Paradiso · Canto I ·
Paradiso I — Beatrice Gazing at the Sun
Reading Divine Comedy · canto 68 of 100 · Paradiso, Canto I
Before reading
This is the first canto of Paradiso, the third and final cantica of the Commedia. The pilgrim has climbed thirty-three cantos of mountain and earned, at its summit, the right to ascend. He is no longer in a place anyone has been before in literature: he is leaving the earth. The whole cantica that follows is the attempt to write what cannot be written. This first canto sets the terms of that attempt, and its terms are explicit. Trying to put it into words, the canto will say, is impossible. The poem will spend thirty-three more cantos doing it anyway.
Where the canto sits
The cosmos of the Commedia is the Ptolemaic and Aristotelian universe inherited by the Latin Middle Ages. The earth sits motionless at the centre. Around it, nine concentric spheres rotate: the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the Fixed Stars, and the Primum Mobile — the swiftest sphere, which transmits motion to all the others. Beyond all nine lies the Empyrean, the motionless heaven of pure light where God and the blessed actually dwell. Each of the nine spheres is the dwelling place of an order of angels and the matter from which time, motion, and physical reality are spun. The pilgrim is about to traverse all of them in twenty-eight cantos and then enter the Empyrean for the last five.
There is a doctrine that must be carried into this cantica from the start, even though Beatrice will only explain it openly in canto IV. The blessed souls Dante is about to meet do not actually live in the spheres where they appear to him. All the saved dwell, eternally and equally, in the Empyrean. They show themselves in the Moon, Mercury, Venus and the rest as a sign for him — a pedagogical accommodation, a visual language adapted to a living man's incapacity to apprehend their true seat. The whole structure of Paradiso is, in a sense, a courtesy paid to the pilgrim's eyes.
What it helps to know
The canto opens with two invocations. The first is to God — the Latin medieval understanding of the universe as light radiating from a single source, more intense in the parts closer to that source. The second is to Apollo, the pagan god of poetry, asked to fill the poet as a vessel and crown him with the laurel. The boldness of the gesture is hard to overstate. Christian poets did not normally ask pagan gods for help with theology. Dante is announcing that the task ahead requires the whole of the poetic tradition — not only the Christian inheritance but the Greek mountain — and that one Parnassian summit is no longer enough.
Beatrice has now replaced Virgil as the pilgrim's guide. Virgil has been gone since the top of Purgatory. This is the first canto in which she leads alone in heaven, and her authority is different in kind from Virgil's: she does not explain the otherworld from outside, she belongs to it.
The mechanics of the ascent are physical before they are theological. The pilgrim looks at the sun reflected in Beatrice's eyes, and finds himself already rising. He is not propelled; he returns upward, the way a flame returns to the heavens or a stream falls to the sea. The whole of Paradiso depends on the proposition that the redeemed soul has a natural direction of motion, and that direction is up.
What to read for
Watch the very first word: gloria — glory. Inferno opened on a personal nel mezzo; Paradiso opens on a cosmic fact. The poem has changed scale.
Listen for the canto's invention of a verb. Halfway through, the poet will say that what happened to him cannot be put into words, and then he will coin a word for it — a verb so new that it will not exist in Italian until he writes it. The whole problem of the cantica is condensed into that one neologism.
Notice that the canto ends mid-question. The pilgrim has begun to ascend, has asked how, has been answered partway, and is left wondering. Paradiso will move by question and answer for thirty-two more cantos. The form of theological inquiry is established here.
From here on: illustrations and analysis. The three images below are scenes from the canto, and after them comes the close reading — famous lines quoted in full, paradoxes explained, political and theological freight unpacked. If you have not yet read the canto, stop here — read it, then come back.
After reading
What the canto did
The canto did three things at once. It opened the third cantica with a metaphysical fact rather than a personal scene — the universe as light radiating from a single source, more in one part and less in another. It invoked the help required for the task ahead, and the invocation crossed a boundary no medieval Christian poet had quite crossed before: it asked Apollo to fill the poet as a vessel, and to grant the laurel. And it set the pilgrim in motion upward without ever quite explaining how. The ascent is not a journey across distance; it is a return to a native place. The whole Paradiso is built on the proposition that the human soul, in its undamaged state, has a natural direction of motion, and that direction is up. By the end of this short canto the pilgrim has begun moving in that direction, has noticed that he is moving, and has been told — in language deliberately strange — that the noticing is the wonder, not the motion.
The verb that did not exist
At the centre of the canto the poet attempts to name what has happened to him and admits the language is not there.
To represent transhumanise in words Impossible were; the example, then, suffice Him for whom Grace the experience reserves. (Par. I.64–66)
Trasumanar — to go beyond the human — is a word Dante coined for this tercet. It does not exist in Italian before this canto. The whole cantica's problem is condensed into a single neologism: there is no word for what Paradiso is about, and the poet's first move on entering its country is to make one. Notice that the line does not say I will explain it. It says: I will give you the example — the narrative of one man's ascent — and you must let it suffice if Grace reserves the experience for you. The poem renounces explanation and offers narrative as the only available bridge. This is, structurally, the inverted twin of the Hell-gate inscription: there the gate speaks a doctrine before any soul is met; here the poet refuses a doctrine and offers only a story. Paradiso will repeat that refusal in different keys for thirty-two more cantos.
