BY GRADUAL SCALE SUBLIMED

 


 Dante’s Benedict
and Contemplative Ascent
Peter S. Hawkins
 

 Benedict in the Sphere of Saturn, Di Paolo

 

 

Monasticism and the Arts., ed. Timothy Verdon, Syracuse Univ. Press New York 1984,Chapter 10, pp. 255-269

 

 

Dante’s treatment of St. Benedict in the Divine Comedy illustrates the hold which monastic ideals continued to exert upon the popular imagination in the fourteenth century. The symbolic role of monasticism within late medieval society becomes clear both from Dante’s lofty characterization of the Patriarch of Monks and from his harsh condemnation of Benedict’s “sons,” the monks of the poet’s own day, for failing to fulfill the obligations of their way of life. Peter Hawkins also makes clear the extent to which a lay public was assumed to be conversant with the ideology and practices of the cloister.
      Peter S. Hawkins is a member of the faculty of the Yale Divinity School.

      So from the root
Springs lighter the green stalk, from thence the leaves
More airy, last the bright consummate flower
Spirits odorous breathes: flowers and their fruit
Man’s nourishment, by gradual scale sublimed.

—Paradίse Lost 5

In a poem where almost nothing seems to have been left to chance, it is surely remarkable that from beginning to end Dante’s Paradiso unfolds within the context of monasticism. At the outset the first of the blessed whom the pilgrim meets is Piccarda Donati (cantos 3-4), whose breaking of her cloistral vow under family pressure does not prevent her from initiating Dante into the rule of the heavenly kingdom: E’n la sua voluntade è nostra pace” (3: 85),1 in His will is our peace. At the conclusion of the journey he joins up with St. Bernard (cantos 31—33), whose great abbey at Clairvaux was at best but a shadowy preface of the divine community which the saint now enables Dante to enter and, through his intercession to the Virgin, to worship among. Despite the earthly differences between failed nun and illustrious abbot, both of these monastic personages share with the pilgrim the great legacy of organized religious life and the fulfillment of its gift to the larger Church on earth: they teach him to know God. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that twο cantos of this final portion of the Commedia are specifically devoted to exploring the fruits of the contemplative life, or that at the heart of this exploration the pilgrim should come upon the founder of Western monasticism himself, St. Benedict of Nursia.

In canto 22 of the Paradiso, Dante meets St. Benedict within the sphere of Saturn, the seventh heaven of the Ptolomeic universe, where those of the blessed who practiced monastic contemplation in their lifetimes share with him a measure of their far greater vision. To be sure, these spirits do not live out their beatitude within the dimensions of time and space; they appear in a specific place only as an extraordinary condescension to the plgrim’s mortality, a condescension “per far segno/ della celestial” (Par. 4: 38—39)—as a sign of the heavenly reality which lies entirely beyond signification. The different “identity” of each sphere is significant, however, for from the beginning of the Paradiso it is precisely through these fictive or metaphorical appearances that we begin to understand the different ways and degrees by which the blessed “feel more and less the divine breath” (“senor più e men l’etterno Spiro,” Par. 4: 36). Thus, those who in cantos 21 and 22 momentarily take their place “in” Saturn have prepared for their eternal experience of God in the Empyrean by following the influence of the “cold planet” while still on earth—an influence which led them not to melancholia, but to contemplation, that is (to quote the Postillatore Cassinese), “by giving themselves to the contemplative life in hermitage and in religious solitude ... living in silence and in chastity.”2 Dante’s high esteem for this, the vocation of Rachel, is suggested not only by the inevitable association of Saturn with a paradisiacal Golden Age, but by its celestial position above the six lower spheres and the versions of the active life which they have been shown to represent in the preceding cantos.

In his valuation of the contemplative life over the active, Dante is, of course, at one with the medieval predilection. It is underscored, moreover, by a striking disruption of the poems narrative procedure. From the first canto of Paradiso onward, the pilgrim has moved from one planetary sphere to another, from one power of vision to another which sees yet deeper into the heart of things. He makes these transitions by looking into the face of Beatrice, finding her eyes or smile even more beautiful than he has seen them before. In that discovery he finds himself translated, as it were, a claritate in claritatem, from glοry to glory (2 Cor. 3:18), into new light and sound.3 At the entrance to the sphere of Saturn in canto 21, however, this pattern is suddenly broken: Beatrice does not smile and the dolce sinfonia di paradsso” (Par. 21:59) is silent. What this absence betokens is a presence so full that were Dante actually to be shown its “face” in Beatrice’s smile, he would become, she says, like Semele when she beheld Jove in his divinity and was immediately thereby turned to ash (verses 4—12). The degree to which the contemplatives knοw God is, therefore, not only magnitudes beyond the capacity of the blessed encountered in the spheres below, it is also a reality which the pilgrim can learn to experience for himself only gradually. To this end Beatrice urges him in a marvellous image to make mirrors of his eyes and in the act of speculation” to practice the discipline of the contemplative life (vv 16—18).4 What he comes to reflect, and hence to reflect upon, is the central image of Saturn:

