Paradiso · Canto XVIII ·
Paradiso XVIII — The Letters
Reading Divine Comedy · canto 85 of 100 · Paradiso, Canto XVIII
Before reading
This is the canto in which the Paradiso's third great ideogram appears. Mars showed the pilgrim a cross composed of warrior-souls. Jupiter — the sixth heaven, the planet of justice — will show him a sentence of Latin written across the sky in letters made of souls, and then the souls of the last letter will rearrange themselves into the shape of a vast imperial eagle. Read the canto as a short, almost cinematic visual sequence: a roll-call, a sequence of letters spelt out one by one across the heavens, a transformation, a denunciation. The argument of the canto is its own choreography.
Where the canto sits
The pilgrim has heard the prophecy of exile. He stands in the Heaven of Mars with Beatrice and his ancestor; the great cross of warrior-souls is still around him. The canto opens with the pilgrim tasting his own, the bitter tempering with the sweet — the line is one of the Paradiso's most quietly autobiographical, the bitterness of the prophecy folded into the sweetness of being in his ancestor's presence. Cacciaguida then names, one by one, eight of the great warrior-souls of the cross: Joshua, Maccabaeus, Charlemagne, Roland, William of Orange, Renouard, Duke Godfrey, Robert Guiscard. Each name causes a corresponding light to flash along the arm of the cross. The roll-call ends; the pilgrim turns to Beatrice; she tells him not to look only at her eyes — not in mine eyes alone is Paradise — and he turns to find the heaven of Mars left behind and Jupiter beginning around him.
What it helps to know
The new heaven shows the souls of just rulers — the kings and emperors and judges who governed well — and the canto displays them in a way the Commedia has never displayed anything before. The souls fly, in patterns of light, against the white surface of the planet, and they spell letters. They spell, one slow letter at a time, the opening verse of the Book of Wisdom in the Latin Vulgate:
Diligite iustitiam qui iudicatis terram.
Love justice, you who judge the earth.
The verse is the divine command to the rulers of the world. Dante puts it where it belongs — at the entrance to the heaven of the just rulers — and lets the reader watch it being assembled out of the bodies of the rulers themselves. The whole sequence is one of the Paradiso's great pieces of theatre.
The final letter — M, the last letter of terram — does something different. It does not dissolve when the next letter would form; it stays, and the souls of the M rearrange themselves in place. First into the head and neck of an eagle; then, as more souls join, into the full body. The eagle is the imperial standard — the aquila of Rome — and its appearance, formed out of the souls of the just rulers, is the Paradiso's most direct visual argument for the unity of justice and empire. The figure will speak, in the cantos that follow, with a single voice on behalf of all the souls that compose it. Justice, in Heaven, has one voice; on earth, the canto means, it would have one if the world were governed properly.
The canto closes with a sharp denunciation. The pope Dante is denouncing is John XXII (Jacques Duèze, born Cahors, pope 1316–1334), the Avignonese pope who, by the time the Paradiso was being completed, was famous for his use of excommunication as a political weapon — writing only to cancel, the canto says, issuing bulls of excommunication only to be paid to withdraw them. The denunciation is one of the Commedia's most direct attacks on a living person in the pontificate.
What to read for
Notice the spelling itself. The souls fly into the shape of a D, then an I, then an L, and so on. Dante is asking the reader to watch the letters being made — to imagine, in the eye of the mind, each shape forming and dissolving. The canto is one of the Paradiso's most demanding pieces of imaginative reading.
Notice the thirty-five letters. The sentence DILIGITE IUSTITIAM QUI IUDICATIS TERRAM is thirty-five letters long. The number is also the number of years of the half-life — the mezzo del cammin — that opened the Commedia in Inferno I. The poem is bracketing its own structure with the number of its protagonist's age at the journey's start.
Notice the heat of the closing denunciation. The canto's quiet visual choreography breaks, in its last twenty lines, into one of the Commedia's most direct political attacks. Read the temperature change as the point: the heaven of justice cannot watch the church of John XXII without speaking.
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 small interior moment, a roll-call, an ascent, a piece of visual theatre across the whole sky, and a denunciation. The canto opens with the pilgrim alone with his thoughts after Cacciaguida's prophecy — tasting his own, the bitter tempering with the sweet — and closes with one of the Commedia's sharpest attacks on a living pope. Between the two, the souls of the just rulers spell a Latin sentence across the heaven of Jupiter, the sentence reassembles itself into an imperial eagle, and the cantica's third great ideogram appears. The whole thing is a single piece of stagecraft. The poem is showing the reader, in the most direct visual terms it ever uses, the relation between justice as a divine command and justice as the form of right government.
