Authors: Dante
100.
For the connection of this image, “corrective” of divination, with Dante’s harsh views of that practice put forward in
Inferno
XX, see Hollander (Holl.1980.1), pp. 197–99.
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101.
Pertile (Pert.1991.3), p. 41, cites Wisdom 3:7: “Fulgebunt iusti, / Et tamquam scintillae in harundineto discurrent” (The just will shine forth, / And they will show themselves like sparks in the stubble), crediting Pietrobono (comm. to this verse) as being the only other reader to note this clear citation (but also see Fallani [comm. to vv. 100–102]).
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105.
This Sun is God and these arriving souls sing, apparently, of their desire to return to Him. It is of some interest that, forming the head of the Eagle, they are in fact moving up, and thus back toward Him.
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109–111.
Just as birds need no exemplar to design their nests, but follow some inner imprinting, so God needs no “model” for his creating. This simple paraphrase of the tercet would have come as a great surprise to almost all who either avoided dealing with it or who labored over it in order to find something “more profound” in it. Indeed, its first clear statement had to await Brunone Bianchi (comm. to this tercet) in 1868. However,
it is perhaps prudent to observe that the main opposing argument (there are several to choose from) has it that not the nests but the creatures within them, referred to by synecdoche, are portrayed as developing in accord with their archetypal form. And this just may be what Dante had in mind.
It was Grandgent (comm. to this tercet) who was perhaps the first to point to Thomas Aquinas for a potential source (
ST
I, q. 19, a. 4). Perhaps still closer is the reference put forward by Becker (Beck.1988.1) to Thomas’s
Quaestiones disputatae de veritate
, XXIV, a. 1, resp. 3, which has it that “all swallows build their nests in the same way.”
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112–114.
The rest of the spirits who had at first seemed to be content to make up the “enlilying” cap of the “M” now fill out the Eagle’s shape (his wings?). This detail would argue against those who claim that some of the first group are drawn up into this further design. It would seem rather that they stay in the original “m.” See the note to vv. 100–108.
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113.
For a consideration of a range of possible significances of this figure, see Sarolli (Saro.1971.1), pp. 337–56. Picone (Pico.2002.5), pp. 277–78, argues effectively for the fugitive vision that Dante has of the “M” as lily being the representation of the civic principles of Florence of the “buon tempo antico” as being consistent with the restoration of Roman imperial virtue in the city. Fumagalli (Fuma.2005.1) attempts to resuscitate the “French connection,” arguing that the passage (vv. 88–114) presents St. Louis (King Louis IX of France) in a better light than is customarily perceived. He admits that Fenzi (Fenz.2004.1) has offered a strong argument against such a view, but presents it anyway.
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115–117.
The first of the apostrophes with which this canto concludes is addressed (as will be the second) to the positive forces in God’s universal plan, first the tempering planet, just Jupiter. This tercet offers a clear example of Dante’s belief in astral influence on earthly behaviors, with Jupiter conceived as the heavenly shaper of human embodiments of justice. See
Paradiso
VIII.97–99 and VIII.122–126 and the appended notes.
Lenkeith’s chapter “Jupiter and Justice” (Lenk.1952.1, pp. 73–131) concludes with a citation of this tercet. She offers an evaluation of Dante’s debt to Cicero’s Stoic statecraft (with which the poet is in accord except for a total disavowal of its Godless theory of politics) and his total disagreement with Augustine’s theologically determined rejection of the state’s ability to have anything to do with “real justice” altogether.
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118–136.
The reader can hardly fail to notice the sudden and sustained shift in the tense of the verbs (from past definite in verse 116) to present, some eighteen verbs in all, from
prego
(I pray [118]) to
conosco
(I know [136]). The most dramatic is perhaps the resurrective “are alive” (
son vivi
) for Saints Peter and Paul in verse 132. But the ostensible reason for the shift in tenses is clear: Dante looks up from composing his text to see again the souls he had previously seen in this sphere (we will meet them only in
Par.
XX), first among them David, those of just rulers, to pray for their intervention with God to alleviate the civic distress of all on earth who have been led astray by corrupt clergy, presided over by a corrupt pope. For reasons to believe that Dante here is thinking specifically of the papacy and particularly of Pope John XXII, see the note to verse 130.
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118–123.
Now the poet turns his attention from this planetary home of justice, where he was suspended, to God the Father, who is the source of the justice that Jupiter rays down to earth, and prays that He will observe the “smoke” that extinguishes those just rays before they reach our world and will feel wrath at the offenders.
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122–124.
Each of these three verses is constructed from a different verse of the Bible. For the commerce in the temple, see Matthew 21:12; for the bloody cost of building the Church out of sacrifice and martyrdom, see Acts 20:28; for the heavenly militia, see Luke 2:13.
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124.
The second of the three concluding apostrophes is addressed to the souls of the just rulers, whom he contemplates, as he writes these words, in the Empyrean. Nowhere in this passage does the poet rise to a higher pitch of blissful contemplation than here, where he even now “holds in mind” those whom he has previously seen in this heaven. See the note to vv. 118–136.
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126.
Surely Dante does not mean that all on earth are misled by corrupt prelates; his negative enthusiasm runs away with him. But he clearly does mean to indicate the population of Italy (and of others as well) that is misgoverned by the Church.
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127–129.
