Summary
As canto eighteen begins, Dante is “tasting” his own thoughts, “tempering the bitter with the sweet,” but Beatrice quickly asks that he remember that she is dwelling in God’s love. Dante experiences a joy that can neither be told nor remembered “unless Another guide” the memory. “[N]ot in my eyes alone is Paradise,” she tells him, and he turns to see Cacciaguida ready to tell him more. Cacciaguida directs Dante’s attention to the cross, where he sees Joshua, Maccabaeus, Charlemagne, Roland, and many others. The wheeling lights grow brighter, and Dante and Beatrice ascend from Mars to Jupiter. There, the “resplendent” lights form in letters, spelling out “DILIGITE IUSTITIAM… QUI IUDICATIS TERRAM,” Latin for “Love Justice, you who judge the earth.” They then turn into an eagle, and Dante asks that the divine power’s “wrath come down” on those figures of the church’s corruption. As the canto closes, he implicitly accosts his readers, reminding them that “Peter and Paul, who died/to save the vineyard you lay waste, still live.”
At the beginning of canto nineteen, the souls before Dante seem “interwoven” and yet distinct as rubies. They speak in a chorus in which “the words for I and my” mean “we and our," saying that they have reached this sphere of the heavens for “being just and merciful.” Dante asks them to address his doubts. They explain that God’s creation is absolutely surpassed by his wisdom, which is why Satan “plummeted unripe”—he could never obtain God’s wisdom. Even further, this is why humans cannot “see” their “source” in God, just as one cannot see into the depths of “the open sea.” Thus, when someone wants to question why a person never exposed to Christianity should be punished for being faithless, they should consider that God’s wisdom is unfathomable and much more precise than limited, human vision. Still, the eagle says, “many shout out ‘Christ, O Christ!’ / who shall be farther off from Him, / on Judgment Day, than such as know not Christ.’” The eagle’s speech concludes with a long prophecy, subtly alluding to many royal houses, medieval kingdoms, and political figures from Dante’s time.
Dante is enjoying the eagle’s sweet song of love when a sudden sound, like “the murmur of a stream,” comes from its neck. It states that Dante must look into its eyes, which “in mortal eagles,/sees and endures the sun.” The voice describes how in its eyes are the spirits of David, Trajan, Hezekiah, Constantine, and Ripheus the Trojan. Ending by noting the surprise one might feel at Ripheus, a pagan, being among the saved, the eagle falls silent. Dante is overcome by its beauty and begs the eagle to explain what he has seen. The eagle clarifies that the pagans among them “left their bodies not as gentiles / but as Christians” and thus were saved. It warns mortals to suspend judgment about who is to be saved, as even the elect do not “know all those who are elect,” a fact that is actually “sweet” to them, insofar they merge their wills with God’s perfect judgment. Dante notes that the eagle has thus cured “the shortness of [his] vision,” and that all the while it spoke, its eyes pulsed in time to its words.
As Dante ascends to Saturn, he looks to Beatrice, who is unable to smile—“If I smiled,” she says, “you would become what Semele became/when she was turned to ashes.” Her beauty, having increased, is quite literally unbearable, of a similar power to Zeus’ lightning. She turns his attention towards a ladder, which rises “to so great a height / [Dante’s] eyesight could not rise along with it.” In a long simile, Dante describes how lights move along its rungs in the varied patterns of a group of rooks, and soon a light near them shines brightly. Beatrice prods Dante to question it, and he asks why it drew near to them and “why, within this wheel / the sweet symphony of Paradise falls silent.”
The light responds first that the lights are only silent because their song, like Beatrice’s smile, would overwhelm Dante; he continues by suggesting that he came near them because of his love for serving “the Wisdom governing the world.” Dante entreats him again, asking why he was “foreordained” to address Dante. The light responds by ensuring Dante that this line of inquiry will get him nowhere; not even the highest of the angels could answer such a question. Dante, now “reined in,” asks who the light is, and we learn that this is Peter Damian or Peter the Sinner, a saint. He criticizes the religious officials of Dante’s day, and when he goes silent, the lights let out a cry of anger at these monks and prelates; Dante says it is indescribable, and he is overwhelmed by “its thunder.”
Analysis
As with many of the other spheres of heaven, the imagery and language Dante uses to describe Mars reflect the typical associations of the stars and planets. In canto eighteen, Mars, named for the Roman god of war, is populated by figures associated with war and conquest, like Joshua and Maccabaeus. But Dante includes more subtle gestures toward Mars in this canto. For example, he writes that Beatrice’s smile “conquered” him. By using this term to refer to her effect on him, he lends her a sort of military power. Even further, he suggests that her body has within itself a power to conquer in the service of divine love. In the context of the consistent motif of divine light, love, and vision, Beatrice’s conquering powers become the method by which Dante is drawn even further into “paradise.”
One significant aspect of canto nineteen is that Dante works to tie together the motif of the sea-voyage (present throughout the Commedia), the motif of sight, and his theological considerations. By using the metaphor of a sea-voyager attempting to look into the depths of the sea to figure the attempt to “fathom” God, Dante connects a theology that posits the limitations of human knowledge of God with a concrete experience of the limitations of human perception. Thus Dante suggests that readers, with him on a metaphoric boat, are able to see slightly past the surface but not into the depths.
In canto twenty, we should note how Dante has continued to elaborate on the symbolism of the eagle. Not only are many of those who make up the eagle kings or other significant figures—a gesture towards the eagle’s association with royalty and empire—but Dante specifically points to their supposed ability to stare directly at the sun. Thus the eagle, too, is folded into the motif of vision, and it becomes a sort of paragon for the direct vision of the divine (represented as the sun) that Dante persistently gestures toward in the Paradiso. The eagle then serves, simultaneously, as a symbol for Rome, Christ, and the vision needed to withstand divine light. Notably, the stanza ends with Dante’s eyes looking at the eagle’s eyes as they pulse, joining Dante’s increasingly strengthened gaze with the eagles and signifying the correction not only of his vision but of his intellect.
Canto twenty-one can help us to see how Dante has, within a single canto, created structure and a sort of sub-motif, revealing the poet's acute attention to detail and form. Note that Dante uses a classical metaphor related to Jove’s lightning (Semele was killed by it) to open the canto. This opening once again emphasizes Dante's limited ability to access or withstand the divine, and a theme that returns at the very end in this indescribable cry. But this theme is yet again connected to the imagery of lightning; in Italian, the canto ends on the word “thunder” (tuono), recalling yet again the divine power evoked at the canto’s beginning. This circular structure both lends coherence to this section and allows Dante to consistently call on the classical imagery of divine light and power to bolster his Christian poem.
Another significant aspect of this canto is that Dante alludes to Genesis 28. There, the biblical patriarch Jacob falls asleep and sees a ladder where angels ascend and descend from earth to heaven; Dante has put Jacob’s ladder in heaven itself.
