Author Archives: jtimpane

About jtimpane

Media Editor/Writer at The Philadelphia Inquirer.
March 30, 2012

Canto 32: We Can’t Get There Without Grace

By jtimpane

So . . . who’s in Heaven? And how close do they sit to God? And who’s next to them? Is everyone equal? Or are there degrees, and ranks, and grades? Do we have all ages? All genders? Young and old? Is Heaven a diverse place? And the question all of us really want to know: Is there room in it for me?
“From petal to petal, down through the rose”: we learn who sits where, what the seating chart is for Heaven.
The entire Commedia has been one voice explaining how it works (whether the it in question is Inferno, Purgatorio, or Paradiso) to another voice. Most commonly, it’s an old hand around here, such as Vergil in Inferno, or Bernard of Clairvaux here in the Tenth Heaven. The single most voluble, detailed, and patient explainer is Beatrice herself. The power of her intellect is a lifeline to the Divine, the Intellect instilling, literally, intelligence and information into the cosmos.
And the student, always, has been the pilgrim, Dante, amazed, confused, afraid, doubtful, curious, on fire to understand.
In Paradiso, we’ve been traveling throughout Paradise, always ascending toward the One, the Center, the Love informing all, and now that the lesson is about to end – or, more accurately in the poem’s terms, now that vision is about to become one with Vision – the questing, questioning pilgrim beholds, truly, a Rose that is a City that is a Theater that is a Garden: the holy greats of human history, named and nameless, arrayed in orders around the central Love that makes the wildly complex, inflorescent Rose cohere.

Plenty of paradoxes. In a Heaven without place and time, there are places and orders; there appears to be separateness. Individuals such as Mary, Peter, Anna, St. Francis, and others are identified by name, so they must maintain an individual integrity of some sort. But, as we see, they also, mysteriously, all are one, all focused, all gazing lovingly on the Vision that is one with vision. These are individual souls unified into one Flower, one Garden, one City, one Theater, organized around a Center that gives them being and the power to understand and praise.
Repeat: the Vision that is one with vision. To understand is to be at one with the Understood, in a way in which we can’t do it on Earth (although we get intimations of it). Heaven is where perception subsumes us into the object of perception. Observer ceases to be separate from Observed, who is expressed, in the first place, in the observer.

This Lent, we often meditate on the frustrations of being an individual dissoluble from others. We cannot stay fully consistent. Integrity eludes us. Mindfulness stutters or flags. Our attention may be like a searchlight sometimes, but at others it’s more like a flashlight.

But in these last Cantos, Dante suggests that the human self is the deepest of all errors. Not that it does not exist; it is the ultimate gift of the Giver. Only that we mistake it for what it is not. We think our intellect belongs to us, when it really is on a permanent continuum with the divine Intellect. We may be in time and space, but we are never separate from the power-station of Mind.

Consider the saying of Heraclitus, that “the Logos pervades everything, yet every man thinks he has his very own wisdom.” All thinking, mentation, mind, wisdom, and reason, expresses and is pervaded by, partakes in and is not separable from, the Logos, the principle underlying existence and also the principle structuring the way we use our minds. We think we have private versions of the Logos, when our minds and bodies already are penetrated and pervaded by it, and express it in being. That expression, of the mystical Logos (which for Dante and the Christian, is Christ) in the act of understanding, brings the Divine together with the timebound, placebound flesh, in an ineffable mystery. The miracle of human thought is the site, again, of the Incarnation.

Which raises the hair. And makes the knees shake. Which is literally not possible to understand, precisely because nothing is more present to us moment to moment than the movement, origin, foundations, and color of our own thoughts. And since they arise from our minds and are first known to us, and are not accessible to others unless we tell them, we assume they belong to us, and that we have a privileged relation to them. Which we do, but only contingently. Our relation to Mind is fallen, expressed through the flesh. Here in Dante’s Flower/City/Theater/Garden, we maintain the integrity of Self while unified with the Supra-Self.

Logos is the rules, the way things are, so that not only thought but also the structure of mind, and the physical laws of the universe that give rise to body and mind, are continually expressed in the life of body and mind. The life of fallen, enfleshed, ensouled human beings is a fallen version of the Logos-saturated life in Paradise.

It’s beautiful that Beatrice has given way to Mary. Bernard’s love of her is truly moving, his rapt gaze at her (“absorbed in his delight,” both absolutely enthralled with it, and merging with it) throughout the three cantos in which he serves as Dante’s final guide, and his vastly loving prayer to her, are sublime depictions of total connection with loving intercession.

I love the catalogue of holy women first described. It reminds us how Dante has been concerned to include both women and men in the sweep of his poem, and also reminds us of how many holy women are named among the saints. With piercing irony, Eve sits at the seat of Mary:

The wound that Mary closed and healed with ointment
Had been opened and pierced through by the person
Who sits, so beautiful, there at her feet.

Slightly disconcertingly, another echo of the Fall and the Passion sounds, but this permanent reunion of Eve and Mary signals the ultimate reconciliation, when everything, all Christ and humankind went through for the sake of rescue, of salvation, has been made all right.

We see one place, all filled, for those who had faith “Christ would come,” who somehow believed in Him even before the fact of his Incarnation on Earth. Bernard doesn’t go into much detail about who they are or how they could believe in Christ and be rewarded as such. Instead, on the facing side, are “where you see semicircles / Gapped with empty spaces” where sit those “who turned their faces to Christ who had come.” There are a few empty seats, but not many. They await the faithful of this moment on Earth, and not many will qualify.

Then we get to the children sitting in the rose. Bernard senses a doubtful hesitation in the usually vocal pilgrim. These are those “spirits who were freed / Before they had the power of true choice.” The ranks just above them were people who had choice, who had reached the age of reason. But these never got there, through various circumstances. They died as children: “You can observe it clearly in their faces / And in their children’s voices, if you regard them / With care and listen.” There’s no question of judging such souls by their merits, and they are here through a divine mystery. Before Christ, children were saved by their sheer innocence; after Christ, they are saved by circumcision and baptism.

Bernard had begun this part of his tour by saying, “Now wonder at the depth of Providence,” and Dante-pilgrim certainly is, for he can’t understand how children, who died before their time, “hurried to true life” (God, what a great phrase) can be ranked before and behind one another.

