“Vergine Madre, figlia del tuo figlio,
umile e alta più che creatura,
termine fisso d'etterno consiglio,
tu se' colei che l'umana natura
nobilitasti sì, che 'l suo fattore
non disdegnò di farsi sua fattura.
Nel ventre tuo si raccese l'amore,
per lo cui caldo ne l'etterna pace
così è germinato questo fiore.
Qui se' a noi meridïana face
di caritate, e giuso, intra ' mortali,
se' di speranza fontana vivace.
Donna, se' tanto grande e tanto vali,
che qual vuol grazia e a te non ricorre,
sua disïanza vuol volar sanz' ali.
La tua benignità non pur soccorre
a chi domanda, ma molte fïate
liberamente al dimandar precorre.
In te misericordia, in te pietate,
in te magnificenza, in te s'aduna
quantunque in creatura è di bontate.
Or questi, che da l'infima lacuna
de l'universo infin qui ha vedute
le vite spiritali ad una ad una,
supplica a te, per grazia, di virtute
tanto, che possa con li occhi levarsi
più alto verso l'ultima salute.
E io, che mai per mio veder non arsi
più ch'i' fo per lo suo, tutti miei prieghi
ti porgo, e priego che non sieno scarsi,
perché tu ogne nube li disleghi
di sua mortalità co' prieghi tuoi,
sì che 'l sommo piacer li si dispieghi.
Ancor ti priego, regina, che puoi
ciò che tu vuoli, che conservi sani,
dopo tanto veder, li affetti suoi.
Vinca tua guardia i movimenti umani:
vedi Beatrice con quanti beati
per li miei prieghi ti chiudon le mani!”
Li occhi da Dio diletti e venerati,
fissi ne l'orator, ne dimostraro
quanto i devoti prieghi le son grati;
indi a l'etterno lume s'addrizzaro,
nel qual non si dee creder che s'invii
per creatura l'occhio tanto chiaro.
E io ch'al fine di tutt' i disii
appropinquava, sì com' io dovea,
l'ardor del desiderio in me finii.
Bernardo m'accennava, e sorridea,
perch' io guardassi suso; ma io era
già per me stesso tal qual ei volea:
ché la mia vista, venendo sincera,
e più e più intrava per lo raggio
de l'alta luce che da sé è vera.
Da quinci innanzi il mio veder fu maggio
che 'l parlar mostra, ch'a tal vista cede,
e cede la memoria a tanto oltraggio.
Qual è colüi che sognando vede,
che dopo 'l sogno la passione impressa
rimane, e l'altro a la mente non riede,
cotal son io, ché quasi tutta cessa
mia visïone, e ancor mi distilla
nel core il dolce che nacque da essa.
Così la neve al sol si disigilla;
così al vento ne le foglie levi
si perdea la sentenza di Sibilla.
O somma luce che tanto ti levi
da' concetti mortali, a la mia mente
ripresta un poco di quel che parevi,
e fa la lingua mia tanto possente,
ch'una favilla sol de la tua gloria
possa lasciare a la futura gente;
ché, per tornare alquanto a mia memoria
e per sonare un poco in questi versi,
più si conceperà di tua vittoria.
Io credo, per l'acume ch'io soffersi
del vivo raggio, ch'i' sarei smarrito,
se li occhi miei da lui fossero aversi.
E' mi ricorda ch'io fui più ardito
per questo a sostener, tanto ch'i' giunsi
l'aspetto mio col valore infinito.
Oh abbondante grazia ond' io presunsi
ficcar lo viso per la luce etterna,
tanto che la veduta vi consunsi!
Nel suo profondo vidi che s'interna,
legato con amore in un volume,
ciò che per l'universo si squaderna:
sustanze e accidenti e lor costume
quasi conflati insieme, per tal modo
che ciò ch'i' dico è un semplice lume.
La forma universal di questo nodo
credo ch'i' vidi, perché più di largo,
dicendo questo, mi sento ch'i' godo.
Un punto solo m'è maggior letargo
che venticinque secoli a la 'mpresa
che fé Nettuno ammirar l'ombra d'Argo.
Così la mente mia, tutta sospesa
mirava fissa, immobile e attenta,
e sempre di mirar faceasi accesa.
A quella luce cotal si diventa,
che volgersi da lei per altro aspetto
è impossibil che mai si consenta;
però che 'l ben, ch'è del volere obietto,
tutto s'accoglie in lei, e fuor di quella
è defettivo ciò ch'è lì perfetto.
Omai sarà più corta mia favella,
pur a quel ch'io ricordo, che d'un fante
che bagni ancor la lingua a la mammella.
Non perché più ch'un semplice sembiante
fosse nel vivo lume ch'io mirava,
che tal è sempre qual s'era davante;
ma per la vista che s'avvalorava
in me guardando, una sola parvenza,
mutandom' io, a me si travagliava.
Ne la profonda e chiara sussistenza
de l'alto lume parvermi tre giri
di tre colori e d'una contenenza;
e l'un da l'altro come iri da iri
parea reflesso, e 'l terzo parea foco
che quinci e quindi igualmente si spiri.
Oh quanto è corto il dire e come fioco
al mio concetto! e questo, a quel ch'i' vidi,
è tanto, che non basta a dicer “poco.”
O luce etterna che sola in te sidi,
sola t'intendi, e da te intelletta
e intendente te ami e arridi!
Quella circulazion che sì concetta
pareva in te come lume reflesso,
da li occhi miei alquanto circunspetta,
dentro da sé, del suo colore stesso,
mi parve pinta de la nostra effige:
per che 'l mio viso in lei tutto era messo.
Qual è 'l geomètra che tutto s'affige
per misurar lo cerchio, e non ritrova,
pensando, quel principio ond' elli indige,
tal era io a quella vista nova:
veder voleva come si convenne
l'imago al cerchio e come vi s'indova;
ma non eran da ciò le proprie penne:
se non che la mia mente fu percossa
da un fulgore in che sua voglia venne.
A l'alta fantasia qui mancò possa;
ma già volgeva il mio disio e 'l velle,
sì come rota ch'igualmente è mossa,
l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle.
"Thou Virgin Mother, daughter of thy Son,
Humble and high beyond all other creature,
The limit fixed of the eternal counsel,
Thou art the one who such nobility
To human nature gave, that its Creator
Did not disdain to make himself its creature.
Within thy womb rekindled was the love,
By heat of which in the eternal peace
After such wise this flower has germinated.
Here unto us thou art a noonday torch
Of charity, and below there among mortals
Thou art the living fountain-head of hope.
Lady, thou art so great, and so prevailing,
That he who wishes grace, nor runs to thee,
His aspirations without wings would fly.
Not only thy benignity gives succour
To him who asketh it, but oftentimes
Forerunneth of its own accord the asking.
In thee compassion is, in thee is pity,
In thee magnificence; in thee unites
Whate'er of goodness is in any creature.
Now doth this man, who from the lowest depth
Of the universe as far as here has seen
One after one the spiritual lives,
Supplicate thee through grace for so much power
That with his eyes he may uplift himself
Higher towards the uttermost salvation.
And I, who never burned for my own seeing
More than I do for his, all of my prayers
Proffer to thee, and pray they come not short,
That thou wouldst scatter from him every cloud
Of his mortality so with thy prayers,
That the Chief Pleasure be to him displayed.
Still farther do I pray thee, Queen, who canst
Whate'er thou wilt, that sound thou mayst preserve
After so great a vision his affections.
Let thy protection conquer human movements;
See Beatrice and all the blessed ones
My prayers to second clasp their hands to thee!"
The eyes beloved and revered of God,
Fastened upon the speaker, showed to us
How grateful unto her are prayers devout;
Then unto the Eternal Light they turned,
On which it is not credible could be
By any creature bent an eye so clear.
And I, who to the end of all desires
Was now approaching, even as I ought
The ardour of desire within me ended.
Bernard was beckoning unto me, and smiling,
That I should upward look; but I already
Was of my own accord such as he wished;
Because my sight, becoming purified,
Was entering more and more into the ray
Of the High Light which of itself is true.
From that time forward what I saw was greater
Than our discourse, that to such vision yields,
And yields the memory unto such excess.
Even as he is who seeth in a dream,
And after dreaming the imprinted passion
Remains, and to his mind the rest returns not,
Even such am I, for almost utterly
Ceases my vision, and distilleth yet
Within my heart the sweetness born of it;
Even thus the snow is in the sun unsealed,
Even thus upon the wind in the light leaves
Were the soothsayings of the Sibyl lost.
O Light Supreme, that dost so far uplift thee
From the conceits of mortals, to my mind
Of what thou didst appear re-lend a little,
And make my tongue of so great puissance,
That but a single sparkle of thy glory
It may bequeath unto the future people;
For by returning to my memory somewhat,
And by a little sounding in these verses,
More of thy victory shall be conceived!
I think the keenness of the living ray
Which I endured would have bewildered me,
If but mine eyes had been averted from it;
And I remember that I was more bold
On this account to bear, so that I joined
My aspect with the Glory Infinite.
O grace abundant, by which I presumed
To fix my sight upon the Light Eternal,
So that the seeing I consumed therein!
I saw that in its depth far down is lying
Bound up with love together in one volume,
What through the universe in leaves is scattered;
Substance, and accident, and their operations,
All interfused together in such wise
That what I speak of is one simple light.
The universal fashion of this knot
Methinks I saw, since more abundantly
In saying this I feel that I rejoice.
One moment is more lethargy to me,
Than five and twenty centuries to the emprise
That startled Neptune with the shade of Argo!
My mind in this wise wholly in suspense,
Steadfast, immovable, attentive gazed,
And evermore with gazing grew enkindled.
In presence of that light one such becomes,
That to withdraw therefrom for other prospect
It is impossible he e'er consent;
Because the good, which object is of will,
Is gathered all in this, and out of it
That is defective which is perfect there.
Shorter henceforward will my language fall
Of what I yet remember, than an infant's
Who still his tongue doth moisten at the breast.
Not because more than one unmingled semblance
Was in the living light on which I looked,
For it is always what it was before;
But through the sight, that fortified itself
In me by looking, one appearance only
To me was ever changing as I changed.
Within the deep and luminous subsistence
Of the High Light appeared to me three circles,
Of threefold colour and of one dimension,
And by the second seemed the first reflected
As Iris is by Iris, and the third
Seemed fire that equally from both is breathed.
O how all speech is feeble and falls short
Of my conceit, and this to what I saw
Is such, 'tis not enough to call it little!
O Light Eterne, sole in thyself that dwellest,
Sole knowest thyself, and, known unto thyself
And knowing, lovest and smilest on thyself!
That circulation, which being thus conceived
Appeared in thee as a reflected light,
When somewhat contemplated by mine eyes,
Within itself, of its own very colour
Seemed to me painted with our effigy,
Wherefore my sight was all absorbed therein.
As the geometrician, who endeavours
To square the circle, and discovers not,
By taking thought, the principle he wants,
Even such was I at that new apparition;
I wished to see how the image to the circle
Conformed itself, and how it there finds place;
But my own wings were not enough for this,
Had it not been that then my mind there smote
A flash of lightning, wherein came its wish.
Here vigour failed the lofty fantasy:
But now was turning my desire and will,
Even as a wheel that equally is moved,
Oft have I seen at some cathedral door
A laborer, pausing in the dust and heat,
Lay down his burden, and with reverent feet
Enter, and cross himself, and on the floor
Kneel to repeat his paternoster o'er;
Far off the noises of the world retreat;
The loud vociferations of the street
Become an undistinguishable roar.
So, as I enter here from day to day,
And leave my burden at this minster gate,
Kneeling in prayer, and not ashamed to pray,
The tumult of the time disconsolate
To inarticulate murmurs dies away,
While the eternal ages watch and wait.
How strange the sculptures that adorn these towers!
This crowd of statues, in whose folded sleeves
Birds build their nests; while canopied with leaves
Parvis and portal bloom like trellised bowers,
And the vast minster seems a cross of flowers!
But fiends and dragons on the gargoyled eaves
Watch the dead Christ between the living thieves,
And, underneath, the traitor Judas lowers!
Ah! from what agonies of heart and brain,
What exultations trampling on despair,
What tenderness, what tears, what hate of wrong,
What passionate outcry of a soul in pain,
Uprose this poem of the earth and air,
This mediaeval miracle of song!
I enter, and I see thee in the gloom
Of the long aisles, O poet saturnine!
And strive to make my steps keep pace with thine.
The air is filled with some unknown perfume;
The congregation of the dead make room
For thee to pass; the votive tapers shine;
Like rooks that haunt Ravenna's groves of pine,
The hovering echoes fly from tomb to tomb.
From the confessionals I hear arise
Rehearsals of forgotten tragedies,
And lamentations from the crypts below
And then a voice celestial that begins
With the pathetic words, "Although your sins
As scarlet be," and ends with "as the snow."
With snow-white veil, and garments as of flame,
She stands before thee, who so long ago
Filled thy young heart with passion and the woe
From which thy song in all its splendors came;
And while with stern rebuke she speaks thy name,
The ice about thy heart melts as the snow
On mountain heights, and in swift overflow
Comes gushing from thy lips in sobs of shame.
Thou makest full confession; and a gleam
As of the dawn on some dark forest cast,
Seems on thy lifted forehead to increase;
Lethe and Eunoe—the remembered dream
And the forgotten sorrow—bring at last
That perfect pardon which is perfect peace.
I Lift mine eyes, and all the windows blaze
With forms of saints and holy men who died,
Here martyred and hereafter glorified;
And the great Rose upon its leaves displays
Christ's Triumph, and the angelic roundelays,
With splendor upon splendor multiplied;
And Beatrice again at Dante's side
No more rebukes, but smiles her words of praise.
And then the organ sounds, and unseen choirs
Sing the old Latin hymns of peace and love
And benedictions of the Holy Ghost;
And the melodious bells among the spires
O'er all the house-tops and through heaven above
Proclaim the elevation of the Host!
O star of morning and of liberty!
O bringer of the light, whose splendor shines
Above the darkness of the Apennines,
Forerunner of the day that is to be!
The voices of the city and the sea,
The voices of the mountains and the pines,
Repeat thy song, till the familiar lines
Are footpaths for the thought of Italy!
Thy fame is blown abroad from all the heights,
Through all the nations; and a sound is heard,
As of a mighty wind, and men devout,
Strangers of Rome, and the new proselytes,
In their own language hear thy wondrous word,
And many are amazed and many doubt.
This much (and justly) celebrated passage, Bernard's prayer to the Virgin, has the authority and unity of a separate poem. This is not to suggest that it is in any way incongruous in its context (quite the opposite is true), only that it could be published (as surely it has been) in an anthology of devotional lyrics and be one of the most moving and commanding of the collection.
For a study of this passage, see Erich Auerbach (“Dante's Prayer to the Virgin [Par. XXXIII] and Earlier Eulogies,” Romance Philology 3 [1949]: 1-26), who aligns it with examples of classical and Christian praise. And for the large extent to which Dante has borrowed from Bernard's own writings for the words of this prayer, see Mario Aversano (Dante daccapo [glosses to the Paradiso], copia d'eccezione, sent by the author on 11 September 2001), pp. 173-76.
Gian Carlo Alessio, in a lecture he presented at Princeton University during the autumn semester of 1981, broke down the rhetorical divisions of Bernard's prayer as follows:
1-12: salutatio
13-21: exordium
22-27: narratio
28-33: repetitio
34-39: peroratio
The tone of intimacy found in this prayer is emphasized by its extraordinary number of second-person-singular pronouns (tu, te, ti) and adjectives (tuo, tua), 17 of them in 39 verses (and that figure does not include second-person-singular endings of verbs). See the note to Paradiso XXXI.79-90.
This verse establishes the basic modality of the entire canto, making two references to what will be a common theme of so many verses in it: harmonious resolution of impossibly related contraries. “Virgin” and “mother” cannot logically be the shared properties of any woman; nor can any woman be the daughter of her son. This overriding of the logic of impossibility will culminate in the final simile of the poem, the geometer attempting to square the circle. The only answer to impossibility is miracle. Reacting to the entire canto, Güntert has said (“Canto XXXIII,” in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone [Florence: Cesati, 2002], p. 505): “No Christian poet had ever been so daring.”
For the beginnings of the last cantos of the first two cantiche, see the note to Purgatorio XXXIII.1-3, which points out that each of the previous opening lines was in another poetic voice, first that of Venantius Fortunatus and second that of David, both of them speaking Latin. Here we have another poetic voice, that of St. Bernard, but he does not use his customary Latin tongue (apparently no writing of Bernard in French survives), but the vernacular. This opening line thus presents us, first with a completed pattern and then, on further consideration, with a broken pattern: We expect Latin here, but do not find it. We may also speculate on the presence of another linguistic program here. We first hear the Latin of Venantius, then a Latin “translation” of David's Hebrew, and finally Bernard's Italian, the three main languages that provide the basic materials for Dante's own literary making.
For both elements of this verse as dependent on formulations found in the fifth book of Alain de Lille's Anticlaudianus, see Giuseppe Ledda (La guerra della lingua [Ravenna: Longo, 2002], p. 308n.), citing the previous notice by Angelo Jacomuzzi (“'L'imago al cerchio'. Nota sul canto XXXIII del Paradiso,” in his L'imago al cerchio. Invenzione e visione nella “Divina Commedia” [Milan: Silva, 1968 {1965}], p. 12n.). Ledda also reports other medieval formulae that are similar to Dante's paradoxical expressions.
This marks the thirteenth time that a canto has begun with a speaker's words (see the note to Par. V.1).
If one had to choose a single line of the fourteen thousand two hundred and thirty-three verses of the Commedia to stand for its stylistic program, countering classical high style with Christian sermo humilis, this one might serve that purpose. It begins and ends with the humanity of Mary, humble and a mere human creature, who is, at the same time, lofty (alta), as is the poem itself.
See Carroll's explanation of this line (comm. to vv. 1-39): “The woman worthy to be the 'Mother of God' must have been elect from the beginning.”
This tercet, remarkable for its triple play on the “making” of flesh (fattore, farsi, fattura), rises to the heights with the hapax (and coinage?) nobilitasti (ennobled). What is the noblest act ever done? God's making himself mortal for our sake (cf. Par. VII.118-120).
Sapegno (comm. to vv. 4-6) cites Dante's previous praise of Mary in Convivio IV.v.5.
Dante's use of the word ventre (here and once earlier for Mary's womb at Par. XXXIII.104) was perhaps not intended to be controversial. See Bosco/Reggio (comm. to vv. 1-21), pointing out that Dante may have deliberately been echoing “et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Jesus” (blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus [originally found in Luke 1:42]). This is the end of the first part of the prayer: “Hail, Mary, full of grace, / blessed are you among women.” Nonetheless, and as we have observed (see the notes to Par. XXI.84 and XXIII.104), some of Dante's readers find this a lowering of diction unbefitting such a lofty subject. And the first ten of Dante's uses of the word (8 in Inferno, 2 in Purgatorio) are all negatively charged, since the term is associated with Cerberus (Inf. VI.17), the Harpies (Inf. XIII.14), Aruns (Inf. XX.46), reptilian transformations (Inf. XXV.74), the counterfeiters (Inf. XIXX.67), Capocchio (Inf. XXX.30), Master Adam (Inf. XXX.123), the giants (Inf. XXXI.47), the femmina balba (Purg. XIX.32), and the bellies afflicted with pain for eating of the tree (Purg. XXXII.45).
In a related and similar vein, see Martin McLaughlin (Literary Imitation in the Italian Renaissance: The Theory and Practice of Literary Imitation in Italy from Dante to Bembo [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995], pp. 20-21), remarking that “After Petrarch reasserts the absolute superiority of Latin over the volgare, Dante's vernacular echoes of classical auctores are regarded as a diminution of their status.”
On the word amore, see Aleardo Sacchetto (“Il canto XXXIII del Paradiso,” Nuove letture dantesche, vol. VII [Florence: Le Monnier, 1974], pp. 265-87), for whom love is the key to the poem, occurring nineteen times in Inferno, fifty in Purgatorio, and eighty-five in Paradiso.
Christ's sacrifice was the evidence of the rekindling of God's love for humankind, resulting in the saved souls that populate the Rose.
For the elevation of Mary found here (and in all this passage), see Carroll (comm. to vv. 1-39): “[Dante] must have been familiar with the distinction of Aquinas between latria, the worship due to God; dulia, the veneration given to saints and Angels; and hyperdulia, the higher veneration given to Mary, as the most exalted of creatures (Summa, II-II, q. 103, a. 3, 4).” See two earlier commentators who also cite this threefold distinction, if without tracing it to Aquinas: Guido da Pisa (comm. to verse 48) and John of Serravalle (comm to vv. 106-111).
For the saved, there is no more need for hope – their hope (as well as their faith) has been rewarded, and now they only love eternally. Meanwhile, while to those (few, we need to recall, lest we get carried away by the warmth of these verses) left on earth who will be saved, Mary offers the surest path of hope for their salvation.
Campi (comm. to vv. 13-15) cites Monsignor Cavedoni for the attribution of this image to St. Bernard, Sermones in Vigilia Nativitatis Domini III.10: “Nihil nos Deus habere voluit, quod per Mariae manus non transiret” (God does not wish us to have anything that has not first passed through the hands of Mary).
Geoffrey Chaucer, who knew and understood this poem better than any English writer for many centuries, appropriated this line in his Troilus with hilarious result. Stanza 182 of Book III (one stanza from the numerical midpoint of the work, 588 of 1178 stanzas) has Troilus in the midst of his three-stanza prayer to Venus (his “Mary”). Whoever wants to accomplish his love (he is thinking about carnal pleasure), he says, without Venus's help, “his desire will fly without wings,” that is, will not be successful. It is Paradiso XXXIII done as Some Like It Hot, one of Billy Wilder's greatest films. (That Chaucer could do Dante “straight” is witnessed in many of his texts; in the context of this canto, see particularly his rewriting of the first half of Bernard's prayer in “The Second Nun's Prologue” of The Canterbury Tales, vv. 29-77.)
As Simone Marchesi, in conversation, has pointed out, Chaucer's Billy Wilder was Giovanni Boccaccio, whose lascivious Venetian friar Albert (Decam. IV.ii), in illicit pleasure with a Venetian matron, “flew many times without his wings.” Albert appears to the credulous woman as the angel Gabriel, decked out in a costume including wings that he takes off only in the darkness of her bedroom. Boccaccio is clearly pulling Dante's leg; now Chaucer does so also.
For liberality extending itself unrequested, see Purgatorio XVII.59-60 and Paradiso XVII.75.
Here we have a case of a Virgilian borrowing that has apparently remained hidden for centuries (in both texts, CAPITALS mark structural parallels and italics indicate secondary repeated sounds of te):
In TE misericordia, in TE pietate,
in TE magnificenza, in TE s'aduna...
See Georgics IV.465-466 (Orpheus lamenting his dead Eurydice, a scene Dante has revisited in Purg. XXX.49-51 [see the note to that passage] as parallel to his plaint for lost Virgil, as is fairly widely agreed these days):
TE, dulcis coniunx, TE solo in litore secum,
TE veniente die, TE decedente canebat.
This seems an obvious revisitation. Perhaps we have not seen it because the situations are so opposed. But that is the point: Bernard is a better Orpheus singing a better Eurydice, Maria. It is a small but telling emblem of how Dante rewrites Virgilian tragedy as Christian comedy. And the Virgilian context is striking: We last heard the notes of Georgics IV in tragic mode for his disappearance as a character from the poem; now that poem becomes the subtext for a better moment, his own re-entry to this Christian comedy at its highest point. However, notice of this echo is fairly recent. See Hollander (“Le opere di Virgilio nella Commedia di Dante,” in Dante e la “bella scola” della poesia: Autorità e sfida poetica, ed. A. A. Iannucci [Ravenna: Longo, 1993], p. 339), citing a communication from Professor Rachel Jacoff in 1987, suggesting the existence of this borrowing, which also possibly reflects Paradiso XXIII.88-89, where Dante presents himself as praying to Mary each morning and evening, while Orpheus presents himself as “singing” Eurydice morning and evening. The stark contrast between Virgilian “Orphic” love that leads to death and Marian affection that leads to eternal life could not be more striking.
We may remember that the first (and only) time we heard Dante's name in this poem (Purg. XXX.55), it was echoing a passage just a little farther along in this Georgic (see the note to Purg. XXX.63).
The reader may be pleased to know of the existence of Virgil in Late Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, an online bibliography assembled by David Wilson-Okamura and graciously provided to scholars and anyone else interested with no bothersome encumbrance: http://www.virgil.org/bibliography/virgil-bibliography.htm. The bibliography is updated on occasion, with the last version (as of 6 April 2006) dating from 6 February 2006. While the rest of the world argues over Google's desire simply to take and distribute other people's intellectual property, some scholars have dedicated themselves to sharing the fruits of their labor with others without a thought of financial reward.
Bosco/Reggio (comm. to these verses) rightly express surprise that there is any debate at all over exactly which of the souls in which parts of the afterworld Bernard refers to, since he obviously refers to all of them.
Tommaseo (comm. to vv. 22-24) hears an echo of the word lacuna in Virgil: Georgics III.365. Giuseppe Velli (“Petrarca, Dante, la poesia classica: 'Ne la stagion che'l ciel rapido inchina' [RVF, L] 'Io son venuto al punto de la rota' [Rime, C],” Studi petrarcheschi 15 [2002.1]: p. 92) also connects this passage with Rime C.60-61.
The first notice of a possible Virgilian source here is found in Gabriele (comm. to vv. 31-32). Tasso's notes to the poem (comm. to verse 31) have a non-specified Virgilian source in mind, but very likely the same one as Gabriele. Tommaseo (comm. to vv. 31-33) is unhesitating in his identification of the source. Campi (comm. to vv. 31-33) and Tozer (comm. to vv. 31-32) also point to this passage in the Aeneid. Toward the close of his long note to verses 1-39, Carroll takes fuller notice of II.604-606. It may be worth a moment's consideration of this not exactly obvious “citation.” Among the moderns, Mattalia (comm. to vv. 31-32) and Aversano (Dante daccapo [glosses to the Paradiso], copia d'eccezione, sent by the author on 11 September 2001, p. 175) are among the few who cite Virgil's text here. See Aeneid II.602-606;622-623: Venus will tear away the clouds that keep Aeneas from seeing that it is neither Helen nor Paris, but the gods who are destroying Troy:
divum inclementia, divum,
has evertit opes sternitque a culmine Troiam.
aspice (namque amnem, quae nunc obducta tuenti
mortalis hebetat visus tibi et umida circum
caligat, nubem eripiam....
apparent dirae facies inimicaque Troiae
numina magna deum.
[the gods, the relentless gods, overturn this
wealth and make Troy topple from her pinnacle.
Behold, for all the cloud, which now, drawn
over thy sight, dulls thy mortal vision and with
dark pall enshrouds thee, I will tear away....
Dread shapes came to view – mighty powers
divine, warring against Troy. (Tr. H.R. Fairclough)]
Vellutello and Daniello, and, more recently, Singleton (all three in their comms. to vv. 28-33), and Chiavacci Leonardi (Paradiso, con il commento di A. M. C. L. [Milan: Mondadori, 1997], p. 911) have another choice, Boethius (Consolatio III.m9.25-28):
Dissice terrenae nebulas et pondera molis
Atque tuo splendore mica! Tu namque serenum,
Tu requies tranquilla piis, te cernere finis,
Principium, vector, dux, semita, terminus idem.
