SOURCE: Pelikan, Jaroslav. “The Otherwordly World of the Paradiso.” In Eternal Feminines: Three Theological Allegories in Dante's Paradiso, pp. 11-31. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990.

[In the following excerpt from an essay originally delivered as a lecture in 1989, Pelikan discusses the theological foundations of the Paradiso, concluding that Dante closely followed St. Augustine's insistence on surrendering to God's will.]

As even the cursory examination of a bibliography on Dante or of a library card catalog will suggest, the third and final cantica of the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, the Paradiso, has, for whatever reason, received considerably less attention than the other two. On the other hand, the Inferno is the most prominent—perhaps because it is the first, or possibly because it is the most vividly dramatic, or probably because it is existentially the most accessible to the reader. Yet the Paradiso is in many ways the cantica of most interest to the history of Christian theology and dogma. Thomas Bergin has trenchantly summarized its doctrinal import: “For Dante, paradise was clearly the place where one learned things, so that there is more overt didactic matter in the Paradiso than in the other cantiche. It is not entirely fanciful to find significance in the fact that the word ‘dottrina’ occurs twice in the Inferno, four times in the Purgatorio, and six times in the Paradiso; nor to note that the Inferno begins with a straightforward narrative statement, the Purgatorio with a metaphor, and the Paradiso with a statement of dogma. And with dogma, clearly and forcefully put, the Paradiso is replete.”¹ It is, then, with that cantica that the present study in the history of theology deals—surely an ambitious undertaking, if not indeed a presumptuous one.

For a scholar, there is some consolation to be derived from the awareness that any presumption involved in this assignment falls far short of that entailed by the composition of a work of literature whose author dares to assert, already in its second sentence and its second tercet:

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.(2)

In those lines the poet is echoing, no doubt consciously,³ the words of another visionary. As most interpreters ancient and modern would agree, the apostle Paul was speaking about himself when he wrote to the Corinthians: “I will come to visions and revelations of the Lord. I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago (whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth); such an one caught up to the third heaven. And I knew such a man (whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth); how that he was caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter.”⁴ (Of course, although Saint Paul, at any rate most of the time, leaves such “unspeakable words [arrēta hrēmata]” unspoken, Dante does go on for the next thirty-three cantos of the Paradiso to describe, from among the things he saw, at least all those which he that descended from the light does have both the knowledge and the power to tell again.) It is, fortunately, not the task of the scholar to reenact, or to participate in, the visions of an ancient seer—be it Saint Paul in the third heaven or Saint John the Divine in the Apocalypse, or Virgil in hell and purgatory, or Dante in paradise—but only to give a faithful account of the text of the Paradiso and to put it into context, specifically its broader historical context in the theology and piety of the late Middle Ages, or what we are calling in this chapter “the otherworldly world of the Paradiso.” The Paradiso belongs to the late Middle Ages first of all, of course, because that is when its author lived.⁵ Dante Alighieri was born in Florence sometime between 21 May and 21 June⁶ in 1265—thus, exactly fifty years after the greatest church council of the Middle Ages, the Fourth Lateran held in 1215. Dante's birth came just one year after Roger Bacon's composition of the De Computo Naturali [On Natural Computation], one year after Thomas Aquinas's Summa contra Gentiles, and two years after the founding of Balliol College. And he died in exile, at Ravenna, in 1321, nineteen years before the birth of Geoffrey Chaucer. Thus, it was during Dante's lifetime that Pope Boniface VIII, indelibly pictured in Canto XXVII of the Inferno⁷ (as well as in other passages, though he is named only once),⁸ ascended the throne of Saint Peter in 1294, and during his lifetime that Pope Clement V moved the papacy from Rome to Avignon. John Wycliffe, moreover, was born only seven years after Dante died. In anyone's chronology, therefore, Dante belongs to the Middle Ages, much as he is connected also to the Renaissance.⁹

