SOURCE: Reynolds, Barbara. Introduction to The Comedy of Dante Alighieri, the Florentine, Cantica III, Paradise (Il Paradiso), translated by Dorothy L. Sayers and Barbara Reynolds, pp. 13-52. London: Penguin Books, 1962.

[In the following essay, Reynolds describes the Paradiso as a work of timeless aesthetic and intellectual validity.]

It has been said¹ that the joys of Heaven would be for most of us, in our present condition, an acquired taste. In a sense, Dante's Paradise is a story about the acquisition of that taste. The Dante who has been down to the uttermost depths of Hell and has climbed the Mount of Purgatory, to behold on its summit the wonder and enchantment of the Earthly Paradise, is no more prepared, after all these tremendous and unique experiences, than we should be ourselves for what he finds in Heaven. He is bewildered by his ascent from earth and totally at a loss to describe how he enters the Moon; when souls first approach him, he mistakes them for reflections of people behind him; when Piccarda speaks to him of the hierarchy of bliss, he shows, by the question he asks, how much he has to learn about the nature of heavenly life; when the contemplatives in the Heaven of Saturn utter their cry of execration at the degeneracy of monastic life, he momentarily loses his wits and has to turn to Beatrice for reassurance, as a child runs to its mother; problems of grace and predestination trouble him, the very purpose of his whole experience eludes him; wonder, fear, amazement, and, at one point, even reprehensible curiosity characterize his state of mind. There is only one phase of his journey during which he may be said to feel reasonably certain of himself and that is when he undergoes the examination in faith, hope, and love, conducted, respectively, by St Peter, St James, and St John; though even then he commits the blunder of peering too inquisitively into the radiant deeps of the light of St John, hoping to glimpse the body in which, it was rumoured, the saint had been taken up into Heaven. Yet, as he mounts ever higher through the circling spheres and beyond them to the still centre of infinity which is the abode of God, his vision strengthens and he grows in understanding and love until, at last, in the unveiled presence of the Deity, his will and desire are integrated with the divine love. Although we may feel we are strangers in Heaven, Dante at least is known to us; he is our very selves.

He is, at the same time, most personally and intimately himself. Much has been written of an illuminating and edifying nature regarding the relevance of the Divine Comedy to life as lived by mankind in general, but the really tantalizing problem which the Paradiso presents is the extent to which it symbolizes Dante's own intellectual and spiritual development. Does the Beatific Vision in the last Canto represent a mystical experience which Dante himself underwent, or is it only a symbol, intellectually arrived at, of the relationship between man's understanding and divine revelation? What are we to make of the silences, the omissions, the confessions of inadequacy or downright inability to describe what he saw? Are these merely technical devices for suggesting the inexpressible, or do they represent some incommunicable phase of Dante's own intuition of the ineffable? How far, in other words, is the Paradiso a record of personal experience as well as a communication, in imagined form, of personal convictions?

Such questions as these, and many others akin to them, can never, perhaps, be answered, but they constitute a perennial challenge to readers of every generation and make the story of Dante's progress through Heaven one of the most fascinating and enigmatic autobiographies ever written. Yet the Paradiso has probably lost more readers than it has held. Many, taking Dante's warning to heart, must have turned back to “seek the safety of the shore.”² These words by an early-nineteenth-century scholar and critic³ have still some truth today: “Few, even among the warmest admirers of Dante, have had the enthusiasm to follow him, step by step, through the last division of his stupendous edifice.” Macaulay, an ardent enthusiast for the narrative power of the poem as a whole,⁴ considered the Paradiso by no means equal to the two preceding parts, except in regard to its style. His reasons for considering it “far inferior to the Hell or the Purgatory” stem from a misunderstanding of the very quality in Dante which he so much admired, namely, his narrative skill. “Among the beatified he appears,” says Macaulay, “as one who has nothing in common with them—as one who is incapable of comprehending, not only the degree, but the nature of their enjoyment.” This is a striking instance of the mistake which readers have often made of confounding the character Dante (who in the story is bewildered when he first ascends to Heaven and, throughout his progress, in need of enlightenment and guidance) with the poet or creator Dante, whose mind and soul have comprehended the nature of heavenly joy as conveyed in the dialogues and descriptions devised for our understanding. For a still more surprising reason, Schiller thought the Paradiso boring—because it was all praise and no blame.⁵ He must have turned back early in the voyage—if he set out at all. Shelley, on the other hand, was profoundly and sensitively appreciative of the Paradiso, which he preferred to Inferno and Purgatorio, calling it “a perpetual hymn of everlasting love” and “the most glorious imagination of modern poetry.” Mr T. S. Eliot, for whom the Paradiso is “never dry”, but “either incomprehensible or intensely exciting” has lucidly perceived and indicated the relationship of the third cantica to the Commedia as a whole, and anyone wishing to be rightly orientated in this respect would do well to read his essay entitled “A Reading on the Purgatorio and Paradiso”, if he has not already done so.⁶

It has long been considered impossible for any commentator to enlist the general reader's interest in this third and last section of the Commedia and retain it to the end. On the whole, recent studies on the Paradiso have shown little sign of recanting this opinion, in that they are almost exclusively intended for specialists.⁷ It is often urged by scholars that the only way of understanding Dante is to put aside all knowledge and prejudice derived from the wisdom of a later age and to try to grasp the principles of his thought in the spirit of the fourteenth century, interpreting his mind in its totality by reference to the general intellectual and spiritual outlook of his time. There is much wisdom in such advice, although it is a counsel of perfection. Even so, to stop there is to remain in the realm of the relative and historical. It is perhaps the business of the commentator and critic to point to resemblances, as well as to differences, between the form of thought of a poet of the past, and our own, for it seems that unless this is done, and done repeatedly from generation to generation, works of the past cease to have significance for the ordinary reader, which is tantamount to saying that they cease to live.

Heaven has, of course, always been inconceivable, “passing man's understanding”. Of the few poets or prophets who have undertaken to describe it, even fewer have dared to keep us there for long. The angel comes, the river is passed and all the trumpets sound on the other side, but we do not enter the City. Milton's heaven is so distracted with wars and tumults that, except in a few isolated and magnificent lines, he is never really called upon to present us with the picture of changeless and inexhaustible bliss, and the same may perhaps be not unfairly said of the author of the Apocalypse. Of all the poets of fulfilment, Dante alone has had the astonishing courage to take us into Heaven and keep us there for thirty-three long cantos, building it to his ecstatic climax without introducing any grandiose events, any scenery, or any incantatory dreaminess which suspends disbelief by lulling the wits to sleep. His Heaven is at first sight almost disconcertingly lucid; it is only as it piles up, line upon line, dogma upon dogma, sphere upon sphere to the exquisite and mathematical exactitude of the final vision, that we realise how much of its power to convince lies precisely in its lucidity. Of the light of Heaven he says:

“Pure intellectual light, fulfilled with love,
          Love of the true Good, filled with all delight,
          Transcending sweet delight, all sweets above.”(8)

The word “intellectual” is significant; the light is that of reality.

It is in the Paradiso that we find affirmed with the utmost clarity and consistency the fundamental Christian proposition that the journey to God is the journey into reality. To know all things in God is to know them as they really are, for God is the only absolute and unconditioned Reality, of whose being all contingent realities are at best the types and mirrors, at worst the shadows and distortions—at best, the created universe, at worst the deliberately willed delusion which we call Hell.

