Paradiso XXV — The Font — History in Books

Before reading

The second of the three apostolic examinations. St James is about to examine the pilgrim on Hope. But the canto opens with twelve lines that have nothing to do with Hope as a doctrine and everything to do with hope as a life — Dante's own hope, in his own voice, that one day his exile will end and he will return to Florence to be crowned at the same baptismal font where he was christened. The exile passage is one of the most personally exposed passages in the entire Commedia. Read the opening tercets slowly before the examination proper begins.

Where the canto sits

We are still in the sphere of the Fixed Stars. Peter has just blessed the pilgrim three times for Faith; the canto opens with a long parenthetical, then resumes the viva. James arrives as the second of the three apostolic professors. After he has finished, John will arrive as the third. This is the central canto of a three-canto sequence — the same architecture Dante used for Cacciaguida in cantos XV–XVII, where the political and personal questions are placed between the cosmic ones. Hope, the middle theological virtue, gets the canto in which the poet's own biography surfaces.

What it helps to know

St James the Greater — son of Zebedee, brother of John, one of the three apostles (with Peter and John) admitted to the Transfiguration. By Dante's time his shrine at Santiago de Compostela was the most-walked pilgrimage destination in Western Christendom, and Galicia was synonymous with his name. The poem calls him the Baron / for whom below Galicia is frequented. The medieval association of James with hope derives from his Epistle and from the long tradition that read his shrine as the goal of the peregrinatio — the journey toward the heavenly Jerusalem of which every earthly pilgrimage is a figure.

Dante's exile: the poet was exiled from Florence on 27 January 1302, on trumped-up charges of corruption pressed by the new Black Guelph regime under the influence of Boniface VIII. Florence offered to allow him to return only on condition of a public confession of guilt and a humiliating ritual penance. Dante refused, and never went home. The opening tercets of this canto are written from inside that refusal — they imagine the impossible future condition in which he would be invited back without humiliation. The font he names is San Giovanni, the Florentine Baptistery, where he had been christened. The same Baptistery he had cursed by name in Inferno XIX. The contradictions are wound tightly.

The examination itself uses a definition of Hope drawn from Peter Lombard's Sentences, the standard theology textbook of the period — Hope is the certain expectation of future glory. It is, again, the textbook definition, used by Dante to show his discipline.

What to read for

Read the opening twelve lines as a single sustained sentence about a future that may not arrive. If e'er it happen… The conditional is the whole grammar. The poet hopes for a kind of homecoming the way the theology of the canto says we should hope for Heaven — certain in expectation, contingent in arrival.

Notice the canto's quiet self-undoing. James asks Dante to define Hope, and Beatrice intervenes before Dante can answer, telling James that the answer is yes — Dante does possess Hope, more than anyone else in the militant Church. The reader hears the apostle and the loved woman certify the same gift from opposite sides.

At the canto's end, John arrives as a third light, and Dante tries to see if his body is visible inside the flame. He looks too hard. He goes blind. The canto closes with a small terrifying detail: the pilgrim turns to Beatrice and cannot see her. Hope's canto ends with a moment of complete sensory loss.

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 with twelve of the most personally exposed lines in the Commedia — the poet, in his own voice, hoping he might one day return from exile to be crowned at his Florentine baptismal font — and then immediately moved into the apostolic viva on Hope. James asked the question; Beatrice answered for the pilgrim before he could; the pilgrim answered the remaining questions; John arrived as a third light; the pilgrim looked too hard at the third flame, went blind, and turned to find that Beatrice too had vanished from his sight. The canto on the theological virtue of Hope ends, paradoxically, with an experience of total loss. The lesson is not subtle and is not consoling: the certainty of Hope is not the same as the visibility of its object. Hope must be held precisely when one cannot see. The whole structure of the canto enacts that doctrine on the pilgrim's body.

The exile passage — the poet at his most exposed

The opening twelve lines are written in a single sustained conditional. If e'er it happen that the Poem Sacred… o'ercome the cruelty that bars me out / From the fair sheepfold, where a lamb I slumbered… / With other voice forthwith, with other fleece / Poet will I return, and at my font / Baptismal will I take the laurel crown. The grammar carries the whole psychology of long exile: the future Dante imagines is contingent on his poem succeeding. He will be crowned not as a politician but as a poet, and the crowning will happen at the Baptistery of San Giovanni — the very building he had cursed by name in Inferno XIX for being defaced by simoniac popes. The contradictions are deliberate. The same font that washed him as an infant will receive him as a laureate; the same city that exiled him will be the city that crowns him; the same poem that records his exile is the one that earns him return. None of it happened. He died in Ravenna in 1321 and was never crowned in Florence. The passage stands as one of the Commedia's most touching unfulfilled wishes.

The grammar of if

Notice that the long opening sentence has no main clause until line 7. The condition runs first — if the poem overcome the cruelty that bars me out — and then the apodosis arrives: with other voice… poet will I return. The whole shape of the sentence is the shape of the virtue the canto is about. Hope, in Dante's own definition seven tercets later, is the certain expectation of future glory. The poet's hope of return is structured exactly the same way: a certain expectation contingent on conditions outside his control. The form of the opening tercets is the doctrine of the canto.

