are the representations of the four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, traditionally portrayed, respectively, as angel (or man), lion, ox, and eagle. These identifications derive from Ezechiel (10:4-14) and the Book of Revelation (Apoc. 4:6-8).
The six wings are found in the Apocalypse (Apoc. 4:8) but not in Ezechiel (1:6), where they are four (see verse 105). The reference is to the hundred eyes of Ovid's Argus (see Metam. I.568-723). Jove chose Io as a victim of his desire. When jealous Juno came near them, he changed Io into a heifer, but Juno remained suspicious and sent Argus, with his hundred eyes, to watch over Io. Jove despatched Mercury to slay him, which he did after telling a long tale that closed his eyes in sleep. Juno put those hundred eyes into the feathers of the peacock.
Dante's reference intrinsically distinguishes between the eyes of dead Argus and these living visionary eyes that have loftier purpose than guarding pretty heifers. For a study of the resonances of the Io narrative in the following cantos see Jessica Levenstein (“The Pilgrim, the Poet, and the Cowgirl: Dante's Alter-Io in Purgatorio XXX-XXXI,” Dante Studies 114 [1996], pp. 189-208).
This is the fifth address to the reader in this cantica. For the poet's insistence on the constraints on his ability to expand his verse, see Purgatorio XXXIII.139-141 and the note to Purgatorio XXXIII.136-141.
Dante refers us to the lengthy passage in Ezechiel (see the note to Purg. XXIX.94-96) for the details of the appearance of the four gospel beasts.
Lombardi (comm. to vv. 104-105) is perhaps unique in his understanding of why Dante preferred John's six to Ezechiel's four. Bishop Primasius, he says, the student of St. Augustine, commenting on the fourth chapter of the Apocalypse, said that the beasts have six wings because six is the number of the sixth and final age, after which we will come to the fullness of time (plenitudo temporum). There is nothing like consensus on a solution for this problem, but Lombardi's thesis is, if nothing else, original.
Dante's claim here mirrors the pretext of the entire poem; his experience of the otherworld is to be treated as actual and not as imagined. As a result, his authority as teller of the tale is absolute, and even biblical testimony is secondary to his own. Lucia Battaglia Ricci, in her essay “Polisemanticità e struttura della Commedia” (in her Dante e la tradizione letteraria medievale [Pisa: Giardini, 1983 (1975)]), pp. 92-95, saw that this phrasing insisted on the historical footing of Dante's experience of the pageant. In the same year, Hollander had made a more pointed observation (if mistakenly referring it to the griffin rather than to the four gospel beasts), which he repeated soon after (“Literary Consciousness and the Consciousness of Literature,” Sewanee Review 83 [1975], p. 123; “Dante Theologus-Poeta,” Dante Studies 94 [1976], p. 112; “Dante's Poetics,” Sewanee Review 85 [1977], pp. 406-7). See the second of these passages: 'Where does authority lie here? In the primacy of the author's vision. A writer willing to accept a fictional pretext for his work would never have written so prideful a statement, would have been content with the more “honest” and humble “And here I follow John.”' Several other American Dantists now seem committed to this view (e.g., Hawkins, Barolini, Kleinhenz). It is also true that at moments in the commentary tradition there has been an awareness of a certain self-consciousness in Dante's locution. See Jacopo della Lana (comm. to vv. 103-105): 'the vision, similar to mine, of John the Evangelist.' But the far more common response is fairly represented by the paraphrase found in the Anonimo Fiorentino (comm. to vv. 100-105): 'I agree with John.' Among more recent commentators perhaps only Poletto (comm. to vv. 100-105) seems to be aware that Dante has seized more authority than he really should have. Poletto is reminded of someone whom he knew who, involved in a discussion of Dante, announced to those assembled that 'even Vellutello agrees with my opinion.'
The chariot, as will become evident, represents the Church, an opinion for which there is essential consensus. Its two wheels, however, are variously interpreted. Do they represent the two Testaments (but these are fully represented in the pageant, as Bosco/Reggio [comm. to verse 107] rightly object)? Wisdom and Love? The active and the contemplative life? We probably need to understand literally that Dante wanted his chariot to look like something, not a four-wheeled ox-cart, but a two-wheeled Roman triumphal chariot. It may be better to leave allegory to one side. Scartazzini (comm. to vv. 106-120) offers a scathing review of the attempts mentioned above and still others.
The griffin has only recently become a cause for controversy, even though for six hundred years it was assumed to signify Christ (e.g., Pietro [Pietro1, comm. to this verse], for whom 'Gryphon... figurat Christum' [the griffin figures Christ]). Beginning with Scartazzini (comm. to vv. 106-120), commentators point to Isidore of Seville's description (Etym. XII.xxii.17) of the griffin as being half lion and half eagle, and then going on to say that Christ is like both lion and eagle. Sergio Cristaldi's neglected and useful study (“'Per dissimilia.' Saggio sul grifone dantesco,” Atti e memorie dell'Arcadia 9 [1988-89], pp. 57-94) of the griffin helps to address a number of crucial questions. Taking issue with the 'English school' of rather fanciful interpretations of the biform beast, he gives reasons to disregard the opinion of Colin Hardie (“The Symbol of the Gryphon in Purgatorio XXIX.108 and Following Cantos,” in Centenary Essays on Dante by Members of the Oxford Dante Society [Oxford: Clarendon, 1965]), p. 123, for whom the beast should be read as 'a symbol of Dante's own nature restored, i.e., of his two “souls,” animal and spiritual,' and that of Peter Dronke (“The Procession in Dante's Purgatorio,” in Cambridge Readings in Dante's “Comedy,” ed. Kenelm Foster and Patrick Boyde [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981 (1978)], pp. 114-37), who thinks the griffin represents the daimón that Neoplatonists saw as guiding the soul. And Cristaldi's main discussion answers the central objection to the standard view of the griffin as emblem of Christ posed by Peter Armour (how can a hybrid symbolize Christ?) before Armour (Dante's Griffin and the History of the World: A Study of the Earthly Paradise [“Purgatorio” XXIX-XXXIII] [Oxford: Clarendon, 1989]) made it, showing that Dante was employing the method embraced by Dionysius the Areopagite, as cited by Thomas Aquinas (Summa I.i.9): 'It is more fitting that divine things be put forward in Scripture in the figurations of vile bodies than in those of noble ones' and goes on to point out (p. 90) that Dante deals with matters propounded in the next article of the Summa in Paradiso IV.43-48. Cristaldi also cites (p. 70) Richard of St. Victor on the legitimate comparisons of Christ both to lion and to lamb. Christ was also, we might reflect, at times referred to as a worm, in a tradition reflecting Job (25:6: 'How much less [is] man, that is a worm? And the son of man, that is a worm?' Bildad's mournful view of humankind is ransomed by St. Gregory the Great (Moralia in Iob, Patrologia Latina LXXVI, col. 560), who also cites Psalms 21:7 (22:6): 'But I am a worm, and no man' in order to make these words fit Christ, as had, indeed, St. Augustine before him (Enarrationes in Psalmos, PL XXXVI, col. 137), and see pseudo-Augustine, Sermones suppositii de tempore, CLI.4, PL XXXIX, col. 2038: 'Christus in cruce vermis....' [Christ on the cross a worm]). Such a comparison makes the griffin seem, by comparison, noble indeed. And now see Lino Pertile (La puttana e il gigante: Dal Cantico dei Cantici al Paradiso Terrestre di Dante [Ravenna: Longo, 1998]), pp. 143-62, whose arguments in favor of the griffin as symbolizing Christ seem difficult to counter.
