"Diligite iustitiam": Loving Justice in Siena and Dante's Paradiso

I have never been to Johns Hopkins before today, but the university has long played a large role in my imagination because of the way John Freccero spoke about his years there. His wonderful anecdotes about the great figures who had been his teachers made them presences in our heady Yale classroom at a time that he himself was quickly becoming a legendary teacher. For several years after being in that classroom I found myself still working out the implications of things that I learned there. To this day certain moments in the Commedia are inextricably linked with the glosses that Freccero gave to them or the ways that he brought them to life. Reading Dante with him was also a way of reading in many directions—back to Plato, Origen, and Augustine and forward to Kenneth Burke, Antonioni, or "the rhetoric of temporality." There seemed no end to the contexts and connections that reading Dante offered. In this essay I will explore the contexts of what Freccero has called "perhaps the most daring of all the sequences in the poem" (Freccero 1986, 213).

This moment marks Dante's entrance into the sphere of Jupiter in Paradiso XVIII. As the pilgrim enters the sphere of Jupiter he is greeted with an evolving spectacle, a progressive celestial metamorphosis. The souls of the just rulers first appear as glowing sparks forming the letters of a living alphabet, with vowels and consonants; gradually they spell out, individual letter by letter, the first sentence of the Book of Wisdom, Diligite iustitiam qui iudicatis terram ("Love justice, you rulers of the earth"). This initial animated alphabet gradually morphs into subsequent shapes, as the final "M" of the word terram is adorned by the sign of the giglio (lily), and then becomes the heraldic profile of an eagle whose eye and eyebrow "are" the souls of six just rulers who will be named two cantos later.

The sequence opens with the first three letters of the citation presented one by one before we know that the letters will form a word or will be part of a citation. On the silvery white ground of the temperate planet, Jupiter, Dante sees sequentially three letters of "our speech," as the souls "volitando cantavano, e faciensi / or D, or I, or L, in sue figure" (were flying and singing and making themselves into the figures now D, now I, now L [vv. 77-78]). The souls fly and sing, and then, as they become one of these "segni," they pause briefly in silence. At this point, our attention is focussed purely on the wonder of the event, on the fact that the souls of the blessed are appearing in "nostra favella" (our speech [v. 72]). Dante delays turning the letters into words by interrupting the narrative with a six line invocation—the sixth of a total of nine invocations in the poem—in which he prays for divine assistance in rendering the spectacle that he is about to record:

O diva Pegasëa che li 'ngegni    fai glorïosi e rendili longevi    ed essi teco le cittadi e'regni,illustrami di te, sì ch'io rilevi    le lor figure com' io l'ho concette:    paia tua possa in questi versi brevi!

(Par. XVIII, 82-87)¹

This invocation alerts us to the prospect that something very special is about to happen. (It is one of those "Get a load of this" moments with which Dante occasionally punctuates his narrative.) The souls then show themselves in "cinque volte sette/vocali e consonanti" (five times seven vowels and consonants [vv. 88-89]) to spell out first "DILIGITE IUSITITIAM," and then "QUI IUDICATIS TERRAM."

Why does Dante pause here to utter what some critics have called his most passionate invocation? (Chiavacci Leonardi 511). Surely the bravura at stake can not lie in the words that are formed since they are an exact quotation of a well known biblical text. What is extraordinary, however, is that the souls of the blessed form the signs of our own alphabet and of a text of the Vulgate before they...