(Paradiso 3–20)
“Only Man!”
In the previous chapter, we discussed what the heavens meant for the medieval sky gazer, how he imagined it as bathed in warmth and sound and light. He looked up at the heavens wistfully, longingly, as a place of peace. But the same sight that could occasion joy could inspire disgust and melancholy. After staring up at the heavens, vibrantly alive, that paradigm of order full of pure light, the medieval poet dejectedly turned his eyes back down, to lament that the human community could not better resemble the world of the stars: Why can’t individuals be content to be grouped in constellations? Don’t they know that their beauty would be increased? Don’t they know that their erratic, selfish movements ruin the dance? In contrast to the orchestra of the heavens, we on earth have factions, wars, hatred, pride, envy, avarice—the tumult of our interior passions. In the previous chapter, we saw how Boethius basks in the warm music of the universe: “Not even the blowing winds are random,” he shouts with glee, because God “observe[s] and order[s] all from [his] high office.” But there is one creature who messes things up:
Only man is endowed with freedom
That you could constrain but have chosen not to, . . .
The innocent suffer . . .
Wicked men sit upon thrones.
Villains thrive and trample the necks
Of virtuous men into the mud. . . .
Look down from on high and impose your correction
You who bind all the world within your laws,
Who control the waves and the tides, bring order
To the surging waves of mankind’s follies.1
Nature obeys God perfectly; humanity, endowed with the gift of freedom, rarely lives in restful harmony. Boethius ached when he thought about how little human society embodied that beautiful cosmic order.
With this in mind, we are prepared to appreciate the great shock of Paradiso 3, where Dante, in the heaven of the moon, gets his first chance not just to look at the beauty of the astral bodies but also to speak to heaven’s inhabitants: “Just as through transparent and polished glass / or through tranquil and limpid water . . . / faint traces of our visages are reflected . . . / in this way I saw so many faces ready to speak” (Par. 3.10–11, 13, 16). The face that is brightest and most eager to speak to Dante is that of Piccarda Donati, the younger sister of Dante’s old drinking buddy, Forese Donati, whom we met in Purgatorio 23. In Purgatorio, Dante did not at first recognize the face of his old friend on account of how emaciated he had grown through penitential fasting. Likewise here he meets the younger sister, but she has grown so fair that Dante does not recognize her at first. Her face is unrecognizable to him, not because of its gauntness, but because it has been transformed in new splendor (Par. 3.58–61). Such beauty, even here, in the lowest of all the heavens! Piccarda then relates her story (3.46–57).
Piccarda became a nun, but her ambitious and machinating older brother Corso (not Forese) had her forcibly removed from the monastery and married off. In the next canto Dante struggles over this point: it seems unfair that Piccarda gets demoted to the basement of heaven because of an act of violence that occurred to her against her will. Beatrice addresses this problem head-on (Par. 4.73–80): Piccarda could have walked back to the convent every single day. She could have been like Mucius Scaevola, the ancient Roman hero who, when caught in the enemy camp, stuck his left hand into the fire and let it be burned off in order to demonstrate his inflexible commitment. She could have been like Saint Lawrence, who refused to betray his Christian community and was tortured for it. According to pious legend, while being roasted alive, he said, “Turn me over, because on this side I’m done.” Piccarda did not have this irrepressible will, even if she wore the “veil of the heart” her whole life (3.117). Her will didn’t have the resolve, like fire that always rises up, to keep returning to the good to which she had committed. Her reflective power is less than that of others because her capacity to choose love was less.
As soon as Dante hears this, he is pricked by a question that would probably occur to almost any of us. If I saw a man, every day on my walk to work, who was three times better looking, two times fitter, and four times wealthier, I admit I would probably dislike him. And similarly Dante, who still has much of his earthly thinking with him, hesitantly asks Piccarda and those around her, “But tell me: you who, here, are happy, / do you not desire a higher place / where you will see more and better make yourselves friends?” (Par. 3.64–66). I gotta ask you, Piccarda, is there just a small part of you that envies the others, higher up? And Piccarda makes the most amazing reply:
Along with the other shades, she smiled a little,
then answered me. She was so happy
that she seemed to burn in the first fire of love:
“Brother, our will here rests in tranquility,
because of the power of love, which makes us want
only what we have, and it makes us thirst for nothing else.
