Paradiso

(1321)

In Paradiso, Dante posed for himself as great a challenge as any writer could possibly have: to describe being in Heaven, face-to-face with God. And we’re not just talking about any old god, for Dante’s Lord was the “get-medieval-on-your-ass,” ineffable, unknowable, all-powerful Christian god of the 14th century: as superhuman and daunting a deity as human pen ever aimed to represent. If you are at all interested in how he managed the business, or in the various poetic and imagistic devices that he had to push to their absolute utmost trying to do so, then you have a decent chance of enjoying Paradiso. If, however, you don’t think an encounter with our dread creator, as imagined by one of Europe’s finest poets, will fluff your fancy, at least consider this conundrum: How do you write about the thing that’s most important to you, that centers your and everyone else’s life and world, that is the supreme of all that is good and beautiful and true but that is entirely beyond human comprehension? That’s what Dante set out to do, and with the proper gaze, one can see in his attempt a poetry unlike any other.

Paradiso begins, and immediately Dante puts his chips on the table: “In the Heaven that takes the most of His light / was I, and saw things that to retell / one neither knows how to nor can when he descends / because, as we try to re-approach Him / our intellect falls so deeply inward that the memory cannot follow” (I, 4–9). It’s nice when the author tells us that the story is not a tellable one, right? Clearly, things are not as they normally are with this book Paradiso. Reading it for the things we tend to enjoy—plot, character, psychology, suspense, or even arousal—you’re probably going to stay thumbs-down (like pretty much all Italians who are forced to read it in school). No, this one has a purely poetic and theological agenda, as we watch Dante negotiate the exact problem he set forth in the first few lines: how to tell what can’t be told, how to speak of Heaven and its ineffable king.

Now, however, I grudgingly have to confess that Paradiso, unlike almost every other book I talk about here, is pretty hard to enjoy without a little academic horsepower under your hood. The problem is, if you’re not used to reading allegorical poetry, Paradiso ain’t gonna work. In Inferno and even Purgatorio, understanding Dante’s use of allegory isn’t that important to enjoying what you’re reading. Once we’re in Heaven, however, there’s some reckoning to be done. But take heart, dear reader, for I am about to offer you the quickest of all possible tutorials in reading Dante’s allegory—don’t say I never did anything for you.

Allegory has been said to mean a lot of different things at different times, but for Dante it meant that his poetic images could have a number of different meanings—and he wants you to look for them. So far this is pretty normal, as are most of the images he uses. Many are exquisitely beautiful, if a bit predictable, and not too hard to decipher: concentric rings, unbearably bright lights, the celestial choir, angels in flame, and finally the culminating “eternal rose” composed of all the angels and the blessed shining together—all stuff you might expect to find in the upper room.

But Dante also employs another kind of allegory that’s much more sophisticated, as he tries to represent the unrepresentability of Heaven to mortal minds. These kinds of images are Dante’s real advancement: the ability to create signs that tell you that they can’t properly signify and that the words they are using no longer correspond to the things they used to stand for. Take the image of light, which, with vision (and to a lesser extent sound and hearing), is the most important of all of Dante’s rewritten concepts. If you monitor the modulation of light in Paradiso, you’ll see how intricately Dante tries to weave the symbolic tapestry of his Heaven. First the lights are so bright that Dante can barely stand them; then they become too bright, and eventually he is actually blinded; then he is weaned to be able to “see” a higher “light”—but we are told this isn’t seeing at all; then we find that there’s a “living light,” but of course that isn’t actually a light at all, and it’s alive. After that comes another “light” that God allows the angels to “see” to make himself more and more visible, and so forth. Dante keeps using the words “light” and “see,” but he hasn’t been talking about what any of us know by those terms for a long time.

That’s why I have to keep putting everything in quotes, not because I want to annoy you, but because Dante wants us to understand that the words have been separated from their original meanings, and that to think that we know what he’s talking about is an error. But Dante’s great point is this: that we can’t help but keep committing that error as he keeps using the words—that is, the fact that we keep thinking in our minds that the light is a light—and that he has no choice but to employ human words (how else could he say it?) are both signs of the feebleness of the mortal mind and its unreadiness to bear witness to the glory of the One above. The word “light” doesn’t signify what it says, but the fact that he’s forced to use it, and forces us to make the mistake of thinking it, signifies that we can’t and couldn’t understand what was really going on. That’s pretty intricate, no?

Even if all of this sounds like gobbledygook—and I suspect it just might—at least go into reading Paradiso knowing that it’s as sophisticated a linguistic and epistemological inquiry into its subject as you will ever find. Dante is trying to reach the Unknowable, and he tried to make his poetry an asymptote moving closer and closer to the axis it knows it can never touch.

