Dante's empyrean and the eye of God

Speculum

Volumn 78, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 37-64

  Kay, Richard ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 60949714513     PISSN: 00387134     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/s0038713400098973     Document Type: Article

References (84)

1. In this article the Comedy is cited from "La Commedia" secondo l'antica vulgata, ed. Giorgio Petrocchi, Edizione Nazionale 7, vols. 1-4 (Milan, 1966-67);
2. Dante's other works are cited as edited in his Opere minori, La Letteratura Italiana: Storia e Testi 5, 3 vols. (Milan, 1979-86). I am indebted for bibliographic assistance to Karl F. Morrison, Richard A. Orchard, and Richard R. Ring; for reading the work in progress, to Casey Law, David C. Lindberg, John A. Scott, and R. Dean Ware; and for enhancing the figures, to Paul Hotvedt.
3. The Eye of Providence in a radiant triangle was suggested in 1776 by Pierre Eugéne du Simitière, consultant to the ad hoc congressional committee; it was incorporated in the final design, which was approved in 1782. The original right eye was altered to a left one in 1856. A die has never been cut of the seal's reverse, or "spiritual side," but it has been depicted on the one-dollar bill since 1935. See The Great Seal of the United States, United States Department of State, Bureau of Public Affairs, Office of Public Communication, Publication 10411 (Washington, D.C., 1996), pp. 3, 7-8, and 19, which is based on the work of Richard S. Patterson and Richardson Dougall, who find no conclusive evidence of Masonic influence on the choice of the symbol and think it more likely that du Simitière was familiar with Renaissance depictions: The Eagle and the Shield, United States Department of State Publication 8900, Department and Foreign Service Series 161 (Washington, D.C., 1978), pp. 529-32.
4. Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names 1.8 (Migne, PG 3:597AB), trans. Colm Luibheid, PseudoDionysius: The Complete Works (New York, 1987), p. 57: "[Scripture writers] have applied to the divine Goodness . . . descriptions of every sort. . . ; they praise its eyes, ears, hair, face, and hands, back, wings, and arms, a posterior, and feet."
5. Dante's use of the Bible was conveniently documented by Edward Moore, Studies in Dante, First Series (Oxford, 1896), pp. 321-34. Many further echoes and oblique references have been detected since then;
6. for a recent appreciation of the predominant place of the Bible in Dante's thought, see Peter S. Hawkins, "Dante and the Bible," in The Cambridge Companion to Dante, ed. Rachel Jacoff (Cambridge, Eng., 1993), pp. 120-25.
7. Richard H. Lansing, Dante's Il Convivio [The Banquet], Garland Library of Medieval Literature B/65 [New York, 1990], pp. 45-46).
8. See also Cesare Vasoli's extensive comment in Opere minori 1/2:133-35.
9. "No medieval example [of the Eye of God] has yet been found. . .," according to Peter and Linda Murray, The Oxford Companion to Christian Art and Architecture (Oxford, 1996), p. 177, s.v. "Eye of God."
10. "Oculo picto Deum intelligebant, quod ut oculus quicquid sibi propositum est intuetur, sic omnia Deus cognoscit ac videt" (Paris, 1551, p. 222), quoted by Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, 2nd ed. (London, 1968), p. 232, n. 52 (see also pp. 231-35 and fig. 84);
11. cf. Rudolf Wittkower, "Hieroglyphics in the Early Renaissance," in Developments in the Early Renaissance, ed. Bernard S. Levy (Albany, N.Y., 1972), pp. 66, 69-70, and 74-76.
12. For the development of extramission theories, see David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from alKindi to Kepler (Chicago, 1976), pp. 1-57.
13. Plato's theory of vision was also available to Dante in Calcidius's Latin translation of, and commentary on, the Timaeus, but whether he did in fact use it seems, after heated controversy, unlikely: Maria Cristiani, "Timeo," in Enciclopedia dantesca, 6 vols. (Rome, 1970-78), 5:604-5 (see also 4:548).
14. Nonetheless it is remarkable that the image of God's Eye could have been suggested by Calcidius, who understood Plato to have drawn an analogy between God and the human eye because both can be likened to the sun: "idem auctor [Plato] in Politia [Republic 508B12-C2] solem quidem simulacrum esse ait inuisibilis dei, oculum uero solis et solstitiale [ = solare] quiddam": Timaeus a Calcidio translatus commentarioque instructus, ed. J. H. Waszink, Plato Latinus 4 (London, 1962), p. 258.