When Dante and his poem venture, as best they may, into the world of Reality, his guide is Beatrice, who represents his own personal experience of the immanence of the Creator in the creature.⁹ In her he had seen, in those moments of revelation which he describes in the Vita Nuova, the eternal Beauty shining through the created beauty, the reality of Beatrice as God knew her. Apart from this personal image, Dante has restricted himself to only a very few simple and traditional symbols. For the physical structure of his ascent, he has taken the accepted system of the Ptolemaic heavens and has peopled them with souls representing the stages of spiritual attainment both in the active and contemplative life. But he is careful to insist that all these spirits really inhabit only one Heaven, which is God's presence, and is not in time or space at all, but contains within itself “every where and every when”.¹⁰ Except for Dante and Beatrice themselves, no human form appears between the second Heaven and the tenth. The dwellers in the Moon appear faint as reflections in clear water; those in Mercury only gleam out for a moment from the light of joy which partly shrouds them and in which all the dwellers in the heavens above them are wholly hidden. All the variety is provided by the changing colour and intensity of the lights and by the abstract patterns which they trace against a background, itself of pure light. From heaven to heaven Dante is conducted, beholding in each the reality of what each soul was in the earthly counterpart of the Heavenly City. In Venus he enters the Heaven of the Lovers, in Mars the Heaven of the Warriors who figure with Christ in a cross formed of two bands of white light constellated with radiances like rubies. He enters the intellectual Heaven of the Sun, where the great doctors of the Church, some of whom had disagreed upon earth, find all their partial truths reconciled in the One Truth and lead their shining and joyous dance in an ecstasy of mutual courtesy. In the Heaven of Jupiter, he beholds the form of the perfect Empire. There the souls gather in the shape of an Eagle and when the Eagle speaks, Dante says:

What I must now relate was ne'er with ink
          Written, nor told in speech, nor by the powers
          Of mind e'er grasped, to imagine it or think;
For I beheld and heard the beak discourse,
          And utter with its voice both Mine and Me,
          When in conception still 'twas Us and Ours.(11)

The spirits are one with another in love and will, and when that is so, then there is perfect Empire and perfect Justice. Above that is the Heaven of the Contemplatives, and above that, the Heaven of the Friends of Christ, where Dante sees Adam and the Apostles and the Virgin Mary. Above that, beyond the visible spheres, is the Primum Mobile or the Heaven of the Angels. At last Dante is taken to bathe his eyes in the River of Light, which is also the River of Time, and the flowing of time is turned into the circle of Eternity, the mystic Rose. He sees the ranks of the Blessed, rising up about him, tier upon tier, into the light of God; from the Heaven of Venus until now, he has seen them only as bright radiances, but now they are shown to him in their true shapes, wearing the body of glory which they will put on at the Resurrection.

Here Beatrice leaves him, her mission fulfilled. And now, at the prayer of Beatrice herself, of St Bernard the Great Contemplative, of the Virgin and of all the Saints, his eyes are opened to the ultimate realities. At first, he sees the universe, as God sees it. The entire created universe and everything in it: its substance (that is, the true being of the thing as it is in itself), its accidents (that is, its qualities, whatever they may be) and the mode or relationship which connects one thing with another, are seen as co-inhering in one simultaneous whole, so that what to us is an immeasurable and unimaginable succession of multiple events is revealed to him as a single and perfectly lucid unity. This, says Dante, is what he saw, and knows he saw, though the vision was gone in a flash and he cannot now recapture it. The “five-and-twenty centuries” which have passed since Jason's quest of the Golden Fleece could not bury it in deeper oblivion, yet he knows he saw it, for the joy and rapture of the vision are still realities to him.

Then, as he gazes into the light, it becomes the vision of God Himself in His Tri-Unity, the Father, and the Son eternally begotten of Him, and the Holy Ghost proceeding from Father and Son, wholly distinct in Person and wholly indivisible in Substance (that is, in essential being). This, of course, the poem can only convey by an image; and it is characteristic of Dante that he chooses an image of pure geometrical form, the famous image of the three distinct spheres occupying a single multidimensional space.

But there is one thing still to come. All his life he had known that the key to reality was somehow connected with that God-bearing image which was Beatrice, and yet not she, but which shone through and made her, as the vision of God shines through and makes the vision of the universe. So now he searches the Godhead for sight of the Master-Image, the Reality of which Beatrice was the figure, the union of Creator and created in the person of Christ. He sees it, but cannot understand it, and then in a flash it comes to him, beyond all understanding and yet known. In that supreme moment, “high fantasy” reaches its limit and leaves him, but in that moment he feels his whole being re-orientated and turning upon God as its true centre, as the heavens turn upon their poles.

As this visual music proceeds through its shimmering variations upon the theme of light, to resolve itself finally into one great harmony of recovered form,¹² we begin to see the outline of a single over-riding pattern impressed on the whole poem, which is the pattern of salvation. In Dante's personal revelation, it stretches from the first image of the earthly Beatrice, through the loss of that image, to the recovery of the image in the heavenly Beatrice. In the ascent to contemplation, which is the Paradiso, it stretches from the faint lunar images of the first Heaven, through the overwhelming of the images, to the return of the images in the Celestial Rose, clear and distinct in the light without addition or substraction by distance. In the life of man, it stretches from the birth of the flesh, through the death of the flesh and the luminous persistence of the substantial form, to the triumphant resurrection of the flesh. The pattern is defined by Solomon in Canto xiv:

“Long as shall last the feast of Paradise,
          Even so long,” it said, “our love shall lace
          This radiance round us for our festal guise.
Its brightness with our fervour shall keep pace,
          Fervour with sight, sight so enlarge the mesh
          Of its own worth as it hath more of grace;
And when we put completeness on afresh,
          All the more gracious shall our person be,
          Reclothèd in the holy and glorious flesh; …
But, as the living coal which shoots forth fire
          Outgoes it in candescence, and is found
          Whole at the heart of it with shape entire,
The lustre which already swathes us round
          Shall be outlustred by the flesh, which long
          Day after day now moulders underground;
Nor shall that light have power to do us wrong,
          Since for all joys that shall delight us then
          The body's organs will be rendered strong.”(13)

It would be difficult to assert more emphatically that fundamental earthiness and particularity, that sanctity of the individual creature and of the “holy and glorious flesh”, which marks Christianity off so sharply from the Gnostic heresies. The body, by its very nature, implies difference—the Many over against the One. The heavenly life is not absorption into, but union with, the Absolute, for the creation of the Many is a deliberate divine act.

An act, moreover, of pure love, for the sake of the creature, giving to every created thing the joy of existing, of being, so far as it may, aware of its existence, and of responding to its Creator, after its own manner, by mirroring back to Him the glory of being which it derives from Him:

“Not to increase His good, which cannot be,
          But that His splendour, shining back, might say:
          Behold I am, in His eternity,
Beyond the measurement of night and day,
          Beyond all boundary, as He did please,
          New loves Eternal Love shed from His ray.”(14)

It is sometimes supposed that Dante and his contemporaries, living in an earth-centred cosmos so much smaller than that to which modern science has introduced us, had an over-weening sense of man's importance in the scheme of things. The truth is quite the contrary. For Dante, the earth was indeed at the centre of the universe, but the centre was the lowest and meanest point in the scale of creation. The cosmos as he conceived it was physically smaller than ours, but its range was greater, for it included vast orders of beings of which our statistical frame of reference can take no note. As mediaeval man stood upon the surface of his central earth, and gazed beyond it towards that august infinitude by Whom and in Whom and for Whom all things exist, his spiritual eye beheld, imaged by the concentric circlings of the heavenly spheres, the ninefold order, rank above rank, of the celestial Intelligences, his absolute superiors. Pure love, pure mind, pure will, pure spirit, these are the Angels, the “primal creatures”, the “first effects of God”. Living in perpetual contemplation of the final Reality, their wills perfectly conjoined to His, they, by His delegated authority, move and order the whole visible universe in obedience to eternal law. They and their operations include everything that we understand by the forces and operations of Nature. They are the Movers, controlling not only the motions of the spheres but all natural change throughout the universe—change being, for the mediaeval Aristotelian, simply a particular kind of motion. It is the Intelligences who (in Dante's metaphor) imprint upon the wax of matter the seal of form. Although they are the instruments of change, they are themselves by nature changeless, living in the mode of instantaneousness or (which is the same thing) of eternity. They know what they know, not by a process of learning, but by direct intuition as they contemplate the divine fountain of light and wisdom. Their only “proper motion”, so to call it, is the perpetual motion of love by which they circle about God, the Prime Mover, whom Dante sees as the point from which the heavens and all nature hang.¹⁵ By love, each order is attracted to the orders above and attracts the orders below it, so that “all are drawn to God and to Him draw”. And in its circling, each order sweeps its own celestial sphere along with it, so that the motions of the heavens are a reflection, an analogy, an allegory, of the loves of the angels. “Love”, said Dante, “moves the sun and the other stars.” “They are moved”, said Kepler, “by mutual attraction.” “The stars”, said Hegel, “are not pulled this way and that by mechanical forces; theirs is a free motion. They go their way, as the ancients said, like the blessed gods.” According to Dante, they move indeed “by attraction”, but theirs is also a “free motion”, for their movers are “the blessed gods”, who of their own free will perpetually move to the love that draws them.

