Dante and the film 'Arrival': Language and Angels

(Paradiso, Canto XXIX): Arrival, Remote and Near Past, and the nature of Time.

But now I’m not so sure I believe in beginnings and endings. There are days that define your story beyond your life

~ Louise Banks, from the film Arrival

Welcome to Dante Read-Along! ✨

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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-ninth Canto, Beatrice exponds upon the nature of the angelic realms. 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 Primum Mobile, continued - Beatrice’s meditation on the Point of light that is God - He knowledge of what Dante was to learn of next - Her exposition upon the nature of Angels - Why, when and how they were created - She denounces false teachers - The vast numbers of the angelic realms.

Canto XXIX Summary:

Beatrice gazed silently at the divine Point of light that was God in a profound but short moment of meditation in the exact moment of the vernal equinox; Latona’s twins Apollo—the Ram of the constellation Aries, representing the sun—and Diana,—she of the scales of Libra, representing the moon—were opposite each other in the sky, one rising and the other setting, creating a perfect balance on either side of the horizon. In the moment that their paths were in exact alignment and the spring was ushered in, that perfect balance was also the balance of Beatrice’s meditation, in “an infinite moment of time and space.”¹

The simile of the sun and moon in balance is used to convey the idea of one instant of intermediate stillness and suspense-the silence that intervenes between Beatrice’s speech at the end of the last canto and her discourse. Thus the stage is set for Beatrice’s exalted discourse on the act of creation, as she gazes intently on the point which, symbolically, is God.²

Beatrice began the speech that would extend through the entire canto. Dante had been full of questions at every stage up until this point, but Beatrice took the lead, knowing what he both wanted and needed to hear: the reason for the creation of the angelic hierarchies and the way in which the splendor and glory of God proceed down through their ranks.

First, a negation; God did not create the realms to obtain more goodness for Himself only, but as a way to increasingly celebrate existence through the reflected glory shining from the angelic intelligences, that they may truly express Subsisto-I Am. If God was outside of time—the place in which he rested before creation—than this reflective action may bring that I Amness into the material universe. For this reason did he create the angelic intelligences.

Thus were the three kinds of substance created; first, Form, which is action of spirit without matter, the essence of mind, found in the beings of the angels. Secondly, Matter, the primal substance of which all physical things were made, embodying pure potentiality, and third, the blend of the two; that which was Form and Matter conjoined became the substance of the heavenly realm.

We are in the habit of recognizing, as one determinate kind of what is, substance, and that in several senses, (a) in the sense of matter or that which in itself is not ‘a this’, and (b) in the sense of form or essence, which is that precisely in virtue of which a thing is called ‘a this’, and thirdly (c) in the sense of that which is compounded of both (a) and (b). Now matter is potentiality, form actuality; of the latter there are two grades related to one another as e.g. knowledge to the exercise of knowledge.
Aristotle de Anima II.ii.412.7

This moment of creation happened in an instant, as quickly as light dissipating through colored glass, the nature of order inherent in it from the first moment. Pure Form, or action, was the nature of the angelic realm, the low point of earth had the nature of pure potentiality, and the heavens were that conjoined blending that could never be undone.

Created with the substances were order
and pattern; at the summit of the world
were those in whom pure act had been produced;

and pure potentiality possessed
the lowest part; and in the middle, act
so joined potentiality that they
never disjoin.
xxix.31-37

Beatrice disproved certain theories about the timing of the creation of matter and the angels, such as those St. Jerome held—he of the Vulgate Latin translation of the Bible—that the angels had been created long before the material universe.

Six thousand years of our time have not yet elapsed; yet how shall we measure the time, how shall we count the ages, in which the Angels, Thrones, Dominations, and the other orders served God?
St Jerome, Commentary on Titus i.2

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There is a twofold opinion on this point to be found in the writings of the Fathers. The more probable one holds that the angels were created at the same time as corporeal creatures. For the angels are part of the universe: they do not constitute a universe of themselves; but both they and corporeal natures unite in constituting one universe.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica I, q. 61, a.3

With this, Beatrice finished answering the questions she had set out in the beginning; satisfying the answers of where, when, and how, in regard to the purpose and creation of the angelic realms. She described the split between the fallen angels and those who stayed in heaven reflecting the glory of God, and how quickly that split had happened at the moment of creation:

Then, sooner than it takes to count to twenty,
a portion of the angels violently
disturbed the lowest of your elements.

