Paradiso- Dante  (1321) 
On to the third book (section) of the Dante’s Divine Comedy. 

Canto 1  
Prologue and ascent to the first sphere. 
This first canto is divided into two parts: a prologue and the narrative.  

The prologue is an invocation to Apollo, the sun god, begging Apollo to supply the necessary words to convey the sense of this journey. 

The narrative starts with a typically Dantean reference to constellations to mark the time, but to save the effort, it’s noon on April 13, 1300. 

Beatrice looks into the sun intently, which, in turn, caused Dante to do the same. He couldn’t maintain this for very long, but quickly the sky was brightening up dramatically. Dante, a la Paul in 2 Corinthians, questions whether he was in the body, or just the spirit, but then he notices the harmony of the spheres, and along with the increasing brightness, he prepares to ask Beatrice what is going on. She sees what he is going to say and tells him that his mind is being dulled by so many wrong guesses as to why the phenomenon is occurring. The fact is that they are no longer on earth, but flying quickly towards the heavens. Dante then wonders how he ‘transcends these light bodies’? Beatrice answers that all things, being created by God, have an order and in this sense, resemble God to their varying degrees. All natures are inclined in different ways to the nearness of their origin to God. For example, fire tends upwards since its origin is in the sphere over the earth. The movements of animals originate in their hearts, and gravity holds the earth together. This tendency holds for man as well. Providence has arranged that the highest heaven is silent because it holds God’s light, and so doesn’t move. But the prime mover sphere, just below it, is the fastest. As God has created us to be with Him, we too are drawn to Him. But, God’s intention isn’t always realized in us because we have been given free will, and can choose our direction. So often, we are drawn away by the false pleasures of sin, just like when you see lightning, which is a fire and should tend upward, sometimes strikes the ground. 

Beatrice tells Dante that if he has understood this, then his ascent should make as much sense as the water of a stream flowing downhill by gravity. It’s natural that man, unimpeded by sin, should ascend to his Maker. What would truly be astonishing is if Dante had stayed on earth. 

Canto 2 
Ascent and arrival at the first sphere- the moon 
Dante first warns off readers that it may be too deep for them to follow in these seas, but then returns to the narrative. As he and Beatrice arrive at the moon 

The second part of the canto has Dante and Beatrice arriving at the first sphere, of the moon in a very short time; Dante is amazed and unable to hide his concern. They enter into what Dante can only describe as a cloud, but it is actually the dense, solid, and polished clean surface of the moon itself. The substance of the moon had taken them in, like a ray of light entering the water. It would incomprehensible on earth for two solid surfaces to intersect this way. This kindles in Dante a desire to see the essence that united God and man (in Jesus). He mentions that one day, all those in heaven will see with their own eyes what we can only accept in faith here; and it will then be known as self-evidently as any first principle here. 

This is the first important theological point of the canto: in heaven, two differing essences can inhabit the same space.  

Dante then asks about the dark spots on the moon, recognizing that the tale told on earth about them being due to Cain being banished to the moon is nothing more than fable. The bulk of the canto is an argument Beatrice will give in two parts. Beatrice notes that men will devise fables to try and make sense of what they don’t have access to. Then she asks Dante what explanation he might give for the different colored spots on the moon. Dante puts forward the argument from Aristotle that the difference is due to varying densities in the material making up the heavenly bodies. This was, I’m told, how the ancients to the different aspects visible to our eyes, but maintain a unity of substance for the stars. It is this that Beatrice will challenge. She starts by referencing the eighth sphere, containing the distant stars, and notes that within this sphere, there are many different stars with many different qualities. If differing densities were the cause of this, then that would mean that there was only one essence for all. Turning the argument back to the moon, if the different colors were due to varying density, then either the planet’s substance was unevenly made, or perhaps different layers, like pages of a book, with different densities could explain this.  

She walks Dante through some experiments and demonstrates that neither is true. 

However, having torn down the false argument, it still leaves Dante uninformed of the actual truth. So Beatrice enters the second portion of her argument, and the fourth section of the canto, by noting that the Primum Mobile sphere will influence all the others with the being it contains. 

The next sphere has many different stars, each having had its essence portioned out from the Primum Mobile; the stars are distinct, yet all contained within it. The other smaller spheres, with their various differences, all arrange their distinctions within themselves according to their purpose and ends. These instruments or organs of the universe each take from above and act as such below them. And here is Beatrice’s point: the motion and virtue of these spheres is animated ultimately from God himself. Just like the soul inside us resolves itself into the different members and fits according to their different abilities, so the intelligence of God unfolds its goodness through the stars, turning them all in its unity. The essence of God’s creativity is to create a huge variation of things, all deriving their purpose from his unity. Theologically, this diversity in unity is seen in its most fundamental form- the trinity.  

