SOURCE: Mills Chiarenza, Marguerite. “The Imageless Vision and Dante's Paradiso. In Dante, edited by Harold Bloom, pp. 83-95. New York: Chelsea House, 1986.

[In the following essay, originally published in 1972, Mills Chiarenza explains how Dante's exquisite poetic imagery mysteriously leads the reader to an imageless vision of spiritual realms.]

In interpreting St. Paul's claim to have been rapt to the third heaven, St. Augustine developed a theory of knowledge which influenced the entire Middle Ages. For St. Augustine the problem was to define the third heaven and this involved discovering what was meant by the other two as well. He concluded that the three heavens are to be taken in a spiritual sense and represent three modes of vision. Briefly, the first mode is visio corporalis, knowledge through the senses of material objects; the second, visio spiritualis, is knowledge through the imagination in which, as in dreams, the senses are inactive but forms of physical objects are the means of representation; the third and highest, visio intellectualis, is intuition of spiritual substances facie ad faciem, without direct or indirect participation of the senses. Both spiritual and intellectual vision are immaterial but while intellectual vision is emphatically direct, spiritual vision is mediated by images.

Francis X. Newman, to whom I refer the reader for a fuller discussion of St. Augustine's doctrine, has suggested most convincingly that the Augustinian modes of vision are a governing principle in Dante's imagery, that each of the cantiche tends toward a vision of God in one of the Augustinian modes and that the imagery of each reflects this tendency. Lucifer, the most corporeal object in the universe, parodies God in Inferno; the reflected image of the griffon in the Purgatorio is Dante's spiritual vision of Christ and, finally, in the Paradiso Dante sees God directly. Newman's suggestion is of particular significance for the Paradiso where Dante makes the unique claim to have followed in St. Paul's footsteps and to have seen God face to face. And yet, except for the last cantos, Newman seems hesitant in his application of the concept of intellectual vision to the Paradiso:

At the start of his flight, and, in fact, until its very conclusion, the pilgrim is still seeing (that is, knowing) with a mind conditioned to corporeal forms. For this reason, although the inhabitants of Paradise are properly incorporeal, they are given a perceptible shape of light—now not ombre, but luci—in order that the pilgrim may be prepared gradually for the final truly incorporeal vision.

Intellectual vision is by its very nature incongruent with poetry, for it is the denial of that of which poetry is made, images, and perhaps this is what leads Newman to imply that such an experience does not occur until the end of the voyage. However, what Dante claims in the Paradiso, to have seen God and lived, is as inconceivable as representing or mediating that which is by definition unmediated. Therefore, I would like to go further than Newman and suggest that the basic position of the poet in the Paradiso is revealed by his struggle to express a vision which was imageless from the start.

The Paradiso is possibly the greatest paradox in the history of poetry and it is small wonder that we are often distressed by a certain ambiguity found in the descriptions of its poetics. Nonetheless, if certain basic problems are clarified it is easier to arrive at some degree of precise statement. The two aspects of the Paradiso which lead to most confusion are, I think, the hierarchy represented there and the fact that the pilgrim's ultimate vision is of God. Both of these can lead the critic to distinguish stages in such a way as to imply that the poetics proper to the Paradiso are to be found only in the last cantos. If too much emphasis is placed on the division of the cantica in preparatory vision in the heavens and final vision in the Empyrean and if this division is then extended to the poetics of the Paradiso, the end of the poem becomes the true Paradiso and we are left with some thirty cantos which are not the Purgatorio and are not the Paradiso. To avoid this we must stress the declared superhuman quality of vision in these cantos and do away with the definitions, such as per speculum or in aenigmate, which make of it nothing more than a rarefied version of human experience.

The division of the Paradiso in vision in the heavens and vision in the Empyrean is partially false. Clearly, the vision of God's face is to be distinguished from all other vision. But this vision transcends the poem, it does not end it. In the last verses Dante tells us that he did penetrate God's face and he tells us something of the effect it had on him, but he also tells us that this experience is lost to him as a man in whom memory fails and as a poet in whom fantasia fails—indeed failed already in the moment that vision was granted him. These last verses, not all of the Empyrean, are perhaps to be distinguished in that they represent the little that can be said of the ultimate vision. But all other vision in Paradise ends in the sum total of its parts, leaving only the mystery of God's nature to be known. What the poet can say of God's face is possible only because all conceivable vision has been exhausted. Vision in heaven is universal vision of truth which becomes a totality only when its separateness is transcended. This transcending of separateness is foreshadowed in the Empyrean but becomes a reality only as the pilgrim turns to God's face and, just before all experience, superhuman as well as human, is left behind, sees the unity implicit in the nature of truth, only to transcend even that unity in the vision of the Trinity and the Incarnation.

