Paradiso · Canto XV ·
Paradiso XV — The Falling Star
Reading Divine Comedy · canto 82 of 100 · Paradiso, Canto XV
Before reading
This is the canto in which the Paradiso turns, suddenly and without warning, into personal autobiography. Three cantos — XV, XVI, and XVII — will be given to a single voice; the voice belongs to Dante's own great-great-grandfather; what he says will be the most direct thing the Commedia ever says about Dante himself. Of all the cantos in the Paradiso, these three are the ones the poem cannot do without and the ones for which the rest of the poem has been preparing.
Where the canto sits
The pilgrim is in the Heaven of Mars, the fifth sphere, where the spirits of those who fought for the faith have arranged themselves into the figure of a vast luminous cross. In the previous canto the cross assembled itself and Christ flashed within it. This canto opens in the silence that follows. One of the points of light in the cross detaches itself, runs down the right arm to the foot, and stops at the level of the pilgrim — the famous star shooting through the still evening sky. Out of the descended light comes a voice in Latin. The voice will speak in Latin first — the formal language of the ancestor and of the empire he served — and then turn to the vernacular Italian when it begins to address the descendant in front of it.
What it helps to know
The speaker is Cacciaguida degli Elisei, born in Florence about 1091, knighted by the Emperor Conrad III, and killed (his date is given by tradition as 1147) on the Second Crusade — the disastrous expedition launched by Bernard of Clairvaux against the Seljuk Turks in the Holy Land. He is the most distant ancestor whose name Dante's family preserved; Dante's surname comes through his wife, who came from the Val di Pado — the valley of the Po, near Ferrara — and brought the Aldighieri name with her. The historical Cacciaguida is barely more than a name in the documentary record. The Cacciaguida of these three cantos is, accordingly, Dante's own invention, set up to do for Dante what Anchises did for Aeneas in Aeneid VI: greet the descendant in the underworld, tell him what he is, tell him what he must do.
The whole canto is structured as that greeting. Cacciaguida speaks first in Latin — O sanguis meus, o blood of mine — using the language of the Virgilian fas (the holy permission to enter the unseen) and of the Pauline gratia superinfusa (the grace poured down from above). He then turns to the vernacular for the body of his speech. The two-language structure is the canto's signature: the high formal greeting in the language of the empire, the warm personal address in the language of the family. The two languages are the two halves of what Cacciaguida is for Dante: ancestor of the public man and ancestor of the private one.
The body of the speech is the lament for old Florence. Cacciaguida describes the city of his youth — the Florence within the ancient circle, before the second wall was built, before the new families flooded in from the contado, before the merchant wealth and the painted faces and the gold-ringed daughters and the dowries that no father can pay. He names a handful of the old citizens by name. The catalogue is the canto's elegy. Read it for what it is: a piece of nostalgia that is also a piece of political analysis, mounted by a poet whose city had banished him and burnt his property.
What to read for
Notice the falling-star simile that opens the descent. It is a deliberate piece of stagecraft: the highest soul of Mars detaches itself from the figure of the cross and travels through space to meet the visitor. The motion is the visual equivalent of the Latin greeting that follows.
Notice the chain of negatives in the description of old Florence. Each piece of contemporary luxury that Cacciaguida names is named in order to say it did not exist in his day. The figure is the via negativa of civic virtue: the old city is described by what it lacked.
Listen for the last line. Cacciaguida does not name how he died until the canto's final tercet — and came from martyrdom unto this peace. The line stands alone at the bottom of the canto, structurally orphaned, as the closing line of XIII was orphaned. The orphaning is part of the poem's grammar for the deaths it cannot complete.
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 single point of light detached itself from the great cross of Mars, ran along the right arm and down to its foot, and stopped before the pilgrim. Out of the light came a Latin greeting — O blood of mine, O grace of God poured down upon thee — and then a long speech in the vernacular about Florence as it had been a century and a half before the journey, and about the speaker himself. The speaker was Cacciaguida, born in the Florence of about 1091, knighted by the Emperor Conrad III, killed on the Second Crusade. He is Dante's great-great-grandfather; he is the source of the Alighieri surname; and he is, structurally, the Anchises of the Commedia — the ancestor met in the high place who tells the descendant what he is. The whole of the next two cantos will be given to him. This canto is the entry: the descent of the light, the formal greeting in Latin, the elegy for the lost city, the placing of the speaker as a member of the family. The canto's last line names how he died, and stands alone at the bottom of the page.
