Paradiso · Canto II ·
Paradiso II — The Little Boats
Reading Divine Comedy · canto 69 of 100 · Paradiso, Canto II
Before reading
This is the first of the Paradiso's sphere-by-sphere ascents. The pilgrim and Beatrice have left the earth behind and arrive at the heaven of the Moon, the slowest and lowest of the nine rotating spheres. The canto opens with one of the Commedia's most extraordinary direct addresses to the reader — a warning that what follows is not for everyone — and then settles into something the cantica will spend most of its length doing: a sustained theological tutorial, given by Beatrice, that the reader must work hard to follow. From here on, Paradiso will frequently look more like a lecture hall than a poem. Believing that it is a poem anyway is part of the cantica's demand.
Where the canto sits
The Moon is the boundary between the sub-lunar world — the realm of change, generation, and decay where everything earthly lives — and the heavens proper, where matter is incorruptible and motion is eternal. Medieval cosmology drew a hard line at this boundary. Below the Moon, things spoil; above it, they do not. To pass into the Moon's sphere is, physically, to enter a different kind of being. The Moon also carried a famous puzzle. Anyone who looked at it could see dark patches on its face. What were they? Folk tradition called them the man in the moon (specifically Cain with his bundle of thorns, in Italian usage). Natural philosophy proposed that the dark patches were regions of denser matter that did not reflect light as well as the rest. The canto will treat the moon-spot question as theology, not optics, and will use it to teach the basic shape of Paradiso's metaphysics.
What it helps to know
A piece of scholastic vocabulary is unavoidable here. Medieval philosophy distinguished between matter and form. Matter is what a thing is made of; form is what makes it the kind of thing it is. A statue's marble is its matter; the shape of the figure is its form. Form, in this language, is not external decoration — it is the active principle that organises matter into a particular kind of being. The natural-philosophical explanation of moon-spots (denser matter here, rarer matter there) is what Beatrice will reject. The explanation she will give is formal: the spots are evidence not of differing densities but of differing degrees by which a single creative power — a formal principle received from the higher heavens — has been able to express itself in lunar matter. The whole hierarchy of Paradiso, in fact, is being introduced through this small question: the cosmos is a graded reception of a single light, more here, less there.
A second piece of inheritance: the bread of Angels is the medieval phrase for the highest theological knowledge — the truth that the blessed feed on directly, with no need of further explanation. The pilgrim will be told that he has been brought to that bread, and the reader will be warned that few are.
What to read for
Notice the canto's opening warning. It is the bluntest the Commedia ever gives. Dante turns to the reader and says: if your little boat has only just begun to follow my ship, turn back to shore. The image is taken from contemporary Mediterranean shipping — small boats hugging the coast in the wake of a great galley they cannot keep up with. The warning is not snobbery. It is an accurate description of how hard Paradiso is about to be. Take the line seriously; the canto means it.
Notice that the pilgrim enters the Moon as a body entering water without displacing it. The image is precise and physically impossible, and the impossibility is the point. Paradiso is going to require imagining what cannot be imagined.
Notice that Beatrice's explanation of the moon-spots is not delivered as opinion. She first lets Dante state the natural-philosophical theory, then demolishes it with an experiment using mirrors and candles, then offers the formal explanation in its place. The procedure is scholastic: state the wrong answer fully, refute it, give the right one. Paradiso will follow this rhythm again and again. Get used to it now. It is the cantica's basic engine.
The canto is one of the Commedia's least dramatic and one of its most demanding. The reward is structural rather than emotional: by the end of it, the reader knows how this cantica is going to work.
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 opened with the bluntest direct address the Commedia gives its reader, took the pilgrim through the boundary that separates the corruptible from the incorruptible cosmos, deposited him inside the body of the Moon as if a body could enter water without breaking its surface, and then settled into the slow scholastic procedure that will dominate most of Paradiso: state the wrong answer, refute it, give the right one. The whole canto is a tutorial on how this cantica is going to work. The wrong-answer theory is the natural-philosophical one — the moon-spots are denser matter. The refutation is a thought-experiment about mirrors and candles. The right answer is the cantica's metaphysical foundation: the universe is a single creative power, descending through a hierarchy of heavens, received in differing degrees by what receives it. Everything that the rest of Paradiso will say about saints, spheres, and beatitude is built on this small lesson about the marks on the Moon.
The warning to the reader
The opening tercets are unique in the Commedia. Dante turns from the narrative and speaks directly to the reader — and not to invite the reader in but to turn most of them away.