di color d’oro in che raggio traluce
vid’io uno scaleo eretto in suso
tanto, che nol seguiva a mia luce.

I saw, of the color of gold on which a sunbeam is shining, a ladder rising up so high that my sight might not follow it

Vidi anche per li gradi scender giuso
tanti splendor, ch’io
pensai ch’ogne lume
che par nel
ciel, quindi fosse diffuso.

 I saw, moreover, so many splendors descending along the steps, that I thought every light which appears in heaven had been poured down from it.

E come, per lo natural costume,
le pole insieme, al cominciar del
giorno,
si
movono a scaldar le fredde piume;

And, as by their natural custom, the daws move about together, at the beginning of the day, to warm their cold feathers,

poi altre vanno via sana ritorno,
altre rivolgon sé onde son mosse,
e
altre roteando fan soggiorno;

then some fly away not to return, some wheel round to whence they had started, while others wheeling make a stay;

tal modo parue me che quivi fosse
in quello sfavillar che ‘nsieme venne,
sl come in certo grado
si percosse.

such movements, it seemed to me, were in that sparkling, which came in a throng, as soon as it smote upon a certain step.

(Par. 21:28-42)

The golden scaleo which we find here is an ancient and venerable one. It originates in Jacobs spectacular dream at Bethel of God standing at the top of the ladder and angels ascending and descending below Him.5 Elsewhere in Scripture what Jacob finds at the apex is Wisdom, who “showed him the kingdom of God and gave to him knowledge of the holy ones (Wisdom 10:10).6 For this reason it is no surprise that Boethius Lady Philosophy should be adorned with the same emblem, showing as it does the “gradus ab inferiore ad superius which Wisdom prompts us to climb.7 Nor is Dante’s appropriation of the image for the sphere of Saturn in any way unusual. The ladders association with the contemplative life is a medieval commonplace and one which all the poets contemporary commentators had no trouble recognizing, even to the point of seeing in the varied flight of the daws an allegory of the contemplatives existence.8 Nonetheless, if a specific gloss is required, the most likely one is offered by St. Benedict himself in the seventh chapter of the Rule, where the Abbot tells his monks that the true road to heavenly exaltation—what Beatrice speaks of at the opening of canto 21 as “le scale/ de l’etterno palazzo (vv. 7—8)—is none other than a life of humility.

Wherefore brethren ... then must we set up a ladder by our ascending actions like unto that which Jacob saw in his vision, whereon angels appeared to him, descending and ascending. By that descent and ascent we must surely understand nothing else than this, that we descend by self-exaltation and ascend by humility. And the ladder erected is our work in this world, which for the humble heart is raised up by the Lord unto heaven.9

The blessed who appear to the pilgrim as “so many splendors descending along the steps (vv. 31—32) have already been, to quote St. Benedict, “lifted up by the Lord to heaven. Their descent here, however, is no less an act of humility for being accomplished in glory -  it is, in fact, an interruption of their beatific vision, offered on behalf of one who cannot yet see that “Supreme Essence, la somma essenza (v 87), who is the end of all heavenly contemplation. It is a reaching down to the pilgrim in order that he, with them, might ascend.

The first of the spirits to “condescend” is not St. Benedict but rather a Benedictine who followed him by some six centuries: St. Peter Damian, a member of the Camaldolese monastery of Fonte Avellana (an extremely austere community reformed by St. Romualdus early in the eleventh century, which included within the framework of the Rule the eremitical life which Benedict himself esteemed, but which he nonetheless rejected). It is interesting to note that in his short work, Dominus vobiscum, Peter Damian praises the hermit’s life as a Jacob’s ladder and golden way” (via aurea) by which men travel back to their true home in heaven.10 His prominent inclusion in the sphere of Saturn, however, has less to do with any gloss he may provide on the central image of these cantos than it does with what Dante would have best known and valued him for: the extreme rigor of his vocation and the vehemence of his anger against all those, no matter now highly placed, who abused the sanctity and responsibility of their office. Dante first presents him as one who is content in thoughts contemplative”— contento ne’ pensier contemplative” (v 117)—a phrase which suggests by its syntax and alliteration the full enclosure of the monastic life. And yet it is precisely this soul, given over to worship and the spiritual harvest” of the cloister, who is compelled by the present degeneracy of the Church to break the silence of this heaven, even as he was thus compelled to speak out while on earth:

Venne Cefàs e venne il gran vasello
  de lo Spirito Santo, magri e scalzi,
  prendendo
il cibo da qualunque ostello.

