Paradiso, Canto 16

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Summary

In reverence to his ancestor and with a gratified sense of his own derived dignity, Dante addresses the spirit with the ceremonious plural “you” instead of “thou”, at which Beatrice smiles. Replying to Dante’s eager appeal for news of twelfth-century Florence, Cacciaguida speaks of his own birth and origin and mentions many noble Florentine families illustrious in his day but already in Dante’s time extinct or fallen to low estate. He deplores the change that has come over Florence, now enlarged, corrupted, and polluted by the influx of greedy and ambitious newcomers, and laments the feud between the Amidei and the Buondelmonti, the origin of civil strife in Florence.

The Prepatory Lecture

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Questions for Reflection

• The sequence in the heaven of Mars forms the center of Paradiso. These cantos focus very tightly on Florence’s politics and culture. What might Dante devote such an important part of his “spiritual” journey in Paradiso to such particular historical concerns? How is Dante helping his readers see the connections between divine eternity and historical reality?
• Why does Dante have Cacciaguida look back to Florence’s golden age? Why focus on the dissolution of the great Florentine families? What vice(s) destroy great families and great cities? What relationship does Dante see between political and moral failing? What might Dante’s presentation of Florence’s decline tell us about our own political and moral contexts?
• In light of the Florentine “fall narrative” of this canto, why do you think Dante opens the canto by mocking (his own) misplaced pride in nobility (16.1-9)? In what, by way of contrast, does true nobility consist? Where do we see this true nobility at play in the Comedy (and indeed in our own world)?
• Cacciaguida frames his own birth with a reference to Christ’s incarnation in the womb of Mary (16.34-36). What does this brief statement reveal about the nature of Cacciaguida’s identity? Does this challenge your way of conceiving of personhood and identity?

Paradiso, Canto 16 © Jan Hearn

The Images

Cacciaguida: The existence of this great-great-grandfather of Dante (see Genealogical Tables, p. 397) is attested by a document (still preserved in Florence) which refers to his two sons. Apart from this, we have no independent testimony concerning him. From Dante we learn that he served in the Second Crusade under the Emperor Conrad III, by whom he was knighted, and that he died in battle against the Infidel about the year 1147. He was born in Florence about 1090 of one of the old Florentine families who claimed Roman descent; from his wife, who came from the region of the river Po, the surname of Alighieri was derived.

In the story, this encounter between Dante and his illustrious ancestor is one of the most poignant and climactic moments in the poem. Of all the souls with whom he has conversed in Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, this is the one from whom his life-blood flows. Cacciaguida claims him insistently as his ‘blood’, his ‘seed’, his ‘son’, his ‘branch’, and renders thanks to God for the measureless grace whereby his descendant has visited Heaven. The link, so intimate and personal, between ancestor and scion, is also the link between past, present and future which binds all men in an unending chain of heritage. From Cacciaguida to Dante flows not only the blood of illustrious forbears but also the past events of Borence, the history of Christendom, the inheritance of sin and of redemption, the burden and the glory of the Cross.

Florence of olden times: The ideal of twelfth-century Borence as a free Commune, confined within her ancient walls and peopled by upright and simple-living republicans, is conveyed by Cacciaguida in moving and nostalgic terms, mingled with stern reproach for the immoral influences which have since corrupted the city. In the allegory, the decline of morals in Florence is an instance of that widespread increase of evil throughout the world, the causes of which are the subject of Inferno and Purgatory, the remedy for which Dante believes it to be his mission to proclaim.

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