Paradiso

Fiction | Novel/Book in Verse | Adult | Published in 1320

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Cantos 1-7

Cantos 8-9

Cantos 10-14

Cantos 15-20

Cantos 21-22

Cantos 23-27

Cantos 28-33

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Cantos 15-20Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Canto 15 Summary

Dante sees a star racing from the arm of the cross of Mars to its foot: another heavenly soul hurrying to speak to him. At first, Dante cannot understand the soul’s speech because it expresses conceptions that are beyond mortal comprehension. After a time, however, the soul begins to speak in a way more adapted to “the limits of our intellect” (15: 45). When Dante asks him his name, he reveals that he is Dante’s great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida (c.1098-c.1148).

Cacciaguida recalls with nostalgia the old days of Florence, when the citizens were “temperate and chaste,” humble, simple, and civic-minded. He reminds Dante of his family history: Dante derives his surname, Alighieri, from Cacciaguida’s wife, who came from the Po Valley. Finally, Cacciaguida recounts how he enlisted in the Crusades under Emperor Conrad and was “martyred” in the Holy Land.

Canto 16 Summary

Dante regrets glorying in his ancestry, even in heaven. He sees as a sign of this foolish pride the fact that when he begins to speak again to Cacciaguida, he addresses him with voi, the honorific form of “you.” He asks Cacciaguida to tell him about his own ancestry and childhood and about the state of Florence in his youth. Cacciaguida says that his family was from the heart of Florence, which was smaller and morally purer in his day. He reminisces nostalgically about the many noble families that ruled Florence and about the good old days of peace before wars affected the city.

Canto 17 Summary

Dante wants Cacciaguida to reassure him about his future. Cacciaguida responds with a prophetic speech. First, he asserts that God knows contingent events and actions without taking away man’s freedom of will. Then he gives three predictions: Dante will be exiled from Florence and will be reduced to begging; his friends will turn against him; and he will find refuge with a Lombard nobleman. Dante thanks Cacciaguida for forewarning him about these events, even though telling of them in his poem will leave many readers with a “bitter taste.”

Canto 18 Summary

As Dante reflects on the bittersweet nature of Cacciaguida’s message, Beatrice reminds him of God’s consolation. As he looks at Beatrice, Dante experiences the beauty of God reflected in her face and feels the satisfaction of his every longing. However, Beatrice reminds him that “not in my eyes alone is Paradise” (18: 21) and directs his attention back to what Cacciaguida has to say.

Among the souls around him on the heavenly cross, Cacciaguida points out nine “worthies” from Biblical and medieval history: Joshua, Maccabaeus, Charlemagne, Roland, William the Duke of Orange, Renouard, Duke Godfrey of Bouillon, and Robert Guiscard.

Suddenly the scene and color change around Dante, and he is aware of being in the next heavenly sphere: the planet Jupiter. In contrast to the reddish glow of Mars, Jupiter has a “white radiance.” Souls fly in a formation of letters, spelling the Latin phrase translated as “Love justice, you who judge the earth” (the opening of the Book of Wisdom in the Bible). On the letter “M,” some of the souls settle and form an eagle’s head and neck.

This vision causes Dante to reflect that earthly justice comes from heaven. This thought in turn leads Dante to entreat God to enact justice on evildoers and the saints to pray for them; in particular, Dante alludes to corrupt clergy who have led people astray.

Canto 19 Summary

The souls forming the Eagle each appear to Dante like a glowing ruby. Dante asks the Eagle to clear up a theological difficulty he has regarding the damnation to Hell of virtuous pagans and non-Christians. The Eagle chides Dante for questioning God’s justice, reminding him that God’s ways are far above ours—his wisdom is necessarily above that of his creatures—and that believing in Christ is necessary to enter heaven. Nevertheless, many self-professing Christians will be worse off on Judgment Day than many non-Christians. The Eagle enunciates an acrostic condemning the misdeeds of 12 kings in 1300 (19: 115-148), who will be severely judged by God.

