The image of the Eagle-made-of-Rulers which Dante first sees in Canto XVIII continues throughout Canto XIX, and leads to questions about the difference between the real and the symbolic. For instance, Dante notes that the Eagle speaks in the first person rather than the third, thought it is visibly made up of many spirits. My colleague thinks this has to do with the radical community nature of Paradise, especially as contrasted with the terrible individualism of the Inferno. I'm not so sure - I think it is surreal, and more about those who were supreme individuals, rulers, becoming part of something larger, a symbol of Rule.

What's more, I'm not sure why Dante should be asking an Eagle made up of rulers, however just, about the salvation of pagans. Maybe because they were just judges, and a standard accusation against God's justice is that it is unjust, since it judges people who never knew the rules. I'm not at all sure.

Certainly Dante asks the Eagle these questions because - surprise - there are two pagan rulers in the composite Eagle, Trajan and Ripheus the Trojan. But we won't meet them till the next Canto.

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This guy should have Unhappy Hipsters on his RSS feed! Irony would help him break through to authenticity.

Dante describes Cacciaguida close to the first of Canto XVIII as il folgór santo, "the saintly thunderbolt" (XVIII.25). How apt! The Thunderbolt goes on to name the warriors of God in another dantean list - Joshua, Judaas Maccabaeus, Roland, Charlemagne -- on to a nice full list of seven or eight. And then they're off to the Sixth Sphere, Jupiter, where just rulers rest.

Dante sees souls spelling out words -- kind of like those old sign made up of individual bulbs, where each letter blings. The texts say DILIGITE IUSTITIAM and QUI IUDICATIS TERRAM, "love justice, you who judge the earth." The blinking souls reconfigure into the shape of an eagle in weird ways.

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Canto XVII, the mid-point of Paradiso, shows us the new Dante, refined by fire in Purgatory he is now not fearful. All along the way people have predicted his exile, but those were damned souls in Hell and souls with clouded vision in Purgatory. Now that he feels "solid as a tetragon" (Par XVII.24), Dante asks Cacciaguida, "Make me content,/tell me the fortune that awaits me now!" (Par XVII.25-26). Cacciaguida tells him that he will be exiled, but he puts it differently. Rather than being expelled, he will flee Florence (48). Cacciaguida also uses a suitably martial metaphor for the sphere of Mars:

You'll leave behind you everything you love
  most dearly; this will be the arrow shot
  first from the bow of exile. (Par XVII.55-57)

After Cacciaguida predicts some of the trials and comforts to come, Dante asks him a really interesting question about the poem -- should he use the names of the sinners -- repentant and unrepentant -- he's seen? Cacciaguida assures him that there's been a reason behind the meetings; hearing the stories of known folks will teach future readers more, and:

This is the reason why, within these spheres,
  upon the mount and in the sorrowing pit,
  you've been shown only souls whose names men know... (Par XVII.136-138)

Just think how much inky commentaries the world would have saved without that advice!

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OK - in 1960 someone paid $1.5 million to sink a real ship and film it. Is that really any more expensive than what James Cameron did with special effects?

Mavis Staple helps.

Oh dear - I don't think that I reminded you in blogging about Canto XV that we are still in the Sphere of Mars - so Caccciaguida, crusader and Florentine, is an appropriate resident. I remembered the "ancient temple of Mars" legend, which will come up again here.

Canto XVI is a description - not entirely a complaint - of the rise and fall of Florentine families. Esolen mischaracterizes them as "noble." One of the characteristics of Italy in the middle middle ages (though I'm oversimplifying) is that nobility was rural, and the new towns were something else. They might have striven to become knights under imperial legates, but knighthood itself was not heritable. We tend to read Italy through the hyper-nobilized later Renaissance rather than for itself.

There are a few moments of language interest in this canto. At line 10 and 16 Dante comments on and then uses an unusual pronoun.

With the voi that was offered first at Rome
  (usage in which they do not persevere),
  my words to him resumed... (Par XVI.10-12)

And:

Io cominciai: "Voi siete il padre mio;
  voi mi date a parlar tutta baldeza;
  voi mi levate sì, ch'i' son più ch'io.

"You are my father," I began in reply.
  "You fill my heart with confidence to speak,
  you raise me so, that I am more than I! (Par XVI.16-18)

Esolen tells us that the disquisition on voi, the 2nd person plural pronoun used as a singular, is based on the idea that the Romans first used vos for Julius Caesar (and that it is a bad thing that they, and the Church, have stopped using it, Dante suggests). Pronouns are always fraught in Italy! The now-polite way to say "you" in Rome is Lei, one of those converted 3rd person pronouns, literally "she." The way to make your neighborhood merchants think you're not an American barbarian, just an American, is to return their "grazie" at the end of a transaction with "a Lei." Rather old fashioned, but polite, and seldom heard much north of Rome, I'm told.

Still, Dante is hammering it home -- Cacciaguida deserves a polite pronoun. But then he asks him who their ancestors were, their names, how long they lived (22-24). Cacciaguida doesn't particularly know. This is a sign of the great shift in heredity-mongering that had occurred between Cacciaguida's time and Dante's.

