Paradiso

Canto XXXI

The glory of Paradise—St. Bernard.

In fashion then as of a snow-white rose¹Displayed itself to me the saintly host,Whom Christ in his own blood had made his bride,But the other host, that flying sees and singsThe glory of Him who doth enamour it,And the goodness that created it so noble,Even as a swarm of bees, that sinks in flowers²One moment, and the next returns againTo where its labor is to sweetness turned,Sank into the great flower, that is adornedWith leaves so many, and thence reascendedTo where its love abideth evermore.Their faces had they all of living flame,And wings of gold, and all the rest so whiteNo snow unto that limit doth attain.From bench to bench, into the flower descending,They carried something of the peace and ardorWhich by the fanning of their flanks they won.Nor did the interposing ’twixt the flowerAnd what was o’er it of such plenitudeOf flying shapes impede the sight and splendor;Because the light divine so penetratesThe universe, according to its merit,That naught can be an obstacle against it.This realm secure and full of gladsomeness,Crowded with ancient people and with modern,Unto one mark had all its look and love.O Trinal Light, that in a single starSparkling upon their sight so satisfies them,Look down upon our tempest here below!If the barbarians, coming from some regionThat every day by Helice is covered,³Revolving with her son whom she delights in,Beholding Rome and all her noble works,⁴Were wonder-struck, what time the Lateran⁵Above all mortal things was eminent—I who to the divine had from the human,From time unto eternity, had come,From Florence to a people just and sane,With what amazement must I have been filled!Truly between this and the joy, it wasMy pleasure not to hear, and to be mute.And as a pilgrim who delighteth himIn gazing round the temple of his vow,And hopes some day to retell how it was,So through the living light my way pursuingDirected I mine eyes o’er all the ranks,Now up, now down, and now all round about.Faces I saw of charity persuasive,Embellished by His light and their own smile,And attitudes adorned with every grace.The general form of Paradise alreadyMy glance had comprehended as a whole,In no part hitherto remaining fixed,And round I turned me with rekindled wishMy Lady to interrogate of thingsConcerning which my mind was in suspense.One thing I meant, another answered me;I thought I should see Beatrice, and sawAn Old Man habited like the glorious people.O’erflowing was he in his eyes and cheeksWith joy benign, in attitude of pityAs to a tender father is becoming.And “She, where is she?” instantly I said;Whence he: “To put an end to thy desire,Me Beatrice hath sent from mine own place.And if thou lookest up to the third roundOf the first rank, again shalt thou behold herUpon the throne her merits have assigned her.”Without reply I lifted up mine eyes,And saw her, as she made herself a crownReflecting from herself the eternal rays.Not from that region which the highest thunders⁶Is any mortal eye so far removed,In whatsoever sea it deepest sinks,As there from Beatrice my sight; but thisWas nothing unto me; because her imageDescended not to me by medium blurred.“O Lady, thou in whom my hope is strong,And who for my salvation didst endureIn Hell to leave the imprint of thy feet,Of whatsoever things I have beheld,As coming from thy power and from thy goodnessI recognise the virtue and the grace.Thou from a slave hast brought me unto freedom,By all those ways, by all the expedients,Whereby thou hadst the power of doing it.Preserve towards me thy magnificence,So that this soul of mine, which thou hast healed,Pleasing to thee be loosened from the body.”Thus I implored; and she, so far away,Smiled, as it seemed, and looked once more at me;Then unto the eternal fountain turned.And said the Old Man holy: “That thou maystAccomplish perfectly thy journeying,Whereunto prayer and holy love have sent me,Fly with thine eyes all round about this garden;For seeing it will discipline thy sightFarther to mount along the ray divine.And she, the Queen of Heaven, for whom I burnWholly with love, will grant us every grace,Because that I her faithful Bernard am.”⁷As he who peradventure from CroatiaCometh to gaze at our Veronica,⁸Who through its ancient fame is never sated,But says in thought, the while it is displayed,“My Lord, Christ Jesus, God of very God,Now was your semblance made like unto this?”Even such was I while gazing at the livingCharity of the man, who in this worldBy contemplation tasted of that peace.“Thou son of grace, this jocund life,” began he,“Will not be known to thee by keeping everThine eyes below here on the lowest place;But mark the circles to the most remote,Until thou shalt behold enthroned the Queen⁹To whom this realm is subject and devoted.”I lifted up mine eyes, and as at mornThe oriental part of the horizonSurpasses that wherein the sun goes down,Thus, as if going with mine eyes from valeTo mount, I saw a part in the remotenessSurpass in splendor all the other front.And even as there where we await the poleThat Phaeton drove badly, blazes more¹⁰The light, and is on either side diminished,So likewise that pacific oriflammeGleamed brightest in the centre, and each sideIn equal measure did the flame abate.And at that centre, with their wings expanded,More than a thousand jubilant Angels saw I,Each differing in effulgence and in kind.I saw there at their sports and at their songsA beauty smiling, which the gladness wasWithin the eyes of all the other saints;And if I had in speaking as much wealthAs in imagining, I should not dareTo attempt the smallest part of its delight.Bernard, as soon as he beheld mine eyesFixed and intent upon its fervid fervor,His own with such affection turned to herThat it made mine more ardent to behold.

