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Paradiso, Canto II

On Sunday, I had a long drive to and from New Orleans, and was able to listen for a second time to most of the Great Courses lectures (by Bill Cook and Ron Herzman) on Paradiso. It made me excited (well, moreso) about what’s ahead. I can’t recommend the Cook/Herzman lectures strongly enough; it’s hard […]
Illustration by Michael Hogue
Illustration by Michael Hogue

On Sunday, I had a long drive to and from New Orleans, and was able to listen for a second time to most of the Great Courses lectures (by Bill Cook and Ron Herzman) on Paradiso. It made me excited (well, moreso) about what’s ahead. I can’t recommend the Cook/Herzman lectures strongly enough; it’s hard to overpraise them. Cook and Herzman say at the outset that Paradiso is the most difficult of the three Commedia canticles, but the work you put into understanding it will be richly rewarded. The point is, this one is not going to come as easily as the first two.

I tell you this to buck you up for the journey. Dante himself, in the beginning of Canto II, wants you to be aware of what you’re in for if you continue:

O you, eager to hear more,

who have followed in your little bark

my ship that singing makes its way,

 

turn back if you would see your shores again.

Do not set forth upon the deep,

for, losing sight of me, you would be lost.

The reference here is clear: to Ulysses, from Canto XXVI of Inferno. Ulysses is in Hell because he set out for deep and uncharted territory unprepared, and destroyed his life and the lives of his crew. Dante cautions the reader that this leg of the pilgrimage is going to be the most harrowing, and that the reader might lose his life, so to speak, if he follows Dante into Paradise. This is to be hoped, in a way; Dante is not interested in learning about God, but rather in having an experience of the living God, which by its nature would leave the pilgrim transformed. The old life will no longer be possible. This, it seems to me, is part of Dante’s message.

He’s also making a point about not attempting deep spiritual work without a guide, for fear of being lost at sea. I have heard this warning given by monks to spiritual novices too eager to plunge into the depths of mystical experience and contemplation, or willing to do so without a spiritual guide. This is important. For much of my life, I have been eager to plumb spiritual depths, but unwilling to do the hard, often tedious, work necessary to do so. For me, it’s usually been a matter of wanting to read the right book. It doesn’t work that way. Truth to tell, I don’t think that I would have been rightly disposed to receive the Commedia in the life-transforming way that I did had I not submitted to the slow, initially frustrating work of following a very demanding contemplative prayer rule given to me by my priest. When Dante writes:

You other few who craned your necks in time

to reach for angels’ bread, which gives us life on earth,

yet never leaves us satisfied,

 

you may indeed set out, your ship afloat

upon the salty deep, keeping to the furrow

I have made, before the sea goes smooth again.

he is addressing intellectuals and scholars, telling them that their search for knowledge and wisdom (the bread of angels) can never satisfy them, but inviting them to come with him into the realm of revelation.

Dante and Beatrice rise into the first heaven, that of the moon (following the Ptolemaic model, the earth is surrounded by concentric spheres, each one named for a heavenly body). Dante and Beatrice enter the moon. They don’t land on the moon; they become one with it:

The eternal pearl received us in itself,

as water does a ray of light

and yet remains unsundered and serene.

This, the pilgrim tells us, is a prefiguring of our future, in which we will be absorbed into God. Seeing a miracle like this should make us all the more eager to be with Him. “What we now take on faith will then be seen,” says Dante, “not demonstrated but made manifest.”

Dante and Beatrice have a lengthy exchange about the physical qualities of the moon, e.g., why are there dark spots there? Dante repeats a medieval legend attributing them to Cain, but Beatrice tells him not to be silly. She explains the phenomenon in metaphysical terms. I read this canto over and over, and find it to be puzzlingly dense — one of those “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” things that the Scholastics were famous for. But re-reading it alongside commentaries bears out the counsel of Cook and Herzman, that if you’re willing to work at it, you can mine riches from Paradiso. Besides, as Richard Weaver (I think it was) said, the “how many angels can dance on a head of a pin” remark is taken today as an example of Scholastic fussiness over abstract concepts that had no relation to the “real world.” In fact, he said, these questions had more to do with reality than people today think.

So it is with this canto’s preoccupation with why the moon appears the way it does. It hardly needs saying that astronomy and optics have advanced since the High Middle Ages, such that we need not take Dante seriously as an observer of the heavenly bodies’ material qualities. Still, this exchange between Dante and Beatrice is a reflection of the metaphysical concerns pervading the Commedia.

The answer Beatrice gives to the pilgrim is this: things look different based on their ability to contain, and to refract, the divine light. Simple enough, right? But there is a complex metaphysics behind this statement. I talked about it somewhat in the first canto’s entry. Because we’re about to get into more down-to-earth theology in Canto III, I’ll take this opportunity to share with you what I’ve learned today from my reading.

For me, the best source for understanding what Dante is up to in this canto is Christian Moevs’ book The Metaphysics Of Dante’s Comedy. If I’m reading it correctly, then Canto II sets out a basic metaphysical principle, derived from Aristotle, and Christianized. The divine shines through particular things insofar as they are able, through their particular form, to receive the divine light. Only God is; everything else exists because they share, in some sense, in His being.

