Who He Is
Folquet is the soul of Venus to whom Cunizza da Romano points as the nearest jewel, whose fame will still be spoken of for five centuries, and whom Dante addresses with two verbs that he himself invents, intuarsi and inmiarsi, to enter into the other as the other enters into oneself. He answers with a map: the Mediterranean, the greatest valley in which water spreads, and on its shore, between the Ebro and the Magra, a land that made its own blood, already hot, its port: Marseille. The people who knew his name called him Folco, and this heaven is stamped by him as he was stamped by heaven. Tradition reads him as the troubadour who became a monk and then bishop of Toulouse, and the poem says nothing of that. It says that neither Dido, who wronged Sychaeus and Creusa, nor Phyllis, deceived by Demophoön, nor Alcides, when he had Iole in his heart, burned more than he did while it was fitting for his hair. He appears only in canto IX, and it is there that he defines Paradise by what it leaves undone, which is repentance. He points to Rahab, the first soul taken up in the triumph of Christ, and closes with an invective against Florence and the Church, with a hope at the end.
Trajectory
In canto IX he sets aside the wonder at one who was so ardent and now laughs:
Non però qui si pente, ma si ride, / non de la colpa, ch’a mente non torna, / ma del valor ch’ordinò e provide. / Qui si rimira ne l’arte ch’addorna / cotanto affetto, e discernesi ’l bene / per che ’l mondo di sù quel di giù torna, yet here one does not repent, but laughs, not at the fault, which does not return to the mind, but at the worth that ordered and provided. Here one contemplates the art that adorns such great affection, and one discerns the good by which the world above makes the world below turn.
He points to the light that shines at his side like a sunbeam in clear water: Rahab, the prostitute of Jericho who hid Joshua's spies, in the last heaven that the earth's shadow reaches.
Da questo cielo, in cui l’ombra s’appunta / che ’l vostro mondo face, pria ch’altr’ alma / del trïunfo di Cristo fu assunta, from this heaven, where the shadow your world casts comes to a point, before any other soul, she was taken up into the triumph of Christ.
Then he turns back to Florence, which he calls the plant of him who first turned his back on his Creator:
La tua città, che di colui è pianta / che pria volse le spalle al suo fattore / e di cui è la ’nvidia tanto pianta, / produce e spande il maladetto fiore / c’ha disvïate le pecore e li agni, / però che fatto ha lupo del pastore, your city, which is the plant of him who first turned his back on his Creator, and whose envy is so much lamented, produces and spreads the accursed flower that has led the ewes and the lambs astray, for it has made the shepherd a wolf.
Because of this flower, the Gospel and the great doctors are abandoned, and only the Decretals are studied. The canto, however, does not end in censure:
Ma Vaticano e l’altre parti elette / di Roma che son state cimitero / a la milizia che Pietro seguette, / tosto libere fien de l’avoltero, but the Vatican and the other chosen parts of Rome, which were a cemetery for the militia that followed Peter, will soon be free of adultery.
Themes Embodied
Folquet embodies Love reordered: the desire that burned him more than Dido's was not extinguished, it was put back in its place, and what returns to the mind is the power that foresaw it. He also embodies the limit of Justice and law, in the critique of Florence's coinage and of the Decretals that took the place of the Gospel.
The text sustains two readings of why nothing repents in Venus. In the first, the guilt was atoned for and therefore forgotten. In the second, disordered love appears only as a fault to someone who does not yet see the order into which it enters, and in heaven that order is seen. The canto links the two without changing register: the same love that burned in Folquet is the desire to have that turns the shepherds away from the flock.
Relationships
- Cunizza da Romano: the one who points him out and comes before him in the same canto.
- Dante: the living man whom he addresses with new verbs.
- Beatrice: the one who sustains Dante's gaze while Folquet speaks.