The Arrow One Foresees Arrives more Gently.

(Paradiso, Canto XVII): Prophecy of Dante's exile, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil and others

You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.

This city will always pursue you.

You’ll walk the same streets, grow old

in the same neighborhoods, turn gray in these same houses.

You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere:

there’s no ship for you, there’s no road.

Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,

you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.

~ C.P. Cavafy, The City

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 seventeenth Canto, we hear a prophecy about Dante’s exile. 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 ⭕️

Fifth celestial sphere of Mars, continued - Dante asks Cacciaguida about his future - Cacciaguida’s prophecy about Dante’s exile from Florence - The hopefulness of the refuge of the della Scala family - Dante’s daring to expose the truth in his poetry.

Canto XVII Summary:

After the close of Cacciaguida’s speech on the downfall of the noble houses of Florence in the fifth celestial sphere of Mars, Dante sought assurance from both his ancestor and of Beatrice about his own fate, which stemmed from the creation of the Florentine factions that Cacciaguida had just spent so much time detailing.

His doubt about that future and what it would bring had Dante feeling just as Phaëthon had when, in the Greek myth, his companions doubted his parentage as claimed by his mother Clymene, who told Phaëthon that the lord Apollo was his father. Phaëthon came to her with his own doubts:

Clymene, moved by Phaëthon’s petition
(or by the insult to her own good name),
lifted her arms and stretched them out to heaven
and gazing right into the sun, replied,
“By this great radiance, my child, I swear,
by this bright orb which sees and hears us now,
that from this being which you now behold,
and which rules the world, you have your origin,
child of the Sun! And if I speak a lie,
never may I look on his face again.
Ovid Metamorphoses i.1063-1072

We have visited Phaëthon’s fate before;¹ when visiting his father Apollo in the heavens, he requested that he be able to drive the chariot of the sun, but unable to control the divine chariot, suffered the disaster of a fiery crash which led to his death. In contrast, Dante, in the heavens, was guided into understanding rather than left to recklessness.

Beatrice addressed Dante’s thoughts, as she and all the other heavenly souls could read them; but she requested something more of him:

Therefore my lady said to me: “Display
the flame of your desire, that it may
be seen well-stamped with your internal seal,

not that we need to know what you’d reveal,
but that you learn the way that would disclose
your thirst, and you be quenched by what we pour.”
xvii.7-12

Even though they could read his thoughts and desires, the act of formulation, of shaping the request, was part of the transformative act, and helped Dante himself to define it thoroughly.

Dante posed his question, addressing Cacciaguida’s ability to focus on God’s omniscience as a point of light, seen as easily to those in the heavens as one on earth could appraise the shape of a triangle, and could therefore see what was to come.

The idea of contingency is used frequently in this canto, expressing all of the possible outcomes of events in the sublunar realm—the world under the moon, the world of the four elements—that depend upon the working of free will; the word embraces all potentialities of outcome.

The blessed see even ‘contingent,’ or causal things—whether they be past, present, or future—as clearly as ‘earthly minds’ can grasp an eternal, concrete, elementary fact—as for instance the geometrical proposition that ‘two obtuse angles cannot be contained in a triangle.’²

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Now God knows all contingent things not only as they are in their causes, but also as each one of them is actually in itself. And although contingent things become actual successively, nevertheless God knows contingent things not successively, as they are in their own being, as we do; but simultaneously. The reason is because His knowledge is measured by eternity, as is also His being; and eternity being simultaneously whole comprises all time, as said above. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica I.q.14.a.13

Dante continued to expand upon his question, remembering back to his journey up the mountain of Purgatorio, as well as the prior descent into the Inferno with Virgil, where he had heard prophecies about his future; remember, while written beginning in 1303 and published in 1321, the setting for the Commedia is in the year 1300, before Dante’s exile. During his poetic pilgrimage, he was given prophecies more than once about his future troubles. While he felt as “firmly planted as a cube’ (24) against whatever was to befall him, he ultimately asked Cacciaguida to share foreknowledge of his fate, so that he could be prepared.

The blow that is foreseen strikes with less force, and we are able more easily to bear earthly wrongs, if we are forearmed with the shield of foreknowledge.
St. Gregory the Great, Homiliae XL in Evangelia xxxv

Sandro Botticelli Dante and Beatrice

Cacciaguida, in answer to this question, began the speech that composed his reply with a clear and logical progression, so unlike the ‘maze of words’ (31) as was used by the pagan oracles in the time before Christ’s redemptive act.

