Authors: Dante
97–99.
Piccarda is referring to the companion and fellow citizen of St. Francis of Assisi, founder (in collaboration with Francis) of her own order in 1212, the Clarisse, St. Clare (1194–1253). “[S]he was canonized by [Pope] Alexander IV in 1255. The rule of her order, which was confirmed in 1247, and again in 1253, two days before her death, by Pope Innocent IV, was characterized by extreme austerity”
(T)
.
As Lauren Scancarelli Seem suggested in conversation many years ago, Piccarda’s reference to St. Clare, as being loftier than she, parallels, in opposition, Francesca’s reference to her husband, Gianciotto, as being fated to a place lower in Hell than she (see
Inf
. V.107). And see the note to
Purgatorio
XXIV.13–15 for another set of “family resemblances.”
The resemblances and differences among the first three women in the three
cantiche
(Francesca in
Inf
. V, Pia de’ Tolomei in
Purg
. V, and Piccarda) have offered occasion for frequent comment. See Stefanini (Stef.1992.1), pp. 26–31, for a study of structural similarities in these three narratives.
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97.
Dante’s coinage,
inciela
(inheavens, “set[s] in a higher sphere”), again raises the issue of whether he refers to the Empyrean (in which Clare [whom we do not see there] is seated higher in the Rose than Piccarda) or to yet another heavenly sphere (e.g., that of the Sun, where we learn of St. Francis in Canto XI). It is very difficult to be certain, despite Bosco/Reggio’s assurances that all is under control (see their note to vv. 28–30).
The second alternative, however, does seem more likely (i.e., St. Clare, in Piccarda’s view [the poet’s also?], is in the Sun [or perhaps in Saturn]). Once more, see the note to vv. 29–30.
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100–102.
Piccarda’s language recollects various biblical passages equating the love of God with marriage to Christ. Compare the Song of Solomon, passim, as read by Christian interpreters; Matthew 9:15 and 25:1–12; Mark 2:19; and Luke 5:34, but in particular the parable of the wise and foolish virgins in Matthew 25.
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106–108.
This celebrated tercet condenses a moment of horror followed by a life of despondency into a single unit of verse. As for the events to which Piccarda refers, the most frequent understanding among the commentators is that her brother Corso wanted to marry her off to one Rossellino della Tosa in order to further his political/financial ambition and, for this reason, had her abducted from her convent.
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109–120.
Constance of Sicily is the only companion mentioned by Piccarda (and one wonders, here and elsewhere, why, if the souls appear in the spheres only for the instruction of visiting Dante, they always seem to be accompanied by crowds of anonymous others, who are thus temporarily deprived of the joys of the Empyrean).
Bosco/Reggio offer a succinct account of the significant facts about her as they were known to Dante (in their comment to verse 118): “Constance, daughter of Roger II, king of Sicily, born in 1154, last heir of the Norman kingdom of Naples and Sicily, in 1185 married Henry VI of Swabia, son of Frederick Barbarossa. By marrying her, the emperor was finally obtaining dominion over southern Italy, which he had in vain attempted to conquer by force of arms. In 1194 Frederick II was born of this marriage. Constance, widowed in 1197, until her death in 1198 knew how to govern the kingdom with a shrewd sort of wisdom. With sure political instinct, sensing that she was near death, she named Pope Innocent III guardian of her three-year-old son, Frederick. During the time that the latter was emperor, the Guelphs spread the story that Constance had been made a nun against her will and that, at the age of 52, taken from the convent by the archbishop of Palermo, she had been joined in matrimony to Henry VI. Frederick II, the ‘Antichrist,’ would then have been born to an ex-nun who was at the same time a woman of a certain age, and thus opposing the precepts of every law, whether human or divine. In this way did Guelph propaganda attempt to discredit the emperor. Constance, in fact,
had never been a nun and had married Henry at the age of 31. Dante accepted the story that she had become a nun, but omitted any negative elements from it, thus being able to illumine the figure of the empress in a lofty poetic light, making her the innocent victim of political machinations and violent acts. The halo of light that surrounds her, the refulgence in her of all of the light of this heaven, the attributes accorded her, all these tell us of Dante’s high esteem for the ‘Great Norman,’ with the negative elements of Guelph propaganda transformed into a luminous attestation of the poet’s reverence.”
