Choose Your Archetype:Ulysses, Siren or Adam

(Paradiso, Canto XXVI): Saint John Questions Dante's Vision of Love

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Welcome to Dante Book Club, where you and I descend into Hell and Purgatory to be able to ascend to Paradise. Our guide in Paradise is Beatrice, and in this twenty-sixth Canto, Dante is questioned on Love by St. John. You can find the main page of the read-along right here, reading schedule here, and the list of chat threads here.

In each post you can find a brief summary of the canto, philosophical exercises that you can draw from it, themes, character, and symbolism explanations.

All the wonderful illustrations are done specially for the Dante Read-Along by the one and only Luana Montebello.

This Week’s Circle ⭕️

The realm of the Fixed Stars, continued - Dante’s blindness - St. John addresses Dante with questions - The theological virtue of Love - Dante successfully defends his entrance into ordered Love - The heavenly hosts rejoice - He is cured of blindness - Adam, the first soul, presents himself - Dante’s questions to Adam and their answers.

Canto XXVI Summary:

Having been blinded by the light of St. John, the third Apostle who, after James and Peter, would examine Dante on the Theological Virtue of Love in the realm of the Fixed Stars, Dante heard John’s voice address him. The souls here more often than not ‘breathe’ out their words, showing the nature of the reception of their speech there in Paradise.

The examination began, but in a different way than with the other Apostles; first, these questions on Love were being conducted in blindness, but also in that John did not ask Dante to define Love at the outset, as he had been asked to define Faith and Hope.

During the entire examination on caritas, or love, the third theological virtue, Dante is blinded, a fact which can hardly fail to bring to mind Cupid blindfolded and many another such traditional association of blindness with love. In this striking context it should also be noted that no definition of love is given in the examination, as it is with faith and hope. This serves to stress the fact that love is primarily a matter of the will, not of the intellect. Dante is simply asked what he loves, and why.¹

John’s first question to Dante was to state the goal that his soul was working toward, what was that target? Remember here that both the act of aiming and the act of choosing love are of the will. He also stated assurance that his blindness was but temporary, and would soon be restored by the eyes of Beatrice, just as the hand of Ananias had restored sight to the Apostle Paul in the New Testament:

Then do begin; declare the aim on which
your souls is set—and be assured of this:
your vision, though confounded, is not dead,

because the woman who conducts you through
this godly region has, within her gaze,
that force the hand of Ananias had.”
xxvi.7-12

And there was a certain disciple at Damascus, named Ananias; and to him said the Lord in a vision, Ananias. And he said, Behold, I am here, Lord. And the Lord said unto him, Arise, and go into the street which is called Straight, and enquire in the house of Judas for one called Saul, of Tarsus: for, behold, he prayeth, and hath seen in a vision a man named Ananias coming in, and putting his hand on him, that he might receive his sight.
Acts 9:10-12

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When, in the central cantos of the Purgatorio, Dante had offered an earlier discussion of love, he had also been deprived of sight, not by blindness but by the black smoke of repentance and the shadows of his second night on the mountain.²

Dante answered John’s first question, letting it be known that he would accept the blessing of the restoration of his sight from Beatrice whenever she deemed it time, as it was through her gaze that love had set his heart afire in the first place.

The blessed lady appeared to me dressed in pure white standing between two ladies of high bearing both older than herself. While walking down a street, she turned her eyes to where I was standing faint-hearted and, with that indescribable graciousness that today is rewarded in the eternal life, she greeted me so miraculously that I felt I was experiencing the very summit of bliss.
Dante, Vita Nuova III

Dante answered that God was the beginning and end—the Alpha and Omega—of all that Love had taught him.

