c. 1308-1321 2026
This is an AI modernization of Paradiso into contemporary English. The original is available from Project Gutenberg. Also available as an epub.
The Paradiso is the last third of the poem Dante Alighieri wrote in exile and finished shortly before he died at Ravenna in 1321. The other two parts, the Inferno and the Purgatorio, are separate volumes in this collection; this one can be read alone, but it begins where the second left off, at the top of the mountain of Purgatory, with Beatrice taking over as guide from Virgil. From there Dante rises through the spheres of the moon, the planets, the fixed stars, and out beyond them.
It has a reputation for being the difficult one, and the reason is worth stating plainly. There are no bodies here and no weather. The souls are points of light, the settings are spheres of light, and after the first canto nothing happens that could be called a plot. Most translations answer that by going vague and grand, which is what actually makes it unreadable. Dante's own answer is the opposite. Whenever the subject gets least physical, he reaches for the smallest thing in the room: fish rising to something dropped in a tank, a bird on the nest waiting for dawn, a baby flinging its face towards the milk, jackdaws warming their feathers, wheels turning in a clock, a tailor cutting the gown to fit the cloth he has. Those comparisons are the technique, and they are kept here.
Two other things a reader should know going in. The light vocabulary is technical: Dante uses a dozen different words for light and means different things by them, and this edition keeps them apart instead of smoothing them into one word. And he says over and over that he cannot remember what he saw and cannot say it. That is not throat-clearing. The failure of language is one of the poem's subjects, and every one of those passages is here in full.
It is also angrier and more personal than its reputation. Saint Peter turns red in the face over what has become of his office and the whole heaven changes colour with him. Dante's great-great-grandfather, a crusader killed on campaign, tells him he is going to be exiled and that he will learn how salt another man's bread tastes. Two pagans turn up among the saved, and Dante knows exactly how startling that is. A whole canto argues that a good man born on the Indus who never heard of Christ has no claim anyone can measure, and it is not resolved in the reader's favour. None of that is softened here, and there are no notes.
The translation is from the Italian, complete: thirty-three cantos, 4,758 lines, three-line stanzas in the same number and order, without the rhyme, which cannot be carried into English without padding. The poem ends, after thirty-three cantos of saying it cannot be said, on a single line about a wheel turning evenly.
The glory of him who moves all things goes through the universe and shines back more in one part and less in another.
I was in the heaven that takes most of his light, and I saw things that nobody who comes down from there knows how to tell again, or can;
because as our understanding draws near to what it longs for, it goes so deep that memory cannot follow it back.
Still, whatever of that holy kingdom I was able to store up in my mind shall now be the matter of my song.
Good Apollo, for this last labour make me such a vessel of your power as you demand before you give the laurel you love.
Until now one peak of Parnassus has been enough for me; but now I need both of them, to enter the last stretch of the course.
Come into my breast and breathe there, as you did when you drew Marsyas out of the sheath of his own limbs.
Divine power, if you lend yourself to me enough for me to show even the shadow of the blessed kingdom stamped inside my head,
you will see me come to the foot of your beloved tree and crown myself with the leaves that the theme, and you, will make me worthy of.
So rarely, father, are those leaves gathered for the triumph of an emperor or a poet (the fault and the shame of what men want)
that the laurel ought to give birth to gladness in the glad god of Delphi whenever it makes anybody thirst for it.
A great flame follows a small spark. Perhaps after me, with better voices, men will pray until Apollo's oracle answers.
The lamp of the world rises on mortals through different gates; but from the one where four circles cross to make three crosses
it comes out on a better course, under a better star, and tempers and stamps the wax of the world more nearly to its own liking.
It had made morning there, and evening here, by rising through that gate, and almost all that hemisphere was white and this one black,
when I saw Beatrice turn to her left and look straight into the sun. No eagle ever fixed on it so.
And just as a second ray comes out of the first and climbs back up again, like a pilgrim who wants to go home,
so out of what she did, poured through my eyes into my imagination, my own act was made, and I fixed my eyes on the sun beyond what we can do.
Much is allowed there that is not allowed here to our powers, thanks to the place that was made to be the home of the human race.
I did not bear it long; nor so briefly that I did not see it sparkling all round, like iron that comes boiling out of the fire.
And suddenly it seemed that day had been added to day, as if he who has the power had decked the sky with a second sun.
Beatrice stood with her eyes fixed wholly on the eternal wheels; and I fixed mine on her, and took them off the sky.
Looking at her, I became inside what Glaucus became when he tasted the grass that made him a companion of the gods in the sea.
To pass beyond the human cannot be told in words; so let the example be enough for anyone whom grace keeps the experience for.
Whether I was only that part of me which you created last, my soul, love who govern the heavens, you know, who lifted me with your light.
When the wheel that you keep turning for ever by being longed for drew my attention to itself with the harmony you tune and set apart,
so much of the sky then seemed to me alight with the flame of the sun that rain or river never made a lake so wide.
The newness of the sound and the great light kindled in me such a longing to know their cause as I had never felt so keenly.
So she, who saw me as I saw myself, to quiet my stirred-up mind, opened her mouth before I opened mine to ask,
and began: "You make yourself dull with false imagining, so that you do not see what you would see if you had shaken it off.
You are not on earth, as you believe. Lightning, fleeing its own place, never ran as fast as you are running back to yours."
If I was stripped of my first doubt by those few smiling words, I was caught inside a new one all the more,
and said: "I was content already, and at rest from my great wondering; but now I wonder how I can be rising up through air and fire."
At that she gave a sigh of pity, and turned her eyes on me with the look a mother gives a child in a fever,
and began: "All things, whatever they are, have an order among themselves, and this order is what makes the universe like God.
Here the high creatures, the angels, see the print of the eternal worth, which is the end for which that order was made.
In the order I am speaking of, all natures lean, according to their different lots, nearer to their source or less near;
and so they move to different harbours over the great sea of being, each one with an instinct given it to carry it there.
This is what carries fire up towards the moon; this is the mover in mortal hearts; this binds the earth together and makes it one;
and this bow shoots not only the creatures that have no understanding, but those that have understanding and love.
The providence that orders all of this keeps still, with its own light, the heaven inside which the fastest-turning sphere goes round;
and there, now, as to a place appointed, the power of that bowstring is carrying us, which aims whatever it looses at a glad mark.
It is true that, as a shape often fails to answer to what the craftsman intended, because the material is deaf to him,
so the creature sometimes turns aside from this course, since it has the power, though driven one way, to bend another;
and as you may see fire fall from a cloud, so the first impulse, twisted by a false pleasure, drives it back to the ground.
If I judge rightly, you should wonder no more at your rising than at a stream running down from a high mountain to the bottom.
The marvel would be if you, with nothing in your way, had stayed sitting down below, like a living flame that lay still on the ground."
Then she turned her face back towards the sky.
You there, in your little boat, who have followed, longing to listen, behind my ship as it goes singing on its way:
turn back to see your own shores again. Do not put out on the open sea, for perhaps, losing me, you would be left astray.
The water I am taking was never crossed before. Minerva fills my sail, Apollo steers, and the nine Muses show me the Bear to steer by.
But you few others, who reached up early for the bread of angels, the food of truth, which men live on here and are never full of,
you may well set your vessel out on the deep salt water, keeping in my furrow ahead of the water that closes level again.
The Argonauts, those glorious men who crossed to Colchis, did not wonder as you will wonder, when they saw Jason ploughing with the fire-breathing oxen.
The thirst we are born with and never lose, for the kingdom made in God's image, carried us almost as fast as you see the sky turn.
Beatrice was looking upward, and I at her; and perhaps in the time an arrow takes to settle and fly and leave the notch,
I saw myself arrived where a marvellous thing twisted my face towards it; and so she, from whom what I cared about could not be hidden,
turned to me, as glad as she was beautiful, and said: "Set your mind on God with thanks, for he has brought us to the first star, the moon."
It seemed to me that a cloud covered us, shining, dense, solid and polished, like a diamond struck by the sun.
The eternal pearl took us inside itself as water takes in a ray of light and stays unbroken.
If I was still a body (and down here we cannot conceive how one solid thing could let another through it, which must be so if body enters into body),
that ought to kindle in us the longing all the more to see that essence in which one sees how our nature and God were joined.
There we shall see what we hold by faith, not proved, but known of itself like the first truths a man believes without proof.
I answered: "My lady, as devoutly as I can, I thank him who has taken me away from the mortal world.
But tell me: what are the dark marks on this body, which down there on earth make people tell stories about Cain?"
She smiled a little, and then: "If the opinion of mortals goes wrong," she said to me, "about things the key of the senses cannot unlock,
surely the arrows of astonishment should not sting you now, since you see that reason, following the senses, has short wings.
But tell me what you think about it yourself." And I: "The light and dark we see up here I believe are made by the moon being thin in some parts and dense in others."
And she: "You will certainly see your belief sunk deep in the false, if you listen well to the argument I shall bring against it.
The eighth sphere, the sphere of the fixed stars, shows you many lights, and in their quality and in their size you can see that they have different faces.
If thin and dense were all there was to it, one single power would be in every star, shared out in larger and smaller amounts and nothing more.
But different powers must be the fruits of different forming principles; and on your reasoning all of those but one would be wiped out.
Again, if thinness were the cause of the dark patches you ask about, then either this planet would be starved of its matter
right through in one part, or else, as a body has fat parts and lean, this one would be layered like the leaves of a book.
If the first were so, it would show plainly in an eclipse of the sun, by the light shining through, as it does through anything else rare.
That does not happen; so we must look at the other case, and if I can knock that down too, your opinion will be proved false.
If the thin part does not go right through, there must be a boundary beyond which the dense part lets it go no further;
and from there the sun's ray is thrown back, as colour comes back from a glass that has lead hidden behind it, a mirror.
Now you will say that the ray shows itself darker there than in other parts because it is reflected from further back.
Experiment can free you from this objection, if you ever try it; experiment is the spring your sciences flow from.
You will take three mirrors; and set two of them the same distance from you, and let the third, further off, meet your eyes between the first two.
Turned towards them, have a light behind your back which kindles the three mirrors and comes back to you struck off all of them.
Although the more distant image does not stretch so far in size, you will see there that it must shine just as brightly.
Now, as under the blows of the warm rays the ground under the snow is left bare of the colour and the cold it had before,
so, now that your understanding is bared like that, I want to fill it with a light so living that it will tremble before your eyes.
Inside the heaven of the divine peace a body wheels round, the outermost sphere, and in its power lies the being of everything it holds inside it.
The next heaven, the one with so many stars, shares that being out among different things, distinct from it and held inside it.
The other spheres, each in its own way, direct the differences they hold inside themselves towards their own ends, as seed is directed to its fruit.
These organs of the world go on as you see now, from rank to rank, taking from above and working below.
Watch carefully now how I go through this place to the truth you long for, so that afterwards you can cross this ford on your own.
The motion and the power of the holy circles must be breathed into them by the blessed movers, as the hammer's craft comes from the smith;
and the heaven that so many lights make beautiful takes its image from the deep mind that turns it and becomes the seal that stamps that image on.
And as the soul inside your dust is worked out through different limbs, shaped to different faculties,
so the angelic intelligence unfolds its own goodness, multiplied, through the stars, while it turns on its own oneness.
A different power makes a different alloy with each precious star-body it brings to life, and is bound into it as life is bound into you.
Because of the glad nature it comes from, the power mixed through the body shines as gladness does through a living eye.
This is what makes one light differ from another, not dense and thin: this is the forming principle that produces,
according to its own goodness, the dim and the clear."
That sun which first warmed my breast with love had uncovered for me, by proof and disproof, the sweet face of beautiful truth;
and I, to confess myself corrected and certain, lifted my head to speak as far up as was fitting;
but a vision appeared which held me so tightly to itself, to be looked at, that I forgot what I had meant to confess.
As, through clear polished glass, or through clean still water not so deep that the bottom is lost,
the outlines of our faces come back so faint that a pearl on a white forehead does not come less strongly to our eyes,
so I saw a number of faces ready to speak; so that I fell into the opposite mistake to Narcissus, who loved his reflection in the spring.
As soon as I noticed them, taking them for reflected likenesses, I turned my eyes to see whose they were;
and I saw nothing, and turned them forward again straight into the light of my sweet guide, who was burning, smiling, in her holy eyes.
"Do not wonder that I smile," she said to me, "at your childish thought, since your foot does not yet trust itself on the truth,
but turns you, as usual, back towards nothing. These are real beings that you see, set here because they fell short of a vow.
So speak with them and listen and believe; for the true light that satisfies them does not let them turn their feet away from itself."
And I turned to the shade who seemed keenest to talk, and began, like a man whom too much wanting bewilders:
"Oh well-created spirit, who in the rays of eternal life feel the sweetness which, untasted, is never understood,
it would be a grace to me if you would content me with your name and with what has become of you." At which she, ready, and with laughing eyes:
"Our charity does not shut its doors on a just wish, any more than that charity does which wants its whole court to be like itself.
I was in the world a virgin sister; and if your mind looks well at itself, my being more beautiful will not hide me from you,
but you will know again that I am Piccarda, who, set here with these other blessed ones, am blessed in the slowest sphere, the moon's.
Our affections, which are kindled only in the pleasure of the Holy Spirit, are glad to be formed by his order.
And this lot, which seems so far down, is given us because our vows were neglected and left empty in some corner."
At which I to her: "In your marvellous faces something divine shines which I cannot name, and which changes you from what you first were,
so I was not quick to remember; but now what you say helps me, so that making you out again is easier.
But tell me: you who are happy here, do you long for a higher place, to see more and to make yourselves dearer?"
With the other shades she first smiled a little; then she answered me so gladly that she seemed to burn in the first fire of love:
"Brother, the power of charity quiets our will and makes us want only what we have, and thirst for nothing else.
If we longed to be higher up, our longings would be out of tune with the will of him who assigns us here,
and you will see that has no place in these circles, if being in love is a necessity here and if you look well at what love is.
No: it is the very shape of this blessed life to keep ourselves inside the will of God, so that all our wills are made one will;
so that, as we are set from threshold to threshold through this kingdom, it pleases the whole kingdom as it pleases the king, who draws us into his will.
And in his will is our peace: it is that sea to which everything moves that it creates and that nature makes."
It was clear to me then how everywhere in heaven is paradise, even if the grace of the highest good does not rain there in one way.
But as it happens, if one food fills us and the appetite for another is still there, that we ask for that one and give thanks for this,
so I did, with my gesture and with my words, to learn from her what the web was she had begun to weave and never finished.
"A perfect life and great merit set a lady higher in heaven," she said, "Saint Clare, by whose rule women take the habit and the veil down in your world,
so that till death they may wake and sleep beside that bridegroom who accepts every vow which charity shapes to his own pleasure.
To follow her I ran from the world while I was still a girl, and shut myself in her habit and promised to keep to the way of her order.
Then men used more to evil than to good tore me away from the sweet cloister: God knows what my life was after that.
And this other splendour that shows itself to you on my right, and that kindles with all the light of our sphere,
understands about herself what I say about myself. She was a sister, and in the same way the shadow of the holy veil was taken off her head.
But when she too was turned back to the world against her will and against good custom, she was never loosed from the veil of the heart.
This is the light of the great Constance, who by the second of the storm-winds out of Swabia gave birth to the third of those emperors, and the last."
So she spoke to me, and then began to sing "Ave, Maria," and singing vanished as something heavy does through deep water.
My sight, which followed her as far as it could, when it had lost her turned back to the mark of its greater longing,
and gave itself wholly to Beatrice; but she flashed so in my gaze that at first my eyes could not bear it;
and that made me slower in asking.
Set between two dishes, equally far off and equally tempting, a man free to choose would die of hunger before he got either of them to his teeth;
so a lamb would stand between the hunger of two fierce wolves, fearing both alike; so a dog would stand between two deer.
So, if I said nothing, I neither blame nor praise myself, driven the same way by both my doubts, since it could not be helped.
I said nothing, but my longing was painted on my face, and my question with it, far hotter than any speech could have made it.
Beatrice did what Daniel did when he lifted Nebuchadnezzar out of the anger that had made him unjustly cruel;
and she said: "I see well how one longing and another pull you, so that your care is tied so tight that it cannot get its breath.
You argue: 'If my good will lasts, how can somebody else's violence cut down what I deserve?'
And you are given cause for doubt as well by the souls seeming to go back to their stars after death, as Plato's teaching has it.
These are the questions that press equally on your will; and so I shall first deal with the one that has more gall in it.
The angel who sees deepest into God, Moses, Samuel, and whichever John you like, the Baptist or the Evangelist, and I mean Mary too:
do not have their seats in any other heaven than these spirits who have just appeared to you, nor have they more or fewer years of being;
but all of them make the first circle beautiful, and have a sweet life differently by feeling the eternal breath more and less.
They showed themselves here not because this sphere is allotted to them, but to make a sign of the heavenly one that is the least high.
One has to speak this way to human minds, because they learn only through the senses what they afterwards make fit for the understanding.
For this reason Scripture comes down to your faculties, and gives God feet and hands while meaning something else;
and Holy Church represents Gabriel and Michael to you in human shape, and Raphael, who gave Tobias back his sight.
What Plato argues about souls in the Timaeus is not like what you have seen here, because he seems to mean it literally.
He says the soul goes back to its own star, believing it was cut off from there when nature gave it a body to inform;
and perhaps his teaching is other than his words sound, and may have a meaning that is not to be laughed at.
If he means that the credit for the stars' influence, and the blame, come back to these spheres, then perhaps his arrow hits on some truth.
That principle, badly understood, once misled almost the whole world, so that it ran off and named the planets Jove and Mercury and Mars, and worshipped them.
The other doubt that troubles you has less poison in it, because its mischief could not lead you away from me into heresy.
That our justice should seem unjust in the eyes of mortals is an argument for faith, and not an excuse for heresy.
But because your understanding is well able to get through to this truth, I will content you, as you wish.
If violence means that the one who suffers it gives nothing at all to the one who forces, then these souls were not excused by it;
for the will, unless it consents, is not put out, but does what fire does by nature, and springs back up, though violence bends it down a thousand times.
So if it bends, much or little, it is going along with the force; and these souls did, since they could have run back to the cloister and did not.
If their will had been whole, as the will that kept Saint Lawrence on the gridiron and made Mucius hold his own hand in the fire,
it would have driven them back along the road they were dragged along, once they were loose; but a will so firm is much too rare.
And by these words, if you have gathered them as you should, the argument is cancelled which would have troubled you many times again.
But now another narrow pass lies across your path, and by yourself you would not get through it: you would tire first.
I have put it in your mind for certain that a blessed soul could not lie, being always next to the first truth;
and then you were able to hear from Piccarda that Constance never stopped loving the veil, so that here she seems to contradict me.
Many a time, brother, it has happened that men have done, against their liking, what was not fitting, in order to escape a danger;
as Alcmaeon, at his own father's dying wish, killed his own mother, and to keep faith with one parent became merciless to the other.
At this point I want you to think that force mixes with the will, and together they make offences that cannot be excused.
The will taken by itself does not consent to the wrong; but it consents in so far as it is afraid of falling into worse trouble if it holds back.
So, when Piccarda says what she says, she means the will taken by itself, and I mean the other; so we are both telling the truth."
Such was the rippling of the holy river that came out of the spring from which all truth flows; and it put both my longings at peace.
"Beloved of the first lover, you who are divine," I said then, "whose speech floods me and warms me so that it quickens me more and more,
my affection is not deep enough to thank you as your grace deserves; let him who sees and can, repay you for me.
I see well that our understanding is never satisfied until the truth lights it, the truth beyond which there is no other.
It rests in it, like a wild beast in its lair, as soon as it has reached it; and it can reach it, or every longing would be in vain.
Because of that, doubt springs up like a shoot at the foot of each truth; and it is nature that pushes us on to the summit, ridge by ridge.
This invites me, this gives me the confidence, my lady, to ask you with reverence about another truth which is dark to me.
I want to know whether a man can make up to you for vows he has failed to keep, with other goods that are not too light on your scales."