Bernard in essence says, it’s how God rolls. There are good reasons, just as there are for the way the entire universe operates. We can’t always know those reasons. Perhaps we can’t ever really know them. Just as in Canto XXXI, Dante sounds the first theme of the limit of language, the limit of being able to express, here we come up against the limit of understanding:
The King, in whom this kingdom comes to rest
In so much love and delight
That no will would dare ask for more

Creating all minds in his joyous sight,
Endows each differently with grace, by
His own pleasure – and here let that suffice.
When I was a boy, it used to disturb me to think that some people were better than others, that some people were smarter, or better at singing, or baseball, or arithmetic. I envied those who excelled me, and I lorded it over those I excelled. And when I thought of Heaven, it seemed unfair that there could be any stratification of ecstasy. If we are One, how can we be arranged and ordered?

The answer is that God’s doing it for God’s own reasons. The fascinating discussion, led by Charles Martel, about why children of the same parents can have such different fates, came to the same ground. We can’t know why. It’s so, and in Heaven, everybody is where they wanted to be throughout life, so no one’s complaining if they’re lower than Mary. In earthbound life, of course, the question of differing fates has the same answer, much less satisfying. Yet, Bernard implies, that state of affairs suits. After we have seen Gabriel flying before Mary, we see what Bernard calls “the roots of the Rose”: Adam, Moses, Peter, John the Baptist. There are conjunctions of angel and human, man and woman, pagan and Christian.

Having beheld the entire, splendidly enfolding Rose, we have come to the moment, when the pilgrim can direct his gaze to God. It’s beautifully done: “Since the moments allotted to you are flying, here we make a period.” A full stop. Two references at once, to Dante-pilgrim’s still essentially timebound mode of understanding. It also reminds us of the timebound experience we have had of the Commedia itself, of all poetry, saturated in time (in rhythm and in length), and that that experience, too, alas, is running toward its period. We’re coming to a full stop, and the moments for this exquisite, immense poem are flying. “Toward the First Love we will direct our eyes,/ So that, looking upon Him, you may penetrate / As much as possible through his effulgence.”

But Dante-pilgrim can’t hope to do that without help. Here, as on Earth, if he needs an Intercessor between himself and God, he goes through the Intercessor of all Intercessors, Mary. “Remember, oh most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known, that anyone who fled to thy protection, implored thy help, or sought thy intercession, was left unaided.” That’s how the prayer goes. “Oh, Mother of the Word Incarnate.” Dante needs “grace from the one who can help you.” We simply can’t get there without grace.

Can there be a better Lenten thought? Maybe not. We simply can’t get there without grace. We need help. We can’t go it alone. It’s a long road, a demanding journey, asking not less than everything, as is fitting and right. So has the Commedia been, and in the next Canto, Dante-pilgrim will both see and fail to recall the full, luculent Lightfall of the Uncreated Word. Not only could he not get there without grace, but also he cannot say it, cannot recall it with justice. He will fail to tell us, and yet his failure tells us all we need to know.

Happy Easter, everyone.

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March 29, 2012

Canto 31: City, Theater, Garden, Rose

By jtimpane

Is Paradise a rose? Or a city? A theater? Or a garden?

All. Any. None. In Canto 31, this kaleidoscopic shimmer among images is the spectacle, and spectacular it is, of a poet, and a believer, employing poetry in all its magic to do what cannot be done in human language: give us the sense and sight of Heaven.

Poetry has is mystical to begin with. It seizes on our most human tool, language, that servant and master that issues from our lungs and our throats, teeth, nose, tongue, eyes, lips, fingers, and hands, our whole bodies, twisting and standing and knotting up, and somehow it speaks what’s in our minds. Or gets somewhere near. Or at least that’s the hope. Having seized it, poetry wrings yet more out of it, freighting each sound, rhythm, and shape with so much meaning we cannot catch up, meanings we can’t even be aware of, not as writers, not as readers, not as species.

So much about language escapes us, so much about even our own individual use of it. You’d think we’d have a feeling of ownership, and we do, yet, as even a moment’s reflection tells us, no, no one really owns this though all use it. And no one uses it, to the utter horizons of possibility and beyond, like the poet, and that brings a feeling of the unspeakable, what cannot be said, a feeling, also, of truth and truthfulness ordinary language cannot approach. Poetry, like all art, gestures, in its very existence and workings, toward Being, toward One, toward the Without-Time. I’m already verging on the poetic with those phrases, but they hardly go too far. No matter what else poetry is talking about (even when the poet speaks of God’s nonexistence, ironically enough), it is also always invoking the mystic.

That’s what’s crucial about the Commedia, and especially so in its last few, glorious, triumphant Cantos. I must say, few human achievements can be as wondrously assured and successful as this last stretch of the journey. We always have been moving forward, moving upward. Dante assiduously has been keeping track of time as long as time has lasted. Yet always he is maneuvering us toward a moment when we leave time and place, when our habit, indeed our error (itself redolent of the Fall) of distinguishing the then from the now, must fall away. Remember Canto XXIX, when Beatrice gets cross about the way we’re always going after appearances, and tells us we’re wrong, just wrong? We need appearances and can’t get along without them, but our reflexes of definition, analysis and synthesis, cubbyholing existence, the hot mind chugging away all it can, actually constitute a kind of lie. The bed is unmade, so we make the bed, but again the bed is unmade. We assume we are deathless and ever-right when we are blind and mortal. (“You say, ‘I am rich, and have put up great wealth, and am in need of nothing,’ and you do not know you are wretched, destitute, poor, blind, and naked.”) Dante reminds us, Beatrice and all the guides remind us, that what we’re trying to do we cannot actually do.

And so is Dante. And in the final Canto, he’ll let us know he failed, that he has to fail, being human. Meantime, to write poetry is trasumanare, either really to transcend our humanness, or to feel as if we have. Even if that were all poetry did, it’d be pretty good. But Dante wants it to lead to real transcendence.
My bold, slashing suggestion for this, my final log-in after three years of Dante with my beloved brethren, is: Dante believed poetry could actually get us there, get us to a direct experience of the divine, maneuver our spirits to the intersection of flesh and spirit that is the Incarnation. He definitely believed it could help us transcend our limits. The entire Commedia is based on that faith, and I think you’d have to say, after almost 700 years, it is doing a very good job. But in doing that job, Dante’s after the biggest moving project of all: to move us, as readers, into mystical contact with God.

