The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
“My mind, already recovered from the surprise
of the great marvel you have just explained,
is now amazed anew: how can I rise
in my gross body through such aery substance?”
She sighed in pity and turned as might a mother
to a delirious child. “The elements
of all things,” she began, “whatever their mode,
observe an inner order. It is this form
that makes the universe resemble God.
In this the higher creatures see the hand
of the Eternal Worth, which is the goal
to which these norms conduce, being so planned.
All Being within this order, by the laws
of its own nature is impelled to find
its proper station round its Primal Cause.
Thus every nature moves across the tide
of the great sea of being to its own port,
each with its given instinct as its guide.
This instinct draws the fire about the Moon.
It is the mover in the mortal heart.
It draws the earth together and makes it one.
Not only the brute creatures, but all those
possessed of intellect and love, this instinct
drives to their mark as a bow shoots forth its arrows.
The Providence that makes all things hunger here
satisfies forever with its light
the heaven within which whirls the fastest sphere.
And to it now, as to a place foretold,
are we two soaring, driven by that bow
whose every arrow finds a mark of gold.
It is true that oftentimes the form of a thing
does not respond to the intent of the art,
the matter being deaf to summoning—
just so, the creature sometimes travels wide
of this true course, for even when so driven
it still retains the power to turn aside
(exactly as we may see the heaven’s fire
plunge from a cloud) and its first impulse may
be twisted earthward by a false desire.
You should not, as I see it, marvel more
at your ascent than at a river’s fall
from a high mountain to the valley floor.
If you, free as you are of every dross,
had settled and had come to rest below,
that would indeed have been as marvelous
as a still flame there in the mortal plain.”
So saying, she turned her eyes to Heaven again.
NOTES
1. of Him who moves all things: God as the unmoved mover. Since any change from perfection would have to be toward a lessening, God is changeless in Dante’s conception. Himself changeless (unmoved), therefore, He imparts the creating motion to all things.
2-3. reflected . . . in proportion to its worth: The more perfect the thing, the more perfectly it will reflect God’s perfect shining. The more clouded the glass, so to speak, the less its ability to reflect the light.
4. that Heaven of His most light: Literally: “that heaven that takes (i.e., “receives” and, by implication, “reflects again”) the most of His light.” The Empyrean.
5-12. those who descend . . . lack: Dante was not a mystic in the pure sense of the word, but all mystics have stressed the ineffability of the mystical experience. How does one convey any rapturous experience once the rapture is over? William James in his Varieties of Religious Experience offers a fine introductory discussion of this question. as our intellect draws near its goal: The goal of intellect is God.
13-36. THE INVOCATION. Heretofore, Dante has invoked the Muses. Now he invokes Apollo himself as the God of Poetry, and as the father of the Muses. Note, too, that Apollo is identified with the Sun and that Dante has consistently used the Sun as a symbol for God.
15. crowned with bay: The laurel wreath awarded to poets and conquerors. See also line 29 and XXV, 1-12.
16. one peak of cleft Parnassus: Parnassus has two peaks: Nisa, which was sacred to the Muses; and Cyrrha, which was sacred to Apollo. Heretofore Nisa has been enough for Dante’s need, but for this last canticle he must summon aid from both peaks (i.e., from all the Muses and from Apollo as well).
20-21. Marsyas: The satyr Marsyas challenged Apollo to a singing contest and was defeated. Ovid (Metamorphoses, VI, 382-400) recounts in gory detail how Apollo thereupon punished him by pulling him out of his skin leaving all the uncovered organs still functioning.
Note that in this godly sport the skin was not pulled off Marsyas but that Marsyas was pulled out of his skin. In citing this incident Dante may be praying that he himself, in a sense, be pulled out of himself (i.e., be made to outdo himself), however painfully. its sheath: its skin.
23-27. make clear even the shadow: Sense: “Lend me enough power to make clear so much as the shadow of the ineffable light, and your power and my lofty theme will win me a laurel crown.” your dear grove: The grove in which grows the sacred laurel, or bay.
31. the glad Delphic god: Apollo.
32. Peneian frond: The laurel or bay, so called for Daphne, daughter of the river god Peneus. Cupid, to avenge a taunt, fired an arrow of love into Apollo and an arrow of aversion into Daphne. Fleeing from the inflamed Apollo, Daphne prayed to her father and was changed into a laurel tree.
36. Cyrrha will reply: Cyrrha, Apollo’s sacred peak, is here taken for Apollo himself. If Apollo does not heed his prayer, Dante will at least show the way, and perhaps a better poet will come after him and have his prayer answered by Apollo, whereby Paradise will at last be well portrayed.
