‘Paradiso’: Face to Face with God
A review of ‘Paradiso’, by Dante Alighieri; c.1320.
Paradiso picks up where Purgatorio left off. Dante’s pilgrim has drunk from the rivers of Lethe to forget his sins and Eunoe to strengthen his virtues. This cleansing readies him to ascend from the edenic Earthly Paradise at the summit of the Seven-Storey Mountain to the celestial realms. Beatrice has now replaced Virgil, symbolising the transition from human reason to divine revelation. And as they rise, drawn upwards by grace instead of effort, they encounter a luminous, harmonious scene. The pilgrim, tested in Inferno and forced to climb in Purgatorio registers at once a change in his being. His senses are sharpened, his soul lightened. And he can gaze upon celestial light without flinching.
The nine spheres through which he passes each stand for a celestial order. On the Moon, he encounters souls who broke their vows. On Venus, he meets souls who were devoted to love. On the Sun, he meets the wise: theologians and scholars like St. Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure; they wax poetic on godly wisdom and the harmony of faith and reason. Then come the just rulers, the mystics, the saints and the angels. And only in the Empyrean, the final realm, which lies outside of time, does he come face to face with that which he sought at the start.
Thus Dante maps poetically what cannot be mapped: the experience of the divine. Paradiso is an attempt—a bold attempt—to articulate what cannot be articulated. Divine grace, eternal joy, what is loosely called the transcendent—these are the kinds of things that lie beyond language and the understanding of reason. They cannot be conceptualised or pinned down, cannot be grasped by thought alone. Rather, they must be experienced. One cannot describe a sunset to one who has always been blind, or Bach’s B Minor Mass to one who has always been deaf.
Dante maps poetically what cannot be mapped: the experience of the divine.
And Dante knows this. He knows he is attempting the impossible. He reminds us repeatedly that his language falters, that his descriptions pale before the realities he glimpses. Paradiso is less about explaining and more about pointing us towards that experience, about awakening us to a sense of wonder and longing. (Zen, as the saying tells us, is a finger pointing at the Moon, but not the Moon itself.) Thus Paradiso grapples with the limitations of our perception: ‘Trasumanar significar per verba / non si poria; però l’essemplo basti / a cui esperienza grazia serba.’ (‘Transhumanising cannot be signified in words; / let the example suffice / for those whom grace has reserved for experience.’) The closer Dante’s pilgrim gets to God, the less his intellect can make sense of what is happening. His longing pulls him forward.
Yet love and knowledge are not in opposition. Beatrice, Dante’s muse, embodies love yet makes theological claims. The light that is the ruling metaphor of Paradiso stands not just for revelation, as in ‘enlightenment’ or ‘illumination’, but for mystery, as in the case of light that blinds. This light grows brighter and stronger as the canticle unfolds. The souls who are closest to God, who live most in accordance with His will, shine brightest. But we are not exhorted to accept this will unquestionably. Dante’s pilgrim grapples with the fate of virtuous pagans like Virgil, asking how God, if He is just, could deny salvation to those who could not know of Christ. The eagle of divine justice responds that God’s justice is perfect and inscrutable. What comes next, in Canto XIX, is radical in its implications:
‘Che non conosce Cristo, né sua fede,
i tal sono tra’ cristiani più vicini
a Cristo, in giudizio che si vede.’
Translated:
‘But see: many who cry ‘Christ, Christ’
will be far less near Him on the Judgment Day
than those who do not know of Christ.’
Dante claims here that at the Judgement Day there will be many Christians who will be further from Him than those who do not ‘know Christ’. In other words, there will be damned Christians whose fates are worse than those of the virtuous pagans. But there is another possibility: that pagans may yet be saved, despite having no knowledge of Christ. Their faith is implicit in their actions. They live as if they were believers.
What makes Paradiso and the Commedia as a whole so powerful and so engaging is the way that Dante bridges the universal and the personal. He puts an avatar of himself, ‘the pilgrim’ in the story, so that Paradiso, which reads at times like a dense theological treatise, is a deeply intimate quest in which a soul struggles to relate an experience of growing profundity that, ultimately, cannot be expressed in words. His words are charged with awe and doubt, imbuing the theology with an urgency and vitality. Persons like St. Bernard of Clairvaux ground the abstract in the human and concrete.
Pagans may yet be saved, despite having no knowledge of Christ.
The interplay of light, music and movement, all of it taking place in the setting of the Aristotelian cosmos, issues in a dreamlike atmosphere and a sensory tapestry that even to the reader evokes the sublime. Dante’s pilgrim proceeds in wonder and confusion, finally surrendering to the will of God and so undergoing the transformation that can only follow surrender. He must abandon the pride that drives him to seek out answers and to understand. Only then can he truly understand, in a moment of intense mystical clarity.
It almost goes without saying that Paradiso is the most remote of the three canticles, for it deals with theology and symbol, much of it drawn from medieval scholasticism. It was chiefly due to Paradiso that the Commedia was called by the Italian poet and critic Benedetto Croce ‘the Summa in verse’, that is, the poetic counterpart to Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, a systematic theological work that aimed to summarise and reconcile all major parts of Christian doctrine and philosophy. It is telling that after a mystical vision that took place at Mass on 6th December, 1273, Aquinas abandoned his masterpiece, declaring that all of the 1.8 million words he had written, all of the 4,000 pages, was ‘straw’ compared to what that experience revealed to him.
Paradiso is an exercise in evoking, hunting, awakening, suggesting, signposting: pointing towards something that cannot be expressed in the hope that the reader might take up the quest to reach that something herself. I will leave you with Eliot, who, in the ‘East Coker’ section of his Four Quartets, explored this same paradox, that the path to the divine entails the surrender of pride, of certainty and of attachment to knowledge and worldly things:
‘To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.’
The reward for such an undertaking is an encounter with what, in those imperishable final lines, Dante calls: ‘The Love that moves the sun and the other stars.’
