Dante's Divine Comedy: From Effable to Ineffable

The mind wanders in search of answers, of sense, of the effable. However, the endless search points to its impossible endeavor: The mortal mind is never satiated with the logic of the earthly, bodily, and physical kind. Dante Alighieri illustrates this in Purgatorio and Paradiso, where he draws the theological line between mortal and spiritual. Both poems give rise to his larger religious and philosophical message of transcending human sin and achieving the highest good: divinity. However, the catch is in how one can achieve a self-sufficient, satiating love. This kind of love is ineffable and Dante the pilgrim must move through purgatory and heaven, entering into a realm difficult to translate. He moves from depictions of the effable to the ineffable by slowly giving way to otherness in knowledge, sense, and description. Through Statius’s explanation for the desiring a prior spiritual state, the motif of fire reaching towards heaven, the inability of Dante to describe many divine images, the progression of songs from purgatory to heaven, the contrast between pictograms of the letter ‘M’, and the characterization of God as an artist, Dante reveals soul’s divine journey from the effable realm of human understanding to the ineffable realm of the soul’s origin, God.

Dante begins his argument for returning to an ineffable love-state in Statius’s explanation of the soul and body, noting how all things instinctively move towards their origin. Upon meeting Statius in the seventh terrace of purgatory, Dante learns of the process of generation. “Two bloods mix” and coagulate to form a fetus, which God, “the First Mover,” breathes spirit into so it becomes a soul with a “self-consciousness” (Purg. XXV, 46, 70, 75). The soul then follows its physical body just as a “flame will follow after the fire” when it moves so the “new form becomes the spirit’s follower” (Purg. XXV, 97-99). This distinction between follower, the flame, and the followed, the fire, points to Dante’s belief that the soul exists without the “airy body” that grants speech and the senses (Purg. XXV, 100). However, the fire of the soul must go somewhere where the flame follows and Paradiso illuminates this: A “motive force,” or “impulse,” “carries the fire to the moon” (Par. I, 115, 116). This impulse is the natural “bent” of everything to move to or away from its origin (Par. I, 110). Dante emphasizes the latter—the sky that fire rises toward—as not only associated with heaven but God’s natural order of “returning home” (Par. I, 93). The association with fire rising above the earth implies the other option—moving away from the soul’s spiritual origin—as a “living flame stood still,” an unnatural image (Par. 1, 141). Therefore, Dante is arguing that the journey towards divinity is the natural movement of the soul to a spiritual origin, one that lacks speech, sense, or sin.

The motif of fire further demonstrates the soul’s ideal journey from the effable realm of earth to the ineffable heaven. In particular, the imagery of fire appears numerous times as a metaphor for transition. Souls, including Dante, seem to be homo viator, ‘man, the traveler,’ as they are traveling back to the happiness breathed into them by God. Beatrice, who symbolizes God’s love, illustrates this as Dante describes his first encounter with her as “signs of the old flame” that evoke the “mighty power of old love” (Purg. XXX, 48, 39). The fact that Dante feels this when viewing a veiled Beatrice further foreshadows the ineffable nature of God’s love portrayed in Paradiso. The structure of purgatory also emphasizes fire as a transition from earthly to heavenly: “the mountain hurls its flames” as a wind “pushes” it back (Purg. XXV, 112, 114). This setting depicts the eternal struggle of a soul between its earthly desires, to move away from its divine origin, and its natural longing for the home above. Dante’s journey through purgatory even illustrates this as he must pass through a wall of fire, a transition, to reach the earthly paradise, the origin of man. The soul as a fire is even articulated in the name of the souls: Purgatory’s “‘shades’” contrast heaven’s souls as “lights,” the natural emanation of fire (Purg. XXV, 101, Par. III, 23). Thus, fire seems to be a symbolic medium between a soul’s earthly place and its higher origin.

Dante’s journey towards his spiritual origin in viewing God slowly reveals its ineffable yet satisfying nature through his inability to describe the pure form of love. When Dante glimpses Beatrice’s “holy eyes,” he does not “trust [his] speech” or memory in describing it (Par. XVIII, 9, 10). Dante’s descriptive ability begins to falter as he realizes there are some heavenly images he cannot translate for the reader. In fact, it is not Beatrice’s eyes that he cannot describe but their “Eternal Loveliness” that reflects God’s light (Par. XVIII, 16). The lack of simile or metaphor for such a pure loveliness is reminiscent of a passage from Purgatorio, where Virgil explains how the mind bends its love towards an image. Dante’s guide notes how “beauty wakens [the soul] to act” and apprehends an “image from a real object and expands upon that object until the soul has turned to it” (Purg. XVIII, 21, 22-24). This process is called love and continues until the object’s “nature joins the soul” (Purg. XVIII, 26). However, what Dante glimpses in Beatrice’s eyes is not an object but the nature of loveliness itself. This relates to the fallibility of language as not every “love is, in itself, praiseworthy” because it might only seem like the higher good one desires within it (Purg. XVIII, 38). For instance, Beatrice’s eyes could have been described as lovely or loveable but those are not the true, satisfying nature of love itself. Love itself cannot be described for any description may limit its seemingly infinite “propensity” to satisfy (Purg. XVIII, 26). Therefore, Dante associates the highest good, God’s love, with an ineffable nature—that which the human faculty of language, even Dante’s, cannot encapsulate.