Beatrice looked at me with eyes so full of sparks of love, and so divine, that my strength gave way and turned its back,
and I almost lost myself with my eyes cast down.
"If I flame at you in the heat of love beyond the measure that is seen on earth, so that I overcome the power of your eyes,
do not wonder at it, for it comes from perfect seeing, which, as it understands, steps forward into the good it has understood.
I see well how the eternal light is already shining again in your understanding, which, once seen, alone and always kindles love;
and if anything else seduces your love, it is nothing but some trace of that light, badly recognized, which shines through it.
You want to know whether one can pay back enough with other service, for a vow left unkept, to keep the soul safe from being sued for it."
So Beatrice began this canto; and like someone who does not break off her speech, she went on with the holy discourse:
"The greatest gift God made in creating, out of his own generosity, the one most like his own goodness, and the one he prizes most,
was the freedom of the will; with which intelligent creatures, all of them and they alone, were and are endowed.
Now the high worth of a vow will be plain to you, if you reason from this: a vow is made so that God consents to it when you consent;
for in sealing the pact between God and man, this treasure, free will itself, is the thing sacrificed, and it is sacrificed by its own act.
What, then, can be given back to make it up? If you think you can put to good use what you have offered, you want to do good work with stolen goods.
You are certain now of the main point; but because Holy Church gives dispensations in this, which seems against the truth I have uncovered to you,
you must sit a little longer at table, because the hard food you have taken still needs help to be digested.
Open your mind to what I show you and fix it inside; for it makes no knowledge to have understood without keeping.
Two things belong to the essence of this sacrifice: one is the matter it is made of, the other is the compact.
The compact is never cancelled except by being kept; and it is about the compact that what I said above is so exact.
That is why the Hebrews were still bound to make their offerings, although what was offered could sometimes be exchanged, as you must know.
The other part, the matter of the vow, the thing you promised, may well be such that there is no fault in changing it for some other thing.
But let nobody shift the load on his shoulder by his own judgment, without the turning of both the Church's keys, the silver and the gold;
and count every exchange foolish unless the new burden contains the old as six contains four.
So whatever thing weighs so much by its own worth that it drags down every scale cannot be made good by any other outlay.
Let mortals not take vows lightly. Be faithful, but do not be blind about it, as Jephthah was over his rash vow,
who would have done better to say 'I was wrong' than to do worse by keeping his word and kill his daughter; and Agamemnon, the great leader of the Greeks, was as foolish,
which made Iphigenia weep for her lovely face and made both the wise and the foolish weep for her who heard of such a rite.
Be slower to move, Christians: do not be like a feather in every wind, and do not believe that any water at all can wash you clean.
You have the New Testament and the Old, and the shepherd of the Church who guides you; let this be enough for your salvation.
If evil greed cries something else at you, be men, and not mad sheep, so that the Jew among you does not laugh at you!
Do not do as the lamb does that leaves its mother's milk and, silly and skittish, fights with itself for its own amusement!"
So Beatrice to me, as I write it; then she turned, all longing, to that quarter where the world is most alive.
Her falling silent and her changed look put silence on my greedy wits, which already had new questions in front of them;
and like an arrow that strikes the mark before the string is quiet, so we ran on into the second kingdom, Mercury.
There I saw my lady grow so glad, as she entered the light of that heaven, that the planet itself was made brighter by it.
And if the star changed and laughed, what did I become, who by my very nature am changeable in every way!
As in a fishpond that is still and clear the fish draw towards anything that comes in from outside, if they take it for their food,
so I saw more than a thousand splendours draw towards us, and in each of them was heard: "Here is one who will increase our loves."
And as each came to us, the shade could be seen full of gladness in the bright blaze that came out of it.
Think, reader, if what begins here broke off now, how anguished your hunger to know more would be;
and by yourself you will see how I longed to hear from these what their condition was, as soon as they were plain to my eyes.
"Oh well-born soul, to whom grace grants that you should see the thrones of the eternal triumph before you leave the field of war,
we are kindled with the light that spreads through the whole of heaven; so, if you want to be enlightened about us, fill yourself as you please."
So it was said to me by one of those devout spirits; and Beatrice said: "Speak, speak confidently, and trust them as you would trust gods."
"I see well how you nest in your own light, and that it comes from your eyes, because it flashes when you smile;
but I do not know who you are, nor why, worthy soul, your place is in this sphere that the sun's rays hide from mortal eyes."
This I said, straight at the light which had spoken to me first; at which it became much brighter than it had been.
As the sun hides itself in its own excess of light, once the heat has eaten away the softening haze of the thick vapours,
so, by more gladness, the holy figure hid itself from me inside its own ray; and so, shut wholly in, it answered me
in the way the next canto sings.
"After Constantine moved the empire east, and turned the Roman eagle back against the course of the sun, which it had followed westward behind Aeneas, the ancient hero who married Lavinia,
for a hundred and a hundred years and more the bird of God stayed at the far edge of Europe, at Constantinople, near the mountains of Troy it first came out of;
and under the shadow of the holy feathers it governed the world there from hand to hand, and, changing so, came at last into mine.
Caesar I was, and am Justinian, who, moved by the first love I feel, God's, cleared the laws of what was excessive and useless.
And before I set my mind to that work I believed there was only one nature in Christ, the divine, and was content with that belief;
but the blessed Agapetus, who was the highest shepherd, set me straight towards the true faith with his own words.
I believed him; and what was in his faith I now see as clearly as you see that of two contradictory statements one is false and one true.
As soon as I walked in step with the Church, it pleased God by his grace to breathe the high work into me, and I gave myself wholly to it;
and I left the fighting to my general Belisarius, to whom the right hand of heaven was so closely joined that it was a sign I should rest from war.
There is my answer to your first question, who I am; but what the answer touched on forces me to add something more,
so that you may see with how much right men take sides against the sacred standard of the eagle, both those who claim it as their party's and those who fight it.
See how much valour has earned it reverence; and that began from the hour when young Pallas died fighting for Aeneas, to give it a kingdom.
You know that it made Alba Longa its home for three hundred years and more, until at the end three brothers fought three brothers for it, the Horatii and the Curiatii.
And you know what it did, from the rape of the Sabine women to the grief of Lucretia, under the seven kings, beating the neighbouring peoples all around.
You know what it did, carried by the great Romans against Brennus, against Pyrrhus, against the other princes and republics;
from which Torquatus, and Cincinnatus, who was named for his uncombed hair, and the Decii and the Fabii won the fame that I gladly keep fresh.
It brought down the pride of the Carthaginians who followed Hannibal over the Alpine rocks that you, river Po, come sliding down from.
Under it Scipio and Pompey triumphed as young men; and it was bitter to Fiesole, the hill above Florence, where you were born, when it was destroyed.
Then, near the time when all heaven willed to bring the world back to its own calm state, Caesar took it up by the will of Rome.
And what it did from the Var to the Rhine, the Isère saw and the Loire, and the Seine saw it, and every valley the Rhone is filled from.
What it did after he came out of Ravenna and jumped the Rubicon was such a flight that neither tongue nor pen could follow it.
He turned his troops towards Spain, then towards Durazzo, and struck Pharsalia so that the pain was felt on the hot Nile.
It saw again Antandros and the river Simois, where it had first set out, and the place at Troy where Hector lies; and then it shook itself out again, and that was bad for Ptolemy in Egypt.
From there it came down like lightning on King Juba in Africa, then wheeled round into your west, to Spain, where it heard the trumpet of Pompey's sons.
For what it did under the next man to carry it, Augustus, Brutus and Cassius howl in Hell, and Modena and Perugia were sorry they resisted.
Wretched Cleopatra weeps because of it still, who, fleeing before it, took from the snake a death both sudden and black.
With him it ran as far as the Red Sea shore; with him it set the world in such peace that the doors of the temple of Janus, the god of war, were locked.
But what the standard that makes me speak had done before, and was to do afterwards, through the mortal kingdom that lies under it,
becomes small and dim to look at, beside what it did in the hand of Tiberius, the third Caesar, if one looks with a clear eye and a pure heart;
for the living justice that breathes in me granted it, in that emperor's hand, the glory of carrying out God's own vengeance, the crucifixion.
Now marvel at what I say next: afterwards it ran with Titus to Jerusalem to take vengeance for that vengeance on the ancient sin.
And when the Lombards sank their teeth into Holy Church, Charlemagne conquered under its wings and came to her help.
Now you can judge of the men I accused above, and of their faults, which are the cause of all your troubles.
The Guelphs set the golden lilies of France against the standard of the whole empire, and the Ghibellines make it a party badge, so that it is hard to see which is more at fault.
Let the Ghibellines do their work, let them do it under some other standard; for a man always follows this one badly who parts justice from it;
and let this new Charles of Anjou not try to knock it down with his Guelphs, but let him fear the claws that have stripped the hide off a greater lion than him.
Many times before now the sons have wept for the father's fault, and let nobody believe that God will change his arms for their lilies!
This little star, Mercury, is decked with good spirits who were active in the world so that honour and fame might follow them;
and when desires lean that way, so far off the true road, the rays of true love have to climb less brightly.
But part of our gladness is in matching our wages against what we deserved, because we see they are neither smaller nor larger.
So the living justice sweetens our affection so much that it can never be twisted to any wickedness.
Different voices make sweet music; so different ranks in our life make a sweet harmony among these wheels.
And here inside this pearl shines the light of Romeo of Villeneuve, whose great and beautiful work was badly rewarded.
But the Provençal courtiers who worked against him got no laughter out of it; and a man walks badly who takes another man's good deeds as an injury to himself.
Raymond Berengar had four daughters, and every one of them married a king, and Romeo arranged it for him, a humble man and a foreigner.
And then slanderous words moved the count to demand his accounts from this honest man, who had turned every ten he was given into twelve;
then he went away, poor and old; and if the world knew the heart he had, begging his life a crust at a time,
the world praises him a great deal already, and would praise him more."
"Osanna, sanctus Deus sabaòth, superillustrans claritate tua felices ignes horum malacòth!" (Hosanna, holy God of hosts, lighting with your brightness the happy fires of these kingdoms.)
So I saw that spirit, Justinian, turn back to its own melody and sing, crowned with a double light, emperor and lawgiver;
and it and the others moved into their dance, and like the swiftest sparks they veiled themselves from me in sudden distance.
I was in doubt, and said "Tell her, tell her!" inside myself, "tell her," I said, "tell my lady, who quenches my thirst with her sweet drops."
But the reverence that rules the whole of me at the mere sound of her name, even at Be and at ice, bowed my head down again like a man falling asleep.
Beatrice did not bear me like that for long, and began, shining on me with a smile such as would make a man happy in the fire:
"By my own unerring judgment, I know what has set you thinking: how a just punishment, the crucifixion, could itself be justly punished, by the fall of Jerusalem.
but I will quickly untie your mind; and you listen, because my words will make you a present of a great teaching.
By refusing, for his own good, to accept a bridle on his will, Adam, the man who was never born, in damning himself damned all his descendants;
so that the human race lay sick down there for many centuries, in great error, until it pleased the Word of God to come down
to where he joined that nature to himself in one person, by the act alone of his own eternal love, that nature which had gone far
from its own maker. Now turn your eyes to the reasoning: this human nature, joined to its maker, was pure and good when it was created;
but by itself it had been banished out of paradise, because it turned aside from the way of truth and from its own life.
So the punishment of the cross, if it is measured against the human nature Christ took on, was the justest punishment there ever was;
and so nothing was ever so unjust, if you look at the person who suffered it, in whom that nature was joined to God.
So out of one act came different things: one death satisfied God's justice and the Jews' hatred both; the earth shook at it and heaven opened.
It should no longer seem hard to you when it is said that a just vengeance was afterwards avenged by a just court, the Romans under Titus.
But now I see your mind tied from thought to thought inside a knot which it waits with great longing to have untied.
You say: 'I make out well enough what I hear; but why God should have willed just this way for our redemption is hidden from me.'
This decree, brother, lies buried from the eyes of everyone whose wits have not grown up in the flame of love.
Still, because a great deal is aimed at this mark and little of it is made out, I shall say why this way was the worthiest.
The divine goodness, which has no envy in it, burns inside itself and throws out sparks, and so unfolds the eternal beauties.
What comes from it directly, with nothing in between, has no end afterwards, because the seal does not shift once it has stamped.
What rains down from it directly is wholly free, because it is not subject to the power of the stars, which came later.
It is more like God, and so it pleases him more; for the holy fire that shines on everything is most alive in what is most like itself.
The human creature has the advantage of all these gifts, and if one of them fails, it must fall from its own nobility.
Sin alone is what strips it of that freedom and makes it unlike the highest good, so that it is lit only a little by that light;
and it never comes back to its dignity unless it fills up what guilt emptied, paying for bad pleasure with just penalties.
Your nature, when the whole of it sinned in Adam, its seed, was stripped of these dignities, as it was of paradise;
nor could they be recovered, if you look carefully enough, by any road at all, without passing by one of these fords:
either that God, out of his courtesy alone, should have forgiven, or that man of himself should have made satisfaction for his own folly.
Now fix your eye inside the abyss of the eternal counsel, and hold yourself as closely fixed on my speech as you can.
Man could never, within his own limits, make satisfaction, since he could not go down in obedience with humility afterwards
as far as, in disobeying, he had meant to go up; and this is the reason why man was shut off from making satisfaction by himself.
So it fell to God to restore man to his whole life by his own ways — I mean by mercy, or by justice, or by both.
But because a work is the more welcome to the workman, the more it shows of the goodness of the heart it came out of,
the divine goodness that stamps the world was content to go by all its ways to lift you up again.
And between the last night of the world and its first day there never was, and never will be, an act so high or so magnificent, by either way;
for God was more generous in giving himself, so that man could lift himself again, than if he had simply forgiven and left it there;
and all the other ways fell short of justice, unless the Son of God had humbled himself to be made flesh.
Now, to fill every longing of yours properly, I go back to explain one more point to you, so that you may see there as I do.
You say: 'I see the water, I see the fire, the air and the earth and all their mixtures come to corruption and last only a little;
and these things were creatures too; so that, if what has been said is true, they ought to be safe from corruption.'
The angels, brother, and the pure heavens you are in were created directly, just as they are, in their whole being;
but the elements you have named, and the things that are made out of them, are shaped by a power that was itself created.
The matter they are made of was created; the shaping power in these stars that circle round them was created too.
The soul of every beast and of every plant is drawn by the rays and the motion of the holy stars out of matter that has that power in it;
but your life the highest goodness breathes into you directly, with nothing between, and makes it fall in love with him, so that it always longs for him afterwards.
And from this you can argue as well your resurrection, if you think again how human flesh was made at the time
when the first parents were both of them made."
The world used to believe, to its own harm, that Venus, the beautiful goddess of Cyprus, shot mad love down on it as she wheeled in the third heaven;
so that the ancient peoples in their ancient error did honour not only to her with sacrifice and with the cry of vows,
but honoured Dione too, and Cupid, the one as her mother and the other as her son, and told how Cupid had sat in Dido's lap and made her love Aeneas;
and from her, whom I begin this canto with, they took the name of the star, Venus, that courts the sun, now behind it and now in front.
I did not notice climbing into it, but that I was inside it my lady gave me faith enough, whom I saw grow more beautiful.
And as a spark is seen inside a flame, and as one voice is made out inside another when one holds and the other comes and goes,
so I saw inside that light other lamps moving in a circle, faster and slower, according, I believe, to how deeply each one sees God.
No winds ever came down from a cold cloud, visible or not, so fast that they would not have seemed hindered and slow
to anyone who had seen those divine lights come towards us, leaving the circling begun first among the high Seraphim;
and inside those that appeared foremost "Hosanna" sounded so that ever afterwards I have not been without the longing to hear it again.
Then one of them came nearer to us and began alone: "We are all ready for your pleasure, so that you may take joy in us.
We wheel with the heavenly princes in one circle and one wheeling and one thirst, the angels you once addressed, from the world, in a song of yours:
'You who by understanding move the third heaven'; and we are so full of love that, to please you, a little quiet will be no less sweet."
When my eyes had been offered in reverence to my lady, and she had made them content and sure of her,
they turned back to the light that had promised so much, and "Ah, who are you?" was my voice, stamped with great affection.
And how much greater and of what kind I saw it grow with a new gladness added, when I spoke, to the gladnesses it had!
Grown so, it said to me: "The world had me down there only a short time; and if it had been longer, much evil that is going to happen would not.
My own gladness keeps me hidden from you, shining round me and covering me like an animal wrapped in its own silk.
You loved me much, and you had good reason; for if I had stayed down there I would have shown you the fruit of my love, and not only the leaves.
Provence, the left bank the Rhone washes after the Sorgue has joined it, was waiting for me as its lord in due time,
and so was the kingdom of Naples, that horn of Italy which has for its towns Bari and Gaeta and Catona, from where the Tronto and the Verde run into the sea.
The crown of Hungary already shone on my forehead, the land the Danube waters after it leaves the German banks.
And beautiful Sicily, which grows dark with smoke between its two capes, over the gulf that gets the worst of the east wind
(not because the giant Typhoeus is buried there, as the poets say, but from sulphur forming), would still be waiting for her kings, descended through me from Charles of Anjou and from the emperor Rudolph,
if bad lordship, which always breaks the heart of the peoples under it, had not moved Palermo to shout 'Death, death!' at the French, in the Sicilian Vespers.
And if my brother Robert could foresee this, he would already be getting rid of the greedy, penniless Catalans in his service, before they damage him;
for truly there is need for provision to be made, by him or by another, so that no more load is put on his already loaded boat.
His nature, which came out mean from a generous father, would have needed officers around it who did not care about filling their own chests."
"Because I believe the high gladness your words pour into me, my lord, is seen by you as I see it,
there where every good ends and begins, it is dearer to me; and I hold this dear too, that you make it out by looking into God.
You have made me glad, so make this clear to me too, since by speaking you have moved me to doubt how a bitter thing can come from a sweet seed."
So I to him; and he to me: "If I can show you a truth, you will have your face towards what you ask, where you now have your back.
The good that turns and satisfies the whole kingdom you are climbing through makes its providence into a power working in these great stars.
And in the mind that is perfect of itself not only are the natures of things provided for, but their well-being along with them;
so that whatever this bow shoots falls disposed to a foreseen end, like something aimed at its own mark.
If it were not so, the heaven you walk through would produce its effects in such a way that they would not be works of art but ruins;
and that cannot be, unless the angelic minds that move these stars are defective, and the first mind defective too, for not making them perfect.
Do you want this truth made whiter still for you?" And I: "Not at all; for I see it is impossible that nature should tire in what is necessary."
At which he again: "Now tell me: would it be worse for a man on earth if he were not a citizen?" "Yes," I answered, "and here I ask for no reason why."
"And can he be one, if men do not live differently down there, doing different jobs? No; not if your master Aristotle writes the truth."
So he came deducing as far as this; then he concluded: "So the roots of your effects must be different:
so that one is born a lawgiver like Solon and another a king like Xerxes, another a priest like Melchizedek, and another an inventor like Daedalus, who lost his son while flying through the air.
The turning heavens, which are the seal stamped on our mortal wax, do their work well, but do not distinguish one family from another.
That is why Esau differs from Jacob from the womb; and why Romulus came from so low a father that men called him the son of Mars.
A child's nature would always follow the road its parents took, if divine providence did not overrule it.
Now what was behind you is in front of you; but so that you may know that I take pleasure in you, I want to wrap you in one more conclusion, a corollary.
Nature always makes a bad showing if it finds fortune out of tune with it, like any other seed outside its own country.
And if the world down there paid attention to the foundation nature lays, and followed it, the people would be good.
But you twist to religion a man born to gird on the sword, and make a king of one who is fit for preaching;
and so your track runs off the road."
After your Charles, beautiful Clemence, had enlightened me, he told me of the betrayals his own children would have to suffer;
but he said: "Say nothing, and let the years go round"; so I can say no more than this: a just weeping will follow the wrong that is going to be done to you.
And already the life of that holy light had turned back to the Sun that fills it as to the good that is enough for everything.