Fearsome, ambiguous words such as these are the Sibyl of Cumae’s
Song from her sanctum. She rolls up the truth in obscurity’s riddles,
Rumbling the cavern with echoes.
Virgil, Aeneid vi.98-100

‘Enclosed by his own radiance and manifesting his own joy’,³ Cacciaguida opened by explaining again this idea of contingency that Dante had brought up in his question:

Contingency,
while not extending past the book in which
your world of matter has been writ, is yet
in the Eternal Vision all depicted

(but this does not imply necessity,
just as a ship that sails downstream is not
determined by the eye that watches it).
xvii.36-42

Cacciaguida saw all possibilities blend together as would the harmonious sounds created by a group of voices, mingling with each other and creating a whole. He used an example from classical antiquity to describe Dante’s inevitable banishment and flight through the story of Hippolytus, son of Theseus, and the treachery of his stepmother Phaedra; so would Dante be forced to flee:

In vain the daughter of Queen Pasiphaë
once tempted me to shame my father’s bed
and then imputed her foul lusts to me
(either from fear that she would be discovered
or else from her displeasure with rejection);
and though I had done nothing to deserve it,
my father ordered me to leave the city,
placing a fatal curse upon my head.
Ovid, Metamorphoses xv.579-586

Cacciaguida told Dante that the machinations were already working toward his exile, even as he was in Paradise conversing with him, and that the success of the plan put in place by Pope Boniface VIII, instigated by Corso Donati, was certain:

Apparently the exile of Dante and other opponents of the papal policy was planned in Rome in April 1300, two months before Dante’s priorate. Specifically the reference seems to be to the fact that Boniface VIII and the Roman curia were already plotting to turn the city of Florence over to the faction of the Neri, an event which did indeed lead finally to Dante’s exile. At this time the city was in a state of ferment, owing to the feuds between the Neri and the Bianchi. The former were the partisans of Boniface and were clamoring for Charles of Valois as his representative, while the Bianchi, to which faction Dante belonged, were bitterly opposed both to Boniface and to Charles.⁴

Dante—the historical Dante—had gone to Rome with an embassy of Bianchi—White Guelfs—at which time Charles of Valois took over Florence, and subsequently the exile order was pronounced against Dante and the other members of the Bianchi party. After this, Dante was never to return to Florence, but would taste the bitter humiliation of exile and poverty.

You shall leave everything you love most dearly:
this is the arrow that the bow of exile
shoots first. You are to know the bitter taste

of other’s bread, how salt it is, and know
how hard a path it is for one who goes
descending and ascending others’ stairs.
xvii.55-60

Yet, as if exile were not bad enough, this was not the biggest challenge that Dante would face. Most difficult would be the infighting among his own party, the White Guelphs, upon which he would come to stand alone in his political ideals. He even moved toward the ideas of the Ghibellines and the rebuilding of the entire Roman Empire, which he outlined in his work the Monarchia. Dante would stand alone politically.

Of their insensate acts, the proof will be
in the effects; and thus, your honor will
be best kept if your party is your self.
xvii.67-69

There was a spot of hope though, and Cacciaguida moved from the downfall of Dante’s fortunes to the blessings; he would find refuge with the noble Lombard family in the person of Bartolomeo della Scala, lord of Verona. It is they who bore the eagle on the ladder on their coat of arms, and Bartolomeo who offered Dante assistance before Dante even had to request it of him. Through him Dante met his patron, when still but a boy, Can Grande della Scala, brother of Bartolomeo, whose strengths Cacciaguida attributed to the influence of Mars, and whose generosity would follow his name down the ages.