The griffin's enormous wings go up, one on either side of the central pennon made by the fourth of the seven candlesticks' flaming paintbrush, so as not to disturb the canopy in any way.
His mixture of immortal gold in the part of him that was eagle and the more 'human' red-and-white parts of the lion would surely seem further to identify him with Christ.
This chariot is not only more splendid than those awarded either to Scipio Africanus (185-129 B.C.), conqueror of Hannibal and destroyer of Carthage, or to the great Augustus himself (63 B.C.-A.D. 14), the emperor at the 'fullness of time,' when Christ was born in a world at peace under the rule of Augustus. Dante goes still further: this chariot makes the sun, become a chariot for Phaeton's wild misadventure (Metam. II.47-324), seem a poor thing by comparison. It is striking that this third chariot involves a tragic event – Phaeton's death – while the first two are used to glorious purpose. We are reminded of God's mercy and of his justice.
That the most significant element in the procession is a triumphal chariot makes it difficult not to see that this pageant represents the Church Triumphant, i.e., the Church as it shall be in eternity. It is only in Purgatorio XXXII that we shall observe a representation of the Church Militant. There is a resemblance in this rhythm to that which we have experienced on all the seven terraces, namely exempla of the opposed virtue preceding those of the vice to be purged. Here the perfected Church precedes its temporally prior and persecuted self in all its tribulations. For this observation, see Richard Lansing (“Narrative Design in Dante's Earthly Paradise,” Dante Studies 112 [1994]), pp. 106-8.
This part of the allegory escapes no one: the three ladies represent the three theological virtues, charity (red), hope (green), and faith (white). They stand at the right wheel of the cart, its better side. Faith, necessary to a proper form of love, first leads their dance; then it is the turn of Charity, necessary to a proper form of Hope.
At the left wheel we find the four cardinal virtues, associated with Roman virtue by their purple robes, temperance, justice, fortitude, and prudence (represented by the three-eyed lady, since she is knowledgeable about past, present, and future).
We now come to the second Christian section of the pageant, those who came after Christ. We recognize Luke as the doctor he was, author of the Acts of the Apostles; Paul as the sword-bearer (see Ephesians 6:17), where Paul speaks of the sword of the spirit, that is, the word of God). And, as Singleton points out (comm. to vv. 139-140), the sword also represents Paul's martyrdom.
Here Dante uses the authors of New Testament texts to represent their works, and not vice versa, as he had done for the Old Testament. See the note to Purgatorio XXIX.83-84.
The writers of the lesser Epistles (James, Peter, John, and Jude) are followed by the Apocalypse, its author John depicted as sleeping the mystic sleep of vision.
These seven authors or books all are typified not by the white of faith, as was the Old Testament, but by the red of love (for Christ come).
On the word brolo (which we have translated 'garland') see Moore (Studies in Dante, Third Series: Miscellaneous Essays [Oxford: Clarendon, 1968 (1903)]), pp. 216-18, arguing that, since the unusual word seems to have a sense of rough wooded land, of thickets, it thus emphasizes the thick, luxuriant character of the flowers that these elders wear upon their heads.
Gian Luca Pierotti (“La filia solis di Bonaventura e i cambiamenti di colore in Par. XXVII,” Lettere Italiane 33 [1981], p. 220 (n. 12) has offered the following census of the pageant:
1) 24 books of the Old Testament
2) 4 gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John
3) 1 griffin
4) 3 theological virtues (love, hope, faith)
5) 4 cardinal virtues (prudence, fortitude, temperance, justice)
6) 2 'authors' of Book of Acts & major Epistles: Luke and Paul
7) 4 'authors' of lesser Epistles: Peter, James, John, Jude
8) 1 Apocalypse: John
Total: 43
Canto XXX will add 100 angels and Beatrice to bring the number to 144, the mystical number (144,000) of the Church Triumphant. See Revelation 7:4, 14.1, 14:3.
The canto ends with the thunderclap, arresting all, from the front to the back of the procession, as they await an obviously momentous event.
Commentary text is copyrighted and reproduced by permission.
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Cantando come donna innamorata,
continüò col fin di sue parole:
“Beati quorum tecta sunt peccata!”
E come ninfe che si givan sole
per le salvatiche ombre, disïando
qual di veder, qual di fuggir lo sole,
allor si mosse contra 'l fiume, andando
su per la riva; e io pari di lei,
picciol passo con picciol seguitando.
Non eran cento tra ' suoi passi e ' miei,
quando le ripe igualmente dier volta,
per modo ch'a levante mi rendei.
Né ancor fu così nostra via molta,
quando la donna tutta a me si torse,
dicendo: “Frate mio, guarda e ascolta.”
Ed ecco un lustro sùbito trascorse
da tutte parti per la gran foresta,
tal che di balenar mi mise in forse.
Ma perché 'l balenar, come vien, resta,
e quel, durando, più e più splendeva,
nel mio pensier dicea: “Che cosa è questa?”
E una melodia dolce correva
per l'aere luminoso; onde buon zelo
mi fé riprender l'ardimento d'Eva,
che là dove ubidia la terra e 'l cielo,
femmina, sola e pur testé formata,
non sofferse di star sotto alcun velo;
sotto 'l qual se divota fosse stata,
avrei quelle ineffabili delizie
sentite prima e più lunga fïata.
Mentr' io m'andava tra tante primizie
de l'etterno piacer tutto sospeso,
e disïoso ancora a più letizie,
dinanzi a noi, tal quale un foco acceso,
ci si fé l'aere sotto i verdi rami;
e 'l dolce suon per canti era già inteso.
