This week, I had lunch with a friend who said that he loved reading my Purgatorio blogging, but dropped off the Paradiso threads early, because it was too abstract. I felt oddly comforted by that. I have stretched Paradiso blogging out way, way longer than I ought to have done, because it is such a difficult text. I have been preoccupied with a side project for the past two months, a writing endeavor that has taken a great deal of my time and energy. I haven’t flagged on blogging in general, but Paradiso blogging has been especially difficult, because it requires concentration and more research than I did on Purgatorio to make sense of. Yet if you would understand Dante’s vision, Paradiso is no less vital than Inferno or Purgatorio. 

I’m not making excuses for my tardiness here, only trying to explain to you why I haven’t been diligent with these posts. I’m committed to finishing Paradiso this weekend, because I would really like to go through the entirety of Inferno before I leave for Florence in a couple of weeks. Before I get to the final three cantos (which I’m going to cover in a single post), I have to retrace my steps and blog Canto 28, which I inadvertently skipped. It is an important canto to understanding the final three, so I appreciate the reader who pointed out my oversight.

You might find it helpful to go back to our discussion of Canto 27, paying particular attention to the fact that it is in that canto, and the two that follow it, that Dante sets down his cosmology — that is, how the universe is designed. In Canto 27, we learn that in Dante’s vision (which the poet puts into Beatrice’s words), the material universe is a projection of the divine (immaterial) mind. It depends entirely on the world of Ideals — that is to say, God and his transcendent reality — for its existence. The line between the spiritual and the material worlds is paper-thin; the material world depends entirely on the energies emanating from God, transmitted through the Primum Mobile, for its life.

Canto 28 is mostly a description of the angelic hierarchies. The point for the general reader to take away from all this is that the cosmos is hierarchically designed. This will not be a surprise to you if you’ve been reading Dante all along. But there is more to be revealed. The pilgrim begins his narration by seeing reflected in Beatrice’s eyes a piercing point of light. He turned to look at it himself. Beatrice tells him that point of light is God. The reader will be reminded of the Big Bang theory, which says that everything that exists began as an almost infinitely dense point of light, which exploded and created in a single instant the universe. Dante calls this point of light “the Pure Spark of Being.” Then:

My lady, who observed my eagerness

and my bewilderment, said: “On that Point

depend all nature and all of the heavens.

 

Observe the circle nearest it, and know

the reason for its spinning at such speed

is that Love’s fire burns it into motion.

Note that Love is what causes motion. Whirling around the point of light are nine orbits of angels. The ardor with which these angelic beings regard God determines the velocity of their motion. It’s as if God were the nucleus of an atom, and the orders of angels were electrons.

An interesting aspect of this, something that will come up in the final cantos, is how the angelic orders all rotate in a circular motion around God, in Dante’s conception. Remember this for later.

Beatrice explains further about the brightness of the various angelic orders. The brighter they are, the greater their participation in the life of the Mind of God:

‘And you should know that all of them delight

in measure of the depth to which their sight

can penetrate the truth, where every intellect finds rest.

 

‘From this, it may be seen, beatitude itself

is based upon the act of seeing,

not on that of love, which follows after,

 

‘and the measure of their sight reveals their worth,

which grace and proper will beget in them.

There was an argument in Dante’s time about whether love precedes knowledge, or knowledge precedes love. Another way to think of it is like this: which comes first, vision or will? Dante, like Aquinas, comes down on the side of vision preceding will. As I wrote earlier this year, in Dante’s view (following St. Bonaventure’s), the Seraphim represent Love, and the Cherubim stand for Contemplation (that is, Knowledge). The poet says here (in Beatrice’s voice) that Knowledge — that is, seeing — precedes Love, because you have to first see something before you can love it, but that one is not higher than the other. They both work together. To know God is to love Him, and to love Him is to know Him. Earlier in Paradiso, Dante underscores the symbiotic relationship between knowledge and love by having St. Thomas Aquinas (a Dominican) speak in praise of the rival Franciscans, and St. Bonaventure (a Franciscan) speak in praise of the rival Dominicans. Yet vision comes first.