Cephas came, and the great vessel
   of the Holy Spirit came, lean and barefoot,
    taking their food at whatsoever inn.

Or voglion quinci e quindi chi rincalzi
  li moderni pastorί e chili meni,
  tanto son gravi, e chi di rietro li alzi.

Now the modern pastors require one to prop them up
 on this side and one on that, and one to lead them, so heavy are they, and one to hold up their train behind.

Cuopron d’i manti lorο i palafreni,
  sl che due bestie van
sott’ una pelle:
 
oh pazienza che tanto sostieni!

They cover their palfreys with their mantles,
   so that two beasts go under one hide.
   O patience that do endure so much!

(Par. 21:127–35)

This invective shatters the silence of the sphere with what the poet identifies as “a cry of such deep sound that nothing here could be likened to it” (un grido di si alto suono,/ che non potrebbe qui assomigliarsi,” vv 140-41). The pilgrim is utterly overwhelmed at the end of canto 21, a condition in which he remains through the opening of canto 22, even as Beatrice interprets the “alto suono as a righteous call for what she refers to darkly as “la vendetta: an unspecified act of divine vengeance. It is against this tumultuous background that Beatrice turns the pilgrims attention to the “hundred little spheres of light (vv. 28-29) on the ladder, and in particular to the one which shines most brightly. The pilgrim “was standing as one who within himself represses the urge of desire, who does not make bold to ask, he so fears to go too far” (vv 25-27). The situation recalls the sixth chapter of the Rule, “De taciturnitate, where Benedict says that “it becomes the master to speak and teach, but it is fitting for the disciple to be silent and to listen11—an association which might seem merely fanciful except for the fact that the magister who breaks through Dantes reserve is none other than the author of the Rule! What this most splendid of the contemplative fires then goes on to do is answer the question which the pilgrim hesitated to ask: the question of the spirits individual, historical identity.

Quel monte a cui Cassino è ne la costa
fu frequentato già in
su la cima
da la gente ingannata e mal disposta;

That mountain on whose slope Cassino lies
was of old frequented on its summit
by the folk deceived and perverse,

e quel son io che sù vi portai prima
lo
nome di colui che ‘n terra addusse
la verità che tanto ci soblima;

and I am he that bore up there His name
who brought to earth that truth
which so uplifts us;

e tanta grazia supra me relusse,
ch’io ritrassi le ville circunstanti
da l’empio cόlto che ‘l mondo sedusse.

and such grace shone upon me
that I drew away the surrounding towns
from the impious worship that seduced the world.

Questi altri fuochi tutti contemplante
uomini fuoro, accesi di quel caldo
che fa nascere i fiore e ‘ frutti santi.

These other fires were all contemplative men, kindled by that warmth which gives birth to holy flowers and fruits.

Qui è Maccario, qui è Romoaldo,
qui son li frate miei che dentro ai chiostri
fermar
h piedi e tennero il cor saldo.

Here is Macarius, here is Romualdus, here are my brethren who stayed their feet within the cloisters and kept a steadfast heart.

(Par. 22: 37—51)

The biographical details in this passage come from Gregory’s second Dialogue: Benedict’s foundation of a community on the summit of Monte Cassino, his supplanting of local paganism, his gradual winning over the hearts of the country people round about.12 The speech also ends with a characteristic invocation of the votum stabίlitatτs in the mention of the brothers who stayed their feet within the cloisters.” But what is perhaps more interesting and more subtle is Dante’s incorporation of images and metaphors from the earlier canto, the effect of which is to generate a common lexicon for the sphere of Saturn. We notice this first of all in the submerged figure of the ladder: Benedict speaks of himself as the one who first brought up to Monte Cassino the name of Him who brought down to earth the truth that so uplifts us” (vv. 40 42). There is also the continued play on the opposition of cold and hot. The sphere of Saturn, the cold planet,” with its presumably icy austerities, is nonetheless populated with souls described as fires kindled by that warmth which gives birth to holy flowers and fruits” “accessi di gt(el caldo/ the fa nascere i fiori e frutti santi,” w 47-48)—a complex of imagery that recalls Peter Damians assertion in canto 21 that the cloister’s heats and frosts yield a spiritual harvest “fertilemente (v 119).

