(Paradiso 1–2)
Turn Back, Reader!
Although modern readers are often left cold by Paradiso, Dante himself thought it was the greatest thing he had ever written. This does not mean that he was unaware of the difficulty of his final canticle. In fact, it is so difficult that he urges his readers to quit and turn back:
O you, within your little boat,
desirous of hearing more, having followed
behind my ship that makes its way by singing,
turn back if you would see your shores again!
Do not set forth upon the deep, since should it happen
that you lose sight of me, you would be lost forever.
The water I venture out upon has never been crossed before.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
But you few who have lifted up your heads, longingly,
and for a long time, for the bread of angels . . .
you may indeed set forth a proper ship
upon the salty deep, taking advantage of that furrow
in the water that so quickly returns to being level.
The glorious men who crossed the sea for Colchis
did not gaze in wonder as much as you will,
even when they saw Jason become a plowman. (Par. 2.1–7, 10–11, 13–18)
It’s not a very good marketing scheme for reaching a large public, but the poet says that he only needs a few dedicated readers. In words that echo Ulysses’s speech to raise a crew (Inf. 26), the poet calls for those who thirst for adventure and are willing to endure extreme intellectual hardship, analogous to the hardships endured by the legendary heroes who accompanied Jason in pursuit of the Golden Fleece. And if it just so happens that you are bold enough, then “the glorious men who crossed the sea for Colchis / did not gaze in wonder as much as you will” (Par. 2.16–17). Dante alludes to the Argonauts, who watched their captain crush the teeth of a magical serpent and plow them into the ground. From this unusual sowing, a group of warriors sprang up and cut one another down. You will be more amazed than they. Thus, although Dante knew his final canticle was extremely difficult, he also thought that if we could stay in his wake, then we would come to see his vision as breathtakingly beautiful. This insight will guide the concluding chapters of this book.
Although difficulties are inevitable, my goal is to help my readers come to see why Dante loved his Paradiso so much. To do so, I will use the remainder of this chapter to clear away two obstacles to appreciating Paradiso. The first is Dante’s strange conception of “the heavens.”1 Just as in our day, so in Dante’s, readers felt there was something inherently exciting about space travel. If we don’t appreciate Dante’s sci-fi journey through the heavens now, this is simply because of a historical accident; that is, because so much has changed in our cosmic imagination, we first have to reconstruct Dante’s understanding of the heavens before we can appreciate the adventure of the story on the most literal level. The second obstacle to our appreciation of the canticle is an “inherent difficulty”; that is, the poet hopes to talk about the joy of the saints, the bright fire of God, but these things are higher and lighter than ordinary human language. For Dante, God simply cannot be “known,” because any word we might use to describe him fails to do him justice. This is what theologians call the problem of “ineffability” or “unspeakability.”
Perhaps it also strikes you as strange that we are only now taking up a discussion of the failure and limitation of language, two-thirds of the way through Dante’s wordy, thousand-page book! Thus, in this introductory chapter, we will also have to deal with this complementary feature of Dante’s poem: at the very same time that Dante believes that his subject is ultimately “unsayable,” he remains a poet, a craftsman of words, who tries to use his language to point at that which is beyond it. Thus, throughout the final canticle, there is a kind of war of language, a tension between Dante’s desire to write the most penetrating poem in the history of human thought and his unshakable conviction that even that will be a failure.
Dante dramatically illustrates the tension between ineffability and eloquence in the opening lines of Paradiso. Invoking the classical god of poetic inspiration, he implores:
O good Apollo . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Enter into my breast! May you breath in me,
as when you drew Marsyas
out from the scabbard of his limbs. (Par. 1.13, 19–21)
The image is the brutal death of the mythological Marsyas, the musician who so recklessly challenged Apollo to a competition. When the mortal inevitably lost, Apollo punished Marsyas by flaying him alive, a gruesome death famously portrayed by the Venetian painter Titian. This is the story Dante uses, in the very first lines, to describe the kind of inspiration he needs! He calls for an inspiration so profound that he is stripped and drawn out of himself, an inspiration by which he radically leaves the limitations of his mortal humanity behind.
