The Garden of Our Mind

(Paradiso, Canto XII): Bonaventure, Chiana and Limits of our marshy stillness

[Adam and Eve] had to earn their human hearts outside of the garden… a life of action, pervaded through and through by care, is what has always rendered human life meaningful.

~ Robert Pogue Harisson, Gardens: Essay on the Human Condition

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 twelfth Canto of the Paradiso, we learn of the order of St. Dominic. 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 celestial sphere of the Sun, continued - A second ring of souls surrounds the first, with Dante and Beatrice still in the center - They sing and dance in harmony - One soul speaks, St. Bonaventure - He tells the story of the life of St. Dominic - Bonaventure names the additional souls who have encircled the first dozen theologians and philosophers.

Canto XII Summary:

As Thomas Aquinas finished his speech on the life of St Francis, and on the criticisms of the faults of the Dominican order from canto xi, the wheel of twelve souls of light began to circle around again in their horizontal motion.

Yet this time, the circle became like a millstone, which required two stones to grind grain; as another circle of souls appeared on the outside of the one already in place, they began to move together, matching each other’s movements in circling Dante and Beatrice and joining the other souls in a sweet song. Their song was filled with such delight, that not even the poetry of the muses or the song of the sirens could match it; that earthly music was only a diffused reflection of that higher glory.

The second garland of lights, which, at the conclusion of St. Thomas’s discourse, encircles the first, consists of a further twelve spirits, most of whom were followers of St Francis. By the perfect accord and harmony between the two circles, compared to the co-ordination of two eyes which open and shut in obedience to a single controlling mind, Dante conveys his conception of the divine union and inter-relation of love and learning, of seraphic ardour and cherubic insight, the former being born of the latter, since, in the Thomist theology, knowledge of God precedes over love. In the lesser, historical sense, this image, suggesting an ideal partnership between these and other Orders, rebukes all worldly rivalry between the ideals of renunciation and of learning.¹

Dante blended classical and biblical references to elaborate on the parallels of these two circles of souls; first with the visual of mirrored rainbows, such as those created by Iris, the handmaiden of Juno, or, in the audible mirror, the voice of the nymph Echo who was cursed by Juno:

Iris, the messenger of Juno, clad
in many colored robes, draws water up
to heaven, where she nourishes the clouds.
Ovid, Metamorphoses i.374-376

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Until this time, Echo had a body;
though voluble, she wasn’t just a voice,
as she is now-although she used her voice
no oftener than she does now, repeating
just the last words of any speech she heard.

Juno had done this to her, for whenever
Saturn’s daughter was poised to apprehend
Jove in his dalliance with a mountain nymph,
Echo, who knew full well what she was doing,
detained the goddess with a long recital
of idle chatter while the nymphs escaped.

But Juno figured out what she was up to:
“Once too often has your tongue beguiled me;
from now on you’ll have little use for it!”
And that is why Echo skips now to the end
of any speech she hears and then repeats it.
Ovid, Metamorphoses iii.462-477

These classical examples of “vain repetition” and “frustrated doubleness”² were then paralleled with the Biblical imagery of Noah, and the sign of the rainbow given as a promise:

And I will establish my covenant with you, neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood; neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth. And God said, this is the token of the covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations; I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth.
Genesis 9:11-13

‘The Region of the Sun’ by Palioli

As all the imagery of the revolving and dancing circles set the illuminated scene in place, there in the celestial sphere of the Sun, those circles now came to a stop in perfect accord, as coordinated as the movement of two eyes. From that position, Dante heard a voice, the sound of which made him turn as a compass needle turned to the north:

Then from the heart of one of the new flights
there came a voice, and as I turned toward it
I seemed a needle turning to the polestar;

and it began: “The love that makes me fair
draws me to speak about the other leader
because of whom my own was so praised here.
xii.28-33

The voice belonged to St. Bonaventure, who stayed unidentified until later in the canto; Bonaventure, a Franciscan, served as the Minister General of the Order in 1255, and wrote a biography of St. Francis, The Soul’s Journey into God; The Life of St. Francis. Bonaventure began to expound upon the life of St. Dominic; he was a Franciscan speaking about the Dominicans, just as St. Thomas Aquinas had spoken of St. Francis in canto xi.

The founder of the Dominican Order is presented, together with St. Francis, as one of the two champions divinely destined to rally the straggling army of Christ. His story, as related by the Franciscan, St. Bonaventure, is one of loving self-surrender to the combat for the Faith, to which he brought the relentless weapons of his zeal and learning.³

Both St. Dominic and St. Francis, being praised together, were notable, as they both helped to combat the disintegration of values in the church and to help reform it in the process; together they gave leadership and principle back to the people of the church, as well as comfort and connection.

