The Poetry of Dante's Paradiso: Lives Almost Divine, Spirits that Matter 3030656276, 9783030656270

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The Poetry of Dante’s Paradiso Lives Almost Divine, Spirits that Matter

Jeremy Tambling

The Poetry of Dante’s Paradiso

Jeremy Tambling

The Poetry of Dante’s Paradiso Lives Almost Divine, Spirits that Matter

Jeremy Tambling London, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-65627-0    ISBN 978-3-030-65628-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65628-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. incamerastock / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface and a Note on the Text

I began research for this book—which as it is intended as a close reading of a text will benefit most from being read alongside a copy of Paradiso— when on holiday in Lodève in 2010. After publication of my book Dante in Purgatory: States of Affect (Brepols, 2010), which itself was started in 2003 on holiday in Pernes-les-Fontaines, I began earnest work by reading the canto-by-canto commentaries on Paradiso edited by Allen Mandelbaum, and following that with the Tibor Wlassics introductory readings to Paradiso (University of Virginia Press, 1995). Both these volumes, and their authors therein, and Robert Hollander’s edition of Paradiso (2007), were invaluable starters. But this book is less a sequel to work on Purgatorio than new ideas coupled with thinking about Paradiso which go back to my doctorate, and my book Dante and Difference: Writing in the Commedia (Cambridge University Press, 1988), and to work which has appeared since in journals. Thus, material on cantos 8 and 9 greatly revises and develops a paper: ‘The Violence of Venus: Dante in Paradiso’ (Romanic Review 90 (2000), 93–114), while a draft of material on canto 11 appeared as ‘Dante and St Francis: Shaping Lives: Reshaping Allegory’ in Walter S. Melion and Bart Ramakers (eds.), Personification: Embodying Meaning and Emotion (Leiden: Brill, 2016, 73–94). I am grateful for permission to reprint. Further, I wrote before on cantos 21 and 22  in ‘Getting Above the Thunder: Dante in the Sphere of Saturn’ MLR 90 (1995), 632–645, and incorporated some of it into my Dante in Purgatory. An unpublished draft of material on canto 6 was given to a Medieval and Renaissance Literature v

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seminar at Queen Mary University, November 2012; thanks to Adrian Armstrong for organising that. An early draft of some of canto 10 appeared in an unpublished paper for a conference on Isidore of Seville in Manchester University, 2012, and part of material which appears here on canto 33 was delivered at a conference on ‘Forgotten Books’ at National Taipei University of Technology, Taiwan, May 2016. An early version of the work on the Cacciaguida cantos was read to the Oxford Dante Society on 9 November 2016, and I am grateful to Nick Havely for arranging this and to the Society for hosting me. Material relevant to canto 9 was read to a seminar at King’s College London in 2018 and I am grateful to Michael Silk for arranging that. Two papers given at St Andrews, on Purgatorio 4, and Convivio 3, stimulated my interest in Dante’s astronomy: thanks to Robert Wilson and Claudia Rossignoli for the invitations. While writing, I turned some undergraduate lectures into a book, Histories of the Devil (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), and much thinking for that book has gone indirectly into this. Thanks to Peter Such, whose edition of the Poema de mio Cid stimulated interest in Dante and Spain. I thank him and Rich Rabone for letting me see their translation of the Poema de Fernán González in manuscript and for discussion of medieval Spain. During writing, I recall a good conversation with Patrick Boyde. Thanks are due to Dennis Walder for encouragement; to Spencer Pearce, Priscilla Martin, Terry Bird, Peter Crickmore, John Pickering, David Wells, and Louis Lo, for conversations and especially for doing the diagram; and to Jo Rose, for ‘mastering’ everything as it’s called, to do with the manuscript. I could not have written this book at all without consistent encouragement and loving support from Pauline. Any dedication must go to her. The book was finished in a week when Emil, a second grandchild, was born; he joins Kirsten and Simon, Frances, and Felix, as part of a circle which makes this writing an act of hope as much as an attempt at scholarship. A note on Bibliographies: Dante has received so much attention that it is not possible to keep abreast. I have referenced work which I have used; Bibliographies add other work consulted, but not necessarily mentioned in the text or notes. Jeremy Tambling

Abbreviations and References

Dante’s Commedia comprises three cantiche—that is, Inferno (Inf.), Purgatorio (Purg.), and Paradiso (Para.). Quotations, by canto and line numbers (e.g. Para. 20.13), come from the three-volume edition of Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1999–2001). Equally useful, and cited are: Bosco/Reggio—the three volumes edited by Umberto Bosco and Giovanni Reggio (Florence: Le Monnier, 1979) Sapegno—the three volumes edited by Natalino Sapegno (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1968). It is to be assumed that reference to the name is to the relevant passage of the poem being discussed. Dante’s minor works are cited from the Opere minori, 2 vols, ed. Domenico de Robertis, Gianfranco Contini, and Cesare Vasoli (Milan: Ricciardi, 1979). Here appear references to VN (i.e. Vita Nuova), Con. (Convivio), DVE (De Vulgari Eloquentia), and Mon. (Monarchia) Other editions of Dante referred to by abbreviations are as follows: Frisnardi—Convivio trans. Andrew Frisnardi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Durling and Martinez—The Divine Comedy trans. Robert M. Durling and Ronald L. Martinez. Inferno (1996), Purgatorio (2003), Paradiso (2011) (Oxford: Oxford University Press) Hollander—Paradiso edited and translated by Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander (New York: Doubleday, 2007). vii

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Kay—Monarchia trans. Richard Kay (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1998). Lansing—Convivio trans. Richard Lansing (New York: Garland, 1990). Rime—Kenelm Foster and Patrick Boyde, Dante’s Lyric Poetry 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967). Pharsalia—Lucan, Civil War trans. Susan H.  Braund (Oxford: O.U.P., 1992). Ryan—Dante’s The Banquet ed. Michael Ryan (Saratoga: CA: ANMA Libri, 1989). Reynolds and Sayers—Hell and Purgatory trans. and ed. Dorothy Sayers, and Paradise trans. Dorothy Sayers and Barbara Reynolds, and ed. Barbara Reynolds (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1949–1962). Shaw, Monarchia trans. Prue Shaw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Toynbee—Dante, Dantis Alagherii Epistlolae ed. Paget Toynbee, 2nd edition ed. Colin Hardie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966). Shapiro—De Vulgari Eloquentia: Dante’s Book of Exile trans. Marianne Shapiro (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990). Singleton—Commedia ed. and trans. Charles Singleton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970–1975). Translations from Italian are mine but with much dependence upon editions given above which show on every page. Other authors and titles: Aquinas—Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologia 9: Angels. trans. Kenelm Foster (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode 1963). Boethius—Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy in The Theological Tractates trans. S.J.  Tester (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973). City—Augustine, City of God—trans. Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972). Quoted by book and chapter. Confessions—Henry Chadwick, trans. Augustine: Confessions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). De Anima—Aristotle, De Anima, trans. Hugh Lawson-Tancred (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986). ED—Enciclopedia Dantesca ed. Umberto Bosco, 6 vols. (Roma: Istituto della enciclopedia italiana, 1984). DS—Dante Studies

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GL—Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). Heroides—Ovid, Heroides trans. Grant Showerman rev. G.P.  Goold (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard U.P., 1977). Lansing—Richard Lansing, Dante Encyclopaedia (New  York: Garland, 2000). Life—Stephen Bemrose, Stephen, A New Life of Dante (Exeter: Exeter U.P., 2009). Metaphysics—Aristotle, The Metaphysics, trans. Hugh Lawson-Tancred (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004). Met.—Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller and G.P.  Goold (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1977). Fausti—Ovid, Fausti trans. J.G.  Frazer, rev. J.G.  Goold (London: Heinemann, 1966). Ars Amatoria—Ovid, The Art of Love and Other Poems trans. J. H. Mozley (London: Heinemann, 1959). Heroide—Ovid, Heroides and Amores trans., Grant Showerman (London: Heinemann, 1971) Plotinus—Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna, introduction by John Dillon (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991). Physics—Aristotle, Physics trans. Robin Waterfield, Oxford: O.U.P., 1996. Timaeus—Plato, Timaeus and Critias, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: O.U.P., 2008). Virgil, Virgil, 2 vols, Loeb Classical Library trans. by H. Ruston Fairclough revised G.P. Goold (London: Heinemann, 1967). Quotations from the Bible come from the King James (1611) version, sometimes corrected from the Revised (1881) version.

Contents

1 Introduction: Reading Paradiso Out of Time  1 2 Within the Shadow of the Earth 29 3 Dancing in the Sun: Paradiso—Cantos 10–14 91 4 Mars, Jupiter, Saturn: History and Its Reversals141 5 Fixed Stars, Diasporic Times: Paradiso 22–27193 6 Angels: Paradiso 28 and 29233 7 The Ultimate Vision: Paradiso 30–33271 Index307

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Reading Paradiso Out of Time

If one had to expound the doctrine of antiquity with utmost brevity … it could only be in this sentence: ‘They alone shall possess the earth who live from the powers of the cosmos’. Nothing distinguishes the ancient from the modern man so much as the former’s absorption of a cosmic experience scarcely known to the later periods. Its waning is marked by the flowering of astronomy at the beginning of the modern age. Kepler, Copernicus, and Tycho Brahe were certainly not driven by scientific impulses alone. All the same, the elusive emphasis on an optical connection to the universe, to which astronomy very quickly led, contained a portent of what was to come. The ancients’ intercourse with the cosmos had been different: the ecstatic trance. (Benjamin 1996: 486–487)

Walter Benjamin hints at problems in approaching Paradiso. For the modern to know the ‘cosmos’ means going ‘to the planetarium’. The older contact with the cosmos—including Dante’s—was different. It was ecstatic: the self was taken outside the self. We remain separated from the cosmos, knowing it objectively by ocular perception. Seventeenth-century Baroque texts mark the break with the ecstatic. The planets are at a distance, known only by ‘optical connection’, even though:  A man that looks on glasse,  On it may stay his eye; Or if he pleaseth, through it passe,  And then the heav’en espie. (‘The Elixer’, Herbert: 188) © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Tambling, The Poetry of Dante’s Paradiso, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65628-7_1

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Paradiso imagines the ecstatic trance, but knows it is doing that, being in process of understanding the cosmos it describes as an allegory.  But while it is on both sides of the ancient/modern argument, it believes that the cosmos is a finite entity, described as such by Ptolemy (c.100–170 CE), through the Latin version of the Arabic astronomer Alfraganus (ninth century), who had translated Ptolemy’s Almagest. Ptolemy had paid tribute to Hipparchus (c.150 BCE). Further, Dante knew the universe as described in the Timaeus, the only document of Plato (427–347 BCE), which the Medieval world possessed. Dante’s is not our world. We are out of its time, and reading a text of the past cannot mean escaping into past certainties to be comfortable in them, taking an aesthetic refuge in a past world where we can lose sense of our own more relativist modernity. We cannot assume a privileged access to Paradiso claiming a shared theological understanding, or even as wishing to possess Dante’s certainties. We cannot even assume entry into the same meanings as are in Dante; hermeneutics means that we cannot read across from his work to our world, save by an act of mental translation, however much, and however usefully, we equip ourselves with relevant knowledge. It may be even harder to read Dante now than during the modernism of Eliot, Pound, Joyce, and Beckett; the Dantean assumptions that lay like fragments before those writers are yet more dissipated another hundred years on. Yet reading Dante’s Commedia and, specifically, Paradiso remains relevant, not because it gives access to a world whose assumptions we cannot share, but because it is untimely, and the best meditations are untimely, and all thinking has to be anachronistic, as Dante is, plentifully.1 The difficulties affect texts prior to Shakespeare and the ‘Early Modern’. Later writing is haunted by the sense of the ‘nothing’ (le néant), which comes forcefully into critical and philosophical thinking with Shakespeare and beyond, with the absence of a universe of which spiritual authority can speak affirmatively. Present writing demands ‘tarrying with the negative’ as Hegelian discourse puts it: accepting that there may be nothing, or no-­ thing, out there, no grounds for saying that language affirms meaning (Hegel 1977: 19). This contrasts with the affirmativeness and joy of Paradiso, though there is a wager involved in arguing that earlier writing did not have such vertiginousness: it may even be an undertow within Paradiso. There is a bigger difficulty for readers of Inferno, which holds the attention, continually challenging readers’ assent to, or fascinated disagreement with, judgments passed on people, concepts, and historical

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moments. Purgatorio is also a text that can be taken with a certain immediacy; it is instantly attractive. Paradiso, however, seems to have an unsympathetic discarding of material human bodies in favour of the reality of a spiritual world, which threatens to make it an alienating text; moreover, there is little that is easy in it. This book, which started by wanting to confront these issues, offers an advanced introduction to Paradiso to those who would like it and argues that here is one of the great European texts that should not be left to a professionalism in criticism which only disputes competing critical positions, nor assumed to be the province of theology, nor confined to a historicising which assumes that Dante’s cultural contexts are knowable and definitive for reading. We cannot read outside contexts such as those given by psychoanalysis, by deconstruction, or a modernist Marxism—all three inform the reading here—to do so is to put a brake on reading, pretending to know less than we either do—or ought to do—and it assumes a too determinate knowledge of Dante. While noting the alterity of the text from our own assumptions, reading should not isolate Dante within a medieval context, but see him within a history of the creation of the modern subject, to be read as medieval, and with traces of the modern.2

Paradiso: The Cosmos I start in introductory mode, by mapping the poem. Paradiso has a narrative simplicity. Dante’s editors and translators, Durling and Martinez, propose Friday, 8 April 1300, as when Dante enters Inferno: that is, around the spring equinox, when the sun was in Aries in its annual journey through the Zodiac (note to Inf. 1.37). As for Chaucer, beginning The Canterbury Tales, ‘the yonge sonne / Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne’ (CT 1.7, 8). Being at the equinox, the sun is on the celestial equator, which encircles the outermost heaven of the universe. Paradiso 1 sees Dante and Beatrice leaving the Earthly Paradise where they were at the end of Purgatorio at noonday; thereafter they are out of time. Dante’s universe comprises a sphere, its core the round earth. The two pass through seven planets, whose name-associations—classical-pagan and mythological, astronomical and astrological—are exploited, and show a tendential dualism in the poem’s values. And Dante’s angels are vestiges of what pagans called Gods and Goddesses, to whom temples were built and about whom poets like Virgil testified (Con. 2.4.6–7): Pallas, or Minerva,

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Vulcan, and Ceres—spirits of wisdom, fire, and grain. These planets have a chiasmic, echoing order. The Moon’s nuns (in the first heaven) correspond to Saturn’s monks (in no. 7). Mercury (2) corresponds to Jupiter (6) through the image of the eagle, which is first spoken of as Roman, then seen as a sign. Venus (3) corresponds with Mars (5), with the equivalent hot energies of love and war. The Sun stands central as the fourth of seven. Within the first three heavens, examined in Chap. 2, political failure shows in every body of power. Femininity, the subject of the Moon, in the third heaven becomes an active force, giving character to violence, and creating the poetry of courtly love, rescinding nothing of the alliance of poetry and fin’ amor, which was foregrounded with Francesca in Inferno 5, nor of the alliance of desire and an innovatory modern poetry within Purgatorio 26, where all the lustful are poets. Between, Mercury speaks of history and empire. These planets orbit within the shadow the earth casts (Para. 9.118, 119). Indeed, for Dante and the Medieval world darkness meant only the conical shadow cast by the earth: Since the sun moves and the earth is stationary, we must picture this long, black finger perpetually revolving like the hand of a clock; and called “the circling canopy / Of Night’s extended shade” (Paradise Lost 3.556–557). Beyond Venus there is no darkness. (Lewis 1962: 111–112)

Darkness beyond the earth is a post-Copernican conception. It separates Dante as the poet of light from baroque awareness of darkness— Giottesque brightness from Caravaggio—where darkness includes the ‘nothing’. Darkness means loss of a centre and an origin: Paradiso, however, moves from light to greater light. Souls in the shadow of the earth are closest in character to those in Purgatorio. Something of the earth clings to them. We hear of imperfect motivations; we see souls, as after Venus we cannot. The Sun, in canto 10, gives a change in intensity.3 Here, and in Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn are heavens that, answering loosely to cantos 9–26 of Purgatorio, adopt the four cardinal virtues of Prudence, Fortitude, Justice, and Temperance. Here appear the most intense encounters with Paradisal lives, which redefine the meaning of Paradise, not limiting it to the afterlife. They re-define the present, as souls in Inferno continue in fuller form the hell they lived on earth, while souls in Purgatorio refine

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lives that on earth were singular instances of virtues and vices together and that continue to activate dualities within them. In Chap. 3, the heaven of the Sun, we see the wise and encounter four modern theologians. Aquinas the Dominican (canonised 1323) speaks of Francis of Assisi (canonised 1228), and Bonaventura the Franciscan (canonised 1482) gives the life of Dominic (canonised 1234). Francis is no less than Christ refigured, manifest as a human miracle present in urban Italy a hundred years earlier than Paradiso (Foster 1985: 480–496). In Mars, where imminent violence and hatred requires peaceful citizenship, and exile necessitates poetry, Dante is commissioned to write the Commedia. Saved lives, contrasted with excoriated contemporary rulers, appear in Jupiter, in canto 20 (37–72), and again with Saturn’s contemplatives, where lives are stripped down to the utmost simplicity, being on the threshold between time and eternity. These contemplatives write the lives of others, lives as marvels, completing a pattern discernible throughout, in the spirit of such saints’ lives as are recorded in The Golden Legend—where, amongst its 153 lives,4 Francis, Dominic, and Bernard appear, in what Jacques Le Goff (2014) calls sacred time. Politics throughout these heavens is pan-European, and strains at Europe’s limits. Chapter 5 examines the Fixed Stars and makes concentrated reference to Rome as an imperial and Papal centre. Chapters 6 and 7 go beyond, for whereas Timaeus made the Fixed Stars the eighth outmost sphere, Dante adds the Primum Mobile or the Crystalline Heavens as a ninth, counting out from the earth. This makes a complete diurnal East-West revolution round the earth, moving because it is attracted by the abode of God, in the unmoving Empyrean (not, actually, a Dantean word). Dante’s Epistle 10.26 explains why: anything moves ‘because of something which it has not, and which is the terminus of its motion’. Desire and motion are inseparable. As if emboldened by the language of Neo-Platonic deification, canto 33, in the Empyrean, is the most concentrated in willing to see God, as both the utterly immaterial, who is, nonetheless, manifest in Christ, ‘nostra effige’, and thus material. The text tries to unite loyalties to the material and the immaterial, by seeing them tied in a single ‘nodo’, at the risk of language, sanity, and life. Throughout, there has been little resolution of the dualist vision that moves between desire for the spiritual, the virginal, the angelic, and the world of light, and the other world, material, and corrupt; treated with alternating anger and love.

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Writing Paradiso Dante acknowledges difficulty from the beginning. In canto 2.1–18, three terzine (the three-line stanzas in which the cantos are written) tell readers—who are poised like sailors in little boats—not to venture out into the ocean, that is, not to read any further. If they lost Dante, voyaging outwards, they would remain lost: L’acqua ch’io prendo già mai non si corse; Minerva spira, e conducemi Appollo, e nove Muse mi dimostran l’Orse. (2.7–9)

(The water which I take was not already ever crossed; Minerva [i.e. wisdom] inspires or fills the sails, and Apollo [i.e. poetry] leads me, and nine Muses point out the Bears.) Dante’s barque sounds like the ship of fools, despite these splendid guides. The Bears are Ursa Major and Ursa Minor. Ursa Major was Callisto, Ursa Minor Arcas, her son by Jupiter. These constellations indicate the pole star. Though he says he is being guided, he knows he is doing something new; hence he addresses those readers who want wisdom. They must follow his boat’s wake, or furrow (solco) ‘dinanzi a l’acqua che ritorna equale’: before the water that returns evenly (15); catching each momentary epiphanic insight that the writing opens up before the sea closes over it. Dante wants fellow-travellers (2.1–18) despite pretending to dissuade people from following. The ship and its wake return in canto 33, when Dante thinks of the shadow (l’ombra) of the Argo—Jason’s ship, Jason the fabled first mariner—furrowing the sea. For now, we see that canto 2 makes Dante Jason: Que’ glorïosi che passaro al Colco non s’ammiraron come voi farete, quando Iasón vider fatto bifolco. (2.16–18)

(Those glorious ones who passed to Colchis did not wonder as much as you will do, when they saw Jason become a ploughman.) This evokes Ovid (Metamorphoses 7.100–120), where one test imposed on Jason was to plough with wild brazen oxen. Dante re-invokes the furrow Jason created when he used the refractory and difficult oxen to open up the field, furrowing it, like the wake the ship creates. In Inferno 2,

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Dante was afraid to start his journey. Purgatorio 1.1 speaks of sailing over better waters. Now he embarks on what exceeds Jason or the crazy voyage, ‘il varco / folle’ (Paradiso 27.82–83) of Ulysses, the unforgettable voyager of Inferno 26. In attempting something new, many literary precedents are brought in, because the poem comes out of a tradition that Dante modifies, actively. This God-wards journey is offset by Dante’s experience of exile from Florence in 1302. The text divides between growing enablement and deepening sense of loss. Politically, Paradiso is more urgent than Inferno and Purgatorio. Needing less to speak of their condition, past or present, in self-justifying or self-adjusting, Paradisal lives speak of others and reflect on current political states. Separated from time, they are absolutely engaged with time, as eager to advise on earthly affairs as Dante is to hear them. It seems that at the same time, Dante was writing his treatise on world-government, Monarchia, that is, in 1316–1317 (Hollander 2001: 148–167, but for an earlier date, c.1312, see Davis 1957: 263–269). Paradiso was concluded in Ravenna, where Dante was the guest of the Guelf-leaning Guido Novello da Polenta, and visiting Verona, Mantua, and Venice.5 He had left Verona in 1318, and the Ghibelline Cangrande della Scala, with whom he had stayed—with intervals in Lucca—for perhaps six years. Petrocchi holds that half of Paradiso was in progress by 1318, including, perhaps, the tribute to Cangrande in Paradiso 17 (Bemrose 2009: 190). The Epistle to Cangrande (Epistle 10), which most Dante commentators accept was written either in part or fully by Dante as an official letter in Latin, dedicating the work to Cangrande, and as a self-­ exegesis of the first canto of the poem, accompanies the work.6 The Epistle’s Paragraph 7 declares the poem ‘polysemous’, having four senses derived from Biblical exegesis: literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical—these last three being allegorical: ‘different (diversi) from the literal or historical, for the word “allegory” is so called from the Greek alleon, which in Latin is alienum (strange) or diversum (different)’. The work may be seen as ‘allegory’, however, in a less literal, or rigid (some might say reductive) sense than in Epistle 10, and I will try to show some rethinking about allegory below. As poetry, Paradiso’s statements neither reduce to discursive utterance, nor to prose paraphrase. However formally committed to distinctive points of view, the utterance discovers more conflictual significances. Arguments proving Paradiso’s orthodoxy, which seem increasingly fashionable, especially in America, mean that the

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intention (as this is assessed, with heavy dependence on Epistle 10) controls how the poetry is read. Criticism may include interpretation, but is not reducible to that. At this point, I will indicate one way into the poem.

Mary and Beatrice Paradiso is full of a poetry deriving indirectly, perhaps not always consciously, from the place given to Mary, and the Annunciation (Luke 1.26–38), an event that was coming into a new visibility in Dante’s time.7 The Annunciation reverses order: the angel takes the subordinate place to the woman. Georges Didi-Huberman, studying Fra Angelico, notes how Aquinas had insisted on the newness ‘that an angel had bowed down before an earthly woman’. He mentions Albertus Magnus (c.1200–1280), to comment on Gabriel’s exalting of Mary, the angel by this making himself—superior, coming from above—appear embodied, human, below Mary. Didi-Huberman sees in the Annunciation-images something double, demanding a figural reading, beyond the ‘literality’ of the representation in art. Its presentation of the Incarnation and of the Trinity, which lie concealed in the Annunciation-image, exists in ‘dissembled’, concealed form within the pictorial image. Several points emerge here, beginning with the place given to the woman, whose materiality is complex. As Purgatorio noted instances in Mary’s life as exempla for Purgatorial figures, so Mary is exalted throughout Paradiso, implicitly in the place given to nuns’ virginity in the Moon; seen as a glory in the Heaven of the Fixed Stars (canto 23); seen physically in the Empyrean (31.115–138 and canto 32); addressed and responding in canto 33.1–45. Mary was, historically, the theme of such men as Bonaventure (canto 12), Peter Damiani (canto 21), and Bernard of Clairvaux (cantos 31–33). Her distinction was to be Mother of God (Theotokos: declared so in Ephesus in 431 CE) and perpetual virgin, who had made a vow of virginity before the Annunciation (so Gregory of Nyssa, c.335–395), her virginity declaring her singleness and sincerity (Ambrose). She was a figure of the Church (so Isidore of Seville: canto 10). She was sister of Christ and of the angels. Franciscans said she had taken a vow of poverty. Bernard of Clairvaux said she had been bodily assumed into heaven.8 Peter Damiani considered Mary’s womb to be the house in the phrase ‘wisdom hath builded her house’ (Proverbs 9.1).

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Dante says her womb, ‘fu albergo del nostro disiro’ (the hostelry of our Desire, 23.105); this idea reappears in Bernard’s prayer to the Virgin (33.7–9). Her womb makes her body’s materiality pure, not needing to be touched by any other spiritual force that would redeem materiality. In Peter Damiani’s words, ‘the all-chaste womb of the holy maid becomes heaven’ (Gambero 2005: 97). This poses complex problems for feminism. Women within patriarchy are characteristically victims of contradictory double demands: required to be objects of beauty yet chaste; subjected to different and harder codes as regards the materiality of their bodies than those given to men; having to respond to the demands of men yet needing to find a place in patriarchy which they may claim as their own even  though it may have been prescribed for them. The choice of virginity has engendered endless controversy as being repressive and disabling, in disregarding the materiality of women’s bodies. Yet it may have been positive in giving a separate space though one not free from male violation, as canto 3 shows. The materiality of bodies, and of women’s bodies, problematic in modernity no less than in medieval Christianity, appears throughout Paradiso. Further, another woman speaks in the Commedia: Beatrice, who had died in 1291, aged 23, who as an allegorical figure partially derives from Wisdom in the Jewish Bible (Proverbs 8), and from Philosophy in Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy. Philosophy as a woman derives from Athena, from Thetis, and from the idea of the nurse—Odysseus’ nurse Eurycleia—as well as from the classical Muses (Crabbe 1981: 237–274). In Convivio 2.16.12, the ‘donna’ Dante loves after Beatrice’s death is Philosophy. These women and goddesses, like Mary, supplement the woman’s value in Dante’s poetic tradition, the dolce stil nuovo. Paradiso’s claims for Beatrice go as far as they can; Dante in the Empyrean exalts Beatrice, seen in her appointed place, remote from him: Da quella regïon che più sù tona occhio mortale alcun tanto non dista, qualunque in mare più giù s’abbandona, quanto lì da Beatrice la mia vista; ma nulla mi facea, ché süa effige non discendëa a me per mezzo mista. ‘O donna in cui la mia speranza vige, e che soffristi per la mia salute in inferno lasciar le tue vestige,

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di tante cose quant’i’ ho vedute, dal tuo podere e da la tua bontate riconosco la grazia e la virtute. Tu m’hai di servo tratto a libertate per tutte quelle vie, per tutti’i modi che di ciò fare avei la potestate. La tua magnificenza in me custodi, sì che l’anima mia, che fatt’hai sana, piacente a te dal corpo si disnodi.’ Così orai …. (31.73–91)

(From that region which thunders most high up, no mortal eye is so distant, not one that is lost deepest in the sea, as was my gaze from Beatrice, but that did not matter, for her image did not descend to me mixed with any medium. ‘O lady in whom my hope is strong, and who suffered, for my salvation, to leave your footprints in hell, in all the things which I have seen, I recognise the grace and the strength, from your power and your bounty. You have drawn me from slavery to freedom by all the ways, by all the modes that you had the power to use. Keep your generosity towards me so that my soul, which you have made whole, may, pleasing to you untie itself from the body’. Thus I prayed ….). The distance from earth to the highest part of the atmosphere is augmented, as the distance from the region of thunder to the sea’s bottom, the place of silence. This intensification gives the clue, for Dante sees Beatrice’s image without material interruption (mezzo) across the Empyrean. Perspective, which distances things from the privileged subject’s viewpoint, is not involved. He sees what she is, which his prayer, which is salutation, unfolds. Praise begins with Beatrice as the image of hope that imprints itself in hell. That impress of the immaterial upon the material substance of Hell, that is, Limbo (Inf. 2.52–108), sums up what the following terzine amplify: what Beatrice has done since the Vita Nuova days. Her trace (vestige) applies to everything when, though absent, she was drawing him from slavery to freedom of the will (in that way Dante reads his life and gives a reading of the substance of Paradiso). The last terzina expounds his ‘hope’: he desires her ‘magnificenza’ to continue to his death. ‘Magnificenza’, which includes in it the sense of ‘fortitude’ as one of the cardinal virtues, is a rare word in Paradiso: applied only to Cangrande (17.85), and Mary (33.20). Is Beatrice a material or immaterial presence? Is her ‘trace’ a third thing, not material, but questioning immateriality, because something real?

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Beatrice’s visibility is also absence. He sees her as an ‘effige’: as an image and the trace of Christ in his descent to Limbo, harrowing hell, and, in ascending from earth, leaving his footprints (GL 1.292). ‘Vestige’ recalls the poet Guinizelli, purging his lust in fire, telling Dante that his words to him leave a ‘trace’ (vestigio, Purg. 26.106). The words of Dante affect Guinizelli’s afterlife but are to Guinizelli memories from his life (giving memories before events). In following Guinizelli’s poetry, Dante adds a trace to the earlier poet’s work, deepening its meaning. The ‘vestige’ means that readers must enlarge their conventional chronology of first this poet followed by that. The afterlife of poetry vivifies its chronologically earlier moment of writing. Miri Rubin (2006: 169) notes that St Clare, who followed St Francis’ teaching, desired to be the ‘footprint’ of St Francis, by following Francis’ manner of life, but she adds that Clare was historically called ‘a footprint [vestigium] of the Mother of God’ (199). Clare, the trace of another, brings Mary into further visibility as her trace. Piccarda tells Dante that Clare, who is above her in heaven, and Piccarda’s model, is followed on earth by nuns, whose desire is to the Bridegroom (Para. 3.97–101). Clare, wanting to be the trace of Mary and Francis, gives way to the Bridegroom whom Francis followed, who existed in time as the son of Mary; the trace enlarging the significance of the other. Beatrice, who left her footprints in hell, supplements Paradiso’s Christianity, adding to heaven and to orthodoxy by guiding Dante, leaving her trace that makes her absent, and present, smiling, a spirit that matters.

Angels, Immateriality, and Prime Matter The other figure in the Annunciation is the Angel. If angels enjoy a special place in Paradiso’s cosmos, Dante is paralleled by Modernism, for example by Benjamin, whose ‘Angel of History’ attempts, perhaps impossibly, communication within history. If angels are messengers, their medium language, there is an analogy between angels and the immateriality of poetry. Angels are substances without matter (‘sustanze separate da materia’, Convivio, 2.4.2), immaterial. Yet, after Beatrice has died, in the Vita Nuova: In quello giorno nel quale si compiea l’anno che questa donna era fatta de li cittadini di vita eterna, io mi sedea in parte ne la quale, ricordandomi di lei, disegnava uno angelo sopra certe tavolette … (VN 34.1)

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(On that day in which was completed a year since this lady [Beatrice] had become a citizen of eternal life, I was sitting in a place where, remembering her, I was designing an angel on some wooden boards …) Dante’s Trauerarbeit takes the form of expressing, on the anniversary of Beatrice’s death, another form of life, drawing an angel. That is analogous to writing poetry. The angel is not Beatrice, though it may be her trace, Beatrice here becoming even more an immaterial spirit. Drawing an angel on a wooden tablet, or panel, is creatio ex nihilo; bringing into visibility the invisible, as art does, since ‘painting celebrates no other enigma than that of visibility’ (Merleau-Ponty 1993: 127). What is visible is a riddle, as an image of what is invisible and only conceptual, questioning the difference between the visible and the invisible. What is seen is never the whole, and something permits visibility that is not visible, though it is inherent within it. Drawing an angel says that what the woman is or was cannot be brought into vision, and only what is not visible is worth seeing. Levinas calls it the il y a—the ‘there is’—which is nothing in the sense that it is no thing (Tambling 2004: 351–372). Writing must be fascinated by it; it ensures that nothing is wholly visible. Paradiso finds it so potent that it sacrifices the visible for it, as the ‘trace’ that is, still elusively in this poem, God. Angels by their understanding move the heavenly spheres, to quote the incipit to Dante’s canzone, ‘Voi che ‘ntendendo il terzo ciel movete’: commented on in Convivio Book 2, cited in Paradiso 8.37. Convivio Book 2, fascinated with angelic intelligences, and their spheres is Paradiso’s seed-­ plot. Kenelm Foster and Patrick Boyde find that this canzone shows Dante turning to allegory (Convivio 2.1; see Rime 2.161). Angels and allegory connect, and if the language describing/evoking angels is allegorical, allegory becomes a dualistic mode, the literal describes the immaterial, or spiritual. Angels contemplate God, and have no unrealised ‘potential’ in their knowledge. They need no language, though they may speak (see Para. 14.35, 36). Their immateriality puts them outside sexuality; angels being, psychoanalytically, ‘the most ambitious attempt in our civilization to establish a world in which identity is not based on sex’ (Schneiderman 1988: 17). They are opposite from the problem of ‘prime matter’, something ghosting Paradiso. What ‘prima materia’ is was a critical crux for Dante (Convivio 3.15.6, 4.18), not soluble by his dual allegiance to the philosophies of the Dominicans or the Franciscans. It will be discussed in Chap. 6. Here we can say that Aristotle held that the universe had not been created; it was eternal, as is matter. In what, then, lay the work of

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creation, which, being ‘in the beginning’, inaugurates time (according to Augustine)? Did creation work on existent prime matter, or had God created ex nihilo? If so, what is the status of unused prime matter?—which is also il y a. The tensions in this debate, lasting through disputes and condemnations in the University of Paris in 1370 and 1377, took various forms onto which were mapped a problematic dualism between spirit and matter. The Neo-Platonic tradition from Proclus held that prime matter was not created by God, matter being eternal; but this made matter antagonistic to God. Followers of Aristotle’s Arab commentator, Averroes (1126–1178) believed that matter’s elements were created by the heavens, not by God, a view Bishop Tempier condemned in Paris in 1277. According to Bruno Nardi (1884–1968), Siger of Brabant, seen in the heaven of the Sun, accepted this.9 Boethius of Dacia, teaching at Paris, believed that philosophy could prove that creation could never have had a beginning, even though faith taught the opposite. This compelled belief in something like a ‘double truth’—that something could be true and false together, depending on the system of thought used—and meant that there was always something slipping away from proof, resisting the firmness of faith (Boethius of Dacia 1987: 36–37, Introduction, 9–19). Whether there was matter that God created which lacked form, or whether matter was always there, haunting the primacy of God’s creation had been a crisis-point for Augustine with the Manichees, whose dualism made matter and God’s purity irreconcilable. This, questioning whether everything can be brought into God’s system, haunts, perhaps troubles Paradiso. Angels symbolise a desire for a pure knowing uncontaminated by matter, but the Annunciation implies the value of a virginal, pure-womb-like materiality. Here we must address allegory as the medium for expressing ‘immateriality’.

Allegory Paradiso gives converse with jewel—or flame—or flower-like lights within light, supplementing light by reflecting light, as human eyes do, but disembodied, which the spirits feel as a loss (see canto 14.37–66). The only body visible is Beatrice’s, who escorts Dante. In the Moon, she explains the non-literality of the heavens they are passing through. None of the beings encountered in the Moon are there, they only appear there. The staging-posts of the different heavens are only apparent: hence ‘chiaro mi

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fu allor come ogne dove / in cielo è paradiso’ (3.89–90: it was clear to me then how everywhere in heaven is Paradise). The souls in the Moon are actually in the Empyrean. They are like the highest Seraphim who most ‘s’india’ (4.28)—most sinks himself in God.10 Beatrice names Moses and Samuel, Jewish prophets, and writers of sacred texts (see Jeremiah 15.1). She then names two Johns, saying Dante can choose either the Baptist, ‘a man sent from God whose name was John’ (John 1.6), or the Gospel writer, the beloved disciple John (13.23), who stood by Mary at the foot of the cross (John 19.26). John was a virgin, and Peter Damiani said he, like Mary, was assumed bodily into heaven, though Dante’s John denies that in canto 25 (Gambero 2005: 87). All, says Beatrice, are equally within the Empyrean, whatever their capacity to feel, ‘più e men’, the eternal breath.11 But they appear for Dante’s benefit, in these other, lower, heavens: Qui si mostraro, non perché sortita sia questa spera lor, ma per far segno de la spiritüal c’ha men salita. Così parlar conviensi al vostro ingegno, però che solo da sensato apprende ciò che fa poscia d’intelletto degno. Per questo la Scrittura condescende a vostra facultate, e piedi e mano attribuisce a Dio, e altro intende; e Santa Chiesa con aspetto umano Gabrïel e Michel vi rappresenta, e l’altro che Tobia rifece sano. (4.37–48)

(They have shown themselves, not because this sphere is assigned to them, but to make a sign of the spiritual sphere, which has the less ascent [the Moon]. It suits that they speak thus to your intellect, which only from the senses apprehends what it then makes worthy of the intellect. For this reason, Scripture condescends to your capacity, and attributes feet and hands to God, and means something else, and Holy Church represents to you Gabriel and Michael with human aspect, and that other [Raphael] who made Tobias whole.) The souls in the Moon have descended, appearing as if in a masquerade. They make the Moon a sign, of weakness of the will. David Gibbons finds more metaphor in Paradiso than in Inferno or Purgatorio.12 Perhaps this indicates that presentations in Paradiso move towards the intellect by

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way of something visible. In reaching the non-sensual through the sensual, Dante is akin to the Gothic mentality of the Cistercian Suger (1081–1151), Bernard of Clairvaux’s contemporary. Bernard refused church ornamentation, but Suger justified the Gothic ethos of his new Abbey buildings at St-Denis, proclaiming the ‘anagogical’ nature of Gothic images: all art within it figures divine reality, because Mens hebes ad verum per materialia surgit—‘the dull mind rises to truth through that which is material’ (Panofsky 1970: 164). Suger—and Gothic art—worked from the Syrian pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (c.525 CE), the Neo-Platonist influenced by Proclus (412–488) whom Plotinus (c.204–270) influenced, and the saint whom Suger’s Abbey church honoured. Pseudo-Dionysius stylised himself after the Pauline convert, the Athenian Dionysius who lived in the atmosphere of the worship of ‘the Unknown God’ (Acts 17.16–34). He appears in canto 10.112–114, and canto 28.130 evokes him as instructed by Paul, who had been in Heaven. The Celestial Hierarchy was translated into Latin by John Scotus Eriugena (c.860), the Irish poet at the Carolingian court of Charles the Bald (823–877).13 He believed in a ‘hierarchy’—his neologism; it appears in Para. 28.121—of knowledge, ascending towards the hidden, though God also descends to matter hierarchically (Rorem 1993: 30). ‘Anagogical’, Panofsky’s word in discussing Suger, means ‘mystical, spiritual, having a secondary spiritual sense’ (OED), being one of the fourfold senses of Scripture discussed in Dante’s Epistle to Can Grande, deriving from such patristic sources as Origen, Cassian, St Jerome, and Eucharis of Lyons (d. c.449).14 Fourfold interpretation gives the Bible literal, allegorical, topological (or moral), and anagogical meanings. In anagogy, pseudo-Dionysius reads symbols as a way of returning towards God. It implies an uplifting: moving from the perceptible to the intelligible, towards contemplation or theoria, as angels contemplate (Rorem 1984: 55, 114).15 The necessity for metaphorical/allegorical terms expands in canto 4. Scripture anthropomorphises the immaterial God, giving him a foot, or hand, for allegorical speech ‘altro intende’ (4.45). It means something else. The Church permits visual representations of Gabriel, or Michael, or Raphael as humans though they are immaterial spirits. Such humanising individuates, as art does. The angel who made Tobias whole comes from the Apocryphal Book of Tobit, 3.17: Raphael ‘scaled away the whiteness of Tobit’s eyes’, an action allegorical of healing spiritual blindness (a refusal to read spiritually/allegorically). The material angel (a contradiction)

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allegorises a spiritual work, but Dionysius had spoken of ‘dissimilar similarities’ within Biblical symbols for angels, or God (Rorem 1993: 54–56). ‘Dissemblance’ disallows reading images for their apparent sense: the visible dissembles the invisible. This resembles Paradiso, whose literal heavens have allegorical features, their spheres not housing their spirits. This presentational mode, comprising dissimilar similarities and non-­ reality, was not Dante’s mode in Inferno or Purgatorio. There, souls were literal, within literal spaces. With Paradiso, the cosmos becomes allegorical. Beatrice in canto 4 explains the poem’s method: finding sensuous equivalents to the cosmic spheres. Philo of Alexandria (15 BCE–45 CE) saw the cosmos as embellishing the divine idea, as allegories. The cosmos means ‘the universe’ and ‘ornamentation, embellishment’: for example, the stars as ornaments (Fletcher: 70–145, Radice: 131–135). Hence the cosmos is not intelligible ‘scientifically’ but allegorically: ornamental jewels flash back within it, adding to it. The Convivio compared the planets’ sequence to that of the Trivium and the Quadrivium.16 With that ‘scientific’ order ghosting Paradiso’s sequence, Dante creates the heavens in poetic terms. In canto 4.43–48, the Scriptures, and Church practices, justify Paradiso, according with Dante’s mode of creation. The later text makes earlier ones, declared divine, accord with it. The poet works with his own absolute creation, though he presents this as an order vouchsafed to him; for, returning to canto 2.7–9, the waters his boat crosses were uncrossed before, but Minerva, Apollo, and nine Muses—Dante’s essential number—show him the Bears. These constellations are co-ordinates for him, as the only nameable entities with a reality or a shape outside these uncrossed seas. As, historically speaking, mythic realities produced an ancient impulse to find them imaged as cosmic patterns, which, though fictional designs, gave viable indications for navigators, so with the fictional realities created in each heavenly sphere. Fictionally charged pagan constellations point out the way for writing Paradiso. Dante’s inspiration within looks for pagan-classical and allegorical-fictional inspiration without which points him on; and his heavens generate new constellations.

Origin, Dissemination, and Hierarchy Dante’s heaven shows increasing light without shadow, harmony without disharmony. The stress on returning to God as the origin divides him from present modern critical theory. Teodolinda Barolini, I think rightly, shows disquiet with the implications of the statement that Dante has ‘unease and

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suspicion in the presence of multiplicity’. She is quoting Patrick Boyde, who locates the source of that ‘unease’ in Dante’s keen relationship to Neo-Platonism, this being marked in Monarchia 1.15.1–3, wherein Dante opposes plurality to a unity that seems closer to the origin: ‘the best is that which is one as much as possible’. What falls short, ‘falls short of being one, and therefore good’ (Barolini 1992: 173, 181). Boyde writes that, with this Neo-Platonism, Dante ‘seems to have entertained misgivings about the goodness of a universe which could not be perfect because it was neither “simple” nor “one”- as it should be’ (Boyde 1981: 219). But Dante’s thought shows doubleness. It desires and seeks throughout Paradiso an original, and immaterial, unity, but is attracted to materiality, which includes multiplicity, and fascination with numbers, and is inherently dualist, while ‘sinning is nothing else than scorning unity and moving away from it towards multiplicity’.17 Pseudo-Dionysius made creation a precession from God; creation stands still before him, and returns to him. There may be plural possible cycles of creation. This view, though the Christian framework does not affirm it, haunts the thought that external reality is layered hierarchically, as if it could be taken away (Schäfwe 2006: 65). In pseudo-Dionysius’ follower, Maximus the Confessor (580–662), who influenced John Scotus Eriugena’s Periphyseon (c.864), this return to God is to Christ, for Maximus identifies creation with Christ himself, speaking of the Incarnation as threefold: in the cosmos, that is, in creation, in the Scriptures, and in Christ. The soul returns to God. Maximus calls ‘deification’ the destiny of the human, invoking 2 Peter 1.4, where Christians are ‘partakers of the divine nature’, and I John 3.2, ‘now are we the children of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be’. Lives will be more than almost divine, for God’s intention—his divine love—was to be creator and saviour of the cosmos.18 Dante is akin to Maximus, drawing on Neo-Platonism in making everything return to a ‘proprio sito’ (Para 1. 91–93), making diverse elements ‘accline’ towards their common ‘principio’ (1.109–111). Everything must be spoken of in allegory, whether the allegory of poets, or of theologians, since language is always, necessarily, ‘other’.19 In Philo of Alexandria’s tendential Neo-Platonism, allegory draws its power from inability to speak of divine mysteries literally, and from the idea of transmuting material into spiritual reality. The outer, literal meaning of Scripture was the body, the inner, allegorical meaning, the soul: reality is veiled behind the empirically seen (Whitman 1987: 62, 65). If writing allegory in Paradiso means

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rejecting the material (as with angels) and the literal—it bears repeating that it is not Inferno’s mode—that necessitates accepting multiplicity, because speech as ‘other’, plural, exfoliates within material images. Dante knew the Neo-Platonism emanating from Plotinus’ Enneads (Ennead means ‘nine’—for the six divisions of the text include nine books each). Plotinus’ disciple Porphyry, incidentally, recorded in his biography that he ‘seemed ashamed of being in the body’ (quoted Plotinus: cii). Plotinus indeed considered matter to be evil (Ennead 1.8.3). His influence reached Boethius (480–524). A follower of the Plotinian Proclus wrote the ninth-century Liber de Causis, which Aquinas commented on, and which Dante quotes, in Convivio 3.4, and in Epistle 10, paragraph 21.20 God is known within a hierarchy, emanating downwards in light, and in and through angels, and, since an angel is a messenger, in language. Such emanations, pluralising themselves, are interrupted by materiality, a point Convivio 3.7 emphasises. The brightness of the cosmos and scriptural language unite. The association of light’s rays with language is implicit in Dante’s chilling phrase ‘the sun was silent’ (Inf. 1.60). No light means no language, no poetry: death. Knowledge returns upwards, with the anagogical power of the symbolic: ideas from the senses convey higher, non-sensuous realities. For Plotinus, the Divinity inheres within three hypostases: the One, the Divine Mind, and the All-Soul. Emanations processing from the One are revealed in what the Divine Mind displays: Real-­ Beings, Intelligences, and Powers, all nameable as the spiritual universe. They are ‘closely like Dante’s conception of the circle of angels and blessed spirits gathered in contemplation and service round the throne of God’, while the All-Soul is ‘the eternal cause of the existence, eternal existence, of the cosmos’ (MacKenna in Plotinus 1991: xxxiii, xxxiv). We can hardly distinguish between God and the hierarchy of being; just as Maximus the Confessor deified Christ, the cosmos, and redeemed creation. Such thinking virtually de-centres God by overthrowing separate categories of thought. The distinction between spirit and matter comes into question. The dissemination, and the downward fragmentation of light and language, weakens the possibility of distinguishing literality and allegory in the Commedia—but it should be axiomatic that reading language ‘literally’ already requires interpretation. Language is figural, and allegorical, and literality is a sense derived from language’s several significations. The literal is only that in being part of the ‘letter’ of ‘literature’. Dionysius’ ‘mystical theology’, from Philo, Gregory of Nyssa, and Proclus, contends that knowing God means entering ‘the darkness of

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unknowing’, a phrase from Exodus 24.15, where God appears in the cloud and Moses goes into it. Thus in ‘Midnight’ by Henry Vaughan (1975: 290): ‘There is in God (some say), / A deep, but dazzling darkness’. True language about ‘the unknown God’ must deny qualities of God, using such negating words as ‘invisible’, ‘infinite’, and ‘ineffable’ (Routh 1989: 45; Rorem 1993: 47–90, 183–236). God must be defined in negatives (apophatically). The Bible’s symbols for God are those that are unlike him; they exist in the realm of ‘dissemblance’ (Didi-Huberman 1995: 45–60). This theology makes knowing less a loving than an intellectual principle, though description of what the soul knows or sees must be in the realm of the unlike—and multiple, neither singly spiritual, nor material. On one side, everything speaks, as with Purgatorio’s annunciating angel (10.34–40), so realistically carved that he seems to be saying Ave. He is messenger and message. Aquinas thought that when immaterial angels assumed a body this ‘had a symbolic character: it signified the future assumption of a human body by the Word of God’ (Aquinas 1968–1969: 1a.50–64, p. 37). Gabriel is allegorical, like his visibility, where his mien embodies his immaterial word; he is a speaking work of art. Mary, responding, ‘avea in atto impressa esta favella / Ecce ancilla Dei’ (had in her bearing stamped this speech, Behold the handmaid of the Lord, 10.43–44). Language, its Latin foregrounding it, is stamped into Mary’s carved posture, her body, as if she needed not to speak. On the other side, language fails. Paradiso notes gaps in memory, creating discontinuities within the self, the loss of a reference-point within the subject. One example, discussed in Chap. 5, comes in canto 23, when Dante cannot describe Beatrice’s smile. Memory fails, and the writing self, which would think in single continuous terms, loses itself. Commentators often divide Dante the pilgrim from the poet writing, separating the partial insight the traveller possesses from the knowledge possessed by the writing subject (a random instance: Murtaugh 1975: 277–284, note 8). If this was possible it would allow autobiographical writing, where finality, centredness, and completion characterises the writing self, beyond the earlier self, which has partial knowledge. But the distinction is unsustainable. The Dante who travels with partial knowledge is a textual creation of his present writing which cannot distinguish the two. Nor can there be a return to a past original experience, for present writing cannot guarantee the purity of a past event, because it writes within its own present. Not only may memory not have registered experience, as happens in Paradiso,

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so that it cannot know what it did not know; in saying ‘I’, there cannot be a self with full presence to itself. The present self has not self-presence. It cannot distinguish itself from the past save by assertion, nor can it claim a separate time for narration putting itself outside the past. These points complicate thought of an origin, of a determinate single knowledge that the subject is acquiring.

Lives Almost Divine, Spirits That Matter Paradiso may be a desire for pure speech, unstained by anything of materiality, as with Mallarmé, where speech moves beyond immediate sensuous auras as if wanting to be analogous to the angelic state, pure language that removes from it the conventional associations borne in poetic language. But Dante’s poetry is driven by the referentiality of what it has left behind, as with its politics, voiced by those within the paradisal and contemplative state, but excited by earthly sensuous reality. Even angels have a desire: contemplation being for them desire of God (Pertile 1997: 148–166). Mary, Beatrice, angels, and the absence of bodies in ever-brightening light witness to a desire for the immaterial, just as resurrection-bodies will not be sexed (Matthew 22.30), yet this is not a single drive. Hence the subtitle: Spirits That Matter. This plays on the book-title to Judith Butler’s Bodies that Matter (1993), where ‘matter’ means ‘that which materialises’ or ‘which become matter’ or simply ‘which is important’. In how it ‘matters’, spirit contrasts with any theoretical discourse of the body. And spirit-­ lives are individual, rich, and complex, and that, in Paradiso questions distinctions between the material and the non-material, and the visible and invisible. Paradisal lives are no less vivid than those of Inferno or Purgatorio; one prompting to start this study was noticing how many lives—whether offstage, and alluded to (outstandingly, Francis), or whether visibly, onstage—come before Dante in Paradiso, with histories that matter. The full subtitle, Lives Almost Divine, Spirits That Matter explores what it means that Paradiso works by allegory, by figural language, however much affirming the reality of what has happened. Dante writes: Nel ciel che più de la sua luce prende fu’ io’ (1.4, 5)

(I have been in the heaven that receives most of his light.)

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‘Fu io’ is deliberate; it summons up St Paul’s mystic vision (compare Inferno 2.28–32, 2 Corinthians 12.2–4, Para. 1.73–75). Dante desires the immateriality and perfection of the Paradisal world, as in such a figure as the Virgin, or angels. Allegory, enforcing dualism between the spiritual and the literal, is essential. The external, material secular world, whose multiplicity problematises thought of an origin, makes everything threaten to shade into the contradiction of equally valid opposites, including the dualism of this Christian heaven. Inferno has been found questionable, at least since the time of Chaucer’s reception of it, on account of its punishments and its pain, which souls feel in their ‘bodies’, but Paradisal souls lack bodies, though desiring them, so making Paradiso an unfinished state, poised between spirit and matter. The desire for one state while engaging with another is symptomatic of split sympathies materialising throughout the text, and within Christian discourse. And there, as Caroline Walker Bynum shows, matter is unignorable. It discloses the divine, with its own strangeness, or foreign quality stubbornly inherent within it. A certain wonder clings to creation, haunts created things, and, for the Middle Ages, associates with the exotic homeliness of saints’ miracles, fuzzing the boundaries between visible and invisible, material and immaterial, obeying chronology or not.21 It is with these conflictual states that the following chapters proceed. It is hard now to think of a text comprising a unity: such could only exist at the level of conscious intention, and apart from unconscious intentions—which it is disingenuous to say we can know nothing of—we know that language makes such purity of intention impossible. Further, criticism has the task of seeing how intentions are realised. But we are in the afterlife of the text. Walter Benjamin distinguishes between reading for the ‘material content’ and the ‘truth content’. While much outstanding work has been done on interpreting Dante’s ‘material content’, it is insufficient; criticism must, more elusively, note a ‘truth content’ growing within the reading of the text, in proportion as the potential for taking it in its own terms recedes, as the text becomes out of time (Benjamin 1996: 297–298). The ‘truth content’, however non-definable, is what in the text speaks to present modernity as the text separates itself from this. The purchase of this in Benjamin is the need to redeem the past; to count nothing lost to history, to let past lives matter in the present, to upturn a history that simply says the past is gone. We may not accept Dante’s scheme of salvation—possibly it is not as unified and self-consistent as is claimed for

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it, and as it claims to be—but we may follow Benjamin’s sense that salvation of the past is essential for a future: the point activating the importance of reading Dante, who speaks always with the dead, and whose concern is always redemption.

Notes 1. I refer to Nietzsche’s Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen (1876), variously translated as ‘Untimely Meditations’ or ‘Thoughts out of Season’, literally thoughts in ‘unmeasurable time’ outside chronological history. 2. I defend here, implicitly, my Dante and Difference (Tambling 1988); see Robey 1990: 116–131. 3. This corresponds to Inferno 10, when Dante was inside the city of Dis, and to Purgatorio 10, when he and Virgil reach the first cornice of Purgatory (Castellani 1981: 221–223). Both moments in those cantiche underlie this one, as if forming its unconscious. 4. For 153, see John 21.11. It is 17 × 9; 17 is the seventh prime number, so special, as 9 is (see Chap. 6). 5. See Anderson 1983: 238–241, Life: 206–220. A recent biography by Santagata 2016, finds Dante at his loneliest in Ravenna, downplays Beatrice (being affirmative about Gemma Donati). It downplays Verona’s significance for the Paradiso, and Cangrande, whom Santagata considers not the Veltro (see chapter 5). It doubts Dante’s authorship of Epistle 10. It assigns Monarchia to the Henry VII period, and thinks that the Commedia was begun in Florence before 1302 as a Guelf work; and that Dante might have been epileptic. Negatively, it effectively gives no reading of the Commedia’s significance; it lacks attention to its theology and puzzles the reader to know why Santagata thought Dante wrote. 6. See Curtius 1953: 221–225, Toynbee 1966: 160–211. Though not mentioned as Dante’s until Filippo Villani’s commentary at the beginning of the Quattrocentro, the Epistle, analysing the opening of Paradiso 1, seems to have been a source for commentary throughout the Trecento. See Luis Jenaro-­MacLennan 1974. On the commentary tradition, see Parker 1993: 25–49; and the entry on Epistle 10 by Albert Russell Ascoli, in Lansing; and Minnis et  al. 1988: 439–519. A case against authenticity on the grounds of the disparity between it and the poem comes from Barański 1991: 26–55. He notes no sense in the Epistle of ‘plurilingualism’, a term from Contini, discussing it in Carlo Emilio Gadda. Indeed, the literal meaning is ‘the state of souls after death’; the allegorical: ‘man according as by his merits or demerits in the exercise of his free will he is deserving of reward or punishment by justice’ (para. 8). Some readers will indeed find

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this a narrowing down, thinking these ‘literal’ and ‘allegorical’ senses hardly adequate. The restricted signification of the definition of ‘tragedy’: ‘at the beginning is admirable and placid, but at the end or issue is foul and horrible … foul like a goat as appears from the tragedies of Seneca’ and of comedy: ‘a rustic song … comedy begins with sundry adverse conditions, but ends happily, as appears from the comedies of Terence … tragedy is high-flown and sublime, while [the style of language] of comedy is unstudied and lowly’ are not the bases for understanding the text. Nor the reason for it being called a comedy ‘for if we consider the subject-matter; at the beginning it is horrible and foul, as being Hell; but at the close it is happy, desirable, and pleasing, as being Paradise. … the style is unstudied and lowly, as being in the vulgar tongue in which even women-folk hold talk’ (paragraph 10). Kelly rejects the Epistle’s authenticity for its definitions of tragedy and comedy; for additional reasons he cites Dronke 1986: 103–111, a thesis developed by Hall and Sowell (1989, see further, correspondence with Teodolinda Barolini, in 6 (1990), 140–144). Kelly debates Hollander 1993 in Kelly 1995: 61–115. 7. Didi-Huberman 1995: 180, taking ‘dissemblance’ from Pseudo-Dionysius. Muir Wright 2006: 76, considers Simone Martini’s ‘Annunciation with Two Saints’ (1333), as the earliest example where the Annunciation was the subject of the entire altarpiece (76). See for the history, Robb 1936: 480–526. 8. Gambero 2005: 157, 191, 376, Pelikan 1990: 122, 144; for the Assumption, 33–35, 206–212. 9. Bruno Nardi, ‘Se la prima materia de li elementi era da Dio intesa’, in Nardi 1983: 197–206. The doctoral thesis of Nardi, one of Dante’s best twentieth-­century readers, was on Siger of Brabant and Dante: see Falzone 2013: 357–373. 10. The neologism implies the loss of a subject/object distinction. Brenda Deen Schildgen (1989: 101–119) notes 26 neologisms in Paradiso; compare Luzzi 2010 and Ferrante 1983. 11. ‘Più o meno’ (more, or less) as a formula connoting acceptance of hierarchical order (see 1.103–104, 109), marks Paradiso; see 1.3, 1.111, 2.69, 4.36, 8.20, 28.65, 77, 32.60; see Barolini 1992: 166–193. 12. Gibbons 2002: 39; and see 39–116, on metaphors in Paradiso. Lansing 1977: 148–168 has excellent discussion of the simile in Paradiso. 13. For more on Eriugena, see Chap. 4. As author of the Periphyseon (c. 860) he is well inside the neo-Platonic tradition which implicitly accepted apokatastasis. 14. See Caplan 1929 and Smalley (1931: 60–76), who distinguish between Augustine’s insistence on the allegorical and Aquinas’ on the literal, as preceding an allegorical understanding. See Smalley 1952.

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15. For Dante and Pseudo-Dionysius, see Prandi 2009: 3–29, especially footnote 15; see Patch 1929, for Boethius, and his derivations from Plotinus, 139, that is, the speech of Cosmos in Enneads 3.2.3., Patch compares Para. 4.49ff. 16. Verdicchio 2010 follows this through, using Convivio 2.13.9–2.14.21. See Paterson 1995: 331–354 for connections between the heavens and the sciences (forms of knowledge), in Convivio 2, chapters 13–14. 17. Monarchia 1.15.3. Reviewing Dante’s sources, Kay cites Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy 3, prose 11, to demonstrate that the one and the good are equivalents, as Dante holds. 18. For Maximus, see Berthold 1985: 10–11 for ‘deification’, and Tollefsen 2008: 66–67. 19. These forms of allegory are discussed in Convivio 2.1, and which form Dante writes has been discussed from Singleton onwards. 20. For the Liber de Causis, a Greek-Arabic text translated in Toledo by Gerhard of Cremona (c.1167–1187) and thought by Albertus Magnus (but not by Aquinas) to be by Aristotle, see D’Ancona 2014: 137–161. 21. Caroline Walker Bynum 2001: 267–286. I assume the relevance of Bynum’s work on Christ as feminine: and the relevance of her book Jesus as Mother (Bynum 1982) on Christ as feminine. That material objects can become fetishised is obvious from the case of Chaucer’s Pardoner’s relics.

Bibliography Anderson, William, 1983, Dante the Maker, London: Hutchinson. Aquinas, Thomas, 1968–1969, Summa Theologiae 1968, ed. Thomas Gilby, London: Blackfriars and Eyre & Spottiswoode. Vol. 9, Angels (Ia. 50–64) ed. Kenelm Foster. Barański, Zygmunt, 1991. ‘Commedia: Notes on Dante, the Epistle to Cangrande, and Medieval Comedy’, Lectura Dantis 8: 26–55. Barolini, Teodolinda, 1990, ‘Q. Does Dante Hope for Virgil’s Salvation. A. Why do we care? For the very reason we should not ask the Question’, (Response to Mowbray Allan), MLN 105: 138–144. ———, 1992, The Undivine Comedy: Detheologising Dante, Princeton: Princeton U.P. Bemrose, Stephen, 2009, A New Life of Dante, Exeter: Exeter U.P. Benjamin, Walter, 1996. Selected Writings Vol 1: 1913–1926. Ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U.P. Berthold, George C. 1985, Maximus the Confessor: Selected Writings, New York: Paulist Press. Boethius of Dacia, 1987, On the Supreme Good, On the Eternity of the World, On Dreams, trans. and introduction by John F.  Wippel, Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies.

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Boyde, Patrick, 1981, Dante: Philomythes and Philosopher: Man in the Cosmos, Cambridge: C.U.P. Bynum, Caroline Walker, 1982, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages, Berkeley: California U.P. ———, 2001, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe New York: Zone Books. Caplan, Harry, 1929, ‘The Four Senses of Scriptural Interpretation and the Medieval Theory of Preaching’, Speculum 4: 282–290. Castellani, Victor, 1981, ‘Heliocentricity in the Structure of Dante’s Paradiso, SP: 211–223. Crabbe, Anna, 1981, ‘Literary Design in the De Consolatione Philosophiae’ in Margaret Gibson (ed.), Boethius: His Life and Thought, and Influence, Oxford: Blackwell: 237–274. Curtius, E.R., 1953, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages trans. Willard R. Trask, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Davis, C.T. 1957, Dante and the Idea of Rome, Oxford: Clarendon. D’Ancona, Cristine, 2014, ‘The Liber de Causis’ in Stephen Gersh (ed.), Interpreting Proclus: From Antiquity to the Renaissance, Cambridge: C.U.P: 137–161. Didi-Huberman, Georges, 1995, Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration trans. Jane Marie Todd, Chicago: Chicago U.P. Dronke, Peter, 1986, Dante and Medieval Latin Traditions, Cambridge: C.U.P. Falzone, Paolo, 2013, ‘Bruno Nardi’s Louvain Dissertation (1911) and the Uneasy Character of Dante’s Philosophy’, Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 75: 357–373. Ferrante, Joan, 1983, ‘Words and Images in the Paradiso: Reflections of the Divine’ in Aldo S.  Bernardo and Anthony L.  Pellegrini, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio: Studies in the Italian Trecento in Honour of Charles S.  Singleton, Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies. Foster, Kenelm, 1985, ‘Dante and Two Friars: Paradiso XI–XII’, New Blackfriars 66: 480–496. Gambero, Luigi, 2005, Mary in the Middle Ages: The Blessed Virgin Mary in the Thought of Medieval Latin Theologians trans. Thomas Buffer, San Francisco: Ignatius Press. Gardner, Edmund, 1913. Dante and the Mystics. London: Dent. Grant, Edward, 1994. Planets, Stars, and Orbs: The Medieval Cosmos 1200–1687. Cambridge: C.U.P. Gibbons, David, 2002, Metaphor in Dante, Oxford: Legenda. Hall, Ralph G. and Madison U. Sowell, 1989, ‘Cursus in the Cangrande Epistle: A Forger Shows his Hand’, Lectura Dantis 5: 89–104. Hegel, G.W.F., 1977, The Phenomenology of Spirit trans. A.V.  Miller, Oxford: Oxford U.P.

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Herbert, George, 1974, The English Poems of George Herbert ed. C.A.  Patrides, London; Dent. Hollander, Robert, 1993, Dante’s Epistle to Cangrande, Ann Arbor: Michigan U.P. ———, 2001, Dante: A Life in Works, New Haven: Yale U.P. Jenaro-MacLennan, L., 1974, The Trecento Commentaries of the Divina Commedia and the Epistle to Can Grande, Oxford: Clarendon. Kay, Richard, 1994, Dante’s Christian Astrology, Philadelphia: Pennsylvania U.P. Kelly, Henry Ansgar, 1988, Tragedy and Comedy from Dante to Pseudo-Dante, Berkeley: California U.P. ———, 1995, Lectura Dantis 14–15: 61–115. Kirkpatrick, Robin, 1978, Dante’s Paradiso and the Limits of Modern Criticism, Cambridge: C.U.P. Koyré, Alexandre, 1957, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U.P. Lacan, Jacques, 1990, Television, trans. Dennis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson, New York: W.W. Norton. ———, 1999, Encore: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality ed. Jacques Alain-Miller, trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W.W. Norton. Lansing, Richard, 1977, From Image to Idea: A Study of the Simile in Dante’s Commedia, Ravenna: Lono Editore. Le Goff, Jacques, 2014, In Search of Sacred Time: Jacobus de Voragine and The Golden Legend, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane, Princeton: Princeton U.P. Lewis, C.S., 1962, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature Cambridge: C.U.P. Luzzi, Joseph, 2010, ‘“As a Leaf on a Branch”: Dante’s Neologisms’, PMLA 125: 322–336. Mallarmé, Stephane, 1998, Oeuvres completes 2 vols, Paris: Gallimard. Mazzeo, Jerome, 1958, Structure and Thought in the Paradiso, Ithaca: Cornell U.P. Mazzotta, Giuseppe, 1993, Dante’s Vision and the Circle of Knowledge, Princeton: Princeton U.P. McInery, Ralph, 2010, Dante and the Blessed Virgin, Indiana: Notre-Dame U.P. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1993, ‘Eye and Mind’ trans. David B.  Smith, in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, Evanston: Northwestern U.P. Minnis, A.J., A.B. Scott, and David Wallace, 1988, Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, c. 1100–c.1375. Oxford: Clarendon. Murtaugh, Daniel M., 1975, ‘“Figurando il paradiso”: The Signs that Render Dante’s Heaven’, PMLA 90: 277–284. Nardi, Bruno, 1983 [1942], ‘Se la prima materia de li elementi era da Dio intesa’, in Dante e la cultura medievale ed. Paolo Mazzantini, Bari: Editori Laterza: 197–206.

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Ordiway, Frank B., 1982, ‘In the Earth’s Shadow: The Theological Virtues Marred’, Dante Studies 100: 77–92. Panofsky, Erwin, 1970, ‘Abbot Suger of St-Denis’ in Meaning in the Visual Arts, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Parker, Patricia, 1993, Commentary and Ideology; Dante in the Renaissance, Durham NC: Duke U.P. Patch, Howard Rollin, 1929, ‘Fate in Boethius and the Neoplatonists’, Speculum 4: 62–72. Paterson, Thomas E., 1995, ‘Secularism and Religiosity in the Central Heavens of Paradiso’, Centennial Review 39: 331–354. Pelikan, Jaroslav, 1990, Eternal Feminines: Three Theological Allegories in Dante’s Paradiso, Brunswick: NJ: Rutgers U.P. Pertile, Lino, 1997, ‘A Desire of Paradise, and a Paradise of Desire’ in Amilcare A.  Ianucci (ed.), Dante: Contemporary Perspectives, Toronto: Toronto U.P.: 148–166. Plotinus, 1991, The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna, introduction by John Dillon, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Prandi, Stefano, 2009, ‘Dante e lo Pseudo-Dionigi: una nuova proposta per l’immagine finale della Commedia’, Lettere Italiane 61: 3–29. Ragland, Ellie, 1995, ‘Psychoanalysis and Courtly Love’, Arthuriana 5: 1–20. Robb, David M. 1936, ‘The Iconography of the Annunciation in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries’, Art Bulletin 18: 480–526. Robey, David, 1990, ‘Dante and Modern American Criticism: Post-structuralism’, Annali d’Italianistica 8: 116–131. Rorem, Paul, 1993, Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary on the Texts and an Introduction to their Influence, Oxford: O.U.P. ———, 1984, Biblical and Liturgical Symbols Within the Pseudo-Dionsysian Synthesis. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies. Routh, Andrew, 1981, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys, Oxford: Clarendon. ———, 1989, Denys the Areopagite, London: Geoffrey Chapman. Rubin, Miri, 2006, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary, London: Allen Lane. Santagata, Marco, 2016, Dante: The Story of his Life. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U.P. Schäfwe, Christian, 2006, The Philosophy of Dionysius the Areopagite: An Introduction to the Structure and the Content of the Treatise on the Divine Names, Leiden: Brill. Schildgen, Brenda Deen, 1989, ‘Dante’s Neologisms in the Paradiso and the Latin Rhetorical Tradition’, Dante Studies 107: 101–119. Schneiderman, Stuart, 1988, An Angel Passes: How the Sexes Became Undivided, New York: New York U.P.

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Smalley, Beryl, 1931, ‘Stephen Langton and the Four Senses of Scripture’, Speculum 6: 60–76. ———, 1952, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, Oxford: Blackwell. Tambling, Jeremy, 1988, Dante and Difference: Writing in the Commedia, Cambridge: C.U.P. ———, 2004, ‘Levinas and Macbeth’s Strange Images of Death’, Essays in Criticism 54: 351–372. ———, 2010, Allegory, London: Routledge: 25–36. Tollefsen, Thorsten Theodor, 2008. The Christocentric Cosmology of St Maximus the Confessor, Oxford: O.U.P. Toynbee, Paget, 1966, Dante, Dantis Alagherii Epistlolae ed. Paget Toynbee, 2nd edition ed. Colin Hardie, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Whitman, Jon, 1987, Allegory: The Dynamics of an Ancient and Medieval Technique, Oxford: Clarendon. Wlassics, Tibor, 1995, (ed.) Lectura Dantis Virginiana III: Dante’s Paradiso: Introductory Readings. Wright, Rosemary Muir, 2006, Sacred Distance: Representing the Virgin, Manchester: Manchester U.P. Vaughan, Henry, 1975, The Complete Poems ed. Alan Rudrum. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Verdicchio, Massimo, 2010, The Poetics of Dante’s Paradiso, Toronto: Toronto U.P.

CHAPTER 2

Within the Shadow of the Earth

Paradiso 1: Light, Apollo, the Sun, the Zodiac In canto 1, Dante declares he has been in the heaven ‘che più de la sua luce prende’—which receives most of God’s light (line 4). Light. Four glosses may be given on this. As ‘la gloria di colui che tutto move’ (1.1), it comes from Aristotle’s ‘unmoved mover’ (Metaphysics 12.7: p. 171); it pierces (penetra) and shines back (risplende, 1.2.).1 The universe resembles God (Para. 1.105), by being successive mirrors passing light down and up, a Neo-Platonist Plotinus-derived conception deriving from the Liber de Causis and Pseudo-Dionysius. For ‘everything that exists produces an image or likeness of itself, which it directs into its surroundings’. Light is what God is, and radiates outwards (Lindberg, 10, quoting Enneads 5.1.6). Albertus Magnus, in De Intellectu et Intelligibili, followed the Liber de Causis, considered then as an Aristotelian sequel to the Metaphysics Convivio 3.7.1–5, which illustrates Albertus’ Neo-Platonism. God, the One, had created, in an emanation, the ‘first created thing’: being (esse), or Intelligence, or Intelligences. Creation, indirectly proceeding from the One, returns to him. Some parts of the created universe shine back with a gold-like brightness, supplementing the light on them; some are diaphanous: some are like earth, reflecting little or nothing back. Light shines ‘più e meno’, more, where there is something in the precious stone that once touched emits light, or fire; here, light exceeds its source. Convivio 3.7.6–7 argues © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Tambling, The Poetry of Dante’s Paradiso, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65628-7_2

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something essential for considering the woman, whom Dante calls Philosophy: in the universe’s intellectual order, the uninterrupted flow of light as goodness is almost continuous, unimpeded, between angel and human, and human and animal. Some humans may seem animals; some are so ‘nobile e di sì alta condizione che quasi non sia altro che angelo’ (‘noble, and of such exalted condition that they are hardly any different from angels’) (3.7.6). Following Aristotle’s Ethics 7.1145a, they may be called divine: e cotale dico io che è questa donna, sì che la divina virtude, a guisa che discende nell’angelo, discende in lei. (Convivio 3.7.7)

(And so I say that that is what this woman is, that the divine virtue descends into her as into an angel.) If that is the case with this woman, Philosophy, Paradiso’s intuition is that human lives may be almost divine. Acknowledgement of such divinity in the Convivio tests both Aristotelianism and Christian orthodoxy, which requires redemption of the soul and the material body. Light. It is, classically, the sun-god, Apollo, whom Dante invokes (13–36) asking his ‘valor’ (14) to let him make manifest ‘l’ombra del beato regno’ (the shadow of the blessed realm, 23), to display what is on the inside. He asks for annihilation of the self, as the lyre-playing god entered Marsyas, taking over, possessing him, breathing within him, making him the flute he had played (Metamorphoses 6. 362–900)2 The arena Dante enters shows his readiness to go under, like Marsyas, the figure of a martyred saint, like Bartholomew. Surrendering is inseparable from the desire for ecstasy in poetry; willing metamorphosis: canto 1 gives precedents in Marsyas, Daphne, and Glaucus, the last metamorphosed into divinity. Ecstasy, like Marsyas, spilt out of his body’s casing, breaks down inside/outside distinctions in the self. Interpenetration and inversion show the will to be possessed by poetry, in another address to Apollo: ‘O divina virtù’. He wants the laurel, which Apollo had loved, and would give (15). The laurel, an apotropaic against lightning, being instinct with fire, associates with the laureola, and the golden aureole around a saint’s head, his outburst of fiery glory. Dante would come to the tree and crown himself with the leaves of the desired Daphne, but the tree manifests divinity, trembling in his presence, possessing Apollonian life:3 Sì rade volte, padre, se ne coglie per trïunfare o cesare o poeta, colpa e vergogna de l’umane voglie,

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che parturir letizia in su la lieta delfica deïtà dovria la fronda peneia, quando alcun di sé asseta. Poca favilla gran fiamma seconda: forse di retro a me con miglior voci si pregherà perché Cirra risponda. (1.28–36)

(So few times, father, is there gathered of it for the triumph either of Caesar or of poet, fault and shame of human wills, that the Peneian leaf should bring forth gladness in the joyful Delphic deity [Apollo] when someone is set athirst for it [i.e. the laurel]. A great fire follows a small spark; perhaps behind me with better voices prayer will be offered so that Cyrrha may respond.) Daphne, metamorphosed into laurel, was daughter of Peneus, the river god. The sun-god (fire) pursues the opposite (water), making the tree of poetry arise; this, and the laurelling Dante wants, which identifies Dante with Daphne, will excite Apollo’s joy, making the god—Cyrrha, and the spirit of Delphi, the prophetic oracle—give birth as Marsyas issuing forth in a new birth. The woman enwrapping Dante and Apollo’s joy are equivalents. The prayer metamorphoses into asking Apollo to become fire, taking over the universe; the muse of fire producing a second sun (63). Light. It is the sun (1. 38, 47, 54, 63, 80; compare Aeneid 3.637). Beatrice’s gazing at the sun makes her eagle-like, the eagle being a solar symbol, associated with lightning as Jupiter’s bird, indeed Jupiter itself (Wittkower 1939: 293–325). Dante too gazes at the sun, sparkling ‘com’ ferro che bogliente esce del foco’ (like iron that boils forth from the fire, 1.60). Metamorphosis follows: Nel suo aspetto tal dentro mi fei, qual si fé Glauco nel gustar de l’erba che ‘l fé consorto in mar de li altri dèi. Trasumanar significar per verba non si poria; però l’essemplo basti a cui esperïenza grazia serba. (1.67–72)

(In looking on her such within I became as made Glaucus in eating the grass which made him the consort in the sea of the other gods. To signify by words passing beyond the human is not possible, therefore the example is enough for whom grace keeps back the experience.)

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He has transcended earth, hearing divine harmonies. Surpassing the human he has entered the sphere of fire, like the sea wherein Glaucus plunged after eating the grass that gave him such a desire that the sea-gods made him one of themselves (Met. 13.917–963). The man whose name means ‘bluish-green’, eats green grass, and enters the blue sphere as a god. These Ovidian metamorphoses differ from Inferno or Purgatorio, where journeying was strenuous, physical, corporeal: here movement changes inner states, while passing beyond the human recalls Christ’s transfiguration (Matthew 18.1–13; see Epistle 10, paragraph 28). Marsyas, Daphne, and Glaucus undergo transhumanising experiences. Everything moves around Dante, passing through the music of the spheres: parvemi tanto allor del cielo acceso de la fiamma del sol, che pioggia o fiume lago non fece alcun tanto disteso. La novità del suono e ‘l grande lume di lor cagion m’accesero un disio … (79–83)

(it seemed to me that the heaven seemed aflame with the fire of the sun that rain nor river never made so extended a lake. The newness of the sound and the great light lit in me a desire for their cause …) The fire makes him burn, as he moves up like fire (92–93, 115). In canto 4 (76–78) fire figures the constantly moving upwards ascent of the soul, as characterised by a firm will; when fire moves towards the moon (115), fire is desire. He is moving to his ‘proprio sito’ (92), like the ‘pelegrin che tornar vuole’ (51—the pilgrim, or falcon, that wills to return). Love, driving everything towards its origin, returns him to his appropriate sphere. In Purgatorio 18.70–75, Virgil discoursed of loves, which arise of necessity in the human, but says there is a noble power (‘nobile virtù’) to restrain, which Beatrice understands as ‘libero arbitrio’. Cantos 4 and 5 pick up Beatrice’s hint: free will is their subject. Light. It is the sun rising: Christ and the material sun together. Dante’s astronomy makes the cosmos a divine image. It joins four circles in three crosses (1.37–42). The horizon is one circle; another is the celestial equator, within the celestial sphere, where the Fixed Stars are. A third is the Zodiac, that band of constellations in the celestial sphere, crossing the celestial equator at an angle of 23 degrees, shown in Fig. 2.1. Chapter 3 describes how the sun moves through the Zodiac, or the ecliptic; but for now, we remember that the Zodiac intersects the Equator as it passes

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THE REALM OF

THE CELESTIAL SPHERE NORTH CELESTIAL POLE Equinoctal colure

ancer stial C Cele

b

a

c d

Celestial E quat or

`

e

Winter Solstice

EARTH

_

f

Summer Solstice

^ g

i

orn apric Tropic of C

SOUTH CELESTIAL POLE

ZODIAC SIGNS

^

_

`

a

Aries

Taurus

Gemini

Cancer

b

c

d

e

Leo

Virgo

Libra

Scorpio

f

g

i

Sagittarius Capricorn Aquarius

Pisces

Fig. 2.1  Dante’s universe: the poles, the equator, the Zodiac, and the colures

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between the tropics (Cancer and Capricorn). The sun spirals West-East through that band, being now at Aries, the Ram, a ‘miglior’ (better) star-­ sign as Chaucer’s ‘colerike hoote signe’ (The Squire’s Tale 51). It is vigorous; the sun now marks the world, the earthly wax, in its own warm mode (1.127–129). The fourth circle is the equinoctal colure (Orr: 271–272). This, as a circle, connects the North and South poles of the celestial sphere, going through Aries and Libra (March 21, September 21). The solstitial colure (not alluded to here) connects the poles, and the places when the sun is at the solstices: Cancer (June 21), and Capricorn (December 21). The sun comes over the horizon and makes a cross with the other three circles: a ‘harmony of opposites’ as Joan Ferrante (1984:255) calls it, seeing Paradiso as the description of an ideal society.

Dante’s Astronomy: The Moon In Plato’s Timaeus, the Demiurge creates the material cosmos, that is, the body of the world, unique, uniformly spherical—the perfect shape—rotating on its axis, unchanging (33b). This contrasts with the soul of the cosmos (34c), comprising Existence (ousia), the Same, and Difference, within a unity (Timaeus 2 35b, 20). The Demiurge marked the soul, a pliable strip, with a series of subdivisions, whose numbers create musical harmony (36). The Demiurge cut the strip down the middle, placed them crosswise to form the letter X, and bent both into two circles, the Same, corresponding to the sidereal equator (in the Fixed Stars), and the Different, corresponding to the seven heavens seen in relation to the Zodiac, and moving in an opposite, East-West direction. Timaeus 36 adds that the creator inserted the material world inside the soul, which ‘entered as a deity upon a never-ending life of intelligent activity, spinning within itself for all time. The soul is invisible … and … characterized by reasoning and harmony’. The cosmos, the World Soul, combines Reason and Harmony (36e), and contains the material cosmos. Its motions, and its numbers, are moving images of eternity, forms of time whose measurable cycles imitate eternity (37d). Cornford (1937: 103) stresses that the Greeks thought of time as turning in a circle. Days, nights (measured by the stars in the constellations of the Fixed Stars), months (measured by the moon), and years (measured by the sun) are ‘aspects of time as it imitates eternity and cycles through the numbers’

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(38a). Eternity, then, is ‘precisely this remaining always selfsame, the heavenly bodies always circle back to the same’: that being time (Sallis 1999: 83). Plato’s Demiurge ignited the sun ‘to enable … creatures to become numerate by studying the revolution of identity and sameness’ (39b). But time is allegorical; it works inside the creation but has no meaning outside it. Dante follows Plato on the turning of the spheres wherein the planets move, in canto 2, discussing the markings on the moon. If the moon as a sphere is ethereal in make-up (22.132); whence come its ‘segni bui’, dark marks, or signs (2.49)? They recall the folk-belief that it might be Cain’s dwelling-place, who committed the first murder. The moon is called Cain in Inferno 20.124, where it is the guide to time passing. Beatrice contradicts Dante’s sense-informed view that the moon comprises bodies ‘rari e densi’ (60–66). That was what Genius, the priest-like figure, told Nature, in the thirteenth-century poem, Le Roman de la Rose, when Nature complains how earthly things, meant for good, have gone awry. She describes creation, the progress of the heavens, and the planets, and the light and dark parts of the moon in ways like Dante’s Averroist view in Convivio 2.13.9.4 Nature demonstrates that the moon has dense and rare qualities, because the planets form a unity in creating entities out of the four warring elements, and if they are not good, ‘it is because of the defect in their materials’ (Roman 16974). Paradiso rejects this dualism. Beatrice says that the eighth sphere, of the Fixed Stars, possesses different qualities and quantities (76), and that plurality implies different virtues, originating from purposive ‘principi formali’: formative principles. ‘Matter’ for Beatrice is explicable through that which is spiritual. The Primum Mobile turns inside the Empyrean, and everything within the eight spheres turns, following its diffused virtue. The Fixed Stars, the sphere closest to the Primum Mobile divides up this virtue amid ‘diverse essenze’ (116), that is, angelic beings within it. The spheres below, that is, the seven heavens, direct the distinctive qualities emanating from there, as organs of the body of the universe (see lines 133–135), distributing what came from above and passing it down, step by step. Beatrice then goes in reverse, from the planets back to the Fixed Stars and the Primum Mobile: Lo moto e la virtù d’i santi giri come dal fabbro l’arte del martello, da’ beati motor convien che spiri,

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e ‘l ciel cui tanti lumi fanno bello, de la mente profonda che lui volve prende l’image e fassene suggello. (2.127–132)

(The movement and the virtue of the sacred wheels, like the art of the hammer from the blacksmith, must be a breathing out from the blessed movers, and the heaven which so many lights make beautiful [see lines 64, 112, 130] takes the image and makes the seal from the profound mind which turns it.) The seven planetary heavens, the wheels, are turned, like a hammering work, by a breathing out from the angelic Intelligences—the Movers within the Fixed Stars, who have already been imprinted (stamped—the work of the hammer) by the ‘mente profunda’ within, and making turn, the Primum Mobile, that which is enclosed by the Empyrean, the heaven of ‘divina pace’ (112), with which it is in love. Durling and Martinez stress that these lines derive from Boethius’ Consolation 3 metrum 9, which themselves adopt the Timaeus, Plotinus, and Proclus. The image the Fixed Stars receive from the imprint expresses what is in the One. The divine image emanates downwards. From that image, the Intelligences make the seal, making every star imprinted, stamped, ready to be impressed on what is below. The Intelligence within the Fixed Stars multiplies its virtue through the stars. Lines 142–144 state the principle: the virtue makes a different alloy with each precious planetary body below it, down to the moon, as the spirit animates the body. The moon’s marks are signs of a communicating joy, as eyes convey brightness to those seeing them. The marks show differences meeting, the virtue that descends through the spheres, and the material of the moon. Diverse virtues come from the ‘formal principio’, the ‘intrinsic cause which determines the specific form’ of something (Singleton). They inform the stars with the dark and the clear as a speaking sign revealing how the Intelligences distribute bounty: that is, differently. Inferno and Purgatorio had no sense of influence exerted by place upon the person: for example, Farinata gives character to the sixth circle of hell, not the other way round. But in Paradiso 2, lives are produced in their unique difference from the influences of these virtues, rejecting Macrobius’ view that souls descend from the spheres, picking up qualities from the planets—from Saturn, reasoning powers; Jupiter, the power to act; Mars, fervour of spirit; the Sun, feeling and imagination; Venus, sense experience; Mercury, hermeneutical power; and the Moon, power to plant and nourish bodies (Klibansky: 155–159).

