Dante clearly offers these verses as an introduction to the third and final cantica as a whole. So much is dealt with in them, and in precisely such a way as to set Paradiso off from the rest of the poem, that it is perhaps worth considering them as a unit before attempting to come to grips with particular lines. One burden of these remarks (and of the specific glosses that follow them) is that Dante is once again (see, e.g., Purg. XXIV.52-54) playing a dangerous game as he addresses his role as poet. He presents himself, if in hidden ways (in modern political parlance, he “preserves deniability”), as being inspired by God to write this part of the poem (a barely hidden claim in the first two canticles as well). At the same time he allows us to believe, if we are uncomfortable with that claim here, that he is only doing what all poets do, invoking deities for poetic inspiration as has been conventional since Homer's time. And so here we shall find him referring to Apollo (in verse 13), Mt. Parnassus (verse 16), the satyr Marsyas (verse 20) and Daphne (in the form of the laurel tree – verse 25). Yet all those classicizing gestures do not quite obfuscate the clear post-classical network of the necessary Christian appurtenances of a poem that begins by remembering its culmination and conclusion, the vision of God in the Empyrean.

We are fortunate in the fact that the first dozen of these opening verses are the subject of a commentary written by no less an expert than Dante himself, in his Epistle to Cangrande. The Epistle cannot easily be denied its Dantean paternity now that Luca Azzetta (“Le chiose alla Commedia di Andrea Lancia, l'Epistola a Cangrande e altre questioni dantesche,” L'Alighieri 21 [2003]: 5-76) has demonstrated that it was known and extensively cited by Andrea Lancia around 1345, thus countering the major piece of negative evidence, which was the alleged absence of direct reference to Dante's authorship during the fourteenth century. Azzetta was soon joined by Selene Sarteschi (“Ancora in merito all'Epistola XIII a Cangrande della Scala,” L'Alighieri 26 [2005]: 63-96), who studied similarities among the epistle and the other late Latin works. For what may prove to be the last gasp of those who would deny the epistle its Dantean paternity, see Silvia Conte (“Le finalità del comico: una nuova proposta per l'interpretazione della intitulatio della Commedia,” Critica del testo 4 [2001]: 559-74). She reviews (pp. 569-74) some recent work that also would deny the authenticity of the document, that by Brugnoli, Tavoni, Inglese, and especially Baranski. It is hard to believe that what has always been a weak argument should have to suffer so slow and difficult a death. However, the stakes for our basic understanding of what Dante was about are so high and the investment of effort (and of reputation) on the part of the opposers so great that one realizes that we may hear again, from some of them (and from others?), that a “forger” created Dante's most significant surviving epistle, or at least the greater part of it.

Dante himself marks off these thirty-six verses as introductory, referring to the rest of the cantica (Par. I.37-XXXIII.145) as its “pars executiva” (executive portion [Epist. XIII.43]), i.e., the narrative, of which he says nothing, if he seems to promise to do so (Epist. XIII.89). In fact, his detailed treatment (the pars executiva, as it were, of his epistle) is reserved, interestingly enough, only for the first dozen of these three dozen lines, which receive, after a general exposition of their content (Epist. XIII.49-52), some four pages of analysis (Epist. XIII.53-85). (We might reflect that, had the commentator continued at this rate, he would have produced a document of some 1600 pages for Paradiso alone). Then the commentator begins to treat his subject at breakneck speed: The last terzina of the group (vv. 10-12) receives only a single brief sentence of attention (Epist. XIII.85), while the following fifteen verses (13-27) are glossed even more hurriedly (Epist. XIII.86-87). Did Dante plan to write a full-scale commentary to the Commedia? Maurizio Palma di Cesnola (Semiotica dantesca: Profetismo e diacronia [Ravenna: Longo, 1995], pp. 80, 140), is of the opinion that Dante intended eventually to gloss his own work completely. We shall never know.... On the other hand, the final words of this epistle, in which Dante apparently hopes that Cangrande will give him the opportunity to take on this task, if we accept them at face value, might seem to hold out that possibility: “I trust, however, that your Magnificence may afford me the opportunity to continue this useful exposition at some other time” (Epist. XIII.88). Was it Dante's intention, had he not caught malarial fever and died on his embassy to Venice in 1321, to enlighten us with a full-scale commentary to the Commedia, as he had done in both Vita nuova and Convivio? In these, especially the latter, he regales us with literal and allegorical expositions of his own poetic texts, but the Epistle to Cangrande is much more reticent, cagey, strategic, and not at all the revealing sort of exposition we might hope to find in a commentary put forward by the very author of a work. And so, had he indeed spent years interpreting his poem for us, he might only have helped us with its literal sense (no small thing), and left its more dangerous gestures as moot as the epistle leaves, for example, the invocation of Apollo.

Except for Scartazzini, a happy and fairly early exception (see his comments to Par. I.1-12, I.1, I.2, I.4, I.6, I.7, I.9, I.13-36, I.13), few exegetes have made wide use of the epistle in their responses to the opening of the Paradiso (Charles Singleton, in his “Special Note” to the canto and then in his commentary [Par. I.1, I.2-3, I.4, I.5-9, I.13-36] and Umberto Bosco/Giovanni Reggio [Par. I.1, I.2, I.3, I.4, I.6, I.7-9, I.12, I.13] offer notable exceptions; see also Ignazio Baldelli [“Il canto I del Paradiso,” L'Alighieri 1/2 {1993}: 59-74]).

Dante's practice as composer of prologues to each of his three cantiche is diverse, as may be readily observed in the following table:

 introduction invocation narrative begins
Inferno I 1-9 II.7 [delayed] I.10 
Purgatorio I 1-6 I.7-12 I.13
Paradiso I 1-12 I.13-36 I.37

Paradiso, it seems clear, required more painstaking justification than anything before it, and this, the fifth of the nine invocations in the poem (see the note to Inf. II.7-9), is by far the most elaborate, requiring eight tercets for its development. We shall return to the invocatory portion of the introduction to Paradiso shortly; here we may simply observe that the self-reflective poetic gestures made in those eight tercets occupy fully two-thirds of this introductory poetic space, but less than 3% of his analysis in the Epistle (XIII.85-87); Dante has previously limited his analysis of vv. 1-12 to a literal exposition only, i.e., he eschews the possible deeper meanings; next, he does not offer more than a summarizing gesture toward vv. 13-36, and refuses us even a literal exposition. This sort of cageyness might long ago have convinced those skeptical about the Dantean authorship of the epistle that only he would have dealt with us in this way; other commentators are far more likely to have waded straight into the swamp of the deeper meaning of these verses. And thus the epistle cuts away just as things begin to get extraordinarily interesting.

For Dante's discussion of the opening of this cantica, with his distinctions among the terms “proem,” “prologue,” and “prelude” (derived, he says, from Aristotle's Rhetoric), see Epistle XIII.44-46.

For a close examination of Dante's combination of a protasis insisting on the ineffability of what he has experienced coupled with a countering claim, expressed as an invocation, that he somehow can express something, see Angelo Jacomuzzi (“'Ond'io son fatto scriba,'” in his L'imago al cerchio. Invenzione e visione nella Divina Commedia [Milan: Silva, 1968], pp. 29-100) and Giuseppe Ledda (La guerra della lingua [Ravenna: Longo, 2002], pp. 17-30).

The phrasing “di colui che tutto move” (of Him who moves all things) is unmistakably derived from Aristotle's “unmoved mover” (see Metaphysics XII.7), frequent in Scholastic writings, as Scartazzini (comm. Par. I.1) insists. For one of Dante's previous references to the “unmoved mover,” see Convivio III.xv.15; and for Aristotle's concept and Aquinas's gloss of it, see Singleton (comm. Par. XXVIII.41-42). See also Purg. XXV.70. “La gloria,” on the other hand, initiates and controls the Scholastic definition in order to Christianize its terminology. (“Glory” is notably and understandably absent from Aristotle's or Thomas's discussion of the first mover.) The word has various possible meanings in the Commedia (see the article “gloria” by Sebastiano Aglianò [ED 1975.3, pp. 240-42]): e.g., it may represent earthly renown, a shining quality, the state of blessedness. Here it may retain some of its more earthly resonance, but in only the highest sense: God's shining forth from his beatitude, the most “famous” of all things that exist.

The Letter to Cangrande devotes well over a page (Epist. XIII.53-65) to these verses, arguing that we are to find the glory of God's Being reflected in all that exists in His secondary creation; likewise, His essence, or His intellect, lies at the heart of all the substances found in the created universe. Thus it is not surprising that we find a gradation among even the things that God has made, some being more or less corruptible than others. Dante offers no examples in this difficult passage, but it is clear that he is thinking of the angels at the highest end of creation, and of the less exalted forms of matter (e.g., rocks, mud) at the lowest. The words penetra (pervades, penetrates) and risplende (shines [with reflected light]) distinguish between God's unmediated glory and its reflection, its quality various as what it is reflected by.

For the interrelated phenomena in Paradiso (beginning with this passage) of “the seeing and understanding of the protagonist – with their related difficulties – and the ability to remember and to express his experience – with their related difficulties,” see the densely supported observations of Giuseppe Ledda (La guerra della lingua [Ravenna: Longo, 2002], pp. 243-98). And for Dante's exposition of vv. 5-9, see Epistle XIII.77-84.

