Commentary Par X 1-6

Like the other tenth canti, this one marks the crossing of a borderline (in Inferno it separated the sins of Incontinence from the walls of the City of Dis, enclosing the sins of the hardened will; in Purgatorio, Ante-purgatory from Purgatory proper).  The first of these is fairly indistinctly marked; the next is more formally established.  But this one is as though a double line had been drawn across the space separating Canto IX from Canto X, separating the planets attained by the earth's shadow from those, beginning with the Sun, that are free of such darkening.  None of the souls we will meet from now on suffered from the human weakness that we found among those who lacked a vigorous faith, or those who placed too much hope in the things of this world, or those who failed to understand the nature of true love (for the program of the defective Theological Virtues in the first three heavens of Paradiso, see C.Par.III.47-48; and see Andreoli [DDP Andreoli.Par.III.16]: 'The fact is that it is only in the fourth heaven that we shall begin to find souls who are completely beyond reproach').

On this opening, see Forti (Fort.1968.1), p. 352: After the several references in the last canto to human strife, Dante now turns to 'celestial harmony instead of earthly disorder.'  Forti later says (p. 380) that the celestial Athens (see Conv.III.xiv.15) is the point at which we have now arrived.  For the mistaken notion that these opening lines constitute an 'invocation,' see Cestaro (Cest.1995.1), p. 148: ' ...this opening contemplation of the Trinity, and of spiratio in particular, amounts to no less than a new invocatio.'

These six verses might be paraphrased: 'God the Father (the Power), gazing on His Son (Wisdom) with the Holy Spirit (Love) that breathes forth eternally from both Father and Son, created all things that revolve above, whether in angelic consciousness or in the sphere that they govern (e.g., that ruled by the Principalities, Venus), with the result that anyone who (as Dante now is doing) contemplates the Father's Power cannot fail to savor it.'

Angela Meekins (Meek.1998.1) has written a study of the heaven of the Sun that deals in an orderly way with the main subjects of these four and a half cantos: the Trinity; the theologies of Thomas and of Bonaventure; the order and imagery of this heaven; its mirror motif; its unity and difference as they variously apply to the souls whom we meet in the Sun; its mysticism and poetry; and, finally, its representation of the mind's road to God.

Sweeney (Swee.1985.1) argues that, beginning in the heaven of the Sun, Dante has programmatic recourse to Aquinas's three levels of human predication of the qualities of God, affirmative (e.g., one may say that God is wise), negative (God is wise, but not as humans are wise), supereminent (God is wise, but His wisdom cannot be expressed in human language).