Again at 32-33, Dante refers to Cacciaguida speaking in a dialect of more sweetness, not like we talk today. Dante, of course, was very interested in the vernacular -- but it is interesting that Toscana, usually pretty unmodified by time (remember that Farinata degli Uberti recognized him by his speech) is getting inflected here.

When Cacciaguida talks about all the country folk moved to town of the new Florence he makes a nice usage of the State-as-body metaphor.

As when you bolt two different suppers down
  you rouse diseases, so a town grows sick
  from populations all confused in one (Par XVI.67-69)

The rest of the canto is, I fear, impenetrably localist. I've said before that I understand, but can't pretend to be interested in, Dante's love of Florence. Gimme an Orsini or a Colonna and I might pay attention, but the distant origin of the Guelph/Ghibelline feuds in a jilted bride (XVI.140) doesn't do much for me.

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As a departmental chair at Cornell University, Seeley [bee scientist] says, he applies these principles at faculty meetings with great success.

With such a loving piety for his son,

  if we may trust our greater muse, Anchises

  once hailed Aeneas in Elysium.

"O blood of mine, O overbrimming grace

  poured out by God! for whom has Heaven's door

  been opened twice, as it has been for you?"

So spoke that light . . . . (Par XV.25-31)

Canto XIV is a transition canto -- we hear the end of the conversation with Solomon and then Beatrice move on to the sphere of Mars.

Dante's last question for the wise is about the resurrected body -- won't it dim their lights? Solomon replies:

. . . When, blessed and glorified,
  the flesh is robed about us once again,
  we shall be lovelier for being whole (Par XIV.43-45)

The souls circling round respond:

So prompt and ready was the loud "Amen!"
  both choirs responded, it was clear to me
  how much they yearned to see their flesh again,
Maybe less for themselves than for their mamas,
  their fathers, and the others they held dear
  before they had become eternal flames. (Par XIV.61-66)

And thence they pass on to the sphere of Mars.

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If I thought the appearance of Juno's messenger at the start of Canto XII was odd, the mention of Minos early in Canto XIII is downright jarring! This time we're talking about Ariadne, who became a constellation (given how often that happens in world myth I'm amazed I don't know a happy greco-english word for it, like apotheosized). Still, minos surfaces again. But she is only a ghost of that true constellation, the Wise (Par XIII.20).

Thomas begins speaking again (this is his fourth cano - he's becoming the Statius of this canticle) and makes a lovely parallel between biblical types -- Adam and the New Adam.

You're thinking of the breast that gave its rib,
  drawn forth to form the woman of fair cheek
  whose palate made the whole world pay so dearly,
and of that breast pierced with a lance to make
  full recompense forfuture sins and past,
  causing the scales of human debt to break.

All this is in service of some mind reading -- Thomas had said in Canto X (line 109) that the fifth light (whoever that was) was the wisest ever. He's accusing Dante of thinking that surely Adam or Christ must have been wiser - but he goes on to identify the fifth light and explain how he was the wisest ever -- Solomon was best in class, rulers.

From what I've spoken you can see he was
  a king, and asked for the capacity
  to fulfill a king's duties - not to muse
About the angels and the quantity
  of movers of the stars; or if a must
  and might together make necessity; (Par XIII.94-99)

Solomon wanted to be the wisest king - not the best scholastic. I think this is also another jab at Robert of Anjou, King of Naples, who we saw denounced by his dead brother back in Canto VIII. Dante's theory of kingship is coming clearler - a separation of duties and of intelligences.

Canto XIII ends with Aquinas denouncing misdirected intelligence and inquiry - very Dominican!

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So Thomas Aquinas praised Francis and his chivalric love of Lady Poverty and chastened his own order for wandering astray, a second garland or ring comes wit h Bonaventure. Interestingly, Dante gives the classical comparison first - "When the clouds are fine/and Juno sends her herald to earth" (Par XII.10-11) precedes "Rainbows that make us mortals early wise / by the pact God made Noah" (Par XII.16-17). I sometimes think our students wonder about Dante's devotion to the classics. Is he emulating? Rivaling? Showing off? I tend to think a little of all of those.

So Bonaventure joins them, and praises the mendicant founders together. And where Thomas's talk was full of chivalry, Bonaventure's is full of military and imperial terms - even to calling God "the high Emperor who rains forever" (Par XII.40). Bonaventure describes Dominic's (miraculous) birth and then the military zeal with which he fought heresy:

Then armed with zeal and doctrine and the charge

  of apostolic duty, he fell quick

  as torrents bursting from a mountain vein

And slammed the thickets of the heretic,

  pummeling onward with his surging drive

  where the resistance was most harsh and thick (Par XII.97-102).

Bonaventure's list of those lights who accompany him includes a few names that interest me. A second Hebrew appears - the prophet Nathan. Aelius Donatus the grammarian - I didn't know he was a Christian, but he's certainly late enough (mid 4th C). Rabanus Maurus, Carolingian abbot of Fulda! And finally and weirdest, Joachim of Fiore, the Calabrian abbot and apocalypticist. Odd company.

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