The White Rose of Paradise. ↩
Iliad, II 86, Anon. Tr.:— “And the troops thronged together, as swarms of crowding bees, which come ever in fresh numbers from the hollow rock, and fly in clusters over the vernal flowers, and thickly some fly in this direction, and some in that.” ↩
The nymph Callisto, or Helice, was changed by Jupiter into the constellation of the Great Bear, and her son into that of the Little Bear. See note 1036. ↩
Rome and her superb edifices, before the removal of the Papal See to Avignon. ↩
Speaking of Petrarch’s visit to Rome, Mr. Norton, Travel and Study Italy, p. 288, says:— “The great church of St. John Lateran, ‘the mother and head of all the churches of the city and the world,’—mater urbis et orbis—had been almost destroyed by fire, with its adjoining palace, and the houses of the canons, on the Eve of St. John, in 1308. The palace and the canons houses were rebuilt not long after; but at the time of Petrarch’s latest visit to Rome, and for years afterward, the church was without a roof, and its walls were ruinous. The poet addressed three at least of the Popes at Avignon with urgent appeals that this disgrace should no longer be permitted—but the Popes gave no heed to his words; for the ruin of Roman churches, or of Rome itself, was a matter of little concern to these Transalpine prelates.” ↩
From the highest regions of the air to the lowest depth of the sea. ↩
St. Bernard, the great Abbot of Clairvaux, the “Doctor Mellifluus” of the Church, and preacher of the disastrous Second Crusade, was born of noble parents in the village of Fontaine, near Dijon, in Burgundy, in the year 1190. After studying at Paris, at the age of twenty he entered the Benedictine monastery of Citeaux; and when, five years later, this monastery had become overcrowded with monks, he was sent out to found a new one. Mrs. Jameson, Legends of the Monastic Orders, p. 149, says:— “The manner of going forth on these occasions was strikingly characteristic of the age;—the abbot chose twelve monks, representing the twelve Apostles, and placed at their head a leader, representing Jesus Christ, who, with a cross in his hand, went before them. The gates of the convent opened—then closed behind them—and they wandered into the wide world, trusting in God to show them their destined abode. “Bernard led his followers to a wilderness, called the Valley of Wormwood, and there, at his biding, arose the since renowned abbey of Clairvaux. They felled the trees, built themselves huts, tilled and sowed the ground, and changed the whole face of the country round; till that which had been a dismal solitude, the resort of wolves and robbers, became a land of vines and corn, rich, populous, and prosperous.” This incident forms the subject of one of Murillo’s most famous paintings, and is suggestive of the saint’s intense devotion to the Virgin, which Dante expresses in this line. Mr. Vaughan, Hours with the Mystics, I 145, gives the following sketch of St. Bernard:— “With Bernard the monastic life is the one thing needful. He began life by drawing after him into the convent all his kindred; sweeping them one by one from the high seas of the world with the irresistible vortex of his own religious fervor. His incessant cry for Europe is, Better monasteries, and more of them. Let these ecclesiastical castles multiply; let them cover and command the land, well garrisoned with men of God, and then, despite all heresy and schism, theocracy will flourish, the earth shall yield her increase, and all people praise the Lord. Who so wise as Bernard to win souls for Christ, that is to say, recruits for the cloister? With what eloquence he paints the raptures of contemplation, the vanity and sin of earthly ambition or of earthly love! Wherever in his travels Bernard may have preached, there, presently, exultant monks must open wide their doors to admit new converts. Wherever he goes, he bereaves mothers of their children, the aged of their last solace and last support; praising those the most who leave most misery behind them. How sternly does he rebuke those Rachels who mourn and will not be comforted for children dead to them forever! What vitriol does he pour into the wounds when he asks if they will drag their son down to perdition with themselves by resisting the vocation of Heaven; whether it was not enough that they brought him forth sinful to a world of sin, and will they now, in their insane affection, cast him