So maybe transcending the human is essentially mystical. And writing poetry that seeks that transcendence is a mystical act. I’m going to swim up that waterfall as we proceed.
Dante, for the previous few Cantos, has been battering us with metaphors for Heaven. He’s trying to shift us into a mode of consciousness such that all his metaphors – the Theater, in which all of Heaven is arrayed as a whole before us, as on a stage; the Garden, a joyous, fertile, light-saturated region of eternal growth, union, and color; the City, that is, the New Jerusalem, the society of saints, angels, and Trinity, ordered in Divine Reason, reflecting (but also embodying) the goodness of eternal community; and the divine Flower, the white rose spirits in constant, ecstatic, eternal praise, infloresced around the integral, radiating Center – are not different ways of saying the same thing, but are, mystically and mysteriously, one thing, as the Trinty are One and One is Three. All the metaphors call on us to take on a total mental view of the vast, cosmic tapestry of Paradise, to see it as a whole. And . . . then . . . to collapse our notions of part and whole, and realize that Part and Whole are One. Dante is not different from Paradise and Paradise not different from Creation. Dante’s imagination shifts among these registers not as alternatives or parts but as constant, equal, interequilibrating, total truths. And if you can let your mind do what he’s urging it to do, you feel an expansion of the fabric of thought, a rising, an intimation of an impossible state we glimpse and perhaps, for an eye-blink, see.

My God, is it beautiful.

In the form of a white-hot Rose
The holy host showed itself to me
Which Christ through his blood had made his bride.

So the milizia, the “host” or (in a metaphoric way, military) ranks of Heaven, the assembled orders in limitless, spaceless eternity, show themselves to Dante, and we’re told that this host was made a bride through Christ’s sacrifice. That’s the basic teaching of the Harrowing of Hell, that Christ as God suffered mortal pain and death, thereby freeing the billions from their intermediary state and into Heaven. We recall, too, that the Church is also called the Bride of Christ, and as we’re told on many Sunday’s, also betrothed through that blood sacrifice. The blizzard of various yet unitary metaphors rains down: the stupefying candor of the white rose, the military, the wedding, the blood sacrifice. All of this feeds into the machinery of theater/garden/city/flower, a continuum, not a chain of separable visions. We may find the addition of violence disconcerting, but it fits. There is blood, there is punishment – and there is victory. And here you see it, in its singleness, all around you.

And now, if we can even bear it, we read:

But the other host, that flying, sees and sings
The glory of Him who enamors it,
And the goodness of Him that created it so wondrous,
As a swarm of bees that inflowers itself
One second and another returns
There where its labor adds sweetness,
Sank into the Great flower that adorns itself
With so many leaves, then rose again
There, where its love always sojourns.
All of them had faces of living flame
And golden wings, and the rest such a white
That no snow ever attains to that extreme.
When they let down into the Flower, from bank to bank
They carried something of the peace and ardor
They gained by fanning their flanks.
Nor did the interposing between the Flower
And what hovered over it
Of such a flying multitude
Impede the view or the splendor:
For the divine Light penetrates
Throughout the universe according to its merits
Such that nothing can stand obstacle to it.

Ravishing, and (for me) seductive, but also, in its constant process of metaphorization, of bringing each new way-of-seeing-one-thing-as-another into the whole, further expanding the aperture. The heavenly hosts either celebrate the Rose or fly into and out of it. Yet they never obscure the view of it, for they are of it and are not separable from it. Heaven is where Praise is at one with the Praised. The Light pervades and runs through all things, according to the degree to which those things merit the Light. Nor is the Light to be thought of as something that can be considered separate from the universe or the things the universe contains. The Light is the condition of the universe’s being. As is Praise of the light. Pure verb.

In this overpowering vision, we almost forget there’s a speaker, or that there has been a series of guides, or Beatrice. But Dante is moving us gently to the moment when we must let go even of her. We might feel sad, since she has been such a central fulcrum of all that’s gone on since Inferno: Through her we’ve been led out of the savage Abyss, through the grey regions of the Great Waiting, and now into this, the Empyrean.

Beatrice is our way to God, but is not God. She is our Lady, but she is not Our Lady. And Dante has come to the point at which he must relinquish his dynamo, his mirror and conduit of love and divinity, the human love that drove his poetry and drove him to the Divine. Why? Because now she is with Divinity, and he can see but not go there. And, despite the powers of his unexampled (and it is) poetry, he will fail, in the end, to say what he saw, even though what he says may bring us to that What.

Wow. Wow:

I, that had come from the human to the divine,
From Time to the Eternal,
From Florence to a just and whole Community,
Into what a stupor must I have been thrown!
Truly, between this and the Joy
I was pleased not to hear and to stay mute. . .
Passenger through the living Light
I passed my eyes over all the variegations
Now up, now down, now circling round.
I saw faces of persuasive charity
Empowered by the Light and His Smile
In attitudes adorned by all graces.
My regard already had gathered in
The general sweep of Paradise
No aspect staying fixed or closed
And I turned around me with the renewed wish
To ask my lady of things
About which my mind was in suspense.

Can we stand it, I wonder? Who else could have the towering, powerful, triumphant gust to write, or to have a character claim that “My regard already had gathered in / the general sweep of Paradise?” No aspect stays fixed or closed: Heaven always moves, ever takes the shape of music and song and praise. No sense of separability, of Time, of change. It is not change as we know it but a necessary, joyous movement, growth, and fructification. And persuasion: Who can resist those “faces of persuasive charity”? How could you resist Charity, when Heaven shows what Charity does?

But then he looks for Beatrice, as he’s done throughout the poem. And she is no longer at his side. She is seated, her crown reflecting the One, at the Third Level, below Christ and the real Queen of Heaven, Mary. When Bernard of Clairvaux appears as Dante-pilgrim’s final guide, he directs him to see her, who is both infinitely far from him, and not separated at all:

No mortal eye is so far removed
From the region in which the on-high thunders
Or no matter how deep the sea sinking
As my view was from Beatrice,
But I was not dismayed, because her image
Did not reach down to me through any obscuring medium.

Dante joyfully acknowledges his far remove from Beatrice, but it is a remove of ontology, of intrinsic degree of relation to the Divine, not a remove of physical distance. No mediation in Heaven. Ranks and realms and differing relations, but nothing separate. There is no place. Beatrice is sharp and clear, and acknowledging the differing realms is but, once again, to Praise. In fact, all verbs in Heaven are one verb, Praise.
Dante utters an absolutely gorgeous poem of thanks to his Beatrice, and asks for her continued grace, and then Bernard directs him to see Mary. And, if Dante was amazed before, he is now stupefied by the sight on which all are focused.

I saw smile there . . .
A beauty, a gladness
Such as was in the eyes of all the other saints.
And if I had as much skill in speaking
As in imagining, I wouldn’t dare
To try the smallest part of it.