The “bread” that God the Father bars to none is generally understood as the sacraments of the Church, and in this instance most particularly the sacrament of the Eucharist.
Since it is the Church that “makes war” by denying the sacrament of
communion (an inevitable consequence of excommunication), in a better age the Church (and not, as some commentators believe, ancient Roman warriors) must have been brave on the field of battle. Exactly what Dante means by this is perhaps as puzzling as the commentaries have allowed it to become. However, in this very canto we have heard about those worthies who battled against the soldiery of Mohammed in order to regain the Holy Land, the Crusaders. Is this an approving recollection of the Crusades? No commentator apparently thinks so, but that fact in itself seems surprising. (Commentators who do attempt to identify the objects of these Christian weapons are content with a general sense, heretics and/or pagans.)
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130–136.
The third and final apostrophe is hurled at the sitting pope, and perhaps explains Dante’s reasons for shifting out of the normal “time zone” of the poem to a “now” in which Pope John XXII is very much alive. See the note to verse 130.
The rhythmn of the three apostrophes is noteworthy, the first two addressed to the temporary inhabitants of Jupiter and the permanent residents of the Empyrean (
O dolce stella, … O milizia del ciel
), lofty in tone; the last, brutally personal and in the casual intonation not far removed from that of the gutter (
Ma tu …
). This conclusion of the canto is meant to be scabrous, because it is concerned with scabrous deeds, the repeated selling of Christ for personal gain. These verses offer what may be considered an appendix to
Inferno
XIX (where we first met simoniac popes) in which we hear the sitting pontiff, his words lent him by the acid-tongued Signor Alighieri, sounding like a mobster in
The Godfather
or
The Sopranos
, speak of his dead “buddies,” one who was killed (John the Baptist, whose image, of course, adorns the florin) so that a political functionary could watch a striptease performed by his stepdaughter, and another two (whom we heard rightly named in the poet’s voice just now, Peter and Paul) disparagingly referred to as a fisherman and “Paulie”—to whom he greatly prefers the florin.
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130.
A probable reference to Pope John XXII, who acceded to the Holy See in 1316 (he would survive in it for thirteen years past Dante’s death, until 1334). John was not only French, but he decided to keep the Church in France, in its Avignonian “captivity,” thus managing to draw Dante’s ire. It has seemed to some that this diatribe against papal use of excommunication for political purpose is grounded in John’s excommunication of the imperial vicar Cangrande in 1317.
The last pope who had a speaking part in the poem was Adrian V, on his way to Paradise, addressed by the protagonist with the honorific
voi
(
Purg.
XIX.131). Now, in the poem called
Paradiso
, we hear the protagonist speak to the sitting pope, using the familiar
tu
, in the most disparaging terms and tone of voice.
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131–132.
Dante’s threat to Pope John is advanced in two lines hinged on the past tense of the verb “to die” (
moriro[no]
) and culminating in the triumphant assertion that the first keepers of the vineyard of the Church, who gave their lives for it as martyrs, are indeed alive (
vivi
). Peter and Paul (and John the Baptist, as we shall shortly hear), for the pope and his cofunctionaries, are dead indeed; but not for believers like Dante.
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1–6.
The Eagle is first seen as a discrete entity (
la bella image
) and then as its components, the individual just rulers who constitute this beautiful image of justice, each appearing as a much-prized precious stone, the ruby. The text goes on to suggest that all of them were glowing as though the sun were equally reflected in all of them at once (something that would not happen in earthbound optics, where uneven surfaces reflect a distant light variously). In fact, these “rubies,” red with the glow of
caritas
, are shining with their own light of affection, if that is eventually a reflection of God’s love for them.
Dante’s radical (and revolutionary, at least from an Augustinian point of view) notion is that earthly justice is the direct product of a divine principle. And, as we learned in the last canto (see the note to
Par.
XVIII.115–117), the souls of the shapers of those human institutions that serve justice are themselves shaped by the agency of this heaven.
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1.
The image of the Eagle, with its open wings, suggests, to Baranski (Bara.1995.4), p. 277, a passage from Deuteronomy 32:11, “expandit alas suas” (spreading out its wings), in the song about himself that Moses intones near the end of his life, in which he is presented as an eagle taking his chicks upon his back for an exodal ride. (Scartazzini cited that passage, but at
Purgatorio
IX.30.)
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2.
The term
frui
(to enjoy), first identified as deriving from St. Augustine by Benvenuto (comm. to vv. 1–3), probably arrives in Dante via Aquinas (
ST
I–II, q. 11, a. 3), as Scartazzini may have been the first to suggest.
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7–12.
What Dante must now report was never reported by voice, nor written in ink, nor present in the image-receiving faculty of the mind, for he had seen the beak speak and had heard it, too, when it uttered with its voice “I” and “mine,” while in its conception it meant “we” and “our.” We have had a similar experience once before, hearing Dante introduce himself as “we” and then speak as “I” in the first two lines of the poem (
Inf.
I.1–2): “Nel mezzo del cammin di
nostra
vita /
mi
ritrovai per una selva oscura.…”
St. Paul describes similar marvelous truths (I Corinthians 2:9) that “the eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined,” an observation dating back to Jacopo della Lana (proem to this canto). For
discussion of this example of Dante’s exploitation of the familiar topos of novelty, see Ledda (Ledd.2002.1), pp. 81–82.
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