15. For Galen, see Lindberg, Theories of Vision, pp. 10-11 and 212
16. (bibliographic details in David C. Lindberg, A Catalogue of Medieval and Renaissance Optical Manuscripts, Subsidia Mediaevalia 4 [Toronto, 1975], no. 187);
17. For medieval Aristotelians, such as Aquinas, Aristotle's definitive statement on visual rays was De sensu 2, 438a26-b2. They had to explain away other passages that allowed the possibility of extramitted rays (De generatione animalium 5.1, 780b36-781a8) or even assumed their existence (Meteorologica 2.9, 370a18-19, 373a35-374a3, and 3.4, 374b11-15, probably an early work):
18. Alessandro Parronchi, "La perspettiva dantesca," Studi danteschi 36 (1959), 5-103, stresses Dante's dependence on Albert and Aquinas;
19. see also Simon A. Gilson, Medieval Optics and Theories of Light in the Works of Dante, Studies in Italian Literature 8 (Lewiston, N.Y., 2000), pp. 32, 54-55, and 113-15.
20. See Alessandro Parronchi, "Perspettiva," in Enciclopedia dantesca, 4:438-39;
21. and Gilson, Medieval Optics, pp. 7-37.
22. Gilson, Medieval Optics, p. 69, n. 70;
23. Dante's Lyric Poetry, ed. K. Foster and P. Boyde, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1967), nos. 30.1-2 and 5
24. ( = Rime 65, ed. Michele Barbi, in Le opere di Dante [Florence, 1921]).
25. For visual rays that "strike" (percosse), see Guido Cavalcanti: "la qual degli occhi suoi venne a ferire" and "Per gli occhi fere la sua claritate," in his canzone "lo non pensava," ed. Gianfranco Contini, Poeti del Duecento, 2 vols. (Milan, 1966-88), 2:500-501.
26. Illuminated Manuscripts of the Divine Comedy, ed. Peter Brieger, Millard Meiss, and Charles S. Singleton, Bollingen Series 81, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J., 1969), plate 435a, initial at head of Paradiso 4 in Padua, Biblioteca del Seminario, MS 67, fol. 208r (Paduan, saec. XV in.). Ca. 1456 this was the model for a similar illustration in Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Plut. 40.1, fol. 221r (Brieger, 1:226-30).
27. Trans. Charles S. Singleton, The Divine Comedy, Bollingen Series 80, 6 vols. (Princeton, N.J., 1970-75).
28. Robert Podgurski has argued that Dante reconciled the theories of extramission and intromission by treating the former as a supraphysical phenomenon: "Where Optics and Visionary Metaphysics Converge in Dante's Novella vista," Italian Quarterly 35 (1998), 29-38.
29. Francis J. Carmody, Al Farghani Differentie scientie astrorum (Berkeley, Calif., 1943), pp. 14 and 39.
30. Such a cone plays a prominent part in perspectivists' accounts of intromission: e.g., Pecham, Perspectiva communis 1.36-38, ed. David C. Lindberg, John Pecham and the Science of Optics (Madison, Wis., 1970), p. 121; see also p. 38.
31. Extramissionists were less precise: Euclid located the vertex "in the eye" (Lindberg, Theories of Vision, p. 12, n. 77);
32. Trans. Singleton, altered ("appearance" for parvenza, not "expanse"). The apparent paradox may be resolved by Aquinas's explanation that intellectual light is visible, but not to our senses: Scriptum super libros Sententiarum 2.2.2.1 ad 1 (Opera omnia, ed. Roberto Busa, annexed to Index Thomisticus [Stuttgart, 1980], 1:130-31)
33. cited by Bortolo Martinelli, "La dottrina dell'Empireo nell'Epistola a Cangrande (capp. 24-27)," Studi danteschi 57 (1985), 49-143, at p. 111.
34. Trans. Singleton, lines 31-33 revised. Cf. Patrick Boyde, Dante Philomythes and Philosopher: Man in the Cosmos (Cambridge, Eng., 1981), pp. 243-45.
35. My translation of Paradiso 29.31-32a; Singleton's: "Therewith order was created and ordained for the substances . . ." and Boyde's: "The separate substances were created in their ordered hierarchy . . ." (Dante Philomythes, p. 245).
36. For Scholastic arguments that the Empyrean was among the first created things, see Martinelli, "La dottrina dell'Empireo," pp. 66-67 and 99-100.
37. L'Optique de Claude Ptolémée dans la version latine d'après l'arabe de l'émir Eugène de Sicile, ed. Albert Lejeune, 2nd ed., Collection de Travaux de l'Académie Internationale d'Histoire des Sciences 31 (Leiden, 1989).