This announces that language, from here on in, fails. Once Beatrice leaves us, so does the power of language to explain, to present, to mediate. Dante-pilgrim lets us know that the Commedia has given us the sweep of Heaven, the one view of the One . . . and has moved us past words, time, place. We are at the end of the poem and the end of Time. What we see in the next Canto is the unity of all things.

The Commedia has been nothing but language. But language is never nothing but language. Language can move people, change them, bring them new places. Imagination is body as well as mind. Where language takes us, all of us go. Whether Dante wishes us to be absolutely literal-minded, or whether he is conjuring with the ineffable through utterance, courting an inevitably failed enterprise (as he himself just told us!), as of Canto 31, we’re transported into a realm of ecstasy, where all moves, and where movement makes a whole, a drama, a city, a host, a sacrifice, a garden (without walls!), a Flower. We move, but not from place to place. We move as praise and joy and justice move. That Holy Stasis invoked at the end of Paradiso is an ever-growing, ever-sweetening, ever-burgeoning realization of perfection, endless and endlessly unfolding. It is the reality beyond speech to which poetry, all art, all thought, all our ultimate best, ever gesture. As Dante-pilgrim tells us, we’re always there already. Our desire, and our wish to be good, to be with the good, to be of God and with God, happens all the time, continually furnishes us with intimations and glimpses of the Unity within and through all things, so finely pervaded throughout that, although we use terms such as “hidden” and “elusive,” perhaps we really should use terms such as “superpresent” and “superfamiliar” and “supraverbal.” The fire and the rose are one.

Ah, Lent, you are long. But it is spring, and it is a good thing to reflect on our distance yet to travel and how far we have come. Those of us (I’m one) who think we’re always already there don’t think that solves everything. When infinity separates, you can’t span the gulch — except by spanning it. The somber reality of Lent, that we are flesh and make mistakes and keep making them, that our physical destination is as humble and dirty as our origins, can merge with the joy that precedes Lent (that of Christmas) and the unworded ecstasy in which it ends, that of Easter. But we can’t get to Easter unless we minister to the Easter within, let it guide us to the Easter up, down, all round. It’s a journey outside of time and across much other than space. We cannot possibly traverse it, except by traversing it. Dante has shown us.

Thanks, Jeff, for letting me be part of this. And my other brothers and sisters in this beautiful task.

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March 22, 2012

Canto 26: The Ecstatic Recitation of Love

By jtimpane

This, to be sure, is the Canto That Has Everything. Vision, light, love, and Adam, Our Father. Dante is in rare, rarified, high companionship here, as he hangs out with Beatrice, St. John, and Adam.

You can feel  the end of Paradiso coming, and with it the end of the Commedia. The poetry and the ideas are exquisite, finely tuned, at once sublime and limpid, the trademark of this very learned poet who somehow turned out this lucid, inexhaustible epic of hope.

Since the last word was hope, maybe it’s not inappropriate to note that the end of the Commedia will be the beginning of everything, the One that gathers all the pages of the cosmos into a single, gold-diamond, singing book. Throughout the Paradiso, we have seen, again and again, the One as the basis and organizing principle, not just of life or the soul, but Paradise itself, light itself, the relations of all things in the universe. All of them are arranged as they are as a direct consequence of their roles played in relation to the One. (This is the to dunamon of Aristotle.) We human beings don’t understand this order and can’t attain to it – reminding us of Psalm 139, one of the best poems ever written on the nature of God: ”Such knowledge is too wonderful  and excellent for me; I cannot attain unto it” (Book of Common Prayer). Dante-as-Pilgrim keeps forgetting that the Love that binds all things orders all things. In this Canto, however, he remembers, in a very moving fashion.

Dazzled Dante is examined by the Evangelist about the love in the former’s heart. What elated precision in Dante’s answer! For once, he knows what to say: He knows why he loves, and he knows what has motivated this love. This is one of the most articulate moments, word for word, Dante-as-pilgrim has in the entire Commedia. Maybe, after his incredible journey through Despair and Waiting to Eternal Love, he finally realizes why he has come, why he was lost to begin with, and why, with dazzled eyes, he is so close now to the Ultimate. I think we’re meant to see this as divine inspiration, not just “the right answer” (although it is) – this is the same Dante who has made every mistake in the book, Mr. Misunderstanding, who’s has had to be schooled by Virgil, Beatrice, and everyone who knows anything. The Commedia’s been one long, running man-or-woman-on-the-road interview from level to level, insatiably, ardently trying to understand.  The entire Commedia, we realize, has been driven by this relentless thirst to know, to see, to understand, to transcend the human . . . ah, that verb, trasumanare. When it all gets down to it, now he can say it:

The good, to the extent it’s understood as such,

Ignites love, all the more as more goodness

Is comprehended in itself.

Toward the Essence, then (so exquisite

That all goods outside of it

Are but a light from its own rays) . . .

Moves any mind that discerns the truth,

Loving it more than anything else.

We are in the presence of powerful philosophy as well as lovely poetry, to which Dante-as-pilgrim adds references to Aristotle, and to the beginning of John’s Gospel, “which more than any other reports show earth the mysteries here.”

And St. John says, beautifully: “The utmost of your loves looks on God” (“d’i tuoi amori a Dio guarda il sovrano“). He asks Dante to go on, and in a blaze of dazzled inspiration, he says:

The being of the world and my own being,

The death He suffered so I could live,

And that which all the faithful (like me) hope for

Along with the aforesaid lively consciousness 

Have hauled me out of the sea of love gone wrong

And set me on the shore of the straightmost way.

Dante is here, and Dante is in love, thanks to the moment-to-moment fact of the Incarnation and Death of Christ, and he’s here because the cosmos exists as it does, an ongoing unfolding of the Essence. All this has ransomed him. We began Inferno in the middle of a dark road in a savage wood, direction lost. Now we know ourselves, and the Love that has brought us, and it is our living consciousness of that Love that has hauled us out of that marvelously phrased “sea of love gone wrong.”

Love is here. Love is Here. And the moment we are conscious of it, conscious in a vibrant, living consciousness, our way is made straight. The Incarnation happens. This may remind us of a moment in the “Dry Salvages” section of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets:

The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.
Here the impossible union
Of spheres of existence is actual,
Here the past and future
Are conquered, and reconciled

Eliot knew he was shadowing Dante, or Dante him. The “impossible union/Of spheres of existence is actual”: We come into contact with Love, with the Essence. Most of us get only “hints,” Eliot says:  “For most of us,” he writes, “this is the aim/Never here to be realized” but glimpsed and guessed.

But in Paradise, Dante-as-pilgrim sees it clear enough, because it is all around him, and his living awareness is all-pervading.