Furthermore, for Dante, the deeper you see into the truth of things, the greater your love. This is what happens to him as he rises through the heavens, drawing closer to God. The journey is a series of unmaskings, with his sight improving the stronger in spirit Dante becomes.

In his book Universe Of Stone, about the building of the Chartres cathedral, Philip Ball talks about the neoplatonic “near-worship of light” that dominated the mind of 12th and 13th-century Europeans. Ball contends that this attitude towards light led to the architectural revolution of Gothic cathedrals, which flooded dark church interiors with light — light that was also analogized by the Schoolmen to Reason. Think of the Gospel of St. John, describing Christ, the Logos, as the “light that shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

Further, Ball writes:

This suggests that the mundane and material can lead us towards the transcendental and immaterial by an affinity of their essence is an example of the concept of anagogy (literally, “upward-leading”). It is a difficult idea for us who lack the Neo-Platonist’s sense of the connectedness of the universe or the medieval notion of world as symbol.

What he’s saying is that for the medievals, contemplation of ordinary things like stone and light can lead one to awareness of higher realities. The Divine Comedy is saturated with this kind of thinking. Indeed, Dante repeatedly indicates that the divine must communicate to us finite creatures symbolically, because we lack the vision to see divine reality as it truly is. As I said, the entire Paradiso is about a journey into sight, and into Dante’s growing in spiritual strength until he is at last capable of bearing heaven’s blinding light at full strength.

Interestingly, in Inferno and Purgatorio, Dante grows by acquiring knowledge of how sin works, and how man is corrupted, but he is also required to repent. In Paradiso, no one repents — it would be pointless to repent in Heaven — but Dante does grow in the power of vision as he learns more about divine reality by gazing up on the progressively higher levels of heavenly being, and by accustoming himself to the progressive experience of ever more intense light. The closer a creature is to God, the brighter it glows with the Uncreated Light, which indicates the degree to which it has been deified. Crucially, this is also in heaven a bond of love. The light of knowledge is different from but also inseparable from love.

This is why all the material here about the Angelic Hierarchies is not simply a matter of medieval fussiness and a fetish for classification. Dante is trying to convey here a sense of metaphysical order.

And all of the angelic ranks gaze upward,

as downward they prevail upon the rest,

so while each draws the next, al draw toward God.

The Great Chain of Being. It’s intense and heavy stuff, at least to a novice like me. It raises interesting philosophical question about the nature of ultimate truth. Or rather, it puts (for me) a somewhat new way of thinking about a familiar question: is truth objective or subjective? As you know, I think there are truths that are true whether or not you believe them. Mathematical and scientific truths are like this. But there is a category of truth that can only be realized subjectively. I believe, with Kierkegaard, that all the truths worth living and dying for are subjective truths, which is to say, things that are objectively true, but can only be properly realized in subjectivity. God is like this. God exists objectively, but that truth means nothing unless I appropriate it inwardly and commit myself as a subject to it. Here’s Kierkegaard’s own definition of truth (in this sense):

An objective uncertainty held fast in an appropriation-process of the most passionate inwardness is the truth, the highest truth attainable for the individual.

It would be wrong to call the The Divine Comedy pre-Kierkegaardian, but it’s not entirely crazy. What I mean is this: for Dante, growing in Truth is inseparable from growing in personal and intellectual union with God. It is not simply something one does with one’s mind, but with the totality of one’s being. The “intellect” is better understood by the Greek term “nous” (pron. noose) the perceiving faculty of the soul. For Orthodox Christians, salvation — which is to say, theosis, dissolving oneself in total unity with God — depends on sharpening one’s noetic vision. Though I hesitate to pronounce a Christian poet so thoroughly Scholasticized as Dante as one who is consonant with Orthodox theology — I ask your correction if I here err — it was remarkable to me, as an Orthodox Christian, to read Paradiso as a long poem about the cleansing of Dante’s nous (his ability to perceive God as He is), a cleansing that of necessity increased the divine love within Dante.