“If we did long to be more exalted,
our desires would be discordant
with the will of the one who appoints us to be here.
“And that doesn’t work among these circles, as you will see. . . .
“On the contrary! It is the very essence of this blessed esse
to cling within to the divine will,
so that our various wills are made one.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
“And in his will is our peace.
It is that sea toward which all things move.” (Par. 3.67–76, 79–81, 85–86)
A human will at peace. A human will that wants nothing more. A human will that loves what it has and finds itself at rest, moving within the larger cosmic order. If you think back to the heartbroken plea from Boethius, then you can see what is so striking about Dante’s depiction of heaven. True, his pilgrim soaks up the beauty of the luminescent bodies and exalts in their symphonic music; but, most importantly, he finds a community of human beings, at long last, forming an ordered cosmos that resembles the symphony of the heavenly spheres. It is for this reason that I think Piccarda is the most beautiful character in all the Comedy: she is a picture of a soul who is not just a member of the choir but a note in the symphony.
Piccarda understands that, in a heaven of rubies and diamonds, she’s just an opal. And yet, on a deeper level, she also understands that a jewelry store that only sold diamonds would be dull. In order to better proclaim the depth of the beauty of God, a diversity of creatures is needed. Piccarda is happy to accept her role. Paradise, then, is that place where human beings, now moving in harmony with one another, have finally joined the cosmic symphony. At the same time, Dante emphasizes the need for variety in the universe to express the infinite beauty of God. In this way, Dante builds his heaven on two competing principles: individuality and harmony. To see better how these core principles reinforce each other, we need to be attentive to the poet’s use of the metaphor of music.
Polyphony in Paradiso
The three canticles of the Comedy can be thought of as movements in a symphony, with each movement written in a different key and tempo. Dante in fact built into his poem a system of allusions to music to make sure we hear his poetry with musical overtones. In Dante’s Journey to Polyphony, Francesco Ciabattoni points out that every allusion to music in Inferno is to broken song, failed hymns, or warped and perverted parodies of the liturgy.2 In Inferno 6, there are a few fleeting lines that refer to souls who sing “hymns,” but not real hymns, because those souls can only gurgle, submerged in mud. In life they were those who allowed their hearts to be plagued by constant sorrow (tristitia); in death they sing a pathetic hymn that is choked by the mud in their vocal chords. The final canto of Inferno opens with a twisted parody of a Christian hymn, and we also hear about the trumpet of Malacoda—that is, his fart—or how Master Adam’s dropsied belly rings like a kettle drum. Hell is full of fragmented music and broken instruments; every attempt to raise the voice into music is marked by its collapse into cacophonous sound.
Ciabattoni goes on. Purgatorio, in contrast, is full of references to Gregorian chant, called “monophony” by musicologists. Monophony is that sober music of the monastic choir, in which every voice sings the same melodic line. It is restrained and thus used for chanting during the liturgical hours of the Divine Office. Every one of the eighteen songs the poet alludes to in Purgatorio are, we are led to understand, chanted in monophony.
In Paradiso, though, Dante specifies that the songs and hymns are polyphonic—that is, made up of varying voices, each of which sustains its own melodic line. The choirs form nesting layers of distinct voices. Thus, in heaven you still have that unity practiced in purgatory, but now each voice, while remaining in harmony with the others, is able to regain its individuality without losing its role in adding to the concord of heaven. This form of music, although developed already by the so-called Notre Dame school in thirteenth-century Paris, found its culmination in the English composer Thomas Tallis. In fact, Tallis wrote a piece (albeit three hundred years after Dante) that I have always thought of as one of the best musical embodiments of Dante’s Paradiso: Spem in alium, a forty-two-part motet!
