The sequence of Paradiso 10-13 has enjoyed some of the greatest critical attention over the years. The beginning two terzine alone of canto 10 have been called one of the greatest monuments of theology and trinitarian mysticism of all time, not just the Middle Ages.1 This
“liturgia trasferita in cielo,”2 marked by a “tono fortemente didascalico e cattedratico,”3 initiates
the pilgrim, and by extension the reader, into the some of the mysteries of speculative theology, and eventually, as canto 13 draws to a close, reveals to both pilgrim and reader that such
theology can also serve practical and ethical ends. The instructors are many: both Dante as narrator and the figures he represents in these canti ascend into the pulpit to deliver their
1 “uno dei maggiori monumenti della teologia e della mistica trinitaria, non soltanto del Medioevo,” (Vincenzo Placella, “Canto X,” in Paradiso, ed. Pompeio Giannantonio, Lectura Dantis Neapolitana [Naples: Loffredo, 2000], 209).
2 Ettore Bonora, cited in: Enzo Esposito, “Il canto XIIV del Paradiso,” in Paradiso: Letture degli anni 1979-’81 (Rome: Bonacci, 1989), 388.
3 This description of canto 13 by Ruggiero Stefanelli could easily apply to the entire sequence (“Canto XIII,” in Paradiso, ed. Pompeio Giannantonio, Lectura Dantis Neapolitana [Naples: Loffredo, 2000], 281).
messages. I have already noted in my first chapter how the poet assumes the role of preacher through his appeals to the reader. Other critics have noted the emphatic uses of apostrophes in these canti, which the poet uses in continuation to emphasize his role as guide and teacher: Lucia Battaglia Ricci notes how Dante signals his new role by calling out to the reader in the opening of canto 10: “lo scrittore si fa qui maestro, e guida il suo lettore nella decrittazione del mondo fisico, alla scoperta dell'ordine sapientissimo del creato testimoniato dalla ratio che ne ha determinato la struttura.”4 This “decryption” is accomplished not by the force of the poet alone,
but also by a variety of theologians and church intellectuals that he employs to assist him. Most apparent of these are Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, who both speak at length. They, in turn, introduce twenty-two non-speaking characters, masters of theology and spirituality mostly, who by their presence function as authorities to validate the poet's claims.5 In
addition, Aquinas and Bonaventure narrate the lives of Francis and Dominic, whose stories serve as exempla. In this way, the poet deputizes Aquinas and Bonaventure as guides for the pilgrim, and by proxy the reader. Critics have recognized this role that the two mendicants play, and link it to their Franciscan and Dominican duties in life as pastoral guides and preachers. Ettore Bonora imagines Aquinas's speech as a “predica tenuta da un pulpito altissimo,” which Bonora says, explains the heavy larding of Aquinas's speech with expressions from the Gospels and the
4 Lucia Battaglia Ricci, “Nel cielo del Sole -- Paradiso X-XI-XII,” in Esperimenti Danteschi: Paradiso 2010, ed. Tommaso Montorfano (Genoa-Milan: Marietti, 2010), 120.
5 Although what is validated, as I will shortly show, is not so much an intellectual concord, but a kind of harmony arising from the counterpoint inherent in intellectual discord. It may seem impossible that conflict can produce consonance, but this is the entire point that Dante argues here. Kenelm Foster, aligning himself with Etienne Gilson, says “I am persuaded that Etienne Gilson is right, and that Dante intended his twenty-four sages to represent a harmony not of doctrinal agreement, but of diverse aspects and functions reflecting the various ways in which mankind may participate in the one divine Wisdom; and that he wrote this vision out, like everything
Acts of the Apostles.6
If what Aquinas says is a “predica,” then he employs one of the most textually-conscious forms of orality (or, conversely, one of the most orally-conscious forms of textuality) known in the Middle Ages. The location of a sermon, after all, is both in the preacher's voice and in the notes in his hand.7 Thus to discuss a “ predica” in Dante's textuality is already to implicitly call
attention to the fraught relationship between the lived and the literary in the Commedia. Dante's deployment of preachers in these canti means to highlight their speech as text, to facilitate his pursuit of a deeper meditation on textuality and its relationship to the real world it attempts to describe. This is especially important in the case of Thomas Aquinas, who speaks for the poet within the narrative, and whose speech parallels that of the master narrative voice. Bonaventure's formula for aligning Francis and Dominic, “dov'è l'un, l'altro s'induca,” could just as well be applied to Aquinas and the poet here, for they are twinned figures, each speaking in the language
else in the Comedy, 'in pro del mondo che mal vive,' as a sign and model for Christian society on earth” (“The Celebration of Order: Paradiso X,” Dante Studies no. 90 [1972]: 121).
