Paradiso (116 page)

43–48.
   God the Father made the corporeal natures of Adam and Christ directly. All other human bodies are formed with the influence of intermediating agencies (i.e., the angels and the stars). And thus, in Dante’s view, Thomas’s statement of Solomon’s singular intellectual gifts (
Par.
X.112–114) does indeed require further explanation, to which a goodly portion of the rest of the canto (vv. 49–111) will be devoted.
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49–51.
   This tercet perhaps exemplifies the “unpoetic” quality of this canto (representing the sort of “philosophic discourse” that Benedetto Croce so often inveighed against [e.g., Croc.1921.1]), the cause of its being denigrated even by those to whose lot it fell to write
lecturae
dedicated to it. For documentation, see Cahill (Cahi.1996.1), p. 245 and note 1 (p. 266).
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50–51.
   Thomas’s figure of speech, insisting that Dante’s view of Adam’s and Christ’s knowledge and his own championing of Solomon’s not only do not contradict one another, but are equally close to the truth as are two points coinciding at the center of a circle.
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52–87.
   This portion of Thomas’s speech is one of the most “philosophical” in the entire poem. It may serve as a pretext for answering the protagonist’s concern about Solomon’s relative perfection as knower; at the same time we sense that the poet simply wanted to posit his view of primary and secondary creation.

For a straightforward explanation, in simplified terms, of the passage, see Tozer (comm. to these verses): “What is created directly by God is perfect, whereas that which is created indirectly by Him through intermediate agencies and materials is imperfect; and therefore Dante is right in thinking that Adam, and Christ in His human nature, who belong to the former class, must have been superior in wisdom to all men, and therefore to Solomon.”
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52.
   “That which does not die” resolves into God, the angels, the heavens, prime matter, and the human soul; “that which must [die]” refers to all corruptible things (see
Par.
VII.133–141 and the note to vv. 124–138).
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53–54.
   All that God makes, eternal and bound by time, is made radiant by reflecting the Word (Christ as Logos) made by the Father (Power) in his Love (the Holy Spirit).
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55–60.
   The first step in this procession of God into His universe is for the Trinity to be reflected in the nine orders of angels (see the note to verse 59). See Moevs on these six verses: “The Trinity evoked in the [preceding] tercet is evoked again [in this one]: the Word-Son is a living light … which flows from the source of light ( … the Father), but is not other than … its source: both are a power of love, … which ‘en-threes’ itself with them” (Moev.2005.1), p. 121.
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57.
   Dante’s coinage
intrearsi
(literally, “to inthree oneself”) represents a form of linguistic boldness to which the reader has perhaps become accustomed. See, for example, the verb
incinquarsi
(literally, “to infive oneself”) in
Paradiso
IX.40.
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59.
   This is the first appearance (see
Par.
XXXIII.115; and see
Par.
XXIX.15 for the shining angelic substance announcing itself in the Latin verb
Subsisto
) of the Scholastic-flavored noun “subsistence,” that is, existence as purely related to God’s nature as is possible, here, in the nine orders of angels. Compare
Paradiso
XIV.73 and the note thereto. And see Alfonso Maierù, “sussistenza,”
ED
V (1976), pp. 493a–494b, who cites Boethius, in
De duabus naturis
, referring to “a being, which, in order to be able itself to exist, has no need of any other being.” See also Tozer (comm. to vv. 58–59): “These are called ‘subsistences,’ because this is the Scholastic term for that which exists by itself, and not in anything else; cp. Aquinas [
ST
I, q. 29, a. 2].” Among the earliest commentators there is a certain
hesitation in choosing between angels and heavens (e.g., Jacopo della Lana [comm. to vv. 55–60]). Benvenuto (comm. to vv. 55–60), however, is definitive in seeing the angels here (“idest in novem ordines angelorum”). The dispute meandered along until Scartazzini’s magisterial review (comm. to this verse) of that errancy and his interpretation fixed the identification (Benvenuto’s) for nearly all later discussants: the nine orders of angels. Scartazzini invokes passages in Dante’s own texts:
Epistle
XIII,
Convivio
II.v and III.xiv, and most particularly
Paradiso
XXIX.142–145. Today one cannot find a discussant who has not benefited from Scartazzini’s gloss, whether directly or indirectly; at the same time one can find no commentator (at least not among those included in the DDP) who even mentions him, although Singleton (comm. to this verse) does cite two of the Dantean passages that he cited.
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60.
   The presence of Christ, Itself three-personed but unitary, is reflected by myriads of angels in nine groups.
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61–66.
   The second stage of God’s progression (for the first see the note to vv. 55–60) is into that part of the universe created out of the four elements and, not directly by God, but indirectly and by various agencies. Lombardi (comm. to vv. 55–63) refers the reader to
Paradiso
II.112–141 for an earlier exposition of this process. The light of the Word (verse 55) blends its creative power with the angelic presences in each heavenly sphere, moving downward “from act to act” and reaching the elements, until it finally interacts with the most short-lived perishable things,
brevi contingenze
(brief contingencies). According to Scholastic philosophy, contingent things have the potential either to be or not to be, depending on the presence or absence of a conjoined formal property. Those perishable things that are shaped by form are, if produced from seed, animal or vegetable; if not, mineral.
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67–78.
   To explain the principle of difference, the results of which are so noticeable to any observer of any species, Thomas, wanting to avoid imputing to God a causal relation with mortality, ugliness, and/or failure, puts the blame for such things on Great Creating Nature. Thus the angel-derived powers of the planetary spheres are seen as waxing and waning, and the resultant creations (e.g., human beings, horses, zucchini, and garnets) variable.