O sacrosante Vergini, se fami,
freddi o vigilie mai per voi soffersi,
cagion mi sprona ch'io mercé vi chiami.
Or convien che Elicona per me versi,
e Uranìe m'aiuti col suo coro
forti cose a pensar mettere in versi.
Poco più oltre, sette alberi d'oro
falsava nel parere il lungo tratto
del mezzo ch'era ancor tra noi e loro;
ma quand' i' fui sì presso di lor fatto,
che l'obietto comun, che 'l senso inganna,
non perdea per distanza alcun su atto,
la virtù ch'a ragion discorso ammanna,
sì com' elli eran candelabri apprese,
e ne le voci del cantare “Osanna.”
Di sopra fiammeggiava il bello arnese
più chiaro assai che luna per sereno
di mezza notte nel suo mezzo mese.
Io mi rivolsi d'ammirazion pieno
al buon Virgilio, ed esso mi rispuose
con vista carca di stupor non meno.
Indi rendei l'aspetto a l'alte cose
che si movieno incontr' a noi sì tardi,
che foran vinte da novelle spose.
La donna mi sgridò: “Perché pur ardi
sì ne l'affetto de le vive luci,
e ciò che vien di retro a lor non guardi?”
Genti vid' io allor, come a lor duci,
venire appresso, vestite di bianco;
e tal candor di qua già mai non fuci.
L'acqua imprendëa dal sinistro fianco,
e rendea me la mia sinistra costa,
s'io riguardava in lei, come specchio anco.
Quand' io da la mia riva ebbi tal posta,
che solo il fiume mi facea distante,
per veder meglio ai passi diedi sosta,
e vidi le fiammelle andar davante,
lasciando dietro a sé l'aere dipinto,
e di tratti pennelli avean sembiante;
sì che lì sopra rimanea distinto
di sette liste, tutte in quei colori
onde fa l'arco il Sole e Delia il cinto.
Questi ostendali in dietro eran maggiori
che la mia vista; e, quanto a mio avviso,
diece passi distavan quei di fori.
Sotto così bel ciel com' io diviso,
ventiquattro seniori, a due a due,
coronati venien di fiordaliso.
Tutti cantavan: “Benedicta tue
ne le figlie d'Adamo, e benedette
sieno in etterno le bellezze tue!”
Poscia che i fiori e l'altre fresche erbette
a rimpetto di me da l'altra sponda
libere fuor da quelle genti elette,
sì come luce luce in ciel seconda,
vennero appresso lor quattro animali,
coronati ciascun di verde fronda.
Ognuno era pennuto di sei ali;
le penne piene d'occhi; e li occhi d'Argo,
se fosser vivi, sarebber cotali.
A descriver lor forme più non spargo
rime, lettor; ch'altra spesa mi strigne,
tanto ch'a questa non posso esser largo;
ma leggi Ezechïel, che li dipigne
come li vide da la fredda parte
venir con vento e con nube e con igne;
e quali i troverai ne le sue carte,
tali eran quivi, salvo ch'a le penne
Giovanni è meco e da lui si diparte.
Lo spazio dentro a lor quattro contenne
un carro, in su due rote, trïunfale,
ch'al collo d'un grifon tirato venne.
Esso tendeva in sù l'una e l'altra ale
tra la mezzana e le tre e tre liste,
sì ch'a nulla, fendendo, facea male.
Tanto salivan che non eran viste;
le membra d'oro avea quant' era uccello,
e bianche l'altre, di vermiglio miste.
Non che Roma di carro così bello
rallegrasse Affricano, o vero Augusto,
ma quel del Sol saria pover con ello;
quel del Sol che, svïando, fu combusto
per l'orazion de la Terra devota,
quando fu Giove arcanamente giusto.
Tre donne in giro da la destra rota
venian danzando; l'una tanto rossa
ch'a pena fora dentro al foco nota;
l'altr' era come se le carni e l'ossa
fossero state di smeraldo fatte;
la terza parea neve testé mossa;
e or parëan da la bianca tratte,
or da la rossa; e dal canto di questa
l'altre toglien l'andare e tarde e ratte.
Da la sinistra quattro facean festa,
in porpore vestite, dietro al modo
d'una di lor ch'avea tre occhi in testa.
Appresso tutto il pertrattato nodo
vidi due vecchi in abito dispari,
ma pari in atto e onesto e sodo.
L'un si mostrava alcun de' famigliari
di quel sommo Ipocràte che natura
a li animali fé ch'ell' ha più cari;
mostrava l'altro la contraria cura
con una spada lucida e aguta,
tal che di qua dal rio mi fé paura.
Poi vidi quattro in umile paruta;
e di retro da tutti un vecchio solo
venir, dormendo, con la faccia arguta.
E questi sette col primaio stuolo
erano abitüati, ma di gigli
dintorno al capo non facëan brolo,
anzi di rose e d'altri fior vermigli;
giurato avria poco lontano aspetto
che tutti ardesser di sopra da' cigli.
E quando il carro a me fu a rimpetto,
un tuon s'udì, e quelle genti degne
parvero aver l'andar più interdetto,
fermandosi ivi con le prime insegne.
Singing like unto an enamoured lady
She, with the ending of her words, continued:
"Beati quorum tecta sunt peccata."
And even as Nymphs, that wandered all alone
Among the sylvan shadows, sedulous
One to avoid and one to see the sun,
She then against the stream moved onward, going
Along the bank, and I abreast of her,
Her little steps with little steps attending.
Between her steps and mine were not a hundred,
When equally the margins gave a turn,
In such a way, that to the East I faced.
Nor even thus our way continued far
Before the lady wholly turned herself
Unto me, saying, "Brother, look and listen!"
And lo! a sudden lustre ran across
On every side athwart the spacious forest,
Such that it made me doubt if it were lightning.
But since the lightning ceases as it comes,
And that continuing brightened more and more,
Within my thought I said, "What thing is this?"
And a delicious melody there ran
Along the luminous air, whence holy zeal
Made me rebuke the hardihood of Eve;
For there where earth and heaven obedient were,
The woman only, and but just created,
Could not endure to stay 'neath any veil;
Underneath which had she devoutly stayed,
I sooner should have tasted those delights
Ineffable, and for a longer time.
While 'mid such manifold first-fruits I walked
Of the eternal pleasure all enrapt,
And still solicitous of more delights,
In front of us like an enkindled fire
Became the air beneath the verdant boughs,
And the sweet sound as singing now was heard.