38. Lindberg, John Pecham, pp. 29-32.
39. Discussed by Gilson, Medieval Optics, pp. 109-49.
40. Thus Pecham, Perspectiva communis 2.7 and 2.10, ed. Lindberg, pp. 162-65.
41. On Dante's use of the latitude-related climatic zones in Paradiso, see Richard Kay, Dante's Christian Astrology (Philadelphia, 1994), pp. 63-64, 88-91, 119-20, 173, 217, and 226.
42. Monarchia 3.15.3: "[homo] assimilatur orizonti, qui est medium duorum emisperiorum": trans. Richard Kay, Dante's "Monarchia," Studies and Texts 131 (Toronto, 1998), p. 309.
43. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Book of Causes, ad prop. 2, trans. Vincent A. Guagliardo et al. (Washington, D.C., 1996), p. 17.
44. Summarized in Lindberg, Theories of Vision, pp. 209-13;
45. for manuscripts and editions, see Lindberg, Catalogue (above, n. 14).
46. Stewart Duke-Elder and Kenneth C. Wybar, The Anatomy of the Visual System, System of Ophthalmology 2 (St. Louis, Mo., 1961), pp. 33-38.
47. Constantini monachi Montiscassini Liber de oculis, ed. P. Pansier, in his Collectio ophtalmologica veterum auctorum, 2 vols. (Paris, 1903-33), 2:167-82.
48. The work is in fact a reworking of Galen by Hunain ibn Ishaq (d. 877), The Book of the Ten Treatises on the Eye, ed. and trans. Max Meyerhof (Cairo, 1928).
49. See Lindberg, Catalogue, no. 185. According to Meyerhof's notes, Hunain's principal source was Galen's De usu partium corporis humanis, but he also used Galen's De placitis Hippocratis et Piatonis and De demonstratione, neither of which Dante could have known because one was not yet translated and the other has been lost (pp. 20, 21, 27, 36, and 38).
50. Dante cites Avicenna but not his Liber canonis or other medical works: Enciclopedia dantesca, 1:481-82.
51. Albert treats the anatomy of the eye most fully in his De animalibus 1.2.7, in Opera omnia, ed. Auguste Borgnet, 38 vols. (Paris, 1890-99), 11:50-52.
52. Not surprisingly, since Dante alludes only to his work as a logician: Paradiso 12.134-35. His treatise on ophthalmology (Lindberg, Catalogue, no. 206) simply names the tunics, which he remarks number seven like the planets, and the three humors: Brevarium de egritudinibus oculorum et curis 1.1, ed. A. M. Berger, Die Ophthalmologie (Liber de oculo) des Petrus Hispanus (Munich, 1899), pp. 2-3.
53. Constantine, De oculis 1.2.4 and 1.3.6, ed. Pansier, 2:168 and 170; Hunain, Ten Treatises, trans. Meyerhof, pp. 5 and 12;
54. Galen, De usu partium 10.2, trans. Margaret Tallmadge May, Galen on the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body, 2 vols. (Ithaca, N. Y., 1968), 2:469.
55. Galen, De usu partium 10.3, trans. May, 2:470-71.
56. See the diagram in Hugo Magnus, Die Anatomie des Auges in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung, Augenärtzliche Unterrichtstafeln 20 (Breslau, 1900), pl. 22; reproduced in Duke-Eider, Anatomy, p. 16.
57. and Duke-Elder, Anatomy, p. 309. Since the centrally placed lens is not authentically "Galenic," I shall hereafter designate the medieval Latin tradition incorporating this feature, derived from Hunain and Avicenna, as that of the "Latin medical anatomists."
58. Galen, De usu partium 10.1, trans. May, 2:463;
59. For the topography of the human eye, see Duke-Elder, Anatomy, p. 78 (fig. 65).
60. Lindberg, Theories of Vision, pp. 10-11 and esp. n. 63.
61. Phillip De Lacy, Corpus Medicorum Graecorum 5/4/1,2 vols. (Berlin, 1980-81), 2:449-53, which Dante could not have known because the first Latin translation was made in 1490.
62. Galen, De usu partium 10.5, trans. May, 2:476.
63. The three known Latin translations of Galen's De usu partium are (1) a translation from the Arabic that abbreviated Galen's books 1-11 into nine tractates, according to Pietro d'Abano; (2) Pietro's own translation from the Greek, made before 1310 and now lost; and (3) Niccolò da Reggio's translation from the Greek, made in 1317. See Lynn Thorndike, "Translations of Works of Galen from the Greek by Peter of Abano," Isis 33 (1942), 649-53, at p. 649, n. 4;
64. and idem, "Translations of Works of Galen from the Greek by Niccolö da Reggio (c. 1308-1345)," Byzantina-Metabyzantina 1 (1946-49), 213-35, at pp. 214 and 232 (no. 53).