The reference to St. Paul's ascent to the heavens is unmistakable (II Cor. 12:3-4) and has long been acknowledged (at least since the time [ca. 1385] of Francesco da Buti [comm. Par. I.1-12]). For a particularly incisive treatment, see Landino's commentary on this tercet. More recently, see the extended treatment by Giuseppe Ledda (La guerra della lingua [Ravenna: Longo, 2002)], pp. 243-59). And see Giuseppe Di Scipio (The Presence of Pauline Thought in the Works of Dante [Lewiston, N.Y.: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1995], p. 253), for the pertinence here of the concept of excessus mentis (but see the previous recognitions of Sapegno [comm. Par. I.6-9] and a few other modern commentators). For the Pauline background of the concept, see Di Scipio, pp. 153-55.

Some commentators, perhaps beginning with Pietrobono (comm. Par. I.4), put forward the notion that the reference is to all ten heavens, that is, to the totality of this super-terrestrial world. A few have also argued that the reference is to the outermost of the physical heavenly spheres, either the Crystalline, or the Primum Mobile. However, it seems utterly clear that Dante is referring to the Empyrean, God's “home” (insofar as He who is everywhere can be thought of as located in a particular anywhere as well). Scartazzini (comm. Par. I.4) was perhaps the first to refer to the Epistle to Cangrande (which devotes considerable space to a literal exposition of this verse [Epist. XIII.66-76]) as eventual justification of this reading: “And it is called the Empyrean, which is as much as to say, the heaven glowing with fire or heat; not that there is material fire or heat therein, but spiritual, which is holy love, or charity” (XIII.68 – tr. P. Toynbee).

It is difficult not to think of the heavenly experience granted St. Paul.

For his several discussions of the language of desire in Dante, with special reference to Paradiso, see Lino Pertile (“'La punta del disio': storia di una metafora dantesca,” Lectura Dantis [virginiana] 7 [1990]: 3-28); (“Paradiso: a Drama of Desire,” in Word and Drama in Dante: Essays on the “Divina Commedia,” ed. J.C. Barnes & J. Petrie [Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1993], pp. 143-80); (La puttana e il gigante: Dal Cantico dei Cantici al Paradiso Terrestre di Dante [Ravenna: Longo, 1998], pp. 87-133; (“Quale amore va in Paradiso?” in “Le donne, i cavalieri, l'arme, gli amori”: Poema e romanzo: la narrativa lunga in Italia, ed. Francesco Bruni [Venice: Marsilio, 2001], pp. 59-70). And now see his global study of this subject (La punta del disio: Semantica del desiderio nella “Commedia” [Fiesole: Cadmo, 2005]).

On this verse, “che dietro la memoria non può ire” (that memory cannot follow after it), see Bruno Nardi, “Perché 'dietro la memoria non può ire' (Paradiso, I, 9),” in his “Lecturae” e altri studi danteschi, ed. Rudy Abardo (Florence: Le Lettere, 1990 [1960], pp. 267-76), who examines the understanding of the nature of memory as it is reflected in the traditions that develop from Aristotle and Augustine and come down into Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas in order to establish that “when our intellect comes near to the beatific vision of God..., it so immerses itself in it... that the memory and the image-receiving capacity of the mind are unable to contain it any longer” (p. 273). As Poletto (comm. Par. I.7-9) and Tozer (comm. Par. I.7-9) point out, Dante has explained this verse in the Epistle to Cangrande (XIII.77): “Et reddit causam dicens 'quod intellectus in tantum profundat se' in ipsum 'desiderium suum', quod est Deus, 'quod memoria sequi non potest'” (And he gives the reason, saying that “the intellect plunges itself to such depth” in its very longing, which is for God, “that the memory cannot follow” [tr. P. Toynbee]). There is (mainly unexpressed) disagreement among the commentators as to whether the memory is with the intellect in its first experience of the Godhead and only loses that perception afterwards or, as Dante seems to be saying, is left behind at the outset in the intellect's excitement. Whatever hypothesis one accepts, the result is the same, as the last verses of the poem will also announce: The vision of God cannot be contained in human memory; rather, we can only claim a memory of having had a experience, now lost from memory. (For more on this passage, see the note to Par. XXIII.50.)

As though in preparation for the invocation that is to come in the following tercet, Dante resorts to a series of phrases or words laden with literary overtone, whether intrinsically or by the context offered from their other appearances in the Commedia: veramente (discussed in the note to Par. I.10), regno santo, mente, tesoro, materia, il mio canto. For instance, the “holy kingdom” (regno santo) that is Paradise may remind us of medieval poets assigning themselves geographic/political areas as subjects of their work (e.g., the “matter of Troy,” the “matter of France,” etc.); all the rest of these terms are also used by Dante in passages that refer to the writing of his poem. For materia, see Paradiso X.27, where Dante refers to the text of the last canticle as “that matter of which I am made the scribe.” The epistle is perhaps surprisingly chary in its treatment of this “overheated” tercet, which receives a single sentence of explication (Epist. XIII.85). As will be the case for the even more shocking passage that follows, the invocation to Apollo, it seems that the commentator does not want to tip the poet's hand, and none of these “loaded” literary terms is referred to.

While it is clear that, as commentators have pointed out, Dante's conjunction (veramente, here “nevertheless”) mirrors the formality of the Latin conjunction verumtamen, it also necessarily exhibits the only partly hidden claim that this poem is a record of things that have truly (veramente) been observed. In 1791 Lombardi (comm. Par. I.10) was perhaps the first commentator to insist on the force of the Latin root, specifically denying the meaning of con verità, certamente, found in the earlier commentaries. It is, however, difficult to accept the notion that the obvious Italian meaning is utterly effaced in the Latinism. In accord with that view Benvenuto (comm. Par. I.10-12) glosses veramente as “not in empty dreams.” Poetry, as commentators should realize perhaps more often than we do, has the propensity to open into a plurality of meanings that cannot be fully rendered in prose. (Dante, however, in Vita nuova [XXV.10] clearly himself sponsors the notion that the meaning of poems are known to those who make them: “For, if any one should dress his poem in images and rhetorical coloring and then, being asked to strip his poem of such dress in order to reveal its true meaning, would not be able to do so – this would be a veritable cause for shame. And my best friend [Guido Cavalcanti] and I are well acquainted with some who compose so clumsily” [tr. M. Musa]).

Since most of the seven of the preceding uses of the adverb fairly obviously offer only the more usual Italian sense of the word (i.e., “truly,” “really” – as will most of the seven that follow), its undertone here is not easily muffled.

The word tesoro is focal in a number of contexts as we move through the poem. For these, see the note to Par. XVII.121-122. Here Dante claims to have laid up in his memory the “treasure of Heaven” (see Matth. 19:21).

For the concept behind Dante's word materia, see the note to Par. I.10-12. As for the noun canto, when it signifies “song” (and not “side” or “edge,” a meaning it has fully seven times, interspersed through all three cantiche), it is used twenty-four times in the poem, and includes reference to a gamut of “songs”: (1) classical epic (Inf. IV.95); (2) a specific canto or passage in the Commedia (Inf. XX.2; Inf. XXXIII.90; Purg. I.10; Par. V.16; Par. V.139); (3) Dante's former song, the second ode of the Convivio (Purg. II.107; Purg. II.131); (4) the Ulysses-seducing song of the Siren in Dante's second Purgatorial dream (Purg. XIX.23); (5) songs of biblical derivation sung as part of the rite of purgation, i.e., the Miserere sung by the penitents in ante-purgatory (Purg. V.27) and the Gloria in excelsis sung by the penitent avaricious at Statius's liberation from his penitence (Purg. XX.140); (6) Charity's directive song to which Faith and Hope measure the steps of their dance (Purg. XXIX.128); and finally (7) twelve songs in the Paradiso directed to or emanating from Heaven, first the holy songs of the Seraphim (Par. IX.77) and, last, the Gloria sung by the Church Triumphant (if not by Jesus and Mary, already returned to the Empyrean – Par. XXVII.3). The other ten occurrences in Paradiso are found as follows: Par. X.73, XII.6 (twice), XII.7, XX.40, XX.144, XXII.10, XXIV.23, XXV.109, XXVI.67.

The author of the Epistle to Cangrande himself divides the introduction to Paradiso into two parts, vv. 1-12 and 13-36 (Epist. XIII. 48). While the invocation proper occupies only three verses, this entire passage supports and extends it. (For an intense consideration of Dante's use of invocation, see Ledda, La guerra della lingua [Ravenna: Longo, 2002], pp. 55-63.)

