Abstract
Paradiso 23 is intensely lyrical. Everything in it is part of a coherent construct both readable in relation to itself alone and also as part of a larger set of themes, images, and narrative strategies. Even by the standards of the Paradiso, it takes place in an atmosphere of exalted rarification and intense dependence on metaphor. Until the final lines there is no hint of earthly troubles, nor are we given the cosmological or theological discourses we have come to expect. The canto is replete with tropes of phonic repetition (alliteration and assonance), with Latinisms, and exclamations—all of which serve to magnify its intensity and stylistic elegance, even while conveying, for most readers, an effect of simplicity. Instead of the customary dialogue between Dante and the souls that he encounters, this canto is given over to spectacle; the only dialogue is between Dante and Beatrice.
There are certain cantos in the Paradiso that seem to gather up and intensify its key rhythms and images, and I find myself coming back to them with growing appreciation for their compression and richness of implication. Canto 23 is one of those, and I have long been intrigued by its special tonality and its magical musicality. It is part of the longest sequence of cantos given to a single sphere, the sphere of the fixed stars. Dante enters into this sphere in the middle of canto 22, and he remains there through canto 27. The entrance into the sphere is marked by an invocation to the “gloriose stelle” of Gemini, the constellation under which Dante was born, and where he is providentially placed for this segment of his journey.
Because Dante is in his natal constellation Gemini, themes of origins, birth and rebirth become important here. In this sphere, the borderline between the visible and invisible heavens, Dante’s upward progress through the material heavens takes a new form. While canto 22 concludes with a backward glance through the planetary spheres he has traversed to this point, canto 23 re-establishes the poem’s forward motion, pointing to its end, ten cantos later. It functions as a preface, a provisional version of the poem’s ending. It also establishes one of the key coordinates of the final canto—its focus on the maternal, and on Mary in particular.
Paradiso 23 is intensely lyrical. Everything in it is part of a coherent construct both readable in relation to itself alone and also as part of a larger set of themes, images, and narrative strategies. Even by the standards of the Paradiso, it takes place in an atmosphere of exalted rarification and intense dependence on metaphor. Until the final lines there is no hint of earthly troubles, nor are we given the cosmological or theological discourses we have come to expect. The canto is replete with tropes of phonic repetition (alliteration and assonance), with Latinisms, and exclamations—all of which serve to magnify its intensity and stylistic elegance, even while conveying, for most readers, an effect of simplicity. Instead of the customary dialogue between Dante and the souls that he encounters, this canto is given over to spectacle; the only dialogue is between Dante and Beatrice.
What actually happens in the canto? What does Dante see? Paradiso 23 presents a double “triumph,” first of Christ, then of Mary. The blessed arrive in their multitude, imagined as flames or lights. Dante is granted a vision of Christ in his resurrected glory. His glimpse of Christ’s “lucent substance” (32) is fleeting: it can neither be sustained nor remembered. To compensate for its loss, however, he turns to the radiance of Beatrice’s smile, occluded since his entrance into the sphere of Saturn. Christ ascends to make way for a vision of Mary encircled and praised by Gabriel, the angel of the Annunciation. She then follows her son, ascending out of view into the Empyrean. Left behind is St Peter, representative of the Church in its role as earthly guardian of salvation. As Christ gives way to Mary who gives way to St Peter, we have a sequential version of mediators of salvation. It is important to remember that what Dante sees is a series of flames or lights; the actual blessed, in their resurrection bodies, will be visible only after he arrives in the Empyrean. This is the basic plot of canto 23, but such a summary in no way indicates its extraordinary affective power.
