Idyllic Homelands: How Our Blood Shapes Us

(Paradiso, Canto XV): Cacciaguida, ancestry and idyllic homeland

“The bonds of common blood hold men fast through good-will and affection; for it means much to share in common the same family traditions, the same forms of domestic worship, and the same ancestral tombs”

~ from Cicero’s On Duties

Welcome to Dante Read-Along! ✨

(If this post appears truncated in your inbox you can read it on the web by clicking here. )

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 fifteenth Canto of the Paradiso, we meet Dante’s ancestor Cacciaguida. 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 fifth celestial sphere of Mars - Noble and courageous warriors of God - The souls in the cross fall silent - One soul comes forward to Dante - Beatrice gives assent to Dante’s question - He asks who this soul is - It is Dante’s ancestor, Cacciaguida - The virtues of old Florence - the life of Cacciaguida and his death in the Crusades.

Canto XV Summary:

The unified will of the souls, here in the fifth celestial sphere of Mars, who together reflected the exact will of God, and whose lights made up the shape of the cross, came together in one accord and silenced the music that Dante had heard at the end of canto xiv.

If they could act in such unison for Dante, how much more powerfully then could they also act on the prayers of those on earth; such was the love pouring from them, that anyone on earth who could not lift their eyes and hearts to it would grieve endlessly. The silence made their message clear; they were making space for Dante to speak, and they wanted to hear what he had to say.

The dominant image of this sequence is the Cross. Whereas in the previous canto the Christian philosophers danced in circles, expressing their participation in the harmonious movements of the created order, the courageous are represented here as intense points of light, moving with certain agitation to form the disciplined right-angles of the Cross, thereby associating their sufferings with the redemptive sufferings of Christ. The emphasis here is on energy, concentration and discipline.¹

From this silent display of the cross, made of the twinkling lights of the souls of the righteous virtue of courage, came one light that traveled from the group as a shooting star, leaving in its wake no empty space where it had been:

As, through the pure and tranquil skies of night,
at times a sudden fire shoots, and moves
eyes that were motionless—a fire that seems

a star that shifts its place, except that in
that portion of the heavens where it flared,
nothing is lost, and its own course is short—

so, from the horn that stretches on the right,
down to the foot of that cross, a star ran
out of the constellation glowing there.
xv.13-21

The light appeared as a pearl on a length of ribbon as it moved, such as was popular in Dante’s day, glowing as through a translucent screen of alabaster. It approached Dante, and through its light shone so much love, that it was akin to the affection with which Aeneas’ father Anchises had greeted him with open arms in his home in the Elysian fields when Aeneas traveled to the Underworld to see him as told by Virgil—that greatest muse—in the Aeneid:

What a great spurring-on that was, when Aeneas dared, accompanied by only the Sibyl, to enter the Inferno in search of the soul of his father, Anchises, in the face of many perils.
Dante, Convivio IV.xxvi.9

For Dante Read-Along by the one and only Luana Montebello

Father Anchises, deep in a hollow valley of greenness,
Was, as it chanced, making careful review of the souls in confinement
Who, in time, would ascend to the light. He was holding a census,
Counting up all his descendants, the grandsons he doted on, weighing
Fates and fortunes of men, strength of character, power of body.

But, when he noticed Aeneas approach, reaching out across the meadows,
He too opened his arms, reached both hands eagerly forward.
Tears were now flooding his cheeks, words poured from his mouth in a torrent:
‘Have you at last really come? Did righteous love for your father
Conquer the rough road here as I thought it would?’
Virgil, Aeneid vi.679-688

The soul called to him in Latin, the only fully Latin tercet in the whole poem; by calling Dante one of his blood, he indicated that he was an ancestor, and by pointing out that since Dante was a living soul for whom Heaven would be opened twice, he was having a unique experience, as the only other person who had that distinction was spoken of by St. Paul.

O blood of mine, O lavish grace of God, to whom was Heaven’s gate ever twice opened to thee? xv.38-30

---

I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago, (whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;) such an one caught up to the third heaven. And I knew such a man, (whether in the body, or out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;) How that he was caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter.
II Corinthians 12:2-4

Dante looked to Beatrice for confirmation to continue, dazzled by her ever growing sublime presence. As the soul from the cross continued to communicate with Dante, so beyond the mortal ken were his words that Dante’s limited understanding could not comprehend his meaning; even the idea he was trying to convey, in that realm of transparent understanding of thought and intention, Dante could not grasp, for that too was beyond his own understanding.

Then—and he was a joy to hear and see—
that spirit added to his first words things
that were too deep to meet my understanding.