into the fires of hell? Yet Bernard is not hard-hearted by nature. He can pity this disgraceful weakness of the flesh. He makes such amends as superstition may. I will be a father to him, he says. Alas! cold comfort. You, their hearts will answer, whose flocks are countless, would nothing content you but our ewe lamb? Perhaps some cloister will be, for them too, the last resource of their desolation. They will fly for ease in their pain to the system which caused it. Bernard hopes so. So inhuman is the humanity of asceticism; cruel its tender mercies; thus does it depopulate the world of its best in order to improve it. … “Bernard had his wish. He made Clairvaux the cynosure of all contemplative eyes. For any one who could exist at all as a monk, with any satisfaction to himself, that was the place above all others. Brother Godfrey, sent out to be first Abbot of Fontenay—as soon as he has set all things in order there, returns, only too gladly, from that rich and lovely region, to reenter his old cell, to walk around, delightedly revisiting the well-remembered spots among the trees or by the waterside, marking how the fields and gardens have come on, and relating to the eager brethren (for even Bernard’s monks have curiosity) all that befell him in his work. He would sooner be third Prior at Clairvaux, than Abbot of Fontenay. So, too, with Brother Humbert, commissioned in like manner to regulate Igny Abbey (fourth daughter of Clairvaux). He soon comes back, weary of the labor and sick for home, to look on the Aube once more, to hear the old mills go drumming and droning, with that monotony of muffled sound—the associate of his pious reveries—often heard in his dreams when far away; to set his feet on the very same flagstone in the choir where he used to stand, and to be happy. But Bernard, though away in Italy, toiling in the matter of the schism, gets to hear of his return, and finds time to send him across the Alps a letter of rebuke for this criminal self-pleasing, whose terrible sharpness must have darkened the poor man’s meditations for many a day. “Bernard had further the satisfaction of improving and extending monasticism to the utmost; of sewing together, with tolerable success, the rended vesture of the Papacy; of suppressing a more popular and more Scriptural Christianity, for the benefit of his despotic order; of quenching for a time, by the extinction of Abelard, the spirit of free inquiry; and of seeing his ascetic and superhuman ideal of religion everywhere accepted as the genuine type of Christian virtue.” ↩
The Veronica is the portrait of our Saviour impressed upon a veil or kerchief, preserved with great care in the church of the Santi Apostoli at Rome. Collin de Plancy, Légendes des Saintes Images, p. 11, gives the following account of it:— “Properly speaking, the Veronica (vera icon) is the true likeness of Our Lord; and the same name has been given to the holy woman who obtained it, because the name of this holy woman was uncertain. According to some, she was a pious Jewess, called Seraphia; according to others, she was Berenice, niece of Herod. It is impossible to decide between the different traditions, some of which make her a virgin, and others the wife of Zaccheus. “However this may be, the happy woman who obtained the venerable imprint of the holy face lived not far from the palace of Pilate. Her house is still shown to pilgrims at Jerusalem; and a Canon of Mayence, who went to the Holy Land in 1483, reported that he had visited the house of the Veronica. “When she saw Our Lord pass, bearing his cross, covered with blood, spittle, sweat, and dust, she ran to meet him, and, presenting her kerchief, tried to wipe his adorable face. Our Lord, leaving for an instant the burden of the cross to Simon the Cyrenean, took the kerchief, applied it to his face, and gave it back to the pious woman, marked with the exact imprint of his august countenance.” Of the Veronica there are four copies in existence, each claiming to be the original; one at Rome, another at Paris, a third at Laon, and a fourth at Xaen in Andalusia. The traveller who has crossed the Sierra Morena cannot easily forget the stone column, surmounted by an iron cross, which marks the boundary between La Mancha and Andalusia, with the melancholy stone face upon it, and the inscription, “El verdadero Retrato de la Santa Cara del Dios de Xaen.” ↩
The Virgin Mary, Regina Coeli. ↩
The chariot of the sun. ↩