[In the following excerpt, originally published in 1982, Mandelbaum praises Dante's “poem of spectacle,” commenting on the poet's ability to traverse, in his mind, dizzying cosmic expanses and deep recesses of his soul.]

Paradiso is a poem of spectacle, of wheeling shapes that enter and exit, form, re-form, and dis-form; of voices that discourse out of their faceless flames; of letters and words spelled out across the heavens by living lights in flight; of flames that shape the remarkable Eagle; of the vast amphitheater of the Celestial Rose in the tenth and final heaven, the Empyrean, where the blessed range in carefully orchestrated ranks.

That expanse is such that when, some two-thirds of the way through Paradise, the voyager turns his gaze back and downward toward the earth, he sees (XXII, 134-135 and 148-152):

… this globe in such a way that I
smiled at its scrawny image …

.....

          And all the seven heavens showed to me
their magnitudes, their speeds, the distances
of each from each. The little threshing floor
          that so incites our savagery was all—
from hills to river mouths—revealed to me …

Such cosmic expanse and order does admit of likeness to spacious waters (I, 112-117):

          Therefore, these natures move to different ports
across the mighty sea of being, each
given the impulse that will bear it on.
          This impulse carries fire to the moon;
this is the motive force in mortal creatures;
this binds the earth together, makes it one.

But that expanse does not allow us solitude or intimacy—with one exception: our intimate entry into the making of the poem, into the atelier, forge, foundry, workshop, mind and heart, of the maker-orchestrator.

Here we find the exilic despair that was so imperative a source of the energies and exhilaration of a work unlike anything Dante had completed before. That despair forms the bitter part of the burden of the prophecy he hears from his ancestor, Cacciaguida, at the center of Paradiso (XVII, 55-60):

          “You shall leave everything you love most dearly:
this is the arrow that the bow of exile
shoots first. You are to know the bitter taste
          of others' bread, how salt it is, and know
how hard a path it is for one who goes
descending and ascending others' stairs.”

And here we find the pride that this terminal cantica engenders, Dante's sense of the uniqueness of this work as against any wrought prior to him (II, 7-9 and XIX, 7-9):

          The waves I take were never sailed before;
Minerva breathes, Apollo pilots me,
and the nine Muses show to me the Bears.
          And what I now must tell has never been
reported by a voice, inscribed by ink,
never conceived by the imagination …

There is pride—and there is the nakedly buoyant, joyous presumption, and even fleeting complacency, of one who contemplates not only from the heights (as in XXII, 148-152, above) but also savors the height itself (XI, 1-12):

          O senseless cares of mortals, how deceiving
are syllogistic reasonings that bring
your wings to flight so low, to earthly things!
          One studied law and one the Aphorisms
of the physicians; one was set on priesthood
and one, through force or fraud, on rulership;
          one meant to plunder, one to politick;
one labored, tangled in delights of flesh,
and one was fully bent on indolence;
          while I, delivered from our servitude
to all these things, was in the height of heaven
with Beatrice, so gloriously welcomed.

And in Dante's envisioning of this ever-widening expanse—so unlike the ever-narrowing hellish voyage to the deepest pit, and the hopeful, ever-narrowing voyage to the Mount of Purgatory's summit—we are asked to share the travail of the writer, the constraints and limits of speech and memory, as he struggles with magnitudes. Time and time again, the very scribe who tells us (X, 22-27):

          Now, reader, do not leave your bench, but stay
to think on that of which you have foretaste;
you will have much delight before you tire.
          I have prepared your fare; now feed yourself,
because that matter of which I am made
the scribe calls all my care unto itself.

also asks us to enter—intimately—into his cares and concerns at his own bench. But each of the chimings on obstacles and barriers, on the immensity of the task, on its impossibility, only serves to magnify the dimensions and intensity of the vision—whether it be the vision of the smile of Beatrice, or of the happiness of St. Peter coming to greet Beatrice, or of the mystery of the Incarnation.

