Abstract
Much recent commentary on Dante’s Commedia focuses on Dante’s truth claims in the poem. Indeed, Teodolinda Barolini has proposed that “the fundamental question for all readers of Dante’s poem” is “How are we to respond to the poet’s insistence that he is telling us the truth?” I propose that the poem itself gives us guidance as to the seriousness of its claims to literal truth. It does so by actively deconstructing its own meaning at critical junctures. I look at several such moments of deconstruction, but I argue that the first few cantos of the Paradiso in particular provide a reflection on the difference between reality and fiction. Early in the Paradiso, Dante draws attention to the metaphoric nature of his poem and reminds his reader, through his character’s own actions, that metaphor is not reality. In this way, Dante implies that we should not take the narrative particulars of his poem too literally but should treat metaphor as metaphor rather than as mimesis.
Much recent commentary on Dante’s Commedia focuses on Dante’s truth claims in the poem. Indeed, Teodolinda Barolini (1992: 4) has proposed that “the fundamental question for all readers of Dante’s poem” is “How are we to respond to the poet’s insistence that he is telling us the truth?” According to Mirko Tavoni (2015: 70), “The debate over whether Dante’s Comedy is a visio or a fictio has continued for more than a century and a half, with the vast majority of scholars arguing in favour of the fictio thesis.”
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Reaching even further back, William Franke (1997: 259) observes that “The question of truth has riddled reception of Dante’s poem from the beginning of a tradition of commentary as old as the poem itself. How are the truth-claims made by the poem to be taken?” As Franke (1997: 260) notes, “For a start, it is observed on all sides that Dante’s poem makes exceptional and exceptionally insistent claims for its status as true revelation, vision, or experiential record.” More specifically, as Douglas Biow (1996: 49) affirms: Dante’s poetic strategy throughout the Commedia is to historicize the marvelous, to assert repeatedly that everything that takes place in this voyage must be understood as credible and real … above all because the poet, as the wayfarer, witnessed these events and has returned to tell us about them.
But at the same time, as Christian Moevs (2005: 178) notes, “What the Comedy is claiming by claiming to be true or real is by no means obvious.” The truth of the Commedia is not simple or straightforward, nor is Dante a simple or straightforward writer. Indeed, Dante appears to have had a most complex understanding of the nature of truth and of his role in revealing that truth through his writing. Moevs (2005: 185), for example, has pointed out that Dante insistently blurs the line between truth and fiction: The narrative of the Comedy places all finite form on the same ontological level: ancient history, mythology, art, literary inventions, current events, Scripture, and personal experience. It is a relentless assault on the conventional boundary between reality and fiction; it annihilates the careful medieval distinction among historia, argumentum, and fabula, among what happened, what could have happened but did not, and what could not have happened. It fictionalizes historical characters and historicizes fictional characters until we can no longer say which is which.
Franke (1997: 267) concludes that Dante: felt that he could claim historicity for the experience proposed by his poem on the basis of his sense that, for all its use of fictions, the story of his journey and its making was the very reality of his own life as an interpretive venture.
In contrast, “Equating historicity as the ground and anchor for Dante’s truth-claims with mimesis … defrauds Dante’s richly hermeneutic understanding of history by a narrow, positivistic conception of it” (Franke, 1997: 274).
Yet, Franke (1997: 261) also maintains that: the poem itself cannot answer the question as to whether its truth-claims are … just poetic postures or ‘serious’ in a sense exceeding poetry as rhetorical form altogether. This is an interpretive choice, and on it depends what the poem is for us.
I disagree with Franke here and propose that the poem does in fact give us guidance as to the seriousness of its claims to literal truth. It does so by actively deconstructing its own meaning at critical junctures. In this article, I will look at several such moments of deconstruction, but I will argue that the first few cantos of the Paradiso in particular provide a reflection on the difference between reality and fiction. Early in the Paradiso, Dante draws attention to the metaphoric nature of his poem and reminds his reader, through his character’s own actions, that metaphor is not reality. In this way, Dante implies that we should not take the narrative particulars of his poem too literally but should treat metaphor as metaphor rather than as mimesis.