Yet it is in far more than a literal chronological sense that Dante's Divine Comedy, and specifically the Paradiso, belongs to the Middle Ages. As Thomas Bergin has said, the images of the poem “cover all kinds of human activities, giving us such a richness of objective correlatives as to bring into the great ‘hall of the Comedy’ all forms and features of the medieval world.” At the same time, Bergin observes, “Dante's great work is concerned with matters not of this world; his subject is the afterlife, his pilgrimage takes him into realms which cannot be charted on physical maps, and his interests are in things eternal and not temporal.”¹⁰ For that is the world of the Divine Comedy, even and especially of the Paradiso: the otherworldly world view of Western Christendom at the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth century. “World view” here does refer, of course, to cosmology, and from time to time we shall have occasion to examine Dante's universe. But “world view,” Weltanschauung, includes as well the vision of life and of reality with which the entire poem is suffused. For the Paradiso, that means first and foremost a view of this world in the light of the world to come, of Terra in the light of Inferno and Purgatorio and Paradiso, of time in the light of eternity, sub specie aeternitatis. To read the poem intelligently, it is not necessary to share, but it is necessary to try to imagine and thus to understand, a conception of reality in which the very definition of being, the “is-ness” of what “is,” has been set by the Ultimate Reality and Ultimate Being that is God. Thus when Dante, addressing the apostle Peter, paraphrases the Nicene Creed and quotes its opening words, “Io credo in uno Dio,” he declares:

For this belief I have not only proofs
both physical and metaphysical;
I also have the truth that here rains down
through Moses

and others of the Old and the New Testament.¹¹ As his earlier reference to “your dear brother,” the apostle Paul, makes clear, Dante is referring to the celebrated definition of faith in the Epistle to the Hebrews (regarded as having been written by Paul): “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”¹² The “proofs both physical and metaphysical” should probably be taken as more or less equivalent to the familiar “five ways” of proving the existence of God set down by Saint Thomas Aquinas on almost the first page of the Summa.¹³ But the reference to “Moses” is an echo of the saying of God quoted by Thomas in that discussion and addressed to Moses from the burning bush, “I am that I am,”¹⁴ which Dante, together with the consensus of thinkers Jewish and Christian, takes to mean that God is Being itself, while all other “being,” whether visible or invisible, angelic or inanimate, as the same Creed affirms, is the creation of that God and hence possesses its being derivatively and dependently.

The “world of the Paradiso,” however, must mean even more specifically what cannot be called anything except its “otherworldly world.” As the striking epigram of Shirley Jackson Case put it, “The sky hung low in the ancient world,”¹⁵ and it continued to do so in Dante's medieval world. For not only does Dante present the Being of God as the Ultimate Reality in relation to which all other “being” has a secondary reality, thus providing what Arthur Lovejoy has called “a fairly unequivocal expression of the principle of plenitude”;¹⁶ but the primacy of the divine reality of God the Creator is, in a mysterious fashion, shared with all the creaturely dwellers of paradise as well, transforming their very existence into another order of being. That applies in a special way to the angels, but perhaps the most dramatic (and almost certainly the most enigmatic) case of such transformation is Beatrice. Whatever may be the status of “the quest of the historical Beatrice,” she is, here in the Paradiso and above all in its closing cantos, beyond time and space and almost (though not quite) beyond creatureliness itself. “If that which has been said of her so far,” Dante summarizes,

were all contained within a single praise [in una loda],
it would be too scant to serve me now.
The loveliness I saw surpassed not only
our human measure—and I think that, surely,
only its Maker can enjoy it fully.(17)

Therefore, the intuition of Gertrud Bäumer is correct when she relates Dante to the closing lines of Goethe's Faust.¹⁸ Its final line, “Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan [The Eternal Feminine draws us above],” unforgettably set to music by Gustav Mahler in his Eighth Symphony, does echo Dante's apotheosis of Beatrice; and it was therefore natural for it to provide the title for this book. In present-day English usage, however, the term “otherworldly” usually means “spectral” (or “spooky”) and therefore suggests something “unreal,” while in the Paradiso it is precisely the “otherworldliness” that is “really real.” As A. Bartlett Giamatti put it, “all the landscapes of Hell and Purgatory are either defective or incomplete versions of the terrestrial paradise. But the terrestrial paradise is itself only an image of the celestial paradise. The garden of Eden simply reflects the City of God.”¹⁹