Expectation
The canto’s affectivity is in large part developed in the extended similes that create the canto’s distinctive, unified tonality. The extraordinary opening simile is the key to the canto’s emotional valence. It weaves together maternal and erotic language, suggesting a music of sweet aspiration. The opening nine lines depict a mother bird eagerly awaiting the dawn so that she can both see and feed her young. This is the most developed of the poem’s many bird similes. Commentators have noted that this image draws on observation of nature but is also densely allusive to the poetry of Virgil, Statius, and Lactantius. Lyric longing is suffused with tenderness and dolcezza. Maternal love is rendered in a lexicon of quasi-erotic terms through such phrases as “amate fronde,” “dolci nati,” “li aspetti disïati,” and “ardente affetto.” The mother bird eagerly anticipating sunrise reverses the expectation of the alba or dawn song, wherein the (male) poet wants the night to go on forever in order to be with his lover. By contrast, the bird longs for light: Come l’augello, intra l’amate fronde, posato al nido de’ suoi dolci nati la notte che le cose ci nasconde, che, per veder li aspetti disïati e per trovar lo cibo onde li pasca, in che gravi labor li sono aggrati, previene il tempo in su aperta frasca, e con ardente affetto il sole aspetta, fiso guardando put che l’alba nasca: As does the bird, among beloved branches, when, through the night that hides things from us, she has rested near the nest of her sweet fledglings and, on an open branch, anticipates the time when she can see their longed-for faces and find the food with which to feed them—chore that pleases her, however hard her labors— as she awaits the sun with warm affection, steadfastly watching for the drawn to break: (vv. 1–9) And like an infant who, when it has taken its milk, extends its arms out to its mother, its feeling kindling into outward flame, each of those blessed splendors stretched its peak upward, so that the deep affection each possessed for Mary was clear to me. (vv. 121–26)
The simile of Beatrice as mother bird makes her fully loveable for the first time in the Commedia. Gone is the admiral of the reunion scene in Purgatorio; gone, too, the infantilizing interlocutor of the earlier cantos of Paradiso. Associating Beatrice with the lovely augello of the opening lines as well as with Mary, she becomes what Dante calls her here in the first of three exclamations, “O Bëatrice, dolce guida e cara!” (O Beatrice, sweet guide and dear) (v. 34). The canto reveals the poet to be making one of his fundamental moves: he “maternalizes” Beatrice to neutralize the erotic dimension of his love for her, and then eroticizes the maternal to restore the affective component so important to the poem’s texture. Beatrice is like the attentive nurturing mother bird, but the bird is described in language which retains the lexicon of stilnovistic love lyric.
Dante will invoke the mother-suckling infant relationship that frames this canto at its beginning and end in two subsequent moments of visionary intensity. In Paradiso 30, as he is about to bathe his eyes in the river of light, he describes himself as a hungry infant: “No infant who awakes long after his usual hour would turn his face toward milk as quickly as I hurried toward that stream” (vv. 82-84). Three cantos later, he compares his inability to describe the vision of the “highest light” to the inarticulateness of “one whose infant tongue still bathes at the breast” (33. 107-108). The importance Dante accords the mother-infant relationship and the quasi-erotic language that he uses for it has a modern gloss in the work of the psychoanalyst Hans Loewald, who posits Eros as the fundamental force that permeates and constitutes the infant-mother field central to a person’s development. In Dante’s poem it turns out that even fathers can be mothers, as when Virgil carries Dante to safety in Inferno 23.37- 42 like a mother who takes no care for herself in her anxiety to save her child. Likewise, Statius refers to Virgil’s Aeneid as his “mother and his nurse” (Purgatory 21.97-98). The “milkiness” of Paradiso 23 is fitting given that the Milky Way is, as Dante says in the Convivio (2.14. 7?) one of the distinguishing features of the Heaven of the Fixed Stars.
