The Sphere of Wisdom: Be Able to Differentiate

(Paradiso, Canto XIII): Parmenides, King Solomon, and the Truth

It’s not only what you see that matters; it’s how you see.

~ Seneca

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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 thirteenth Canto of the Paradiso, we hear why King Solomon was so wise. 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 - The magnificence of the starry souls in the double crown of light - They revolve and dance to a song, and then St. Thomas Aquinas speaks again - The perfections of Adam and Christ - King Solomon and his wise choice - Hasty judgment and quick opinions are to be avoided.

Canto XIII Summary:

Dante invited his readers to visualize the starry beauty of the scene that had unfolded before him in the last three cantos as he expounded upon the theologians and philosophers in the celestial circle of the Sun.

He inventoried a number of the brightest and most recognizable stars in the sky to paint a picture of the radiance that was that double circle of souls in a starry corona around him.

First he named the fifteen stars that “quicken heaven with such radiance” (5), the brightest first magnitude stars. Next were the seven stars of the Wain, or Ursa Major, plus the two stars that make up the mouth of the Horn, Ursa Minor, making two dozen stars, the same as our number of souls. The star on the tip of that horn constellation was the pole star, forever pointing to the Primum Mobile and which is the axis on which it revolves.

The double ring they created was likened unto Ariadne’s crown in the constellation of Corona Borealis, placed there by Bacchus after her death:

Bacchus brought love and comfort to the girl,
and so that she would shine among the stars,
he sent her diadem up into heaven;
it flew through the thin air, and where it flew
its precious stones were turned to brilliant fires;
now in appearance still a crown, it’s found
between Ophiucus and Hercules.
Ovid Metamorphoses viii.245-251

These double rings of souls, moving in opposite directions, were so magnificent, that even by describing them with reference to the brightest stars known to mankind, Dante could not come close to expressing their magnificence.

He will have a shadow—as it were—
of the true constellation, the double dance
that circled round the point where I was standing:

a shadow—since its truth exceeds our senses,
just as the swiftest of all heavens is
more swift than the Chiana’s sluggishness.
xiii.19-24

The attempt to describe the souls was like comparing the swiftness of the highest heaven to the most sluggish, malarial swamp; the beauty of these heavens was beyond human understanding.

There are continual crescendos of beauty and sublime understandings all through Paradise, and from this height the souls began to sing to the three members of the Trinity, the Triune God, as well as the identity of Christ made man.

Their song and dance complete, they turned joyfully back to Beatrice and Dante, and St. Thomas Aquinas again addressed them. Dante’s first question,¹ compared to grain harvested from the field, had been answered: what had it meant when he referred to those who may fatten well if they did not stray? Aquinas could now address the second question regarding Solomon, who had been referenced with the phrase “no other ever rose with so much vision.”²

With extensive imagery of Adam and Christ, Aquinas restated Dante’s question asking why the fifth light in that inner circle, King Solomon, had no equal. The reasoning behind this question was the idea that both Adam and Christ should, in essence, be more perfect and more wise than Solomon could be; therefore, how could Aquinas reconcile this? Aquinas began his extensive theological explanation of this question;

Now let your eyes hold fast to my reply,
and you will see: truth centers both my speech
and your belief, just like a circle’s center.
xiii.49-51

Dante’s belief that these were the wisest of all men and St. Thomas’ words on the unparalleled wisdom of Solomon are both equally correct.³

Aquinas explained that both immortal and mortal things shone with the reflected love that the Source—God the Father—sent down as the Idea—the Son—through love—the Holy Ghost.

Even when shining from above and reflected through things below, the power from this Source was always One and could not be divided. The Son, the Idea, gathered that emanating power together and shone it down through the nine orders of angelic hierarchies; from each of the nine levels, beginning at the top in the Primum Mobile, all the way to the Earth, it trickled down with a diffused energy as the Light and power traveled downward.

Here it should also be understood that the first agent, God, impels his power into some things by means of a direct ray and into others by means of reflected splendor. Thus the divine light radiates into the separate Intelligences without any intermediary and is reflected into others by these Intelligences, which are illuminated first.
Dante, Convivio III.xiv.4

Parmeneides from Raphael’s fresco

From there, from act to act, light then descends
down to the last potentialities,
where it is such that it engenders nothing

but brief contingent things, by which I mean
the generated things the moving heavens
bring into being, with or without seed.
xiii.61-66

The radiance of God descended through the nine levels until it came to the very lowest of the vibratory existence, infusing generated things such as plants and animals in the sublunar realm.

These mortal things were moldable, like wax, and contained the light of God in lesser or greater degrees, depending on their ability to contain it. He noted that this influenced the different talents of people, hearkening back to the conversation with Charles Martel⁴ in the sphere of Venus about the different constitutions present within a house or family.

Continuing his argument, Aquinas said that the stamp on the wax that came directly from the divine was made in perfection, yet, on earth, that light coming from the divine worked through the transmitter of Nature, as a secondary cause, which was not perfect, and therefore worked as if with “a hand that trembles” (78). Adam and Christ then, were made from this perfect impression, directly, with no intermediary, as in the perfect seal in wax.

