Authors: Dante
43–48.
Trajan, the Roman emperor (a.d. 98–117), is closest to the Eagle’s beak in the semicircle that describes the “eyebrow,” as it were, above David, located as the pupil of the eye. For his humble service to the widow and the tradition of his salvation, see
Purgatorio
X.73–93 and the appended note. For some of the twists and turns in the history of the accounts of the salvation of Trajan, see Picone (Pico.2002.6), pp. 313–19.
Now Trajan appreciates, both by now being here with God and by having been in Limbo, the cost of not following Christ.
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49–51.
Hezekiah, a king of Judah in the seventh century b.c., was a just monarch, according to the Bible, at least in his own accountancy (see II Kings 20:3).
His tears (but were they shed in penitence?) are found in Isaiah 38:3, as was first noted by Jacopo della Lana (comm. to verse 51). Here is the pertinent passage (38:1–5): “In those days Hezekiah became sick and was at the point of death. And Isaiah the prophet the son of Amoz came to him, and said to him, ‘Thus says the Lord: Set your house in order, for you shall die, you shall not recover.’ Then Hezekiah turned his face to the wall and prayed to the Lord, and said, ‘Please, O Lord, remember how I have walked before you in faithfulness and with a whole heart, and have done
what is good in your sight.’ And Hezekiah
wept
bitterly. Then the word of the Lord came to Isaiah: ‘Go and say to Hezekiah, Thus says the Lord, the God of David your father: I have heard your prayer; I have seen your
tears
. Behold, I will add fifteen years to your life’ ” (italics added). Hezekiah in fact here does not weep out of penitence, as Dante says he did, but the detail that God saw his tears and then remitted his sentence of death was perhaps enough to suggest to the poet that the king was contrite for his sins, and not merely brokenhearted and afraid.
Now Hezekiah knows that answered prayers are part of God’s plan, rather than representing a change in it (cf.
Purg.
VI.28–42, where the same question is raised about Virgil’s views on this matter). Carroll (comm. to vv. 49–54) puts this well: “In short, what Hezekiah now knows in Heaven is the mystery of how prayer harmonizes with and fulfils ‘the eternal judgment,’ instead of being, as it seems, an alteration of it.”
For Hezekiah as “type” of Dante, see Charity (Char.1966.1), p. 230, and the note to
Inferno
I.1.
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52–54.
Tozer (comm. to this tercet) paraphrases and interprets this passage as follows: “ ‘when a worthy prayer causes that which was ordained for the present time to be postponed to a future time’; this was what happened in Hezekiah’s case through the postponement of his death. The meaning of the entire passage here is, that what God has ordained is not changed in answer to prayer, because God has already provided for it.”
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55–60.
Since the spatial arrangement of the inhabitants of the Eagle’s semicircular eyebrow is not chronological, the fact that Constantine (274–337) is the middle figure in it, and thus the highest, takes us by surprise, given the number and vehemence of Dante’s outbursts against the Donation (e.g.,
Inf.
XIX.115–117,
Purg.
XXXII.124–129; and see
Monarchia
, which fairly seethes with them). In this passage Dante settles for Constantine’s good intent in his governance of the Eastern empire. However, now this emperor knows that if the evil he unwittingly committed has not harmed him, it has nonetheless destroyed the world. Dante may allow him salvation, but makes him pay for it eternally and dearly with this permanent wound in his self-awareness. This does not efface the glory his good intention won him, but it does mar its beauty.
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61–66.
William the Good, king of (Naples and) Sicily (ruled 1166–89), is presented as mourned by his subjects (he died young, at thirty-five), who now must suffer the misdeeds of his two successors, Charles of Anjou
(who ruled Apulia) and Frederick II of Aragon (who ruled Sicily itself—see
Par.
XIX.127–135, where these two are the sixth and seventh unworthy rulers in that pestilential acrostic). Now William, who was widely celebrated in his lifetime for his lawful reign and his generosity, knows that God loves a just king.
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67–72.
