Authors: Dante
127–135.
Dante, aware of our awareness that not all creatures possessed of immortal souls tend toward the good, explains why not all arrows hit their target. The fault is not in the archer (God), but in the material (Beatrice switches metaphoric equivalence in mid-metaphor, moving from archery to the production of artifacts): Some of the craftsman’s work is faulty because of the innate shortcomings of his material. It is a paradox that God’s more noble creatures may swerve in their movement while the lesser follow more predictable paths; that paradox results from the unique gift of the freedom of the will to humans and to angels (see
Par
. V.19–24).
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136–141.
Having offered the necessary philosophic background, Beatrice now more or less answers Dante’s question: His natural inclination is to move upward. To be sure, his quandary (vv. 98–99) was how he, as an object possessing mass and weight, could penetrate matter, and this concern is not, strictly speaking, answered in her remarks so much as it is bypassed for a higher degree of abstraction.
Bosco/Reggio (comm. to verse 141) set into relief the paradox that underlies these two
terzine
. While Dante’s voyage through the heavens is itself miraculous in any terms, his upward tendency, which seems paranormal to him, is utterly natural; that he was called to witness, as was Paul, is a mystery that only God can explain; that, once called, he rises through the spheres is explained by the merest science, the result of a spiritual force of gravity, as it were.
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142.
The final verse of the canto, returning to the narrative mode, describes Beatrice’s renewed contemplation of Heaven, to which she is obviously pleased to return, having had to lower her intellectual powers in order to explain what to her is intuited and obvious to such an auditor as Dante, with his as yet necessarily lesser capacity to experience and to understand the highest truths.
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1–18.
For the Ovidian resonances in this passage, so marked by classical motif (the poem as voyage across a sea, the poet as inspired by gods and/or muses) and allusion (Jason and the voyage of the Argonauts), see Picone (Pico.1994.1), pp. 191–200.
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1–6.
The canto begins apparently by discouraging the “average reader” from attempting to understand it. As we shall shortly discover, only some of us are welcomed to the attempt (vv. 10–18). We may be put in mind of the similar gesture near the beginning of
Convivio
(I.i.2–6). That passage continues (I.i.7): “Blessed are the few who sit at the table where the bread of the angels is eaten, and most unfortunate those who share the food of sheep” (tr. R. Lansing). See O’Brien (Obri.1979.1) for a strong differentiation of the references to the “bread of angels” in these two passages, the first accommodating secular knowing, this one based on faith and the Scriptures. For the differing audiences sought for
Convivio
and
Paradiso
, see Vincenzo Placella (Plac.1995.1).
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1.
Despite the distraction of an address to the reader, we realize that, beginning with the opening of this canto, we are in the sphere of the Moon. There is only one other occasion in the ten heavens when the entrance to a celestial realm coincides with the beginning of a canto:
Paradiso
XXI (Saturn). Those who are overwhelmed by the organized quality of Dante’s mind might like to be aware of its “disorderly” side as well.
The “little bark” inevitably reminds readers of the “small bark” (
navicella—Purg
. I.2) that represents Dante’s intellect at the beginning of
Purgatorio
. His capacities, we may infer, have increased in accord with his nearness to God; his ship, we understand by implication, is now a mighty craft; ours is the “little bark.”
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2.
For only the second time in the poem (see
Inf
. XXII.118), Dante addresses his readers as listeners, as Aversano (Aver.2000.2), p. 10, points out.
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3.
The phrase “ship that singing makes its way” once again capitalizes on the equation ship = poem (see
Purg
. I.2). The word
legno
as metaphoric expression, the material of construction being referred to as the thing itself, has a classical heritage and a heavy Dantean presence. While in
Purgatorio
it appears four times without once having this meaning, in
Inferno
it
had appeared ten times, in fully seven of which it denotes “ship” or “boat.” Now in the last
cantica
it is used six times, twice (here and in Canto XIII.136) with the meaning “ship.”
The self-consciously “literary” language continues that strain from the first 36 verses of the opening canto in less lengthy but similar behavior in the first 18 of this one. And see Paola Allegretti (Alle.2004.1) for a consideration of the opening passage of this canto (II.1–15) as the centerpiece between two other important passages involving ships,
Purgatorio
II.10–51 and
Paradiso
XXXIII.94–96, with ample consideration of classical sources, in a revisitation of Curtius’s often-cited essay, “The Ship of the Argonauts” (Curt.1950.1).
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4–6.
The warning sounds “elitist,” even scornful (and see the note to vv. 13–15). But if we think about what is at stake, nothing less than our salvation, its exclusionary nature seems only necessary. Did Dante really mean that those of us who have no Christian upbringing either cannot be saved or at least cannot be saved by reading Dante’s poem? The latter is what the passage apparently asserts, for if we lose track of him, we may lose track of God. It is perhaps necessary to remind ourselves that the voice we hear belongs to an unsuccessful, exiled Florentine, with one completed work longer than a single
canzone
(
Vita nuova
, some twenty years behind him), who has banked all that he is and has on this text that he will barely manage to finish before his death. The intervening centuries have allowed Dante an authority only doubtfully accorded him by his early commentators, who by and large manage to avoid paying sufficient attention to this amazing claim, with possibly the single exception of Benvenuto (comm. to vv. 5–6), perhaps the sole interpreter to put the potential failure of Dante’s readership in specifically Christian terms: “quia cum vestro parvo ingenio non possetis intelligere meam profundam materiam, et possetis
errare a via rectae fidei
” (lest, with your limited understanding, you fail to understand the depth of my material, and
wander from the path of the true faith
[italics added]). Benvenuto goes on to cite Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, not the
Consolation of Philosophy
, but the specifically Christian treatise,
The Trinity Is One God Not Three Gods
.
