Welcome to Dante Read-Along! ✨

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Welcome to Dante Book Club, where you and I descend into Hell and Purgatory to be able to ascend to Paradise. Our guide in Paradise is Beatrice, and in this thirty third and final canto of the Paradiso, and of the entire Commedia, Dante looks up into the Light of God and attains the final vision. You can find the main page of the read-along right here, reading schedule here, and the list of chat threads here.

In each post you can find a brief summary of the canto, philosophical exercises that you can draw from it, themes, character, and symbolism explanations.

All the wonderful illustrations are done specially for the Dante Read-Along by the one and only Luana Montebello.

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This Week’s Circle ⭕️

The Empyrean Realm - Bernard’s heartfelt prayer to the Virgin Mary on Dante’s behalf - Dante turns his gaze upward to the Light that is God - The final exalted vision - The Trinity within the Light - The perfection of understanding - His desire and will, becoming perfect, are one with the Love that moves the stars.

Canto XXXIII Summary:

St. Bernard opened with the supplication of the Virgin Mary, first praising her, and then exalting her position as the intercessor for the final vision of God.

He used many names to qualify her attributes; the contradictory but miraculous concept of being both Virgin and Mother, daughter of her own Son, chosen for her humble and exalted role from the recesses of eternity. Through her the eternal peace of heaven became knowable to humanity, and the celestial Rose could bloom.

Bernard’s adoration for Mary was expressed in ever deeper ways through this prayer as he likened her to the radiance of the noon sun to those in the heavenly realms and as a spring of hope for those on earth. Bernard recognized the necessity of her intercession, without which humanity would not be able to fulfill its own longing for God:

Not only was she intercessor for those who asked, but even also for those who needed her aid yet had not, or perhaps could not, ask for themselves, as she had for Dante, becoming the impetus for Dante’s entire pilgrimage at the outset of the Inferno. Bernard praised her as being the one in whom all virtues were found.

After this opening praise, Bernard shifted the nature of his prayer to the role taken by Dante during his journey from the very depths of Hell to that most exalted height, asking for her grace for his final vision as he prepared to raise his eyes and lift his gaze:

This man—who from the deepest hollow in
the universe, up to this height, has seen
the lives of spirits, one by one—now pleads

with you, through grace, to grant him so much virtue
that he may lift his vision higher still—
may lift it toward the ultimate salvation.
xxxiii.22-27

Bernard prayed more fervently for Dante’s vision than he had ever prayed for his own, asking that the remaining mists of mortality before Dante’s eyes would clear, and that his eyes be made ready for that final brightness.

In closing this revered address, Bernard also asked Mary to grant that Dante could maintain the purity of his passions once he returned home from this pilgrimage. Bernard pointed to Beatrice—her final mention in the poem—and the surrounding blessed in their seats in the Rose, who were joining him in his prayer.

During Bernard’s prayer, Mary gazed upon him with a look that expressed her joy at his adoration before turning her eyes upward.

The eyes that are revered and loved by God,
now fixed upon the supplicant, showed us
how welcome such devotions are to her;

then her eyes turned to the Eternal Light—
there, do not think that any creature’s eye
can find its way as clearly as her sight.
xxxiii.40-45

Dante brought to the very limit the maximum intensity of love that he, in a living human body, could extend, and before Bernard could signal him to look up, Dante had already lifted his eyes, for his sight indeed had been so purified that it could sustain that greatest light of all lights, the source of all light, of which all other light is only a reflection; the vision could now expand into its fullest manifestation before his faculties of reception.

Dante’s upward gaze was the turning point between the description of the events around him and his own experience of the highest vision, and the line marking his solitary experience of the One, a state which would remain through the end of the poem. As he tried to write, after the experience of it first hand, his words failed to create the fullest expression of it. Perhaps they seemed a failure to him when compared to his own first hand knowledge of it, but to us, he has brought that sublimity to life in a thousand ways. Dante blended his present writing of the vision with the experience of the vision itself, circling both times into one eternity, with which the poem will end.

The effort of remembrance was as a dreamer attempting to recall a dream, the feelings stronger than the exact progression of events and images. The images faded like marks in the snow under the heat of the sun, or in a final nod to Virgil in these last moments, like the leaves on which were written the prophecies of the Cumaean Sybil, that oracle who directed Aeneas’ journey in the Underworld:

No longer needing to invoke the Muses or Apollo, or to make request of Beatrice, Dante now made an invocation to God Himself for aid as he attempted to describe in words that highest vision of light:

O Highest Light, You, raised so far above
the minds of mortals, to my memory
give back something of Your epiphany,

and make my tongue so powerful that I
may leave to people of the future one
gleam of the glory that is Yours, for by

returning somewhat to my memory
and echoing awhile within these lines,
your victory will be more understood.
xxxiii.67-75

Dante basked in the living Light, which was so strong that gazing upon it was a motion that he had to sustain with effort; holding the intensity through til the end of the final vision.

Dante cried out in praise of the grace that let him see this highest Light; his gaze brought his vision penetrating deeper and deeper into the interpretation of what it was, understanding more layers of the vision as it grew to fullness.

He saw in that essence of Light everything that existed in the material and spiritual universes bound together as though pages in the book; the mind of God contained all, both the center and the circumference of all being. All things were contained within that Light, and all the separate parts that the philosophers tried, in so many words, to distinguish—substances and accidents—one from the other, Dante experienced in their wholeness, and in their unity there was no distinguishing their separate characteristics.

In its profundity I saw—ingathered
and bound by love into one single volume—
what, in the universe, seems separate, scattered:

substances, accidents, and dispositions
as if conjoined—in such a way that what
I tell is only rudimentary.
xxxiii.85-90

Dante knew that his understanding of the nature of this Light, made of those elements that were so bound together that they were unknowable by the normal, mortal self—a fusion of temporal and eternal things—was true, for the sense of joy that bloomed within him was the tangible result.

Yet in recalling it to write it, he grasped the edges of his memory to find more specifics, more distinctions, but they slipped away. How else could you comprehend such depths except by the actual experience?

And yet once he was not longer experiencing this vision, but trying to write of it, it seemed to fall further into oblivion than something that had occurred millennia ago; the ship of Jason and the Argonauts was 2500 years behind him in his calculation, and could be remembered better than this vision was. The Argo was the first ship ever built, and Neptune’s surprise came as it crossed his waters and cast a shadow as it set out on its journey for the Golden Fleece.

Dante’s mind and heart were one-pointed, single-minded, and sustained in pure concentration; he explained the state of one who could thus turn their vision completely to God and become absorbed in it, resting in it.

Whoever sees that Light is soon made such
that it would be impossible for him
to set that Light aside for other sight;

because the good, the object of the will,
is fully gathered in that Light; outside
that Light, what there is perfect is defective.
xxxiii.100-105

He explained the next part of the vision, of which words were but meek and helpless things, like an infant at the breast. The One that was before him was still only that One, contained within its own unity, but as Dante’s vision penetrated deeper into the Light what he saw there began to change; the image resolved itself into three circles—a mystic vision of the Trinity.

These three revolving circles had a dynamic interplay, the Son reflecting off of the Father, and the Holy Ghost a fire emanating from both. The words to describe this scene more fully almost slipped away from Dante. Again he praised the sight.

The circling of the Son, that which had been conceived and embodied on earth, seemed to develop within itself an image of the figure of a man; Dante gazed at this sight, examining it, pushing his understanding to the limits of possibility, yet still unable to comprehend how the image was even possible, or even to know what element he was missing that would help him to understand what he saw. He examined it with the same attention to detail and form as the mathematician, measuring and defining, and yet unable to come to a conclusion, just as the geometricians of antiquity could not square the circle.

This mystery was not for him to know on his own; in a flash of mystical consciousness, it was given him to know the answers to all desire in a moment. His mind was uplifted to a true revelation, and more than just that, he was being given the same sight and understanding that was given to all the host of heaven. As a living man, he saw the union of flesh and God that embodied Christ.

I wished to see
the way in which our human effigy
suited the circle and found place in it—

and my own wings were far too weak for that.
But then my mind was struck by light that flashed
and, with this light, received what it had asked.
xxxiii.137-141

And that, faithful friends and fellow pilgrims, was as far as his journey upward into Paradiso could extend; but “as far as” hardly indicated a lack: he had reached fulfillment, the end of all desire. His final sight was lifted up to the comprehension of the mystery of the Trinity.

His exalted vision could express no more, and now he could rest in the fulfillment of that moment, of that exalted moment, in which his desire and will circled in as perfect accord as those spheres that he gazed upon, moved by Love, in perfect harmony, the Love that moved all the ordered universe to work together for Good.

Thus, was all of his experience resolved into the perfection of the unity of Love.

Thus, was his journey complete.

💭 Philosophical Exercises

Dear friends,

Before we say anything else, I want to begin with a quiet but striking convergence of time.

There have been many coincidences along this journey. Dante tells us that he crosses a decisive threshold in his ascent on Good Friday. And, without planning it, our own read-along crossed that same threshold on Good Friday as well: we read the canto in which Dante passes beyond that boundary on the very day the poem assigns to it. The liturgical moment and the narrative moment coincided.

The year 2025, through which we have been reading Dante, carries a further, subtler echo: the stars in the sky stand in positions strikingly similar to those under which Dante himself began his journey and started to write the Divine Comedy. And there is also a more personal coincidence, one I noticed only gradually. Dante begins his journey at the age of thirty-five, the midpoint of a human life, and this is the age I am living through now as well.

And now, without any planning at all, almost accidentally, our journey comes to an end on a sacred day, Christmas.

These coincidences do not prove anything. But they create a sense of measure and rightness, as if the journey unfolded according to an inner rhythm rather than a schedule, as if time itself were cooperating.

And now, dear friends, Lisa and I are almost crying, because our journey through Dante’s Divine Comedy has truly come to an end.

Before we dive into the final scene and explore its meaning, I want to thank you sincerely for your patience, for your dedication, for your attention throughout this long and demanding journey. I am trying to articulate my thoughts about how profoundly transformative this year has been for me in a separate post. And if I find the strength and clarity to explain how deeply this journey has changed me spiritually, philosophically, and mentally, I will write you a separate letter very soon.

In some sense, I feel a little like Dante himself at the end of this poem.

I know what I have experienced. I know that I have been transformed. And yet I also know how difficult it is to explain that transformation, to put into words what has happened inwardly.

I.

In this final canto, Dante struggles with exactly the same problem. He knows that something decisive has taken place. He knows that his vision has changed him forever. And yet language fails him. Words fall short. Memory fades. Expression becomes inadequate.

I feel something very similar.

I know that the transformation is enormous. I know that I want to look at life differently now, with a different orientation of desire and will. And yet, to explain to another person what exactly has changed feels almost impossible.

Perhaps the only thing one can truly say is this: everything makes sense. Not in a simplistic way, not as a set of answers, but as a deep coherence, as if life, suffering, love, time, and destiny suddenly belong together.

Before we move further into the canto itself, I want to draw my reader’s attention to something essential: the idea of measure and symmetry.

As you already know, Dante’s Divine Comedy is constructed with extraordinary precision. The poem consists of one hundred cantos. Inferno, as an exception, contains thirty-four, while Purgatorio and Paradiso contain thirty-three each. The structure is therefore one, thirty-three, thirty-three, thirty-three. What appears at first as a technical detail slowly reveals itself as a vision of order, as if the entire journey were held inside a single, intelligible proportion.

What is remarkable is that this same sense of symmetry governs the final canto itself.

Paradiso XXXIII consists of one hundred and forty-five lines. The first forty-six lines are devoted entirely to Saint Bernard’s prayer to the Virgin. This prayer functions as an introduction, in the same way that the first canto of the entire Divine Comedy functions as an introduction to the poem as a whole. And just as that initial introduction explains why Inferno has thirty-four cantos, this final canto, too, begins with a deliberate opening movement before the vision unfolds.

After this introductory prayer, Dante structures the remainder of the canto into three circular waves, three revolving movements in which the same inner pattern is repeated again and again.

Each of these waves follows the same sequence.

First, we have plot moments, narrated in the past tense. Dante tells us what happened, how his gaze intensified, how his vision advanced.

Then comes collapse. Dante insists that speech and memory cannot match what he experienced. Language fails. Memory dissolves. Expression becomes inadequate.

And finally, each wave ends with an apostrophe, or rather, a prayer. Dante turns toward God, or toward the Light itself, begging for the strength to say even a little of what he has seen.

So what we receive is a perfectly ordered structure: an introductory prayer, followed by three circular movements, each composed of three inner gestures. The canto itself mirrors the order it seeks to describe.

The opening prayer confronts us immediately with the paradoxes of faith: the Virgin who is also a mother, the mother who gives birth to the one who becomes her father. These are not puzzles to be solved, but mysteries to be held.

And this is why the symmetry does not end with mathematics or poetic architecture.

If we pay close attention, we begin to see that the last canto mirrors the first.

At the beginning of the Divine Comedy, Dante experiences a complete loss of understanding. He is lost in the dark forest, unable to orient himself. His mind cannot operate properly. The world around him is unintelligible.

And now, at the very end of the poem, something similar happens.

Dante once again finds himself in a state of incomprehension. Even at the summit of his journey, even at the moment of ultimate vision, he cannot fully grasp what is happening to him. The poem does not end with intellectual mastery. It ends with the recognition of limits.

If we return to the three circular movements, we see this clearly.

II.

In the first movement, the problem is Dante’s vision itself. He tells us that he sees things he does not yet understand. His sight advances faster than his comprehension. Perception outruns reason.

But here, the failure is not one of weakness. It is one of excess.

This becomes clear through the simile of Neptune and the Argo.

Neptune, the god of the sea, had ruled waters that had never been crossed by a ship. Nothing like that had ever entered his field of vision. And when the Argo appeared, the first ship to cut through the sea, what Neptune saw was not merely strange, but unbelievable. It was something without precedent.

This is the point of the comparison.

Dante does not say that he cannot see. He does not say that he does not understand. He says that what he saw was unbelievable, in the same way that even a god could not immediately believe his eyes when confronted with something entirely new.

The failure here is not blindness. It is astonishment.

Language fails not because the vision is unclear, but because reality itself has exceeded every available form of expression. Just as Neptune’s astonishment had nothing to do with ignorance, Dante’s struggle has nothing to do with weakness. It is the shock of encountering something for which there is no measure, no analogy, no precedent.

And this is where Dante deepens the description of loss, not of vision, but of memory.

The similes he uses here are among the most beautiful in the entire poem.

To describe what happens to memory after the vision, Dante compares it to snowflakes that melt. What once had form and presence dissolves under warmth. Nothing violent happens. There is no destruction. The memory simply loses its capacity to hold shape.

He then turns to another image: the leaves of the Sibyl, scattered by the wind. These leaves once carried meaning, prophecy, coherence. But once they are lifted and dispersed, they no longer form a message. They exist only as fragments, detached from one another, impossible to gather back into a whole.

This is how Dante describes memory after the vision.

It is not erased. It is scattered.

It is not denied. It is weakened.

Memory loses its ability to retain the strength and beauty of what has been seen. The experience itself was real, overwhelming, transformative, but what remains afterward cannot preserve its intensity. It melts like snow. It disperses like leaves.

And then Dante introduces a final, decisive element.

Beyond vision, beyond memory, there is the question of intellect.

Here, too, a threshold is crossed.

Dante compares this incapacity to understand to the geometer trying to square the circle. It is that peculiar situation in which one feels that the solution is near and yet knows with certainty that it cannot be reached. The mind senses coherence, but cannot articulate it.

At this very threshold, Dante once again finds himself in a state of incomprehension, strikingly similar to the one we encountered in the first canto of the Divine Comedy.

But the difference between these two moments could not be greater.

III.

In the first canto, Dante is lost. He resembles a rock, immobile and heavy, unable to move or orient itself. He does not know where to go. He cannot act.

Here, at the very end of the journey, Dante resembles a bird. He knows how to fly. He knows how to direct himself through the air. The limitation is still present, but its nature has completely changed. He is no longer lost. He is oriented. He is moving, even if he cannot fully comprehend what he sees.

The journey begins and ends in incomprehension, but the quality of that incomprehension is transformed.

And this is where I want to be careful with my words.

What I am trying to explain here is not something Dante explains easily himself. The poet openly acknowledges his struggle. He tells us again and again that there are limits to intellect, to memory, to speech, to vision.

And yet, despite all these limits, something undeniable has taken place.

The transformation has happened.

The experience of this journey, the participation in it, creates a form of understanding that does not rely on explanation alone. I cannot fully describe why this is so. But I can say this with certainty: had I opened the Paradiso and read only its final cantos, ten or even fifteen, without having journeyed through Inferno and Purgatorio, I would not have understood what is happening here.

It becomes clear that the journey itself is the condition of understanding.

One cannot leap directly to the summit. The meaning of the final vision is carried silently by everything that precedes it. A reader who approaches these cantos without having walked the entire path would miss what truly matters, not because the text is obscure, but because the transformation has not yet occurred.

And so, in these final words of our philosophical exercises, I want to say this.

There is still so much to explore. Dante will remain inexhaustible. But I also want to welcome you, my reader, to this moment of completion.

Because I know something, quietly and without drama.

You who began this read-along, and you who are reading these lines now, are not the same person.

Not because of my writing.

But because of Dante’s vision.

Thank you for being with us.

I am about to cry.

Thank you.

This Week’s Sinners and Virtuous 🎭

(Themes, Quotes, Terms and Characters)

I. Mary: Grace cannot be

Grace is not something the intellect comprehends, but something the soul receives. Dante does not arrive at the vision through reasoning or effort alone. Again and again, he interrupts himself with prayer and thanksgiving, acknowledging that even the act of seeing depends entirely on grace.

Marsilio Ficino, in his Platonic Theology, mentions that our soul is like a mirror, and it is by purifying it, and then aligning it properly towards the divine that we can see a true reflection from God.

Quotes 🖋️

(The ones I keep in my journal as reminders of eternal wisdom):

As the geometer intently seeks
to square the circle, but he cannot reach,
through thought on thought, the principle he needs,

so I searched that strange sight: I wished to see
the way in which our human effigy
suited the circle and found place in it—

and my own wings were far too weak for that.
But then my mind was struck by light that flashed
and, with this light, received what it had asked.

Here force failed my high fantasy; but my
desire and will were moved already—like
a wheel revolving uniformly—by

the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.

~ lines 133- 145, Paradiso, Canto XXXIII

Welcome to Dante Read-Along! ✨

(If this post appears truncated in your inbox you can read it on the web by clicking here. )

Welcome to Dante Book Club, where you and I descend into Hell and Purgatory to be able to ascend to Paradise. Our guide in Paradise is Beatrice, and in this thirty second, penultimate Canto, Dante gazes upon the Saints of the Celestial Rose. You can find the main page of the read-along right here, reading schedule here, and the list of chat threads here.

In each post you can find a brief summary of the canto, philosophical exercises that you can draw from it, themes, character, and symbolism explanations.

All the wonderful illustrations are done specially for the Dante Read-Along by the one and only Luana Montebello.

Subscribe now

This Week’s Circle ⭕️

Tenth heaven of the Empyrean - the White Celestial Rose - Mary at the pinnacle - Bernard points out the saints in their thrones on the petals - Predestination and the souls of innocent children - Dante sees more saints - He needs the intercession of Mary - Bernard begins a final prayer.

Canto XXXII Summary:

As Dante and St. Bernard gazed upward at the Queen of Heaven, the Virgin Mary in her seat at the pinnacle of the white Celestial Rose, Bernard began to speak, pointing out the blessed souls who sat in the petals of the Rose.

Directly below Mary sat Eve, whose wound Mary had healed; that wound was the effect of the first sin, Eve yielding to temptation.

Mary and Eve were on the first two tiers of petals, and below Eve sat Rachel, with Beatrice on her left from Dante and Bernard’s point of view in the center of the flower. Dante had seen Rachel, a symbol of contemplation, in his third dream in Purgatory alongside her active sister Leah; her husband was the patriarch Jacob. Virgil had made note of their seats long ago in the second canto of the Inferno.

Bernard continued to name those who occupied each seat, tier by tier; after Rachel came Sarah, whose husband was Abraham and who was the mother of Isaac. Below Sarah was Rebecca, wife of Isaac and mother of the twins Jacob and Esau, then Judith, who had rescued her people when, through bravery and intrigue, she had cut off the head of the Assyrian King Holofernes.

Bernard named the last figure in the tiers, Ruth, the great-grandmother of King David; he had atoned through the poetry of his Psalms for his actions of taking another’s wife and then seeing that the man—Uriah—was killed in battle. Bathsheba became the mother of King Solomon. This row of Hebrew women were all from the time before Christ.

That dividing line between groups indicated those born before Christ on one side, and those born after on the other. The exceptions were Mary, who embodied both A.D. and B.C., and as we shall see, John the Baptist, who also embodied both time periods, and who was seated opposite Mary on the other side of the rose.

The petals on the side in which all of those who lived before Christ were full, with all the seats taken; the old covenant was occupied and complete. The other side, with those who came after the new covenant, still had empty seats; there were still more occupants who had not yet arrived. They were waiting on fullness.

Upon one side,
there where the Rose is ripe, with all its petals,
are those whose faith was in the Christ to come;
and on the other side—that semicircle

whose space is broken up by vacant places—
sit those whose sight was set upon the Christ
who had already come.
xxxii.21-27

This bit of theology was Dante’s own, as he looked at the greater frameworks that informed this highest heaven; that there were a certain number of seats to fill to completion was “according to God’s providential plan, as conceived by the poet.”4

Dante and Bernard, during this inventory of the saints, were standing in the yellow center of the great amphitheater of the Rose, looking upward to all of these figures. Bernard pointed out those seated directly across from the row of women; beginning at the top and mirroring Mary’s place was John the Baptist. He was the forerunner of Christ who had wandered in the wilderness, surviving on locusts and honey while preaching his message of repentance. He was later beheaded at the wishes of Salome, who was granted a boon by King Herod, and through the influence of her mother, asked for the head of John the Baptist on a platter.

John, predestined for his role, was born with purpose and holiness, and had been in Limbo for two years after this execution, until the crucifixion and Christ’s Harrowing of Hell.

Below John’s seat, continuing the line of Saints, were St. Francis of Assisi, whom we learned of in the sphere of the Sun from St. Thomas Aquinas, and St. Benedict, of whom we heard in the sphere of Saturn. St. Augustine was next, a figure of whom we have heard hardly a thing through Dante’s work by name, although his ideas, especially on ordo amoris, or the rightly ordered loves, permeate the work, especially in Virgil’s discourse on love in the very center of the Purgatorio and of the entire Commedia.

The element on which Dante was divided from the theology of Augustine was on the role of Empire, especially the Roman Empire, which Augustine saw as working against theology, where, for Dante, the whole lineage of the Roman Empire gave it a divine purpose. Add to that brief mention the missing St. Dominic in this scheme, and the arrangement gives food for thought for Dante scholars.

Benedict pointed out that this arrangement showed the foresight of the mind of God, and that the arrangement was thus perfect; the empty seats would be filled on the side of those who came after Christ, to match the side that was already complete.

He continued to explain who held the seats in the center circles of the rose; these were all children who had died before the age of reason and maturity, before they could make decisions that affected their own souls. These were of the elect because of the merits of their parents:

And know that there, below the transverse row
that cuts across the two divisions, sit
souls who are there for merits not their own,

but-with certain condition-other’ merits;
for all of these are souls who left their bodies
before they had the power of true choice.
xxxii.40-45

Dante strayed from established doctrine in his next idea, for where the medieval theologians had one concept of how the bodies of the redeemed would look to be in the prime of life, no matter at what age they died, Dante presented them at their age of death, apparent with the children in the center and the aged countenance of Bernard.

Bernard saw that the arrangement of the children in higher or lower seats confused Dante; if they were not there based on their own merit, then what significance did their different seats have, and were some considered higher than the others based on this positioning? How were the degrees

of beatitude determined? This pointed to the concept of predestination, which Bernard spent some time explaining.

Paradise was a place where all was placed in the most perfect order; chance or accident were impossible, as impossible as the idea of lack through hunger or thirst. All those here were fulfilled in perfection, as was right according to the heights to which they had risen. What was before his eyes fit in exact correspondence of perfect order; in essence, the everlasting law of predestination. So the children were not simply placed in their seats; there was a reason behind the order:

Thus these souls who have, precociously,
reached the true life do not, among themselves,
find places high or low without some cause.
xxxii.58-60

Bernard admitted that this fact must just be accepted, even if not completely understood; but here he also reminded us that in Virgil’s speech on love in the center of the Commedia, that love could not cease in its striving until it came face to face with the object of its desire; and in this case, that desire was the vision of God:

The King through whom this kingdom finds content
in so much love and so much joyousness
that no desire would dare to ask for more,

creating every mind in His glad sight,
bestows His grace diversely, at His pleasure—
and here the fact alone must be enough.
xxxii.61-66

Bernard gave an example which would help Dante better understand; the twins of Rebecca, Jacob and Esau, were at odds with each other even within the womb, an example of the unpredictability of human roles in service to a larger order.

Bernard then explained how merit was proven in the days before Christ and what proofs were needed in the time after, so that the merit of parents could be passed down to include their young children. In the first age of humanity, from Adam to Abraham, the days of the patriarchs of the Old Testament, to profess one’s faith was sufficient. Yet the time came that an external proof was necessary, and that was when the circumcision of males became a requirement of proof after the time of Abraham. Then there was yet another way, and after Christ, it was baptism that gave this proof; after this turning point of the age of grace, then, children had to be baptized at birth; without that baptism, they were then placed in Limbo if they died young, not in Paradise.

In early centuries, their parent’s faith
alone, and their own innocence, sufficed
for the salvation of the children; when

those early times had reached completion, then
each male child had to find, through circumcision,
the power needed by his innocent

member; but then the age of grace arrived,
and without perfect baptism in Christ,
such innocence was kept below, in Limbo.
xxxii.76-84

Dante, in this exposition upon children being placed either in Paradise or in Limbo, had Bernard contradict his true position in life, in which he “shrinks from the appalling conclusion that unbaptized children are doomed to Limbo.”9 Perhaps it is only in this highest place of Paradise that the truth of these most intriguing questions can be attempted.

But, Bernard seems to steer them away from theological wrangling and back to the vision that is before them of the Celestial Rose, and of Mary seated at the center pinnacle, coming full circle from their visual journey around the amphitheater of Saints. For it is only through her intercession that Dante would be prepared for the final and ultimate vision.

Look now upon the face that is most like
the face of Christ, for only through its brightness
can you prepare your vision to see Him.
xxxii.85-87

Dante looked above and saw the joy of all the angelic intelligences raining down upon Mary in a pageant of perfect vision and grace, surpassing every sight that he had yet seen. Although we recognize the angel as Gabriel who then sang the Ave Maria as the elect in their thrones along with all the host of heaven responded, Dante had to ask Bernard—who radiated in the light given off by Mary just as Venus was illuminated by the Sun—who this angel was, who to him seemed the most beautiful of all:

O holy father—who, for me, endure
your being here below, leaving the sweet
place where eternal lot assigns your seat—

who is that angel who with such delight
looks into our Queen’s eyes—he who is so
enraptured that he seems to be a flame?
xxxii.100-105

Bernard praised the angel Gabriel as the most blessed of all the angelic beings, and it was he who had handed the palm of triumph to Mary at the annunciation. But Bernard had more individuals to identify, and told Dante to look as he named them.

On either side of Mary sat Adam and St. Peter—sitting in their proper positions of before and after Christ; Adam who brought to humanity the bitter consequences of sin, and St. Peter, identified through mention of the keys of the kingdom given to him by Christ.

Next to Peter was St. John, the author of the book of Revelation, who had seen the trials of the church, the Bride of Christ, won through the cross, before his own death. Next to Adam was the patriarch Moses who led the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt.

Across the Rose from Mary, with these figures by her side, opposite of Peter, was Mary’s mother St. Anna, who had eyes only for her lovely daughter; she gazed upon Mary rather than up above.

While Anna was opposite Peter, Lucy, on the other side of of John the Baptist, was opposite Adam; she was the saint who, on Mary’s urging, had interceded with Beatrice to look to her faithful one’s—Dante’s—lost condition far back in the beginning of the Inferno, after which Beatrice passed the message on to Virgil in Limbo.

These were the souls of the elect pointed out to Dante; and with that, Bernard signaled the end, not just of these introductions, but of our journey, of the poem, and of Dante’s long climb upward; for now, like the humble tailor, they must make the best use of what was before them—time—in order to see the journey through to its final and magnificent conclusion. Dante was in the liminal space between comprehension of the mechanics of Paradise and the final all encompassing vision of that which informs all that he has so far seen and experienced, the One:

But time, which brings you sleep, takes flight, and now
we shall stop here—even as a good tailor
who cuts the garment as his cloth allows—

and turn our vision to the Primal Love,
that, gazing at Him, you may penetrate—
as far as that can be—His radiance.
xxxii.139-144

“As far as that can be…” How deeply can Dante penetrate, on his own, the light of God?

Yet if in Dante’s desire to ascend he should lose trust in his own ability to rise up so high, he must ask for grace through prayer to Mary, the intercessor-she had intervened at the very beginning, when moving through Lucy and Beatrice to intercede for the lost Dante, and here, for the final vision, she will intercede again, that he may experience that moment as fully as is possible.

It is for Bernard, with his words, so aligned with Dante’s heart, that will show him how. He began to pray.

💭 Philosophical Exercises

My dear reader, at the start of our journey I told you that Dante’s Divine Comedy is an encyclopaedia.

It is an encyclopaedia of everything that works and dwells within our psyche.

The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once suggested that myth is an answer to a question we have not yet learned how to ask. And Dante’s Divine Comedy feels very much like that: a vast answer to one of the most important questions a human being can ask about life as a whole.

As the Russian psychologist Rada Granovskaya wrote in her book Psychology of Faith, faith is a way of organising the separate parts of our psyche into one unified whole. And it is precisely this act of unification that Dante is moving toward in the final cantos of Paradiso.

But what does it actually mean to organise the separate parts of our psyche?

What does it mean to see everything as a whole?

The reason Dante had to travel through all the circles of Hell, all the terraces of Purgatory, and all the celestial spheres is that only now, with Saint Bernard as his guide, is he able to stand outside of time. Time no longer flows here. Nothing unfolds chronologically. Everything is present at once.

It is as if our ordinary life were like standing beside a great painter — someone like Caravaggio — watching him create a masterpiece stroke by stroke. In that position, we can admire individual movements of the hand, but we cannot yet see the painting as a whole. Here, in this moment of the journey, Dante is no longer watching the strokes. He is allowed to step back and contemplate the finished work.

He looks upon the entire metaphorical painting of creation. At its centre stands Mary, and beneath her feet stands Eve — the two women who mirror the entire human story. If Eve led humanity out of Paradise, Mary made it possible for humanity to return. The fall and the restoration are no longer scattered events; they are held together in a single image.

This is the beauty of Mary being placed at the focal point — in the same way that an artist unifies a composition not by equal strokes, but by a centre that gives proportion to every stroke. Each stroke is unique and different, not equal, yet each is in its rightful place, at the right moment.

To stand outside of time is like reading history on the pages of a book. You can see what happened and in what order. You can observe individuals, institutions, environments, and circumstances, and how they interacted with one another. The actions within that history are complete. Nothing is still unfolding.

But not everyone is capable of being a fair historian. Some people read history and draw conclusions that exist only inside their own minds rather than on the pages of history itself. It requires profound training to look at history without projection — to judge it, to understand it, and to grasp human action as it truly was.

Dante undergoes precisely this training. Standing here, he is finally able to look at the divine order itself — an order in which nothing is superfluous, nothing superficial, nothing incoherent. It has taken him the entire journey to acquire the inner discipline required to see reality from this perspective, to understand it, and to contemplate it without distortion.

And this is why, when Dante now sees the children — even the unbaptised children — seated within the Celestial Rose, he is able to understand what would otherwise appear unjust or incomprehensible. He sees clearly that we are born with a certain capacity, and we are born with freedom of will. It is through our freedom of will that we may realise the capacity we were given.

God knows that children, even unbaptised children, possess divine grace within them, and that they were born with a capacity — even if that capacity was never brought into action through choice or effort. And for that reason, they too have their own appropriate and rightful place within the divine order.

From this vantage point, difference is no longer hierarchy. It is harmony. Fulfilment does not come from having more than others, but from fully inhabiting what one is.

This vision, for me, has revealed many things — and it will take me a lifetime to fully comprehend them. But one of the great temptations of our time is the belief that we stand outside of history. As if we were lifted out of it. As if history were something that happens elsewhere, to others.

Yet just as we have a mother and a father, grandparents and a biological past, we are also shaped by our place in history. The events that happen around us are not external to us. They are inseparable parts of the divine order as it unfolds.