The full force of these visions rests in and rises from the temporal shapes and duration of fabulation in the Comedy, a long poem, long in the time of its making (“this work so shared by heaven and by earth / that it has made me lean through these long years,” XXV, 2-3). But Dante's leaps and lapses in the making of Paradiso, the gyres and wheelings of his dervishing desk, do offer, in themselves, another “strange sight” (XXXIII, 136), an extraordinary spectacle, a vision of the cunning yet transparent place of Dante's own incarnating (I, 4-9; XXIII, 55-63; XXIV, 25-27; XXX, 22-33; XXXIII, 55-57, 58-63, 106-108, 121-123):

          I was within the heaven that receives
more of His light; and I saw things that he
who from that height descends, forgets or can
          not speak; for nearing its desired end,
our intellect sinks into an abyss
so deep that memory fails to follow it.
          If all the tongues that Polyhymnia
together with her sisters made most rich
with sweetest milk, should come now to assist
          my singing of the holy smile that lit
the holy face of Beatrice, the truth
would not be reached—not its one-thousandth part.
          And thus, in representing Paradise,
the sacred poem has to leap across,
as does a man who finds his path cut off.
          My pen leaps over it; I do not write:
our fantasy and, all the more so, speech
are far too gross for painting folds so deep.
          I yield: I am defeated at this passage
more than a comic or a tragic poet
has ever been by a barrier in his theme;
          for like the sun that strikes the frailest eyes,
so does the memory of her sweet smile
deprive me of the use of my own mind.
          From that first day when, in this life, I saw
her face, until I had this vision, no
thing ever cut the sequence of my song,
          but now I must desist from this pursuit,
in verses, of her loveliness, just as
each artist who has reached his limit must.
          From that point on, what I could see was greater
than speech can show: at such a sight, it fails—
and memory fails when faced with such excess.
          As one who sees within a dream, and, later,
the passion that had been imprinted stays,
but nothing of the rest returns to mind,
          such am I, for my vision almost fades
completely, yet it still distills within
my heart the sweetness that was born of it.
          What little I recall is to be told,
from this point on, in words more weak than those
of one whose infant tongue still bathes at the breast.
          How incomplete is speech, how weak, when set
against my thought! And this, to what I saw
is such—to call it little is too much.

Much, of course, is tellable, is chartable. We, seated at our benches, intent on Dante's dervishing, may have at hand both the Paradiso and a gazetteer for sedentaries therefor, a gazetteer with seven entries for the seven heavenly bodies that were considered planets (and Dante will also call the planets stars)—Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. Three additional entries would cover the Eighth Heaven or Sphere of the Fixed Stars, those stars that are invariant in their position in relation to each other; the Ninth Heaven, the “swiftest of the spheres” (I, 123) and “matter's largest sphere” (XXX, 38), the Primum Mobile, the primal source of motion for all the eight spheres that lie below and within it; and the Tenth Heaven, the Empyrean, a Christian addition to the gazetteer, a heaven not envisioned by Ptolemy, Alfraganus, or Alpetragius. This gazetteer—except for the entry under the Empyrean—may well be subject to the cavil muttered by another exile, Osip Mandelstam: “The Middle Ages … did not fit into the Ptolemaic system: they took refuge there.”

But Dante's refuge is also ours: a way to scan his journey in space, riprap or calculated scaffold, a frame of composition in which he and we can rest, as he labors at the fundamental, experimental, scribal trial and task: invention. We can see the invented becoming memory as it is made, and we can also see Dante outreading readers, conjuring his being remembered in a future. The energy of his invention informs the words of Mandelstam:

Dante is an antimodernist. His contemporaneity is inexhaustible, measureless, and unending. … It is unthinkable to read the cantos of Dante without aiming them in the direction of the present day. They were made for that. They are missiles for capturing the future. They demand the commentary of the futurum.

We, bruised by this incredibly cruel century, are part, a small part of that future, and Dante is concerned for his place among us. That concern and desire are momentarily shadowed by his fear that too much truth may offend the readers of his own age. But that shadow is quickly dispelled; for Dante to compromise his words would lose, for him, fame, honor, audience, in the future (XVII, 118-120):

          “Yet if I am a timid friend of truth,
I fear that I may lose my life among
those who will call this present, ancient times.”