O Virgins sacrosanct! if ever hunger,
Vigils, or cold for you I have endured,
The occasion spurs me their reward to claim!
Now Helicon must needs pour forth for me,
And with her choir Urania must assist me,
To put in verse things difficult to think.
A little farther on, seven trees of gold
In semblance the long space still intervening
Between ourselves and them did counterfeit;
But when I had approached so near to them
The common object, which the sense deceives,
Lost not by distance any of its marks,
The faculty that lends discourse to reason
Did apprehend that they were candlesticks,
And in the voices of the song "Hosanna!"
Above them flamed the harness beautiful,
Far brighter than the moon in the serene
Of midnight, at the middle of her month.
I turned me round, with admiration filled,
To good Virgilius, and he answered me
With visage no less full of wonderment.
Then back I turned my face to those high things,
Which moved themselves towards us so sedately,
They had been distanced by new-wedded brides.
The lady chid me: "Why dost thou burn only
So with affection for the living lights,
And dost not look at what comes after them?"
Then saw I people, as behind their leaders,
Coming behind them, garmented in white,
And such a whiteness never was on earth.
The water on my left flank was resplendent,
And back to me reflected my left side,
E'en as a mirror, if I looked therein.
When I upon my margin had such post
That nothing but the stream divided us,
Better to see I gave my steps repose;
And I beheld the flamelets onward go,
Leaving behind themselves the air depicted,
And they of trailing pennons had the semblance,
So that it overhead remained distinct
With sevenfold lists, all of them of the colours
Whence the sun's bow is made, and Delia's girdle.
These standards to the rearward longer were
Than was my sight; and, as it seemed to me,
Ten paces were the outermost apart.
Under so fair a heaven as I describe
The four and twenty Elders, two by two,
Came on incoronate with flower-de-luce.
They all of them were singing: "Blessed thou
Among the daughters of Adam art, and blessed
For evermore shall be thy loveliness."
After the flowers and other tender grasses
In front of me upon the other margin
Were disencumbered of that race elect,
Even as in heaven star followeth after star,
There came close after them four animals,
Incoronate each one with verdant leaf.
Plumed with six wings was every one of them,
The plumage full of eyes; the eyes of Argus
If they were living would be such as these.
Reader! to trace their forms no more I waste
My rhymes; for other spendings press me so,
That I in this cannot be prodigal.
But read Ezekiel, who depicteth them
As he beheld them from the region cold
Coming with cloud, with whirlwind, and with fire;
And such as thou shalt find them in his pages,
Such were they here; saving that in their plumage
John is with me, and differeth from him.
The interval between these four contained
A chariot triumphal on two wheels,
Which by a Griffin's neck came drawn along;
And upward he extended both his wings
Between the middle list and three and three,
So that he injured none by cleaving it.
So high they rose that they were lost to sight;
His limbs were gold, so far as he was bird,
And white the others with vermilion mingled.
Not only Rome with no such splendid car
E'er gladdened Africanus, or Augustus,
But poor to it that of the Sun would be,—
That of the Sun, which swerving was burnt up
At the importunate orison of Earth,
When Jove was so mysteriously just.
Three maidens at the right wheel in a circle
Came onward dancing; one so very red
That in the fire she hardly had been noted.
The second was as if her flesh and bones
Had all been fashioned out of emerald;
The third appeared as snow but newly fallen.
And now they seemed conducted by the white,
Now by the red, and from the song of her
The others took their step, or slow or swift.
Upon the left hand four made holiday
Vested in purple, following the measure
Of one of them with three eyes m her head.
In rear of all the group here treated of
Two old men I beheld, unlike in habit,
But like in gait, each dignified and grave.
One showed himself as one of the disciples
Of that supreme Hippocrates, whom nature
Made for the animals she holds most dear;
Contrary care the other manifested,
With sword so shining and so sharp, it caused
Terror to me on this side of the river.
Thereafter four I saw of humble aspect,
And behind all an aged man alone
Walking in sleep with countenance acute.
And like the foremost company these seven
Were habited; yet of the flower-de-luce
No garland round about the head they wore,
But of the rose, and other flowers vermilion;
At little distance would the sight have sworn
That all were in a flame above their brows.
And when the car was opposite to me
Thunder was heard; and all that folk august
Seemed to have further progress interdicted,
There with the vanward ensigns standing still.
Echoing Guido Cavalcanti (see the note to Purg. XXVIII.43-48), the poet begins this canto by returning to the situation that we found early in the last one: Dante thinking that a beautiful young woman was in love with him. Now the poet himself seems to confirm this. We, nonetheless, probably realize that the song Matelda sings is once again utterly different from the sexually charged pastorella and is indeed once again a Psalm 31:1 (32:1): 'Blessed are they whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered.' As Singleton (comm. to verse 3) points out, St. Paul (Romans 4:3-8) interprets this Psalm as indicating God's reward for just humans. However, this is not, in short, to 'fuse' the 'theme of profane love' with that of 'charity, love of a higher order' (comm. to verse 1), but simultaneously to include and supersede it. Matelda is a very different sort of 'shepherd girl' from the one we found in Cavalcanti; that seems to be Dante's main point. She does indeed love the protagonist, but she is not in love with him, as he at first believed. The word that describes her affective state, innamorata (touched by love), here appears for the first time in the poem. It seems to collocate itself in the Cavalcantian world of sexual love. However, as a graduate student at Princeton, Sheila Colwell, pointed out in the spring of 1984, the verb innamorare, in an inflected form or as a past participle, will be used eight more times in Paradiso, always to indicate, as we may realize either now or retrospectively, heavenly affection. (See Par. VII.143, Par. XIV.127, Par. XX.64, Par. XXIII.70, Par. XXV.44, Par. XXVII.88, Par. XXXI.5, Par. XXXII.105).
Why are these two groups of nymphs made part of the simile, when Dante and Matelda are moving near one another and in the same direction? Benvenuto (comm. to vv. 4-9) glosses the tercet simply. In the old days some nymphs wanted to leave the shade for the sun, while others desired to leave the sun for the shade. Beginning with Tommaseo (comm. to these verses) some commentators have suggested a relationship with Virgil's two bands of nymphs (Georgics IV.383), one hundred guarding the woods, another one hundred guarding the streams ('centum quae silvas, centum quae flumina servant'). Neither the gloss nor the citation, however, answers the question, above, that has bothered many commentators, none more than Porena (comm. to vv. 4-7), who posits a lost classical source to explain our puzzlement but has not convinced others of this hypothesis. It would seem that Dante wishes to express only the thought that, just as in the distant (classical) past nymphs would move purposefully from one place to another in the forest, so did he and Matelda move from where they had been standing to go somewhere else. However, the brightness that they shall soon find would seem intrinsically to associate them with those nymphs who move from shade to sunshine.
