Paradiso · Canto XXII ·
Paradiso XXII — Benedict on Monte Cassino
Reading Divine Comedy · canto 89 of 100 · Paradiso, Canto XXII
Before reading
This is the canto in which Saturn closes and the pilgrim is lifted out of the planetary heavens entirely. It opens inside the thunder of canto XXI's closing cry, brings forward the father of Western monasticism, lets him say what he has to say about the ruin of his own Rule, and then takes the pilgrim up through the eighth heaven — the heaven of the Fixed Stars — to a height from which he can look back down at the Earth and see it whole. The closing image is one of the Commedia's most famous: the world as a small threshing-floor.
Where the canto sits
The pilgrim is in Saturn at the start of the canto, still inside the wordless roar with which canto XXI ended. Beatrice quietens him. She explains that the cry he could not interpret was the prayer of all the contemplatives for the vengeance that, the canto adds, thou shalt look upon before thou diest. The line is the canto's first piece of structural set-up — the prophecy of a coming judgement, made specific in cantos XXVII and XXX. Then the canto's main visitor descends the golden ladder: a light fairer than the others, who names himself, and who is the canto's anchoring figure.
The visitor is Saint Benedict of Nursia (c. 480 – c. 547), founder of Western monasticism. The historical Benedict, born in Norcia in Umbria, withdrew first to a cave at Subiaco and then, around 530, to the summit of Monte Cassino — the mountain south of Rome that had been the site of an old pagan shrine of Apollo — where he founded the abbey that would become the mother-house of Western monastic life and codified, in the Regula Benedicti (the Rule of Saint Benedict), the structure that would govern the daily life of Western monks for the next fifteen centuries. Ora et labora — pray and work — is the Rule's compressed motto, but the Rule itself is one of the kindest, most psychologically intelligent disciplinary texts ever written. Benedict's life was the founding act of the Western contemplative tradition. The canto's choice of him as Peter Damian's complement is exact: Damian was the medieval reformer of monasticism; Benedict was its founder. Both will say, of the contemporary monastic situation, that the founding has been forgotten and the reform has not held.
What it helps to know
The historical detail that makes the canto land is the description of Monte Cassino. Benedict's first act on the summit, the canto says, was to clear it of a deluded folk who had worshipped there of old. The mountain had in fact been an active pagan cult site — the chronicler Gregory the Great records Benedict's destruction of the altar of Apollo and the cutting down of the sacred grove. The canto compresses the act into a tercet. The conversion of the pagan summit into the Christian abbey is a small picture of what the Commedia understands the work of the contemplative life to be: the bringing-up of the divine name to a place that had previously known other names.
The canto then names two further great contemplatives — Macarius and Romuald. Macarius the Egyptian (c. 300 – c. 391) was one of the early Desert Fathers, a hermit of the Egyptian wilderness whose sayings shaped the entire Eastern monastic tradition. Romuald of Ravenna (c. 951 – c. 1027) was the founder of the Camaldolese order, the strict Italian Benedictine reform that combined the cenobitic monastery with the hermit's cell. The three names — Macarius, Benedict, Romuald — mark the three foundational moments of monastic life in the West: the desert origin, the Latin codification, the Italian medieval reform.
The denunciation that follows is one of the Paradiso's most direct. Benedict laments that no one now lifts up his feet from the earth to climb the golden ladder — that the contemplative ascent has stopped — and that his Rule has become waste of paper below. He says the great founders began with nothing: Peter began with neither gold nor silver, and I with orison and abstinence, and Francis with humility his convent. Now the walls that used to be an Abbey are changed to dens of robbers. The cowls of the monks are now sacks of mouldy flour. The cantica is mounting its second great anti-monastic denunciation (after Damian's), now in the mouth of the founder himself.
The canto's last movement is the ascent. Beatrice lifts the pilgrim, in a single sudden motion, through all the heaven from Saturn upward — through Saturn, through the Fixed Stars, to the sign that follows Taurus, the constellation of Gemini. Gemini is Dante's natal constellation; the Twins were the stars under which he was born; the Paradiso notes the astronomical detail directly. The pilgrim is rising into his own birth-sign, and from that position he is allowed to look back down at the Earth. He sees it as a small disc — the threshing-floor that maketh us so proud, all apparent made from hill to harbour.
What to read for
Notice the canto's two halves. The first half is Benedict's speech: founder, denunciation, lament. The second half is the ascent and the look back. The two halves are the canto's argument: the proper response to the corruption of the contemplative life is, the canto says, to rise higher, until the corruption is seen from the perspective of the heaven for which the contemplation was always trying to prepare the soul.
