Sì tosto come l'ultima parola
la benedetta fiamma per dir tolse,
a rotar cominciò la santa mola;
e nel suo giro tutta non si volse
prima ch'un'altra di cerchio la chiuse,
e moto a moto e canto a canto colse;
canto che tanto vince nostre muse,
nostre serene in quelle dolci tube,
quanto primo splendor quel ch'e' refuse.
Come si volgon per tenera nube
due archi paralelli e concolori,
quando Iunone a sua ancella iube,
nascendo di quel d'entro quel di fori,
a guisa del parlar di quella vaga
ch'amor consunse come sol vapori,
e fanno qui la gente esser presaga,
per lo patto che Dio con Noè puose,
del mondo che già mai più non s'allaga:
così di quelle sempiterne rose
volgiensi circa noi le due ghirlande,
e sì l'estrema a l'intima rispuose.
Poi che 'l tripudio e l'altra festa grande,
sì del cantare e sì del fiammeggiarsi
luce con luce gaudïose e blande,
insieme a punto e a voler quetarsi,
pur come li occhi ch'al piacer che i move
conviene insieme chiudere e levarsi;
del cor de l'una de le luci nove
si mosse voce, che l'ago a la stella
parer mi fece in volgermi al suo dove;
e cominciò: “L'amor che mi fa bella
mi tragge a ragionar de l'altro duca
per cui del mio sì ben ci si favella.
Degno è che, dov' è l'un, l'altro s'induca:
sì che, com' elli ad una militaro,
così la gloria loro insieme luca.
L'essercito di Cristo, che sì caro
costò a rïarmar, dietro a la 'nsegna
si movea tardo, sospeccioso e raro,
quando lo 'mperador che sempre regna
provide a la milizia, ch'era in forse,
per sola grazia, non per esser degna;
e, come è detto, a sua sposa soccorse
con due campioni, al cui fare, al cui dire
lo popol disvïato si raccorse.
In quella parte ove surge ad aprire
Zefiro dolce le novelle fronde
di che si vede Europa rivestire,
non molto lungi al percuoter de l'onde
dietro a le quali, per la lunga foga,
lo sol talvolta ad ogne uom si nasconde,
siede la fortunata Calaroga
sotto la protezion del grande scudo
in che soggiace il leone e soggioga:
dentro vi nacque l'amoroso drudo
de la fede cristiana, il santo atleta
benigno a' suoi e a' nemici crudo;
e come fu creata, fu repleta
sì la sua mente di viva virtute
che, ne la madre, lei fece profeta.
Poi che le sponsalizie fuor compiute
al sacro fonte intra lui e la Fede,
u' si dotar di mutüa salute,
la donna che per lui l'assenso diede,
vide nel sonno il mirabile frutto
ch'uscir dovea di lui e de le rede;
e perché fosse qual era in costrutto,
quinci si mosse spirito a nomarlo
del possessivo di cui era tutto.
Domenico fu detto; e io ne parlo
sì come de l'agricola che Cristo
elesse a l'orto suo per aiutarlo.
Ben parve messo e famigliar di Cristo:
ché 'l primo amor che 'n lui fu manifesto,
fu al primo consiglio che diè Cristo.
Spesse fïate fu tacito e desto
trovato in terra da la sua nutrice,
come dicesse: 'Io son venuto a questo.'
Oh padre suo veramente Felice!
oh madre sua veramente Giovanna,
se, interpretata, val come si dice!
Non per lo mondo, per cui mo s'affanna
di retro ad Ostïense e a Taddeo,
ma per amor de la verace manna
in picciol tempo gran dottor si feo;
tal che si mise a circüir la vigna
che tosto imbianca, se 'l vignaio è reo.
E a la sedia che fu già benigna
più a' poveri giusti, non per lei,
ma per colui che siede, che traligna,
non dispensare o due o tre per sei,
non la fortuna di prima vacante,
non decimas, quae sunt pauperum Dei,
addimandò, ma contro al mondo errante
licenza di combatter per lo seme
del qual ti fascian ventiquattro piante.
Poi, con dottrina e con volere insieme,
con l'officio appostolico si mosse
quasi torrente ch'alta vena preme;
e ne li sterpi eretici percosse
l'impeto suo, più vivamente quivi
dove le resistenze eran più grosse.
Di lui si fecer poi diversi rivi
onde l'orto catolico si riga,
sì che i suoi arbuscelli stan più vivi.
Se tal fu l'una rota de la biga
in che la Santa Chiesa si difese
e vinse in campo la sua civil briga,
ben ti dovrebbe assai esser palese
l'eccellenza de l'altra, di cui Tomma
dinanzi al mio venir fu sì cortese.
Ma l'orbita che fé la parte somma
di sua circunferenza, è derelitta,
sì ch'è la muffa dov' era la gromma.
La sua famiglia, che si mosse dritta
coi piedi a le sue orme, è tanto volta,
che quel dinanzi a quel di retro gitta;
e tosto si vedrà de la ricolta
de la mala coltura, quando il loglio
si lagnerà che l'arca li sia tolta.
Ben dico, chi cercasse a foglio a foglio
nostro volume, ancor troveria carta
u' leggerebbe 'I' mi son quel ch'i' soglio';
ma non fia da Casal né d'Acquasparta,
là onde vegnon tali a la scrittura,
ch'uno la fugge e altro la coarta.
Io son la vita di Bonaventura
da Bagnoregio, che ne' grandi offici
sempre pospuosi la sinistra cura.
Illuminato e Augustin son quici,
che fuor de' primi scalzi poverelli
che nel capestro a Dio si fero amici.
Ugo da San Vittore è qui con elli,
e Pietro Mangiadore e Pietro Spano,
lo qual giù luce in dodici libelli;
Natàn profeta e 'l metropolitano
Crisostomo e Anselmo e quel Donato
ch'a la prim' arte degnò porre mano.
Rabano è qui, e lucemi dallato
il calavrese abate Giovacchino
di spirito profetico dotato.
Ad inveggiar cotanto paladino
mi mosse l'infiammata cortesia
di fra Tommaso e 'l discreto latino;
e mosse meco questa compagnia.”
Soon as the blessed flame had taken up
The final word to give it utterance,
Began the holy millstone to revolve,
And in its gyre had not turned wholly round,
Before another in a ring enclosed it,
And motion joined to motion, song to song;
Song that as greatly doth transcend our Muses,
Our Sirens, in those dulcet clarions,
As primal splendour that which is reflected.
And as are spanned athwart a tender cloud
Two rainbows parallel and like in colour,
When Juno to her handmaid gives command,
(The one without born of the one within,
Like to the speaking of that vagrant one
Whom love consumed as doth the sun the vapours,)
And make the people here, through covenant
God set with Noah, presageful of the world
That shall no more be covered with a flood,
In such wise of those sempiternal roses
The garlands twain encompassed us about,
And thus the outer to the inner answered.
After the dance, and other grand rejoicings,
Both of the singing, and the flaming forth
Effulgence with effulgence blithe and tender,
Together, at once, with one accord had stopped,
(Even as the eyes, that, as volition moves them,
Must needs together shut and lift themselves,)
Out of the heart of one of the new lights
There came a voice, that needle to the star
Made me appear in turning thitherward.
And it began: "The love that makes me fair
Draws me to speak about the other leader,
By whom so well is spoken here of mine.
'Tis right, where one is, to bring in the other,
That, as they were united in their warfare,
Together likewise may their glory shine.
The soldiery of Christ, which it had cost
So dear to arm again, behind the standard
Moved slow and doubtful and in numbers few,
When the Emperor who reigneth evermore
Provided for the host that was in peril,
Through grace alone and not that it was worthy;
And, as was said, he to his Bride brought succour
With champions twain, at whose deed, at whose word
The straggling people were together drawn.
Within that region where the sweet west wind
Rises to open the new leaves, wherewith
Europe is seen to clothe herself afresh,
Not far off from the beating of the waves,
Behind which in his long career the sun
Sometimes conceals himself from every man,
Is situate the fortunate Calahorra,
Under protection of the mighty shield
In which the Lion subject is and sovereign.
Therein was born the amorous paramour
Of Christian Faith, the athlete consecrate,
Kind to his own and cruel to his foes;
And when it was created was his mind
Replete with such a living energy,
That in his mother her it made prophetic.
As soon as the espousals were complete
Between him and the Faith at holy font,
Where they with mutual safety dowered each other,
The woman, who for him had given assent,
Saw in a dream the admirable fruit
That issue would from him and from his heirs;
And that he might be construed as he was,
A spirit from this place went forth to name him
With His possessive whose he wholly was.
Dominic was he called; and him I speak of
Even as of the husbandman whom Christ
Elected to his garden to assist him.
Envoy and servant sooth he seemed of Christ,
For the first love made manifest in him
Was the first counsel that was given by Christ.
Silent and wakeful many a time was he
Discovered by his nurse upon the ground,
As if he would have said, 'For this I came.'
O thou his father, Felix verily!
O thou his mother, verily Joanna,
If this, interpreted, means as is said!
Not for the world which people toil for now
In following Ostiense and Taddeo,
But through his longing after the true manna,
He in short time became so great a teacher,
That he began to go about the vineyard,
Which fadeth soon, if faithless be the dresser;
And of the See, (that once was more benignant
Unto the righteous poor, not through itself,
But him who sits there and degenerates,)
Not to dispense or two or three for six,
Not any fortune of first vacancy,
'Non decimas quae sunt pauperum Dei,'
He asked for, but against the errant world
Permission to do battle for the seed,
Of which these four and twenty plants surround thee.
Then with the doctrine and the will together,
With office apostolical he moved,
Like torrent which some lofty vein out-presses;
And in among the shoots heretical
His impetus with greater fury smote,
Wherever the resistance was the greatest.
Of him were made thereafter divers runnels,
Whereby the garden catholic is watered,
So that more living its plantations stand.
If such the one wheel of the Biga was,
In which the Holy Church itself defended
And in the field its civic battle won,
Truly full manifest should be to thee
The excellence of the other, unto whom
Thomas so courteous was before my coming.
But still the orbit, which the highest part
Of its circumference made, is derelict,
So that the mould is where was once the crust.
His family, that had straight forward moved
With feet upon his footprints, are turned round
So that they set the point upon the heel.
And soon aware they will be of the harvest
Of this bad husbandry, when shall the tares
Complain the granary is taken from them.
Yet say I, he who searcheth leaf by leaf
Our volume through, would still some page discover
Where he could read, 'I am as I am wont.'
'Twill not be from Casal nor Acquasparta,
From whence come such unto the written word
That one avoids it, and the other narrows.
Bonaventura of Bagnoregio's life
Am I, who always in great offices
Postponed considerations sinister.
Here are Illuminato and Agostino,
Who of the first barefooted beggars were
That with the cord the friends of God became.
Hugh of Saint Victor is among them here,
And Peter Mangiador, and Peter of Spain,
Who down below in volumes twelve is shining;
Nathan the seer, and metropolitan
Chrysostom, and Anselmus, and Donatus
Who deigned to lay his hand to the first art;
Here is Rabanus, and beside me here
Shines the Calabrian Abbot Joachim,
He with the spirit of prophecy endowed.
To celebrate so great a paladin
Have moved me the impassioned courtesy
And the discreet discourses of Friar Thomas,
And with me they have moved this company."
The action of this canto begins, if we take its first line literally, before the preceding one ends, i.e., before Thomas utters the last syllables (or syllable) of vaneggia. See Iacopo della Lana (comm. to vv. 1-3) and Alfonso Bertoldi (Il canto XII del “Paradiso” [“Lectura Dantis Orsanmichele,” Florence: Sansoni, 1913], p. 43, n. 5). That seems fitting, since these two cantos are, perhaps more than any other pair in the work, mirror images of one another. See Bertoldi (Il canto XI del “Paradiso” [“Lectura Dantis Orsanmichele,” Florence: Sansoni, 1903]), referring to them, despite their differing subjects and feelings, as “twin cantos.” See also the note to Par. XII.142-145. For one expression of the widely shared notice that the first verse of this canto clearly is intended to attach it to its predecessor, see Antonio Di Pietro (“Il canto dantesco dei due Guidi,” in Studi in onore di Alberto Chiari [Brescia: Paideia, 1973], p. 421). Compare, in contrast, the opening of Canto X, which stresses its discontinuity with what preceded it.
Carmine Di Biase (Il Canto XII del “Paradiso” [Naples: Ermanno Cassitto 1992], p. 8), suggests that both cantos may be broken into four parallel parts; in this canto, matching the four divisions of Canto XI, exordium (XII.1-45), narrative in praise of Dominic (XII.46-105), blame directed at his failed followers (XII.106-126), and, in conclusion, the second circle of saints (XII.127-145).
Dante had earlier resorted to the image of the millstone (mola) to refer to the rotation of the Sun, seen from either pole, around the earth (see Conv. III.v.14).
The matching circles of twelve saints, each moving in such a way as to match the other both in the eye and in the ear of the beholder, anticipates the final image of the poem (Par. XXXIII.143-145).
This first circle of saints was described (Par. XI.14) as having completed a first full rotation; now it is seen as being on the point of completing a second one.
The double repetition (moto/moto; canto/canto) underlines the matching quality of these two circles.
The previous tercet had divided the activity of the souls into circling movement and song; this one divides that song itself (repeating the word canto) into two components, words (muse) and melody (sirene). Dante had used the word Muse (capitalized by Petrocchi, if we have little idea of Dante's actual practice with regard to capitalization) in Inferno I.7, in Purgatorio II.8 and XXII.102, then in Paradiso II.9, to indicate the Muses of classical antiquity. Beginning here, however, and then in two later passages (Par. XV.26 and XVIII.33) Petrocchi obviously believes that Dante uses the lowercase word musa metaphorically, here to refer to poets (the next use will refer to Virgil [or his poetry] as “nostra maggior musa” [our greatest muse], and finally [Par. XVIII.33], to poetry itself - or so most readers believe).
Torraca (comm. to vv. 7-9) seems to have been the first to remark on the similar conjoining of Sirens and Muses in Boethius (Cons. Phil. I.1[pr]). Aversano (Dante daccapo [glosses to the Paradiso], copia d'eccezione, sent by the author on 11 September 2001), p. 52, believes that the Muses inspire the words of the song, the Sirens, the music.
These two verses contain four words relating to music: canto (song), musa (muse), serena (siren), tuba (brass musical instrument [more precisely, “horn”]). For the echoing effect that results from the repetition of the first two, Dante may have had in mind the similar effect found in Ovid's story of Echo and Narcissus, referred to in vv. 14-15. The next (and last) time we read the noun tuba (Par. XXX.35), it will be the metaphoric expression for Dante's poetic voice, while here it refers to the voices of the singing saints.
The word splendore is, in Dante, always the result of light (luce), proceeding along its ray (raggio), and then reflected by an object. (For these interrelated terms, describing the three major aspects of light, see Dante's earlier statement [Conv. III.xiv.5].) This verse makes clear Dante's belief that a second reflection (e.g., as in a mirror) is less vivid than that original splendor (but cf. Par. II.94-105, which seems to contradict this understanding). As we have learned in Canto X (vv. 64-69), these crowns of dancing saints are presented as circles of musical lights. And in that earlier passage, a simile, the comparison is to the rainbow, as will also be true in the simile that begins in the next verse.
This simile, explicitly formal in its construction (Come... così) and, balanced in its content, containing one classical and one biblical reference (Iris and the rainbow that God offered as a sign to Noah), gives a sense of the identity of the two circles of saints, despite their evident differences.
Dante apparently thought of thin (and thus “translucent”) clouds as actually being constituted of a layer of water-soaked dust suspended in the atmosphere in which the rainbow appears.
There are a number of candidates for the classical source at work here, primarily texts in Virgil and Ovid. It seems likely that Dante would have had the reference (Metam. I.270-271) to Juno's sending Iris (her “handmaid,” the rainbow) as a result of Jove's huge storm, sent below in his attempt to extirpate, in a flood, the human race (typified in the first murderer, Lycaon [the wolf-man], and hence abandoned by piety and justice [Metam. I.149-150]). That would nicely balance these gestures toward “famous rainbows,” since the second of them is without doubt reflective of the rainbow that God sent as the sign of his covenant (Gen. 9:13) with Noah and the few other surviving members of humankind based on His promise never to send such a destructive flood again. (The first book of the Metamorphoses is, as it were, the pagan equivalent of Genesis.) We are also probably meant to compare the unchecked vengeful desires of the king of the pagan gods with the moderated sternness of God the Father.
Dante adds a second rainbow, as his context demands, not as he found in his sources, but as may at least occasionally be observed in Tuscany even today.
The second circle is, like the second rainbow, wider than the first. Dante's science believed that the second rainbow was born from the first, not that it was part of a double refraction of light.
The reference is to the nymph Echo (Metam. III.356-510), who fell in love with Narcissus. She wasted away with unrequited passion until all that was left of her was a voice. This second simile, within the overarching simile that compares the two circles of saints to the double rainbow, replicates the form of such a rainbow.
As Tommaseo suggests (comm. to vv. 16-18), the present tense of the verb allagare (to flood) suggests the past, present, and future application of God's covenant with humankind: This global flood has not recurred and will never do so.
Dante seemingly intuits the extraordinary effect made by large modern-day symphony orchestras when called upon to modulate huge sound suddenly into silence. If the reader imagines Beethoven as the background music to this scene, perhaps he or she will better experience what is projected by these verses. Of course, the miraculous sound has not so much to do with extraordinary musical abilities as it does with the result of living in God's grace, in which all is harmonious, even sudden silence.
These similetic elements of this passage (vv. 22-30), two eyes opening or closing as one and Dante ineluctably being drawn to the voice of a new spirit (it will turn out to be Bonaventure), speak to the sense of the overpowering quality of the love and beauty that affects both the performers and their observer. Torraca (comm. to vv. 28-30) points out that the compass, invented only a short while before, had already become a familiar image in thirteenth-century Italian poetry, e.g., in poems by Guido Guinizzelli and in Ristoro d'Arezzo.
St. Bonaventure is about to praise the leader of Thomas's Order, St. Dominic, in response to Thomas's praise of Francis, the leader of his own. For information about the speaker, see the note to vv. 127-128.
In the previous canto (Par. XI.40-42) Thomas had gone out of his way to insist that praise of either Francis or Dominic is necessarily praise of the other; Bonaventure matches him.
While Dante has made every effort to “militarize” the sweetness of St. Francis, making both him and Dominic share the verb militaro (lit. “soldiered”), the following three tercets show that he is willing to associate himself with the traditional portrayal of Dominic as warlike, while the traditional depiction of Francis is decidedly not (see the note to Par. XI.91). On the other hand, it is again notable that he has included Francis within the construct of the Christian soldier.
These three tercets contain seven words that associate the two friars with militarism and imperial rule: essercito (army), riarmar (to rearm), insegna (battle standard), imperador (emperor), regna (reigns), milizia (soldiers), campioni (“champions,” i.e., those who excel in single combat).
The “troops” obviously form the Church Militant, now led by the newly approved mendicant orders, expensive to rearm, since it took the blood of the apostles to accomplish that task (see Aversano, Dante daccapo [glosses to the Paradiso], copia d'eccezione, sent by the author on 11 September 2001], p. 53, for reasons to prefer this gloss to that which insists the reference is to Christ's blood, an interpretation unopposed since the earliest days of the commentary tradition; Aversano refers the reader to Par. XXVII.40-45 for confirming evidence). Despite that, the soldiers, apparently, still lack resolve.
The “standard” of this army is obviously the Cross.
The meaning is that God succored His “troops,” not because they were particularly worthy, but because He extended them His grace. For a clear summary of the two kinds of grace at work in Dante's world, operating grace (which Dante received from God, through the agency of Beatrice, in Inferno II) and cooperating grace, see Scott (Understanding Dante [Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2004], pp. 187-90). Once a sinner is justified by the receipt of operating grace, which is gratuitous (i.e., cannot be earned), he or she must “cooperate” in order to merit eventual reward (salvation). Scott reviews the American discussion of this issue, which was dominated by the views of Charles Singleton, until Antonio Mastrobuono (Dante's Journey of Sanctification [Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1990]) clarified the nature of the problem.
That God is here referred to as “emperor” (as He is on only two other occasions: Inf. I.124 and Par. XXV.41) makes Dante's comfort with imperial trappings clear, especially to his Guelph enemies. This term for God is not in itself unwarranted in Christian tradition, far from it. But Dante uses it here in an ecclesiastical context where it might seem, at least to some, improper.
The reference (“as was said”) is to Paradiso XI.31-36, where Thomas tells of God's appointment of these two stalwarts to succor the bride of Christ, His Church.
Francis (typified by love) is best represented by his deeds, Dominic (typified by knowledge), by his words.
For Francis and Dominic as “postfigurations” of Elijah and Enoch, see Ubertino of Casale: “... in thipo Helie et Enoch Franciscus et Dominicus singulariter claruerunt” (... as antitypes of Elijah and Enoch Francis and Dominic stand strikingly forth), cited by Carmine Di Biase (Il Canto XII del “Paradiso” [Naples: Ermanno Cassitto 1992], p. 27).
Dominic was “born 1170, in the village of Calaroga, in Old Castile; he is supposed to have belonged to the noble family of Guzmàn, his father's name being Felix, his mother's Joanna. The latter is said to have dreamed before he was born that she gave birth to a dog with a torch in its mouth, which set the world on fire. At the age of fourteen he went to the university of Palencia, where he studied theology for ten or twelve years. He was early noted for his self-denial and charity. In 1195 he became canon of the cathedral of Osma. In 1215 he accompanied Folquet, bishop of Toulouse, to the Lateran Council; and in the same year, on his return to Toulouse, he founded his order of Preaching Friars, which was formally recognized by Honorius III in 121[7]. He died in Aug. 1221 at Bologna, where he was buried. He was canonized soon after his death (in 1234) by Gregory IX” (Toynbee, “Domenico” [Concise Dante Dictionary]). And see G.R. Sarolli, “Domenico, santo,” ED II (1970), pp. 546-51. Sarolli points out that, when Dominic, with six companions, arrived in Toulouse in 1215, on the verge of forming a more structured group, he associated with Folco di Marsiglia (whom we encountered in Par. IX.88-102), the newly appointed bishop of that city.
For a global consideration of Bonaventure's praise of Dominic, see Giuseppe Ledda (“Osservazioni sul panegirico di San Domenico,” L'Alighieri 27 [2006]: 105-25).
For Guglielmo Gorni (“Due note su Paradiso XI,” L'Alighieri 23 [2004]: 51-56) the description of Dominic's birthplace does not work in tandem with the description of Francis's (see the note to Par. XI.43-48), a function the text itself (Par. XI.37-42) claims – as Gorni admits – but in an opposite way, that is, to support the position of the Spiritual Franciscans (see the note to Par. XI.58-60) and to undermine that of the Dominicans. A key component of Gorni's reading is the pun found in the name Calaroga, the town in Spain where Dominic was born, which not only has the resonance of the setting sun (by common consent) but an innate negative sense, opposing the optimistic oriens of Assisi/Ascesi, in its first two syllables, cala, which reflects a sense of the verb calare, to sink or fall. It is difficult to accept this assessment, which would undo all that Dante has crafted to make Dominic and Francis equal - even if Dominic is not seen by Dante in the Rose of the saved souls in the Empyrean, a point insisted on by Gorni, in whose view the third cantica is (p. 54) no less, in its essence, than “a manifesto of Spiritual Franciscanism.” Among the commentators, few would support Gorni's hypothesis, but, for one who might, see Mestica (comm. to vv. 37-39), making two fairly obvious points: The Seraphim are closer to God than are the Cherubim; Dominic is never mentioned again in the poem, while Francis is. Nonetheless, Dante, here and for the rest of the Paradiso, makes the core “Dominican” value (knowledge) and the “Franciscan” one (love) so conjoined that a reader naturally resists (and should) any attempt to make Dante more a praiser of Dominic (a view sponsored by Busnelli's Thomistic view of Dante's theology) than of Francis (or vice versa), either of which understandings the text rather clearly and insistently strives to make all but impossible.
Spain is located in the westernmost part of Europe.
Zephyr is the west wind. For the association of Dominic with the west and Francis with the east, see Alfonso Bertoldi (Il canto XI del “Paradiso” [“Lectura Dantis Orsanmichele,” Florence: Sansoni, {1903}], p. 47 [n. 27]), adding the details that for Dante, the Florentine, the main Dominican church (S. Maria Novella) was situated in the western part of the city, while the main Franciscan church (S. Croce) was located in eastern Florence.
Torraca (comm. to vv. 56-57) thinks that the waves are found on the surface of the Ebro, the river running two miles from Dominic's native city, an argument contested vigorously by Alfonso Bertoldi (Il canto XI del “Paradiso” [“Lectura Dantis Orsanmichele,” Florence: Sansoni, {1903}], pp. 45-46), who supports the early commentators' belief that the reference is to the Atlantic Ocean. Others specify the Bay of Biscay. After Scartazzini (comm. to vv. 49-51), however, the ruling understanding is that the passage refers to this body of water.
The sun hides itself from human sight when, at or near the summer solstice, it sets beyond the sight of those on land, because it has moved so far out over the Atlantic. For Dante, we must remember, to the west of the Gates of Hercules lies “the world where no one lives” (Inf. XXVI.117).
Calaruega (“Calaroga,” in Dante's Italian), a small town in Castile, “fortunate” in having been the birthplace of Dominic.
The royal arms of Castile bear a castle in the second and third quarters, and a lion in the first and fourth. “Thus on one side of the shield the lion is subdued by the castle, and on the other subdues it” (Oelsner, comm. to these verses). The images represent the kingdoms of Castile and Leon, respectively.
The vocabulary of feudal times (drudo, “vassal”) combines with that of erotic poetry (amoroso, “loving”) to interrupt the military associations of Dominic, and eventually presents him, like Francis, as a “husband” (see verse 61, sponsalizie, “nuptials”). The word drudo, a triple hapax, i.e., a word appearing once in each cantica (see Hollander [“An Index of Hapax Legomena in Dante's Commedia,” Dante Studies 106 {1988}: 81-110] for a listing of all examples of this phenomenon in the poem), occurs previously in Inferno XVIII.134 and Purgatorio XXXII.155, in both cases referring to a male partner in an illicit sexual liaison, in the first case, the man sleeping with the whore, Thaïs; in the second, the giant beating his harlot, the Church in its Avignonian captivity. Thus its context in the poem works against those who would read Dante's treatment of Dominic as sugar-coated (see the note to verse 57).
The new interpretation of the second scene offered by Filippo Bognini (“Gli occhi di Ooliba: Una proposta per Purg. XXXII 148-60 e XXXIII 44-45,” Rivista di Studi Danteschi 7 [2007]: 73-103) does not change the valence of the preceding remark, but does alter the identities of the “actors” in the pageant in Purgatorio XXXII. In a new (and entirely convincing) reading of the major characters in that scene, Bognini demonstrates that the whore is Ezechiel's Jerusalem and thus Dante's Florence, while the giant reflects Goliath as Robert of Anjou, the king of Naples and the Guelph leader in Italy, prime enemy of Henry VII. See as well his further study of the problem of the “DXV” (or “515”), “Per Purg., XXXIII, 1-51: Dante e Giovanni di Boemia,” Italianistica 37 (2008): 11-48.
