Literarily speaking, what might be derived from the notion of a being composed of other beings, a bird, say, made up of birds? Thus formulated, the problem appears to allow for merely trivial, if not actively unpleasant, solutions. One might suppose its possibilities to have been exhausted by the multiply feathered, eyed, tongued, and eared "monstrum horrendum ingens" [vast horrible monster] that personifies Fame (or Scandal or Rumor) in Book IV of the Aeneid, or that strange king made of men who occupies the frontispiece of the Leviathan, armed with sword and staff. Francis Bacon (Essays, 1625) praised the first of these images; Chaucer and Shakespeare imitated it; no one, today, considers it any better than the "beast Acheron" who, according to the fifty-odd manuscripts of the Visio Tundali, stores sinners in the roundness of its belly, where they are tormented by dogs, bears, lions, wolves, and vipers.
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The first is in Canto XVIII of the Paradiso. In his journey through the concentric heavens, Dante observes a greater happiness in Beatrice's eyes and greater power in her beauty, and realizes that they ahve ascended from the ruddy heaven of Mars to the heaven of Jupiter. In the broader arc of this sphere, where the light is white, celestial creatures sing and fy, successively forming the letters of the phrase DILIGITE IUSTITIAM and the shape of an eagle's head, not copied from earthly eagles, of course, but directly manufactured by the Spirit. Then the whole of the eagle shines forth: it is composed of thousands of just kings. An unmistakable symbol of Empire, it speaks with a single voice, and says "I" rather than "we" (Paradiso XIX 11). An ancient problem vexed Dante's conscience: Is it not unjust of God to damn, for lack of faith, a man of exemplary life who was born on the bank of the Indus and could know nothing of Jesus? The Eagle answers with the obscurity appropriate to a divine revelation: it censures such foolhardy questioning, repeats that faith in the Redeemer is indispensable, and suggests that God may hae instilled this faith in certain virtuos pagans. It avers that among the blessed are the Emperor Trajan and Ripheus the Trojan, the former having lived just after and the latter before the cross. (Though resplentdent in the fourteenth century, the Eagle's appearance is less effective in the twentieth, which generally reserves glowing eagles and tall, fiery letters for commercial propoganda. CF. Chesterton, What I Saw in America, 1922.)