What we find, then, is that Dante’s musical program embodies theological realities. Infernal sinners remain willfully rebellious. In life they broke away from the human community to pursue some good in vicious competition with the rest of the human race. Now, as a community, they fail to achieve concord. Like musical notes that remain independent, their retained individuality is ugly and broken. Repentant sinners in purgatory, on the other hand, now willfully submit their individuality to the community. They learn now what it is like to live as members of a body. And thus they erase their tendencies to erratic individualism, forcing their voices into the unison of the simple plainchant. But with the polyphonic hymns of Paradiso, we have not only concord but also a simultaneous expression of individuality: Dante gives us a vision of heaven as a million-part motet. And it is the underlying polyphonic reality of heaven that explains why heavenly souls welcome the pilgrim with such affection, as we shall see now.
“This Is One Who Will Cause Our Loves to Grow!”: Erotic Love in Paradise (Paradiso 5–9)
When the pilgrim moves into the second heaven (the heaven of Mercury), he is greeted with a joy that astounds him:
I saw more than a thousand splendors
bring themselves toward us, and in the midst of this light I could hear:
“Look! This is one who will cause our loves to grow!”
And as each shade came up to us,
it struck me as steeped in joy
on account of the bright radiance that emanated from it. (Par. 5.103–8)
It is true that Paradiso sometimes lacks drama. And yet it has its own energy and peculiar excitement. Here, the pilgrim is immediately enveloped by a thousand souls who surround him from all directions. Their eagerness to know him is embarrassingly flattering: “Look! This is one who will cause our loves to grow” (5.105). Our pilgrim is surprised by joy, disconcerted to find himself enveloped by such superabundant loving.
In chapter 9 we discussed how Dante brought together epic and lyrical modes of writing for his new Christian epic, but it is only in Paradiso that we realize how far Dante went to graft the lyrical into his cosmic epic, a bold move, given that many of Dante’s contemporaries thought the lyrical tradition was antithetical to theological discussion of heavenly love. The Sicilian poet Giacomo da Lentini said that although he wanted to go to heaven, he would opt out if it meant being there without his lady.3 Heaven seemed so far away, whereas earthly love was nearer to me than I am to myself. In another poem, Giacomo described his interior suffering, how his heart was plagued by an aching, burning, and longing so violent as to threaten death:
There burns within me painful sorrow,
like unto a man who holds fire within,
hidden within his breast;
the more he tries to smother it,
so much the more does it take hold
and it cannot remain enclosed.
In just this way do I burn
when I pass by and do not look
at You, O Beautiful Countenance.4
Giacomo uses the verb ardere (to burn) three times in only one stanza, as if obsessively returning to the secret flame. The more he tries to keep it in, the more it threatens to devour, as if he were trying to put out a fire by packing it with dry leaves. We have seen, too, how such burning is enkindled by rays shot forth from a lady’s eyes, and how the rays follow the channel down to the heart. It comes as a huge surprise, then, when we hear all this language of “sparks” and “fire,” “radiant eyes” and “burning hearts,” everywhere in . . . Paradiso! How did such earthly love make it to heaven?
As I have said, medieval lyrical poetry was meant to perform in you what is happening in me; that is, by describing my experience of love, I could make it take root in you. And it is my opinion that this “performative” aspect of lyrical poetry unlocked an extraordinary theological opportunity for Dante: the portrayal of heaven as a community vertiginously falling in love. In other words, in depicting heaven, Dante conducted a literary experiment: he imagined what it would be like if, in heaven, there were no longer any donne petrose—stonyhearted ladies—who remain aloof or coldhearted, coy mistresses who have to be convinced. Indeed, in Paradiso there are no longer lover and beloved, but rather all souls have “gentle hearts” and thus are easily enflamed with love. As soon as you begin wooing a soul in heaven, you find that, before you have finished, it is trying to ignite a new flame within you. The dynamism of this vision of reality, in which heavenly souls are all lovers, makes even the vernacular courtly lyric seem staid. Dante portrays a whole community of ardent lovers whose love only fires more love in return.