The rest remained; and they, with such rejoicing,
began the office you can see, that they
never desert their circling contemplation.
xxix.49-54

And one thing cannot go unmentioned here. I say that of all these orders, hardly had they been created when a certain number, perhaps a tenth, was lost: to replenish which human nature was then created.
Dante, Convivio II.v.12

To further examine the nature of Form of the angelic realm, and the intellection through which it operates in fullness of purpose, the celestial beings were granted additional illumination through grace, more than what they could contain in reflecting solely on their own:

Those whom you see
in Heaven here were modestly aware
that they were ready for intelligence
so vast, because of that Good which had made them:

through this, their vision was exalted with
illuminating grace and with their merit,
so that their will is constant and intact.
xxix.58-63

She was confident in all of the teachings that she had shared, and invited Dante to confirm what she had said in the scriptures, or even to question those angelic beings before them. And yet there was more; since he had learned on earth, through false teachers, erroneous ideas about the angelic nature, she would elaborate further.

The false teachers had attributed three concepts to all created beings: understanding, memory, and will. But she wanted to clarify the distribution of these concepts in humans and angels. Only humanity had all three; the angels did not have memory as we understand it, and her explanation was profound and beautiful in its meaning.

With their sight consistently focused on God, even from the very moment of their creation, angelic beings had never had an interval of distraction from that purpose, not even the possibility of an interference that could come between their adoration and the nature of God; there was no prior event on which to put their focus, hence memory was not even a conceivable element, and was truly an impossibility through this distinction.

These beings, since they first were gladdened by
the face of God, from which no thing is hidden,
have never turned their vision from that face,

so that their sight is never intercepted
by a new object, and they have no need
to recollect an interrupted concept.
xxix.76-81

Tenth Heaven, or Empyrean

They represent perfect single mindedness; contrast that with the philosophic sophistry that is only engaged in for show or renown, and further, to those who did not even feel remorse for teaching purposeful falsehoods.

Below, you do not follow one sole path
as you philosophize—your love of show
and thought of it so carry you astray!
xxix.85-87

Those false teachers had missed the mark completely and had turned away from truth in preference of show and novelty, interpreting the scripture with wrong ideas; again she pointed to Jerome, and his interpretation for the darkness that was cast upon the earth at the moment of the crucifixion:

To explain this darkness at the Crucifixion, some said that the moon left its course to make an eclipse, others that the sun hid its own rays. Dionysius favored the first explanation, St. Jerome the second. The second theory has the advantage of accounting for an obscuration ‘over all the land’, whereas an ordinary eclipse would darken only a part of it. The miraculous eclipse recorded in the Bible ‘answered for the Spaniards and the Indians’—at the two extremes of the habitable world—as well as for the Hebrews.³

The congregations who were fooled by these teachers fed on the emptiness of their words, their jokes and low humor, and were ignorant of their own lack of understanding—such that they saw that emptiness as being the real substance, and were not even interested in anything more. Profits from false indulgences sold to the unknowing people were one example, and in one case were even used to fatten the swine of the order of St. Anthony, in a disparaging comparison. For their efforts toward salvation, the people were repaid with false coin in the form of empty indulgences.

[St. Anthony] is regarded as the father of monastic institutions, the disciples who followed him in his retirement to the desert having formed, as it were, the first community of monks. His symbol is a hog, which is generally represented lying at his feet. The monks of the order of St. Anthony kept herds of swine, which they fattened with the proceeds of their alms, and which were allowed to roam the streets of towns and feed at public charge. They were regarded by the common folk with superstitious reverence, a fact which the monks turned to account when collecting alms.⁴

Beatrice pulled back from her digression on false teachings, and returned to the topic of the nature of the angelic realms. She turned to the unfathomable number of the celestial host, and how they basked in the radiance exuded by God.

A fiery stream issued and came forth from before him: thousand thousands ministered unto him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him: the judgment was set, and the books were opened.
Daniel 7:10

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I think we also ought to reflect on the tradition in scripture that the angels number a thousand times a thousand and ten thousand times ten thousand. These numbers, enormous to us, square and multiply themselves and thereby indicate clearly that the ranks of the heavenly beings are innumerable. So numerous indeed are the blessed armies of transcendent intelligent beings that they surpass the fragile and limited realm of our physical numbers. Pseudo-Dionysius, The Celestial Hierarchy 14.321a

The angels received the light of God in as many ways as there were angels; for each received it in a unique way, and as we saw in the last canto, this capacity to receive is greatest in the higher realms, and least in the lower realms; and yet all conceive of God as much as they are able by their nature.

The First Light reaches them in ways as many
as are the angels to which It conjoins
Itself, as it illumines all of them;

and this is why (because affection follows
the act of knowledge) the intensity
of love’s sweetness appears unequally.
xxix.136-141

Now it had been explained in fullness, and Dante could understand the vastness of it all; of the One who never lost its Oneness, no matter in how many beings it was reflected back to itself.

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💭 Philosophical Exercises

‘The Hierarchies’ (from The Divine Comedy, Paradise), 1 May 1807 After John Flaxman RA (1755 - 1826)...

