“Only one thing is certain: that nothing is certain / And nothing is more wretched or arrogant than man.”
~ as inscribed on Montaigne’s wall, attributed to Pliny
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-second Canto, Dante and Beatrice encounter St. Benedict. 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 seventh heaven of Saturn and the contemplatives, continued - Dante understands righteous zeal - St. Benedict - Dante asks to gaze upon his face, which is hidden within the light - St. Benedict denounces the clergy and the corruption in his order - Dante and Beatrice follow St. Benedict up the celestial ladder into the eighth realm of the fixed stars - The constellation of Gemini and Dante’s final wish for poetic expression - Dante gazes back upon all of the planets in their spheres.
Canto XXII Summary:
Dante was still feeling overwhelmed at the cry of indignation that had come from the souls in the realm of Saturn after the condemnation of corrupt clergy by Peter Damian at the end of canto xxi. In this state he turned to Beatrice for reassurance.
She pointed out that even those in these highest spheres, here in the realm of the contemplatives, could feel righteous zeal toward injustice:
Do you not know you are in Heaven,
not know how holy all of Heaven is,
how righteous zeal moves every action here?
Now, since this cry has agitated you
so much, you can conceive how—had you seen
me smile and heard song here—you would have been
confounded.
xxii.7-13
The parts of the cry that he did not comprehend, the prayer hidden within the cry, would have shown him that there would be justice for those corrupt clergy in due time. He was not to await that justice with impatience, however, as the justice of God worked in its own time, perhaps slowly, and not in accordance with the rush of human desire for resolution.
The sword that strikes from Heaven’s height is neither
hasty nor slow, except as it appears
to him who waits for it—who longs or fears.
xxii.16-18
She urged him to leave this idea as complete and to turn and look at the many souls, like orbs of light, which grew brighter by virtue of their proximity to the other orbs, joy supporting joy. Dante stood watching, holding back from speech, when the most beautiful of the orbs of light came toward him, saying to Dante that if he could have comprehended the love that was within those souls, he would not have hesitated to speak.
The glowing soul introduced himself; this was St. Benedict, founder of the Benedictine order of monks that was a driving force in early medieval religious monasticism in the sixth century. His Rule of St. Benedict was transformative, a document outlining not only teachings for monks in their spiritual lives, but also for ordering the smooth operation of a communal monastery.
St. Benedict was born of a noble family at Nursia (Norcia) in the east of Umbria ca. 480. In early youth he was sent to school in Rome, but shocked by the wild life of his associates he ran away at about the age of fourteen and hid himself among the mountains near Subiaco on the borders of the Abruzzi. There he lived in solitude for three years in a cave, acquiring a great reputation for sanctity, which led the monks of the neighboring monastery of Vicovaro to choose him as their abbot. Impatient, however, of his severe rule, of which he had warned them before accepting their invitation, they attempted to rid themselves of him by poison. Their attempt being discovered, St. Benedict left them and returned once more to Subiaco, whence he went to Monte Cassino, where ca. 529 he founded his famous monastery on the site of an ancient temple of Apollo.1
St. Benedict’s Regula Monachorum, which was designed to repress the irregular lives of the wandering monks, was first introduced in this monastery and eventually became the rule of all the western monks. One of the features of his system was that, in addition to their religious exercises, his monks occupied themselves with manual labor and in the instruction of the young.2
Benedict pointed out the contemplative nature of his fellow souls in that realm of Saturn, inspired by the love of God to produce the flowers of ordered sentiment and the fruits of good works. He introduced two of them, Macarius and Romualdus, fellow monks who had also attained this high estate. It is uncertain which of the monks named Macarius Dante referred to, either Macarius the Elder, the Egyptian, or St. Macarius the Younger of Alexandria.