It is precisely the “ardor” (v 54) of Benedict’s self disclosure that causes Dante to expand in confidence “as the sun does the rose when it opens to its fullest bloom” (vv. 56-57)—or, to translate more literally than Singleton, Thus I dilated my confidence as the sun does the rose when, fully open, it gives over whatever power it has.” This extraordinary simile can be seen to grοw imagistically from the warmth that gives birth to holy flowers and fruits” cited just a few lines before. Its point, however, is to prepare us for what follows: not the pilgrim’s wordless desire to know who Benedict was—the unspoken question that launched their dialogue—but the clear request to knοw who he is now May I behold you, not veiled by light, but directly”: ch’io/ ti veggta con imagine scoverta” (vv 59-60).

This request to see one of the blessed, as Benvenuto da Imola puts it, in Pura essentia (“in pure being”),13 is unique in the whole of the Paradiso—an anomaly that all but forces us to ask why the sphere of Saturn should be its occasion or St. Benedict the one singled out. The answer lies, I think, in Dante’s understanding of the contemplative life as a formal, regularized preparation for nothing less than the beatific vision: for the sight of God facίe ad faciem, face to face. Thus far in the Commedia—indeed, from the time of the Vita nuova—Dantes yearning for such vision has been focused on Beatrice and mediated in terms of her. It is in her unveiled face that he first sees the “splendor of the living light eternal (Purgatorio 31:139) and through her, as we have said, that he is enabled to rise through the heavens to the Empyrean. She represents in this regard the Lady transfigured, revealing how eros can be redeemed—can become, in fact, a means of ascent to God. On the other hand Benedict, the father of Western monasticism, would seem to represent a radically different route to the same destination, one in which eros, rather than becoming transcendent, is transcended altogether. And yet, in the pilgrim’s longing to see Benedict “con imagine scoverta, even as he has longed thus to see Beatrice unveiled, do we not find a juxtaposition of the twο ways—the affirmation and the negation of a beloved one—a juxtaposition which may suggest the ultimate convergence of both? In any event, Francesco da Buti’s 14th century commentary on this moment in the canto is especially apt: “[The] contemplatives ponder the high things of God, contemplating the creature and thereby ascending to contemplate the Creator; and because the human soul is made in Gods likeness, therefore the contemplatives have the desire to see the essence of the human soul more than that of any other created thing. Thus the poet has it that such thoughts come to him in this place.”14 One thinks as well of St. Augustines conjecture at the close of the City of God that the blessed will see God facie ad faciem precisely by looking into the faces of one another.15

When Benedict turns in answer to the pilgrim, it is to acknowledge both the profundity of what he has asked and its impossibility at this turning of the stair.

Ond elli: “Frate, il tuo alto disio
s’adempierà in su l’ultima spera,
ove s’adempion tutti li altri e ‘l mio.

Whereon he, “Brother, your high desire
shall be fulfilled up in the last sphere,
where are fulfilled all others and my own.

Ivi è perfetta, matura e intera
ciascuna disianza; in quells sola
è ogne parte 1à ove semer’ era,

There every desire is perfect, mature, and whole.
In that alone is every part
there where it always was,

perché non è in loco e non s’imροla;
e nostra scala infino ad essa varca,
onde così dal viso ti s’invola.

for it is not in space, nor has it poles;
and our ladder reaches up to it,
wherefore it steals itself from your sight.

Infin là sù la vide li patriarca
Iacobbe gorger la superna parte,
quando li apparue d’angeli si carca.”

All the way thither the patriarch Jacob
saw it stretch its upper part,
when it appeared to him so laden with Angels.”