If Francis is presented as a lover, Dominic is (here) presented as a fighter, but even here he is first described (verse 55) as l'amoroso drudo. See the note to verse 55.
Raimondo Spiazzi (“Il Canto XII,” in “Paradiso”: Letture degli anni 1979-81, ed. S. Zennaro [Rome: Bonacci, 1989], pp. 339-41) thinks that the word crudo (cruel) is uncalled for, and he sets off on a lengthy defense: St. Dominic was in fact, and despite his crusading spirit, the most mild-mannered person imaginable. However, others take this verse at face value, and see its pertinence to Dominic's labors against the Cathars (e.g., Alessandro Ghisalberti [“Canto XII,” in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone {Florence: Cesati, 2002}], pp. 184-86), during the period 1203-1210, when Dominic moved from preaching and debate to more violent means; but even Ghisalberti insists on the predominance of the “sweet” approach. Others have been less tolerant of Dominic's behavior. This is the last of thirteen appearances of the adjective crudo in the poem (leaving to one side the related words crudele, crudeltà, etc.); in none of the preceding dozen presences of the word does it have a mitigated meaning. As a result, the motives of those who argue for such mitigation here seem suspect. Dominic, as presented by Dante, is a tough warrior whom the poet goes out of his way also to present as a “lover.”
The embryonic mind of Dominic was so powerful that it could send concepts (or at least images) to the mother who was bearing him. In this way he lent his mother the gift of prophecy. The early commentators are frequently misled, and think the reference of “lei” is not to the mother but to Dominic's mente in the preceding line, thus making a prophet of him. However, legend has it that, before his birth, his mother had a dream of a black-and-white dog who carried a torch in its mouth, which set fire to the whole world. That is what most of its interpreters today believe is referenced in the line, the mother's vision of her unborn son's wide effect on humanity. Since the colors of the habits of the Dominicans are black and white and since an easily available pun (Domini canes = the dogs of God) was in circulation at the time and was included in the first official “Life” of Dominic (by Teodorico d'Appoldia), the dream became a permanent piece of Dominican lore.
Frequent in discussions of this passage are citations of Isaiah 49:1, “Dominus ab utero vocavit me” (The Lord has called me from the womb); but see also Luke 1:15, “Spiritu Sancto replebitur adhuc ex utero matris suae” (and he shall be filled with the Holy Spirit, even from his mother's womb), describing John the Baptist, referred to by Carmine Di Biase (Il Canto XII del “Paradiso” [Naples: Ermanno Cassitto 1992], p. 40n. – first cited by Tommaseo [comm. to vv. 58-60]).
Where Francis married Poverty, Dominic took Faith as his wife.
A difficult line to translate convincingly, partly because the noun salute has different meanings in Dante. In Dominic's case, he will find salvation in his faith; he cannot “save” her, but he does keep her safe from heresy. Vellutello's gloss (comm. to vv. 61-66) has guided us as far as the sense is concerned: “because he saved the Faith, battling for it against heretics, and she in turn kept him safe.”
A woman present at the baptismal ceremony, the child's godmother, answers (saying “I do”) for the child when the priest asks whether he or she wishes to be baptized.
Dominic's godmother dreamed that he appeared with a bright star in his forehead that illumined the world; his “heirs” are, obviously, his fellow Dominicans.
The riddling diction yields its meaning after only a little effort. As Tozer (comm. to this tercet) unravels it: “An inspiration from Heaven (Quinci) was communicated to his parents to name him by the possessive adjective (viz. Dominicus) derived from the name of the Lord (Dominus), who possessed him entirely.”
The word costrutto has caused a certain difficulty. In modern Italian it means “sense, meaning” but that meaning is not easily assigned to the word here. Tozer (comm. to vv. 67-69) sorts things out as follows: “... 'that he might be in name what he was in reality'; costrutto: 'the form of his name'; similarly in Purg. XXVIII.147 costrutto means 'a form of words' or 'sentence': and in Par. XXIII.24 senza costrutto is 'without putting it into words.'”
From the Empyrean (and not this heaven of the Sun), the text suggests, the Holy Spirit inspired the baby's parents to call him “Dominicus” (Domini-cus – the Latin for his name, Domenico [from the possessive form of the noun Dominus, the Lord]).
Aversano (Dante daccapo [glosses to the Paradiso, copia d'eccezione, sent by the author on 11 September 2001]), p. 54, sees this verse as reflecting II Kings 12:25 (II Samuel 12:25), Nathan the prophet's renaming of the infant Solomon, thus named, according to the preceding verse, by his mother, Bathsheba: “and [Nathan] called his name Jedidiah [the Beloved of God, 'Amabilis Domino' in the Vulgate] because of the Lord.” Aversano's argument, which is less than immediately convincing, gains strength because of the presence of Nathan in this canto (verse 136), where he is spoken of exactly as he is in this verse of the Bible, “Nathan propheta” (but see also II Kings [II Samuel] 7:2 [and in six other O.T. loci]).
This is the first set of the so-called “Cristo rhymes.” There will be three others, occurring in Paradiso XIV.104-108, XIX.104-108, and XXXII.83-87. For a valuable early study of this phenomenon, see Francesco D'Ovidio (“Cristo in rima,” in his Studii sulla “Divina Commedia” [Milan: Sandron, 1901], pp. 215-24). It is clear that, for Dante's purposes, no other word is good enough to rhyme with “Christ,” who is the Word. The pattern is not unusual in Dante, three occurrences (in the spheres) followed by one in the Empyrean, not significantly adding up to four, but reminding us of the Trinity, which is three in one.
Porena (comm. to vv. 73-78) holds that D'Ovidio was correct to argue that the word Cristo is allowed to rhyme only with itself because, as a penitential gesture, Dante wants to undo the scabrous act he had perpetrated when, in one of his sonnets attacking Forese Donati's behaviors, he had rhymed the name of the Lord with tristo (distraught) and malo acquisto (ill-gotten gains).
The chore given Dominic to perform can hardly fail to remind a Christian reader of the task that Adam and Eve were given and failed to perform, to dress and keep the garden. See Genesis 2:15.
What exactly was Christ's “first counsel” to his followers? In the past one hundred years there has been continuing and uncertain discussion of this seemingly simple question. But it was not always thus. Almost every early commentator seizes on the same biblical passage, Matthew 19:21, Christ's advice to the rich young man to sell all that he possesses, give the proceeds to the poor, and then follow Him. This was the view of Jacopo della Lana (comm. to vv. 73-75) and Francesco da Buti (comm. to vv. 73-87), who added the detail that Dominic followed this advice when he sold all his books and gave the money to the poor. Others who agree include Serravalle (comm. to vv. 73-75), Landino (comm. to vv. 73-75), Vellutello (comm. to vv. 73-75), Daniello (comm. to vv. 73-75), Venturi (comm. to verse 75), Lombardi (comm. to verse 75), Tommaseo (comm. to vv. 73-75), and, at the beginning of the modern era of Dante scholarship, Scartazzini (comm. to verse 75). For a summarizing sense of nearly six hundred years of near-total agreement, see Oelsner (comm. to verse 75): “The counsel of poverty (Matth. 19:21, whence the phrase 'counsels of perfection'). Thomas Aquinas, while distinguishing between the precepts and the counsels of Christ, says that the latter may all be reduced to three – Poverty, Continence, and Obedience. The first counsel, then, is Poverty.” However, that long-held, sensible, and nearly unanimous view has recently undergone some puzzled (and puzzling?) scrutiny. A certain latent dissatisfaction with it (because Francis was popularly identified with poverty, but not Dominic?) peeps out from the long gloss of Carroll (comm. to vv. 46-105). Torraca (comm. to vv. 73-75) does not even refer to the familiar and insistent earlier gloss, but simply says that the reference is to the first Beatitude, “Blessed are the poor in spirit” (Matth. 5:3). Mestica (comm. to verse 75) briefly considers the question of which of these two texts from Matthew is most appropriate and decides in favor of the old favorite, both because, in his view, a Beatitude is not “advice,” and because Dominic did in fact sell his books and gave the resulting cash to the poor. During the next thirty years no commentator sides with Torraca, but then Grabher (comm. to vv. 73-75) simply makes reference to both passages in Matthew as though there were no debate over the issue of which one Dante had in mind. It is Manfredi Porena (comm. to vv. 73-78) who seems to have been the commentator most responsible for the current view that this verse is problematic. Sapegno (comm. to vv. 73-75) supports that opinion, and sides with Torraca's view (in favor of Matth. 5:3); Mattalia (comm. to vv. 74-75) mounts an effective counter-attack. Chimenz (73-75) retreats, Fallani (75) fights back, Giacalone (73-75) equivocates, as do Singleton (75) and Bosco/Reggio (73-75), who really want both humility and poverty to identify Dominic, and who also adduce Matthew 6:25f. Pasquini/Quaglio (75) return to Matthew 3:5 without discussing the crux. However, Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi (Paradiso, con il commento di A. M. C. L. [Milan: Mondadori, 1997], p. 342) returns to the original formulation, rescuing Christ's appeal for the virtues of poverty.
For a departure from the sources battled over in the commentaries (Matth. 5:3; Matth.19:21), see Alessandro Ghisalberti (“Canto XII,” in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone [Florence: Cesati, 2002], p. 184): Matthew 6:33 (part of a passage already mentioned as a potential source by Bosco/Reggio). See also Aversano (Dante daccapo [glosses to the Paradiso, copia d'eccezione, sent by the author on 11 September 2001]), p. 54, who dismisses the two conflicting and standard explanations, poverty and humility, arguing that both these are central attributes of Francis, and thus unlikely to be applied to Dominic (not a convincing view, since the bulk of the two cantos is dedicated to the similarity between the two heroes of the modern Church). Aversano points to the context introduced by the phrase amoroso drudo (“loving vassal” – verse 55) and chooses the passage from Luke (10:25) that encourages us to love God and our neighbor.
The problem of the precise reference in verse 75 is complicated by the neighboring presences of two instances of the adjective primo (first). Are they used as synonyms, in both cases having a temporal relevance, or not? We think that they are, and thus have translated as we have (“since the first affection manifest in him / was for the initial precept taught by Christ”). Some, however, believe that the first primo is temporal, that the second has to do with order of importance, i.e., the most important of Christ's teachings, which would offer a bit more latitude as one searched through the Gospels. If we are correct, what then is “the initial precept” taught by Jesus? (Salsano, “consiglio,” ED II [1970], p. 159b, understands consiglio to equate with “precetto divino.”) That can in fact be the first Beatitude. Or, if Oelsner (see the first paragraph, above) is correct, and Dante's sense of the word consiglio flows through St. Thomas's distinction between it and “precept,” then the first “counsel” may indeed be thought of as accepting poverty, first among the three “counsels” of Christ: poverty, continence, obedience. Either way, poverty is the issue focal to this line. This seems more than acceptable, since Dominic is presented as parallel in his virtues to Francis (Grandgent [comm. to verse 75] points out that vv. 73-75 of both cantos thus deal with poverty), since Dominicans as well as Franciscans took vows of poverty, and since the next tercet, although also less clearly than some might like, would seem to associate him both with Francis and with poverty as well.
“For this have I come”: See Mark 1:38, “ad hoc enim veni,” as Jesus announces his intention to preach. The baby Dominic's closeness to the earth reminds us of the similar association of Francis, indelibly associated with the dust at the end of his life (Par. XI.115-117). Poverty and humility, more usually associated with Francis, are both present in this vignette, as preconditions for Dominic's preacherly calling.
Dominic's father's name, Felice, means “happy” (felix) in Latin.
Bosco/Reggio (comm. to these verses) say that Dante, in the life of Dominic by Theodoric of Appoldia, could have read that his mother's name, Giovanna, meant “grace of God,” or “full of grace.” Theodoric's source (and Dante's) may have been, says Torraca (comm. to vv. 79-81), Uguccione da Pisa.
This passage presents the life and accomplishments of Dominic, after his engendering and childhood (vv. 58-81), the ensemble paralleling that portion of the preceding canto dedicated to the life and works of Francis (Par. XI.55-117).
Dominic's honest religiosity is contrasted with the eye-on-the-prize sort of sham activities of two intellectuals, both of whom died within Dante's lifetime. The first, Enrico di Susa, from Ostia (died in 1271), was a famous canon lawyer (and thus Dante fires another salvo at the venal practitioners of this profession), while Taddeo d'Alderotto (the probable reference is to him) was a Florentine (died in 1295) who studied and then taught medicine at Bologna. Dante mocks his translation of Aristotle's Ethics in Convivio I.x.10. In these two men Dante pillories two kinds of false intellectual activity, religious law and Aristotelian science, both of which were of great importance to him.
The metaphorical vineyard (fairly obviously the Church) turns gray with rot if its keeper (obviously the pope) does not take good care of it. This reference to Boniface VIII is thinly veiled.
Carroll (comm. to vv. 46-105) paraphrases this elegant pastiche of a canon lawyer's style as follows: “[Dominic] asked from the Head of the Church none of the evil privileges so eagerly sought for by others: to distribute only a third or a half of moneys left for charitable purposes, retaining the rest; to receive the first vacant benefice; or to use for himself the tithes which belong to God's poor. His one request was for leave to fight against an erring world for the seed of the Faith.”
Bonaventure, here most assuredly Dante's mouthpiece, distinguishes between the papacy, in its design supportive of the poor, and the pope (the hated Boniface VIII in 1300), ignoring that design.
These three corrupt practices all reveal the avarice of prelates, the first and third involving theft of monies destined for the poor, the second, advancement in ecclesiastical position. For this last, see Tozer (comm. to this tercet): “The reference is to the expectationes, or nominations to posts not yet vacant that popes of the day were pleased to make.” Obviously, none of these self-aggrandizing activities had as their goal support for the benevolent tasks that customarily fell to the Church.
The Latin (“the tenth part that belongs to the poor,” the tax collected by the clergy) refers to the tithe, the 10% of a parishioner's income that the Church collected in order to help feed and clothe the poor. Not even this was safe from predatory clergy, who took these funds for their own use.
See Bosco/Reggio (comm. to this verse): Dominic's request for approval of his Order was made to Pope Innocent III in 1215, and only approved late in 1216 by Pope Honorius III, the newly elected pope (the Church had for a time prohibited the formation of new Orders). However, in 1205, Dominic had gone to Rome, seeking permission to wage a campaign against heretics, which was granted. Between 1207 and 1214 he was part of the eventually bloody attempt to bring the Albigensian Cathars back into the fold, alongside of Folco di Marsiglia (see the notes to Par. IX.40 and to Par. IX.94). Bosco/Reggio try to keep Dominic's hands free of Albigensian blood, saying that, on the day of the terrible battle of Muret (12 September 1213), Dominic was at prayer in a church. However, given the poet's praise of Folco, the leader of that crusade (if Simon de Montfort was in charge of the army at that particular battle), he may have imagined a Dominic as warlike as his Folco. See vv. 97-102, where Dominic's forcefulness in combating heresy is applauded.
This indication reminds us of the precise balance in the two circles of saints that we have seen in these two cantos, each containing twelve souls. See Carmine Di Biase (Il Canto XII del “Paradiso” [Naples: Ermanno Cassitto, 1992], pp. 68-69) and Bruno Porcelli (“Numeri e nomi nei canti danteschi del sole,” Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 117 [2000]: 8-100) for thoughts about the importance of the number twelve in the heaven of the Sun.
While the militarism of Dominic's Order may be metaphorical, referring to his preaching, that his “career” began with a literal war, the crusade against the Albigensians, certainly colors these lines, whatever Dante's intention.
Dominic fought against heresy with the support of Pope Honorius III, who had approved his request to found a new Order. However, he had also had the approval of Pope Innocent III to subdue the Albigensians and bring them back to the fold (see the note to verse 95). In that effort, the crusaders' military force was more than metaphoric.
The “resistance was most stubborn” in Provence, with the Albigensian Cathars. This detail again tends to erode the distinction between Dominic the Christian debater and Dominic the Christian soldier. See the note to vv. 97-102.
Raoul Manselli (“Il canto XII del Paradiso,” in Nuove letture dantesche, vol. VI [Florence: Le Monnier, 1973], p. 118) characterizes this tercet, moving from Dominic's day into Dante's, with the Order burgeoning with new chapters, as setting a tranquil conclusion to a story that began with military roughness. One might add that it has hardly moderated its tone until now.
These verses offer a kind of summary of both saints' lives. The resulting image, the two wheels of a chariot of war, already deployed in the earthly paradise (introduced at Purg. XXIX.107 and on the scene until Purg. XXXII.147), is perhaps remembered in the final verses of the poem. For the “tensions, deriving from the need simultaneously to individuate and unify, that subtend the stories of Francis and Dominic,” see Teodolinda Barolini (The Undivine “Comedy”: Detheologizing Dante [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992], pp. 198-202, 217).
Here begins the denunciation of the current Franciscan Order (cf. the similar attack on the wayward Dominicans, Par. XI.118-123). Where in the last canto the image of Thomas's Order was a merchant ship, here that founded by Francis is presented as a chariot of war. Bosco/Reggio (comm. to these verses) complain that, after the fresh and convincing images of the last canto, some of those encountered in this one, beginning with these chariot wheels, seem forced. Here Dominic is compared to the rim of a wheel that leaves a clear imprint in the earth, while his followers do no such thing.
Abruptly switching semantic fields, Bonaventure compares the good old days of Francis's leadership and the current condition of the Order to wine casks: Good wine leaves crust in the barrel it was contained in, while bad wine leaves mold.
The faltering Order is depicted as reversing its track; see the parallel moment in Thomas's denunciation of the Dominicans (Par. XI.124-132), portrayed as sheep wandering astray, away from the Rule, in search of new nourishment.
There is agreement among the commentators about the difficulty of making exact sense of this verse. We have not attempted to do more than give its obvious general meaning, though it happens that we are in fairly close agreement with the gloss of Daniele Mattalia to this tercet, who takes issue with some of the more strained attempts to make sense of this line, i.e., the understanding, begun with Michele Barbi (Problemi di critica dantesca [Florence: Sansoni, 1934], p. 287), that the Franciscan backsliders retrogress while facing forward, moving their front foot back toward (and then behind?) the other. Even if Dominic has been described as “the holy athlete” (verse 56), that way of retrogression seems to require muscular skills and patience well beyond those of most corrupt barefoot friars. Momigliano (comm. to vv. 115-117) justly complains that this line seems forced, and lays some of the blame for that on the verb form gitta (lit. “throws”), forced by rhyme.
The obvious Scriptural allusion (to Matth. 13:24-30, the parable of the wheat and the tares) somehow seems to have escaped the earliest commentators. It appears first in Landino (comm. to these verses) and then is repeated in almost all subsequent comments. The reference of the tercet is a cause of some debate. See Raoul Manselli, “francescanesimo,” ED III (1971), pp. 15-16; his view is that the word “loglio” (tares) does not refer to the Spiritual Franciscans, as some believe, but to all corrupt members of the Order, whatever their leaning in the controversy between Spirituals and Conventuals.
The word volume (volume), occurring first in Inferno I.84 and last in Paradiso XXXIII.86, literally runs from one end of the poem to the other. It occurs nine times, and always else either refers to God's book (the Scriptures) or to his “other book,” the created universe (except in its first use, where it refers to the Aeneid [see the note to Inf. I.84]). Thus, to refer to the slender booklet, the Rule of the Franciscan Order, as a volume is to employ a heavy word.
Umberto Cosmo (L'ultima ascesa: Introduzione alla lettura del “Paradiso”, ed. B. Maier [Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1965 {1936}], pp. 149-54) contrasts the inner tension among the Franciscan ranks with the struggles that afflicted Dominic's order, shaped by external enemies. For a study locating Francis, as Dante does here, in the middle, see Stanislao da Campagnola (“Francesco d'Assisi in Dante,” Laurentianum 24 [1983]: 175-92); and for his indebtedness to Ubertino's very words for his characterizations of Francis (seraphicus) and Dominic (cherubicus), see p. 182n. See also Raoul Manselli (“Dante e gli Spirituali francescani,” Letture classensi 11 [1982]: 47-61) for an overview of Dante's response to the Spiritual Franciscans, with many bibliographical indications in the notes. Mario Trovato (“Paradiso XI,” in Dante's “Divine Comedy,” Introductory Readings III: “Paradiso,” ed. Tibor Wlassics [Lectura Dantis {virginiana}, 16-17, supplement, Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1995], p. 168), on the additional basis of his interpretation of Paradiso XI.109-114, lends his support to Manselli's position. And for what has been the standard view of the tension among the Conventual and Spiritual Franciscans themselves (at least after Manselli's work), see Manselli, pp. 57-58: Matteo d'Acquasparta is criticized for loosening the strictures of the Rule of the Order, while Ubertino da Casale is seen as too rigid in his adherence to the founder's insistence on the importance of poverty in a true Christian life. Some have tried to argue against the dominant understanding, making Matteo the one who is overly strict in his interpretation of the Rule, while Ubertino is too loose; but see Manselli, “francescanesimo,” ED III (1971), p. 16, for a refutation. And see his lectura (“Il canto XII del Paradiso,” in Nuove letture dantesche, vol. VI [Florence: Le Monnier, 1973], pp. 122-23) for a demonstration that coartare regulam and fugere regulam were formulae in discussions of the day.
We have translated “la scrittura” in the narrowest sense (“the Rule”). In Dante's Italian the word has meant both writing in general and, on some occasions, the Bible. Here it is a third form of writing, something more than ordinary words and to be taken as post-biblical, but having a similar authority. (See the note to verse 122 for the similar status of the noun volume.) Mario Aversano (Dante e gli “scritti” di San Francesco [Salerno: Palladio, 1984], pp. 23-24) points out that Francis was so concerned that his Rule would be fraudulently emended that he encouraged his friars to memorize it.
For a helpful discussion of the participants of this second circle of souls found in the heaven of the Sun, see Carmine Di Biase (Il Canto XII del “Paradiso” [Naples: Ermanno Cassitto 1992], pp. 71-83). Comparing the two circles, Umberto Cosmo (L'ultima ascesa: Introduzione alla lettura del “Paradiso”, ed. B. Maier [Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1965 {1936}], pp. 106-7) argues that there is no sense of rigid separation between the two, rather, in fact, that there are many similarities between them. Each has two representatives of the early days of Christian thought (Isidore and Bede in the first group; Anselm and Rabanus here) and two from the days of the origins (Boethius, Orosius; Chrysostom, Donatus), and one from the Old Testament (Solomon; Nathan). Then there are masters of the Summa (Peter Lombard; Peter Comestor) and mystics (Dionysius the Areopagite, Richard of St. Victor; Hugh of St. Victor, Joachim of Flora). Nearest the leaders (Thomas and Bonaventure) are Albertus Magnus, Gratian; Illuminatus, Augustinus; and then the culmination in those who do not seem easily acceptable to the leaders at whose side they appear, Siger and Joachim. (Cosmo's tabulation somehow loses track of Peter Hispano and counts Joachim twice.)
“St. Bonaventura was born at Bagnoregio (now Bagnorea) near Orvieto in 1221, the year of St. Dominic's death. As a child he was attacked by a dangerous disease, which was miraculously cured by St. Francis of Assisi. When the latter heard that the child had recovered he is said to have exclaimed 'buona ventura,' whereupon the boy's mother changed his name to Bonaventura. In 1238 or 1243 he entered the Franciscan order. After studying in Paris under Alexander of Hales, he became successively professor of philosophy and theology, and in 1257 was made doctor. Having risen to be general of the Franciscan order (in 1257), he was offered the archbishopric of Albano by Gregory X, whom he accompanied to the second Council of Lyons, where he died, July 15, 1274, 'his magnificent funeral being attended by a pope, an emperor, and a king.' St. Bonaventure was canonized in 1482 by Sixtus IV, and placed among the doctors of the Church, with the title of Doctor Seraphicus, by Sixtus V” (Toynbee, “Bonaventura” [Concise Dante Dictionary]). The word vita, used here by Bonaventure to identify himself as a soul in grace, is used with this sense for the second time in the poem (see the note to Par. IX.7).
For Dante's debt to mysticism, as focused for him in the writings of Bonaventure, see A.G. Meekins (“The Study of Dante, Bonaventure, and Mysticism: Notes on Some Problems of Method,” in In amicizia: Essays in Honour of Giulio Lepschy, ed. Z.G. Baranski and L. Pertile [The Italianist 17 {1997–special supplement}], pp. 83-99). For the possibility that Dante read the apparent contradictions between the positions of Aquinas and Bonaventure syncretistically, see Giuseppe Mazzotta (“The Heaven of the Sun: Dante between Aquinas and Bonaventure,” in Dante for the New Millennium, ed. Teodolinda Barolini and H. Wayne Storey [New York: Fordham University Press, 2003], pp. 152-68) and Manuele Gragnolati (Experiencing the Afterlife [Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2005], pp. 58-77). Paolo Di Somma (“Canto III,” in Lectura Dantis Neapolitana: “Paradiso,” ed. P. Giannantonio [Naples: Loffredo, 2000 {1986}], p. 50n.) argues for the central importance of Bonaventure's Itinerarium mentis in Deum for all of Dante's poem, not only for this canto. A survey of Bonaventure's presence in the Dartmouth Dante Project reveals that the vast majority of references to “Bonaventura” before the end of the nineteenth century occur only in notes to this canto, in which he is a named (and thus inescapable) presence. Perhaps we realize, after a few minutes of reflection, that a serious use of Bonaventure's texts as a guide to Dante's is a fairly recent development. In fact, it is only in Scartazzini's commentary that one finds a total of more references to him in all the other cantos than one finds to him in this one. After Scartazzini, that situation begins to change. (English readers will find that in this particular, as well as in others, John Carroll outstrips his competitors.) See Edward Hagman (“Dante's Vision of God: The End of the Itinerarium Mentis,” Dante Studies 106 [1988]: 1-20) for a study of Bonaventure's extensive and overall importance to Dante. But see Sofia Vanni Rovighi, “Bonaventura da Bagnoreggio, santo,” ED I (1970), p. 673, arguing that attempts to show a direct textual dependence of Dante on Bonaventure have had only dubious results, that all one can say is that his work (the Itinerarium mentis in Deum in particular) is a generic model for the outline of the Comedy, without being able to make more of a claim for it than that.
The “left-hand care” reflects the traditional link between left- and right-handedness as reflecting, respectively, “sinister” (the Latin word for “left”) and positive purposes. The former here signifies “worldly concerns.” Francesco da Buti (comm. to vv. 127-141) does not attempt to banish cares of the world from the curate's interest, but does say that he does not (and must not) treat them as having the same importance as issues related to eternal life.
Illuminato and Augustino were among Francis's earliest followers. The first was a nobleman from Rieti and accompanied him on his voyage to Egypt. Augustino was a townsman of Francis and eventually became head of a chapter of the Order in Terra di Lavoro. Neither one of them is particularly associated with knowledge, which causes Benvenuto (comm. to vv. 130-132) to wonder why these two homines ignorantes were included here. He goes on to admire Dante's subtlety in doing so, for they, if not great intellects themselves, helped others to become, by their labor and example, more wise.