Piccarda’s remarks at vv. 112–117 will puzzle Dante in the next canto (
Par
. IV.19–21).
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109.
This is the first time the word “splendor” (
splendore
) is used to describe the appearance of a soul in
Paradiso
(but see also at least V.103; IX.13; XI.39; XIV.95; XXI.32; XXIII.82; XXV.106; XXIX.138). In the heaven of the Sun we learn that the souls are enclosed in their own light (e.g.,
Par
. XIII.48), thus explaining why we would not be able to recognize them even had we previously known them—as well as why Dante
can
recognize the features of Piccarda; that is, she still possesses features, if they are but faint. Thus for Constance to be treated in this way, as though she were appearing in a higher heaven, tells us a good deal about Dante’s admiration for her.
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118.
Her name, Constance, plays with and against her former weakness, inconstancy, in that, if she was inconstant in her vows when forced (as she was at least in Dante’s sense of her life) back into the world, she was also constant in her heart (see verse 117). It is also interesting that there are reports that the name assumed by Piccarda, in the convent of the Clarisse, was Constance (see Lombardi’s commentaries [1791] to
Purg
XXIV.10 and
Par
. III.49). In
Purgatorio
(III.113), Constance is remembered with great affection by her grandson, Manfred (like his grandmother in this, not mentioning the name of the magnificent but hated “last of the Roman emperors,” Frederick II [
Conv
. IV.iii.6]). As was suggested in the note to
Purgatorio
III.143, that canto is also a “canto of two Constances.”
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120.
Frederick is referred to as the third powerful figure in the line of Frederick Barbarossa and Henry VI, the three Swabian emperors. See Grandgent (comm. to verse 119): “The Swabian Emperors are called ‘blasts’ because of the violence and the brief duration of their activity. Frederick I (Barbarossa) was the first; the ‘second wind’ was Constance’s husband, Henry VI; the third and last was her son, Frederick II.”
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121–123.
Where do these two Constances go after they recede from view? Opinions are divided, some more recent commentators (beginning with Costa in 1819 [comm. to verse 122]) claiming that they head back to the Empyrean (as will, apparently, many souls encountered later in the
cantica
); others are of the opinion that they go deep into the mass of the Moon (e.g., Benvenuto [comm. to vv. 115–123]: “disparuit in corpore lunae frigido” [disappeared into the cold matter of the Moon]). This is also maintained by Francesco da Buti (comm. to vv. 121–130): “profondò nel corpo lunare” (sank deep into the matter of the Moon). Most, however, do not even raise the question of where Piccarda (not to mention Constance or, indeed, any of their companions) is headed.
This is the last passage in the canto that makes the reader confront the problem of the permanent residence of the souls we see in the Moon (see the note to vv. 29–30). Here, the sense of descent would seem to make the second hypothesis more likely. The fact that, among the early commentators, only Benvenuto and Francesco da Buti tried to assign a destination to their departure makes the problematic nature of the passage apparent. In the later nineteenth century, Scartazzini (comm. to verse 123) and Campi (comm. to this tercet) also draw the conclusion that Costa did, basing it on what the next canto (vv. 28–39) will make clear: The souls are all in the Empyrean and descend from there to manifest themselves in the planets (or so Dante called both Moon and Sun along with those to which we reserve that appellation). However, twentieth-century exegetes preferred to admire the aesthetic attractiveness of the passage rather than apply themselves to this little conundrum. The result is that there is no “official” view of the problem, which remains unsolved. Dante should have shown Piccarda and the others going up, returning to God; he did not, and we have either, like Scartazzini, tried to be more correct than our author or, like Benvenuto, followed our poetic sense to make Dante seem to violate his own rules—at least the rules that he would lay down in the next canto. There is, according to an Italian proverb, always a third way (“C’è sempre una terza via”). In this case, that has proven more popular than the first two, the way of avoidance, whether knowingly chosen or not.