Dante and Medieval Space Travel
These days we moderns all possess a kind of built-in arrogance about our superiority to earlier cultures, what C. S. Lewis once called “chronological snobbery.” In contrast to medievals, who tended to believe that the ancients were greater, we moderns are inclined to think that, because of our technological and scientific progress, we know more and live better than anyone who came before. In particular, we like to think of ourselves as vastly superior when it comes to knowledge of space. Watch Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014) and you’ll hear terms like “black holes,” “neutron stars,” “gravitational fields,” “relativity,” and “worm holes” batted around. Dante’s cosmos, then, with the earth at the center and all the planets neatly revolving around it, seems, at first glance, positively primitive.
Before we can appreciate how exciting Dante’s readers would have felt his journey in Paradiso to be, we have to know something about what medieval men and women thought about the heavens in the first place. In this section, though, I don’t just want to relate some medieval ideas about the cosmos. Rather, I want to try to re-create the medieval experience of looking at the nighttime sky; that is, I want to conduct a kind of phenomenology of the medieval cosmos, relating not just what it looked like to them and how it worked, but also how it felt.
We have to recognize that even if we might have more knowledge about some things far away, Dante and his contemporaries had a better understanding about the practical appearance of the nighttime sky on any given evening. Unless you have an annual subscription to Astronomer’s Monthly, you will not have a clue what Dante is talking about in Paradiso 1 when he begins to describe his ascent into the heavens:
The lamp of the world rises on us mortals
at different points. But, by the one that joins
four circles with three crossings, it comes forth
on a better course and in conjunction
with a better sign. (Par. 1.37–41; trans. Hollander)
In other words, it’s late March, and the sun is in the constellation of Aries. This and many other bits of astronomical information lead us to see that Dante had a sky chart entirely within his mind, and he seems to have expected his readers to possess the same internal map. He knows the constellations, how the planets move through them, the phases of the moon, the appearance of the sun throughout the zodiac, and so forth. It is as if he could close his eyes and, not just visualize a model of the earth at the center and the planets around it, but spin it in his mind and watch it revolve.
In addition to being more familiar with the nighttime sky’s ordinary appearance, medieval people took delight and even comfort in looking up at it. This was in part because the medieval model of the cosmos was of a universe that was orderly and close in. At the center of the cosmos, of course, was the earth, and then came the moon, which divided the atmosphere from the heavenly ether. Next was Mercury, Venus, the sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, then the sphere in which the stars were thought to be lodged, like gems set into a transparent band of crystal. The pilgrim will travel through each one of these spheres and meet souls within, and on several important occasions he will step back, turn around, look down, and take in a view of the whole cosmic system. This is important because medievals thought the distance between these planets was spaced out in harmonic intervals. In a way similar to how the frequency of one note in a chord resonates harmoniously with a second note in the chord, to make, for example, a fifth, medieval men and women thought the interval between one planet and the next was spaced out in harmonic chords. The world, then, in its ordinary existence, constituted a visual symphony, notes written into the heavens to be plucked by the daily movements of the planetary bodies. And Dante the pilgrim ascended high enough to “read” the score!
In this way, Dante recycles a bit of classical literature, Cicero’s “Dream of Scipio,” an ancient text famous throughout the Middle Ages. Cicero describes the visionary dream of a Roman general, Scipio, during which the soul of the general flies through the spheres of the heavens to reach the apex of the universe. Scipio then turns around and sees the universe, stretched out at his feet: “What is this sound, so loud and yet so sweet, that fills my ears?” he asks. His guide answers:
That is the sound produced by the impetus and momentum of the spheres themselves. It is made up of intervals which, though unequal, are determined systematically by fixed proportions. The blend of high and low notes produces an even flow of various harmonies. . . . By imitating this system with strings and voices experts have succeeded in opening a way back to this place. . . . Filled with this sound, people’s ears have become deaf to it.2
In other words, the music created by the spheres, to which we have become deaf, can be regained through study or through beautiful music that imitates the same harmonic proportions that space out the heavenly bodies. And so, if Dante wrote a poem that had the same order that the cosmos has, then he could provide his readers with a kind of harmonic template that could help them see the deeper harmonies underneath.