Canto 3 
The first sphere: the moon- unfulfilled vows. 
After Beatrice proves Dante’s thoughts about the variation in the colors of the moon wrong, he is ready to confess himself corrected, when he notices faces barely outlined. He goes towards them, and then thinking they must be reflected, as in a mirror, he turns around. But sees nothing behind him. Beatrice smiles at this childish act, but encourages him to speak to the spirits, who are relegated to this sphere for unfulfilled vows. 

He asks the shades to give him their names and stories.  

The first is someone he knows, but doesn’t immediately recognize because her beauty has been so augmented by her being in heaven. Piccarda, sister of his friend Forese Donati.  

Dante asks her if she ever wishes to ascend to higher spheres? She responds that God has placed each in their appropriate spheres, and they are each contented with their place, since longing for something outside what God has given would be discord, and all throughout heaven, those placed in their spheres are in accord with the will of God who placed them there. 

He further asks Piccarda what the vow was that was left unfulfilled. 

She had joined the order of Saint Clair of Assisi and vowed her life to follow their rules, but her other brother, Corso Donati, had her forcibly removed and married her off for political reasons. She only says about her following life that God knows what it became.  

Then she mentions another next to her that knows exactly what she went through. It is Costanza, daughter of Roger I of Sicily and the mother of Frederick II. Piccarda states that Costanza was also a sister and had the sacred veil removed from her head, and was returned to the world against her will, but she always retained the veil over her heart. Whether or not this take was true, is dodgy. But Dante believes it and relates the story as he knew it. 

The two then turn away as they are singing Ave Maria. Dante turns to ask Beatrice some questions, but finds Beatrice is now shining so brightly that he can take looking at her for too long, which makes it difficult to ask her his question. 

Canto 4 
The first sphere: the moon- discussion of will 
Dante starts the canto with three examples of choice: given equal choices, the will can’t decide on its own. He uses this to illustrate how he, with two different questions, couldn’t decide which to ask first, so he ended up staying quiet. But he says Dante did as Daniel did to Nebuchadnezzar and answers the question without even having heard it from the source. She notes that two questions are pulling at him. 

The first is: why did Piccarda and Costanza enjoy lesser merit, when they preserved the intent to keep their vows, but were prevented from it? 

The second concerns Plato’s assertion that souls return to the stars- or more to the point, to the planetary gods that made them.  

Beatrice deals first with the second question, since she says misunderstanding it is more poisonous. 

Plato’s assertion was that souls were immortal, but that after death they would return to the planetary gods that the great creator god instructed to create them. Dante had a belief that God created some things directly and others through an intermediary, but this was thought to entail that the body was not good and holy and would resurrected. Beatrice confronts this first to clarify this. 

From the highest to the lowest in heaven, all have access to God, and equal time in it. But they experience the sweet life differently through more or less of the eternal spirit.  

Piccarda and Costanza weren’t assigned to the sphere of the moon, far away from God, (as might be assumed by the poetic scheme) but they appeared in that sphere to Dante in order for him to grasp that there are different ways in which the life of heaven is experienced, and so that Dante could understand the lowest sphere. This is fitting and necessary, because humanness is only able to grasp things through what it knows, then apprehending beyond. The Bible itself descends to this form, using anthropomorphic terms to explain God’s actions, while of course referring to something other. The church represented the archangels Michael, Gabriel, and Rafael with human faces so that humans could grasp something of them. 

Beatrice says that isn’t true, if taken literally. Perhaps, if he meant rather that the honor or blame of the influence of the spheres returns, then the statement could be taken as closer to the truth. But the principle of the stars themselves being the guides has been misapplied greatly, such that people have even named the stars the names of the gods Mercury, Mars, and Jupiter. 

The first question is less problematic because it wouldn’t lead Dante astray: If the justice of heaven appears unjust to the world, Beatrice says that is a mark in favor of the faith, not an evidence that justice in heaven is heretically misunderstood. Beatrice then offers an explanation of the problem from the last canto. Violence, if understood as the situation that occurs when one person is forced to do something not wished, neither Piccarda’s or Costanza’s situations would qualify. 

Because the will, if it truly doesn’t want, does not soften in the face of the threat. But it will act as fire does, which always does what is in its nature even if buffeted a thousand different ways and returns to its ways as soon as the buffeting is over. 

Therefore, whether the will submits a little, or a lot, to the force, it still submits, as did these two. 

They could have returned to their vows as soon as the threats subsided. Had their wills truly been steadfast, as Lawrence, who was roasted on a grate, or Mucius Scaevola, who threw his own hand into the fire as he was threatened with burning at the stake. But, Beatrice admits, such iron will is extremely rare. 

But here Beatrice submits another difficulty: She has said souls in heaven can’t lie because they are close to God, the First Truth. So if Piccarda and Costanza both claimed to love the religious life they had before abduction, yet they didn’t really resist their removal, it would seem to say that they didn’t really love their vows. 