The two invocations
The canto opens by addressing not Apollo but God — the glory of Him who moveth everything. Eight lines in, it turns and addresses Apollo. The order matters: God is the source of the universe described; Apollo is the source of the poetry needed to describe it. Christian theology and pagan craft are placed side by side without apology.
O good Apollo, for this last emprise Make of me such a vessel of thy power As giving the beloved laurel asks! One summit of Parnassus hitherto Has been enough for me, but now with both I needs must enter the arena left. (Par. I.13–18)
The boldness is in the both summits. Classical tradition gave Parnassus two peaks — one for the Muses (poetic craft), one for Apollo (prophetic vision). To say that the earlier cantiche were written from one peak and Paradiso requires both is to say that what is coming demands a poetry that does not yet exist, and that the poet must seize both halves of the pagan tradition to attempt it. The Christian Paradise is to be sung in a language that includes Apollo.
A few lines later, the poet drops one of the cantica's many quiet self-defences.
A little spark is followed by great flame; Perchance with better voices after me Shall prayer be made that Cyrrha may respond! (Par. I.34–36)
The little spark is Paradiso; the great flame is the future tradition of theological poetry it intends to start. The line is humble in form and immodest in content.
The mechanics of ascent
The pilgrim does not climb. He looks at Beatrice looking at the sun, and finds himself elsewhere.
When Beatrice towards the left-hand side I saw turned round, and gazing at the sun; Never did eagle fasten so upon it! (Par. I.46–48)
The eagle simile is precise: the eagle in medieval lore was the one bird who could look directly at the sun without flinching. Beatrice can do this; the pilgrim, by imitation through her eyes, can do it for a moment. Vision in Paradiso is always borrowed, always relayed. From this single sustained look the whole ascent unfolds.
When Dante asks how he can be rising through bodies normally too light to traverse, Beatrice answers with a doctrine the cantica will return to again and again: the redeemed soul has a natural place above, and motion toward it is no more remarkable than a stream falling to the sea.
Thou shouldst not wonder more, if well I judge, At thine ascent, than at a rivulet From some high mount descending to the lowland. Marvel it would be in thee, if deprived Of hindrance, thou wert seated down below, As if on earth the living fire were quiet. (Par. I.136–141)
If the living fire were quiet on earth — that would be the wonder, not its rising. The pilgrim's body is no longer holding him down because his soul has been unburdened. Hell was the conversion of fear into desire; Paradise is the discovery that desire was, all along, the gravity of a different country.
Famous and meaningful passages
The opening.
The glory of Him who moveth everything Doth penetrate the universe, and shine In one part more and in another less. Within that heaven which most his light receives Was I, and things beheld which to repeat Nor knows, nor can, who from above descends; Because in drawing near to its desire Our intellect ingulphs itself so far, That after it the memory cannot go. (Par. I.1–9)
The cantica's metaphysics in a single tercet — light radiating, unevenly received, the intellect engulfed beyond the reach of memory. Memory cannot go: the Comedy that claims to be reportage is here admitting the reportage is partial.
The verb that did not exist.
To represent transhumanise in words Impossible were; the example, then, suffice Him for whom Grace the experience reserves. (Par. I.64–66)
Trasumanar. The cantica's defining word, coined here and not used again in Italian for centuries.
Beatrice on the order of the universe.
All things whate'er they be Have order among themselves, and this is form, That makes the universe resemble God. (Par. I.103–105)
Order — ordine — is the cantica's central word. Hell was the privation of order; Purgatory was its restoration; Paradise is it. Form in scholastic language is what makes a thing the thing it is; the universe has form, and that form is the resemblance.
The arrow.
Thou shouldst not wonder more, if well I judge, At thine ascent, than at a rivulet From some high mount descending to the lowland. (Par. I.136–138)
The reversed gravity. The fall of water to the sea is the model for the soul's rise.
What to watch for
Watch the word light. The whole cantica is a slow refining of the senses by which a living man can look at it. By Paradiso XXXIII the pilgrim will be looking, and not flinching, at the source. The lesson of looking-by-relay begins here.
Watch every promise that the language is insufficient. Trasumanar is the first; there will be one or two in nearly every canto. The poem keeps telling you it cannot do what it is doing. Believe both halves.
Watch what Beatrice now does that Virgil never did. She gazes upward as her first act in heaven. Virgil, on every threshold, looked across or down. The new guide's first move is the new guide's whole pedagogy.
This post is part of Reading Divine Comedy, a slow daily companion to Dante's Commedia in the Longfellow translation — read one canto at a time, with a short orientation before and a close reading after. From Inferno I to Paradiso XXXIII.