Paradiso · Canto XX ·
Paradiso XX — The Eye of the Eagle
Reading Divine Comedy · canto 87 of 100 · Paradiso, Canto XX
Before reading
This is the canto in which the eagle of Jupiter names six of its own souls — the six that compose its eye, the centre and the brow — and what the canto reveals about them is one of the Commedia's most stunning theological provocations. Two of the six, the poem says, are pagans. The cantica that has just refused, in the canto before, to pronounce on whether a virtuous pagan can be saved, turns around and names two pagans by name in the highest part of the highest figure in the heaven of justice. The whole canto is built around the contradiction with what canto XIX seemed to teach. The contradiction is the canto's argument.
Where the canto sits
The pilgrim is still in the Heaven of Jupiter, in front of the great imperial eagle composed of the souls of the just rulers. Canto XIX ended with the long denunciation of the contemporary unjust Christian kings. As that catalogue closes, the eagle falls silent and a thousand smaller voices rise out of its body in song — the canto opens on the figure of the sun gone down and the stars emerging one by one, which is the Paradiso's great visual figure for the way a single voice resolves back into the choir that composes it. Then the song ends, and the eagle's one voice speaks again. This canto's body is what it says.
What it helps to know
The eagle's eye, the canto says, is the supreme part of the whole figure — the six most ranked of all the just-ruler souls assembled there. The pupil of the eye is David, the singer of the Psalms, the king who brought the Ark to Jerusalem. Around the pupil, forming the brow of the eye, are five souls arranged in a wreath. Closest to the eagle's beak is Trajan — the second-century Roman emperor (98–117 AD), the conqueror of Dacia, the builder of the Forum that bore his name. Trajan was, of course, a pagan; he persecuted Christians; he died in 117 AD without baptism, without faith in Christ, with no Christian theological grounds whatsoever for the salvation the canto is about to claim for him. A long medieval legend — picked up by Gregory the Great and repeated in every breviary thereafter — held that the pope's prayers had eventually been heard, that Trajan's soul had been temporarily raised from Hell and given a chance to believe, and that he had believed and died (again) in faith. The canto endorses the legend. For one from Hell, where no one e'er turns back unto good will, returned unto his bones.
Next around the brow comes Hezekiah, the king of Judah whose death was postponed fifteen years by his sincere prayer (Isaiah 38). Then Constantine, the emperor who legalised Christianity in 313 AD and moved the Roman capital to Byzantium — a complicated soul, since the Inferno (XIX) had placed his alleged Donation of his Italian lands to the Church among the great catastrophes of history. The canto says he is in Heaven under the good intent that bore bad fruit — his intentions were honourable; the consequences were disastrous; the divine judgement is on the intention.
Then William II (William the Good) of Norman Sicily (king 1166–1189), the good king of a corrupt dynasty.
And finally, in the most provocative position of all — the fifth one of the holy lights — comes Rhipeus the Trojan. Rhipeus is a single name in Virgil's Aeneid II, a Trojan warrior killed in the sack of Troy, described in three brief lines as the most just among the Trojans. He is otherwise unknown. He was a pagan. He lived twelve centuries before Christ. He has no medieval legend explaining his salvation. The poem simply names him, places him in the eagle's eye, and lets the placement do its work.
What to read for
Notice the structure: a song, a single voice, six souls named, two doctrinal explanations, a closing image. The whole canto is built around the question: how is it possible that these two pagans are here? and the canto's deepest move is to refuse the question's premise. The salvation of Trajan and Rhipeus is not explained away; it is offered as fact.
Notice the doctrine of violence to Heaven. The eagle says that the kingdom of Heaven suffers violence from fervent love and living hope, and that those who win it by such violence are crowned with it. The line is the canto's deepest piece of theology, and it is a quotation of Matthew 11:12 — the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force. The conventional reading was that the violent were the ascetics who took Heaven by force of penance. The Paradiso's reading is more startling: love and hope, strong enough, can compel the divine will. The figure puts the human soul and the divine decree into a kind of mutual play that the systematic theology of Dante's century almost never permitted.
Notice the closing image. The two pagan souls winking in the eagle's eye — the slight tremor of light that confirms the eagle's words. The canto ends in the smallest possible visual gesture, and the gesture is the canto's quiet smile at the size of its own theological claim.
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's song ended; a thousand small voices rose like stars after sunset; the eagle's single voice spoke again. The canto then performed one of the most provocative single moves in the Commedia. It named the six souls that compose the eagle's eye — David at the centre, then Trajan, Hezekiah, Constantine, William the Good of Sicily, and Rhipeus around the brow — and two of the six were pagans. The cantica that had refused, in canto XIX, to pronounce on whether a virtuous pagan could be saved, turned around in canto XX and placed two virtuous pagans in the highest part of the highest figure of the heaven of justice. The canto then gave two doctrinal explanations — Trajan was prayed back from Hell long enough to believe; Rhipeus was given grace before Christ by anticipation — and let the explanations not quite settle what they were meant to settle. The whole canto is the Paradiso's most direct argument that the divine mercy does not reach only where the visible Church reaches, and that the visible Church is not, in heaven, the boundary of what is saved.