6 “perciò nel suo discorso entrano, adatte all'argomento specifico, expressioni prese dai Vangeli e dagli Atti degli Apostoli” (Ettore Bonora, “Canto XI,” in Paradiso, ed. Pompeio Giannantonio, Lectura Dantis Neapolitana [Naples: Loffredo, 2000], 248).
7 The hybrid textuality of sermons, in fact, continues to puzzle historians of the Middle Ages. Carolyn Muessig confirms that it is very difficult to define preaching, since any simple definition of preaching “obscures its multifaceted character” (“What Is Medieval Monastic Preaching? An Introduction,” in Medieval Monastic
Preaching, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History 90 [Leiden, Boston, Köln: Brill, 1998], 4). She adds that “there
is also a similar problem in defining sermons. This is greatly owing to the situation of studying a written genre which is supposed to represent an oral event” (ibid.). One notable example of this difficulty in differentiating between written and oral events can be found in Bernard of Clairvaux's sermons on the Song of Songs; scholars have still not been able to determine whether they were meant to be preached aloud or read silently. See: Christopher Holdsworth, “Were the Sermons of St. Bernard on the Song of Songs Ever Preached?,” in Medieval
Monastic Preaching, ed. Carolyn Muessig, vol. 90, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History (Leiden, Boston: Brill,
1998), 295–318.The preaching “event” has been the focus of recent studies in preaching. See:
Augustine Thompson, “From Texts to Preaching: Retrieving the Medieval Sermon as an Event,” in Preacher, Se
rmon, and Audience in the Middle Ages, ed. Carolyn Muessig, vol. 3, A New History of the Sermon (Leiden, Bo
of the other, each working towards the same end.
In her book The Undivine Comedy, Teodolinda Barolini notes the parallels between the speech of Dante and Aquinas.8 She accurately indicates an unusually acute hyper-awareness of
speech as textuality in this canto, and of the nesting of one's textuality within the textuality of another:
Having chosen two saints whose lives had already occasioned complex narrative traditions, Dante responds to this previous textuality not with the usual fictive reality of an imagined encounter – his own textuality posing as reality – but with an explicitly narrative construct: his own textuality posing as someone else's textuality.9
The argument of the Undivine Comedy centers around the poet's consciousness of his poem qua text, in its attempts to represent the real. According to Barolini's reading, Dante's innovation in these canti is to bring the figures he represents into this game of self-aware representation; Aquinas's own discourse is conscious of the gap between the real and the words used to describe it. His speech is thus nested, matrioshka-like, inside that of the poet, echoing the same themes of the larger frame narrative.10
My argument takes as givens both that Aquinas's speech is meant to be understood as a “predica” and that his words involve a high level of textual self-awareness, which he shares with the poet and which deliberately echoes the poet's own textuality. Over the next several pages, I
8 “[Aquinas's] exhortation to the pilgrim that mimics the poet's own exhortation to the reader” (Teodolinda Barolini, The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992], 198). 9 “The Heaven of the Sun as a Meditation on Narrative,” in Ibid., 195.
10 Mario Scotti also recognizes the incessant doubling in these canti, but he does not take it as far as it needs to be taken: “La serie di particolari a coppie, che costituisce una delle costanti del suo sviluppo, sembra riproporre in varie guise una dualità unitaria o una unità binata, come emanazione o riflesso del motivo di fondo: la simultanea e concorde presenza dei due Santi sulla terra.” (“Canto XII,” in Paradiso, ed. Pompeio Giannantonio, Lectura Dantis Neapolitana [Naples: Loffredo, 2000], 269).
will explore these readings from a historically-minded standpoint, in order to show how the rhetorical strategies and the logical organizational principles that guide elite preaching in the Middle Ages are redeployed in Dante's poetry to accord it the same gravitas that a highly erudite sermon might bear. Our itinerary will not be straight; in the first third of this chapter I will more fully explain some of the interpretive parameters that Dante establishes in the first several lines of Paradiso 10. This will lead organically to a second large section, dedicated entirely to the medieval sermon. I will discuss the invention and development of a new and erudite form called
sermo modernus, focusing especially on its use of divisiones and distinctiones, which organize
and parse not only the structure of the sermonic text but also the structure of medieval thought. In short, I will show that sermo modernus is not just a rhetorical genre, but also an epistemology. After this lesson on medieval sermonics, my third section returns to Dante's poem furnished with new tools for interpreting the particulars of Dante's textuality in Paradiso 10-13. I will show how Dante at once pays homage to the structure of sermo modernus – especially its insistent equation of the world with the text used to describe it, and will finally show how Dante's poem
simultaneously struggles against the confines of sermo modernus, as it progresses towards the latter regions of Paradiso, where it ultimately comes up against the completely ineffable.