At the same time, this “otherworldliness” of the Paradiso must not be taken to mean that Dante's consideration of this world of time and space, the world of politics and of human history, is confined to the Inferno and the Purgatorio, in both of which (as even the most casual reader can recognize) it is so prominent. On the contrary, it is possible to argue that in those first two cantiche Dante could treat politics and history as incisively and as severely as he did for the very reason that even then he had his eye on a rule of measurement beyond the here and now. That becomes strikingly evident, for example, in the portrait of the emperor Justinian which occupies all of Canto VI of the Paradiso, with a prelude at the conclusion of Canto V and a curious liturgical cadenza (employing a mixture of Latin and quasi-Hebrew words) in the opening three lines of Canto VII.²⁰ Justinian introduces himself to the poet as the lawgiver of Rome, the one

who, through the will of the Primal Love I feel,
removed the vain and needless from the laws.(21)

According to this definition of jurisprudence, what the law expresses is not the harsh reality of moral ambiguity in the world of politics (an ambiguity that Dante knew well from his own Florentine experience, and about which he repeatedly speaks with great bitterness in the Divine Comedy), but the will and purpose of the primo Amor, which embodies itself in natural and positive law, even though, as in the empyrean,

where God governs with no mediator [sanza mezzo],
no thing depends upon the laws of nature,(22)

much less upon the positive legislation of human societies. Justinian's introduction is followed by a remarkable survey of the history of Rome, in which one Caesar after another passes in review, from the original Caesar, Julius, to the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne. “Caesar I was and am Justinian [Cesare fui e son Iustiniano],” the emperor declares,²³ setting the criterion of law and justice as an absolute standard by which to measure all his predecessors—and all his successors as well, up to and including the political parties and partisans of Dante's own time in the empire. “Let Ghibellines,” the emperor Justinian asserts as, speaking from the sixth century, he addresses himself to the problems of the fourteenth,

                    pursue their undertakings
beneath another sign, for those who sever
this sign and justice are bad followers.(24)

It is this medieval otherworldliness of the Paradiso that, far from having abstracted Dante out of the real world of politics and concrete choice, enables him to pass specific judgment on conditions in the empire past and present.

That applies a fortiori to his treatment of the Church, to which we shall be returning in greater detail but which is appropriate here as a prime illustration of the otherworldly world that is the context of the Paradiso. The century of the Paradiso is also the century of Boniface VIII and of the “Babylonian captivity” of the Church under the Avignon papacy and, on the other hand, the century of John Wycliffe at Oxford and then (beginning in the fourteenth century but continuing into the fifteenth) of Jan Hus in Prague. Dante was caught up passionately in the agitation for the reform of the Church, of its hierarchy, and of the papacy itself. This is evident from Dante's other writings, above all from the De Monarchia, which it is a mistake to read only as a treatise on secular politics, as though there were no difference between Dante's De Monarchia and the Defensor Pacis of Marsilius of Padua; for, as a leading student of Marsilius has pointed out, “even Dante, despite his dedication of the ‘temporal monarchy’ to intellectual activity, also finally apportions the papal function to caring for man's incorruptible soul, and the temporal imperial function to man's corruptible body.”²⁵ The passage cited earlier from the Inferno indicates what Dante thought of Pope Boniface VIII. But all of that denunciation of corruption in the Church and in the papacy does not, as one might have expected, come to its crescendo in the hell or in the purgatory to which so many of the past occupants of the throne of Saint Peter have been consigned by Dante (and, presumably, by God), but here in heaven, where it is Saint Peter himself,

that ancient father
of Holy Church, into whose care the keys
of this fair flower were consigned by Christ,(26)

who pronounces their judgment upon them—just as it is from the vantage point of heaven that its former inhabitant, “the first proud being ['l primo superbo]” who was “the highest of all creatures,”²⁷ Satan the fallen angel, must be judged. Beginning with an Italian metric version of the Latin Gloria Patri, Canto XXVII goes on to these stinging words from Peter, the Prince of the Apostles. Three times Saint Peter plaintively cries out “my place [il luogo mio],” just as, fulfilling Christ's grim prophecy, he had denied his Lord three times:²⁸

He who on earth usurps my place, my place,
my place that in the sight of God's own Son
is vacant now, has made my burial ground
a sewer of blood, a sewer of stench, so that
the perverse one who fell from Heaven, here
above, can find contentment there below.(29)

Apparently, as the Church is viewed by none other than Saint Peter himself in the light of the other world, such a corrupt Church could provide a more comfortable domicile for Satan than it could—or, at any rate, than it should—for any legitimate successor of Peter.