Thus, we can see that whereas we moderns tend to think of space as being a cavernous depth in which there are things billions of miles away, hidden away in the utter darkness of their chaotic landscape, medievals saw the universe as harmonious and comforting. As C. S. Lewis famously put it,
Nothing is more deeply impressed on the cosmic imaginings of a modern than the idea that the heavenly bodies move in a pitch-black and dead-cold vacuity. It was not so in the Medieval Model. You must conceive yourself looking up at a world lighted, warmed, and resonant with music. . . . Pascal’s terror at the eternal silence of that infinite emptiness never entered his [i.e., the medieval’s] mind. He is like a man being conducted through an immense cathedral, not like one lost in a shoreless sea.3
Similarly, Dante describes his first entry into heaven as entering into a world of warmth, light, and harmony:
When the great wheel that you, through being desired, make eternal
attuned me, too,
with the harmony you moderate and discern,
it struck me, all of a sudden, that the heavens were lit on fire
by the flame of the sun. . . .
The extraordinary newness of sound and the brilliance of the light
enkindled in me such a desire to know their cause
I had never felt something so sharp. (Par. 1.76–80, 82–84)
Dante, then, sees the heavenly sky and, rapturously, feels it saturated with peace and with love.
At the same time that the pilgrim feels the order of the heavens, he is also struck by its dazzling brightness. In the medieval world, the spectator delighted in the mere quality of color or light in a way that is hard for us to conceive—we who live in a world flooded by artificial lights. He could almost taste its radiance. Umberto Eco describes how beautiful gems, flowers, colorful works of art, or sparkling objects were “sensuously present” to medieval men and women: “The passage from aesthetic pleasure to mystical joy is virtually instantaneous,” he writes. “Their love of colour and light . . . was a spontaneous reaction. . . . The beauty of color was everywhere felt to be beauty pure and simple, something immediately perceptible and indivisible. . . . Feelings of artistic beauty were converted at the moment of their occurrence into a sense of communion with God and a kind of joie de vivre.”4
What is more, just as we all know that the orbit of the moon affects the tides of large bodies of water, so too did medieval people think all heavenly bodies exerted their influence on earth. Looking at the stars wasn’t just pretty: it was opening yourself to spiritual powers that penetrated your body. Their beauty was spiritually radioactive. For Dante’s contemporaries, then, even the basic idea of flying through this place of peace and radiance would have been a wildly exciting sci-fi journey. The pilgrim visits that region bathed in happiness and light, which flows into his body. It is this visceral feeling for the physical effects of light and music that appears everywhere throughout Dante’s final canticle.
And so medieval men and women looked up at the sky and saw it as beautiful, radiant, dazzling, and ordered—or rather, felt it as perfection. It always moved in order, always obeyed, always sang. But although this ordered motion was most perfectly embodied in the starry sky, this order, this love, if you will, also flowed throughout the world and, in fact, was thought to keep everything in motion. It was love that regulated the seasons as they yielded to each other; it was love that ensured that the sea harmoniously lapped the land without overflowing its boundaries; it was even love that bound the soul to the body. In a famous poem that monks memorized and schoolboys chanted, the Late Antique philosopher Boethius praises the order of the world, ruled by what he called “cosmic music” or “cosmic love”:
O Lord, you govern the universe with your eternal order:
You brought time itself into being, and all that marks
Its changes in the heavens and here on the earth,
[you who are] Both moving,
And also in stillness. . . .