Bonaventure began his eulogy into the life of St. Dominic with a meditation on the beauty of the order of the natural world, honing in above the place and lands where Dominic was born in Spain; the west from where the warm spring breezes arrived into the rest of Europe:

Zephyr took his place
on the western shores warmed by the setting sun.
Ovid, Metamorphoses i.87-88

The imagery of a militant church with Dominic as warrior is prevalent throughout. Even his beginnings, before his birth, were prophetic:

No sooner was his mind created than
it was so full of living force that it,
still in his mother’s womb, made her prophetic.
xii.58-60

The soul was thought to descend into the body of the unborn child as it developed enough to contain it; with this inherent power, it gave his mother prophetic visions and dreams of her unborn child as a black and white dog holding a lighted torch in its mouth; the robes of the Dominicans were black and white. The word “Dominican” itself became associated with the Latin Domini Canes because of this, the Hounds of the Lord.

Then, at the sacred font, where Faith and he
brought mutual salvation as their dowry,
the rites of their espousal were complete.

The lady who had given the assent
for him saw, in a dream, astonishing
fruit that would spring from him and form his heirs.
xii.61-66

Upon Dominic’s baptism, as his godmother stood in for him in her role of responding to the questions of the priest, as was usual during an infant baptism, she also had a vision of the infant with a star on his forehead, one that would light up the world.

As he continued to describe Dominic’s beginnings, Bonaventure pointed to the way in which Dominic’s very name indicated that he belonged to God: Dominus is the name of the Lord in Latin. He was a laborer of the Lord, a cultivator in his vineyard, who entered into the path through his love of the virtue of Humility. Even the names of his parents represented the forms behind the names.

- Nomina sunt conequentia rerum -
Names are the consequences of things.
Dante, Vita Nuova xiii.4

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The Platonic doctrine that the inherent quality of things issued in their names, current among medieval philosophers and grammarians, is reflected in Dante’s Vita Nuova…Felix de Guzman, the father of Dominic, was well named, in that he was happy and blessed in his son; likewise his mother, Giovanna, whose name means “abounding in the grace of Jehovah,” is an instance of a similar relationship between name and specific virtue.⁴

Dominic’s love of truth and inner understanding was contrasted by those contemporaries who looked only to external circumstances, such as the theologian Henry of Susa, Cardinal of Ostia, who wrote a commentary on the Papal Decretals. While his work was intellectual, it only focused on the external elements of the church, pointing to the letter over the spirit. Neither did the followers of Thaddeus Alderotti find this spirit in his writings. He was a physician who wrote commentaries on the medical treatises of Galen and Hippocrates; his practice had been for material gain rather than feasting on that bread of angels, manna.

Santo Domingo de Guzmán, portrait by the Portuguese-Spanish painter Claudio Coello in 1670

Dominic did eat of that bread of angels however, and increasingly began teaching and tending the vineyard of the church, after which his work was recognized by the pope—whose office was holy in conception, if not always in function—and the Dominicans were granted an official order:

And from the seat that once was kinder to
the righteous poor (and now has gone astray,
not in itself, but in its occupant),

he did not ask to offer two or three
for six, nor for a vacant benefice,
nor decimas, quae sunt pauperum Dei—

but pleaded for the right to fight against
the erring world, to serve the seed from which
there grew the four-and-twenty plants that ring you.
xii.88-96

Where it had been common practice for Orders—such as the Dominicans were—to request a deferral from tithing, Dominic did not ask for forbearance of “two or three for six”; put another way, he did not ask to be excused financially from tithing to the poor in order to keep more for himself and his Order; he gave all that was required of him and more. Dominic, in the militant sense again, wanted to fight for what was right, and serve the greater purpose and function of the church and its stewards.

Thus he fought for justice within the church, “where the thickets of the heretics / offered the most resistance.” (101-102), probably referring to the Cathars and the Albigensian Crusade:

In Provence, where the Albigensian heresy was most tenacious. St Dominic has been regarded as a relentless persecutor of heretics and the founder of the Inquisition In fact, the inquisitorial functions did not become attached to his Order until some years after his death, nor did he take any considerable part in the persecution of the Albigensians.⁵

If such was one wheel of the chariot
in which the Holy Church, in her defense
taking the field, defeated enemies

within, then you must see the excellence
of him—the other wheel—whom Thomas praised
so graciously before I made my entry.
xii.106-111

St. Dominic was the militant wheel, while the other, St. Francis, made his impressions through love. Yet Bonaventure laments the state of the Franciscan order after Francis, just as St. Thomas had lamented the state of the Dominicans.