The opening: the bitter and the sweet
The first three lines are quiet and load-bearing. The pilgrim is alone with the prophecy he has just heard. Cacciaguida is in his beatific rejoicing; the pilgrim is tasting his own — his own thoughts, his own future — the bitter tempering with the sweet. The line is the Paradiso's most direct statement of the strange mixed taste of being a man who has been told what is coming and is, at the same time, in Heaven. Beatrice, sensing the inwardness, conquers him with the radiance of a smile and tells him, gently, not to look only at her — not in mine eyes alone is Paradise. The line could be the Paradiso's motto. The love that has lifted the pilgrim through the spheres is the same love that, at each stage, asks him to look past the immediate object of his love at what is beyond it. The whole Paradiso is the discipline of that looking-past.
The roll-call of warriors
Cacciaguida names eight souls and each name flashes along the cross of Mars in turn. Joshua (the conqueror of Canaan, the leader of Israel into the promised land). Maccabaeus (Judas Maccabaeus, the warrior of the Hasmonean revolt, the type of the Jewish freedom-fighter who became the model for the medieval crusader). Charlemagne (the eighth-century Frankish king who refounded the western empire). Roland (Charlemagne's nephew, the hero of the Song of Roland, killed at Roncesvalles). William of Orange (William of Gellone, the eighth-century Frankish duke who fought the Saracens in Provence and became the hero of the long Geste de Guillaume cycle). Renouard (Rainouart, William's giant Saracen-convert companion in the Geste). Duke Godfrey (Godfrey of Bouillon, the first ruler of crusader Jerusalem in 1099). Robert Guiscard (the eleventh-century Norman warlord who carved Sicily and southern Italy out of Byzantine and Saracen hands). The list moves from biblical to legendary to historical without distinction — the Commedia's typical refusal to draw a hard line between the worlds — and the warriors named are all fighters for the faith against the Saracens or the heathen. The list is the standard medieval canon of the just war, and the poem places it inside Mars without softening its profile.
The ascent and the alphabet
Then the pilgrim turns and finds Mars left behind and Jupiter beginning. The new heaven is pale silver-white where Mars was red, and across its surface fly the souls of the just rulers as small bright lights. The lights fly in patterns, and the patterns are letters. D, I, L, the first three letters of DILIGITE — love ye. Then I, G, I, T, E — completing the verb. The verse begins.
So from within those lights the holy creatures Sang flying to and fro, and in their figures Made of themselves now D, now I, now L. (Par. XVIII.76–78)
The figure is the Paradiso's most direct visual argument that the just rulers are the words of the divine command. They do not merely receive the command and try to obey it; in Heaven they are the command — their souls are the very letters in which it is written. The medieval distinction between the agent of the law and the content of the law collapses. To rule justly, the canto says, is to be inscribed as a syllable in the sentence God writes across the sky.
The full sentence is the opening verse of the Book of Wisdom in the Latin Vulgate: Diligite iustitiam qui iudicatis terram. Love justice, you who judge the earth. The verse is the divine command to rulers; it is what every coronation liturgy of medieval Europe quoted; and it is, in Dante's view, the verse no contemporary ruler has been observing. The canto puts the verse into the heaven of the just rulers and lets the contrast with the earthly rulers of his own day do its work without comment.
The five-times-seven
The sentence is thirty-five letters long (five times seven), and Dante notes the count directly — five times seven vowels and consonants. The number is not casual. Five times seven is also the number of years in the mezzo del cammin — halfway through the journey of our life — that opened the Commedia in Inferno I.1. The poem is bracketing its own structure. The traveller who was lost in the dark wood at thirty-five sees, halfway through the third cantica, the divine sentence of justice spelt across the sky in a number of letters equal to his own age at the journey's start. The numerological detail is the kind of medieval reading the Commedia invites; the modern reader may take it as suggestion rather than insistence.
The transformation into the eagle
When the last letter is in place — the M of terram, the earth — the other letters dissolve but the M remains. The M of terram is also, in medieval epigraphy, the standard glyph for Monarchia — the one rule, the empire — and the canto is about to make the etymological joke into a doctrine. Other lights fall from above onto the standing M; the M rearranges itself, in place, into first the head and neck of an eagle and then its full body. The eagle is the aquila of imperial Rome, the standard of the legions, the heraldic figure of the Holy Roman Emperor. The figure built out of the just-ruler souls is the imperial standard. The canto is making, in the most direct visual terms, the argument of Dante's prose treatise Monarchia: that the rightly ordered earth is one earth, one ruler, one empire, under the figure of the eagle, in obedience to the divine command of which the eagle's own body is composed.