As soon as Dante concludes his ecstatic account of Love-Known-As-Love, Paradise rings with “Holy, Holy, Holy!” and Beatrice wipes away the dazzle from his eyes. He has spoken the Truth that moves all Heaven, and the joy pulses throughout Paradise.

I’m not going to say much about Adam’s fascinating appearance. Dante’s search for knowledge continues, the running interview, the “What Do You Know?” asked of all the greats of Creation. We have to know; we want to know.  It is piercingly sad how short a time (a few hours) Adam spent in Eden, compared to those 4,302 years in Limbo. Adam says interesting things about the changing Name of God (“I” and then “El”). His presence here, as is everything else, is a direct reflection of the suffering and death of Christ, without which those who died without Christ had to wait in the anteroom of Paradise. Not that Adam is complaining.

Above all, I’m struck with the electric certainty of Dante’s proclamation: He knows Love now and knows why he loves. He knows the source and the motive. And he realizes it’s his own intellect that must stay wide open to Intellect/Love/the One, to see the goodness within It, and to discern the works of goodness radiating out from It.

It’s spring, with two and half weeks left before the end of Lent. I’m willing to say (it’s true, after all) I believe, but not to tell someone else what to think. Like the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, I realize I have built-in limitations common to my species. I want to know, but some walls I can’t break through. I’m fallen, fallen for sure. So I’m wary of defining the One, of saying that somehow I understand It and can “tell you what God is.”

But like Eliot, I think I get glimpses. Like Dante, I hope for moments of white heat of soul, full head of sail, where I am surfing on the breakers of sunlit benediction, humble, aware, and open. Easter.

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March 1, 2012

Paradiso Canto 8: We’re Mixed Up, and That’s Good

By jtimpane

Dante’s questions continue as he ascends the spheres of heaven. Again and again, his questions are absolutely understandable – but again and again, the answers suggest that he has momentarily forgotten the pervasive role of the Creator in directing all things. He is learning, brick by brick, that things have to be the way they are, and that’s good, because it embodies the cohering light of Intelligence, flowing through all, characterizing all, ensouling all.

There’s an undertone, perhaps unconscious, to Dante’s questions: Why are things the way they are? Why do they work this way and not another? Constantly, we feel the ramping, vibrant human mind kicking at its stall, wanting to blow down its limits, wanting to know, to know. Dante’s interrogation isn’t profane or irreligious, but its energy is nevertheless questing and profound. And being in heaven doesn’t quench the thirst of the search.

The sphere of Venus, eh? We’d expect a look at sexual desire and love, but no. (Maybe because, in the end, the belief in Venus and the star was a pagan holdover?) Instead, we find ourselves in a discussion with Charles Martel about a topic that has puzzled and horrified many parents: why do children turn out so differently? Why are people so diverse? What is the origin of that diversity, which admittedly makes human society so rich, and so is inarguably necessary to human life (as Aristotle pointed out), but also leads to such trouble? “How is it,” asks Dante, “sweet seed can bear bitter fruit?”

That question bespeaks human insecurity and frustration at unpredictability – in the world in general, but especially in human affairs. We can’t tell how people will turn out, and we can’t control the ways their differences will combine. We can’t foresee or catch up all the consequences. All parents know this tremulous, balked feeling in regard to their children. We just can’t see the future. Charles, now in heaven, is worried about the choices of his brother Robert. (Although I must say, he needn’t have worried: Robert turned out to be a good king, a peacemaker and defender of the Italian peninsula against foreign invaders.)

Charles, evidently for a while an admired acquaintance of Dante’s, is a good authority, because (as Dante sees it) he was very different from his brother, who may be on a perilous path. Charles says that had he not died so young, things might have been different. As in both Inferno and Purgatorio, the affairs of the world, and the worries of the world, go on, and those in these various postlife realms are aware of them and share them — even those, like Charles Martel, who are in perpetual bliss.

Dante had begun by calling the belief in Venus a relic of pagan times – but Martel’s explanation of human diversity is a mixture of the pagan (astrology) and the Christian (the informing divine Intelligence). The stars exert different influences on us as each of us are born; this astral individuation takes place within the plan of Providence. Martel reminds Dante of “The Good, which turns and gladdens the entire Kingdom you’re climbing,” and which “makes Providence a power” in the stars. “And in Mind, which is itself perfect, there is provision” for both the natures of men and for their well-being.

Dante and Martel agree that nature can never “tire of doing what is necessary,” because that’s what nature is. And, following Aristotle, Dante also agrees we’re a naturally gregarious, social animal, and that it would be awful if we were all the same. We need to live in society, and we need to be different and diverse and divergent. God has done a good thing in making it so.

But how, then, does human diversity lead to so much trouble? As usual, it’s us and our fallenness. We mess up the plan of Providence. Human beings misinterpret the plan, or they try to force others or themselves into talents, lives, or positions for which they aren’t cut out. People don’t pay attention to the groundwork laid by Nature, and humankind gets off on to the wrong road.

Suppose we substituted the term genetic material for the term stars. We’d have a rather moving notion. Thanks to sexual recombination of genes, it’s exceedingly, vastly unlikely that any two people are identical. In human terms, it’s all but impossible. Our genes are what recombine, take different mixes and forms, at our formation. What results is my and your and his and her unrepeatable identity.

Can we see genetics, that outplaying braid of human diversity, as nestling within the plan of Providence?

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February 23, 2012

Paradiso Canto 2: Reason Has Short Wings

By jtimpane

How can you ask a question in Paradise?

Quite a question in and of itself. You’d have thought Paradise was where all questions have been answered. Was itself the answer to all questions. The garden in which all questions come to rest, without need for more.

Um, no. Not Dante’s Paradise.

More than once I’ve heard people say something to the effect of, “If I ever get to heaven, I’m going to have a few questions for the Almighty.” Understandable. Let’s say you find yourself in the Promised Beyond. All is One. All is revealed. All is known. A lot of us might well be like the Dante of the Paradiso. We might start asking, “OK, this is great. So how does it all work? And why does it work this way?”

In that (celestial?) light, it makes sense that so much of Paradiso is a question-and-answer session between Dante and his beloved pipeline to the Divine, Beatrice. Dante’s a lover, a poet, a scholar, a sinner, and in each of these roles he is amped, hyper-pumped, and supercharged with desire to know. As in know everything. Now’s his chance, and he’s going to make the most of it. He writes of the “longing” that is “enflamed” to “see” how it all works, our “inborn, perpetual thirst” that compels us forward and upward. And that has been the spur to the creation of this vast epic journey in the first place.

