After the warning of spiritual distortions, Dante continues with an image of how it should be, when the distortions are removed and the will and being are aligned:
non v’accorgete voi che noi siam vermi
nati a formar l’angelica farfalla,
che vola a la giustizia sanza schermi?
Meaning: “Does it not occur to you that we are worms, born to form into the angelic butterfly, who flies towards the Justice without shields?”
Intuitive interpretation: Dante addresses the internal impulse for spiritual distortions, control and containment – pointing to how one internally is meant to transform into a spiritually free and ascending being, that flies towards Justice without any shields, in the sense of imposed constructs of “walls”, delineations, “capturings” of one’s own making. Partly playing on the David as dancing theme; the receiving and responsive nature of much of the spiritual life, whilst learning and ascending.
The Justice aspect is harder to decipher at this stage – but it will be explained later in Sphere Six of Paradiso: Divine Justice in part as one finding one’s own mission as part of a much larger and cosmic force of Virtue, the Good, the maintenance of the health of Being itself. This comes much later on the spiritual path, but is still a part of the overall process over years and decades towards the “butterfly”.
So in short; Dante outlines the real outline for one’s inner Journey – from opening/beginnings, to growing ascent, to eventually finding one’s own being as an essential part of the infinite forces and nature of Being.
And now,
we well run the method for the more rational-analytic approach. This could be read either just for skimming, or for deeper study. It mostly maps – perhaps with the exception of seeing the “schermi” as a natural part of being built during the process. This is likely not Dante’s intention; the schermi is the overreach – analyzing and processing the spiritual is good (and essential) for learning, but for adding insights, not for building an outer “shield” of containment. The result section however, is stunning in its conclusions.
So here it is – the 4 tools and the 3 example levels of the Reader’s interior state.
Literal function: Dante the Writer breaks the narrative frame to address the reader directly, inserting a rhetorical question that functions as both rebuke and revelation. Coming immediately after the warning about sick-minded Christians trusting backwards steps, he now gives the positive counter-image: you are not a finished thing going wrong, you are an unfinished thing in process. The worm-cocoon-butterfly image does three things at once: it names the current state (worm), it names the purpose (angelic butterfly), and it names the condition of arrival (without screens). It is not a metaphor decorating a point but a compressed map of the entire journey placed at the exact moment when the first distortions are being crushed.
Sequential position: The three carvings have just established the spiritual foundation (Gabriel’s outreach, the Ark’s steady motion, the Trajan-Gregory secular-spiritual dynamic). The Pilgrim has delighted in their beauty. Then the purgative process arrived, was initially unrecognizable, and Virgil explained how the heavy condition crushes the distortions to earth and how each one strikes itself. The stern warning followed about Christians whose sick mental vision leads them to trust backwards steps. So the spiritual life has been opened, its beauty appreciated, its corrective process begun, its dangers identified. And precisely HERE Dante places the positive vision of what all of this is FOR. The crushing is not destruction. It is cocoon-breaking. The backwards steps are not just wrong, they are a betrayal of what you actually are and are becoming.
Teleological direction: Everything serves the soul’s journey to God. The “angelica farfalla” is thus not merely a poetic image of moral improvement but the actual telos: the soul transformed into its intended nature, capable of flying directly to justice (the right ordering of Reality, the proper alignment with God) without any screens, barriers, self-constructed frameworks, or distorted perceptions between itself and the Divine. The “sanza schermi” is the Empyrean state in embryo. The whole of Paradiso’s teaching about receptivity, about the soul as pure threshold, about “fassi di raggio tutta sua parvenza,” is compressed into these two words. And the “nati a formar” insists that this is not optional aspiration but ontological purpose. You were born for this. The worm stage is not your identity. It is your chrysalis.