Notice the aiuola — the little threshing-floor. The word recurs at Paradiso XXVII.86 and again at the canto's close. The figure of the Earth as a small flat round disc on which men beat out grain — and on which they kill each other for the grain — is the cantica's gentlest piece of cosmic contempt. The Earth is not large enough to deserve the wars it generates.
Notice the closing line. Then to the beauteous eyes mine eyes I turned. After the cosmic view, the pilgrim turns his eyes back to Beatrice. The cantica's recurring discipline: every height is followed by a return to the immediate object of love, and the love is what makes the next height possible.
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 canto opened inside the thunder of canto XXI's wordless cry. Beatrice quietened the pilgrim and explained the cry — it was the prayer of all the contemplatives for the vengeance that the pilgrim shalt look upon before thou diest. A new soul descended the golden ladder, brighter than the rest, and named itself: Saint Benedict, founder of Western monasticism, the man who in the sixth century built the abbey on the summit of Monte Cassino and wrote the Rule that would govern Western monastic life for fifteen centuries. Benedict named two of his companions — Macarius the Egyptian and Romuald of Ravenna — and then, in the canto's structural turn, denounced the contemporary monastic orders in some of the cantica's sharpest lines: the great founders began with nothing; the contemporary monks have made the abbeys into dens of robbers and the cowls into sacks of mouldy flour; no one now lifts up his feet from the earth to climb the golden ladder of contemplation. Then the canto pivoted upward. Beatrice lifted the pilgrim, in a single sudden motion, through Saturn and through the Fixed Stars into the constellation of Gemini — the pilgrim's natal sign — and from that height he was allowed to look back down at the Earth. The canto closes on one of the Commedia's most famous lines: the threshing-floor that maketh us so fierce, the small disc of the Earth seen from above. The pilgrim then turned his eyes back to Beatrice. The threshing-floor and the eyes are the canto's two closing images, set against each other.
Beatrice on the cry
The canto's first piece of speech is Beatrice's interpretation of the noise that closed canto XXI. In which if thou hadst understood its prayers, already would be known to thee the vengeance which thou shalt look upon before thou diest. The line is a prophecy. The contemplatives are praying for the divine punishment of the corrupt church — and Beatrice tells the pilgrim that the punishment will fall before he dies. The prophecy is cashed out, in the cantica, twice. In canto XXVII, Saint Peter will prophesy the vengeance with extraordinary specificity: a great providential intervention is coming, and the contemporary papacy will be made to suffer. In canto XXX, Beatrice will point at an empty seat in the celestial rose and identify it as reserved for the great Henry — the Emperor Henry VII of Luxembourg — who shall come to set Italy in order before she is well disposed. The poem's bet on Henry VII's Italian expedition of 1310–1313 (which failed, with Henry's death at Buonconvento in August 1313) is the Paradiso's great political wager. Canto XXII plants the seed; the later cantos pay it off.
Benedict and the founding of the West
The visitor names himself indirectly. That mountain on whose slope Cassino stands was frequented of old upon its summit by a deluded folk and ill-disposed. The mountain south of Rome had been an active pagan cult site through the late empire — the chronicler Gregory the Great records the standing altar of Apollo and the sacred grove. I am he who first up thither bore the name of Him who brought upon the earth the truth that so much sublimateth us. Benedict cleared the summit, smashed the altar, felled the grove, and built the abbey that became the mother-house of the Western monastic tradition. The act is given in two tercets and one image. The conversion of the pagan summit into the Christian abbey is the Commedia's small picture of what the contemplative life is at its origin: the bringing-up of the divine name to a place that had previously known other names.
The historical detail is important. The Regula Benedicti — the Rule of Saint Benedict — codified at Monte Cassino around 540 AD, was the disciplinary text that organised the daily life of Western monasticism for the next fifteen centuries. Ora et labora — pray and work — is its motto, but the Rule itself is a long and tender administrative document, gentle on the weak and demanding of the strong, ordering the day into the seven canonical offices of prayer and the long hours of manual labour and lectio that filled the spaces between. Charlemagne adopted the Rule for the whole empire in the ninth century; it became the basic structure of Western religious life. Benedict's voice in the canto is therefore the voice of the structure itself, lamenting that the structure has been emptied of what it was built to hold.
