Paradiso · Canto XIII ·
Paradiso XIII — The Fifteen Stars
Reading Divine Comedy · canto 80 of 100 · Paradiso, Canto XIII
Before reading
This is the third canto in the Heaven of the Sun, and the place where the Paradiso permits itself one of its most demanding pieces of pure theological thinking. Bonaventure has finished naming the second wreath; Aquinas speaks again. The two wreaths of twelve fires resume their dance. Then, in the quiet that follows, the Angelic Doctor takes up a problem he raised three cantos back and answers it — patiently, scholastically, at length.
Where the canto sits
The pilgrim is still in the Sphere of the Sun, the fourth heaven, where the spirits of the wise appear as light. The previous two cantos staged the symmetry of the two great preaching orders: Aquinas praised Francis, Bonaventure praised Dominic, each saint judged his own. This canto withdraws from the orders and turns to a problem of doctrine — but it does so by way of a long simile of fifteen constellations, the most elaborate astronomical opening in the Paradiso. Read the opening as the canto's small ceremonial flourish before the argument begins.
What it helps to know
The problem is the one Aquinas planted in canto X, when he identified Solomon — the third light of the inner wreath — as the soul whose wisdom was such that, if the truth be true, to see so much there never rose a second. The pilgrim has been worrying at the line ever since. How can it be said that no second rose to Solomon's wisdom when Adam was created directly by God and so came forth perfect, and when Christ was God Himself made man? Two figures, at least, must have known more than Solomon. The line cannot mean what it seems to mean. Aquinas, having read the doubt in the pilgrim's mind, takes the canto to clear it up.
The answer turns on a distinction that is at the heart of medieval theology. There is wisdom in the absolute — the perfect knowledge proper to God, and to those (Adam before the fall, Christ in His humanity) whom God made directly. And there is wisdom under a determination — the wisdom proper to a kind of person doing a kind of work. When Solomon, asked by God what he would have, asked for the wisdom to govern his people, what he asked for and what he received was kingly wisdom — and no king has risen like him. The qualifier is silent on the page and load-bearing in the doctrine. Read for it.
The second half of the canto is not an argument but a warning. Aquinas turns from Solomon to the question of judgement itself, and tells the pilgrim — and through him the reader — to be slow in pronouncing on what God has or has not saved. The warning is delivered as a small image of lead at the foot, and as an even smaller image of a thorn in winter bearing the rose in spring. Sit with both. They are the canto's gift to the reader who has been judging.
What to read for
Notice the patience. The canto's argument unfolds at a deliberate pace and refuses to take any shortcut; it is the Paradiso's most extended exercise in the rhythm of Scholastic thinking, and it is the rhythm of a method that holds two contradictions in mind for a long time before resolving them. The poem is staging, by ear, what intellectual humility sounds like.
Notice the closing line. The canto ends on a single isolated line — for one may rise, and fall the other may — and the asymmetry on the page is part of the meaning. Judgement is suspended; the line trails into the next canto unanswered.
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 two wreaths danced and stopped, and Aquinas spoke again. The pilgrim had been carrying, since canto X, a doubt about the line in which Aquinas named Solomon as the soul to whose wisdom no second rose. The doubt was the obvious one: Adam, made directly by God, came forth perfect; Christ was God Himself. How can Solomon, son of David, son of Bathsheba, have been wiser than either? Aquinas answers the doubt by way of a long argument about how creation works — about the perfect Light that is the second Person of the Trinity, and the imperfect mirroring of that Light in the things God makes through nature rather than directly — and then resolves the difficulty in a single twist of the syntax. Solomon, asked by God to name what he would have, asked for kingly wisdom. Kingly wisdom was what he received, and no king has risen like him. The qualifier was always there; the pilgrim, like the rest of us, had not heard it. The canto's second half is no longer doctrine but warning: be slow to judge what God has saved and what God has not. The closing image is a thorn in winter that bears a rose in spring, and the closing line is a single line that hangs unanswered.
The cosmology behind the answer
The argument's first move is the part of the canto most modern readers find hardest. Aquinas walks the pilgrim through the medieval account of how creation descends from God: at the top, the eternal Word — the Light in which the Father generates the Son and in which the Spirit proceeds. Beneath the Word, the nine angelic intelligences, each governing one of the heavenly spheres. Beneath the angelic intelligences, the spheres themselves, which transmit the formative power of the Word down to the sublunar world. Things made directly by the Word — the universe's first matter, the angels, Adam's body before the fall, the human nature assumed by Christ — come forth perfect. Things made by the secondary causes — the way ordinary humans come forth from ordinary parents, through the angelic and stellar mediations — come forth more or less well according to the disposition of the material the formative power encounters. Nature, Aquinas says, is always like the artist who has the skill of the art and a hand that trembles. The making always falls short of the design. The whole machinery of medieval cosmology is mobilised in twenty-odd lines for one purpose: to establish that Adam and Christ stand outside the class of beings to which Solomon belongs, and so cannot be the second to whom Solomon is compared.
