Paradiso · Canto XII ·
Paradiso XII — The Two Wreaths
Reading Divine Comedy · canto 79 of 100 · Paradiso, Canto XII
Before reading
This is the second canto of the Heaven of the Sun, and the structural twin of the one before it. In canto XI a Dominican praised the founder of the Franciscans; in this canto a Franciscan will praise the founder of the Dominicans. The symmetry is deliberate and almost architectural — the Paradiso will keep returning to it as a small picture of how charity is meant to work across the lines that the Church on earth has drawn.
Where the canto sits
The Sphere of the Sun (the fourth heaven, as Dante's cosmology counts up from the Moon) houses the spirits of the wise — theologians, mystics, doctors of the Church. They appear as garlands of dancing fires, twelve to a ring, two rings now circling the pilgrim and Beatrice. The first ring spoke in canto X and XI through Thomas Aquinas. This canto opens with the second ring beginning to move, and out of it speaks Saint Bonaventure of Bagnoregio (c. 1217–1274), the great Franciscan theologian, minister-general of his order, cardinal-bishop of Albano, the man who wrote the official life of Saint Francis.
What it helps to know
The figure Bonaventure is about to praise is Saint Dominic (1170–1221), born in Caleruega in Old Castile, founder of the Order of Preachers — the Dominicans. Where Francis preached poverty, Dominic preached doctrine. Where Francis went out to embrace the leper and the bird, Dominic went out to argue down the heretic. The two orders were founded within a few years of each other, met as friends in Rome, and were taken by Dante's century as the twin wheels of the chariot of the Church. The poem assigns them exactly that figure.
Dominic's career also has a darker shadow the canto does not name but the reader should remember: he organised the early preaching campaigns against the Cathars of Languedoc, and the order he founded would, within a generation of his death, supply the Inquisition with most of its officers. Dante praises Dominic as the athlete consecrate, kind to his own and cruel to his foes, and the praise is not innocent. The poem is praising the harder of the two saints.
Two small notes will make the speech easier. Felix and Giovanna were Dominic's parents — Latin felix for happy, Hebrew Giovanna for grace of God — and Bonaventure will play the etymology of both names like a small theological joke. The town Calahorra (Dante's name for Caleruega) is fixed by a long-winded geographical periphrasis: where the west wind opens Europe's new leaves, where the sun sometimes hides itself in its long career — that is, in the far west of Spain, near the Atlantic.
What to read for
Notice the doubling. The two wreaths of fire, the two rainbows of Iris, the two founders, the two orders, the two great speeches in praise of each other's saints. The canto is built as a mirror image of canto XI, and the mirror itself is the point — charity is the structure that makes the praise of the other order possible.
Notice the turn in the middle of Bonaventure's speech. After praising Dominic he turns, exactly as Aquinas turned in canto XI, on his own order — on the Franciscans of Dante's day, who have abandoned the rule of their founder. Each saint praises the other order and accuses his own. The poem is teaching what charity in heaven looks like.
The canto closes with a roll-call of the second ring — twelve more wise men, named in rapid succession, ending on a figure whose presence in Heaven has scandalised every commentator since. Listen for the last name.
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
A second wreath of twelve lights closed itself around the first, and the two rings began to revolve together — motion joined to motion, song to song. Out of the new ring spoke a voice that turned the pilgrim toward it as a needle turns toward the star, and identified itself only at the end: Bonaventure, Franciscan, minister-general, cardinal, the official biographer of Francis. The whole intervening speech is the praise of the founder of the other order. Then, exactly at the structural midpoint of the canto, the praise turns — Bonaventure stops talking about Dominic and starts talking about the corruption of his own Franciscans. The canto closes with a rapid roll-call of the twelve fires in the new ring, ending on a name that has scandalised commentators ever since. The whole construction is a single ethical figure executed twice: a saint of one order praises the founder of the other; a saint of one order judges his own. Charity in heaven is what makes both halves of that sentence sayable in the same breath.