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The Moon The Moon’s heart is a cloud, ‘lucida, spessa’ (lucid, dense), and ‘solida e pulita’ (solid, polished), like a diamond (‘adamante’) in sunlight. As an ‘etterna margarita’ it receives light into itself, as water receives a ray of light, remaining united in itself. It is, then, cloud, diamond, pearl, and water interpenetrated with sunlight, the hardest and the softest matter together. ‘Margarita’ implies a flower, a pearl, and a name. Two Margarets appeared in the Golden Legend (GL 1.368–370, 2.232–233), both dedicated to virginity. One disguised herself as a monk to preserve her virginity, naming herself Pelagius (Greek: sea)—whence the association with the name Marina, and ‘the pearl of great price’ (Matthew 13.45, 46). In Shakespeare’s Pericles, the chaste Marina in the brothel echoes these saints’ lives; she is called Mariana (Pericles 4.3.33 Quarto), like the Maria of Paradiso 3.122. The pearl associates with the sea and with generation from dew from heaven, so imaging the Annunciation. Ambiguities about how the Moon may be entered question how matter may be inserted into matter, and how Christ could be man and God. The English fourteenth-century poem, Pearl, has as subject the death of a child—the Pearl—and her appearance to the Dreamer as ‘that precios perle withouten spotte’ (12). But the Dreamer cannot cross the river to the Pearl-maiden, his body being an impediment (1089–1092). The moon may have marks, but as the pearl, it is ‘withouten spotte’. Recalling the Roman context of Diana, virgin goddess of the moon, it has another strangeness: housing nuns who marry and in one case become a mother. But perhaps Diana was a mother, as goddess of fertility, like Diana of the Ephesians (Acts 19.28). Ambiguities remain for exploration, after considering these nuns: Piccarda and Costanza, who draw attention to women in Paradiso, just as the moon itself is feminine. For example, Juliet tells Romeo: O swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon That monthly changes in her circled orb Lest that thy love be likewise variable. (Romeo and Juliet 2.2.109–111).

She projects onto Romeo the inconstancy commonly associated with women, influenced by the moon. Does Dante’s Moon speak for women? Since the woman’s position in patriarchy makes her a split subject, required to be both ‘virgin’, to recoup the sin Eve committed, and yet

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wife and mother, we should start with the contradictions inherent in considering the moon and with Dante’s trope of the Muses pointing out the bears: Ursa Major and Ursa Minor (2.9). These are Callisto and her son Arcas. Callisto, called Elice, named as the Great Bear in Fasti 2.108, is part of the theme of the lustful in Purgatorio for after the souls have cried out, as a reproach to themselves, the Virgin’s words at the Annunciation, ‘Virum non cognosco’ (Purgatorio. 25.128: I do not know a man), they then cry: ‘Al bosco / si tenne Diana, ed Elice caccionne / che di Venere avea sentito il tòsco’ (Purg. 25.130–132: Diana kept to the wood, and chased out Helice, who had felt the poison of Venus). Callisto, raped by Jupiter in Arcadia, was chased thence by Diana when discovered to be pregnant, after nine moons; she was metamorphosed into a bear. Her 16-year-old son, who gives his name (‘a bear’), to Arcadia, was about to kill her, but was similarly transformed; mother and son becoming constellations. The mother who is the bear may be behind the vengeful bear of The Winter’s Tale (3.3.57), killing the man who exposed her child, Perdita, even though Shakespeare’s bear is male. The relation between bears and revenge appears at Inf. 26.34 where again, two bears are specified. There may be a primal history of the rape of one dedicated to chastity, under Diana’s protection. Dante evokes the moon’s classical associations and of Arcadian protection embodied in St Clare (1194–1253), who is alluded to in 3.98–105: where we hear that a ‘perfect life’ and ‘high merit’ ‘inciela’ (‘enheaven’—a neologism) her there. The heavens protect the virgin sisters (3.46). Those of the order of Clare ‘si vegghi e dorma’ (wake and sleep) with Christ the bridegroom; a strange eroticism. Writing psychoanalytically about angels, Stuart Schneiderman aligns them with the virginal maternal feminine: virginity being valued as the essence of female virtue. ‘Both the type of mother Christianity venerates and the virginal girl have this in common: both are untouched by the phallus. That a virgin becomes a mother is a singular event. For virgins the Church offered not only sisterhood in the convent but the possibility of a symbolic or superior motherhood, one that was not defined in terms of phallic power, but rather in terms of identification with another mother’ (Schneiderman: 62). These ambiguities show in Diana, hunting goddess, goddess of chastity, the Moon, and Proserpine, or Hecate, goddess of eternal lamentation (Inferno 9.44, 10.80). In that way, like Piccarda and Constance, she and her avatars pervade Dante’s three regions. Proserpine as a rape-victim brings out an ambiguity about Diana’s chastity or virginity, making virginity an unsettled category, even related to the point that the vir within

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‘virgin’ contains the word ‘man’, a point upsetting the division between the non-material virgin and phallic materiality. As Diana, an image for Mary, was goddess of childbirth, perhaps she and Callisto are dual aspects of the same person—impossible resolutions of the virgin/mother paradox, a recognition that these states cannot be seen in separation. The historical Peter Damian asked whether God could restore virginity, arguing that he could, since Mary’s giving birth put her on both sides of the virgin/ mother divide (Resnick: 125–134). According to Augustine, Mary must have sworn herself to virginity before the Annunciation: it was no accident that she was and remained a virgin; her words ‘Ecce ancilla Dei’ (Luke 1.38) accept the overriding of her vow and its continuation in another form (Otter: 76). Diana represents a violent reaction against male power in rape, her violence apparent in her hunting, and an independence of masculinity, which Jupiter thwarts with Callisto: maiden companion of Diana, and bear—what is hunted and worshipped simultaneously. It even seems, from Pausanias, that Diana and the Bear were to be equated, both being called Callisto/Calliste (‘the fairest’—Wall: 10–25). The souls crying out in Purgatorio 25 will to separate Diana from Venus’ poison as an ‘other’ force; yet Paradiso places Diana, as the moon, beneath the power of Venus, in a strange hierarchy, which elevates Cunizza above these nuns. The same sense of deficiency runs through A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where Hermia is threatened with the convent: For aye to be in shady cloister mewed, To live a barren sister all your life, Chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon. (1.1.70–73)

As Dante associates the moon with water (2.35, 26, 3.11, 12, 123), so does Shakespeare, speaking of ‘Cupid’s fiery dart / Quenched in the chaste beams of the watery moon’ (2.1.161, 162), and of the moon’s ‘watery eye’, weeping over an ‘enforced chastity’ (3.1.175–177): watery, but not just because controlling tides (compare The Winter’s Tale 1.2.1). It is worth noting that Venus, too, is identifiable with wet elemental qualities, though warm (Kay 1994: 311). Canto 3: Piccarda and Costanza: Florence and the Empire Quali per vetri trasparenti e tersi, o ver per acque nitide e tranquille, non sì profonde che i fondi sien persi,

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tornan d’i nostri visi le postille debili sì, che perla in bianca fronte non vien men tosto a le nostre pupille; tali vid’io più facce a parlar pronte … (3.10–16)

(As through transparent and clear glass, or else through waters limpid and tranquil, not so deep that the bottom is dark, the imprint returns to our sight, so faint, that pearl on a white forehead does not come less hard to our eyes; so I saw many faces eager to speak…) Dante assumes that he is looking in a mirror and turns to see the faces he imagines behind him, contrasting himself with Narcissus, who, looking into water, beheld his reflection, which he thought the face of another. Plotinus warns against taking physical beauty—‘shapes of grace’—for reality: [we] must know them for copies, vestiges, shadows, and hasten away towards That they tell of. For if anyone follows what is like a beautiful shape playing over water—is there not a myth telling in symbol of such a dupe, how he sank into the depths of the current, and was swept away to nothingness? (Plotinus: 91).

Narcissus typifies the one for whom the self and physical beauty are the same and his error must be turned from. The opposite error, Dante’s, which, because it is unusual, implies that the error of Narcissus is the prevalent and ruling one, especially in love, is not to be able to see beauty as ‘other’, as Paradisal. What seems to be in front of Dante is there; the pearl, of which we have spoken, is real and adorns the woman as ‘other’, as different from masculine expectation. The image speaks for a double reality—physical and non-physical together. In contrast to the prevalent error of Narcissus, there is the enigma of visibility—the invisible in the visible. Constance, and Piccarda, who took the name Constance, show a diversity of possibilities for life and the afterlife (Lansing 1987: 63–77; Shapiro 1975: 54–590). Piccarda’s presence recalls her brothers: Forese, on the cornice of gluttony, and the never-named Corso, destined for Inferno as Purgatorio 24.12ff indicates. Piccarda, forced from her nunnery by Corso, her Black Guelf brother, and made to marry the Florentine nobleman Rosselino della Tosa, recalls the violence practised against Francesca, and La Pia (Inferno 5 and Purgatorio 5). But as virginal, she seems not only to

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bring out the male violence this excites, but also to be like a medieval virgin-­martyr, where mutilation and beauty co-existed, the martyr being distinguished by the mode of torture applied to her (Winstead: 5–10). Further, she associates with Dante, since Corso Donati bore responsibility for Dante’s exile from Florence, the Guelf city-state. But Piccarda speaks of another ‘splendour’ on her right, evoking consideration of a more powerful political body: è la luce de la gran Costanza che del secondo vento di Soave generò ‘l terzo e l’ultima possanza. (3.118–120) ([this] is the light of the great Constance, who from the second blast of Swabia generated the third and last power.)

This is Costanza d’Altavilla (1154–1195), heiress of the Norman house of Tancred who had conquered Sicily and Southern Italy in the eleventh century. Posthumously born to the Norman king Roger II (1130–1154), she was forced to marry Henry VI (Emperor 1191–1197), son of the Swabian Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa (ruled 1155–1190). Her son was Frederick II, whom Dante admired as the last emperor of the Romans (Convivio 4.3.6), and damned (Inf. 10.119). Medieval Sicily was ‘an essential possession for anyone who would rule the Mediterranean world’ (Runciman 1961: 15). Its last Norman king was William the Good (1166–1189: see cantos 20.60–66), but it became Hohenstaufen with Constance’s marriage. Frederick’s illegitimate son was Manfred (1231–1266), by 1261 ruling much of Italy through his influence, as for example, at the battle of Montaperti (Dunbabin 1998: 130, and 83). His power prompted the French Pope Urban IV (1261–1264) to let Charles of Anjou (1226–1285) invade, killing Manfred at Benevento. Manfred in Purgatorio 3.113 remembers Constance. His daughter, another Constance, married Peter III of Aragon; his nephew, Conradin, was executed by Charles at Naples in 1268, after the battle of Tagliacozzo.5 Hence Costanza introduces Paradiso’s Empire theme. Frederick’s and Manfred’s deaths concluded Ghibelline hopes insofar as these were identified with the Hohenstaufen. Promising beginnings, their ruthlessness and sprezzatura apparent here, produce failure. Dante laments the Emperor’s absence from ‘serva Italia’ in Purgatorio 6.97–126, comprehending both Rudolph of Habsburg, Emperor from 1273 to 1291 (seen in Purg. 7.91–96), and his son Albert, the uncrowned elected

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Emperor. Paradiso 6 corresponds to Purgatorio 6, in detailing the Roman nature of the Empire. Whereas Purgatorio 6 was satirical complaint, even mentioning the absence of a Justinian (6.89), Justinian himself speaks in Paradiso 6. The Emperor of Paradiso, however, is Henry VII of Luxembourg (1275–1313), victim of the hatred of the French, the Guelf Florentines, and the Papacy. Elected king of the Romans in 1309, he entered Italy in October 1310, with the apparent, but deceptive, encouragement of the French Pope Clement V (1305–1314), being crowned in Milan on 6 January 1311, and in Rome on 29 June 1312, but—significantly—at the Lateran, not St Peter’s. Opposed by Italy’s Guelf cities, fever killed him while besieging Siena. Barbara Reynolds concludes her Introduction to Paradiso commenting on Monarchia and on Paradiso’s stress on justice, saying that the cantica ‘is poignant with the thought of what might have been if Henry of Luxembourg had succeeded, and exultant with the poet’s faith that one day justice will triumph over greed’, quoting canto 27.142–148.6 Such belief was not sustainable through any nameable objective cause: it supplements the sense of Paradiso being not solely joyful, but a time of waiting, deferral, and anger. Nuns contrast with Saturn’s monks, also ‘margherite’ (22.29), whose Peter Damiani had to leave monastic life to become a Cardinal (21.124–126). Saturn, associated with melancholy, and so slowness, is anticipated when Piccarda uses the word ‘tarda’ (slow, 3.51). The Moon even makes Dante slow (Para. 3.130), and it associates with Piccarda saying that there was an emptiness in her vow—her vows (‘voti’) were ‘vòti [empty] in alcun canto’ (57)—they would not make up a complete canto. Similarly, the Moon seems the least desirous of the planets to catch up with the Primum Mobile (28, 30). This canto, devoted to failed virginity and to the nunnery, shows the least passion, the least desire, as if that was the nuns’ inherent limitation; similarly, it makes the nuns’ ambition impossible, for we see not nuns but those who have failed in the effort. Perhaps vows cannot be full, but must contain an absence, in attempting to relate to a future, not a present; perhaps that makes this canto Paradiso’s shortest. The first-seen souls in Hell were envious, angry (Inf. 3.103–105). Piccarda accepts her position (3.70–72). She contrasts with Mary, whom her farewell evokes: Così parlommi, e poi cominciò ‘Ave, Maria’ cantando, e cantando vanio come per acqua cupa cosa grave. (3.121–123)

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(So she spoke to me, and after beginning singing Hail Mary, vanished singing, like a heavy thing through deep water.) Disappearance erases the possibility of being seen, as the veil shields her (114) with a prayer heard across the enjambment, and the echoing, ‘cantando’, filling out the verbal pun of line 57, intensifying as she fades. Ave Maria quotes Gabriel’s greeting to Mary (Luke 1.28) and Mary’s obedient response and virtual vow (contrast Para. 3.57), itself therefore a sacrifice. The vow recalls the canto’s references to the will (44, 70, 71, 75, 80, 81) and, outstandingly, the treble repetition in lines 84 and 85, where ‘e’n la sua volontade è nostra pace’ approaches Mary’s words. Canto 4: On the Will Dante has met souls whose will to obey was inconstant, prompting something in him (canto 4), as if Piccarda’s words resonated with him; it produces the image of a man paralysed in will, caught between two foods, uncertain which to take. This is supplemented by two similes giving a dread/attraction tension, which implies the double forms of desire, including its irresolution in acting. It silences Dante, and Beatrice speaks as already knowing—like all souls in Paradiso, and in contrast to the other cantiche—what he is thinking, and the implications of his thoughts. She is like the Daniel of Daniel  Chap. 2, lifting Nebuchadnezzar from the ire making him cruel unjustly (‘inguistamente’: the word—repeated in line 67—anticipates the heaven of Jupiter). Daniel could interpret the dream Nebuchadnezzar had forgotten, and for which he killed the Babylonian soothsayers, as if he was bestial, like the wolves, or the dog, slaves to appetite. Much is going on unconsciously, and Beatrice sees that Dante has two unequally significant but different questions: 1. Why do the nuns have less reward (being in the Moon) if they persisted in the right will, only being victims of violence which took them from the nunnery? 2. Do souls return to their appropriate star, as indicated in Plato’s Timaeus? These questions express deep, even unconscious, conflicts which, while not mentioning free will, make that the subject of these cantos. Beatrice’s words, discussed in Chap. 1, that all blessed souls are in the Empyrean, and only allegorically present in the moon, reject the Timaeus,

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where souls are created from the matter comprising the world soul, and to each is assigned a star; they then enter bodies, and the souls that make good use of their allotted time return to dwell on the star with which it had been paired (Timaeus 2 41d–42b, 31). As Beatrice circumscribed Plato’s influence in canto 2, she again qualifies him, rejecting an argument that assigns the stars as causes for humans going astray. Beatrice concedes, however, that Plato might only have meant that divine influences mediated through the agency of the planets, additional, then, to the will of the human, return to the star (Schildgen 2015: 95–113). Souls, however, are in the Empyrean, not in the planets. But Beatrice rejects the sense of an indirect creation by God of human souls, as taught in the Timaeus, which idea produced misunderstanding and idolatry (4.61–63). These pagan gods are lesser, not responsible for creation; the Timaeus calls them daemons (40d). Timaeus’ account of creation sees it as a contest between Reason/Intelligence and Ananke: Necessity (48a), the latter an agent of an unfavourable destiny, the force that explains why the world goes awry; Necessity includes within it a ‘wandering cause’ (48a), that is, chance. Timaeus on creation introduces a third thing, a receptacle, or nurse, or mother, itself characterless, indefinable and almost unintelligible, but preceding creation. This is the chora (52a), which gives form in that it holds things, as a receptacle. But it precedes description, since not having form. The chora cannot be said to have presence. It is the origin and the abyss together, even identifiable with Necessity (Sallis: 123, 131). It precedes even the prime matter of the universe. The Timaeus is strange in both setting up Platonism, and Neo-Platonism, and, in Sallis’ terms, in disrupting division between spirit and matter, the real and the apparent, through the category of the chora. It is a third thing, which is nonetheless feminine, disturbing binary categories by being an additional feminine (because of its association with the womb). As this, the chora is discussed by Julia Kristeva, for whom it helps in thinking beyond the symbolic co-ordinates of language, as more like the trace, the ‘semiotic’, ‘no more than the place where the subject is both generated and negated’ (Kristeva 1984: 28). The chora precedes but underlies the first state wherein the subject emerges, and contradicts its belief in its autonomy. Beatrice safeguards Free Will against Necessity, hence she qualifies Plato, but the Timaeus resists that binary neatness, as perhaps Dante does. It seems uncoincidental that the Moon receives Dante and Beatrice, as a passive receptacle; as that is what may be aligned with the womb, with women’s time, which after all, gives it, in patriarchal thought, its

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inconstancy. That nexus of ideas associates with the mother, though in no way describable systematically. If the Moon associates with birth, as Saturn, the complement, with old age, the seven heavens may correspond to the course of life: Shakespeare’s ‘seven ages’ of man comes from similar thinking. The Moon and the convent are not the chora, but may gesture towards it since the chora disturbs single categories, including that of place (how can two objects be in one space?). Derrida discusses the chora in a way giving several indirect relevancies to these cantos. It is ‘that “something” which is not a thing, puts in question these presuppositions and these distinctions’ (of genus, species, individual, type, schema, etc.; Derrida 1995, 96). He connects the chora with giving, via Heidegger’s sense of life as the event that gives (es gibt), which he finds as a concept implicit in negative theology (96). It further connects with receiving.7 Further, he quotes Plato’s mother-image for the chora: ‘this strange mother who gives place without engendering’ (124), cannot be considered as an origin, but seems so virginal, that it does not even have ‘the figure of a virgin’ (126). It cannot be conceptualised, defined, and it questions what is meant by virginity, since this is part of a patriarchal concept or law. Last, Derrida distinguishes the chora, which Aristotle defined as matter (Physics: 4.2b, 81), from the concept of matter itself (Derrida 1995: 127; Kalligas 2014: 1.304–308 on matter in Plotinus). The chora questions the form/matter distinction, implying that matter itself may not be so easily defined as thought by Aristotle—who began the philosophical task of discussing it as hule. The chora is an attempt to think in a way making questionable the immaterial/material distinction, which Paradiso seems to maintain. Instead, it allows for double states, as even virginity may be, as like the moon a double, or uncertain state. It pushes at all commanding absolute distinctions, undoing them. Hence the convent, a place of hiding for women in a refuge against patriarchal power—as virginity might be a choice for women wanting enclosure (Wogan-Browne 2001: 19–56). Virginity might figure the separateness of women, a point reinforced in fin’amor—and be a third space, neither public nor merely withdrawing from life—but still open to violation. It produces the shame that was glimpsed at in Callisto, the raped virgin being forced to misrecognise herself as a bear: a fearful state where the woman says, like Piccarda, ‘Iddio si sa qual poi mia vita fusi’ (God knows what my life became, 3.108), as though blaming only herself.

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Cantos 4 and 5: Vows and Free Will In canto 4.82–105, Beatrice speaks of people whose will to fidelity remained intact despite violence, mentioning the Christian St Laurence, burned on the grid, and the pagan Mucius Scaevola, burning his hand (4.82–84; for the latter, compare Convivio 4.5.13, Monarchia 2.5.14). Laurence, brought from Spain to Rome, was named for the laurel, which Dante sought, as a victor: as a figure of Dante’s own will, and since the laurel wards off lightning (GL 2.63), his burning becomes sacred suffering. Mucius, sacrificing his right hand (with which a vow is made), becomes a figure expressing opposites: the body lets the body, which failed in its blow, burn, as if turning against it as a traitor or perjurer. The implication of sacrifice upon an altar was present in both and anticipates themes within Mars. But the affirmation of a single will, described as like a fire, is, in both, haunted by double meanings, and allying two Roman spirits is not coincidental. Their response to testing displayed their will-power, while Piccarda’s and Constance’s showed their lack of that. Hence Piccarda’s speeches are understated, like her praise of St Clare; she is almost passive. She explains little to Dante, above saying what she and others in the Moon feel: explanation comes from Beatrice, uniquely in the Moon. Feminine passivity, if it is that, required in the nunnery, contrasts with Constance’s fortune outside it, generating the third ‘blast’ from Swabia: energy in masculine form. Beatrice now covers unmeet adherence to a vow: people doing what they should not against their will. It produces more violence, as in Alcmaeon, who killed his mother (4.103–105), obeying a conditioned will (that of his father), not an absolute will, which would not sanction murder. Alcmaeon was the victim, with irreconcilable demands laid on him, becoming both ‘dutiful and wicked’ in his deed (Met. 9.407–408). It is not made easier that his mother’s pride was condemned in the engraved images of Purgatorio 12.49–51. Beatrice says: Alcmaeon ‘per non perder pietà, si fé spietato’ (not to lose piety, he made himself impious; 105). The contradictoriness shows in the line’s balance and contrast, between piety/ impiety, and losing/becoming something else: religious and irreligious, like the nuns; becoming a minus, then, in becoming not religious, and approaching the bestiality of the wolves noted in the exordium. The line’s complexity replays Dante’s irresolution in lines 1–12. The gender of the males who persisted with the fire, and the gender of Alcmaeon, at the

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demand of his father, killing his mother, and so her, and his, femininity, must be weighed. The males show enough, or overmuch will; the women insufficient. Both offend the mother, who is evoked in Diana. The questioning which holds Dante in canto 4’s exordium is not yet resolvable. Dante asks what Piccarda had meant when saying Constance remained loyal to her vow. The logic of the two wills meant that Constance, though remaining loyal in heart to the nunnery (showing her absolute will), married and lived outside (obeying the conditioned will). Unlike Alcmaeon, she chose the compromise, but the examples are incompatible. Alcmaeon exhibits the complexity of judgments that the classical world induces; Constance’s indecision may be more modern. Perhaps freedom to choose may be less a matter of the will than appears; too many other factors are involved. Perhaps the exercise of free will by itself was only possible with virtuous Romans or ancient Christians. Hence, Dante persists with a question voiced in a new initiative: can an unfulfilled vow be compensated for by another act? This crosses into canto 5, with the repeated ‘io veggio ben’ (4.124: Dante speaking), and 5.7—Beatrice, beginning an exordium that was not introduced, and summarising Dante’s question (1–15), and answering in a speech (parlar) called a canto (16), though it resembles a written discourse (note ‘di sopra’ (48)—that is, ‘what was said above’). This calls free will God’s gift, which a vow sacrifices. A person under a vow can, however, alter its composition (52–72), as when the vow is foolish, as with Jephthah (Book of Judges) and with  Agamemnon—two instances of folly, slaying their virgin daughters, making virginity the patriarchy’s preserve, whether fetishised, overridden, or destroyed. The fathers sacrificed the wrong things: their daughters, not their male vows, which, fetishised as to be kept at all costs (like virginity), express their egotism. They do not sacrifice their free will; their vows express their wilfulness. Jephthah’s daughter asked to bewail her virginity for two months (Judges 11.37); Iphigenia sacrificed to Diana when she was brought to Aulis, thought that she was to be betrothed to Achilles. These Biblical and classically derived women anticipate Piccarda and Costanza. Masculine violence begins with women, in relation to either their virginity or their motherhood, as with Alcmaeon. The will, because it never acts alone, must be supplemented by the vow. Vows and the will unite in the Moon, in association with virginity, because if that could be kept, and could possess a single meaning, it would express, uniquely, the absolute

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will. For ‘refusal to marry mirrored the right of a human being, the possessor of a pre-existent utterly free soul, not to surrender its liberty to the pressures placed upon the person by society’ (Brown 1988: 170). Voluntary virginity as fulfilled expresses a supreme identity, and the desire for that, but psychoanalysis might see that wish as highly masculine, expressing a phallic will. Hence those who maintained their will are males, some militaristic. Virginity cannot be regarded as a single and indivisible thing and Catholic Christianity knows that (a) since the virgin is the mother, and (b) because virginity means waking and sleeping with Christ. Sacrifice of the will, as in entering the cloister, may express the will as egotistic. The text expands on the ambiguity of this: even being in the convent or being forced from it cannot be read in one way only. Piccarda from her account ended miserably. Constance’s departure from the convent was essential, and since she did not give birth to Frederick until she was  forty-one, it seems to be little short of miraculous, a special birth, evoking the comparable stories of Joachim and Anna. But Paradiso notably presents births as miraculous as with Dominic’s mother (12.58–60), and Cacciaguida’s (15.130–135). Beatrice gives a corollary, aimed at stopping a Jephthah-like folly, or indeed people thinking that vows are essential to salvation. Believing the latter would allow people to be caught by ‘mala cupidigia’ (79)—for example, by inducements by mendicant friars to make vows for financial reasons, which contrasts with the sober vow-keeping of the Jews. Such greed marks the church’s corruption. Cantos 4 and 5 show Beatrice rejecting those who would buy up souls, and get them to make vows. Such materialistically based vows and promises differ from the sacrifice of the will made by such commitments as voluntarily entering the cloister. Beatrice defends the sanctity of the vow, in defending free will, doing so on behalf of women. These cantos say much for the feminine, give a space for the woman, which, while the least in Paradiso, shows how she has never been a free subject, since her material being has always been subject to a silencing patriarchy. In canto 6, deeds were done for the sequent honour and fame (6.112–115).8 And yet femininity connects the Moon and Mercury, because that too is a ‘margarita’ (6.127). Issues raised by Piccarda and Costanza reappear in Mercury. The Moon evokes beginnings which become failure; Justinian’s single speech shows energy and dynamism.9

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Mercury Cicero said that Mercury was associated with giving laws to the Egyptians (Mazzotta 1993: 103). From Servius, Dante might have known that Mercury fled to Egypt and invented letters and numbers, and was called Theuth. Convivio 13.11 makes Mercury eloquence coming from dialectic, and the sense of a proposition to be proved appears in line 31 and is completed by a conclusion (6.97–102), while Beatrice’s speech in canto 7 answers questions Dante would ask if he could. Beatrice’s intricate arguing, supplementing Justinian, finishes with ‘argomentare’ (145), that is, with the demonstration of an argument from which a deduction can be made.10 The mercurial is volatile, changing in fortunes, never in one place, like Dante’s eagle. Canto 6: Justinian Cesare fui e son Iustinïano. (10)

(I was Caesar, and am Justinian) Justinian so introduces himself in the heaven which, most concealed by the sun, is therefore most obscure. Names, like ‘Constantine’, are real and allegorical. Justinian, no longer Caesar, retains an activating pride. Paradiso pluralises lives and glories, not single identity; symptoms of such pluralising coming in such neologisms as ‘s’incinqua’ (fives itself, 9.40), or ‘s’intrea’ (threes itself, 13.57), or ‘s’inmilla’ (thousands itself, 28.93). Justinian puns on his name through the ‘viva giustizia che mi spira’—the living justice that inspires me (88)—returning to that phrase when saying that he, like others, is assigned to this star by ‘la viva giustizia’ (121). He followed Constantine (306–337 CE), who had removed the empire to Constantinople, making himself a Greek. His motives for creating a ‘new Rome’, in the place of the Greek Byzantium, relate to his victory over the rival Emperor Licinius at Chrysopolis; Constantine was named Caesar and built Constantinople as a new city dedicated in 330, as both Rome and an allegory of the Emperor’s own being. Division of the empire, now implicit, was used to Papal advantage, as with the letter written by Pope Gelasius I to the Eastern Emperor Anastasius, urging separation between the secular and the religious states. This was supplemented by the forgery of the Donation of Constantine, which the Papacy began wielding as a powerful document in the eleventh century, though it was shown by Giorgio Valla

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to be a forgery in the fifteenth. In the later thirteenth century, the Papacy claimed that Constantine had recognised that since Peter, the Papacy had proper dominion in Rome. Dante blames Constantine for the Donation, claiming he had no right to make it.11 Constantine had initiated failure; the eagle of God, emblem of the Empire, has been removed from Rome, exiled. Justinian, two centuries later, was there too; and perhaps therefore Dante only speaks of his work in revising Roman law. John Moorhead indicates the significance of Justinian’s legal reforms for revival of civil law in Italy, and how much the Codex Justinianus (529) was absorbed by Frederick Barbarossa and Frederick II. Moorhead thinks Dante valued that work in contrast to the invasions of Italy led by Belisarius, which, indeed, the canto hardly mentions; though one of the demonstrations of such power was the conquest of Ravenna in 540. He notes the tradition that makes Justinian say, on entering Hagia Sophia, ‘Solomon, I have been victorious over you’ (Moorhead 1994: 58), but the sense of who had the surpassing wisdom shows in Solomon’s superior place (Paradiso 13). Ravenna, created capital of the Western Empire by Honorius in 402, had been captured by the Ostrogoths (476). A sign of Justinian’s re-conquest was the consecration of San Vitale (547) with its mosaics, in the two side apse walls, of Justinian and Theodora, shown as though they were coming into the church (Poeschke 2010: 160-177). But Justinian never saw Ravenna nor San Vitale, hardly leaving Constantinople. Ravenna was Dante’s, and the Empire’s, city of exile; Rome, as shown increasingly in Paradiso, is Dante’s ideal. Davis (1975: 158) recalls the uniqueness of the use of Rome in Purg. 33.100–102, saying that it upsets the conventional sense of Jerusalem as the city which for Augustine meant ‘vision of peace’. Justinian had thought that Christ had only the divine nature (the Monophysite heresy). He needed correction from the Pope, Agapetus. Learning to see Christ as human lessens absoluteness, and makes law necessary. Monophysitism must be rejected, and Christ’s doubleness in oneness accepted: quoting from the Chalcedon creed in 451: the differences of the Natures [God and man] being in no way removed because of the Union, but rather the properties of each nature being preserved and concurring into one Prosopon [personality] and one Hypostasis [individuality], not as though [Christ] were parted or divided into two Prosopa but One and the self-same Son and only-begotten God …. (Frend 1972: 1-2)

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Paradiso accepts the coincidence of opposites. Every contradiction separates false and true; logic separates truth from falsehood on the basis of non-contradiction (see Dante’s use of logic in Monarchia 2.10.4–10). But what logic could not give Justinian, that Christ could be God and man, faith could give; Justinian now sees that the content of Agapetus’ faith is true; earlier, he only believed it, and Bosco and Reggio note how ‘fede’ recurs frequently in Justinian’s speech, as if in an ascending scale (15, 17, 19). Canto 6: The Eagle Justinian describes the ‘l’uccel di Dio’ (4), ‘bird of God’ (compare Purgatorio 32.112, and Aeneid 1.394), the bird of Rome, with talons (107), though requiring hands, as an ensign to be held (6, 86.89). It leaps (62), shakes itself (69), and runs (79). Divinely sheltering, it comes into Justinian’s possession (9), investing him with its powers. To be Caesar compares with being a poet (Para. 1.48). It motivates history and prompts language: as ‘’l segno che parlar mi face’ (the sign which makes me speak (82)). What the eagle, or Mercury, is transcends limitations—whether those of rivers, or armies, or death; and Mercury may intimate Christ, since this heaven speaks both of the Atonement, and of the Incarnation. Mercury indicates a motor-force in history. Beatrice noted that worship was given to him, alongside Jupiter and Mars (4. 61–63), and he haunts those other deities, of war and justice. This poetry works through metonymies, working with names (Hollander counts 38) and place-names (perhaps 24). While names individuate, they connect, making events prove figural of later ones. The first is Lavinia, so setting up marriage and an ordered society, but the ‘virtù’ that has made the eagle worthy of reverence begins with the death of the youth Pallas (Aeneid 10.439–509). Pallas was sacrificed not from love of humble Italy, to say which recalls the names of Inferno 1.106–108, which includes Turnus, Pallas’ slayer, but because he wanted to establish the noble ‘patria’ (Aeneid 10.374) and the eagle’s rule. This Virgilian tragedy permeating Books 7–12 of the Aeneid, presided over by Erato (Aen. 7.37), is heavy with sexual feeling (Aeneas’ for Pallas) and with irrationality, and is discordant with the narrative of the eagle’s triumph, especially since Virgil makes Aeneas impious and unjust in killing Turnus (Aeneid, 12.938–952; see Putnam 1985: 1-21). It may be asked how much Justinian’s recall of the Aeneid Books 5–12 responds to these details, which set emotional issues against the

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march of empire; indeed the elision of poetry and the Roman empire— ‘imperium sine fine’ (empire without end, 1.279, words quoted in Convivio 4.4.11)—which may have troubled Virgil, may be troubling too to readers of Dante. And not least because of the human loss they entail. Roman kingship, for example, involves the injury to the Sabine women (prophesied in Aen. 8.635) through to the ‘dolor’ of Lucrece. Rape opens and closes Rome’s monarchy: Romulus commissioned the first, Tarquin executed the last, and two innocents’ deaths, Pallas and Lucrece, enframe the section. Two modes of government follow: the Republic (509–31 BCE) and the Empire; but it may be unwise to separate these two forms since Augustus insisted that he had restored the republic (Barrow, 1949: 28). Outstanding (‘egregi’) republican Romans give examples of heroism, taken up by Convivio and Monarchia and by Cacciaguida in Mars. The eagle casts down the pride (‘orgoglio’ 49) of the Carthaginians, called ‘Arabi’, a detail making this history allegorical of the Crusades. The context is Hannibal’s overreaching in crossing the Alps to reach the spot, which is the source of Italy’s longest river, the Po (51). The invader’s act defines the nation’s richness, evoked in its river. Then comes the ‘triumph’ of Scipio Africanus, defeating the Carthaginians at Zama in 202 BCE, ending the Second Punic War. In Convivio 4.5.19, Scipio, a ‘thunderbolt of war’ (Aeneid 6.842), has ensured Rome’s freedom.12 Later comes the capture of Fiesole, where Villani says that Pompey was present and where apparently Catiline had taken refuge, and the founding of Florence.13 In praising republican heroes, whom Augustine had dismissed (City of God 5.18), Dante uses Lucan, and contemporary republican theory, which Charles Davis traces to the Dominican Ptolemy of Lucca (1236–1326), ‘the first modern republican theorist’. Davis finds the origins of his thought in John of Salisbury, and his influence in the Dominican Remigio de Girolami whom Dante might have heard teaching at Santa Maria Novella in the 1290s. Davis notes the republicanism of Dante’s teacher, Brunetto Latini, writing the Trésor in France in the 1260s. Nonetheless more emphasis falls on Caesar. Rome works with heaven to secure a divine peace, a ‘modo sereno’, inaugurated by Caesar seizing the standard (57). Dante says in Monarchia 2.1.2 that he had previously resisted this idea, following Augustine’s negativity about Rome—that all was done for earthly fame and glory (City of God 5.18)—that the Romans succeeded only by force of arms.14 Now, assuming that they followed divine providence, he follows a double, contradictory set of values, which

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show in using Virgil, and his opposite, Lucan, for whom history is non-­ providential; hence his negativity about the madness of civil war, where ‘eagles are matched’ (Pharsalia 1.7)—there is not just one.15 Dante, Lucan, and Caesar Much in Dante, especially his Limbo, and the thieves in Inf. 24 and 25, honours Lucan. He quotes the episode of Curio, the sower of discord, one who, apparently bribed, changed sides and urged Caesar to cross the Rubicon (Inf. 28.85–102).16 Dante does not let Curio speak, but his words in the Pharsalia are quoted in Inferno by Pier della Medicina, another, modern, sower of discord in Romagna. Curio, it seems, met Caesar at Ravenna, in the Romagna, where the Po reaches the sea (Para. 6.61–62). Hannibal, at the Po’s source, is counterposed by Caesar near its mouth. Curio’s words, ‘affermando che ‘l fornito / sempre con danno l’attender sofferse’ (affirming that to the ready, delay is always hurtful, Inf. 28.98–99), translates ‘semper nocuit differre paratis’—‘procrastination always harms the men prepared for action’ (Phars. 1.281)—and Dante addresses them to Henry, 17 April 1311 (Epistola VII, Toynbee p. 93), urging him to come to Tuscany. For Lucan, Caesar resembles a thunderbolt (Phars. 1.151–7). Dante equates Caesar’s energy and lightning speed with the eagle’s, in ‘folgorando’ (70); as in canto 11, he returns to Lucan with Amyclas, the poor fisherman, forced by Caesar to take ship during a storm, ‘al suon de la sua voce, / colui ch’a tutto ’l mondo fé paura’—at the sound of that voice, which made all the world fearful (Para. 11.68–69, compare Phars. 5.510–531, Convivio 4.13.12). Lucan makes Caesar’s progress, while heroic, unjustifiable. Starting with Caesar crossing the Alps (Phars. 1.183), he exemplifies the emptiness of a virtus founded on furor.17 Dante confirms Caesar as imperial, when line 86 refers to the third Caesar (Julius Caesar—Augustus—Tiberius), and divides his career into what he did at Rome’s will, and then after crossing the Rubicon, working so fast that neither tongue nor pen (penna: wing, and pen) could follow it. Mercury embodies writing: these flights of the eagle inscribe its trace throughout Europe and its borders with Asia. Lines 58–60 follow Lucan in naming Gallic rivers: the Var, the Rhine, the Isère, and the Arar, either the Saône, which meets the Rhône at Lyon (Phars. 1.434), or the Loire (so Sapegno), and the Seine, and the Rhône. Mercury defines borders, as do rivers, but Caesar skips over them and then, encompassing all the Mediterranean, conquers Spain (compare

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Purg. 18.101–102, Para. 9.91–93, and Phars. 3.453). From there, he crosses to northern Greece (Durazzo) and to Pharsalia (Thessaly):18 e Farsalia percosse sì ch’al Nil caldo si sentì del duolo. (6.65–66)

(and struck Pharsalia, so that the grief was felt as far as to the warm Nile.) The disaster spreads to the river outside Europe, where Pompey was murdered (Pharsalia 8.456–793). The eagle becomes a metonymy for Caesar, returning to Troy (Phars. 9.950–999) to see Antandros. There, Aeneas had begun his journey to Italy by building a fleet (Aeneid 3.6: ‘close to Antandros and the mountains of Phrygian Ida’). The line is a key for the opening of the canto; Ida will be discussed in Chap. 4. Antandros for Aeneas is like Ravenna for Caesar, who, at Troy, sees the river Simois. There, Hector, another Limbo-­ figure, was buried; there, Lucan comes into relationship with Aeneid 5.371. Hector is ennobled by being associated with the eagle’s history. Does Caesar seeing the grave recall Mercury as the psychopomp, the hero being led into the presence of Hector’s death, which Caesar must confront, in a mirror-image? Lucan made this a momentary pause, remarking ‘how sacred and immense the task of bards’ (Phars. 9.980). Troy and Constantinople are a hinge between Asia and Europe: the constellation of names—Hector, Aeneas, Caesar, and Justinian—increases the significances Lucan saw. They deepen for Dante, as Lucan’s successor, for different images coalesce, giving, beyond the eagle, the presence of death, which ruins a narrative of imperial advancement. Caesar returns to Egypt to remove Ptolemy, who had murdered Pompey, followed up by a lightning-swoop on Juba, defeating the man who had defeated Curio, at the battle of Thapsus (Tunisia), and concluding with battle in Spain, at Munda, over Pompey’s sons. Lines 70–72 take revenge on what Pompey represented; lightning speed and narrative speed correspond. The Empire For Ptolemy of Lucca, Caesar was a tyrant needing death. Canto 6 is virtually silent on Julius Caesar’s assassination, but gives three expressions of frustrated sorrow. Brutus and Cassius, the assassins, howl in hell in frustration at what Augustus Caesar did in revenge. Modena (Mutina, where

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Marcus Antony was defeated) and Perugia, where his brother Lucius was defeated, weep, fulfilling Pharsalia 1.41, 42. Both cities know civil war first-hand, Perugia being destroyed. If this history comments on Dante’s present, it is relevant that Modena was Ghibelline, and Perugia Guelf, and both are described as suffering. Finally, Cleopatra, who was implicit in the reference to Ptolemy (line 69), is described twice in terms of sorrow: ‘Piangene ancor la trista Cleopatra’ (76); fleeing from the eagle, she is caught by the snake (‘colubro’). Finishing with the rebellious but sensuous woman is not accidental. Augustus’ triumph is completed with Egypt (Aeneid 8.686); this, as in Purgatorio 2.46, symbolises oppression. The peace created closes the doors of Janus’ temple, open in time of war (Aeneid 1. 294, Fasti 1.279–282). Janus, the double-faced god, is either excluded as a war-god or kept as the guardian of peace inside the temple— unless war is inside the temple, and confined, unable to escape. The action, is ambiguous, for Janus represents something ‘other’ inside the city, possibly menacing; see Chap. 4. He seems an older god outside the Christian implications of the pax Romana, which hold him in place. Contradictory, double movements show when the eagle relates to another power, with the Incarnation and Crucifixion, only possible in a time of universal peace (82–96).19 Tiberius (14–37 CE) is granted power to exact God’s vengeance for his wrath: that is, the Crucifixion happens under his auspices, and is made legal thereby. In it, God takes revenge on the existence of the ancient sin. But under Titus, a later emperor, the eagle ‘coursed’ to take revenge on the vengeance that had been taken, that is, in the destruction of Jerusalem (70 CE). The double action is necessitated through Christ’s double nature. As man, God, whose anger (‘ira’) accords with Mercurial energies, could take vengeance for man’s sin; an argument of Monarchia 2.11.5–6. If Rome had not been a legitimate power, there could have been no Atonement. But the emblem of power ran with Titus to avenge that vengeance, which was unjust, because Christ was both innocent, and God. The legitimacy of either action comes from the other; salvation-history must justify empire. Canto 6: Guelfs and Ghibellines Justinian reaches the last named Emperor, Charlemagne, when ‘Santa Chiesa’ is bitten by Desiderius, the Lombard king (757–774). He asserted his power in Italy after the Frankish king Pepin died in 768; wanting to replace the Papal choice for Archbishop of Ravenna, by his own man. The

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Pope, Hadrian I, commissioned Charlemagne, Pepin’s son, to conquer Desiderius; in crossing the Alps like Hannibal, Charlemagne named himself king of the Lombards (774).20 Charlemagne’s concessions to the Papacy seem like a second Donation of Constantine (Ullman 1973: 73), uncoincidentally, since the forgery of the Constitutum Constantini originated during this tension between the Lombards and the Papacy, justifying Lateran rule and independence in Italy (Noble 1984: 134-137). But then comes awareness of Italy’s modern state, divided between imperial Ghibellines and republican Guelfs—names that are present here only in Paradiso (103–105). Making Dante, addressed in line 54, part of this canto’s present, makes it autobiographical, warning him off both groups. As the canto reaches these factions, recalling lines 31–33, the question arises: what is this canto’s subject? Obviously, contemporary politics. The Guelfs oppose the universal standard of the eagle with French yellow lilies: specifically with Charles of Valois (1270–1325), who entered Florence in 1301 invited by Boniface VIII. This brother of Philip the Fair (1268–1314: discussed in Chap. 4), once inside Florence, sided with the Neri Guelfs, including Forese Donati. Piccarda’s history is not remote from this. Spoken of contemptuously in Purg. 20.70–78, Vanni Fucci prophesies his entry into Florence (Inf. 24.142–151). The Ghibellines are partisan in appropriating the eagle for themselves, separating it from ‘giustizia’ (105). Justinian anticipates the eagle coping with the French, the lion of 6.108, calling him ‘esto Carlo novello’ (106), backed by ‘gigli’ (lilies—the French insignia). This ‘Carlo’—not ‘Carlo magno’—is Charles II of Anjou (1248–1309), son of Charles of Anjou (1226–1284). Criticisms of him abound: in Purg. 7.127–9, 20.79–81, and outstandingly in Para. 19.127–9, 20.62–63 (see below).21 Marrying Mary of Hungary (1371–1395), his daughter Margaret married Charles of Valois, who sought possession of Aragon. His eldest son, Carlo Martello (1271–1295), graces Paradiso 8; his wife, perhaps the ‘Clemenza’ of Paradiso 9.1, was daughter of the Emperor Rudolph. Their son Caroberto was debarred from the throne of Naples by his uncle, Robert the Wise (1277–1343), Carlo Martello’s Guelf brother, in a trick orchestrated by Clement V, designed to support Robert’s mobilising against Henry VII. Dante anticipates revenge for this (9.5, 6).22 The possibility of Guelf-Ghibelline reconciliation was spoiled by the deaths of Carlo Martello, predeceasing ‘Carlo novello’, and Clemenza, both in 1295, in Naples. Carlo Martello says he would have been ruler of Provence, which his grandfather acquired by marriage, and would have

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possessed the kingdom of Naples. In marrying Clemenza, he already possessed Hungary, so creating for himself an empire, if that is defined as a plurality of crowns. Canto 8 comments on what might have been, but on how everything slips away. It confirms a sense of failure developing throughout these three heavens, with sons paying for the fathers’ faults. The Moon showed the Hohenstaufen. Mercury shows the French dynasty that attempted to replace it. Canto 9.1–6 prophesies its failure, as resulting from strife and deception within the family. Constantine turning back the eagle recalls Costanza in canto 3. Both went retrograde. Asking again the question, what is this canto’s subject?— we could say it has none. Constantine was a figure of the ruin of Empire: perhaps, following Pier Renucci, ‘au fond, l’Empire était mort sous Constantin’ (quoted, Davis 1957: 29). The end comes at the canto’s beginning, for a narrative of Rome now  finishes, becoming, after Constantine, more like a record of decline, a series of mere damp squibs. The eagle is gone, even if the Ghibellines claim it. We may ask how much the structure of the canto lets the point emerge, whether by overplaying Caesar at the price of Lucan, or letting Justinian attribute overmuch power to the eagle in Dante’s present. Epistle VI, dated 31 March 1311, written to the Florentines from the borders of Tuscany, anticipates how, ‘terrible in gold, the eagle shall swoop down upon you, which, soaring now over the Pyrenees, now over Caucasus, now over Atlas, ever strengthened by the support of the host of heaven, gazed down of old on the vast expanse of ocean in its flight’ (Toynbee: 79). Dante commands Henry VII to appear. The politics seems strained (Pertile 1997: 1-17). Caesarism failed, and Justinian lacks a subject. Hence he praises, elegiacally, a modern servant, Romeo (1170–1250), whose ‘ovra grande e bella’ was badly rewarded. Provence’s ruler, the Catalan Raymond Berenguer (ruled 1209–1245), in whose court Sordello stayed, had not praised Romeo acceptably. The Emperor gives poetic reparation, correcting a tendency to self-aggrandisement, in eulogising Romeo the obscure. Inside this ‘margarita’, ‘luce la luce di Romeo’ (128). The verse echoes, mirroring itself, like light, saying that Romeo went ‘mendicando sua vita a frusto a frusto’ (141, begging his life from crust to crust). Romeo, as an allegorical name, expresses the eagle’s power in a time of failure, and it evokes pilgrimage to Rome, for Romeo is not only ‘peregrina’ in entering the Provençal court but also heterogeneous to it, and causing it to profit, like a merchant. Romeo echoes the problematic survival of justice in Inf. 6.73, and Purg. 6.130. Saying that Romeo extended

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the glory of Raymond Berengar, he illustrates the action’s flaw: producing rivalries. In this folk-tale-like account of a King, his four daughters, and his faithful servant, Raymond’s daughters became Queens by marriages. One of them, Beatrice, by marrying Charles of Anjou, became a Queen after Charles defeated Manfred, and took Naples and Sicily. The narrative veils the point that ‘Carlo novello’ was Beatrice’s son, and that her grandson speaks in Venus. Provence belonged to the Empire and Raymond Berengar was Frederick II’s vassal, but in being so joined to France (see Purgatorio 20.61), Provence’s interests were severed from the Empire. Berengar’s father, count of Barcelona, had acquired Provence by marriage, making him cousin of James I of Aragon (ruled 1213–1276: see Runciman 1961: 223, for James’s antagonism to Charles of Anjou on account of Provence). James’s son, Peter, married Manfred’s daughter Constance and took Sicily in 1282. Three mutually destabilising power-­ blocks emerge: France, Charles of Anjou, and Aragon. To be  the ‘peregrine’ falcon of Para. 1.51—and before that in Purgatorio 13.96—is now the only condition possible: to be a Rome-­ bound stranger. Constantine lost Rome by turning the eagle backward; the exile Romeo comments, distantly, on this. Canto 7 After Justinian’s singing and veiling of himself, this ‘doppio lume s’addua’ (double light doubles itself, 7.6), as if given new honour as the representative of Empire. Durling and Martinez explain this pluralising through the doctrine of ‘the king’s two bodies’, which Ernst Kantorowicz theorised, giving attention to Frederick the Second declaring himself ‘the animate Law on Earth’.23 The Emperor is himself, and has a mystical body of absolute authority: he is rex et sacerdos (Kantorowicz: 117). The Guelf refusal of the Empire shows that this mystical power had been seen through; in which case, Dante’s honouring of Justinian works against that secular modern materiality, which contested the world-order of the ‘king’s two bodies’. This is not the subject of Beatrice’s speech, which comes with the smile and sweetness of the dolce stil, which Dante says would have made a man happy in fire (it would have compensated Mucius Scaevola). She answers questions nagging Dante: a) In 7.19–21, which is based on what Justinian had said about the Atonement (canto 6.88–93)

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b) In 7.53–57, which attends to another unspoken question: why the redemption had to happen in this mode c) In 7.124–129, which recalls the implications of something she had said in lines 64–78 about God’s direct creation of man, and how this differs from the creation of the material universe. The argument needs paraphrasing. It turns on the idea of redeeming materiality. Adam, never born (26), was created pure and good, and because created with no intermediary, he was free, almost divine: here, freedom of the will is seen to be an essential for bodily living, while being free from created things. It supplements what was said about the will in cantos 4 and 5, which said little about the body (Moevs 2005: 122-123). Adam’s sin meant the appearance of an ‘errore’ (29), which disregarded the body as needing salvation: an error perpetuated in Justinian’s Monophysitism, which de-emphasised the human nature of Christ. The Word of God descended; and that ‘The Word was made flesh and dwelt amongst us’ (John 1.14) is echoed in the verb ‘incarnasi’ (120). The body cannot be disregarded. Christ had to be man for just vengeance for sin to take place; as he was God, such vengeance could be taken upon him. A distinctive place of the Jews (47)—though they are seen as divided and opposite from God because of their negative estimate of Christ—is maintained in the Hebrew words that, alongside Latin, open the canto; they are part of the language of salvation. In those languages, transposition happens: Justinian has been singing of Latin wars fought with armies, but he speaks of the Lord of hosts—‘Deus sabaòth’—as if God was Hebrew. In the Crucifixion, one act—just and unjust together—has two results, in a doubling that reappears in God’s two ways of salvation (105)—his bounty or mercy, and his justice (115–120). The punishment bit (‘morse’, 42—compare 6.95). The Incarnation involved raising up again the human body, and ‘rilevarvi’ (111) implies its resurrection, presented as a hope, and as a deduction in lines 145–148. Both ways of salvation (114) stand inside a period that reverses chronology; they are between ‘l’ultima notte e l’ primo die’ (the last night and the first day’, 112). Like Janus, we look both ways, from the end to the beginning. The ‘evening and the morning’ rhythm of the days of Genesis 1 are reworked in this formula, which makes the purpose of the Atonement—the resurrection of bodies at the Last Judgment—precede bodily creation. The canto says humanity was created ‘sanza mezzo’ (67, 70.142). Beatrice’s discussion of creation will be

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analysed in Chap. 6, but it develops a logic where the body is God’s enduring image of God, directly created, and therefore to be raised up. Beatrice concludes with a strange corollary indicating why Justinian’s Monophysitism, a heresy that inherently promotes a single absolute authority, needed correcting. The body’s materiality is part of a more plural, modern emphasis, which Dante both favours and finds problematic.24 The body is seen as more directly challenging with the ascent into Venus, the sphere of love.

Venus Solea creder lo mondo in suo periclo che la bella Ciprigna il folle amore raggiasse, volta nel terzo epiciclo; per che non pur a lei faceano onore di sacrificio e di votivo grido le genti antiche ne l’antico errore; ma Dïone onoravano e Cupido, quella per madre sua, questo per figlio, e dicean ch’el sedette in grembo a Dido; e da costei ond’io principio piglio pigliavano il vocabol de la stella che ‘l sol vagheggia or da coppa or da ciglio. (Para. 8, 1–12)25

(The world used to believe, to its peril, that the beautiful Cyprian, turning in the third epicycle, radiated mad love. For this reason, the ancient people in the ancient error not only gave honour to her of sacrifice and of prayers accompanied by vows, but they honoured Dione and Cupid, this one as her mother, this one as her son, and they said that he sat in Dido’s lap. And from her from whom I take my start, they took the name of the star that courts the sun, now on the nape of the neck and now on the brow.) The principio to canto 8 makes Dante recall the ancients who believed that Venus irradiated a love which made people mad, so they sacrificed to the beautiful Cyprian, and offered vows. As though living on a knife-edge, what they believed was to their peril—whether that was damnation (Sapegno) or whether it meant that they lived dangerously, in the shadow of violence. For the erotic is the realm of danger, as when the theorist Georges Bataille (1987: 11) defines eroticism as ‘assenting to life up to the point of death’.26 In eroticism the subject flings away his or her

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individuality, or autonomy, or narcissism, in a giving of the self that is without reserve. Reading the ancients through Virgil and Ovid, main interlocutors for considering the ancients here, Dante makes this error determinate: they were in ‘errore’, significantly rhyming with ‘amore’. Though Dante never defines himself as a modern, as opposed to the thinking of the classical world, that is the logic of separating himself from the ancients. What was erroneous about the ancient error? And does it survive in the modern world? Is there a modern error? The third terzina shows criticism of the Aeneid, where, in 3.19, Aeneas offers sacrifice to Venus, his mother, whom he calls Dione’s daughter. Doing so, he inadvertently perpetrates violence on the dead Polydorus, an episode guiding Inferno 13. Venus, as mother of Aeneas, is at the centre of the Aeneid,27 and the episode related in the terzina shows her destabilising power. Anxious to safeguard Aeneas from possible danger from the double-tongued Carthaginians—Carthage being Juno’s city, and Juno the antagonist of Aeneas—she intends that Cupid by his gifts should ‘kindle the queen to madness and send the flame into her very marrow’ (Aeneid 1.659–60). For Dido is not yet in love with Aeneas. It is important for the principio’s second line that in the Aeneid Venus says not that Dido should succumb to love, but to furor. With that, everything appears that will happen to her, including her suicide. What the Aeneid calls madness is in Dante mad love. ‘Folle amore’ recalls Arnaut Daniel’s ‘passada folor’— past madness (Purg. 26.143)—but these cantos are more absorbed with madness and violence; they return to the atmosphere of Inferno 5 by echoing Francesca, called out from the ‘flock’ associated with Dido (Hawkins 1991: 113-130). Francesca calls herself ‘noi che tignemmo il mondo di sanguigno’—we who stained the earth with blood (Inf. 5, 90), her own, and Paolo’s. Thinking of the ancients, with whom he contrasts himself, it is important that Dante finds pathos and difficulty in considering ‘le donne antiche e’ cavalieri’ (Inf. 5.71). In the Aeneid, Venus calls to Cupid for help with Dido, ‘O son, who scornest the mighty father’s Typhoean darts…’ (Aen. 1. 665). The ‘darts’ brought low the hundred-headed giant Typhoeus, son of Gaeta and Tartarus, attempting to gain sovereignty over gods and men, and the episode suggests an Oedipal structure: the power of Eros, unlike that of Typhoeus, cannot be repressed by the power of the father. For Cupid is ‘unafraid even of Jupiter, whose thunderbolt had chastened the giant’ (Barolini 1984: 72-74). The passage had been used by Dante in the

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Convivio (2.5.14–15), thinking how the ancients believed that Love emanates from Venus, but there, the passage makes Eros’ power withstand another, equally irrational, chthonic violence. Typhoeus, haunting the reference to the Aeneid, as this is cited in the principio, reappears in canto 8 when Carlo Martello rationalistically denies his existence, saying that Sicily between Pachynus and Pelorus, on the gulf most vexed by the east wind Eurus, (‘tra Pachino e Peloro, sopra ‘l golfo / che riceve da Euro maggior briga’ [8.68, 69]) is darkened not by the struggles of Typhoeus, but by sulphur (8.70). In Ovid, the island of Sicily was heaped on Typhoeus who had dared aspire to heaven, and the eruptions of Etna were his struggles to regain his liberty (Met. 5. 321–358; Aeneid 9. 715–6, 3, 578–82). Typhoeus’ chthonic struggles give the context for the citation in Convivio 2.5.14–15, immediately after the Aeneid citation, for the text continues that Venus calls Cupid her son ‘when he [Ovid] portrays Venus as addressing Love with these words, “Son, my weapons, my might”’. That comes from Metamorphoses 5. 365, when Venus observes Dis crossing the land of Sicily, looking to see what damage the imprisoned Typhoeus has inflicted. Typhoeus has done none, but in another moment, Eros shoots Dis through the heart and extends love’s dominion into the third part of the cosmic triple kingdom. Eros and Typhoeus represent alternative forms of power, violence, destabilisation, the erotic more troubling than the chthonic. In Metamorphoses, Typhoeus is held down by Pelorus and Pachnyus, who in canto 8 become defining capes in Sicily, part of a geography that maps limits. Carlo Martello sketches out the riverine borders of the lands that he might have inherited. On the analogy with the demythologising of Pelorus and Pachnyus, each river named in cantos 8 and 9 represents a demythologised but material landscape, no longer empowered by a demonic or powerful riverine or chthonic god, just as the heaven of Venus is not the place for Venus. Yet the landscape’s power is no less, and Carlo Martello’s rationality only goes so far. After demythologising the darkness from Etna on Sicily, saying it is not caused by the violence of the monster Typhoeus, he continues with lines bringing violent and sudden rebellion back again: E la bella Trinacria … attesi avrebbe li suoi regi ancora, nati per me di Carlo e di Ridolfo,

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se mala segnoria, che sempre accora li popoli suggetti, non avesse mosse Palermo a gridar: ‘Mora, mora!’ (8. 67, 71–75)

(And beautiful Sicily … would yet have looked to have its kings born through me from Charles and Rudolph, if bad lordship, which always embitters the subject people had not moved Palermo to cry ‘Death, death!’) He says his descendants would be ruling in Sicily in 1300 had it not been for the ill-rule of Charles of Anjou. Subsequent French tyranny in Sicily produced the murder of 2000 French on the night of Easter Monday, 30 March 1283. Drouet, a French soldier, tried to rape a Sicilian woman in the square outside the Church of San Spirito in Palermo, while people were waiting for the Vespers service. The cry went up ‘moranu li Franchiski’ (Runciman 1961: 215). It was a moment of violence that in Dante recalls the fire of anger that produces the stoning of Stephen, to cries of ‘Martira, martira’ (Purg. 15. 108). The massacres spread to Corleone, Trapani, and Caltanissetta, and, by 28 April, to Messina. Whereas Carlo Martello’s language is of order, as he speaks of a patriarchally formed dynasty, this does not survive, being subverted by revolution from below: as though Typhoeus named a violence active in the form of the power of the people, who aimed at setting up communes under papal sovereignty. The violence suggests the resurgence of peril and of ancient living on the edge now being repeated, since ‘through revolution, for the first time, the “lower” classes take control of the means of expenditure [dépense]. And what they expend is precisely the ruling class, in a bloody and orgiastic social potlach’ (Bataille 1987: xvi). The language of order must face the power of violent destabilisation, aiming to purify the land of the foreign coloniser. Runciman (1961: 215) tells how the rioters—excommunicated by the Pope, Martin IV, who compared them to the crowds calling for Jesus’ execution—‘broke into the Dominican and Franciscan convents; and all the foreign friars were dragged out and told to pronounce the word “circiri,” whose sound the French tongue could never accurately reproduce. Anyone who failed in the test was slain’. The French had to evacuate: Aragonese rule followed that August, and this meant war for the following 90 years (Larner 1980: 45). Another historian sees the Vespers as only ending in 1302, with the Aragonese Frederick III being confirmed as ‘King of Trinacria’ after a decade of fighting with his brother James. The place-­name, recalled in Carlo Martello’s evocation of Sicily’s three capes, in ‘la bella Trinacria’, appears because of Angevin claims to Sicily, including Naples and Apulia (and Frederick in 1302 married Eleanor, Carlo Martello’s sister).28

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Trinacria includes a trinitarian thought as part of a sense of Sicily being ‘bella’, defined by winds, and by water, and by fire, being the ‘isola del foco’ where Anchises ended his long life (19.131, 132), as though this poetry makes him disappear in fire, like Empedocles, or the penitents of Purgatorio 26. Or it is as if absorbing him into the fires of canto 1, the ‘isola del foco’ being the paradisal opposite to the material world spoken of in Inferno 1.73–75, where Virgil says that he sang of the just son of Anchises, who came from Troy ‘poi che ‘l superbo Ilïon fu combusto’ (after proud Ilium was burned). The instability Carlo Martello speaks of pits brother against brother— hence Para. 9.1–6 records Carlo Martello speaking of his brother’s meanness and blindness—and uncle against nephew—Robert, Carlo’s brother, against Carlo Martello’s son, Caroberto. The Sicilian Vespers comprise the first of several massacres within these cantos, more stainings of the earth with blood. Appearing in cantos devoted to the erotic, with madness and error, and a death-drive within rational rule, these incidents re-create the ancients’ subordination of Typhoeus to Eros. Dante’s re-reading of the Aeneid makes Venus inseparable from the violence that destroys Dido (Book 4) and produces the slaughters and holocausts ending it. When Aeneas carries out live human sacrifices in the war (Aeneid 10.517–20; 11, 81–2), this gives meaning to the violence of ‘sacrificio e di votivo grido’, which Dante said the ancients offered to Venus.29 Venus, the Aeneid and violence fuse. In the principio’s citation of the Aeneid, ‘folle amore’ marks Dido, who is made to mistake Cupid, Venus’ son, for Aeneas’ son, Ascanius, and to embrace him, thus unconsciously opening up her desire for Aeneas, leading to further furor. Dido’s reactions are extreme (Aeneid 1. 717–8). Fondling the boy, longing for a son by Aeneas (4. 327–30), she gives herself in imagination to Aeneas. But Virgil does not need the narrative of Venus changing Cupid into Ascanius. If Dido had embraced Ascanius, it would have the same effect, for she brings her madness with her in treating Ascanius who is really Cupid— Aeneas’ son being, in this context, Aeneas’ brother—as though he were her son, or lover. Virgil gives an adequate—even psychoanalytic—explanation for Dido’s case. Venus becomes a textual projection, naming or supplementing a cause already rendered sufficiently. Dido, ruler of Carthage, like the chaste Diana—Dante’s Moon—in her first entrance (Aen. 1. 496–504), becomes the Venus of mad love. The ancients’ madness—their error—meant that they reified the star with the qualities of mad love they themselves possessed. Sacrificing to

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Venus is an act of violence intended to ward off the violence of ‘folle amore’. Dante demythologises Virgil: Dido now embraces the real Ascanius, not the allegorical Cupid. Rivers and capes become natural boundaries. But violence remains, however named, and the text affirms the importance of something material that has no name: ‘e da costei ond’io principio piglio / pigliavano il vocabol della stella …’. Sapegno glosses Dante taking his start from Venus either as meaning that it is with her that the canto opens, or that Dante derives from love his mode of being, the basis of his virtue. Venus is the non-name for something necessary: even at the level of the empirical, the planet woos—tempts—the sun, either from before or from behind. The sun is fascinated by something unnameable, feminine. Fin’Amors In the heaven of Venus, lights move fast as if amorously, singing Osanna, as in Mercury. Using the ready-to-love language of fin’amor, that is, ‘courtly love’ (a nineteenth-century term, of course), as this developed in Occitania in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Carlo Martello announces himself ready at Dante’s pleasure, and the courtliness develops: Noi ci volgiam coi principi celesti d’un giro e d’un girare e d’una sete, ai quali tu del mondo già dicesti: ‘Voi che ‘ntendendo il terzo ciel movete’; e sem sì pien d’amor, che, per piacerti, non fia men dolce un poco di quïete. (8.34–39)

(We turn with those celestial Princes in one circle, and in one circling, and with one thirst, to whom you said before in the world, You who by intelligence move the third heaven, and are so full of love that to pleasure you [repeating line 33], a space of quiet will be no less sweet to us.) The last line recalls Francesca and Paolo (Inferno 5.96). Venus’ heaven and its souls turn (and ‘turn’ poetically), but those who turn the heaven are angelic Principi. The Prince associates himself with others belonging to a court. If he heard the canzone, Voi che ‘ntendendo il terzo ciel movete (Rime no. 59), which Convivio 2 commented on, when in Florence in March 1294, he becomes an addressee. Dante says that Venus had completed two revolutions in her epicycle since the death of Beatrice (8 June 1290).30 Thus,

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1168 days passed, and then the ‘donna gentile’ appeared to him, as recorded in Vita Nuova 35 and commented on in Convivio 2.2.1. Convivio 2.12 explains that wanting the consolation of philosophy after Beatrice’s death, he began imagining Philosophy as a donna gentile (2.12.6), which happened after 30 months (Convivio 2.12.7). Two counting systems apply: one relating to Venus’ consolations; the other, associated with the number three (see ‘terzo’ in Para. 8.2 and 8.37), and the moon (another woman). Both appear in the same Book of Convivio (see Rime 2.341–362). Beatrice was never allegorised, but the woman of Vita Nuova was, problematically. Why was what reads as an erotic encounter dematerialised into being made into an encounter with Philosophy, and as such, different from Beatrice? The Vita Nuova retracts the donna gentile in favour of Beatrice, but the later Convivio elevates her as Philosophy, with the highest status (Convivio 3.15). Philosophy gives a life almost divine, but Beatrice was a spirit that matters, as her existence and her encounter with Dante in Purgatorio 30 affirms, when she charges him with desertion. When Carlo Martello quotes the canzone, no splits between praising Beatrice and praising Philosophy seem possible. The addressees, divine intelligences in Venus, the heaven of rhetoric (Convivio 2.13.13, 14), inspire poetry and love. Carlo Martello resembles Casella, who quoted another Dante incipit and Forese Donati, remembering another—two early stilnovo canzoni (Purg. 2. 112, 24.51). These were Dante’s friends: Carlo Martello—unnamed—is the only friend in Paradiso, recognising Dante first. Did he understand the poem erotically, or philosophically? If it addresses those who know, its erotic content produces a philosophic outcome, such as the donna gentile in Convivio apparently represented, though Paradiso’s Beatrice has silently newly acquired her characteristics as Wisdom, the daughter of God.31 The sirens, the ‘pargoletta’ (Purg. 31.45, 59, and for the ‘dolce serena’, see Purg. 19.19), the donna petrose, and the woman of the canzone montanina (no. 89), suggest Dante’s inability to assimilate women into any single scheme. The impulse seems to be to allegorise, as if bringing the text under control while questioning that allegorisation in successive poems (Rime, nos. 60 and 61). But the canzone is restated by Carlo Martello, as though its meaning was not contrary to the listening Beatrice, whereas in the Convivio, it displaced her. Yet we cannot even regard the woman, the fantasised object of desire, as even unambiguously of one gender: identities flow into each other. Assenting to life, as Bataille expresses it, questions the identity of the lover, and brings about, as in here, violent excess.32

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Double Joy in Paradise Courtly love, unlike the reality of feudal patriarchy, elevates the woman: Chaucer’s Squire is ‘in hope to stonden in his lady grace’ (CT 1.88). She is raised to the dignity of what the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan calls das Ding, the non-nameable place associated with ‘the mythic body of the mother’, given that dignity as being the ‘lost object’, which as it is lost— but yet what it is remains unspecifiable—is that which the Occitan trouvères sought to find (Lacan 1992: 106, 112, 118, 126). The ‘lost object’ is what is sought when Dante, mourning, draws the angel (see Chap. 1), veiled—inaccessible, invisible. Fin’amor makes the woman the inexpressible Other, elevating her, Lacan thinks, to evade acknowledging another reality: that the male lover pursues that which would complete his narcissism, a point derivable from Le Roman de la rose (1425–1536). The logic of that narcissism means, as Lacan says, that there is no sexual relation; no pathway to the other; only the attempt to satisfy the self, which is the antithesis of Bataille’s definition of the erotic. For Lacan, recognition of the other would make love an acceptance of lack in the self (a failure of phallic authority: the male must accept, like the woman, the reality of castration). The woman’s jouissance, her joy, inexpressible, but found in her contemplation, rather than in the failed sexual relation, gives her ecstasy; the point challenges the courtly lover. Fin’amor is named in the fifth stanza of Arnaut Daniel’s sestina (c.1200) ‘Lo ferm voler q’el cor m’intra’ (‘The firm desire which enters into my heart’); here, love for the woman, which must be concealed, is opposed by an ‘uncle’ as though she was an object of incest, and he was a Hamlet-like usurper. Pois flori la seca verga Ni d’en Adam foron nebot ni oncle, Tant fin’amors cum cella q’el cor m’intra Non cuig qu’anc fos en cors, ni eis en arma … (25–28)

(since there flowered the dry rod, and from Sir Adam there came nephew or uncle, such perfect love as that which enters my heart I think there never was yet in body, nor in soul …) Such love means, relevantly for Paradiso: Qu’en paradis n’aura double joi m’arma, Si ja nuils hom per ben amar lai intra. (35–36)

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(Hence my soul will have double joy in Paradise, if ever a man through fine loving enters there.) The poem’s six apparently arbitrarily chosen line-ending unrhyming words move in a gracious dance-like circling over 36 lines, like the dance of lights in Paradiso 10, before they re-emerge in the 3-line tornada, where I italicise them: Arnautz tramet son chanter d’ongl ‘e d’oncle Ab grat de lieis de sa vergua l’arma Son Dezirat, c’ab pretz en cambra intra. (37–39)

(Arnaut sends his song of nail and uncle for the pleasure of her who has the soul of his rod [‘who arms him with her rod’—so Press] to his Desired One, into whose chamber fame/merit (i.e. the poem) enters.)33 Arnaut Daniel’s desire to be in her ‘cambra’ (chamber) is witty and secular, but perhaps, too, Christian and spiritual.34 If both, it makes fin’amor essential for an earthly Paradise, and Paradiso: Arnaut will have twofold joy in Paradise if a man can enter there through his loving. Twofold because loving with body and soul? Plaisir and jouissance? Twofold through loving more than cousin or uncle? Is it sensual and spiritual, or excessive joy? Is ‘Paradis’ more than the woman? Does the poem support the materiality of love, or is love ‘fine’ in going beyond that? Roger Dragonetti recalls that Roland was thought to be the son by incest of Charlemagne, and similarly, Mordred, of Arthur: perhaps the statement in the fourth stanza ‘Anc la seror de mon oncle / Non amei tan ni plus’ (‘I never loved my uncle’s sister as much, nor more …’ (lines 19–20)) implies loving the mother—but that implies transgressiveness within the relationship of the Virgin (the vergua) to Jesus, since she is ‘figlia del tuo figlio’ (33.1). Gender is ambiguous: in entering the chamber, the woman is ‘son Dezirat’ (39, his desired one—the gender is masculine). But who, in Lacan’s terms, possesses the phallus, that is, the illusion of single patriarchal authority (line 38)? Lacan says no-one, hence the lack which the male must accept if he loves, and which elevates the woman, while the story of Aaron’s rod that budded (Numbers 17), seen as a figure for the virgin birth, makes Mary the masculine rod, unless the dry rod typifies Joseph. Either way, there is the male’s lack, and the woman’s privilege, and her separateness.

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Dante followed this trobar clus poetry of Arnaut Daniel in the sestina ‘Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d’ombra’ (Rime no.79), one of the rime petrose. The structure is square-like in its separate blocks, and circular in rhyming, which encloses the poem, as if squaring the circle, a topic for canto 33, something that spiritually ‘transcends the obstacles of matter (the four elements embodied in the four-cornered square)’ (Spanos 1975: 551). It shows difficult technical complexity matching the subject-matter: love having a double meaning; the nail and the uncle suggesting the nearest, and that which interdicts, which distances. Both make love difficult, the sestina form respecting this since there seems no resolution. The expression of love is the poem. The woman points to the Lacanian ‘real’ as being beyond what can be spoken of. She threatens with the power of trembling (line 10—‘non ai membre noom fremisca’—I have no limb which doesn’t shake)—to potentially traumatic effect. Canto 9: Massacres Canto 9 considers love in society. Evoking three women—Clemenza, Cunizza, and Rahab—and one man, Folco—it describes blood-letting, materiality defiled and defiling, as though the Aeneid’s wars were repeated in modern, ‘prava’ (9.25) Italy. Cunizza says ‘prava’: sexual love contains a purity that judges political depravity. Cunizza’s brother, unnamed, she calls a firebrand. He is referred to in Inf. 12.109–110 as the first of two references to violent people associated with figures in Venus: the other being Nessus. He was Ezzelino III da Romano (1194–1256), the Ghibelline who made a ‘grande assalto’ on the country round about. Ezzelino and Cunizza were married for political reasons into the Guelph San Bonifazio family in Verona. Sordello abducted Cunizza from the Count Riccardo di San Bonifazio at Ezzelino’s bidding, returning her to Treviso, where they were lovers (Barolini 1984: 185). Ezzelino linked himself to Frederick II by marrying Selvaggia, Frederick’s illegitimate daughter, and used this advantage to control Verona and Padua. The last years ‘were marked by a reign of terror which came to an end in June 1256 with the capture of the city by a crusading army of Paduan exiles and Guelph partisans from neighbouring cities’.35 He died in warfare in 1259. This history connects Sordello with Ezzelino36 and perhaps with Folco. Cunizza’s erotic adventures are overcoded by violent political relationships. She remembers the people of the March of Treviso, subjects of Marco Lombardo’s words in Purgatorio 16, 115–40, while the next

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blood-shedding she recalls happened in 1314 when Cangrande—whose forerunner, according to Guelf propaganda and Mussato, had been Ezzelino—drove the Guelph Paduans out of Vicenza, the city they occupied in 1265. E ciò non pensa la turba presente che Tagliamento e Adice richiude, né per esser battuta ancor si pente; ma tosto fia che Padova al palude cangerà l’acqua che Vincenza bagna, per essere al dover le genti crude. (9. 43–48)

(And of this the present crowd that are enclosed by the Tagliamento and the Adige [rivers—that is, of the March of Treviso] do not think, nor do they repent despite being beaten. But it will be soon that Padua at the pool shall change the water that bathes Vicenza, because the people are stubborn against duty.) Vicenza is upstream of Padua, on the Bacchiglione. Blood will flow back down from Vicenza to the swamps around Padua, causing the annihilation of city life as an already stagnant city sits in its own blood. Cunizza, who defines the Treviso by boundary waters, describes a river of blood, shed in Vicenza, returning downstream to the polluting source. In Purgatorio 5, 73–84, Jacopo del Cassero remembered assassination in the region of Padua, in the ‘bosom of the Antenori’—the seat of treachery (Purg. 5. 75) since Antenor, the Trojan who betrayed Troy, founded Padua and gave his name to the region where traitors are punished (Inf. 32, 88). Blood is now more plentiful, being that of the guilty Padua that returns to it, giving colour and definition. The city was enclosed by rivers—and the warmth implicit in ‘inchiude’ is confirmed when it reappears as ‘rinchiusa’, used about Hercules’ relation to Iole, enclosing her in his heart (line 102). Cunizza continues with Riccardo da Cammino, son of the ‘good Gherardo’ of Purgatorio 16.124, lord of Treviso in 1300 (9.49–51). After an example of ‘mal segnoria’ Riccardo was murdered in 1312, perhaps avenging an adultery, perhaps with Cangrande’s connivance (so the Ottimo Commento), or through the agency of his brother Guecello, (so Benvenuto). As rivers run together, as if forming a net, like a spider’s web, a net will catch him. The assassination leads on to the next massacre, whose first word contains the suggestion of a poetic planh, like Sordello’s for Blacatz (Press 1971: 252-255):

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Piangerà Feltro ancora la difalta de l’empio suo pastor, che sarà sconcia sì, che per simil non s’entrò in malta. Troppo sarebbe larga la bigoncia che ricevesse il sangue ferrarese e stanco chi ‘l pesasse a oncia a oncia, che donerà questo prete cortese per mostrarsi di parte; e cotai doni conformi fieno al viver del paese. (9. 52–60)

(Feltro will yet weep for the treachery of its impious bishop, which will be so foul that for the like of it no one entered in Malta [prison]. Too large would the vat be that should receive the blood of the Ferrarese, which this courteous priest will offer to show himself a member of his party, and the person wearied who weighed it out ounce by ounce—and such gifts will conform to the country’s way of life.) Cunizza’s ‘cortese … donerà … doni’, uses fin’amors language to critique the brutality of Alessandro Novello from Treviso, Bishop of Feltre, who in 1314 turned over to the governor, Pino della Tosa, Ghibelline refugees who had placed themselves under his protection. As a result, 30 men were decapitated as rebels. The gift, of blood, is an offering made without measure—an ironic example of Bataille’s dépense, expenditure without reserve as happens in the erotic, save that the courteous, liberal Bishop is ‘liberale di sangue altrui’ (Sapegno). There follows the self-introduction of Folco di Marsiglia (see Kay 2016: 205-246), a troubadour and lover, between 1179 and 1195, before becoming a Cistercian, and Bishop of Toulouse (1215–1231): La maggior valle in che l’acqua si spanda, incominciaro allor le sue parole, fuor di quel mar che la terra inghirlanda, tra’ discordanti liti contra ‘l sole tanto sen va, che fa meridïano là dove l’orrizzonte pria far suole. Di quella valle fu’io litorano tra Ebro e Macra, che per cammin corto parte lo Genovese dal Toscano. Ad un occaso quasi e ad un orto Buggea siede e la terra ond’io fui, che fé del sangue suo già caldo il porto. (9. 82–93)

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(‘The greatest valley in which water spreads itself’, his words then began, ‘from that sea which makes a garland round the earth, between discordant shores, goes so far back against the sun that it makes meridian of the place where before it made horizon. Of those shores I became a shore-dweller, between the Ebro and the Macra, which for its short course divides the Genoese from the Tuscan. With almost the same rising and setting, Buggea sits, and the city [earth] from where I was, which once made its harbour warm with its blood’.) The incomincio recalls 8.32: this is one poet’s beginning as rendered by another, as Purg. 26.140–148 adopted Arnaut Daniel’s style.37 Folco’s introduction, like trobar clus, has a difficult periphrastic mode, challenging the reader to find the relevance within its allusiveness. Why such ampleness of selective detail, alluded to with such conciseness? Folco begins by seeing the Mediterranean—almost yet unnamed in Dante’s time—as the greatest valley wherein water spreads itself, coming from that water which garlands the world, lovingly enclosing it, and moving back from the westeast via discordant shores. Such discordancy evokes Dido’s curse in Aeneid 4.628, praying that coast may conflict with coast. The water goes eastwards against the sun through 90 degrees of latitude. The meridian and the horizon are at right angles to each other, so that at Jerusalem, when the sun is overhead, it is on the horizon at Cadiz; when at the meridian at Cadiz, it is sunset in Jerusalem. He evokes the long west-east running Spanish Ebro (meaning ‘valley’), which historically separated the Romans from the Carthaginians, so creating the discordance of the Second Punic War; and the short east-west running Magra in Italy, separating the Ligurian Genoese from Tuscany (Folco’s father seems to have been from Genoa). The rivers, marking discordance, enclose the space between where he was born, so that Folco’s poetry begins from, and Paradiso describes, shores between waters, as the Mediterranean gives waters between shores. Folco names not his birthplace, Marseilles, but its opposite, Buggea (Algeria), specifying that the cities on these shores share the same sunset and sunrise, being on the same meridian. This poetry works by defining something by its opposite; like allegory; what is, is known by what is not. If discordancy rules in life, poetry responds by working by contraries, as if either of the contraries are the unconscious of a particular state assumed in a conscious state. Marseilles, called a ‘terra’ (compare line 84), appears only in the last line alluding to blood warming its harbour, which recalls the heaven of

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Mercury and civil war between Caesar and Pompey, perhaps reverting to Dido’s curse, desiring Romans to have civil wars (Aeneid 6.629). Caesar campaigned in Spain to annihilate Pompey’s armies (Purg. 18.101–2, cp. Pharsalia 3, 453–5), but left his troops under Brutus and Trebonius to fight Massilia at sea. In the battle, dying men fell into the water from their ships: their blood foamed deep upon the wave, and a crust of gore covered the sea. The ships caught and dragged by the iron chains were prevented from coming close by the crowded corpses. Some sailors sank half alive into the bottomless deep and drank the brine mixed with their own blood. (3. 572–7: see Green 1994; 203-233)

In the weeping which follows women mourn over unidentifiable bodies, sometimes headless bodies of enemies. This is the climax in a series of civil wars for which Lucan’s question opening the Pharsalia (1.80) is essential: ‘What madness was this, my countrymen, what fierce orgy of slaughter?’ The furor aligns Mercury and Venus. In Folco’s line, ‘che fe’ del sangue suo già caldo il porto’, warm blood, associated with the heat of violence and of sexual love, shows the ultimate discordance with the water of the harbour (water and land meeting in violence), and Lucan’s allusion indicates that the worst violence relates, metonymically, to Rome—taking us back to canto 6, but unmentioned in this canto until Folco excoriates the Papacy, metonymically evoked in the word ‘Vaticano’ (9.139). This poetry shows everything in the Mediterranean going ‘contra ‘l sole’—reversing natural orders. The predilection to see violence everywhere suits Folco, since his part in bloody repression in the Albigensian crusade (see below) remains tacit. That may be part of the unconscious of his utterance, especially since being a ‘litorano’ admits that any position within this Mediterranean valley must be factional, divided, and divisive, a view that should correct any crusader’s self-assurance. The passage implicitly asks what is a ‘valle’ (a word appearing twice) if it can be so destructive. Two Purgatorial references may help, Purg. 14.25–30 and 24.84, where a valley implies a space showing an antithesis between what nature gives— the sun and rivers—and what appropriations are made of this. Unnaming shows poetic resistance to a rationality which thinks that by naming (as with the word ‘amor’) something is known: this enforces other ways of knowing. Folco’s poetry purifies in giving another way of

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considering the Mediterranean as a theatre of war, and makes darting connections between at least six wars (those of the Aeneid; those between Liguria and Tuscany; the recurrent Punic Wars; the Civil Wars; the Crusades; and the Albigensian crusade). Yet it is the lover and the poet who speaks; self-­division is apparent, and if that is inseparable from what happens in fin’amor, Paradiso’s difficulties come not from its intellectualism nor theology, but from complexities relating to divisions between the material and the immaterial self, which the poetry cannot resolve. Folco shows a carefully studied poetry working itself out through pairings, which throw emphasis from one to another: meridïano/orizzonte; Ebro/Macra; Genovese/Toscano. The first two are balanced, unlike the second two, because nothing is said about the Ebro, but a line and a half is given to the Macra. Buggea is named; its opposite, with a line and a half, not. Canto 9: Folco Folco, speaking openly of love, unlike Cunizza, traces a contrary pattern moving from feminine to masculine, for his identifications make him feminine, disempowered, abandoned, by love. This is so especially with Dido, where the feminine erotic is mad and violent:  e questo cielo di me s’imprenta, com’io fe’ di lui; ché più non arse la figlia di Belo, noiando e a Sicheo e a Creusa, di me, infin che si convenne al pelo; né quella Rodopëa che delusa fu da Demofoonte, né Alcide quando Iole nel core ebbe rinchiusa. (9.95–102)

(this heaven is imprinted by me, as I was by it; for the daughter of Belus, wronging both Sichaeus and Creusa, did not burn more than I, as long as it suited my hair; nor yet the Rhodopean maid who was deluded by Demophoon, nor Alcides, when he had enclosed Iole in his heart.) Poetry and the erotic link converge in Folco, yet the lovers he compares himself with are ancient: invoking them puts distance between himself and love, as though there are no lovers now. Dido derives from Virgil, and Ovid’s Heroides, no. 7; Phyllis, another maddened suicide, from Heroides no. 2. The Heroides, Ovid’s imaginary letters from abandoned women, are

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rhetorical exercises, trying to persuade a lover back, ways of describing lamentation; rhetoric, or poetry, conjoined with love. Dido, called the daughter of Belus, recalls an earlier violence: Belus in the Aeneid (1.621) fought against Cyprus, Venus’ island, giving a pre-history of warfare against love, and she, further evoking the self-torments of the woman in love, fights against love. Dido has wronged her dead husband (Sichaeus) and Aeneas’ dead wife, before wronging herself by self-immolation. The de-allegorisation gives Dido, not Venus, responsibility for her love, but simplifies: Phyllis wronged herself—killing herself because she was wronged by her lover. Dido and Phyllis are comparable, since both were women with the power of rule, but both lost their rationality in loving: Phyllis, ‘delusa’, a victim of folle amore, admits her folly (believing in a stranger, and giving herself over to someone whom she knew was going away). Her letter says that she has not loved wisely (‘non sapienter amavi’—2. 27).38 Her madness, which even helped fit Demophoon’s ships to leave her (2.45), unnames her, makes her ‘quella Rodopëa’—taking character from Thrace’s ‘Rhodope glacialis’ (2. 113)—an icy mountain divested of its god or goddess. Her sexual initiation by Demophoon has accompanying evocations of death (2. 117–120). After these women, Folco alludes to Hercules, given the patriarchal title Alcide (descendant of Alcaeus) following Heroides 9, which records his wife Deianira’s lament before her suicide. Hercules, loving Iole, encloses her in his heart as Dido fondled Ascanius in her bosom, and makes himself a woman by what he does on her account. Hercules ‘burns’—Iole being the burning agent before he is immolated literally, like Dido, when Deianira gives him the poisoned shirt of Nessus that bursts into flames. Inf. 12. 58–69 shows Nessus in the circle of the violent, having died for ‘la bella Deianira’ and wrought vengeance for himself. As if associating Dido with Hercules, the fire is in the midst of the body, in the marrow, held in the heart and further enclosing the body, like the shirt, which eats into the body, consuming it. Hercules, the hero who subdued the infernal world (Inferno 9. 97–99), but is subdued by love, replays the Aeneas myth backwards. He is the faithless lover who burns, suffering the fate that Dido would visit on Aeneas, when wishing she had burned his whole camp and thrown herself on the flames (Aeneid 4. 604–6). Her death becomes a model for Hercules, because the third stage of his burning comes when he creates a funeral pyre for himself and becomes divine (Metamorphoses 9, 98–272: there are parallels with Marsyas). Paralleling Purgatorio 26, Hercules’ death purges his love, or libido. Sexual excess

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becomes so intense that it ends in a total dépense. Waning love—because of which Deianira gives him the poisoned shirt—revives in self-­destruction. Though the image of the firebrand burning everything appeared with Ezzelino’s violence, only now is love associated with fire. This ‘folle amore’ replays the Commedia’s pattern: Hercules’ pathway is infernal, purgatorial, and paradisal. It makes bodily love Dionysian, dissolving the subject, maddening but purifying through that. It contrasts with the feminine examples, which stress the woman versus the public world; it changes direction by Valorising the patriarchal male over the feminine and the force of love. Dido’s love intersected unknowingly with a public sphere; Phyllis deluded herself that Demophoon would return from his masculine pathway. Venus must be subordinate to Mars: this is Paradiso’s order. Though the text evokes the Heroides, poems envoicing women, it works against them. These women loved to their peril, and Folco, having identified himself with them, pulls back from them and their fate. He distinguishes himself from ancient lovers by not admitting that his own loves wronged anyone. His eroticism was calculated; his love burned as long as it suited his hair. Separation from the ancients means separation from the erotic, from Venus: perhaps the price of modernity is loss of the erotic, or the affective. Folco is Paradiso’s only poet, and love here stands outside the spiritual. His cessation from love-poetry, and change of direction, becoming a monk, which licenses him to condemn the Papacy, has two purposes, one pointing to an irresolution in Dante, relative to the conflicts which make up Paradiso. Dante seems anxious to resolve the destabilising power of language, rhetoric, and allegory, unlike the lingering over the love-poets of Purgatorio 26. Did Folco give himself to Bataille’s sense of dépense: ‘the principle of loss … of unconditional expenditure, no matter how contrary it might be to the economic principle of balanced account (expenditure regularly compensated for by acquisition)’ (Bataille 118)? Folco exchanged love-poetry for becoming the crusading Bishop against the Albigensians. Another massacre underlies these cantos. Historians divide over the extent and coherence of the Cathar (Greek: ‘the pure’) heresy.39 Bernard Hamilton argues that it moved as a Manichean heresy from Bulgaria and Byzantium in the eleventh century, becoming active in western Europe by 1140, in Cologne and the Rhineland. Cathars, then, were in force from the mid-twelfth century to the 1320s, not wholly destroyed by the crusade against them. In Italy they were the Patarenes, in Languedoc, the Albigensians, one of their texts being the Greek Gnostic

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text The Ascension of Isaiah (pre-350 CE). Here, Isaiah is taken up to Paradise for a vision of the spiritual universe. Asking about strife in a lower one of the seven heavens, Isaiah hears that ‘it has been like this since the world was made till now’.40 This Manicheism made Catharism ask questions of the relation of Satan to Christ, as, being, perhaps, brothers, while being dualistic in believing the material world to be the work of the devil and his angels. Valorising the devil as prior to Christ creates an ambiguity about moral categories: who defines good, who defines evil? Anything can be said against the ‘heretics’, who opposed sex, marriage, and procreation (against bringing more souls into entrapment by the body): was that what Nietzsche calls the ‘ascetic ideal’? Or part of a fascination with the sexual which lurks inside a stress on the spiritual, whereby there is a return of sexuality as that which is repressed (David D’Avray in Sennis 2016: 177-184)? How far was anger against the anti-clerical, ascetically driven Cathars, politically, materially based? Dominic preferred the Cathars to the luxury of the Cistericans, who were prominent in their repression of them, as with Arnaud Amaury, Abbot of Cîteaux, whom Innocent III entrusted with the Occitan mission opposing them. The French made a land-grab against the Languedoc in the crusade, but perhaps an anxiety characterised the crusaders against the Cathars since the heresy touched something inherently contradictory in Christianity: discomfort with the body (Paterson 1993: 332-340). The connections between the troubadours and the Cathars puzzle: did the former license an eroticism attractively tinged with death for the pure (the Cathar perfecti), as Denis de Rougemont argues? Or was the sensuousness of troubadour poetry antithetical to the asceticism of the Cathars? Does it help that troubadours—such as Marcabru—were apparently sceptical about the Crusades? (Padel 2007: 2). Dante is silent on these things and on Folco’s part in them. An absence in the text may indicate unease in Dante between the claims of the spiritual and the material. It is hard to assess what Dante would have made of Catharism, though consciously he must have considered it heretical. His response to love and love-poetry seems divided—between a narcissism and fin’amors expressed in the dolce stil, which nonetheless spiritualises more than fin’amor did, if we consider either Guinizelli or Arnaut Daniel. Beatrice’s anger in Purgatorio 30 indicates more at stake than Dante’s turn to philosophy, however potentially Averroist, as Convivio hints that it was. Folco’s transition from love-poet to crusader against heresy, which like all heresies, that is, intellectual divisions, was characterisable by its opposers in sexually

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deviant terms, separates, dualistically, poetry, with its affective core, and Christianity, as unlike fin’amor. Folco’s calculatedness comments adversely on a materialistic poetry which he relinquished. Contrastedly, the Cathars apparently rejected the material world completely. In Dante’s Folco, the materiality and sensuousness of love-poetry is replaced by a crusading spirit, whose single-­ mindedness enforces orthodox belief in the material body, though love-poetry was no less meaningful for Cathars. Where does Dante stand here? The ironies, and contradictions, neither escape him nor let him escape them. The Turn in Paradiso Dante needs the narrative of Folco’s turn to the church because it figures a transition in Paradiso, from largely secular material to critique of the Church. If Folco does not speak about the Albigensian crusade, he does about crusades against Islam: these, though mentioned in Inf. 27.85–90, become a new subject for Paradiso and are discussed in Chap. 4. Folco first speaks for Rahab, said to have favoured ‘la prima gloria’—the first triumph—that ‘Iosuè’ achieved in ‘la Terra Santa’ (124, 125). That triumph prefigured Christ’s ‘alta vittoria’ (122), including Christ removing her from Limbo. The impulse, which seizes Rahab, placing her in the erotic sphere, derives from a violence then associated with fighting error or heresy in the holy land, and now with ‘la milizia che Pietro seguette’— the soldiers that followed Peter into martyrdom (141). Folco turns to Florence, contrasted with Nazareth (127–138). Florence coins the ‘maladetto fiore’. Nazareth (Hebrew nēsér) was translated by the Vulgate as meaning flos, flower. Envy within Florence balances Gabriel’s homage to Mary, who represents a sublimation of sexuality contrasting with Venus and Dido. Folco’s attacks on the Papacy and Florentine money-lust recall Cunizza’s on the Treviso. Now the Gospels and the doctors of the church are deserted, abandoned, and the modern Papacy studies only Decretals, which, compiled by Gratian (see Chap. 3), were supplemented by Popes: Alexander III, Gregory IX, Boniface VIII, and Clement V. They cover the margins of these Decretals, aiming at money-­ making, through institutionalising non-erotic, modern bureaucracy. The last word of the canto, ‘avoltero’, shows Dante’s sleight of hand whereby these cantos displace adultery from being literal, practised by Cunizza and

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Folco, to allegorical, by adding, from Inferno 19.1–4, the idea that adultery means money-making via the practice of religion. The passion recording such adultery is Folco’s, whose crusading makes him an older voice. The Papal modern error, with its money-lust, and forgetting Nazareth, and Rome, the burial place of martyrs who followed Peter, comprises a worse, colder adultery than the ancients: non-­ transgressive, having nothing madness in its calculatedness. The lines that depend on an iconographic tradition of the Annunciation, and extend the angel-image of Inferno 9: Nazarette, là dove Gabrïello aperse l’ali. (9.137, 138)

(Nazareth, there, where Gabriel opened his wings) do not mention Mary in their reverential gesture, but convey a new opening, on leaving the earth’s shadow (9.118–9). If Venus showed violence and turmoil, the new beginning—characterised by a woman with different values from Cunizza or Rahab, and attended by the angel—proves, strangely, more effectually powerful.