Not that he chose to hide his sense from me;
necessity compelled him; he conceived
beyond the mark a mortal mind can reach.
xv.37-42

But finally his speech matched what Dante could absorb and he heard the souls thank the Threefold and One God who allowed Dante to travel through these otherworldly realms.

The soul revealed that he had already known of this meeting, as it was written in the book, the book of omniscience in which all to those in the afterlife were able to read to glean the future.

This soul, who would not be identified until the end of the canto, was Cacciaguida, Dante’s great-great-grandfather.

‘The Glorious Cross’ (from The Divine Comedy, Paradise ), 1 May 1807

This encounter between Dante and his illustrious ancestor is one of the most poignant and climactic moments in the poem. Of all the souls with whom he has conversed in Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, this is the one from whom his life-blood flows. Cacciaguida claims him insistently as his ‘blood’, his ‘seed’, his ‘son’, his ‘branch’, and renders thanks to God for the measureless grace whereby his descendant has visited Heaven.²

Cacciaguida knew that Dante thought his elder could read his mind as known through the Unity of God, as could so many others in Paradise, as easily as figuring arithmetic from the starting point of One:

Unity is the beginning of number, as God is the beginning of thought; from the conception of unity is derived the conception of all numbers, and in the divine mind all thought is contained.³

Even though this transparent knowledge was the case, Cacciaguida was still eager to hear Dante’s questions from his own lips, as he had waited through ages for that very moment; Cacciaguida’s desire was to let the moment play out to the fullest and not race to the fulfillment of the question. Beatrice again, at a glance from Dante, gave her assent to this line of conversation, and Dante began his long and descriptive method at arriving at his question.

Dante here excuses himself for being unable to thank Cacciaguida as he would wish to do for his benevolence. The ground of his excuse is that, whereas in Heaven a feeling is accompanied by an equivalent power of thought, through which that feeling can find expression, this is not the case with mortal men, for in them the means of expressing feeling fall short of the wish to do so.⁴

Dante asked the soul, comparing it to a precious topaz set in the cross, his name.

Cacciaguida began, going back in time to the Florence of the past, a more noble and virtuous time, to the ancestor who gave the family their name; this ancestor was at that moment in the first cornice of Purgatory with the Prideful, and Dante’s prayers could shorten the time that he would have to circle round that terrace with the heavy stone upon his back, gladly paying his debt.

In the Florence of the past, that of the old city walls, before its expansion and the addition of more widely encompassing walls, the residents had lived in accordance with the order of the church bells, attending to the ‘tierce’ and ‘nones’. It was a simpler time, before excessive displays of wealth through jewels and embroidered clothing. The women were safe, neither marrying too young nor with the expectation of a high dowry, unsustainable and out of reach. Sexual immorality—symbolized by Sardanapalus, an Assyrian king known for his wanton behavior and neglect of his kingdom for pleasure—was as yet not widespread and rampant as it was in the Florence that Dante knew.

The view of that Florence, as seen from the hill of Uccellatoio just as Rome was seen from the hill of Montemario upon traveling to it, was more beautiful than that of Rome, but would also fall harder than Rome at its demise.

Cacciaguida spoke of the noble Bellincion Berti; he and his wife dressed simply, as did other ancestors of the city, the Nerli and del Vecchio. In these noble families the wives were content, without fear of exile, as was the case in Dante’s time. He painted a picture of families and their children, mothers telling the origin stories of their ancestors, the stories of Troy and Fiesole, and of Rome.

The Florentines told of the origins of their city in the following way. After the linguistic division made as a result of the attempt to construct the tower of Babel, Atlas built the first city, which thus fu sola [stood alone] and was therefore called Fiesole. Another of Atlas’s sons, Dardanus, traveling in the East, built Troy there. From Troy Aeneas came to Italy. One of his descendants founded Rome. The Romans destroyed Fiesole. Romans and Fiesolans founded Florence.⁵

To continue his description of the old versus the new Florence, Caccaguida looked to other notable characters; as Cinghella contrasted Cornelia—the first lived lavishly while the second was the respected daughter of the Roman General Scipio Africanus—Lapo Salterello contrasted Cincinnatus—a corrupt lawyer against a respected Emperor.

Cacciaguida continued this history of Dante’s ancestors as his forebearers, until he himself was born with the prayers to Mary for his safekeeping on the lips of his own mother during his birth, and here he finally named himself, in answer to Dante’s original question.

Continuing his story, he grew, and married, and became a knight, winning favor through fighting in the second crusade with Conrad III against Islam.

It was in that crusade that he met his death; yet one that was celebrated and rewarded with placement there, in the fifth celestial sphere of Mars, home of the noble soldiers of the faith.

