Paradiso (179 page)

Authors: Dante

BOOK: Paradiso

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142–145.
The final four lines are divided into two parts, the first referring to an apparent failure (“Here my exalted vision lost its power”), in which the protagonist/poet, so recently rewarded with the comprehension of Everything (verse 141), loses that vision, which is blotted out by his reemergent humanity. And then the poem’s final sentence, begun with an adversative,
ma
(but), tells a quite different story: The protagonist’s interior motions, that of his affective power (the will) and that of his intellective power (his transmuted desire), both move in harmony with God’s cosmos.
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142.
See the
Grande Dizionario
for a definition of
facoltà
: “the property of every being endowed with sense to perceive, revive, and represent in the
soul sensations, perceptions, impressions, and images.” On
fantasia
and
imaginazione
, see Lepschy (Leps.1987.1). And see the notes to
Purgatorio
XVII.13–18 and 25.
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143.
For discussion of Dante’s use of Latin in the poem, including this final instance, see the note to
Paradiso
IV.25.
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144.
Pertile (Pert.2005.2), pp. 265–81 (a reprinting of an article published in 1995) and pp. 133–35, reopens the question of the meaning of this final image. The vast majority of readers have believed that Dante has a single wheel in mind (none more exigently and at greater length than Nardi [Nard.1944.1], pp. 337–50), all places on which move with uniform regularity. Pertile revives the view of those few twentieth-century readers who saw the tautological vacuity of this as a final image and, revisiting Ezechiel (1:19–21 and 10:16) and Boethius (
Cons
. II.m8.28–30), revives a better idea: Dante has
two
wheels in mind. Aversano (Aver.1984.2), pp. 203–6, also finds the source in Ezechiel (1:15–21), but in order to make a different point. But see Freccero (Frec.1986.1, pp. 246–50 of an essay entitled “The Final Image,” first published in 1964) for whom there is but one wheel, despite the fact that he thinks it reflects Ezechiel’s wheel within a wheel, which would seem to indicate two wheels.

For a new wrinkle, see Rizzardi (Rizz.2000.1), who makes a case for Dante’s having an image in mind that would become a staple in later ages: the universe as the movements in a mechanical clock. She bolsters her argument by pointing back to previous clock imagery (at
Purg.
VIII.85–87;
Par.
X.139–146 and
Par.
XXIV.13–18).

Whatever the metaphor controlling this passage, whether biblical or astronomical or mechanical, the simplest solution of the literal sense of the line is to understand that line 144, “as a wheel that is moved in just the same way,” is attached to the preceding (Latin) noun,
velle
. What the text then says is clear: “But already my desire was moving in a circle (around God), as was my will, revolving in just the same way.” This was precisely the understanding put forward by Torraca (comm. to vv. 143–145) over one hundred years ago that Bruno Nardi belittled (Nard.1944.1), p. 349n. The protagonist/poet’s soul has left our solar system behind and is moving in a circle, not around our earth, but, like the angelic orders, around God. See Pertile’s concluding remarks on the last paradox in the poem: The pilgrim has found his peace in continual movement. It is not an accident that Goethe admired this final scene and used it in developing the conclusion of the second part of
Faust
.
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145.

While the fact that the word
stelle
is the last word of each canticle would seem to have been an early and lasting perception, John of Serravalle (comm. to vv. 133–145) appears to have been the first ever to have had it.

For the possibility that Dante’s
stella
reflects Ovid’s
astra
(
Metam.
XV.876) and
his
starry vision of his own personal immortality that concludes his great poem (vv. 871–879), reformulated by Dante to accord with quite a different (and less self-absorbed) view, see Levenstein (Leve.2003.1), p. 418.

For an essay on this “last word,” see Ahern (Aher.1984.1), who, while not referring to Ovid, argues that this canto couches its central concerns, conflating two metaphors, in the images of the heavens as book and of the stars as alphabet.

Scartazzini (comm. to this verse) points out that the presence of the same form of the verb
muovere
in the first and last lines of the
cantica
creates a sort of ring composition. He also points out that Dante’s practice in this regard resembles that found in
canzoni
of other poets in his time; he also suggests the pertinence of the ending (which happens to constitute its thirty-third paragraph) of the
Epistle to Cangrande
(XIII.90): “And since, when the Beginning or First, which is God, has been reached, there is nought to be sought for beyond, inasmuch as He is Alpha and Omega, that is, the Beginning and the End, as the
Vision
of John tells us, the work ends in God Himself, who is blessed for evermore, world without end” (tr. P. Toynbee).
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AMDG
9
.ix.MMVI

INDEX OF NAMES AND PLACES

Index of these items (in their English forms, where these exist) in the Italian text of
Paradiso
. NB: (1) if a character or a place is mentioned more than once in a canto, only the first reference is indicated; (2) no distinction has been made between direct and indirect references; that is, one will find “Lavinia” and not “Amata, daughter of.”

Acone,
XVI.65

Acquasparta,
XII.124

Adam,
VII.26
;
XIII.37
;
XXVI.83
;
XXXII.121

Àdige,
IX.44

Adimari,
XVI.115

Adriatic,
VIII.68
;
XXI.123

Aeneas,
VI.3
;
XV.27

Agamemnon,
V.69

Agapetus,
VI.16

Aguglione,
XVI.56

Alagna,
XXX.148

Alba,
VI.37