Yale Dante Lecture 21 Paradise Xxiv Xxv Xxvi

TITLE: 21. Paradise XXIV, XXV, XXVI CHANNEL: YaleCourses DATE: 2009-09-08 URL: https://youtu.be/KPJIZAmNhbw?si=LnOJ3-rvJdirM5Em ---TRANSCRIPT--- Prof: Today we are going to look at the three cantos in the eighth sphere of Dante’s cosmos; we are beyond the planets, beyond all this so called eighth sphere, or the Heaven of the Fixed Stars.

Before we get to, which will be next week— next time, the Empyrean, the heaven of light and fire but now we are in the heaven of the fixed stars and Dante discusses the three theological virtues. The three theological virtues, unlike— they are so called to distinguish them from the cardinal virtues that Christians share with the classical tradition, namely the fortitude, prudence, and justice, etc. These are the virtues that deal with the understanding of the divine; they open up this horizon of speculations about the language of God, the way God speaks to us, theology in this sense, the way in which we speak about God, theology, the logos.

In theology there’s the word logos and the way God speaks to us, so it’s the place in paradise where Dante will focus on the meaning of what I call— it’s not my phrase, “basic words,” the words which are foundations of the way in which we come out to discover who we are; they are words that we use, the words that we many not even know exactly what they mean and yet Dante will try to define them, they are, I repeat faith, hope and charity. The three virtues that Dante will— in this, using Paul’s letter to the Hebrews where he accounts or gives a definition at least of faith and hope, but they are words—they are terms that always implicate each other.

You cannot go explaining faith without really talking about hope. You cannot go on talking about hope without explaining faith, and both of them are recapitulated and come together, gather within the question of—within the virtue of charity and the virtue of love.

They are words that—they are very mysterious in many ways but there are degrees of understanding all of them. The three examiners, because Dante will go through the equivalent of a university examination, a medieval Bachelor’s degree, that’s the term comes to us from the universities, medieval universities, the Bachelor.

Dante is a bachelor who presents himself to the teacher, the teacher is testing him, and he will give an answer according to textbooks. Authentic—where the authentic—the departed of one’s own beliefs, one’s own hopes, and one’s own charity are gathered.

The three teachers are going to be three Apostles who are known as Peter for faith, St. Peter for faith and that makes sense because Peter himself, the name stands for the cornerstone on which the edifice of Christian belief is built; the second one is going to be for the virtue of hope is going to be James, known as the Galician because—why him; it would seem to be less obvious than the other two because he among of all the Apostles is the one whose death was recorded in the Acts of the Apostles and so he lived in a certain expectation of a life to come, so he would seem to be the real figure of hopefulness of some idea of— some way of expecting a future and the life of eternity. The virtue of charity instead, is examined by John, the Apostle, to distinguish him from the seer, the writer of the Apocalypse. So it’s the three Apostles Peter, James, and John.

Are there ways in which we could—I could give you some summary ways of trying to understand some of these virtues. One thing that I would ask you to look through when you have time to go into detail of these texts, it seems to me that all the three cantos deal, or have as a kind of what I would call under text, the subtext of them, something running through but sometimes even visible but not all the time visible, is the question of exile.

Dante is retrieving the language of exile as if these virtues are clearly virtues that don’t concern at all the blessed in heaven; they can only concern us here in time. The blessed in heaven certainly do not need faith, or hope, or they don’t really need to know about what love may be; either they have it or they wouldn’t be there so this is— but it’s the language of exile is running through these three issues just as the language of time, so the connection between time and exile probably needs not much explanation, much glossing.

We are in time, we are fallen, and it’s only in the language of the fall that it’s possible to think about exile.

The other element running through this is really the question of, very visible, especially in Canto XXVI, the actual question of language itself. What is the language of God? What are the names of God? Dante asks that question. Are we talking about an entity with a name, and if so, you know the whole debate about the so-called tetragrammaton, the four letters that are supposedly that name God. That’s what the word means, the four letters. Are they known or is God just an effable? Is there some—Is He some kind of reality we can never even hope to name or are we going to be related and connected to this idea, this knowledge of God by analogical discourse.