We have come full circle, then—that is, back to Paradiso 5 (surely meant to be read in light of Inferno 5, which describes Paolo and Francesca!), where Dante is surrounded and enveloped by the joyful souls who dwell within the heaven of Mercury. Just after they call out to him, “This is one who will cause our loves to grow,” Beatrice asks one of the souls to speak: Justinian, the former Byzantine emperor. The pilgrim can’t help but notice how bright this soul has grown:
“I can see well how you nest
in your own light, and how then you send it forth from your eyes,
because it comes out like lightning when you smile.
“But I know not who you are, nor why your merit is weighed in the balance here.” (Par. 5.124–27)
Justinian, who has been “first to speak” (Par. 5.131), seems delighted that Dante wants to know who he is. He is a little like the father or mother leaning over the crib and speaking first to the infant, but when the parents find that their love solicits love within the tiny heart they address, they are filled with even more love than they had before:
This I said directly to that light
that had spoken to me first; but there irrupted from within
a greater brilliance than there had been before.
As the sun that conceals itself
through the excess of its own light, once its heat has burned through
the tempering layers of its vapors,
so, too, did he! Because of his increasing joy he hid himself from me,
within his radiance, that holy figure!
Thus, enclosed and concealed, he replied . . . (Par. 5.130–38)
There is a fascinating connection here. In a canzone that Dante had written as a young man (the love song performed by Casella in Purg. 2.112), the poet referred to how the smile of the beloved “overpowers our intellect as a ray of sunlight overpowers a weak sight.”5 There, Dante used the images of sun and weak eyes to represent how a beautiful person conceals herself within her own radiance of light. In Paradiso, Justinian is described as a beloved: he not only conceals himself in his radiance, like the beloved, but he also delights in Dante’s desire to know him, as the lyrical lover would. This is a dynamic exchange.
We find the same dynamic increase of love again, perhaps not surprisingly, in Paradiso 8—that is, in the heaven of Venus. Dante is careful to add a narrative detail to make us feel the intensity. In hell Paolo and Francesca were whipped about by a violent windstorm; in Purgatorio 26 the lustful lovers are described, humorously, as inching forward to speak to the pilgrim, getting as close as they can while remaining within the fire. Thus, in the first canticle, we have an image of violent but empty motion; in the second, we have love that is finally beginning to yield to moderation. And now in heaven we have a passion for the good that makes the love of Paolo and Francesca seem lukewarm:
There is no wind that descends from cold cloud
with such violence—either visible or not—
as would not seem impeded and slow,
to one who had seen those heavenly lights
come toward us. . . .
Then one of them neared himself to us and
alone began: “All of us are so eager
for your delight, so that you may take joy in us.” (Par. 8.22–26, 31–33)
Needless to say, the fact that such a surprise party awaits him brings the pilgrim great joy. Dante squeals with delight: “Deh, chi siete?” (“And who are you?,” Par. 8.44). He is, again, almost infantile in the purity of his glee. His joy comes as a response to the generosity of the first invitation, but then the pilgrim’s joy adds even more affection to the heavenly soul:
And then, what I saw! It became greater, both in size and kind!
It grew by adding a new bliss
to its bliss, when I had spoken. (Par. 8.46–48)
In fact, the soul grows so joyful that, once again, it becomes hidden to the eyes of Dante.
There’s more in the next terzine. When this soul (Charles Martel of Anjou, not the more famous Charles) has finished his speech, Dante says:
“But since I believe that the deep happiness
your speaking has poured into me, my lord,
is seen by you, just as I see it,
“I am pleased all the more. . . .
“You have made me happy.” (Par. 8.85–87, 89, 91)
The narrative details are important, and their significance easy to miss. What we have is a picture of heaven as a place in which souls are constantly and vertiginously falling deeper in love. Charles Martel’s speech brings the pilgrim delight, but when Charles observes that his speech has given joy to the listener, his own joy increases yet again because his listener’s has grown. But then it continues: when Dante sees now that his growth in joy has been responsible for Charles’s increase of joy, he then grows even happier than before. This process, seemingly, could continue.