The “otherworldly” criterion in the Paradiso's treatment of the Church and its reform makes itself visible also in the prominent role that the Paradiso assigns to monks and to monasticism. For, in the vocabulary of the Middle Ages, the monastic life was often called “the angelic life [vita angelica].” In the Gospel, Christ had said that “in the resurrection [human beings] neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven.”³⁰ Saint Gregory of Nyssa used the saying from the Gospel to argue that since “the resurrection promises us nothing else than the restoration of the fallen to their ancient state,” virginity was characteristic of “the life before the transgression” of Adam and Eve, which for that reason was “a kind of angelic life.”³¹ On that basis, virginity and therefore monasticism had been referred to as “angelic” by Gregory's brother, the father of Eastern monasticism, Saint Basil of Caesarea, as well as by Saint John Chrysostom.³² Perhaps from such Greek sources, Rufinus of Aquileia, who knew the Greek Christian authors well and translated some of them into Latin, spoke of monasticism as the vita angelica, as did other Latin writers.³³ And in the supplement to Part III of the Summa Theologica the term is explained this way: “Virginity is said to be an ‘angelic life,’ insofar as virgins imitate by grace what angels have by nature. For it is not owing to a virtue that angels abstain altogether from pleasures of the flesh, since they are incapable of such pleasures.”³⁴ It seems plausible that “the bread of angels” of which Dante speaks in the Paradiso³⁵ refers to the wisdom of the angels who, because they did not fall from grace with their fellows,

                              were modestly aware
that they were ready for intelligence
so vast, because of that Good which had made them.(36)

But the “angelic life” in the usage of his time is a way of speaking about monasticism, a usage that Dante does reflect here in the Paradiso when—alluding to the traditional distinction according to which “the cherubim have the excellence of knowledge and the seraphim the excellence of ardor” in their charity³⁷—he says that Saint Dominic was “cherubic” whereas Saint Francis was “seraphic.”³⁸

Even without running a detailed and precise statistical analysis, moreover, it is striking to note how often monastic figures and monastic themes appear throughout the entire third cantica of the Divine Comedy.³⁹ For example, the words of Piccarda Donati in Canto III, “We have neglected vows,”⁴⁰ are followed by the poet's question at the end of Canto IV:

I want to know if, in your eyes, one can
amend for unkept vows with other acts.(41)

This is followed in turn by Beatrice's response about vows at the beginning of Canto V.⁴² All of this carries echoes of the most extensive discussions of vows in medieval thought, which were addressed to monastic vows. Therefore, the interpreters who have detected a note of irony in Beatrice's explanation that “the Holy Church gives dispensations”⁴³ are probably correct. For a vow, in Beatrice's (and Dante's) view, is not merely an agreement between two human beings, even if one of them is a priest or prelate, but ultimately a sacred contract between creature and Creator. That vertical dimension is what makes the betrayal of a vow such a crime, as can be seen also in the various cases of marital infidelity, “the force of Venus' poison,”⁴⁴ that appear in the Inferno and the Purgatorio. Here in the Paradiso the crime of betraying monastic vows evokes from the eleventh-century reformer of monasticism and of the Church, Saint Peter Damian, this lament:

That cloister used to offer souls to Heaven,
a fertile harvest, but it now is barren—
as Heaven's punishment will soon make plain.(45)

For throughout the Middle Ages, as R. W. Southern has put it, “those who set themselves a standard higher than the ordinary looked to the monasteries for their examples,”⁴⁶ because the monasteries were the outposts of the other world here in this world, the models of authentic community, the seedbeds of holiness, and the sources of renewal. If they themselves became corrupt, as they did with such depressing regularity—

The flesh of mortals yields so easily;
on earth a good beginning does not run
from when the oak is born until the acorn

is Dante's one-sentence lament⁴⁷—the result was that not only the monks but everyone would suffer. In the familiar maxim of the Roman poet Juvenal, “Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes? [But who is to guard the guards themselves?]”⁴⁸

Or, in the complaint that Dante puts into the mouth of the sixth-century founder of Western monasticism, Saint Benedict of Nursia,

                              my Rule is left
to waste the paper it was written on.(49)