Turning his eyes from the great celestial wheels, and looking downward at the earth, mediaeval man was aware of another section of the ladder of being, which dropped away below his feet. Immediately beneath him were the brutes, creatures endowed with an animal-sensitive soul, in addition to life and form and matter. Below them was the vegetable kingdom, whose matter had only life and form. Below this again was inorganic matter, having form only without life. And, underlying the whole, was the prime matter itself, mere being without form and as such unintelligible, scarcely being at all, but only the potentiality of being.¹⁶ Lower than this one could not go, except to the “dreadful centre” of Hell, which was the privation of being and the contradiction of reality, a number, as it were, on the minus side of the graph and possessing only that spurious and derived shadow of real being which minus numbers have.

Between these two hierarchies, and linking them, stood man himself, like the angels an eternal spirit, and like the brutes a compound of informed matter with a vegetative and an animal soul. His unique characteristic was the possession of a rational soul. He was not, like the Angels, wholly intuitive, nor, like the brutes, wholly instinctive; he could reason and learn. And like the angels he had a will that was by nature free in both the Augustinian senses: he had a minor liberty of being able to choose between means to an end (whether between good and evil, or between two goods which are alternative means to a good end); this was the liberum arbitrium; he had also a major liberty which consists in a total love-conformity of the will to God.

This was man's glory, as it was his shame, for he was the broken rung in the ladder of created being. He alone, rejecting the manner of knowledge appropriate to his place in the hierarchy, had desired to know “as God”, or at least, “as the gods”, disregarding the warning that no material being could know in that way without grievous damage to himself and his operations. This rebellion of the human will, of which the consequences are handed down subconsciously from generation to generation in the very act of generation, meant that man could not fulfil his functions spontaneously like the Intelligences and the lower creation. His work had to be redeemed by being incorporated into the Humanity of the Incarnate Godhead. The Incarnation is a new glory given to mankind; but that glory belongs to the act of God and not to the nature of man. The proper function of man, whether in his original or in his redeemed perfection, was, like that of the Intelligences, to draw up by love all the grades of the hierarchy below him, so that the whole material universe—organic and inorganic—might, in the Resurrection of the Body, be restored and transformed into the new heaven and new earth.

Modern science has not superseded mediaeval thought about the nature of creation, but only the physical picture which accompanied and illustrated it. In Dante's Divine Comedy, the form of the literal story is, of course, as much dictated by contemporary science as is that of any story of planetary adventure by Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, or C. S. Lewis. The pit of Hell, running down to the “great fundament of the universe, on which all weights downweigh”; the southern hemisphere, uninhabited and completely covered with water, in which Dante's fantasy has situated the island and the mountain of Purgatory; the nine concentric celestial spheres with their motions—all these things belonged to the accepted current cosmology; and Dante, like all writers on similar subjects, embellishes his tale with a multitude of astronomical and geographical details, so as to lend an air of conviction to his narrative. But this conventional picture is in no way necessary to his thought, or to the significance of his allegory. He could, for instance, have managed very well with a Copernican universe centred about the sun; in some ways it would have accommodated itself better to his ideas than the earth-centred universe he knew. For he has a picture of the angelic hierarchy circling about God as their centre—the nearest the swiftest, as Kepler's law demands; and Beatrice has to furnish quite an elaborate explanation of why this arrangement differs from that of the spheres themselves, of which (since they are regarded as wheeling daily about the earth) the farthest from the centre must obviously be accorded the highest velocity.¹⁷ The sun is frequently used as a type of God; consequently a universe revolving about a central sun would have offered great convenience to poetry. An Einsteinian ten-dimensional universe¹⁸ with no recognized centre might be supposed less appropriate for allegory, but if Dante had now to re-write his poem in conformity with twentieth-century physics he would probably seize on the interesting numerical correspondence between the ten heavens of his cosmology and the ten dimensions of ours, and find little difficulty in adapting his picture accordingly. Nor would a centreless universe disconcert him; it would fit in conveniently enough with the famous dictum of the Schoolmen that “God is a circle whose centre is everywhere and its circumference nowhere.”

Dante's thought, then, while closely associated with the cosmology of his period, was in no way dependent on it. Philosophy in his day was the dominant branch of learning and what we now call science tended to conform its findings to the requirements of philosophy. This had long been the case. Aristarchus in the third century before Christ had suggested that the earth might revolve round the sun, but this theory was rejected on philosophic grounds. Or again, the movements of heavenly bodies were held to be circular because the circle was philosophically the perfect figure; it was not until Kepler's time that observation, fortified by improved instruments, was able to free itself from the constraints of an idealist philosophy of mathematics. But as experimental science gradually obtained the upper hand and became in its turn dominant, the ability to interpret poetic allegory and to distinguish the figure from the thing figured was lost. The poetic statements of the Bible, for instance, were mistaken for the factual statements which they were never intended to be; and it came to be felt that if the cosmic picture which they conveyed were false to fact, then the thought behind that picture must be false too. It does not follow that because Dante's schematic arrangement of circling spheres is an inexact picture of the physical heavens, and the southern hemisphere, on being explored, is found to contain no Mountain of Purgatory, that the religious and moral ideas which his cosmos allegorizes must, logically, be discarded. It would be as though a horticulturist reading:

There is a garden in her face
Where roses and white lilies blow

and proving by careful experiment that flower-gardens cannot be cultivated upon the human countenance, were to conclude that Thomas Campion's lady never existed, nor his love for her either. Similarly, when Darwin's theory of evolution was made known, honest-minded Christians saw themselves faced with a choice between intellectual integrity and religious belief. Darwinism would scarcely have worried Dante, whose system of delegated creation was flexible enough to allow considerable variation in the functioning of secondary causes.

Two other obstacles, more formidable by far than an outdated cosmology, stand in the way of the modern reader's enjoyment of Paradiso. One is the timelessness of Heaven;¹⁹ the other is the variation in the degrees of celestial bliss. The two are interdependent as concepts and both may be expressed in terms of a third, namely the absence of progress. This, to the twentieth-century mind, is perhaps the most disconcerting aspect of all, for one of the results of having substituted a philosophy of becoming for a philosophy of being is that the very notion of an achieved happiness has become not merely inconceivable but actually repugnant to us. Timelessness, or eternity, like Heaven itself, passes man's understanding. Like the concept of infinity, of which it is an aspect, it can only be suggested to man's intelligence by means of mathematical symbols or poetic imagery.