It was only in 1960 that a commentator on this verse (Mattalia), responding to a number of Dantists who raised the issue, suggested that a predictable reaction in one who is reading this line might very well be: “But that's not Saint Augustine of Hippo; where is he in all this?” (And we have to wait for Paradiso XXXII.35 to find that he is indeed among the blessed; see the note to that tercet.) For the last time he was named, see Paradiso X.120, but without mention of his eventual fate. Is it possible that Dante is playing a game with us? He mentions the actual St. Augustine two cantos ago, where we might have expected to find him, among other theologians in the Sun; he now mentions the name of a saved soul named “Augustine” who is not he but who is here. Both these gestures lead us to contemplate the possibility that Dante is teasing us. There will be some speculation as to his reasons for doing so in a note to Paradiso XXXII.34-36, a passage that situates Augustine among the inhabitants of the celestial Rose. Mattalia (comm. to verse 130) refers to the notion, which he attributes to C. Landi, that Dante's hostility toward Augustine is a reaction against the Bishop of Hippo's strong opposition to the legitimacy of the state, a position that is not easily reconciled with Dante's central agreement with the Aristotelian/Thomistic understanding of the question, the ideological basis of those who sustained the theocratic position.
See the note to Paradiso XI.87 for the capestro as signal of adherence to the Franciscan Order.
“Hugh of St. Victor, celebrated mystic and theologian of the beginning of cent. xii; he was born near Ypres in Flanders c. 1097 or, as some believe, at Hartingham in Saxony, and was educated during his early years in the monastery of Hammersleben near Halberstadt in Saxony; in 1115 he removed to the abbey of St. Victor near Paris, which had recently been founded by William of Champeaux, the preceptor of Abelard, and which during cent. xii was a centre of mysticism; he became one of the canons-regular of the abbey, and was in 1130 appointed to the chair of theology, which he held until his death in 1141, his reputation being so great that he was known as 'alter Augustinus' [a second Augustine] and 'lingua Augustini' [Augustine's tongue]. He was the intimate friend of Bernard of Clairvaux, and among his pupils were Richard of St. Victor and Peter Lombard. His writings, which are very numerous, and are characterized by great learning, are frequently quoted by Thomas Aquinas”; the most celebrated are the De eruditione didascalica, a sort of encyclopaedia of the sciences as then understood, viewed in their relation to theology, the Institutiones monasticae, including the treatises De arca morali, De arca mystica, and De vanitate mundi; and the De sacramentis Christianae fidei, on the mysteries of the faith, comprising a systematic exposition of Catholic theology; he also wrote commentaries on various books of the Old and New Testament (with the latter of which he appears to rank as of equal importance the canons, the decretals, and the writings of the fathers), and upon the De caelesti hierarchia of Dionysius the Areopagite (Toynbee, “Ugo da San Vittore” [Concise Dante Dictionary]).
Petrus Comestor (comestor is the Latin word for “eater,” and was the nickname that Peter was given by his fellow priests because of his tremendous appetite for books), “priest, and afterwards dean, of the cathedral of Troyes in France, where he was born in the first half of cent. xii; he became canon of St. Victor in 1164, and chancellor of the University of Paris, and died at St. Victor in 1179, leaving all his possessions to the poor. His chief work was the Historia scholastica, which professed to be a history of the Church from the beginning of the world down to the times of the apostles” (Toynbee, “Pietro Mangiadore” [Concise Dante Dictionary]).
“Petrus Hispanus (Pedro Juliani), born at Lisbon, c. 1225, where he at first followed his father's profession of medicine; he studied at Paris, probably under Albertus Magnus; subsequently he was ordained and became (1273) archbishop of Braga; in 1274 he was created cardinal bishop of Tusculum (Frascati) by Gregory X; on Sept. 13, 1276, he was elected pope, under the title of John XXI, at Viterbo, in succession to Adrian V; he died May 20, 1277, after a reign of a little more than eight months, his death being caused by the fall of the ceiling of one of the rooms in his palace at Viterbo” (Toynbee, “Ispano, Pietro” [Concise Dante Dictionary]). His manual of logic, the Summulae logicales, in twelve books, had a large audience.
That Dante calls no attention whatsoever to the fact that Peter was a pope (if very briefly) has caught the attention of many commentators. For the “scorecard” of the perhaps twelve popes who, in Dante's opinion, were saved (and the probably larger number who were damned), see the note to Inferno VII.46-48. John XXI is the last saved pope mentioned in the poem.
“Nathan, the prophet, who was sent by God to reprove David for his sin in causing the death of Uriah the Hittite in order that he might take Bathsheba to wife” (Toynbee, “Natàn”[Concise Dante Dictionary]).
For Nathan as figura Dantis and the question of why he, a relatively minor prophet, is given such high relief in this poem, see G.R. Sarolli (Prolegomena alla “Divina Commedia” [Florence: Olschki, 1971]), pp. 189-246. See also the note to verse 69. And for a note that, apparently written without awareness of Sarolli's previous work, makes the venturesome claim that Dante thought of Nathan as “a Judaic Orpheus or Thespis, the creator of an artistic mode,” that he serves as “a biblical model for Dante the story-teller,” whose “handling of David is an allegory of the moral and epistemological relevance of literature” [i.e., telling truth to power indirectly, by means of a relevant fiction], see Manfred Weidhorn (“Why Does Dante Cite Nathan in the Paradiso?,” Philological Quarterly 61 [1982]: 91).
“St. John Chrysostom (i.e., in Greek his name means 'golden-mouthed'), celebrated Greek father of the Church, born at Antioch c. 345, died at Comana in Pontus, 407. He belonged to a noble family, and was first a lawyer; he afterward became a monk, in which capacity he so distinguished himself by his preaching that the Emperor Arcadius appointed him (in 398) patriarch of Constantinople. His severity toward the clergy in his desire for reform made him an object of hatred to them, and led to his deposition (403) at the instance of Theophilus, patriarch of Alexandria, and the Empress Eudoxia, whose excesses he had publicly rebuked. Sentence of exile was pronounced against him, but the people, to whom he had endeared himself by his preaching, rose in revolt, and he was reinstated in his office. Shortly afterward, he was again banished (404), and he finally died in exile on the shores of the Black Sea. He left nearly 1,000 sermons or homilies as evidence of his eloquence” (Toynbee, “Crisòstomo” [Concise Dante Dictionary]).
“Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury, 1093-1109; he was born at Aosta in Piedmont in 1033, and in 1060, at the age of 27, he became a monk in the abbey of Bec in Normandy, whither he had been attracted by the fame of Lanfranc, at that time prior; in 1063, on the promotion of Lanfranc to the abbacy of Caen, he succeeded him as prior; fifteen years later, in 1078, on the death of Herluin, the founder of the monastery, he was made abbot, which office he held till 1093, in that year he was appointed archbishop of Canterbury by William Rufus, in succession to Lanfranc, after the see had been vacant for four years; in 1097, in consequence of disputes with William on matters of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, he left England for Rome to consult the pope, and remained on the Continent until William's death in 1100, when he was recalled by Henry I; he died at Canterbury, April 21, 1109; canonized, in 1494, by Alexander VI.”
“Anselm was the author of several theological works, the most important of which are the Monologion (to which Anselm gave the subtitle Exemplum meditandi de ratione fidei), the Proslogion (Fides quaerens intellectum), and the Cur Deus homo (a treatise on the atonement intended to prove the necessity of the incarnation)” (Toynbee, “Anselmo” [Concise Dante Dictionary]).
“Aelius Donatus, Roman scholar and rhetorician of cent. iv, said to have been the tutor of Jerome; he was the author of a commentary on Virgil (now lost, but often alluded to by Servius), and of another on Terence, but his most famous work was an elementary Latin grammar, Ars Grammatica in three books; part of this work, the Ars minor, or De octo partibus orationis, served as a model for subsequent similar treatises. Owing to the popularity of this work in the Middle Ages it was one of the earliest books, being printed even before the invention of movable type – the name of its author became a synonym for grammar, just as Euclid for geometry” (Toynbee, “Donato” [Concise Dante Dictionary]).
Donatus was the “people's grammarian” in that his Ars, unlike Priscian's (see Inf. XV.109), supposedly kept grammar as simple as possible. And grammar was itself the “first art” in the sense that it was the first subject taught to children, the first of the seven liberal arts. Thus his “intellectual humility” may have, in Dante's mind, paralleled that of Illuminato and Augustino. Both the Ottimo (comm. to these verses) and John of Serravalle (comm. to vv. 136-138) cite the incipit of the work: “Ianua sum rudibus” (I am the doorway through which the unlettered may pass [to learning]).
Rabanus Maurus was “born at Mainz of noble parents, c. 776; while quite a youth he entered the monastery at Fulda, where he received deacon's orders in 801; he shortly after proceeded to Tours to study under Alcuin, who in recognition of his piety and diligence gave him the surname of Maurus, after St. Maurus (d. 565), the favourite disciple of St. Benedict. He was ordained priest in 814, and after a pilgrimage to the Holy Land returned to Fulda in 817, where he became abbot in 822. He held this office for twenty years until 842, when he retired in order to devote himself more completely to religion and literature. Five years later, however, he was appointed to the archbishopric of Mainz, which he held until his death in 856. Rabanus, who was considered one of the most learned men of his time, wrote a voluminous commentary on the greater portion of the Bible, and was the author of numerous theological works..., the most important being the De institutione clericorum. His treatise De laudibus Sanctae Crucis contains figures in which rows of letters are cut by outlines of stars, crosses, and the like, so as to mark out words and sentences. Butler suggests that Dante may have borrowed thence the idea of his image in [Par. XVIII.91], where he represents the spirits as arranging themselves in the shape of letters to form the words 'Diligite iustitiam qui iudicatis terram'” (Toynbee, “Rabano” [Concise Dante Dictionary]). And see Nicolò Mineo, “Rabano Mauro,” ED IV (1973), pp. 817-18. While Mineo insists that a careful study of the extent of Dante's knowledge of Rabanus has yet to be undertaken, he does indicate some points of contact between Dante and at least Rabanus's commentary on Ezechiel, his De Universo, and his Liber de Cruce. Most are content with the traditional identification of the ninth-century biblical commentator; however, for the view that this Rabanus is not Maurus but Anglicus, see Robert E. Lerner (“On the Origins of the Earliest Latin Pope Prophecies: A Reconsideration,” Monumenta Germaniae Historica 33, Teil V [1988], pp. 631-32). Lerner did not have access to the DDP for a study of the identity of “Rabanus” among Dante's commentators, but would have found support for his thesis among some important early discussants, the Ottimo (comm. to this verse); Benvenuto (comm. to vv. 139-141), who adds that he was a brother of the Venerable Bede; John of Serravalle (comm. to vv. 139-141), following (as he often did) his magister, Benvenuto; Landino (comm. to vv. 139-141); and Vellutello (comm. to vv. 139-141). Among the early commentators only Francesco da Buti (comm. to vv. 127-141) refers to the Rabanus we routinely think was in Dante's mind. That modern tradition began in 1732 with Venturi (comm. to this verse). Lombardi (comm. to vv. 139-141), who delighted in disagreeing with Venturi, for once is in accord with him, and says as much. While Tommaseo (comm. to vv. 139-141) is a rare modern even to refer to Bede's brother as an alternative possibility, all but one of the post-Renaissance commentators back Rabanus Maurus, and very few even mention that there has been another candidate. Scartazzini (comm. to this verse) mentions the lack of awareness of the German Rabanus among the early commentators and cites the presence of the English one in their work, but does not treat their opinion as being worthy of serious study. Finally Campi (comm. to vv. 139-141) does not bat an eyelash when, out of the blue, he says that Rabanus was Bede's brother and does not even mention Rabanus Maurus; but he is apparently absolutely alone in the last one hundred and ten years (until Lerner came along) in thinking so.
Joachim of Flora “appears to have enjoyed in his own day, and long afterwards, a reputation for prophetic power; hence Bonaventure speaks of him as 'di spirito profetico dotato,' words which are said to be taken verbatim from the anthem still chanted on the Festival of St. Joachim in the churches of Calabria.
”Joachim was born c. 1145 at Celico, about 4 miles NE. of Cosenza in Calabria. He made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and on his return to Italy became a monk, entering (c. 1158) the Cistercian monastery of Sambucina. In 1177 he was made abbot of Corazzo in Calabria. In 1185, Pope Urban III appointed a deputy abbot in order that Joachim might have leisure to devote himself to his writings. In 1189 Joachim founded a monastery, San Giovanni in Fiore in the forest of the Sila among the mountains of Calabria, whence he was named 'de Floris.' From this institution, the rule of which was sanctioned by Celestine III in 1196, ultimately sprang the so-called Ordo Florensis (absorbed by the Cistercians, 1505). Joachim died c. 1202. The authenticated works of Joachim: a commentary upon the Apocalypse (Expositio in Apocalypsin), a Harmony of the Old and New Testaments (Concordia veteris et novi Testamenti), the Psalterium decem chordarum, and the Contra Judaeos. Many works have been attributed to him – among them, the Liber figurarum, the authorship of which is much debated [if, since the work of Leone Tondelli (Il libro delle figure dell'abate Gioachino da Fiore [Turin: SEI, 1940]), it has mainly been accepted as genuine]. He was credited with the authorship of a book on the popes, in which the persons and names of all the future popes were described“ (Toynbee, ”Giovacchino“ [Concise Dante Dictionary]).
On Dante's relationships with Joachim's work and various of its followers see Antoine Calvet (”Dante et les joachimismes,“ in Pour Dante: Dante et l'Apocalypse: Lectures humanistes de Dante, ed. Bruno Pinchard and Christian Trottmann [Paris: Champion, 2001], pp. 77-98). And see Bruno Nardi (”Dante e Gioacchino da Fiore,“ in his ”Lecturae“ e altri studi danteschi, ed. Rudy Abardo [Florence: Le Lettere, 1990 {1965}], pp. 277-331). For a more recent study, see Alessandro Ghisalberti (”Canto XII,“ in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone [Florence: Cesati, 2002], pp. 187-90).
Marco Veglia (”Per un'ardita umiltà. L'averroismo di Dante tra Guido Cavalcanti, Sigieri di Brabante e San Francesco d'Assisi,“ Schede Umanistiche 1 [2000]: 71) points out that Averroës (Inf. IV.144), Siger (Par. X.136), and Joachim is each the last figure in a group (fortieth, twelfth, and twelfth, respectively); they have in common the surprise generated by their presence in these groups.
Rather than attempting, as some do, to ”Franciscanize“ this second circle in the Sun (while ”Dominicanizing“ the first in Canto X), Steven Botterill (”Paradiso XII,“ in Dante's ”Divine Comedy,“ Introductory Readings III: ”Paradiso,“ ed. Tibor Wlassics [Lectura Dantis {virginiana}, 16-17, supplement, Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1995], p. 184) speaks of (and he is also referring to the first circle, seen in Par. X) the ”images of celebration, reconciliation, and harmony“ that typify this entire heaven.
There has been dispute over the reference of paladino, but most today seem content to believe that it refers to Dominic, rather than to Francis, Thomas, or Joachim. See Mario Scotti (”Canto XII,“ in Lectura Dantis Neapolitana: ”Paradiso,“ ed. P. Giannantonio [Naples: Loffredo, 2000 {1987}], p. 257n.).
On the verb inveggiar, see Singleton (comm. to this verse): ”The most plausible interpretation would seem to be that inveggiar, deriving from invidiare, to envy, would mean (as does its Provençal equivalent envejar) to envy in a good sense, hence to praise.“
For a review of both questions (the meaning of the verb and the reference of the noun), accompanied by an attempt to make related sense of them by denying an emergent consensus, see Porena (comm. to vv. 142-145). But for the paladin who rides out to re-establish that consensus, see Mattalia (comm. to verse 142). For a similar result, see the review offered by Giacalone (comm. to vv. 142-143).
It has long been observed that Dante constructed these two cantos so as to make them reflect one another in a thoroughgoing way. See the chart offered by Bosco/Reggio (who at times seem to be forcing the details to fit) for the parallel elements in Cantos XI and XII (numbers in parentheses refer to the number of terzine dedicated to each subject; square brackets contain one element not included in their table):
Canto XI Canto XII
General introduction: 28-36 (3) 37-45 (3)
Actions performed by the two saints: 40-42 (1) 34-36 (1)
Place of birth: 43-51 (3) 46-54 (3)
Birth: 49-51 (1) 55-57 (1)
[Saint's Life: 55-117 (21) 58-105 (16)]
Transition from biography to condemnation: 118-123 (2) 106-111 (2)
Condemnation of his own Order: 124-129 (2) 112-117 (2)
Faithful friars: 130-132 (1) 121-123 (1)
For a nearly identical table, without reference to any source, see Alessandro Ghisalberti (”Canto XII,“ in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone [Florence: Cesati, 2002], p. 182n.).
For the several elements that inform Dante's notion of courtesy, see Andrea Fassò (”La cortesia di Dante,“ in Filologia Romanza e cultura medievale: studi in onore di Elio Melli, ed. A. Fassò, L. Formisano, and M. Mancini [Alessandria: Edizioni dell'Orso, 1998], vol. I, pp. 279-301).
Ettore Bonora (”Canto XI,“ in Lectura Dantis Neapolitana: ”Paradiso,“ ed. P. Giannantonio [Naples: Loffredo, 2000 {1987}], pp. 281-83) discusses the phrase describing Aquinas's speech as ”discreto latin“ and says that it is obvious that Thomas is not speaking Latin, but using Latin stylistic devices (in the lingua franca of the poem, Italian) that ennoble speech. (And it should be pointed out that Dante several times uses the word latino to indicate either the Italian language or ”Italy“ itself. See the note to Inf. XXII.64-66, the passage in which it first appears; and see the note to Par. XVII.34-35, its last appearance in the poem.) For the connection between this descriptor, the adjective discreto, and, in Dante's formulations, Thomas's ”stress on the need to make distinctions,“ see Teodolinda Barolini (The Undivine ”Comedy“: Detheologizing Dante [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992)], pp. 203-6), citing Kenelm Foster and Ettore Bonora.
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Sì tosto come l'ultima parola
la benedetta fiamma per dir tolse,
a rotar cominciò la santa mola;
e nel suo giro tutta non si volse
prima ch'un'altra di cerchio la chiuse,
e moto a moto e canto a canto colse;
canto che tanto vince nostre muse,
nostre serene in quelle dolci tube,
quanto primo splendor quel ch'e' refuse.
Come si volgon per tenera nube
due archi paralelli e concolori,
quando Iunone a sua ancella iube,
nascendo di quel d'entro quel di fori,
a guisa del parlar di quella vaga
ch'amor consunse come sol vapori,
e fanno qui la gente esser presaga,
per lo patto che Dio con Noè puose,
del mondo che già mai più non s'allaga:
così di quelle sempiterne rose
volgiensi circa noi le due ghirlande,
e sì l'estrema a l'intima rispuose.
Poi che 'l tripudio e l'altra festa grande,
sì del cantare e sì del fiammeggiarsi
luce con luce gaudïose e blande,
insieme a punto e a voler quetarsi,
pur come li occhi ch'al piacer che i move
conviene insieme chiudere e levarsi;
del cor de l'una de le luci nove
si mosse voce, che l'ago a la stella
parer mi fece in volgermi al suo dove;
e cominciò: “L'amor che mi fa bella
mi tragge a ragionar de l'altro duca
per cui del mio sì ben ci si favella.
Degno è che, dov' è l'un, l'altro s'induca:
sì che, com' elli ad una militaro,
così la gloria loro insieme luca.
L'essercito di Cristo, che sì caro
costò a rïarmar, dietro a la 'nsegna
si movea tardo, sospeccioso e raro,
quando lo 'mperador che sempre regna
provide a la milizia, ch'era in forse,
per sola grazia, non per esser degna;
e, come è detto, a sua sposa soccorse
con due campioni, al cui fare, al cui dire
lo popol disvïato si raccorse.
In quella parte ove surge ad aprire
Zefiro dolce le novelle fronde
di che si vede Europa rivestire,
non molto lungi al percuoter de l'onde
dietro a le quali, per la lunga foga,
lo sol talvolta ad ogne uom si nasconde,
siede la fortunata Calaroga
sotto la protezion del grande scudo
in che soggiace il leone e soggioga:
dentro vi nacque l'amoroso drudo
de la fede cristiana, il santo atleta
benigno a' suoi e a' nemici crudo;
e come fu creata, fu repleta
sì la sua mente di viva virtute
che, ne la madre, lei fece profeta.
Poi che le sponsalizie fuor compiute
al sacro fonte intra lui e la Fede,
u' si dotar di mutüa salute,
la donna che per lui l'assenso diede,
vide nel sonno il mirabile frutto
ch'uscir dovea di lui e de le rede;
e perché fosse qual era in costrutto,
quinci si mosse spirito a nomarlo
del possessivo di cui era tutto.
Domenico fu detto; e io ne parlo
sì come de l'agricola che Cristo
elesse a l'orto suo per aiutarlo.
Ben parve messo e famigliar di Cristo:
ché 'l primo amor che 'n lui fu manifesto,
fu al primo consiglio che diè Cristo.
Spesse fïate fu tacito e desto
trovato in terra da la sua nutrice,
come dicesse: 'Io son venuto a questo.'
Oh padre suo veramente Felice!
oh madre sua veramente Giovanna,
se, interpretata, val come si dice!
Non per lo mondo, per cui mo s'affanna
di retro ad Ostïense e a Taddeo,
ma per amor de la verace manna
in picciol tempo gran dottor si feo;
tal che si mise a circüir la vigna
che tosto imbianca, se 'l vignaio è reo.
E a la sedia che fu già benigna
più a' poveri giusti, non per lei,
ma per colui che siede, che traligna,
non dispensare o due o tre per sei,
non la fortuna di prima vacante,
non decimas, quae sunt pauperum Dei,
addimandò, ma contro al mondo errante
licenza di combatter per lo seme
del qual ti fascian ventiquattro piante.
Poi, con dottrina e con volere insieme,
con l'officio appostolico si mosse
quasi torrente ch'alta vena preme;
e ne li sterpi eretici percosse
l'impeto suo, più vivamente quivi
dove le resistenze eran più grosse.
Di lui si fecer poi diversi rivi
onde l'orto catolico si riga,
sì che i suoi arbuscelli stan più vivi.
Se tal fu l'una rota de la biga
in che la Santa Chiesa si difese
e vinse in campo la sua civil briga,
ben ti dovrebbe assai esser palese
l'eccellenza de l'altra, di cui Tomma
dinanzi al mio venir fu sì cortese.
Ma l'orbita che fé la parte somma
di sua circunferenza, è derelitta,
sì ch'è la muffa dov' era la gromma.
La sua famiglia, che si mosse dritta
coi piedi a le sue orme, è tanto volta,
che quel dinanzi a quel di retro gitta;
e tosto si vedrà de la ricolta
de la mala coltura, quando il loglio
si lagnerà che l'arca li sia tolta.
Ben dico, chi cercasse a foglio a foglio
nostro volume, ancor troveria carta
u' leggerebbe 'I' mi son quel ch'i' soglio';
ma non fia da Casal né d'Acquasparta,
là onde vegnon tali a la scrittura,
ch'uno la fugge e altro la coarta.
Io son la vita di Bonaventura
da Bagnoregio, che ne' grandi offici
sempre pospuosi la sinistra cura.
Illuminato e Augustin son quici,
che fuor de' primi scalzi poverelli
che nel capestro a Dio si fero amici.
Ugo da San Vittore è qui con elli,
e Pietro Mangiadore e Pietro Spano,
lo qual giù luce in dodici libelli;
Natàn profeta e 'l metropolitano
Crisostomo e Anselmo e quel Donato
ch'a la prim' arte degnò porre mano.
Rabano è qui, e lucemi dallato
il calavrese abate Giovacchino
di spirito profetico dotato.
Ad inveggiar cotanto paladino
mi mosse l'infiammata cortesia
di fra Tommaso e 'l discreto latino;
e mosse meco questa compagnia.”
Soon as the blessed flame had taken up
The final word to give it utterance,
Began the holy millstone to revolve,
And in its gyre had not turned wholly round,
Before another in a ring enclosed it,
And motion joined to motion, song to song;
Song that as greatly doth transcend our Muses,
Our Sirens, in those dulcet clarions,
As primal splendour that which is reflected.
And as are spanned athwart a tender cloud
Two rainbows parallel and like in colour,
When Juno to her handmaid gives command,
(The one without born of the one within,
Like to the speaking of that vagrant one
Whom love consumed as doth the sun the vapours,)
And make the people here, through covenant
God set with Noah, presageful of the world
That shall no more be covered with a flood,
In such wise of those sempiternal roses
The garlands twain encompassed us about,
And thus the outer to the inner answered.
After the dance, and other grand rejoicings,
Both of the singing, and the flaming forth
Effulgence with effulgence blithe and tender,
Together, at once, with one accord had stopped,
(Even as the eyes, that, as volition moves them,
Must needs together shut and lift themselves,)
Out of the heart of one of the new lights
There came a voice, that needle to the star
Made me appear in turning thitherward.
And it began: "The love that makes me fair
Draws me to speak about the other leader,
By whom so well is spoken here of mine.
'Tis right, where one is, to bring in the other,
That, as they were united in their warfare,
Together likewise may their glory shine.
The soldiery of Christ, which it had cost
So dear to arm again, behind the standard
Moved slow and doubtful and in numbers few,
When the Emperor who reigneth evermore
Provided for the host that was in peril,
Through grace alone and not that it was worthy;
And, as was said, he to his Bride brought succour
With champions twain, at whose deed, at whose word
The straggling people were together drawn.
Within that region where the sweet west wind
Rises to open the new leaves, wherewith
Europe is seen to clothe herself afresh,
Not far off from the beating of the waves,
Behind which in his long career the sun
Sometimes conceals himself from every man,
Is situate the fortunate Calahorra,
Under protection of the mighty shield
In which the Lion subject is and sovereign.
Therein was born the amorous paramour
Of Christian Faith, the athlete consecrate,
Kind to his own and cruel to his foes;
And when it was created was his mind
Replete with such a living energy,
That in his mother her it made prophetic.
As soon as the espousals were complete
Between him and the Faith at holy font,
Where they with mutual safety dowered each other,
The woman, who for him had given assent,
Saw in a dream the admirable fruit
That issue would from him and from his heirs;
And that he might be construed as he was,
A spirit from this place went forth to name him
With His possessive whose he wholly was.
Dominic was he called; and him I speak of
Even as of the husbandman whom Christ
Elected to his garden to assist him.
Envoy and servant sooth he seemed of Christ,
For the first love made manifest in him
Was the first counsel that was given by Christ.
Silent and wakeful many a time was he
Discovered by his nurse upon the ground,
As if he would have said, 'For this I came.'
O thou his father, Felix verily!
O thou his mother, verily Joanna,
If this, interpreted, means as is said!
