Paradiso: The Second Sphere, Mercury

Beatrice begins the canto by explaining how souls get distracted from their true purpose -- it's not that they fail to pursue the good, for all do, but that they sometimes pursue the wrong good and think it right. The soul has the free will to pursue whatever good it likes, of course, up to the point where it makes a pact with God signing away its will to God's purposes in exchange for eternal orientation toward the divine, which is what all priests and religious do explicitly. A vow has two parts, the form and the content, and while the form cannot be changed, the content can be, provided it has first been approved by a Church authority. It is in this way that a person can set aside a vow and still compensate for it -- the vow of orientation toward God must be kept even if the method by which one orients oneself must change. Evil vows, because they are by nature a turning away from God, are not binding, and it is better for the soul to refute them than to enact them.



At the conclusion of Beatrice's explanation, we meet the souls of Mercury, those who sought personal honour in the good they did on earth, something that Aristotle claims "seems too superficial to be what we are looking for, since it is thought to depend on those who bestow honour rather than on him who receives it." Like St. Stephen of Mar Saba, we might best accept the honour of others without seeking it, for honour cannot be an end in and of itself so it does no good to waste our energies pursuing it. Here, however, we might find Dante at home, which is to say, after he concludes his purgatorial sojourn on the first cornice, he may find himself flying directly to this sphere if he doesn't get assigned to the sphere of the moon for his inconstancy toward Beatrice for which she chided him in the terrestrial paradise. Regardless of his ultimate eternal placement, as we learned in the previous canto, all souls who have achieved heaven dance in the light of the empyrean even if they are manifested in these lower spheres. The mercurial souls see their interaction with Dante as something that will increase their love, not because the love they already share is imperfect, but because adding a candle's light to that of another will always make the whole glow more brightly. Note how the contrapasso continues in heaven -- as we saw in the first sphere, one's state of being in life persists beyond it.

S.