Ah, deluded souls, creatures without reverence, who twist your hearts away from such a good and set your foreheads towards emptiness!
And then another of those splendours came towards me, and showed its will to please me by growing brighter outside.
Beatrice's eyes, which were fixed on me as before, gave me the sure assurance of dear consent to what I longed for.
"Ah, quickly make up to me what I want, blessed spirit," I said, "and give me proof that I can reflect in you what I am thinking."
At which the light which was still new to me, out of its own depth, where it had been singing before, went on like one who takes pleasure in doing good:
"In that part of corrupt Italy that lies between Venice and the springs of the Brenta and the Piave,
there rises a hill, not very high, from which a firebrand came down once, the tyrant Ezzelino, and laid waste the whole country round.
I was born from one root with him: Cunizza I was called, and I shine here because the light of this star overcame me;
but I gladly forgive myself the cause of my being placed so low, and it does not trouble me, which perhaps would seem hard to your ordinary people to understand.
Of this shining and precious jewel of our heaven, the one nearest to me, the poet Folco, great fame is left on earth; and before it dies
this hundredth year will be five times over. See, then, whether a man ought to make himself excel, so that a second life, his fame, may follow the first.
And the mob that lives now between the Tagliamento and the Adige gives this no thought, and does not repent yet, though it has been beaten;
but soon Padua will turn the water that bathes Vicenza red at the marsh, with its own blood, because its people are stubborn against their duty;
and at Treviso, where the Sile and the Cagnano meet, a man rules and goes about with his head high for whom the net is already being woven.
Feltre will weep yet for the crime of its faithless bishop, which will be so foul that nobody was ever put in the prison of Malta for the like.
The vat would have to be very wide to hold the blood of the men of Ferrara that this obliging priest will hand over
to show himself a good party man; whoever weighed it ounce by ounce would be tired. And such gifts will suit the way that country lives.
Above us are mirrors, the angels you call Thrones, in which God's judgments shine back to us; so we are right to speak as we do."
Here she fell silent, and seemed to me to have turned to something else, by going back into the wheeling dance she had been in before.
The other glad spirit, which she had already told me was a precious thing, became in my sight like a fine ruby struck by the sun.
Up there a spirit grows brighter by being glad, as we laugh here; but down in Hell the shade grows darker outside as the mind grows sad.
"God sees everything, and your seeing goes into him," I said, "blessed spirit, so that no wish can steal itself away from you.
Why then does your voice, which always delights heaven together with the singing of those devout fires, the Seraphim, who make themselves a cowl of six wings,
not give me what I long for without my asking? I would not be waiting for you to ask, if I could see into you as you see into me."
"The greatest valley that water fills," his words began then, "apart from the ocean that garlands the earth, is the Mediterranean, and it
runs so far eastward between its quarrelling shores that the sky's noon-line at one end is the horizon at the other.
I lived on the shore of that valley between the Ebro in Spain and the Magra, which for a short stretch divides the Genoese from the Tuscans.
On almost the same line of sunset and sunrise sit Bougie in Africa and the town I came from, Marseilles, which once made its harbour warm with its own blood, when Caesar took it.
Folco those people called me to whom my name was known; and this heaven is stamped with me, as I was with it;
for Dido, wronging both her dead husband and Aeneas's dead wife, did not burn with love more than I did, as long as it suited my hair, before it went grey,
nor Phyllis of Thrace, who was deceived by Demophoon, nor Hercules when he had Iole shut in his heart.
Yet here there is no repenting, but laughter: not at the fault, which does not come back to mind, but at the divine power that ordered and provided everything.
Here we gaze into the art that makes so great a work so beautiful, and we make out the good by which the world above turns the world below.
But so that you may carry away all the wishes that are born in this sphere fulfilled, I must go on further still.
You want to know who is in this light which sparkles here beside me like a ray of the sun in clear water.
Know now that Rahab, the harlot of Jericho, is at rest in there; and being joined to our order, she holds the highest rank in it.
Before any other soul was taken up into the triumph of Christ, she came to this heaven, where the shadow cast by your world comes to its point.
It was right to leave her in some heaven as a trophy of that high victory which was won with both palms, nailed to the cross,
because she helped Joshua to his first victory in the Holy Land, which the pope hardly remembers now.
Your city, Florence, which was planted by the one who first turned his back on his own maker, the devil, and whose envy has caused so much weeping,
mints and spreads the accursed flower, the gold florin, that has led the sheep and the lambs astray, because it has turned the shepherd into a wolf.
For its sake the Gospel and the great teachers of the Church are abandoned, and only the books of canon law are studied, as their well-thumbed margins show.
This is what the pope and the cardinals attend to; their thoughts do not go to Nazareth, where Gabriel opened his wings.
But the Vatican and the other holy places of Rome, which have been the burial ground of the soldiers who followed Peter, the martyrs,
will soon be freed of this adultery."
Looking into his Son with the Love that the two of them breathe out eternally, the first Power, which no words can speak,
made whatever wheels through mind and space with such order that nobody can look at it without tasting something of him.
Lift your eyes with me, then, reader, to the high wheels of the sky, straight to the point where the sun's yearly path crosses the daily turning of the heavens;
and there begin to gaze with love at the art of that master who loves it so within himself that his eye never leaves it.
See how the slanting circle that carries the planets, the zodiac, branches off from that point, to serve the world that needs them.
For if their road were not turned aslant, much power in the sky would be wasted, and almost every power of life down here would be dead;
and if the slant were more or less far from the straight, a great deal of the world's order would be lacking, both below and above.
Now stay in your seat, reader, and think over what you have tasted here, if you want to enjoy it well before you tire.
I have set it before you: feed yourself now; for the subject I have been made the scribe of is pulling all my attention to itself.
The greatest minister of nature, who stamps the world with the power of heaven and measures time for us with his light,
standing in that part of the sky I spoke of above, was wheeling through the spring spirals in which he rises earlier every day;
and I was with him; but of the climbing I noticed nothing, except as a man notices a first thought before it comes.
It is Beatrice who leads like that from good to better, so suddenly that her act does not stretch itself out in time.
How bright in itself it must have been, what I found inside the sun when I entered it, if it showed against the sun not by colour but by light!
Though I called on wit and art and practice, I could not tell it so that it could ever be imagined; but one may believe it, and long to see it.
And if our imaginations are too low for such a height, it is no wonder; for there was never an eye that went beyond the sun.
Such was the fourth household of the high Father, there in the fourth heaven; and he satisfies it always, showing it how he breathes out the Spirit and how he begets the Son.
And Beatrice began: "Give thanks, give thanks to the Sun of the angels, who by his grace has raised you to this one that you can see."
No mortal heart was ever so ready for devotion, and to give itself to God with all its liking so quickly,
as I became at those words; and all my love was so set in him that Beatrice was eclipsed in forgetting.
It did not displease her; but she laughed at it so that the splendour of her laughing eyes divided my mind, that had been one, among more things.
I saw more lights, living and overcoming, make a centre of us and a crown of themselves, sweeter in voice than shining in look:
so we sometimes see the moon wear a girdle, when the air is so full of mist that it holds the thread that makes her halo.
In the court of heaven, which I come back from, are found many jewels so precious and beautiful that they cannot be carried out of the kingdom;
and the song of those lights was one of them. Whoever does not grow wings to fly up there can wait for news of it from the dumb.
Then, when those burning suns had wheeled three times round us, singing so, like stars near the fixed poles,
they seemed to me like women who have not broken off the dance, but stop, silent, listening until they have caught the new notes.
And inside one of them I heard begin: "Since the ray of grace, at which true love is kindled and which then grows by loving,
shines so brightly in you, so multiplied, that it leads you up the stair that nobody comes down without going up again,
whoever refused you the wine of his flask for your thirst would be no more at liberty than water is that does not run down to the sea.
You want to know what plants this garland is made of, that gazes lovingly round the beautiful lady who strengthens you for heaven.
I was one of the lambs of the holy flock that Dominic leads along the road where they fatten well if they do not stray.
This one nearest me on the right was my brother and my master, and he is Albert of Cologne, and I am Thomas Aquinas.
If you want to be sure about all the others so, come along after my speaking with your eyes going round the blessed wreath.
The next flame comes from the smile of Gratian, who served both courts, the Church's and the world's, so well that paradise is pleased with him.
The next, who adorns our choir after him, is Peter Lombard, who, like the poor widow with her two coins, offered Holy Church all the treasure he had.
The fifth light, which is the most beautiful among us, breathes with such love that the whole world down there hungers for news of it, whether it was saved:
inside it is the high mind of Solomon, into which such deep wisdom was put that, if the Scripture is true, no second ever rose to see so much.
Beside it, see the light of that candle, Dionysius, who, in the flesh below, saw furthest into the nature and the orders of the angels.
In the next little light there smiles Orosius, the historian who pleaded the Christian cause, whose Latin Augustine drew on for his own great book.
Now if you draw the eye of your mind from light to light behind my praises, you are left already thirsty for the eighth.
Inside it the holy soul of Boethius takes joy in seeing every good, and makes the deceiving world plain to whoever reads his Consolation properly.
The body he was driven out of lies down there at Pavia, in the church of the golden ceiling; and he came from martyrdom and exile to this peace.
See flaming further on the burning breath of Isidore, of Bede and of Richard of Saint Victor, who at contemplation was more than a man.
This one from whom your look comes back to me is the light of a spirit to whom, in his heavy thinking, death seemed slow in coming:
that is the eternal light of Siger of Brabant, who, lecturing in the Street of Straw in Paris, reasoned out truths that earned him envy."
Then, like a clock that calls us at the hour when the Church, the bride of God, gets up to sing matins to her bridegroom so that he will love her,
one wheel in its works pulling and driving the next, sounding ting, ting, with a note so sweet that a spirit ready for it swells with love,
so I saw the glorious wheel move and give voice to voice, in a tuning and a sweetness that cannot be known
except there, where joy is made everlasting.
Oh the senseless cares of mortals, how faulty the reasoning that makes you beat your wings downward!
One was going after the law and another after medicine, one chasing a career in the Church, and one after power, by force or by cunning,
one to rob and one to public business, one wearing himself out wrapped in the pleasure of the flesh, and one giving himself to idleness,
while I, loosed from all these things, was up in heaven with Beatrice, welcomed so gloriously.
When each of them had gone back to the point of the circle where he had been before, he stopped, like a candle in a candlestick.
And I heard, inside that light which had spoken to me first, a beginning, smiling, and growing purer as it spoke:
"As I shine again with his ray, so, looking into the eternal light, I learn the reasons your thoughts come from.
You are in doubt, and you want my speech sorted out again in language so open and so plain that it lies flat to your understanding,
where I said before, 'where they fatten well', and where I said, 'no second ever rose'; and here one must distinguish carefully.
The providence that governs the world with a wisdom in which every created eye is defeated before it can reach the bottom,
so that the Church, the bride of him who with loud cries on the cross married her with his blessed blood, should go towards her beloved
sure in herself and also more faithful to him, ordained two princes to help her, Francis and Dominic, to be her guides on either side.
The one was all burning love, like a Seraph; the other was on earth, for his wisdom, a splendour of light, like a Cherub.
I shall speak of the one, because in praising either of them one speaks of both, whichever a man takes, for their works were to one end.
Between the river Tupino and the stream that comes down from the hill where the blessed Ubaldo chose to live, a fertile slope hangs from a high mountain,
from which Perugia feels cold and heat through the Porta Sole; and behind it Nocera and Gualdo weep under a heavy yoke.
On this slope, where it eases its steepness most, a sun rose on the world, as the real sun sometimes rises out of the Ganges.
So whoever speaks of that place should not say Assisi, which is too small a word, but the East, if he wants to name it properly.
He was not yet far from his rising when he began to make the earth feel some comfort from his great power;
for while still a young man he went to war with his father for the sake of a lady whom nobody, any more than death, willingly lets in;
and before the bishop's court, in his father's presence, he was married to her; and from day to day he loved her more.
She, widowed of her first husband, Christ, had stood despised and unnoticed for eleven hundred years and more, with nobody asking for her, until he came;
nor did it help her that men had heard how Caesar, who terrified the whole world, found her unafraid of him in the hut of Amyclas, the poor fisherman;
nor did it help that she had been so constant and so fierce that, while Mary stayed at the foot of it, she climbed up and wept with Christ on the cross.
But so that I do not go on too obscurely: the two lovers in this long speech of mine are Francis, and Lady Poverty.
Their harmony and their glad faces, the love and the wonder and the sweet looking, made men's thoughts turn holy;
so much that the venerable Bernard of Quintavalle was the first to take off his shoes and run after such peace, and thought himself slow even as he ran.
Oh riches nobody knows of! oh fruitful good! Giles takes off his shoes, Sylvester takes off his shoes, and follow the bridegroom, the bride pleases them so.
Then that father and that master goes off with his lady and with the household which was already tying on the humble cord.
And he did not lower his eyes in shame at being only the son of Pietro Bernardone, a cloth merchant, nor at looking so astonishingly like a beggar;
but like a king he laid his hard purpose before Pope Innocent, and had from him the first seal of approval on his order.
When the poor people had grown behind this man, whose marvellous life would be better sung in the glory of heaven,
the holy purpose of this chief shepherd was crowned a second time by the Holy Spirit, through Pope Honorius.
And then, out of thirst for martyrdom, when he had preached Christ and those who followed him in the proud presence of the Sultan,
and finding the people too unripe for conversion, and not wanting to stay for nothing, he came back to reap the harvest of the Italian fields;
on the harsh rock of La Verna, between the Tiber and the Arno, he took from Christ the last seal, the wounds of the cross, which his own limbs carried for two years.
When it pleased the one who allotted him so much good to draw him up to the reward he had earned by making himself small,
he commended his dearest lady to his brothers, as to his rightful heirs, and ordered them to love her faithfully;
and out of her lap, lying naked on the bare ground, his glorious soul chose to set off, going back to its own kingdom, and it wanted no other bier for its body.
Think now what sort of man he was who was a worthy colleague to Francis in keeping Peter's boat, the Church, on a straight course in the high sea;
and that man was Dominic, our founder; so that you can see that whoever follows him as he commands is loading good merchandise.
But his flock has grown greedy for new food, so that they cannot help scattering over different pastures;
and the further his sheep go from him, wandering and remote, the emptier of milk they come back to the fold.
There are certainly some who fear the danger and keep close to the shepherd; but they are so few that it would take very little cloth to make their cloaks.
Now, if my words have not been faint, if your hearing has been attentive, if you call back to mind what has been said,
your wish will be partly satisfied, because you will see the tree that is being chipped away, my own order, and you will see what the correction in my words meant:
'where they fatten well, if they do not stray'."
As soon as the blessed flame had taken up its last word to speak it, the holy wheel of lights began to turn like a millstone;
and it had not wheeled all the way round before another closed it in a circle, and matched motion to motion and song to song —
a song that beats our muses and our sirens, sung through those sweet throats, as the light itself beats its own reflection.
As two rainbows, parallel and of the same colours, arch through a thin cloud when Juno gives the order to Iris, her messenger,
the outer one born from the inner, the way Echo's voice is born from another's, that wandering girl whom love consumed as the sun consumes vapours,
and make people here foretell, because of the pact God made with Noah, that the world will never be flooded again:
so the two garlands of those everlasting roses turned about us, and so the outer answered the inner.
When the dancing and the other great festival, both of the singing and of the flaming of light with light, joyful and gentle,
came to rest together at one point and at one will, just as eyes must open and close together at the pleasure that moves them,
out of the heart of one of the new lights a voice came that turned me towards it as a compass needle turns to the north star;
and it began: "The love that makes me beautiful draws me to speak of the other leader, Dominic, since on his account my own, Francis, has been so well spoken of here.
It is right that where the one is, the other should be brought in, so that, as they campaigned together, so their glory should shine together.
Christ's army, which had cost so dear to arm again with his blood, was moving behind its standard slowly, distrustful and thinned out,
when the emperor who reigns for ever provided for his soldiers, who were in danger, by grace alone, and not because they deserved it;
and, as has been said, came to his bride's help with two champions, at whose doing, at whose speaking the strayed people gathered again.
In that part of the world where the sweet west wind rises to open the new leaves that Europe is seen dressing itself in again,
not very far from the beating of the Atlantic waves behind which, at the end of its long run, the sun sometimes hides itself from everybody,
sits fortunate Calahorra, in Spain, under the protection of the great shield of Castile, on which the lion is both under the castle and over it;
inside it was born the loving lover of the Christian faith, the holy athlete, kind to his own and harsh to his enemies;
and as soon as his mind was created it was so filled with living power that while she still carried him it made his mother a prophet.
When the marriage between him and the Faith had been finished at the holy font, where they endowed each other with mutual salvation,
his godmother, who answered for him at the font, saw in a dream the marvellous fruit that was to come from him and his heirs;
and, so that he might be in his very name what he was, a spirit moved from here to name him Dominic, the Lord's own, after the one he wholly belonged to.
Dominic he was called; and I speak of him as of the labourer whom Christ chose for his garden, to help him.
He truly seemed a messenger and a servant of Christ, for the first love that showed itself in him was for the first counsel Christ gave, to be poor.
Many a time his nurse found him on the ground, silent and awake, as if he were saying: 'I have come for this.'
Oh his father, truly Felix, the happy one! Oh his mother, truly Joan, the grace of God, if the names mean what men say they mean!
Not for worldly gain, the reason men now toil over the law books of the Ostian and the medicine of Thaddeus, but for love of the true manna, the bread of heaven,
he made himself a great teacher in a short time, and set about going round the vineyard of the Church, which withers quickly if the vine-dresser is bad.
And of the papal seat, which was once kinder to the honest poor (not of itself, but through the man who sits in it now and degenerates),
he asked no licence to pay back two or three for six, no claim on the next vacant church living, no share of the tithes, which belong to God's poor,
but leave to fight against the erring world for the faith, the seed from which the twenty-four lights around you here have grown.
Then, with learning and with will together, he set out with the apostolic office like a torrent driven from a high spring;
and his force struck against the heretical thickets most fiercely there where the resistance was thickest.
From him afterwards various streams were made which water the catholic garden, so that its bushes stand more alive.
If such was one wheel of the chariot in which Holy Church defended herself and won her civil war in the field,
the excellence of the other wheel, Francis, should be quite clear to you, since Thomas spoke of him so courteously before I began.
But the track that wheel's rim cut has been abandoned by his followers, so that there is mould in the cask where the crust of good wine used to be.
His household, which set out with their feet straight in his footprints, is so turned about that the front foot lands on the heel of the one behind;
and the harvest of this bad tilling will soon be seen, when the weeds complain that the granary is shut against them.
I grant that whoever searched our order leaf by leaf would still find a page where he could read 'I am what I always was';
but it will not be from Casale or from Acquasparta, the two men who approach the rule in such a way that one runs from it and the other pulls it too tight.
I am the living soul of Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, who in great offices always put worldly cares second.
Illuminato and Augustine are here, who were among the first barefoot poor men who made themselves God's friends in the cord.
Hugh of Saint Victor is here with them, and Peter Comestor, the Book-eater, and Peter of Spain, whose fame shines down below in his twelve little books of logic;
Nathan the prophet, and Chrysostom the archbishop, and Anselm, and that Donatus who was willing to set his hand to grammar, the first of the arts.
Rabanus is here, and shining beside me is the Calabrian abbot Joachim, endowed with a prophetic spirit.
The glowing courtesy of brother Thomas and his measured speech moved me to praise so great a champion of the faith;
and it moved this company along with me."
Let him imagine, who longs to understand well what I saw now — and let him hold the image while I speak, like a firm rock —
the fifteen brightest stars, which in different quarters so quicken the sky with their clearness that it beats through every thickness of the air;
let him imagine the seven stars of the Great Bear, which our sky has room for by night and by day, so that they never set as the pole turns;
let him imagine the two stars at the mouth of the Little Bear's horn, which begins at the point of the axle round which the outermost heaven goes,
and that all twenty-four have made two circles of themselves in heaven like the crown that Ariadne, the daughter of Minos, was turned into when she felt the chill of death;
and that each has its rays inside the other, and that both turn in such a way that one goes first and the other after;
and he will have something like the shadow of the real constellation and of the double dance that was circling the point where I was —
since it is as far beyond anything we know as the fastest heaven, which outruns all the others, is beyond the crawling of the Chiana, the slowest river in Tuscany.