In hell Dante had to approach the lethargic souls to induce them by blandishment or force to give up their stories; here in heaven he is bombarded and enveloped by eager souls who keep anticipating his questions. The souls rush down upon and around him to sweep him up into that dynamic communal experience of falling ever deeper in love, an experience of love that has been going on for a long time before the pilgrim arrived: “Look! This is one who will cause our loves to grow!” (Par. 5.105). In his pilgrimage Dante experiences a role reversal: the love poet becomes the beloved. And so Dante makes a concerted effort to turn up the temperature of his final canticle by embedding within his poetry the language of “glistening eyes” and “burning hearts,” borrowed from the lyric tradition.
Long before (in Vita Nuova), Dante related an eerie dream in which Love fed his core ardendo (burning heart) to an understandably hesitant Beatrice. But such images of burning do not disappear in Paradiso; rather, they grow more abundant! In the circle of the sun, Dante is surrounded by ardenti soli (burning suns). Dante will later refer to Cacciaguida’s “bow of ardent affection” (Par. 15.43); to how ardente is the “sweet love” that issues from the Eagle of Justice (20.14–15); to the ardente amore of Peter, James, and John (25.108); to how Bernard of Clairvaux turns his eyes “with such affection” to Mary that it makes Dante’s eyes più ardenti (“more burning,” 30.142). In fact, Dante uses the adjective ardente eleven times in Paradiso, only two times in Purgatorio, and not at all in Inferno. In our popular imagination we think of the realm of Satan as sultry and hot; but if we follow Dante’s insight, we should change the simile to “cold as hell.” For Dante, Paradiso is not only the place of the more intricate music of polyphony (as opposed to the broken songs and warped instruments of hell); it is also hotter and more radiant. It is within this heat that an extraordinary unity is forged: a paradoxical fusion of diverse individuals within a fully united body.
Diversity and Unity in Human Community (Paradiso 10–14)
The higher the pilgrim travels through the heavens, the more shocked and amazed he is by this paradoxical diversity within unity. And thus, as the journey continues, the poet has to reach for more imaginative art to match the pilgrim’s ever richer experience. This is particularly true for the heaven of the sun and the Eagle of Justice.
The heaven of the sun (Par. 10–14) is often a favorite passage for students, in part because most recognize (for a change!) all three of the speakers within it, as well as the subjects they discuss: Thomas Aquinas (the Dominican) first tells the story of the foundation of the Franciscan order by Saint Francis; then Bonaventure (the Franciscan) praises Saint Dominic; and finally, Solomon praises prudence. The poet structured these canti in a chiastic pattern; that is, the speeches and speakers are delicately woven together in an interlocking, X-like pattern. Even beyond that, Dante goes out of his way to make these canti densely poetic. For instance, when Aquinas describes Francis as the “holy man of God,” he cycles through a whole carousel of metaphors: he likens Francis to a sun that rose on the world; he describes him as one of those passionate lovers from a rich family who disobeys daddy’s wishes and marries the poor girl; he says that the Saracens were “unripe” for conversion, effectively likening Francis to a gardener; he refers to Peter’s ship, likening Francis to a navigator; and finally, he refers to the wayward flock, likening Francis to a shepherd.
In addition to these metaphors, Dante portrays Aquinas engaged in poetic wordplay:
“Let anyone who used words for this place
not say Ascesi, . . .
but Orient, if he wants to say it properly.” (Par. 11.52–54)
In other words, we should think of Assisi as the little town in which the world was remade, the place in which the sun was reborn. Thus, let’s not call it Assisi, which is close to the Latin for “to ascend,” but rather Orient, the place where the sun is “reborn.” And so Aquinas, that serious theologian par excellence, has grown uncharacteristically wordy, surprisingly poetic, and linguistically playful. In fact, on two occasions in canto 11, Aquinas has to stop himself, recognizing that his poetic exuberance has gotten out of hand (“But, lest I go on too densely,” 11.73; “And so, if my words are not too overcast,” 11.133).