Others before me have linked Dante and deconstruction. Jeremy Tambling (1988: 1), for example, has argued for reading Dante—and all literature of the Middle Ages—in a new, deconstructive way: It is time that medieval literature, which is profoundly different from either the realist mode, or from any sense of single meaning, was brought in, in all its difference and alterity from modern literature, to display a way of signifying that is not committed to monologism, or to establishing a narrowed set of hierarchical truths.
More recently, Francis J Ambrosio (2007: 4) ask[s] whether the style of writing with which Jacques Derrida has identified himself, generally labeled “Deconstruction,” might prove to be singularly effective in aiding contemporary readers to understand the power and beauty of Dante’s writing, and most particularly, to understand how today that power and beauty might be read as expressing a revelation of the Spirit of resurrection differently.
More concretely, Simone Marchesi (2013: 99–100) argues that where: Dante’s authorial strategy of constructing his narrative as historical, his own biography as perfectly linear, and the inspiration for his poem as supernatural … is insinuated, articulated, or reinforced, the text also invites the audience to take a distancing, deconstructing, and ironic hermeneutical stance.
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At the same time, scholars such as Steven Botterill (1997) and Douglas Biow (1996) have argued that, despite deconstructive moments in the Comedy, Dante’s trust in language, meaning, and truth remains supreme. As Botterill (1997: 176) maintains: That the authority of poetic language is not absolute does not mean that it does not exist; that the last word can never be spoken (in this world) does not mean that the word that is spoken here cannot justify its claim to enjoy authority. It is surely more satisfactory, and more in keeping with everything we can deduce from Dante’s writings, to interpret the very existence of Paradiso as an assertion, even a celebration, of language’s innate power … than it is to see it, and the Commedia as a whole, as a text forever gloomily harping on its own representational inadequacy.
Similarly, as Biow (1996: 60) proposes: Wherever the marvelous appears in the Commedia, Dante’s language never permits it to intrude and singularly call attention to the “fictionality” of his poem. He often goes one step further and asserts, as with the ecphrasis on the first terrace of Mount Purgatory, that his marvels are real, sometimes more real than reality …. [E]ven in the last moment of the poem, when the poet strains to describe the ineffable and yearningly strives to recall his vision of God, his failing memory and language may still be understood as the assurance that he, in fact, was there.
As Barolini (1992: 15) observes, “Dante protects himself most when he seems most exposed; he neutralizes the betrayal of self-consciousness implicit in all narrative authenticating devices by making his authenticating devices outrageously inauthentic.” Indeed, Dante often makes his most outrageous truth claims with the very greatest shows of audacity (e.g. with respect to Geryon in Inferno 16.124–132). But at the same time, Dante insistently undermines his poem’s claims to literal truth by repeatedly drawing attention to the fundamental inauthenticity of his narrative. In Inferno 9, for example, Dante foregrounds the artifice and fictionality of his poem by advising his reader to glean the truth beneath what he admits to be arcane, novel imagery: “O voi ch’avete li ’ntelletti sani, / mirate la dottrina che s’asconde / sotto ’l velame de li versi strani” (“O you who have healthy intellects, look at the doctrine that hides beneath the veil of these strange verses,” If 9.61–63). 3 In Purgatorio 8, Dante again draws attention to the “veil” of his poem’s narrative, and even though in this instance the veil is thin and revealing, it is still not the truth but rather a barrier that must be pierced in order to discern the truth: “Aguzza qui, lettor, ben li occhi al vero, / ché ’l velo è ora ben tanto sottile, / certo che ’l trapassar dentro è leggero” (“Sharpen well here your eyes, reader, toward the truth, because the veil is now indeed so very thin, certain it is that piercing within is easy,” Pg 8.19–21). Dante’s invitations to his reader to pierce the veil of his poem’s literal particulars in order to access the truth below or behind those particulars imply that his poem’s narrative details are window dressing—not a truth that matters but superficial feigning for the purpose of conveying the poet’s deeper, truer message.
