Paradiso · Canto VII ·
Paradiso VII — The Departing Hosanna
Reading Divine Comedy · canto 74 of 100 · Paradiso, Canto VII
Before reading
This is the canto in which Beatrice resolves the puzzle that Justinian planted at the end of canto VI. Justinian had said, in passing, two things that should have been incompatible: that the Crucifixion of Christ under Tiberius was just satisfaction for Adam's sin, and that the destruction of Jerusalem under Titus was just vengeance for the same death. If the Crucifixion was justice, how could avenging it also be justice? The pilgrim is silent; Beatrice sees the silence, names it, and answers. The answer is the cantica's deepest single piece of theology — a sustained meditation on the meaning of the Incarnation as the union, in one historical event, of God's justice and God's mercy.
Where the canto sits
The pilgrim is still in the heaven of Mercury, where Justinian has finished speaking. The eagle has flown across history; the canto's argument has been imperial. Canto VII turns from imperial to theological. It is one of the cantica's set-piece doctrinal cantos, the others being IV (accommodation), V (vows), XIII (the wisdom of Solomon), XIX (justice), and XXIX (creation). It is the closest the Commedia comes to a sustained doctrinal sermon, and it is delivered, in this case, by Beatrice rather than by a saint of the doctrine in question. The canto has no human encounters. It is teaching from start to finish.
What it helps to know
The doctrinal content rests on a small number of premises the reader should hold in mind:
- The Fall. When Adam sinned, human nature itself — not just the individual Adam — was wounded. Every human being inherits a damaged nature. This is the standard doctrine of original sin as Augustine and the medieval church had developed it.
- The two ways God could have responded. God could have forgiven Adam by sheer act of mercy, or could have required satisfaction — that is, an act of restitution proportionate to the offence. Sheer forgiveness would have shown mercy without justice. Required satisfaction was impossible for any human alone, because the offence (against an infinite God) was infinite in weight, and no finite human could pay an infinite debt.
- The Incarnation as the solution. The Incarnation united in one person a fully divine nature (capable of paying the infinite debt) and a fully human nature (legitimately owing it). When God became human and suffered as human, the satisfaction was made by humanity, but with an infinite weight only divinity could supply. Justice was satisfied. Mercy was shown. The two converged in a single act.
This is the doctrine often known by the formula of St Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) in his treatise Cur Deus Homo — Why God Became Man. Dante's Beatrice will not name Anselm. The doctrine she expounds is recognisably Anselmian; the rhetoric is her own.
A second, smaller premise matters for the closing sections: the medieval distinction between immediate creations of God (the angels, the heavens, primal matter, the human rational soul) and creations through intermediate causes (everything mortal, generated, perishable). The immediate creations are incorruptible — they have being all the way down. Mortal things, made of form mixed with material that has been worked on by lesser causes, are corruptible. The argument has implications for the doctrine of the resurrection of the body, which Beatrice will gesture toward at the canto's close.
What to read for
Notice that the canto opens not with Beatrice but with Justinian's exit-hymn — a brief Latin-Hebrew salute that the pilgrim cannot understand. Osanna sanctus Deus Sabaoth. The salute marks the closing of canto VI's monologue and is the only Latin Beatrice will need to gloss in this canto. The fact that the blessed in Paradiso speak Hebrew, Latin, and Italian without distinction is a small piece of the cantica's eschatology: the Babel of earthly languages has been resolved.
Notice that Beatrice's exposition is structured as the answer to two questions, not one. The first: why was the Crucifixion the just satisfaction? The second, much harder: why did God choose this particular way of satisfying — why Incarnation rather than mere mercy? Her answer to the second is the canto's deepest single move.
The canto closes on a small turn toward the resurrection of the body — a doctrine the cantica will not address again until much later. The transition is unmarked. Paradiso is patient with its planted seeds.
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 is one of the cantica's set-piece doctrinal expositions, and it is the Commedia's deepest sustained meditation on the meaning of the Incarnation. Beatrice answers, in 148 lines, the puzzle Justinian's monologue had planted: how could the Crucifixion be just satisfaction for Adam's sin and the destruction of Jerusalem be just vengeance for that same death, without the two cancelling each other? Her answer reframes the whole question. The Crucifixion was not one event but two: in Christ's divine nature, it was just satisfaction for Adam; in Christ's human nature, it was an unjust act for which justice was rightly avenged. The two faces of one event require two responses, and both are just. From there she expands the answer into a full account of why God chose Incarnation as the means of restoration — and the answer is the cantica's most exalted argument for the goodness of God.
The hymn the pilgrim cannot understand
The canto opens with Justinian's exit. He wheels and sings.
Osanna sanctus Deus Sabaoth, Superillustrans claritate tua Felices ignes horum malahoth! (Par. VII.1–3)
The hymn is in mixed Latin and Hebrew. Osanna is Hebrew (hoshanna, save us); sanctus Deus Sabaoth is Latin (holy God of hosts); malahoth is a corruption of the Hebrew mamlakhoth, kingdoms. The pilgrim does not understand it. Neither, it is implied, does the reader of vernacular Italian. The blessed in Paradiso speak the languages of all the holy peoples without distinction — Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and the vernaculars — and Babel has been resolved into a single understanding that does not need to translate. The reader is left, for these three lines, in the position of a stranger at a feast. The cantica makes that strangeness part of its work.
Beatrice diagnoses the silence
The pilgrim wishes to ask a question and cannot frame it. Beatrice sees the wish.