The panegyric on Francis is pronounced by a Dominican, and that on Dominic by a Franciscan (whereas the denunciation of the unworthy Dominicans and Franciscans is in each case pronounced by one of themselves). Thus Dante foreshadowed what afterwards became a general usage, viz., for a Dominican to read mass in a Franciscan convent on their founder’s day, and a Franciscan to do the like for a Dominican convent on their founder’s day.⁶

Thus he expounded upon a metaphor of Francis as the wheel of a chariot, while the track of the chariot—the foundation that he left behind with his teachings—had been abandoned by the Franciscan order and his followers. The track is abandoned and in decay, just as fermenting wine with a healthy crust of debris on top is what is hoped for, but when it becomes moldy, has been ruined. The order took steps backward in the footsteps of Francis, away from the true purpose of his teachings, rather than forward into more service, greater love, and more selfless poverty.

His family, which once advanced with steps
that followed his footprints, has now turned back:
its forward foot now seeks the foot that lags.
xii.115-117

At the Day of Judgement, Bonaventure said, the weeds would be collected and cast out as the harvest of the good crop was gathered:

Let both grow together until the harvest: and in the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather ye together first the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them: but gather the wheat into my barn.
Matthew 13:30

Fourth Heaven, or that of the Sun: St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Buonaventura of Bagnoregio

There were still good souls in the fold, Bonaventure said of the Franciscans, they were not all off-track. Yet a schism in the ideals of the Franciscans had taken place, which looked away from the original teachings. One sect, begun by Matthew of Acquasparta, a General of the Franciscan Order, relaxed the rule of poverty and simplicity. This opened the door for misuse; in contrast, Ubertino da Casale led a group of Franciscans calling themselves the Spirituals, who followed even stricter constraints than those which were customary to the Order. Both extremes, according to Bonaventure, missed the true goal of the Order, and could not bring it into a new era of aligning with the original virtues.

Instead, Bonaventure said as he finally identified himself by name, he and others who held true to the Franciscan vision would help to usher in the change necessary for the continuation of the Order. He looked to the wisdom of the right hand, that of spiritual things, as his first priority, and second were the goods of the left hand, those of worldly affairs.

And wisdom, like other spiritual goods, belongs to the right hand, while temporal nourishment belongs to the left, according to Prov. iii.16: In her left hand are riches and glory. And the priestly power is midway between temporal goods and spiritual wisdom; because thereby both spiritual wisdom and temporal goods are dispensed.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II.q.102.a. 4, ad 6

He went on to name the soul lights in the outer ring of the double circle in the celestial sphere of the Sun, and lest we forget, Dante and Beatrice were at its center listening as Bonaventure related all of these things to them.

As a child, [Bonaventure] was attacked by a dangerous disease, which was miraculously cured by St. Francis of Assisi. When the latter heard that the child had recovered, he is said to have exclaimed ‘buona ventura,’ whereupon the boy’s mother changed his name to Bonaventura.⁷

He began with Illuminato and Augustine, who were both early followers of St. Francis. This Augustine was a friar, but not the famous St. Augustine of Hippo, whom we will meet in canto xxxii.

The following three souls were Hugh of St. Victor, a mystical theologian, friend of Bernard of Clairvaux and teacher of Peter Lombard, whose writings were often quoted by Thomas Aquinas; Peter the Book-Devourer, who was a voracious consumer of books and who wrote a history of the church called the Historia scholastica that became an authority on the subject, and Peter of Spain, a priest who studied under Albertus Magnus and who eventually became Pope John XXI; he wrote the twelve volume text Summulae logicales, or Summaries of Logic, contesting the teachings of Magnus and Aquinas and their dependence on the philosophy of Aristotle.

Nathan the prophet, from the Old Testament, was known for being unafraid to confront monarchy when they erred; he condemned the actions of King David, who had one of his soldiers, Uriah, killed in battle so that he could marry Uriah’s wife, Bathsheba.

Wherefore hast thou despised the commandment of the Lord, to do evil in his sight? thou hast killed Uriah the Hittite with the sword, and hast taken his wife to be thy wife, and hast slain him with the sword of the children of Ammon. II Samuel 12:9

Also in that circle of souls was St. John Chrysostom, a Patriarch of Constantinople who spoke out against the excesses of the court of the Roman Emperor Arcadius. Anselm was a Bishop of Canterbury and authored the Cur Deus Homo, questioning why God had to be made man and the necessity of the incarnation of Christ upon earth. Donatus was a Roman scholar, rhetorician and grammarian, who outlined the seven liberal arts in education in his work Ars Grammaria. The tenth light was Rabanus Maurus, Archbishop of Mainz, a ninth century priest.