The invocation of God, even if as the “good Apollo,” is, once one considers the poetic moment, almost a necessity. (Paulinus of Nola apostrophizes Christ as follows: “Salve o Apollo vere” [Save us, O true Apollo – Carmina II.51], as noted by Ernst Kantorowicz [“Dante's 'Two Suns,'” in Walter J. Fischel, ed., Semitic and Oriental Studies, a Volume Presented to William Potter on the Occasion of His Seventy-fifth Birthday, October 29, 1949 {Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951}, pp. 217-31], among a plethora of similar expressions found in Greek [and some Latin] syncretistic passages.) Who else but God Himself can serve as the ultimate “muse” for a poem about the ultimate mysteries of the Christian faith? If the first two of these three verses indirectly but clearly associate Apollo with God (the word valore in verse 14 is used at least thrice again, undoubtedly to refer to the Power of God the Father [see Par. I.107, X.3, and XXXIII.81]), while the second indirectly but clearly associates Dante with St. Paul (see Inf. II.28, “lo Vas d'elezïone” [the Chosen Vessel]), since Dante, likewise, will be made God's chosen vessel (vaso). And what of the gift that this poet seeks? The “belovèd laurel,” in this exalted context, becomes, rather than poetic fame, the true immortality of those who are blessed for eternity, another and better kind of immortality: the “laurel” granted by God to his immortal (i.e., saved) poet, rewarded, among other things, for having written, under His inspiration, of Him. In the Epistle to Cangrande, Dante offers the following explanation of the reason poets call on higher authority: “For they have need of invocation in a large measure, inasmuch as they have to petition the superior beings for something beyond the ordinary range of human powers, something almost in the nature of a divine gift” (tr. P. Toynbee – the last phrase reads quasi divinum quoddam munus, representing an only slightly veiled reference to the theologized nature of his “Apollo”). For Dante's single use of the Latinism “muno,” based on munus, see Par. XIV.33. For a somewhat different view, one closer to the usual understanding, see Robin Kirkpatrick, Dante's Paradiso and the Limitations of Modern Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 108-11, he believes that in the invocation Dante seems to be seeking only an intellectual or philosophical competence. We should not forget, if we insist on the pagan valence of Apollo, that Dante has already twice “transvaluated” a pagan god into the Christian deity: see Inf. XXXI.92 and Purg. VI.118 for the expression sommo Giove (highest Jove). This is surely the same phenomenon that we witness here.

Do these “transvaluations” of the more usual understandings of poetic inspiration and success entirely erase the traces of their original reference among poets and their audiences? We are, after all, reading a poem. And we should have no doubt but that its human agent was as interested in earthly success as any other poet (and perhaps more than most). However, the context makes a pagan understanding of these grand poetic gestures at the same time both impossible and desirable. We are almost forced to recognize the divine claims made by this very human agent, but we are allowed to understand them in completely human terms as well. We find ourselves in a usual dilemma: if we take the truth claims made by the poet on behalf of his poem seriously, we feel greatly troubled (mortal agents are not allowed such claims unless they are demonstrably chosen, as, to Christian believers, was Paul); on the other hand, if we insist that these claims are in fact not true, we sense that we have failed to deal with something that, if it makes us uncomfortable, nonetheless must be dealt with; other poets do not make such stringent demands upon our belief. In another way of phrasing this, we can only say No after we have said Yes, that is, by understanding Dante's veiled claims, no matter what we eventually decide to think of them.

It seems clear that, whatever the eventual identity we are meant to assign to Ovid's amorous god, there is one that this personage cannot possibly have in its higher context, that of Apollo, pagan god of the Sun, music, etc. Ovid's Apollo (Metam. I.452-567), pursuing Daphne with immediate disastrous consequence for the girl, is, we are probably meant to understand, the “bad” Apollo. The later poet's “sun God” is in antithetic relationship to him when Dante reconstructs the Ovidian tale into a sort of Christian riddle. Since the pagan Apollo was understood as the poet seeking immortality (Daphne is metamorphosed, of course, into the laurel tree), we are left to consider what the laurel becomes in this rarified circumstance. The best understanding of it is perhaps that Dante is invoking the aid of the true God in his triune majesty (see the note to Par. II.7-9) to make his inspired poem so that he himself may achieve “immortal glory, eternal life in the Empyrean” (the use of the phrase here reflects Jamie Fumo's defense of her doctoral dissertation before the Department of English at Princeton concerning Chaucer's appropriation of Apollo on 23 May 2003); and now see her discussion of the English poet's “subversion” of Ovid's god (“'Little Troilus': Heroides 5 and Its Ovidian Contexts in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde,” Studies in Philology 100 [2003]: 288-90). This understanding of the laurel should be set against that found earlier in the poem (see Purgatorio XI.91-93 and note), for unlike the green crown of mortal achievements, which adorns its winner's brow only until someone is eventually adjudged better by the crowd, this one is the reward of true immortality for the writing of the poem “to which both heaven and earth have set their hand” (Par. XXV.2). The passage sounds exactly like the usual petition for aid in making a poem, but has this subtle and absolutely crucial difference. The Epistle to Cangrande is modesty itself in dealing – or not dealing – with this verse, which is glossed over quickly, avoiding any confrontation with the enormous claim being made here (Epist. XIII.86). Apollo is a familiar Christian analogue for Christ (for later manifestations of this medieval tradition in Calderón, see Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, tr. W. R. Trask [New York: Harper & Row, 1963 {1948}], pp. 245, 568) and here it is perhaps the Second Person of the Trinity that first shines through to the reader as the dominant Person present in these lines (see Giacalone, comm. Par. I.20-21: “here Apollo is a figure of Christ”). As we shall see, the other two Persons are both referred to, clearly if obliquely.

This tercet explains its predecessor (i.e., why the poet feels he must turn to “the Delphic god” [Par. I.32] now), although it is fair to say that elements in it have remained a puzzle through the centuries. If previously he has not needed to appeal directly to a higher authority for inspiration, relying only on the Muses, Dante now turns to the god himself. Whatever the meanings and references of the details put before us here, almost every commentator agrees that this is their basic significance.

Dante, however, is apparently confused about the configuration of the actual Mt. Parnassus in Greece. See Tozer's explanation (1901, comm. to this tercet) of this material (which Dante borrows, without perhaps recognizing the problem he inherits in doing so, from his Latin precursors): “That mountain rises to a single conspicuous summit; and when the Greek poets speak of its two summits (Soph., Ant. 1126; Eurip., Bacch. 307; cp. Ion. 86-8) they mean, not the real summit of the mountain, but the two peaks that rise above Delphi, which are several thousand feet lower. These expressions were misunderstood by the Roman poets, who regularly describe Parnassus as rising to two summits; e.g., Ovid, Metam. I.316-317, 'Mons ibi verticibus petit arduus astra duobus, Nomine Parnassus' [There Mount Parnassus lifts its two peaks skyward, high and steep – tr. F.J. Miller]; Lucan, Phars. V.72, 'Parnassus gemino petit aethera / colle' [the twin peaks of Parnassus soar to heaven – tr. J.D. Duff]. Dante followed them, and naturally fell into the same mistake.”

Further, Isidore of Seville (Etym. XIV.viii.11), perhaps reflecting texts in Servius (on Aen. VII.641 and X.163, i.e., at the two appearances of the word “Helicon” in the Aeneid), says that the names of the peaks were Cyrrha and Nissa, but adds that they were also named after the two brothers Cithaeron and Helicon. Since Helicon is another mountain entirely, certain confusions have resulted; it is difficult to be certain exactly what Dante here means to indicate. Did he, conflating Parnassus (associated with Apollo) and Helicon (associated with the Muses), believe (or decide) that the two peaks of Parnassus “belonged” to Apollo and to the Muses, respectively, i.e., Cyrrha and Helicon? Here is Tozer again: “In fact, the only passage which may be taken to imply this is found in the Scholia in Bucolica et Georgica attributed to Probus the Grammarian (Georg. III.43), and there is no reason to suppose that Dante knew that work.” Thus, even if we cannot be sure of what Dante knew or invented about the actual mountain, that possibility is perhaps the best one we have to explain the passage – if with caution. And see Paratore, “Il canto I del Paradiso,” in Nuove letture dantesche, vol. V (Florence: Le Monnier, 1972), pp. 273-74, for a possible Lucanian source for Dante's version of Cyrrha (Phars. V.93-96), a passage which, in Dante's eyes, might have represented Lucan's version of the Empyrean (since the caves of Cyrrha are closely linked with heaven-dwelling Jupiter [tonans]).

Nonetheless, if Dante knew what many of his commentators, from the earliest through those of the last century, report at verse 16 (e.g., the Ottimo, Pietro di Dante, the author of the Chiose ambrosiane, Benvenuto, the Anonimo Fiorentino, John of Serravalle, Lombardi, Portirelli, Tommaseo, Scartazzini, Campi), namely, that Cyrrha was sacred to Apollo, Nissa to Bacchus, how could he have made the second “peak” of Parnassus sacred to the Muses? At Purg. XXIX.37-42, Dante's second invocation of that cantica makes reference to the Heliconian residence of the Muses. However, two other passages in Purgatorio (Purg. XXII.65 and XXXI.141) make oblique reference to the Castalian spring on Mt. Parnassus as also being home to these ladies. It does seem possible that Dante has deliberately conflated two homes of the Muses, the spring on Parnassus with that on Helicon (which Dante may not have known as a mountain but as itself a spring [Toynbee, “Elicona” {Concise Dante Dictionary}]).

On the other hand, still another (and even more attention-catching) passage in Lucan may lie behind some of the apparent confusion in Dante's account. Here is the conclusion of the pseudo-dedication (Phars. I.33-66) of the unfinished epic to the emperor, Nero:

Sed mihi iam numen; nec, si te pectore vates
accipio, Cirrhaea velim secreta moventem
sollicitare deum Bacchumque avertere Nysa:
tu satis ad vires Romana in carmina dandas. (Phars. I.63-66)

But to me you are divine already; and if my breast receives
you to inspire my verse, I would not care to trouble the god
who rules mysterious Delphi, or to summon Bacchus from Nysa:
you alone are sufficient to give strength to a Roman bard (tr. J.D. Duff).