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7–9.
For a discussion of the triune God, see Canto I, note 13. And for the “triune Apollo,” see Di Scipio (Disc.1995.1), pp. 258–59, who offers a passage in Alain de Lille’s
Anticlaudianus
as a potential source for Dante’s Christianized Apollo. For the presence of a text of Alanus in another context, the river of light in
Paradiso
XXX, see the note to
Par
. XXX.61–69.
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7.
Familiar by now (e.g.,
Inf
. I.22–24,
Purg
. I.1–3) is the watery expression for nonaqueous spaces. The assertion that the poet is the first to report his travel over such “seas” is essentially true; for an exhaustive discussion of the topos of novelty in the
Commedia
, see Ledda (Ledd.2002.1), pp. 57–86.
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9.
Benvenuto (comm. to vv. 7–9) thinks that Dante’s “nove,” not only indicating the number “nine,” is more subtly construed as a form of the adjective
nuovo
(new), and believes that the poet felt the need for new muses since he was writing of the Christian God, not the pagan divinities. While that argument probably needs to be more accommodating (since the phrase “nine Muses” is bypassed only with considerable difficulty), it should have alerted readers to the unlikely presence of pagan goddesses at this height in the poem’s development. Suffice it to say that such concerns were expressed from time to time in the commentary tradition, but have never won the day, so that there results a certain unsureness of exactly how to deal with this verse. Scartazzini (comm. to this verse) has a useful review of such puzzlement, but does not attempt to solve the riddle himself. However, possibly the most compelling gloss to this verse was written by Giovan Battista Gelli halfway into the sixteenth century, and not in response to this verse, but to
Inferno
II.7–9: “Ma perchè io mi persuado che il Poeta nostro, per trattar di quelle cose divine, le quali son veramente divine, e non fabulose come quelle delle quali trattano quasi tutti gli altri poeti, abbia in tutte le cose ancor concetti molto più alti e più profondi di loro, dico ancora io (ascendendo con lo intelletto più alto, …) che le Muse, propiamente e divinamente parlando, significano quelle intelligenze, o sieno anime o sieno motori, che muovono e guidano le nove sfere celesti, cioè quelle de’ sette pianeti, quella del cielo stellato e quella del primo mobile” (However, since I am persuaded that our poet, in order to treat of things divine—indeed truly divine, not the stuff of fable, such as almost all other poets deal with—had in all things ideas both more lofty and more profound than they do; and I say further, ascending higher with my intellect, that the Muses, properly and divinely speaking, signify those intelligences, whether they be souls or movers, that move and direct the nine heavenly spheres, that is those of the seven planets, that of the Starry Sphere, and that of the Primum Mobile.) See Hollander (Holl.1993.3), p. 227, for a highly similar solution without, however, reference to Gelli. If the verse is read in this way, the discomfort of Benvenuto is addressed without twisting the literal sense of the line. It is the nine heavens that are referred to as “muses”; they are the sign of God’s creating power and lead Dante’s mind to port. (Several commentators, beginning with Vellutello,
refer to the Muses in this context as Dante’s
bussola
[compass], but only one [Campi, comm. to vv. 7–9] sees that metaphor in a Christian conceptual frame, i.e., that these are not the classical Muses.)
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10–12.
The handful of Christian readers who will be able to navigate the third canticle are marked by long devotion to the study of religious truth (not necessarily demonstrating, as several commentators urge, a more general philosophical interest). For the distinction, see Attilio Mellone, “Pane degli angeli,”
ED
(IV [1973]), p. 266, contrasting what is conveyed by the expression “bread of angels” when it is used in
Convivio
(I.i.7) to its meaning here; there it covers all kinds of knowing, but here only revealed truth.
The opening tercet looks to the Bible and to Dante’s
Convivio
, as Singleton points out (comm. to Par.I.1–6 and 10–11). While the biblical phrase (Psalms 77 [78]:25, Wisdom 16:20) is clearly theological in meaning, the passage from
Convivio
(I.i.7) is not: “Blessed are the few who sit at the table where the bread of the angels is eaten, and most unfortunate those who share the food of sheep!” (tr. R. Lansing). It seems likely that the author of the
Comedy
would look back upon these words with a shudder, noting this hostility to the most Christian of images, the faithful as a flock to which Jesus is shepherd.
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10.
“Voi altri pochi” (you other few): This is the fifteenth address to the reader in the poem. See the note to
Inferno
VIII.94–96; and see Ledda (Ledd.2002.1), pp. 117–58, for a full discussion of Dante’s addresses to the reader (nineteen in all, according to him [pp. 119–21]), as part of the poet’s larger authorial strategies.
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11.
For the meaning of the Eucharist in the liturgy for the Wednesday after Easter as informing this scene (which just happens to take place on the Wednesday after Easter, the day that Beatrice ascends with the protagonist), see O’Brien (Obri.1979.1), pp. 99–100. The offertory verse from the mass for that day, O’Brien reports, quoting the Roman Missal, contains the phrase “the bread of angels” in the following exalted context: “The Lord God opened the gates of Heaven and rained down manna upon them (the disciples in company of the risen Jesus) so that they might eat; He gave them heavenly bread; and, hallelujah, man ate the bread of angels (
panem Angelorum manducavit homo
).”
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