[Cast off the earthly weight wherewith I am opprest,
Shine as Thou art most bright, Thou only calm and rest
To pious men whose end is to behold Thy ray,
Who their beginning art, their guide, their bound, and way. (tr. in Singleton)]
It is interesting to find Daniello divagating from his teacher's (Gabriele's) view of this problem.
If we believe that the Virgilian passage is being alluded to, the parallels are fairly inviting. Where Venus removes the shield of invisibility from the gods so that Aeneas may see his true enemies for what they are, Mary takes the cloud of his mortality away from Dante so that he may see his friend, God, as He is.
These verses contain six words for praying, the densest occurrence of noun and verb forms of priego in the poem.
Once again the precise understanding one should have of the verbal noun piacer is an issue. See the note to Purgatorio XXXI.47-54. Grabher (comm. to vv. 28-33) believes that here it means somma bellezza (highest beauty), as do we.
See Bosco/Reggio (comm. to vv. 1-21), who observe that this final prayer offered by Bernard may reflect the second and final part of the Ave Maria: “Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, / ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc, / et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen” (Holy Mary, Mother of God, / pray for us sinners now / and at the hour of our death. Amen).
The traditional interpretation of these lines, as it is advanced by Sapegno (comm. to these verses); by Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi (comm. vv. 34-36); and by Peter Dronke (“The Conclusion of Dante's Commedia,” Italian Studies 49 [1994]: 28) fits well with the Marian text. It sees the final moments of the prayer as turning to Dante's Nachleben back on earth, and hoping that Mary will intervene to help him remain pure, so that he will indeed be able to return here. This understanding is opposed by Lino Pertile (“Paradiso XXXIII: l'estremo oltraggio,” Filologia e critica 6 [1981]: 1-21); Giorgio Bàrberi Squarotti (“La preghiera alla Vergine: Dante e Petrarca,” Filologia e critica 20 [1995]: 367-71); and Giuseppe Ledda (La guerra della lingua [Ravenna: Longo, 2002], pp. 309-10), all of whom find it inappropriate for Bernard's prayer to leave the subject of Dante's vision being pure for that of his post-Paradiso life back on earth being morally sound. Why is this an unseemly concern, either aesthetically or intellectually? It had already been before the reader in Paradiso XXXI.88-90, where Dante himself beseeches Beatrice for this kind of heavenly assistance. Pertile (p. 2) argues that, for the very reason that Dante's prayer has been accepted, as signified by Beatrice's smile, there is no longer any need to linger on this issue. Perhaps so. On the other hand, the language of these six verses (particularly at vv. 36 and 37) really does seem to be related to earthly concerns. In other words, even if it seems ungainly to some (but not to most), the standard interpretation seems more plausible.
The Virgin, evidently made of more august stuff than Beatrice, does not smile when Bernard finishes his prayer as Beatrice did when Dante finished his (Par. XXXI.92), but indicates by the expression in her eyes how much she is gratified by the prayers of the devout. Then she turns her gaze (as did Beatrice) back up to God.
As Güntert observes (“Canto XXXIII,” in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone [Florence: Cesati, 2002], p. 511), after the formal conclusion to Bernard's prayer (vv. 40-45), this verse begins the final “macrosequence” of the one-hundreth canto; it is precisely one hundred verses in length. However, for previous notice of what she characterizes as Dante's “invisible ink,” marking three segments for this final sub-section of the poem (verse 75 = its thirtieth line; verse 105 = line 60; verse 145 = line 100), see Teodolinda Barolini (The Undivine Comedy [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992], pp. 255-56).
This verse has caused a central disagreement over its two main potential meanings. We follow Singleton's interpretation (comm. to this verse): “The meaning of the verb in this verse is much debated, but one aspect of that meaning seems beyond discussion: finii cannot here be in a normal signification of 'bring to an end.' Indeed, the context requires that the meaning be the exact opposite, i.e., 'I brought the ardor of my desire to its highest intensity.'” And see the similar position of Bosco/Reggio (comm. to this verse). Another difficult passage may be considered a “preview” of this one (Purg. XVIII.31-33) and may help unscramble the sense of this line. See the note to that passage (Purg. XVIII.28-33).
As Aversano (Dante daccapo [glosses to the Paradiso], copia d'eccezione, sent by the author on 11 September 2001), p. 177, points out, this is the third and last appearance of Bernard's name in the poem (see also Par. XXXI.102 and 139), as a sort of Trinitarian gesture of farewell.
Bernard was signaling, in his capacity as guide, what Dante should be doing, but Dante was already doing exactly that. He has not outrun his need for guidance so much as he has internalized his guide.
The poet could not be more precise. Up to now his powers of sight have improved so that he can finally see God's reflection in the universe perfectly, an ability that was far from his grasp when the poem began. Now he will see Him as Himself. Thus the protagonist's vision is about to move from reflections of His glory up into the beam of light emanating from Him. It is balanced for seconds between the two aspects of deity, reflection and source (see the note to Par. XXIII.82-84). In the next tercet we realize that he has recorded his breakthrough. No Christian except for St. Paul has seen so much – or such is the unspoken claim the poet makes us share.
The experience of seeing God face-to-face (1) is ineffable, not describable, and (2) the vision cannot be remembered in any of its details anyway (these twin disclaimers were made at the outset [see Par. I.7-9]). All that remains is the awareness of having had the experience.
Petrocchi's selection of parlar mostra (instead of parlar nostro, among other possibilities) has not met with enthusiasm. See the note to Paradiso XXXIII.56.
For the word oltraggio as expressing Dante's version of the excessus mentis of the Christian mystical tradition, see Lino Pertile (“Paradiso XXXIII: l'estremo oltraggio,” Filologia e critica 6 [1981]: 1-21 [repr. in La punta del disio: Semantica del desiderio nella “Commedia” [Fiesole: Cadmo, 2005]).
Given our previous experience reading in the Paradiso, we expect here exactly what we get. Moving into an area of heightened experience, which challenges his expressive powers (as it had challenged his perceptive powers), Dante has inevitably moved to simile. After, in the last tercet, understating the fact that he saw God, he now turns, not to one simile, but to three of them, in order to express the nature of his loss. This is perhaps the only time in the poem that he deploys three similes back-to-back; in any case, the Trinitarian nature of what he has looked upon (which will be made clear to us before long) is perhaps reflected in their number.
These are the penultimate similes in a poem that turns to them more often than we might have expected, and surely his use of the technique reflects his sense of the classical Latin epic simile, so familiar to him, particularly from the pages of Virgil. And the last of these three will be unmistakably Virgilian.
The first and fullest of the three similes is one of a class defined by Tozer (see the note to Inf. XXX.136-141) as “drawn from mental experiences.”
The present tense of the verb in the simile seems natural to us, since Dante usually bases his similes in the world of our present experience. We do not, however, expect to hear the narrative voice speaking in the present tense – but if we look ahead to verse 61, we find the poet speaking to us now, from his writing table back on earth. He won't stay there (see vv. 133-138, offering a parallel structure, in which the poet compares himself to the geometer and then says “such was I”), as we will see, but that is where he presents himself as being now, at least for the moment.
Switching from the experience itself to writing about his recording of the experience, the poet speaks in the present tense, which comes as a surprise, since we have not heard him use that tense in the Empyrean, and not since Paradiso XXX.34.
Benvenuto (comm. to vv. 58-63) says that Dante is claiming that even now he still tastes just a drop of this immense joy (adhuc sentio aliquam stillam, idest, guttam illius immensae dulcedinis).
This is the sixth and final appearance of the word visione, used here for the first time for the poem itself. It was apparently from here that the many writers who referred to the work as the Visione (perhaps wanting to avoid the embarrassing [to some] title, Commedia), took their cue. And see the note to Paradiso XVII.127-129.
Benvenuto (comm. to vv. 64-66) says that this is a fitting simile, because “the human mind, weak and infirm, loses the form of its phantasy's vision beneath the heat of the Eternal Sun.” This second comparison is apparently not “literary” in its inspiration. There is in fact no citation of any text of any kind for this verse among the commentators gathered in the DDP.
When we read her name, we may wonder why we have not heard it before now; it is as though Dante were holding her in reserve for his hundredth canto (as we will see, that number is three times associated with her in the main passage involving her in the Aeneid). The Sibyl, we may sometimes fail to remember, was merely the conduit for Apollo's messages. Thus, and as Benvenuto (comm. to vv. 64-66) says, both the Sibyl and Dante lost track of a communication from a divinity. If we recall the first two cantos of this canticle, with their insistence on Apollo as God's “stand-in” (Par. I.13; II.8), we can see why Benvenuto makes them companions in losing track of the truth revealed by “Apollo.”
The history of the commentators' response to this Virgilian reference is strange, beginning with the mistake of Francesco da Buti (or his scribe), who identifies (comm. to vv. 55-66) the source as being in Aeneid V, when he clearly means Aeneid III. All the other earlier commentators, beginning with Pietro (Pietro1, comm. to vv. 58-66), and including Benvenuto, John of Serravalle, Daniello, and Venturi, refer only to the appropriate passage in Aeneid VI. However, beginning with Lombardi (comm. to vv. 64-66), every commentator but two refers only to the passage in Aeneid III (443-451), which is the one in which the usual scattering of her leaves is described; the second passage, while also referring to that usual result, has Aeneas convincing the oracle to speak, and not write, her expression of Apollo's response. However, it is probably helpful to have both scenes in mind; the only two commentators in the DDP to refer to both passages are Oelsner and Singleton (comms. to these verses).
The passage in the Aeneid (VI.42-155) describing the Sibyl's cave is both long and full of arresting “Dantean” detail. The cave possesses one hundred mouths and one hundred gates (VI.43); Aeneas requests that the Sibyl not write her “poems” (carmina) on leaves to be scattered by the wind, but recite them aloud (VI.74-75); the hundred gates open and their breezes carry her reply (VI.81-82); she gives a prophecy concerning the “first safe road” (via prima salutis), which in Latin sounds, to the right listener, like a Christian message, “the first way to salvation”; Virgil (VI.99) typifies her utterance as “horrible enigmas” (horrendas ambages), a phrase that Dante has picked up in Paradiso XVII.31; Aeneas asks (VI.108) the Sibyl to bring him into his father's sight (ad conspectum cari genitoris), while Dante hopes to see his Father. (While there are other resonances in Dante's poem of the last four dozen verses, they are not relevant to this passage.)
If the obvious references to Virgil have been recognized, but not all that well exploited, there is also possibly a reference to Augustine, which has only rarely been noticed and not exploited at all. It is found in chapter xxiii of Book XVIII of De civitate Dei, a text vengefully hostile to Virgil for his prideful view of Rome's continuing and sempiternal hegemony (especially now that the city has been sacked in the year 410). Augustine says that the Sibyl (not the Cumaean [Virgil's] but the Erythraean – if he later hedges by saying it may have been the Cumaean) had prophesied the coming of Christ and ought to be considered as inhabiting the City of God. What led Augustine to make such claims may have been a desire to roast Virgil, either for not heeding his own Sibyl (who, after all, presides over the fourth Eclogue) or for choosing to sponsor the wrong one. Here is a portion of what he sets down in his lengthy analysis of this poem: The first letters of each successive line in the Greek Sibylline pronouncement spell out, Augustine reports: “'Jesus Christ the Son of God, the Saviour.' And the verses are twenty-seven, which is the cube of three. For three times three are nine; and nine itself, if tripled, so as to rise from the superficial square to the cube, comes to twenty-seven. But if you join the initial letters of these five Greek words,... they will make the word ikduj, that is, 'fish,' in which word Christ is mystically understood, because He was able to live, that is, to exist, without sin in the abyss of this mortality as in the depth of waters” (tr. M. Dods). Should one want to gild the lily, one might note that Dante's verse about the Sibyl, if it contains six words (and not five), does in fact contain twenty-seven letters. Notice of this passage in St. Augustine is not a frequent feature of the commentaries. However, see Benvenuto (comm. to these verses), who points to it at some length. He is followed apparently only by Campi (comm. to these vv.). Hollander (Il Virgilio dantesco: tragedia nella “Commedia” [Florence: Olschki, 1983], pp. 146-50), while suggesting this connection, neglected his two precursors (when he could have used all the help he could find).
For an article by Philippe Verdier on the Sibyl's appearance to Augustine at Ara coeli in Rome, see Mélanges de l'École française à Rome 94 (1982): 85-119. And for a collection of studies of the Sibyl's antique and medieval presence, see Febo Allevi (Con Dante e la Sibilla ed altri [dagli antichi al volgare] [Milan: Edizioni Scientifico-Letterarie, 1965]) as well as Monique Bouquet and Françoise Morzadec (eds., La Sibylle: Parole et représentation [Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2004]). Allevi discusses this passage on pp. 443-48.
On the Sibyl's leaves, see Piero Boitani (“The Sibyl's Leaves: A Study of Paradiso XXXIII,” Dante Studies 96 [1978]: 83-126), taking them as a starting point for his lectura of the canto.
The word concetto (conception, conceiving) is the linchpin of this passage, occurring in verses 68 and 75 (on the latter occasion as a verb). Dante, in this last of his nine invocations (see the note to Inf. II.7-9), asks God to make His reality “conceivable” by mortals. If He requites Dante's request, the poet promises, that will be the result. A scaled-back request, the poet insists, is all that he makes, underlined by the repetition of the phrase “un poco” (one small part).
This is the fourth time in the poem that the word concetto is connected with an invocation (see the notes to Inf. XXXII.1-9 and 10-12; Par. XVIII.82-87; and, for a survey of all the presences of concetto in the poem, see the note to Par. XXXIII.127). It surely seems to be involved in Dante's sense of what the human agent needs from a higher source, not the mere substance of his vision, but its shaping conceptual formulation. And that is precisely what, the poet will tell us, he was granted in the lightning bolt that resolves all his questions in verses 140-141.
It is interesting to look back to the two uses of concetto in Convivio. In the first of these (I.v.12) Dante concludes that Latin possesses higher conceptual power than the vernacular: “più è la vertù sua che quella del volgare”. When, only shortly afterwards, he returns to the topic (I.xiii.12), he seems to have revised that opinion. Speaking of the vernacular, he says: “E noi vedemo che in ciascuna cosa di sermone lo bene manifestare del concetto è più amato e commento.” That he first had held that highly significant utterance was possible only in Latin stands in clear opposition to his eventual insistence on the conceptual value of the vernacular throughout the Commedia. The noun concetto appears first in Inferno XXXII.4 and then reappears ten more times in the poem; in addition to its first two presences in this final canto (once as noun and once as verb – see the first paragraph of this note), it reappears in the final tercets (vv. 122 and 127), once again first as noun and then as verb. That four of their fewer than twenty presences in the poem are found in its final canto underlines the importance that Dante found in the words concetto and concepire.
The poet here addresses God as source (O somma luce), not as what He irradiates, but as the fonte (spring, font) of everything.
The protagonist had entered the raggio (ray) in verse 53. Now he has issued from it and approached the source. Having uttered his ninth invocation a few lines earlier (vv. 67-75), he does not invoke the Deity. He does not need help to see Him any longer; he has accomplished that goal. And so he gives thanks for His grace in allowing this final vision, which he is about to unfold before us. See discussion in Giuseppe Ledda (La guerra della lingua [Ravenna: Longo, 2002], pp. 313-14 and n.).
For the past presence of the adjective smarrito in the poem, see the note to Paradiso XXVI.9.
For an attempt to load the significance of the verb presunsi (presumed) by noting that it occurs in a verse the number of which (82) resolves to 10 (8+2) in a canto numbered 100, see Selene Sarteschi (“Sant'Agostino in Dante e nell'età di Dante,” in her Per la “Commedia” e non per essa soltanto [Rome: Bulzoni, 2002 {1999}], p. 194n.).
For a most suggestive and yet concise reading of this passage, the universe explained and put into relationship with its Creator in three tercets, see Christian Moevs (The Metaphysics of Dante's “Comedy” [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005], pp. 78-79). God creates all things as unity. He is the ground of all being. And Dante, seeing the universal diversity as unity, experiences it as God saw it in creating it, as a simple yet “limitless and dimensionless reality” (Moevs, p. 78).
On the various dimensions of this passage, from medieval book production, in which a writer took his individual quartos (quaderni) to have them conflated and sewn into a “book,” John Ahern (“Binding the Book: Hermeneutics and Manuscript Production in Paradiso 33,” PMLA 97 [1982]: 800-9) argues that Dante's poem reflects the “book” of God's created universe, even to its Trinitarian structure. For bibliography on the concept (God's “two books,” the Bible and His creation), see Güntert (“Canto XXXIII,” in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone [Florence: Cesati, 2002], p. 511n.).
Marguerite Mills Chiarenza (“The Imageless Vision and Dante's Paradiso,” Dante Studies 90 [1972]: 80) says that this tercet is “inspired by the doctrine of the double existence of creation, separate in the universe and unified in its Creator's conception.”
This is the final occurrence of the noun universo in the poem, suggesting the “universality” of a poem that can record such totality. The word was introduced to the poem by Francesca (Inf. V.91), speaking of an “unfriendly” God as “king of the universe”; it then appears four more times in Inferno and not at all in Purgatorio. It occurs eight times in Paradiso, twice in the first and last cantos (Par. I.2 and 105; Par. XXXIII.23 and here). However, we may notice the only appearance of the word in any other form, the adjective universale at Paradiso XXXIII.91, which makes threefold the presence of “universe”/“universal” uniquely in this ultimate canto (and ninefold in the final canticle altogether).
Güntert (“Canto XXXIII,” in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone [Florence: Cesati, 2002], p. 508) would like to have us see “three Dantes” in this tercet, the narrator (credo), the protagonist (i' vidi), and the “post-vision protagonist” (mi sento... i' godo), a being somehow differentiated from the narrator (see the similar argument advanced by Picone [“Leggere la Commedia di Dante,” in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Inferno, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone {Florence: Cesati, 2000}], pp. 18-21). However, his separation of the first and third voices cannot be supported, since they both use the present tense and surely seem to be the io narrante rather than two different voices, speaking from different times. Since it is not logically possible for that time to be post-writing, it must fall between the vision and the writing, and thus in the past. To put this another way, had such been Dante's plan, he would have needed to deploy a better-conceived tactic in order to make it effective. As it is, we have two moments in the poem, one stable (the protagonist's voyage during a week in the spring of 1300), the other always in fact shifting between circa 1307 and circa 1321, but treated without temporal distinction as the authorial “now,” if it has in fact finally reached its farthest point. Proust would later choose to dramatize the subject of the author's mortal change through time; all times in which Dante, on the other hand, looks up at us from his writing table are equally “now.” In Hollander's formulation (Allegory in Dante's “Commedia” [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969], p. 227), “The Pilgrim he was has become the history of the Poet he is.”
For the similarities between Dante's “apotheosis” here and that of Glaucus in Paradiso I.67-79, see Hollander (Allegory, pp. 228-29). See also Eugene Longen (“The Grammar of Apotheosis: Paradiso XXX, 94-99,” Dante Studies 93 [1975]: 209-14).
For the suggestion that this image of a ship, filled with armed men and headed for battle, underlines the poet's desire to associate his Christian poem with classical martial epic in this final reference to the world of men, see Hollander (“Dante and the Martial Epic,” Mediaevalia 12 [1989], p. 85).
This tercet has called forth equal amounts of admiration and distress, admiration for the beauty and scope of its conception, distress at the indubious difficulty of its highly compacted literal sense. First things first. What does the tercet mean? Perhaps because of the difficulty of understanding why Dante might have wanted to present himself as forgetting the greatest insight he (or practically anyone) has ever had, there has been some attempt to understand letargo, not as “forgetting,” but as a form of visionary experience. However, most now think that the former meaning is far more likely here, as, obviously, do we. If all can agree (and that is to assume a good deal) that the term, in Dante's Italian, refers to oblivion, or forgetfulness, that still leaves a deal of difficulty. For interesting considerations of this tercet, see Georg Rabuse (“'Un punto solo m'è maggior letargo,'” Deutsches Dante-Jahrbuch 43 [1965]: 138-52) and Peter Dronke (“Boethius, Alanus and Dante,” Romanische Forschungen 78 [1966]: 119-25).
A good place to begin one's study of this tercet is Scartazzini's gloss on it, not because it solves its mysteries (it almost certainly does not), but because it so thoroughly indicates what these are. Francesco da Buti's long gloss to this tercet (a part of his comm. to vv. 82-99) makes a point based in mythographic history that stands as the basic understanding even today. He (uniquely) offers a striking version of the classical background: Neptune had longed to see his “kingdom,” the sea, “inhabited” as was the land. Therefore, he took great joy in seeing the first ship, and has been painfully “forgetting” it (in the sense that, without satisfaction, he longs to see it every day) for 2,500 years ever since. Thus Dante's one minute of awareness, now lost, is more painful than Neptune's far longer period. See Tozer's similar explanation (comm. to this tercet): “'[O]ne single moment is greater oblivion to me (letargo, lit. lethargy, dullness), than twenty-five centuries have been to the enterprise which caused Neptune to marvel at the shadow of Argo.' In other words: 'I forgot in a single moment more of what I saw... than men have forgotten, in twenty-five centuries, of the Argonautic expedition.' The reason why this expedition is mentioned is that it was the earliest important event recorded in history.” Needless to say, there are other views. For instance, Chimenz (comm. to this tercet) believes that the twenty-five centuries are marked by remembrance, not by forgetting. Others have noted that the structure of the passage simply forces the reader to accept the painful understanding (i.e., the view advanced by Tozer). And if the poet goes on to describe the vision in great detail (the main point put forward by those who read the text “positively”), he also will insist on its fleetingness, as Carroll (comm. to this tercet), objecting to Scartazzini's “positive” interpretation, rightly argues. Lombardi had offered, in addition to the classical modern statement later found in Tozer, two important additions to the sum of commentary knowledge: the word letargo derives from Greek lethe (forgetfulness), and the years between the voyage of the Argo and 1300 are, according to Dante's authorities, either 2,523 or 2,570. Tommaseo (comm. to this tercet) supports the first of these dates, which has now become “canonical” among the commentators. Either one is a promising date, since both sector the “history of sea voyages” in an arc of twenty-six centuries, 1223 (or 1270) B.C. to 1300, with its approximate midpoint in the Incarnation (as Hollander [Allegory in Dante's “Commedia” {Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969}, pp. 231-32] has argued). The voyage of the Argonauts, preceding the Trojan War, was the first important event in the Greek portion of universal history. (See Hermann Gmelin [Kommentar: das Paradies {Stuttgart: Klett, 1957}, p. 572] for an examination of Dante's Argonautical chronology.)
For a different and not ultimately convincing possible source, see Giacalone (comm. to vv. 94-96) citing Parodi (BSDI 23 [1916], p. 66) for the latter's citation of Statius (Achilleid I.20-26): Thetis looks up from her home in the sea at the oars of the ship bearing Paris and Helen to Troy, a voyage that will eventually result in the death of Achilles.
See Angelo Jacomuzzi (“'L'imago al cerchio'. Nota sul canto XXXIII del Paradiso,” in his L'imago al cerchio. Invenzione e visione nella “Divina Commedia” [Milan: Silva, 1968 {1965}], p. 10), discussing the tension in this canto between letargo (forgetting) and the frequent presence of verbs for seeing. And see Picone (“Dante argonauta: la ricezione dei miti ovidiani nella Commedia,” in M. Picone and B. Zimmermann, eds., Ovidius redivivus: von Ovid zu Dante [Stuttgart: M&P Verlag, 1994], pp. 200-202).
The word impresa (undertaking, enterprise) has an interesting history in the poem. See Hollander (Allegory in Dante's “Commedia” [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969], pp. 230-31), pointing out that, in Inferno II.41 and 47, the word refers to Dante's journey and that, in Inferno XXXII.7, it represents Dante's poem about that journey; here, on the other hand, it would seem to refer both to the journey and to the record of that journey, for the first is in process of becoming the second.
According to Ovid, Jason was the builder of the first ship (“primaeque ratis molitor” [Metam. VIII.302]). For the Argo in Lucan (Phars. II.715-718), see Pietro di Dante (Pietro1, comm. to vv. 94-96) and Lombardi (comm. to vv. 94-96), a possible, but not immediately convincing, “echo.” For still another Jasonic presence in Ovid, see Amores II.xi.1-2. For the history of the Argo-motif, see Ernst Robert Curtius (“The Ship of the Argonauts,” in Essays on European Literature, tr. M. Kowal [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973 {1950}], pp. 465-96), favoring Ovid (Metam. VII.120), which assuredly lies behind Dante's earlier reference to Jason's voyage (see the note to Par. II.17-18), but does not seem quite so good a fit here.
The image of Neptune looking up from beneath the sea is reminiscent of what the poet tells us in Canto XXXI.73-78, where he looked up at Beatrice as though he were immersed in the deepest point in the sea and she were at the highest point in the earth's atmosphere. Both sightings involve the word effige (features), the first time as Beatrice's likeness, the second (Par. XXXIII.131), that of Jesus. The fact that Neptune saw the shadow (ombra) of the Argo makes it at least probable that the poet hoped we would consider that voyage as the prefiguration of his own (see Hollander [Allegory in Dante's “Commedia” {Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969}], p. 232).
And as for Ovidian inspiration for what is sometimes considered a Dantean invention, Hollander (p. 222) has argued for the impact of the last line (721) of Ovid's Book VI, describing the Argo setting sail from Iolcos: “Per mare non notum prima petiere carina” (The first keel to cleave an unknown sea). That would leave Neptune alone unaccounted for. To be sure, we find him looking up from the seabed (wherever Dante found the source of the image) earlier in this very poem, Inferno XXVIII.83-84, where, in his only other appearance, he witnesses Malatestino's treachery as he has witnessed similar crimes on the part of Greeks (gente argolica), the “bad Argonauts” succeeding Jason, as it were.
For Dante's “sospesa,” Etienne Gilson (“La conclusion de la Divine Comédie et la mystique franciscaine,” Révue d'histoire franciscaine 1 [1924], p. 59) cites the prologue of Bonaventure's Itinerarium mentis in Deum for a similar use of the word suspensio to denote the mind's ecstatic rapture in its contemplation of God.
When Dante looked at Beatrice in Eden, the angels cried out (Purg. XXXII.9) that he was “troppo fiso!” (too fixed), in the sense that he was confounding the physical and the spiritual in his appreciation of Beatrice. Now there can be no question of that, since “fixation” on God is the condition of blessedness for eternity, as the following two tercets make absolutely plain.
Not only is the intellect satisfied by gazing on God, but the will is, too; for what other good, as object of the will, can supervene?
For a final time, the poet, having nearly completed a poem that has just reported having seen and understood the underlying principle ordering the entire universe, insists that, compared to the truth of that vision, his work is mere babytalk. See the note to Par. XV.121-123 and Hollander (“Babytalk in Dante's Commedia,” in Studies in Dante [Ravenna: Longo, 1980]), pp. 115-29.