Each one of us is a part of history. And this is why Dante reminds us, at the very beginning of the Divine Comedy, that the darkest places in Hell are reserved for those who, in times of crisis, choose neutrality.

We explored this idea at the start of our journey, but it gains a deeper meaning here. Dante himself was shaped by the clashes between the Black and White Guelphs, by political conflict, exile, and responsibility. He did not observe history from a distance. He was implicated in it.

And so are we.

To see the divine order is not to escape responsibility. It is to recognise that we are already inside the painting — not spectators, but strokes — each placed in a particular moment, bearing meaning, and accountable for the role we play.

This Week’s Sinners and Virtuous 🎭

(Themes, Quotes, Terms and Characters)

I. Empty seats of Celestial Rose

One of the most quietly unsettling details in this canto is something that is not immediately visible unless Bernard points it out: the empty seats in the Celestial Rose.

On one side, the Rose is full. Those who lived before Christ, whose faith was in what was to come, occupy every place allotted to them. Their story is complete. On the other side, the side of those who lived after Christ, there are gaps. Vacant places. Seats that have been prepared but not yet filled.

This detail matters more than it seems. It tells us that while the divine order is complete in its design, history itself is not complete in its unfolding. Paradise contains not only what has been, but what is still becoming. Even here, at the summit of vision, time has not been erased entirely; it has left its trace in the form of absence.

This is what rescues Dante’s vision from fatalism. The order of the Rose is not a frozen caste system. It is teleological, oriented toward fullness. The empty seats are not signs of exclusion, but of invitation.

They remind us that history still matters. That choice still matters. That neutrality is not innocence. We are not merely observers of the painting. We are still among the strokes that have yet to find their final place.

Quotes 🖋️

(The ones I keep in my journal as reminders of eternal wisdom):

But time, which brings you sleep, takes flight, and now
we shall stop here—even as a good tailor
who cuts the garment as his cloth allows—

and turn our vision to the Primal Love,
that, gazing at Him, you may penetrate—
as far as that can be—His radiance.

~ lines 139- 144, Paradiso, Canto XXXII

Welcome to Dante Read-Along! ✨

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Welcome to Dante Book Club, where you and I descend into Hell and Purgatory to be able to ascend to Paradise. Our guide in Paradise is Beatrice, and in this thirty first Canto, Dante looks upon the Celestial White Rose of Heaven. You can find the main page of the read-along right here, reading schedule here, and the list of chat threads here.

In each post you can find a brief summary of the canto, philosophical exercises that you can draw from it, themes, character, and symbolism explanations.

All the wonderful illustrations are done specially for the Dante Read-Along by the one and only Luana Montebello.

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This Week’s Circle ⭕️

The Celestial White Rose of the Empyrean - The petals filled with rows of the blessed - Beatrice takes her place in the heights of the Rose - St. Bernard the contemplative takes her place - They watch the pageant of the angels ministering to the blessed - St. Bernard directs his vision higher - The Virgin Mary seated at the height of the Celestial Rose.

Canto XXXI Summary:

The magnificent Celestial White Rose was unfolded in all of its radiant glory before Dante’s eyes, that representation of the Church Triumphant, filled with the souls of the redeemed, those blessed inhabitants of Paradise, the elect, the Saints; the petals were filled with their thrones.

While that host of the elect had their places in the petals of the rose, the angelic beings, who forever had the sight of their hearts toward God, flew like bees from the center of the flower back up toward the One, toward God, their duty a labor of sweetness. Their countenances were of fire, their wings golden, and their robes the most brilliant white.

As they flew into the center of the flower and back up over the petals, the blessings of the highest One were poured onto the elect through the beating of their wings, like honey brought from above and deposited into the celestial rose. No matter how many of them flew about, the light of God was such that nothing could obstruct it.

Nor did so vast a throng in flight, although
it interposed between the candid Rose
and light above, obstruct the sight or splendor,

because the light of God so penetrates
the universe according to the worth
of every part, that no thing can impede it.
xxxi.19-24

The elect within the Rose were from all eras of time, ancient and new, and all used both their will and their intellect, purified, to gaze upward into the light of God. Dante said a prayer that the Light of the Three in One, upon which those souls gazed, would also extend down to the suffering upon earth, as that vision was the only thing that could bring true peace in troubled times.

Dante compared his sense of amazement to what the barbarians of Northern Europe had felt—those under the constellations of Helice and Arcas, the Great Bear and Little Bear—upon first seeing Rome and the Lateran palace. That palace had once been home to Emperors and was now the home of Popes, more magnificent than anything they had ever seen. Parallel that amazement to his perspective of being one not simply looking upon a new city, but as a humble Florentine gazing upon the wonders of the highest heavens as a living man, having crossed the final boundary between time and eternity.

He could do nothing but bask in the wonder of the sight, gazing toward each detail of the Rose, the saints, and the Angelic intelligences, with the contentedness of a pilgrim arriving at his destination

And as a pilgrim, in the temple he
had vowed to reach, renews himself—he looks
and hopes he can describe what it was like—

so did I journey through the living light,
guiding my eyes, from rank to rank, along
a path now up, now down, now circling round.
xxxi.43-48

By calling himself a pilgrim near his journey’s end, we are reminded that he has returned from that journey and is relating it to his readers, this long final pageant of the ultimate vision.

He took in his fill of the multitude and their movements, and turned to address Beatrice; but instead of seeing her, he saw an elder, dressed in the pure white of the beatific vision of glory, kind and inviting.

The loss of Beatrice felt for a moment like the loss of Virgil, that turning round expecting to find what was not there. Yet here it was different, as she was not gone; in bringing him this far, she could now return to her own place in the Celestial Rose, from where she had descended to guide him; this was the beginning of the final vision. He had moved into that space of highest contemplation, which was ultimately the place from which to gaze upon the light of God itself, directly.

The elder who had presented himself was St. Bernard of Clairvaux, a contemplative monk who had been the abbot of the Clairvaux monastery, although as yet unnamed.

Dante asked where Beatrice had gone, and St. Bernard directed his gaze up into the petals of the Celestial Rose, where Beatrice sat in the third circle of petals down from the top. The top tier held the Virgin Mary herself, the second tier, Eve, and Beatrice shared the third tier with Rachel, the contemplative, whom we met contrasted with her active sister Leah in the seventh terrace of Purgatorio.

Although the distance between Dante and those edges of the Rose were as far away from each other as the depth of the ocean was to the clouds in the sky, still he saw her clearly and without obstruction. He began a speech to Beatrice, like a final address, a hymn of praise for this, their journey; that from the beginning, it was she that drew him forward, continuing on through every step of the way. He shifted the very form of words that he used in this address, going from the formal voi to the familiar tu. He praised her for drawing him upward to beatitude, and prayed that he would stay true to what she had inspired in him, that he may rise so far after his earthly life was complete.

You drew me out from slavery to freedom
by all those paths, by all those means that were
within your power. Do, in me, preserve

your generosity, so that my soul,
which you have healed, when it is set loose from
my body, be a soul that you will welcome.
xxxi.85-90

She looked down at Dante from her place in the Rose, and then turned to gaze once again upon the Light of God. Bernard spoke again; he was there to help Dante with the final moments of purification, so that he might see the final vision. By looking round the Rose, preparing his sight for the light of glory, Dante would be more prepared to see the highest.

Bernard finally named himself, he whose love and servitude for the Virgin Mary were at the forefront of his whole life, and whose beatitude had stemmed from that deep contemplation. Dante looked at him again with the eyes of a pilgrim, as one who had come to see the sacred shroud of Veronica—a cloth which held the imprint of the image of Christ on it, from the day she had offered to wipe his face as he carried the cross to the crucifixion. That pilgrim on earth would look with amazement at Christ’s image; Dante looked in just such amazement at St. Bernard, wondering to himself how incredible it was that he was seeing the famous figure he had heard about for so long.

Bernard directed Dante’s glance not to himself, which would not accomplish the final goal, but above, to the Virgin Mary, on her seat and the top and center of the Rose, who shone with a light that was brighter than anything else round it:

I lifted up my eyes; and as, at morning,
the eastern side of the horizon shows
more splendor than the side where the sun sets,

so, as if climbing with my eyes from valley
to summit, I saw one part of the farthest
rank of the Rose more bright than all the rest.
xxxi.118-123

As high above him as the sun at noon, she shone. She shone like the red and gold standard, the Oriflamme, granted to France by the Angel Gabriel in the days of old. Around her flew all the angelic beings of the heavens, in the perfect dance and pageant of the highest of the high.

Bernard turned his gaze to match Dante’s, and they both basked in the sight.

💭 Philosophical Exercises

We do not entirely know how we mature as we grow up.

Maturity does not arrive all at once, nor does it follow a clear rulebook. It reveals itself through subtle shifts in how we relate to the world and to those who guide us through it.

When we are children and find ourselves in an unfamiliar place — a shop, a crowded street — we instinctively stay close to our parents. The world feels too large, too confusing, too unpredictable. We rely on them not only for protection, but for interpretation.

Paradiso XXXI opens with Dante still overwhelmed by the vision of the white Rose. The sheer scale of what he sees exceeds any single point of focus. His gaze moves, but it has not yet settled into order.

This is very much our state in the Inferno. There, Dante cannot afford to lose sight of Virgil. The landscape is overwhelming, disorienting, and hostile. Without Virgil constantly beside him, the journey would collapse into fear. Guidance at this stage is parental: it must be immediate, protective, and ever-present.

As we grow, something begins to change. We slowly become capable of moving away from our parents, of venturing into unknown spaces on our own. We still look back from time to time — not out of panic, but for reassurance.

I believe that this is precisely the role Beatrice plays once she enters Dante’s journey. A new level of maturity has been reached. Dante no longer needs to be guided step by step. His way of seeing has changed. He can move forward on his own, and yet it still comforts him to know that Beatrice is there — that if something escapes him, there is a gaze through which he can understand.

Beatrice does not merely accompany Dante; she reflects the divine order in a form he can bear. She mediates vision. She protects him from being blinded by what he is not yet ready to see directly.

At this stage of our journey, Dante explicitly says that he has grasped “the general form of Paradise.” Nothing has yet been fixed in detail, but the whole is already present to him.

But in Paradiso XXXI, Dante crosses a final threshold. He turns to speak to Beatrice — and she is no longer beside him.

It is the threshold of no longer needing a parent in an unknown place. No longer needing to turn back for explanation or comfort. When Dante turns around and does not see Beatrice, he is not distressed. He is not afraid. He is curious.

The line is strikingly calm: “Uno intendea, e altro mi rispuose.” He expects one voice, but another answered. With no panic after it.

This detail matters enormously. Fear has disappeared. Dependency has loosened. Dante can now see, and he is responsible for his own vision — in the same way that a mature person is responsible for how they face the world.

At this moment, Saint Bernard appears.

Bernard does not introduce himself dramatically. He simply answers. His presence feels functional, not emotional.

I.

The best way I can explain his role is by turning to an experience from my own life — my time at a Russian school.

Every quarter, we were taken on compulsory visits to museums and galleries. Once, at the Tretyakov Gallery, my school’s art teacher was guiding us through the halls. His explanations drained all life from the paintings. Dates, names, classifications — everything except meaning. I wrote about that tour in my piece ‘The Art of Teaching’.

But the brief version is this: during one of these boring tours, I escaped. And almost accidentally, I found myself standing before a painting by Aivazovsky.

I stood there. I looked.

For the first time, I grasped a painting as a whole. Not through facts. Not through explanation. But through direct perception.

Like Dante, I stood captivated, perceiving every stroke that Aivazovsky made, the whole of the painting pulled me in.

Then a woman approached me, who turned out to be one of the leading art historians in Russia, though I didn’t know it at the time.

She did not explain the painting. She did not interrupt my experience. She could see that I had already understood something essential.

Her role was similar to Bernard. It was to guide my attention.

She gently directed my attention to parts of the painting my gaze had not yet reached. She pointed, not to instruct, but to expand my vision.

My boring and annoying teacher would have told me the exact meaning of the painting; this lovely lady however, did the reverse. Instead of telling me what to think, she asked me to think for myself.

She was training my vision, in the same manner as Bernard repeatedly tells Dante where to look.

He redirects his gaze upward, toward Mary. He never explains what Dante sees — only how to approach seeing it.

This is exactly what Saint Bernard does for Dante and that was what the lovely lady did to me.

Virgil taught Dante how to survive.

Beatrice taught Dante how to understand.

Bernard teaches Dante how to attend.

He no longer needs explanations, interpretations, or reflections. What he needs now is orientation.

Saint Bernard does not stand between Dante and the divine. He does not soften the light. He does not translate meaning. He gives Dante a map.

“Let your eyes fly through this garden,” Bernard says. Vision is no longer mediated — it is trained.

Beatrice was a mirror.

Saint Bernard is a map.

And only once a person no longer needs a mirror can a map become useful.

Paradiso XXXI is therefore not about vision itself, but about readiness for vision. It is the canto in which Dante learns the final discipline before the ultimate sight: not interpretation, not protection, but attention.

This Week’s Sinners and Virtuous 🎭

(Themes, Quotes, Terms and Characters)

I. Beatrice’s Proper Place

Do you remember how attached Dante was to Virgil? We know it was necessary, but Dante’s entire attention was tied to Virgil. The attachment to Beatrice was different in its nature, and yet there was a dependence.

In this canto however, we can see that Beatrice does not disappear as Virgil, and yet she has her “place”. Carl Jung would have said that she has been ‘integrated’ into psyche, became a coherent whole of it.

Dante’s attention now is fully his. It no longer is focused on Virgil or Beatrice. His vision is his own.

I find this beautiful.

II. Historical Continuity

The quote below shows us that even in Paradiso we are tied to our roots. Dante’s connection to Florence, to its history, to the events that brought his exile are present even in a place where one would think they would disappear. We are united with history, and are history’s inseparable part.

Quotes 🖋️

(The ones I keep in my journal as reminders of eternal wisdom):

If the Barbarians, when they came from
a region that is covered every day
by Helice, who wheels with her loved son,

were, seeing Rome and her vast works, struck dumb
(when, of all mortal things, the Lateran
was the most eminent), then what amazement

must have filled me when I to the divine
came from the human, to eternity
from time, and to a people just and sane

from Florence came! And certainly, between
the wonder and the joy, it must have been
welcome to me to hear and speak nothing.

And as a pilgrim, in the temple he
had vowed to reach, renews himself—he looks
and hopes he can describe what it was like—

so did I journey through the living light,
guiding my eyes, from rank to rank, along
a path now up, now down, now circling round.

~ lines 31- 48, Paradiso, Canto XXX

Welcome to Dante Read-Along! ✨

(If this post appears truncated in your inbox you can read it on the web by clicking here. )

Welcome to Dante Book Club, where you and I descend into Hell and Purgatory to be able to ascend to Paradise. Our guide in Paradise is Beatrice, and in this thirtieth Canto, Dante’s vision is cleansed in the River of Light. You can find the main page of the read-along right here, reading schedule here, and the list of chat threads here.

In each post you can find a brief summary of the canto, philosophical exercises that you can draw from it, themes, character, and symbolism explanations.

All the wonderful illustrations are done specially for the Dante Read-Along by the one and only Luana Montebello.

Subscribe now

This Week’s Circle ⭕️

The hosts of Angels in the Primum Mobile fades before Dante’s sight - Beatrice’s beauty is beyond Dante’s ability to describe it - They ascend into the Heaven of the Empyrean - The cleansing Light of the Celestial River - Dante’s vision is cleansed - The Celestial Rose of the elect - The empty seat awaiting Henry VII - Beatrice condemns Boniface VIII.

Canto XXX Summary:

Dante visualized the scene before him through the imagery of the fading stars of the sky as they were overcome by the light of Aurora, goddess of the Dawn; the host of the angelic triumph which had filled his vision faded as those stars had, for the love of that Point of light filled his consciousness. That Point was “enclosed by that which It encloses” (11), meaning that while it was enclosed by that ring of angelic host, it was the God of the Point itself that also contained those hosts.

As this vision of the angels faded, Dante’s only sight became that of Beatrice. The further they travelled, the more she grew perfected in her role as embodiment of pure theology, pure love, and of pure blessedness. He knew that everything he had thus said of her, from his Vita Nuova to the Convivio and into the present Comedy, were all at fault, as none could convey what his eyes beheld of her, that what she represented was so great that it could only ever be understood and appreciated in the very Mind of God.

If that which has been said of her so far
were all contained within a single praise,
it would be much too scant to serve me now.

The loveliness I saw surpassed not only
our human measure—and I think that, surely,
only its Maker can enjoy it fully.
xxx.16-21

Dante claimed artistic defeat; before this point, he had attempted in a myriad of ways to express the pure loveliness of Beatrice, but now, his ability faltered, he was at a loss. No poet, comic or tragic, had ever come upon such an obstacle as Dante had in attempting to describe her beauty.

Dante had written about Beatrice from the very beginning, in all of his works, yet he had reached the end of being able to describe her fully; he had reached the pinnacle of his talent, and his inability to describe her beauty any longer amounted to the highest praise he could give, almost higher than describing her would be—and in a way, the beginning of his farewell to her.

In returning to the heavenly place from which she had come, Beatrice was growing into the glory that was hers naturally in that place. The only beings who could now do her justice in their praise were the angels themselves. This return gave another indication of the poem nearing its conclusion.

Beatrice showed Dante that they had ascended out of the Primum Mobile and into the Empyrean, the Heaven of Pure Light; they had left the material universe and were now in the spiritual realm of the tenth heaven, outside of time and into eternity. This was the home of God, the ranks of angels, and all the blessed. By guiding him here, she had fulfilled her goal:

From matter’s largest sphere,
we now have reached the heaven of pure light,

light of the intellect, light filled with love,
love of true good, love filled with happiness,
a happiness surpassing every sweetness.
xxx.38-42

She defined that realm through a trinity of its qualities: beginning with light, moving to love, and that love filling with joy. Here, she told him, he would see both the ranks of the angelic hierarchies, those who had resisted the fall of Lucifer, and the elect of Paradise in their afterlife, those who had resisted sin and temptation in life and worked through every last fault; the blessed he would be able to see in their glorified bodies, where before he only seen them encased in light.

This vision that Dante saw in his human form was the same as he would see when he himself attained to that place after his death; this was another assurance that he would count among the ranks of the blessed in Paradise, as had been hinted to him before while in the realms below. In the structure of theology that would support this idea, Dante was now crafting his own theories.

Dante was dazzled as the vision before him unfolded; he was enveloped with such a bright and rapturous light that he was momentarily blinded. This all-encompassing light was the greeting that was given to any soul that was so blessed as to approach it; this light of glory helped the soul to prepare to receive the light of God, just as a candle would have to be prepared to receive and contain a flame:

Like sudden lightning scattering the spirits
of sight so that they eye is then too weak
to act on other things it would perceive,

such was the living light encircling me,
leaving me so enveloped by its veil
of radiance that I could see no thing.
xxx.46-51

Power and radiance beyond human comprehension descended upon Dante’s being at the influx of this light, and another step on his ladder of transformation was achieved. Through this new experience, he felt prepared to receive and bear any level of light that might shine on him.

His visionary experience expanded; through each successive vision that would present itself from this point on, each was grandly leading up to the final and ultimate vision. A River of Light unfolded before him, symbolic of the Love that poured down from the highest Point into all of the realms below it. It was surrounded by living and dancing sparks landing upon colorful flowers on the banks of its flow, and those sparks would fly about and then submerge themselves again in the river in a dance of celebrating the living waters.

This imagery, in all its beauty, was still just symbolic of the greater truths that would be shown in full as Dante grew deeper into the truths and visions of the Empyrean; his sight, as exalted as it was, still could not encompass the true nature of the vision before him; to continue his transformation, he must drink of those waters.

The river and the gems
of topaz entering and leaving, and
the grasses’ laughter—these are shadowy

prefaces of their truth; not that these things
are lacking in themselves; the defect lies
in you, whose sight is not yet that sublime.
xxx.76-81

On learning he was to drink of that River of Light, Dante lost not a moment, and in letting his own eyes be that mirror which could reflect the eternal glory, he eagerly pressed his face into its waters. No sooner did it touch his eyes than his vision was cleansed still more, and the scene he had witnessed was unmasked: he could see the reality of it, that the sparks were the angelic host, and the flowers were the souls of the blessed.

Then, just as maskers, when they set aside
the borrowed likenesses in which they hide,
seem to be other than they were before,

so were the flowers and the sparks transformed,
changing to such festivity before me
that I saw—clearly—both of Heaven’s courts.
xxx.91-96

Here was the true kingdom of God in all its glorious radiance. Rather than call to the Muses for aid in telling what he saw, Dante could now only call out directly to God for that aid. The effulgent light that revealed the divine sights above was such that its edges spread out beyond the circumference of the Sun; the source of this Light was there in the Empyrean, and Dante saw reflected back to it all of the host of the heavens, and was awed by its vastness.

Dante reveled in the sight, which was like an amphitheater of souls; the smallest tier so large that the size of the furthest and largest sphere of it was incomprehensible; the distance from the center Point of light to any of the spheres, either the smallest or largest, did not matter, for all received the light most equally here in this city of God. The vision transformed yet again, and the circles that had seemed an amphitheater now revealed themselves into the petals of a magnificent Rose.

Beatrice delighted in Dante’s gaze at this realm of glory, and drew him toward the center of the Celestial Rose, the yellow center eternally exuding the fragrance of its praise. Within the petals of the Rose were seats of the angels, and of the elect:

See how great is this council of white robes!

See how much space our city’s circuit spans!
See how our seated ranks are now so full
that little room is left for any more!
xxx.129-132

Beatrice pointed out one of the empty seats which held only a crown, telling Dante that it would be filled within his lifetime: it was waiting for the Emperor Henry VII, who on earth had attempted to heal the rifts brought about through Italy’s political turmoil between the Guelfs and Ghibellines. Yet like fools, those who could have helped him establish peace instead pushed him away; the most unhelpful in this regard was Pope Clement V—against whom Dante had already said so much—who would not work for a reconciliation, even when it had been possible.

Clement, said Beatrice, had a place already prepared for him; not in Paradise, but in the Inferno in the circle of Simony, where the offenders were shoved headfirst into holes in the ground; Clement would be placed on top of Boniface VIII, his predecessor, driving him deeper into the hole with his presence.

💭 Philosophical Exercises

During one of my first visits to the National Gallery in London, our guide stopped in front of a painting by Luca Giordano — the same painting I mentioned in a previous post — and said something that stayed with me.

He told us that painting is perhaps the only art form that does not truly belong to time or space. Every other art demands something temporal from us. Music requires duration. Literature requires hours, sometimes days. Even architecture unfolds through movement. Painting does not. It confronts us all at once.

And I believe this insight connects very closely to Dante’s arrival in the Empyrean in Paradiso Canto XXX, and to his encounter with overwhelming light. When Dante and Beatrice enter the Empyrean, Dante is struck by an intense, blinding brightness. It is an encounter with something too vast to comprehend at once.

It feels remarkably similar to standing before a truly great painting — overwhelmed by its meaning, yet unable to grasp it immediately. It is as if the painting covers us, momentarily blinds us with its light.

In the same way, Dante cannot yet see clearly. His sight is inadequate to receive the light before him. This moment mirrors a recognition we often experience before great art: that perception itself — our way of seeing — is the limiting factor.

It is like standing before a painting and realising that quick glances or technical knowledge alone will not unlock it. You might know the chemical composition of the pigments. You might understand the geometry, the historical context, the brushwork. And yet none of this, by itself, explains the metaphysical meaning of what stands before you.

Beatrice then instructs Dante and explains that the images he sees are accommodations — forms adapted to his current capacity. She urges him to lean forward and drink from the river of light.

This moment can be interpreted in many ways, but in simple terms, it resembles the act of leaning closer to a painting in a gallery — not to analyse it further, but to receive it more deeply. This is the moment when we stop interrogating the artwork — asking about context, technique, provenance — and instead allow ourselves to remain quietly present, absorbing its meaning.

When Dante bends forward and drinks from the river, he drinks light itself. This gesture feels like a voluntary desire to understand the world. It is a conscious act of receptivity.

In this sense, this moment also clarifies what snobbery truly is. A snob is not someone who believes in high art and dismisses popular art. A snob is someone whose mind is deliberately closed — someone who refuses to bend, as Dante bends here, refusing to absorb the meaning of the artwork that stands before them.

After Dante drinks from the river, his vision immediately strengthens. And this makes profound sense. Once we voluntarily bend to drink from the well of knowledge — or from the well of art — something reorganises within us.

It is the same moment when we readjust our ears to hear music more attentively, or our eyes to see more patiently. Our entire perception reorganises itself. We become more receptive. The mind begins to perceive differently. In other words, we willingly suspend control and allow the presence of the experience itself to work on us.

What happens next is that Dante’s vision becomes so clear that he can finally understand what he sees as a whole. It is no longer a matter of perceiving fragments or isolated scenes, but of grasping the totality of what stands before him.

It is like standing before a great painting and suddenly no longer seeing only its individual parts, but perceiving the painting as a unified whole.

To describe this, let me introduce another painting that is particularly dear to me, one I have written about before in a piece called The Art of Teaching. It is The Storm at Sea by Ivan — or more precisely, Hovhannes — Aivazovsky.

When you first look at this painting, you are immediately seized by its atmosphere and beauty. At first, you observe it in parts. You notice the contrast between darkness and light. You see the ship dissolving into the horizon. You register the movement of the waves.

But after a moment, something changes. You no longer perceive each individual wave that Aivazovsky painted with such mastery. Instead, you feel the meaning of the painting as a whole. The painting stops being a collection of details and becomes a single experience.

This is precisely the moment that corresponds, in Paradiso 30, to the emergence of the Celestial Rose. Dante now sees the vast white rose of the blessed, arranged in perfect order. Meaning no longer arrives through explanation, but through harmony.

Instead of someone explaining the painting to you — as a guide might do during a tour of a gallery — the meaning reveals itself all at once. This, I believe, is why great paintings have such a profound impact on us.

What distinguishes mediocre art from great art is that mediocre art requires explanation and ends with comprehension. You may encounter an abstract work that initially leaves you indifferent or resistant. Then a guide explains it to you: the artist’s life, the concept, the historical context. Eventually, the work begins to make sense.

But that is often where its power ends. It does not carry you any further. You understand it, perhaps admire its cleverness, but the harmony of colours, forms, emotions, and shadows never unites into a single, living whole that overwhelms you with its presence.

Great art is different. In great art, the subject, the intention, and the emotional logic suddenly cohere. They arrive not as information, but as experience.

In Dante’s vision of the Celestial Rose, we see something similar. Each soul occupies its place freely, drawn solely by love. Order here does not arise from force or coercion, but from attraction.

This resembles the way we discover what truly belongs to us in life. Discovering what you love is not the result of pressure or obligation. It is like realising that writing is something you genuinely want to devote yourself to. Or discovering that your physical being is attuned to music, that your ears perceive sound in a particular way. Or sensing that literature stirs something deep within you, and that you return to it again and again in your spare time.

For some people, exploring Dante canto by canto, week by week — writing thousands of words, investing so much effort — would feel like torture. For me, it is joy. It is delight. It is not coercion.

I am not forced to write these words for you, my dear reader. I do so because I am drawn to Dante, because I want to understand him deeply. That attraction, and nothing else, is the source of this work.

And yet, even after being granted such an exceptional and exclusive way of seeing — a vision no one else has ever been allowed — Dante maintains a remarkable humility.

He tells us that even this vision precedes the final Beatific Vision. Even here, clarity is not completion.

This humility is not weakness. It is the first step of clarity without final possession.

At this point, I want to move away from the painting analogy and return to Dante’s Divine Comedy itself. Because despite reading this work with great attention, care, and effort — despite spending hours each week writing thousands of words on individual cantos — I still feel that Dante’s Divine Comedy has more to reveal to me.

I have the sense that I could read it for the rest of my life and still encounter something new. Something that had been there all along, waiting for a different kind of readiness.

And I believe this is one of the core messages of the Divine Comedy: that the deepest truths of life do not offer final answers in the way scientific formulas or mathematical equations do. Those may reach definitive conclusions. But the deepest meanings of life do not.

They continue to disclose themselves.

Interestingly, Paradiso 30 ends in a very particular way. It does not conclude with final vision, but with preparation. It trains us for deeper sight.

Learning how to see becomes more important than what is seen.

This changes the way we think about reading altogether. It is not enough to say, as I once did, that finishing a book means having read it. The further one goes, the more one realises that learning how to see is a continuous task — one that never truly ends.

And perhaps that is Dante’s final gift here: not an image to possess, but a way of seeing to practise.

This Week’s Sinners and Virtuous 🎭

(Themes, Quotes, Terms and Characters)

I. Revelation Fitting to One’s Eyes

One of the quiet but essential themes of Paradiso Canto XXX is accommodation — the idea that truth does not reveal itself all at once, nor does it impose itself violently upon the human mind. Beatrice explains to Dante that what he sees in the Empyrean is not reality as it is in itself, but reality translated into forms his soul can bear. The river of light, the sparks, the flowers, even the Celestial Rose are not deceptions, but merciful adaptations.

This suggests something important about how meaning works in our lives. Confusion, partial understanding, or symbolic vision are not signs of exclusion or failure. They are signs of preparation. Truth does not overwhelm us; it educates us. It meets us where we are and slowly trains our vision.

Dante reminds us that meaning is never withheld out of cruelty, but revealed with patience — always one step ahead of our readiness, never beyond it.

Quotes 🖋️

(The ones I keep in my journal as reminders of eternal wisdom):

So did the triumph that forever plays 
around the Point that overcame me (Point
that seems enclosed by that which It encloses)
fade gradually from my sight, so that
my seeing nothing else—and love—compelled
my eyes to turn again to Beatrice.

~ lines 10- 15, Paradiso, Canto XXX

But now I’m not so sure I believe in beginnings and endings. There are days that define your story beyond your life

~ Louise Banks, from the film Arrival

Welcome to Dante Read-Along! ✨

(If this post appears truncated in your inbox you can read it on the web by clicking here. )

Welcome to Dante Book Club, where you and I descend into Hell and Purgatory to be able to ascend to Paradise. Our guide in Paradise is Beatrice, and in this twenty-ninth Canto, Beatrice exponds upon the nature of the angelic realms. You can find the main page of the read-along right here, reading schedule here, and the list of chat threads here.

In each post you can find a brief summary of the canto, philosophical exercises that you can draw from it, themes, character, and symbolism explanations.

All the wonderful illustrations are done specially for the Dante Read-Along by the one and only Luana Montebello.

Subscribe now

This Week’s Circle ⭕️

The Primum Mobile, continued - Beatrice’s meditation on the Point of light that is God - He knowledge of what Dante was to learn of next - Her exposition upon the nature of Angels - Why, when and how they were created - She denounces false teachers - The vast numbers of the angelic realms.

Canto XXIX Summary:

Beatrice gazed silently at the divine Point of light that was God in a profound but short moment of meditation in the exact moment of the vernal equinox; Latona’s twins Apollo—the Ram of the constellation Aries, representing the sun—and Diana,—she of the scales of Libra, representing the moon—were opposite each other in the sky, one rising and the other setting, creating a perfect balance on either side of the horizon. In the moment that their paths were in exact alignment and the spring was ushered in, that perfect balance was also the balance of Beatrice’s meditation, in “an infinite moment of time and space.”1

Beatrice began the speech that would extend through the entire canto. Dante had been full of questions at every stage up until this point, but Beatrice took the lead, knowing what he both wanted and needed to hear: the reason for the creation of the angelic hierarchies and the way in which the splendor and glory of God proceed down through their ranks.

First, a negation; God did not create the realms to obtain more goodness for Himself only, but as a way to increasingly celebrate existence through the reflected glory shining from the angelic intelligences, that they may truly express Subsisto-I Am. If God was outside of time—the place in which he rested before creation—than this reflective action may bring that I Amness into the material universe. For this reason did he create the angelic intelligences.

Thus were the three kinds of substance created; first, Form, which is action of spirit without matter, the essence of mind, found in the beings of the angels. Secondly, Matter, the primal substance of which all physical things were made, embodying pure potentiality, and third, the blend of the two; that which was Form and Matter conjoined became the substance of the heavenly realm.

This moment of creation happened in an instant, as quickly as light dissipating through colored glass, the nature of order inherent in it from the first moment. Pure Form, or action, was the nature of the angelic realm, the low point of earth had the nature of pure potentiality, and the heavens were that conjoined blending that could never be undone.

Created with the substances were order
and pattern; at the summit of the world
were those in whom pure act had been produced;

and pure potentiality possessed
the lowest part; and in the middle, act
so joined potentiality that they
never disjoin.
xxix.31-37

Beatrice disproved certain theories about the timing of the creation of matter and the angels, such as those St. Jerome held—he of the Vulgate Latin translation of the Bible—that the angels had been created long before the material universe.

