Commentary Par IV 29

The meaning of Beatrice's remark is not difficult to grasp. The angels (she refers to the highest order, the Seraphim, but from the context we know that she means all nine orders) and all the blessed are found, and found only, in the Empyrean. From Par. XXXII we know that four of the five saints referred to here are in the highest rank of the stadium-rose: Moses ([Par XXXII 131-132]), John the Baptist ([Par XXXII 31-33]), John the Evangelist ([Par XXXII 127-128]), Mary ([Par XXXII 88-93]). Samuel is not among the eighteen saints referred to in that canto, but since all four who are, like their Seraphic counterparts, have been elevated to the topmost rank, we are probably meant to understand that Samuel has been also; i.e., we are to understand that he is there, even if we do not see him.

But why Dante singles him out here (and why he passes him over in silence in Par. XXXII) are questions rarely formed and perhaps never answered. Tommaseo (DDP Tommaseo.Par.IV.28-30) was perhaps the first to refer to the fact that Moses and Samuel were only once referred to in the same passage of Scripture, the first verse of Jeremiah 15: 'Then said the Lord unto me, though Moses and Samuel stood before me, yet my mind could not be toward this people: cast them out of my sight, and let them go forth. G.R. Sarolli, 'Samuele' ({ ED.1973.4}), does improve upon the relatively sorry record of the commentators, who just do not seem to realize that this sudden appearance of Samuel in the poem calls for study. Why, for instance, if Dante wants to pick a pair of Old Testament 'heroes,' does he not couple Moses with his favorite Hebrew figure, David? Perhaps, since Samuel was the last of the Judges of Israel, in Dante's mind he balances the first Hebrew 'law-giver,' Moses (see [Inf IV 57]). Sarolli points to Samuel's position among the exegetes as typus Christi as well as a figure of John the Baptist and to his role in transferring the kingly power from Saul to David as clues to Dante's reasons for his lofty placement in the Commedia. (But why, we wonder, was not that lofty placement confirmed, as it was for his four fellow-nominees, in Par. XXXII?) Toynbee had already made the point that the rest of Dante's references to Samuel by name (Mon.II.vii.8; Mon.III.vi.1-6; Epist.VII.19) have to do with Samuel's intervention that resulted in the termination of Saul's kingship. (This last passage is a casuistic argument, in which Dante insists that Samuel had the power to depose Saul not because he was God's vicar, which the hierocrats insisted was indeed true [thus buttressing their case for papal intervention in imperial affairs], but because God selected him as an 'angelic' messenger, His direct emissary.) Such is dramatically true of Dante's second epistle to Henry VII (Epist.VII.19), in which he compares Henry to Saul, about to be dethroned by Samuel (I Sam.[I Reg.] 15), and in which his accusations put Dante unmistakably in Samuel's place. If the order of composition of these Samuel-Saul passages is Epistle VII (late 1311), Paradiso IV, Monarchia II and III, the last three likely written within only a few months of one another in ca. 1314, we may begin to have an inkling of why Samuel, so long absent from Dante's pages, should suddenly have sprung to life in them. Henry's foundering kingship shows the need for a new Samuel to hector the struggling king, a role that Dante, no stranger to answering an elevated call to action, tries to take on. For Henry’s increasing similarity to Saul, see the article referred to by Bognini (Bogn.2007.1), p. 93 (n. 54). By the time Dante is writing Paradiso XXXII, Henry is dead, and thus well beyond useful hectoring.