Not for the world which people toil for now
In following Ostiense and Taddeo,
But through his longing after the true manna,
He in short time became so great a teacher,
That he began to go about the vineyard,
Which fadeth soon, if faithless be the dresser;
And of the See, (that once was more benignant
Unto the righteous poor, not through itself,
But him who sits there and degenerates,)
Not to dispense or two or three for six,
Not any fortune of first vacancy,
'Non decimas quae sunt pauperum Dei,'
He asked for, but against the errant world
Permission to do battle for the seed,
Of which these four and twenty plants surround thee.
Then with the doctrine and the will together,
With office apostolical he moved,
Like torrent which some lofty vein out-presses;
And in among the shoots heretical
His impetus with greater fury smote,
Wherever the resistance was the greatest.
Of him were made thereafter divers runnels,
Whereby the garden catholic is watered,
So that more living its plantations stand.
If such the one wheel of the Biga was,
In which the Holy Church itself defended
And in the field its civic battle won,
Truly full manifest should be to thee
The excellence of the other, unto whom
Thomas so courteous was before my coming.
But still the orbit, which the highest part
Of its circumference made, is derelict,
So that the mould is where was once the crust.
His family, that had straight forward moved
With feet upon his footprints, are turned round
So that they set the point upon the heel.
And soon aware they will be of the harvest
Of this bad husbandry, when shall the tares
Complain the granary is taken from them.
Yet say I, he who searcheth leaf by leaf
Our volume through, would still some page discover
Where he could read, 'I am as I am wont.'
'Twill not be from Casal nor Acquasparta,
From whence come such unto the written word
That one avoids it, and the other narrows.
Bonaventura of Bagnoregio's life
Am I, who always in great offices
Postponed considerations sinister.
Here are Illuminato and Agostino,
Who of the first barefooted beggars were
That with the cord the friends of God became.
Hugh of Saint Victor is among them here,
And Peter Mangiador, and Peter of Spain,
Who down below in volumes twelve is shining;
Nathan the seer, and metropolitan
Chrysostom, and Anselmus, and Donatus
Who deigned to lay his hand to the first art;
Here is Rabanus, and beside me here
Shines the Calabrian Abbot Joachim,
He with the spirit of prophecy endowed.
To celebrate so great a paladin
Have moved me the impassioned courtesy
And the discreet discourses of Friar Thomas,
And with me they have moved this company."
The action of this canto begins, if we take its first line literally, before the preceding one ends, i.e., before Thomas utters the last syllables (or syllable) of vaneggia. See Iacopo della Lana (comm. to vv. 1-3) and Alfonso Bertoldi (Il canto XII del “Paradiso” [“Lectura Dantis Orsanmichele,” Florence: Sansoni, 1913], p. 43, n. 5). That seems fitting, since these two cantos are, perhaps more than any other pair in the work, mirror images of one another. See Bertoldi (Il canto XI del “Paradiso” [“Lectura Dantis Orsanmichele,” Florence: Sansoni, 1903]), referring to them, despite their differing subjects and feelings, as “twin cantos.” See also the note to Par. XII.142-145. For one expression of the widely shared notice that the first verse of this canto clearly is intended to attach it to its predecessor, see Antonio Di Pietro (“Il canto dantesco dei due Guidi,” in Studi in onore di Alberto Chiari [Brescia: Paideia, 1973], p. 421). Compare, in contrast, the opening of Canto X, which stresses its discontinuity with what preceded it.
Carmine Di Biase (Il Canto XII del “Paradiso” [Naples: Ermanno Cassitto 1992], p. 8), suggests that both cantos may be broken into four parallel parts; in this canto, matching the four divisions of Canto XI, exordium (XII.1-45), narrative in praise of Dominic (XII.46-105), blame directed at his failed followers (XII.106-126), and, in conclusion, the second circle of saints (XII.127-145).
Dante had earlier resorted to the image of the millstone (mola) to refer to the rotation of the Sun, seen from either pole, around the earth (see Conv. III.v.14).
The matching circles of twelve saints, each moving in such a way as to match the other both in the eye and in the ear of the beholder, anticipates the final image of the poem (Par. XXXIII.143-145).
This first circle of saints was described (Par. XI.14) as having completed a first full rotation; now it is seen as being on the point of completing a second one.
The double repetition (moto/moto; canto/canto) underlines the matching quality of these two circles.
The previous tercet had divided the activity of the souls into circling movement and song; this one divides that song itself (repeating the word canto) into two components, words (muse) and melody (sirene). Dante had used the word Muse (capitalized by Petrocchi, if we have little idea of Dante's actual practice with regard to capitalization) in Inferno I.7, in Purgatorio II.8 and XXII.102, then in Paradiso II.9, to indicate the Muses of classical antiquity. Beginning here, however, and then in two later passages (Par. XV.26 and XVIII.33) Petrocchi obviously believes that Dante uses the lowercase word musa metaphorically, here to refer to poets (the next use will refer to Virgil [or his poetry] as “nostra maggior musa” [our greatest muse], and finally [Par. XVIII.33], to poetry itself - or so most readers believe).
Torraca (comm. to vv. 7-9) seems to have been the first to remark on the similar conjoining of Sirens and Muses in Boethius (Cons. Phil. I.1[pr]). Aversano (Dante daccapo [glosses to the Paradiso], copia d'eccezione, sent by the author on 11 September 2001), p. 52, believes that the Muses inspire the words of the song, the Sirens, the music.
These two verses contain four words relating to music: canto (song), musa (muse), serena (siren), tuba (brass musical instrument [more precisely, “horn”]). For the echoing effect that results from the repetition of the first two, Dante may have had in mind the similar effect found in Ovid's story of Echo and Narcissus, referred to in vv. 14-15. The next (and last) time we read the noun tuba (Par. XXX.35), it will be the metaphoric expression for Dante's poetic voice, while here it refers to the voices of the singing saints.
The word splendore is, in Dante, always the result of light (luce), proceeding along its ray (raggio), and then reflected by an object. (For these interrelated terms, describing the three major aspects of light, see Dante's earlier statement [Conv. III.xiv.5].) This verse makes clear Dante's belief that a second reflection (e.g., as in a mirror) is less vivid than that original splendor (but cf. Par. II.94-105, which seems to contradict this understanding). As we have learned in Canto X (vv. 64-69), these crowns of dancing saints are presented as circles of musical lights. And in that earlier passage, a simile, the comparison is to the rainbow, as will also be true in the simile that begins in the next verse.
This simile, explicitly formal in its construction (Come... così) and, balanced in its content, containing one classical and one biblical reference (Iris and the rainbow that God offered as a sign to Noah), gives a sense of the identity of the two circles of saints, despite their evident differences.
Dante apparently thought of thin (and thus “translucent”) clouds as actually being constituted of a layer of water-soaked dust suspended in the atmosphere in which the rainbow appears.
There are a number of candidates for the classical source at work here, primarily texts in Virgil and Ovid. It seems likely that Dante would have had the reference (Metam. I.270-271) to Juno's sending Iris (her “handmaid,” the rainbow) as a result of Jove's huge storm, sent below in his attempt to extirpate, in a flood, the human race (typified in the first murderer, Lycaon [the wolf-man], and hence abandoned by piety and justice [Metam. I.149-150]). That would nicely balance these gestures toward “famous rainbows,” since the second of them is without doubt reflective of the rainbow that God sent as the sign of his covenant (Gen. 9:13) with Noah and the few other surviving members of humankind based on His promise never to send such a destructive flood again. (The first book of the Metamorphoses is, as it were, the pagan equivalent of Genesis.) We are also probably meant to compare the unchecked vengeful desires of the king of the pagan gods with the moderated sternness of God the Father.
Dante adds a second rainbow, as his context demands, not as he found in his sources, but as may at least occasionally be observed in Tuscany even today.
The second circle is, like the second rainbow, wider than the first. Dante's science believed that the second rainbow was born from the first, not that it was part of a double refraction of light.
The reference is to the nymph Echo (Metam. III.356-510), who fell in love with Narcissus. She wasted away with unrequited passion until all that was left of her was a voice. This second simile, within the overarching simile that compares the two circles of saints to the double rainbow, replicates the form of such a rainbow.
As Tommaseo suggests (comm. to vv. 16-18), the present tense of the verb allagare (to flood) suggests the past, present, and future application of God's covenant with humankind: This global flood has not recurred and will never do so.
Dante seemingly intuits the extraordinary effect made by large modern-day symphony orchestras when called upon to modulate huge sound suddenly into silence. If the reader imagines Beethoven as the background music to this scene, perhaps he or she will better experience what is projected by these verses. Of course, the miraculous sound has not so much to do with extraordinary musical abilities as it does with the result of living in God's grace, in which all is harmonious, even sudden silence.
These similetic elements of this passage (vv. 22-30), two eyes opening or closing as one and Dante ineluctably being drawn to the voice of a new spirit (it will turn out to be Bonaventure), speak to the sense of the overpowering quality of the love and beauty that affects both the performers and their observer. Torraca (comm. to vv. 28-30) points out that the compass, invented only a short while before, had already become a familiar image in thirteenth-century Italian poetry, e.g., in poems by Guido Guinizzelli and in Ristoro d'Arezzo.
St. Bonaventure is about to praise the leader of Thomas's Order, St. Dominic, in response to Thomas's praise of Francis, the leader of his own. For information about the speaker, see the note to vv. 127-128.
In the previous canto (Par. XI.40-42) Thomas had gone out of his way to insist that praise of either Francis or Dominic is necessarily praise of the other; Bonaventure matches him.
While Dante has made every effort to “militarize” the sweetness of St. Francis, making both him and Dominic share the verb militaro (lit. “soldiered”), the following three tercets show that he is willing to associate himself with the traditional portrayal of Dominic as warlike, while the traditional depiction of Francis is decidedly not (see the note to Par. XI.91). On the other hand, it is again notable that he has included Francis within the construct of the Christian soldier.
These three tercets contain seven words that associate the two friars with militarism and imperial rule: essercito (army), riarmar (to rearm), insegna (battle standard), imperador (emperor), regna (reigns), milizia (soldiers), campioni (“champions,” i.e., those who excel in single combat).
The “troops” obviously form the Church Militant, now led by the newly approved mendicant orders, expensive to rearm, since it took the blood of the apostles to accomplish that task (see Aversano, Dante daccapo [glosses to the Paradiso], copia d'eccezione, sent by the author on 11 September 2001], p. 53, for reasons to prefer this gloss to that which insists the reference is to Christ's blood, an interpretation unopposed since the earliest days of the commentary tradition; Aversano refers the reader to Par. XXVII.40-45 for confirming evidence). Despite that, the soldiers, apparently, still lack resolve.
The “standard” of this army is obviously the Cross.
The meaning is that God succored His “troops,” not because they were particularly worthy, but because He extended them His grace. For a clear summary of the two kinds of grace at work in Dante's world, operating grace (which Dante received from God, through the agency of Beatrice, in Inferno II) and cooperating grace, see Scott (Understanding Dante [Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2004], pp. 187-90). Once a sinner is justified by the receipt of operating grace, which is gratuitous (i.e., cannot be earned), he or she must “cooperate” in order to merit eventual reward (salvation). Scott reviews the American discussion of this issue, which was dominated by the views of Charles Singleton, until Antonio Mastrobuono (Dante's Journey of Sanctification [Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1990]) clarified the nature of the problem.
That God is here referred to as “emperor” (as He is on only two other occasions: Inf. I.124 and Par. XXV.41) makes Dante's comfort with imperial trappings clear, especially to his Guelph enemies. This term for God is not in itself unwarranted in Christian tradition, far from it. But Dante uses it here in an ecclesiastical context where it might seem, at least to some, improper.
The reference (“as was said”) is to Paradiso XI.31-36, where Thomas tells of God's appointment of these two stalwarts to succor the bride of Christ, His Church.
Francis (typified by love) is best represented by his deeds, Dominic (typified by knowledge), by his words.
For Francis and Dominic as “postfigurations” of Elijah and Enoch, see Ubertino of Casale: “... in thipo Helie et Enoch Franciscus et Dominicus singulariter claruerunt” (... as antitypes of Elijah and Enoch Francis and Dominic stand strikingly forth), cited by Carmine Di Biase (Il Canto XII del “Paradiso” [Naples: Ermanno Cassitto 1992], p. 27).
Dominic was “born 1170, in the village of Calaroga, in Old Castile; he is supposed to have belonged to the noble family of Guzmàn, his father's name being Felix, his mother's Joanna. The latter is said to have dreamed before he was born that she gave birth to a dog with a torch in its mouth, which set the world on fire. At the age of fourteen he went to the university of Palencia, where he studied theology for ten or twelve years. He was early noted for his self-denial and charity. In 1195 he became canon of the cathedral of Osma. In 1215 he accompanied Folquet, bishop of Toulouse, to the Lateran Council; and in the same year, on his return to Toulouse, he founded his order of Preaching Friars, which was formally recognized by Honorius III in 121[7]. He died in Aug. 1221 at Bologna, where he was buried. He was canonized soon after his death (in 1234) by Gregory IX” (Toynbee, “Domenico” [Concise Dante Dictionary]). And see G.R. Sarolli, “Domenico, santo,” ED II (1970), pp. 546-51. Sarolli points out that, when Dominic, with six companions, arrived in Toulouse in 1215, on the verge of forming a more structured group, he associated with Folco di Marsiglia (whom we encountered in Par. IX.88-102), the newly appointed bishop of that city.
For a global consideration of Bonaventure's praise of Dominic, see Giuseppe Ledda (“Osservazioni sul panegirico di San Domenico,” L'Alighieri 27 [2006]: 105-25).
For Guglielmo Gorni (“Due note su Paradiso XI,” L'Alighieri 23 [2004]: 51-56) the description of Dominic's birthplace does not work in tandem with the description of Francis's (see the note to Par. XI.43-48), a function the text itself (Par. XI.37-42) claims – as Gorni admits – but in an opposite way, that is, to support the position of the Spiritual Franciscans (see the note to Par. XI.58-60) and to undermine that of the Dominicans. A key component of Gorni's reading is the pun found in the name Calaroga, the town in Spain where Dominic was born, which not only has the resonance of the setting sun (by common consent) but an innate negative sense, opposing the optimistic oriens of Assisi/Ascesi, in its first two syllables, cala, which reflects a sense of the verb calare, to sink or fall. It is difficult to accept this assessment, which would undo all that Dante has crafted to make Dominic and Francis equal - even if Dominic is not seen by Dante in the Rose of the saved souls in the Empyrean, a point insisted on by Gorni, in whose view the third cantica is (p. 54) no less, in its essence, than “a manifesto of Spiritual Franciscanism.” Among the commentators, few would support Gorni's hypothesis, but, for one who might, see Mestica (comm. to vv. 37-39), making two fairly obvious points: The Seraphim are closer to God than are the Cherubim; Dominic is never mentioned again in the poem, while Francis is. Nonetheless, Dante, here and for the rest of the Paradiso, makes the core “Dominican” value (knowledge) and the “Franciscan” one (love) so conjoined that a reader naturally resists (and should) any attempt to make Dante more a praiser of Dominic (a view sponsored by Busnelli's Thomistic view of Dante's theology) than of Francis (or vice versa), either of which understandings the text rather clearly and insistently strives to make all but impossible.
Spain is located in the westernmost part of Europe.
Zephyr is the west wind. For the association of Dominic with the west and Francis with the east, see Alfonso Bertoldi (Il canto XI del “Paradiso” [“Lectura Dantis Orsanmichele,” Florence: Sansoni, {1903}], p. 47 [n. 27]), adding the details that for Dante, the Florentine, the main Dominican church (S. Maria Novella) was situated in the western part of the city, while the main Franciscan church (S. Croce) was located in eastern Florence.
Torraca (comm. to vv. 56-57) thinks that the waves are found on the surface of the Ebro, the river running two miles from Dominic's native city, an argument contested vigorously by Alfonso Bertoldi (Il canto XI del “Paradiso” [“Lectura Dantis Orsanmichele,” Florence: Sansoni, {1903}], pp. 45-46), who supports the early commentators' belief that the reference is to the Atlantic Ocean. Others specify the Bay of Biscay. After Scartazzini (comm. to vv. 49-51), however, the ruling understanding is that the passage refers to this body of water.
The sun hides itself from human sight when, at or near the summer solstice, it sets beyond the sight of those on land, because it has moved so far out over the Atlantic. For Dante, we must remember, to the west of the Gates of Hercules lies “the world where no one lives” (Inf. XXVI.117).
Calaruega (“Calaroga,” in Dante's Italian), a small town in Castile, “fortunate” in having been the birthplace of Dominic.
The royal arms of Castile bear a castle in the second and third quarters, and a lion in the first and fourth. “Thus on one side of the shield the lion is subdued by the castle, and on the other subdues it” (Oelsner, comm. to these verses). The images represent the kingdoms of Castile and Leon, respectively.
The vocabulary of feudal times (drudo, “vassal”) combines with that of erotic poetry (amoroso, “loving”) to interrupt the military associations of Dominic, and eventually presents him, like Francis, as a “husband” (see verse 61, sponsalizie, “nuptials”). The word drudo, a triple hapax, i.e., a word appearing once in each cantica (see Hollander [“An Index of Hapax Legomena in Dante's Commedia,” Dante Studies 106 {1988}: 81-110] for a listing of all examples of this phenomenon in the poem), occurs previously in Inferno XVIII.134 and Purgatorio XXXII.155, in both cases referring to a male partner in an illicit sexual liaison, in the first case, the man sleeping with the whore, Thaïs; in the second, the giant beating his harlot, the Church in its Avignonian captivity. Thus its context in the poem works against those who would read Dante's treatment of Dominic as sugar-coated (see the note to verse 57).
The new interpretation of the second scene offered by Filippo Bognini (“Gli occhi di Ooliba: Una proposta per Purg. XXXII 148-60 e XXXIII 44-45,” Rivista di Studi Danteschi 7 [2007]: 73-103) does not change the valence of the preceding remark, but does alter the identities of the “actors” in the pageant in Purgatorio XXXII. In a new (and entirely convincing) reading of the major characters in that scene, Bognini demonstrates that the whore is Ezechiel's Jerusalem and thus Dante's Florence, while the giant reflects Goliath as Robert of Anjou, the king of Naples and the Guelph leader in Italy, prime enemy of Henry VII. See as well his further study of the problem of the “DXV” (or “515”), “Per Purg., XXXIII, 1-51: Dante e Giovanni di Boemia,” Italianistica 37 (2008): 11-48.
If Francis is presented as a lover, Dominic is (here) presented as a fighter, but even here he is first described (verse 55) as l'amoroso drudo. See the note to verse 55.
Raimondo Spiazzi (“Il Canto XII,” in “Paradiso”: Letture degli anni 1979-81, ed. S. Zennaro [Rome: Bonacci, 1989], pp. 339-41) thinks that the word crudo (cruel) is uncalled for, and he sets off on a lengthy defense: St. Dominic was in fact, and despite his crusading spirit, the most mild-mannered person imaginable. However, others take this verse at face value, and see its pertinence to Dominic's labors against the Cathars (e.g., Alessandro Ghisalberti [“Canto XII,” in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone {Florence: Cesati, 2002}], pp. 184-86), during the period 1203-1210, when Dominic moved from preaching and debate to more violent means; but even Ghisalberti insists on the predominance of the “sweet” approach. Others have been less tolerant of Dominic's behavior. This is the last of thirteen appearances of the adjective crudo in the poem (leaving to one side the related words crudele, crudeltà, etc.); in none of the preceding dozen presences of the word does it have a mitigated meaning. As a result, the motives of those who argue for such mitigation here seem suspect. Dominic, as presented by Dante, is a tough warrior whom the poet goes out of his way also to present as a “lover.”
The embryonic mind of Dominic was so powerful that it could send concepts (or at least images) to the mother who was bearing him. In this way he lent his mother the gift of prophecy. The early commentators are frequently misled, and think the reference of “lei” is not to the mother but to Dominic's mente in the preceding line, thus making a prophet of him. However, legend has it that, before his birth, his mother had a dream of a black-and-white dog who carried a torch in its mouth, which set fire to the whole world. That is what most of its interpreters today believe is referenced in the line, the mother's vision of her unborn son's wide effect on humanity. Since the colors of the habits of the Dominicans are black and white and since an easily available pun (Domini canes = the dogs of God) was in circulation at the time and was included in the first official “Life” of Dominic (by Teodorico d'Appoldia), the dream became a permanent piece of Dominican lore.
Frequent in discussions of this passage are citations of Isaiah 49:1, “Dominus ab utero vocavit me” (The Lord has called me from the womb); but see also Luke 1:15, “Spiritu Sancto replebitur adhuc ex utero matris suae” (and he shall be filled with the Holy Spirit, even from his mother's womb), describing John the Baptist, referred to by Carmine Di Biase (Il Canto XII del “Paradiso” [Naples: Ermanno Cassitto 1992], p. 40n. – first cited by Tommaseo [comm. to vv. 58-60]).
Where Francis married Poverty, Dominic took Faith as his wife.
A difficult line to translate convincingly, partly because the noun salute has different meanings in Dante. In Dominic's case, he will find salvation in his faith; he cannot “save” her, but he does keep her safe from heresy. Vellutello's gloss (comm. to vv. 61-66) has guided us as far as the sense is concerned: “because he saved the Faith, battling for it against heretics, and she in turn kept him safe.”
A woman present at the baptismal ceremony, the child's godmother, answers (saying “I do”) for the child when the priest asks whether he or she wishes to be baptized.
Dominic's godmother dreamed that he appeared with a bright star in his forehead that illumined the world; his “heirs” are, obviously, his fellow Dominicans.
The riddling diction yields its meaning after only a little effort. As Tozer (comm. to this tercet) unravels it: “An inspiration from Heaven (Quinci) was communicated to his parents to name him by the possessive adjective (viz. Dominicus) derived from the name of the Lord (Dominus), who possessed him entirely.”
The word costrutto has caused a certain difficulty. In modern Italian it means “sense, meaning” but that meaning is not easily assigned to the word here. Tozer (comm. to vv. 67-69) sorts things out as follows: “... 'that he might be in name what he was in reality'; costrutto: 'the form of his name'; similarly in Purg. XXVIII.147 costrutto means 'a form of words' or 'sentence': and in Par. XXIII.24 senza costrutto is 'without putting it into words.'”
From the Empyrean (and not this heaven of the Sun), the text suggests, the Holy Spirit inspired the baby's parents to call him “Dominicus” (Domini-cus – the Latin for his name, Domenico [from the possessive form of the noun Dominus, the Lord]).
Aversano (Dante daccapo [glosses to the Paradiso, copia d'eccezione, sent by the author on 11 September 2001]), p. 54, sees this verse as reflecting II Kings 12:25 (II Samuel 12:25), Nathan the prophet's renaming of the infant Solomon, thus named, according to the preceding verse, by his mother, Bathsheba: “and [Nathan] called his name Jedidiah [the Beloved of God, 'Amabilis Domino' in the Vulgate] because of the Lord.” Aversano's argument, which is less than immediately convincing, gains strength because of the presence of Nathan in this canto (verse 136), where he is spoken of exactly as he is in this verse of the Bible, “Nathan propheta” (but see also II Kings [II Samuel] 7:2 [and in six other O.T. loci]).
This is the first set of the so-called “Cristo rhymes.” There will be three others, occurring in Paradiso XIV.104-108, XIX.104-108, and XXXII.83-87. For a valuable early study of this phenomenon, see Francesco D'Ovidio (“Cristo in rima,” in his Studii sulla “Divina Commedia” [Milan: Sandron, 1901], pp. 215-24). It is clear that, for Dante's purposes, no other word is good enough to rhyme with “Christ,” who is the Word. The pattern is not unusual in Dante, three occurrences (in the spheres) followed by one in the Empyrean, not significantly adding up to four, but reminding us of the Trinity, which is three in one.
Porena (comm. to vv. 73-78) holds that D'Ovidio was correct to argue that the word Cristo is allowed to rhyme only with itself because, as a penitential gesture, Dante wants to undo the scabrous act he had perpetrated when, in one of his sonnets attacking Forese Donati's behaviors, he had rhymed the name of the Lord with tristo (distraught) and malo acquisto (ill-gotten gains).
The chore given Dominic to perform can hardly fail to remind a Christian reader of the task that Adam and Eve were given and failed to perform, to dress and keep the garden. See Genesis 2:15.
What exactly was Christ's “first counsel” to his followers? In the past one hundred years there has been continuing and uncertain discussion of this seemingly simple question. But it was not always thus. Almost every early commentator seizes on the same biblical passage, Matthew 19:21, Christ's advice to the rich young man to sell all that he possesses, give the proceeds to the poor, and then follow Him. This was the view of Jacopo della Lana (comm. to vv. 73-75) and Francesco da Buti (comm. to vv. 73-87), who added the detail that Dominic followed this advice when he sold all his books and gave the money to the poor. Others who agree include Serravalle (comm. to vv. 73-75), Landino (comm. to vv. 73-75), Vellutello (comm. to vv. 73-75), Daniello (comm. to vv. 73-75), Venturi (comm. to verse 75), Lombardi (comm. to verse 75), Tommaseo (comm. to vv. 73-75), and, at the beginning of the modern era of Dante scholarship, Scartazzini (comm. to verse 75). For a summarizing sense of nearly six hundred years of near-total agreement, see Oelsner (comm. to verse 75): “The counsel of poverty (Matth. 19:21, whence the phrase 'counsels of perfection'). Thomas Aquinas, while distinguishing between the precepts and the counsels of Christ, says that the latter may all be reduced to three – Poverty, Continence, and Obedience. The first counsel, then, is Poverty.” However, that long-held, sensible, and nearly unanimous view has recently undergone some puzzled (and puzzling?) scrutiny. A certain latent dissatisfaction with it (because Francis was popularly identified with poverty, but not Dominic?) peeps out from the long gloss of Carroll (comm. to vv. 46-105). Torraca (comm. to vv. 73-75) does not even refer to the familiar and insistent earlier gloss, but simply says that the reference is to the first Beatitude, “Blessed are the poor in spirit” (Matth. 5:3). Mestica (comm. to verse 75) briefly considers the question of which of these two texts from Matthew is most appropriate and decides in favor of the old favorite, both because, in his view, a Beatitude is not “advice,” and because Dominic did in fact sell his books and gave the resulting cash to the poor. During the next thirty years no commentator sides with Torraca, but then Grabher (comm. to vv. 73-75) simply makes reference to both passages in Matthew as though there were no debate over the issue of which one Dante had in mind. It is Manfredi Porena (comm. to vv. 73-78) who seems to have been the commentator most responsible for the current view that this verse is problematic. Sapegno (comm. to vv. 73-75) supports that opinion, and sides with Torraca's view (in favor of Matth. 5:3); Mattalia (comm. to vv. 74-75) mounts an effective counter-attack. Chimenz (73-75) retreats, Fallani (75) fights back, Giacalone (73-75) equivocates, as do Singleton (75) and Bosco/Reggio (73-75), who really want both humility and poverty to identify Dominic, and who also adduce Matthew 6:25f. Pasquini/Quaglio (75) return to Matthew 3:5 without discussing the crux. However, Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi (Paradiso, con il commento di A. M. C. L. [Milan: Mondadori, 1997], p. 342) returns to the original formulation, rescuing Christ's appeal for the virtues of poverty.
