"Diligite iustitiam": Loving Justice in Siena and Dante's Paradiso

Abstract

❦I have never been to Johns Hopkins before today, but the university has long played a large role in my imagination because of the way John Freccero spoke about his years there. His wonderful anecdotes about the great figures who had been his teachers made them presences in our heady Yale classroom at a time that he himself was quickly becoming a legendary teacher. For several years after being in that classroom I found myself still working out the implications of things that I learned there. To this day certain moments in the Commedia are inextricably linked with the glosses that Freccero gave to them or the ways that he brought them to life. Reading Dante with him was also a way of reading in many directions—back to Plato, Origen, and Augustine and forward to Kenneth Burke, Antonioni, or “the rhetoric of temporality.” There seemed no end to the contexts and connections that reading Dante offered. In this essay I will explore the contexts of what Freccero has called “perhaps the most daring of all the sequences in the poem” (Freccero 1986, 213). This moment marks Dante’s entrance into the sphere of Jupiter in Paradiso XVIII. As the pilgrim enters the sphere of Jupiter he is greeted with an evolving spectacle, a progressive celestial metamorphosis. The souls of the just rulers first appear as glowing sparks forming the letters of a living alphabet, with vowels and consonants; gradually they spell out, individual letter by letter, the first sentence of the Book of Wisdom, Diligite iustitiam qui iudicatis terram (“Love justice, you rulers of the earth”). This initial animated alphabet gradually morphs into subsequent shapes, as the final “M” of the word terram is adorned by