In its depth I saw that it contained, bound by love in one volume, that which is scattered in leaves through the universe.

(Par. XXXIII, 85-87)

This image not only clarifies the content of Dante's vision but also, because he uses the book as his metaphor, it is a clue to his poetics as well. God's face is not the universe but in it is contained the universe in its truest form. In Medieval doctrine every creature has its truest existence in the mind of God, although its natural existence is external. … St. Augustine compares the difference between the natural existence of creatures and their existence in God to the difference between night and day and tells us that knowledge of a creature in itself compares to knowledge of it in God in the same way that no knowledge at all compares to knowledge in the creature. … Dante's terzina is inspired by the doctrine of the double existence of creation, separate in the universe and unified in its Creator's conception. The unity of creation in God's mind is the pilgrim's final vision of the universe and represents the point at which the poem begins to be transcended. The pilgrim sees again all that he has hitherto seen, in its truest form. Dante tells us that he saw a repetition of his entire vision but does not describe it, for he has only human tools and to describe it would be literally a repetition. However, the image is far from being simply a statement of the whereabouts of the universe's conception, precisely because Dante chooses the book as his metaphor. When the universe is transcended, what was separate becomes unified just as all the pages when bound become the book. Dante does not represent the vision of always greater things ending in a thing greater still but the vision of all things followed and transcended by the vision of their unity. Vision of unity and totality are not a part of the poem but a result of it. The mind, the pilgrim's and the reader's, absorbs totality in its separate parts but is destined to transcend that separation. This principle is true of the poem also. The pilgrim does not see the last page of the book in God's face, he sees the book bound together, for when the poem is complete it is no longer a sequence but a unity. The reader transcends the pages to retain in his mind the poem, which was conceived by the author before it was written and is now transcended by him much the same as creation is conceived and transcended by God.

As the pilgrim turns to God's face all that is left to be seen of the universe is its unity. If vision until this moment is of spiritual substances, such as souls, and is defective only in its lack of unity, then it is intellectual in the Augustinian sense. It is direct intuition of spiritual substances even though not yet intuition of them in God. The notion that the highest form of vision is only to be found in the Empyrean seems, however, to be supported by the hierarchy represented throughout the heavens. Because of this some discussion of hierarchy will be necessary if we are to maintain that St. Augustine's highest mode of vision is the mode of all of the Paradiso.

Hierarchy, whose incongruous presence in the Paradiso is the source of some equivocation, is itself presented as an equivocation. It is presented, in fact, as an artificial structure which does not exist outside of the momentary need for it. The saints descend to various spheres which dramatize their place in a harmonious world of beatitude where the greater and the lesser are equally perfected, where qualitative difference does not diminish quantitative completeness, for “ogni dove in cielo è paradiso” and each position is unlimited. They stage this hierarchy because the pilgrim is not ready for a vision of totality. He must see the parts in order to see the whole. Because this hierarchy is not temporal in nature, time is so underplayed in the Paradiso that there is no way of accurately measuring it. The various entities must all appear to the pilgrim to give him the whole vision but their ordering is not a sequential phenomenon. They do not have to follow one another in taking their place, they simply must all be there. The poem, on the other hand, is constrained in a sequential form and, if it is to be read, verse must follow verse. In fact, while the pilgrim is speeding through the heavens at a velocity inconceivable to the human mind, time for the poet, the length of the third cantica, is the same as it was in the other two. This consideration leads us to confront the new relation between the pilgrim and the poet.