(Par. 22: 61—72)

The reply is straightforward enough. Saturn, the mediation of all heavenly metaphors, the ladder of vision itself—all these must be transcended before Dante is able to see Benedict’s imagine e scoverta. It is a sight reserved for those who are in the presence of God, in the last and ineffable spherelEmperio—whose name is hidden here within the verbs of fulfillment: sadempierà” (v 62), s’adempion” (v 63). It is there, in fact, that canto 32:35 will show Benedict to us, seated in that cloister of which Christ Himself is the Abbot (Purgatοrio 26:129), having assumed his glorified body and his place” between St. Francis and St. Augustine. While the language of the passage encourages us to imagine the vision of the Empyrean primarily as something to climb up toward, it also presents the satisfaction of the “high desire” as something to grοw into. Thus Benedict speaks here of a completion, or ripening, of a growth process—perfetta, matura, e inters”—and for this reason we may begin to understand that fulfillment for which the imagery of cantos 21–22 has been a kind of promise. For what are the flowers born in the monastery and full-blown in Dante’s desire to see but intimations of that eternal rose into whose odor of praise,” offered up to the sun, Beatrice leads him in canto 30? Likewise, how else can we finally understand the pilgrim’s request to see the imagine scoverta of Benedict but as the shadowy forecast of the sight to which he will wholly give himself at the very end of the poem: the three circles of the Blessed Trinity and there, incarnate at their center, “la nostra effge,” (Par. 33:131), our human image?

It is not, however, with the top of the stairway, nor with the fruition of high desire,” that Benedict leaves us. Rather, he shifts abruptly from the supernal heights of Jacob’s ladder, laden with angels, to the earthly neglect of even its bottommost rung.

Ma, per salirla, mo nessun diparte
da terra i piedi, e la regola mia
rimasa è per dann de le carte.

But no one now lifts his foot from earth to ascend it, and my Rule remains for waste of paper.

Le mura che solieno esser badia
fatte
sono spelonche, e le cocolle
sacca son piene di farina
ria.

The walls, which used to be an abbey, have become dens, and the cowls are sacks full of rotten meal.

Ma grave usura tanto non si tolle
contra ‘l piacer di Dio, quanto quel frutto
che fa
il cor de’monaci sl folle;

But heavy usury is not exacted so counter to God’s pleasure as that fruit which makes the hearts of monks so mad;

ché quantunque la Chiesa guards, tutto
è de la
gente che per Dio dimanda;
non di parenti
d’altro più brutto.

for whatsoever the Church has in keeping is for the folk that ask it in Gods name, not for kindred, or for other filthier thing.

La carne d’i mortali è tanto blanda,
che giù non
basta buon cominciamento
dal nascer de la quercia al far la ghianda.

The flesh of mortals is so soft that on earth a good beginning does not last from the springing of the oak to the bearing of the acorn.

Pier comincio sanz’ oro e sanz’ argento,
e io con orazione e con digiuno,
e Francesco umilmente
il suo convento;

Peter began his fellowship without gold or silver, and I mine with prayer and fasting, and Francis his with humility;

e se guardi ‘l principio di ciascuno,
poscia riguardi
dod è trascorso,
tu vederai del bianco fatto brun.

and if you look at the beginning of each, and then look again whither it has strayed, you will see the white changed to dark.

Veramente Iordan vàlto retrorso
più fu, e ‘l mar fuggir, quando Dio volse,
mirabile a veder che
qui ‘l soccorso.

Nevertheless, Jordan driven back, and the sea fleeing when God willed, were sights more wondrous than the succor here.

(Par. 22: 73—96)

Benedict’s final words bring us back to the vendetta with which this canto opened—the call for a miracle of Biblical proportions, a soccorso that will destroy, deliver, and cleanse. Yet there is more here that is familiar than the repetition of a prophecy. There is the basic structure of the speech itself: the contrast between then and now, between apostolate and apostasy. It is a contrast we have seen most immediately in canto 21, in Peter Damian’s bitter comparison of St. Peter and St. Paul with “li moderni pastori (v 131). But it is also writ large in the sphere of the Sun, where praise for Francis and Dominic changes suddenly into denunciation of those who presently bear their names. Its most dramatic instance, moreover, is still to come in canto 27, where the rapturous joy of the blessed turns to bitter mourning, as St. Peter cries out against the pollution of his office by the current pope, Boniface VIII.

