The Heaven of the Sun

In the Commedia, the great majority of astronomical passages describe or include mention of the sun: the "pianeta / che mena dritto altrui per ogne calle" (Inferno 1.17–18) functions in the poem as beacon, guide, timepiece, symbol, and chief minister of the heavens through all three cantiche. In one sense, its importance culminates in the heaven of Gemini, where it is named "padre di ogni mortal vita" in connection with its role in the nativity of the poet. The importance of the sun in the Commedia is similar to its place in the petrose, where three of the poems exemplify in their form the principles of the sun's motion and effects: "Io son venuto" imitates the sun's descent to winter solstice; "Al poco giorno," in its spiral movement of rhyme-words, graphs the sun's movement with both Same and Other; and "Amor, tu vedi ben" imitates the changing effects of the sun in conjunction with successive constellations or planets and is arranged axially with cold at its center, representing the winter depression of the sun and the central location of a cold earth and the coldness of the lady.^[100] Although "Così" appears to lack the sun (see, however, "nel sol quanto nel rezzo," 57), the treatment of the lady's glances as shafts of light anticipates, as we saw, the imagery in the Para-

diso of the pilgrim's upward motion as a beam of light or arrow seeking its target, and ultimately of emanation and return as the propagation and reflection of light.

The first twenty-seven lines of Paradiso 10 are themselves an astronomical incipit. They introduce the principle that orders the heaven of the sun, the motions of Same and Other that cross at the equinoctial points on the celestial equator:

Guardando nel suo Figlio con l'Amore 
     che l'uno e l'altro etternalmente spira, 
     lo primo e ineffabile Valore 
quanto per mente e per loco si  gira 
   con tant'ordine fé, ch'esser non puote 
     sanza gustar di lui chi ciò rimira. 
Leva dunque, lettore, a l'alte  rote 
   meco la vista,  dritto  a quella parte 
     dove  l'un moto e l'altro si percuote; 
e comincia a vagheggiar nell'arte 
     di quel maestro che dentro a sé l'ama, 
     tanto che mai da lei l'occhio non parte. 
Vedi come da indi  si dirama 
   l'oblico cerchio  che i pianeti porta, 
     per sodisfare al mondo che li chiama. 
Che se la strada lor non fosse  torta, 
   molta virtù nel ciel sarebbe in vano, 
     e quasi ogne potenza qua giù morta; 
e se dal dritto  più o men lontano 
     fosse'l partire, assai sarebbe manco 
     e giù e su del ordine mondano. 
Or ti riman, lettor, sovra 'l tuo banco, 
     dietro pensando a ciò che si preliba, 
     s'esser vuoi lieto assai prima che stanco. 
Messo t'ho innanzi: omai per te ti ciba; 
     ché a  sé  torce  tutta la mia cura 
     quella materia  ond'io son fatto scriba. 
           (emphasis added)

In its twenty-seven lines, the passage enacts the procession of the cosmos from the Creator and the beginning of the creature's return to him. The first two tercets treat of the Trinity, the procession of the cosmos from it, and its immanence in creation. The next five describe the motions of the Same and the Other, which mediate the eternal to the temporal and which through the movements of the sun govern birth and decay in the sublunary world. In the final two tercets the poet invites

the reader to reflect on the text (which is now before the reader, innanzi, as the heavens were straight above, leva . . . dritto ) and testifies to his own yearning to return to its order in his narrative.^[101]

The passage has thus a tripartite structure emphasizing (1) the divine summit, (2) the two motions as mediators, and (3) the reader or poet as last term and subject of return. This structure (like the length of the passage) is clearly modeled on Boethian principles, as has been widely recognized (Dante 1979b 3:153). Boethian derivation is evident in the combination of expressed petitions and yearning for the source (il mondo che li chiama; torce mia cura ). In structural terms, the divisions are nearly parallel to those of Boethius's poem. "O qui perpetua" is divided into a nine-verse section on the procession of the world from the mind of God; a twelve-verse section (with a central five-verse section of lines of fifteen syllables) on the physical form of the cosmos, with the World-Soul at its center; and a final seven-line section, the prayer proper, asking that the speaker be raised up to a vision of the fountain of Good. In Dante's proem, one line shorter than the Latin poem's twenty-eight, the division is six lines on the Godhead, fifteen on the two motions, and six again on the reader-poet's return.^[102]

Dante's passage is based on Neoplatonic principles: the poet and reader ascend by contemplating the movements of the heavens (5–6). The viewer's lifting of his gaze to the celestial cross imitates the Father's unswerving gaze upon the Son and the Creator's (quel maestro ) unswerving contemplation of the cosmic model (che mai da lei l'occhio non parte ). Thus, the whole passage unfolds the procession within the Trinity.^[103] As in Boethius's poem, however, where the participation in the World-Soul by individual souls implies the upward return of the latter (mentioned as early as line 21, "facis igne reverti," but already implicit in the internal meditation of the World-Soul on noûs —"In semet reditura meat mentemque profundam / circuit," 16–17), the movement of return actually begins much earlier, with the poet's invitation to look at the equinoctial point itself (Leva dunque, lettor  . . .)—where, as Freccero notes (1986 242), the logical connective implies that human souls participate in the rationality of the heavens. As in Boethius, the ascent begins with the invitation itself. Descent and ascent, procession and return, are simultaneous, interwoven in the passage.

