In forma dunque di candida rosa
mi si mostrava la milizia santa
che nel suo sangue Cristo fece sposa;
ma l'altra, che volando vede e canta
la gloria di colui che la 'nnamora
e la bontà che la fece cotanta,
sì come schiera d'ape che s'infiora
una fïata e una si ritorna
là dove suo laboro s'insapora,
nel gran fior discendeva che s'addorna
di tante foglie, e quindi risaliva
là dove 'l süo amor sempre soggiorna.
Le facce tutte avean di fiamma viva
e l'ali d'oro, e l'altro tanto bianco,
che nulla neve a quel termine arriva.
Quando scendean nel fior, di banco in banco
porgevan de la pace e de l'ardore
ch'elli acquistavan ventilando il fianco.
Né l'interporsi tra 'l disopra e 'l fiore
di tanta moltitudine volante
impediva la vista e lo splendore:
ché la luce divina è penetrante
per l'universo secondo ch'è degno,
sì che nulla le puote essere ostante.
Questo sicuro e gaudïoso regno,
frequente in gente antica e in novella,
viso e amore avea tutto ad un segno.
Oh trina luce che 'n unica stella
scintillando a lor vista, sì li appaga!
guarda qua giuso a la nostra procella!
Se i barbari, venendo da tal plaga
che ciascun giorno d'Elice si cuopra,
rotante col suo figlio ond' ella è vaga,
veggendo Roma e l'ardüa sua opra,
stupefaciensi, quando Laterano
a le cose mortali andò di sopra;
ïo, che al divino da l'umano,
a l'etterno dal tempo era venuto,
e di Fiorenza in popol giusto e sano,
di che stupor dovea esser compiuto!
Certo tra esso e 'l gaudio mi facea
libito non udire e starmi muto.
E quasi peregrin che si ricrea
nel tempio del suo voto riguardando,
e spera già ridir com' ello stea,
su per la viva luce passeggiando,
menava ïo li occhi per li gradi,
mo sù, mo giù e mo recirculando.
Vedëa visi a carità süadi,
d'altrui lume fregiati e di suo riso,
e atti ornati di tutte onestadi.
La forma general di paradiso
già tutta mïo sguardo avea compresa,
in nulla parte ancor fermato fiso;
e volgeami con voglia rïaccesa
per domandar la mia donna di cose
di che la mente mia era sospesa.
Uno intendëa, e altro mi rispuose:
credea veder Beatrice e vidi un sene
vestito con le genti glorïose.
Diffuso era per li occhi e per le gene
di benigna letizia, in atto pio
quale a tenero padre si convene.
E “Ov' è ella?” sùbito diss' io.
Ond' elli: “A terminar lo tuo disiro
mosse Beatrice me del loco mio;
e se riguardi sù nel terzo giro
dal sommo grado, tu la rivedrai
nel trono che suoi merti le sortiro.”
Sanza risponder, li occhi sù levai,
e vidi lei che si facea corona
reflettendo da sé li etterni rai.
Da quella regïon che più sù tona
occhio mortale alcun tanto non dista,
qualunque in mare più giù s'abbandona,
quanto lì da Beatrice la mia vista;
ma nulla mi facea, ché süa effige
non discendëa a me per mezzo mista.
“O donna in cui la mia speranza vige,
e che soffristi per la mia salute
in inferno lasciar le tue vestige,
di tante cose quant' i' ho vedute,
dal tuo podere e da la tua bontate
riconosco la grazia e la virtute.
Tu m'hai di servo tratto a libertate
per tutte quelle vie, per tutt' i modi
che di ciò fare avei la potestate.
La tua magnificenza in me custodi,
sì che l'anima mia, che fatt' hai sana,
piacente a te dal corpo si disnodi.”
Così orai; e quella, sì lontana
come parea, sorrise e riguardommi;
poi si tornò a l'etterna fontana.
E 'l santo sene: “Acciò che tu assommi
perfettamente,” disse, “il tuo cammino,
a che priego e amor santo mandommi,
vola con li occhi per questo giardino;
ché veder lui t'acconcerà lo sguardo
più al montar per lo raggio divino.
E la regina del cielo, ond'ïo ardo
tutto d'amor, ne farà ogne grazia,
però ch'i' sono il suo fedel Bernardo.”
Qual è colui che forse di Croazia
viene a veder la Veronica nostra,
che per l'antica fame non sen sazia,
ma dice nel pensier, fin che si mostra:
“Segnor mio Iesù Cristo, Dio verace,
or fu sì fatta la sembianza vostra?”;
tal era io mirando la vivace
carità di colui che 'n questo mondo,
contemplando, gustò di quella pace.
“Figliuol di grazia, quest' esser giocondo,”
cominciò elli, “non ti sarà noto,
tenendo li occhi pur qua giù al fondo;
ma guarda i cerchi infino al più remoto,
tanto che veggi seder la regina
cui questo regno è suddito e devoto.”
Io levai li occhi; e come da mattina
la parte orïental de l'orizzonte
soverchia quella dove 'l sol declina,
così, quasi di valle andando a monte
con li occhi, vidi parte ne lo stremo
vincer di lume tutta l'altra fronte.
E come quivi ove s'aspetta il temo
che mal guidò Fetonte, più s'infiamma,
e quinci e quindi il lume si fa scemo,
così quella pacifica oriafiamma
nel mezzo s'avvivava, e d'ogne parte
per igual modo allentava la fiamma;
e a quel mezzo, con le penne sparte,
vid' io più di mille angeli festanti,
ciascun distinto di fulgore e d'arte.
Vidi a lor giochi quivi e a lor canti
ridere una bellezza, che letizia
era ne li occhi a tutti li altri santi;
e s'io avessi in dir tanta divizia
quanta ad imaginar, non ardirei
lo minimo tentar di sua delizia.
Bernardo, come vide li occhi miei
nel caldo suo caler fissi e attenti,
li suoi con tanto affetto volse a lei,
che ' miei di rimirar fé più ardenti.
In fashion then as of a snow-white rose
Displayed itself to me the saintly host,
Whom Christ in his own blood had made his bride,
But the other host, that flying sees and sings
The glory of Him who doth enamour it,
And the goodness that created it so noble,
Even as a swarm of bees, that sinks in flowers
One moment, and the next returns again
To where its labour is to sweetness turned,
Sank into the great flower, that is adorned
With leaves so many, and thence reascended
To where its love abideth evermore.
Their faces had they all of living flame,
And wings of gold, and all the rest so white
No snow unto that limit doth attain.
From bench to bench, into the flower descending,
They carried something of the peace and ardour
Which by the fanning of their flanks they won.
Nor did the interposing 'twixt the flower
And what was o'er it of such plenitude
Of flying shapes impede the sight and splendour;
Because the light divine so penetrates
The universe, according to its merit,
That naught can be an obstacle against it.
This realm secure and full of gladsomeness,
Crowded with ancient people and with modern,
Unto one mark had all its look and love.
O Trinal Light, that in a single star
Sparkling upon their sight so satisfies them,
Look down upon our tempest here below!
If the barbarians, coming from some region
That every day by Helice is covered,
Revolving with her son whom she delights in,
Beholding Rome and all her noble works,
Were wonder-struck, what time the Lateran
Above all mortal things was eminent,—
I who to the divine had from the human,
From time unto eternity, had come,
From Florence to a people just and sane,
With what amazement must I have been filled!
Truly between this and the joy, it was
My pleasure not to hear, and to be mute.
And as a pilgrim who delighteth him
In gazing round the temple of his vow,
And hopes some day to retell how it was,
So through the living light my way pursuing
Directed I mine eyes o'er all the ranks,
Now up, now down, and now all round about.
Faces I saw of charity persuasive,
Embellished by His light and their own smile,
And attitudes adorned with every grace.
The general form of Paradise already
My glance had comprehended as a whole,
In no part hitherto remaining fixed,
And round I turned me with rekindled wish
My Lady to interrogate of things
Concerning which my mind was in suspense.
One thing I meant, another answered me;
I thought I should see Beatrice, and saw
An Old Man habited like the glorious people.
O'erflowing was he in his eyes and cheeks
With joy benign, in attitude of pity
As to a tender father is becoming.
And "She, where is she?" instantly I said;
Whence he: "To put an end to thy desire,
Me Beatrice hath sent from mine own place.
And if thou lookest up to the third round
Of the first rank, again shalt thou behold her
Upon the throne her merits have assigned her."
Without reply I lifted up mine eyes,
And saw her, as she made herself a crown
Reflecting from herself the eternal rays.
Not from that region which the highest thunders
Is any mortal eye so far removed,
In whatsoever sea it deepest sinks,
As there from Beatrice my sight; but this
Was nothing unto me; because her image
Descended not to me by medium blurred.
"O Lady, thou in whom my hope is strong,
And who for my salvation didst endure
In Hell to leave the imprint of thy feet,
Of whatsoever things I have beheld,
As coming from thy power and from thy goodness
I recognise the virtue and the grace.
Thou from a slave hast brought me unto freedom,
By all those ways, by all the expedients,
Whereby thou hadst the power of doing it.
Preserve towards me thy magnificence,
So that this soul of mine, which thou hast healed,
Pleasing to thee be loosened from the body."
Thus I implored; and she, so far away,
Smiled, as it seemed, and looked once more at me;
Then unto the eternal fountain turned.
And said the Old Man holy: "That thou mayst
Accomplish perfectly thy journeying,
Whereunto prayer and holy love have sent me,
Fly with thine eyes all round about this garden;
For seeing it will discipline thy sight
Farther to mount along the ray divine.
And she, the Queen of Heaven, for whom I burn
Wholly with love, will grant us every grace,
Because that I her faithful Bernard am."
As he who peradventure from Croatia
Cometh to gaze at our Veronica,
Who through its ancient fame is never sated,
But says in thought, the while it is displayed,
"My Lord, Christ Jesus, God of very God,
Now was your semblance made like unto this?"
Even such was I while gazing at the living
Charity of the man, who in this world
By contemplation tasted of that peace.
"Thou son of grace, this jocund life," began he,
"Will not be known to thee by keeping ever
Thine eyes below here on the lowest place;
But mark the circles to the most remote,
Until thou shalt behold enthroned the Queen
To whom this realm is subject and devoted."
I lifted up mine eyes, and as at morn
The oriental part of the horizon
Surpasses that wherein the sun goes down,
Thus, as if going with mine eyes from vale
To mount, I saw a part in the remoteness
Surpass in splendour all the other front.
And even as there where we await the pole
That Phaeton drove badly, blazes more
The light, and is on either side diminished,
So likewise that pacific oriflamme
Gleamed brightest in the centre, and each side
In equal measure did the flame abate.
And at that centre, with their wings expanded,
More than a thousand jubilant Angels saw I,
Each differing in effulgence and in kind.
I saw there at their sports and at their songs
A beauty smiling, which the gladness was
Within the eyes of all the other saints;
And if I had in speaking as much wealth
As in imagining, I should not dare
To attempt the smallest part of its delight.
Bernard, as soon as he beheld mine eyes
Fixed and intent upon its fervid fervour,
His own with such affection turned to her
That it made mine more ardent to behold.
For the resemblance of Dante's candida rosa to the rose-wheel windows of medieval cathedrals, see John Leyerle (“The Rose-Wheel Design and Dante's Paradiso,” University of Toronto Quarterly 46 [1977]: 280-308). He argues for the double significance of this design: the wheel of Fortune, symbol of the fleetingness of earthly success, and the rose, symbol of a higher and more ordered affection (one particularly related to the Blessed Virgin). He then goes on to suggest that Dante has this design in mind both in his depiction of Fortune's wheel (Inf. VII) and of the Rose found here in the Empyrean. Leyerle also believes that a particular rose-wheel window was in Dante's mind, the one that was completed in the façade of the basilica of S. Zeno in Verona at least by 1300. On the exterior of S. Zeno, carvings of human figures, all four of whom are either falling or rising, strengthen his first case; the lovely tracing of the light on the inner spaces of the cathedral are at least not unlike the design found in Dante's Rose. However, see John Scott (“Canto XXXI,” in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone [Florence: Cesati, 2002], p. 477), citing John Barnes (“Ut architectura poesis? The Case of Dante's candida rosa,” The Italianist 6 [1986], pp. 25 and 31, n. 30) for the argument that the term for “rose window” only begins to appear in the European vernaculars, first in France, in the very late seventeenth century. This is hardly conclusive evidence that Dante did not think of one of these round, large, beautiful, and many-hued glass structures, piercing stone and splashing the interior space with colored light, as the model for his Rose. (In fact, Rosetta Migliorini-Fissi's lectura of the canto [“Canto XXXI,” in “Paradiso”: Lectura Dantis Neapolitana, dir. P. Giannantonio {Naples: Loffredo, 2000 [1989]}, pp. 609-11] certainly lends credence to Leyerle's argument; while she does not mention his article, but does note two later treatments, found in Giuseppe Di Scipio's fifth chapter [The Symbolic Rose in Dante's “Paradiso” {Ravenna: Longo, 1984}] and in John Demaray [Dante and the Book of the Cosmos {Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1987}], she points out that the idea was first broached in 1870 by Ozanam.) The term may be anachronistic, but nothing in Leyerle's case depends upon the availability of the term. And if one were to select a particular window, Leyerle has chosen well. Verona was, at least for two lengthy periods in both decades of the fourteenth century in which Dante lived, the focal point of his life as an exile, at least until his removal to Ravenna probably in the final third of the second decade. San Zeno was (and is) an astoundingly beautiful church. In an unpublished article written ca. 1980, Hollander, in passing, raised the possibility that the head of a hound in the central panel of the left portal of the bronze doors of San Zeno, which he photographed in April 1975, might have served as instigation (or confirmation) of the prophecy of the Veltro on Dante's first visit to that city soon after he arrived there early in his exile.
Benvenuto (comm. to vv. 1-3) sees that the adverb dunque (then) is pointing to a previous discussion (Beatrice's first description of the Rose, in Par. XXX.124-132, “interrupted” by the “digression” [at XXX.133-145] of her bitter words about Henry's death and the corrupt recent popes Boniface and Clement). With “dunque” the poet announces his return to her prior subject. The word's casual, “vernacular-sounding” nature caught the attention of Aldo Scaglione (“Periodic Syntax and Flexible Meter in the Divina Commedia,” Romance Philology 21 [1967]: 1-22), as is reported by John Scott (“Canto XXXI,” in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone [Florence: Cesati, 2002], p. 476). Both of them refer to the term brought to bear in Dante studies by Erich Auerbach (“Sermo humilis,” in Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, tr. R. Manheim [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965 {1958}], pp. 25-66), sermo humilis, for the low style, in their classification of this linguistic gesture. Scott admires the juxtaposition of dunque with candida rosa (luminous white rose) as the expression of Dante's union of the low with the sublime.
Vellutello (comm. to vv. 1-3) was apparently the first commentator, in a long tradition, to link the “bianche stole” (white robes) last heard of in Paradiso XXX.129 with the adjective candida (luminous white) modifying rosa. Grandgent (comm. to this verse) is one of only two in the DDP to suggest a source in Albertus Magnus (De laudibus beatae Mariae Virginis [XII.iv.33]): “Et nota, quod Christus rosa, Maria rosa, Ecclesia rosa, fidelis anima rosa,” equating Jesus, Mary, the Church, and the faithful soul of a believer with the rose.
For the fullest bibliography for this canto available in print, see Gustavo Costa (“Il canto XXXI del Paradiso,” L'Alighieri 8 [1996], pp. 78-85).
The protagonist gazes at the milizia (soldiery) that fought on for the Church that Christ “adquisivit sanguine suo” (obtained with His own blood – Acts 20:28, first cited by Tommaseo [comm. to vv. 1-3]). And see the note to verse 127. Dante never stops seeing the Church as an army, even in its peaceful triumph.
The other host, the angels, now take the poet's attention, flying up to the “hive” while contemplating and singing Its glory.
The first five words of Paradiso I.1 are present here, verbatim.
The angelic host is given similetic expression. At first, by Pietro di Dante (Pietro1, comm. to vv. 7-9) and Benvenuto (comm. to vv. 4-12), these bees were seen as deriving from Aeneid I.430-431. However, from Vellutello (comm. to vv. 4-12) onward, commentators have heard the more relevant echo of the simile at Aeneid VI.703-709 (for that text, see the note to Paradiso XXX.64-66).
The conclusion of Albert Rossi's study (“The Poetics of Resurrection: Virgil's Bees [Paradiso XXXI, 1-12],” Romanic Review 80 [1989], pp. 313-24) accounts for the disparities in the two similes by showing that the situation in the Aeneid, from a Christian perspective, is less propitious than it first may seem. As a central case in point, Aeneas discovers that all these happy shades are about to be (from Dante's perspective) “reincarnated.” We can hardly imagine the joy felt by the hero of this “epic” when he sees the souls in the Rose as they will look when they are resurrected. Surely we are meant to remember Aeneas's quite different reaction, when he learns from Anchises about the flesh that these souls in the Elysian Fields will bear with them as they return to the world and its toils. Indeed, Aeneas laments their return to the world of flesh (Aen. VI.719-721). In the post-Platonic Aeneid, the world of flesh has nothing to do with spiritual perfection; in Dante's poem the beatified spirit has only a single unfulfilled desire: to be granted the return of its flesh. Thus, if Dante allows Virgilian text a renewed presence in his poem, he is not without the ironic distance that we have found present in even the first moments of the poem (for example, see the notes to Inf. II.28 and II.56-57).
For other possible sources for this passage, e.g., in St. Anselm and St. Bernard, see Scott (“Canto XXXI,” in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone [Florence: Cesati, 2002], p. 478). For several different passages in Bernard, see the following: Carroll (comm. to vv. 1-12), Torraca (comm. to these verses), Casini/Barbi (comm. to verse 7), and Trucchi (comm. to vv. 4-12), who also cites Anselm. A few later commentators also make gestures in both these directions, if without furnishing texts.
A discussion of the elaborate structural play in this simile is found in Richard Lansing (From Image to Idea: A Study of the Simile in Dante's “Commedia” [Ravenna: Longo, 1977], p. 37). The vehicle and tenor of the simile each mirrors both moments in the movement of the bees/angels, first down to the flowers/souls, then back up to the hive/God.
As we have seen (note to Par. XXX.64-66), Virgil's verb (insidere) for what the bees do at least suggests that, more than settling on the blossoms, they enter them. Thus Dante here follows Virgil faithfully, if others seem to believe he does not (see Bosco/Reggio [comm. to this verse]).
The word laboro is obviously a deliberate Latinism, since lavoro, Italian for “labor,” is metrically the same, and Dante's hand was not forced by rhyme. Why does he choose this linguistic tactic here? Perhaps to underline his borrowing from Virgil.
We are given a clue as to the separate “dwelling” of God. According to Fallani (comm. to vv. 40-42), among the Scholastics there was a tradition of a second “heaven” in the Empyrean, the coelum Trinitatis (the heaven of the Trinity), a “place” distinct from the Empyrean, where dwelt the triune God, separated from the blessed souls. In Fallani's opinion, Dante accepts that tradition. It is, however, not clear that he does. Perhaps he both honors and abrogates it, for his God is not in an “eleventh zone” of the heavens, but in the one He shares with the saints - if in a higher and thus different locus from them (the distance between the “floor” and the top tier of the Rose is greater than that between the lowest place in the sea and the highest place beneath the Moon [see the note to vv. 73-78]; the distance between that point in the Rose and God would seem to be infinite). And thus Dante can have things both ways: Is God separate from the saints? Yes and no. He is infinitely higher up than they, but that does not require that He “inhabits” another “place,” especially since His “habitation” is everywhere and nowhere. It seems clear that Dante intends to avoid this issue. For the presence of the phrase coelum Trinitatis, in a context that is related, see Thomas Aquinas, Super Evangelium S. Matthaei lectura (51.2, referring to Psalm 36:11 [37:11] and Matthew 5:5, “The meek shall inherit the earth”; Aquinas explains that the terra [earth] promised them is the Empyrean). It is not entirely clear, but he seems to think of the Empyrean and the coelum Trinitatis as though they might be considered one and the same.
Dante's description of the angels, flaming red faces, golden wings, and white “bodies,” is possibly based in biblical texts as well as popular iconography (as found, for instance, painted on church walls). Quite a few biblical sources have been a part of the indeterminate discussion down through the centuries. Perhaps the only sure citation (for the angels' red faces) is Scartazzini's (comm. to verse 13): Ezechiel 1:13: “their appearance was like burning coals of fire,” which has quantitatively the most support. A second at least likely attribution is Tommaseo's (comm. to this tercet), who, for the white, cites Matthew 28:3: the angel who appears at the tomb of Jesus, his vestments “white as snow” (some later commentators join [or substitute] Matthew's supposed “source,” Daniel 7:9). The gold has several suggestions based in Daniel 10:5, but this is not convincingly chosen, since the gold there described is that found on a belt, not on wings.
