Paradiso · Canto XIV ·
Paradiso XIV — Solomon Speaks
Reading Divine Comedy · canto 81 of 100 · Paradiso, Canto XIV
Before reading
This is the canto in which the Heaven of the Sun closes and the Heaven of Mars opens. Two questions, one image, and a journey upward: the canto is short, and every section of it carries more than its length suggests. Read it slowly. Solomon will speak, briefly and beautifully, in the middle.
Where the canto sits
The pilgrim has now spent three full cantos among the wise of the Sphere of the Sun. Aquinas has answered the question about Solomon's wisdom. Beatrice, sensing that one further doubt remains in the pilgrim's mind, asks the question for him — and asks it of Aquinas's own ring. Solomon, who has been silent through three cantos, finally answers. Then the canto ascends. Mars is the fifth heaven in Dante's cosmology, the red planet, and the sphere assigned to the spirits of those who fought for the faith. The canto closes inside Mars, where the souls of the warrior-blessed have arranged themselves into the figure of a vast luminous cross — and from within that cross will speak, in the next canto, Dante's own great-great-grandfather.
What it helps to know
Beatrice's question is one of the great puzzles of medieval theology and the question on which the Paradiso has unusual purchase. What happens to the body of the blessed after the resurrection? The Christian creeds insist on the resurrection of the body — at the Last Judgement the saved will be reunited with their flesh, glorified — but no canonical text says what that flesh will be like. Will the light the blessed now radiate be diminished when they take their bodies back, the bodies that were dust the whole time? Or will the body somehow be added to the light? The puzzle is old, and it is sharp. Christian eschatology is committed to the body — committed against the Manichaean and Platonic temptation to see the flesh as the soul's prison — but committed in a way that is hard to imagine.
Solomon's answer is the Paradiso's great affirmation of the body. The blessed will be more glorious after the resurrection, not less. The light will be deeper because the organ that perceives the light will be more complete. The eyes — Solomon says the organs of the body shall be strong enough to bear delight — are the figure of the whole sensible person made fit for the divine vision. This is one of the Commedia's most physical theological statements, and it is the answer that Christian orthodoxy gave to the question, but it is given here with a tenderness that the doctrinal manuals never quite manage.
The cross of Mars then assembles itself out of the new heaven's light. The cross is the standard the warrior-blessed bear; the souls themselves are the stars of which it is composed; the figure of Christ flashes within the cross — triumphs within it, as the canto says — in a way the poem confesses it cannot describe.
What to read for
Notice the canto's image of water in a round vase, struck either from inside or outside. The figure is the canto's small picture of how Beatrice's questions and the pilgrim's questions move between them, by sympathy alone. The shape is one of the Paradiso's recurring small geometries.
Notice the brightness is proportioned to the ardour, the ardour to the vision formula. The whole hierarchy of the Paradiso is in those two lines. The blessed are not arranged by reward; they are arranged by depth of seeing, and the light each radiates is the measure of that depth.
Notice the canto's ending. The pilgrim, ascending to Mars, fails to look back at Beatrice, and the canto's last lines are an apology for the failure — an apology that turns out to be a theological argument. Read it twice.
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 short canto, structured in three movements, each doing work the Paradiso could not do without. First, the water-in-the-vase figure for the way the pilgrim's silent question and Aquinas's voice meet and turn each other into Beatrice's spoken request. Second, Solomon's answer — the only one Solomon gives in the entire Commedia, and the Paradiso's single fullest theological statement about the resurrection of the body. Third, the ascent to Mars and the assembly of the great luminous cross out of the souls of the warrior-blessed, with the implication of Christ flashing within the cross that the poem confesses it cannot describe. The canto ends with the pilgrim failing to look back at Beatrice, and then mounting a brief defence of his failure that is itself a small piece of doctrine about how the heavens work.
The water in the vase
The opening figure is the Paradiso's great small image of resonance. A round vessel can be set rippling either from outside — a hand striking the bronze rim — or from inside — a drop falling at the centre. The two patterns travel in opposite directions, and where they meet they pass through each other. The figure is the canto's geometry of communication: Beatrice has heard the pilgrim's unspoken question (the inward drop) and Aquinas is about to answer it (the outward ripple), and the two waves meet inside the wreath of the wise. The picture is also a small picture of the whole Paradiso — the divine love moves out from the centre, the pilgrim's love moves in from the rim, and the cantos are the patterns of their crossing.
Solomon's speech and the body
The question is the Paradiso's most physical. After the Last Judgement, when the blessed take their bodies back, will they be more glorious, the same, or less? The pagan-Platonic instinct is to answer less — the body is the heavy thing the soul rises from. The Manichaean instinct is to answer less with hostility — the body is the evil thing the soul should never have been bound to. Christian orthodoxy answers more, and answers in the teeth of both instincts. Solomon gives the answer. The light the blessed now radiate is proportioned to the ardour, the ardour to the vision, the vision to the grace they have received above their merit. After the resurrection the body will be added to the soul; the organ of sight will be added to the light of sight; the whole sensible person, glorified, will receive more of the divine vision than the unbodied soul now does. When, glorious and sanctified, our flesh is reassumed, then shall our persons be more pleasing by their being all complete. The line is the Commedia's answer to the long suspicion of the body that ran through late-antique and medieval Christianity. The body is not the soul's prison; the body is the soul's instrument, and the resurrection completes the instrument.
The image Solomon uses is exact. A burning coal sends forth a flame that for a moment seems to outshine the coal — but the coal, glowing white-hot beneath, still maintains its own appearance through the flame. The light of the soul is the flame; the resurrected body is the white-hot coal. The flame would not be more visible without the coal; the coal would not be glowing without the flame. The two together are more than either alone. The whole canto is contained in the comparison.
