#canto 32

Canto 32, Paradiso - Heaven's Empire

I had originally thought to myself that it might be clever, or cute, or just stupid to title today’s penultimate post “Weekend at Bernie’s,” but then I though better of dredging up such horrors from the depths of the 1980s, a hellscape those of us who lived through it can never speak of without weeping.  At any rate, dumb humor is likely out of place now; when you approach the end, you’re supposed become maudlin and reflective.  Fuck that.  It’s just a poem.

Ma vieni omai con li occhi sì com’ io / andrò parlando, e nota i gran patrici / di questo imperio giustissimo e pio. / Quei due che seggon là sù più felici / per esser propinquissimi ad Agusta, / son d’esta rosa quasi due radici: / colui che da sinistra le s’aggiusta / è ‘l padre per lo cui ardito gusto / l’umana specie tanto amaro gusta; / dal destro vedi quel padre vetusto / di Santa Chiesa a cui Cristo le chiavi / raccomandò di questo fior venusto.

But come now with your eyes so as I / proceed speaking, and note the great patricians / of this empire most just and pious. / Those two who sit there above more happy / for being nearest to Augusta, / are of this rose akin to two roots: / the one who sets himself on the left / is the father through whose burning taste / the human race tastes such bitterness; / on the right see that ancient father / of Holy Church to whom Christ the keys / to this beautiful flower commended.

The two fathers in question are St. Peter (the first bishop of Rome, thus the first Pope, whose symbol is a pair of crossed keys) and Adam, whose taste was for the super knowledge fruit that made the rest of us taste the bitterness of our shitty lives.  They function as the two roots of the imperial rose of heaven, because the one is the point of origin for the human species and the other of the universal or catholic faith.  In fact, if you think back to the pilgrim’s comprehensive examinations, it was Peter who questioned him with regard to the first of the theological virtues, faith.  So, what is he doing here?  Moreover, we’ve seen Adam before as well, when he explained to us the stupid, easily disprovable bullshit that the human race is only a few thousand years old.  What gives?

Well, we’ve covered this, and I would appreciate your actually going over your notes, if you even bothered to take any, before bothering me a minute before the end of my office hours.  J.K., BRO!  They’re here, because they have always been here, and what the pilgrim saw as Peter the dissertation chair and Adam the bad-at-science were mere reflections in particular crystalline spheres.  Again, covered; will be on the final, if this were a class and I’d bothered to written a final.

Augusta (Agusta), referring to Mary, is the Empress of Heaven, due to being the feminine form of Augustus (and signifying, in Italian, at least, the wife of the emperor), that guy who defeated Antony at Actium and closed the Janus gate and ushered in that whole Pax Romana that I hear was pretty dope, y’all.  The allusion to emperor as Augustus and not Caesar is worth noting, given Octavian’s enforced unification of various Roman client states and ending a number of years of civil war.  The parallel to the political situation of contemporary Europe should be obvious by now (again, consult your notes), but an empire of faith is a little different.  This is because, while on earth the secular and religious domains were meant to be distinct, in Heaven there is no distinction: the one is the other.  Heaven erases trivial differences like tribes and bodies politic to unite all the saved under one banner, the universal empire, the one true rule under God.

Or dubbi tu e dubitando sili; / ma io discioglierò ‘l forte legame / in che ti stringon li pensier sottili. / Dentro a l’ampiezza di questo reame / casüal punto non puote aver sito, / se non come tristizia o sete o fame

Now you are dubious and in doubting silent; / but I will untie the strong knot / in which your subtle thoughts bind you. / Within the amplitude of this kingdom / a casual point cannot have a place, / any more than sadness or thirst or hunger

I pointed out last time that Beatrice is no longer appropriate as a guide due to her allegorical status as the epitome of the faculties of the mind, and Bernie implies here that the pilgrim may be over-thinking things.  It’s best to just let it be, man… oh!  The point!  The point is that in Heaven nothing is, as Bernard later says, sine causa, “without cause,” so intention underlies every single fucking thing, so just, like, accept it, man.  There is not a single soul just hanging out in Heaven, because he didn’t have much better to do, no one empty chair that will not one day be occupied by the person for whom it has always been intended.

The tragedy of all the old empires, aside from, you know, slavery and subjugation and a host of demeaning forms of political oppression, is that they could never last, that even as centralized rule spreads over large expanses, it all ends up being constructed and maintained in a completely haphazard fashion, so factional sentiment eventually re-emerges and disrupts the whole empire-building exercise.  Parochial interests rule the day.

　It did not look like water, but like a glass ... right clear