In the Inferno and the Purgatorio the poet's struggle is secondary to the pilgrim's and the danger is essentially in the voyage. In the Paradiso it is the poet who struggles while the pilgrim is safe. This is because the pilgrim was in possession of transhuman powers while the poet, who has returned to the human, is not. The pilgrim transcended time in Paradise, which from the start of his flight approached deletion. Human categories of perception were left behind with Purgatory. His vision was essentially “in un ponto solo,” which punto substituted and annulled a kind of paraphrase which led up to it. The poet, however, must work exclusively with human categories and make the paraphrase take the place of the essential vision, that is, spend thirty three cantos telling us that he approached the vision which he uses only a few verses to tell us he has forgotten. The pilgrim should not be seen as one who is passing from one stage to another in order to acquire his highest faculties but as one in whom these faculties are already activated and who is growing, through the accumulation of vision, not toward a new kind of vision but toward the supreme object of vision. If this growth appears to occur in stages it is because the poet is representing it. Whatever the pilgrim's limitations, which made certain concessions from heaven necessary, the poet's are far greater and his concessions to the reader greatly exceed those of heaven to him. We must not attribute all of the characteristics of the representation to the vision itself but must remember that what we read is twice mediated, first through memory for the poet and then through words for the reader. This mediation must not be confused with any mediation in the experience itself. My purpose is (1) to show that Dante denies mediation in the experience and (2) to illustrate partially how he copes with its necessity in the poem.

Just as Dante gives us a hierarchy but at the same time undercuts its value by denying its independent reality, so he makes the limitations to which he (who has returned to the human) is subject work in his favor. These limitations are memory and words. From the start he tells us that the vision is no longer accessible to him and that memory must take its place. If intellectual vision—unmediated, imageless knowledge of spiritual substances—is the subject of the Paradiso and memory which, like the imagination, functions through images is the source, then we should expect to find universal infidelity in the representation. … Dante is counting on us to know that memory will introduce images where there were no images. He tells us that we are reading only what his memory could retain:

I was in the heaven that most receives His light and I saw things which he that descends from it has not the knowledge or the power to tell again; for our intellect, drawing near to its desire, sinks so deep that memory cannot follow it. Nevertheless, so much of the holy kingdom as I was able to treasure in my mind shall now be matter of my song.

(Par. I, 4-12)

Thus, we are warned to look beyond what we are offered. Dante warns us and reminds us constantly of the limitations of the source, because if these limitations are forgotten, it will lose its truthfulness as a source.

What we have said of memory can also be said of words. Their insufficiency is declared from the beginning:

The passing beyond humanity cannot be set forth in words; let the example suffice, therefore, for him to whom grace reserves the experience.

(Par. I, 70-72)

Indeed words are one step further removed from the experience than memory itself. The poet can only communicate through verbal reference to experience derived from the senses, the denial of intellectual vision. Again, Hugh of St. Cher tells us, in terms very like Dante's, what happens when an attempt is made to communicate intellectual vision. He compares it to trying to describe the taste of wine to one who has never tasted it and can only refer the description to something else which he has tasted. … As with memory, Dante uses the obviousness of the insufficiency of his means to his advantage, and creates his most revolutionary technique, that of using words and images not merely to point beyond themselves but to point against themselves as well.

As I will show, Dante tells us that his vision was intellectual throughout the journey in Paradise and, therefore, to acquire such vision is not a goal of the pilgrim. The representation of such vision is, however, a goal for the poet. He is human and must cope gradually with the elimination of mediatory images and will completely do away with them only when he is silent. Vision of God by a man in the flesh is parallel to the paradox of a poet attempting through images, which are incorporeal only in that they have no corporeal—or spiritual—substance but which are based on reference to the senses, to represent that which is by definition spiritually substantial and void of any reference to the senses. And yet Dante's imagery in the Paradiso is developed in two directions which tend precisely toward the fulfillment of the two attributes of intellectual vision, incorporeality and substantiality.

Light metaphysics is not the subject of this discussion, but since light plays a role in the representation of intellectual vision it will be necessary to make a few remarks, however general, on its function in the Paradiso. The pilgrim sees everything in Paradise in the form of light which is gradually intensified to the point of blindness. Light has the unique attribute of being the source of all vision though itself shapeless and invisible outside the objects it illuminates. In the Paradiso, however, it does not illuminate objects but shines forth from subjects. These are lights themselves, not shining on objects but reflecting their own vision. Everything in the Paradiso is a reflecting light and it is this light which Dante uses to represent substances, which light is not a passive reflection of an external source but an active reflection of internal vision. The souls are not represented as inferior versions of something else but as spiritual centers of energy and truths in themselves. In fact, the pilgrim does not see God indirectly in the souls but beatitude directly. The souls are, of course, dependent on God for their vision and their beatitude but this dependence in no way diminishes their substantiality, for God is reflected by the entire universe which could not exist without Him. For the souls not to reflect God would be to cease to exist.

