Paradiso, Canto 9

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Summary

Still in the heaven of Venus, Dante speaks first with Cunizza, the mistress of the troubadour poet, Sordello, and sister of the tyrant, Ezzelino da Romano, and secondly with Foulquet of Marseilles, a troubadour poet, renowned as much for his amours as for his poetry. The discourse of both souls is concerned with affairs on earth, Cunizza foretelling the disasters which will befall the inhabitants of the Trevisan territory, and Foulquet deploring the avarice of the Church and her neglect of true religion. Both spirits rejoice in the degree of bliss to which God has destined them; the love in which they erred in their first life is now discerned by them as the power by which the universe is governed.

The Prepatory Lecture

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Questions for Reflection

• As Dante progresses through Paradiso, he has to resort to inventing words. Canto 9 includes a number of them: “s’inluia”—“in-Himmed” (9.73); “m’intuassi…t’inmii”—“in-you’d…in-me’d” (9.81). What is Dante gesturing to with these new terms? Why might he invent these terms specifically to use in Venus, the heaven of love and rhetoric?
• “Here we don’t repent, but smile instead” (9.103). Why is this true of heaven? How does this connect us back to the river Lethe in the garden of Eden at the end of Purgatorio? What are the blessed smiling about?
• Why might Dante want to associate the spiritual bliss of heaven with the very physical reality of the human smile?
• What does it mean that the souls in heaven “discern the good with which the world above informs the one below” (9.107-108)? What relationship does Dante draw here between heaven and earth and how does this inform the prayer that “God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven”?

Paradiso, Canto 9 © Jan Hearn

The Images

The planet Venus: See Canto viii, under Images.

Cunizza: The soul of Cunizza, speaking from her “deep heart, at one delighted to give generously”, tells Dante that she was the sister of the ferocious Ezzelino da Romano, notorious for his cruelty and especially for his hideous massacre of the citizens of Padua (cf. Inf. xii. 109–10). In this relationship. Cunizza is a living symbol of the principle of individual differentiation upon which Charles Mattel has discoursed in the previous Canto. By using this extreme and striking instance, Dante thrusts upon our notice the limitations of material causation. Here are two children, he seems to say, born or the same parents, brought up together in the same hilltop castle – and lo! one is in Hell and the other in Paradise.

Cunizza’s temperament was not, like her brother’s, savage and cruel, but ardent and passionate. A glance at her biography shows that she was indeed swayed by the planet Venus, for she had no fewer than two lovers and four husbands. One of the former was the troubadour, Sordello (cf. Purg. vi), with whom she ran away from her first husband, Da San Bonifacio. On being sent for safekeeping to her second brother, Alberico, at his court in Treviso, Cunizza again made off, this time with a knight named Bonio, with whom she wandered about Italy. When Bonio was killed in battle against Ezzelino, she married, as her second husband, the Count of Breganze. When he, too, died in combat against Ezzelino, she married a gentleman of Verona (of unknown name) and finally, fourthly, Salione Buzzacarini of Padua, who was Ezzelino’s astrologer. In about the year 1260, her brothers and husband being dead, she went to live in Florence and, in 1265, in the house of the Cavalcanti, she executed a deed granting freedom to the slaves of her father and brothers. She died soon after 1279, being then over eighty years of age.

The presence in Florence of the notorious sister of the dread Ezzelino, quietly passing her old age (so the chroniclers tell us) in the performance of acts of mercy and compassion, must have created something of a stir. Dante may even have known her, for he was about fifteen years of age when she died; at any event, he would have heard first-hand accounts of her from his friend, Guido Cavalcanti, whose family gave her hospitality. Something authentic of her personality may be reflected in that gay forgiveness of herself which she expresses in one of the most joyous utterances in the whole of Paradise. Her words recall Piccarda’s “and His will is our peace” (iii. 85). Dwelling now within the will of God, Cunizza is able to see that her place in Heaven is in conformity with her natural capacity for love, which she therefore counts not as loss but as gain.

Foulquet of Marseilles: Foulquet, a famous troubadour, flourished as a poet from 1180 to 1195. According to his Provençal biographer, he was the son of a rich merchant of Genoa who left him a large fortune. Devoting himself to a life of pleasure, Foulquet attached himself to various courts and counted among his patrons Richard Coeur-de-Lion, Alphonso VIII of Castile, Raymond V, Count of Toulouse and Barral, Viscount of Marseilles. Later, he retired from the world and entered a Cistercian monastery, from which he emerged in 1201 to become Abbot of Torronet and, in 1205, Bishop of Toulouse. He died in 1231.

​Foulquet, like Cunizza, acknowledges the overmastering influence of love, which caused him, he says, torments equal to those of Dido, Rhodope and Demophoön. This three-fold comparison is thought to be an indirect allusion to his love for three women: Adelais, the wife of his patron, Barral, Laura, Barral’s sister, and Eudoxia, the wife of William VIII of Montpellier. Foulquet’s role in Paradise is not, however, to relate his loves, but to relate human to divine love. Whereas formerly he suffered the pangs of unrequited love, now he and all the souls with him contemplate with ecstasy the wondrous order of God’s plan, wherein the love by which they formerly erred is discerned in its highest manifestation as the power by which the universe is governed.

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