Quelli chusurpa in terra il luogo mio,
il luogo mio, il luogo mio che vacs
ne la presenza del Figliuol di Dio,

He that usurps on earth my place, my place, my place, which in the sight of the Son of God is empty,

fatt’ ha del cimitero mio cloaca
del sangue e de la puzza;
onde ‘l perverso
che cadde di qua sù,
giù si placa.’

has made of my tomb a sewer of blood and filth, so that the apostate who fell from here above takes comfort there below’

(Par. 27: 22—27)

What is noteworthy in Benedict’s particular appropriation of this recurring rhetorical form is his use of exactly those images employed earlier in the canto to evoke the glory of the contemplative life. Once again the most obvious of these is the ladder, now become functionless from sheer disuse. More pervasive, however, is that cluster of metaphors suggesting growth and maturation. Here we are told that the spiritual granary” of the abbey has become the den of thieves; the harvest has spoiled and the fruit of monastic life become a mad lust for money or power “ne daltro più brutto” (v 84), “or for other filthier thing.” Before our eyes Benedict transforms the full-blown hope of contemplation from a white rose, opened to the sun, to one which has already darkened with corruption: “del bunco fatto bruno” (v 93).

Nonetheless, despite the anger of these lines and the very dim view of the visible Church which they express, Benedict’s parting word is not one of negation or despair; rather, it is one of hope, of soccorso. Once having left the pilgrim with that, he is able to leave him (and the sphere of Saturn) altogether. Thus he spoke, then drew back to his company, and the company closed together; then like a whirlwind all were gathered upwards” (vv 97-99). The word which Singleton twice translates here as companycollegio—can refer to any group bound together by a common function or identity. But Dante’s use of it earlier in the Commedia has a more specific and monastic connotation. In Inferno 23, for instance, the pilgrim is welcomed by one of the Jovial Friars of the sixth bolgia “al collegio/ de l’ipocriti tristi (vv. 91-92), “to the assembly of the sad hypocrites. Then in Purgatorio 26, Guido Guinizelli will speak of paradise itself as “f ill chiostro/ nel quale è Cristo abate del collegio (vv. 128-29), “the cloister in which Christ is abbot of the brotherhood. From all that we have learned in the sphere of Saturn, both of these eternal dimensions of collegio—the infernal and the heavenly—are possibilities afforded by the monastic life on earth. But it is here, in the gathering of the contemplatives around Benedict and in their whirlwind ascension of the ladder, that we are reminded of the true nature and destiny of the vocation—what the Prologue to the Rule describes as an “expanded heart” (“dilatato corde), one which “runs with the unspeakable sweetness of love in the way of God’s commandments (via mandatorum Dei”), “so that, by never abandoning his rule, but persevering in his teaching in the monastery until death ... we may deserve to be partakers of his kingdom.16

It is into the heart of that kingdom—to the Empyrean which is, so to speak, at the “top of the ladder—that Benedict vanishes from Dantes sight. All that remains, therefore, is the ladder itself. The situation in which the pilgrim finds himself recalls most immediately that of the prophet Elisha, who watches Elijah ascend to heaven in a whirlwind, per turbinem in caelum (2 Kings 2: 11; cf. come turbo, v 99).17 But this prophetic reference, with its provocative suggestion of a prophetic identity for the pilgrim, may not be the only text that Dante would have us bring to our reading. There is as well an incident which Gregory describes at the end of his second Dialogue:

 [The day Benedict died] two monks, one of them at the monastery, the other some distance away received the very same revelation. They both saw a magnificent road covered with rich carpeting and glittering with thousands of lights. From this monastery it stretched eastward in a straight line until it reached up into heaven. And there in the brightness stood a man of majestic appearance, who asked them, “Do you know who passed this way? “No, they replied. “This, he told them, is the road taken by blessed Benedict, the Lords beloved, when he went to heaven.18

In canto 22 the “majestic one” who appears in brίghtness at the departure of Benedict is, of course, none other than Beatrice, she whom the poet addresses here, without any sense of incongruity, as “la dolce donna (v. 100), “my sweet lady. Nor does this novice mistress waste any words, but rather,

        mi spinse
con
un sol cenno su per quella scala,
sl
sua virtù la mia natura vine;

with only a sign she thrust me up after them by that ladder, so did her power overcome my nature;

né mai qua giù dove si monta e cala
naturalmente, fu si ratto moto
ch’
agguagliar si potesse a la mia ala.

nor ever here below, where we mount and descend by nature’s law, was motion so swift as might match my flight.

Sio torn mai, lettore, a quel divoto
triunfo per lo quale io piango spesso
le
mie peccata e ‘l petto mi percuoto,

So may I return, reader, to that devout triumph for the sake of which I often bewail my sins and beat my breast.