Three remarks seem called for. (1) It is inconceivable that Dante would not have paid close attention to this passage, loaded as it is with Lucan's poetic and political strategies that inform the entire work. Thus he might have noted that his favorite republican poet/historian has situated Apollo and Bacchus, as was only to be expected in the Latin tradition, on the two “peaks” of Parnassus. Or, since Lucan is assuming his reader's knowledge of these matters, perhaps Dante did not understand that the passage referred to Parnassus, even with its reference to Nysa (although he surely might have known that this was one of the “peaks” of Parnassus). (2) Whatever his understanding of the geography of the passage, he surely understood the only slightly veiled reference to Apollo, to whom he himself will refer in only a few lines as “the Delphic god” (verse 32). What may we imagine Dante thought as he reconsidered Lucan's proemial passage (he will later refer to the poem as “scriptura paganorum” [Epist. XIII.63], a phrase that may be neutral, meaning only “the writings of the pagans” or that may carry a biblical overtone: “pagan scripture”)? In contrast with his own proem to Paradiso, he notes that Lucan does not “invoke” Apollo, as Dante has done (vv. 13-21), but treats the emperor, Nero, as his muse – no matter how playfully. Thus Dante does invoke Apollo by name if not in fact, while Lucan apparently bypasses him for the emperor (already semi-divine, in Lucan's devastatingly overstated obsequiousness); the reversals of our expectations are, in both cases, stunning. (3) If Dante's invocation of Apollo is a response to Lucan's non-invocation in the proem to the Pharsalia, he must have realized that the “orthodox” companion on the “orthodox” companion peak was Nissa-based Bacchus and not the Castalian-spring-dwelling Muses. And thus we would observe yet another example of his bold and sure reshaping of pagan myth to his own Christian purpose. See, for a discussion of this complicated example of Dantean-Lucanian intertextuality, Violetta De Angelis, “... e l'ultimo Lucano,” in Dante e la “bella scola” della poesia: Autorità e sfida poetica, ed. A. A. Iannucci (Ravenna: Longo, 1993), pp. 183-95. De Angelis, however, believes that Dante does think of Bacchus, god of eloquence, as having guided him this far (p. 194), a judgment difficult to accept, given the fact that the first four invocations in the poem were all Muse-directed (see discussion of the invocations in the note to Par. I.1-36).

For the phrase “m'è uopo,” here translated “I need,” see Landino (comm. to vv. 16-18): “chome in latino diciamo 'mihi est opus'” (as in Latin we say, “I have this to do”).

The word aringo (here translated loosely and, in reverse metonymy, as “struggle”) actually descends from a Gothic word referring to the space in which troops were gathered (and subsequently a contest took place) – see Giacalone (comm. to Par. I.16-18). The English “ring” (definition 13 in the OED) offers, if not perhaps a true cognate, a useful analogue, as in the phrase “I would not get into the ring with him, if I were you.”

In this second piece of his invocation proper (in the first, at verse 14, he had asked to be made God's vessel), the poet asks to be, literally, inspired (“Come into my breast and breathe in me”). If the first petition seems to have been aimed in particular at the Second Person of the Trinity, Christ as Apollo, this one seems to be directed to the Holy Spirit, as has been the case in the Comedy when Dante has represented inspiration, reflecting the “spiration of the Holy Spirit” (e.g., see the notes to Inf. XXXIII.106-108 and Purg. XXIV.52-54). And now see Picone, “Il tema dell'incoronazione poetica in Dante, Petrarca e Boccaccio,” L'Alighieri 25 (2005), pp. 10-11.

If the reader has accepted the possibility (even the likelihood) that Dante's guarded speech is to be unriddled as an invocation of Christian dimension and scope, these next two verses seem to undo such a formulation with a certain exigency, for the story of Marsyas does not seem to lend itself to such understandings (but see the similar treatment of Apollo discussed in the note to Par. I.13).

Dante probably did not have access to the fragmentary accounts knit together to make the story of Marsyas that modern readers can find in various compendia. The pre-history of Marsyas was, if known to him, interesting. Minerva, having invented the wind instrument that we know as the flute or Pan-pipes, saw herself, playing it, reflected in water and noticed how ugly the exercise made her face. She hurled it away, only to have it picked up by Marsyas, who found that he quickly learned the skill to make his tunes. He became so convinced of his ability that he challenged Apollo to a musical contest (cf. those similar Ovidian challengers of the gods' aesthetic abilities, the daughters of King Pierus [Purg. I.9-12] and Arachne [Purg. XII.43-45]). Naturally, Apollo and his lyre outdo Marsyas and his flute. Since each combatant was to have his will if victorious, Apollo flays Marsyas alive (presumptuous mortals are always taught their lesson by the Ovidian gods whom they offend, but never seem to learn it). Ovid's account (in the sixth book of the Metamorphoses) of the early stages of the myth are brief (vv. 383-386 [he spends the core of his account, vv. 387-391, on the flaying in graphic detail and then, in the quieter conclusion, vv. 392-400, on the sadness of Marsyas's fellow fauns and satyrs at his death and transformation into the clearest stream in Phrygia]). He is a satyr defeated in a contest by Apollo on Minerva's rejected reed and punished by the god; but do we not catch a glimpse in him of a potentially failed Dante, his vernacular a low instrument contrasted with the lofty Apollonian lyre? In the account of Marsyas's punishment that Dante knew best (Metam. VI.383-400), his musical instrument has evidently humble origins: it is a reed (harundo [verse 384]) such as a yokel might pluck to make a tuneful sound; it is also a flute (tibia [verse 386]). Thus, along with presenting in Marsyas a coded figure of the poet as vas electionis, Dante also would seem to encourage us to fashion a further understanding: As Marsyas, he is a proponent of the comic muse, of the low style, against the higher forms of artistry intrinsically represented by Apollo, the flute vs. the lyre. We have learned to read Dante's controversial self-identifications with a certain ingenuity. At one remove, he goes out of his way (and we readily follow him with great relief) to show that he is not at all like Uzzah (see the note to Purg. X.56-57) or, for that matter, Arachne (see the note to Purg. XII.43-45). On the other hand, we never rid ourselves of the suspicion that the poet is also confessing that he, secretly, for all his protestation by the use of contrary exemplars, acknowledges precisely his resemblance to these outlaws, these challengers of divine authority, these chafers at divine constraint upon human knowledge and capacity. Ovid's Marsyas is the opposite of Dante's, who has been turned inside out, as it were. See Jessica Levenstein's succinct remark (“The Re-Formation of Marsyas in Paradiso I,” Dante for the New Millennium, ed. Teodolinda Barolini and H. Wayne Storey [New York: Fordham University Press, 2003], p. 412): “While Ovid portrays the god's removal of the skin from the satyr, Dante describes the god's removal of the satyr from the skin.”

From Apollo's perspective, Marsyas is a bumpkin who deserves to be roundly punished; from Dante's, he is the classical equivalent of a poet working in the low vernacular, and thus a more enigmatic presence. Dante's God, unlike Apollo, rewards humble singers with true vision accomplished in a rapture of the soul, drawn from its body (even though we have reason to acknowledge that Dante is in the heavens corporeally). For an appreciation of Dante's ringing of the changes on Ovid's Apollo/Marsyas relationship, see Marguerite Mills Chiarenza, “Pagan Images in the Prologue of the Paradiso,” in Proceedings, Pacific Northwest Council on Foreign Languages 26 (1975): Part 1, 133-36.

For a a discussion relevant to the generic concerns of the poet as he began composing his Paradiso, see Manlio Pastore Stocchi, “Dante, Mussato, e la tragedìa,” in Dante e la cultura veneta, ed. V. Branca and G. Padoan (Florence: Olschki, 1966), pp. 251-62. He examines the complex and interrelated questions of Dante's (1) knowledge of Albertino Mussato's thoughts about Senecan tragedy (in Mussato's Evidentia tragediarum Senece [written before 1313]), (2) awareness of the definition of tragedy as being Senecan in nature, as promulgated by Uguccione da Pisa, (3) acquaintance with the actual tragedies of Seneca (i.e., of an author distinct from the “Seneca morale” of Inf. IV.141), (4) desire to distance himself, in the Epistle to Cangrande (which Pastore Stocchi does not hesitate to consider Dantean in origin), from Mussato's definitions, (5) “coded” rejection of Mussato's tragic poetics (and embrace of his own comic ones) in his first eclogue in response to Giovanni del Virgilio (Egl. I.47).

Apollo now becomes God the Father, addressed by the first of his Trinitarian attributes, Power. His highest creation, the Empyrean, is referred to as the “kingdom,” of which Dante hopes to be allowed to retain a weak but true copy in his mind; he will bring that back and write it down for us. The phrase “l'ombra del beato regno” (the shadow of the blessèd kingdom – verse 23) reflects the Latin technical term umbra found in discussions of figure and fulfillment in biblical exegesis. See Ledda (La guerra della lingua [Ravenna: Longo, 2002]), pp. 302-3; Hollander (Allegory in Dante's “Commedia” [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969]), pp. 196-97; Hollander (“Paradiso XXX,” Studi Danteschi 60 [1988 {=1993}]): 19-21; Ledda (“Tópoi dell'indicibilità e metaforismi nella Commedia,” Strumenti critici 12 [1997]): 137.