To begin, he reminds us no other poet has written a poem like his: “The waterway I take never was coursed before.” I love the opening lines, with Dante sailing in his boat, and warning other writers, in effect, not to try this at home. You might get lost!

Heaven, we soon see, is a hierarchical place. You can be closer or farther away from God, according to the virtue shown in your life. Like many of us, Dante is bothered by this, and he wants to know more. In Canto II, he is in the lowest sphere of heaven, that of the Moon. He writes, beautifully, “Beatrice looked upward, and I on her” (Beatrice in suso, e io in lei guardava). As a character in his own poem, Dante has always relied on someone, but really, his real guide has always been Beatrice, what she represents, the love of his life, and the Love toward which he and all things progress. His dependence on her is really, in the end, his dependence, the dependence of all existence, on God. He keeps forgetting that, and she keeps having to remind him.

So the question is: Why do we on Earth see black marks on the moon? If the moon is part of Heaven, why wouldn’t everything be perfect? Constant? As we learn, we are now in the lowest sphere of Heaven, that of the Moon, and this sphere, although still celestial, is characterized by inconstancy. With its changing phases, the moon was a symbol of the inconstant, the changeable, and Dante finds it a little unsettling to discover what appears to be inconsistency in the celestial realm.
Now, Dante had no telescope. But his question is one we still ask. We see the physical cosmos all around us, and we’re amazed by its vastness and beauty. But we also see signs of randomness, chaos, destruction. How, we ask, does this reflect the caress of the creating Hand? Dante’s question has resonance for 2012, no doubt about it.

Dante has some theories about varying densities of matter, and he runs them by Beatrice. It’s already pretty clear he’s wrong. Beatrice smiles indulgently “for a moment,” then remarks that Dante, knowing that human reason makes a lot of mistakes, and also knowing that “even when supported by the senses, reason has short wings.”

Wow. Dante and Beatrice take for granted the very truth our own age finds so repugnant, and which many people argue against with all their might: reason, even when the senses give reason evidence, has “corti l’ali,” short wings, a circumscribed ambit. To understand Paradise, to understand matters spiritual and divine, you have to think with more than reason. You have to augment reason with ways of knowing that connect with divinity, with hope, with virtue. To echo George Michael, to whom I never thought I’d be referring in any context whatsoever, “You Gotta Have Faith.”

It’s important for those of us with faith to acknowledge that those who reject faith do so for good reasons. Our reason and our senses are all we’ve got, or it can seem like that. These amazing tools help us solve our problems every moment of every day. When we’re asked to leave them, or to augment them, or to modify them — or when we’re told, as Beatrice tells Dante here, that they are inadequate — it seems an outrage, an affront. Little wonder when faith makes people feel disoriented or insecure.

But let’s be serious here. We employ faith all the time. “Object permanence,” the stage of infant thinking in which we asumme that objects that disappear momentarily from view still exist (as in a blanket withdraw from view momentarily), begins our long, innate, and necessary dependence on faith of all sorts. We can’t think or reason, ironically enough, without various levels of faith. That doesn’t invalidate the insistence that we honor reason, the senses, and the rules of evidence and argument. But it does make it seem silly to insist that we hold ourselves to only those things.

Beatrice, for one, is a big fan of reason and evidence. She even, in a wonderful, premodern moment, recommends that Dante conduct experiments to test his theories: “You can be set free from this quandary through experiment — if you ever want to try it — which is the font of the river of your arts” (“Da questa instanza puo deliberarti/Esperienza, se gia mai la provi,/Ch’esser suol fonte ai rivi di vostri’arti“). And by “arts” she means the arts and what we’d call the sciences. So both she and Dante are enthusiastic fans of science and reason.

But both insist that reason has those short wings. And this canto demonstrates it. She answers Dante’s question about the spots on the moon, but neither the substance of his question, nor, really, her answer, is the canto’s real point.

The real point is that Dante, in asking the question as he did, fails to understand. He fails because Heaven cannot be understood. Not, at least, without understanding the limits of understanding.

The last seven stanzas, among the most beautiful in the whole Paradiso, depict a cosmos deriving from the Intelligence behind it, which distributes intelligence throughout the universe as befits the bodies and levels of being in the cosmos:

Thus Intelligence multiplies its goodnesses
Among the scattered stars
Revolving itself upon its own unity.

Varying power makes diverse connections
With the precious matter it enlivens, in which –
As it does with life in you – it binds.

Thanks to glad nature from which it derives,
This mingled power shines throughout the body
Like gladness through the living pupil [of the eye].

It’s both not much of an answer (God mingles with everything, and everything shines according to God’s best plan), and a great answer, since it brings all questions back to the Light, to the Intelligence, in which human reason participates but from which it remains far distant, and of which it is but a circumscribed version. Dante, once again, has forgotten the dependence of all creation on the Light. That led him to ask the question. (Thus Beatrice’s smile!) Our one way even to approach the truth of the Truth is to have faith, and to see through faith — indeed, as the glad light of Intelligence shines through the living pupil.

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April 14, 2011

Canto 32: Sleeper, Awake!

By jtimpane

It’s just my luck to draw this Canto. Action-packed, ain’t it? You got the Eagle, The Griffin, the Giant and the Whore. You have Beatrice, seated on the ground near the Apple Tree. Most of all, most active of all, most turbulent of all, is the speaker’s mind, going in and out of consciousness, in and out of full and half-awareness, now focused like a laser to only one thing, now overloaded.

Even more than most is what lies just beyond all this . . . Paradise. Purgatorio is a strange, frustrating poem, written to be frustrating, to feel awkward and balked, thwarted, thirsty, wondering, agonizing. It’s the last assertion of the clog of the flesh, the asymmetrical axis of spirit and body, the sense of the human soul, caught in time, gravity, infirmity, and sin, not really fitting in anywhere, ever caught, ever in a state of painful between-ness.

As Purgatorio is! The ultimateTweenLand!

It’s hard to describe, after the hard descent of Inferno and the hard ascent up the terraced mountain of Purgatorio, how moving, how sad, how Lenten, the sight of the Tree is when we first see it. I realize that allegorically this Tree symbolizes the Earthly authority of the Church – but even here we have echoes of the Edenic tragedy. And later, when we see the allegory of the corruption of the Church by greed and political intrigue, we see the expression of original fallenness even in the institution (the Church) that should be teaching us the way.