There they sang no hymn to Bacchus and none to Apollo, but of three persons in one divine nature, and of that nature and the human joined in one person, Christ.
The singing and the wheeling finished their measure, and those holy lights attended to us, making themselves happy from care to care.
Then the light in which the marvellous life of God's poor man Francis had been told to me, Thomas Aquinas, broke the silence among those spirits who agreed as one,
and said: "When one sheaf is threshed, when its seed is already stored, sweet love invites me to thresh the other.
You believe that into Adam, from whose breast the rib was drawn to shape the beautiful face of Eve, whose taste for the apple cost the whole world dear,
and into Christ, whose breast, pierced by the lance, paid so much, both before that wound and after it, that it outweighs every fault on the scales,
all the light that human nature is allowed to have was poured by the Power that made both of them;
and so you wonder at what I said above, when I told you that the good soul shut in the fifth light, Solomon, never had a second, never had an equal.
Now open your eyes to what I answer you, and you will see that your believing and my saying come together in the truth like the centre in a circle.
What cannot die and what can die are nothing but the reflected light of that idea, the Word, which our Lord, the Father, by loving, brings to birth;
for that living light, the Son, which so pours out from its shining source that it is never parted from the Father, nor from the Love that makes a third with them,
gathers its shining, out of its own goodness, as if in mirrors, in the nine orders of angels, while it remains eternally one.
From there it comes down, stage by stage, to the lowest powers, growing so much weaker that it makes nothing but short-lived, chance things;
and by chance things I mean the things that are born, which the wheeling heavens produce with seed and without seed.
Their wax, the matter, and the heavens that shape it, are never twice the same; and so under the seal of the idea the light shines through more in one thing and less in another.
From this it comes that one and the same tree, by species, gives better and worse fruit; and that you are born with different wits.
If the wax were exactly ready and the heaven at the top of its power, the light of the seal would show entire;
but nature always gives it short, working like the artist who has the habit of the art and a trembling hand.
But if the warm Love itself prepares the wax and stamps it with the clear vision of the first Power directly, then all perfection is gained there.
So the earth was once made worthy of all the perfection of a living creature; so the Virgin was made pregnant;
so that I agree with your opinion that human nature never was, and never will be, what it was in those two persons, Adam and Christ.
Now, if I went no further than that, your next words would be: 'Then how could Solomon be without an equal?'
But so that what is not yet clear may become clear, think who he was, and what moved him to ask what he asked, when God told him 'Ask.'
I have not spoken so that you cannot see that he was a king, and asked for wisdom so that he might be a king who was equal to it;
He did not ask to know how many angels move the heavens up here, nor whether a necessary premise and a chance one ever make a necessary conclusion;
nor whether a first motion has to be granted, nor whether a triangle can be drawn inside a half circle that has no right angle.
So if you take note of this, and of what I said before, the peerless wisdom my words were aimed at is a king's wisdom, the prudence to rule;
and if you look clearly at the words 'ever rose', you will see they apply only to kings, who are many, while the good ones are rare.
Take what I said with this distinction, and it can stand beside what you believe about Adam, the first father, and about Christ, our Beloved.
And let this always be lead on your feet, to make you move slowly, like a tired man, both to the yes and to the no that you do not see:
for he is very low among the fools who affirms and denies without distinction in the one case as in the other;
because it often happens that a hasty opinion leans the wrong way, and then pride in it ties the understanding down.
A man who fishes for the truth without the art of it puts out from shore far worse than uselessly, because he does not come back the man he was when he set off.
And of this there are open proofs in the world: the philosophers Parmenides, Melissus and Bryson, and many others, who went along and did not know where they were going;
so did the heretics Sabellius and Arius, and those fools who were like sword-blades held up to the Scriptures, reflecting straight faces back crooked.
Nor let people be too confident in judging, like a man who reckons up the corn in the field before it is ripe;
for I have seen the briar first show itself stiff and fierce all winter, and afterwards carry the rose on its top;
and I have seen a ship run straight and fast over the sea for the whole of its voyage, and perish at the end, entering the harbour mouth.
Do not let every Bertha and Martin in the street believe, because they see one man steal and another give alms, that they can see how God will judge them;
for that one may rise, and this one may fall."
From the centre to the rim, and so from the rim to the centre, the water moves in a round vessel, according as it is struck outside or inside:
that picture dropped suddenly into my mind, as soon as the glorious spirit of Thomas fell silent,
because of the likeness between his speaking from the rim of the circle and Beatrice's from the centre, who was pleased to begin like this after him:
"This man needs — and he does not tell you so, either with his voice or by thinking it yet — to go to the root of another truth.
Tell him whether the light your beings flower with will stay with you for ever, as it is now;
and if it does stay, tell him how, once your bodies are given back to you at the resurrection, it can be that it will not hurt your eyes."
As dancers going round in a ring, driven and drawn by more gladness, sometimes lift their voices and quicken their movements,
so, at that ready and devout request, the holy circles showed a new joy in their wheeling and in their marvellous note.
Whoever complains that we die here in order to live up there has not seen the refreshment of the eternal rain.
That One and Two and Three, the Trinity, which always lives and always reigns in Three and in Two and in One, bounded by nothing, and bounding everything,
was sung three times by each of those spirits with such a melody as would be a just reward for any merit.
And in the most godlike light of the smaller circle, Solomon's, I heard a modest voice, perhaps such as the angel's was to Mary,
answer: "As long as the festival of paradise lasts, so long will our love throw such a garment round us.
Its brightness follows from our love's heat, our love from our seeing, and our seeing is as great as the grace it is given, beyond anything it deserves.
When the flesh, glorious and holy, is put on again, our person will be more pleasing for being all there;
so that what the highest good gives us of free light will be increased, the light that fits us to see him;
from which our seeing must grow, and the ardour that is kindled from it grow, and the ray that comes from that grow.
But as a coal that gives out flame still outshines it with its own white heat, so that the coal is what you see,
so this brightness which already surrounds us will be beaten in appearance by the flesh which the earth is covering over all this while;
nor will so much light be able to tire us, for the organs of the body will be strong for everything that can delight us."
Both choirs seemed to me so quick and eager to say "Amen" that they showed clearly their longing for their dead bodies —
perhaps not only for their own, but for their mothers, for their fathers, and for the others who were dear to them before they became everlasting flames.
And there, all round, of a brightness equal to what was there, a radiance was born above it, after the manner of a horizon growing light.
And as at the coming on of early evening new appearances begin through the sky, so that the sight seems, and does not seem, true,
it seemed to me that I began to see new substances there, and that they made a ring outside the other two circumferences.
Oh true sparkling of the Holy Spirit! how suddenly it became burning white before my eyes, which were beaten and could not bear it!
But Beatrice showed herself to me so beautiful and so smiling that it must be left among the sights that the mind did not follow.
From there my eyes took strength again to lift themselves; and I saw myself carried across, alone with my lady, into a higher salvation.
I knew well that I had been raised by the burning laughter of the planet Mars, which seemed to me redder than usual.
With my whole heart, and in that language of the heart that is the same in everybody, I made an offering to God such as suited this new grace.
And the ardour of the sacrifice was not yet spent out of my breast before I knew that the offering had been accepted and favoured;
for splendours appeared to me inside two rays with such brightness and such redness that I said: "O Sun, who dress them so!"
As the Milky Way, marked out by lesser and greater lights, shows white between the poles of the world, so that it makes even wise men wonder what it is,
so those rays, made into constellations, formed in the depth of Mars the venerable sign that two lines make when they cross a circle at right angles: a cross.
Here my memory beats my art; for that cross was flashing out Christ, and I cannot find any likeness worthy of it;
but whoever takes up his cross and follows Christ will excuse me still for what I leave out, seeing Christ lighten in that whiteness.
From arm to arm, and between the top and the foot, lights were moving, sparkling hard as they came together and as they passed:
just as we see here, straight and slanting, fast and slow, changing as they go, the motes of dust, long and short,
move through a beam of sunlight that stripes the shade people rig up, with cleverness and craft, to keep the sun off.
And as a viol and a harp, strung in tune with many strings, make a sweet ringing for someone who cannot make out the notes,
so from the lights which appeared to me there a melody gathered along the cross which carried me away, though I did not understand the hymn.
I knew well that it was of high praises, because "Rise again" and "Conquer" came to me as they do to a man who hears and does not understand.
I fell so much in love with it there that until then there had been nothing that bound me with such sweet bonds.
Perhaps my words seem too bold, setting the pleasure of those beautiful eyes below it, the eyes in which my longing comes to rest as it gazes;
but whoever considers that her eyes, the living seals of all beauty, have more power the higher one climbs, and that I had not yet turned to look at them there,
can excuse me for what I accuse myself of in order to excuse myself, and can see that I am telling the truth: for that holy pleasure is not being shut out here,
because, as one climbs, it only becomes purer.
A kindly will, into which a love that breathes rightly always dissolves, as greed dissolves into a crooked one,
put silence on that sweet lyre, and quieted the holy strings that the right hand of heaven slackens and draws.
How could those spirits be deaf to just prayers, when they agreed to fall silent on purpose to give me the wish to pray to them?
It is right that a man should grieve without end who, for love of a thing that does not last eternally, strips himself of that love.
As, through the calm and clear evening sky, a sudden fire runs now and then, moving eyes that had been steady,
and seems a star changing its place, except that from the quarter where it is kindled nothing is lost, and it lasts only a moment:
so, from the arm that stretches to the right, a star ran to the foot of that cross out of the constellation shining there;
and the gem did not leave its ribbon, but ran along the radial band, so that it looked like fire behind alabaster.
Just so lovingly did the shade of Anchises come forward, if Virgil, our greatest poet, deserves belief, when in Elysium he made out his son Aeneas.
"O sanguis meus, o superinfusa gratïa Deï, sicut tibi cui bis unquam celi ianüa reclusa?" (O my blood, o grace of God poured out from above; to whom, as to you, was heaven's gate ever opened twice?)
So that light spoke, in Latin; and I attended to him; then I turned my face back to my lady, and I was astonished on the one side and on the other,
for such a laughter was burning inside her eyes that I thought I had touched with mine the bottom of my glory and of my paradise.
Then the spirit, a joy to hear and to see, added to his beginning things I did not understand, so deeply did he speak;
nor did he hide himself from me by choice, but by necessity, because his thought went up above the reach of mortals.
And when the bow of his burning affection had been so unbent that his speech came down towards the mark of our understanding,
the first thing I understood was this: "Blessed be you, Three and One, who are so courteous to my descendant!"
And he went on: "A long and welcome hunger, which I got from reading in the great book of God's foreknowledge, where no page is ever altered,
you have satisfied for me, my son, inside this light in which I speak to you, by the favour of the lady who gave you wings for the high flight.
You believe that your thought flows to me from God, who is first, just as five and six follow from one, once one is known;
and so you do not ask me who I am nor why I seem to you more full of gladness than any other in this joyful crowd.
You believe the truth; for the small and the great of this life gaze into that mirror in which your thought is spread out before you have thought it;
but so that the holy love in which I keep watch with everlasting sight, and which makes me thirsty with sweet longing, may be filled up better,
let your voice, sure and bold and glad, sound out the will, sound out the desire, to which my answer is already decreed."
I turned to Beatrice, and she heard me before I spoke, and smiled a sign at me that made my wanting grow wings.
Then I began like this: "Love and understanding, as soon as God, in whom all is equal, appeared to you, became of one weight in each of you,
because the sun which lit you and burned you is so equal in its heat and in its light that all comparisons fall short.
But in mortals the will and the means to carry it out, for a reason that is plain to you, have wings of unequal length;
so that I, who am mortal, feel that unevenness in myself, and so I can give thanks for this fatherly welcome with my heart alone, and not with words.
I do beg you, living topaz who set this precious jewel with your gem, to satisfy me with your name."
"O my branch, in whom I took pleasure even while I was only waiting for you, I was your root": that was how he began his answer.
Then he said to me: "The man your family takes its name from, who for a hundred years and more has gone round the first terrace of the mountain of Purgatory, among the proud,
was my son and your great-grandfather: it is only right that you should shorten his long labour with the works you do.
Florence, inside the old circle of walls from which she still hears the bells for terce and nones, stood at peace, sober and modest.
She had no chain and no coronet, no embroidered gowns, no girdle more to be looked at than the woman.
A daughter's birth did not yet frighten her father, for the time of marriage and the dowry did not run past the measure on either side.
There were no great houses standing empty; Sardanapalus, the king of luxury, had not yet come there to show what can be done in a bedroom.
Your hill of Uccellatoio had not yet outdone Monte Mario at Rome for the view of palaces; and as Florence has outdone Rome on the way up, so she will outdo her on the way down.
I saw Bellincion Berti go about belted with leather and bone, and his wife come from the mirror with her face unpainted;
and I saw the men of the Nerli and of the Vecchio content with plain skins, and their wives at the spindle and the flax.
Oh lucky women! Each of them was sure of being buried in her own city, and none was yet left alone in bed while her husband traded in France.
One kept watch, minding the cradle, and, comforting, used the baby-talk that first delights fathers and mothers;
another, drawing the wool off the distaff, told her household stories of the Trojans, and of Fiesole, and of Rome.
A loose woman like Cianghella, or a crook like Lapo Salterello, would have been thought as great a wonder then as a Cincinnatus or a Cornelia would be now.
To such a restful, such a beautiful life of citizens, to such a trustworthy citizenship, to such a sweet lodging,
Mary gave me, when my mother called on her in the cries of childbirth; and in your ancient Baptistery I became at once a Christian and Cacciaguida.
Moronto was my brother, and Eliseo; my wife came to me from the valley of the Po, and your surname was made from that.
Afterwards I followed the Emperor Conrad; and he girded me with his knighthood, I came so far into his favour by doing well.
I followed him on crusade against the wickedness of that religion whose people hold the Holy Land that is yours by right, through the fault of the popes.
There I was set free from the deceiving world by that foul people, who killed me; the world whose love befouls so many souls;
and I came from martyrdom to this peace."
Oh our poor little nobility of blood! If you make people glory in you down here, where our love is so feeble,
it will never surprise me again: for there where desire is not twisted, I mean in heaven, I gloried in it myself.
You are indeed a cloak that quickly shortens: so that, unless something is added day by day, time goes round it with the shears.
I began again, addressing him with the respectful 'you' that Rome was the first to offer, and that the Romans themselves keep up least of all;
at which Beatrice, who had drawn a little apart, smiled, like the lady-in-waiting who coughed at Guinevere's first recorded lapse with Lancelot.
I began: "You are my father; you give me all boldness to speak; you lift me so that I am more than I am.
My mind is filled with gladness by so many streams that it makes a joy of itself because it can bear it and not break.
Tell me, then, my dear first fruit, who were your ancestors, and what year it was when you were a boy;
tell me about Florence, the sheepfold of Saint John, how big it was then, and which families were worthy of the highest seats."
As a coal quickens into flame at the breathing of the winds, so I saw that light shine out at my coaxing;
and as it grew more beautiful to my eyes, so, with a sweeter and gentler voice, but not in the Florentine we speak now,
it said to me: "From the day the angel said 'Ave' to Mary to the birth in which my mother, who is a saint now, was delivered of me,
this planet Mars came five hundred and eighty times back to the sign of the Lion to be kindled again under his paw: I was born in the year 1091.
My ancestors and I were born in the quarter where the runners in your yearly race first reach the last ward of the city.
Let this be enough to hear about my forebears: who they were, and where they came from, is more decent to keep quiet about than to talk of.
All the men of fighting age who lived then between the statue of Mars and the Baptistery were a fifth of the number living now.
But the citizenry, which is mixed now with Campi and Certaldo and Figline, was seen pure down to the humblest workman.
Oh how much better it would be for those people I speak of to be your neighbours, and for you to have your boundary at Galluzzo and at Trespiano,
than to have them inside the walls and put up with the stink of the peasant from Aguglione, and the one from Signa, who already has a sharp eye for a crooked deal!
If the churchmen, who go furthest wrong of anyone in the world, had not been a stepmother to the emperor, but kind to him as a mother is to her son,
then a certain man who has become a Florentine, and changes money and trades, would have been sent back to Simifonti, where his grandfather went round begging;
Montemurlo would still belong to the Counts; the Cerchi would be in the parish of Acone, and the Buondelmonti perhaps in Valdigreve.
The mixing of people has always been the beginning of a city's harm, as food piled on food is of your body's;
and a blind bull falls sooner than a blind lamb; and often one sword cuts more and better than five.
If you look at Luni and Urbisaglia, how they have gone, and how Chiusi and Senigallia are going the same way after them,
then to hear how families come undone will seem to you neither new nor hard, since even cities come to an end.
All your things have their death, as you do; but in some it is hidden, because they last long and lives are short.
And as the wheeling of the heaven of the moon covers and uncovers the shores without stopping, so Fortune does with Florence:
so that what I shall say about the high Florentines, whose fame is hidden in time, should not seem a marvellous thing.
I saw the Ughi, and I saw the Catellini, the Filippi, the Greci, the Ormanni and the Alberichi, already going down, illustrious citizens;
and I saw, as great as they were old, the man of the Sannella and the man of the Arca, and Soldanieri and Ardinghi and Bostichi.
Over the gate that at present is loaded with a new treachery, the Cerchi, of such weight that the boat of the city will soon be sunk by it,
were the Ravignani, from whom Count Guido is descended, and everyone who has taken the name of high Bellincione since.
The man of the Pressa knew already how a city should be governed, and Galigaio already had the gilded hilt and pommel in his house.
Great already were the Pigli, with the column of fur on their shield, and the Sacchetti, Giuochi, Fifanti and Barucci and Galli, and the Chiaramontesi, who still blush for the false bushel.
The stock from which the Calfucci were born was already great, and the Sizii and Arrigucci had already been raised to the highest offices.
Oh what men I saw among the Uberti, who are undone by their own pride! And the Lamberti, with the balls of gold on their arms, made Florence flower in all her great doings.
So did the fathers of the Visdomini and the Tosinghi, who, whenever your bishop's seat stands empty, grow fat by managing its revenues.
The overbearing Adimari, who play the dragon behind anyone who runs, and turn lamb for anyone who shows his teeth, or his purse,
were coming up already, but from small beginnings; so that it did not please Ubertino Donato when his father-in-law made them his in-laws too.
Already the Caponsacco had come down from Fiesole into the market place, and already Giuda and Infangato were good citizens.
I shall tell you a thing that is incredible and true: the little circle of walls was entered by a gate which was named after the family of the Pera.
Everyone who carries any part of the fine arms of the great baron Hugh, whose name and whose worth the feast of Saint Thomas keeps alive,
had his knighthood and privilege from him; although one of them, Giano della Bella, who edges those arms with a border, sides with the common people today.
The Gualterotti and Importuni were there already; and the Borgo would still be quieter if it had gone without its new neighbours.
The house of the Amidei, from which your weeping was born, through the just anger that has killed you and put an end to your happy living,
was honoured then, itself and its allies. O Buondelmonte, how badly you ran away from that marriage, on other people's advice!
Many would be glad who are sad now, if God had drowned you in the river Ema the first time you came to the city.
But it was fitting that Florence, in her last days of peace, should offer a victim, you, to that broken statue of Mars that guards the bridge.
With these families, and with others besides them, I saw Florence in such repose that she had no cause for weeping.
With these families I saw her people glorious and just, so much so that the lily on her banner had never yet been carried upside down on the staff by a conqueror,
nor been changed from white to red by civil war."
Like Phaethon, who to this day makes fathers wary of giving their sons what they ask for, when he came to his mother Clymene to make sure of what he had heard said against him, that he was no son of the Sun:
so was I, and so I was felt to be both by Beatrice and by the holy lamp which had already changed its place for me.