The language here admits of two referential fields; in the Ovidian one the tree is Apollo's laurel, to which Dante comes to crown himself with its leaves, as his subject and the god himself shall make him worthy. However, poets are not usually portrayed as crowning themselves. Perhaps that is a clue to our necessary radical transformation of the pagan myth as it applies to Dante. In the Christian version of the myth, Apollo is Christ (see the note to Par. I.13-15), whose “tree” (the cross) the Christian poet approaches to gather to himself the Christian version of the laurel wreath, the immortality won for humankind by Christ, which his poem and Christ's love will make him worthy to receive. In this vein see Goffis (“Canto I,” in Lectura Dantis Scaligera: “Paradiso” [Florence: Le Monnier, 1968 {1964}], pp. 1-36): “E così il 'diletto legno,' a cui si rivolgerà Dante, è certo l'alloro, ma è anche il lignum crucis, e le foglie d'alloro non saranno segno di gloria terrena soltanto” (And thus the “beloved tree,” to which Dante shall address himself, is, to be sure, the laurel, but it is also the wood of the cross; and the laurel's leaves shall not be a sign of earthly glory alone). In Dante's world, however, as the next tercet will make clear, there are none or few who even long for such reward.

The word legno occurs in nineteen passages in the poem, nine times as metonymic for “ship,” seven times to mean “tree,” twice to mean “a piece of wood,” and once to refer to the cross, the “tree” to which Jesus was nailed (Par. XIX.105).

Far from worrying about not having enough laurel leaves to accommodate all those worthy of them (intrinsically the condition in earlier times, i.e., classical ones), Dante's Apollo must take joy whenever, in this leaden age, anyone, no matter how undeserving, desires to be crowned with the leaves of “the Peneian bough,” i.e., those of the laurel (or bay-tree), in Daphne's transformed state; Daphne's father, god of a Thessalian river, was named Peneus, and the river after him. See, as Scartazzini (comm. Par. I.31-33) suggests, Ovid (Metam. I.452): “Primus amor Phoebi Daphne Peneia” (Apollo's first love, Peneus's daughter, Daphne).

Dante abruptly broadens the subject area to include emperors along with poets. Since, up to now (vv. 9-27), the focus has been exclusively on poetry, it comes as something of a surprise to find the imperial crown beneath our gaze, no matter how usual the reference to both laureations may be in our minds. Dante's sense of himself as political poet may account for this expansion; nothing else in the immediate context would seem to do so.

Palma di Cesnola (Questioni dantesche: “Fiore”, “Monarchia”, “Commedia” [Ravenna: Longo, 2003]), pp. 43-62, in a complex and perhaps not eventually convincing argument, would place the completion of the second cantica soon after the coronation (29 June 1312) of Henry VII of Luxemburg (Purg. XXXIII.37-45, the prophecy that some take to refer to Henry) and of Paradiso I-V by the end of 1313. In Palma's further calculations, Monarchia was written soon after the completion of these canti, at least by the end of 1314, and only then, beginning in the second half of 1315, Paradiso VI and the rest of the cantica. This dating might help explain the sudden Ghibelline outburst, which characterizes Canto VI, a canto that then, with its confirmation of the lasting validity of the imperial ideal, becomes a kind of continuation of Monarchia and a considered response to the death of Henry VII on 24 August 1313. But see Anthony Cassell (The “Monarchia” Controversy: An Historical Study with Accompanying Translations of Dante Alighieri's “Monarchia,” Guido Vernani's “Refutation of the 'Monarchia' Composed by Dante,” and Pope John XXII's Bull “Si fratrum” [Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2004], p. 340), arguing that 1314 can only be a terminus a quo for the Monarchia, not, as Palma would have it, p. 45, a terminus post quem.

Arianna Punzi, “'Oh Beatrice, dolce guida e cara!' (Paradiso XXIII, v. 34),” Critica del testo 2 (1999): 771-99, sees this line as an example of “false modesty”; however, the line reads more ordinarily as modesty itself (“the smallest spark leaps from a great fire”), a reading that is ridiculous and thus never attempted (how could Dante say the Commedia was “a small spark”?). On the other hand, normal grammatical usage would point in that direction. This is not to suggest that Dante wanted us to read the verse that way, but that when we do (as he surely knew we would in our first reading of the verse, before we discard that reading as impossible), we excuse him from the potential sin of pride. Nonetheless, it is clear that his little spark is meant to kindle a vast flame in us. That, however, is not necessarily to be understood as a prideful thought, when we consider the matter in light of the given of this poem (namely, that it is derived directly from God in order to help us to pray better), rather the completion of a chosen poet's duty.

It is interesting to come upon the line “Gran foco nasce di poca favilla” (a great flame is born of a small spark) in a sonnet of Cino da Pistoia (CLXX.12, ed. Marti). The first to call attention to the resemblance was apparently Francesco Torraca (comm. Par. I.34-36). We perhaps will never know which poet was responding to the other, as is frequently the case in this poetic relationship between two friends. For instance, Palma di Cesnola (Questioni dantesche: “Fiore”, “Monarchia”, “Commedia” [Ravenna: Longo, 2003], p. 44-45) argues that, in his lament for the dead emperor, Henry VII, Cino is echoing a passage in the first canto of Paradiso (Par. I.22-27). However, it seems at least as likely that Dante is echoing Cino – if there is any link between the two passages at all (the fact that the main evidence is a series of three rhymes probably dilutes the case for a borrowing, since rhyming is a case apart in studies of poetic dependence, one with special ground rules and requiring special care).

The translation is based on an interpretation that may strike those who know the commentary tradition as erroneous (but see Hollander [“Why Did Dante Write the Comedy?” Dante Studies 111 {1993}: 20-21 and Dante's Epistle to Cangrande {Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993}, p. 91]. These verses are usually (nearly universally) interpreted to refer to other better poets who will be inspired to write by reading Dante (and who, because of his example, will have even more success in finding Apollo's favor). Michelangelo Picone has in fact suggested (“Canto XIV,” in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone [Florence: Cesati, 2002], p. 212n.) that Cino da Pistoia may be one such. And even the generally skeptical Scartazzini (comm. Par. I.35) falls victim to a probably unwise spirit of unanimity, although he is plainly uncomfortable with the portrait of the poet that results from this interpretation. “Troppa umiltà” (overabundant humility) is his muttered response. Indeed, the very notion that Dante might envision the possibility that a single other poet (much less a whole crowd) might outdo him in poetic accomplishment seems nothing less than preposterous. In the later twentieth century, several commentators have tried another solution, one that is first reflected in the commentary tradition when Daniele Mattalia (comm. Par. I.35 – as also would Giovanni Fallani [Par. I.34-36]) cites Giuseppe Toffanin's remarks (Sette interpretazioni dantesche [Naples: Libreria scientifica editrice, 1947], pp. 80-82), even though he does not agree with them, that try to make the case for the saints in Heaven, including Beatrice, as being those whose prayers will be amended by Dante's poem. That also seems a strained interpretation, since self-interested prayer is a necessary instrument only for those who are on earth, not yet experiencing their salvation. Nonetheless, the view impressed Rocco Montano (Storia della poesia di Dante, vol. II [Naples: Quaderni di Delta, 1963], p. 321, enough to make its way to print yet again and, through him, in 1968, to Giuseppe Giacalone (comm. Par. I.34-36). This minority position, however, does not hold up very well to scrutiny, either, though it is a welcome, if belated, response to the standard, if unlikely, gloss. There is a “third way,” fortunately, of solving the problem; see Hollander, “The 'miglior voci' of Paradiso 1.35,” Electronic Bulletin of the Dante Society of America (November 2005) and “Paradiso I.35-36: 'con miglior voci / si pregherà perché Cirra risponda,'” Letteratura italiana antica 7 (2006): 241-47. Literally, the verses seem to express the (not immodest) hope that the Comedy will help those who will read it to pray more effectively (and thus put themselves in the way of salvation – that would seem to be the necessary conclusion). It is no wonder that for centuries most of Dante's readers avoided recognition of the barely hidden daring in such religious claims as this. But it seems the simplest explanation of these verses, one that is in harmony with the avowed aim of this poet, which is to move those living in the bondage of the sins of this life toward the liberty of eternal glory (see Epist. XIII.21). The literal sense of si pregherà is surely better rendered as “pray.” Had Dante wanted to say what most of his interpreters want him to have said, he could just as easily (and with the same rhythm) written “si canterà”; that is how, for centuries, commentators and translators have rendered the phrase. In fact, Dante uses the verb cantare (“to sing”) nearly seventy times in the poem, almost always to represent poetic utterance. And readers also may note that other forms of the verb pr[i]egare and its related nouns, pr[i]ego and preghiera, are not problematic in their more than sixty other appearances, always either specifically signifying prayer or, more generally, urgent request. Thus one has the sense that this defensive interpretation represents yet another example of avoidance behavior on the part of those who wish to shun a theological reading of a passage, trying to protect poor Dante from himself.

See the similar dispute that dogs a similar passage, Paradiso XXX.34 (and the note to that verse).

We have translated verse 35 in a way that is not usual, sharing the understanding of such as Isidoro Del Lungo (comm. Par. I.34-36), Mario Aversano (Dante daccapo [glosses to the Paradiso], copia d'eccezione, sent by the author on 11 September 2001), p. 6, and Selene Sarteschi (“Canto I,” in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone [Florence: Cesati, 2002]), p. 17n., that di retro a me has less to do with time (as the vast majority of commentators take the phrase to do) – if it does surely imply sequence – than it does with imitation. Del Lungo: “sull'esempio mio” (after my example); Aversano: “seguendo il mio esempio” (following my example). Sarteschi is also in this camp, hearing an echo of Purgatorio XXIV.59, “di retro al dittator”; Dante will become the new “dictator” – for other poets we assume – but Sarteschi is not eventually clear about her interpretation of this line. We part company from both her precursors once they continue their analysis; for Del Lungo and his followers, those who will follow Dante in prayer are the blessed in Heaven (see discussion earlier in this note); Aversano, while disagreeing with that argument (as well as with the previously ruling hypothesis, that other [and superior poets] would succeed Dante in writing religious poetry), offers an at least equally unlikely solution: these favored ones are the emperor and/or other practitioners of imperial politics.