Yet where the ardent Love prepares and stamps
the lucid Vision of the primal Power,
a being then acquires complete perfection.

In that way, earth was once made worthy of
the full perfection of a living being;
thus was the Virgin made to be with child.
xiii.79-84

Yes, said Aquinas, Adam and Christ had a perfection that was greater than Solomon, but there was more to the question than that. To understand why Aquinas had been right that no one rose higher than Solomon in Wisdom, he asked Dante to consider Solomon’s role, who he had been and what he had needed, when he was visited in a dream by God and asked what the desire of his heart was.

Give therefore thy servant an understanding heart to judge thy people, that I may discern between good and bad: for who is able to judge this thy so great a people? And the speech pleased the Lord, that Solomon had asked this thing. And God said unto him, Because thou hast asked this thing, and hast not asked for thyself long life; neither hast asked riches for thyself, nor hast asked the life of thine enemies; but hast asked for thyself understanding to discern judgment. Behold, I have done according to thy words: lo, I have given thee a wise and an understanding heart; so that there was none like thee before thee, neither after thee shall any arise like unto thee.
I Kings 3:9-12

Solomon was a king, and his request was to become a wiser and more just king; since he did not ask for self-aggrandizing honors, or for foolish requests and unanswerable questions, he proved himself as worthy of being called most wise.

From prudence comes good counsel, by which we guide ourselves and others to a good end in human affairs and activities. This is the gift which Solomon, finding himself in the position of being his people’s leader, requested from God, as is written in the third book of Kings. Nor does the prudent person wait for others to ask for advice but, seeing what the other needs in advance, gives him counsel without having to be asked; just like the rose, which gives its fragrance not only to those who intentionally smell it but to anyone who simply goes near it. Dante, Convivio IV.xxvii.6-7

The adoration of Trinity by Flaxman

Not to know the number of the angels
on high or, if combined with a contingent,
necesse ever can produce necesse,

or si est dare primum motum esse,
or if, within a semicircle, one
can draw a triangle with no right angle.
xiii.97-102

Solomon did not ask God to reveal to him: 1. how many are the Intelligences that move the heavenly spheres; 2. whether, in logic, a limitation occurring in either of the premises can be escaped in the conclusion (a thing which Aristotle affirms, but Plato denies); 3. whether it must be conceded that there is such a thing as first motion; 4. whether the truths of geometry are valid throughout the universe. In other words, Solomon did not ask for philosophic, speculative or scientific wisdom, such as is required for the understanding of metaphysics, logic, physics and geometry, but for practical wisdom.⁵

If Dante would consider these things, both the relation of the wisdom of Solomon to the perfection of Adam and Christ, as well as the quality of what it was that Solomon asked for, then Dante would see that the original statement stood as truth; that if Adam had been created directly by God, and was therefore perfect, and if Christ the man had been sent down from his Father as a perfect specimen, even then, was Solomon still exalted by the nature of his request.

With this in mind, then, as events unfold in the future, Aquinas said, it was always best to approach questions slowly, as one who was weary, in order to refrain from making hasty assumptions about the answers, especially when the question required so much thought, contemplation, and explanation.

Whether he would affirm or would deny,
he who decides without distinguishing
must be among the most obtuse of men;

opinion—hasty—often can incline
to the wrong side, and then affection for
one’s own opinion binds, confines the mind.
xiii.115-20

He gave examples of this hasty judgment, or of those that cast opinions which bound them to error. He mentioned Parmenides, the pre-Socratic ancient Greek philosopher of the Eliatic school, and his student Melissus:

And because the error may be either in the matter or in the form of the argument the fault may be made in one of two ways—either through a false premise or through an invalid syllogism. Both these charges were made against Parmenides and Melissus by the Philosopher, who said: ‘They make false premises and invalid syllogisms.’
Dante, Monarchia III.iv.4

He mentioned Bryson, another Greek philosopher who tried to “square the circle” through illogical geometry, Sabellius who rejected the concept of the Trinity, and Arius, a heretic who claimed that the Father and Son of God were separate substances, not unified into one.

These figures saw truth as one would see their own distorted reflection in the blade of a sword. Patience in all things, patience and wise council and discernment were necessary always.

Aquinas moved from the errors of higher reason to those quandaries of daily life as he closed out his argument, of barren winter branches blooming in the spring, of ships that sailed home safely only to sink within sight of home. The everyman figures Bertha and Martin—like our Jack and Jill—should also not pass judgement on what they see others doing, whether it is stealing or almsgiving, for they do not have the omniscience of God to know what the final state of those they see doing those actions may be.

The thief might be redeemed while the alms giver may have his downfall.

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

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💭 Philosophical Exercises

“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”

~ Oscar Wilde

Paradiso XIII feels like a physics class.

In a physics class a teacher might tell us how grand the cosmos is, how huge our universe is, with billions of stars and thousands of galaxies. When a physics teacher describes the vastness of our universe it can seem unreal. For a person who observes the world from a perspective as narrow as ours (with our two eyes, two legs, and a limited capacity for perception), to grasp the enormity of the universe—to feel how small we are within it—is difficult.