I must ask my reader’s forgiveness for the analogy I am about to make, but one of the greatest pieces of storytelling I have encountered in recent years is the film Arrival. Its premise is simple: an alien civilization descends to Earth, and a linguist is charged with the task of discovering how to speak with them. Every ordinary method of communication fails. Sounds, gestures, symbols — nothing bridges the abyss between human and non-human intelligence. This might be a small spoiler of the film, but I believe that no great story can ever be spoiled by revealing a single fact; what matters is not the plot point but the way the story is told, the way its meaning is allowed to unfold.

The beauty of Arrival lies in the moment it reveals that the real barrier is not vocabulary but perception itself. I doubt the screenwriter — or the author whose novella inspired the film — was consciously drawing from Paradiso Canto XXIX, yet the similarities are remarkable. The languages we speak do more than convey meaning: they determine the way we perceive the world, the way reality unveils itself to our minds. Dante understands this. Human beings, he says, grasp truth discursively, syllogistically, one step at a time. Our intellect proceeds through sequence. This is why we require memory — because the truth that reaches us arrives in portions, one after another, each depending on what came before.

But in Arrival, the alien civilisation communicates through a language that is not sequential at all. Their symbols do not unfold in time; they contain time. Each utterance spans past, present, and future in a single, indivisible form. Meaning is not revealed to them step by step — it is given all at once. And here the parallel with Canto XXIX becomes astonishing. Just as the alien beings do not perceive time as we do, the angels Beatrice describes do not experience creation as humans do. Their mode of knowing is fundamentally different. When Beatrice begins her explanation, we are confronted with the same truth that Arrival dramatizes: the human intellect cannot receive the divine unless its very framework of perception changes. Misunderstanding comes not from too little information but from the wrong form of cognition. The mind must be reshaped.

What Dante is doing here echoes a philosophical tradition he absorbed deeply. In The Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius raises the classic question: if God already knows everything, if all things are present to His vision, how can human beings be free?

Boethius’ Lady Philosophy corrects him.

God does not “foresee” events as though looking into a future that has not yet happened.

Rather, He stands outside of time altogether and perceives the entirety of temporal existence in one eternal, simultaneous act. For us, choices unfold; for God, they are simply present.

This means our decisions remain free — left or right, courage or hesitation, virtue or error — and yet God’s knowledge encompasses them because His knowing does not unfold in sequence. Dante in Canto XXIX borrows this metaphysical insight and transforms it poetically: creation itself was instantaneous because God’s act cannot be divided into temporal stages.

This question of how beings perceive time — humans, angels, God — reminded me of something from my own life. When I was learning Italian, I once asked an Italian friend to explain the difference between passato prossimo (recent past) and passato remoto (remote past).

I said I didn’t understand how Italians decide which past is “remote,” and therefore which conjugation to use. His joking reply contained a deep truth: Italians struggle with this themselves because their history is so long. What counts as remote past? The Second World War? The Renaissance? Ancient Rome?

In a culture where events from two thousand years ago still shape the present more vividly than things that happened yesterday, the categories of “near” and “far” lose their boundaries. A remote past may feel more alive than a recent one; a recent past may feel already forgotten. Time does not always correspond to experience.

And this is precisely the difficulty Dante confronts. He shows that for humans, time is something we move through. For angels in Canto XXIX, time is something they perceive all at once. For God, time is something He stands entirely outside of. The Italian grammar problem — innocent as it seems — reveals the same instability of temporal categories. What is remote? What is near? In whose perception? According to what framework? Dante, like Boethius, is pushing us to imagine an order of knowing in which such distinctions dissolve.

From this point the similarities with Arrival deepen further. About halfway through the canto, Beatrice suddenly launches into a harsh polemic against theologians who distort divine truth — men who, through carelessness or pride, impose their own fantasies on Scripture.

Her tone becomes almost surgical. She insists that all false conceptions must die before Dante can ascend further. And this is where Arrival illuminates the canto once again. Just as Louise Banks must unlearn her assumptions about time, grammar, causality, and language itself, Dante must shed his inherited interpretive frameworks. Louise’s human categories make understanding the alien language impossible; Dante’s inherited theological categories make understanding angelic being impossible. In both cases, a flawed framework blocks access to truth.

Beatrice points specifically to errors rooted in over-literal readings of Pseudo-Dionysius — treating the angelic hierarchy as if it were physical — and to Platonising tendencies that treat souls as pre-existing in some other realm. These are not harmless mistakes. They deform the lens through which the mind perceives spiritual reality. And this ties directly into the Luciferian and Ulyssian theme we explored before. The crime of Lucifer — and even of Ulysses — is not merely disobedience but a misdirection of attention. Lucifer turned inward, loving the beam of his own brilliance and the thoughts that arose within him. He refused the outward orientation toward the divine that sustains true perception. The result was catastrophic: when perception is distorted, the entire world collapses around it.