These are positions, the mystical position that denies even our knowledge of the name of God, the analogical position put forth by Aquinas, for instance, that we really talk about God analogically and know the qualities we attribute to God only they’re not real by what we may know in our own lives. Dante asks this question about what is the language of God? What are the names of God and how do we get to know God? The first virtue then is the virtue of faith. There are many ways literally—I call it a basic word because it’s really a basic word because it founds us. It’s a stone, Peter asks for the foundation of all this poetic edifice of the Divine Comedy.

[Lecturer reads Canto XXIV opening apostrophe: “O fellowship elect to the great supper of the blessed Lamb, who feeds you so that your desire is ever satisfied…”]

The presence of this actual metaphor of a banquet. We’re dealing with two metaphors here; one which is exilic, the manna in the desert, the falling of this dew on the exiles, the wanderers, the Jewish wanderers in the desert, and the other one is the eschatological banquet. Any debate about faith has to be placed within a communal context.

This is not going to be the professional faith the way you may have it, let’s say in 1550 roughly. I’m really alluding to, as a contrast, the great debate between two figures of the Renaissance called Erasmus and Luther. They debated, at length, about the question of whether or not how a text written about a century earlier, around 1440, a text by Valla, a great humanist who wrote about the free will in the defense of the free will— on free will. Erasmus maintains that Valla really had defended the existence of free will. Free will, which is a gift of God. Luther had very radical ideas about the question of freedom. There was not such a thing he would argue as free will, and actually the world, the universe is a universe of absolute faith, and faith is freedom and it’s given to us by freedom because it releases us from all obligations, it frees us from all constraints.

Dante removes the question of faith from one of radical subjectivity or radical faith. Dante focuses on the question of the communal experience, the banquet.

Beatrice’s words to Peter around lines 30: “O eternal light of the great soul with whom our Lord left the keys, which He brought down of this wondrous joy, test this man on points light and grave as thou seest good regarding the faith by which thou walkedst on the sea.” This is an allusion recorded in the Gospel of Peter walking out of an act of faith, walking on water. The strange thing is that Peter did not want to walk on water. It is the moment of the crisis of faith, the moment where Peter had no faith and in fact Jesus calls him, “Oh man of little faith why don’t you walk.” Dante’s emphasizing that there are degrees of faith and that the so-called crisis of faith must not be seen as denials of faith.

Just as the bachelor arms himself and does not speak to the master, magister, submits the question for argument, not for settlement. These issues are issues that always need the open-endedness of argumentation and not that of a settling of the point.

Faith from Paul (Hebrews): “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” This I take to be its quiddity, quiddity and medieval—part of the medieval lexicon meaning its constitutive essence, its specificity.

The famous formulation of faith comes from Tertullian who says, “I believe because it is absurd,” so that faith becomes the consequence of the absurdity of all things. Dante does not pursue that line. He tries to make faith and reason co-extensive. That faith itself is a mode of knowledge. That it is a mode of knowledge exactly the way you have the knowledge of philosophy though its modalities are going to be different, because philosophy submits to the rules of the rationality, but faith opens your eyes and it’s a way of showing you something about the world that the reason alone cannot do.

The joining of philosophy and theology, reason and faith, makes and projects faith as a way of knowing.

[Then Peter shifts metaphor abruptly:] “Now the alloy and the weight of this money have been well examined; but tell me if thou hast it in thy purse.” All of a sudden the question of money and the question of faith—faith is literally given as said to be money. Do you have this coin in your purse?