The Buzz: If you’re going to talk about Paradiso, you have to talk about Beatrice. Beatrice Portinari was a girl in Florence whom Dante met briefly when he was nine and she eight, then in passing nine years later, but never again as she died at age twenty-four—before too much reality could intrude on Dante’s idealized image of her. She is the one who first takes him to Virgil in Inferno and then becomes his guide near the end of the Purgatorio and through most of Paradiso. As they move closer and closer to God, she gets brighter, more beautiful, and happier, mirroring in herself the increasing beatitude of Paradiso’s spheres.

What People Don’t Know (But Should): Dante might well have been the most arrogant poet in recorded history (with Milton a close second). See some astounding hubris in II, 7–18 (“not so amazed as you shall be”); XVII, 127–35 (his “voice … will leave behind vital nourishment;” XIX, 7–10 (“what I now relate, no voice has ever reported”) and the quote in the next section.

Best Line: Here is my translation of Dante trying to describe Beatrice’s smile in Heaven, both lamenting his mortal inabilities and backhandedly complimenting himself on having nonetheless taken on such a task (and, again, I’ve not tried to reproduce the meter and rhyme):

If all those tongues should sound together

To aid me, still not the thousandth part of the truth Would be reached, singing of the heavenly smile
And how it lit her sacred face.
For in depicting Paradise,
The divine Poem needs take a leap,
Like one who finds a block in his path.
But considering the heaviness of my matter,
And the mortal shoulder trying to carry it,
None would blame should I tremble beneath.
No waters for a little boat are these
Through which my audacious prow doth cut,
Nor for a pilot who would have care for himself.
   [XXIII, 55–69]

What’s Sexy: Beatrice is an attractive guide and all, but Dante’s Heaven seems to be missing a few things I’d like to find if I ever make it to the promised land. Heaven in the Bible sounds a little more promising; why else would Deuteronomy insist that every male elect must have his frank and beans?

Quirky Fact: Dante spent the last two decades of his life in exile from his home in Florence (which at the time was an independent city-state), so when Cacciaguida, his great-great-grandfather (see below), foretells Dante’s future, he says Dante will “taste how salty another’s bread is.” That’s because Florentine bread didn’t contain salt—and doesn’t to this day.

What to Skip: If you’re reading Paradiso as I’ve advised you to—for a sense of how Heaven works and why Dante as a human is unfit to understand the celestial happenings—by the end of the first twelve or so lines of Canto V, you’ll get the point. From then on, unless there are religious figures you’re interested in, I’d skip everything but the openings to each canto (normally the first ten or fifteen lines are the best) until you get to XXIII. But, to do a little goody-goody celeb head-count, Aquinas, Boethius, and King Solomon (among others) appear in Canto X; St. Francis in XI; St. Dominic and others in XII; XIII has Aquinas back and a discussion of Solomon; XV-XVII have Cacciaguida discussing Florence and Dante’s futures (including, in XVII, some moving lines prognosticating Dante’s exile—see “Quirky Fact”); XVIII briefly mentions the great conquerors Joshua, Charlemagne, Roland, and William; XXI has Peter Damian; and XXII has St. Benedict and Jacob’s ladder.

At Canto XXIII, you really start to get to the good stuff. It begins with an all-time crazy simile (twelve lines long!) about Beatrice being like a bird on a tree limb (much better than it sounds), then moves on to the quote in “Best Line” above, then Mary appears, who for the time being Dante can only see as a “living star” circled in fire and heavenly melody—no longer the oenophile we saw in the New Testament.

From there, it’s pretty much a Who’s Who of biblical greats: St. Peter in XXIV, who questions Dante on his theological understanding (sadly, their dialogue is a little academic—skim); St. James (actually, both St. Jameses conflated in one) in XXV; St. John in XXVI and then this fellow called Adam whom you might have heard of; St. Peter again in XXVII, and the structure and creation of Heaven in XXVII-IX.

In XXX comes God. Dante can’t see Him yet, but he can see the Eternal Rose of angels, which he continues to describe in XXXI. Here Beatrice leaves Dante, and St. Bernard takes his hand. In XXXII, Dante sees Mary as preparation for his final encounter. Then in XXXIII, the hundredth and last canto of the last canticle of Dante’s great trilogy, the pilgrim meets his maker. I’m sure you want to know what Dante found “at the end of all desires” but don’t even think I’m going to give it away. Let’s just say that I’ve already given you a hint of how he’ll “describe” Him.