Rabanus, who was considered one of the most learned men of his time, wrote a voluminous commentary on the greater portion of the Bible and was the author of numerous theological works, the most important being the De institution clericorum.⁸

Finally, Joachim of Calabria, an influential preacher and prophetic figure, the first to come up with a doctrine of the ages of man in conjunction with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit of the Trinity; he saw history as prophetic, rather than just the march of time.

It is considered by some scholars that Dante himself was much influenced by Joachim. If, as is also held by some, Dante became a member of the Franciscan Order, he would have come into contact with the influence of Joachim in the extreme Spiritual movement among the Franciscans. It is noteworthy that Joachim is called a true prophet by St. Bonaventure in Dante’s narrative, whereas in life Bonaventure was an opponent of Joachim. This juxtaposition corresponds symmetrically, and significantly, to that of St. Thomas and Siger of Brabant in the inner ring.⁹

Thus influenced by the glowing words of Thomas Aquinas in his praise of the inner circle of philosophers, did Bonaventure end his speech in praise of St. Dominic.

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💭 Philosophical Exercises

A flower is something which... is dug round and manured, watered and transplanted, divided and trimmed… ...cultivation involves a lot of brute destruction, pruning, and cutting back to the ground.
―Robert Pogue Harisson, Gardens: Essay on the Human Condition

Sandro Botticelli Dante and Beatrice

In Inferno, I mentioned that if Heaven was a garden, Hell must be a forest.

I did not fully understand the idea that had first appeared in my mind. And this is the beauty of Dante’s wisdom: he reveals truth to you, and you do not even realise that you are in the presence of truth until you think about it deeply and thoroughly.

We often imagine the garden (the story of being expelled from the Garden of Eden) literally. But in reality, there is a much deeper truth that lies there.

The garden that we have lost was the garden of our mind, the harmony of our mind.

Any gardener, or anyone who lives in England and knows the English tradition of gardening, understands that it involves continuous work, nourishment, watering of the plants, care for the garden. You cannot cut the grass once a year and expect it to remain beautiful and neat for the entire year. Every gardener knows that it needs to be tended regularly to maintain it; the same with the flowers or any other kind of plant. In the same way, it is so with our minds. When Adam and Eve were expelled from the garden, they were expelled from the garden of a harmonious and balanced mind. The forest, in contrast—where Dante finds himself in the Inferno—is what happens to a garden that is not looked after.

Reading Robert Pogue Harrison’s Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition sharpened this lens for me. Harrison argues that Eden’s loss is not merely a mythic eviction; it is the beginning of cultivation.

In Eden, the first humans were beneficiaries rather than caretakers; too careless for stewardship. After the Fall they enter the vita activa: labour, work, action.

They become cultivators and givers instead of mere consumers. The human spirit itself is a garden of sorts that needs care and solicitude. That is precisely what Dante’s vineyard asks of us: to recover the daily art of tending - mind, character, doctrine, love - so that the wine does not sour.

Harrison’s hortus conclusus (i.e. the enclosed garden) also resonates here. A garden’s perimeter creates a precinct for repose and recollection, yet the best gardens keep porous openings to the world.

This is how I see the Sun’s heaven: two ordered rings like a spiritual enclosure, protecting contemplation while remaining open to instruction. The silence before Bonaventure speaks is the garden’s gate closing softly so attention may bloom.

Vincent van Gogh - History of the Red Vineyard

I.

Here we see a beautiful metaphor of Saint Dominic, told through the lips of Bonaventure, who notes that in the medieval tradition the Church was seen as God’s vineyard, a place that must be tended or it goes wild.

Bonaventure, when he rebukes the Franciscan decay, says that the once fruitful wine has now turned bitter, that the good wine has soured. The vineyard metaphor shows us that there was a loss of order and discipline: the corruption of what had been carefully cultivated.

So we go to sleep, because Canto XII begins before the last word of the previous canto is spoken. Hollander underlines this timing as deliberate: Dante wants us to feel that the two cantos overlap, their endings and beginnings folding into one another like a single movement of a symphony. And just as a composer would weave two motifs together, Dante repeats his words—moto / moto, canto / canto—to make the pattern visible to the eye and audible to the ear. It is his way of showing us that truth moves in harmony, that divine music is made of repetition, reflection, and order.

There are two concentric rings that move in harmony, and each ring, Dante says, sings “equal to the eye and to the ear.” The eye, Hollander explains, symbolizes the intellect—the power to see truth—while the ear stands for the will, the capacity to listen and to love. The equality of sight and sound means that the intellect and the will move together in perfect balance, just as knowledge and love, reason and charity, are one in God. The entire heaven of the Sun becomes a vast symphony of light and harmony—a continuation of what I said in the previous canto, that Paradise itself is like music.