Thus, he holds fast to Cacciaguida's injunction (XVII, 127-134):

          “Nevertheless, all falsehood set aside,
let all that you have seen be manifest,
and let them scratch wherever it may itch.
          For if, at the first taste, your words molest,
they will, when they have been digested, end
as living nourishment. As does the wind,
          so shall your outcry do—the wind that sends
its roughest blows against the highest peaks …”

We, too, as part of the future, are asked by Dante to measure our fitness as readers, to measure our hungering for the fare that he calls the “bread of angels” (II, 1-6 and 10-15):

          O you who are within your little bark,
eager to listen, following behind
my ship that, singing, crosses to deep seas,
          turn back to see your shores again: do not
attempt to sail the seas I sail; you may,
by losing sight of me, be left astray.
          You other few who turned your minds in time
unto the bread of angels, which provides
men here with life—but hungering for more—
          you may indeed commit your vessel to
the deep salt-sea, keeping your course within
my wake, ahead of where waves smooth again.

In a literal sense, we may fall short. For to have turned to the “bread of angels” means, in the most probable “translation” of Dante's metaphorical use of biblical manna, to have begun the study of speculative theology. Such study is less than frequent today, such disciplined recognition and schooling of a hungering that can only be fully appeased with the enlightenment found in the beatific vision proper to the angels—and perhaps not even to them.

But the “bread of angels” as object of the hungering of the mind for meaning involves “a reachless goal,” a search that must for us, here—and even for the Seraphim there—collide with mystery (XXI, 91-99):

          “But even Heaven's most enlightened soul,
that Seraph with his eye most set on God,
could not provide the why, not satisfy
          what you have asked; for deep in the abyss
of the Eternal Ordinance, it is
cut off from all created beings' vision.
          And to the mortal world, when you return,
tell this, lest men continue to trespass
and set their steps toward such a reachless goal.”

And if “we cannot satisfy / our mind unless it is enlightened by / the truth beyond whose boundary no truth lies” (IV, 124-126), then Dante would accord with Stevens's assessment of our earthly situation: “It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.”

That collision with mystery, that dissatisfaction of the mind—we do know. It is from this earth that we turn to the “bread of angels,” and upon this earth that Dante envisions. That “bread” is also the bread of desire and of the forms that longing engenders. It is the manna that all of us receive in act and memory, the manna of days and nights of grace that lies beyond any algebra of merits.

Now we can set aside the gazetteer. Now we can share the hungering. We, in this future, may lack the resolution and independence of Dante, but we certainly share his metamorphic vicissitudes, the mutabilities of a man who defines himself as one “who by my very nature am / given to every sort of change” (V, 98-99). And when the changing Dante appropriates, it is not only the mediators of antiquity, the gods and muses of his invocations, whom he calls upon; he also appropriates our age, the future angels of Rilke and of Stevens; and he even appropriates the still nameless poets of the future (I, 34-36):

          Great fire can follow a small spark: there may
be better voices after me to pray
to Cyrrha's god for aid—that he may answer.

That future also includes the future of the poet after the completion of the poem. For though Dante's Paradiso is completed near the end of his life, his poem is not equatable with his life. And in the opening of the final canto we are to share the sense of poetry as prayer—as vocative that pleads not only for the present need to reach, to see, but also for help in persevering, in living after the envisioning. The prayer of Bernard of Clairvaux to Mary, “Virgin mother, daughter of your Son,” after fixing her place as centerpoint in universal time, turns to the needs of “this man,” Dante (XXXIII, 19-36):

          “In you compassion is, in you is pity,
in you is generosity, in you
is every goodness found in any creature.
          This man—who from the deepest hollow in
the universe, up to this height, has seen
the lives of spirits, one by one—now pleads
          with you, through grace, to grant him so much virtue
that he may lift his vision higher still—
may lift it toward the ultimate salvation.
          And I, who never burned for my own vision
more than I burn for his, do offer you
all of my prayers—and pray that they may not
          fall short—that, with your prayers, you may disperse
all of the clouds of his mortality
so that the Highest Joy be his to see.
          This, too, o Queen, who can do what you would,
I ask of you: that after such a vision,
his sentiments preserve their perseverance.”

That Saint Bernard should be the speaker here, and that this prayer should occupy so privileged a place in Paradiso—these attest to the complex conjoining in Dante of two often diverging paths: the path of intellect and the path of love.

Dante inhabits and inherits the extraordinary intellectual edifice, foreshadowed a century earlier by Abelard, that finds its culmination in the university life and institutions of thirteenth-century Paris. His Ulysses in the Inferno may indeed represent Dante's recoiling from the very limits that the ultimate exaltation of intellect may reach, extend, transgress.

