Paradiso (155 page)

118–120.
   For the first notice of Adam’s long life of exile from God’s kingdom, first on earth and then in Limbo, see
Purgatorio
XXXIII.58–63 and the note thereto. See also the note to
Paradiso
IX.40 and to vv. 121–123, below.

Eusebius (whose dates were the basis for Jerome’s authoritative
Chronicon
[which served most medieval encyclopedists, such as Isidore of Seville and Uguccione da Pisa]) is credited by the more recent commentators (beginning with Lombardi [comm. to vv. 119–120]) as being Dante’s source for the 4,302 years between Adam’s death and the Harrowing.
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118.
   This represents the thirty-second and final appearance of Virgil’s name in the poem. It thus occurs slightly more than half as often as that of Beatrice, which appears sixty-three times. (See the notes to
Purg.
XV.77 and
Par.
XVII.19.)
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121–123.
   Adam says that he had lived on earth for 930 solar years (see Genesis 5:5). This means that he was harrowed (in a.d. 34) after 5,232 years (930 + 4,302) of sinful life, first on earth, then in Limbo, where his
punishment was, apparently, to live without hope yet in desire. At least that is Virgil’s description of the suffering of him and his cosufferers in Limbo (
Inf.
IV.42: “without hope we live in longing”), and it certainly fits him and all other damned pagans. But what of the Hebrew saints, like Adam? During their time in Hell were they equally without hope? Or, because they believed in Christ to come, were they in fact hopeful? Adam, however, does refer to his time in Hell as being typified by “anguish” (verse 133). In short, this is not an issue that Dante has chosen to confront, and we cannot say whether Dante thought that Adam and his eventually to-be-harrowed companions knew that Christ was coming for them or not, or whether they even hoped that He would.

Adam has now enjoyed 1,266 years of grace in Heaven. Adam’s years coincide, of course, with the course of human life in general, 6,498 years along its road in 1300. See the note to
Paradiso
IX.40 for one traditional estimate of the future duration of human time. And see, for a fuller discussion of three views of that future, involving the Platonic Great Year (36,000 years), a medieval variant of that tradition (13,000 years), and St. Augustine’s (possible) view that the world will last seven millennia, the last paragraph of the note to
Inferno
I.1 and the note to
Paradiso
IX.40 in the PDP.
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124–126.
   Pietro di Dante explicitly identifies (comm. to vv. 124–132) Adam’s first
lingua
as being vernacular speech. It was extinct, this tercet insists, before construction of the Tower of Babel began. Many have realized that this is a direct contradiction of what Dante had said in
De vulgari
(I.vi.4–7), where he specifically says that the first language was Hebrew and that it was spoken until after the construction of the Tower. (For a study of the literary history of this topos, see Borst [Bors.1957.1].)

From Genesis, Dante might have learned several things about the history of the language that squared with his spectacularly idiosyncratic theory of that history. The tenth chapter teaches that Noah’s three sons (Japheth, Ham, and Shem) each had children, and all these groups of progeny spoke different languages (
linguae
); that is, the “confusion” was apparently in progress
before
the launch of Nimrod’s “unachievable” architectural project. Nonetheless, Genesis 11 begins with the earth still being of a single tongue (
terra labii unius
), and this passage is what Dante “revises,” whatever justification he might have thought he had found, in the previous chapter, for doing so. God puts humankind into confusion for trying to build the tower (and that is the version found both in Genesis and in
De vulgari
); in the
Commedia
, however, the result of Babel is pre-Babelic. This
is not the only time that we find Dante revising the text of the Bible to suit his own purpose. To seize on only one other blatant example, found in a neighboring passage in
De vulgari
(I.iv.2–3), Dante denies the authority of Genesis in making Eve the first speaker (God, he says, would not have wanted a woman to utter the first spoken word). And see his similarly high-handed treatment of classical text, e.g., of the
Aeneid
in
Purgatorio
XXII.40–41. Fortunately, there is a good deal of playfulness that lies behind these otherwise numbingly troglodytic gestures; nonetheless, there they are, and they are certainly challenging.
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130.
   See P. V. Mengaldo, “lingua,”
ED
(III [1971]), p. 661b, discussing the source of this verse in Egidio Romano,
De regimine principum
(III.ii.24): “It is a natural thing that man should speak, and nature teaches him to do so; but whether the speech should be German or French or Tuscan nature does not instruct him. On the contrary, a man must himself learn it, either by himself or with the aid of others.”
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132.
   Daniello (comm. to vv. 130–132) makes the astute observation that Dante is here citing the first line of the poem in Provençal he composes and attributes to Arnaut Daniel (it actually derives from a poem by Folchetto—see the note to
Purg.
XXVI.140–147—“Tan m’abellis l’amoros pensamen”). See
Purgatorio
XXVI.140.
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133.
   Adam dates the change in the pre-Hebrew vernacular as having occurred before his death at the age of 930. His words do not allow any greater precision than that.