But Dante also deconstructs the authenticity of his poem in more subtle and more fundamental ways. In Paradiso 17, for example, Dante explicitly signals that rhetorical artifice—rather than authentic spontaneity—organizes the entire journey of the Commedia. Cacciaguida in the sphere of Mars, speaking to Dante the pilgrim but also to Dante’s readers, tells us that “ti son mostrate in queste rote, / nel monte e ne la valle dolorosa / pur l’anime che son di fama note” (“to you are shown in these circles, on the mount and in the painful valley, only the souls that are noted for fame,” Pd 17.136–139). This selectivity in terms of the souls encountered in the poem is necessary, according to Cacciaguida, because of the limitations of human intelligence and credence, “che l’animo di quel ch’ode, non posa / né ferma fede per essempro ch’aia / la sua radice incognita e ascosa, / né per altro argomento che non paia” (“because the soul of the one who hears, puts firm faith neither in the example that has its root unknown and hidden, nor through other argument that does not match,” Pd 17.140–142). The implication here is subtle but significant. Dante’s alleged experience of the afterlife, initially presented as a natural, spontaneous journey, is neither natural nor spontaneous at all but orchestrated and artificial. It is rhetorical—a pretense designed with a purpose and an audience in mind. 4 Dante’s journey has, moreover, been shaped in a manner most likely to affect and persuade those who read his story (“quel ch’ode”) rather than for maximum impact on Dante the pilgrim himself. Dante seems to be intentionally distancing us from the literal events of the narrative, abruptly making his readers self-conscious through a gratuitous revelation by Cacciaguida as we are suddenly, retroactively made aware that rhetorical artifice has shaped the poem’s events all along—and specifically for our benefit as audience. Whether Dante intends for us to see God or the poet as artificer, the pilgrim’s journey is no longer a series of random, individual encounters—no longer a true, authentic experience in the sense of a sequence of haphazard, lived events—but is instead a rhetorical drama, orchestrated deliberately and played out specifically for us as readers.
Similarly, in Paradiso 13, Dante undermines the very premise of the Commedia—that the poet can accurately and authoritatively tell where souls have ended up in the afterlife—by having no less an authority than Thomas Aquinas warn against presuming to know on earth the eternal destination of souls in heaven and hell: “Non creda donna Berta e ser Martino, / per vedere un furare, altro offerere, / vederli dentro al consiglio divino; / ché quel può surgere, e quel può cadere” (“Don’t believe that Lady Bertha and Master Martin, by seeing one steal and another offer, see them according to divine counsel, because one may rise, and the other may fall,” Pd 13.139–142). To “donna Berta e ser Martino” we are surely tempted to add Dante Alighieri’s name, since he claims to know and tell in his poem the final resting places of a host of sinners and saints. Even if we accept the proposition that Dante’s vision of the afterlife, unlike the errant claims of “donna Berta e ser Martino,” comes from God rather than from his own flawed observation, reasoning, and imagination, Aquinas’s warning must still give us pause. If it is presumptuous to trust the witness of “donna Berta e ser Martino” about the mysteries of divine judgment, it must surely be rash to trust Dante’s witness in the Commedia, based solely on the poet’s own repeated claims to be telling the truth. After all, as Dante’s Aquinas observes: questo ti sia sempre piombo a’ piedi, / per farti mover lento com’ uom lasso / e al sì e al no che tu non vedi: / … / perch’ elli ’ncontra che più volte piega / l’oppinïon corrente in falsa parte, / e poi l’affetto l’intelletto lega. (let this be always lead to your feet, to make you move slowly like a weary man, to both the yes and the no that you do not see … because it happens that many times the present opinion bends toward the false part, and then affection ties up the intellect, Pd 13.112–120).
