she who stood beside her: Constance.

105. his piety: To his father. impiety: To his mother. For Alcmaeon see Purgatorio, XII, 49-51 and note.

106-114. The central idea of this passage is the difference between the Absolute and the Conditioned Will. The Absolute will is incapable of willing evil. The Conditioned Will, when coerced by violence, interacts with it and consents to a lesser harm in order to escape a greater. All that Piccarda said was true of the Absolute Will, but all that Beatrice has said is true of the Conditioned Will.

113-115. that stream: Stands for both Beatrice and her discourse. the Fountain of All Truth: God. Dante’s figure also expounds Beatrice’s allegorical function as Revealed Truth (which flows from God, the Fountain of All Truth, and calms all doubt from the souls of those to whom it descends).

127. In That: In the truth of God, within which the soul may rest as instinctively as does a beast within its den.

CANTO V

ASCENT TO THE SECOND SPHERE

Beatrice Discourses

THE SECOND SPHERE? MERCURY

The Seekers of Honor
The Emperor Justinian

BEATRICE EXPLAINS the SANCTITY OF THE VOW, its RELATION TO FREE WILL, THE LIMITED RANGE WITHIN WHICH VOWS MAY BE ALTERED, and the DANGERS OF EVIL VOWS.

When she has finished, she and Dante soar to the SECOND SPHERE. There a host of radiant souls gathers to dance homage around Beatrice and Dante. These are the SEEKERS OF HONOR, souls who were active in their pursuit of the good, but who were motivated in their pursuit by a desire for personal honor, a good enough motive, but the least of all good motives.

One soul among them addresses Dante with particular joy. In Canto VI this soul identifies itself as the radiance that in mortal life was the EMPEROR JUSTINIAN.

“If, in the warmth of love, I manifest
more of my radiance than the world can see,
rendering your eyes unequal to the test,

do not be amazed. These are the radiancies
of the perfected vision that sees the good
and step by step moves nearer what it sees.

Well do I see how the Eternal Ray,
which, once seen, kindles love forevermore,
already shines on you. If on your way

some other thing seduce your love, my brother,
it can only be a trace, misunderstood,
of this, which you see shining through the other.

You ask if there is any compensation
the soul may offer for its unkept vows
that will secure it against litigation.”

So Beatrice, alight from Heaven’s Source,
began this canto; and without a pause,
continued thus her heavenly discourse:

“Of all creation’s bounty realized,
God’s greatest gift, the gift in which mankind
is most like Him, the gift by Him most prized,

is the freedom he bestowed upon the will.
All his intelligent creatures, and they alone,
were so endowed, and so endowed are still.

From this your reasoning should make evident
the value of the vow, if it is so joined
that God gives His consent when you consent.

When, therefore, God and man have sealed the pact,
the man divests himself of that great treasure
of which I speak—and by his own free act.

What can you offer, then, to make amends?
How can you make good use of what is His?
Would you employ extortion to good ends?

This much will make the main point clear to you.
But since the church grants dispensations in this,
whereby what I have said may seem untrue;

you must yet sit at table, for the food
you have just taken is crusty; without help
you will not soon digest it to your good.

Open your mind to what I shall explain,
then close around it, for it is no learning
to understand what one does not retain.

The essence of this sacrificial act
lies, first, in what one does, and, second, in how—
the matter and the manner of the pact.

This second part cannot be set aside
except by full performance; on this point
what I said earlier stands unqualified.

Thus it was mandatory to sacrifice
among the Jews, though the offering itself
might vary, or a substitute might suffice.

The other—what I have called the matter—may
be of the sort for which a substitution
will serve without offending in any way.

But let no man by his own judgment or whim
take on himself that burden unless the keys
of gold and silver have been turned for him.

And let him think no change a worthy one
unless what he takes up contains in it,
at least as six does four, what he puts down.

There are, however, things whose weight and worth
tip every scale, and for these there can be
no recompense by anything on earth.