Ripheus is unlike the first five identified rulers in not ever having been mentioned within a Christian context by anyone at all; he is also the only one of them not to have been a king or an emperor. Indeed, he is a sort of “extra,” a bit player (if a heroic and probably highborn one) in the
Aeneid
, barely mentioned but for his death fighting along with Aeneas (
Aen
. II.426–428; see also II.339, II.394). Dante does not refer to a particular good deed that he performed, insisting instead on the general fact of his justness. The not inconsiderable poetic space (vv. 118–129) devoted to “explaining” his Christian belief has never diminished readers’ amazement at finding him here. That is not surprising, as even he is portrayed (in verse 72) as not knowing the reason for his being among the elect.
For a recently discovered (it had been hiding in plain view for centuries) and probable source, or at least confirmation, of Dante’s view of Ripheus, see Scott (Scot.1994.1), pp. 190–92, pointing out that a passage in Boethius (
Cons. Phil
. IV.6[pr].127–131) offers several reasons to think it was in Dante’s mind as he wrote this passage: (1) that Boethius is referring to the same passage that scholars habitually point to as Dante’s source in
Aeneid
II seems highly likely; (2) the Boethian context is utterly appropriate, since it involves the surprising nature, in human eyes, of providence; (3) the passage includes a specific reference to Lucan’s Cato of Utica (
Phars.
I.128), approving Cato’s worth (even though he lost his war) against that of Caesar, though Julius (and not Cato) was victorious (see Dante’s presentation of Cato in the first two cantos of
Purgatorio
). The text in question reads in part as follows (tr. W. V. Cooper, italics added): “For, to glance at
the depth of God’s works
with so few words as human reason is capable of comprehending, I say that what you think to be most fair and most conducive to
justice
’s preservation, that appears
different to an all-seeing Providence.
Has not our fellow-philosopher
Lucan
told us how ‘the conquering cause did please the gods, but the conquered,
Cato
?’ ” One can only imagine how Dante felt, seeing that his own radical and dangerous ideas had some justification in no less an authority than Boethius. For an earlier, similar, but not quite as pointed recognition of the influence of the
Consolatio
(and particularly its fourth book) on Dante’s thought here, see Chiarenza (Chia.1983.2).
On the other hand, one may be excused a certain dubiety concerning the genuineness of Dante’s belief in the salvation of this pagan. Virgil has handed Dante the stick with which to beat him: After he calls Ripheus the most just of the Trojans (“iustissimus”), he concludes with the phrase “dis aliter visum” (to the gods it seemed otherwise [
Aen.
II.428]); the muffled meaning seems to be that the gods do not care about just humans, and “kill us for their sport” (as King Lear phrased it). Dante lands hard upon Virgil for this judgment: His Christian God reverses pagan justice. (For this view, see Hollander [Holl.1983.1], p. 138; for a more conciliatory one, Bosco/Reggio, comm. to verse 68.)
Chiarenza (Chia.1995.3), pp. 304–5, puts into intelligent focus the way so much of
Paradiso
XX reopens the “question of Virgil” in our minds: “Virgil’s drama is based on the contingency that he died just nineteen years before the birth of Christ. If God could extend Hezekiah’s life by fifteen years, why did He not extend Virgil’s by little more? It was said that St. Paul, moved by the beauty and wisdom of Virgil’s poetry, prayed at the poet’s tomb for his salvation. (For this topic, she adverts to the work of Comparetti [Comp.1872.1], p. 98; Davis [Davi.1957.1], pp. 103–4; and Vickers [Vick.1983.1], p. 72.) If God could answer Gregory’s prayers for Trajan, why did He reject the similar prayer of the great St. Paul? How could a minor figure in Virgil’s poem have caught the attention of God, while Virgil himself failed to?” Whether we like it or not, we have heard the answer to our question in the last canto, when the Eagle came down hard upon Dante for his similar question (
Par.
XIX.79–90): We cannot weigh God’s intent, only recognize it.