The triumph of Christ
Following upon the mother bird anticipating the sunrise, the canto’s second extended simile establishes the relationship between Christ and the blessed. Even though this figure concerns the sun and the stars that all derive their light from the sun, the simile begins with a magically serene image of the full moon and the stars at night. In Paradiso 10 Dante had compared himself and Beatrice in the midst of the twelve “spiriti sapienti” to the moon surrounded by a lunar halo, thereby suggesting that the Church and her wise doctors are analogous to Christ and his apostles. Now in canto 23, Christ is once again figured by the sun, but the simile in fact foregrounds the moon: Quale ne’ plenilunïi sereni Trivïa ride tra le ninfe etterne che dipingon lo ciel per tutti i seni, vid’ i’ sopra migliaia di lucerne un sol che tutte quante l’accendea, come fa ’l nostro le viste superne. Like Trivia—at the full moon in clear skies— smiling among the everlasting nymphs who decorate all the reaches of the sky, I saw a sun above a thousand lamps; it kindled all of them as does our sun kindle the sights above us here on earth. (vv. 25–30)
As Dante describes the sun by means of a description of the moon, the reader must remember that, while the moon and stars may be seen together, the sun and the stars are never visible at the same time. Furthermore, both the “real” sun and moon were left behind several cantos earlier. This is typical of the Paradiso’s way of retrieving elements of the cosmos that have been transcended and then reweaving them into the text. Planets, stars, flowers, even seasons become part of the texture of the heavens when they are no longer physically present. This manipulation of the cosmos is apparent in the opening of the canto as well, where the longed-for dawn takes place at the zenith of the sky rather than at the horizon. As Durling and Martinez (1990) point out, there are many correspondences between the Sphere of the Sun and that of the Fixed Stars, and by bringing elements of the Sun into Gemini Dante recreates the zodiacal situation at his own nativity.
Commentators agree that what Dante sees in the blinding solar light is the glorified body of Christ. Dante’s language is deliberately not corporeal: “lucent substance” is as far as he goes in specifying what he sees. The glowing body of Christ outshining its luminous aura reminds us of Solomon’s speech in Paradiso 14 which speaks of a coal outshining the flame it kindles just as the brightness that envelops the glorified body will be? surpassed by the visibility of its reborn flesh (vv. 52-57). More time is spent on the pilgrim’s reaction to the vision, the ecstasy that expands his mind at the same time that it goes beyond his ability to remember or describe. Beatrice explains, echoing 1 Corinthians 1:24, that he has been overcome by “the Wisdom and Power that opened the roads between earth and heaven.” It is a vision which enables him to sustain the power of her smile, which she invites him to behold: “the things you witnessed will have made you strong/enough to bear the power of my smile” (vv. 47–48). Throughout the later cantos of Paradiso Dante undergoes a continuous accommodation of his visionary capacity by being first overwhelmed in order to subsequently bear increasingly luminous and powerful sights.
Beatrice’s smile
Her invitation triggers the poet’s resort to the ineffability topos: his inability to render the “holy smile that lit the holy face of Beatrice” signifies the limits of poetry itself. If all the tongues that Polyhymnia together with her sisters made most rich with sweetest milk, should come now to assist my singing of the holy smile that lit the holy face of Beatrice, the truth would not be reached—not its one-thousandth part. (vv. 55–60)
Beatrice’s smile is conflated with Paradise itself when Dante speaks of the “leap” he must make, given his inability to represent the truth of her smile: And thus, in representing Paradise, the sacred poem has to leap across, as does a man who finds his path cut off. (vv. 61–63)
Dante refers once again to the necessity of “leaping” in the following canto (24.25) where it is a “divine song” that cannot be rendered. Barolini (1992) calls attention to the role of these leaps (or “jumps,” as she prefers to call them) as an aspect of Dante’s purposeful development of a non-linear, anti-narrative style in Paradiso’s latter cantos. The “leaps” that interrupt the narrative flow of the canto include the poet’s exclamations and his repeated references to the poetic challenges of the task at hand. They make it difficult to recount the canto’s progress in orderly sequence since they repeatedly fragment the narrative line.