So my lady said: "Send out the flame of your longing, so that it may come out well stamped with the mark inside;
not so that our knowledge may grow by your speaking, but so that you may get used to telling your thirst, and men may pour for you."
"O my dear root, who are lifted so high that, as easily as earthly minds see that a triangle cannot hold two obtuse angles,
you see things that have not happened yet before they happen, gazing at the point where all times are present at once;
while I was in Virgil's company, going up the mountain that heals souls and going down into the dead world,
heavy words were said to me about my life to come; though I feel myself square-set against the blows of chance,
so that my wish would be satisfied to hear what fortune is coming near me: for an arrow foreseen comes more slowly."
So I said to that same light which had spoken to me before; and, as Beatrice had wanted, my wish was confessed.
Not in riddles, the kind the foolish pagans used to be caught by, like birds in lime, before the Lamb of God who takes away sins was killed,
but in clear words and with exact speech, that fatherly love answered, shut in and shining out with its own laughter:
"Chance, which reaches no further than the pages of your material world, is all painted already in the eternal sight;
yet it does not take necessity from that, any more than a ship going down a river takes it from the eye it is mirrored in.
From there, as sweet harmony comes to the ear from an organ, so the time that is being prepared for you comes to my sight.
As Hippolytus had to leave Athens because of his pitiless and treacherous stepmother's lies, so you must leave Florence.
This is wanted, and this is already being worked for, and it will soon be brought off by the man who plots it at Rome, where Christ is bought and sold all day long.
The blame will go, in the shouting, to the injured side, as it usually does; but the vengeance will bear witness to the truth that hands it out.
You will leave everything you love most dearly; and this is the arrow the bow of exile shoots first.
You will find out how salt another man's bread tastes, and how hard a road it is going down and up another man's stairs.
And what will weigh your shoulders down most will be the wicked and stupid company you will fall into this valley with;
for it will turn against you, ungrateful and mad and godless; but soon afterwards it, and not you, will be the one whose face goes red for it.
Its own behaviour will prove its brutishness; so that it will be to your credit to have made a party of your own by yourself.
Your first refuge and first lodging will be the courtesy of the great Lombard lord of Verona, who carries the imperial eagle above a ladder on his shield;
and he will look on you so kindly that between you two the giving and the asking will come in the order that is slowest between other men.
With him you will see his young brother, Cangrande, who at his birth was so stamped by this strong planet, Mars, that his doings will be worth telling.
People have not noticed him yet because he is young — these wheels have only been turning round him for nine years —
but before the Gascon pope cheats the noble emperor Henry, sparks of his worth will show in his caring nothing for money or for hardship.
His great deeds will be known yet, so that his enemies will not be able to keep their tongues quiet about them.
Wait on him and on what he does for you; many people will be changed by him, the rich and the beggars trading places;
and you will carry away written in your mind about him, and you will not tell it"; and he told me things that will be unbelievable even to those who see them happen.
Then he added: "Son, that is the explanation of what was said to you; those are the traps hidden behind a few turnings of the years.
But I do not want you to envy your neighbours, since your life will go on into the future far beyond the punishing of their treacheries."
When, by falling silent, the holy soul showed that it had finished weaving the cloth on the loom I had set up for it with my question,
I began, like a man who longs, in his doubt, for advice from somebody who sees and wills rightly and loves:
"I see well, my father, how time is spurring towards me to give me such a blow as falls heaviest on the man who gives way most;
so it is good that I arm myself with foresight, so that, if the place I love best is taken from me, I do not lose every other place by what I write.
Down through the world that is bitter without end, and up the mountain from whose beautiful summit my lady's eyes lifted me,
and afterwards through heaven, from light to light, I have learned things which, if I tell them again, will taste to many like a bitter sourness;
and yet if I am a timid friend to the truth, I am afraid I shall not live on among those who will call this time of ours the old days."
The light in which the treasure I had found there was smiling first flashed out like a golden mirror in a sunbeam;
then it answered: "A conscience darkened either by its own shame or by another's will certainly feel your words are harsh.
But all the same, put every lie aside and make your whole vision plain; and then let them scratch where the itch is.
For if your voice is troublesome at the first taste, it will leave living nourishment behind afterwards, once it has been digested.
This cry of yours will do what the wind does, which strikes hardest at the highest peaks; and that is no small proof of your honour.
That is why, in these wheels, and on the mountain, and in the valley of sorrow, only the souls who are known to fame have been shown to you:
because the mind of a listener does not settle or put its faith in an example whose root is unknown and hidden,
nor in any proof that is not plainly seen."
That blessed mirror of God, Cacciaguida, was already enjoying his own thoughts alone, and I was tasting mine, tempering the bitter with the sweet;
and the lady who was leading me to God said: "Change your thinking; think that I am near to him who lightens every wrong."
I turned round at the loving sound of my comfort; and what love I saw then in those holy eyes, I give up here:
not only because I distrust my own speech, but because the mind cannot go back so far above itself unless another guides it.
This much I can tell again about that moment: that, gazing at her, my affection was free of every other desire,
while the eternal pleasure, which was shining straight into Beatrice, was contenting me out of her beautiful face with its reflection.
Overcoming me with the light of a smile, she said to me: "Turn round and listen; paradise is not only in my eyes."
As one sometimes sees the affection here in the face, when it is so great that the whole soul is taken up with it,
so, in the flaming of the holy brightness I turned to, I knew there was a wish in him to talk with me a while longer.
He began: "On this fifth level of the tree of heaven, which is fed from its top and always bears fruit and never loses a leaf,
there are blessed spirits who, before they came to heaven, were of great fame down below, so that any poet would grow rich on them.
So look at the arms of the cross: the man I name will do there what its quick fire does in a cloud."
I saw a light drawn along the cross as Joshua was named, as the name was said; and the word was not known to me before the deed.
And at the name of Judas Maccabeus I saw another move, spinning, and gladness was the whip that drove that top.
So for Charlemagne and for Roland my attentive gaze followed two of them as the eye follows its falcon flying.
Then William of Orange and his giant Renouard, and Duke Godfrey of the crusade, drew my sight along that cross, and Robert Guiscard the Norman.
Then, moving and mixing among the other lights, the soul which had spoken to me showed me what an artist he was among the singers of heaven.
I turned round to my right side to see my duty marked out in Beatrice, either by speech or by a gesture;
and I saw her eyes so pure, so full of gladness, that her look beat all the others, and beat the last one too.
And as a man, by feeling more delight in doing well, notices from day to day that his own strength is going forward,
so I noticed that my wheeling round together with the heavens had widened its arc, seeing that miracle more richly adorned.
And such a change as comes over a fair-skinned woman in the small space of time in which her face unloads the load of a blush,
was in my eyes when I had turned, because of the whiteness of the mild sixth planet, Jupiter, which had taken me into itself.
I saw, in that torch of Jupiter, the sparkling of the love that was there spell out letters of our own alphabet before my eyes.
And as birds risen from a riverbank, as if congratulating each other on their feeding, make a flock of themselves, now round, now some other shape,
so, inside those lights, holy creatures sang as they flew, and made themselves now a D, now an I, now an L in their figures.
First they moved to their own note as they sang; then, becoming one of these letters, they stopped a little and fell silent.
O Muse, divine daughter of the winged horse, who make minds glorious and give them long life, so that they, through you, do the same for cities and kingdoms,
light me with yourself, so that I may set out their figures as I have taken them in: let your power show in these few lines!
They showed themselves, then, in five times seven letters, vowels and consonants; and I noted the words as they seemed to me to be spelled out.
'DILIGITE IUSTITIAM' — love justice — were the first verb and noun of the whole painting; 'QUI IUDICATIS TERRAM', you who judge the earth, were the last.
Then they stayed drawn up in the M of the fifth word; so that Jupiter looked there like silver picked out with gold.
And I saw other lights come down to where the top of the M was, and settle there, singing, I think, the good that moves them to itself.
Then, as when burning logs are struck countless sparks fly up, and fools like to read their fortunes in them,
so more than a thousand lights seemed to rise again from there and to climb, some far and some little, as the Sun that kindles them allotted;
and when each had settled in its place, I saw the head and neck of an eagle represented by that picked-out fire.
He who paints up there has nobody to guide his hand; he is the guide, and even the instinct that shapes the birds' nests is known to come from him.
The other blessed spirits, which had seemed content at first to make a lily of themselves on top of the M, shifted a little and finished the pattern of the eagle.
O sweet star, what jewels and how many showed me that our justice is an effect of the heaven you are set in!
So I pray the Mind in which your motion and your power begin, to look at where the smoke comes from that spoils your ray;
so that it may grow angry once again, as Christ did, at the buying and selling inside the temple, the Church, whose walls were built of miracles and martyrdoms.
O soldiery of heaven whom I am gazing at, pray for those on earth who have all gone astray after the bad example!
Men used to make war with swords; but now the pope makes it by withholding, here and there, the sacraments, the bread that the loving Father shuts off from nobody.
But you, pope, who write decrees only to cancel them for a price, remember that Peter and Paul, who died for the vineyard you are wasting, are still alive.
Well may you answer: "My longing is fixed so hard on the man stamped on the gold florin, John the Baptist, who chose to live alone and was dragged to martyrdom by a girl's dance,
that I do not know Peter the fisherman, or Paul."
The beautiful image of the eagle, which the interwoven souls made, glad in their sweet enjoyment, appeared before me with its wings open;
each of them seemed a little ruby in which a ray of the sun was burning so kindled that it threw the sun back into my eyes.
And what I have to draw now no voice ever carried, nor ink ever wrote, nor was ever taken in by the imagination;
for I saw, and also heard, the beak speak, and its voice said "I" and "mine" where the meaning was 'we' and 'ours'.
And it began: "For being just and merciful I am exalted here to that glory which does not let itself be beaten by any longing;
and on earth I left such a memory of myself that the wicked people there praise it, but do not follow the example."
As one warmth is felt from many coals, so out of that image came one sound out of many loves.
At which I said: "O everlasting flowers of the eternal gladness, who make all your scents seem only one to me,
breathe on me and loose the long fast which has kept me hungry all this while, finding no food for it on earth.
I know well that if divine justice uses any other part of heaven as its mirror, your part sees it with no veil between.
You know how attentively I make myself ready to listen; you know what that doubt is which has been so old a fast for me."
Like a falcon coming out of the hood, which moves its head and claps itself with its wings, showing its will and making itself handsome,
so I saw that sign become, woven as it was out of the praises of the divine grace, with such songs as only those who are glad up there can know.
Then it began: "The one who turned the compasses round the edge of the world, and inside that circle marked out so much that is hidden and so much that is shown,
could not print his power so far on the whole universe that his Word did not remain in infinite excess.
And this makes it certain that the first proud one, Lucifer, who was the summit of all creation, fell unripe because he would not wait for the light;
and from this it appears that every lesser nature is too small a vessel for that good which has no end and measures itself by itself.
So your sight, which must be one of the rays of that Mind with which all things are filled,
cannot be so powerful by its own nature that it can make out its own source far beyond what appears to it.
So the sight which your world receives goes into the everlasting justice as an eye goes into the sea:
for although it sees the bottom from the shore, in the open water it does not; and yet the bottom is there, and the depth is what hides it.
There is no light except what comes from the calm that is never troubled; everything else is darkness, or the shadow the flesh casts, or its poison.
Now the hiding place which kept living justice from you, about which you kept putting your question, has been opened wide enough;
for you used to say: 'A man is born on the bank of the Indus, and there is nobody there to talk about Christ, and nobody to read or write;
and all his wishes and his acts are good, as far as human reason sees, without sin in his living or in his speaking.
He dies unbaptized and without faith: where is this justice that condemns him? Where is his fault, if he does not believe?'
Now who are you, to want to sit on the bench and judge a thousand miles away with sight that reaches a hand's breadth?
Certainly, for a man who wanted to split hairs with me, if you did not have the Scriptures over you, there would be marvellous room for doubt.
Oh earthly animals! Oh dull minds! The first will, God's, which is good of itself, never moved away from itself, which is the highest good.
Everything is just so far as it chimes with that: no created good draws it to itself, but it, by shining out, is the cause of that good."
As a stork wheels above her nest when she has fed her young, and as the one that has been fed looks up at her,
so did the blessed image, and so I lifted my eyes, while it moved its wings, driven by so many wills together.
Wheeling, it sang, and said: "As my notes are to you, who do not understand them, so is the eternal judgment to you mortals."
Then, when those shining fires of the Holy Spirit had grown quiet, still in the shape of the eagle, the sign that made the Romans revered by the world,
it began again: "Nobody ever climbed to this kingdom who did not believe in Christ, either before or after he was nailed to the wood.
But look: many cry 'Christ, Christ!' who at the judgment will be far less near to him than someone who never knew Christ;
and the Ethiopian, who never heard of him, will condemn such Christians when the two companies separate at the last judgment, the one rich for ever and the other beggared.
What will the Persians be able to say to your kings when they see that book opened in which all their contemptible deeds are written?
There will be seen, among the doings of the emperor Albert, the one that will soon set the pen going, his laying waste of the kingdom of Bohemia.
There will be seen the grief the king of France brings on the Seine by debasing the coinage, the man who will die when a wild boar throws his horse.
There will be seen the thirsty pride which makes the Scot and the Englishman mad, so that neither can bear to stay inside his own border.
There will be seen the lechery and the soft living of the man of Spain and the man of Bohemia, who never knew worth and never wanted it.
For Charles the Lame, who calls himself king of Jerusalem, there will be seen his good deeds marked with an I, for one, while an M, for a thousand, will mark the opposite.
There will be seen the greed and the cowardice of Frederick, who holds Sicily, the island of the burning mountain, where Anchises finished his long life;
and to give some idea of how small he is, what is written about him will be in clipped letters which will note a great deal in a little room.
And the filthy doings of his uncle and his brother, the kings of Majorca and Aragon, will be plain to everyone: they who have made so fine a family, and two crowns, into a disgrace.
The kings of Portugal and of Norway will be known there, and the king of Serbia, who copied the coin of Venice to his cost.
O happy Hungary, if she lets herself be misgoverned no longer! And happy Navarre, if she armed herself with the mountains that belt her!
And everybody ought to believe that already, as an earnest of this, Nicosia and Famagusta in Cyprus are complaining and crying out at the beast who rules them,
who does not go one step out of line with the others."
When the sun, which lights the whole world, goes so far down below our horizon that the daylight is used up on every side,
the sky, which was kindled by him alone before, suddenly shows itself again by many lights, all of them shining with the sun's one light;
and this act of the sky came into my mind when the eagle, the standard of the world and of its rulers, fell silent in its blessed beak;
because all those living lights, shining far more, began songs that slip and fall out of my memory.
O sweet love, cloaking yourself in laughter, how burning you seemed in those living flutes that had nothing but holy thoughts for breath!
When the dear and shining jewels I had seen the sixth planet, Jupiter, set with stopped their angelic pealing,
I seemed to hear the murmuring of a river that comes down clear from rock to rock, showing how full its source is.
And as a sound takes its shape at the neck of the lute, and as the wind that gets in takes its shape at the vent of the bagpipe,
so, with the delay of waiting taken away, that murmuring of the eagle went up through its neck as though the neck were hollow.
There it became a voice, and from there it came out through its beak in the form of words, such as the heart I wrote them in was waiting for.
"The part of me that sees, and that in mortal eagles can bear to look at the sun," it began, "my eye, must now be looked at steadily,
because, of the fires I make my figure with, the ones with which the eye sparkles in my head are the highest of all their ranks.
He who shines in the middle as the pupil was the singer of the Holy Spirit, King David, who carried the ark from town to town:
now he knows what his song deserved, so far as it was the effect of his own counsel, by a reward that is just as great.
Of the five who make the arch of my eyebrow, the one nearest my beak is the emperor Trajan, who stopped to comfort the poor widow for her son:
now he knows how dearly it costs not to follow Christ, having tasted both this sweet life and its opposite, Hell.
And the one who comes next on the curve I am speaking of, on the upper arc, is King Hezekiah, who put off his death by true repentance:
now he knows that the eternal judgment is not changed when a worthy prayer makes tomorrow of today down there.
The next one is Constantine, who with the laws and with me, the eagle, out of a good intention that bore bad fruit, moved to Greece in order to leave Rome to the pope:
now he knows that the harm that came of his good deed does him no injury, although the world has been ruined by it.
And the one you see on the downward arc was William the Good, whom Sicily mourns, the land that mourns because Charles and Frederick, its present kings, are alive:
now he knows how heaven falls in love with a just king, and he shows it still by the look of his own brightness.
Who would believe, down in the erring world, that Ripheus the Trojan was the fifth of the holy lights in this ring?
Now he knows a great deal of the divine grace that the world cannot see, although his sight does not make out the bottom of it."
As a lark that ranges through the air, singing first, and then falls silent, content with the last sweetness that fills it,
so the eagle seemed to me, the image stamped by the eternal pleasure, by whose will each thing becomes what it is.
And although I was there to my own doubt as glass is to the colour it wears, the doubt could not bear to wait its turn in silence,
but drove "What things are these?" out of my mouth by the force of its own weight, at which I saw great festivals of flashing.
Then, straight after, with its eye more kindled, the blessed sign answered me, so as not to keep me hanging in my wonder:
"I see that you believe these things because I say them, but you do not see how; so that, though they are believed, they are hidden.
You do like a man who takes in a thing well by its name, but cannot see what it is in itself unless somebody else brings it out.
Regnum celorum, the kingdom of heaven, suffers violence, as the Gospel says, from warm love and from living hope, which overcome the divine will:
not the way one man overcomes another, but they beat it because it wants to be beaten, and, beaten, it beats them with its own kindness.
The first soul of the eyebrow, Trajan, and the fifth, Ripheus, make you wonder, because you see the country of the angels painted with them.
They did not leave their bodies, as you believe, as pagans, but as Christians, in firm faith, the one in the feet of Christ that were still to suffer, the other in the feet that had.
For Trajan came back to his bones from Hell, where nobody ever comes back to a good will; and that was the wages of living hope,
the living hope of Pope Gregory, whose prayers to God to raise the emperor up again had such power that God's will could be moved.
The glorious soul I am speaking of, come back into the flesh, where it was a short while, believed in him who could help it;
and, believing, it was kindled into such a fire of true love that at its second death it was worthy to come to this festival.
The other, Ripheus, by a grace that trickles from so deep a spring that no creature ever pushed its eye as far as the first wave of it,
set all his love down there on righteousness: so that, from grace to grace, God opened his eye to our redemption that was to come;
and so he believed in it, and from then on he could not bear the stench of paganism any longer, and he rebuked the crooked people for it.
The three ladies you saw dancing at the right wheel of the chariot in Purgatory, faith, hope and love, stood as his baptism, more than a thousand years before baptizing began.
O predestination, how far away your root is from the sight of those who cannot see the first cause whole!
And you, mortals, hold yourselves back in your judging: for even we, who see God, do not know all the chosen yet;
and such a lack is sweet to us, because our good is refined in this good, that what God wills, we will too."
So, by that divine image, a gentle medicine was given me to clear my short sight.
And as a good lute player makes the quivering of the string go with a good singer, which gives the song more pleasure,
so, while it spoke, I remember that I saw the two blessed lights move their little flames along with the words,
exactly as the blinking of two eyes keeps time.
My eyes were already fixed again on my lady's face, and my mind with them, and it had been taken off every other purpose.
And she was not smiling; but she began to me: "If I smiled, you would become what Semele became when she asked to see Jupiter in his glory and was burnt to ashes:
for my beauty, which is kindled more on the stairs of the eternal palace the higher one goes, as you have seen,
shines so, if it is not tempered, that your mortal power, at its blaze, would be a branch a thunderbolt splits.
We have been lifted to the seventh planet, Saturn, which stands now under the breast of the burning Lion and is sending its power down to earth mixed with his.
Put your mind behind your eyes, and make mirrors of them for the shape that will show itself to you in this mirror of a planet."
Whoever knew what pasture my sight had in that blessed face when I turned from her to something else
would know how welcome it was to me to obey my heavenly escort, weighing the one side against the other.