It is striking that we do not hear his name in this scene (we have heard it five times in
Inferno
and
Purgatorio
). See Andrea Ciotti, “Adamo,”
ED
(I [1970]), pointing out that medieval Scriptural exegesis related Greek
’âdhâm
to
âdâhmah
(“man” to “earth”), thus
homo
to
humus
. This would surely have been of interest to Dante, since it would tend to locate Adamic vernacular within the low style, Dante’s own (or so at least he chose to present it as being).
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134.
   This verse has been the cause of a great deal of confusion, as some of its interpreters are honest enough to admit. Scartazzini, after an exhaustive survey of the history of its interpretation, concludes with the notice that, while it is most embarrassing for a commentator to admit such a thing, he has not resolved its problems. (For another noteworthy attempt to clarify [if not to solve] the problem, see Porena [comm. to this verse].)
The most enduring, among the several desperate stabs it has caused, has been the following: Vellutello (comm. to vv. 130–138) was apparently the first to claim that “I” was to be read numerically, as “one.” Another notion has periodically reappeared (after having been introduced by Scartazzini [comm. to this verse]): “I” (or “J”) is the first letter of “Jah” or “Jehovah.” A much rarer but still interesting proposed solution is only found as late as Trucchi’s commentary (comm. to vv. 133–138): Dante wanted “I” and not “El” because “I” (or “J,” the same character in his Italian) was the first letter of “Jesus.” Nonetheless, the formulation that “I” equals “un” (“one”) found favor, over the years, with many interpreters (including several editors, who replace what is “I” in our text with “un”), beginning with Francesco da Buti (comm. to vv. 133–142). Lombardi (comm. to this verse) was apparently the first commentator to refer to Dante’s earlier treatment of the nature of Adam’s first word in
De vulgari;
he also pointed out that Dante was (whether deliberately or not he does not say) in disagreement with Isidore, who had been plain that “El” was the name that God was first called. That “I” is the number/name of God is a valid reading of this verse is reinforced by the presence of the same alpha-numerical pun on the Roman “i” as “one” at
Paradiso
XIX.128.

See Casagrande (Casa.1976.1) for a careful consideration of the problems of this verse. He ends up linking it, through the commentary of the Ottimo
ad loc.
, to Isidore’s eighth (of ten appellations) name of God (
Etym
. VII.i),
ia
, itself connected to the Hebrew word
alleluia
, as praise of God’s name. Hollander (Holl.1969.1), p. 144n., had previously argued for Isidore’s
ninth
name of God, the
tetragrammaton
, transliterated as
ia ia
, as being the text that Dante had in mind, as evidenced by the parodic reference to it and the sixth name of God (“Ego
sum
, qui
sum
” [I am that I am]) found first in the Siren’s self-naming (
Purg.
XIX.19), “
Io son, io son
dolce serena” and then corrected in Beatrice’s self-naming (
Purg.
XXX.73), “
Ben son, ben son
Beatrice.” (All of these phrases have repetition as a common feature.)