But that complaint is voiced by one who is already in heaven, as Beatrice is obliged to remind Dante about himself.⁵⁰ Indeed, he is not only in heaven, but (as she also reminds him) Dante has, at the point of encountering Benedict, come very “near the final blessedness.”⁵¹ At that exalted position, moreover, Benedict speaks as “the largest and most radiant”⁵² of the hundred pearls or “little spheres [sperule]” to which Beatrice directs Dante's gaze. With the kind of spiritual boasting of which the apostle Paul speaks,⁵³ Benedict describes the achievements of his monastic foundation on Monte Cassino, built on the site of a pagan temple: “Such abundant grace had brought me light,” he says,

that, from corrupted worship that seduced
the world, I won away the nearby sites.(54)

In so doing, Benedict established a pattern that was to become an essential component of monastic life throughout the rest of Christian history, as over and over the monks in both East and West were to be the shock troops of the Catholic and Christian faith, in the vanguard of its march across the continents. It was for this reason, among others, that in the twentieth century Saint Benedict and Saints Cyril and Methodius, the apostles to the Slavs, have been designated co-patron saints of Europe. From Dante's celebration of monastic heroism and from his lament over monastic vice, it is clear that in Dante's eyes the history of monasticism since the age of Benedict contained some of the most glorious chapters of Christian heroism, and some of the most degenerate chapters of Christian betrayal. Yet it is undeniable that for Dante the monks were among the leading citizens of both the Church on earth and the Church in paradise.

Despite the high praise for Saint Benedict, the father of Western monasticism, the pride of place among the monks in the Paradiso is reserved for another monk who was not a Benedictine but a Cistercian, the monastic reformer who was also a reformer of the Church, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux.⁵⁵ In the final three cantos, which may well be the most powerful hymn ever written in praise of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the speaker is Bernard the “holy elder [santo sene].”⁵⁶ He describes himself as “Mary's faithful Bernard [suo fedel Bernardo].”⁵⁷ As Masseron has suggested, that title applies to Dante as well as to Bernard.⁵⁸ In this closing scene Bernard has left

                              the sweet
place where eternal lot assigns [his] seat,(59)

in order to expound to Dante the historical typology of Eve the mother of humankind and Mary the Second Eve. The speeches about Mary that Dante places into the mouth of Bernard are in fact a compendium of his rich and varied works devoted to her praises. Other works of Bernard of Clairvaux, particularly his letters and his treatise On Consideration, written for his pupil Pope Eugenius III, were likewise a source upon which Dante and his fellow reformers of church and empire drew for their denunciation of the Church's corruption.⁶⁰ In addressing such an essay as On Consideration to the pope, Bernard had clearly risen above the corruption of his time to carry out the historic responsibility of the monks as the conscience of the medieval Church.⁶¹

In Dante's own time it was neither the Benedictines nor the Cistercians, but the Franciscans and the Dominicans who had assumed much of the responsibility for the spiritual life of the Church—and who had, yet again, manifested the universal tendency to corruption through “their decadence, and sudden passion for the material goods their masters had taught them to abandon, [which] destroyed many of the spiritual gains made by Francis and Dominic, and reduced the Orders to a state little better than that of the Church their founders had begun to rebuild.”⁶² The founders of these two orders are the subject of Canto XI of the Paradiso:

                              two princes, one
on this side, one on that [quinci e quindi], as her [the Church's] guides(63)—

one of them, as noted earlier, “all seraphic in his ardor” and the other “the splendor of cherubic light on earth.”⁶⁴ In his miniature biography of Francis, in which scholars have found a remarkably “symmetrical construction,”⁶⁵ Dante describes how Francis had, after an interval of “some eleven hundred years,”⁶⁶ restored the primitive Christian ideal of poverty when he took Lady Poverty as his spiritual bride. Although this bizarre act brought upon him the “scorn and wonder [maraviglia]”⁶⁷ of most of his contemporaries, he did manage to extract from Pope Innocent III the approval of the Rule of the Franciscans, or, as Dante calls it, “the first seal of his order.”⁶⁸ What Dante then goes on to call “the final seal [l'ultimo sigillo],” which “his limbs bore for two years,”⁶⁹ came in the form of the stigmata, the marks of the Passion of Christ on the body of Saint Francis. Francis was and still is a controversial figure, indeed a revolutionary one. The implications of his doctrine and practice of poverty came to be seen by many of his followers, particularly the Spiritual Franciscans, as a radical attack upon the institutional Church as such, earning for them the condemnation of the Church's leaders. Nevertheless at his death this “second Christ,” as he came to be known, issued a Testament (now generally acknowledged to be genuine) to his Franciscan brethren, in which

Francis commended his most precious lady,
and he bade them to love her faithfully.(70)

The official biographer of Saint Francis and the most eminent theological mind of the Franciscan Order (at least until Duns Scotus, who was born in the same year as Dante, 1265) was Bonaventure, who speaks in Canto XII of the Paradiso.