I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great Ring of pure and endless light,
          All calm, as it was bright;
And round beneath it, Time, in hours, days, years,
          Driv'n by the spheres,
Like a vast shadow mov'd; in which the world
          And all her train were hurl'd.(20)

These lines by a seventeenth-century poet express, by means of an image very similar to Dante's, the relationship of eternity to time. It is only as a negation of, or as something beyond or outside, time and space that we can apprehend eternity at all. “Beyond the measurement of night and day, beyond all boundary”, Dante says,²¹ God created the universe and, with it, time. But however we express it, the experience of timelessness eludes most of us. Indeed, if and when we grasp it, we experience beatitude. That is what happens to Dante during the vision in the last Canto of Paradiso. “Eternity”, said Boethius, “is the perfect and simultaneous possession of unending life”—unending, not in the sense of endless prolonging, but in the sense that a sphere in three-dimensional space has neither end nor beginning—and the entering into this eternity is beatitude.²²

If Heaven is unconfined by time and space, it follows that all the Blessed are as they are, and can be no other, for eternity. Yet each spirit is content to be its true self, which now it knows, for what God wills, they also will, and His will is their peace.²³ The knowledge that other souls exceed them in beatitude in no way diminishes their own meed of joy, and the very blemishes or imperfections of character which led them in their earthly life to merit lowlier celestial grace than others are now a matter for rejoicing. Thus the notorious Cunizza, speaking to Dante in the Heaven of Venus, gaily forgives herself the influence which love had over her life, since it is now her joy to will what God wills for her:

                                                            “… I was by name
Cunizza; and I glitter here because
I was o'ermastered by this planet's flame;
Yet gaily I forgive myself the cause
          Of this my lot, for here (though minds of clay
          May think this strange) 'tis gain to me, not loss.”(24)

Against the timeless, changeless beatitude of the Blessed, which, like eternity, we can conceive of intellectually but cannot experience, Dante has set the progression of his story, which moves in time and space like the hands of a clock across the motionless dial. Within the space-time continuum of the story, the souls appear to Dante in the various spheres as he ascends, though in the timeless and unchanging fulfilment of their bliss they never leave the Empyrean. Because Dante is still in the first life, impeded by the limitations of mortality, he cannot see things in their essence, as the Blessed do, but only in their sequence, which is how he is shown them; and though, in the final vision, he does for an instant glimpse the whole of life, by love “held bound into one volume”,²⁵ he bears in mind the limitations of his mortal readers and tells the story of his approach to that instant, page by page, from the beginning to the end.²⁶

If Heaven is beyond time and change, life on earth is a progression upward or downward according to man's choice. The souls in Heaven, who see all things in God, know every choice that man will ever make, but this foreknowledge, pertaining to the instantaneousness of their beatitude, does not in the least affect the freedom of man's will. As Cacciaguida, Dante's ancestor, explains:

“Contingence, which doth exercise no right
          Beyond that frame of matter where you lie,
          Stands all depicted in the Eternal Sight,
Though suffering thence no more necessity
          Than doth the vessel down the river gliding
          From its reflection in the watcher's eye.”(27)

Since man's will is free, it follows that the choice of good must be an occasion of rejoicing in Heaven and the choice of evil an occasion of wrath. And this we find to be the case. Against the ecstatic perfection of utter bliss experienced by the souls “beyond the frame of matter” is traced the crescendo or diminuendo of their joys in measure as they participate in the triumph or defeats of human life. It is difficult to grasp that the Blessed, remaining as they do untroubled in their ecstasy, are nevertheless closely and intimately concerned with the affairs of earth. The apparent contradiction is resolved if we regard the undiminished perfection of their beatitude, like their foreknowledge of contingence, as pertaining to the timelessness of Heaven, and the increase or clouding of their joy as a sign of their share in the experience of time which will continue until the Last Judgement. By means of the imagery of his story, Dante describes the souls as experiencing an ever-mounting ecstasy of joy as he himself ascends and grows in understanding. As the souls in the Moon draw near, they exclaim in delight:

“Lo! here is one that shall increase our loves”.²⁸ Foulquet of Marseilles, in his joy at beholding Dante,

                    … flashed forth in brilliance clad
Like a fine ruby smitten by the sun.(29)

Cacciaguida, in his foreknowledge of the event, has awaited his descendant with “a long sweet eagerness” and bids him speak, that the sound of his voice may “slake the sweet thirst and longing” of his love.³⁰

Perhaps more striking even than the enhancement of celestial joy by human fulfilment is the wrath of Heaven at wrong-doing upon earth. In the Heaven of the Contemplatives, a loud cry of execration greets St Peter Damian's denouncement of the corruption of monastic life; when St Peter proclaims the Holy See vacant in the eyes of Christ, all Heaven is veiled in shame as though by the darkness which shrouded the earth at the Crucifixion; in the Primum Mobile itself, on the very threshold of the abode of God, Beatrice rebukes the covetousness of mankind and pours scorn upon petty-minded and unworthy preachers who misrepresent or neglect the Gospel in their sermons. Her very last words to Dante are a reproach to the Italians who will resist the Emperor and a prophecy of the damnation of Pope Clement V who will join Boniface among the Simoniacs in the Third Bolgia:

“Him in the Holy Office no long term
          Will God endure, but thrust him down below
          Where Simon Magus pays his score, to squirm
Behind the Anagni man, who'll deeper go.”(31)

The more gladsome the rejoicing and the more vehement the wrath, the more emphatic is the assertion that man's will is free, for both emotions are meaningless if we are puppets of necessity. This, no doubt, is why the questions of astral determinism and free will were discussed on the Cornice of Wrath in Purgatory,³² and why Beatrice, whose expositions on the freedom of the will are among the great imperatives of the Paradiso, leaves Dante with this final image of judgement.

There is, of course, an important difference between celestial and earthly passions. In Heaven, the emotion of wrath is experienced with an utter detachment from all sense of guilt. In this the saints display an attitude that is in keeping with Catholic Christianity, which must always simultaneously affirm and deny the value and importance of the things of this world, being at once concerned with them and wholly detached from them. When loved in themselves and for the sake of the self they are, however intrinsically innocent, pomps and vanities, pitfalls and impediments, “falso piacer”, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes, the Siren who is the false Beatrice, the mere projection of the ego upon the surface of phenomena.³³ But when they are loved for God's sake, because He makes and loves them, they are vehicles of His glory and sacraments of Himself, the teeth by which love grips the soul, the leaves of the Gardener's garden, the beauty of Beatrice, the eyes of Mary, the Incarnate God and the inmost mystery of the Godhead. This Dante has learnt, and the stages by which he has learnt it are the story of the Divine Comedy. When St John questions him concerning the secondary objects of his love (being satisfied that his highest love is directed to God), Dante replies:

… “All ratchets which can severally
Revolve the heart towards God co-operate
And are indented with my charity:
The being of the world and my own state,
          The death He died that I might live the more,
          The hope in which I, by faith, participate,
The living truth which I conveyed before,
          Have dredged me from the sea of wrongful love,
          And of the right have set me on the shore.
And through the garden of the world I rove,
          Enamoured of its leaves in measure solely
          As God the Gardener nurtures them above.”(34)

As he concludes, the whole of Heaven fills with a song of praise, and Dante's sight, temporarily lost, is restored to him. His love, like that of the Blessed, has been set in order, so that concern for secondary good cannot disturb his love for God. That is why, beside every line of the Divine Comedy that repudiates the world one can place another that eagerly exalts it; that is why the Blessed are as joyously interested in the living Dante as they are indignantly interested in the living Boniface, and why, at the same time, not even the knowledge that Hell co-exists with Heaven can make the least wound in their eternal and unchanging beatitude.

