Paradiso, Canto 11

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Summary

Still in the Heaven of the Sun, Dante listens again to the voice of St Thomas Aquinas, who explains the meaning of certain words he has used in the preceding canto. His explanation leads him to relate the wondrous love of St Francis for the Lady Poverty.

The Prepatory Lecture

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Questions for Reflection

• Dante opens this canto by criticizing the human tendency to arrange ourselves in schools of disputation, devoting ourselves to polarizing arguments that divide and alienate us from each other. Why denounce this tendency in a canto dedicated to wisdom and theology?
• Why does Thomas Aquinas remind Dante that no human eye can plumb the abyss of divine providence (11.27-30)? Why is awareness of the limits of our knowledge so important for becoming wise?
• What was the divine vocation of Dominic and Francis, founders of two mendicant orders (religious orders that take vows of poverty in order to live among the poor and outcast), the Dominicans and the Franciscans (11.34-36)? Why would Dante discuss the mendicants in the heaven of the sun?
• Why do you think Dante has Aquinas, a Dominican, tell the life-story of Francis?
• (e) Who did Francis love and marry (11.57-75)? How is Francis a model of a martyr (11.100-108)? How does the example of Francis point us toward wisdom?

Paradiso, Canto 11© Jan Hearn

The Images

St Francis of Assisi: The story of St Francis as related in this canto by St Thomas Aquinas has features which are significant both for the literal and the allegorical sense of the poem. In the story, the recounting of this great Franciscan epic by a Dominican arises from a need to clarify a rebuke which St Thomas, himself a Dominican, has uttered against his own Order. That a Dominican should sing the praises of the founder of the Franciscans and that a Franciscan should return the compliment and extol St Dominic (as occurs in Canto xii) is an instance of the gracious mutuality and harmony of Heaven. In the history of the Church Militant, St Francis is shown to have been (with St Dominic) divinely ordained as her prince and counsellor. Of St Francis’s personality, Dante has chosen to present, with an epic fervour which leaves unspoken almost every other characteristic of the Saint, that utter renunciation of worldly possessions which he judged, evidently, to be the most outstanding and efficacious feature of the Franciscan message. In this, as in the ardour of his love of God, St Francis is seen by Dante as a new embodiment of the spirit of Christ on earth.

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