Paradiso · Canto XIX ·
Paradiso XIX — The Eagle with One Voice
Reading Divine Comedy · canto 86 of 100 · Paradiso, Canto XIX
Before reading
This is the canto in which the eagle of Jupiter speaks, and what it speaks about is the question the Commedia has been dodging since the Inferno: what happens, in the divine justice, to the man who through no fault of his own never heard of Christ. The poem confronts the question directly. It does not answer it. The whole canto is structured around the refusal to answer, and the refusal is itself the canto's deepest piece of theology.
Where the canto sits
The pilgrim is in the Heaven of Jupiter, the sixth sphere, the planet of justice. In the previous canto the souls of the just rulers spelt the Latin verse Diligite iustitiam qui iudicatis terram across the sky, and the last letter of the verse rearranged itself into the figure of a vast imperial eagle. The eagle, composed of all the souls of the just rulers, now begins to speak — and it speaks with a single voice, in the first person singular, even though it is many. The figure is the Paradiso's deepest piece of political theology: when justice is rightly done, the many become one; the plurality of just persons becomes the unity of just government; the eagle speaks I because justice has one mouth.
What it helps to know
The question the canto turns on is sometimes called the problem of the virtuous pagan, and it had been a live question in Christian theology since at least Augustine. The canonical Christian answer was that no one is saved without faith in Christ; the canonical Christian discomfort was that an enormous part of humanity — everyone born outside the reach of the Christian preaching, before Christ or after — had had no opportunity to acquire that faith. The Inferno placed the unbaptised in Limbo (canto IV), without torment but without hope; the Purgatorio allowed at least one virtuous pagan, the suicide Cato, to govern the entrance to the mountain; and the Paradiso will, in the very next canto, place two specific pagans — Trajan and Rhipeus — in the heaven of justice itself. The whole arc of the poem is a steady erosion of the simplest answer to the question.
In this canto, however, the question is mounted at its hardest. The pilgrim poses it directly: a man is born on the shore of the Indus river — the geographical limit of the medieval European world's known land — where no one can speak of Christ, where no one can read, where no one can write; this man lives a life of perfect moral correctness; what becomes of him? If he is damned, the canto asks, where is the justice that condemns him? If he is saved, where is the necessity of Christian faith?
The eagle's answer is not the answer either question is asking for. The eagle says: who are you to sit in judgement at a thousand miles' distance, with the sight of a single span? The question is not refused; the questioner's standing to ask it is. The whole long line of medieval theological argument about implicit faith, baptism of desire, and the limits of the Pauline invincible ignorance — Aquinas's Summa contains the systematic treatment — is here compressed into the eagle's single rebuke. The reader does not learn the answer. The reader is taught instead that the question itself is misposed.
The second half of the canto turns from the abstract problem to the contemporary kings. The eagle reads, in advance, the entries that will appear in the book of justice at the Last Judgement, naming a long line of European rulers — Albert of Habsburg, Philip the Fair of France, Wenceslas of Bohemia, Frederick of Aragon, James of Majorca, the kings of Norway, Portugal, Cyprus — and judging them. The roll-call is the most direct anti-monarchical passage in the Commedia. Read it as the counterpart to the catalogue of fallen Florentine families in canto XVI: there a private nostalgia, here a public reckoning.
What to read for
Notice the I of the eagle. The bird speaks as a single self even though it is many souls. The grammar is the doctrine. I in the mouth of the just is the we that has become one.
Notice the rebuke. Now who art thou, that on the bench wouldst sit in judgement at a thousand miles away, with the short vision of a single span? The line is the Paradiso's most direct piece of theological humility — and it is delivered to the questioner, not to the abstract sceptic. The poem is teaching the pilgrim, and the reader, the size of his own seeing.
Notice the list of kings. Every name in the catalogue is a contemporary or recent ruler whose injustices Dante's first readers would have known. The list ends in a single line about a beast whose other side a young king will not leave. The poem leaves the beast unnamed and the line incomplete. The closing-line orphaning is the same structural device the previous Cacciaguida cantos used.
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 eagle spoke. The fully-formed bird of just rulers, composed of the souls of every right monarch ever, opened its single beak and addressed the pilgrim — and it spoke in the first person singular, I, even though it was many. The first words it spoke were the canto's quietest theological claim: because I was just and merciful here I am exalted to a glory that desire cannot exceed. Then the pilgrim raised the question the Commedia has been carrying since the Inferno: what becomes, in the divine justice, of the man born on the far shore of the Indus who never had a chance to hear of Christ? The eagle's answer was a refusal. Who art thou, that on the bench wouldst sit in judgement at a thousand miles' distance, with the sight of a single span? The canto's deepest doctrine is contained in that single refusal. The question is not denied; the questioner's standing to demand an answer is. The second half of the canto turned outward — into a long catalogue of the unjust contemporary kings of Christian Europe, every one of them named and judged by the same eagle that had refused to judge the pagan. The contrast is the canto's structural argument. The poem will not pronounce on the man at the Indus; it will pronounce, plainly, on the kings of France and Bohemia and Aragon and Portugal.