As for the “allegorical” meaning of the three colors, nearly all can agree that the red faces bespeak angelic love. However, the other two are the cause of disagreement. Some, unconvincingly, propose the Trinity (Love, Wisdom [?], and Power [??]); others select various abstractions, not much more convincingly. There is a general understanding that the angels and their colors are perfect in three respects: they love perfectly, fly on immortal pinions, and have “bodies” that are utterly pure. And that is probably enough.
In Dante's lovely transposition, these bees, now having gathered the “pollen” (God's love) from the hive, bring “honey” back from the hive to the souls: a celestial variant on nature's apiary artistry. These flowers have a second chance to enjoy their own (now enhanced) sweetness. Dante's “honey,” like God's love and their love for Him, is bidirectional.
As Augustine knew and taught, mortal love can never satisfy or be satisfied: “inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te” (restless is our heart until it find rest in you – Confessiones I.1). These two words, pace and ardore (“peace” and “love”), can be found together only here in the Empyrean, never in Dante's world below.
The numberless host of the angels, circling God in nine ranks (see the note to Par. XXVIII.25-27), do not hinder in any way either His ray from reaching the saints in the Rose or their ability to make out His splendor (which Aversano [Dante daccapo {glosses to the Paradiso}, copia d'eccezione, sent by the author on 11 September 2001], p. 159) particularizes as the Second Person, Christ, irradiated by the Father). Torraca (comm. to vv. 22-24) reminds us that, in Convivio (III.vii.5), Dante had in fact said that the angels were as though translucent (diafani). Indeed, all of them, those who believed in Christ to come and those who believed after the fact, are gazing lovingly on the triune God.
See Paradiso I.2 and the note to verse 5, above. Thus Dante, nearing his ending, reflects his beginning, a way of also signaling that the poem is approaching its conclusion.
We now see all the saints doing what, as we will learn in the next canto, they always do, looking up, fixing their gaze on God. There is no variety in Heaven, nor is it desired by the blessed.
We also learn, in that canto, what is intrinsic only to what we see here. There are more Jews in Heaven than Christians. This puzzled some commentators and infuriated others, the first group claiming that Dante could not possibly have meant this, the others believing him only too well. Pretty clearly Dante's neat division of the Rose into two equal parts, with a few empty seats in the Christian half and none in the Jewish one, is meant to force that conclusion upon a reader. As far as we know, there are only a very few gentiles among the Hebrew group. In fact, we know only that there are two, Cato (there thus should be at least one empty place in the full half, as Cato is still minding Purgatory) and Ripheus (Statius and Trajan were both alive in Christian times). Dante's point is clear: More Jews believed in Christ without the authority of His presence, as certified by the witness provided by the New Testament, than did Christians, even though they were given the answers before they took the exam.
In verse 27 the saints are said to aim their gaze at a single target. Now the poet speaks of that single essence as a “star,” but also as the Trinity, a “threefold Light,” bringing joy to all the blessed who behold it (and they all do). Some of the early commentators are less clear than they might be that this is not an “invocation” or part of the prayer that Dante will address to God in verse 30. This is an example of apostrophe, one of praise, and not part of a request.
The poet then addresses God, praying that He look down at the “storm” afflicting mortal lives on earth. Is there an implicit further request to be understood here? Most of the commentators think so. And all of them who are of this opinion believe that Dante is asking God to intervene on behalf of storm-tossed mortals. However, it seems at least as likely that he means no such thing. Rather, as the reference to Florence (verse 39) might also suggest, God ought to look down at the spectacle of human sin with grim recognition of the lostness of those living now on earth, almost all of them beyond redemption. Apparently the first to offer so point-blank a negative reading was Francesco Roffarè (“Canto XXXI,” in Lectura Dantis Scaligera: “Paradiso”, dir. M. Marcazzan [Florence: Le Monnier, 1968], p. 1107). What stands in the way of accepting this pessimistic interpretation is the highly possible presence of a citation of a passage, first cited by Tommaseo (comm. to vv. 28-30), in Boethius's Consolatio (I.m5.42-48): “O God, whoever you are, who joins [sic] all things in perfect harmony, look down upon this miserable earth! We men are no small part of Your great work, yet we wallow here in the stormy sea of fortune. Ruler of all things, calm the roiling waves and, as You rule the immense heavens, rule also the earth in stable concord” (tr. R. Green). Also germane is Monarchia I.xvi.4, first cited by Torraca (comm. to vv. 28-30): “O human race, how many storms and misfortunes and shipwrecks must toss you about while, transformed into a many-headed beast, you strive after conflicting things” (tr. P. Shaw). This last is part of the bitter conclusion of the first book of that treatise, and would not encourage one to believe that, if Dante were thinking of it here, he foresaw any sort of divine aid coming to the human race. On the other hand, see the prophecy concluding Paradiso XXVII, which does predict God's positive intervention in the affairs of men (similarly presented as a storm at sea [fortuna] – see the note to Par. XXVII.142-148). It is thus difficult to decide what the author intended us to gather about the nature of his request for God's attention.
For the possible presence of a citation here of Aeneid II.689-690, see Daniello (comm. to vv. 29-30).
In this lengthy simile the poet compares barbarians, probably coming, in times of peace, from Northern Europe to Rome, seeing the imperial buildings of the city before Constantine gave those buildings to the papacy just after his conversion in 312, to himself, moving in the opposite direction, “south” to “north,” from Florence to the New Jerusalem above the heavens. The magnificent church of St. John Lateran was destroyed by fire in 1308. Making things worse, Henry VII, denied a coronation in St. Peter's by Pope Clement, was crowned in the ruins of that church in 1312, nearly exactly one thousand years later, and died the next year (see the note to Par. XVII.82-84).
For a discussion of the various notions of what exactly Dante meant by the reference, see Gustavo Costa (“Il canto XXXI del Paradiso,” L'Alighieri 8 [1996], pp. 65-66).
Callisto was exiled by Diana from the “nunnery” of chaste forest maidens for her affair with Jove, which resulted in her giving birth to Arcas. “The 'zone' that is always 'covered by Helice' is the North. The nymph Helice or Callisto was transformed into the constellation of the Great Bear, and her son Arcas or Boötes into the Little Bear: Metam. II.496-530, especially 515-517; cf. Purg. XXV.131. The Bears, or Dippers, are close to the North Star” (Grandgent, comm. to vv. 31-34).
The phrase “a people just and sane” is the third and last in a series of parallel pairs, with the parallelism inverted in the third term: good/bad, good/bad, bad/good. See Paradiso XVI.152, where Florentines in “the good old days” were portrayed in much more positive terms. Now things have changed, and Florentines are those left behind in order for Dante to associate with such people as they once were, now found only in Heaven.
This is the fifteenth and last time we hear the word Fiorenza in the poem; we first heard it in Farinata's voice (Inf. X.92). While in fact Florence had replaced Rome as the greatest city of Italy, Dante here reverses that equation, making old Rome the type of the celestial city, while new Florence is portrayed as the city of the lost.
The second simile in a series of three dedicated to the theme of pilgrimage (see the note to vv. 103-111), this one presents Dante as a traveler to a shrine, a journey that he has vowed to make. For the pilgrimage motif in the entire poem, see Julia Bolton Holloway (The Pilgrim and the Book [New York: Peter Lang, 1992]).
While Dante leaves the particular shrine he may have had in mind shrouded in silence, the early commentators variously suggested the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, St. Peter's in Rome, and St. James of Compostella in Galicia (Spain), the three most important destinations for pilgrims in his day.
The Tuscan word for “now” (mo) was first heard at Inferno X.21 and leaves the poem after a dazzling three uses in a single line (and the twenty-third through twenty-fifth in all), perhaps underlining Dante's desire to be considered a vernacularizing poet even at the sublime height of the Empyrean. The effect of the triple presence of the word accents the eager nature of his glance, unable to move quickly enough in taking in every aspect of the place he has so long desired to see, the goal of his pilgrimage. Verse 54 describes Dante's similar hurried and eager glances cast around the Rose in the attempt to take it all in.
What the protagonist sees, faces, reminds us that it was only the first few souls whom he saw in the heavens whose human features he could make out (see the note to Par. III.58-63). Now he is seeing, as Beatrice promised he would (in Par. XXX.44-45), the souls as they will look when they are reincarnate.
The word onestade has only two occurrences in the poem. The last time we heard it was in the poet's description of Virgil when he was running up the slope of Mount Purgatory (Purg. III.11) after Cato chastised the souls who listened, charmed, to Casella's song. There Virgil is seen as having lost his dignity; here the souls in the Rose are seen by the protagonist as having theirs.
The mood is quiet, preparing us for a transition, moving from the general to the specific.
Compare the similar scene in Purgatorio XXX.43-54, when the protagonist turns back to speak to Virgil, only to find him gone. This scene, clearly reflective of that one, is much briefer and in an altogether different key. That one is three times as long, and in the tragic mode. Here, the disappearance of Beatrice has a quite different tonality. Among the differences is that she disappears from the “floor of the arena” only to reappear in her place in the Rose (see Par. XXXI.71).
What were the questions Dante still wanted Beatrice to answer? Are we supposed to wonder? Or is this mere “realistic detail” (i.e., are we merely supposed to reflect, “Of course, anyone would have a lot of questions during a first visit to Paradise”)? Some commentators, however, try to ascertain what questions Dante wanted to ask. For example, Jacopo della Lana (comm. to vv. 55-57): Dante wants to know the identities of those seated in the Rose; or Benvenuto (comm. to vv. 52-57): Dante wants to know where Mary and Beatrice are seated. Poletto (comm. to vv. 52-57) loses patience with such attempts, urging us not to seek what the poet has chosen not to reveal. Francesco da Buti (comm. to vv. 43-57) had solved the riddle acceptably, if obviously and unprofitably: Dante had questions about Paradise.... Steiner (comm. to these verses) has the wisest response: These lines refer to the questions that St. Bernard will eventually respond to, reading them in God. In fact, this is a rare occasion on which almost everyone is essentially correct. Bernard does answer Dante's voiced question (Where is Beatrice? [verse 64]) and one unvoiced one (Where is Mary? [verse 100]). He also in the next canto names a good number of souls seated in the Rose, as Jacopo suggested he might and as Bernard says he will (vv. 97-99).
In a recent conversation, Simone Marchesi made the suggestion that possibly this “comically resolved” scene is meant to remind us not only of Dante's “tragic” loss of Virgil in this poem (see the note to vv. 100-102) but also of Aeneas's turning back to Creusa to speak further, only to find her gone (Aen. II.790-794), a scene which itself looks back to Orpheus's loss of Eurydice in the fourth Georgic, which Dante has borrowed to such striking effect in Purgatorio XXX.49-51.
In place of Beatrice, he finds, near him on the “floor” of the Rose, an “old man” (it will turn out to be Bernard, but we do not know that yet), looking like the other blessed souls.
See Bosco/Reggio (comm. to Par. XXXII.40-75), who point out that by portraying Bernard as an old man (sene), Dante is violating a commonly understood ground rule of Paradiso, that all souls are, in their perfected beings, of the age of Christ in His last year on earth, when he was thirty-three. (This is sometimes given as thirty, thirty-three, thirty-four, or even thirty-five.) Why Dante chose to violate this “rule” is not clear. Bosco/Reggio opt for an artist's rebellion against a view that would inhibit his artistic virtuosity, an old Bernard being more believable than one in his renewed youth. And see Carroll (comm. to Par. XXXII.1-48), discussing the babes seated in the lower half of the Rose: “Further, as we saw in the case of Bernard himself, Dante appears to ignore the doctrine of Aquinas that in the Resurrection the saints will rise at the age of thirty. Bernard, himself an old man, draws his attention to the child faces and voices of the lower ranks [Par. XXXII.46-48]. Each soul, apparently, wears the form proper to the age it had attained on earth, freed of course from weakness and defect of the flesh. Dante evidently felt that there would have been something incongruous in making babies, who had never exercised true choice, appear full-grown in the flower of life. [Augustine thought otherwise: infants would receive 'by the marvelous and rapid operation of God that body which time by a slower process would have given them' (De Civ. Dei, XXII.14).]” For a counter-thrust, see Mario Aversano (“Sulla poetica dantesca nel canto XXIV del Purgatorio,” L'Alighieri 16 [2000]: 167) on verse 46 of the next canto. He argues that in Dante's Empyrean we see only the aspects worn by the saints as of “now,” in the year 1300. They will “mature” (or grow younger, as the case may be) in their appearance only after the General Resurrection, citing Inferno VI.103-111. Are we thus to believe that what Dante sees now is only temporary likenesses of these souls? Perhaps. But surely Dante would have given us a clue that this is what we should understand. In any case, Aversano is perhaps alone in this interpretation.
Bernard is Dante's last “father” in the poem. For a listing, see the note to Paradiso XVI.16.
See Scartazzini (comm. to this verse), reminding the reader of the Magdalen's remark to the resurrected Jesus, whom she mistakes for a “gardener,” upon not seeing Jesus where she expects to see him, in his sepulcher (John 20:15): “Si tu sustulisti eum, dicito mihi ubi...” (If you have carried him away, tell me where...“ [italics added]). The only other commentator in the DDP to cite this passage, without, it nearly goes without saying, citing his predecessor, is Poletto (comm. to vv. 64-69).
These are Dante's first spoken words since Paradiso XXVIII.57. See the note to Paradiso XIV.88-96 for notice of a considerably longer silence on his part.
Bernard's first words answer Dante's most pressing concern, the whereabouts of Beatrice, who, he points out, is in the third row from the top. For a similar scene, see Inferno II.109-112, where Beatrice tells how Lucy came to her exactly where we see her now and got her to leave this seat in order to go into Limbo to enlist Virgil's aid. Just so has she now enlisted Bernard's help on Dante's behalf and then reassumed her place.
Dante sees Beatrice literally in glory, resplendent with the light of God.
For Beatrice's crown and Aquinas's discussion of the additional aureola accorded especially favored saints, see the note to Paradiso XXIII.95 and Scartazzini (comm. to vv. 71-72).
From the highest point in the earth's sublunar atmosphere to the deepest seabed was not so far as Dante found himself now from Beatrice; and yet he could see her as though there were no appreciable distance between them. The poet has already explained (Par. XXX.121-123) that in the Empyrean, the usual physical laws that we know on earth are suspended.
In a sense, Dante here ”disinvents“ the as-yet-to-be-discovered technique of perspectival representation that would distinguish Italian painting of the next century.
See John Scott (”Canto XXXI,“ in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone [Florence: Cesati, 2002], p. 485) for this striking word (effige), which is used only here and in Paradiso XXXIII.131, thus further associating Beatrice and Christ. No commentator in the DDP looks up from his text to make that observation.
Apparently, the first commentator to pay any conscious attention to the protagonist's switch from the honorific voi, in addressing Beatrice, to the affectionate tu, was Grabher (comm. to vv. 70-93), if he does not make much out of it. Porena (comm. to vv. 79-90) also notices the change, but has quite a strong sense of what it signifies, only appearing to be a closing of the distance between them, but being in fact a distancing, because it is the tu addressed to a saint, or that is proffered both to God and to Mary. Indeed, both God and Mary, in Christian theology, have the unique gift of being divine and human simultaneously - as does Beatrice. Nonetheless, Chimenz (comm. to vv. 79-84) admires Porena's formulation. Giacalone (comm. to vv. 79-84) is also in their camp. A different view is advanced by Singleton (comm. to verse 80), one that proposes that the guide has become the individual soul of Beatrice (Singleton retains his sense that the guide is ”allegorical,“ while the individual is not, a judgment that some would dispute in its first instance, others in the second). Bosco/Reggio (comm. to vv. 82-84) also support Porena's thesis.
For a different view, see Hollander (Dante: A Life in Works [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001], pp. 126-27), pointing out that, as in the Vita nuova, Beatrice in Heaven may indeed be addressed with tu, ”only when she is at one with God, where and when there are no human hierarchies.“ The fact would seem to be that these eleven second-person-singular pronouns and verb endings (in only twelve verses) do indicate a more personal sense of affection, in a sort of uncontrolled outburst of personal enthusiasm, allowable now that they are on an equal footing as lovers of one another in God. We cannot imagine Jesus addressing Mary as Voi.
For the figural equation, Beatrice as Dante's ”Christ,“ see Hollander (Allegory in Dante's ”Commedia“ [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969]), p. 261. After calling attention to the poet's last words to Virgil in the poem (Purg. XXX.51), ”Virgilio a cui per mia salute die'mi“ (Virgil, to whom I gave myself for my salvation), he then continues as follows, discussing this tercet: ”At Dante's beginnings we do well to have in mind his endings, and vice versa. It is Beatrice, the figure of Christ, who brings Dante to salvation; it is Virgil who brings Dante to Beatrice. Dante does not (and did not in the Vita nuova) use the word salute lightly. His last words to Virgil give him the highest function anyone less than Christ can perform, and that is to bring another to Christ.“ In this vein, see John A. Scott (”Dante's Allegory,“ Romance Philology 26 [1973]: 570). See also Amilcare Iannucci (”Paradiso XXXI,“ in Dante's ”Divine Comedy,“ Introductory Readings III: ”Paradiso,“ ed. Tibor Wlassics [Lectura Dantis {virginiana}, 16-17, supplement, Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1995], p. 483 - citing his earlier article [”Beatrice in Limbo: a Metaphoric Harrowing of Hell,“ Dante Studies 97 {1979}: 23-45]), who also notes Beatrice's Christlike attributes in this passage (as, once again, does Scott [”Canto XXXI,“ in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone {Florence: Cesati, 2002}], p. 486). This has become more or less the standard interpretation of those considered by some in Italy to be part of a so-called scuola americana, ”the American school (of Dante studies).“ And see Emilio Pasquini (Dante e le figure del vero: La fabbrica della ”Commedia“ [Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2001], p. 254), remarking on the ”near-heterodoxy“ of these verses.
To be honest, this reading seems so obvious that one feels apologetic for harping on it. However, to understand what blinders Dantists accustomed themselves to wearing whenever they came near the border of so ”blasphemous“ a theologized poetic for the poem, see the allegorizing glosses of such as Benvenuto da Imola (comm. to this tercet). In his reading (and he is far from being alone in it), Beatrice becomes ”theology“ who comes down to this ”hell on earth“ (our world, not Limbo) in order to bring her message to all mortals (including, we assume, Dante Alighieri). This is so flagrantly wrongheaded that one has to admire Benvenuto at least for his stubbornness in not yielding to a Christological interpretation of Beatrice nor to a personal one of Dante, who, in his treatment, is only a stand-in for all humankind. This, one of the most personal moments of the Commedia, is thus turned into a kind of simpleminded version of an uplifting moral tale, one only implausibly attributed to the genius of Dante. Reviewing responses to this passage in the DDP, one finds the word ”Christ“ only in Singleton's commentary (to verse 91) of 1975. How did (or does) anyone read this passage and not think of Christ's descent into Hell and His subsequent harrowing of the Hebrew saints? However, not even Giacalone, the first commentator who presents himself as a follower of the figural interpretation sponsored first by Auerbach (cited by him in 56 glosses) and then by Singleton (cited in 25), responds as one might have expected he would to this provocation. It is surely more shocking that Singleton, who only mentions Auerbach once in his commentary, not even on that occasion (his gloss to Purg. XII.40-42) refers to Auerbach's discussions of Dante's figural technique (something Singleton never did in any of his publications; see Hollander [Dante: A Life in Works {New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001}, p. 38]). Talk about Harold Bloom's ”anxiety of influence“!
The typological equations (Beatrice = Moses; Dante = the Hebrews) once again align Beatrice with Christ. See the note to verses 79-81. Here, as there, the commentators seem to want to avoid such ”blasphemous“ associations. For the Exodus as the poem's controlling trope, see Singleton (”'In exitu Israel de Aegypto,'“ Annual Report of the Dante Society 78 [1960]: 1-24).
As one who had sinned against Beatrice once before, Dante knows whereof he speaks. He thus prays that she will help him remain pure of soul for the rest of his time on earth when he is again without her. When he wrote these lines, he probably did not realize how brief that time would be.
This is the final tercet devoted to the interaction of the two lovers in the poem. Her final smile yields to her returning her attention to the source of all being.
Bernard summarizes the tasks that lie ahead for Dante: He must contemplate this resplendent gathering (splendore) to prepare himself to see, up through the ray (raggio), the source of the irradiating light (luce). See the note on Dante's physics of light, Paradiso XXIII.82-84.
Dante uses the Latinism sene (from senex) again. See the note to verse 59. The word had appeared, in a Latin form, once before, in Purg. XXX.17.
A disputed verse. Some believe the prayer is Beatrice's, the love Bernard's; others think that both are Beatrice's. See Scartazzini (comm. to this verse) for a summary of the two positions and a strong vote for the first solution, but eventual openness to the second.
Bernard's suggestion might indicate that one of Dante's unasked questions (see the note to vv. 56-57) had to do with the population of the Rose.