I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty.
Revelation 1:8

Peter Paul Rubens - Apostle John

John spoke again and framed his second question: Dante must refine and clarify this answer by telling who helped him aim at such a lofty target. Dante named two inspirations; the first was through human reason as outlined in the philosophic arguments of thinkers such as Aristotle—his explanation outlined the whole basis of Scholastic reasoning. This would then lead to, upon discovering this truth through reason, to the source of that love expounded upon in the scriptures, which, being the highest good, was the logical outcome of this progression; Dante gives us a blending of the pagan and Christian pathway that he himself took, and that the Scholastics were so well known for:

The good, once it is understood as such,
enkindles love; and in accord with more
goodness comes greater love. And thus the mind

of anyone who can discern the truth
on which this proof is founded must be moved
to love, more than it loves all else, that Essence

which is preeminent (since any good
that lies outside of it is nothing but
a ray reflected from Its radiance).
xxvi.28-36

Studying Aristotle had pointed Dante to the concept of the ‘unmoved mover,’ as had the description of the voice of God when he spoke to Moses in the Divinely inspired scriptures.

This is clearly Aristotle, who teaches that God is the supreme object towards whom the heavens yearn…the extension of this idea from the heavens to the Angels or Deities is not remote from Aristotle’s spirit, and is entirely germane to Dante’s conception of it.³

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Since there were three kinds of substance, two of them physical and one unmovable, regarding the latter we must assert that it is necessary that there should be an eternal unmovable substance.
Aristotle, Metaphysics XII.1071.3-4

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These are scriptural authorities. The method of basing a demonstration in theology on both Aristotle and the Scriptures is, of course, constant with Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus, to name but two theologians.⁴

Dante had found this also at the beginning of the Epistle of John, which opened with the most mystical theology of any of the Gospels:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. John 1:1-2

The light that was St. John celebrated this answer and asked, as his third question, if Dante could not expand even further upon the nature of this love, if he did not have yet other motives, using the unusual metaphor of sinking his teeth into the idea, as there were so many other things that he could expand upon in this most important of Virtues. Dante understood his motives and for what clarifications John was asking for: more revealing ideas than Dante had yet put forth.

He referred to John as Christ’s Eagle; the Apostles of the Gospels each had a representation as an animal in the Biblical symbology;

And the first beast was like a lion, and the second beast like a calf, and the third beast had a face as a man, and the fourth beast was like a flying eagle.
Revelation 4:7

Dante expounded upon the additional things that brought him to Love, the many things that came together, blended, and came to new life pointing to the totality of the expression of that love. These things were the very existence of the world itself, the symbolism of the crucifixion, and those things held in common by all believers—“salvation, eternal beatitude, and the vision of God”⁵—and how these all had brought him from the sea of false love. More importantly, they brought him from disordered love to rightly ordered love, a theme that is here brought to its fruition conclusion:

The world’s existence
and mine, the death that He sustained that I
might live, and that which is the hope of all
believers, as it is my hope, together

with living knowledge I have spoken of—
these drew me from the sea of twisted love
and set me on the shore of right love.
xxvi.57-63

We encountered the idea of disordered love in the very beginning of our journey, the state from which Dante was wandering when he first came upon Virgil in the dark wood, so long ago. Here, however, in this examination, showing the results of his divine journey, Dante can, with confidence, express that he has come to set this love in order in the most profound of ways:

All Dante’s spiritual progress, from the Vita Nuova to the Paradiso, has consisted of setting his love in order. How love can require guidance was explained to him by Virgil on the Mountain of Purgatory. Now, at last, the right choice of objects for his love has led him to make the full committal of his soul to God.⁶

At this, the hosts of heaven called out in praise of these most exalted answers to the most exalted of questions; Dante had passed all three of his examinations on the qualities of the Theological Virtues; they burst out in a song of adoration that was the essence of the contemplation of the Seraphim:

And the four beasts had each of them six wings about him; and they were full of eyes within: and they rest not day and night, saying, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come.
Revelation 4:8

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Above it stood the seraphims: each one had six w

ings; with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly. And one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory.
Isaiah 6:2-3

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And here our good faith has its origin; from which comes hope, which is desire for what is foreseen; and through this arises the act of charity. Through these three virtues one ascends to philosophize in that celestial Athens.
Dante, Convivio III.xiv.14-15

This passage is symbolic, with Peter in attendance, of that other passage in Purgatory, through which Dante entered the gate up the three steps into Purgatory proper. Here, in Paradise, his questions from the three Apostles were like another three steps upon which, now that he has successfully completed it, will come his true vision of Paradise, the highest realm possible for souls to rest in the adoration of God. But that is still to come.

