Paradiso (88 page)

4–5.
   The second vehicle of the simile seems, from what one may find in the commentary tradition, not to have a discernible source anywhere. If that is true, what we have here is pure Dantean invention, a post-Scholastic paradox added to Thomas’s. Whereas in the first tercet Dante the questioner is likened to a hungry man unable to decide between two equally tempting foods (so long a time that he will, undirected by external agency, die), in these two lines he becomes the potential victim of his lupine questions, unable to decide which one to run from, since each looks equally fierce. While this part of the extended comparison surely seems askew, given the fact that Dante must choose which question to ask rather than which to avoid, the passage does impart something that will later be brought back into play (at verse 27): These questions are potentially destructive, and thus like (or at least not unlike) ravening wolves. And so, after initial puzzlement, a reader must admit that the apparently otiose comparison does pay its passage in the greater scheme. Angiolillo (Angi.1986.1) complains about the “incongruity” of this comparison, since it portrays immobility, not indecision; passivity, not aggression. But this is to miss Dante’s point: Solutions of his two doubts seem equally attractive and, potentially at least, the concerns that give rise to each of them are equally destructive. For a hypothesis relating to Dante’s own broken vow, which may account for the poet’s “overkill” in this simile, offering a sense of what makes the questions both attractive and dangerous, see the second paragraph of the note to vv. 139–142.
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6.
   While in the actual world two deer are capable of accomplishing more damage to a single dog than Dante’s text allows, it is clear that the third vehicle of the simile displays exactly the same relationship as the first: hungry Dante between two equally tempting viands. Here some commentators do suggest a source (see Bosco/Reggio on this verse: Ovid [
Metam
. V.164–167], first suggested by Pietro di Dante and then by Daniello, and/or possibly, if Mattalia is correct, Virgil [
Georg
. III.539–540], as was first suggested by the author of the Codice Cassinese). Angiolillo (Angi.1986.1) proposes the passage from Ovid, and then adds another
from Seneca’s drama
Thyestes
, 707–711. Whatever the source, what seems puzzling is the fact that our usually orderly and rigorous poet (or so we like to conceive him) here seems to have allowed himself an unnecessary repetition. It seems fair to say that, while detractors of the poet’s inclusion of the second piece of business (see the note to vv. 4–5) have failed to take the point behind it, the several expressions of discomfort with the third part of the simile have not had sufficient response. However, experience teaches that Dante knows his business far better than we; if we fail to fathom his purposes, that does not necessarily require that he was without them. A possible solution is to suggest that the three-part simile mirrors the process of the protagonist’s actual inner thoughts, moving from philosophical eagerness to fearful worry and then back to the first eagerness.
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13–15.
   The simile puts into parallel Beatrice (placating Dante’s anxiety) and Daniel (stilling Nebuchadnezzar’s wrath). It thus also necessarily puts into parallel Dante and Nebuchadnezzar, a relation that at first seems to make no sense at all. The poet has already visited this text in the Bible (the second book of the prophet Daniel), the king’s dream and the prophet’s interpretation of it (see
Inf
. XIV.94–111 for Dante’s version of that dream, embodied in the representation of the
veglio di Creta
). Here he fastens on its perhaps strangest aspect: the new king’s desire to kill all the wise men in his kingdom of Babylon who could neither bring his forgotten dream back to mind nor then interpret it—about as unseemly a royal prerogative as anyone has ever sought to enjoy. Thus it seems natural to wonder in what way(s) Dante may possibly be conceived of as resembling the wrathful king of Babylon. The entire commentary tradition observes only a single link: Nebuchadnezzar’s displeasure and Dante’s puzzlement are both finally relieved by (divinely inspired—see Trucchi on these verses) external intervention on the part of Daniel, in the first case, of Beatrice in the second. Why should Dante have cast himself as the tyrannical Babylonian ruler? That is a question that has stirred only the shorelines of the ponds of commentaries and has never had an answer. If one looks in the
Epistle to Cangrande
(77–82), however, one finds a gloss to
Paradiso
I.4–9 that is germane here. And apparently, in any discussion of this passage, only G. R. Sarolli, in his entry “Nabuccodonosor” (
ED
IV [1973]), has noted the striking similarity in the two texts, going on to argue that this similarity serves as a further proof of the authenticity of the epistle. In that passage Dante explains that his forgetting of his experience of the Empyrean (because he was lifted beyond normal human experience and could not retain his vision) has some egregious precursors: St. Paul, three of Jesus’
disciples, Ezechiel (their visionary capacity certified by the testimony of Richard of St. Victor, St. Bernard, and St. Augustine); and then he turns to his own unworthiness to be included in such company (if not hesitating to insist that he had been the recipient of such exalted vision): “But if on account of the sinfulness of the speaker [Dante himself, we want to remember] they should cry out against his claim to have reached such a height of exaltation, let them read Daniel, where they will find that even Nebuchadnezzar by divine permission beheld certain things as a warning to sinners, and straightway forgot them” (81—tr. P. Toynbee). Dante, like the Babylonian king, has had a vision that was God-given, only to forget it. And now he is, Nebuchadnezzar-like, distraught; Beatrice, like the Hebrew prophet, restores his calm. Thus the typological equation here is not idle; Dante
is
the new Nebuchadnezzar in that both he and the wrathful king, far from being holy men (indeed both were sinners), had access to visionary experience of God, only to forget their vision. The king enters this perhaps unusual history, that of forgetting a divine revelation on the part of those who were less than morally worthy, as “the first forgettor”; Dante, as the second (see Hollander [Holl.2005.1]).
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16–18.
   We are now reminded that all the fuss (vv. 1–12) over Dante’s paralyzed will, rendering him unable to choose which question to ask, was eventually in vain, since Beatrice can read his thoughts in God anyway. The poem, of course, needs to hold our attention and thus make Dante’s choices important, even when they are technically unnecessary. His development, as sinner gradually being made worthy of the visionary experience of God and thus of salvation itself, is the major strand of the narrative of the
cantica
. And thus the poet may at times allow himself a certain latitude with the rules of his own game, making his work the richer for it.
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19–27.
   Beatrice addresses the nature of Dante’s questions. The first concerns the apparent fact that even a person who never ceases willing the good, and who ceases doing good only by virtue of the force of others, is in some way responsible for that failure. The second, zeroing in on a problem that we frequently encountered throughout the previous canto (see the note to
Par
. III.29–30), concerns the ultimate abode of the blessed: whether or not they return to dwell forever in the stars that most shaped their personalities. This is the more pernicious of these two dangerous questions and will thus be addressed first, if at lesser length, vv. 28–63 (Beatrice’s answer to the first question will be found at vv. 64–114).
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19–21.
   