The two companions Benedict names — Macarius of Egypt (c. 300 – c. 391) and Romuald of Ravenna (c. 951 – c. 1027) — bracket the West's contemplative arc. Macarius was one of the great Desert Fathers of fourth-century Egypt, a hermit of the wilderness whose collected Apophthegmata shaped the eastern monastic tradition that Benedict's Rule inherited and adapted. Romuald, three centuries after the Carolingian Rule's high tide, was the eleventh-century Italian reformer who founded the Camaldolese order — the strict Benedictine reform combining the cenobitic monastery with the hermit's cell, the order Peter Damian himself would later join. The three names trace the contemplative tradition from its Egyptian desert origins through its Latin codification to its medieval Italian reform. The cantica is locating Benedict, accurately, in a longer history.
The denunciation
Then the canto's hammer falls. Benedict says, in three tercets, what no later monastic could quite afford to say so plainly:
But to ascend it now no one uplifts His feet from off the earth, and now my Rule Below remaineth for mere waste of paper. (Par. XXII.73–75)
La regola mia — my Rule — rimasa è per danno de le carte — has remained as wastage of paper. The text Charlemagne made imperial law is now, in Benedict's mouth, an unread document. The contemplative ascent has stopped. The ladder he came down is unattended.
The cause is named in the next tercet. The great founders began with nothing:
Peter began with neither gold nor silver, And I with orison and abstinence, And Francis with humility his convent. (Par. XXII.88–90)
Pietro cominciò sanz' oro e sanz' argento. The apostle who held the keys; the founder of Western monasticism; the founder of the Friars Minor — all three began in poverty. The line is one of the canto's most quoted because it is exact. The order Benedict founded was, in his lifetime, a few cells on a cleared mountaintop; the order Francis founded was, in his lifetime, a few brothers in cast-off clothes; the church Peter led was, in his lifetime, a small persecuted community without buildings. The corruption Benedict denounces is the long historical accident by which the cells and the cast-off clothes and the small communities became, by Dante's day, enormous landowners with armed retainers and dependent peasantries.
The figure of the cowls as sacks of mouldy flour is exact. The monastic cowl, the canto says, has become farina ria — bad flour — the sack in which the corrupt monk hides his accumulated wealth. The walls that used to be an Abbey are changed to dens of robbers. The denunciation is the cantica's most direct attack on the monastic establishment, and it is delivered, structurally, by the founder. The founder against his order is the same figure as Peter Damian against the cardinals in canto XXI: each saint accuses what came of his own founding. The pattern is the cantica's working figure for what charity looks like when it confronts the institutions love has built.
The ascent into Gemini
Then the canto pivots. Benedict and the other contemplatives are gathered up like a whirlwind into the heaven above; Beatrice lifts the pilgrim with a single sign through Saturn and through the Fixed Stars into the eighth heaven. The pilgrim arrives in the constellation of Gemini, the Twins — the zodiacal sign under which he was born, with all my genius, whatsoe'er it be. The astronomical detail is precise: Dante was born in late May or early June 1265, with the sun in Gemini, and the Paradiso is being told as if the journey of 1300 has just lifted him into his own natal stars. The poet is naming, openly, the astrological assumption that the configuration of the heavens at one's birth shapes the disposition of one's soul — and is owning his own gifts as gifts of those particular stars. O glorious stars, O light impregnated with mighty virtue, from which I acknowledge all of my genius, whatsoe'er it be. The line is one of the cantica's quiet pieces of personal acknowledgement.
The threshing-floor
From the height of his own natal sign, the pilgrim looks back down. The Earth is small. The threshing-floor that maketh us so fierce, to me revolving with the eternal Twins, was all apparent made from hill to harbour. The aiuola — the little threshing-floor — is the medieval round Earth-disc of the T-O world-maps, seen from above as a small flat circle. The hills and the harbours visible all at once — da' colli a le foci — the whole of Eurasia and Africa as the medieval European geography knew it, taken in at one glance. The figure is the Paradiso's most concentrated piece of cosmic perspective.
The word that does the work is fieros — fierce. The threshing-floor is what makes us so fierce. The world looked at from the eighth heaven is the cause of the long catalogue of furies the Inferno spent thirty-four cantos documenting; the wars, the betrayals, the simoniacs, the schismatics, the violence — all the long Florentine civic disaster of Paradiso XVI — are for this small round disc. The line is gentler in its judgement than its surface suggests. The Earth is not damned; it is merely small. The fierce nations that contend over it are not damned for being fierce; they are pitied for thinking the disc is worth what they pay for it.
The figure returns in Paradiso XXVII.86, where the pilgrim, lifted yet higher, sees the same Earth as the little threshing-floor again. The cantica is teaching the reader, by repetition of the same image at successive heights, what the disciplined cosmic perspective looks like.
