The Divine Comedy

by Dante Alighieri

Cosi n’andammo infino alla lumiera, parlando cose, che il tacere è bello, sì com’ era il parlar colà dov’ era.

Cosi n’andammo infino alla lumiera, parlando cose, che il tacere è bello, sì com’ era il parlar colà dov’ era.

“Well heeded is well heard.”

47. thought to hide his face: The general rule of the sinners above the great barrier cliff has been a great willingness—in fact, an eagerness—to make themselves known and to be remembered in the world. From this point to the bottom of Hell that rule is reversed, and the sinners, with a few exceptions, try to conceal their identity, asking only to be forgotten. This change should be noted as one more evidence of Dante’s architectural sense of detail: this exploitation of many interrelated themes and their progression from point to point of the great journey give the poem its symphonic and many-leveled richness.

Nicomachaean Ethics

refrained from commenting on the poetry,

—ARCHIBALD T. MACALLISTER

“That love of good which in the life before lay idle in the soul is paid for now. Here Sloth strains at the once-neglected oar. But that you may more clearly know The Way, give your entire attention to my words; 90 thus shall you gather good fruit from delay.

Thus you may understand that love alone is the true seed of every merit in you, 105 and of all acts for which you must atone.

beneath which, had she stayed God’s acolyte, I should have known before then, and for longer 30 those raptures of ineffable delight.

Dante has not presented any allegory of such formality up to this point, and some readers have thought the allegory of the Pageant stiff and lifeless. One should bear in mind, however, that Dante is beginning to deal, now, not with reason but with revelation, and that the increased formality of his allegory here is apt to its content, and apt again in its resemblance to the rituals of the Church whose triumph he is representing. Note too, as distinct from the rest of Dante’s allegory, that these figures do not enter as themselves (St. John, for example, appears in three guises) but as heavenly beings made up to represent others.

that power that reaps for reason’s mill: The discernment of the senses through which reason draws the data of nature from which it derives its concepts.

“Brother, the power of love, which is our bliss, calms all our will. What we desire, we have. There is in us no other thirst than this.

essence of God is love, i.e., caritas, the love of others. With caritas as the essential mood of the Paradiso, no soul can help but rejoice

It is mankind, by forcing men into situations not in harmony with their talents, that strays from God’s plan.

Then as a clock tower calls us from above 140 when the Bride of God rises to sing her matins to the Sweet Spouse, that she may earn his love, with one part pulling and another thrusting, tin-tin, so glad a chime the faithful soul swells with the joy of love almost to bursting— 145 just so, I saw that wheel of glories start and chime from voice to voice in harmonies so sweetly joined, so true from part to part that none can know the like till he go free where joy begets itself eternally.

Man must be content with the guidance of Scripture and with the sure knowledge that God is perfect, good, and just.

he has St. Bernard point out the empty thrones, the number of which Dante might reasonably have guessed, though had he done so he would have found himself prophesying the end of the world within fairly tight limits, a prophecy Dante wisely chose not to utter. Poetry is, among other things, the art of knowing what to leave out.

For in a final sense every man of the faith must answer to nothing less than the Apostolic Creed, making himself worthy to be examined by the true source.

so that I saw past Cadiz the mad route Ulysses took; and almost to the shore from which Europa rode the godly brute.

Now hear this and, beyond all doubt, believe it: 65 the good of grace is in exact proportion to the ardor of love that opens to receive it.

This is the true rebirth, the spiritual enlargement to which the entire journey has been directed.

but there the distance did not matter, for her image reached me unblurred by any atmosphere.

Here my powers rest from their high fantasy, but already I could feel my being turned— instinct and intellect balanced equally 145 as in a wheel whose motion nothing jars— by the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars.

How much more impossible, he implies, to resolve the mystery of God, study as man will. The mystery remains beyond Dante’s mortal power. Yet, there in Heaven, in a moment of grace, God revealed the truth to him in a flash of light—revealed it, that is, to the God-enlarged power of Dante’s emparadised soul. On Dante’s return to the mortal life, the details of that revelation vanished from his mind but the force of the revelation survives in its power on Dante’s feelings. So ends the vision of the Comedy, and yet the vision endures, for ever since that revelation, Dante tells us, he feels his soul turning ever as one with the perfect motion of God’s love.