Upon this passage of examination, Dante’s blindness was cured, described in an extended metaphor of light passing through closed eyes, its inner ‘spirit of sight’ eager to open the eyes of the sleeper in order to encounter the light that was before it.

And just as a sharp light will startle us
from sleep because the spirit of eyesight
races to meet the brightness that proceeds

From layer to layer in the eye, and he
who wakens is confused by what he sees,
awaking suddenly, and knows no thing

until his judgment helps him; even so
did Beatrice dispel, with her eyes’ rays,
which shone more than a thousand miles, the chaff
from my eyes:
xxvi.70-79

La Divina Commedia illustrata da Federico Zuccari

Dante’s sight returned to him cleansed, even clearer than it had been before; with amazement, he saw that another soul encased in light had arrived while he was blinded, whom Beatrice introduced as Adam, the first soul created by God. Dante was taken aback that he stood before such a one, and upon recovering himself, asked with all humility if he could put a question to Adam, indicating that Adam already knew the question of his longing, as did all in this heavenly realm.

Adam’s response came, not audibly, but through the movement of the light surrounding him, which Dante compared to an animal under a cover of cloth, and how that cover moved with its movements.

Adam confirmed that he knew Dante’s wishes more deeply than even Dante did, as he could see them in the very mind of God itself. He stated Dante’s questions for him:

You wish to hear how long it is since I
was placed by God in that high garden where
this lady readied you to climb a stair

so long, and just how long it pleased my eyes,
and the true cause of the great anger, and
what idiom I used and shaped.
xxvi.109-114

Dante addresses four questions to Adam, who first formulates and then answers them. The questions are answered, however, not in the order in which they are put, but in the order of their importance. First comes the reply to question number three: What was the real nature of Adam’s sin? Then follows the answer to question number one: How long ago was he created? Next comes the reply to question number four, which concerns the language that the first man invented and spoke. And last is offered the answer to question number two: How long did Adam stay in the Garden of Eden?⁷

First Adam answered the “true cause of the great anger,” or why he and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden; it was not, he clarified, from the act of eating the forbidden fruit, but from their disobedience which led to the act of transgressing boundaries. Adam next answered the question of how long ago he was created, which included the tally of his years in Limbo, in addition to the years of the span of his earthly life; Dante here used the dating of the historian and scholar Eusebius in his calculations:

Adding the number of years that Adam lived on earth (930) to the number of years he spent in Limbo (4,302) gives a total of 5,232 years between the creation of Adam and the Crucifixion, hence 6,498 years between the Creation and the date of the journey.⁸

Next, Adam addressed Dante’s question about the nature of the first language that he himself created (line 114), and which was no longer in use by the time the tower of Babel, built under the direction of Nimrod, began construction, as it was created with human reason, not divine agency, and was thus impermanent:

The tongue I spoke was all extinct before
the men of Nimrod set their minds upon
the unaccomplishable task; for never

has any thing produced by human reason
been everlasting-following the heavens,
men seek the new, they shift their predilections.
xxvi.124-129

He continued on with the concept of language by looking at the first name that God was called by humans in this early language; during Adam’s lifetime, he said that God was referred to simply as I, which could indicate both a unity, or the J of Jehovah or Jah, but later that name was changed, Adam said, to El; in Hebrew, all are holy names for God. This was appropriate, said Adam, for as changeable as is the nature of humanity in the sublunar realm, so was the mutability of language:

As forests change their leaves with each year’s decline,
and the earliest drop off: so with words, the old race dies,
and, like the young of human kind, the new-born bloom and thrive.
We are doomed to death—we and all things ours.
Horace, Ars Poetica 60-63

Finally, Adam addressed Dante’s second question: how long was he in the Garden of Eden? The answer here may be surprising, even shocking: Adam spent only a bit more than six hours in the earthly paradise. Dante based this estimate on the work of Petrus Comestor in his commentary of the book of Genesis.