The reflecting light characteristic of the Paradiso represents substantiality in Dante's imagery. To represent substantiality is a challenge for a poet, but for him to attempt to represent the other essential quality of intellectual vision—absence of reference to experience derived from the senses—is more than a challenge, it is a contradiction in terms. It means, in effect, to represent through images that which is by definition incompatible with images. Nevertheless, this is a theme of Dante's imagery already evident in the pilgrim's first encounter with the inhabitants of the heavens.

As through smooth and transparent glass, or through limpid and still water not so deep that the bottom is lost, the outlines of our faces return so faint that a pearl on a white brow does not come less quickly to our eyes, many such faces I saw, eager to speak. …

(Par. III, 10-17)

These souls are compared to mirrors but, immediately, the traditional mirror, that of Narcissus, is negated:

… at which I ran into the opposite error to that which kindled love between the man and the spring.

(18-19)

Most interesting is the way in which these images stress immateriality in their very reference to material objects. They are calculated to suggest incorporeality, even imperceptibility. Their visibility is described only through their near invisibility: reflections not in a mirror but in glass or shallow water so clear as to offer virtually no reflection at all; a pearl whose color so blends into the forehead on which it is worn that it cannot even be seen at first glance. Dante tells the reader what he saw in terms of visual experience in which the eye fails. I will return to this passage to show how directly it introduces the concept of intellectual vision, but first I would like to illustrate briefly, through a few other images, how what is already present here at the beginning is developed in the rest of the Paradiso.

When the pilgrim enters the heaven of Mars the souls arrange themselves in the pattern of the cross. Dante's images at this point (Par. XIV, 91ff.) are extremely complex and deserve a fuller analysis. For our present purpose, we should notice that now Dante does not describe the lights in terms of their individual visibility but only of the collective shape they form. It is as if, on the one hand, only the cross not the souls were visible; on the other hand, there is no material cross to be seen but only the souls in the shape of the cross. That of which the cross is formed is not described, all that we are told is that it is formed. We are given a shape formed of shapeless parts. Neither the cross nor the souls are directly more visible than light itself; what the pilgrim sees is the meaning which the souls wish to show him, the “venerabil segno” (v.101). That this cross is not a material shape but the spiritual shape it signifies, is reinforced by the fact that as the pilgrim looks at it, he no longer sees it but the mystery from which it is inseparable:

Here my memory defeats my skill, for that cross so flamed forth Christ that I can find for it no fit comparison. …

(103-105)

The spiritual value of his vision is further enhanced by his use immediately afterward of the metaphor, not so metaphorical for Dante, of the cross in each man's life:

… but he that takes up his cross and follows Christ shall yet forgive me for what I leave untold. …

(106-107)

The same can be said of the souls in the heaven of Jupiter who form the sign of the eagle (XVIII, 74ff.), but here Dante has progressed one step further beyond the material form. The eagle is the final shape in a series of metamorphic images which remain visible only until they have been comprehended. Furthermore, these images represent letters, shapes indeed but as inseparable from their collective meaning as they are individually meaningless. This inseparability is all the more evident because the letters are not seen together but one by one so that when their meaning is read they have already disappeared leaving only their message, a verse from the Bible, whose author is God. When they have disappeared, their meaning, now in the form of the symbolic eagle, emerges, and again Dante could say he saw no eagle but only the meaning of justice shining forth from the formless souls of the just.

The cross and the eagle are images taken from the middle cantos of the Paradiso and show an obvious development from the first images of the cantica. Turning to the last canto of the poem and necessarily skipping countless other equally significant images, we find the famous image with which Dante ends his series of “anti-images”:

Like the geometer who sets all his mind to the squaring of the circle and for all his thinking does not discover the principle he needs, such was I at that strange sight.

(XXXIII, 133-135)

The squaring of the circle crowns a series of abstract geometrical shapes describing the mystery of God's nature and is the one shape in the universe which can be defined but cannot be seen. We, like Hugh of St. Cher's caecus natus, can “say much of it because we have heard much about it,” but we have no experience of it.