Since the stream normally flows east to west but now makes a 90o veer to the north, Matelda, followed by Dante, heads south for fifty paces until it makes a second 90o bend, and they are once again heading due east. Why the poet wanted to have this bend in the river, which accomplishes the removal of Dante and Matelda to a point some fifty feet south of where they had been and from which they resume movement in an easterly direction, has not been clear to the commentators.
Matelda's addressing Dante as 'frate' (brother) reminds him (and the reader) of his earlier misunderstanding of the nature of her affection for him (see Purg. XXVIII.43-45).
The lustrous presence is so bright that the protagonist, forgetting his recent and abundant instruction by Matelda on the absence of 'real' weather here (Purg. XXVIII.85-126), at first takes this shining for lightning, until its duration makes it clear that it is something altogether other. In this way the poet builds suspense for the pageant yet to come.
It is probably not without purpose that, near the beginning of each of these cantos (XXVIII and XXIX), in which his will is finally integral and good (see Purg. XXVII.140 and the note to Purg. XXVII.139-141), the poet reveals that the protagonist's problems now center in his weak understanding. Thus this second part of the poem anchors itself in the program of the correction of his intellect, which will last until Paradiso XXX.
The protagonist hears a melody (we will be allowed to know its lyric component at Purg. XXIX.51) so beautiful that righteous indignation causes him to condemn Eve for depriving him of immortal life in this beautiful garden.
The veil that she would not accept is variously glossed, from the first commentators onward, either as being negative (ignorance) or positive (obedience), and some (e.g., Grabher [comm. to vv. 19-30]) have believed that it has both valences.
The primizie (first fruits) are the first fruits of God's eternal love as these are found here in Eden, 'this foretaste of eternal bliss,' promising the joys of eternity.
This second reference to the growing intensity of this son et lumière again whets the reader's appetite to know what lies just ahead (see Purg. XXIX.21).
This is the fourth of the Commedia's nine invocations (see the note to Inf. II.7-9). The first to identify the nine invocations of the Comedy correctly was apparently Fabio Fabbri (“Le invocazioni nella Divina Commedia,” Giornale dantesco 18 [1910], pp. 186-92). See also Hollander (“The Invocations of the Commedia,” Yearbook of Italian Studies 3 [1976], pp. 235-40). Singleton (comm. to these verses) is in error (but has much company in this) in referring only to the first six of these.
Fallani (comm. to vv. 37-38) rightly explains that 'the marvelous vision is entirely contained in the poet's memory' and that Dante now requires aid only in finding the correct words to express it. (See the note to Inf. XXXII.10-12 in response to a similar second invocation in the first cantica.) In other words, he now requires aid from holy Muses to express in poetry the deeper truth of what he has seen in the pageant representing the Church Triumphant. For the increasing importance of the notion of a prior 'conception' of God's truth to Dante's evolving self-presentation as poet, see the note to Inferno XXXII.1-9 and Hollander (Dante: A Life in Works [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001]), p. 59.
Two authors stand behind this passage, as has been variously understood in the commentary tradition. The first is St. Paul (II Cor. 11:27): 'in labor and hardships, in many a vigil, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness.' Paul tells us of his trials and tribulations that prepared him for his visionary rapture, when he was taken up into the third heaven (II Cor. 12:2). The first commentator to make this connection, which now seems fairly obvious, was apparently Torraca (comm. to vv. 37-39). See also Grandgent (comm. to verse 38), Sapegno (comm. to verse 38), Fallani (comm. to vv. 37-38), and Singleton (comm. to vv. 37-38). The context fits: we are about to witness a Pauline vision (one which happens, however, to be more Johannine in nature, as we shall see). However, there is another source, a much less apparently appropriate one, given the religious context of the entire scene: Virgil's invocation in his seventh book (Aen. VII.641): 'now, goddesses, cast Helicon forth and move your song.' 'Helicon, celebrated range of mountains in Boeotia, sacred to Apollo and the Muses, in which rose the famous fountains of the Muses, Aganippe and Hippocrene. Dante (perhaps through a misunderstanding of Aen. VII.641; Aen. X.163) speaks of Helicon itself as a fountain' (Toynbee “Elicona” [Concise Dante Dictionary]). (He may, on the other hand, be indicating all the sources of poetic expression by their common site.)
This invocation in Virgil's poem marks the transition to the 'Iliadic' military second half of the epic. That might not seem particularly promising as a parallel here. On the other hand, just as Virgil, some 600 lines into the second half of his martial epic places another invocation, so does Dante, some 185 lines into the second half of his theological epic, insert one of his. For the first notice of the Virgilian reference see Tommaseo (comm. to vv. 40-42). See also Scartazzini (comm. to verse 40), Poletto (comm. to these verses), Grandgent (comm. to verse 40), Casini/Barbi (comm. to verse 40), and almost all the recent commentators starting with Sapegno (comm. to verse 40). For the meaning of the word merce (translated as 'reward'), we follow the reasoning of Bosco/Reggio (comm. to verse 39), who argue that the more common understanding ('aid' or 'help') is countered by the rhetoric of the tercet, in which Dante presents himself as having suffered for the Muses and as now claiming what is due him.
As for Urania, here the highest of the Muses and their leader (where Calliope, muse of epic, had held that role in Purg. I.9-12), as the muse of astronomy, of 'high things,' she is needed to give the poet fit words to convey the conceptual truth of the pageant to come. Dante has seen it, but now, coming to write of it, he requires an understanding of its theological meaning in order to give it proper expression.
The thoughts behind the verses are 'hard' because of their exalted and difficult subject – allegories of the Bible – according to Marina De Fazio (“Purgatorio XXIX,” in Dante's “Divine Comedy,” Introductory Readings II: “Purgatorio,” ed. Tibor Wlassics [Lectura Dantis (virginiana), 12, supplement, Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1993]), p. 435.
Like Matelda, who also seemed other than what she finally comes to mean to the protagonist, the seven candlesticks (verse 50) are perceived first and erroneously by him as seven trees. Carroll (in his lengthy comm. to vv. 64-150) comments upon them as follows: 'They represent the seven “gifts of the Spirit,” as named in the Vulgate of Isaiah 11:2-3, namely, Wisdom, Intellect, Counsel, Fortitude, Knowledge, Piety, and Fear of the Lord.' Dante discusses them in Convivio IV.xxi.11-12.
