Paradiso (104 page)

85.
   For the context offered by the citation of
Aeneid
IV.622–629, see Balfour (Balf.1995.1), p. 137. He points out that IV.628, “litora litoribus contraria” (shore with opposing shore), recognized by some as the source of Dante’s “tra ’ discordanti liti” (between its opposing shores) is drawn from Dido’s penultimate utterance, her curse on Aeneas and his offspring. “Dante’s allusion to Dido’s curse, therefore, underlines the far-reaching consequences of Aeneas’s illicit love, for the conflict between Islamic East and Christian West is, for Dante, a continuation of the enmity between Carthage and Rome.”
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93.
   For the citation of Lucan here (
Phars
. III.453), see the notes to
Purgatorio
XVIII.101–102 and
Paradiso
VI.55–72.
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94.
   Folchetto di Marsiglia was born circa 1160 and died in 1231. His poems, written in Provençal roughly between 1180 and 1195, were known to Dante, who praises them highly (if the only one referred to is his canzone “Tan m’abellis l’amoros pensamen” [So greatly does the thought of love please me]), naming him by his more familiar name as poet (
Folchetus
in Latin, which would yield
Folchetto
in Italian, as many indeed do refer to him) in
De vulgari eloquentia
II.vi.6. Dante “recycles” the opening of the first line of that canzone in the first line he gives to Arnaut Daniel (
Purg.
XXVI.140, “Tan m’abellis vostre cortes deman” [So greatly does your courteous question please me]). At least several years before 1200, Folchetto left the life of the world behind (including a wife and two sons), becoming first a friar, then abbot of Torronet in Toulon, and finally bishop of Toulouse in 1205. He was deeply involved in a leadership role in the bloody and infamous Albigensian Crusade (1208–29). As Longfellow has it (comm. to this verse), “The old nightingale became a bird of prey.”

One wonders if Dante’s use of Folco (rather than Folchetto) for him in this canto mirrors his sense of the “new man” that eventuated once he turned from love and amorous poetry to the religious life. For a perhaps similar appreciation, if it is not clearly stated, see Bertoldi (Bert.1913.1), p. 27,
noting that St. Dominic was at Rome in 1216 “in compagnia del vescovo Folco, l’amoroso Folchetto di Marsiglia.…” On Dante’s sense of Folco’s two-part “career,” see Barolini (Baro.1984.1), pp. 114–22.
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95–96.
   Folco’s meaning is that the heaven of Venus has its light increased by the presence of his soul, now wrapped in a sheath of light because he is saved, just as it once stamped his nature with an amorous disposition.
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96.
   While Folchetto’s status as poet seems not to be alluded to here at all, many deal with it as part of the context of his presence, understandably assuming that Dante is centrally interested in that. Among those involved in examining the possible Old French and Provençal sources of Dante’s poems, Michelangelo Picone has been particularly active. Opposing the views advanced by Picone (Pico.1980.1 and Pico.1983.1) and Rossi (Ross.1989.1) and reaffirmed by Antonelli (Anto.1995.2), p. 347, Pietro Beltrami (Belt.2004.1), p. 33n., argues that Folco is
not
to be taken as the highest exponent of Troubadour lyrics found in the poem, but rather as a poet who has given over poetry for religion and is saved for that reason alone. That is, Folco’s distinction in Paradise lies in his rejection of poetry, not in his continued embrace of it. Compare the similar opinion of Luca Curti (Curt.2002.1), p. 146: “…  but now [we hear not the troubadour] but only the bishop Folco, in whose discourse poetry has not even a marginal presence.…”
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97–102.
   Dido (“the daughter of Belus”) was no more aflame with love (bringing grief to Sychaeus [Dido’s dead husband; see
Aen
. IV.552 and
Inf.
V.62] and Creusa [Aeneas’s dead wife; see
Aen
. II.736–794 and the note to
Purg.
II.79–81]) than Folco was. (However, since the next two classical lovers are both apparently drawn from Ovid’s
Heroides
, Dante may be thinking of the portrait of Dido found there [Book VII].) Nor was Phyllis more in love with Demophoön, who betrayed her (see Ovid,
Heroides
II); nor was Hercules more in love with Iole (see Ovid,
Heroides
IX). Allegretti (Alle.2002.1), p. 142, suggests that Dante wants us to think of the
Heroides
in part because the work insists on the adulterous nature of most of the loves it recounts, using faithful Penelope as a counter
exemplum
to them.
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103–105.
   The tercet clarifies the similar, but more occluded, statement of Cunizza (vv. 34–36). All the pain of sin is utterly erased from the memory of every saved soul. On this simile, see Jacoff (Jaco.1980.1).
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106–108.
   