Canto 20 Summary

The Eagle, which had previously spoken through its beak, now speaks through its neck. It introduces five of the most illustrious souls contained in it: the Biblical hero David, the Roman emperor Trajan, the Biblical king Hezekiah, the Roman emperor Constantine, the medieval ruler William the Good, and the Trojan hero Ripheus. When Dante marvels at the pagans Trajan and Ripheus being in Paradise, the Eagle responds that both died believers in Christ (in Ripheus’s case, by receiving a prophetic dream about Christ’s coming). The Eagle urges Dante not to judge who will be saved and who will not—even those in Paradise do not know.

Cantos 15-20 Analysis

Like the previous section, the one devoted to Mars comprises four cantos, making it one of the longer sections. This section is dominated by Cacciaguida, Dante’s great-great-grandfather and the only relative of his to appear in the Paradiso. The planet Mars is named after the Roman god of war, and accordingly, Dante focuses on warriors for the faith and those who showed the virtue of fortitude. Cacciaguida himself fought in the Second Crusade, a religious war aimed at returning the Holy Land to Christian control.

In contrast to the previous heavenly sphere, which emphasized the intellect and ideas, this sphere centers on personal life and history and the ties to family, place, and society. Cacciaguida, a remote ancestor whom Dante never knew, tells the poet about the history of his family and of his hometown, Florence. Throughout the Paradiso, discussion of Florence involves affection and passion in Dante, increased by the fact that he is now in exile.

Here again, Dante employs a character—Cacciaguida—as a mouthpiece for his criticism of society. Dante, through Cacciaguida, expresses a nostalgia for an idealized picture of the way Florence used to be, with virtuous citizens who lived in peace with one another. That Cacciaguida joined the crusade as a warrior means, for Dante, that he participated in a noble and just war; by contrast, Florence in Dante’s day is being torn apart by a civil war, which Dante deplores. Dante uses this contrast to draw contemporary readers’ attention to social problems of the present and what he sees as the decline of values and ideals.

When Cacciaguida first appears, Dante cannot understand what he is saying; this implies that souls in heaven communicate using a language that transcends earthly understanding. However, after modifying his language so that Dante can understand, he expresses affection toward Dante as his “seed,” adding to the more personal tone of this section compared with the previous sections. In 15: 25 Dante compares his meeting with Cacciaguida to Aeneas’s reunion with his father, Anchises, in the underworld in Virgil’s Aeneid. This reference also indirectly recalls the importance that Virgil had as a character in the Inferno and Purgatorio, where he acted as Dante’s guide through both regions. Dante the poet also has Cacciaguida foretell the predicament that Dante was, in fact, suffering at the time he was writing the Paradiso: his banishment from Florence (See: Background, Political Context).

Cantos 19-20 address a theological issue much debated in Christian thought: the salvation of non-Christians. Dante places a number of Old Testament figures in Heaven; the Christian tradition held that virtuous Old Testament patriarchs and matriarchs were saved by virtue of their good lives and their faith in the coming of Christ. On the other hand, Dante includes even pagan Greeks and Romans in Heaven, such as the emperor Trajan and Ripheus the Trojan (20: 43-72). Dante the pilgrim reveals to the Eagle that he struggles with the idea that people who never heard of Christ should be condemned to Hell. He asks why someone born in India and who never heard about Christ, yet lived a virtuous life by the light of reason, would be condemned (19: 70-78).

The Eagle responds that we must not submit God’s goodness to human standards, but instead realize that God is the source of every standard (19: 88-90). The Eagle, however, tempers this by saying that Christians should not be smug in their possession of the true faith and should concentrate on living a virtuous life. The non-Christian may very well possess more virtue than the Christian, and this disparity will show up on Judgement Day. Elaborating on this, the Eagle catalogs at length the “many infamies” done by Christian kings (19: 112-148), with which Dante’s readers would have been familiar.

This discussion shows that Dante, in addition to expounding theology in the Paradiso, is willing to wrestle with theological difficulties and ask questions. Although no definitive answer is reached on the salvation question, Dante implies that we should trust in God’s justice and goodness.