---

💭 Philosophical Exercises

“Follow in the footsteps of your fathers’ virtue! How would you climb high if the will of your fathers did not climb with you?”

~ From Nietzsche’s Zarathustra

‘The Birth of Cacciaguida’ after John Flaxman

In the culture that I come from, there is a saying that originates in the tragic events of the twentieth century. The saying goes that: “the Armenian woman is a woman who teaches her child how to speak, how to write in Armenian, despite being in the desert of Deir ez-Zor, in pain, hungry, and starving.”

This saying originates in the terrible and awful experiences that my family endured in the early twentieth century.

It highlights that despite pain and suffering, one can preserve the connection to the roots from which they come. The important thing is that nobody can eliminate or erase your identity if you maintain that connection to your origins.

Dante himself was exiled and cast out from his native city. He spent a large part of his life wandering, never returning to Florence. The greatest Florentine poet is not even buried in Florence but in the city of Ravenna.

Despite his exile and despite travelling across Italy and beyond, Dante never severed his bond with his native city. He preserved his connection to Florence through memory, through language, through art, through the act of writing itself. And this, I believe, mirrors the experience of many of us, myself included, who maintain a living connection to where we come from even when we are far away from it.

In the sphere of Mars it is all about lineage, about language, about the connection to where one comes from. It is a radical counterpoint to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, where we are often told about the nobility, virtue, and freedom of being international, of being cosmopolitan.

And as a person who is myself cosmopolitan and international, who has lived in many countries and speaks many language, the language I use most every day is not my native tongue. In fact, the language in which I am writing to you right now is my fourth language. And yet, I feel a deep connection to where I come from.

This, I think, is the story of this canto. Dante’s ancestor tries to remind him of the roots from which he descends. The message of this canto may seem to stand in contrast to the previous themes we have explored — particularly the idea that nobility is not inherited; it is earned, and that a noble father can give birth to an evil son. Once again, Dante teaches us how to differentiate, how to categorise the experiences and the realities that shape us.

Dante shows us that although our actions are always taken within the context of the community into which we are born, there is another important theme here — one especially relevant to what we call Philosophical Exercises. Dante’s ancestor, Cacciaguida, tells him about the Florence of his own time — an almost idyllic, utopian Florence where everything was in harmony and balance. Cacciaguida himself was a noble soldier, for he did not fight against his fellow citizens as many Florentines did in Dante’s time. The divisions and conflicts that Dante witnessed in his life were essentially a civil war between the White and Black Guelphs.

In Cacciaguida’s time, he was a crusader fighting for what he believed was a noble cause. Dante, therefore, contrasts this idyllic Florence, the utopian city that once existed, with the corrupt Florence he experienced in his own life.

But the most important lesson here is what Dante ultimately tells us. He does not teach us that we should chase utopian visions of our origins. Rather, he teaches us that despite the corruption we see in the cities of our birth — in his origin, in my origin, in our origin — we must still hold an image of what they could become.

We must retain the feeling, the confidence, and the desire — as we will witness in the next cantos — to act as though our city will one day become that idyllic place once described by Cacciaguida to Dante himself.

---

This Week’s Sinners and Virtuous 🎭

(Themes, Quotes, Terms and Characters)

by Gustave Dore

I. Oh Virgil, our father, we miss you

When Dante sees Cacciaguida and recalls Anchises reaching out to Aeneas, it’s as if his soul instinctively remembers the tenderness of another lost father—Virgil.

The reference to Anchises isn’t casual; it’s Dante’s way of acknowledging the lineage of spiritual fathers that shaped him: Anchises to Aeneas, Virgil to Dante, Cacciaguida to his descendant. Each encounter carries the same gesture of recognition and blessing across generations.

In this moment, Dante ties together poetry, ancestry, and guidance—the chain of love and wisdom that travels not through blood alone, but through teaching, language, and the inheritance of the soul.

---

Quotes 🖋️

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

Generous will—in which is manifest
always the love that breathes toward righteousness,
as in contorted will is greediness—

imposing silence on that gentle lyre,
brought quiet to the consecrated chords
that Heaven’s right hand slackens and draws taut.

Can souls who prompted me to pray to them,
by falling silent all in unison,
be deaf to men’s just prayers? 

~ lines 1-9, Paradiso, Canto XV

---

1. Robin Kirkpatrick, Paradiso 391

2. Dorothy L. Sayers, Paradise 190

3. Charles S. Singleton, Commentary on Paradiso 255

4. Robert Hollander, Paradiso 416

5. Hollander 421