Paradiso · Canto XI ·
Paradiso XI — The Betrothal of Francis and Poverty
Reading Divine Comedy · canto 78 of 100 · Paradiso, Canto XI
Before reading
This is one of the Paradiso's most quietly daring cantos. The Dominican theologian Aquinas — who in canto X named the eleven companions in his dance — now uses his second speech to tell, with full love and full theological weight, the life of the founder of the other great order: St Francis of Assisi. The choice is the cantica's argument. The two great mendicant orders of the thirteenth century, Dominicans and Franciscans, had spent the century in rivalry — over theology, over property, over papal patronage, over which had the truer poverty. Dante puts the praise of Francis in the mouth of a Dominican, and in canto XII he will put the praise of Dominic in the mouth of a Franciscan. The symmetry is the cantica's reconciliation of the two orders' work, performed by their two greatest doctors.
Where the canto sits
The pilgrim is still in the heaven of the Sun, surrounded by the crown of twelve theologians. Aquinas has just finished naming his companions and seeing the pilgrim's puzzlement at one of his earlier statements (a remark about Solomon's wisdom that will be the subject of canto XIII). Before answering that question, Aquinas opens his second speech with a long preamble on the vanity of human cares and then narrates the life of St Francis at sustained length. The narrative is the canto. The puzzle about Solomon will wait two cantos.
The reader should be ready for a particular literary form: hagiography. The medieval saint's life had its own conventions — birth in a particular place, early signs, the renunciation, the call, the founding of the order, the imprimatur of the Pope, the miraculous sign at the close. Aquinas's narrative observes the form precisely, but it is not a flat recital. The cantica's most distinctive contribution is to tell the life of Francis as a betrothal — Francis as a passionate lover, his bride as Lady Poverty (Madonna Povertà), the whole life a courtship and a marriage.
What it helps to know
St Francis of Assisi (Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone, c. 1181–1226) was the son of a wealthy Umbrian cloth-merchant. In his twenties, after illness and a period of war captivity, he renounced his inheritance — famously stripping naked in the public square of Assisi and returning his clothes to his father — and adopted a life of total poverty, begging for his bread and serving the lepers outside the town. He gathered followers; in 1209 Pope Innocent III gave his rule provisional approval; in 1223 Pope Honorius III confirmed the Regula Bullata. In 1224, on the rough mountain of La Verna in Tuscany, Francis received the stigmata — the wounds of Christ marked on his own body — and bore them until his death two years later. He was canonised in 1228, two years after he died.
The Lady Poverty of Aquinas's narrative is a literary figure with a precise history. The early Franciscans had personified poverty as Francis's bride — the figure who, since Christ's death, had remained despised and obscure for over eleven hundred years, awaiting a suitor with the courage to love her again. The conceit was already established by the time Dante was writing, in the early thirteenth-century text Sacrum commercium beati Francisci cum domina Paupertate (The Sacred Exchange of Blessed Francis with Lady Poverty). Dante's contribution is to compress the conceit into a few tercets of unforgettable narrative weight.
The canto's bitter close is the part that requires preparation. After the gentle telling of the saint's life, Aquinas turns to the present and laments the corruption of the Franciscan Order in the eighty years since the founder's death. Already, by 1300, the Order had split into rival factions over the question of how literally to keep Francis's vow of poverty — the Spirituals who held to the strict interpretation and the Conventuals who allowed accommodation. Aquinas, in the canto, sides clearly with the spirit of the founder against the laxity of the followers. The Dominican is praising the Franciscan founder and condemning the contemporary Franciscan Order. The political subtlety is part of the canto's nerve.
What to read for
Notice the opening. The canto begins with one of the Commedia's most quoted single tercets — a sweeping dismissal of the syllogisms and the wing-beats by which human beings spend their lives chasing vanity. The dismissal is structural: the canto wants to wash all earthly motives off the table before it tells the life of a man who chose to want nothing.
Notice the geographical opening. Aquinas does not begin Francis's life with the boy's birth. He begins with the place — between Tupino and the water that falls from the hill elect of blessed Ubald. The Italian medieval reader would have known the Umbrian geography by ear; the modern reader can let the names be incantation. The point is that Aquinas is locating Francis as a feature of the landscape, like a river or a saint's mountain. The man is a place.