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The fact that Dante, through the fictional words of his character Aquinas, needlessly draws attention to the inability of humans, including presumably Dante himself, to fathom the mysteries of divine justice only serves to make the deconstruction of the poet’s reliability here appear intentional on Dante’s part. In fact, Dante deconstructs his own reliability again and again throughout the poem. He does so by relentlessly deconstructing his objectivity as witness and author. When Dante joins “la bella scola” (“the beautiful school,” If 4.94) of Virgil, Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan in limbo, we are scandalized by his audacity in taking a proffered spot among such revered poets—an event about which modesty would have required silence even if we believed the event to have really happened rather than to be merely a product of Dante’s self-aggrandizing imagination. When Dante sees his personal enemy Filippo Argenti among the wrathful in the swamp-like Styx and says to Virgil, “Maestro, molto sarei vago / di vederlo attuffare in questa broda / prima che noi uscissimo del lago” (“Master, I would be very eager to see him dunked in this swill before we leave the lake,” If 8.52–54), we are horrified by the poet’s vindictiveness, so flagrantly and so self-servingly settling a personal grudge to the marked disadvantage of the other (dead and defenseless) party. When Dante the pilgrim is terrified that the demons who guard the barrators are going to mistake him for a sinner and capture him (e.g. in Inferno 21.127–132 and 23.19–24), we are amused by Dante’s inside joke and tongue-in-cheek coyness, since the poet himself was (wrongfully?) exiled from his beloved Florence on a (false?) charge of barratry. In each of these instances (as well as many others), Dante deconstructs his own objectivity as witness before our very eyes. We are scandalized, horrified, or amused by Dante’s behavior—as pilgrim or poet or both. As a result, we feel a greater distance from Dante’s persona, and we scrutinize and doubt the poet’s reliability. Unlike most visionaries and mystics, Dante does not minimize his ego for the sake of the message in his text but instead writes himself larger than life on almost every page. In doing so, he undermines his poem’s authority as a record of a true vision, since self-interested motives seem to influence his telling of his tale. As Albert Ascoli (2008: 9) has noted, “a modern, living individual with a distinctive personality like Dante’s could not hope to claim that depersonalized auctoritas which belongs to the Biblical and classical auctores.” 6 He could also not hope to claim the depersonalized authority of medieval mystics and visionaries. By repeatedly foregrounding his personal grudges, his pride, and his ambitions, Dante makes the Commedia a personal poem rather than a wholly transcendent one and, seemingly, intentionally deconstructs his objectivity as author, casting doubt on the genuineness of the literal events that he alleges to have witnessed.
Dante’s own contemporaries certainly had little faith in Dante’s claims to have literally witnessed all that he relates in his poem. Barolini (1992: 6) observes that 14th-century commentaries on his poem: deflected attention from the literal sense and its preposterous claims by intentionally devaluing it, equating it with the allegedly fictitious imaginings of the poet … with the moralist responsible for the allegorical truth that is hidden under the bella menzogna of the poet’s fanciful inventions.
Franke (1997: 261–262) notes that: Pietro [di Dante] explains that his father only poetically feigns (“poetando fingit”) to have gone on the journey through the other world to the Empyrean narrated in the Commedia. Pietro is joined by other fourteenth-century commentators, such as Benvenuto da Imola and Francesco da Buti, in their somewhat nervous and hedging explanations that Dante visited Paradise “mentaliter et non corporaliter” [mentally but not bodily], that he was there “intellettualmente, ma non corporalmente, ma finge secondo la lettera ch’elli vi fusse corporalmente” [intellectually, but not corporeally, but he feigns according to the letter that he was there corporeally].
These early commentators characterize the overarching premise of the Commedia as an instance of poetic feigning, but they also point to specific instances where Dante departs from literal truth in favor of poetic license. Of Inferno 5, for example, Benvenuto da Imola writes: Quomodo autem Dido fuerit amorata de Enea, et quomodo se occiderit propter eius recessum, patet eleganter apud Virgilium, et quotidie vulgi ore celebratur. Sed hic est attente notandum quod istud, quod fingit Virgilius, nunquam fuit factum, neque possibile fieri …. Nunc ad propositum autor ponit Didonem amorosam, quia sequitur Virgilium. (How Dido fell in love with Aeneas and how she killed herself because of his slipping away is told elegantly by Virgil and is celebrated every day in the mouth of the vulgar. But it is to be carefully observed that these events, which Virgil feigns, were never accomplished, nor could be possible …. But now to the purpose, our author posits an amorous Dido, because he follows Virgil, ad If 5.61).