Against Abelard and that nascent reason-able tradition stood his ferocious adversary Bernard, emblem of the rich expansion of the language of God-directed love, in which the theologians outdo all poets before—and often including—Dante. That line exalts affection, the ardor of God-seeking.

Aquinas had already charted the erotics of knowing with enduring precision; he had already wed intellect and affect. But in Aquinas, Dante could never have found so central a place for the feminine protagonist of affect: Mary. And in Aquinas, he could certainly not have found his incarnate Beatrice. Beatrice, of course, also shares the modes of argumentation, the instruments of the “other”—intellectual—tradition. If not Theology or Sacred Science itself, she is a confident theologian. But she is, too, a feminine apparition—yet not an icon or idol. She is the living daughter of Memory and Affection.

Mary herself, before Bernard's prayer, had been evoked by Dante in the present tense of the writer writing of his life on our earth, outside the poem of Paradise, in lines that are no less memorable than Bernard's prayer to Mary: “The name of that fair flower which I always / invoke, at morning and at evening …” (XXIII, 88-89), where that fair flower is Mary, the Rosa Mystica, the Mary of the Rosary and “the Rose in which the Word of God became / flesh” (XXIII, 73-74).

And when Dante evokes Beatrice in Canto XXIII, he finally brings to bear on her two earthly likenesses most dear to him, the maternal and the ornithological, here joined to his stupendous string of dawn and pre-dawn scenes (XXIII, 1-15):

          As does the bird, among beloved branches,
when, through the night that hides things from us, she
has rested near the nest of her sweet fledglings
          and, on an open branch, anticipates
the time when she can see their longed-for faces
and find the food with which to feed them—chore
          that pleases her, however hard her labors—
as she awaits the sun with warm affection,
steadfastly watching for the dawn to break:
          so did my lady stand, erect, intent,
turned toward that part of heaven under which
the sun is given to less haste; so that,
          as I saw her in longing and suspense,
I grew to be as one who, while he wants
what is not his, is satisfied with hope.

Along the way to Beatrice as bird among “beloved branches,” along the way to Bernard's prayer, we are asked to share the work of a maker who is ever conscious that the praise and enactment of music or dance are auto-celebrations of the movement of verse itself (even as Milton was in praising Harry Lawes, or Hopkins in praising the “colossal smile” of Henry Purcell, or Fray Luis in praising Salinas). A maker conscious, too, that verse can mime the movement of the soul in joyous love (XIV, 19-24):

          As dancers in a ring, when drawn and driven
by greater gladness, lift at times their voices
and dance their dance with more exuberance,
          so, when they heard that prompt, devout request,
the blessed circles showed new joyousness
in wheeling dance and in amazing song.

That “amazing song” is sung in a poem that, may, in program, claim to be a timeless poem. Paradiso may be intent on the vision of the everlasting, a poem that sees—apparently—what are the simultaneous presences of the blessed in the Empyrean stretched out over time and space only to accommodate Dante's earthly eyes (IV, 37-45):

          “They showed themselves to you here not because
this is their sphere, but as a sign for you
that in the Empyrean their place is lowest.
          Such signs are suited to your mind, since from
the senses only can it apprehend
what then becomes fit for the intellect.
          And this is why the Bible condescends
to human powers, assigning feet and hands
to God, but meaning something else instead.”

Yet Dante does not hesitate to glory in the timing mechanism of the clock and in seeing in its machinery the movement of music, of dance, of the time-borne verse line itself, and of the spirit's growth in love (X, 139-148 and XXIV, 13-18):

          Then, like a clock that calls us at the hour
in which the bride of God, on waking, sings
matins to her Bridegroom, encouraging
          His love (when each clock-part both drives and draws),
chiming the sounds with notes so sweet that those
with spirit well-disposed feel their love grow;
          so did I see the wheel that moved in glory
go round and render voice to voice with such
sweetness and such accord that they can not
          be known except where joy is everlasting.
          And just as, in a clock's machinery,
to one who watches them, the wheels turn so
that, while the first wheel seems to rest, the last
          wheel flies; so did those circling dancers—as
they danced to different measures, swift and slow—
make me a judge of what their riches were.