The Relevance of Paradiso

The relevance of Dante's allegory of heavenly life to orthodox Christianity is not far to seek. What seems more difficult to establish is any connection between it and modern conceptions of the cosmos. Since the Renaissance and the Reformation, a rift, widening inexorably year by year, century by century, has divided the facts of religious experience from those of natural science. No comparable chasm existed in Dante's time; yet he, no less than modern man, was driven, by an intellectual and spiritual urge, to seek a synthesis between—what? Between matter and spirit, causation and free will, human justice and divine providence, merit and grace, time and eternity, earthly and heavenly life, man and God. This dual pattern still runs through all existence as it appears to man, and modern science, far from showing that a synthesis is irrelevant to our intellectual and spiritual condition, makes the need for it seem all the more urgent, while rendering it more and more difficult of achievement. How, then, can Dante's synthesis meet the requirements of modern man? The very suggestion that it could do so seems almost laughable. Those narrow circles revolving with the seven planets and the fixed stars—what a tight, suffocating little universe he imagines! What has it to do with the inconceivable dimensions of our expanding cosmos, with its receding galaxies, its primeval matter which draws ever nearer to the infinitesimal the further we pursue it along the scale of time, its immensity of space and duration which mathematics can symbolize but not measure, the inexpressible complexity and multiplicity of its evolution? How can the Divine Comedy, above all the third cantica, Paradise, lay claim to the serious attention of any but historians of literature and thought?

Anyone who undertakes to interpret Dante's Paradise for the general reader in the mid twentieth century must, in all honesty, ask himself these questions. He may, of course, attempt to evade them by seeking refuge in the values and criteria of poetry, but even there the same questions will eventually obtrude themselves. This is a poem about the universe; if the poet's data are no longer valid in relation to our present knowledge of the cosmos, does the work move us by its verbal beauty alone? Or has the poet's intuition seized and communicated transcendant truths to which we are now returning by another route?

It is beginning to look as though this may be the case. The synthesis achieved by Teilhard de Chardin in his remarkable work The Phenomenon of Man³⁵ would have delighted Dante, as it must indeed delight all Dantists, renewing as it does an awareness of the enduring validity of his poem. There can be little doubt that if Dante were writing the Paradiso today, Teilhard de Chardin would shine forth among that double circle of lights which are the souls of those who sought to reconcile the truth of man with that of God.

Like Dante, Teilhard de Chardin had a strong visual imagination. With all the means of verification which modern science commands, man is still, for Teilhard, at the stage of picture language, or allegory, at least as regards communication with his fellows. Speaking of the phases of life which ran their course before the appearance of thought on earth, he says: “I do not pretend to describe them as they really were, but rather as we must picture them to ourselves so that the world may be true for us at this moment.”³⁶ What is remarkable is not so much that man still uses pictures to convey his thought, for metaphor is the very stuff of language, but that the same pictures keep recurring. The image of the circle is particularly persistent. This may have something to do with the roundness of the earth, the sphericity of man's environment, to which Teilhard attributes the intensification of man's psychosocial activity, and to which Sir Julian Huxley traces ultimately what he calls “the bounding structure of evolving man, marking him off from the rest of the universe and yet facilitating exchange with it.”³⁷ Whatever the ultimate cause may be, it is remarkable that a poet and a scientist, separated by over 600 years and approaching the subject from what would seem to be totally opposed points of view, should both use the sphere as the image of the universe and the “Point Beyond” as the image of God or Omega. The All towards which the universe, in Teilhard's interpretation of phenomena, is shown to be converging, is imaged by him as a Point³⁸ beyond the sphere of the world, “which only exists and is finally perceptible (however immense its sphere) in the directions in which its radii meet—even if it were beyond space and time altogether”.³⁹ Dante would be perfectly at home with such imagery; and the modern reader who concerns himself with these immense and challenging considerations—and, in our present-day dilemma and bewilderment, how can any of us fail to do so?—will find in Dante's Prime Mover existing in a spaceless and timeless Empyrean an image no more remote and no less relevant than the cogitations of a twentieth-century scientist.

On the relation of the Ego with the All, Teilhard, again resorting to the image of the circle, speaks of the three-fold property possessed by every consciousness:

• (1) of centring everything partially on itself;
• (2) of being able to centre itself upon itself constantly and increasingly;
• (3) of being brought by this very super-centration into association with all the other centres surrounding it. Each consciousness exists for ever as itself, but can only be fully realized as itself by integration with the Whole; or, to express it as Sir Julian Huxley has done, “persons are individuals who transcend their merely organic individuality in conscious participation.”⁴⁰ For the scientist, then, no less than for the theologian, personality exists; and, further, for the scientist, no less than for the theologian, it participates in, but cannot be absorbed by, the Absolute. “In and by means of each one of us,” says Teilhard, “an absolutely original centre is established in which the universe is reflected in a unique and inimitable way.” These centres are our very selves and personalities, which, he goes on to show, in terms of the reasoning which sustains his whole book, grow conscious of themselves the more fully they evolve, becoming more clearly distinct from others the closer they draw to the All or Omega.⁴¹

In both Dante and Teilhard the relationship of the Many to the One is perceived as the persistence of the personal consciousness (i.e. the soul) and the centring of the consciousness upon the centre of all centres (i.e. God).

On the subject of love, also, the poet and the scientist are basically in perfect agreement.⁴² This is not so surprising as it might seem, for both are concerned with the dynamism of love rather than its passive or sentimental aspect. According to Teilhard: “Love in all its subtleties is nothing more, and nothing less, than the more or less direct trace marked on the heart of the element by the psychical convergence of the universe upon itself.”⁴³ This statement, for all its modern connotations, would have been, with certain reservations, acceptable to the thirteenth-century poet, Guido Guinizelli, whose famous poem on the nature of love⁴⁴ conveys much the same conviction. It could stand, without alteration, as an explanation of Dante's vision of love at the end of the Vita Nuova.⁴⁵ He does not there describe that vision to us, but from the Divine Comedy, which is the fulfilment of the pledge he there makes, we may reconstruct something of its nature and of the route by which he came to see that the love he experienced was something he shared with all creation. “If there were no internal propensity to unite”, says Teilhard, “even at a prodigiously rudimentary level—indeed in the molecule itself—it would be physically impossible for love to appear higher up, with us, in ‘hominized’ form. By rights, to be certain of its presence in ourselves, we should assume its presence, at least in an inchoate form, in everything that is. And in fact if we look around us at the confluent ascent of consciousness, we see it is not lacking anywhere.”⁴⁶ Dante, in the Convivio, says very much the same, all due allowance being made for the different data which were available to him,⁴⁷ and he says it again, in a more condensed form and in a different context, through the mouth of Virgil in Purgatory.⁴⁸

If consciousness persists and is truly realized only on being integrated with the All, it follows that “a universal love is not only psychologically possible; it is the only complete and final way in which we are able to love.”⁴⁹ Here, expressed in terms of scientific reasoning, is Dante's Celestial Rose. “Universal love” may seem much vaguer than Dante's precise and symmetrical picture of the souls seated on thrones and all visible to him in human form despite the measureless dimensions of time and space; but Teilhard, though he speaks in the abstract, is no less specific and personalized than Dante on this question. “Love,” he says, “dies in contact with the impersonal and anonymous. With equal infallibility it becomes impoverished with remoteness in space—and still more, much more, with difference in time. For love to be possible there must be co-existence.”⁵⁰ Therefore, Omega, or, to use Teilhard's, no less than Dante's, image, the Prime Mover ahead, must be supremely present and the consciousness converging towards it must at the same time draw further and further away from anonymity, becoming increasingly actual and personal the nearer it approaches to the personalizing action of the centre of centres.