Notes 1. Lindberg discusses Plotinus on ‘light as the form of all corporeal substance’ (Lindberg: 11). Any substance is a composite of matter and form, a point essential for Paradiso. Incorporeal substances include Aristotle’s prime mover, and the intelligences that move the heavenly spheres: they comprise bare form (Lindberg: 7–8.) Light is, in Aristotle’s successors, ‘spiritual matter that can receive spiritual forms to produce spiritual (and hence incorporeal) substances’ (8): a spiritual embodiment of form. 2. For Marsyas, see Wind: 171–176, Bull: 301–307. Seznec, 105, 249, reads Marsyas as resistant matter. For Dante’s Ovid, see Reynolds: 21–55. 3. On Apollo and Daphne, see Barnard 1987:19–43, and Ogle 1910: 287–311, referencing Aeneid 3.90, 5.154, Metamorphoses 15.634. 4. Averroes’ De substantia orbis argues that some parts of the moon, where matter is denser, make the sun’s rays shine back; lighter parts are where material is more rare; here, the light shines through. See Dahlberg 1983: lines 16707–17038, pp. 281–286. 5. For Charles of Anjou outside these cantos, see Inf. 19. 98–99 (see below); Purgatorio 7.124–129, 20.79–81; Paradiso 19.127–129, 20.62, 63; Convivio 4.6; and DVE 1.12.

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6. Reynolds and Sayers: 51–52. The Emperor following was Ludwig IV of Bavaria (1282–1347), crowned King of the Germans in 1314, King of Italy in 1327, and Holy Roman Emperor in 1328. Joan Ferrante 1984: 27–28, 38, 119–121, considers Ludwig in relation to the DXV of Purg. 33.37–44. 7. Derrida 1995: 89–117. For Heidegger, Es gibt suggests both the ‘giving’ nature of the other that precedes me and the ‘there is’ (il y a), a theme in Levinas; see Tambling 2004: 351–372. 8. On canto 6, see Limentani 85: 131–47; J.H.  Whitfield 1977: 143–177; Bellomo 1990: 9–26, with bibliography. 9. Canto 7 continues with three lines of Latin mixed with Hebrew, contrasting with the incoherent opening of Inferno 7, and including a form of utterance that comes when one line has only three words: ‘superillustrans claritate tua’ (7.2). Further examples of these single lines in Dante will be noted. 10. References: Stahl 1977: 2.65; Derrida 1981: 84–94. See Martianus Capella’s Neoplatonist allegory De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii (The Marriage of Philology and Mercury, c.410 to 439 CE), a textbook of the medieval period. See Convivio 2.13.7, 8, 2.13–2.14.1–21, and Eastwood 2007: 181. 11. For Constantine, see Grigg and Kelley 2012: 3–31; for the letter, Unn Falkeid 2017: 25–51, Davis 1975: 411–433. See Inf. 19.115–117, 27.94–97, Purg. 32.124–9, and Ferrante 1984: 3–43, noting that the Donation was interpreted to mean that the Papacy had imperial powers (29); for the Donation and Monarchia 3.10, Park 2012: 67–161. 12. See further, canto 27.61–63, and Monarchia 2.9.18. For Scipio in Dante, see Inf. 31.115–117, addressing Antaeus (using Pharsalia 4.593–660), and Purg. 29.116. Hollander and Rossi 1986: 59–82 discuss these names, and Scipio. 13. Davis 1957: 4; see also Chap. 4. In Ep. VI, Dante calls Florentines the ‘most wretched offshoot of Fiesole’ (Toynbee 81: cp. Inf. 15.61–62, 73). For Republican themes, see Davis 1974: 30–50 on Ptolemy of Lucca, and Davis 1984: 198–223. That Dante so encountered Remigio de Girolami (1235–1319) is controversial: see essays by Luca Bianchi, Robert Black, and John C.  Barnes in Barański and Pertile 2015: 167–168, 273–274, 359–360. See Silverstein 1938: 326–349, for Dante’s reading of Roman history, noting that Aeneid 6.756–853, giving that history, was Augustine’s source. He discusses Ptolemy of Lucca’s republicanism (and monarchism as regards the Pope). See ‘Brunetto Latini and Dante’, Davis 1984: 166–197. 14. Shaw, Monarchia, 30, quoting City of God 4.4. See her notes on Augustine, and Davis 1957: 47–68 on Dante, Augustine, and Orosius; ‘Augustine

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tried to demolish the myth of a universal and eternal Rome; Orosius attempted to christianise it’ (62). Davis thinks Dante lacked direct knowledge of Livy (47). 15. See Wetherbee 2008: 61–96 for Lucan, noting Statius’ Silvae 2.7.79–80; Statius imagines the ‘Aeneid itself’ doing homage to Lucan (162). It is assumed that Dante did not know the Silvae. 16. Curio, subject of Phars. 1.268–292, concludes Book Four meeting his death in battle in Africa, fighting Juba, King of Numidia, who owed his throne to Pompey; Lucan judges him, noting his flow of rhetoric, and bribery (Phars. 4.799–824), Mercurial qualities. 17. Hershkowitz 1998: 231–246; she stresses Caesar’s madness, 216–218, and finds Cato mad in his virtue. 18. This gives the poem’s title; see Braund in Pharsalia: xxxviii–xxxix, quoting 9.980–986. 19. Monarchia 1.16.1–3. Shaw, Monarchia 28 says that this is the argument of Orosius, Hist. 3, 8, and 6.22. Compare the argument of Convivio 4.5. 20. Noble 1984: 119, 123–4, and 99–137; Christie 1995: 104–106; and Barbero 2004: 30. 21. Charles of Anjou was brother of Louis IX of France (1214–1270). He possessed Provence, by marriage (see below), and, invited by Pope Urban IV to assume the crown of Naples and Sicily, defeated Manfred, inaugurating Angevin rule there. Wanting Emperorship of the Latin empire, including Constantinople, captured in the Fourth Crusade (1204), he made himself King of Jerusalem (1277): that is, ruler of a crusader state created after the First Crusade. Michael VIII Palaeologos (1223–1282) reclaimed Constantinople in 1261. Charles II felt, like him, a right to Sicily, which the father lost after 1282 (Dunbabin 1998: 99–113). Sicily passed to the Aragonese, who were backed by the Papacy; See Inf. 19. 98–99 and Runciman 1961: 224–230. 22. Perhaps meaning the battle of Montecatini in 1315, between Ghibelline Pisa and the Guelf Florentines; Life 193–4. 23. Kantorowicz 1963: 131; see Schiller 1990: 396–411. This special honour for the Emperor is contested by Grossvogel 2012: S131–S137. 24. Frank 2007: 185–206 recalls how parallels were found between Monophysites (mainly living in Egypt and the Eastern provinces of the Empire) and Muslims (187–188). But see Frend, 351–359. 25. On cantos 8 and 9, see Barolini 1984: 57–84, 114–123, 184–5; Jacoff 1980; 111–122; Boyde 1993: 284–8. On 8, see Heilbronn 1984: 39–54, Peters 1991: 51–70. On 9, Shapiro 1975: 97–105; on Rahab, see Mazzotta 1979: 308–11, Barnicelli 1995: 115–309, Balfour 1995: 131–145. 26. See Bloch 1991: 173–178 on Bataille and Denis de Rougemont on courtly love.

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27. Her importance appears in 1.223–304, when Jupiter outlines the history of Rome; in 1. 305–417, in 1.657–90; in 2. 588–625; in 4. 90–128 when she conspires with Juno over Dido, securing Dido’s downfall; in 5. 779–826; 8. 370–415 and 8. 608–731; 10. 331–2; 12. 411–29 and 786–7. 28. Backman 1995: 4. Frederick is referred to in Purg. 7. 119 and Para. 20. 63. For the excommunication, until 1302, see Backman 1995: 187–8. 29. Quinn 1968: 225 notes Octavian’s putative practising of human sacrifice; see Aeneid, 1. 415–7; 4. 60–67; 8. 714–19. 30. Venus has a smaller sphere, the epicycle, attached to its deferent—i.e. the circle forming the sphere. The epicycle’s centre is on the deferent’s circumference. With Venus, the two motions interreact when the star is inside the circumference of the deferent, and the star seems to be stationary, or to be retrograde, and then moves forward again. Epicycle theory accounted for these oscillations, which relate to the position of the sun as if some special charge was involved then; the planet being at its most unstable when directly opposite it. Its retrograde and forwards movement makes it seem to be before or behind the sun, at its brow (the morning star, Lucifer) or at its nape (the evening star, Hesperus), in either case destabilising the masculine. See Orr 1956: 138–143. 31. See Mazzotta 1993: 56–74, and Holmes 2008, for Beatrice and the ‘donna gentile’, and Pertile 2005: 104–114, and Ferrante 1975: 129–152. No single topic, nor addressee may be recovered by positing a revision of the Vita Nuova, though that might have happened: Maria Corti’s 1983 arguments remain compelling for finding internal division in the Convivio itself, qualifying the confidence in Philosophy from Books 2 and 3 to 4; she follows Nardi and Pietrobono for the revision. See Hardie 1960: 359–370, and Barnes and Barański 1978: 359–370. 32. See Boswell 1994: 63–76. Schultz 2006 argues with reference to medieval German texts that the love-object in courtly love poetry was less the body of the other (less heterosexual, then, a category he critiques), than courtliness itself. On the bisexuality of Venus, see MacLachlan 2005: 310–326. 33. Toja 1961: 373–385. Translation from Press 1971: 189–191. 34. See Topsfield 1975: 213–215, Paterson 1995: 198–199, and discussion of Arnaut Daniel, 186–206, noting Dante’s admiration (DVE, 2.2.9, 2.6.5–6, 2.20.2, and Purgatorio. 26.115–148). See Smith 1980: 99–109. For the transgressiveness, see Roger Dragonetti 1977: 227–252. For the sestina, see Simonelli 1973: 131–144. Jernigan 1974: 127–151 sees the poem as comprising sexual punning solely. The limiting absence of an unconscious in Jernigan’s reading is discussed by Cholakian 1990: 138–154. 35. Hyde 1966: 1, 2. For Ezzelino in relation to Frederick II’s attack on the Lombard league, see Larner, pp. 30, 31; for the crusade against him by Pope Alexander IV, Larner p. 39: he was seen as an ‘antichrist’. Innocent

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IV (Pope, 1243–1254) called Ezzelino ‘persecutor of the Faith and favourer of heretics’ as though he was a Cathar. Larner notes Ezzelino’s father (the ‘radice’ of 9.31) as being accused of heresy, i.e. of Catharism. See C.W. Previté-Orton 1952: 699, and Hyde 1973: 82, 108, 122–3, 150. 36. Perhaps Folco writing in Occitan evokes a more complete Sordello. Dante seems to have been ambivalent about Sordello, unsurprising if his association with Ezzelino is considered (Barański 1993: 80–97). On Sordello see Barolini 1984: 153–73, Ferrante 1984: 216–8. She (270–71), associates each of the figures who speak in cantos 8 and 9 with poetry (270–271); further, see Bergin 1965: 15–30. 37. Folco’s cominciato ‘Tan m’abellis’, quoted in De Vulgari Eloquentia 2.5.6, is re-heard when Dante begins Arnaut’s words with the same phrase (Purg. 26.140), as if aligning the poets. Folco may have been earlier, historically, and ‘Tan m’abellis’ is equally the poet of ‘fin’amors’ (line 6), while possessing a self-conflictual sense of not loving wisely (line 33). See Hill and Bergin 1973: no. 96, and discussion of Folquet’s vida: for a translation of ‘Tan m’abbelis’, see Thomas 2015: 65–68. 38. For Dido and Phyllis, see Ovid, Ars Amatoria 3. 37–40, Remedia Amoris 55–58, and the Roman de la Rose, 13173–13214. For Phyllis as an example of ‘amor stultus’, see Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women F.2493–2554, and Delany 1994: 221–25. 39. Historians sceptical of the Cathars as a coherent movement influenced by the Bogomils include Pegg 2003, Pegg 2008, and Moore 2014. For contrary views, see Lambert 1998, Barber 200l; see Sennis 2016, especially essays by Peter Biller (274–304), and Hamilton, 131–150, and de Rougemont 1983: 75–91; and for the Albigensian Crusade, Hamilton 1981, stressing the role of Dominic; Riley-Smith 1987: 133–139. 40. See Sparks 1984: 775–812, and Barber 2000: 86–93, and Yuri Stoyanov, ‘Pseudepigraphic and Parabiblical Narratives in Medieval Eastern Christian Dualism, and their Implications for the Study of Catharism’, in Sennis 2016, 151–176, and Bernard 1979: VII (115–124) and VIII (1–40).

Bibliography Andrew, Malcolm and Ronald Waldron (eds.), 2002, The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript Exeter: Exeter U.P. Backman, Clifford R. 1995, The Decline and Fall of Medieval Sicily: Politics, Religion and Economy in the Reign of Frederick III, 1296-1337 (Cambridge: C.U.P.) Balfour, Mark, 1995, ‘Canto 9’, Letturae Dantis Supplement 16-17: 131-45.

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Barański, Zygmunt, 1993, Purgatorio 6 in Dante’s Divine Comedy: Introductory Readings II. Purgatorio ed. Tibor Wlassics, Charlottesville: Virginia U.P., 80-97 Barański, Zygmunt, and Lino Pertile (eds.), 2015. Dante in Context, Cambridge: C.U.P. Barber, Malcolm, 2000, The Cathars: Dualist Heretics in Languedoc in the High Middle Ages, London: Longman. Barbero, Alessandro, 2004, Charlemagne: Father of a Continent trans. Allan Cameron, Berkeley: California U.P. Barnard, Mary E, 1987, The Myth of Apollo and Daphne from Ovid to Quevedo: Love, Agon, and the Grotesque, Durham: Duke U.P. Barnes, John, and Zygmunt Barański, 1978, ‘Dante’s “Canzone Montanina”’, MLR 73: 359-370. Barnicelli, Jean-Pierre, 1995, ‘Canto 8’,  Letturae Dantis Supplement 16-17: 115-130. Barolini, Teodolinda, 1984, Dante’s Poets: Textuality and Truth in the Commedia Princeton U. P. Barrow, R.H, 1949, The Romans, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Bartsch, Shadi, 1997, Ideology in Cold Blood: A Reading of Lucan’s Civil War, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U.P. Bataille, Georges, 1987, Eroticism, translated Mary Dalwood, London: Marion Boyars. Bellomo, Saverio, 1990, ‘Contributo all’ Esegesi de Par.VI’, Italianistica: Rivista di Letturatura Italiana 19: 9-26. Bergin, Thomas, 1965: ‘Dante’s Provençal Gallery’, Speculum 40: 15-30. Bloch, H.  Howard, 1991, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Boitani, Piero, 2007, Dante’s Poetry of the Donati, The Barlow Lectures, 2005: London: Maney Publishing for the Society of Italian Studies. Boswell, John E., 1994, ‘Dante and the Sodomites’, DS 112: 63-76. Botterill, Steven, 1988, ‘“Quae non Licet Homini Loqui”: The Ineffability of Mystical Experience in Paradiso 1 and the “Epistle to Can Grande”’, MLR 83: 332-341. Boyde, Patrick, 1993, Perception and Passion in Dante’s Comedy, Cambridge: C.U.P. Brown, Peter, 1988. The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, New York: Columbia U.P. Bull, Malcolm, 2005, The Mirror of the Gods: Classical Mythology in Renaissance Art Harmondsworth: Penguin. Cholakian, Rouben C., 1990, The Troubadour Lyric: A Psychocritical Reading, Manchester: M.U.P. Christie, Neil J., 1995, The Lombards: The Ancient Longobards, Oxford: Blackwell. Cornford, Francis M, 1937, Plato’s Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato, translated with a Running Commentary, London: Kegan Paul.

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Corti, Maria, 1983, La felicità mentale: Nuove prospective per Cavalcanti e Dante, Turin: Einaudi. Dahlberg, Charles, 1983 (ed. and trans.) Romance of the Rose by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, trans. Charles Dahlberg, Princeton: Princeton U.P. Davis, C.T. 1957, Dante and the Idea of Rome, Oxford: Clarendon. ———, 1974, ‘Ptolemy of Lucca and the Roman Republic’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 118: 30-50. ———, 1975, ‘Dante’s Vision of History’, DS, 93: 143-160. ———, 1984. Dante’s Italy and Other Essays, Philadelphia: Pennsylvania U.P. Delany, Sheila, 1994, The Naked text: Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, Berkeley: California U.P. Derrida, Jacques, 1995, ‘Khora’ in On the Name ed. Thomas Dutoit, trans. Ian McLeod, Stanford: Stanford U.P. de Rougemont, Denis, 1983, Love in the Western World trans. Montgomery Belgion (1940), Princeton: Princeton U.P. Dragonetti, Roger, 1977, ‘The Double Play of Arnaut Daniel’s Sestina and Dante’s Divina Commedia’, Yale French Studies 55/56: 227-252. Dronke, Peter, 1997, Dante’s Second Love: The Originality and Contexts of the Convivio, Exeter: Society for Italian Studies. Dunbabin, Jean, 1998, Charles I of Anjou: Power, Kingship and State-Making in Thirteenth-Century Europe, London: Longman. Durling, Robert M, and Ronald L. Martinez, 1990, Time and the Crystal: Studies in Dante’s Rime Petrose. Berkeley: California U.P. Eastwood, S. 2007, Ordering the Heavens: Roman Astronomy and Cosmology in the Carolingian Renaissance, Leiden: Brill. Falkeid, Unn, 2017, The Avignon Papacy Contested: An Intellectual History from Dante to Catherine of Siena, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U.P. Ferrante, Joan, 1975, Women as Images in Medieval Literature, New  York: Columbia U.P. ———, 1984, The Political Vision of the Divine Comedy, Princeton: Princeton U.P. Frank, Maria Esposito, 2007, ‘Dante’s Muhammad: Parallels Between Islam and Arianism’, DS 125: 185-206. Frend, W.H.C., 1972, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement: A Chapter in the History of the Church in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries, Cambridge: C.U.P. Foster, Kenelm, 1955, ‘Dante’s Paradiso: Canto 1’, Life of the Spirit (1946-1954) 10: 180-184. Ginsberg, Warren, 1988, ‘Place and Dialectic in Pearl and Dante’s Paradiso’, ELH 55: 731-753. Green, C.M.C., 1994, ‘“The Necessary Murder”: Myth, Ritual, and Civil War in Lucan, Book 3’, Classical Antiquity, 13: 203-233. Grigg, Lucy and Gavin Kelley, 2012, Two Romes: Rome and Constantinople in Late Antiquity, Oxford: O.U.P.

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Grossvogel, Steven, 2012, ‘Justinian’s “Jus” and “Justificatio” in Paradiso 6.10-27’, MLN, 127: 130-137. Hill R.T. and T.G. Bergin 1973, Anthology of the Provençal Troubadours 2 vols. 2nd edition, New Haven: Yale U.P. Hamilton, Bernard, 1979, Monastic Reform: Catharism and the Crusades (900-1300) London: Variorum Reprints. ———, 1981, The Medieval Inquisition, London: Edward Arnold 1981. Hardie, Colin, 1960, ‘Dante’s “Canzone Montanina”’, MLR 55: 359-370. Hawkins, Peter S., 1991, ‘Dido, Beatrice and the Signs of Ancient Love’ in Rachel Jacoff and Jeffrey T. Schnapp (eds.), The Poetry of Allusion: Virgil and Ovid in Dante’s Commedia, Stanford: Stanford U.P. Heilbronn, Denise, 1984: ‘Contrapuntal Imagery in Paradiso VIII’, Italian Culture 5: 39-54. Hershkowitz, Debra, 1998 The Madness of Epic: Reading Insanity from Homer to Statius, Oxford: Clarendon. Hollander, Robert and Albert L. Rossi, 1986, ‘Dante’s Republican Treasury’, DS 104: 59-82. Holmes, Olivia, 2008, Dante’s Two Beloveds: Ethics and Erotics in the Divine Comedy New Haven: Yale U.P. Howell, Margaret, 1998, Eleanor of Provence: Queenship in Thirteenth-Century England, Oxford: Blackwell. Hyde, J.K., 1966, Padua in the Age of Dante, Manchester: M.U.P. ———, 1973, Society and Politics in Medieval Italy, London: Macmillan. Jacoff, Rachel, 1980, ‘The Post-Palinodic Simile: Paradiso VIII and IX’, DS 98: 111-122. Jernigan, Charles, 1974, The Song of Nail and Uncle: Arnaut Daniel’s Sestina “Lo ferm voler q’el cor m’intra”’, Studies in Philology 71: 127-151. Johnson, W.R. 1987, Momentary Monsters: Lucan and his Heroes, Ithaca: Cornell U.P. Kalligas, Paul, 2014, The Enneads of Plotinus: A Commentary 2 vols, trans. Elizabeth Key Fowden and Nicolas Pilavachi Princeton: Princeton U.P. Kantorowicz, Ernst, 1963, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology, Princeton: Princeton U.P. Kay, Richard, 1994, Dante’s Christian Astrology, Philadelphia: Pennsylvania U.P. Kay, Tristan, 2016, Dante’s Lyric Redemption: Eros, Salvation, Verbal Tradition: Oxford: O.U.P. Klibansky, Raymond, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, 1964, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy and Art, London: Thomas Nelson Kristeva, Julia, 1984, Revolution in Poetic Language trans. Leon S.  Roudiez, New York Columbia U. P. Lacan, Jacques, 1992, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans. Dennis Porter, New York: W.W. Norton.

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Lambert, Malcolm, 1998, The Cathars Oxford: Blackwell. Lansing, Richard, 1987, ‘Piccarda and the Poetics of Paradox’, Dante Studies 105: 63-77. Larner, John, 1980, Italy in the Age of Dante and Petrarch, London: Longman Lewis, C.S., 1938, The Allegory of Love, Oxford: O.U.P. ———, 1964: The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature, Cambridge: C.U.P. Limentani, Uberto, 1985, Dante’s Comedy: Introductory Readings of Selected Cantos, Cambridge: C.U.P.: 131-47. Lindberg, David C., 1986, ‘The Genesis of Kepler’s Theory of Light: Light Metaphysics from Plotinus to Kepler’, Osiris 2: 4-42. MacLachlan, Bonnie, 2005, ‘The Cyprian Redeemed: Venereal Influence in Paradiso’ in James Miller (ed.), Dante and the Unorthodox: The Aesthetics of Transgression Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier U.P.: 310-326. Mancusi-Ungaro, Donna, 1987, Dante and the Empire, New York: Peter Lang. Masters, Jamie, 1992, Poetry and Civil War in Lucan’s Bellum Civile, Cambridge: C.U.P. Mazzotta, Giuseppe, 1979, Dante: Poet of the Desert: History and Allegory in the Commedia, Princeton: Princeton U.P. ———, 1993, Dante’s Vision and the Circle of Knowledge, Princeton: Princeton U.P. Menachal, Sophie 1998, Clement V, Cambridge: C.U.P. Miller, James L., 1977, ‘Three Mirrors of Dante’s Paradiso’, University of Toronto Quarterly 46: 263-279. Moevs, Christian, 2005, The Metaphysics of Dante’s Comedy, Oxford: O.U.P. Moore, R.I. W., 2014, The War on Heresy: Faith and Power in Medieval Europe London: Profile Books. Nardi, Bruno, 1960, Dal Convivio alla Commedia: Sei saggi danteschi, Roma: Nella Sede dell’Instituto Palzazzo Borromini. Noble, Thomas F.X., 1984, The Republic of St Peter: The Birth of the Papal State, 680-825, Philadelphia: Pennsylvania U.P. Ogle M.B, 1910 ‘Laurel in Ancient Religion and Folk-Lore’, American Journal of Philology 31: 287-311. Moorhead, John, 1994, Justinian, London: Longman. Olson, Paul R., 1962, ‘Theme and Structure in the Exordium of the Paradiso, Italica 39: 89-104. Orr, M.A. 1956, Dante and the Astronomers, London: Allan Wingate. Otter, Monika, 1999, ‘Closed Doors: An Epithalamium for Queen Edith, Widow and Virgin’, in Cindy L. Carlton and Angel Jane Weisel (eds.), Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages, Basingstoke; Macmillan: 63-92. Paden, William D. and Frances Freeman Paden (eds.), 2002, Troubadour Poems from the South of France, Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer. Park, Dabney G., 2012, ‘Dante and the Donation of Constantine’, DS 130: 67-161.

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Paterson, Linda M, 1993, The World of the Troubadours: Medieval Occitan Society, c.1100—c.1300, Cambridge: C.U.P. ———, 1995, Troubadours and Eloquence, Oxford: Clarendon. Pegg, Mark Gregory, 2003, The Corruption of Angels: The Great Inquisition of 1245-1246, Princeton: Princeton U.P. ———, 2008, A Most Holy War: The Albigensian Crusade and the Struggle for Christendom, Oxford: O.U.P. Pertile, Lino, 1997, ‘Dante Looks Forward and Back: Political Allegory in the Epistles’, DS 115: 1-17. ———, 2005: 104-114 ‘Does the Stil Nuovo go to Heaven’ in Teodolinda Barolini and H.  Wayne Storey (eds.), Dante for the New Millennium, New  York: Fordham U.P.; 104-114. Peters, Edward, 1991, ‘Human Diversity and Civil Society in Paradiso VIII,’ DS 109: 51-70. Poeschke, Joachim, 2010, Italian Mosaics 300-1300 trans. Russell Stochman, New York: Abbeville Press. Press, Alan R., 1971, Anthology of Troubadour Lyric Poetry, Edinburgh: Edinburgh U.P. Previté-Orton C.W., 1952, The Shorter Cambridge Medieval History Cambridge: C.U.P. Putnam, Michael J., 1985, ‘Possessiveness, Sexuality, and Heroism in the Aeneid’, Vergilius 31: 1-21. Quinn, Kenneth, 1968, Virgil’s Aeneid: A Critical Description, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Resnick, Irven M., 1988, ‘Peter Damian on the Restoration of Virginity: A Problem for Medieval Theology’, Journal of Theological Studies 39: 125-134. ———, (ed.), 2013, A Companion to Albert the Great: Theology, Philosophy, and the Sciences, Leiden: Brill. Reynolds, Brian, 2008, ‘Morphing Mary: Pride, Humility, and Transformation in Dante’s Rewriting of Ovid’, DS 126: 21-55. Riley-Smith, Jonathan, 1987, The Crusades: A Short History, New Haven: Yale U.P. Runciman, Stephen, 1961, The Sicilian Vespers: A History of the Mediterranean World in the Later Thirteenth Century, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Sallis, John, 1999, Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus, Bloomington: Indiana U.P. Schildgen, Brenda Deen, 2015, ‘Philosophers, Theologians, and the Islamic Legacy in Dante: Inferno 4 versus Paradiso 4’ in Jan M.  Ziolkowski (ed.), Dante and Islam, New York: Fordham U.P.: 95-113. Schiller, Kay E., 1990, ‘Dante and Kantorowicz: Medieval History as Art and Autobiography’, Annali d’Italianistica 8: 396-411. Schneiderman, Stuart, 1988, An Angel Passes, New York: New York U.P. Schultz, James A., 2006, Courtly Love, the History of Courtliness and the History of Sexuality, Chicago: Chicago U.P.

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Sennis, Antonio (ed.), 2016, Cathars in Question, York: York Medieval Press 2016. Seznec, Jean, 1972, The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition in Renaissance Humanism and Art trans. Barbara F.  Sessions. Princeton: Princeton U.P. Shapiro, Marianne, 1975, Woman Earthly and Divine in the Comedy of Dante, Lexington: Kentucky U.P. Shoaf, R.A., 1990, ‘Purgatorio and Pearl: Transgressions and Transcendence’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 32: 52-166. Silverstein, Theodor, 1938, ‘On the Genesis of De Monarchia II.v’, Speculum 13: 326-349. Simonelli, Maria Picchio, 1973, ‘La sestina dantesca fra Arnaut Daniel e il Petrarca’, DS 91: 131-144. Smith, Nathaniel B., 1980, ‘Arnaut Daniel in the Purgatorio: Dante’s Ambivalence Toward Provençal’, DS 98: 99-109. Spanos, Margaret, 1975, ‘The Sestina: An Exploration of the Dynamics of Poetic Structure’, Speculum 53: 545-557. Sparks, H.F.D. (ed.), 1984, The Apocryphal Old Testament, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Stahl, William Harris and Richard Johnson with E.L.  Burge, 1977, Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts 2 vols, New York: Columbia U.P. Tambling, Jeremy, 2004, ‘Levinas and Macbeth’s ‘Strange Images of Death’, Essays in Criticism 54: 351-372. Thomas, James (ed.), 2015, Grains of Gold: An Anthology of Occitan Literature, London: Francis Boutle. Toja, Gianluigi, 1961, Arnaut Daniel: Canzoni, Firenze: G.C. Sansonsi. Topsfield, L. T., 1975, Troubadours and Love, Cambridge: C.U.P. Ullmann Walter, 1973, A Short History of the Papacy in the Middle Ages, London: Methuen. Wall, Kathleen, 1988, The Callisto Myth from Ovid to Atwood: Initiation and Rape in Literature, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s U.P. Wetherbee, Winthrop, 2008, The Ancient Flame: Dante and the Poets, Notre Dame: Notre Dame U.P. Whitfield, J.H., 1977, Canto 6 in David Nolan (ed.), Dante Commentaries: Eight Studies of the Divine Comedy, Dublin: University College and the Italian Cultural Institute: 143-177. Wind, Edgar, 1967, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Winstead, Karen A., 1997, Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval England, Ithaca: Cornell U.P. Wittkower, Rudolph, 1939, ‘Eagle and Serpent: A Study in the Migration of Symbols’, Journal of the Warburg Institute 2: 293-325. Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn, 2001: Saints’ Lives and Women’s Literary Culture c. 1150-1300, Oxford: O.U.P.

CHAPTER 3

Dancing in the Sun: Paradiso—Cantos 10–14

Paradiso 10: Dante and Time We have left the Earth behind with the exordium to canto 10 (1–27), which demands a new contemplation of heaven, beginning with the Trinity; the Father and the Son together breathing forth the Love which is the Holy Spirit.1 The Father made all things that turn—this is almost a definition of life. Creation is a moving image of eternity, and here Timaeus 37c is a source, for beholding the divine art of the heavens gives a lesson as to what eternity is. Dante directs the reader to admire the work of God as Master of Arts, by looking up at where the celestial Equator and the sun in the zodiac cross, forming a Latin X, this canto’s number. The zodiac is the belt, extending 8  degrees on either side of the sun’s pathway on the ecliptic (compare canto 1:37–42). Plato saw this X as where the contrasted directions of the Same and the Different cross, for ‘the circle of the Same [the Demiurge] caused to move from left to right, and the circle of the Different from right to left on an axis inclined to it’ (Timaeus 36c). The Different produces the solar year, counted out by the course of the sun in the zodiac, which goes obliquely, ‘torta’ (16), because if it followed the line of the equator, its virtue would be wasted on the northern and southern hemispheres, and the Earth would lose all its life-giving potential. The sun would remain at the same height; there would be no seasonal change. If the ecliptic’s angle was greater, seasons would be more marked. If the sun © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Tambling, The Poetry of Dante’s Paradiso, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65628-7_3

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was not on the ecliptic, there would be eclipses of planets (Boyde 1981: 152–155). The sun spiralling from the celestial equator to Cancer (21 March–21 June) rises earlier each day in the northern hemisphere. Spiralling, for Proclus, combines ascent in a straight, that is, linear way, and in a circular, that is, divine, mode (Hathaway 1969: 38). And the sun ‘il tempo ne misura’—it measures out time (30) for those below it. Part of an image of eternity, it gives time, so satisfying people below. The stress on time, as a gift, as an event which is given, is new, though a sense of the value of its different moments was a consistent interest in Purgatorio. In the sun, Dante says nothing. He and Beatrice are surrounded by a crown-like circle of lights, which, compared to a circle around the moon seen on a watery night, its light held around it as the thread of a girdle, gives a hint of pregnancy. The daughter of Latona (the moon) is girdled (cp. French enceinte) by what surrounds her, giving the sense of a new full life coming. Hence, perhaps these lights are called ‘donne’, and they sing and circle Dante and Beatrice three times. They pause silently, counting, during the stanza sung by the leader, until the notes announcing the refrain for the ballata are heard again (79–81). Silent dancing-measures count time, and the canto concludes with forms of time devised in response to the sun’s measuring activities, creating patterns which mime eternity: church bells, and the clock, which work by the escapement which divides time into countable repeating beats: two-fro, and sounding ‘tin-tin’ (143), replacing canonical hours by equal hours: Indi, come orologio che ne chiami ne l’ora che la sposa di Dio surge a mattinar lo sposo perché l’ami, che l’una parte e l’altra tira e urge, tin tin sonando con sì dolce nota, che ‘l ben disposto spirto d’amor turge; così vid’ïo la gloriosa rota muoversi e render voce a voce in tempra e in dolcezza ch’esser non pò nota se non colà dove gioir s’insempra. (10.139–148)

(Then, like a clock that calls us in the hour that the espoused of God rises to sing matins to the spouse so that he may love her, so that one part draws or drives another, sounding ‘tin tin’ with notes so sweet that the well-disposed spirit swells with love, so I saw the glorious wheel move and voice answering voice in temper [harmony, cp. 14.118, cp. Latin

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temperare: dividing according to time] and in sweetness that can never be known save there where joy eternalises itself [compare 1.76–78].) Clocks began chiming the hours in Dante’s lifetime (Moevs 1999: 59–84). The sun gives time, while the clock, man’s art responding to God’s art, responds, attempting to map the cosmos, as with the astronomical clock designed by Richard of Wallingford at St Albans (c.1327), counting out time as the sun does. The clock-image and the 12 figures supply the hours which the clock rings in at the hour when the Bride (i.e. conventual figures) rises to sing matins (Leclercq 1979: 27–61, 137–144). Bosco and Reggio note ‘a matinar’ as ecclesiastical and popular, that is, courting the beloved below the window (compare the verb ‘to serenade’). That the singer’s gender is female accords with the feminine wooing speaker in the Song of Songs, though she reports his speech: ‘My beloved spake and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away’ Song of Songs (2.10). He is courting her, the Bride, in an aubade. The Song of Songs permits this gender-change, where male spirits sing as women, making Christ masculine (‘sposo’) and feminine, sung to, wooed by the masculine Bride (‘sposa’). The clock’s motion has a pulling (‘Draw me, we will run after thee’—Song 1.3) and pushing alternation, compellingly, as the bell sounds ‘tin tin’ so sweetly (note ‘dolce’ and ‘dolcezza’) that it swells (turge) the spirit of love like spring buds opening, in an image masculine and phallic and feminine (the sexuality is infused in urge and gioir). The alternating movement is the wheel moving ‘voce a voce’: the spirits forming a series of interlocking wheels, drawing the one behind, pushing the one in front, creating a perpetual motion expressed in the neologism of joy ‘eternalising’ itself, a word responding to ‘etternalmente’ (2). This wheel intensifies the spiralling of the 12 signs of the zodiac. The ‘tin tin’ in the time-telling (‘orologio’) urges towards love, not towards the asceticism and disciplinarity which present-day time-keeping enforces where we ‘spend’ time, that is, in being consumers of it. This love which the Bride feels inheres within the joy of these spirits, turning intellectual study into dancing, singing, and loving. A concentrated eroticism suffuses this developed ten-line simile finishing the tenth canto: a jouissance extraordinarily controlled, and imaged in such allusive yet specific language—clockwork interlocking, the bell sounding, matins as love-poetry, spirits materialising like lovers. We can read its difference from Chaucer’s comparable fusion of the erotic and the spiritual: Nicholas and Alison lie in bed:

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In bisynesse of myrthe and of solas, Til that the belle of laudes gan to rynge, And freres in the chauncel goone synge. (The Miller’s Tale, Chaucer 1.3654–3656)

Yet Dante’s world risks being less unequivocally heterosexual than Chaucer’s; these male, monk-like figures participate in imagery which describes lovers coming together. It is one more use of the Song of Songs, which activates much in these cantos; the dancing a sublime reminiscence of the wheeling movement of the sodomites in Inf. 16.19–27; refusing to limit an image; and rather holding worlds and possibilities in play. In that it exceeds Chaucer.

The Spirits in the Sun In the earlier heavens Dante knew how and when he had arrived, but is now in a new state of being, where the sun’s physical movement, lighting all the universe is visible. Beatrice speaks (52–54), but says nothing else until canto 14, though she is signally dignified (10. 91–93).2 From now, Paradisal souls appear in groups: the speaker naming the 12 figures concealed in these lights, plants within the garland (91) earlier called a ‘corona’ (65). The first is Thomas Aquinas, the Dominican: Io fui de li agni de la santa greggia che Domenico mena per cammino u’ ben s’impingua se non si vaneggia. Questi che m’è a destra più vicino, frate e maestro fummi, ed esso Alberto è di Cologna, e io Thomas d’Aquino. Se sì di tutti li altri esser vuo’ certo, di retro al mio parlar ten vien col viso girando su per lo beato serto. Quell’altro fiammeggiare esce del riso di Grazïan, che l’uno e l’altro foro aiutò sì che piace in paradiso. L’altro ch’appresso addorna il nostro coro, quel Pietro fu che con la poverella offerse a Santa Chiesa suo tesoro. La quinta luce, ch’è tra noi più bella, spira si tale amor, che tutto ’l mondo

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là giù ne gola di saper novella: entro v’è l’alta mente u’ sì profondo saver fu messo, che, se ’l vero è vero, a veder tanto non surse il secondo. Appresso vedi il lume di quel cero che giù in carne più a dentro vide l’angelica natura e ’l ministero. Ne l’altra piccioletta luce ride quello avvocato de’ tempi cristiani del cui latino Augustin si provide. Or se tu l’occhio de la mente trani di luce in luce dietro a le mie lode, già de l’ottava con sete rimani. Per vedere ogni ben dentro vi gode l’anima santa che ’l mondo fallace fa manifesto a chi di lei ben ode. Lo corpo ond’ella fu cacciata giace giuso in Cieldauro; ed essa da martiro e da essilio venne a questa pace. Vedi oltre fiammeggiar l’ardente spiro d’Isidoro, di Beda e di Riccardo, che a considerar fu più che viro. Questi onde a me ritorna il tuo riguardo, è ’l lume d’uno spirto che ’n pensieri gravi a morir li parve venir tardo: essa è la luce etterna di Sigieri, che, leggendo nel Vico de li Strami, silogizzò invidïosi veri. (Para 10. 94–113)

(I was of the lambs of the sacred flock that Dominic leads along the road where there is good fattening, if there is no straying. This ones who on the right is nearest to me, was my brother and master; and he is Albert of Cologne, and I Thomas of Aquino. If you would be certain of all the others, come with me, following my speech, with your eyes, circling up along the blessed wreath. That other flame comes from the smile of Gratian, who aided the one and other court so much that it pleases in Paradise. The next one adorning our choir was that Peter who with the poor woman offered his treasure to Saint Church. The fifth light, amongst us the most beautiful, breathes from that love of which all the world below is hungry to know news: within it is the high mind to which profound knowledge was given, so that if the truth is true, to such vision never rose a second.

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Next, see the light of that candle that below in flesh saw furthest within the angelic nature and ministry. In the other little light smiles that advocate of Christian times of whose discourse Augustine availed himself. Now if the eye of your mind is drawn from light to light following my praises, you are already thirsting for the eighth. There rejoices, to see every good within, the sacred soul who makes manifest the fallacious world to whoever listens well. The body from which he was chased lies below in Cieldauro, and he from martyrdom and from exile came to this place. See beyond, flaming, the burning breath of Isidore, of Bede, and of Richard, who in contemplation was more than man. This one, from whence to me your gaze returns, is the light of a spirit to whom in heavy thoughts it seemed that death came slowly; it is the eternal light of Siger, who, lecturing in the Street of Straw, syllogised enviable truths.) As if fulfilling the pregnancy-image, another circle surrounds this one in canto 12, and the imagery of Iris, and Echo evokes the pact made with Noah (Genesis 9.11–16), and shows another way in which the heavens accord time to the earth: people can ‘presage’ (12.16); they can anticipate. That sense of futurity continues the thought of pregnancy and moves towards prophecy (see below for this). The second circle lets Bonaventura, the Franciscan describe Dominic, as Thomas has described St Francis, before he names those in this second group. Later, more figures produce a third circle (14.70–76), making the significant numbers 3, 5, and 12. Io son la vita di Bonaventura di Bagnoregio, che ne’ grandi offici sempre pospuosi la sinistra cura. Illuminato e Augustin son quici, che fuor de’ primi scalzi poverelli che nel capestro a Dio si fero amici. Ugo da San Vittore è qui con elli, e Pietro Mangiadore e Pietro Spano, lo qual giù luce in dodici libelli; Natàn profeta e ’l metropolitano Crisostomo e Anselmo e quel Donato ch’a la prim’arte degnò porre mano. Rabano è qui, e lucemi dallato il calavrese abate Giovacchino di spirito profetico dotato. (12. 127–141)

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(I am the life of Bonaventura of Bagnoregio, who in the great office always placed behind the left-hand care. Illuminato and Augustine are here, who were among the first bare-foot brothers who made themselves friends to God with the cord. Hugh of St Victor is here with them, and Peter Mangiadore, and Peter of Spain, who left below light in twelve books. Nathan the prophet and the metropolitan Chrysostom, and Anselm, and that Donatus who deigned to set his hand to the first art. Rabanus is here, and shining at my side the Calabrian abbot Joachim, who was endowed with prophetic spirit.) Whereas Justinian had given names in chronological order, this now changes; names constellate together, in a more advanced patterning.

The First Circle Aquinas does not name the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth in his circle: Solomon, Dionysius, Orosius, Boethius. Solomon’s identity is confirmed in cantos 13 and 14; Dionysius is so described that canto 28.130–132 confirms who he is. Orosius, if it is he, in lines 118–120, is controversial: Ambrose and Lactantius are other possibilities; Sapegno suggests, on account of his Platonic dialogues, that it may be Marius Victorinus, ‘a rhetor of African origin, who embodied the ideal of high culture, writing […] on grammar, rhetoric and dialectic, translating some of Aristotle’s logic and presenting to Latin readers works by Porphyry and Plotinus’ (Chadwick’s note in Confessions 140). Confessions 8: 2–5 treats Victorinus as a figure of conversion to be followed. Isidore’s Etymologies notes that Victorinus translated Porphyry’s Isagoge, an introductory lost handbook on logic (c.300 CE), and notes that Boethius commented on Victorinus in five books (Barney et al. 2006: II.xxv.81). If Dante knew this Isidorean passage, there may be reason for following Sapegno. Isidore mentions Victorinus for syllogisms and logic (II.xxix, 84; and for the subject of the enthymeme, II.ix.72). The Spanish-born Paulus Orosius travelled to meet Augustine and Jerome and to escape the Goths, and wrote Historiae adversus paganos at Augustine’s direction. Its seven books showed Christianity in relation to human history, making Rome the centre of everything. His editor notes his geographical awareness (Raymond 1936: 15). The editors of Isidore’s Etymologies note he influenced Isidore’s Book XIV (Barney et al. 2006: 15). But whoever the figure in the seventh place is, the significant name is Augustine; Orosius, if he, is ‘piccoletta’, giving place to him. The last unnamed, Boethius is identified by his burial-place

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in Cieldauro, in Pavia, where Augustine was re-interred by the Lombard king Liutprand, c.752, as Bede records. Aquinas (1225–1274) places himself second to the Dominican Albertus Magnus (c.1200–1280), starting, then, and finishing, with men who outlived him: Siger was murdered c.1283, which makes Aquinas, chronologically, the tenth spirit. The numbers and names combine, flexibly, identity and difference. Associating Aquinas with Albert and with Siger resembles the play of end-words in a sestina: their unfixed positions create new and unexpected ways of seeing. Further, 12 names are complicated by the widow (Luke 21.1–4), and by Augustine, making the total 14; and the widow is the ‘poverella’ (10.107), a word heard often in the sun, as an adjective in 11.94, for the poor folk increasing in Francis’ ministry. ‘Poveri giusti’ reappears with Dominic’s ministry (12.89), while the first two names of the second circle are ‘poverelli’ (12.131), like Francis, the ‘poverel di Dio’ (13.33). The widow and Poverty (canto 11) are feminine presences, not to be forgotten. All the lights are writers, their impulse being to combine things which are double, creating syntheses of knowledge, systems of knowing, as with the Summa Theologiae, which mentions all but the last two names. The Benedictine Gratian, (no. 3) worked at Bologna as author of the Decretum (c.1140), which systematised law and the authority of the Church, distinguishing what was appropriate for a public ecclesiastical court, and what for the private forum of confession and penance: his name plays on the idea of ‘grace’. The fourth, Peter the Lombard (died 1160), parallel in time, was supposed to have been born poor; his mother apparently a widowed washerwoman (Rosemann 2004: 34). His Sentences in Four Books (c.1150) make, like the widow of the Gospel, his contribution to the ‘treasure’ of Holy Church. As Bishop of Paris in 1159 but trained at Saint Victor (see below), his inspiration Augustine’s De doctrina christiana, as well as Boethius and Isidore, he wrote not collections of Biblical histories and allegories, but systematic theology (Rosemann 2004: 25). After these twelfth-century figures, a new chronology. From the Old Testament, Solomon; from the New, Dionysius the Areopagite (Acts 17.34). Solomon was wiser than all before and since (1 Kings 3.12) and his writings were encyclopaedic (I Kings 4. 32–33), like the wisdom of Dionysius. As with the Victorines, his influence was felt on Albertus, whose presence next to Aquinas juxtaposes Neo-Platonism with Aristotelianism.

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Another chronology gives Victorinus or Orosius. The eighth, Boethius (480–526) is noted by Isidore to have written and translated mathematical works (Barney et al. 2006: III.ii.89), and works on music; indeed, the Editors of the Etymologies say that he covered the quadrivium (Barney et al. 2006: 13). This makes him an encyclopaedist, quite apart from his Consolation of Philosophy, showing the negative nature of one world and the positive nature of the other. Isidore of Seville (died 636) is in a line continuing from Boethius, even if the reasons for giving him are not mentioned, though they must include the Etymologies, which, like Orosius, influenced the tenth light, Bede (674–735), another ecclesiastical historian, making history miraculous and hagiographic. The eleventh soul, Richard of St Victor (born, perhaps in Scotland, as Bede in Jarrow) was an inmate at the monastery at St Victo in Paris, dying in 1173. His Benjamin Minor (see Psalms 68.27) and Benjamin Major, or De arca mystica (The Mystical Ark) a work on contemplation, returns us to the twelfth century. The word for his contemplation is ‘considerar’—that is, ‘to move with the heavenly bodies’, an idea basic to Paradiso. Mentioned in Epistle 10, paragraphs 21 and 28, he is a modern parallel to the Dionysius who ‘saw deepest’ (‘più addentro vide’): this reputation for his contemplation was confirmed by Bonaventura (Coulter 2006: 11). The surprise name is the man Aquinas disputed with, in De unitate intellectus contra Averroistas (1270). Aquinas attacked Siger’s adherence to Averroes (1126–1198), who authored the great commentary on Aristotle (cp. Inf. 4.144) which denied personal immortality in claiming that the rational soul—beyond the vegetative/generative and the sensitive/animal soul—did not possess of itself the ‘possible intellect’. This, unlike that of angels, who as pure essence have uninterrupted understanding, is a capacity to understand, a potentiality, and whereas Purgatorio 25.61–66 sees it as inborn with man, Averroes, and Monarchia 1.3.6–9, argued Siger’s position, that there was only one possible intellect for all humans, a collective intellect, and separate from matter, that is, the material of the body. Canto 10 evokes Cavalcanti’s Averroist canzone ‘Donna mi prega’ (Nelson 1986: 38–41), which is silently echoed in Dante’s exchange with Cavalcanti’s father, one of the materialists whom Inferno 10 says makes the soul die with the body. Cavalcanti’s canzone, a complex of end-rhymes and echoing internal rhymes (see DVE 2.12.8), calls love ‘un accident che sovente è fero / ed è si altero ch’è chiamato amore’ (an accident—not a substance in itself—which is often so violent and proud that it is called love). Though the love is found with ‘gente di valor’ (49),

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it is not idealised. It resides ‘dove sta memora’—where memory abides, that is, in the sensitive soul, and its negativity means that ‘di sua portenza segue spesso morte’ (from its power, death often follows, line 35). Bruno Nardi read the poem as Averroistic, while recent discussion stresses Cavalcanti’s adherence in it to an anonymous commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima, perhaps by Boethius of Dacia, or by Siger, which was available in Bologna. The canzone seems an instance of Parisian ‘radical Aristotelianism’, either deterministic or believing in chance.3 Love is determined by matter—‘created’ in the sense that as nothing new can be generated, ‘the apparently new is just a product of transformation. … Averroes asserts that eternal generation may be identified as a process of creation because it is continuously changing’ (Ardizzone 2002: 77). Announcing that Love is not a virtue, in its second stanza’s sirma: Vèn da veduta forma che s’intende, che prende nel possible intelletto, come in subietto, loco e dimoranza; in quella parte mai non a possanza. Perché da qualitate non descende, resplende in sé perpetüal effetto; non ha diletto ma consideranza; sì cher non pote largir simiglianza. (21–28)

(It comes from a seen form which is comprehended, which takes up place and dwelling in the possible intellect as in a subject. Yet it does not have power because it does not come from a quality, so it does not have delight but reflection, because it can provide no similar image.) The other’s loving form which is seen resides in the possible intellect, which remains isolated, unable to communicate with the phantasmas produced by the sensitive soul, being, rather, split off and admiring only itself. Siger in Paradiso 10 may indicate a desire for reconcilement with what Cavalcanti stood for, as if the challenge his de-idealising of love presented was not over. Siger, Cavalcanti’s model, had questioned in De Aeternitate Mundi (c.1270)—perhaps after Aquinas had written a book with the same title—whether the world had been created, or was in course of an eternal generation (so the Timaeus). Siger was accused by Bishop Tempier in 1277 of teaching contrary, double truths in the ‘street of straw’, a place-­ name whose materialism incidentally indicates the centrality of Paris to these cantos. Praising him as the ‘luce eterna’, words only elsewhere

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applied to Beatrice (Purg. 31.119) and Peter (Para. 24.34), Aquinas creates his own synthesis of two bodies of knowledge. The three names of line 131 enact a trinitarian thinking which segues into the three words characterising Siger’s work: silogizzò invidïosi veri. (138)

Siger syllogised unwelcome truths which have an apparent physical weight. The body’s heaviness sounds in that three-word structure, and he is the only other in this circle, after Boethius, to have his death recorded.

The Second Circle Canto 12 first names three Franciscans in the second circle of lights. Bonaventura (1221–1274) author of Itinerarium mentis in Deum, was Aquinas’ virtual contemporary. Both were associated with the Second Council at Lyon presided over by Gregory X; Aquinas dying en route, Bonaventura while there. Illuminato, whose name suggests the mystic tradition which marks many in this second circle, and Augustine, who punningly suggests the other Augustine of 10.120, cross-weave names and identities within these lists. They join the Franciscans Aquinas names in telling Francis’ life: Bernardo, Egidio, and Silvestro (11.79–84). Then, fourth, Hugh of St Victor (1096–1141), who came from Saxony, and was a prior of St Victor, which was  William of Champeaux’s monastery for Augustinian canons founded in 1111 (Monagle 2013: 49). This, with its urban context, predated the thirteenth-century University of Paris, where Aquinas, Bonaventura, Albertus, and Siger taught: it was significant for no less than four of the twenty-four lights: Hugh, Richard, Peter Lombard, and Peter Comestor. Hugh, who influenced Gratian by his work on the sacraments, was author of the Didascalicon (Latin ‘didascalic’: ‘of the nature of a teacher or of instruction; didactic; pertaining to a teacher’ (OED—see Minnis et al. 1988: 65–112)). This was a new type of book, a collection of allegoriae and distinctiones, contributing to Scholastic theology; but less systematically or abstractly, than Peter Lombard. Hugh produced a commentary on PseudoDionysius’ Celestial Hierarchy and, as with Richard of St Victor, wrote ‘pedagogy to bring humanity to its ultimate end—including mystical ascent, including speculatio’ (Coulter 2013: 205). Speculatio, as vision, meant ‘an imaginative construction of reality, more than hypothetical, in which one supposes what may be the case’,

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creation, therefore, of a kind of poetry, drawing out the meaning within created realities, within the book of nature, where created things (as a speculum), mirror other realities. From speculation, by reflecting on the created world the mind ascends to God; this is the spirit of Suger of St Denis, discussed in Chap. 1, and it influences Bonaventura. For Richard, speculation was ‘when we perceived through a mirror, but contemplatio [is] when we see the truth in its purity without any covering and veil of shadow’, as angels see. When we see through a mirror, it is ‘through clouds of corporeal likenesses’ (Coulter, 205, 210, 217, citing De arca mystica). At the heart of these thinkers is the desire to probe ‘the enigma of visibility’, to see what sustains the vision within coverings and shadowy veils. Petrus Comestor was a student of Peter Lombard, and his writing devoured the books he read. Dying at St Victor in 1179, he had been Chancellor of the University of Paris. There follows Dante’s only contemporary Pope to be saved: Peter of Spain, who, born in Lisbon in 1215, and a student of Albertus at Paris, became Pope John XXI for a few months in 1276. Though there is some controversy whether the Pope and the author of the Summulae Logicales are the same, because the Pope was responsible for having condemned, in early 1277, 219 propositions which Aquinas in Paris was identified with, Dante implicitly identifies them (Copenhaver 2014: 1–16). Peter was a peacemaker and, as at the Council at Lyon, had attempted to make accord with the Eastern Church and with the Byzantine Emperor, Michael Palaeologos. After six twelfth- and thirteenth-century figures, the chronology reverts to the Jewish Bible: to Nathan, ‘profeta’, significant both for David and for Solomon (2 Samuel 7.1–17, I Chronicles 25.29, I Kings 1). Not a writer, like Illuminato and Augustine, Nathan pairs with the theologian John Chrysostom (344–407), who wrote against the Arians. ‘Crisostomo’ came from Antioch in Syria, becoming ‘metropolitan’ Archbishop of Constantinople, and so of the Eastern Church, from which, however, he was driven out, dying, exiled, near the Black Sea. Another Archbishop follows: the Italian Anselm (1053–1109) who studied with Lanfranc at the Benedictine Abbey of Bec, and occupied the see at Canterbury in 1093. He wrote on the Trinity, and in the Monologion on the essence of the divine, being more philosophical than theological; Durling and Martinez note how his Cur Deus Homo [Why God became Man] is used in Paradiso 7. Another chronology begins with Donatus the grammarian (c.350), teacher of Jerome (345–420), followed by the Benedictine Rabanus Maurus (c.776–856),

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student of Alcuin (who followed Bede in the first group) and, similarly, a figure of the learning associated with Charlemagne, as well as being Archbishop of Mainz. Influenced by Isidore, his encyclopaedia De universo ran to twenty-two  books, the number of, and sacralised by, the Hebrew alphabet. The circle concludes with Joachim (1130–1202), to be discussed later. He associates specifically with Bonaventura, who, like Aquinas with Siger, implicitly makes a palinode for his past opposition to him.

The Twenty-Four Spirits What unites these lives? For Peter Dronke, all of the first circles are marked by love. He instances Solomon, whose light ‘breathes from such a love that all the world down there thirsts to know the news of it’ (110–111), while Isidore, Bede, and Richard are said to have ‘l’ardente spiro’ (glowing breath, 130). And Dante is said to ‘thirst’ to know who the eighth, Boethius, is (123). There is the ‘riso’ of Gratian (103), the laughter (‘ride’, 118) of Orosius, and the rejoicing (120) of Boethius (Dronke 1986: 82–102). Dronke thinks Isidore is present as the author of a commentary on the Song of Songs, now attributed to Alcuin (1986: 96, 141–142): Bede commented, too, on the Song of Songs. But in intellectual terms, the first circle names writers of synthesis, or encyclopaedias, or works of theology resting on logic and dialectic, and dependent on a huge prior reading. Donatus represents grammar as ‘la prim’arte’; Peter of Spain is the figure of logic, which Isidore identified with dialectic: Dialectic is the discipline devised for investigating the causes of things. It is a branch of philosophy and is called logic, that is, the rational power of defining, questioning, and discussing. Dialectic teaches, with regard to many types of questions, how the true and the false may be distinguished by disputation. Some of the earliest philosophers had ‘logic’ among their terms, but they did not refine it to the level of skill of an art. … Aristotle brought the argumentative methods of this discipline under certain rules and names it ‘dialectic’ because in it one disputes about terms (dictum) for lecton means ‘utterance’ (dictio). Dialectic follows the discipline of rhetoric because they have many things in common. (Barney et al. 2006: II. xxii.79)

Isidore, linking rhetoric with dialectic, pairs with those who would identify literature and philosophy as the same. Perhaps that is one of Solomon’s merits: he presented encyclopaedic wisdom in poetry, and his

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work is theology. Isidore, who discusses types of poetry in his first Book, on grammar (I. xxxix, 64–66), considers the syllogism, the marker of logic—it was essential to Peter of Spain—as part of rhetoric (II.ix.71–72). Siger syllogised invidious truths, putting logic is on the side of truth, even if that truth is double. In contrast, humans syllogise defectively (11.2). Isidore considers law in terms of rhetoric: ‘law (lex) is so named from ‘reading’ (legere), because it is written’ (II.x.73). His discussion of law appears in Book V, but the alliance of grammar and rhetoric and dialectic with law is shown in these circles. If the distinction between logic, grammar and dialectics was porous (Copenhaver 2014: 10), aligning grammar and law was anticipated by putting Priscian alongside the jurist Francesco d’Accorso (1225–1293) in Inferno 15.110. Gratian, the jurist, arranged his Decretum according to the dialectical method: he would first state a disputed canonical problem, then adduce all the texts that could be quoted in favour of one solution, then those that favoured an opposing solution, and finally he would try to show how the two sets of texts could be reconciled with one another, or why one solution was to be preferred to the other. Gratian’s original title for his book was A Concord of Discordant Canons. The Decretum is divided into two main sections called Distinctiones and Causae, and the Causae are divided into Quaestiones. (Tierney 1964:116)

We begin to understand Aquinas’ meaning, saying that Gratian gave such aid to the one and the other ‘foro’ as is acceptable in Paradise. One argument Gratian gave rise to was the distinction between the legislative power of the church and of the state, Dante’s topic in Monarchia. Gratian thus repeats a pattern evident in these cantos, of holding oppositions together (opposition between the Franciscans and the Dominicans, between ardour and knowledge, the affective and the rational and truth-­ seeking; oppositions between Aquinas/Siger and Bonaventura/Joachim). And Orosius—if it was him—was an ‘avvocato’—using the rhetoric of the legal advocate—of Christian times against a pessimistic Augustinian view of history, when Rome was in crisis. The thirteenth-century debate between an Aristotelian/Dominican Christianity and one more affective (Franciscan) recurs in Mazzotta’s distinction between two formal structures organising forms of knowledge into a systematic unity. One was the encyclopaedia (Isidore, Rabanus Maurus, and Hugh of St Victor); the other the summa, ‘a logical

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compendium of arguments and counterarguments aiming to define the cosmos as an ordered and intelligible totality, from metaphysics to the Trinity, angelology, ethics, and politics’ (Mazzotta 1993: 209). This includes Dionysius, Anselm, Peter of Spain, Gratian, Peter Lombard, Albertus, and Aquinas. Mazzotta thinks that the relation between these models might have been strained. Perhaps the encyclopaedist makes no necessary claim to truth, in accumulating knowledge, whereas the second does. And Isidore wrote etymologies, an apparently older practice than writing an encyclopaedia. Allegorical significance invades etymologising, for an etymology may become an allegory, if a surprising root ‘explains’ a current word, so that the etymologist must invent significances for the root. Isidore can be neither an encyclopaedist nor a writer of summas; working in the dark, severed from the texts of the ancient world that he attempts to give a new and yet historical sense to, he writes something else drawing attention to language creating meaning. Persuasion as well as prophecy marks these writers, showing with those who were persuaded, Illuminato and Augustin. Peter Lombard and Isidore were bishops; in the second circle so were Peter of Spain, Chrysostom, Anselm, Rabanus Maurus. Nathan has an equivalent role, with regard to the king; Bonaventura (1221–1274) became general of the Franciscan order. In Dionysius’ angelic hierarchy, the sun is the sphere of angelic ‘Podestadi’, authoritative powers. Peter Landau (2008: 53) notes the tradition which made Gratian and Peter Lombard brothers. Gratian used Isidore and influenced Peter Lombard. These were heavyweights whose alignment of law and theology established Western canon law, and Papal authority, a new subject for Paradiso. Gratian was both theologian and jurist, but the Papacy in canto 9. 133–135 only regards law: it has rejected the Gospels and these ‘dottori magni’: it has abandoned Paris. These 24 figures reject such reductiveness.4

Paradisal Lives: Francis of Assisi Aquinas makes a riddling comment about Solomon, and says that he himself was a lamb of the sacred flock—the Dominican order of friars— which Dominic leads on the road ‘u’ ben s’impingua se non si vaneggia’ (‘where one may fatten well, if one does not stray off’, 10.96). In canto 11, he notes that Dante wants to understand ‘in sì aperta e ‘n sì distesa lingua’ (‘in such open and extended discourse’, 11.23), what Thomas means by these gnomic statements, and expands on the second by telling

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a story, saying he will speak of one of the two guides, Francis (c.1181–1226) and Dominic (40–42): in speaking of one, he would actually speak of both: supporting the definition of allegory as ‘speaking other’; to speak of one person is to speak of another. They were intended for the bride of Him ‘ch’ad alter grida/disposò lei col sangue benedetto’ (who with high cries [i.e. on the Cross] espoused her with his blessed blood 11.31–32). The Passion is presented as an erotic experience and the loud cry on the cross, ‘Consummatum est’ (‘It is finished’—John 19.30), acquires another, sexual meaning: that Christ and the Church are for ever united so that the task must be to increase the bride’s desire (compare 10.139–141). Aquinas then turns to literal biographical detail, but at line 118 speaks of Dominic, as a worthy colleague to Francis, switching so suddenly that identities are hard to distinguish. The Dominicans as a flock have wandered from the rules of their order and are no longer fattened so that he finishes the canto with the same enigmatic line of 10.96, half-quoted in 11.25. In his first published work on Dante, Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt (1929), Erich Auerbach (1892–1957), noted Francis’ historical importance ‘for the renewal of imagination and sensibility in Europe’ (Auerbach 1961: 26). It gave an increased sense of the power of the human, apparent in expressive writing and art, and in the sense of religion being made vernacular (Italian rather than Latin); the Franciscans becoming ‘urban apostles’, whose writings indicated a ‘new bourgeois spirituality’ (Fleming 1977: 15, 256, 22). John White (1957: 23–56) suggests a new spatial awareness arising in and from the art which painted the life of St Francis. A new affect, erotic in intensity, appears, and Auerbach speaks for it,5 arguing for an increasing realism in figuralism: people on earth are the shadows of what they are in their ‘afterlife’. Their being appears now in more clarity than possible in life so that personifications show people who are individual, and different. That has implications for how any writing must attend to the ‘secular world’, giving its materiality full attention, not thinking of it within the abstractions of allegory. Auerbach notes that Dante does not meet Francis of Assisi in the Commedia, as he does others even more famous; as with Dominic, Francis is only spoken about. The man and the life become a text, extending this cantica’s mode of presenting Paradisal lives by making them disappear behind lights. A greater reality is to be found in thinking of Francis’ life in textual terms, its essence its signifying, which exceeds the literalism of personification. Such a presentation exemplifies Auerbach’s commanding thesis, that Francis becomes figural of Christ; that what is said of Christ

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may be said with greater reality about Francis, because now what is said belongs to the context of the secular world. And writing the life of Francis, as Dante does, through imagining and creating the words of Thomas, does not produce mere literal realism but engenders more allegory. Francis became the substance of legend and allegorisation after his death in official biographies: by Thomas of Celano (1229, revised in the 1240s), and Bonaventura of Bagnoregio’s Major Legend of Saint Francis (the Legenda Maior 1263). The Franciscans became popular: the first Franciscan Pope, Nicholas IV (1288–1292) had been Bonaventura’s successor, as general of the Order. Celestine V, Pope for a few months in 1294, was another Franciscan. Alongside narrative legends, visualisations of Francis appeared, as in the St Francis Dossal (c.1250), made to decorate a family funerary chapel, now in the Bardi Chapel in Santa Croce, the Franciscan church in Florence. Francis is seen full-length, his right hand raised in a Christ-like gesture of blessing (Goffen 1988; Havely 2004: 135–137, 190–191). Amongst visual images of Francis and his life, there were twenty-eight naturalistic and expressive frescoes painted on the walls of the nave in the basilica of San Francesco in Assisi, built to honour the canonisation of Francis (1228–1239). The frescoes, attributed by Vasari to Giotto, but probably the work of several other hands, may have been the work of the 1290s to the 1300s. Alastair Smart distinguishes the work of the Master of Saint Cecilia, the St Francis Master, the Master of the Obsequies of St Francis, and sees a relationship between these and the Isaac Master, represented elsewhere in the nave.6 Giotto, first recorded in relation to Florence in 1301, and praised in Purgatorio 11.94–96—not accidentally corresponding to this canto—contributed to the legend of St Francis: as an artist he could be said to have been created by it. He and his workshop created a panel, now in the Louvre, showing the stigmatisation of St Francis for St Francesco in Pisa, with scenes from the life in the predella: the Dream of Innocent III, of the man (Francis) supporting the church in collapse; the sanctioning of the rule, and—not a Dantean topic—the preaching to the birds (Smart 1971: 109–117). Giotto produced frescoes for the Bardi Chapel in Santa Croce (after 1310): the Stigmatisation and six smaller works (the Renunciation of Earthly Goods; the Confirmation of the Rule; the Appearance at Arles; St Francis Before the Sultan; Death and Ascension of St Francis; and Vision of the Ascension of St Francis). Dante might have heard of them: he could have seen the frescoes of the Assisi basilica.7

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Smart’s study of the Assisi cycle, which suggests there was another Florentine tradition of art independent of the Cimabue/Giotto line of Purgatorio 11, one owing more to a Roman tradition associated with Cavallini (1259–1300), notes parallels between different scenes in the life of Francis. One incident prefigures another; parallels are stressed between these scenes and the life of Christ prefigured in Old and New Testament scenes, depicted in the Assisi nave. They demonstrate that Francis was seen as another Christ, alike in poverty, in miracles, and stigmata. Anne Derbes (1996: 22), stressing how the thirteenth-century Franciscans encouraged an art which narrated the Passion of Christ—another aspect of the emotional and affectual intensity which Francis brought about—shows that the Franciscans modified the details of the Passion to make it speak more of Francis, and constructed a life of Francis to fit the Passion. An example of figural art appears in the first fresco of the St Francis series in Assisi, which Smart attributes to the St Cecilia Master. Smart (1971: 231–232) considers it the most daring and revolutionary in the cycle: ‘never before had sacred legend been given a local habitation as it had here: never before had a painter dared to represent … the familiar aspect of the contemporary scene’. It is placed in geographical symmetry with the last of the series, which represents Rome. Assisi fulfils what Rome, symbolised by the appearance in the picture of Trajan’s column, stands for; or, reading in reverse, Rome is the anagogical fulfilment of Assisi, as Dante’s heavenly Rome anagogically fulfils the earthly Rome. The salient point is the rarity of using an actual building in art. James Stubblebine finds it defines a realism different from Giotto, making it ‘vernacular art’.8 Smart (1978: 33) calls it ‘the first modern street scene in European art’. Like others in the series, it depends on Bonaventura’s Legenda Maior: A certain man from Assisi, who was held to be of great simplicity of mind, but who was yet inspired by God, whenever he met [the young] Francis going through the city, would take off his cloak and spread the garment before his feet, declaring that Francis was worthy of all reverence, as one who before long would perform great works, and that by reason of this he should be splendidly honoured by all the faithful. (quoted Smart 1978: 263)

It is what Erasmus names the praise of folly. One holy fool greets another, Francis, and honours him, saying that this is what Francis will have. The symbolism of laying down the cloak anticipates the literal reality to follow when Francis is canonised (in fresco no. 24). The picture, like

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the fool—his inspiration his folly, his folly his inspiration—is a forerunner, preluding the career of Francis, and his fame; he suggests what his character is and will be, and shows a transformed Assisi. Francis already aureoled, steps out from the left with two people behind him. The cloak lies in the middle of the ground in the centre, the fool is on his knees to the right, laying it down; behind him stand two others. The building in the centre of the picture, behind the cloak, is the Roman Temple of Minerva, and to the left the Torre del Commune in Pisa (Smart 1978: Frontispiece and Plate 41). The Master of St Cecilia has taken the old Roman facade with its six Corinthian pillars supporting the pediment, making them a symbolic five. He has graced the pediment with a rose window whose roundness echoes the aureole, and with sculpted angels on either side of this window. The classical has become Gothic, like the actual Romanesque windows of the Torre del Commune, which are now Gothic, while the tower itself has lost its battlements, making it resemble a church campanile. The Roman temple has become a Christian edifice in an anagogical allegory, and it stands centrally, three steps high, and with a marble flooring. Architecture becomes allegory; the secular world (the Torre, the pagan temple and the houses to the right of the picture) image how honour is paid in the divine world. In the following fresco, which Smart attributes to the St Francis Master, Francis is outside Assisi, giving his mantle to a beggar, an impoverished knight. The first holy fool becomes Francis the holy fool, leading to the renunciation of worldly wealth in the fifth; Francis has returned his clothes to his father. The sharpest comment on the significance of how Francis’ life has been adorned by its legends and its art comes from an unexpected source, Nietzsche, in The Antichrist (1888), resisting the literalisation of interpretation of Christianity (Shapiro 1989: 124–141). He takes Christ as an anarchic ambiguous figure, as a ‘great symbolist’, taking all that is natural, temporal, spatial, and historical as ‘signs, as occasions for similes’ (Nietzsche 2004: 103). The fault of Ernest Renan (1823–1892), to whom Nietzsche refers, is attempting to systematise the four gospels into a single biography; in this, Nietzsche partially contrasts Renan with David Strauss. Nietzsche writes: ‘Of what account are the contradictions of “tradition” to me? How can legends of saints be called “tradition” at all? The stories of saints are the most ambiguous literature that exists’ (98), not to be subjected to the positivism of scientific methods. The point holds for Dante’s presentation of Paradisal lives. Section 29 opens:

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What is of account to me is the psychological type of the Saviour. For it might be contained in the Gospels, in spite of the Gospels, however much it might be mutilated or overloaded with strange features: as that of Francis of Assisi is contained in his legends, in spite of the legends. Not the truth with regard to what he did, or said, or how he died exactly, but the question whether his type is at all representable now, whether it is “handed down” to us. (Nietzsche 2004: 98)

Christ and Francis break tradition, meaning traditional thought, which can cope with neither. The challenge within the Gospels, like the Franciscan legends, is to read them not as fragments from which a coherent biography might be shaped, which would assume that both figures could be seen in the normative sense of modern psychology, but as discontinuous fragments, with infinite interpretations. Christ cannot be seen in terms of the ‘antitheses’ of a predetermined good and evil (Nietzsche 2004: 100), but, relativises ‘every kind of expression, formula, law, belief or dogma … the whole of nature, language itself has for him merely the value of a sign or a simile’ and ‘the “knowledge” of Jesus is just the pure folly that there should be anything’ of certain knowledge (101). Christianity is a ‘stupendous question-­mark’ over certitudes (104), and that applies to Francis, carrying over the same mode of pointing beyond himself and beyond literalism, attracting legends as Christ attracted gospels. Thomas begins with two rivers meeting, the Tupino and the Chiascio, which falls from the hill chosen by the blessed Ubaldo Baldassini (1084–1160), who became Bishop of Gubbio. He says there hangs a fertile slope from a southward-facing mountain whose winds reach Perugia through its Porta Sole (Sun Gate), while behind the mountain Nocera and Gualdo suffer from coldness. From where this slope most breaks its steepness, there was born into the world a ‘sole’, as this sun rises from the Ganges, a phenomenon apparent at the spring equinox. So the place may be called, allegorising Assisi by wordplay, not Ascesi (‘I have risen’) but ‘Orïente’, so keeping the image from the Ganges, and taking Francis as the angel ‘ascending from the east having the seal of the living God’ (Revelation 7.2). The ‘seal’ is the stigmata, making Francis already marked, having, in one way, no history at all, being always the angel, and because he ‘ascends’ (notably, he does not descend) from the east, he makes Assisi an Orient. Such imagery comes from Bonaventura, making Francis a figure to be venerated, not imitated, and more, from the ‘spiritual’ Franciscans, Peter Olivi (1248–1298) and his follower Ubertino da Casale

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(1259–1329) (Burr 2001: 37). These Franciscans insisted on the poverty of Francis and his order, condemning its degeneration into the materialism of great church buildings and insistence on position within the order. Ubertino’s Arbor vitae crucifixe Jesu Christi (1305), leading into an attack on the contemporary Pope, Boniface VIII, stressed Francis’ marriage to Poverty. Francis and Dominic were seen in apocalyptic terms, as beginning the sixth age of the church—drawing this from the prophecies of Joachim of Fiore (1135–1202), who, of course, predated Francis.9 The allegory stresses the affective, with the warmth of the sun; this ‘sun’ was not distant from his rising (‘orto’ from Latin ‘orior’, ‘I rise up’, thus continuing the ‘Oriente’ pun) but he made the earth feel this warmth, as if through a tremor was running through it, marking a historical change. Another figure emerges: of courtly love, and marriage; being united, in the spiritual court (the presence of the bishop) and presence of his father (the Latin ‘et coram patre’, from Matthew 10.32–33, makes the whole process legal) with the woman ‘a cui, come a la morte,/la porta del piacer nessun diserra’ (‘to whom, as to death, no-one opens the gates of desire’, 11.59–60). Auerbach (88) interprets ‘the opening of the “gates of desire” in sexual terms, and porta as the gateway to the feminine body’. These gates correspond to the Porta Sole in Perugia, through which Assisi’s influence comes. The woman spoken of, her identity slowly revealed, has been bereaved of her first husband for more than 1100 years; that is, from the time of Christ; she is despised (compare the Christological terms of Isaiah 53.3, which makes her Christ’s equivalent); she is an obscure old woman, until Francis stands before her. She is unwanted though Lucan describes her as having been alone with the fisherman Amyclas, when Julius Caesar visited him and found him sleeping on a bed of seaweed: she is protecting the poor fisherman, Julius Caesar here being a more powerful form of the father; protection is offered against the patriarchy, against whom Francis went into ‘guerra’ (58). Lucan comments: ‘O safe the lot of a poor man’s / life and humble home! O gods’ gifts not yet / understood! Which temples or which walls / could enjoy this blessing, not to shake in panic / when Caesar’s hand is knocking?’ (Pharsalia 5.528–531). The image is followed by: né valse esser costante né feroce, sì che, dove Maria rimase giuso, ella con Cristo pianse in su la croce. (11.70–72)

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(And nothing availed her to have been so constant and undaunted that she, when Mary remained below, mounted the Cross with Christ—reading salse as some manuscripts do instead of pianse: ‘she wept with Christ upon the cross’.)10 Auerbach stresses the—already noted—sexual nature of the love activating the wise in this heaven and the desire which must activate the ‘sposa’ of Christ who espoused her with his blood (11.31–33). The woman personifying Poverty (73–75) sought sexual union with Christ on the cross, while Mary stayed below. She mounted, or wept, depending on the reading, on the cross itself in an act of closer identification than Mary could make.11 That she ascended is borne out by Anne Derbes, showing how Christ’s voluntary ascent of the cross via the ladder was a Franciscan theme in art; Poverty does what Christ did, in bounding up the ladder.12 Poverty willingly courts shame with Amyclas, who, as a fisherman, prefigures Christ’s disciples as to their first occupation (Matthew 4.18), and Christ. Such loyalty counts for nothing until Francis appears, and takes her, repeating her previous acts of identification. And then Thomas, historically attacked by Peter Olivi for his apparent down-grading of poverty, which was for Aquinas not a perfection in itself but only an instrument of perfection, now speaks plainly (Burr 1980: 48, 54–55). He assigns Poverty the highest elevation, in what seems to be a palinode: Ma perch’io non proceda troppo chiuso, Francesco e Povertà per questi amanti prendi oramai nel mio parlar diffuso. (73–75)

(But so that I should not proceed too darkly, take now, in my open speech, Francis and Poverty as these lovers.) This is the only time either figure is named; here, in an apparent catachresis, joining a literal identity with a personification. Francis marries Poverty, as Poverty paradoxically gives something to the figure who is already poor. Masculinity and femininity combine; Francis, another Christ, another sun, personifies Poverty. Thomas explains his allegorical terms after language which shows that the male’s active pursuit of the woman is the woman’s active pursuit of the male. The result of such union makes such ‘amore e maraviglia e dolce sguardo’ (love and wonder and joyful thoughts) cause a new affect, marking a new discursive imaginative awareness of poverty as an ideal which can be experienced as giving an emotional, indeed sexual satisfaction, because ‘sí la sposa piace’ (‘so does the

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bride delight’, 84). The increase spoken of is shown in how, spontaneously, Bernard and Egidio and Silvestro, early disciples, named within the text’s realism, throw off their sandals to run faster after Francis (a literal act becomes allegorical: they must run); the bride so delights. Another affective state appears in Francis: humility (87).13 He moves positively action in lines 85–87, going his way, while the following terzina takes the language applied to Poverty (the ‘né … né’ of lines 67 and 70) and applies it to him, adding ‘dispetto’ from line 65: Né li gravò viltà di cuor le ciglia per esser fi’ di Pietro Bernardone, né per parer dispetto a maraviglia; (88–90)

(nor did the shame weigh down his brow [contrasting with the proud of Purgatorio 11, weighed down and bent over] that he was Pietro Bernardone’s son, nor to appear marvellously despised….) ‘Maraviglia’ follows from line 77: the name of the father, an apparently second-class citizen, appears, like those of the first Franciscan disciples, to establish the historical truth of what was happening in Assisi: this is followed by the emphatically placed ‘regalmente’ (‘royally’, 91), for how he appealed to Innocent III; receiving from him the first mark, or seal, of his religious order. Naming the father, unnamed in line 59, completes the action of lines 58–90, and leads to the second episode, in Rome; the second mark, in the third episode, comes from Honorius, in 1223, when ‘la gente poverella’ (94) had so grown that Francis had to become the chief shepherd (‘archimandrita’, 99). The fourth episode, or act (100–108), goes from the preaching of Christ and his disciples to the ‘Soldan superba’; and returns to Italy, for Francis to receive not the martyrdom he sought but another: nel crudo sasso intra Tevero e Arno da Cristo prese l’ultimo sigillo, che le sue membra due anni portarno. (106–108)

(on the bare rock between the Tiber and Arno, he received from Christ that final mark which for two years his body carried.) The rock on Mount La Verna, corresponding to Patmos, where St John received the Apocalypse, is poor like Francis; its hardness accords with Francis’ ‘dura intenzione’ (91). The rock between rivers parallels the

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mountain where Francis was born, between two rivers (43–45); likewise, the hermit Ubaldo, spoken of there, becomes a figure of Francis, while Francis becomes a figure of Christ. Christ became flesh in the incarnation, but the flesh is further marked, blood-red, like the Papal seals. In Auerbach’s terms, it makes Francis more than Christ, bringing out what Christ bore in death; Francis carries the stigmata for two years; that two (‘due’) relating to the two rivers, as if these were witnesses to Francis, as the two years witness to an extra hardness incurred through the ‘ultimo sigillo’. Dante specifies Christ’s appearance to Francis; in Bonaventura: he saw a Seraph with six wings, flaming and resplendent, descending from the heights of heaven. And when in his most swift flight he had reached the space of air in the vicinity of the man of God, there appeared between his wings the image of a Crucified Man, having his hands and feet stretched out in the manner of a Cross and fastened to a Cross. Two wings were raised above his head and two spread out for flight, while two hid his whole body. Seeing this, Francis was mightily astonished, and joy, mingled with grief, possessed his heart. He rejoiced, that is, in the gracious aspect with which, as he perceived, he was regarded by Christ (in the guise of the Seraph) …. (quoted Smart 1978: 283)

Francis has already been called seraphic (37); he becomes more so in his identification with the seraphic Christ, in the moment of the stigmata. If Francis is Christ, as both Poverty, and as the Seraph, then identity and even the body, made feminine through its wounds, are plural, which means that no emotional, or affectual state is single either. The five wounds making up the stigmata appear in the twenty-five terzine giving the account of Francis’ life (43–117), five groups of five terzine each, accompanying five acts in Francis’ life. Three terzine (109–117) complete the acts. Francis’ death, where he lays his body on the earth, literalising the language of Genesis 3.19: ‘dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return’, is in sequence with the avaricious in Purgatorio 19.232, saying Adhaesit pavimento anima mea: ‘my soul cleaveth to the dust’ (Psalm 119.25). He commends (‘raccomandò … comandò’, 113, 114) his loved woman, Poverty, to his ‘frati’: the word, applied to the Friars, being literal, and he dies in her arms, his soul departing from her bosom (‘grembo’) which is the earth. Thomas returns to Dominic, as a worthy colleague of Francis—but his flock have pursued different pastures and return empty of milk. The more

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they get by going astray, the less they have; the language distantly echoes Virgil, that the she-wolf, after feeding, is hungrier than before (Inf. 1.99). Sheep, for Thomas, seem to have the qualities of wolves. So the statement ‘u’ben s’impingua, se non si vaneggia’ (139) returns now, not explained, but indirectly amplified by looking at the other case, where straying is from the rule of poverty, and the good fattening comes from adhering to that. The riddling is left as such. ‘Emotional warmth’, relating to the heaven of the sun, and evocative of the fertile (Assisi is a ‘fertile costa’ (45) and Francis’ actions produce ‘ben ferace’ (82)); associates with the eroticism with which Francis embraces Poverty. Such intensity shows in the canto’s stress upon nakedness. Writing on the canto, defending and expanding the sexual interpretations made by Auerbach, Marguerite Chiarenza says that Dante identifies Poverty with nakedness.14 This, personified, relates to the canto’s insistence on coldness: Perugia feeling ‘freddo e caldo’, and the towns behind Mount Subasio feeling cold; two of them, in a pattern of doubles seen throughout the canto, joined together in communal feeling (Vettori, 206: 289–306). The union with Poverty of lines 58–63 invokes the woman’s nakedness, being the occasion when Francis, as though mad (the holy fool), undressed and returned his clothes to his father: as though made drunk by his wondrous fervour of spirit he cast aside even his breeches and made himself naked in the presence of all, saying to his father, ‘Hitherto I have called you my father on earth, but henceforth I can truly say, Our Father which art in heaven …’ (Legenda maior 11, 4, quoted Smart 1978:266, plates 48, 49)

The woman is naked in being deprived of her first husband, while the identification which she made with Christ on the cross shocks since it is with his nakedness. Smart notes nakedness as an interest appearing in then contemporary art, while Anne Derbes notes stress on the nudity of Christ in Franciscan writings, and on his translucent loincloths, as in the crucifixion by Cimabue in Santa Croce; the loincloth having replaced the colobium in eleventh-century art. Derbes quotes Bonaventura: ‘since He desired to end His life in the nakedness of absolute poverty, he chose to hang unclothed upon the cross’—words applicable to Francis. And she notes the new emphasis on the voluntary self-stripping of Christ before ascending the cross in images of the Passion, connecting this with Francis’ stripping (Smart 1978: 165; Derbes 1996: 30–31, 200–202, bibliographical

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references there, and 138). Attention to nakedness shows a new affect, whose effect in Dante is to make Poverty literal, material, and erotic, in the most surprising of contexts; intensifying the eroticism seen within Venus. Poverty identifies with Christ as the naked fool, while Christ prefigures Francis, the naked fool, stripping to identify with Poverty. The Assisi and Bardi frescoes of Francis’ renunciation incorporate children menacing Francis with stoning: an act of popular opposition furthering the identification of Francis with Christ (Smart 1978: 161–162, Gardner 2005: 275–285, Derbes, 227, for the mocking of Francis as a fool). Hence the stress on nakedness in the unsandalling of Francis’ disciples, while the rock where he receives the stigmata is bare. Francis, naked in death, cites Job 1.21: ‘Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither’. When Francis is imprinted with the marks of crucifixion, the verses intensify Poverty being on the cross with Christ. The asceticism of hunger and nakedness which is basic to a Paradisal life, is erotic, like the erotics implied within the stigmata. And when Francis receives the stigmata, it is from Christ within the seraph; there is no single identity of Christ experienced; Christ is Christ, yes, and Poverty, male, and female. Francis’ allegiance to Poverty, outstripping Christ’s in the fervour with which he courts her, as she courted Christ, is allegiance to Christ, but it questions what Christ is. Thomas, rowing back on definitions of orthodoxy with Siger of Brabant, talks about not straying, but the confined meaning he gives that cannot erase the point that Francis’ life strays magnificently beyond orthodoxy and single, precise meaning, as a magnificent poetry of ‘infiammata cortesia’ (12.143), like fin’ amor. There is more than plurilingualism here; if Francis dies upon the bare ground, the ‘song of the earth’ within this canto differs from those aspects of the poem which set aside the body. Both are significant voices.