Human beings are in a special category: we can live forever, and have the freedom to choose or to reject union with God, the source of our existence. We are the meeting ground between the Eternal and the Finite. We are either participating in the dissolution of the unity of being by turning away from God, or participating in the flowing back towards God, and the unity of all things. Because we are made in God’s image, the divine spark resides in each of us; this is why the only way to know our true selves is to know God — and the only way to know God truly is to surrender everything to Him, and to put nothing in the way of our straight path back to Him.

The early Church Fathers applied these philosophical insights from the Greeks to Scripture (e.g., Jesus words, “The kingdom of God is within you”) in shaping early Christian theology. Writes Moevs:

Identifying wholly with Christ, both God and man, we live in Christ, or rather Christ or the Spirit of God lives in us, and no longer we in ourselves: this is truly to love, which is to dwell in God, who is love. Christianity recasts the Neoplatonic tradition it adopts: Christ, the Word, designates the oneness of the human and the divine, a union lost in human experience but restored through sacrifice. Sacrifice is revelation: the loving surrender of the human mind to the ground of its being is one with, and consequent upon, the loving surrender of the transcendent to the finite, of God to and as man. … This is to recognize oneself as, in, or through Christ, which is to know Christ, to live in Christ. In Christian thought, to know Christ is not, as many people think, simply to have heard of Him.

He continues later:

The direct experience of God is a kind of death to this life; it alone — not talking or thinking or writing — constitutes wisdom. The path to this experience, as in the whole Christian tradition back to Origen, is through purgation leading to illumination leading to union. Union is possible only through the nexus between God and creation that is Christ: the Word is the metaphysical medium through which the divine expresses itself as the world, and it is also the medium through which — by taking human form and sacrificing itself on the Cross — the divine reveals itself to man in the world. God leads man to God by revealing Himself as man; the mind goes beyond itself only by contemplating Christ as both God and human, by identifying itself with Christ.

This is what Jesus meant when he said those who would save their lives must lose them. Only by radical self-emptying, united with Christ, can we fully become ourselves as God made us to be: that is, filled with Himself, completed, “deified” (or, in-Godded, to fully participate in the divine nature). This we can only do by the movement of grace. Our role is to clear the way for grace to act on us. All honest intellection — and I think Dante would say all true art — prepares the way for us to experience the transformative grace of God. This is absolutely not to say that all true art is explicitly religious art. Rather, all true art is art that reveals to us what is, and opens the nous — the soul and its rational, sensing capacity — up to communion with God. Moevs writes:

The ascent [to God] begins through the “shock of beauty,” which reorients the mind away from the senses and into the depths of itself toward its source (one might say that this is the shock the pilgrim Dante will call “Beatrice”). It is a spontaneous movement toward absolute purity and renunciation, a knowing that is a stirring of love so intense that the soul becomes love, willing to renounce everything, to surrender all self-definition, to retain nothing of itself, in its thirst to be all, to rest in the One.

This happened to me at age 17, gazing at the Chartres cathedral. It happened to me a second time at the age of 46, reading Dante’s Divine Comedy. Chartres is not God; the Commedia is not God. They opened the doorway to a profound experience of God, for me.

Here’s another paragraph from Moevs’ book, summing up the metaphysical heart of the Commedia. I am somewhat repeating myself here, but it’s very, very important to get this straight. I’m not offering this as an argument in favor of Dante’s vision, though of course as an Orthodox Christian I hold to the teachings of the Fathers, which are at the metaphysical core of Dante’s Christian vision as well. Even if you do not agree with Dante — and I would think Protestants would not agree with  ultimately, it’s important to think like he thinks so you can more completely grasp his message. Here’s Moevs:

We could thus sum up the Neoplatonic Christian tradition (indeed all major spiritual traditions) by saying: self-sacrifice is self-knowledge; self-knowledge is wisdom; wisdom is love; love is God; God is sweetness or bliss. Unity is divinity, purity is enlightenment: we can know what we inalienably are, or are from, only by surrendering what we contingently are, with all its concomitant desire and fear. Wisdom or understanding expands with love: a mind willing to be nothing, no longer petrified by its obsessive self-identification with the body, memories, expectations, family, and other attachments, is freed to experience itself as all, to recognize itself in, and as, each thing that exists; such an intelligence awakens to its own immortality and transcendence. Knowing itself as (one with) all things, as nothing in itself, it craves nothing, seeks nothing, rejects nothing, fears nothing: it loves unconditionally and absolutely. The Christian path to this love is epitomized in the Passion: hear all and say nothing; bear all and do nothing; give all and take nothing; serve all and be nothing. That the path is anything but passive has been demonstrated by its difficulty, and by its effect when practiced.

What is salvation for Christians, in the classical Christian understanding? Moevs:

Expressed in strictly Aristotelian terms, “salvation” would be to share in the reflexive self-awareness of nous without interruption, whereupon one could describe oneself as (one with) anything or everything that exists, or as (one with) the principle through which all things exist. For the Christians this would of course entail and apparently non-Aristotelian possibility: the dissolution of the ego, of the sense of oneself as only a finite subject of experience, through humility, self-sacrifice, surrender, and selfless love.