Preparing us to see the Trinity through his eyes, the poet reassures us that he harbors no heretical notions about God's nature(s); if He is three, that does not mean that He is other than one; if He is one, that does not mean that He is other than three. Even the protagonist's vastly improved powers still have one more stage of visionary capacity to reach, one in which he will be able to experience the unchanging Trinity with his changed sight.
The Trinity is first experienced as three circles inhering in a single space, distinguished only by their colors, not their sizes, which are identical.
Danilo Bonanno (“Guido in Paradiso: Donna me prega e l'ultimo canto della Commedia,” Critica del testo 4 [2001], p. 224) suggests that the rhymes here deliberately echo those found in Donna me prega, vv. 51-55 (miri, tiri, giri), with subversive intent, and indeed sees the entire final canto as entering into a corrective debate with the understanding of the nature of love proposed in Cavalcanti's canzone.
The tercet, as characterized by Carroll (comm. to vv. 115-123), as presenting “what Aquinas calls the Relations of Divinity according to the Procession of Persons out of identity of substance – the Relations of Paternity, Generation and Spiration (Summa, I, q. 28). From the circle of the Father appeared reflected the circle of the Son, as Iris [rainbow] from Iris [rainbow]; and from both was breathed forth equally the fire of Love which is the Holy Spirit (on the Procession of the Spirit from both Father and Son, and the filioque controversy, see above, [Carroll's comm.] on Par. X.1-6). We must not think of these in the form of three rainbows one within another, or even as the three colours of a rainbow, for these are also one within another. The 'one dimension' shows that Dante conceived of them as co-existing in the one space, though he does not explain how he was able to see the three colours distinct within each other.” One supposes that they manifested themselves as changing colors. Dante does not assign a particular color either to Father or Son; the Holy Spirit, as Love, is understandably red.
For this last use of fioco (weak, indistinct) in the poem, see Hollander (Il Virgilio dantesco: tragedia nella “Commedia” [Florence: Olschki, 1983]), tying together Vita nuova XXIII (see pp. 76-77), Inferno I.63, and this verse (pp. 150-51). For a similar view, see Corrado Bologna (“Canto XXX,” in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone [Florence: Cesati, 2002], p. 461). Torraca seems to have been the first commentator (and, among those gathered in the DDP, he seems to have been followed only by Mestica [comm. to this tercet]) even to note that we have seen this term before in Inferno I.63, but has no further comment. Hollander suggests that “this use of the word is intended to make us consider Virgil's initial fiochezza, with all its metaphoric insistence on the fact that he had failed to speak the Word. In this respect, the two poets find themselves once again together at the end, reunited in their failures, and yet so very far from one another, separated by the ground of their failures” (p. 151).
Saverio Bellomo (“Il canto XXX del Paradiso,” L'Alighieri 8 [1996]: 55n.) believes that the question of Dante's Virgil needs to be reopened, beginning with a rereading of Bruno Nardi (Dal “Convivio” alla “Commedia”, con premessa alla ristampa di O. Capitani [Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, 1992 {1960}], esp. pp. 96-150).
Giuseppe Ledda (La guerra della lingua [Ravenna: Longo, 2002], p. 317n.) says he is following Jacomuzzi in seeing that the protagonist's final vision is of the Incarnation, and not the Trinity. Does one really have to make that choice? It would seem to be preferable to see it as Trinitarian, which includes the vision of Jesus as spirit in flesh, as He is.
Finally, Dante sees the Humanity of the Trinity, the Son, Jesus Christ, incarnate within the circle that abstractly represents the Second Person. Once again the differing colors of the Persons are insisted on, and once again (see the note to vv. 118-120) Dante does not report the color of the Son (nor of the Father).
It took centuries until a commentator (Scartazzini [comm. to verse 131]) realized that this image contained a reference to St. Paul (Philippians 2:7), “but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.” This is currently a fairly widespread perception, but the only other writer in the DDP to observe it is Grandgent (comm. to verse 131). The enormous presence of the Bible in the poem has at times simply overwhelmed its observers. This is a case in point. Moore (Studies in Dante, First Series: Scripture and Classical Authors in Dante [Oxford: Clarendon, 1969 {1896}], pp. 321-34) lists over six hundred possible citations in all Dante's works, the bulk of them in the Commedia. Thus one needs to deal cautiously with George Steiner's accountancy (Grammars of Creation [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001], p. 89), which counts the actual citations (rather than more general forms of reference) as two in Inferno, eight in Purgatorio, and a dozen in Paradiso.
See also Peter Dronke (“'Orizzonte che rischiari,'” in his Dante and Medieval Latin Traditions [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986 {1975}], pp. 7-8), arguing that this, too (see Par. XIV.67-78 and the note to that passage), is a reference to Joachim's three Ages, represented by three circles in the Liber figurarum.
This is the final use of this word, whether as an abstract noun meaning “concept” or “conceiving” or a transitive verb (to conceive [an idea – see Inf. XII.13 for the first and only use of the verb to mean “to conceive offspring,” although there is more than an overtone of that sense here]). There have been twelve previous uses of the noun or of the verb (Inf. XXVI.73, XXXII.4; Par. III.60, XV.41, XVIII.86, XIX.12, XXII.33, XXIV.60, XXIX.81 and 132, XXXIII.68 and 122), which has more uses in this canto than in any other (three). See the note to Paradiso XV.40-42. See also Giuseppe Ledda (La guerra della lingua [Ravenna: Longo, 2002], pp. 316-19).
See Peter Dronke (“'L'amore che move il sole e l'altre stelle,'” Studi medievali 6 [1965]: 389-90) and Zygmunt Baranski (Dante e i segni [Rome: Liguori, 2000], pp. 173-74, 217), both cited by Simon Gilson (“Rimaneggiamenti danteschi di Aristotele: gravitas e levitas nella Commedia,” in Le culture di Dante. Atti del quarto Seminario dantesco internazionale, ed. Michelangelo Picone et al. [Florence: Cesati, 2004], p. 174n.) as synthesizing Platonism and Aristotelianism. And see Christopher Ryan (“The Theology of Dante,” in The Cambridge Companion to Dante, ed. R. Jacoff [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993], p. 136) for the point (which he presents as being more than a quibble) that the final vision in the poem is not one of the Trinity (the usual understanding) but of the humanity of Jesus. Ryan is correct that this is not a quibble; however, he is probably not correct about the nature of the vision. The final vision is of the Trinity, which includes Jesus – in both His natures. See the note to vv. 124-126.
For notice of a possible reflection here of the fourth and final stage of loving God in St. Bernard's De diligendo Deo, see Hollander (Studies in Dante [Ravenna: Longo, 1980]), p. 35 (repr. of “The Invocations of the Commedia,” Yearbook of Italian Studies 3 [1976]: 235-40): “Commentators have for a long time annotated this passage with a reference to Philippians 2:7” (as we have seen [see the note to vv. 127-132], that is barely true; only two of them in the last 150 years). Hollander goes on to show that Bernard, in De diligendo Deo (Sancti Bernardi Opera, ed. J. Leclercq and H.M. Rochais, Vol. III [Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1963], p. 142), resorts to the same Pauline passage in a highly similar context, describing the height of the mystical love of God, when one loves oneself in God. For Bernard's four stages in the love of God and their possible relation to the stages in the Comedy (first suggested by a student at Princeton, Donald J. Mathison, in 1968), see the note to Purgatorio XXVII.139-141. For later discussions that are in agreement, 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], p. 176) as well as Christian Moevs (The Metaphysics of Dante's “Comedy” [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005], p. 81. And see E.G. Gardner (Dante and the Mystics [London: Dent, 1913], p. 118) for the relation of De diligendo Deo X.27-28 to Dante's spiritual preparedness for the final vision.
For a study of this penultimate simile, a meditation on how Dante may be said to have “squared the circle,” see Ronald Herzman and Gary Towsley (“Squaring the Circle: Paradiso 33 and the Poetics of Geometry,” Traditio 49 [1994]: 95-125). See also Giuseppe Ledda (La guerra della lingua [Ravenna: Longo, 2002], p. 317n.).
See Richard Kay (“Vitruvius and Dante's Giants,” Dante Studies 120 [2002], pp. 30-31) for the notion, advanced as a follow-up to his examination of the Vitruvian nature of Dante's calculations of the dimensions of both the giants (Inf. XXX) and of Satan (Inf. XXXIV), that what Dante sees is Vitruvius's image of man inscribed in a circle, his umbelicus at the center of the circle, his fingers and toes at the circumference, in what is the eventual model for Leonardo da Vinci's far more famous design. As charming as this notion is, the word effige in Dante (Par. XXXI.77, XXXIII.131) seems rather to indicate, as is generally the case in Italian, the visage, not the whole human body.
Angelo Jacomuzzi (“'L'imago al cerchio'. Nota sul canto XXXIII del Paradiso,” in his L'imago al cerchio. Invenzione e visione nella “Divina Commedia” [Milan: Silva, 1968 {1965}], pp. 5-27) offers a reading of these verses and of the poem as a whole in the mode of a theologically determined fourfold allegoresis. For discussion, with some bibliography, of Italian and American treatments of theological allegory in the poem, see Hollander (Dante: A Life in Works [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001], pp. 37-39 and p. 188, nn. 55-57).
For insistence on the role played, in this final vision, of both the Benjamin major of Richard of St. Victor and the Itinerarium mentis in Deum of Bonaventure, see Etienne Gilson (“La conclusion de la Divine Comédie et la mystique franciscaine,” Révue d'histoire franciscaine 1 [1924]), pp. 56-57). Gilson (pp. 62-63) concludes that, given these two sources, Dante's vision is not a Pauline raptus (a function of the intellect), but a Franciscan exstasis (a function of the affective capacity). This, however, and despite Gilson's authority, is not the general current opinion, which rather insists that Dante did have a Pauline raptus (as the entire cantica has been preparing us to grant). For instance, Güntert (“Canto XXXIII,” in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone [Florence: Cesati, 2002], p. 507) cites Aquinas (ST II-II, q. 175, a. 3), distinguishing among three kinds of vision (but for an earlier and similar treatment see Pertile [“Paradiso XXXIII: l'estremo oltraggio,” Filologia e critica 6 {1981}: 1-21], pp. 6-7). After discussions that are in strong agreement with positions taken on the issues by Augustine, Thomas explains, in his Reply to Objection 1: “Man's mind is rapt by God to the contemplation of divine truth in three ways. First, so that he contemplates it through certain imaginary pictures (per similitudines quasdam imaginarias), and such was the ecstasy that came upon Peter [Acts 10:10-16]. Secondly, so that he contemplates the divine truth through its intelligible effects (per intelligibiles effectus); such was the ecstasy of David, who said (Psalm 115 [116]:11): 'I said in my excess: Every man is a liar.' Thirdly, so that he contemplates it in its essence (in sua essentia). Such was the rapture of Paul, as also of Moses; and not without reason, since as Moses was the first Teacher of the Jews, so was Paul the first 'Teacher of the gentiles'” (tr. from the website of the Catholic Encyclopedia). It is typical of Gilson, a Dominican himself, to downplay the importance of Dominicans in favor of Franciscans. His graciousness is a model to us all. However, it may be that he is simply incorrect here. The reader will note that here, even at the conclusion of the great poem, commentators are divided among Franciscan and Dominican positions on the issues. For the difficult history of the intertwined strands of knowledge and love in St. Thomas, in whom, at least apparently, such distinctions would be clearer than they are in Dante, see Michael Sherwin (By Knowledge and By Love: Charity and Knowledge in the Moral Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas [Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2005]). In Dante, we find at moments, like this one, knowledge eclipsing the claims of love; at others, that dynamic would seem to be reversed. One comes away with the feeling that Dante responds fully to the main competing voices in this continuing dialectic, “Franciscans” (Francis himself, Bonaventure, Bernard, and perhaps Joachim as well), who privilege love (but not against knowledge), and “Dominicans” (Thomas primissimus inter impares, but Albertus Magnus and Remigius Girolamus as well), who privilege knowledge (but not against love).
For the distinction between seeing face to face, as did Paul and lesser forms of a similar experience, see Gabriele Muresu (“Lo specchio e la contemplazione [Paradiso XXI],” L'Alighieri 8 [1996]: 23n.), comparing the higher nature of the contemplation available in Heaven to what was available to Dante in Eden, when he sees Christ as griffin in Purgatorio XXIX.108.
The final four lines are divided into two parts, the first referring to an apparent failure (“Here my exalted vision lost its power”), in which the protagonist/poet, so recently rewarded with the comprehension of Everything (verse 141), loses that vision, which is blotted out by his reemergent humanity. And then the poem's final sentence, begun with an adversative, ma (but), tells a quite different story: the protagonist's interior motions, that of his affective power (the will) and that of his intellective power (his transmuted desire), both move in harmony with God's cosmos.
See the Grande Dizionario for a definition of facoltà: “the property of every being endowed with sense to perceive, revive, and represent in the soul sensations, perceptions, impressions, and images.” On fantasia and imaginazione, see Giulio Lepschy (“Fantasia e immaginazione,” Lettere Italiane 38 [1987]: 20-34). And see the notes to Purgatorio XVII.13-18 and 25.
For discussion of Dante's use of Latin in the poem, including this final instance, see the note to Paradiso IV.25.
Lino Pertile (La punta del disio: Semantica del desiderio nella “Commedia” [Fiesole: Cadmo, 2005], pp. 265-8 - reprint of the article published in 1995 [pp. 133-35]) reopens the question of the meaning of this final image. The vast majority of readers have believed that Dante has a single wheel in mind (none more exigently and at greater length than Bruno Nardi [Nel mondo di Dante {Rome: Edizioni di “Storia e Letteratura”}, 1944], pp. 337-50), all places on which move with uniform regularity. Pertile revives the view of those few twentieth-century readers who saw the tautological vacuity of this as a final image and, revisiting Ezechiel (1:19-21 and 10:16) and Boethius (Cons. II.m8.28-30), revives a better idea: Dante has two wheels in mind. Aversano (Dante e gli “scritti” di San Francesco [Salerno: Palladio, 1984], pp. 203-6) also finds the source in Ezechiel (1:15-21), but in order to make a different point. For him Ezechiel's four beasts, traditionally interpreted as the four Gospels, imply the Commedia as a “fifth wheel,” since it also is dictated by the Holy Spirit. But see John Freccero (Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, ed. Rachel Jacoff [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986], pp. 246-50 of an essay entitled “The Final Image,” first published in 1964), for whom there is but one wheel, despite the fact that he thinks it reflects Ezechiel's wheel within a wheel, which would seem to indicate two wheels. For an article that strongly supports the notion that Dante was closely aware of the text of Ezechiel, see Filippo Bognini, “Gli occhi di Ooliba: Una proposta per Purg. XXXII 148-60 e XXXIII 44-45,” Rivista di Studi Danteschi 7 (2007): 73-103.
For a new wrinkle, see Sandra Rizzardi (“Dante e l'orologio,” Studi e problemi di critica testuale 60 [2000]: 51-70), who makes a case for Dante's having an image in mind that would become a staple in later ages: the universe as the movements in a mechanical clock. She bolsters her argument by pointing back to previous clock imagery (at Purg. VIII.85-87; Par. X.139-146 and Par. XXIV.13-18). Professor Steven Marcus, in a conversation that took place in November 2002, independently suggested this solution. For a similar observation, although one not made with this passage in mind (rather Par. XIV.106-111), see Steven Botterill (“Paradiso XII,” in Dante's “Divine Comedy,” Introductory Readings III: “Paradiso,” ed. Tibor Wlassics [Lectura Dantis {virginiana}, 16-17, supplement, Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1995], p. 181): “... the excellence of one wheel implies that of the other, and the chariot would, of course, not be able to function without making equal and simultaneous use of both.”
Whatever the metaphor controlling this passage, whether biblical or astronomical or mechanical, the simplest solution of the literal sense of the line is to understand that line 144, “as a wheel that is moved in just the same way,” is attached to the preceding (Latin) noun, velle. What the text then says is clear: “But already my desire was moving in a circle (around God), as was my will, revolving in just the same way.” This was precisely the understanding put forward by Torraca (comm. to vv. 143-145) over one hundred years ago that Bruno Nardi belittled (Nel mondo di Dante [Rome: Edizioni di “Storia e Letteratura”, 1944]), p. 349n.). The protagonist/poet's soul has left our solar system behind and is moving in a circle, not around our earth, but, like the angelic orders, around God. See Pertile's concluding remarks on the last paradox in the poem: The pilgrim has found his peace in continual movement. It is not an accident that Goethe admired this final scene and used it in developing the conclusion of the second part of Faust.
Strangely enough, Giuseppe Ledda (La guerra della lingua [Ravenna: Longo, 2002], p. 319) treats the ending of the poem as a failure of Dante's “imaginative and intellectual faculties.” Perhaps he should have taken into account the context furnished by the last four verses of the poem, which he for some reason does not include in the final considerations of his study.
While the fact that the word stelle is the last word of each canticle would seem to have been an early and lasting perception, John of Serravalle (comm. to vv. 133-145) appears to have been the first ever to have it. For the possibility that Dante's stella reflects Ovid's astra (Metam. XV.876) and his starry vision of his own personal immortality that concludes his great poem (vv. 871-879), reformulated by Dante to accord with quite a different (and less self-absorbed) view, see Jessica Levenstein (“The Re-Formation of Marsyas in Paradiso I,” in Dante for the New Millennium, ed. Teodolinda Barolini and H. Wayne Storey [New York: Fordham University Press, 2003], p. 418).
For an essay on this “last word,” see John Ahern (“Dante's Last Word: The Comedy as a liber coelestis,” Dante Studies 102 [1984]: 1-14), who, while not referring to Ovid, argues that this canto couches its central concerns, conflating two metaphors, in the images of the heavens as book and of the stars as alphabet.
Scartazzini (comm. to this verse) points out that the presence of the same form of the verb muovere in the first and last lines of the cantica creates a sort of ring composition. He also points out that Dante's practice in this regard resembles that found in canzoni of other poets in his time; he also suggests the pertinence of the ending (which happens to constitute its thirty-third paragraph) of the Epistle to Cangrande (XIII.90): “And since, when the Beginning or First, which is God, has been reached, there is nought to be sought for beyond, inasmuch as He is Alpha and Omega, that is, the Beginning and the End, as the Vision of John tells us, the work ends in God Himself, who is blessed for evermore, world without end” (tr. P. Toynbee).
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“Vergine Madre, figlia del tuo figlio,
umile e alta più che creatura,
termine fisso d'etterno consiglio,
tu se' colei che l'umana natura
nobilitasti sì, che 'l suo fattore
non disdegnò di farsi sua fattura.
Nel ventre tuo si raccese l'amore,
per lo cui caldo ne l'etterna pace
così è germinato questo fiore.
Qui se' a noi meridïana face
di caritate, e giuso, intra ' mortali,
se' di speranza fontana vivace.
Donna, se' tanto grande e tanto vali,
che qual vuol grazia e a te non ricorre,
sua disïanza vuol volar sanz' ali.
La tua benignità non pur soccorre
a chi domanda, ma molte fïate
liberamente al dimandar precorre.
In te misericordia, in te pietate,
in te magnificenza, in te s'aduna
quantunque in creatura è di bontate.
Or questi, che da l'infima lacuna
de l'universo infin qui ha vedute
le vite spiritali ad una ad una,
supplica a te, per grazia, di virtute
tanto, che possa con li occhi levarsi
più alto verso l'ultima salute.
E io, che mai per mio veder non arsi
più ch'i' fo per lo suo, tutti miei prieghi
ti porgo, e priego che non sieno scarsi,
perché tu ogne nube li disleghi
di sua mortalità co' prieghi tuoi,
sì che 'l sommo piacer li si dispieghi.
Ancor ti priego, regina, che puoi
ciò che tu vuoli, che conservi sani,
dopo tanto veder, li affetti suoi.
Vinca tua guardia i movimenti umani:
vedi Beatrice con quanti beati
per li miei prieghi ti chiudon le mani!”
Li occhi da Dio diletti e venerati,
fissi ne l'orator, ne dimostraro
quanto i devoti prieghi le son grati;
indi a l'etterno lume s'addrizzaro,
nel qual non si dee creder che s'invii
per creatura l'occhio tanto chiaro.
E io ch'al fine di tutt' i disii
appropinquava, sì com' io dovea,
l'ardor del desiderio in me finii.
Bernardo m'accennava, e sorridea,
perch' io guardassi suso; ma io era
già per me stesso tal qual ei volea:
ché la mia vista, venendo sincera,
e più e più intrava per lo raggio
de l'alta luce che da sé è vera.
Da quinci innanzi il mio veder fu maggio
che 'l parlar mostra, ch'a tal vista cede,
e cede la memoria a tanto oltraggio.
Qual è colüi che sognando vede,
che dopo 'l sogno la passione impressa
rimane, e l'altro a la mente non riede,
cotal son io, ché quasi tutta cessa
mia visïone, e ancor mi distilla
nel core il dolce che nacque da essa.
Così la neve al sol si disigilla;
così al vento ne le foglie levi
si perdea la sentenza di Sibilla.
O somma luce che tanto ti levi
da' concetti mortali, a la mia mente
ripresta un poco di quel che parevi,
e fa la lingua mia tanto possente,
ch'una favilla sol de la tua gloria
possa lasciare a la futura gente;
ché, per tornare alquanto a mia memoria
e per sonare un poco in questi versi,
più si conceperà di tua vittoria.
Io credo, per l'acume ch'io soffersi
del vivo raggio, ch'i' sarei smarrito,
se li occhi miei da lui fossero aversi.
E' mi ricorda ch'io fui più ardito
per questo a sostener, tanto ch'i' giunsi
l'aspetto mio col valore infinito.
Oh abbondante grazia ond' io presunsi
ficcar lo viso per la luce etterna,
tanto che la veduta vi consunsi!
Nel suo profondo vidi che s'interna,
legato con amore in un volume,
ciò che per l'universo si squaderna:
sustanze e accidenti e lor costume
quasi conflati insieme, per tal modo
che ciò ch'i' dico è un semplice lume.
La forma universal di questo nodo
credo ch'i' vidi, perché più di largo,
dicendo questo, mi sento ch'i' godo.
Un punto solo m'è maggior letargo
che venticinque secoli a la 'mpresa
che fé Nettuno ammirar l'ombra d'Argo.
Così la mente mia, tutta sospesa
mirava fissa, immobile e attenta,
e sempre di mirar faceasi accesa.
A quella luce cotal si diventa,
che volgersi da lei per altro aspetto
è impossibil che mai si consenta;
però che 'l ben, ch'è del volere obietto,
tutto s'accoglie in lei, e fuor di quella
è defettivo ciò ch'è lì perfetto.
Omai sarà più corta mia favella,
pur a quel ch'io ricordo, che d'un fante
che bagni ancor la lingua a la mammella.
Non perché più ch'un semplice sembiante
fosse nel vivo lume ch'io mirava,
che tal è sempre qual s'era davante;
ma per la vista che s'avvalorava
in me guardando, una sola parvenza,
mutandom' io, a me si travagliava.
Ne la profonda e chiara sussistenza
de l'alto lume parvermi tre giri
di tre colori e d'una contenenza;
e l'un da l'altro come iri da iri
parea reflesso, e 'l terzo parea foco
che quinci e quindi igualmente si spiri.
Oh quanto è corto il dire e come fioco
al mio concetto! e questo, a quel ch'i' vidi,
è tanto, che non basta a dicer “poco.”
O luce etterna che sola in te sidi,
sola t'intendi, e da te intelletta
e intendente te ami e arridi!
Quella circulazion che sì concetta
pareva in te come lume reflesso,
da li occhi miei alquanto circunspetta,
dentro da sé, del suo colore stesso,
mi parve pinta de la nostra effige:
per che 'l mio viso in lei tutto era messo.
Qual è 'l geomètra che tutto s'affige
per misurar lo cerchio, e non ritrova,
pensando, quel principio ond' elli indige,
tal era io a quella vista nova:
veder voleva come si convenne
l'imago al cerchio e come vi s'indova;
ma non eran da ciò le proprie penne:
se non che la mia mente fu percossa
da un fulgore in che sua voglia venne.
A l'alta fantasia qui mancò possa;
ma già volgeva il mio disio e 'l velle,
sì come rota ch'igualmente è mossa,
l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle.
"Thou Virgin Mother, daughter of thy Son,
Humble and high beyond all other creature,
The limit fixed of the eternal counsel,
Thou art the one who such nobility
To human nature gave, that its Creator
Did not disdain to make himself its creature.
Within thy womb rekindled was the love,
By heat of which in the eternal peace
After such wise this flower has germinated.
Here unto us thou art a noonday torch
Of charity, and below there among mortals
Thou art the living fountain-head of hope.
Lady, thou art so great, and so prevailing,
That he who wishes grace, nor runs to thee,
His aspirations without wings would fly.
Not only thy benignity gives succour
To him who asketh it, but oftentimes
Forerunneth of its own accord the asking.
In thee compassion is, in thee is pity,
In thee magnificence; in thee unites
Whate'er of goodness is in any creature.
Now doth this man, who from the lowest depth
Of the universe as far as here has seen
One after one the spiritual lives,
Supplicate thee through grace for so much power
That with his eyes he may uplift himself
Higher towards the uttermost salvation.
And I, who never burned for my own seeing
More than I do for his, all of my prayers
Proffer to thee, and pray they come not short,
That thou wouldst scatter from him every cloud
Of his mortality so with thy prayers,
That the Chief Pleasure be to him displayed.
Still farther do I pray thee, Queen, who canst
Whate'er thou wilt, that sound thou mayst preserve
After so great a vision his affections.
Let thy protection conquer human movements;
See Beatrice and all the blessed ones
My prayers to second clasp their hands to thee!"
The eyes beloved and revered of God,
Fastened upon the speaker, showed to us
How grateful unto her are prayers devout;
Then unto the Eternal Light they turned,
On which it is not credible could be
By any creature bent an eye so clear.
And I, who to the end of all desires
Was now approaching, even as I ought
The ardour of desire within me ended.
Bernard was beckoning unto me, and smiling,
That I should upward look; but I already
Was of my own accord such as he wished;
Because my sight, becoming purified,
Was entering more and more into the ray
Of the High Light which of itself is true.
From that time forward what I saw was greater
Than our discourse, that to such vision yields,
And yields the memory unto such excess.
Even as he is who seeth in a dream,
And after dreaming the imprinted passion
Remains, and to his mind the rest returns not,
Even such am I, for almost utterly
Ceases my vision, and distilleth yet
Within my heart the sweetness born of it;
Even thus the snow is in the sun unsealed,
Even thus upon the wind in the light leaves
Were the soothsayings of the Sibyl lost.
O Light Supreme, that dost so far uplift thee
From the conceits of mortals, to my mind
Of what thou didst appear re-lend a little,
And make my tongue of so great puissance,
That but a single sparkle of thy glory
It may bequeath unto the future people;
For by returning to my memory somewhat,
And by a little sounding in these verses,
More of thy victory shall be conceived!
I think the keenness of the living ray
Which I endured would have bewildered me,
If but mine eyes had been averted from it;
And I remember that I was more bold
On this account to bear, so that I joined
My aspect with the Glory Infinite.
O grace abundant, by which I presumed
To fix my sight upon the Light Eternal,
So that the seeing I consumed therein!
I saw that in its depth far down is lying
Bound up with love together in one volume,
What through the universe in leaves is scattered;
Substance, and accident, and their operations,
All interfused together in such wise
That what I speak of is one simple light.