The closing line
The cantica's most famous moment of cosmic vision is followed by the cantica's most characteristic small reversal:
Then to the beauteous eyes mine eyes I turned. (Par. XXII.154)
A single line. After the threshing-floor, the eyes of Beatrice. The pilgrim does not stay in the cosmic perspective; he returns it to the immediate object of his love. The Paradiso's recurring discipline: every height is followed by a return to the particular, and the particular is what makes the next height possible. The line stands alone at the bottom of the canto, an orphaned-fourth structural ending again, hanging into the next canto's space.
Famous and meaningful passages
The pilgrim turning to Beatrice.
Oppressed with stupor, I unto my guide Turned like a little child who always runs For refuge there where he confideth most, (Par. XXII.1–3)
The simile of the small child running to the trusted adult is one of the cantica's most domestic. The pilgrim, in the heaven of the contemplatives, is reduced to the size of a child in his mother's arms.
The prophecy.
In which if thou hadst understood its prayers Already would be known to thee the vengeance Which thou shalt look upon before thou diest. (Par. XXII.13–15)
The seed of the great cantica-wide prophecy of judgement that will flower in cantos XXVII and XXX.
Benedict on Cassino.
That mountain on whose slope Cassino stands Was frequented of old upon its summit By a deluded folk and ill-disposed; (Par. XXII.37–39)
The pagan summit, the converted summit, the canto's small figure of the contemplative founding.
The naming.
And I am he who first up thither bore The name of Him who brought upon the earth The truth that so much sublimateth us; (Par. XXII.40–42)
Benedict does not name himself by his own name; he names himself by what he brought. The cantica's preferred grammar of saintly self-introduction.
The companions.
Here is Macarius, here is Romualdus, Here are my brethren, who within the cloisters Their footsteps stayed and kept a steadfast heart. (Par. XXII.49–51)
The Egyptian Desert Father, the Italian medieval reformer, the brothers who kept a steadfast heart. The contemplative tradition assembled in one tercet.
The empty ladder.
But to ascend it now no one uplifts His feet from off the earth, and now my Rule Below remaineth for mere waste of paper. (Par. XXII.73–75)
The Rule as wasted paper. The founder's lament.
The founders' poverty.
Peter began with neither gold nor silver, And I with orison and abstinence, And Francis with humility his convent. (Par. XXII.88–90)
Three foundings in three lines, all with nothing.
The corruption.
The walls that used of old to be an Abbey Are changed to dens of robbers, and the cowls Are sacks filled full of miserable flour. (Par. XXII.76–78)
Cocolle / sacca son piene di farina ria. The cowls as sacks of bad flour. The canto's most compressed image of monastic corruption.
The natal stars.
O glorious stars, O light impregnated With mighty virtue, from which I acknowledge All of my genius, whatsoe'er it be, (Par. XXII.112–114)
The poet's open acknowledgement of his own birth-sign. Di voi è la mia ingegnezza, qual che ella sia.
The threshing-floor.
The threshing-floor that maketh us so proud, To me revolving with the eternal Twins, Was all apparent made from hill to harbour! (Par. XXII.151–153)
L'aiuola che ci fa tanto feroci — the little threshing-floor that makes us so fierce. The cantica's most concentrated image of cosmic perspective.
The closing line.
Then to the beauteous eyes mine eyes I turned. (Par. XXII.154)
The single line that returns the pilgrim from the cosmos to the particular love. The cantica's structural orphan-line ending once more, the line that hangs into the next canto's white space.
What to watch for
Watch the rose. The next canto, XXIII, will lift the pilgrim into the great triumph of the Fixed Stars — the vision of Christ in light, Mary as the rose, the apostles around her — and the visual register of the Paradiso will rise to the highest pitch it has yet reached. After the silence of Saturn, the heaven of the Fixed Stars will be the cantica's loudest single piece of music.
Watch the examination. After the triumph, the Paradiso will turn (cantos XXIV–XXVI) to the apostolic examination of the pilgrim's faith, hope, and charity by Peter, James, and John. The contemplative ascent of XXI and XXII is the preparation for that examination: the soul that has been disciplined by the cell is the soul that can answer the apostles' questions.
Watch the threshing-floor. The figure will return in Paradiso XXVII.86, when the pilgrim is lifted yet higher and sees the same Earth again — smaller, dimmer, more pitiful. The cantica is teaching the reader, by the repetition of one image at successive heights, what the disciplined cosmic view looks like as it deepens. L'aiuola che ci fa tanto feroci is the Paradiso's last word to anyone who has read the Inferno and is still wondering why the Inferno needed to be so long.
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.