At every essential point, the image or allegory which Dante's intuition has constructed upon the basis of his admittedly limited knowledge of the material world touches and joins hands with this recent structure assembled from the disparate elements of modern scientific discovery and thought. Even the scholastic division of substance and accident has its counterpart in Teilhard's “without” and “within” of things; and the reconciliation of causation with the freedom inherent in consciousness is tentatively essayed when he asks:

Determinate without and “free” within—would the two aspects of things be irreducible and incommensurable? If so, what is your solution?⁵¹

Of unity-in-multiplicity, he shows three different views. The first, looking downwards, so to speak, scrutinizes the infinitesimal being of ultimate matter:

It is almost as if the stuff of which all stuff is made were reducible in the end to some simple and unique kind of substance.⁵²

The second is an intermediate view, showing the conjunction of plurality with identity:

We do not get what we call matter as a result of the simple aggregation and juxtaposition of atoms. For that, a mysterious identity must absorb and cement them, an influence at which our mind rebels in bewilderment at first but which in the end it must perforce accept.⁵³

The “upwards” view, of the universe as a total aggregate within an immeasurable and unimaginable element or being, is expressed as follows:

The history of consciousness and its place in the world remain incomprehensible to anyone who has not seen first of all that the cosmos in which man finds himself caught up constitutes, by reason of the unimpeachable wholeness of its whole, a system, a totum and a quantum: a system by its plurality, a totum by its unity, a quantum by its energy; all three within a boundless contour.⁵⁴

If relevance to modern life and thought is conceded to such considerations as these, then relevance must also be conceded to Dante's Paradise, and relevance of the same kind. Both writers are talking about the same things, though in different ways and on different scales. In comparison with our cosmos, the universe of Dante seems a very miniature model indeed; but if Teilhard de Chardin has rightly described the phenomena of the universe as we now know it, he has shown that the same principles are valid, ultimately, for both.

The Allegory of Paradise

As regards the discrepancies which are said to exist between the Epistle [to Can Grande] and other works by Dante, the most important is that which relates to his discussion of allegory. As this is a crucial matter, not only for the genuineness or otherwise of the Epistle, but also for every reader's understanding of the Divine Comedy, it must be examined at some length. At the beginning of the first tractate of the Convivio, Dante expresses his intention of explaining fourteen of his odes “by means of allegorical interpretation after the literal narrative has been discussed.”⁵⁵ In the first chapter of the second tractate, he explains what he means by the terms “literal” and “allegorical”:

I say that, as is affirmed in the first chapter, it is meet for this exposition to be both literal and allegorical. And to make this intelligible, it should be known that writings can be understood and ought to be expounded chiefly in four senses. The first is called literal [and this is that sense which does not go beyond the strict limits of the letter; the second is called allegorical], and this is disguised under the cloak of such stories, and is a truth hidden under a beautiful fiction. Thus Ovid says that Orpheus with his lyre made beasts tame, and trees and stones move towards himself; that is to say that the wise man by the instrument of his voice makes cruel hearts grow mild and humble, and those who have not the life of science and of art move to his will, while they who have no rational life are as it were like stones. And why this disguise was invented by the wise will be shown in the last tractate but one. Theologians indeed do not apprehend this sense in the same fashion as poets; but, inasmuch as my intention is to follow here the custom of poets, I will take the allegorical sense after the manner which poets use.

The third sense is called moral; and this sense is that for which teachers ought as they go through writings intently to watch for their own profit and that of their hearers; as in the Gospel when Christ ascended the Mount to be transfigured, we may be watchful of His taking with Himself the three Apostles out of the twelve; whereby morally it may be understood that for the most secret affairs we ought to have few companions.

The fourth sense is called anagogic, that is, above the senses; and this occurs when a writing is spiritually expounded, which even in the literal sense by the things signified likewise gives intimation of higher matters belonging to the eternal glory; as can be seen in that song of the prophet which says that, when the people of Israel went out of Egypt, Judaea was made holy and free. And although it be plain that this is true according to the letter, that which is spiritually understood is not less true, namely, that when the soul issues forth from sin she is made holy and free as mistress of herself.⁵⁶

It will be seen that, in this passage, Dante regards the three figurative senses as three possible interpretations of the literal, but does not say whether any one text could be susceptible of all three interpretations. The fact that he uses a different text to illustrate each of the three implies that he did not regard them as “layers” of meaning underlying a single text, nor even as alternatives, but as possible meanings which were relevant according to the nature of the literal sense.

In the Epistle to Can Grande, Dante discusses the four meanings as follows:

For the elucidation, therefore, of what we have to say, it must be understood that the meaning of this work⁵⁷ is not of one kind only; rather the work may be described as “polysemous”, that is, having several meanings; for the first meaning is that which is conveyed by the letter, and the next is that which is conveyed by what the letter signifies; the former of which is called literal, while the latter is called allegorical or moral or anagogical.⁵⁸ And for the better illustration of this method of exposition we may apply it to the following verses: “When Israel went out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a people of strange language; Judah was his sanctuary, and Israel his dominion.” For if we consider the letter alone, the thing signified to us is the going out of the children of Israel from Egypt in the time of Moses; if the allegory, our redemption through Christ is signified; if the moral sense, the conversion of the soul from the sorrow and misery of sin to a state of grace is signified; if the anagogical, the passing of the sanctified soul from the bondage of the corruption of this world to the liberty of everlasting glory is signified. And although these mystical meanings are called by various names, they may one and all in a general sense be termed allegorical, inasmuch as they are different from the literal or historical.⁵⁹

It will be seen that in this passage there is a two-fold generic division between the literal and the allegorical sense, and under the latter are listed three “species” of meaning, allegorical (in its second sense), moral and anagogical. …

How does this difference affect the question of the authenticity of the Epistle? According to Moore, it is an argument in support of it, since anyone forging the letter and hoping to pass it off as authentic would have been careful to make this passage tally exactly with the corresponding passage in the Convivio, the contents of which would be well known. If we consider that Dante wrote both passages, we have only to suppose that after eleven or twelve years of writing allegory (from 1307 to 1318), he had altered his view of it. The surprising thing is that he altered it so little. What he has done is to reinforce the two-fold division into literal and allegorical, a division which is in any case the one selected by him in the Convivio to serve as the framework for the exposition of his own odes.

The new emphasis in the Epistle on the basically two-fold pattern of meaning is of paramount importance as regards the Commedia.⁶⁰ In the Convivio Dante was concerned with distinguishing the allegorical from the literal sense of certain love poems he had written previously. At the time of writing the Epistle, he has been constructing an allegory for many years, and an allegory, moreover, of sublime and universal significance. One might have expected that in the process his distinctions between the possible interpretations of the literal sense would have become more numerous and complicated. On the contrary, he has reduced them from three to one:

… it is clear that the subject, with regard to which the alternative meanings are brought into play, must be twofold (“duplex”). And therefore the subject of this work must be considered in the first place from the point of view of the literal meaning, and next from that of the allegorical interpretation. The subject, then, of the whole work, taken in the literal sense only, is the state of the souls after death, pure and simple.⁶¹ For on and about that the argument of the whole work turns. If, however, the work be regarded from the allegorical point of view, the subject is man, according as by his merits or demerits in the exercise of his free will he is deserving of reward or punishment by justice.⁶²

Dante's intention is perfectly clear. If confusion arises it is because allegory, by its very nature, cannot be limited to a two-fold interpretation. A lily can signify Florence, or France, or the Ghibelline party, or the Virgin Mary, or Christ, or all these things together, in various combinations of inter-related meaning. Dante saw these possible complications, which is why he tried to clarify the matter, warning us, in the Monarchia, against looking for allegory “where it is not, or taking it as it ought not to be taken”,⁶³ and firmly restricting the allegorical significance of the Commedia to one, and one only, in the Epistle.

This, however, is all very well. Dante chose, for the literal and the allegorical meanings of his work, a subject which by the universality of its significance and application embraces the whole of life, namely, in the literal sense, “the state of souls after death”, and, in the allegorical sense, “man, according as by his merits and demerits in the exercise of his free will he is deserving of reward or punishment by justice”. How are we to understand “man” (“homo”) in this context? As mankind in history, as man in society, or as man's individual soul, or as all three? And if all three, are we to look for the meanings separately or in combination? As soon as we examine it, the very stuff of allegory divides and sub-divides before our eyes, despite Dante's determined attempt to bind it together. If we add to its inherent complexities the multiple connotations of language, and, still more, of the highly associative and emotive form of language which is poetry, we begin to understand why Dante insisted that his work was two-fold in meaning, and two-fold only. He was no doubt anxious to prevent readers (perhaps the Inferno and Purgatorio were already suffering in this way) from reducing his orderly and coherent structure to elemental chaos.

