Spiritual Sunday – Mother’s Day
Today being Mother’s Day, here’s Dante’s celebration of Jesus’s mother in the final canto of The Divine Comedy, which my Dante discussion group has just—well—discussed. Guided at this stage in his journey by St. Bernard, Dante is gazing at an enormous celestial rose, representing God’s love. Bernard offers up a prayer, asking Mary to intercede on Dante’s behalf.
Bernard mentions how God ennobled her, transforming her into one through whom He could “create Himself His creature.” The warmth of her womb, a “timeless peace,” quickened the seek of “this immortal bloom”:
O Virgin Mother, Daughter of thy Son
Lowliest and loftiest of created stature,
Fixed goal to which the eternal counsels run,
Thou art that She by whom our human nature
Was so ennobled that it might become
The Creator to create Himself His creature,
Thy side were made a shelter to relume [rekindle]
The Love whose warmth within the timeless peace
Quickened the seed of this immortal bloom;
High noon of charity to those in bliss,
And upon earth, to men in mortal plight
A living spring of hope, thy presence is.
Then comes Bernard’s intercession request for the pilgrim who has traveled all the way from the deepest pits of hell:
This man, who witnessed from the deepest pit
of all the universe, up to this height
The souls’ lives one by one, doth now entreat
That thou, by grace, may grant to him such might
That higher yet in vision he may rise
Towards the final source of bliss and light.
Bernard also asks Mary to cleanse Dante’s sight “till in the highest bliss it shares”:
And further do I pray thee, heavenly Queen
Who canst all that thou wilt, keep his heart pure
And meet when such great vision he has seen.
After gazing upon Bernard and Dante, Mary looks up to God. No other human can gaze so fixedly:
The eyes which God doth love and reverence,
Gazing on him [Bernard] who prayed, to us made plain
How prayers, devoutly prayed, her joy enhance.
Unto the eternal light she raised them then:
No eye of living creature could aspire
To penetrate so fixedly therein.
The mention of “prayers, devoutly prayed” reminds me of Milton’s Adam and Eve praying straight from the heart prior to bedtime in Book IV of Paradise Lost. Heartfelt prayers require no special ritual:
…other rites
Observing none, but adoration pure
Which God likes best, into their inmost bower
Handed they went.
Thanks to Mary’s intercession on his behalf, Dante discovers that he can look directly at the heavenly light:
For now my sight, clear and yet clearer grown,
Pierced through the ray of that exalted light,
Wherein, as in itself, the truth is known.
What he sees cannot be rendered into words or recalled by memory:
Henceforth my vision mounted to a height
Where speech is vanquished and must lag behind,
And memory surrenders in such a flight.
Conveying to his reader what he saw–the goal of Divine Comedy, is like recalling a dream:
As from a dream one may awake to find
Its passion yet imprinted on the heart,
Although all else in canceled from the mind,
So of my vision now but little part
Remains, yet in my inmost soul I know
The sweet instilling which it did impart.
Mary has enabled the pilgrim to see the love at the core of the universe:
In that abyss I saw how love held bound
Into one volume all the leaves whose flight
Is scattered through the universe around;
How substance, accident, and mode unite
Fused, so to speak, together, in such wise
That this I tell of is one simple light.
Yea, of this complex I believe mine eyes
Behind the universal form—in me,
Even as I speak, I feel such joy arise.
And further:
That light doth so transform a man’s whole bent
That never to another sight or thought
Would he surrender, with his own consent;
For everything the will has ever sought
Is gathered there, and there is every quest
Made perfect, which apart from it falls short.
The canto ends, along with The Divine Comedy, by Dante extolling one last time the great wheel of love that moves all things:
Yet, as a wheel moves smoothly, free from jars,
My will and my desire were turned by love,The love that moves the sun and the other stars.
Say it again: through mothers we gain access to the love that moves the sun and the other stars.
Further thought: Reading The Divine Comedy with other literature professors has alerted me to Dante’s influence on poets I know and love. I’ve mentioned Milton above and in previous blog posts (for instance, here). I’ll add here Dante’s influence on Percy Shelley, who identifies with Dante’s struggle to express what is beyond expressing. Both poets use the image of scattered pages, which are ultimately designed to come together in one book. Dante writes:
In that abyss I saw how love held bound
Into one volume all the leaves whose flight
Is scattered through the universe around
In “Ode to a West Wind,” meanwhile, Shelley puns on leaves, equating dead tree leaves with pages of poetry. Like Dante, he knows his words can’t fully capture his vision but hopes that they will “quicken” a spark in readers, causing them to momentarily glimpse the divine:
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like wither’d leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguish’d hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawaken’d earth
The trumpet of a prophecy!
Donne too picks up in the image in his famous “Meditation 17.” Just as “no man is an island” but inextricably bound up with the rest of humankind, so also are the leaves of God’s book:
[A]ll mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God’s hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again, for that library where every book shall lie open to one another;