The universal fashion of this knot
Methinks I saw, since more abundantly
In saying this I feel that I rejoice.
One moment is more lethargy to me,
Than five and twenty centuries to the emprise
That startled Neptune with the shade of Argo!
My mind in this wise wholly in suspense,
Steadfast, immovable, attentive gazed,
And evermore with gazing grew enkindled.
In presence of that light one such becomes,
That to withdraw therefrom for other prospect
It is impossible he e'er consent;
Because the good, which object is of will,
Is gathered all in this, and out of it
That is defective which is perfect there.
Shorter henceforward will my language fall
Of what I yet remember, than an infant's
Who still his tongue doth moisten at the breast.
Not because more than one unmingled semblance
Was in the living light on which I looked,
For it is always what it was before;
But through the sight, that fortified itself
In me by looking, one appearance only
To me was ever changing as I changed.
Within the deep and luminous subsistence
Of the High Light appeared to me three circles,
Of threefold colour and of one dimension,
And by the second seemed the first reflected
As Iris is by Iris, and the third
Seemed fire that equally from both is breathed.
O how all speech is feeble and falls short
Of my conceit, and this to what I saw
Is such, 'tis not enough to call it little!
O Light Eterne, sole in thyself that dwellest,
Sole knowest thyself, and, known unto thyself
And knowing, lovest and smilest on thyself!
That circulation, which being thus conceived
Appeared in thee as a reflected light,
When somewhat contemplated by mine eyes,
Within itself, of its own very colour
Seemed to me painted with our effigy,
Wherefore my sight was all absorbed therein.
As the geometrician, who endeavours
To square the circle, and discovers not,
By taking thought, the principle he wants,
Even such was I at that new apparition;
I wished to see how the image to the circle
Conformed itself, and how it there finds place;
But my own wings were not enough for this,
Had it not been that then my mind there smote
A flash of lightning, wherein came its wish.
Here vigour failed the lofty fantasy:
But now was turning my desire and will,
Even as a wheel that equally is moved,
Oft have I seen at some cathedral door
A laborer, pausing in the dust and heat,
Lay down his burden, and with reverent feet
Enter, and cross himself, and on the floor
Kneel to repeat his paternoster o'er;
Far off the noises of the world retreat;
The loud vociferations of the street
Become an undistinguishable roar.
So, as I enter here from day to day,
And leave my burden at this minster gate,
Kneeling in prayer, and not ashamed to pray,
The tumult of the time disconsolate
To inarticulate murmurs dies away,
While the eternal ages watch and wait.
How strange the sculptures that adorn these towers!
This crowd of statues, in whose folded sleeves
Birds build their nests; while canopied with leaves
Parvis and portal bloom like trellised bowers,
And the vast minster seems a cross of flowers!
But fiends and dragons on the gargoyled eaves
Watch the dead Christ between the living thieves,
And, underneath, the traitor Judas lowers!
Ah! from what agonies of heart and brain,
What exultations trampling on despair,
What tenderness, what tears, what hate of wrong,
What passionate outcry of a soul in pain,
Uprose this poem of the earth and air,
This mediaeval miracle of song!
I enter, and I see thee in the gloom
Of the long aisles, O poet saturnine!
And strive to make my steps keep pace with thine.
The air is filled with some unknown perfume;
The congregation of the dead make room
For thee to pass; the votive tapers shine;
Like rooks that haunt Ravenna's groves of pine,
The hovering echoes fly from tomb to tomb.
From the confessionals I hear arise
Rehearsals of forgotten tragedies,
And lamentations from the crypts below
And then a voice celestial that begins
With the pathetic words, "Although your sins
As scarlet be," and ends with "as the snow."
With snow-white veil, and garments as of flame,
She stands before thee, who so long ago
Filled thy young heart with passion and the woe
From which thy song in all its splendors came;
And while with stern rebuke she speaks thy name,
The ice about thy heart melts as the snow
On mountain heights, and in swift overflow
Comes gushing from thy lips in sobs of shame.
Thou makest full confession; and a gleam
As of the dawn on some dark forest cast,
Seems on thy lifted forehead to increase;
Lethe and Eunoe—the remembered dream
And the forgotten sorrow—bring at last
That perfect pardon which is perfect peace.
I Lift mine eyes, and all the windows blaze
With forms of saints and holy men who died,
Here martyred and hereafter glorified;
And the great Rose upon its leaves displays
Christ's Triumph, and the angelic roundelays,
With splendor upon splendor multiplied;
And Beatrice again at Dante's side
No more rebukes, but smiles her words of praise.
And then the organ sounds, and unseen choirs
Sing the old Latin hymns of peace and love
And benedictions of the Holy Ghost;
And the melodious bells among the spires
O'er all the house-tops and through heaven above
Proclaim the elevation of the Host!
O star of morning and of liberty!
O bringer of the light, whose splendor shines
Above the darkness of the Apennines,
Forerunner of the day that is to be!
The voices of the city and the sea,
The voices of the mountains and the pines,
Repeat thy song, till the familiar lines
Are footpaths for the thought of Italy!
Thy fame is blown abroad from all the heights,
Through all the nations; and a sound is heard,
As of a mighty wind, and men devout,
Strangers of Rome, and the new proselytes,
In their own language hear thy wondrous word,
And many are amazed and many doubt.
This much (and justly) celebrated passage, Bernard's prayer to the Virgin, has the authority and unity of a separate poem. This is not to suggest that it is in any way incongruous in its context (quite the opposite is true), only that it could be published (as surely it has been) in an anthology of devotional lyrics and be one of the most moving and commanding of the collection.
For a study of this passage, see Erich Auerbach (“Dante's Prayer to the Virgin [Par. XXXIII] and Earlier Eulogies,” Romance Philology 3 [1949]: 1-26), who aligns it with examples of classical and Christian praise. And for the large extent to which Dante has borrowed from Bernard's own writings for the words of this prayer, see Mario Aversano (Dante daccapo [glosses to the Paradiso], copia d'eccezione, sent by the author on 11 September 2001), pp. 173-76.
Gian Carlo Alessio, in a lecture he presented at Princeton University during the autumn semester of 1981, broke down the rhetorical divisions of Bernard's prayer as follows:
1-12: salutatio
13-21: exordium
22-27: narratio
28-33: repetitio
34-39: peroratio
The tone of intimacy found in this prayer is emphasized by its extraordinary number of second-person-singular pronouns (tu, te, ti) and adjectives (tuo, tua), 17 of them in 39 verses (and that figure does not include second-person-singular endings of verbs). See the note to Paradiso XXXI.79-90.
This verse establishes the basic modality of the entire canto, making two references to what will be a common theme of so many verses in it: harmonious resolution of impossibly related contraries. “Virgin” and “mother” cannot logically be the shared properties of any woman; nor can any woman be the daughter of her son. This overriding of the logic of impossibility will culminate in the final simile of the poem, the geometer attempting to square the circle. The only answer to impossibility is miracle. Reacting to the entire canto, Güntert has said (“Canto XXXIII,” in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone [Florence: Cesati, 2002], p. 505): “No Christian poet had ever been so daring.”
For the beginnings of the last cantos of the first two cantiche, see the note to Purgatorio XXXIII.1-3, which points out that each of the previous opening lines was in another poetic voice, first that of Venantius Fortunatus and second that of David, both of them speaking Latin. Here we have another poetic voice, that of St. Bernard, but he does not use his customary Latin tongue (apparently no writing of Bernard in French survives), but the vernacular. This opening line thus presents us, first with a completed pattern and then, on further consideration, with a broken pattern: We expect Latin here, but do not find it. We may also speculate on the presence of another linguistic program here. We first hear the Latin of Venantius, then a Latin “translation” of David's Hebrew, and finally Bernard's Italian, the three main languages that provide the basic materials for Dante's own literary making.
For both elements of this verse as dependent on formulations found in the fifth book of Alain de Lille's Anticlaudianus, see Giuseppe Ledda (La guerra della lingua [Ravenna: Longo, 2002], p. 308n.), citing the previous notice by Angelo Jacomuzzi (“'L'imago al cerchio'. Nota sul canto XXXIII del Paradiso,” in his L'imago al cerchio. Invenzione e visione nella “Divina Commedia” [Milan: Silva, 1968 {1965}], p. 12n.). Ledda also reports other medieval formulae that are similar to Dante's paradoxical expressions.
This marks the thirteenth time that a canto has begun with a speaker's words (see the note to Par. V.1).
If one had to choose a single line of the fourteen thousand two hundred and thirty-three verses of the Commedia to stand for its stylistic program, countering classical high style with Christian sermo humilis, this one might serve that purpose. It begins and ends with the humanity of Mary, humble and a mere human creature, who is, at the same time, lofty (alta), as is the poem itself.
See Carroll's explanation of this line (comm. to vv. 1-39): “The woman worthy to be the 'Mother of God' must have been elect from the beginning.”
This tercet, remarkable for its triple play on the “making” of flesh (fattore, farsi, fattura), rises to the heights with the hapax (and coinage?) nobilitasti (ennobled). What is the noblest act ever done? God's making himself mortal for our sake (cf. Par. VII.118-120).
Sapegno (comm. to vv. 4-6) cites Dante's previous praise of Mary in Convivio IV.v.5.
Dante's use of the word ventre (here and once earlier for Mary's womb at Par. XXXIII.104) was perhaps not intended to be controversial. See Bosco/Reggio (comm. to vv. 1-21), pointing out that Dante may have deliberately been echoing “et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Jesus” (blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus [originally found in Luke 1:42]). This is the end of the first part of the prayer: “Hail, Mary, full of grace, / blessed are you among women.” Nonetheless, and as we have observed (see the notes to Par. XXI.84 and XXIII.104), some of Dante's readers find this a lowering of diction unbefitting such a lofty subject. And the first ten of Dante's uses of the word (8 in Inferno, 2 in Purgatorio) are all negatively charged, since the term is associated with Cerberus (Inf. VI.17), the Harpies (Inf. XIII.14), Aruns (Inf. XX.46), reptilian transformations (Inf. XXV.74), the counterfeiters (Inf. XIXX.67), Capocchio (Inf. XXX.30), Master Adam (Inf. XXX.123), the giants (Inf. XXXI.47), the femmina balba (Purg. XIX.32), and the bellies afflicted with pain for eating of the tree (Purg. XXXII.45).
In a related and similar vein, see Martin McLaughlin (Literary Imitation in the Italian Renaissance: The Theory and Practice of Literary Imitation in Italy from Dante to Bembo [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995], pp. 20-21), remarking that “After Petrarch reasserts the absolute superiority of Latin over the volgare, Dante's vernacular echoes of classical auctores are regarded as a diminution of their status.”
On the word amore, see Aleardo Sacchetto (“Il canto XXXIII del Paradiso,” Nuove letture dantesche, vol. VII [Florence: Le Monnier, 1974], pp. 265-87), for whom love is the key to the poem, occurring nineteen times in Inferno, fifty in Purgatorio, and eighty-five in Paradiso.
Christ's sacrifice was the evidence of the rekindling of God's love for humankind, resulting in the saved souls that populate the Rose.
For the elevation of Mary found here (and in all this passage), see Carroll (comm. to vv. 1-39): “[Dante] must have been familiar with the distinction of Aquinas between latria, the worship due to God; dulia, the veneration given to saints and Angels; and hyperdulia, the higher veneration given to Mary, as the most exalted of creatures (Summa, II-II, q. 103, a. 3, 4).” See two earlier commentators who also cite this threefold distinction, if without tracing it to Aquinas: Guido da Pisa (comm. to verse 48) and John of Serravalle (comm to vv. 106-111).
For the saved, there is no more need for hope – their hope (as well as their faith) has been rewarded, and now they only love eternally. Meanwhile, while to those (few, we need to recall, lest we get carried away by the warmth of these verses) left on earth who will be saved, Mary offers the surest path of hope for their salvation.
Campi (comm. to vv. 13-15) cites Monsignor Cavedoni for the attribution of this image to St. Bernard, Sermones in Vigilia Nativitatis Domini III.10: “Nihil nos Deus habere voluit, quod per Mariae manus non transiret” (God does not wish us to have anything that has not first passed through the hands of Mary).
Geoffrey Chaucer, who knew and understood this poem better than any English writer for many centuries, appropriated this line in his Troilus with hilarious result. Stanza 182 of Book III (one stanza from the numerical midpoint of the work, 588 of 1178 stanzas) has Troilus in the midst of his three-stanza prayer to Venus (his “Mary”). Whoever wants to accomplish his love (he is thinking about carnal pleasure), he says, without Venus's help, “his desire will fly without wings,” that is, will not be successful. It is Paradiso XXXIII done as Some Like It Hot, one of Billy Wilder's greatest films. (That Chaucer could do Dante “straight” is witnessed in many of his texts; in the context of this canto, see particularly his rewriting of the first half of Bernard's prayer in “The Second Nun's Prologue” of The Canterbury Tales, vv. 29-77.)
As Simone Marchesi, in conversation, has pointed out, Chaucer's Billy Wilder was Giovanni Boccaccio, whose lascivious Venetian friar Albert (Decam. IV.ii), in illicit pleasure with a Venetian matron, “flew many times without his wings.” Albert appears to the credulous woman as the angel Gabriel, decked out in a costume including wings that he takes off only in the darkness of her bedroom. Boccaccio is clearly pulling Dante's leg; now Chaucer does so also.
For liberality extending itself unrequested, see Purgatorio XVII.59-60 and Paradiso XVII.75.
Here we have a case of a Virgilian borrowing that has apparently remained hidden for centuries (in both texts, CAPITALS mark structural parallels and italics indicate secondary repeated sounds of te):
In TE misericordia, in TE pietate,
in TE magnificenza, in TE s'aduna...
See Georgics IV.465-466 (Orpheus lamenting his dead Eurydice, a scene Dante has revisited in Purg. XXX.49-51 [see the note to that passage] as parallel to his plaint for lost Virgil, as is fairly widely agreed these days):
TE, dulcis coniunx, TE solo in litore secum,
TE veniente die, TE decedente canebat.
This seems an obvious revisitation. Perhaps we have not seen it because the situations are so opposed. But that is the point: Bernard is a better Orpheus singing a better Eurydice, Maria. It is a small but telling emblem of how Dante rewrites Virgilian tragedy as Christian comedy. And the Virgilian context is striking: We last heard the notes of Georgics IV in tragic mode for his disappearance as a character from the poem; now that poem becomes the subtext for a better moment, his own re-entry to this Christian comedy at its highest point. However, notice of this echo is fairly recent. See Hollander (“Le opere di Virgilio nella Commedia di Dante,” in Dante e la “bella scola” della poesia: Autorità e sfida poetica, ed. A. A. Iannucci [Ravenna: Longo, 1993], p. 339), citing a communication from Professor Rachel Jacoff in 1987, suggesting the existence of this borrowing, which also possibly reflects Paradiso XXIII.88-89, where Dante presents himself as praying to Mary each morning and evening, while Orpheus presents himself as “singing” Eurydice morning and evening. The stark contrast between Virgilian “Orphic” love that leads to death and Marian affection that leads to eternal life could not be more striking.
We may remember that the first (and only) time we heard Dante's name in this poem (Purg. XXX.55), it was echoing a passage just a little farther along in this Georgic (see the note to Purg. XXX.63).
The reader may be pleased to know of the existence of Virgil in Late Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, an online bibliography assembled by David Wilson-Okamura and graciously provided to scholars and anyone else interested with no bothersome encumbrance: http://www.virgil.org/bibliography/virgil-bibliography.htm. The bibliography is updated on occasion, with the last version (as of 6 April 2006) dating from 6 February 2006. While the rest of the world argues over Google's desire simply to take and distribute other people's intellectual property, some scholars have dedicated themselves to sharing the fruits of their labor with others without a thought of financial reward.
Bosco/Reggio (comm. to these verses) rightly express surprise that there is any debate at all over exactly which of the souls in which parts of the afterworld Bernard refers to, since he obviously refers to all of them.
Tommaseo (comm. to vv. 22-24) hears an echo of the word lacuna in Virgil: Georgics III.365. Giuseppe Velli (“Petrarca, Dante, la poesia classica: 'Ne la stagion che'l ciel rapido inchina' [RVF, L] 'Io son venuto al punto de la rota' [Rime, C],” Studi petrarcheschi 15 [2002.1]: p. 92) also connects this passage with Rime C.60-61.
The first notice of a possible Virgilian source here is found in Gabriele (comm. to vv. 31-32). Tasso's notes to the poem (comm. to verse 31) have a non-specified Virgilian source in mind, but very likely the same one as Gabriele. Tommaseo (comm. to vv. 31-33) is unhesitating in his identification of the source. Campi (comm. to vv. 31-33) and Tozer (comm. to vv. 31-32) also point to this passage in the Aeneid. Toward the close of his long note to verses 1-39, Carroll takes fuller notice of II.604-606. It may be worth a moment's consideration of this not exactly obvious “citation.” Among the moderns, Mattalia (comm. to vv. 31-32) and Aversano (Dante daccapo [glosses to the Paradiso], copia d'eccezione, sent by the author on 11 September 2001, p. 175) are among the few who cite Virgil's text here. See Aeneid II.602-606;622-623: Venus will tear away the clouds that keep Aeneas from seeing that it is neither Helen nor Paris, but the gods who are destroying Troy:
divum inclementia, divum,
has evertit opes sternitque a culmine Troiam.
aspice (namque amnem, quae nunc obducta tuenti
mortalis hebetat visus tibi et umida circum
caligat, nubem eripiam....
apparent dirae facies inimicaque Troiae
numina magna deum.
[the gods, the relentless gods, overturn this
wealth and make Troy topple from her pinnacle.
Behold, for all the cloud, which now, drawn
over thy sight, dulls thy mortal vision and with
dark pall enshrouds thee, I will tear away....
Dread shapes came to view – mighty powers
divine, warring against Troy. (Tr. H.R. Fairclough)]
Vellutello and Daniello, and, more recently, Singleton (all three in their comms. to vv. 28-33), and Chiavacci Leonardi (Paradiso, con il commento di A. M. C. L. [Milan: Mondadori, 1997], p. 911) have another choice, Boethius (Consolatio III.m9.25-28):
Dissice terrenae nebulas et pondera molis
Atque tuo splendore mica! Tu namque serenum,
Tu requies tranquilla piis, te cernere finis,
Principium, vector, dux, semita, terminus idem.
[Cast off the earthly weight wherewith I am opprest,
Shine as Thou art most bright, Thou only calm and rest
To pious men whose end is to behold Thy ray,
Who their beginning art, their guide, their bound, and way. (tr. in Singleton)]
It is interesting to find Daniello divagating from his teacher's (Gabriele's) view of this problem.
If we believe that the Virgilian passage is being alluded to, the parallels are fairly inviting. Where Venus removes the shield of invisibility from the gods so that Aeneas may see his true enemies for what they are, Mary takes the cloud of his mortality away from Dante so that he may see his friend, God, as He is.
These verses contain six words for praying, the densest occurrence of noun and verb forms of priego in the poem.
Once again the precise understanding one should have of the verbal noun piacer is an issue. See the note to Purgatorio XXXI.47-54. Grabher (comm. to vv. 28-33) believes that here it means somma bellezza (highest beauty), as do we.
See Bosco/Reggio (comm. to vv. 1-21), who observe that this final prayer offered by Bernard may reflect the second and final part of the Ave Maria: “Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, / ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc, / et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen” (Holy Mary, Mother of God, / pray for us sinners now / and at the hour of our death. Amen).
The traditional interpretation of these lines, as it is advanced by Sapegno (comm. to these verses); by Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi (comm. vv. 34-36); and by Peter Dronke (“The Conclusion of Dante's Commedia,” Italian Studies 49 [1994]: 28) fits well with the Marian text. It sees the final moments of the prayer as turning to Dante's Nachleben back on earth, and hoping that Mary will intervene to help him remain pure, so that he will indeed be able to return here. This understanding is opposed by Lino Pertile (“Paradiso XXXIII: l'estremo oltraggio,” Filologia e critica 6 [1981]: 1-21); Giorgio Bàrberi Squarotti (“La preghiera alla Vergine: Dante e Petrarca,” Filologia e critica 20 [1995]: 367-71); and Giuseppe Ledda (La guerra della lingua [Ravenna: Longo, 2002], pp. 309-10), all of whom find it inappropriate for Bernard's prayer to leave the subject of Dante's vision being pure for that of his post-Paradiso life back on earth being morally sound. Why is this an unseemly concern, either aesthetically or intellectually? It had already been before the reader in Paradiso XXXI.88-90, where Dante himself beseeches Beatrice for this kind of heavenly assistance. Pertile (p. 2) argues that, for the very reason that Dante's prayer has been accepted, as signified by Beatrice's smile, there is no longer any need to linger on this issue. Perhaps so. On the other hand, the language of these six verses (particularly at vv. 36 and 37) really does seem to be related to earthly concerns. In other words, even if it seems ungainly to some (but not to most), the standard interpretation seems more plausible.
The Virgin, evidently made of more august stuff than Beatrice, does not smile when Bernard finishes his prayer as Beatrice did when Dante finished his (Par. XXXI.92), but indicates by the expression in her eyes how much she is gratified by the prayers of the devout. Then she turns her gaze (as did Beatrice) back up to God.
As Güntert observes (“Canto XXXIII,” in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone [Florence: Cesati, 2002], p. 511), after the formal conclusion to Bernard's prayer (vv. 40-45), this verse begins the final “macrosequence” of the one-hundreth canto; it is precisely one hundred verses in length. However, for previous notice of what she characterizes as Dante's “invisible ink,” marking three segments for this final sub-section of the poem (verse 75 = its thirtieth line; verse 105 = line 60; verse 145 = line 100), see Teodolinda Barolini (The Undivine Comedy [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992], pp. 255-56).
This verse has caused a central disagreement over its two main potential meanings. We follow Singleton's interpretation (comm. to this verse): “The meaning of the verb in this verse is much debated, but one aspect of that meaning seems beyond discussion: finii cannot here be in a normal signification of 'bring to an end.' Indeed, the context requires that the meaning be the exact opposite, i.e., 'I brought the ardor of my desire to its highest intensity.'” And see the similar position of Bosco/Reggio (comm. to this verse). Another difficult passage may be considered a “preview” of this one (Purg. XVIII.31-33) and may help unscramble the sense of this line. See the note to that passage (Purg. XVIII.28-33).
As Aversano (Dante daccapo [glosses to the Paradiso], copia d'eccezione, sent by the author on 11 September 2001), p. 177, points out, this is the third and last appearance of Bernard's name in the poem (see also Par. XXXI.102 and 139), as a sort of Trinitarian gesture of farewell.
Bernard was signaling, in his capacity as guide, what Dante should be doing, but Dante was already doing exactly that. He has not outrun his need for guidance so much as he has internalized his guide.
The poet could not be more precise. Up to now his powers of sight have improved so that he can finally see God's reflection in the universe perfectly, an ability that was far from his grasp when the poem began. Now he will see Him as Himself. Thus the protagonist's vision is about to move from reflections of His glory up into the beam of light emanating from Him. It is balanced for seconds between the two aspects of deity, reflection and source (see the note to Par. XXIII.82-84). In the next tercet we realize that he has recorded his breakthrough. No Christian except for St. Paul has seen so much – or such is the unspoken claim the poet makes us share.
The experience of seeing God face-to-face (1) is ineffable, not describable, and (2) the vision cannot be remembered in any of its details anyway (these twin disclaimers were made at the outset [see Par. I.7-9]). All that remains is the awareness of having had the experience.
Petrocchi's selection of parlar mostra (instead of parlar nostro, among other possibilities) has not met with enthusiasm. See the note to Paradiso XXXIII.56.
For the word oltraggio as expressing Dante's version of the excessus mentis of the Christian mystical tradition, see Lino Pertile (“Paradiso XXXIII: l'estremo oltraggio,” Filologia e critica 6 [1981]: 1-21 [repr. in La punta del disio: Semantica del desiderio nella “Commedia” [Fiesole: Cadmo, 2005]).
Given our previous experience reading in the Paradiso, we expect here exactly what we get. Moving into an area of heightened experience, which challenges his expressive powers (as it had challenged his perceptive powers), Dante has inevitably moved to simile. After, in the last tercet, understating the fact that he saw God, he now turns, not to one simile, but to three of them, in order to express the nature of his loss. This is perhaps the only time in the poem that he deploys three similes back-to-back; in any case, the Trinitarian nature of what he has looked upon (which will be made clear to us before long) is perhaps reflected in their number.
These are the penultimate similes in a poem that turns to them more often than we might have expected, and surely his use of the technique reflects his sense of the classical Latin epic simile, so familiar to him, particularly from the pages of Virgil. And the last of these three will be unmistakably Virgilian.
The first and fullest of the three similes is one of a class defined by Tozer (see the note to Inf. XXX.136-141) as “drawn from mental experiences.”
The present tense of the verb in the simile seems natural to us, since Dante usually bases his similes in the world of our present experience. We do not, however, expect to hear the narrative voice speaking in the present tense – but if we look ahead to verse 61, we find the poet speaking to us now, from his writing table back on earth. He won't stay there (see vv. 133-138, offering a parallel structure, in which the poet compares himself to the geometer and then says “such was I”), as we will see, but that is where he presents himself as being now, at least for the moment.
Switching from the experience itself to writing about his recording of the experience, the poet speaks in the present tense, which comes as a surprise, since we have not heard him use that tense in the Empyrean, and not since Paradiso XXX.34.
Benvenuto (comm. to vv. 58-63) says that Dante is claiming that even now he still tastes just a drop of this immense joy (adhuc sentio aliquam stillam, idest, guttam illius immensae dulcedinis).
This is the sixth and final appearance of the word visione, used here for the first time for the poem itself. It was apparently from here that the many writers who referred to the work as the Visione (perhaps wanting to avoid the embarrassing [to some] title, Commedia), took their cue. And see the note to Paradiso XVII.127-129.
Benvenuto (comm. to vv. 64-66) says that this is a fitting simile, because “the human mind, weak and infirm, loses the form of its phantasy's vision beneath the heat of the Eternal Sun.” This second comparison is apparently not “literary” in its inspiration. There is in fact no citation of any text of any kind for this verse among the commentators gathered in the DDP.
When we read her name, we may wonder why we have not heard it before now; it is as though Dante were holding her in reserve for his hundredth canto (as we will see, that number is three times associated with her in the main passage involving her in the Aeneid). The Sibyl, we may sometimes fail to remember, was merely the conduit for Apollo's messages. Thus, and as Benvenuto (comm. to vv. 64-66) says, both the Sibyl and Dante lost track of a communication from a divinity. If we recall the first two cantos of this canticle, with their insistence on Apollo as God's “stand-in” (Par. I.13; II.8), we can see why Benvenuto makes them companions in losing track of the truth revealed by “Apollo.”