Notice the betrothal. Lady Poverty is not metaphor in the canto; she is character. Read the moment when Francis is clad with her before his spiritual court. The cantica is in earnest about its allegorical figure.
The closing is brief and harsh. Hold it against the gentleness of the narrative. The cantica is reading the Franciscan present against the Franciscan founder.
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 one of the Commedia's most concentrated single tercets of contempt for human striving, brought the reader back to the dance of the wise, and then let Aquinas — the great Dominican — tell the life of St Francis as a love story. The deliberate paradox is the canto's whole nerve. The two great mendicant orders of the thirteenth century had spent a hundred years in rivalry over poverty, learning, papal favour, and the right interpretation of their founders' wills. Dante puts the praise of Francis in a Dominican mouth, and (in canto XII) the praise of Dominic in a Franciscan mouth. The symmetry is the cantica's quiet healing. By the end of canto XI the reader has been told the life of one founder with such tenderness that the Order he founded — already corrupt, by 1300, in the cantica's reading — is shamed by its own founder's gentleness. Aquinas's closing tercets are the shaming, delivered as lament rather than as invective.
The opening tercet
The canto begins with a sweeping survey of the things human beings spend their lives on.
O Thou insensate care of mortal men, How inconclusive are the syllogisms That make thee beat thy wings in downward flight! (Par. XI.1–3)
Inconclusive syllogisms — defettivi silogismi. The line is bitter and exact. The reasonings by which people justify their pursuits — of law, of medicine, of priestly office, of rule, of theft, of the body's pleasures — all of them are defective, in the strict logical sense: they do not yield their conclusions. The wings beat in downward flight: the metaphor inverts the cantica's central image of the soul's natural upward motion. To pursue any of those earthly goods is to fly the wrong direction. The canto wants the reader's mind to have no other competing object before it tells the life of a man who chose to want none of them.
The geography of holy birth
Aquinas does not begin with Francis's birth. He begins with the place.
Between Tupino and the stream that falls Down from the hill elect of blessed Ubald, A fertile slope of lofty mountain hangs (Par. XI.43–45)
The Tupino is the small Umbrian river that flows past Assisi. The stream that falls from the hill elect of blessed Ubald is the Chiascio, which flows from Monte Ingino above Gubbio (where St Ubaldus was bishop). Aquinas is triangulating Francis's birthplace from two waterways and a holy mountain — locating the saint as a feature of the landscape, the way one locates a town or a shrine. The man is a place before he is a person. The line continues with the cantica's small piece of word-play on the name of Francis's town: one would do well not to call it Ascesi but Orient — Assisi (from ascesi, "ascent") is too small; the proper name for the place that gave the world the sun of Francis is Orient, the place of sunrise. The geography is theological from its first syllable.
The betrothal
The narrative then enters Francis's life and immediately transforms it into a courtship-and-marriage allegory. Lady Poverty is the bride; the public square of Assisi is the church; the bishop is the officiant.
Francis and Poverty for these two lovers Take thou henceforward in my speech diffuse. (Par. XI.74–75)
For these two lovers — per questi due amanti. The poetic move is precise. The reader has been told, repeatedly through cantos III–IX, that the Paradiso recognises love as the unifying principle of all the blessed — and that the love that disorders an earthly life can be the same love redirected. Here that proposition reaches its summit. Francis's love for Poverty is not metaphor; it is the actual content of his life. The whole fin'amor tradition of Provençal love-poetry — the same tradition Folquet of Marseille had served in canto IX — is being claimed for the Franciscan story. The medieval lover's quest for an unobtainable beloved becomes the saint's quest for an impossible bride.
The portrait of the bride is one of the cantica's most quietly affecting tercets.
She, reft of her first husband, scorned, obscure, One thousand and one hundred years and more, Waited without a suitor till he came. (Par. XI., from the central narrative)
Reft of her first husband, scorned, obscure. Her first husband was Christ on the Cross — to whom Poverty had been wedded at Calvary. Since then she has waited eleven hundred years without a suitor. The Church, in the cantica's reading, had abandoned her almost immediately after the apostolic age; she had grown old in obscurity; Francis is the first to woo her back to dignity. The line is a quiet historical indictment as well as a love-poem. The cantica is reading the medieval Church's eleven centuries of not wedding Poverty as a long widowhood that has now been ended.