Inside the crystal sphere that carries, as it circles the world, the name of its dear king, Saturn, under whose reign, in the golden age, all wickedness lay dead,
I saw, of the colour of gold with a ray shining through it, a ladder set up so far that my sight did not follow it.
I saw so many splendours coming down the rungs too that I thought every light that shows in the sky had been poured out from there.
And as jackdaws, by their natural habit, move off together at the beginning of the day to warm their cold feathers,
then some go away and do not come back, others turn round to where they set out from, and others stay, wheeling;
that seemed to me to be the way of it in that sparkling crowd, which came down together until it reached a certain rung.
And the one that held itself nearest to us grew so bright that I said in my thinking: 'I see clearly the love you are signalling to me.
But she from whom I look for the how and the when of speaking and of keeping quiet is not moving; so, against my longing, I do well not to ask.'
At which she, who was seeing my silence in the seeing of him who sees everything, said to me: "Loose your warm longing."
And I began: "My own deserving does not make me worthy of your answer; but for her sake who lets me ask,
blessed life, who keep yourself hidden inside your own gladness, make known to me the cause that has set you so near me;
and say why the sweet symphony of paradise falls silent in this wheel, when it sounds so devoutly below through the others."
"Your hearing is mortal, as your sight is," it answered me; "so there is no singing here, for the same reason that Beatrice did not smile.
I came down so far by the rungs of the holy stair only to make a festival for you with my speech and with the light that cloaks me;
nor did more love make me quicker, for as much love and more is burning up there, as the flaming shows you.
But the high love that makes us ready servants of the wisdom that governs the world allots each of us his part, as you can see."
"I see clearly, holy lamp," I said, "how free love in this court is enough to follow the eternal providence;
but this is what seems hard to me to make out: why you alone among your companions were predestined to this office."
I had not come to the last word before the light began to spin on its own centre, like a fast millstone;
then the love that was inside it answered: "Divine light is focused on me, piercing this light I am wrapped in like a womb,
and its power, joined with my seeing, lifts me so far above myself that I see the highest being it is drawn from.
From that comes the gladness I flame with, because I match the brightness of my flame to the clearness of my sight.
But that soul in heaven which is clearest, that seraph who has his eye most fixed on God, could not satisfy your question,
because what you ask goes so far into the abyss of the eternal decree that it is cut off from every created sight.
And when you go back to the mortal world, report this, so that it may not presume to move its feet any further towards such a goal.
The mind that shines here only smokes down there; so consider how it could do on earth what it cannot do even when heaven has taken it up."
His words laid such a rule on me that I left the question and drew back to asking him humbly who he had been.
"Between the two shores of Italy, rocks rise, not very far from your own country, so high that the thunder sounds well below them,
and they make a hump that is called Catria, beneath which a hermitage is consecrated that used to be given over to worship and nothing else."
So the third speech began to me again; and then, going on, it said: "There I made myself so steady in the service of God
that with nothing but food dressed in olive oil I got lightly through heat and frost, content in contemplative thoughts.
That cloister used to send a rich harvest of souls to these heavens; and now it has been made barren, so that its shame must soon come out.
In that place I was Peter Damian; and it was another Peter, Peter the Sinner, who lived in the house of Our Lady on the Adriatic shore, though people confuse us.
Little mortal life was left to me when I was called and dragged off to wear the cardinal's hat, which only passes from bad to worse.
Peter came, and Paul, the great vessel of the Holy Spirit, came, thin and barefoot, taking their food at whatever lodging there was.
Now the modern shepherds want somebody to prop them up on this side and on that, and to lead them, they are so heavy, and somebody to hold up their trains behind.
They spread their cloaks over their horses too, so that two beasts go under one skin, the prelate and the palfrey: oh patience of God, that bears so much!"
At this voice I saw more little flames come down from rung to rung and wheel, and every wheeling made them more beautiful.
They came round this one and stopped, and gave a cry of so high a sound that nothing here could be like it;
nor did I understand it, the thunder so beat me.
Weighed down with astonishment, I turned to my guide like a small child who runs back always to where he trusts most;
and she, like a mother who comes at once to help her pale and gasping son with her voice, which usually settles him,
said to me: "Do you not know you are in heaven? And do you not know that heaven is all holy, and that what is done here comes from good zeal?
You can think now how the singing would have changed you, and how my smiling would, since the cry has moved you so much;
and if you had understood the prayers in it, you would know already the vengeance you will see before you die.
The sword from up here does not cut in haste or slowly, except as it seems to the man who waits for it, longing or afraid.
But turn round now towards the others; for you will see many famous spirits if you take your sight back the way I tell you."
As it pleased her, I turned my eyes back, and I saw a hundred little spheres which together were making each other more beautiful with mutual rays.
I stood like a man who presses down inside himself the point of his longing, and does not venture to ask, he is so afraid of going too far;
and the largest and the most shining of those pearls came forward to satisfy my wish about itself.
Then I heard inside it: "If you could see, as I do, the charity that burns among us, your thoughts would have been said out loud.
But so that waiting does not slow you down on the way to your high goal, I shall answer only the thought you are guarding so carefully.
That mountain on whose slope Cassino stands used once to be visited on its summit by pagans, deceived and badly disposed;
and I am Benedict, the one who first carried up there the name of him who brought to earth the truth that lifts us so high;
and such grace shone down on me that I drew the villages round about away from the godless worship that led the world astray.
These other fires were all men who lived the contemplative life, kindled by the warmth that makes holy flowers and fruits come up.
Here is Macarius, here is Romuald, here are my brothers who kept their feet inside the cloisters and held their hearts steady."
And I to him: "The affection you show in speaking with me, and the good looks I see and note in all your burnings,
have opened out my confidence as the sun does the rose, when it becomes as open as it has power to be.
So I beg you — and you, father, make me sure — whether I can receive so much grace that I may see you with your image uncovered."
At which he: "Brother, your high longing will be fulfilled in the last sphere, the Empyrean, where all the other longings are fulfilled, and mine.
There every longing is perfect, ripe and whole; in that sphere alone every part is where it always was,
because it is not in space and does not turn on poles; and our ladder reaches all the way up to it, which is why its top steals out of your sight like this.
The patriarch Jacob saw it reach that far, its upper part, when it appeared to him so loaded with angels.
But nobody lifts his feet off the earth to climb it now, and the rule I wrote for my monks is left on the page, and wastes the paper.
The walls that used to be an abbey have been made into dens, and the cowls are sacks full of bad flour.
But even heavy usury does not go so much against God's pleasure as that fruit, the income of the Church, which makes the hearts of monks so mad for it;
for everything the Church keeps belongs to the people who ask in God's name; not to relatives, nor to anything filthier still.
The flesh of mortals is so soft that down there a good beginning does not last as long as it takes an oak to grow from a seedling to bear acorns.
Peter began without gold and without silver, and I with prayer and with fasting, and Francis with humility for his order;
and if you look at each man's beginning, and then look again at where it has run, you will see the white turned dark.
Truly the Jordan turning back in its bed, and the Red Sea running away when God willed it, were greater marvels than it would be for him to set this right."
So he said to me, and then drew back to his company, and the company closed up; then, like a whirlwind, it all wound upward.
The sweet lady drove me after them up that stair with a single sign, her power so overcame my nature;
and never down here, where one goes up and down naturally, was there so fast a motion that it could match my wing.
Reader, as I hope to come back again to that devout triumph for which I often weep for my sins and beat my breast,
you could not have taken your finger out of a fire and put it back in the time it took me to see the constellation of the Twins, which follows the Bull, and to be inside it.
O glorious stars of Gemini, O light heavy with great power, to which I owe all my talent, whatever it may be,
the sun, the father of every mortal life, was rising and setting with you when I first felt the air of Tuscany, the day I was born;
and afterwards, when grace was given me to enter the high wheel that turns you, your region was allotted to me.
To you my soul now devoutly sighs, to get strength for the hard passage that is drawing it to itself.
"You are so near the last blessedness," Beatrice began, "that you must have your eyes clear and sharp;
and so, before you go further into it, look back down, and see how much of the world I have already put under your feet;
so that your heart may present itself, as glad as it can be, to the triumphing crowd that comes happily through this round ether."
I came back with my sight through all the seven spheres, and I saw this globe such that I smiled at its shabby look;
and I approve that judgment as the best which holds it cheapest; and whoever thinks of other things can truly be called upright.
I saw the moon lit up from above, without the dark patches that had once made me believe her thin in some parts and dense in others.
I bore the face of the sun there, which I could not bear on earth, and I saw how Mercury and Venus move round him and near him.
Then Jupiter, the mild planet, appeared to me between his father Saturn and his son Mars; and from there the changing of all their places was clear to me;
and all seven showed themselves to me, how great they are and how fast, and how far apart their lodgings stand.
The little threshing floor that makes us so fierce showed itself to me whole, from the hills to the river mouths, while I was wheeling with the everlasting Twins;
then I turned my eyes back to the beautiful eyes.
As a bird among the leaves she loves, settled on the nest of her sweet young through the night that hides things from us,
who, longing to see their faces and to find the food to feed them with, work in which hard labour is welcome to her,
goes ahead of the time on an open branch and waits for the sun with burning affection, staring hard for the dawn to be born:
so my lady was standing upright and attentive, turned towards the top of the sky, where the sun at noon seems to move slowest;
so that, seeing her waiting and eager, I became like a man who in his longing would like something else, and is content in hoping.
But it was a short while between one moment and the other — I mean between my waiting and my seeing the sky grow brighter and brighter;
and Beatrice said: "Here are the armies of Christ's triumph, and all the fruit gathered from the wheeling of these spheres!"
Her whole face seemed to me to be burning, and her eyes were so full of gladness that I must pass over it without saying anything.
As at the full moon in a clear sky the moon smiles among the everlasting stars, her nymphs, who paint the sky through all its depths,
I saw, above thousands of lamps, one Sun that was kindling every one of them as our sun kindles the stars above us;
and through that living light the shining body of Christ showed so bright to my sight that my sight could not bear it.
Oh Beatrice, sweet and dear guide! She said to me: "What overcomes you is a power against which there is no defence.
Here are the wisdom and the might that opened the roads between heaven and earth, which had been longed for so long."
As fire breaks out of a cloud, swelling until there is no room for it, and against its own nature comes down to earth,
so my mind, made greater among those feasts, came out of itself, and cannot remember what it became.
"Open your eyes and look at what I am; you have seen such things that you have been made strong enough to bear my smiling."
I was like a man who comes back to himself out of a forgotten vision and tries in vain to bring it back to mind,
when I heard this offer, worthy of such gratitude that it can never be blotted out of the book that records the past.
If all the tongues sounded now together that the Muses, Polyhymnia and her sisters, made richest with their sweetest milk,
to help me, it would not come to a thousandth of the truth, singing the holy smile and how pure it made her holy face;
and so, in figuring paradise, the sacred poem has to jump, like a man who finds his road cut.
But whoever thinks of the weight of the subject and of the mortal shoulder loaded with it would not blame that shoulder if it trembles under it:
it is no crossing for a little boat, this water the bold prow goes cleaving, nor for a steersman who spares himself.
"Why does my face fall in love with you so that you do not turn to the beautiful garden which is flowering under the rays of Christ?
Here is the rose in which the divine Word was made flesh; here are the lilies whose scent set men on the good road."
So Beatrice; and I, who was all ready for her advice, gave myself once more to the battle of my weak eyelids.
As my eyes, being in shadow, have seen a meadow of flowers under a sunbeam that pours pure through a broken cloud,
so I saw many crowds of splendours, struck with lightning from above by burning rays, without seeing where the lightning began.
O kindly Power who so stamp them, you lifted yourself high to make room for eyes there that had no strength for you.
The name of the beautiful flower I call on always, morning and evening, Mary, drew my whole mind together to look at the greatest fire;
and when both my eyes had painted for me the quality and the greatness of the living star which conquers up there as she conquered down here,
a little torch came down through the heaven, made into a circle like a crown, and girdled her and wheeled about her.
Whatever melody sounds sweetest down here and draws the soul most to itself would seem a cloud torn open by thunder
beside the sounding of that lyre which was crowning the beautiful sapphire that the brightest heaven is made sapphire by.
"I am angelic love, and I wheel round the high gladness that breathes out of the womb which was the lodging of our longing;
and I shall wheel, Lady of heaven, as long as you follow your son and make the highest sphere more godlike because you enter it."
So that circling melody set its seal, and all the other lights made the name of Mary sound.
The outermost heaven, the royal cloak wrapped round all the spheres of the world, which burns and quickens most in the breath of God and in his ways,
had its inner shore so far above us that from where I was it was not yet in sight;
so my eyes had no power to follow the crowned flame that rose up after her own son.
And as an infant that stretches its arms towards its mother when it has taken the milk, because the love inside it flames right out,
each of those white lights stretched upward with its tip, so that the high affection they had for Mary was plain to me.
Then they stayed there before my eyes, singing 'Regina celi', Queen of heaven, so sweetly that the delight of it has never left me.
Oh how great is the plenty stored up in those richest granaries, which were good sowers down here in the fields!
Here they live and enjoy the treasure they won with weeping in their exile on earth, our Babylon, where they left the gold behind.
Here, under the high Son of God and of Mary, together with the saints of the old covenant and the new, he triumphs in his victory,
Peter, who holds the keys of such a glory.
"O fellowship chosen for the great supper of the blessed Lamb, who feeds you so that your wanting is always full,
if by God's grace this man gets a foretaste of what falls from your table before death sets him his time,
consider his measureless longing and sprinkle him a little from what you drink: you drink always from the spring his thoughts come from."
So Beatrice; and those glad souls made spheres of themselves upon fixed poles, flaming, as they wheeled, like comets.
And as wheels in the works of a clock turn so that to a man watching them the first seems still and the last seems to fly,
so those dances, dancing at different speeds, fast and slow, made me judge how rich each of them was.
Out of the one I noticed as the most precious I saw a fire come, so happy that it left none there of greater brightness;
and it turned three times round Beatrice with a song so godlike that my imagination cannot repeat it to me.
So my pen jumps, and I do not write it: for our imagination, let alone our speech, paints in colours too crude for folds as fine as these.
"O my holy sister, who pray to us so devoutly, by your burning affection you unbind me from that beautiful sphere."
Then, when it had stopped, the blessed fire turned its breathing towards my lady, and it spoke as I have said.
And she: "O eternal light of the great man, Peter, to whom our Lord left the keys of this marvellous joy, and carried them down to him,
examine this man on light points and heavy ones, as it pleases you, about the faith by which you once walked on the sea.
Whether he loves well and hopes and believes well is not hidden from you, because you have your sight there where everything is seen painted;
but since this kingdom has made its citizens by the true faith, it is right that speaking of it should fall to him, to give it glory."
As a student arms himself for a disputation and does not speak until the master sets the question, ready to argue it but not to settle it,
so I was arming myself with every argument while she was speaking, to be ready for such a questioner and such a profession.
"Speak, good Christian, show yourself: what is faith?" At which I lifted my forehead into that light which this was breathed from;
then I turned to Beatrice, and she made quick signs to me to pour out the water from my inward spring.
"May the Grace that lets me make my confession to the chief captain of the faith," I began, "make my thoughts come out well expressed."
And I went on: "As the truthful pen of your dear brother Paul wrote it, father, he who set Rome on the good road along with you,
faith is the substance of things hoped for and the proof of things not seen; and this seems to me to be what it is."
Then I heard: "You judge rightly, if you understand well why he placed it among substances, and then among proofs."
And I after that: "The deep things that let themselves be seen by me up here are so hidden from eyes down there
that their being is a matter of belief alone, and high hope is founded on that belief; and so it takes the meaning of substance.
And from this belief we have to go on reasoning, having no other sight: so it holds the meaning of proof."
Then I heard: "If everything that is learned down there by teaching were understood as well as that, there would be no room for the cleverness of sophists."
So it was breathed out of that kindled love; then it added: "The alloy and the weight of this coin have been gone over well;
but tell me whether you have it in your purse." At which I: "I have, so shining and so round that I am in no doubt about its stamp."
Then out of the deep light shining there came: "This precious jewel, on which every virtue is founded — where did it come to you from?"
And I: "The wide rain of the Holy Spirit, poured out over the old Testament and the new,
is the reasoning that has concluded it for me so sharply that, beside it, every other demonstration seems blunt to me."
Then I heard: "The old scripture and the new, which prove it to you so, why do you take them for the word of God?"
And I: "The proof that opens the truth to me is the miracles that followed, for which nature never heated iron nor beat an anvil."
I was answered: "Tell me, what makes you sure that those works happened? The very thing that needs to be proved swears it to you, and nothing else."
"If the world turned to Christianity without miracles," I said, "this one is such that the others are not a hundredth of it:
for you went into the field poor and hungry to sow the good plant, the Church, which was once a vine and is now a thorn bush."
When this was finished, the high holy court rang through the spheres with a 'Dio laudamo' — we praise you, God — in the melody they sing up there.
And that great lord Peter, who had already drawn me from branch to branch with his questions, so that we were coming near the last leaves,
began again: "The Grace which courts your mind opened your mouth up to this point as it ought to be opened,
so that I approve what came out of it; but now you must set out what you believe, and where your believing came to you from."
"O holy father, spirit who now see what you believed so surely that you outran the younger John to Christ's tomb," I began,
"you want me to make plain here the form of my ready believing, and you asked as well what the cause of it is.
And I answer: I believe in one God, alone and eternal, who moves all the heavens with love and with longing, and is not moved;
and for that belief I have not only proofs from natural science and from philosophy, but I am given it also by the truth that rains down from here
through Moses, through the prophets and through the psalms, through the Gospel, and through you who wrote after the burning Spirit had hallowed you;
and I believe in three eternal Persons, and I believe these are one being, so one and so three that you can say of them both 'are' and 'is'.
This deep condition of God that I am touching on now, the teaching of the Gospel stamps into my mind again and again.
This is the beginning, this is the spark which then spreads into a living flame and sparkles in me like a star in the sky."
As a lord who hears what pleases him then embraces his servant, congratulating him on the news, as soon as the man stops speaking,
so, blessing me and singing, the apostolic light at whose command I had spoken circled me three times when I fell silent:
so much did I please him in what I said!
If it ever happens that the sacred poem which both heaven and earth have set a hand to, so that it has made me lean for many years,
beats the cruelty that shuts me out of the beautiful sheepfold where I slept as a lamb, an enemy to the wolves that make war on it;
with another voice by then, with another fleece, I shall come back as a poet, and at the font of my baptism I shall take the crown;
because it was there that I entered into the faith which makes souls known to God, and afterwards Peter circled my forehead for that faith.
Then a light moved towards us out of the same ring that Peter had come from, the first fruit, whom Christ left as chief of his vicars;
and my lady, full of gladness, said to me: "Look, look: here is the great lord Saint James, for whose sake pilgrims go down there to Galicia."
As when a dove settles beside its companion, and each spreads out its affection to the other, wheeling and murmuring,
so I saw one great and glorious prince welcomed by the other, praising the food they dine on up there.
But when the greeting was over, each stood silent coram me, before me, so kindled that it overcame my face.
Then Beatrice said, smiling: "Renowned soul, who wrote down in your letter the generosity of our heavenly court,
make hope sound at this height: you know that you stood for hope every time Jesus showed the three of you most favour."
"Lift your head and make sure of yourself: for whatever comes up here from the mortal world must be ripened in our rays."
This comfort came to me from the second fire; at which I lifted my eyes to those two mountains, the apostles, which had bent them down before with too much weight.
"Since by grace our Emperor, God, wills that you should meet his nobles before your death in his most secret hall,
so that, having seen the truth of this court, you may strengthen in yourself and in others the hope which makes men truly fall in love down there,
say what it is, say how your mind is flowering with it, and say where it came to you from." So the second light went on again.
And that merciful lady who had guided the feathers of my wings to so high a flight forestalled me in the answering like this:
"The Church militant has no child with more hope, as is written in the Sun that shines on our whole company:
so it has been granted to him to come out of Egypt, the world, into Jerusalem, heaven, to see it, before his time of soldiering is served out.
