All these spirits registered vows in Heaven and then either broke or slighted them. Both of those cited took vows as nuns and were then forced to break them against their own wishes. One must assume, however, that the same category would include not only monks and priests who similarly gave up holy orders, but all who offered up a vow of any sort and then failed to observe it strictly.

They are “assigned here” (line 30), which is to say they appear on the moon (the inconstant planet), but each has his throne in the Empyrean (see IV, 23). All the souls of the blessed, whatever their rank in Heaven, experience as much bliss as they are capable of and cannot wish for more. Within the divine order each seeks and finds its proper place.

 

18. the smitten Greek: Narcissus. His error was in taking a reflection (his own) to be a real face. Dante’s opposite error is in taking real faces to be reflections.

 

32. the True Light: God.

 

33. permits no soul to wander: So Dante’s phrasing, but it should be understood that filled as these souls are by the True Light, their inability to stray from its ray (contrast Dante’s situation in line 27) is not a prohibition but a choice of their own perfected volition. They are not capable of error.

 

44. that Love: God, as the essence of Caritas.

 

46. virgin sister: A nun.

 

49. Piccarda: Piccarda Donati was the daughter of Simons Donati (Inferno, XXV, 32) and sister of Forese (Purgatorio, XXIII, 48) and of the war-leader, Corso (Purgatorio, XXIV, 82ff.). Forese was Dante’s friend. Dante was married to Gemma Donati, who also had a brother named Forese, but Piccarda’s family was grander than Dante’s in-laws.

Piccarda was already a nun and living in her convent when her brother Corso, needing to establish a political alliance, forced her to marry Rossellino della Tossa of Florence. Various commentators report that Piccarda sickened and soon died as a consequence of having been so forced against her will and vows.

 

52-54. THE BLISS OF THE BLESSED. Every soul in Heaven, whatever its station, is entirely happy because it is entirely identified with God’s plan and has no joy but in being formed to His will. The essence of God is love, i.e., caritas, the love of others. With caritas as the essential mood of the Paradiso, no soul can help but rejoice in the joy of all about it. Contrast the state of things in the Inferno: the infernal souls have all refused to accept and to identify themselves with the Divine Love; each, therefore, is closed into itself, and no soul in Hell can derive any comfort from any other (see Inferno. V, note to line 102). Joy finds its increase exactly in being freely given to others. As Piccarda soon makes clear to Dante, that joy is expressed in Heaven in no way but in the complete identification with God’s love.

 

63. easier to retrace: A desperate simplification of Dante’s untranslatable “m’è più latino” (literally: “it is more Latin to me”). Learned men of Dante’s time used Latin naturally and gracefully. Thus to make a thing “more Latin” was to facilitate it. An opposite form of a similar idiom is our still current “It’s Greek to me.”

 

68. to make yourselves more dear: To God.

 

69. the first fire of love: Could variously be taken to mean God, the Moon (the first lit sphere of the Universe, which is Love), or the bliss mortals feel in the fire of newly awakened love.