Biographical confirmation: Dante in his years of secular philosophy experienced exactly the cocoon. The frameworks of Aristotle, the Roman pagan epics, the Greek mythology applied as total cosmology, these were the self-produced wrapping that seemed to contain and define him. The breaking out, around 1306-1308 with the Malaspina, was the butterfly tearing through its own constructs. And the “sanza schermi” matches his mature conviction that the Comedy itself must fly without doctrinal shields, without the protective coverings of purely philosophical systems, directly toward the justice and truth of fuller Reality. He experienced the cocoon from inside, and he knows the flight requires leaving every screen behind.
Reader variable:
First encounter: What a beautiful image. We are not finished. We are worms becoming butterflies. I should not despair about my current state or trust my old habits. There is something I am becoming, and the struggles of this terrace are part of the transformation.
Years of practice: I recognize the cocoon now. Those years when the spiritual life felt enclosed, when the frameworks I built around myself seemed both necessary and suffocating, they were not wasted. They were the dissolving. And the screens I am still carrying, the ones I barely notice because they feel like “me,” those are what must go before the flight can happen. The butterfly does not fly with a thinner cocoon. It flies with none.
Post-Paradiso perception: This tercet is the entire Comedy in three lines. The worm is consciousness in the dark forest. The cocoon is the self-constructed “schermi” that Purgatorio systematically strips away. The butterfly is the soul in the Empyrean, whose whole appearance is made of received ray, flying to justice without screens because the screens were never part of its nature but only part of its becoming. And the “nati a formar” reveals that the outpouring itself, the eternal Love opening into new loves, always intended this: free creatures who would tear through their own coverings and fly, unshielded, directly into the justice that sustains all of Reality. The worm was always the butterfly. It just had not finished forming yet.
Result: The method produces a meaning that deepens from “we are in process toward something beautiful” through “the self-made enclosures of my spiritual journey were necessary stages that must now be torn away” to “the entire architecture of Reality exists so that creatures born as worms can form themselves into beings capable of unshielded participation in the Divine justice that holds all things together, and every screen removed is a step closer to the state where the soul’s whole being is nothing but received light in flight.”
The biographical reading here is particularly compelling – Dante’s years immersed in pagan philosophy functioning as the necessary chrysalis that must be left behind resonates deeply with the medieval contemplative tradition’s distinction between lectio as scaffolding and contemplatio as direct vision. The “sanza schermi” anticipates Bernard’s insistence in De Diligendo Deo that the highest degree of love operates without mediation, where the soul knows God as immediately as it knows itself. What strikes me most forcefully is how this tercet’s placement – precisely after the warning against spiritual regression – mirrors the structure of Hugh of St. Victor’s De Sacramentis, where the image of restoration always follows and answers the analysis of fallen distortion.
What a breathtaking vision of transformation Dante gives us here! The idea that we’re not finished beings going wrong, but unfinished beings in process completely reframes how we understand spiritual struggle. I’m especially moved by how the “sanza schermi” evolves from simply removing barriers to that stunning final insight about becoming beings capable of unshielded participation in Divine justice itself. The progression from worm to butterfly isn’t just personal growth—it’s our very purpose woven into the architecture of Reality!
The architectural elegance here is remarkable—how the metamorphosis framework maps perfectly onto a three-stage system where each phase serves a specific structural function. I’m particularly struck by the “sanza schermi” concept as a removal of load-bearing elements that turn out to be scaffolding rather than structure; what we think defines us is actually just temporary infrastructure for the transformation. The sequential positioning you’ve identified suggests this isn’t arbitrary placement but rather a load distribution point—right after identifying the problem (distortions), you need to establish the design intent before the system can properly self-correct.
The image of tearing through our own self-constructed screens to reach what we were always meant to become… this strikes at the heart of our deepest struggle, no? We build these frameworks thinking they protect us, when perhaps they only delay the flight toward our true nature. What courage it requires to recognize that the cocoon we carefully wove around ourselves – our philosophies, our certainties, our comfortable containments – must be completely abandoned, not merely thinned, before we can approach giustizia without barriers.