The Anchises pattern
The structural model is Aeneid VI, the canto's controlling intertext. In Virgil, Aeneas descends into the underworld and meets his father Anchises, who shows him the souls of the future Romans and gives him the prophecy of the empire he is to found. The scene is the model for all subsequent literary visits-of-the-living-to-the-dead-ancestor. Dante reverses Virgil's direction — the ancestor descends to meet the descendant rather than the other way around — and he replaces the direct paternal line (Anchises to Aeneas) with the lateral, almost forgotten line of the great-great-grandfather. The reversal is doctrinal. The Christian pilgrim is not founding an empire; he is being given back his own family in a heaven that is the empire's true completion. And the ancestor he meets is not, like Anchises, the great patriarch of the gens; he is the most distant ancestor whose name happened to survive, a minor twelfth-century knight whose only documented act was to die in the Second Crusade. Dante is using the slenderness of the historical record as part of the poem's argument. Any ancestor, named or unnamed, has this place in Heaven; what makes Cacciaguida visible is only that the family remembered his name.
The two languages of the greeting
Cacciaguida begins in Latin. The opening tercet is one of the few unaltered Latin tercets in the entire Commedia — O sanguis meus, o superinfusa / gratia Dei, sicut tibi, cui / bis unquam Coeli janua reclusa? The language is exact. Sanguis meus is a Virgilian formula — Anchises uses sanguis meus in Aeneid VI to greet a coming Roman in the parade of souls. Superinfusa gratia Dei is Pauline — the grace poured down from above of Romans and Ephesians. And bis Coeli janua reclusa — the gate of Heaven twice unbarred — turns the question to Paul's own ecstasy in 2 Corinthians 12, which canto II of the Inferno had named as one of the two precedents for the pilgrim's journey. The three sources fuse in nine words. The empire, the apostle, and the family converge in the ancestor's greeting.
Then the language switches. The body of the speech is in the vernacular Italian of Dante's own day — the language of the family, of the streets of Florence, of the Commedia itself. The switch is the canto's first picture of what Cacciaguida is for the poem: Latin for what is owed to the empire he served, Italian for what is owed to the descendant he is addressing. Both registers run through the whole canto. The autobiography that follows will be told in the Italian of the dialect Cacciaguida remembers; the few formal nouns — the names of the old families, the offices and ceremonies of the old city — will keep the gravity of the Latin opening.
The elegy for old Florence
The body of the canto is the Florence of the ancient circle. Cacciaguida describes, with the negative precision of the moralist, what his city did not contain: no gold ornaments, no painted faces, no daughters more frightening than their dowries, no Sardanapalus in the bedroom, no immigrants from the contado swelling the population beyond what the old families could absorb. The catalogue is structured as a series of denials, each tercet a small not yet: Bellincion Berti (a respected old citizen) was seen girt with leather and bone — the simplest belt — and his wife departed from the mirror without a painted face. The Cerchi (Dante's contemporaries, the leaders of the White Guelphs and Dante's own faction at the time of his ruin) are not yet in their painted halls. The figure is the via negativa of civic virtue: the lost good is described by what it lacked.
The whole picture is, of course, false in the way that all nostalgia is false. The Florence of 1091 was not chaste and quiet; it was small, poor, and dangerous. The Florence of 1300 was rich, factional, and dangerous in a more elaborate way. What Cacciaguida is mourning is not a historical city but a moral one — the city as the moralist always remembers it, when virtue was simple and the dowries were modest. The reader has to hold the nostalgia against the historical implausibility and let both stand. The poem is not historiography. It is a piece of moral memory mounted in the mouth of a man whose grandsons' grandsons would be exiles.
The naming of the line
After the elegy, Cacciaguida turns to the family proper. Moronto was his brother, Eliseo the other; the Val di Pado — the Po Valley — was where his wife came from, and the surname thou bearest came from her. He does not name Alighieri; he gestures at it, gives its source, and leaves the descendant to recognise it. The whole naming is done in three tercets, with the deliberate sparingness of a man whose name was nearly lost.
The dating is a careful piece of poetry. Cacciaguida says he was born when the planet Mars completed its 580th return to the constellation of the Lion — Mars circles the heavens in roughly two years, so 580 returns gives a birth-date the commentators have settled on 1091 (or perhaps 1090). Dante is doing the medieval astronomical calculation with the precision of a mathematician working backward from his own date of birth. The ancestor is dated in the language of the heaven he now inhabits. The cross of Mars composed of warrior-souls is the figure that gives Cacciaguida's date its measure.