On that peak rising highest from the sea,
my life-first pure, than tainted—lasted from
the first hour to the hour that follows on

the sixth, when the sun shifts to a new quadrant.
xxvi.139-142

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💭 Philosophical Exercises

‘Conference with St. John’ (from The Divine Comedy, Paradise ), 1 May 1807

My reader can now see why it matters that we made this journey together.

Why we took the time to move step by step—through circles, through terraces, and finally into the celestial spheres. Because without that long ascent, this encounter—this sudden irruption of overwhelming light, this exam administered by Saint John (and others)—would be incomprehensible.

If you opened the Divine Comedy for the first time at Paradiso XXVI, none of this would make sense. Saint John’s questions, Dante’s answers, even the vocabulary Dante uses—everything here depends on what we have already seen in Inferno and Purgatorio. Barolini says it beautifully: this canto only reveals its full meaning when all the earlier encounters “come together.”

Here, in the sphere of the Fixed Stars, Saint John examines Dante on charity, on love—the third and final theological virtue, after Peter tested his faith and James tested his hope. But Dante’s response, and our understanding of it, would be impossible without two earlier figures: Ulysses in Inferno and the Siren in Purgatorio.

There is something unique I’ve noticed about this canto.

I.

If in Inferno our direction was clearly toward evil, toward a love that is fundamentally misplaced, then in Purgatorio we felt something more complicated. There, we were in a kind of crossroads. We were equally drawn toward misplaced love and toward well-directed love. There was a duality. As readers, we were moving through the middle ground.

We might remember the scene of the Siren in Purgatorio—the Siren who, as we discussed, was luring Dante’s mind back toward vain attempts, back toward empty pursuits. (I still find that one of the most moving and psychologically honest moments in the entire Divine Comedy.)

Here, in Paradiso, we have reached a point where our impulse, our direction, is no longer headed toward something misdirected, as it was in Inferno. It no longer has the ambivalence between two poles that we felt in Purgatorio. Here, the movement has a clear direction. Love is finally oriented, and oriented rightly.

And this is why those earlier figures—Ulysses in Inferno and the Siren in Purgatorio—matter so much. Because Ulysses and the Siren represent the distortions of love: the ways desire and our impulses can go wrong, the ways the human mind can aim at the wrong object, or choose to cross the wrong boundary, and chase empty, vain attempts.

I want my reader to imagine this as if someone is pulling us towards a direction: in Inferno our mind was pulled towards evil, in Purgatorio we were pulled towards evil and good at the same time, and in Paradiso we are pulled towards the good.

II.

If we go even further back, to the circle of Paolo and Francesca, Dante already gave us another image of misdirected desire: the wind of lust. The way they are blown about by the storm is exactly how lust feels in our own bodies, like a wind that picks us up and carries us, whether we want it to or not.

In Paradiso XXVI, that “wind” becomes something else, another physical feeling: it becomes the bite.

Saint John turns to Dante and asks him:

“With what teeth does this love bite you?”

In other words: what is pulling you now? What force is interrupting your ordinary life and driving you forward?

I find this image of the “bite” incredibly striking, almost physically palpable. Because each one of us is driven by some kind of bite. There is always something that breaks the normal flow of days, something that gnaws at us, keeps returning, refuses to be ignored.

In Inferno, those bites were vain bites. For example, the souls trapped in anger are perpetually chewing on the past, stuck in old injuries. Their bite is resentment. Others are bitten by envy, or greed, or lust: each passion is a kind of tooth that has sunk into their lives and will not let go.

Here, in Paradiso, Dante describes a very different kind of bite—one that many thinking people will recognise.

The first bite is the existence of the world and of ourselves.