With this, Beatrice finished answering the questions she had set out in the beginning; satisfying the answers of where, when, and how, in regard to the purpose and creation of the angelic realms. She described the split between the fallen angels and those who stayed in heaven reflecting the glory of God, and how quickly that split had happened at the moment of creation:

Then, sooner than it takes to count to twenty,
a portion of the angels violently
disturbed the lowest of your elements.

The rest remained; and they, with such rejoicing,
began the office you can see, that they
never desert their circling contemplation.
xxix.49-54

To further examine the nature of Form of the angelic realm, and the intellection through which it operates in fullness of purpose, the celestial beings were granted additional illumination through grace, more than what they could contain in reflecting solely on their own:

Those whom you see
in Heaven here were modestly aware
that they were ready for intelligence
so vast, because of that Good which had made them:

through this, their vision was exalted with
illuminating grace and with their merit,
so that their will is constant and intact.
xxix.58-63

She was confident in all of the teachings that she had shared, and invited Dante to confirm what she had said in the scriptures, or even to question those angelic beings before them. And yet there was more; since he had learned on earth, through false teachers, erroneous ideas about the angelic nature, she would elaborate further.

The false teachers had attributed three concepts to all created beings: understanding, memory, and will. But she wanted to clarify the distribution of these concepts in humans and angels. Only humanity had all three; the angels did not have memory as we understand it, and her explanation was profound and beautiful in its meaning.

With their sight consistently focused on God, even from the very moment of their creation, angelic beings had never had an interval of distraction from that purpose, not even the possibility of an interference that could come between their adoration and the nature of God; there was no prior event on which to put their focus, hence memory was not even a conceivable element, and was truly an impossibility through this distinction.

These beings, since they first were gladdened by
the face of God, from which no thing is hidden,
have never turned their vision from that face,

so that their sight is never intercepted
by a new object, and they have no need
to recollect an interrupted concept.
xxix.76-81

They represent perfect single mindedness; contrast that with the philosophic sophistry that is only engaged in for show or renown, and further, to those who did not even feel remorse for teaching purposeful falsehoods.

Below, you do not follow one sole path
as you philosophize—your love of show
and thought of it so carry you astray!
xxix.85-87

Those false teachers had missed the mark completely and had turned away from truth in preference of show and novelty, interpreting the scripture with wrong ideas; again she pointed to Jerome, and his interpretation for the darkness that was cast upon the earth at the moment of the crucifixion:

The congregations who were fooled by these teachers fed on the emptiness of their words, their jokes and low humor, and were ignorant of their own lack of understanding—such that they saw that emptiness as being the real substance, and were not even interested in anything more. Profits from false indulgences sold to the unknowing people were one example, and in one case were even used to fatten the swine of the order of St. Anthony, in a disparaging comparison. For their efforts toward salvation, the people were repaid with false coin in the form of empty indulgences.

Beatrice pulled back from her digression on false teachings, and returned to the topic of the nature of the angelic realms. She turned to the unfathomable number of the celestial host, and how they basked in the radiance exuded by God.

The angels received the light of God in as many ways as there were angels; for each received it in a unique way, and as we saw in the last canto, this capacity to receive is greatest in the higher realms, and least in the lower realms; and yet all conceive of God as much as they are able by their nature.

The First Light reaches them in ways as many
as are the angels to which It conjoins
Itself, as it illumines all of them;

and this is why (because affection follows
the act of knowledge) the intensity
of love’s sweetness appears unequally.
xxix.136-141

Now it had been explained in fullness, and Dante could understand the vastness of it all; of the One who never lost its Oneness, no matter in how many beings it was reflected back to itself.

💭 Philosophical Exercises

I must ask my reader’s forgiveness for the analogy I am about to make, but one of the greatest pieces of storytelling I have encountered in recent years is the film Arrival. Its premise is simple: an alien civilization descends to Earth, and a linguist is charged with the task of discovering how to speak with them. Every ordinary method of communication fails. Sounds, gestures, symbols — nothing bridges the abyss between human and non-human intelligence. This might be a small spoiler of the film, but I believe that no great story can ever be spoiled by revealing a single fact; what matters is not the plot point but the way the story is told, the way its meaning is allowed to unfold.

The beauty of Arrival lies in the moment it reveals that the real barrier is not vocabulary but perception itself. I doubt the screenwriter — or the author whose novella inspired the film — was consciously drawing from Paradiso Canto XXIX, yet the similarities are remarkable. The languages we speak do more than convey meaning: they determine the way we perceive the world, the way reality unveils itself to our minds. Dante understands this. Human beings, he says, grasp truth discursively, syllogistically, one step at a time. Our intellect proceeds through sequence. This is why we require memory — because the truth that reaches us arrives in portions, one after another, each depending on what came before.

But in Arrival, the alien civilisation communicates through a language that is not sequential at all. Their symbols do not unfold in time; they contain time. Each utterance spans past, present, and future in a single, indivisible form. Meaning is not revealed to them step by step — it is given all at once. And here the parallel with Canto XXIX becomes astonishing. Just as the alien beings do not perceive time as we do, the angels Beatrice describes do not experience creation as humans do. Their mode of knowing is fundamentally different. When Beatrice begins her explanation, we are confronted with the same truth that Arrival dramatizes: the human intellect cannot receive the divine unless its very framework of perception changes. Misunderstanding comes not from too little information but from the wrong form of cognition. The mind must be reshaped.

What Dante is doing here echoes a philosophical tradition he absorbed deeply. In The Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius raises the classic question: if God already knows everything, if all things are present to His vision, how can human beings be free?

Boethius’ Lady Philosophy corrects him.

God does not “foresee” events as though looking into a future that has not yet happened.

Rather, He stands outside of time altogether and perceives the entirety of temporal existence in one eternal, simultaneous act. For us, choices unfold; for God, they are simply present.

This means our decisions remain free — left or right, courage or hesitation, virtue or error — and yet God’s knowledge encompasses them because His knowing does not unfold in sequence. Dante in Canto XXIX borrows this metaphysical insight and transforms it poetically: creation itself was instantaneous because God’s act cannot be divided into temporal stages.

This question of how beings perceive time — humans, angels, God — reminded me of something from my own life. When I was learning Italian, I once asked an Italian friend to explain the difference between passato prossimo (recent past) and passato remoto (remote past).

I said I didn’t understand how Italians decide which past is “remote,” and therefore which conjugation to use. His joking reply contained a deep truth: Italians struggle with this themselves because their history is so long. What counts as remote past? The Second World War? The Renaissance? Ancient Rome?

In a culture where events from two thousand years ago still shape the present more vividly than things that happened yesterday, the categories of “near” and “far” lose their boundaries. A remote past may feel more alive than a recent one; a recent past may feel already forgotten. Time does not always correspond to experience.

And this is precisely the difficulty Dante confronts. He shows that for humans, time is something we move through. For angels in Canto XXIX, time is something they perceive all at once. For God, time is something He stands entirely outside of. The Italian grammar problem — innocent as it seems — reveals the same instability of temporal categories. What is remote? What is near? In whose perception? According to what framework? Dante, like Boethius, is pushing us to imagine an order of knowing in which such distinctions dissolve.

From this point the similarities with Arrival deepen further. About halfway through the canto, Beatrice suddenly launches into a harsh polemic against theologians who distort divine truth — men who, through carelessness or pride, impose their own fantasies on Scripture.

Her tone becomes almost surgical. She insists that all false conceptions must die before Dante can ascend further. And this is where Arrival illuminates the canto once again. Just as Louise Banks must unlearn her assumptions about time, grammar, causality, and language itself, Dante must shed his inherited interpretive frameworks. Louise’s human categories make understanding the alien language impossible; Dante’s inherited theological categories make understanding angelic being impossible. In both cases, a flawed framework blocks access to truth.

Beatrice points specifically to errors rooted in over-literal readings of Pseudo-Dionysius — treating the angelic hierarchy as if it were physical — and to Platonising tendencies that treat souls as pre-existing in some other realm. These are not harmless mistakes. They deform the lens through which the mind perceives spiritual reality. And this ties directly into the Luciferian and Ulyssian theme we explored before. The crime of Lucifer — and even of Ulysses — is not merely disobedience but a misdirection of attention. Lucifer turned inward, loving the beam of his own brilliance and the thoughts that arose within him. He refused the outward orientation toward the divine that sustains true perception. The result was catastrophic: when perception is distorted, the entire world collapses around it.

Louise Banks mirrors this dynamic. As long as she tries to interpret the alien symbols through the grammar of human language, she cannot understand what they say. She is trapped inside her own temporality. Only when she allows her perceptual framework to dissolve does she begin to grasp meaning.

And so Canto XXIX brings us to a profound theme, one that reaches beyond theology and into epistemology itself. Humans know discursively. We proceed step by step, syllogistically: from A comes B, from B comes C. Our ascent through Paradise mirrors this structure. Truths arrive in sequence because our minds require unfolding. Angels know intuitively. They perceive everything all at once, in a single act of intellect. Their knowing is not bound by time, memory, or succession but is total, simultaneous, immediate. And God knows eternally. God does not perceive in time at all. He stands outside of time, knowing creation not as a process but as a single, indivisible act of being.

Here Arrival illuminates Dante with unexpected clarity. Humans speak in linear sentences; angels “speak” in totalities; God speaks by creating. Louise Banks learns a language whose symbols contain the whole of time within themselves, and in doing so, she acquires something like an analogy to angelic intuition.

Dante invites us to consider what it would mean to perceive without past or future, to know truth not as a sequence but as a single luminous whole. That is the horizon toward which Canto XXIX pushes us.

This Week’s Sinners and Virtuous 🎭

(Themes, Quotes, Terms and Characters)

I. Perseus and Time

The best way I can describe what this canto tries to convey about time is by turning to the relationship between an artist creating a painting and a viewer encountering that painting centuries later in a museum. I want to compare this contrast in perception to the relationship between mortal beings and God because the parallel is unexpectedly exact.

Think of an artist like Luca Giordano, whose famous Perseus with the Head of Medusa hangs today in the National Gallery in London. When Giordano painted it, he proceeded step by step. He made decisions stroke by stroke: where to place the light, how to shape the muscles, which colours to choose, what emotions to reveal, what meaning the composition should carry. His process unfolded slowly, logically, with each choice following from the one before. For Giordano, the painting came into being in time. It unrolled in front of him like a syllogism: premise, consequence, conclusion.

Now think of the viewer who stands before that painting five centuries later. We take in the entire scene at once. We see Perseus in mid-motion, the horror and beauty mingling in the severed head, the storm of action frozen into a single gesture. The painting reveals itself to us not piece by piece but in its whole dramatic unity. And although the scene depicts movement — emotion, danger, triumph — we perceive all of this simultaneously.

The painting’s temporal unfolding is contained within our single act of seeing.

In this sense, our perception as museum-goers mirrors, in a very distant way, the perception of God. The artist worked through time; the viewer stands above it. The work that for the creator required a sequence of decisions appears to us as a completed whole, a totality.

This distinction becomes even clearer when we contrast painting with other forms of art. Music must be heard over time; a symphony demands minutes or hours before it reveals itself. A book requires time to be read, sentence after sentence. A film unfolds frame by frame. These arts exist within time. But a painting does not. A painting can be seen in three seconds — the notorious average viewing time in the Louvre — or contemplated for an hour or a lifetime. It asks for no duration. It grants its entirety in a single moment of perception. Paintings, unlike every other art, live in a state that transcends temporal sequence.

Dante’s insight in Canto XXIX is remarkably similar. As we live our lives, we move through them moment by moment, hour by hour. Our experience unfolds gradually, like the painter at work, building our days stroke by stroke. The harmony of what we create — the spiritual beauty or disharmony of our choices — depends on how closely our actions correspond to the divine pattern of wisdom.

But God perceives differently. God, like the viewer standing before the completed painting, perceives the whole of our life as a single form. What unfolds to us through time is present to Him in its fullness. The work is already complete in His sight.

We live as painters; God beholds us as a viewer beholds a finished masterpiece.

In this way, Dante allows us to glimpse the difference between temporal beings and the eternal. Our lives must be lived in sequence; but the One who stands outside time perceives everything at once, not in fragments, not as unfolding chapters, but as a single luminous unity.

Quotes 🖋️

(The ones I keep in my journal as reminders of eternal wisdom):

Not to acquire new goodness for Himself—
which cannot be—but that his splendor might,
as it shines back to Him, declare “Subsisto,” 
in His eternity outside of time,
beyond all other borders, as pleased Him,
Eternal Love opened into new loves.

~ lines 13- 18, Paradiso, Canto XXIX

The wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish.

~ Herman Hesse

Welcome to Dante Read-Along! ✨

(If this post appears truncated in your inbox you can read it on the web by clicking here. )

Welcome to Dante Book Club, where you and I descend into Hell and Purgatory to be able to ascend to Paradise. Our guide in Paradise is Beatrice, and in this twenty-eighth Canto, Dante learns about the nine levels of the celestial hierarchy of angelic beings. You can find the main page of the read-along right here, reading schedule here, and the list of chat threads here.

In each post you can find a brief summary of the canto, philosophical exercises that you can draw from it, themes, character, and symbolism explanations.

All the wonderful illustrations are done specially for the Dante Read-Along by the one and only Luana Montebello.

Subscribe now

This Week’s Circle ⭕️

The ninth celestial realm of the Primum Mobile - Dante sees a divine reflection in Beatrice’s eyes - The light of God as a distant, brilliant point - The nine rings of the angelic hierarchy - Beatrice describes the orders of the angelic realms.

Canto XXVIII Summary:

Beatrice had fallen silent after explaining the disordered nature that kept some on earth in a state of dimmed sight and erroneous action. In the silence that followed, Dante looked into her eyes and saw reflected in them a sight that made him turn and look behind him to see what it could be, and if he saw that reflection correctly. It was as if he was standing before a mirror and had seen the image of a double candle placed behind him shine in the mirror before him; was the reflection the same as the reality? Was the image as in harmony with the reality as a singer was in tune with a musician?

Just as one who sees a mirrored flame—
its double candle stands behind his back—
even before he thought of it or gazed

directly at it, and he turns to gauge
if that glass tells the truth to him, and sees
that it accords, like a voice and instrument,

so—does my memory recall—I did
after I looked into the lovely eyes
of which Love made the noose that holds me tight.
xxviii.4-12

As he turned to look, he saw the substance of that which was within their present sphere, the ninth and highest celestial circle, the Primum Mobile. He also saw a bright point of light far, far away, his first glimpse of the highest One, of God in His Empyrean realm. In size, it was as if the smallest star seen from earth would look as large as a moon next to it, but still it was that piercingly bright. Around that point was a ring of fire, as one would see a halo round the moon.

This ring of fire moved more swiftly than the ring within which it was contained; this, as will be explained more explicitly, was the ring of Seraphim spinning within the sphere of the Primum Mobile.

Around that point a ring of fire wheeled,
a ring perhaps as far from that point as
a halo from the star that colors it

when mist that forms the halo is most thick.
It wheeled so quickly that it would outstrip
the motion that most swiftly girds the world.
xxviii.22-27

From his vantage point, Dante then saw all nine concentric rings, the sphere of each heaven along with their orders of hierarchical angelic powers. Since the sphere of the Primum Mobile was closest to the Empyrean realm above it, it spun the fastest. Each successive sphere, moving toward earth, moved more slowly, until the last and final sphere was the slowest of all. The ninth sphere had a clearer, more ineffable flame than any other, being so close as it was to the point of the One and the truth that it embodied. Beatrice saw Dante take all this in, wondering at it all, and she spoke, referring to the bright point of light that he had seen:

“On that Point
depend the heavens and the whole of nature.

Look at the circle that is nearest It,
and know: its revolutions are so swift
because of burning love that urges it.”
xxviii.41-45

Here we begin to see the fulfillment of the perfectly ordered love that we have been tracing for so long, the step by step journey through every level of being that has finally brought us to the top of the ladder, the highest realm that perceives of God without intermediary, existing in eternal adoration and praise without even a remnant of earthly limitation. These beings move the fastest because they are that full of love for the highest good, it is the highest possible expression of desire for the One, the unmoved mover of Aristotle:

Dante responded, always with the medieval worldview informing his understanding of the very real presence of the influence of the heavens on life, the earth and the celestial sphere. In that medieval worldview, each material sphere in this conception became ‘ever more divine’ the higher it climbed from earth.

But he had a question as he tried to understand the difference between the ‘model’ of this spiritual universe as presented before him, compared to the ‘copy’ of the physical universe. He saw a discrepancy between what he understood of the physical universe and what was being presented as the nature of the spiritual universe.

His question represented a question for the ages, for it was a puzzle—the correspondence between the spiritual and physical world—that had been on the mind of the wisest thinkers for ages. Yet his question would be answered, and Beatrice proceeded to explain. The two representations were both matter and spirit conjoined with each other, the wider the material sphere, the more power those within it could contain.

More excellence
yields greater blessedness; more blessedness
must comprehend a greater body when
that body’s parts are equally complete.
xxviii.66-69

The Primum Mobile, with its swift movement that it passed down to the levels below it, must hold within itself the angelic order that moves the most swiftly, the Seraphim. She encouraged him to look at the spiritual dimension of the sphere, and not just the material conception of it; from these observations the two would then be in accord with each other.

Beatrice’s answer regarding these correspondences made the matter so clear to Dante, it was as though the Northwest wind—the Boreas—had blown clear all the lingering questions at the corners of his mind.

Just as the hemisphere of air remains
splendid, serene, when from his gentler cheek
Boreas blows and clears the scoriae,

dissolves the mist that had defaced the sky,
so that the heavens smile with loveliness
in all their region; even so did I

become after my lady had supplied
her clear responses to me, and—like a star
in heaven—truth was seen.
xxviii.79-87

All the angelic realms, each being as a point of light, now thronged in their respective rings, shining their light, like sparks flying from molten metal. Their numbers seemed so infinite that they were virtually uncountable, reminding Dante of the story of the inventor of the chessboard:

Each circle of angelic beings sang together the praise of Hosanna, to the One that gave order to their circling. Beatrice began to describe the levels of heavenly beings, each with their own name and properties, beginning at the quickest, stationed closest to the One. The first two realms closest to God were the Seraphim in the circle of the Primum Mobile, and the Cherubim, of the Fixed Stars. They were the angelic beings that were most like God and were those who were the most powerfully moved by love; they were as like to God as it was possible for anything in the material universe to be. The third realm below these two were called Thrones, and they inhabited the realm of Saturn; these made up the first triad of beings extending out from the Empyrean realm.

And she who saw my mind’s perplexities
said: “The first circles have displayed to you
the Seraphim and Cherubim. They follow

the ties of love with such rapidity
because they are as like the Point as creatures
can be, a power dependent on their vision.

Those other loves that circle round them are
called Thrones of the divine aspect, because
they terminated the first group of three.
xxviii.97-105

Before going any further, let us look at the larger scope of the architecture of heaven that Beatrice is expounding upon; the nine levels of the heavenly beings are divided further into three groups of three; therefore you will find us building trinity upon trinity, as we will explore more.

Each angelic realm corresponded with a planetary sphere. The first triad, from closest to God down, is made up of the Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones. The second triad, is made of Dominions, Virtues and Powers, and the third triad, closest to earth, is made of Principalities, Archangels and Angels. While the circle closest to earth is the only one where the intelligences are actually called Angels, all realms can be considered angelic beings for the purpose of putting words to the forms. Each realm also holds a specific quality. These are the hierarchies of the heavens as outlined in the text The Celestial Hierarchy by Pseudo-Dionysius, and whose authority Dante pulled on for informing this architecture of heaven.

The glory and participation in God is highest at the highest level, and as we move downward from the Empyrean toward the earth, each level participates as much as it is able by its nature; so it is not that the lower realms are lesser than the higher as far as any morality goes, but that they are not able to participate as fully in the highest due to their nature, and so participate as much as they are able. Keep in mind however, that however much the lower orders can participate, is their fullest expression of that participation.

And know that all delight to the degree
to which their vision sees—more or less deeply—
that truth in which all intellects find rest.
xxviii.106-108

Dante here added a theological distinction as to what element in these beings did the participating, and how it sprung into being; to the Scholastics and theologians that Dante drew upon, these were matters of great importance.

Beatrice next expounded upon the second triad, composed of the Dominions, Virtues, and Powers, which occupied the celestial spheres of Jupiter, Mars, and the Sun. Each of the ranks are taken from Biblical references, both Old and New Testaments, and arranged so in Pseudo-Dionysius’ text.

Finally Beatrice named the last triad, that which was closest to earth which corresponded to Venus, Mercury, and the Moon: the Principalities, Archangels and Angels.

Using the Neoplatonic idea of abiding, proceeding and returning, each realm draws up the realm below it into the participation with the highest God in the Empyrean realm; all of these distinctions were written down by that figure to whom we have referred, known as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. Pseudonymous literature in antiquity were texts that were labelled as being written by a specific author—usually one that was well known and could be accepted with authority—yet were later discovered to have been written anonymously.

The historical figure of Dionysius is found in the book of Acts, and was thought to be the first bishop of Athens, attending and meeting with St. Paul:

The texts attributed to him, however, were found to have been written in the sixth century by a figure well versed in Neoplatonic philosophy—but that history would need an entire separate study. Suffice it to say that Dante was not yet aware of the pseudonymous nature of the text, and still attributed it to that bishop of Athens mentioned as an associate of Paul.

These orders all direct—ecstatically—
their eyes on high; and downward, they exert
such force that all are drawn and draw to God.

And Dionysius, with much longing, set
himself to contemplate these orders: he
named and distinguished them just as I do.
xxviii.127-132

The placement of beings within these realms had been presented in different orders by different theologians, and St. Gregory had followed a different arrangement of some of the realms; Beatrice pointed out that once he arrived in the heavenly realms and saw the circles himself, he changed his mind about his earthly proclamations, going so far as to laugh at his own mistake.

Then, she said, if Dante should wonder how Dionysius knew their order, being mortal, that Dante was to keep in mind that Dionysius had received the information from St. Paul, who had journeyed into the high heavens while still a mortal, and passed on the information to him:

Thus do we understand the placement of the spiritual celestial realms corresponding to the material planetary realms, and the divine architecture of Paradise.

💭 Philosophical Exercises

My dear reader,

I found this canto to be incredibly beautiful, because it reveals, perhaps more clearly than anywhere else in the Paradiso, how our universe truly moves.

Dante offers an extraordinary explanation of the connection between the physical, Ptolemaic universe and the deeper, divine universe that underlies it.

Essentially, he shows us that two universes operate in parallel: the earthly one we can measure, observe, and describe, and the interior one, where the very forces that move the heavens originate.

When Dante enters the Primum Mobile, he sees nine circles of living fire revolving around a blinding point of divine light. These are the nine angelic orders. Each circle spins more rapidly the closer it is to this point, closer, that is, to the love of God. These nine circles, as Dante learns, are the true engines of the cosmos.

What we call planetary motions—the turning of the heavens, the rhythms of time—are merely the shadows of their love.

The whole universe, in other words, turns because love burns.

It is important, I believe, to notice that Dante does not dismiss the physical astronomy he inherited. He doesn’t say that the science of his age is false; he simply says that it is not the deepest truth. Behind the tangible universe that we can study and model, there is something hidden, something more originating, something that causes the visible motions.

We can look at the heavens, we can observe how the planets and stars move, we can build systems to describe their paths, and yet we still cannot explain what truly sets everything in motion. Dante’s answer is that there is an astronomical surface and an angelic interior.

This is one of the aspects of the canto that moves me the most. I realised, reading it closely, that the way I used to imagine angels was incredibly primitive. I thought of them in the usual vague, symbolic way: beautiful messengers, decorative figures of light hovering somewhere “up there.”

Dante shatters this soft, sentimental image. In his universe, angels are not ornaments. They are transmitters of divine energy. Each angelic order receives something from God, gathers it, understands it, and transmits it downward into the lower orders, until eventually it reaches the physical world.

They are essentially miners of divine light.

This idea comes from a theologian of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite; I included a short exploration of his angelology in the themes.

Depending on their order, these angels extract from God intelligence, illumination, form, motion, order, and love. Each circle is at the same time a recipient and a giver. Each circle is both contemplative and active. Each one transforms the divine energy in a particular way and sends it outward.

They are messengers of meaning in the most literal sense: they do not merely bring us “messages,” they carry the very forms and forces through which reality becomes ordered and alive.

This is where the canto becomes most personal for me. It ties directly into something I keep returning to in my own writings and videos: the nature of our attention.

I have long believed that attention is one of the primary ways we participate in life, give it meaning, and in the case of the Commedia, the way we perceive the divine order. When I read Dante’s description of the angelic circles through this lens, I began to see each angelic order as a mode of attention, a way of receiving and transmitting the divine.

The Seraphim, who are closest to God, receive through burning love. When we attend to the world with love, with warmth, with that kind of intensity of presence, we participate, in a small human way, in the Seraphic mode. The Cherubim receive through perfect knowledge. When we attend with clarity, with a desire to understand rather than to control, we brush against the Cherubic way of seeing. The Thrones receive through stable judgment. When we attend with discernment, sobriety, and inner steadiness, when we resist the impulse to judge hastily, we echo something of the Thronal attention.

In this sense, our attention is not a neutral tool. It is a spiritual alignment. Where and how we pay attention determines which “circle” we are standing closest to. When you act in love, you enter into a distant but real kinship with that intensely burning circle of the Seraphim around the divine Point. When you seek understanding in humility, you are, in Dante’s symbolic language, in conversation with the Cherubim. When you practise a calm, grounded judgment, you are shadowing the Thrones. The genius of this canto is that it quietly suggests a parallel between the hidden movements of the cosmos and the hidden movements of the soul. Just as the visible heavens are moved by an invisible interior of angelic love, our visible actions are moved by an invisible interior of attention.

For me, this is the most beautiful explanation I have ever encountered of how we participate in the divine order of God. It is not a participation based on mere submission, nor on a rejection of earthly life, but on the way and the mood in which we pay attention to the world—how we attend to what is before us.

In this light, the simple image of a distant God reigning as a kind of celestial authoritarian governor, or of angels as strange beings appearing in hallucinatory visions starts to dissolve.

So, too does the narrow, transactional perception that by prayer we might simply obtain material rewards.

All of these images are quietly replaced, in Dante’s vision, by a deeper understanding: that beneath the surface of the things we can see, there is a subtler surface at work, a living order we can begin to perceive by choosing to participate in it.

This is why sometimes, my dear reader, when we do good despite the odds, it feels like more than just a private moral victory.

It feels like stepping, however briefly, into a movement that is larger than ourselves, as if our small act had aligned with a greater orbit, a greater burning circle of love turning silently at the heart of things.

This Week’s Sinners and Virtuous 🎭

(Themes, Quotes, Terms and Characters)

I. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite

There is another layer to this canto that becomes visible when we understand the source Dante is drawing from: the mysterious thinker known as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. His writings shaped almost all medieval thought on angels, and Dante’s nine orders come directly from him. But Dante does not borrow Dionysius just to sound theological. He borrows him because Dionysius offers a structure, a way of imagining how God’s inner life becomes the architecture of the universe.

Dionysius teaches that God radiates Himself into creation through three triads of angels. The highest triad stands closest to God’s inner movements: Seraphim participate in the burning intensity of divine love, Cherubim in the luminous clarity of divine knowing, Thrones in the calm stability of divine judgment. When Dante places these three in the innermost circles around the Point, he is saying that the universe begins not with matter or motion, but with love, knowledge, and judgment.

The second triad (Dominions, Virtues, Powers) governs how this inner life becomes effective. They clarify what must be done, give strength to it, and protect its unfolding. The third triad (Principalities, Archangels, Angels) brings the divine light closest to human life, guiding peoples, events, and individual souls.

In this view, hierarchy is not a chain of command but a chain of transmission. God’s light does not leap from infinity to us in one step. It cascades through beings who understand it, shape it, and give it onward. Each order opens space for the one below it to receive more fully. The universe becomes a sequence of attentions bent toward the Point.

Seen this way, Dionysius is no longer remote. His hierarchy becomes a map of the soul. The Seraphim’s love, the Cherubim’s clarity, the Thrones’ stability are also modes of our own attention. Dante is not only describing the architecture of heaven; he is quietly sketching the architecture of a soul that wants to receive, understand, and transmit the divine.

Quotes 🖋️

(The ones I keep in my journal as reminders of eternal wisdom):

Thus, if my longing is to gain its end
in this amazing and angelic temple
that has, as boundaries, only love and light,
then I still have to hear just how the model
and copy do not share in one same plan—
for by myself I think on this in vain.

~ lines 52- 57, Paradiso, Canto XXVIII

The wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish.

~ Herman Hesse

Welcome to Dante Read-Along! ✨

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Welcome to Dante Book Club, where you and I descend into Hell and Purgatory to be able to ascend to Paradise. Our guide in Paradise is Beatrice, and in this twenty-seventh Canto, St. Peter condemns corruption in the church. You can find the main page of the read-along right here, reading schedule here, and the list of chat threads here.

In each post you can find a brief summary of the canto, philosophical exercises that you can draw from it, themes, character, and symbolism explanations.

All the wonderful illustrations are done specially for the Dante Read-Along by the one and only Luana Montebello.

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This Week’s Circle ⭕️

The souls in the eighth realm of the Fixed Stars rejoice - St. Peter grows red with indignation - His speech denouncing Pope Boniface VIII - The attending souls and Beatrice also blush with shame - The souls rise to the ninth sphere - The sight of Beatrice’s eyes lifts Dante into the Primum Mobile - The view of earth from above - Beatrice’s speech on the nature of the universe and on greed.

Canto XXVII Summary:

The souls of Paradise sang a celebratory song of the Trinity at the conclusion of Adam’s speech, and all of Dante’s senses were overwhelmed with joy and delight as he experienced the full beatitudes of love at having arrived at such an exalted place, all doubt and craving cast far, far away from him as reveled in the joys of heaven.

Four shining souls were before him, those with whom he had spoken during his time in the eighth realm of the Fixed Stars: Peter, James, John, and Adam. Peter came forward, shining, and Dante saw his color change from white—shining like Jupiter—to the ruddy hue—the red of Mars—that would prove to be due to his indignation as he gave an extended speech of condemnation against the papacy, and Boniface VIII specifically.

Before my eyes, there stood, aflame, the four
torches, and that which had been first to come
began to glow with greater radiance,

and what its image then became was like
what Jupiter’s would be if Mars and he
were birds and had exchanged their plumages.
xxvii.10-15

The assembled host grew quiet and Peter began to speak. He told Dante and Beatrice that as they heard his message, the souls around them would also change hue for the shame of what he would reveal. His denunciation of Boniface began, and while Dante had not been shy over criticizing him through the course of the poem, the words coming from the mouth of St. Peter himself made them even more powerful due to his role as the Apostle of Christ and as the first pope.

Calling out in triplicate to the seat of the Bishop of Rome, Peter named Boniface as a vacant presence, an usurper who had turned the great city into a sewer running with filth, so much so that Lucifer himself would be at home there.

In the Inferno, we saw a reference to Boniface in the eighth circle of the Simoniacs—sellers of church offices and favors—placed upside down in pits with burning feet, as Pope Nicholas III called out to Dante, thinking that he was Boniface come to his condemnation:

And he cried out: “Are you already standing,
already standing there, o Boniface?
The book has lied to me by several years.

Are you so quickly sated with the riches
for which you did not fear to take by guile
the Lovely Lady, then to violate her?
Inferno xix.52-57

At these words of Peter, the whole host did indeed blush for shame, turning the color of the clouds before a low sun, rising or setting. Beatrice in her innocent purity blushed as well, her complexion darkening as though eclipsed, as had the sun during the crucifixion at the moment of Christ’s death.

Peter continued with a shift in his tone as he continued to narrate, naming the earliest popes after himself, St. Linus and St. Cletus. They were also martyrs for their faith, Linus beheaded by Saturninus and Cletus killed under the Emperor Domitian. The blood of Peter and these other martyred popes did not spill in order for the church to be glutted with greed for gold, nor to sit between political factions granting favors or fortunes, as the Guelphs who supported Boniface sat on his right, and the Ghibellines, who were against him, on the left.

Nor would Peter ever have intended for the image of the keys of the kingdom, granted to him by Christ, to be used on a standard in war against other Christians. But the outrages continued, in that his image on the papal seal was even used to grant indulgences.

Pope John XXII, the Cahorsines, and Clement V, the Gascon—under whom the papacy was moved from Rome to Avignon—were similar to Boniface in their corruption; what had begun as Peter’s noble rule had fallen to the basest error.