The structural mirror
Canto XI gave the life of Francis as told by the Dominican Aquinas; canto XII gives the life of Dominic as told by the Franciscan Bonaventure. The symmetry is so exact it is almost a diagram. Each speaker praises the founder he might have been expected to slight; each praises that founder in the language of his own order — Aquinas's praise of Francis is full of theological precision, Bonaventure's praise of Dominic is full of mystical light. The praise crosses the line of allegiance, and the crossing is the point. The two orders are the two wheels of the chariot of the Church (the figure Aquinas used in canto XI), and a chariot whose wheels do not love each other will not roll. The poem is staging, in Heaven, what the orders manifestly failed to do on earth.
The dark light around Dominic
The canto's praise of Dominic is not soft. He is the amorous paramour of Christian Faith, but he is also the athlete consecrate, kind to his own and cruel to his foes. Bonaventure does not flinch from the second half of the sentence — the saint who organised the preaching campaigns against the Cathars of Languedoc, whose order would, within a generation of his death, supply most of the Inquisition's officers, is praised exactly for his ferocity against heresy. The torrent metaphor is not gentle either: with great force it strikes against the stocks of the heretics, and there where the resistance is the greater, there with greatest vehemence it strikes. The reader who knows what came of those campaigns in Provence — the burning of villages, the massacre at Béziers, the long apparatus of the Holy Office — has to hold the praise and the historical weight together. The poem does not warn the reader; it simply says what it says. The Dominic of canto XII is the Dominic who chose the harder of the two roads, and the poem honours him for the choice.
Felix and Giovanna, the etymological joke
Bonaventure plays the names of Dominic's parents like a small theological game. O thou his father, Felix verily! — Latin felix means happy, but it also means fruitful, and a father whose son is Dominic is fruitful in both senses. O thou his mother, verily Joanna — Giovanna is the Italian of Hebrew Yohanan, grace of God. The pun runs if this, interpreted, means as is said, and the as is said is a polite Scholastic formula for if the etymology holds. The names of the parents prophesy the son. The whole passage is the kind of word-play medieval theology took perfectly seriously: the name a thing carries was held to disclose its essence, and a saint's parents were held to carry, in their own names, the prophecy of the saint's gift.
The turn against the Franciscans
The structural hinge of the canto comes when Bonaventure stops praising Dominic and starts judging his own order. But his own wheel-track is so much abandoned — the rule of Francis has been left behind; the friars of Dante's day have fled either into laxity or into the rigorist heresies of the Spirituals. The exact phrase Bonaventure uses for his own contemporary order — the new Jerusalem it is not — would have struck Dante's first readers as devastating. Bonaventure himself, the historical man, had spent his career trying to hold the Franciscan order together against the Spiritualist faction; the poem puts the verdict on his own work in his own mouth, in Heaven. The praise of Dominic is the rhetorical run-up to the accusation of one's own. The pattern is the same as Aquinas's in canto XI. The two saints judge their own orders and bless the other's; charity is the structure that makes the judgement possible.
The roll-call and the scandal of Joachim
The canto closes with Bonaventure naming the other eleven fires of the second ring — Illuminato and Augustine of the early Franciscans, Hugh of Saint Victor, Peter Comestor, Peter of Spain (later Pope John XXI), Nathan the Old Testament prophet, John Chrysostom, Anselm of Canterbury, Donatus the grammarian, Rabanus Maurus — and then, in the very last position of the roll-call, the Calabrian Abbot Joachim, he with the spirit of prophecy endowed. Joachim of Fiore (c. 1135–1202) had taught that history was divided into three ages — Father, Son, Holy Spirit — and that the third age, the age of the Spirit, would supersede the institutional Church. His ideas were condemned at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 and again by Bonaventure's own commission in 1255. To put Joachim in Heaven is provocation; to put him in Bonaventure's mouth, in the very ring of light Bonaventure inhabits, is provocation raised to a point of doctrine. The most famous opponent of Joachimism praises Joachim in Paradise. The reader is meant to feel the small explosion. The Commedia's heaven is not the verdict of any council; it is the verdict of the poem.