(Par. 22:100—108)

Thus the episode ends. The pilgrim follows rapidly in the wake of the contemplatives, not yet to the Empyrean itself, but to the next rung of the celestial ladder, to the heaven of the fixed stars. It is from that vantage point that he will look down through the spheres and see our world, a small paltry thing. Thus Gregory says Benedict saw it, gathered into a single ray of light.19 What is ultimately most poignant in the closure of the episode, however, is the poet’s address to the reader, the effect of whίch is to place Benedict’s ladder and all that it represents outside the sphere of the fiction; to place it, that is, in the world in which the lettore reads this poem—the world in which we live. “So may I return, reader, to the devout triumph for the sake of which I often bewail my sins and beat my breast.” The poet’s words, of course, are explicitly about himself, about his hope to return after death to the reality of which this poem can be but the dark glass of a similitude. But as we have known from the very first line of Inferno—”Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita—the fiction of his experience is an invitation for us to discover the truth of our own. Or, to put it in the vocabulary of Paradiso, 21-22, Dante has given the reader a ladder to climb, a ladder whose canto-by-canto intention is, to quote his letter to Can Grande, “to remove those living in a state of misery, and to bring them to a state of happiness;”20 to bring them, that is, from the frozen sign of Satan to the ineffable vision of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. For what is the poem in the end but a rule that blossoms with observance

 

1 All citations of the Commedia are from the Charles S. Singleton text and translation, Bollingen Series 80 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970—75). For an excellent discussion of Benedicts place in Dantes thought and works, see “Benedetto, santo, Encyclopedia Dantesca (Roma: Istitutο della Enciclopedia Italiana,1970), which also includes a concise bibliography. I have also consulted the standard contemporary commentaries of Hermann Gmelin, André Lézard, Natalino Sapegno, John D. Sinclair, and Charles Singleton, as well as the studies of Par. 21 and 22 by Marco Pecoraro and Giorgio Varanini respectively, in Lectura Dantis Scaligeri (Firenze: Felice Le Monnier, 1968).

2Sub infusion Saturni due species hominum cadunt; uns quarum grossi est et inculta: puts illorum qui grosse, nigre et inculte capillature sunt dicentes, vestes spernentes; alfa est qui in heremis et in solitudine religiose ad contemplativam vitam se dint, monastice et hermitice abominantes omnia singularia, ac in silentio et castitate viventes ... “ Il codice cassinese della Diving Commedia per la prima volta letteralmente messο a stamps per cura dei monacί benedettini della Badin di Monte Cassino (Tipographia di Monte Cassino, 1865), p. 493. Cited by Pecoraro, Lectura Dantis Scaligeri, pp. 737—38.

3 The first and most extensive of these transitions is found in Par. 1: 64—99.

4 Ficca di retro a li occhi tuoi la mente, e fa di quelli specchi a la figura
    che n questo specchio ti sarà parvente.
(Par. 21: 16—18) Fix your mind after your eyes, and make of them mirrors to the figure whίch in this mirror shall be shown to you.

5Uditque in somnis scalam stantem super terram, et cacumen illius tangens caelum: angelus quoque Dei ascendentes et descendentes per earn, et Dominum innixum scalae. Genesis 28: 12—13. All citations of the Vulgate are from Biblia Sacra (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1955); the English text is the Revised Standard Version.

6Haec profugum irae fratris iustum deduxit per vins rectas, Et ostendit illi regnum Deί, Et dedit illi scientism sanctorum. Sapientia 10:10.

7 De Consolatio Philosophiae, I Prοsa Trima. PL. 63, 588—89.

8 Benvenuto da Imola, Commentum super Dantis Aligherii Comoediam (Firenze: Barbera, 1887), 5: 278, says that the poet figures the contemplatives as birds because they flee from evil and soar above the flesh (quia omnes animae separatae ubique figurantut in avibus volantibus propter earum levitatem et velocitatem; et inter caeteras animas animae contemplativorum sunt veloces, leves et expeditae, non gravatae a carne, non impeditae ab occupaminibus mundi). He describes them as daws (pole) in particular, quia pulse amant solitudinem, similiter et contemplative. Francesco da Buti, Commento di Francesco da Buti supra la Diving Commedia di Dante Alighieri, edited by Crescentino Giannini (Pisa: Nistri, 1862), 3: 590, interprets the simile as an allegory of different contemplative vocations, some constant and lifelong, others going into active life only later to return to the first calling. (E quests fizione non à fatto lautore senza cagione; ma sotto sensu allegorico dimostra come a la fantasia sua si rappresentarno alquanti beati spirite che sempre erano state contemplative, e questi che sono quell^ che ritornorno unde erano venuti: imperb talί beati animί sempre da Dio tornano a Dio, alquanti vanno altro; e questi sono quelli che lasciato ànno la contemplazione e sonο iti di rieto a le virtù attive poi, et altri sono che roteano e girano quine; e questi sono quelli che, usciti de la contemplazione, girano per certi atti virtuosi; ma pur ritornano a la contemplazione.)