Paradisal Lives: Dominic In canto 12, the second circle embraces the first by encircling it, and three terzine conveying this are followed by another three comprising a simile, beginning with two rainbows ‘paralelli e concolori’, perhaps punning on the solsticial and equinoctal colures mentioned in Chap. 2, which appear when Juno commands her handmaid (Iris), the second rainbow born from the first, like Echo. The simile expands into an image of two wholes: sempiternal roses (the spirits) forming a double crown of flames, which revolved ‘circa noi’ (20). The ‘tripudio’ (22), a Latinism, expressing a

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three-footed dance, beating the ground with the feet, as a Latin ‘triumph’ derives from the Greek thriambos, a dance to Bacchus (and it possibly informs the Bacchus image in 13.25). This ‘tripudio’ goes with a ‘festa grande’ comprising singing and ‘fiammeggiarsi/luce con luce gaudïose e blande’—the flaming of light with light, joyful, and caressing. These circles sing contrapuntally, in a double dance, sound and light, stopping at one point and with one act of will. The comparison following explains that single spontaneous action by considering two eyes closed and lifted together by the pleasure which moves them. The circles form two eyes which blink together, and the eyelids of each express in their motion a complete circle. Bonaventura, speaking within the light, eulogises Dominic (1170–1221). Moved by hearing Thomas’ eulogising Francis, he comes to praise Dominic (142). That complementing explains those double images: millstones, rainbows, the voice and echo, garlands, eyes. As ‘guerra’ was used of Francis (11.58), and as Francis had gone preaching, searching for martyrdom, so a military image persists. Christ’s army had to be re-equipped, as by the blood of martyrs: the army was following the ‘standard’, the cross, but feebly, when the Emperor (12.40) raised up two champions. ‘Imperador’ compares with ‘paladin’ (142), which derives from the Emperor’s seat, the Palatine Hill in Rome. Charlemagne’s peers in medieval romance were ‘paladins’. Canto 12 makes Castile ‘quella parte ove surge ad aprire / Zefiro dolce le novelle fronde / di che si vede Europa rivestire / non molto lungi al percuoter de l’onde / dietro a le quali, per la lunga foga, / lo sol talvolta ad ogne uom si nasconde’ (46–51). Sweet Zephyrus rises there to open the new plants, wherein Europe sees itself reclothed, and it is said to be near waves pounding the shore, behind which, through its long flight, the sun is hidden so often from everyone.15 Zephyrus, the west wind blows from the west, first to Spain, renewing Europe in colour and clothing from there: Dominic’s significance as the west wind becomes apparent; this is a historically new moment for Europe. The sun sets in the west, in its long course (this is the equinox: night and day are equal), and that is said to complement the stress on the east in Francis’ canto (‘talvolta’ appears in 11.51 and 12.51). At Europe’s limits (see Inf. 26.103), where the sun sets, in Spain (beyond Gades—the Latin form of the Phoenician name which means Cadiz in Para. 27.82), the waves insist, as if with the power of a challenge, and the sun setting beyond them, contains them, as if in a

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circle. Spain is the place of rebirth. Assisi’s church was occidented, as if making that point: divine movement goes west-east. Dominic, the fourth Hispanic in these cantos, was born in ‘fortunata Caleruega’ (52) in Old Castile, c.1170, near the abbey of Santo Domingo de Silos, (d. 1073), part of the diocese of Osma, in Burgos. Caleruega derives, perhaps, from Calera, ‘chalk oven’. His successor as Minister-­ General of the Order of Preachers and his first biographer was Jordan of Saxony, who apparently recruited Albertus as a Dominican. Dominic studied at Palencia, the metropolitan see, at Osma (province of Soria), where he became a canon in the community, practising the common life under Augustinian rule. Their ideal was individual poverty, and the apostolic life (Vicaire 1964: 36–39); they functioned in the cathedral as preachers. Dominic journeyed to Denmark in 1203, on a marital mission for Alfonso VIII (ruled 1158–1214), whom Dante calls ‘lo buon re di Castella’ (Convivio. 4.11.14) for his liberality. Passing through the Occitan, with its Cathars, he apparently proposed to devote himself to the apostolate of the pagans, founding the Order of Preachers under Innocent III; confirmed under Honorius III. It commenced at Toulouse in 1215, on a preaching programme, itinerant, and mendicant, but, unlike the Franciscans, the preachers were clerics. Dominic, made a monastic Prior on 7 February 1217, worked in Paris and in Spain—Toledo, Madrid, and Segovia—and in Bologna, Milan, and Lombardy, and Occitania. He died 6 August 1221, a hundred years before Dante.

Canto 12: Dante and Spain Alfonso VIII expanded the kingdom of Castile and legends were encouraged to consolidate and legitimise the monarchy, like the Plantagenets’ insistence on the Arthurian legends. Eleanor, daughter of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, married Alfonso VIII, and promoted a Castilian court patronising Occitan poets. Alfonso’s daughter, Berenguela (1180–1246), married his cousin Alfonso IX of León (died 1230), and was similarly influential: their son was the other king in Dominic’s time, Fernando III of Castile (1217–1252). This court enabled the scholarly achievements of Alfonso X (1252–1284), whose court was characterised by writers, including Brunetto Latini, and by such writing as the Poema de Fernán González. Dominic relates to Spain’s place in Paradiso’s politics in cantos 3, 6, 8, 18, and 19, and it should be outlined, however, briefly.

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The Visigothic Spain of Isidore of Seville had yielded in 711 to Muslim control which, penetrating into France, was defeated by Charles Martel, so confining it to Spain. Its capital was Córdoba, under the Umayyad dynasty, which was abolished in 1031, though Córdoba’s continuance shows in its native son, Averroes. The myth of a peninsular having shed its Arianism at the Third Council of Toledo (580), and become truly Christian had been part of Isidore’s legacy, as with the twelfth-century pseudo-­ Isidorean Chronica Gothurum, a history of the Visigothic kingdom. Remnants of Visigothic rule in Asturias, specifically at León, were strengthened by the cult of St James at Compostela after 813 (see Paradiso 25.16–18). Barcelona was Christianised in 801, making Catalonia emerge independent of Frankish rule. Sancho III in Pamplona was king of Navarre until his death in 1035, when his kingdom divided, becoming Navarre, Aragon, and Castile, the latter later fragmenting into Castile, León and Galicia.16 Navarre was annexed by France, in 1314 (Paradiso 19.143–144). The Sancho who became king of Castile had as son Alfonso VI (1040–1109) who conquered the Visigothic capital Toledo (1085).17 The Moroccan Almohads beat Alfonso VIII back at Alarcos (1195), resulting in Alfonso’s new Papal-backed attack at Las Navas de Tolosa (1212), routing them, and accelerating the myth of the reconquista: making the peninsular again fully Christian. By 1230, the kingdom of León was part of Castile, its centre Burgos, unified under Fernando III. When Bonaventura says that Caleruega, Dominic’s birthplace, ‘sits’ (‘siede’: compare ‘Assisi’), he alludes to Dante’s present time, when it was protected by the shield of Castile, which displays the lion of León in one quartering, and subjected by being placed under the castle, while in another quartering, the lion as above the castle, dominates it (12. 52–54). Aragon and Catalonia, united in 1134, were controlled by count Ramon Berenguer (1135–1166, ancestor of the Berenguer of canto 6). His interests in Languedoc continued with his sons, with Alfonso II (1157–1196), and his son, Peter of Aragon (1191–1213), who supported the Cathars against the crusade, dying at the battle of Muret near Toulouse in 1213 (see below). His successors expanded towards the Mediterranean. The strongly Catalan James I (1213–1276) took the Balearic islands and Valencia in 1258 from the Moors, and took Languedoc, while further expansion into Sicily came with Peter III (1276–1285), mentioned in Chap. 2. James I divided his realm, giving Aragon to Peter, and Majorca to his other son, James of Majorca (1243–1311), while his daughter,

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Isabella, married Philip III of France, becoming mother of Philip the Fair and Charles of Valois. Peter III appears in Purgatorio 7.112–114 alongside his foe, Charles of Anjou. Having married Constance, Manfred’s daughter, ‘genetrice/de l’onor di Cicilia e d’Aragona’ (Purg. 3.115–116), he took Sicily after the Sicilian Vespers ended Charles’ Angevin grip. Peter’s claim to the island, based on his marriage, was contested by the Papacy which encouraged Charles of Valois to war against his brother-in-law (1285), joined in this by James of Majorca. Peter’s sons by Constance were Alfonso III of Aragon (1285–1291, ‘lo giovinetto’ of Purg. 7.127–129); James II, king of Sicily from 1285–1295, and King of Aragon until his death in 1327; and Frederick II, who succeeded him in Sicily until 1337, and the subject of Paradiso 19.130–135. The Balearic Islands, plus Roussillon and Montpellier, were ruled from Perpignan during Dante’s time by this Aragonese dynasty, specifically by James II. The scandals associated with this are noted in canto 19.124–138, where the Eagle condemns Castile, followed by Aragon, twin halves of ‘Christian’ Spain.

Canto 12: Dominic The battle of Las Navas de Tolosa (1212), already mentioned, made Castile a centre for Catholic Christianity; as the Bishop Sicard of Cremona said, not only had ‘Yspania’ been saved, but ‘Rome and indeed the whole of Europe’ (quoted, Linehan 1993: 295). This battle, happening within Dominic’s life, helps with Dante’s portrayal of him: in the first part of his life (12. 46–57), he is another Cid, the amorous lover [‘drudo’] of the Christian faith, the holy athlete, benign to his own, and harsh to his enemies. He is presented in John the Baptist-like terms (58–60); his baptism, occupying four terzine, sees him espoused to Faith, like Francis with Poverty. His godmother sees in a dream the fruit of Faith destined to spring from him and the Dominicans (64–66). And that he might be in name what he was in reality, a Holy Spirit-like prophetic inspiration from the sun (‘quinci’) moved them to call him by the possessive form of him to whom he wholly belonged. Thus he is named ‘Domenico’ (70) in a terzina which begins a triple rhyme on ‘Cristo’ (71, 73, 75), thus naming the Dominus, and putting Dominic under authority in a way which contrasts with Francis (literally the ‘free’ man). Bonaventura says he will speak of Dominic as the labourer chosen for Christ’s orchard (compare 104), before calling him a messenger and

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intimate of Christ, since the first love manifested in him was for Christ’s initial precept: that is, poverty (Matthew 19.21). The language of ‘Io son venuto a questo’ (78) is Christ-like (John 12.27), while lying on the ground makes him like Francis, laid on the earth as if aware of death in life (11.115–117). His parents’ names—Felice, and Giovanna, ‘happy’ and ‘grace of God’—evoke his conception (58–60), within a section which is—unusually—devoted to the boy’s childhood (58–80). Vicaire (1964), follows the tradition which made his mother, Jane, a d’Aza and his father, Felix, a Guzman, making both of the highest degree of nobility, of the ricahombría (nobleness of blood). The d’Azas served the church militarily, for example, by joining the military order of Santiago de la Espada, or Calatrava, both founded in the twelfth century, as Knights Hospitallers. Giovanna’s name associates with John the Baptist (Luke 1.63); and the feminine is stressed, for Dominic is associated with four women: his mother and her pregnancy; the allegorical figure of Faith (‘la Fede’) to whom he is espoused, in a significant comparison with Francis’ espousal; the prophetess at his baptism; and his nurse. The language of ‘Io son venuto a questo’ (78) is Christ-like (John 12.27), while lying on the ground makes him like Francis. In his adulthood (82–105), unlike Henry of Susa, Cardinal Bishop and commentator on the Decretals, and Taddeo d’Alderotto, whom Convivio 1.10.10 criticises for his unattractive, even offensive translation of the Ethics, Dominic lacks self-interest or disengaged abstraction or superiority. He wants the true manna (Convivio 1.1.6–7, Paradiso 2.11) and becomes a ‘gran dottor’, who would go round (‘circuir’—like the sun) the vineyard, that is, the church. After criticising two materialists in religion, Bonaventura notes that the Papacy was then ‘benigna’—like Dominic (57)—to the ‘poveri giusti’. Dominic wants not to dispense to the poor two or three for every six given, nor wants a benefice, nor the ‘decimus quae sunt pauperum Dei’, that is, the tenth part belonging to God’s poor (87). He wants only licence to combat the erring world on behalf of that seed (Matthew 13.3–9) which produces the  twenty-four plants around Dante. Then, with (‘con’ returns three times in 97 and 98) teaching, and will, and with apostolic office, he goes forward like a torrent in an ambiguous image, since the Latin torrēre to scorch, or burn, makes Dominic a fire, or lightning, but one fed by a deep ‘vein’, which implies a spring, and therefore makes the torrent water. His power, as divine, exceeds description in single terms, as he strikes (‘percosse’—like the ‘percuoter’ of the Atlantic waves on the shore [49]) the roots of heresy where resistance was

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hardest. Bonaventura says nothing about Dominic’s death, unless lying on the earth means that, proleptically. Simply, Dominic’s teaching begins, and spreads. Like Francis, he fights for poverty, and the Franciscan notes his freedom from self-seeking, and his poverty, which is re-defined in terms of freeing from error, as the ‘agricola’ who works against infertile thickets of heresy. The effect is felt in the ‘orto cattolico’, with its complex of meanings: the Church in Spain, as the guardian of Christendom, the Church as separate from heresy, and—confirming the direction of the eagle’s flight—the Church as opposed to the Byzantine, Orthodox Church, from which a split had happened, re-affirmed with the sack of Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade (1204). The Council of Lyons (1274) already mentioned, failed to resolve it (Ware 1997: 43–62). Dante stays silent on an implicit theme taken up from canto 9. It could not have been guessed, from cantos 9 to 12 that Folco and Dominic worked together, as Singleton notes. Unlike the Cid, Dominic’s work is less in Spain than in the Languedoc where he struck at the ‘sterpi eretici’ (100). Cathars were supported by Raymond VI, Count of Toulouse (1194–1222), and Peter II of Aragon, who died contesting the French baron Simon de Montfort (1175–1218) in the Albigensian crusade. Dominic worked with the Cistercians, tasked to root out the heresy (Wakefield 1974: 89–91, 137–138). Though in Dante ‘civil briga’ (108) indicates heresy—dividing Christians from each other, as though these formed a nation—the Cathars are hardly present in canto 12, and the life of Dominic virtually stops with the sanction given to him by the Papacy in 1216; after which it loses specificity. Letting the implications here hang, we will complete a reading of canto 12.

Canto 12: Joachim—Prophecy and History Bonaventura returns to Franciscan history, noting Ubertino da Casale, and Matteo d’Acquasparta (General of the Franciscan order in 1287, died 1302). Ubertino believed in the usus pauper, the restricted use—not ownership—of goods by the Franciscans. He was the pupil of Peter Olivi, born in 1247 near Béziers, an old Cathar centre, and dying at Narbonne in 1298, where his tomb was desecrated in 1319, because of John XXII’s condemnations. Olivi, a voluminous writer, commentator on Peter Lombard’s Sentences, preached an unrelieved attitude to poverty, with chastity as its accompaniment (Burr 1976:12). Malcolm Lambert (1961:

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178), noting Olivi’s preference for the Occitan, speculates on a continuity of attitude between the Cathars and the Spirituals led by Olivi, who was censured in 1283 at Avignon. Bonaventura endorses neither spirituals nor conventuals in saying that disciples of these two come to the volume of the Franciscan order in such manner that one flees from it as too narrow, and the other as too broad: the followers of Ubertino placing poverty above everything else; Ubertino himself combining ‘spiritualist piety and partisan recriminations’, to quote C.T. Davis, who notes that between 1287 and 1289, Olivi, Ubertino and Dante were all in Florence; the first two at Santa Croce (Davis 1957: 239). Both Ubertino and Matteo d’Acquasparta depart from Franciscanism, which in Dante looks as if it should become a pre-Hegelian synthesis of Francis and Dominic (for relations between these two see Brooke 1967: 23–40). Dante could have had little love for Matteo d’Acquasparta, who, sent as a pacifier to Florence in 1300, as Durling and Martinez note, fostered the Black Guelf coup of Charles of Valois (1302). But Dante’s Bonaventura cannot separate himself from Olivi or Ubertino. Franciscanism cannot be defended by adhering to a party; the moment of the historical Francis has passed, and there must be a new thinking of what this movement means; one of its major focuses now coming from Joachim, ‘di spirito profetico dotato’ (12.141). Joachim of Fiore (c.1145 to c.1202) was a Cistercian, indebted to Bernard of Clairvaux, and author of a commentary on the Apocalypse (Expositio in Apocalypsim); and of the Liber Concordie Novi et Veteris Testamenti, putting the events of the two Testaments into parallel; and of the Psalterium decem chordarum. A historical view emerges. The ages divide into seven, with forty-two generations in Old and New Testaments alike. The second set of seven ages has, in the sixth age, seven seals (as in the Book of Revelation). The opening of the sixth of these seals was imminent (i.e. in 1200) and would yield to the seventh age, which, a Sabbath, would precede the Last Judgment. History divided into three, the status of the Father (corresponding to the Old Testament), the status of the Son, and finally, that of the Holy Spirit. Law, Grace, and the Spirit express the Trinity, conceived of as three interlocking rings (Whalen 2009: 100–124). The age of the Spirit does not set aside Christ, because the Spirit issues from the Father and the Son. Marjorie Reeves’ study of Joachim brings out his fascination with numbers: with 2, 3, 5, 7, and 12, and with typology, with concords between the Old and the New Testaments, which foreshadow what the third status would mean. In the Liber Concordie and the

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Liber Figuram, possibly spurious, he developed the figure of a threefold tree which was one tree, embodying all history.18 This historical-prophetic sense influenced Franciscanism, as with John of Parma, who was Bonaventura’s predecessor. He resigned as Minister-­ General in 1257, it seems on account of the Franciscan Gerard da Borgo San Donnino, who published a collection of Joachim’s writings in 1254, the Liber introductorius in Evangelium aeternum. This preached Joachim’s work as the ‘Eternal Gospel’ (Revelation 14.6), claiming 1260 as the year which would bring about a wholly spiritual church and the Age of the Spirit: it incurred the charge of heresy from William of Saint-Amour in Paris.19 Bonaventura, in his extensive writings was deeply influenced by Joachim. The tension opening up between a Millenarian prophetic strain, and one content with the political state of this world is aptly summed up by the remark attributed to Boniface VIII—‘who are these fools awaiting the end of the world?’ (Cullen 2006: 178) That, if true, speaks volumes for what Dante hated  i.e. a gross materialism, and what he cleaved to: these ‘fools’ populate the sun, and Dante is Joachite in wanting to pass beyond his present. Perhaps Bonaventura was more mystic than Joachim. He called Francis the angel of the sixth seal (Revelation 7.2), an identification already made by John of Parma. There seems a tension in Joachim and Bonaventura between the sixth age: was it realised internally, in terms of peace, or in terms of events on earth (Delio 1997: 153–177)? Bernard McGinn (1978: 71) indicates that Francis points forward to a future order, rather than installing one, so that Dante’s sense of the decline of Franciscans and Dominicans does not prevent a future order emerging: hence Bonaventura declares Joachim a prophet. Perhaps that is why neither Francis nor Dominic are seen, for in a sense they are yet to come; they are not fulfilled in their lives, but, as paradisal lives, afterlives, still work within history. Dominic’s conception produces a new prophetic power in his mother; his name points forward anagogically; the Faith is given health (‘salute’) by his baptism; the results of his work are ‘il mirabile frutto’, and there is no account of his death. The prophetic sense modifies, profoundly, canto 10’s reading of time as the image of eternity. Time unfolds into history which is separate from eternity; it changes, and does not only return to the beginning. Beyond Bonaventura stands Peter Olivi, a Joachite, and Ubertino da Casale, whose magnum opus was the Arbor Vitae Crucifixae Iesu (1305), chronicling Christ’s pre-existence, including prophecies of him and his

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birth; his childhood; his ministry; his passion. Its fifth book gives a Joachite history, Francis being an alter Christus. It follows Bonaventura’s Lignum Vitae with the image of a tree growing throughout history (Reeves 1969: 207–209). A new reading of the Apocalypse was current; the older allegorical and moral sense given to Revelation by Augustine was replaced by Joachim’s more literalising mode, seeing history anticipated by prophecy, to be read with its aid, and anticipative of a future. Ubertino, who did not believe that Celestine V had the right to surrender his papacy, regarded his successor, Boniface VIII as a mystic Antichrist, preceding the future Antichrist. This was not like Olivi (Davis 1957: 207). Prophecy, becoming apocalyptic, seems in danger of being sectarian, especially when, as with Dominic, the preacher’s fervour derives from desire to destroy heresy in the name of a single revealed truth. Perhaps that is why the Cathari are not mentioned with Dominic; his partisan aspects disappear, making him more Christ-like. Peter Olivi’s Joachite commentary saw the Apocalypse as imminent, when ‘the holy spirit will reveal itself as a fiery furnace of divine love and a wine-cellar of spiritual intoxication’ marked by ‘that chaste and sweet contemplation typical of monks or religious’ (Burr 1976: 19). Dante’s heaven of the sun, including Joachim, pays tribute to that coming age, pointing to it anagogically.

Canto 13. 1–27 Canto 13 directs the reader with the anaphoric ‘imagini’ (1, 7, 10)—an invitation to rearrange the cosmos. First take 15 stars on different beaches of the cosmos, with undiminishable brightness. Then the Wain, the Great Bear, which never sets in the ‘bosom’ (seno) of the northern hemisphere, comprising seven stars. Then the horn, Ursa Minor, whose narrow end comprises the Pole Star, which is the axis on which the Primum Mobile turns. The two stars at its mouth (Beta and Gamma) are seen whichever way its pole turns. These twenty-four must be imagined turning in a double circle, each reflecting the other, one outside the other, so that each turning seems to outpace the other in a gracious emulation. These circles have formed themselves into two ‘segni’ (13) in heaven, like a crown—the Corona Borealis—given by Bacchus to Ariadne, the daughter of Minos (Ovid, Met. 8.177–192). By metonymy, the stars express her being: she is in heaven. But Dante sees a double sign, a double crown. This introduction diverts attention from the sun and sunlight, to stars as signs. Dante, recomposing the stars into an imaginary constellation,

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calls that a shadow (ombra) of the constellation visible in the sun. In the double dancing of this double circle of lights circling Dante, he becomes a fulfilment of Ariadne, a life made divine. The thought of it and how different it is to ‘nostra usanza’ is implied in comparing the speed of the sluggish Chiana, near Arezzo, with that of the Primum Mobile. Several comparisons are implied, followed by: Lì si cantò non Bacco, non Peana, ma tre persone in divina natura, e in una persona essa e l’umana. (25–27)

(There they sang not Bacchus, not Paean, but three persons in the divine nature, and in one person, itself, and the human.) There is a divide between the classical and the Christian. Bacchus saved Ariadne; Paean was Apollo, the sun God, a shadow of this Heaven; but because ‘Paean’ opens the hymn to him (Aeneid 6.657) it evokes praise. Parnassus, to whose caves Virgil led Statius (Purg. 22.65), had two peaks (Lucan, Phars. 3.173); hence, Parnassus evokes an interior and exterior life together. The peak of Cyrrha was dedicated to Apollo, but Hollander (discussing 1.16–18) notes that its other peak, Nissa, was for Bacchus (Phars. 5.72–73). The twin peaks Dante needs are Bacchic and Apollonian, the agonistic gods of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy. In Paradiso, these comprise a unity of the classical gods, but their two-ness is followed by evoking the Trinity. Two sets of lives almost divine celebrate three. In canto 14.67–75, a third circle appears as if making the whole a shadow of the Trinity. Is there an increasing reality in these cantos? Their substance is the Trinity. Lines 5–27 risk, in the first two lines, five gods being spoken of (as if that number 15 which starts the canto with 15 stars was 5 × 3; five being the privileged number for Solomon, central to this canto), and the terzina’s last line makes one person double: divine and human together, risking making the trinity into four (which Joachim accused Peter Lombard of doing). Or ‘una persona’ could be pluralised into two (three persons, and one person who is one—or two in which case five), which would then give seven within the terzina. That sounds like Joachite heterodoxy, but the gods forming the first line, who did not need to be pluralised to enforce the negative, seem subsumed, as shadows, into the Trinity, making this hold as many divinities as are countable, however allegorical, making the Trinity itself a constellation answering to the double circle of spirits dancing and circling. What is a

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constellation? For Walter Benjamin (1977: 34), ‘ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars’. The aphorism implies that ‘to constellate’ means putting things together to generate new ways of seeing. Angus Fletcher quotes Henry Peacham’s The Garden of Eloquence (1577) that ‘as a metaphor may be compared to a star in respect of beauty, brightness and direction, so may an allegory be truly likened to a figure composed of many stars, which of the Grecians is called Astron, and of the Latins Sidus, which we call a constellation, that is, a company, or conjunction of many stars’.20 Dante ‘constellates’ and ‘reconstellates’ in selecting stars to make up the number, re-setting things, as happens in this canto, generating a new idea, ideas being new ways of showing reality, since ‘every idea contains the image of the world’, (Benjamin 1977: 48). A previously unknown ‘idea’ appears showing life differently; creates visibility, altering perception, as happens when Thomas elucidates the second riddle.

Paradisal Lives: Solomon Thomas announces Dante’s dilemma (37–48), and his answer begins as an account of creation—discussed below in Chap. 6. Briefly, however, there seems a non-unity between matter, the ‘ultime potenze’, the wax; and the heavens’ forming power. Yet if the ‘caldo amore’ (the Spirit), the ‘chiara vista’ (the Son) and the ‘prima virtú’ (the Father), dispose and seal the wax there is perfection, as with Adam, and Christ. If all the light that human nature could receive was given to them, unalloyed, how was Solomon peerless? Thomas directs Dante to think who Solomon was, and what moved him to make a demand of God, when asked to choose what God should give him. The offer demands that the person should not reply empirically. God’s ‘Ask what I shall give thee’ (I Kings 3.5) riddles, like Thomas’ words about Solomon, ‘se ‘l vero è vero / a veder tanto non surse il secondo’ (10.113–114), which depend on realising that ‘surse’—a word applicable to the sun rising—means ‘rising to succession to kingship’. Thomas quotes from the Biblical narrative of Solomon’s dream, which announces that ‘none (no king) shall arise like unto thee’ (I Kings 3.12). The demand that Dante open his eyes (49), that he think (92), the challenge to make distinctions (106, 109, 116) and the lesson drawn from the example of Solomon (112–142), counters empiricist thinking. Solomon himself, like Siger, or Joachim is a strange test-case. He has several valencies; his name means ‘Peace’, or ‘Peacemaker’; he was regarded

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as a type of Christ (2 Samuel 7.13,14, in comparison with Psalm 2) in words spoken to Nathan; he was given unique status by God (2 Kings 3.13); his wisdom exceeded other wisdoms. But his love-affairs were scandalous and secured Israel’s downfall (1 Kings 11). He had a reputation as a magus, largely derived from his status as king, and as an exorcist (Torijano 2002: 42, Verheyden 2013). He wrote about love, in the Song of Songs, and that is relevant for the circle he is found in. But, for Augustine, in De doctrina Christiana, Solomon’s lust, unlike his father’s: was no guest paying a passing visit, but took over the whole kingdom. Scripture did not remain silent about this, but condemned him as a womaniser. In his early life he had a passionate desire for wisdom, but then, after gaining it through spiritual love, lost it through carnal love. (Augustine 1996: 3.21.72, p. 84)

The wisest man was the most foolish for the Middle Ages: Chaucer, describing the artwork in the Temple of Venus says there was not forgotten ‘the folye of kyng Salaomon’ (The Knight’s Tale, CT 1.1942). Chaucer’s contemporary, Langland, makes Rechelesse, in his ‘ribaudie’ (ribaldry) and indifference to learning compare ‘Salomon the sage that Sapience made’. Langland compares him with Aristotle for wisdom, concluding ‘And holi churche, as y here, haldeth bothe in helle’ (‘Holy Church, as I hear, holds both to be in hell’). Aristotle, too, had been associated with lust, like Solomon.21 Solomon seems a limit-case of salvation, like Ripheus, or Trajan, or, putting the point in Derrida’s terms, he would be a pharmakon, the salvific and the damnable being equal within him. Thomas is not making a smart point about ‘regal prudenza’ (104), the Solomonic quality here; he rather illustrates the strangeness of all these souls: none of them are to be taken for granted. Perhaps the politics of damnation practised in the Inferno receives something of a palinode, especially in the conclusion of lines 130–142, giving the folly of making a final judgment. The suicides of Inferno 13, existing parallel to this canto, are painful cases of people who have made a final judgment about themselves. Or Solomon may be an instance of the person who knows he knows nothing. ‘I am but a little child: I know not how to go out or come in’ (I Kings 3.7). He dramatises the praise of folly as Erasmus wrote of this, and which has already  been applied to Francis. The foolish person, in some ways like Francis, the ‘poverel di Dio’ (13,33) is the wisest, while the wisest is the one ensnared

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by ‘folye’. Erasmus noted that Solomon says ‘the fool delights in his folly’ ‘thus openly admitting that nothing in life is pleasant without folly’, and then ‘even such a great king was not ashamed of this title, when he says in [Proverbs] chapter 30, “I am the most foolish of men”’ (Erasmus 1979: 120, 122, quoting Proverbs 15.21, 30.2). Solomon’s wisdom—prudence, but much else—is the effect of his folly, his folly the effect of his wisdom. That is part of the liberating effect in Dante’s evoking Francis’ deep humanity: it creates ‘paradisal lives’ as a new concept. In contrast to Adam and Christ, Solomon stands as an instance of having nothing and everything, ‘as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing all things’ (2 Corinthians 6.10—and Paul’s assessment of God negating the wisdom of this world, 1 Corinthians 1.19–29 is equally relevant). More can be learned from Solomon as an ambiguous figure than from those with a more full nature. Michael Hattaway (1968: 499–530) quotes Innocent III’s assessment of Solomon in George Gascoigne’s 1576 translation of De contemptu mundi: ‘All things (sayeth he), are hard and difficult. No man can express them by words. Some man doth neither give rest unto his eyes by day nor by night, and yet can he neither find the cause nor the reason of God’s works, yea, the more he laboreth to seek it, so much the less shall he find it’. Dante gives place to this other assessment of wisdom as folly. What constitutes wisdom may be, as with Francis, an innocent non-knowing. Aquinas’ speech is less about prudence, with a morality attached to it; it revalues wisdom, as that which inverts values. Solomon had not asked for long life, or riches, or the life of his enemies (I Kings 3.11). Aquinas does not quote these, but gives modern instances. Solomon had not asked the number of the angelic movers of the spheres, a question which accords with the sun as the sphere of arithmetic and the quadrivium. The question is unanswerable according to the authorities Dante uses: indeed, it is declared not knowable (Kay, Monarchia 206–207, note). Nor had he asked if a necessity in philosophical truth was derivable from a necessary cause plus a contingent one. A truth, that is, may be dependent on accepting something unprovable, it may rely on an unknown: it may be folly philosophically, but still be necessary, as poetry seems contingent, baseless, and therefore comprising, and making, nothing that is provable though it is absolutely essential. Nor had Solomon asked si est dare primum motum esse (100)—is there a first moved thing?, that is, an origin of everything: he showed resistance to finding foundations. Fourth, he had not asked if a semicircle could be constructed which would have a triangle without a right angle: a point which Euclid had established by answering ‘no’. As

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Dante says, one should only reveal truths which not attempted by others, ‘for what fruit would a man bear who proved once again a theorem of Euclid’s?’ (Monarchia 1.13–4). Solomon was not interested in knowledge as repetition (a point implicit in repeating Euclid’s proof); knowledge for him would be more like an event, a happening within a situation. Questions 1 and 4 parallel each other (why ask for what cannot be known? or what is impossible?). So do questions 2 and 3 (knowledge rests on an unknown). Paradiso considers the place which must be given to knowledge, as not something accumulative—which has the danger of increasing, aggrandising the self, inflating its sense of worth—it makes wisdom intuitional, like poetry, the next thing to folly. Prudence must see the riddling character of truth, manifest in the sun: the ‘sí e al no che tu non vedi’—the yes and the no that you do not see: the positive and negative within any state, (114). To affirm or negate without distinguishing between cases means being among the ‘fools’ (stolti: 115, 127); I assume an allusion to Solomon’s judgment between the women with the dead and the living child (I Kings 3.16–28), which Brecht follows in The Caucasian Chalk Circle. Aquinas gives instances of people looking without knowing what they were looking for, as Solomon bypassed the women’s narratives—ignoring the ‘evidence’—to find something prior: who was the true mother, which, as in Brecht, may not be the literal mother, but the one who acts as such. Aquinas cites Parmenides, Melisso (Melissus), his follower, and the Euclidian Brisso (Bryson), whom Aristotle said had tried by non-geometrical methods, to square the circle. As in Monarchia 3.3.2, the geometrician cannot square the circle, but he does not argue about with someone who thinks it can be done non-­ geometrically; nor does the theologian know the number of angels, but does not dispute over it. From these non-Aristotelian philosophers, Dante switches to another issue preoccupying these cantos: the Trinity, and to Sabellius arguing that the Father, Son, and Spirit were alternative names for one God, while Arius denied that Christ was one substance with the Father. Their methods meant distorting the Scripture, as a concave sword-blade distorts a face. Their learning failed, as if indicating that knowledge of the Trinity is intuitional. Aquinas finishes with examples from experience: the future may be better or worse: it is pointless to guess; past experience may say nothing about present cases. Perceptions of other people, as with the parable of the Pharisee and the publican (Luke 18.9–14), perhaps alluded to in the last full terzina, may be equally wrong. The unexpected one may

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rise up (‘surgere’), remembering Solomon (10.114) and the speech’s beginning. The corollary to what was said about Solomon comes in canto 14 in three ways. First, Beatrice—silent thus far—asks Aquinas something Dante needs to know, though he neither yet thinks nor voices it; second, Solomon, still unnamed, replies. Third, another circle begins to appear. The movement of water in a ‘ritondo vaso’ suggests a rapport between the circumference, where the lights stand and where Thomas is now silent, and the centre, where Beatrice and Dante are. There is a ‘similitudine’— the word is unique in the Commedia—between how Aquinas and Beatrice speak, and the effect, and Beatrice draws Dante’s thoughts into this continual rapport., asking if the light ‘onde s’infiora/vostea sustanza’ will remain eternally, and if so how it will impinge on their sight when they have bodies. The question produces a perichoresis, a Stoic term: ‘interpenetration’. It is a round-dance, a rotation expressing the relationship of one, two, and three of the Trinity to each other, as if the divine persons whirl about each other, and inside each other (Stramara 1997: 257–263). The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church says that perichoresis, the Greek term of St John of Damascus (c.675 to c.749), was used by Maximus the Confessor for the idea of human penetration into the divine and was Latinised as ‘circumincession’ [‘going round’] by Burgundio of Pisa (d. 1194) (Thunberg 1995: 12–36). Circumincession means ‘there is one single activity through all things, of God and those worthy of him, or rather of God alone who circumscribes them benevolently, a whole around worthy wholes’. Thus, ‘I am in the Father and the Father in me’ (John 14.10) is an instance of circumincession. For Eriugena, theos (God) means ‘he who runs, for he runs through all things, and in no way stops, but fills all things with his running’—taking this from Maximus the Confessor (Gersh 1978: 179–180). The circular dance acts out, performs, Trinitarian relationships in paradisal play. The language of 14.28–33 is not of praise from the creature upward, but enacts what the Trinity is, entering into it, as it enters into the souls, coming in circular expressions (the Trinity as centre and circumference), in chiasmic form (furthering the wave-like back and forth movement in the first terzina): Quell’uno e due e tre che sempre vive e regna sempre in tre e ‘n due e ‘n uno, non circunscritto, e tutto circunscrive,

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tre volte era cantato da ciascuno di quelli spirti …. (28–32)

(That one and two and three that always lives and always reigns in three and in two and in one, not circumscribed and circumscribing everything, three times was sung by each one of these spirits …) Dante hears 72 (24 × 3) separate (‘ciascuno’) and interlaced renderings of, perhaps, the ‘Gloria’, which is heard in Paradiso 27.1–2. Canto 14.28–33 illustrates something essential for understanding the Trinity: it is not an absolute thought; it conveys an idea of constant activity and interplay, dancing between one, two, and three, and three and two and one, as an activity, coterminous with the course of history. In the sun’s spiralling circuit, where spiralling (punning on spirare to breathe) is dancing, are lives not one and singular, but interrelating, interlacing. Solomon, discussing ‘cotal vesta’ (39), perhaps remembering ‘s’infiora’ (13), aligns with Christ, as holy fool, on the lilies of the field, ‘they toil not, neither do they spin, and yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these’ (Matthew 6. 28–29). And Solomon evokes the cantica’s title in ‘la festa / di Paradiso’ (37–38) saying love radiates this garment of brightness around them. Love produces light, (compare 10.109–110), its clearness following their burning, their ‘ardore’, which comes from their vision which is of grace. Resurrection in the flesh (‘carne’, 43, 56, 58), will give more light, more vision, more burning, more radiance. There is a round and chiastic dance of words (40–51) in this brightness (light)—ardour (love burning)—vision—grace. The resurrection complements this with grace—‘gratuïto lume’ (47, and another ‘lume’, 48)—vision—ardour—and light. ‘Grazia (42) grows through ‘gratuïto’ (47), being complemented by ‘più grata’ (45). Increase grows in ‘s’accrescerà’ (46, compare 49, 50, and 51). ‘Lume’ extends to ‘luce’ (58). This and the following simile answer Beatrice’s questions about resurrected bodies: Ma sì come carbon che fiamma rende e per vivo candor quella soverchia, sì che la sua parvenza si difende, così questo folgór che già ne cerchia fia vinto in apparenza da la carne che tutto dì la terra ricoperchia;

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né potrà tanta luce affaticarne: ché li organi del corpo saran forti a tutto ciò che potrà dilettarne. (52–61)

(But as coal which gives flame and by living whiteness overcomes that, so that it keeps its visibility, so this effulgence which circles us now will be overcome in appearance by the flesh which the earth covers over all day; nor will that light weary us, for the organs of the body will be strong for everything that will be able to give us delight.) Black coal—red flame—living whiteness which is visible through that, leads to that glory which encircles being vanquished by the reappearance of the flesh currently now occluded by the earth. That flesh is described as light, and as the resurrected body, will occlude the present light, being strong enough for all joy. These things are sayable in the sun’s light. There is awareness of lost bodies, including parents lost before.22 This look into the future is followed by a present-tense recording of new lights forming a wider circumference; so sunlight spreads, so time expands.

Notes 1. For Trinitarian doctrine from the emanationism of Plotinus, and his threefold division of Being-Life-Intellect, through to Bonaventure, see McGinn (2007: 137–155). The theology of the Spirit proceeding from Father and Son differs from the Byzantine church, where it proceeds only from the Father. 2. Two essays in Barolini and Storey (2003), are relevant: Giuseppe Mazzotta, ‘The Heaven of the Sun: Dante Between Aquinas and Bonaventure’ (152–158) and Ronald Herzman, ‘From Francis to Solomon: Eschatology in the Sun’ (320–333), and Cornish (2009: S51–S69). 3. On points raised by Siger, see (Dales 1990: 140–145, and 31, 64, 153, 172–173), and Mahoney (1974: 531–553). Maurer (1955: 233–239) asserts that no one held the doctrine of the double truth as it was condemned in 1277. See Mazzotta (1993: 112–115), Tambling (2010: 113–117). Recent work comes from Luca Banchi, ‘A “Heterodox” in Paradise? Notes on the Relationship between Dante and Siger of Brabant’; Bryan Brazeau, ‘“I Fight Auctoritas, Auctoritas always Wins”: Siger of Brabant, Paradiso X and Dante’s Textual Authority’; and Zygmunt Baránski, ‘The Temptations of a Heterodox Dante’, in Ardizzone (2015: 78–105, 106–125, 164–196). On Cavalcanti, see Cornish (2000a).

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4. They indicate a new authority which the clerici were gaining by the thirteenth century. Here, heresy was treated more authoritatively as with the pantheistic Almaricians—see Thijissen (1996: 43–65). 5. ‘St Francis of Assisi in Dante’s Commedia’ (1944) reprinted in Auerbach (1959: 79–100) and ‘“Figura”’ (1944, in Auerbach 1959: 11–78). Auerbach’s ‘Figura’ is referred to in his essay on Dante in Mimesis. The best use of Auerbach is in Charity (1966). 6. Smart (1971), distinguishes the work of the Master of Saint Cecilia, the St Francis Master, the Master of the Obsequies of St Francis, seeing a relationship between these and the Isaac Master, represented elsewhere in the nave. For a recent statement of the controversy, see Zanardi (2004: 32–62). 7. Giotto condenses different images from the Assisi frescoes, showing several things happening in each. Francis seems less mystical, with no posthumous miracles, and with visionary experiences associated with him reduced from the Assisi basilica nine, to two. Smart (1971: 109–117), Cook (2004: 144–145). For Dante and the Assisi frescoes, see Herzman (2005: 189–210.) 8. Stubblebine (1985: 108–109), dating the frescoes to the 1330s, makes them a response to Giotto, but see White (1956: 344–351) for a terminus post quem of 1307. 9. See Gardner (1913: 184–264) and Davis (1957, 198–242); both bring out specific debts to Ubertino; see Davis (1984: 42–70) for this canto. 10. Petrocchi’s edition, the standard for modern texts, reads ‘pianse’; Auerbach thinks this shows a preference for ‘good taste’ (238). Auerbach’s reading is defended in Needler (1969). 11. The language derives from Ubertino: Gardner quotes: ‘when, by reason of the height of the Cross, even thine own Mother (who nevertheless alone did then faithfully worship Thee, and was joined by agonised love to Thy passion), even she, I say, and such a Mother, could not reach up to Thee; Lady Poverty with all her penury, as Thy most dear servitor, held Thee more than ever closely embraced, and was joined most intimately [precordialibus] to Thy sufferings’ (Gardner 1913: 235). 12. Derbes (1996: 154–156); for an illustration, see 148. Derbes cites Bonaventura on Francis: ‘he made a ladder by which he might mount up and embrace Him who is all-desirable’ (156) and incidentally enables a connection to be made between this bounding up, and running (cp. Para. 11.59). Compare the Cistercian Adam of Perseigne (c.1145–1221), writing to a nun on ‘the merits of the cross’: ‘if you do not refuse to copulate with your husband [Christ] on such a bed you shall achieve one day the glory of a nuptial bed which knows nothing of cross or pain’ (quoted, Fleming, 252).

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13. Derbes (1996: 92, 133), notes the connection between the cord Francis binds on himself and the new stress in pictures of the Passion on Christ being bound: one becomes an image of the other; compare Isaiah 3.24. The pride/humility of the market-place in Purg 11.136–142 gives another comparison. 14. Chiarenza (1993: 164). She draws on the nakedness and shame that the feminine figure of Justice has been reduced to in the canzone ‘Tre donne’; see lines 28, 91, 92 (Rime no. 81). 15. Chaucer: ‘whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth / Inspired hath in every holt and heeth / The tendre croppes’ (Prologue to the Canterbury Tales lines 5–7). 16. Portugal separated from Galicia by 1179; it is alluded to in Para.19.139. 17. Frontiers between Islam and the Christian rulers were permeable, as with Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar: El Cid (born 1040s). El Cid was hospitable to both sides, while advising Alfonso VI, ‘Emperor of all the Spains’. Whereas the Chanson de Roland (c.1100—see Para.18.43) shows division between the Christians and the Muslims, the Cantar de Mio Cid (1201–1207), contemporary with Dominic, shows the slow ascendancy of the Christians in Castile, describing events between 1043 and 1099. 18. Reeves (1976: 1–28 and 65–65) for Dantean derivations from Joachim. See Marjorie Reeves and Beatrice Hirsch-Reich, The Figurae of Joachim of Fiore (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 297–329 for the influence of this book upon Dante’s visual imagination, deriving the sky-writing of Paradiso 18.94–108 from the Liber Figuram. For Dante and the Joachites, see Davis (1957: 239–243). 19. See McGinn (1971: 30–47), for Aquinas, and Bonaventura on Francis; Cullen (2006: 177–179) for Bonaventura on Joachim. 20. Fletcher (1964: 97); quoted, Cornish (2000b: 106), in her chapter on canto 13. 21. Langland (2008), C Text, XI: 212–221; see note vol. 2 pt 2, 594–595. 22. See Rachel Jacoff’s ‘“Our Bodies, Our Selves”: The Body in the Commedia’ in Stewart and Cornish (2000: 119–138); and, in the  same volume, Marguerite Chiarenza, ‘Solomon’s Song in the Divine Comedy’, 199–208.

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Ware, Timothy, 1997, The Orthodox Church, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Whalen, Brett Edward, 2009, Dominion of God: Christendom and Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U.P. White, John, 1956, ‘The Date of the “Legend of St Francis” at Assisi’, Burlington Magazine 98, no. 643: 344–351. ———, 1957, The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space, London: Faber and Faber. Zanardi, Bruno, 2004, ‘Giotto and the St Francis Cycle at Assisi’, in Anne Derbes and Mark Sandona (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Giotto, Cambridge: C.U.P.: 32–62. Zupan, Patricia, 1990, ‘The New Dantean Alba: A Note on Paradiso X.139–48, Lectura Dantis 6: 92–99.

CHAPTER 4

Mars, Jupiter, Saturn: History and Its Reversals

The music of Mars and Jupiter—there is none in Saturn—contests a vein of near-despair which understudies Dante’s reading of himself, and his history, and world-history and which becomes apparent here. I take these three planets together and separately, seeing them and what they represent as underlined by systemic conflicts exceeding the cognizance of the conscious voices which speak. Mars is dominated by the image of the cross; Jupiter, the temperate (i.e. harmonious), white, almost silvery star (Para. 18.67, Con. 2.13.35), by the eagle which the redeemed comprise. Saturn, cold and slow, has the image of the golden ladder or stairway whose gold is touched by the sun, warming it. In Boethius, Philosophy comes to the soon-to-be-martyred mourner in prison, with a tattered death-marked dress, depicting ‘steps marked like a ladder’ to move higher (Boethius 1.1.133). A similar ladder in Dürer’s woodcut ‘Melancolia I’ (1513) suggests that the rungs are the seven planets. In Dante’s Saturn, a ladder ascending beyond that planet shows the attempted overcoming of a death-­ dealing melancholia. There seems throughout these planets a confrontation with violence, as recurrent, and impossible to channel. Mars, son of Juno (Fasti 5.229–260), was the founder of Rome, and his presence broods over Florence, which answers to Rome. Jupiter gives a sense of history recording injustice. Saturn, Jupiter’s father, shows inertia and melancholia overcome, become contemplation. Melancholy—acedia—joins with the silence of his heaven, and Saturn must represent the sublimation of what I have elsewhere © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Tambling, The Poetry of Dante’s Paradiso, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65628-7_4

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argued is an acedia threatening Dante, most manifested in the dream of the Siren (Purgatorio 19.1–33, Tambling 2010: 145–173). We move from rule in the city (Mars) to secular rule and justice (Jupiter) and to monastic rule which retreats from the secular world, though failure means that it has become identified with it. Saturn’s appearance, after his grandson, and son, honours him more, because Paradiso gives a better place to poverty and deprivation than to secular rule, making this heaven one for the exile. Exploring these issues requires returning to the Aeneid: se fede merta nostra maggior musa. (15.26) (if our greatest muse is worthy of belief)

This gives a different sense of Virgil from Inferno and Purgatorio; suggesting that Dante uses the Aeneid as the seed plot of plural manifestations of character and of disaster, impinging on Dante with the potential of near despair. And if he is the greatest muse, what of his position in Limbo? Convivio 2.13.20–24 correlates Mars with music, as being in the fifth place—the dominant—in the scale, and including Cacciaguida’s harsh music of exile. This heaven, presented with literary analogues (Chiarenza 1966: 65–68, Brownlee 1984: 135–144), lets Cacciaguida speak of others whose Martian greatness will be essential to Dante, after giving the terzina of exile in an anaphora commencing ‘Tu lascerai’ (17.55): Tu proverai sì come sa di sale lo pane altrui, e come è duro calle lo scendere e ‘l salir per l’altrui scale (17.58–60)

(You will prove how full of salt tastes the bread of others, and how it is a hard road the descent and ascent by other people’s stairs.) There are echoes here of exilic Psalms: ‘Thou feedest them with the bread of tears …’ (Psalm 80.5) ‘I have eaten ashes like bread and mingled my drink with weeping’ (Psalm 102.9). Salt is meaningful in the context of tears. If Mars showed Dante’s pride in family dignity, that receives a contrapasso, for these lines chastise that pride before stating what will be worse: the noxious and foolish company Dante will suffer. Unlike ‘l’altrui scale’, there is the Scaligeri ladder. Bartolomeo della Scala is the ‘gran Lombardo’—‘che ‘n su la scala porta il santo uccello’ (72). The Lombard emblem is a golden ladder (Saturn) on a red shield (Mars), surmounted by a black eagle (Jupiter). Bartolomeo died in March 1304; perhaps Dante

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visited Verona after banishment. Another Martian, his birth stamped by being born on 9 March, under the ‘strong star’ was Bartolomeo’s brother: Cangrande (1291–1329), of ‘novella età’, currently of ‘nove anni’, a number redolent of the new, and of Beatrice. Appointed Imperial Vicar by the ‘alto Arrigo’ in March 1311, Cangrande became the ruling Scaligeri in 1311 after the death of another brother, Alboino. He had Christ-like status in changing (‘trasmutata’) the fortunes of many by his ‘benefici’. The rich and poor changing conditions cites the Magnificat (Luke 1.52–53); this indicates why rich families in Florence may have been destroyed; it comforts the exile. In Jupiter, the bird-like lights form sky-writing, putting the onus on earthly justice (Foster 1977: 137–155), as Jupiter associates with the Quadrivium’s Geometry, mapping out the earth. When the M appears of the fifth word which the lights have formed, reading DILIGITE IUSTITIAM QUI IUDICATIS TERRAM (‘Love justice, ye that be judges of the earth’—Wisdom of Solomon 1.1), Jupiter and Saturn unite. The lights supplement the M to form the head and neck of the eagle (18.107), further adorned by the lights which ‘contenta/ pareva prima d’ingigliarsi a l’emme’ (had appeared content to make lilies of the M, 18.112, 113). The joy shows in the lights descending to the summit of the M which has been formed, then taking off, as ‘surgono innumerabili faville’ (innumerable sparks arise, 18.101: another of the Dantean three-­ word only lines). Though they seem dissimilar, the eagle preoccupied downwards, with rule on earth, and Saturn’s ladder going upwards, as monasteries were planted on the tops of mountains, yet souls can descend ladders as eagles can fly high (Job 39.27–30, Isaiah 40.31; see Ginsberg 1982: 41–69). The eagle suggests thunder, and the thunderbolt, but Saturn is above the thunder, though it is heard (21.108–142), and significantly, Beatrice, cannot smile (contrast 20.13–15); it would be like a thunderbolt striking (21.4–6; see Brownlee 1991: 224–232). Not smiling suits with Saturn’s melancholy, but noticeably, Peter Damiani is the only planetary soul actually naming Beatrice (21.63), in a tenderness showing that not smiling is not a negative. The eagle implies vision, and contemplation (1.48), while Saturn is the heaven for contemplatives. Flight and contemplation go together, as John Steadman (1960: 153–159) shows, writing on Chaucer’s eagle in The House of Fame, noting the equation there of the Eagle with the power of Thought (Chaucer, House of Fame 2.523).

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The Golden Age Returning In Purg. 6.118: ‘o sommo Giove’ means Christ; as the eagle’s lights, the ‘lucenti incendi / de lo Spirito Santo’ (the shining burnings of the Holy Spirit 19.100–101) are of the sign that made the Romans reverenced by the world (19.101–102, compare 20.8). Rome is Dante’s subject: for in canto 17, his exile comes from the Black Guelf Corso Donati, in Rome in 1300 under the auspices of Boniface (1294–1303), and the Spini family, the Papacy’s bankers, specifically Simone di Gerardo degli Spini (Holmes 1997: 55). Dante will be betrayed, as, in 17.82, the Gascon (Clement V) will deceive the lofty Harry. In contrast, Saturn, the ‘caro duce / sotto cui giacque ogne malizia morta’—under whom every malice lay dead (21.26–27)—was anticipated in Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, which converted Statius (Purg. 22.70–72): iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna. (Eclogues 4.6)

The Virgin, that is, Astraea: Justice, returns (as a theme of Saturn). Saturn brings in what Jupiter desires, the ‘primo tempo umano’ (Purg. 22.71). A Renaissance topic, (Giamatti 1966: 94–122), Dante anticipates that later moment by giving its characteristics on the cornice of gluttony: ‘le Romane antiche, per lor bere / contente furon d’acqua’ (the ancient Roman women were content with water for their drink, Purg. 22.145–146), and: Lo secol primo, quant’oro fu bello, fé savorose con fame le ghiande, e nettare con sete ogne ruscello. (Purg. 22.148–150)

(The first age was beautiful as gold; it made acorns savoury with hunger, and every stream nectar with thirst.) This, evoking Metamorphoses 1.89–150, connects critique of avarice, subject of the fifth cornice, with critique of gluttony, and praise of a vegetarian diet, where gold becomes a moral quality, marking austerity. Gluttony plus avarice shows in usury; extracting money for priests appears in Saturn (21.112–135, 22.79–84, 89). In Virgil, Saturn’s realm was Ausonia, the old name for Italy (Aen. 11.252), because Saturn, a fugitive and exiled god, arrived there, fleeing his son and establishing the Golden Age there (Aen. 8.319–325). Latinus, the father of Livia, was the son of Saturn (Aen. 7.49, see 7.180). The Latins were Saturn’s race (7.202–204)

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and Saturnia, an early version of Rome, his city (8.357). Georgics 2.173 calls Italy ‘Saturnia tellus’—land of Saturn. Since Saturn is so associated with Italy, we note how many references to Italy appear in his heaven (21.106–109, 121–123, 22.37–45). Juno, wife of Jupiter, is Saturnian (Aeneid 12.807). Antagonistic to the Trojans, Italy must not be known as Trojan; she wants that Latium and Alban kings will last: ‘let it be a Roman stock, strong in Italian valour’ (12.827; Mackay 1956: 59–60; Anderson 1958: 519–532). Jupiter with whom she pleads as sister and wife is another son of Saturn (12.830), called ‘Saturnius’ (4.372). Anchises prophesies the coming of Augustus Caesar, son of a God (i.e. Julius Caesar). He is Aeneas’ descendant (6.788–800), as seen on his shield (8.678–682). Augustus: will again establish a Golden Age in Latium amid fields once ruled by Saturn; he will advance his empire beyond the Garamants and Indians, to a land which lies beyond out stars, beyond the path of year and sun, where sky-­ bearing Atlas wheels on his shoulders the blazing star-studded sphere. (Aen. 6.792–797)

Virgil was sceptical, ambiguous about whether Augustus had begun— or had ended—the Golden Age, in the character of Jupiter (Thomas 2001: 25–54). In this prophecy, the Garamants imply North Africa (Libya), and Anchises thinks Augustus’ Golden Age will press on not only eastwards, but beyond the Equator—to the territory explored in Purgatorio. Anchises speaking about India makes it unsurprising that in Jupiter, where questions of empire are implied, the man born on the banks of the Indus (Para. 19.70–71) is mentioned as ignorant of Christ, being outside his rule in literal terms, though not in terms of the assurances the eagle gives about divine salvation (Schildgen 1993: 177–193). Dante connects Anchises with Cacciaguida via the shooting star which introduces Cacciaguida (15.13–24). This has as analogue the shooting star which acts as an omen to Anchises, telling him he must leave Troy (Aen. 2.692–700). Immediately afterwards, Dante evokes Anchises again greeting Aeneas, ‘quando in Eliso del figlio s’accorse’ (15.27). Cacciaguida as Anchises asks about Dante: ‘bis unquam celi ianüa reclusa?’ (15.30—to whom has the gate of Heaven ever been twice opened), meaning that the gate is open now to Dante, and will be when Dante dies. The words correspond to the Sibyl telling Aeneas that ‘easy is the descent to Avernus’ (Aen. 6.126). Avernus was the entry to Hades from Cumae (Putnam

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1988: 189–190). Dante associates himself with Aeneas, and the poetic task, written in exile, accords with the warfare Aeneas faces returning from the underworld. Dante sees himself as the resolution of issues pronounced in Mars, whose conflictual nature shows in Jupiter and Saturn. This is, of course, material familiar from the disavowal: ‘Io non Enëa, io non Paulo sono’ (Inf. 2.32—I am not Aeneas, I am not Paul). Dante must be both, however opposite—even conflictual—these roles are. Virgil when first seen defines himself: Poeta fui, e cantai di quel giusto figliuol d’Anchise che venne di Troia poi che ‘l superbo Ilïón fu combusto. (Inf. 1.73–75)

Anchises and Aeneas combine. Troy is signalled as a primal site of pride, (compare Purg. 12.61–63), now reincarnated in Florence, whose pride the heaven of Mars discusses, making the city necessitate, yet again, exile, as for Anchises and Aeneas. In the Aeneid, Turnus fears Jupiter as his foe (12.895). Juno favoured Turnus but was limited in power (9.802–804). In a triple anaphora, the Trojans claimed Jupiter for themselves, announcing: ‘from Jove is the origin of our race, in Jove, as ancestor, the sons of Dardanus glory, of Jove’s supreme race is our king himself, Trojan Aeneas’ (7.219–721). The Aeneid contrasts Latinus, Italy, Saturn, and Juno with Aeneas, Troy and Jupiter, and Aeneas elucidates to Evander a complex genealogy (Aen. 7.131–142): Atlas had two daughters, Electra, and Maia. By Electra, Jupiter fathers Dardanus, and the Trojans. By Maia, he fathers Mercury, and Evander. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the heaven of Mercury, son of Maia, gives an honourable place to Pallas, Evander’s son, as a parallel to Aeneas (Para. 6.36). And Saturn gives laws to the people of Latium, like Evander, and Aeneas, who shows himself, therefore, to be both of Jupiter and Saturn. Nonetheless, Saturn’s justice comes neither from restraint nor laws, but through self-restraint (Aen. 7.202–204), this meaning, for Dante the hermit’s, or monk’s practice. Georgics 1.121–135 distinguishes between Saturn and Jupiter. In the Golden Age, earth of her own accord gave her gifts when none demanded them, whereas Jupiter installed agriculture, and art, and toil, triumphing over every obstacle. The acorn was replaced by corn (Georgics 1.8). Clear antitheses appear in this comparison of art (Jupiter) and nature (Saturn): Dante ascends from the city, and civilisation towards nature and the

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Golden Age, which, unlike the equivalent in the Georgics, necessitates labour, even though Peter Damiani survived solely on juice of olives (‘liquor d’ulivi’—with associations of the oil of the Holy Spirit). This ascent reverses chronology; the older god takes the superior place. Chronology is not singular; nor is history linear. Aeneid 8.357–359, where Evander speaks to Aeneas about Saturn, implies that Janus and Saturn are doubles, something reaffirmed in Macrobius’ Saturnalia, on the mid-December Roman festival of the Saturnalia. Macrobius uses the Roman scholar Varro (116–27 BCE), an essential source for City of God, though Augustine was appalled by Varro’s pagan mythologies, and rationalised them, disliking, for example, details of Jupiter’s immorality (City 4.25, 167). Augustine sees Janus and Saturn as equivalents and sees Jupiter as ‘father and mother’ and Saturn as the figure of seed. The former point lurks in the stork-image of Para. 19.91–96, the latter in the harvest image of 21.118–119 (City 7.11–7.19, 268–278). According to Varro, ‘without the passage of time, the seed cannot be productive’ (quoted City 277). That marks Saturn’s identification with Time, and, controversially, as Cronus, and with the fertility (including sexual fertility) that time brings forth (Macrobius 1969: 1.7–8, 56–65). Saturn, then, embodies something akin to what Shakespeare calls ‘the seeds of time’ (Macbeth 1.3.58). When his doors are shut in Paradiso 6.81, Janus may be a figure for Saturn; the god is present, and safe, since Ovid’s Fasti (1.125–127) identifies Janus with time, with control over Jupiter (Schiebe 1986: 54–55). The Saturnalia (1.9.11) makes Janus the universe, and the heavens, saying ‘the name is derived from eundo, since the universe is always in motion, wheeling in a circle, and returning to itself at the point where it began’. This makes Janus/Saturn figure the solar year (1.9.9–10: for this see Gee 2000: 118–119, 121). This complex figure then establishes the rule of time, with the sense that it will come round again, that ‘Secol si rinova’ (Purg. 22.70). Or Saturn/Janus may figure apocalyptic time revealing itself in judgment (21.119–120, 22.91–99), where time goes into a whirlwind-like reverse (‘come turbo’), changing all chronologies, destabilising them. So time has tricks, detours, in Jupiter, as we shall see. Time as ordered and yielding to prophecy in the Sun develops further here, for it does not proceed regularly, but has moments permitting absolute alteration.

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The Old Man of Crete Times renewing is essential because of an ambiguity haunting Saturn, as the negative god who devours his children. Cacciaguida in Mars is associated with the Lion (16.37); so is Saturn, with the ‘Leone ardente’, radiating downward with his power, with what Chaucer writes: I do vengeance and pleyn correccioun While I dwelle in the signe of the leoun. (Chaucer, The Knight’s Tale, 2461–2462)

Perhaps Dante and Chaucer drew on common traditions associating Saturn with Leo (North 1988: 409–410). Saturn in the constellation of the Lion implies strength, and judgment, as marks this heaven; the lion’s roar seems intimated in the whirling and thunderous angry cry of the contemplatives (21.136–142). Saturn’s ambiguity: cold yet warm, old yet associated with the lion, confirms a sense that Paradiso’s planets embody pagan energies, unconscious irreducible material presences. It shows in the story that Benedict, the monk of canto 22, founded the oratory of John the Baptist on Monte Cassino on the site of a temple of Apollo (compare 22.45: the ‘empio cólto che ‘l mondo sedusse’), and that ‘the ancient Enemy, resenting what he had done, appeared to his bodily eyes in a horrible vision, raging at him visibly with flames shooting out of his eyes and mouth’ (GL 1.189). Apollo’s transformation, from a God in Paradiso canto 1 into a demon, the singularising of the pagan world’s plural beliefs into a single ‘cult’, and the desire to efface a previous worship with that of the Baptist (like the equivocal replacement of Mars in Cacciaguida’s Florence), and even the Crusades, seem forceful demonstrations of a will within Christianity to impose closure. Yet this is impossible, since the evidences of other ways of thinking survive as traces. The devil’s protest is another voice of Saturn, of the god displaced by his son. Dante apparently knew the account of the four ages, gold to silver to brass to iron, set out in Metamorphoses 1.89–150, which the earlier Georgics narrative—which he also apparently knew—hints at. The account is cited by Virgil in Inferno 14.94–120, when commenting on the origins of Acheron, Styx, Phlegethon, and Cocytus, the rivers of Hell, and drawing in the interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream (Daniel 2.31–44). The Inferno passage finds its issues resumed in these heavens in Paradiso, in a poetic, not discursive clarity. Inferno gives a vision of failure, which since

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it includes an inevitable decline, argues for a grim historical determinism. Virgil does not speak of the stone cut without hands which destroys the image (Daniel 2.34–35): there is no redemptive alleviation promised such as Daniel foresees. Rather, he begins with the waste land in the middle of the sea, Crete, ‘sotto ‘l cui rege fu già ‘l mondo casto’ (Inferno 14.96—under whose king the world was once chaste’). That chastity finds its Paradisal fulfilment in Saturn’s monasticism, though that was more intense because of the emphasis, especially in the Cluniac reforms—which included Peter Damiani—on Mary’s virginity and poverty, making her the model for monasticism, so that she is seen praying and reading at the Annunciation (Gambero 2005: 88–101). Crete has as its mountain, Ida, indicating that it was the cradle of the Trojans, though Virgil says it is deserted, like an antique thing. It was the cradle of Rhea’s son, Jupiter, whose infant cries were concealed by the cries of the Corybantes; all this material paraphrasing Anchises in Aeneid 3.104–113, speaking of Crete as the home of the Trojans. Rhea, as Cybele, tells the story via the Muse Erato, in Fasti 4.197–214, when her feast-day (the Megalesia) is being celebrated; part of the story appears in Georgics 4.150–152: Ida there being called Dicte.1 Rhea, as Mother of the Gods, was brought to Rome from Crete in a ceremony which the Megalesia celebrates. But Crete, whether for Paul, journeying to Rome (Acts 27.7–13) or for Aeneas, deflected there from his journey which is Rome-bound (Aeneid 3.166), is not the answer (Aeneid 3.121–191); it is deserted and pestilential. Preceding Rome, its promise must be fulfilled in Rome. Georgics 2.536–540 calls Jupiter ‘Dictaei regis’: before the Cretan king (i.e. Jupiter) held sceptre, and before a godless race banqueted on slaughtered bullocks, such was the life golden Saturn lived on earth, while yet none had heard the clarion blare, none the sword blades ring, as they were laid on the stubborn anvil….

Crete as waste symbolises what humanity will be redeemed from in the Golden Age, which the poets dreamed of (Purg. 28.133–147). Virgil says that Ida contains the veglio, having his back to Damietta, where Francis preached desiring martyrdom (11.100–105). It was taken by the Crusaders in the thirteenth century, before being lost to the Saracens. His face is towards Rome as though it was his mirror: he looks westward from the east, and from Egypt, as a scene of failure, in a

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direction which the eagle’s flight in Paradiso 6 underlines. There is none of the joy of ‘In exitu Isräel de Aegypto’ (Purg. 2.46) here, with the sense of moving towards Jerusalem (compare Para. 25.55–56). The head is gold; weeping begins from the veglio’s arms and breast (silver) and his lower body (brass) and the legs which are iron, with the right foot of clay. Tears flow from fissures throughout the body, neck downwards, and form the rivers of hell, contrasting with the four rivers of Paradise (Genesis 2.10–14). Tears come from wounds made in nature, injured in ways intimated in Georgics 2.536–540, and from history as a record of accumulated sadness. Their existence forms a weak mercy giving relief for those in hell, who would suffer worse without them, as the opening of Inferno 15 implies. The veglio is melancholic like Saturn, whose avatar he must be; if not Saturn himself in his exiled state. He contrasts with the ‘Giove’, whom Capaneus curses in Inferno 14.52–60; that God who represents brute strength, and who contrasts with Jupiter in Paradiso, whose justice gives him sweetness (18.115), and grace, with plural gems (i.e. rulers) with which his heaven is ingemmed. Since the veglio’s head is gold, a trace remains with him of the Golden Age; hence the reference to the water and foliage within Crete. Hence the old man must look towards Rome as in a mirror, for time and for the Golden Age to renew—and if not there, nowhere. That, turning history round, is, in its necessity and impossibility, what Paradiso reflects upon. Each of these three heavens ask for that, and Inferno 14 must be complemented by Paradiso 14, where we begin.

Mars In Mars, seeing spirits forming the intersections of a cross, makes Dante, silent in the sun, evoke ‘Elios’, as a neologism, or an ecstatic polylingual word, combining Hebrew ‘El’ (‘strong one’) and Greek ‘Helios’. The lights make the sign ‘che fan giunture di quadranti in tondo’, uniting a quadrant within a circle. The Greek cross, associated with the halo for Christ, evokes the paradox of the Incarnation—the squared sign within the circle—while the flashing out gives the triple ‘Cristo’ rhyme (104, 106, 108).2 The words of command, ‘Resurgi’ and ‘Vinci’ combine resurrection and the challenge to Constantine in 312: ‘in hoc signo vinces’. As Eusebius narrates that:

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About the time of the midday sun, when day was just turning, [Constantine] said he saw with his own eyes, up in the sky and resting over the sun, a cross-­ shaped trophy formed from light, and a text attached to it which said, ‘By this conquer’. Amazement at the spectacle seized both him and the whole company of soldiers which was then accompanying him on a campaign he was conducting somewhere, and witnessed the miracle. He was, he said, wondering to himself what the manifestation might mean; then, while he meditated, and thought long and hard, night overtook him. Thereupon, as he slept, the Christ of God appeared to him with the sign which had appeared in the sky, and urged him to make himself a copy of the sign which had appeared in the sky, and to use this as protection against the attacks of the enemy. (Eusebius 1999: 80–812, see 204–211)

Constantine sees the tropaeum or trophy, as a cross, which must be fashioned into the labarum, the standard surmounted by the chi-rho which forms the shape of the cross (the chi resembling a St Andrew’s cross) and which serves as the vexillum. The tropacum is a pagan cross, or tree, predating the Christian sign of victory, familiar in the Aeneid when Aeneas pays to the gods, specifically Mars, his vows of victory after killing Mezentius and his son Lausus in the wars: ‘A mighty oak, its branches lopped all about, he plants on a mound, and arrays in the gleaming arms stripped from Mezentius the chief, of a trophy to thee, thou Lord of War’ (Aen. 11.5–8). The Loeb editor notes: ‘in the trophy here described, the tree-trunk doubtless represents the body of the vanquished foe’. The tropaeum acts as the apotropaic, which is what an outcast scapegoat is; as Paul writes: ‘cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree’ (Galatians 3.13), meaning, of course, the cross, and Christ the sacred scapegoat. And Dante becomes a scapegoat in canto 17. This incident from Constantine’s life, heavy with Biblical echoes,3 shows the tropaeum identified with the labarum which by 327 CE was forged into coins in Constantinople. The labarum unites the pole, and the chi-rho emblem, comprising the cross, which may have an earlier meaning other than being the first two letters of Christ in Greek. The etymology of the labarum may include the laurel tree, whose symbolism Paradiso has noted (Storch 1970: 105–118). Constantine, as Augustus, sees the sun: Apollo seems to have been an essential God for Augustus (Aen. 8.704–720) and that may underline the word ‘Elios’. How much of this Dante knows consciously is questionable, but the cross taps into energies predating Christianity, and the tropaeum is as sacred to Mars as to Christ: and that, at a distance, must be inside

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these cantos. In any case, in an almost Hegelian move, the cross as visible emblem displaces the eagle spoken about in Mercury, as a more vivid and meaningful sign of empire.4 This conception of the cross, moving from its identification with Christ’s shame (11.72), gives Mars a crusader-context, signalled by Dante’s line ‘ma chi prende sua croce e segue Cristo’ (14.106). This, deriving from Matthew 16.24, was the command inducing taking the vow to become a crusader, an act considered as going on pilgrimage, while being crucesignatus, that is, signed with the cross sewn into the clothes, ‘the sign of death’, according to one monk writing in 1101 (Gaposchkin 2013: 48, Tyerman 1998: 8–29). Popes such as Gregory IX (1227–1241) encouraged crusading via the preaching of the Mendicants, the Franciscans and Dominicans, throughout the thirteenth century. Not only the Albigensian campaign, but that against Manfred, whose army was stocked with Saracens, was a ‘crusade’. Jerusalem, captured in 1099, was however re-­taken in 1187 by Saladin, and Acre fell to the Mamluks in 1291, to the disappointment of Pope Nicholas IV. The Third Crusade, led by Richard of England, Philip II (Augustus), and Frederick Barbarossa, failed to dislodge Saladin. Crusading gradually ceased to be practical politics: indeed, a critique of it was circulating at the Council of Lyon (1274; Daniel 1984: 94). Though Clement V tried to revive the crusading spirit (Menachal 1998: 101–128), ‘in reality, talking about the crusade had taken the place of action’ (Mayer 1988: 287). Cacciaguida’s contempt for Papal indifference to crusades (5.143–144) reprises a theme of Folco, but it should not be assumed that all Christendom endorsed crusading, nor its mentality; Joachim and the Joachites for instance, did not (Daniel 1969: 127–154), and it is a subject producing considerable ambiguity in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Willehalm (c.1220). Considering the antiquity of the tropaeum which becomes the cross, it seems that the Crusades channelled older, pre-existing violence into warfare, and this is visible in the iconography of Mars. In Paradiso, crusading means looking backwards, even with the soldiers named in canto 18, who succeed the knightly and crusading qualities of Francis and Dominic. Their oddness, as we shall see, adds not a little to the ambiguities between Cacciaguida’s history of Florence, and the sense of an ongoing renewed violence. Convivio notes that Mars dries things out and burns them because its heat is like fire, while its vapours ignite of themselves:

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E però dice Albumasar che l’accendimento di questi vapori significa morte di regi e transmutamento di regni, però che sono effetti della segnoria di Marte. E Seneca dice però, che nella morte d’Augusto imperadore vide in alto una palla di fuoco; e in Fiorenza, nel principio della sua destruzione, veduta fue nell’aere, in figura d’una croce, grande quantità di questi vapori seguaci della stella di Marte. (Con. 2.13.22)

(And for this reason Albumasar [Arabic astronomer, 787–886] says that the burning of this vapour signifies the death of kings and the change of kingdoms, because these are effects of Mars’ rule, and this is why Seneca says that at the death of Augustus the emperor, he saw on high a ball of fire, and in Florence, at the beginning of its ruin, there was seen in the air, in the figure of a cross, great quantities of these vapours which follow the star of Mars.) This Convivio passage, where the sign of Florence’s ruin resembles what Constantine saw, reads like a draft for these cantos. The mutability theme, of cosmic warnings of the fall and death of kings becomes Cacciaguida’s, like the emergent cross-shape, and warning of destruction to Florence, presumably in November 1301, when Charles of Valois entered Florence to support the Black Guelfs, as recorded by the chronicler Dino Compagni. The Black Guelf Vanni Fucci from Pistoia warns of this in Inf. 24.142–151. The Blacks will apparently, be driven out until Mars draws from the Val di Magra (north-west of Florence) a hot wind wrapped in rolling clouds. This is metaphorical for Moroello Malaspina, Lord of Lunigiana, who will have devastating results, taking Serravalle, part of the defences of the White Pistoians (1302), and producing the capture of Pistoia in 1306, and, of course, the devastation of the White Guelfs.5 Mars, as the spirit of war sunders Guelfs, as earlier, Guelfs and Ghibellines were sundered. Moroello Malaspina may be a Mars, as a Black Guelf condottiere; but he is not negative, if he is the one who gave Dante hospitality in the Lunigiana (Epistle 4, Life 89). Ave was first spoken, Cacciaguida says, on 25 March, Mars’ month (16.34). Mars had returned 580 times to its Lion, following the Martian year of 687 days. Perhaps Cacciaguida was born in March, at the Annunciation, and canto 15 evokes Florence in 1091, the year of his birth. Cacciaguida later indicates that Cangrande was born in 1291, creating an expanse of time of 200 years for these cantos. Cacciaguida’s biography prompts questions, including (16.22–27):

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( a) who were your ancestors; (b) what years were recorded in your childhood (i.e. were to be noted, historically); and (c) ‘ditemi de l’ovil di San Giovanni’—tell me of the sheepfold of San Giovanni, a phrase re-echoed in 25.5, and previously heard before in Inf. 19.17. That produces supplementary questions, how great Florence was, and who were its worthiest people. Cacciaguida replies that his family came from the prime place for the palio, which, as horse-racing, evokes Mars since the horse was primarily a military animal for the Romans (Rosivach 1983: 511). The Chronica de origine civitatis (late c.12) gave the existence of Fiesole prior to Florence, since Dardanus founded Troy out of Fiesole. Aeneid 3.167–170, and 7.209 give clues here, as does Aen. 7.240. But Dardanus as hero has a double birth, and, Jupiter being his father (7.219), he has double parentage, being now among the gods. The Chronica, making Dardanus son of Atlas and Electra, told of the suppression of the Catiline conspiracy (63 BCE), wherein Fiesole fought Caesar and his generals, Metellus, and Florinus. Catiline was defeated in 63 BCE supposedly at Campo Piceno, where Moroello fought (Inf. 24.148). Two Martian events figure each other. Florinus was killed, his name made a memorial in the new city (hence the equation of men with flowers). Justinian referred to this (in canto 6.53–54), contrasting the hill-top town of Fiesole with the valley-­ based Florence.6 Florence, replaced Fiesole, absorbing its citizens, until it was destroyed by Totila (450), who rebuilt Fiesole. Florence’s walls were apparently rebuilt by Charlemagne under Papal direction, according to the Nuova Cronica of Villani (c.1276–1348). Sanzanome’s Gesta Florentinorum in 1231 enlarges on rivalry between Fiesole and Florence, producing destruction of Fiesole (1125), as part of Florence’s outward expansion. Villani gave the trading importance of Florence, since Julius Caesar founded it; being a Black Guelf, he supported French intervention and seems more secular than Brunetto Latini, whose Tresor (1268) shows Florence dominated by Mars.7 Cacciaguida’s Florence hears the bells from the Badia, the Benedictine abbey, founded in 978 by the mother of the Marquis Hugh of Brandenburg, the gran Barone (16.127–132). That intimacy and inclusiveness echoes the conditions Cacciaguida describes, before his name emerges:

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A così riposato, a così bello viver di cittadini, a così fida cittadinanza, a così dolce ostello, Maria mi diè, chiamata in alte grida; e ne l’antico vostro Batisteo insieme fui cristiano e Cacciaguida. (15.130–135)

(To such repose, to such a beautiful life of citizens, to such faithful citizenry, to such a sweet hostelry, Mary gave me—called on with loud cries— and in your ancient Baptistery, I became at the same time a Christian, and Cacciaguida.) ‘Antico’ resonates in these cantos (15.97, 16.23 and 92). An implicit association of Cacciaguida’s mother with the city as feminine evokes other contrasting mother-images (16.58–60, 17.48–48).8 Cacciaguida joined the Second Crusade—promoted by Eugenius III, preached by Bernard of Clairvaux, and led by the French Louis VII—and a fiasco (Runciman 1965b; 247–288). Cacciaguida was killed perhaps at Damascus in 1147 and came ‘dal martiro a questa pace’ (15.148), like Boethius, whose body lies in Pavia, in Cieldauro (10.124–129), beneath a golden ceiling, evocative of divine light; the anagogue of what he enjoys in the Sun. But Singleton (note to 15.140), drawing on Villani, shows that there is no record of Cacciaguida having been knighted by Conrad III, though Conrad II (1024–1039), a hundred years earlier, apparently fought against the Saracens in Calabria, and passed through Florence on his way, knighting several Florentines. Cacciaguida’s historic character may be questioned; he himself may be part of a foundation-legend, of which more below. The Statue of Mars Florence’s Baptistery (Cacciaguida’s and Dante’s) was re-consecrated in 1059. Singleton quotes Villani on how an equestrian statue of Mars had been taken from his temple when Florence took St John as the new patron; when Totila took Florence in 450, the Arno claimed the statue, which was retrieved in Charlemagne’s rebuilding, and placed near the Ponte Vecchio first documented in 996, but lost when the bridge was washed away in a flood (1333). As a mere ‘semblance’ (‘alcun vista’), the statue is alluded to by the anonymous suicide of Inferno 13.130–151, who sees Mars’ ‘arte’— an active force—as always destructive.9 The statue is ‘quella pietra scema’ (16.145): a mutilated torso.