But it is one of the most striking of the many transpositions in the entire Divine Comedy, as many readers have noted and as a Dominican scholar has recently explained in some detail, that Bonaventure speaks not about Saint Francis but about Saint Dominic, founder of the Order of Preachers, just as it is the Dominican Thomas Aquinas who speaks in such glowing terms about Francis, founder of the Order of Friars Minor.⁷¹ Writing at a time when the rivalry between the two orders and the general state of the monastic life had become a scandal throughout Western Christendom,⁷² Dante employs this device to remind his readers—and any Franciscans or Dominicans who might be listening—that the two emphases, the “seraphic” celebration of the supremacy of love associated with the Franciscans and the “cherubic” cultivation of wisdom and scholarship identified with the Dominicans, are by no means mutually exclusive, but in fact need each other to be rescued from exaggeration. They are like two wheels of the chariot of Holy Church,⁷³ both of them indispensable to her journey on this earthly pilgrimage to the otherworldly paradise. Therefore, after Aquinas has begun by pointing to Dominic as “our patriarch [il nostro patriarca],”⁷⁴ it is Bonaventure who takes over to draw a vivid portrait of Dominic as “the holy athlete,” whose valiant efforts as a formidable champion in defense of the truth of the Catholic faith made him “kind to his own and harsh to enemies.”⁷⁵ In Dominic, it was above all the power of his intellect⁷⁶ that equipped him for his special ministry:

Then he, with both his learning and his zeal,
and with his apostolic office, like
a torrent hurtled from a mountain source,
coursed, and his impetus, with greatest force,
struck where the thickets of the heretics
offered the most resistance.(77)

For an appreciation of “the otherworldly world of the Paradiso,” the angelic world of cherubim and seraphim, the most important accent in Dante's treatment of the Franciscans and the Dominicans here in the Paradiso is his use of angelic metaphors for both: Francis “was all seraphic in his ardor,” Dominic was endowed with “the splendor of cherubic light on earth”⁷⁸—“on earth,” because such light and such ardor were ordinarily part of the other world, but in these two “princes” they had appeared in this world as well.

In this connection, however, it is necessary to examine one suggestion of a possible historical connection of Dante with the Franciscan Order, and to evaluate the suggestion of another historical connection between Dante and the Dominican Order. It is clear from the presentation in Cantos XI and XII just summarized that Dante was striving to be evenhanded in his treatment of the two orders, of their two founders, and of the shameful condition into which both of the orders had fallen by his own time. Yet that evenhandedness, which was apparently quite sincere and surely quite successful, must not be permitted to obscure Dante's special personal bond with the Franciscans. For like many late medieval figures—it should be noted, for example, that in June 1496, upon arriving in Cádiz, Spain, at the end of his second voyage, Christopher Columbus “assumed the coarse brown habit of a Franciscan, as evidence of repentance and humility”⁷⁹—Dante had identified himself with Saint Francis. In Canto XVI of the Inferno Dante says of himself: “Around my waist I had a cord as girdle [una corda intorno cinta],”⁸⁰ a cord that Virgil borrows to use as an enormous fishing line for catching the monster Geryon.⁸¹ Although this could be a purely symbolic allusion—for which there is a parallel, for example, in the words of the Purgatorio about Charles of Aragon as one who “wore the cord of every virtue [ogne valor portò cinta la corda]”⁸²—the Franciscan cord did have a special significance for Dante, which some scholars have seen expressed by his reference, here in the description of Francis and his retinue in the Paradiso, to “the lowly cord already round their waists.”⁸³ The reference to the “cord” in Canto XVI of the Inferno has given rise to the theory that Dante had once, as a young man, briefly joined the Franciscan Order.⁸⁴ John D. Sinclair thinks it “may well be true,”⁸⁵ while Charles S. Singleton insists that “these speculations are without documentary evidence” and that “it is in no way certain that D[ante] ever joined the Order, even as a tertiary.”⁸⁶ Whatever may be the truth of such reports about Dante's early life, it does seem certain that when he died on the night of 13 September 1321, after a journey to Venice, he was buried at Ravenna in a small chapel near San Piero Maggiore (which is now, appropriately enough, called San Francesco)—and that he was “buried with honors, and in the costume of the Franciscan order.”⁸⁷