Famous and meaningful passages
The opening of the second wreath.
Soon as the blessed flame had taken up The final word to give it utterance, Began the holy millstone to revolve, And in its gyre had not turned wholly round, Before another in a ring enclosed it, And motion joined to motion, song to song; (Par. XII.1–6)
The holy millstone — la santa mola — is one of the Paradiso's great working metaphors: the dance of the blessed is also the grinding of grain, the slow patient labour of the wise. The second ring closes itself around the first without sound, by sympathy alone.
The Iris simile.
And as are spanned athwart a tender cloud Two rainbows parallel and like in colour, When Juno to her handmaid gives command, (Par. XII.10–12)
Iris was the messenger Juno sent on the rainbow. The two-rainbow figure is the visual translation of the two-ring choreography — and behind both stands the rainbow God set above Noah, named two tercets later, as the pledge that the world will not be drowned again. The wise of the Sphere of the Sun are the new sign of that pledge.
The geography of Dominic's birth.
Within that region where the sweet west wind Rises to open the new leaves, wherewith Europe is seen to clothe herself afresh, Not far off from the beating of the waves, Behind which in his long career the sun Sometimes conceals himself from every man, Is situate the fortunate Calahorra, Under protection of the mighty shield In which the Lion subject is and sovereign. (Par. XII.46–54)
Nine lines to say Caleruega, in Old Castile, in Spain. The periphrasis is part of the canto's praise: Dominic is born at the far western edge of Europe, where the wind opens the spring and the sun goes down — the saint comes from the rim of the world.
The praise of Dominic.
Therein was born the amorous paramour Of Christian Faith, the athlete consecrate, Kind to his own and cruel to his foes; And when it was created was his mind Replete with such a living energy, That in his mother her it made prophetic. (Par. XII.55–60)
Kind to his own and cruel to his foes. The single line that the rest of the canto, and the next eight hundred years of Dominican history, will be measured against.
The etymological joke.
O thou his father, Felix verily! O thou his mother, verily Joanna, If this, interpreted, means as is said! (Par. XII.79–81)
The parents' names prophesy the son. Medieval theology held that names disclosed essences; the canto plays the doctrine as wit.
The torrent of doctrine.
Then with the doctrine and the will together, With office apostolical he moved, Like torrent which some lofty vein out-presses; (Par. XII.97–99)
Preaching as broken water on stubborn ground. The image is gentle on the page; what came of it in Languedoc was not gentle.
Bonaventure names himself.
Bonaventura of Bagnoregio's life Am I, who always in great offices Postponed considerations sinister. (Par. XII.127–129)
The withholding of his own administrative skill — considerations sinister, li sinistri cogitamenti, the left-hand thoughts of self-interest — as the only thing he will claim for himself in Paradise.
The roll-call's last name.
Here is Rabanus, and beside me here Shines the Calabrian Abbot Joachim, He with the spirit of prophecy endowed. (Par. XII.139–141)
The condemned mystic in Heaven, named by his most famous opponent. The poem's quiet refusal of the Church's verdict.
What to watch for
Watch the figure of two. Two wreaths, two rainbows, two founders, two great speeches — the next canto, XIII, will return to a single voice (Aquinas) and untwist a famous theological knot about one king, Solomon, who is wiser than all others. The poem moves from doubling to singling and back.
Watch the chariot of the Church. Aquinas's metaphor in canto XI named the two orders as the two wheels; this canto has shown the wheels in motion. The figure will return in Purgatorio XXIX–XXXII as the great pageant of the Church, where the chariot itself is dragged through history and disfigured. Read those Purgatorial cantos against these two: the high vision of the orders in Heaven, the wrecked vision of the Church in time.
Watch Joachim. The Calabrian abbot's three ages will haunt the Commedia's political thinking — the figure of a coming age in which the institutional Church is superseded by a more spiritual one is, in some readings, the deep structure of the poem's hope. The last name of canto XII is one of its quiet keys.
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.