The world’s beauty is your beauty: your mind is the source of its grandeur
As you shaped it to your liking, imposing upon it your order,
Which harmonizes the many elements that compose it,
The cold with the fiery hot, the dry with the wet, lest any
Fly off on its own and unbalance the equipoise of creation.5
In other words, there’s no good reason why the elements don’t just repel one another and fly off in their own directions. Somehow, someway, they remain united, in a body. For Boethius, then, this harmony or glue that holds them together is divine love, which has its source in the heart of God, who generously pours forth his love to keep the world together.6
There is one final point to make about Dante’s cosmos: although love flows through the universe, moving each part of creation toward its Creator, it yet remains true that creatures have different capacities for absorbing the presence of God. This varying capacity of different creatures to absorb the light of God was thought to be perfectly illustrated with an analogy to light. Take coal, for example: dark, dirty, greasy coal has little reflective power, but even coal, if you light it on fire, can release a burning light as if there were light hidden within. But other types of matter, say a diamond or an emerald, were just made to be filled with brilliant light! They let light flow through them, hardly obstructing its path at all. Topaz can be saturated by heavenly light; the dull stone cannot. Similarly, although all creatures seek out God by a kind of internal movement, some created things imbibe more of his light than others. Otto Von Simson, author of the classic Gothic Cathedral, summarizes the teaching in this way:
According to the [thinkers] of the Middle Ages, light is the most noble of natural phenomenon. . . . Light is the creative principle in all things, most active in the heavenly spheres, whence it causes all organic growth here on earth, and weakest in the earthly substances. But it is present even in them, for, asks St. Bonaventure, do not metals and precious stones begin to shine when we polish them, are not clear windowpanes manufactured from sand and ashes, is not fire struck from black coal, and is not this luminous quality of things evidence of the existence of light in them?7
All of this helps us understand that first terzina of Paradiso: “The glory of Him who moves all things / pervades the universe and shines / in one part more and in another less” (Par. 1.1–3). God, then, is present to every creature, but he is closer to some on account of the fact that they can be more present to him.
Dante, Words, and the Unspeakable Beauty of God
Modern Christians often do not think about mysticism or negative theology as proper to Christianity. Mysticism seems like some vaguely Eastern phenomenon, something that belongs to Hinduism or Buddhism. But the truth is that Christianity inherited its mysticism from both the Greek and Jewish traditions, and ever since the church fathers (such as Gregory of Nyssa), the doctrine of the “unknowability” of God has been a cornerstone of Christian life. There are even hints of such teaching on God’s “unknowability” within Scripture. For instance, in 2 Corinthians 12:2, 4, Saint Paul modestly alludes to a mysterious vision he was given:
I knew a man in Christ . . . (whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell, God knoweth;) such an one caught up to the third heaven. . . . He was caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter.
Paul’s word for “unspeakable” is arrhētos, the equivalent of the Latin ineffabilis, from whence we get our own English “ineffable.”
A sixth-century Byzantine theologian by the name of Dionysius the Areopagite picked up on this passage in Saint Paul and purported to explain what this mysterious vision was and how we too can come to enjoy it ourselves. His writings were translated into Latin in the early ninth century, after which time they influenced numerous theologians, such as Hugh and Richard of St. Victor (both mentioned in Dante), as well as the great Thomas Aquinas. In fact, if you consult the latter’s Summa theologiae, you will find that Dionysius is cited more times than any other author within the first thirteen questions (that is, those questions that deal with how human intellects can know God).
Needless to say, “negative theology” is not explained easily or quickly, but I at least want to provide some background for mystical theology before we return to the opening of Paradiso. In particular, I will refer to a short, five-page treatise by Dionysius the Areopagite, The Mystical Theology.8
Dionysius states it simply: God is the cause of all, and “the Cause of all is above all.”9 Because God is above all, the language we routinely use about this world—this lower world of creatures—is radically deficient when we use it in reference to him who is not a creature but the cause of creatures. For example, take the word “is.” We can say that there is no such thing as a unicorn, but there is such a thing as a man called Trevor. When we say “Trevor is,” we mean that this creature lives and has being. Trevor doesn’t necessarily have to exist. We could imagine a world without horses or a world without Trevor. And so, although Trevor “exists” or “is,” what we mean by that is simply the following: this creature has being, but not of necessity. Its being is on loan for a short time.