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121–122.
For the program of song in the last
cantica
, see the note to
Paradiso
XXI.58–60.
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124–130.
In the wake of the disappearance of the two nuns, the poet prepares us for the answers to the questions to which they have given rise. These lines could, without disrupting the reader’s sense of order, have been moved forward into the next canto. As we have seen (since at least
Inferno
VIII, which opens with the often-noted self-consciousness of the words “Io dico, seguitando …” [To continue, let me say … ]), the reader experiences a sense that there was a kind of willful and arbitrary process at work in the poet’s decisions about how a given canto should begin (or end). That Dante was increasingly amused by this practical poetic problem is evidenced in the growing number of ungainly narrative restarts as we move into
Purgatorio
. Dante obviously enjoyed playfully challenging our sense of proper beginnings and endings.
Battaglia Ricci (Batt.1989.1), p. 29, cites with approval Marti’s argument (Mart.1964.1), p. 1385, for the circular movement of the canto, from Beatrice as Sun to Beatrice as Sun. (Dante is in the first case rewarded with an understanding of the dark places in the Moon; in the second he is promised an answer [if in rather disquieting terms] to the two questions that his interview with Piccarda has given rise to in him. Marti characterizes the first Beatrice as the “sun of love” and the second as the “sun of knowledge.”)
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1–9.
This three-part opening simile is not so much difficult as it is puzzling. The residue of the confusion resulting from what he has seen and heard in the previous canto, it prepares the ground for the protagonist’s two-pronged question for Beatrice about human liability. (1) How can a person not be guilty of a sin who wills to live the good life but somehow comes up short of doing so? (2) Where will this kind of saved soul be located in the afterlife? While readers are probably eventually able to make sense of the relationship between the tenor and the vehicle(s) of the simile, not a few nonetheless wonder about Dante’s practice here. To deal with the tenor first, the prose sense of what is at stake is simple. The protagonist is so eager to have answers to both of his questions (and so afraid of what the answers might be) that he simply cannot decide which one to ask first and, instead of speaking, he is silent (vv. 7–9). As for the vehicles, to some only the first seems necessary, while the second may initially seem otiose, and the third redundant, since it only seems to repeat the substance of the first.
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1–3.
Bruno Nardi (Nard.1944.1), pp. 301–3, has argued that the widespread notion that these lines are a recasting of Buridan’s famed paradox (starving donkey between two equally distant piles of straw) should be rejected. As Nardi and others have shown, the more certain source lies in the
Summa theologica
(I–II, q. 13, a. 6): “If any two things are absolutely equal, a man is not moved to the one more than to the other; just as a starving man, if he has food equally appetizing in different directions and at an equal distance, is not moved to the one more than to the other” (English text as found in Carroll’s commentary to
Par
. IV.1–9). Further, and as Fallani (in his comm. to these verses) points out, Buridan’s ass was posterior to Dante’s
Paradiso
. Beginning with Lombardi (comm. to this tercet), and continuing into the twentieth century, one finds insistence on Thomas as source, neglecting Aristotle, for example, Tommaseo (comm. to this tercet); Andreoli (comm. to this tercet); Scartazzini (comm. to vv. 1–2); Poletto (comm. to vv. 1–6); Carroll (comm. to vv. 1–9), etc. The first commentators to put the two together, as is in our day fairly commonplace, were apparently Tozer in 1901 and Torraca in 1905, both in response to this tercet. However, if one reads farther in Thomas’s passage, it is striking, as Sapegno points out (comm. to vv. 1–9), citing Nardi (Nard.1944.1), pp. 297–303, that Thomas has proposed this paradox only to refute its relationship
to practical reality—as might any sensible person. Zeno’s arrow and Buridan’s ass (and Thomas’s starving man, as Thomas himself insists) are the sorts of logically developed paradoxes that “philosophers” enjoy creating and that poets generally enjoy mocking. Here Thomas, Dante’s “philosopher,” rejects philosophical nonsense while Dante, our poet, seems to sponsor it.
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