For a departure from the sources battled over in the commentaries (Matth. 5:3; Matth.19:21), see Alessandro Ghisalberti (“Canto XII,” in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone [Florence: Cesati, 2002], p. 184): Matthew 6:33 (part of a passage already mentioned as a potential source by Bosco/Reggio). See also Aversano (Dante daccapo [glosses to the Paradiso, copia d'eccezione, sent by the author on 11 September 2001]), p. 54, who dismisses the two conflicting and standard explanations, poverty and humility, arguing that both these are central attributes of Francis, and thus unlikely to be applied to Dominic (not a convincing view, since the bulk of the two cantos is dedicated to the similarity between the two heroes of the modern Church). Aversano points to the context introduced by the phrase amoroso drudo (“loving vassal” – verse 55) and chooses the passage from Luke (10:25) that encourages us to love God and our neighbor.
The problem of the precise reference in verse 75 is complicated by the neighboring presences of two instances of the adjective primo (first). Are they used as synonyms, in both cases having a temporal relevance, or not? We think that they are, and thus have translated as we have (“since the first affection manifest in him / was for the initial precept taught by Christ”). Some, however, believe that the first primo is temporal, that the second has to do with order of importance, i.e., the most important of Christ's teachings, which would offer a bit more latitude as one searched through the Gospels. If we are correct, what then is “the initial precept” taught by Jesus? (Salsano, “consiglio,” ED II [1970], p. 159b, understands consiglio to equate with “precetto divino.”) That can in fact be the first Beatitude. Or, if Oelsner (see the first paragraph, above) is correct, and Dante's sense of the word consiglio flows through St. Thomas's distinction between it and “precept,” then the first “counsel” may indeed be thought of as accepting poverty, first among the three “counsels” of Christ: poverty, continence, obedience. Either way, poverty is the issue focal to this line. This seems more than acceptable, since Dominic is presented as parallel in his virtues to Francis (Grandgent [comm. to verse 75] points out that vv. 73-75 of both cantos thus deal with poverty), since Dominicans as well as Franciscans took vows of poverty, and since the next tercet, although also less clearly than some might like, would seem to associate him both with Francis and with poverty as well.
“For this have I come”: See Mark 1:38, “ad hoc enim veni,” as Jesus announces his intention to preach. The baby Dominic's closeness to the earth reminds us of the similar association of Francis, indelibly associated with the dust at the end of his life (Par. XI.115-117). Poverty and humility, more usually associated with Francis, are both present in this vignette, as preconditions for Dominic's preacherly calling.
Dominic's father's name, Felice, means “happy” (felix) in Latin.
Bosco/Reggio (comm. to these verses) say that Dante, in the life of Dominic by Theodoric of Appoldia, could have read that his mother's name, Giovanna, meant “grace of God,” or “full of grace.” Theodoric's source (and Dante's) may have been, says Torraca (comm. to vv. 79-81), Uguccione da Pisa.
This passage presents the life and accomplishments of Dominic, after his engendering and childhood (vv. 58-81), the ensemble paralleling that portion of the preceding canto dedicated to the life and works of Francis (Par. XI.55-117).
Dominic's honest religiosity is contrasted with the eye-on-the-prize sort of sham activities of two intellectuals, both of whom died within Dante's lifetime. The first, Enrico di Susa, from Ostia (died in 1271), was a famous canon lawyer (and thus Dante fires another salvo at the venal practitioners of this profession), while Taddeo d'Alderotto (the probable reference is to him) was a Florentine (died in 1295) who studied and then taught medicine at Bologna. Dante mocks his translation of Aristotle's Ethics in Convivio I.x.10. In these two men Dante pillories two kinds of false intellectual activity, religious law and Aristotelian science, both of which were of great importance to him.
The metaphorical vineyard (fairly obviously the Church) turns gray with rot if its keeper (obviously the pope) does not take good care of it. This reference to Boniface VIII is thinly veiled.
Carroll (comm. to vv. 46-105) paraphrases this elegant pastiche of a canon lawyer's style as follows: “[Dominic] asked from the Head of the Church none of the evil privileges so eagerly sought for by others: to distribute only a third or a half of moneys left for charitable purposes, retaining the rest; to receive the first vacant benefice; or to use for himself the tithes which belong to God's poor. His one request was for leave to fight against an erring world for the seed of the Faith.”
Bonaventure, here most assuredly Dante's mouthpiece, distinguishes between the papacy, in its design supportive of the poor, and the pope (the hated Boniface VIII in 1300), ignoring that design.
These three corrupt practices all reveal the avarice of prelates, the first and third involving theft of monies destined for the poor, the second, advancement in ecclesiastical position. For this last, see Tozer (comm. to this tercet): “The reference is to the expectationes, or nominations to posts not yet vacant that popes of the day were pleased to make.” Obviously, none of these self-aggrandizing activities had as their goal support for the benevolent tasks that customarily fell to the Church.
The Latin (“the tenth part that belongs to the poor,” the tax collected by the clergy) refers to the tithe, the 10% of a parishioner's income that the Church collected in order to help feed and clothe the poor. Not even this was safe from predatory clergy, who took these funds for their own use.
See Bosco/Reggio (comm. to this verse): Dominic's request for approval of his Order was made to Pope Innocent III in 1215, and only approved late in 1216 by Pope Honorius III, the newly elected pope (the Church had for a time prohibited the formation of new Orders). However, in 1205, Dominic had gone to Rome, seeking permission to wage a campaign against heretics, which was granted. Between 1207 and 1214 he was part of the eventually bloody attempt to bring the Albigensian Cathars back into the fold, alongside of Folco di Marsiglia (see the notes to Par. IX.40 and to Par. IX.94). Bosco/Reggio try to keep Dominic's hands free of Albigensian blood, saying that, on the day of the terrible battle of Muret (12 September 1213), Dominic was at prayer in a church. However, given the poet's praise of Folco, the leader of that crusade (if Simon de Montfort was in charge of the army at that particular battle), he may have imagined a Dominic as warlike as his Folco. See vv. 97-102, where Dominic's forcefulness in combating heresy is applauded.
This indication reminds us of the precise balance in the two circles of saints that we have seen in these two cantos, each containing twelve souls. See Carmine Di Biase (Il Canto XII del “Paradiso” [Naples: Ermanno Cassitto, 1992], pp. 68-69) and Bruno Porcelli (“Numeri e nomi nei canti danteschi del sole,” Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 117 [2000]: 8-100) for thoughts about the importance of the number twelve in the heaven of the Sun.
While the militarism of Dominic's Order may be metaphorical, referring to his preaching, that his “career” began with a literal war, the crusade against the Albigensians, certainly colors these lines, whatever Dante's intention.
Dominic fought against heresy with the support of Pope Honorius III, who had approved his request to found a new Order. However, he had also had the approval of Pope Innocent III to subdue the Albigensians and bring them back to the fold (see the note to verse 95). In that effort, the crusaders' military force was more than metaphoric.
The “resistance was most stubborn” in Provence, with the Albigensian Cathars. This detail again tends to erode the distinction between Dominic the Christian debater and Dominic the Christian soldier. See the note to vv. 97-102.
Raoul Manselli (“Il canto XII del Paradiso,” in Nuove letture dantesche, vol. VI [Florence: Le Monnier, 1973], p. 118) characterizes this tercet, moving from Dominic's day into Dante's, with the Order burgeoning with new chapters, as setting a tranquil conclusion to a story that began with military roughness. One might add that it has hardly moderated its tone until now.
These verses offer a kind of summary of both saints' lives. The resulting image, the two wheels of a chariot of war, already deployed in the earthly paradise (introduced at Purg. XXIX.107 and on the scene until Purg. XXXII.147), is perhaps remembered in the final verses of the poem. For the “tensions, deriving from the need simultaneously to individuate and unify, that subtend the stories of Francis and Dominic,” see Teodolinda Barolini (The Undivine “Comedy”: Detheologizing Dante [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992], pp. 198-202, 217).
Here begins the denunciation of the current Franciscan Order (cf. the similar attack on the wayward Dominicans, Par. XI.118-123). Where in the last canto the image of Thomas's Order was a merchant ship, here that founded by Francis is presented as a chariot of war. Bosco/Reggio (comm. to these verses) complain that, after the fresh and convincing images of the last canto, some of those encountered in this one, beginning with these chariot wheels, seem forced. Here Dominic is compared to the rim of a wheel that leaves a clear imprint in the earth, while his followers do no such thing.
Abruptly switching semantic fields, Bonaventure compares the good old days of Francis's leadership and the current condition of the Order to wine casks: Good wine leaves crust in the barrel it was contained in, while bad wine leaves mold.
The faltering Order is depicted as reversing its track; see the parallel moment in Thomas's denunciation of the Dominicans (Par. XI.124-132), portrayed as sheep wandering astray, away from the Rule, in search of new nourishment.
There is agreement among the commentators about the difficulty of making exact sense of this verse. We have not attempted to do more than give its obvious general meaning, though it happens that we are in fairly close agreement with the gloss of Daniele Mattalia to this tercet, who takes issue with some of the more strained attempts to make sense of this line, i.e., the understanding, begun with Michele Barbi (Problemi di critica dantesca [Florence: Sansoni, 1934], p. 287), that the Franciscan backsliders retrogress while facing forward, moving their front foot back toward (and then behind?) the other. Even if Dominic has been described as “the holy athlete” (verse 56), that way of retrogression seems to require muscular skills and patience well beyond those of most corrupt barefoot friars. Momigliano (comm. to vv. 115-117) justly complains that this line seems forced, and lays some of the blame for that on the verb form gitta (lit. “throws”), forced by rhyme.
The obvious Scriptural allusion (to Matth. 13:24-30, the parable of the wheat and the tares) somehow seems to have escaped the earliest commentators. It appears first in Landino (comm. to these verses) and then is repeated in almost all subsequent comments. The reference of the tercet is a cause of some debate. See Raoul Manselli, “francescanesimo,” ED III (1971), pp. 15-16; his view is that the word “loglio” (tares) does not refer to the Spiritual Franciscans, as some believe, but to all corrupt members of the Order, whatever their leaning in the controversy between Spirituals and Conventuals.
The word volume (volume), occurring first in Inferno I.84 and last in Paradiso XXXIII.86, literally runs from one end of the poem to the other. It occurs nine times, and always else either refers to God's book (the Scriptures) or to his “other book,” the created universe (except in its first use, where it refers to the Aeneid [see the note to Inf. I.84]). Thus, to refer to the slender booklet, the Rule of the Franciscan Order, as a volume is to employ a heavy word.
Umberto Cosmo (L'ultima ascesa: Introduzione alla lettura del “Paradiso”, ed. B. Maier [Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1965 {1936}], pp. 149-54) contrasts the inner tension among the Franciscan ranks with the struggles that afflicted Dominic's order, shaped by external enemies. For a study locating Francis, as Dante does here, in the middle, see Stanislao da Campagnola (“Francesco d'Assisi in Dante,” Laurentianum 24 [1983]: 175-92); and for his indebtedness to Ubertino's very words for his characterizations of Francis (seraphicus) and Dominic (cherubicus), see p. 182n. See also Raoul Manselli (“Dante e gli Spirituali francescani,” Letture classensi 11 [1982]: 47-61) for an overview of Dante's response to the Spiritual Franciscans, with many bibliographical indications in the notes. Mario Trovato (“Paradiso XI,” in Dante's “Divine Comedy,” Introductory Readings III: “Paradiso,” ed. Tibor Wlassics [Lectura Dantis {virginiana}, 16-17, supplement, Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1995], p. 168), on the additional basis of his interpretation of Paradiso XI.109-114, lends his support to Manselli's position. And for what has been the standard view of the tension among the Conventual and Spiritual Franciscans themselves (at least after Manselli's work), see Manselli, pp. 57-58: Matteo d'Acquasparta is criticized for loosening the strictures of the Rule of the Order, while Ubertino da Casale is seen as too rigid in his adherence to the founder's insistence on the importance of poverty in a true Christian life. Some have tried to argue against the dominant understanding, making Matteo the one who is overly strict in his interpretation of the Rule, while Ubertino is too loose; but see Manselli, “francescanesimo,” ED III (1971), p. 16, for a refutation. And see his lectura (“Il canto XII del Paradiso,” in Nuove letture dantesche, vol. VI [Florence: Le Monnier, 1973], pp. 122-23) for a demonstration that coartare regulam and fugere regulam were formulae in discussions of the day.
We have translated “la scrittura” in the narrowest sense (“the Rule”). In Dante's Italian the word has meant both writing in general and, on some occasions, the Bible. Here it is a third form of writing, something more than ordinary words and to be taken as post-biblical, but having a similar authority. (See the note to verse 122 for the similar status of the noun volume.) Mario Aversano (Dante e gli “scritti” di San Francesco [Salerno: Palladio, 1984], pp. 23-24) points out that Francis was so concerned that his Rule would be fraudulently emended that he encouraged his friars to memorize it.
For a helpful discussion of the participants of this second circle of souls found in the heaven of the Sun, see Carmine Di Biase (Il Canto XII del “Paradiso” [Naples: Ermanno Cassitto 1992], pp. 71-83). Comparing the two circles, Umberto Cosmo (L'ultima ascesa: Introduzione alla lettura del “Paradiso”, ed. B. Maier [Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1965 {1936}], pp. 106-7) argues that there is no sense of rigid separation between the two, rather, in fact, that there are many similarities between them. Each has two representatives of the early days of Christian thought (Isidore and Bede in the first group; Anselm and Rabanus here) and two from the days of the origins (Boethius, Orosius; Chrysostom, Donatus), and one from the Old Testament (Solomon; Nathan). Then there are masters of the Summa (Peter Lombard; Peter Comestor) and mystics (Dionysius the Areopagite, Richard of St. Victor; Hugh of St. Victor, Joachim of Flora). Nearest the leaders (Thomas and Bonaventure) are Albertus Magnus, Gratian; Illuminatus, Augustinus; and then the culmination in those who do not seem easily acceptable to the leaders at whose side they appear, Siger and Joachim. (Cosmo's tabulation somehow loses track of Peter Hispano and counts Joachim twice.)
“St. Bonaventura was born at Bagnoregio (now Bagnorea) near Orvieto in 1221, the year of St. Dominic's death. As a child he was attacked by a dangerous disease, which was miraculously cured by St. Francis of Assisi. When the latter heard that the child had recovered he is said to have exclaimed 'buona ventura,' whereupon the boy's mother changed his name to Bonaventura. In 1238 or 1243 he entered the Franciscan order. After studying in Paris under Alexander of Hales, he became successively professor of philosophy and theology, and in 1257 was made doctor. Having risen to be general of the Franciscan order (in 1257), he was offered the archbishopric of Albano by Gregory X, whom he accompanied to the second Council of Lyons, where he died, July 15, 1274, 'his magnificent funeral being attended by a pope, an emperor, and a king.' St. Bonaventure was canonized in 1482 by Sixtus IV, and placed among the doctors of the Church, with the title of Doctor Seraphicus, by Sixtus V” (Toynbee, “Bonaventura” [Concise Dante Dictionary]). The word vita, used here by Bonaventure to identify himself as a soul in grace, is used with this sense for the second time in the poem (see the note to Par. IX.7).
For Dante's debt to mysticism, as focused for him in the writings of Bonaventure, see A.G. Meekins (“The Study of Dante, Bonaventure, and Mysticism: Notes on Some Problems of Method,” in In amicizia: Essays in Honour of Giulio Lepschy, ed. Z.G. Baranski and L. Pertile [The Italianist 17 {1997–special supplement}], pp. 83-99). For the possibility that Dante read the apparent contradictions between the positions of Aquinas and Bonaventure syncretistically, see Giuseppe Mazzotta (“The Heaven of the Sun: Dante between Aquinas and Bonaventure,” in Dante for the New Millennium, ed. Teodolinda Barolini and H. Wayne Storey [New York: Fordham University Press, 2003], pp. 152-68) and Manuele Gragnolati (Experiencing the Afterlife [Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2005], pp. 58-77). Paolo Di Somma (“Canto III,” in Lectura Dantis Neapolitana: “Paradiso,” ed. P. Giannantonio [Naples: Loffredo, 2000 {1986}], p. 50n.) argues for the central importance of Bonaventure's Itinerarium mentis in Deum for all of Dante's poem, not only for this canto. A survey of Bonaventure's presence in the Dartmouth Dante Project reveals that the vast majority of references to “Bonaventura” before the end of the nineteenth century occur only in notes to this canto, in which he is a named (and thus inescapable) presence. Perhaps we realize, after a few minutes of reflection, that a serious use of Bonaventure's texts as a guide to Dante's is a fairly recent development. In fact, it is only in Scartazzini's commentary that one finds a total of more references to him in all the other cantos than one finds to him in this one. After Scartazzini, that situation begins to change. (English readers will find that in this particular, as well as in others, John Carroll outstrips his competitors.) See Edward Hagman (“Dante's Vision of God: The End of the Itinerarium Mentis,” Dante Studies 106 [1988]: 1-20) for a study of Bonaventure's extensive and overall importance to Dante. But see Sofia Vanni Rovighi, “Bonaventura da Bagnoreggio, santo,” ED I (1970), p. 673, arguing that attempts to show a direct textual dependence of Dante on Bonaventure have had only dubious results, that all one can say is that his work (the Itinerarium mentis in Deum in particular) is a generic model for the outline of the Comedy, without being able to make more of a claim for it than that.
The “left-hand care” reflects the traditional link between left- and right-handedness as reflecting, respectively, “sinister” (the Latin word for “left”) and positive purposes. The former here signifies “worldly concerns.” Francesco da Buti (comm. to vv. 127-141) does not attempt to banish cares of the world from the curate's interest, but does say that he does not (and must not) treat them as having the same importance as issues related to eternal life.
Illuminato and Augustino were among Francis's earliest followers. The first was a nobleman from Rieti and accompanied him on his voyage to Egypt. Augustino was a townsman of Francis and eventually became head of a chapter of the Order in Terra di Lavoro. Neither one of them is particularly associated with knowledge, which causes Benvenuto (comm. to vv. 130-132) to wonder why these two homines ignorantes were included here. He goes on to admire Dante's subtlety in doing so, for they, if not great intellects themselves, helped others to become, by their labor and example, more wise.
It was only in 1960 that a commentator on this verse (Mattalia), responding to a number of Dantists who raised the issue, suggested that a predictable reaction in one who is reading this line might very well be: “But that's not Saint Augustine of Hippo; where is he in all this?” (And we have to wait for Paradiso XXXII.35 to find that he is indeed among the blessed; see the note to that tercet.) For the last time he was named, see Paradiso X.120, but without mention of his eventual fate. Is it possible that Dante is playing a game with us? He mentions the actual St. Augustine two cantos ago, where we might have expected to find him, among other theologians in the Sun; he now mentions the name of a saved soul named “Augustine” who is not he but who is here. Both these gestures lead us to contemplate the possibility that Dante is teasing us. There will be some speculation as to his reasons for doing so in a note to Paradiso XXXII.34-36, a passage that situates Augustine among the inhabitants of the celestial Rose. Mattalia (comm. to verse 130) refers to the notion, which he attributes to C. Landi, that Dante's hostility toward Augustine is a reaction against the Bishop of Hippo's strong opposition to the legitimacy of the state, a position that is not easily reconciled with Dante's central agreement with the Aristotelian/Thomistic understanding of the question, the ideological basis of those who sustained the theocratic position.
See the note to Paradiso XI.87 for the capestro as signal of adherence to the Franciscan Order.
“Hugh of St. Victor, celebrated mystic and theologian of the beginning of cent. xii; he was born near Ypres in Flanders c. 1097 or, as some believe, at Hartingham in Saxony, and was educated during his early years in the monastery of Hammersleben near Halberstadt in Saxony; in 1115 he removed to the abbey of St. Victor near Paris, which had recently been founded by William of Champeaux, the preceptor of Abelard, and which during cent. xii was a centre of mysticism; he became one of the canons-regular of the abbey, and was in 1130 appointed to the chair of theology, which he held until his death in 1141, his reputation being so great that he was known as 'alter Augustinus' [a second Augustine] and 'lingua Augustini' [Augustine's tongue]. He was the intimate friend of Bernard of Clairvaux, and among his pupils were Richard of St. Victor and Peter Lombard. His writings, which are very numerous, and are characterized by great learning, are frequently quoted by Thomas Aquinas”; the most celebrated are the De eruditione didascalica, a sort of encyclopaedia of the sciences as then understood, viewed in their relation to theology, the Institutiones monasticae, including the treatises De arca morali, De arca mystica, and De vanitate mundi; and the De sacramentis Christianae fidei, on the mysteries of the faith, comprising a systematic exposition of Catholic theology; he also wrote commentaries on various books of the Old and New Testament (with the latter of which he appears to rank as of equal importance the canons, the decretals, and the writings of the fathers), and upon the De caelesti hierarchia of Dionysius the Areopagite (Toynbee, “Ugo da San Vittore” [Concise Dante Dictionary]).
Petrus Comestor (comestor is the Latin word for “eater,” and was the nickname that Peter was given by his fellow priests because of his tremendous appetite for books), “priest, and afterwards dean, of the cathedral of Troyes in France, where he was born in the first half of cent. xii; he became canon of St. Victor in 1164, and chancellor of the University of Paris, and died at St. Victor in 1179, leaving all his possessions to the poor. His chief work was the Historia scholastica, which professed to be a history of the Church from the beginning of the world down to the times of the apostles” (Toynbee, “Pietro Mangiadore” [Concise Dante Dictionary]).
“Petrus Hispanus (Pedro Juliani), born at Lisbon, c. 1225, where he at first followed his father's profession of medicine; he studied at Paris, probably under Albertus Magnus; subsequently he was ordained and became (1273) archbishop of Braga; in 1274 he was created cardinal bishop of Tusculum (Frascati) by Gregory X; on Sept. 13, 1276, he was elected pope, under the title of John XXI, at Viterbo, in succession to Adrian V; he died May 20, 1277, after a reign of a little more than eight months, his death being caused by the fall of the ceiling of one of the rooms in his palace at Viterbo” (Toynbee, “Ispano, Pietro” [Concise Dante Dictionary]). His manual of logic, the Summulae logicales, in twelve books, had a large audience.
That Dante calls no attention whatsoever to the fact that Peter was a pope (if very briefly) has caught the attention of many commentators. For the “scorecard” of the perhaps twelve popes who, in Dante's opinion, were saved (and the probably larger number who were damned), see the note to Inferno VII.46-48. John XXI is the last saved pope mentioned in the poem.
“Nathan, the prophet, who was sent by God to reprove David for his sin in causing the death of Uriah the Hittite in order that he might take Bathsheba to wife” (Toynbee, “Natàn”[Concise Dante Dictionary]).
For Nathan as figura Dantis and the question of why he, a relatively minor prophet, is given such high relief in this poem, see G.R. Sarolli (Prolegomena alla “Divina Commedia” [Florence: Olschki, 1971]), pp. 189-246. See also the note to verse 69. And for a note that, apparently written without awareness of Sarolli's previous work, makes the venturesome claim that Dante thought of Nathan as “a Judaic Orpheus or Thespis, the creator of an artistic mode,” that he serves as “a biblical model for Dante the story-teller,” whose “handling of David is an allegory of the moral and epistemological relevance of literature” [i.e., telling truth to power indirectly, by means of a relevant fiction], see Manfred Weidhorn (“Why Does Dante Cite Nathan in the Paradiso?,” Philological Quarterly 61 [1982]: 91).
“St. John Chrysostom (i.e., in Greek his name means 'golden-mouthed'), celebrated Greek father of the Church, born at Antioch c. 345, died at Comana in Pontus, 407. He belonged to a noble family, and was first a lawyer; he afterward became a monk, in which capacity he so distinguished himself by his preaching that the Emperor Arcadius appointed him (in 398) patriarch of Constantinople. His severity toward the clergy in his desire for reform made him an object of hatred to them, and led to his deposition (403) at the instance of Theophilus, patriarch of Alexandria, and the Empress Eudoxia, whose excesses he had publicly rebuked. Sentence of exile was pronounced against him, but the people, to whom he had endeared himself by his preaching, rose in revolt, and he was reinstated in his office. Shortly afterward, he was again banished (404), and he finally died in exile on the shores of the Black Sea. He left nearly 1,000 sermons or homilies as evidence of his eloquence” (Toynbee, “Crisòstomo” [Concise Dante Dictionary]).
“Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury, 1093-1109; he was born at Aosta in Piedmont in 1033, and in 1060, at the age of 27, he became a monk in the abbey of Bec in Normandy, whither he had been attracted by the fame of Lanfranc, at that time prior; in 1063, on the promotion of Lanfranc to the abbacy of Caen, he succeeded him as prior; fifteen years later, in 1078, on the death of Herluin, the founder of the monastery, he was made abbot, which office he held till 1093, in that year he was appointed archbishop of Canterbury by William Rufus, in succession to Lanfranc, after the see had been vacant for four years; in 1097, in consequence of disputes with William on matters of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, he left England for Rome to consult the pope, and remained on the Continent until William's death in 1100, when he was recalled by Henry I; he died at Canterbury, April 21, 1109; canonized, in 1494, by Alexander VI.”
“Anselm was the author of several theological works, the most important of which are the Monologion (to which Anselm gave the subtitle Exemplum meditandi de ratione fidei), the Proslogion (Fides quaerens intellectum), and the Cur Deus homo (a treatise on the atonement intended to prove the necessity of the incarnation)” (Toynbee, “Anselmo” [Concise Dante Dictionary]).
“Aelius Donatus, Roman scholar and rhetorician of cent. iv, said to have been the tutor of Jerome; he was the author of a commentary on Virgil (now lost, but often alluded to by Servius), and of another on Terence, but his most famous work was an elementary Latin grammar, Ars Grammatica in three books; part of this work, the Ars minor, or De octo partibus orationis, served as a model for subsequent similar treatises. Owing to the popularity of this work in the Middle Ages it was one of the earliest books, being printed even before the invention of movable type – the name of its author became a synonym for grammar, just as Euclid for geometry” (Toynbee, “Donato” [Concise Dante Dictionary]).
Donatus was the “people's grammarian” in that his Ars, unlike Priscian's (see Inf. XV.109), supposedly kept grammar as simple as possible. And grammar was itself the “first art” in the sense that it was the first subject taught to children, the first of the seven liberal arts. Thus his “intellectual humility” may have, in Dante's mind, paralleled that of Illuminato and Augustino. Both the Ottimo (comm. to these verses) and John of Serravalle (comm. to vv. 136-138) cite the incipit of the work: “Ianua sum rudibus” (I am the doorway through which the unlettered may pass [to learning]).