At the end of the passage the poet himself is twisted back to his subject, the heaven of the sun, imitating the twisting away of the Other from the Same and its return at the opposite point of the circle. The

implication is that the crossed circles are the specific formal model of his poetics. It is no accident that (again like Boethius) Dante places at the exact center of his proem (lines 13–15) the point where the two motions are joined:

Vedi come da indi  si dirama 
   l'oblico cerchio  che i pianeti porta, 
    per sodisfare al mondo che li chiama.

"Si dirama / l'oblico cerchio," the forking away of the oblique circle, is the cardinal event in the whole passage (Freccero 1986 81). It may be hazarded that the spiral form of terza rima is itself an instance of the oblico cerchio crossed with the equator.^[104] That the two circles are the constructive principle of the heaven of the sun will be evident in the rest of this section.

As in Boethius, finally, the last terms are crucial. The Latin poem ends and begins with beginning and end, Alpha and Omega, in the inversion of initial O and final Idem. In Dante's proem the first verse ends with Amore, the Spirit that enlivens creation, and the last verse with scriba, naming the poet who writes under Love's inspiration, who returns to his Author in writing this passage, who extends in words (innanzi ) the intelligible richiamo of the heavens even as he himself hears the world calling to the divine art that informs it, "per sodisfare al mondo che li chiama." The reader, for his part, practices return both in looking up to the heavens and in reflecting on the cruciform cosmos in the poet's text (di retro pensando )—that is, both per mente and per loco —so that the joined actions of memory and vision (which leads here to desire, vagheggiar nell'arte ) themselves imitate the two motions of intellect and will.

The proem to Paradiso 10 also echoes, in addition to "O qui perpetua," distinguishing aspects of the petrose. Some of these are verbal details: the beginning of verse paragraphs with forms of the verb—guardando, leva, vedi, or ti riman, messo t'ho (inverted)—recalls "Io son venuto" articulated by inverted finite verbs (levasi, fuggito son, passato han, versan ).^[105] Its petitions and yearning evoke the reiterated (again, structural) petitions of "Amor, tu vedi ben" and the powerful desire for satisfaction and love throughout the petrose. The rhyme on morta and porta (around torta ) regarding the inclination of the ecliptic echoes the central rhyme of "Io son venuto" (ammorta/porta ) defining the contrast between the winter apathy of animals and the speaker's love: alludes,

that is, both to an effect of the inclined ecliptic and to the spiritual principle of the Same that thrives in the lover. Manco/(banco) /stanco in turn echo the negative moment of "Così nel mio parlar," where the lover is near death (stanco, 43) and wounded by Love in the left side ("sotto il braccio manco," 48) (the third rhyme is bianco ).^[106]

Specific verbal echoes are confirmed by shared thematic concerns and structural principles. The emphasis on the participation of the mind in a cosmic order; mention of divine and human artisanal skill (that of nature is implied); the apparently paradoxical truth that the departure of the Other from the Same is required for the wholeness of nature, and thus the idea that the Other—what twists away—must be included in the ambit of Mind, are general notions underlying both the petrose and the proem to the heaven of the sun.^[107] More specifically, spiral motion as an imitation of the movements of the sun and the soul recalls "Io son venuto" and "Al poco giorno"; and the movement in the text to and from first principles (eternity, the One) recalls "Amor, tu vedi ben." As we shall see, the crossed circles of the proem return in the sun itself, whose status as the heart and governor of the zodiac is implicit in Dante's establishment of the point of the vernal equinox, "dove 'l sol è più vivo." In the poet's elaboration of his solar heaven we see perhaps the fullest development within the Commedia of a range of poetic effects first attempted in the petrose. It is properly Dante's heliotropic heaven.