On the other hand, the intellectual content of the Divine Comedy has often been identified (in perhaps too hasty and facile a conclusion on the basis of evidence that is at best tenuous) not with the Franciscans at all, but with the Dominicans and specifically with Saint Thomas Aquinas. This issue was brought to the fore in the book Dante le théologien, published in 1935 by the Dominican scholar and distinguished editor of the Commentary on the Sentences of Thomas Aquinas, Pierre Mandonnet, who is perhaps best known to students of the history of philosophy for his pioneering research on Siger of Brabant and Latin Averroist philosophy.⁸⁸ The most important response to Mandonnet's thesis is that of Etienne Gilson, whom many would regard as the most eminent historian of medieval thought in the past hundred years.⁸⁹ In addition to many incisive comments on the standing issues of Dante interpretation, above all on the tangled problem of whether Beatrice has become more than human by the time Dante gets to the final cantos of the Paradiso, Gilson reviews the alleged dependence of Dante on Thomas in a section entitled “Dante's Thomism.”⁹⁰ And despite his own standing as a Thomist scholar and despite the prominent place occupied by Saint Thomas in the Paradiso,⁹¹ Gilson concludes that it is a mistake to read Dante as a partisan and disciple of Thomas in any but the most general sense.

He must rather be seen as a disciple of Saint Augustine—which is, after all, how Thomas also saw himself even when he was criticizing Augustine.⁹² Many of the phrases and tropes that a student of Aquinas seems to recognize as Thomistic upon reading the Divine Comedy are in fact Augustinian.⁹³ Thomas Aquinas and Dante Alighieri were drawing upon a common source, who was likewise the source for most of medieval theology, and for much if not most of medieval philosophy as well. It is rather curious, then, that Augustine himself occupies a relatively small place in the Comedy.⁹⁴ He appears together with Saint Francis and Saint Benedict in the Tenth Heaven,⁹⁵ but he does not function as one of the dramatis personae in the way that Thomas and Bonaventure and, above all, Bernard of Clairvaux do; nor does the narrative of his life story receive any special place in the poem. Yet that very obscurity can be taken to mean that the presence and influence of Augustine are so pervasive throughout the Purgatorio, especially throughout the Paradiso, that he does not have to be one of the characters in the play, since he has provided so many of its lines—including what may well be the most familiar line in the entire work, the words of Piccarda Donati, “And in His will there is our peace [E ‘n la sua volontade è nostra pace],”⁹⁶ words that seem to be an unmistakable echo of the words of Augustine in the Confessions, “In Thy good will is our peace.”⁹⁷ Similar parallels abound throughout the Divine Comedy, above all perhaps in the Paradiso. All of these Augustinian, medieval, and “otherworldly” qualities of the world of the Paradiso come together in its employment of allegory, especially of theological allegory.

Notes

1. Bergin 1965, 274.

2. Par.I.4-6.

3. Mazzeo 1958, 84-110.

4. 2 [Corinthians] 12:1-4.

5. Vossler 1929 continues to be an indispensable introduction to the entire world of Dante.

6. That is the conclusion most scholars draw from Dante's words (Par.XXII.111-120) about “the sign that follows Taurus,” that is to say, Gemini, the “constellation steeped in mighty force [gran virtù],” as his “fated point of entry,” to which all of his genius looks as its source.

7. Inf.XXVII.67-129.

8. Inf.XIX.53.

9. On this latter connection, it is instructive to note that throughout The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy Jacob Burckhardt celebrated Dante as the embodiment of his major themes. What he said in chapter 3 of Part II could have been said of each part: “Here, again, as in all essential points, the first witness to be called is Dante” (Burckhardt 1958, 1:151).

10. Bergin 1965, 286 and 1.

11. Par.XXIV.130-141.

12. Par.XXIV.61-66, quoting [Hebrews] 11:1.

13. [Summa Theologica] I.2.3.

14. [Exodus] 3:14.