The history of the commentators' response to this Virgilian reference is strange, beginning with the mistake of Francesco da Buti (or his scribe), who identifies (comm. to vv. 55-66) the source as being in Aeneid V, when he clearly means Aeneid III. All the other earlier commentators, beginning with Pietro (Pietro1, comm. to vv. 58-66), and including Benvenuto, John of Serravalle, Daniello, and Venturi, refer only to the appropriate passage in Aeneid VI. However, beginning with Lombardi (comm. to vv. 64-66), every commentator but two refers only to the passage in Aeneid III (443-451), which is the one in which the usual scattering of her leaves is described; the second passage, while also referring to that usual result, has Aeneas convincing the oracle to speak, and not write, her expression of Apollo's response. However, it is probably helpful to have both scenes in mind; the only two commentators in the DDP to refer to both passages are Oelsner and Singleton (comms. to these verses).
The passage in the Aeneid (VI.42-155) describing the Sibyl's cave is both long and full of arresting “Dantean” detail. The cave possesses one hundred mouths and one hundred gates (VI.43); Aeneas requests that the Sibyl not write her “poems” (carmina) on leaves to be scattered by the wind, but recite them aloud (VI.74-75); the hundred gates open and their breezes carry her reply (VI.81-82); she gives a prophecy concerning the “first safe road” (via prima salutis), which in Latin sounds, to the right listener, like a Christian message, “the first way to salvation”; Virgil (VI.99) typifies her utterance as “horrible enigmas” (horrendas ambages), a phrase that Dante has picked up in Paradiso XVII.31; Aeneas asks (VI.108) the Sibyl to bring him into his father's sight (ad conspectum cari genitoris), while Dante hopes to see his Father. (While there are other resonances in Dante's poem of the last four dozen verses, they are not relevant to this passage.)
If the obvious references to Virgil have been recognized, but not all that well exploited, there is also possibly a reference to Augustine, which has only rarely been noticed and not exploited at all. It is found in chapter xxiii of Book XVIII of De civitate Dei, a text vengefully hostile to Virgil for his prideful view of Rome's continuing and sempiternal hegemony (especially now that the city has been sacked in the year 410). Augustine says that the Sibyl (not the Cumaean [Virgil's] but the Erythraean – if he later hedges by saying it may have been the Cumaean) had prophesied the coming of Christ and ought to be considered as inhabiting the City of God. What led Augustine to make such claims may have been a desire to roast Virgil, either for not heeding his own Sibyl (who, after all, presides over the fourth Eclogue) or for choosing to sponsor the wrong one. Here is a portion of what he sets down in his lengthy analysis of this poem: The first letters of each successive line in the Greek Sibylline pronouncement spell out, Augustine reports: “'Jesus Christ the Son of God, the Saviour.' And the verses are twenty-seven, which is the cube of three. For three times three are nine; and nine itself, if tripled, so as to rise from the superficial square to the cube, comes to twenty-seven. But if you join the initial letters of these five Greek words,... they will make the word ikduj, that is, 'fish,' in which word Christ is mystically understood, because He was able to live, that is, to exist, without sin in the abyss of this mortality as in the depth of waters” (tr. M. Dods). Should one want to gild the lily, one might note that Dante's verse about the Sibyl, if it contains six words (and not five), does in fact contain twenty-seven letters. Notice of this passage in St. Augustine is not a frequent feature of the commentaries. However, see Benvenuto (comm. to these verses), who points to it at some length. He is followed apparently only by Campi (comm. to these vv.). Hollander (Il Virgilio dantesco: tragedia nella “Commedia” [Florence: Olschki, 1983], pp. 146-50), while suggesting this connection, neglected his two precursors (when he could have used all the help he could find).
For an article by Philippe Verdier on the Sibyl's appearance to Augustine at Ara coeli in Rome, see Mélanges de l'École française à Rome 94 (1982): 85-119. And for a collection of studies of the Sibyl's antique and medieval presence, see Febo Allevi (Con Dante e la Sibilla ed altri [dagli antichi al volgare] [Milan: Edizioni Scientifico-Letterarie, 1965]) as well as Monique Bouquet and Françoise Morzadec (eds., La Sibylle: Parole et représentation [Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2004]). Allevi discusses this passage on pp. 443-48.
On the Sibyl's leaves, see Piero Boitani (“The Sibyl's Leaves: A Study of Paradiso XXXIII,” Dante Studies 96 [1978]: 83-126), taking them as a starting point for his lectura of the canto.
The word concetto (conception, conceiving) is the linchpin of this passage, occurring in verses 68 and 75 (on the latter occasion as a verb). Dante, in this last of his nine invocations (see the note to Inf. II.7-9), asks God to make His reality “conceivable” by mortals. If He requites Dante's request, the poet promises, that will be the result. A scaled-back request, the poet insists, is all that he makes, underlined by the repetition of the phrase “un poco” (one small part).
This is the fourth time in the poem that the word concetto is connected with an invocation (see the notes to Inf. XXXII.1-9 and 10-12; Par. XVIII.82-87; and, for a survey of all the presences of concetto in the poem, see the note to Par. XXXIII.127). It surely seems to be involved in Dante's sense of what the human agent needs from a higher source, not the mere substance of his vision, but its shaping conceptual formulation. And that is precisely what, the poet will tell us, he was granted in the lightning bolt that resolves all his questions in verses 140-141.
It is interesting to look back to the two uses of concetto in Convivio. In the first of these (I.v.12) Dante concludes that Latin possesses higher conceptual power than the vernacular: “più è la vertù sua che quella del volgare”. When, only shortly afterwards, he returns to the topic (I.xiii.12), he seems to have revised that opinion. Speaking of the vernacular, he says: “E noi vedemo che in ciascuna cosa di sermone lo bene manifestare del concetto è più amato e commento.” That he first had held that highly significant utterance was possible only in Latin stands in clear opposition to his eventual insistence on the conceptual value of the vernacular throughout the Commedia. The noun concetto appears first in Inferno XXXII.4 and then reappears ten more times in the poem; in addition to its first two presences in this final canto (once as noun and once as verb – see the first paragraph of this note), it reappears in the final tercets (vv. 122 and 127), once again first as noun and then as verb. That four of their fewer than twenty presences in the poem are found in its final canto underlines the importance that Dante found in the words concetto and concepire.
The poet here addresses God as source (O somma luce), not as what He irradiates, but as the fonte (spring, font) of everything.
The protagonist had entered the raggio (ray) in verse 53. Now he has issued from it and approached the source. Having uttered his ninth invocation a few lines earlier (vv. 67-75), he does not invoke the Deity. He does not need help to see Him any longer; he has accomplished that goal. And so he gives thanks for His grace in allowing this final vision, which he is about to unfold before us. See discussion in Giuseppe Ledda (La guerra della lingua [Ravenna: Longo, 2002], pp. 313-14 and n.).
For the past presence of the adjective smarrito in the poem, see the note to Paradiso XXVI.9.
For an attempt to load the significance of the verb presunsi (presumed) by noting that it occurs in a verse the number of which (82) resolves to 10 (8+2) in a canto numbered 100, see Selene Sarteschi (“Sant'Agostino in Dante e nell'età di Dante,” in her Per la “Commedia” e non per essa soltanto [Rome: Bulzoni, 2002 {1999}], p. 194n.).
For a most suggestive and yet concise reading of this passage, the universe explained and put into relationship with its Creator in three tercets, see Christian Moevs (The Metaphysics of Dante's “Comedy” [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005], pp. 78-79). God creates all things as unity. He is the ground of all being. And Dante, seeing the universal diversity as unity, experiences it as God saw it in creating it, as a simple yet “limitless and dimensionless reality” (Moevs, p. 78).
On the various dimensions of this passage, from medieval book production, in which a writer took his individual quartos (quaderni) to have them conflated and sewn into a “book,” John Ahern (“Binding the Book: Hermeneutics and Manuscript Production in Paradiso 33,” PMLA 97 [1982]: 800-9) argues that Dante's poem reflects the “book” of God's created universe, even to its Trinitarian structure. For bibliography on the concept (God's “two books,” the Bible and His creation), see Güntert (“Canto XXXIII,” in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone [Florence: Cesati, 2002], p. 511n.).
Marguerite Mills Chiarenza (“The Imageless Vision and Dante's Paradiso,” Dante Studies 90 [1972]: 80) says that this tercet is “inspired by the doctrine of the double existence of creation, separate in the universe and unified in its Creator's conception.”
This is the final occurrence of the noun universo in the poem, suggesting the “universality” of a poem that can record such totality. The word was introduced to the poem by Francesca (Inf. V.91), speaking of an “unfriendly” God as “king of the universe”; it then appears four more times in Inferno and not at all in Purgatorio. It occurs eight times in Paradiso, twice in the first and last cantos (Par. I.2 and 105; Par. XXXIII.23 and here). However, we may notice the only appearance of the word in any other form, the adjective universale at Paradiso XXXIII.91, which makes threefold the presence of “universe”/“universal” uniquely in this ultimate canto (and ninefold in the final canticle altogether).
Güntert (“Canto XXXIII,” in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone [Florence: Cesati, 2002], p. 508) would like to have us see “three Dantes” in this tercet, the narrator (credo), the protagonist (i' vidi), and the “post-vision protagonist” (mi sento... i' godo), a being somehow differentiated from the narrator (see the similar argument advanced by Picone [“Leggere la Commedia di Dante,” in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Inferno, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone {Florence: Cesati, 2000}], pp. 18-21). However, his separation of the first and third voices cannot be supported, since they both use the present tense and surely seem to be the io narrante rather than two different voices, speaking from different times. Since it is not logically possible for that time to be post-writing, it must fall between the vision and the writing, and thus in the past. To put this another way, had such been Dante's plan, he would have needed to deploy a better-conceived tactic in order to make it effective. As it is, we have two moments in the poem, one stable (the protagonist's voyage during a week in the spring of 1300), the other always in fact shifting between circa 1307 and circa 1321, but treated without temporal distinction as the authorial “now,” if it has in fact finally reached its farthest point. Proust would later choose to dramatize the subject of the author's mortal change through time; all times in which Dante, on the other hand, looks up at us from his writing table are equally “now.” In Hollander's formulation (Allegory in Dante's “Commedia” [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969], p. 227), “The Pilgrim he was has become the history of the Poet he is.”
For the similarities between Dante's “apotheosis” here and that of Glaucus in Paradiso I.67-79, see Hollander (Allegory, pp. 228-29). See also Eugene Longen (“The Grammar of Apotheosis: Paradiso XXX, 94-99,” Dante Studies 93 [1975]: 209-14).
For the suggestion that this image of a ship, filled with armed men and headed for battle, underlines the poet's desire to associate his Christian poem with classical martial epic in this final reference to the world of men, see Hollander (“Dante and the Martial Epic,” Mediaevalia 12 [1989], p. 85).
This tercet has called forth equal amounts of admiration and distress, admiration for the beauty and scope of its conception, distress at the indubious difficulty of its highly compacted literal sense. First things first. What does the tercet mean? Perhaps because of the difficulty of understanding why Dante might have wanted to present himself as forgetting the greatest insight he (or practically anyone) has ever had, there has been some attempt to understand letargo, not as “forgetting,” but as a form of visionary experience. However, most now think that the former meaning is far more likely here, as, obviously, do we. If all can agree (and that is to assume a good deal) that the term, in Dante's Italian, refers to oblivion, or forgetfulness, that still leaves a deal of difficulty. For interesting considerations of this tercet, see Georg Rabuse (“'Un punto solo m'è maggior letargo,'” Deutsches Dante-Jahrbuch 43 [1965]: 138-52) and Peter Dronke (“Boethius, Alanus and Dante,” Romanische Forschungen 78 [1966]: 119-25).
A good place to begin one's study of this tercet is Scartazzini's gloss on it, not because it solves its mysteries (it almost certainly does not), but because it so thoroughly indicates what these are. Francesco da Buti's long gloss to this tercet (a part of his comm. to vv. 82-99) makes a point based in mythographic history that stands as the basic understanding even today. He (uniquely) offers a striking version of the classical background: Neptune had longed to see his “kingdom,” the sea, “inhabited” as was the land. Therefore, he took great joy in seeing the first ship, and has been painfully “forgetting” it (in the sense that, without satisfaction, he longs to see it every day) for 2,500 years ever since. Thus Dante's one minute of awareness, now lost, is more painful than Neptune's far longer period. See Tozer's similar explanation (comm. to this tercet): “'[O]ne single moment is greater oblivion to me (letargo, lit. lethargy, dullness), than twenty-five centuries have been to the enterprise which caused Neptune to marvel at the shadow of Argo.' In other words: 'I forgot in a single moment more of what I saw... than men have forgotten, in twenty-five centuries, of the Argonautic expedition.' The reason why this expedition is mentioned is that it was the earliest important event recorded in history.” Needless to say, there are other views. For instance, Chimenz (comm. to this tercet) believes that the twenty-five centuries are marked by remembrance, not by forgetting. Others have noted that the structure of the passage simply forces the reader to accept the painful understanding (i.e., the view advanced by Tozer). And if the poet goes on to describe the vision in great detail (the main point put forward by those who read the text “positively”), he also will insist on its fleetingness, as Carroll (comm. to this tercet), objecting to Scartazzini's “positive” interpretation, rightly argues. Lombardi had offered, in addition to the classical modern statement later found in Tozer, two important additions to the sum of commentary knowledge: the word letargo derives from Greek lethe (forgetfulness), and the years between the voyage of the Argo and 1300 are, according to Dante's authorities, either 2,523 or 2,570. Tommaseo (comm. to this tercet) supports the first of these dates, which has now become “canonical” among the commentators. Either one is a promising date, since both sector the “history of sea voyages” in an arc of twenty-six centuries, 1223 (or 1270) B.C. to 1300, with its approximate midpoint in the Incarnation (as Hollander [Allegory in Dante's “Commedia” {Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969}, pp. 231-32] has argued). The voyage of the Argonauts, preceding the Trojan War, was the first important event in the Greek portion of universal history. (See Hermann Gmelin [Kommentar: das Paradies {Stuttgart: Klett, 1957}, p. 572] for an examination of Dante's Argonautical chronology.)
For a different and not ultimately convincing possible source, see Giacalone (comm. to vv. 94-96) citing Parodi (BSDI 23 [1916], p. 66) for the latter's citation of Statius (Achilleid I.20-26): Thetis looks up from her home in the sea at the oars of the ship bearing Paris and Helen to Troy, a voyage that will eventually result in the death of Achilles.
See Angelo Jacomuzzi (“'L'imago al cerchio'. Nota sul canto XXXIII del Paradiso,” in his L'imago al cerchio. Invenzione e visione nella “Divina Commedia” [Milan: Silva, 1968 {1965}], p. 10), discussing the tension in this canto between letargo (forgetting) and the frequent presence of verbs for seeing. And see Picone (“Dante argonauta: la ricezione dei miti ovidiani nella Commedia,” in M. Picone and B. Zimmermann, eds., Ovidius redivivus: von Ovid zu Dante [Stuttgart: M&P Verlag, 1994], pp. 200-202).
The word impresa (undertaking, enterprise) has an interesting history in the poem. See Hollander (Allegory in Dante's “Commedia” [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969], pp. 230-31), pointing out that, in Inferno II.41 and 47, the word refers to Dante's journey and that, in Inferno XXXII.7, it represents Dante's poem about that journey; here, on the other hand, it would seem to refer both to the journey and to the record of that journey, for the first is in process of becoming the second.
According to Ovid, Jason was the builder of the first ship (“primaeque ratis molitor” [Metam. VIII.302]). For the Argo in Lucan (Phars. II.715-718), see Pietro di Dante (Pietro1, comm. to vv. 94-96) and Lombardi (comm. to vv. 94-96), a possible, but not immediately convincing, “echo.” For still another Jasonic presence in Ovid, see Amores II.xi.1-2. For the history of the Argo-motif, see Ernst Robert Curtius (“The Ship of the Argonauts,” in Essays on European Literature, tr. M. Kowal [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973 {1950}], pp. 465-96), favoring Ovid (Metam. VII.120), which assuredly lies behind Dante's earlier reference to Jason's voyage (see the note to Par. II.17-18), but does not seem quite so good a fit here.
The image of Neptune looking up from beneath the sea is reminiscent of what the poet tells us in Canto XXXI.73-78, where he looked up at Beatrice as though he were immersed in the deepest point in the sea and she were at the highest point in the earth's atmosphere. Both sightings involve the word effige (features), the first time as Beatrice's likeness, the second (Par. XXXIII.131), that of Jesus. The fact that Neptune saw the shadow (ombra) of the Argo makes it at least probable that the poet hoped we would consider that voyage as the prefiguration of his own (see Hollander [Allegory in Dante's “Commedia” {Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969}], p. 232).
And as for Ovidian inspiration for what is sometimes considered a Dantean invention, Hollander (p. 222) has argued for the impact of the last line (721) of Ovid's Book VI, describing the Argo setting sail from Iolcos: “Per mare non notum prima petiere carina” (The first keel to cleave an unknown sea). That would leave Neptune alone unaccounted for. To be sure, we find him looking up from the seabed (wherever Dante found the source of the image) earlier in this very poem, Inferno XXVIII.83-84, where, in his only other appearance, he witnesses Malatestino's treachery as he has witnessed similar crimes on the part of Greeks (gente argolica), the “bad Argonauts” succeeding Jason, as it were.
For Dante's “sospesa,” Etienne Gilson (“La conclusion de la Divine Comédie et la mystique franciscaine,” Révue d'histoire franciscaine 1 [1924], p. 59) cites the prologue of Bonaventure's Itinerarium mentis in Deum for a similar use of the word suspensio to denote the mind's ecstatic rapture in its contemplation of God.
When Dante looked at Beatrice in Eden, the angels cried out (Purg. XXXII.9) that he was “troppo fiso!” (too fixed), in the sense that he was confounding the physical and the spiritual in his appreciation of Beatrice. Now there can be no question of that, since “fixation” on God is the condition of blessedness for eternity, as the following two tercets make absolutely plain.
Not only is the intellect satisfied by gazing on God, but the will is, too; for what other good, as object of the will, can supervene?
For a final time, the poet, having nearly completed a poem that has just reported having seen and understood the underlying principle ordering the entire universe, insists that, compared to the truth of that vision, his work is mere babytalk. See the note to Par. XV.121-123 and Hollander (“Babytalk in Dante's Commedia,” in Studies in Dante [Ravenna: Longo, 1980]), pp. 115-29.
Preparing us to see the Trinity through his eyes, the poet reassures us that he harbors no heretical notions about God's nature(s); if He is three, that does not mean that He is other than one; if He is one, that does not mean that He is other than three. Even the protagonist's vastly improved powers still have one more stage of visionary capacity to reach, one in which he will be able to experience the unchanging Trinity with his changed sight.
The Trinity is first experienced as three circles inhering in a single space, distinguished only by their colors, not their sizes, which are identical.
Danilo Bonanno (“Guido in Paradiso: Donna me prega e l'ultimo canto della Commedia,” Critica del testo 4 [2001], p. 224) suggests that the rhymes here deliberately echo those found in Donna me prega, vv. 51-55 (miri, tiri, giri), with subversive intent, and indeed sees the entire final canto as entering into a corrective debate with the understanding of the nature of love proposed in Cavalcanti's canzone.
The tercet, as characterized by Carroll (comm. to vv. 115-123), as presenting “what Aquinas calls the Relations of Divinity according to the Procession of Persons out of identity of substance – the Relations of Paternity, Generation and Spiration (Summa, I, q. 28). From the circle of the Father appeared reflected the circle of the Son, as Iris [rainbow] from Iris [rainbow]; and from both was breathed forth equally the fire of Love which is the Holy Spirit (on the Procession of the Spirit from both Father and Son, and the filioque controversy, see above, [Carroll's comm.] on Par. X.1-6). We must not think of these in the form of three rainbows one within another, or even as the three colours of a rainbow, for these are also one within another. The 'one dimension' shows that Dante conceived of them as co-existing in the one space, though he does not explain how he was able to see the three colours distinct within each other.” One supposes that they manifested themselves as changing colors. Dante does not assign a particular color either to Father or Son; the Holy Spirit, as Love, is understandably red.
For this last use of fioco (weak, indistinct) in the poem, see Hollander (Il Virgilio dantesco: tragedia nella “Commedia” [Florence: Olschki, 1983]), tying together Vita nuova XXIII (see pp. 76-77), Inferno I.63, and this verse (pp. 150-51). For a similar view, see Corrado Bologna (“Canto XXX,” in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone [Florence: Cesati, 2002], p. 461). Torraca seems to have been the first commentator (and, among those gathered in the DDP, he seems to have been followed only by Mestica [comm. to this tercet]) even to note that we have seen this term before in Inferno I.63, but has no further comment. Hollander suggests that “this use of the word is intended to make us consider Virgil's initial fiochezza, with all its metaphoric insistence on the fact that he had failed to speak the Word. In this respect, the two poets find themselves once again together at the end, reunited in their failures, and yet so very far from one another, separated by the ground of their failures” (p. 151).
Saverio Bellomo (“Il canto XXX del Paradiso,” L'Alighieri 8 [1996]: 55n.) believes that the question of Dante's Virgil needs to be reopened, beginning with a rereading of Bruno Nardi (Dal “Convivio” alla “Commedia”, con premessa alla ristampa di O. Capitani [Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, 1992 {1960}], esp. pp. 96-150).
Giuseppe Ledda (La guerra della lingua [Ravenna: Longo, 2002], p. 317n.) says he is following Jacomuzzi in seeing that the protagonist's final vision is of the Incarnation, and not the Trinity. Does one really have to make that choice? It would seem to be preferable to see it as Trinitarian, which includes the vision of Jesus as spirit in flesh, as He is.
Finally, Dante sees the Humanity of the Trinity, the Son, Jesus Christ, incarnate within the circle that abstractly represents the Second Person. Once again the differing colors of the Persons are insisted on, and once again (see the note to vv. 118-120) Dante does not report the color of the Son (nor of the Father).
It took centuries until a commentator (Scartazzini [comm. to verse 131]) realized that this image contained a reference to St. Paul (Philippians 2:7), “but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.” This is currently a fairly widespread perception, but the only other writer in the DDP to observe it is Grandgent (comm. to verse 131). The enormous presence of the Bible in the poem has at times simply overwhelmed its observers. This is a case in point. Moore (Studies in Dante, First Series: Scripture and Classical Authors in Dante [Oxford: Clarendon, 1969 {1896}], pp. 321-34) lists over six hundred possible citations in all Dante's works, the bulk of them in the Commedia. Thus one needs to deal cautiously with George Steiner's accountancy (Grammars of Creation [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001], p. 89), which counts the actual citations (rather than more general forms of reference) as two in Inferno, eight in Purgatorio, and a dozen in Paradiso.
See also Peter Dronke (“'Orizzonte che rischiari,'” in his Dante and Medieval Latin Traditions [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986 {1975}], pp. 7-8), arguing that this, too (see Par. XIV.67-78 and the note to that passage), is a reference to Joachim's three Ages, represented by three circles in the Liber figurarum.
This is the final use of this word, whether as an abstract noun meaning “concept” or “conceiving” or a transitive verb (to conceive [an idea – see Inf. XII.13 for the first and only use of the verb to mean “to conceive offspring,” although there is more than an overtone of that sense here]). There have been twelve previous uses of the noun or of the verb (Inf. XXVI.73, XXXII.4; Par. III.60, XV.41, XVIII.86, XIX.12, XXII.33, XXIV.60, XXIX.81 and 132, XXXIII.68 and 122), which has more uses in this canto than in any other (three). See the note to Paradiso XV.40-42. See also Giuseppe Ledda (La guerra della lingua [Ravenna: Longo, 2002], pp. 316-19).
See Peter Dronke (“'L'amore che move il sole e l'altre stelle,'” Studi medievali 6 [1965]: 389-90) and Zygmunt Baranski (Dante e i segni [Rome: Liguori, 2000], pp. 173-74, 217), both cited by Simon Gilson (“Rimaneggiamenti danteschi di Aristotele: gravitas e levitas nella Commedia,” in Le culture di Dante. Atti del quarto Seminario dantesco internazionale, ed. Michelangelo Picone et al. [Florence: Cesati, 2004], p. 174n.) as synthesizing Platonism and Aristotelianism. And see Christopher Ryan (“The Theology of Dante,” in The Cambridge Companion to Dante, ed. R. Jacoff [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993], p. 136) for the point (which he presents as being more than a quibble) that the final vision in the poem is not one of the Trinity (the usual understanding) but of the humanity of Jesus. Ryan is correct that this is not a quibble; however, he is probably not correct about the nature of the vision. The final vision is of the Trinity, which includes Jesus – in both His natures. See the note to vv. 124-126.
For notice of a possible reflection here of the fourth and final stage of loving God in St. Bernard's De diligendo Deo, see Hollander (Studies in Dante [Ravenna: Longo, 1980]), p. 35 (repr. of “The Invocations of the Commedia,” Yearbook of Italian Studies 3 [1976]: 235-40): “Commentators have for a long time annotated this passage with a reference to Philippians 2:7” (as we have seen [see the note to vv. 127-132], that is barely true; only two of them in the last 150 years). Hollander goes on to show that Bernard, in De diligendo Deo (Sancti Bernardi Opera, ed. J. Leclercq and H.M. Rochais, Vol. III [Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1963], p. 142), resorts to the same Pauline passage in a highly similar context, describing the height of the mystical love of God, when one loves oneself in God. For Bernard's four stages in the love of God and their possible relation to the stages in the Comedy (first suggested by a student at Princeton, Donald J. Mathison, in 1968), see the note to Purgatorio XXVII.139-141. For later discussions that are in agreement, 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], p. 176) as well as Christian Moevs (The Metaphysics of Dante's “Comedy” [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005], p. 81. And see E.G. Gardner (Dante and the Mystics [London: Dent, 1913], p. 118) for the relation of De diligendo Deo X.27-28 to Dante's spiritual preparedness for the final vision.
For a study of this penultimate simile, a meditation on how Dante may be said to have “squared the circle,” see Ronald Herzman and Gary Towsley (“Squaring the Circle: Paradiso 33 and the Poetics of Geometry,” Traditio 49 [1994]: 95-125). See also Giuseppe Ledda (La guerra della lingua [Ravenna: Longo, 2002], p. 317n.).
See Richard Kay (“Vitruvius and Dante's Giants,” Dante Studies 120 [2002], pp. 30-31) for the notion, advanced as a follow-up to his examination of the Vitruvian nature of Dante's calculations of the dimensions of both the giants (Inf. XXX) and of Satan (Inf. XXXIV), that what Dante sees is Vitruvius's image of man inscribed in a circle, his umbelicus at the center of the circle, his fingers and toes at the circumference, in what is the eventual model for Leonardo da Vinci's far more famous design. As charming as this notion is, the word effige in Dante (Par. XXXI.77, XXXIII.131) seems rather to indicate, as is generally the case in Italian, the visage, not the whole human body.
Angelo Jacomuzzi (“'L'imago al cerchio'. Nota sul canto XXXIII del Paradiso,” in his L'imago al cerchio. Invenzione e visione nella “Divina Commedia” [Milan: Silva, 1968 {1965}], pp. 5-27) offers a reading of these verses and of the poem as a whole in the mode of a theologically determined fourfold allegoresis. For discussion, with some bibliography, of Italian and American treatments of theological allegory in the poem, see Hollander (Dante: A Life in Works [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001], pp. 37-39 and p. 188, nn. 55-57).