Rabanus Maurus was “born at Mainz of noble parents, c. 776; while quite a youth he entered the monastery at Fulda, where he received deacon's orders in 801; he shortly after proceeded to Tours to study under Alcuin, who in recognition of his piety and diligence gave him the surname of Maurus, after St. Maurus (d. 565), the favourite disciple of St. Benedict. He was ordained priest in 814, and after a pilgrimage to the Holy Land returned to Fulda in 817, where he became abbot in 822. He held this office for twenty years until 842, when he retired in order to devote himself more completely to religion and literature. Five years later, however, he was appointed to the archbishopric of Mainz, which he held until his death in 856. Rabanus, who was considered one of the most learned men of his time, wrote a voluminous commentary on the greater portion of the Bible, and was the author of numerous theological works..., the most important being the De institutione clericorum. His treatise De laudibus Sanctae Crucis contains figures in which rows of letters are cut by outlines of stars, crosses, and the like, so as to mark out words and sentences. Butler suggests that Dante may have borrowed thence the idea of his image in [Par. XVIII.91], where he represents the spirits as arranging themselves in the shape of letters to form the words 'Diligite iustitiam qui iudicatis terram'” (Toynbee, “Rabano” [Concise Dante Dictionary]). And see Nicolò Mineo, “Rabano Mauro,” ED IV (1973), pp. 817-18. While Mineo insists that a careful study of the extent of Dante's knowledge of Rabanus has yet to be undertaken, he does indicate some points of contact between Dante and at least Rabanus's commentary on Ezechiel, his De Universo, and his Liber de Cruce. Most are content with the traditional identification of the ninth-century biblical commentator; however, for the view that this Rabanus is not Maurus but Anglicus, see Robert E. Lerner (“On the Origins of the Earliest Latin Pope Prophecies: A Reconsideration,” Monumenta Germaniae Historica 33, Teil V [1988], pp. 631-32). Lerner did not have access to the DDP for a study of the identity of “Rabanus” among Dante's commentators, but would have found support for his thesis among some important early discussants, the Ottimo (comm. to this verse); Benvenuto (comm. to vv. 139-141), who adds that he was a brother of the Venerable Bede; John of Serravalle (comm. to vv. 139-141), following (as he often did) his magister, Benvenuto; Landino (comm. to vv. 139-141); and Vellutello (comm. to vv. 139-141). Among the early commentators only Francesco da Buti (comm. to vv. 127-141) refers to the Rabanus we routinely think was in Dante's mind. That modern tradition began in 1732 with Venturi (comm. to this verse). Lombardi (comm. to vv. 139-141), who delighted in disagreeing with Venturi, for once is in accord with him, and says as much. While Tommaseo (comm. to vv. 139-141) is a rare modern even to refer to Bede's brother as an alternative possibility, all but one of the post-Renaissance commentators back Rabanus Maurus, and very few even mention that there has been another candidate. Scartazzini (comm. to this verse) mentions the lack of awareness of the German Rabanus among the early commentators and cites the presence of the English one in their work, but does not treat their opinion as being worthy of serious study. Finally Campi (comm. to vv. 139-141) does not bat an eyelash when, out of the blue, he says that Rabanus was Bede's brother and does not even mention Rabanus Maurus; but he is apparently absolutely alone in the last one hundred and ten years (until Lerner came along) in thinking so.
Joachim of Flora “appears to have enjoyed in his own day, and long afterwards, a reputation for prophetic power; hence Bonaventure speaks of him as 'di spirito profetico dotato,' words which are said to be taken verbatim from the anthem still chanted on the Festival of St. Joachim in the churches of Calabria.
”Joachim was born c. 1145 at Celico, about 4 miles NE. of Cosenza in Calabria. He made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and on his return to Italy became a monk, entering (c. 1158) the Cistercian monastery of Sambucina. In 1177 he was made abbot of Corazzo in Calabria. In 1185, Pope Urban III appointed a deputy abbot in order that Joachim might have leisure to devote himself to his writings. In 1189 Joachim founded a monastery, San Giovanni in Fiore in the forest of the Sila among the mountains of Calabria, whence he was named 'de Floris.' From this institution, the rule of which was sanctioned by Celestine III in 1196, ultimately sprang the so-called Ordo Florensis (absorbed by the Cistercians, 1505). Joachim died c. 1202. The authenticated works of Joachim: a commentary upon the Apocalypse (Expositio in Apocalypsin), a Harmony of the Old and New Testaments (Concordia veteris et novi Testamenti), the Psalterium decem chordarum, and the Contra Judaeos. Many works have been attributed to him – among them, the Liber figurarum, the authorship of which is much debated [if, since the work of Leone Tondelli (Il libro delle figure dell'abate Gioachino da Fiore [Turin: SEI, 1940]), it has mainly been accepted as genuine]. He was credited with the authorship of a book on the popes, in which the persons and names of all the future popes were described“ (Toynbee, ”Giovacchino“ [Concise Dante Dictionary]).
On Dante's relationships with Joachim's work and various of its followers see Antoine Calvet (”Dante et les joachimismes,“ in Pour Dante: Dante et l'Apocalypse: Lectures humanistes de Dante, ed. Bruno Pinchard and Christian Trottmann [Paris: Champion, 2001], pp. 77-98). And see Bruno Nardi (”Dante e Gioacchino da Fiore,“ in his ”Lecturae“ e altri studi danteschi, ed. Rudy Abardo [Florence: Le Lettere, 1990 {1965}], pp. 277-331). For a more recent study, see Alessandro Ghisalberti (”Canto XII,“ in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone [Florence: Cesati, 2002], pp. 187-90).
Marco Veglia (”Per un'ardita umiltà. L'averroismo di Dante tra Guido Cavalcanti, Sigieri di Brabante e San Francesco d'Assisi,“ Schede Umanistiche 1 [2000]: 71) points out that Averroës (Inf. IV.144), Siger (Par. X.136), and Joachim is each the last figure in a group (fortieth, twelfth, and twelfth, respectively); they have in common the surprise generated by their presence in these groups.
Rather than attempting, as some do, to ”Franciscanize“ this second circle in the Sun (while ”Dominicanizing“ the first in Canto X), Steven Botterill (”Paradiso XII,“ in Dante's ”Divine Comedy,“ Introductory Readings III: ”Paradiso,“ ed. Tibor Wlassics [Lectura Dantis {virginiana}, 16-17, supplement, Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1995], p. 184) speaks of (and he is also referring to the first circle, seen in Par. X) the ”images of celebration, reconciliation, and harmony“ that typify this entire heaven.
There has been dispute over the reference of paladino, but most today seem content to believe that it refers to Dominic, rather than to Francis, Thomas, or Joachim. See Mario Scotti (”Canto XII,“ in Lectura Dantis Neapolitana: ”Paradiso,“ ed. P. Giannantonio [Naples: Loffredo, 2000 {1987}], p. 257n.).
On the verb inveggiar, see Singleton (comm. to this verse): ”The most plausible interpretation would seem to be that inveggiar, deriving from invidiare, to envy, would mean (as does its Provençal equivalent envejar) to envy in a good sense, hence to praise.“
For a review of both questions (the meaning of the verb and the reference of the noun), accompanied by an attempt to make related sense of them by denying an emergent consensus, see Porena (comm. to vv. 142-145). But for the paladin who rides out to re-establish that consensus, see Mattalia (comm. to verse 142). For a similar result, see the review offered by Giacalone (comm. to vv. 142-143).
It has long been observed that Dante constructed these two cantos so as to make them reflect one another in a thoroughgoing way. See the chart offered by Bosco/Reggio (who at times seem to be forcing the details to fit) for the parallel elements in Cantos XI and XII (numbers in parentheses refer to the number of terzine dedicated to each subject; square brackets contain one element not included in their table):
Canto XI Canto XII
General introduction: 28-36 (3) 37-45 (3)
Actions performed by the two saints: 40-42 (1) 34-36 (1)
Place of birth: 43-51 (3) 46-54 (3)
Birth: 49-51 (1) 55-57 (1)
[Saint's Life: 55-117 (21) 58-105 (16)]
Transition from biography to condemnation: 118-123 (2) 106-111 (2)
Condemnation of his own Order: 124-129 (2) 112-117 (2)
Faithful friars: 130-132 (1) 121-123 (1)
For a nearly identical table, without reference to any source, see Alessandro Ghisalberti (”Canto XII,“ in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone [Florence: Cesati, 2002], p. 182n.).
For the several elements that inform Dante's notion of courtesy, see Andrea Fassò (”La cortesia di Dante,“ in Filologia Romanza e cultura medievale: studi in onore di Elio Melli, ed. A. Fassò, L. Formisano, and M. Mancini [Alessandria: Edizioni dell'Orso, 1998], vol. I, pp. 279-301).
Ettore Bonora (”Canto XI,“ in Lectura Dantis Neapolitana: ”Paradiso,“ ed. P. Giannantonio [Naples: Loffredo, 2000 {1987}], pp. 281-83) discusses the phrase describing Aquinas's speech as ”discreto latin“ and says that it is obvious that Thomas is not speaking Latin, but using Latin stylistic devices (in the lingua franca of the poem, Italian) that ennoble speech. (And it should be pointed out that Dante several times uses the word latino to indicate either the Italian language or ”Italy“ itself. See the note to Inf. XXII.64-66, the passage in which it first appears; and see the note to Par. XVII.34-35, its last appearance in the poem.) For the connection between this descriptor, the adjective discreto, and, in Dante's formulations, Thomas's ”stress on the need to make distinctions,“ see Teodolinda Barolini (The Undivine ”Comedy“: Detheologizing Dante [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992)], pp. 203-6), citing Kenelm Foster and Ettore Bonora.
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Sì tosto come l'ultima parola
la benedetta fiamma per dir tolse,
a rotar cominciò la santa mola;
e nel suo giro tutta non si volse
prima ch'un'altra di cerchio la chiuse,
e moto a moto e canto a canto colse;
canto che tanto vince nostre muse,
nostre serene in quelle dolci tube,
quanto primo splendor quel ch'e' refuse.
Come si volgon per tenera nube
due archi paralelli e concolori,
quando Iunone a sua ancella iube,
nascendo di quel d'entro quel di fori,
a guisa del parlar di quella vaga
ch'amor consunse come sol vapori,
e fanno qui la gente esser presaga,
per lo patto che Dio con Noè puose,
del mondo che già mai più non s'allaga:
così di quelle sempiterne rose
volgiensi circa noi le due ghirlande,
e sì l'estrema a l'intima rispuose.
Poi che 'l tripudio e l'altra festa grande,
sì del cantare e sì del fiammeggiarsi
luce con luce gaudïose e blande,
insieme a punto e a voler quetarsi,
pur come li occhi ch'al piacer che i move
conviene insieme chiudere e levarsi;
del cor de l'una de le luci nove
si mosse voce, che l'ago a la stella
parer mi fece in volgermi al suo dove;
e cominciò: “L'amor che mi fa bella
mi tragge a ragionar de l'altro duca
per cui del mio sì ben ci si favella.
Degno è che, dov' è l'un, l'altro s'induca:
sì che, com' elli ad una militaro,
così la gloria loro insieme luca.
L'essercito di Cristo, che sì caro
costò a rïarmar, dietro a la 'nsegna
si movea tardo, sospeccioso e raro,
quando lo 'mperador che sempre regna
provide a la milizia, ch'era in forse,
per sola grazia, non per esser degna;
e, come è detto, a sua sposa soccorse
con due campioni, al cui fare, al cui dire
lo popol disvïato si raccorse.
In quella parte ove surge ad aprire
Zefiro dolce le novelle fronde
di che si vede Europa rivestire,
non molto lungi al percuoter de l'onde
dietro a le quali, per la lunga foga,
lo sol talvolta ad ogne uom si nasconde,
siede la fortunata Calaroga
sotto la protezion del grande scudo
in che soggiace il leone e soggioga:
dentro vi nacque l'amoroso drudo
de la fede cristiana, il santo atleta
benigno a' suoi e a' nemici crudo;
e come fu creata, fu repleta
sì la sua mente di viva virtute
che, ne la madre, lei fece profeta.
Poi che le sponsalizie fuor compiute
al sacro fonte intra lui e la Fede,
u' si dotar di mutüa salute,
la donna che per lui l'assenso diede,
vide nel sonno il mirabile frutto
ch'uscir dovea di lui e de le rede;
e perché fosse qual era in costrutto,
quinci si mosse spirito a nomarlo
del possessivo di cui era tutto.
Domenico fu detto; e io ne parlo
sì come de l'agricola che Cristo
elesse a l'orto suo per aiutarlo.
Ben parve messo e famigliar di Cristo:
ché 'l primo amor che 'n lui fu manifesto,
fu al primo consiglio che diè Cristo.
Spesse fïate fu tacito e desto
trovato in terra da la sua nutrice,
come dicesse: 'Io son venuto a questo.'
Oh padre suo veramente Felice!
oh madre sua veramente Giovanna,
se, interpretata, val come si dice!
Non per lo mondo, per cui mo s'affanna
di retro ad Ostïense e a Taddeo,
ma per amor de la verace manna
in picciol tempo gran dottor si feo;
tal che si mise a circüir la vigna
che tosto imbianca, se 'l vignaio è reo.
E a la sedia che fu già benigna
più a' poveri giusti, non per lei,
ma per colui che siede, che traligna,
non dispensare o due o tre per sei,
non la fortuna di prima vacante,
non decimas, quae sunt pauperum Dei,
addimandò, ma contro al mondo errante
licenza di combatter per lo seme
del qual ti fascian ventiquattro piante.
Poi, con dottrina e con volere insieme,
con l'officio appostolico si mosse
quasi torrente ch'alta vena preme;
e ne li sterpi eretici percosse
l'impeto suo, più vivamente quivi
dove le resistenze eran più grosse.
Di lui si fecer poi diversi rivi
onde l'orto catolico si riga,
sì che i suoi arbuscelli stan più vivi.
Se tal fu l'una rota de la biga
in che la Santa Chiesa si difese
e vinse in campo la sua civil briga,
ben ti dovrebbe assai esser palese
l'eccellenza de l'altra, di cui Tomma
dinanzi al mio venir fu sì cortese.
Ma l'orbita che fé la parte somma
di sua circunferenza, è derelitta,
sì ch'è la muffa dov' era la gromma.
La sua famiglia, che si mosse dritta
coi piedi a le sue orme, è tanto volta,
che quel dinanzi a quel di retro gitta;
e tosto si vedrà de la ricolta
de la mala coltura, quando il loglio
si lagnerà che l'arca li sia tolta.
Ben dico, chi cercasse a foglio a foglio
nostro volume, ancor troveria carta
u' leggerebbe 'I' mi son quel ch'i' soglio';
ma non fia da Casal né d'Acquasparta,
là onde vegnon tali a la scrittura,
ch'uno la fugge e altro la coarta.
Io son la vita di Bonaventura
da Bagnoregio, che ne' grandi offici
sempre pospuosi la sinistra cura.
Illuminato e Augustin son quici,
che fuor de' primi scalzi poverelli
che nel capestro a Dio si fero amici.
Ugo da San Vittore è qui con elli,
e Pietro Mangiadore e Pietro Spano,
lo qual giù luce in dodici libelli;
Natàn profeta e 'l metropolitano
Crisostomo e Anselmo e quel Donato
ch'a la prim' arte degnò porre mano.
Rabano è qui, e lucemi dallato
il calavrese abate Giovacchino
di spirito profetico dotato.
Ad inveggiar cotanto paladino
mi mosse l'infiammata cortesia
di fra Tommaso e 'l discreto latino;
e mosse meco questa compagnia.”
Soon as the blessed flame had taken up
The final word to give it utterance,
Began the holy millstone to revolve,
And in its gyre had not turned wholly round,
Before another in a ring enclosed it,
And motion joined to motion, song to song;
Song that as greatly doth transcend our Muses,
Our Sirens, in those dulcet clarions,
As primal splendour that which is reflected.
And as are spanned athwart a tender cloud
Two rainbows parallel and like in colour,
When Juno to her handmaid gives command,
(The one without born of the one within,
Like to the speaking of that vagrant one
Whom love consumed as doth the sun the vapours,)
And make the people here, through covenant
God set with Noah, presageful of the world
That shall no more be covered with a flood,
In such wise of those sempiternal roses
The garlands twain encompassed us about,
And thus the outer to the inner answered.
After the dance, and other grand rejoicings,
Both of the singing, and the flaming forth
Effulgence with effulgence blithe and tender,
Together, at once, with one accord had stopped,
(Even as the eyes, that, as volition moves them,
Must needs together shut and lift themselves,)
Out of the heart of one of the new lights
There came a voice, that needle to the star
Made me appear in turning thitherward.
And it began: "The love that makes me fair
Draws me to speak about the other leader,
By whom so well is spoken here of mine.
'Tis right, where one is, to bring in the other,
That, as they were united in their warfare,
Together likewise may their glory shine.
The soldiery of Christ, which it had cost
So dear to arm again, behind the standard
Moved slow and doubtful and in numbers few,
When the Emperor who reigneth evermore
Provided for the host that was in peril,
Through grace alone and not that it was worthy;
And, as was said, he to his Bride brought succour
With champions twain, at whose deed, at whose word
The straggling people were together drawn.
Within that region where the sweet west wind
Rises to open the new leaves, wherewith
Europe is seen to clothe herself afresh,
Not far off from the beating of the waves,
Behind which in his long career the sun
Sometimes conceals himself from every man,
Is situate the fortunate Calahorra,
Under protection of the mighty shield
In which the Lion subject is and sovereign.
Therein was born the amorous paramour
Of Christian Faith, the athlete consecrate,
Kind to his own and cruel to his foes;
And when it was created was his mind
Replete with such a living energy,
That in his mother her it made prophetic.
As soon as the espousals were complete
Between him and the Faith at holy font,
Where they with mutual safety dowered each other,
The woman, who for him had given assent,
Saw in a dream the admirable fruit
That issue would from him and from his heirs;
And that he might be construed as he was,
A spirit from this place went forth to name him
With His possessive whose he wholly was.
Dominic was he called; and him I speak of
Even as of the husbandman whom Christ
Elected to his garden to assist him.
Envoy and servant sooth he seemed of Christ,
For the first love made manifest in him
Was the first counsel that was given by Christ.
Silent and wakeful many a time was he
Discovered by his nurse upon the ground,
As if he would have said, 'For this I came.'
O thou his father, Felix verily!
O thou his mother, verily Joanna,
If this, interpreted, means as is said!
Not for the world which people toil for now
In following Ostiense and Taddeo,
But through his longing after the true manna,
He in short time became so great a teacher,
That he began to go about the vineyard,
Which fadeth soon, if faithless be the dresser;
And of the See, (that once was more benignant
Unto the righteous poor, not through itself,
But him who sits there and degenerates,)
Not to dispense or two or three for six,
Not any fortune of first vacancy,
'Non decimas quae sunt pauperum Dei,'
He asked for, but against the errant world
Permission to do battle for the seed,
Of which these four and twenty plants surround thee.
Then with the doctrine and the will together,
With office apostolical he moved,
Like torrent which some lofty vein out-presses;
And in among the shoots heretical
His impetus with greater fury smote,
Wherever the resistance was the greatest.
Of him were made thereafter divers runnels,
Whereby the garden catholic is watered,
So that more living its plantations stand.
If such the one wheel of the Biga was,
In which the Holy Church itself defended
And in the field its civic battle won,
Truly full manifest should be to thee
The excellence of the other, unto whom
Thomas so courteous was before my coming.
But still the orbit, which the highest part
Of its circumference made, is derelict,
So that the mould is where was once the crust.
His family, that had straight forward moved
With feet upon his footprints, are turned round
So that they set the point upon the heel.
And soon aware they will be of the harvest
Of this bad husbandry, when shall the tares
Complain the granary is taken from them.
Yet say I, he who searcheth leaf by leaf
Our volume through, would still some page discover
Where he could read, 'I am as I am wont.'
'Twill not be from Casal nor Acquasparta,
From whence come such unto the written word
That one avoids it, and the other narrows.
Bonaventura of Bagnoregio's life
Am I, who always in great offices
Postponed considerations sinister.
Here are Illuminato and Agostino,
Who of the first barefooted beggars were
That with the cord the friends of God became.
Hugh of Saint Victor is among them here,
And Peter Mangiador, and Peter of Spain,
Who down below in volumes twelve is shining;
Nathan the seer, and metropolitan
Chrysostom, and Anselmus, and Donatus
Who deigned to lay his hand to the first art;
Here is Rabanus, and beside me here
Shines the Calabrian Abbot Joachim,
He with the spirit of prophecy endowed.
To celebrate so great a paladin
Have moved me the impassioned courtesy
And the discreet discourses of Friar Thomas,
And with me they have moved this company."
The action of this canto begins, if we take its first line literally, before the preceding one ends, i.e., before Thomas utters the last syllables (or syllable) of vaneggia. See Iacopo della Lana (comm. to vv. 1-3) and Alfonso Bertoldi (Il canto XII del “Paradiso” [“Lectura Dantis Orsanmichele,” Florence: Sansoni, 1913], p. 43, n. 5). That seems fitting, since these two cantos are, perhaps more than any other pair in the work, mirror images of one another. See Bertoldi (Il canto XI del “Paradiso” [“Lectura Dantis Orsanmichele,” Florence: Sansoni, 1903]), referring to them, despite their differing subjects and feelings, as “twin cantos.” See also the note to Par. XII.142-145. For one expression of the widely shared notice that the first verse of this canto clearly is intended to attach it to its predecessor, see Antonio Di Pietro (“Il canto dantesco dei due Guidi,” in Studi in onore di Alberto Chiari [Brescia: Paideia, 1973], p. 421). Compare, in contrast, the opening of Canto X, which stresses its discontinuity with what preceded it.
Carmine Di Biase (Il Canto XII del “Paradiso” [Naples: Ermanno Cassitto 1992], p. 8), suggests that both cantos may be broken into four parallel parts; in this canto, matching the four divisions of Canto XI, exordium (XII.1-45), narrative in praise of Dominic (XII.46-105), blame directed at his failed followers (XII.106-126), and, in conclusion, the second circle of saints (XII.127-145).
Dante had earlier resorted to the image of the millstone (mola) to refer to the rotation of the Sun, seen from either pole, around the earth (see Conv. III.v.14).
The matching circles of twelve saints, each moving in such a way as to match the other both in the eye and in the ear of the beholder, anticipates the final image of the poem (Par. XXXIII.143-145).
This first circle of saints was described (Par. XI.14) as having completed a first full rotation; now it is seen as being on the point of completing a second one.
The double repetition (moto/moto; canto/canto) underlines the matching quality of these two circles.
The previous tercet had divided the activity of the souls into circling movement and song; this one divides that song itself (repeating the word canto) into two components, words (muse) and melody (sirene). Dante had used the word Muse (capitalized by Petrocchi, if we have little idea of Dante's actual practice with regard to capitalization) in Inferno I.7, in Purgatorio II.8 and XXII.102, then in Paradiso II.9, to indicate the Muses of classical antiquity. Beginning here, however, and then in two later passages (Par. XV.26 and XVIII.33) Petrocchi obviously believes that Dante uses the lowercase word musa metaphorically, here to refer to poets (the next use will refer to Virgil [or his poetry] as “nostra maggior musa” [our greatest muse], and finally [Par. XVIII.33], to poetry itself - or so most readers believe).
Torraca (comm. to vv. 7-9) seems to have been the first to remark on the similar conjoining of Sirens and Muses in Boethius (Cons. Phil. I.1[pr]). Aversano (Dante daccapo [glosses to the Paradiso], copia d'eccezione, sent by the author on 11 September 2001), p. 52, believes that the Muses inspire the words of the song, the Sirens, the music.
These two verses contain four words relating to music: canto (song), musa (muse), serena (siren), tuba (brass musical instrument [more precisely, “horn”]). For the echoing effect that results from the repetition of the first two, Dante may have had in mind the similar effect found in Ovid's story of Echo and Narcissus, referred to in vv. 14-15. The next (and last) time we read the noun tuba (Par. XXX.35), it will be the metaphoric expression for Dante's poetic voice, while here it refers to the voices of the singing saints.
The word splendore is, in Dante, always the result of light (luce), proceeding along its ray (raggio), and then reflected by an object. (For these interrelated terms, describing the three major aspects of light, see Dante's earlier statement [Conv. III.xiv.5].) This verse makes clear Dante's belief that a second reflection (e.g., as in a mirror) is less vivid than that original splendor (but cf. Par. II.94-105, which seems to contradict this understanding). As we have learned in Canto X (vv. 64-69), these crowns of dancing saints are presented as circles of musical lights. And in that earlier passage, a simile, the comparison is to the rainbow, as will also be true in the simile that begins in the next verse.
This simile, explicitly formal in its construction (Come... così) and, balanced in its content, containing one classical and one biblical reference (Iris and the rainbow that God offered as a sign to Noah), gives a sense of the identity of the two circles of saints, despite their evident differences.
Dante apparently thought of thin (and thus “translucent”) clouds as actually being constituted of a layer of water-soaked dust suspended in the atmosphere in which the rainbow appears.
There are a number of candidates for the classical source at work here, primarily texts in Virgil and Ovid. It seems likely that Dante would have had the reference (Metam. I.270-271) to Juno's sending Iris (her “handmaid,” the rainbow) as a result of Jove's huge storm, sent below in his attempt to extirpate, in a flood, the human race (typified in the first murderer, Lycaon [the wolf-man], and hence abandoned by piety and justice [Metam. I.149-150]). That would nicely balance these gestures toward “famous rainbows,” since the second of them is without doubt reflective of the rainbow that God sent as the sign of his covenant (Gen. 9:13) with Noah and the few other surviving members of humankind based on His promise never to send such a destructive flood again. (The first book of the Metamorphoses is, as it were, the pagan equivalent of Genesis.) We are also probably meant to compare the unchecked vengeful desires of the king of the pagan gods with the moderated sternness of God the Father.
Dante adds a second rainbow, as his context demands, not as he found in his sources, but as may at least occasionally be observed in Tuscany even today.
The second circle is, like the second rainbow, wider than the first. Dante's science believed that the second rainbow was born from the first, not that it was part of a double refraction of light.
The reference is to the nymph Echo (Metam. III.356-510), who fell in love with Narcissus. She wasted away with unrequited passion until all that was left of her was a voice. This second simile, within the overarching simile that compares the two circles of saints to the double rainbow, replicates the form of such a rainbow.
As Tommaseo suggests (comm. to vv. 16-18), the present tense of the verb allagare (to flood) suggests the past, present, and future application of God's covenant with humankind: This global flood has not recurred and will never do so.
Dante seemingly intuits the extraordinary effect made by large modern-day symphony orchestras when called upon to modulate huge sound suddenly into silence. If the reader imagines Beethoven as the background music to this scene, perhaps he or she will better experience what is projected by these verses. Of course, the miraculous sound has not so much to do with extraordinary musical abilities as it does with the result of living in God's grace, in which all is harmonious, even sudden silence.
These similetic elements of this passage (vv. 22-30), two eyes opening or closing as one and Dante ineluctably being drawn to the voice of a new spirit (it will turn out to be Bonaventure), speak to the sense of the overpowering quality of the love and beauty that affects both the performers and their observer. Torraca (comm. to vv. 28-30) points out that the compass, invented only a short while before, had already become a familiar image in thirteenth-century Italian poetry, e.g., in poems by Guido Guinizzelli and in Ristoro d'Arezzo.
St. Bonaventure is about to praise the leader of Thomas's Order, St. Dominic, in response to Thomas's praise of Francis, the leader of his own. For information about the speaker, see the note to vv. 127-128.
