Canto 20, Paradiso - Exceptions

It occurs to me that I should clarify that the “soul” I referred to in the previous canto is actually an eagle, speaking with a “benedicted beak,” made up of all the individual souls of the just.  It was confusing, though, because it speaks as if a specific soul, so I chose to obfuscate.  The power of revision, though, permits me to completely contradict what I just said.  Those of us in the essay bidness call this “pulling a Monty,” after that great French weirdo Michel de Montaigne.

So, to recap, you have to be a Christian to get into Heaven, otherwise the best you can hope for is Limbo, and even professing the faith is no guarantee.

ora conosce come s’innamora / lo ciel del giusto rege, e al sembiante / del suo fulgore il fa vedere ancora. / Chi crederebbe giù nel mondo errante / che Rifëo Troiano in questo tondo / fosse la quinta de le luci sante? / Ora conosce assai di quel che ‘l mondo / veder non può de la divina grazia, / ben che sua vista non discerna il fondo.

now he knows how enamored is / Heaven of a just king, and to the semblance / of its splendor it yet makes to see. / Who would believe below in the errant world / that Ripheus the Trojan in this round / was the fifth of the holy lights? / Now he knows much of that which the world / cannot see of the divine grace, / even though his sight does not discern the bottom.

Ripheus the Trojan was an Anatolian mercenary who fought against Constantine at the Battle of Philippi and, when he saw the Emperor on the field bearing the emblem of the cross as his standard, fell to his knees and converted to Christianity just as one of Constantine’s honor guard was about to strike the killing blow.  Just kidding; none of that happened.  Ripheus is, in fact, some guy Aeneas mentions in recounting his travails to Dido who, apparently, was very just but not especially favored by the gods, who, being petty motherfuckers, let him die despite his virtue.  Virgil devotes all of two lines to his existence, outside of simple name-checking.

Cadit et Ripheus, iustissimus unus / qui fuit in Teucris et servantissimus aequi

Ripheus as well falls, a most just one / who was among the Teucrians and most observant of the right

That’s it, and from this alone Dante, the first to make this leap, mind you, surmises that dear, silly, pagan Ripheus must have been led by divine grace to his affinity for EXTREME JUSTICE (*guitar riff*), and so, of course, he must have been a crypto-pre-Christian, so crypto that even he didn’t know it!

There is a bit of pouring salt in the wound of the problem of the virtuous pagan.  Dante, who won’t even leave his own convenient formulation alone, cannot help but stick it to his reader and press the point even further: you do not and cannot understand the mind of God.  Dont.  Fucking.  Try.  You.  Lose.  No.  Continues.  The “sight not discerning the bottom” bit recalls an image from the previous canto of someone peering into the depths of the ocean, knowing full well that it is there but failing to see it.  The pilgrim’s reaction is a perfectly understandable “WAT” the shear force of which causes it to spill onto his lips.  The benedicted beak, awaiting precisely this objection, adds:

Io veggio che tu credi queste cose / perch’ io le dico, ma non vedi come; / sì che, se son credute, sono ascose. / Fai come quei che la cosa per nome / apprende ben, ma la sua quiditate / veder non può se altri non la prome.

I see that you believe these things / because I say them, but you see not how; / so that, if they are believed, are hidden. / You do as one who the thing by name / apprehends well, but its quiddity / cannot see if another not draw it out.

The mode of understanding that the still living pilgrim must undergo, where sensory experience must pass into the mind through the transformative power of the intellect, simply does not attain for those in Heaven, and so he is wont to get the nature of justice backwards.  It is not that one is just of themselves and Heaven responds to that which is manifest in them but that Heaven is the true source of all justice, so if Ripheus was iustissimus, it has to mean that the divine order had made him its vessel of justiness.  So, clearly he was already among the elect.

For those denizens of Heaven sensory experience of is of a completely different and largely inscrutable kind, where the passage from the senses to the mind simply does not happen.  They merely feel, because, as a part of Heaven, they resonate with it, so their sensations are not a movement from exteriority to interiority but a simple quivering of their being, which is co-terminal with Heaven and other non-sensical things.  The inscrutability of Heaven lies in the incommensurability of the way we speak of sensory experience in terms of sight and hearing and touching and smelling and what have you and how celestial beings actually feel.  The one can only ever be, as best, a metaphor for the other, so there comes a point where you just have to be okay with it not making sense.  It’s not supposed to make “sense,” because the senses are a poor substitute for the pure, unmitigated sensation of eternal awesomeness.

E come a buon cantor buon citarista / fa seguitar lo guizzo de la corda, / in che più di piacer lo canto acquista, / sì, mentre ch’e’ parlò, sì mi ricorda / ch’io vidi le due luci benedette, / pur come batter d’occhi si concorda, / con le parole mover le fiammette.

And as to a good singer a good citharist / makes follow the spring of the string, / in which the song becomes more pleasing, / so, while it spoke, so I remember / that I saw the two blessed lights, / just as the batting of the eyes concords, / moving their flames with their words.