This long and difficult beginning of the narrative portion of the final cantica may be paraphrased as follows: The Sun (“the lamp of the world”) rises on us mortals from various points along the horizon, but from that point at which four circles intersect in such a way as to form three crosses (generally understood as the circles of the horizon, the equator, the zodiac, the colure of the equinoxes, the last three of which intersect the horizon in this way on the vernal equinox, March 21), it comes forth conjoined with a better constellation (Aries) and takes a better course, and it better tempers and imprints the material compound of the world with its informing power. And from that point on the horizon it had made morning there, where almost all was light (Purgatory), and evening here, where almost all was dark (i.e., in the Northern Hemisphere). As Bosco/Reggio (comm. Par. I.37-42) point out, Dante has marked the beginnings of all three cantiche with references to the time (Inf. II.1-5; Purg. I.13-30, 115-117). Singleton refines the point (comm. Par. I.44-45): Where Inferno begins at evening (around 6 pm) and Purgatorio at dawn (shortly before 6 am), Paradiso begins, more propitiously, at noon, the most “noble” hour of the day (see Purg. XXXIII.104 and Conv. IV.xxiii.15). And see the note in Bosco/Reggio to the following tercet (vv. 43-45) for some of the elaborate exegesis attached to the astronomical problems here. For a detailed discussion in English, see Alison Cornish, Reading Dante's Stars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 87-92. The passage (vv. 37-54, in fact) offers numerous examples of enjambement in two (and more) successive terzine. See Paratore, “Il canto I del Paradiso,” in Nuove letture dantesche, vol. V (Florence: Le Monnier, 1972), pp. 266-67, who points out that the first canto of the Paradiso is particularly marked by this phenomenon, which he counts as occurring a total of nine times, much more than is usual.

The lengthy opening description of the heavens yields to the first presence and first naming of Beatrice in Paradiso. Her superhuman ability to gaze directly and fixedly at the Sun reflects a tradition insisting on eagles' ability to do so found in Aristotle among the ancients (Animal. IX.xxxiv) and in Brunetto Latini among the moderns (Tresor I.v.8). And see Par. XX.31-32. As Carroll points out (comm. Par. I.49-64), we probably should not draw allegorical conclusions about Beatrice's turning leftward (a movement frequently symptomatic, in this poem, of moral deficiency); here her turning in this direction is necessitated by her being in the Southern Hemisphere, where she was facing east; north, whence the Sun shone, was thus to her left.

The noun aguglia is a popular form of the Latin/Italian word for “eagle.” For discussion of the linguistic mixture that is so important a feature of this canto, see Pompeo Giannantonio, “Canto I,” in Lectura Dantis Neapolitana: “Paradiso,” ed. P. Giannantonio (Naples: Loffredo, 2000 [1986], p. 18).

This, the first formally developed simile of Paradiso, is in fact double (and that its second element deploys the image of a completed pilgrimage should not surprise us). We may sense an increasing degree of abstraction in the similes of this cantica (but not always – see Par. I.67-69, where Dante's “transhumanization” is cast in physical terms; he is changed as was Glaucus). For the increasingly abstract nature of the poetry of roughly the first two-thirds of Paradiso, see Fredi Chiappelli, “Abstraction et réalité dans la structure figurative du Paradiso,” in Le Réel dans la littérature et dans la langue, actes du Xe congrès de la Féderation internationale des langues et littératures modernes (F.I.L.L.M.), Strasbourg, 29 août-3 septembre 1966, ed. Paul Vernois (Paris: C. Klincksieck, 1967, pp. 7-22). And for two bibliographies of studies devoted to the Dantean simile, see Madison U. Sowell, “A Bibliography of the Dantean Simile to 1981,” Dante Studies 101 (1983: 167-80), and Juan Varela-Portas de Orduña, Introducción a la semántica de la “Divina Commedia”: teoría y análisis del símil (Madrid: Ediciones de la Discreta, 2002).

Beatrice's miraculous (to ordinary mortals) ability to look into the Sun is momentarily granted to Dante, who sees the reflection of the Sun in her eyes and somehow is able to look up into that planet with his returning gaze. When we reflect that, according to Purgatorio IV.62, the Sun itself is a mirror (specchio), Beatrice then becomes a mirror of the mirror of God.

For the imaginativa, the image-receiving capacity of the brain, see the note to Purgatorio XVII.13-18.

Some of the early commentators make the understandable mistake (since “here” obviously refers to the earth) of thinking that “there” applies to the heavens and not the pinnacle of the mount of purgatory; however, both Benvenuto da Imola (comm. Par. I.49-57) and Francesco da Buti (comm. Par. I.49-63) comprehend that Dante and Beatrice are still in the earthly paradise, a fact that the title of this new cantica tends to make us forget. Carroll (comm. Par. I.49-64) senses that the protagonist is presented as the “new Adam,” quoting St. Gregory of Nazianzus for the belief that “The head and aim of all the Christian mysteries is my perfection and restoration and return to the first Adam” and reminds us that this last scene situated on the purgatorial mount is occurring at the propitious time of noon (see the note to Par. I.37-45).

Dante is able to make out the corona of the Sun. The reader must assume that his greater sight results from his greater closeness to the Sun at this highest point on the earth's surface as well as from his regaining the vision of innocence (see the note to Par. I.55-57).

Venturi (comm. Par. I.62-63) believes that this additional brightness was caused by the sight of the Moon, now grown larger in its appearance because Dante is so much higher. However (and as Lombardi [comm. Par. I.61-63] correctly objects), this cannot be the sphere of the Moon, which awaits Beatrice and Dante in the next canto, but is the sphere of fire, in the outermost situation of the four elements that constitute our earth (water and earth, then air, and finally fire), a solution at first proposed in 1333 or so by the Ottimo (comm. Par. I.58-63). And see verse 115 of this canto (“This instinct carries fire up toward the moon”), where the sphere of fire is apparently again alluded to. However, some ancient commentators (e.g., Benvenuto [comm. Par. I.58-63]) and some modern ones as well (e.g., Singleton [comm. Par. I.61-63]) deny this, the first insisting that Dante had passed this zone on the Mount of Purgatory, the second observing that Dante does not definitively refer to this important boundary of the earth's atmosphere, thus leaving the question unresolved. However, Benvenuto either has conflated what Dante says about the limits of normal earthly weather to the ante-purgatorial precincts (see Purg. XXI.41-60) with the location of the sphere of fire or he simply misconstrues details in the earthly paradise, since he claims that we frequently learn in that part of the poem that it is found lower down; as for Singleton's objection, this would not be the first time that Dante withholds information that we would like to have (e.g., how he entered Hell, how he crossed Acheron, etc., etc.) on the good ground that we would find such information simply too challenging to our already challenged credence in the givens of this poem. He probably felt forced, since there are nine of them, to account for his passages through the boundaries that constitute the starry spheres; but he may have felt that he could finesse the sphere of fire, thus avoiding the need to explain how he passed through it unscathed (in contrast one thinks of the lengthy and detailed description of Dante's difficult passage through the wall of fire around the seventh terrace [Purg. XXVII.10-57]).

On this tercet see Carroll (comm. Par. I.49-64): “'The light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun, and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days, in the day that the Lord bindeth up the hurt of his people, and healeth the stroke of the wound' (Isaiah 30:26). This represents the vast increase of knowledge which would have come to Adam had he remained in his first estate, and which Dante receives because he has regained it, – not the direct vision of the Divine Essence, but power to see the sparks which it flung forth – its operations and effects in creation.”

The guide and her charge apparently have passed through the (unnamed) sphere of fire that girds the earth just below the sphere of the Moon; Dante's eyes are guided by Beatrice's beyond this home of earth's highest-dwelling element and to a first sight of the heavenly spheres.

Glaucus's transformation, described by Ovid (Metam. XIII.904-968), is a dazzling rendition of how an ordinary fisherman, chancing upon a magic herb, is metamorphosed into a god of the sea. Dante can sharply reduce the poetic space he devotes to the Ovidian scene because it is so familiar to his readers (at least to the ones he most cares about). For the classical history of Glaucus as it comes into Ovid, Dante's primary source, see Diskin Clay, “The Art of Glaukos (Plato Phaedo 108D4-9),” American Journal of Philology 106 (1985: 230-36).

For Dante's Glaucus (along with Marsyas) as figures of Dante's own divinization, see Paola Rigo, Memoria classica e memoria biblica in Dante (Florence: Olschki, 1994, pp. 109-33). For the theme of deificatio in St. Bernard's De diligendo Deo as clarifying Dante's notion of “transhumanization,” see Rosetta Migliorini-Fissi, “La nozione di deificatio nel Paradiso,” Letture classensi 9-10 (1982: 39-72); she indeed sees traces of Bernard's work throughout the poem, as does Francesco Mazzoni, “San Bernardo e la visione poetica della Divina Commedia,” in Seminario Dantesco Internazionale: Atti del primo convegno tenutosi al Chauncey Conference Center, Princeton, 21-23 ottobre 1994, ed. Z.G. Baranski (Florence: Le Lettere, 1997, esp. pp. 178-80, 192-230).