You shall—beside him—see one who, at birth,
had so received the seal of this strong star
that what he does will be remarkable.
xvii.76-78

So great, and even unbelievable, were the deeds of Can Grande, that some of the things Cacciaguida told Dante he did not even write down, but hid them in his memory. Dante had dedicated the Paradiso to Can Grande della Scala, addressing him thus in a letter:

The illustrious praise of your munificence, which wakeful fame scatters abroad as she flies, draws divers in such divers directions as to exalt these in the hope of prosperous success and hurl down those into terror of destruction…even as the queen of the south sought Jerusalem or as Pallas sought Helicon, so did I seek Verona, to scrutinise by the faithful testimony of my own eyes the things which I had heard. And there I beheld your splendour, I beheld and at the same time handled your bounty; and even as I had formerly suspected excess on the side of the reports, so did I afterwards recognize that it was the facts themselves that exceeded.
Dante, Epistulae xiii.2-3

Such was the extended explanation of the cryptic clues that Dante had received in the other realms as to his fate; Cacciaguida encouraged him to put disdain for his plight and those that brought it into play behind him, as that would not serve his greater purpose. Dante felt his questions had been answered, as if Cacciaguida had cast the fibers into the fabric that completed the pattern that Dante had begun:

After that holy soul had, with his silence,
showed he was freed from putting in the woof
across the web whose warp I set for him,

I like a man who, doubting, craves for counsel
from one who sees and rightly wills and loves,
replied to him.
xvii.100-105

Dante saw that the time was coming close for these events, and that he was now prepared to deal with them, being forewarned; and that even if he were to lose his home, his refuge would continue to be in his poetry. Yet he had learned things in the afterlife which he feared would bring him more trouble, were he to relate them in song:

Down in the world of endless bitterness,
and on the mountain from whose lovely peak
I was drawn upward by my lady’s eyes,

and afterward, from light to light in Heaven,
I learned that which, if I retell it, must
for many have a taste too sharp, too harsh;

yet if I am a timid friend of truth,
I fear that I may lose my life among
those who will call this present, ancient times.
xvii.112-120

Dante’s hesitancy as to his duty to relate in the world all he has heard and seen recall the misgivings he expressed to Virgil at the outset of his journey: “I am not Aeneas, I am not St Paul.” Virgil reassured him, and with that reassurance implied that, like Aeneas and like St Paul, Dante was by grace selected for a divinely ordained mission for the benefit of mankind. Now once again, and for the last time, Dante seeks confirmation of his calling. Is he to speak out and boldly rebuke vice? His ancestor’s reply leaves him in no doubt as to this or as to the purpose of his high privilege.⁵

Even if the truth was hard to hear, assured Cacciaguida, it was necessary; for even a bitter truth had purpose, and in time, once that bitter medicine had been swallowed, digested, and assimilated, it would do its work and be accepted. For why else was he shown the things that he had seen, but to express them with his gift of poetry? The renowned characters that he was shown were for a purpose, for when they were read about, his words would be believed all the more because there was proof in the world of what he said.

Had he used examples unknown to those in the world, his words may have fallen on unbelieving ears.

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💭 Philosophical Exercises

Understand that your life is not in your body, but in your spirit, in your soul, and that this ‘you’ is eternal.

~ Leo Tolstoy

John Flaxman, Prophecy of Exile

You shall leave everything you love most dearly:
this is the arrow that the bow of exile
shoots first. You are to know the bitter taste

of others’ bread, how salt it is, and know
how hard a path it is for one who goes
descending and ascending others’ stairs.

~ lines 55-60

What happens when we are severed from our root?

The French philosopher Simone Weil wrote in her work The Need for Roots:

To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.

Weil writes that the “uprooted” often follow two paths. The first is what she calls spiritual lethargy, a kind of living death. These are people who die long before their bodies do.

The second path is that of those who, in their restlessness, “hurl themselves into some form of activity necessarily designed to uproot, often by the most violent methods, those who are not yet uprooted, or only partly so.”

But there is a third path, the one Weil does not explore, perhaps because no one can write about everything in a single essay. It is what Nietzsche calls digging the well where you are, not where you wish to be.

I explore this briefly in my piece on Victor Hugo’s drawings of the unconscious:

Every great poet tasted the bitter fruit of being in exile. Ovid, Dante, Byron, Wilde — these great connoisseurs of the human heart were rejected by the capricious narrow-mindedness of the crowd and were forced out of their homes. But their exile was always accompanied with a dream — a dream of the glorious and powerful return. This is, of course, a paradox: they looked forward by always looking back to what they have lost.

Perhaps, their exile acted as an ‘invisible tax’ which they had to pay to unlock the labyrinths of their unconscious.