It’s important to recognize the historical reality behind this poetic artifice: these two religious orders had a lot in common but were rivals in the Middle Ages. Both Franciscans and Dominicans taught in the famous universities of their time, but they emphasized different core principles. Dominicans, thanks to their roots in fighting dualistic heresies, were keen to emphasize how grace works through nature, the power of reason, and the importance of study. They said that without knowledge you can’t love, and that “first the bow is bent in study”; that is, knowing is necessary for love.6 Franciscans were scholars too, but because of their roots in Francis’s radical embrace of poverty, they tended to emphasize the importance of the will in the spiritual life and wanted to protect the unknowability of God and his frightening distance. And so, to simplify things, if Dominicans proceeded to love through knowledge, Franciscans got to love through acts of service. It so happens among human beings that, even when they agree on almost everything, if there is one tiny difference in emphasis, there (sadly) almost always is divisiveness. In the Middle Ages, we know many Franciscan authors who wrote treatises against Aquinas, and some Franciscan leaders even forbade their followers to read his writings!7
With these tensions in mind, we can turn back to Dante to see how he poetically hints at those differences in these canti. On the one hand, he (through Aquinas) describes Francis as a lover, a man of poverty, and a shepherd. On the other hand, Bonaventure describes Dominic, the great heresy buster, in terms entirely different: Dominic is not a wide-eyed lover but “the holy athlete” (Par. 12.56), like a broken-nosed fighter from Philadelphia. Dominic was born “behind the shelter of the noble shield” (12.53) and was “gentle to his own and savage to his foes” (12.57). The word Dante uses for “savage” is crudo (raw). Dominic’s marriage to the church is described in terms of courtly love, as if he were a knight (12.64). He is also described as the wheel of a chariot that smashes down the faces of enemies in battle (12.106–8). Finally, he is a torrent that strikes with hurricane-like force (12.97–102). And yet, at the same time, Dante also says that Dominic’s work gave rise to “fruit” (12.65); Dante refers to him as one who travels through the vineyard (12.86) and the twenty-four plants (12.95–96); his followers are a garden in which the weeds are overgrown, and he is a spring that watered them when he was alive (12.103–5).
We see what Dante has done: through his use of metaphor he has both brought these saints together and kept them apart. Francis, the wild-eyed lover, is contrasted to Dominic, the Rocky Balboa warrior-athlete-saint; yet both tend their flocks, both are gardeners, both are like the sun. Both make sure their “trees rise with greater vigor” (Par. 12.105). Both souls now shine like the sun—shielding themselves in brilliance—because they poured out the radiance of their love on earth. And so the two groups, which had viewed one another with suspicion, now have the delightful opportunity to recognize that they were actually playing for the same team. As if in recompense for their earthly doubts, now every time they hear praise of the other order they are overcome with a joyful recognition. For example, as soon as Aquinas has finished speaking, Bonaventure is moved to return the favor:
“It is fitting that, when one is, the other should be brought up.
In this way, just as they went to war as one,
their glory can shine out together.” (Par. 12.34–36)
In keeping with the densely poetic structure of these canti, Dante describes how these souls are like parts of a clock. In a clock, if gears and mechanisms are moving in opposite directions, that does not mean the clock is broken or at odds with itself. On the contrary, in a clock, divergent movements are necessary for unified function (Par. 10.139–48). But there are more similes used—indeed, piled up on top of one another. At the beginning of canto 12, after Thomas has finished his speech, the souls cannot help but break into dance and song, again. They are likened to a turning millstone, then to an orchestra, to a wreath of flowers woven together, and even to twin rainbows (12.1–11). At the end of Bonaventure’s story of Dominic, all the souls are moved yet again. Dante describes them as when you look up at the nighttime sky and see a bunch of stars shining, but then you recognize that those stars, which you had admired as a collection of individuals, actually form a constellation. But then you zoom out one more time and recognize that even that constellation is the centerpiece of an even bigger constellation (13.1–24).