The 'common object' is a technical term derived from Scholastic discussions of sense perception. Strictly speaking, it refers to things that can be perceived simultaneously by more than one of the five senses (e.g., taste and touch and perhaps smell for something in one's mouth; or sight, smell, and hearing [an animal in a field]) and are thus more likely to be misperceived. For instance, one might have a pebble in one's mouth and smell a clove and think the pebble is a candy; or one might be looking at a horse in the distance in a cow pasture and smell manure, thus taking horse for cow. Dante discusses the term as the sensibile comune (that which is perceivable by several senses) in Convivio III.ix.6.
Dante here has two senses in play, sight and hearing. He was thus at first unable to make out what is being uttered (see Purg. XXIX.36) nor what is present at the uttering. By now he realizes that the 'trees' are candlesticks and the song 'Hosanna.' Dante is, strictly speaking, 'cheating,' in that it is not the combination of confused senses that caused his problem, but merely distance, in each case.
The word Osanna, an untranslatable expression of joyous praise, is Dante's most frequent Hebraism in the Comedy (see the note to Purg. XI.11). It derives from the salute to Jesus offered as he enters Jerusalem (Matthew 21:19 ['Hosanna in altissimis']; Mark 11:10 ['Hosanna in excelsis']).
The candlesticks, now seen as a single shape, are all flaming at their tips, brighter than the full moon at its apex in the sky on a clear night. This image, and many that are to follow, reflect passages in the Book of Revelation (here Apoc. 4:5), the seven lamps burning before the great throne of Judgment, 'which are the seven spirits of God,' as was first noted by Pietro di Dante (comm. to verse 50).
For a useful discussion of the meaning of stupore (amazement) see Marina De Fazio (“Purgatorio XXIX,” in Dante's “Divine Comedy,” Introductory Readings II: “Purgatorio,” ed. Tibor Wlassics [Lectura Dantis (virginiana), 12, supplement, Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1993]), pp. 436-45. She considers this passage alongside its precursor, with which it has evident similarities (Purg. XXVIII.139-148), in which Statius and Virgil smile at the revelation that this place, the earthly paradise, was what they understood as Parnassus. Now Dante seeks only to see the reaction of Virgil to the pageant of Revelation and finds that his guide is amazed as are those who cannot understand, for all their wonder and reverence, what they are gazing at. Thus, for her, Dante's ammirazione and Virgil's stupore have different valences. For this to be Virgil's final observed behavior in the poem shows Dante's desire to control his admiration for his auctor. Botterill (“Purgatorio XXVII,” in Dante's “Divine Comedy,” Introductory Readings II: “Purgatorio,” ed. Tibor Wlassics [Lectura Dantis (virginiana), 12, supplement, Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1993]), p. 405, on the other hand, argues that in these verses, for the first and only time in the poem, Dante and Virgil are 'on a footing of absolute equality.' On stupore as the sign of Virgil's incomprehension, see Hollander (Il Virgilio dantesco: tragedia nella “Commedia” [Florence: Olschki, 1983]), p. 133n. See Dante's own gloss on stupore (Conv. IV.xxv.5), where it is read as stordimento (stupefaction, bewilderment).
The reference to the modest gait of newly wedded brides as they leave the church to go to their husband's house introduces the theme of the wedding ceremony to the procession and to the poem, where it will reappear in a number of guises, including parody, throughout the rest of the scenes in the earthly paradise.
Matelda calls Dante's and our attention to what will be, at that moment, the theological high point in the poem, the pageant of the Church Triumphant. For useful studies of the entirety of the scene that follows, see Edward Moore (Studies in Dante, Third Series: Miscellaneous Essays [Oxford: Clarendon, 1968 (1903)]), pp. 178-220, “The Apocalyptic Vision”; Sergio Cristaldi (“Dalle beatitudini all'Apocalisse: Il Nuovo Testamento nella Commedia,” Letture classensi 17 [1988], pp. 23-67); Lino Pertile (La puttana e il gigante: Dal Cantico dei Cantici al Paradiso Terrestre di Dante [Ravenna: Longo, 1998]), pp. 23-42 (for the particular relevance of the Song of Songs). For the artistic sources of this procession, particularly those found in mosaics in and near Ravenna, see Bosco/Reggio (introductory note to this canto). For the iconography and meaning of the symbolic elements in it, see Joan Isobel Friedman (“La processione mistica di Dante: allegoria e iconografia nel canto XXIX del Purgatorio,” in Dante e le forme dell'allegoresi, ed. M. Picone [Ravenna: Longo, 1987], pp. 125-48). And see Lansing (“Narrative Design in Dante's Earthly Paradise,” Dante Studies 112 [1994], pp. 101-13) for the way in which Dante has designed the earthly paradise as an 'eighth terrace.' For the notion that the arrival of the pageant marks a change from the 'horizontal' nature of the Old Testament model for the poem in the Exodus to a New Testament's 'vertical' expression present in the Transfiguration, see Jeffrey Schnapp (“Trasfigurazione e metamorfosi nel Paradiso dantesco,” in Dante e la Bibbia, ed. G. Barblan [Florence: Olschki, 1988], pp. 273-92).
Those dressed in the white of faith in Christ to come (we will soon find out that they represent the Hebrew Scriptures) are presented as followers of the seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit or of the seven spirits of God (Apoc. 4:4), not as the leaders they surely were on their own terms. Simone Marchesi (“A Rhetoric of Faith: Dante's Poetics in the Transition from De vulgari eloquentia to the Commedia” [Doctoral dissertation, Princeton University, 2002]) argues that Augustine's discussion of biblical hermeneutics in De doctrina christiana (II.7) helps to define more precisely the nature and role of the seven candlesticks in the procession. Augustine, prescribing a spiritual discipline for biblical interpreters, patterns his instruction on the seven spiritual gifts (Isaiah 11:2-3). These gifts are the spirits of wisdom, intellect, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of God (sapientia, intellectus, consilium, fortitudo, scientia, pietas, and timor Dei). Just as in Dante's procession the candlesticks precede the pageant of the canonical books and cover them with their sevenfold light, so in Augustine the discussion of the seven gifts is preliminary to his treatment of the biblical canon in De doctrina and frames that discussion.
Dante, facing east, has the stream to his left, as he has all along, and sees the pageant approach him on the far side of the narrow water.
That the poet emphasizes his left side so strongly may indicate his sense of his mortal unworthiness to look upon such wonders.