He concluded his speech with a prophecy that was clear to him as he read it within the mind of God: that help would come to deliver Rome. It would arrive as had Scipio Africanus, through an act of Providence who had committed heroic acts in defeating Hannibal in the second Punic War, and that to usher that in that new era, Peter charged Dante to write all that he had been told regarding the state of these societal and religious ills.

But that high Providence which once preserved,
with Scipio, the glory of the world
for Rome, will soon bring help, as I conceive;

and you, my son, who through your mortal weight
will yet return below, speak plainly there,
and do not hide that which I do not hide.
xxvii.61-66

With this final word, Peter ceased speaking, and the attendant souls drifted upward, like snowflakes under the winter constellation of Capricorn; Dante watched as they soared far upward, out of sight, toward the next celestial realm, the last of the material realms, the ninth sphere of the Primum Mobile, the realm closest to that of God.

As, when the horn of heaven’s Goat abuts
the sun, our sky flakes frozen vapors downward,
so did I see that ether there adorned;

for from that sphere, triumphant vapors now
were flaking up to the Empyrean—
returning after dwelling here with us.
xxvii.67-72

Beatrice spoke and told Dante to look down below him, just as she had admonished him to do as they were leaving the seventh circle of Saturn and rising up into the eighth sphere of the Fixed Stars; this time as Dante looked back, he saw the movement of the earth far below him, its view of the region of the Mediterranean showing him just how many hours he had resided in the eighth sphere.

He could see from the straits of Gibraltar at Cadiz, from where Ulysses, on his mad journey, had attempted to sail, to the eastern Mediterranean near where Europa had fled from the pursuing Jupiter. The commentators pay close attention to the details of this view, as Dante described the view before him:

I saw that, from the time when I looked down
before, I had traversed all of the arc
of the first clime, from its midpoint to end,

so that, beyond Cadiz, I saw Ulysses’
mad course and, to the east, could almost see
that shoreline where Europa was sweet burden.
xxvii.79-84

Gazing upon the expansive scene before him, Dante’s attention moved back to Beatrice, that beacon of light that continually brought him back to her gaze—nothing on earth, no artist’s brush or physical beauty, could compare with her radiance as the embodiment of love and the perfected soul.

In that gaze Dante found the impetus to lift him from the realm of the Fixed Stars upward, just as the souls like flakes of snow had ascended before him. Lifted from his place in the constellation of Gemini—those twins from myth, Castor and Pollux, whose mother, Leda, had lain them as eggs in her nest with their sister Helen—he was thrust upward into the highest material realm, the crystalline sphere that held no planet or star, but was the swift moving Primum Mobile, so uniform in its structure that each part within it appeared like every other part.

The powers that her gaze now granted me
drew me out of the lovely nest of Leda
and thrust me into heaven’s swiftest sphere.

Its parts were all so equally alive
and excellent, that I cannot say which
place Beatrice selected for my entry.
xxvii.97-102

Beatrice spoke, explaining the nature of the sights before them, the nature of the Primum Mobile, and the function of its rapid spinning. When viewed from the Empyrean, it was the boundary of the material universe, the beginning of the movement that spread down through every other sphere down through the center, where the Earth rested. Remembering back upon the center of the Inferno as the place that was the furthest removed from God, we can now appreciate the very heights and distance, both literally and poetically, that this entails.

The love that pours from the mind of God first arrived here, in the sphere that surrounds all else, indeed, it is the boundary not just of God in the highest heaven but of time itself. Every other sphere gains its movement from this one in proportion.

The nature of the universe, which holds
the center still and moves all else around it,
begins here as if from its turning-post.

This heaven has no other where than this:
the mind of God, in which are kindled both
the love that turns it and the force it rains.

As in a circle, light and love enclose it,
as it surrounds the rest-and that enclosing,
only He who encloses understands.
xxvii.106-114

Following this exposition upon the structure and function of the highest, Beatrice shifted tone from the most exalted of topics down to what occurred when all of this vastness is unrecognized, not taken into account, and in that blindness that takes hold of the person of society when overcome by the greed so eloquently expounded upon by St. Peter in his denunciation of Boniface; she called out to what state humanity could sink through the negative influences that stunt and rot the will, that which starts out well, as a blossoming flower, but becomes rotten, as fruit is lost to too much rain.

She explained this process as the child grew to adulthood, where faith and innocence flee under such influences, one person with no discernment as to what belongs in what season, eating in and out of the times set for fasting, or of another whose loving speech turns to denunciation of their own mothers.

They become like the goddess Circe when she turned Ulysses from his goal through avarice and cupidity, encouraging the turning away from the good to the satisfaction of the self and is corrupted.

Beatrice again aligned with Peter’s words when she said that humanity had no guidance to show the way, that both temporal and ecclesiastical power were so corrupted that it could be no surprise that humanity was so astray from the truth.

Yet she ended on a hopeful note; that before long, when considered from the standpoint of the Julian calendar with all its error in calculation, that the tides of this corruption would shift:

But well before nine thousand years have passed
(and January is unwintered by
day’s hundredth part, which they neglect below),

this high sphere shall shine so, that Providence,
long waited for, will turn the sterns to where
the prows now are, so that the fleet runs straight.
xxvii.142-147

Then, instead of the rotten plums that fall through too much rain, the harvest that begun as the beautiful flower would be able to ripen into perfection.

💭 Philosophical Exercises

We often say that every meaningful life contains a moment when everything changes and yet, when we try to understand or describe what has happened to us, we find ourselves strangely unable to measure it. Inner change does not unfold in ordinary space or time. It has no coordinates. It does not obey chronology. It arrives from another dimension of the soul.

Dante, in this canto, is brought directly to that threshold.

Beatrice asks him to look back once again. She asked him earlier in the journey, and we spoke then about the Orphean resonance of that first backward glance — an anti-Orpheus moment in which Dante was permitted to look behind without losing what he loves. Now, just before entering the Primum Mobile, she commands him to look downward through all the heavens he has traversed.

But this time, something remarkable happens. Dante tries to measure what he sees. He reaches for the tools of the astronomer and geographer — zodiac signs, climatological divisions, the meridians of Jerusalem and Gades. He tries to calculate how much distance he has travelled, how much time has passed.

And yet he cannot. The more he attempts to quantify his ascent, the more inadequate his categories become.

This moment reveals something deep about human experience. We, too, look back at our lives and we know that our greatest transformations often have nothing to do with the quantity of events. Sometimes a single event, a single day, even a single sentence reshapes our very identity. And other times, long seasons pass with no transformation at all.

Real inner change refuses to be plotted on a timeline.

Dante’s attempt to calculate his journey fails for the same reason our attempts to calculate our interior transformations fail: the soul does not move through space or hours. The soul moves by intensity, by orientation, by its proximity to what is Good. As commentators note, Dante could earlier measure precisely how many hours he spent descending or ascending. But now, as he approaches the realm where time itself begins, time dissolves. He is arriving at the source of movement and so movement, too, collapses.

And Dante’s inner realisation here becomes the threshold for an even greater mystery.

After turning his gaze back, after grasping that the deepest transformations of his journey have occurred outside the dimensions of space and time, Dante turns once again toward the Empyrean. And this is where his genius becomes most visible. He does not simply move from one sphere to another; he creates interior transitions within the soul of the reader. He prepares us for a world where our normal categories — motion, measure, comparison — can no longer function.

As he approaches the Empyrean, Dante’s language shifts. He begins to rely on paradox. He sees by being blinded. He understands through un-understanding. The highest visibility becomes indistinguishable from darkness because the clarity is too great for a human mind to bear.

These paradoxes are not poetic decoration. They mark exactly the point where human cognition buckles under the weight of what it encounters. They indicate the boundary of finite thought when it approaches an infinite reality.

And this is something difficult to explain to a strictly materialist outlook. If the invisible world Dante describes truly exists, and if the soul can feel it, then by definition it cannot be proven in the way physical facts are proven. It is the origin of space and time, not an object within them. Asking for empirical proof of it is like asking for a photograph of the light that makes visibility itself possible.

On a personal note, we find something similar whenever we stand before a great work of art. We can trace the material conditions of Dante’s Commedia: the events of his life, the manuscripts he read, the gates of Florence that might have suggested the entrance to Hell. We can describe the ink, the vellum, the act of writing. We can even trace the neurobiology of creative thought. And yet none of this touches the first spark that moved through Dante’s mind — the impulse that organized all that material into this single, impossible masterpiece.

We can trace the wires, but not the spark.

In the same way, we can trace the material components of the universe: particles, forces, radiation, expansion. But the immaterial act that gives being to all these things remains outside our descriptions. Dante’s approach to the Empyrean is his poetic way of revealing this: there is a reality that sustains everything we can measure, and yet it cannot be reduced to measurement. It can only be approached through paradox, wonder, and a luminous form of un-knowing.

This Week’s Sinners and Virtuous 🎭

(Themes, Quotes, Terms and Characters)

I. Explaining the Invisible

To my dear reader, I want to remind you that the earthly world can be known through measurement through space, time, and causes we can trace and explain. But when we approach the world Dante enters here, the world from which all things originate and yet cannot be described or quantified, knowledge changes its form.

We understand such realities not by observing them from the outside, but by participating in them: just as we cannot measure love, yet we know it intimately when we experience it. If this distinction feels mysterious, I encourage you to return to the earlier cantos where we first explored this theme of participation for this is the key Dante gives us to approaching the immeasurable.

Quotes 🖋️

(The ones I keep in my journal as reminders of eternal wisdom):

The nature of the universe, which holds
the center still and moves all else around it,
begins here as if from its turning-post.

This heaven has no other where than this: 
the mind of God, in which are kindled both
the love that turns it and the force it rains.

~ lines 106-111, Paradiso, Canto XXVII

Welcome to Dante Read-Along! ✨

(If this post appears truncated in your inbox you can read it on the web by clicking here. )

Welcome to Dante Book Club, where you and I descend into Hell and Purgatory to be able to ascend to Paradise. Our guide in Paradise is Beatrice, and in this twenty-sixth Canto, Dante is questioned on Love by St. John. You can find the main page of the read-along right here, reading schedule here, and the list of chat threads here.

In each post you can find a brief summary of the canto, philosophical exercises that you can draw from it, themes, character, and symbolism explanations.

All the wonderful illustrations are done specially for the Dante Read-Along by the one and only Luana Montebello.

Subscribe now

This Week’s Circle ⭕️

The realm of the Fixed Stars, continued - Dante’s blindness - St. John addresses Dante with questions - The theological virtue of Love - Dante successfully defends his entrance into ordered Love - The heavenly hosts rejoice - He is cured of blindness - Adam, the first soul, presents himself - Dante’s questions to Adam and their answers.

Canto XXVI Summary:

Having been blinded by the light of St. John, the third Apostle who, after James and Peter, would examine Dante on the Theological Virtue of Love in the realm of the Fixed Stars, Dante heard John’s voice address him. The souls here more often than not ‘breathe’ out their words, showing the nature of the reception of their speech there in Paradise.

The examination began, but in a different way than with the other Apostles; first, these questions on Love were being conducted in blindness, but also in that John did not ask Dante to define Love at the outset, as he had been asked to define Faith and Hope.

John’s first question to Dante was to state the goal that his soul was working toward, what was that target? Remember here that both the act of aiming and the act of choosing love are of the will. He also stated assurance that his blindness was but temporary, and would soon be restored by the eyes of Beatrice, just as the hand of Ananias had restored sight to the Apostle Paul in the New Testament:

Then do begin; declare the aim on which
your souls is set—and be assured of this:
your vision, though confounded, is not dead,

because the woman who conducts you through
this godly region has, within her gaze,
that force the hand of Ananias had.”
xxvi.7-12

Dante answered John’s first question, letting it be known that he would accept the blessing of the restoration of his sight from Beatrice whenever she deemed it time, as it was through her gaze that love had set his heart afire in the first place.

Dante answered that God was the beginning and end—the Alpha and Omega—of all that Love had taught him.

John spoke again and framed his second question: Dante must refine and clarify this answer by telling who helped him aim at such a lofty target. Dante named two inspirations; the first was through human reason as outlined in the philosophic arguments of thinkers such as Aristotle—his explanation outlined the whole basis of Scholastic reasoning. This would then lead to, upon discovering this truth through reason, to the source of that love expounded upon in the scriptures, which, being the highest good, was the logical outcome of this progression; Dante gives us a blending of the pagan and Christian pathway that he himself took, and that the Scholastics were so well known for:

The good, once it is understood as such,
enkindles love; and in accord with more
goodness comes greater love. And thus the mind

of anyone who can discern the truth
on which this proof is founded must be moved
to love, more than it loves all else, that Essence

which is preeminent (since any good
that lies outside of it is nothing but
a ray reflected from Its radiance).
xxvi.28-36

Studying Aristotle had pointed Dante to the concept of the ‘unmoved mover,’ as had the description of the voice of God when he spoke to Moses in the Divinely inspired scriptures.

Dante had found this also at the beginning of the Epistle of John, which opened with the most mystical theology of any of the Gospels:

The light that was St. John celebrated this answer and asked, as his third question, if Dante could not expand even further upon the nature of this love, if he did not have yet other motives, using the unusual metaphor of sinking his teeth into the idea, as there were so many other things that he could expand upon in this most important of Virtues. Dante understood his motives and for what clarifications John was asking for: more revealing ideas than Dante had yet put forth.

He referred to John as Christ’s Eagle; the Apostles of the Gospels each had a representation as an animal in the Biblical symbology;

Dante expounded upon the additional things that brought him to Love, the many things that came together, blended, and came to new life pointing to the totality of the expression of that love. These things were the very existence of the world itself, the symbolism of the crucifixion, and those things held in common by all believers—“salvation, eternal beatitude, and the vision of God”5—and how these all had brought him from the sea of false love. More importantly, they brought him from disordered love to rightly ordered love, a theme that is here brought to its fruition conclusion:

The world’s existence
and mine, the death that He sustained that I
might live, and that which is the hope of all
believers, as it is my hope, together

with living knowledge I have spoken of—
these drew me from the sea of twisted love
and set me on the shore of right love.
xxvi.57-63

We encountered the idea of disordered love in the very beginning of our journey, the state from which Dante was wandering when he first came upon Virgil in the dark wood, so long ago. Here, however, in this examination, showing the results of his divine journey, Dante can, with confidence, express that he has come to set this love in order in the most profound of ways:

At this, the hosts of heaven called out in praise of these most exalted answers to the most exalted of questions; Dante had passed all three of his examinations on the qualities of the Theological Virtues; they burst out in a song of adoration that was the essence of the contemplation of the Seraphim:

This passage is symbolic, with Peter in attendance, of that other passage in Purgatory, through which Dante entered the gate up the three steps into Purgatory proper. Here, in Paradise, his questions from the three Apostles were like another three steps upon which, now that he has successfully completed it, will come his true vision of Paradise, the highest realm possible for souls to rest in the adoration of God. But that is still to come.

Upon this passage of examination, Dante’s blindness was cured, described in an extended metaphor of light passing through closed eyes, its inner ‘spirit of sight’ eager to open the eyes of the sleeper in order to encounter the light that was before it.

And just as a sharp light will startle us
from sleep because the spirit of eyesight
races to meet the brightness that proceeds

From layer to layer in the eye, and he
who wakens is confused by what he sees,
awaking suddenly, and knows no thing

until his judgment helps him; even so
did Beatrice dispel, with her eyes’ rays,
which shone more than a thousand miles, the chaff
from my eyes:
xxvi.70-79

Dante’s sight returned to him cleansed, even clearer than it had been before; with amazement, he saw that another soul encased in light had arrived while he was blinded, whom Beatrice introduced as Adam, the first soul created by God. Dante was taken aback that he stood before such a one, and upon recovering himself, asked with all humility if he could put a question to Adam, indicating that Adam already knew the question of his longing, as did all in this heavenly realm.

Adam’s response came, not audibly, but through the movement of the light surrounding him, which Dante compared to an animal under a cover of cloth, and how that cover moved with its movements.

Adam confirmed that he knew Dante’s wishes more deeply than even Dante did, as he could see them in the very mind of God itself. He stated Dante’s questions for him:

You wish to hear how long it is since I
was placed by God in that high garden where
this lady readied you to climb a stair

so long, and just how long it pleased my eyes,
and the true cause of the great anger, and
what idiom I used and shaped.
xxvi.109-114

First Adam answered the “true cause of the great anger,” or why he and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden; it was not, he clarified, from the act of eating the forbidden fruit, but from their disobedience which led to the act of transgressing boundaries. Adam next answered the question of how long ago he was created, which included the tally of his years in Limbo, in addition to the years of the span of his earthly life; Dante here used the dating of the historian and scholar Eusebius in his calculations:

Next, Adam addressed Dante’s question about the nature of the first language that he himself created (line 114), and which was no longer in use by the time the tower of Babel, built under the direction of Nimrod, began construction, as it was created with human reason, not divine agency, and was thus impermanent:

The tongue I spoke was all extinct before
the men of Nimrod set their minds upon
the unaccomplishable task; for never

has any thing produced by human reason
been everlasting-following the heavens,
men seek the new, they shift their predilections.
xxvi.124-129

He continued on with the concept of language by looking at the first name that God was called by humans in this early language; during Adam’s lifetime, he said that God was referred to simply as I, which could indicate both a unity, or the J of Jehovah or Jah, but later that name was changed, Adam said, to El; in Hebrew, all are holy names for God. This was appropriate, said Adam, for as changeable as is the nature of humanity in the sublunar realm, so was the mutability of language:

Finally, Adam addressed Dante’s second question: how long was he in the Garden of Eden? The answer here may be surprising, even shocking: Adam spent only a bit more than six hours in the earthly paradise. Dante based this estimate on the work of Petrus Comestor in his commentary of the book of Genesis.

On that peak rising highest from the sea,
my life-first pure, than tainted—lasted from
the first hour to the hour that follows on

the sixth, when the sun shifts to a new quadrant.
xxvi.139-142

💭 Philosophical Exercises

My reader can now see why it matters that we made this journey together.

Why we took the time to move step by step—through circles, through terraces, and finally into the celestial spheres. Because without that long ascent, this encounter—this sudden irruption of overwhelming light, this exam administered by Saint John (and others)—would be incomprehensible.

If you opened the Divine Comedy for the first time at Paradiso XXVI, none of this would make sense. Saint John’s questions, Dante’s answers, even the vocabulary Dante uses—everything here depends on what we have already seen in Inferno and Purgatorio. Barolini says it beautifully: this canto only reveals its full meaning when all the earlier encounters “come together.”

Here, in the sphere of the Fixed Stars, Saint John examines Dante on charity, on love—the third and final theological virtue, after Peter tested his faith and James tested his hope. But Dante’s response, and our understanding of it, would be impossible without two earlier figures: Ulysses in Inferno and the Siren in Purgatorio.

There is something unique I’ve noticed about this canto.

I.

If in Inferno our direction was clearly toward evil, toward a love that is fundamentally misplaced, then in Purgatorio we felt something more complicated. There, we were in a kind of crossroads. We were equally drawn toward misplaced love and toward well-directed love. There was a duality. As readers, we were moving through the middle ground.

We might remember the scene of the Siren in Purgatorio—the Siren who, as we discussed, was luring Dante’s mind back toward vain attempts, back toward empty pursuits. (I still find that one of the most moving and psychologically honest moments in the entire Divine Comedy.)

Here, in Paradiso, we have reached a point where our impulse, our direction, is no longer headed toward something misdirected, as it was in Inferno. It no longer has the ambivalence between two poles that we felt in Purgatorio. Here, the movement has a clear direction. Love is finally oriented, and oriented rightly.

And this is why those earlier figures—Ulysses in Inferno and the Siren in Purgatorio—matter so much. Because Ulysses and the Siren represent the distortions of love: the ways desire and our impulses can go wrong, the ways the human mind can aim at the wrong object, or choose to cross the wrong boundary, and chase empty, vain attempts.

I want my reader to imagine this as if someone is pulling us towards a direction: in Inferno our mind was pulled towards evil, in Purgatorio we were pulled towards evil and good at the same time, and in Paradiso we are pulled towards the good.

II.

If we go even further back, to the circle of Paolo and Francesca, Dante already gave us another image of misdirected desire: the wind of lust. The way they are blown about by the storm is exactly how lust feels in our own bodies, like a wind that picks us up and carries us, whether we want it to or not.

In Paradiso XXVI, that “wind” becomes something else, another physical feeling: it becomes the bite.

Saint John turns to Dante and asks him:

“With what teeth does this love bite you?”

In other words: what is pulling you now? What force is interrupting your ordinary life and driving you forward?

I find this image of the “bite” incredibly striking, almost physically palpable. Because each one of us is driven by some kind of bite. There is always something that breaks the normal flow of days, something that gnaws at us, keeps returning, refuses to be ignored.

In Inferno, those bites were vain bites. For example, the souls trapped in anger are perpetually chewing on the past, stuck in old injuries. Their bite is resentment. Others are bitten by envy, or greed, or lust: each passion is a kind of tooth that has sunk into their lives and will not let go.

Here, in Paradiso, Dante describes a very different kind of bite—one that many thinking people will recognise.

The first bite is the existence of the world and of ourselves.

The sheer fact that anything exists at all. This question bites reality: Why is there something rather than nothing? We think we can move on, but the question returns; it gnaws at us again and again.

The second bite is Christ’s death.

Even in our secular age, the story of Christ will not go away. People continue to discuss it, argue about it, reinterpret it. Why did he have to die? Why was this death necessary for our salvation? It is another bite in the mind of history.

And the third bite is our mortality and the hope of eternal life.

We are alive now, and we cannot feel what it is not to be alive. We know we will die, but we can only think our way toward that edge. This too bites us. We keep asking: What happens to me? What is all this for?

These are the three “morsi”—the three bites Dante names when he answers Saint John. Barolini notes that Dante is reusing the sharp, almost violent erotic language of his earlier rime petrose, but now it is purified and redirected. The old language of eros becomes the new language of charity.

So, if in Inferno the bites were anger, lust, obsession, resentment, and in Purgatorio we watched those bites slowly lose their power; here in Paradiso we see them replaced by higher bites:

metaphysical wonder, the scandal of the Cross, the longing for eternal life.

These three bites pull Dante out of the sea of twisted love—the sea where Ulysses drowned—and place him on the shore of right love. This is what Barolini calls conversio in bono: the turning of the soul toward its true centre, toward God as the Alpha and Omega of every desire.

III.

When I read the Divine Comedy for the first time, and reached this point, and realised that here we meet Adam, I was blown away by Dante’s genius.

Because in the Divine Comedy we are travelling several journeys at once.

First of all, I often describe this journey as going through the circles, terraces, and spheres of our foolishness, of our stupidity, of our conformity, in order to reach the point where everything is straightened up. But this journey also feels as if we are travelling chronologically back to the state of mind that our ancestors, Adam and Eve, had.

And the journey feels particularly pertinent in our own day and time. We live in an age that often feels like a dark forest: a time of confusion, of noise, of moral and intellectual fog. And it feels that Dante wanted to travel from his time, which also felt like a dark forest, back to the essence, to the first state of mind, that of Adam.

So it is deeply fitting that after being examined on love by Saint John, Dante now turns and sees Adam: the first human being, the first consciousness, the origin of our story. The last great encounter of the poem is with the first man.

Adam then does something very characteristic of Paradiso: he answers questions that Dante has not yet spoken aloud. In Heaven, desire is transparent. Dante’s unspoken curiosity is already visible.

Adam names four things Dante wants to know:

1. How long it has been since his creation.

2. How long he remained in the Garden.

3. What the true cause of the Fall really was.

4. And finally, what language he “used and made.”

And this is where I want to return to something we’ve been tracing across several cantos: the nature of original sin.

We’ve described before that the sin committed by Lucifer, the sin committed by Ulysses, and the sin committed by Adam are unified by one element. It is not simply trespassing a boundary for its own sake. It is trespassing a particular kind of boundary.

The boundary they cross is the desire to reach the heights without God’s help. To reach beyond the measure of the creature, without God as your ally, without God as your pilgrim-companion.

This is the true trespass of Adam, the true trespass of Lucifer, the true trespass of Ulysses. They wanted to reach higher, to expand, to go further—but what they refused was not just “the bite of a fruit.” What they refused was dependence. The boundary they crossed is the boundary you cross when you try to do something without God, on your own, convinced that you can achieve everything by your own power.

And what does that mean for us in a secular world, this attempt to do something “without God”? It means going against harmony. Going against the natural order. Going against reality itself.

To trespass, in this Dantean sense, is to decide that you will bend reality to your will, rather than bending your will to reality. That is the common thread running through Lucifer’s fall, Ulysses’ last voyage, and Adam’s choice in the Garden.

Then Adam turns to the question of language, and here Dante becomes almost shockingly modern.

Adam says that the language he spoke—traditionally understood as Hebrew no longer exists. It was already extinct before the Tower of Babel. And he insists that he made this language himself.

At this point I want to remind you of something we discussed earlier, when we explored the Tower of Babel. I pointed out that we move through this world not only through national languages like English, French, or Mandarin, but also through what we might call languages of perception.

Love is a language.

Faith is a language.

Courage is a language.

Poetry, physics, biology, botany—all of these are complex languages that we learn in order to perceive the world. Anatomy is a language for understanding how your body works. Each discipline is a grammar for reading reality.

So, in my interpretation, Adam’s confession about language has a double force. On the literal level, he is saying that the language in which he spoke with God, the idiom he invented to understand and address God, was already completely extinct by the time humanity reached the episode we call the Tower of Babel.

On the symbolic level, you could say: the original way of understanding God, the original “language” of the mind that lived in harmony with reality, was gone long before our later confusions.

In the biblical story, the Tower of Babel appears when humans decide they can reach God, or make themselves equal to God, by building high enough. A king—traditionally associated with Nimrod, later echoed by figures like Nebuchadnezzar—imagines that with enough height, enough bricks, enough human effort, he can storm the heavens.

And in that story, God confuses their languages so that they can no longer understand each other, no longer coordinate their attempt to storm heaven. Their speech fractures; understanding breaks.

But now Dante does something quite daring through Adam.

If Adam’s own language had already died before Babel, then Babel cannot be the origin of linguistic diversity. It can no longer be the single, neat explanation for why humans speak in so many different tongues.

Barolini calls this move the “death of Babel” as punishment. Dante no longer treats linguistic plurality as a curse, but as a consequence of time and of human inventiveness. Nature gives us the capacity to speak, Adam says, but whether we speak in this way or that way, in this language or in another, is left to us, “according to what pleases you.”

Everything created in time has its own death: cities, families, reputations—and also languages, and also these “languages of perception” through which we interpret the world. They are born, they flourish, they decay; new ones are invented.

So in this final encounter, I am once again amazed by Dante’s genius. We see a shared pattern that continues on from Lucifer, Ulysses, and Adam: the desire to rise without God, against reality, against harmony, something that, in different ways, we are all guilty of. At the same time, we witness the straightening of love through the examination of the direction of our life. And finally, we see the mortality and the astonishing creativity of language both spoken language and these deeper languages by which we make sense of the world.

For a reader living in our own dark forest, this movement feels eerily relevant. Dante invites us to make the same journey: through our circles of folly, through our terraces of half-repentance, through our competing “languages” and interpretations, up into the clear air where our love, our limits, and our ways of understanding reality are finally seen in their true light.

And that is why Paradiso XXVI feels like a great convergence point: a place where theology, psychology, language, and our own modern confusion all meet in one luminous figure—Adam, the first mind at the summit of the journey.

This Week’s Sinners and Virtuous 🎭

(Themes, Quotes, Terms and Characters)

Instead of themes in this canto, I would like to share some previous posts that can help my reader understand this part of your journey. As I said, if anyone opens the Divine Comedy on Canto XXVI of Paradiso, they might not fully grasp its meaning:

Quotes 🖋️

(The ones I keep in my journal as reminders of eternal wisdom):

Before I was sent down to Hell’s torments,
on earth, the Highest Good—from which derives
the joy that now enfolds me—was called I;

and then He was called El. Such change must be:
the ways that mortals take are as the leaves
upon a branch—one comes, another goes.

~ lines 133--138, Paradiso, Canto XXVI

Welcome to Dante Read-Along! ✨

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Welcome to Dante Book Club, where you and I descend into Hell and Purgatory to be able to ascend to Paradise. Our guide in Paradise is Beatrice, and in this twenty-fifth Canto, Dante is questioned on Hope by St. James. You can find the main page of the read-along right here, reading schedule here, and the list of chat threads here.

In each post you can find a brief summary of the canto, philosophical exercises that you can draw from it, themes, character, and symbolism explanations.

All the wonderful illustrations are done specially for the Dante Read-Along by the one and only Luana Montebello.

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This Week’s Circle ⭕️

Celestial Sphere of the Fixed Stars, Continued - Dante’s desire for his hometown of Florence - The appearance of St. James - James questions Dante about Hope - Beatrice answers one of the questions for Dante - Dante gives the definition of Hope - St. John arrives from the circle of lights - Dante is blinded by the light.

Canto XXV Summary:

After St. Peter crowned Dante with light, his thoughts, in the opening of canto xxv, turned to his exile and the suffering he had endured while cast out of his beloved city of Florence; these thoughts came to him as he prayed that his magnum opus, the Divine Comedy, might grant him a return. He compared himself to a lamb within the safety of home that had been overtaken by wolves, and longed for his future, older self, to stand before the very spot he was baptized in the church of San Giovanni and be crowned with the poet’s laurel:

This sacred spot was where he had discovered that Faith which he had just defended to Peter in such detail. With this thought, Dante watched as from the brightest circle of lights—the same from which St. Peter had come, there in the eighth celestial sphere of the fixed stars—came another bright light toward them. Beatrice pointed out to Dante the soul that was arriving, identifying him by the town of his pilgrimage in Galicia; this was the Apostle James:

Peter welcomed James with affection:

As when a dove alights near its companion,
and each unto the other, murmuring
and circling, offers its affections, so

did I see both those great and glorious
princes give greeting to each other, praising
the banquet that is offered them on high.
xxv.19-24

The brightness of their presence before Dante was so astounding that he was overcome and had to avert his eyes. Beatrice addressed James, indicating that after his examination on Faith, Dante was ready to defend the virtue of Hope, which James was uniquely perfect to examine. He was the allegorical representation of Hope, just as Peter was of Faith, and as we shall see, John was of Love.

James called Dante to lift his gaze back to the brightness of his visage, as he was in the very spot in which his sight would be prepared for even greater light:

Lift up your head, and be assured:
whatever comes here from the mortal world
has to be ripened in our radiance.
xxv.34-36

Being thus assured, Dante raised his eyes and gazed upon both James and Peter, and listened to the beginning of James’ speech. James announced the special dispensation that Dante had, to view the highest realms while still in a mortal body, and to express that story through his epic poetry, rekindling hope, which opened the door to love:

And speaking of this theological virtue of Hope, James asked Dante to answer him three questions; to define what Hope was, how much of it unfolded within himself, and from what work he came upon receiving that virtue.

Beatrice, she who was like the wise Daedalus, crafting Dante’s path each step of their journey, replied for Dante, answering the second of James’ questions in a beautiful interlude between the asking and Dante’s telling. Imagine having to present before the very saints your understanding of the deepest intellectual designs!

Dante was an ideal example of the exemplar of Hope, Beatrice shared, as James would see in the unspoken mind of God in which all is imprinted, the proof of which was his enduring sense of justice that social and religious ills would be put to right, and his presence in that high realm.

Beatrice concluded her thoughts, and left the other questions open for Dante to answer; for in having answered as she did, she saved him the embarrassment of self-praise. Just as before Peter, Dante felt ready to be examined by the master. He gave the definition of Hope in answer to James’ first question:

Hope is the certain expectation
of future glory; it is the result
of God’s grace and of merit we have earned.
xxv.67-69

As Beatrice had already answered the second question, Dante next answered the third question posed by James, how Hope had come to him. It was inspired from many places, said Dante, from the scriptures and commentaries, those bright guiding stars of the past, but it was the Psalms of King David that truly inspired him:

This light has come to me from many stars;
but he who first instilled it in my heart
was the chief singer of the Sovereign Guide.
xxv.70-72

David had sung out with delight in his Divine Song of the Psalms, that those who knew God would put their hope in him; Dante saw the result of the wisdom of the Psalm and the wisdom of the Epistle of James as a fullness within himself, as an overflowing fountain which could go on to inspire others.

James’ inner light flashed in response; he had been filled with Hope even to the end of his life and martyrdom, and the love which was kindled by that Hope bid him to speak and ask a fourth question; “what hope has promised unto you” (87).

