Paradiso

Canto XXVII

St. Peter’s reproof of bad popes—The Ascent to the Ninth Heaven, or the Primum Mobile.

“Glory be to the Father, to the Son,¹And Holy Ghost!” all Paradise began,So that the melody inebriate made me.What I beheld seemed unto me a smileOf the universe; for my inebriationFound entrance through the hearing and the sight.O joy! O gladness inexpressible!O perfect life of love and peacefulness!O riches without hankering secure!²Before mine eyes were standing the four torches³Enkindled, and the one that first had comeBegan to make itself more luminous;And even such in semblance it becameAs Jupiter would become, if he and Mars⁴Were birds, and they should interchange their feathers.That Providence, which here distributethSeason and service, in the blessed choirHad silence upon every side imposed.When I heard say: “If I my color change,Marvel not at it; for while I am speakingThou shalt behold all these their color change.He who usurps upon the earth my place,⁵My place, my place, which vacant has becomeBefore the presence of the Son of God,Has of my cemetery made a sewer⁶Of blood and stench, whereby the Perverse One,Who fell from here, below there is appeased!”With the same color which, through sun adverse,Painteth the clouds at evening or at morn,Beheld I then the whole of heaven suffused.And as a modest woman, who abidesSure of herself, and at another’s failing,From listening only, timorous becomes,Even thus did Beatrice change countenance;And I believe in heaven was such eclipse,When suffered the supreme Omnipotence;⁷Thereafterward proceeded forth his wordsWith voice so much transmuted from itself,The very countenance was not more changed.“The spouse of Christ has never nurtured beenOn blood of mine, of Linus and of Cletus,⁸To be made use of in acquest of gold;But in acquest of this delightful lifeSixtus and Pius, Urban and Calixtus,⁹After much lamentation, shed their blood.Our purpose was not, that on the right handOf our successors should in part be seated¹⁰The Christian folk, in part upon the other;Nor that the keys which were to me confidedShould e’er become the escutcheon on a banner,¹¹That should wage war on those who are baptized;¹²Nor I be made the figure of a sealTo privileges venal and mendacious,¹³Whereat I often redden and flash with fire.In garb of shepherds the rapacious wolves¹⁴Are seen from here above o’er all the pastures!O wrath of God, why dost thou slumber still?¹⁵To drink our blood the Caorsines and Gascons¹⁶Are making ready. O thou good beginning,Unto how vile an end must thou needs fall!But the high Providence, that with Scipio¹⁷At Rome the glory of the world defended,Will speedily bring aid, as I conceive;And thou, my son, who by thy mortal weightShalt down return again, open thy mouth;What I conceal not, do not thou conceal.”As with its frozen vapors downward fallsIn flakes our atmosphere, what time the horn¹⁸Of the celestial Goat doth touch the sun,¹⁹Upward in such array saw I the etherBecome, and flaked with the triumphant vapors,Which there together with us had remained.²⁰My sight was following up their semblances,And followed till the medium, by excess,²¹The passing farther onward took from it;Whereat the Lady, who beheld me freedFrom gazing upward, said to me: “Cast downThy sight, and see how far thou art turned round.”Since the first time that I had downward looked,²²I saw that I had moved through the whole arcWhich the first climate makes from midst to end;²³So that I saw the mad track of Ulysses²⁴Past Gades, and this side, well nigh the shore²⁵Whereon became Europa a sweet burden.²⁶And of this threshing-floor the site to me²⁷Were more unveiled, but the sun was proceedingUnder my feet, a sign and more removed.