The metaphor of money for faith. One reason: it’s a precious jewel. The word money which Dante uses in Italian, moneta, comes from the Latin meneo, meaning a warning, an advice, a warning—we have the word admonishment that comes from it. It admonishes that it’s not a counterfeit, that it is really pure. Another trait of money: it circulates, has the power of putting everything into motion. It establishes the values of all the things that are around us. Fourth—Dante wants us to think about the resonance of profanation that is in the language of money and link it with the purity of faith. The world of faith comes out of the world of profanation. It belongs to the world of time, it can be profane and yet it still manages to put things into circulation.

Hope. The Greeks never thought of hope as a virtue. There’s a reference to hope in—as being one of the entities available in Pandora’s Box. All the evils of the world came out of Pandora’s Box, save for one, hope. That casts hope as some kind of evil or a delusion. For the Greeks the idea of hope is always a term that implies the delusion of exiles. It’s the radical illusion; it’s a kind of hope against hope. I have nothing more to do; it’s a self-deception.

Dante does not follow that route. Hope is a virtue of time, and a virtue specifically of the future. I can’t really hope about the past. It’s the most realistic of virtues. Normally we think that if you really hope it’s because you are really desperate. Dante says no, hope is the most realistic of virtues because it tells me that nothing is really ever over. The negation of hope, the opposite of hope would be despair. The encounter with the Medusa in Inferno VIII-IX is that fear of despair, that idea of being petrified.

Hope is a virtue of the future; it’s a virtue that can even change the past. In that sense, it’s effective on the past, because it tells us that the past may not be what we thought it was. Whatever disaster you may have had in the past, that disappointment may contain seeds that really will reappear in the future.

Canto XXV opens with an optative: “If it ever come to pass that the sacred poem to which both heaven and earth have set their hand, that it has made me lean for many years, should overcome the cruelty that bars me from the fair sheepfold where I slept as a lamb, an enemy to the wolves that make war on it, with another voice now, and other fleece I shall return a poet, and to the font of my baptism take the laurel crown.”

If I could ever go back home, but he called back home Florence, in the canto of hope where he’s an exile. The metaphor of the city as a sheepfold, the Passover language, the language you expect to have in the Eclogues of Virgil, the pastoral tradition. The pun of wolves and Guelfs.

Why would Dante use this metaphor of the baptismal font? The baptism is clearly the place where a community is constituted. The baptismal font is the sacramental re-enactment of Exodus. When a child is baptized, he is re-enacting the crossing of Exodus. It is as if the poet can only come home in order to tell his community that I have to get out again. The poet convokes the whole community around the baptismal font, which is the figure of exile, to tell them this is really where we belong—in exile.

Beatrice presents Dante to St. James: “The Church Militant has not a child more full of hope, as is written in the Sun that irradiates all our host; therefore is it granted him to come from Egypt to Jerusalem.” Dante’s journey is glossed through the figure of Exodus. Dante’s journey here is literally described as a journey from Egypt to Jerusalem, the master plot of the Hebrews’ exile from bondage to freedom. Exile becomes the master figure of the poem.

“Hope is a sure expectation of future glory, and it springs from divine grace and precedent merit. This light comes to me from many stars, but he first distilled it in my heart who was the sovereign singer of the Sovereign Lord”—David, who to Dante is the greatest of poets.

Now we move to love. There’s no definition of love. Love is the key word that seems to escape all possible definitions. Dante says in the De vulgari eloquentia that the word love is the only residual term from the past.

Canto XXVI: Dante meets Adam. The confrontation with the beginning, the confrontation with the arch poet, because Adam is the one who names the world, and therefore brings it into existence. Dante addresses him: “O fruit that alone wast brought forth ripe.” Ripeness is an element of grace.

Adam’s answer: “Know then, my son, that not the tasting of the tree in itself was the cause of so long exile, but solely the trespass beyond the mark.” “In the place from which thy Lady sent Virgil, I longed for this assembly during four thousand, three hundred and two revolutions of the sun.” “I saw it return to all the lights on its track nine hundred and thirty times while I lived on earth. The tongue I spoke was all extinct before Nimrod.”