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Francesco da Buti adds disapprovingly: Virgilio fece molto male a dare tale infamia a si onesta donna, per fare bella la sua poesia; e lo nostro autore Dante fece peggio a seguitarlo in questo, che credo che avesse veduto Geronimo e li altri che di cio parlano. (Virgil did very badly in giving such dishonor to so honest a lady, in order to make his poetry beautiful; and our author Dante did worse by following in this, for I believe that he had seen Jerome and the others who speak of it, ad If 5.52–69)
To these 14th-century commentators, Dante is first and foremost a poet—one who follows the feigning and falsehoods of other poets, motivated, like them, “fare bella la sua poesia” (“to make his poetry beautiful”). Dante’s poem, like Virgil’s, ignores literal truth for story and effect. The Comedy is a fiction that prefers Virgil’s poetic license to the well-established historical reality—the literal truth—of Dido’s fidelity.
Even if we do not trust the witness of these early readers and commentators, the first few cantos of the Paradiso provide a reflection on the difference between fiction and reality—a reflection that suggests that we should not take Dante’s poem too literally. In the opening of the first canto of the Paradiso, Dante praises God and claims that “Nel ciel che più de la sua luce prende / fu’ io, e vidi cose che ridire / né sa né può chi di là sù discende” (“I was in the heaven that most takes his light, and I saw things that the one who descends from there above neither knows how to nor can retell,” Pd 1.4–6). Dante combines here a bald, unqualified statement of alleged truth (“Nel ciel … fu’ io, e vidi cose”) with a caveat about his ability to express that truth accurately (“ridire / né sa né può chi di là sù discende”). A few lines later, he adds, “Veramente quant’ io del regno santo / ne la mia mente potei far tesoro, / sarà ora materia del mio canto” (“Truly as much of the holy realm as I could treasure up in my mind will now be the matter of my song,” Pd 1.10–12). Botterill (1997: 178) argues that such examples of the ineffability topos in the Paradiso are “an obligatory acknowledgement of poetic language’s limits, but not a shamefaced confession of its falsity.” 8 Yet the implications of Dante’s words are clear: his retelling in the Paradiso of what he claims to have seen in heaven is going to be flawed. Dante explicitly warns his readers that we cannot entirely trust what we read hereafter. The divine is hopelessly beyond human comprehension, memory, and expression. 9 What we are about to read is filtered through the inadequate mind and unreliable language of the poet. If we take it for exact, literal truth, we go beyond the remit that Dante claims for himself.
Dante reinforces this limit of his poem’s literal remit three cantos later. In Paradiso 4, Beatrice explains to the pilgrim Dante that what he sees in paradise is not literally real. Of the souls in the sphere of the moon, Beatrice says, “Qui si mostraro, non perché sortita / sia questa spera lor, ma per far segno / de la celestïal c’ha men salita” (“They show themselves here, not because this sphere is their lot, but in order to serve as a sign of the celestial that is less exalted,” Pd 4.37–39). Such counterfactual figuration on the part of the souls is necessary, because: Così parlar conviensi al vostro ingegno, / però che solo da sensato apprende / ciò che fa poscia d’intelletto degno. / Per questo la Scrittura condescende / a vostra facultate, e piedi e mano / attribuisce a Dio e altro intende. (Speaking thus suits your intelligence, because it learns only from sensation what later it makes worthy of intellect. For this reason Scripture condescends to your faculties, and attributes feet and a hand to God when it means something else, Pd 4.40–45).
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In essence, Beatrice is telling Dante (and his readers) that what we see in the Paradiso is metaphor—a “segno” that “altro intende.” 11 What Dante the pilgrim “sees” in heaven is not real but symbolic, not literal but figurative, and what Dante’s audience sees in the Paradiso, as readers who must rely on the poet’s necessarily flawed report of what he “saw,” is yet another remove from the literal truth that Dante may (or may not) be claiming as the basis of his poem.