The hierarchy of light
The two lines around which the Paradiso's entire architecture turns appear here.
The order is the order of the Comedy's heaven: the saved are arranged neither by reward nor by merit but by vision — by how deeply each soul sees the One that all see. The ardour each soul feels is the response to that depth of seeing. The light each radiates is the visible measure of the ardour. There is no other hierarchy. The blessed do not compete; they are arranged in a graduated transparency. The lower spheres see less but they see truly; the higher spheres see more but the lower spheres do not envy them. The doctrine is gentler than its formula, and the canto makes it audible by giving it to Solomon, who himself sits next to Aquinas and Bonaventure as a peer.
The cross of Mars and the failure of speech
When the pilgrim arrives at the new heaven he sees, before he sees anything else, the great Greek cross made out of the points of light of the warrior-blessed. The four arms are equal; the centre is the brightest; along the cross's long axis flashes the figure of Christ, triumphs in the cross, in a way the poem says it cannot find an ensample worthy of. Dante interrupts his own description to confess he cannot describe what he saw — but he who takes his cross and follows Christ shall yet forgive me what I leave untold. The breakdown is itself the doctrine. Mars is the sphere of those who bore the cross in the literal sense, who fought and died for the faith; the cross they composed for the pilgrim to see is the figure of their bearing. To describe what flashes in it would be to describe what Christ is, and that the poem will not yet attempt.
The pilgrim's failure to look back
The canto closes with Dante mounting upward and not turning round to look at Beatrice — a small failure of devotion he has not committed before. The closing lines are an apology, and the apology turns into a piece of cosmology. The higher each heaven is, the more pure its joy; in Mars he has been given more than he had in the Sun; in failing to look back he was being lifted by the new heaven's joy past the lower one. For here the holy joy is not disclosed, because ascending it becomes more pure. The defence reads as a casuistry until you read it again. The pilgrim's apology is a small picture of the Paradiso's entire structural principle: the love that moves him upward is the same love that, at each stage, takes him farther from the things below — including, briefly, from his guide.
Famous and meaningful passages
The water in the vase.
From centre unto rim, from rim to centre, In a round vase the water moves itself, As from without 'tis struck or from within. (Par. XIV.1–3)
The geometry of love that meets in the middle.
The voice from the inner wreath.
And, in the lustre most divine of all The lesser ring, I heard a modest voice, Such as perhaps the Angel's was to Mary, (Par. XIV.34–36)
Solomon begins by being compared, in his voice, to Gabriel. The annunciation is the type; the resurrection is the antitype the voice is about to disclose.
The doctrine of resurrected glory.
As long as the festivity Of Paradise shall be, so long our love Shall radiate round about us such a vesture. (Par. XIV.37–39)
The light the blessed now wear is vesture — clothing, ornament, not essence. The body underneath the light is still to come.
The hierarchy.
Its brightness is proportioned to the ardour, The ardour to the vision; and the vision Equals what grace it has above its worth. (Par. XIV.40–42)
The three-step ladder that holds the whole Paradiso together. Read the line and watch the rest of the cantica unfold from it.
The coal and the flame.
But even as a coal that sends forth flame, And by its vivid whiteness overpowers it So that its own appearance it maintains, (Par. XIV.52–54)
The image that turns the resurrection from a doctrine into a picture. The body underneath is brighter than the soul-flame above it; they are seen together because they belong together.
The promise.
When, glorious and sanctified, our flesh Is reassumed, then shall our persons be More pleasing by their being all complete; (Par. XIV.43–45)
The Commedia's settling of accounts with the long Christian suspicion of the body. The resurrection is more, not less.
The cross of Mars.
Thus constellated in the depths of Mars, Those rays described the venerable sign That quadrants joining in a circle make. (Par. XIV.100–102)
The geometry of the cross described as a cross-quartering inscribed in a circle — the medieval heraldic figure, mounted as an asterism in the red planet's sky.
The confession of failure.
For on that cross as levin gleamed forth Christ, So that I cannot find ensample worthy; But he who takes his cross and follows Christ (Par. XIV.103–105)
Cristo flashes; the poem stops; the only ensample is the bearing the soul itself will offer. The Paradiso's most efficient piece of theological humility.
The apology that turns into doctrine.
For here the holy joy is not disclosed, Because ascending it becomes more pure. (Par. XIV.139–140)
The failure to look back at Beatrice is excused by the geometry of the heavens. Each ascent is a slight tilting of love away from what is now lower; the same love makes the tilt, and the same love will, at the end, return.
What to watch for
Watch the cross. The figure of light arranged in a geometric sign — the cross here, the eagle in Jupiter (cantos XVIII–XX), the ladder in Saturn (cantos XXI–XXII) — is the Paradiso's great recurring stagecraft. Each higher heaven gives the pilgrim a new ideogram of itself, and the ideograms are the cantica's substitute for narrative.
Watch the figure inside the cross. Cristo will return as a rhyme-word three times in the Paradiso — at XII.71, XIV.104, XIX.104, XXXII.83 — and in each case will be allowed to rhyme only with itself. The grammar of the rhyme is a small theological argument. The Name has no equal.
Watch for Cacciaguida. The next canto will summon, out of the centre of the cross, the figure who will dominate the heart of the Paradiso — Dante's own great-great-grandfather, a crusader who died with Conrad III, the man through whose voice the poem will at last say plainly what Dante's exile cost.
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.