The other two points, which are asked not for knowledge but so that he may report how much you take pleasure in this virtue,
I leave to him, for they will not be hard for him, nor a matter for boasting; and let him answer them, and God's grace make it easy for him."
Like a pupil who follows his teacher, ready and willing in what he is skilled at, so that his own worth may be brought out,
"Hope," I said, "is a sure expectation of the glory to come, which divine grace and merit gone before produce.
This light comes to me from many stars; but the first to drop it into my heart was David, the highest singer of the highest lord.
'Let them hope in you,' he says in his psalm to God, 'who know your name': and who does not know it, if he has the faith I have?
Then you dropped it into me too, after him, in your letter; so that I am full, and I rain your rain again on other people."
While I was speaking, inside the living heart of that fire a flash was trembling, sudden and repeated, like lightning.
Then it breathed: "The love with which I still blaze for the virtue of hope, which stayed with me up to my martyrdom and my leaving the field of battle,
wants me to breathe on you, who take delight in her; and I should be glad if you told me what hope promises you."
And I: "The new scriptures and the old set the mark, and the mark points it out to me, of the souls whom God has made his friends.
Isaiah says that each of them, in her own land, will be dressed in a double garment: and their land is this sweet life;
and your brother John, where he writes in Revelation of the white robes, makes this promise plain to us much more clearly still."
And first, just at the end of these words, 'Sperent in te' — let them hope in you — was heard above us; and all the dancing rings answered it.
Then one light among them grew so bright that if the constellation of the Crab held one star like it, winter would have a whole month of unbroken day.
And as a glad girl gets up and goes and enters the dance, only to do honour to the new bride, and for no other reason,
so I saw that brightened splendour come to the two who were wheeling to a note that suited their burning love.
It put itself into the singing and the wheeling; and my lady kept her eyes on them, just like a bride, silent and still.
"This is John, who lay upon the breast of our Pelican, Christ, at the last supper, and this is he who was chosen from the cross to care for Mary."
So my lady; but her look did not move from its attentiveness any more after those words of hers than before them.
Like a man who stares and strains to see the sun a little eclipsed, and by trying to see becomes unseeing,
so I became at that last fire, while it was said: "Why do you dazzle yourself to see a thing that has no place here?
On earth my body is earth, and there it will stay with the rest until our number matches the eternal purpose.
Only two lights wear both robes, body and soul, in the blessed cloister, the two that went up bodily, Christ and Mary; and you will carry this back into your world."
At this voice the flaming ring grew quiet, and so did the sweet mingling that was made by the sound of the three breathing together,
as, to stop labour or danger, the oars, which had been striking the water, all rest together at the sound of a whistle.
Ah, how it moved me in my mind when I turned to see Beatrice and could not see her, although I was
close beside her, and in the happy world!
While I was in doubt because my sight was put out, a breath came out of the blazing flame that had put it out, and made me attentive,
saying: "Until you get back the sense of the sight you have used up on me, it is right to make up for it by talking.
Begin, then; and say where your soul is aimed, and take it that your sight is bewildered in you and not dead:
because the lady who is leading you through this godlike region has in her look the power Ananias had in his hand, when he gave Paul back his sight."
I said: "At her pleasure, early or late, let the cure come to my eyes, which were the gates she came in by, with the fire I burn with always.
The good that satisfies this court is the beginning and the end, the Alpha and Omega, of every text that Love reads to me, softly or aloud."
That same voice which had taken away my fear at the sudden dazzling set me to talking again,
and said: "Certainly you must clear yourself through a finer sieve: you must say who aimed your bow at such a target."
And I: "By philosophical arguments and by authority that comes down from here, such a love has to be stamped on me:
for the good, as good, so far as it is understood, kindles love, and it kindles the more the more goodness it holds inside itself.
So towards that being, God, which is so far above all others that every good found outside it is nothing but a beam of its own light,
the mind of everyone who makes out the truth on which this proof is founded must move in love, more than towards anything else.
This truth is laid out for my understanding by the philosopher Aristotle, who shows me that the everlasting beings are moved by the first love.
It is laid out by the voice of God himself, who cannot lie, when he says to Moses, speaking of himself: 'I will make you see all goodness.'
You lay it out for me too, John, in the opening of your Gospel, which cries the secret of this place down there more loudly than any other announcement."
And I heard: "By human understanding and by authorities that agree with it, the highest of your loves looks to God.
But say as well whether you feel other cords drawing you towards him, so that you may sound out with how many teeth this love bites you."
The holy purpose of John, Christ's eagle, was not hidden from me; on the contrary, I saw where he wanted my confession to go.
So I began again: "All those bites that can turn a heart towards God have come together in my charity:
for the being of the world and my own being, the death he suffered so that I might live, and what every believer hopes for, as I do,
together with the living knowledge I spoke of, have drawn me out of the sea of crooked love and set me on the shore of the straight love.
The leaves that the whole garden of the eternal gardener is green with, all his creatures, I love just as much as the good he has given to each of them."
As soon as I fell silent, a sweetest song rang through the heaven, and my lady was saying with the others: "Holy, holy, holy!"
And as a man is woken out of sleep by a sharp light, because the spirit of sight runs to meet the brightness that passes through the coats of the eye one by one,
and the man who wakes shrinks from what he sees, his sudden waking is so uncomprehending, until his judgment comes to his help:
so Beatrice chased every mote out of my eyes with the ray of hers, which shone more than a thousand miles;
so that I saw better after than before, and, almost stupefied, I asked about a fourth light which I saw among us.
And my lady: "Inside those rays the first soul that the first Power ever created gazes lovingly at its maker."
As a branch bends its top at the wind's going by, and then lifts by its own strength, which raises it again,
so I did while she was speaking, astonished; and then a longing to speak, which I was burning with, made me sure again.
And I began: "O Adam, the one apple that was made ripe from the start, O ancient father to whom every bride is both daughter and daughter-in-law,
as devoutly as I can I beg you to speak to me: you see what I want, and to hear you sooner I do not say it."
Sometimes an animal stirs under a cover, so that its feeling has to show by the way the wrapping follows it;
and in the same way the first soul made it clear to me through his covering how gladly he was coming to please me.
Then he breathed: "Without your telling it to me, I make out your wish better than you make out whatever is surest to you;
because I see it in the truthful mirror, God, which reflects all other things exactly, and which nothing else reflects.
You want to hear how long it is since God put me in the high garden, where this lady made you ready for so long a stair,
and how long that garden was a delight to my eyes, and the true cause of the great anger, and the language I used and made.
Now, my son, the tasting of the tree was not in itself the cause of so long an exile, but only the overstepping of the mark.
In Limbo, the place your lady sent Virgil out of, I longed for this company for four thousand three hundred and two turnings of the sun;
and while I was on earth I saw him come back to all the lights of his own road nine hundred and thirty times.
The language I spoke was altogether dead before Nimrod's people set themselves to their unfinishable work, the tower of Babel:
for no product of reason was ever lasting, because of the human liking that keeps renewing itself as the heavens turn.
That a man speaks is nature's doing; but whether it is this way or that, nature leaves to you, to do as it pleases you.
Before I went down to the anguish of Hell, the highest good, from which comes the gladness that wraps me, was called I on earth;
and afterwards he was called El: and that is fitting, for the habits of mortals are like leaves on a branch, one going and another coming.
In Eden, on the mountain that rises highest out of the sea, I stayed, with a life first pure and then shamed, from the first hour of the day to the hour that follows
the sixth, about seven hours, when the sun passes noon."
'Glory to the Father, to the Son, to the Holy Spirit!' all paradise began, so that the sweet singing made me drunk.
What I was seeing seemed to me a laughter of the universe; so that my drunkenness was coming in through my hearing and through my sight.
Oh joy! oh gladness beyond words! oh life made whole of love and peace! oh riches held in safety, with nothing left to crave!
Before my eyes the four torches, Peter, James, John and Adam, stood kindled, and the one that had come first, Peter, began to grow more alive,
and became in its look what the silver planet Jupiter would become if he and red Mars were birds and swapped feathers.
The providence which allots turn and office there had put silence on every side of the blessed choir,
when I heard: "If I change colour, do not be surprised, for as I speak you will see all these change colour.
He who usurps my place on earth, my place, my place, which stands empty in the presence of the Son of God,
has made a sewer of my burial ground, Rome, a sewer of blood and of stench; at which the perverted one who fell from up here, Satan, takes his ease down below."
I saw the whole sky then spread over with that colour which the sun opposite it paints on a cloud at evening and at morning.
And as an honest woman who stays sure of herself, and yet grows timid merely at hearing of another's fault,
so Beatrice changed her look; and I believe there was such an eclipse in heaven when Christ suffered on the cross.
Then his words went on in a voice so changed from itself that his look was not changed any more:
"The Church, the bride of Christ, was not brought up on my blood, and the blood of Linus and Cletus, the popes who followed me, to be used for the getting of gold;
but for the getting of this glad life Sixtus and Pius and Calixtus and Urban shed their blood, after much weeping.
It was not our purpose that a part of the Christian people should sit at the right hand of our successors and a part at the left;
nor that the keys which were granted to me should become a device on a banner that made war on the baptized;
nor that I should be the figure on a seal for privileges that are sold and lying, at which I often blush and flash out.
Ravening wolves in shepherds' clothing can be seen from up here over all the pastures: O defence of God, why do you lie still?
The men of Cahors and of Gascony, the next popes, are getting ready to drink our blood: O good beginning, to what a vile end you must come down!
But the high providence, which with Scipio defended the glory of the world for Rome, will help soon, as I conceive it;
and you, my son, who because of your mortal weight will still go back down there, open your mouth, and do not hide what I do not hide."
As our air flakes downward with snow when the sun is in the sign of the Goat, in December,
so I saw the ether above adorn itself and flake upward with triumphing vapours which had stayed there together with us.
My sight followed their looks, and followed until the distance between us, being so great, took from it the going any further.
At which my lady, who saw me released from looking upward, said to me: "Lower your sight and see how far you have turned."
From the hour when I had looked before I saw that I had been carried through a quarter of the earth's turn, from the middle of the first zone of the world to its end;
so that beyond Cadiz I saw the ocean where Ulysses made his mad crossing, and on this side, near me, the shore of Phoenicia where Europa let the bull carry her off, a sweet burden.
And more of the plot of this little threshing floor would have been uncovered to me; but the sun was going on beneath my feet, a sign and more away.
My mind in love, which is always courting my lady, was burning more than ever to bring my eyes back to her;
and if nature or art has ever made bait to catch the eyes and so to catch the mind, in human flesh or in pictures of it,
all of it together would seem nothing beside the divine pleasure that shone on me when I turned to her smiling face.
And the power her look gave me tore me out of Gemini, the beautiful nest of Leda's twin sons, and drove me into the swiftest heaven, the one that moves all the rest.
Its parts, most living and most high, are so uniform that I cannot say which place Beatrice chose for me.
But she, who saw what I wanted, began, smiling so happily that God seemed to be rejoicing in her face:
"The nature of the world, which holds the centre still and moves everything else round it, begins here, as from its own goal;
and this heaven has no other where but the divine mind, in which the love that turns it is kindled, and the power it rains down.
Light and love hold it in one circle, as it holds the others; and that girdle is understood only by him who girds it.
Its motion is not measured out by any other's, but the others are measured by this, as ten is measured by its half, five, and its fifth, two;
and how time keeps its roots in this vessel and its leaves in the others can be plain to you from now on.
Oh greed, that plunge mortals so far beneath you that nobody has the strength to lift his eyes out of your waves!
The will flowers well enough in men; but the continual rain turns the sound plums into blighted ones.
Faith and innocence are found only in small children; then each of them runs away before the beard has covered the cheeks.
One, while he is still lisping, keeps the fasts, and afterwards, with his tongue loosed, devours any food whatever, under any moon;
and another, while he is lisping, loves and obeys his mother, and afterwards, with his speech complete, longs to see her buried.
So the white skin turns black, so human nature is corrupted, at the first sight of the beautiful daughter of the sun, who brings the morning and leaves the evening.
And you — so that you may not be surprised — remember that there is nobody governing on earth; which is why the human family goes so far astray.
But before January is pushed out of winter altogether by the hundredth part of a day your calendar neglects each year, these upper circles will shine out so
that the storm which has been waited for so long will turn the sterns round to where the prows are, so that the fleet will run straight;
and true fruit will come after the flower."
After the lady who makes a paradise of my mind had opened the truth to me against the present life of wretched mortals,
as a man who is lit from behind by a candle flame sees it in a mirror before he has it in sight or in mind,
and turns round to see whether the glass is telling him the truth, and sees that it agrees with the flame as a song does with its measure,
so my memory remembers that I did, looking into the beautiful eyes out of which Love made the cord to take me with.
And when I turned round, and my eyes were touched by what appears in that heaven whenever one looks well into its wheeling,
I saw a point that was shining out a light so sharp that the sight it burns has to shut itself against the fierce keenness;
and the star that looks smallest from earth would look as big as the moon if it were set beside that point as one star is set beside another.
Perhaps as far off as a halo seems from the light that paints it, when the vapour that carries it is at its thickest,
a circle of fire was wheeling round the point so fast that it would have beaten the motion that girdles the world most quickly;
and this one was girdled by another, and that by a third, and the third by a fourth, the fourth by a fifth, and then the fifth by a sixth.
Above them came the seventh, already so wide that the rainbow, Juno's messenger, would be too narrow, even if it were a whole circle, to hold it.
So the eighth and the ninth; and each of them moved more slowly the further it was in its number from the one;
and the ring whose flame was purest was the one nearest the pure spark, because, I think, it shares most in its truth.
My lady, who saw me hanging in a hard uncertainty, said: "On that point the heavens and all nature depend.
Look at the circle that is joined most closely to it; and know that its moving is so fast because of the kindled love that pricks it."
And I to her: "If the world were arranged in the order I see in those wheels, what has been set before me would have satisfied me;
but in the world we see with our senses the heavens become more godlike the further they are from the centre, the earth;
So, if my longing is to come to an end in this marvellous and angelic temple which has only love and light for its boundary,
I still need to hear why the copy and the pattern do not go the same way, for by myself I think about it in vain."
"If your fingers are not enough for such a knot, it is no wonder: it has been made so hard by nobody trying it!"
So my lady; then she said: "Take what I shall tell you, if you want to be satisfied; and sharpen your wits round it.
The heavens you can see are wide or narrow according to how much of the divine power spreads through all their parts.
Greater goodness means to do greater good; a greater body holds greater good, if its parts are equally perfect.
So the outermost heaven, which sweeps the whole of the rest of the universe along with it, answers to the innermost ring here, which loves most and knows most:
so that if you measure by the power, and not by the size of the angels who look like rings to you,
you will see a marvellous correspondence, greater to more and lesser to less, in each heaven, with its own intelligence."
As the dome of the air is left shining and clear when the north wind blows from its gentler side,
so that the mist which was clouding it before is purged and dissolved, and the sky laughs with the beauties of every one of its quarters,
so I became when my lady provided me with her clear answer, and the truth was seen like a star in the sky.
And when her words had stopped, the circles sparkled exactly the way boiling iron throws off sparks.
Every spark followed its own fire; and there were so many that their number runs into more thousands than the grains on the chessboard, doubled square by square.
I heard 'Hosanna' sung from choir to choir to the fixed point which holds them in the places where they have always been, and always will hold them.
And she who saw the doubting thoughts in my mind said: "The first circles have shown you Seraphim and Cherubim.
They follow their bonds so fast in order to be like the point as far as they can; and they can as far as they are high in seeing.
The other loves that go round them are called Thrones, because God's judgments rest on them, and they complete the first group of three;
and you must know that all of them have delight in proportion as their sight goes deep into the truth in which every understanding is quieted.
From this one can see how being blessed is founded on the act of seeing, not on the act of loving, which comes after it;
and the measure of the seeing is merit, which grace and a good will bring to birth: so it goes on from rank to rank.
The next three orders, which bud like this in this everlasting spring that no autumn ever strips,
sing 'Hosanna' perpetually, like birds in spring, with three melodies, which sound in the three orders of gladness that make its three levels.
In that group are the other godlike orders: first Dominations, and then Virtues; the third order is the Powers.
Then, in the last two dancing rings but one, Principalities and Archangels wheel; the last is all of Angels at their play.
These orders all gaze upward, and downward they so prevail that towards God they are all drawn, and they all draw.
And Dionysius set himself to contemplate these orders with such longing that he named them and divided them as I have.
But Pope Gregory afterwards disagreed with him; so that, as soon as he opened his eyes in this heaven, he laughed at himself.
And if a mortal on earth set out so secret a truth, do not let it astonish you: Paul, who had seen it up here, revealed it to him,
along with much else that is true about these wheelings."
When the sun and the moon, Latona's two children, one in the Ram and one in the Scales, stand on opposite horizons at the same moment,
then, for as long as it takes from that instant when the sky holds them balanced until each crosses into the other hemisphere and the balance is broken,
just so long did Beatrice keep silent, her face painted with smiling, gazing steadily at the point that had overcome me.
Then she began: "I tell you, and I do not ask you, what you want to hear, because I have seen it there where every where and every when is centred.
Not to gain any good for himself, which cannot be, but so that his splendour could say 'I am' by shining out,
the eternal love opened into new loves in his own eternity, outside time, outside every other bound, as it pleased him.
Nor did he lie idle before that; for God's moving over these waters had no before and no after.
Form and matter, joined together and each by itself, came out into being with no flaw in them, like three arrows from a three-stringed bow.
And as a ray shines in glass, in amber or in crystal, in such a way that there is no interval between its coming and its being all there,
so the threefold work of their Lord shone out into its own being all together, with no distinction of beginnings.
Order was created along with them, and the ranking of all created things; and the angels, pure form, pure act, were the summit of that world;
pure matter, mere possibility, held the lowest part; in the middle, matter and form were bound together with such a knot that it is never untied.
Jerome wrote for you of a long stretch of centuries during which the angels were created before the rest of the world was made;
but this truth is written in many places by the writers of the Holy Spirit, and you will notice it if you look well;
and reason too sees something of it, for it would not grant that the angels who move the heavens could be so long without heavens to move.
Now you know where and when these loves were created, and how: so that already three burnings are put out in your longing.
Nor could a man count to twenty as quickly as a part of the angels fell, and shook the ground of your world.
The rest stayed, and began this art which you are watching, with such delight that they never leave off circling.
The beginning of the fall was the accursed pride of Lucifer, whom you saw held down at the bottom of Hell by all the weight of the world.
Those you see here were modest in acknowledging that they came from the goodness which had made them ready for such understanding;
so their sight was exalted by grace that lights, together with their own merit, and they have a full and settled will;
and I do not want you to doubt, but to be sure, that receiving grace is a thing deserved, according as the affection is open to it.
From now on you can contemplate a great deal about this assembly by yourself, if my words have been gathered in, with no other help.
But because it is taught on earth in your schools that the angelic nature is such that it understands and remembers and wills,
I shall say more, so that you may see pure the truth which is confused down there, being read equivocally like that.
These angels, from the time they were made glad by the face of God, have never turned their sight from it, and nothing is hidden from that face:
so their seeing is not interrupted by a new object, and so they have no need to remember by way of a divided thought;
so that down there men are dreaming with their eyes open, some believing what they teach and some not; but in the second kind there is more fault and more shame.
You do not go down one path in your philosophizing: so much are you carried away by the love of showing off, and by thinking about it!
And even that is borne up here with less indignation than when the divine Scripture is put second, or is twisted.
Nobody there thinks how much blood it cost to sow it in the world, and how pleasing the man is who keeps humbly close to it.
Everyone strains to make a show, and makes up inventions of his own; and those are what the preachers run through, and the Gospel is left unmentioned.
One says that the moon turned back at the passion of Christ and put itself in the way, so that the sun's light did not reach the earth;
and he lies, for the light hid itself of its own accord: so that eclipse was seen by the Spaniards and the Indians as much as by the Jews.