Beatrice answering for the pilgrim

When James puts the question — say what it is, and how is flowering with it / thy mind — Beatrice intervenes before Dante can speak. She tells James that there is no man in the Church Militant who possesses Hope to a higher degree than the pilgrim before them, and that this very journey he is making is the proof: he has been allowed, by special grace, to come from Egypt — the world of exile — into Jerusalem before his warfare is completed. The intercession is striking. It is a moment of the loved woman speaking for the lover at the highest court — the same office she performed on the road in Inferno II when she sent Virgil down to find him. The canto stages the continuity of her love across the whole hundred-canto journey: she is still the one who speaks for him when he cannot yet speak for himself.

John, and the resurrection-of-the-body question

The third apostle to arrive, John, will give the canto a polemic. There was a long medieval legend — drawn from a difficult passage at the end of the Gospel of John — that John alone among the apostles had been bodily assumed into Heaven without dying. Dante refuses the legend. Earth in the earth my body is, and shall be / With all the others — only Christ and Mary, John says, have their bodies in Heaven; the rest of us await the general resurrection. The canto is correcting popular piety in passing. The pilgrim has tried to see John's living body inside the flame and has gone blind in punishment for the attempt. The reader is being told, twice over: there is no point looking for what is not there.

Why the canto ends in blindness

The closing tercet is one of the quietest small horrors in Paradiso. The pilgrim, blinded by trying to see what cannot be seen, turns to Beatrice — and she is not visible. Close at her side and in the Happy World, the canto says, I could not see her. Hope's canto ends with the loss of the beloved face. The argument is structural: the very canto in which Hope is doctrinally certified ends with the experiential absence of the only object the pilgrim has ever hoped for with certainty. The doctrine and the experience contradict each other on purpose. Hope is what one holds when sight fails. The poem is teaching, by the deliberate pain of the closing tercet, what Hope actually feels like to live.

Famous and meaningful passages

The exile.

If e'er it happen that the Poem Sacred, To which both heaven and earth have set their hand, So that it many a year hath made me lean, O'ercome the cruelty that bars me out From the fair sheepfold, where a lamb I slumbered, An enemy to the wolves that war upon it, With other voice forthwith, with other fleece Poet will I return, and at my font Baptismal will I take the laurel crown; (Par. XXV.1–9)

Il poema sacro again — the name Dante gives his own poem. The fair sheepfold is Florence; the lamb I slumbered is his childhood self; the wolves that war upon it is the political faction that exiled him. Other voice, other fleece is the older man he has become through the writing of the poem. The whole emotional autobiography of the exile is in one sentence.

The arrival of James.

Look, look! behold the Baron For whom below Galicia is frequented. (Par. XXV.17–18)

James named only by his pilgrimage shrine. Compostela's baron.

The definition of Hope.

Hope, said I, is the certain expectation Of future glory, which is the effect Of grace divine and merit precedent. (Par. XXV.67–69)

The Peter Lombard definition, given by the man whose own hope of return from exile may never be fulfilled. Certain expectation and contingent fulfilment coexist in the sentence the way they coexist in the poet's life.

The two robes.

Isaiah saith, that each one garmented In his own land shall be with twofold garments, And his own land is this delightful life. (Par. XXV.91–93)

The two stoles of the resurrected — body and soul restored — drawn from Isaiah 61. Dante's hope is for the resurrection of the body, not for a disembodied immortality.

The bride and the pelican.

This is the one who lay upon the breast Of him our Pelican; and this is he To the great office from the cross elected. (Par. XXV.112–114)

Christ as the Pelican — the medieval bestiary held that the pelican fed her young with blood from her own breast, and so became a figure of Christ in the Eucharist. John is the one who lay upon the breast of Christ at the Last Supper; the great office delivered to him from the cross is the care of Mary entrusted to him at the crucifixion.

The refusal of the legend.

Why dost thou daze thyself To see a thing which here hath no existence? Earth in the earth my body is, and shall be With all the others there, until our number With the eternal proposition tallies. (Par. XXV.122–126)

John refusing the legend of his bodily assumption. The body is earth in the earth until the general resurrection.

The closing eclipse.

Ah, how much in my mind was I disturbed, When I turned round to look on Beatrice, That her I could not see, although I was Close at her side and in the Happy World! (Par. XXV.136–139)

Hope's canto ends with the blinded pilgrim unable to find the woman who has been the literal embodiment of his Hope for the entire journey. The doctrine and the experience are placed in direct contradiction.

What to watch for

Watch the third apostle. John has arrived; he has not yet examined. Canto XXVI will be the examination on Love — and then, in an extraordinary structural move, Adam himself will appear in the same canto to answer Dante's unspoken questions about the Fall and language.

Watch the laurel. At my font / Baptismal will I take the laurel crown — the wish that the same building that christened him will one day crown him as a poet. Compare to the Aeneid: when Anchises crowned Augustus, it was the imperial crown of a new Rome. Dante wants a poet's crown in a city that exiled him. The crown will not come.

Watch the I cannot see her of the closing line. Beatrice will return to Dante's sight in the next canto, and the recovery will be dramatised as the cure of sight. The canto sequence is teaching Paradiso's reader to feel the rhythm of blindness and recovery — the same rhythm the final cantos will use to figure the Beatific Vision itself.

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.