The Tree has been here all along. Everything we are must pass this way. We can be good, we can be wonderful, but everything we do must pass through our original fallenness. The Tree need not be a bar, need not be impassable, but it can be. That’s what it was in Inferno, where reside those who in their personal lives replicated the angelic fall from grace that created Inferno. The Tree was there, too, all along. It’s one of two Trees essential to Christian iconography – the other being the Tree on which Christ was grafted in exquisite, ecstatic agony. That second Tree lies in the shadow cast by the first; the first made the second necessary.

And how consistent Dante has been in stressing, and lashing, the corruptions of wealth and power. We saw it at all levels of Inferno, and we’ve been seeing it at all Terraces of Purgatorio. It’s pervasive, it’s everywhere, it ruinedFlorence, it ruinedRome, and if we’re not careful it will ruin us and the Church. Dante looks around at the evils of what was, for him, modern Europe, and he depicts a battle of mythic beings, the long, tortured history of the Church, from the Rome of Constantine toAvignon.

I admire how bumbling Dante is throughout this canto – and yet, how full of pathos and dramatic irony his situation is. He sees Beatrice full in the face, and stares too long, and (once again) is yelled at. Of course, we’d all do the same. This guy has made a confession, been admonished for wasting his gifts, been criticized for weeping over the loss of Virgil . . . he can’t do anything right.

Except follow Beatrice. He knows she can show him the way, show him the Divine as the Divine really is. Even if Dante messes up a lot – and he does, in ways he can’t anticipate – he doesn’t know the rules – I mean, who does? – he is saved by his belief he can be saved. Beatrice is the mystery of Divine Guidance, revelation, the hints, clues, and teachings in earthly life that lead to God. Seeing Beatrice in the face prefigures the moment, at the end of Paradiso, when Dante beholds all the leaves of the universe bound into a transcendent book.

It’s also a comment on human love, as Dante says it came into his heart, and how, through the image of the Divine in the beloved, led him to the Divine. Neoplatonism was more than an intellectual game to Dante – it was an attempt to connect the transcendent, life-changing power of human love with the Love that moves the universe, literally linking the two. In a poem such as “Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona,” which we saw performed earlier in Purgatorio, Dante magnificently and repeatedly lets us know that My Lady is more than My Lady. She’s herself, of course, and I love her for herself, but she is also Light. She is also a portal of Love. She “strengthens our faith, / for such was ordained from eternity.” She, if we stay awake and alive and alert to it – she – whoever She is for us – is how we learn in this life, and this body, and this intellect, of the Love that is God.

Dante has said throughout his poem that the good person pays attention, and commits to memory (and to heart!) the lessons strewn, like bread on a forest road, throughout our existence. It’s both a medieval alertness for reality as a series of signs and a timeless awareness that God has structured existence to speak continually of the Divine, if one is a good enough person to recognize that, read it, and follow it.

It makes me wonder how many of us are that alert, that aware, that mindful. Poetry, music, and scholarship – and my job as a journalist – all of these rely heavily on notions of being aware, being in the midst of the world, cultivating a nuanced, omnidirectional alertness. Engaged and informed. Alert and aware. That’s what being alive is – and it obligates us to lead moral, humble lives, because without those, we’ll have no hope of seeing clearly.

And when Matilda calls on a dozing Dante to “Arise!” we definitely remember Lazarus. We remember the Transfiguration. We remember Easter. We remember Ephesians, with “Sleeper, awake!” It is a rising from the dead, a small version, a personal Resurrection.

And you know? I find his little personal awakening far more haunting, far more moving, far more Lenten, than the massive smash-up with Eagle, Chariot, and so on. The fate and history of the Church seems less moving than the spiritual fate of Dante. If such a bumbler, such a time-waster, such a political failure, such a trembling, flailing mess can see Beatrice and be blessed and be taken to Paradiso, anyone can.

That’s not true, of course. Not anyone. Inferno showed us those who can’t. But what counts here is that sense of hope, for the little person in the midst of a vast universe in which sin and goodness battle moment to moment. If Dante, then why not me? Maybe I will have my own Beatrice. Maybe — if I but saw it rightly — I already do.

That hope, that hopefulness, is extended to all by Dante though Dante, that feeling that we can achieve the sight of the Divine, if we stay open, work to be alert, follow the signs . . . and keep climbing.

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April 7, 2011

Canto 26: Add To Our Burning Our Shame

By jtimpane

There are many arresting things about Dante’s Purgatorio. You can no longer sin – unlike in Inferno, where everything you do is sin, to compound and perpetuate the sin for which you have been damned. But in Purgatorio, you can sin no longer, only do things that expiate sin, a hopeful, gratifying sign that in Purgatorio, you are within the skirts of grace. You can and do suffer, however, both externally (as in corporeal agony and the physical work of climbing up the winding terraces of the mountain) (which, beautifully enough, gets easier and lighter as you climb, signifying an increase of grace and a nearness to Paradise) and internally – through shame. And as we see throughout this astonishing, strange, twilit poem, shame agonizes as bad as fire. The denizens “add to their burning with their shame,” hastening their self-purification toward Paradise.

In Inferno, Dante sees many burning in endless torment for lust, and for unnatural or excessive brands of sex. Paolo and Francesca, two of the most admired characters in the entire Commedia, are in hell. So why are they in hell, but Sodomites and Hermaphrodites and poets of desire here in Purgatorio?

Because in hell you can’t feel shame. Paolo and Francesca capitulated to the kind of desire in which you cease to care. They abandoned station, compassion, and conscience; they literally let their passion (stoked, remember, by love poetry!) burn them up until there was nothing left. They ceased to feel the shame that is the voice of conscience calling. And in Inferno they feel no shame, either. Shame is, of course, pointless once you’re in hell. You can feel regret, bitterness, and fury – and since these will be directed at God, they, too, will be sins. Paolo and Francesca didn’t care and still don’t. They are beautiful in a way, because of the totality of their passion, and also because of its source. But shame implies you care, and they didn’t then, and they don’t now that they’re in Inferno.

So it’s not sex, or the kind of sex, or the mere fact of sex, that damns. It’s a particular, familiar kind of crime, an immersion past conscience in the luxurious blandishments of physical pleasure. We recall that the  Latin verb pervertere, from which we get “perversion,” really means “a turning away,” possibly a relic of a time in which face-to-face sex was the only kind thought to be allowed, and so any turning away from the partner was a perversion – but much more probably an acknowledgment that any kind of perversion, as when we pervert parenthood, or fiscal probity, or social responsibility, or trust, or love, or food, involves a turning away from God.

So those who are here at the Seventh Cornice, those so close to the top, to the embrace of the Lord, they are those who fell through lust, but retained a conscience throughout. From here (2011), it may seem a small thing, but it’s dispositive, the utter difference. The Lust we encounter in Purgatorio is not mortal, not the soul-destroying, God-alienating evil lust (or any sinful behavior) can be.