Let no man make his vow a sporting thing.
Be true and do not make a squint-eyed choice
as Jephthah did in his first offering.

He had better have cried, ‘I had no right to speak!’
than, keeping his vow, do worse. And in like case
will you find that chief war leader, the great Greek

whose Iphigenia wept her loveliness,
and made both fools and wise men share her tears
hearing of such dark rites and her distress.

Be slower to move, Christians, be grave, serene.
Do not be like a feather in the wind,
nor think that every water washes clean.

You have the Testaments, both old and new,
and the shepherd of the church to be your guide;
and this is all you need to lead you true.

If cunning greed comes promising remission,
be men, not mad sheep, lest the Jew among you
find cause to point his finger in derision.

Do not be like the lamb that strays away
from its mother’s milk and, simple and capricious,
fights battles with itself in silly play!”

—Thus Beatrice to me, just as I write.
Then she turned, full of yearning, to that part
where the world is quickened most by the True Light.

Her silence, her transfigured face ablaze
made me fall still although my eager mind
was teeming with new questions I wished to raise.

And like an arrow driven with such might
it strikes its mark before the string is still,
we soared to the second kingdom of the light.

My lady glowed with such a joyous essence
giving herself to the light of that new sky
that the planet shone more brightly with her presence.

And if the star changed then and laughed with bliss,
what did I do, who in my very nature
was made to be transformed through all that is?

As in a fish pond that is calm and clear
fish swim to what falls in from the outside,
believing it to be their food, so, here,

I saw at least a thousand splendors move
toward us, and from each one I heard the cry:
“Here is what will give increase to our love!”

And as those glories came to where we were
each shade made visible, in the radiance
that each gave off, the joy that filled it there.

Imagine, reader, that I had started so
and not gone on—think what an anguished famine
would then oppress your hungry will to know.

So may you, of yourself, be able to see
how much I longed to know their names and nature
the instant they had shown themselves to me.

—“O well born soul, permitted by God’s grace
to see the thrones of the Eternal Triumph
while still embattled in the mortal trace,

the lamp that shines through all the vaults of Heaven
is lit in us; if, therefore, you seek light
on any point, ask and it shall be given.”

—So spoke one of those pious entities.
And my lady said: “Speak. Speak with full assurance.
And credit them as you would deities!”

“I do indeed see that you make your nest
in your own light, and beam it through your eyes
that dazzle when you smile, o spirit blest.

But I know not who you are, nor why you are
assigned here, to this sphere that hides itself
from men’s eyes in the rays of another star.”

These were my words, my face turned to the light
that had just spoken; at which it made itself
far more resplendent yet upon my sight.

Just as the sun, when its rays have broken through
a screen of heavy vapors, will itself
conceal itself in too much light—just so,

in its excess of joy that sacred soul
hid itself from my sight in its own ray,
and so concealed within its aureole,

it answered me, unfolding many things,
the manner of which the following canto sings.

Notes

9-12. some other thing: The light of God, once seen, kindles eternal love and no soul so kindled can stray from it. Since Dante’s soul has already been so kindled, the only possible error remaining to him is that he could mistakenly believe he sees the light of God in some lesser object and so be seduced by that lesser thing, not because his love is lacking, but because his understanding is.

15. litigation: At the bar of judgment.

16-18. An odd tercet. In it Dante pauses only to say Beatrice did not pause but spoke and went on speaking. A literal rendering (I have had to take liberties) would be: “So Beatrice began this canto; and, like a man who does not interrupt his discourse, continued her sacred process [of reasoning and explication] as follows:”.

19-33. THE SANCTITY OF HOLY VOWS. Dante has asked if a man may not, by other good works, make amends for an unfulfilled vow. Beatrice replies that God’s greatest gift to man is his free will, and that a vow is a direct compact with God wherein man, of his free will, offers that freedom back to God. Once God accepts, the man’s will is no longer free for it has been given to God. How then is man free to will what is good, his will and freedom now belonging to God? To assert a free will that is no longer his is to seek to embezzle his way to the good.

23.