Example after example makes us see how these individuals have been knitted together, including some individuals who no one, neither Dominican nor Franciscan, would have ever thought would have made it. For instance, Aquinas mentions Sieger of Brabant—a shocking move by the poet Dante, because he was Aquinas’s archenemy in life. They each wrote numerous books to refute one another. And so we have a vision of the heaven of the sun, which would be a little like Notre Dame and Wheaton College deciding to start accepting one another’s credits and sharing a faculty; or perhaps as though you went to heaven and found Josemaría Escrivá, Pius XII, Dorothy Day, and Thomas Merton all holding hands. Dante’s poetry weaves together a cornucopia of metaphors to show how God weaves together different kinds of people within the history of the church.8
The Eagle of Justice
What Dante begins in canto 10—weaving souls together through the artistry of his poetry—he continues throughout all the middle canti of Paradiso. He seems completely enchanted by the idea of the diversity and unity of heaven. The universe itself is God’s poem. Seen as individual pieces, the cosmos looks like a series of mistakes, a series of erratic accidents and off-axis slants (Par. 10.13–21). But taken together, these jagged parts cooperate to make manifest the secret, deep, and hidden plan of the divine mind:
Lift your gaze, reader, to the wheels on high,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
now start to look longingly there, upon the art
of that master craftsman who loves it within himself
so much that his eye is never moved off of it. (Par. 10.7, 10–12)
Dante is convinced that he who studies the order of the cosmos “cannot but taste of Him” (10.5–6).
What God does on the level of cosmology and physics, he also does among human beings and through time: he providentially gathers up broken bits and pieces of human beings and forms them into the great mosaic of history. In the heaven of Jupiter (Par. 18–20), Dante speaks this time not to single representative souls but to all the souls together, who speak to him of providence, taking up the single, mighty voice of an eagle. Dante is shocked to learn that, among the great kings who make up the Eagle, there is not only David but also Ripheus and Trajan. Trajan was a pagan Roman emperor who, according to medieval legend, was prayed out of hell by Gregory the Great. Trajan was given his flesh back for a day, and he used his time well, repenting and thus being allowed to enter into heaven. Ripheus is a character in the Aeneid, mentioned in passing in only one line as just some soldier who came to help Aeneas fight in Troy. And that’s it; he is left out of the remainder of the Aeneid and forgotten by history. Dante, though, lifts this failed character out of Virgil’s audition and makes him, literally, one of the stars of heaven. The Eagle asks, “Who would have believed down in the erring world / that Ripheus, the Trojan, would have been fifth in this circle / among the holy lights?” (Par. 20.67–69). Dante, alarmed, asks, “What are these things?” (20.82). The Eagle responds that Ripheus
“through grace—that wells up
from a fountain, so deep, that never did creature
thrust his eye down to where it issues at its source—
“he set all of his love there on righteousness.
And for that, from grace to grace, God opened up for him
his eyes to our future redemption,
“so that he believed in it. . . .
“Those three ladies were there for him in baptism—
the ones you saw to the right of the wheel—
one thousand years before there was baptizing.” (Par. 20.118–24, 127–29)
The poet had made up a backstory: Ripheus grew discontented with the wise of his day, and he trusted that God would reveal a savior. And so, in this way, one thousand years before Christ, Ripheus was saved through implicit faith, like Cato. Dante uses his poetic license to invent a story to illustrate concretely the mysterious way providence works through history. Trying to understand its working would be like expecting you could see down to the ocean’s floor (Par. 20.72).
In conclusion, throughout all these canti, Dante gives us a vision of a shocking and radical diversity, in which seemingly random souls are unexpectedly gathered up from foreign lands. Heaven is for Dante, as for John in the Apocalypse, “a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues” (Rev. 7:9). In a certain sense, Dante’s heaven is more like Los Angeles than Lincoln, Nebraska. And yet Dante’s “diversity” is not the isolated and individualistic pluralism of contemporary society, in which we don’t have the goods of diversity because none of those goods are brought together into a meaningful and beautiful whole. Dante has something to say to this as well. While it is true that his heaven has an uncompromising diversity and plurality, it is also true that all these souls live and breathe as one.