37-42. THE POSITION OF THE SUN AT THE VERNAL EQUINOX. Short of pages of diagrams, there is no way of explaining Dante’s astronomical figure in detail. A quick gloss must do: the lamp: The Sun. various stations: various points on the celestial horizon from which the Sun rises at various times of the year. four circles with three crosses: The four circles here intended are: (1) the celestial horizon, (2) the celestial equator, (3) the ecliptic, and (4) equinoxial colure. The equinoxial colure is the great circle drawn through both poles and the two equinoxial points (the solsticial colure, similarly, passes through both poles and the two solsticial points). Since the equinox occurs when the Sun crosses the celestial equator, both equinoxial points must lie on the equator and the equinoxial colure must be at right angles to the celestial equator. The celestial equator is the infinite extension of the plane of the earth’s equator into the celestial sphere.
When the Sun is in the position shown in the diagram the time is sunrise of the vernal equinox and all four circles meet, each of the other three forming a cross with the celestial horizon. Astrologers took this to be a particularly auspicious conjunction. Its happier course (line 40) brings the brighter and longer days of summer. Its happier conjunction (line 40) with the stars of Aries brings it back to the sign of the first creation (see Inferno, I, 38-39, note). And certainly the fact that the diagram forms three crosses would weigh it with the good omens of both the cross and trinity. All would once more be in God’s shaping hand. So the wax of the world (line 41) is warmed and sealed, in a first sense by the warmth of approaching summer, and in a clearly implicit spiritual sense by the favor of God’s will upon His creation.
This complicated figure could hardly have failed to suggest, further, some reference to the Four Cardinal Virtues, the Three Theological Virtues, and to the approaching Sun as Divine Illumination, now drawing to the full summer of mankind—for bear in mind that the southern hemisphere, in Dante’s geography, was all water: there would be no mankind for the Sun to shine upon in its southern summer.
43-44. evening here and morning there: At the time Dante returned from drinking the waters of Eunoë. It is now noon, for only at noon could the entire southern hemisphere be alight and the north dark—or so Dante must clearly intend, though I do not understand how that could be.
46. had turned left: Beatrice had been faci
47. no eagle ever: In the Middle Ages men believed that the eagle was able to stare directly into the Sun.
49-54. and as a ray: Just as a descending ray of light strikes a reflecting surface and sends a reflected ray back upward, and at the same angle at which it struck the surface, so Beatrice’s action in looking at the Sun descends upon Dante like a ray from on high that enters through his eyes and strikes upward to his mind giving rise to a “reflected” action.
62. day was added to day: Dante perceives the increased brilliance of the light as if God had added a second Sun to the sky, and he wonders at it. He does not yet know that the light has grown so much more brilliant because he is soaring through space toward the sun. He believes himself to be still in the Terrestrial Paradise.
Dante’s device here, in showing himself as soaring toward God at enormous speed without, at first, realizing that he is soaring, is a superbly conceived climax to the whole theme of Purification as Gradual Weightlessness. In Hell all is gross and heavy. At the start of the Ascent of Purgatory, Dante almost drops from exhaustion. As he mounts and sin is stricken from him, he climbs ever more lightly. Now purified and perfected, he need not even think about mounting on high. His new nature draws effortlessly to God.
68. Glaucus: The fisherman Glaucus, noting how his catch revived and leaped into the sea after being laid upon a certain herb, ate some of it and was transformed into a god (Ovid, Metamorphoses, XIII, 898-968). Staring at Beatrice, Dante feels the beginning inside himself of that change that will make him, too, immortal.
73-75. the last created part of my being: The soul, which is created after the body. (See Purgatorio, XXV, 37-75.) O Love that rulest Heaven: God. whose lamp: Beatrice as the reflector of God’s love.
76-78. The Great Wheel etc.: Dante says, literally: “The Wheel that Thou, in being desired [i.e., loved] by it, makest eternal.” The Great Wheel is the Primum Mobile, its motion deriving from the love of God. captured my attention: Indicates that Dante turned his eyes from Beatrice to look up again. that harmony: The Music of the Spheres.
79. ablaze with sun: Dante believed that the earth’s atmosphere extended as high as the Sphere of the Moon. Beyond the Moon is another atmosphere of fire. This sphere of fire was believed to cause lightning. (See also line 115, “the fire about the moon”.)
92. natural place: The Sphere of Fire. It summons all fire to itself. Conflicting forces of nature force the lightning downward, but the fiery elements dislocated under stress find their way back to their natural place. Dante still has not realized that he and Beatrice are soaring toward Heaven at an incalculable speed.