The thing is, he could not love to the utmost without having the strength and the clarity of vision to take in more light, and he could not take in more light without having the capacity to love more perfectly. Dante says that the act of seeing precedes the act of loving, and that makes rational sense. But isn’t it also true that some things cannot be perceived except insofar as one loves?

Here’s what I mean. You walk through the mall, you see strangers, but you don’t perceive the reality of those strangers. You can’t see them as they are, because you have no subjective experience of them. You don’t love them, and can’t love them, because you don’t know them. You perceive them in your eyesight, but you don’t see any deeper than the surface of these people, because you have no subjective knowledge of them. You don’t know them like their wives, their husbands, their children, their parents. You don’t, for that matter, know them like their Creator. Now, it is also true that within our subjectivity, we may fail to perceive objective truths about a person. The mother of the school bully may not perceive her child’s cruelty, for example. Only God, who has perfect omniscience — that is, perfect objective knowledge and perfect subjective knowledge — can say for sure. The point I want to make here, though, is that I don’t think Dante is quite right to say that perception always precedes love, or to be more precise, that the distinction between seeing and willing is so cleanly delineated.

There is something else to notice about the Angelic Ranks. They are divided into three ranks or three beings each. Dante is intensely interested in numbers. The number three, of course, symbolizes the Holy Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. For Dante, all creation is mathematical — that is, the mathematicality inherent in the universe is a sign of the Divine Mind. And more, the trinitarian principle is manifest throughout the cosmos. Our relationship to God is trinitarian, consisting of three parts: God, us, and the relationship itself. More, from the Dante scholar Prue Shaw:

For Dante, it is not just the fabric of the cosmos that yields the pattern of three-in 0ne. Time and space, the defining conditions of human existence, embody a three-in-one principle: past, present, and future; height, depth, width. Human activity within our world also lends itself surprisingly well to analysis in these terms. Three key kinds of human functioning — thinking, doing, making — all invite examination, albeit in somewhat different ways, in terms of three stages or three aspects of three constituent parts that make up a single whole.

More:

Dante saw direct parallels between the act by which God created the universe, the workings of the natural world, and the productive activities of human beings who operate within that world. In other words, in our everyday lives we are all engaged in activities that are in some way analogous to the way God works.

Reality itself is trinitarian, according to Dante. The material world is the clay, God and His design is the idea (form), and the Primum Mobile is the potter’s wheel through which the Creator imprints Form onto Matter. See how that works? The creative energies of God pass through the Primum Mobile to fashion creation into the ideas in God’s mind. For us, it doesn’t matter whether or not the Primum Mobile actually exists. This is a mental construct to help us understand how God’s trinitarian nature plays out in the creative act. One more lengthy quote from Shaw, as long as we’re talking about numbers and metaphysical design:

Dante’s is a world where the number three seems to be a key to understanding reality in many of its fundamental aspects. The numerical pattern three-in-one is built into the very structure of things, a medieval version of what modern thinkers call a “fractal.” (Fractals are self-similar patterns: at whatever degree of magnification one uses, one sees the same pattern reappearing.) It is perhaps not surprising that  Dante used the principle of three-in-one to structure his imagined world and the poem which celebrates it. What is astounding is how successfully he did so.

The Commedia as a product of human making — a man-made work of verbal art — was designed by Dante to embody the three-in-one principle. With satisfying symmetry, it does so both in its overall structure and in its individual component parts. The poem has three sections — Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso — which constitute one poem, the Commedia. The basic building block from which it is constructed is the terzina, or tercet, a single metrical unit consisting of three lines. Dante invented this metrical scheme, and by so doing made three-in-oneness a part of the very fabric of his poem.

Each line of each tercet is 11 syllables long, making 33 syllables per tercet. He keeps this up for 14,000+ lines. There is much more to be said about the ingenious mathematical structure of the Commedia, but not here. The point is that Dante, by infusing mathematical design to a breathtaking degree in his poetic creation, invites us to contemplate the order embedded into creation by the Creator.

Now, you may wish to re-read the reflection on Canto XXIX, and the one on Canto XXX. I intend to make one more long post this weekend, summing up the last three cantos. Thanks for your patience.