Perhaps the most remarkable artistic achievement of the poet's heliotropic art in Paradiso 10–14 is the representation of the sun's annual and diurnal motions, which express the logical motions of the cosmos. The two motions inform the figurative language of the sphere, influence its syntax, govern the selection of topics broached by the speakers, and determine the articulation of the whole heaven. In one sense the two motions refer directly to the sun. The groups of theologians are compared to a clock (10.139) because the sun, set in the heaven for a sign of seasons and times, marks days and years; to dancers (10.79, 12.22, 13.22) because the strophe/antistrophe of choral song imitates the movements of the heavens;^[108] and to double lunar rainbows and imaginary constellations because the sun was ruler of the zodiac.^[109] They are compared to millstones, echoing Dante's comparison in the Convivio of the sun's motions to those of a millstone (Freccero 1986 227–234). The pairing of Francis and Dominic is also stated as that of chiarezza (brightness, intellect) and ardore (heat, charity) near the end of the heaven, in 14.40; both brightness and heat are attributes of the sun.^[110]

It is the two motions themselves, however, that are the principal object of Dante's representation. The division of the theologians into two groups results from the distinction, in the human microcosm, of the two motions: those who approach God through ardent love, like the Seraphic Francis, and those who approach him through the light of intellect, with the Cherubic Dominic (Ferrante 1984 274)—though Dante does not adhere strictly to these distinctions, as Francis and Dominic and their followers share in both forms of devotion, through ardent love and works and through contemplation and study.^[111] As readers have noted, the linkage and concordance of the two reformers to the one end (ad una militaro ) and the movement of the two circles are repeatedly described with the coordinating expression l'un . . . l'altro.^[112] The homology of coordinate phrasing and the cosmic motions is a key to Dante's specific poetics in the heaven of the sun, where paired terms—luce e luce (10.122), voce a voce (10.146), moto a moto e canto a canto (11.5)—reiterate the parallelism of the two circles.^[113] Doubling is itself a reiterated topic, again centered on the two princes ("due principi," 11.35; also "due campioni," 12.44) and the two circles of theologians ("due archi," 12.11; "due segni in ciel," 13.13; "due circonferenze," 14.74).^[114] It recurs in the presence not only of the two champions, but also of the two perfect men, Christ and Adam, and in the two questions introduced by Thomas, one regarding the corruption of the Dominicans, the other the salvation of Solomon.^[115] The two questions are a form of structural pairing whose principal example is to be found in the coordinated, chiastically ordered biographies of the two founders: that of Francis, related by the Dominican Thomas, and that of Dominic, related by the Franciscan Bonaventure. The chiasmic distribution of biographer and subject reiterates the founding chiasmus of the proem, marked both by the celestial Chi and by the movement from center to circumference and back again described at the beginning of Canto 14.^[116]

As is well known, the topics of the effects, birthplaces, birth, and orders established by the two saints show close parallels of position, length, and wording in the two biographies (Dante 1979a 206). Each biography is thirty-five tercets long; each contains an account of the saint's birthplace and birth; each decries the decline of the respective orders. The pairing of the saints persists in the design and detail of the biographies. Thus the binomial l'un . . . l'altro or one of its elements appears at the opening (11.37–38, 12.34) and closing (11.118–122, 12.106—111) of the narratives, while the centers of the passages (11.70–75, 12.70–

75) are marked with appearances of the word Cristo, as the spouse of Poverty (like Francis himself) in the life of Francis and in rhyme in the life of Dominic.^[117] The center, itself a crossing point, is marked by Cristo, by the cross (11.72), just at the moment when each saint is named ("Francesco e Povertà," 11.74; "Domenico fu detto," 12.70).^[118] However, at only one point do the two biographies verbally coincide—we might say cross—in the same line:

   . . .  nacque al mondo un sole, 
come fa questo talvolta  di Gange. 
              (11.50–51) 
non molto lungi al percuoter de l'onde 
    dietro a le quali, per la lunga foga, 
   lo sol talvolta ad ogne uom si nasconde. 
           (12.49–51)

Only talvolta is identical and on the same line in both cases. The sun, explicit in 12.51, is present in the pronoun (questo ) of 11.51 and explicit in the previous verse. Francis appears as a rising sun, and Dominic, born in the west, is associated with a setting one. But the punctual juncture of the two passages has more to tell us than that.^[119] That the terms of identity should be talvolta and (pronominally) sole is important: Dante refers in each case to the variability of where the sun rises and sets. He is thus referring to the sun's proper motion in the ecliptic, the motion that carries it south in the winter and north in the summer, twice crossing the equator at the equinoxes—as implied in the proem to Canto 10.