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Florence stood geographically and symbolically, ‘tra Marte e ‘l Batista’ (16.47), on a south/north axis. The city balanced itself between two religions and allegiances, which debased themselves into civil war (Mars), and florin-worship (9.137–142, 18.133–135). Mars’ presence suggests that the city rests on a pagan blood-sacrifice, showing in an initial climactic moment when the Amidei family was dishonoured, when Buondelmonte, whose family had crossed from the country over the Ema river into Florence, broke his betrothal to them for a member of the Donati family. John Barnes quotes the Pseudo-Brunetto record of how Buondelmonte was taunted with cowardice by Madonna Gualdrada, wife of one Forese de Donati, for being manipulated by the interests of the Ghibellines. She persuaded him to marry her daughter instead: this mother then becomes one of the ‘altrui’ of 16.141 (Lansing 1991: 167–169). A conference in the church of S. Maria sopra Porta decided Buondelmonte’s fate, being incited by the Ghibelline Mosca dei Lamberti whom Dante asked Ciacco about in Hell (Inf. 6.80) and who encouraged Buondelmonte’s murder on his wedding day on Easter Sunday 10 April 1216, with ‘Capo ha cosa fatta’ (Inf. 28.107): a thing done has an end, or, as Sapegno quotes from Dino Compagni, ‘cosa fatta non può disfarsi’—what’s done cannot be undone.10 These words, chronicles of a death foretold, lead on to all who are ‘disfatti’ (16.109)—undone by what has been done in pride. Luca Gatti (1995: 201–230) discusses the prevalence of the myth of Mars in Florence. Though Mars’ loss in 1333 was specifically regarded as a judgment on paganism and on sodomy, he was resurrected in the Pisano Campanile in Florence, riding on horseback. Gatti says that Mars could be associated with the Arno, from whence he came; and with Hercules, a Florentine hero, and with David, whose appearance in Donatello’s statue of the 1430s is read by Michael Camille (1989: 343–345) as a sexual provocation if not a transgression. Equally, Donatello’s David, now in the Bargello, may evoke Mars, and Hercules, and Mercury, holding the head of Argus (like David with Goliath’s); a complex image indeed (Freedman 2011: 135–157, 281–284). He is the Lion (and associated with Hercules), just as his name ‘Marte’ punned with ‘morte’. These are relevant echoes for these cantos, showing that Mars’ associations with Florence were the subject of a continual reinvention of a figure whose valencies are plural and, like the cross, pagan and Christian.11 Another connection comes from the canzone discussed in Chap. 3— Cavalcanti’s ‘Donna mi prega’:

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In quella parte dove sta memora prende suo stato, si formato, come diaffan da lume, d’una scuritate la qual da Marte, vène, e fa demora … (15–18)

(In that part here memory resides, it takes up its abode, formed, as the diaphanous is by light, from a darkness which comes from Mars, and stays …) Love is not associated with light which makes the body shine; it comes from beyond Venus; ‘fero’ associates love with warfare, and darkness is malicious, like the ‘vapor … ch’e è di torbidi nuvoli involuto / e con tempesta impetüosa e agra’ (Inf. 24.145–147). The aggressiveness passing down from Mars through Venus to lovers contrasts with the virtues conducted downwards in Paradiso. Mosca in Inferno is mutilated. Inferno 28, canto of the sowers of discord, begins in epic mode, evoking accumulated battlefields in Puglia, with the dead and injured, beginning with the Aeneid’s wars, then the Second Punic War (218–202 BCE), where countless rings were gathered from the slaughtered (so Livy—Convivio 4.5.19). Inferno 28 supplements that with the wars fought by the Norman Robert Guiscard. It then gives the destruction of Manfred at Benevento, when the Apulians deserted at Ceperano: here, the relics were bones, not rings. The fifth instance is the battle at Tagliacozzo (1268). These wars, even those in the Aeneid, spring from invasion, and only Robert Guiscard’s campaigns are spoken of honourably (see below). Inferno 28’s warfare, and war’s effects on people, are re-invoked in Mars through Guiscard, and through Mosca whose words sow discord, inciting a Guelf-Ghibelline split and a murder which Cacciaguida sees as a sacrifice marking the end of peace, as though Mars needed placating. Or it was an initiatory sacrifice beginning a 100 years’ war where Dante would be another sacrificial victim. The reversal to sacrifice is the theme of Ricardo Quinones (1994: 9–29, 123–135). He contrasts this sacrifice to that which Dante makes (14.88–96), while remembering the pagan sacrifice in 8.4–6. No single account of warfare can emerge from Inferno 28 and Mars: even crusading cannot be seen unambiguously, nor, unlike Mosca’s words, does it have an ‘end’. Supporting belief in blood-sacrifice, foundation-legends underlie these cantos. One is the place given to Mars, implying a cult which was implicit in Florence. Cacciaguida becomes part of a second, an ideal patriarch. A third legend is about legends: stories told about Trojans, and Fiesole, and

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Rome (15.125–126). These are tales of pride (Fiesole the parent of Troy, subdued like its proud offspring: Rome, founded by Trojans, and the parent of Florence). They supplement the chronicle of Buondelmonte’s mutilation in murder, which matching Mars’ mutilated statue, emblem of the always fractured condition of the commune, contradicting Cacciaguida’s sense of the safely enclosed city. If ruin is ever present, no foundation-legend intending to establish a city-narrative can be other than fictional. Mars’ statue implies that any account of a city, or history, must take account of an ever-present residue of anger (this canto is shadowed by the anger of Marco Lombardo in Purgatorio 16). Inferno 28 begins with mutilation on the battlefield and ends with mutilated war-mongers; Paradiso 16 ends with a mutilated statue which initiates warfare and severance from the city for Dante. Uncoincidentally canto 18 ends with a reference to another martyrdom (like Cacciagudia’s)—that of John the Baptist, mutilated by decolletage (18.135). Mutilation, psychoanalytically speaking, evokes castration as not only the threat to masculinity but as the sign of masculinity as always, already, ‘disfatto’, making warfare a compensatory activity for this fear of loss of power. Mars tutelary spirit of Florence, and of this heaven, is mutilated. Masculine power remains incomplete, lacking; such lack, in psychoanalytic terms, generates warfare.12 Mars the Protector Ovid’s Fasti narrates the union of Silvia the Vestal with Mars, and the birth of the twins Romulus and Remus, saying that March was the beginning of the year; while Mars, the Marching God (Gradivus) declares that he brought about the beginning of Rome, in alignment with the opening of the year. Mars is a nature god, associated with lustral processes, his power purificatory and protective. So Cacciaguida speaks about Florence as a newer, smaller, Rome (15.109–111), following the idea of its founder, Julius Caesar, who was deified in Mars’ month. Mars even notes the importance of Juno, his mother, being called upon by women in travail, like Cacciaguida’s mother (Fasti 3.245–358). Romulus in Paradiso is called Quirino, a name given posthumously, when he was deified. Aeneid 1.292–293 makes him the law-giver, with his brother Remus, who was killed by his brother’s agency (Fasti 4.808–862). It is difficult to distinguish Quirinus from Romulus: Virgil and Ovid identify them (Fasti 3.41), though J.G.  Frazer, editing the Fasti, considers Quirinus an older,

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pre-Roman deity (Fasti 1.37). He may then be indistinguishable from Mars: haunting city founders with their plural legends. Remus’ assassination has been replaced by that of Buondelmonte. Dante removes Mars as the power of irrational violence, by demythologising, giving definite reasons for the Easter 1215 crisis. Cacciaguida, whose son is within the cornice of pride, while his own is patent when he addresses Dante, says the city has been ruined by expansionist ‘superbia’ (16.110). Florence absorbed all others surrounding it out of a desire for new neighbours (16.135, compare line 53), cracking the limits which St John and Mars set out for it. The city’s greatness, about which Dante asked, was its smallness, its humility. Florence reworks themes of Pride (16.110), the lessons being pointed out by anaphora, beginning: Io vidi li Ughi e vidi i Catellini Filippi, Greci, Ormanni e Alberichi, già nel calare, illustri cittadini …. (16.88–90)

(I saw the Ughi, I saw the Catellini, Filippi, Greci, Ornanni, and Alberichi, illustrious citizens, already falling.) ‘Io vidi’ returns in 92, 109, 149, and 151. ‘Già’ resonates from line 90 through to 100, 102, 103, 107 (twice) and 118, 121, 122, 133. The clergy are accused of creating a Guelf/Ghibelline dispute throughout Italian towns (16.58–66). People from these were imported into Florence: mentioning the Guelf Buondelmonte coming from Valdigrieve (16.66), south of Florence, clinches the point. Canto 16 names figures of pride who have insinuated themselves into Florence; they are modern (a word used, significantly, in 16.33), secular, not mythological. Mars in the Fasti (3.79) seems prior to all gods, expressing the spirit that builds cities, and as irreducible anger threatening them. He represents justice, as when the Temple of Mars Ultor (Avenger) was built by Augustus (see Fasti 5.545–599), to commemorate the revenge at Philippi upon Brutus and Cassius. Horace, however, had thought of Mercury as the Avenger (Odes 1.2.41–44). There are connections here with Justinian’s canto, but we should not too easily equate justice and revenge, another attribute of Saturn; the ethics of revenge are atavistic, and what the city must withstand. The temple is like that of Janus (Para. 6.81—compare Aeneid, 1.294–296) shut by Augustus, as if to keep peace—or strife— within. ‘Janus’ as double allows both possibilities:

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My gate, unbarred, stands open wide, that when the people hath gone forth to war, the road for their return may be open too. I bar the doors in time of peace, lest peace depart, and under Caesar’s star I shall be long shut up. (Fasti 1.279–282)

Janus and Mars are ambiguous guardians: stabilising and ruining. Once a sheepfold, the city now possesses the peasant from Aguglion (Baldo d’Aguglione) (16.55–56).13 The Babylonish ‘confusion’ (16.67) within Florence is associated by Brunetto Latini, in a parallel canto, with the Fiesolean spirit within Florence (Inf. 15.61–78). Hence Epistle 6 section 6 (1311) calls the Florentines resisting the rule of Henry VII ‘most wretched offshoot of Fiesole’. Florence has lost its destiny and is full of people lacking a sense of a Roman inheritance. Canto 16: Florence: Decline and Fall The mixing of populations which Cacciaguida criticises (16.67–69) has been seen as evidence of Dante’s nostalgia, his anti-modernity, as if Dante was Cacciaguida (Santagata 2016: 12). Yet, while that has a certain truth,  Cacciaguida  cannot be a single voice, but  must argue opposite propositions: a city needs to keep its Roman purity: but it cannot possibly keep it. For the Chronica has a sense of Fiesole as an Etruscan town, making the Roman/Etruscan wars palimpsests beneath the stories of Florence and Fiesole. Buried significations, likely to re-emerge in disguised or distorted form, make backwards-looking over-simple; there is more than Cacciaguida can know. Florence was twice deliberately stocked with Fiesoleans, once after the Catiline conspiracy, once after Totila’s sacking of the city. As Villani says: And note that it is not to be wondered at that the Florentines are always at war and strife among themselves, being born and descended from two peoples so contrary and hostile and different in habits as were the noble Romans in their virtue and the rude Fiesolans in war. (Villani, Chronicle 1906: 1.38: 30)

Florence then is always marked by Fiesole. The foundation-myth of the Trojans, Fiesole, and Rome (15.126), given in an order which ignores Fiesole’s precedence over Troy, gives continuity, yet Florence can exist neither with nor without Fiesole, keeping it as a trace within itself. What

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appears a united or a pure city has never been, nor can be; texts are mixed, so, necessarily, are cities, even if Cacciaguida’s particular innocence cannot see it. An extraordinary poetry chronicles the old city, in canto 15.97–148 and in Cacciaguida’s speech (16.34–154). He calls that Florence pure down to the last artisan (16.34–51). Lines 52–72, give the perils of mixing, prompted by desire to expand: they contain a threnody and sense of imminent trouble: sariesi Montemurlo ancor de’ Conti, sarieno i Cerchi nel piovier d’Acone, e forse in Valdigrieve i Buondelmonti. (64–66)

Montemurlo was sold by the Conti Guidi to Florence, because they could not hold it against Pistoia: so bringing them into the city, which had buying-power. The Cerchi (White Guelfs) left the village of Acone: perhaps that is why Dante  calls the Whites ‘selvaggia’ (Inf. 6.65). The Buondelmonti family did not stay in Valdigrieve, leaving c.1135 (Singleton). Warning about intermixing produces lines 73–90, which mentions those who are in decline, as Fortune alters the state of Florence, so that ‘già nel calare’ (90), suggests Fortune’s wheel. Conversely, 91–135 show those rising in Cacciaguida’s time, even if they have declined by Dante’s. Lines 136–147 record the specific strife between the Amidei and Buondelmonte. The former showed a ‘giusto disdegno’ which ended Florence’s ‘viver lieto’; and Cacciaguida indicts Buondelmonte, for without him, ‘molti sarebbe lieti, che son tristi’ (compare ‘fleto’, 136). Lines 148–154 step back from that murder to when the city was in repose, the lily on the lance not reversed (a sign of military defeat) nor turned red, as happened at Montaperti. ‘Nobiltà di sangue’ (1), ends ‘né per divisïon fatto vermiglio’ (154), with literal bloodshed. Within this development, where names recur with the inevitability of disaster, place-names and personal names accumulate, and places create identities, as with the gate of lines 94–99, sold to the Cerchi by the Guidi (64–66) who had inherited it from the Ravignani. That involved the marriage of Count Guido Guerra IV and Bellincione Berti’s daughter, the good Gualdrada, grandmother of Guido Guerra (1220–1272) seen in Inferno 16.37–39, in a canto connecting to this one in relation to Florence.14

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Oh quali io vidi quei che son disfatti per lor superbia! e le palle de l’oro fiorian Fiorenza in tutt’i suoi gran fatti. (16.109–111)

(Oh how great have I seen those now undone by their pride! And the golden balls made Florence flower in all their grand deeds.) Do these golden balls anticipate by contrast the circles which are the image of God in canto 33? They made Florence flourish, as a fine flower for the city. Two apparently German-derived families are here: the Uberti, their greatest representative Farinata, named alongside the Visconti of Milan (Convivio 4.20.5). ‘Disfattti’ carries the weight of Boethian tragedy, history as decline and the fall of princes. ‘Superbia’ is more primal, being the reason for Lucifer’s fall, the beginning of history as tragedy. The other identifiable name is the Lamberti, arriving with Emperor Otto I in the tenth century. Mosca was of them, but Inf. 28.106–111 indicates that the family had disappeared by 1300. Other markers of pride include like the Ghibelline ‘Galigaio’ who had ‘dorata in casa sua già l’elsa e ‘l pome’ (101–102). Despite the gilded hilt and pommel of knighthood, the family was banished in 1258. ‘Grand’ era già la colonna del Vaio’ (103)—a vertical strip of ermine on a vermilion field—defines the fallen Pigli. There follows the detail of a city-gate being named after a family (the Pera), and the eulogy for Count Hugo of Brandenburg, imperial deputy, and marquis of Tuscany from 961 to 1001: Ciascun che de la bella insegna porta del gran barone il cui nome e ‘l cui pregio la festa di Tommaso riconforta, da esso ebbe milizia e privilegio; avvegna che con popol si rauni oggi colui che la fascia col fregio. (16.127–132)

(Each one who carries anything of the beautiful emblem of the great baron whose name and whose praise the Feast of St Thomas strengthens, from him had knighthood and privilege, although one of them today, who adorns it with the fringe, has united himself with the people.) The name of this baron is remembered on the feast of St Thomas the apostle to India, 21 December, in the Badia. His coat of arms, seven vermiglion and white staves, marked families, who received knighthood from him. This shows mutual generosity, and the positive spirit of Mars, as the

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patron that Ovid, and clearly Dante considered him. It culminates with the unnamed Giano della Bella (131–132), siding with the guilds against the magnates and exiled in 1295. His ornamentation is a coat of arms with a gold fringe, part of the city’s bright visibility. Cantos 17 and 18: Exile These emblems compare with the cross. The arising and conquering which evokes Christ (14.125), challenges Dante who falls into the ‘valle’ (17.63); Mars must include the fieriness of writing the Commedia. The cross (the ‘albero’) returns with Cacciaguida’s corollary: El cominciò: ‘In questa quinta soglia de l’albero che vive de la cima e frutta sempre e mai non perde foglia, spiriti son beati, che giù, prima che venissero al ciel, fuor di gran voce, sÌ ch’ogne musa ne sarrebe opima. Però mira ne’ corni de la croce: quello ch’io nomerò, lì farà l’atto che fa in nube il suo foco veloce. Io vidi per la croce un lume tratto dal nomar Iosuè, com’el si feo; né mi fu noto il dir prima che ‘l fatto. E al nome de l’alto Macabeo vidi moversi un altro roteando, e letizia era ferza del paleo. Così per Carlo Magno, e per Orlando due ne seguì lo mio attento sguardo, com’occhio segue suo falcon volando. Poscia trasse Guiglielmo e Rinoardo, e ‘l duca Gottifredi la mia vista per quella croce, e Ruberto Guiscardo. Indi, tra l’altre luci mota e mista, mostrommi l’alma che m’avea parlato qual era tra i cantor del cielo artista. (Para. 18.28–51)

(He began: ‘In this fifth level [applied to a step, or grade, like those of a tree’s branches] of the tree which lives from the summit, and always bears fruits and never loses leaves, there are blessed spirits, who below, before they came to heaven, were of great fame, so that every Muse [poet,

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or poem] would be abundant from them. Therefore, look on the horns [the arms of the cross, cp. 14.109]; he who I name will there act as swift fire does in a cloud’. I saw a light drawn along the cross at the name of Joshua, as it was done, nor was the word noted by me before the deed. And at the name of the exalted Maccabaeus, I saw another moving, and joy was the whip of the top. Thus for Charlemagne, and for Roland, my attentive gaze followed the two of them as the eye follows the falcon flying. Then William and Renouard and Duke Godfrey drew my sight along the cross, and Robert Guiscard. Then, moving and mixing among the other lights, the spirit who had spoken with me showed me how he was an artist among the singers of heaven.) The tree is nourished from its summit, and described with its separate branches, as the equivalent of the spheres of Paradise. The souls are distinguished by their fame which attracts poetry, which grows below from these names’ repute. Cacciaguida takes his place among those named by poets, because he is being named by Dante, five generations below him. As the ancestor reveals a future and destiny for Dante, so the descendant gives a place to the ancestor, who has assured him the fame that his poetry will have (17.97–99). The first light, Joshua, connects with Folco on the Israelites entering Canaan (9.124–126); the name evokes Christ. Judas Maccabeus, who restored the temple in Jerusalem and died fighting the Seleucids in 160 BCE (1 Maccabees 2.4, chapters 3–9.18) receives a complete terzina. Two figures in a specifically Jewish history are singled out: Judas Maccabaeus in the time of its fall, and so more identified with; he is the only one given two forms of motion as he is named—spinning, as he moves along the cross. He was used as an example to urge on the First Crusade, as an instance of a secular warrior, aiming for martyrdom. (Tyerman 2006: 40–41). His name, the ‘hammer’ aligns him with Charles Martel (c.688–741) who, according to ninth-century chroniclers, evoked Maccabaeus by being named ‘Martel’ (Riche 1993: 44). He defeated Islamic forces at Tours in 732. Charlemagne, son of Pepin the Short, who had been crowned King of the Franks by the Pope at Saint Denis (754), was his grandson. Though not appearing here, this Charles Martel bridges Judas Maccabaeus and Charlemagne (742–815) who has the third place. In the sequencing of generations, Charlemagne, the third Holy Roman Emperor Justinian names (6.96), appears with his nephew Roland. Dante draws on the Chanson de Roland, contemporary with the First Crusade, and not from the earliest lives of Charlemagne, which record the Basques

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destroying Charlemagne’s army (at Ronceveaux 778).15 The Chanson de Roland, which gives this date, makes Roland, in dream, the hunting-dog (veltre) which attacks the boar and the leopard menacing Charlemagne (lines 725–736: these animals  correspond to  the traitor Ganelon and Marsile, the Saracen king in Saragossa working in concert). The veltre suggests the ‘veltro’ of Inf 1.101, and perhaps Cangrande.16 Charlemagne and Roland contrast in terms of youth and age: Roland has half the poem, Charlemagne, the 200-year old the other half in which he avenges his nephew, and starts campaigning again. If Roland contributes to the portrait of Cangrande, then there can be no final victory, no cessation of warfare—rather endless repetition, for Dante, like Charlemagne. Four names follow in the next terzina. William of Orange (c.755–812), a cousin of Charlemagne—but presented in the texts as his vassal—fought against the Saracens at Barcelona and, like Folco, became a monk, dying at Gellone, and being sainted in 1066. He was the subject of a Chançun de Willame (c.1120) and then of the Bataille d’Aliscans (1185), and outstandingly, of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Willehalm. With him, as the sixth spirit, comes the half-comic, half-heroic rustic giant Rainouart of Aliscans, who becomes the more noble Saracen Rennewart in Willehalm. If Dante, as is not inconceivable, knew Wolfram’s text, a courtly epic rather than a chanson de geste, issues become more polarised, for in Aliscans Rainouart is baptised, but not in Willehalm, where he is a noble prince, the brother of the heroine Giburc, who has converted from Islam to Christianity and is married to Willehalm. Willehalm suspects that Rennewart is more noble than he, and there are hints that Rennewart could even become—fictionally—the Emperor. Both William and Rainouart are to be seen in the entrance to the Duomo in Verona, unless the images there are of Roland and Oliver. The title Aliscans derives from l’Archamp, the Gallo-Roman necropolis at Arles (see Inf. 9.112), where the Christians were buried by angels after a first defeat by the Saracens. If Dante used the Aliscans, Rainouart is the most heterogeneous figure named. Dante passed over using the Oliver of the Chanson de Roland, a more ‘natural’ choice; perhaps assuming Oliver within Roland, perhaps wanting the comic figure. But if he chose Wolfram’s Rennewart, the figure is a little less heterogeneous (more like Wolfram’s Parzival) and he throws questions of salvation into confusion, because of the genuine sympathy the poem gives to the ‘heathen’, who have spread into Spain and France from the East, and because of Giburc’s speech pleading for mercy for them, and mooting that they may be saved

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(Willehalm 6.306–311, Passage 1977: 174–177). Nor is this the only episode in that text which complicates the thought of crusading, and relativises the necessity of baptism. 17 Seventh comes Godfrey of Bouillon, Duke of Lower Lorraine (1058–1100), whose mother claimed descent from Charlemagne. As a leader of the First Crusade (1096) he died as ruler of Jerusalem, Adovocatus Sancti Sepulchri, ‘the dedicated defender of the Holy Sepulchre’ (Runciman 1965a: 292, Tyerman 2006: 108–110). Last comes Robert Guiscard (1015–1085) whose surname is animalaic, fox, or weasel-like, certainly ‘the Cunning’. Dante breaks chronological order with this heterogeneous figure, describable as ‘a brigand and a horse-thief’ (Matthew 1992: 10, and Loud 2000). That characterisation is not the only echo of Mercury, nor of the comic, among these figures. Guiscard calls into question a single, noble, historical account. A Norman, the son of Tancred of Hauteville, he came south with others of his family to oppose the Byzantines, who, under Belisarius (Para. 6.25) had taken Sicily, but were followed by invading Lombards (568), and then Arabs (ninth century). We have seen that Inferno 28.14 mentions Robert Guiscard’s conquests in Apulia. He established the rule of the Tancredi in Sicily, as the eponym of the Gesti Roberti Guiscardi. With Robert, authorised to conquer in southern Italy by the Papacy and with his dynasty, the Norman history of Sicily—one antagonistic to the Saracens there—completes itself, for his brother, Roger, took all Sicily in 1071, and his son Roger II (1095–1154) fathered the Constance of Paradiso 3.109–120.18 These names, with comic, non-heroic elements, are a variant of the Nine Worthies (‘les neuf preux’), who extended out across Europe and across time from Charlemagne’s exclusively French paladins in the Chanson de Roland. Three were pagans, Hector, Alexander, and Julius Caesar; three were Jewish, Joshua, David, and Judas Maccabaeus; and three were Christians, Arthur, Charlemagne, and Godfrey of Bouillon.19 Of these, Hector and Julius Caesar are in Limbo (Inf. 4.121, 123, and also in Mercury), but Dante ignores Alexander, unless Inf. 12.107 refers to him. Of the Jews, two are here, while David appears in Jupiter. Arthur’s omission helps focus attention on the characteristics of fighting here; it is not characterised by the spirit of Romance, which generates a Tristan or Lancelot; it is in the spirit of territorial protection from heathen forces, especially Muslim. 20 But Reainouart/Rennewart challenges not just crusading, but the injustice which condemns the Saracen, since he is essentially on the same side as the Christian, and is the surprise name: in that way anticipating Ripheus, in Jupiter.

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Jupiter Jupiter’s subject is injustice. Canto 18 concludes praying that the mind (‘mente’) which motivates the star, and produces rulers who love justice— insofar as ‘justice’ works within the earth—will address the avarice which, like smoke, prevents justice shining. The prayer blames the bartering within the Temple—once Jerusalem (Matthew 21.12), then Rome, and the Lateran, now Avignon (compare 17.51). And ‘martiri’ resonates with 10.128, 5.148, and 18.137. Another prayer to the ‘milizia del Ciel cu’ io contemplo’ (18.124) defines the difference between Mars and Jupiter. In Mars, people went to war with swords, on whichever side. Jupiter is more modern, and the age’s character is meanness; avarice depriving people by excommunication (including Cangrande), of the bread freely given by the Father. A third address fastens on one who is the epitome of the unjust: John XXII—Jacques d’Euse of Cahors, Archbishop of Avignon, elected Pope at Lyons (1316): Ma tu che sol per cancellare scrivi, pensa che Pietro e Paulo, che moriro per la vigna che guasti, ancor son vivi. Ben puoi tu dire: ‘I’ ho fermo ‘l disiro sì a colui che volle viver solo e che per salti fu tratto al martiro, ch’ io non conosco il pescator né Polo’. (18.130–136)

(But you who write only to cancel out, think that Peter and Paul, who died for the vine that is broken, are still living. You may well say ‘I have fixed my desire so on him who wished to live alone and who by dancing was drawn to martyrdom, that I do not know the fisherman, nor Pol’.) Simon Peter and Paul are remembered by Peter Damiani in Para. 21.127–128, and of course, Peter appears in Paradiso 24. Desire for money, for the florin with the image of John the Baptist, implicates Florence (9.130–131, ‘l’ovil di San Giovanni’, 16.25). The periphrasis is neat: money changes hands, its reality is unmentioned. And Salome, dancing before Herod, is unidentified. John was beheaded under the sway of that sexual inducement offered to Herod, as a result of frivolous arbitrariness (Matthew 14.1–12). And ‘arbitrariness’ sums up much in the record, especially the Papacy’s disposition, writing to strike people out by excommunication, disingenuously forgetting Peter’s and Paul’s names. The

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Papacy resembles the unmentioned Herod; their arbitrariness is unjust, and the hint of how sexuality and its uses (dancing in front of the ruler) impedes just dealings is noted on several occasions in Jupiter and Saturn. Pestilential Rulers Fear of arbitrariness informs the unexpressed and apparently long-felt anxiety of Dante, perhaps partially expressed in Limbo (Inf. 4.46–51), and which the eagle articulates: where is the justice which eternally condemns the man born on the banks of the Indus, (compare Hahn 1978: 213–234) who has never heard of Christ (19.70–78)? This question is not necessarily to be taken at face-value, but may displace a certain despair about Dante’s own position as an exile, that there is no justice for him, and that justice can hardly be asserted in the face of an apparent arbitrariness, which has touched him badly—and might challenge many virtuous pagans. No satisfactory answer to this can come in Paradiso; any climbing out of despair could only work by continuing to assert justice. The eagle answers that all who come to this kingdom must believe in Christ, though at the Judgment (‘in giudicio’, 19.107) an apparent Christian will be no nearer Christ than someone who does not know Him, while ‘Christians’ will be damned when compared to Ethiopians. This may be glossed from Matthew 8.11–12: ‘many shall come from the east and west and shall sit down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, but the children of the kingdom shall be cast out …’: Che poran dir li Perse a’ vostri regi, come vedranno quel volume aperto nel qual si scrivon tutti suoi dispregi? (19.112–114)

(What will the Persians be able to say to your kings when they see that book open in which all their dispraise is written?) Persians (i.e. Muslims) will be amazed, and will condemn such Christians, who will view the record, written here in acrostic-form, as LUE (‘pestilence’). The acrostic records the ‘dispregi’ of the various ‘Christian’ rulers of Europe and extends over 12 terzine (19.115–141), giving 36 lines (6 × 6, appropriate for this sixth heaven), followed by a last line closing the canto. No other part of Paradiso emphasises so much global thinking. After evoking Africa and Asia, the acrostic extends over European kings, of

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whom only the first is even mentioned by name, the last being called a beast. An eagle-like survey which swoops on individuals singles out countries and territories which contemporary rulers have disgraced. Many names are the descendants of those criticised in Purgatorio 7, as if things have gone from one stage to a worse (Ferrante 1984: 293). This, of course, could only increase despair. In the anger, which focuses on some rulers who have not been universally criticised, as if the poet notes other, more secret things than historians do, the plural indictments against the French will be noted. So, will financial injustices, where coinage loses the trust that it should have, and the place given to usurping other territories as a prime instance of this usury. In the interweaving of names and places, there is the sense of repetitions of events, which indicate a sterile time, life as repetition of the same, in what Walter Benjamin (2003: 395–407) calls ‘empty homogenous time’, where the ‘seeds of time’ have not grown, as opposed to ‘historical time’ wherein are the seeds of change. Fratricide, or its equivalent, runs through these condemnations, treated differently here from how such treachery appeared in Inferno’s ninth circle. The squalid actions of these rulers lack an elementary tragic grandeur, giving the grossest sense of ‘materiality’ as I discuss this. Yet it is fascinated, its vituperative energy making its place in Paradiso distinctive, unpredictable, and demanding that readers note such filth. First comes Albert of Austria, the son of Rudolph, making a desert of the kingdom of Prague. This Emperor (1298–1308), subject of Purgatorio 6. 97–102, a reminder of that canto’s affinity with this heaven, invaded Bohemia in 1304. His violence is described by a contemporary chronicler (Antonín 2017: 204). There follows Philip the Fair, his money-interests paralleling the Papacy’s; his effect in bankrupting souls on the Seine being singled out. He is absolutely secular; the contrast with his practice in degrading Boniface VIII, and destroying the Templars, which Purgatorio 20.82–93 dwells on, is not even mentioned. His death comes from the skin, or hide of the boar (‘cotenna’), suggestive of the roughness of the animal which frightened his horse which threw him and killed him (Albert, in contrast, was murdered by his nephew, and Purg. 6.100–102 shows awareness of that). Unlike his trick of using falsified money, Philip’s confrontation in death is a moment of absolute realism, and the plain linguistic tone accords with what Cacciaguida recommended for Dante (17.127–129).

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Third comes the thirsty pride which maddens the Scot (Robert Bruce) and the Englishman, meaning either Edward the First (reigned 1272–1207), though since he is spoken of well in Purg. 7.132, perhaps Edward the Second (1307–1327) defeated at Bannockburn in 1314. Neither England nor Scotland can keep within bounds, which, it may be noted, is a way of defining madness: failure to see boundaries between the self and the outside world. In contrast to these two’s frantic activity comes the non-activity of the ‘lussuria’ (lust) and effeminacy of Ferdinand IV of Castile (1295–1312) and Wenceslaus of Bohemia, ‘che mai valor non conobbe né volle’—who never knew worth nor willed it (126). That repeats Sordello in Purgatorio 7.101–102, adding the accusation of ‘lussuria’. In Purgatorio, his father, Ottacar II (1253–1278) rules the land ‘dove l’acqua nasce / che Molta in Albia, e Albia in mar ne porta’ (where the water is born that the Moldau carries to the Elbe, and the Elbe to the sea, 7.98–99), an image of the sources of fertility increasing and increasing, giving an alternative sense of power from the political. It seems that Albert’s invasion was backed by Boniface VIII; and that Wenceslaus II (ruled 1278–1305), whose effect on his country was wholly negative, fought off the attack, but: he died in 1305, and his son, Wenceslas III (1305–1306) surrendered the Hungarian crown and negotiated peace with Albrecht of Habsburg. Wenceslas III was murdered at Olomouc in 1306 en route to a military campaign in Poland …. (Měřínský and Mezník 1998; 53)

So ended the Premyslide dynasty. Albert wanted Wencelaus to yield his claim to Hungary in favour of Charles Martel’s son, Caroberto (see Para. 8.64), since Charles Martel was married to his daughter, Clemence of Habsburg, Caroberto entered Hungary and fought Wenceslaus until he abandoned Hungary, but the conqueror, who died in 1342 at Visegrád, fought civil wars until at least 1323 (Engel 2001: 124–139). Meanwhile, the Emperor Henry VII of Luxembourg (1274–1313) married his daughter Marie to Charles VI, and his daughter Beatrice to Caroberto, and made his son John King of Bohemia by virtue of marriage to Wenceslaus II’s daughter, Elizabeth. John fathered the famous Charles IV, but was unsuccessful in Bohemia (Měřínský and Mezník 1998: 53–55). This politicking engaged Henry in Bohemia until 1310, and something of a sense that Henry was diverted from his ‘real’ work in Italy thereby may underscore the significance of the one and a half terzine given to Bohemia.

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The ‘Ciotto di Jerusalemme’ who follows is Martel’s father, Charles II of Naples (compare 6.106). The number, or the letter one (I) stands for his goodness and M (a thousand), for his badness. A pun at the level of the letter involves the I which starts ‘Jerusalemme’, and the M concluding it. Then Sicily, the ‘l’isola del foco’ comes into view, with Anchises mentioned, the honourable figure who died there as another exile from Troy (Moore, 1899: 269–302). After Norman and Hohenstaufen, and Angevin rule until 1282, Sicily became Catalan, under Peter (1282–1285) and his sons Alfonso IV, and James (1285–1295), and then Frederick II of Sicily (1296–1337). Frederick, getting three terzine to himself—not a mark of distinction— was brother of James and son of Peter III of Aragon, so being Manfred’s grandson.21 Frederick held on to Sicily when his brother would surrender it to the Angevins, and was confirmed in place by the Treaty of Caltabellotta (1302). This terminated war between the brothers, and the Angevins, making Frederick King of Trinacria, on condition that this would return to the Angevins on Frederick’s death (Backman 1995: 42–46): e a dare ad intender quanto è poco, la sua scrittura fian lettere mozze che noteranno molto in parve loco. (19.133–135)

(and to give to understand how much he is little, his writing [the writing about him] will be in cropped letters which will note much in small space.) Condemnation of usurpation brings in his uncle (James II of Majorca) and his brother (James, who had possessed Sicily). They are mentioned (130–138), not in tragedy’s alto stilo, but in comic mode: ‘sozze’ (filthy) and ‘barba’ (beard—here a metonymy for the uncle), and ‘bozze’ (‘fatte bozze’ = cuckolded), are deliberately colloquial. This linguistic register contrasts with the sober evocation of the seven deadly sins: Lucifer-like superbia (121, 46), lussuria (124), and avarizia (130), implicit, too, in lines 119 and 141. Another vice, ‘viltate’ (cowardice, 130), perhaps implies sloth. James II, brother of Peter III, represents fraternal strife in a previous generation. This passage, alongside Purgatorio 7.112–120, shows rivalry repeating rivalry: Charles I of Anjou versus Pedro II; James and Frederick against Charles II. In both cases, the latter group was worse than the earlier. Frederick’s nemesis was Robert of Anjou, who replaced Charles II on

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the throne of Naples in 1304 (8.76–84), in rivalry against Caroberto, orchestrated by Clement V. Injustice takes the vivid forms of familial and generational betrayals. The eagle then scorns his uncle, James II of Majorca (1243–1311), who contended with his nephew, Alfonso III, for the Balearic Islands, losing them for ten years, when Alfonso annexed them. He was followed by James II of Aragon, the other scorned object. This James was Peter III’s second son, who having possessed Sicily, surrendered it in a deal with Charles II of Anjou at the Treaty of Agnagni in 1295. Reilly summarises: he made his peace with the French, and a marriage to Blanche, daughter of Charles II of Naples [the new Charles] ensued. He also agreed to help return Sicily to the house of Anjou but his brother Frederick, who had been his viceroy there, refused to accept that decision and had himself crowned king in Palermo in 1296. But as part of the settlement, Pope Boniface VIII already had recognised Jaume [James II] as king of Sardinia and Corsica. (Reilly 1993: 198–199)

James fought his brother Frederick for Sicily, at a papal behest, but in vain, as Frederick held on until his death. The uncle and brother alluded to by the eagle, not dignified by naming (19.136–138), are, then, James II of Majorca, and James II of Aragon, same name, same characteristics, different generations. They have cuckolded an excellent nation (Aragon) in their associations with the pro-Guelf French, and two crowns (the Balearic Islands and Sicily). The eagle’s contraction of the details associates with the contraction of I and M for Charles, and the contracted letters which note much in little space: incidentally, a definition for much of the writing of the Commedia. Frederick II’s littleness will be legible when the book criticising the kings is opened (Backman 1995: 75–77). Three kings are within the next terzina: Dinís of Portugal (ruled 1279–1325), who, when the Templar order was dissolved by Clement V, with Philip the Fair leading the way, syphoned off money from them to create a new national Knights of Christ (by 1319), while warring both with rebellions at home and with Aragon and Castile (Oliveira Marques 1976: 120–122). Then come Eirik II (ruled 1280–1299) and his younger brother Haakon V (1299–1319) of Norway whom we may take together. Eirik made dynastic alliances with Scotland, by marrying the daughter of Alexander III of Scotland; the daughter, Margaret, who died, was to be married to the son of Edward I, who married Isabella, the sister of Robert

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Bruce, in a way inciting wars against England. This anti-English policy was maintained by Haakon, especially in relation to the Hanseatic League (Perry 1957: 172–174). Third comes Stephen Urosh II Milutin, king of Rascia (1282–1321), a name surviving in the capital Stari Ras, (present-­ day Serbia). He was an ally of Charles of Anjou against Byzantium, and in warfare against Caroberto in Hungary as well as his brother Dragutin, for which he needed silver, for mercenaries. Thus, during his reign Novo Brdo became the richest silver mine in the Balkans. From the produce of the mines Milutin minted money … His coins imitated those of the Venetians, but it seems they had a poorer silver content. Venice regularly complained about the coins … (Fine 1987: 257)

Mixing coinage was the sin of maestro Adamo (Inf. 30.73–90), and binds this particular condemnation to that of Philip the Fair. It implicates Venice, in whose sphere of influence Rascia was, after the Fourth Crusade. Venice, which first issued gold ducats in 1282, 30 years after Florence, prospered by importing bullion and coins (silver and gold remained in short supply until the Europeans mined the Americas) and re-exporting these. This paid for Venetian imports of spices, silks, and cotton, which were then sold on. Milutin’s effect was to corrupt money as a guarantor of value between people exchanging it, and further, infecting justice within a city-state such as Venice. (See Lane and Mueller 1985: 262–265; for Philip: 26, 30, 186, 309.) The acrostic ends, the anger persists. There is the wish, which is another marker of Paradiso, that things emerging could be better, that countries could defend themselves from their rulers, and those of other countries. Could Hungary be less badly led (‘malmenare’, picking up from ‘mal’ in line 141)? Navarre was the separate kingdom of Joanna, wife of Philip the Fair; her father, Henry, amongst the negligent rulers (Purgatorio 7.109–111). Navarre was protected from France by the Pyrenees fringing the kingdom, and must be warned by Cyprus, identified by Nicosia and Famagosta, and at that time controlled by Henry II of Lusignan, called here ‘the beast’, like the one that killed Philip the Fair. 22 This ‘beast’ is like the rest of the kings. Ruling means having arbitrary contempt for the ruled; adopting a Derrida title, the beast is the sovereign.

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Canto 20: Paradisal Lives Redeemed lives illustrate time’s reversals, creating a salvation history: two pagan, two Hebrew, and two Christian, comprising the pupil and the eyebrows of the eagle, the centre being David. Each figure has two terzine, contrasting an action performed in their lives, or a quality they had, with an anaphoric—‘ora conosce’—making Paradisal life depend on accepting something unseen, unknown, knowledge coming later. David and Trajan summarise Purgatorio 10.55–93, where the eagles on Trajan’s banners prelude this later passage, as if Dante wants to gloss further and develop what Purgatorio had affirmed. David, ‘il cantor de lo Spirito Santo’ (38), was singing when he could neither know the meaning of that psalm, nor the ‘merto del suo canto’ (the merit of his singing—and ‘canto’ associates him with Dante). As he sang of transferring the ark from ‘villa’ to ‘villa’ (2 Samuel 6.1–23), he has been transferred out of Limbo (Inf. 4.58). The Iberian-born, martial Trajan (53–117 CE, Emperor after 89) was not a Christian in his life, though he consoled the widow (compare Isaiah 1.17). Dante uses The Golden Legend’s life of Saint Gregory learning the story of Trajan and the widow, which made him pray for him, securing his release from Hell (GL 1.178–179). Trajan’s salvation rewarded Gregory’s ‘viva spene’ (lively hope, 20.108, 109, compare 95), and its strangeness is re-affirmed when it appears in Langland’s Piers Plowman. Trajan speaks himself, bursting in saying: ‘Ye, bawe for bokes’ (C.XII.74 Langland 2008: 1.458–46). That expresses the cheerful confidence of one who knows that not the letter of the Bible counts, nor the offices of the church, but the spirit. No theological arguments could have freed Trajan, only the intercession of Gregory who ‘saued me, Sarrysyn, soul and body bothe’ (XII.86): ‘Sarraysn’ being a term for any pagan.23 Trajan in Langland makes salvation, as in Paradiso, not something legislated for by intellectual superiority while seated on a ‘scranna’—a bench for a justice, or for a teacher (Para. 19.79). The issue in question is a thousand miles away from the judge and cannot be measured, as an artist would measure a problem of perspective with his hand.24 Such an artist assumes his position to be the centred, privileged one (which is the problem of perspectival art). The eagle’s contempt for the person trying to be subtle with it, as the embodiment of justice, is evident: Certo a colui che meco s’assottiglia se la Scrittura sovra voi non fosse, da dubitar sarebbe a maraviglia. (19.82–84)

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Grandgent’s paraphrase, quoted by Singleton, is useful: ‘if you mortals had not the Bible and its clear utterances to guide you, there would be no end to your sophistries, since even with the Bible you enter into such discussions’. Singleton renders the last line as ‘there would be a marvellous chance for questioning’. Behind the doubts about the salvation of the one born on the Indus may lie a desire to show off intellectually, in a sophistication which assumes the doubter’s superiority over both Indian and eagle: the doubting questioner ‘knows’—wrongly—that justice has condemned the man born on the Indus; that the eagle, judging, has found fault with the pagan (19.77–78). The cases of redemption require undoing an assumed knowledge. Thus Constantine here is not the victor, but someone needing salvation since he ‘made himself Greek’ in building Constantinople, a treachery comparable to the epithet given to Sinon ‘falso Sinon greco di Troia’ (false Greek, Sinon of Troy, Inf. 30.98). Constantine moved things in a different direction from David, which brings out the complexity of good intentions which have wrong results. These terzinas are a palinode for Monarchia 2.8.11, which, referring to the Donation of Constantine, thinks how glorious Ausonia would be if ‘he who weakened your Empire either had never been born or had never been misled by his own pious intention’ (Kay 195). The ill emanating from his ‘mal’ (56, 58) affects neither him nor his salvation. The affirmations here (though Hezekiah received extra life it made no difference to his salvation which he already had, through Isaiah’s intercession; though Constantine spoiled everything that does not deny his value) separate individual destinies from the course of history.25 That shows with the last two lives; first William II, the Good, of Sicily, whose death in 1189 meant that his crown passed to the Constance of Paradiso 3.118 whose marriage he had facilitated, thus enabling the Empire. He is mourned (‘plora’) by Sicily which weeps (‘piagne’) because of the vile rulers of Paradiso 19.127–129 and 130–135. In this weeping, contrasting with Hezekiah’s penitence, we remember the ‘veglio’ of Inferno 14, and see the ‘distrutto’ befalling Ausonia, and Sicily. ‘Rifeo Troiano’ contrasts with Constantine making himself Greek, and reprises the issues of Juno’s destructiveness towards the Trojans, yet one is saved and appears in Jupiter’s heaven (Para. 20.67–69), as someone lost in history, but redeemed from its disasters.

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Apokatastasis When the dial retreated ten degrees, time reversed itself for Hezekiah, as it did for Trajan. Ripheus, dying early to the spirit of paganism, was given ‘grazia’ (the word appears three times), giving him faith in a future redeemer, making him to be baptised spiritually a thousand years early by the three donne of Purgatorio 29.121–129, who relate to the women working for Dante’s salvation in Inferno 2. Perhaps they imply Virgil’s salvation, remembering Beatrice’s words (Inf. 2.73–74). Virgil’s salvation—as a poet and virtuous pagan—is certainly a question raised by the text, not least in the centrality of his poem to these cantos.26 Including him with Ripheus in his salvation is problematic since the latter’s righteousness includes denunciation of the pagan world, but we cannot reconcile Ripheus’ exclusionary righteousness with the honour in which stories of pagan Troy are held in within Florence (15.124–126) which has no criticism of its pride. In these heavens, while some opportunities are opened (Trajan, Ripheus), others (the value of the pagan world) seem to close. No single attitude to the past—or to the material world—can be deduced from the Commedia; the text has moments where it tries to resurrect more of the past, especially more of its own past, its earlier cantos, as when David and Trajan in Purgatorio seem to be revisited and have even higher status in Paradiso. Positively, it seems that Dante is moving from despair as lack of hope towards something else; signalled when the eagle alludes to Matthew 11.12: ‘the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence and the violent take it by force’ (20.94–99), as if heaven is willing to be bullied by love and hope— as with Gregory’s prayers which conquered the divine will, and secured Trajan’s salvation.27 Ripheus, a Christian avant la letter; in his non-literal achronological ‘baptism’ (compare 19.76) replaces a single linear history with something more plural, making even the eagle not know the number of ‘li elletti’. And Peter Damiani follows affirming his lack of knowledge (21.77–78, 91–93). The potentialities for salvation are unfixed; nothing prevents, finally, thinking that Paradiso could be drawing towards a belief in apokatastasis; ‘the time of restitution of all things’ (Acts 3.21), a restoration, a universal salvation, as accepted by the Christian Platonist Origen (c.184–253). For him, the decisive verse for apokatastasis was ‘that God may be all in all’ (1 Corinthians 15.28): that finally, the fires of hell would be extinguished. It appears in De principiis, by Gregory of Nyssa (c.335–395), and in Maximus the Confessor (Ramelli 2007: 313–356), and it was followed by John Scot Eriugena, whose Periphyseon (c.865), a

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text which was appealed to by the Cathars, maintained the pattern of everything precessing from God and returning to him in ‘deification’, and with, now, the resurrection, which knows no sexual difference (like angels), and Paradise being now ‘human nature itself’.28 Eriugena draws extensively from pseudo-Dionysius and Maximus. Michael Jennings (2016: 102–103), writing on a desire in Walter Benjamin to interpret history—reversing its destructiveness—in terms of apokatastasis, calls Origen a ‘process theologian: he believed that our capacity to understand the divine concepts was a dynamic process … that led to a gradual transformation not just of our knowledge but of our very being. A central stage of this education was in fact the fire of punishment, which is not an instrument of eternal torment, but of divine instruction and purgation—both of which are necessary preconditions for any apokatastatic restitution’. Perhaps a similar process runs through the Commedia. For Dante would be, in Benjamin’s terms ‘the chronicler who narrates events without distinguishing between major and minor ones’, acting ‘in accord with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost to history’ (Benjamin 2003: 390). These six names of canto 20 seem non-rationally selected lives, turned round by death. Their new knowledge is non-rational, each of the last three lines given to them being strangely related to the first three, even not quite  related to them, never quite following expectations, reaching a crowning non-rationality when Ripheus, a figure from poetry, with no necessary historical existence, receives one in Paradiso’s poetry. Poetry saves (David); poetry is saved (Ripheus), because poetry (Virgil’s) created a record requiring justice to be done. Gordon Whately (1984: 25–63) shows how Dante’s salvation for Trajan exceeded what Aquinas was prepared to endorse for him. If no necessary argument emerges from the logic of these six-line groups, the names and lives demonstrate a poetry which has the possibility of extending its referential possibilities endlessly, beyond the canto’s limits. The logic of Paradiso becomes then one of movement towards the Golden Age, finding no inherent objection to apokatastasis.

Saturn Justice in Jupiter, as divine yieldingness, is answered in Saturn by a sense of imminent justice armed with a sword, as 22.13–15 speaks of a future ‘vendetta’. The spirit of justice which must condemn shows most strikingly with what is said of contemporary monasticism, expressed by Peter

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Damiani and by Benedict. The latter silently connects to the heaven of Jupiter since his life, a theme of The Golden Legend (1.186–193), was written by Gregory in his Dialogues (c.593–594) as the record of a series of miracles; without Gregory, we would know nothing of Benedict. Gregory is full of Benedict’s deeds, which show the spirit of the walls of the Temple being built with ‘segni’ (signs—miracles) and with ‘martiri’ (18.123). Gregory had begun as a monk in Rome and could not have been at Monte Cassino which, destroyed by the Lombards in 581, remained waste until the eighth century. But none of these cantos mention Gregory, until canto 28.133, as if they dismiss the Papacy as an institution. Peter Damiani (c.1007–1072)—born in Ravenna, which saw itself as separate from the Papacy—reads his life as an opposition to Rome. He entered the Benedictine monastery of Fonte Avallana, on Monte Catria, a peak of the Apennines. Refusing to be called ‘abbot’, he was ‘the sinful monk’ (Leclercq 1971: 221). Forced to go to Rome for a time (21.124–126) as Papal Legate, he travelled to France to defend the Cluniac order (1063), supporting the new Cluniac foundation, begun in 909, as a rule owing obedience only to the Papacy, and so enjoying the ‘libertas romanas’.29 Dante shows Peter Damiani returning to the hermit life and being called Pietro Peccator in the monastery of Santa Maria in Porto, near Ravenna, on the Adriatic coast. He emphasises the monk’s increasing sense of being a sinner, and learning more the Virgin’s worth, and brings out by implication, the significance of the simplicity of Cîteaux (1098), and, even more, Clairvaux (1115), which replaced the Cluniac tendency towards over-elaboration of monasteries (Cowdrey 1970: 257–258, 261–262). Injustice in the contemporary church shows with Peter Damiani’s sense of the cardinal’s hat passing from bad to worse. After the death of the Gascon Pope, Clement V, 20 April 1314, Dante had written a public letter to 24 Cardinals meeting in conclave at Carpentras, near Avignon, 17 of whom were French, specifically Gascons, five of these being, in addition, nephews of Clement. Their number assured the election of John XXII. In this Epistle 8, Dante accuses them of espousing avarice and urges them— specifically addressing the Italian Cardinals, such as Napoleon Orsini and Iacopo Stenfaneschi—to put Rome first (Life: 190–191, Anderson 1980: 226–228). Charles Davis (1957: 1–2) quotes from the Epistle to show how it witnesses to Dante mourning for Rome, as becoming like Jerusalem, after that city was sacked by Nebuchadnezzar (587 BCE). Jeremiah’s Lamentations weep for Jerusalem, and Dante quotes them in relation to

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Rome; Davis showing thereby how various Rome’s significances were to Dante. Peter Damiani speaks for the Dante of Epistle 8. That Dante’s subject is opposition to ‘Rome’ is inferrable from Peter Damiani’s terzina: Venne Cefàs e venne il gran vasello de lo Spirito Santo, magri e scalzi, prendendo il cibo da qualunque ostello. (21.127)

(Cephas came, and the great vessel of the Holy Spirit came, lean and barefoot, taking food from every hostelry.) Damiani’s language associates the apostles with the friars, their poverty contrasting with how slightingly John XXII spoke of them (18.136). The emphasis falls on divine naming and election, the topic preoccupying Dante, and now asked about openly (21.73–102; compare 20.130–138). This allows Peter Damiani to say how divine light penetrates the light in which ‘io m’inventro’ (‘I enwomb myself’—a neologism, 84), and which, in ecstatic language, ‘mi leva sopra me’ (lifts me above myself), making him see the highest Essence from which that light, and its power is ‘munta’ (‘milked’, 87). The Creator is made visible (cp. Para. 30.100–102) in an image of receiving mother’s milk, a direct reception and transmutation of white light. The power of the feminine shows, as it did with Virgil’s Saturn. Light as milk produces the joy which enflames Damiani, but why the light should particularise him to speak to Dante, neither he, nor the seraphim, can say. His contempt for the modern obese clergy is what would be expected from one whose home is Saturn’s Golden Age. Thin and barefoot (‘magri e scalzi’, 128) clerics are now fat and on horseback, needing a mantle so copious that horse and rider are covered in one ornate skin, with a trinity of men keeping the priest in place. This acerbic presentation of grossness resumes with Benedict, founding the monastery at Monte Cassino (529 CE) and giving three beginnings: Pier cominciò sanz’oro e sanz’ argento, e io con orazione e con digiuno, e Francesco umilmente il suo convento (22.88–90)

(Peter began without gold and without silver, and I with prayers and fasting, and Francis his convent in humility.)

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Negativity about the literal material (Saturn’s gold, Jupiter’s silver) is followed by a positive, evoking non-material forces—prayers and fasting. The first beginning Benedict mentions effectively establishes Rome; the second shows Benedict quitting it, rejecting Rome by a new centre by Monte Cassino, separating ‘le ville circonstanti’ (22.44) from the cult they were subject to. The third beginning, in the terzina’s last line, moves from monastic isolation to Francis and the city. These beginnings resemble three momentary Golden Ages; moments like Saturn reappearing in Latium after banishment. Each associates with Italy—Rome, Monte Cassino, Assisi—in short-lived moments (22.85–93), giving a reverse chronology: Francis, the latest in the Sun; canto 22 illustrating the historically earlier failure of monasticism; while in the Fixed Stars comes Rome and Papal failure. Benedict identifies himself by naming Monte Cassino, and his companions. The first, Macarius, may conflate different Egyptian monks of the third century. One of these showed skill over demons (GL 1.189–191), in telling a monk who was tempted to go out and live with other people, that he should tell these disturbing thoughts that ‘this at least I do for Christ. I stay within the walls of my cell’ (1.191): Qui è Maccario, qui è Romoaldo, qui son li frati miei che dentro ai chiostri fermar li piedi e tennero il cor saldo. (22.49–51)

(Here is Macarius, here is Romualdus, who are my brothers, who stayed their feet and kept their heart sound within the cloisters.) Romualdus, from Ravenna, founded the monastery at Camaldoli in the Apennines, whence flows the Archiano (see Purg. 5.94–96). His life was written by Peter Damiani, who while negating himself, associates with others: with his own brother, Damian, and with Romualdus, the latter associated, then, with new beginnings, and then, with perseverance in returning to the hermit’s life. The Golden Age contrasts with the ‘modern’ (21.131). The gravamen of Benedict’s words is the failure of contemplation now. His Rule, though made official for western monasticism under Charlemagne, remains as waste paper. The abbey walls are caverns, presumably because the monks are no longer inside—like Chaucer’s Monk who is outside his cell (Chaucer, CT 165–207), or because caverns associate with dens of thieves, following Christ’s judgment about the Temple (Matthew 21.12–13—compare

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18.121–123). The cowls, which like walls should enclose the monks, are full of evil flour. In one metonymy, the cowl, which does not make the monk (as in the proverb cucullus non facit monachum) is a metonymy for everything literally and figuratively accompanying the monks; in another, the evil flour, whatever this is, will make bad bread, that is, it produces worse deeds. Waste paper—derelict buildings; such is the rotten and enruining material world. Benedict criticises monastic usury, but that is less offensive than ‘quel frutto / che fa il cor de’ monaci sì folle’ (that fruit which makes mad the heart of monks, 22.80, 81). The fruit gained is the monasteries’ agricultural produce, and the revenues are those intended to feed the poverty of ‘la gente che per Dio dimanda’ (the people who demand on behalf of God—22.83), not to feed relatives, ‘né d’altro più brutto’ (nor something uglier, 22.84). The money feeds priestly families, and illegitimate children; sexual faults condemn the loss of the monastic vision, making topmost the injustice performed towards God’s poor. Beggars should associate with the monks and friars; with Peter, and Francis, with those ‘predendo il cibo da qualunque ostello’ (21.129—taking their food in whatever hostel). Beggars as God’s fools express an attitude to the material life which modern life supersedes. The language of the Seven Deadly sins continues in Saturn, adding two sins unmentioned in canto 19: envy, in the usurious demand for money, and, anger, implied in the word ‘folle’ (22.81, compare 19.122). This, evoking the madness of disturbed thoughts, connects with the irrationality of anger (ira). Benedict, who in Gregory’s characterisation, was full of miracles, believes in the power of the miraculous to change present events, putting them in reverse, but the Golden Age is deferred. Dante is swept up the ladder, away from the apocalyptic, and from judgment. Such deferral of hopes—time not reversing, Jordan not yet ‘vòlto retrorso’ (94)— keeps life exilic, like monastic life, for Jacob’s ladder was seen in a vision by an exile.30 Crusading as pilgrimage, exile, and monasticism compare. Exile being the unjust sentence requires Jupiter’s rectification, while monasticism seems a mode of self-containment and of overcoming injustice, making Saturn ultimately, a nobler heaven than Jupiter. Benedict refers to his ‘Rule’ (see Dunn 2000: 111–137). It is ‘old and somdel streit’, as Chaucer’s Monk says (Chaucer, CT 174), appropriate to the Saturnine elders of this Heaven. Gregory said little about the ‘Rule’, but it influenced Justinian, who, Benedict’s almost exact contemporary, used Benedict’s ‘Rule’ in his law-making (Chapman 1929: 57–76). Not wasted paper, it influenced the justice of Mercury and of Jupiter. Paradiso’s

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presentation of history may have a totalising view, a determinism which follows the despair-inducing tones of Inferno 14, but there is hope for a reversal of history. The possibility of this, introducing ‘messianic time’ (Benjamin 2003: 397), emphasises that history must be so written as to allow the meaning of the past to turn; neither history nor the past can be left as waste paper.

Notes 1. It is at least interesting that Met. 8.43 calls Minos the Dictaean king. Possibly the judgment this figure (animal-like, self-torturing) exercises in Inferno 5 relates to a certain negativity in this old man. With my reading, those by Mazzotta (1979: 23–41) and Cassell (1984: 57–65) should be compared. 2. It is marked by the triple ‘Cristo’ rhyme: (104, 106, 108), repeating its use with Dominic, the first warrior-figure of Paradiso (12.71, 73, 75). See also 19.104,106,108, and the dramatic double use of the invocation in line 106 (compare Matthew 7.21,22). It appears last in 32. 83,85,87. 3. See, for example, for the association of the sign with the sun, Acts 26.13; for the divine image given which must be modelled on the earth, see discussions of the Tabernacle, Exodus 25.9, Hebrews 8.3–6; the mark on the forehead in Ezekiel 9.4 was interpreted as the tau (= the three-armed crux comissa, the ‘Antononius cross’) as opposed to the crux immissa, the fourarmed cross, which could also be derived from the Hebrew or Phoenician tau; keeping an ambiguity between three and four which in Dante persists to Para. 33. See Passage (1977: 273–275). Compare Numbers 21.9 for a type of the Cross in the brazen serpent on the pole; for Constantine’s vision as analogous to the Son of Man coming, see Matthew 24.27, 30. 4. Lofmark (1972: 207–209) gives evidence that Frederick II began the use of the cross on the imperial banner and that this had been anticipated by Henry VI. 5. The cousin of this Moroello, Currado Malaspina, is met with in Purg. 8. 109–139. The family, apart from Moroello, was Ghibelline; their descent was from ‘l’antico’, Purg. 8.119, that is, from Currado who married Costanza, a daughter of Frederick II.  For Moroello, see Ep. 4 (29–41), from which we know that Dante was with them in 1306. If the Moroellos are the same, this increases a sense of the ambiguity of Mars. See Armour, ‘Exile and Disgrace’ in Kay (2011: 48–52). For other prophecies with implications for Dante, see Inf. 6. 64–75, 10.79–81, 15.55–57, Purg. 8.133–139, 11.139–141, 24.37–38 and 82–90, and Cacciaguida, canto 17, 46–93: see Wilson (2008).

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6. Pistoia (see Inf. 25.12) as a warlike city, the name meaning pestis (pestilence, which had broken out after the city was founded by Catiline’s soldiers), was supposed to be a survival of Catiline: see Osmond (2000: 3–38). Dante notes Cicero’s part in Catiline’s destruction, Con. 4.5.19. The latter, as republican (like Cicero) and as a critique of Roman decadence, is ambiguous for Dante, and for Fiesole, as opposed to Rome. 7. See Baldassarri (2009: 23–44). For Villani, see Green (1972: 1–43, 155–169), and Rubenstein (1942: 196–227). For Mars see John C. Barnes, ‘Dante’s Knowledge of Florentine History’, in Kay (2011, 138), noting that the Chronica de origine civitatis had spoken of Florence being founded on the village of Carmartia (‘villa Camartiae’) which Brunetto Latini etymologises as ‘house of Mars’. Barnes discusses a lost chronicle, the Gesta Florentinorum, apparently running from 1080 to 1278, and containing the earliest account of the Buondelmonte murder (see below). The question is of the common source for Dante and Villani: see Barnes 138–140 who discusses the chronicle of Pseudo-Brunetto Latini, the Cronica fiorentina compilata nel secolo XIII, giving an extended account of the murder. On Brunetto Latini, see Davis (1957: 71–93, 1984: 166–197). 8. On the presentation of women, with a ‘moral citizenship’ in this Florence, see Honess (2006: 45–51, 160–167), and Keen (2003: 193–233). 9. Singleton, notes to Inferno 13. 143–150; adding that Florence was besieged by the Ostrogoth Totila, but not destroyed, and that it was a myth that the city was refounded by Charlemagne. The walls were extended in 1078. 10. Barnes, 140–141: he notes from Pseudo-Brunetto that the Ghibellines called themselves the Imperial party, though they were known as Paterines, or Cathars, as was Farinata. 11. Dante associates David and Hercules in Monarchia 2.9.11. See Ettlinger (1972: 119–142). Dante’s Epistle VII, 20 addressed to Henry VII, urges him to be like Lacides in striking down the Hydra (Florence); note the reference to Alcides in Para 9. 1012. 12. A comparativist might find Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (whose hero is called ‘thou Mars’ (4.5.118) by his enemy) interesting here; admiration for martial values sees them as incompatible with the city, and the masculinity which claims to stand alone defective. 13. Cornelia, mentioned after Cincinnatus, is in Limbo, Inf. 4.128: mother of the Gracchi (Aen. 6.843). She was daughter of the elder Scipio Africanus. The contrasts are with Cianghella, a merry widow (d.1330), and Lapo Salterello, of the Cerchi (White Guelfs), exiled in 1302, and an apparent parody of Dante: for his treachery, see Santagata (2016: 140). For Baldo d’Aguglione, see Santagata (2016: 108–109), linking him with Purg.

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12.105, and Para. 16.105. Note ‘barrattare’ in line 57. Dante was accused of this. 14. Names recurring: apart from Bellincione Berti (15.112, 16.99 and 120), the Nerli (15.115) were a family ennobled by Hugo of Brandenburg—see 16.128. The Cerchi (16.65) are the family living at the gate of 16.90; for Buondelmonte, see 16.66 and 139. Galigaio’s descendant (101) was the Puccio Sciancato of Inf. 25.148. One of the Fifanti (104) may be the Arrigo of Inf. 6.80 who helped murder Buondelmonte. The ‘oltracotata schiatta’ of line 16.115 were the Adimari, who included Filippo Argenti, and Tegghiaoio Aldorandi, who is amongst the sodomites (Inf. 16.40–42). See Santagata (2016: 127–128). 15. In Einhard (c.830), there appears the death of ‘Roland, Lord of the Breton Marches’—see Einhard and Notker the Stammerer in Thorpe (1969: 64–65, 181–183); see The Song of Roland (Burgess 1990). See Inf. 31.16–18, for Roland’s blowing of the horn at Roncevaux. 16. For the Veltro, and for the DXV, perhaps, better DVX—i.e. Duke—see Emiliani (1993: 149–152), linking the ‘gran cane’ with Cinghis Khan (1167–1227), in other words, with a leader possessing the virtues of the Great Khans of the Orient, as reported by Marco Polo. The argument of Colin Hardie (1963: 267–294), excludes the sense of Cangrande as the Veltro of Inf. 1, making Dante that. See Woody (1977: 119–134). 17. On the chansons de geste see Jones (2014: 32–35), calling Rainouart ‘a scruffy giant who wields a large club’, and Norman Daniel saying they are ‘entirely about war, with episodes of love and religion interspersed … Saracens are called ‘pagan’ and there is a persistent effort to link them with the pagans of the ancient world, as well as a confusion … between the Arabs and the pagans of the barbarian invasions of Europe’ (Daniel 1984: 263). On the differences between Rennewart in Willehalm from the figure in Aliscans, see Lofmark (1972). 18. See Finley (1986: 48–69). Jupiter completes the narrative. Before Frederick II, there was the Sicilian rule of William I (1154–1166) and William II, founder of Monreale (1162–1189), the ‘giusto rege’ (19.61–66). After two further kings, Tancred and William III, Henry VI was crowned in 1194. 19. Huizinga (1955: 69–70) notes that the grouping was first found in Les Voeux du Paon (1312) by Jacques de Longuyon, contemporary with the Commedia. Its dedicatee was Thibaut de Bar, Bishop of Liege, who was related to Henry VII of Luxembourg, and died at the hands of Robert of Naples. See for his liberality Convivio 4.11.14. 20. For Arthur, see Keen (1995: 115–122). Note Inf. 5. 127–138, and Tristan’s place there. Paradiso 16.13–15 quotes from the Old French

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Lancelot; Merlin may be ‘il buon incantatore’ of the Rime, no. 15, line 11, since a magic boat features in Arthurian legends. DVE 1.10.2. speaks of the langue d’oïl’s collection of vernacular prose, including the histories of Troy, and Rome, and the lovely digressions in the fables of King Arthur, while Convivio 4.28.6 discusses Lancelot’s end. Arthur’s murderer, Mordred, Arthur’s illegitimate son, is aligned with Ganelon (Inf. 32.61–62). 21. Frederick is further condemned, for example in Paradiso 20.63, like Convivio 4.6.20, where he is paired with Charles II of Anjou; he is seen as no more than a murderer and avaricious in DVE 1.12.5. 22. The Lusignan dynasty had been part of the First Crusade: Henry II (1270–1324) had inherited the title of King of Jerusalem (1286–1291), when Acre fell, taking it by wresting it from Hugh Pelerin, Charles of Anjou’s lieutenant: Lusignan thus pitching itself against the Angevins. Henry became King of Cyprus, taking this title from his brother John II, in 1285, perhaps murdering him to do so. His own rule was interrupted by Almaric, Lord of Tyre, another brother, who had him deposed between 1306 and 1310, when he was assassinated. See Nicolau-Konnari and Schabel (2005: 64–76). 23. The subject appeared in the anonymous mid-fourteenth-century alliterative poem St Erkenwald. A pagan judge’s body is found in St Paul’s Cathedral in a perfect state of preservation. The people consider this a miracle, but St Erkenwald secures the real miracle: the judge’s spirit is returned from Limbo, and tells how he judged justly in the days before Christ’s knowledge was available; Erkenwald has compassion and his tears have the power of baptism (line 330); see Morse (1975: 64). See Langland (2008: 2, part 2, 603–605). St Erkenwald, more sacramental than Langland, challenges equally a theological conservatism. Whately (1986: 330–363) makes links with Trajan and Dante. 24. See Doxsee (1988: 295–311), and Mazzotta (2014: 94), reading these cantos’ relationship to Geometry. 25. Justice threads the sequence: ‘giudicio etterno’ (52); ‘giusto rege’ (65); Ripheus was ‘iustissimus unus’ (Aeneid 2.426). Purgatorio 10, especially line 93, ‘giustizia vuole e pietà mi ritene’, is remembered in what is said of Trajan. See Vickers (1983: 67–85). On Ripheus, see Battistini (1990: 26–50), Picone (1989: 251–268). Wintle (2009: 169), notes of the Beatus Map of 1109, that the Riphean Mountains (Montes Rifrei) are northern markers of the traditional source of the River Don, which separates Asia from Europe’. Perhaps this sense of the outflung marginal helps with the man outside, Ripheus. 26. See Allan (1989: 193–204, 1993: 195–211), on Virgil’s salvation, and Barolini (1990: 138–144), to which Allan responded in MLN 105 (1990),

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138–144, Barolini in 105 (1990), 147–149. See Allan 107: 18–35, and Taylor (1987: 47–66). 27. See Took (1997: 137–151). Gragnolati (2007: 117–137) notes that Regnum celorum means both God and the whole heaven; as though there was no distinction between these two. 28. Eriugena (1976: xxiii) (comment by Jean A. Potter), and 226, 295–296, 298, 311. It is a question whether Beatrice makes Eriugena’s thinking about sexual difference irrelevant to Dante. 29. Cowdrey (1970: 47–51, 90–94). For Peter Damiani’s life, see McNulty (1959: 11–52). 30. Gill (2014: 135). Relatedly, Cowdrey (1970: 182) calls the eleventh century, that of Peter Damiani, ‘the heyday of pilgrimage’.

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Freedman, Luba, 2011, ‘Mercury à la David in Italian Renaissance Art’, Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. Classe di Lettere e Filosofia 3: 135–157, 281–284. Gambero S.M. Luigi, 2005: Mary in the Middle Ages: The Blessed Virgin Mary in the Thought of Medieval Latin Theologians. Trans. Thomas Buffer. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. Gaposchkin, M.  Cecilia, 2013, ‘From Pilgrimage to Crusade: The Liturgy of Departure, 1095–1300’, Speculum 88: 44–91. Gatti, Luca, 1995, ‘Il mito di Marte a Firenze e la “pietra scema”: Memorie, riti, ascendenze’, Rinascimento 35: 201–230. Gee, Emma, 2000, Ovid, Aratus, and Augustus: Astronomy in Ovid’s Fasti. Cambridge: C.U.P. Giamatti, A.  Bartlett, 1966, The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic, Princeton: Princeton U.P. Gill, Meredith J., 2014, Angels and the Order of Heaven in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, Cambridge: C.U.P. Ginsberg, Warren, 1982, ‘Dante’s Dream of the Eagle and Jacob’s Ladder’, DS 100:41–69. Gragnolati, Manuele, 2007, ‘Nostalgia in Heaven: Embraces, Affection, and Identity in the Commedia’ in John Barnes and Jennifer Petrie (eds.), Dante and the Human Body, Dublin: Four Courts: 117–137. Green, Louis, 1972, Chronicle into History; An Essay on the Interpretation of History in Florentine Fourteenth-Century Chronicles, Cambridge: C.U.P. Gregory, 1911, The Dialogues of Saint Gregory, Surnamed the Great: Pope of Rome and the First of that Name, trans. P.W., ed. Edmund Gardner, London: Philip Lee Warner. Hahn, Thomas, 1978, ‘The Indian Tradition in Western Medieval Intellectual History’, Viator, 9: 213–234. Hardie, Colin, 1963, ‘Cacciaguida’s Prophecy in Paradiso 17’, Traditio 19: 267–294. Hawkins, Peter S., 1992, ‘Dante’s Lesson of Silence: Paradiso 21’, Lectura Dantis, 11: 42–51. Holmes, George, 1997, ‘Dante’s Attitude to the Popes’ in John Woodhouse (ed.), Dante and Governance. Oxford: Clarendon. Honess, Claire E., 2006, From Florence to the Heavenly City: The Poetry of Citizenship in Dante, Oxford: Legenda. Huizinga, J., 1955, The Waning of the Middle Ages trans. F.  Hopman, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Jennings Michael W., 2016, ‘The Will to Apokatastasis: Media, Experience, and eschatology in Walter Benjamin’s Late Theological Politics’ in Colby Dickinson and Stephanie Symons (eds.), Walter Benjamin and Theology, New  York: Fordham U.P.

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Jones, Catherine M. 2014, An Introduction to the Chansons de Geste (Gainesville: Florida U.P.). Kay, Tristan, Martin McLaughlin and Michelangelo Zaccarello (eds.), 2011, Dante in Oxford: The Paget Toynbee lectures. Oxford: Legenda. Keen, Catherine, 2003, Dante and the City, Stroud: Tempus. Keen, M.H., 1995, ‘Dante’s Circle of Mars and the History of Arthur’s Britain’, Arthuriania 5: 115–122. Lane, Frederic C. and Reinhold Mueller, 1985, Money and Banking in Medieval and Renaissance Venice: Vol. 1: Coins and Moneys of Account (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U.P.). Langland, William, ed. A.V.C. Schmidt, 2008, William Langland, Piers Plowman: A Parallel-Text Edition of the A, B, C, and Z Versions, 3 vols, Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications. Lansing, Carol, 1991, The Florentine Magnates: Lineage and Faction in a Medieval Commune, Princeton: Princeton U.P. Leclercq, Jean, 1971, ‘The Monastic Crisis of the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries’, in Noreen Hunt (ed.), Cluniac Monasteries in the Central Middle Ages, London: Macmillan: 217–237. Lofmark, Carl, 1972, Rennewart in Wolfram’s ‘Willehalm’, Cambridge: C.U.P. Loud, G.A., 2000, The Age of Robert Guiscard: Southern Italy and the Norman Conquest London: Longman. Mackay, L.A., 1956, ‘Satvrnia Ivno’, Greece and Rome 3: 59–60. Macrobius, 1969, The Saturnalia trans. Percival Vaughan Davies, New  York: Columbia U.P. Matthew, Donald, 1992, The Norman Kingdom of Sicily (Cambridge: C.U.P.). Mayer, Hans Eberhard, 1988, The Crusades, trans. John Gillingham, 2nd edition, Oxford: O.U.P. Mazzotta, Giuseppe F., 1979, Dante: Poet of the Desert: History and Allegory in the Divine Comedy, Princeton: Princeton U. P. ———, 2014, Confine quasi Orizzonte; Saggi su Dante, Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura. McNulty, Patricia, 1959, St Peter Damian: Selected Writings on the Spiritual Life: Translated with an Introduction, London: Faber. Menachal, Sophie, 1998, Clement V, Cambridge: C.U.P. Měřínský, Zdeněk and Jaroslav Mezník, 1998, ‘The Making of the Czech State: Bohemia and Moravia from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries’ in Mikuláš Teich (ed.), Bohemia in History, Cambridge: C.U.P. Moore, Edward, 1899, ‘Dante and Sicily’, Studies in Dante Second Series (Oxford: O.U.P.: 269–302). Morse, Ruth (ed.), 1975, St Erkenwald, Cambridge: D.S. Brewer. Nicolau-Konnari, Angel and Chris Schabel (eds.), 2005, Cyprus: Society and Culture 1191–1374, Leiden: Brill.

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North, J.D., 1988, Chaucer’s Universe, Oxford: Clarendon. de Oliveira Marques, A.H., History of Portugal (New York: Columbia University Press 1976). Osmond, Patricia J., 2000, ‘Catiline in Fisole and Florence: The After-life of a Roman Conspirator’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition 7: 3–38. Passage, Charles, 1977, trans. The Middle High German Poem of Willehalm by Wolfram of Eschenbach, New York: Frederick Ungar. Perry, T.K. 1957, A Short History of Norway (London: George Allen and Unwin). Peters, Edward, 1995, ‘The Shadowy, Violent Perimeter: Dante Enters Florentine Political Life’, DS 113: 69–87. Picone, Michelangelo, 1989, ‘La “viva speranza” di Dante e il problema della salvezza dei pagani virtuosi. Una lettura di Paradiso 20’, Quaderni di l’italianista 10: 251–268. Putnam, Michael, 1988, ‘Virgil’s Inferno’, Materiali e discussioni per l’analisi dei testi classici’, 20.21: 165–202. Quinones, Ricardo J., 1994, Foundation Sacrifice in Dante’s Commedia, University Park: Pennsylvania U.P. Ramelli, Ilaria L.E., 2007, ‘Christian Soteriology and Christian Platonism: Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and the Biblical and Philosophical Basis of the Doctrine of Apokatastasis’, Vigilae Christianae 61: 313–356. Reilly, Bernard F. 1993, The Medieval Spains, Cambridge: C.U.P. Riche, Pierre, 1993, The Carolingians: A Family who Forged Europe trans. Michel Idomin Allen, Philadelphia: Pennsylvania U.P. Rosivach, Vincent J., 1983, ‘Mars the Lustral God’, Latomus T.42. Fasc.3: 509–521. Rubenstein, Nicolai, 1942, ‘The Beginnings of Political Thought in Florence: A Study in Medieval Historiography’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 5: 196–227. Runciman, Steven, 1965a, A History of the Crusades 1: The First Crusade and the Foundation of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———, 1965b, A History of the Crusades 2: The Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Frankish East 1100–1187, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Santagata, Marco, 2016, Dante: The Story of his Life trans. Richard Dixon, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Schiebe, Marianne Wifstrand, 1986, ‘The Saturn of the Aeneid—Tradition or Innovation?’, Vergilius (1959–) 32: 43–60. Schildgen, Brenda Deen, 1993: ‘Dante and the Indus’, DS 111: 177–193 ———, 1998, ‘Dante and the Crusades’, DS 116: 95–125. ———, 2002, Dante and the Orient, Urbana: Illinois U.P. Schnapp, Jeffrey, 1986, The Transfiguration of History at the Center of Dante’s Paradiso Princeton: Princeton U.P. Steadman, John M., 1960, ‘Chaucer’s Eagle: A Contemplative Symbol’, PMLA 75: 153–159

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Storch, Rudolph H. 1970, ‘The Trophy and the Cross: Pagan and Christian Symbolism in the Fourth and Fifth Centuries’, Byzantion 40: 105–118. Tambling, Jeremy, 2010, Allegory, London: Routledge: 25–36. Taylor, Karla T., 1987, ‘From “Superbo Ilïon” to “Umile Italia”: The Acrostic of Paradiso 19’, Stanford Italian Review 7: 47–66. Thomas, Richard F., 2001, Virgil and the Augustan Reception, Cambridge: C.U.P. ———, 2004, ‘Torn Between Jupiter and Saturn: Ideology and Rhetoric and Culture Wars in the Aeneid’, Classical Journal 100: 121–147. Thorpe, Lewis, (trans.), 1969, Two Lives of Charlemagne. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Took, John, 1997, ‘“Diligite iustitiam qui iudicatus terram”: Justice and the Just Ruler in Dante’ in John Woodhouse (ed.), Dante and Governance, Oxford Clarendon: 137–151. Tyerman, Christopher, 1998, The Invention of the Crusades, Basingstoke: Macmillan. ———, 2006, God’s War: A New History of the Crusades, New York: Allen Lane. Vickers, Nancy J., 1983, ‘Seeing is Believing: Gregory, Trajan, and Dante’s Art’, DS 101: 67–85. Villani, Giovanni, 1906, Chronicle trans. Rose E. Selfe and ed. Philip H. Wicksteed, London: Archibald Constable. Whately, Gordon, 1984, ‘The Uses of Hagiography: The Legend of Pope Gregory and the Emperor Trajan in the Middle Ages’, Viator 15: 25–63. ———, 1986, ‘Heathens and Saints: St Erkenwald in its Legendary Context’, Speculum 61: 330–363. Wilson, Robert, 2008, Prophecies and Prophecy in Dante’s Commedia. Leo S Olschki. Wintle, Michael, 2009, The Image of Europe: Visualising Europe in Cartography and Iconography Throughout the Ages, Cambridge; C.U.P. Woody, Kennerly M, 1977, ‘Dante and the Doctrine of the Great Conjunctions’, DS 95: 119–134.

CHAPTER 5

Fixed Stars, Diasporic Times: Paradiso 22–27

The ladder from Saturn reaches ‘la spera ottava’ (Para. 2.64): the Fixed Stars. We are in the last third of the poem, the final 11 cantos, with almost no modern ‘lives almost divine’: rather Mary, Peter, James, John, and Adam are seen and Peter has the last word.1 Here, and until the end, the problems for the poem posed by immateriality are foregrounded. The Fixed Stars are pulled East-West by the Primum Mobile, but their ‘natural’ travel is West-East, taking 100 years for each of the 360 degrees which would complete that revolution. Vita Nuova 2.1 notes this when saying that when Dante first saw Beatrice, she had lived for the 12th part of a degree in the eastwards movement of the Fixed Stars. Her age was, then, 100 divided by 12, making her a 9. Convivio 2.14.1–13 compares the Fixed Stars with Physics, as an art of the visible, because this Heaven contains the Galaxy (Greek—‘Milky Way’), and its 1022 stellar bodies.2 But Dante thinks the Fixed Stars include Metaphysics, for the Galaxy is ‘an effect of those stars which we cannot see’, as Metaphysics: tratti delle prime sustanzie, le quali noi non potemo simigliantemente intendere se non per li loro effetti, manifesto è che ’l Ciel stellato ha grande similitudine colla Metafisica. (Convivio 2.14.8)

(Metaphysics treats of the primary substances, which similarly we cannot know save by their effects, [hence] it is manifest that the Fixed Stars have a close similitude to Metaphysics.) © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Tambling, The Poetry of Dante’s Paradiso, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65628-7_5

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The almost invisible West-East motion of the Fixed Stars, which will never complete itself in history, because that would take 36,000 years, and according to Joachim we are already in the sixth age, may associate with Metaphysics. It deals with first principles, and with endings which are unknowable by Physics. The Fixed Stars draw attention to knowability resting on unknowability, therefore, and amongst the unknowable are the ‘primary substances’—but what are these?

Canto 22: 106–154 Knowing effects means looking for causes: hence, in an autobiographical vein persisting throughout these cantos, Dante addresses the Gemini, inspiration for his ‘ingegno’ (22.114). He has addressed the reader—for the last time in the Commedia (106–111), and there follows another address to the stars (112–123) before he looks down and addresses Hyperion (142–143). Castor and Pollux, are within the ‘bel nido [nest] di Leda’ (27.98), their mother, and the implications of this make Dante refer to Gemini as the sign which follows the Bull—as if displacing it—within the Zodiac’s sequence (22.111). But at the close of the Fixed Stars cantos, Phoenicia is seen, as the shore ‘nel qual si fece Europa dolce carco’ (27.84), Europa willingly surrendering to the Bull (Jupiter) which took her from there to Crete, whose significance as the cradle of Europe was noted from Inferno 14, in Chap. 4. An old violence there is replaced by a new propitiousness here: for the sun, father of all mortal life, was in the sign of Gemini when Dante first felt the air of Tuscany (this is a very positive phrase), and grace has returned Dante to this source in his reaching the Fixed Stars, which constellation, inspiring poets, is essential for the hard passage concluding Paradiso. No other visualisation of Paradise than Dante’s so mapped it onto the physical heavens; nor had been so forensic in giving the physical cosmos (Morgan 1990: 166–195). Others give a sense of the heavenly Jerusalem or take inspiration from the Book of Revelation, or from the Visio Pauli, the Apocalypse of Paul (see Elliott 1993: 616–644, Silverstein 1932: 397–399). Dante’s downwards survey, deriving from Macrobius (contemporary of Augustine and admirer of Servius on Virgil), comments on Cicero’s account of the dream of Scipio, the Somnium Scipionis which appears at the end of Cicero’s Republic. It adds a neo-Platonic, even pagan philosophy to supplement Cicero’s secular account of fame and the rewards of right behaviour in serving the republic (Lewis 1967: 23–28,

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60–69). Publius Cornelius Scipio (c.184–129 BCE) tells Laelius how he dreamed he met his grandfather, Scipio Africanus (c.235–129 BCE), Hannibal’s conqueror: the episode informs the Cacciaguida cantos. Scipio and his grandfather visit the stellatum, the sphere of the stars, the eighth sphere, looking down from the Milky Way, whence souls come to be born on earth. In Chaucer’s paraphrase of the Somnium Scipionis, Scipio’s grandfather warns ‘that he ne shulde hym in the world delyte’ (Chaucer The Parliament of Fowls 66). The ‘portals of the sun’ are those through which souls pass when the sun is at the tropics.3 Descending through the planets, the new soul acquires qualities from each. The account of the spheres succeeds (Book 1 chapters 14–19), and distinguishes stellae as solitary planets and stars from sidera, the latter referring to the 48 constellations Ptolemy recognised (12 of them comprising the zodiac). The grandfather explains 11 great circles which gird the celestial sphere. And Scipio says that ‘the earth itself seemed so small to me that I felt ashamed of our empire, whose extent was no more than a dot on its surface’ (Cicero 1998: section 16, 89). This contemptus mundi stance indicates what is ambiguous in Dante, for he never loses a sense of the Empire as vital: Vidi la figlia di Latona incensa sanza quell’ombra che mi fu cagione per che già la credetti rara e densa. L’aspetto del tuo nato, Iperïone, quivi sostenni, e vidi com’si move circa e vicino a lui Maia e Dïone. Quindi m’apparve il temperar di Giove tra ‘l padre e ‘l figlio; e quindi mi fu chiaro il varïar che fanno di lor dove; e tutti e sette mi si dimostraro quanto son grandi e quanto son veloci e come sono in distante riparo. L’aiuola che ci fa tanto feroci, volgendom’io con li etterni Gemelli, tutta m’apparve da’ colli a le foci; poscia rivolsi li occhi a li occhi belli. (22.139–154)

(I saw the daughter of Latona wholly illuminated [by the sun] without that shade which had given me reason to think her rare and dense. The aspect of your son, Hyperion, I here sustained [the sun], and saw how Maia [mother of Mercury] moved about and near him, and Dione [mother

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of Venus]. Now appeared to me the tempering of Jove between the father and the son [Saturn and Mars], and here was clear to me the varying they make in their positions [their ‘where’]. And all the seven were demonstrated to me, how great they are, and how fast, and how they are distant from each other in their place. The threshing-floor which makes us so fierce, as I was turning with the eternal Gemini, all appeared to me from hills to river-mouths, after which I turned my eyes back to the beautiful eyes.) The space of the inhabited earth is between Gades and the Ganges: ‘a small island surrounded by the sea which you on earth call the Atlantic, the Great Sea, or the Ocean’.4 The poem reconsiders Dante’s itinerary, with a sense of distances, and playing with the planets’ identities by naming them through their classical parentage, not allegorising them in relation to Christianity. The moon was earlier called daughter of Latona (10.67); she is mother of twins, Apollo and Diana (Purg. 20.130–132, Para. 10.67, 29.1). As the exiled mother-to-be, she wandered through the world (Metamorphoses 6.189) until she was pitied by the island Delos, hitherto a wandering island—her instability moon-like—who gave her a place to give birth. Here, the sun (Apollo) is not called son of Latona, but masculinised as son of the Titan Hyperion (Met. 4.191). Maia, one of the Pleiades, is called mother of Mercury, and the watery Dion mother of Venus (see 8.7). The planets below the sun are made implicitly feminine. The sun, and above are masculine. Jove’s temperature (18.68)—as a secular planet—assigns his place between the coldness of Saturn, his father, and the heat of Mars who is called his son (Convivio 2.13.25). They flank the figure of ideal warmth. In contrast to these seven ‘grandi’ and ‘veloci’ planets, comes the earth, divided, and fought over for possession, unlike these, whose orbits separate them. ‘Aiuola’ derives from the Latin areola, which appears in Monarchia 3.15.11 as the little space, a diminutive of area, perhaps derived from ‘arere’, to be dry, as with ‘arid’ (OED), needing to be kept clear of pests (Ascoli 2008: 396). Dante’s letter to Henry speaks of ‘in angustissima mundi area’ (the narrow corner of the world).5 Such dryness, essential for threshing, which makes it dusty, emphasises dry land as opposed to sea, which is basic to Scipio’s vision. This land is where Empire must be mapped, and is torn apart by Guelfs and Ghibellines. This is almost the end of Paradiso’s taking heed to secular politics: though there is more on Rome and the Papacy.