Dante had gained Hope from the scriptures, which promised attainment to heaven for those elect who followed the way; they would obtain the double garment of Isaiah, the glorified body unified with the purified soul. St. John, the third of the heavenly questioners, would make Isaiah’s words more clear in his book of Revelation, where he spoke of the elect in their white robes:

This answer brought a cry of joy from above them, Sperent in te-May they put their hope in Thee. At this cry, one light separated itself from the rest, shining so brightly that it could have abolished the night for an entire month, so much did it resemble the brightness of the sun. This light joined the lights of Peter and James and the three whirled in a dance of delight and love, three virtues dancing before Beatrice just as the virtues had in the garden at the heights of Purgatory:

And as a happy maiden rises and
enters the dance to honor the new bride—
and not through vanity or other failing—

so did I see that splendor, brightening,
approach those two flames dancing in a ring
to music suited to their burning love.
xxv.103-108

Beatrice spoke to Dante and identified this new light; this was John, the Apostle who laid his head upon Christ’s breast at the Last Supper, and to whom Christ gave the charge to watch over his mother while he was on the cross. The imagery of the Pelican as Dante used it was often seen as a symbol for Christ, due to the legend that it revived its young after piercing its own breast and feeding them with drops of its blood.

The brightness of the three souls in that dance made Dante strain to look at them, his sight overwhelmed:

Even as he who squints and strains to see
the sun somewhat eclipsed and, as he tries
to see, becomes sightless, just so did I

in my attempt to watch the latest flame,
until these words were said: “Why do you daze
yourself to see what here can have no place?”
xxv.118-123

It was John who spoke to him, laying to rest the legend that he had risen, deathless, to heaven, knowing that Dante peered at him attempting to see his still human flesh there within the light; John assured him that his physical body was still on earth, buried, waiting for the resurrection, which would not come until the numbers of the elect were fulfilled. Only Christ and Mary had risen to heaven, embodied:

On earth my body now is earth and shall
be there together with the rest until
our number equals the eternal purpose.

Only those two lights that ascended wear
their double garment in this blessed cloister.
And carry this report back to your world.”
xxv.124-129

Their dance and message complete, their movements ended as quickly as would the oarsmen on a boat stop as one at a signal, and Dante found himself, on turning to find Beatrice, blinded by the light.

💭 Philosophical Exercises

I want to begin with a question for my reader.

If you were writing Dante’s Divine Comedy, this section in particular, the great triad of Cantos XXIV, XXV, and XXVI, nd you had to choose the order in which the three apostles appear before you, which order would you choose? If you had to decide how to arrange Faith, Hope, and Love as three examining lights in Heaven, how would you do it?

Would you begin with Faith, then move to Hope, then Love?

Or would you start with Hope?

Or would you end with Faith?

If my reader wishes, they can pause for a moment and think about it.

My attempt here is to understand the logic, the architecture, the hidden message Dante encodes in the sequence of these three celestial encounters. Because Dante, more than any other poet, constructs meaning not only through what he says, but through the order in which he says it. The structure is the teaching.

And the first figure he chooses is Saint Peter, the apostle of Faith.

Peter examines Dante on his faith because to borrow and adapt a well-known philosophical line the unexamined faith is not worth living. What is the wisdom behind that idea?

Faith is not a vague spiritual feeling. Faith represents a direction. It is the orientation of one’s inner vision. What you focus on is where you walk; your attention is the compass of your life. So when Peter examines Dante on his faith, he is really asking: What do you choose to see? What do you orient your soul toward?

Think of it this way: when we leave our house to walk somewhere, we usually know roughly which direction to take. We know the streets, the path we intend to follow. But rarely can we see the final destination from where we stand. Faith is the ability to hold the destination in mind even when it’s invisible to the eyes. It is the clarity of purpose that allows the journey to begin.

This, I believe, is why Dante places Saint Peter first and not last or in the middle. Before you begin the ascent toward God, you must clean the lenses of your interior sight. If the lenses are dirty, the entire journey becomes muddled. Peter establishes the direction.

Then comes Saint James, the apostle of Hope.

When James arrives, Dante constructs a dual movement, a kind of dance between two realities: the heavenly and the earthly. On the heavenly side, James asks the great questions: What is hope? How does it blossom in you? What is its source? And what always astonishes me in these cantos is how open Dante’s universe is. Nothing is taken for granted. Nothing is left unexamined. There is no dogmatic enclosure here. Everything is interrogated in a Socratic, almost philosophical manner: What is faith? What is hope? What is love?

But the earthly dance — that is where things become even more interesting.

My reader may recall that in the Inferno we met Brunetto Latini, Dante’s mentor, condemned among the sodomites for having sought earthly fame, a fame rooted in the shifting sands of time and politics. Brunetto wrote to be remembered by the world, not to transform it. His pursuit was earthly glory, measured by the applause of his century.

In Paradiso 25, Dante returns to his native Florence, not physically but imaginatively. He speaks of the Baptistery, the ovile — the sheepfold — where he was “a lamb.” He remembers the place that gave him faith. And then he expresses the hope that Florence might one day accept him back.

But Teodolinda Barolini helps us see the deeper meaning behind this. Dante’s hope here is not merely the desire to return physically to Florence, though he certainly wanted that. His hope is of a different order. Here, for the first time, he calls himself sacro poeta, sacred poet. His hope is that by creating a poem so holy, so beyond earthly politics, so unlike Brunetto Latini’s chase for temporal fame, his work would one day return him to Florence in a way that politics never could.

Barolini reminds us of something remarkable: in 1315, while Dante was in exile, the world revived the ancient custom of crowning poets with the laurel. But the honour did not go to Dante. It went to Albertino Mussato, celebrated for his Latin tragedy Ecerinis, which condemned the tyrant Ezzelino da Romano. Mussato wrote on contemporary politics — politics that Dante also cared about deeply — but Mussato’s work did not reach the sacred, universal depth of the Commedia.

And now the irony becomes almost cosmic: today, even in Florence itself, even among its educated citizens, very few remember Mussato’s name. Many remember Ezzelino, the villain of his play but not Mussato, the poet who attacked him.

Time has revealed the difference between poetry that wins a political coronation and poetry that crowns itself by its own sacred force. Dante did not receive the laurel in 1315. But in 2021, seven hundred years after his death, Florence finally did what Dante hoped it would: it recognised him as its true, eternal poet laureate.

The hope of Paradiso XXV was fulfilled, just not in Dante’s lifetime.

But the canto does not stop here. It moves toward its most astonishing moment.

After the examination on hope, after the heavenly chanting of “Sperent in te”, after the sublime appearance of Saint John, Dante turns around — and Beatrice is no longer there.

For the first time since the dark wood, Dante finds himself without a guide. Not Virgil. Not Beatrice. No one. He turns and she is gone.

And this is where hope becomes existential, not theological. When do we need hope the most? When we look around and find no companion beside us. When we feel we must walk the next step alone. When no external resource, no guide, no Beatrice, stands ready to interpret reality for us.

Hope begins exactly where our visible guides end.

Dante knows that Beatrice’s disappearance is not abandonment but initiation. He must now act with the virtues he has learned. He must trust the orientation Peter helped him clarify, and the expectation of future blessedness that James helped him articulate. Hope is no longer something outside; it becomes something within him.

And this allows us to ask, finally: what is hope for us?

Not the modern idea that the world must unfold according to our desires. Not the illusion that our plans will be executed by the universe. Hope is something quieter, deeper, fiercer. It is the conviction that if you set your vision, your faith — toward what is true and good, and if you walk in that direction with sincerity, the outcome of your life will not be chaos. It will not be meaningless. It will take on a harmony that may not match your original expectation, but will match the truth of who you have become.

Hope is the trust that your soul will be able to meet reality, to arrange itself in relation to truth, to endure, to understand, to grow into beauty. Hope is the inner certainty that the final destination, though invisible not, will justify the journey.

And perhaps this is why Beatrice disappears. Because for hope to become real, for the soul to stand on its own, the guide must step aside. Hope is the virtue that teaches us how to walk when no one is watching, how to continue upward when the hand we relied on has let go.

Faith shows us the direction.

Hope sustains us when the path is empty.

And Love, the fire that John embodies, waits just ahead.

This Week’s Sinners and Virtuous 🎭

(Themes, Quotes, Terms and Characters)

I. The Sacred Poem

At the start of Canto XXV, Dante voices a hope that is both fragile and audacious: if his poema sacro, “the sacred poem to which heaven and earth have put a hand” can overcome Florence’s cruelty, he will return to the “fair sheepfold where I slept as a lamb” and receive the laurel at the Baptistery.

Barolini hears both pathos (he never returned) and triumph: Psalm 23’s “green pastures” console the exile, while Dante inserts himself into the new culture of laurel coronations after Mussato and, above all, self-anoints as the unique poeta of Paradiso, whose future “ritornerò poeta” history eventually fulfils.

Quotes 🖋️

(The ones I keep in my journal as reminders of eternal wisdom):

At first, as soon as I had finished speaking,
“Sperent in te” was heard above us, all
the circling garlands answering this call.

And then, among those souls, one light became
so bright that, if the Crab had one such crystal,
winter would have a month of one long day.

~ lines 97--102, Paradiso, Canto XXV

Welcome to Dante Read-Along! ✨

(If this post appears truncated in your inbox you can read it on the web by clicking here. )

Welcome to Dante Book Club, where you and I descend into Hell and Purgatory to be able to ascend to Paradise. Our guide in Paradise is Beatrice, and in this twenty-fourth Canto, Dante is questioned by St. Peter. You can find the main page of the read-along right here, reading schedule here, and the list of chat threads here.

In each post you can find a brief summary of the canto, philosophical exercises that you can draw from it, themes, character, and symbolism explanations.

All the wonderful illustrations are done specially for the Dante Read-Along by the one and only Luana Montebello.

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This Week’s Circle ⭕️

The celestial sphere of the Fixed Stars, continued - The circling wheels of souls - The brightest soul comes forth - St. Peter addresses Dante - Questions of the theological virtue of Faith - Dante answers each question posed - Peter celebrates Dante’s deep understanding of Faith, both doctrinally and personally.

Canto XXIV Summary:

Beatrice called out to the souls of the elect in the realm of the Fixed Stars, after having watched the ascension of the Virgin Mary into the highest spheres of the heavens. She asked them to accept Dante into the feast of the blessed, to share their table and their deep insights with him, so that he may be quenched in his desire to understand all there was to know about the most divine truths, and the realms in which he ascended through.

At this request the souls before them rejoiced, arranging themselves in concentric circles, spinning faster or slower round a fixed central point, the speed of their dance contingent on the degree of their blessedness.

As we encounter vision after vision here in Paradise, it is as if we have entered into one vast pageant of delight in the highest God, and each scene that Dante witnesses unfolding before him is but one element of a much grander scheme; it is as though since the moment of ascension up the ladder from Saturn to this eighth sphere of the fixed stars, it is a continual unfolding to the bright center of its final achievement.

And just as, in a clock’s machinery,
to one who watches them, the wheels turn so
that, while the first wheel seems to rest, the last

wheel flies; so did those circling dancers—as
they danced to different measures, swift and slow—
make me a judge of what their riches were.
xxiv.13-18

Even when considering the different speeds of these circles, their unity—as a clock’s gears need the others to function—is palpable and ever increasing. From the brightest of these spheres, the very brightest light of them all came forth and circled round Beatrice three times, singing as it crowned her with light. So beautiful was its song that Dante, in writing out this vision for us, his readers, was unable to put it into words. It was imprinted there, upon his ‘phantasy’, or sense faculty that received images, but was beyond his capacity to express in mere mortal terms.

Just as the past masters of painting would work tirelessly to capture the nuances of light in the folded gowns and fabrics of their painted models, so did Dante try to be as nuanced in this description of the song, but to no avail. The soul, who encircled Beatrice addressed her:

“O you who pray to us with such devotion—
my holy sister—with your warm affection,
you have released me from that lovely sphere.”
xxiv.28-30

Beatrice addressed him back, indicating who he was with her words: “that great man to whom our Lord bequeathed the keys” (35), who, as we know by now, was St. Peter the Apostle, and the first pope of Rome:

She asked Peter to test Dante on matters of Faith, both the major themes of church doctrine and minor themes of how he applied it to his own life. This will be the first examination of the elements of the three theological virtues, Faith, Hope, and Charity, or Love. Peter himself had put this faith into practice when he walked on water toward Jesus during a storm on the Sea of Galilee:1

She expanded on the purpose of Dante’s replies; that even though Peter knew the answers already, as we have seen, for Dante himself to express his understanding brought the ideas into a concrete reality. To have to put into words that which one believes is not always the easiest task. Since he was to speak of this in poetry, how much more fitting was it that Dante had to express those thoughts concretely.

Dante prepared himself to answer these questions of faith as if for the examination before the master for a degree in theology or philosophy; just as today the doctoral candidate must defend their thesis before a committee, so did this tradition stem from the earliest Universities. That discussion did not come to the terminus in answering any such question in its proven and final statement, but was rather a discussion of ideas which was then later expanded upon by the master:

Just as the bachelor candidate must arm
himself and does not speak until the master
submits the question for discussion—not

for settlement—so while she spoke I armed
myself with all my arguments, preparing
for such a questioner and such professing.
xxiv.46-51

St. Peter asked his first question of Dante; a simple question based on the tenets of the Church: What is faith? With a glance at Beatrice, Dante was ready to spill forth the waters of intellectual knowledge that was within him.

His opening was like an invocation to the moment: that he would be blessed to be able to speak lucidly before St. Peter, whom he called the Chief Centurion, indicating that he was the principal commander of the Church.

Dante spoke of St. Paul, “your dear brother” (61), he who was the author of many of the New Testament books—the Pauline Epistles—and quoted a verse from Hebrews, a clear and concise definition of Faith:

The ‘quiddity’ that Dante referred to in relation to this definition indicated the substantial form of a thing as defined by scholastic philosophy, that which gives a thing its defining essence.

This definition gave way to a confirmation by St. Peter, and a follow up clarification of terms, when Peter asked if Dante understood why Faith was called a substance while at the same time calling it an evidence. Dante answered succinctly that on earth, as the heavenly things cannot be seen, that they must be approached first through faith, but that transforms into evidence:

And it is from this faith that we must reason,

deducing what we can from syllogisms
without our being able to see more:
thus faith is also called an evidence
xxiv.75-78

Peter complimented Dante on his understanding of these deeper theological matters, saying that those sophists who taught only for praise or recognition would have nowhere to teach if everyone understood the truth so well. He moved on to another question: now that they had defined Faith as a whole from a doctrinal perspective, Peter wanted to know if Dante himself had that weighty coin in his possession, not just through argument:

“Now this coin is well-examined,
and now we know its alloy and its weight.

But tell me: do you have it in your purse?”
And I: “Indeed I do—so bright and round
that nothing in its stamp leads me to doubt.”
xxiv.83-87

Dante specified the roundness of the coin that represented his Faith; as the edges of gold and silver coins were notoriously shaved off to collect the scraps into extra ‘profit’ in the middle ages, having one of full weight was an indication of its full measure.

Peter’s fourth question to Dante inquired about the origin of this Faith and how one would uncover the benefits of it in their own life. Dante pointed to the inspired scriptures, and the power of their word to instantly show the truth; a truth that shone brighter than any other he had found:

“The Holy Ghost’s abundant
rain poured upon the parchments old and new;
that is the syllogism that has proved

with such persuasiveness that faith has truth—
when set beside that argument, all other
demonstrations seem to me obtuse.”
xxiv.91-96

While that was acceptable as an answer, it led Peter to refine it even further; that even if these scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are convincing, how could he be assured that they were the actual words of God? Dante answered that it was the fact that miracles were recorded in those scriptures.

Peter continued to press for more proof; and the sixth question formed pointed to the circular reasoning of this argument, that the miracles professed within the scriptures were proof of the scriptures authenticity as the word of God: how did Dante know these miracles actually happened?

Dante was ready with the answer: that since the world had come to accept Christianity without those miracles being in the present moment, but only as written, and through the word of the ‘poor and hungry’ (109-110) apostles, that in itself made it an even greater miracle than those recorded in the scripture.

“If without miracles the world
was turned to Christianity, that is
so great a miracle that all the rest

are not its hundredth part: for you were poor
and hungry when you found the field and sowed
the good plant—once a vine and now a thorn.”
xxiv.106-111

So deeply did Dante’s answer mirror the hearts of those souls in the realm of the fixed stars that they all called out in praise at this junction, a sign that his answer was sufficient and accepted: Te Deum Laudamus—Lord we praise you.

Peter, however, had a few more questions for Dante, as he stated that up until this point, it was grace that spoke through Dante in giving these answers, and he now wanted to know about Dante’s personal experience with Faith, not just the theological answers. To do this, he began with the tenets of the Apostle’s Creed4, to which he added a few Aristotelian notions:

‘I believe in one God—sole,
eternal—He who, motionless, moves all
the heavens with His love and love for Him;
xxiv.130.132

Dante gave proofs of these: physical proof, metaphysical proof, and the proofs of the Biblical scriptures as a whole.

He also outlined his belief in the Trinity of the three persons in one, of God as the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, the proof of this Trinity in the Scripture, and how deeply these truths were ingrained upon his heart.

This is the origin, this is the spark
that then extends into a vivid flame
and, like a star in heaven, glows in me.
xxiv.145-147

Peter celebrated these answers by embracing Dante and welcoming him into the community of light in the starry heavens. He sang with delight as he circled Dante three times, just as he had with Beatrice, thus crowning him with light.

💭 Philosophical Exercises

My father once told me that faith is a gift. He didn’t mean it in the sentimental sense that “believers are lucky to believe,” as if belief were a comforting blanket handed to a chosen few. He meant something much sharper.

For him, the true gift was the ability to believe in realities that almost certainly lack any empirical proof.

To continue his line of thought, and to add a small correction of my own, I would say that every true believer must be, in a certain sense, a little bit of an atheist. By this I mean: genuine faith always carries a trace of inner opposition, a vein of doubt that never quite disappears. A belief that has never wrestled with questions, that has never trembled under the weight of uncertainty, is not faith but submission.

The person who never experiences doubt has not surrendered their life to God, but has surrendered their intelligence. That is not holiness; it is fanaticism.

In the next three cantos of Paradiso, Dante is examined by Saint Peter, Saint James, and Saint John on the three theological virtues: faith, hope, and charity.

What is paradoxical is the setting in which this examination takes place. In the previous canto, Canto XXIII, the language became circular, almost disorganized, dreamlike. Images appeared in fragments, as if Dante were catching glimpses of a vision too vast to grasp all at once.

Here, in Canto XXIV, something different happens. Against that swirling, circular background, Dante now introduces a more linear, almost scholastic movement. Contrary to Teodolinda Barolini’s stronger emphasis on the circular and disjunctive quality of this stretch of Paradiso, I think that here Dante is deliberately combining the two: the circular motion of contemplation with the straightforward, logical motion of an examination by St. Peter.

And this is where the real paradox emerges. Dante is being questioned by Saint Peter about faith while our pilgrim already stands within the celestial realm. He is already in Paradise. Peter is before him in person. He has just witnessed the radiant presence and power of Christ. And yet, despite all this vision, he is still interrogated on belief. Peter asks him: What is faith? What is it like? Where does it come from? What do you, Dante, actually believe?

I find this absolutely remarkable, because it echoes, in a higher key, the small piece of wisdom I mentioned earlier from my father.

Faith here is not treated as a tranquil possession, a certainty that abolishes all inner struggle. Even in the very presence of the divine light, Dante’s faith must be examined, articulated, tested. It is as if Paradise itself confirms what my father intuited: that true faith is not the absence of doubt, but the courage to carry doubt into the presence of God and still answer, as best one can, the question, “What do you believe?”

But then we have to ask ourselves a harder question. Dante follows the traditional definition that faith is belief in things not seen. What does that actually look like in human life?

If we look at the stories that shape our civilisation, many of them concern events no one alive has witnessed. Think of the great founding narratives of peoples and cities. Virgil’s story in his great poem, the Aeneid, stands at the foundation of Rome: the journey of Aeneas, the fall of Troy, the divine promises that Rome will arise. No one has “seen” these scenes with their own eyes; there is no empirical evidence in our modern sense, and yet entire cultures live as though such stories were, in some deeper way, true.

Our capacity to receive these narratives, to hold them as trustworthy and formative even when they lie beyond our direct experience, is very close to what Dante means by faith. It is the ability to live by realities that are not available to sight. In Canto XXIV, when he recalls that faith is “the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen,” he is naming this mysterious movement of the soul: we lean on words, on testimony, on a story given to us, and we let that unseen truth organise our lives.

For Dante himself, of course, the highest form of this is not the epic myth of Rome but the revealed story of Scripture: creation, Incarnation, resurrection, the Trinity. Yet the very structure of our trust in the Aeneid helps us understand what is at stake.

We already know what it is to be shaped by stories we cannot verify with our senses. Faith, in Dante’s vision, takes this human capacity and lifts it into a different key: it is the decision to entrust one’s life not only to poetic or civic narratives, but to a divine narrative that can never be fully “seen,” even when one is standing in the very light of Paradise.

This Week’s Sinners and Virtuous 🎭

(Themes, Quotes, Terms and Characters)

I. True Humility

One cannot get rid of the thought of how necessary it was for Dante to go through the difficult path that he did so he could appear at this point and be examined by Saint Peter.

An arrogant and prideful soul, a soul that had not crossed Inferno or Purgatorio, would have been combative if, after going through such a hard journey, they would have been questioned about their faith.

What do you mean do I have faith? Have you seen the journey that I’ve treaded to appear here?

And yet, Dante humbly answers Saint Peter’s questions.

Quotes 🖋️

(The ones I keep in my journal as reminders of eternal wisdom):

I heard: “The premises of old and new
impelling your conclusion—why do you
hold these to be the speech of God?” And I:

“The proof revealing truth to me relies
on acts that happened; for such miracles,
nature can heat no iron, beat no anvil.”

“Say, who assures you that those works were real?”
came the reply. “The very thing that needs
proof—no thing else—attests these works to you.”

~ lines 97--105, Paradiso, Canto XXIV

Welcome to Dante Read-Along! ✨

(If this post appears truncated in your inbox you can read it on the web by clicking here. )

Welcome to Dante Book Club, where you and I descend into Hell and Purgatory to be able to ascend to Paradise. Our guide in Paradise is Beatrice, and in this twenty-third Canto, Dante and Beatrice have a vision of the light of Christ. You can find the main page of the read-along right here, reading schedule here, and the list of chat threads here.

In each post you can find a brief summary of the canto, philosophical exercises that you can draw from it, themes, character, and symbolism explanations.

All the wonderful illustrations are done specially for the Dante Read-Along by the one and only Luana Montebello.

Subscribe now

This Week’s Circle ⭕️

The Eighth Celestial Realm of the Fixed Stars - Beatrice gazes upward - The Vision of the descending light of Christ - The radiance of Beatrice’s smile and of the heavenly light - Dante’s illumination - The crowning of the Virgin Mary - The ascension of Christ and Mary to the Empyrean - The souls of the Fixed Stars sing praise.

Canto XXIII Summary:

In the opening of this visionary canto, filled with the lights and glory indicative of the Empyrean realm to come, Dante opened with the imagery of a bird waiting eagerly through the dark night, settled by her sweet chicks, face upturned in anticipation of the coming dawn. Beatrice stood thus, prepared for the sight which was about to greet them as they rested in the realm of the fixed stars, after the ascent up the divine ladder from the celestial realm of Saturn.

She looked not toward any horizon, as one would expect with a coming dawn, but at the meridian, the zenith, the crown of the sky; her expectant gaze filled Dante with longing as well, a longing that brought satisfaction rather than emptiness. Quickly his longing was fulfilled, for the heavens lightened as if the dawn were breaking far above them. The vision had begun.

And Beatrice said: “There you see the troops
of the triumphant Christ—and all the fruits
ingathered from the turning of these spheres!”
xxiii.19-21

Where before we beheld a single planet in each sphere, here that has changed into the multitude of stars, each a soul, the beginning of the hosts of heaven.

Beatrice’s face, as she directed him to this unfolding vision, shone in fiery brightness, so much so that he did not even attempt to describe it. Her radiant bearing matched the glorious light that grew ever brighter above him, and just as the goddess Diana in her triple form of the moon, the hunt, and death, would shine among the nymph like stars around her, back in sight of earth, this light was a thousand times brighter and more magnificent:

Like Trivia—at the full moon in clear skies—
smiling among the everlasting nymphs
who decorate all reaches of the sky,

I saw a sun above a thousand lamps;
it kindled all of them as does our sun
kindle the sights above us here on earth.
xxiii.25-30

Such was its light that it was not only that ineffable brightness lacking in solidity, but the light itself held substance of its own separate existence that enveloped him and blinded him. In his heart he cried out to Beatrice, who defined this substance as the very source of Wisdom and Power animating everything, opening the way to heaven that had been closed since the sins of Adam.

The effect of the vision on Dante crescendoed into a moment of bursting light within his very mind, a transformative moment of becoming the light within himself which he visioned outside of him, an ultimate moment of oneness that we have waited for with anticipation:

Even as lightning breaking from a cloud,
expanding so that it cannot be pent,
against its nature, down to earth, descends,

so did my mind, confronted by that feast,
expand; and it was carried past itself—
what it became, it cannot recollect.
xxiii.40-45

Such moments are described by the mystics as Cosmic Consciousness, enlightenment, or ecstasy; yet in gazing upon the infinite, there is no end to the absorption of that light. The vision has tempered him, prepared him, awakened him to be able to gaze upon the face of Beatrice as he has so longed to do; her brightness having become so great that he had not looked upon her face since entering Saturn, but now he was able to endure it.

Open your eyes and see what I now am;
the things you witnessed will have made you strong
enough to bear the power of my smile.
xxiii.46-48

Dante had new eyes; he was as one who had awakened from a dream that he did not even know was a dream. The songs of all the poets inspired by the Muse of sacred poetry—Polyhymnia—and her sisters, throughout all the ages, that had nurtured and fattened the poets of old with their rich nourishment, could not touch in words the radiance of her smile as he gazed upon it.

In order to speak of what would come after this moment of illumination, Dante had to leap from mortal understanding to something much more divine, and the prospect brought a tremble of trepidation to his task; yet he carried on, not to be dissuaded. He compared his attempt to a tiny boat in a great and wide sea; we know that he accomplished his goal.

Beatrice turned Dante’s gaze to sights more wondrous than her own radiance; the blooming of the garden of the blessed was before them, and she pointed to the appearance of the Virgin Mary and to the apostles, she the mystic rose and they the lilies:

Why are you so enraptured by my face
as to deny your eyes the sight of that
fair garden blossoming beneath Christ’s rays?

The Rose in which the Word of God became
flesh grows within that garden; there—the lilies
whose fragrance let men find the righteous way.
xxiii.70-75

Dante moved his gaze as the light of Christ slowly rose higher again, dimming the brightness that had shone down on them, and leaving behind it the ray of light as through a cloud the many glowing souls who remained, anchored by the brightest of the flames, the Virgin Mary, she whom Dante invoked morning and evening back on earth:

The name of that fair flower which I always
invoke, at morning and at evening, drew
my mind completely to the greatest flame.
xxiii.88-90

Her light was imprinted upon his eyes; not only her light, but another light descended from above, the angel Gabriel of the annunciation, to crown her with a garland of light in a ritualistic celebration that we can imagine plays out constantly in the great pageant of the heavens. The beautiful music that emanated from Gabriel was so heavenly that the loveliest music on earth would be only as a rumble of thunder or a crash of lightning.

I am angelic love who wheel around
that high gladness inspired by the womb
that was the dwelling place of our Desire;

so shall I circle, Lady of Heaven, until
you, following your Son, have made that sphere
supreme, still more divine by entering it.
xxiii.103-108

He looked above him to the ninth sphere of the Primum Mobile, that “royal mantle” of the eight spheres below it. As Mary rose up to it, it was so far distant above them that he lost sight of her before she reached that high heaven. The Primum Mobile was the quickest moving of all the spheres, the Prime Mover:

With an innocent and wordless gesture infused with love and longing, the souls of the Fixed Stars reached their light toward Mary as she ascended above them, singing the hymn Regina Coeli, or the Queen of Heaven:

The reaping of joy that Dante witnessed in this high heaven was the result of the seeds sown on earth, seeds of love and truth, of justice and nobility. As the tears of exile were bitter on earth even while upholding the true nature of the pure in heart, so were the joys of victory here in heaven.

They reap these benefits with the souls of the Prophets of the Old Testament and the Apostles of the New, and the keeper of the keys of the Kingdom, St. Peter.

💭 Philosophical Exercises

I have to confess to my dear reader that this was one of the hardest cantos in which to find a philosophical exercise, because Paradiso XXIII is so mystical. It has no plot in the usual sense; there is no conversation, no moral discourse, no visible path to follow. And yet something remarkable happens here: Dante crosses another threshold.

The thresholds of Inferno were visible and tangible, often terrifying; in Purgatorio, they were solemn and sacramental, guarded by angels or marked by figures who helped the pilgrim ascend. But in Paradiso XXIII Dante crosses a threshold of a completely different kind. He moves from the planetary spheres, the last remnants of the cosmos still connected to the earth, into the higher, divine, mystical spheres. And it is here that he encounters Christ, the blinding source of all light.

What stands out to me is that this threshold is crossed through contemplation. Once again Dante shows us that contemplation is not a passive state, but an active power of the soul that allows us to grasp the strength of the divine.

It reminded me of a story some of my readers may know: the story of Thales of Miletus, the philosopher who was mocked by his fellow citizens.

They believed he spent his life contemplating because he was incapable of doing anything practical or useful. To prove them wrong, Thales used his knowledge of astronomy to predict that the next year would bring an unusually good olive harvest. Before anyone else understood what was coming, he rented all the olive presses in the region. And when the abundant harvest arrived, everyone had to come to him to rent the presses at a high price. Aristotle tells this story to show that Thales did not choose the contemplative life because he couldn’t succeed in the practical world, but because he preferred to devote himself to higher things.

I believe this fits perfectly with what we’ve seen in the previous canto. When Dante was asked to look back at the earth in Paradiso XXII — the reverse Orpheus moment we explored — the message was clear: the direction toward the divine must be voluntary. One must walk the earthly path, see it fully, and then freely turn toward something higher.

Contemplation is not an escape from the world, but the act of choosing the highest aim in the world.

II.

What is remarkable here is that even when fortified by grace, the human eye still strains to withstand the intensity of heavenly light. Up to this point in Paradiso, it seemed to us, from Canto to Canto, that Dante had finally reached the level at which he could grasp divine beauty and meaning. And yet, when the blinding light of Christ appears in Canto XXIII, we are reminded that contemplation always involves effort. It is not a passive vision. It is an active stretching of the soul.

Here we witness something essential about true contemplation: it requires that the self be exceeded. Dante experiences what the tradition calls ecstasy — literally ex-stasis, standing outside oneself. The meaning is that the true inner workings of the world, the reality behind appearances, can be perceived only when the self steps aside, when the soul slips beyond the boundaries of ordinary consciousness.

This naturally recalls Carl Jung’s idea of loosening and stripping away the ego in order to experience a deeper unity with the whole of being. I’ve noted many times that Dante’s Paradiso feels like an alchemical text, and I want to underline that here. Jung believed that the alchemists were struggling to express complex inner experiences — mystical illuminations, moments of union, encounters with the divine — in a symbolic language because ordinary speech is incapable of carrying them. When Dante tries to describe what it is like to witness the arrival of the divine light — to feel himself overwhelmed yet transformed, he is doing something similar. Jung would say that Dante is translating an inner, mystical event into a language of images, symbols, and poetic fractures.

This helps explain why, as Teodolinda Barolini beautifully shows, this canto operates through what she calls an anti-narrative mode. There is no clear linear sequence; even the visions of Christ are presented out of chronological order. Instead of a chain of events, the canto unfolds like a dream — coherent in meaning, but not obedient to time. It is driven by revelation, not by plot. The order is experiential, interior, symbolic.

And this brings to mind another idea, this one from the world of science and logic. In Jim Holt’s essay on Kurt Gödel — the remarkable logician whose theorems transformed mathematics — Holt recounts Gödel’s speculation that perhaps the events of the world do not unfold in time. Perhaps all events already exist, all at once, in a single totality. It is only our human brain, limited in its capacity, that forces reality into chronological sequence so that we can grasp it.

In a way, Dante dramatises this very insight in Canto XXIII. The visions come not in the order in which they historically happened, but in the order in which the soul can bear them. Dante’s consciousness is being drawn up into a reality where sequence breaks down, where meaning is no longer temporal, but eternal.

This Week’s Sinners and Virtuous 🎭

(Themes, Quotes, Terms and Characters)

I. The opening lines

The opening bird image shows contemplation as loving vigilance. A mother bird, awake before dawn, leaves the nest and fixes herself on the place where the sun will rise, eager to see her young and feed them.

This is Beatrice, and the soul, poised toward Christ’s coming: not drifting in abstraction, but burning with tender, alert expectation for the light.