Bernard names himself, having sounded like a lyric poet of Dante's youthful acquaintance talking about his lady, associating himself, however, not with a Giovanna, a Lagia, or a Selvaggia, but with the Blessed Virgin Mary. Everything about this moment comes as a surprise. We did not anticipate a new guide in the poem, if Dante surely decided that he wanted to have a chance to bid farewell to Beatrice, as well as to present her as being back in bliss. In addition, perhaps for reasons reflecting his personal devotion (for a possible confirmation, see Par. XXIII.88-89), he wanted a guide more associated with Mary for this highest part of the poem (not that Beatrice would have been in any way unqualified); perhaps he also felt a numerological tug in deciding to have a trinitarian third instructor. Still, one sympathizes with those who feel that there is something ungainly about the substitution of Bernard for Beatrice. (See the discussion in Steven Botterill [Dante and the Mystical Tradition: Bernard of Clairvaux in the ”Commedia“ {Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994}], pp. 64-115.) And no one who defends the advent of a new guide can argue that it has been at all prepared for, as was Beatrice's (as early as Inf. I.121-126). Lino Pertile (”Quale amore va in Paradiso?“ in ”Le donne, i cavalieri, l'arme, gli amori“: Poema e romanzo: la narrativa lunga in Italia, ed. Francesco Bruni [Venice: Marsilio, 2001]), pp. 67-69) goes so far as to argue, if not particularly convincingly, that Dante had planned (and the first sign of such a plan revealed itself, according to him, in Inf. II.24-25, with the indication of Mary, Lucy, and Beatrice) to have Beatrice replaced by Lucy. Whatever one thinks of that solution, one must admit that there is a problem here, one that a few strokes of the quill could have avoided. However, see Francesco Mazzoni (”San Bernardo e la visione poetica della Divina Commedia,“ in Seminario Dantesco Internazionale: Atti del primo convegno tenutosi al Chauncey Conference Center, Princeton, 21-23 ottobre 1994, ed. Z.G. Baranski [Florence: Le Lettere, 1997], pp. 171-241), who insists on the influence of Bernard's work (or that which Dante considered Bernardine) behind the text of the poem from its outset. And see Amilcare Iannucci (”Paradiso XXXI,“ in Dante's ”Divine Comedy,“ Introductory Readings III: ”Paradiso,“ ed. Tibor Wlassics [Lectura Dantis {virginiana}, 16-17, supplement, Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1995], pp. 481-82), for the notion that the surprise of Bernard's presence is only a tactic to alert us to his importance for Dante. A series of essays discussing the reflection of several of Bernard's writings in the Commedia is found in Mario Aversano (San Bernardo e Dante. Teologia e poesia della conversione [Salerno: Edisud, 1990]). For a summary of Bernard's importance for Dante and of the presence of his writing behind the cantos in which he appears, see Carroll (comm. to vv. 118-142).
For the possible influence of Bernard's De diligendo Deo on the structure of the entire poem, see Hollander (”The Invocations of the Commedia,“ Yearbook of Italian Studies 3 [1976]: 235-40, repr. in Studies in Dante [Ravenna: Longo, 1980], pp. 33-38). And see the notes to Purgatorio XXVII.139-141 and Paradiso XXXIII.127-132. For a compact treatment of Bernard's life, see Raoul Manselli, ”Bernardo di Chiaravalle, santo,“ ED (I [1970]), pp. 601a-5b, which, however, skirts the question of the actual literary influence of Bernard on Dante. For an introductory treatment in English, one may, in addition to Botterill, consult E.G. Gardner (Dante and the Mystics [London: Dent, 1913], pp. 111-43).
Dante does not refer to Bernard's urgent and frequent support of the Second Crusade (1145-1147) in his preaching. For a study of this crusade, inevitably linked to the adjective ”disastrous,“ see Giles Constable (”The Second Crusade as Seen by Contemporaries,“ Traditio 9 [1953]: 213-279). Dante's silence is perhaps not surprising, given its failure.
Bernard names himself only at the end of his speech (vv. 94-102). The impression of humility is perhaps less pronounced than when similar behavior was exhibited by both Thomas Aquinas (Par. X.82-99) and Cacciaguida (Par. XV.88-135), who indeed speak longer before naming themselves. Nonetheless, his comportment is clearly intended to portray his modesty.
This long but essentially simple simile links Dante once again with a pilgrim arriving at his destination, in this case Rome, where the Veronica, a most holy relic, was preserved. Veronica was supposedly a woman of Jerusalem who offered Jesus a cloth (sudarium) to wipe the blood and sweat from His face on the way to Calvary. His features remained on the cloth, which was eventually taken to St. Peter's in Rome, where it was displayed to the faithful on certain occasions. That her name was actually Veronica is doubtful, since her name itself means ”true likeness“ (vera icona). The whole history of this image (and of other relics like it, particularly the Shroud of Turin) is controversial. But for Dante, there was not even a question of its authenticity. See his earlier reference, at the climactic moment of the Vita nuova (XL.1), to pilgrims on their way to Rome to see the Veronica, a moment fulfilled here in this poem by Dante's pilgrimage to ”that Rome where Christ Himself is Roman“ (Purg. XXXII.102). For a discussion of both these moments, see Alessandro Vettori (”Veronica: Dante's Pilgrimage from Image to Vision,“ Dante Studies 121 [2003 {2006}]: 43-65).
See Richard Lansing (From Image to Idea: A Study of the Simile in Dante's ”Commedia“ [Ravenna: Longo, 1977]), pp. 137-40) for consideration of three consecutive similes in this canto (see also vv. 31-40 and 43-48) dedicated to the theme of completion of a pilgrimage.
Croatia, for Dante's audience, represented a very distant and ”foreign“ place, as in the more recent expression ”from here to Timbuktu.“
See Singleton (comm. on these verses): ”Bernard's two principal qualifications to serve as final guide in the journey stem from his special devotion to the Virgin Mary and from his fame as one dedicated to mystical contemplation with special emphasis on the affective movement of the mind as it rises to God, an emphasis which later Franciscan thought and devotion adopted and stressed. It was believed that Bernard, in such meditation, had a foretaste of the peace of Heaven. In the Meditationes piissimae (XIV, 36-37), ascribed to Bernard, there is a rhapsody on the joys of contemplation. See also Bernard, Sermones in Cantica Canticorum, XXIII, 15-16. As noted above, Dante in his Letter to Can Grande (Epist. XIII, 80) refers the reader of his Paradiso to Bernard's work De contemplatione.“
Dante, in fixing his gaze on Bernard, who has descended from his seat in the Rose upon Beatrice's urging (see verse 66), has fixated on a lesser version of the good and true than that which Bernard will eventually bring him to see. At least for now the Virgin is the best sight available to him, and she is at the very highest point, in the top row of the stadium-rose.
How many souls are seated in the Rose? Dante keeps his counsel on that question. The Apocalypse numbers the saved as 144,000 (Apoc. 7:1, 7:4; 14:1, 14:3). Landino (comm. to Par. XXX.133-138) reports that some say that the number of blessed is equivalent to the number of fallen angels, while others are of the opinion that it is the same as that of the remaining good angels. (For Dante's previous opinion on a related matter, see the note to Paradiso XXIX.50.) Landino concludes that only God knows the number of angels, as Aquinas says.
This passage is seamless, describing a single action, Dante's raising his eyes (verse 118) at Bernard's command and seeing Mary, surrounded by angels and admired by the rest of the blessed. It is like a painting of the Virgin seated in glory. However, since it is only like a painting, the poet introduces his central scene with a double simile, each element of which begins ”e come.“
Until now, we have been shown the Empyrean with a long-range perspective, seeing all the Rose as a unit divided into many parts. Now we focus on a single part of it and are presented with a new sense of graduated selectivity, in which the things that are nearest Mary are brightest, while those farthest from her gradually fade from view.
The first simile pairs Mary with the brightness of the Sun at its rising, as compared with the entire rim of the sky. We are asked to imagine a 360o view: The east and the parts of the horizon nearest it are brightest, the west, where the Sun lit up the horizon the evening before, the darkest. As we will see, this arrangement is perfectly mirrored in the varying brightness of parts of the Rose.
In the second simile, the brightness at the locus of the rising Sun is contrasted with the diminished light on either side of it, and is compared either to all the Rose or to Mary (see the note to verse 127).
Once again, as in the first of these conjoined similes (vv. 118-123), the varied lightness in parts of the Rose is insisted on.
Rhyme forces Dante into synecdoche, the part temo (yoke-beam, or chariot pole [i.e., that to which the horses are attached]) for the whole (chariot). For other occurrences of this word (timone in modern Italian), see Purgatorio XXII.119; XXXII.49, 140, 144; Paradiso XIII.9.
We last heard of Phaeton, a frequent presence in the poem, in Paradiso XVII.3 (see the note to XVII.1-6). Why Dante wants to recall that tragic adventure here is not immediately evident.
This arresting oxymoron, ”peaceful oriflamme“ (or ”battle flag of peace“), has a varied history in the commentaries. Most trace its origin to the French royal battle standard. John Scott (”Canto XXXI,“ in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone [Florence: Cesati, 2002], p. 488) points out that, whereas many contemporary commentators say that this banner of the French kings, maintained at St. Denis, was red, it was actually red and gold, as its Latin derivation makes plain (auri fiamma [golden flame]). Earlier notice of this begins perhaps with Benvenuto (comm. to vv. 124-129): ”Maria flamma ignis aeterni et aurea“ (Mary, a golden tongue of eternal fire). Venturi (comm. to this verse) seems to have been the first to identify the French provenance of the banner and the view that whoever fought beneath it was unconquerable. A French tradition claimed that the banner was first brought to the son of the Christian emperor Constantine by an angel. Andreoli (comm. to this verse) refines the source of the tale a bit, referring to a version indicating that Charlemagne fought under it. The most complex discussion of the various possibilities is found in Scartazzini (comm. to this verse). See Oelsner's brief exposition (comm. to this verse), which, however, reverses the more usual relations between the red and the gold: ”The Oriflamme (aurea flamma) was the standard given by the Angel Gabriel to the ancient kings of France, representing a [red] flame on a golden ground. No one who fought under it could be conquered. The golden glow of heaven is the invincible ensign not of war but peace.“
Most who write about this verse play up the opposed values of the two elements in this image, Mary's peaceful conquest as opposed to the French (or any) king's military exploits. However, we should remember that this gathering, too, is an army, if now a triumphant one, with all but a final battle (that of the returning Christ against Antichrist at the end of days) behind it. (For a view in absolute disagreement with this one, see Porena [comm. to this verse].) While there is some dispute about whether the oriafiamma is Mary alone, all the Rose (including her), or some portion of the blessed souls distinct from her, see Trucchi (comm. to vv. 124-129) for an interesting solution. The oriafiamma is the entire Rose, Mary is the golden flame, the rest of the blessed (the petals of the ”rose“) the red background. While this is not in accord with the minority explanation of what is figure, what background, it surely is worth serious consideration for its complete explanation of all the elements in the image. However, it is clear that Mary is the light referred to as the Sun in both similes. She is at the center (nel mezzo) of things as the protagonist now sees them.
For a study of the resonance of martial epic in the poem, particularly in Paradiso, see Hollander (”Dante and the Martial Epic,“ Mediaevalia 12 [1989]: 62-91; Ital trans.: ”Dante e l'epopea marziale,“ Letture classensi 18 [1989], pp. 93-113), who, however, fails to consider this verse as part of that resonance.
Around Mary, the central object in this picture, the protagonist sees an assemblage of angels, apparently of all nine orders, since they seem differentiated from one another in how bright they shine and in what they do.
The topos of the inexpressibility of great beauty, now that it is no longer needed for Beatrice (see the note to Par. XXX.22-27), is made to accompany Mary.
Dante's verb imaginar (referring to the mind's ability to receive and store images received from outside it) is quite different from the more modern instance of the word, with its clear reference to invention of things not previously seen by the imaginer. See the note to Purgatorio XVII.13-18.
The canto concludes with Bernard, famous as the ”lover-poet“ of Mary, gazing, alongside her newest ”lover-poet,“ Dante Alighieri. His awareness of Bernard's affection for her makes his own all the more ardent.
For a recent discussion of whether or not Dante is to be considered ”a mystic,“ see Steven Botterill (”Mysticism and Meaning in Dante's Paradiso,“ in Dante for the New Millennium, ed. Teodolinda Barolini and H. Wayne Storey [New York: Fordham University Press, 2003], pp. 143-51), who is mainly in the affirmative. It is difficult to believe that the final cantos of the poem, so obviously reflective of a great mystic, St. Bernard, and so triumphantly presenting a final vision, can be thought of as separate from the tradition of Western mysticism. At the same time, it is difficult to think of the earlier ninety-seven cantos of the poem as being essentially mystical in character. Thus the best answer seems to be ”no“ and ”yes“ – in that order. But see John Scott (”Canto XXXI,“ in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone [Florence: Cesati, 2002], pp. 407-8) for a cautious denial of even this much mysticism in Dante's poetry. One supposes that some (who find Dante's poetry more like Blake's than not) think of him as a mystic, while others (who do not so find) deny that he is one.
This is the sort of moment that might cause a doggedly literal-minded reader to observe that Dante could not possibly have observed the movement of Bernard's eyes because he was staring fixedly at the Virgin. For a passage that has indeed served as similar cause of over-zealous concern for ”realistic“ details, see the note to Purg. XXI.10-14.
The phrase fissi e attenti (fixed and intent) is repeated here for the third time. We heard it first in Purgatorio II.118, used in malo, for Dante and the newly arrived souls who are seduced by Casella's song and require Cato's reprimand in order to get back on their path toward God. It then appears in Purgatorio XXXII.1, where it describes Dante's gaze, fixed on Beatrice, trying to slake his ten-year ”thirst“ for her presence. That repetition was perhaps intended to counter the first instance, the context of which was the song that Dante had composed in favor of Beatrice's rival, the Lady Philosophy (her identity at least according to the Convivio [first at II.xii.9]). Now it is used a second time in bono, here referring to Dante's new ”lady,“ the Virgin. Unlike the last one, this ocular gesture does not reflect the rejection of one lady in favor of another. In Heaven there may be no marrying, but there is no limit to the number of objects of one's affection.
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In forma dunque di candida rosa
mi si mostrava la milizia santa
che nel suo sangue Cristo fece sposa;
ma l'altra, che volando vede e canta
la gloria di colui che la 'nnamora
e la bontà che la fece cotanta,
sì come schiera d'ape che s'infiora
una fïata e una si ritorna
là dove suo laboro s'insapora,
nel gran fior discendeva che s'addorna
di tante foglie, e quindi risaliva
là dove 'l süo amor sempre soggiorna.
Le facce tutte avean di fiamma viva
e l'ali d'oro, e l'altro tanto bianco,
che nulla neve a quel termine arriva.
Quando scendean nel fior, di banco in banco
porgevan de la pace e de l'ardore
ch'elli acquistavan ventilando il fianco.
Né l'interporsi tra 'l disopra e 'l fiore
di tanta moltitudine volante
impediva la vista e lo splendore:
ché la luce divina è penetrante
per l'universo secondo ch'è degno,
sì che nulla le puote essere ostante.
Questo sicuro e gaudïoso regno,
frequente in gente antica e in novella,
viso e amore avea tutto ad un segno.
Oh trina luce che 'n unica stella
scintillando a lor vista, sì li appaga!
guarda qua giuso a la nostra procella!
Se i barbari, venendo da tal plaga
che ciascun giorno d'Elice si cuopra,
rotante col suo figlio ond' ella è vaga,
veggendo Roma e l'ardüa sua opra,
stupefaciensi, quando Laterano
a le cose mortali andò di sopra;
ïo, che al divino da l'umano,
a l'etterno dal tempo era venuto,
e di Fiorenza in popol giusto e sano,
di che stupor dovea esser compiuto!
Certo tra esso e 'l gaudio mi facea
libito non udire e starmi muto.
E quasi peregrin che si ricrea
nel tempio del suo voto riguardando,
e spera già ridir com' ello stea,
su per la viva luce passeggiando,
menava ïo li occhi per li gradi,
mo sù, mo giù e mo recirculando.
Vedëa visi a carità süadi,
d'altrui lume fregiati e di suo riso,
e atti ornati di tutte onestadi.
La forma general di paradiso
già tutta mïo sguardo avea compresa,
in nulla parte ancor fermato fiso;
e volgeami con voglia rïaccesa
per domandar la mia donna di cose
di che la mente mia era sospesa.
Uno intendëa, e altro mi rispuose:
credea veder Beatrice e vidi un sene
vestito con le genti glorïose.
Diffuso era per li occhi e per le gene
di benigna letizia, in atto pio
quale a tenero padre si convene.
E “Ov' è ella?” sùbito diss' io.
Ond' elli: “A terminar lo tuo disiro
mosse Beatrice me del loco mio;
e se riguardi sù nel terzo giro
dal sommo grado, tu la rivedrai
nel trono che suoi merti le sortiro.”
Sanza risponder, li occhi sù levai,
e vidi lei che si facea corona
reflettendo da sé li etterni rai.
Da quella regïon che più sù tona
occhio mortale alcun tanto non dista,
qualunque in mare più giù s'abbandona,
quanto lì da Beatrice la mia vista;
ma nulla mi facea, ché süa effige
non discendëa a me per mezzo mista.
“O donna in cui la mia speranza vige,
e che soffristi per la mia salute
in inferno lasciar le tue vestige,
di tante cose quant' i' ho vedute,
dal tuo podere e da la tua bontate
riconosco la grazia e la virtute.
Tu m'hai di servo tratto a libertate
per tutte quelle vie, per tutt' i modi
che di ciò fare avei la potestate.
La tua magnificenza in me custodi,
sì che l'anima mia, che fatt' hai sana,
piacente a te dal corpo si disnodi.”
Così orai; e quella, sì lontana
come parea, sorrise e riguardommi;
poi si tornò a l'etterna fontana.
E 'l santo sene: “Acciò che tu assommi
perfettamente,” disse, “il tuo cammino,
a che priego e amor santo mandommi,
vola con li occhi per questo giardino;
ché veder lui t'acconcerà lo sguardo
più al montar per lo raggio divino.
E la regina del cielo, ond'ïo ardo
tutto d'amor, ne farà ogne grazia,
però ch'i' sono il suo fedel Bernardo.”
Qual è colui che forse di Croazia
viene a veder la Veronica nostra,
che per l'antica fame non sen sazia,
ma dice nel pensier, fin che si mostra:
“Segnor mio Iesù Cristo, Dio verace,
or fu sì fatta la sembianza vostra?”;
tal era io mirando la vivace
carità di colui che 'n questo mondo,
contemplando, gustò di quella pace.
“Figliuol di grazia, quest' esser giocondo,”
cominciò elli, “non ti sarà noto,
tenendo li occhi pur qua giù al fondo;
ma guarda i cerchi infino al più remoto,
tanto che veggi seder la regina
cui questo regno è suddito e devoto.”
Io levai li occhi; e come da mattina
la parte orïental de l'orizzonte
soverchia quella dove 'l sol declina,
così, quasi di valle andando a monte
con li occhi, vidi parte ne lo stremo
vincer di lume tutta l'altra fronte.
E come quivi ove s'aspetta il temo
che mal guidò Fetonte, più s'infiamma,
e quinci e quindi il lume si fa scemo,
così quella pacifica oriafiamma
nel mezzo s'avvivava, e d'ogne parte
per igual modo allentava la fiamma;
e a quel mezzo, con le penne sparte,
vid' io più di mille angeli festanti,
ciascun distinto di fulgore e d'arte.
Vidi a lor giochi quivi e a lor canti
ridere una bellezza, che letizia
era ne li occhi a tutti li altri santi;
e s'io avessi in dir tanta divizia
quanta ad imaginar, non ardirei
lo minimo tentar di sua delizia.
Bernardo, come vide li occhi miei
nel caldo suo caler fissi e attenti,
li suoi con tanto affetto volse a lei,
che ' miei di rimirar fé più ardenti.
In fashion then as of a snow-white rose
Displayed itself to me the saintly host,
Whom Christ in his own blood had made his bride,
But the other host, that flying sees and sings
The glory of Him who doth enamour it,
And the goodness that created it so noble,
Even as a swarm of bees, that sinks in flowers
One moment, and the next returns again
To where its labour is to sweetness turned,
Sank into the great flower, that is adorned
With leaves so many, and thence reascended
To where its love abideth evermore.
Their faces had they all of living flame,
And wings of gold, and all the rest so white
No snow unto that limit doth attain.
From bench to bench, into the flower descending,
They carried something of the peace and ardour
Which by the fanning of their flanks they won.
Nor did the interposing 'twixt the flower
And what was o'er it of such plenitude
Of flying shapes impede the sight and splendour;
Because the light divine so penetrates
The universe, according to its merit,
That naught can be an obstacle against it.
This realm secure and full of gladsomeness,
Crowded with ancient people and with modern,
Unto one mark had all its look and love.
O Trinal Light, that in a single star
Sparkling upon their sight so satisfies them,
Look down upon our tempest here below!