Now, when we turn back to talking about God, we begin to realize the radical limitations of our words. If we utter the seemingly straightforward sentence “God is,” we think we know what we mean; but the problem is that we are using the same word (“is”) that we use for creatures of dust, and we are trying to apply that to the Being who cannot not be! Thus, when we try to use our ordinary language to talk about God, we run the risk of imprisoning his majesty within the cage of our own speech. Dionysius makes this same argument, but he employs a rhetoric full of paradox and mystery: “[The more I climb in my speech] the more language falters, and when it has passed up and beyond the ascent, it will turn silent completely.”10 Dionysius says, then, that the closer we get to God, the less our words mean anything when applied to him. We are left feeling that our words are babble and chatter. We are reduced to silence. Or, in the words of Dionysius, “The fact is the more we take flight upward, the more our words are confined to the ideas we are capable of forming; so that now as we plunge into darkness which is beyond intellect, we shall find ourselves not simply running short of words but actually speechless and unknowing.”11 In this way, Dionysius, using the image of Moses climbing Mount Sinai, says you have to strive to leave everything behind, to recognize the radical limitations of your words for talking about God, and plunge into divine darkness: “[The good cause of all] is on a plane above all this, and it is made manifest only to those who travel through foul and fair, who pass beyond the summit of every holy ascent, who leave behind them every divine light, every voice, every word from heaven, and who plunge into the darkness where, as scripture proclaims, there dwells the One who is beyond all things.”12
We can now turn back to Dante. In the opening lines of Paradiso, the poet refers to precisely this getting lost within God, plunging into his darkness:
That heaven that draws in more of his light:
I was there, and I saw things that one who has come down
from there cannot—nor does he even know how!—tell.
Because drawing itself near to its desire,
our intellect is immersed, so profoundly,
that memory cannot follow up after it from behind. (Par. 1.4–9)
Here in Paradiso Dante finds himself making up words unheard of before. So strange and shockingly new is his experience that old, tired verbs and nouns will no longer do. His term I translated above as “immersed” is actually si profonda—that is, to “profound oneself” or perhaps “our intellect is so in-profounded.” Later Dante invents another term, trasumanar: “To signify in words ‘going-beyond-mere-human’: / it cannot be done” (1.70–71).
Throughout the opening verses of Paradiso, we see Dante adopting Saint Paul as the patron saint of his journey. Dante alludes to the Pauline passage quoted above: “Whether I was there merely by that part of me you created / last, O Love who rule the heavens, / you know” (Par. 1.73–75). Thus, as a pilgrim, Dante follows the example of Saint Paul and Dionysius’s description of Moses climbing Mount Sinai. What he saw and experienced is beyond the ability of language to capture.
But all of this—that is, Dante’s claim to have gone to a place beyond intellect, beyond memory, and beyond language—presents a major problem for a poet, a problem more intense than any Dante has faced so far. Poets are wordy, and they are supposed to talk about things. And thus, to our surprise, we find that Dante not only claims that his subject is ineffable and that he takes Saint Paul as the patron of his journey, but at exactly the same time, he also turns to the classical and epic tradition for inspiration to speak about what he saw. At the beginning of Paradiso, then, we see two long-standing traditions collide: that of the mystic whose vision ends in silence and that of the classical poet whose craft of language culminates in eloquence. In addition to being a Saint Paul, Dante also wants to be Orpheus, the legendary poet who could tame beasts and bend trees through the sweetness of his verse. And finally, Dante will lay one more layer on top of all this: he depicts himself also as a great classical hero who goes and steals something of great worth and then brings it home again, like Jason and the Golden Fleece. We hear all of the strands of these interweaving traditions in his opening invocation. Having just mentioned the failure of memory and words, Dante continues:
Truly, as much of the holy kingdom as
I could treasure up in my mind
shall now be the matter for my song. (Par. 1.10–12)
Dante makes himself out to be some adventurous hero from a fairy tale who climbs a ladder and steals a miniscule part of the giant’s treasure; or perhaps he is like Prometheus, who stole just a spark, banked it, and brought it back home to earth. But Dante is convinced that, given the extraordinary nature of the treasure of this kingdom, if he could get just one single tiny spark from this ocean of fire, and somehow get it back home to earth and into his poem, then the whole world would be consumed with the flame of love. Or as he says, “Poca favilla gran fiamma seconda” (“Great flames leap from the smallest spark,” Par. 1.34). It is for this reason that Dante prays and begs with such urgency. Dante invokes God, he invokes the Holy Spirit, he invokes the ancient Muses, he calls upon Apollo, as if calling upon anyone who will listen, to enable him to capture just a glimmer of the heavenly kingdom:
Truly, as much of the holy kingdom as
I could treasure up in my mind
shall now be the matter for my song.
O good Apollo, for this final task
make me into a vessel of your power.
This you require before you give your laurel, so much loved.
Up to this point, one peak of Parnassus
has been enough for me, but now I need both
to enter into the arena that remains for me.