Kevin Brownlee, “Pauline Vision and Ovidian Speech in Paradiso I,” in Rachel Jacoff and Jeffrey T. Schnapp, eds., The Poetry of Allusion: Virgil and Ovid in Dante's “Commedia” (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991, p. 213), suggests that the transformation of Marsyas figures the transformation of the poet, while that of Glaucus has the same function for the protagonist. Manuele Gragnolati (Experiencing the Afterlife [Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2005], p. 173), is of the opinion that Dante wants us to conclude that, as Glaucus leapt into the sea with his body in Ovid's account (Metam. XIII.949-951), so the protagonist ascended in his flesh. See Hollander, Allegory in Dante's “Commedia” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), pp. 216-20, 228-29, for an examination of the Ovidian passage with particular emphasis on the special pertinence of its numerical components (nine and one hundred) for Dante.

For Glaucus's “tasting” of the grass that transforms him as “reversing” Adam's “tasting” of the forbidden tree (Par. XXVI.115), see Rigo, Memoria classica e memoria biblica in Dante (Florence: Olschki, 1994, p. 113). The notion of Glaucus as Adam in his refound innocence goes well with that of Dante in his: see Carroll's observation, cited in the note, above, to Par. I.55-57. We observe here a conflation of Ovid's Heroides, XVIII.160, a verse (cited by Rigo, p. 114) referring to Glaucus: “reddidit herba deum” (whom a plant once deified – tr. H.C. Cannon).

The two major classical myths evoked in this canto, Apollo and Glaucus, along with the associated references to arrows and the ingestion of food, indicate the two main ways to understanding that we will hear about all through the cantica, intellectual penetration and a more passive reception of the truth.

That Dante has turned to Ovid for three major myth/motifs in this canto (Apollo and Daphne/immortality; Apollo and Marsyas/being drawn out of one's bodily limits; Glaucus/transhumanization) would almost seem to indicate that, for Dante's purposes, Ovid's poem about the gods, transmogrified by Dante's Christian intellect into shadowy prefaces (see Par. XXX.78) of a higher truth, is a more adaptable source than Virgil's martial epic for this more exalted and final component of the Comedy. If, after our encounter with the first cantos of Paradiso, we are of that opinion, we are not altogether incorrect. However, if we believe that Virgil's text is no longer a valued source in the poem's most Christian precincts, we will eventually be disabused of this notion, particularly in Cantos XV and XXXIII.

For Dante “transhumanization” is the passing beyond normal human limits by entering into a state at least approaching that enjoyed by divinity.

Marguerite Mills Chiarenza, “The Imageless Vision and Dante's Paradiso,” Dante Studies 90 (1972), p. 83, holds this passage up to Hugh of St. Cher's comparison of the difficulty of conveying one's “intellectual vision” to someone else to the difficulty of describing the taste of wine to one who had never experienced it.

See Rosetta Migliorini-Fissi, “La nozione di deificatio nel Paradiso,” Letture classensi 9-10 (1982), pp. 41-44, for St. Bernard's relevant concept of deificatio.

Dante's claim is lodged in self-conscious language that, in a single verse, includes an Italian neologism (trasumanar), literally “to transhumanate,” an intransitive verb signifying “to become more than human,” and a Latin phrase, per verba (in words).

This tercet reflects the Three Persons of the Trinity, one per verse (Power, Knowledge, Love); we also learn in a single line (75) how Dante and Beatrice move upward: drawn instantaneously by God Himself, not propelled gradually by themselves.

This citation of II Corinthians 12:3 has not escaped many commentators. There Paul is not certain as to whether he was in body or not in his ascent through the heavens. For his phrase “third heaven” as meaning, not the heaven of Venus, to which the phrase would ordinarily refer in Dante, but the highest part of God's kingdom, see St. Thomas (ST II-II.175.3), r. to obj. 4 (cited from the online edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia [http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/]): “In one way by the third heaven we may understand something corporeal, and thus the third heaven denotes the empyrean (I Tim. 2:7; cf. ST I.12.11, ad 2), which is described as the 'third,' in relation to the aerial and starry heavens, or better still, in relation to the aqueous and crystalline heavens. Moreover, Paul is stated to be rapt to the 'third heaven,' not as though his rapture consisted in the vision of something corporeal, but because this place is appointed for the contemplation of the blessed. Hence the gloss on II Corinthians 12 says that the 'third heaven is a spiritual heaven, where the angels and the holy souls enjoy the contemplation of God: and when Paul says that he was rapt to this heaven he means that God showed him the life wherein He is to be seen forevermore.'”

On the Pauline stance of the poet here and elsewhere, see Joseph A. Mazzeo, “Dante and the Pauline Modes of Vision,” Medieval Cultural Tradition in Dante's “Comedy” (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1960), pp. 84-110. (And see his earlier book, Structure and Thought in the “Paradiso” [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1958], for a wider consideration of the poetics of this cantica.) Jeffrey Schnapp (“Trasfigurazione e metamorfosi nel Paradiso dantesco,” in Dante e la Bibbia, ed. G. Barblan [Florence: Olschki, 1988], pp. 273-92) relates the Pauline raptus, the “disappearance” of Virgil, and the increased reliance upon Ovidian text as a reflection of a new “vertical” poetic in the Paradiso. See also the discussion of this verse by M.E. Dwyer, “Whether in the body or out of the body?” Spunti e Ricerche 11 (1995): 45-58.

See Paradiso XXVII.64-65, where St. Peter finally makes it plain that Dante is present, ascending through the heavens, in the flesh. Bosco/Reggio (comm. Par. I.73-75) make the point that, since Dante eventually allows us to believe that he went up in body (they cite passages that are perhaps less decisive than that in Par. XXVII, Par. XXI.11 and XXI.61), all this coy uncertainty has a main purpose: to give himself Pauline credentials, since Paul himself either cannot or will not say in what state he was during his rapture. Gragnolati (Experiencing the Afterlife [Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press], 2005, pp. 162-74) joins those who believe that Dante contrives to make us see that he wants to be understood as having made this final ascent in the flesh.

For Dante's phrasing describing God's love as manifest in His creation, commentators beginning with Scartazzini (comm. Par. I.74) have suggested the resonance of Boethius (Cons. II.m8.15), “coelo imperitans amor” (love governing the heavens).

God is portrayed as drawing Dante upward through His beam of light; whether the protagonist possesses physical weight or not, it is a spiritual force that lifts him, not a physical one.

If God loved the universe in creating it, it loves him back. These two tercets create a picture of the totality of God's spheres. Having created them in time, He also made eternal (sempiternal, as Dante rightly says, i.e., having a beginning but not an end) their desire to reunite themselves with Him.

The reference is pretty clearly to the “music of the spheres,” that harmony created by the movement initiated by the love of the spheres themselves for God. As early as the Ottimo (comm. Par. I.76-81), students of the poem attributed the notion of the harmony of the spheres (as do other early commentators [see also Pietro1 on Par. I.76-78; Benvenuto on Par. I.82-84 – including Macrobius in a more complete list of earlier sponsors of this phenomenon, Plato, Aristotle, Boethius, and others; Francesco da Buti on Par. I.73-84; John of Serravalle on Par. I.76-81]) to Macrobius's commentary to the Ciceronian Somnium Scipionis (for a brief overview of the vexed topic, the extent of Dante's knowledge of this early-fifth-century neoplatonist, see Georg Rabuse, “Macrobio,” ED (1971.3), pp. 757-59 [Rabuse enthusiastically supports the view that Dante knows both the Somnium Scipionis and the Saturnalia well]). And for an also brief but useful discussion of Macrobius as reader of Virgil, see E.R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, tr. W. R. Trask (New York: Harper & Row, 1963 [1948], pp. 443-45). Among the moderns, since Lombardi (1791, in his comm. to Par. I.76-78), commentators have suggested the dependence here upon that concept; and, closer to our own time, Bosco/Reggio (comm. Par. I.78) point out that it is clear that Dante refers to the so-called “music of the spheres,” with its roots in Pythagorean and Platonic writings (perhaps best known to Dante by the passage in the Somnium Scipionis [Cicero's De re pub. VI.18] that exhibits Latin forms of the two verbs found here, “temperi” [temperans] and “discerni” [distinctis]). Such music is a pleasing notion, but all of Aristotle's three greatest commentators, Averroës, Albert the Great, and Thomas Aquinas, quash its possibility. Dante, as poet, seems to like the idea well enough that he is willing to be its sponsor despite such firm and authoritative opposition, as indeed Benedetto Varchi, citing only Aristotle, remarked (comm. Par. I.73-93). Bosco/Reggio go on to point out that this reference to the music of the spheres is the only one found in Paradiso, where all later music will be in the form of the singing of the saved and of the angels, less suspect musical forms, we might conclude. Eddie Condon, a banjoist, describes the night sounds of music in Chicago's jazz area in 1925, when King Oliver and Louis Armstrong were duelling cornetists, in terms that may remind a classicist of another kind of “natural” music, the Aeolian harp. See Laurence Bergreen, Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life (New York: Broadway, 1997), p. 261: “Around midnight you could hold your instrument in the middle of the street and the air would play it.”

Perhaps because humans are accustomed to seeing no measurable space-consuming object more vast than a lake or a sea, the poet compares the extended fire he saw in the sky to a watery body. How we are to understand the exact nature of the phenomenon at which he gazed is not clear, although some believe (see the note to Par. I.61-63) it is the fiery ring that surrounds the sphere of the Moon, a common fixture of medieval astronomy that would otherwise have remained unmentioned in the poem. But there is simply no certainty in this matter.