For insistence on the role played, in this final vision, of both the Benjamin major of Richard of St. Victor and the Itinerarium mentis in Deum of Bonaventure, see Etienne Gilson (“La conclusion de la Divine Comédie et la mystique franciscaine,” Révue d'histoire franciscaine 1 [1924]), pp. 56-57). Gilson (pp. 62-63) concludes that, given these two sources, Dante's vision is not a Pauline raptus (a function of the intellect), but a Franciscan exstasis (a function of the affective capacity). This, however, and despite Gilson's authority, is not the general current opinion, which rather insists that Dante did have a Pauline raptus (as the entire cantica has been preparing us to grant). For instance, Güntert (“Canto XXXIII,” in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone [Florence: Cesati, 2002], p. 507) cites Aquinas (ST II-II, q. 175, a. 3), distinguishing among three kinds of vision (but for an earlier and similar treatment see Pertile [“Paradiso XXXIII: l'estremo oltraggio,” Filologia e critica 6 {1981}: 1-21], pp. 6-7). After discussions that are in strong agreement with positions taken on the issues by Augustine, Thomas explains, in his Reply to Objection 1: “Man's mind is rapt by God to the contemplation of divine truth in three ways. First, so that he contemplates it through certain imaginary pictures (per similitudines quasdam imaginarias), and such was the ecstasy that came upon Peter [Acts 10:10-16]. Secondly, so that he contemplates the divine truth through its intelligible effects (per intelligibiles effectus); such was the ecstasy of David, who said (Psalm 115 [116]:11): 'I said in my excess: Every man is a liar.' Thirdly, so that he contemplates it in its essence (in sua essentia). Such was the rapture of Paul, as also of Moses; and not without reason, since as Moses was the first Teacher of the Jews, so was Paul the first 'Teacher of the gentiles'” (tr. from the website of the Catholic Encyclopedia). It is typical of Gilson, a Dominican himself, to downplay the importance of Dominicans in favor of Franciscans. His graciousness is a model to us all. However, it may be that he is simply incorrect here. The reader will note that here, even at the conclusion of the great poem, commentators are divided among Franciscan and Dominican positions on the issues. For the difficult history of the intertwined strands of knowledge and love in St. Thomas, in whom, at least apparently, such distinctions would be clearer than they are in Dante, see Michael Sherwin (By Knowledge and By Love: Charity and Knowledge in the Moral Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas [Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2005]). In Dante, we find at moments, like this one, knowledge eclipsing the claims of love; at others, that dynamic would seem to be reversed. One comes away with the feeling that Dante responds fully to the main competing voices in this continuing dialectic, “Franciscans” (Francis himself, Bonaventure, Bernard, and perhaps Joachim as well), who privilege love (but not against knowledge), and “Dominicans” (Thomas primissimus inter impares, but Albertus Magnus and Remigius Girolamus as well), who privilege knowledge (but not against love).
For the distinction between seeing face to face, as did Paul and lesser forms of a similar experience, see Gabriele Muresu (“Lo specchio e la contemplazione [Paradiso XXI],” L'Alighieri 8 [1996]: 23n.), comparing the higher nature of the contemplation available in Heaven to what was available to Dante in Eden, when he sees Christ as griffin in Purgatorio XXIX.108.
The final four lines are divided into two parts, the first referring to an apparent failure (“Here my exalted vision lost its power”), in which the protagonist/poet, so recently rewarded with the comprehension of Everything (verse 141), loses that vision, which is blotted out by his reemergent humanity. And then the poem's final sentence, begun with an adversative, ma (but), tells a quite different story: the protagonist's interior motions, that of his affective power (the will) and that of his intellective power (his transmuted desire), both move in harmony with God's cosmos.
See the Grande Dizionario for a definition of facoltà: “the property of every being endowed with sense to perceive, revive, and represent in the soul sensations, perceptions, impressions, and images.” On fantasia and imaginazione, see Giulio Lepschy (“Fantasia e immaginazione,” Lettere Italiane 38 [1987]: 20-34). And see the notes to Purgatorio XVII.13-18 and 25.
For discussion of Dante's use of Latin in the poem, including this final instance, see the note to Paradiso IV.25.
Lino Pertile (La punta del disio: Semantica del desiderio nella “Commedia” [Fiesole: Cadmo, 2005], pp. 265-8 - reprint of the article published in 1995 [pp. 133-35]) reopens the question of the meaning of this final image. The vast majority of readers have believed that Dante has a single wheel in mind (none more exigently and at greater length than Bruno Nardi [Nel mondo di Dante {Rome: Edizioni di “Storia e Letteratura”}, 1944], pp. 337-50), all places on which move with uniform regularity. Pertile revives the view of those few twentieth-century readers who saw the tautological vacuity of this as a final image and, revisiting Ezechiel (1:19-21 and 10:16) and Boethius (Cons. II.m8.28-30), revives a better idea: Dante has two wheels in mind. Aversano (Dante e gli “scritti” di San Francesco [Salerno: Palladio, 1984], pp. 203-6) also finds the source in Ezechiel (1:15-21), but in order to make a different point. For him Ezechiel's four beasts, traditionally interpreted as the four Gospels, imply the Commedia as a “fifth wheel,” since it also is dictated by the Holy Spirit. But see John Freccero (Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, ed. Rachel Jacoff [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986], pp. 246-50 of an essay entitled “The Final Image,” first published in 1964), for whom there is but one wheel, despite the fact that he thinks it reflects Ezechiel's wheel within a wheel, which would seem to indicate two wheels. For an article that strongly supports the notion that Dante was closely aware of the text of Ezechiel, see Filippo Bognini, “Gli occhi di Ooliba: Una proposta per Purg. XXXII 148-60 e XXXIII 44-45,” Rivista di Studi Danteschi 7 (2007): 73-103.
For a new wrinkle, see Sandra Rizzardi (“Dante e l'orologio,” Studi e problemi di critica testuale 60 [2000]: 51-70), who makes a case for Dante's having an image in mind that would become a staple in later ages: the universe as the movements in a mechanical clock. She bolsters her argument by pointing back to previous clock imagery (at Purg. VIII.85-87; Par. X.139-146 and Par. XXIV.13-18). Professor Steven Marcus, in a conversation that took place in November 2002, independently suggested this solution. For a similar observation, although one not made with this passage in mind (rather Par. XIV.106-111), see Steven Botterill (“Paradiso XII,” in Dante's “Divine Comedy,” Introductory Readings III: “Paradiso,” ed. Tibor Wlassics [Lectura Dantis {virginiana}, 16-17, supplement, Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1995], p. 181): “... the excellence of one wheel implies that of the other, and the chariot would, of course, not be able to function without making equal and simultaneous use of both.”
Whatever the metaphor controlling this passage, whether biblical or astronomical or mechanical, the simplest solution of the literal sense of the line is to understand that line 144, “as a wheel that is moved in just the same way,” is attached to the preceding (Latin) noun, velle. What the text then says is clear: “But already my desire was moving in a circle (around God), as was my will, revolving in just the same way.” This was precisely the understanding put forward by Torraca (comm. to vv. 143-145) over one hundred years ago that Bruno Nardi belittled (Nel mondo di Dante [Rome: Edizioni di “Storia e Letteratura”, 1944]), p. 349n.). The protagonist/poet's soul has left our solar system behind and is moving in a circle, not around our earth, but, like the angelic orders, around God. See Pertile's concluding remarks on the last paradox in the poem: The pilgrim has found his peace in continual movement. It is not an accident that Goethe admired this final scene and used it in developing the conclusion of the second part of Faust.
Strangely enough, Giuseppe Ledda (La guerra della lingua [Ravenna: Longo, 2002], p. 319) treats the ending of the poem as a failure of Dante's “imaginative and intellectual faculties.” Perhaps he should have taken into account the context furnished by the last four verses of the poem, which he for some reason does not include in the final considerations of his study.
While the fact that the word stelle is the last word of each canticle would seem to have been an early and lasting perception, John of Serravalle (comm. to vv. 133-145) appears to have been the first ever to have it. For the possibility that Dante's stella reflects Ovid's astra (Metam. XV.876) and his starry vision of his own personal immortality that concludes his great poem (vv. 871-879), reformulated by Dante to accord with quite a different (and less self-absorbed) view, see Jessica Levenstein (“The Re-Formation of Marsyas in Paradiso I,” in Dante for the New Millennium, ed. Teodolinda Barolini and H. Wayne Storey [New York: Fordham University Press, 2003], p. 418).
For an essay on this “last word,” see John Ahern (“Dante's Last Word: The Comedy as a liber coelestis,” Dante Studies 102 [1984]: 1-14), who, while not referring to Ovid, argues that this canto couches its central concerns, conflating two metaphors, in the images of the heavens as book and of the stars as alphabet.
Scartazzini (comm. to this verse) points out that the presence of the same form of the verb muovere in the first and last lines of the cantica creates a sort of ring composition. He also points out that Dante's practice in this regard resembles that found in canzoni of other poets in his time; he also suggests the pertinence of the ending (which happens to constitute its thirty-third paragraph) of the Epistle to Cangrande (XIII.90): “And since, when the Beginning or First, which is God, has been reached, there is nought to be sought for beyond, inasmuch as He is Alpha and Omega, that is, the Beginning and the End, as the Vision of John tells us, the work ends in God Himself, who is blessed for evermore, world without end” (tr. P. Toynbee).
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“Vergine Madre, figlia del tuo figlio,
umile e alta più che creatura,
termine fisso d'etterno consiglio,
tu se' colei che l'umana natura
nobilitasti sì, che 'l suo fattore
non disdegnò di farsi sua fattura.
Nel ventre tuo si raccese l'amore,
per lo cui caldo ne l'etterna pace
così è germinato questo fiore.
Qui se' a noi meridïana face
di caritate, e giuso, intra ' mortali,
se' di speranza fontana vivace.
Donna, se' tanto grande e tanto vali,
che qual vuol grazia e a te non ricorre,
sua disïanza vuol volar sanz' ali.
La tua benignità non pur soccorre
a chi domanda, ma molte fïate
liberamente al dimandar precorre.
In te misericordia, in te pietate,
in te magnificenza, in te s'aduna
quantunque in creatura è di bontate.
Or questi, che da l'infima lacuna
de l'universo infin qui ha vedute
le vite spiritali ad una ad una,
supplica a te, per grazia, di virtute
tanto, che possa con li occhi levarsi
più alto verso l'ultima salute.
E io, che mai per mio veder non arsi
più ch'i' fo per lo suo, tutti miei prieghi
ti porgo, e priego che non sieno scarsi,
perché tu ogne nube li disleghi
di sua mortalità co' prieghi tuoi,
sì che 'l sommo piacer li si dispieghi.
Ancor ti priego, regina, che puoi
ciò che tu vuoli, che conservi sani,
dopo tanto veder, li affetti suoi.
Vinca tua guardia i movimenti umani:
vedi Beatrice con quanti beati
per li miei prieghi ti chiudon le mani!”
Li occhi da Dio diletti e venerati,
fissi ne l'orator, ne dimostraro
quanto i devoti prieghi le son grati;
indi a l'etterno lume s'addrizzaro,
nel qual non si dee creder che s'invii
per creatura l'occhio tanto chiaro.
E io ch'al fine di tutt' i disii
appropinquava, sì com' io dovea,
l'ardor del desiderio in me finii.
Bernardo m'accennava, e sorridea,
perch' io guardassi suso; ma io era
già per me stesso tal qual ei volea:
ché la mia vista, venendo sincera,
e più e più intrava per lo raggio
de l'alta luce che da sé è vera.
Da quinci innanzi il mio veder fu maggio
che 'l parlar mostra, ch'a tal vista cede,
e cede la memoria a tanto oltraggio.
Qual è colüi che sognando vede,
che dopo 'l sogno la passione impressa
rimane, e l'altro a la mente non riede,
cotal son io, ché quasi tutta cessa
mia visïone, e ancor mi distilla
nel core il dolce che nacque da essa.
Così la neve al sol si disigilla;
così al vento ne le foglie levi
si perdea la sentenza di Sibilla.
O somma luce che tanto ti levi
da' concetti mortali, a la mia mente
ripresta un poco di quel che parevi,
e fa la lingua mia tanto possente,
ch'una favilla sol de la tua gloria
possa lasciare a la futura gente;
ché, per tornare alquanto a mia memoria
e per sonare un poco in questi versi,
più si conceperà di tua vittoria.
Io credo, per l'acume ch'io soffersi
del vivo raggio, ch'i' sarei smarrito,
se li occhi miei da lui fossero aversi.
E' mi ricorda ch'io fui più ardito
per questo a sostener, tanto ch'i' giunsi
l'aspetto mio col valore infinito.
Oh abbondante grazia ond' io presunsi
ficcar lo viso per la luce etterna,
tanto che la veduta vi consunsi!
Nel suo profondo vidi che s'interna,
legato con amore in un volume,
ciò che per l'universo si squaderna:
sustanze e accidenti e lor costume
quasi conflati insieme, per tal modo
che ciò ch'i' dico è un semplice lume.
La forma universal di questo nodo
credo ch'i' vidi, perché più di largo,
dicendo questo, mi sento ch'i' godo.
Un punto solo m'è maggior letargo
che venticinque secoli a la 'mpresa
che fé Nettuno ammirar l'ombra d'Argo.
Così la mente mia, tutta sospesa
mirava fissa, immobile e attenta,
e sempre di mirar faceasi accesa.
A quella luce cotal si diventa,
che volgersi da lei per altro aspetto
è impossibil che mai si consenta;
però che 'l ben, ch'è del volere obietto,
tutto s'accoglie in lei, e fuor di quella
è defettivo ciò ch'è lì perfetto.
Omai sarà più corta mia favella,
pur a quel ch'io ricordo, che d'un fante
che bagni ancor la lingua a la mammella.
Non perché più ch'un semplice sembiante
fosse nel vivo lume ch'io mirava,
che tal è sempre qual s'era davante;
ma per la vista che s'avvalorava
in me guardando, una sola parvenza,
mutandom' io, a me si travagliava.
Ne la profonda e chiara sussistenza
de l'alto lume parvermi tre giri
di tre colori e d'una contenenza;
e l'un da l'altro come iri da iri
parea reflesso, e 'l terzo parea foco
che quinci e quindi igualmente si spiri.
Oh quanto è corto il dire e come fioco
al mio concetto! e questo, a quel ch'i' vidi,
è tanto, che non basta a dicer “poco.”
O luce etterna che sola in te sidi,
sola t'intendi, e da te intelletta
e intendente te ami e arridi!
Quella circulazion che sì concetta
pareva in te come lume reflesso,
da li occhi miei alquanto circunspetta,
dentro da sé, del suo colore stesso,
mi parve pinta de la nostra effige:
per che 'l mio viso in lei tutto era messo.
Qual è 'l geomètra che tutto s'affige
per misurar lo cerchio, e non ritrova,
pensando, quel principio ond' elli indige,
tal era io a quella vista nova:
veder voleva come si convenne
l'imago al cerchio e come vi s'indova;
ma non eran da ciò le proprie penne:
se non che la mia mente fu percossa
da un fulgore in che sua voglia venne.
A l'alta fantasia qui mancò possa;
ma già volgeva il mio disio e 'l velle,
sì come rota ch'igualmente è mossa,
l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle.
"Thou Virgin Mother, daughter of thy Son,
Humble and high beyond all other creature,
The limit fixed of the eternal counsel,
Thou art the one who such nobility
To human nature gave, that its Creator
Did not disdain to make himself its creature.
Within thy womb rekindled was the love,
By heat of which in the eternal peace
After such wise this flower has germinated.
Here unto us thou art a noonday torch
Of charity, and below there among mortals
Thou art the living fountain-head of hope.
Lady, thou art so great, and so prevailing,
That he who wishes grace, nor runs to thee,
His aspirations without wings would fly.
Not only thy benignity gives succour
To him who asketh it, but oftentimes
Forerunneth of its own accord the asking.
In thee compassion is, in thee is pity,
In thee magnificence; in thee unites
Whate'er of goodness is in any creature.
Now doth this man, who from the lowest depth
Of the universe as far as here has seen
One after one the spiritual lives,
Supplicate thee through grace for so much power
That with his eyes he may uplift himself
Higher towards the uttermost salvation.
And I, who never burned for my own seeing
More than I do for his, all of my prayers
Proffer to thee, and pray they come not short,
That thou wouldst scatter from him every cloud
Of his mortality so with thy prayers,
That the Chief Pleasure be to him displayed.
Still farther do I pray thee, Queen, who canst
Whate'er thou wilt, that sound thou mayst preserve
After so great a vision his affections.
Let thy protection conquer human movements;
See Beatrice and all the blessed ones
My prayers to second clasp their hands to thee!"
The eyes beloved and revered of God,
Fastened upon the speaker, showed to us
How grateful unto her are prayers devout;
Then unto the Eternal Light they turned,
On which it is not credible could be
By any creature bent an eye so clear.
And I, who to the end of all desires
Was now approaching, even as I ought
The ardour of desire within me ended.
Bernard was beckoning unto me, and smiling,
That I should upward look; but I already
Was of my own accord such as he wished;
Because my sight, becoming purified,
Was entering more and more into the ray
Of the High Light which of itself is true.
From that time forward what I saw was greater
Than our discourse, that to such vision yields,
And yields the memory unto such excess.
Even as he is who seeth in a dream,
And after dreaming the imprinted passion
Remains, and to his mind the rest returns not,
Even such am I, for almost utterly
Ceases my vision, and distilleth yet
Within my heart the sweetness born of it;
Even thus the snow is in the sun unsealed,
Even thus upon the wind in the light leaves
Were the soothsayings of the Sibyl lost.
O Light Supreme, that dost so far uplift thee
From the conceits of mortals, to my mind
Of what thou didst appear re-lend a little,
And make my tongue of so great puissance,
That but a single sparkle of thy glory
It may bequeath unto the future people;
For by returning to my memory somewhat,
And by a little sounding in these verses,
More of thy victory shall be conceived!
I think the keenness of the living ray
Which I endured would have bewildered me,
If but mine eyes had been averted from it;
And I remember that I was more bold
On this account to bear, so that I joined
My aspect with the Glory Infinite.
O grace abundant, by which I presumed
To fix my sight upon the Light Eternal,
So that the seeing I consumed therein!
I saw that in its depth far down is lying
Bound up with love together in one volume,
What through the universe in leaves is scattered;
Substance, and accident, and their operations,
All interfused together in such wise
That what I speak of is one simple light.
The universal fashion of this knot
Methinks I saw, since more abundantly
In saying this I feel that I rejoice.
One moment is more lethargy to me,
Than five and twenty centuries to the emprise
That startled Neptune with the shade of Argo!
My mind in this wise wholly in suspense,
Steadfast, immovable, attentive gazed,
And evermore with gazing grew enkindled.
In presence of that light one such becomes,
That to withdraw therefrom for other prospect
It is impossible he e'er consent;
Because the good, which object is of will,
Is gathered all in this, and out of it
That is defective which is perfect there.
Shorter henceforward will my language fall
Of what I yet remember, than an infant's
Who still his tongue doth moisten at the breast.
Not because more than one unmingled semblance
Was in the living light on which I looked,
For it is always what it was before;
But through the sight, that fortified itself
In me by looking, one appearance only
To me was ever changing as I changed.
Within the deep and luminous subsistence
Of the High Light appeared to me three circles,
Of threefold colour and of one dimension,
And by the second seemed the first reflected
As Iris is by Iris, and the third
Seemed fire that equally from both is breathed.
O how all speech is feeble and falls short
Of my conceit, and this to what I saw
Is such, 'tis not enough to call it little!
O Light Eterne, sole in thyself that dwellest,
Sole knowest thyself, and, known unto thyself
And knowing, lovest and smilest on thyself!
That circulation, which being thus conceived
Appeared in thee as a reflected light,
When somewhat contemplated by mine eyes,
Within itself, of its own very colour
Seemed to me painted with our effigy,
Wherefore my sight was all absorbed therein.
As the geometrician, who endeavours
To square the circle, and discovers not,
By taking thought, the principle he wants,
Even such was I at that new apparition;
I wished to see how the image to the circle
Conformed itself, and how it there finds place;
But my own wings were not enough for this,
Had it not been that then my mind there smote
A flash of lightning, wherein came its wish.
Here vigour failed the lofty fantasy:
But now was turning my desire and will,
Even as a wheel that equally is moved,
Oft have I seen at some cathedral door
A laborer, pausing in the dust and heat,
Lay down his burden, and with reverent feet
Enter, and cross himself, and on the floor
Kneel to repeat his paternoster o'er;
Far off the noises of the world retreat;
The loud vociferations of the street
Become an undistinguishable roar.
So, as I enter here from day to day,
And leave my burden at this minster gate,
Kneeling in prayer, and not ashamed to pray,
The tumult of the time disconsolate
To inarticulate murmurs dies away,
While the eternal ages watch and wait.
How strange the sculptures that adorn these towers!
This crowd of statues, in whose folded sleeves
Birds build their nests; while canopied with leaves
Parvis and portal bloom like trellised bowers,
And the vast minster seems a cross of flowers!
But fiends and dragons on the gargoyled eaves
Watch the dead Christ between the living thieves,
And, underneath, the traitor Judas lowers!
Ah! from what agonies of heart and brain,
What exultations trampling on despair,
What tenderness, what tears, what hate of wrong,
What passionate outcry of a soul in pain,
Uprose this poem of the earth and air,
This mediaeval miracle of song!
I enter, and I see thee in the gloom
Of the long aisles, O poet saturnine!
And strive to make my steps keep pace with thine.
The air is filled with some unknown perfume;
The congregation of the dead make room
For thee to pass; the votive tapers shine;
Like rooks that haunt Ravenna's groves of pine,
The hovering echoes fly from tomb to tomb.
From the confessionals I hear arise
Rehearsals of forgotten tragedies,
And lamentations from the crypts below
And then a voice celestial that begins
With the pathetic words, "Although your sins
As scarlet be," and ends with "as the snow."
With snow-white veil, and garments as of flame,
She stands before thee, who so long ago
Filled thy young heart with passion and the woe
From which thy song in all its splendors came;
And while with stern rebuke she speaks thy name,
The ice about thy heart melts as the snow
On mountain heights, and in swift overflow
Comes gushing from thy lips in sobs of shame.
Thou makest full confession; and a gleam
As of the dawn on some dark forest cast,
Seems on thy lifted forehead to increase;
Lethe and Eunoe—the remembered dream
And the forgotten sorrow—bring at last
That perfect pardon which is perfect peace.
I Lift mine eyes, and all the windows blaze
With forms of saints and holy men who died,
Here martyred and hereafter glorified;
And the great Rose upon its leaves displays
Christ's Triumph, and the angelic roundelays,
With splendor upon splendor multiplied;
And Beatrice again at Dante's side
No more rebukes, but smiles her words of praise.
And then the organ sounds, and unseen choirs
Sing the old Latin hymns of peace and love
And benedictions of the Holy Ghost;
And the melodious bells among the spires
O'er all the house-tops and through heaven above
Proclaim the elevation of the Host!
O star of morning and of liberty!
O bringer of the light, whose splendor shines
Above the darkness of the Apennines,
Forerunner of the day that is to be!
The voices of the city and the sea,
The voices of the mountains and the pines,
Repeat thy song, till the familiar lines
Are footpaths for the thought of Italy!
Thy fame is blown abroad from all the heights,
Through all the nations; and a sound is heard,
As of a mighty wind, and men devout,
Strangers of Rome, and the new proselytes,
In their own language hear thy wondrous word,
And many are amazed and many doubt.
This much (and justly) celebrated passage, Bernard's prayer to the Virgin, has the authority and unity of a separate poem. This is not to suggest that it is in any way incongruous in its context (quite the opposite is true), only that it could be published (as surely it has been) in an anthology of devotional lyrics and be one of the most moving and commanding of the collection.
For a study of this passage, see Erich Auerbach (“Dante's Prayer to the Virgin [Par. XXXIII] and Earlier Eulogies,” Romance Philology 3 [1949]: 1-26), who aligns it with examples of classical and Christian praise. And for the large extent to which Dante has borrowed from Bernard's own writings for the words of this prayer, see Mario Aversano (Dante daccapo [glosses to the Paradiso], copia d'eccezione, sent by the author on 11 September 2001), pp. 173-76.
Gian Carlo Alessio, in a lecture he presented at Princeton University during the autumn semester of 1981, broke down the rhetorical divisions of Bernard's prayer as follows:
1-12: salutatio
13-21: exordium
22-27: narratio
28-33: repetitio
34-39: peroratio
The tone of intimacy found in this prayer is emphasized by its extraordinary number of second-person-singular pronouns (tu, te, ti) and adjectives (tuo, tua), 17 of them in 39 verses (and that figure does not include second-person-singular endings of verbs). See the note to Paradiso XXXI.79-90.
This verse establishes the basic modality of the entire canto, making two references to what will be a common theme of so many verses in it: harmonious resolution of impossibly related contraries. “Virgin” and “mother” cannot logically be the shared properties of any woman; nor can any woman be the daughter of her son. This overriding of the logic of impossibility will culminate in the final simile of the poem, the geometer attempting to square the circle. The only answer to impossibility is miracle. Reacting to the entire canto, Güntert has said (“Canto XXXIII,” in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone [Florence: Cesati, 2002], p. 505): “No Christian poet had ever been so daring.”
For the beginnings of the last cantos of the first two cantiche, see the note to Purgatorio XXXIII.1-3, which points out that each of the previous opening lines was in another poetic voice, first that of Venantius Fortunatus and second that of David, both of them speaking Latin. Here we have another poetic voice, that of St. Bernard, but he does not use his customary Latin tongue (apparently no writing of Bernard in French survives), but the vernacular. This opening line thus presents us, first with a completed pattern and then, on further consideration, with a broken pattern: We expect Latin here, but do not find it. We may also speculate on the presence of another linguistic program here. We first hear the Latin of Venantius, then a Latin “translation” of David's Hebrew, and finally Bernard's Italian, the three main languages that provide the basic materials for Dante's own literary making.
For both elements of this verse as dependent on formulations found in the fifth book of Alain de Lille's Anticlaudianus, see Giuseppe Ledda (La guerra della lingua [Ravenna: Longo, 2002], p. 308n.), citing the previous notice by Angelo Jacomuzzi (“'L'imago al cerchio'. Nota sul canto XXXIII del Paradiso,” in his L'imago al cerchio. Invenzione e visione nella “Divina Commedia” [Milan: Silva, 1968 {1965}], p. 12n.). Ledda also reports other medieval formulae that are similar to Dante's paradoxical expressions.
This marks the thirteenth time that a canto has begun with a speaker's words (see the note to Par. V.1).
If one had to choose a single line of the fourteen thousand two hundred and thirty-three verses of the Commedia to stand for its stylistic program, countering classical high style with Christian sermo humilis, this one might serve that purpose. It begins and ends with the humanity of Mary, humble and a mere human creature, who is, at the same time, lofty (alta), as is the poem itself.
See Carroll's explanation of this line (comm. to vv. 1-39): “The woman worthy to be the 'Mother of God' must have been elect from the beginning.”
This tercet, remarkable for its triple play on the “making” of flesh (fattore, farsi, fattura), rises to the heights with the hapax (and coinage?) nobilitasti (ennobled). What is the noblest act ever done? God's making himself mortal for our sake (cf. Par. VII.118-120).