²⁸My mind enamoured, which is dallying²⁹At all times with my Lady, to bring backTo her mine eyes was more than ever ardent.And if or Art or Nature has made bait³⁰To catch the eyes and so possess the mind,In human flesh or in its portraiture,All joined together would appear as noughtTo the divine delight which shone upon meWhen to her smiling face I turned me round.The virtue that her look endowed me withFrom the fair nest of Leda tore me forth,³¹And up into the swiftest heaven impelled me.Its parts exceeding full of life and loftyAre all so uniform, I cannot sayWhich Beatrice selected for my place.But she, who was aware of my desire,³²Began, the while she smiled so joyouslyThat God seemed in her countenance to rejoice:“The nature of that motion, which keeps quietThe centre and all the rest about it moves,From hence begins as from its starting point.And in this heaven there is no other Where³³Than in the Mind Divine, wherein is kindledThe love that turns it, and the power it rains.Within a circle light and love embrace it,Even as this doth the others, and that precinct³⁴He who encircles it alone controls.Its motion is not by another meted,But all the others measured are by this,As ten is by the half and by the fifth.³⁵And in what manner time in such a potMay have its roots, and in the rest its leaves,Now unto thee can manifest be made.O Covetousness, that mortals dost engulfBeneath thee so, that no one hath the powerOf drawing back his eyes from out thy waves!Full fairly blossoms in mankind the will;But the uninterrupted rain convertsInto abortive wildings the true plums.Fidelity and innocence are found³⁶Only in children; afterwards they bothTake flight or e’er the cheeks with down are covered.One, while he prattles still, observes the fasts,Who, when his tongue is loosed, forthwith devoursWhatever food under whatever moon;Another, while he prattles, loves and listensUnto his mother, who when speech is perfectForthwith desires to see her in her grave.Even thus is swarthy made the skin so whiteIn its first aspect of the daughter fair³⁷Of him who brings the morn, and leaves the night.Thou, that it may not be a marvel to thee,Think that on earth there is no one who governs;³⁸Whence goes astray the human family.Ere January be unwintered whollyBy the centesimal on earth neglected,³⁹Shall these supernal circles roar so loudThe tempest that has been so long awaited⁴⁰Shall whirl the poops about where are the prows;So that the fleet shall run its course direct,And the true fruit shall follow on the flower.”

The Heaven of the Fixed Stars continued. The anger of St. Peter; and the ascent to the Primum Mobile, or Crystalline Heaven. Dante, Convito, II 15, makes this crystalline Heaven the symbol of Moral Philosophy. He says:— “The Crystalline Heaven, which has previously been called the Primum Mobile, has a very manifest resemblance to Moral Philosophy; for Moral Philosophy, as Thomas says in treating of the second book of the Ethics, directs us to the other sciences. For, as the Philosopher says in the fifth of the Ethics, legal justice directs us to learn the sciences, and orders them to be learned and mastered, so that they may not be abandoned; so this heaven directs with its movement the daily revolutions of all the others, by which daily they all receive here below the virtue of all their parts. For if its revolution did not thus direct, little of their virtues would reach here below, and little of their sight. Hence, supposing it were possible for this ninth heaven to stand still, the third part of heaven would not be seen in each part of the earth; and Saturn would be hidden from each part of the earth fourteen years and a half; and Jupiter, six years; and Mars, almost a year; and the Sun, one hundred and eighty-two days and fourteen hours (I say days, that is, so much time as so many days would measure); and Venus and Mercury would conceal and show themselves nearly as the Sun; and the Moon would be hidden from all people for the space of fourteen days and a half. Truly there would be here below no production, nor life of animals, nor plants; there would be neither night, nor day, nor week, nor month, nor year; but the whole universe would be deranged, and the movement of the stars in vain. And not otherwise, were Moral Philosophy to cease, the other sciences would be for a time concealed, and there would be no production, nor life of felicity, and in vain would be the writings or discoveries of antiquity. Wherefore it is very manifest that this heaven bears a resemblance to Moral Philosophy.” ↩
Without desire for more. ↩
St. Peter, St. James, St. John, and Adam. ↩
If the white planet Jupiter should become as red as Mars. ↩
Pope Boniface VIII, who won his way to the Popedom by intrigue. See note 49, and note 270. ↩
The Vatican hill, to which the body of St. Peter was transferred from the catacombs. ↩