Dante expands on the imperfection of language by detailing the progression of songs heard from purgatory to heaven, revealing the ineffable power of songs closer to God. In purgatory, the songs often elucidate a “sweetness” in Dante and represent some kind of mortal sin or an expression of overcoming said sin (Purg. II, 114). For instance, when Dante meets the late-repentant shades in ante-purgatory, the spirits are singing “the Miserere verse by verse” (Purg. V, 24). The song is appropriate since these spirits only looked towards heaven in the last moments of their lives and “were done to death by violence” (Purg. V, 52). Thus, they are given a chance at redemption and the psalm they sing is a prayer for cleansing sin and guilt. While the songs in Purgatorio are effable and referential to a mortal sin, the songs in Paradiso are not. After seeing the vision of Christ on a flaming cross, Dante hears a song of “many chords […] although each note is not distinct” (Par. XIV, 118-120). Despite only recognizing the sparse words of “Rise” and “Conquer,” the song “enchanted” like no other “had ever bound” him before (Par. XIV, 125, 127, 128). Here, an ineffable song seems to enjoin Dante’s soul in the way Virgil described love. Later on, however, Dante’s mortal nature limits him as the seventh heaven is temporarily made “silent” (Par. XXI, 59). Knowing his hearing is mortal and cannot bear the song’s beauty, the spirits of this heaven remain silent. The songs throughout Dante’s journey detail the transition from effable, mortal sin to an ineffable beauty that tests Dante’s divinity.

Dante further contrasts divine ineffability with human understanding in the first depiction of the letter ‘M,’ which associates sin with the expressible words of human language. This first instance of the ‘M’ is in the sixth terrace of purgatory, where emaciated spirits form an emoticon in Dante’s mind. Dante notes that “those who, in the face of man, would read OMO would here have recognized the M” (Purg. XXIII, 32-33). This is a reference to the word ‘HOMO’, meaning man, and Dante’s emphasis on a visual “M” relates to these shades as gluttons, who used their gaunt mouths excessively. The starved look of these shades is so extreme that Dante does not recognize Forese “by his face” (Purg. XXIII, 43-44). Therefore, Dante draws a similitude between effable language, sin, and mortal identity, implying their earthly tether that prevents a faith in Him above. In contrast, the second depiction of the letter ‘M’ brings judicial context to the first depiction.

Dante’s pictogram of the letter ‘M’ in heaven serves as a microcosm of the human journey from effable to ineffable by relating divine justice to a transforming letter. In the Sphere of Mars, Dante observes blessed spirits take the shape of multiple letters until they form a phrase: “DILIGITE IUSTITIAM […] QUI IUDICATIS TERRAM” (Par. XVIII, 91-93). The phrase means “love justice, you who judge the earth” and is a fitting message since Dante will encounter the souls of Earth’s just rulers in this heaven. In a moment of transformation, the letter ‘M’ in “TERRAM” and its thousands of spirits form into “an eagle’s frame” (Par. XVIII, 114). The eagle, symbolizing divine justice, is an example of the effable, the letter ‘M,’ leading to the divine. In fact, Beatrice explains that “affection follows the act of knowledge;” therefore, God’s love can be reached from the effable but likely must transition to the ineffable (Par. XXIX, 139-140). The first depiction of the ‘M’ in the gluttonous shades exemplifies how a transformation of this sort must happen. For instance, Dante only glimpses the spirits forming the divine phrase because he was granted access to heaven through his own transformation.

The associations of God as an artist, poet, and painter finalize Dante’s message to inspire in the reader their own journey toward the ineffable, divine origin that only God can reflect. God is described in purgatory as a painter “whose brush might have described” the colored strokes of air in the earthly paradise (Purg. XXIX, 75). When hearing the flames of the eighth heaven sing a divine song, Dante admits that his speech “is far too gross for painting folds so deep” (Par. XXIV, 27). Dante even tells the reader that God is the “Truthful Mirror,” a mirror that itself “no thing can reflect” perfectly, even Dante’s poetry (Par. XXVI, 106-108). Dante’s final canto concludes his subservience to God as a Creator by describing his vision of God as the universe “ingathered and bound by love into one single volume” with pages scattered (Par. XXXIII, 85-87). God is therefore envisioned as a book whose pages—their order, essence, and creation—are not understood through effable words but their binding of love. This is Dante’s claim on the ineffability of the divine—that it requires faith, the “evidence of things not seen,” in an infinite love that cannot be translated but only achieved (Par. XXIV, 64). Dante achieves this faith and divine knowledge but the impossibility of him to depict it perfectly is thus an invitation for the reader to take the journey themself.

Dante’s Purgatorio and Paradiso are thus a call to action for the reader to have faith in the ineffability of the divine. Only through love’s intersection of the human intellect and the affective divine can one reach the origin of their soul—the point they naturally desire to return to—God. Therefore, whether it is the tendency of a flame, the impossibility to articulate the divine, the progression of songs, the pictorial transformation of a letter, or the identity of God as an artist, Dante’s poems explicate how the reader can take their own journey towards divine faith. For the promise of an infinite satisfaction can only be truly achieved by putting down the poem, the effable, and looking up—just like Dante did.