The sheer fact that anything exists at all. This question bites reality: Why is there something rather than nothing? We think we can move on, but the question returns; it gnaws at us again and again.

The second bite is Christ’s death.

Even in our secular age, the story of Christ will not go away. People continue to discuss it, argue about it, reinterpret it. Why did he have to die? Why was this death necessary for our salvation? It is another bite in the mind of history.

And the third bite is our mortality and the hope of eternal life.

We are alive now, and we cannot feel what it is not to be alive. We know we will die, but we can only think our way toward that edge. This too bites us. We keep asking: What happens to me? What is all this for?

These are the three “morsi”—the three bites Dante names when he answers Saint John. Barolini notes that Dante is reusing the sharp, almost violent erotic language of his earlier rime petrose, but now it is purified and redirected. The old language of eros becomes the new language of charity.

So, if in Inferno the bites were anger, lust, obsession, resentment, and in Purgatorio we watched those bites slowly lose their power; here in Paradiso we see them replaced by higher bites:

metaphysical wonder, the scandal of the Cross, the longing for eternal life.

These three bites pull Dante out of the sea of twisted love—the sea where Ulysses drowned—and place him on the shore of right love. This is what Barolini calls conversio in bono: the turning of the soul toward its true centre, toward God as the Alpha and Omega of every desire.

III.

When I read the Divine Comedy for the first time, and reached this point, and realised that here we meet Adam, I was blown away by Dante’s genius.

Because in the Divine Comedy we are travelling several journeys at once.

First of all, I often describe this journey as going through the circles, terraces, and spheres of our foolishness, of our stupidity, of our conformity, in order to reach the point where everything is straightened up. But this journey also feels as if we are travelling chronologically back to the state of mind that our ancestors, Adam and Eve, had.

And the journey feels particularly pertinent in our own day and time. We live in an age that often feels like a dark forest: a time of confusion, of noise, of moral and intellectual fog. And it feels that Dante wanted to travel from his time, which also felt like a dark forest, back to the essence, to the first state of mind, that of Adam.

So it is deeply fitting that after being examined on love by Saint John, Dante now turns and sees Adam: the first human being, the first consciousness, the origin of our story. The last great encounter of the poem is with the first man.

Adam then does something very characteristic of Paradiso: he answers questions that Dante has not yet spoken aloud. In Heaven, desire is transparent. Dante’s unspoken curiosity is already visible.

Adam names four things Dante wants to know:

1. How long it has been since his creation.

2. How long he remained in the Garden.

3. What the true cause of the Fall really was.

4. And finally, what language he “used and made.”

And this is where I want to return to something we’ve been tracing across several cantos: the nature of original sin.

We’ve described before that the sin committed by Lucifer, the sin committed by Ulysses, and the sin committed by Adam are unified by one element. It is not simply trespassing a boundary for its own sake. It is trespassing a particular kind of boundary.

The boundary they cross is the desire to reach the heights without God’s help. To reach beyond the measure of the creature, without God as your ally, without God as your pilgrim-companion.

This is the true trespass of Adam, the true trespass of Lucifer, the true trespass of Ulysses. They wanted to reach higher, to expand, to go further—but what they refused was not just “the bite of a fruit.” What they refused was dependence. The boundary they crossed is the boundary you cross when you try to do something without God, on your own, convinced that you can achieve everything by your own power.

And what does that mean for us in a secular world, this attempt to do something “without God”? It means going against harmony. Going against the natural order. Going against reality itself.

To trespass, in this Dantean sense, is to decide that you will bend reality to your will, rather than bending your will to reality. That is the common thread running through Lucifer’s fall, Ulysses’ last voyage, and Adam’s choice in the Garden.

Then Adam turns to the question of language, and here Dante becomes almost shockingly modern.

Adam says that the language he spoke—traditionally understood as Hebrew no longer exists. It was already extinct before the Tower of Babel. And he insists that he made this language himself.

At this point I want to remind you of something we discussed earlier, when we explored the Tower of Babel. I pointed out that we move through this world not only through national languages like English, French, or Mandarin, but also through what we might call languages of perception.