St. Macarius the Elder retired at the age of thirty into the Libyan desert, where he remained for sixty years, passing his time between prayer and manual labor, until his death at the age of ninety, in 391. St. Macarius the Younger had nearly 5,000 monks under his charge; he is credited with having established the monastic rule of the East, as St. Benedict did that of the West.3
St. Romuald, founder of the order of Camaldoli or reformed Benedictines, belonged to the Onesti family of Ravenna…He entered the Benedictine order ca. 970 and lived a hermit’s life…He then began to establish the hermitages of his order; a purely contemplative life was enjoined on the members of his order.4
Dante felt the effect of the presence of St. Benedict, whose speech and countenance had helped Dante to bloom like a rose in the sun. He asked his pressing question then to the Saint, asking if he would be able to see his human form divested of its shining envelope of light. It had been some time since Dante had seen any of the heavenly souls in their human form, so much light had they displayed in each realm as they had climbed higher. Yet now was not the time for such an unveiling; that vision was saved for the Empyrean realm.
By such a question, and considering how great the saint is to whom he is speaking, the poet causes the wayfaring Dante to express a wish that may well be that of the reader by now. The answer, moreover, points to the end, and such signals are beginning to come. By the answer we are also given the first hint of the special grace that awaits the pilgrim at the end, to which end the ladder of contemplation rises.5
Brother, your high desire will be
fulfilled within the final sphere, as all
the other souls’ and my own longing will.
There, each desire is perfect, ripe, intact;
and only there, within that final sphere,
is every part where it has always been.
xxii.61-66
Benedict expanded on the architecture of the highest Empyrean; first, that his wish to see the forms of the souls in the heavens would be fulfilled, but that was not the only element that would find fulfillment, no, for every desire—and those have all been purified now, to even reach to this phase of perfection—would find complete fulfillment, “perfect, ripe, intact.”
The ladder before which they stood rose all the way to that highest realm, Dante was told, to the place of perfect stillness and rest; no more activity of attainment would be required in such a space of fulfillment. It did not revolve as did the other spheres, for it was out of time; on that ladder was the boundary between time and eternity. Such was the meaning behind the ladder in the dream of Jacob; we visited this verse in canto xxi, but it is worth noting again:
And Jacob went out from Beersheba, and went toward Haran. And he lighted upon a certain place, and tarried there all night, because the sun was set; and he took of the stones of that place, and put them for his pillows, and lay down in that place to sleep. And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it.
Genesis 28:10-12
St. Benedict lamented that his Order on earth now did not have the drive to aim their sights at climbing that ladder, and that his work there was worth less than the paper it was written on.
Accordingly, brothers, if we want to reach the highest summit of humility, if we desire to attain speedily that exaltation in heaven to which we climb by the humility of this present life, then by our ascending actions we must set up that ladder on which Jacob in a dream saw angels descending and ascending. Without doubt, this descent and ascent can signify only that we descend by exaltation and ascend by humility. Now the ladder erected is our life on earth, and if we humble our hearts the Lord will raise it to heaven. We may call our body and soul the sides of this ladder, into which our divine vocation has fitted the various steps of humility and discipline as we ascend.
Rule of Saint Benedict, vii.5-9
[Here] begins St. Benedict’s denunciation of corruption in monastic orders and in the Church, which extends through vs. 96 and is strong indeed. Since he speaks in terms, first, of the ladder of contemplation which reaches all the way to the Empyrean, his words are important for the basic allegory of the Paradiso, which is that of a journey of contemplation. And Contemplation, let it be remembered, is one of Beatrice’s names, so that the very journey with her is seen through St. Benedict’s words, even though they apply more to monastic orders and their neglect of the ladder.6
He denounced the church as a place of thieves, where the habits of once dedicated monks were now more akin to sacks of rotten food, that their crimes of greed and use of the riches of the church for their own ends filled them with madness. Those resources were there for holy work, not to squander on family or mistresses.
But the Church is in no sense properly disposed to receive temporal things, on account of the express prohibition recorded by Matthew: ‘Possess not gold nor silver, nor money in your girdles, nor purse for your journey, etc.’ And although we find a slight modification of this precept in certain respects in Luke, still I have been unable to discover that permission to possess gold and silver was granted to the Church subsequent to that prohibition.