Quotes 🖋️

(The ones I keep in my journal as reminders of eternal wisdom):

Here, under the high Son of God and Mary,
together with the ancient and the new
councils, he triumphs in his victory—

he who is keeper of the keys of glory.

~ lines 136--39, Paradiso, Canto XXIII

Welcome to Dante Read-Along! ✨

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Welcome to Dante Book Club, where you and I descend into Hell and Purgatory to be able to ascend to Paradise. Our guide in Paradise is Beatrice, and in this twenty-second Canto, Dante and Beatrice encounter St. Benedict. You can find the main page of the read-along right here, reading schedule here, and the list of chat threads here.

In each post you can find a brief summary of the canto, philosophical exercises that you can draw from it, themes, character, and symbolism explanations.

All the wonderful illustrations are done specially for the Dante Read-Along by the one and only Luana Montebello.

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This Week’s Circle ⭕️

The seventh heaven of Saturn and the contemplatives, continued - Dante understands righteous zeal - St. Benedict - Dante asks to gaze upon his face, which is hidden within the light - St. Benedict denounces the clergy and the corruption in his order - Dante and Beatrice follow St. Benedict up the celestial ladder into the eighth realm of the fixed stars - The constellation of Gemini and Dante’s final wish for poetic expression - Dante gazes back upon all of the planets in their spheres.

Canto XXII Summary:

Dante was still feeling overwhelmed at the cry of indignation that had come from the souls in the realm of Saturn after the condemnation of corrupt clergy by Peter Damian at the end of canto xxi. In this state he turned to Beatrice for reassurance.

She pointed out that even those in these highest spheres, here in the realm of the contemplatives, could feel righteous zeal toward injustice:

Do you not know you are in Heaven,
not know how holy all of Heaven is,
how righteous zeal moves every action here?

Now, since this cry has agitated you
so much, you can conceive how—had you seen
me smile and heard song here—you would have been
confounded.
xxii.7-13

The parts of the cry that he did not comprehend, the prayer hidden within the cry, would have shown him that there would be justice for those corrupt clergy in due time. He was not to await that justice with impatience, however, as the justice of God worked in its own time, perhaps slowly, and not in accordance with the rush of human desire for resolution.

The sword that strikes from Heaven’s height is neither
hasty nor slow, except as it appears
to him who waits for it—who longs or fears.
xxii.16-18

She urged him to leave this idea as complete and to turn and look at the many souls, like orbs of light, which grew brighter by virtue of their proximity to the other orbs, joy supporting joy. Dante stood watching, holding back from speech, when the most beautiful of the orbs of light came toward him, saying to Dante that if he could have comprehended the love that was within those souls, he would not have hesitated to speak.

The glowing soul introduced himself; this was St. Benedict, founder of the Benedictine order of monks that was a driving force in early medieval religious monasticism in the sixth century. His Rule of St. Benedict was transformative, a document outlining not only teachings for monks in their spiritual lives, but also for ordering the smooth operation of a communal monastery.

Benedict pointed out the contemplative nature of his fellow souls in that realm of Saturn, inspired by the love of God to produce the flowers of ordered sentiment and the fruits of good works. He introduced two of them, Macarius and Romualdus, fellow monks who had also attained this high estate. It is uncertain which of the monks named Macarius Dante referred to, either Macarius the Elder, the Egyptian, or St. Macarius the Younger of Alexandria.

Dante felt the effect of the presence of St. Benedict, whose speech and countenance had helped Dante to bloom like a rose in the sun. He asked his pressing question then to the Saint, asking if he would be able to see his human form divested of its shining envelope of light. It had been some time since Dante had seen any of the heavenly souls in their human form, so much light had they displayed in each realm as they had climbed higher. Yet now was not the time for such an unveiling; that vision was saved for the Empyrean realm.

Brother, your high desire will be
fulfilled within the final sphere, as all
the other souls’ and my own longing will.

There, each desire is perfect, ripe, intact;
and only there, within that final sphere,
is every part where it has always been.
xxii.61-66

Benedict expanded on the architecture of the highest Empyrean; first, that his wish to see the forms of the souls in the heavens would be fulfilled, but that was not the only element that would find fulfillment, no, for every desire—and those have all been purified now, to even reach to this phase of perfection—would find complete fulfillment, “perfect, ripe, intact.”

The ladder before which they stood rose all the way to that highest realm, Dante was told, to the place of perfect stillness and rest; no more activity of attainment would be required in such a space of fulfillment. It did not revolve as did the other spheres, for it was out of time; on that ladder was the boundary between time and eternity. Such was the meaning behind the ladder in the dream of Jacob; we visited this verse in canto xxi, but it is worth noting again:

St. Benedict lamented that his Order on earth now did not have the drive to aim their sights at climbing that ladder, and that his work there was worth less than the paper it was written on.

He denounced the church as a place of thieves, where the habits of once dedicated monks were now more akin to sacks of rotten food, that their crimes of greed and use of the riches of the church for their own ends filled them with madness. Those resources were there for holy work, not to squander on family or mistresses.

He continued to lament that good seed planted did not last to bear fruit in the followers of the church, and that both St. Peter and St. Francis, as well as himself, had dedicated themselves to God without all those trappings of finery and wealth.

The flesh of mortals yields so easily—
on earth a good beginning does not run
from when the oak is born until the acorn.

Peter began with neither gold nor silver,
and I with prayer and fasting, and when Francis
began his fellowship, he did it humbly;
xxii.85-90

The purity of Benedict’s initial mission was now stained with that corruption; and yet, he cautioned Dante against despair, perhaps knowing that this was one of the themes closest to his heart, for the repairing of the fault was not such a challenge that God could not oversee it. He pointed to the miracle in the book of Joshua, where the Jordan river parted so that the priests carrying the Ark of the Covenant could pass over it on dry ground, or in Exodus, when Moses parted the Red Sea so that the Hebrew people could pass through and escape from the pursuing Egyptians. If these were possible, so was justice over corruption.

With this note of encouragement, St. Benedict left Dante and returned to the other souls; they swept up the ladder and out of sight. Beatrice beckoned Dante to follow suit:

So did he speak to me, and he drew back
to join his company, which closed, compact;
then, like a whirlwind, upward, all were swept.

The gentle lady—simply with a sign—
impelled me after them and up that ladder,
so did her power overcome my nature;
xxii.97-102

Swifter than would be possible on earth, they flew up that ladder into the eighth celestial sphere, leaving behind them the planetary circles and ascending into the realm of the Fixed Stars. Here, with the final wish formula of the entire Commedia, Dante by his longing to return to that place as he wrote, swore to the quickness of that flight. It had been instantaneous, quicker than the instinct to remove a finger burnt by a fire, so quickly did he move into that realm.

He saw the sign of Gemini—the very sign under which he was born, and therefore held deep kinship with—and now that he had arrived here to this most glorious place, exclaimed with praise on the beauty of the vision that spread before him.

O stars of glory, constellation steeped
in mighty force, all of my genius—
whatever be its worth—has you as source:

with you was born and under you was hidden
he who is father of all mortal lives,
when I first felt the air of Tuscany;
xxii.112-117

Dante, in his praise to the stars under which he was born, and the gift of poetry that they had placed within him, that genius, asked for one final boon from those muses of his soul; that he be able to finish his poem with the glory and magnificence that it deserved, for how else could one dare to write of the highest levels of paradise?

To you my soul now sighs devotedly,
that it may gain the force for this attempt,
hard trial that now demands its every strength.
xxii.121-123

Beatrice spoke, telling Dante that he was very close to the ultimate vision of God, but that in order to prepare for it, that he should look down upon all the realms through which they had ascended, all the planetary spheres arrayed in their perfect order below them; for understanding the heights to which they had come, it would prepare his heart to join the ranks of the blessed:

before
you enter farther, do look downward, see
what I have set beneath your feet already:
much of the world is there. If you see that,

your heart may then present itself with all
the joy it can to the triumphant throng
that comes in gladness through this ether’s rounds.
xxii.126-132

Dante gazed below him, seeing the celestial realms from above, and understanding the small insignificance of the earth below, tiny against the vast expanse of the heavens, in what must be one of the most beautiful images in the Paradiso:

My eyes returned through all the seven spheres
and saw this globe in such a way that I
smiled at its scrawny image: I approve

That judgment as the best, which holds this earth
to be the least; and he whose thoughts are set
elsewhere, can truly be called virtuous.
xxii.133-138

This imagery was based on a similar theme in Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis, or the Dream of Scipio, the closing dream sequence at the end of his longer work the Republic, in which Scipio Africanus is visited by his grandfather, Scipio the Elder, and lifted to the heavens to understand the greater workings behind small human affairs.

He called out to the planets as he saw them with their names based in myth; Dante saw the back of the moon—Diana, Latona’s daughter—clear from the craters seen on earth, he saw the sun, child of Hyperion, he saw Mercury, son of Maia, and Venus, daughter of Dïone, he saw Jupiter between his son Mars and his father, Saturn, tempering “the cold of his father with the heat of his son.”9

In gazing upon all that was below, how so little land could create such great discord, Dante was satisfied that it was all worth being left behind in order to place oneself in facing that which was the truest of true, the most divine of the divine, and turned instead to the eternity reflected in Beatrice’s eyes.

💭 Philosophical Exercises

We do seem to be reaching the end of our journey through the Divine Comedy, and I have to say, I already miss Dante, even though we still haven’t reached the most important part: the end, where we will finally see where this journey leads.

In Canto XXII I see a kind of reverse Orpheus. Around the hundredth line, Beatrice asks Dante to turn back and look at the earth, to see the road he has already travelled, before he can proceed further into the realm where one’s sight must be completely purified.

Myths and religious poems like this one reveal psychological truths that are very hard to express in scientific language.

In the case of Orpheus, his looking back is uncontrolled: it is a pure impulse, an act of vision not yet mastered. As I’ve explored several times in previous cantos, Orpheus’s backward glance is the sign of an unprepared soul, someone who has not really made the inward journey and still entrusts his fate, and the fate of his beloved, to the whimsical decisions of the gods.

Dante’s backward look is the exact opposite. Orpheus looks back in disobedience and loses his beloved; Dante looks back in obedience and is prepared to receive her and his final vision more fully.

Orpheus’s gaze collapses love into possession. Dante’s gaze, guided by Beatrice, dissolves possession into contemplation. Orpheus is the poet who fails to manage the relation between visible and invisible: he cannot hold image and reality together, and his glance shatters what he loves.

Dante, in contrast, is finally learning how to see rightly. At this point in Paradiso, the poem itself is turning from long stretches of abstraction back toward more concrete, incarnate imagery. The commanded backward look belongs to this turning: Dante is being trained to hold heaven and earth, the invisible and the visible, in a single, ordered gaze.

Beatrice’s command to look down places Dante inside a much older tradition: the philosophical “view from above.”

Like Scipio in Cicero’s dream, or Marcus Aurelius’ contemplation or Boethius being lifted by the Lady Philosophy, Dante is raised to the stars and invited to see the earth from a height, to watch the world shrink to its proper proportions.

From here the kingdoms and empires, the ambitions and wars, all become a “little threshing-floor.” But Dante overlays this philosophical exercise with the myth of Orpheus.

We are not only invited to despise the littleness of the world; we are shown what a disciplined backward look looks like. It is no longer a desperate check to see whether we have managed to drag love out of the underworld; it is a contemplative reassessment of the road already travelled, under the guidance of someone who knows where this road is going.

All of this happens as Dante leaves the heaven of Saturn, the sphere of contemplatives: Peter Damian, Benedict, and the ruined monastic orders. There he has been taught what it means to leave the world behind, to climb a ladder of interior detachment.

The final contemplative exercise is paradoxical: not to stare upwards so intensely that one forgets the earth, but to look back at it once, from above, in the right way.

After listening to the great contemplatives, Dante is allowed a single, grace-governed backward glance at the earth and at his own past.

In that act he learns to love the world without clinging to it, to see his journey without trying to possess it, and to hold the visible and the invisible together without tearing them apart.

Dante, in other words, becomes the reverse of Orpheus.

This Week’s Sinners and Virtuous 🎭

(Themes, Quotes, Terms and Characters)

I. Vita Activa

I’ve been reading recently a lot about Sophocles’ life. I did not know much about his biography and once again was shaken to my core to discover that he served as a general, military commander, and held a political office several times.

The myth of the introverted writer, who rejects any social interaction, and creates great stories from the seclusion of their home dissipates when you read about the lives of Dante, Sophocles or Milton.

Contemplation unites mind and reality, thought and action, will and deed.

II. From Planetary to Celestial Realms

Our pilgrim has also reached another threshold of this poem, from planetary spheres to the divine realms. My reader will feel the distinction from the figures we will encounter in the cantos, the difference between the two.

Quotes 🖋️

(The ones I keep in my journal as reminders of eternal wisdom):

The sword that strikes from Heaven’s height is neither
hasty nor slow, except as it appears
to him who waits for it—who longs or fears.

But turn now toward the other spirits here;
for if you set your sight as I suggest,
you will see many who are notable.

~ lines 16-21, Paradiso, Canto XXII

Welcome to Dante Read-Along! ✨

(If this post appears truncated in your inbox you can read it on the web by clicking here. )

Welcome to Dante Book Club, where you and I descend into Hell and Purgatory to be able to ascend to Paradise. Our guide in Paradise is Beatrice, and in this twenty-first Canto, Dante and Beatrice rise to the contemplatives in the sphere of Saturn. You can find the main page of the read-along right here, reading schedule here, and the list of chat threads here.

In each post you can find a brief summary of the canto, philosophical exercises that you can draw from it, themes, character, and symbolism explanations.

All the wonderful illustrations are done specially for the Dante Read-Along by the one and only Luana Montebello.

Subscribe now

This Week’s Circle ⭕️

Dante and Beatrice ascend to the seventh sphere of Saturn - The souls of the contemplative - The golden ladder rising into the atmosphere - One soul came forward, St. Peter Damian - Dante’s questions about the silence of Saturn and of predestination - Damian’s reply that no one can know the workings of the mind of God - He denounces the corrupt clergy of his day.

Canto XXI Summary:

Dante gazed upon Beatrice again after the close of the speech by the Eagle in the sphere of Jupiter, and as he gazed, they rose to the seventh celestial realm of Saturn, the home of contemplatives and the final planet in the celestial cosmology before moving into the circles of the fixed stars and Primum Mobile.

He saw something unusual however, in that Beatrice did not smile at him—that smile that grew lovelier with every rise in station. Her beauty was not simply of her form or bearing, but a representation of pure truth, of a revealed theology, mirroring the glory of Dante’s growing understanding of each realm they rose into. Her smile would now, in Saturn, be so magnificent that his mortal eyes could not even bear the sight, and by refraining, she preserved him from sure destruction.

Such had been the fate of Semele, in myth, who was destroyed when she asked her lover Jove to show himself to her in all of his divine glory. She had been tricked by the jealous Juno to ask for this boon, as Juno knew well how it would end, the divine light revealed before mortal eyes.

The nature of Saturn is cold, and the planet was in the sign of Leo in that spring of 1300. Here we enter the third triad of celestial intelligences, following the map of hierarchies of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite that Dante used.

The first triad of the moon, mercury, and Venus were the intelligences that held those still most closely relating to affairs on earth, the second triad of the Sun, Mars, and Jupiter, looked to those whose glory related to power and rule, and here in the third and highest triad we will discover the realms that are the very closest to God, and therefore look to contemplation and adoration in the company of the saints. Beatrice prepared Dante for this realm of contemplation and the sight they would shortly witness:

Let your mind follow where your eyes have led,
and let your eyes be mirrors for the figure
that will appear to you within this mirror.
xxi.16-18

Dante’s desire here was twofold; he weighed the scales of these two desires against each other, on one side his desire to contemplate her beauty, the other to obey her request. In obeying her, he found the greatest joy.

There, revolving in the sphere that held the celestial body named after the god Saturn—father of Jupiter, ruler of the Golden Age of when all was good and evil had not yet invaded humankind—Dante saw a golden ladder before him, extending so far into the atmosphere above him that he could not see the end of it.

Mars had the emblem of the cross, and Jupiter of the Eagle; now, here we see the emblem of the ladder, symbolic of ascent and the ready passage to higher realms. Multitudes of lights, each a soul, poured down the ladder, until a single light came forward.

And just as jackdaws, at the break of day,
together rise—such is their nature’s way—
to warm their feathers chilled by night; then some

fly off and never do return, and some
wheel back to that point where they started from,
while others, though they wheel, remain at home;

such were the ways I saw those splendors take
as soon as they had struck a certain step,
where they had thronged as one in radiance.
xxi.34-42

The single soul shone brightly and Dante felt in communion with it, felt the love that was indicated by the growing radiance emitting from it. He did not speak this thought, but pondered in his heart the feeling of what he desired to ask, communing silently with both the soul and with Beatrice as he let his desire be known to her: permission to express himself.

Beatrice granted his unspoken wish to address the soul; although not named until the end of the canto, the one before them was Peter Damian, Benedictine Abbot and Cardinal of the church, and later a saint:

Dante humbled himself before Damian before asking him two questions: why was it he that had come forward to speak to Dante—hinting again at the idea of predestination which had surfaced in canto xx—and secondly, why was the heaven of Saturn so quiet? In every other heaven, the songs of rejoicing were ever present, but here was silence. Damian answered the second question first; the reason for the silence was the same as the reason that Beatrice did not smile:

“Your hearing is as mortal as your sight;
thus, here there is no singing,” he replied,
“and Beatrice, in like wise, did not smile.”
xxi.61-63

Damian went on to answer Dante’s first question, about what had made him come forward, out of all the other souls traversing the golden ladder. Damian stated simply that it was not a greater love for Dante himself that brought him forward, but the desire that was in him to express the charity of God.

The love that prompted me is not supreme;
above, is love that equals or exceeds
my own, as spirit-flames will let you see.

But the deep charity, which makes us keen
to serve the Providence that rules the world,
allots our actions here, as you perceive.
xxi.67-72

Yet Dante still did not quite understand, or his question had not quite been addressed, for he asked again why Damian specifically had come forward, why he had been predestined for the task. Damian whirled in place, his light shining, at the question.

Even basking in the love of the highest heaven and God, with an inflamed joy and clear sight, as Damian did, he could not—and nor even could the highest realm of angels, the seraphim—give an answer as to the highest workings of the mind of God, in order to give an answer to Dante’s question

But even Heaven’s most enlightened soul,
that Seraph with his eye most set on God,
could not provide the why, not satisfy

what you have asked; for deep in the abyss
of the Eternal Ordinance, it is
cut off from all created beings’ vision.
xxi.91-96

Damian charged Dante to relate, once back in the earthly realms, this message of the mystery of the mind of God.

Recognizing that he had reached a boundary of understanding that could not be crossed, Dante withdrew his question; instead, he asked the soul who he was, and here Damian introduced himself by stating where he was from.

In the Apennines mountains within central Italy, he had been housed in the monastery of Santa Croce di Fonte Avellana. He had lived simply and frugally, steeped in contemplation, and where once they had plenty of souls in the forms of monks there to lift up as an offering to God, now there was a lack as fewer dedicated themselves to God. He named himself, and spoke of the necessity of his taking on the role of Cardinal with its red hat, even though he did not want to leave his quiet contemplation for the duties and responsibilities of higher office.

He compared the current state of the clergy to the old ideal of Sts. Peter—Cephas, his Aramaic name—and Paul—the Holy Ghost’s great vessel—who had been simple and lean:

Once there were Cephas and the Holy Ghost’s
great vessel: they were barefoot, they were lean,
they took their food at any inn they found.

But now the modern pastors are so plump
that they have need of one to prop them up
on this side, one on that, and one in front,

and one to hoist them saddleward. Their cloaks
cover their steeds, two beasts beneath one skin:
O patience, you who must endure so much!
xxi.127-135

Damian had fought against the very corruption of the clergy that Dante spoke out against at almost every turn. He ended his speech, and the souls on the ladder gathered toward him. They uttered a cry of near contempt all together at the thought of what the church had become.

Just as he had been awed by their silence, now he was surprised by their energetic cries.

💭 Philosophical Exercises

About a year ago, I was given a book called The Rigor of Angels, written by William Egginton. In this exceptional book, which I highly recommend you to read, Egginton explores how Werner Heisenberg, Jorge Luis Borges, and Immanuel Kant each approached the nature of reality.

I think this, in itself, is a powerful advertisement for you to read this book. But what is truly curious is how Egginton shows that three very different figures, who never knew one another, explored the same reality and came to strikingly similar conclusions.

In Borges’ case this happened through literature; in Kant’s, through philosophy; and in Heisenberg’s, through physics, as he was one of the greatest physicists who ever lived.

The reason I mention this book here is that we have now reached Saturn, the realm of the contemplatives. Here we encounter a staircase: a very ordered set of steps that rises upward, yet Dante’s vision cannot see where it ends or where it leads.

This is exceptionally interesting, because even such a simple object as a staircase—something we encounter every day, perhaps several times—can carry profound meaning. Stairs represent a structured ascent higher, or a structured descent lower. They imply that our movement is not a chaotic scramble upward but an ordered, step-by-step path towards some higher truth.

As my dear reader knows, this image of a structured ascent is omnipresent in sacred texts. I find it visually and spiritually compelling, especially in the context of contemplation.

Contemplation is often confused with chaotic thinking, as if serious thought were just a storm of disordered impressions in the mind, where we try to connect disparate things at random. But this image of the staircase suggests something else: true thinking, thinking that leads to truth—as it did for Kant, Borges, and Heisenberg—is a structured ascent.

What unites these three figures? What connects Heisenberg, the German physicist, Borges, the Argentinian writer of magical realism, and Kant, the critical philosopher from Königsberg? It is that all three understood, first of all, that there is no final step, no visible end point—just as, for Dante, the stairs have no clear end. You can go step by step, higher and higher, and still never see the terminus.

I find this extremely interesting, perhaps even the quiet beauty of this entire canto.

In the sphere of Saturn, Dante is essentially telling us that our thinking, our intellectual explorations, our desire to understand the nature of reality, are themselves forms of divine revelation. God reveals Himself step by step through the very act of contemplating truth.

My reader will have noticed something striking in this realm: there is no music, no singing. And Beatrice warns Dante that if she were to smile here, the radiance would be so overwhelming that his mind would go blind.

Through contemplation we discover God; we understand the nature of reality. And the reason contemplation matters so deeply is that it reveals truth gradually, so that we do not go blind from its brilliance.

Imagine someone trying to explain the entire nature of physics, or quantum mechanics, to you all at once, without any preliminary education. Your mind would simply collapse under the weight of it. As we ascend toward the higher realms, up this stairway without end, each step brings more light, more radiance, and each step allows our sight to adjust to what has just been revealed.

The same applies to literature. Try handing Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment to a five-year-old. The truth on those pages is far too bright for someone so unformed to comprehend. A child must grow, must be trained, must learn how to hold deeper truths. Only then can the novel speak.

(This is also the reason why some great novels are often interpreted so primitively by the minds of unformed adults, without a proper education and genuine instruction, they see simple interpretations even within the great novels.)

It is the same here. Dante shows us that contemplation is beautiful not because it is passive or abstract, but because it brings us closer to truth in a way that we are capable of bearing. It is God’s way of revealing Himself gently, allowing our intellect to mature step by step toward the light.

II.

Another thing that amazes me in Dante’s vision is the placement of contemplation within the order of the heavens. Contemplation comes only after we have passed through the more “earthly” elements. Dante has already gone beyond Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and the Sun. It is striking that contemplation belongs to this highest realm: it comes after love has been purified, after action has been tested, after justice has been contemplated, after the illumination of the Sun.

Only after passing through these realms of earthly and civic life does Dante reach contemplation and become capable of seeing it.

This is why, in this sphere, Dante looks to Beatrice and for the first time she tells him that his eyes may lead and his mind may follow where his gaze directs him. It is a sign that Dante has reached a certain height in understanding the order within himself.

In the themes I want to explore two more element that add some detail to this idea of contemplation: Peter Damian and Dante; and a bit about time to keep silence.

This Week’s Sinners and Virtuous 🎭

(Themes, Quotes, Terms and Characters)

I. Is this the end of Commedia?

The commentator from Columbia University, Teodolinda Barolini, observes that the beginning of the sphere of Saturn marks, in a sense, the beginning of the end of the Commedia.

By crossing this threshold, from the realm of earthly concerns into the realm of pure contemplation, Dante is already approaching the final movement of the journey.

We are drawing closer to God, and because contemplation stands so near to the divine, the ascent through Saturn feels like the quiet opening of the poem’s final act.

II. Peter Damian

Some scholars have also drawn parallels between Peter Damian and Dante himself. Both men were, in different ways, driven out from the lives they wished to lead and pushed into a deeper life of contemplation. Dante, of course, was exiled from Florence and found himself writing the Divine Comedy in a state of enforced wandering and reflection. Peter Damian, on the other hand, was driven into solitude because of his fierce denunciations of clerical corruption and luxury.

It is fascinating to see how both figures, displaced and unwillingly uprooted, transformed their exile into a contemplative vocation. In each case, the loss of worldly place became the condition for a higher, more interior vision.

Quotes 🖋️

(The ones I keep in my journal as reminders of eternal wisdom):

Let your mind follow where your eyes have led,
and let your eyes be mirrors for the figure
that will appear to you within this mirror.”

That man who knows just how my vision pastured
upon her blessed face, might recognize
the joy I found when my celestial guide

had asked of me to turn my mind aside,
were he to weigh my joy when I obeyed
against my joy in contemplating her.

~ lines 16-24, Paradiso, Canto XXI

Welcome to Dante Read-Along! ✨

(If this post appears truncated in your inbox you can read it on the web by clicking here. )

Welcome to Dante Book Club, where you and I descend into Hell and Purgatory to be able to ascend to Paradise. Our guide in Paradise is Beatrice, and in this twentieth Canto, the Celestial Eagle explains the redemption of virtuous pagans. You can find the main page of the read-along right here, reading schedule here, and the list of chat threads here.

In each post you can find a brief summary of the canto, philosophical exercises that you can draw from it, themes, character, and symbolism explanations.

All the wonderful illustrations are done specially for the Dante Read-Along by the one and only Luana Montebello.

Subscribe now

This Week’s Circle ⭕️

The sixth celestial sphere of Jupiter, continued - The just souls that made up the eye and brow of the Eagle - Six celebrated just rulers - The question of the virtuous pagans revisited - Dante’s amazement at the placement of pagans in Paradise - The question of predestination.

Canto XX Summary:

Dante praised the setting sun as seen from earth, and the stars that appeared in the night time sky upon its setting; as the moon reflects the light of the sun, so did Dante understand that the stars also reflected that greatest of celestial lights:

The lights of the souls that made up the image of the Eagle in the sixth celestial sphere of Jupiter reminded Dante of just such a group of sparkling stars in the night sky. The great Eagle, that symbol of the Roman Empire made of the souls of just rulers, ceased the speech it had been giving at the end of Canto xix on the nature of belief and of the twelve unjust rulers. In this full silence, the voices that made up the Eagle began to sing, their lights growing brighter in the unison of their song. So transcendent was it, that Dante could not begin to record it as he wrote.

O gentle love that wears a smile as mantle,
how ardent was your image in those torches
filled only with the breath of holy thoughts!
xx.13-15

Their song came to a close, and as a rush of mighty wind or the murmur of water over rocks, Dante heard a sound emit from the Eagle, which, gathering in strength, became again its voice in speech, and asked Dante to pay close attention to the souls that made up its eye and brow—imagine the image in profile; in opposition to the twelve unjust monarchs listed previously, here in the Eagle’s eye were the very highest and most noble rulers:

“Now you must watch—and steadily—that part
of me that can, in mortal eagles, see
and suffer the sun’s force,” it then began

to say to me, “because, of all the flames
from which I shape my form, those six with which
the eye in my head glows hold highest rank.”
xx.31-36

The first named was the most exalted of those high souls, the pupil of the eye, King David of Israel; as ‘singer of the Holy Spirit” (38) he composed the Psalms through his own artistic merit, although they were inspired by God; David was also he “who bore the ark from one town to another” in bringing the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem during his kingship.

Five other souls made up the lights of the arching eyebrow of the Eagle; the first, he “who comforted the widow for her son” (45) was the Emperor Trajan, whom we saw in Purgatorio canto x in the first terrace as the example of humility—we also saw King David there. He was said to have been moved by compassion on his way to war by the request of a widow:

Trajan, by this account, had spent time in Limbo before being lifted into Paradise; though dying a pagan, he was brought back to life through the intercessory prayers of St. Gregory—according to the legend—long enough that he was able to convert his beliefs and be lifted into the heavenly realms. The origin of the story as Dante would have known it was from the Legenda Aurea, or Golden Legend, a collection of tales of the Saints, which gave a number of the fantastic ways in which Trajan could have arrived in Paradise.

Hezekiah was the second soul in the brow of the Eagle, and his deathbed request that he be granted a longer life was granted by God, as told in the Old Testament book of Isaiah, indicating his great favor with the Lord;

Through this favor, Hezekiah was to understand that an answered prayer did not change the original will of God, but was a part of the enactment of it:

Now he has learned that the eternal judgment
remains unchanged, though worthy prayer below
makes what falls due today take place tomorrow.
xx.52-54

The Emperor Constantine held the place of the center and highest point on the brow; he “whose good intention bore evil fruit” referred to the document the Donation of Constantine, which had not yet been disproven as a forgery in Dante’s day. In it, Constantine ceded Rome to the pope, and moved the capital of the Empire to Byzantium, thus opening the door to the rise in temporal power of the church. By settling in the Greek eastern half of the Roman Empire, Byzantium grew and flourished through that attention which was then lost to the west. Yet Dante had previously denounced the actions of Constantine, so how did he reconcile placing the emperor in this exalted state of the just?

The fourth soul in the arch was king William II of Naples and Sicily, a just king, especially next to the corrupt rulers Charles of Apulia and Frederick II of Aragon, both of whom Dante listed in his roll call of corrupt monarchs in the previous canto.

The last named just soul was Ripheus, a Trojan warrior killed in the battle against the Greeks who was briefly mentioned in Virgil’s Aeneid:

His presence answered the question posed by Dante to the Eagle in canto xix about the fate of the virtuous pagans, and whether they, through their virtue not in Christ, but with the goodness that could be inherent in any human, could attain the heights of Paradise.

Dante the poet here, in the Eagle’s reply, made the bold assertion that indeed, yes, it was possible for a virtuous pagan to achieve to the level of Paradise; the specifics of his reasoning in whom he placed where—Virgil and the philosophers in Limbo, but Cato in Purgatory, and now Ripheus in Paradise—are of the poet’s own interpretation of much larger questions, but which also show Dante’s willingness to move against the current of theological understanding of the time, and grant a view based on love rather than rigid dogma:

As if it were a lark at large in air,
a lark that sings at first and then falls still,
content with final sweetness that fulfills,

such seemed to me the image of the seal
of that Eternal Pleasure through whose will
each thing becomes the being that it is.
xx.73-78

The Eagle celebrated in the justice it had just expounded upon. Dante knew that it could read the continuing current of his thoughts, but spoke his idea aloud anyway, amazed and almost incredulous at the vision that had just been shown to him.

The Eagle knew that Dante could absorb up to a point the truths that he had been shown, but that the true understanding that would turn it from fact to wisdom was yet missing.

“I can see
that, since you speak of them, you do believe
these things but cannot see how they may be;
and thus, though you believe them, they are hidden.

You act as one who apprehends a thing
by name but cannot see its quiddity
unless another set it forth to him.”
xx.87-93

Dante the pilgrim still did not understand the quiddity—the essence—of the reason behind Ripheus being granted a place in Paradise. What truly then, could bring a soul into the heavenly realms, if not the commonly accepted dogma of salvation through belief in Christ and attention to the sacraments? Dante the poet stated clearly his take on the matter, that to attain to the kingdom of heaven-Regnum celorum-“fervent love and vivid hope avail.”4

Dante had shown amazement that Trajan and Ripheus were there in Jupiter. The Eagle transferred their fervent love of justice onto a spontaneous understanding of the ideal of Christ, hence granting that admission through their almost natural understanding of the idea of an intercessor. The Eagle described this path explicitly; first for Trajan, referring back to the legend of his being brought back to life in order to finish his act of redemption:

One, from Hell,
where there is no returning to right will,
returned to his own bones, as the reward

bestowed upon a living hope, the hope
that gave force to the prayers offered God
to resurrect him and convert his will.
xx.106-111

Next he turned again to Ripheus, and that the way he had come to this understanding stemmed from his knowledge of absolute justice, and the effect that embodying that justice had upon his transformation of understanding the true nature of God; this interpretation of theology is surely Dante’s own, and yet he used it to solidify his point of pagans ascending to the heavens;

The other, through the grace that surges from
a well so deep that no created one
has ever thrust his eye to its first source,

below, set all his love on righteousness,
so that, through grace on grace, God granted him
the sight of our redemption in the future;

thus he, believing that, no longer suffered
the stench of paganism and rebuked
those who persisted in that perverse way.
xx.118-126

Faith, Hope, and Charity, the three theological virtues whom we met in the pageant at the crest of Mt. Purgatory, those near the right wheel of Beatrice’s chariot, were strong and living forces for Ripheus, baptizing him symbolically if not literally.