15. Case 1946, 1.

16. Lovejoy 1936, 68-69.

17. Par.XXX.16-21.

18. Bäumer 1949, 149; also Newman 1987, 262.

19. Giamatti 1966, 116.

20. [Enciclopedia Dantesca] 3:231-233.

21. Par.VI.10-12.

22. Par.XXX.122-123.

23. Par.VI.10.

24. Par.VI.103-105.

25. Gewirth 1951, 100, n. 54.

26. Par.XXXII.124-126.

27. Par.XIX.46-48.

28. [Matthew] 26:34, 69-75.

29. Par.XXVII.22-27.

30. Matt. 22:30.

31. Gregory of Nyssa On the Making of Man xvii.2.

32. Lampe 1961, 9; on “Chrysostom the metropolitan,” see Par.XII.136-137.

33. Blaise and Chirat 1954, 81.

34. S.T.III, Sup.96.9. ad 1.

35. For example, Par.II.11.

36. Par.XXIX.58-60; see also the Epilogue below.

37. S.T.I.108.5. ad 6.

38. Par.XI.37-39.

39. As Palgen 1940, 66-67, has noted, the only two souls who speak to Dante in the Heaven of Saturn are both monks, Saint Benedict and Saint Peter Damian.

40. Par.III.56.

41. Par.IV.136-137.

42. Par.V.13-15.

43. Par.V.35-36.

44. Purg.XXV.132.

45. Par.XXI.118-120; see the discussion of Dante's use of medieval legends about Peter Damian in Capetti 1906.

46. Southern 1953, 158.

47. Par.XXII.85-87.

48. Juvenal Satires VI.347-348.

49. Par.XXII.74-75.

50. Par.XXII.7-8.

51. Par.XXII.124.

52. Par.XXII.28.

53. 2 Cor. 11:16-33.

54. Par.XXII.43-45.

55. See the long footnote discussing the question “Why Saint Bernard?” in Rabuse 1972, 59-61.

56. Par.XXXI.94.

57. Par.XXXI.102.

58. Masseron 1953, 71-143.

59. Par.XXXII.101-102.

60. [Epistles] X.28.

61. Kennan 1967.

62. Needler 1969, 21.

63. Par.XI.36.

64. Par.XI.37-39.

65. Santarelli 1969, 37.

66. Par.XI.65.

67. Par.XI.90.

68. Par.XI.93.

69. Par.XI.107-108.

70. Par.XI.113-114. Although some interpreters have taken this “most precious lady” to be Poverty, the tenor of my argument here seems to point to the conclusion that she is the Catholic Church.

71. Foster 1987, 229-249.

72. On the state of monastic life and monastic reform in the later Middle Ages, see the helpful summary of Oakley 1979, 231-238.

73. Par.XII.106-107.

74. Par.XI.121.

75. Par.XII.57.

76. Par.XII.59: “la sua mente di viva virtute.”

77. Par.XII.97-102.

78. Par.XI.37-39.

79. Morison 1955, 102.

80. Inf.XVI.106.

81. See the review of recent critical scholarship on this passage in D'Amato 1972.

82. Purg.VII.114, apparently a reference to [Isaiah] 11:5.

83. Par.XI.85-87.

84. On the entire question of Dante and the Franciscans, see the studies of Needler 1969, Santarelli 1969, and Foster 1987.

85. Sinclair 1961, 1:213.

86. Singleton in Toynbee 1965, 48.

87. Bergin 1965, 44.

88. Mandonnet 1935.

89. Gilson 1949.

90. Gilson 1949, 226-242.

91. Par.X.82-138. XI.16-XII.2, XII.110-111, 141, XIII.32-XIV.8.

92. Gilson 1926.

93. Mazzotta 1979, 147-191.

94. Enc.Dant.1:80-82.

95. Par.XXXII.35.

96. Par.III.85.

97. Augustine Confessions XIII.ix.10.

Abbreviations

Cons.: Boethius Consolation of Philosophy

Conv.: Dante Convivio [Convito]

Enc. Dant.: Enciclopedia Dantesca

Ep.: Dante Epistolae

Inf.: Dante Inferno

Mon.: Dante De Monarchia

OED: Oxford English Dictionary

Par.: Dante Paradiso

Purg.: Dante Purgatorio

S.T.: Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologica

V.N.: Dante Vita Nuova

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