There are, then, stages in the development of Dante's imagery in the Paradiso. Three of them are those mentioned, in which we find, first, concrete shapes which can barely be perceived, then shapes in which symbolic meaning overshadows concrete form, and at last purely conceptual shape not found in the material universe. These stages lead the poet to the point at which he can go no further but must end his poem in order that it become literally imageless. This does not mean that the pilgrim's vision was not imageless from the start. His vision was peripheral at the beginning as he tended toward “un punto solo” at the spiritual center of the universe. But that it was peripheral does not mean that it was not direct spiritual intuition. In describing the impenetrable depth of God's mind Dante uses an image which becomes very eloquent if we remember that the souls in the moon, the first encountered in Paradise, were compared to shallow water in which the bottom is still visible:

Therefore the sight that is granted to your world penetrates within the Eternal Justice as the eye into the sea; for though from the shore it sees the bottom, in the open sea it does not, and yet the bottom is there but the depth conceals it.

(Par. XIX, 58-63)

The difference between the pilgrim and the man whose faculties have not been elevated beyond the human is that the pilgrim approaches the spiritual creatures of the “gran mar dell'essere” without ever losing sight of the sea's bottom.

All of this might seem pure speculation if Dante did not make it explicit from the start, from that first encounter with the souls in the moon to which I must now return. In the moon the pilgrim is faced with a vision which seems designed to discourage the senses. The human mind knows incorporeality through spiritual and therefore unsubstantial vision. So incorporeal is the pilgrim's vision that, since his mind is still conditioned to human experience, he falls into the error of thinking it also unsubstantial and turns away looking for what he has taken to be an image. Beatrice corrects him with the words: “These are real beings that thou seest.” Surely, by “real beings” Beatrice does not mean corporeal substances, for she is speaking of souls, not bodies. She means spiritual substances. But it is not through Beatrice's words, unequivocable as they are, that we first realize the nature of what the pilgrim sees, it is through the image with which Dante describes the pilgrim's error:

… at which I ran into the opposite error to that which kindled love between the man and the spring.

(III, 18-19)

The allusion is of course to the myth of Narcissus.

Twice already Hugh of St. Cher's discussion of intellectual vision has seemed relevant to Dante's poetic position in the Paradiso. It is perhaps most revealing with regard to the image of Narcissus which appears in Hugh's text as the image of the man, perhaps a philosopher or a mystic, who is so carried away with the flight of his imagination that he thinks he has transcended the senses altogether and does not realize that his vision is still mediated by images. Hugh is discussing the difference between spiritual and intellectual vision and poses the problem whether any man could so abstract himself from the senses as to see God as St. Paul did. The answer is that he could not, but he might think he had. … When Dante describes his error as the opposite of Narcissus' there can be no doubt that his Narcissus is the same as Hugh of St. Cher's, the man who mistakes an abstraction of the imagination for direct intuition or, what is the same, spiritual vision for intellectual vision. The pilgrim, who has been prepared on all levels of human experience, but only of human experience, when confronted with incorporeal vision assumes that it is also unsubstantial. His error is indeed the opposite of that of Narcissus for, while Narcissus mistook spiritual vision for intellectual vision, he mistakes intellectual vision for spiritual vision. While Narcissus failed to turn away from an image which he thought was substance, the pilgrim turns away from substance thinking it an image.

It is worthwhile comparing this episode to that of Casella in the Purgatorio:

I saw one of them come forward with so much affection to embrace me that it moved me to do the same. O empty shades, except in semblance! Three times I clasped my hands behind him and as often brought them back to my breast. Wonder, I think, was painted in my looks. …

(Purg. II, 76-82)

Like the souls in the moon, Casella is the first soul the pilgrim meets in the new realm. Newman has pointed out that the encounter with Casella represents a kind of introduction of the pilgrim to spiritual vision, for the pilgrim, who has just come from the realm of corporeal vision, does not realize at first that Casella is but an “ombra vana fuor che nell'aspetto,” almost a technical definition of an image. In the Paradiso the situation is similar, for the pilgrim has just arrived from Purgatory and again misjudges his new vision which is again described in terms which seem almost a definition, “vere sustanze.”