Love is a language.

Faith is a language.

Courage is a language.

Poetry, physics, biology, botany—all of these are complex languages that we learn in order to perceive the world. Anatomy is a language for understanding how your body works. Each discipline is a grammar for reading reality.

So, in my interpretation, Adam’s confession about language has a double force. On the literal level, he is saying that the language in which he spoke with God, the idiom he invented to understand and address God, was already completely extinct by the time humanity reached the episode we call the Tower of Babel.

On the symbolic level, you could say: the original way of understanding God, the original “language” of the mind that lived in harmony with reality, was gone long before our later confusions.

In the biblical story, the Tower of Babel appears when humans decide they can reach God, or make themselves equal to God, by building high enough. A king—traditionally associated with Nimrod, later echoed by figures like Nebuchadnezzar—imagines that with enough height, enough bricks, enough human effort, he can storm the heavens.

And in that story, God confuses their languages so that they can no longer understand each other, no longer coordinate their attempt to storm heaven. Their speech fractures; understanding breaks.

But now Dante does something quite daring through Adam.

If Adam’s own language had already died before Babel, then Babel cannot be the origin of linguistic diversity. It can no longer be the single, neat explanation for why humans speak in so many different tongues.

Barolini calls this move the “death of Babel” as punishment. Dante no longer treats linguistic plurality as a curse, but as a consequence of time and of human inventiveness. Nature gives us the capacity to speak, Adam says, but whether we speak in this way or that way, in this language or in another, is left to us, “according to what pleases you.”

Everything created in time has its own death: cities, families, reputations—and also languages, and also these “languages of perception” through which we interpret the world. They are born, they flourish, they decay; new ones are invented.

So in this final encounter, I am once again amazed by Dante’s genius. We see a shared pattern that continues on from Lucifer, Ulysses, and Adam: the desire to rise without God, against reality, against harmony, something that, in different ways, we are all guilty of. At the same time, we witness the straightening of love through the examination of the direction of our life. And finally, we see the mortality and the astonishing creativity of language both spoken language and these deeper languages by which we make sense of the world.

For a reader living in our own dark forest, this movement feels eerily relevant. Dante invites us to make the same journey: through our circles of folly, through our terraces of half-repentance, through our competing “languages” and interpretations, up into the clear air where our love, our limits, and our ways of understanding reality are finally seen in their true light.

And that is why Paradiso XXVI feels like a great convergence point: a place where theology, psychology, language, and our own modern confusion all meet in one luminous figure—Adam, the first mind at the summit of the journey.

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This Week’s Sinners and Virtuous 🎭

(Themes, Quotes, Terms and Characters)

The Fall and Expulsion from Paradise, fresco painted by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, Vatican City

Instead of themes in this canto, I would like to share some previous posts that can help my reader understand this part of your journey. As I said, if anyone opens the Divine Comedy on Canto XXVI of Paradiso, they might not fully grasp its meaning:

The Gates of Hell Are Wide, Path To Heaven Narrow (Dante Read-Along)

The Art of Resilience: How to Choose Your Destiny?

How to Avoid Mental Confusion in a World of Infinite Knowledge

Oculus Tortus: The Twisted Eye

Sirens: How to Know That You're Being Seduced?

The Labyrinth of Love

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Quotes 🖋️

(The ones I keep in my journal as reminders of eternal wisdom):

Before I was sent down to Hell’s torments,
on earth, the Highest Good—from which derives
the joy that now enfolds me—was called I;

and then He was called El. Such change must be:
the ways that mortals take are as the leaves
upon a branch—one comes, another goes.

~ lines 133--138, Paradiso, Canto XXVI

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1. Charles S. Singleton, Commentary on the Paradiso 410

2. Robin Kirkpatrick, Paradiso 438

3. Singleton 414

4. Singleton 415-16

5. Singleton 417

6. Dorothy L. Sayers, Paradise 288

7. Singleton 420

8. Singleton 422