As though these issues of doctrine were not enough, the Eagle then touched on the idea of predestination, the workings of which are hidden from the sight of those not prepared to understand such divine and mysterious ways. Even though the souls in heaven understood God’s inner workings more fully than those on earth, they were still lacking in the final understanding, which was known only to God. And yet that was not necessarily a bad thing:

the incompleteness of our knowledge is
a sweetness, for our good is then refined
in this good, since what God wills, we too will.
xx.136-38

Dante recognized all of that which the vision was there to show him, not as a harsh truth, but as a ‘gentle medicine.’

Just as the sympathy between the lutist and singer could bring forth harmony through reading each others cues perfectly, bringing out more beauty from each of them, so Dante saw the lights of the Eagle twinkle and move to indicate their perfect harmony with the words just spoken, showing that they were as one.

💭 Philosophical Exercises

I can’t always say I understand Dante and his vision, but when the fog of my vision lifts, I glimpse his deeper wisdom.

Here, in the sphere of Justice, my view before entering it was primitive: a bureaucratic picture of courts and procedures.

Divine justice is far deeper and broader. It isn’t built on the processes required on earth. Rather, it is like a Renaissance painting—harmonious, with nothing superfluous—every stroke beginning and ending precisely where it should, every slight pressure of the master’s hand exact.

This is divine justice.

Here, I also face a point that has long baffled me and as I assume my reader as well.

In the previous cantos we met those kept at a distance from divine grace—like Virgil—by chronology and, as the last canto suggests, by geography as well.

For me, in the Canto XX—the chronological and the geographical almost merge. As Boethius suggests, God’s vision of time does not unfold step by step as it does for us; it is more like viewing paintings in a gallery. Each canvas holds time still: beginnings and endings present at once. God sees how everything unfolds, yet sees it as wrought through human action and life.

What moves me most is that Dante lets us glimpse divine vision itself—how God sees—and, in figure, what His Eye consists of. The Eagle isn’t only an emblem of justice; it is God’s vision, his sight, made legible to our simple inner eye.

This is also, to me, one of the most beautiful moments in the Paradiso: Dante describes the Eagle’s eye and brow, and the figures that compose them, so that each person becomes a facet of Justice seen as a single form.

At the pupil stands David, sign of poetic inspiration and sacred song—the psalmist—set at the very centre of the Eagle’s sight. Along the eyebrow are five souls. First, Trajan, the Roman emperor renowned for justice and mercy; medieval tradition says Gregory the Great prayed him back to life so he could be baptised—a legend Dante embraces to show mercy reaching beyond ordinary order.

Next, Hezekiah, whose repentance and prayer gained him added years; he witnesses that humility and amendment belong inside justice.

Then Constantine, whom Dante elsewhere blames for entangling the Church in temporal power through the Donation, yet who appears here among the saved—an image of right intention amid unintended consequences and of our limits in judging history.

After him comes William II of Sicily, “the Good,” praised for mildness, fairness, and piety—an exemplar of equity in rule.

Finally, the most startling: Ripheus the Trojan, hailed by Virgil as the most just of the Trojans, whom Dante dares to place in Heaven because grace “opened his eyes” to the future Redeemer—proof that God’s justice can outrun our categories of time, nation, and rite.

Dante makes a radical claim here—radical for his time and for ours. His inner iconography divides the Eagle’s sight into living meanings: David, the inspired ruler-poet; Trajan, justice among pagans; Hezekiah, repentance and answered prayer; Constantine, good will despite flawed results; William II, earthly kingship tempered and sanctified by equity; and Ripheus, divine grace beyond human reason.

This also answers the rebuke from the Eagle in Canto XIX, when he dared to ask how those far from Christ’s preaching could be excluded simply by geography. Here we see that divine justice is all-encompassing. Its vision is the master’s stroke. And it is as if Virgil had to remain in Limbo for this painting of justice to keep its severe harmony—a hard, humbling truth that sharpens the picture rather than softens it.

This Week’s Sinners and Virtuous 🎭

(Themes, Quotes, Terms and Characters)

I. Time and Eternity

In this canto, Dante dissolves the boundaries of time into the stillness of eternity.

The canto’s two emblematic figures—Hezekiah, whose death was postponed through prayer, and Trajan, whose soul was recalled to life centuries after his death, reveal how divine justice transcends the linear order of past and future.

As Hollander notes, Dante’s Heaven “gathers all temporal difference into one simultaneous vision,” where acts of repentance and faith, whether before or after Christ, stand equally present before God’s eternal gaze.

In this realm there is no “before” or “after,” only the immediacy of divine knowing: every just act, once illumined by grace, becomes forever now in the mind of God.

Quotes 🖋️

(The ones I keep in my journal as reminders of eternal wisdom):

So, from the image God Himself had drawn,
what I received was gentle medicine;
and I saw my shortsightedness plainly.

~ lines 139-41, Paradiso, Canto XX

Welcome to Dante Read-Along! ✨

(If this post appears truncated in your inbox you can read it on the web by clicking here. )

Welcome to Dante Book Club, where you and I descend into Hell and Purgatory to be able to ascend to Paradise. Our guide in Paradise is Beatrice, and in this nineteenth Canto, the Celestial Eagle expounds upon the nature of earthly Justice. You can find the main page of the read-along right here, reading schedule here, and the list of chat threads here.

In each post you can find a brief summary of the canto, philosophical exercises that you can draw from it, themes, character, and symbolism explanations.

All the wonderful illustrations are done specially for the Dante Read-Along by the one and only Luana Montebello.

Subscribe now

This Week’s Circle ⭕️

The sixth celestial realm of Jupiter - The Eagle, made of the lights of the souls of the just - Dante’s question about the fate of the virtuous pagans - The Eagle describes the ineffability of God and humanity’s inability to conceive of its depth - Virtuous pagans are at times more virtuous than professed Christians - The twelve corrupt monarchs.

Canto XIX Summary:

The massive Eagle suspended in the sixth heaven of Jupiter spread its wings before Dante, as the points of light that created its image, made of the souls of the Just, each of whom glowed like a Ruby, joined together as one being, unified in purpose and function.

And what I now must tell has never been
reported by a voice, inscribed by ink,
never conceived by the imagination;

for I did see the beak, did hear it speak
and utter with its voice both I and mine
when we and ours were what, in thought, was meant.
xix.7-12

In the realm of Jupiter, no single soul would ever speak alone; they always spoke as one being through the form of the Eagle; it now began its speech, and instead of using a plurality when referring to itself, such as we and ours, this eagle used singular words to indicate its unified being.

The Eagle referred to its own two natures upon the opening of its speech, that of justice and mercy, therefore indicating that the souls who made up the form of the Eagle were just and merciful in life. These were also the two natures of God, and in reference to temporal power, should also inform the empire and the emperor; the empire should be just and the emperor should be merciful, core ideas that Dante had spoken of in his work de Monarchia. These souls, in their place in Paradise, through their established justice on earth, had achieved a conception of justice that was so far beyond human understanding, that their earthly selves would not have been able to even imagine it, or desire for anything greater than it. They would not have been strong enough to bear it in their limited understanding.

The love exuding from that Eagle as it spoke was such that it blended together unified in their one voice, just as one constant heat is felt from a group of embers.

Dante addressed the Eagle with a profound question on the nature of justice which would become the theme of the canto, highlighting the reach of theology and its effect on the world as a whole, an idea that occupied Dante’s mind greatly. No answer on earth had been able to quench this desire for knowledge, so he asked it in the highest place possible, the place that held the highest truth of the ideal of justice. Where the realm of Jupiter was concerned with earthly justice, Dante pointed to the realm that enacted God’s justice, the seventh realm of Saturn and the angelic order of the Thrones, who forever look upon God’s justice directly, and who reflect it down to the realms below:

I know indeed that, though God’s Justice has
another realm in Heaven as Its mirror,
you here do not perceive it through a veil.

You know how keenly I prepare myself
to listen, and you know what is that doubt
which caused so old a hungering in me.
xix.28-33

Dante knew that the souls making up the celestial Eagle knew his question, the depth and the nature of it. The Eagle thrummed with divine music before it began its extended speech, where, with one voice, it would expound upon the question of the virtuous pagan, one that was close and dear to Dante’s heart.

Just like a falcon set free from its hood,
which moves its head and flaps its wings, displaying
its eagerness and proud appearance, so

I saw that ensign do, that Eagle woven
of praises of God’s grace, accompanied
by songs whose sense those up above enjoy.
xix.34-39

The Eagle began it’s speech by displaying the majesty of God as creator, he who measured the perfect order of the universe with his compass, making that order both visible in external things and invisible in the inner working of things. In this creation, as mighty as His works were, nothing excelled His own being; He remained in “infinite excess” of His creation, by necessity and by design. Lucifer, the fallen angel, proved this “inferiority of every created thing to the creative mind”2 in his fall.

In proof of this, the first proud being, he
who was the highest of all creatures, fell—
unripe because he did not wait for light.

Thus it is clear that every lesser nature
is—all the more—too meager a container
for endless Good, which is Its own sole measure.
xix.46-51

The Eagle began to set the stage for the idea that Dante also could not comprehend the hidden order of the Mind of God by the very nature of his limited understanding. Coming to his question—of the fate of the virtuous pagan—with this groundwork, the Eagle could proceed, in limited explanation, the answer to his question. What beauty Dante uses to express this infinite nature of God, and the longing that accompanies it as the human mind and heart strive to reach its depths:

Therefore, the vision that your world receives
can penetrate into Eternal Justice
no more than eye can penetrate the sea;

for though, near shore, sight reaches the sea floor,
you cannot reach it in the open sea;
yet it is there, but hidden by the deep.
xix.58-63

Where in realms below we studied the depths of the psychology of the human heart in all its error and striving toward goodness, here, in this realm of full freedom to worship in purity, there remains only to express and understand the limitations of that purity as man strives to reach toward full worship of the Divine. The flesh of humanity prevents such perfection. Now the Eagle restated the question in Dante’s mind and heart, first explaining, then again asking, almost ironically, how he thought he could understand such immense questions:

For you would say: “A man is born along
the shoreline of the Indus River; none
is there to speak or teach or write of Christ.

And he, as far as human reason sees,
in all he seeks and all he does is good;
there is no sin within his life or speech.

And that man dies unbaptized, without faith.
Where is this justice then that would condemn him?
Where is his sin if he does not believe?’
xix.70-78

In this speech, Dante used terms to indicate, not specific peoples such as those from the Indus River, or from Ethiopia, but to point more generally to those regions that were considered heathen, or unchristian, in his day. The Eagle pointed to the importance of using the Scripture to unpack this question:

The Eagle finished this first exposition saying that created good can be drawn toward God and Justice, but since it is the origin of this good, it is not itself drawn toward that which is created. That movement only goes in one direction.

The throng of souls that made up the divine Eagle portrayed their unity in the movement of the wings, as if to indicate that the first part of their speech was complete.

Just as, above the nest, the stork will circle
when she has fed her fledglings, and as he
whom she has fed looks up at her, so did

the blessed image do, and so did I,
the fledgling, while the Eagle moved its wings,
spurred on by many wills in unison.
xix.91-96

The Eagle, now that it had set the stage regarding human understanding, moved on more specifically to Dante’s question. It qualified from the start that the requirement for attaining to Paradise was a belief in Christ, either during his lifetime before the crucifixion, or as a later believer in the ages that followed. It warned of those who professed belief, but whose words went no further than their lips; although professing, they were less virtuous than what would be considered the virtuous pagan:

But there are many who now cry ‘Christ! Christ!’
who at the Final Judgment shall be far
less close to Him than one who knows not Christ;
xix.106-108

These virtuous pagans would be incredulous that such were considered of a higher standing than themselves, as in the afterlife, those who professed Christ and those who did not would walk their different paths to their eternal placements. The kings of nations, professed believers whose actions inscribed into the Book of Judgment told of a different story, would amaze those pagans who looked upon their unjust actions:

What shall the Persians, when they come to see
that open volume in which they shall read
the misdeeds of your rulers, say to them?
xix.112-114

We do not yet quite find out the answer to that question in this canto, as here was an opportunity for Dante to list those unjust rulers, twelve corrupt monarchs, not always by name, but through their actions. He did this with a poetic conceit of the acrostic; in the Italian, the first line of the following nine terzains began with the triple sets of letters L V E, purposefully placed to point to these rulers as a ‘plague’ or ‘pestilence.’

The first written in the book of Judgment is Albert of Austria and his invasion of Bohemia, which was under the rule of Wenceslaus II, for his own ends.

Next, Philip the Fair of France whose death came from his horse being assaulted by a boar and throwing him off, debased the currency in order to create more for himself, and wreaked havoc on the country’s economy.

Third, he moved to Britain and the border wars under Edward against the Scots, led by Robert the Bruce, then on to Ferdinand IV of Spain, who fought with Wenceslaus II of Bohemia.

The fifth corrupt monarch was Charles II of Naples, referred to as the “Cripple of Jerusalem” due to his inheriting the title from his father Charles of Anjou, who claimed right to it. Charles II was so corrupt that his virtues could be represented by I (one) while his faults by the letter M (1,000).

Dante continued the list with the Sicilian king Frederick II of Aragorn, whose virtues were so few that they could be written in shorthand and never expanded upon:

That book will show the greed and cowardice
of him who oversees the Isle of Fire,
on which Anchises ended his long life;

and to make plain his paltriness, the letters
that register his deeds will be contracted,
to note much pettiness in little space.
xix.130-135

Not only Frederick II but his uncle and brother could be counted among the unjust, James, King of the Balearic Islands, and James, King of Aragon respectively.

The next tercet names three more corrupt monarchs, those of Portugal, Norway and Rascia:

Hungary would rejoice if she no longer let a corrupt one sit on the throne, as it was when Andrew III usurped the throne from Charels Martel, and the region of Navarre could stay safe there if it wrapped its mountainous Pyrenees around it like armor. Navarre would see what laid in store for it if it did not stay so protected through the actions on the island of Cyprus, whose towns of Nicosi and Famagosta were devastated by “their own beast” Henry II, who, like one in a pack of wolves, kept abreast of injustice just as all the other monarchs named.

💭 Philosophical Exercises

Throughout two-thirds of the Divine Comedy we were accompanied by a guide who led us through every peril, yet we knew from the start his salvation was impossible. We mourned his disappearance as we entered Paradise. And of course, my dear reader, I mean Virgil.

In Canto XIX of Paradiso, we face a different kind of challenge. If Virgil’s salvation was unreachable because of the chronology of history—he was born before Christ’s message was spread—then he must spend eternity in yearning, in Limbo.

The question Dante raises in the sphere of Justice (Jupiter) is geographical. If Virgil was restricted chronologically, many people on the banks of the Indus, as Dante says, are restricted by geography from Christ’s truth. And, as some commentators note, Dante elsewhere (for example in the Convivio) repeatedly highlights the privilege of those with access to education and thus to truth.

Here, Dante signals that what he is about to report is radically new—a marvel “never spoken by voice nor written in ink,” a classic topos of novelty that frames the paradox to come. The Eagle then appears and speaks, and Dante stresses the wonder not only of what he saw but of what he heard: a single beak saying “I” and “mine,” while meaning “we” and “our”—unity speaking through plurality.

Dante dares the great question: what becomes of those who live virtuously yet—because of their location—never hear Christ’s truth?

Before he gets the direct rebuke, the poem walks him up a doctrinal staircase: God’s wisdom surpasses anything in creation and even Lucifer, highest of creatures, fell because he lacked the final light.

The conclusion is humbling: we cannot grasp fully the reasons of divine judgment, which lie in God’s unclouded light, not in our dim sight.

The rebuke finally lands with Scripture’s edge: “Who are you, O man, to answer back to God?” (Romans 9:20). Hollander notes this tercet as the pivot of the canto: we may know that God judges justly, but not why in each case, including the “just man beyond the Indus.”

Having established the limits of human judgment, the canto then turns to prayer and invective.

Dante begs the Mind that moves Jupiter to clear the “smoke” that dims its beam and denounces new “wars” that consist in withholding the bread, a figure of denying the sacraments, and those who “write only to cancel.”

The greatest question, of course, concerns divine justice itself.

What becomes of the virtuous who, through no fault of their own, were denied the knowledge of God’s wisdom by the mere accident of geography?

And what of those who did receive the truth of Christ, yet chose a life of vice? Dante’s final judgment is clear and consoling: those who live virtuously, though ignorant of revelation, shall stand higher than those who knew the truth and refused to follow it.

This Week’s Sinners and Virtuous 🎭

(Themes, Quotes, Terms and Characters)

I. Avian pedagogy

In Jupiter, Dante explains ideas with two bird images. First, the Eagle is like a trained falcon just unhooded: steady, alert, ready to fly. Later it is like a mother stork hovering over her fed young, watchful and gentle.

Taken together, the point is simple: meet divine justice with disciplined attention and a willingness to be cared for and taught. Dante compares the Eagle to two birds to show two attitudes. The falcon means “be ready and focused.” The stork means “you are being looked after as you learn.

Quotes 🖋️

(The ones I keep in my journal as reminders of eternal wisdom):

Just like a falcon set free from its hood,
which moves its head and flaps its wings, displaying
its eagerness and proud appearance, so

I saw that ensign do, that Eagle woven
of praises of God’s grace, accompanied
by songs whose sense those up above enjoy.

~ lines 34-39, Paradiso, Canto XIX

Welcome to Dante Read-Along! ✨

(If this post appears truncated in your inbox you can read it on the web by clicking here. )

Welcome to Dante Book Club, where you and I descend into Hell and Purgatory to be able to ascend to Paradise. Our guide in Paradise is Beatrice, and in this eighteenth Canto, we admire the Eagle made of the souls of the just. You can find the main page of the read-along right here, reading schedule here, and the list of chat threads here.

In each post you can find a brief summary of the canto, philosophical exercises that you can draw from it, themes, character, and symbolism explanations.

All the wonderful illustrations are done specially for the Dante Read-Along by the one and only Luana Montebello.

Subscribe now

This Week’s Circle ⭕️

The fifth celestial realm of Mars, continued - Cacciaguida names nine heroes of the warriors of the faith - Dante and Beatrice ascend to the celestial realm of Jupiter - The lights of the souls there form words of Justice - The transformation of the letter M - The lily evolves into an Eagle - Dante condemns the injustice of avaricious popes.

Canto XVIII Summary:

As Dante’s ancestor Cacciaguida, acting as a reflection of the mind of God and rejoicing in the truth, resolved his speech to Dante regarding his future exile and the suffering he would undergo, he felt both a sense of peace regarding the consolations Cacciaguida had just given him, as well as the bitterness over the truth of his impending exile from Florence. Within the consolation was the surety that he had been given the blessing of speaking the truth through poetic form.

Here, Beatrice spoke, urging him to release that bitterness as he remembered that she gladly guided him, and that through her he could be assured that any future injustice would be lightened through the hand of God.

Her eyes glowed with such love and beauty that he could not express it in poetry, as it was so elevated that he would have needed to return to that realm of Paradise as he wrote the words to even begin to describe it. She encouraged him to continue to listen to Cacciaguida, there in the fifth celestial realm of Mars; while his gaze seemed only for her, as a representation of the perfection of theology, she told him that he could also learn from those in their present realm, those who had fought and died for their faith.

As, here on earth, at times our sentiment,
if it be passionate enough to take
the soul entirely, shows in the face,

so, in the flaming of the holy fire
to which I turned, I saw that he desired
some further words with me. And he began:
xviii.22-27

At Beatrice’s promptings, Cacciaguida continued his speech. He spoke of the nature of the divine realms, using the metaphor that from the heavens grew the fruits of the beatitudes in the form of a tree that was forever in bloom, always lush and green. It’s nourishment and roots came from God above, and each celestial realm was like the ring on this everlasting tree. In this fifth ring of the tree of God resided those warriors of the faith that were the subjects of poetry and song.

Cacciaguida pointed Dante’s attention back to that cross suspended before them made of the lights of souls, saying that he would call out to some of these heroes residing there, who would flash forth quick as lightning as he named them—Nine Heroes that were worthy of renown. He proceeded to name a number of figures spanning time, from the Old Testament days until nearer to Dante’s own.

The first soul that Cacciaguida called came so quickly, that Dante saw his light flashing before the name was even finished being pronounced; Joshua, the successor of Moses, conquered Canaan and led the Israelites into the Promised Land after his death.

Next came Judas Maccabeus, whose story was told in the apocryphal text of the Maccabees; he led his people to success against King Antiochus IV of Syria who attempted to destroy the Jewish religion:

After the biblical examples came those of Christian knights, and champions of the Christian faith; first, Charlemagne, king of the Franks, restorer of the western Roman Empire, and the first Holy Roman Emperor. Fourth was Roland, one of Charlemagne’s most faithful knights, who was immortalized in the French medieval epic the Song of Roland.

The next names that Cacciaguida called from the celestial cross all fought against the Saracens; William, Duke of Orange, and Renouard, William’s brother-in-law and companion, a mythical giant who was a convert to Christianity. While William and Renouard waged battle in France, Charlemagne and Roland fought in Spain.

Duke Godfrey, the next soul called, had journeyed in the first crusade in 1099 that sought to recapture Jerusalem, and was crowned king upon his victory; lastly, Robert Guiscard, the eleventh century Norman conqueror. All of these representatives of the Christian faith had in some way restored lands and peoples to Christianity, from the time of Joshua up until the Crusades, of which Cacciaguida also took part as the ninth member of this exalted group.

Cacciaguida rejoined these warriors back in the cross of lights after this roll call. His speech and teachings to Dante were complete. Dante turned to Beatrice.

And as, by feeling greater joyousness
in doing good, a man becomes aware that day by day his virtue is advancing,

so I became aware that my revolving
with heaven had increased its arc—by seeing
that miracle becoming still more brilliant.
xviii.58-63

Dante recognized, by the increase in Beatrice’s beauty, that they had risen to the next sphere in the celestial realms; from Mars, they rose to the sixth celestial realm of Jupiter, rotating more widely in their arc as the circles grew larger with each advance upwards. As the spheres grew larger and wider, so did their revolutions grow as the spheres spun within each other.

Not only did Beatrice’s growing beauty signal this to him, but the shift in the ruddy red of Mars to the brilliant white of Jupiter, the colors melting into each other as the modest blush on a fair cheeked maiden:

Dante watched as in the realm of Jupiter, representing the virtue of Justice, a vision came before his sight. Spelled out letter by letter, created out of the light of souls, a word slowly formed; this word represented the qualities of Jupiter just as the cross had in the heaven of Mars.

The souls in Jupiter, as they sang their holy song, shone bright as they shaped themselves into letters, one by one, beginning with the letters D, I, and L. Dante called upon the sacred Muses to give him the words to express the vision that he was about to describe, one of ever changing imagery that gave both the words it was trying to convey as well as changing into a picture of the image of justice.

The words appeared in thirty five letters, spelling out in Latin Diligite Iustitiam, Qui Iudicatis Terram—Love justice, you who judge the earth—the first verse of the first book of the Wisdom of Solomon.

Once these letters were in place, the transformation of the final letter, M, began to transform into an image. This M, standing for the concept of Monarchy, had additional soul lights arrive to it, which began to change the M into a figure; the figure of a Lily appeared within the top crest of the M.

Then, even more sparks flew to join the transforming figure, landing atop the shape of the Lily on the M, and changing even further to become the figurehead of an Eagle, the symbol of the Roman Empire.

With each light settled quietly in place,
I saw that the array of fire had shaped
the image of an eagle’s head and neck.

He who paints there has no one as His guide:
He guides Himself; in Him we recognize
the shaping force that flows from nest to nest.

the other lights, who were, it seemed, content
at first to form a lily on the M,
moving a little, formed the eagle’s frame.
xviii.106-114

Dante radiated in the brilliance of the display before him, understanding well that the image that had unfolded before him represented the actions of divine justice upon the earthly planes. He prayed that the moving force of God behind these images would protect the source of religion on earth, Rome, from the harmful effects of the avarice of the popes and clergy who stripped it of its true meaning. Just as Jesus had expelled the moneylenders from the temple in Jerusalem, Dante prayed that Justice would similarly protect it through that righteous wrath. He prayed for guidance from the corruption of the church.

Where once these wars were fought in battle with swords and valor, he now saw them being fought through avarice, with the buying and selling of indulgences, and with excommunication used as a weapon to gain more funds for the church. All the corruption he had seen through the Inferno, and the repentance through the Purgatorio, was now displayed in its full and fully realized splendor.

He condemned those religious leaders who paid lip service to their devotion to John the Baptist, who, being the patron saint of Florence imprinted on their coins, could be worshiped through the love of gold rather than the virtue he represented.

That love, above and beyond the love of the saints Peter and Paul, gave a true account of the direction of their devotion.

💭 Philosophical Exercises

Dante gives us a tip on how to write great masterpieces.

In the first half of Canto XVIII, he lists characters from the great epics of the past: Joshua, Judas Maccabaeus, Charlemagne and Roland, William and Renouard, Duke Godfrey, and Robert Guiscard.

These figures were epic heroes, who brought back justice to a disordered world and defended it against forces of disharmony.

The tip to writers here is that if your story revolves around great characters—those we consider truly great, whose names have survived the test of time, through centuries and even millennia—you will never fail in your writing. Your story will still have greatness.

In other words, if you want to write a great book, your subject itself should be great. The masterpiece we are reading right now together, my dear reader, was inspired by a single scene from Virgil’s Aeneid, where the main protagonist descends into the underworld to find his father.

Virgil, in his turn, was inspired by Homer, so the story of Aeneas is a continuation of an epic story of what happens after the fall of Troy. It is equally worth mentioning the Bible. Whether one is a believer or not, it is undeniable that it was and still remains a well from which great writers draw their exceptional ideas from.

It’s difficult to make a mediocre subject great. But when you begin with a great character or a great story, the task becomes far easier. Everything that touches or even approaches such greatness naturally absorbs some of its light.

I don’t say this out of pride. (I’ve worked as hard as I could to purge that from myself throughout our journey.) Yet however modest my own words may be, these reflections on Dante’s Divine Comedy partake in a kind of borrowed grandeur because to speak of a great subject is already to stand in its radiance.

All these letters, all these reflections we’ve shared with you, my dear reader, owe almost everything to Dante. Whatever greatness they possess comes from the light of his wisdom. Without it, my words would lose their strength and fall silent.

I.

Canto XVIII is, in itself, a transitional canto. We move from the sphere of Mars, the sphere of action, to Jupiter, the sphere of justice. What is remarkable is Dante’s genius in bridging the two and showing their connection. After he names those epic heroes—men whose actions and courage sought to restore justice—the poem immediately carries us into the heaven where Justice itself is spelled out. These heroes, by their deeds, are the bridge between the two spheres.

Dante’s genius blows me away, because these heroes that Cacciaguida lists are the pinnacle of Mars, they are the ultimate model of action. “Remember who you are” - wrote Persian poet Hafiz, and that’s what Dante’s ancestor reminded our pilgrim. He reminded him of his noble roots, of his once noble city, then the true worth of noble speech. So, these epic heroes act as a perfect bridge since the first thing that a noble person does is restoration of justice.

III.

At the exact moment of ascent, Dante turns to Beatrice and the motion of his soul widens. The red of Mars fades from his sight like a blush leaving a fair face. In that instant he finds himself gathered into Jupiter - the white, temperate sixth star.

Once in Jupiter, the souls line up as letters and write: “Love justice, you who judge the earth.”

The Divine Justice here resembles a painting we can see in a gallery. Think of the divine order not as a rigid code but as a composition in which every brush-stroke is placed in the right spot, pressed with the right force, and bearing the right hue.

In Canto XVIII, the heroes of Mars act as restorers of that composition, bridging action and justice; and as we move toward Canto XIX, keep in mind a Renaissance painter - Botticelli, Michelangelo, Raphael- because true justice is not mechanical rule-keeping but the harmony of perfectly executed strokes, while injustice is the randomness of strokes out of place.

This Week’s Sinners and Virtuous 🎭

(Themes, Quotes, Terms and Characters)

I. The Great Lombard

As we have seen when Dante reaches Jupiter, he sees the blessed souls arrange themselves into letters across the sky that spell out “Love justice, you who judge the earth.”

They stop on the last M of the word terram, and the planet shines like silver inlaid with gold.

Then more souls drift down to the top of that M, and the letter starts to change shape—its middle stretches upward until it turns into the head and neck of an eagle, the symbol of divine justice.

Barolini explains that this isn’t just a visual trick but a kind of “visible speech,” where language becomes image: the letter M literally transforms into the sacred eagle that stands for God’s justice and Rome’s divine mission.

It’s also a reminder that, in this heaven, God is the artist Himself—the one who paints and writes directly in the stars.

Quotes 🖋️

(The ones I keep in my journal as reminders of eternal wisdom):

I saw within that torch of Jupiter
the sparkling of the love that it contained
design before my eyes the signs we speak.

And just as birds that rise from riverbanks,
as if rejoicing after feeding there,
will form a round flock or another shape,

so, in their lights, the saintly beings sang
and, in their flight, the figures that they spelled
were now a D, now I, and now an L.

~ lines 70-78, Paradiso, Canto XVIII

Welcome to Dante Read-Along! ✨

(If this post appears truncated in your inbox you can read it on the web by clicking here. )

Welcome to Dante Book Club, where you and I descend into Hell and Purgatory to be able to ascend to Paradise. Our guide in Paradise is Beatrice, and in this seventeenth Canto, we hear a prophecy about Dante’s exile. You can find the main page of the read-along right here, reading schedule here, and the list of chat threads here.

In each post you can find a brief summary of the canto, philosophical exercises that you can draw from it, themes, character, and symbolism explanations.

All the wonderful illustrations are done specially for the Dante Read-Along by the one and only Luana Montebello.

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This Week’s Circle ⭕️

Fifth celestial sphere of Mars, continued - Dante asks Cacciaguida about his future - Cacciaguida’s prophecy about Dante’s exile from Florence - The hopefulness of the refuge of the della Scala family - Dante’s daring to expose the truth in his poetry.

Canto XVII Summary:

After the close of Cacciaguida’s speech on the downfall of the noble houses of Florence in the fifth celestial sphere of Mars, Dante sought assurance from both his ancestor and of Beatrice about his own fate, which stemmed from the creation of the Florentine factions that Cacciaguida had just spent so much time detailing.

His doubt about that future and what it would bring had Dante feeling just as Phaëthon had when, in the Greek myth, his companions doubted his parentage as claimed by his mother Clymene, who told Phaëthon that the lord Apollo was his father. Phaëthon came to her with his own doubts:

We have visited Phaëthon’s fate before;1 when visiting his father Apollo in the heavens, he requested that he be able to drive the chariot of the sun, but unable to control the divine chariot, suffered the disaster of a fiery crash which led to his death. In contrast, Dante, in the heavens, was guided into understanding rather than left to recklessness.

Beatrice addressed Dante’s thoughts, as she and all the other heavenly souls could read them; but she requested something more of him:

Therefore my lady said to me: “Display
the flame of your desire, that it may
be seen well-stamped with your internal seal,

not that we need to know what you’d reveal,
but that you learn the way that would disclose
your thirst, and you be quenched by what we pour.”
xvii.7-12

Even though they could read his thoughts and desires, the act of formulation, of shaping the request, was part of the transformative act, and helped Dante himself to define it thoroughly.

Dante posed his question, addressing Cacciaguida’s ability to focus on God’s omniscience as a point of light, seen as easily to those in the heavens as one on earth could appraise the shape of a triangle, and could therefore see what was to come.

The idea of contingency is used frequently in this canto, expressing all of the possible outcomes of events in the sublunar realm—the world under the moon, the world of the four elements—that depend upon the working of free will; the word embraces all potentialities of outcome.

Dante continued to expand upon his question, remembering back to his journey up the mountain of Purgatorio, as well as the prior descent into the Inferno with Virgil, where he had heard prophecies about his future; remember, while written beginning in 1303 and published in 1321, the setting for the Commedia is in the year 1300, before Dante’s exile. During his poetic pilgrimage, he was given prophecies more than once about his future troubles. While he felt as “firmly planted as a cube’ (24) against whatever was to befall him, he ultimately asked Cacciaguida to share foreknowledge of his fate, so that he could be prepared.

Cacciaguida, in answer to this question, began the speech that composed his reply with a clear and logical progression, so unlike the ‘maze of words’ (31) as was used by the pagan oracles in the time before Christ’s redemptive act.

