What It Is
The celestial rose is the form that light takes in the Empyrean to show the court of the blessed. When Dante drinks from the river of light and the flowers and sparks exchange places in a greater festival, he sees the light that makes the creator visible to the creature, extended in a circular figure so wide that its circumference would be too great a belt for the sun. It is the rose, in more than a thousand tiers, and from it Beatrice shows the convent of the white stoles, the turning city, the benches already so full that few more are wanted. The saints are the petals and the angels the bees that go down to the flower and rise back to love. There is no perspective there: near and far add nothing and take nothing away, because where God governs without intermediary, natural law is worth nothing. Saint Bernard teaches the design: Eve at the feet of Mary, the line of the Hebrew women that splits the flower into two sides, the children on the lowest steps, the roots (Adam and Peter, in the common reading), and a great seat already crowned, that of the high Henry, whom tradition reads as Henry VII.
Where It Appears
The Empyrean opens at the end of Canto XXX, after the river and the topazes, which are shadowy prefaces of the true:
Anche soggiunse: «Il fiume e li topazi / ch’entrano ed escono e ’l rider de l’erbe / son di lor vero umbriferi prefazi. / Non che da sé sian queste cose acerbe; / ma è difetto da la parte tua, / che non hai viste ancor tanto superbe», he also added: "The river and the topazes that go in and out, and the laughter of the grass, are shadowy prefaces of their truth. Not that these things are unripe in themselves, but the defect is on your side, for you have not yet seen things so splendid."
Beatrice shows the empty throne of the emperor:
sederà l’alma, che fia giù agosta, / de l’alto Arrigo, ch’a drizzare Italia / verrà in prima ch’ella sia disposta. / La cieca cupidigia che v’ammalia / simili fatti v’ha al fantolino / che muor per fame e caccia via la balia, there will sit the soul, which will be august down there, of the high Henry, who will come to set Italy straight before she is ready. The blind greed that bewitches you has made you like the little child who dies of hunger and drives away his nurse.
In Canto XXXI the form is named:
In forma dunque di candida rosa / mi si mostrava la milizia santa / che nel suo sangue Cristo fece sposa; / ma l’altra, che volando vede e canta / la gloria di colui che la ’nnamora / e la bontà che la fece cotanta, in the form, then, of a white rose the holy militia showed itself to me, which Christ made his bride with his blood; but the other, which flying sees and sings the glory of the one who enamors it and the goodness that made it so great.
In Canto XXXII Bernard reads the rose by the order of the seats. Eve is at the feet of Mary:
«La piaga che Maria richiuse e unse, / quella ch’è tanto bella da’ suoi piedi / è colei che l’aperse e che la punse, the wound that Mary closed and anointed, the one so beautiful at her feet, is she who opened it and pricked it.
The lower steps have been filled by another's merit:
E sappi che dal grado in giù che fiede / a mezzo il tratto le due discrezioni, / per nullo proprio merito si siede, / ma per l’altrui, con certe condizioni: / ché tutti questi son spiriti ascolti / prima ch’avesser vere elezïoni, and know that from the degree downward that strikes the two discretions at mid-span, one sits by no merit of one's own, but by another's, with certain conditions; for all these are spirits who were released before they had true choices.
And the law of all things is that of the ring on the finger:
Dentro a l’ampiezza di questo reame / casüal punto non puote aver sito, / se non come tristizia o sete o fame: / ché per etterna legge è stabilito / quantunque vedi, sì che giustamente / ci si risponde da l’anello al dito, within the vastness of this realm no chance point can have a place, unless as sadness or thirst or hunger; for by eternal law is established whatever you see, so that one justly answers from the ring to the finger.
In Canto XXIII the rose had already appeared in which the Word became flesh, which is Mary and not the whole court:
«Perché la faccia mia sì t’innamora, / che tu non ti rivolgi al bel giardino / che sotto i raggi di Cristo s’infiora? / Quivi è la rosa in che ’l verbo divino / carne si fece; quivi son li gigli / al cui odor si prese il buon cammino»., why does my face so enamor you that you do not turn to the fair garden that flowers beneath the rays of Christ? There is the rose in which the divine Word became flesh; there are the lilies, by whose scent the good path was taken.
What It Means
The rose is the Church that Christ bought with his blood, and its design says that salvation has form and order: it is not chance, and the measure of the seat is that of the ring and the finger. The flower gathers those who believed in Christ as yet to come and those who believed in him as come, and the children seated by another's merit recall that the kingdom does not belong only to those who chose. It is also the form the poem gives to communion, in a space without distance, in which the image of the saint descends to Dante without any intervening medium.
The text supports two readings. On the first, the rose is the ordered hierarchy, and Bernard answers Dante's doubt through the eternal law that fixes each seat. On the second, it is the image of a communion in which the inequality of the seats matters less than each one's place in the same flower. Dante's doubt about the children is left in silence, and the poem answers with order, not with justification.
Relationships
- Standard themes: God and the divine, Justice and law, Religion.
- Themes of the work: God and the divine, Justice and law.
- Characters: Saint Bernard, The Virgin Mary, Adam, Saint Peter.
- Related symbols: the point of light and the nine choirs, the three circles and the wheel.