Louise Banks mirrors this dynamic. As long as she tries to interpret the alien symbols through the grammar of human language, she cannot understand what they say. She is trapped inside her own temporality. Only when she allows her perceptual framework to dissolve does she begin to grasp meaning.

And so Canto XXIX brings us to a profound theme, one that reaches beyond theology and into epistemology itself. Humans know discursively. We proceed step by step, syllogistically: from A comes B, from B comes C. Our ascent through Paradise mirrors this structure. Truths arrive in sequence because our minds require unfolding. Angels know intuitively. They perceive everything all at once, in a single act of intellect. Their knowing is not bound by time, memory, or succession but is total, simultaneous, immediate. And God knows eternally. God does not perceive in time at all. He stands outside of time, knowing creation not as a process but as a single, indivisible act of being.

Here Arrival illuminates Dante with unexpected clarity. Humans speak in linear sentences; angels “speak” in totalities; God speaks by creating. Louise Banks learns a language whose symbols contain the whole of time within themselves, and in doing so, she acquires something like an analogy to angelic intuition.

Dante invites us to consider what it would mean to perceive without past or future, to know truth not as a sequence but as a single luminous whole. That is the horizon toward which Canto XXIX pushes us.

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This Week’s Sinners and Virtuous 🎭

(Themes, Quotes, Terms and Characters)

Perseus turning Phineus and his Followers to Stone by Luca Giordano

I. Perseus and Time

The best way I can describe what this canto tries to convey about time is by turning to the relationship between an artist creating a painting and a viewer encountering that painting centuries later in a museum. I want to compare this contrast in perception to the relationship between mortal beings and God because the parallel is unexpectedly exact.

Think of an artist like Luca Giordano, whose famous Perseus with the Head of Medusa hangs today in the National Gallery in London. When Giordano painted it, he proceeded step by step. He made decisions stroke by stroke: where to place the light, how to shape the muscles, which colours to choose, what emotions to reveal, what meaning the composition should carry. His process unfolded slowly, logically, with each choice following from the one before. For Giordano, the painting came into being in time. It unrolled in front of him like a syllogism: premise, consequence, conclusion.

Now think of the viewer who stands before that painting five centuries later. We take in the entire scene at once. We see Perseus in mid-motion, the horror and beauty mingling in the severed head, the storm of action frozen into a single gesture. The painting reveals itself to us not piece by piece but in its whole dramatic unity. And although the scene depicts movement — emotion, danger, triumph — we perceive all of this simultaneously.

The painting’s temporal unfolding is contained within our single act of seeing.

In this sense, our perception as museum-goers mirrors, in a very distant way, the perception of God. The artist worked through time; the viewer stands above it. The work that for the creator required a sequence of decisions appears to us as a completed whole, a totality.

This distinction becomes even clearer when we contrast painting with other forms of art. Music must be heard over time; a symphony demands minutes or hours before it reveals itself. A book requires time to be read, sentence after sentence. A film unfolds frame by frame. These arts exist within time. But a painting does not. A painting can be seen in three seconds — the notorious average viewing time in the Louvre — or contemplated for an hour or a lifetime. It asks for no duration. It grants its entirety in a single moment of perception. Paintings, unlike every other art, live in a state that transcends temporal sequence.

Dante’s insight in Canto XXIX is remarkably similar. As we live our lives, we move through them moment by moment, hour by hour. Our experience unfolds gradually, like the painter at work, building our days stroke by stroke. The harmony of what we create — the spiritual beauty or disharmony of our choices — depends on how closely our actions correspond to the divine pattern of wisdom.

But God perceives differently. God, like the viewer standing before the completed painting, perceives the whole of our life as a single form. What unfolds to us through time is present to Him in its fullness. The work is already complete in His sight.

We live as painters; God beholds us as a viewer beholds a finished masterpiece.

In this way, Dante allows us to glimpse the difference between temporal beings and the eternal. Our lives must be lived in sequence; but the One who stands outside time perceives everything at once, not in fragments, not as unfolding chapters, but as a single luminous unity.

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Quotes 🖋️

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

Not to acquire new goodness for Himself—
which cannot be—but that his splendor might,
as it shines back to Him, declare “Subsisto,” 
in His eternity outside of time,
beyond all other borders, as pleased Him,
Eternal Love opened into new loves.

~ lines 13- 18, Paradiso, Canto XXIX

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1. Dorothy L. Sayers, Paradise 314

2. Charles S. Singleton, Commentary on the Paradiso 463

3. Singleton 482-3

4. Singleton 484-5