The figure of the song that becomes the voice
The opening tercets are one of the Paradiso's most beautiful small visual sequences. The sun (the eagle's single voice) sets; the stars (the thousand voices of the assembled souls) come out one by one. The figure is the sky's daily turning translated into the cantica's small theology of unity-and-plurality: when one voice goes silent, the many that compose it become audible; when the many finish singing, the one resumes. The image will recur in Paradiso XXVII, when all the blessed cry out together against the contemporary papacy in a single roar that is also a chorus. The cantica is building, through these small visual rhymes, the conviction that the one and the many in Heaven are not opposed: they are alternations of the same love.
The pupil and the brow
The eagle's eye is the supreme part of the whole figure. The pupil is the central, single soul — David — the singer of the Holy Spirit, who bore the ark from city unto city. David is the first king-and-poet of the Hebrew Bible, the type of every later just ruler, the man whose Psalms are the breviary's daily prayer. The pupil-position is the obvious one for the king-poet of the Old Testament; the surprise is what comes around him.
The five souls of the brow are arranged in a wreath. Closest to the beak is Trajan (53–117 AD), the Roman emperor whose legendary act of justice — halting his army on the road to war to hear the case of a widow whose son had been killed — was retold throughout the Middle Ages as a model of the just ruler. Trajan was a pagan; he persecuted Christians; he died unbaptised. His presence in the eagle's eye is the canto's first explicit pagan.
Next around the brow is Hezekiah, king of Judah (Isaiah 38), whose death sentence God revoked after the king's sincere prayer. The canto comments that Hezekiah now knows the eternal judgement suffers no change — the prayer did not change God's mind; it was already in God's mind that the prayer would be answered. The note is doctrinal: the divine knowledge is timeless; what looks like a change of decree is the same decree seen in time.
Then Constantine (272–337 AD), the emperor who legalised Christianity at Milan in 313 and shifted the imperial capital to Byzantium in 330. Constantine is, in the Commedia's political theology, an enormously vexed figure. The medieval Donation of Constantine — the forged document by which Constantine was supposed to have given the western empire to the popes — is the Inferno's great political catastrophe (the simoniac popes are punished in canto XIX, and Dante shouts at them: Ah, Constantine, of how much ill was mother, not thy conversion, but that dower which the first wealthy Father took from thee!). The Paradiso solves the difficulty in one line: Constantine is in Heaven under the good intent that bore bad fruit. His intention was honourable; the consequences were disastrous; the divine judgement is on the intention.
Then William II of Norman Sicily — William the Good — the twelfth-century king whose rule was the bright spot of an otherwise grim dynasty, and whose death in 1189 left Sicily to the catastrophic regency that ended in the loss of the island to the Angevins.
And finally, in the most provocative position of all, the fifth one of the holy lights: Rhipeus the Trojan.
Rhipeus
Rhipeus is the canto's deepest dare. He is named once, briefly, in Aeneid II.426–428, in the long disastrous narrative of the sack of Troy: Cadit et Rhipeus, iustissimus unus / qui fuit in Teucris et servantissimus aequi: / dis aliter visum — and Rhipeus fell, the one most just among the Teucrians and the strictest keeper of right: the gods thought otherwise. Six Latin words from Virgil. He has no other tradition, no medieval legend, no Gregorian intercession, no plausible theological route into Christian heaven. He lived twelve centuries before Christ. He worshipped the wrong gods. He died in the wrong city in the wrong century, in a narrative that Virgil himself summarises by saying the gods thought otherwise — that is, by registering the failure of justice in the case. And Dante puts him in the eye of the eagle.
The poem's defence of the placement is the canto's most theologically dense passage. Heaven suffers violence from fervent love and from living hope. Rhipeus's love of justice in his pagan life was so great that grace, fonte d'amore — fountain of love — fell on him before the time of Christ, in a way the Christian world saw later but the pagan world experienced in advance. He was baptised, the canto says, by the three women who appeared at the right wheel of the chariot a thousand years before baptism existed — that is, by the three theological virtues (Faith, Hope, Charity) who would appear, in the Purgatorio's great pageant of canto XXIX, at the right wheel of the chariot of the Church. The chronology is inverted; the salvation works backward through time; Rhipeus is implicitly baptised by grace before grace had its visible Christian form.
The doctrine is not what Aquinas teaches in the Summa Theologiae. Aquinas is more cautious: implicit faith can save when explicit faith is unavailable, but always within a framework that requires some contact with the saving knowledge. Dante's canto is bolder. Grace, the canto says, can give itself anywhere it wills, before Christ as well as after, in cultures where no preaching has occurred. The provocation is real. The line on which the doctrine rests — Regnum coelorum violenza pate / da caldo amore e da viva speranza — is one of the Commedia's most quoted lines, and it is also one of its most theologically radical.
The canto does not press the implication. It names the two pagans, gives the two-line doctrinal explanations, and lets the reader carry what the placements imply.