The poem will spend the next two cantos developing what the eagle has to say. For now, the picture is enough: the command to love justice and the form of right government are not two things; they are the same souls, rearranged.
The denunciation of John XXII
The canto closes with a sharp turn outward. The eagle has just formed; the cantica's largest political icon is in the sky; and the poem looks down at the earth and at the pope. The pope is John XXII (1316–1334), who by the late 1310s and early 1320s — the years the Paradiso was being completed — was famous for two things: the use of excommunication as a financial weapon (issuing bulls of excommunication only to be paid for their withdrawal), and the doctrinal persecution of the Franciscan Spirituals. The canto attacks the first. The pope, the poem says, writes only to cancel — tu scrivi sol per cancellare. The image is exact. The Avignonese chancery's bulls were enforcing the cancellation of other men's livings. The poem replies with the bluntest available figure:
Yet thou, who writest but to cancel, think That Peter and that Paul, who for this vineyard Which thou art spoiling died, are still alive! (Par. XVIII.130–132)
The implication is sharp: the pope's predecessors in office are now in this very heaven of the just rulers, and they are looking down at him. The denunciation has the high temperature of the cantica's other anti-papal passages — Inferno XIX (the simoniac popes), Paradiso XXVII (the great closing denunciation by Peter himself) — but it is delivered in the heaven of the just, which gives it a particular gravity. The pope is being measured against the souls who are, at that moment, the letters of the divine command for justice.
The pope's closing line — I know not the Fisherman, nor Paul — is the canto's final note. The bishop of Rome who does not know the founders of his own see is a self-contradiction, and the contradiction is enough; the canto does not need to add to it.
Famous and meaningful passages
The bitter and the sweet.
Now was alone rejoicing in its word That soul beatified, and I was tasting My own, the bitter tempering with the sweet, (Par. XVIII.1–3)
The taste of being told the future, in the kindest company that could be told it. Temprando il dolce con l'acerbo. The line that holds the whole prophecy of XVII in three words.
Beatrice's correction.
Conquering me with the radiance of a smile, She said to me, 'Turn thee about and listen; Not in mine eyes alone is Paradise.' (Par. XVIII.19–21)
The single line that could serve as the Paradiso's motto. The love that lifts looks past itself.
The flying letters.
So from within those lights the holy creatures Sang flying to and fro, and in their figures Made of themselves now D, now I, now L. (Par. XVIII.76–78)
The just rulers as the letters of the command they obeyed. The medieval distinction between agent and content collapses.
The full verse.
'Diligite justitiam,' these were First verb and noun of all that was depicted; 'Qui judicatis terram' were the last. (Par. XVIII.91–93)
Love justice, you who judge the earth. The Vulgate's Book of Wisdom 1:1 placed where it belongs, in the heaven of those who obeyed it.
The transformation.
And, each one being quiet in its place, The head and neck beheld I of an eagle Delineated by that inlaid fire. (Par. XVIII.106–108)
The M of terram rearranging itself, in place, into the head and neck of the imperial eagle. The cantica's third great ideogram is born.
The denunciation.
Yet thou, who writest but to cancel, think That Peter and that Paul, who for this vineyard Which thou art spoiling died, are still alive! (Par. XVIII.130–132)
The address to John XXII. Tu scrivi sol per cancellare. The pope as the negative figure of the just scribe.
The closing line.
That I know not the Fisherman nor Paul. (Par. XVIII.136)
The pope's own mouth, in the poem's mockery. The self-contradiction of a bishop of Rome who has forgotten the names of the saints whose chair he sits in.
What to watch for
Watch the eagle. It speaks in canto XIX and XX, in a single voice that is the voice of all the souls that compose it, and what it says is one of the Paradiso's most uncomfortable pieces of theology — the long question of whether a virtuous pagan born outside Christendom can be saved. The eagle's answer in canto XIX is unanswerable; in canto XX, the eagle names two specific pagans who are in fact in Heaven, and the answer becomes a stunning theological provocation.
Watch the closing denunciation. The high temperature of the attack on John XXII is the same temperature that will return, four cantos later, in St Peter's own attack on the contemporary papacy in Paradiso XXVII — he who on earth usurps my place, my place, my place, which is vacant in the sight of the Son of God, has made of my graveyard a sewer of blood. The Paradiso is not silent about the Church of Dante's day. It is more direct than the Inferno could afford to be.
Watch the figure of the spelling. The just rulers in Heaven do not speak; they are letters. The Word of God is built out of the lives that obeyed it. The figure will be picked up at the very end of the cantica, in the great image of the universe as one volume gathered by love — the Paradiso will, at its close, return to the metaphor of the cosmos itself as a book.
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.