Sapegno (comm. to vv. 4-6) cites Dante's previous praise of Mary in Convivio IV.v.5.
Dante's use of the word ventre (here and once earlier for Mary's womb at Par. XXXIII.104) was perhaps not intended to be controversial. See Bosco/Reggio (comm. to vv. 1-21), pointing out that Dante may have deliberately been echoing “et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Jesus” (blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus [originally found in Luke 1:42]). This is the end of the first part of the prayer: “Hail, Mary, full of grace, / blessed are you among women.” Nonetheless, and as we have observed (see the notes to Par. XXI.84 and XXIII.104), some of Dante's readers find this a lowering of diction unbefitting such a lofty subject. And the first ten of Dante's uses of the word (8 in Inferno, 2 in Purgatorio) are all negatively charged, since the term is associated with Cerberus (Inf. VI.17), the Harpies (Inf. XIII.14), Aruns (Inf. XX.46), reptilian transformations (Inf. XXV.74), the counterfeiters (Inf. XIXX.67), Capocchio (Inf. XXX.30), Master Adam (Inf. XXX.123), the giants (Inf. XXXI.47), the femmina balba (Purg. XIX.32), and the bellies afflicted with pain for eating of the tree (Purg. XXXII.45).
In a related and similar vein, see Martin McLaughlin (Literary Imitation in the Italian Renaissance: The Theory and Practice of Literary Imitation in Italy from Dante to Bembo [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995], pp. 20-21), remarking that “After Petrarch reasserts the absolute superiority of Latin over the volgare, Dante's vernacular echoes of classical auctores are regarded as a diminution of their status.”
On the word amore, see Aleardo Sacchetto (“Il canto XXXIII del Paradiso,” Nuove letture dantesche, vol. VII [Florence: Le Monnier, 1974], pp. 265-87), for whom love is the key to the poem, occurring nineteen times in Inferno, fifty in Purgatorio, and eighty-five in Paradiso.
Christ's sacrifice was the evidence of the rekindling of God's love for humankind, resulting in the saved souls that populate the Rose.
For the elevation of Mary found here (and in all this passage), see Carroll (comm. to vv. 1-39): “[Dante] must have been familiar with the distinction of Aquinas between latria, the worship due to God; dulia, the veneration given to saints and Angels; and hyperdulia, the higher veneration given to Mary, as the most exalted of creatures (Summa, II-II, q. 103, a. 3, 4).” See two earlier commentators who also cite this threefold distinction, if without tracing it to Aquinas: Guido da Pisa (comm. to verse 48) and John of Serravalle (comm to vv. 106-111).
For the saved, there is no more need for hope – their hope (as well as their faith) has been rewarded, and now they only love eternally. Meanwhile, while to those (few, we need to recall, lest we get carried away by the warmth of these verses) left on earth who will be saved, Mary offers the surest path of hope for their salvation.
Campi (comm. to vv. 13-15) cites Monsignor Cavedoni for the attribution of this image to St. Bernard, Sermones in Vigilia Nativitatis Domini III.10: “Nihil nos Deus habere voluit, quod per Mariae manus non transiret” (God does not wish us to have anything that has not first passed through the hands of Mary).
Geoffrey Chaucer, who knew and understood this poem better than any English writer for many centuries, appropriated this line in his Troilus with hilarious result. Stanza 182 of Book III (one stanza from the numerical midpoint of the work, 588 of 1178 stanzas) has Troilus in the midst of his three-stanza prayer to Venus (his “Mary”). Whoever wants to accomplish his love (he is thinking about carnal pleasure), he says, without Venus's help, “his desire will fly without wings,” that is, will not be successful. It is Paradiso XXXIII done as Some Like It Hot, one of Billy Wilder's greatest films. (That Chaucer could do Dante “straight” is witnessed in many of his texts; in the context of this canto, see particularly his rewriting of the first half of Bernard's prayer in “The Second Nun's Prologue” of The Canterbury Tales, vv. 29-77.)
As Simone Marchesi, in conversation, has pointed out, Chaucer's Billy Wilder was Giovanni Boccaccio, whose lascivious Venetian friar Albert (Decam. IV.ii), in illicit pleasure with a Venetian matron, “flew many times without his wings.” Albert appears to the credulous woman as the angel Gabriel, decked out in a costume including wings that he takes off only in the darkness of her bedroom. Boccaccio is clearly pulling Dante's leg; now Chaucer does so also.
For liberality extending itself unrequested, see Purgatorio XVII.59-60 and Paradiso XVII.75.
Here we have a case of a Virgilian borrowing that has apparently remained hidden for centuries (in both texts, CAPITALS mark structural parallels and italics indicate secondary repeated sounds of te):
In TE misericordia, in TE pietate,
in TE magnificenza, in TE s'aduna...
See Georgics IV.465-466 (Orpheus lamenting his dead Eurydice, a scene Dante has revisited in Purg. XXX.49-51 [see the note to that passage] as parallel to his plaint for lost Virgil, as is fairly widely agreed these days):
TE, dulcis coniunx, TE solo in litore secum,
TE veniente die, TE decedente canebat.
This seems an obvious revisitation. Perhaps we have not seen it because the situations are so opposed. But that is the point: Bernard is a better Orpheus singing a better Eurydice, Maria. It is a small but telling emblem of how Dante rewrites Virgilian tragedy as Christian comedy. And the Virgilian context is striking: We last heard the notes of Georgics IV in tragic mode for his disappearance as a character from the poem; now that poem becomes the subtext for a better moment, his own re-entry to this Christian comedy at its highest point. However, notice of this echo is fairly recent. See Hollander (“Le opere di Virgilio nella Commedia di Dante,” in Dante e la “bella scola” della poesia: Autorità e sfida poetica, ed. A. A. Iannucci [Ravenna: Longo, 1993], p. 339), citing a communication from Professor Rachel Jacoff in 1987, suggesting the existence of this borrowing, which also possibly reflects Paradiso XXIII.88-89, where Dante presents himself as praying to Mary each morning and evening, while Orpheus presents himself as “singing” Eurydice morning and evening. The stark contrast between Virgilian “Orphic” love that leads to death and Marian affection that leads to eternal life could not be more striking.
We may remember that the first (and only) time we heard Dante's name in this poem (Purg. XXX.55), it was echoing a passage just a little farther along in this Georgic (see the note to Purg. XXX.63).
The reader may be pleased to know of the existence of Virgil in Late Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, an online bibliography assembled by David Wilson-Okamura and graciously provided to scholars and anyone else interested with no bothersome encumbrance: http://www.virgil.org/bibliography/virgil-bibliography.htm. The bibliography is updated on occasion, with the last version (as of 6 April 2006) dating from 6 February 2006. While the rest of the world argues over Google's desire simply to take and distribute other people's intellectual property, some scholars have dedicated themselves to sharing the fruits of their labor with others without a thought of financial reward.
Bosco/Reggio (comm. to these verses) rightly express surprise that there is any debate at all over exactly which of the souls in which parts of the afterworld Bernard refers to, since he obviously refers to all of them.
Tommaseo (comm. to vv. 22-24) hears an echo of the word lacuna in Virgil: Georgics III.365. Giuseppe Velli (“Petrarca, Dante, la poesia classica: 'Ne la stagion che'l ciel rapido inchina' [RVF, L] 'Io son venuto al punto de la rota' [Rime, C],” Studi petrarcheschi 15 [2002.1]: p. 92) also connects this passage with Rime C.60-61.
The first notice of a possible Virgilian source here is found in Gabriele (comm. to vv. 31-32). Tasso's notes to the poem (comm. to verse 31) have a non-specified Virgilian source in mind, but very likely the same one as Gabriele. Tommaseo (comm. to vv. 31-33) is unhesitating in his identification of the source. Campi (comm. to vv. 31-33) and Tozer (comm. to vv. 31-32) also point to this passage in the Aeneid. Toward the close of his long note to verses 1-39, Carroll takes fuller notice of II.604-606. It may be worth a moment's consideration of this not exactly obvious “citation.” Among the moderns, Mattalia (comm. to vv. 31-32) and Aversano (Dante daccapo [glosses to the Paradiso], copia d'eccezione, sent by the author on 11 September 2001, p. 175) are among the few who cite Virgil's text here. See Aeneid II.602-606;622-623: Venus will tear away the clouds that keep Aeneas from seeing that it is neither Helen nor Paris, but the gods who are destroying Troy:
divum inclementia, divum,
has evertit opes sternitque a culmine Troiam.
aspice (namque amnem, quae nunc obducta tuenti
mortalis hebetat visus tibi et umida circum
caligat, nubem eripiam....
apparent dirae facies inimicaque Troiae
numina magna deum.
[the gods, the relentless gods, overturn this
wealth and make Troy topple from her pinnacle.
Behold, for all the cloud, which now, drawn
over thy sight, dulls thy mortal vision and with
dark pall enshrouds thee, I will tear away....
Dread shapes came to view – mighty powers
divine, warring against Troy. (Tr. H.R. Fairclough)]
Vellutello and Daniello, and, more recently, Singleton (all three in their comms. to vv. 28-33), and Chiavacci Leonardi (Paradiso, con il commento di A. M. C. L. [Milan: Mondadori, 1997], p. 911) have another choice, Boethius (Consolatio III.m9.25-28):
Dissice terrenae nebulas et pondera molis
Atque tuo splendore mica! Tu namque serenum,
Tu requies tranquilla piis, te cernere finis,
Principium, vector, dux, semita, terminus idem.
[Cast off the earthly weight wherewith I am opprest,
Shine as Thou art most bright, Thou only calm and rest
To pious men whose end is to behold Thy ray,
Who their beginning art, their guide, their bound, and way. (tr. in Singleton)]
It is interesting to find Daniello divagating from his teacher's (Gabriele's) view of this problem.
If we believe that the Virgilian passage is being alluded to, the parallels are fairly inviting. Where Venus removes the shield of invisibility from the gods so that Aeneas may see his true enemies for what they are, Mary takes the cloud of his mortality away from Dante so that he may see his friend, God, as He is.
These verses contain six words for praying, the densest occurrence of noun and verb forms of priego in the poem.
Once again the precise understanding one should have of the verbal noun piacer is an issue. See the note to Purgatorio XXXI.47-54. Grabher (comm. to vv. 28-33) believes that here it means somma bellezza (highest beauty), as do we.
See Bosco/Reggio (comm. to vv. 1-21), who observe that this final prayer offered by Bernard may reflect the second and final part of the Ave Maria: “Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, / ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc, / et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen” (Holy Mary, Mother of God, / pray for us sinners now / and at the hour of our death. Amen).
The traditional interpretation of these lines, as it is advanced by Sapegno (comm. to these verses); by Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi (comm. vv. 34-36); and by Peter Dronke (“The Conclusion of Dante's Commedia,” Italian Studies 49 [1994]: 28) fits well with the Marian text. It sees the final moments of the prayer as turning to Dante's Nachleben back on earth, and hoping that Mary will intervene to help him remain pure, so that he will indeed be able to return here. This understanding is opposed by Lino Pertile (“Paradiso XXXIII: l'estremo oltraggio,” Filologia e critica 6 [1981]: 1-21); Giorgio Bàrberi Squarotti (“La preghiera alla Vergine: Dante e Petrarca,” Filologia e critica 20 [1995]: 367-71); and Giuseppe Ledda (La guerra della lingua [Ravenna: Longo, 2002], pp. 309-10), all of whom find it inappropriate for Bernard's prayer to leave the subject of Dante's vision being pure for that of his post-Paradiso life back on earth being morally sound. Why is this an unseemly concern, either aesthetically or intellectually? It had already been before the reader in Paradiso XXXI.88-90, where Dante himself beseeches Beatrice for this kind of heavenly assistance. Pertile (p. 2) argues that, for the very reason that Dante's prayer has been accepted, as signified by Beatrice's smile, there is no longer any need to linger on this issue. Perhaps so. On the other hand, the language of these six verses (particularly at vv. 36 and 37) really does seem to be related to earthly concerns. In other words, even if it seems ungainly to some (but not to most), the standard interpretation seems more plausible.
The Virgin, evidently made of more august stuff than Beatrice, does not smile when Bernard finishes his prayer as Beatrice did when Dante finished his (Par. XXXI.92), but indicates by the expression in her eyes how much she is gratified by the prayers of the devout. Then she turns her gaze (as did Beatrice) back up to God.
As Güntert observes (“Canto XXXIII,” in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone [Florence: Cesati, 2002], p. 511), after the formal conclusion to Bernard's prayer (vv. 40-45), this verse begins the final “macrosequence” of the one-hundreth canto; it is precisely one hundred verses in length. However, for previous notice of what she characterizes as Dante's “invisible ink,” marking three segments for this final sub-section of the poem (verse 75 = its thirtieth line; verse 105 = line 60; verse 145 = line 100), see Teodolinda Barolini (The Undivine Comedy [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992], pp. 255-56).
This verse has caused a central disagreement over its two main potential meanings. We follow Singleton's interpretation (comm. to this verse): “The meaning of the verb in this verse is much debated, but one aspect of that meaning seems beyond discussion: finii cannot here be in a normal signification of 'bring to an end.' Indeed, the context requires that the meaning be the exact opposite, i.e., 'I brought the ardor of my desire to its highest intensity.'” And see the similar position of Bosco/Reggio (comm. to this verse). Another difficult passage may be considered a “preview” of this one (Purg. XVIII.31-33) and may help unscramble the sense of this line. See the note to that passage (Purg. XVIII.28-33).
As Aversano (Dante daccapo [glosses to the Paradiso], copia d'eccezione, sent by the author on 11 September 2001), p. 177, points out, this is the third and last appearance of Bernard's name in the poem (see also Par. XXXI.102 and 139), as a sort of Trinitarian gesture of farewell.
Bernard was signaling, in his capacity as guide, what Dante should be doing, but Dante was already doing exactly that. He has not outrun his need for guidance so much as he has internalized his guide.
The poet could not be more precise. Up to now his powers of sight have improved so that he can finally see God's reflection in the universe perfectly, an ability that was far from his grasp when the poem began. Now he will see Him as Himself. Thus the protagonist's vision is about to move from reflections of His glory up into the beam of light emanating from Him. It is balanced for seconds between the two aspects of deity, reflection and source (see the note to Par. XXIII.82-84). In the next tercet we realize that he has recorded his breakthrough. No Christian except for St. Paul has seen so much – or such is the unspoken claim the poet makes us share.
The experience of seeing God face-to-face (1) is ineffable, not describable, and (2) the vision cannot be remembered in any of its details anyway (these twin disclaimers were made at the outset [see Par. I.7-9]). All that remains is the awareness of having had the experience.
Petrocchi's selection of parlar mostra (instead of parlar nostro, among other possibilities) has not met with enthusiasm. See the note to Paradiso XXXIII.56.
For the word oltraggio as expressing Dante's version of the excessus mentis of the Christian mystical tradition, see Lino Pertile (“Paradiso XXXIII: l'estremo oltraggio,” Filologia e critica 6 [1981]: 1-21 [repr. in La punta del disio: Semantica del desiderio nella “Commedia” [Fiesole: Cadmo, 2005]).
Given our previous experience reading in the Paradiso, we expect here exactly what we get. Moving into an area of heightened experience, which challenges his expressive powers (as it had challenged his perceptive powers), Dante has inevitably moved to simile. After, in the last tercet, understating the fact that he saw God, he now turns, not to one simile, but to three of them, in order to express the nature of his loss. This is perhaps the only time in the poem that he deploys three similes back-to-back; in any case, the Trinitarian nature of what he has looked upon (which will be made clear to us before long) is perhaps reflected in their number.
These are the penultimate similes in a poem that turns to them more often than we might have expected, and surely his use of the technique reflects his sense of the classical Latin epic simile, so familiar to him, particularly from the pages of Virgil. And the last of these three will be unmistakably Virgilian.
The first and fullest of the three similes is one of a class defined by Tozer (see the note to Inf. XXX.136-141) as “drawn from mental experiences.”
The present tense of the verb in the simile seems natural to us, since Dante usually bases his similes in the world of our present experience. We do not, however, expect to hear the narrative voice speaking in the present tense – but if we look ahead to verse 61, we find the poet speaking to us now, from his writing table back on earth. He won't stay there (see vv. 133-138, offering a parallel structure, in which the poet compares himself to the geometer and then says “such was I”), as we will see, but that is where he presents himself as being now, at least for the moment.
Switching from the experience itself to writing about his recording of the experience, the poet speaks in the present tense, which comes as a surprise, since we have not heard him use that tense in the Empyrean, and not since Paradiso XXX.34.
Benvenuto (comm. to vv. 58-63) says that Dante is claiming that even now he still tastes just a drop of this immense joy (adhuc sentio aliquam stillam, idest, guttam illius immensae dulcedinis).
This is the sixth and final appearance of the word visione, used here for the first time for the poem itself. It was apparently from here that the many writers who referred to the work as the Visione (perhaps wanting to avoid the embarrassing [to some] title, Commedia), took their cue. And see the note to Paradiso XVII.127-129.
Benvenuto (comm. to vv. 64-66) says that this is a fitting simile, because “the human mind, weak and infirm, loses the form of its phantasy's vision beneath the heat of the Eternal Sun.” This second comparison is apparently not “literary” in its inspiration. There is in fact no citation of any text of any kind for this verse among the commentators gathered in the DDP.
When we read her name, we may wonder why we have not heard it before now; it is as though Dante were holding her in reserve for his hundredth canto (as we will see, that number is three times associated with her in the main passage involving her in the Aeneid). The Sibyl, we may sometimes fail to remember, was merely the conduit for Apollo's messages. Thus, and as Benvenuto (comm. to vv. 64-66) says, both the Sibyl and Dante lost track of a communication from a divinity. If we recall the first two cantos of this canticle, with their insistence on Apollo as God's “stand-in” (Par. I.13; II.8), we can see why Benvenuto makes them companions in losing track of the truth revealed by “Apollo.”
The history of the commentators' response to this Virgilian reference is strange, beginning with the mistake of Francesco da Buti (or his scribe), who identifies (comm. to vv. 55-66) the source as being in Aeneid V, when he clearly means Aeneid III. All the other earlier commentators, beginning with Pietro (Pietro1, comm. to vv. 58-66), and including Benvenuto, John of Serravalle, Daniello, and Venturi, refer only to the appropriate passage in Aeneid VI. However, beginning with Lombardi (comm. to vv. 64-66), every commentator but two refers only to the passage in Aeneid III (443-451), which is the one in which the usual scattering of her leaves is described; the second passage, while also referring to that usual result, has Aeneas convincing the oracle to speak, and not write, her expression of Apollo's response. However, it is probably helpful to have both scenes in mind; the only two commentators in the DDP to refer to both passages are Oelsner and Singleton (comms. to these verses).
The passage in the Aeneid (VI.42-155) describing the Sibyl's cave is both long and full of arresting “Dantean” detail. The cave possesses one hundred mouths and one hundred gates (VI.43); Aeneas requests that the Sibyl not write her “poems” (carmina) on leaves to be scattered by the wind, but recite them aloud (VI.74-75); the hundred gates open and their breezes carry her reply (VI.81-82); she gives a prophecy concerning the “first safe road” (via prima salutis), which in Latin sounds, to the right listener, like a Christian message, “the first way to salvation”; Virgil (VI.99) typifies her utterance as “horrible enigmas” (horrendas ambages), a phrase that Dante has picked up in Paradiso XVII.31; Aeneas asks (VI.108) the Sibyl to bring him into his father's sight (ad conspectum cari genitoris), while Dante hopes to see his Father. (While there are other resonances in Dante's poem of the last four dozen verses, they are not relevant to this passage.)
If the obvious references to Virgil have been recognized, but not all that well exploited, there is also possibly a reference to Augustine, which has only rarely been noticed and not exploited at all. It is found in chapter xxiii of Book XVIII of De civitate Dei, a text vengefully hostile to Virgil for his prideful view of Rome's continuing and sempiternal hegemony (especially now that the city has been sacked in the year 410). Augustine says that the Sibyl (not the Cumaean [Virgil's] but the Erythraean – if he later hedges by saying it may have been the Cumaean) had prophesied the coming of Christ and ought to be considered as inhabiting the City of God. What led Augustine to make such claims may have been a desire to roast Virgil, either for not heeding his own Sibyl (who, after all, presides over the fourth Eclogue) or for choosing to sponsor the wrong one. Here is a portion of what he sets down in his lengthy analysis of this poem: The first letters of each successive line in the Greek Sibylline pronouncement spell out, Augustine reports: “'Jesus Christ the Son of God, the Saviour.' And the verses are twenty-seven, which is the cube of three. For three times three are nine; and nine itself, if tripled, so as to rise from the superficial square to the cube, comes to twenty-seven. But if you join the initial letters of these five Greek words,... they will make the word ikduj, that is, 'fish,' in which word Christ is mystically understood, because He was able to live, that is, to exist, without sin in the abyss of this mortality as in the depth of waters” (tr. M. Dods). Should one want to gild the lily, one might note that Dante's verse about the Sibyl, if it contains six words (and not five), does in fact contain twenty-seven letters. Notice of this passage in St. Augustine is not a frequent feature of the commentaries. However, see Benvenuto (comm. to these verses), who points to it at some length. He is followed apparently only by Campi (comm. to these vv.). Hollander (Il Virgilio dantesco: tragedia nella “Commedia” [Florence: Olschki, 1983], pp. 146-50), while suggesting this connection, neglected his two precursors (when he could have used all the help he could find).
For an article by Philippe Verdier on the Sibyl's appearance to Augustine at Ara coeli in Rome, see Mélanges de l'École française à Rome 94 (1982): 85-119. And for a collection of studies of the Sibyl's antique and medieval presence, see Febo Allevi (Con Dante e la Sibilla ed altri [dagli antichi al volgare] [Milan: Edizioni Scientifico-Letterarie, 1965]) as well as Monique Bouquet and Françoise Morzadec (eds., La Sibylle: Parole et représentation [Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2004]). Allevi discusses this passage on pp. 443-48.
On the Sibyl's leaves, see Piero Boitani (“The Sibyl's Leaves: A Study of Paradiso XXXIII,” Dante Studies 96 [1978]: 83-126), taking them as a starting point for his lectura of the canto.
The word concetto (conception, conceiving) is the linchpin of this passage, occurring in verses 68 and 75 (on the latter occasion as a verb). Dante, in this last of his nine invocations (see the note to Inf. II.7-9), asks God to make His reality “conceivable” by mortals. If He requites Dante's request, the poet promises, that will be the result. A scaled-back request, the poet insists, is all that he makes, underlined by the repetition of the phrase “un poco” (one small part).
This is the fourth time in the poem that the word concetto is connected with an invocation (see the notes to Inf. XXXII.1-9 and 10-12; Par. XVIII.82-87; and, for a survey of all the presences of concetto in the poem, see the note to Par. XXXIII.127). It surely seems to be involved in Dante's sense of what the human agent needs from a higher source, not the mere substance of his vision, but its shaping conceptual formulation. And that is precisely what, the poet will tell us, he was granted in the lightning bolt that resolves all his questions in verses 140-141.
It is interesting to look back to the two uses of concetto in Convivio. In the first of these (I.v.12) Dante concludes that Latin possesses higher conceptual power than the vernacular: “più è la vertù sua che quella del volgare”. When, only shortly afterwards, he returns to the topic (I.xiii.12), he seems to have revised that opinion. Speaking of the vernacular, he says: “E noi vedemo che in ciascuna cosa di sermone lo bene manifestare del concetto è più amato e commento.” That he first had held that highly significant utterance was possible only in Latin stands in clear opposition to his eventual insistence on the conceptual value of the vernacular throughout the Commedia. The noun concetto appears first in Inferno XXXII.4 and then reappears ten more times in the poem; in addition to its first two presences in this final canto (once as noun and once as verb – see the first paragraph of this note), it reappears in the final tercets (vv. 122 and 127), once again first as noun and then as verb. That four of their fewer than twenty presences in the poem are found in its final canto underlines the importance that Dante found in the words concetto and concepire.
The poet here addresses God as source (O somma luce), not as what He irradiates, but as the fonte (spring, font) of everything.
The protagonist had entered the raggio (ray) in verse 53. Now he has issued from it and approached the source. Having uttered his ninth invocation a few lines earlier (vv. 67-75), he does not invoke the Deity. He does not need help to see Him any longer; he has accomplished that goal. And so he gives thanks for His grace in allowing this final vision, which he is about to unfold before us. See discussion in Giuseppe Ledda (La guerra della lingua [Ravenna: Longo, 2002], pp. 313-14 and n.).
For the past presence of the adjective smarrito in the poem, see the note to Paradiso XXVI.9.
For an attempt to load the significance of the verb presunsi (presumed) by noting that it occurs in a verse the number of which (82) resolves to 10 (8+2) in a canto numbered 100, see Selene Sarteschi (“Sant'Agostino in Dante e nell'età di Dante,” in her Per la “Commedia” e non per essa soltanto [Rome: Bulzoni, 2002 {1999}], p. 194n.).
For a most suggestive and yet concise reading of this passage, the universe explained and put into relationship with its Creator in three tercets, see Christian Moevs (The Metaphysics of Dante's “Comedy” [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005], pp. 78-79). God creates all things as unity. He is the ground of all being. And Dante, seeing the universal diversity as unity, experiences it as God saw it in creating it, as a simple yet “limitless and dimensionless reality” (Moevs, p. 78).
On the various dimensions of this passage, from medieval book production, in which a writer took his individual quartos (quaderni) to have them conflated and sewn into a “book,” John Ahern (“Binding the Book: Hermeneutics and Manuscript Production in Paradiso 33,” PMLA 97 [1982]: 800-9) argues that Dante's poem reflects the “book” of God's created universe, even to its Trinitarian structure. For bibliography on the concept (God's “two books,” the Bible and His creation), see Güntert (“Canto XXXIII,” in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone [Florence: Cesati, 2002], p. 511n.).
Marguerite Mills Chiarenza (“The Imageless Vision and Dante's Paradiso,” Dante Studies 90 [1972]: 80) says that this tercet is “inspired by the doctrine of the double existence of creation, separate in the universe and unified in its Creator's conception.”
This is the final occurrence of the noun universo in the poem, suggesting the “universality” of a poem that can record such totality. The word was introduced to the poem by Francesca (Inf. V.91), speaking of an “unfriendly” God as “king of the universe”; it then appears four more times in Inferno and not at all in Purgatorio. It occurs eight times in Paradiso, twice in the first and last cantos (Par. I.2 and 105; Par. XXXIII.23 and here). However, we may notice the only appearance of the word in any other form, the adjective universale at Paradiso XXXIII.91, which makes threefold the presence of “universe”/“universal” uniquely in this ultimate canto (and ninefold in the final canticle altogether).