Think of Dr. Faustus in Christopher Marlowe’s play. When he gets close to hell, Faustus prays to feel remorse – and he can’t. Prayer is futile. Efforts at reform, repentance, metanoia, useless. It’s gone. When Claudius, Hamlet’s uncle, kneels to pray, he does so knowing his repentance is incomplete. He feels some sorrow that he killed his brother . . . but he still wants the things he got via the murder – his brother’s kingdom and his brother’s wife. Wanting these, he knows, means he doesn’t want to pray, doesn’t want to get any better. The intention isn’t there, so you might as well get up, Claudius, and go your way, because you’re cooked. Conscience is gone. “Words without thoughts, never to heaven go.” God won’t hear them because what you’re saying aren’t words – they’re noises without meaning or sense.”

By contrast, the way the Sodomites and Hermaphrodites and poets of desire – all the while burning in the terrible fire to Dante’s left – mingle praise (of Mary, of chaste Diana, etc.) and shout out their crimes in shame demonstrate how far we’ve come from hell. That’s how the Whip of Shame works, the Whip of Lust. Passing in different directions, exchanging kisses of greeting with one another, the homosexuals cry out “Sodom and Gomorrha!” and the straights repeat the tale of Pasiphaë. Shame, the capacity to feel shame, shows conscience is still alive; once shame dies, your soul dies, too. So, as Dante and Virgil wind their way along the Seventh Cornice, they hear the alternating shouts of physical agony and cries of personal grief at transgression, which amounts, in an uncanny, surreal way, to an ecstasy, a possession by the spirit of grace.

I don’t think Dante is saying you can screw around and still be all right. He’s saying, reasonably enough, that sin and intention and conscience lie across a certain range, for almost all sins. Yes, for some sins, to commit, even to consider, is to self-condemn. But the great mass of human failings stretch across a spectrum, and that includes lust.

Jimmy Carter will join me in the part of Purgatorio (I hope) dedicated to those who have lusted in their hearts.

That this state involves agony is inescapable. When the souls in the wall of flame realize Dante is mortal, they want to know why and how he’s here, and one cries out to him: “Answer me, who burns in thirst and fire.” Burning, surely, is apposite for the crime of lust. And in the next Canto, Dante himself will, after hesitating cowardly, plunge face-first into fire that will make him write, “I would have cast myself into molten glass to refresh myself, so measureless was the burning there.” This is serious fire, people, and even Dante, to get to Beatrice, to Paradise, to God, must go through the same fire as all mortals, suffer what all Purgatorio’s denizens suffer.

As a matter of fact, actual representations of lust and perversion are somewhat light in this Canto. We see Pasiphaë, who had intercourse with a bull, but this is a type, and besides, anyone who knew the myth knew she did it because she was driven mad in a curse from Poseidon, so that rather dilutes the intentionality implicit in excessive lust. (I mean, if bulls are your fancy, fine.) There’s also passing reference to Caesar’s homosexual dalliance with Nicomedes, King of Bithynia. But, especially compared to parallel depictions in Inferno, it goes light.

We get to see and hear much more of the poets of passion. We are not told why these poets are here, specifically . . . there seems to be an implication that, having written of lust, they must burn a little for lust. Guinizelli does speak for the “hermaphrodites” (which apparently means the heterosexuals who indulged too much), that they are here because “we did not serve human law, following appetite like beasts,” but adding that they had “repented before the final hour,” showing conscience and presumably landing their souls here. Strangely, though, I must say (and maybe because he’s a poet), Dante’s evident reverence for Guinizelli and Arnaut Daniel seems, tonally, to balance out our consciousness of their punishment.

Now it’s time to talk about poets. The entire Commedia is a job application, in a way. Dante is well aware that he’s a well-known, much-praised poet, and he’s working, quite self-consciously, in a groundbreaking fashion, writing epic poetry in the vulgar tongue, not Latin. He’s using a language, if you will, that still isn’t used to being poetry, a language still controversial, still a challenge to taste and propriety. And he, Dante, is bent on showing how this language can rank with the great literary tongues of all time, that is, with Latin and Greek. Dante takes up the Commedia, in part, to show that what became “Italian” was a suitable language to sustain the greatest themes, the most profound investigations. Much like the Virgil who leads him through Inferno and Purgatorio, Dante is an urban, self-conscious “modern” (he even calls his style of poetry “l’uso moderno,” “the modern fashion,” to distinguish it from the classical writers), who shoulders the vast tasks of ancient poetry (tales of God, man, sin, good, evil, and redemption) both to echo the ancients and to make something new. He thinks of what he’s doing as modern, as being of his moment. And he knows he’s putting himself forward as a poet without precedent. Thus he rubs shoulders with Statius, Virgil,

We get to meet a forerunner in writing verse in Italian, Guinizelli. I’m always amazed by just how good these writers were: Guinizelli, Cavalcanti, Dante . . . incredibly complex stanza forms, complex ideas, wit, and music. Dante calls Guinizelli “father of me and of others better than me.” Really the founder of the “sweet new style.” Dante had already written love poetry in La Vita Nuova and Il Convivio , poetry good enough to establish a reputation, and here, he continues, professionally, aggressively, expansively, to go for the very top.

These things mean a lot to him. We get a little literary-critical argument about poets with undeserved reputations, such as Guittone, or Girault de Bornelh. I don’t know Guittone much, but I’ve translated a bit of Girault, and I think he’s pretty good. But Dante clearly reverences Arnaut Daniel more. John Ciardi seems to sniff at this taste, but others don’t. Ezra Pound called him one of the greatest poets of all time, and T.S. Eliot loved him, too. So do I, for a lot of reasons. You’ll note that Arnaut speaks to Dante in Provencal, and although Ciardi might be right, that Dante would have heard this as antique and old-timey, I rather think he also thought of it as “great” poetry, and the moment his beloved Arnaut addresses him, in the revered language of his poetry, is a moment at which Dante pretty much crowns himself an equal of the greats.

And that’s where we end. We still have a ways to go in the Seventh Cornice, including a cannonball into the Wall of Flame itself. But we have to go there. Dante has to suffer it to get to Beatrice (Virgil even incentivizes him with “I can almost see her eyes now!”). It’s a minor personal Purgatory within the greater scheme of Purgatorio – almost as if the poet knew that he, along with the passionate poets he reveres, will pay a price for their art beyond their earthly lives. Yet they are also “souls sure of having, whenever it may be, a state of peace.”

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