Justice and mercy, brother, would the same Be utterly diverse, did not their reasons Equally bend together in one cause. (Par. VII., paraphrased from the canto's central section)
The puzzle she names is exact. If God's justice required Adam's sin to be punished, then why was punishing Christ for it not itself an injustice that itself required punishing? The proper answer, she will say, has to look at the natures in Christ. In his divine nature, his suffering on the Cross was a willing and infinite payment of an infinite debt: pure justice satisfied. In his human nature, his death at the hands of Pilate's court and the Sanhedrin was the murder of an innocent man: an injustice for which Titus's destruction of Jerusalem (in the canto's imperial framework) was the just response. Both responses were just because the natures were two. The doctrine is Chalcedonian — the council of 451 that declared Christ to have two complete natures in one person — pushed to its narrative consequence.
Why the Incarnation rather than mere forgiveness
The harder question follows: why did God choose this way of restoring humanity? Why not simply forgive Adam by mercy alone?
Beatrice's answer is one of the cantica's most exalted single moves. God had two ways open to him: pure mercy (forgiveness without satisfaction) or pure justice (satisfaction by humanity). Pure mercy would have shown his clemency but not his justice. Pure justice was impossible by humanity alone, because no finite creature can pay an infinite debt. The Incarnation — God becoming human, paying the infinite debt as human while supplying the infinite weight as God — chose both attributes at once. Mercy was shown (God himself stepped down to do what humanity could not). Justice was satisfied (the payment was made in human nature, by a human will). The two converged in a single act.
Then Beatrice goes one move further. Even if both ways were open, this way was more becoming to the divine goodness, because in this way the gift was greater. God could have forgiven; he chose to be born and die. The choice is excessive — more than was strictly required — and the excess is the nature of his goodness. Goodness Divine, which from itself doth spurn all envy — the line is the canto's deepest single statement of who, in Beatrice's understanding, God is. The choice of Incarnation was not necessity. It was love beyond necessity, and that excess is the cantica's whole foundation for hope.
Goodness Divine, which from itself doth spurn All envy, burning in itself so sparkles That the eternal beauties it unfolds. (Par. VII., from Beatrice's exposition)
The two creations
The canto closes on a doctrinal turn that may seem peripheral but is structurally crucial. Beatrice distinguishes between immediate creations of God (the angels, the heavens, primal matter, and — implicitly — the human rational soul) and creations through intermediate causes (everything mortal, generated, perishable). The immediate creations are incorruptible; the rest are not.
The Angels, brother, and the land sincere In which thou art, created may be called Just as they are in their entire existence. (Par. VII., from the close)
The distinction matters because of where it points. If the rational soul is an immediate creation of God, then it shares the incorruptibility of the angels and the heavens — and so the human person, in the part that is rational soul, cannot perish. The doctrine of immortality is being grounded here in metaphysics rather than just in revelation. And — by extension — when the resurrection of the body is finally taught (Beatrice will gesture toward it in the closing lines), it will be the restoration of the immediate creation: the rational soul re-united with the matter that was, originally, also made directly. The canto plants this without naming it. The cantica is patient.
The hidden architecture of cantos VI and VII
Justinian's canto and Beatrice's canto are a single composition split across two cantos. VI was the historical face of providence (the eagle); VII is the metaphysical face (the Incarnation). Together they argue that political history and theological history are the same history — that the Roman Empire was the historical envelope within which the Incarnation could be staged, and that the Incarnation was the inner event the empire was made for. The argument is breathtakingly imperial in its ambition. It is also Dante's most exalted single piece of theological-political poetry. The reader who reads VI without VII has only half of it; the reader who reads VII without VI has only the other half.
Famous and meaningful passages
The hymn the pilgrim cannot understand.
Osanna sanctus Deus Sabaoth, Superillustrans claritate tua Felices ignes horum malahoth! (Par. VII.1–3)
The cantica's polyglot song. Hebrew, Latin, vernacular all heard as one.
The argument for the two natures.
Either that God through clemency alone Had pardon granted, or that man himself Had satisfaction for his folly made. (Par. VII., central exposition)
The two ways God could have chosen — mercy alone, satisfaction alone — and the third he chose: Incarnation, which is both.
The maximal claim about divine goodness.
Goodness Divine, which from itself doth spurn All envy, burning in itself so sparkles That the eternal beauties it unfolds. (Par. VII., from the central section)
The line is the cantica's quietest single piece of theology. God is without envy — that is, without any holding back — and what he is essentially is the sparking forth of beauty.
The two creations.
The Angels, brother, and the land sincere In which thou art, created may be called Just as they are in their entire existence. (Par. VII., from the close)
The immediate creations. Incorruptible. Including, by implication, the rational soul.
What to watch for
Watch the doctrine of excess. God could have forgiven; he chose to be born. The cantica will keep returning to this — in canto XXXIII, the final vision will rest on the same proposition: that the universe is the overflow of a love beyond all necessity.
Watch what the doctrine of the immediate creations sets up. The resurrection of the body, the immortality of the rational soul, the equality of all the blessed in their final state — all rest on the metaphysics planted here. The cantica will collect on the plant much later.
Watch the polyglot song. From here onward, the saints of Paradiso will sing in Latin without warning, sometimes in scraps of Hebrew. Paradiso is the cantica in which the languages of holy speech are heard as one. Babel was an early canto's worry; here it is over.
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.