Summary
Dante, now on the sun, asks the reader to “raise your eyes/up to the lofty wheels…” and “from that point begin to gaze in rapture/at the Master’s work.” He adds that he “has set your [the reader’s] table” and invites the reader to “feed yourself” as you read. Shifting back to narrative poetry, Dante describes how the imagination is too limited and “earthbound” to understand the light in the sun. Beatrice tells Dante to “give thanks,” and he is so full of love for God that she is “eclipsed… in forgetfulness” for a moment. Suddenly lights ring them in a crown, singing. They circle them three times, and then one speaks to Dante, telling him that he is Thomas of Aquino, better known as Thomas Aquinas, writer of the Summa Theologica and foremost medieval theologian. He names the remaining lights: Albertus Magnus, Francesco Graziano, Peter Lombard, King Solomon, Dionysius the Areopagite, and Paulus Orosius; the next soul, Boethius, is especially important for having written The Consolation of Philosophy and other significant medieval works. Aquinas adds Isidore of Seville, Bede, Richard of Saint Victor, and Siger of Brabant, and the canto ends with their lights wheeling like a clock waking a monastery in the morning.
Immediately as the eleventh canto begins, Dante the poet addresses the “foolish cares of mortals”—law, medicine, priesthood, government, theft, public affairs, sensuality, and idleness. He and Beatrice are free of these, he writes. The lights of the theologians stop, and Aquinas again addresses Dante, responding to his doubts; to do so, he tells the narrative of Saint Francis of Assisi’s (or Ascesi’s) life. Francis, he suggests, was married to lady poverty, Christ’s widow. It is this dedication to poverty that gains him an order of monks (the Franciscan order) and martyrdom. He has told this narrative of Francis’s strength in poverty to explain that those who, like sheep, do not stray from him, will be fed well spiritually; those who stray from his commitment to poverty will be spiritually barren.
Canto twelve begins when Aquinas is done speaking and the lights are wheeling like interlocking “twin rainbows.” They dance and then stop, a new voice rising. This is Bonaventure, who will describe—just as Aquinas has with Francis—the life of Saint Dominic, founder of the Dominican order of monks. He describes how Dominic’s name came from his mother dreaming he would be a great force for God and choosing the possessive form of Dominus, used in reference to God, to name him. Bonaventure praises his criticism of “degenerate” popes and heresy; the language of the military inflects his speech. He concludes by castigating the state of the contemporary Dominican order, but he predicts that it will soon be “tilled” of these bad elements. The canto ends with Bonaventure describing the second circle of the sun, where other important Christian figures reside.
In canto thirteen, Dante asks the reader to “imagine” the lights moving like a number of features seen in the earthly sky; doing so will allow them to see “the shadow / of the true constellation and the double dance” that wheel about him. The lights praise “the divine nature in three Persons,” but they soon quiet down. Aquinas begins to speak again, addressing yet another of Dante’s doubts. He explains that, though the divine light is perfect, the “wax” of created things is imperfect and thus bears the “seal” of this divine light imperfectly. This is because nature, rather than God himself, forms this wax. Still, there are things that have been sealed by “burning Love” and thus are perfect, as was the case with Adam and Eve before the fall. Solomon, for example, was above Adam in wisdom but not in creation. Aquinas ends the canto by urging caution for those thinking through important questions, attention to making distinctions, and the need for people not to “be too certain/in their judgments.”
Analysis
We should first note that Dante’s address to the reader in canto ten once again plays with the theme of using sensory experience to think about God. In this instance, Dante uses the motif of food—used elsewhere with metaphors of taste—to describe how the reader is “consuming” his work. But Dante will not feed you; instead, you have to nourish yourself with the writing that he has provided. Another notable aspect about this canto’s opening address to the reader is that, by calling the reader’s eyes to the “lofty wheels,” Dante may subtly be calling attention to his own poetic form. His terza rima moves almost like these wheeling lights, cycling through beautiful rhymes in interlocking patterns. Perhaps by noticing this, we can see how the Paradiso uses the terza rima deployed throughout the Commedia to give the reader a sense of moving, heavenly beauty.
In canto eleven, Dante opens with an apostrophe (or address) to his mortal readers, and though it may seem like somewhat of a non-sequitur, it is significant that Dante brings up a number of earthly or secular concerns immediately before moving into the narrative of Francis of Assisi, known for his willingness to remove himself from these earthly concerns. Thus Dante has shaped his canto to balance between modes—first direct address by Dante the poet and then the narrative of Dante the pilgrim—but keep them joined by a single theme, that being the value of focusing on the divine rather than the earthly.
Although the Paradiso as a whole is shaped by the motif of ascent, canto twelve shows how the individual cantos often have their own sub-structures. For example, between the narratives of Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas there is an almost exact parallelism; the theologians’ “saint’s lives” mirror one another, and even further, they each tell the narrative of and praise the person who founded the others’ monastic order. Thus Aquinas, a Dominican monk, praises Francis; Bonaventure, a Franciscan monk, praises Dominic. Note the almost chiastic (meaning crossed or mirrored) structure of these cantos—Dante’s poem consistently creates similar structures, juxtapositions, and relationships between groups of cantos.
One of the most notable aspects of canto thirteen is Dante’s use of anaphora. The “Let him imagine” repeated throughout the opening stanzas of the canto emphasize the imaginary work that the reader must do to approximate what Dante is experiencing; this work is imaginary both in the sense of literally attempting to understand the image Dante is creating, and in the sense of stretching the mind to think creatively. This anaphora is even stronger in the Italian, where imagini opens three of the first four stanzas, and it truly brings out the interplay between the limits of the imagination and the understanding that are so repeatedly thematized in the Paradiso.