The commentators agree that the sun rising talvolta from the Ganges is a spring (equinoctial) sun. In fact, questo seems to require that Francis's sun be equinoctial, since it refers to this very sun where the pilgrim finds himself.^[120] But both passages also refer to the year in a more general manner. Thomas mentions the place from which Perugia feels the seasons, which depend on the position of the sun as it rises over the Appenines; Bonaventure refers to the west, from which Zephyrus comes to reclothe the earth with foliage. The sun appears in each passage as the daystar, rising and setting, and in terms of its effects over the year.^[121]

In Paradiso 12, Bonaventure's biography of Dominic passes directly into the list of twelve constellated Franciscans. The juxtaposition implies that the two biographies inset in Cantos 11–12 are themselves paired cycles spinning in the heaven of the sun—like the biga, or two-wheeled chariot, of which Francis and Dominic are the wheels ("l'una

rota della biga . . . l'altra," 12.106, 110). As the circles of sapientes spinning in opposite directions mimic the principles of Same and Other that unify the cosmos, the two "wheels" of the biographies are the fullest imitation in the text of the cosmic motions. Like the circulation of rhyme-words in "Al poco giorno" and "Amor, tu vedi ben," the textual wheels of the heaven of the sun, intersecting precisely in the term of the sun's motion itself—talvolta —imitate the "volta di tempo" and in so doing enact the poet's own return to the Maker. The principles laid down in the proem are thus fully satisfied. But the poet's role in the biographies of Francis and Dominic is not only that of maker. Thirteenth-century accounts of Francis and Dominic as gemelli, noted by Kaske (1961 237–240), would have permitted Dante to associate his inspiration by the stars of Gemini with the providential influence of the two reformers.

It is implicit that the sun also helps to cause the eloquence displayed in talking about it.^[122] Dante's rich linguistic inventions (including the allegory of Francis as a sun, the liturgical song of the Church referred to in 10.139–141, and the wealth of metaphors deployed) are rhetorical colors adorning the heaven like gems and flowers. The several metaphorical series—drawn from the language of chivalry and love service as well as from georgic and pastoral—are linked to what for Dante were traditional subjects of poetry.^[123] As readers have noted, the heaven of the sun features many allusions to the Song of Songs, the biblical book that provided a rich vein of erotic imagery to the lyric tradition of the Middle Ages, including the alba, the dawn song, of which there is a version in the heaven of the sun.^[124]

Dante's exactitude regarding the place of birth of each saint is a key to the importance of the heavens. Francis and Dominic enjoy the virtues instilled before and at birth at the geographical situs where the rays of the sun and the stars coincided to inform them.^[125] But the poet's own genius and destiny, like those of Dominic or Francis, are also a consequence of the influence of the sun in his generation.^[126] Self-included in the bella scola of Limbo, Dante is also self-included in the company of the sapientes, whose circling has the pilgrim as its focus: like the stars circling the earth, the circling of the sapientes around the pilgrim is evidence of his own infusion by wisdom, a paideia that will be repeated explicitly in the heaven of Gemini.^[127] The plenitude and diversity of wisdom in the doctors of the Church is complemented by the poet's own fullness and variousness of art.^[128] It is not unlikely, then, that the

verse Dante attributes to Dominic, "Io son venuto a questo" (12.78), is a distant but deliberate echo of the first verse of "Io son venuto." It links the saint's election, demonstrated by the viva virtute that filled him, to the poet's, equally influenced by the stars to which he turns in his own heaven ("per acquistar virtute," 22.122) and by the sun (22.116). But where in the canzone the speaker arrives at the dark nadir of the winter solstice, the pilgrim-poet in the Commedia arrives in the sun at its moment of greatest fertility, dov'è più vivo.^[129]

As the Timaeus describes it, the crossing of the Same and the Other in the heavens provides the model for the union of intellect and will in the human microcosm. The human soul, we recall, is made from the same "stuff" as the World-Soul.^[130] Thus, in terms of the poetics we have traced, the celestial Chi, where macro- and microcosm intersect, marks the point where the soul coincides, as it were, with the cosmos, and the art of God and Nature with that of the poet ("e io era con lui," 10.34). We can reach further and say that the celestial Chi unifies the poetics of the petrose—based on the motions of the sun and of the planets—with that of the Commedia and authorizes the unfolding of Dante's microcosmic poetics in the universal scope of the Paradiso.

The celestial Chi, the Creator's mark in the heavens (here Dante is following the tradition, as John Freccero has pointed out, of identifying the zodiac as the Creator's signature), is also the poet's mark, a trace of his own history as well as of his artisanal skill. As a form of the Cross, it echoes the cross Christ had to bear; it echoes, too, the negative punto, the katabasis of the petrose. By inviting the reader to consider the cosmic chiasmus as his prelibation, the poet is also inviting him or her to discern the vestiges of that chiasmus in the heaven he has composed, which manifests it everywhere. Where the stigmata mark the flesh of Francis, the corresponding sigillo, the mark that allows us to discern the poet's ingegno and virtù, are in the body of the poem itself, in its perceptible form. As in "Amor, tu vedi ben," it is through the fashioning of formal beauty that the poet touches on his divine gift.