Enter into my breast! May you breath in me,
as when you drew Marsyas
out from the scabbard of his limbs.
O divine virtue! If you lend yourself to me,
I will show forth the shadow of the blessed realm
that is stamped within my mind.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Great flames leap from the smallest spark. (Par. 1.10–24, 34)
“Poca favilla gran fiamma seconda.” And so we have a gap between the ambition of the poet and the “unspeakability” of the place into which he ventures. He wants, like Jason, to steal a treasure, a tiny spark, but he worries that his human faculty to carry it home in language is hardly capable of such an adventurous undertaking. And so, what is the pilgrim to do?
Love as the Vehicle of Ascent
And now we return to that deeper problem: the pilgrim’s inability to even see the depths of what he hopes to write about! Dante represents this almost right away in Paradiso 1, when the pilgrim, inspired by Beatrice, turns to look at the sun (Par. 1.54–58). Indeed, this gazing at the sun is the perfect image for Dante’s journey into heaven. Ordinarily, the sun is so bright that it blinds you; if you look at the source of sight too much, then it will take away your vision. And thus, for medieval men and women, who loved so much the splendor of shining gems and the dazzling color of stained glass, it was a shame that human powers were not fully capable of enjoying the most beautiful object in the world: the sun. In heaven (and beginning in Eden), though, you are given more power to see, more power than you have here. We will see that as the pilgrim progresses through the spheres of heaven, his power of sight will grow stronger and stronger, so that in the end he will be able to stare at a light that is one thousand times brighter than the sun.
Dante also gives us a precious hint of an answer to a fascinating question: How is it the case that what blinds the pilgrim and sears his eyes with pain will later delight him? How does his vision get stronger? For Dante, the instrument by which his vision is deepened is love. Love adds to our capacity to see:
I could not bear it long, yet not so short a time
as not to see [the sun] sparking within,
like boiling iron when pulled out of the fire.
And then, all of a sudden, it seemed a day to this day
was added, as if He who can
had adorned the heavens with another sun.
Beatrice stood motionless with her eyes
fixed on the eternal wheels; and I fixed my eyes
on her, withdrawing them from above.
By gazing on her I was made into something new within,
just as Glaucus was when he tasted the grass
that made him consort of the other gods in the sea. (Par. 1.58–69)
Having just withdrawn his eyes from the sun, Dante looks down, but to his surprise he sees a new sun blazing directly next to him. This is, of course, Beatrice, who glows so brightly because she herself is looking at the center point of the wheels of heaven. As we will see, in Dante’s cosmos, everything that moves, moves because it is filled with a kind of giddy, childlike energy, a bright happiness to be in existence. Beatrice looks at this love at the center of the universe and is moved with love. And when she is moved by love, she becomes moving to Dante. Thus, in the reflection of the radiance of her happiness, Dante himself is able to grow in the ability to see bliss.
Dante also says that he can feel himself being changed from the inside out, in the same manner that Glaucus was transformed, an allusion to Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Ovid relates the tale of a simple fisherman who one day brought in a good haul of fish, pulled up his net, and laid the fish on the bright grass to dry. But then the fish magically came back to life and started hopping about, until they flopped back into the sea. Glaucus was confused:
I stood dumbfounded, for a while not believing it, searching for the cause. Had some god done it, or the juice of some herb? . . . Gathering some herbage in my hand, I bit what I had gathered with my teeth. My throat had scarcely swallowed the strange juice, when suddenly I felt my heart trembling inside me, my breast seized with yearning for that other element. Unable to hold out for long, crying out: “Land, I will never return to, goodbye!” I immersed my body in the sea.
The gods of the sea received me, thinking me worth the honour of their company, and asked Oceanus and Tethys to purge what was mortal in me. . . . When later I came to, my whole body was altered from what I was before, and my mind was not the same.13
This was the metamorphosis of Glaucus: his transformation from human to god. He began to long for new things, to swim with new speed, and to live in new depths, to say goodbye to the ordinary land that used to sustain him. In a similar way, then, Dante’s Paradiso will be the tale of what the poet calls trasumanar—that is, to go beyond (“trans”) the human (Par. 1.70). This transformation works from the inside out, and it is love that enters into the heart to make it divine from within.