Dante, de Monarchia III.10
He continued to lament that good seed planted did not last to bear fruit in the followers of the church, and that both St. Peter and St. Francis, as well as himself, had dedicated themselves to God without all those trappings of finery and wealth.
The flesh of mortals yields so easily—
on earth a good beginning does not run
from when the oak is born until the acorn.
Peter began with neither gold nor silver,
and I with prayer and fasting, and when Francis
began his fellowship, he did it humbly;
xxii.85-90
The purity of Benedict’s initial mission was now stained with that corruption; and yet, he cautioned Dante against despair, perhaps knowing that this was one of the themes closest to his heart, for the repairing of the fault was not such a challenge that God could not oversee it. He pointed to the miracle in the book of Joshua, where the Jordan river parted so that the priests carrying the Ark of the Covenant could pass over it on dry ground, or in Exodus, when Moses parted the Red Sea so that the Hebrew people could pass through and escape from the pursuing Egyptians. If these were possible, so was justice over corruption.
With this note of encouragement, St. Benedict left Dante and returned to the other souls; they swept up the ladder and out of sight. Beatrice beckoned Dante to follow suit:
So did he speak to me, and he drew back
to join his company, which closed, compact;
then, like a whirlwind, upward, all were swept.
The gentle lady—simply with a sign—
impelled me after them and up that ladder,
so did her power overcome my nature;
xxii.97-102
Swifter than would be possible on earth, they flew up that ladder into the eighth celestial sphere, leaving behind them the planetary circles and ascending into the realm of the Fixed Stars. Here, with the final wish formula of the entire Commedia, Dante by his longing to return to that place as he wrote, swore to the quickness of that flight. It had been instantaneous, quicker than the instinct to remove a finger burnt by a fire, so quickly did he move into that realm.
He saw the sign of Gemini—the very sign under which he was born, and therefore held deep kinship with—and now that he had arrived here to this most glorious place, exclaimed with praise on the beauty of the vision that spread before him.
O stars of glory, constellation steeped
in mighty force, all of my genius—
whatever be its worth—has you as source:
with you was born and under you was hidden
he who is father of all mortal lives,
when I first felt the air of Tuscany;
xxii.112-117
God’s providence has seen to it that the pilgrim Dante “lands” precisely in the constellation under which he was born, Gemini, or the Twins, and his apostrophe to these stars constitutes the most eloquent witness to the belief in the influence of the heavenly bodies on human character that is found anywhere in the poem.7
Dante, in his praise to the stars under which he was born, and the gift of poetry that they had placed within him, that genius, asked for one final boon from those muses of his soul; that he be able to finish his poem with the glory and magnificence that it deserved, for how else could one dare to write of the highest levels of paradise?
To you my soul now sighs devotedly,
that it may gain the force for this attempt,
hard trial that now demands its every strength.
xxii.121-123
Beatrice spoke, telling Dante that he was very close to the ultimate vision of God, but that in order to prepare for it, that he should look down upon all the realms through which they had ascended, all the planetary spheres arrayed in their perfect order below them; for understanding the heights to which they had come, it would prepare his heart to join the ranks of the blessed:
before
you enter farther, do look downward, see
what I have set beneath your feet already:
much of the world is there. If you see that,
your heart may then present itself with all
the joy it can to the triumphant throng
that comes in gladness through this ether’s rounds.
xxii.126-132
Between Saturn and the fixed stars is a distance greater than any hitherto traversed by Dante. The long, swift ascent symbolizes the uplifting of the soul by contemplation. In the 8th sphere, which contains countless heavenly bodies, the poet enters the constellation of Gemini, under whose influence he was born. Thus, in a spiritual sense, he returns, like Plato’s departed, to his native star.8
And those who have lived well for their allotted time will return to the dwelling of their kindred star, and there enjoy blessedness.