93. there: To the Sphere of Fire.
104. an inner order: In relation to one another, and each in its relation to the total and to its final end, as fire to fire (see line 115). The end of man is God; therefore, the purified soul ascends naturally and inevitably to Him.
106. the higher creatures: The rational beings of creation: angels, heavenly spirits, and men.
108. these norms: The mode and form of lines 103-104.
123. the heaven: The Empyrean. the fastest sphere: The Primum Mobile. The Empyrean does not move and it is beyond space. It is eternal and perfect Love (therefore unchangeable) and holds within its constancy all of space, including the outermost and greatest sphere, the Primum Mobile.
125. that bow: The innate impulse of all creatures to seek their place in God.
127-135. The free will of creatures allows them, despite the innate order of all things, to yield to false pleasures and so to resist God’s plan as the matter in which the artist works, being base and imperfect, may resist his intent to give it ideal form. One might argue against this figure that the artist in this case, being God, is omnipotent and could, at will, work in perfect matter. But to enter into such an argument would only be to bump heads on the question of fallible free will within an omnipotent creation—a question that has vexed Christian theology for millennia.
141. that would indeed have been . . . marvelous: Because then it would be going against the order of the universe. What is purified must ascend to God as inevitably as earthly waters must flow downhill.
Canto II
ASCENT TO THE MOON
THE FIRST SPHERE: THE MOON
Warning to the Reader
Beatrice Explains the
Markings on the Moon
DANTE AND BEATRICE are soaring to THE SPHERE OF THE MOON at a speed approaching that of light. Dante warns back the shallow reader: only those who have eaten of the knowledge of God may hope to follow him into the last reaches of his infinite voyage, for it will reveal such wonders as only faith can grasp.
His warning concluded, he and Beatrice enter the Sphere of the Moon and pass into the substances of the Moon as light into water, as God incarnated himself into man, or as the saved soul reenters God, without disruption of the substance thus entered.
Still unenlightened by the ultimate revelation, Dante does not understand how there can appear on the diamond-smooth surface on the Moon (as he conceived it) those markings we know as THE MAN IN THE MOON, and which the Italians knew as CAIN WITH HIS BUSH OF THORNS.
Beatrice asks for his explanation, refutes it, and proceeds to explain the truth of the Moon’s markings.
O you who in your wish to hear these things
have followed thus far in your little skiffs
the wake of my great ship that sails and sings,
turn back and make your way to your own coast.
Do not commit yourself to the main deep,
for, losing me, all may perhaps be lost.
My course is set for an uncharted sea.
Minerva fills my sail. Apollo steers.
And nine new Muses point the Pole for me.
You other few who have set yourselves to eat
the bread of angels, by which we live on earth,
but of which no man ever grew replete;
you may well trust your keel to the salt track
and follow in the furrow of my wake
ahead of the parted waters that close back.
Those heroes who sailed to Colchis, there to see
their glorious Jason turned into a plowman,
were not as filled with wonder as you will be.
The connate and perpetual thirst we feel
for the Godlike realm, bore us almost as swiftly
as the sight soars to see the heavens wheel.
Beatrice was looking upward and I at her
when—in the time it takes a bolt to strike,
fly, and be resting in the bowstring’s blur—
I found myself in a place where a wondrous thing
drew my entire attention; whereat she
from whom I could not hide my mind’s
least yearning
turned and said, as much in joy as beauty:
“To God, who has raised us now to the first star
direct your thoughts in glad and grateful duty.”
It seemed to me a cloud as luminous
and dense and smoothly polished as a diamond
struck by a ray of sun, enveloped us.
We were received into the elements
of the eternal pearl as water takes
light to itself, with no change in its substance.
If I was a body (nor need we in this case
conceive how one dimension can bear another,
which must be if two bodies fill one space)
the more should my desire burn like the Sun
to see that Essence in which one may see
how human nature and God blend into one.
There we shall witness what we hold in faith,
not told by reason but self-evident;
as men perceive an axiom here on earth.
“My lady,” I replied, “in every way
my being can, I offer up my thanks
to Him who raised me from the world of cl
But tell me what dark traces in the grain
of this bright body show themselves below
and cause men to tell fables about Cain?”
She smiled a moment and then answered me:
“If the reckoning of mortals fails to turn
the lock to which your senses hold no key,
the arrows of wonder should not run you through:
even when led by the evidence of the senses
the wings of reason often do not fly true.
But what do you believe the cause to be?”
And I: “That these variations we observe
are caused by bodies of varying density.”