It is striking that when Bonaventure begins to speak, the music stops. There is silence. As Hollander notes, this is Dante’s way of showing attention the stillness that allows true understanding to enter. And when the Franciscan Bonaventure steps forward to praise Dominic, the structure of the poem itself mirrors the previous canto, where the Dominican Thomas Aquinas praised Francis. Hollander calls these “mirror cantos,” designed to reflect one another perfectly. The symmetry is not only thematic but moral: each order praises the other, proving that humility and love are the foundations of divine wisdom.

Dominic, in Bonaventure’s words, is portrayed as a knight of the faith, a disciplined soldier of God. Hollander notes that Dante deliberately uses seven military or imperial titles to describe him—commander, standard-bearer, soldier, and so on—to emphasise that Dominic’s virtue was order, structure, and the restoration of discipline. His mission was to “till God’s vineyard,” a phrase Hollander highlights as central to the canto’s imagery.

The vineyard, like the garden we spoke of earlier, must be tended or it grows wild. And when Bonaventure shifts from praise to rebuke, he laments that the once fruitful vine has now turned bitter, the good wine soured—a metaphor, Hollander explains, for the loss of order and balance within the Franciscan community.

The canto ends with an image of holy envy. Bonaventure praises Thomas Aquinas, just as Aquinas had praised him. Dante uses the verb inveggiar (to envy) in a good sense, to praise with love.

Hollander notes that this moment of mutual admiration expresses the highest form of wisdom in Paradise: knowledge joined with humility.

In this way, the entire canto: its double rings, its mirrored structure, its shifting music becomes a lesson in spiritual balance. It shows that divine understanding is not a solitary possession but a harmony among souls who reflect one another’s light.

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This Week’s Sinners and Virtuous 🎭

(Themes, Quotes, Terms and Characters)

Map by Pierre Mortier captioned Map of the location of the terrestrial paradise, and of the country inhabited by the patriarchs, laid out for the good understanding of sacred history, by Pierre Daniel Huet (1700)

I. Ariadne’s Crown

Dante once again compliments Scripture with the myth when he compares a double rainbow to the crown of Ariadne, which are set among the stars.

The first rainbow recalls the one sent by God to Noah as a covenant of peace (Genesis 9:13); the second, wider rainbow mirrors the first, just as the second circle of blessed souls reflects the first.

The Ariadne image comes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses : after her death, Bacchus placed her garland in the heavens as the constellation Corona Borealis.

Dante fuses these two traditions—the biblical and the classical—to show divine harmony made visible. The covenantal rainbow and the bridal crown both signify reconciliation and glorification, and together they create the perfect emblem of mirrored joy.

What my reader sees here is the poetic logic of reflection: one light generating another, each echoing the first. In other words, Dante’s image is itself a symbol of unity through reflection, the central theme of this canto

II. The Speed of Spheres

A few lines later, Dante introduces a quick comparison that is easy to overlook. He says that the reality he is now witnessing exceeds imagination just as the motion of the Primum Mobile surpasses the slow current of the Chiana, a sluggish river in Tuscany.

(I was trying to find a good image of the river Chiana, but all of them were awful, apologies!)

The contrast between the Chiana and the outermost sphere expresses the distance between the human and the divine.

The Chiana, known in Dante’s time for its marshy stillness, stands for the limits of the material world and of human perception. The Primum Mobile, by contrast, turns with unimaginable speed, symbolising the pure dynamism of divine life.

The point is moral as well as physical: our understanding moves like the Chiana until it is purified; only when the soul is attuned to God can it move as swiftly as the heavens

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Quotes 🖋️

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

Just as, concentric, like in color, two
rainbows will curve their way through a thin cloud
when Juno has commanded her handmaid,

the outer rainbow echoing the inner,
much like the voice of one—the wandering nymph—
whom love consumed as sun consumes the mist

(and those two bows let people here foretell,
by reason of the pact God made with Noah,
that flood will never strike the world again):

so the two garlands of those everlasting
roses circled around us, and so did
the outer circle mime the inner ring.

~ lines 1-9, Paradiso, Canto XII

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1. Dorothy L. Sayers, Paradise 161

2. Robin Kirkpatrick, Paradiso 378

3. Sayers 161

4. Sayers 163

5. Sayers 164

6. Charles S. Singleton, Commentary on the Paradiso 215

7. Singleton 217

8. Singleton 223

9. Sayers 167-168