Nevertheless, as Dante himself perfectly well perceived, and as he demonstrates in the Epistle in relation to the psalm, “When Israel went out of Egypt”, the two-fold significance (literal and allegorical) can be unfolded into a four-fold interpretation,⁶⁴ and commentators who avail themselves of its range are not departing from what Dante has laid down. Beyond these boundaries, however, anything can happen. The American scholar, H. Flanders Dunbar, perceived no fewer than nine levels of allegory in the Commedia and could no doubt have found more, for she concludes: “It is only through multiplicity of interpretation that approach to the truth is gained.”⁶⁵ To this, Dante would no doubt have replied by quoting again from St Augustine, as he does in the Monarchia:⁶⁶ “It is the same mistake as is made by someone who, leaving the right path, comes by a circuitous route to the place to which the road leads … his error should be pointed out to him for fear lest his habit of leaving the path should carry him into cross roads and wrong ones.”

It is a relief to turn from the complex systems of interpretation erected by some commentators to the austere words of Umberto Cosmo: “The supremely important thing is that we should not lose sight of the poetic reality through being too meticulous in our search for the right interpretation.”⁶⁷ As Dante himself said, “the literal sense ought always to come first, as being that sense in the expression of which the others are all included, and without which it would be impossible and irrational to give attention to the other meanings, and most of all to the allegorical … I therefore will first discuss the literal meaning, and after that will speak of its allegory, that is, of the hidden truth contained in it, and sometimes I shall touch incidentally on the other meanings (i.e. the moral and the anagogical) as place and time shall permit.”⁶⁸ He shows no sign of having changed his mind about this, for in the Epistle he likewise begins his commentary with an exposition of the literal meaning of the beginning of Paradiso.

Accordingly, in the Notes which accompany the present translation, attention has been paid first and foremost to the literal sense. The allegorical sense, in relation to the literal, is discussed chiefly in the sections entitled “Images”. When the literal and the allegorical expositions have been considered, it will be found that the other meanings (the moral and anagogical) are either implied or, as Dante puts it, are touched on incidentally as place and time have permitted.

Beatrice in Paradiso

It is perhaps necessary to add something to what has already been said concerning Beatrice in the first volume in this series.⁶⁹ As in the Inferno and Purgatorio, so also in Paradiso, Beatrice in the story is what she was in real life. Like Piccarda or Cunizza or Cacciaguida, or like Dante himself, she is, first of all, a person. There can be no doubt about this, for in the Celestial Rose she returns to the place among all the other saints, all of whom are persons. For Dante, Beatrice is actively present, since like all the Blessed in Heaven, she knows clearly what happens on earth. It is quite in accordance with Catholic orthodoxy for Dante to believe that Beatrice intervened for his salvation, as it is for him to offer thanks to her for what she has done and pray to her that she may continue to watch over him:

“O thou in whom my hopes securely dwell,
          And who, to bring my soul to Paradise,
          Didst leave the imprint of thy steps in Hell,
Of all that I have looked on with these eyes
          Thy goodness and thy power have fitted me
          The holiness and grace to recognize.
Thou hast led me, a slave, to liberty,
          By every path, and using every means
          Which to fulfil this task were granted thee,
Keep turned towards me thy munificence
          So that my soul which thou hast remedied
          May please thee when it quits the bonds of sense.”
Such was my prayer and she, so distant fled,
          It seemed, did smile and look on me once more,
          Then to the eternal fountain turned her head.(70)

The last glimpse we have of her is as she folds her hands in prayer, with all the thronging multitude of the heavenly host, that the Virgin Mary may intercede for Dante that he may behold God.

What Dante tells us is that in real life Beatrice and his love for her were the medium of his moral reform and of his religious salvation. In the story, or poetic reality, he represents the influence she had on him by, in the Inferno, her visit to Virgil in the Limbo, in the Purgatorio, her accusation and reproaches, his confession and repentance and the ensuing reconciliation, and, in the Paradiso, by the power of her beauty to uplift him and of her knowledge and understanding to enlighten him.

In the allegory, Beatrice does not exclusively or specifically “stand for” theology, the Christian revelation, heavenly beatitude, the light of glory or any of the abstractions which, in the course of centuries, have been put forward by critics and scholars. She is the image by which Dante perceives such things and her function in the poem is to bring him to that state in which he is able to perceive them directly. To quote the great mediaevalist and Dantist, Étienne Gilson, “It is right to mark them and associate them with the figure of Beatrice, but we cannot, without being presumptuous, infer that she actually is the Light of Glory, or Theology, or the Contemplative Life, or, broadly speaking, any of these ideas. We have not even the right to infer that she is the Christian Life regarded as a whole. The sanctity of this member of the elect does not entitle us to equate her to this any more than that of St Francis, St Dominic and St Bernard entitles us to identify them with similar abstractions.”⁷¹ The role of Beatrice in the Comedy is, however, more prolonged and implicated than that of any other saint and, though she is never wholly an abstraction, there are moments when the allegorical significance of her reality (or, literal sense) can be unfolded into a multiple interpretation, as, for instance, in Canto xxxi of Purgatory, when in the mirror of Revelation (the eyes of Beatrice) Dante sees the double Nature of the Incarnate Love—now as wholly divine, now as wholly human, or in Canto xxviii of Paradise, when her eyes image the theological demonstrations of the Church concerning the unity of God. The important thing is to avoid defining her too narrowly, in either her literal or her allegorical meaning. Perhaps the most comprehensive thing one might say concerning Beatrice is that she is for Dante the embodiment of his experience of love.

The Ideal of Justice in Paradiso

For an understanding of Dante's ideal of justice, it is necessary to read his treatise on world monarchy. The issue is one on which he held the most passionate and blazing convictions and, though it is not the chief, it is a dominant theme in the Divine Comedy. Justice, as Dante conceived it philosophically, is an absolute standard of righteousness. In the world, in which nothing can be perfect, a maximum of justice can be found where there is a minimum of injustice. The antithesis of justice, which provokes injustice, is greed or covetousness. The sharpener and enlightener of justice is charity, which is incompatible with covetousness. The establishment, therefore, of universal love is a necessary condition of the reign of justice. How can this be brought about? Only by a universal Monarch, a single world Emperor, who alone, of all temporal rulers, would be free from covetousness and disposed, therefore, to act in accordance with the maximum justice possible on earth.

Since these are his convictions, we can understand why Dante lashes out with such vehement invective against the enemies of justice, namely, greed and rivalry for wealth and power, particularly as manifested in the temporal ambitions of the Church and clergy, whose betrayal of their divine function he attacks with an implacable hatred.

The betrayal of his great ideal of justice Dante condemns and despises more than any other sin. Judas, the betrayer of Christ, and Cassius and Brutus, the betrayers of Caesar, are in the ultimate depths of Hell, in the very mouths of Satan. Hell itself is chiefly filled with sins of injustice in its widest sense. What he esteems and exalts above all virtues is loyalty to the ideal of justice, to the temporal powers appointed by God for its establishment on earth, to the great authorities whose origins are sacred, the Church and the Empire; for justice is rendering what is due to God as well as to man.

These are the basic conceptions underlying the cantos in Paradise which are an apotheosis of Roman or Imperial justice (i.e. the canto of Justinian and the cantos of the Eagle) and those in which resistance to this ideal or a falling away from it is condemned, as for instance, in Cacciaguida's denigration of contemporary Florence, or St Peter's denunciation of Pope Boniface. The whole of Paradise is poignant with the thought of what might have been if Henry of Luxemburg had succeeded, and exultant with the poet's faith that one day justice will triumph over greed:

“Ere January be unwintered, through
          The hundredth of a day which men neglect,
          These lofty circles shall give vent unto
Such roaring, that the storm we long expect
          Shall whirl the vessels round upon their route,
          Setting the fleet to sail a course direct;
And from the blossom shall come forth true fruit.”(72)

Notes

1. by C. S. Lewis.