Beatrice makes the need to deal with Dante’s first question seem even more pressing by revealing that for him it has a personal interest: It is
he
who wonders if his own merit might be diminished through no fault of his own.
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24.
   Beatrice refers to Plato’s teaching as it is found in his
Timaeus
. See the note to vv. 49–54. Torraca, in his comment to this verse, the phrase “secondo la sententia di Platone,” cites Thomas’s
Summa contra gentiles
(II.83), “secundum Platonis sententiam.” Bosco/Reggio posit the possibility that, if Dante did not know the text of the
Timaeus
directly, he might have been acquainted with key portions of it through St. Augustine, St. Thomas, Albertus Magnus, Cicero, or Macrobius. This is the position, assumed tentatively, by most students of the question; some, however, take it that Dante did have direct knowledge of at least this one Platonic text. For Dante’s knowledge of Plato in general and the
Timaeus
in particular, see Edward Moore (Moor.1896.1), pp. 156–64. The great British Dantist makes a sound case for Dante’s direct acquaintance with Chalcidius’s text of the
Timaeus
(41 D and E, 42 B, p. 157) in the relevant passages of this canto and
Convivio
IV.xxi.2 and II.xiii.5, although on one occasion he admits to a reasonable doubt in that respect, offering a near disclaimer in the clause “in whatever form it found its way to Dante” (p. 160). Margherita de Bonfils Templer (Debo.1987.1), building on her previous investigations (see p. 90, n. 5 for these), makes her case for Dante’s use of the glosses to the
Timaeus
of Guillaume de Conches. And see her study of Platonic gnoseology in
Convivio
(Debo.1987.2). More recently, see Giuliana Carugati’s investigation (Caru.1994.1) of Dante’s reliance on Proclus in
Convivio
II and III. For a view counseling caution in attributing direct knowledge of the
Timaeus
to Dante, who refers to the work by name only once in
Convivio
(III.v.6) and then here, see Marta Cristiani, “Timeo,”
ED
V (1976), pp. 604–5. See also her entries “Platone,”
ED
IV (1973), pp. 546–50, and “platonismo,”
ED
IV (1973), pp. 550–55.
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25–27.
   Both of the protagonist’s questions reflect a dangerous uncertainty on his part about the nature of free will, which will be the subject of Beatrice’s urgent lecture at the beginning of the next canto. If he believes that compromise in making vows is possible or that our souls’ choices are controlled by the stars that govern our natures, he is in heresy. The second doubt, since it would destroy the notion of free will utterly (and not just partially), is the more dangerous, which is why Beatrice chooses to address it first. As Trucchi, discussing this tercet, points out, Plato’s notion that souls return to their formative stars, embraced by some
early Christians, was finally condemned at the Council of Constantinople in the year 540.
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25.
   Dante’s use of the Latin infinitive as a noun is not without precedent in the work: See
Paradiso
III.79,
esse
(to be [as substantive, “being”]);
Paradiso
XIX.2,
frui
; and, more interestingly in this context,
Paradiso
XXXIII.143, where
velle
(to will [as substantive, “the will”]) itself reappears, once again rhyming with
stelle
(stars). That only other recurrence of this Latin word may be more programmatic than has been noticed. Plato’s apparent doctrine, rejected here, receives a final disapproving glance in the last lines of the poem, in which Dante has his final vision of the universe as it truly is, and not as Plato’s
Timaeus
(and Dante’s
Convivio
[IV.xxi.2]: “Plato and others maintained that they issued from the stars and were more or less noble according to the nobility of their star”—tr. Lansing; and see also
Conv
. II.xiii.5) might have us believe.

There are some seventy-five Latin words or passages incorporated in this insistently vernacular work, more than half of them in its most “churchly”
cantica
,
Purgatorio
, as is not surprising.
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28–39.
   Beatrice’s refutation is in three main parts:

The first part refutes not only what Dante has shown himself to believe in the previous canto, namely that the souls in the Moon are there permanently (see the note to
Par
. III.29–30), but resolves what Piccarda and even Beatrice (depending on how one reads verse 30 of
Par
. III) had left an open question. Now we are told by Beatrice, definitively, that no soul of Paradise is present in any star, except for the occasion of Dante’s visit to the spheres. Thus if, while reading the ending of the last canto, we may (quite reasonably) have thought that Piccarda and Constance were heading back into the matter of the Moon, we now probably have to understand that they have returned to their home in the Empyrean.
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28.
   Indicating only the highest rank of angels, the Seraphim, Beatrice reminds Dante that
all
the nine ranks of angels are in the Empyrean and
are the beings closest to God. Here the poet resolves a potential problem, similar to that caused by the appearance of the souls in the spheres, in that readers might eventually assume that the angelic order most associated with a certain heaven actually dwells in that heaven. This verse cancels that potential reading before it can be applied.
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