#canto 22

“Nel fosso sù”, diss’ el, “de’ Malebranche, là dove bolle la tenace pece, non era ancora giunto Michel Zanche, che questi lasciò il diavolo in sua vece nel corpo suo.” (Inf. 33.142-46)

Canto 22, Paradiso - Looking Back

If you were in any doubt about the significance of astronomical phenomena to the Comedy, Dan-to-the-te is here to nip that one in the bud.

O glorïose stelle, o lume pregno / di gran virtù, dal quale io riconosco / tutto, qual che si sia, il mio ingegno, / con voi nasceva e s’ascondeva vosco / quelli ch’è padre d’ogne mortal vita, / quand’ io senti’ di prima l’aere tosco; / e poi, quando mi fu grazia largita / d’entrar ne l’alta rota che vi gira, / la vostra regïon mi fu sortita.

O glorious stars, o light pregnated / with great virtue, from which I recognize / all my genius, whatever it may be, / with you was breaching and was hiding himself with you / who is father of every mortal life, / when I felt first the Tuscan air; / and then, when grace was granted me / to enter into the high wheel that spins you, / your region to me was apportioned.

So, stars, they are a good.

But there’s more to it than that, and Dante wants us to understand that the gyre of the Heavens (l’alta rota che vi gira) has influence, which, prior to the gradual corruption of that term by an ever increasingly “rational” culture, referred explicitly to the astrological effect of the Heavens upon the sublunar world, as Chaucer put it (slightly revised for clarity), “O Influences of these heavens high.”  I have written already about the resonance of Heaven with its denizen souls, so I won’t abuse your patience with that again, but the influence of the stars here is about much more than some ethereal fluid flowing down from the sky into the affairs of mortal lives or Benedict (reprising his star turn as your mean uncle) whining about how monks these days are all lazy and degenerate.  The Heavens and their own astronomic denizens become part and parcel of the way in which the poem constructs revision as a necessary condition for moving beyond one’s mean state.

“Tu se’ sì presso a l’ultima salute,” / cominciò Bëatrice, “che tu dei / aver le luci tue chiare e acute; / e però, prima che tu più t’inlei, / rimira in giù, e vedi quanto mondo / sotto li piedi già esser ti fei; / sì che ‘l tuo cor, quantunque può, giocondo / s’appresenti a la turba trïunfante / che lieta vien per questo etera tondo.”

“You are so close to the ultimate blessing,” / began Beatrice, “that you must / have your lights clear and sharp; / and so, before you enter in further, / look back down, and see what a world / I have already made to be under your feet; / so that your heart, cheerful, however much it can, / present itself to the triumphant crowd / who glad come through this ether round.”

Influence, then, is not influenza, an ineluctable force pouring down through the ether, but the souls of those the pilgrim is yet to meet as well as the vision of that which he has passed through and by so far.  This means that influence is a function of contemplation, which makes sense given where we are, and thus interpretation.  Influence is how we construct our relationship in the present to that which has come before us, so that we might face the future.

You might already see where I am going with this, but permit me to be frank: as I come very near to the end of the Comedy, I never, in fact, intended for this to happen–I merely wanted to read something more thoroughly than I had before–but I have come to realize something about myself, something that did not become apparent until this afternoon, when I was at a lecture.  I have changed remarkably.  That sounds too simple: I have come to see what only very recently I felt to be the true calling of my scholarly output and intellectual energy as a fool’s errand.  I saw embodied before me many of the things I once thought to be VERY TRUE and as a result also began to see the flaw in my own thinking.  I won’t bore you with the details, but I must have been naïve to think that I could just slide right back into the ivory tower without a few carpet burns.

The pilgrim looks down from his vantage point in the seventh sphere to see again, for the first time, the world below, our world, the mortal realm with its persistent shittiness, with what Dante refers to as “its vile semblance” (suo vil sembiante), though “vile” here is likely used in its older sense of “cheap” or “base.”  “Petty” would probably work best to communicate what the pilgrim has begun to feel, the disdegno, the high disdain we first saw in the celestial messenger who opened the gates of Dis for the incoherent gnashing of the damned.  The world below, more specifically the conflation of our world, the mortal coil, with the below of belows, the blind world, Hell, comes to seem petty, trivial, insignificant, and so we see why it might be reasonable that Heaven collectively rolls its eyes at the meaningless distinctions we insist on parsing with our very lives.  As Dante says, anyone who would turn from that could be called truly probo, honest… decent.