A problematic passage. We have followed Bosco/Reggio’s reading of it (see their comm. to this tercet), in which a Florentine form of the verb
torniare
(to turn, as on a lathe) is seen as bringing the meaning into focus, as follows: “Here, in Paradise, we contemplate the craft revealed in the creation that God’s love makes beautiful; we also discern the goodness through which the heavens give form to the world below.”

For a lengthy and unapologetic negative response to Dante’s saving of Folco, see the judgment of John S. Carroll (comm. to vv. 82–102), which concludes as follows: “It certainly gives us a shock to find a noble spirit like Dante’s so subdued to the colour and temper of its time that deeds which sink Ezzelino to perdition exalt Folco to Paradise, because done in the name of Christ and authority of His Vicar.”

For the other appearance of the phrase “cotanto affetto,” see
Inferno
V.125, where it applies to carnal affections. Folco’s use of it now is very different, we may imagine, than it would have been in his flaming youth.
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109–114.
   Having read Dante’s mind, Folco changes the subject from himself to the particularly dazzling light (“like a sunbeam gleaming on clear water”) about which he knows Dante is curious. Once we find out who it is, we understand why he has tried to create a sense of excited mystery around this being.
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115–117.
   The enjambment in the second line of the tercet creates Dante’s desired effect: surprise. Not only does Rahab’s name cause us (at least temporary) consternation, what Folco goes on to say of her does also. Not only is a whore among the saved, she is among the loftiest souls whom we see here.

Among the first commentators, only the author of the Codice Cassinese (comm. to verse 117) said that by the “highest rank” Dante indicates the Empyrean, which is what he
should have
meant, since none of the Hebrew (and a very few other) souls saved in the Harrowing of Hell is anywhere recorded as going anywhere else, not even by Dante. That anonymous commentator would wait for nearly five and a half centuries for company (Torraca in 1905 [comm. to this tercet]). Torraca also believes the reference is to the Empyrean. The passage is, as many commentators protest, difficult to understand. Nonetheless, Benvenuto da Imola (comm. to vv. 115–117) seems quite certain that her highest “rank” pertains to the hierarchy of the souls gathered in Venus. Most of those after him who elect to identify her location also think the reference is to the planet. Only in the last one hundred years has the pendulum of scholarly opinion
begun to swing, if only slightly, in the direction of the Empyrean. Allegretti (Alle.2002.1), pp. 143–44, makes a strong case for that resolution. The only problem is that in the entire passage, all other references are unquestionably to the sphere of Venus (vv. 113 [
qui
]; 115 [
là
]; 116 [
di nostr’ ordine congiunta
]; 118–120 [
questo cielo … fu assunta
]; 122 [
in alcun cielo
]). And so it would seem that this is yet another instance of an authorial slip (see the note to vv. 119–123).
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118–119.
   The point at which ends the shadow of the earth cast by the Sun, a cone stretching nearly 900,000 miles above the earth according to Alfraganus, reaches only as far as the sphere of Venus (and thus marks the planet only when it is on the lower half of its epicyclical rotation). Most early commentators, if they cite any astronomical authority, refer to Ptolemy (for the relevance of his chapter on eclipses, first by Jacopo della Lana). Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Alfraganus becomes more widely used as Dante scholars begin to understand the extent of the poet’s debt to the Latin translation of the ninth-century Arabian astronomer’s work, in fact the probable source for whatever Ptolemy he knew.