…..
The first six lines of canto 10, the lines in which Dante-poet reiterates his status as guide for his readers, also establish a relationship of perfect balance and order between the three persons of the one God.
Guardando nel suo Figlio con l'Amore che l' uno e l'altro etternalmente spira, lo primo e ineffabile Valore
quanto per mente e per loco si gira con tant' ordine fé, ch'esser non puote sanza gustar di lui chi ciò rimira Gazing on His Son with the Love
the One and the Other eternally breathe forth, the inexpressible and primal Power
made with such order all things that revolve that he who studies it, in mind and in space, cannot but taste of Him (Par. 10.1-6).
The “Valore” creates the world with perfect order by gazing at the “Figlio” with the “Amore” that circulates between them. The relationship is one of gazes and breaths exchanged between the figures of the Godhead, a give-and-take relationship that is implicitly dialogic. The result of this conversation is the creation of everything, both the terrestrial and astral worlds (“quanto per mente e per loco si gira”), constructed with perfect order (“con tant' ordine”).
With this observation of the ultimate interlocking and interdependent unity between the figures of the Godhead, Dante initiates a sequence of canti whose structure mimics that unity in its textual and thematic parallels and overlaps, which do not allow for them to be read in
isolation from one another, as critics have noted. Luciano Rossi says that these canti constitute “un complesso impianto strutturale, ideologico e narrativo, che non consente di analizzarli singolarmente, senza perdere di vista gli elementi che ne fanno un unico agglomerato testuale.”11
Lucia Battaglia Ricci also notes this unity: “I canti X, XI, e XII del Paradiso compongono con i due successivi un microsistema di canti dedicati agli spirit sapienti, che sarebbe bene poter
11 “Canto XI,” in Paradiso, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone, Lectura Dantis Turicensis (Florence: Cesati, 2000), 167.
leggere in modo continuo.”12 Light is a unifying principle in these canti; as Carlo Sini notes: “La
dottrina della luce è il luogo nel quale un'unica grandiosa visione fiameggiante, esaltante e moralmente edificante lega in un unico senso e fine l'universo tutto e le sue creature.”13 Light is
associated with the unified truth, as well as the intellect used to understand that truth.14 Unity is
also represented by some of the figures that Aquinas and Bonaventure announce, whose acts of reconciliation in life stand out as emblematic of the greater themes of unity and unifying in these canti.15 Most notable of these are Francis and Dominic, who are represented in parallel, and who
– it is emphasized again and again – pursue identical spiritual ends.
In spite of the poet's broad claim to oneness, he nevertheless guides us into a world of particulars here, which instead testify to multiplicity, complexity, elliptical relationships and sometime outright opposition. The perfect balance and harmony of the first six verses of canto 10 is complicated by the skewed orbits of planets that the Poet describes to his reader:
Leva dunque, lettore, a l'alte rote meco la vista, diritto a quella parte dove l'un moto e l'altro si percuote; e lì comincia a vagheggiare ne l'arte di quel maestro che dentro a sé l'ama, tanto che mai da lei l'occhio non parte.
12 Battaglia Ricci, “Nel cielo del Sole -- Paradiso X-XI-XII,” 113.
13 Carlo Sini, “Salomone e il cielo della luce,” in Esperimenti Danteschi: Paradiso 2010, ed. Tommaso Montorfano (Genoa-Milan: Marietti, 2010), 160.
14 See John Anthony Mazzeo's essay:
John Anthony Mazzeo, “Dante’s Sun Symbolism,” Italica 33.4 (1956): 243–251, which is entirely dedicated to this matter of light and unity.
15 Emerico Giachery, “Il canto X del Paradiso,” in Paradiso: Letture degli anni 1979-’81 (Rome: Bonacci, 1989), 308–09.
Vedi come da indi si dirama l'oblico cerchio che i pianeti porta per sodisfare al mondo che li chiama. Che se la strada lor non fosse torta, molta virtù nel ciel sarebbe in vano, e quasi ogne potenza qua giù morta; e se dal dritto più o men lontano fosse 'l partire, assai sarebbe manco e giù e sù de l'ordine mondano. With me, then, reader, raise your eyes up to the lofty wheels, directly to that part where the one motion and the other intersect, and from that point begin to gaze in rapture at the Master's work. He so loves it in Himself that never does His eye depart from it.