One could argue that Dante intends for us to conclude that the source of metaphor in his poem is God and that, therefore, the metaphorical nature of the poem does not appreciably affect its truth value. God’s metaphors are true. But in fact, metaphors are never entirely true. Even in Scripture, as Dante tells us, divine metaphor ascribes to God features that God does not truly possess: “la Scrittura condescende / a vostra facultate, e piedi e mano / attribuisce a Dio e altro intende” (“Scripture condescends to your faculties, and attributes feet and a hand to God when it means something else,” Par 4.43–45). Dante has, moreover, already forewarned us a canto earlier about the error that arises from confusing metaphor and reality.
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In Paradiso 3, Dante sees the souls of the sphere of the moon: Quali per vetri trasparenti e tersi, / o ver per acque nitide e tranquille, / non sì profonde che i fondi sien persi, / tornan d’i nostri visi le postille / debili sì, che perla in bianca fronte / non vien men forte a le nostre pupille. (As by clear, transparent windows, or better by clear and tranquil waters, not so deep that the depths are lost, the traces of our face return, so weak that a pearl on a white forehead does not arrive less strong to our eyes, Pd 3.10–15)
The souls look like reflections in a window or in a shallow pool of water, but Dante the pilgrim mistakes metaphor for reality: “Sùbito sì com’ io di lor m’accorsi, / quelle stimando specchiati sembianti, / per veder di cui fosser, li occhi torsi; / e nulla vidi” (“As suddenly as I became aware of them, esteeming them reflected semblances, I turned my eyes to see whose they were; and I saw nothing,” Pd 3.19–22). Beatrice teases Dante for “il tuo püeril coto” (“your childish thought,” Pd 3.26), because that thought “sopra ’l vero ancor lo piè non fida, / ma te rivolve, come suole, a vòto” (“still does not trust its foot about the truth, but turns you, as is its custom, to a void,” Pd 3.27–28). In contrast to the metaphoric reflections that Dante mistakes for reality, the actual souls are “vere sustanze … che tu vedi” (“true substances … that you see,” Pd 3.29).
This episode perfectly illustrates the deconstructive nature of metaphor. As Richard Lansing (2009: 61) has written, the word metaphor—or translatio in Latin—“means to carry one thing over to another, to effect a transferal of sense from one thing to another in virtue of a perceived similarity between them.” 13 Essentially, metaphor is the conceptual linking of two similar things. But no matter how similar the two things are, they are not the same thing. They remain two discrete things. Indeed, there can be no translatio—no one thing carried over to another—without an ontological difference between them. The souls in the sphere of the moon may look like reflections, but they are not reflections. Seeming never becomes reality; likeness never becomes identity. As Paul Ricoeur (1975: 6) has written, “[metaphoric] resemblance itself must be understood as a tension between identity and difference in the predicative operation set in motion by semantic innovation.” According to Ricoeur (1975: 7), “The metaphorical ‘is’ at once signifies both ‘is not’ and ‘is like’.” Metaphor, by its very nature, emphasizes likeness, but it simultaneously draws attention to the difference that defines and disrupts likeness. Indeed, Thomas Aquinas argues in the Summa theologica that Scripture’s use of material metaphors to express spiritual truths is effective precisely because of the all-important difference that distinguishes material vehicles from spiritual tenors: “quia per hoc magis liberatur humanus animus ab errore. Manifestum enim apparet quod haec secundum proprietatem non dicuntur de divinis” (“because the human mind is better liberated from error by this. For it appears manifest that these metaphors are not said, according to their literal nature, about divine things,” 1.1.9). 14
Confusing metaphor with reality is, moreover, dangerous. Augustine, in the third book of the De doctrina christiana, advises readers of Scripture that “in principio cavendum est ne figuratam locutionem ad litteram accipias” (“first it is to be cautioned that you do not take a figurative expression literally,” 3.5.9).