In the previous canto (Par. XI.40-42) Thomas had gone out of his way to insist that praise of either Francis or Dominic is necessarily praise of the other; Bonaventure matches him.
While Dante has made every effort to “militarize” the sweetness of St. Francis, making both him and Dominic share the verb militaro (lit. “soldiered”), the following three tercets show that he is willing to associate himself with the traditional portrayal of Dominic as warlike, while the traditional depiction of Francis is decidedly not (see the note to Par. XI.91). On the other hand, it is again notable that he has included Francis within the construct of the Christian soldier.
These three tercets contain seven words that associate the two friars with militarism and imperial rule: essercito (army), riarmar (to rearm), insegna (battle standard), imperador (emperor), regna (reigns), milizia (soldiers), campioni (“champions,” i.e., those who excel in single combat).
The “troops” obviously form the Church Militant, now led by the newly approved mendicant orders, expensive to rearm, since it took the blood of the apostles to accomplish that task (see Aversano, Dante daccapo [glosses to the Paradiso], copia d'eccezione, sent by the author on 11 September 2001], p. 53, for reasons to prefer this gloss to that which insists the reference is to Christ's blood, an interpretation unopposed since the earliest days of the commentary tradition; Aversano refers the reader to Par. XXVII.40-45 for confirming evidence). Despite that, the soldiers, apparently, still lack resolve.
The “standard” of this army is obviously the Cross.
The meaning is that God succored His “troops,” not because they were particularly worthy, but because He extended them His grace. For a clear summary of the two kinds of grace at work in Dante's world, operating grace (which Dante received from God, through the agency of Beatrice, in Inferno II) and cooperating grace, see Scott (Understanding Dante [Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2004], pp. 187-90). Once a sinner is justified by the receipt of operating grace, which is gratuitous (i.e., cannot be earned), he or she must “cooperate” in order to merit eventual reward (salvation). Scott reviews the American discussion of this issue, which was dominated by the views of Charles Singleton, until Antonio Mastrobuono (Dante's Journey of Sanctification [Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1990]) clarified the nature of the problem.
That God is here referred to as “emperor” (as He is on only two other occasions: Inf. I.124 and Par. XXV.41) makes Dante's comfort with imperial trappings clear, especially to his Guelph enemies. This term for God is not in itself unwarranted in Christian tradition, far from it. But Dante uses it here in an ecclesiastical context where it might seem, at least to some, improper.
The reference (“as was said”) is to Paradiso XI.31-36, where Thomas tells of God's appointment of these two stalwarts to succor the bride of Christ, His Church.
Francis (typified by love) is best represented by his deeds, Dominic (typified by knowledge), by his words.
For Francis and Dominic as “postfigurations” of Elijah and Enoch, see Ubertino of Casale: “... in thipo Helie et Enoch Franciscus et Dominicus singulariter claruerunt” (... as antitypes of Elijah and Enoch Francis and Dominic stand strikingly forth), cited by Carmine Di Biase (Il Canto XII del “Paradiso” [Naples: Ermanno Cassitto 1992], p. 27).
Dominic was “born 1170, in the village of Calaroga, in Old Castile; he is supposed to have belonged to the noble family of Guzmàn, his father's name being Felix, his mother's Joanna. The latter is said to have dreamed before he was born that she gave birth to a dog with a torch in its mouth, which set the world on fire. At the age of fourteen he went to the university of Palencia, where he studied theology for ten or twelve years. He was early noted for his self-denial and charity. In 1195 he became canon of the cathedral of Osma. In 1215 he accompanied Folquet, bishop of Toulouse, to the Lateran Council; and in the same year, on his return to Toulouse, he founded his order of Preaching Friars, which was formally recognized by Honorius III in 121[7]. He died in Aug. 1221 at Bologna, where he was buried. He was canonized soon after his death (in 1234) by Gregory IX” (Toynbee, “Domenico” [Concise Dante Dictionary]). And see G.R. Sarolli, “Domenico, santo,” ED II (1970), pp. 546-51. Sarolli points out that, when Dominic, with six companions, arrived in Toulouse in 1215, on the verge of forming a more structured group, he associated with Folco di Marsiglia (whom we encountered in Par. IX.88-102), the newly appointed bishop of that city.
For a global consideration of Bonaventure's praise of Dominic, see Giuseppe Ledda (“Osservazioni sul panegirico di San Domenico,” L'Alighieri 27 [2006]: 105-25).
For Guglielmo Gorni (“Due note su Paradiso XI,” L'Alighieri 23 [2004]: 51-56) the description of Dominic's birthplace does not work in tandem with the description of Francis's (see the note to Par. XI.43-48), a function the text itself (Par. XI.37-42) claims – as Gorni admits – but in an opposite way, that is, to support the position of the Spiritual Franciscans (see the note to Par. XI.58-60) and to undermine that of the Dominicans. A key component of Gorni's reading is the pun found in the name Calaroga, the town in Spain where Dominic was born, which not only has the resonance of the setting sun (by common consent) but an innate negative sense, opposing the optimistic oriens of Assisi/Ascesi, in its first two syllables, cala, which reflects a sense of the verb calare, to sink or fall. It is difficult to accept this assessment, which would undo all that Dante has crafted to make Dominic and Francis equal - even if Dominic is not seen by Dante in the Rose of the saved souls in the Empyrean, a point insisted on by Gorni, in whose view the third cantica is (p. 54) no less, in its essence, than “a manifesto of Spiritual Franciscanism.” Among the commentators, few would support Gorni's hypothesis, but, for one who might, see Mestica (comm. to vv. 37-39), making two fairly obvious points: The Seraphim are closer to God than are the Cherubim; Dominic is never mentioned again in the poem, while Francis is. Nonetheless, Dante, here and for the rest of the Paradiso, makes the core “Dominican” value (knowledge) and the “Franciscan” one (love) so conjoined that a reader naturally resists (and should) any attempt to make Dante more a praiser of Dominic (a view sponsored by Busnelli's Thomistic view of Dante's theology) than of Francis (or vice versa), either of which understandings the text rather clearly and insistently strives to make all but impossible.
Spain is located in the westernmost part of Europe.
Zephyr is the west wind. For the association of Dominic with the west and Francis with the east, see Alfonso Bertoldi (Il canto XI del “Paradiso” [“Lectura Dantis Orsanmichele,” Florence: Sansoni, {1903}], p. 47 [n. 27]), adding the details that for Dante, the Florentine, the main Dominican church (S. Maria Novella) was situated in the western part of the city, while the main Franciscan church (S. Croce) was located in eastern Florence.
Torraca (comm. to vv. 56-57) thinks that the waves are found on the surface of the Ebro, the river running two miles from Dominic's native city, an argument contested vigorously by Alfonso Bertoldi (Il canto XI del “Paradiso” [“Lectura Dantis Orsanmichele,” Florence: Sansoni, {1903}], pp. 45-46), who supports the early commentators' belief that the reference is to the Atlantic Ocean. Others specify the Bay of Biscay. After Scartazzini (comm. to vv. 49-51), however, the ruling understanding is that the passage refers to this body of water.
The sun hides itself from human sight when, at or near the summer solstice, it sets beyond the sight of those on land, because it has moved so far out over the Atlantic. For Dante, we must remember, to the west of the Gates of Hercules lies “the world where no one lives” (Inf. XXVI.117).
Calaruega (“Calaroga,” in Dante's Italian), a small town in Castile, “fortunate” in having been the birthplace of Dominic.
The royal arms of Castile bear a castle in the second and third quarters, and a lion in the first and fourth. “Thus on one side of the shield the lion is subdued by the castle, and on the other subdues it” (Oelsner, comm. to these verses). The images represent the kingdoms of Castile and Leon, respectively.
The vocabulary of feudal times (drudo, “vassal”) combines with that of erotic poetry (amoroso, “loving”) to interrupt the military associations of Dominic, and eventually presents him, like Francis, as a “husband” (see verse 61, sponsalizie, “nuptials”). The word drudo, a triple hapax, i.e., a word appearing once in each cantica (see Hollander [“An Index of Hapax Legomena in Dante's Commedia,” Dante Studies 106 {1988}: 81-110] for a listing of all examples of this phenomenon in the poem), occurs previously in Inferno XVIII.134 and Purgatorio XXXII.155, in both cases referring to a male partner in an illicit sexual liaison, in the first case, the man sleeping with the whore, Thaïs; in the second, the giant beating his harlot, the Church in its Avignonian captivity. Thus its context in the poem works against those who would read Dante's treatment of Dominic as sugar-coated (see the note to verse 57).
The new interpretation of the second scene offered by Filippo Bognini (“Gli occhi di Ooliba: Una proposta per Purg. XXXII 148-60 e XXXIII 44-45,” Rivista di Studi Danteschi 7 [2007]: 73-103) does not change the valence of the preceding remark, but does alter the identities of the “actors” in the pageant in Purgatorio XXXII. In a new (and entirely convincing) reading of the major characters in that scene, Bognini demonstrates that the whore is Ezechiel's Jerusalem and thus Dante's Florence, while the giant reflects Goliath as Robert of Anjou, the king of Naples and the Guelph leader in Italy, prime enemy of Henry VII. See as well his further study of the problem of the “DXV” (or “515”), “Per Purg., XXXIII, 1-51: Dante e Giovanni di Boemia,” Italianistica 37 (2008): 11-48.
If Francis is presented as a lover, Dominic is (here) presented as a fighter, but even here he is first described (verse 55) as l'amoroso drudo. See the note to verse 55.
Raimondo Spiazzi (“Il Canto XII,” in “Paradiso”: Letture degli anni 1979-81, ed. S. Zennaro [Rome: Bonacci, 1989], pp. 339-41) thinks that the word crudo (cruel) is uncalled for, and he sets off on a lengthy defense: St. Dominic was in fact, and despite his crusading spirit, the most mild-mannered person imaginable. However, others take this verse at face value, and see its pertinence to Dominic's labors against the Cathars (e.g., Alessandro Ghisalberti [“Canto XII,” in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone {Florence: Cesati, 2002}], pp. 184-86), during the period 1203-1210, when Dominic moved from preaching and debate to more violent means; but even Ghisalberti insists on the predominance of the “sweet” approach. Others have been less tolerant of Dominic's behavior. This is the last of thirteen appearances of the adjective crudo in the poem (leaving to one side the related words crudele, crudeltà, etc.); in none of the preceding dozen presences of the word does it have a mitigated meaning. As a result, the motives of those who argue for such mitigation here seem suspect. Dominic, as presented by Dante, is a tough warrior whom the poet goes out of his way also to present as a “lover.”
The embryonic mind of Dominic was so powerful that it could send concepts (or at least images) to the mother who was bearing him. In this way he lent his mother the gift of prophecy. The early commentators are frequently misled, and think the reference of “lei” is not to the mother but to Dominic's mente in the preceding line, thus making a prophet of him. However, legend has it that, before his birth, his mother had a dream of a black-and-white dog who carried a torch in its mouth, which set fire to the whole world. That is what most of its interpreters today believe is referenced in the line, the mother's vision of her unborn son's wide effect on humanity. Since the colors of the habits of the Dominicans are black and white and since an easily available pun (Domini canes = the dogs of God) was in circulation at the time and was included in the first official “Life” of Dominic (by Teodorico d'Appoldia), the dream became a permanent piece of Dominican lore.
Frequent in discussions of this passage are citations of Isaiah 49:1, “Dominus ab utero vocavit me” (The Lord has called me from the womb); but see also Luke 1:15, “Spiritu Sancto replebitur adhuc ex utero matris suae” (and he shall be filled with the Holy Spirit, even from his mother's womb), describing John the Baptist, referred to by Carmine Di Biase (Il Canto XII del “Paradiso” [Naples: Ermanno Cassitto 1992], p. 40n. – first cited by Tommaseo [comm. to vv. 58-60]).
Where Francis married Poverty, Dominic took Faith as his wife.
A difficult line to translate convincingly, partly because the noun salute has different meanings in Dante. In Dominic's case, he will find salvation in his faith; he cannot “save” her, but he does keep her safe from heresy. Vellutello's gloss (comm. to vv. 61-66) has guided us as far as the sense is concerned: “because he saved the Faith, battling for it against heretics, and she in turn kept him safe.”
A woman present at the baptismal ceremony, the child's godmother, answers (saying “I do”) for the child when the priest asks whether he or she wishes to be baptized.
Dominic's godmother dreamed that he appeared with a bright star in his forehead that illumined the world; his “heirs” are, obviously, his fellow Dominicans.
The riddling diction yields its meaning after only a little effort. As Tozer (comm. to this tercet) unravels it: “An inspiration from Heaven (Quinci) was communicated to his parents to name him by the possessive adjective (viz. Dominicus) derived from the name of the Lord (Dominus), who possessed him entirely.”
The word costrutto has caused a certain difficulty. In modern Italian it means “sense, meaning” but that meaning is not easily assigned to the word here. Tozer (comm. to vv. 67-69) sorts things out as follows: “... 'that he might be in name what he was in reality'; costrutto: 'the form of his name'; similarly in Purg. XXVIII.147 costrutto means 'a form of words' or 'sentence': and in Par. XXIII.24 senza costrutto is 'without putting it into words.'”
From the Empyrean (and not this heaven of the Sun), the text suggests, the Holy Spirit inspired the baby's parents to call him “Dominicus” (Domini-cus – the Latin for his name, Domenico [from the possessive form of the noun Dominus, the Lord]).
Aversano (Dante daccapo [glosses to the Paradiso, copia d'eccezione, sent by the author on 11 September 2001]), p. 54, sees this verse as reflecting II Kings 12:25 (II Samuel 12:25), Nathan the prophet's renaming of the infant Solomon, thus named, according to the preceding verse, by his mother, Bathsheba: “and [Nathan] called his name Jedidiah [the Beloved of God, 'Amabilis Domino' in the Vulgate] because of the Lord.” Aversano's argument, which is less than immediately convincing, gains strength because of the presence of Nathan in this canto (verse 136), where he is spoken of exactly as he is in this verse of the Bible, “Nathan propheta” (but see also II Kings [II Samuel] 7:2 [and in six other O.T. loci]).
This is the first set of the so-called “Cristo rhymes.” There will be three others, occurring in Paradiso XIV.104-108, XIX.104-108, and XXXII.83-87. For a valuable early study of this phenomenon, see Francesco D'Ovidio (“Cristo in rima,” in his Studii sulla “Divina Commedia” [Milan: Sandron, 1901], pp. 215-24). It is clear that, for Dante's purposes, no other word is good enough to rhyme with “Christ,” who is the Word. The pattern is not unusual in Dante, three occurrences (in the spheres) followed by one in the Empyrean, not significantly adding up to four, but reminding us of the Trinity, which is three in one.
Porena (comm. to vv. 73-78) holds that D'Ovidio was correct to argue that the word Cristo is allowed to rhyme only with itself because, as a penitential gesture, Dante wants to undo the scabrous act he had perpetrated when, in one of his sonnets attacking Forese Donati's behaviors, he had rhymed the name of the Lord with tristo (distraught) and malo acquisto (ill-gotten gains).
The chore given Dominic to perform can hardly fail to remind a Christian reader of the task that Adam and Eve were given and failed to perform, to dress and keep the garden. See Genesis 2:15.
What exactly was Christ's “first counsel” to his followers? In the past one hundred years there has been continuing and uncertain discussion of this seemingly simple question. But it was not always thus. Almost every early commentator seizes on the same biblical passage, Matthew 19:21, Christ's advice to the rich young man to sell all that he possesses, give the proceeds to the poor, and then follow Him. This was the view of Jacopo della Lana (comm. to vv. 73-75) and Francesco da Buti (comm. to vv. 73-87), who added the detail that Dominic followed this advice when he sold all his books and gave the money to the poor. Others who agree include Serravalle (comm. to vv. 73-75), Landino (comm. to vv. 73-75), Vellutello (comm. to vv. 73-75), Daniello (comm. to vv. 73-75), Venturi (comm. to verse 75), Lombardi (comm. to verse 75), Tommaseo (comm. to vv. 73-75), and, at the beginning of the modern era of Dante scholarship, Scartazzini (comm. to verse 75). For a summarizing sense of nearly six hundred years of near-total agreement, see Oelsner (comm. to verse 75): “The counsel of poverty (Matth. 19:21, whence the phrase 'counsels of perfection'). Thomas Aquinas, while distinguishing between the precepts and the counsels of Christ, says that the latter may all be reduced to three – Poverty, Continence, and Obedience. The first counsel, then, is Poverty.” However, that long-held, sensible, and nearly unanimous view has recently undergone some puzzled (and puzzling?) scrutiny. A certain latent dissatisfaction with it (because Francis was popularly identified with poverty, but not Dominic?) peeps out from the long gloss of Carroll (comm. to vv. 46-105). Torraca (comm. to vv. 73-75) does not even refer to the familiar and insistent earlier gloss, but simply says that the reference is to the first Beatitude, “Blessed are the poor in spirit” (Matth. 5:3). Mestica (comm. to verse 75) briefly considers the question of which of these two texts from Matthew is most appropriate and decides in favor of the old favorite, both because, in his view, a Beatitude is not “advice,” and because Dominic did in fact sell his books and gave the resulting cash to the poor. During the next thirty years no commentator sides with Torraca, but then Grabher (comm. to vv. 73-75) simply makes reference to both passages in Matthew as though there were no debate over the issue of which one Dante had in mind. It is Manfredi Porena (comm. to vv. 73-78) who seems to have been the commentator most responsible for the current view that this verse is problematic. Sapegno (comm. to vv. 73-75) supports that opinion, and sides with Torraca's view (in favor of Matth. 5:3); Mattalia (comm. to vv. 74-75) mounts an effective counter-attack. Chimenz (73-75) retreats, Fallani (75) fights back, Giacalone (73-75) equivocates, as do Singleton (75) and Bosco/Reggio (73-75), who really want both humility and poverty to identify Dominic, and who also adduce Matthew 6:25f. Pasquini/Quaglio (75) return to Matthew 3:5 without discussing the crux. However, Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi (Paradiso, con il commento di A. M. C. L. [Milan: Mondadori, 1997], p. 342) returns to the original formulation, rescuing Christ's appeal for the virtues of poverty.
For a departure from the sources battled over in the commentaries (Matth. 5:3; Matth.19:21), see Alessandro Ghisalberti (“Canto XII,” in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone [Florence: Cesati, 2002], p. 184): Matthew 6:33 (part of a passage already mentioned as a potential source by Bosco/Reggio). See also Aversano (Dante daccapo [glosses to the Paradiso, copia d'eccezione, sent by the author on 11 September 2001]), p. 54, who dismisses the two conflicting and standard explanations, poverty and humility, arguing that both these are central attributes of Francis, and thus unlikely to be applied to Dominic (not a convincing view, since the bulk of the two cantos is dedicated to the similarity between the two heroes of the modern Church). Aversano points to the context introduced by the phrase amoroso drudo (“loving vassal” – verse 55) and chooses the passage from Luke (10:25) that encourages us to love God and our neighbor.
The problem of the precise reference in verse 75 is complicated by the neighboring presences of two instances of the adjective primo (first). Are they used as synonyms, in both cases having a temporal relevance, or not? We think that they are, and thus have translated as we have (“since the first affection manifest in him / was for the initial precept taught by Christ”). Some, however, believe that the first primo is temporal, that the second has to do with order of importance, i.e., the most important of Christ's teachings, which would offer a bit more latitude as one searched through the Gospels. If we are correct, what then is “the initial precept” taught by Jesus? (Salsano, “consiglio,” ED II [1970], p. 159b, understands consiglio to equate with “precetto divino.”) That can in fact be the first Beatitude. Or, if Oelsner (see the first paragraph, above) is correct, and Dante's sense of the word consiglio flows through St. Thomas's distinction between it and “precept,” then the first “counsel” may indeed be thought of as accepting poverty, first among the three “counsels” of Christ: poverty, continence, obedience. Either way, poverty is the issue focal to this line. This seems more than acceptable, since Dominic is presented as parallel in his virtues to Francis (Grandgent [comm. to verse 75] points out that vv. 73-75 of both cantos thus deal with poverty), since Dominicans as well as Franciscans took vows of poverty, and since the next tercet, although also less clearly than some might like, would seem to associate him both with Francis and with poverty as well.
“For this have I come”: See Mark 1:38, “ad hoc enim veni,” as Jesus announces his intention to preach. The baby Dominic's closeness to the earth reminds us of the similar association of Francis, indelibly associated with the dust at the end of his life (Par. XI.115-117). Poverty and humility, more usually associated with Francis, are both present in this vignette, as preconditions for Dominic's preacherly calling.
Dominic's father's name, Felice, means “happy” (felix) in Latin.
Bosco/Reggio (comm. to these verses) say that Dante, in the life of Dominic by Theodoric of Appoldia, could have read that his mother's name, Giovanna, meant “grace of God,” or “full of grace.” Theodoric's source (and Dante's) may have been, says Torraca (comm. to vv. 79-81), Uguccione da Pisa.
This passage presents the life and accomplishments of Dominic, after his engendering and childhood (vv. 58-81), the ensemble paralleling that portion of the preceding canto dedicated to the life and works of Francis (Par. XI.55-117).
Dominic's honest religiosity is contrasted with the eye-on-the-prize sort of sham activities of two intellectuals, both of whom died within Dante's lifetime. The first, Enrico di Susa, from Ostia (died in 1271), was a famous canon lawyer (and thus Dante fires another salvo at the venal practitioners of this profession), while Taddeo d'Alderotto (the probable reference is to him) was a Florentine (died in 1295) who studied and then taught medicine at Bologna. Dante mocks his translation of Aristotle's Ethics in Convivio I.x.10. In these two men Dante pillories two kinds of false intellectual activity, religious law and Aristotelian science, both of which were of great importance to him.
The metaphorical vineyard (fairly obviously the Church) turns gray with rot if its keeper (obviously the pope) does not take good care of it. This reference to Boniface VIII is thinly veiled.
Carroll (comm. to vv. 46-105) paraphrases this elegant pastiche of a canon lawyer's style as follows: “[Dominic] asked from the Head of the Church none of the evil privileges so eagerly sought for by others: to distribute only a third or a half of moneys left for charitable purposes, retaining the rest; to receive the first vacant benefice; or to use for himself the tithes which belong to God's poor. His one request was for leave to fight against an erring world for the seed of the Faith.”
Bonaventure, here most assuredly Dante's mouthpiece, distinguishes between the papacy, in its design supportive of the poor, and the pope (the hated Boniface VIII in 1300), ignoring that design.
These three corrupt practices all reveal the avarice of prelates, the first and third involving theft of monies destined for the poor, the second, advancement in ecclesiastical position. For this last, see Tozer (comm. to this tercet): “The reference is to the expectationes, or nominations to posts not yet vacant that popes of the day were pleased to make.” Obviously, none of these self-aggrandizing activities had as their goal support for the benevolent tasks that customarily fell to the Church.
The Latin (“the tenth part that belongs to the poor,” the tax collected by the clergy) refers to the tithe, the 10% of a parishioner's income that the Church collected in order to help feed and clothe the poor. Not even this was safe from predatory clergy, who took these funds for their own use.
See Bosco/Reggio (comm. to this verse): Dominic's request for approval of his Order was made to Pope Innocent III in 1215, and only approved late in 1216 by Pope Honorius III, the newly elected pope (the Church had for a time prohibited the formation of new Orders). However, in 1205, Dominic had gone to Rome, seeking permission to wage a campaign against heretics, which was granted. Between 1207 and 1214 he was part of the eventually bloody attempt to bring the Albigensian Cathars back into the fold, alongside of Folco di Marsiglia (see the notes to Par. IX.40 and to Par. IX.94). Bosco/Reggio try to keep Dominic's hands free of Albigensian blood, saying that, on the day of the terrible battle of Muret (12 September 1213), Dominic was at prayer in a church. However, given the poet's praise of Folco, the leader of that crusade (if Simon de Montfort was in charge of the army at that particular battle), he may have imagined a Dominic as warlike as his Folco. See vv. 97-102, where Dominic's forcefulness in combating heresy is applauded.
This indication reminds us of the precise balance in the two circles of saints that we have seen in these two cantos, each containing twelve souls. See Carmine Di Biase (Il Canto XII del “Paradiso” [Naples: Ermanno Cassitto, 1992], pp. 68-69) and Bruno Porcelli (“Numeri e nomi nei canti danteschi del sole,” Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 117 [2000]: 8-100) for thoughts about the importance of the number twelve in the heaven of the Sun.
While the militarism of Dominic's Order may be metaphorical, referring to his preaching, that his “career” began with a literal war, the crusade against the Albigensians, certainly colors these lines, whatever Dante's intention.
Dominic fought against heresy with the support of Pope Honorius III, who had approved his request to found a new Order. However, he had also had the approval of Pope Innocent III to subdue the Albigensians and bring them back to the fold (see the note to verse 95). In that effort, the crusaders' military force was more than metaphoric.
The “resistance was most stubborn” in Provence, with the Albigensian Cathars. This detail again tends to erode the distinction between Dominic the Christian debater and Dominic the Christian soldier. See the note to vv. 97-102.
Raoul Manselli (“Il canto XII del Paradiso,” in Nuove letture dantesche, vol. VI [Florence: Le Monnier, 1973], p. 118) characterizes this tercet, moving from Dominic's day into Dante's, with the Order burgeoning with new chapters, as setting a tranquil conclusion to a story that began with military roughness. One might add that it has hardly moderated its tone until now.
These verses offer a kind of summary of both saints' lives. The resulting image, the two wheels of a chariot of war, already deployed in the earthly paradise (introduced at Purg. XXIX.107 and on the scene until Purg. XXXII.147), is perhaps remembered in the final verses of the poem. For the “tensions, deriving from the need simultaneously to individuate and unify, that subtend the stories of Francis and Dominic,” see Teodolinda Barolini (The Undivine “Comedy”: Detheologizing Dante [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992], pp. 198-202, 217).
Here begins the denunciation of the current Franciscan Order (cf. the similar attack on the wayward Dominicans, Par. XI.118-123). Where in the last canto the image of Thomas's Order was a merchant ship, here that founded by Francis is presented as a chariot of war. Bosco/Reggio (comm. to these verses) complain that, after the fresh and convincing images of the last canto, some of those encountered in this one, beginning with these chariot wheels, seem forced. Here Dominic is compared to the rim of a wheel that leaves a clear imprint in the earth, while his followers do no such thing.
Abruptly switching semantic fields, Bonaventure compares the good old days of Francis's leadership and the current condition of the Order to wine casks: Good wine leaves crust in the barrel it was contained in, while bad wine leaves mold.
The faltering Order is depicted as reversing its track; see the parallel moment in Thomas's denunciation of the Dominicans (Par. XI.124-132), portrayed as sheep wandering astray, away from the Rule, in search of new nourishment.