2. Canto ii. 4.

3. Robert Bland, 1779–1825.

4. He called it “the finest narrative poem of modern times” and said: “The great source, as it appears to me, of the power of the Divine Comedy is the strong belief with which the story seems to be told. In this respect, the only books which approach to its excellence are Gulliver's Travels and Robinson Crusoe.” (Miscellaneous Writings, ed. 1875, pp. 21–32.) It is interesting to compare with this the emphasis laid by Dorothy L. Sayers on the compelling power of the Divine Comedy as a narrative, an aspect of the work which has tended since the time of Macaulay to become overlaid by allegorical interpretations. (See her article “… And Telling You a Story” in Further Papers on Dante, Methuen, 1957.)

5. Goethe-Schiller Correspondence, letter to Goethe, 27 August 1799.

6. Dante, Faber and Faber, 1929.

7. An exception to this is the article by Dorothy L. Sayers, originally given as an expository lecture to a non-specialized audience, entitled “The Meaning of Heaven and Hell” (Introductory Papers on Dante, Methuen, 1954, pp. 44–72).

8. Canto xxx. 40–42.

9. For a discussion of the significance of Beatrice in Paradise, see below [in Reynolds, Barbara. The Comedy of Dante Alighieri, The Florentine, Cantica III, Paradise (Il Paradiso). London: Penguin, 1962.], pp. 49–51.

10. Canto xxix. 12.

11. Canto xix. 7–12.

12. i.e. the Blessed in bodily form in the Celestial Rose.

13. Canto xiv. 37–45, 52–60.

14. Canto xxix. 13-18.

15. Canto xxviii. 42.

16. Compare with this conception the following passage from J. B. S. Haldane's The Inequality of Man (Chatto, 1932), p. 113: “We do not find obvious evidence of life or mind in so-called inert matter, and we naturally study them most easily where they are most completely manifested; but if the scientific point of view is correct, we shall ultimately find them, at least in rudimentary forms, all through the universe.”

17. See Canto xxviii.

18. According to Einstein's law of gravitation, there are ten principal measures or coefficients of curvature of the world. “Space-time is a four-dimensional manifold embedded in … as many dimensions as it can find new ways to twist about in; … its invention is not exhausted until it has been provided with six extra dimensions, making ten dimensions in all.” (See A. S. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World, Cambridge University Press, 1928, p. 120.)

19. The concept of timelessness, or eternity, is of course inherent in Christianity and not particular to the concepts of Paradiso.

20. Henry Vaughan, The World.

21. Canto xxix. 16–17.

22. Consolatio Philosophiae, V, vi, and ii.

23. Canto iii, 85. From the last Canto, xxxiii, 109–14, we learn that, for Dante, the perfected life, which is the eternal vision of God, does not mean that further progress is impossible; on the contrary, eternal life means an endlessly deepening vision of the inexhaustible.

24. Canto ix. 32–6.

25. Canto xxxiii. 85–6.

26. Readers interested in the theological implications of the gradualness of Dante's approach to the Beatific Vision will find an illuminating treatment of the subject in the article by Kenelm Foster, “Dante's Vision of God”, Italian Studies, 1959, pp. 21–39.

27. Canto xvii. 37–42.

28. Canto v. 105.

29. Canto ix. 68–9.

30. Canto xv. 49, 64.

31. Canto xxx. 145–8.

32. Purg. Canto xvi.

33. This is the substance of the doctrine of Purgatory. See especially Cantos xvii and xviii.

34. Canto xxvi. 55–66.

35. English translation by Bernard Wall and others, Collins, 1959. All quotations are from this edition.

36. op. cit., p. 35; italics mine, B. R.

37. ibid., Introduction, pp. 17–18.

38. Strictly speaking, Teilhard places it beyond, though in line with, that ultimate Point which man's mind can conceive. “This is in deference to the theological concept of the ‘supernatural’ according to which the binding contact between God and the world, hic et nunc inchoate, attains to a superintimacy (which is thus outside all logic) of which man can have no inkling and to which he can lay no claim by virtue of his ‘nature’ alone.” (p. 298.)

39. p. 259. My italics, B. R.

40. op. cit. Introduction, p. 20.

41. For a full discussion of this, see Teilhard, op. cit., pp. 261–2.

42. It is perhaps necessary to make clear that there is here no intention of indicating the “influence” of Dante on Teilhard, who makes no mention of him in The Phenomenon of Man and gives no indication of having read him. Some points of contact between them are traceable, ultimately, to a common Catholic heritage; but this does not account for them all.

43. p. 265. Italics are mine, B. R.

44. “Al cor gentil ripara sempre amor”. It would have been less acceptable to Dante's friend and fellow poet, Guido Cavalcanti, whose Averrhoistic concept of love was in conflict with his soul's awareness. Dante quotes Guinizelli's poem in the Vita Nuova and by the conversation he holds with him in the Purgatorio shows how much he regarded himself as indebted to him (see Purg., Canto XXVI).

45. See xliii.

46. p. 264.

47. Tractate III, Ch. ii and iii.

48. Cantos xvii-xviii.

49. Teilhard, op. cit., p. 267.

50. p. 269.

51. p. 57.

52. p. 41. Compare with this, Paradise, Canto ii. 112–20 and note.

53. p. 42. Compare with this, Paradise, Canto xxix. 28–36 and note.

54. p. 43. Compare with this the Vision of the Universe in God, Paradise, Canto xxxiii.

55. W. W. Jackson's translation (Oxford, Clarendon, 1909), p. 34.

56. pp. 73–4. The passage between brackets is a reconstruction (here translated from the Italian) of a lacuna in the text. “But no one who knows the general argument of the whole work will, I think, make serious objection to the way the editors of the accepted text have filled the lacuna.” (C. S. Singleton, Dante Studies I, Harvard University Press, 1954, p. 84.)

57. i.e. the Commedia.

58. I follow here the accepted text of the Società Dantesca.

59. ed. cit., p. 199.

60. This new emphasis has been recognized by Professor C. S. Singleton as a shift from the allegory of poets (cf. Convivio II, 1, 4) to the allegory of theologians. He ingeniously defines it as “not an allegory of ‘this for that’, but an allegory of ‘this and that’, of this sense plus that sense.” For his illuminating discussion of this question, see Dante Studies, I, Harvard University Press, 1954, pp. 84—98.

61. The original Latin which has been translated by Toynbee as “pure and simple” is simpliciter sumptus. The truth, as Algernon Moncrieff said, is rarely pure and never simple. What Dante probably means is that this is the simplest and most concise way of summing up the literal meaning.

62. ed. cit., pp. 199–200.

63. Book III, Ch. 4, 50.

64. Or application. In speaking of “two-fold” and “four-fold” meaning, the literal sense is counted as the first.

65. Symbolism in Medieval Thought and its Consummation in the Divine Comedy, Yale University Press, 1929.

66. Book III, Ch. 4, 60.

67. Handbook to Dante Studies, p. 153.

68. Convivio, II, 1, Jackson's translation, p. 75.

69. Hell, pp. 67–8.

70. Canto xxxi. 79-93.

71. Dante the Philosopher, translated by David Moore, Sheed and Ward, 1948, p. 297.

72. Canto xxvii. 142–8.

Books to Read

Edmund Gardner, Dante's Ten Heavens (Constable, 1900).

P. H. Wicksteed, From Vita Nuova to Paradiso (Longmans, 1922).

Sheila Ralphs, Etterno Spiro, a Study in the Nature of Dante's Paradise (Manchester University Press, 1959).