Although the Paradiso contains many examples of the “ineffability topos,” this instance is exceptionally lengthy since it is extended over five terzinas. It leads Dante to speak about the challenge he is undertaking as a “weighty theme,” and to call attention to the audacity of his task: This is no crossing for a little bark— the sea that my audacious prow now cleaves— nor for a helmsman that would spare himself. (vv. 67–69)
The triumph of Mary
Beatrice turns Dante’s attention away from herself to the scene in front of him, to the “fair garden blossoming (s’infiora) beneath Christ’s rays” (v. 72). Dante uses the reflexive verb “infiorarsi” five times in Paradiso; here, as in Paradiso 14.13, it conveys the sense of the soul’s radiance in blessedness, its blossoming beatitude. Once Christ has ascended, all that remains of his blinding radiance is the ray that lights up the rest of the scene, which is compared to a flowery field illuminated by the sun passing through a broken cloud cover. Under a ray of sun that, limpid, streams down from a broken cloud, my eyes have seen, while shade was shielding them, a flowered meadow. (vv. 79–81)
Extending the garden imagery, Beatrice first speaks of Mary as “the Rose in which the Word of God became flesh,” (73-74) introducing the language of the liturgy which is further developed in the subsequent references to Mary as “living star,” a phrase that recalls the hymn “Ave stella maris” and the liturgical “Mary mattutina.” Most striking is Dante’s development of the idea of Mary as the “fair sapphire, the brightest light that has ensapphired heaven.” (102) He brings together the traditional association of the Madonna’s blue robe and the precious qualities of the sapphire. As Bosco and Reggio note, the medieval sapphire was lapis lazuli, whose field of blue speckled with iron pyrites makes it look like a sky strewn with stars. We are also reminded of the “gentle (dolce) hue of oriental sapphire” that described the first sight of the sky at the opening of Purgatorio. “Ensapphired” is one of Dante’s choicest neologisms.
At the heart of Mary’s “triumph” is the angelic torch of light that encircles her, forming a lucent and melodic crown that celebrates her role in the Incarnation. In this figure Dante brilliantly brings together the Annunciation and the Coronation of the Virgin, the first and the final acts of Mary’s role in salvation history. (In Books of Hours, the Annunciation and the Coronation are illustrated at Matins and Compline, that is, at the earliest and latest of the Offices). Not surprisingly, several of the early illustrators of this canto place an image of the coronation of the virgin in the scene. Dante is likely to have seen the two great Roman apse mosaics in Sta Maria del in Trastevere and Sta Maria Maggiore, which are among the earliest versions of this iconography in Italy. The Coronation of the Virgin, with its bridal imagery and frequent allusions to the lush language of Song of Songs, is an icon that abolishes the generational difference between Christ and Mary. In many painted versions of the image (such as the one by Paolo Veneziano in the Frick museum), the Madonna is both a queen and a tender bride. She wears a crown but inclines her head sideways, her arms crossed in the posture of humility often seen in Annunciations. This pictorial yoking of the humble annunciate and the queenly Mary is analogous to Dante’s double emphasis on Mary’s maternal tenderness and her regality. At the canto’s end, the blessed both look to her as a nursing mother and they sing to her as Queen of Heaven. The hymn they sing, Regina Coeli, is an Easter hymn that celebrates her maternity in relation to Christ’s Resurrection: “Hail, Queen of Heaven, rejoice, alleluia,/For He whom thou didst merit to bear, alleluia,/Hath risen, as He said, alleluia.” As St Bernard’s prayer to the Virgin in the final canto puts it, Mary is at once “umile e alta più che creatura,” (more humble and sublime than any creature) at once most humble and most exalted. Dante’s style in this canto attempts a similar yoking of simplicity and sublimity.
The Annunciation is strategically invoked throughout the Commedia as the most significant episode in Dante’s incarnational theology and poetics. On the terrace of Pride in Purgatory, the first of seven, it constitutes the first image of humility, with the angel’s greeting (Ave) and Mary’s humble response (Ecce ancilla Dei) specifically recalled (10.40). Each purgatorial terrace thereafter also begins with an example of Mary’s virtue, and the final terrace returns to the Annunciation, this time underlining Mary’s virginity as it is affirmed in her question to the angel of how she could be with child since she has not known a man (Virum non cognosco, 25.127). At the close of Paradiso 3, Dante has Piccarda Donati take her leave by singing the angel’s greeting to Mary, “Ave, Maria.” And in the Empyrean (32.96) an angel sings “Ave, Maria, gratia plena” to the Virgin, with all the blessed singing responsively with him. This angel is identified with the “angelic love” that descends to encircle the Virgin in canto 23 and is described as “enraptured” by the beauty of Mary. In a perceptive meditation on Dante’s devotion to Mary, the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar speculated, “Dante would have wished to be this angel.” (1973: 93).