The grammar of the eagle's I
When the eagle speaks it says I. The grammar is the doctrine. The bird is the assembled souls of every just ruler — Trajan and David and Hezekiah and Constantine, named in the next canto — and yet when they speak they speak as one. The canto pauses on the grammatical strangeness:
And as a single heat from many embers Is sensible, so likewise from that image Issued a single sound from many loves.
(Par. XIX.19–21)
The figure is the Paradiso's deepest piece of political theology, and it is also the most direct visual answer the Commedia gives to the political problem of medieval Europe. Earthly justice is fractured because it has many mouths — every prince, every commune, every bishop speaks in its own voice, with its own partial interest, and the result is the long civic war of the Inferno and the long Florentine civic war of Paradiso XVI. Heavenly justice is one because it has one mouth. The eagle of Jupiter is the picture of what the world would look like if justice spoke as it does in Heaven. The poem is not naive about this. It is offering, in a single image, the doctrine of Dante's Monarchia: that the world has been arranged so that one rightful authority might speak with one rightful voice, and that the fragmentation of that voice is the diagnosis of every political ill the Commedia has named.
The question of the man at the Indus
Then the question. The pilgrim does not soften it. He takes the hardest possible case — a man at the geographical limit of the known world, with no preaching, no scripture, no Christian neighbour, no possibility of hearing the gospel — and asks the eagle to pronounce. The case is the standard one of medieval discussions of the invincibly ignorant, but the canto strips away every theological hedge: this is a man whose ignorance is not his fault, whose moral life is not defective, who will not receive the gospel because no one has been sent to bring it. If the divine justice condemns him, the canto asks, where is the justice?
The eagle does not answer the question. The eagle answers the asker. The reply is the canto's central piece of speech, and it deserves to be read in full attention:
Now who art thou, that on the bench wouldst sit In judgment at a thousand miles away, With the short vision of a single span? (Par. XIX.79–81)
The figure is the Paradiso's deepest piece of intellectual humility. The pilgrim sits in his own particular country with his own particular eyes and proposes to judge an entire structure of divine justice he does not see whole. The thousand miles is the geographical distance from Florence to the Indus, taken as a figure for the conceptual distance between the human seeing and the question being asked. The single span is the breadth of the human eye, taken as a figure for the limit of every human seeing. The reply does not say the man at the Indus is damned and it does not say the man at the Indus is saved. It says: that decision is not yours to make, and the inability to make it is the form your finitude takes.
The reader of the twenty-first century, who has had several centuries of Enlightenment to teach the suspicion of every appeal to divine mystery, will be slow to take this answer at face value. The poem does not require the modern reader to take it. What the poem requires is that the modern reader hear it as the medieval theology's honest answer — not the easy answer (which is the pagan is damned), not the easy modern answer (which is of course the pagan is not damned), but the answer that says the question is, on the available evidence, undecidable, and that the Commedia's reader is being asked to live with the undecidability.
The next canto's answer
What makes canto XIX particularly remarkable is what the very next canto does. After mounting the question of the virtuous pagan in its hardest possible form, and after refusing to answer it in the abstract, the poem turns around and names two specific pagans who are in Heaven. Trajan and Rhipeus, in canto XX, sit in the eye of the eagle itself. The poem will not say the pagan at the Indus is saved. The poem will say Trajan is here, and Rhipeus is here, and Trajan and Rhipeus are pagans. The abstract question is refused; the concrete fact is offered. The reader who has heard the rebuke of canto XIX is meant to feel the next canto's contradiction as the Paradiso's most provocative piece of theology. The canto we are reading sets up that provocation.
The denunciation of the contemporary kings
After the rebuke, the canto turns outward. The eagle, the figure of the just rulers, reads aloud from the book of judgement the entries that will appear at the Last Judgement against the unjust contemporary rulers of Christian Europe. The list is bitter and exact. Albert of Habsburg (king of the Germans, emperor 1298–1308) for his neglect of Italy; Philip the Fair (king of France, 1285–1314) for his debasement of the French coinage — he who falsifies the coin — and his death gored by a wild boar (Philip died in 1314 after a hunting accident); Edward of England and Robert of Scotland for their wars; Ferdinand IV of Castile, Wenceslas of Bohemia who has never known nor wishes valour; Charles II of Anjou, called the Cripple, king of Naples; Frederick of Sicily; James of Majorca, James of Aragon, who dishonour their crowns; the kings of Norway and of Portugal and of Cyprus.