The twist that resolves the difficulty
Then the small grammatical detail. I have not spoken so darkly — non parlai sì, che non ti possi accorger — that thou canst not see clearly he was a king who asked for wisdom, that he might be sufficiently a king. Solomon, in 1 Kings 3, was offered any gift by God in a dream at Gibeon. He asked for an understanding heart to judge thy people. He did not ask for the wisdom of the angels, nor for the wisdom of the metaphysician, nor for the wisdom of the saints. He asked, specifically, for the wisdom proper to his office. What he received was that wisdom, and no king has risen like him. The line is true under its qualifier; Aquinas's job in the canto has been to make the reader hear the qualifier that was silent on the page.
The Scholastic precision is not show. It is doing real work. The poem's first wreath of the wise places Solomon next to Aquinas and Bonaventure — that is, places kingly wisdom on the same level of light as theological wisdom — and that placement would be a scandal if Solomon were being claimed as wiser than the doctors of the Church as such. The canto is making the placement liveable. The wise of the Sphere of the Sun are wise in their kinds. The kingly wise sits next to the theological wise; neither outranks the other; both are facets of the one Light.
The warning that follows
Then the canto turns. Aquinas, having resolved the difficulty about Solomon, addresses the larger temptation the resolution exposes — the temptation to think that, having got the doctrine right, one can now sit in judgement on who is saved and who is damned. The warning is short, exact, and entirely unScholastic in its rhetoric:
The lead at the feet, slowing the yes and the no the pilgrim has not yet seen — that figure is Aquinas restraining the very habit of confident pronouncement that has made him, in life, the greatest of the Schoolmen. The poem has him correct, in himself, the deformation his own profession risks. Then the thorn-and-rose: the same plant that is intractable and fierce through the winter bears the rose at its top in spring; the ship that runs straight all its voyage may sink within sight of the harbour. The Latin tag is de internis non iudicat ecclesia — the Church does not judge of inner things — and the canto is putting it in the mouth of the doctor whose work made the Church's external judgements possible. The juxtaposition is the canto's deepest small moment.
The Dame Bertha line
The closing tercet names two ordinary persons of the Tuscan thirteenth century — Dame Bertha and Ser Martin, the medieval equivalents of Mary Jones and John Smith — and warns them not to think that, having seen one neighbour steal and another offer in church, they have read the books of God. For one may rise, and fall the other may. The line stands alone at the bottom of the canto, structurally orphaned, an incomplete tercet hanging into the white space where the next canto will begin. The orphaning is the meaning. Judgement is the unfinished line the Commedia keeps refusing to complete.
Famous and meaningful passages
The astronomical opening.
Let him imagine, who would well conceive What now I saw, and let him while I speak Retain the image as a steadfast rock, (Par. XIII.1–3)
The reader is asked to hold an image as a rock while the canto builds a fifteen-fold simile around it. The canto's first move is to enlist the reader's memory before the argument starts.
The thinking proper to the Scholastic.
'Twas not to know the number in which are The motors here above, or if 'necesse' With a contingent e'er 'necesse' make, (Par. XIII.97–99)
Aquinas lists what Solomon did not ask for — the number of the angelic intelligences, the technical question of whether the modal necessary can be derived from contingent premises — and the items in the list are the showpieces of the Schoolman's own trade. He is naming his own discipline and saying that is not what Solomon asked for either.
The doctrinal resolution.
I've not so spoken that thou canst not see Clearly he was a king who asked for wisdom, That he might be sufficiently a king; (Par. XIII.94–96)
The qualifier that was silent on the page is now audible. Kingly wisdom, asked for and received; no king has risen like him.
The Adam-and-Christ knot.
Into that bosom, thou believest, whence Was drawn the rib to form the beauteous cheek Whose taste to all the world is costing dear, (Par. XIII.37–39)
Adam, whose rib became Eve, whose taste of the fruit is costing dear to the whole human race. The line that gathers the entire history of the fall in two clauses.
The warning against hasty judgement.
And lead shall this be always to thy feet, To make thee, like a weary man, move slowly Both to the Yes and No thou seest not; (Par. XIII.112–114)
Lead at the feet of the doctrinal mind. The slowest line in the canto, by design.
The thorn and the rose.
For I have seen all winter long the thorn First show itself intractable and fierce, And after bear the rose upon its top; (Par. XIII.133–135)
The image of slow grace. The thorn does not stop being a thorn; it adds the rose to what it was.
The closing line.
Let not Dame Bertha nor Ser Martin think, Seeing one steal, another offering make, To see them in the arbitrament divine; For one may rise, and fall the other may. (Par. XIII.139–142)
Four lines where there should be three. The canto refuses to close on a tercet because the question it closes on refuses to close.
What to watch for
Watch the figure of measure. Aquinas's lead at the feet is the Paradiso's small image for the right pace of judgement; the same figure will return in Paradiso XIX, where the great Eagle of Justice will refuse to answer the question of why a virtuous pagan should be damned, and insist instead that the question be carried slowly.
Watch Solomon. He has been named but not yet heard. The very next canto will give him a single speech — about the resurrection of the body, the only doctrinal point on which the Commedia lets a king of Israel teach a Christian heaven — and the speech will be one of the Paradiso's most luminous brief passages.
Watch the closing white space. The Paradiso will end, twenty cantos hence, on the most famous closed line in literature: the Love which moves the sun and the other stars. This canto's open line is a small early picture of the question that line will, at the end, finally close.
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.