The candlestick-paintbrushes leave streaks above the entire procession, as the sun colors the rainbow and the moon (Delia, Diana, born on the island of Delos) its halo.
These banners form, as it were, a canopy over the entire procession. The ten paces that separate the two outer ones are sometimes allegorized by commentators. On the other hand, they may simply imply the triumphal perfection of the procession, since ten is known as the number of God's perfection (as is 100, 1,000, etc.), since 10 = 1.
The twelve ranks, two abreast, dressed in white (see vv. 64-66) and crowned with white lilies, are the twenty-four books of the Old Testament. In the Book of Revelation (Apoc. 4:4) there are twenty-four elders, clothed in white, seated around the throne of Judgment. They are sometimes interpreted as representing the twelve tribes of Israel and the twelve apostles. Here they clearly represent the books of the Old Testament according to St. Jerome's accountancy in his Prologue to his Latin translation of the Bible. (Pietro di Dante [comm. to vv. 82-84] cites Jerome's discussion of the books of the Old Testament in his Prologue to the Book of Daniel.) It is clear also that Dante is in this part of the procession referring to books and not authors, for these would be fewer (e.g., Moses was 'author' of five of them). He will change tactics when he comes to the New Testament (see vv. 133-144).
The faith in Christ to come of the Hebrew scriptures is indicated by the elders' salute to Mary as mother of Christ. See Luke 1.28: 'Blessèd are you among women.' Mary does not appear in the procession.
The four creatures clad in the green of hope are the representations of the four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, traditionally portrayed, respectively, as angel (or man), lion, ox, and eagle. These identifications derive from Ezechiel (10:4-14) and the Book of Revelation (Apoc. 4:6-8).
The six wings are found in the Apocalypse (Apoc. 4:8) but not in Ezechiel (1:6), where they are four (see verse 105). The reference is to the hundred eyes of Ovid's Argus (see Metam. I.568-723). Jove chose Io as a victim of his desire. When jealous Juno came near them, he changed Io into a heifer, but Juno remained suspicious and sent Argus, with his hundred eyes, to watch over Io. Jove despatched Mercury to slay him, which he did after telling a long tale that closed his eyes in sleep. Juno put those hundred eyes into the feathers of the peacock.
Dante's reference intrinsically distinguishes between the eyes of dead Argus and these living visionary eyes that have loftier purpose than guarding pretty heifers. For a study of the resonances of the Io narrative in the following cantos see Jessica Levenstein (“The Pilgrim, the Poet, and the Cowgirl: Dante's Alter-Io in Purgatorio XXX-XXXI,” Dante Studies 114 [1996], pp. 189-208).
This is the fifth address to the reader in this cantica. For the poet's insistence on the constraints on his ability to expand his verse, see Purgatorio XXXIII.139-141 and the note to Purgatorio XXXIII.136-141.
Dante refers us to the lengthy passage in Ezechiel (see the note to Purg. XXIX.94-96) for the details of the appearance of the four gospel beasts.
Lombardi (comm. to vv. 104-105) is perhaps unique in his understanding of why Dante preferred John's six to Ezechiel's four. Bishop Primasius, he says, the student of St. Augustine, commenting on the fourth chapter of the Apocalypse, said that the beasts have six wings because six is the number of the sixth and final age, after which we will come to the fullness of time (plenitudo temporum). There is nothing like consensus on a solution for this problem, but Lombardi's thesis is, if nothing else, original.
Dante's claim here mirrors the pretext of the entire poem; his experience of the otherworld is to be treated as actual and not as imagined. As a result, his authority as teller of the tale is absolute, and even biblical testimony is secondary to his own. Lucia Battaglia Ricci, in her essay “Polisemanticità e struttura della Commedia” (in her Dante e la tradizione letteraria medievale [Pisa: Giardini, 1983 (1975)]), pp. 92-95, saw that this phrasing insisted on the historical footing of Dante's experience of the pageant. In the same year, Hollander had made a more pointed observation (if mistakenly referring it to the griffin rather than to the four gospel beasts), which he repeated soon after (“Literary Consciousness and the Consciousness of Literature,” Sewanee Review 83 [1975], p. 123; “Dante Theologus-Poeta,” Dante Studies 94 [1976], p. 112; “Dante's Poetics,” Sewanee Review 85 [1977], pp. 406-7). See the second of these passages: 'Where does authority lie here? In the primacy of the author's vision. A writer willing to accept a fictional pretext for his work would never have written so prideful a statement, would have been content with the more “honest” and humble “And here I follow John.”' Several other American Dantists now seem committed to this view (e.g., Hawkins, Barolini, Kleinhenz). It is also true that at moments in the commentary tradition there has been an awareness of a certain self-consciousness in Dante's locution. See Jacopo della Lana (comm. to vv. 103-105): 'the vision, similar to mine, of John the Evangelist.' But the far more common response is fairly represented by the paraphrase found in the Anonimo Fiorentino (comm. to vv. 100-105): 'I agree with John.' Among more recent commentators perhaps only Poletto (comm. to vv. 100-105) seems to be aware that Dante has seized more authority than he really should have. Poletto is reminded of someone whom he knew who, involved in a discussion of Dante, announced to those assembled that 'even Vellutello agrees with my opinion.'
The chariot, as will become evident, represents the Church, an opinion for which there is essential consensus. Its two wheels, however, are variously interpreted. Do they represent the two Testaments (but these are fully represented in the pageant, as Bosco/Reggio [comm. to verse 107] rightly object)? Wisdom and Love? The active and the contemplative life? We probably need to understand literally that Dante wanted his chariot to look like something, not a four-wheeled ox-cart, but a two-wheeled Roman triumphal chariot. It may be better to leave allegory to one side. Scartazzini (comm. to vv. 106-120) offers a scathing review of the attempts mentioned above and still others.