Luke 23:44:— “And there was darkness over all the earth. … And the sun was darkened.” ↩
Linus was the immediate successor of St. Peter as Bishop of Rome, and Cletus of Linus. They were both martyrs of the first age of the Church. ↩
Sixtus and Pius were Popes and martyrs of the second age of the Church; Calixtus and Urban, of the third. ↩
On the right hand of the Pope the favored Guelfs, and on the left the persecuted Ghibellines. ↩
The Papal banner, on which are the keys of St. Peter. ↩
The wars against the Ghibellines in general, and particularly that waged against the Colonna family, ending in the destruction of Palestrina. Inferno XXVIL 85:— “But he, the Prince of the new Pharisees, / Having a war near unto Lateran, / And not with Saracens nor with the Jews, / For each one of his enemies was Christian, / And none of them had been to conquer Acre, / Nor merchandising in the Sultan’s land.” ↩
The sale of indulgences, stamped with the Papal seal, bearing the head of St. Peter. ↩
Matthew 7:15:— “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.” ↩
Psalm 44:23:— “Awake, why sleepest thou, O Lord?” ↩
Clement V of Gascony, made Pope in 1305, and John XXII of Cahors in France, in 1316. Buti makes the allusion more general:— “They of Cahors and Gascony are preparing to drink the blood of the martyrs, because they were preparing to be Popes, cardinals, archbishops and bishops, and prelates in the Church of God, that is built with the blood of the martyrs.” ↩
Dante alludes elsewhere to this intervention of Providence to save the Roman Empire by the hand of Scipio. Convito, IV 5, he says:— “Is not the hand of God visible, when in the war with Hannibal, having lost so many citizens, that three bushels of rings were carried to Africa, the Romans would have abandoned the land, if that blessed youth Scipio had not undertaken the expedition to Africa, to secure its freedom?” ↩
Boccaccio, “Ninfale d’ Ameto,” describing a battle between two flocks of swans, says the spectators “saw the air full of feathers, as when the nurse of Jove [Amalthaea, the Goat] holds Apollo, the white snow is seen to fall in flakes.” And Whittier, Snowbound:— “Unwarmed by any sunset light, / The gray day darkened into night, / A night made hoary with the swarm / And whirl-dance of the blinding storm, / As zigzag wavering to and fro / Crossed and recrossed the winged snow.” ↩
When the sun is in Capricorn; that is, from the middle of December to the middle of January. ↩
The spirits described in Canto XXII 131, as “The triumphant throng / That comes rejoicing through this rounded ether,” and had remained behind when Christ and the Virgin Mary ascended. ↩
Till his sight could follow them no more, on account of the exceeding vastness of the space between. ↩
Canto XXII 133. ↩
The first climate is the torrid zone, the first from the equator. From midst to end, is from the meridian to the horizon. Dante had been, then, six hours in the Heaven of the Fixed Stars; for, as Milton says, Paradise Lost, V 580:— “Time, though in eternity, applied / To motion, measures all things durable / By present, past, and future.” ↩
Being now in the meridian of the Straits of Gibraltar, Dante sees to the westward of Cadiz the sea Ulysses sailed, when he turned his stern unto the morning and made his oars wings for his mad flight, as described in Inferno XXVI. ↩
Eastward he almost sees the Phoenician coast; almost, and not quite, because, say the commentators, it was already night there. ↩
Europa, daughter of King Agenor, borne to the island of Crete on the back of Jupiter, who had taken the shape of a bull. Ovid, Metamorphoses, II, Addison’s Tr.:— “Agenor’s royal daughter, as she played / Among the fields, the milk-white bull surveyed, / And viewed his spotless body with delight, / And at a distance kept him in her sight. / At length she plucked the rising flowers, and fed / The gentle beast, and fondly stroked his head. / ⋮ / Till now grown wanton and devoid of fear, / Not knowing that she pressed the Thunderer, / She placed herself upon his back, and rode / O’er fields and meadows, seated on the god. / “He gently marched along, and by degrees / Left the dry meadow, and approached the seas; / Where now he dips his hoofs and wets his thighs, / Now plunges in, and carries off the prize.” ↩
