Denunciation by St. Peter of his degenerate successors. — Dante gazes upon the Earth. — Ascent of Beatrice and Dante to the Crystalline Heaven. — Its nature. — Beatrice rebukes the covetousness of mortals.
“To the Father, to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit be glory,” all Paradise began, so that the sweet song was inebriating me. That which I was seeing seemed to me a smile of the Universe; for my inebriation was entering through the hearing and through the sight. O joy! O ineffable gladness! O life entire of love and of peace! O riches secure, without longing!1
1 Which leave nothing for desire.
Before my eyes the four torches were standing enkindled, and that which had come first began to make itself more vivid, and in its semblance be came such as Jove would become, if be and Mars were birds, and should interchange feathers.1 The Providence which here apportions turn and office, had imposed silence on the blessed choir on every side, when I heard, “If I change color, marvel not; for, while I speak, thou shalt see all these change color. He who on earth usurps my place, my place, my place, which is vacant in the presence of the Son of God, has made of my burial-place a sewer of blood and of stench, wherewith the Perverse One who fell from here above, below there is placated.”
1 The pure white light becoming red.
With that color which, by reason of the opposite sun, paints the cloud at evening and at morning, I then saw the whole Heaven overspread. And like a modest lady who abides sure of herself, and at the fault of another, in bearing of it only, becomes timid, even thus did Beatrice change countenance; and such eclipse I believe there was in heaven when the Supreme Power suffered.
Then his words proceeded, in a voice so transmuted from itself that his countenance was not more changed; “The Bride of Christ was not nurtured on my blood, on that of Linus and of Cletus, to be employed for acquist of gold; but for acquist of this glad life Sixtus and Pius and Calixtus and Urban1 shed their blood after much weeping. It was not our intention that part of the Christian people should sit on the right hand of our successors, and part on the other; nor that the keys which were conceded to me should become a sign upon a banner which should fight against those who are baptized;2 nor that I should be a figure on a seal to venal and mendacious privileges, whereat I often redden and flash. In garb of shepherd, rapacious wolves are seen from here-above over all the pastures: O defence of God, why dost thou yet lie still! To drink our blood Cahorsines and Gascons are making ready:3 O good beginning, to what vile end behoves it that thou fall! But the high Providence which with Scipio defended for Rome the glory of the world, will succor speedily, as I conceive. And thou, son, who because of thy mortal weight wilt again return below, open thy mouth, and conceal not that which I conceal not.”
1 Early Popes martyred for the faith.
2 A reference to the war which Boniface VIII. waged against the Colonnesi. See Inferno, Canto XXVII.
3 John XXII., who came to the Papacy in 1316, was a native of Cahors; his immediate predecessor, Clement V., 1305-1314, was a Gascon. The passage is one of those which shows that this portion of the poem was in hand during the last years of Dante’s life.
4 In midwinter, when the sun is in Capricorn.
Even as our air snows down flakes of frozen vapors, when the horn of the Goat of heaven touches the sun,1 so, upward, I saw the aether become adorned, and flaked with the triumphant vapors2 that had made sojourn there with us. My sight was following their semblances, and followed, till the intermediate space by its greatness pre. vented it from passing further onward. Whereon my Lady, who saw me disengaged from upward heeding, said to me, “Cast down thy sight, and look how thou hast revolved.”
1 The spirits.
Since the hour when I had first looked, I saw that I had moved through the whole are which the first climate makes from its middle to its end;1 so that I saw beyond Cadiz the mad track of Ulysses, and near on this side the shore2 on which Europa became a sweet burden. And more of the site of this little threshing-floor would have been discovered to me, but the sun was proceeding beneath my feet, a sign and more removed.3
1 From Dante’s first look downward from the Heavens, at the end of Canto XXII, to the present moment, he had moved over the arc which the first climate describes from its middle to its end. The old geographers divided the earth into seven zones, called climates, by circles parallel to the equator. The first climate extended twenty degrees to the north of the equator. The sign of the Gemini, in which Dante was revolving in the Heaven of the Fixed Stars, is in the zone of the Heavens corresponding to the first climate. As each climate extended on the habitable hemisphere for one hundred and eighty degrees, the arc from its middle to its end would be of ninety degrees, comprised between Jerusalem and Cadiz, and the time required for passing through it would be six hours, one fourth of the diurnal revolution of the Heavens.
2 The shore of Phoenicia, whence Europa was carried off by Jupiter.
3 The Sun in Aries was separated by Taurus from Gemini; hence not all of the hemisphere of the earth seen from Gemini was illuminated by the sun, which was some three hours in advance.
My enamoured mind, that ever dallies with my Lady, was more than ever burning to bring back my eyes to her. And if nature has made bait in human flesh, or art in its paintings, to catch the eyes in order to possess the mind, all united would seem naught compared to the divine pleasure which shone upon me when I turned me to her smiling face. And the virtue with which the look indulged me, tore me from the fair nest of Leda,1 and impelled me to the swiftest heaven.2
1 From Gemini, the constellation of Castor and Pollux, the twin sons of Leda.
2 The Primum Mobile, or Crystalline Heaven.
Its parts, most living and lofty, are so uniform that I cannot tell which of them Beatrice chose for a place for me. But she, who saw my desire, began, smiling so glad that God seemed to rejoice in her countenance, “The nature of the world1 which quiets the centre, and moves all the rest around it, begins here as from its, starting-point. And this heaven has no other Where than the Divine Mind, in which the love that revolves it is kindled, and the virtue which it rains down. Light and love enclose it with one circle, even as this does the others, and of that cincture He who girds it is the sole Intelligence.2 The motion of this heaven is not marked out by another, but the others are measured by this, even as ten by a half and by a fifth.3 And how time can hold its roots in such a flower-pot, and in the others its leaves, may now be manifest to thee.
1 The world of the revolving Heavens.
2 The Angelic Intelligences move the lower Heavens, but of the Empyrean God himself is the immediate governor.
3 The reversal of magnitudes makes this image obscure. The motion of the Crystalline Heaven, the swiftest of all, determines the slower motions of the Heavens below it, and divides them; as five and two divide ten. The fixed unit of time is the day which is established by the revolution of the Primum Mobile.
“O covetousness,1 which whelms mortals beneath thee, so that no one has power to withdraw his eyes from out thy waves! Well. blossoms the will in men, but the continual rain converts the true plums into wildings. Faith and innocence are found only in children; then both fly away ere yet the cheeks are covered. One, so long as he stammers, fasts, who afterward, when his tongue is loosed, devours whatever food under whatever moon; and one, while stammering, loves his mother and listens to her, who, when speech is perfect, desires then to see her buried. So the skin of the fair daughter of him who brings morning and leaves evening, white in its first aspect, becomes black.2 Do thou, in order that thou make not marvel, reflect that on earth there is no one who governs; wherefore the human family is gone astray. But ere January be all un-wintered by that hundredth part which is down there neglected,3 these supernal circles shall so roar that the storm which is so long awaited shall turn the sterns round to where the prows are, so that the fleet shall run straight, and true fruit shall come after the flower.”
1 The connection of the ideas presented in what precedes with this denunciation of covetousness, or selfishness, is not at first apparent. But the transition is not unnatural, from the consideration of the Heaven which pours down Divine influence, to the thought of the engrossment of men in the pursuit of their selfish and transitory ends, in which they are blinded to heavenly and eternal good.
2 Both the order of the words and the meaning of this sentence axe obscure.
3 Before January falls in spring, owing to the lack of correctness in the calendar, by which the year is lengthened by about a day in each century. It is as if the poet said, — Before a thousand years shall pass; meaning, — Within short while.