‘Enclosed by his own radiance and manifesting his own joy’,3 Cacciaguida opened by explaining again this idea of contingency that Dante had brought up in his question:

Contingency,
while not extending past the book in which
your world of matter has been writ, is yet
in the Eternal Vision all depicted

(but this does not imply necessity,
just as a ship that sails downstream is not
determined by the eye that watches it).
xvii.36-42

Cacciaguida saw all possibilities blend together as would the harmonious sounds created by a group of voices, mingling with each other and creating a whole. He used an example from classical antiquity to describe Dante’s inevitable banishment and flight through the story of Hippolytus, son of Theseus, and the treachery of his stepmother Phaedra; so would Dante be forced to flee:

Cacciaguida told Dante that the machinations were already working toward his exile, even as he was in Paradise conversing with him, and that the success of the plan put in place by Pope Boniface VIII, instigated by Corso Donati, was certain:

Dante—the historical Dante—had gone to Rome with an embassy of Bianchi—White Guelfs—at which time Charles of Valois took over Florence, and subsequently the exile order was pronounced against Dante and the other members of the Bianchi party. After this, Dante was never to return to Florence, but would taste the bitter humiliation of exile and poverty.

You shall leave everything you love most dearly:
this is the arrow that the bow of exile
shoots first. You are to know the bitter taste

of other’s bread, how salt it is, and know
how hard a path it is for one who goes
descending and ascending others’ stairs.
xvii.55-60

Yet, as if exile were not bad enough, this was not the biggest challenge that Dante would face. Most difficult would be the infighting among his own party, the White Guelphs, upon which he would come to stand alone in his political ideals. He even moved toward the ideas of the Ghibellines and the rebuilding of the entire Roman Empire, which he outlined in his work the Monarchia. Dante would stand alone politically.

Of their insensate acts, the proof will be
in the effects; and thus, your honor will
be best kept if your party is your self.
xvii.67-69

There was a spot of hope though, and Cacciaguida moved from the downfall of Dante’s fortunes to the blessings; he would find refuge with the noble Lombard family in the person of Bartolomeo della Scala, lord of Verona. It is they who bore the eagle on the ladder on their coat of arms, and Bartolomeo who offered Dante assistance before Dante even had to request it of him. Through him Dante met his patron, when still but a boy, Can Grande della Scala, brother of Bartolomeo, whose strengths Cacciaguida attributed to the influence of Mars, and whose generosity would follow his name down the ages.

You shall—beside him—see one who, at birth,
had so received the seal of this strong star
that what he does will be remarkable.
xvii.76-78

So great, and even unbelievable, were the deeds of Can Grande, that some of the things Cacciaguida told Dante he did not even write down, but hid them in his memory. Dante had dedicated the Paradiso to Can Grande della Scala, addressing him thus in a letter:

Such was the extended explanation of the cryptic clues that Dante had received in the other realms as to his fate; Cacciaguida encouraged him to put disdain for his plight and those that brought it into play behind him, as that would not serve his greater purpose. Dante felt his questions had been answered, as if Cacciaguida had cast the fibers into the fabric that completed the pattern that Dante had begun:

After that holy soul had, with his silence,
showed he was freed from putting in the woof
across the web whose warp I set for him,

I like a man who, doubting, craves for counsel
from one who sees and rightly wills and loves,
replied to him.
xvii.100-105

Dante saw that the time was coming close for these events, and that he was now prepared to deal with them, being forewarned; and that even if he were to lose his home, his refuge would continue to be in his poetry. Yet he had learned things in the afterlife which he feared would bring him more trouble, were he to relate them in song:

Down in the world of endless bitterness,
and on the mountain from whose lovely peak
I was drawn upward by my lady’s eyes,

and afterward, from light to light in Heaven,
I learned that which, if I retell it, must
for many have a taste too sharp, too harsh;

yet if I am a timid friend of truth,
I fear that I may lose my life among
those who will call this present, ancient times.
xvii.112-120

Even if the truth was hard to hear, assured Cacciaguida, it was necessary; for even a bitter truth had purpose, and in time, once that bitter medicine had been swallowed, digested, and assimilated, it would do its work and be accepted. For why else was he shown the things that he had seen, but to express them with his gift of poetry? The renowned characters that he was shown were for a purpose, for when they were read about, his words would be believed all the more because there was proof in the world of what he said.

Had he used examples unknown to those in the world, his words may have fallen on unbelieving ears.

💭 Philosophical Exercises

You shall leave everything you love most dearly:
this is the arrow that the bow of exile
shoots first. You are to know the bitter taste

of others’ bread, how salt it is, and know
how hard a path it is for one who goes
descending and ascending others’ stairs.

~ lines 55-60

What happens when we are severed from our root?

The French philosopher Simone Weil wrote in her work The Need for Roots:

To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.

Weil writes that the “uprooted” often follow two paths. The first is what she calls spiritual lethargy, a kind of living death. These are people who die long before their bodies do.

The second path is that of those who, in their restlessness, “hurl themselves into some form of activity necessarily designed to uproot, often by the most violent methods, those who are not yet uprooted, or only partly so.”

But there is a third path, the one Weil does not explore, perhaps because no one can write about everything in a single essay. It is what Nietzsche calls digging the well where you are, not where you wish to be.

I explore this briefly in my piece on Victor Hugo’s drawings of the unconscious:

Every great poet tasted the bitter fruit of being in exile. Ovid, Dante, Byron, Wilde — these great connoisseurs of the human heart were rejected by the capricious narrow-mindedness of the crowd and were forced out of their homes. But their exile was always accompanied with a dream — a dream of the glorious and powerful return. This is, of course, a paradox: they looked forward by always looking back to what they have lost.

Perhaps, their exile acted as an ‘invisible tax’ which they had to pay to unlock the labyrinths of their unconscious.

I believe the exile had a profound effect on their psyche, moreover, I believe that Dante could not have written Divine Comedy if not in exile; Byron could not have written Don Juan or Manfred if not in exile; and Oscar Wilde, of course, would not have written De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol if not in exile.

In this canto, Dante wishes to know his fate, for the arrow that one foresees strikes more gently. He seeks to understand his path, knowing it will be perilous, in order to soften the wound of the blow when it comes.

What follows are some beautiful lines, and I wish I could quote them all as we explore them. Yet the line about “how bitter is the taste of others’ bread” is one I can fully resonate with. For however sweet and fresh the bread of the place where you now dwell, the seductive scent of the bread of home still lures you.

The advice Dante receives is remarkable, and those who find themselves far from home might recognise its truth. I certainly do.

And what will be most hard for you to bear
will be the scheming, senseless company
that is to share your fall into this valley;

against you they will be insane, completely
ungrateful and profane; and yet, soon after,
not you but they will have their brows bloodred.

Of their insensate acts, the proof will be
in the effects; and thus, your honor will
be best kept if your party is your self.

~ 61-69

A person in exile always gathers small fragments of home, in the vain hope of reassembling it in a new dwelling. But if they are not deluded, they soon realise that those fragments are broken pieces, and no amount of glue, however strong, can make them whole again.

Hannah Arendt, another exile (if that’s a word we may permit ourselves), wrote in her essay:

“We lost our home, which means the familiarity of daily life. We lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are of some use in this world. We lost our language, which means the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expression of feelings.”

The purpose of exile is not to reconstruct Germany, as it was for Arendt, nor to rebuild France, as it was for Weil, nor even to reclaim Florence, as it is for our pilgrim. After exile, the only root that remains is the self. That is why, in the life of every great figure, exile becomes an essential part of the journey.

For Dante tells us this in his own words. After hearing the prophecy of the great Lombard who offers him refuge, Dante says:

“I clearly see, my father,

how time is hurrying toward me in order
to deal me such a blow as would be most
grievous for him who is not set for it;

…

thus, it is right to arm myself with foresight,
that if I lose the place most dear, I may
not lose the rest through what my poems say.

Dante’s new Florence was built within his poem. In the same way, seven centuries later, Nabokov, another exilé, would say that he holds his Russia in his language and his memories.

In the beginning was the word. When we are stripped of everything—of our home, our city, our connections, we must return to the root, to the origin, to the element that began it all: the word.

Cacciaguida encourages Dante to speak the truth about his native city, the word that reveals how individual corruption and vice led to the infernal decay into which Florence had fallen. That, perhaps, is how what Weil called “uprootedness” can be healed. For if my reader looks closely, all the scattered figures I have mentioned in this piece, Dante, Arendt, Nabokov, Weil, Hugo, and Byron, found refuge in telling their truth.

This Week’s Sinners and Virtuous 🎭

(Themes, Quotes, Terms and Characters)

I. The Great Lombard

The “great Lombard” is Can Grande della Scala - Can Francesco, the third son of Alberto della Scala, Lord of Verona.

Our pilgrim immortalises him through the line “who on the ladder bears the sacred bird,” a reference to the Scaliger coat of arms: the ladder (scala) symbolising the family name, and the “sacred bird,” the imperial eagle, marking their office as Vicars of the Holy Roman Empire.

Dante’s description of the Lombard’s generosity “he will give before you ask” captures Can Grande’s legendary courtesy, a virtue rare among benefactors, and a quality that, for Dante, transformed patronage into grace.

Quotes 🖋️

(The ones I keep in my journal as reminders of eternal wisdom):

You shall leave everything you love most dearly:
this is the arrow that the bow of exile
shoots first. You are to know the bitter taste

of others’ bread, how salt it is, and know
how hard a path it is for one who goes
descending and ascending others’ stairs.

And what will be most hard for you to bear
will be the scheming, senseless company
that is to share your fall into this valley;

against you they will be insane, completely
ungrateful and profane; and yet, soon after,
not you but they will have their brows bloodred.

~ lines 55-66, Paradiso, Canto XVII

Welcome to Dante Read-Along! ✨

(If this post appears truncated in your inbox you can read it on the web by clicking here. )

Welcome to Dante Book Club, where you and I descend into Hell and Purgatory to be able to ascend to Paradise. Our guide in Paradise is Beatrice, and in this sixteenth Canto, we hear Cacciaguida’s exposition on the rise and fall of nobility in Florence. You can find the main page of the read-along right here, reading schedule here, and the list of chat threads here.

In each post you can find a brief summary of the canto, philosophical exercises that you can draw from it, themes, character, and symbolism explanations.

All the wonderful illustrations are done specially for the Dante Read-Along by the one and only Luana Montebello.

Subscribe now

This Week’s Circle ⭕️

The fifth celestial sphere of Mars, continued - Dante meditates on true nobility - The nobility of family versus the nobility of character - Dante asks Cacciaguida for the ancestry and history of Florence - Noble Florentine families once flourished - Families now in decay and corruption - Cacciaguida laments the downfall of Florence.

Canto XVI Summary:

Dante considered the way that those on earth regarded the importance of nobility, placing undue credit on it; he even admitted his own guilt, that he also had seen it as too important in contrast to the true nobility that he saw now in the fifth celestial sphere of Mars.

Such a prize as earthly nobility could not last; if new honors were not continually added during ensuing generations, and if each generation was not continually more noble than the last, then the strength of that nobility in a family line would wear away with time, bringing with it a gradual decline. But this was not the ultimate practice of nobility as he now saw it in the heavens; the heart of man on earth was weak, and did not yet understand heavenly love and nobility.

In opening with this idea of nobility as he was meeting with Cacciaguida, his ancestor, Dante set the stage for the exploration of the noble houses of Florence, his ancestral home, and what set about their downfalls. Dante wrote, in his works the Vita Nuova and the Convivio, extensively on true nobility; he wrote that love was a key component for its realization, far and above simple family connections, as well as the importance of wisdom and philosophy in the life of one attaining to nobility.

Dante addressed the singular Cacciaguida with the grammatical usage of the plural form of “you”; this construction was an indicator of honor, as it had been first used in addressing Julius Caesar, which set it apart as a distinctive use. As he did so, however, Beatrice gave a discreet smile as if to acknowledge Dante’s prideful words concerning his own nobility. This smile served the same purpose as the cough that the Lady of Malehault gave to Queen Guinevere to let her know her motives toward Lancelot were known, when Guinevere thought they were hidden.

Cacciaguida had concluded relating his origins and the events of his life at the end of canto xv, and after Dante’s meditation on the nature of nobility, he began to speak to his ancestor:

So did my speech begin: “You are my father;
you hearten me to speak with confidence;
you raise me so that I am more than I.

So many streams have filled my mind with gladness—
so many, and such gladness, that mind must
rejoice that it can bear this and not burst.
xvi.16-21

He then proceeded with his questions; to know Cacciaguida’s ancestors and childhood, (though we just heard much of this in canto xiv) as well as of the lineage of Florence, whose patron was St. John the Baptist, those referred to as the “sheepfold of St. John” (25). That sheepfold indicated the small and simple days of old Florence, and Dante also wanted to know its lineage and what families were worthy of the high office to which the nobility spoken of in the beginning of the canto was embodied.

At the question, Cacciaguida’s light shone like an ember bursting to life, just like the blush that infused Medea when she thought of her love for Jason in the myth of the Golden Fleece:

Cacciaguida began to speak in an old and sweet archaic Florentine tongue, and thus began a long and detailed speech about the intricacies of lineage and the fortunes of a host of Florentine families. He marked the beginning of his discourse by speaking briefly about his own ancestry, hearkening back to the moment that the Angel Gabriel announced to Mary that she was blessed-Ave; the Florentine calendar dated the new year from the Annunciation, on March 25.

He counted 580 revolutions of Mars since that moment unto his own birth, noting its passage through the constellation Leo; mathematically, given the length of time of the revolutions of Mars, Cacciaguida’s year of birth was marked at 1091.

He indicated in what portion of the city he had been born, near where the annual horse race was run, finishing at the Porta San Piero. The population of Florence had been so much smaller then; Cacciaguida slowly began to make his commentary on the groupings of families through the generations and blending of communities that would make up the Florence that Dante knew. Cacciaguida was not always encouraging in his thoughts that the communities were better off keeping to themselves and not mixing with others.

If those who, in the world, go most astray
had not seen Caesar with stepmothers’ eyes,
but, like a mother to her son, been kind,

then one who has become a Florentine
trader and money changer would have stayed
in Semifonte, where his fathers peddled.
xvi.58-63

Here he referred to the power that the Church held in political affairs; in a scathing rebuke, he compared the Church to a hostile stepmother who worked to influence Caesar, or the Emperor. If the Church had kept to spiritual ideals and not been involved in politics, many of the unrest surrounding Florence could have been prevented, or handled differently.

With the proverbial expression of a blind bull, he inferred that the growth in the size of the changing population did not indicate more strength and nobility, only a growth in simple numbers, noting the disadvantaged position.

He considered certain fallen families whose fortunes were unable to be changed, that indicated the possibilities of whole cities falling from a high estate. The shifting tides of Fortune acted on Florence just as the tides of the sea, changing as often as the phases of the moon:

All things that you possess, possess their death,
just as you do; but in some things that last
long, death can hide from you whose lives are short.

And even as the heaven of the moon,
revolving, respiteless, conceals and then
reveals the shores, so Fortune does with Florence;
xvi.79-84

Here began a detailed and exhaustive list of the families of Florence; while this list may not deliver a movement of the plot, or an explanation of the realm of Mars, or even the sights that Dante saw in Paradise, it does serve as a historical record, placing the poem in time, and proves the deep care that Dante felt toward the ancestry of his homeland. The chronicle can be compared to similar genealogical lists in the Old Testament, or the listing of ships or the death of soldiers during battle in Homer’s Iliad, which at times seems to go on interminably.

All of the commentators explain in detail the background and inner workings of these family connections. The deeds of forty family groups and the actions of their descendants are described, closing, after the twists and turns of families and fortunes, with the disgrace and murder that ultimately brought about the split between the Guelph and Ghibelline political factions, which were contemporary with Dante’s time and known to him only too well:

The house of Amidei, with which your sorrows
began—by reason of its just resentment,
which ruined you and ended years of gladness—

was honored then, as were its close companions.
O Buondelmonte, through another’s counsel,
you fled your wedding pledge, and brought such evil!
xvi.136-140

Cacciaguida lamented that it would have been better had Buondelmonti drowned before breaking off the engagement, saving Florence from the fallout of the Guelf Ghibelline split.

Buondelmonti was killed at the foot of the statue of Mars that had been placed as a protection for the city, almost as a sacrificial victim to war at the outset of that split. The noble families that had ruled in the past had ended here, in discord and disillusion.

Those families of old would not have supported the desecration of their flag by dragging it through the dust, or by reversing its colors, as the Guelfs did on the expulsion of the Ghibellines.

💭 Philosophical Exercises

There is something profoundly moving about Paradiso XVI; and that is even in Paradiso, even in this high realm, one can have shortcomings. Let me explain.

The canto opens with an astonishing admission - “O poca nostra nobiltà di sangue” — “O our meager nobility of blood.” Dante, even in Heaven, cannot help but feel pride in his lineage, pride in the bloodline that connects him to his ancestor Cacciaguida.

It almost feels like the contrapasso technique Dante used in the Inferno, where the damned were punished by the opposite expression of their sin. Here, in the realm of Mars, where Cacciaguida speaks of lineage and pride, Dante recognises, rather than suffers from, his own pride.

As I have mentioned in the previous post the heaven of Mars, which began in Paradiso XV, it is the heaven of lineage, of history, of ancestry, of the blood that binds. It is the most human of heavens, where affection, pride, and memory are still alive, and where Dante faces the deepest paradox of existence: that even the things we know to be transient still hold meaning for us.

Cacciaguida, radiant in his light, speaks not as a saint detached from the world but as an ancestor whose love is still grounded in history. He recalls the Florence of his youth — a smaller, purer city, untouched by the corruption and division of Dante’s time. His description feels almost like a dream: a Florence of honesty, of modesty, of balance. But then, like a shadow creeping across a sunlit wall, the tone darkens. For time has been at work. Time, Dante tells us, “goes around with its scissors” — “lo tempo va dintorno con le force.”

It cuts away at everything human, shortens every cloak, unless we mend it daily with new material.

You are indeed a cloak that soon wears out,
so that if, day by day, we add no patch,
then circling time will trim you with its shears.

~ lines 7-9, Canto XVI (Mandelbaum)

It’s one of the most haunting metaphors in the entire poem. Time’s scissors - silent, relentless - trim the fabric of human achievement, generation after generation. Our families fade, our names disappear, our cities crumble. And yet, in the same gesture that acknowledges destruction, Dante gives us a philosophy of preservation. If time cuts, then art must sew. If life shortens, then memory must lengthen. The only way to resist time’s shears is through renewal through conscious acts of remembrance, creativity, and love.

II.

In his Life, Leo Tolstoy asked one of the most piercing questions that can confront a human being:

What is the purpose of life if after we die, the world continues unchanged, beating on with its indifferent rhythm, and our name fades from memory?

For Tolstoy, the tragedy of existence lies not merely in death, but in the world’s indifference to our having lived. His answer is strikingly close to what Dante intuited in this canto: that the meaning of life cannot rest on the fragile foundation of the self. If all that we do is bound to the ego, then our deeds perish when we do.

Therefore, said Tolstoy, one must act with an eternal purpose to contribute something that allows life to continue even after our own disappearance. Our actions should not serve our vanity, but the continuity of the world; not our name, but the survival of meaning.

Cacciaguida’s long catalogue of old Florentine families (the “Florentine phonebook,” as Teodolinda Barolini calls it) may at first seem tedious to modern readers. But it is, in truth, one of the most beautiful acts of preservation in literature.

Each name Dante records, each family he mentions, is rescued from the oblivion of time. Even as Cacciaguida laments their disappearance, Dante immortalises them through the act of writing.

“Le vostre cose tutte hanno lor morte” — “All things that you possess, possess their death.” But by naming them, by remembering them, he gives them a second life.

This, I think, is the heart of Paradiso XVI. It is not only about Florence; it is about mortality and the fragile continuity of culture. Dante is not just preserving the memory of his city, instead he is preserving the memory of what it means to belong. Every name he records, every vanished lineage, becomes a piece of human history caught in these lines. The canto transforms loss into legacy, the decay of time into the permanence of art.

And yet, this is not a simple nostalgia. Even if it is, Dante’s nostalgia is not naïve. He does not propose a return to the past, nor does he idealise it beyond recognition. He knows that Cacciaguida’s Florence - that tranquil, “pure” city - was as mortal as any other.

The past itself is not the goal; it is the measure. What matters is not to rebuild what was lost but to keep alive the spirit of virtue that once animated it. Dante’s memory is not sentimental but moral. It teaches that the past is not an escape from the present but a challenge to it.

About six months ago, I visited one of my favourite cities in the world - Prague, in Czechia. It is an extraordinarily beautiful city, often called the City of Palaces, because its countless buildings look like miniature palaces in which great figures of the past once lived. One walks through its streets and cannot escape the feeling of moving inside a single vast palace open to the air.

And yet, as I walked through it, I felt a quiet sadness. These palaces, magnificent as they are, feel like ruins preserved by the care of modern people who can no longer build as those before them did. The quality of the human being has changed — or perhaps diminished — and on those noble façades now hang the loud and garish signs of modern brands, like an insult to the past.

Even while stunned by Prague’s beauty, I could not help but feel that I was walking through a fallen city. These kinds of buildings will never be made again, not because we lack the tools, but because we lack the spirit. And this, I think, is exactly what Dante teaches in this canto: that the past is not there for us to sentimentalise or merely preserve like a museum exhibit. It is there to measure us.

When we look at what our ancestors built — in stone, in art, in virtue — and then look at what we build today, we are forced to confront the uncomfortable truth that not all progress is upward. In that sense, the past is not a comfort but a mirror — one that should humble us.

Reading this canto today, especially after visiting Prague, I can’t help but think about our own cities: how quickly they change, how swiftly communities disappear. Language, identity, memory — all of these are trimmed by the same scissors of time.

Cacciaguida’s lament could be spoken by anyone who has watched their homeland alter beyond recognition. And Dante’s response, to write, to remember, to record, remains one of the few antidotes we have.

When I read Dante here, I hear a voice speaking across centuries to anyone who has ever lost a home, a family, or a city. It tells us that even as time erases what we love, our words can still hold the outlines of what was — and perhaps even what could be again. Time’s scissors will always cut, but every act of memory is a small repair. Dante reminds us that we may not conquer time, but we can answer it , not with despair, but with the quiet work of remembrance.

This Week’s Sinners and Virtuous 🎭

(Themes, Quotes, Terms and Characters)

I. Homer’s Catalogue of Ships

In Canto XVI, there’s something almost sacred in the act of naming. It is hard to ignore the resemblance to Homer’s catalogue of ships in the Iliad. Cacciaguida’s list serves a purpose akin to Homer’s: while Homer sought to preserve the memory of the ships and warriors who sailed to Troy, Cacciaguida safeguards the citizens of Florence.

Both poets, through the act of naming, rescue their worlds from oblivion.

Quotes 🖋️

(The ones I keep in my journal as reminders of eternal wisdom):

You are indeed a cloak that soon wears out,
so that if, day by day, we add no patch,
then circling time will trim you with its shears.

~ lines 7-9, Paradiso, Canto XVI

Welcome to Dante Read-Along! ✨

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Welcome to Dante Book Club, where you and I descend into Hell and Purgatory to be able to ascend to Paradise. Our guide in Paradise is Beatrice, and in this fifteenth Canto of the Paradiso, we meet Dante’s ancestor Cacciaguida. You can find the main page of the read-along right here, reading schedule here, and the list of chat threads here.

In each post you can find a brief summary of the canto, philosophical exercises that you can draw from it, themes, character, and symbolism explanations.

All the wonderful illustrations are done specially for the Dante Read-Along by the one and only Luana Montebello.

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This Week’s Circle ⭕️

The fifth celestial sphere of Mars - Noble and courageous warriors of God - The souls in the cross fall silent - One soul comes forward to Dante - Beatrice gives assent to Dante’s question - He asks who this soul is - It is Dante’s ancestor, Cacciaguida - The virtues of old Florence - the life of Cacciaguida and his death in the Crusades.

Canto XV Summary:

The unified will of the souls, here in the fifth celestial sphere of Mars, who together reflected the exact will of God, and whose lights made up the shape of the cross, came together in one accord and silenced the music that Dante had heard at the end of canto xiv.

If they could act in such unison for Dante, how much more powerfully then could they also act on the prayers of those on earth; such was the love pouring from them, that anyone on earth who could not lift their eyes and hearts to it would grieve endlessly. The silence made their message clear; they were making space for Dante to speak, and they wanted to hear what he had to say.

From this silent display of the cross, made of the twinkling lights of the souls of the righteous virtue of courage, came one light that traveled from the group as a shooting star, leaving in its wake no empty space where it had been:

As, through the pure and tranquil skies of night,
at times a sudden fire shoots, and moves
eyes that were motionless—a fire that seems

a star that shifts its place, except that in
that portion of the heavens where it flared,
nothing is lost, and its own course is short—

so, from the horn that stretches on the right,
down to the foot of that cross, a star ran
out of the constellation glowing there.
xv.13-21

The light appeared as a pearl on a length of ribbon as it moved, such as was popular in Dante’s day, glowing as through a translucent screen of alabaster. It approached Dante, and through its light shone so much love, that it was akin to the affection with which Aeneas’ father Anchises had greeted him with open arms in his home in the Elysian fields when Aeneas traveled to the Underworld to see him as told by Virgil—that greatest muse—in the Aeneid:

The soul called to him in Latin, the only fully Latin tercet in the whole poem; by calling Dante one of his blood, he indicated that he was an ancestor, and by pointing out that since Dante was a living soul for whom Heaven would be opened twice, he was having a unique experience, as the only other person who had that distinction was spoken of by St. Paul.

Dante looked to Beatrice for confirmation to continue, dazzled by her ever growing sublime presence. As the soul from the cross continued to communicate with Dante, so beyond the mortal ken were his words that Dante’s limited understanding could not comprehend his meaning; even the idea he was trying to convey, in that realm of transparent understanding of thought and intention, Dante could not grasp, for that too was beyond his own understanding.

Then—and he was a joy to hear and see—
that spirit added to his first words things
that were too deep to meet my understanding.

Not that he chose to hide his sense from me;
necessity compelled him; he conceived
beyond the mark a mortal mind can reach.
xv.37-42

But finally his speech matched what Dante could absorb and he heard the souls thank the Threefold and One God who allowed Dante to travel through these otherworldly realms.

The soul revealed that he had already known of this meeting, as it was written in the book, the book of omniscience in which all to those in the afterlife were able to read to glean the future.

This soul, who would not be identified until the end of the canto, was Cacciaguida, Dante’s great-great-grandfather.

Cacciaguida knew that Dante thought his elder could read his mind as known through the Unity of God, as could so many others in Paradise, as easily as figuring arithmetic from the starting point of One:

Even though this transparent knowledge was the case, Cacciaguida was still eager to hear Dante’s questions from his own lips, as he had waited through ages for that very moment; Cacciaguida’s desire was to let the moment play out to the fullest and not race to the fulfillment of the question. Beatrice again, at a glance from Dante, gave her assent to this line of conversation, and Dante began his long and descriptive method at arriving at his question.

Dante asked the soul, comparing it to a precious topaz set in the cross, his name.

Cacciaguida began, going back in time to the Florence of the past, a more noble and virtuous time, to the ancestor who gave the family their name; this ancestor was at that moment in the first cornice of Purgatory with the Prideful, and Dante’s prayers could shorten the time that he would have to circle round that terrace with the heavy stone upon his back, gladly paying his debt.

In the Florence of the past, that of the old city walls, before its expansion and the addition of more widely encompassing walls, the residents had lived in accordance with the order of the church bells, attending to the ‘tierce’ and ‘nones’. It was a simpler time, before excessive displays of wealth through jewels and embroidered clothing. The women were safe, neither marrying too young nor with the expectation of a high dowry, unsustainable and out of reach. Sexual immorality—symbolized by Sardanapalus, an Assyrian king known for his wanton behavior and neglect of his kingdom for pleasure—was as yet not widespread and rampant as it was in the Florence that Dante knew.

The view of that Florence, as seen from the hill of Uccellatoio just as Rome was seen from the hill of Montemario upon traveling to it, was more beautiful than that of Rome, but would also fall harder than Rome at its demise.

Cacciaguida spoke of the noble Bellincion Berti; he and his wife dressed simply, as did other ancestors of the city, the Nerli and del Vecchio. In these noble families the wives were content, without fear of exile, as was the case in Dante’s time. He painted a picture of families and their children, mothers telling the origin stories of their ancestors, the stories of Troy and Fiesole, and of Rome.

To continue his description of the old versus the new Florence, Caccaguida looked to other notable characters; as Cinghella contrasted Cornelia—the first lived lavishly while the second was the respected daughter of the Roman General Scipio Africanus—Lapo Salterello contrasted Cincinnatus—a corrupt lawyer against a respected Emperor.

Cacciaguida continued this history of Dante’s ancestors as his forebearers, until he himself was born with the prayers to Mary for his safekeeping on the lips of his own mother during his birth, and here he finally named himself, in answer to Dante’s original question.

Continuing his story, he grew, and married, and became a knight, winning favor through fighting in the second crusade with Conrad III against Islam.

It was in that crusade that he met his death; yet one that was celebrated and rewarded with placement there, in the fifth celestial sphere of Mars, home of the noble soldiers of the faith.

💭 Philosophical Exercises

In the culture that I come from, there is a saying that originates in the tragic events of the twentieth century. The saying goes that: “the Armenian woman is a woman who teaches her child how to speak, how to write in Armenian, despite being in the desert of Deir ez-Zor, in pain, hungry, and starving.”

This saying originates in the terrible and awful experiences that my family endured in the early twentieth century.

It highlights that despite pain and suffering, one can preserve the connection to the roots from which they come. The important thing is that nobody can eliminate or erase your identity if you maintain that connection to your origins.

Dante himself was exiled and cast out from his native city. He spent a large part of his life wandering, never returning to Florence. The greatest Florentine poet is not even buried in Florence but in the city of Ravenna.

Despite his exile and despite travelling across Italy and beyond, Dante never severed his bond with his native city. He preserved his connection to Florence through memory, through language, through art, through the act of writing itself. And this, I believe, mirrors the experience of many of us, myself included, who maintain a living connection to where we come from even when we are far away from it.

In the sphere of Mars it is all about lineage, about language, about the connection to where one comes from. It is a radical counterpoint to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, where we are often told about the nobility, virtue, and freedom of being international, of being cosmopolitan.

And as a person who is myself cosmopolitan and international, who has lived in many countries and speaks many language, the language I use most every day is not my native tongue. In fact, the language in which I am writing to you right now is my fourth language. And yet, I feel a deep connection to where I come from.

This, I think, is the story of this canto. Dante’s ancestor tries to remind him of the roots from which he descends. The message of this canto may seem to stand in contrast to the previous themes we have explored — particularly the idea that nobility is not inherited; it is earned, and that a noble father can give birth to an evil son. Once again, Dante teaches us how to differentiate, how to categorise the experiences and the realities that shape us.

Dante shows us that although our actions are always taken within the context of the community into which we are born, there is another important theme here — one especially relevant to what we call Philosophical Exercises. Dante’s ancestor, Cacciaguida, tells him about the Florence of his own time — an almost idyllic, utopian Florence where everything was in harmony and balance. Cacciaguida himself was a noble soldier, for he did not fight against his fellow citizens as many Florentines did in Dante’s time. The divisions and conflicts that Dante witnessed in his life were essentially a civil war between the White and Black Guelphs.

In Cacciaguida’s time, he was a crusader fighting for what he believed was a noble cause. Dante, therefore, contrasts this idyllic Florence, the utopian city that once existed, with the corrupt Florence he experienced in his own life.

But the most important lesson here is what Dante ultimately tells us. He does not teach us that we should chase utopian visions of our origins. Rather, he teaches us that despite the corruption we see in the cities of our birth — in his origin, in my origin, in our origin — we must still hold an image of what they could become.

We must retain the feeling, the confidence, and the desire — as we will witness in the next cantos — to act as though our city will one day become that idyllic place once described by Cacciaguida to Dante himself.

This Week’s Sinners and Virtuous 🎭

(Themes, Quotes, Terms and Characters)

I. Oh Virgil, our father, we miss you

When Dante sees Cacciaguida and recalls Anchises reaching out to Aeneas, it’s as if his soul instinctively remembers the tenderness of another lost father—Virgil.

The reference to Anchises isn’t casual; it’s Dante’s way of acknowledging the lineage of spiritual fathers that shaped him: Anchises to Aeneas, Virgil to Dante, Cacciaguida to his descendant. Each encounter carries the same gesture of recognition and blessing across generations.

In this moment, Dante ties together poetry, ancestry, and guidance—the chain of love and wisdom that travels not through blood alone, but through teaching, language, and the inheritance of the soul.