In the Old Testament, Rahab has a major role in the second chapter of Joshua (2:1–21), where she aids and abets two spies from Joshua’s army; then she is rescued during the destruction of the city by a grateful Joshua (Joshua 6:22–25). Bosco/Reggio (comm. to vv. 118–126) point out that her salvation is not original with Dante, but is a matter of biblical record, with such witness as offered by St. Paul (Hebrews 11:31) and St. James (James 2:25), the first of whom insists on her faith in God, while the second extols her good works. And see Matthew 1:5, where Rahab is listed as the mother of Boaz, and thus a distant ancestress of Jesus. For a figural understanding of Rahab, see Auerbach (Auer.1946.1), pp. 482–84.
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119–123.
   Dante slips back into the language of
Paradiso
III, where Piccarda and Constance seem to be located in the Moon on a permanent basis. See Bosco/Reggio (comm. on verse 120), who are of the opinion that Dante does not in fact mean what he seems to, since the souls of all those who were harrowed from Hell by Christ (see
Inf.
IV.52–63) were assumed at once into the Rose, as have been, indeed, all those who have been “graduated” from Purgatory (not to mention those few [we assume] in the Christian era who went straight to Heaven). However, we may once again be witnessing the trace of an earlier plan (see the note to
Paradiso
III.29–30). Bosco/Reggio’s alternative explanation seems weak (repeating the explanation of Grabher [comm. to vv. 118–120]): Dante only means
that in the Empyrean their rank corresponded to the rank of Venus among the planets. Dante, in fact (and deliberately?), never clarifies the relationship between the order of the eight heavens in which he sees the saved arranged for his edification (nor indeed between the hierarchy among the souls who appear in each heavenly sphere) and the seating plan in the Rose. One probable cause of his avoidance of this question is that there are obvious distinctions among the degrees of blessedness of the saved who appear in various spheres, as we have just seen (Rahab is the highest in rank among these visitors to Venus). To calibrate
both
scales of beatitude probably proved too much even for a Dante, who thus simply avoided a question that we sometimes choose to force on him.
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123.
   Benvenuto (comm. to vv. 118–126) perhaps exhausted the possible interpretations of this line. The two “palms” refer to (1) the palms of Rahab’s hands when she lowered her line for Joshua’s two spies from the window of her room so that they could climb down; (2) the palms that Joshua and those who followed him raised in prayer. Benvenuto says these interpretations have been suggested by other readers and dismisses both of them in favor of (3): the palms of the hands of Jesus, nailed to the Cross. While there is still a certain amount of uncertainty, most current commentators support Benvenuto’s reading.
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124–126.
   In his
voce
dedicated to “Folchetto (Folco) di Marsiglia,”
ED
II (1970), p. 955b, Antonio Viscardi makes the interesting suggestion that parallels exist between Folco’s destruction of the fortified town of Lavaur in the Albigensian Crusade in 1211, accompanied by the voices of priests raised in song, and the fall of Jericho, accomplished by the sound of trumpets and shouts; he also suggests that both Folco and Rahab are humans stained by the sin of lust and ultimately redeemed by good works.
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127–129.
   Satan is traditionally thought of as being prideful (in that he cannot accept being less important than God); but he is also thought of as envious, particularly in his dealings with Adam and Eve, whose happiness he cannot abide. Dante uses the rhetorical figure periphrasis here to rousing effect, for who does not know the “answer” to this riddle? We seem to be invited to shout the name of Lucifer. But note also the crushing result when we consider the adverb
pria
(first): Satan may have been the first to deny his Creator, but he was hardly the last, dear reader.…

The sins of Eve and Adam brought all of us “distress” in that we weep for our lost immortality.

For Satan’s fall as a “foundation myth” of humankind, see the note to
Inferno
XXXIV.121–126. This text would seem to offer another version of that myth, with Satan’s envy as the founding sin of Florence.
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