Güntert (“Canto XXXIII,” in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone [Florence: Cesati, 2002], p. 508) would like to have us see “three Dantes” in this tercet, the narrator (credo), the protagonist (i' vidi), and the “post-vision protagonist” (mi sento... i' godo), a being somehow differentiated from the narrator (see the similar argument advanced by Picone [“Leggere la Commedia di Dante,” in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Inferno, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone {Florence: Cesati, 2000}], pp. 18-21). However, his separation of the first and third voices cannot be supported, since they both use the present tense and surely seem to be the io narrante rather than two different voices, speaking from different times. Since it is not logically possible for that time to be post-writing, it must fall between the vision and the writing, and thus in the past. To put this another way, had such been Dante's plan, he would have needed to deploy a better-conceived tactic in order to make it effective. As it is, we have two moments in the poem, one stable (the protagonist's voyage during a week in the spring of 1300), the other always in fact shifting between circa 1307 and circa 1321, but treated without temporal distinction as the authorial “now,” if it has in fact finally reached its farthest point. Proust would later choose to dramatize the subject of the author's mortal change through time; all times in which Dante, on the other hand, looks up at us from his writing table are equally “now.” In Hollander's formulation (Allegory in Dante's “Commedia” [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969], p. 227), “The Pilgrim he was has become the history of the Poet he is.”
For the similarities between Dante's “apotheosis” here and that of Glaucus in Paradiso I.67-79, see Hollander (Allegory, pp. 228-29). See also Eugene Longen (“The Grammar of Apotheosis: Paradiso XXX, 94-99,” Dante Studies 93 [1975]: 209-14).
For the suggestion that this image of a ship, filled with armed men and headed for battle, underlines the poet's desire to associate his Christian poem with classical martial epic in this final reference to the world of men, see Hollander (“Dante and the Martial Epic,” Mediaevalia 12 [1989], p. 85).
This tercet has called forth equal amounts of admiration and distress, admiration for the beauty and scope of its conception, distress at the indubious difficulty of its highly compacted literal sense. First things first. What does the tercet mean? Perhaps because of the difficulty of understanding why Dante might have wanted to present himself as forgetting the greatest insight he (or practically anyone) has ever had, there has been some attempt to understand letargo, not as “forgetting,” but as a form of visionary experience. However, most now think that the former meaning is far more likely here, as, obviously, do we. If all can agree (and that is to assume a good deal) that the term, in Dante's Italian, refers to oblivion, or forgetfulness, that still leaves a deal of difficulty. For interesting considerations of this tercet, see Georg Rabuse (“'Un punto solo m'è maggior letargo,'” Deutsches Dante-Jahrbuch 43 [1965]: 138-52) and Peter Dronke (“Boethius, Alanus and Dante,” Romanische Forschungen 78 [1966]: 119-25).
A good place to begin one's study of this tercet is Scartazzini's gloss on it, not because it solves its mysteries (it almost certainly does not), but because it so thoroughly indicates what these are. Francesco da Buti's long gloss to this tercet (a part of his comm. to vv. 82-99) makes a point based in mythographic history that stands as the basic understanding even today. He (uniquely) offers a striking version of the classical background: Neptune had longed to see his “kingdom,” the sea, “inhabited” as was the land. Therefore, he took great joy in seeing the first ship, and has been painfully “forgetting” it (in the sense that, without satisfaction, he longs to see it every day) for 2,500 years ever since. Thus Dante's one minute of awareness, now lost, is more painful than Neptune's far longer period. See Tozer's similar explanation (comm. to this tercet): “'[O]ne single moment is greater oblivion to me (letargo, lit. lethargy, dullness), than twenty-five centuries have been to the enterprise which caused Neptune to marvel at the shadow of Argo.' In other words: 'I forgot in a single moment more of what I saw... than men have forgotten, in twenty-five centuries, of the Argonautic expedition.' The reason why this expedition is mentioned is that it was the earliest important event recorded in history.” Needless to say, there are other views. For instance, Chimenz (comm. to this tercet) believes that the twenty-five centuries are marked by remembrance, not by forgetting. Others have noted that the structure of the passage simply forces the reader to accept the painful understanding (i.e., the view advanced by Tozer). And if the poet goes on to describe the vision in great detail (the main point put forward by those who read the text “positively”), he also will insist on its fleetingness, as Carroll (comm. to this tercet), objecting to Scartazzini's “positive” interpretation, rightly argues. Lombardi had offered, in addition to the classical modern statement later found in Tozer, two important additions to the sum of commentary knowledge: the word letargo derives from Greek lethe (forgetfulness), and the years between the voyage of the Argo and 1300 are, according to Dante's authorities, either 2,523 or 2,570. Tommaseo (comm. to this tercet) supports the first of these dates, which has now become “canonical” among the commentators. Either one is a promising date, since both sector the “history of sea voyages” in an arc of twenty-six centuries, 1223 (or 1270) B.C. to 1300, with its approximate midpoint in the Incarnation (as Hollander [Allegory in Dante's “Commedia” {Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969}, pp. 231-32] has argued). The voyage of the Argonauts, preceding the Trojan War, was the first important event in the Greek portion of universal history. (See Hermann Gmelin [Kommentar: das Paradies {Stuttgart: Klett, 1957}, p. 572] for an examination of Dante's Argonautical chronology.)
For a different and not ultimately convincing possible source, see Giacalone (comm. to vv. 94-96) citing Parodi (BSDI 23 [1916], p. 66) for the latter's citation of Statius (Achilleid I.20-26): Thetis looks up from her home in the sea at the oars of the ship bearing Paris and Helen to Troy, a voyage that will eventually result in the death of Achilles.
See Angelo Jacomuzzi (“'L'imago al cerchio'. Nota sul canto XXXIII del Paradiso,” in his L'imago al cerchio. Invenzione e visione nella “Divina Commedia” [Milan: Silva, 1968 {1965}], p. 10), discussing the tension in this canto between letargo (forgetting) and the frequent presence of verbs for seeing. And see Picone (“Dante argonauta: la ricezione dei miti ovidiani nella Commedia,” in M. Picone and B. Zimmermann, eds., Ovidius redivivus: von Ovid zu Dante [Stuttgart: M&P Verlag, 1994], pp. 200-202).
The word impresa (undertaking, enterprise) has an interesting history in the poem. See Hollander (Allegory in Dante's “Commedia” [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969], pp. 230-31), pointing out that, in Inferno II.41 and 47, the word refers to Dante's journey and that, in Inferno XXXII.7, it represents Dante's poem about that journey; here, on the other hand, it would seem to refer both to the journey and to the record of that journey, for the first is in process of becoming the second.
According to Ovid, Jason was the builder of the first ship (“primaeque ratis molitor” [Metam. VIII.302]). For the Argo in Lucan (Phars. II.715-718), see Pietro di Dante (Pietro1, comm. to vv. 94-96) and Lombardi (comm. to vv. 94-96), a possible, but not immediately convincing, “echo.” For still another Jasonic presence in Ovid, see Amores II.xi.1-2. For the history of the Argo-motif, see Ernst Robert Curtius (“The Ship of the Argonauts,” in Essays on European Literature, tr. M. Kowal [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973 {1950}], pp. 465-96), favoring Ovid (Metam. VII.120), which assuredly lies behind Dante's earlier reference to Jason's voyage (see the note to Par. II.17-18), but does not seem quite so good a fit here.
The image of Neptune looking up from beneath the sea is reminiscent of what the poet tells us in Canto XXXI.73-78, where he looked up at Beatrice as though he were immersed in the deepest point in the sea and she were at the highest point in the earth's atmosphere. Both sightings involve the word effige (features), the first time as Beatrice's likeness, the second (Par. XXXIII.131), that of Jesus. The fact that Neptune saw the shadow (ombra) of the Argo makes it at least probable that the poet hoped we would consider that voyage as the prefiguration of his own (see Hollander [Allegory in Dante's “Commedia” {Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969}], p. 232).
And as for Ovidian inspiration for what is sometimes considered a Dantean invention, Hollander (p. 222) has argued for the impact of the last line (721) of Ovid's Book VI, describing the Argo setting sail from Iolcos: “Per mare non notum prima petiere carina” (The first keel to cleave an unknown sea). That would leave Neptune alone unaccounted for. To be sure, we find him looking up from the seabed (wherever Dante found the source of the image) earlier in this very poem, Inferno XXVIII.83-84, where, in his only other appearance, he witnesses Malatestino's treachery as he has witnessed similar crimes on the part of Greeks (gente argolica), the “bad Argonauts” succeeding Jason, as it were.
For Dante's “sospesa,” Etienne Gilson (“La conclusion de la Divine Comédie et la mystique franciscaine,” Révue d'histoire franciscaine 1 [1924], p. 59) cites the prologue of Bonaventure's Itinerarium mentis in Deum for a similar use of the word suspensio to denote the mind's ecstatic rapture in its contemplation of God.
When Dante looked at Beatrice in Eden, the angels cried out (Purg. XXXII.9) that he was “troppo fiso!” (too fixed), in the sense that he was confounding the physical and the spiritual in his appreciation of Beatrice. Now there can be no question of that, since “fixation” on God is the condition of blessedness for eternity, as the following two tercets make absolutely plain.
Not only is the intellect satisfied by gazing on God, but the will is, too; for what other good, as object of the will, can supervene?
For a final time, the poet, having nearly completed a poem that has just reported having seen and understood the underlying principle ordering the entire universe, insists that, compared to the truth of that vision, his work is mere babytalk. See the note to Par. XV.121-123 and Hollander (“Babytalk in Dante's Commedia,” in Studies in Dante [Ravenna: Longo, 1980]), pp. 115-29.
Preparing us to see the Trinity through his eyes, the poet reassures us that he harbors no heretical notions about God's nature(s); if He is three, that does not mean that He is other than one; if He is one, that does not mean that He is other than three. Even the protagonist's vastly improved powers still have one more stage of visionary capacity to reach, one in which he will be able to experience the unchanging Trinity with his changed sight.
The Trinity is first experienced as three circles inhering in a single space, distinguished only by their colors, not their sizes, which are identical.
Danilo Bonanno (“Guido in Paradiso: Donna me prega e l'ultimo canto della Commedia,” Critica del testo 4 [2001], p. 224) suggests that the rhymes here deliberately echo those found in Donna me prega, vv. 51-55 (miri, tiri, giri), with subversive intent, and indeed sees the entire final canto as entering into a corrective debate with the understanding of the nature of love proposed in Cavalcanti's canzone.
The tercet, as characterized by Carroll (comm. to vv. 115-123), as presenting “what Aquinas calls the Relations of Divinity according to the Procession of Persons out of identity of substance – the Relations of Paternity, Generation and Spiration (Summa, I, q. 28). From the circle of the Father appeared reflected the circle of the Son, as Iris [rainbow] from Iris [rainbow]; and from both was breathed forth equally the fire of Love which is the Holy Spirit (on the Procession of the Spirit from both Father and Son, and the filioque controversy, see above, [Carroll's comm.] on Par. X.1-6). We must not think of these in the form of three rainbows one within another, or even as the three colours of a rainbow, for these are also one within another. The 'one dimension' shows that Dante conceived of them as co-existing in the one space, though he does not explain how he was able to see the three colours distinct within each other.” One supposes that they manifested themselves as changing colors. Dante does not assign a particular color either to Father or Son; the Holy Spirit, as Love, is understandably red.
For this last use of fioco (weak, indistinct) in the poem, see Hollander (Il Virgilio dantesco: tragedia nella “Commedia” [Florence: Olschki, 1983]), tying together Vita nuova XXIII (see pp. 76-77), Inferno I.63, and this verse (pp. 150-51). For a similar view, see Corrado Bologna (“Canto XXX,” in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone [Florence: Cesati, 2002], p. 461). Torraca seems to have been the first commentator (and, among those gathered in the DDP, he seems to have been followed only by Mestica [comm. to this tercet]) even to note that we have seen this term before in Inferno I.63, but has no further comment. Hollander suggests that “this use of the word is intended to make us consider Virgil's initial fiochezza, with all its metaphoric insistence on the fact that he had failed to speak the Word. In this respect, the two poets find themselves once again together at the end, reunited in their failures, and yet so very far from one another, separated by the ground of their failures” (p. 151).
Saverio Bellomo (“Il canto XXX del Paradiso,” L'Alighieri 8 [1996]: 55n.) believes that the question of Dante's Virgil needs to be reopened, beginning with a rereading of Bruno Nardi (Dal “Convivio” alla “Commedia”, con premessa alla ristampa di O. Capitani [Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, 1992 {1960}], esp. pp. 96-150).
Giuseppe Ledda (La guerra della lingua [Ravenna: Longo, 2002], p. 317n.) says he is following Jacomuzzi in seeing that the protagonist's final vision is of the Incarnation, and not the Trinity. Does one really have to make that choice? It would seem to be preferable to see it as Trinitarian, which includes the vision of Jesus as spirit in flesh, as He is.
Finally, Dante sees the Humanity of the Trinity, the Son, Jesus Christ, incarnate within the circle that abstractly represents the Second Person. Once again the differing colors of the Persons are insisted on, and once again (see the note to vv. 118-120) Dante does not report the color of the Son (nor of the Father).
It took centuries until a commentator (Scartazzini [comm. to verse 131]) realized that this image contained a reference to St. Paul (Philippians 2:7), “but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.” This is currently a fairly widespread perception, but the only other writer in the DDP to observe it is Grandgent (comm. to verse 131). The enormous presence of the Bible in the poem has at times simply overwhelmed its observers. This is a case in point. Moore (Studies in Dante, First Series: Scripture and Classical Authors in Dante [Oxford: Clarendon, 1969 {1896}], pp. 321-34) lists over six hundred possible citations in all Dante's works, the bulk of them in the Commedia. Thus one needs to deal cautiously with George Steiner's accountancy (Grammars of Creation [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001], p. 89), which counts the actual citations (rather than more general forms of reference) as two in Inferno, eight in Purgatorio, and a dozen in Paradiso.
See also Peter Dronke (“'Orizzonte che rischiari,'” in his Dante and Medieval Latin Traditions [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986 {1975}], pp. 7-8), arguing that this, too (see Par. XIV.67-78 and the note to that passage), is a reference to Joachim's three Ages, represented by three circles in the Liber figurarum.
This is the final use of this word, whether as an abstract noun meaning “concept” or “conceiving” or a transitive verb (to conceive [an idea – see Inf. XII.13 for the first and only use of the verb to mean “to conceive offspring,” although there is more than an overtone of that sense here]). There have been twelve previous uses of the noun or of the verb (Inf. XXVI.73, XXXII.4; Par. III.60, XV.41, XVIII.86, XIX.12, XXII.33, XXIV.60, XXIX.81 and 132, XXXIII.68 and 122), which has more uses in this canto than in any other (three). See the note to Paradiso XV.40-42. See also Giuseppe Ledda (La guerra della lingua [Ravenna: Longo, 2002], pp. 316-19).
See Peter Dronke (“'L'amore che move il sole e l'altre stelle,'” Studi medievali 6 [1965]: 389-90) and Zygmunt Baranski (Dante e i segni [Rome: Liguori, 2000], pp. 173-74, 217), both cited by Simon Gilson (“Rimaneggiamenti danteschi di Aristotele: gravitas e levitas nella Commedia,” in Le culture di Dante. Atti del quarto Seminario dantesco internazionale, ed. Michelangelo Picone et al. [Florence: Cesati, 2004], p. 174n.) as synthesizing Platonism and Aristotelianism. And see Christopher Ryan (“The Theology of Dante,” in The Cambridge Companion to Dante, ed. R. Jacoff [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993], p. 136) for the point (which he presents as being more than a quibble) that the final vision in the poem is not one of the Trinity (the usual understanding) but of the humanity of Jesus. Ryan is correct that this is not a quibble; however, he is probably not correct about the nature of the vision. The final vision is of the Trinity, which includes Jesus – in both His natures. See the note to vv. 124-126.
For notice of a possible reflection here of the fourth and final stage of loving God in St. Bernard's De diligendo Deo, see Hollander (Studies in Dante [Ravenna: Longo, 1980]), p. 35 (repr. of “The Invocations of the Commedia,” Yearbook of Italian Studies 3 [1976]: 235-40): “Commentators have for a long time annotated this passage with a reference to Philippians 2:7” (as we have seen [see the note to vv. 127-132], that is barely true; only two of them in the last 150 years). Hollander goes on to show that Bernard, in De diligendo Deo (Sancti Bernardi Opera, ed. J. Leclercq and H.M. Rochais, Vol. III [Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1963], p. 142), resorts to the same Pauline passage in a highly similar context, describing the height of the mystical love of God, when one loves oneself in God. For Bernard's four stages in the love of God and their possible relation to the stages in the Comedy (first suggested by a student at Princeton, Donald J. Mathison, in 1968), see the note to Purgatorio XXVII.139-141. For later discussions that are in agreement, 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], p. 176) as well as Christian Moevs (The Metaphysics of Dante's “Comedy” [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005], p. 81. And see E.G. Gardner (Dante and the Mystics [London: Dent, 1913], p. 118) for the relation of De diligendo Deo X.27-28 to Dante's spiritual preparedness for the final vision.
For a study of this penultimate simile, a meditation on how Dante may be said to have “squared the circle,” see Ronald Herzman and Gary Towsley (“Squaring the Circle: Paradiso 33 and the Poetics of Geometry,” Traditio 49 [1994]: 95-125). See also Giuseppe Ledda (La guerra della lingua [Ravenna: Longo, 2002], p. 317n.).
See Richard Kay (“Vitruvius and Dante's Giants,” Dante Studies 120 [2002], pp. 30-31) for the notion, advanced as a follow-up to his examination of the Vitruvian nature of Dante's calculations of the dimensions of both the giants (Inf. XXX) and of Satan (Inf. XXXIV), that what Dante sees is Vitruvius's image of man inscribed in a circle, his umbelicus at the center of the circle, his fingers and toes at the circumference, in what is the eventual model for Leonardo da Vinci's far more famous design. As charming as this notion is, the word effige in Dante (Par. XXXI.77, XXXIII.131) seems rather to indicate, as is generally the case in Italian, the visage, not the whole human body.
Angelo Jacomuzzi (“'L'imago al cerchio'. Nota sul canto XXXIII del Paradiso,” in his L'imago al cerchio. Invenzione e visione nella “Divina Commedia” [Milan: Silva, 1968 {1965}], pp. 5-27) offers a reading of these verses and of the poem as a whole in the mode of a theologically determined fourfold allegoresis. For discussion, with some bibliography, of Italian and American treatments of theological allegory in the poem, see Hollander (Dante: A Life in Works [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001], pp. 37-39 and p. 188, nn. 55-57).
For insistence on the role played, in this final vision, of both the Benjamin major of Richard of St. Victor and the Itinerarium mentis in Deum of Bonaventure, see Etienne Gilson (“La conclusion de la Divine Comédie et la mystique franciscaine,” Révue d'histoire franciscaine 1 [1924]), pp. 56-57). Gilson (pp. 62-63) concludes that, given these two sources, Dante's vision is not a Pauline raptus (a function of the intellect), but a Franciscan exstasis (a function of the affective capacity). This, however, and despite Gilson's authority, is not the general current opinion, which rather insists that Dante did have a Pauline raptus (as the entire cantica has been preparing us to grant). For instance, Güntert (“Canto XXXIII,” in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone [Florence: Cesati, 2002], p. 507) cites Aquinas (ST II-II, q. 175, a. 3), distinguishing among three kinds of vision (but for an earlier and similar treatment see Pertile [“Paradiso XXXIII: l'estremo oltraggio,” Filologia e critica 6 {1981}: 1-21], pp. 6-7). After discussions that are in strong agreement with positions taken on the issues by Augustine, Thomas explains, in his Reply to Objection 1: “Man's mind is rapt by God to the contemplation of divine truth in three ways. First, so that he contemplates it through certain imaginary pictures (per similitudines quasdam imaginarias), and such was the ecstasy that came upon Peter [Acts 10:10-16]. Secondly, so that he contemplates the divine truth through its intelligible effects (per intelligibiles effectus); such was the ecstasy of David, who said (Psalm 115 [116]:11): 'I said in my excess: Every man is a liar.' Thirdly, so that he contemplates it in its essence (in sua essentia). Such was the rapture of Paul, as also of Moses; and not without reason, since as Moses was the first Teacher of the Jews, so was Paul the first 'Teacher of the gentiles'” (tr. from the website of the Catholic Encyclopedia). It is typical of Gilson, a Dominican himself, to downplay the importance of Dominicans in favor of Franciscans. His graciousness is a model to us all. However, it may be that he is simply incorrect here. The reader will note that here, even at the conclusion of the great poem, commentators are divided among Franciscan and Dominican positions on the issues. For the difficult history of the intertwined strands of knowledge and love in St. Thomas, in whom, at least apparently, such distinctions would be clearer than they are in Dante, see Michael Sherwin (By Knowledge and By Love: Charity and Knowledge in the Moral Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas [Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2005]). In Dante, we find at moments, like this one, knowledge eclipsing the claims of love; at others, that dynamic would seem to be reversed. One comes away with the feeling that Dante responds fully to the main competing voices in this continuing dialectic, “Franciscans” (Francis himself, Bonaventure, Bernard, and perhaps Joachim as well), who privilege love (but not against knowledge), and “Dominicans” (Thomas primissimus inter impares, but Albertus Magnus and Remigius Girolamus as well), who privilege knowledge (but not against love).
For the distinction between seeing face to face, as did Paul and lesser forms of a similar experience, see Gabriele Muresu (“Lo specchio e la contemplazione [Paradiso XXI],” L'Alighieri 8 [1996]: 23n.), comparing the higher nature of the contemplation available in Heaven to what was available to Dante in Eden, when he sees Christ as griffin in Purgatorio XXIX.108.
The final four lines are divided into two parts, the first referring to an apparent failure (“Here my exalted vision lost its power”), in which the protagonist/poet, so recently rewarded with the comprehension of Everything (verse 141), loses that vision, which is blotted out by his reemergent humanity. And then the poem's final sentence, begun with an adversative, ma (but), tells a quite different story: the protagonist's interior motions, that of his affective power (the will) and that of his intellective power (his transmuted desire), both move in harmony with God's cosmos.
See the Grande Dizionario for a definition of facoltà: “the property of every being endowed with sense to perceive, revive, and represent in the soul sensations, perceptions, impressions, and images.” On fantasia and imaginazione, see Giulio Lepschy (“Fantasia e immaginazione,” Lettere Italiane 38 [1987]: 20-34). And see the notes to Purgatorio XVII.13-18 and 25.
For discussion of Dante's use of Latin in the poem, including this final instance, see the note to Paradiso IV.25.
Lino Pertile (La punta del disio: Semantica del desiderio nella “Commedia” [Fiesole: Cadmo, 2005], pp. 265-8 - reprint of the article published in 1995 [pp. 133-35]) reopens the question of the meaning of this final image. The vast majority of readers have believed that Dante has a single wheel in mind (none more exigently and at greater length than Bruno Nardi [Nel mondo di Dante {Rome: Edizioni di “Storia e Letteratura”}, 1944], pp. 337-50), all places on which move with uniform regularity. Pertile revives the view of those few twentieth-century readers who saw the tautological vacuity of this as a final image and, revisiting Ezechiel (1:19-21 and 10:16) and Boethius (Cons. II.m8.28-30), revives a better idea: Dante has two wheels in mind. Aversano (Dante e gli “scritti” di San Francesco [Salerno: Palladio, 1984], pp. 203-6) also finds the source in Ezechiel (1:15-21), but in order to make a different point. For him Ezechiel's four beasts, traditionally interpreted as the four Gospels, imply the Commedia as a “fifth wheel,” since it also is dictated by the Holy Spirit. But see John Freccero (Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, ed. Rachel Jacoff [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986], pp. 246-50 of an essay entitled “The Final Image,” first published in 1964), for whom there is but one wheel, despite the fact that he thinks it reflects Ezechiel's wheel within a wheel, which would seem to indicate two wheels. For an article that strongly supports the notion that Dante was closely aware of the text of Ezechiel, see Filippo Bognini, “Gli occhi di Ooliba: Una proposta per Purg. XXXII 148-60 e XXXIII 44-45,” Rivista di Studi Danteschi 7 (2007): 73-103.
For a new wrinkle, see Sandra Rizzardi (“Dante e l'orologio,” Studi e problemi di critica testuale 60 [2000]: 51-70), who makes a case for Dante's having an image in mind that would become a staple in later ages: the universe as the movements in a mechanical clock. She bolsters her argument by pointing back to previous clock imagery (at Purg. VIII.85-87; Par. X.139-146 and Par. XXIV.13-18). Professor Steven Marcus, in a conversation that took place in November 2002, independently suggested this solution. For a similar observation, although one not made with this passage in mind (rather Par. XIV.106-111), see Steven Botterill (“Paradiso XII,” in Dante's “Divine Comedy,” Introductory Readings III: “Paradiso,” ed. Tibor Wlassics [Lectura Dantis {virginiana}, 16-17, supplement, Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1995], p. 181): “... the excellence of one wheel implies that of the other, and the chariot would, of course, not be able to function without making equal and simultaneous use of both.”
Whatever the metaphor controlling this passage, whether biblical or astronomical or mechanical, the simplest solution of the literal sense of the line is to understand that line 144, “as a wheel that is moved in just the same way,” is attached to the preceding (Latin) noun, velle. What the text then says is clear: “But already my desire was moving in a circle (around God), as was my will, revolving in just the same way.” This was precisely the understanding put forward by Torraca (comm. to vv. 143-145) over one hundred years ago that Bruno Nardi belittled (Nel mondo di Dante [Rome: Edizioni di “Storia e Letteratura”, 1944]), p. 349n.). The protagonist/poet's soul has left our solar system behind and is moving in a circle, not around our earth, but, like the angelic orders, around God. See Pertile's concluding remarks on the last paradox in the poem: The pilgrim has found his peace in continual movement. It is not an accident that Goethe admired this final scene and used it in developing the conclusion of the second part of Faust.
Strangely enough, Giuseppe Ledda (La guerra della lingua [Ravenna: Longo, 2002], p. 319) treats the ending of the poem as a failure of Dante's “imaginative and intellectual faculties.” Perhaps he should have taken into account the context furnished by the last four verses of the poem, which he for some reason does not include in the final considerations of his study.
While the fact that the word stelle is the last word of each canticle would seem to have been an early and lasting perception, John of Serravalle (comm. to vv. 133-145) appears to have been the first ever to have it. For the possibility that Dante's stella reflects Ovid's astra (Metam. XV.876) and his starry vision of his own personal immortality that concludes his great poem (vv. 871-879), reformulated by Dante to accord with quite a different (and less self-absorbed) view, see Jessica Levenstein (“The Re-Formation of Marsyas in Paradiso I,” in Dante for the New Millennium, ed. Teodolinda Barolini and H. Wayne Storey [New York: Fordham University Press, 2003], p. 418).
For an essay on this “last word,” see John Ahern (“Dante's Last Word: The Comedy as a liber coelestis,” Dante Studies 102 [1984]: 1-14), who, while not referring to Ovid, argues that this canto couches its central concerns, conflating two metaphors, in the images of the heavens as book and of the stars as alphabet.
Scartazzini (comm. to this verse) points out that the presence of the same form of the verb muovere in the first and last lines of the cantica creates a sort of ring composition. He also points out that Dante's practice in this regard resembles that found in canzoni of other poets in his time; he also suggests the pertinence of the ending (which happens to constitute its thirty-third paragraph) of the Epistle to Cangrande (XIII.90): “And since, when the Beginning or First, which is God, has been reached, there is nought to be sought for beyond, inasmuch as He is Alpha and Omega, that is, the Beginning and the End, as the Vision of John tells us, the work ends in God Himself, who is blessed for evermore, world without end” (tr. P. Toynbee).
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