There is agreement among the commentators about the difficulty of making exact sense of this verse. We have not attempted to do more than give its obvious general meaning, though it happens that we are in fairly close agreement with the gloss of Daniele Mattalia to this tercet, who takes issue with some of the more strained attempts to make sense of this line, i.e., the understanding, begun with Michele Barbi (Problemi di critica dantesca [Florence: Sansoni, 1934], p. 287), that the Franciscan backsliders retrogress while facing forward, moving their front foot back toward (and then behind?) the other. Even if Dominic has been described as “the holy athlete” (verse 56), that way of retrogression seems to require muscular skills and patience well beyond those of most corrupt barefoot friars. Momigliano (comm. to vv. 115-117) justly complains that this line seems forced, and lays some of the blame for that on the verb form gitta (lit. “throws”), forced by rhyme.
The obvious Scriptural allusion (to Matth. 13:24-30, the parable of the wheat and the tares) somehow seems to have escaped the earliest commentators. It appears first in Landino (comm. to these verses) and then is repeated in almost all subsequent comments. The reference of the tercet is a cause of some debate. See Raoul Manselli, “francescanesimo,” ED III (1971), pp. 15-16; his view is that the word “loglio” (tares) does not refer to the Spiritual Franciscans, as some believe, but to all corrupt members of the Order, whatever their leaning in the controversy between Spirituals and Conventuals.
The word volume (volume), occurring first in Inferno I.84 and last in Paradiso XXXIII.86, literally runs from one end of the poem to the other. It occurs nine times, and always else either refers to God's book (the Scriptures) or to his “other book,” the created universe (except in its first use, where it refers to the Aeneid [see the note to Inf. I.84]). Thus, to refer to the slender booklet, the Rule of the Franciscan Order, as a volume is to employ a heavy word.
Umberto Cosmo (L'ultima ascesa: Introduzione alla lettura del “Paradiso”, ed. B. Maier [Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1965 {1936}], pp. 149-54) contrasts the inner tension among the Franciscan ranks with the struggles that afflicted Dominic's order, shaped by external enemies. For a study locating Francis, as Dante does here, in the middle, see Stanislao da Campagnola (“Francesco d'Assisi in Dante,” Laurentianum 24 [1983]: 175-92); and for his indebtedness to Ubertino's very words for his characterizations of Francis (seraphicus) and Dominic (cherubicus), see p. 182n. See also Raoul Manselli (“Dante e gli Spirituali francescani,” Letture classensi 11 [1982]: 47-61) for an overview of Dante's response to the Spiritual Franciscans, with many bibliographical indications in the notes. Mario Trovato (“Paradiso XI,” in Dante's “Divine Comedy,” Introductory Readings III: “Paradiso,” ed. Tibor Wlassics [Lectura Dantis {virginiana}, 16-17, supplement, Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1995], p. 168), on the additional basis of his interpretation of Paradiso XI.109-114, lends his support to Manselli's position. And for what has been the standard view of the tension among the Conventual and Spiritual Franciscans themselves (at least after Manselli's work), see Manselli, pp. 57-58: Matteo d'Acquasparta is criticized for loosening the strictures of the Rule of the Order, while Ubertino da Casale is seen as too rigid in his adherence to the founder's insistence on the importance of poverty in a true Christian life. Some have tried to argue against the dominant understanding, making Matteo the one who is overly strict in his interpretation of the Rule, while Ubertino is too loose; but see Manselli, “francescanesimo,” ED III (1971), p. 16, for a refutation. And see his lectura (“Il canto XII del Paradiso,” in Nuove letture dantesche, vol. VI [Florence: Le Monnier, 1973], pp. 122-23) for a demonstration that coartare regulam and fugere regulam were formulae in discussions of the day.
We have translated “la scrittura” in the narrowest sense (“the Rule”). In Dante's Italian the word has meant both writing in general and, on some occasions, the Bible. Here it is a third form of writing, something more than ordinary words and to be taken as post-biblical, but having a similar authority. (See the note to verse 122 for the similar status of the noun volume.) Mario Aversano (Dante e gli “scritti” di San Francesco [Salerno: Palladio, 1984], pp. 23-24) points out that Francis was so concerned that his Rule would be fraudulently emended that he encouraged his friars to memorize it.
For a helpful discussion of the participants of this second circle of souls found in the heaven of the Sun, see Carmine Di Biase (Il Canto XII del “Paradiso” [Naples: Ermanno Cassitto 1992], pp. 71-83). Comparing the two circles, Umberto Cosmo (L'ultima ascesa: Introduzione alla lettura del “Paradiso”, ed. B. Maier [Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1965 {1936}], pp. 106-7) argues that there is no sense of rigid separation between the two, rather, in fact, that there are many similarities between them. Each has two representatives of the early days of Christian thought (Isidore and Bede in the first group; Anselm and Rabanus here) and two from the days of the origins (Boethius, Orosius; Chrysostom, Donatus), and one from the Old Testament (Solomon; Nathan). Then there are masters of the Summa (Peter Lombard; Peter Comestor) and mystics (Dionysius the Areopagite, Richard of St. Victor; Hugh of St. Victor, Joachim of Flora). Nearest the leaders (Thomas and Bonaventure) are Albertus Magnus, Gratian; Illuminatus, Augustinus; and then the culmination in those who do not seem easily acceptable to the leaders at whose side they appear, Siger and Joachim. (Cosmo's tabulation somehow loses track of Peter Hispano and counts Joachim twice.)
“St. Bonaventura was born at Bagnoregio (now Bagnorea) near Orvieto in 1221, the year of St. Dominic's death. As a child he was attacked by a dangerous disease, which was miraculously cured by St. Francis of Assisi. When the latter heard that the child had recovered he is said to have exclaimed 'buona ventura,' whereupon the boy's mother changed his name to Bonaventura. In 1238 or 1243 he entered the Franciscan order. After studying in Paris under Alexander of Hales, he became successively professor of philosophy and theology, and in 1257 was made doctor. Having risen to be general of the Franciscan order (in 1257), he was offered the archbishopric of Albano by Gregory X, whom he accompanied to the second Council of Lyons, where he died, July 15, 1274, 'his magnificent funeral being attended by a pope, an emperor, and a king.' St. Bonaventure was canonized in 1482 by Sixtus IV, and placed among the doctors of the Church, with the title of Doctor Seraphicus, by Sixtus V” (Toynbee, “Bonaventura” [Concise Dante Dictionary]). The word vita, used here by Bonaventure to identify himself as a soul in grace, is used with this sense for the second time in the poem (see the note to Par. IX.7).
For Dante's debt to mysticism, as focused for him in the writings of Bonaventure, see A.G. Meekins (“The Study of Dante, Bonaventure, and Mysticism: Notes on Some Problems of Method,” in In amicizia: Essays in Honour of Giulio Lepschy, ed. Z.G. Baranski and L. Pertile [The Italianist 17 {1997–special supplement}], pp. 83-99). For the possibility that Dante read the apparent contradictions between the positions of Aquinas and Bonaventure syncretistically, see Giuseppe Mazzotta (“The Heaven of the Sun: Dante between Aquinas and Bonaventure,” in Dante for the New Millennium, ed. Teodolinda Barolini and H. Wayne Storey [New York: Fordham University Press, 2003], pp. 152-68) and Manuele Gragnolati (Experiencing the Afterlife [Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2005], pp. 58-77). Paolo Di Somma (“Canto III,” in Lectura Dantis Neapolitana: “Paradiso,” ed. P. Giannantonio [Naples: Loffredo, 2000 {1986}], p. 50n.) argues for the central importance of Bonaventure's Itinerarium mentis in Deum for all of Dante's poem, not only for this canto. A survey of Bonaventure's presence in the Dartmouth Dante Project reveals that the vast majority of references to “Bonaventura” before the end of the nineteenth century occur only in notes to this canto, in which he is a named (and thus inescapable) presence. Perhaps we realize, after a few minutes of reflection, that a serious use of Bonaventure's texts as a guide to Dante's is a fairly recent development. In fact, it is only in Scartazzini's commentary that one finds a total of more references to him in all the other cantos than one finds to him in this one. After Scartazzini, that situation begins to change. (English readers will find that in this particular, as well as in others, John Carroll outstrips his competitors.) See Edward Hagman (“Dante's Vision of God: The End of the Itinerarium Mentis,” Dante Studies 106 [1988]: 1-20) for a study of Bonaventure's extensive and overall importance to Dante. But see Sofia Vanni Rovighi, “Bonaventura da Bagnoreggio, santo,” ED I (1970), p. 673, arguing that attempts to show a direct textual dependence of Dante on Bonaventure have had only dubious results, that all one can say is that his work (the Itinerarium mentis in Deum in particular) is a generic model for the outline of the Comedy, without being able to make more of a claim for it than that.
The “left-hand care” reflects the traditional link between left- and right-handedness as reflecting, respectively, “sinister” (the Latin word for “left”) and positive purposes. The former here signifies “worldly concerns.” Francesco da Buti (comm. to vv. 127-141) does not attempt to banish cares of the world from the curate's interest, but does say that he does not (and must not) treat them as having the same importance as issues related to eternal life.
Illuminato and Augustino were among Francis's earliest followers. The first was a nobleman from Rieti and accompanied him on his voyage to Egypt. Augustino was a townsman of Francis and eventually became head of a chapter of the Order in Terra di Lavoro. Neither one of them is particularly associated with knowledge, which causes Benvenuto (comm. to vv. 130-132) to wonder why these two homines ignorantes were included here. He goes on to admire Dante's subtlety in doing so, for they, if not great intellects themselves, helped others to become, by their labor and example, more wise.
It was only in 1960 that a commentator on this verse (Mattalia), responding to a number of Dantists who raised the issue, suggested that a predictable reaction in one who is reading this line might very well be: “But that's not Saint Augustine of Hippo; where is he in all this?” (And we have to wait for Paradiso XXXII.35 to find that he is indeed among the blessed; see the note to that tercet.) For the last time he was named, see Paradiso X.120, but without mention of his eventual fate. Is it possible that Dante is playing a game with us? He mentions the actual St. Augustine two cantos ago, where we might have expected to find him, among other theologians in the Sun; he now mentions the name of a saved soul named “Augustine” who is not he but who is here. Both these gestures lead us to contemplate the possibility that Dante is teasing us. There will be some speculation as to his reasons for doing so in a note to Paradiso XXXII.34-36, a passage that situates Augustine among the inhabitants of the celestial Rose. Mattalia (comm. to verse 130) refers to the notion, which he attributes to C. Landi, that Dante's hostility toward Augustine is a reaction against the Bishop of Hippo's strong opposition to the legitimacy of the state, a position that is not easily reconciled with Dante's central agreement with the Aristotelian/Thomistic understanding of the question, the ideological basis of those who sustained the theocratic position.
See the note to Paradiso XI.87 for the capestro as signal of adherence to the Franciscan Order.
“Hugh of St. Victor, celebrated mystic and theologian of the beginning of cent. xii; he was born near Ypres in Flanders c. 1097 or, as some believe, at Hartingham in Saxony, and was educated during his early years in the monastery of Hammersleben near Halberstadt in Saxony; in 1115 he removed to the abbey of St. Victor near Paris, which had recently been founded by William of Champeaux, the preceptor of Abelard, and which during cent. xii was a centre of mysticism; he became one of the canons-regular of the abbey, and was in 1130 appointed to the chair of theology, which he held until his death in 1141, his reputation being so great that he was known as 'alter Augustinus' [a second Augustine] and 'lingua Augustini' [Augustine's tongue]. He was the intimate friend of Bernard of Clairvaux, and among his pupils were Richard of St. Victor and Peter Lombard. His writings, which are very numerous, and are characterized by great learning, are frequently quoted by Thomas Aquinas”; the most celebrated are the De eruditione didascalica, a sort of encyclopaedia of the sciences as then understood, viewed in their relation to theology, the Institutiones monasticae, including the treatises De arca morali, De arca mystica, and De vanitate mundi; and the De sacramentis Christianae fidei, on the mysteries of the faith, comprising a systematic exposition of Catholic theology; he also wrote commentaries on various books of the Old and New Testament (with the latter of which he appears to rank as of equal importance the canons, the decretals, and the writings of the fathers), and upon the De caelesti hierarchia of Dionysius the Areopagite (Toynbee, “Ugo da San Vittore” [Concise Dante Dictionary]).
Petrus Comestor (comestor is the Latin word for “eater,” and was the nickname that Peter was given by his fellow priests because of his tremendous appetite for books), “priest, and afterwards dean, of the cathedral of Troyes in France, where he was born in the first half of cent. xii; he became canon of St. Victor in 1164, and chancellor of the University of Paris, and died at St. Victor in 1179, leaving all his possessions to the poor. His chief work was the Historia scholastica, which professed to be a history of the Church from the beginning of the world down to the times of the apostles” (Toynbee, “Pietro Mangiadore” [Concise Dante Dictionary]).
“Petrus Hispanus (Pedro Juliani), born at Lisbon, c. 1225, where he at first followed his father's profession of medicine; he studied at Paris, probably under Albertus Magnus; subsequently he was ordained and became (1273) archbishop of Braga; in 1274 he was created cardinal bishop of Tusculum (Frascati) by Gregory X; on Sept. 13, 1276, he was elected pope, under the title of John XXI, at Viterbo, in succession to Adrian V; he died May 20, 1277, after a reign of a little more than eight months, his death being caused by the fall of the ceiling of one of the rooms in his palace at Viterbo” (Toynbee, “Ispano, Pietro” [Concise Dante Dictionary]). His manual of logic, the Summulae logicales, in twelve books, had a large audience.
That Dante calls no attention whatsoever to the fact that Peter was a pope (if very briefly) has caught the attention of many commentators. For the “scorecard” of the perhaps twelve popes who, in Dante's opinion, were saved (and the probably larger number who were damned), see the note to Inferno VII.46-48. John XXI is the last saved pope mentioned in the poem.
“Nathan, the prophet, who was sent by God to reprove David for his sin in causing the death of Uriah the Hittite in order that he might take Bathsheba to wife” (Toynbee, “Natàn”[Concise Dante Dictionary]).
For Nathan as figura Dantis and the question of why he, a relatively minor prophet, is given such high relief in this poem, see G.R. Sarolli (Prolegomena alla “Divina Commedia” [Florence: Olschki, 1971]), pp. 189-246. See also the note to verse 69. And for a note that, apparently written without awareness of Sarolli's previous work, makes the venturesome claim that Dante thought of Nathan as “a Judaic Orpheus or Thespis, the creator of an artistic mode,” that he serves as “a biblical model for Dante the story-teller,” whose “handling of David is an allegory of the moral and epistemological relevance of literature” [i.e., telling truth to power indirectly, by means of a relevant fiction], see Manfred Weidhorn (“Why Does Dante Cite Nathan in the Paradiso?,” Philological Quarterly 61 [1982]: 91).
“St. John Chrysostom (i.e., in Greek his name means 'golden-mouthed'), celebrated Greek father of the Church, born at Antioch c. 345, died at Comana in Pontus, 407. He belonged to a noble family, and was first a lawyer; he afterward became a monk, in which capacity he so distinguished himself by his preaching that the Emperor Arcadius appointed him (in 398) patriarch of Constantinople. His severity toward the clergy in his desire for reform made him an object of hatred to them, and led to his deposition (403) at the instance of Theophilus, patriarch of Alexandria, and the Empress Eudoxia, whose excesses he had publicly rebuked. Sentence of exile was pronounced against him, but the people, to whom he had endeared himself by his preaching, rose in revolt, and he was reinstated in his office. Shortly afterward, he was again banished (404), and he finally died in exile on the shores of the Black Sea. He left nearly 1,000 sermons or homilies as evidence of his eloquence” (Toynbee, “Crisòstomo” [Concise Dante Dictionary]).
“Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury, 1093-1109; he was born at Aosta in Piedmont in 1033, and in 1060, at the age of 27, he became a monk in the abbey of Bec in Normandy, whither he had been attracted by the fame of Lanfranc, at that time prior; in 1063, on the promotion of Lanfranc to the abbacy of Caen, he succeeded him as prior; fifteen years later, in 1078, on the death of Herluin, the founder of the monastery, he was made abbot, which office he held till 1093, in that year he was appointed archbishop of Canterbury by William Rufus, in succession to Lanfranc, after the see had been vacant for four years; in 1097, in consequence of disputes with William on matters of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, he left England for Rome to consult the pope, and remained on the Continent until William's death in 1100, when he was recalled by Henry I; he died at Canterbury, April 21, 1109; canonized, in 1494, by Alexander VI.”
“Anselm was the author of several theological works, the most important of which are the Monologion (to which Anselm gave the subtitle Exemplum meditandi de ratione fidei), the Proslogion (Fides quaerens intellectum), and the Cur Deus homo (a treatise on the atonement intended to prove the necessity of the incarnation)” (Toynbee, “Anselmo” [Concise Dante Dictionary]).
“Aelius Donatus, Roman scholar and rhetorician of cent. iv, said to have been the tutor of Jerome; he was the author of a commentary on Virgil (now lost, but often alluded to by Servius), and of another on Terence, but his most famous work was an elementary Latin grammar, Ars Grammatica in three books; part of this work, the Ars minor, or De octo partibus orationis, served as a model for subsequent similar treatises. Owing to the popularity of this work in the Middle Ages it was one of the earliest books, being printed even before the invention of movable type – the name of its author became a synonym for grammar, just as Euclid for geometry” (Toynbee, “Donato” [Concise Dante Dictionary]).
Donatus was the “people's grammarian” in that his Ars, unlike Priscian's (see Inf. XV.109), supposedly kept grammar as simple as possible. And grammar was itself the “first art” in the sense that it was the first subject taught to children, the first of the seven liberal arts. Thus his “intellectual humility” may have, in Dante's mind, paralleled that of Illuminato and Augustino. Both the Ottimo (comm. to these verses) and John of Serravalle (comm. to vv. 136-138) cite the incipit of the work: “Ianua sum rudibus” (I am the doorway through which the unlettered may pass [to learning]).
Rabanus Maurus was “born at Mainz of noble parents, c. 776; while quite a youth he entered the monastery at Fulda, where he received deacon's orders in 801; he shortly after proceeded to Tours to study under Alcuin, who in recognition of his piety and diligence gave him the surname of Maurus, after St. Maurus (d. 565), the favourite disciple of St. Benedict. He was ordained priest in 814, and after a pilgrimage to the Holy Land returned to Fulda in 817, where he became abbot in 822. He held this office for twenty years until 842, when he retired in order to devote himself more completely to religion and literature. Five years later, however, he was appointed to the archbishopric of Mainz, which he held until his death in 856. Rabanus, who was considered one of the most learned men of his time, wrote a voluminous commentary on the greater portion of the Bible, and was the author of numerous theological works..., the most important being the De institutione clericorum. His treatise De laudibus Sanctae Crucis contains figures in which rows of letters are cut by outlines of stars, crosses, and the like, so as to mark out words and sentences. Butler suggests that Dante may have borrowed thence the idea of his image in [Par. XVIII.91], where he represents the spirits as arranging themselves in the shape of letters to form the words 'Diligite iustitiam qui iudicatis terram'” (Toynbee, “Rabano” [Concise Dante Dictionary]). And see Nicolò Mineo, “Rabano Mauro,” ED IV (1973), pp. 817-18. While Mineo insists that a careful study of the extent of Dante's knowledge of Rabanus has yet to be undertaken, he does indicate some points of contact between Dante and at least Rabanus's commentary on Ezechiel, his De Universo, and his Liber de Cruce. Most are content with the traditional identification of the ninth-century biblical commentator; however, for the view that this Rabanus is not Maurus but Anglicus, see Robert E. Lerner (“On the Origins of the Earliest Latin Pope Prophecies: A Reconsideration,” Monumenta Germaniae Historica 33, Teil V [1988], pp. 631-32). Lerner did not have access to the DDP for a study of the identity of “Rabanus” among Dante's commentators, but would have found support for his thesis among some important early discussants, the Ottimo (comm. to this verse); Benvenuto (comm. to vv. 139-141), who adds that he was a brother of the Venerable Bede; John of Serravalle (comm. to vv. 139-141), following (as he often did) his magister, Benvenuto; Landino (comm. to vv. 139-141); and Vellutello (comm. to vv. 139-141). Among the early commentators only Francesco da Buti (comm. to vv. 127-141) refers to the Rabanus we routinely think was in Dante's mind. That modern tradition began in 1732 with Venturi (comm. to this verse). Lombardi (comm. to vv. 139-141), who delighted in disagreeing with Venturi, for once is in accord with him, and says as much. While Tommaseo (comm. to vv. 139-141) is a rare modern even to refer to Bede's brother as an alternative possibility, all but one of the post-Renaissance commentators back Rabanus Maurus, and very few even mention that there has been another candidate. Scartazzini (comm. to this verse) mentions the lack of awareness of the German Rabanus among the early commentators and cites the presence of the English one in their work, but does not treat their opinion as being worthy of serious study. Finally Campi (comm. to vv. 139-141) does not bat an eyelash when, out of the blue, he says that Rabanus was Bede's brother and does not even mention Rabanus Maurus; but he is apparently absolutely alone in the last one hundred and ten years (until Lerner came along) in thinking so.
Joachim of Flora “appears to have enjoyed in his own day, and long afterwards, a reputation for prophetic power; hence Bonaventure speaks of him as 'di spirito profetico dotato,' words which are said to be taken verbatim from the anthem still chanted on the Festival of St. Joachim in the churches of Calabria.
”Joachim was born c. 1145 at Celico, about 4 miles NE. of Cosenza in Calabria. He made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and on his return to Italy became a monk, entering (c. 1158) the Cistercian monastery of Sambucina. In 1177 he was made abbot of Corazzo in Calabria. In 1185, Pope Urban III appointed a deputy abbot in order that Joachim might have leisure to devote himself to his writings. In 1189 Joachim founded a monastery, San Giovanni in Fiore in the forest of the Sila among the mountains of Calabria, whence he was named 'de Floris.' From this institution, the rule of which was sanctioned by Celestine III in 1196, ultimately sprang the so-called Ordo Florensis (absorbed by the Cistercians, 1505). Joachim died c. 1202. The authenticated works of Joachim: a commentary upon the Apocalypse (Expositio in Apocalypsin), a Harmony of the Old and New Testaments (Concordia veteris et novi Testamenti), the Psalterium decem chordarum, and the Contra Judaeos. Many works have been attributed to him – among them, the Liber figurarum, the authorship of which is much debated [if, since the work of Leone Tondelli (Il libro delle figure dell'abate Gioachino da Fiore [Turin: SEI, 1940]), it has mainly been accepted as genuine]. He was credited with the authorship of a book on the popes, in which the persons and names of all the future popes were described“ (Toynbee, ”Giovacchino“ [Concise Dante Dictionary]).
On Dante's relationships with Joachim's work and various of its followers see Antoine Calvet (”Dante et les joachimismes,“ in Pour Dante: Dante et l'Apocalypse: Lectures humanistes de Dante, ed. Bruno Pinchard and Christian Trottmann [Paris: Champion, 2001], pp. 77-98). And see Bruno Nardi (”Dante e Gioacchino da Fiore,“ in his ”Lecturae“ e altri studi danteschi, ed. Rudy Abardo [Florence: Le Lettere, 1990 {1965}], pp. 277-331). For a more recent study, see Alessandro Ghisalberti (”Canto XII,“ in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone [Florence: Cesati, 2002], pp. 187-90).
Marco Veglia (”Per un'ardita umiltà. L'averroismo di Dante tra Guido Cavalcanti, Sigieri di Brabante e San Francesco d'Assisi,“ Schede Umanistiche 1 [2000]: 71) points out that Averroës (Inf. IV.144), Siger (Par. X.136), and Joachim is each the last figure in a group (fortieth, twelfth, and twelfth, respectively); they have in common the surprise generated by their presence in these groups.
Rather than attempting, as some do, to ”Franciscanize“ this second circle in the Sun (while ”Dominicanizing“ the first in Canto X), Steven Botterill (”Paradiso XII,“ in Dante's ”Divine Comedy,“ Introductory Readings III: ”Paradiso,“ ed. Tibor Wlassics [Lectura Dantis {virginiana}, 16-17, supplement, Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1995], p. 184) speaks of (and he is also referring to the first circle, seen in Par. X) the ”images of celebration, reconciliation, and harmony“ that typify this entire heaven.
There has been dispute over the reference of paladino, but most today seem content to believe that it refers to Dominic, rather than to Francis, Thomas, or Joachim. See Mario Scotti (”Canto XII,“ in Lectura Dantis Neapolitana: ”Paradiso,“ ed. P. Giannantonio [Naples: Loffredo, 2000 {1987}], p. 257n.).
On the verb inveggiar, see Singleton (comm. to this verse): ”The most plausible interpretation would seem to be that inveggiar, deriving from invidiare, to envy, would mean (as does its Provençal equivalent envejar) to envy in a good sense, hence to praise.“
For a review of both questions (the meaning of the verb and the reference of the noun), accompanied by an attempt to make related sense of them by denying an emergent consensus, see Porena (comm. to vv. 142-145). But for the paladin who rides out to re-establish that consensus, see Mattalia (comm. to verse 142). For a similar result, see the review offered by Giacalone (comm. to vv. 142-143).
It has long been observed that Dante constructed these two cantos so as to make them reflect one another in a thoroughgoing way. See the chart offered by Bosco/Reggio (who at times seem to be forcing the details to fit) for the parallel elements in Cantos XI and XII (numbers in parentheses refer to the number of terzine dedicated to each subject; square brackets contain one element not included in their table):
Canto XI Canto XII
General introduction: 28-36 (3) 37-45 (3)
Actions performed by the two saints: 40-42 (1) 34-36 (1)
Place of birth: 43-51 (3) 46-54 (3)
Birth: 49-51 (1) 55-57 (1)
[Saint's Life: 55-117 (21) 58-105 (16)]
Transition from biography to condemnation: 118-123 (2) 106-111 (2)
Condemnation of his own Order: 124-129 (2) 112-117 (2)
Faithful friars: 130-132 (1) 121-123 (1)
For a nearly identical table, without reference to any source, see Alessandro Ghisalberti (”Canto XII,“ in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone [Florence: Cesati, 2002], p. 182n.).
For the several elements that inform Dante's notion of courtesy, see Andrea Fassò (”La cortesia di Dante,“ in Filologia Romanza e cultura medievale: studi in onore di Elio Melli, ed. A. Fassò, L. Formisano, and M. Mancini [Alessandria: Edizioni dell'Orso, 1998], vol. I, pp. 279-301).
Ettore Bonora (”Canto XI,“ in Lectura Dantis Neapolitana: ”Paradiso,“ ed. P. Giannantonio [Naples: Loffredo, 2000 {1987}], pp. 281-83) discusses the phrase describing Aquinas's speech as ”discreto latin“ and says that it is obvious that Thomas is not speaking Latin, but using Latin stylistic devices (in the lingua franca of the poem, Italian) that ennoble speech. (And it should be pointed out that Dante several times uses the word latino to indicate either the Italian language or ”Italy“ itself. See the note to Inf. XXII.64-66, the passage in which it first appears; and see the note to Par. XVII.34-35, its last appearance in the poem.) For the connection between this descriptor, the adjective discreto, and, in Dante's formulations, Thomas's ”stress on the need to make distinctions,“ see Teodolinda Barolini (The Undivine ”Comedy“: Detheologizing Dante [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992)], pp. 203-6), citing Kenelm Foster and Ettore Bonora.
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