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Canto 23: Mary A new poetry in canto 23 (Bosco 1965: 1–22; Picone 1989: 193–217), which seems dedicated to the feminine, begins with a simile (1–12), after Dante has returned from looking downwards towards Beatrice’s eyes, only to see her gazing upwards, as if towards the noon—but since she is above the sun, actually towards the Empyrean whence Christ’s triumph will come. She has announced the imminence of a ‘turba trïunfante’—a triumphant crowd (22.131, compare 23.20, 136): the Church Triumphant. The simile begins ‘Come l’augello, intra l’amate fronde’—like a bird within the beloved foliage—and it evokes the ‘enigma of visibility’, for the image is of what is not seen, because the bird is within the leaves, and the night is dark. A mother-bird waits for the birth of dawn (‘l’alba nasca’), wanting to see both her fledglings and, with ‘ardente affetto’, the sun. She cannot see the first without the second, and that second desire is folded into lines 4–6. The simile is about wanting to see, where seeing is deferred. The bird alludes to Beatrice (10), but anagogically, it evokes Mary, though this is only descried from the entire canto; and from the associations the canto gathers, it might conceivably suggest Christ in the womb waiting for birth. The bird is, further, Dante. The nestlings are one of the bird’s two loves, the other the Sun, appearing as ‘la lucente sustanza’ after line 29. This, coming within the canto’s second simile (25–30), unites it with the first, making the similes not the application of something outside onto poetic material in a ‘like … so’ pattern, but as impossible to separate as comparison and reality. There is nothing visible outside the flow of comparisons which both give and hold back reality (as the bird is there, but invisible), making the visible and invisible inseparable. The sight within such looking as Dante has looking at Beatrice, prompts desire to see something other (‘altro’, 15) and to feel hope. Then Beatrice announces a first fulfilment: ‘le schiere / del trïunfo di Cristo e tutto ‘l frutto / ricolto del girar di queste spere’ (19–21). This is Christ’s personal triumph, while the armies belonging to this sphere are the fruit harvested from the turning of the Fixed Stars, with the virtues within them. Dante registers a failure in language to describe Beatrice’s smile, as she turns towards him after looking away, in one of those moments stressing her separateness, and difference.6 His failure implies an ecstatic state where the language is no longer that of the subject who can record the past. For he is not looking from outside, he is on the inside, part of what he sees, as for

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instance, he is comparable to the bird in the initial simile, waiting for light, of which the first instalment, as it were, is Beatrice’s face, her ‘viso’ and ‘occhi’. For Beatrice bids him look at her, but he declares that he must pass on ‘sanza costrutto’ (i.e. without expressing her beauty, 24), to the second simile which like the first begins with natural observation before reversing: Quale ne’ plenilunïi sereni Trivïa ride tra le ninfe etterne che dipingon lo ciel per tutti i seni: vid’i’ sopra migliaia di lucerne un sol che tutte quante l’accendea, come fa ‘l nostro le viste superne; e per la viva luce trasparea la lucente sustanza tanto chiara nel viso mio …             (25–33)

(As in the calm full moons, Trivia smiles amid the eternal nymphs who paint the heaven in all her parts, I saw above thousands of lights, a sun which lit all of them, as our sun lights the sights above, and through the living light shone through the light substance so clear in my vision…) ‘Plenilunïi’, in its internal echoing (leni/luni, plus the double i) enacts the sense of fullness it evokes; and ‘sereni’ (clear), picked up in ‘sera’ (evening, 89) echoes its n sound, combined with the e and the i. We pass from feminine image to masculine sense: Trivia to the sun; night to day. The stars are nymphs in the image, painting every part (literally ‘breast’) within the sky’s body, but the full moon, though smiling has no separate light, which makes the difference with the sun lighting the stars.7 Painting the heavens creates smiles: Aldo Scaglione (1967: 137–172) compares the painting image and the smile with Purgatorio 11.79–84, where illuminated pages smile. The painted stars are as flowers, as though these nymphs were working in a meadow.8 The smiling, and laughing, is light giving, attracting the sun; and it is not the moon which smiles, but Trivia, something more absolute, an animating principle for full moons; the name of the triple-goddess whose grove Aeneas passes on his way to the Underworld (Aeneid 6.13, compare 4.511). The simile jumps from observation to absolute impossible dazzling reality, three in one, a total vision named in ‘Trivia’.

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Diana on earth has nymphs: the moon has stars, nymphs being their images. The moon at the full implies, like much in this canto, including the round nest, the fullness of pregnancy, and evokes Mary, who has the moon under her feet (Revelation 12.1) The sun was awaited in lines 1–9; but what was not expected—that ‘other’ which Dante waited for—is the ‘lucerne’, the redeemed, corresponding to the stars and the nymphs, which are not separate from the sun, but illuminated by it; but the sun is not the sun, but Christ, the ‘lucente (compare “lucerne”) sustanza’ (32). This scholastic expression, giving light the quality of a separate substance, is Christ, now called by Beatrice the wisdom and power of God (I Corinthians 1.24) which ‘aprì le strade tra ‘l cielo e la terra / onde fu già sì lunga disïanza’ (opened the roads between heaven and earth, for which there had long been such desire) (38, 39). Beatrice looks, and Dante must attempt to follow, being overpowered by the living light’s brightness, like suicidal lightning, breaking forth from a cloud, plunging downwards to material earth (‘s’atterra’), earthing itself. His mind has gone out of itself (‘di sé stessa uscìo’, 23.44), as if epileptically, in a moment of loss: e che si fesse rimembrar non sape. (45)

(and what it became, it cannot remember.) He must be brought back to Beatrice’s smile, for she saves him, saying he can look on her ‘riso’ (smile), which returns to the moon’s ‘ride’. Bid to sustain Beatrice’s jouissance, he comes back to himself from something forgotten, his ‘visïone oblita’ (50)9—the absence in the heart of seeing— saying that her words should never be extinguished (stingue) from the book which records the past: ‘il libro che ‘l preterito rassegna’ (23.54). But he would not be helped to praise her smile by all the tongues (‘lingue’: the number of poets, and the number of languages) which Polyhymnia, the muse of sacred poetry and the other muses, her sisters, have suckled (compare Purg. 22.100–101). ‘Tutte quelle lingue’ could not avail: per aiutarmi, al millesmo del vero non si verria, cantando il santo riso e quanto il santo aspetto facea mero; e così, figurando il paradiso, convien saltar la sacrato poema, come chi trova suo cammin riciso. (23.58–63)

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(it would not come to the thousandth part of the truth to aid me, singing the sacred smile and how much it made clear the sacred aspect, and therefore, figuring Paradise, it suits that the sacred poem must jump like someone who finds their pathway cut off.) The smile, and the face, is ‘il Paradiso’, what he must ‘figure’, as before, he was drawing the angel (Chap. 1). That was depicting absence, now he must depict full presence, which is what the Trivia-like smile is. The statement of loss of memory—often taken as a conventional declaration of impossibility—seems more a troubling breakdown of being and language not relegatable to the past, disturbing the present, threatening to break the poem’s fluency, producing discontinuous ‘punti’, which in a more modern writer such as Hölderlin, would be signs of a traumatic failure of memory, from being over-close to an absolute event, like the Semele of whom Beatrice had spoken (21.4–12). The present reactivates the failure; he knows that language cannot embody what overcame him, creating an aporia, a ‘cammin riciso’ (23.63). Sacred poem or no sacred poem, the poem must skip, and the canto’s unity falters. The woman is beyond him—and has been since the days of the Vita Nuova. Her gaze is commented on by Lacan, who was fascinated by the woman’s mystical experience; he says that in her ‘gaze’ there emerges that Other whom we can identify only through her jouissance: her whom he, Dante cannot satisfy because from her he can only have this look, only this object, but of whom he tells us that God fulfils her utterly.

Beatrice’s jouissance, an untranslatable word, her joy, comes from contemplation; and Lacan thinks that Dante would ‘feel himself exiled’ from it (Lacan 1990; 23). Jouissance includes ecstasy, the end of a discourse premised on the subject’s mastery, for it involves contact with the unsymbolisable Real of which ‘Trivia’ is an instance. It is joy, as overwhelming, it is pain too; it is ‘paradise’—Paradiso. Dante cannot use Beatrice for his own narcissism, to fill out his own incompleteness; his lack he feels contains the possibility of distraction, and must be compensated for in the following cantos, where apostolic examination allows self-stabilising. Returning to Beatrice’s smile is not to something personal; it takes in what she names, which it brings into visibility—the lights as the ‘bel giardino’ which flourishes (‘s’infiora’—a neologism) under Christ’s rays, with Mary and the apostles:

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Quivi è la rosa in che ‘l verbo divino carne si fece; quivi son li gigli al cui odor si prese il buon cammino. (73–75)

(There is the rose in which the Divine Word made itself flesh; there are the lilies at whose odour the good path was taken.) 10 The effort, and difficulty of looking evokes another simile, which succeeded by gratitude for the withdrawal of Christ, who as excess of light, is the ‘principio’ of the vision: Come a raggio di sol, che puro mei per fratta nube, già prato di fiori vider, coverti d’ombra, li occhi miei; vid’io così più turbe di splendori, folgorate di sù da raggi ardenti, sanza veder principio di folgóri. (79–84)

(As under the ray of the sun, which pours down pure through a broken cloud, my eyes covered by the shade have before seen a meadow of flowers, so I saw many throngs of splendours illuminated [as if by lightning] from above by ardent rays, without seeing the source of the lightning.) These flowers shine as fires, their brightness illuminated by lightning which is as dangerous as when Dante’s mind went out of itself (40–45). ‘Ardenti’ describing the rays, aligns the flowers with the waiting birds’ ‘ardente affetto’ (8). The simile indicates that something is invisible (which reminds us of the relation of the Fixed Stars to Metaphysics): the broken clouds—the ‘ombra’—veil the clear source. The ‘enigma of visibility’ is this: that vision depends on something unseen, includes the not-seen. The name of Mary as the rose (73) which Dante follows up with another periphrasis: ‘il nome del bel fior ch’io sempre invoco / e mane e sera…’ (‘the name of the beautiful flower which I always invoke, morning and evening’, 88–89), draws his sight to her as the ‘maggior foco’, the ‘viva stella’ (90, 92) before another fire (‘una facella’) encircles her like a crown, and, as a ‘lyre’ with a double music—voice and accompaniment—crowns her as ‘il bel zaffiro / del quale il ciel più chiaro s’inzaffira’ (101–102: the beautiful sapphire by which the brightest heaven en-sapphires itself). Seeing needs all the senses; sound acts as the crown, and the woman/light is a sapphire, a metonymy expanding into a reflexive verb and neologism: ‘s’inzaffira’, emerging when Mary ascends. Heaven en-sapphires itself by receiving Mary, its bluest adornment: blue added to blue. Purgatorio 1.13

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had that transparently blue sapphire; the paved work of a sapphire stone under the feet of God (Exodus 24.10) gives heaven seen from below. The angel’s melody evokes the high joy that breathes (‘spira’—leading to ‘spera’ [108]) from the womb that was the inn ‘del nostro disiro’, a metonym for Christ (lines 4, 14 and 39) as much as the womb breathing out joy is metonymic for Mary. Her body, ‘endued with grace’ (Luke 1.28, RV margin), protected by the circling, and the lyre-sound, makes the lights resound ‘lo nome di Maria’. The ‘circulata melodia’—action, agent, and music—makes Mary the ‘coronata fiamma’ (119) as she follows Christ upwards. This, all that was anticipated in the initial waiting, ends with the mother following the son; and desire for the maternal, with a simile of infants satiated with milk raising their arms (flame-like) towards the mother. These spirits’ ‘affetto’ makes them fulfilments of the first simile’s ‘dolce nati’ with their ‘aspetti disiati’ (2, 4, 8). As they sing the Easter hymn Regina coeli, with the name ‘Donna del Ciel’ (106), we see that the first simile has been opened up into being the praise of the mother bird by her brood; the bird is fulfilled in Mary, and the canto has expanded the simile’s visual image into action and unfolding of meaning together, though never saying so; keeping its self-referentiality so that there is no outside comment on it. We have not finished with images not commented on from outside. Mary’s ascent leaves behind the apostles, ‘arche richissime che fuoro / a seminar qua giù buone bobolce!’ (131, 132: those rich coffers/granaries which down here were good plowmen to sow!). The ‘arche’ contain the harvest of that which the apostles sowed as herdsmen. They were sowers, and  seed, and the harvest which in heaven is simultaneously a treasure (compare Matthew 6.20). The anaphora (‘quivi’, resuming from lines 73, 74) goes from plural to singular, reaching Peter, whom periphrasis identifies. Only Mary is named: Quivi si vive e gode del tesoro che s’acquistò piangendo ne lo essilio di Babillòn, ove si lasciò l’oro. Quivi trïunfa, sotto l’alto Filio di Dio e di Maria, di sua vittoria, e con l’antico e col novo concilio, colui che tien le chiavi di tal gloria. (133–139)

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(Here they live and joy in the treasure which was gained weeping in the Babylonian exile, where gold was left behind. Here triumphs in his victory, under the exalted son of God, and of Mary, with the old and the new council, the one who holds the keys of such glory.) ‘Trïunfa’ is emphasised, as in: ‘they that sow in tears shall reap in joy. He that goes forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him’ (Psalm 126.5, 6), which has echoes in ‘by the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept when we remembered Zion’ (Psalm 137.1). These Psalms explain the prominence given to the ‘antico concilio’, Old Testament believers. The Babylonian exile references the captivity of the Jews, and the Papacy in Avignon, making this a period of defeat for those associated with Peter’s Christianity, and his martyrdom in Rome.11 The stories of his leaving Rome and encountering Christ entering (‘Quo vadis’?) and being crucified upside down appear in the apocryphal Acts of Peter (c.150–200—see Elliott 1993: 390–426), while John 21.18, 19 indicated martyrdom for Peter; hence the significance of the ‘triumph’, associated with Rome. Peter’s First Epistle (5.13) is signed from ‘the church that is at Babylon’ presumably Rome. By canto 27 it is apparent that early Christian Rome, now an alienating and empty space, is the context for the Fixed Stars. That revives a previous emphasis, on pilgrimage and on diaspora, draws for its poetry on the Bible (Hawkins 1999: 72–95).

Canto 24: Peter The ‘enigma of visibility’ means that I look—but not as Cartesian thinking and the Copernican universe implies, from myself to an objective world— but as being in the world, which attracts me to look. This meaning comes alive with the souls circling round Dante. Unlike those in the Sun who kept their distance, these are like individual circles, flaming like comets, the circle being the comet’s tail. They are called ‘carole’ (see 25.99)—a round dance, which includes the sense of ‘corolla’ (a crown), which are ‘differente / mente danzando’—dancing each with different mind, dancing differently, fast and slow. The richest circles three times round Beatrice as a fire, and his song produces another jump in the writing of Paradiso, for imagination and speech are of too bright colours—not sufficiently differentiated—for such folds (pieghe). These folds contain multi-coloured light and shadow. Giottesque painting shows colour laid next to colour in the manner of the folds of clothes, which is how the linguist Emile

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Benveniste (1971: 286) thinks of rhythm; as a continual series of contrasts. Writing must take account of folds, and take their form, but it cannot search all a fold’s intricacies. Peter’s circling Beatrice is followed at the end when Peter embraces Dante (as the lord ‘abbraccia il servo’, 149), by circling around him thrice, an action so signal that Dante gives it one of his three-word lines: così, benedicendomi cantando tre volte cinse me …(24.151–152)

(thus blessing me in singing [the apostolic light] three times encircled me) This expresses a world without the three-dimensionality of perspectival writing; it questions subject-object distinctions. Dante is effectively obliterated in 23.40–51; here too, his ‘fantasia’, his ‘imagine’ is too weak to take in Peter’s music. Beatrice addresses the light that speaks as the man to whom the Lord left the keys of this miraculous joy (34–45, Matthew 16.19, compare canto 23.139—Peter uses the keys for Dante here). Paradiso has prepared us for Peter, (‘il pescator’, 18.136), since Benedict’s words (22.88–89); his earthly poverty, indispensable to his preaching and to the spread of the faith, as Dante indicates (116–121), informs the content here. Beatrice indicates that a further unlocking will happen in cantos which—in reverse order—test Dante on love, hope, and the faith ‘per la qual tu su per lo mare andavi’ (39). This allusion (Matthew 14.28–31), wherein Peter showed a failure of faith, shows Beatrice thinks not of personal faith, but ‘la verace fede’ (44). Within the following questions and responses, Dante’s replies have comparatively little that is personal. They are those of the ‘baccialier’ in the school of theology who is ready for the master’s setting out the question; here preparation is twice called ‘arming’ (Benfell 1997: 89–109). The Christian must reply to ‘l’alto primipilo’—the army’s standard-­ bearer, who throws the first javelin in battle—asking what faith is. Dante’s reply quotes Paul, another who put Rome on the right path: for Peter and Paul were both at Rome, and were martyred the same day, so giving Rome status, with two martyrs, and their bones. In Hebrews, 11.1: ‘faith is the substance (hupostasis—“assurance”, or “the giving substance to”) of things hoped for, the evidence (elegmos—proving, or test) of things not seen’. Hebrews announces that the Old Testament saints—the old council—‘died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them

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afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers (xenos) and pilgrims (parapidemos) on the earth’ (Hebrews 11.13). And Hebrews 12 says Christians are ‘compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses’ (martus, or martur). Those who witnessed to faith by martyrdom include Paul and Peter, whose letter dated from Rome, calls the ‘sojourners (parapedimos) of the Dispersion (diaspora)’ ‘strangers (paraoikos) and pilgrims (parapedimos)’ (1 Peter 2.11). Dante paraphrases Hebrews 11.1: fede è sustanza di cose sperate e argomento de le non parventi; e questa pare a me sua quiditate. (24.64–66)

(Faith is the substance of things hoped for, and rational proof of the non-seen, and this seems to me its essence.) Its essence is its quiddity—its thisness, its ‘haecceity’ (Duns Scotus: the word appeared earlier (20.92)). So why did Paul—the authority he is tested on—place faith amongst the substances, and then among the ‘argomenti’ (‘evidence,’ in Hebrews 11.1. includes the sense of ‘reasons’): E io appresso: ‘Le profonde cose che mi largiscon qui la lor parvenza, a li occhi di là giù son sì ascose, che l’esser loro v’è in sola credenza, sopra la qual si fonda l’alta spene; e però di sustanza prende intenza. E da questa credenza ci convene silogizzar, sanz’avere altra vista: però intenza d’argomento tene’. (24.70–78)

(And I following: ‘The deep things which to me enlarge here their appearance, upon which is founded the high hope, are so hidden from eyes below, that their being is only in belief, and therefore it takes the sense [i.e. it has the concept] of substance. And from this belief it is right to syllogise without having another sight: therefore it takes the sense of argument’.) Faith must be a substance, replacing on earth the things visible above, which Dante calls the high hope (Greek elpis, ‘expectation’—almost synonymous with belief). Such belief gives the basis for syllogising, a form lending itself to the terzina. Faith becomes a way of reasoning, which is

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part of what hope does (and Dante’s syllogising shows in the repeated ‘però’; syllogising contrasting with what the ‘sofista’ do).12 The third question is whether Dante has this faith, and the fourth: this precious jewel (faith), whence did it come to Dante? Faith is called that on which every virtue is founded, whether the confidence to syllogise, or to walk on the sea—for Peter, the ‘gran viro’ (34—a Latinism implying ‘great virtue’), is the figure of action, not theorising faith. Dante’s speed (the pace quickens), replying in the same line as Peter’s, continues the scholastic image, since ‘conchiusa’ is the technical term relating to a syllogism’s third part:                 La larga ploia de lo Spirito Santo, ch’è diffusa in su le vecchie e ‘n su le nuove cuoia, è silogismo che la m’ha conchiusa acutamente sì, che ‘nverso d’ella ogne dimostrazion mi pare ottusa. (24.91–96)

(The ample rain of the Holy Spirit which is diffused over the old and the new parchments is a syllogism which has concluded it to me so acutely that in comparison with that every demonstration would appear obtuse.) The Old and New Testaments parallel the first parts of the syllogism; the Spirit poured out the third. In contrast, any other demonstration would be blunt (Latin obtundere: the demonstrations are like the point of a needle or a knife). The reference to the Holy Spirit evokes ‘Amor mi spira’ (Purg. 24. 53) from Dante’s account of the dolce stil novo. Inspiration (compare 2 Timothy 3.16) is imaged in the refreshment of showers, spread through the content of the parchments (silently compared to dry ground). Then why are the old and new ‘proposizion’ (i.e. premises of a syllogism) held to be divine discourse? The answer is that miracles (‘opere’) followed, as a corollary to such statements and evidences of the faith. But—sixth question—how can these miracles be validated as to their truth, since they are contained in the Bible, whose reliability is in question, making the proofs circular, self-validating, and so invalid? Dante breaks from this self-­ referentiality: if the miracles (‘miracoli’) are set aside, another remains: that the world did turn to ‘cristianesmo’, and he breaks into a non-abstract material realism, making ordinary everydayness miraculous: ché tu intrasti povero e digiuno in campo, a seminar la buona pianta che fu già vite e ora è fatta pruno. (24.109–111).

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(for you entered poor and hungry into the field to seed the good plant which once was a vine, and is now become a thorn.) The image recalls Dominic. The seventh question (118–123) is double: what does Dante believe and how did it come to him to be believed? Such questions were not posed in Inferno or Purgatorio, but were implicit in Jupiter, where the destiny of those outside Christianity questions the tenets of faith. The sophist’s false arguments threaten; knowledge needs vindicating. As canto 17 represents Dante’s self-communings about his exile, the Fixed Stars show self-questioning about what he believes and why. Since these questions lead to Peter and to his life, the ultimate proof of Christianity relates neither to the Church, nor to syllogistic ability, but to Peter’s life as ‘povero e digiuno’. And hunger—this canto being ghosted by Purgatorio’s cornice of gluttony—continues when Dante says that the poem has made him ‘macro’ (lean, 25.3). Peter’s ‘puritas et simplicitas naturalis’(Monarchia 3.9.9), as an admirable Paradisal life, appears in: O santo padre, spirito che vedi ciò che credesti sì, che tu vincesti ver’ lo sepulcro più giovani piedi … (24.124–126)

(O holy father, spirit who now sees that which you believed, so that you outdid younger feet [going] towards the sepulchre…) Peter was older than John; running faster stressed his vigour. John 20.4–10 makes John as younger run faster, but letting Peter enter the sepulchre first, and Monarchia 3.9.16: modifies this: ‘John also says that Peter went into the tomb quickly when he came and saw the other disciple hesitating at the door’. That proves that ‘our archimandrite’—emphasising his shepherd quality, as with John 21.15—had ‘puritatis’—‘lack of sophistication’ (Kay), openness, frankness, guilelessness, contrasting with the ‘sofista’ (24.81). Peter needed not to run fast because he had a surer belief (we mentally compare the running of Bernardo, Egido, and Silvestro in canto 11.79–84). Christianity lets Dante visualise and write such lives, whose contingencies, adopting Ascoli’s language (2008: 402) are almost divine, and work against seeing this part of Paradiso as abstract. Dante’s profession of faith is Aristotelian (God as ‘non moto’, unmoved), marked by proofs physical and metaphysical, but uses the

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authority of Old Testament figures, and ‘voi che scriveste / poi che l’ardente Spirto vi fe’ almi’ (you, who wrote after the fiery Spirit had made you holy, 137–138). The apostles became fiery, like their writings, after the Holy Spirit fell with tongues of fire, and the testimonies to the Trinity, which Dante’s verse draws out (‘uno Dio’, ‘tre Persone’, ‘una’, and ‘trina’, and ‘sono’ (plural) and ‘este’ (singular) all comprising a ‘profonda condizion divina’, 142) make the point that a Trinity could not be syllogised. Accepting the Trinity, paramount throughout Paradiso, makes Peter’s light encircle Dante thrice. That it is Peter is confirmed in 25.12 in the context of baptismal naming; and emphasised there when imagining returning to Florence with another fleece than Jason’s, and receiving the ‘cappello’ (see Ascoli 2008: 363); there Dante reaffirms the significance of the font, plus that of the ‘poema sacro’ and the title ‘poeta’.13

Canto 25: James Ovid calls the Milky Way the ‘Palatia caeli’ (Met.1.168–176), thinking comparatively of the Palatine Hill in Rome. This Augustan sense may underlie the palatial images within canto 25.29–30, 40–45, calling Peter and James barons (24.115, 25.17), and James a ‘principe’ (23). As Picone noted with canto 23, there are signs of pilgrimage (23.38–38, 63, 75) reappearing here with regard to Spain, since James’s shrine is the cause for people going on pilgrimage to Galicia, presumably, in hope, despite the difficulties (see Picone 1989, Scott 2010: 77–78). Convivio 2.14.1 calls the ‘Galassaia’ ‘St James’s way’, hence the punning on Galassia and Galicia.14 Beatrice tells James that by him the bounty of the court (‘basilica’) was chronicled, meaning that such ‘larghezza’ is written in his Epistle, which like Peter’s, is written to pilgrims—‘to the twelve tribes of the Dispersion’ (diaspora)—and which opens decorously: If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, who giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not, and it shall be given him. But let him ask in faith … (James 1.5, 6).

Faith is the necessary foundation, before we can consider what James’s Epistle speaks of: hope. Hence Beatrice: fa risonar la spene in questa altezza: tu sai, che tante fiate la figuri, quante Iesù ai tre fé più carezza. (25.31–33)

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(make hope resonate in this height: you know that as many times you figured it as Jesus to the three made most endearment [or honour: compare 24.19].) The ‘tre’ were Peter, James, and John, distinguished from the other disciples in the Synoptic Gospels (Luke 8.40–56, Matthew 17.1–19, and Matthew 26: 36–46), and considered personifications of faith, hope, and love (1 Corinthians 13.13). Appropriately, James now speaks encouragingly (hopefully) to Dante, as though out of his Epistle (James 1.5, 6, 1.17, and 2.5); hope producing love (44), the subject of canto 26. The generosity (‘larghezza’) of God as the feudal lord means that James speaks of ‘nostro Imperadore’ and his ‘conti’ who are within his most secret hall (‘aula’: the Greek suggests a place to stay or sleep the night). The imagery suits exile, and the canto’s noting of places: Florence, as a sheepfold, and with its baptistery: Compostella, and now the secret courts of heaven. Here, too Beatrice speaks of Dante coming from Egypt to Jerusalem (55, 56, compare Hebrews 12.22). Beatrice answers as the courtly lady for Dante, as though he was a crusader coming to Jerusalem: fighting for the ‘Chiesa militante’ (52).15 In saying that Dante can answer for himself, for his replies will neither  be difficult (‘forti’) to him, nor come  from vainglory (‘iattanza’), meaning it will not be presumptuous for him to answer, Beatrice hints at an anxiety perhaps underlining these cantos, about what Dante can claim for himself. Canto 25 begins by saying what he will do if it happens (‘se mai continga’) that the ‘poema sacro’ will overcome the cruelty which has excluded him from the sheepfold.16 This gives two senses of ‘hope’: either the firm expectation resulting from writing the sacred poem (with ‘sacro’ placed at the end of the line, indicating its solemnity) or the non-­ Christian—classical, pagan—sense of hope, which aligns it with contingency (things touching each other, by chance: compare Latin ‘tangere’, to touch). The desire to return to Florence is hope in the non-Christian, ‘ordinary’ sense, where the opposite is despair. The Christian sense of hope is different, excluding despair as an allowable possibility, but the poem, which makes him display such a hope, may be a guarantee for his return; a point recognised since Beatrice, Dante’s poetic creation, answers for him (52–63), as an image of what the poem can effect for him. Paradiso’s content guarantees that the poem is ‘sacro’, but this is a circular argument: it guarantees Dante’s status as the Bible guarantees Christianity’s. That danger becomes key to understanding these cantos where Dante gives grounds for what he says he believes. The fear remains that he has no

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objective basis for what he claims for himself in the poem, any more than a poem has an objective value outside itself: reading a poem is the only way of deciding its worth. Dante with his poem may appear to show ‘iattanza’: boastfulness. If it seems easier to enter Paradise than Florence, that is because the incipit of the isolated exile of canto 25’s may sound presumptive. The Epistle of St James describes the tongue which is an unruly member (James chapter 3); imagery influencing the Ulysses canto, where the tongue’s power is the subject (James 3.4, 5). The danger of ‘iattanza’ remains: the disappointed exile must make such claims about himself and the ‘poema sacro’ because he cannot, but would, return to Florence.17 In defining hope, Dante sounds like the pupil of James; hope is grace plus preceding merit (67–69—see James 2.20: ‘faith without works is dead’). The merit a person’s ‘works’ confer, ensure their hope. He receives this light (this hope, this expectation), from many stars (Christian saints), but first from David, the ‘sommo cantor del sommo duce’ (72) who first ‘instilled’ (distillò, 71) hope, in his ‘tëodia’, in Psalms 9.10: ‘Sperino in te … color che sanno il nome tuo’—‘And they that know thy name will put their trust in thee’. Dante’s citation magnifies the place given to the Psalms, and to David, in both 24.136, and 20.40 (see Ascoli 2008: 380). A tëodia—‘divine song’—is Dante’s coinage (Barolini 1984: 277), and it makes Dante supplement David, whose ‘tëodia’ is aligned with James’s own Epistle (perhaps in: ‘Blessed is the man who endureth temptation; for when he is tried he shall receive the crown of life, which the Lord hath promised to them that love him’—James 1.12). Dante adds ‘tu mi stillasti, con lo stillar suo’, (you instilled [hope] in me with his instilling), and the poetic repetitions confirm, and demonstrate that the language of Psalms (divine song) and of James (divine prose) is performative; the writing creates hope. If Dante says that the language of David and of the martyr who endured temptation have seeped into the heart; and that he is full, and pours the refreshing shower on others, then he claims his writing as a ‘tëodia’, and so as a ‘poema’. But that claim is ultimately circular, as writing which is performative, like poetry, must be, because he gains hope from writing, and what he writes is self-authentication, as the Commedia is. The fear of ‘iattanza’ arises because he must claim for his work a ‘precedente merto’ (preceding merit, 69), to affirm which implies both a challenge to Florence, and a plea. James’s reply, with the lightning-flash which recalls his and John’s surname ‘Boanerges, sons of thunder’ (Mark 3.17), evokes ‘la Chiesa militante’:

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L’amore ond’ïo avvampo ancor ver’ la virtù che mi seguette infin la palma e a l’uscir del campo, vuol ch’io respiri a te che ti dilette di lei; ed emmi a grato che tu diche quello che la speranza ti ‘mpromette. (25.82–87)

(The love with which I still flare up towards the virtue which followed me to the palm and to leaving the field, wills that I speak [re-breathe] to you, who delight in it [hope]; and it is my pleasure that you tell me that which hope promises you.) James declares that he loves that virtue of hope (‘virtù’ may be a name of God) which inspired him to martyrdom. The Biblical James was killed by Herod Agrippa I (Acts 12.2, compare Mark 19.39).18 The palm associates with successful pilgrimage, and victory after coming out of ‘great tribulation’ (Revelation 7.9, 14). The (battle)field (‘campo’—cp. 24.110) for the ‘Chiesa militante’, provides the name ‘Compostella’, and stars (stelle, 70), gives the name’s other half. James’s death has been twice noted, as has his burial place. What hope promises is double. Dante hopes to return to Florence, but states a further hope to James. Both Testaments show the goal (taking this as a translation of ‘segno’) awaiting the souls ‘che Dio s’ha fatte amiche’—whom God has made his friends. Citation of Revelation is preceded by Isaiah from the Old Testament: For your shame ye shall have double, and for confusion they shall rejoice in their portion: therefore in their land they shall enjoy double: everlasting joy shall be unto them. (Isaiah 61.7) Dice Isaia che ciascuna vestita ne la sua terra fia di doppia vesta: e la sua terra è questa dolce vita; e ‘l tuo fratello assai vie più digesta là dove tratta de le bianche stole, questa revelazion ci manifesta. (25.91–96)

(Isaiah says that each will be invested in his own land with a double garment, and this land is this sweet life; and your brother far more distinctly, there, where he treats of the white robes, manifests this revelation to us.) The ‘doppia vesta’ may be interpreted by Isaiah 61.3—‘the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness’—and, further, Isaiah 61.10—‘he hath

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clothed me with the garments of salvation, he hath covered me with the robe of righteousness’. Isaiah writes of vindication in the land, of hope’s fulfilment in this life—for Dante—by returning to Florence. Dante’s addition makes the ‘terra’ the ‘dolce vita’ of Paradiso; amplifying it through Revelation, whose context continues from language speaking of ‘la palma’ (84—see Revelation 7.9). The redeemed ‘have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb’ (Revelation 7.13, 14). The Johannine statement is declared to say what Isaiah says, but ‘più digesta’— that is, as interpreting Isaiah’s allegorical sense—but interpretation will always mean reading a text allegorically; there can be no return to an ‘original’ meaning. Dante wants two types of vindication, which are combined via Isaiah and John, James’s brother and his double, who therefore makes love and hope a virtual double identity (as in lines 82–83). The ‘segno’ (89) is the goal, and a sign: there is a double garment, and there are white robes, both part of an anagogical allegory bound to the idea of hope, because speaking of what exceeds description. Whose voice endorses this hope with ‘Sperent in te’ (98), quoting the Latin of the Psalm, which was given in Italian, in line 73? It reawakens dancing, first in the word ‘carole’, until everything stops (130–131). Hollander says there is no identifying the voice, as one or many. It might be David; Durling and Martinez assume it is Christ, who has gone up above and he is David’s anagogical fulfilment. The passive construction obviates interpretation, and lack of identification of the voice shows a mobility within identities. John is like a virgin joining a wedding dance (Peter and James, as Faith and Hope being the couple). Then Beatrice (‘la mia donna’) becomes the Bride, and the occasion repeats Purgatorio 29.21–29 with the sexes changed. Her speech introducing John is typical of an indirectness or periphrasis within Paradiso: Questi è colui che giacque sopra ‘l petto del nostro pellicano, e questi fue di sue la croce al grande officio eletto. (112–114)

(This is he who lay on the breast of our pelican, and this one was elected to the great office from the cross.) The Pelican is Christ and is connected with two other narratives (John 13.23, John 19.26–27). Common to the terzina’s two halves is Christ’s breast, which John leaned against, and which Longinus pierced on the cross, literalising or varying the figure of the female pelican piercing its

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breast to feed its young. These are images of tenderness and love, making the ‘great office’ the care of the Virgin Mother. Christ is made feminine, and mother, as perhaps John is feminised in his leaning, before he is made mother-like—though he is called a son—in succouring the mother. Motherhood is signified by the pelican, an exiled image of solitariness (Psalm 102.7). The pelican figures Christ upon the cross, which nonetheless becomes a place for decision-making (electing). The language circles, repeating the circling of the ‘carole’. John is first active (leaning), and then passive (made son to the Virgin). The tropes issue from the iconographic image of the pelican19 and from portrayals of the crucifixion where Mary seems to endure the pains of childbirth, paralleling Christ, giving birth to the Church (Neff 1998: 254–273, Revelation 12). This birth-image is in keeping with the image of the apostles as infants seeing Mary as mother (canto 23). John becomes more than himself in his brightness, figuring of the redeemed. The three lights, apostles and virtues, move in a dance marked rhythmically by their singing (‘trino spiro’—triple breath, 132), until they fall silent when John speaks. Their stopping is like oars in a ship ceasing at the sound of a whistle. The audial comparison increases significance since, in a dramatic detail crossing the canto-break, Dante has gone blind.

Canto 26: John This blindness is another instance of something failing within Dante, who has dazzled his eyesight, unlike the eagle (compare 26.53), wanting to see what ‘non ha loco’: for ‘in terra è terra il mio corpo’ the light says. John quotes his own Gospel (John 21.20–24) to make the point (Jacoff 1999: 45–57). The three lights each have their bodies’ fates commented on: James, and John in canto 25, and Peter in canto 27.25, where Rome is his defiled burial-place. Only two have ascended to the ‘beato chiostro’ with ‘le due stole’: double robe—like the white robes of 25.91–96. The double robes correspond to the soul, and the body, and only Christ and Mary have so ascended, the latter’s ascent completing John’s ‘grande officio’. Blindness in canto 26, from ‘la fulgida fiamma che lo spense’ (26.2; the flame which extinguishes sight) has symmetrical relationships with Inferno 26 and Purgatorio 26. Dante must speak of love, of where his soul is sharpened, or focussed (26.6, 8, 21). There is a trope of love as blind: hence ‘Quinci sù vo per non esser più cieco’ (Purg. 26.58). Love works invisibly, seen only by its results, as with Metaphysics. Beatrice—not

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looking yet at Dante (25.110–111, 115–117)—has in her look the power of Ananias (Acts 9.10–18), which aligns Dante with Paul, who, in writing about faith, hope and love, stands beyond these three. Dante starts from what John had said, and from the Vita Nuova: Io dissi: ‘Al suo piacere e tosto e tardo vegna remedio a li occhi, che fuor porte quand’ella entrò col foco ond’io sempr’ardo. Lo ben che fa contenta questa corte, Alfa e O è di quanta scrittura mi legge Amore o lievemente o forte. (26.13–18)

(I said: At her pleasure, whether fast or slow, let remedy come for the eyes that were the doors through which she entered with the fire with which I always burn. The good that makes this court content is Alpha and O[mega] of whatever scripture love reads to me whether lightly or emphatically.) This is Dante’s autobiography, not distinguishing between the woman who made love burn in him by entering the doors of his eyes, and the goodness which makes this court of heaven burn. Dante burning with love is like John, saying God is love (I John 4.19). It quotes John writing of the Alpha and Omega (Revelation 1.8 and 22.13), as a title of Christ, making him the sum of all writing, history, revelation, as the sum of the cosmos. The terzina riddles in its self-circularity. ‘Lo ben’ must be Christ, and love. If ‘Amore’ reads the text aloud, Love has become a substance, incarnated in Beatrice, or in the Amor of the dolce stil, or in St John, or within Dante, as the canzone ‘Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona’ (Purg. 2.112) shows, where ‘Amor’ may be the Holy Spirit (Ascoli 2008: 323). Love is the reader and the read within the ‘scrittura’ comprised within Alpha and O. As Maximus the Confessor held, the cosmos is the book which resolves itself into letters which spell Christ; as he, the logos, is the signified of the writing. In the Vita Nuova, when seeing Beatrice, if anyone had asked him anything, Dante’s answer could only have been ‘Love’ (VN 11.2), as though that was sufficient answer; Love now shows the blind reader the meaning of all writing in the universe. ‘Lievemente o forte’ are love’s two aspects, as the subtext inside all utterance, or as the signified of all that has been written. Dante has been directed to love from philosophic arguments. The mind must turn to that Essence, which contains all goodness, when it discerns

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the truth on which this proof, or argument, is founded. The proof, with the truth which inheres in it, is set forth by Aristotle, if it is he who ‘mi dimonstra il primo amore / di tutte le sustanze sempiterne’.20 The spheres’ love for the unmoved mover sets the universe into motion, and indicates the primacy of love. Aristotle’s mode is circularity, as, on the basis of movement, he argues for a single prime unmoved mover; hence proofs in Dante ascend from Aristotle to ‘la voce del verace autore’, a significant word for Ascoli (2008: 371). The repeated ‘sterne’ (unfolds, lines 37, 40, and 43) applies to Greek philosophy and then to God as author, telling Moses that he will make him see ‘ogne valore’ (Exodus 33.19), meaning himself. Finally, it means John himself, now directly addressed, for the beginning (incominciando) of his ‘alto preconio’, his high proclamation. John’s ‘incominciando’ must be ‘In the beginning was the word’ (John 1.1), which complements the opening of the Books of Moses: ‘In the beginning God created…’. Further, the ‘light’ of John 1.4 was implicitly identified as being the light of Genesis 1.3. John’s Gospel, and Genesis as authored by Moses, gives the contrast of Moses and Christ (John 1.17). The proclaiming seems to refer to John 1.15—‘John bear witness of him and cried …’. In the rest of John chapter 1 this witnessing John is identified as the Baptist, and he is the only ‘John’ of the Gospel, since the disciple whom Jesus loved, and the author, is never called John. Dante’s words make the name ‘John’ cover two identities, the Baptist—the witness—and the disciple—named as author of the Gospel, and of course a witness himself. The forerunner and the one who comes after are identified, indicating that a name does not necessarily relate to identity, which comes from an action, or event. It makes identities provisional, masks, personae. Dante was blinded because he wants to associate the light with a given identity, a given body, and that in the sphere of love induces possessiveness. But John, talking to Dante was ‘not that light’ (John 18). Witnessing, the function that ‘John’ has in the Gospel, is to the Alpha and Omega which covers all identities, but the John of canto 26, is both the speaker and the one who in the Gospel, withdraws his very identity. He speaks here as as the all-seeing Eagle (53), an identity like that of the fourth beast before the throne (Revelation 4.7); as in all writing, he is author and subject of his own books. He asks the third question: Ma dì ancor se tu senti altre corde tirarti verso lui, sì che tu suone con quanto denti questo amor ti morde. […]

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Però ricominciai: ‘Tutte quei morsi che posson far lo cor volgere a Dio, a la mia caritate son concorsi: ché l’essere del mondo e l’esser mio, la morte ch’el sostenne perch’io viva, e quel che spera ogne fedel com’io, con la predetta conoscenza viva, tratto m’hanno del mar de l’amor torto, e del diritto m’han posto a la riva. Le fronde onde s’infronda tutto l’orto de l’ortolano etterno, am’io cotanto quanto da lui a lor di bene è porto’. (48–51, 55–66)

(But also [say] if you feel other cords draw you towards him, so that you sound out with how many teeth this love bites you. […] Therefore I recommenced: ‘All the bitings which have the power to make the heart turn to God have run together in my love: for the being of the world, and my own being, the death that he sustained that I might live, and which every faithful one hopes for, as I do, with the already-­ spoken of living knowledge, has drawn me from the sea of wrong love, and placed me on the shore of the right. I love the leaves which enleave all the garden of the eternal gardener for how much goodness is carried from him to them.’) The assonance of ‘amor’, ‘morde’, ‘morsi’ and ‘morte’ interweaves these words with a ‘cor’ and ‘concorsi’. Bitings include remorse, perhaps remembering, by contrast, the serpent’s bite. The reply connects faith (‘fedel’), hope (‘spera’), and love (62–63, 65); putting a primary stress on ‘caritate’ and concluding with John’s garden imagery (John 18.1, 18.26, 19.41) and with the supposition Mary Magdalene makes that the risen Christ is the gardener (John 20.15), to which ‘ortolano etterno’ must refer. It is another hint that John’s Gospel references Genesis, and it makes Adam, the gardener (Genesis 2.15) the almost inevitable next figure to appear. The duplications of fronde/onde/infronda; orto/ortolano; cotanto/quanto—later repeated with the new singing of ‘canto’ and ‘Santo, santo, santo’ (67, 69—notably the language of the four beasts in Revelation 4.8 as it had been of the Seraphim—Isaiah 6.3)—affirm plenitude, as Dante says that he loves everything within the garden for whatever goodness it carries from God.

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Canto 26: Adam Adam’s appearance is in sequence with what has gone before, but it reverses everything within these cantos. Dante had to learn not to identify the light with a single identity, but now he sees a particular light, Adam, the ‘anima prima’ created by the ‘prima virtù’ (the different senses of ‘prima’ are significant), and spoken of in natural terms.21 This yields the image of a tree coming back to its proper shape (85–87). And Dante addresses him in natural, even sexual terms, not in terms of identity but of event: O pomo che maturo solo prodotto fosti, o padre antico a cui ciascuna sposa è figlia e nuro … (91–93)

(O fruit that alone was produced mature, O ancient father to whom every bride is daughter and daughter-in-law …) These show nature in contradiction: fruit comes before the seed, growth not necessary to life, incest as essential and implicit in every relationship. As ‘pomo’ evidences what the divine ‘ortolano’ has planted, ‘padre’ makes Adam name Virgil (only here in Paradiso), and Nimrod, who appears in all three cantiche; while lines 139–140 all but name another patriarch, Ulysses. Adam refers to Beatrice twice, perhaps because this is the canto of love, and if Eve—‘the mother of all living’ (Genesis 3.20) is unmentioned, it is because the theme is, critically, failed patriarchy.22 Adam speaks voluntarily, rather than interrogating Dante, which changes these cantos’ pattern. His delight shows in the ‘natural’ image of the spirit stirring inside its wrappings of light, as though it wanted to be a spirit coming into matter, and was a material spirit within the covering. Adam first names Dante’s questions: ( 1) how long it was since he was in the ‘eccelso giardino’; (2) how long was it a delight to his eyes; (3) the true cause of the great anger (‘disdegno’); (4) ‘l’idïoma ch’usai e che fei’—the language which I used and made (the reversed order is typical: as though language was already there to be used).

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Adam answers (3) first: he crossed the bounds set, like Nimrod and Ulysses; then (1), then (4), and last (2). Question 1 puts together 4302 years of Limbo, and 930 years of Adam’s life, from his creation to the Resurrection. Adam would not have seen the sun in Limbo, but he speaks of its rhythms. Then come more significant issues: La lingua ch’io parlai fu tutta spenta innanzi che a l’ovra inconsummabile fosse la gente di Nembròt attenta; ché nullo effetto mai razïonabile per lo piacere uman che rinovella seguendo il cielo, sempre fu durabile. Opera naturale è ch’uom favella; ma così o così, natura lascia poi fare a voi secondo che v’abbella. Pria ch’i’ scendessi a l’infernale ambascia, I s’appellava in terra il sommo bene onde vien la letizia che mi fascia; e El si chiamò poi: e ciò convene, ché l’uso d’i mortali è come fronda in ramo, che sen va e altra vene. Nel monte che si leva più da l’onda, fu’ io, con vita pura e disonesta, da la prim’ora a quella che seconda, come ‘l sol muta quadra, l’ora sesta. (124–142)

(The language which I spoke was all spent before the people of Nimrod attempted the uncompletable work, for rational effect was never durable, through human desire which renews itself following the heavens. It is a natural work that man speaks, but how, nature leaves for you to do, according as you desire. Before I descended to the infernal anguish, the highest Good, from which came the good which wraps me, was called on earth I, and then he was called El, and this is convenient, for the practice of humans is as the leaves on the branches, that one goes away and another comes. In the mountain that raises itself most from the waves, I was, with pure life and guilty, from the first hour [i.e. 6 am] to that which follows, as the sun changes quadrant, the sixth hour [i.e. after midday].) As the ‘lunga scala’ (111) up which Beatrice leads Dante quotes Purgatorio 26 (Adam’s fall and Dante’s rising), so ‘abbella’ (132) quotes

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Arnaut Daniel, and Dante’s deliberate writing in Occitan, in a ventriloquism demonstrating how easily languages move between each other. Why this order of answering Dante’s questions? All Adam’s answers are time-related (Armour 1995: 418). He begins with ‘tanto essilio’, which compares with Dante the exile, and with the Babylonian exile (23.135); then he says how long this exile was—answering, in ‘volumi’, how many turnings of the book there were—during which he desired ‘questo concilio’.23 Then he speaks of the time from him to Nimrod and Babel, during which time I as a name of God (see Ascoli 2008: 392) changed to El. Time implies change and multiplicity—moving away, therefore, from the singular ‘io’. Finishing with six hours, each period gets shorter, each is different. Time in the first case relates to boundaries, which it marks out. But it is lived experience under the control of the objective turning of the sun, whose journeyings are with the bounds imposed by the Zodiac (121). In the third case, it is a natural, seasonal, order, wherein language changes. In the fourth, it marks, or witnesses, the limits of obedience: up till noon, which seems the fatal time.24 In Limbo, time is the space of desire; on earth, the reference to the sun’s road speaks of human desire changing. Hence no work can be completed; all works of reason are relativised; likings alter languages; even the names for God alter. The caesura in line 136 enforces how epistemic shifts occur, and break with what has been before, showing too, how short human liking is. All relates to the instability of language, which defines, and therefore changes desire, and the gift of language, which comes from a nature about which nothing else is said here, seems like the gift of time, which, because it comes as a series of disparate events, as here, has its own moments and periodicity. The gift of time, and the changing gift of language, seem, indeed, equivalents. What Adam says about language is, as Stefano Selenu says (2014: 59–85), a palinode for what was argued in De Vulgari Eloquentia (1.4, 1.6, 1.7) which declared Hebrew the original language, El the first name for God, and Nimrod’s building of Babel the breakdown of the first language into a multiplicity of languages (including Hebrew). In canto 26, which opposes Adam the gardener to Nimrod the hunter, nothing appears which is theological or part of a divine order of history. Natural changes control everything, and even the first name of God cannot be considered as having divine authority. There is no single divine origin, and time is not a way of reading eternity, as it was in canto 10, nor is it directed by a prophetic or apocalyptic destiny, as for Joachim, during which divine judgment happens (17.92, 93, 22.94–96); though the it can reverse, as canto 20 noted; here with the effect of returning Adam from Limbo to the Fixed Stars.

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Canto 27: Prophetic Time Canto 27 goes through sweet singing, the universe smiling; Beatrice smiling (96, 104), Dante’s state of divine drunkenness, and then the changes of complexion which affect Peter and all heaven when speaking of contemporary Rome. Peter seems associated with Jupiter’s silver (Convivio 2.13.25), and Mars’ redness, denouncing Boniface VIII, in a speech understudied by equivalent denunciation in Inferno 27. Redness covers anger and blushing for shame. Christian Rome is the cemetery for the martyrs who followed Christ, and Peter; and the city is built on such ruins (see Brown 1981). According to Augustine, such figures as Vaticanus, who ‘presides over the wails—vagitus of infants’—and Cloacina, who is alluded to in the following quotation (Rome had the Cloaca Maxima running through it), were pagan Gods (City 4.8, 143–144), presumably needing sacrifice. Legendarily, St Peter was buried in the Mons Vaticanus, site of Nero’s circus, where Constantine commissioned the old basilica of St Peter after 320 CE: Quelli ch’usurpa in terra il luogo mio, il luogo mio, il luogo mio che vaca ne la presenza del Figliuol di Dio, fatt’ha del cimiterio mio cloaca del sangue e de la puzza; onde ’l perverso che cadde di qua sù, là giù si placa. (27.22–27)

(He who usurps on earth my place, my place, my place which in the presence of the son of God, is vacant, has made my burial-place a sewer of blood and stench, so that the perverse one who fell from here above, down there takes comfort.) ‘Luogo’ suggests Peter’s physical tomb, the confessio beneath the altar; the foundation of the church; and the abstract office of the Pope. Jeremiah 7.4 repeats, in equivalent manner, ‘the temple of the Lord’, and Peter Armour (1995: 402–423) notes other parallels with Jeremiah, the prophet witnessing against Jerusalem, notably chapters 25.30–36, and 50.2, 6, 44–45. The ‘sewer’ runs with martyrs’ blood (physical) and with corruption (abstract). The ‘pestilence’ (lue) of the acrostic in canto 19 recurs in physical material form. But the ‘luogo’ is empty, for its place-holder, Boniface, is an usurper, like Satan who lost his place in heaven, and it is literally empty since Philip IV removed it to Avignon, for which Ubertino

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da Casale—because Philip had denied Boniface even legitimacy—thought that he was acting as God’s servant (Davis 1957, 218–219). Since that removal happened in 1309, Peter speaks prophetically: Non fu la sposa di Cristo allevata del sangue mio, di Lin, di quel di Cleto, per essere ad acquisto d’ora usata; ma per acquisto d’esto viver lieto e Sisto e Pïo e Calisto e Urbano sparser lo sangue dopo molto fleto. … Ma l’alta provedenza, che con Scipio difese a Roma la gloria del mondo soccorrà tosto, sì com’io concipio … (27.40–45, 61–63)

(The spouse of Christ was not nurtured on my blood, and that of Linus, and that of Cletus, to gain and acquire gold as it is used; but for acquisition of this happy life, Sistus, and Pius, and Calixtus, and Urban shed their blood after much weeping. … But the high Providence, that with Scipio defended the glory of the world for Rome, will give help soon, as I conceive …) Linus and Cletus (Anacletus) were martyred before the end of the first century; Sixtus I and Pius I in the second. Callistus died (c.223), and Urban, his successor, in a pogrom arranged by the Emperor Decius (c.250). They comprise some of those in the ‘novo concilio’ of canto 23.138, Rome being their Babylon. The repetition of ‘acquisto’ (42, 43) is noticeable; so is the relation of blood and tears (45), and the lieto/fletto opposition.25 Rome now executes parodic Last Judgments (46–48), while the iconographic keys are borne on standards in factional disputes with other Christians, and Peter becomes an emblem sealing bills selling privileges.26 But concluding, with the repeated ‘difesa’ and ‘difese’, Peter finishes with prophetic time, with Scipio Africanus—already noted from canto 22. He was an essential figure for Petrarch, in defending secular and republican Rome in relation to Hannibal, and, according to Livy, was the victim of envy afterwards, dying a semi-exile.27 After this negative, comes the hope that time will come round again, with Scipio. The fiery redness of the lights changes; like snowflakes falling to earth when the sun is in Capricorn, the ‘vapor trïunfanti’ snow upward, and Dante looks down before following into the Primum Mobile:

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Da l’ora ch’ïo avea guardato prima i’ vidi mosso me per tutto l’arco che fa dal mezzo al fine il primo clima; sì ch’io vedea di là da Gade il varco folle d’Ulisse, e di qua presso il lito nel qual si fece Europa dolce carco. E più mi fora discoverto il sito di questa aiuola; ma ‘l sol procedea sotto i mie’ piedi un segno e più partito. (27.79–87)

(From the hour that I had first looked down, I saw that I had moved me through all the circle which the First Climate makes from middle to end, so that I saw down there from Gades the mad pathway of Ulysses, and over there, hard by, the shore at which Europa made herself a sweet burden, and more would have been discovered of the site of this threshing-­ floor, but the sun was proceeding under my feet a sign, and more.) Dante pairs Inferno 26, Ulysses voyaging into the Atlantic from Cadiz, with Ovid’s chronologically earlier Europa, gladly leaving Tyre for Crete (Metamorphoses 2.833–875).28 Sexual passion initiates westward-bound journeying; intellectual passion continues it. Dante has turned 90 degrees in this heaven, equivalent to six hours, the length of time of Adam in Paradise, but enough to traverse the Mediterranean, its length given in canto 9.82–87; so going from the space of the birth of Europe to Ulysses quitting it. That onward movement, which for us must include Columbus, indicates awareness of a dawning modernity which even questions St Peter’s insistent anger, even his insistence on a literal Rome. The Primum Mobile, subject of Chap. 6, is where time—a leitmotif until the end of this canto—starts. The apparent subject, however, is cupidity, which possesses human lives in time, and seems definable as a frenzied wish to make time serve human purposes, to possess it. The sustaining mother is wished to be in her grave, to assume her property, and if the ‘mother’ includes the church, that implies further despoiling. Cupidity parodies the definition of time as motion motivated by love, and Beatrice on it produces a most complex, riddling comparison: Così si fa la pelle bianca nera nel primo aspetto de la bella figlia di quel ch’apporta mane e lascia sera. (27.136–138)

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(So does the white skin blacken in the first appearance/sight of the beautiful daughter of him who brings morning and leaves evening.) First the mother (134), now the father. Aldo Vallone (1987: note to 27.136–138) reads the light as the ‘bella figlia’, the father being the sun. White become black compares with Benedict on the decline of the Benedictines and Franciscans (22.91–93). The general sense echoes 27.28–29. But other readings need consideration (see for example Hollander 1969: 174–180). In Singleton’s and Durling and Martinez’s reading of this terzina, and following Michele Barbi, the sun (who brings morning) has its sorceress-like daughter, Circe (see Aeneid 7.11), who spoils innocence, like the ‘strega’ of Purgatorio 19, commencing cantos whose theme is cupidity. Here ‘bella’ is a force for deception. Or perhaps the daughter of the sun is the destructive Phaedra. Are there two agents in these lines, or three? The sun may figure the church triumphant, the beautiful daughter the church militant (so Leonardi)—making the church which Peter has excoriated through the Papacy, the fair daughter, figured by the moon, beautiful Proserpine (Aeneid 6.142) and obscured by the sun. The sun may be God, or the father of all mortal life (22.116), making the daughter every human life; or it may be Christ. One clue comes with: ‘I am black but comely … look not upon me because I am black, because the sun hath looked upon me’ (Song of Songs 1.5, 6). There may be a contrast between the noonday which makes black (darkens, or burns) and line 138’s sense of sunrise and sunset. If so, daughter and spouse may be identical, figurations of the individual soul, or of the Church (Pertile 1991: 3–26). Then the white skin of purity turns black—with the implication of a loss of grace—in the first appearance of the daughter (the Spouse) of Him who brings day and leaves night behind. Perhaps the gender-divide between feminine white skin and the sun is relevant. The context suggests further corruption after three terzine (127–136) describing the loss of childhood innocence. The day is evoked by the sun, who brings morning and leaves evening. The sense of things going wrong is supplemented by Beatrice on the absence of government— which should correspond to the sun’s order. The human family goes astray, as with the child’s hatred of the mother. J.E. Shaw makes God the one that brings morning and leaves evening—that is, leaves it behind, as adding something: with morning brightening evening (Shaw 1921: 569–590: in Genesis 1 evening precedes morning). For Augustine creation of light means the creation of light-filled angels, mirroring God,

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distributing light in mirroring form; hence angels are called ‘day’. The rebellious angels became darkness, ‘deprived of participation in the eternal light. For evil is not a positive substance: the loss of good has been given the name of “evil”’ (City 11.9, 439–440). Augustine identified the angels who fell with those who would not wait for morning light to supplement evening knowledge. Using Convivio 2.13.9 and 3.12.14, Shaw identifies the daughter with Wisdom, as not only the daughter of God, but sister and spouse, as in the Song of Songs. Light is Wisdom, and Philosophy, like angels ‘shining with the intelligible illumination of truth’ (City 11.19, 450). If so—departing from Shaw—God bringing morning light to supplement evening light, has a fair daughter who turns in skin-colour from white (dawn) to black (night, and opacity); ‘bianca / nera’ in juxtaposition enforce the contrast. Divine wisdom becomes corruption, which may refer to the rebel angels, or imply, in its continuing present tense, the fate of what God gives. Since Venus is the daughter of God (of Jupiter), and is the Morning Star (Lucifer), Lucifer may even be that power turning from white to black. Perhaps none of these explanations satisfy, in which case we have a terzina whose shape, and hint of a fall defies paraphrase; there is something to be read in its non-specificity, as there is with the sense that there is an ‘Alfa e  O’ to be read through any only half-intelligible script. Perhaps ‘lievemente o forte’ (26. 18) means an acceptance that Dante’s content is easy or difficult by turns, and the rhythm of this changing pattern must be noted. However, the writing does not conclude; perhaps reference to the sun in line 138 follows the terzina, showing that a fault lies in how its progression is reckoned: Ma prima che gennaio tutto si sverni per la centesma ch’è là giù negletta, raggeran sì questi cerchi superni, che la fortuna che tanto s’aspetta, le poppe volgerà u’ son le prore, sì che la classe correrà diretta; e vero frutto verrà dopo ’l fiore. (27, 142–148)

(But before that January is completely unwintered by that hundredth part which down there is neglected, the supernal circles will so ray down that the fortune which is so long awaited will turn the poops to where the

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prows are, so that the fleet will have straight course, and true fruit shall follow on the flower.) The Julian calendar, introduced in 46 BCE, made the day a hundredth part too long (one day too long every 128 years), making counting of the days affect dating by the sun’s pathway in the ecliptic. March 21, the ‘date’ of the vernal equinox, was by Dante’s time March 13, showing a slippage, or an anticipation of the date, as if the year could not wait for the equinox. This, if it continued, would eventually make January—the other start of the year—a spring month. The seasons are affected because wrongly measured, not according with realities, which require patient waiting. The error arises because the sidereal year is 20 minutes longer than the tropical (solar) year since the Heaven of the Fixed Stars moves both East-West, and West-East, in the ‘precession of the equinoxes’, causing the retrograde motion detected in the signs of the Zodiac. Hipparchus noted it, as did the Almagest (Kay 2003: 237–244). These instabilities in time are ignored on earth. Bad government neither respects time nor notes appropriate time (Convivio 4.2.9–10). Yet time unaccounted for leaves fissures for an (un)timely intervention reversing everything. Beatrice calls this intervention ‘la fortuna’—chance, or a waited-for season, or a storm at sea (Hollander). Such a storm is a tempest, which still has its laws, in deriving from Latin tempus, implying a season. Petrarch uses ‘fortuna’ to mean ‘tempest’ in Rime Sparse no. 272 (Durling 1976: 450–451), and a tempest is a time interrupting normative chronology. This ‘season’ is like the one which one day will be forgotten; that is, winter—storm-time, and the season people would forget, in a hurrying-up of time, just as Lent is deliberately forgotten: the implication of line 132. Fortune, or the tempest, like chance, cannot be anticipated, but it will eventually put ships on their right course. The image of true fruit returns to, or reverses, line 124 (‘fiorisce’) and 126 where plum fruits are said, as if under the power of cupidity, to become ‘bozzachioni’—fruits which have not come to term. Lines 142–143 seem indefinite, meaning ‘sometime sooner or later’, and that is the point: what cannot be accounted for, as capitalist cupidity would control everything, will be what is revealed, producing not an apocalypse, but a resetting of everything: on sea, and on land, a new setting of time. The pun on ‘vero’ and ‘verrà’ (148) clinches the prophecy. Perhaps that discordance puts morning and evening out of time with the time of the sun’s fair daughter. Lines 136–138 remain puzzling, part of a strange dark prophesying different from the demand that Dante reveals what

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he has heard (64–66). In the double state the canto gives—ecstatic joy to the point of drunkenness, heaven a Dionysiac condition—and Peter’s anger at the conditions of Papal Rome—white suddenly turns black, as in this terzina. Paradiso does not run evenly. It intersperses anger and melancholia, perhaps despair, with joy, that imbalance being part of its urgency and demand to alter conditions. For ‘redemption depends on the tiny fissure in the continuous catastrophe’, says Benjamin, and we remember that, for him, history, as the unchanging ‘status quo’ is the ‘catastrophe’ (Benjamin 2003: 185, 186). The fissure permits something heterogeneous to open up  in empty homogenous time. Some element has not been taken into account which makes for the possibility of revolutionary change.

Notes 1. On these cantos see Ascoli (2008: 369–405),  part of his argument being that though Dante might claim the title of classical autore, he is a more ‘modern’ author, one who relies more on contingency, not on speaking with authority (though this is always a conflictual issue for Dante). Dante is aware of two derivations of autore, one meaning ‘worthy of faith and obedience’ (99), the other, which derives from avieo meaning ‘binder of words’ (109–121), taking this from Convivio 4.6.3–5, which gives both definitions. Dante apparently refuses the second, but the logic of 26.17–18 and 33.86–87 casts him as that (301–302), while being the autore (the authority) which title he rejects. I use Ascoli throughout this chapter. 2. Convivio associates that number with movement and change. 2 implies movement from one to another: movement as locomotion. 20 modifies the number 10: movement as alteration. 1000 is the highest number with a name of its own, and there can only be movement by multiplying it (motion as growth). Motion, for Dante, is spiritual (Purg. 18.32), meaning that its causes are unknowable. Dante references Aristotle’s Physics 5.225b.5–9 (Aristotle 1996: 121–123). 3. Macrobius, following Porphyry, erroneously makes this to be when the sun is in Capricorn or Cancer, not Gemini and Sagittarius: see Stahl (1952: 133 note). Since souls have their beginning in the Milky Way, milk is appropriate for infants: again following Porphyry (Stahl 1952: 134 note). 4. Somnium Scipionis, 6. 21 (Stahl 1952: 91). Inspiration for Dante’s voyage of Ulysses is implicit, remembering the ‘foce stretta’ (the narrow pass, Inf. 26.107) marking entry into the Atlantic. 5. Kay, Monarchia 317, compare Shaw, Monarchia 93, translating areola as ‘threshing floor or small patch of earth’. See Letters 7.4, p. 102. On ‘aiuola’ as threshing-floor see Durling and Martinez, 456. See on the threshing

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floor (‘area’) in Virgil’s Georgics 1.176–186, Mynors (1990: 39–42). Boyle (2000: 1–12), links the image with harvesting, especially in Aquinas’ use of such images, and evokes Siger, who experienced ferocity, lecturing in the Street of Straw. 6. Lacan says that in courtly love (fin’amor), the lady is unattainable; her place contrasts with her position within patriarchal society, where the satisfaction is the male’s, meaning that ‘there is no sexual relation’; Lacan (1999: 68–77). Courtly love allows her a ‘supplementary’ jouissance beyond the phallus, that is, beyond the order of patriarchy; this makes it impossible to speak of Woman, as the ‘eternal feminine’, which is how she is constructed in patriarchal discourse, as completing the male. Dante gives the woman this other place, which is part of the challenge of Paradiso, and indeed of Beatrice. See Ragland (1995: 1–20). 7. On whether stars and planets were self-luminous, or received light from the sun, the view of Aristotle, Averroes, and Albertus, see Grant (1994: 395–400). 8. Hawkins (2006: 371–387) discusses smiling in the Commedia and compares the smiling angel in Rheims cathedral, as an element of thirteenth-­ century art and theology. 9. Hollander notes the word oblita as used in the Epistle to Can Grande, ‘quasi obliti’ (Toynbee 191), with reference to the Transfiguration (Luke 9.28–36). Here the disciples are asleep, and awake in the midst of the vision. 10. Mary was the thornless rose for Saints Bernard, Bonaventura, and Albertus Magnus. See (Dahlberg 1969: 568–584; Seward 1955: 515–523; Rubin 2004: 1–16); and Ecclesiasticus 39.17–19, and of course, the language of the Fiore, though the woman is not a rose there specifically. Montemaggi (2007: 183–184) speculates on the rose as the church and the lilies as souls. For the savour, compare 2 Corinthians 2.15, 16. 11. This was possibly in Nero’s persecutions, c.64 CE. Grant (1994: 147–158) discusses Peter’s possible presence in Rome, and references to his martyrdom from Clement of Rome, c.96 (p. 152). See I Peter 5.1, and 2 Peter 3.15, 16. For Rome, see McKitterick et al. 2013; Taylor et al. 2016. 12. Compare Con. 2.14.19, which indicates that knowledge of the divine takes place within its own terms. 13. On ‘poeta’ see Brownlee (1984: 597–610). Ascoli (2008: 400–405), regards it as a refusal of the title ‘autore’, noting (402) Macrobius’s use of “sacra poematis” in reference to the Aeneid (Saturnalia 1.24, 13, cf. 3.1–2) discussing Virgil’s representation of sacred things, religion, and the gods. 14. Convivio 2.14.5 refers to Phaeton (Met. 2.1–380) as giving reason to the Pythagorean explanation that the sun once strayed from its course, leaving marks of its scorching which are the Milky Way.

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15. The Church itself, as a woman, the ‘bella sposa’ of 32.128, receives a historically new accentuation in Dante: see Pelikan (1990: 78). The Church’s femininity, as well as her authority, is stressed in Con. 2.5.5, quoting Song of Songs 8.5. 16. Leonardi notes the derivation of ‘continga’ from Aeneid 6.108–109, in the context of Aeneas’ desire to see his father. 17. On the terms on which Dante would return to Florence, see Steinberg (2013: 167–174). 18. At least four James appear in the New Testament. Dante follows the tradition by which the body of the martyred James came to Galicia by ship. Santiago de Compostela became a see c.1095. In this plurality of names, the Protoevangelium of James (second century, second half) identifies its author as James the Less, making him stepbrother of Christ by Joseph’s first marriage: see Elliott (1993: 49). 19. The Pelican is common in Medieval art (e.g. in the mosaic in the apse of S Miniato in Florence). It sits above the tree where Eve takes the fruit; or above the inscription on the cross, and as figuring Christ giving his blood, as a marker of love, it becomes an image used indirectly: in Piers Plowman Christ ‘feddest with Thy fresshe blood oure forfadres in helle’ (C.134), and bade sinners seek for their sin ‘sauete at his brest’ (C.12.54); for the mother-­images with which the Pelican blends, see Isaiah 49.15, 66.13. 20. Lines 38–39  perhaps referencing Metaphysics 12.8 (2004: 376–381), to which may be added the pseudo-Aristotelian Liber de Causis, which is used in Convivio 3.2.4–7. 21. Adam is named in Inf. 3.115, and Purg. 9.10, 11.44, 29.86, 32.37, and named by periphrasis in Inf. 4.55, Purg. 33.61–63, and of course, in Paradiso 7 and 13, discussed in the next chapter. See ED—entry by Andrea Ciotti and Vincenzo Mengaldo. 22. On Dante’s speech to Adam, see comments in Lansing (2009: 59–80). Nimrod is in the Commedia as a display of pride (Inf. 31.77, Purg. 12.34–36), which may be analogous to Adam crossing bounds. His language is shown as deficient. Babel, the scene of his activities (Genesis 10.8–10, 11.1–9) evokes Babylon. See Benfell (1992: 77–93), Barolini (2019: 137–154). 23. Compare 23.138, and rhyme-words essilio/concilio. The third-rhyme word ‘Virgilio’ remembers his exile in Limbo. See Raffa (2002: 73–87). 24. For noon, see Hill (1982: 93–97), arguing that Adam’s unfallen state, like the time of Paradiso, would have been ‘perpetual noon’ (95). 25. The Liber Pontificalis, first appearing in the early sixth century, and based on the Liberian Catalogue, written by the ‘Chronographer of 354’, which ended with Liberius as Pope, named these early martyrs. See Sághuy (2015: 37–56). After Constantine became Christian, the way opened for Damasus,

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Bishop of Rome in 366 (‘Pope’ is a sixth-century term), to create martyr cults, particularly associated with the catacombs, which, as dating from the fourth century, seems to have replaced ‘cimitero’. 26. Wolves: cp. Matthew 7.15. Paradiso 17.82 and 18.130–136 are echoed, for these new Popes. For Cahors, John XXII’s city, see Inf. 11.50. Peter’s anger may be because of the unspoken pun on ‘simony’ (Acts 8.5–24, Inf. 19.1): apocryphally, Simon Magus challenged Peter in Rome itself. 27. See Convivio 4.5.20 for Dante’s regard for Scipio Africanus, and Monarchia 2.9.18, and Wilson (2008: 151–155). For Petrarch see Bernardo (1962). 28. Jacoff (1991: 233–246) argues, perhaps too hard, for the redemption of the erotic with Europa. If Crete is the nesting place for Jupiter in Inferno 14, it resembles Delos, Apollo and Diana’s birthplace, another ‘nido’, like the bird’s (23.2) and Leda’s (27.98), which is effectively, Dante’s ‘nido’— a word uniting the ends of the Fixed Stars cantos, making them a nest.

Bibliography Aristotle, 1996, Physics, trans. Robin Waterfield, Oxford: O.U.P. Armour, Peter, 1995, ‘Paradiso XXVII’ Lectura Dantis 16–17: Dante’s Divine Comedy: Introductory Readings III—Paradiso: 402–423. Ascoli, Albert Russell, 2008, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author, Cambridge: C.U.P. Barolini, Teodolinda, 1984, Dante’s Poets: Textuality and Truth in the Comedy (Princeton: Princeton U.P.). ———, 2019, ‘Difference as Punishment or Difference as Pleasure’, Textual Cultures 12: 137–154. Benfell, V.  Stanley, 1992, ‘Nimrod, the Ascent to Heaven and Dante’s “ovra inconsummabile”’, DS 110: 77–93. ———, 1997, ‘Biblical Truth in the Examination Cantos of Dante’s Paradiso’, Dante Studies 115: 89–109. Benjamin, Walter, 2003, ‘Central Park’ in Selected Writing 4: 1938–1940 ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U.P. Benveniste, Emile, 1971, Problems in General Linguistics trans. May Elizabeth Meek, Coral Gables: Miami U.P. Bernardo, Aldo S, 1962, Scipio and the Africa and the Birth of Humanism’s Dream, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U.P. Brown, Peter, 1981, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity, London: SCM. Brownlee, Kevin, 1984, ‘Why the Angels Speak Italian: Dante as Vernacular Poeta in Paradiso XXV’, Poetics Today 5: 597–610. ———, 1990, ‘Language and Desire in Paradiso XXVI’, Lectura Dantis 6: 46–59. Bosco, Umberto, 1965, ‘Paradiso 23’, Annual Report of the Dante Society, with Accompanying Papers 83: 1–22.

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Boyle, Marjorie O’Rourke, 2000, ‘Closure in Paradise: Dante Outsings Aquinas’, MLN 115: 1–12. Cicero, 1998, Republic and The Laws trans. Niall Rudd, Oxford: O.U.P. Cremona, Joseph, 1981, ‘Paradiso XXVI’ in Kenelm Foster and Patrick Boyde (eds.), Cambridge Readings in Dante’s Comedy, Cambridge: C.U.P.: 174–190. Dahlberg, Charles, 1969, ‘Love and the Roman de la Rose’, Speculum, 44: 568–584 Davis, C.T. 1957, Dante and the Idea of Rome, Oxford: Clarendon. Duffy, Eamon, 2014, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes, New Haven: Yale U.P. Durling, Robert, 1976, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime Sparse and Other Lyrics, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U.P. Elliott, J.K. (ed.), 1993, The Apocryphal New Testament in an English Translation Based on M.R. James, Oxford: Clarendon. Grant, Edward, 1994, Planets, Stars, and Orbs: The Medieval Cosmos 1200–1687, Cambridge: C.U.P. Grant, Michael, 1994, Saint Peter, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Hawkins, Peter S., 1999, Dante’s Testaments: Essays in Scriptural Imagination, Stanford: Stanford U.P. ———, 2006, ‘All Smiles: Poetry and Theology in Dante’, PMLA 121: 371–387. Hill, Thomas D., 1982, ‘Adam’s Noon: Paradiso XXVI, 139–142’, DS 100: 93–97. Hollander, Robert, 1969, Allegory in Dante’s Commedia, Princeton: Princeton U.P. Jacoff, Rachel, 1991, ‘The Rape/Rapture of Europa: Paradiso 27’ in Rachel Jacoff and Jeffrey T. Schnapp (eds.), The Poetry of Allusion: Virgil and Ovid in Dante’s Commedia, Stanford: Stanford U.P.: 233–246. ———, 1999, ‘Dante and the Legends of St John’, DS: 45–57. Kay, Richard, 2003, ‘Unwintering January (Dante, Paradiso 27.142–143)’, MLN 118: 237–244. Lansing, Richard, 2009, ‘The Pageantry of Dante’s Verse’, DS: 59–80. Lacan, Jacques, 1990, Television, trans. Dennis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson, New York: W.W. Norton. ———, 1999, Encore: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality ed. Jacques Alain-Miller, trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W.W. Norton. Lewis, C.S., 1967, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature, Cambridge: C.U.P. Macrobius, 1952, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio trans. William Harris Stahl, New York: Columbia U.P. McKitterick, Rosamond, John Osborne, Carol M. Richardson and Joanna Story (eds), 2013, Old Saint Peter’s, Rome, Cambridge: C.U.P. Montemaggi, Vittorio, 2007, ‘“La rose che il verbo divino carne si fece: Human Bodies and Truth in the Poetic Narrative of the Commedia’, in John C. Barnes and Jennifer Petrie (eds.), Dante and the Human Body: Eight Essays, Dublin: Four Courts Press: 159–194.

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Morgan, Alison, 1990, Dante and the Medieval Other World, Cambridge: C.U.P. Mynors, R.A.B., 1990, Virgil’s Georgics, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Neff, Amy, 1998, ‘The Pain of Compassio: Mary’s Labor at the Foot of the Cross’, Art Bulletin 80: 254–273. Peden, Alison, M., 1985, ‘Macrobius and Medieval Dream Literature’, Medium Aevum 54: 59–73. Pelikan, Jaroslav, 1990, Eternal Feminines: Three Theological Allegories in Dante’s Paradiso, Brunswick: NJ: Rutgers U.P. Pertile, Lino, 1991, ‘“Così si fa la pelle bianca nera”: l’enigma di Par. XXVII.136–38’, Lettere Italiane, 43: 3–26. Picone, Michelangelo, 1989, ‘Miti, Metafore e Similitudini del Paradiso: un essempio di lettura’, Studi Danteschi 69: 193–217. Raffa, Guy P., 2002, ‘Dante’s Poetics of Exile’, Annali d’ Italianistica 20: 73–87. Ragland, Ellie, 1995, ‘Psychoanalysis and Courtly Love’, Arthuriana 5: 1–20. Rubin, Miri, 2004, ‘Mary’, History Workshop Journal 58: 1–16. Sághuy, Marianne, 2015, ‘The Bishop of Rome and the Martyrs’ in Geoffrey Dunn (ed.), The Bishop of Rome in Late Antiquity, Farnham: Ashgate: 37–56. See, generally, Eamon Duffy, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes (New Haven: Yale University Press 2014). Scaglione, Aldo, 1967, ‘Imagery and Thematic Patterns in Paradiso XXIII’ in Thomas G.  Bergin (ed.), From Time to Eternity: Essays on Dante’s Divine Comedy (New Haven: Yale U.P.): 137–172. Scott, Mark S.M, 2006, ‘Shades of Grace: Origen and Gregory of Nyssa’s Soteriological Exegesis of the “Black and beautiful” Bride in Song of Songs 1.5’, Harvard Theological Review 99: 65–83. Scott, Robert A, 2010, Miracle Cures: Saints, Pilgrimage, and the Healing Powers of belief Stanford: Stanford U.P. Scrivano, Riccardo, 2003, ‘Agostinismo e Profetismo in Paradiso XXVII’, Italianistica: Rivista di letteratura italiana, 32:. 357–365. Selenu, Stefano, 2014, ‘Nella caccia della lingua: La gioia di Dante e lo spettro di Babele tra volgare, vita e arti meccaniche’, DS 2014: 59–85. Seward, Barbara, 1955, ‘Dante’s Mystic Rose’ SP 52: 515–523. Shaw, J.E., 1921, ‘And the Evening and the Morning were One Day’, Modern Philology 18: 569–590. Silverstein, Theodor, 1932, ‘Dante and the “Visio Pauli”’, MLN 47: 397–399. Stahl, William Harris (ed.), 1952, Macrobius: Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, New York: Columbia U.P. Steinberg, Justin, 2013, Dante and the Limits of the Law, Chicago: Chicago U.P. Taylor, Rabun, Katherine W.  Rinne, and Spiro Kostof (eds.), 2016, Rome: An Urban History from Antiquity to the Present, Cambridge: C.U.P. Vallone, Aldo, (ed.), 1987, Paradiso, Napoli: Editrice Ferraro. Wilson, Robert, 2008, Prophecies and Prophecy in Dante’s Commedia, Florence: Leo S. Olschki.

CHAPTER 6

Angels: Paradiso 28 and 29

Until the end of canto 29, Dante is within the Primum Mobile (the Prime Mover). This chapter, which necessitates considering, amongst other things, the uncanny effects of numbers, has as its subject materiality, and immateriality, and whether the opposition between these is final. Angels— the topic of these two cantos—are immaterial, but it is evident that matter, including ‘prime matter’, exercises Dante, being especially the focus of canto 29. Matter as ‘prime matter’ may predate creation, and haunt it. Paradiso gives a privileged place to the spiritual and non-material, but it may be impossible to find consistency in these cantos, along with their attendant cantos which analyse creation (Paradiso 2, 7, and 13), considered alongside here. We may find that if consistency fails, that is because the arguments can never go in one way only and because Dante’s loyalties are split.

From the Convivio to the Paradiso Angels, as far as this chapter is concerned, is a term which includes all the nine orders of Intelligences, or Movers, not just the lowest rank who are, obviously, called ‘angels’. Canto 28 gives them their place; canto 29 describes their creation, and the creation-account differs notably from the hexaemeral account in Genesis, because angels and their creation can only be brought into Genesis 1 by a deliberate act of interpretation. They are outside the realm of the sexed body (Matthew 22.30); indeed, they have © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Tambling, The Poetry of Dante’s Paradiso, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65628-7_6

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no body, though this was controversial: that angels have matter and form (being hylomorphic), was Bonaventura’s view, in contradiction to Peter Lombard and to Aquinas. Beatrice declares their incorporeality in canto 4.46–48. They are spirits, since ‘He maketh his angels spirits and his ministers a flame of fire’ (Hebrews 1.7). Further, they are of Paradiso’s essence, though they were, earlier, implied in the Hermes-like messenger of Inferno 9.79–105; and an angel conducted the ship of souls in Purgatorio 2.28–51, with other angels appearing on the mountain. In the sonnet ‘Gentil pensero che parla di vui’, the ‘spiritel novo d’amore’ (VN 38, line 10), allegorises the sweet thought which speaks of the donna gentile, reappearing in Convivio 2, in the canzone ‘Voi che ‘ntendendo il terzo ciel movete’, where he is ‘uno spiritel d’amore gentile’ (line 42). This spirit, an inspiring, and disturbing thought, belongs to a classical sense of spiritelli which Donatello made significant for the Renaissance, but where Dante preceded him (Dempsey 2001: 38, 105). The Primum Mobile is ‘uniform’ in its parts (it has no stars to give it a situation or to measure it), it has no ‘dove’, no where, no place, except in the divine mind which generates it, the love that rolls it, and the power which it rains down. Its boundaries are light and love (27.106–112, 28.54; Boyde 1981: 158–160). Spinning to catch up with the Empyrean, it dictates motion to the spheres below: it is girdled (‘precinto’) by him who girdles (‘cinge’). Nothing measures its spinning—time is only time when it is measured. The spheres internal to it move in an ordered sequence, measured by their stars and planets. Beatrice calls the stars the leaves of time; their circling round the northern star giving a first intimation of how humans can mark it off time. The other heavens are measured from the Primum Mobile, as ten is determined by the half (five) and the fifth (i.e. two); two means of measurement involving hands.1 The Empyrean is the tenth heaven (Convivio 2.12.12), perhaps corresponding to the tenth part of the angels who fell (Convivio 2.5.12) for there are nine orders, and a tenth missing (Barsella 2010: 129, 131–133). Further, the tenth part of everything belongs to the poor (Para. 12.93), giving the tenth a special place, since poverty is the essential for paradisal lives. Is ten necessary because for Gregory the Great—following an exegetical tradition from Origen—the parable of the ten pieces of silver, of which one was lost (Luke 15.8, 9) corresponded to the ten heavens (as 9 plus 1—the tenth being redeemed humanity)? The source for the number of fallen angels was Revelation 12.4, giving a third (which would better suit with nine).

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The number of angels or Intelligences appears in Convivio 2.4.4–5, citing Plato to say that beyond those Intelligences which moved the heavens, there were as many Intelligences as kinds of things, because each Intelligence, or Idea, or Form (eidos—Aristotle’s term), or each Universal (the Scholastic term) generates its own kinds of things—that is, generates different ‘species’—the Latin for eidos, and what Plato means by forms, or universal natures. Aquinas too believed that each angel was a species, each therefore different; each was unique because not linked to matter, which makes humans, for example, part of a single species (ST  1a.50.4). As human nature has two forms of blessedness, the active and, above that, the contemplative, there must be angels whose life comprises contemplation, or speculation only, and which must comprise a greater number. In proving that, Dante cites Aristotle’s Ethics, Book 10.8.1178b, ‘che alle sustanze separate convegna pure la speculativa vita’ (the contemplative life is suitable for separate substances)—and that phrase includes his definition of angels (Con. 2.4.13). Ptolemy’s system demands nine moving heavens, their positions determined by ‘perspettiva’ (optics), arithmetic, and geometry (Convivio 2.3.6). Were there nine orders because as Virgil says, ‘in an uneven number heaven delights’ (Eclogues 8.76)? Does Dante’s pleasure in 3 and its multiples even precede interest in the Trinity, on whose three-ness Paradiso continually plays? Dante, wanting the number nine, because of its associations with Beatrice, is unusual in making Dionysius’ hierarchy of angels correspond to the ‘physical’ heavens, even moving them (so Convivio 2.4.13). Both systems of thinking—the numerological and the physical number of heavens—let him think in a 9 + 1 sequence. Convivio 2 chapters 13–15 show Dante investing in the imaginative possibilities of the cosmos. To the Crystalline Heaven (the Primum Mobile), he assigns Moral Philosophy, the realm of Aristotle’s Ethics, which, analogous to the activities of the First Mover, states the necessity for the other sciences to be learned and taught, so setting them in motion. The Empyrean is matched by Theology, whose subject is God: giving no room for legal arguments or sophistries, associating it with peace (quoting John 14.27). He quotes Solomon as saying, not in the Latin of the Vulgate but in Italian: ‘Sessanta sono le regine, e ottanta l’amiche concubine; e delle ancille adolescenti non è numero: una è la columba mia e la perfetta mia’ (Song of Songs 6.7–8, Con. 2.14.20: ‘there are sixty queens, and eighty concubines, and young maidens without number: one is my dove, and my perfect one’). Theology is the peaceful dove amongst this plurality of

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women, all of whom may be branches of knowledge which wisdom loves; but theology is unique, in wisdom’s assessment. The sixty (5 x 12) compares with the sixty women where Beatrice is a ninth in Vita Nuova 6. It anticipates Solomon as fifth in the circle of twelve in Paradiso 10; Paradiso 13, Solomon’s canto, is no. 80 of the hundred of the Commedia.