That is how I felt reading Stephen Hawking’s or Carlo Rovelli’s books, they are comprehensible and yet almost unreal, unbelievable.

It seems to me that is why the inner workings that Dante describes here feels similar to a physics lecture: what is taught is real, although the description can feel unreal.

Dante reaches for the same effect, but he does something audacious: he braids into poetry the very disciplines (physics and astronomy) that were once thought to belong almost exclusively to prose.

The great exiled Florentine is trying to render realities that dwarf our imagination. In Paradiso he makes the sciences sing and Canto XIII, in particular, concentrates our attention on primary and secondary creation, and on how divine light reflects through the nine orders of angels to the sublunar world.

One of the top Dante scholars from Columbia University, Teodolinda Barolini, says that in this canto Dante tries to describe the complexity of being from a metaphysical perspective.

Everything that was discussed and described in the previous cantos of Paradiso converges here. Things such as differentiation and the absolute and the conditional will—all of it comes to a head in this canto.

One of the biggest questions that Thomas addresses is Dante’s doubt regarding King Solomon’s having the highest and strongest wisdom.

Thomas addresses this because the notion that King Solomon could be the wisest—even higher than Jesus or Adam—perplexes Dante. This is where the issue of the conditional and the absolute comes into play, because Thomas says that Solomon’s wisdom is the wisdom of a king, not an absolute wisdom.

This is what we discussed previously in my piece called “Bitter Fruit, Sweet Seed,” which explored that every one of us has their own place in the world. This is God’s act of differentiation, and the problem is when a person whose temperament is matched to being a priest takes the position of a warrior, or the other way around.

Dante’s confusion stemmed from his inability to differentiate; this is what he must learn here, that King Solomon is the wisest, but among kings.

Thomas’s explanation says that King Solomon did not possess the Adamic or Jesus kind of wisdom, but a wisdom of a kingly kind.

Here Thomas widens the lens to a more general principle: the universe is one, and yet it receives God’s light in differing degrees. Canto XIII reads like a manifesto for difference. Difference is not disorder; it is the law of participation. And if the universe participates in one light by different measures, then we must learn to distinguish things from one another and judge them according to their proper kind and end.

The difference between Solomon and Jesus and Adam follows from the way they are made. As Thomas explains, Adam and Jesus were God’s direct creations, whereas human beings such as Solomon are indirect, natural creations. When the Trinity stamps directly, all perfection is attained; an indirect stamp contains imperfections due to its nature. And nature, like the famous Daedalus’s hand, can tremble and is prone to error.

My reader might remember the fall of Icarus, as Daedalus was the famous inventor and artist who created the wax wings that took Icarus too close to the sun and melted them.

In the same way, when we look at a technological invention such as a plane and compare it to a bird, we can see that the bird is created by nature, while the plane is an invention that comes from the shaking hand of its inventor and is therefore less perfect.

The very natures of the creation of a bird and a plane are similar in function, and yet different in kind.

What Thomas tries to show us is that a crucial ability of our mind is to differentiate things by their nature: to differentiate Solomon from Jesus; to recognise the similarities between a plane and a bird and yet know the exact reason for their difference.

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This Week’s Sinners and Virtuous 🎭

(Themes, Quotes, Terms and Characters)

I. Hasty Judgement

Dante brings Parmenides as a cautionary example of how false syllogisms and the inability to distinguish between different categories can lead us into error.

It is easy to construct an argument that seems coherent and sounds logical by mixing distinct categories. Dante warns that Parmenides, Melissus, and Bryson were thinkers whom Aristotle rebuked for faulty reasoning, and Aristotle did so by showing that they reached conclusions without making distinctions.

Dante in his Monarchia showed how invalid syllogisms lead to erroneous ways of thinking. By pairing such philosophers, Dante shows that intellectual mistakes arise when categories are blurred and measures confused.

This was Dante’s primary doubt: he had confused the wisdom of King Solomon with that of Jesus and Adam.

II. Do not think of thyself as a God

Dante also brings as examples the rash judgments of ordinary folk, represented here by Bertha and Martin.

If, with Parmenides, Dante highlights scientific and scholarly mistakes, Bertha and Martin point to a more common vice.

This vice is one that concerns you and me when we try to interpret divine punishment or reward. In other words, we should not play God by inferring eternal destinies from surface deeds. As my reader can see, if the first part of Canto XIII teaches us to sort categories within the sciences and studies, the last lines forbid us from judging our neighbours and consigning them to Heaven or Hell. Final judgment belongs to God, and humility forbids us from taking His place.

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Quotes 🖋️

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

So, too, let men not be too confident
in judging—witness those who, in the field,
would count the ears before the corn is ripe;

for I have seen, all winter through, the brier
display itself as stiff and obstinate,
and later, on its summit, bear the rose;

and once I saw a ship sail straight and swift
through all its voyaging across the sea,
then perish at the end, at harbor entry.

~ lines 130-138, Paradiso, Canto XIII

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1. Paradiso xi.25

2. Paradiso x.114

3. Allen Mandelbaum, The Divine Comedy 743

4. Paradiso viii.122

5. Dorothy L. Sayers, Paradise 176