If the barbarians, coming from some region
That every day by Helice is covered,
Revolving with her son whom she delights in,
Beholding Rome and all her noble works,
Were wonder-struck, what time the Lateran
Above all mortal things was eminent,—
I who to the divine had from the human,
From time unto eternity, had come,
From Florence to a people just and sane,
With what amazement must I have been filled!
Truly between this and the joy, it was
My pleasure not to hear, and to be mute.
And as a pilgrim who delighteth him
In gazing round the temple of his vow,
And hopes some day to retell how it was,
So through the living light my way pursuing
Directed I mine eyes o'er all the ranks,
Now up, now down, and now all round about.
Faces I saw of charity persuasive,
Embellished by His light and their own smile,
And attitudes adorned with every grace.
The general form of Paradise already
My glance had comprehended as a whole,
In no part hitherto remaining fixed,
And round I turned me with rekindled wish
My Lady to interrogate of things
Concerning which my mind was in suspense.
One thing I meant, another answered me;
I thought I should see Beatrice, and saw
An Old Man habited like the glorious people.
O'erflowing was he in his eyes and cheeks
With joy benign, in attitude of pity
As to a tender father is becoming.
And "She, where is she?" instantly I said;
Whence he: "To put an end to thy desire,
Me Beatrice hath sent from mine own place.
And if thou lookest up to the third round
Of the first rank, again shalt thou behold her
Upon the throne her merits have assigned her."
Without reply I lifted up mine eyes,
And saw her, as she made herself a crown
Reflecting from herself the eternal rays.
Not from that region which the highest thunders
Is any mortal eye so far removed,
In whatsoever sea it deepest sinks,
As there from Beatrice my sight; but this
Was nothing unto me; because her image
Descended not to me by medium blurred.
"O Lady, thou in whom my hope is strong,
And who for my salvation didst endure
In Hell to leave the imprint of thy feet,
Of whatsoever things I have beheld,
As coming from thy power and from thy goodness
I recognise the virtue and the grace.
Thou from a slave hast brought me unto freedom,
By all those ways, by all the expedients,
Whereby thou hadst the power of doing it.
Preserve towards me thy magnificence,
So that this soul of mine, which thou hast healed,
Pleasing to thee be loosened from the body."
Thus I implored; and she, so far away,
Smiled, as it seemed, and looked once more at me;
Then unto the eternal fountain turned.
And said the Old Man holy: "That thou mayst
Accomplish perfectly thy journeying,
Whereunto prayer and holy love have sent me,
Fly with thine eyes all round about this garden;
For seeing it will discipline thy sight
Farther to mount along the ray divine.
And she, the Queen of Heaven, for whom I burn
Wholly with love, will grant us every grace,
Because that I her faithful Bernard am."
As he who peradventure from Croatia
Cometh to gaze at our Veronica,
Who through its ancient fame is never sated,
But says in thought, the while it is displayed,
"My Lord, Christ Jesus, God of very God,
Now was your semblance made like unto this?"
Even such was I while gazing at the living
Charity of the man, who in this world
By contemplation tasted of that peace.
"Thou son of grace, this jocund life," began he,
"Will not be known to thee by keeping ever
Thine eyes below here on the lowest place;
But mark the circles to the most remote,
Until thou shalt behold enthroned the Queen
To whom this realm is subject and devoted."
I lifted up mine eyes, and as at morn
The oriental part of the horizon
Surpasses that wherein the sun goes down,
Thus, as if going with mine eyes from vale
To mount, I saw a part in the remoteness
Surpass in splendour all the other front.
And even as there where we await the pole
That Phaeton drove badly, blazes more
The light, and is on either side diminished,
So likewise that pacific oriflamme
Gleamed brightest in the centre, and each side
In equal measure did the flame abate.
And at that centre, with their wings expanded,
More than a thousand jubilant Angels saw I,
Each differing in effulgence and in kind.
I saw there at their sports and at their songs
A beauty smiling, which the gladness was
Within the eyes of all the other saints;
And if I had in speaking as much wealth
As in imagining, I should not dare
To attempt the smallest part of its delight.
Bernard, as soon as he beheld mine eyes
Fixed and intent upon its fervid fervour,
His own with such affection turned to her
That it made mine more ardent to behold.
For the resemblance of Dante's candida rosa to the rose-wheel windows of medieval cathedrals, see John Leyerle (“The Rose-Wheel Design and Dante's Paradiso,” University of Toronto Quarterly 46 [1977]: 280-308). He argues for the double significance of this design: the wheel of Fortune, symbol of the fleetingness of earthly success, and the rose, symbol of a higher and more ordered affection (one particularly related to the Blessed Virgin). He then goes on to suggest that Dante has this design in mind both in his depiction of Fortune's wheel (Inf. VII) and of the Rose found here in the Empyrean. Leyerle also believes that a particular rose-wheel window was in Dante's mind, the one that was completed in the façade of the basilica of S. Zeno in Verona at least by 1300. On the exterior of S. Zeno, carvings of human figures, all four of whom are either falling or rising, strengthen his first case; the lovely tracing of the light on the inner spaces of the cathedral are at least not unlike the design found in Dante's Rose. However, see John Scott (“Canto XXXI,” in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone [Florence: Cesati, 2002], p. 477), citing John Barnes (“Ut architectura poesis? The Case of Dante's candida rosa,” The Italianist 6 [1986], pp. 25 and 31, n. 30) for the argument that the term for “rose window” only begins to appear in the European vernaculars, first in France, in the very late seventeenth century. This is hardly conclusive evidence that Dante did not think of one of these round, large, beautiful, and many-hued glass structures, piercing stone and splashing the interior space with colored light, as the model for his Rose. (In fact, Rosetta Migliorini-Fissi's lectura of the canto [“Canto XXXI,” in “Paradiso”: Lectura Dantis Neapolitana, dir. P. Giannantonio {Naples: Loffredo, 2000 [1989]}, pp. 609-11] certainly lends credence to Leyerle's argument; while she does not mention his article, but does note two later treatments, found in Giuseppe Di Scipio's fifth chapter [The Symbolic Rose in Dante's “Paradiso” {Ravenna: Longo, 1984}] and in John Demaray [Dante and the Book of the Cosmos {Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1987}], she points out that the idea was first broached in 1870 by Ozanam.) The term may be anachronistic, but nothing in Leyerle's case depends upon the availability of the term. And if one were to select a particular window, Leyerle has chosen well. Verona was, at least for two lengthy periods in both decades of the fourteenth century in which Dante lived, the focal point of his life as an exile, at least until his removal to Ravenna probably in the final third of the second decade. San Zeno was (and is) an astoundingly beautiful church. In an unpublished article written ca. 1980, Hollander, in passing, raised the possibility that the head of a hound in the central panel of the left portal of the bronze doors of San Zeno, which he photographed in April 1975, might have served as instigation (or confirmation) of the prophecy of the Veltro on Dante's first visit to that city soon after he arrived there early in his exile.
Benvenuto (comm. to vv. 1-3) sees that the adverb dunque (then) is pointing to a previous discussion (Beatrice's first description of the Rose, in Par. XXX.124-132, “interrupted” by the “digression” [at XXX.133-145] of her bitter words about Henry's death and the corrupt recent popes Boniface and Clement). With “dunque” the poet announces his return to her prior subject. The word's casual, “vernacular-sounding” nature caught the attention of Aldo Scaglione (“Periodic Syntax and Flexible Meter in the Divina Commedia,” Romance Philology 21 [1967]: 1-22), as is reported by John Scott (“Canto XXXI,” in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone [Florence: Cesati, 2002], p. 476). Both of them refer to the term brought to bear in Dante studies by Erich Auerbach (“Sermo humilis,” in Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, tr. R. Manheim [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965 {1958}], pp. 25-66), sermo humilis, for the low style, in their classification of this linguistic gesture. Scott admires the juxtaposition of dunque with candida rosa (luminous white rose) as the expression of Dante's union of the low with the sublime.
Vellutello (comm. to vv. 1-3) was apparently the first commentator, in a long tradition, to link the “bianche stole” (white robes) last heard of in Paradiso XXX.129 with the adjective candida (luminous white) modifying rosa. Grandgent (comm. to this verse) is one of only two in the DDP to suggest a source in Albertus Magnus (De laudibus beatae Mariae Virginis [XII.iv.33]): “Et nota, quod Christus rosa, Maria rosa, Ecclesia rosa, fidelis anima rosa,” equating Jesus, Mary, the Church, and the faithful soul of a believer with the rose.
For the fullest bibliography for this canto available in print, see Gustavo Costa (“Il canto XXXI del Paradiso,” L'Alighieri 8 [1996], pp. 78-85).
The protagonist gazes at the milizia (soldiery) that fought on for the Church that Christ “adquisivit sanguine suo” (obtained with His own blood – Acts 20:28, first cited by Tommaseo [comm. to vv. 1-3]). And see the note to verse 127. Dante never stops seeing the Church as an army, even in its peaceful triumph.
The other host, the angels, now take the poet's attention, flying up to the “hive” while contemplating and singing Its glory.
The first five words of Paradiso I.1 are present here, verbatim.
The angelic host is given similetic expression. At first, by Pietro di Dante (Pietro1, comm. to vv. 7-9) and Benvenuto (comm. to vv. 4-12), these bees were seen as deriving from Aeneid I.430-431. However, from Vellutello (comm. to vv. 4-12) onward, commentators have heard the more relevant echo of the simile at Aeneid VI.703-709 (for that text, see the note to Paradiso XXX.64-66).
The conclusion of Albert Rossi's study (“The Poetics of Resurrection: Virgil's Bees [Paradiso XXXI, 1-12],” Romanic Review 80 [1989], pp. 313-24) accounts for the disparities in the two similes by showing that the situation in the Aeneid, from a Christian perspective, is less propitious than it first may seem. As a central case in point, Aeneas discovers that all these happy shades are about to be (from Dante's perspective) “reincarnated.” We can hardly imagine the joy felt by the hero of this “epic” when he sees the souls in the Rose as they will look when they are resurrected. Surely we are meant to remember Aeneas's quite different reaction, when he learns from Anchises about the flesh that these souls in the Elysian Fields will bear with them as they return to the world and its toils. Indeed, Aeneas laments their return to the world of flesh (Aen. VI.719-721). In the post-Platonic Aeneid, the world of flesh has nothing to do with spiritual perfection; in Dante's poem the beatified spirit has only a single unfulfilled desire: to be granted the return of its flesh. Thus, if Dante allows Virgilian text a renewed presence in his poem, he is not without the ironic distance that we have found present in even the first moments of the poem (for example, see the notes to Inf. II.28 and II.56-57).
For other possible sources for this passage, e.g., in St. Anselm and St. Bernard, see Scott (“Canto XXXI,” in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone [Florence: Cesati, 2002], p. 478). For several different passages in Bernard, see the following: Carroll (comm. to vv. 1-12), Torraca (comm. to these verses), Casini/Barbi (comm. to verse 7), and Trucchi (comm. to vv. 4-12), who also cites Anselm. A few later commentators also make gestures in both these directions, if without furnishing texts.
A discussion of the elaborate structural play in this simile is found in Richard Lansing (From Image to Idea: A Study of the Simile in Dante's “Commedia” [Ravenna: Longo, 1977], p. 37). The vehicle and tenor of the simile each mirrors both moments in the movement of the bees/angels, first down to the flowers/souls, then back up to the hive/God.
As we have seen (note to Par. XXX.64-66), Virgil's verb (insidere) for what the bees do at least suggests that, more than settling on the blossoms, they enter them. Thus Dante here follows Virgil faithfully, if others seem to believe he does not (see Bosco/Reggio [comm. to this verse]).
The word laboro is obviously a deliberate Latinism, since lavoro, Italian for “labor,” is metrically the same, and Dante's hand was not forced by rhyme. Why does he choose this linguistic tactic here? Perhaps to underline his borrowing from Virgil.
We are given a clue as to the separate “dwelling” of God. According to Fallani (comm. to vv. 40-42), among the Scholastics there was a tradition of a second “heaven” in the Empyrean, the coelum Trinitatis (the heaven of the Trinity), a “place” distinct from the Empyrean, where dwelt the triune God, separated from the blessed souls. In Fallani's opinion, Dante accepts that tradition. It is, however, not clear that he does. Perhaps he both honors and abrogates it, for his God is not in an “eleventh zone” of the heavens, but in the one He shares with the saints - if in a higher and thus different locus from them (the distance between the “floor” and the top tier of the Rose is greater than that between the lowest place in the sea and the highest place beneath the Moon [see the note to vv. 73-78]; the distance between that point in the Rose and God would seem to be infinite). And thus Dante can have things both ways: Is God separate from the saints? Yes and no. He is infinitely higher up than they, but that does not require that He “inhabits” another “place,” especially since His “habitation” is everywhere and nowhere. It seems clear that Dante intends to avoid this issue. For the presence of the phrase coelum Trinitatis, in a context that is related, see Thomas Aquinas, Super Evangelium S. Matthaei lectura (51.2, referring to Psalm 36:11 [37:11] and Matthew 5:5, “The meek shall inherit the earth”; Aquinas explains that the terra [earth] promised them is the Empyrean). It is not entirely clear, but he seems to think of the Empyrean and the coelum Trinitatis as though they might be considered one and the same.
Dante's description of the angels, flaming red faces, golden wings, and white “bodies,” is possibly based in biblical texts as well as popular iconography (as found, for instance, painted on church walls). Quite a few biblical sources have been a part of the indeterminate discussion down through the centuries. Perhaps the only sure citation (for the angels' red faces) is Scartazzini's (comm. to verse 13): Ezechiel 1:13: “their appearance was like burning coals of fire,” which has quantitatively the most support. A second at least likely attribution is Tommaseo's (comm. to this tercet), who, for the white, cites Matthew 28:3: the angel who appears at the tomb of Jesus, his vestments “white as snow” (some later commentators join [or substitute] Matthew's supposed “source,” Daniel 7:9). The gold has several suggestions based in Daniel 10:5, but this is not convincingly chosen, since the gold there described is that found on a belt, not on wings.
As for the “allegorical” meaning of the three colors, nearly all can agree that the red faces bespeak angelic love. However, the other two are the cause of disagreement. Some, unconvincingly, propose the Trinity (Love, Wisdom [?], and Power [??]); others select various abstractions, not much more convincingly. There is a general understanding that the angels and their colors are perfect in three respects: they love perfectly, fly on immortal pinions, and have “bodies” that are utterly pure. And that is probably enough.
In Dante's lovely transposition, these bees, now having gathered the “pollen” (God's love) from the hive, bring “honey” back from the hive to the souls: a celestial variant on nature's apiary artistry. These flowers have a second chance to enjoy their own (now enhanced) sweetness. Dante's “honey,” like God's love and their love for Him, is bidirectional.
As Augustine knew and taught, mortal love can never satisfy or be satisfied: “inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te” (restless is our heart until it find rest in you – Confessiones I.1). These two words, pace and ardore (“peace” and “love”), can be found together only here in the Empyrean, never in Dante's world below.
The numberless host of the angels, circling God in nine ranks (see the note to Par. XXVIII.25-27), do not hinder in any way either His ray from reaching the saints in the Rose or their ability to make out His splendor (which Aversano [Dante daccapo {glosses to the Paradiso}, copia d'eccezione, sent by the author on 11 September 2001], p. 159) particularizes as the Second Person, Christ, irradiated by the Father). Torraca (comm. to vv. 22-24) reminds us that, in Convivio (III.vii.5), Dante had in fact said that the angels were as though translucent (diafani). Indeed, all of them, those who believed in Christ to come and those who believed after the fact, are gazing lovingly on the triune God.
See Paradiso I.2 and the note to verse 5, above. Thus Dante, nearing his ending, reflects his beginning, a way of also signaling that the poem is approaching its conclusion.
We now see all the saints doing what, as we will learn in the next canto, they always do, looking up, fixing their gaze on God. There is no variety in Heaven, nor is it desired by the blessed.
We also learn, in that canto, what is intrinsic only to what we see here. There are more Jews in Heaven than Christians. This puzzled some commentators and infuriated others, the first group claiming that Dante could not possibly have meant this, the others believing him only too well. Pretty clearly Dante's neat division of the Rose into two equal parts, with a few empty seats in the Christian half and none in the Jewish one, is meant to force that conclusion upon a reader. As far as we know, there are only a very few gentiles among the Hebrew group. In fact, we know only that there are two, Cato (there thus should be at least one empty place in the full half, as Cato is still minding Purgatory) and Ripheus (Statius and Trajan were both alive in Christian times). Dante's point is clear: More Jews believed in Christ without the authority of His presence, as certified by the witness provided by the New Testament, than did Christians, even though they were given the answers before they took the exam.
In verse 27 the saints are said to aim their gaze at a single target. Now the poet speaks of that single essence as a “star,” but also as the Trinity, a “threefold Light,” bringing joy to all the blessed who behold it (and they all do). Some of the early commentators are less clear than they might be that this is not an “invocation” or part of the prayer that Dante will address to God in verse 30. This is an example of apostrophe, one of praise, and not part of a request.
The poet then addresses God, praying that He look down at the “storm” afflicting mortal lives on earth. Is there an implicit further request to be understood here? Most of the commentators think so. And all of them who are of this opinion believe that Dante is asking God to intervene on behalf of storm-tossed mortals. However, it seems at least as likely that he means no such thing. Rather, as the reference to Florence (verse 39) might also suggest, God ought to look down at the spectacle of human sin with grim recognition of the lostness of those living now on earth, almost all of them beyond redemption. Apparently the first to offer so point-blank a negative reading was Francesco Roffarè (“Canto XXXI,” in Lectura Dantis Scaligera: “Paradiso”, dir. M. Marcazzan [Florence: Le Monnier, 1968], p. 1107). What stands in the way of accepting this pessimistic interpretation is the highly possible presence of a citation of a passage, first cited by Tommaseo (comm. to vv. 28-30), in Boethius's Consolatio (I.m5.42-48): “O God, whoever you are, who joins [sic] all things in perfect harmony, look down upon this miserable earth! We men are no small part of Your great work, yet we wallow here in the stormy sea of fortune. Ruler of all things, calm the roiling waves and, as You rule the immense heavens, rule also the earth in stable concord” (tr. R. Green). Also germane is Monarchia I.xvi.4, first cited by Torraca (comm. to vv. 28-30): “O human race, how many storms and misfortunes and shipwrecks must toss you about while, transformed into a many-headed beast, you strive after conflicting things” (tr. P. Shaw). This last is part of the bitter conclusion of the first book of that treatise, and would not encourage one to believe that, if Dante were thinking of it here, he foresaw any sort of divine aid coming to the human race. On the other hand, see the prophecy concluding Paradiso XXVII, which does predict God's positive intervention in the affairs of men (similarly presented as a storm at sea [fortuna] – see the note to Par. XXVII.142-148). It is thus difficult to decide what the author intended us to gather about the nature of his request for God's attention.
For the possible presence of a citation here of Aeneid II.689-690, see Daniello (comm. to vv. 29-30).
In this lengthy simile the poet compares barbarians, probably coming, in times of peace, from Northern Europe to Rome, seeing the imperial buildings of the city before Constantine gave those buildings to the papacy just after his conversion in 312, to himself, moving in the opposite direction, “south” to “north,” from Florence to the New Jerusalem above the heavens. The magnificent church of St. John Lateran was destroyed by fire in 1308. Making things worse, Henry VII, denied a coronation in St. Peter's by Pope Clement, was crowned in the ruins of that church in 1312, nearly exactly one thousand years later, and died the next year (see the note to Par. XVII.82-84).
For a discussion of the various notions of what exactly Dante meant by the reference, see Gustavo Costa (“Il canto XXXI del Paradiso,” L'Alighieri 8 [1996], pp. 65-66).
Callisto was exiled by Diana from the “nunnery” of chaste forest maidens for her affair with Jove, which resulted in her giving birth to Arcas. “The 'zone' that is always 'covered by Helice' is the North. The nymph Helice or Callisto was transformed into the constellation of the Great Bear, and her son Arcas or Boötes into the Little Bear: Metam. II.496-530, especially 515-517; cf. Purg. XXV.131. The Bears, or Dippers, are close to the North Star” (Grandgent, comm. to vv. 31-34).
The phrase “a people just and sane” is the third and last in a series of parallel pairs, with the parallelism inverted in the third term: good/bad, good/bad, bad/good. See Paradiso XVI.152, where Florentines in “the good old days” were portrayed in much more positive terms. Now things have changed, and Florentines are those left behind in order for Dante to associate with such people as they once were, now found only in Heaven.
This is the fifteenth and last time we hear the word Fiorenza in the poem; we first heard it in Farinata's voice (Inf. X.92). While in fact Florence had replaced Rome as the greatest city of Italy, Dante here reverses that equation, making old Rome the type of the celestial city, while new Florence is portrayed as the city of the lost.
The second simile in a series of three dedicated to the theme of pilgrimage (see the note to vv. 103-111), this one presents Dante as a traveler to a shrine, a journey that he has vowed to make. For the pilgrimage motif in the entire poem, see Julia Bolton Holloway (The Pilgrim and the Book [New York: Peter Lang, 1992]).