Canto 28: The Reversed Image Beatrice’s words prelude revelation.2 Dante turns to see what was mirrored in Beatrice’s eyes; they show a reversal of everything imagined before; instead of the earth being at the centre with rings around it, he sees a point (un punto) with nine enlarging circles around it (16–39). The universe’s circumference has become the centre, and the circles—the nearest to the centre travelling fastest—correspond to those spheres of the planets travelled through, as if everything is bodiless: everything seen before is an allegory of this new vision. Circles affirm unceasingness, and circular movements have a spiritual significance, as Ptolemy contends in the Preface to the Almagest, which gives a spiritual function to astronomy: For almost every peculiar attribute of material nature becomes apparent from the peculiarities of its motion from place to place. Thus one can distinguish the corruptible from the incorruptible by whether it undergoes motion in a straight line or in a circle, and heavy from light and passive from active by whether it moves towards the centre or away from the centre. … from the constancy, order, symmetry and calm which are associated with the divine, it makes its followers lovers of this divine beauty, accustoming them and reforming their natures, as it were, to a similar spiritual state. (Toomer 1984: 36–37; Pedersen 1974: 26–46)

The ‘punto’ is God. In ‘Burnt Norton’ (Four Quartets), T.S.  Eliot writes, following Dante: At the still point of the turning world. (Eliot 2015: 1.181)

It is a sentence, propositional, tentative, asking what would be there, if such a thing was imaginable, wondering if turning and stillness are reconcilable. Dante makes it that from which hangs heaven, and all nature, deriving it from the Metaphysics (Aristotle 2004: 12.7. 1072b). For Macrobius, ‘geometricians define the point as that space which, on account

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of its incomprehensible minuteness, cannot be further divided into parts; in fact it is not even considered a part but is said to be merely a symbol’ (Stahl 1952: 154). A point is, geometrically, virtual only, as Macrobius says, lacking extent, magnitude, and dimensions; the punctum as a hole made by pricking implies that it is a hollowed-out instant. Dante confirms this in speaking of geometry: the point and the circumference are both immeasurable (Con. 2.13.27). Kierkegaard speaks of this ‘point’, which is defined by him as ‘the moment’: ‘in the individual life, anxiety is the moment’ (Kierkegaard 1980: 81). Confrontation with that moment, however, is crucial, since ‘only with the moment does history begin’ (Kierkegaard 1980: 89); an insight essential for Paradiso, since it culminates with another confrontation with ‘the moment’, God as ‘un punto solo’ (33.94). Seeing the ‘punto’ gives wonder, and induces a crisis of memory, as the soul ‘appressando sé al suo disire’ (draws near to its desire, Para. 1.7). That ‘punto’ organises the writing of the poem, and in Kierkegaardian terms, makes it the source for an understanding of history, informing all three cantiche alike. Kierkegaardian ‘anxiety’ may be too modern a word for Dante, but the punto is a moment re-setting everything, climactic, initiatory. Developing his thought, enabling us to bring it into contact with what canto 28 gives, Kierkegaard calls the moment: that ambiguity in which time and eternity touch each other, and with this the concept of temporality is posited, whereby time constantly intersects eternity and eternity constantly pervades time. As a result, the above-­ mentioned division acquires its significance: the present time, the past time, the future time. (89)

What is seen in this ‘still point’ is enigmatic, and double, because the circle nearest the point is the Primum Mobile (40–45, 70–72). Yet this is unlike the world of sense (49), where what is most distant from the centre (i.e. the earth) spins fastest, being most divine (for Saturn is more ‘divine’ than the moon). Now, Dante says, ‘l’essemplo /e l’essemplare non vanno d’un modo’ (55, 56—the example and the exemplar do not go in the same mode). Which is more authoritative? The exemplar is the paradigm, the pattern, like the divine Idea; it is the opposite of an example, which means a ‘sample’. But ‘sample’ may render the word ‘type’, as in typology, and the Old Testament type may be an example, the New Testament being its fulfilment, as Paul declares in I Corinthians 10.6. Or the example may be

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a prototype with which the literal fulfilment in the New Testament accords. There is an undecidability acknowledged because both images of the centre and the circle, while mutually contradictory, are only examples. No exemplar can stand alone, unable to become an example; each image is figurative. The ‘truth’ of things is announced (see in canto 28 lines 2, 8, 39, 87, 108, 136, and 139, and line 28.2). ‘Il vero’ succeeds 27.148, ‘vero frutto verrà’; and Contini noted the pun on ‘first truth’ in ‘primavera’ (28.116— quoted, Mazzotta 2005: 16). Yet the true image is relative, image giving way to image as both being  true, but this one  which is new is still an image, marked by that reversibility characteristic of Dante; for example, in Inferno 34; in Marsyas being turned inside-out; in snow going upwards in Para 27. 67–72; in time growing downwards from its roots in the Primum Mobile (27.118–120). Such reversibility is Kierkegaard’s ambiguity. Reading reality customarily, the moon, or what moves it (see line 75) completes in a month the sun’s yearly circuit; the years of the planets going outwards beyond the sun being longer. The outmost circle, the fastest, should be divinest—which is impossible to say of the moon, though it moves fastest. Read in the Primum Mobile, the outermost sphere corresponding to the moon is slowest, according with Piccarda and the nuns being the most sluggish, spiritually; but the planet is apparently fastest, if not giddiest. If the sun’s year-long journey is the norm, the planets below it rush, but show fallaciousness; those above are slower. In the model placing the Empyrean at the centre, these are faster, deeper. The Primum Mobile, greatest in excellence and power of conferring goodness, requires the greatest size; the threefold repetitions of ‘maggior’ being noteworthy (67, 68). But if considering the ‘virtù’ (73, 65) of the substances (i.e. the angels) in the wheels, the smaller (faster) is the nearer to the ‘punto’ (70–72). Both models work, God being at the circumference and at the centre; greater and the smaller correspond, impossibly. The meeting of irreconcilable double  visions gives what Walter Benjamin calls ‘the dialectical image’, as the moment of maximum insight, concentrating everything of time and history into one abbreviated moment; sudden awareness of which gives what is properly called ‘temporality’. ‘Historical time’, as opposed to ‘a temporal continuum’ (Benjamin 2003: 407) is encountered when figures whom Dante meets concentrate all history within them. To be ‘out of time’ means encountering how reality appears to be, and how else it could be realised, in the same moment. Dante comes face to face with this experience of ‘temporality’, its impact being the Commedia.

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The Celestial Hierarchy After Beatrice’s lucid account, like a gentle north wind cleaning the sky in its every governmental region, or ‘parish’ (‘paroffia’, 84), comes Dionysius’ hierarchy of the intelligences within the circles, who, ‘quasi innumerabili’ (Con. 2.5.5), become more so as they shine: che ‘l numero loro più che ‘l doppiar de li scacchi s’inmilla. (92, 93)

(that their number thousands itself more than the doubling of the chess pieces) In the Arab story, the King of Persia was checkmated or bankrupted, by making a deal with the inventor of chess, who understood how figures on 64 squares could pluralise exponentially, creating an innumerable army. Dante integrates an Islamic narrative of outsmarting an opponent, with this divine army, multiplying itself by thousands (s’inmilla), and the heavens like a chess-board, whose layout gives more sense of ‘paroffia’. The number’s near incomputability combines two ideas: infinity and the uncanny in numbering, which has power to trick. The first circles nearest the centre reveal the Seraphim, the Cherubim, and Thrones which ‘il primo ternaro terminonno’ (they close the first ternary order, 105). The trinitarian thought is stamped into what Neo-­ Platonism would call emanations outwards from God. This ‘ternary’ occupies three terzine followed by another drawing the lesson about the primacy of sight (97–114). It sees deepest, its contemplation matched by pseudo-Dionysius (line 131), evoking a word-play on ‘templo’ (53). ‘A templum in the Roman sense was an area of land or sky marked out for religious purposes, e.g. for augural observation of the flight of birds. … there was nothing to prevent a templum from embracing the whole visible sky: and here (in Somnium Scipio 15) the whole of the universe is the templum of its presiding deity’ (Powell 1990: 155). Contemplation, and intellectual knowing, is declared superior to loving as more subjective, backing Aquinas against Bonaventura. Yet it is an open question if that is the belief Paradiso proceeds with. It qualifies the Victorines’ appropriation of Dionysius, which stressed love, for pseudo-Dionysius never referred to this. They made the last ternary allegorical of the nature of the soul, and its ways of apprehending, the second, of the soul reaching its limits, and this first, of the soul reaching above and outside itself (Coolman 2009: 89).

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L’altro ternaro, che così germoglia in questa primavera sempiterna che notturno Arïete non dispoglia, perpetüalemente ‘Osanna’ sberna con tre melode, che suonano in tree ordini di letizia onde s’interna. In essa gerarcia son l’altre dee: prima Dominazioni, e poi Virtudi, l’ordine terzo di Podestadi èe. Poscia ne’ due penultimi tripudi Principati e Arcangeli si girano; l’ultimo è tutto d’Angelici ludi. (115–126)

(The other ternary, which thus flowers in this eternal spring which nocturnal Aries does not despoil, perpetually unwinters [with] ‘Hosannah’, with three melodies which sound in three orders of joy whereby it threes itself. In that hierarchy are other gods, first Dominions, and then Virtues, and the third order is of Powers. Then Principalities and Archangels turn in the two penultimate dances; the last is all angelic playings.) The second ternary pluralises three, via its ter beginnings, and in ‘sempiterna’. It includes another of Dante’s distinctive three-word lines ‘perpetüalemente Osanna sberna’. In the third ternary, a ‘tripudi’ as a triumphal dance (another tri) includes three in it, while two pervades the first two lines of the triplet, the plurality of angels in the last line securing another doubling. The spring sense associates with the neologism opening the canto: ‘quella che ’mparadisa la mia mente’ (3): Paradise is the place, the condition, and the person who brings the spring. The writing dances like these angelic groupings, through repetitions, ‘tiene’, and ‘terra’; ‘sempre … sempre’ (95, 96). In nocturnal Aries the constellation is seen at dusk in the Autumn, while the sun is in Libra, so introducing winter. Opposition between Spring and Autumn, night going, and unwintering— compare ‘sverni’ (27.142)—contrasts with human miscalculation which excludes winter. Singing Hosannah—Sapegno associates the verb ‘sberna’ with birdsinging driving out the winter—introduces perpetual spring, echoing Matelda in Purgatorio 28.49–51 with which this canto 28 corresponds. The last terzina begins with two (‘due’), then one (the penultimate) and then three (‘tripudi’), gives two names in the second line, and one in the third, with the reminder, in ‘l’ultimo’, that this is the ninth heaven, another 3 × 3.

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These orders look up (‘s’ammiranno’), mirroring what they see, drawing upwards what is below (‘tirati … tirano’, 129). Such looking up was the work of the pseudo-Dionysius, whose name is punned on with ‘disio’: he desired to see them, and named the orders. What he saw in contemplation, instructed by St Paul (131, 138), Dante now sees, following him, and Proclus.3 Gregory the Great (Pope 590–604), departed from him (Rorem says that Gregory did not claim to know Greek, so he could hardly read Dionysius, though living in Constantinople might have qualified that problem); and he had to smile at himself when in heaven. For Joan Petersen (1987: 529–551), Dionysius’ order stressed the character of the angel, its abstract quality over Gregory’s stress on its function and practical manifestation. But any of the nine orders can perform the functions of a lesser angel, which would prevent Gregory from appreciating the hierarchy within which these orders are set. PseudoDionysius was interested in knowing the names of the orders—the individual angel being impossible to name: as the angel says to Manoah, future father of Samson, ‘why askest thou thus after my name, seeing it is secret (or “wonderful”)?’ (Judges 13.18—see Janowitz 1991: 359–372). Knowing the name gives knowledge of a person. For pseudo-Dionysius, God’s name is unknowable, but something may be learned of the hierarchical order in which the angel moves. The Seraphim are evoked in Para. 4.28 and 8.27, and known from Isaiah 6.1–7 (see Para. 9.77–78), as scintillas of fire (Hebrew sarap, to burn). Their covered faces and feet, implied, for Jerome, mystery. The Cherubim, guarding the tree of life (Genesis 3.24), appear throughout the Hebrew Bible. They bear the throne of God (Ezekiel 10.1), in a citation put alongside Revelation 4.8, in Purgatorio 29.91–105. The black cherub who claims Guido da Montefeltro is a logician: these beings relate to intelligence (Inf. 27.112–123). The Thrones are alternatively Mirrors (9.61); Cunizza indicates that their role is in judgment, though Sbacchi (2006: 45, 55), noting their relationship to Saturn, thinks of them as imperturbable, absorbed in perpetual peace, like the contemplative. The second ternary comprise Dominions (Jupiter—appropriate for the wielding of Justice, as in canto 19.28–30), then Virtues (Mars), whose name connotes masculinity and inner resistance, and Powers (the Sun). ‘Podesta’, a familiar term in Florence, reaffirms the relevance of the sun to rule. Francis and Dominic both comprise Powers. The third ternary comprises Principalities (Venus, and the Princes of canto 8), Archangels, and Angels. Archangels may associate with salvation for many, for Michael

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(‘who is like God?’), ‘the great prince which standeth for the children of thy people’ [i.e. Israel, Daniel 12.1] is the Archangel of Jude 9 and leads the angels in Revelation 12.7. Further, I Thessalonians 4.16 confirms the archangel’s salvific work. Perhaps he has his analogue in Mercury’s flight of the eagle. The angel seems more solitary. Gabriel (‘man of God’, or ‘God has shown himself strong’) is the only Biblically named angel, instructed in Daniel 8.16: ‘Gabriel, make this man to understand the vision’, and in Daniel 9.21 called ‘the man Gabriel’. In Luke 1.19, he ‘stands in the presence of God’; in Luke 1.26, he is the annunciating angel. Raphael, associated with the Apocryphal Tobias, is mentioned in Paradiso 4.48. Paul names angelic orders in Ephesians 1.2, and Colossians 1.16, in a context assigning fullness (the pleroma) to Christ (1.19, 2.9), as if Christ includes all these ranks.4 The ternary nearest the earth is the Spirit’s sphere, the second the Son’s, the third, the Father’s. Each person in the Trinity can be considered ‘triplicemente’ (Con. 2.5.9); each in each ternary contemplates in different ways. If each sees triply, we reach 27 (9 × 3). The hierarchies, and what they see, are not fully distinguishable. Origen argued that Isaiah’s Seraphim were the Son and the Holy Spirit, and further, that Christ was an angel, translating ‘Wonderful Counsellor’ (Isaiah 9.6) as ‘the angel of great counsel’.5 Bonaventura told how the Seraph came to Francis when he received the stigmata; Christ being within the seraph’s wings.

Canto 29: Angels and Creation Quando ambedue li figli di Latona, coperti del Montone e de la Libra, fanno de l’orizzonte insieme zona, quant’è dal punto che ‘l cenìt i ‘nlibra infin che l’uno e l’altro da quel cinto, cambiando l’emisperio, si dilibra, tanto, col volto di riso dipinto, si tacque Bëatrice, riguardando fiso nel punto che m’avëa vinto. (29.1–9)

(When both the children of Latona, covered by the Ram and by the Scales, make together a single girdle of the horizon, so far from the point that the zenith balances the scale until one or the other of that belt,

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changing its hemisphere, liberates itself—so, with a smile pictured on her face Beatrice remained silent, looking fixedly on the point which had conquered me.) Canto 29 summons up an image of momentary balance, the moment of creation at the spring equinox, when day and night are equal—the evening and the morning being the first day. Apollo and Diana, the sun and moon, are momentarily under the sign of the Ram and Libra, the Scales. Half of both are seen. One line of the horizon joins them, as they are joined in imagination at the zenith, as the fulcrum. This stasis lasts for a ‘punto’—then the scale unbalances, as one or the other arises or dips. For that moment Beatrice breaks off her speech which began at 28.98, and which now resumes (29.10–146). The image assumes being on earth, at either of the equinoxes, looking at the moment when sun and moon are momentarily on opposite horizons. Here, it is less the sun and moon which are seen but the mythic figures issuing from Latona whose maternal influence governs. Beatrice is arrested by punto, the still point, for an instant, a moment. The double meaning of ‘punto’ is unfolded when she speaks of it having neither ubi nor quando, because God is not in space, and time is only measured outside the Primum Mobile. She has seen what Dante wants to know—that is, ‘dove e quando’ these angelic loves were created (46–48)— mirrored where ‘s’appunta ogne ubi e ogne quando’ (12—where every where and every when meet in a point). The canto began with an Italian ‘quando’; line 12 concludes with ubi and quando in Latin: an almost undetectable difference, but such is the material of Paradiso. Paradiso and Creation—Canto 7 Canto 29 is the fourth Paradiso creation-account, necessitating return to the earlier ones, not discussed before. The first was in considering the moon (2.112–148) where virtue from the Primum Mobile is distributed in the Heaven of the Fixed Stars, and so below. Paradiso 7, whose context is why God choose to incarnate himself, speaks of heavenly and terrestrial creation, and includes the corruption things fall into, compounded from the four elements: Li angeli, frate, e ‘l paese sincero nel qual tu se’, dir si posson creati,

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sì come sono, il loro essere intero; ma li alimenti che tu hai nomati e quelle cose che di lor si fanno da creata virtù sono informati. Creata fu la materia ch’elli hanno; creata fu la virtù informante in queste stelle che ‘ntorno a lor vanno. L’anima d’ogne bruto e de le piante di complession potenzïata tira lo raggio e ‘l moto de le luci sante; ma vostra vita sanza mezzo spira la somma beninanza, e la innamora di sé sì che poi sempre la disira. (7.130–144)

(The angels, brother, and the unsullied country in which you are [the heavens] it may be said were created, as they are, in their entire being; but the elements which you have named [the four elements of lines 124–125] and those things which were made of them are formed by created virtue. Created was the material which they have, created was the informing virtue in these stars which go around them. The spirit of every animal and of plant is drawn from a complex of potentials by the shining and the movement of the sacred lights, but your life the highest Beneficence breathes without mediation, and he so enamours it of himself that it always desires him.) This distinguishes between immediate and secondary acts of creation. What did God create directly, ‘sanza mezzo’ (7.67, 70, 142)? Among living souls, angels and humans, and the bodies of Adam and Eve, plus the heavenly bodies (the moon upwards) and prime matter. Angels and heavenly bodies, created directly (7.64–72), remain incorruptible as to their life: as Bemrose (2005: 97) argues. God creates only the incorruptible or immortal.6 But the matter comprising the four elements, and everything that derives from that (animal life, plants) was ‘informed’ by the created virtue of these angels over the six days of creation, and is not incorruptible, since not created by God ‘in loro essere intero’.7 Matter precedes, then, the four elements, which are constituted by an informing virtue given them by the stars. Animate and vegetative life comes from a ‘complession potenzïata’ deriving from the light and motion of the sacred lights; this complex which has been given power being a joining together of the heavenly elements possessing potentiality. The life of man is unique, however, following Genesis 2.7, being direct from God. In

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that sense, it was creation ex nihilo; and it made the soul of man ever after turn towards God in a natural thirst.8 Lines 142–144 recall Purg. 25. 67–75, on the development of each individual in the womb, though speaking more specifically about Adam. Since man’s creation was direct, it must have a resurrection. The body, God’s creation, cannot be set aside. Canto 13: 52–81 Aquinas describes creation in canto 13, starting with the Trinity, calling everything the splendour of that Idea (Christ) which our Sire (the Father) in Loving (the Spirit) begets. That light (Christ) streams from its Source (the Father) but is not parted from it, nor from the Love (the Spirit) which ‘s’intrea’ (57, a neologism: ‘makes itself three’). The shining out of the Idea is mirrored in nine subsistences—the nine orders of angelic beings, eternally remaining one (‘etternalmente rimanendosi una’, 60). The three weighty polysyllabic words of this line affirm by their deliberateness the Trinity, singleness, and continuance together, and they allow no entropy within the heavens. ‘Una’ has now appeared thrice—’disuna’ (56), ‘aduna’ (58), and ‘una’ (60). Three and one come together and relate to the ‘nove’ subsistences. ‘Sussistenze’ (59, equivalent to ‘substances’) relates to ‘subsisto’ (29.15) and ‘sussistenza’ in 33.115; in both those latter places, it means God himself, as that which stands entire in itself. After this singleness comes the difference. Below the moon, the light, the splendour of the Idea, descends to the remotest potencies on earth, that is, to prime matter, from act to act (i.e. from heaven to heaven), till it makes only ‘brevi contingenze’, brief contingencies, that is, things generated on earth, from seed (animals, and vegetables) or not (minerals): Quindi discende a l’ultime potenze giù d’atto in atto, tanto divenendo che più non fa che brevi contingenze: e questi contingenze essere intendo le cose generate, che produce con seme e sanza seme il ciel, movendo. La cera di costoro e chi la duce non sta d’un modo; e però sotto ‘l segno idëale poi più e men traluce. …

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Se fosse a punto la cera dedutta e fosse il cielo in sua virtù supprema, la luce del suggel parrebbe tutta; ma la natura la dà sempre scema, similemente operando a l’artista ch’a l’abito de l’arte ha man che trema. (13.61–69, 73–78)

(From there it descends to the last powers, from act to act, becoming such that it does not make more than brief contingencies. And by these contingencies we understand generated things, which heaven, moving, produces with and without seed. The wax of those, and that which moulds it do not exist in one mode, and therefore shine more and less under the ideal stamp … if the wax was more exactly adapted and if the heavens were supreme in their power, the light of the whole seal would all appear. But nature always gives defectively, like the artist who in the practice of his art has a hand that trembles.) The wax of these contingencies indicates primal matter. The image had appeared in canto 1.42, for the material comprising the world. What stamps the wax comes from the material heavens and their movers. The disparity between these two means that the ideal stamp takes, and shines, unevenly. ‘Luce’ from the living light of lines 55 and 56, leads into line 75, where the stamp image implies the form given to matter, which should be, overall, ideal. If the wax was more adapted to the stamp, and the heavens were at their maximum capacity of influence, the seal would shine transparently in what is generated. But nature misses something (compare 8.127–129), though this is not arguing for a defect in the force working on the wax. Nature, however, seems an extra figure brought in, and even Singleton’s note finds its workings puzzling, since it is admitted to have defects, while doing God’s work. In canto 13, prime matter seems to be refractory, rather than pure potency, that is, not fully receptive and able to develop. But more defects are admitted with the influence of the heavenly movers, a point which Con. 4.21.7 on the changing nature of the constellations admits. There is no thought of nature as fallen; the breakdown, if it exists, is between the non-receptivity of a prime matter which is external to the heavens, and the sense of a mediated creation from the heavens which stamps ideal forms only imperfectly.9 Similarly in with a work of art in Monarchia:

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if a fault occurs in its form when the artificer is perfect and his instrument is in its best condition, the fault must be attributed to the matter. The same is true in the case of nature, since God attains the goal of perfection and his instrument which is the heaven, can in no way lack its due perfection (as is evident from what we are taught by philosophy concerning the heaven), and consequently the only possible source for any fault whatsoever that occurs in things below must be a fault on the part of the matter involved. … Moreover any good whatever that occurs in things below cannot derive its existence from matter itself, which exists only as potentiality, but is primarily from God the artificer and secondarily from the heaven, which is the instrument of the divine art that people commonly call nature …. (Mon. 2.3, Kay 97–99)

That matter might be deaf to the artist’s intention appeared in Paradiso 1.127–129. It is ‘fluctuating matter’ (fluitantem materiam—Monarchia 2.2, 97). We observe a dualism between the divine worker and matter, that which is ‘the material cause’ of something being, which therefore always has the quality of ‘potentiality’ (in Aristotle the existence of something is reducible to the sum of its causes). And potentiality includes passivity. Nature is either a popular—possibly unreliable—synonym for God (see Kay 2.3., note 16; and Con. 3.4.10), or a concept going beyond the work of God, more unattributable in its being, as it seems to be in Para. 13. Canto 29. 22–36: Prime Matter Beatrice replies to Dante’s unspoken question—where and when were these angels created?—saying the eternal Love opened himself out into new loves. That utterance comes at the end of six lines (13–18) which begin with a negative and a positive (‘non per … ma perché’), and with four qualifications. It was in eternity; it was outside (fore) time and outside (fuor—the difference between those words will be noted) any force which might constrain him; it was as he pleased. These precede the main verb of the sentence, which comes at the end: ‘s’aperse in nuovi amor l’etterno amore’. These loves are the ‘splendore’, the angelic creation shining back, as in a mirror; declaring ‘Subsisto’—that is, ‘I am’: the Latin version of Exodus 3.14. The name, or declaration, shines back from creatures who can equally say it. A special place is accorded to these angels because they are created as immortal (i.e. they cannot die). As immaterial, according to Aquinas, they occupy no place: a point condemned by Bishop Tempier in 1277.10

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There could be no increase for God, no adding to him. Beatrice gives another negative (‘Né’—19): there was no inactivity beforehand—no time before the spirit of God moved on the face of the waters (Genesis 1.2). Rather there was free instantaneity, and threefold creation: form, matter, and these two joined, in the ‘Fiat lux’ of Genesis 1.3: Forma e materia, congiunte e purette, usciro ad esser che non avia fallo, come d’arco tricordo tre saette. E come in vetro, in ambra o in cristallo raggio resplende sì, che dal venire a l’esser tutto non è intervallo, così ‘l triforme effetto del suo sire ne l’esser suo raggiò insieme tutto sanza distinzïone in essordire. Concreato fu ordine e costrutto a le sustanze; e quelle furon cima nel mondo in che puro atto fu produtto: pura potenza tenne la parte ima; nel mezzo strinse potenza con atto tal vime, che già mai non si divima. (29.22–36)

(Form and matter, joined and absolutely pure or separate, issued into being which had no fault, like three arrows from a three-stringed bow. And as in glass, or amber, or crystal, a ray so glows [resplende—compare lines 14, 15], so that from its coming to its being there is no interval, thus the triform effect from its lord shone all together without distinction in its beginning. Order and structure were created with it in the substances and these were the height of the universe in which Pure Act was produced: Pure Potency held the lowest place; in the middle, Potency and Act were tied together with a bond which will never be unbound.) Creation of form, and matter (also called potency), and form and matter conjoined is a threefold shot from a three-corded bow bearing three arrows. The shooting out is equivalent to light running through three different transparent substances—‘vetro, ambra, [Greek electron—a sun-­ symbol], and cristallo’. The instantaneity of this action, the complement to the momentary pause of the opening of the canto, means that there is none of the gradualism of Neo-platonic emanations coming from the One. Rather, Light shines as the ‘triforme effecto del suo sire’; shining ‘insieme tutto’. Light seems to be three and one, and the

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receptacles into which it shines radiate light outwards. We have noted angels in Convivio 3.7.5 as ‘sustanze separate … sanza grossezza di materia, quasi diafani per la purità de la lora forma’ (separate substances, without grossness of materiality, as if diaphanous in the purity of their form). Being diaphanous accords with this being the Crystalline heaven, ‘cioè diafano, o vero tutto trasparente’ (Con. 2.3.7). Two further points need weighing. The image may presuppose the prior existence of these receptacles/light holders where shining back happens; further, the three arrows/forms of light correspond to form, matter, and form and matter combined, and what these are must be examined. Considering ‘forma e materia, congiunte e purette, / usciro ad esser che non avia fallo’ (22, 23): angels are pure form, separate from matter. Pure or prime matter comprises the building-blocks of the cosmos, either the four elements or rather something more primal than them. These conjoined, form the heavens, and, confirming Paradiso 7, are the direct creation of God. When God conjoins matter with the angels, we have the heavens. In reaffirming the creation of the heavenly orders (31–33), Beatrice makes angels ‘pure act’ (33), absolutely complete. Line 34 introduces potentiality (potenza): that is, prime matter, as what is below the moon, and the heavens. Lines 35–36 unite ‘potenza’ and ‘atto’ in the creation of the heavens. Language shifts. Line 22 gives form and matter, in line 33 pure act, in line 34 pure potentiality, and in line 35 potentiality and act. In Aristotle, ‘form’, meaning the essence of each thing, and its primary substance—but this substance is not matter—gives identity to matter (Metaphysics 1032b, 190–191). Matter in Aristotle seems to be ‘prime matter’, as ‘the primary substrate (hupokeimenon) of each thing, from which it comes to be, and which persists in the result’ (Metaphysics 192a.32–33, 31, compare Bostock 2006: 1–47). For Aristotle did not believe that the world had been created; matter had, therefore, no beginning. In Dante, angels as form inform the heavens which are created at the same instant as them. But then—returning to the contradiction—he calls angels pure act, in contrast with pure Potentiality, ‘potenza’. This category is difficult. Aquinas did not believe that prime matter could exist without form (Snyder 2008: 192–221). But if it was already formed it would not be ‘pure’ potenza. This, of course, follows Aristotle’s view that all beings comprise matter and form.11 Defining something as potentiality implies that it is not complete in itself. Prime matter’s ‘potentiality’ includes the heavens, and the four

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elements, which were created by the angelic intelligences.12 Yet ‘prime matter’ evokes another set of arguments, including creation as at first ‘without form and void’ (Genesis 1.2)—as if intractable, as chaos, with the power to make the universe dualist. This prime matter may be what lurks behind the issue which baffled Dante in Convivio 3.15.6, and 4.1.6; (see below) this matter is unassimilable to Aquinas’ account of creation, since Aristotle and his Arab commentators had accepted the eternity of the world. No more had the Timaeus believed that matter needed to be created, for ‘there were three distinct things in existence even before the universe was created—being, space [the chora], and creation’ (52d). Lee’s translation renders ‘creation’, which I have taken from Waterfield as ‘becoming’, and characterised by the chaos which the four elements comprised.13 Proclus, following, had held the world to have no beginning; he had seen it as the chora in Timaeus and therefore present before the Demiurge’s creation of the cosmos.14 So it seems did Boethius writing in The Consolation of Philosophy—’following Plato we should say that God indeed is eternal, the world perpetual’ (Boethius: 5.6.59 p. 427). These Platonic and Aristotelian accounts seem to grant a prime matter separate from God. In Convivio 2.14.8, metaphysics deals with ‘le prime sustanzie le quali noi non potemo simigliantemente intendere se non per li loro effetti’ (the prime substances, which in like manner we may not understand except by their effects). These are angels and prime matter, the latter as the trace which persists despite the desire to think of a pure beginning. The problem for Dante was whether prime matter was ‘intesa’ by God? Does ‘intesa’ mean ‘created’? Or was the question whether God had a direct and proper sense of it? Was it comprehensible to him in its specifics? 15 The point in Aquinas would be that ‘whatever knowledge one has of something … comes from a definition of its form’, which implies that it could only, following Aristotle, be known at all by analogy.16 The matter God created in line 22 is informed by Pure Act (angels). Aquinas, according to Stephen Bemrose, would not have admitted that angels could be Pure Act, since this was a term reserved for God: every other being must have potency in it (Bemrose 1985: 65). It may be added, incidentally, that ‘Pure Act’ is a contentious term for God: Milton in his posthumous De Doctrina Christiana claims, I think rightly, that ‘God cannot rightly be called Actus Purus or pure actuality … for thus he would do that of necessity, although in fact he is omnipotent and utterly free in his actions’.17 Bemrose thinks the account of angelic creation in canto 7 derives from Avicenna, and from the Liber de Causis; it is as if Dante is overclaiming for

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the angels.18 Perhaps the point is that Pure Form becomes Pure Act in doing—perhaps Dante ‘spoke of “pure act” to stress the importance of the continuous activity of all angels’ (Barsella 2010: 16), and the point is that Dante wants the weave of phrases which are associated with all these concepts, including the words ‘purette’ and ‘puro’; it is a reminder that poetry is not philosophy. Nonetheless, even granting that, it seems that at every stage of creation in Dante there is an aporia: in moving from the One to Creation (see below); in the angels being more active than Genesis would admit; and a sense that something of prime matter remains unassimilable to this thinking, as at line 34, ‘pure potenza tenne la parte ima’.19 If prime matter in Genesis is older than the creation Dante describes, it is hardly assimilable to a Christian narrative. The earth as ‘without form and void’ makes matter older than ‘creation’, but Beatrice’s statement that there was no before or after God’s moving on the waters makes things worse since it foregrounds the Genesis narrative, making it conflictual with her Aristotelian language of Form and Act. Beatrice speaks of a single instantaneous creation, but makes the waters the trace of something that does not relate to that account, and she does not dispose of the argument that matter existed before the creation of time (Christian 1953: 1–25). It becomes harder to argue that the ‘potenza’ of line 34 is assimilable to that which with the angels as ‘pure act’ moulded the heavens. That as Dante’s problem may be why ‘Pure Act’ is not quite assimilable to calling angels Form. Here, I must consider Christian Moevs’ sometimes brilliant, virtually full-length study of cantos 28 and 29. In his conclusion, whose subject is Dante’s claims for the ‘truth’ of his journey (which Moevs takes seriously), Moevs examines ‘matter’ as a concept, and affirms the spirituality of reality (Moevs: 2005: 172). For Moevs: creation exists only as a facet, or qualification, of the self-experience of the creator, the two are not two, and yet the distinction between them could not be sharper: the creator is self-sufficient, attributeless, dimensionless, out of time: its creation is contingent, dependent, limited by attributes, ephemeral.

Hence ‘matter is not something “material”, but a principle dependent on mind’ (5, 49). Moevs does not see matter as an issue affecting Dante’s movement upwards; he has little time for Nardi’s finding Averroism in Dante, which would install a dualism between the body and the divine;

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rather, matter is contained within the divine ‘Truth-Intellect-Being’: that is, Dante’s God, existent in the Empyrean, which is the divine mind. Moevs emphasises Dante’s singularity in making the Empyrean wholly immaterial and uncreated, only inside the divine mind (21–35). Entry into the Empyrean, then, makes Dante divine, for ‘to know God is to know oneself as God, or (if the expression seems troubling) as one “with” God or “in” God’ (146, 5). But if matter is so secondary, God has not created something different; creation lacks alterity if matter is in the mind of God.20 For Moevs: ‘matter, in medieval hylomorphism, is not something “material”: it is a principle of unintelligibility, of alienation from conscious being’ (4, 5). This refers to prime matter but it implies that there is no knowledge which is of the body; indeed, matter is absence, or ‘the flux of the ephemeral’ (182)—greatly extending Augustine’s sense of evil as negation, absence. Moevs wishes not to find any sense of matter as refractory in the account of creation, so that he approaches some of the difficulties outlined above in a fighting paragraph. He notes that Beatrice calling the angels pure act ‘has generated some confusion’: and in the rest of his paragraph clarifies what ‘Christian thought, strictly speaking’ says. He agrees that Dante calls the angels pure form and pure act, then argues that ‘in medieval philosophy “act” is often used interchangeably with “form”, a pure form is simply an immaterial substance, and therefore what Beatrice means by puro atto is simply angels’. (‘Simply’ appears thrice more in this paragraph, as part of Moevs’ short way of confronting complexity where terms seem the same but may not be.) Angels are ‘“uninfected” by the potentiality or contingency that is matter’. That makes them ‘pure form or actuality’ (= act) (150). This assumes that one thing can be said to equal—or be— something else, as if the terms ‘form’ and ‘act’ could be the subjects of profound philosophical debate and yet be collapsed together. Indeed, he grants that Dante is using ‘technical terms loosely’ in canto 29 (43). He glosses matter as ‘potentiality or contingency’; with the sense that the angels lack that: ‘potenza’ for Moevs means matter. ‘Contingency’ is what 13.52–66 engages with, but is that quite the same as ‘materia’ in 29.22? If the ‘potenza’ of 29.34 is sublunary matter, that indeed contrasts with lines 32–33 (‘cima’—‘ima’—the summit vs the lowest part), but cannot be the same as the combination of matter and angel as act in the celestial spheres in 35–36. We have prime matter outside creation, and sublunary matter which is created by the angelic spheres. The problems within the Convivio have not been overcome; indeed, they cannot be, for matter is a defining

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difficulty in all its forms—intractable to spirituality; and identified with the woman; as resurgent in Gnostic and Manicheistic belief and equally in the oppositions to that—and it cannot be eliminated as a problem by saying that ‘matter is nothing in itself’ (42). In this context, it seems surprising that Moevs says almost nothing on Inferno, whose subject is—unlike Paradiso—those who are trapped in matter. Canto 29.22–36 depends on three sets of distinctions: (a) forma/ materia; (b) ‘ordine e costrutto’/‘sustanze/‘puro atto’; and (c) ‘potenza con atto’; three presentations of the instantaneous making of the celestial sphere and its intelligences; in the first grouping, however, we must add the two joined and pure at the same time, making a third thing: the heavens (cp. 7.130–132). In the second grouping, order and structure are like form; they are created in the divine substances, so that the effect is the production of ‘pure act’. The third creates a ‘vima’ never ‘si divima’ (a neologism: a bond never unbound). ‘Pura potenza’ is in the lowest place, on the earth, as ‘puro atto’ is in the highest; between these two there stretches a bond which cannot be undone, of these things together. Yet Beatrice must still leave something over: matter, not yet that of the four elements which may yet remain to be created, but prime matter named ‘potenza’, presented as though it had an entelechy (i.e. actuality), so that it could be something, yet its intractability recognised, silently: it need not, perhaps cannot, be defined in terms of a form. God as the One If prime matter stands outside the entire comprehension of God, this being the problem for Dante, and the moment when the Convivio changes intellectual shape, the concept of God here is equally problematic. We should say something about this. He is the One, and above being, according to Plotinus, because the definition of ‘being’ is that it is intelligible: the First cannot be thought of as having definition and limit, for thus it would not be the Source … If all things belong to the produced, which of them is to be thought of as the Supreme? Not included among them, this can be described only as transcending them: but they are Being, and the Beings; it therefore transcends Being. (Plotinus, V.5.6. 397; the editor notes the quotation from Republic VI.509B)

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God and prime matter share something in that both are not-being. The One is the negation of plurality; perhaps more a zero, for which the Greeks had no symbol; a non-being. Plotinus has already argued that that the One is not counted: ‘it is measure and not the measured’ (Plotinus, 5.5.4, p.395). Number, and time, expresses the external activity of the One, and number becomes being and substance, for ‘Number, Quantity, is not primal’ (Plotinus, 5.1.5, p. 352: see Slaveva-Griffin 2009). The Liber de Causis seems more ambiguous than Plotinus on whether the First Cause is Being or not.21 Convivio quotes it saying that causes descend through the universe from the ‘prima cagione’ which is God, to secondary causes, and into the matter into which the form descends, and ‘e fanno si diverse le bontadi e i doni per lo concorrimento della cosa che riceve’ (the various gifts and bounties are made diverse through their collaboration with the thing that receives them—Con. 3.2.4). The dualism between substantial form and matter is obvious. Dante continues that each effect retains in its nature something of its cause, citing Alpetragius (Liber de motibus celorum), a text Latinised by Michael Scot, that what is caused by a circular body must in some mode be circular; hence everything (since circularity permeates everything) partakes of the divine nature (Convivio, 3.2.5: ‘ciascuna forma ha essere della divina natura in alcuno modo’).22 And so, a fortiori, must the human soul partake more of that nature. Citing the Liber de Causis, however, highlights the ambiguity about the relation between the One and being: ‘prima cosa è l’essere, e anzi a quello nulla è’: ‘being is the first thing, and before that there is nothing’. It seems that being comes first: hence Dante’s angels become ‘Pure Act’—but in Plotinus the One thing is the ‘no thing’ which is before being. God’s creating, as the One, was giving being. In Plotinus, form is identical with being; that which has no form is infinite: The First is not a thing among the things contained by the Intellectual-­ Principle though the source of all. In virtue of this source things of the later order are essential beings; for from that fact there is determination; each has its form: what has being cannot be envisaged as outside of limit; the nature must be held fast by boundary and fixity; though to the Intellectual Beings this fixity is no more than determination and form, the foundations of their substantial existence … (Plotinus, V.I.7, p. 355)

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Dionysius would have agreed: ‘God is infinite because he is nonbeing and hyperbeing’ (quoted Sweeney 1992: 337). To call God hyper- or supra-being puts him beyond naming.23 But if the One is detached from Being, how does the One come to be a cause? The answer must be through a process of emanations, as is implied in the speech of Aquinas in 13.52–60. But nonetheless God’s separation from Creation, which Beatrice does not want to assert—her language in 29.10–36 is intended to give the opposite sense—remains uneasy. There seems one intractable problem after another about creation, and if Paradiso 29 attempts to present angelic creation as it does, it hints that this may not be enough, and the poem is over-affirmative at this point, about both spirit and matter and their togetherness, and the marks of that show within its language. Summarising, it seems problematic how the One relates to creation; except in the indirect modes of emanation from the One through the Divine Mind (Nous), which is where plurality or complexity or multiplicity begins, through to the All-soul, which is the logos of the universe. Similarly, matter, which is spoken of as created on the instant, in Genesis (but this is ambiguous), and precedes creation in Platonism, and is eternal in Aristotle, seems independent of efforts to pull it into being.24 Plotinus, indeed, seems to have thought that matter has no reality; ‘it had no title to the name of Being. It is more properly called a non-Being’ and if it changed, it ceased to be matter, which means that the corporeal matter of the material realm is actually less (or more) than matter (Plotinus, 3.6.7. (p. 196), 3.6.10 (p. 200)). We can understand why Dante gave up on prime matter in Convivio 4, since matter itself remains outside attempts to pull it into either definition or creation and being substantial acts as a parable for a refractoriness which Paradiso would escape but cannot. The rest of the canto does not leave these debates behind. The Rebellious Angels Beatrice dismisses Jerome’s view that angels were created centuries before creation (37–48); ‘motori’ (movers, 44) could not exist before there was something to move. She asserts instantaneity, and act, and exact origin, which creates the moment, and subsequent moments, and she wants nothing before it, so that Dante’s question, ‘quando’ (when) creation occurred

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has no answer in before or after terms; we are within the instant which the opening simile (1–9) expresses. But another chronology emerges: the fall of the rebel angels on account of Lucifer’s ‘maladetto superbir’ (55–56), which happened before a count of 20 after his creation (i.e. before the fists could be opened twice to reveal ten digits). The angels who acknowledged God’s bounty waited for an exalted vision, which gives them ‘ferma e piena volontate’ (a whole, and full will, 63). The argument comes from Augustine’s The Literal Meaning of Genesis, alluded to discussing the terzina Para. 27.136–138. Augustine identifies the creation of light with creation of the angels. From the text ‘the evening and the morning were one day’, Augustine deduced evening knowledge as an inferior one which angels possessed, while the morning knowledge was of the glory of God, which the rebel angels did not wait to see (Augustine 2002: 269–270; for Lucifer’s fall, 448; Coris 2012: 163–164). Aquinas agreed with this, and with Augustine’s sense of the six days of creation being ‘six classes of things presented to angelic knowledge, each day [with its evening and morning knowledge] corresponding to a unified object of knowledge, which however can be known in different ways’ (ST 1a.58, 7, vol. 9: 167). The speed of the Fall contrasts with Beatrice’s single-moment-lasting, yet infinite gaze, but while fast, it is not as instantaneous as that. It takes time, introducing hesitation, a gap, into the neatness of the order of creation, like the fall itself, which convulsed ‘il suggetto d’i vostri alimenti’— ‘the substrate of your elements’ (51).25 It remains a problem whether anything of the earth was yet in place or not: was not the Inferno created first—Inferno 3.7? Or did Satan’s fall create it (Inf. 34. 121–126)? It seems impossible to assert a priority of events, and if that puzzles, perhaps the point is that narrative can never establish a time sequence, as Genette (1980) takes a book to demonstrate in the case of Proust. These angels, whose time however fast, makes time complex and unstable—will they fall or not?—intrude with another time, analogous to the complexity of time-­ measurement in the last lines of canto 27. The rebel angels would not acknowledge the ‘bontate’ which had endowed them ‘a tanto intender’, but their decision was unpredictable and it disturbs with the sense of another time and will be working inside and outside the divine plan. The pride of Satan makes him now spirit weighed down by matter (55–57). These angels who behold the morning light, see God’s face. Though they have desire, which causes their turning, Dante enforces the angels’ completeness and separation from human attributes (70–84). Beatrice

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does not accord them discursive knowledge: understanding, memory, and will, terms which Aquinas takes from Augustine’s De Trinitate (1a.79.7), and which Paradise Lost (5.487–489) uses: The soul Reason receives, and reason is her being Discursive or Intuitive; discourse Is oftest yours, the latter most is ours. (Milton 1998: 232)

As Raphael tells Adam, angelic knowledge is intuitive (Paradise Lost 5. 497–499). ‘Intuitive’ derives from Latin intueor, ‘to gaze at, to contemplate’. Hence, for angels: Queste sustanze, poi che fur gioconde de la faccia di Dio, non volser viso da essa, da cui nulla si nasconde; però non hanno vedere interciso da novo obietto, e però non bisogna rememorar per concetto diviso. (29.76–81)

(Those substances, after they were gladdened by the face of God, from which nothing is hidden, have not turned their face from it, therefore they do not have their sight split by a new object, and therefore they have no need of remembering, because of a divided thought.) Two brisk uses of ‘però’. Understanding, memory, and will suggest the power of their opposites, and are human markers of absence. Angels, pure form, see God, their state one of pure presence, unmarked by a ‘concetto diviso’: they know no ‘cloud of unknowing’. In Monarchia, angels eternally ‘exist only as intelligences and nothing else, and their very being is simply the act of understanding that their own nature exists’ (Shaw, 1.3.7, p. 7). Perhaps Dante argues a harder, less speculative, line than Aquinas, who allows angels intellectual knowledge, though nothing of the memory which comes from having a body—that is, sentience (Bosco and Reggio, lines 79–81 note; ST I. q.54, a.5, vol. 9: 87–91). Kenelm Foster discusses Aristotle’s distinction in De anima between active and passive functions in human intelligence, the intellectus agens and possibilis, as powers of the rational soul. The first renders sense-data intelligible to the self, the second frames such knowledge in terms of ideas/concepts (ST vol. 9: 76–77). The intellect is possibilis in receiving the means of knowledge, carrying it

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into the mind, which for Aquinas was immaterial: ‘God is the mover of the created mind in both ways. First, he is the primary immaterial being, and accordingly, because having intelligence is the consequence of being immaterial, he is the primary intelligent being. … Every power of intelligence derives from him’ (ST. 1.q.105. a.3. vol. 14, 69). Foster says that Aquinas thought this distinction only applied to humans: intelligence at the lowest level emerges in union with animality (ST 9: 87). And, ‘the reason for calling angels “intellects” or minds” is that their knowledge is wholly intellectual: whereas that of the human soul is partly intellectual and partly in the senses’ (ST 1.q.54 a.3, vol. 9: 83). For Foster: An angel’s intelligence … is not primarily concerned with what comes to him from his creaturely lack of full actuality, his imperfection as a unity, his limitation to particularity. All this indeed an angel knows in himself, for it all constitutes in fact what he actually is; but he knows it en route … towards a more perfect object. His intellect, essentially correlated as it is to actuality and being as such, cannot rest in himself but only in the infinite perfection and actuality of God … Intelligence … whether angelic or human, is the power to pass beyond the created subject, to transcend its limits.

Since, Foster says, only God is ‘pure self-identity’ (ST vol. 9: 81), all intelligence, including the angelic, is a matter of separated beings comprehending something ‘other’, through having some image of the things known in the mind: compare Para. 1.23–24. An angel needs no imagination since the imaginatio was a sense-faculty, and may take fancies for facts; as in dreams, for example, or when people are mentally deranged (ST. 1a.54.5, vol. 9: 91). So how could angels know the physical world, in the way humans do (question 57), an issue further vexed by another: whether even God knows the particular or individual? That is more difficult, through: a tendency of Greek and Graeco-Arabic intellectualism to identify matter with the unintelligible—a position St Thomas himself concedes where understanding involves abstraction from the particular. (ST 9: Foster note 127)

Aquinas asserted that angels knew particulars (1a.57.2), but this has to be an argument from inference.26 Beatrice states the full knowledge of angels more straightforwardly, when she shows they have no need of memory.

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In De Vulgari Eloquentia (1.2.3), angels have no need of speech (Shapiro 1990: 48). Aquinas does not go that far, but remembering the phrase ‘the tongues of men and of angels’ (1 Corinthians 13.1), he thinks of an angel’s speech as interior (ST 1a. 107.5), though it is still heard by other angels, in mutual illumination, and he quotes Gregory: ‘it is fitting that our mind, transcending the nature of bodily speech, be lifted up to higher and unknown ways of interior speech’, since ‘we stand, as it were, behind the wall of the body, sheltered from the eyes of others in the recesses of our mind, but when we wish to reveal ourselves, we come forth, with speech as the gateway, in order to show our inner selves’ (ST 1a.107.1 (9: 104)). Aquinas adds: ‘in an angel, however, no such obstacle exists, and as soon as he wishes to share his thoughts, another angel knows them’. It is not so with humans, ‘because of the interference of the body’. We are back to the problems of materiality, as constituting inevitable difference between beings. Thinking and speaking happen in time. That creates a spacing, delay; what Derrida calls differance, preventing self-presence. Thinking and speaking remain partial, concealed, and concealing, because their roots are unknown, unconscious, self-dividing, coming from ‘the other’, the self not fully knowing the sources of its speech. The self’s knowledge is separate from itself; hence the dream of non-division, seen in angels, as in the terzina quoted above, they: non hanno vedere interciso da novo obietto, e però non bisogna rememorar per concetto diviso. (29.79–81)

There is no interval of time involved in the angels’ seeing of God, no ‘concetto diviso’ (81), which Dante finds in himself (23.49–51). ‘And therefore they have no need to remember through divided concepts’. Thought and language are structured by deferral and delay; because it happens in time, any expression in language is an unfolding of memory, which cannot coincide with the memory of another moment. A conception of God—or the forming of a concept—necessitates an image; it will be marked by the signifier, which doubles thought and makes immediacy impossible. This terzina presents a view that the angels are not marked by différance.27 Yet De Vulgari Eloquentia and Adam in Paradiso know how poetic thought is differently realised in different languages. Any one language involves translation inside itself; no single language is outside its

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own internal difference. Spacing, deferral, and delay may create desire for the angelic condition, but bring realisation of its impossibility. Paradiso’s musings on angels take their place inside a growing awareness of what individuation and the body means. Beatrice supplements what has been said about angels, with a digression (to line 127), commenting on the normal human state: sì che là giù, non dormendo, si sogna, credendo e non credendo dicer vero … (83–84)

(so that below, while not sleeping, people dream, believing or not believing that they speak truth …) She attacks a perversion of philosophical and theological truth, noting an earthly Babel-like condition of confusions and contrasted opinions; but her lines are more hesitant in their sense of what imagination—apart from dreaming—does. Human speech is uncertain even when speaking truth, because expression differs in the saying from the conception. If angelic knowledge perfects the angel as a messenger, the unstated comparison made in digressing comes from humans—especially preachers (96) whose ‘invenzioni’ make them fail to be messengers, and whose diverse narratives (97–102) interrupt the sheerly miraculous nature of the divine message in ‘la divina Scrittura’ and in ‘l Vangelio’. For instance, they explain the sun’s unique concealing of itself at the crucifixion by speaking of an eclipse, a recurrent natural phenomenon.28 In contrast, light hiding itself of its own accord reveals its existence as spiritual. Beatrice instances the neglect or perversion of ‘la divina scrittura’ (90), of a writing claiming the stability of the angelic, but decorating it by fancies. Her satire mocks Florence (103), while honouring the acts of the apostles (109–114). Contemporary preaching has, in comic mode, the devil in it, contrasting these details from those concerning his creation in heaven and his fall. People are likely to be taken in by Pardoners, like Chaucer’s slightly later one (c.1390); her tone indicates the satirical range of Paradiso; its plurilingualism, its awareness of popular culture, which gave something to the Decameron, e.g. Day 6 story 10. Preaching friars in contemporary Italy are the antithesis of Francis: Ora si va con motti e con iscede a predicare, e pur che ben si rida, gonfia il cappuccio e più non si richiede.

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Ma tale uccel nel becchetto s’annida, che se ‘l vulgo il vedesse, vederebbe la perdonanza di ch’el si confida: per cui tanta stoltezza in terra crebbe, che, sanza prova d’alcun testimonio, ad ogne promession si correrebbe. Di questo ingrassa il porco sant’ Antonio, e altri assai che sono ancor più porci, pagando di moneta sanza conio. (29.115–126)

(Now they go with jokes and with buffoonery to preach, and if loud laughter arises, the cowl swells [with vanity] and nothing else is asked for, but such a bird is nesting in the hood that if the crowd saw it, they would see the pardon that they trust in, because of which such stupidity has grown on earth that, without proof of any witness, they would run after any promise. On this, they fatten the pig of Saint Antony, and many others who are yet more piggish, paying out in money with no imprint.) Attacking ‘stoltezza’ (121) produces Bosch-like images. The ‘cappuccio’ is a metonym for the monk; but the swelling—Satanic pride (55, 56)—is one of several images of material grossness. The bird inside the cowl is demonic, and the comparison with the barrators and the shouting at Farfarello (‘Butterfly’), the ‘malvagio uccello’, the villainous bird/demon who is about to strike is relevant (Inf. 22.96). ‘Becchetto’ makes the hood into a beak, wittily doubling the bird-image; not only is the devil concealed, but the friar himself is demonic. From devilish birds (Matthew 13.4, 19), we reach the demonic pig (Matthew 8.28–32); drawing in St Antony, the ascetic monk in the Egyptian deserts (c.250–355 CE), whose life was filled with demonic attacks, the presence of the spiritual in material form (see Athanasius 2003). Antony was an inspiration for the Franciscans. Later traditions associated him with putting pigs under his control, as images of sensual temptation. The people’s gullibility lets the monks (the Antoniani, an Augustine foundation), fatten their pigs, which becomes a metonymy for their self-indulgent materiality. And others, fatter than the monks’ concubines and children, pay out worthless indulgences, like dud coins, from the money they receive. The Falsifiers of Inferno 29 understudy this corruption, but falsification acquires a more religious character here. Remembering the baseness of some Inferno episodes, from Ciacco onwards, matter is the ‘other’, but Beatrice’s language confirms its irreducibility. This harks back, therefore, to what it was possible to argue

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about prime matter, and what has been said of the Fall of the rebel angels. Lucifer’s pride (55) has been recreated in the puffed-up cowls (117). The folly contrasts with the word used for the unfallen angels: ‘modesti’ (58, compare ‘l’amor de l’apparenza’, 87). Canto 29 concludes by returning to ‘questa natura’—this angelic nature, which, in a neologism, ‘oltre s’ingrada / in numero’—‘upgrades itself beyond in numbers’. ‘S’ingrada’ changes the circles to another image: that is, ascending steps. This notes the number of angelic intelligences. Beatrice evokes Daniel’s vision, which is in the context of ‘thrones’ allowing the Ancient of Days to sit: ‘thousand thousands ministered unto him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him’ (Daniel 7.9–10), and she notes their aspiration: La prima luce, che tutta la raia, per tanti modi in essa si recepe, quanti son li splendori a chi s’appaia. Onde, però che a l’atto che concepe segue l’affetto, d’amar la dolcezza diversamente in essa ferve e tepe. Vedi l’eccelso omai e la larghezza de l’etterno valor, poscia che tanti speculi fatti s’ha in che si spezza. uno manendo in sé come davanti. (29.136–145)

(The first light, which rays on everything, is received in it in so many ways as are the splendours to whom it appears. Therefore, because effect follows the act which conceives, the sweetness of love burns diversely in it, hotly and warmly. See now the excellence and the bounty of the eternal valour, since it has made for itself so many mirrors in which it splits itself, one remaining in itself as before.) The first light, giving knowledge, is received ‘diversamente’. This hierarchy places intellectual conception above loving (in agreement with 28.109–111). The excellency (a word which implies loftiness, like a tower, and which has as analogue the upward steps of angelic tiers) of the ‘etterno valor’ is its uniqueness, reiterated in the last line. Its bounty is to make so many mirrors, each unique, wherein it divides itself (Barsella 2010: 65–69). The one light remains, while the mirrors it forms throughout the cosmos imply a coruscating and pluralising unity.

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The difficulty in reading the account of matter, which seems i­ntractable, shows a division within the canto which is recognised at some level in the fall of the angels, which introduces an instability of time contrasting with the instantaneity of creation. Their Fall is followed by their activity within history, corrupting matter, producing human pigs. The poem’s attraction to angels, as Aquinas saw them, pure forms, with no incompleteness in themselves, is strangely masculine, curiously like Lucifer, and the preachers. But that masculinity yields the comedy (though Beatrice is not amused) of highly material(istic) preachers, which is trumped by a grosser spirituality, that of demons. Beatrice has not, actually, been digressive; she has shown the fallen spiritual world as inseparable from the material. In contrast to the purity of angels stands something in Convivio 3.7.5 which was noted in Chap. 2; it sees the human as an uneasy double: ‘l’anima umana, che, avegna che da una parte sia da materia libera, da un’altra è impedita’ (the human soul, which has one part free from matter, and another impeded by it). And Monarchia 3.15.3–5 speaks of man’s intermediate position between things corruptible and incorruptible, and as a horizon, the midway-line between two halves of a sphere. Kay (note 3, 308) references Aquinas and the Liber de Causis for sources. Man seems to be a mean between things corruptible and incorruptible, the material impeding, as Aristotle (1986: 2.2.413b p. 160), distinguished the nutritive, sensitive, and intellectual faculties; the latter ‘another kind of soul, and this alone admits of being separated, as that which is eternal from that which is perishable’. Deficiencies in the imagination—which is material— means that the intellect cannot grasp such concepts as the angelic (Con. 3.4.9). Aristotle is involved: asking ‘whether, insofar as it [the intellect] is not itself separate from size [i.e. from materiality], it can, or cannot think one of the things that are separate’ (Aristotle 1986: 3.7.431b: 209, and note 125: 249). Yet such separation of the material from the immaterial is challenged by Dante’s drawing of an angel (Vita Nuova 34), bringing into visibility what rightly is not visible. Materiality asserts itself in the artwork where the immaterial is perceived through the material, which imagines, and creates. Art can know the immaterial: Paradiso must take precedence over the Convivio. The wonders of an imagined angelic world, one without differance, prove less than those wherein the material is asserted: if Paradiso means to back immateriality over materiality, the poem knows better and collapses the difference.

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Notes 1. Ten, as the adding together of 1,2,3,4, numbers which culminatively give the point, the line, the triangle and the tetrahedron, is essential to Pythagorean philosophy: see Butler (1970: 1–31). See Aristotle (2004: 485b–486a) (19–20), Moevs, 138–140. On Beatrice as 9, and 63 (6 + 3 and 7 × 9), see Locke (1967). 2. On canto 28, see Spera (1990: 537–552), with emphasis on pseudo-­ Dionysius; Kirkpatrick (2007: 166–184). For the astronomy, see Cornish (2000: 108–141), and Boyde (1981: 242–247). 3. See Rorem (1993, 63, 75), and chapter on The Celestial Hierarchy, 47–90. For the order of angels, Sbacchi (2006). For the fortunes of pseudo-­ Dionysius through the Renaissance, see Patrides (1959: 155–166). For the significance of three, see Augustine, City, 11.24–26 (pp. 456–460), for six, 11.30 (p.  265), and for seven, 11.31 (pp.  465–466). Six is one of four perfect numbers, alongside 28, 496, and 8128—numbers whose divisors when added produce the number itself (Cachey 2016: 111,112). 4. Gregory in Moralia in Job chapter 23, as with Isidore of Seville, gave, in descending order: Seraphim, Cherubim, Powers, Principalities, Virtues, Dominions, Thrones, Archangels, Angels. Dante follows Gregory’s mistake, in Convivio 2.5. See Barsella (2010: 34), and Barsella (2012: S.189–198). 5. See Trigg (1991: 35–51). Joshua 5.14 was also interpreted as Christ, strengthening the militaristic sense in these titles of angels. Cp. ‘molte legion d’angeli’ (Con. 2.5.4). For the Seraph, as Christ, in art contemporary with Dante, see Davidson (2009: 451–480), pointing out relevantly for the concept of ‘spirits that matter’, that Francis’ stigmata represented a new mysticism where this was marked on the body; perhaps in response to a new concentration on Christ’s sufferings. 6. For Bemrose (2005: 105), the purpose of Para. 7 is ‘to declare God’s intimacy … with the soul, and thus with human nature, a nature he was glad to assume’ (105). 7. Apocalyptic Jewish literature stressed the relation of angels to the elements: Kuhn (1948: 223). 8. Compare Purg. 21.1 for this phrase. Purg. 16.85–90 discusses why humans do not, naturally seek after God. 9. The older translations of Paradiso by P.H. Wicksteed, and John Sinclair noted in reference to 13.52–56, Dante’s ‘veiled dualism’. Wicksteed (1913: 145–147, 149–152) discusses Dante and prime matter, asking whether God created matter formless, which Aquinas would have denied. But in his note to Paradiso, Wicksteed goes further, finding the prima materia ‘treated as something external, on which his power acts and which answers only imperfectly to it’.

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10. For the crisis-nature of the condemnations by Bishop Tempier in 1277, turning on whether God or divine intelligences moved the heavens, or nature, a view from the Averroists, see Dales (1980, 531–550). 11. Matter is potentiality, and form is actuality, as when the soul—as form—is defined as ‘the first actuality of a natural body that has life potentially’ (De Anima 412a.). Compare Metaphysics 1050a (p. 274), which prioritises the actual over the potential ‘in terms of both production and time’. Albertus Magnus, following the Neo-Platonism of Avicenna, separated form from actuality. The form gave the eidos, and the actuality the perfectio of the substance. See Hasse (2009: 10–30). 12. ‘That the four elements were formed from matter by the heavenly bodies and their governing Intelligences is explicit in 7.133–139’—Durling and Martinez’s note to 29. 22–36. 13. Plato (2008: 45). The nurse of ‘becoming’ is characterised by the qualities of the four elements and is described as a chaos. 14. See Haas (1997: 1–26). This view of Proclus was attacked by Philoponus, who believed that God had created the world ex nihilo. This itself was a second-century argument, countering Gnosticism; Philoponus’ text On the Eternity of the World Against Proclus appeared in 529. 15. Nardi (1949: 148–159) argued that the verb had the force of ‘intenta’: that is, was prime matter the object of divine action? He is followed by Corti (1983). Moevs’ discussion of this in Dante seems cavalier; virtually dismissing Dante’s problems with the subject: Nardi finding Dante turning to Averroism ‘creat[es] a mystery story where it does not exist’ (Moevs 2005: 46). For prime matter: Bruce-Jones (1995: 213–221). 16. Quoting Snyder, 197, who quotes Physics 1.7 191a8–18 (Aristotle 1996: 27–28). 17. Quoted, Rumrich (1995: 1043). This argument assumes a further potentiality in God, and a supplementary matter beyond God, which may be identified with Chaos—itself outside God’s creation. 18. Bemrose (1985: 109–113). Barsella (2010: 15–16) resists Nardi’s view that ‘pure act’ implies an Averroistic sense of the Intelligences as divinities: she defends the orthodoxy of calling angels ‘pure act’. 19. Kay, Monarchia 2.2.3, note 12 argues that prime matter was unassimilable to Dante’s thinking because it was corrupted by the rebellious angels—but ends calling Dante’s concept of prime matter ‘a vexed question’. 20. This lack relates to one thrust of Moevs’ argument, that entry into the divine mind gives the self ‘the power to be anything’ (55), that the self knows its ‘true self’ by ‘losing oneself in the ground of one’s being, of all being’ (68). On this basis, there is no separation between the self and the other: see Took (2007: 747–749). The discarding of materiality as ‘ephemeral’ or as ‘nothing’ seems simultaneously narcissistic, ignoring the limits/

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problems/resistances imposed by matter, which come from it being ‘other’, as when Moevs contends that Dante’s itinerary would be ‘I am not (primarily) a thing, but one with the act of existing itself … all “I”s are one: each is everything and nothing’ (31). Moevs’ argument seems inadequate to discuss the Incarnation, as this impinges on the material world, and a longer discussion might ask whether it does not entail downplaying history, as that which is also refractory, and often ‘untimely, sorrowful and miscarried’ (Benjamin 2019: 174). Moevs’ book, the antithesis of mine, in its complexity of writing is so difficult, that I cite other reviews: Milbank (2006: 117–119), Ginsberg (2007: 467–470). 21. On Plotinus and number, Slaveva-Griffin (2009). See Siorvanes (1996: 180–183) for the One, as a concept perhaps derived from Plato’s Parmenides. Convivio 3.2.7 asserts the primacy of being. Heidegger’s account of Being would separate it from any sense of God: if God is thought of in terms of being that is a descent into metaphysics, attempting to stabilise God as an entity. In Heidegger, God would be more like an ‘event’; and the sense of activity that I note in Dante’s sense of the Trinity, has some correspondence to that. 22. For Al-Bitrûjî (called Alpetragius by Albertus Magnus), a contemporary of Averroes, writing in Seville c.1185, see Carmody (1952). 23. Sbacchi (2006: xviii), notes Dante’s use of ‘superillustrans’ (Para. 7.2) and ‘superinfusa’ (15.28) as comparisons with this language of the ‘beyond’, which he traces to Dionysius. 24. For the relationship of angels to 12th century commentaries on Genesis 1 see Clark (2005: 95ff), noting that ‘according to the Old Latin translation of the Book of Wisdom [11.17] God made the universe “of unformed matter” [ex materia informi]’ (102). 25. Prime matter, according to Wicksteed (1913: 150), cp. Kay on Monarchia 2.2.3; but contrast Durling and Martinez, reading ‘l suggetto d’i vostri alimenti’ as the earth, as ‘what bears your foods’. 26. Because in God there is a likeness of all things, both as to form and matter, inasmuch as everything to be found pre-exists in God as in his cause. Hence an angel’s ideas, ‘as likenesses derived from the divine essence, are likenesses of things both as to their form and as to their matter’ (ST vol. 9: note 131). 27. See Derrida’s on ‘différance’ at the origin; and the ‘trace’ as originary; and his sense, via Freud, of delay inside utterance, and of ‘spacing’ (Verspätung): Derrida (1978: 203). ‘The irreducibility of the effect of deferral’, which he calls Freud’s discovery, is the opposite of what is conceptualised in the angel. 28. For this, including Paradiso 2. 97–105, and 10.7–24, and 29.1–2, see Kleiner (1994: 85–116).

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Bibliography Aquinas, Thomas, 1968–1969, Summa Theologiae 1968, ed. Thomas Gilby, London: Blackfriars and Eyre & Spottiswoode. Vol. 9, Angels (Ia. 50–64) ed. Kenelm Foster; vol. 14, Divine Government (Ia2ae. 103–9) [i.e. Ia.] trans. T.C. O’Brien. Aristotle, 1986, De Anima trans. Hugh Lawson-Tancred, Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———, 1996, Physics, trans. Robin Waterfield, Oxford: O.U.P. ———, 2004, Metaphysics, trans. Hugh Lawson-Tancred, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Athanasius of Alexandria, 2003, The Life of Anthony trans. Tim Vivian and Apostolos N.  Athanassakis with Rowan A.  Grier, Kalamazoo, Michigan: Cistercian Publications. Augustine, 2002, On Genesis vol. 13 of Works, trans. Edmund Hille, trans. John E. Rotelle, New York: New City Press. Barsella, Susanna, 2010, In the Light of the Angels: Angelology and Cosmology in Dante’s Divina Commedia, Florence: Leo S. Olschki. ———, 2012, ‘Angels and Creation in Paradiso 29’, MLN 127: S.189–198. Bemrose, Stephen, 1985, Dante’s Angelic Intelligences: Their Importance in the Cosmos and in Pre-Christian Religion, Rome: Editizioni di Storia e Litterature. ———, 2005, ‘God so loves the Soul: Intellections of Immortality in Dante’, Medium Aevum 74: 86–108. Benjamin, Walter, 2003, Selected Writings 4 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, Cambridge, MA: Harvard U.P. ———, 2019, Origin of the German Trauerspiel, trans. Howard Eiland, Cambridge, MA: Harvard U.P. Bostock, David, 2006, Space, Time, Matter, and Form: Essays on Aristotle’s Physics, Oxford: Clarendon. Boyde, Patrick, 1981, Dante Philomythes and Philosopher, Cambridge: C.U.P. Bruce-Jones, John, 1995, ‘L’importanza primaria della materia prima (Why does Prime Matter Matter): Aspetti della materia nella poesia e nel pensiero di Dante’, in Patrick Boyde and Vittorio Russo (eds.), Dante e la scienza, Ravenna: Longo Editore: 213–221. Butler, Christopher, 1970, ‘Numerological Thought’ in Alastair Fowler (ed.), Silent Poetry: Essays in Numerological Analysis, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul: 1–31. Cachey, Theodore J, 2016, ‘Cosmographic Cartography of the “Perfect” Twenty-­ Eights’ in Vertical Readings in Dante’s Comedy: 3 ed, George Corbett and Heather Webb, Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 111–138. Carmody, Francis J., 1952, (ed.) Al-Bitrûjî: De Motibus Celorum: A Critical Edition of the Latin Translation of Michael Scot, Berkeley: California U.P.

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Christian, William A, 1953, ‘Augustine on the Creation of the World’, Harvard Theological Review 46: 1–25. Clark, Mark J., 2005, ‘Peter Comestor and Peter Lombard: Brothers in Deed’, Traditio 60: 85–142. Coolman, Boyd Taylor, 2009, ‘The Medieval Affective Dionysian Tradition’ in Sarah Coakley and Charles M.  Stang, Rethinking Dionysius the Areopagite, Chichester: Wiley Blackwell: 88–102. Coris, Harm, 2012, ‘Angelic Knowledge in Aquinas and Bonaventure’, in Tobias Hoffmann (ed.), A Companion to Angels in Medieval Philosophy, Leiden: Brill. Cornish, Alison, 2000, Reading Dante’s Stars, New Haven: Yale U.P. Corti, Maria, 1983, La felicità mentale: Nuove prospettive per Cavalcanti e Dante, Turin: Giulio Einaudi. Dales, Richard C. 1980, ‘The De-Animation of the Heavens in the Middle Ages’ Journal of the History of Ideas 41: 531–550. Dante Studies, with the Annual Report of the Dante Society, No. 85 (1967), pp. 59–70. Davidson, Arnold I., 2009, ‘Miracles of Bodily Transformation, or How St Francis Received the Stigmata’, Critical Inquiry 35: 451–480. Dempsey, Charles, 2001, Inventing the Renaissance Putto, Chapel Hill: North Carolina U.P. Derrida, Jacques, 1978, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, London: Routledge. Eliot, T.S. 2015. The Poems of T.S. Eliot ed. Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue, 2 vols. London: Faber. Genette, Gérard, 1980, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method trans. Jane E. Lewin Ithaca: Cornell U.P. Ginsberg, Warren, 2007, Review of Christian Moevs, Speculum 82: 467–470. de Haas, Franz A.J., 1997, John Philoponus: New Definitions of Prime Matter: Aspects of the Background in Neoplatonism and the Ancient Commentary Tradition, Leiden: Brill. Hasse, Dag Nikolaus, 2009, ‘The Early Albertus Magnus and his Arabic Sources on the Theory of the Soul’, in Dominik Perler (ed.), Transformations of the Soul: Aristotelian Psychology 1250–1650, Leiden: Brill: 10–30. Janowitz, Naomi, 1991, ‘Theories of Divine Names in Origen and Pseudo-­ Dionysius’, History of Religions, 30: 359–372. Jones, Albert, 2010, Angels: A History, Oxford: O.U.P. Keck, David, 1998, Angels and Angelology in the Middle Ages, Oxford: O.U.P. Kierkegaard, Søren, 1980, The Concept of Anxiety, ed. and trans. Reidar Thomte and Albert B. Anderson. Princeton: Princeton U.P.

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Kirkpatrick, Robin, 2007, ‘Afterlives Now: A Study of Paradiso canto 28’ in Carolyn Muessig and Ad Putter (eds.), Envisaging Heaven in the Middle Ages, London: Routledge: 166–184. Kleiner, John, 1994, Mismapping the Underworld: Daring and Error in Dante’s Comedy, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kuhn, Harold B., 1948, ‘The Angelology of the Non-Canonical Jewish Apocalypses’, Journal of Biblical Literature, 67: 217–232. Locke, Frederick W, 1967, ‘Dante’s Marvellous Enneads’, DS 8: 59–70. Mazzotta, Giuseppe, 2005, ‘Cosmology and the Kiss of Creation (Paradiso 27–29)’, DS 123, 1–21. McCluskey Stephen C., 1998, Astronomies and Cultures in Early Medieval Europe Cambridge: C.U.P. Milbank, Alison, 2006, Review of Christian Moevs, Religion and Literature 38: 117–119. Milton, John, 1998, The Complete Poems ed. John Leonard, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Moevs, Christian, 2005, The Metaphysics of Dante’s Comedy, Oxford: O.U.P. Nardi, Bruno, 1949, Dante e la cultura medievale, Bari: Laterza. Patrides, C.A. 1959, ‘Renaissance Thought on the Celestial Hierarchy: The Decline of a Tradition’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 20: 155–166. Pedersen, Olaf, 1974, A Study of the Almagest, Odense: Odense U.P. Petersen, Joan M, 1987, The Dialogues of Gregory the Great in their Late Antique Cultural Background (Studies and Texts, number 69) Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies. Plato, 2008, Timaeus and Critias, trans. Robin Waterfield, notes by Andrew Gregory, Oxford: O.U.P. Powell, J.G.F., 1990, Cicero, On Friendship and the Dream of Scipio, Warminster: Aris and Phillips. Raymond, Joad, 2010, Milton’s Angels: The Early-Modern Imagination, Oxford: O.U.P. Rorem, Paul, 1993, Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary on the Texts and an Introduction to their Influence, Oxford: O.U.P. Rumrich, John, 1995, ‘Milton’s God and the Matter of Chaos’, PMLA 220: 1035–1146. Sbacchi, Diego, 2006, La Presenza de Dionigi Areopagita nel Paradiso di Dante Florence: Olschki. Shapiro—De Vulgari Eloquentia: Dante’s Book of Exile trans. Marianne Shapiro (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990). Siorvanes, Lucas, 1996, Proclus: Neo-Platonic Philosophy and Science, Edinburgh; Edinburgh U.P. Slaveva-Griffin, Svetla, 2009, Plotinus on Number, Oxford: O.U.P.

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Snyder, James G., 2008, ‘The Theory of Materia Prima in Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology’, Vivarium 46: 192–221. Spera, Francesco, 1990, ‘La poesia degli angeli: lettura del canto XXVIII del Paradiso’, Letture Italiane 42: 537–552. Stahl, William Harris (ed.), 1952, Macrobius: Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, New York: Columbia U.P. Sweeney, Leo, 1992, Divine Infinity in Greek and Medieval Thought, New York: Peter Lang. Took, John, 2007, Review of Christian Moevs, Journal of Theological Studies 58: 747–749. Toomer, G J. 1984, Ptolemy’s Almagest (ed. and trans.), London: Duckworth. Trigg, Joseph W., 1991, ‘The Angel of Great Counsel: Christ and the Angelic Hierarchy in Origen’s Theology’, The Journal of Theological Studies 42: 35–51. Wicksteed, P.H., 1899, (trans.) Paradiso, London: J.M. Dent ———, 1913, Dante and Aquinas. London: J.M. Dent.

CHAPTER 7

The Ultimate Vision: Paradiso 30–33

Six thousand miles away from, say, Italy, and looking east, it is the sixth hour—noon—which means that in Italy it is an hour before dawn (the ‘chiarissima ancella / del sol’ (see canto 30 lines 7–8)). It is 5 a.m., because if the circumference of a quarter of the globe is 5510 miles (see Convivio 3.5.11, following Alfraganus), then sunrise must be 900  miles off. The upwards shadow cast by the earth is levelling, as the sun comes up from under the horizon. The sky above is brightening, the eastern stars being lost to sight ‘a questo fondo’—at this depth, that is, the earth’s surface, when that is looked down on from above. As dawn ascends, the stars retreat, even (‘infino’—twice, 6, 9) the most beautiful, Venus. The simile brings out the slow disappearance of the angelic ‘trïunfo’ (compare 5.115–116, 30.97–98, and ‘tripudi’ in 28.124), which encircles the ‘punto’, which had been seen in canto 28.16. The stars are closed to view (‘di vista in vista’), and ‘chiude’ (8) is repeated as the circles round the ‘punto’ fade from sight. The point seems to be enclosed by that which it encloses (‘parendo inchiuso da quel ch’elli ‘nchiude’). ‘Inchiuso’ leads to ‘conchiuso’ (17), as though all praise of Beatrice was like the circles enclosing the punto. Reprising the personifications of Aurora and Lucifer in Metamorphoses 2.112–114, the simile brings on the dawn and morning light, and gives the fading out of a vision—increasing the sense that what was seen in canto 28 was as much pageant, display, as much as the other sense of travelling from the centre outwards—and it covers passing from the Primum Mobile to the Empyrean. The light of the former heaven becomes a © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Tambling, The Poetry of Dante’s Paradiso, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65628-7_7

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darkness disappearing, and the heavenly fires become stars. The six hours, discussed already in Chaps. 2 and 5, recall Dante calling the sixth hour the noblest and most powerful (Con. 4.23.15), so much that the ninth hour was pushed back towards noon, so that ‘noon’ (= the sixth hour of the day), means, etymologically, the ninth hour, and intimates Beatrice. These details derive from Convivio 3.5, called ‘one of the finest pieces of scientific prose in Italian before Galileo’ (Rime 2.176).1 It glosses the canzone ‘Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona’: Non vede il sol, che tutto ‘l mondo gira cosa tanto gentil, quanto in quell’ora che luce nella parte ove dimora la donna, di cui dire Amore mi face. (Rime no. 61.19–22)

(The sun which goes right round the world does not see such a noble thing as in that hour where he lights that part where the woman stays, of whom love makes me speak.) Dawn, sunrise, making stars disappear, combines with an echo of the canzone sung by Casella as an instance of the dolce stil in Purgatorio 2, at the same hour. That is the simile’s real subject after its puzzling indirections, until it becomes clear that it brings out the ‘bellezza’ (19, 32) of Beatrice, whose name is placed at the end of line 15, as though what had been written was analogous to a sonnet. Convivio makes the canzone’s subject Philosophy which the sun, figuring God’s omniscience, finds the most ‘gentil’; now the canzone is silently evoked, through the language of the sun’s progress, and is made part of a praise of Beatrice’s ‘dolce riso’ (26), which 30.16–36 notes, while it tracks further back than the canzone, to Vita Nuova; making this canto echo Purgatorio 30, when Beatrice was re-encountered: Se quanto infino a qui di lei si dice fosse conchiuso tutto in una loda, poco sarebbe a fornir questa vice. La bellezza ch’io vidi si trasmoda non pur di là da noi, ma certo io credo che solo il suo fattor tutta la goda. Da questo passo vinto mi concedo più che già mai da punto di suo tema soprato fosse comico o tragedo: ché, come sole in viso che più trema, così lo rimembrar del dolce riso la mente mia da me medesmo scema. (30.16–27)

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(If what has been said of her up to now was to be enclosed in one praise, it would be too small to serve this moment. The beauty that I saw passes beyond not only us [i.e. it exceeds angels’ comprehension], but certainly I believe that only its maker enjoys it fully. From this pass, I concede myself defeated more than ever comic or tragic [poet] at the point / crux of his theme; for, like the sun to the most trembling eyesight, thus the remembrance of the sweet smile separates my mind/memory from itself.) He has never ceased following her beauty in poetry, but now must, ‘come a l’ultimo suo ciascuno artista’ (as must every artist at his limit, line 33). Beatrice is beyond the enjoyment of the divine which angels possess. But at this ‘passo’, which becomes the ‘punto’, Dante is vanquished, more than either tragic poet or comic at their theme’s ‘punto’. As Francesca had said of her reading with Paolo on the day of their adultery, that ‘solo un punto fu quell che ci vinse’ (it was only one point which overcame us, Inf. 5.132), the ‘punto’ is critical, and anxiety-inducing; it makes Paolo ‘tutto tremante’ (Inf. 5.136), as with Dante’s phrase ‘in viso che più trema’ (25). The unspeakable difficulty—which is for Kierkegaard the experience of temporality—halts the poet, as that towards which all writing is directed. Like Francesca, Dante is ‘vinto’. Neither generic mode of comedy or tragedy suffices.2 The ‘punto’, which would be identical to a single defining absolute act of praise, if that was possible, would be an ecstatic state, identical to the ‘passo’ which as an aporia, makes the memory sever ‘la mente mia’ from the self. If the title ‘commedia’ exceeds formal divisions of poetry into tragic or comic, Paradiso becomes the name for what exceeds the sayable in knowable forms of poetry: the ‘punto’, the Real, the moment of temporality which gathers all possibilities into itself. In Convivio 3.5, the sun is always shining somewhere. The ‘equator’ (Latin: aequātor one who makes equal) and the ‘equinox’, ‘equality between day and night’ relate to Convivio 4’s praise of nobility as unconnected to birth, and to justice, and ‘equity’, the topic Dante might have taken in his unwritten Book 14 (Con. 4.26.8). Canto 30.1–15 does not mention the sun explicitly (only its ‘ancella’, who might be thought of as another, heavenly Matelda); it lets Beatrice be the sun (line 25). The sun being most like God, Beatrice is the sun, and the woman the sun shines on. The canzone makes her the ‘hour’ wherein the sun sees the woman: that moment of arrest, a punto itself, which makes this threefold meeting place divine. Each hour is Beatrice.3 Dante finishes Paradiso envisioning God, but begins here with something challengingly opposite: a life almost

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divine, in Beatrice. Her smile, as a punto, makes Paradiso her book, challenging future writing’s ability to confront what she represents (30.34–35). She unfolds the heavens but is also  she who ‘imparadisa la mia mente’ (28.3). In the canzone Love speaks in the mind. She makes ‘paradise’ the ecstatic state overcoming the mind; disarraying language and the self, giving more than a hint of death, because taking the mind out of itself.

The Empyrean In the Empyrean angels and redeemed are visible. Dante first sees light as a river (30.61–69—compare Psalm 46.4, Ezekiel 47.1–12, Revelation 22.1, 2), ‘fulvido di fulgore’ (golden in lightning; unless Sapegno’s fluvido (impetuous) is read here). Its banks are ‘dipinte di mirabil primavera’ (painted with miraculous spring) and it exceeds the ‘primavera’ of the Earthly Paradise (Purg. 28.51). From it issues jewelled spray, sparks, like rubies, later called topazes, rounded with gold (the circular imagery which follows is anticipated in ‘circunscrive’, 66), going into the flowers and back into the ‘miro gurge’ (the miraculous whirlpool: again circular). Sparks move in their colours, making red and yellow essential colours. Dante’s desire swells (turge) like the river, by it, and the topazes and flowers, ‘laughing’ with their fragrance. He must drink to have his thirst satisfied. This vision may stand before him like a wall, perhaps like light streaming down from the very sources of being, life moving out of it and back again into its vortices; or it may be spread out before him, and be more active than the classical locus amoenus.4 Yet it is non-specific, not attached to any truth of which it is an allegory. Immaterial, it combines the four elements: fire, water, earth in the flowers on the banks, and air, in the odours, and in the sparks flying like bees, or other insects.5 When drinking, the text highlights the eyelids, intimating circularity through the roundedness of the eyes, and what was extended in length, as a river, becomes round (‘tonda’), while apparent masks (‘larve’), markers of allegorical personification, are stripped away. Flowers and sparks become humans and angels. There is a growing intensity within what is seen, as happens again in canto 33; it is not a question of separate visions, but the ability to see more; any seeing being ‘umbriferi prefazi’—shadowy prefaces (88)—of what can be seen; ‘shadows’ typologically and ‘prefaces’ as introductory ways of speaking. He sees immaterial heavenly beings in rarefied forms, sparks, rubies, topazes, distributing their virtues to saints depicted as flowers—perhaps, on one river-bank, those preceding Christ,

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and on the other, those who came later. If these shadows give a history, Christ as the river of light implies continuance, the waters flow forth ‘perché vi s’immegli’ (a neologism: ‘for us to be bettered in it’, 87). The second vision is inside the first, and depends on a change of perception, as in the Biblical language of ‘Thou shalt make them drink of the river of thy pleasures. For with thee is the fountain of life, and in thy light shall we see light’ (Psalm 36.9, 10, which gives both visions Dante witnesses). ‘Life’ (‘faville vive’, 64) is happening, and since the river (ongoing, as time) changes, becoming circular, time images eternity.