“Before I descended to the anguish of Hell the Supreme Good from whom comes the joy that swathes me was named I on earth. And later he was called El.” Dante’s using two Hebrew words for the name of God. God was called “I” first and then he was called “El.” (One student suggested if you read them backwards they spell out the word Eli.)

“The usage of mortals is like a leaf on a branch, which goes and another comes.”

The whole question of theology then, the names of God, the way we speak about God. There is no proper name for God. We only have words or languages that keep changing according to our own historical circumstances. Dante is changing his own paradigmatic account about the status of the sacred language. He says there is no such a thing as a persistent sacred language in history.

Language is the mark of our own distance from the divine. The language that we use is a part of our own exilic circumstances and exilic predicament. All the language of theology that Dante has been describing is part of this exilic longing of human beings.

Dante uses theology and examination of theology only to place us back on the world where we go on hoping, believing, and loving. Faith is a form of trust without which you cannot really be functioning together. Hope is the realization of faith. Love is that which we are always longing for and somehow the meaning of which is mysteriously escaping us.

Q&A:

Student question on Adam’s “trespass beyond the mark” rather than the tasting itself:

Prof: Canto XXVI of Paradise is symmetrically connected with Canto XXVI of Inferno (Ulysses, who also trespasses boundaries) and Canto XXVI of Purgatory (love in its perverted form, Guinizelli). All three cantos deploy foreign languages—Greek (Virgil speaking to Ulysses), Provencal (Arnault Daniel), Hebrew (the names of God).

Dante distinguishes between the tasting of the fruit and the trespassing of the mark. It’s clear Dante thinks the tasting was good—the act of eating was the discovery of a knowledge that managed to elevate Adam. There’s a contrast with Ulysses’ form of knowledge—Ulysses doesn’t even know where he’s going, it was a gratuitous quest, driven by curiosity. Adam wanted to grow in knowledge, and that’s not the issue. Real knowledge is always going to be tied to an act of making discoveries, even transgressions.

The problem was that there had been a loss of boundaries. The kind of knowledge that made Adam realize that he could be divine; that was his problem. God’s establishment of the boundary between the human and the divine was a way of letting Adam know he was a human being. The fall is a re-establishment of that boundary, a growth in self-knowledge. Dante’s changing the sense of what the fall of man is. The fall is not the fall in the growth of knowledge but the growth of knowledge that leads you to erasing the boundary, to believe that you are by virtue of that knowledge now divine.

Student question on the Trinity:

Prof: Dante has many references throughout Paradise to the Trinity. In Canto XXV of Purgatory, Dante thinks one of the ways we can understand the Trinity is to think about the structure of the mind: memory, intelligence, and will—three but part of one thing. Or in Canto XXIV of Purgatorio, think about speaking: when you speak, you have an idea in your mind, you emit a sound, but to emit the sound you need the breath, and you cannot have the sound without the breath, and you cannot have the sound without the idea—so speaking encompasses this three-fold components of one. Dante does not agree with Joachim of Flora who thought the Trinity could be dissolved into three separate beings. Dante would say we all have some recognition of the Trinity, whether it’s God and the Word of God being the Qu’ran from eternally or God and the Word of God being the Christ.

Student follow-up on whether Adam’s fall is “good”:

Prof: Curiosity is bad in the medieval understanding because it uses up; curiosity has a sort of restlessness within it. I am curious of a particular object, I observe it and I move onto something else. I literally consume, I use up a particular object and devalue it in that process. Ulysses is a figure of this restless curiosity—like don Juan who goes from one woman to another in an endless movement of curiosity. Adam, by contrast, eats because he wants to grow in knowledge, and Dante says that’s not a problem. The consequence of that growth in knowledge was the trespassing of the boundary. Had he really grown, that’s an acceptable aim. The fall of man is only a re-establishment of the boundaries; it’s not a way of mortifying the quest for knowledge.