Florence has not as many men called Lapo and Bindo as there are fables of this kind shouted from the pulpit here and there in a single year:
so that the sheep, who know nothing, come home from pasture fed on wind, and not seeing the harm does not excuse them.
Christ did not say to his first company: 'Go, and preach idle talk to the world'; but he gave them a true foundation;
and that alone sounded in their mouths, so much so that in fighting to kindle the faith they made shield and lance of the Gospel.
Now men go to preach with jokes and with clowning, and so long as there is a good laugh, the hood puffs up and nothing more is asked.
But such a bird nests in the tip of that hood, the devil, that if the crowd could see it, they would see what the pardons they are trusting in are worth:
the pardon by which so much folly has grown on earth that people will run after any promise, without the proof of any witness at all.
The friars of Saint Anthony fatten their pigs on this, and a good many others who are bigger pigs themselves, paying for it in coin that was never stamped, in worthless pardons.
But since we have digressed a long way, turn your eyes back now to the straight road, so that the way may be shortened with the time.
This angelic nature climbs so far in number that there never was mortal speech or thought that reached so far;
and if you look at what is revealed through the prophet Daniel, you will see that no fixed number can be found inside his thousands of thousands.
The first light, which shines through all of it, is received in it in as many ways as there are splendours for it to pair itself with.
And so, since the affection follows on the act that conceives, the sweetness of loving burns and cools differently in it.
See now the height and the breadth of the eternal worth, since it has made so many mirrors for itself to break itself in,
remaining one in itself as it was before."
Perhaps six thousand miles away from us it is blazing noon, while here the earth's shadow is already sinking almost level with the horizon,
when the middle of the sky, high above us, begins to change, so that here and there a star fades from sight all the way down to where we stand;
and as the dawn, the brightest handmaid of the sun, comes on, the sky shuts its stars away one by one, down to the most beautiful of them.
In just the same way the triumph that plays always about the point which overcame me, and seems enclosed by what it encloses,
was put out little by little to my seeing: so that seeing nothing, and love, forced me to turn back with my eyes to Beatrice.
If everything that has been said of her up to here were gathered into one praise, it would be too little to serve this turn.
The beauty I saw goes beyond all measure, not only beyond us; and I truly believe that only her maker takes in the whole of it.
At this pass I admit myself beaten more than any comic or tragic poet was ever overcome by a point of his subject:
for, like the sun in eyes that tremble most, so the remembering of that sweet smile takes my mind away from my own self.
From the first day I saw her face in this life, until this sight, the following of her in my song has not been cut off;
but now my following after her beauty must give up, as a poet, as every artist must give up at the limit of his art.
So I leave her as she is, for a greater trumpet than mine to announce; mine is bringing its hard subject to an end.
with the act and the voice of a ready leader she began again: "We have come out of the largest of the spheres into the heaven that is pure light:
light of the mind, full of love; love of the true good, full of gladness; gladness that goes beyond every sweetness.
Here you will see both companies of paradise, the angels and the saved, and the saved in the very bodies that you will see them wear at the last judgment."
Like sudden lightning that scatters the power of sight, so that the eye cannot see even the most solid things in front of it,
so a living light shone all round me and left me swathed in such a veil of its own blaze that nothing appeared to me.
"The love that quiets this heaven always welcomes into itself with such a greeting, to make the candle ready for its flame."
No sooner had these few words come inside me than I understood that I was rising above my own powers;
and I was kindled again with a new sight such that no light is so pure that my eyes could not have borne it;
and I saw light in the form of a river, tawny with brightness, between two banks painted with a marvellous spring.
Out of that stream came living sparks and settled on every side into the flowers, like rubies which gold sets round;
then, as if made drunk by the scents, they plunged back into the marvellous whirlpool, and as one went in, another came out.
"The high longing that inflames and urges you now to have knowledge of what you see pleases me the more the more it swells;
but you must drink of this water before so great a thirst in you can be satisfied": so the sun of my eyes said to me.
And she added: "The river and the topazes which go in and come out, and the laughter of the grasses, are shadowy prefaces of their own truth.
It is not that these things are unripe in themselves; the fault is on your side, because you do not have sight so high yet."
No baby ever flung its face towards the milk so suddenly, when it wakes much later than its habit,
as I did, to make still better mirrors of my eyes, bending down to the water that flows there so that men may be made better by it;
and as soon as the eaves of my eyelids had drunk of it, it seemed to me to have turned from its length into a round.
Then, like people who have been under masks and look different from before, once they take off the borrowed likeness they were hidden in,
so the flowers and the sparks changed before me into a greater festival, so that I saw both courts of heaven made plain.
O splendour of God, by which I saw the high triumph of the true kingdom, give me the power to say how I saw it!
There is a light up there that makes the Creator visible to every creature whose peace is only in seeing him.
It spreads out in the shape of a circle, so far that its circumference would be too wide a girdle for the sun.
The whole of it is made of a ray reflected from the top of the outermost moving heaven, which takes its life and its power from that ray.
And as a hillside mirrors itself in the water at its foot, as if to see itself adorned when it is rich with green and with little flowers,
so, standing over the light, round and round, I saw mirrored in more than a thousand tiers all of us who have made our way back up there.
And if the lowest rank gathers into itself so great a light, how wide this rose must be in its outermost petals!
My sight was not lost in the breadth or in the height of it, but took in the whole quantity and quality of that gladness.
There, near and far neither add nor take away: for where God governs with nothing in between, the laws of nature count for nothing.
Into the yellow of the everlasting rose, which spreads out rank by rank and breathes a scent of praise to the sun that is always spring,
Beatrice drew me, like a man who is silent and wants to speak, and said: "See how great the gathering of the white robes is!
See how wide our city sweeps; see our seats so full that few people more are wanted here.
And in that great chair on which you are keeping your eyes because of the crown already set above it, before you sup at this wedding,
there will sit the soul of the noble Henry, the emperor Henry the Seventh, who will come to set Italy straight before she is ready for it.
The blind greed which bewitches you has made you like the baby who dies of hunger and drives the nurse away.
And the pope of that day, Clement, will be such a man that openly and secretly he will not go one road with Henry.
But God will bear with him in the holy office only a short while, for he will be thrust down into Hell where Simon Magus is, as he deserves,
and will push his predecessor Boniface, the man of Anagni, further down."
So in the form of a white rose the holy soldiery showed itself to me which Christ made his bride with his own blood;
but the other army, the angels, which as it flies sees and sings the glory of him who makes it fall in love and the goodness that made it so great,
like a swarm of bees which settles into the flowers one moment and the next goes back to where its work is turned to sweetness,
was coming down into the great flower which is adorned with so many petals, and rising again to where its love has its everlasting home.
Their faces were all of living flame, and their wings of gold, and the rest so white that no snow reaches that limit.
When they came down into the flower, they handed from bench to bench the peace and the ardour they had gained by fanning their sides.
Nor did so great a flying multitude, coming between the height and the flower, get in the way of the sight or of the splendour:
for the divine light gets through the universe according as it is deserved, so that nothing can stand in its way.
This kingdom, safe and full of gladness, crowded with old people and new, had its sight and its love all on one mark.
O threefold light which, sparkling in a single star to their sight, satisfies them so! Look down here at our storm!
If the barbarians, coming from the north, the region the Great Bear wheels over every day with the Little Bear, the son she dotes on,
were stupefied at seeing Rome and her towering work, when the Lateran rose above all mortal things,
then I, who had come to the divine from the human, to the eternal from time, and out of Florence to a people just and sound —
with what astonishment must I have been filled! Between that and my gladness I was truly glad not to hear and to stay dumb.
And like a pilgrim who is refreshed as he looks about the church he vowed to visit, and already hopes to tell what it is like,
so, walking through the living light, I led my eyes along the ranks, now up, now down, and now round about again.
I saw faces persuading to charity, set off by another's light and by their own smiling, and gestures graced with every decency.
My gaze had already taken in the general shape of paradise without having fixed itself anywhere in particular;
and I was turning round with my wanting rekindled to ask my lady about things my mind was hanging over.
I meant one thing, and another answered me: I thought to see Beatrice, and I saw an old man dressed like the blessed in their glory.
A kindly gladness was spread over his eyes and his cheeks, in a loving manner such as suits a tender father.
And "Where is she?" I said at once. At which he: "Beatrice moved me from my place to bring your longing to its end;
and if you look up into the third ring from the highest rank, you will see her again on the throne her merits allotted her."
Without answering, I lifted my eyes and saw her making a crown for herself by reflecting back the eternal rays.
No mortal eye, however far down it goes into the sea, is as far from the region where the thunder sounds highest,
as my sight was from Beatrice there; but it made no difference to me, because her image came down to me with nothing mixed in between.
"O lady in whom my hope has its strength, and who bore, for my salvation, to leave your footprints in Hell when you went down to send Virgil to me,
of all the things I have seen I acknowledge the grace and the power as coming from your might and from your goodness.
You have drawn me from slavery into freedom by all those roads, by all those ways you had the power to use to do it.
Keep your great gift in me, so that my soul, which you have made whole, may come loose from my body pleasing to you."
So I prayed; and she, far off as she seemed, smiled and looked at me; then she turned back to the eternal spring.
And the holy old man said: "So that you may finish your journey perfectly — which is what prayer and holy love have sent me for —
fly with your eyes about this garden; for seeing it will make your sight fitter for climbing along the divine ray.
And the Queen of heaven, for whom I am all on fire with love, will grant us every grace, because I am Bernard, her faithful servant."
Like a pilgrim who comes, perhaps from Croatia, to see the Veronica at Rome, the cloth with Christ's face on it, and cannot be satisfied because of his long-standing hunger,
but says in his thinking, while it is shown: 'My Lord Jesus Christ, God in truth, was your face really like this?';
such was I, gazing at the living charity of the man who in this world, by contemplation, tasted that peace.
"Son of grace, this joyful being," he began, "will not be known to you if you keep your eyes down here at the bottom;
but look at the circles out to the furthest, until you see the Queen sitting there to whom this kingdom is subject and devoted."
I lifted my eyes; and as in the morning the eastern part of the horizon beats the part where the sun goes down,
so, going as it were with my eyes from a valley to a mountain, I saw a part on the far edge beat all the rest of that front with its light.
And as, at the point in the east where the sun rises, whose chariot Phaethon steered so badly, the light is most on fire, and grows less on either side,
so that banner of peace, the highest part of the rose, was most alive in the middle, and on every side the flame slackened in the same measure;
and at that middle, with their wings spread, I saw more than a thousand angels making festival, each one distinct in brightness and in skill.
I saw, at their games and at their songs, a beauty smiling which was gladness in the eyes of all the other saints;
and if I had as much wealth in speaking as I have in imagining, I would not dare to attempt the least part of her delight.
Bernard, when he saw my eyes fixed and attentive on the heat he was warm with, turned his own to her with such affection
that he made mine more burning to gaze.
Wrapped up in his own delight, that contemplative man took on the free office of a teacher, and began these holy words:
"The wound that Mary closed and healed was opened and made to bleed by Eve, who is so beautiful there at her feet.
In the rank made by the third seats, Rachel sits below her, with Beatrice, as you can see.
Sarah, Rebecca, Judith, and Ruth, who was great-grandmother to the singer David, who in his grief at his sin said 'Miserere mei',
have mercy on me: you can see them going down like this from tier to tier, as I go down through the rose from petal to petal, naming each.
And from the seventh rank downward, as up to it, Hebrew women follow one another, dividing all the tresses of the flower;
because these women are the wall that divides the rose according to whether faith looked forward to Christ or back at him.
On this side, where the flower is ripe in all its petals, are seated those who believed in Christ who was to come;
on the other side, where the half circles are broken by empty places, are those who had their faces turned to Christ already come.
And as on this side the glorious seat of the Lady of heaven, and the other seats beneath it, make so great a division,
so, opposite, does the seat of the great John the Baptist, who was always holy, and bore the desert and martyrdom, and then two years in Limbo waiting for Christ;
and beneath him Francis, Benedict and Augustine were allotted to make the division, and others down as far as here, ring after ring.
Now look at how high the divine providence is: for faith before Christ and faith after him will each fill half this garden, equally.
And know that from the rank downward which cuts the two divisions across at their middle, souls sit for no merit of their own,
but for another's, under certain conditions: for all these are spirits released before they could make real choices.
You can tell it well enough by their faces and by their childish voices too, if you look at them well and if you listen.
Now you are in doubt, and in your doubt you keep quiet; but I shall loosen the strong knot that your fine thinking is binding you with.
Inside the breadth of this kingdom no chance point can have a place, any more than sorrow can, or thirst, or hunger:
for everything you see is settled by eternal law, so that the ring fits the finger exactly here;
and so this people, hurried into the true life, is not more and less excellent among itself here sine causa, without a cause.
The King through whom this kingdom rests in such love and in such delight that no will dares to want more,
creating all minds in his own glad face, endows them with grace at his own pleasure, differently; and here let the fact be enough.
And this is set down for you expressly and plainly in the Bible, in the twins Jacob and Esau, who were already fighting inside their mother.
So, just as their hair was of different colours from birth, the highest light fittingly crowns each soul with a different measure of grace.
So, with no wages earned by their behaviour, they are placed in different ranks, differing only in their first keenness of sight.
In the earliest ages, along with innocence, the faith of the parents alone was enough to bring salvation;
when the first ages had been completed, males had to gain strength for their innocent wings by circumcision;
but once the time of grace had come, such innocence was held back down there without Christ's perfect baptism.
Look now at the face which is most like Christ, for its brightness alone can make you fit to see Christ."
I saw so much gladness rain down upon her, carried in those holy minds created to fly across that height,
that whatever I had seen before had not held me in so much wonder, nor showed me so much likeness of God;
and that love which had come down there first, singing 'Ave, Maria, gratïa plena' — hail Mary, full of grace — spread its wings before her.
The blessed court answered the divine song from every side, so that every face grew calmer for it.
"O holy father, who bear for my sake being down here, leaving the sweet place where you sit by eternal lot,
who is that angel who with such play looks into the eyes of our Queen, so much in love that he seems made of fire?"
So I turned again to the teaching of the man who took beauty from Mary as the morning star takes it from the sun.
And he to me: "All the boldness and grace that can be in an angel and in a soul is in him; and we want it so,
because he is the one who carried the palm down to Mary, when the Son of God chose to load himself with our burden.
But come now with your eyes as I go on speaking, and note the great patricians of this most just and loving empire.
Those two who sit up there most happy for being nearest to the Empress are, as it were, two roots of this rose:
the one who is fitted to her on the left is Adam, the father whose bold tasting of the fruit makes the human race taste so much bitterness;
on the right you see Peter, the ancient father of Holy Church, to whom Christ entrusted the keys of this lovely flower.
And John, who saw in his Revelation, before he died, all the heavy times of the Church, the beautiful bride who was won with the lance and the nails,
sits beside him; and beside Adam rests Moses, the leader under whom the ungrateful people, changeable and stubborn, lived on manna.
Opposite Peter you see Anna sitting, so content to gaze at her daughter that she does not move her eyes to sing hosanna;
and opposite Adam, the father of the whole human family, sits Lucy, who sent your lady to you when you were bending your head towards your ruin.
But since the time is running out that puts you to sleep, we shall make a stop here, like a good tailor who cuts the gown according to the cloth he has;
and we shall turn our eyes to the first Love, so that, looking towards him, you may get through as far as is possible into his blaze.
But truly — in case you fall back when you move your wings, thinking you are going forward — grace must be gained by prayer,
grace from her who has the power to help you; and you will follow me with your affection, so that your heart does not part from what I say."
And he began this holy prayer:
"Virgin Mother, daughter of your son, humble and higher than any creature, fixed goal of the eternal counsel,
you are the one who so ennobled human nature that its own maker did not disdain to be made its making.
In your womb the love was rekindled by whose warmth this flower has budded so in the eternal peace.
Here you are a noonday torch of charity for us, and down there, among mortals, you are a living spring of hope.
Lady, you are so great and so strong that whoever wants grace and does not turn to you wants his longing to fly without wings.
Your kindness not only helps whoever asks, but many times it freely runs ahead of the asking.
In you is mercy, in you is pity, in you is greatness, in you is gathered whatever goodness there is in any creature.
Now this man, who from the lowest pit of the universe up to here has seen the lives of the spirits one by one,
begs you for grace, for strength enough to lift himself with his eyes higher towards the last blessedness.
And I, who never burned for my own seeing more than I burn for his, offer you all my prayers, and pray they be not too few,
that you may unbind for him with your prayers every cloud of his mortality, so that the highest pleasure may be unfolded to him.
I pray you further, Queen, who can do whatever you will, that after so great a sight you keep his affections sound.
Let your guard beat down the human motions: see Beatrice, and how many of the blessed fold their hands with mine to beg you!"
The eyes God loves and reverences, fixed on the one who prayed, showed us how welcome devout prayers are to her;
then they turned to the eternal light, into which we must not believe that any creature's eye makes its way so clearly.
And I, who was coming near the end of all longings, brought the burning of my own desire to its end, as I had to.
Bernard was making signs to me, and smiling, for me to look up; but I was already of my own accord what he wanted:
for my sight, becoming pure, was going further and further in along the ray of the high light which is true of itself.
From then on my seeing was greater than our speech can show, for speech gives way before such a sight, and memory gives way before such excess.
Like a man who sees while he is dreaming, and after the dream the feeling stays stamped on him and the rest does not come back to mind,
such am I; for my vision has almost entirely stopped, and still the sweetness that was born of it drips into my heart.
So the snow loses its shape in the sun; so the Sibyl's prophecy used to be lost, written on light leaves and scattered by the wind.
O highest light, who lift yourself so far above mortal thoughts, lend my mind again a little of what you seemed to be,
and make my tongue so strong that it may leave a single spark of your glory to the people who come after;
for by coming back a little into my memory and by sounding a little in these lines, more of your victory will be understood.
I believe that, from the keenness of the living ray that I bore, I would have been lost if my eyes had been turned away from it.
And I remember that for this reason I was bolder in bearing it, until I joined my seeing with the infinite worth.
Oh abundant grace, by which I dared to fix my sight through the eternal light so far that I used my seeing up in it!
In its depth I saw that there is gathered, bound with love into one volume, all that is scattered in leaves through the universe:
things, and the qualities of things, and how they relate, as though fused together in such a way that what I am telling of is one simple light.
I believe I saw the shape of the whole, the form of this knot, because as I say this I feel my gladness growing wider.
One moment alone has brought me more forgetting than twenty-five centuries have brought to the voyage of the Argo, the first ship, whose shadow made Neptune wonder.
So my mind, wholly suspended, was gazing fixed, motionless and attentive, and grew more kindled all the time with gazing.
At that light a man becomes such that it is impossible he should ever consent to turn away from it towards any other sight;
because the good, which is the object of the will, is all gathered in it, and outside it whatever is perfect there is defective.
From now on my speech, even for what I remember, will fall shorter than a baby's who is still wetting his tongue at the breast.
Not that there was more than one simple look in the living light I was gazing into, for that is always what it was before;
but because my sight was growing stronger in me as I looked, one single appearance, while I was changing, was changing for me.
In the deep and clear being of the high light there appeared to me three rings of three colours and one size;
and the one seemed reflected from the other as a rainbow is from a rainbow, and the third seemed a fire breathed equally from the one and the other.
Oh how short the telling is, and how faint beside my thought! and my thought, beside what I saw, is such that it is not enough to call it little.
O eternal light, who alone dwell in yourself, alone understand yourself, and, understood by yourself and understanding, love yourself and smile!
The second ring, which seemed, as I have said, to be born in you like a reflected light, when my eyes had gone round it a while,
seemed to me painted inside itself, in its own colour, with our likeness: so that my whole sight was set upon it.
Like the geometer who sets his whole mind to squaring the circle, and does not find, for all his thinking, the principle he needs,
such was I at that new sight: I wanted to see how the image fitted the circle, and how it has its place there;
but my own wings were not up to that, except that my mind was struck by a flash in which its wish came to it.
Here power failed the high imagining; but already my longing and my will were being turned, like a wheel that is moved evenly,
by the love that moves the sun and the other stars.