Hollander (Holl.1980.2), p. 128, returning to this subject, offers a hypothetical reason for Dante’s change of mind: The poet wanted to associate his own vernacular Italian, in which the name of God coincides with Adamic pre-Hebrew vernacular, with that first of all vernaculars. And he might have cited (but in fact did not) the following passage in
De vulgari
(I.vi.2): “For whoever is so misguided as to think that the place of his birth is the most delightful spot under the sun may also believe that his own language—his mother tongue, that is—is pre-eminent among all others; and, as a result, he may believe that his language was also Adam’s”
(tr. S. Botterill). This mocking of boosters of their own inconsequential towns perhaps also conveys Dante’s own hidden claim in the
Commedia
: Dante’s version of Tuscan is to be seen as in some way resurrecting Adamic vernacular, coinciding in the vowel “I,” which is the name of God in each. For a similar opinion, see Moevs (Moev.2005.1), p. 183. And see
Paradiso
XXIX.17 for the dative pronoun “i” referring to God.

One might also speculate that Dante considered
El
as the name of God associated with Hebrew “grammaticality,” the written language of the scribes of the Bible; for this reason he must retract his earlier opinion (
El
) in favor of a truly “vernacular” solution (
I
). Further, we may reflect that when he considered the context of his remark in
De vulgari
(I.iv.4), he surely would have noted that there he had characterized Adam’s first word as an emotive exclamation, indeed a cry of joy. The word
I
, which we have just heard Adam use in the preceding verse (“pria ch’
i
’ scendessi”), may sound and feel “vernacular,” while
El
may sound and feel “grammatical,” that is, like a language learned in school.
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135.
   God the Father had been stern with sinful Adam for more than five thousand years; then his Son drew him forth from the Limbus up to the Empyrean. We hear nothing of the possibility of purgation for pre-Christian Christians and so must assume that in His triumph (
Par.
XXIII.20), when he harrowed Hell, He brought them straight “home.” Anything less charitable (i.e., a visit to Purgatory) would seem picky, wouldn’t it? And so here is a paradox: Some saved Christians, even most (and it seems likely that this restriction applies to all but the saintliest of saints), bound for Heaven must pass through purgation, while the virtuous Hebrews who were harrowed by Christ (if not all the saved pagans—we do see Cato and Statius on the Mount of Purgatory) apparently do not have to repay any of their sins on earth. Merely a moment’s reflection puts David and Solomon in the dock of our understandable sense of retributive justice.…
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136.
   For
El
as a name of God, see the note to verse 134. And see Moore (Moor.1889.1), pp. 487–92, for the history of this tormented verse in the manuscripts.
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137–138.
   The recognition of the Horatian source (
Ars poetica
60–63) of these verses begins with Benvenuto da Imola (comm. to vv. 124–129). Here is Horace, as cited, with a translation by Singleton (comm. to these verses):

139–142.
   The question of the length of time spent by Adam in Eden before the Fall is not uniformly dealt with. On the other hand, and as Thomas Hill (Hill.1982.1), p. 94, has demonstrated, Dante is not alone in stating that the first man’s innocence lasted only between six and seven hours, citing Petrus Comestor and Gulielmus Durandus as preceding him in this opinion.

Dante obviously felt that the detail was of great enough interest to make it the climactic, canto-ending detail.

Brownlee (Brow.1990.1), p. 396, points out that this period corresponds more or less exactly to the amount of time Dante himself has recently spent in the garden of Eden (see
Purg.
XXVII.133 and XXXIII.103–105). He might have added that Dante also spends six hours with Adam and his companions here in the Starry Sphere (starting at
Par.
XXII.129). See the note to
Paradiso
XXVII.79–81. And see the similar observation offered by P. Sabbatino,
L’Eden della nuova poesia: Saggi sulla “Divina Commedia”
(Florence: Olschki, 1991), p. 99, pointing out that Dante enters the earthly paradise on the sixth day of his otherwordly journey at the sixth hour of the day, while Adam, on the sixth day of Creation, fell at the sixth hour and while Christ was crucified to redeem fallen mankind at the sixth hour as well. Sabbatino’s observation of these numerical similarities is cited by Bognini (Bogn.2007.1), p. 82 (n. 32).
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