O Ye, who in some pretty little boat, Eager to listen, have been following Behind my ship, that singing sails along, Turn back to look again upon your shores; Do not put out to sea, lest peradventure, In losing me, you might yourselves be lost. (Par. II.1–6)
The image is from contemporary Mediterranean traffic: small coastal boats keeping a great galley in sight for a while and then turning back at the open water. The poem says: the open water is here. If your boat is small, turn back. The warning is paired immediately with a contrasting address to the few readers who have betimes — early enough — stretched their necks toward the bread of Angels. The image is double-edged: the bread on which the angels feed in heaven is the same bread the Eucharist gives the faithful below, but in this canto it is the food of theological knowledge in its highest form. To eat it is to be already among those who can follow. The reader who keeps reading is being credited, and warned, in the same breath.
Entering the Moon
The arrival is rendered as a physical paradox.
Into itself did the eternal pearl Receive us, even as water doth receive A ray of light, remaining still unbroken. (Par. II.34–36)
The body enters the body of the Moon, but the Moon is not displaced. Paradiso is going to ask the reader to imagine images like this often: a fully real ascent through a fully real sphere whose physical laws are not the earth's. The image is one of two the cantica gives for the meeting of soul and heaven. The other will come in canto IV, when Beatrice explains that the souls do not really inhabit the spheres at all — but the Comedy will keep using the language of inhabitation anyway, because no other language is available.
The wrong answer about the moon-spots
The pilgrim, when asked, gives the natural-philosophical explanation he has presumably learned at the schools: the spots are rarer and denser patches of lunar matter, and the lunar body is less or more transparent where it appears bright or dark. The theory is reasonable. It is what a competent natural philosopher of 1300 would have said. Beatrice rejects it with a thought-experiment about three mirrors set at varying distances and a single candle whose reflection appears equally bright in each. The mirrors prove that variation of brightness is not necessarily a function of variation of distance and density.
The refutation is technical, and most readers (then and now) follow it imperfectly. What matters is not the optics but what the right answer replaces them with.
The right answer, and the shape of the cosmos
Beatrice's correct answer is metaphysical, not physical.
From this proceeds whate'er from light to light Appeareth different, not from dense and rare: This is the formal principle that produces, (Par. II.145, with surrounding context)
The moon-spots are not a property of lunar matter. They are evidence of how lunar matter has received a formal principle descending through the higher heavens. Every sphere of the cosmos transmits a creative virtue from the heaven above it; every body in every sphere shines or dulls in proportion to how that virtue has been received. The whole cosmos is a single ray of light, descending through nine concentric receivers, expressing itself more in some parts and less in others. The first tercet of the cantica — the glory of Him who moveth everything doth penetrate the universe, and shine in one part more and in another less — is now revealed to have been the doctrinal precondition for everything Beatrice has just said. Paradiso I and II form a single argument: the universe is graded reception of a single source, and the moon-spots are the cosmos's first visible proof.
The implication for the cantica's drama is large. The blessed souls Dante is about to meet in the lower heavens — who appear to him in spheres farther from the source — are not less blessed. They are signs of the same blessedness received in different degrees as a visible pedagogy for him. The canto plants the doctrine without yet announcing it. Canto IV will name it.
Famous and meaningful passages
The warning.
O Ye, who in some pretty little boat, Eager to listen, have been following Behind my ship, that singing sails along, Turn back to look again upon your shores; Do not put out to sea, lest peradventure, In losing me, you might yourselves be lost. (Par. II.1–6)
The bluntest direct address in the poem. The image of the small boat in the wake of the galley is contemporary and exact.
The pearl.
Into itself did the eternal pearl Receive us, even as water doth receive A ray of light, remaining still unbroken. (Par. II.34–36)
The image of arrival the cantica will return to in many forms. Eternal pearl — etterna margarita — for the Moon. The pearl is the cantica's preferred figure for the lunar body, and the simile of unbroken water for a ray of light is borrowed from physics and adapted to theology.
The reception of the formal principle.
Lights many the eighth sphere displays to you Which in their quality and quantity May noted be of aspects different. (Par. II.115–117)
The eighth sphere is the heaven of the Fixed Stars — the Milky Way and the constellations. Beatrice begins her demonstration from what the pilgrim has already seen with his earthly eyes: the stars differ in brightness and colour, and this difference cannot be reduced to differing densities of stellar matter. From there she builds the argument downward to the Moon.
What to watch for
Watch the language of light received. Every canto in this cantica will return to it. The blessed appear as lights; their joy increases by receiving more of the divine ray. The vocabulary established here will run unbroken to the end.
Watch the procedure. State the wrong answer, refute it, give the right one. Paradiso runs on this rhythm. Cantos III and IV will repeat it; so will V, VII, XIII, and most of the great theological cantos to come.
Watch the warning. Some readers will obey it and turn back. The cantica is built to be read by those who do not.
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.