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 poem^’s 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:

(Par. 21:28-42)

The golden scaleo which we find here is an ancient and venerable one. It originates in Jacob^’s 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 ladder^’s association with the contemplative life is a medieval commonplace and one which all the poet^’s contemporary commentators had no trouble recognizing, even to the point of seeing in the varied flight of the daws an allegory of the contemplative^’s 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:

(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 pilgrim^’s 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 listen^”11—an association which might seem merely fanciful except for the fact that the magister who breaks through Dante^’s 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 spirit^’s individual, historical identity.

(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 Damian^’s 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—Dante^’s 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 14^th 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 God^’s 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. Augustine^’s 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.

(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 spherel^’Emperio—whose name is hidden here within the verbs of fulfillment: ^“s^’adempierà” (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.

(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.

(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 d^’altro 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 ^“company^”—collegio—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 Dante^’s 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 Lord^’s 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,

(Par. 22:100—108)

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