While Dante leaves the particular shrine he may have had in mind shrouded in silence, the early commentators variously suggested the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, St. Peter's in Rome, and St. James of Compostella in Galicia (Spain), the three most important destinations for pilgrims in his day.
The Tuscan word for “now” (mo) was first heard at Inferno X.21 and leaves the poem after a dazzling three uses in a single line (and the twenty-third through twenty-fifth in all), perhaps underlining Dante's desire to be considered a vernacularizing poet even at the sublime height of the Empyrean. The effect of the triple presence of the word accents the eager nature of his glance, unable to move quickly enough in taking in every aspect of the place he has so long desired to see, the goal of his pilgrimage. Verse 54 describes Dante's similar hurried and eager glances cast around the Rose in the attempt to take it all in.
What the protagonist sees, faces, reminds us that it was only the first few souls whom he saw in the heavens whose human features he could make out (see the note to Par. III.58-63). Now he is seeing, as Beatrice promised he would (in Par. XXX.44-45), the souls as they will look when they are reincarnate.
The word onestade has only two occurrences in the poem. The last time we heard it was in the poet's description of Virgil when he was running up the slope of Mount Purgatory (Purg. III.11) after Cato chastised the souls who listened, charmed, to Casella's song. There Virgil is seen as having lost his dignity; here the souls in the Rose are seen by the protagonist as having theirs.
The mood is quiet, preparing us for a transition, moving from the general to the specific.
Compare the similar scene in Purgatorio XXX.43-54, when the protagonist turns back to speak to Virgil, only to find him gone. This scene, clearly reflective of that one, is much briefer and in an altogether different key. That one is three times as long, and in the tragic mode. Here, the disappearance of Beatrice has a quite different tonality. Among the differences is that she disappears from the “floor of the arena” only to reappear in her place in the Rose (see Par. XXXI.71).
What were the questions Dante still wanted Beatrice to answer? Are we supposed to wonder? Or is this mere “realistic detail” (i.e., are we merely supposed to reflect, “Of course, anyone would have a lot of questions during a first visit to Paradise”)? Some commentators, however, try to ascertain what questions Dante wanted to ask. For example, Jacopo della Lana (comm. to vv. 55-57): Dante wants to know the identities of those seated in the Rose; or Benvenuto (comm. to vv. 52-57): Dante wants to know where Mary and Beatrice are seated. Poletto (comm. to vv. 52-57) loses patience with such attempts, urging us not to seek what the poet has chosen not to reveal. Francesco da Buti (comm. to vv. 43-57) had solved the riddle acceptably, if obviously and unprofitably: Dante had questions about Paradise.... Steiner (comm. to these verses) has the wisest response: These lines refer to the questions that St. Bernard will eventually respond to, reading them in God. In fact, this is a rare occasion on which almost everyone is essentially correct. Bernard does answer Dante's voiced question (Where is Beatrice? [verse 64]) and one unvoiced one (Where is Mary? [verse 100]). He also in the next canto names a good number of souls seated in the Rose, as Jacopo suggested he might and as Bernard says he will (vv. 97-99).
In a recent conversation, Simone Marchesi made the suggestion that possibly this “comically resolved” scene is meant to remind us not only of Dante's “tragic” loss of Virgil in this poem (see the note to vv. 100-102) but also of Aeneas's turning back to Creusa to speak further, only to find her gone (Aen. II.790-794), a scene which itself looks back to Orpheus's loss of Eurydice in the fourth Georgic, which Dante has borrowed to such striking effect in Purgatorio XXX.49-51.
In place of Beatrice, he finds, near him on the “floor” of the Rose, an “old man” (it will turn out to be Bernard, but we do not know that yet), looking like the other blessed souls.
See Bosco/Reggio (comm. to Par. XXXII.40-75), who point out that by portraying Bernard as an old man (sene), Dante is violating a commonly understood ground rule of Paradiso, that all souls are, in their perfected beings, of the age of Christ in His last year on earth, when he was thirty-three. (This is sometimes given as thirty, thirty-three, thirty-four, or even thirty-five.) Why Dante chose to violate this “rule” is not clear. Bosco/Reggio opt for an artist's rebellion against a view that would inhibit his artistic virtuosity, an old Bernard being more believable than one in his renewed youth. And see Carroll (comm. to Par. XXXII.1-48), discussing the babes seated in the lower half of the Rose: “Further, as we saw in the case of Bernard himself, Dante appears to ignore the doctrine of Aquinas that in the Resurrection the saints will rise at the age of thirty. Bernard, himself an old man, draws his attention to the child faces and voices of the lower ranks [Par. XXXII.46-48]. Each soul, apparently, wears the form proper to the age it had attained on earth, freed of course from weakness and defect of the flesh. Dante evidently felt that there would have been something incongruous in making babies, who had never exercised true choice, appear full-grown in the flower of life. [Augustine thought otherwise: infants would receive 'by the marvelous and rapid operation of God that body which time by a slower process would have given them' (De Civ. Dei, XXII.14).]” For a counter-thrust, see Mario Aversano (“Sulla poetica dantesca nel canto XXIV del Purgatorio,” L'Alighieri 16 [2000]: 167) on verse 46 of the next canto. He argues that in Dante's Empyrean we see only the aspects worn by the saints as of “now,” in the year 1300. They will “mature” (or grow younger, as the case may be) in their appearance only after the General Resurrection, citing Inferno VI.103-111. Are we thus to believe that what Dante sees now is only temporary likenesses of these souls? Perhaps. But surely Dante would have given us a clue that this is what we should understand. In any case, Aversano is perhaps alone in this interpretation.
Bernard is Dante's last “father” in the poem. For a listing, see the note to Paradiso XVI.16.
See Scartazzini (comm. to this verse), reminding the reader of the Magdalen's remark to the resurrected Jesus, whom she mistakes for a “gardener,” upon not seeing Jesus where she expects to see him, in his sepulcher (John 20:15): “Si tu sustulisti eum, dicito mihi ubi...” (If you have carried him away, tell me where...“ [italics added]). The only other commentator in the DDP to cite this passage, without, it nearly goes without saying, citing his predecessor, is Poletto (comm. to vv. 64-69).
These are Dante's first spoken words since Paradiso XXVIII.57. See the note to Paradiso XIV.88-96 for notice of a considerably longer silence on his part.
Bernard's first words answer Dante's most pressing concern, the whereabouts of Beatrice, who, he points out, is in the third row from the top. For a similar scene, see Inferno II.109-112, where Beatrice tells how Lucy came to her exactly where we see her now and got her to leave this seat in order to go into Limbo to enlist Virgil's aid. Just so has she now enlisted Bernard's help on Dante's behalf and then reassumed her place.
Dante sees Beatrice literally in glory, resplendent with the light of God.
For Beatrice's crown and Aquinas's discussion of the additional aureola accorded especially favored saints, see the note to Paradiso XXIII.95 and Scartazzini (comm. to vv. 71-72).
From the highest point in the earth's sublunar atmosphere to the deepest seabed was not so far as Dante found himself now from Beatrice; and yet he could see her as though there were no appreciable distance between them. The poet has already explained (Par. XXX.121-123) that in the Empyrean, the usual physical laws that we know on earth are suspended.
In a sense, Dante here ”disinvents“ the as-yet-to-be-discovered technique of perspectival representation that would distinguish Italian painting of the next century.
See John Scott (”Canto XXXI,“ in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone [Florence: Cesati, 2002], p. 485) for this striking word (effige), which is used only here and in Paradiso XXXIII.131, thus further associating Beatrice and Christ. No commentator in the DDP looks up from his text to make that observation.
Apparently, the first commentator to pay any conscious attention to the protagonist's switch from the honorific voi, in addressing Beatrice, to the affectionate tu, was Grabher (comm. to vv. 70-93), if he does not make much out of it. Porena (comm. to vv. 79-90) also notices the change, but has quite a strong sense of what it signifies, only appearing to be a closing of the distance between them, but being in fact a distancing, because it is the tu addressed to a saint, or that is proffered both to God and to Mary. Indeed, both God and Mary, in Christian theology, have the unique gift of being divine and human simultaneously - as does Beatrice. Nonetheless, Chimenz (comm. to vv. 79-84) admires Porena's formulation. Giacalone (comm. to vv. 79-84) is also in their camp. A different view is advanced by Singleton (comm. to verse 80), one that proposes that the guide has become the individual soul of Beatrice (Singleton retains his sense that the guide is ”allegorical,“ while the individual is not, a judgment that some would dispute in its first instance, others in the second). Bosco/Reggio (comm. to vv. 82-84) also support Porena's thesis.
For a different view, see Hollander (Dante: A Life in Works [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001], pp. 126-27), pointing out that, as in the Vita nuova, Beatrice in Heaven may indeed be addressed with tu, ”only when she is at one with God, where and when there are no human hierarchies.“ The fact would seem to be that these eleven second-person-singular pronouns and verb endings (in only twelve verses) do indicate a more personal sense of affection, in a sort of uncontrolled outburst of personal enthusiasm, allowable now that they are on an equal footing as lovers of one another in God. We cannot imagine Jesus addressing Mary as Voi.
For the figural equation, Beatrice as Dante's ”Christ,“ see Hollander (Allegory in Dante's ”Commedia“ [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969]), p. 261. After calling attention to the poet's last words to Virgil in the poem (Purg. XXX.51), ”Virgilio a cui per mia salute die'mi“ (Virgil, to whom I gave myself for my salvation), he then continues as follows, discussing this tercet: ”At Dante's beginnings we do well to have in mind his endings, and vice versa. It is Beatrice, the figure of Christ, who brings Dante to salvation; it is Virgil who brings Dante to Beatrice. Dante does not (and did not in the Vita nuova) use the word salute lightly. His last words to Virgil give him the highest function anyone less than Christ can perform, and that is to bring another to Christ.“ In this vein, see John A. Scott (”Dante's Allegory,“ Romance Philology 26 [1973]: 570). See also Amilcare Iannucci (”Paradiso XXXI,“ in Dante's ”Divine Comedy,“ Introductory Readings III: ”Paradiso,“ ed. Tibor Wlassics [Lectura Dantis {virginiana}, 16-17, supplement, Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1995], p. 483 - citing his earlier article [”Beatrice in Limbo: a Metaphoric Harrowing of Hell,“ Dante Studies 97 {1979}: 23-45]), who also notes Beatrice's Christlike attributes in this passage (as, once again, does Scott [”Canto XXXI,“ in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone {Florence: Cesati, 2002}], p. 486). This has become more or less the standard interpretation of those considered by some in Italy to be part of a so-called scuola americana, ”the American school (of Dante studies).“ And see Emilio Pasquini (Dante e le figure del vero: La fabbrica della ”Commedia“ [Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2001], p. 254), remarking on the ”near-heterodoxy“ of these verses.
To be honest, this reading seems so obvious that one feels apologetic for harping on it. However, to understand what blinders Dantists accustomed themselves to wearing whenever they came near the border of so ”blasphemous“ a theologized poetic for the poem, see the allegorizing glosses of such as Benvenuto da Imola (comm. to this tercet). In his reading (and he is far from being alone in it), Beatrice becomes ”theology“ who comes down to this ”hell on earth“ (our world, not Limbo) in order to bring her message to all mortals (including, we assume, Dante Alighieri). This is so flagrantly wrongheaded that one has to admire Benvenuto at least for his stubbornness in not yielding to a Christological interpretation of Beatrice nor to a personal one of Dante, who, in his treatment, is only a stand-in for all humankind. This, one of the most personal moments of the Commedia, is thus turned into a kind of simpleminded version of an uplifting moral tale, one only implausibly attributed to the genius of Dante. Reviewing responses to this passage in the DDP, one finds the word ”Christ“ only in Singleton's commentary (to verse 91) of 1975. How did (or does) anyone read this passage and not think of Christ's descent into Hell and His subsequent harrowing of the Hebrew saints? However, not even Giacalone, the first commentator who presents himself as a follower of the figural interpretation sponsored first by Auerbach (cited by him in 56 glosses) and then by Singleton (cited in 25), responds as one might have expected he would to this provocation. It is surely more shocking that Singleton, who only mentions Auerbach once in his commentary, not even on that occasion (his gloss to Purg. XII.40-42) refers to Auerbach's discussions of Dante's figural technique (something Singleton never did in any of his publications; see Hollander [Dante: A Life in Works {New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001}, p. 38]). Talk about Harold Bloom's ”anxiety of influence“!
The typological equations (Beatrice = Moses; Dante = the Hebrews) once again align Beatrice with Christ. See the note to verses 79-81. Here, as there, the commentators seem to want to avoid such ”blasphemous“ associations. For the Exodus as the poem's controlling trope, see Singleton (”'In exitu Israel de Aegypto,'“ Annual Report of the Dante Society 78 [1960]: 1-24).
As one who had sinned against Beatrice once before, Dante knows whereof he speaks. He thus prays that she will help him remain pure of soul for the rest of his time on earth when he is again without her. When he wrote these lines, he probably did not realize how brief that time would be.
This is the final tercet devoted to the interaction of the two lovers in the poem. Her final smile yields to her returning her attention to the source of all being.
Bernard summarizes the tasks that lie ahead for Dante: He must contemplate this resplendent gathering (splendore) to prepare himself to see, up through the ray (raggio), the source of the irradiating light (luce). See the note on Dante's physics of light, Paradiso XXIII.82-84.
Dante uses the Latinism sene (from senex) again. See the note to verse 59. The word had appeared, in a Latin form, once before, in Purg. XXX.17.
A disputed verse. Some believe the prayer is Beatrice's, the love Bernard's; others think that both are Beatrice's. See Scartazzini (comm. to this verse) for a summary of the two positions and a strong vote for the first solution, but eventual openness to the second.
Bernard's suggestion might indicate that one of Dante's unasked questions (see the note to vv. 56-57) had to do with the population of the Rose.
Bernard names himself, having sounded like a lyric poet of Dante's youthful acquaintance talking about his lady, associating himself, however, not with a Giovanna, a Lagia, or a Selvaggia, but with the Blessed Virgin Mary. Everything about this moment comes as a surprise. We did not anticipate a new guide in the poem, if Dante surely decided that he wanted to have a chance to bid farewell to Beatrice, as well as to present her as being back in bliss. In addition, perhaps for reasons reflecting his personal devotion (for a possible confirmation, see Par. XXIII.88-89), he wanted a guide more associated with Mary for this highest part of the poem (not that Beatrice would have been in any way unqualified); perhaps he also felt a numerological tug in deciding to have a trinitarian third instructor. Still, one sympathizes with those who feel that there is something ungainly about the substitution of Bernard for Beatrice. (See the discussion in Steven Botterill [Dante and the Mystical Tradition: Bernard of Clairvaux in the ”Commedia“ {Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994}], pp. 64-115.) And no one who defends the advent of a new guide can argue that it has been at all prepared for, as was Beatrice's (as early as Inf. I.121-126). Lino Pertile (”Quale amore va in Paradiso?“ in ”Le donne, i cavalieri, l'arme, gli amori“: Poema e romanzo: la narrativa lunga in Italia, ed. Francesco Bruni [Venice: Marsilio, 2001]), pp. 67-69) goes so far as to argue, if not particularly convincingly, that Dante had planned (and the first sign of such a plan revealed itself, according to him, in Inf. II.24-25, with the indication of Mary, Lucy, and Beatrice) to have Beatrice replaced by Lucy. Whatever one thinks of that solution, one must admit that there is a problem here, one that a few strokes of the quill could have avoided. However, see Francesco Mazzoni (”San Bernardo e la visione poetica della Divina Commedia,“ in Seminario Dantesco Internazionale: Atti del primo convegno tenutosi al Chauncey Conference Center, Princeton, 21-23 ottobre 1994, ed. Z.G. Baranski [Florence: Le Lettere, 1997], pp. 171-241), who insists on the influence of Bernard's work (or that which Dante considered Bernardine) behind the text of the poem from its outset. And see Amilcare Iannucci (”Paradiso XXXI,“ in Dante's ”Divine Comedy,“ Introductory Readings III: ”Paradiso,“ ed. Tibor Wlassics [Lectura Dantis {virginiana}, 16-17, supplement, Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1995], pp. 481-82), for the notion that the surprise of Bernard's presence is only a tactic to alert us to his importance for Dante. A series of essays discussing the reflection of several of Bernard's writings in the Commedia is found in Mario Aversano (San Bernardo e Dante. Teologia e poesia della conversione [Salerno: Edisud, 1990]). For a summary of Bernard's importance for Dante and of the presence of his writing behind the cantos in which he appears, see Carroll (comm. to vv. 118-142).
For the possible influence of Bernard's De diligendo Deo on the structure of the entire poem, see Hollander (”The Invocations of the Commedia,“ Yearbook of Italian Studies 3 [1976]: 235-40, repr. in Studies in Dante [Ravenna: Longo, 1980], pp. 33-38). And see the notes to Purgatorio XXVII.139-141 and Paradiso XXXIII.127-132. For a compact treatment of Bernard's life, see Raoul Manselli, ”Bernardo di Chiaravalle, santo,“ ED (I [1970]), pp. 601a-5b, which, however, skirts the question of the actual literary influence of Bernard on Dante. For an introductory treatment in English, one may, in addition to Botterill, consult E.G. Gardner (Dante and the Mystics [London: Dent, 1913], pp. 111-43).
Dante does not refer to Bernard's urgent and frequent support of the Second Crusade (1145-1147) in his preaching. For a study of this crusade, inevitably linked to the adjective ”disastrous,“ see Giles Constable (”The Second Crusade as Seen by Contemporaries,“ Traditio 9 [1953]: 213-279). Dante's silence is perhaps not surprising, given its failure.
Bernard names himself only at the end of his speech (vv. 94-102). The impression of humility is perhaps less pronounced than when similar behavior was exhibited by both Thomas Aquinas (Par. X.82-99) and Cacciaguida (Par. XV.88-135), who indeed speak longer before naming themselves. Nonetheless, his comportment is clearly intended to portray his modesty.
This long but essentially simple simile links Dante once again with a pilgrim arriving at his destination, in this case Rome, where the Veronica, a most holy relic, was preserved. Veronica was supposedly a woman of Jerusalem who offered Jesus a cloth (sudarium) to wipe the blood and sweat from His face on the way to Calvary. His features remained on the cloth, which was eventually taken to St. Peter's in Rome, where it was displayed to the faithful on certain occasions. That her name was actually Veronica is doubtful, since her name itself means ”true likeness“ (vera icona). The whole history of this image (and of other relics like it, particularly the Shroud of Turin) is controversial. But for Dante, there was not even a question of its authenticity. See his earlier reference, at the climactic moment of the Vita nuova (XL.1), to pilgrims on their way to Rome to see the Veronica, a moment fulfilled here in this poem by Dante's pilgrimage to ”that Rome where Christ Himself is Roman“ (Purg. XXXII.102). For a discussion of both these moments, see Alessandro Vettori (”Veronica: Dante's Pilgrimage from Image to Vision,“ Dante Studies 121 [2003 {2006}]: 43-65).
See Richard Lansing (From Image to Idea: A Study of the Simile in Dante's ”Commedia“ [Ravenna: Longo, 1977]), pp. 137-40) for consideration of three consecutive similes in this canto (see also vv. 31-40 and 43-48) dedicated to the theme of completion of a pilgrimage.
Croatia, for Dante's audience, represented a very distant and ”foreign“ place, as in the more recent expression ”from here to Timbuktu.“
See Singleton (comm. on these verses): ”Bernard's two principal qualifications to serve as final guide in the journey stem from his special devotion to the Virgin Mary and from his fame as one dedicated to mystical contemplation with special emphasis on the affective movement of the mind as it rises to God, an emphasis which later Franciscan thought and devotion adopted and stressed. It was believed that Bernard, in such meditation, had a foretaste of the peace of Heaven. In the Meditationes piissimae (XIV, 36-37), ascribed to Bernard, there is a rhapsody on the joys of contemplation. See also Bernard, Sermones in Cantica Canticorum, XXIII, 15-16. As noted above, Dante in his Letter to Can Grande (Epist. XIII, 80) refers the reader of his Paradiso to Bernard's work De contemplatione.“
Dante, in fixing his gaze on Bernard, who has descended from his seat in the Rose upon Beatrice's urging (see verse 66), has fixated on a lesser version of the good and true than that which Bernard will eventually bring him to see. At least for now the Virgin is the best sight available to him, and she is at the very highest point, in the top row of the stadium-rose.
How many souls are seated in the Rose? Dante keeps his counsel on that question. The Apocalypse numbers the saved as 144,000 (Apoc. 7:1, 7:4; 14:1, 14:3). Landino (comm. to Par. XXX.133-138) reports that some say that the number of blessed is equivalent to the number of fallen angels, while others are of the opinion that it is the same as that of the remaining good angels. (For Dante's previous opinion on a related matter, see the note to Paradiso XXIX.50.) Landino concludes that only God knows the number of angels, as Aquinas says.
