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Canto 18
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 admires the gleaming eagle, in which individual souls shine forth like rubies. The eagle’s beak opens, and it begins to speak, affirming that even those who behave unjustly on earth retain the memory of heavenly justice. This emboldens Dante to ask a question that’s been bothering him for a long time. Already perceiving Dante’s question before he asks it, the eagle answers that human nature cannot even perceive the profound depths of God’s justice.
The eagle speaks as the collective voice of just figures across history. The eagle’s utterances express much of Dante’s argument about the awareness of earthly injustice in Heaven and heavenly justice on earth. Heavenly justice is so powerful that even unjust rulers cannot claim to be totally ignorant of it; yet it’s also so inscrutable that no human being should claim to be able to understand it perfectly.
Themes
The eagle gets to the heart of Dante’s concern—what about the souls of people born in faraway lands, who never have the opportunity to learn of Christ? How can such a soul be held responsible for unbelief and condemned to Hell, despite having lived a faultless life? The eagle retorts that human beings are foolish to presume to judge such things with their limited understanding. After taking flight with a brief song that Dante cannot understand, the eagle continues, saying that there is no one in Heaven who does not believe in Christ. Yet there are plenty in Hell who will claim to have known Christ, yet will be judged to have been further away from Christ than those who never heard of him.
One of Dante’s recurring questions throughout The Divine Comedy is the fate of souls, like his earlier mentor Virgil, who were assigned to hell on the basis of not being Christian, despite having led just lives. The eagle describes God’s justice as being embedded in human nature (hence outcry over injustice) even though it surpasses human ability to understand. Accordingly, the eagle does not specifically answer Dante’s question. Yet it also condemns the hypocrisy of many Christian rulers, who will suffer a harsher fate in Hell than many non-Christians.
Themes
The eagle goes on to condemn the deeds of supposedly Christian kings across Europe. As he lists the corrupt kings of various lands, his words form an acrostic poem spelling out “POX.”
As the eagle catalogues the corrupt rulers of various countries, the first letters of each stanza spell out the Italian word for “pestilence” or “pox.” This suggests that injustice and corruption spread across the whole world like a plague; it’s native to humanity and impossible to escape in this world, even within Christian realms.
Themes
