Summary of the cantos
The four cantos make the passage from love to knowledge, and what links one heaven to the next is the speech of someone who praises and accuses at once. In Venus, the last heaven that the earth's shadow reaches, the souls who loved too much no longer repent: they laugh at the power that ordered them, and the same mouth that describes the laughter condemns the flower of Florence and the Decretals that drove out the Gospel. In the Sun, the sages turn in two crowns, and whoever speaks of each founder is a member of the rival order: Thomas Aquinas, a Dominican, spends an entire canto praising Francis and ends by denouncing the Dominicans, and Bonaventure, a Franciscan, makes the mirror. The center is the symmetry of this crossed praise, and the question the part leaves is why the poem lets the saint be praised only by someone who is not of his order, and what this says about the poverty and the learning he wants to join together.
Canto IX: Cunizza, Folquet and Rahab
Summary of the canto
Dante opens the canto speaking to Clemence, whom the commentators take sometimes for the widow, sometimes for the daughter of the prince of the preceding canto, whom tradition identifies with Charles Martel: Charles told him of the frauds that his descendants would suffer and asked only that he be silent and let the years run, so that the poet can say only that a just weeping will come after the harms. Another splendor comes toward him, and the brightness that grows shows the desire to please; the eyes of Beatrice, fixed on him as before, give the assent that certifies his will. The pilgrim asks the soul to let him reflect back what he is thinking, and she answers by describing the place before its name: in the corrupted part of Italy, between Rialto and the sources of the Brenta and the Piave, rises a not very high hill, from which came down a torch that assaulted the region. Only then is it named:
Analysis
D’una radice nacqui e io ed ella: / Cunizza fui chiamata, e qui refulgo / perché mi vinse il lume d’esta stella; / ma lietamente a me medesma indulgo / la cagion di mia sorte, e non mi noia; / che parria forse forte al vostro vulgo
, from one root were born she and I: I was called Cunizza, and here I shine because the light of this star overcame me; but gladly I pardon myself the cause of my fate, and it does not trouble me; which perhaps would seem hard to your common people.
Cunizza introduces herself through kinship before giving her name: the torch that ravaged the March is her brother, and she was born from the same root. What brought her to Venus fits in one line: the star overcame her, and the pardon she gives herself carries neither regret nor punishment. Two readings: the serenity of one who has understood where her inclination came from, or the anticipation of what Folquet is going to say about a fault that no longer returns to the mind.
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Canto X: The Entrance into the Sun and the Twelve Sages
Summary of the canto
The canto opens with the Trinity: the first and ineffable Worth, looking at the Son with the Love that the two breathe forever, made everything that moves in mind and space with such order that it cannot be seen without tasting it. Dante invites the reader to raise his eyes with him to the high wheels, to the point where the movement of the equator and that of the ecliptic cross, and to admire there the art of the master who loves it from within, in which one sees the oblique circle that carries the planets; if their course were not twisted, much of the heaven's virtue would be vain and nearly all the power here below would be dead. Then he changes tone and hands the book over to the reader:
Analysis
Canto XI: Francis and Poverty
Summary of the canto
The canto opens with an exclamation of the poet, and the list that follows is of trades: those who ran after laws, those after aphorisms (medicine), those after the priesthood, those after reigning by force or by sophisms, those after robbery, those after civil affairs, those who sank into the delight of the flesh or into idleness. Dante writes it from above, free of all that, received in heaven with Beatrice:
Analysis
Canto XII: Dominic and the Second Crown
Summary of the canto
No sooner has Thomas finished his last word than the holy wheel begins to turn again, and before completing its circle another wheel encircles it, movement by movement and song by song, in a chant that surpasses that of our Muses as the first splendor surpasses its reflection. Dante compares it to two parallel arches, of the same color, that form in the thin cloud when Juno sends her servant Iris, the outer one born of the inner one, as the speech of the nymph Echo, whom love consumed as the sun consumes vapors, and which make men believe, by God's pact with Noah, that the world will not be flooded again. Thus the two garlands turn around Dante and Beatrice, and the outer answers the inner. They stop together, like eyes that close and open at the same pleasure, and from one of the new lights comes a voice that makes the pilgrim turn toward it as the needle turns to the star. It is Bonaventure, a Franciscan, who will name himself only at the end, and who replies to the Dominican: the love that makes it beautiful leads him to speak of the other duke, because where one is led, the other must be led too, and the glory of both shines together. The army of Christ, which cost so dearly to rearm, was following the banner slowly, distrustfully and sparsely, when the Emperor who always reigns succored it with two champions, only by grace and not by merit. Bonaventure describes first the cradle of the second: fortunate Calaruega, in Spain, under the protection of the great shield of Castile, in which the lion submits and is subdued:
Analysis
Reading of the block of cantos
Analysis