The stigmata
The narrative compresses Francis's mature ministry — the gathering of disciples (Bernard, Giles, Sylvester), the journey to the East to attempt the conversion of the Sultan, the papal approvals — and arrives at the canto's most quietly miraculous tercet.
On the rude rock 'twixt Tiber and the Arno From Christ did he receive the final seal, Which during two whole years his members bore. (Par. XI., late narrative)
The rude rock 'twixt Tiber and the Arno — La Verna, the rough Tuscan mountain where, in September 1224, Francis received the stigmata. From Christ did he receive the final seal — l'ultimo sigillo. The phrase is exact and astonishing. The stigmata are the last seal — the final wax mark — by which Christ has authenticated his lover. The metaphor is mercantile and legal: a seal impressed on a document, the formal certification of authorship. Francis's body is the document; the Crucifixion is the seal; Christ is the author. The line collapses the whole theology of saint-life into one image.
The bitter close
After two years bearing the stigmata, Francis died in 1226. The narrative ends; Aquinas turns to the present.
(Par. XI., from the closing section, paraphrased)
The diagnosis: Francis's spiritual flock — his Order — has strayed through unfamiliar pastures, and the further they go from the original rule, the emptier they return to the fold. By 1300, the Franciscan Order had split into rival factions over how literally to keep Francis's vow of absolute poverty — the Spirituals who held to the strict reading, the Conventuals who allowed the order to hold property in common through papal trustees, and an emerging laxer middle. The conflict had become political: by Dante's writing-life, several Spiritual leaders had been excommunicated and one (Angelo da Clareno) imprisoned. Aquinas, in the canto, does not name parties. He laments that the milk — the original life — has been lost. The closing tercets are the harder for being delivered as elegy rather than as anger. The Dominican is mourning a Franciscan loss with full sincerity, and the cantica is teaching its reader that mourning each other's failures is part of what the two orders owe each other.
The pairing with canto XII
The reader who reads canto XI alone has only half of the move. In canto XII, the cantica completes the symmetry: a second crown of twelve theologians will appear, and the Franciscan St Bonaventure will tell the life of St Dominic. The two cantos are a single composition. Dominic's life in Bonaventure's mouth will be told with the same tenderness, and his Order's contemporary corruption will be lamented with the same grief. The cantica is using the symmetry to do what the medieval Church could not quite manage in life: to let the two orders honour each other's founders and mourn each other's losses. Read XI and XII together; read them as one canto split into two halves.
Famous and meaningful passages
The opening.
O Thou insensate care of mortal men, How inconclusive are the syllogisms That make thee beat thy wings in downward flight! (Par. XI.1–3)
The cantica's most concentrated dismissal of human striving. Inconclusive syllogisms: defective logic. Downward flight: the inverted natural motion of the soul.
The geography of holy birth.
Between Tupino and the stream that falls Down from the hill elect of blessed Ubald, A fertile slope of lofty mountain hangs (Par. XI.43–45)
Triangulating the birthplace from two waterways and a holy mountain. The man as a feature of the landscape.
The betrothal named.
Francis and Poverty for these two lovers Take thou henceforward in my speech diffuse. (Par. XI.74–75)
For these two lovers. The whole medieval love-poetry tradition gathered into the saint's life.
The eleven hundred years.
She, reft of her first husband, scorned, obscure, One thousand and one hundred years and more, Waited without a suitor till he came. (Par. XI., central)
Poverty's first husband was Christ at Calvary. Her widowhood is the cantica's longest single quiet indictment of medieval ecclesiastical history.
The final seal.
On the rude rock 'twixt Tiber and the Arno From Christ did he receive the final seal, Which during two whole years his members bore. (Par. XI., late)
The stigmata as the last seal. The mercantile-legal language compressed into miracle.
What to watch for
Watch canto XII. The Franciscan St Bonaventure will tell the life of the Dominican St Dominic with the same tenderness. The two cantos are one composition.
Watch the flock-and-pasture image. It connects this canto back to Folquet's the shepherd has been turned to a wolf (canto IX) and forward to St Peter's apocalyptic denunciation (canto XXVII). The cantica's whole institutional critique runs through pastoral metaphors.
Watch poverty. The word will keep returning. By canto XII it will be Dominic's poverty as well as Francis's. By canto XXII it will be the rule of St Benedict abandoned. The cantica's quietest single subject, after love, is what the Church has done with money.
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.