What canto XX does to canto XIX
The two cantos must be read together. Canto XIX mounted the question of the virtuous pagan at its hardest — the man at the Indus — and refused to answer it. Canto XX names two pagans by name and places them in Heaven. The refusal of the abstract question and the affirmation of the concrete cases are the Paradiso's deepest piece of theological method. The poem is not willing to legislate about the salvation of an anonymous class; it is willing to record the salvation of two named individuals. Trajan is here. Rhipeus is here. The reader who has accepted the eagle's rebuke in XIX is now faced with the eagle's roll-call in XX, and the contradiction is the canto's working. The poem teaches, by mounting both moves at full strength, that the divine mercy is larger than the rule, and that the visible Church is not the boundary of the saved. The teaching is delivered in the heaven of the just rulers because the saying of it is, structurally, a piece of justice.
The closing image of the winking
The canto closes on the smallest possible visual gesture. The two pagan souls — Trajan and Rhipeus — winked in the eagle's eye as the eagle named them, the slight tremor of light that confirms speech. The figure is the Paradiso's quiet smile at the size of what it has just claimed. The doctrine was enormous; the gesture that registers it is the smallest light. The cantica's habit, throughout, of measuring large claims with small images is here at its purest.
Famous and meaningful passages
The opening figure of the sun and the stars.
The heaven, that erst by him alone was kindled, Doth suddenly reveal itself again By many lights, wherein is one resplendent. (Par. XX.4–6)
The one voice setting; the many voices rising. The cantica's small theology of unity-and-plurality compressed into three lines.
The eagle's resumption.
There it became a voice, and issued thence From out its beak, in such a form of words As the heart waited for wherein I wrote them. (Par. XX.28–30)
The poet receives the speech and writes it; the speech and the writing are one act. Wherein I wrote them — là 'nd' io le aspettava — the heart was already the page.
The eye named.
For of the fires of which I make my figure, Those whence the eye doth sparkle in my head Of all their orders the supremest are. (Par. XX.34–36)
The eye is the supreme part of the figure. The eagle is the just rulers; the eye is the just rulers' just rulers.
David in the pupil.
He who is shining in the midst as pupil Was once the singer of the Holy Spirit, Who bore the ark from city unto city; (Par. XX.37–39)
The singer of the Psalms at the centre of the eye. The Old Testament's poet-king is the Paradiso's figure of the heaven of justice.
Trajan and the widow.
Of five, that make a circle for my brow, He that approacheth nearest to my beak Did the poor widow for her son console; (Par. XX.43–45)
The legendary act of justice that earned Trajan his place. The Roman emperor named by the act, not by the name.
Rhipeus revealed.
Who would believe, down in the errant world, That e'er the Trojan Ripheus in this round Could be the fifth one of the holy lights? (Par. XX.67–69)
The line that names the cantica's deepest theological provocation. Down in the errant world — giù nel mondo errante — is the cantica's gentle term for the place the reader is reading from.
The doctrine of violence.
'Regnum coelorum' suffereth violence From fervent love, and from that living hope That overcometh the Divine volition; (Par. XX.94–96)
The canto's deepest theological claim. The kingdom of heaven yields to fervent love; living hope can overcome the divine will — meaning, can win from it the mercy it is already in love to give.
Trajan returned.
For one from Hell, where no one e'er turns back Unto good will, returned unto his bones, And that of living hope was the reward,— (Par. XX.106–108)
The Gregorian legend in three lines. The pope's prayer raised Trajan from Hell long enough to believe; that interval was the reward of living hope.
Constantine's complicated salvation.
The next who follows, with the laws and me, Under the good intent that bore bad fruit Became a Greek by ceding to the pastor; (Par. XX.55–57)
The emperor whose Donation the Inferno called the great political catastrophe of Christian history is saved under the good intent that bore bad fruit. The judgement is on the intention.
The pilgrim's astonishment.
But forth from out my mouth, 'What things are these?' Extorted with the force of its own weight; (Par. XX.82–83)
The question is forced out of the pilgrim by the weight of what he has heard. Cose questa? — what things? — the question of any reader who has just been told what canto XX has told.
The closing image.
So, while it spake, do I remember me That I beheld both of those blessed lights, Even as the winking of the eyes concords, Moving unto the words their little flames. (Par. XX.142–145)
Four lines where the canto's grammar would expect three. The two pagan souls winking in confirmation. The cantica's structural orphan-line ending again, on the smallest possible note of light.
What to watch for
Watch the doctrine. Regnum coelorum violenza pate. The line will haunt the Paradiso's remaining theology of grace. The cantica will not retreat from it; the great closing prayer of canto XXXIII assumes its truth.
Watch the figure of seeing what is and not pronouncing what must be. The eagle's method — refuse the abstract question, confirm the concrete fact — is also, increasingly, the Paradiso's own method. The reader who learns to read the cantica with this method discovers a poem that is generous and disciplined at once: it will not legislate about classes of people, and it will record, when it has seen them, the salvation of named individuals the reader did not expect.
Watch the ascent. The pilgrim leaves Jupiter and rises to Saturn, the seventh heaven, the heaven of the contemplatives. There will be no more songs, no more spectacle. Saturn is silent. After the visual choreography of Mars and Jupiter, the cantica is about to teach the reader what it means for a heaven to be too high for music.
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.