In fact, it often happens that one in danger of harm will do things he normally wouldn’t do, even things that are against his principles, like Alcmaeon. Alcmaeon was the son of a prophet. His mother betrayed her husband for a necklace, and his father’s ghost appeared and begged Alcmaeon to avenge his death. While Alcmaeon didn’t want to murder his mother, he did so to honor his father.  

From these, Beatrice is hoping Dante has arrived at the point where he thinks force mixed with will make it impossible to excuse the offense. But here Beatrice references Aquinas’ view of absolute will, which is a simple declaration of what the will would do unconstrained, with the relative or conditional will, which doesn’t consent to harm, but consents to the degree that it fears falling into greater harm if it resists the violence. 

Beatrice acknowledges that Piccarda expressed herself in these terms of absolute will- she didn’t want to leave her vows, while Beatrice herself was speaking of the relative will, and in so doing, they were both speaking the truth. 

Dante is deeply grateful for the explanation and knows that he cannot, of himself, recompense her for the grace she has shown, so he rests that the Lord will do that for her. He then finishes by stating that doubts are the things that push us upward in knowledge so that we can arrive at the summit. With that, he asks Beatrice if an unfulfilled vow can be made up with other good works? 

Beatrice begins to glow with excitement and shines so brightly that Dante has to turn away. 

Sicily: Three Thousand Years of Human History- Sandra Benjamin  (2006) 
Great history covering the development of Sicily from the earliest recorded history of the Greek colonial settlements, and their interactions with the Elymi, Sicels, and Sicani, to the Romans, the Goths, Muslims, Normans, Spanish, Bourbon French, Austrians; and then the unification with Italy, the fascist period, and the influence of the Mafia over the more recent times. 

Albion’s Seed- David Hackett Fischer  (1989) 
The question this book seeks to answer is: what are the determinants of a voluntary society? The US has endured for several centuries now voluntarily working together in an extremely stable system. Why did that happen? The author traces four larger migration patterns coming from England: the Puritans from East England to Massachusetts; a Royalist elite and a large number of indentured servants from the south of England to Virginia; the Quakers of the north Midlands and Wales to the Delaware Valley; and the borderland English speakers from the far North of England and northern Ireland to the Appalachian backcountry. These were all English speaking British protestants, but they each had different conceptions of order, power, and freedom that would become the cornerstones of a voluntary society in America. 

Of particular interest to me were the four different ways each of these groups thought of liberty. Freedom or liberty were of course integral to the groups of migrants to America. Many of them had come from persecution in England, and sought freedom in the new colony. But they had different ideas about what freedom meant, and from the way many of us see it today. The four ways of seeing liberty were: 

Ordered liberty of the New England Puritans. The puritans thought of freedom in the sense of the liberty to live according to the community’s moral and religious laws. Liberty is exercised within the framework of communal obligations. It wasn’t about individual autonomy, but the right to self-regulate under God’s law. 

Hegemonic liberty of the Virgina cavaliers. The leaders of Virginia were often second sons of aristocrats in England who would have no inheritance of land. They believed there was a natural ordered ranking of humanity- a small class of men more ably suited to rule, and a larger class more suited to subservience. The liberty they sought was the liberty for the elite to rule over others. 

Reciprocal liberty of the Delaware Valley Quakers. They understood liberty as mutual respect and equality, extending the same rights they claimed for themselves to others. The Quakers still would have expected the ‘others’ to live largely as the Quakers did, which is implied in the notion that if the Quakers extend the liberties they claimed for themselves to others, those others can’t then live as the others please with no regard for the Quakers. 

Natural liberty of the Borderlanders. The people that lived in the borderlands of England and Scotland had a long history of violent warfare, which led them to see liberty as personal autonomy and resistance to external authority. The borderlanders that populated the Appalachian backcountry thought of freedom as the freedom to do as you wanted without interference.  

The Rights of Man and Common Sense- Thomas Paine  (1776 – 1792) 
This collection of Thomas Paine’s political writings contains The Rights of Man and Common Sense, as well as several smaller letters and treatises. I like Thomas Paine’s reasoning, and I want to agree with it. In fact, in many places I do, but there are other places where many of the early liberals assumed things were turn out much better if only we could get democracy and education and commerce going. In some of his polemic against Edmund Burke, it seems to me that he misrepresents what Burke was saying, but overall, I accept much of what Paine puts forward. 

Metamorphoses- Ovid (8 AD) 
This is a Latin poem, that is very frequently referenced by Dante throughout his divine comedy, which was my impetus for reading it. The narrative is taken from Greek mythological stories and reformed in Latin. There are over 200 stories with the recurrent theme of transformation. I had originally started in to take more notes and pull out the symbolic meanings of these in more detail, but just got tired of it and gave up. At that point, I just read it. That said, the importance of the stories is in the symbolism of the transformations. 

The book ends with the tie from the Greek mythological stories to Rome, and even mentions Julius Caesar at the end, bringing it up to nearly current events at the time.