Put into basic terms, to be “saved” is to be united with God, and to have achieved that by emptying out oneself of all things to be filled, by grace, with the Holy Spirit, who is Love. And this is not simply something that happens internally. In the end of time, all things will be redeemed in Christ. But that is a discussion for another time.

Moevs says it is hard in these post-Cartesian times, when we think of the mind as standing outside of matter, regarding it, to grasp the assertion of traditional metaphysics: that there is no such thing as “natural” and “supernatural,” that it is all the same thing.

This is why Beatrice’s explanation of how the moon got its dark spots matters. It is scientifically nonsense, of course, but metaphysically, it makes a fundamental point about the way the cosmos is structured. As we will see in the cantos ahead, this principle will help us understand the harmony of all things in God.

Canto II is one of the most difficult of the Paradiso. I promise you it gets easier.

[Here is a link to the Canto I discussion, in case you missed it.]

UPDATE: Let me clarify something. This material is highly complex, and I’m not sure I’ve completely understood it. I welcome correction from knowledgeable readers. I don’t claim that there is no distinction at all between the material and the immaterial. In Aquinas, at least, the material is contingent on the immaterial. I am not confident that I properly understand the basic difference between theosis/deification in Latin (Catholic) theology, and the same concept in Greek (Orthodox) theology, but I know that it’s highly significant. I think that for our purposes in reading the Commedia as amateurs on the other side of Descartes and the Enlightenment, it is sufficient that we understand that there is a metaphysical union between the material and the immaterial, that a sharp and definitive mind-body separation is false. If I’m wrong, help me understand this more clearly.

UPDATE.2: Dante translator Andrew Frisardi writes to shine some much needed light on my understanding:

I think you’re exactly right when you say: “As far as I understand, the material world (the natural) is dependent on the immaterial world (the supernatural), in the sense that the former is caused by the latter (that is, contingent on the latter). But there is a fundamental unity there.” The mind-body split can only happen with a Deist-Enlightenment conception of God, as the creator who then stands outside of creation like a clock maker. Which is then emulated by the supposedly impartial observer of empirical science. The traditional Christian teaching is that the creation happens in every moment, and we can only truly know what we love, which means we’re united to it.

And yet there is a difference between the natural and the supernatural. The gist of it for Dante, and for Aquinas and in general for all traditional thought, is that mind is not in matter, but matter is in Mind (which course is not “mind” in the current sense of “me-in-here” brain-based subjectivity). After Descartes, and going further back, to medieval nominalism, we’re subject to what has been called the “ontological inversion”: the idea that mind-consciousness (and everything else) is an epiphenomenon of matter. But the worldview on which the Divine Comedy is based has it that mind—or consciousness—is ontologically prior to matter. This is not to denigrate matter or nature—far from it. On the contrary, modern materialism denigrates matter far more, as environmental disasters and destruction show us every day. Nature and matter are divine revelations. But as the Vedanta of Hinduism says, first (ontologically, not historically) comes Being-Consciousness-Bliss: Sat-Chit-Ananda: Brahman or Being-Intellect, which is not a “thing” but is all things in potential. Aristotle put it this way: Form gives being to matter, and Form is pure Intellect or spirit. What Western science calls reality and the newspapers call the real world, was unanimously called the world of appearances, maya in Hindu thought. The real world is the one Dante and Beatrice are ascending to: the Empyrean.

In the Divine Comedy this ontological inversion (aka believing appearances to be Reality) is represented in the very structure of the three worlds. When Dante descends into the Inferno, his head is directed towards the earth, which is above him. He is still under the spell of appearances. At the end of the Inferno, when he and Virgil shinny through the fissure they reach by hoisting themselves on Lucifer, they change direction 180 degrees while they’re climbing: instead, having passed through center of the Earth, Dante and Virgil are climbing toward Lucifer’s legs, the direction of which is now up instead of down. Dante gets confused, thinking they’re returning to the Inferno, but actually they’re leaving it. That total change of direction is the first sign that the correct orientation is being reestablished. When Dante and Virgil climb out of the hole onto the island of Purgatory, their heads are now facing in the right direction: toward God, the Unmanifest, Being-Intellect, which is the source of everything including matter-nature.

Obviously there is nothing “other worldly” about Dante. He’s down-to-earth, a realist. There’s no “split” per se between natural and supernatural. At the same time, the really real world for Dante and his teachers is God, the Absolute, the “spiritual world.” All else is a revelation and emanation of that. Nature is theophany, Being self-sacrificed in becoming. This is implied in that statement of Christian Moevs which you quoted, that time and space are themselves not in time and space, as the later cantos of Paradiso will say. Just as eternity is in every moment, even though we experience moments for the most part as one giving way to the next. Especially in our current culture, which is obsessed with the world of appearances. No wonder everyone feels they have no time, when time is just a rush of moments and doesn’t exist “in” timelessness.

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