This passage is seamless, describing a single action, Dante's raising his eyes (verse 118) at Bernard's command and seeing Mary, surrounded by angels and admired by the rest of the blessed. It is like a painting of the Virgin seated in glory. However, since it is only like a painting, the poet introduces his central scene with a double simile, each element of which begins ”e come.“
Until now, we have been shown the Empyrean with a long-range perspective, seeing all the Rose as a unit divided into many parts. Now we focus on a single part of it and are presented with a new sense of graduated selectivity, in which the things that are nearest Mary are brightest, while those farthest from her gradually fade from view.
The first simile pairs Mary with the brightness of the Sun at its rising, as compared with the entire rim of the sky. We are asked to imagine a 360o view: The east and the parts of the horizon nearest it are brightest, the west, where the Sun lit up the horizon the evening before, the darkest. As we will see, this arrangement is perfectly mirrored in the varying brightness of parts of the Rose.
In the second simile, the brightness at the locus of the rising Sun is contrasted with the diminished light on either side of it, and is compared either to all the Rose or to Mary (see the note to verse 127).
Once again, as in the first of these conjoined similes (vv. 118-123), the varied lightness in parts of the Rose is insisted on.
Rhyme forces Dante into synecdoche, the part temo (yoke-beam, or chariot pole [i.e., that to which the horses are attached]) for the whole (chariot). For other occurrences of this word (timone in modern Italian), see Purgatorio XXII.119; XXXII.49, 140, 144; Paradiso XIII.9.
We last heard of Phaeton, a frequent presence in the poem, in Paradiso XVII.3 (see the note to XVII.1-6). Why Dante wants to recall that tragic adventure here is not immediately evident.
This arresting oxymoron, ”peaceful oriflamme“ (or ”battle flag of peace“), has a varied history in the commentaries. Most trace its origin to the French royal battle standard. John Scott (”Canto XXXI,“ in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone [Florence: Cesati, 2002], p. 488) points out that, whereas many contemporary commentators say that this banner of the French kings, maintained at St. Denis, was red, it was actually red and gold, as its Latin derivation makes plain (auri fiamma [golden flame]). Earlier notice of this begins perhaps with Benvenuto (comm. to vv. 124-129): ”Maria flamma ignis aeterni et aurea“ (Mary, a golden tongue of eternal fire). Venturi (comm. to this verse) seems to have been the first to identify the French provenance of the banner and the view that whoever fought beneath it was unconquerable. A French tradition claimed that the banner was first brought to the son of the Christian emperor Constantine by an angel. Andreoli (comm. to this verse) refines the source of the tale a bit, referring to a version indicating that Charlemagne fought under it. The most complex discussion of the various possibilities is found in Scartazzini (comm. to this verse). See Oelsner's brief exposition (comm. to this verse), which, however, reverses the more usual relations between the red and the gold: ”The Oriflamme (aurea flamma) was the standard given by the Angel Gabriel to the ancient kings of France, representing a [red] flame on a golden ground. No one who fought under it could be conquered. The golden glow of heaven is the invincible ensign not of war but peace.“
Most who write about this verse play up the opposed values of the two elements in this image, Mary's peaceful conquest as opposed to the French (or any) king's military exploits. However, we should remember that this gathering, too, is an army, if now a triumphant one, with all but a final battle (that of the returning Christ against Antichrist at the end of days) behind it. (For a view in absolute disagreement with this one, see Porena [comm. to this verse].) While there is some dispute about whether the oriafiamma is Mary alone, all the Rose (including her), or some portion of the blessed souls distinct from her, see Trucchi (comm. to vv. 124-129) for an interesting solution. The oriafiamma is the entire Rose, Mary is the golden flame, the rest of the blessed (the petals of the ”rose“) the red background. While this is not in accord with the minority explanation of what is figure, what background, it surely is worth serious consideration for its complete explanation of all the elements in the image. However, it is clear that Mary is the light referred to as the Sun in both similes. She is at the center (nel mezzo) of things as the protagonist now sees them.
For a study of the resonance of martial epic in the poem, particularly in Paradiso, see Hollander (”Dante and the Martial Epic,“ Mediaevalia 12 [1989]: 62-91; Ital trans.: ”Dante e l'epopea marziale,“ Letture classensi 18 [1989], pp. 93-113), who, however, fails to consider this verse as part of that resonance.
Around Mary, the central object in this picture, the protagonist sees an assemblage of angels, apparently of all nine orders, since they seem differentiated from one another in how bright they shine and in what they do.
The topos of the inexpressibility of great beauty, now that it is no longer needed for Beatrice (see the note to Par. XXX.22-27), is made to accompany Mary.
Dante's verb imaginar (referring to the mind's ability to receive and store images received from outside it) is quite different from the more modern instance of the word, with its clear reference to invention of things not previously seen by the imaginer. See the note to Purgatorio XVII.13-18.
The canto concludes with Bernard, famous as the ”lover-poet“ of Mary, gazing, alongside her newest ”lover-poet,“ Dante Alighieri. His awareness of Bernard's affection for her makes his own all the more ardent.
For a recent discussion of whether or not Dante is to be considered ”a mystic,“ see Steven Botterill (”Mysticism and Meaning in Dante's Paradiso,“ in Dante for the New Millennium, ed. Teodolinda Barolini and H. Wayne Storey [New York: Fordham University Press, 2003], pp. 143-51), who is mainly in the affirmative. It is difficult to believe that the final cantos of the poem, so obviously reflective of a great mystic, St. Bernard, and so triumphantly presenting a final vision, can be thought of as separate from the tradition of Western mysticism. At the same time, it is difficult to think of the earlier ninety-seven cantos of the poem as being essentially mystical in character. Thus the best answer seems to be ”no“ and ”yes“ – in that order. But see John Scott (”Canto XXXI,“ in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone [Florence: Cesati, 2002], pp. 407-8) for a cautious denial of even this much mysticism in Dante's poetry. One supposes that some (who find Dante's poetry more like Blake's than not) think of him as a mystic, while others (who do not so find) deny that he is one.
This is the sort of moment that might cause a doggedly literal-minded reader to observe that Dante could not possibly have observed the movement of Bernard's eyes because he was staring fixedly at the Virgin. For a passage that has indeed served as similar cause of over-zealous concern for ”realistic“ details, see the note to Purg. XXI.10-14.
The phrase fissi e attenti (fixed and intent) is repeated here for the third time. We heard it first in Purgatorio II.118, used in malo, for Dante and the newly arrived souls who are seduced by Casella's song and require Cato's reprimand in order to get back on their path toward God. It then appears in Purgatorio XXXII.1, where it describes Dante's gaze, fixed on Beatrice, trying to slake his ten-year ”thirst“ for her presence. That repetition was perhaps intended to counter the first instance, the context of which was the song that Dante had composed in favor of Beatrice's rival, the Lady Philosophy (her identity at least according to the Convivio [first at II.xii.9]). Now it is used a second time in bono, here referring to Dante's new ”lady,“ the Virgin. Unlike the last one, this ocular gesture does not reflect the rejection of one lady in favor of another. In Heaven there may be no marrying, but there is no limit to the number of objects of one's affection.
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In forma dunque di candida rosa
mi si mostrava la milizia santa
che nel suo sangue Cristo fece sposa;
ma l'altra, che volando vede e canta
la gloria di colui che la 'nnamora
e la bontà che la fece cotanta,
sì come schiera d'ape che s'infiora
una fïata e una si ritorna
là dove suo laboro s'insapora,
nel gran fior discendeva che s'addorna
di tante foglie, e quindi risaliva
là dove 'l süo amor sempre soggiorna.
Le facce tutte avean di fiamma viva
e l'ali d'oro, e l'altro tanto bianco,
che nulla neve a quel termine arriva.
Quando scendean nel fior, di banco in banco
porgevan de la pace e de l'ardore
ch'elli acquistavan ventilando il fianco.
Né l'interporsi tra 'l disopra e 'l fiore
di tanta moltitudine volante
impediva la vista e lo splendore:
ché la luce divina è penetrante
per l'universo secondo ch'è degno,
sì che nulla le puote essere ostante.
Questo sicuro e gaudïoso regno,
frequente in gente antica e in novella,
viso e amore avea tutto ad un segno.
Oh trina luce che 'n unica stella
scintillando a lor vista, sì li appaga!
guarda qua giuso a la nostra procella!
Se i barbari, venendo da tal plaga
che ciascun giorno d'Elice si cuopra,
rotante col suo figlio ond' ella è vaga,
veggendo Roma e l'ardüa sua opra,
stupefaciensi, quando Laterano
a le cose mortali andò di sopra;
ïo, che al divino da l'umano,
a l'etterno dal tempo era venuto,
e di Fiorenza in popol giusto e sano,
di che stupor dovea esser compiuto!
Certo tra esso e 'l gaudio mi facea
libito non udire e starmi muto.
E quasi peregrin che si ricrea
nel tempio del suo voto riguardando,
e spera già ridir com' ello stea,
su per la viva luce passeggiando,
menava ïo li occhi per li gradi,
mo sù, mo giù e mo recirculando.
Vedëa visi a carità süadi,
d'altrui lume fregiati e di suo riso,
e atti ornati di tutte onestadi.
La forma general di paradiso
già tutta mïo sguardo avea compresa,
in nulla parte ancor fermato fiso;
e volgeami con voglia rïaccesa
per domandar la mia donna di cose
di che la mente mia era sospesa.
Uno intendëa, e altro mi rispuose:
credea veder Beatrice e vidi un sene
vestito con le genti glorïose.
Diffuso era per li occhi e per le gene
di benigna letizia, in atto pio
quale a tenero padre si convene.
E “Ov' è ella?” sùbito diss' io.
Ond' elli: “A terminar lo tuo disiro
mosse Beatrice me del loco mio;
e se riguardi sù nel terzo giro
dal sommo grado, tu la rivedrai
nel trono che suoi merti le sortiro.”
Sanza risponder, li occhi sù levai,
e vidi lei che si facea corona
reflettendo da sé li etterni rai.
Da quella regïon che più sù tona
occhio mortale alcun tanto non dista,
qualunque in mare più giù s'abbandona,
quanto lì da Beatrice la mia vista;
ma nulla mi facea, ché süa effige
non discendëa a me per mezzo mista.
“O donna in cui la mia speranza vige,
e che soffristi per la mia salute
in inferno lasciar le tue vestige,
di tante cose quant' i' ho vedute,
dal tuo podere e da la tua bontate
riconosco la grazia e la virtute.
Tu m'hai di servo tratto a libertate
per tutte quelle vie, per tutt' i modi
che di ciò fare avei la potestate.
La tua magnificenza in me custodi,
sì che l'anima mia, che fatt' hai sana,
piacente a te dal corpo si disnodi.”
Così orai; e quella, sì lontana
come parea, sorrise e riguardommi;
poi si tornò a l'etterna fontana.
E 'l santo sene: “Acciò che tu assommi
perfettamente,” disse, “il tuo cammino,
a che priego e amor santo mandommi,
vola con li occhi per questo giardino;
ché veder lui t'acconcerà lo sguardo
più al montar per lo raggio divino.
E la regina del cielo, ond'ïo ardo
tutto d'amor, ne farà ogne grazia,
però ch'i' sono il suo fedel Bernardo.”
Qual è colui che forse di Croazia
viene a veder la Veronica nostra,
che per l'antica fame non sen sazia,
ma dice nel pensier, fin che si mostra:
“Segnor mio Iesù Cristo, Dio verace,
or fu sì fatta la sembianza vostra?”;
tal era io mirando la vivace
carità di colui che 'n questo mondo,
contemplando, gustò di quella pace.
“Figliuol di grazia, quest' esser giocondo,”
cominciò elli, “non ti sarà noto,
tenendo li occhi pur qua giù al fondo;
ma guarda i cerchi infino al più remoto,
tanto che veggi seder la regina
cui questo regno è suddito e devoto.”
Io levai li occhi; e come da mattina
la parte orïental de l'orizzonte
soverchia quella dove 'l sol declina,
così, quasi di valle andando a monte
con li occhi, vidi parte ne lo stremo
vincer di lume tutta l'altra fronte.
E come quivi ove s'aspetta il temo
che mal guidò Fetonte, più s'infiamma,
e quinci e quindi il lume si fa scemo,
così quella pacifica oriafiamma
nel mezzo s'avvivava, e d'ogne parte
per igual modo allentava la fiamma;
e a quel mezzo, con le penne sparte,
vid' io più di mille angeli festanti,
ciascun distinto di fulgore e d'arte.
Vidi a lor giochi quivi e a lor canti
ridere una bellezza, che letizia
era ne li occhi a tutti li altri santi;
e s'io avessi in dir tanta divizia
quanta ad imaginar, non ardirei
lo minimo tentar di sua delizia.
Bernardo, come vide li occhi miei
nel caldo suo caler fissi e attenti,
li suoi con tanto affetto volse a lei,
che ' miei di rimirar fé più ardenti.
In fashion then as of a snow-white rose
Displayed itself to me the saintly host,
Whom Christ in his own blood had made his bride,
But the other host, that flying sees and sings
The glory of Him who doth enamour it,
And the goodness that created it so noble,
Even as a swarm of bees, that sinks in flowers
One moment, and the next returns again
To where its labour is to sweetness turned,
Sank into the great flower, that is adorned
With leaves so many, and thence reascended
To where its love abideth evermore.
Their faces had they all of living flame,
And wings of gold, and all the rest so white
No snow unto that limit doth attain.
From bench to bench, into the flower descending,
They carried something of the peace and ardour
Which by the fanning of their flanks they won.
Nor did the interposing 'twixt the flower
And what was o'er it of such plenitude
Of flying shapes impede the sight and splendour;
Because the light divine so penetrates
The universe, according to its merit,
That naught can be an obstacle against it.
This realm secure and full of gladsomeness,
Crowded with ancient people and with modern,
Unto one mark had all its look and love.
O Trinal Light, that in a single star
Sparkling upon their sight so satisfies them,
Look down upon our tempest here below!
If the barbarians, coming from some region
That every day by Helice is covered,
Revolving with her son whom she delights in,
Beholding Rome and all her noble works,
Were wonder-struck, what time the Lateran
Above all mortal things was eminent,—
I who to the divine had from the human,
From time unto eternity, had come,
From Florence to a people just and sane,
With what amazement must I have been filled!
Truly between this and the joy, it was
My pleasure not to hear, and to be mute.
And as a pilgrim who delighteth him
In gazing round the temple of his vow,
And hopes some day to retell how it was,
So through the living light my way pursuing
Directed I mine eyes o'er all the ranks,
Now up, now down, and now all round about.
Faces I saw of charity persuasive,
Embellished by His light and their own smile,
And attitudes adorned with every grace.
The general form of Paradise already
My glance had comprehended as a whole,
In no part hitherto remaining fixed,
And round I turned me with rekindled wish
My Lady to interrogate of things
Concerning which my mind was in suspense.
One thing I meant, another answered me;
I thought I should see Beatrice, and saw
An Old Man habited like the glorious people.
O'erflowing was he in his eyes and cheeks
With joy benign, in attitude of pity
As to a tender father is becoming.
And "She, where is she?" instantly I said;
Whence he: "To put an end to thy desire,
Me Beatrice hath sent from mine own place.
And if thou lookest up to the third round
Of the first rank, again shalt thou behold her
Upon the throne her merits have assigned her."
Without reply I lifted up mine eyes,
And saw her, as she made herself a crown
Reflecting from herself the eternal rays.
Not from that region which the highest thunders
Is any mortal eye so far removed,
In whatsoever sea it deepest sinks,
As there from Beatrice my sight; but this
Was nothing unto me; because her image
Descended not to me by medium blurred.
"O Lady, thou in whom my hope is strong,
And who for my salvation didst endure
In Hell to leave the imprint of thy feet,
Of whatsoever things I have beheld,
As coming from thy power and from thy goodness
I recognise the virtue and the grace.
Thou from a slave hast brought me unto freedom,
By all those ways, by all the expedients,
Whereby thou hadst the power of doing it.
Preserve towards me thy magnificence,
So that this soul of mine, which thou hast healed,
Pleasing to thee be loosened from the body."
Thus I implored; and she, so far away,
Smiled, as it seemed, and looked once more at me;
Then unto the eternal fountain turned.
And said the Old Man holy: "That thou mayst
Accomplish perfectly thy journeying,
Whereunto prayer and holy love have sent me,
Fly with thine eyes all round about this garden;
For seeing it will discipline thy sight
Farther to mount along the ray divine.
And she, the Queen of Heaven, for whom I burn
Wholly with love, will grant us every grace,
Because that I her faithful Bernard am."
As he who peradventure from Croatia
Cometh to gaze at our Veronica,
Who through its ancient fame is never sated,
But says in thought, the while it is displayed,
"My Lord, Christ Jesus, God of very God,
Now was your semblance made like unto this?"
Even such was I while gazing at the living
Charity of the man, who in this world
By contemplation tasted of that peace.
"Thou son of grace, this jocund life," began he,
"Will not be known to thee by keeping ever
Thine eyes below here on the lowest place;
But mark the circles to the most remote,
Until thou shalt behold enthroned the Queen
To whom this realm is subject and devoted."
I lifted up mine eyes, and as at morn
The oriental part of the horizon
Surpasses that wherein the sun goes down,
Thus, as if going with mine eyes from vale
To mount, I saw a part in the remoteness
Surpass in splendour all the other front.
And even as there where we await the pole
That Phaeton drove badly, blazes more
The light, and is on either side diminished,
So likewise that pacific oriflamme
Gleamed brightest in the centre, and each side
In equal measure did the flame abate.
And at that centre, with their wings expanded,
More than a thousand jubilant Angels saw I,
Each differing in effulgence and in kind.
I saw there at their sports and at their songs
A beauty smiling, which the gladness was
Within the eyes of all the other saints;
And if I had in speaking as much wealth
As in imagining, I should not dare
To attempt the smallest part of its delight.
Bernard, as soon as he beheld mine eyes
Fixed and intent upon its fervid fervour,
His own with such affection turned to her
That it made mine more ardent to behold.
For the resemblance of Dante's candida rosa to the rose-wheel windows of medieval cathedrals, see John Leyerle (“The Rose-Wheel Design and Dante's Paradiso,” University of Toronto Quarterly 46 [1977]: 280-308). He argues for the double significance of this design: the wheel of Fortune, symbol of the fleetingness of earthly success, and the rose, symbol of a higher and more ordered affection (one particularly related to the Blessed Virgin). He then goes on to suggest that Dante has this design in mind both in his depiction of Fortune's wheel (Inf. VII) and of the Rose found here in the Empyrean. Leyerle also believes that a particular rose-wheel window was in Dante's mind, the one that was completed in the façade of the basilica of S. Zeno in Verona at least by 1300. On the exterior of S. Zeno, carvings of human figures, all four of whom are either falling or rising, strengthen his first case; the lovely tracing of the light on the inner spaces of the cathedral are at least not unlike the design found in Dante's Rose. However, see John Scott (“Canto XXXI,” in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone [Florence: Cesati, 2002], p. 477), citing John Barnes (“Ut architectura poesis? The Case of Dante's candida rosa,” The Italianist 6 [1986], pp. 25 and 31, n. 30) for the argument that the term for “rose window” only begins to appear in the European vernaculars, first in France, in the very late seventeenth century. This is hardly conclusive evidence that Dante did not think of one of these round, large, beautiful, and many-hued glass structures, piercing stone and splashing the interior space with colored light, as the model for his Rose. (In fact, Rosetta Migliorini-Fissi's lectura of the canto [“Canto XXXI,” in “Paradiso”: Lectura Dantis Neapolitana, dir. P. Giannantonio {Naples: Loffredo, 2000 [1989]}, pp. 609-11] certainly lends credence to Leyerle's argument; while she does not mention his article, but does note two later treatments, found in Giuseppe Di Scipio's fifth chapter [The Symbolic Rose in Dante's “Paradiso” {Ravenna: Longo, 1984}] and in John Demaray [Dante and the Book of the Cosmos {Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1987}], she points out that the idea was first broached in 1870 by Ozanam.) The term may be anachronistic, but nothing in Leyerle's case depends upon the availability of the term. And if one were to select a particular window, Leyerle has chosen well. Verona was, at least for two lengthy periods in both decades of the fourteenth century in which Dante lived, the focal point of his life as an exile, at least until his removal to Ravenna probably in the final third of the second decade. San Zeno was (and is) an astoundingly beautiful church. In an unpublished article written ca. 1980, Hollander, in passing, raised the possibility that the head of a hound in the central panel of the left portal of the bronze doors of San Zeno, which he photographed in April 1975, might have served as instigation (or confirmation) of the prophecy of the Veltro on Dante's first visit to that city soon after he arrived there early in his exile.