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As Augustine observes, “Cum enim figurate dictum sic accipitur, tanquam proprie dictum sit, carnaliter sapitur. Neque ulla mors animæ congruentius appellatur, quam cum id etiam quod in ea bestiis antecellit, hoc est, intelligentia carni subjicitur sequendo litteram” (“When then what is said figuratively is thus taken as though it were said literally, it is known carnally. And nothing is said to be more congruent with the death of the soul than when that which in it excels the beasts, that is, intelligence, is subjected to the flesh by following the letter,” 3.5.9). Following the letter too closely is death to the soul, an abnegation of intelligence in favor of bestial, carnal thinking. This type of error is precisely what leads Dante, in Paradiso 4, into wrongly believing in the “parer tornarsi l’anime a le stelle, / secondo la sentenza di Platone” (“appearing of souls to return to their stars, according to the teaching of Plato,” Par 4.23–24). As Beatrice explains, “Quel che Timeo de l’anime argumenta / non è simile a ciò che qui si vede, / però che, come dice, par che senta … / e forse sua sentenza è d’altra guise / che la voce non suona” (“That which Timaeus said of souls is not like what is seen here, because, as he says, it appears that he feels … and perhaps his words are of another guise than the voice sounds,” Pd 4.49–56). As David Gibbons (2002: 44) points out: A literal interpretation of the philosopher’s assertion that the soul returns to its star after death, she says, misled the pagan world into worshipping celestial beings, and risks leading Dante into the same error. There may however be some truth in it if it is taken figuratively.
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Reading too literally leads to error; reading more figuratively leads to enlightenment and salvation.
Perhaps because of the dangers of misinterpreted metaphor, Dante warns, in Paradiso 2, that “voi che siete in piccioletta barca” (“you who are in a teensy boat,” Pd 2.1) should not risk following “dietro al mio legno che cantando varca” (“behind my wooden ship that, singing, crosses,” Pd 2.3), since “forse, / perdendo me, rimarreste smarriti” (“perhaps, losing me, you would get left behind adrift,” Pd 2.5–6). Only “Voi altri pochi che drizzaste il collo / per tempo al pan de li angeli” (“You other few who turned your head in time toward the bread of angels,” Pd 2.10–11) will be able to follow safely in Dante’s wake and not get lost. Those who read too literally—Augustine’s carnal readers whose “intelligentia carni subjicitur sequendo litteram” (“intelligence is subjected to the flesh by following the letter”)—are certainly not “Voi altri pochi che drizzaste il collo / per tempo al pan de li angeli” (“You other few who turned your head in time toward the bread of angels”). 17
In Paradiso 1, then, Dante tells us that he is relating “cose che ridire / né sa né può chi di là sù discende” (“things that the one who descends from there above neither knows how to nor can retell,” Pd 1.5–6). In Paradiso 2, he advises only those who “drizzaste il collo / per tempo al pan de li angeli” (“perked up your head in time toward the bread of angels,” Pd 2.10–11) to continue reading his poem. In Paradiso 3, he shows us that we should not childishly allow our mind to confuse metaphor and reality, since “sopra ’l vero ancor lo piè non fida, / ma te rivolve, come suole, a vòto” (“it still does not trust its foot about the truth, but turns you, as is its custom, to a void,” Pd 3.27–28). In Paradiso 4, he tells us that the things that he is describing in the Paradiso are metaphorical rather than literal: “Qui si mostraro, non perché sortita / sia questa spera lor, ma per far segno” (“They show themselves here, not because this sphere is their lot, but in order to serve as a sign,” Pd 4.37–38). These four moments in the poem form a kind of syllogism:
The literal nature of the divine is beyond human comprehension, memory, and expression (Pd 1.4–6). Weak readers may get lost in Dante’s poem (Pd 2.1–6). Humans who confuse metaphor and reality are deceived (Pd 3.19–29). The narrative of the Paradiso uses metaphor as its basis for expressing the divine (Pd 4.37–45). Therefore, humans who confuse metaphor and reality in the narrative of the Paradiso (and think that they thereby comprehend the literal nature of the divine) are lost and deceived.
Despite his claims to be telling literal truth in his poem, Dante above all expects his readers to use their intelligence to judge and heed the difference between metaphor and reality, between truth and fiction. If they fail to do so, “forse, / perdendo me, rimarreste smarriti” (“perhaps, losing me, you would get left behind adrift,” Pd 2.5–6).