I believe the exile had a profound effect on their psyche, moreover, I believe that Dante could not have written Divine Comedy if not in exile; Byron could not have written Don Juan or Manfred if not in exile; and Oscar Wilde, of course, would not have written De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol if not in exile.

In this canto, Dante wishes to know his fate, for the arrow that one foresees strikes more gently. He seeks to understand his path, knowing it will be perilous, in order to soften the wound of the blow when it comes.

What follows are some beautiful lines, and I wish I could quote them all as we explore them. Yet the line about “how bitter is the taste of others’ bread” is one I can fully resonate with. For however sweet and fresh the bread of the place where you now dwell, the seductive scent of the bread of home still lures you.

The advice Dante receives is remarkable, and those who find themselves far from home might recognise its truth. I certainly do.

And what will be most hard for you to bear
will be the scheming, senseless company
that is to share your fall into this valley;

against you they will be insane, completely
ungrateful and profane; and yet, soon after,
not you but they will have their brows bloodred.

Of their insensate acts, the proof will be
in the effects; and thus, your honor will
be best kept if your party is your self.

~ 61-69

A person in exile always gathers small fragments of home, in the vain hope of reassembling it in a new dwelling. But if they are not deluded, they soon realise that those fragments are broken pieces, and no amount of glue, however strong, can make them whole again.

Hannah Arendt, another exile (if that’s a word we may permit ourselves), wrote in her essay:

“We lost our home, which means the familiarity of daily life. We lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are of some use in this world. We lost our language, which means the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expression of feelings.”

The purpose of exile is not to reconstruct Germany, as it was for Arendt, nor to rebuild France, as it was for Weil, nor even to reclaim Florence, as it is for our pilgrim. After exile, the only root that remains is the self. That is why, in the life of every great figure, exile becomes an essential part of the journey.

For Dante tells us this in his own words. After hearing the prophecy of the great Lombard who offers him refuge, Dante says:

“I clearly see, my father,

how time is hurrying toward me in order
to deal me such a blow as would be most
grievous for him who is not set for it;

…

thus, it is right to arm myself with foresight,
that if I lose the place most dear, I may
not lose the rest through what my poems say.

Dante’s new Florence was built within his poem. In the same way, seven centuries later, Nabokov, another exilé, would say that he holds his Russia in his language and his memories.

In the beginning was the word. When we are stripped of everything—of our home, our city, our connections, we must return to the root, to the origin, to the element that began it all: the word.

Cacciaguida encourages Dante to speak the truth about his native city, the word that reveals how individual corruption and vice led to the infernal decay into which Florence had fallen. That, perhaps, is how what Weil called “uprootedness” can be healed. For if my reader looks closely, all the scattered figures I have mentioned in this piece, Dante, Arendt, Nabokov, Weil, Hugo, and Byron, found refuge in telling their truth.

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This Week’s Sinners and Virtuous 🎭

(Themes, Quotes, Terms and Characters)

Cacciaguida by Dore

I. The Great Lombard

The “great Lombard” is Can Grande della Scala - Can Francesco, the third son of Alberto della Scala, Lord of Verona.

Our pilgrim immortalises him through the line “who on the ladder bears the sacred bird,” a reference to the Scaliger coat of arms: the ladder (scala) symbolising the family name, and the “sacred bird,” the imperial eagle, marking their office as Vicars of the Holy Roman Empire.

Dante’s description of the Lombard’s generosity “he will give before you ask” captures Can Grande’s legendary courtesy, a virtue rare among benefactors, and a quality that, for Dante, transformed patronage into grace.

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Quotes 🖋️

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

You shall leave everything you love most dearly:
this is the arrow that the bow of exile
shoots first. You are to know the bitter taste

of others’ bread, how salt it is, and know
how hard a path it is for one who goes
descending and ascending others’ stairs.

And what will be most hard for you to bear
will be the scheming, senseless company
that is to share your fall into this valley;

against you they will be insane, completely
ungrateful and profane; and yet, soon after,
not you but they will have their brows bloodred.

~ lines 55-66, Paradiso, Canto XVII

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1. Inferno xvii.106-108

2. Charles S. Singleton, Commentary on Paradiso 287

3. Singleton 290

4. Singleton 293

5. Dorothy L. Sayers, Paradiso 210