Principalities

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The Principalities constitute, in Dante's ordering in Paradiso XXVIII, the second choir of the second angelic ternary, placed between Dominations and Virtues. They bloom eternally, never fading, and raise a song of Hosanna to God which, for its continuous sweetness, is compared by Dante to the perpetual resounding of a chorus of birds greeting the spring. Beatrice indicates the three choirs of the ternary with the words «Principati, Virtudi, Podestadi», an order which Dante explicitly declares he learned from the pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, who contemplated the celestial hierarchies with such fervor as to assign them the names and the subdivision reported. The Principalities dance and turn like the other choirs in the Crystalline Heaven, where Beatrice points out to Dante the angelic hierarchies and the ternaries that compose them.