The “coronation scene” in the final canto is anticipated in Paradiso 23 by the circulating angelic torch who speaks of itself as “angelic love.” I am angelic love who wheel around that high gladness inspired by the womb that was the dwelling place of our Desire. (vv. 103–5)
The six lines of the angel’s “circulating melody” offer a mini-epitome of the circular construction of the canto itself and its propensities for enjambment and repetition. Except for the line that separates its two terzinas, the rest of the lines are enjambed, leading us from one line into the next with unusual fluidity.
As Pertile (1984) has shown, the canto is rich in syntactical and phonic repetitions. The canto’s highly alliterative and assonantal texture is visible in the angel’s song in the repetition of words (girare), internal rhymes, and vowel sounds.
The angel’s song concludes with a choral response from the other lights who “resounded with the name of Mary.” Dante moves at once to describe the Primum Mobile, the “royal cloak of all the wheeling spheres/within the universe.” () It is still so distant that it remains out of sight, and thus the pilgrim cannot follow the assumption of Mary who follows her son upwards beyond the Primum Mobile to the Empyrean where she will be visible to Dante at the poem’s end. The loving response of the blessed to Mary and their devoted singing of the Regina coeli brings the Marian scene to a conclusion. Affection, delight, and sweetness (affetto, diletto, cantando si dolce) recall the lexicon of the opening simile as we return to the mode of mother-infant intimacy. Perhaps the canto might have ended right here, emphasizing its circular construction.
Abundance
In the final ten lines of the canto, attention shifts from the celebration of the Virgin back to the group of the blessed who are enjoying the reward of their toil on earth in the joy of Paradise. Life on earth is referred to as “Babyonian exile” in contrast to the delight of Heaven. The mention of exile implicitly connects the situation of all the blessed to that of the poet whose own exile has been one of the major themes of the poem. Dante celebrates the blessed he sees momentarily clustered in this place: Oh, in those rich coffers, what abundance is garnered up for those who, while below, on earth, were faithful workers when they sowed! Here do they live, delighting in the treasure they earned with tears in Babylonian exile, where they had no concern for gold. (vv. 130–35)
The final triumph is that of St Peter, “he who is keeper of the keys of glory,” whose “victory” is that of the Church Triumphant. The canto ends with the figure of Peter who will examine Dante on the virtue of Faith in the following canto. Nothing in the warmly affective and maternally inflected canto we have discussed quite prepares us for the demanding examination Dante is about to undertake in the following canto. But it does offer a “prelibation,” to use a Dantesque term, of the language and the joys of the Empyrean. Like Mary, it brings together the “umile e alta,” the intimacy of the sermo humilis and the mastery of the high style.
Bibliographical note
Text of translation quoted: Paradiso, A Verse Translation by Allen Mandelbaum, Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 1984
There are a number of imaginative and suggestive readings of this canto that have influenced my essay. Among the Italian commentaries on the canto, I recommend those by Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi (Milano: Mondadori, 1997) and Umberto Bosco (Florence: Le Monnier, 1982). Also in Italian is Lino Pertile’s meticulous analysis, originally in The Italianist 4 (1984), 7-34 and now Chapter 7 in his book, La punta del disio (Florence: Cadmo, 2005, 181-211). Two of the most interesting readings of the canto can be found in Robert M. Durling and Ronald L. Martinez, Time and the Crystal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 24-50 and Teodolinda Barolini, The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 223-28. My understanding of the iconography of the Coronation of the Virgil was amplified by Philippe Verdier, P. Le couronnement de la vierge (Montreal: Institut d’études médiévales Albert-le-Grand, 1980). On the importance of Mary in the Commedia see Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Dante (Brescia: Morcelliana, 1973), especially Chapter 4 which argues for the “forma mariana” of the Paradiso.