And on the way to Bernard's prayer we will also find that our sympathy with Dante's metamorphic nature has been instructed in one specific way of change within his book of changes: the use of multiple possibilities as instruments and way stations in the conversion of the self to an integral presence (not unakin to Saint Augustine's: “Love made me what I am, that I may be what I was not before”). Variety and vicissitude—even exile—may be the apprenticeship and bondage needed before the freedom of oneness can be reached. (And perhaps this mode of metamorphosis is not that un-Ovidian. Did not Ovid himself beseech a “seamless” way in his incipit?

          My soul would sing of metamorphoses,
but since, o gods, you were the source of these
bodies becoming other bodies, breathe
your breath into my book of changes: may
the song I sing be seamless as its way
weaves from the world's beginning to our day.)

To that end, the “io sol uno,” “I myself / alone,” of Inferno (II, 3-4) extends through “I crown and miter you over yourself” of Purgatorio (XXVII, 142) to—now in a political context—Dante's best party as his own “self” at the end of the prophecy by Cacciaguida, Dante's ancestor (XVII, 61-69):

          “And what will be most hard for you to bear
will be the scheming, senseless company
that is to share your fall into this valley;
          against you they will be insane, completely
ungrateful and profane; and yet, soon after,
not you but they will have their brows bloodred.
          Of their insensate acts, the proof will be
in the effects; and thus, your honor will
be best kept if your party is your self.”

That self finds an almost obsessively narcissistic model in the image of the Three-in-One of the Trinity toward the end of Canto XXXIII (124-126):

          Eternal Light, You only dwell within
Yourself, and only You know You; Self-knowing,
Self-known, You love and smile upon Yourself!

But the vast population of the Comedy is proof against the claustrophobia of that model, as is Dante's gratefulness in the Paradiso to the otherness of Beatrice. Her otherness made possible his engendering the Paradiso, even as the otherness of Virgil nurtured the making of Inferno and Purgatorio. The Paradisiac gratitude of Dante to Beatrice stands in a diptych with his valediction to Virgil (Purg. XXX, 43-54), even as her silent smile complements the silent smile of Virgil in the Earthly Paradise, in Purgatorio, XXVIII, 147 (Par. XXXI, 79-93):

          “O lady, you in whom my hope gains strength,
you who, for my salvation, have allowed
your footsteps to be left in Hell, in all
          the things that I have seen, I recognize
the grace and benefit that I, depending
upon your power and goodness, have received.
          You drew me out from slavery to freedom
by all those paths, by all those means that were
within your power. Do, in me, preserve
          your generosity, so that my soul,
which you have healed, when it is set loose from
my body, be a soul that you will welcome.”
          So did I pray. And she, however far
away she seemed, smiled, and she looked at me.
Then she turned back to the eternal fountain.

Even as the smile of Beatrice and Dante's gratitude were—earlier—condensed in one of the rare passages in Paradiso where Dante is likened to a dreamer (XXIII, 49-54):

          I was as one who, waking from a dream
he has forgotten, tries in vain to bring
that vision back into his memory,
          when I heard what she offered me, deserving
of so much gratitude that it can never
be canceled from the book that tells the past.

Bibliographical Note

Essays on the individual cantos of the Paradiso are to be found far beyond the range of the principal collective volumes—or pamphlet collections—of Paradiso readings. But the following compilations (with their separate essays on each canto, in the Lectura Dantis format that the California Lectura Dantis volumes, now in progress, will follow) have been both convenient and particularly helpful:

Letture dantesche: Paradiso, ed. Giovanni Getto, Florence, 1958 (now in the 1965 single-volume edition of the three cantiche); Lectura Dantis Scaligera: Paradiso, ed. Mario Marcazzan, Florence, 1967; the separate pamphlets of the Lectura Dantis Romana, ed. Giovanni Fallani, Turin, 1959-1967; the third, fourth, and fifth volumes of the Nuove letture dantesche of the Casa di Dante di Roma, Florence, 1969-1972; Letture del Paradiso, ed. Vittorio Vettori, Milan, 1970; and readings of Paradiso cantos scattered through Vols. I-III, V, VII, and IX of the Letture Classensi, Ravenna, 1969-1979.