s only partly revealed, for soon the Eagle speaks and its
voice, though made up of a thousand voices of the Just, comes forth a
single sound, like a single heat that comes from many brands or the one
odor that is exhaled from many flowers.

What a startling spectacle it must have been to the mind of the
thirteenth century, used to candles as the ordinary means of
illumination, to have visualized before it the blessed spirits in the
light of Heaven, dancing, whirling, circling in perfect harmony and
making more formal designs to express their bliss by the rapidity of
their rhythmical movements! Even though exquisitely quaint as the
picture may appear to us, it has been executed so reverently that
criticism has rarely if ever attacked this conception of our poet. With
light as his principal material to make known to us the joys of Heaven,
he has to paint everything in high light, using no shadows and he solves
his artistic problem by the variety of his "splendors" and by the deep
symbolism of their action. His nine Heavens are not meant to be a
picture true to reality of what the Souls in Heaven are doing. These
nine Heavens, as we said before, are only myths to which from the
Empyrean come forth the Elect in condescension to Dante's sense-bound
faculties, in order to symbolize certain truths. So in this sixth sphere
the poet would teach us that the Heaven of Jupiter represents justice on
earth and on the screen of this sphere he would put forth by means of
the Imperial Eagle the arguments he has already advanced in his
Monarchia that the Roman Empire is divine in its origin--that only from
such an institution can human justice proceed from civil government. He
represents unity coming from the Roman Empire by his showing to us the
unison with which all the splendors of the Eagle speak in a voice
blended as one sound--clearly also an allegory for the Guelf forces to
become an integral part of the Universal Monarchy.

Justice is the quality which this Heaven symbolizes and the Eagle reads
in Dante's mind a doubt against the operation of justice and proceeds to
dispel it.

"For saidst thou: 'Born a man is on the shore
Of Indus, and is none who there can speak
Of Christ, nor who can read, nor who can write;
And all his inclinations and his actions
Are good, so far as human reason sees,
Without a sin in life or in discourse:
He dieth unbaptized and without faith;
Where is this justice that condemneth him?