Courtney Cahill (Cahi.1996.1), pp. 256–65, discusses this passage at some length (in a portion of her study subtitled “The Limitations of the
artista
in Thomas’s Discourse on Creation”).
Among other things, she puts forward the telling argument (p. 268, n. 25) that Thomas’s initial presentation of Nature as perfect maker of God’s creation is intentionally contradicted here, in order to account for the difference we find all around us in the world. She also finds that the image of the artist’s trembling hand reflects that of Daedalus, as portrayed by Ovid (
Metam.
VIII.211), citing Hollander (Holl.1992.2), pp. 229–30, for an earlier and identical observation. See also Hollander (Holl.1983.1), p. 135n., for the suggestion that this passage may also reflect
Aeneid
VI.32–33, recounting Daedalus’s double fatherly failure as artist to portray in gold his son’s fall from the skies.

As opposed to her performance in God’s direct creation, Nature, when she is working with the “wax” of secondary creation (i.e., not the first man, Adam, but his descendants; not the first apple, but the succeeding “generations” of the fruit, etc.), is
always
defective, coming up short of the archetype.
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77.
   For the word
artista
and its four appearances in the poem (here and
Par.
XVI.51; XVIII.51; XXX.33), see Hollander (Holl.1992.2), p. 217; Cahill (Cahi.1996.1), p. 257.
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79–87.
   Once again the Trinity is referred to—Spirit, Son, Father (in that order)—in order to distinguish between direct creation, under God’s unshared auspices, as distinct from the natural secondary creation of which we have just heard. Thus twice in history human beings were made outside the natural process, with the creation of Adam (as well as Eve, now not referred to by Dante, perhaps, but we can hardly forget that she was indeed remembered in vv. 37–39) and of Jesus marking the limits of human perfection, well beyond the otherwise unmatchable king of Israel.
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88–96.
   Without further explanation, Thomas says, Dante might still remain dubious; if he only considers who Solomon was and what moved him to ask for wisdom, he will understand. See III Kings 3:5–12, in which passage God appears to Solomon in a dream and promises to grant him whatever he asks for. Solomon responds by saying that God has made His servant into a king, but a king who has need of a knowing heart to judge his people. God, pleased by his answer, replies (in the passage quoted in
Par.
X.114 [and see the note to vv. 109–114]) “dedi tibi cor sapiens et intelligens, in tantum ut nullus ante te similis tui fuerit
nec post te surrecturus sit
” (I have given you a wise and an understanding heart; so that there was
none like you before you, nor after you shall any arise who is like you [III Kings 3:12—italics added]).

According to Toffanin (Toff.1968.1), p. 453, Dante’s veneration of Solomon the king is the high point of his Ghibellinism.
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97–102.
   Thomas now contrasts practical kingly wisdom with typical Scholastic speculations, drawn from the following four fields: speculative theology (How many are the angels?), dialectic (Will a mixture of a necessary and a contingent premise ever yield a necessary conclusion?), natural science (Must we grant that motion had a beginning?), and geometry (Can a triangle be constructed in a semicircle in such a way that it not contain a right angle?). (All four answers are negative, beginning with the fact that, according to Dante, the angels are not numerable.) In Dante’s view, Solomon’s practical wisdom trumps all such formal intelligence. However, for a far different appraisal of Solomon’s kingly wisdom, see Carroll (comm. to vv. 88–111): “The real difficulty is that, history being the witness, all Solomon’s wisdom did not make him ‘sufficient as a king.’ The outward brilliance of his reign was but a veil which hid for the moment the slow sapping of his people’s strength and character through his luxury and licentiousness, his tyrannies, exactions, and idolatries. He sowed the wind, and his son reaped the whirlwind when the down-trodden people rent the greater part of the kingdom out of his hand. Whatever Dante may say, Solomon as a king was perhaps the wisest fool who ever lived. In saying this, I am quite aware that I may be incurring the censure on hasty judgments with which Canto XIII closes.”

On Solomon’s song as leading to truthful (and not seductive, deceiving) love, see Chiarenza (Chia.2000.1).
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97.
   For Dante’s own thoughts on this question, see
Convivio
II.iv.3–15 and II.v.4–5,
Paradiso
XXVIII.92–93 and XXIX.130–135. The angels are “quasi innumerabili” (all but innumerable [
Conv.
II.v.5]).
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98–99.
   For a helpful guide through the maze of medieval logical procedures, see Oelsner (comm. to vv. 97–102): “It is a general principle that no limitation that occurs in either of the premises can be escaped in the conclusion. Thus, if either of the premises is negative you cannot get a positive conclusion; if either of them is particular you cannot get a general conclusion; if either is contingent you cannot get a necessary conclusion. For instance, from ‘The man on whom the lot falls
must
be sacrificed,’ and ‘The lot
may
fall on you,’ you can infer: ‘therefore you
may
be sacrificed,’
but not ‘therefore you
must
be sacrificed.’ Ingenious attempts to get a necessary conclusion out of a necessary and a contingent premise are exposed by the logicians,
e.g.
‘Anyone who may run from the foe must be a coward; some of these troops may run from the foe, therefore some of them must be cowards.’ The fallacy lies in the ambiguous use of ‘may run from the foe.’ In the first instance it means, ‘is,
as a matter of fact
, capable of running away’; in the second, ‘may,
for anything I know
, run away.’ So that the two propositions do not hang together, and the conclusion is invalid.”
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100.
   That is, whether one can accept the notion that there existed a first motion, preceding all other motion. Benvenuto (comm. to vv. 97–102), after saying that, according to Aristotle’s
Physics
[VIII.1] motion is eternal, insists that theologians find that it, like the world, has a beginning, and goes on to cite Genesis 1:1: “In the beginning God made the heavens and the earth.” That was the First Mover’s first motion; before that nothing moved.
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