Plato, Timaeus 42.b
Dante gazed below him, seeing the celestial realms from above, and understanding the small insignificance of the earth below, tiny against the vast expanse of the heavens, in what must be one of the most beautiful images in the Paradiso:
My eyes returned through all the seven spheres
and saw this globe in such a way that I
smiled at its scrawny image: I approve
That judgment as the best, which holds this earth
to be the least; and he whose thoughts are set
elsewhere, can truly be called virtuous.
xxii.133-138
This imagery was based on a similar theme in Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis, or the Dream of Scipio, the closing dream sequence at the end of his longer work the Republic, in which Scipio Africanus is visited by his grandfather, Scipio the Elder, and lifted to the heavens to understand the greater workings behind small human affairs.
When I beheld the whole universe from that point, everything seemed glorious and wonderful. There were stars which we have never seen from this earth of ours, each of a size which we have never imagined to exist. The smallest star, which was furthest from heaven and nearest to earth, was shining with a light not its own. The spheres of the stars easily exceeded the earth in size. Now the earth itself seemed so small to me that I felt ashamed of our empire, whose extent was no more than a dot on its surface.
Cicero, Somnium Scipionis, Republic vi.16
He called out to the planets as he saw them with their names based in myth; Dante saw the back of the moon—Diana, Latona’s daughter—clear from the craters seen on earth, he saw the sun, child of Hyperion, he saw Mercury, son of Maia, and Venus, daughter of Dïone, he saw Jupiter between his son Mars and his father, Saturn, tempering “the cold of his father with the heat of his son.”9
Let him whose headstrong thoughts no other end
Than praise, nor higher purpose contemplate
Than fame, the width and breadth of heaven regard
And with the narrow earth their magnitude
Compare. This narrow circle of the world-
O shame-his spreading glory cannot fill.
Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy II.vii.1-6
In gazing upon all that was below, how so little land could create such great discord, Dante was satisfied that it was all worth being left behind in order to place oneself in facing that which was the truest of true, the most divine of the divine, and turned instead to the eternity reflected in Beatrice’s eyes.
💭 Philosophical Exercises
We do seem to be reaching the end of our journey through the Divine Comedy, and I have to say, I already miss Dante, even though we still haven’t reached the most important part: the end, where we will finally see where this journey leads.
In Canto XXII I see a kind of reverse Orpheus. Around the hundredth line, Beatrice asks Dante to turn back and look at the earth, to see the road he has already travelled, before he can proceed further into the realm where one’s sight must be completely purified.
Myths and religious poems like this one reveal psychological truths that are very hard to express in scientific language.
In the case of Orpheus, his looking back is uncontrolled: it is a pure impulse, an act of vision not yet mastered. As I’ve explored several times in previous cantos, Orpheus’s backward glance is the sign of an unprepared soul, someone who has not really made the inward journey and still entrusts his fate, and the fate of his beloved, to the whimsical decisions of the gods.
Dante’s backward look is the exact opposite. Orpheus looks back in disobedience and loses his beloved; Dante looks back in obedience and is prepared to receive her and his final vision more fully.
Orpheus’s gaze collapses love into possession. Dante’s gaze, guided by Beatrice, dissolves possession into contemplation. Orpheus is the poet who fails to manage the relation between visible and invisible: he cannot hold image and reality together, and his glance shatters what he loves.
Dante, in contrast, is finally learning how to see rightly. At this point in Paradiso, the poem itself is turning from long stretches of abstraction back toward more concrete, incarnate imagery. The commanded backward look belongs to this turning: Dante is being trained to hold heaven and earth, the invisible and the visible, in a single, ordered gaze.
Beatrice’s command to look down places Dante inside a much older tradition: the philosophical “view from above.”
Like Scipio in Cicero’s dream, or Marcus Aurelius’ contemplation or Boethius being lifted by the Lady Philosophy, Dante is raised to the stars and invited to see the earth from a height, to watch the world shrink to its proper proportions.
From here the kingdoms and empires, the ambitions and wars, all become a “little threshing-floor.” But Dante overlays this philosophical exercise with the myth of Orpheus.
We are not only invited to despise the littleness of the world; we are shown what a disciplined backward look looks like. It is no longer a desperate check to see whether we have managed to drag love out of the underworld; it is a contemplative reassessment of the road already travelled, under the guidance of someone who knows where this road is going.