The last line and the silent martyrdom
The canto closes with Cacciaguida naming, finally, how he died. The Second Crusade was the disaster Bernard of Clairvaux preached and Conrad III led; it ended in the catastrophic failed siege of Damascus in 1148. Cacciaguida went, was knighted by the emperor, fought, and was killed by that execrable race — the Muslims of the Levant, named without name. The line came from martyrdom unto this peace — e venni dal martirio a questa pace — stands alone at the bottom of the canto, a stranded fourth line where the tercet would expect a third, the same orphaning the closing line of XIII used. The death is named only in its consequence. The line is one of the Paradiso's gentlest small endings.
The canto's verdict on the Crusade is also worth holding lightly. The poem calls Cacciaguida a martyr; it calls his death peace; it does not weigh the historical question of whether the Second Crusade was a holy war or a misadventure. The Crusader-martyrology was orthodox in Dante's century. The poem inherits it. The reader of the twenty-first century, having read what the Crusades did, can hold the orthodoxy and the historical record together without the poem's help.
Famous and meaningful passages
The benign will.
A will benign, in which reveals itself Ever the love that righteously inspires, As in the iniquitous, cupidity, (Par. XV.1–3)
The canto's first line is a doctrine about the unanimity of charity in the blessed. The whole heaven of Mars falls silent at once because all its wills want the same thing.
The falling star.
As through the pure and tranquil evening air There shoots from time to time a sudden fire, Moving the eyes that steadfast were before, (Par. XV.13–15)
The figure for Cacciaguida's descent through the cross. The reader sees the soul before the soul speaks.
The Latin greeting.
O sanguis meus, O superinfusa Gratia Dei, sicut tibi, cui Bis unquam Coeli janua reclusa? (Par. XV.28–30)
O blood of mine, O grace of God poured down upon thee, to whom — as to thee — was the gate of Heaven ever twice unbarred? The three sources — Virgil, Paul, the family — converge in nine Latin words.
The old Florence.
Florence, within the ancient boundary From which she taketh still her tierce and nones, Abode in quiet, temperate and chaste. (Par. XV.97–99)
The city of the first wall, before the second — tierce and nones are the bells of the old church of the Badia that still mark the day. The geography is a moral coordinate.
The simple costume.
Bellincion Berti saw I go begirt With leather and with bone, and from the mirror His dame depart without a painted face; (Par. XV.112–114)
The proper noun of an old citizen, the leather belt, the unpainted wife. The catalogue's most quoted tercet.
The cradle and the spindle.
One o'er the cradle kept her studious watch, And in her lullaby the language used That first delights the fathers and the mothers; (Par. XV.121–123)
The vernacular itself — the idioma of the lullaby — is part of the lost virtue. The mothers who sang in Tuscan to their babies were practising the language that would, three generations later, write the Commedia.
The family naming.
Moronto was my brother, and Eliseo; From Val di Pado came to me my wife, And from that place thy surname was derived. (Par. XV.136–138)
The Alighieri name reached Dante through a marriage on his great-great-grandmother's side. The poem makes the genealogy plain.
The crusade.
I followed afterward the Emperor Conrad, And he begirt me of his chivalry, So much I pleased him with my noble deeds. (Par. XV.139–141)
The historical Conrad III, the unhistorical noble deeds. The poem makes a hero of a man the chronicles barely mention.
The last line.
There by that execrable race was I Released from bonds of the fallacious world, The love of which defileth many souls, And came from martyrdom unto this peace. (Par. XV.145–148)
Four lines where the canto's grammar would expect three. The death is named only as the door to peace.
What to watch for
Watch the next canto. Cacciaguida will spend canto XVI naming the great families of old Florence and their decline. The catalogue is the longest piece of pure local history in the Commedia; read it slowly, and read it as the kind of grief only a man whose city has exiled him can write.
Watch the prophecy. In canto XVII Cacciaguida will say plainly what the Inferno's three earlier prophecies (Ciacco, Farinata, Brunetto) only hinted at — Dante's coming exile, the suffering of it, the commission to write what he has seen. The whole of the central Paradiso is built so that this canto can open into that one.
Watch the figure of the cross-as-family. Mars holds the warrior-blessed; the warrior-blessed have arranged themselves into a cross; out of the cross descends an ancestor. The pattern is the Paradiso's argument that the family, the army, the cross, and the heaven are at root one structure — the structure of people who have given themselves to something larger than themselves and are arranged, in the heaven, by the depth of their giving.
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.