Benvenuto (comm. to vv. 1-3) sees that the adverb dunque (then) is pointing to a previous discussion (Beatrice's first description of the Rose, in Par. XXX.124-132, “interrupted” by the “digression” [at XXX.133-145] of her bitter words about Henry's death and the corrupt recent popes Boniface and Clement). With “dunque” the poet announces his return to her prior subject. The word's casual, “vernacular-sounding” nature caught the attention of Aldo Scaglione (“Periodic Syntax and Flexible Meter in the Divina Commedia,” Romance Philology 21 [1967]: 1-22), as is reported by John Scott (“Canto XXXI,” in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone [Florence: Cesati, 2002], p. 476). Both of them refer to the term brought to bear in Dante studies by Erich Auerbach (“Sermo humilis,” in Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, tr. R. Manheim [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965 {1958}], pp. 25-66), sermo humilis, for the low style, in their classification of this linguistic gesture. Scott admires the juxtaposition of dunque with candida rosa (luminous white rose) as the expression of Dante's union of the low with the sublime.
Vellutello (comm. to vv. 1-3) was apparently the first commentator, in a long tradition, to link the “bianche stole” (white robes) last heard of in Paradiso XXX.129 with the adjective candida (luminous white) modifying rosa. Grandgent (comm. to this verse) is one of only two in the DDP to suggest a source in Albertus Magnus (De laudibus beatae Mariae Virginis [XII.iv.33]): “Et nota, quod Christus rosa, Maria rosa, Ecclesia rosa, fidelis anima rosa,” equating Jesus, Mary, the Church, and the faithful soul of a believer with the rose.
For the fullest bibliography for this canto available in print, see Gustavo Costa (“Il canto XXXI del Paradiso,” L'Alighieri 8 [1996], pp. 78-85).
The protagonist gazes at the milizia (soldiery) that fought on for the Church that Christ “adquisivit sanguine suo” (obtained with His own blood – Acts 20:28, first cited by Tommaseo [comm. to vv. 1-3]). And see the note to verse 127. Dante never stops seeing the Church as an army, even in its peaceful triumph.
The other host, the angels, now take the poet's attention, flying up to the “hive” while contemplating and singing Its glory.
The first five words of Paradiso I.1 are present here, verbatim.
The angelic host is given similetic expression. At first, by Pietro di Dante (Pietro1, comm. to vv. 7-9) and Benvenuto (comm. to vv. 4-12), these bees were seen as deriving from Aeneid I.430-431. However, from Vellutello (comm. to vv. 4-12) onward, commentators have heard the more relevant echo of the simile at Aeneid VI.703-709 (for that text, see the note to Paradiso XXX.64-66).
The conclusion of Albert Rossi's study (“The Poetics of Resurrection: Virgil's Bees [Paradiso XXXI, 1-12],” Romanic Review 80 [1989], pp. 313-24) accounts for the disparities in the two similes by showing that the situation in the Aeneid, from a Christian perspective, is less propitious than it first may seem. As a central case in point, Aeneas discovers that all these happy shades are about to be (from Dante's perspective) “reincarnated.” We can hardly imagine the joy felt by the hero of this “epic” when he sees the souls in the Rose as they will look when they are resurrected. Surely we are meant to remember Aeneas's quite different reaction, when he learns from Anchises about the flesh that these souls in the Elysian Fields will bear with them as they return to the world and its toils. Indeed, Aeneas laments their return to the world of flesh (Aen. VI.719-721). In the post-Platonic Aeneid, the world of flesh has nothing to do with spiritual perfection; in Dante's poem the beatified spirit has only a single unfulfilled desire: to be granted the return of its flesh. Thus, if Dante allows Virgilian text a renewed presence in his poem, he is not without the ironic distance that we have found present in even the first moments of the poem (for example, see the notes to Inf. II.28 and II.56-57).
For other possible sources for this passage, e.g., in St. Anselm and St. Bernard, see Scott (“Canto XXXI,” in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone [Florence: Cesati, 2002], p. 478). For several different passages in Bernard, see the following: Carroll (comm. to vv. 1-12), Torraca (comm. to these verses), Casini/Barbi (comm. to verse 7), and Trucchi (comm. to vv. 4-12), who also cites Anselm. A few later commentators also make gestures in both these directions, if without furnishing texts.
A discussion of the elaborate structural play in this simile is found in Richard Lansing (From Image to Idea: A Study of the Simile in Dante's “Commedia” [Ravenna: Longo, 1977], p. 37). The vehicle and tenor of the simile each mirrors both moments in the movement of the bees/angels, first down to the flowers/souls, then back up to the hive/God.
As we have seen (note to Par. XXX.64-66), Virgil's verb (insidere) for what the bees do at least suggests that, more than settling on the blossoms, they enter them. Thus Dante here follows Virgil faithfully, if others seem to believe he does not (see Bosco/Reggio [comm. to this verse]).
The word laboro is obviously a deliberate Latinism, since lavoro, Italian for “labor,” is metrically the same, and Dante's hand was not forced by rhyme. Why does he choose this linguistic tactic here? Perhaps to underline his borrowing from Virgil.
We are given a clue as to the separate “dwelling” of God. According to Fallani (comm. to vv. 40-42), among the Scholastics there was a tradition of a second “heaven” in the Empyrean, the coelum Trinitatis (the heaven of the Trinity), a “place” distinct from the Empyrean, where dwelt the triune God, separated from the blessed souls. In Fallani's opinion, Dante accepts that tradition. It is, however, not clear that he does. Perhaps he both honors and abrogates it, for his God is not in an “eleventh zone” of the heavens, but in the one He shares with the saints - if in a higher and thus different locus from them (the distance between the “floor” and the top tier of the Rose is greater than that between the lowest place in the sea and the highest place beneath the Moon [see the note to vv. 73-78]; the distance between that point in the Rose and God would seem to be infinite). And thus Dante can have things both ways: Is God separate from the saints? Yes and no. He is infinitely higher up than they, but that does not require that He “inhabits” another “place,” especially since His “habitation” is everywhere and nowhere. It seems clear that Dante intends to avoid this issue. For the presence of the phrase coelum Trinitatis, in a context that is related, see Thomas Aquinas, Super Evangelium S. Matthaei lectura (51.2, referring to Psalm 36:11 [37:11] and Matthew 5:5, “The meek shall inherit the earth”; Aquinas explains that the terra [earth] promised them is the Empyrean). It is not entirely clear, but he seems to think of the Empyrean and the coelum Trinitatis as though they might be considered one and the same.
Dante's description of the angels, flaming red faces, golden wings, and white “bodies,” is possibly based in biblical texts as well as popular iconography (as found, for instance, painted on church walls). Quite a few biblical sources have been a part of the indeterminate discussion down through the centuries. Perhaps the only sure citation (for the angels' red faces) is Scartazzini's (comm. to verse 13): Ezechiel 1:13: “their appearance was like burning coals of fire,” which has quantitatively the most support. A second at least likely attribution is Tommaseo's (comm. to this tercet), who, for the white, cites Matthew 28:3: the angel who appears at the tomb of Jesus, his vestments “white as snow” (some later commentators join [or substitute] Matthew's supposed “source,” Daniel 7:9). The gold has several suggestions based in Daniel 10:5, but this is not convincingly chosen, since the gold there described is that found on a belt, not on wings.
As for the “allegorical” meaning of the three colors, nearly all can agree that the red faces bespeak angelic love. However, the other two are the cause of disagreement. Some, unconvincingly, propose the Trinity (Love, Wisdom [?], and Power [??]); others select various abstractions, not much more convincingly. There is a general understanding that the angels and their colors are perfect in three respects: they love perfectly, fly on immortal pinions, and have “bodies” that are utterly pure. And that is probably enough.
In Dante's lovely transposition, these bees, now having gathered the “pollen” (God's love) from the hive, bring “honey” back from the hive to the souls: a celestial variant on nature's apiary artistry. These flowers have a second chance to enjoy their own (now enhanced) sweetness. Dante's “honey,” like God's love and their love for Him, is bidirectional.
As Augustine knew and taught, mortal love can never satisfy or be satisfied: “inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te” (restless is our heart until it find rest in you – Confessiones I.1). These two words, pace and ardore (“peace” and “love”), can be found together only here in the Empyrean, never in Dante's world below.
The numberless host of the angels, circling God in nine ranks (see the note to Par. XXVIII.25-27), do not hinder in any way either His ray from reaching the saints in the Rose or their ability to make out His splendor (which Aversano [Dante daccapo {glosses to the Paradiso}, copia d'eccezione, sent by the author on 11 September 2001], p. 159) particularizes as the Second Person, Christ, irradiated by the Father). Torraca (comm. to vv. 22-24) reminds us that, in Convivio (III.vii.5), Dante had in fact said that the angels were as though translucent (diafani). Indeed, all of them, those who believed in Christ to come and those who believed after the fact, are gazing lovingly on the triune God.
See Paradiso I.2 and the note to verse 5, above. Thus Dante, nearing his ending, reflects his beginning, a way of also signaling that the poem is approaching its conclusion.
We now see all the saints doing what, as we will learn in the next canto, they always do, looking up, fixing their gaze on God. There is no variety in Heaven, nor is it desired by the blessed.
We also learn, in that canto, what is intrinsic only to what we see here. There are more Jews in Heaven than Christians. This puzzled some commentators and infuriated others, the first group claiming that Dante could not possibly have meant this, the others believing him only too well. Pretty clearly Dante's neat division of the Rose into two equal parts, with a few empty seats in the Christian half and none in the Jewish one, is meant to force that conclusion upon a reader. As far as we know, there are only a very few gentiles among the Hebrew group. In fact, we know only that there are two, Cato (there thus should be at least one empty place in the full half, as Cato is still minding Purgatory) and Ripheus (Statius and Trajan were both alive in Christian times). Dante's point is clear: More Jews believed in Christ without the authority of His presence, as certified by the witness provided by the New Testament, than did Christians, even though they were given the answers before they took the exam.
In verse 27 the saints are said to aim their gaze at a single target. Now the poet speaks of that single essence as a “star,” but also as the Trinity, a “threefold Light,” bringing joy to all the blessed who behold it (and they all do). Some of the early commentators are less clear than they might be that this is not an “invocation” or part of the prayer that Dante will address to God in verse 30. This is an example of apostrophe, one of praise, and not part of a request.
The poet then addresses God, praying that He look down at the “storm” afflicting mortal lives on earth. Is there an implicit further request to be understood here? Most of the commentators think so. And all of them who are of this opinion believe that Dante is asking God to intervene on behalf of storm-tossed mortals. However, it seems at least as likely that he means no such thing. Rather, as the reference to Florence (verse 39) might also suggest, God ought to look down at the spectacle of human sin with grim recognition of the lostness of those living now on earth, almost all of them beyond redemption. Apparently the first to offer so point-blank a negative reading was Francesco Roffarè (“Canto XXXI,” in Lectura Dantis Scaligera: “Paradiso”, dir. M. Marcazzan [Florence: Le Monnier, 1968], p. 1107). What stands in the way of accepting this pessimistic interpretation is the highly possible presence of a citation of a passage, first cited by Tommaseo (comm. to vv. 28-30), in Boethius's Consolatio (I.m5.42-48): “O God, whoever you are, who joins [sic] all things in perfect harmony, look down upon this miserable earth! We men are no small part of Your great work, yet we wallow here in the stormy sea of fortune. Ruler of all things, calm the roiling waves and, as You rule the immense heavens, rule also the earth in stable concord” (tr. R. Green). Also germane is Monarchia I.xvi.4, first cited by Torraca (comm. to vv. 28-30): “O human race, how many storms and misfortunes and shipwrecks must toss you about while, transformed into a many-headed beast, you strive after conflicting things” (tr. P. Shaw). This last is part of the bitter conclusion of the first book of that treatise, and would not encourage one to believe that, if Dante were thinking of it here, he foresaw any sort of divine aid coming to the human race. On the other hand, see the prophecy concluding Paradiso XXVII, which does predict God's positive intervention in the affairs of men (similarly presented as a storm at sea [fortuna] – see the note to Par. XXVII.142-148). It is thus difficult to decide what the author intended us to gather about the nature of his request for God's attention.
For the possible presence of a citation here of Aeneid II.689-690, see Daniello (comm. to vv. 29-30).
In this lengthy simile the poet compares barbarians, probably coming, in times of peace, from Northern Europe to Rome, seeing the imperial buildings of the city before Constantine gave those buildings to the papacy just after his conversion in 312, to himself, moving in the opposite direction, “south” to “north,” from Florence to the New Jerusalem above the heavens. The magnificent church of St. John Lateran was destroyed by fire in 1308. Making things worse, Henry VII, denied a coronation in St. Peter's by Pope Clement, was crowned in the ruins of that church in 1312, nearly exactly one thousand years later, and died the next year (see the note to Par. XVII.82-84).
For a discussion of the various notions of what exactly Dante meant by the reference, see Gustavo Costa (“Il canto XXXI del Paradiso,” L'Alighieri 8 [1996], pp. 65-66).
Callisto was exiled by Diana from the “nunnery” of chaste forest maidens for her affair with Jove, which resulted in her giving birth to Arcas. “The 'zone' that is always 'covered by Helice' is the North. The nymph Helice or Callisto was transformed into the constellation of the Great Bear, and her son Arcas or Boötes into the Little Bear: Metam. II.496-530, especially 515-517; cf. Purg. XXV.131. The Bears, or Dippers, are close to the North Star” (Grandgent, comm. to vv. 31-34).
The phrase “a people just and sane” is the third and last in a series of parallel pairs, with the parallelism inverted in the third term: good/bad, good/bad, bad/good. See Paradiso XVI.152, where Florentines in “the good old days” were portrayed in much more positive terms. Now things have changed, and Florentines are those left behind in order for Dante to associate with such people as they once were, now found only in Heaven.
This is the fifteenth and last time we hear the word Fiorenza in the poem; we first heard it in Farinata's voice (Inf. X.92). While in fact Florence had replaced Rome as the greatest city of Italy, Dante here reverses that equation, making old Rome the type of the celestial city, while new Florence is portrayed as the city of the lost.
The second simile in a series of three dedicated to the theme of pilgrimage (see the note to vv. 103-111), this one presents Dante as a traveler to a shrine, a journey that he has vowed to make. For the pilgrimage motif in the entire poem, see Julia Bolton Holloway (The Pilgrim and the Book [New York: Peter Lang, 1992]).
While Dante leaves the particular shrine he may have had in mind shrouded in silence, the early commentators variously suggested the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, St. Peter's in Rome, and St. James of Compostella in Galicia (Spain), the three most important destinations for pilgrims in his day.
The Tuscan word for “now” (mo) was first heard at Inferno X.21 and leaves the poem after a dazzling three uses in a single line (and the twenty-third through twenty-fifth in all), perhaps underlining Dante's desire to be considered a vernacularizing poet even at the sublime height of the Empyrean. The effect of the triple presence of the word accents the eager nature of his glance, unable to move quickly enough in taking in every aspect of the place he has so long desired to see, the goal of his pilgrimage. Verse 54 describes Dante's similar hurried and eager glances cast around the Rose in the attempt to take it all in.
What the protagonist sees, faces, reminds us that it was only the first few souls whom he saw in the heavens whose human features he could make out (see the note to Par. III.58-63). Now he is seeing, as Beatrice promised he would (in Par. XXX.44-45), the souls as they will look when they are reincarnate.
The word onestade has only two occurrences in the poem. The last time we heard it was in the poet's description of Virgil when he was running up the slope of Mount Purgatory (Purg. III.11) after Cato chastised the souls who listened, charmed, to Casella's song. There Virgil is seen as having lost his dignity; here the souls in the Rose are seen by the protagonist as having theirs.
The mood is quiet, preparing us for a transition, moving from the general to the specific.
Compare the similar scene in Purgatorio XXX.43-54, when the protagonist turns back to speak to Virgil, only to find him gone. This scene, clearly reflective of that one, is much briefer and in an altogether different key. That one is three times as long, and in the tragic mode. Here, the disappearance of Beatrice has a quite different tonality. Among the differences is that she disappears from the “floor of the arena” only to reappear in her place in the Rose (see Par. XXXI.71).
What were the questions Dante still wanted Beatrice to answer? Are we supposed to wonder? Or is this mere “realistic detail” (i.e., are we merely supposed to reflect, “Of course, anyone would have a lot of questions during a first visit to Paradise”)? Some commentators, however, try to ascertain what questions Dante wanted to ask. For example, Jacopo della Lana (comm. to vv. 55-57): Dante wants to know the identities of those seated in the Rose; or Benvenuto (comm. to vv. 52-57): Dante wants to know where Mary and Beatrice are seated. Poletto (comm. to vv. 52-57) loses patience with such attempts, urging us not to seek what the poet has chosen not to reveal. Francesco da Buti (comm. to vv. 43-57) had solved the riddle acceptably, if obviously and unprofitably: Dante had questions about Paradise.... Steiner (comm. to these verses) has the wisest response: These lines refer to the questions that St. Bernard will eventually respond to, reading them in God. In fact, this is a rare occasion on which almost everyone is essentially correct. Bernard does answer Dante's voiced question (Where is Beatrice? [verse 64]) and one unvoiced one (Where is Mary? [verse 100]). He also in the next canto names a good number of souls seated in the Rose, as Jacopo suggested he might and as Bernard says he will (vv. 97-99).
In a recent conversation, Simone Marchesi made the suggestion that possibly this “comically resolved” scene is meant to remind us not only of Dante's “tragic” loss of Virgil in this poem (see the note to vv. 100-102) but also of Aeneas's turning back to Creusa to speak further, only to find her gone (Aen. II.790-794), a scene which itself looks back to Orpheus's loss of Eurydice in the fourth Georgic, which Dante has borrowed to such striking effect in Purgatorio XXX.49-51.
In place of Beatrice, he finds, near him on the “floor” of the Rose, an “old man” (it will turn out to be Bernard, but we do not know that yet), looking like the other blessed souls.
See Bosco/Reggio (comm. to Par. XXXII.40-75), who point out that by portraying Bernard as an old man (sene), Dante is violating a commonly understood ground rule of Paradiso, that all souls are, in their perfected beings, of the age of Christ in His last year on earth, when he was thirty-three. (This is sometimes given as thirty, thirty-three, thirty-four, or even thirty-five.) Why Dante chose to violate this “rule” is not clear. Bosco/Reggio opt for an artist's rebellion against a view that would inhibit his artistic virtuosity, an old Bernard being more believable than one in his renewed youth. And see Carroll (comm. to Par. XXXII.1-48), discussing the babes seated in the lower half of the Rose: “Further, as we saw in the case of Bernard himself, Dante appears to ignore the doctrine of Aquinas that in the Resurrection the saints will rise at the age of thirty. Bernard, himself an old man, draws his attention to the child faces and voices of the lower ranks [Par. XXXII.46-48]. Each soul, apparently, wears the form proper to the age it had attained on earth, freed of course from weakness and defect of the flesh. Dante evidently felt that there would have been something incongruous in making babies, who had never exercised true choice, appear full-grown in the flower of life. [Augustine thought otherwise: infants would receive 'by the marvelous and rapid operation of God that body which time by a slower process would have given them' (De Civ. Dei, XXII.14).]” For a counter-thrust, see Mario Aversano (“Sulla poetica dantesca nel canto XXIV del Purgatorio,” L'Alighieri 16 [2000]: 167) on verse 46 of the next canto. He argues that in Dante's Empyrean we see only the aspects worn by the saints as of “now,” in the year 1300. They will “mature” (or grow younger, as the case may be) in their appearance only after the General Resurrection, citing Inferno VI.103-111. Are we thus to believe that what Dante sees now is only temporary likenesses of these souls? Perhaps. But surely Dante would have given us a clue that this is what we should understand. In any case, Aversano is perhaps alone in this interpretation.
Bernard is Dante's last “father” in the poem. For a listing, see the note to Paradiso XVI.16.
See Scartazzini (comm. to this verse), reminding the reader of the Magdalen's remark to the resurrected Jesus, whom she mistakes for a “gardener,” upon not seeing Jesus where she expects to see him, in his sepulcher (John 20:15): “Si tu sustulisti eum, dicito mihi ubi...” (If you have carried him away, tell me where...“ [italics added]). The only other commentator in the DDP to cite this passage, without, it nearly goes without saying, citing his predecessor, is Poletto (comm. to vv. 64-69).
These are Dante's first spoken words since Paradiso XXVIII.57. See the note to Paradiso XIV.88-96 for notice of a considerably longer silence on his part.
Bernard's first words answer Dante's most pressing concern, the whereabouts of Beatrice, who, he points out, is in the third row from the top. For a similar scene, see Inferno II.109-112, where Beatrice tells how Lucy came to her exactly where we see her now and got her to leave this seat in order to go into Limbo to enlist Virgil's aid. Just so has she now enlisted Bernard's help on Dante's behalf and then reassumed her place.
Dante sees Beatrice literally in glory, resplendent with the light of God.
For Beatrice's crown and Aquinas's discussion of the additional aureola accorded especially favored saints, see the note to Paradiso XXIII.95 and Scartazzini (comm. to vv. 71-72).