All of this happens as Dante leaves the heaven of Saturn, the sphere of contemplatives: Peter Damian, Benedict, and the ruined monastic orders. There he has been taught what it means to leave the world behind, to climb a ladder of interior detachment.
The final contemplative exercise is paradoxical: not to stare upwards so intensely that one forgets the earth, but to look back at it once, from above, in the right way.
After listening to the great contemplatives, Dante is allowed a single, grace-governed backward glance at the earth and at his own past.
In that act he learns to love the world without clinging to it, to see his journey without trying to possess it, and to hold the visible and the invisible together without tearing them apart.
Dante, in other words, becomes the reverse of Orpheus.
This Week’s Sinners and Virtuous 🎭
(Themes, Quotes, Terms and Characters)
I. Vita Activa
I’ve been reading recently a lot about Sophocles’ life. I did not know much about his biography and once again was shaken to my core to discover that he served as a general, military commander, and held a political office several times.
The myth of the introverted writer, who rejects any social interaction, and creates great stories from the seclusion of their home dissipates when you read about the lives of Dante, Sophocles or Milton.
Contemplation unites mind and reality, thought and action, will and deed.
II. From Planetary to Celestial Realms
Our pilgrim has also reached another threshold of this poem, from planetary spheres to the divine realms. My reader will feel the distinction from the figures we will encounter in the cantos, the difference between the two.
Quotes 🖋️
(The ones I keep in my journal as reminders of eternal wisdom):
The sword that strikes from Heaven’s height is neither
hasty nor slow, except as it appears
to him who waits for it—who longs or fears.
But turn now toward the other spirits here;
for if you set your sight as I suggest,
you will see many who are notable.
~ lines 16-21, Paradiso, Canto XXII
Charles S. Singleton, Commentary on Paradiso 360
Singleton 360
Singleton 361
Singleton 361
Singleton 362
Singleton 363
Singleton 365
Singleton 366
Dorothy L. Sayers, Paradise 256
“The sword of Heaven is not too soon dyed red, nor yet too late—except as its vengeance seems to those who wait for it in hope or dread.” (John Ciardi’s translation)
Justice, to me, is one of the primary engines driving the Commedia, along with love, exile and longing for place, and the pilgrim’s hunger for knowledge of God. I think it’s fair to say Dante is obsessed with divine justice; after all, he never really stops reminding us of the personal injustice he has experienced. His all too human longing for vengeance and vindication is entirely understandable; but as a poet, he goes to great pains to temper his pilgrim’s fervency. Who better to rein in that indignation and frustration than Beatrice? She reminds him that vengeance comes at God’s proper and inevitable moment — not his. I’ll make a cross-cultural leap to characterize Beatrice’s counsel to Dante with an eminently suitable quote from Imam Ali: “I will be patient, until even patience tires of my patience.”
The perspective shift at the end of the Canto took my breath away: “And turning there with the eternal Twins, I saw the dusty little threshing ground that makes us ravenous for our mad sins.” (John Ciardi’s translation) I think it’s the most moving and beautiful evolution of the entire Commedia. In a poem full of thunder, its quiet simplicity is heartbreakingly evocative. It reminds me of MacBeth’s lament about earthly life, and all its dramatic, chaotic and empty performance, ultimately amounting to nothing: “Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing". Dante’s metaphor was confirmed by Frank Borman, the astronaut and Apollo 8 commander, who said when earth was viewed from the moon, problems like "Raging nationalistic interests, famines, wars, pestilence don't show from that distance".
One final note, rather late in our journey: I find John Ciardi’s translation to resonate for me in a way Mandelbaum and others don’t. Maybe his wartime experience and war poetry colored his approach (although he never said it did), but I like his freer renderings and his tougher and hard-boiled idiom more than, dare I say, the “stately” renditions. He’s audacious, but so is Dante. Ciardi may be criticized for his swagger, and for taking some “mammoth liberties,” but “audaces fortuna juvat", eh? ("Luck smiles on the daring").