On the question of God’s disposition of the virtuous pagans, see G. Fallani, “salvezza dei pagani,”
ED
IV (1973) and Picone (Pico.2002.6), pp. 311–13, and, with specific reference to Ripheus, pp. 317–20. For the interesting observation that Dante might have found an equally “salvable” pagan in the person of Galaesus, also referred to by Virgil as “iustissimus” (in
Aeneid
VII.536), see Camerino (Came.1995.1), pp. 55–56, who sees Dante as observing this rather striking phenomenon and considering that the two “most just” pagans point only, again, to the inscrutable nature of God’s justice—as well, we might want to add, as of Dante’s.
Apparently first among the few to hear the echo here of the salvation of the Roman (and thus pagan) centurion Cornelius (see Acts 10:22–23; 34–35) was Scartazzini (comm. to vv. 68–69); most recently see Aversano (Aver.2000.2), p. 91, building the evidence for his point better than his (unacknowledged) predecessors: Cornelius the centurion, “vir
iustus
et timens Deum” (a just and God-fearing man [Acts 10:22; Aversano’s italics]).
He concludes, “In patristic exegesis this centurion is the type of the gentiles saved by the grace of God”; Cornelius “because of his great faith and his justness, received the gift of the Holy Spirit before he was baptized” (Aversano is citing Rabanus Maurus for this judgment).
Perhaps our poet was tempted to push his reading of Virgil past the point of no return. At any rate, that is what he has accomplished, making the condemned author of the
Aeneid
, alongside the similarly Limbo-bound hero of his epic, spend their eternities in the lower world of an afterlife they neither believed in nor deserved, while this “bit player” enjoys the fruits of Heaven. For him to be here, Ripheus necessarily had to welcome Christ into his life; again, one has a difficult time believing that Dante really thought so. But that is what he decided he thought.
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69.
Dante is aware that his treatment of Ripheus will astound at least some of his readers. That he wants them to couple it with his similarly contentious insistence on Solomon’s salvation (despite the warmly contrary opinions of some “big guns” of Christian theology, none bigger or more negative about the possibility of Solomon’s salvation than Augustine) is the opinion of Lauren Seem (Seem.2006.1), p. 77. She points out that both Solomon (
Par.
X.109) and Ripheus are the fifth lights in the shapes that they and their colleagues have temporarily assumed in order to display themselves to Dante, a circle and the eyebrow of an eagle, and that both were spectacularly provocative selections for salvation.
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73–78.
The Eagle, delighted by its own report of the salvation of Ripheus (and by the fact that not even he understands why he was saved), is like a lark satisfied by its own song, silent in its flight, savoring that melody in memory. The ensuing description of the silent emblem is not easy to decode, but it seems to refer to the Eagle (
l’imago
) as stamped (
de la ’mprenta
) by the eternal Beauty that is God (
l’etterno piacere
), by whose will each thing becomes that which it is. In this case that last and rather puzzling general statement probably refers most directly to Ripheus’s saved soul, as the context suggests.
This passage has understandably caused a certain amount of debate (for a summary, see Scartazzini [comm. to vv. 76–78]). Its key phrase (“la ’mprenta / de l’etterno piacere”) either means that the Eagle bears the imprint of God’s will or is the imprint of His beauty. Most of the commentators, including Scartazzini, are of the first persuasion. However, when speaking of the
etterno piacere
of God, Dante elsewhere seems to refer to His everlasting beauty (see Took [Took. 1984.1], pp. 10–11, 17–22). The
phrase also occurs in
Purgatorio
XXIX.32 and
Paradiso
XVIII.16. In addition, in
Paradiso
the word
piacere
, standing alone and referring to God, frequently seems to indicate His beauty (see
Par.
XXVII.95, XXXII.65, and XXXIII.33). And so we have translated the phrase, if gingerly, as we have. This is a possible reading, but not a certain one.
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73.
John of Serravalle (comm. to vv. 73–78) is alert to the charming pun available in the name of the bird (
allodetta
, lark). He puts Latin words into its beak: “Surge, Deum
lauda
, iam lux est, cantat
alauda
” (‘Arise,
praise
God, for it is light,’ sings the
lark
[italics added, even though John’s play on words is lost in English]).
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