There is a further relation between the episode of Casella and its counterpart in the Paradiso for, while the pilgrim's error in the Paradiso is described as the opposite of Narcissus' error, with Casella it is strikingly reminiscent of the myth as it appeared in the classics. Like the classical Narcissus the pilgrim sees an image which appears to be a man and, like Narcissus, he attempts to embrace it. His error is identical to the one Ovid described: “corpus putat esse quod umbra est.” Had the pilgrim, or Narcissus, turned away from the image before him, there would have been no error. Perhaps the pilgrim's very caution in the Paradiso (“sovra il ver lo piè non fida” v. 27), which causes him to turn from the souls, is a manifestation of his fear, when confronted with what does not even appear to have corporeal substance, of falling into his previous error. Yet, in the Purgatorio, the poet avoids any direct allusion to the myth of Narcissus. Had Dante's Narcissus been simply the one found in Ovid the image would have been appropriate to the Purgatorio. But this Narcissus has undergone a transformation in a tradition which treated him as the man who fails to turn away from an inferior experience toward the truth, a truth which has long since ceased to be the truth of the senses. As Narcissus appears in Hugh of St. Cher's version his error is clearly that of mistaking an image for spiritual, not corporeal substance and such an error has little to do with the passage from corporeal to spiritual vision.

The encounter with the souls in the moon is clearly an introduction of the concept of intellectual vision. And yet there is one aspect of it which, on the surface at least, seems to go against such an interpretation, encouraging the reader to suppose the pilgrim is not yet ready for a truly incorporeal experience. This is the presence of faces in the description of the souls. In no other part of the Paradiso do souls bear any resemblance to the human form. This corporeality is mitigated by the fact that only faces, not bodies proper, are present and by the fact that they are barely visible. However, in speaking of outlines (“postille”), Dante is using terms inapplicable to spiritual substance. …

Of course, as we have had occasion to say, the poet deals in images and shows us only conceptually what he can have no hope of showing us directly. Still, the form of the human face, in this instance, cannot be understood merely as a necessary imperfection in the representation. It could if there were no emphasis on it, but it is the key image of the passage. Dante compares what he saw, a group of faces, to the reflection of faces in water or glass, and he speaks of a pearl worn on the forehead. The image of Narcissus is the image of a reflected face. Finally, the pilgrim's error consists, dramatically, in his turning his face away from the vision.

Dante's vision could be purely incorporeal but, if it were not direct it would not be intellectual. The whole passage is intended to introduce into the poem the experience of direct spiritual intuition and the image of the face is no exception. It represents the dramatization of the Pauline phrase which was commonplace in describing the directness of intellectual vision, “facie ad faciem,” and which was inseparable from its association with the phrase that described all other vision, “per speculum in aenigmate.” Everything in the episode works to replace the mirror by the face. In fact, the pilgrim does not yet understand the nature of his vision and consequently puts himself in such a position as to reject it. With the help of Beatrice he corrects his error so that he can then receive the vision granted him. In order to see face to face he must turn face to face.

Somehow the pilgrim's error and its correction do not seem vital to his development. Surely, once granted his vision, he should be able to recognize it. But sometimes the pilgrim must show the reader the pitfalls to be avoided by himself failing to avoid them. If recognition should be fairly simple for the pilgrim, it is not simple for the reader. On the one hand, the reader sees what might be described as images of images; on the other hand, he finds the concept of images strongly denied. Different from the pilgrim, no matter how much the images tend to negate their nature as images, the reader will have them before him for the entire duration of the poem. Because of this it is necessary that he understand from the beginning that they were not there for the pilgrim, that the vision the poet describes was imageless. Dante could have followed St. Paul and resorted to silence, for of such things “it is not lawful for men to speak” and a poet cannot speak without images. Instead of this he chose to testify to his experience despite the fact that he could only offer an “essemplo,” an imperfect rendering and a substitute for the experience itself. From the beginning of the Paradiso he confesses that it will be but an “ombra del beato regno,” a shadow, a reflection, even an image. Yet from the very first heaven he shows us, through the pilgrim's initial error, that, though we shall see only images, he saw only substances. If he can make us accept this, then perhaps we will accept the climax of his claimed vision, substantial knowledge of God.

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