65. Galen, De placitis 7.4, ed. Lacy, 2:451;
66. full discussion by Paolo Mugnai in Enciclopedia dantesca, 5:387-90, s.v. "spirito," including both Galenic and angelic senses of the term.
67. For angels as sphere movers and astral influences, see Stephen Bemrose, Dante's Angelic Intelligences: Their Importance in the Cosmos and in Pre-Christian Religion, Letture de Pensiero e d'Arte 62 (Rome, 1983), pp. 77-113;
68. for their contacts with humans, Enciclopedia dantesca, 3:270.
69. On the poem's climax, see Ronald B. Herzman and Gary W. Towsley, "Squaring the Circle: Paradiso 33 and the Poetics of Geometry," Traditio 49 (1994), 95-125.
70. Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th ed., 2 vols. (Oxford, 1940), 1:980, s.v. "κόρη " 3; Oxford Latin Dictionary, ed. P. G. W. Glare (Oxford, 1982), p. 1521, s.v. "pupilla."
71. Galen, De usu partium 10.6, trans. May, pp. 478-79: " [the crystalline humor's] own proper tunic is not only 'like the skin stripped down from a dried onion' [Odyssey 19.232-33], but is also even thinner and clearer than thin cobwebs, and what is more remarkable, it does not extend around all the crystalline humor. . . . All of the part, however, that looks to the outside and is in contact with the grapelike tunic puts on this thin, brilliant tunic.
72. Moreover, the image of the pupil takes shape in this as in a sort of mirror; for it is smoother and more glistening than any mirror." Definitely not available to Dante was the more extensive description of the arachnoid in Galen's Anatomical Procedures; see Galen on Anatomical Procedures: The Later Books, trans. W. L. H. Duckworth (Cambridge, Eng., 1962), p. 40.
73. Hunain, trans. Meyerhof, p. 37; Constantine, De oculis 4.2.21, ed. Pansier, 2:179: "si aliquis studiose in oculo alterius cernit, videt in co suam faciem. Causa, quia visus ad pupillam convertitur propter panniculi splendorem qui dicitur aranee tela. Est enim super crystallinum sicut adeps super jura coagulatus, que nimis rutilans et clara est."
74. For access to this text, I am indebted to Richard Newhauser, who is editing it for the Corpus Christianorum. On the work, see Lindberg, Catalogue, no. 99;
75. David L. Clark, "Optics for Preachers: The De oculo morali by Peter of Limoges," The Michigan Academician 9 (1977), 329-43;
76. Richard Newhauser, "Nature's Moral Eye: Peter of Limoges' Tractatus moralis de oculo," Sewanee Mediaeval Studies 6 (1995), 125-36;
77. and Dallas George Denery II, "Seeing and Being Seen: Vision, Visual Analogy and Visual Error in Late Medieval Optics, Theology and Religious Life," Ph.D. diss., University of California (Berkeley, Calif., 1999), pp. 103-59.
78. For extensive documentation, see Kay, Dante's Christian Astrology.
79. Sacrobosco, Sphere 2: "Est autem meridianus circulus quidam transiens per polos mundi et per zenith capitis nostri. Et dicitur meridianus quia, ubicumque sit homo et in quocumque tempore anni, quando sol raptu firmament! pervenit ad suum meridianum, est illi meridies" (ed. Lynn Thorndike, The "Sphere" of Sacrobosco and Its Commentators [Chicago, 1949], p. 91; trans., p. 126).
80. Sacrobosco, Sphere 2, ed. Thorndike, pp. 86-87; trans., pp. 123-24.
81. Giuseppe C. Di Scipio has argued that this line cuts through the center of the vertical file of seats running from the Virgin Mary to John the Baptist: The Symbolic Rose in Dante's "Paradiso," L'Interprete 42 (Ravenna, 1984), p. 49.
82. Alison Cornish, Reading Dante's Stars (New Haven, Conn., 2000), chap. 5, "Losing the Meridian," pp. 79-92.
83. E.g., Paradiso 1.64-66 and 18.16-18. Further references are conveniently assembled by Federico Tollemache in Encyclopedia dantesca, 4:120, s.v. "occhio."
84. A few instances of Dante's "science fiction": how Pier della Vigna's thornbush talks (Inf. 13.40-45);