9 Unde fratres ... actibus nostris ascendentibus scala ills erigenda est quae insomnio Jacob apparuit, per quam ei descendentes et ascendentes angeli monstrabantur. Non aliud sine dubio descensus ille et ascensus a nobis intelligitur, nisi exaltation descendere et humilitate ascendere. Scala vero ipsa erects nostra est vita in saeculo, quae humilitato corde a Domino erigatur ad caelum.” Latin text and English translation of The Rule of Saint Benedict, prepared by Abbot Justin McCann (Westmiπster, Maryland: Newman Press, 1952), pp. 38—39.

10 Tb scala ills Jacob, quae homines vehis ad coelum, et angelus ad humanum deponis auxilium. lb via aurea, quae homines reducis ad patriam. Migne, PL., 145: 248, cited by Pecoraro, Lectura Dantis Scahgera, p. 742.

11 Nam loqui et docere magistrum condecet: tacere et audire discipulum convenit.” The Rule, pp. 36—37.

12 Vita S. Benedkti, er libro II Dialogorum S. Gregorii Magni excerpta, ch. 8. Migne, PL., 66: 152.

13 Benevenuto da Imola, Commentum, p. 299.

14 [Li] contemplativi pensano tutte 1’alte cose dIddio, contemplandο la creatura sinalzano a contemplare 10 creature: e perche lanima umana e fatta a similitudine sua, Pero anno desiderio h coπtemplativi di vedere lessenzia dellanima umana piu che di niuna altra cosa creata; e Pero finse lautore che tale pensieri li venisse in questo luogo.” Francesco da Buti, Commento .. , supra la Diving Commedia, p. 611.

15 Ita Deus nobis erit notus atque conspicuus, ut videatur spiritu a singulis nobis in singulis nobis, videatur ab altero in altero, videatur in se ipso.... “ The City of God Against the Pagans, text and translation prepared by William M. Green (Cambridge: Harvard Unίversity Press, 1972), 7: 370.

16 Processu vero conversationis et fidei, dilatato corde, inenarrabili dilectionis dulcedine curritur via mandatorum Dei; ut ab ipsius numquam magisterio descendentes, in ejus doctrina usque ad mortem in monasterio perseverantes, passionebus Christi per patientiam participemur, ut et regni ejus mereamur esse consortes.The Rule, pρ.12—13.

17 Cumque pernerent, et incedentes sermocinarentur, ecce currus igneus, et equi ignei diviseront utrumque: et ascendit Elias per turbinem in caelum.” Liber Regum Quartus 2:11. ()Bk of 4 Kingsm2:11)

18 Qua scilicet die duobus de eo fratribus, uni in cella commoranti, alteri autem longius posito, revelatio unius atque indissimilis visionis apparuit. Videront namque quia strata palliis atque innumeris corusca lampadibus via recto orientes tramite ab ejus cella in coelum usque tendebatur. Cui venerando habitu ver desuper clams assistens, cujus esset via quam cernerent, inquisivit. I11^ autem se nescire professe sunt. Quibus ipse ait: Haec est via qua dilectus Domino coelum Benedictus ascendit.” Migne, PL., 66:202. English translation by Odo John Zimmerman, St. Gregory the Great, Dialogues, Fathers of the Church 39 (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1959), p. 108.

19 Mira autem res valde in hac speculatione secuta est: quia, sicut post ipse narravit, omnis etiam mundus velut sub uno solis radio collectus, ante oculus ejus adductus est.” Migne, PL., 66:198. Gregory then goes on to explaίn this phenomenon as an interior flooding of light which caused the exterior universe to be seen in miniature. In ills ergo luce quae exterioribus oculis fulsit, lux interior in mente fuit, quae videntis animum cum ad superiors rapuit, ei quam angusta essent omnia inferiora monstravit.” Migne, PL., 66: 200. Cf Par. 22: 151 and Par. 27: 85—87.

20 Sed omissa subtili investigation, dicendum est breveter quod finis totius et partis est, removere viventes in hac vita de statu miseriae et perducere ad statum felicitates,” Epistola 10: 15, Dantis Alagherii Epistolae, text and translation prepared by Paget Toynbee, 2d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1920; 1966), p. 178.

 

 

 


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