From the highest point in the earth's sublunar atmosphere to the deepest seabed was not so far as Dante found himself now from Beatrice; and yet he could see her as though there were no appreciable distance between them. The poet has already explained (Par. XXX.121-123) that in the Empyrean, the usual physical laws that we know on earth are suspended.
In a sense, Dante here ”disinvents“ the as-yet-to-be-discovered technique of perspectival representation that would distinguish Italian painting of the next century.
See John Scott (”Canto XXXI,“ in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone [Florence: Cesati, 2002], p. 485) for this striking word (effige), which is used only here and in Paradiso XXXIII.131, thus further associating Beatrice and Christ. No commentator in the DDP looks up from his text to make that observation.
Apparently, the first commentator to pay any conscious attention to the protagonist's switch from the honorific voi, in addressing Beatrice, to the affectionate tu, was Grabher (comm. to vv. 70-93), if he does not make much out of it. Porena (comm. to vv. 79-90) also notices the change, but has quite a strong sense of what it signifies, only appearing to be a closing of the distance between them, but being in fact a distancing, because it is the tu addressed to a saint, or that is proffered both to God and to Mary. Indeed, both God and Mary, in Christian theology, have the unique gift of being divine and human simultaneously - as does Beatrice. Nonetheless, Chimenz (comm. to vv. 79-84) admires Porena's formulation. Giacalone (comm. to vv. 79-84) is also in their camp. A different view is advanced by Singleton (comm. to verse 80), one that proposes that the guide has become the individual soul of Beatrice (Singleton retains his sense that the guide is ”allegorical,“ while the individual is not, a judgment that some would dispute in its first instance, others in the second). Bosco/Reggio (comm. to vv. 82-84) also support Porena's thesis.
For a different view, see Hollander (Dante: A Life in Works [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001], pp. 126-27), pointing out that, as in the Vita nuova, Beatrice in Heaven may indeed be addressed with tu, ”only when she is at one with God, where and when there are no human hierarchies.“ The fact would seem to be that these eleven second-person-singular pronouns and verb endings (in only twelve verses) do indicate a more personal sense of affection, in a sort of uncontrolled outburst of personal enthusiasm, allowable now that they are on an equal footing as lovers of one another in God. We cannot imagine Jesus addressing Mary as Voi.
For the figural equation, Beatrice as Dante's ”Christ,“ see Hollander (Allegory in Dante's ”Commedia“ [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969]), p. 261. After calling attention to the poet's last words to Virgil in the poem (Purg. XXX.51), ”Virgilio a cui per mia salute die'mi“ (Virgil, to whom I gave myself for my salvation), he then continues as follows, discussing this tercet: ”At Dante's beginnings we do well to have in mind his endings, and vice versa. It is Beatrice, the figure of Christ, who brings Dante to salvation; it is Virgil who brings Dante to Beatrice. Dante does not (and did not in the Vita nuova) use the word salute lightly. His last words to Virgil give him the highest function anyone less than Christ can perform, and that is to bring another to Christ.“ In this vein, see John A. Scott (”Dante's Allegory,“ Romance Philology 26 [1973]: 570). See also Amilcare Iannucci (”Paradiso XXXI,“ in Dante's ”Divine Comedy,“ Introductory Readings III: ”Paradiso,“ ed. Tibor Wlassics [Lectura Dantis {virginiana}, 16-17, supplement, Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1995], p. 483 - citing his earlier article [”Beatrice in Limbo: a Metaphoric Harrowing of Hell,“ Dante Studies 97 {1979}: 23-45]), who also notes Beatrice's Christlike attributes in this passage (as, once again, does Scott [”Canto XXXI,“ in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone {Florence: Cesati, 2002}], p. 486). This has become more or less the standard interpretation of those considered by some in Italy to be part of a so-called scuola americana, ”the American school (of Dante studies).“ And see Emilio Pasquini (Dante e le figure del vero: La fabbrica della ”Commedia“ [Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2001], p. 254), remarking on the ”near-heterodoxy“ of these verses.
To be honest, this reading seems so obvious that one feels apologetic for harping on it. However, to understand what blinders Dantists accustomed themselves to wearing whenever they came near the border of so ”blasphemous“ a theologized poetic for the poem, see the allegorizing glosses of such as Benvenuto da Imola (comm. to this tercet). In his reading (and he is far from being alone in it), Beatrice becomes ”theology“ who comes down to this ”hell on earth“ (our world, not Limbo) in order to bring her message to all mortals (including, we assume, Dante Alighieri). This is so flagrantly wrongheaded that one has to admire Benvenuto at least for his stubbornness in not yielding to a Christological interpretation of Beatrice nor to a personal one of Dante, who, in his treatment, is only a stand-in for all humankind. This, one of the most personal moments of the Commedia, is thus turned into a kind of simpleminded version of an uplifting moral tale, one only implausibly attributed to the genius of Dante. Reviewing responses to this passage in the DDP, one finds the word ”Christ“ only in Singleton's commentary (to verse 91) of 1975. How did (or does) anyone read this passage and not think of Christ's descent into Hell and His subsequent harrowing of the Hebrew saints? However, not even Giacalone, the first commentator who presents himself as a follower of the figural interpretation sponsored first by Auerbach (cited by him in 56 glosses) and then by Singleton (cited in 25), responds as one might have expected he would to this provocation. It is surely more shocking that Singleton, who only mentions Auerbach once in his commentary, not even on that occasion (his gloss to Purg. XII.40-42) refers to Auerbach's discussions of Dante's figural technique (something Singleton never did in any of his publications; see Hollander [Dante: A Life in Works {New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001}, p. 38]). Talk about Harold Bloom's ”anxiety of influence“!
The typological equations (Beatrice = Moses; Dante = the Hebrews) once again align Beatrice with Christ. See the note to verses 79-81. Here, as there, the commentators seem to want to avoid such ”blasphemous“ associations. For the Exodus as the poem's controlling trope, see Singleton (”'In exitu Israel de Aegypto,'“ Annual Report of the Dante Society 78 [1960]: 1-24).
As one who had sinned against Beatrice once before, Dante knows whereof he speaks. He thus prays that she will help him remain pure of soul for the rest of his time on earth when he is again without her. When he wrote these lines, he probably did not realize how brief that time would be.
This is the final tercet devoted to the interaction of the two lovers in the poem. Her final smile yields to her returning her attention to the source of all being.
Bernard summarizes the tasks that lie ahead for Dante: He must contemplate this resplendent gathering (splendore) to prepare himself to see, up through the ray (raggio), the source of the irradiating light (luce). See the note on Dante's physics of light, Paradiso XXIII.82-84.
Dante uses the Latinism sene (from senex) again. See the note to verse 59. The word had appeared, in a Latin form, once before, in Purg. XXX.17.
A disputed verse. Some believe the prayer is Beatrice's, the love Bernard's; others think that both are Beatrice's. See Scartazzini (comm. to this verse) for a summary of the two positions and a strong vote for the first solution, but eventual openness to the second.
Bernard's suggestion might indicate that one of Dante's unasked questions (see the note to vv. 56-57) had to do with the population of the Rose.
Bernard names himself, having sounded like a lyric poet of Dante's youthful acquaintance talking about his lady, associating himself, however, not with a Giovanna, a Lagia, or a Selvaggia, but with the Blessed Virgin Mary. Everything about this moment comes as a surprise. We did not anticipate a new guide in the poem, if Dante surely decided that he wanted to have a chance to bid farewell to Beatrice, as well as to present her as being back in bliss. In addition, perhaps for reasons reflecting his personal devotion (for a possible confirmation, see Par. XXIII.88-89), he wanted a guide more associated with Mary for this highest part of the poem (not that Beatrice would have been in any way unqualified); perhaps he also felt a numerological tug in deciding to have a trinitarian third instructor. Still, one sympathizes with those who feel that there is something ungainly about the substitution of Bernard for Beatrice. (See the discussion in Steven Botterill [Dante and the Mystical Tradition: Bernard of Clairvaux in the ”Commedia“ {Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994}], pp. 64-115.) And no one who defends the advent of a new guide can argue that it has been at all prepared for, as was Beatrice's (as early as Inf. I.121-126). Lino Pertile (”Quale amore va in Paradiso?“ in ”Le donne, i cavalieri, l'arme, gli amori“: Poema e romanzo: la narrativa lunga in Italia, ed. Francesco Bruni [Venice: Marsilio, 2001]), pp. 67-69) goes so far as to argue, if not particularly convincingly, that Dante had planned (and the first sign of such a plan revealed itself, according to him, in Inf. II.24-25, with the indication of Mary, Lucy, and Beatrice) to have Beatrice replaced by Lucy. Whatever one thinks of that solution, one must admit that there is a problem here, one that a few strokes of the quill could have avoided. However, see Francesco Mazzoni (”San Bernardo e la visione poetica della Divina Commedia,“ in Seminario Dantesco Internazionale: Atti del primo convegno tenutosi al Chauncey Conference Center, Princeton, 21-23 ottobre 1994, ed. Z.G. Baranski [Florence: Le Lettere, 1997], pp. 171-241), who insists on the influence of Bernard's work (or that which Dante considered Bernardine) behind the text of the poem from its outset. And see Amilcare Iannucci (”Paradiso XXXI,“ in Dante's ”Divine Comedy,“ Introductory Readings III: ”Paradiso,“ ed. Tibor Wlassics [Lectura Dantis {virginiana}, 16-17, supplement, Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1995], pp. 481-82), for the notion that the surprise of Bernard's presence is only a tactic to alert us to his importance for Dante. A series of essays discussing the reflection of several of Bernard's writings in the Commedia is found in Mario Aversano (San Bernardo e Dante. Teologia e poesia della conversione [Salerno: Edisud, 1990]). For a summary of Bernard's importance for Dante and of the presence of his writing behind the cantos in which he appears, see Carroll (comm. to vv. 118-142).
For the possible influence of Bernard's De diligendo Deo on the structure of the entire poem, see Hollander (”The Invocations of the Commedia,“ Yearbook of Italian Studies 3 [1976]: 235-40, repr. in Studies in Dante [Ravenna: Longo, 1980], pp. 33-38). And see the notes to Purgatorio XXVII.139-141 and Paradiso XXXIII.127-132. For a compact treatment of Bernard's life, see Raoul Manselli, ”Bernardo di Chiaravalle, santo,“ ED (I [1970]), pp. 601a-5b, which, however, skirts the question of the actual literary influence of Bernard on Dante. For an introductory treatment in English, one may, in addition to Botterill, consult E.G. Gardner (Dante and the Mystics [London: Dent, 1913], pp. 111-43).
Dante does not refer to Bernard's urgent and frequent support of the Second Crusade (1145-1147) in his preaching. For a study of this crusade, inevitably linked to the adjective ”disastrous,“ see Giles Constable (”The Second Crusade as Seen by Contemporaries,“ Traditio 9 [1953]: 213-279). Dante's silence is perhaps not surprising, given its failure.
Bernard names himself only at the end of his speech (vv. 94-102). The impression of humility is perhaps less pronounced than when similar behavior was exhibited by both Thomas Aquinas (Par. X.82-99) and Cacciaguida (Par. XV.88-135), who indeed speak longer before naming themselves. Nonetheless, his comportment is clearly intended to portray his modesty.
This long but essentially simple simile links Dante once again with a pilgrim arriving at his destination, in this case Rome, where the Veronica, a most holy relic, was preserved. Veronica was supposedly a woman of Jerusalem who offered Jesus a cloth (sudarium) to wipe the blood and sweat from His face on the way to Calvary. His features remained on the cloth, which was eventually taken to St. Peter's in Rome, where it was displayed to the faithful on certain occasions. That her name was actually Veronica is doubtful, since her name itself means ”true likeness“ (vera icona). The whole history of this image (and of other relics like it, particularly the Shroud of Turin) is controversial. But for Dante, there was not even a question of its authenticity. See his earlier reference, at the climactic moment of the Vita nuova (XL.1), to pilgrims on their way to Rome to see the Veronica, a moment fulfilled here in this poem by Dante's pilgrimage to ”that Rome where Christ Himself is Roman“ (Purg. XXXII.102). For a discussion of both these moments, see Alessandro Vettori (”Veronica: Dante's Pilgrimage from Image to Vision,“ Dante Studies 121 [2003 {2006}]: 43-65).
See Richard Lansing (From Image to Idea: A Study of the Simile in Dante's ”Commedia“ [Ravenna: Longo, 1977]), pp. 137-40) for consideration of three consecutive similes in this canto (see also vv. 31-40 and 43-48) dedicated to the theme of completion of a pilgrimage.
Croatia, for Dante's audience, represented a very distant and ”foreign“ place, as in the more recent expression ”from here to Timbuktu.“
See Singleton (comm. on these verses): ”Bernard's two principal qualifications to serve as final guide in the journey stem from his special devotion to the Virgin Mary and from his fame as one dedicated to mystical contemplation with special emphasis on the affective movement of the mind as it rises to God, an emphasis which later Franciscan thought and devotion adopted and stressed. It was believed that Bernard, in such meditation, had a foretaste of the peace of Heaven. In the Meditationes piissimae (XIV, 36-37), ascribed to Bernard, there is a rhapsody on the joys of contemplation. See also Bernard, Sermones in Cantica Canticorum, XXIII, 15-16. As noted above, Dante in his Letter to Can Grande (Epist. XIII, 80) refers the reader of his Paradiso to Bernard's work De contemplatione.“
Dante, in fixing his gaze on Bernard, who has descended from his seat in the Rose upon Beatrice's urging (see verse 66), has fixated on a lesser version of the good and true than that which Bernard will eventually bring him to see. At least for now the Virgin is the best sight available to him, and she is at the very highest point, in the top row of the stadium-rose.
How many souls are seated in the Rose? Dante keeps his counsel on that question. The Apocalypse numbers the saved as 144,000 (Apoc. 7:1, 7:4; 14:1, 14:3). Landino (comm. to Par. XXX.133-138) reports that some say that the number of blessed is equivalent to the number of fallen angels, while others are of the opinion that it is the same as that of the remaining good angels. (For Dante's previous opinion on a related matter, see the note to Paradiso XXIX.50.) Landino concludes that only God knows the number of angels, as Aquinas says.
This passage is seamless, describing a single action, Dante's raising his eyes (verse 118) at Bernard's command and seeing Mary, surrounded by angels and admired by the rest of the blessed. It is like a painting of the Virgin seated in glory. However, since it is only like a painting, the poet introduces his central scene with a double simile, each element of which begins ”e come.“
Until now, we have been shown the Empyrean with a long-range perspective, seeing all the Rose as a unit divided into many parts. Now we focus on a single part of it and are presented with a new sense of graduated selectivity, in which the things that are nearest Mary are brightest, while those farthest from her gradually fade from view.
The first simile pairs Mary with the brightness of the Sun at its rising, as compared with the entire rim of the sky. We are asked to imagine a 360o view: The east and the parts of the horizon nearest it are brightest, the west, where the Sun lit up the horizon the evening before, the darkest. As we will see, this arrangement is perfectly mirrored in the varying brightness of parts of the Rose.
In the second simile, the brightness at the locus of the rising Sun is contrasted with the diminished light on either side of it, and is compared either to all the Rose or to Mary (see the note to verse 127).
Once again, as in the first of these conjoined similes (vv. 118-123), the varied lightness in parts of the Rose is insisted on.
Rhyme forces Dante into synecdoche, the part temo (yoke-beam, or chariot pole [i.e., that to which the horses are attached]) for the whole (chariot). For other occurrences of this word (timone in modern Italian), see Purgatorio XXII.119; XXXII.49, 140, 144; Paradiso XIII.9.
We last heard of Phaeton, a frequent presence in the poem, in Paradiso XVII.3 (see the note to XVII.1-6). Why Dante wants to recall that tragic adventure here is not immediately evident.
This arresting oxymoron, ”peaceful oriflamme“ (or ”battle flag of peace“), has a varied history in the commentaries. Most trace its origin to the French royal battle standard. John Scott (”Canto XXXI,“ in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone [Florence: Cesati, 2002], p. 488) points out that, whereas many contemporary commentators say that this banner of the French kings, maintained at St. Denis, was red, it was actually red and gold, as its Latin derivation makes plain (auri fiamma [golden flame]). Earlier notice of this begins perhaps with Benvenuto (comm. to vv. 124-129): ”Maria flamma ignis aeterni et aurea“ (Mary, a golden tongue of eternal fire). Venturi (comm. to this verse) seems to have been the first to identify the French provenance of the banner and the view that whoever fought beneath it was unconquerable. A French tradition claimed that the banner was first brought to the son of the Christian emperor Constantine by an angel. Andreoli (comm. to this verse) refines the source of the tale a bit, referring to a version indicating that Charlemagne fought under it. The most complex discussion of the various possibilities is found in Scartazzini (comm. to this verse). See Oelsner's brief exposition (comm. to this verse), which, however, reverses the more usual relations between the red and the gold: ”The Oriflamme (aurea flamma) was the standard given by the Angel Gabriel to the ancient kings of France, representing a [red] flame on a golden ground. No one who fought under it could be conquered. The golden glow of heaven is the invincible ensign not of war but peace.“
Most who write about this verse play up the opposed values of the two elements in this image, Mary's peaceful conquest as opposed to the French (or any) king's military exploits. However, we should remember that this gathering, too, is an army, if now a triumphant one, with all but a final battle (that of the returning Christ against Antichrist at the end of days) behind it. (For a view in absolute disagreement with this one, see Porena [comm. to this verse].) While there is some dispute about whether the oriafiamma is Mary alone, all the Rose (including her), or some portion of the blessed souls distinct from her, see Trucchi (comm. to vv. 124-129) for an interesting solution. The oriafiamma is the entire Rose, Mary is the golden flame, the rest of the blessed (the petals of the ”rose“) the red background. While this is not in accord with the minority explanation of what is figure, what background, it surely is worth serious consideration for its complete explanation of all the elements in the image. However, it is clear that Mary is the light referred to as the Sun in both similes. She is at the center (nel mezzo) of things as the protagonist now sees them.
For a study of the resonance of martial epic in the poem, particularly in Paradiso, see Hollander (”Dante and the Martial Epic,“ Mediaevalia 12 [1989]: 62-91; Ital trans.: ”Dante e l'epopea marziale,“ Letture classensi 18 [1989], pp. 93-113), who, however, fails to consider this verse as part of that resonance.
Around Mary, the central object in this picture, the protagonist sees an assemblage of angels, apparently of all nine orders, since they seem differentiated from one another in how bright they shine and in what they do.
The topos of the inexpressibility of great beauty, now that it is no longer needed for Beatrice (see the note to Par. XXX.22-27), is made to accompany Mary.
Dante's verb imaginar (referring to the mind's ability to receive and store images received from outside it) is quite different from the more modern instance of the word, with its clear reference to invention of things not previously seen by the imaginer. See the note to Purgatorio XVII.13-18.
The canto concludes with Bernard, famous as the ”lover-poet“ of Mary, gazing, alongside her newest ”lover-poet,“ Dante Alighieri. His awareness of Bernard's affection for her makes his own all the more ardent.
For a recent discussion of whether or not Dante is to be considered ”a mystic,“ see Steven Botterill (”Mysticism and Meaning in Dante's Paradiso,“ in Dante for the New Millennium, ed. Teodolinda Barolini and H. Wayne Storey [New York: Fordham University Press, 2003], pp. 143-51), who is mainly in the affirmative. It is difficult to believe that the final cantos of the poem, so obviously reflective of a great mystic, St. Bernard, and so triumphantly presenting a final vision, can be thought of as separate from the tradition of Western mysticism. At the same time, it is difficult to think of the earlier ninety-seven cantos of the poem as being essentially mystical in character. Thus the best answer seems to be ”no“ and ”yes“ – in that order. But see John Scott (”Canto XXXI,“ in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone [Florence: Cesati, 2002], pp. 407-8) for a cautious denial of even this much mysticism in Dante's poetry. One supposes that some (who find Dante's poetry more like Blake's than not) think of him as a mystic, while others (who do not so find) deny that he is one.
This is the sort of moment that might cause a doggedly literal-minded reader to observe that Dante could not possibly have observed the movement of Bernard's eyes because he was staring fixedly at the Virgin. For a passage that has indeed served as similar cause of over-zealous concern for ”realistic“ details, see the note to Purg. XXI.10-14.
The phrase fissi e attenti (fixed and intent) is repeated here for the third time. We heard it first in Purgatorio II.118, used in malo, for Dante and the newly arrived souls who are seduced by Casella's song and require Cato's reprimand in order to get back on their path toward God. It then appears in Purgatorio XXXII.1, where it describes Dante's gaze, fixed on Beatrice, trying to slake his ten-year ”thirst“ for her presence. That repetition was perhaps intended to counter the first instance, the context of which was the song that Dante had composed in favor of Beatrice's rival, the Lady Philosophy (her identity at least according to the Convivio [first at II.xii.9]). Now it is used a second time in bono, here referring to Dante's new ”lady,“ the Virgin. Unlike the last one, this ocular gesture does not reflect the rejection of one lady in favor of another. In Heaven there may be no marrying, but there is no limit to the number of objects of one's affection.
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