The catalogue is unique in the Commedia in this respect: it judges every one of the major Christian kingdoms of Dante's Europe by name. There is no comparable list anywhere else in the poem. The eagle of justice, having refused to pass judgement on one anonymous pagan, has no hesitation in passing judgement on every named Christian king. The asymmetry is the canto's bitter joke. The poem is asking: when justice itself looks down at the world, who in fact stands closer to the Indus pagan and who in fact stands closer to the eagle's judgement?
The closing image of Cyprus
The catalogue closes on the kings of Cyprus — Nicosia and Famagosta, the two great cities of the Crusader Kingdom — and on a single small image. The two cities lament and rage because of their own beast, who from the others' flank departeth not. The beast is Henry II of Lusignan, king of Cyprus (intermittently 1285–1324), whose reign was marked by epilepsy and political weakness. The line is harsh and difficult to parse — non si scosta da l'altre rie — and stops without quite finishing the figure. The canto closes, like XIII and XV and XVI before it, on an orphan-line ending. The list of unjust kings runs into the silence that the Paradiso keeps reserving for the things it will not, finally, complete.
Famous and meaningful passages
The eagle appears.
Appeared before me with its wings outspread The beautiful image that in sweet fruition Made jubilant the interwoven souls; (Par. XIX.1–3)
Le anime conserte. The interwoven souls — the verb says that the souls have become the figure they compose, and the figure is the source of their joy.
The single voice.
And it began: 'Being just and merciful Am I exalted here unto that glory Which cannot be exceeded by desire;' (Par. XIX.13–15)
Am I exalted — singular. The grammar is the doctrine. Was I just and merciful, then am I exalted — past plural collapsed into present singular.
The question.
Born a man is on the shore Of Indus, and is none who there can speak Of Christ, nor who can read, nor who can write; (Par. XIX.70–72)
The hardest case the Commedia offers. Speak, read, write — the three skills of Christian transmission. None of them available.
The rebuke.
Now who art thou, that on the bench wouldst sit In judgment at a thousand miles away, With the short vision of a single span? (Par. XIX.79–81)
The Paradiso's deepest piece of intellectual humility. The judgement of pagans is refused because the judging eye is too small.
The verdict against secret thinkers.
Truly to him who with me subtilizes, If so the Scripture were not over you, For doubting there were marvellous occasion. (Par. XIX.82–84)
The eagle concedes the difficulty: the man who reasons closely along with the eagle would have marvellous occasion for doubt were Scripture not above you. The Scripture is the only ground; without it, the question would be unanswerable.
The denunciation begins.
There shall be seen, among the deeds of Albert, That which ere long shall set the pen in motion, For which the realm of Prague shall be deserted. (Par. XIX.115–117)
The Holy Roman Emperor named first, for the campaigns against Bohemia. The pen of judgement is moving.
Philip the Fair.
There shall be seen the woe that on the Seine He brings by falsifying of the coin, Who by the blow of a wild boar shall die. (Par. XIX.118–120)
Philip IV — le bel, the fair — debaser of the livre tournois, dead of a hunting accident. The canto knows the death already; the poem is being written after 1314.
The closing on Cyprus.
And each one may believe that now, as hansel Thereof, do Nicosia and Famagosta Lament and rage because of their own beast, Who from the others' flank departeth not. (Par. XIX.146–149)
Four lines where the canto's grammar would expect three. The orphan-line ending again — the Paradiso's structural signature for the verdicts the poem will not finish.
What to watch for
Watch canto XX. The eagle will name the six souls that compose its eye — David, Trajan, Hezekiah, Constantine, William the Good of Sicily, and the Trojan Rhipeus. Two of the six are pagans. After this canto's refusal to answer the abstract question, the next canto's concrete naming will be one of the Commedia's most stunning theological provocations. The arc of XIX and XX must be read together.
Watch the figure of the single voice. The eagle of justice speaks as I because the just are one. The figure will return in Paradiso XXVII, where the chorus of all the blessed will denounce contemporary Rome together in one terrible single sound, and again in the final canto, where the universe itself is described as one volume gathered by love. The Paradiso's great hope is that the many can speak with one mouth without losing the many. The eagle is the cantica's working figure for that hope.
Watch the missing answer. The man at the Indus is not named again. The poem leaves him on the riverbank where canto XIX placed him, and refuses, in either direction, to resolve his case. The figure stays at the edge of the Paradiso as a small ineradicable question.
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.