Both the beautiful sound (the music of the spheres? [see the note to Par. I.78]) and the brilliant and extended pool of light (the sphere of fire between the earth and Moon? [see the note to Par. I.61-63]) increase Dante's intense desire to know their realities. It will at least seem that Beatrice's answer (vv. 88-93) does little to answer either of Dante's questions in ways that we, earthlings like him, would consider satisfying. However, it certainly does seem that the poet means us to be aware of our unslaked curiosity about the identity of these two heavenly phenomena. An attractive hypothesis is that he means us to draw exactly these conclusions without having left himself open to attack by making extraordinary claims (e.g., “I passed through the sphere of fire and listened to the music of the spheres”).

We learn definitively that Beatrice truly reads the protagonist's mind, a capacity that Virgil at times claimed, but was rarely, if ever, capable of demonstrating (see the notes to Inf. XVI.115-123; Inf. XXIII.25-30; and to Purg. XV.133-135). Her lips open in response before Dante's question has been voiced. The reason for the agitation experienced by the protagonist is made clear by verses 82-84.

Beatrice avers that, were only Dante thinking in an otherworldly way, he would not have asked his two questions. He thinks of what his senses are experiencing as though it were sensed on earth. Her point is that it is precisely his earthly home that he has left behind and is indeed racing from as quickly as lightning flies. This response apparently does not satisfy readers' inquisitiveness much better than it satisfies the protagonist's. On the other hand, Benvenuto da Imola (comm. Par. I.91-93) suggests that the sounds of celestial harmony could not be heard from earth (“audit sonum coeli, non quia sit ibi factus de novo, sed quia dum staret in terra non poterat ipsum audire”). Thus Beatrice is intrinsically answering Dante's first question; his earthly ears confounded the reality (the music of the spheres) of what they heard. As for the second, commentators, beginning perhaps with Lombardi in 1791 (comm. Par. I.92), have understood that Dante's allusion is to the sphere of fire that circled the earth above the other elements, near the Moon; in other words, that Beatrice's words “lightning darting from its place” contain a specific reference to the sphere of fire, as is now recognized in most discussions of this tercet.

For a study devoted to the paradoxes that flow from Dante's combined corporeal heaviness and lightness, see Simon Gilson, “Rimaneggiamenti danteschi di Aristotele: gravitas e levitas nella Commedia,” in Le culture di Dante. Atti del quarto Seminario dantesco internazionale, ed. Michelangelo Picone et al. (Florence: Cesati, 2004, pp. 170-73): Beatrice's words gather up and redeploy Aristotle's statements concerning the rapid and violent movement of celestial bodies (De caelo II.2 and Meteor. II.9), combining them with the views of St. Augustine (Conf. XIII.9) on the pondus amoris, the downward-tending direction of earthly affection and the liberating fire of love for God. (Both Sapegno [comm. Par. I.124-126] and Singleton [comm. Par. I.116] cite this passage from the Confessions to make a similar point.) Dante's rational soul is returning to its “birthplace” in the heavens, where God breathed it into the being he was to become, his characteristics set by the Fixed Stars, as we learn, for instance at Par. VIII.94-114).

Dante has conflated his two previous questions as one, since they have both been answered in the same way.

Beatrice's smiling words (sorrise parolette) here contain the first reference to smiles and smiling that run through this canticle. There are roughly twice as many references (two dozen) to smiling in Paradiso as there were in Purgatorio (see the note to Purg. II.83).

Dante's new question probably does not refer to a concern that will arise later (if he is in the body, as he plainly seems to believe he is, how can he pass through the matter of the planetary spheres? see Par. II.37-45 and n.); rather, it more likely relates to his surprise that he in his bodied state can rise above, not only land and water back on earth but, far more puzzling to him, the lighter elements of air and fire. In the view of the author of the Codice cassinese (comm. Par. I.99) the reference is to two of the four elements: “scilicet. aerem et etherem, qui leves sunt respectu aliorum duorum corporum gravium ut est terra et aqua” (that is, air and fire, which are light in comparison to those other two bodies [elements] that are heavy, as are earth and water), a formulation that shows us a fourteenth-century commentator using the word corpo not to refer to the material heavenly spheres (as some modern commentators believe it must) but to the four elements. For the identity of ether and ignis see Guido da Pisa (comm. Inf. XIV.52-60).

While rhyme may have forced the Latin verb requïevi (I was content), Dante surely enjoyed Latinizing his own speech as a character in his own poem (for the first [and last] time since his first word in the poem [Inf. I.65, Miserere]). He is, as his bibliography attests, a writer in vernacular and in Latin.

We have been made aware of the wonder of those in beatitude at the obtuseness of mortals at least since we first observed the angel finding the plight of Dante at the Gates of Dis of absolutely no interest (Inf. IX.100-103). Introduced to this canticle at Paradiso I.37 and I.116, the word mortale will recur on numerous occasions, and, in this sense (human, and thus intellectually flawed), at least another ten times in Paradiso. See Par. II.53, IV.68, V.64, XI.1, XIX.99, XX.133, XXVIII.137, XXIX.132, XXXIII.32, XXXIII.68.

Beatrice's response fills the rest of the canto, with the exception of its final line of narrative. It is divided into three parts. In the first (Par. I.100-126), she deals with Dante's puzzlement as to his upward inclination, given his mortal condition; in the second (Par. I.127-135), she admits that fallen human nature is prone to being drawn downward, away from this true inclination; in the third (Par. I.136-141), she avers that Dante is now proof against such wrong directionality because he has been freed of sin.

While hardly answering Dante's question directly (Par. I.98-99: how can his heaviness pass through lighter zones in the atmosphere above the earth?), Beatrice begins her discourse on the nature of the universe, the formal disposition of which is ordered, in resemblance of its Creator.

In the structure of the created universe, where the divine form first became manifest, angels (and humans?) possess the capacity to understand that form. The Scholastic word “form” is akin to the Platonic term “idea,” a spiritual essence inhering in its physical manifestations.

Beatrice now presents the components of the universe's order: All things in nature, whether nearer to God or farther, have a natural inclination toward the good. While their destinations differ, each responds to its own inborn impulse in finding its goal, whether fire (guided toward the lunar sphere), the sensitive soul in irrational creatures, the force of gravity in inanimate things – and not only irrational things (animals, inanimate nature) but angels and humans as well. Both these classes of being possess not only intellect but love; the latter, as Bosco/Reggio point out (comm. Par. I.120) in the sense of “capable of willing,” as in Purg. XVII.92-93 (“amore... d'animo” [love, whether natural or of the mind]).

For a possible poetic precursor to Dante's formulation of the laws of gravity, see Ovid (Metam. I.29-30), as is pointed out by Antonio Rossini, Dante and Ovid: A Comparative Study of Narrative Technique (doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto, 2000), p. 172. The passage was first noted by Daniello (comm. Par. I.109-111): “Densior his tellus, elementaque grandia traxit et pressa est gravitate sua” (the earth was heavier than these [the elements of fire and air], and, drawing with it the grosser elements, sank to the bottom of its own weight [tr. F.J. Miller]). And see the note to Par. I.91-93.

Reverting to nautical metaphor (see Par. I.67-69) for the life-journeys of all created things, whether capable of willing or not, the poet equates the purposes of inanimate and one kind of animate life with voyages toward various ports, the ends for which He has ordained these of his creations. This impulse is exemplified in three kinds of things: a light element (fire) with its inherent “desire” to rise to its own sphere (see the note to Par. I.61-63); creatures possessed of an animal (but not a rational) soul; and a heavy element (earth) with its obedience to the law of gravity, expressed as a “desire” to become compacted (the opposite impulse from that of fire).

We now realize, if we did not at first, that “mortal hearts” did not refer to those of humans, in whom hearts are bound with immortal souls, guided by intellect and by choice in their loving (their will), but to the inclinations or instincts of animals, guiding their actions.

It is God's plan that the Empyrean, bathed in His light, is unmoving, peaceful, while the uppermost and neighboring heaven, the Primum Mobile, itself most agitated, imparts motion to the other spheres below. It is humans' eventual goal to be drawn toward God.

Dante, aware of our awareness that not all creatures possessed of immortal souls tend toward the good, explains why not all arrows hit their target. The fault is not in the archer (God) but in the material (Beatrice switches metaphoric equivalence in mid-metaphor, moving from archery to the production of artifacts): some of the craftsman's work is faulty because of the innate shortcomings of his material. It is a paradox that God's more noble creatures may swerve in their movement, while the lesser follow more predictable paths; that paradox results from the unique gift of freedom of the will to humans and to angels (see Par. V.19-24).

Having offered the necessary philosophic background, Beatrice now more or less answers Dante's question: His natural inclination is to move upward. To be sure, his quandary (Par. I.98-99) was how he, as an object possessing mass and weight, could penetrate matter, and this concern is not, strictly speaking, answered in her remarks so much as it is bypassed for a higher degree of abstraction.

Bosco/Reggio (comm. to Par. I.141) set into relief the paradox that underlies these two terzine. While Dante's voyage through the heavens is itself miraculous in any terms, his upward tendency, which seems paranormal to him, is utterly natural; that he was called to witness, as was Paul, is a mystery that only God can explain; that, once called, he rises through the spheres is explained by the merest science, the result of a spiritual force of gravity, as it were.

The final verse of the canto, returning to the narrative mode, describes Beatrice's renewed contemplation of Heaven, to which she is obviously pleased to return, having had to lower her intellectual powers in order to explain what to her is intuited and obvious to such an auditor as Dante, with his as yet necessarily lesser capacity to experience and to understand the highest truths.