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Canto 16
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Paradiso, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Earthly and Heavenly Justice
Creation and God’s Providence
God’s Character and Will
Vision, Knowledge, and the Pursuit of God
Language and the Ineffable
Summary
Analysis
Dante longs to ask Cacciaguida a question, and Beatrice urges him to speak freely. Dante explains that, during his journey through Hell and Purgatory, Virgil often spoke obscurely of Dante’s troubled future. Therefore Dante begs Cacciaguida to speak plainly to him of what will happen.
The Divine Comedy is set during the week of Easter, 1300, but the work was actually written more than a decade later. Dante will use his characters to “prophesy” his future, thereby allowing him to provide a self-defense for the events surrounding his political exile. It’s fitting that his own ancestor will speak to him of his earthly fate.
Themes
Cacciaguida explains that, in Heaven, souls are able to glimpse possible futures, though this does not mean that the things seen will infallibly happen. Nevertheless, Cacciaguida warns that Dante will be forced to leave Florence and go into exile. The worst of exile will be that Dante will be forced to keep unsavory company. Eventually, though, this party’s wickedness will turn back on them. In the meantime, Dante should seek refuge with a certain Lombard of good character.
Dante was exiled from Florence in 1302 because of his affiliation with a sub-faction called the White Guelphs after Pope Boniface VIII occupied the city; the White Guelphs tended to be less favorable to papal interference in politics (a position that’s readily detected throughout Dante’s work). Cacciaguida further predicts that the White Guelphs will bring about their own ruin (thus justifying Dante’s failure to rejoin them) and that Dante will find refuge in the court of the Della Scala family in Verona.
Themes
Hearing this, Dante worries that, if he writes about what he’s learned of Florence’s evils during his journey through the afterlife, he will find himself in greater disfavor—yet he doesn’t want to “prove a timid friend to truth.” Cacciaguida encourages Dante to write boldly of what he knows and leave the rest to individuals’ consciences. Ultimately, he’s doing their souls good, and in the end, Dante himself will gain fame from what he writes.
Cacciaguida’s encouragement to Dante to write serves as justification for Dante’s many scathing criticisms of Florentines and other Italians in his day. Dante portrays himself as shrinking from this responsibility at first, while Cacciaguida suggests that Dante will actually be doing his targets a spiritual favor by writing The Divine Comedy.
Themes