The griffin has only recently become a cause for controversy, even though for six hundred years it was assumed to signify Christ (e.g., Pietro [Pietro1, comm. to this verse], for whom 'Gryphon... figurat Christum' [the griffin figures Christ]). Beginning with Scartazzini (comm. to vv. 106-120), commentators point to Isidore of Seville's description (Etym. XII.xxii.17) of the griffin as being half lion and half eagle, and then going on to say that Christ is like both lion and eagle. Sergio Cristaldi's neglected and useful study (“'Per dissimilia.' Saggio sul grifone dantesco,” Atti e memorie dell'Arcadia 9 [1988-89], pp. 57-94) of the griffin helps to address a number of crucial questions. Taking issue with the 'English school' of rather fanciful interpretations of the biform beast, he gives reasons to disregard the opinion of Colin Hardie (“The Symbol of the Gryphon in Purgatorio XXIX.108 and Following Cantos,” in Centenary Essays on Dante by Members of the Oxford Dante Society [Oxford: Clarendon, 1965]), p. 123, for whom the beast should be read as 'a symbol of Dante's own nature restored, i.e., of his two “souls,” animal and spiritual,' and that of Peter Dronke (“The Procession in Dante's Purgatorio,” in Cambridge Readings in Dante's “Comedy,” ed. Kenelm Foster and Patrick Boyde [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981 (1978)], pp. 114-37), who thinks the griffin represents the daimón that Neoplatonists saw as guiding the soul. And Cristaldi's main discussion answers the central objection to the standard view of the griffin as emblem of Christ posed by Peter Armour (how can a hybrid symbolize Christ?) before Armour (Dante's Griffin and the History of the World: A Study of the Earthly Paradise [“Purgatorio” XXIX-XXXIII] [Oxford: Clarendon, 1989]) made it, showing that Dante was employing the method embraced by Dionysius the Areopagite, as cited by Thomas Aquinas (Summa I.i.9): 'It is more fitting that divine things be put forward in Scripture in the figurations of vile bodies than in those of noble ones' and goes on to point out (p. 90) that Dante deals with matters propounded in the next article of the Summa in Paradiso IV.43-48. Cristaldi also cites (p. 70) Richard of St. Victor on the legitimate comparisons of Christ both to lion and to lamb. Christ was also, we might reflect, at times referred to as a worm, in a tradition reflecting Job (25:6: 'How much less [is] man, that is a worm? And the son of man, that is a worm?' Bildad's mournful view of humankind is ransomed by St. Gregory the Great (Moralia in Iob, Patrologia Latina LXXVI, col. 560), who also cites Psalms 21:7 (22:6): 'But I am a worm, and no man' in order to make these words fit Christ, as had, indeed, St. Augustine before him (Enarrationes in Psalmos, PL XXXVI, col. 137), and see pseudo-Augustine, Sermones suppositii de tempore, CLI.4, PL XXXIX, col. 2038: 'Christus in cruce vermis....' [Christ on the cross a worm]). Such a comparison makes the griffin seem, by comparison, noble indeed. And now see Lino Pertile (La puttana e il gigante: Dal Cantico dei Cantici al Paradiso Terrestre di Dante [Ravenna: Longo, 1998]), pp. 143-62, whose arguments in favor of the griffin as symbolizing Christ seem difficult to counter.
The griffin's enormous wings go up, one on either side of the central pennon made by the fourth of the seven candlesticks' flaming paintbrush, so as not to disturb the canopy in any way.
His mixture of immortal gold in the part of him that was eagle and the more 'human' red-and-white parts of the lion would surely seem further to identify him with Christ.
This chariot is not only more splendid than those awarded either to Scipio Africanus (185-129 B.C.), conqueror of Hannibal and destroyer of Carthage, or to the great Augustus himself (63 B.C.-A.D. 14), the emperor at the 'fullness of time,' when Christ was born in a world at peace under the rule of Augustus. Dante goes still further: this chariot makes the sun, become a chariot for Phaeton's wild misadventure (Metam. II.47-324), seem a poor thing by comparison. It is striking that this third chariot involves a tragic event – Phaeton's death – while the first two are used to glorious purpose. We are reminded of God's mercy and of his justice.
That the most significant element in the procession is a triumphal chariot makes it difficult not to see that this pageant represents the Church Triumphant, i.e., the Church as it shall be in eternity. It is only in Purgatorio XXXII that we shall observe a representation of the Church Militant. There is a resemblance in this rhythm to that which we have experienced on all the seven terraces, namely exempla of the opposed virtue preceding those of the vice to be purged. Here the perfected Church precedes its temporally prior and persecuted self in all its tribulations. For this observation, see Richard Lansing (“Narrative Design in Dante's Earthly Paradise,” Dante Studies 112 [1994]), pp. 106-8.
This part of the allegory escapes no one: the three ladies represent the three theological virtues, charity (red), hope (green), and faith (white). They stand at the right wheel of the cart, its better side. Faith, necessary to a proper form of love, first leads their dance; then it is the turn of Charity, necessary to a proper form of Hope.
At the left wheel we find the four cardinal virtues, associated with Roman virtue by their purple robes, temperance, justice, fortitude, and prudence (represented by the three-eyed lady, since she is knowledgeable about past, present, and future).
We now come to the second Christian section of the pageant, those who came after Christ. We recognize Luke as the doctor he was, author of the Acts of the Apostles; Paul as the sword-bearer (see Ephesians 6:17), where Paul speaks of the sword of the spirit, that is, the word of God). And, as Singleton points out (comm. to vv. 139-140), the sword also represents Paul's martyrdom.
Here Dante uses the authors of New Testament texts to represent their works, and not vice versa, as he had done for the Old Testament. See the note to Purgatorio XXIX.83-84.
The writers of the lesser Epistles (James, Peter, John, and Jude) are followed by the Apocalypse, its author John depicted as sleeping the mystic sleep of vision.
These seven authors or books all are typified not by the white of faith, as was the Old Testament, but by the red of love (for Christ come).
On the word brolo (which we have translated 'garland') see Moore (Studies in Dante, Third Series: Miscellaneous Essays [Oxford: Clarendon, 1968 (1903)]), pp. 216-18, arguing that, since the unusual word seems to have a sense of rough wooded land, of thickets, it thus emphasizes the thick, luxuriant character of the flowers that these elders wear upon their heads.
Gian Luca Pierotti (“La filia solis di Bonaventura e i cambiamenti di colore in Par. XXVII,” Lettere Italiane 33 [1981], p. 220 (n. 12) has offered the following census of the pageant:
1) 24 books of the Old Testament
2) 4 gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John
3) 1 griffin
4) 3 theological virtues (love, hope, faith)
5) 4 cardinal virtues (prudence, fortitude, temperance, justice)
6) 2 'authors' of Book of Acts & major Epistles: Luke and Paul
7) 4 'authors' of lesser Epistles: Peter, James, John, Jude
8) 1 Apocalypse: John
Total: 43
Canto XXX will add 100 angels and Beatrice to bring the number to 144, the mystical number (144,000) of the Church Triumphant. See Revelation 7:4, 14.1, 14:3.
The canto ends with the thunderclap, arresting all, from the front to the back of the procession, as they await an obviously momentous event.
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