See note 1819. ↩
The sun was in Aries, two signs in advance of Gemini, in which Dante then was. ↩
Donnea again. See note 1811. ↩
Purgatorio XXXI 49:— “Never to thee presented art or nature / Pleasure so great as the fair limbs wherein / I was enclosed, which scattered are in earth.” ↩
The Gemini, or Twins, are Castor and Pollux, the sons of Leda. And as Jupiter, their father, came to her in the shape of a swan, this sign of the zodiac is called the nest of Leda. Dante now mounts up from the Heaven of the Fixed Stars to the Primum Mobile, or Crystalline Heaven. ↩
Dante’s desire to know in what part of this heaven he was. ↩
All the other heavens have their Regents or Intelligences. See Notes 1240. But the Primum Mobile has the Divine Mind alone. ↩
By that precinct Dante means the Empyrean, which embraces the Primum Mobile, as that does all the other heavens below it. ↩
The half of ten is five, and the fifth is two. The product of these, when multiplied together, is ten. ↩
Wordsworth, “Intimations of Immortality”:— “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: / The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, / Hath had elsewhere its setting, / And cometh from afar: / Not in entire forgetfulness, / And not in utter nakedness, / But trailing clouds of glory, do we come / From God, who is our home: / Heaven lies about us in our infancy! / Shades of the prison-house begin to close / Upon the growing Boy, / But he beholds the light, and whence it flows, / He sees it in his joy; / The Youth, who daily farther from the east / Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest, / And by the vision splendid / Is on his way attended; / At length the Man perceives it die away, / And fade into the light of common day.” ↩
Aurora, daughter of Hyperion, or the Sun. Purgatorio II 7:— “So that the white and the vermilion cheeks / Of beautiful Aurora, where I was, / By too great age were changing into orange.” ↩
Or, perhaps, to steer, and “Over the high seas to keep / The barque of Peter to its proper bearings.” ↩
This neglected centesimal was the omission of some inconsiderable fraction or centesimal part, in the computation of the year according to the Julian calendar, which was corrected in the Gregorian, some two centuries and a half after Dante’s death. By this error, in a long lapse of time, the months would cease to correspond to the seasons, and January be no longer a winter, but a spring month. Sir John Herschel, Treatise on Astronomy, Ch. XIII, says:— “The Julian rule made every fourth year, without exception, a bissextile. This is, in fact, an over-correction; it supposes the length of the tropical year to be 365¼ d., which is too great, and thereby induces an error of 7 days in 900 years, as will easily appear on trial. Accordingly, so early as the year 1414, it began to be perceived that the equinoxes were gradually creeping away from the 21st of March and September, where they ought to have always fallen had the Julian year been exact, and happening (as it appeared) too early. The necessity of a fresh and effectual reform in the calendar was from that time continually urged, and at length admitted. The change (which took place under the Popedom of Gregory XIII) consisted in the omission of ten nominal days after the 4th of October, 1582 (so that the next day was called the 15th, and not the 5th), and the promulgation of the rule already explained for future regulation.” It will appear from the verse of Dante, that this error and its consequences had been noticed a century earlier than the year mentioned by Herschel. Dante speaks ironically; naming a very long period, and meaning a very short one. ↩
Dante here refers either to the reforms he expected from the Emperor Henry VII, or to those he as confidently looked for from Can Grande della Scala, the Veltro, or greyhound, of Inferno I 101, who was to slay the she-wolf, and make her “perish in her pain,” and whom he so warmly eulogizes in Canto XVII of the Paradiso. Alas for the vanity of human wishes! Patient Italy has waited more than five centuries for the fulfilment of this prophecy, but at length she has touched the bones of her prophet, and “is revived and stands upon her feet.” ↩