The Second Vision With the repeated ‘vidi’- 95, 97, 99, the light up there is said to make the Creator visible to whoever ‘in lui vedere ha la sua pace’ (in seeing him has its peace, 102—see Foster 1977: 66–85). It spreads itself ‘in circular figura’; its ‘circunferenza’ a belt, a ‘cintura’ wider than the sun’s circumference (its diameter is 35,750 miles—Con. 4.8.7), as rays descending from above,6 like a cylinder of light, or a cone, its apex above, to be reflected from below from the Primum Mobile, whose invisible, transparent sphere has its outer circle like a convex mirror, drawing in everything to itself, and multiplying perspectives. The light reflected back forms a circle of light, compared to water returning a reflection to surrounding hills (109) as if these wished to see their adornment, and forming the base of the rose, or amphitheatre, or bowl of the Empyrean, which rises all around like hills in graduated formation, as the inverse of the Primum Mobile’s surface, and visible from above. Partaking of the water gives the sense of height: sì, soprastando al lume intorno intorno, vidi specchiarsi in più di mille soglie, quanto di noi là sù fatto ha ritorno. E se l’infimo grado in sé raccoglie sì grande lume, quanta è la larghezza di questa rosa ne l’estreme foglie! (30.112–117)

(so, standing above the light around I saw mirroring itself in more than a thousand levels, how many of us who have returned up there. And if the lowest step gathers in itself such a great light, how much is the largeness [joy] of this rose in its most extreme leaves?)

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The light is the pool, the white light at the rose’s base, and the light from above which is God; the light and its reflection. The circle, wider than the sun, expands outward and upward, exfoliating like a rose. ‘Intorno’ preserves the sense of roundness, essential for mirroring. The hillside looks down to the water; Dante looks upward, but everywhere is mirroring, a word significant from line 85, when he bent towards the light ‘per far migliori spegli / ancor de li occhi’ (to make better mirrors of the eyes, 85). Jacques Lacan insists on the eye as a bowl, not as a flat screen receiving images from external light, but making light bounce round inside it, as it were, giving ‘depth of field’, which is inside Dante’s own mirroring, where what was linear becomes round, encircling (Lacan 1977: 104, 106). Similarly, the hillside would see its greenery mirrored in the water; eyes receiving and sending the light out again from them as mirrors do. The circularity is like the rose window in a cathedral, an architectural detail which does not follow a rose-design (a false etymology), but is a wheel, and an eye, like the Wheel of Fortune, an image and movement from Boethius’ world (Dow 1957: 248–297). Dante would have seen the rose-window in San Zeno, Verona (c.1189–1200), which on the outer wall is a Wheel of Fortune, the arches of its outer parts being like Romanesque columns, symbolising the dignity of church rulers; but the window throws a reflection inside, like a rose, onto the church walls. Significances alter; we can interpret the double vision by saying that inside the Wheel of Fortune, which speaks of the vicissitudes of life in time—in scholastic terms, ‘accidents’—Mary inheres, as a rose (Leyerle 1977: 280–308). Internal rhyming, alliteration and enjambement and word reversal— redole/odor/lode—convey growing excitement: Nel giallo de la rosa sempiterna, che si dilata ed ingrada e redole odor di lode al sol che sempre verna, qual è colui che tace e dicer vole, mi trasse Bëatrice, e disse: ‘Mira quanto è ‘l convento de le bianche stole!’ (124–129)

(In the yellow of the sempiternal rose, which expands, and upgrades (compare 29.130), and gives off odour of praise to the sun which always makes the spring, Beatrice drew me who was as one who is silent and would speak, and said ‘Behold how great the assembly of white robes!’)

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The rose is white in 31.1.7 Red, however, is evoked through the ‘sangue’ of Christ (31.3), giving the colours of the Song of Songs 5.10. ‘Giallo’ works with ‘fulvido’ for this ‘always eternal’ rose. The word ‘sempiterna’, in containing ‘sempre’, implies constant renewal, the rose repeating itself within time, and, in ‘terna’, threeing-itself. It answers to the ‘sol che sempre verna’, where ‘verna’, which implies green, associates with ‘primavera’. Beatrice does not specify names; only the miracle of resurrected clothed bodies. Bidding him ‘mira’, the mirroring structure he sees is simultaneously a city (Silverstein 1949: 149–154), or a Colosseum, or the arena at Verona; with the angelic bee-like orders descending into the great flower adorned with many petals. In highly allusive flower-imagery, as in the Roman de la Rose, the rose combines the mirror, and the fountain; one critic calls it ‘the fountain of God’s bounty transformed into a flower’ (Gunn 1952: 303).8 It is the whole ‘convento’, and it is Mary, and Christ, since ‘there shall come forth a rod (virga) out of the stem of Jesse (i.e. Mary), and a branch/flower [virgo i.e. Christ] shall grow out of his roots’ (Isaiah 11.1). That identification was made by Bernard of Clairvaux, for whom Christ was the lily of the valleys (Song of Songs 2.1—see Johnson 1961: 17–18). ‘Virga’ recalls Aaron’s rod that budded and brought forth buds, blossoms, and almonds (Numbers 17.8)—often carried by Gabriel in images of the Annunciation. Jesse’s ‘roots’ were the Hebrew women leading to him, and to David. Like the lily, the rose is feminine, appealing to sight, smell, and touch. Coming out of the mother earth like Proserpine, its centre evokes the womb. Its beauty and fruitfulness seem continuous with the stars; hence the images evoking stars as flowers in canto 23, Mary being the ‘bel fior’ and the ‘viva stella’ (23.88, 92). Peter Dronke discusses the Greek versions of the rose as the flos florum, which in the twelfth century makes the rose applicable to both the Virgin and Christ, and the ideal woman in fin’ amor poetry, as well as being applied, for instance, in Cavalcanti, to the Spring, as Flora. Dronke notes the treatise Rota Veneris (The Wheel of Love) by the rhetorician Boncompagno (c.1240), which combines Fortune’s Wheel and Mary; and he cites the poem ‘Si linguis angelicus’, making the Rose heavenly love in this life, gained through the woman (Dronke 1968: 1.139–141, 181–192, 249, 318–331).

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Bernard Willing to go beyond ‘la forma general di paradiso’ (31.52), Dante finds Bernard: Beatrice is in her place but as she is mentioned in his prayer (33.38) she has not been displaced from her centrality to Dante Rather, she has moved Bernard (31.66) as she had moved Virgil at the first (Inf. 2.70). The revelation of Bernard’s name follows three terzine (31.94–102) signalling the Virgin, and closing: E la regina del cielo, ond’ïo ardo tutto d’amor, ne farà ogni grazia, però ch’i’ sono il suo fedel Bernardo. (100–102)

(And the Queen of Heaven for whom I burn full of love, will do for us all grace, because I am her faithful Bernard.) Bernard wrote in devotion to Mary, especially with commentaries on the Song of Songs, hence Dante chooses this ‘contemplante’ (32.1, 31.111), author of De Consideratione, mentioned in Epistle 10, after Richard of St Victor’s De Contemplatione (Toynbee, 191) as the final guide.9 His features, like the Veronica, resemble the divine, since he mirrors the divine essence (see 32.107–108); similarly, Mary’s face most resembles Christ’s (32.85). Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), the ‘mellifluus’ (honey-dropping) doctor, advocated the Second Crusade. He was related to the founder of the Templars, as well as being the leader of the Cistercians, meaning that he followed reforms which Peter Damiani would have supported. Further, he acquired some status in Florence, which may be relevant here (France 2007: 239–263). Rachel Fulton (2002: 303–309), like many, dwells on his eloquence: he was attracted alongside Anselm and Francis, to the humanity of Christ. M.B.  Pranger links the subjectivity which this implies with the arguments of Charles Homer Haskins who found a new affectivity emerging within the ‘twelfth-century Renaissance’. Pranger notes the restlessness of one Bernardine prayer to Mary—a prayer really public, made on behalf of the congregation—beseeching her not to neglect the angel of the Annunciation (‘the Angel is awaiting an answer’), fusing Revelation 3.20 and the Song of Songs 5.2, and 3.1–4 in: Look, he for whom all nations have been longing is standing outside, knocking on your door. O do not let your hesitation cause him to pass by! Then your soul would start to wander again, looking for him whom your soul; loves. Rise, run and open! Rise in faith, run in devotion, and open your heart in confession!10

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Bernard epitomises humanity ‘lending voice to the latter’s urgent need of redemption. … Borders are being blurred between the human and the divine, between the voice of the Virgin and the voice of the abbot’ (Pranger 2013: 195). Such restlessness, such aggressively personal speaking, re-­ writing the Biblical events as if Mary might have missed meeting Christ and the Angel—as though all time was the sacred ‘punto’ of salvific happenings—makes him fit to pray to Mary in canto 33. Chaucer writes in The Legend of Good Women (line 16) that ‘Bernard the monk ne saugh nat all, pardee’ (Smith 1946: 38–44). In the fourteenth-­ century poem ‘Lamentation of Mary to St Bernard’ Mary—not Bernard— has seen the Passion, which gives her the knowledge he desires, so that Mary must supply the details of Christ’s physical sufferings to him (Horstmann 1892: 297–328). In this way, as in much late medieval art, Mary’s intercession is assumed when a sainting has a vision of the crucifixion. The ‘Lamentation’ calls Mary ‘Queene of heaven and hell’ (line 161), echoing what Bernard acknowledges about Dante: that he has been in hell (Para. 33.22–.24). Bernard calls Mary ‘Wyf and Maiden, Moder Milde’ (722), as dependent on her for knowledge, but Dante makes him call Mary ‘regina’ (31.116), and Augusta (32.119, compare 30.136). Bernard makes Dante look (31.118–142), and his own eyes and looking follow, making Dante’s eyes look again more willingly, and producing an incremental warmth: Bernardo, come vide li occhi miei nel caldo suo caler fissi e attenti, li suoi con tanto affetto volse a lei che ‘ miei di rimarar fé più ardenti. (31.139–142)

(Bernard, when he saw my eyes fixed and attentive on the object of his ardent love, turned his [eyes] to her with such affect that made mine to look again more ardent.) ‘Suo caler’ means Mary, and it/she generates ‘ardenti’ (Latin, ‘ardere’, to burn), so that fire catches throughout the lines, and is caught in the eyes. Expounding the rose to Dante begins with Mary (31.112–142), whose highest position expands the perspective, so that it becomes like a vertical east window, with the virgin at its summit, for she is seen as it were in the east, like the sun, which becomes the ‘pacifica oriafiamma’ (127), that is, the banner of golden flames on a red background for the kings of France on making war. Though ‘pacifica’ makes Mary transcend French

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monarchs, she ‘looketh forth as the morning’, ‘terrible as an army with banners’ (Song of Songs 6.4, 10). Red and gold colours together were prepared for by ‘rubin che oro circunscrive’ (rubies that gold circumscribed, 30.66), and if red suggests sunset, and the gold sunrise, that ordering of the Hebrew day accords with the simile apparent in lines 118–120, as Dante raises his eyes to her. Mary is the east, is the ‘chariot of fire’, Blake’s phrase (compare 2 Kings 2.11), as the sun was for Phaeton (31.124–125, Ovid, Met. 2.59), where the chariot’s axle and pole and wheel-tyres (Met 2.107) are golden: Ovid’s line repeats aureus thrice.

Canto 32 Below Mary sits Eve, the other virgin, and that gives the key: mothers, literal or spiritual, are given prominence here. Below Eve sits Rachel, and adjacent to her, Beatrice (cp. Inf. 2.102 and Inf. 4.60); she is Rachel’s complement amongst those post-dating Christ. Leah, the active life, is unnamed, but Rachel, the contemplative has been spoken of, and dreamed about (Purg. 27.103–108). She takes priority over the previous generations, Sarah and Rebecca (alluded to in 32.67–79, for Jacob and Esau (Genesis 25.22–27, Romans 9.10–15)). Judith follows (compare Purg. 12.58–60), and Ruth, the exile, and the foreigner. This gives seven women, with others below them, looking for ‘Cristo venturo’. Ruth is an eighth in giving her name to the last book in the Octocheuch. In marrying Boaz, the son of Rahab (Matthew 1.5), she connects to Rahab (canto 9.115–126), her fulfilment, as her daughter-in-law. Judith compares with David, since both decapitated the Hebrews’ enemies: Holofernes and Goliath. Judith (= Judah) figures the Virgin’s triumph over Lust, or Pride, or the devil, as in Donatello’s sculpture of her in Florence. The place where she killed Holofernes, Bethulia, was interpreted as meaning ‘virgin’.11 Ruth enables two lines in the terzina to be dedicated to David (neither are named); he is evoked as weeping, as feminine, saying ‘Miserere mei’ (Psalm 51.1), the Penitential psalm which contrasts with his earlier triumphalism. Dante gives and undoes a chronological order, giving plural significances to names who must be pointed out like saints in a rose-window, with its complex non-linear patterns and internal structuring. The ascent of waiting women becomes a strange feminine version of the Tree of Jesse, that twelfth-century motif seen in St Denis (1144) and in Chartres.12 Associated with the Virgin, in Chartres, where Bernard preached the Crusade in 1146, the Tree was decorated with lilies, significant for Mary,

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and France, and its male rulers; similarly, lilies were on the coin of Florence.13 Facing Mary sits John the Baptist: che sempre santo ‘l diserto e ‘l martiro sofferse, e poi l’inferno da due anni. (32.32–33)

Always holy, he suffered the desert—like the hermits within Saturn— and martyrdom, and hell for two years; three torments, and three descending humiliations, which are complemented by his topmost position above Francis and Benedict, and Augustine, the latter named for his ‘rule’, which was generated from his letters, and adopted after 1215 by various monastic orders. These believers in the Christ who had come correspond to the women anticipating Christ (32.32–39). Canto 32 specifies an equal number of those saved before Christ with those saved after, making the rose divide into semicircles, whose join is invisible, until Bernard returns to Mary’s face, which holds Dante suspended (32.92). We must note this word, which comes from 28.41, when Dante was held by the ‘punto’ from which ‘depende il cielo e tutta la natura’, ‘sospeso’ and ‘depende’ evoking the vertiginousness of ‘he hangeth the earth upon nothing’ (Job 26.7): it will recur in canto 33. In canto 30, Beatrice showed Henry VII’s empty throne, speaking of Italy’s ‘cieca cupidigia’ (blind avarice), and of his betrayal by Clement V who presides in the court (implied by the words ‘foro divino’), opposed inwardly and outwardly to Henry and the Empire, but who will survive Henry for less than eight months, and will join Simon Magus, in a symmetry with the enthronement here.14 The rose is ‘questo imperio giustissimo e pio’ (32.117): Moses, next to Adam (32.130–132), may shadow Henry, whom Epistle 5.1, written in 1310, calls another Moses (Toynbee, 59); the first Moses faced another ungrateful people (32.130–132). Henry will precede Dante at ‘queste nozze’ (30.135), intimating Dante’s life as like his and adding an intimation of mortality. That three deaths are apparent, and that few people are missing from the rose (30.132), makes the end of things imminent. Explanations are ending, and the Commedia’s project nearly finished. Adam and Peter relate, as ‘fathers’ from the Fixed Stars, giving the rose dual sources. To Peter, called the ‘padre vetusto / di Santa Chiesa’, Christ commended the keys (‘chiave’) to this ‘fior venusto’ (beautiful flower). That juxtaposing of images, which leaps over intervening linking stages—a

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key implies that a gate leads into a hortus conclusus where the rose is— seems to include a move typical of many Paradiso images. The sequence often implies an ellipsis, or jumping, such as Dante thought was impelled on him (23.62). The indirection which points out Peter (124–126) is followed by another, a terzina indirectly alluding to John who saw ‘pria che morisse’ (128—another reminder of death)—the ‘tempi gravi’ of ‘la bella sposa, / che s’acquistò con la lancia e coi chiavi’. Noteworthy here are the pun and rhyme associating ‘chiave’ and ‘clavi’. Both are emblematic images in Gothic stained glass (and it will be remembered that only John’s Gospel mentions the lance (John 19.34, 35). The heavy future of the bride of Revelation 19.7) means that the terzina begins with the end (Revelation) and ends with the Gospel. (There are analogies with Purgatorio 32 which is similarly prophetic of Apocalyptic times, using imagery from Revelation.) Since Dante is due to join this feast (30.138), the Bride’s experiences are peculiarly significant. The terzine for Peter and John give a history of the Church, but it is presented through ellipses which assume knowledge of Peter’s confession on which basis the Church is founded (Matthew 16.16–19), and which go through to the Apocalypse. To the idea of Dantean imagery being elliptical, we must add that it has a narrative structure, whether working forwards or from conclusion to beginning. The sense of times being equivalent shows with the last names, two women. Anna, presented as one in a suspended state, faces Peter, and Lucy, Adam. Both come from the literature of the miraculous lives written after the Gospels, giving lives before and after the Gospel events. Anna is part of Mary’s pre-life (Elliott 1993: 48–67), Lucy her afterlife (GL 1.27–29). These elliptical images contrast with another constant emphasis: on unbroken circles, completions which are supplied by mirrors, and on spheres, on  which Jacques Lacan has speculated, in discussing Plato’s Symposium and referring to the sphere in Timaeus 33. Lacan’s psychoanalytic interest makes him see spheres as offering nothing to castration, for their smoothness give no edges to be pruned; they serve as a refusal, or imaginary denial of, or apotropaic against, castration (Lacan 2015: 88–93), that is, against  the interruption of narcissism, so  breaking an imaginary sense of wholeness, spelling death especially to the male subject. As the spheres in Ptolemaic astronomy contrast with the sense of the ellipsis—as Kepler said spheres move elliptically—so the ellipsis argues for something decentred, lacking a centre. There is a contrast, which casts Paradiso as a text whose stress on circles and spheres is confronted by those moments when the sacred text must ‘saltar’ as one who finds his path barred—‘riciso’

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(23.63). It would be spherical in its patterning, and that so much in the poem tends towards being seen as the complete circle shows a desire, or anxiety, to pluralise completeness, while finding another tension within it, which we will note, though certainly not for the first time, in canto 33.

Canto 33 The Empyrean thus far has been marked by the language of the Church, and however new, remains traditional. That cannot be said of what follows, which breaks all bounds.15 Bernard’s prayer to the Virgin compares with the hymn of Philosophy in Boethius, ending with God contemplated in circular terms. It accords with Timaeus’ recommendation to invoke the gods (Timaeus 27c), specifically the author of the creation; and Philosophy in doing so, follows a precise order (Wiltshire 1972: 216–220): Grant, Father, that our minds thy august seat may scan, Grant us the sight of true good’s source, and grant us light That we may fix on thee our mind’s unblinded eye. Disperse the clouds of earthly matter’s cloying weight; Shine out in all thy glory, for thou art rest and peace To those who worship thee; to see thee is our end, Who art our source and maker, lord, and path and goal. (Boethius, 3 m.9, 22–28)16

Confidence in vision is a gift of the neo-Platonic tradition, and Paradiso prays to a visible Mary, whose visibility aligns her with what happens in a medieval picture, where the saint on earth and Mary are seen together, despite their different forms and levels of reality. In an equivalent passage to Boethius, Bernard asks for Dante to see the ‘sommo piacer’. Seven terzine addressing Mary are followed by six interceding for Dante. ‘Vergine madre’, ‘figlia del tuo figlio’ and ‘umile e alta’ and ‘termine fisso d’etterno consiglio’ give four contradictions, vergine/umile/ termine linking in assonance. ‘Vergine madre, figlia del tuo figlio’ comprises four substantives, the first and third and the second and fourth interrelating. The patterning reinforces how Paradiso is marked by interlocking relationships: formed by kinship, or typological affinity. ‘Vergine’, ‘madre’ and ‘figlia’ comprise three ways of considering the woman, within implied relationships which are more significant than identities. Connections come through language-links, interlacing each strange

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relationship; emphasising temporal links like roots/flower, or mother/ daughter. ‘Umile e alta’ relates to the first two terms. ‘Vergine’ segues into ‘umile’, as the keyword aligning Mary with the non-material and the angelic—with what Paradiso values intensely. ‘Termine fisso’ applies Proverbs 8.23 to Mary: ‘I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the world was’. Mary creates the moment destined for the eternal counsel; and ‘figlia’—daughter of her son—she is also daughter of Anna (32.133–134)—remembers Philosophy as ‘la bellissima e onestissima figlia de lo Imperadore dell’ universo’ (Convivio 2.15.12: the most beautiful and most honest daughter of the Emperor of the universe). All the investments Dante makes in the woman as Wisdom continue here, and associate with the word ‘consiglio’. The ‘donna gentile’, when allegorised as Philosophy, was spoken of in terms appropriate for the Virgin, and the language of the Annunciation is used relative to her, as though she was the angel (Rime no. 59.46–52).17 ‘Fattore’ and ‘fattura’ follow Proverbs 8, linked by the verb ‘farsi’. This first terzina creates wonder; Aristotle claimed that ‘it was because of wonder that men both now and originally began to philosophise’ (Metaphysics 982b: p. 9; Boyde 1981: 49–51). The second terzina divides by a caesura; on the one side, praise of Mary, on the other, what the creator (Christ) did not disdain doing. Hence the third terzina exfoliates: Nel ventre tuo si raccese l’amore per lo cui caldo ne l’etterna pace così è germinato questo fiore. (7–9)

(In your womb was re-kindled the love through whose warmth in the eternal peace was thus germinated this flower.) The constraint of ‘your womb’ and the Annunciation continues with the love (Christ), whose warmth, in the eternal peace (i.e. the Atonement— the action of making peace) has caused the germinating of the celestial rose. The ellipses give a narrative circling from the womb to the flower as another, superior womb, protective, warm, and including Christ as the flower; Mary is contained in the flower which she contained. Now, in the rose, Mary becomes the meridian torch, the noonday sun, repeating a significance from the simile introducing canto 30, representing love (‘caritade’); she is both the heat of the day and its refuge within it (as in Genesis 18.1, 2, Song 1.7—Bambeck 1979: 164–175). Below (giuso), Mary is the

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fountain of hope—fire and water together. And the prayer turns to what she is always; the coincidentally stil novist title (‘Donna’) adds how essential it is to have recourse to her. These lines, going from ‘tu se’ (4) and ‘La tua’ (16) and the triple ‘in te’ (19, 20), ascribe to her seven qualities: she is great and powerful, so that whoever wants grace but not by her, wishes to fly without wings. She has good will, mercy, compassion, and magnificence, so that—in a terzina echoing the first: in te s’aduna quantunque in creatura è di bontate. (20, 21)

(in you is united whatever is good in the creature.) She so ennobled creaturely nature that the Maker did not disdain to make himself his own creature: there can be no withdrawal from her; she was the prior instance of nobility before Christ. But as ‘figlia’ she is created, as ‘vergine madre’ she is mother of the son, while ‘vergine’ exempts her from history, while playing on the already cited virga/virgo pun which Auerbach (1949: 1–22) says Bernard knew. Bernard asks in the second half (22–39) that Dante’s eyes may rise to the ultimate ‘salute’ (27), but then comes something more vertiginous: that every cloud of Dante’s mortality may be ‘disleghi’. This asks for complete immateriality, that the highest pleasure may be ‘dispieghi’ (unfolded). ‘Pieghe’ appeared at 24.26, implying the incomprehensible nature of the vision; the ‘folds’ which the sensorium cannot register. The sense that visibility cannot be read has been a constant. And it leads to the third plea, that Dante’s ‘affetti’ will be kept sane. The danger is to succumb to the ‘punto’, as argued before; that Dante’s ‘movimenti umani’ (human stirrings) will overcome him, in and beyond this ecstasy. The danger, which contrasts with Boethius’ distance, is of becoming too near, not being able to return, and it silently introduces death.

Canto 33: The Sybil After the prayer, Dante has no guide, and there is no speech—his own nor another’s. He is alone, as in the first 60 lines of Inferno. Like Mary, he looks into the light, and that continues as an increasingly dominant idea.18 Momentary images are given, before which come expressions of failure of speech, and failure of memory (the ‘inexpressibility’ topos—see Fichera

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2008: 62–76). But whenever he records the trace left of something seen, or felt, that educes something like a prayer. The pattern appears in the first division (55–75), where the comparison is with a dream; the passion impressed (impressa) remains in the mind, but not the substance; for words fail, and the memory cannot hold such ‘oltraggio’ (57—meaning ‘cosa che va oltre, che eccede le sue possibilità’—Leonardi), and relating to outrance (going beyond).19 ‘Oltraggio’ puns on “raggio”: the light that goes beyond, that overcomes. There is distilled in the heart ‘il dolce’, which remains: Così la neve al sol si disigilla; così al vento ne le foglie levi si perdea la sentenza di Sibilla. (64–66)

(so the snow unseals itself to the sun; so, on the wind, on the light leaves, was lost the sentence of the Sybil.) Distinction disappears; snow discoheres in water; in the second line, coherence—writing—scatters itself on leaves. The sun and wind act alike in these similes, one ‘natural’, one literary. Dante would have known of the Sibyls, of whom the Roman Varro (116–27 BCE) had distinguished ten: Persian, Libyan, Delphian, Cimmerian, Erythraean, Samian, Cumaean, Hellespontic, Phrygian, and Tiburtine. Augustine, using Varro and Lactantius, had described them in City of God (18.23). Sibylline prophecies, alongside those of David, are remembered in the medieval Latin poem ‘Dies irae’. The oracles had been preserved in Rome (Aeneas alludes to this in Aeneid 6.69–74), but they were lost in a fire in 83 CE. Fourteen books of the Oracula Sibyllina, from the sixth century CE, Byzantine in source, were partially preserved, and Isidore, Hrabanus Maurus, and Peter Comestor commented on them. Their message was apocalyptic, Judaic and Christian, and they apparently pointed forward to Christ: hence Michelangelo depicted five, alongside seven prophets in the Sistine Chapel (Holdensried 2006: 54–60). Dante would have known of this extra-Biblical wisdom, how the Sibyl’s words prophesied Christ; further, that the verses formed an acrostic, better legible in the Greek from which they had been translated into Latin. And he knew of the Cumaean Sibyl in Virgil’s fourth Eclogue, which Lactantius saw as prophesying the Messiah, as Statius reads it in Purgatorio 22.55–73 (see Chap. 5): hence ‘Now is come the last age of Cumaean song, the great line of the centuries begins anew…’ (Virgil 1.490).

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That Cumaean wisdom which Virgil inscribed, preserving the words of the Sibyl as Dante must preserve what is likely to suffer dissemination, anticipated the Virgin, as source of wisdom; the Sibyl is older than Mary, and more ambiguous, as a sexually violated figure of chthonic as well as Apollonian wisdom, possessing the God. Reference to her prophecy means that Dante steps back from Mary to another, older woman, making several women haunt this canto: the Sybil, Philosophy—whether Solomonic, or Boethian—Mary, and Beatrice. Aeneid 3.443–450 tells Aeneas his boat will reach Cumae, the first Greek settlement in Italy, c.750 BCE (McKay 1970: 202–210). He will see the haunted lakes and Avernus with its rustling woods, and the inspired prophetess ‘who deep in a rocky cave sings the Fates and entrusts to leaves signs and symbols. Whatever verses the maid has traced on leaves she arranges in order and stores away in the cave’. But the breeze takes them and they flutter in the cave. This account expands in Book 6: the cavern is labyrinthine, with ‘a hundred wide mouths, a hundred gateways from which rush as many voices, the answers of the Sibyl’. She, Deiphobe, Glaucus’ daughter, is frenzied, sexually possessed by Apollo, breathed on (‘adflata’, 6.51) by him, and Aeneas appeals to her not to trust her verses to leaves, ‘lest they fly in disorder, the sport of rushing winds’. She must chant her oracles (6.54–76—see Skulsky 1987: 56–80). Apollo and his struggle with Marsyas, and his entering into him, parallels that violence; to re-read canto 1, Dante must become sibylline.20 Her voice, broken up, is inherently echoingly plural, as each leaf on which she has written may be a word, or hieroglyph, or letter of a word, as Servius speculated (Parke 1988: 97). If inscribed leaves blow for ever on the wind—and if found lack any origin—they form the trace which fills the world with writing. Her message is prophetic (Aeneid 6.12), attended with the invitation to Aeneas to go down to Dis, an invitation haunting Inferno: facilis descensus Averno noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis; sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras, hoc opus, hic labor est …

(easy is the descent to Avernus: night and day the door of gloomy Dis stands open; but to recall one’s steps and pass out to the upper air, this is the task, this the toil!) (Virgil 6.126–129, 1.541)

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The Sibyl accompanies Aeneas, Virgil-like, to the underworld. Returning with him (Aen. 6.897), she enables the taking of Rome (Inf. 2.13–27). That her words are lost produces Dante’s first apostrophe to God, that he will return to the memory something of what he saw (echoing Para. 1.7–12), and make his tongue speak (67–75). He is the Sybil, typifying divine possession, whose price is loss; her torment the instability of mind Bernard prayed Dante would not have. Snow unforms, and the Sibyl’s leaves are lost; the snow-image being ambiguous, for, while referring to the vision seen but now in course of dissemination, melting reveals the concealed. ‘Disigilla’ (64) relates to ‘impressa’ (59); after the dream, the stamped impression of the ‘passione’ remains as a seal. The impress remains: the seal unseals. The Sibyl shows speech giving way, it shows passion stamped, inscribed, circling round something inaccessible (1.7–12, 33.55–60), the illustration of a mind fragmenting. He prays that the light may return to the memory what has been lost, and animate the tongue for the ‘futura gente’ (72), casting himself as prophesying like the Sibyl, in his own ‘versi’ (74), fearful it may all go. The present tense of line 58, and of lines 76 and 77 shows pondering on writing, which releases three visions: the book, the circles, and the sense of the incarnation; three moments declared to be all that can be held in memory.

Reading the Book Lines 76–99 revert to where Dante was at line 54, followed by ‘io fui più ardito’ and ‘io presunsi’ as, in praying to abounding grace, he says he fulfilled all his seeing: seeing a central image which answers to, and returns, what was lost from the Sybil (Ahern 1982: 800–809, 1983: 1–14). Leaves scattered through the universe are bound into one thickness, or folding— or one book: 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’ vido, perché più di largo,

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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. (85–96)

(in its depths I saw internalised/as a three, tied together with love in one volume/mass/revolving sphere, that which through the universe becomes so many separate quires [quire = four double pages], substances and accidents and their mode of being, as if blown together, in such a mode that which I speak of is a single light. The universal form of this knot I believe that I saw, because I feel more joy, saying this. A single point/ moment is a greater lethargy/immobility to me than twenty-five centuries to the impression/enterprise that made Neptune admire the shadow of the Argo.) Three and four together relate complexly, as when the sun combined three crosses in four circles (canto 1). What in the universe is dimly intuited because the leaves are scattered, unites in one book, which the last canto of a hundred would parallel; though Dante never saw it. God is the ‘transcendent poet whose creation is “bound with love in one volume”’ (Ascoli 2008: 120). Perhaps Wolfram gives a hint of how God may be a four when Giburc in Willehalm section 309 speaks of ‘Our Father Tetragrammaton’: God described in four Hebrew consonants: God as writing (Passage 1977: 176). That three and four fusion is shadowed here: the Sybil’s ‘foglie’ are scattered, but with the sense of a lost book bound together: substances, and accidents, and their ‘rapporto reciprico’ (Leonardi). Relationships, however plural and disseminated, return in this momentary conflation, like radically differing images comprising one simile. Several quires make a volume. Cacciaguida speaks of the ‘quaderno / de la vostra matera’ (the volume/quire of your material world, 17.37–38), that is, the world below the moon. This comprises one quire of many, its four-ness (quaderno) the four elements. Paradiso 23.112–113 calls the Primum Mobile ‘lo real manto di tutti i volumi / del mondo’: the royal mantle of all the volumes (their scroll-like ‘turnings’) of the world, as though the Primum Mobile wrapped the volume of the inner spheres around. Curtius (1953: 321) compares Revelation 6.14: ‘the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together’. So, ‘mi rivolsi e furon tocchi / li miei da ciò che pare in quel volume’ (28.14). Dante turns, and his eyes are touched by what appears inside that volume (the Primum Mobile as the book) or ‘the revolving sphere’, which encloses the inner spheres.

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Bonaventura thought of the Bible, and the book of nature, and of God known through both. The book is double, as when, in Ezekiel 2.9–10, and Revelation 5.1, it is ‘written within and without’. Curtius (1953: 321) claims the inside of the book gives God’s eternal art and wisdom, the outer, the sensible world. Memory is another book as in Para. 23.54, the opening of Vita Nuova, ‘il libro della mia memoria’, and Inferno 2.8: o mente che scrivesti ciò ch’io vidi

(O memory which wrote that which I saw …) The Muses were daughters of another Sybilline force, Mnemosyne, goddess of memory. Memory writes, making itself / the mind a book to revisit, as Macbeth says: ‘your pains / Are register’d where every day I turn / The leaf to read them’ (Macbeth 1.3.151–153).21 The mind may be struck, but, as seen later, the fantasia may receive nothing of the image: ‘A l’alta fantasia qui mancò possa’ (33.142).22 For now, we note the intuition that there is more in the vision than the visible single light. In modern trauma, consciousness attempts to protect itself against shock, and blanks out what otherwise would overwhelm (Benjamin 2003: 316–319). Here, however, appears desire for the ultimate, for the ‘oltraggio’. The ‘punto’ (94) is the point, what was earlier called ‘un segno’ … ‘trina Luce’ … ‘unica stella’ (31.27, 28). Since it is put into contrast with twenty-five centuries, it must mean a moment in or out of time, or the moment after the vision; it gives Dante a greater oblivion than that since the Argonauts, whom medieval chronology fabled to have crossed the seas in 1223 BCE. Dante’s present reality depends on that ‘punto’, the vision of a book whose meaning his ‘letargo’ cannot recapture. He had the sense of seeing substances (things existing in themselves, e.g. a tree) and accidents (qualities inhering in different substances, e.g. greenness), so interpenetrated that he saw a single light. The complexity shows in the light-image’s multiplicity and non-visibility, bright colours/white light. Aristotle’s Metaphysics calls a substance (ousia) that which has being; an accident (sumbebekos) implies an event, a coincidence, so giving the thought of Fortune, of contingency (Hamilton 2007: 11–42 for Aristotle, 43–68 for Dante). ‘Substance’ and ‘accident’ combined speak of matter and its vicissitudes; Plotinus, however, would not have accepted ‘substance’ as material; it is spiritual in character, so, in a Plotinian reading, ‘substance’ and ‘accident’ suggests spirit and matter brought into relationship: perhaps even implying the hypostatic union, that is, the divine and human natures united in Christ’s materiality. What was so interrelated is a

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‘nodo’, a knot, ‘the universal form’ or ‘idea’, which Paradiso 13.53 equates with Christ. We have the single point, the knot, and the unifying of what had been scattered.23 This moment gives a sleep, or forgetfulness, deeper than twenty-five centuries after Jason’s ‘impresa’ (recalling line 59). An ‘impresa’ is both an undertaking, an enterprise, and the impression made as the boat cuts into the water, like the trace, the shadow which makes Neptune look up as the first boat crosses (recalling 2.1–18). That shadow contrasts with the light which Dante—like Neptune, who is a watcher (Inf. 28.82–84)—sees as he looks into it, wherein the punto and the ‘nodo’ are a trace, a further intensity. But with no darkening—rather, light is within light. For Hollander (1969: 226–232), the ‘impresa’ in Inferno 2.41 means the journey Dante must make, whereas for Inf. 32.7 describing the ‘fondo a tutto l’universo’ is an ‘impresa’, a poetic task: the writing of the poem. An impresa in sixteenth-­century English was something stamped on an emblem, and ‘stamped’ suggests its opposite (64), that the snow unseals—‘disigilla’ (64), as the reverse of St Francis’ ‘sigilla’, that is, the stigmata, his ultimate ‘informing’, by Christ (11.108). Bernard recalls that Dante had been at the ‘infima lacuna / dell’ universo’, at the deepest bottom, or lagoon (lacuna) of Cocytus, the place of emptiness; and he has stamped his writing upon it, like Jason’s boat marking the undifferentiated space of the sea. Jason and Neptune may change places. One moves forward; and a marking comes, and goes in the wake. Neptune watches the shadow of this new thing; Dante moves forward in his impresa, scattering water as the Sibyl’s leaves are scattered: what God marks him? ‘Letargo’ (94) indicates sleep, which Bernard anticipates overtaking Dante (32.139). Ulysses had spoken of the ‘picciola vigilia / d’ i nostri sensi’ (Inf. 26.114–115). It seems that the natural human condition is sleep, the state Dante was in within the dark wood (‘tant’era pien di sonno a quel punto / che la verace via abbandonai’—Inf. 1.11, 12). That makes the ‘punto’ both precise, and a long period of drowsiness, a state of imprecise notation of time. Vision is wrested from absence; seeing is as one ‘che sognando vede’ (58); seeing in sleep, or dream. Oblivion returns, the forgotten; God is remembrable only in negatives. This develops in the following terzina, which is suspended between the immobility of sleep, and intensity: Così la mente mia, tutta sospesa, mirava fissa, immobile e attenta, e sempre di mirar faceasi accesa. (97–99)

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(Thus my mind, all suspended, gazed fixedly, immobile, attentive, and always to gaze became aflame.) It is as if the mind is being burned away, in these lines amplifying the ‘letargo’, as giving states between life and death in an ecstatic state. Hollander notes Curtius saying that letargo in Alan of Insulis bears the sense of ‘ecstasy’. ‘Ammirar’, which records the gazing of Neptune, where it might seem that he was dumb-struck, recurs twice, modified, reinforced by ‘sempre’. These lines imply the risk of shock, experiencing the deepest trauma. ‘Sospesa’, a word noted before, implying the power of the moment to arrest everything, only intensifies this double state.24 Tenacious in his dominance, Dante declares it impossible to consent to turn from that light, because ‘tutto s’accoglie in lei’: everything of goodness (‘ben’) is gathered in it. These lines return to 33.85–92, implying there is a concentration within the punto, and another in the mind which concentrates.

The Vision Seeing the book was the penultimate vision. A last section, the opening declaring inarticulacy, expands on the ‘semplice sembiante’ (109—compare 90) of the image; affirming that while it was always (‘sempre’) the same, it was changing, like him. The tense-change is noticeable in line 111: ‘che tal è sempre qual s’era davante’—it is always what it was before. It is still ‘semplice’, that is, something ‘singly folded’. But, as Austin (1937: 473) translates 112–114: ‘by reason of the sight which was gaining strength in me as I looked, one single appearance, as I kept changing, was travailing within me’ (‘a me si travagliava’). This ‘sola parvenza’ produces the Joachite image of ‘tre giri’—turning, spiralling (116). One becomes three within the deep light’s ‘profonda e chiara sussistenza’. That Trinitarian idea, anticipated in ‘s’interna’ (85), contrasts with Bernard’s insights, thinking of God within humanity. But this concerns the opposite: how can the Godhead cohere, as three coloured circles coalesce in one ‘contenenza’ (circumference, or capacity)? As the image changes, the first two circles seem like double rainbows, iri da iri— moving from giri, out of which ‘iri’ flows. The second issues from the first. The third, like Pentecostal fire, breathing from both others, has the significance of love. The rainbow pluralises any number of colours: between two and a thousand, but perhaps as often in medieval writings, four (Austin 1929: 315–318).

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In another declaration, what he saw was more than he could conceptualise, producing the third (after 67, and 82) apostrophe or prayer. It takes a riddling form: 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. (124–132)

(O divine light, which alone abides in yourself, alone understands yourself, and of yourself known, and understanding, loves and smiles on yourself, that circling which appeared so conceived in you, as a reflected light, to my eyes, looking all around, in itself, of its own colour, appeared as painted with our image, so that my gaze was all fixed in him.) The double ‘sola’ tells the light it alone ‘sits’ in itself, and understands itself, but it is known of itself (by the Son) and, understanding itself, it loves and smiles, which is redolent of the dolce stil as a new, historical, outpouring of spirit. To the self-reflexivity and plurality combined in this divine sitting, knowing, and being known, and within this perfect active circling of knowing, loving and smiling, Dante writes of seeing the divine human within the second ‘circulazion’, which produces the word ‘circunspetto’, conveying what he realises: becoming what he sees, for he too is turning. Everything turns on the presentation of Christ here, provocatively explained by Maximus the Confessor: Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity, is understood as the metaphysical and ontological centre of the total cosmos … the whole history of the cosmos, of its beginning and end, and of its ontological constitution and purpose, has its centre in Christ.

Christ is identifiable with the cosmos, as the circle, its centre, its radii, and its circumference.25 Maximus calls the ‘radii’ logoi, as comprising part of the Logos, emanations filling the cosmos with God: Paradise. In the last terzina quoted, the visions—of light, of circles, and what these

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comprise—become a fourth. The second light seems double, having its own colour, and, painted with ‘nostra effige’, as though with the stamp of humanity. It seems to embrace Christ as incarnated, and as the Resurrection, aureoling humanity, as a ‘vista nuova’ (136).26 The question, posed via the image of the geometer who would square the circle, is how it relates to the second circle, how it ‘wheres itself’ (s’indova—a neologism) within it (Herxman and Towsley 1994: 95–125). Earlier, canto 2.40–45 had wanted to see that Essence revealing ‘come nostra natura e Dio s’unìo’: how our nature and God’s become one. If multiplicity and singleness could unite, contention between matter and spirit would cease. The relationship will be seen by souls in heaven as self-­ evident, but Dante wanted to see the material inside the immaterial before then. Such understanding, incommunicable, being self-evident, strikes in ‘un folgore’, in lightning—with a faint recall of St Laurence as the laurel tree—as earlier, in Para. 30.49: ‘mi circunfolse luce viva’—a living light flashed about me. What he wills comes to him. Nothing is sayable of this relation of Christ’s humanity to the unity of the godhead, except to note the après-coup: 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. (139–145)

(but my own wings (or pen) were not for that, if it was not that my mind was struck by a flash of lightning in which its will came to it. To the high fantasy here power failed, but already the love that moves the sun and the other stars turned my desire and will as a wheel which equally is turned.) He has become wheel-like within a turning order. Desire for vision (intellective), and will (compare 137, 141) which is affective, unite, perhaps as wheels within wheels, as in Ezekiel 1.16. Hollander paraphrases: ‘but already my desire was moving in a circle (around God) as was my will, revolving in just the same way’. Freccero supplements that image of the soul on the circumference turning around God at the centre, with an

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epicycle, whereby the soul turns on itself.27 Turning around God: an endlessly self-reflexive circling image combines circle and mirror. Union with ‘the love that govern the heavens’ (Boethius, Consolation 2.m.8, 28–30), recalls Inferno 1.38–40: e ‘l sol montava ‘n sù con quelle stelle ch’eran con lui quando l’amor divino mosse di prima quelle cose belle …

(and the sun was mounting up with those stars which were with him when divine love first moved those beautiful things.) The love that moves the sun and the other stars—more here than the stars which comprised the constellation of Aries, when creation occurred— combines a three and a four, since those lights (in a list of three) were divinely created on the fourth day, and four entities were created on the third day, a point Isidore noted (Levine 1985: 280–284). The fantasia cannot hold such an image. The canto opened with Mary as ‘figlia del tuo figlio’, an impossible relation allowing the impossible biformation of Christ as God and Man. These impossibilities unite this canto, as the book cannot be both a three and a four. In the circles presenting Christ—uniting materiality and immateriality, the letter and the spirit, the bodily and the spiritual—squaring the circle, making the four of humanity relate equally to the circle, only confirms the impossibility of all this. Nonetheless Dante seems to have an absolute knowledge—which would be included in Maximus’ idea of ‘deification’—and he risks death. And perhaps these last lines are proleptic, bringing on death, like much in the undertow of these last cantos. That includes Bernard asking Mary to dissolve for Dante ‘ogne nube … di sua mortalità’, which Bosco and Reggio (p. 537) connect with the climaxing part of the ‘Ave Maria’—‘ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae’—pray for us sinners now, and in the hour of our death. That Dante is at the ‘fine’ of all his desires seems loaded, as if this is the hour of his death; he has completed (46, 48) the ardour of his desire. One possibility for the circles combining is the Borromean knot,28 three two-dimensional circles so linked that breaking one circle dissevers all. But it is unrealisable in three-dimensional terms without bending the circles. In Lacan (2018), the Borromean knot binds the three registers or conditions of the human (the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real) in a way meaning that if one part is taken away, the whole collapses. Lacan saw James Joyce’s writing as holding the three together with a fourth, called

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the sinthome—binding them to prevent madness. In this fear lies the danger of things falling apart. The Borromean knot may seem complete, protecting from the castration-fear which would be death; but the knot is an anamorphosis, two-dimensional only, impossible to realise in the material reality of three dimensions, so threatening with its irrealisation, collapse into madness, silence, or oblivion, or death. The intensely calibrated organisation and intense wonder of Paradiso shows Dante’s attempt to check that danger, allowing him to turn with that which turns impossibly.

Conclusion Ma dì ancor se tu senti altre corde tirarti verso lui, sì che tu suone con quanti denti questo amor ti morde. (Para. 26.49–51)

(But say again if you feel other cords pulling you towards him, so that you sound out with how many teeth this love bites you.) Paradiso’s commitment to non-sensuous reality characterised neither Inferno or Purgatorio. Its visionary mode, standing out from a material mode of being, wills to find the material within the immaterial, knowing this is essential to the Trinity, and the Incarnation, indeed its sine qua non. Can there be an integration of matter and the non-material, in a form which is not an anamorphosis? Only in the trauma of a ‘fulgore’ answering yes and no at the same time, but yes in a way which implies smoothness, the turning of a wheel ‘igualmente’, and fulfilment. The poetry’s plurilingualism had supported an abrasiveness producing the line ‘lascia pur grattar dov’è la rogna’ (let them scratch where the itch is, Para. 17.129), and producing the physicality of cords pulling Dante, and of teeth biting him. Perhaps poetry always works by an internal resistance to its own statements. The human  animal must be pulled; love produces its bitemarks, pain inside its jouissance. The non-material angelic condition is not possible for it; the angel must bow to the woman. The ‘selva oscura’ implied sin, and error like the forest of Broceliande for Parzival; though it must be relevant to consider its meaning as including hyle, ‘matter’ in Aristotle, which has the sense of ‘wood’ (‘silva’ in Chalcidius’ Latin translation), as like the ‘dark materials’ which Milton thought might form new worlds (Paradise Lost 2.916). It imposes conflict, and resistance, with which Dante’s writing accords, not leaving things as though they were

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either solved or solvable. When Beatrice’s last words recall Inferno 19 by saying that Clement V’s death ‘farà quel d’Alagna intrar più giuso’ (30.148), that tone is not an aberration from a purer more joyful writing which might make Dante attain the laurel in Florence; it continues the mode Cacciaguida commanded. When Dante looked down at the circle called ‘l’aiuola che ci fa tanto feroci’ (22.151—the threshing floor which makes us so fierce), the pronoun allows no separation between them and us, making heaven— almost demonstrably so in canto 27—ferocious. Even the direction of the Primum Mobile and the Fixed Stars are different. Equally the present tense of 22.151 disallows saying that everything resolves into divine peace: these things do not go away but remain unforgotten in the grain of the text. The ‘aiuola’ image is intensified when Philosophy tells Boethius that he has learned from Ptolemy’s astronomy that ‘the whole circle of our earth is but a point (punctum) in comparison with the extent of the whole heavens’ and after subtracting the uninhabitable areas, only an ‘angustissimum … area’ (narrow area) is left for humans (Boethius 2, prose 7.10–20, 217). The constriction emphasises that this earth is a point only. This does not diminish but exacerbates conflict, meaning that nothing can be answered or left behind, yielded or conceded. God as punto contrasts with this punctum; bearing ‘nostra effige’, allowing the possibility that inside that vision of the incarnation—since God is the mirror—there is the projection of Dante into a materiality within the spiritual which makes will and desire lose itself inside a greater ‘amor’ which turns everything evenly, ending all resistance. We have noticed signs of a recall of the first canto of Inferno in this last canto: signs of sleep, of oblivion, of a state fringing death. Canto 33 concludes the task Virgil imposed on Dante (Inf. 1.91), when it seemed that he had to act and write from the condition of bitterness of recognition of being lost within the ‘selva oscura’. The route was necessitated from that condition, producing self-imposed writing difficulties. The resistances within language, which the poem exploits within its plurilingualism, are part of conflictual issues which continue to bite throughout, and which can only end with the self being lost in another mode: in an ecstasy and jouissance which leaves nothing to the self. Yet even that condition cannot be a single state. The word ‘igualmente’, which ends resistance, friction, does not necessarily end Dante’s separate state, for that he writes means that he contains in writing that which he says contains him. The immaterial is still embraced by the material; the writing is inside its world, yet knows its extraneity; it is darkened by a more modern note within its fulfilment.

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Notes 1. Con. 3.5 disagrees with Pythagoras and Plato, holding that the earth moves East-West, saying that Aristotle had nature’s secrets most revealed to him and knew that the earth is fixed at the centre. Dante describes, then, the cosmos, from the viewpoint of the fixed stars. There is a celestial north pole, where the pole star is, and a southern pole, and a celestial equator, perpendicular to the earth’s axis, which is equidistant from these. He asks the reader to imagine a stone fallen from the north pole star down to the earth’s north pole, where he imagines a city with the allegorical name of Maria. Its polar opposite, in the south pole, is another city, Lucia. Between, nearer to Maria than to Lucia, is Rome; the distance between the two being 10,200 miles. An imaginary circle equidistant from these, which is now called the equator, divides north from south; at that circle live the Garamantes, as described by Lucan; on the entire extremity of the first climatic zone. There are seven climatic zones, on either side of the earthly equator, bands of latitude, their limits fixed by the maximum length of the day, from 12 hours at the equator to six months at the poles. Rome occupies the fifth climate—so Alfraganus; the Scythians (Monarchia 1.14.6), live beyond the seventh zone. Each climate is governed by a planet, the first by Saturn, the seventh by the moon. Everything south of the equator is water, save for the mount of Purgatory, not a Convivio-theme. Dante’s poles have the names of two women seen in Inferno 2: Maria and Lucia; only Beatrice is missing. Lucia’s day, 13 December, when the sun is in Capricorn, was, in the old calendar, the shortest day in the northern hemisphere; at that time, an inhabitant in Lucia would experience complete daylight, appropriate for the saint associated with eyesight. When Dante is in the southern hemisphere, Lucia is within his dream (Purg. 9.52–63). Three cities: Maria, Rome, Lucia: powerful women for the Commedia. Dante describes what someone at Maria would see at the spring equinox. Between the autumn equinox and then, the sun would not be seen: at the equinox it would appear half above the horizon. The sun would be seen absolutely low in the sky, but then climb daily in a spiral way, which Dante compares to the thread of a screw, through 91 degrees (one per day) till it is overhead at the summer solstice. Then it declines by the same 91 degrees: half a year in all, then (182 days of the 365). This climbing recalls the etymology of the word ‘climate’. He does the same for what is visible at Lucia, at the autumn equinox, though there is no-one at Lucia; the southern hemisphere is empty. But the sun continues to pour out there, nonetheless. Every part of the world receives equal amounts of sunlight, only, in different proportions of day to night. Dante praises the ‘ineffabile sapienza’ (5.22) which equalises day and night; so evoking the donna gentile.

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2. Dante’s ‘commedia’ incorporates what Virgil calls what ‘alta mia tragedìa’ ‘canta’ (Inferno 20.112–113, compare Inf. 16.121, 121.2). On ‘canta’ and ‘canto’, and ‘canzone’ (see Inf. 20.3) and ‘cantica’ (see Purg. 33.140), see Pertile 1991, 9: 105–123. 3. Convivio 3.6 develops the hours, computed in two ways: the ‘ore temporali’, used by the Church, which divides the day into Prima (6 am, before sunrise, which, at the Equinox in Purgatorio, is at 6.30), Terza (9), Seste (12), Nona (9). There are 12 hours daylight at the equinox, but daylight is differently observed in different parts of the world. (Outside equinoctal days, indeed for the rest of the year, the length of the hours is increased, or diminished, to fit in the different offices of the Church, at these specific named moments.) Another measure of time, ‘ore equali’ (6.3) reckons hours as comprising a mathematical 24 hours (following the sun’s diurnalism). The upward limits are 15 hours sunlight, 9 hours night, or 16  hours night, and 8 daylight (Convivio works on a pattern of 15 chapters for Books 2 and 3, 30 for Book 4; compare the 15 degrees in which the sun moves each hour). Nine is Beatrice’s number in the Vita Nuova. The symbolism suggests that the hours cover Dante’s two loves; tacitly, they bring back Beatrice. Para. 13 opens with a combination of 15 plus 7 plus 2, in giving a specific number of 24 stars. The numbers 16 and 8 spell resurrection, for it exceeds the seven, as with the octave, the eighth day of a Christian festival (see OED). 4. For the Neo-Platonism of the river, see Witke 1959: 144–156; for the ‘landscape of Paradise’, Pearsall and Salter 1973: 56–75, and Curtius 1953: 183–202. 5. Singleton, note to line 63, notes the connection with bees. See a one of the source passages for this vision, Aeneid 6.703–709, and also canto 31.7–12. 6. See diagrams in Kay 2003: 37–65, arguing that the ray comes from the eye of God; see also essays in Kay 2006, especially chapters XII (37–65), XIII (1–20), XIV (169–180). 7. For the ‘stole’, compare Revelation 3.4, and the ‘prime stole’ Luke 15.22 (Vulgate) and the ‘bianche stole’ of Para. 25.95. 8. See Para. 23.70–75, 88, 30.63–66, 124, 31.1–21, 97, 32.22–24, 121, 33.9. I do not enter into discussion of the relation of this part of the Commedia to the Fiore, but see Bernardo 1990: 305–318, Took 2020: 133–159. For a modern theorisation of flowers, see Sartillot 1993. 9. On Bernard’s mysticism, see Gilson 1940: he discusses, negatively, Bernard’s connection with courtly love (170–197). 10. Quoted, Pranger 2013, 194–195. See Haskins 1927, and essays on this topic edited by Hollister 1969. See also Leclercq 1979: 137–144. 11. On Ruth in medieval art, see Sand 2007: 19–40; see also Panofsky 1969: 170, and Reid 1969: 376–387.

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12. The Tree of Jesse affirmed, historically, the humanity of Christ, his materiality, in the face of Catharism, which questions the value of materiality altogether, starting with the Incarnation: see Taylor 1981: 125–176. 13. Johnson 1961: 1–22 discusses lilies, associated in the French monarchy with a mythicisation of Charlemagne, and for constructions of rule which Bernard associated with Mary as the virga Jesse: see below for the Virgin as the oriflamme (31.127). 14. For the throne implying justice—with support from Aeneid. 6.851–853— see Silverstein 1939: 115–129 and Peters 1972: 326–335. 15. Canto 33 is the sixth canto in Paradiso to open with a speaker: earlier, Beatrice (5), Justinian (6 and 7), Beatrice in 24, addressing the company of the elect; and the souls of the elect (27). 16. Boethius pp. 273–275; here the version of Watts 1969: 97–98. Singleton, note to 33.31–32, notes connections between this hymn and Bernard’s prayer. 17. Hence, too, the place given to her eyes: Rime 60.17–20, and Convivio 3.8.6–12, and 4.2.17–18; see also Con. 3.15.2. 18. ‘In XXXIII, we find the following references to God as light: Etterno Lume (43); Alta Luce (54); Somma Luce (67); vivo raggio (77); luce etterna (83); Luce (100); vivo Lume (110); Alto Lume (116); Luce etterna (124). Note how the same light vocabulary is applied to God, angels, and souls’ (Mazzeo 1958: 214). The last thought is Plotinian. (I have slightly amended the quotation.) On light, see Fasolini 2005: 297–310. 19. Compare Macbeth 3.1.70–71: ‘Come fate into the lists / And champion me to the outrance’. On ‘oltraggio’ see Miller 2005: 3–4. 20. The Cumaean Sibyl account expands in Metamorphoses 14, 101–153: she tells Aeneas how she asked Apollo for long life, a thousand years, as a result of which, as she grows older, she grows smaller: her refusal of Apollo resembling Cassandra’s, in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (Aeschylus 1977: lines 1072–1177, 1212–1218 pp. 144–158). 21. For Dante as writing, see Paradiso 5.85, and 10.27 and 24.22, 25–27, where, as earlier at 10.43–48, the ‘fantasia’, the image-receiving part of the mind produces the first failure; inability to hold what would be written. See for the book Gellrich 1985: 157–166. 22. The line may also mean that power failed to write the fantasy. On the fantasia as an image-receiving faculty, see Singleton, note to 142, citing Convivio 3.4.9, whose context is the inability of the fantasia to see ‘the substances’ which are separate from matter: i.e. angels; he also notes 24.24. 23. ‘C’est de l’anéantissement des dimensions physiques de notre monde dans la visio beatifica que le poete parle: et le temps est aussi anéanti: un moment (punto) devient plus important que vingt-cinq siècles’—Spitzer in Austin and Spitzer 1937: 475, noting the contrasts between punto / maggior;

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nodo / largo (which includes the limitlessness of the sea); and punto / venticinque secoli. We are out of time, 25 centuries mean nothing. 24. The state of suspense between death and life is the subject of Maurice Blanchot throughout; see Blanchot 2000 for a demonstration of this: the traumatic moment, held in suspense, influences the reading here, though the differences are of course great. 25. Tollesfsen 2015: 307, see also 310–311. This is not Pantheism, because it assumes that the cosmos is the creation; it is rather that the creation is the incarnation of Christ, as much as the historical Christ. For this use of Maximus, see Davies 2007: 211–213. 26. Contrast Webb 2016: 199 (164–205 for Paradiso) arguing that a literal and single ‘personhood’ is approached in the Commedia, wherein ‘in Paradiso, vision itself is conjoined to God, forming a community of vision that singularly connects each to each’. With ‘effige’, what Dante sees as he sees God is also Beatrice’s face. As he joins his sight with hers, the effige, that is the second person of the Trinity reveals itself as ‘ours’, Christ’s, Beatrice’s, Dante’s (205). She cites Montemaggi 2016 that ‘what Dante beholds is not simply Christ’s figure but our figure, all of our humanities’. I find this a soft-focus universalising, where ‘our’ erodes historical differences, and equating ‘effige’ with ‘humanity’ misses the uniqueness or challenge of seeing Christ. 27. Freccero 1986: ‘The Final Image: 245–257’, for the argument that there is but one wheel, see Hollander pp. 843–844, and Nardi 1944; 337–350. 28. On the rings, see Battistoni 2007: 249–270; Saiber and Mbirika 2013: 237–272. Comparing them with the ‘knot’ (33.91), they speculate on the Borromean knot, which has 64 possible modes of configuration, perhaps comparable to the chessboard-image of 28.93.

Bibliography Aeschylus, 1977, The Oresteia, trans. Robert Fagles, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1977. Ahern, John, 1982, ‘Binding the Book: Hermeneutics and Manuscript production in Paradiso 33’, PMLA, 97: 800–809. ———, 1983, ‘Dante’s Last Word and the Comedy as a Liber coelestis’, DS 102: 1–14. Ascoli, Albert Russell, 2008, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author, Cambridge: C.U.P. Auerbach, Erich, 1949, ‘Dante’s Prayer to the Virgin, Paradiso XXXIII and Earlier Eulogies’, Romance Philology 3: 1–26. Austin, Herbert D., 1929, ‘Dante Notes, XI’, MLN, 44: 315–318.

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Austin, Herbert D. and Leo Spitzer, 1937, “Letargo” (Par., XXXIII, 94), MLN 52: 469–475. Bambeck, Manfred, 1979, ‘Meridiana face di caritate (33.10–11), Studien zu Dantes Paradiso, Wiesbaden: 164–175. Battistoni, Giorgio, 2007, ‘Dante and the Three Religions’, trans. Kyle M. Hall, DS 125: 249–270. Benjamin, Walter, 2003, Selected Writings 4: 1938–1940 ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U.P. Bernardo, Aldo, 1990, ‘Sex and Salvation in the Middle Ages: From the Romance of the Rose to the Divine Comedy’, Italica, 67: 305–318. Blanchot, Maurice, 2000, The Instant of My Death, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg, Stanford: Stanford U.P. Boitani, Piero, 1978, ‘The Sibyl’s Leaves: A Study of Paradiso XXXIII’, DS 96: 83–126. Botterill, Stephen, 1994, Dante and the Mystic Tradition: Bernard of Clairvaux in the Commedia, Cambridge: C.U.P. Boyde, Patrick, 1981, Dante Philomythes and Philosopher, Cambridge: C.U.P. Curtius E.R., 1953, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages trans. W.R. Trask, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Davies, Oliver, 2007, ‘World and Body: Dante’s Cosmological Hermeneutics’ in John Barnes and Jennifer Petrie (eds.), Dante and the Human Body, Dublin: Four Courts. Di Scipio, Giuseppe C., 1984, The Symbolic Rose in Dante’s Paradiso, Ravenna: Longo Editore. Dow, Helen, 1957, ‘The Rose-Window’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 20: 248–297. Dronke, Peter, 1966, ‘Alanis, Boethius, and Dante’, Romanische Forschungen 78: 119–125. ———, 1968, Medieval Latin and the Rise of European Love-Lyric 2 vols, Oxford: Clarendon. ———, 1989, ‘Symbolism and Structure in Paradiso 30’, Romance Philology 43: 29–48. ———, 1994, ‘The Conclusion of Dante’s Commedia’, Italian Studies 59: 21–39. Elliott, J.K., 1993, The Apocryphal New Testament: A Collection of Apocryphal Christian Literature in an English Translation Based on M.R.  James, Oxford: O.U.P. Evans, G.R., 1983, The Mind of St Bernard of Clairvaux, Oxford: Clarendon. Fasolini, Diego, 2005, ‘“Illuminating” and “Illuminated” Light: A Biblical-­ Theological Interpretation of God-as-Light in Canto XXXIII of Dante’s Paradiso’, Literature and Theology 19: 297–310. Fichera, Eduoardo, 2008, ‘A l’alta fantasia qui mancò possa’: Dante Between Vision and Invention’, Mediterranean Studies 17: 62–76.

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Foster, Kenelm, 1977, ‘Dante’s Vision of God’, The Two Dantes and Other Studies, London: Darton, Longman and Todd: 66–85. France, James, 2007, Medieval Images of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, Kalamazoo, Michigan: Cistercian Publications: 239–263. Freccero, John, 1986, Dante; The Poetics of Conversion ed. Rachel Jacoff, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U.P. Fulton, Rachel, 2002, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200, New York: Columbia University Press. Gellrich, Jesse M., 1985, The Idea of the Book in the Middle Ages: Language Theory, Mythology, and Fiction, Ithaca: Cornell U.P. Gilson, Etienne, 1940, The Mystical Theology of Saint Bernard trans. A.H. C. Downes, London: Sheed and Ward. Gunn, Alan, 1952, The Mirror of Love: A Reinterpretation of ‘The Romance of the Rose’, Lubbock: Texas, Texas Tech Press. Hainsworth, Peter, 1997, ‘Dante’s Farewell to Politics’ in John Woodhouse (ed.), Dante and Governance, Oxford: Clarendon: 152–169. Hamilton, Ross, 2007, Accident: A Philosophical and Literary History, Chicago: Chicago U.P. Haskins, Charles Homer, 1927, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U.P. Herxman Ronald B. and Gary W. Towsley, 1994, ‘Squaring the Circle: Paradiso 33 and the Poetics of Geometry’, Traditio 49: 95–125. Holdensried, Anke, 2006, The Sibyl and her Scribes: Manuscripts and Interpretation of the Latin Sibylla Tiburtina, c. 1050–1500, Aldershot: Ashgate. Hollander, Robert, 1969, Allegory in Dante’s Commedia, Princeton: Princeton U.P. Hollister, C. Warren, 1969, The 12th Century Renaissance, New York: John Wiley. Horstmann, Carl (ed.), 1892, ‘The Lamentation that was between our Lady and Saint Bernard’ in The Minor Poems of the Vernon MS, part 1, London: EETS: 297–328. Johnson, James R, 1961, ‘The Tree of Jesse Window of Chartres: Laudes Regiae’, Speculum 36: 1–22. Kay, Richard, 2003, ‘Dante’s Empyrean and the Eye of God’, Speculum, 78: 37–65. ———, 2006, Dante’s Enigmas: Medieval Scholasticism and Beyond, Aldershot: Ashgate. Lacan, Jacques, 1977, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: W.W. Norton. ———, 2015, Transference: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VIII ed. Jacques Alain-Miller, trans. Bruce Fink. Cambridge: Polity. ———, 2018, The Sinthome: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XXIII ed. Jacques Alain-Miller, trans. A.R. Price, Cambridge: Polity. Leclercq, Jean, 1979, Monks and Love in Twelfth-Century France: Psycho-Historical Essays, Oxford: Clarendon.

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Levine, Robert, 1985, ‘Squaring the Circle: Dante’s Solution’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 86: 280–284. Leyerle, John, 1977, ‘The Rose-Wheel Design of Dante’s Paradiso’, University of Toronto Quarterly 44: 280–308. Mazzeo, Joseph, 1958, Structure and Thought in the Paradiso, Ithaca: Cornell U.P. McGuire, Brian Patrick, (ed.), 2011, A Companion to Bernard of Clairvaux, Leiden: Brill. McKay, Alexander G, 1970, Virgil’s Italy, London: Adams and Dart. McNair, Philip, 2003, Dante the Syncretist, and Other Essays on Italian Studies, Much Hadham: Anastasia Press: 179–185. Miller, James, (ed.), 2005, Dante and the Unorthodox: The Aesthetics of Transgression, Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier U.P. Montemaggi, Vittorio, 2016, Reading Dante’s Commedia as Theology: Divinity Realized in Human Encounter, Oxford: O.U.P. Nardi, Bruno, 1944, ‘Sì come rota ch’igualmente è mossa’, in Nel Mondo di Dante, Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura: 337–350. Orsbon, David Allison, 2014, ‘The Universe as Book: Dante’s Commedia as an Image of the Divine Mind’, DS 132: 87–112. Panofsky, Erwin, 1969, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, New York: Harper and Row. Parke, H.W., ed. B.C.  McGing, 1988, Sibyls and Sibylline Prophecy in Classical Antiquity, London: Routledge. Passage, Charles, 1977, trans. The Middle High German Poem of Willehalm by Wolfram of Eschenbach, New York: Frederick Ungar. Pearsall, Derek and Elizabeth Salter, 1973, Landscapes and Seasons of the Medieval World, London: Paul Elek. Pertile, Lino, 1991, ‘Canto-Cantica-Comedia e l’epistola a Cangrande’, Lectura Dantis 9: 105–123. Peters, Edward M., 1972, ‘The Failure of Church and Empire: Paradiso 30, Medieval Studies 34: 326–335. Pranger, M.B., 2013, ‘Bernard of Clairvaux: Work and Self’ in Mette Birkedal Bruun, The Cambridge Companion to the Cistercian Order, Cambridge: C.U.P. Reid, Jane Davidson, 1969, ‘The True Judith’, Art Journal 28: 376–387. Rossi, Albert L., 1985, ‘“Miro gurge”: Virgilian Language and Textual Pattern in the River of Light’, DS 103: 79–101. Saiber, Arielle, and Aba Mbirika, 2013, ‘The Three “Giri” of Paradiso 33’, DS 131: 237–272. Sand, Alexa, 2007, ‘A Small Door: Recognising Ruth in the Psalter-Hours “Of Yolande of Soissons”’, Gesta, 46: 19–40. Sartillot, Claudette, 1993, Herbarium Verbarium: The Discourse of Flowers, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

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Index1

A Adam, 59, 67, 127, 129, 193, 216–219, 222, 228n21, 228n22, 228n24, 244, 245, 257, 259, 281, 282 Aeneas, 51, 54, 61, 64, 75, 145–147, 149, 151, 198, 228n16, 286–288, 300n20 Albert the Great (Albertus Magnus), 8, 24n20, 29, 98, 101, 102, 105, 118, 227n7, 227n10, 265n11, 266n22 Albigensians, 73, 74, 76, 78, 122, 152 Alfraganus, 2, 271, 298n1 Allegory, 2, 7, 12–18, 20, 21, 24n19, 49, 72, 76, 98, 105–107, 109, 111, 127, 212, 236, 274 Angelico, Fra, 8 Angels, 3, 8, 11–13, 15, 16, 18–21, 30, 38, 67, 77, 79, 99, 102, 109, 110, 124, 130, 165, 177, 200,

202, 223, 224, 227n8, 233–263, 273, 274, 278, 279, 284, 296, 300n18, 300n22 Angevin dynasty, 63, 81n21, 120, 171, 185n22 Apokatastasis, 23n13, 176–177, 188, 190 Apollo, 6, 16, 29–34, 126, 148, 151, 196, 229n28, 243, 287, 300n20 Aquinas, St Thomas, 5, 8, 18, 19, 24n20, 94, 97–106, 112, 129–131, 133n2, 177, 227n5, 234, 235, 239, 245, 247, 249, 250, 255–259, 263, 264n9 Aristotle, 12, 13, 24n20, 29, 30, 45, 79n1, 97, 99, 100, 103, 128, 130, 215, 226n2, 227n7, 235, 236, 247, 249, 250, 255, 257, 263, 284, 290, 296, 298n1 Arnaut Daniel, 61, 67–69, 72, 77, 83n37, 219

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Tambling, The Poetry of Dante’s Paradiso, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65628-7

307

308 

INDEX

Ascoli, Albert, 196, 207, 208, 210, 214, 215, 219, 226n1, 227n13, 289 Astronomy, vi, 1, 32, 34–36, 236, 282, 297 Auerbach, Erich, 106, 111, 112, 114, 115, 134n5, 134n10, 285 Augustine of Hippo, St, 13, 39, 50, 52, 96–98, 101, 102, 125, 128, 147, 194, 220, 223, 224, 252, 256, 257, 261, 281, 286 Averroes, 13, 79n4, 99, 100, 119, 227n7, 266n22 Avicenna, 250, 265n11 B Barolini, Teodolinda, 16, 17, 61, 69, 133n2, 210 Bataille, Georges, 60, 63, 66, 67, 71, 76 Beatrice, 3, 8–14, 16, 19, 20, 22n5, 31, 32, 35, 43, 44, 46–49, 51, 58–60, 65, 66, 77, 92, 94, 101, 131, 132, 143, 170, 176, 186n28, 193, 197–200, 203, 204, 208, 209, 212–214, 217, 218, 220, 222, 223, 225, 227n6, 234–236, 239, 243, 247–249, 251–253, 255, 256, 258, 260–263, 271–274, 276–278, 280, 281, 287, 297, 298n1, 299n3, 300n15, 301n26 Benedict, St, 148, 178–181, 204, 223, 281 Benjamin, Walter, 1, 11, 21, 22, 127, 169, 177, 182, 226, 238, 266n20, 290 Bernard, St, 5, 8, 9, 15, 113, 123, 155, 207, 227n10, 277–281,

283, 285, 288, 291, 292, 295, 299n9, 300n13, 300n16 Bible citations Genesis, 59, 96, 114, 150, 215–217, 223, 228n22, 233, 241, 244, 248, 250, 251, 255, 266n24, 280, 284 Exodus, 19, 182n3, 202, 215, 247 Numbers, 68, 182n3, 277 Judges, 47, 241 1 Samuel, 14 2 Samuel, 102, 128, 174 1 Kings, 102, 127–130 2 Kings, 128, 280 1 Chronicles, 102 Psalms, 99, 114, 128, 142, 203, 210, 212, 213, 274, 275, 280 Proverbs, 8, 9, 129, 284 Song of Songs, 93, 94, 103, 128, 223, 224, 228n15, 235, 277, 278, 280 Isaiah, 77, 111, 135n13, 143, 174, 175, 211, 212, 216, 241, 242, 277 Lamentations, 178, 279 Ezekiel, 182n3, 241, 274, 290, 294 Daniel, 43, 148, 149, 242, 262 Tobit, 14, 15, 242, 268 Wisdom of Solomon, 143 Maccabees, 164 Luke, 8, 39, 43, 98, 121, 130, 143, 202, 209, 227n9, 234, 242, 299n7 Acts, 15, 37, 98, 149, 176, 182n3, 211, 214, 229n26 1 Corinthians, 129, 176, 199, 209, 259 2 Corinthians, 21, 129, 227n10 Galatians, 151 Ephesians, 242

 INDEX 

Colossians, 242 1 Thessalonians, 242 Hebrews, 182n3, 204, 205, 209, 234, 280 Jude, 242 Revelation, 110, 123–125, 194, 199, 211–216, 234, 241, 242, 274, 278, 282, 289, 290, 299n7 Blanchot, Maurice, 301n24 Boethius, 9, 18, 36, 97–99, 101, 103, 141, 155, 250, 276, 283, 285, 295, 297, 300n16 Bonaventure, St, 8, 133n1 Book of Causes (Liber de Causis), 18, 24n20, 29, 228n20, 250, 254, 263 Bosco, Umberto and Reggio, Giovanni, 51, 93, 197, 257, 295 Boyde, Patrick, vi, 12, 17, 92, 234, 284 Butler, Judith, 20 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 21, 24n21 C Caesar, 31, 49, 51–54, 57, 73, 81n17, 111, 145, 154, 158, 160, 166 Cangrande della Scala, 7, 10, 22n5, 70, 143, 153, 165, 167, 184n16 Catiline, 52, 154, 160, 183n6 Cato, 81n17 Cavalcanti, Guido, 99, 100, 156, 277 Charlemagne, 55, 56, 68, 103, 117, 154, 155, 164–166, 180, 183n9, 300n13 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 3, 21, 24n21, 34, 67, 93, 94, 128, 135n15, 143, 148, 180, 181, 195, 260, 279 Cicero, 49, 183n6, 194, 195

309

Clement V, 42, 56, 78, 87, 144, 152, 172, 178, 189, 281, 297 Convivio (canzoni), vi, 9, 11, 12, 16, 18, 24n16, 24n19, 29, 30, 35, 41, 46, 49, 52, 53, 62, 65, 66, 77, 82n31, 118, 121, 142, 152, 157, 162, 185n20, 185n21, 193, 196, 208, 220, 224, 225, 226n1, 226n2, 227n14, 228n20, 233–236, 249, 250, 252–255, 263, 264n4, 266n21, 271–273, 284, 299n3, 300n17 Crusades, 52, 73, 74, 76–78, 119, 122, 148, 152, 280 Curtius, Ernst R., 289, 290, 292 D Damiani, Peter, 8, 9, 14, 39, 42, 143, 147, 149, 167, 176–180, 186n29, 186n30, 278 David, King, 102, 156, 166, 174–177, 183n11, 210, 212, 280, 286 Davis, Charles T., 7, 50, 52, 57, 81n14, 123, 125, 135n18, 178, 179, 221 Deconstruction, 3 Derrida, Jacques, 45, 80n7, 85, 128, 173, 259, 266n27, 268 De Vulgari Eloquentia (DVE), 83n37, 99, 185n20, 185n21, 219, 259 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 8, 19, 23n7 Dominic, St, 5, 48, 95, 96, 98, 105, 106, 111, 114, 116–125, 152, 182n2, 241 Durling, Robert M. and Martinez, Ronald L., 3, 36, 58, 102, 123, 212, 223, 225, 226n5, 265n12

310 

INDEX

E Eagle, 4, 31, 49–58, 120, 122, 141–145, 150, 152, 168, 172, 174–176, 213, 215, 242 Eliot, T.S., 2, 236 Ellipsis/eclipse, 92, 260, 282, 284 Epistles by Dante, 5, 7, 15, 178, 179, 278 Epistle to Cangrande, 7 Eriugena, John Scotus, 15, 17, 131, 176, 177, 186n28 Evil, 18, 77, 110, 181, 224, 252 F Faith, 13, 42, 51, 120, 121, 124, 176, 204–210, 212, 214, 216, 226n1, 278 Feminine, the, 24n21, 37, 38, 44, 46, 48, 65, 74, 76, 93, 98, 111, 114, 121, 135n14, 155, 179, 196–198, 213, 223, 277, 280 Fin’ amors, 4, 65–67, 71, 77, 83n37, 116, 277 Florence, 7, 22n5, 39–43, 52, 56, 65, 78, 107, 123, 141, 143, 146, 148, 152–163, 167, 173, 176, 183n7, 183n8, 183n9, 183n11, 208–212, 228n17, 228n19, 241, 260, 278, 280, 281, 297 Folco of Marseille, 72 Foster, Kenelm, 5, 12, 143, 257, 258, 275 Four senses of the Bible including anagogical sense, 7, 15, 18, 108, 109, 120, 125, 197, 212 France, and French rule, 63, 173, 281, 300n13 Francis of Assisi, St, 5, 11, 20, 96, 98, 101, 105–117, 120–125, 128, 129, 134n5, 134n7, 134n12,

135n13, 149, 152, 179–181, 241, 242, 260, 264n5, 278, 281, 291 Freud, Sigmund, 266n27 G Gabriel, 8, 14, 15, 19, 43, 78, 79, 242, 277 Gender, 46, 66, 68, 93 Ghibellines, 7, 41, 55–58, 69, 71, 153, 156, 159, 162, 182n5, 183n10, 196 Giotto di Bondone, 107, 108, 134n8 Gregory of Nyssa, 8, 18, 176 Gregory the Great, 174, 176, 178, 181, 188, 191, 234, 241, 259, 264n4 Guelfs, 55–58, 69, 70, 153, 161, 183n13, 196 Guinizelli, Guido, 11, 77 H Hamilton, Bernard, 76, 290 Hegel, G.W.F., 2, 123, 152 Heidegger, Martin, 45, 80n7, 266n21 Hollander, Robert, v, 7, 23n6, 51, 126, 212, 223, 225, 227n9, 291, 292, 294, 301n27 Horace, 159 Hours, 92, 93, 218, 219, 222, 271–273, 295, 298n1, 299n3 I Inferno, 2, 4, 6, 7, 14, 16, 18, 20, 21, 22n3, 32, 35, 36, 38, 40, 51, 53, 61, 64, 65, 75, 79, 80n9, 99, 104, 128, 142, 148–150, 155,

 INDEX 

157, 158, 161, 166, 169, 175, 176, 182, 182n1, 183n9, 194, 207, 213, 220, 222, 229n28, 234, 238, 253, 256, 261, 285, 287, 290, 291, 295–297, 298n1, 299n2 Isidore of Seville, vi, 8, 99, 119, 264n4 Islam, 78, 135n17, 165 J James, St., 193, 208–213, 228n18 Jerome, St., 15, 97, 102, 241, 255 Jesse, 277, 280 Joachim of Fiore, 111, 123 John, St., 14, 17, 59, 106, 121, 131, 193, 203, 207, 209, 210, 212–216, 235, 282 John XXII Pope, 122, 167, 178, 179, 229n26 K Kierkegaard, Søren, 237, 238, 268, 273 L Lacan, Jacques, 67, 68, 169, 200, 227n6, 276, 282, 295 Langland, William, 128, 185n23 Latini, Brunetto, 52, 118, 154, 160, 183n7 Laurence, St., 46, 294 Le Goff, Jacques, 5 Lewis, C.S., 4, 194 Light, 4, 5, 13, 16, 18, 20, 29–37, 41, 57, 58, 65, 68, 79n1, 79n4,

311

92, 94–99, 101, 103, 106, 117, 126, 127, 131–133, 143, 144, 150, 151, 155, 157, 164, 179, 198–204, 208, 210, 213, 215, 217, 221, 223, 224, 227n7, 234, 236, 244–246, 248, 249, 256, 260, 262, 271, 272, 274–276, 283, 285, 286, 288–295, 300n18 Lucan, 52, 53, 57, 73, 81n16, 111, 126, 298n1 M Macrobius, 36, 147, 226n3, 227n13, 236, 237 Maximus the Confessor, 17, 18, 131, 176, 214, 293 Melancholy, 42, 141, 143 Milton, John, 250, 257, 296 Moevs, Christian, 59, 93, 251–253, 265n15, 265–266n20 Monarchia, 7, 17, 22n5, 24n17, 42, 46, 51, 52, 55, 80n14, 81n19, 99, 104, 129, 130, 175, 183n11, 196, 207, 226n5, 229n27, 246, 247, 257, 263, 265n19, 298n1 N Nardi, Bruno, 13, 23n9, 82n31, 100, 251, 265n15, 265n18 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 22n1, 77, 109, 110, 126, 139 Numerology, 16, 17, 34, 49, 66, 68, 91, 96, 98, 103, 123, 126, 127, 129, 130, 143, 171, 176, 178, 199, 226n2, 233–235, 239, 254, 262, 281, 292, 299n3

312 

INDEX

O Olivi, Peter John, 110, 112, 122–125 Origen, 15, 177, 234, 242 Orosius, 81n19, 97, 99, 103, 104 Ovid, 6, 61, 62, 74, 125, 147, 158, 163, 208, 222, 280 P Panofsky, Erwin, 15 Paris, including St Victor, 13, 98–102, 105, 118, 124 Paul, St, 21, 185n23, 241 Pearl (poem), 37, 40 Perichoresis, 131 Peter, St., 193, 203, 204, 207 Philo of Alexandria, 16, 17 Philosophy, including Dante’s love of, 9, 12, 13, 30, 66, 77, 82n31, 103, 141, 194, 215, 224, 247, 251, 252, 272, 283, 284, 287, 297 Plato, 2, 34, 35, 43–45, 91, 235, 250, 265n13, 266n21, 282, 298n1 Plotinus, 15, 18, 36, 40, 45, 79n1, 97, 133n1, 253–255, 266n21, 290 Poetry, 4–8, 11, 12, 18, 20, 30, 31, 51, 52, 64, 66, 69, 72–75, 77, 78, 82n32, 83n36, 102–104, 116, 129, 130, 161, 164, 177, 197, 199, 203, 210, 251, 273, 277, 296 Popes, Papacy, 42, 49, 50, 56, 63, 73, 76–78, 80n13, 81n21, 102, 105, 107, 111, 113, 120–122, 125, 144, 152, 164, 166–169, 178, 196, 203, 220, 223, 228–229n25, 229n26, 241

Porphyry, 18, 97, 226n3 Poverty, as lady, 98, 112–116, 120, 122, 134, 134n11 Prime matter, 11–13, 44, 233, 244–255, 262, 264n9, 265n15, 265n19, 266n25 Proclus, 13, 15, 18, 36, 92, 241, 250, 265n14 Pseudo-Dionysius, 15, 17, 23n7, 29, 101, 177, 239, 241 Purgatorio, vi, 3, 4, 7, 8, 14, 16, 19, 20, 22n3, 32, 36, 38–42, 46, 51, 55, 58, 64, 66, 69, 70, 75–77, 99, 107, 108, 113, 114, 120, 142, 145, 158, 169–171, 173, 174, 176, 185n25, 198, 201, 207, 212, 213, 218, 223, 234, 240, 241, 272, 282, 286, 296, 299n3 Pythagoras, 227n14, 264n1, 298n1 R Ravenna, 7, 22n5, 50, 53, 54, 178, 180 Rime (Dante), 12, 65, 66, 69, 135n14, 185n20, 272, 284, 300n17 Rivers, 31, 32, 37, 51–54, 62, 65, 70, 72, 73, 110, 113, 114, 148, 150, 156, 203, 274, 275 Roman Empire and emperors, 41, 42, 49, 52, 55–58, 80n6, 81n21, 153, 162, 164, 165, 169, 170, 174, 221, 305 Rome, 5, 42, 46, 49–53, 55, 57, 58, 73, 79, 82n27, 97, 104, 108, 113, 117, 120, 141, 144, 145,

 INDEX 

149, 150, 158, 160, 167, 178–180, 183n6, 185n20, 196, 203–205, 208, 213, 220–222, 227n11, 229n26, 286, 288, 298n1 Rose, 95, 109, 116, 201, 227n10, 275–277, 279, 281, 282, 284 S Saint Erkenwald (poem), 185n23 Satan (Lucifer, the devil), 77, 148, 162, 220, 224, 256, 260–263, 271, 280 Schneiderman, Stuart, 12, 38 Scipio Africanus, 52, 183n13, 195, 221, 229n27 Seneca, 23n6, 153 Shakespeare, William, 2, 37–39, 45, 147, 183n12 Sibyl, the, 145, 286–288, 291 Sicily, 41, 58, 62–64, 81n21, 119, 120, 166, 171, 172, 175 Solomon, 50, 97, 98, 102, 103, 105, 126–133, 235, 236 Spain, history and literature, vi, 46, 53, 54, 73, 117–120, 122, 165, 208 Suger, Denis, 15, 26, 102 T Time, 1–22, 34, 35, 42, 44, 55, 57, 63, 91–94, 96, 98, 111, 112, 118–120, 124, 133, 147, 150, 151, 153, 155, 160, 161, 164, 166, 169, 173, 176, 178, 181, 219–226, 228n24, 234, 237,

313

238, 243, 247, 248, 251, 253, 254, 256, 259, 262, 263, 265n11, 275–277, 279, 290, 291, 296, 298n1, 299n3, 301n23 Trauma, 290, 292, 296 Trinity, 8, 91, 102, 105, 123, 126, 130–132, 179, 208, 235, 242, 245, 266n21, 293, 296, 301n26 Troy, 54, 64, 70, 145, 146, 154, 158, 160, 171, 176, 185n20 U Uberti family, 36, 162, 183 Ubertino da Casale, 110, 122, 124, 220–221 Ulysses, 7, 210, 217, 218, 222, 226n4, 291 Universe, 1–3, 12, 16–18, 29–31, 35, 44, 59, 77, 94, 147, 203, 214, 215, 220, 236, 239, 248, 250, 254, 255, 284, 288, 289 V Virgil, 3, 22n3, 32, 51–53, 61, 64, 65, 74, 115, 126, 142, 144–146, 148, 149, 158, 176, 177, 179, 194, 217, 227n13, 235, 278, 286, 287, 297, 299n2 Virginity, 8, 9, 37–39, 42, 45, 47, 48, 149 Virgin Mary, 8–11, 14, 19, 20, 39, 42, 43, 68, 78, 79, 112, 149, 155, 193, 197–203, 213, 227n10, 276–285, 287, 295, 300n13

314 

INDEX

Visibility/invisibility, 8, 11–13, 15, 16, 19–21, 34, 40, 67, 94, 102, 126, 127, 133, 152, 163, 179, 193, 194, 197, 200, 201, 205, 239, 263, 274, 275, 281, 283, 285, 290, 298n1 Vita Nuova, 10, 11, 66, 82n31, 193, 200, 214, 236, 263, 272, 290, 299n3 W Wicksteed, Philip, 264n9, 266n25

Widow, the, 98, 174 Wisdom, 4, 6, 8, 9, 50, 66, 98, 103, 128–130, 199, 208, 224, 236, 284, 286, 287, 290 Wolfram von Eschenbach, 152, 165 Z Zefiro, 117 Zeno, San, 276 Zodiac, 3, 29–34, 91, 93, 194, 195, 219, 225