See how from there the oblique circle that bears the planets on it branches off to satisfy the world that calls for them. And if their pathway were not thus deflected, many powers in the heavens would be vain and quite dead almost every potency on earth. And, if it slanted farther or less far
in the upper or the lower hemisphere,
much would be lacking in the order of the world (Par. 10.7-21).
The first thing to notice is that Dante's discussion of difference is emphatically contextualized within his self-representation as our magister, as he speak to us, his readers, with sure authority. While the first nine lines are grandiose in scope, embracing both the natural and supernatural worlds, the universe and its creator, here in the seventh line the poet dramatically shifts his focus, drawing it tightly around himself and his reader. Although a critic might call this address to the reader “one of the most imperious”16 it is also one of the most intimate. Dante entreats his reader
to lift up his eyes with him (“leva […] meco la vista”), so they may regard these marvels together. Dante's “meco” highlights an air of familiarity and confidence, suggesting a scene of
him and his reader standing side by side, gazing at the stars together. If here Dante assumes the “veste di maestro e di sapiente,”17 he does so gently, nudgingly, first inviting the reader to sidle
up next to him, and then tracing the points in the night sky with his finger, expecting his reader's gaze to follow. While the complex and opposing orbits in the sky might seem disastrously
chaotic to his hypothetical reader, somewhat ignorant of natural sciences, the poet stands with us, to help make sense of what is superficially beyond our ken.
As the poet points out the stars in the night sky for his readers to see, he introduces a push-and-pull dynamic, which turns out to be an important interpretive key. He calls attention to astral orbits, “dove l'un moto e l'altro si percuote” (“where the one motion and the other
collide”18), whose ecliptic orbits, the “oblico cerchio,” (“oblique circle”), are admittedly a “strada
[…] torta” (“road […] twisted”),19 but which ultimately serve the world's benefit (“per sodisfare
al mondo”). “Torto” is Dante's parola chiave here. In my review of Inferno 23 in chapter 2, I demonstrated how Dante associates “twisting” with a refusal to heed God's commands, and specifically with a refusal to speak and spread the Gospel; here in the realm of the transcendent, however, values are reversed and what is apparently “twisted” or even “wrong,” is in the end no such thing at all. This is of great significance in a poem obsessed from the outset with the correct and the straight (let us remember, Inferno 1 begins with the pilgrim in a wood, having lost the “dritta via,” the straight path.) Here, paradoxically, the “wrong” and the “ right” exchange places
17 Battaglia Ricci, “Nel cielo del Sole -- Paradiso X-XI-XII,” 122.
18 Here I take issue with Hollander's translation: ”where the one motion and the other intersect,” as it does not do justice to Dante's very deliberate suggestion of violence and conflict in “percuotere,” a verb more commonly found in accounts of fights (A demon struck [“percosse”] Venedico Caccianemico in Inf. 18.64), boulders crashing into each other (Inf. 7.28), arrows hitting targets (Par. 5.92, 13.105) and lighting strikes (Capaneus is “percosso” by lightning in Inf. 14.53-54).
– or more precisely, they resolve each other – for in the sphere of the Sun, opposites are
reconciled by means of their own opposition. The ecliptic and conflicting rotations of the spheres provides a large scale objective correlative to this dynamic, but it is also represented in the small, the “tira e urge” between opposing gears in a clock that leads to ultimate harmony, a “tin tin sonando con sì dolce nota.” (“chiming its ting-ting with notes so sweet”) (142-143). The conflict between two opposing agents leads to something greater; what seems a contradiction when examined up close is revealed to work harmonically when seen from the long view.20 The
relationship is ultimately agonistic in the classic sense of the term: mutual competition leading to mutual betterment (not for nothing is the preacher Dominic called an “atleta” in the vita that Bonaventure recounts). This explains Aquinas's introduction of his philosophical nemesis, Siger of Brabant of the “invidïosi veri” in canto 10, and Bonaventure's introduction of Joachim in canto 12.
The sequence of canti is built on multiples, full of doubling and tripling of figures, reflecting one another. Aquinas and Bonaventure are introduced in cantos 10 and 12, respectively, and each is accompanied by several companions, who together form a corona around the pilgrim and Beatrice. These coronas are peopled with the “wise spirits,”21 historical