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.
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.
Following Dante’s brilliant passing of his entrance examination, this represents the highest mark conceivable! A soul out of time, a living man in this case, now crosses over to the “celestial Athens” that lies ahead and above.1
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
By feathers of the planets we are to understand the colors of the rays wherewith they are resplendent, just as the feathers of birds appear diverse because of the different colors which these display.
Francesco da Buti, Commento di Francesco da Buti sopra la Divina Comedia
While St. Peter utters his tremendous denunciation of Pope Boniface VIII, the light of his soul undergoes so fiery a transformation that Dante is moved to imagine, in comparison, the silvery sheen of Jupiter transfigured by the ruddy glow of Mars. Allegorically, this would seem to indicate that St. Peter’s zeal is compounded of the righteousness of the just rulers and the fiery wrath of warriors who fought and died for the Faith. Further, the unworthiness of the Pope is a betrayal of the Christian martyrs and of man’s endeavours to establish justice and peace throughout the world.2
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.
The color taken from the setting sun
by western clouds, so similar to that
which rosy-tinted Dawn so often shows,
was the same color on Diana’s face
when she was seen undressed.
Ovid, Metamorphosis III.230-234
Modesty is the mind’s recoiling from foul things, out of a fear of falling into them; as we see in virgins and in good women and in youths, who are so modest that not only where there are invitations or temptations to wrongdoing, but even where one might simply have a fantasy of erotic corruption, they turn all pale or red in the face.
Dante, Convivio IV.xxv.7
Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land unto the ninth hour.
Matthew 27:45
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
And did not God interpose his own hand when, through Hannibal’s war, the Romans, having lost so many citizens that three pecks of rings were brought to Africa, would have abandoned their land if that blessed young Scipio had not gone to Africa for her freedom?
Dante, Convivio IV.v.19
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
These inversions are contributing to an experience which the reader will undergo as he passes, with the pilgrim Dante, from time to eternity, from the universe with earth at the center to a universe that has God as its center: a complete change in gravitation, from the material to the spiritual.3
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
When Dante once more gazes down at the earth, he finds that during the interval since the end of his previous observation he has traversed 90°, or a quarter of the whole circumference. Six hours, then, have elapsed.4
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
Leda makes Jove my father, deceived by the swan, false bird she cherished in her trusting bosom.
Ovid, Heroides xvii.55-56
However, outside of all these spheres, Catholics posit the Empyrean heaven, that is to say, the heaven of flame or the luminous heaven; and they assert that it is motionless by having within itself, with respect to each of its parts, all that its matter wants. This is the reason for the extremely rapid movement of the Prime Mover: through the exceedingly fervent desire of each part of the ninth heaven (which is right next to that one) to be united with each part of that most divine and tranquil heaven, it revolves within it with so much desire that its speed is practically incomprehensible.
Dante, Convivio II.iii.8-9
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
Every sphere except the ninth is surrounded by another sphere; but the ninth, the outermost sphere of the material universe, is surrounded only by the world of spirit, the Heaven of light and love, the Empyrean, which is the Mind of God. Moreover, every material heaven is directed by an order of angelic Intelligences; but in the Empyrean the only governing Intelligence is the Lord, in whom it exists.5
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’s outburst against covetousness and man’s ensuing degeneracy arises out of the context of the sublime concept of time as a consequence of the divinely coordinated movements of the universe. Men have become degenerate as a result of their abuse of time, so that progress is turned to regress, the innocence of childhood being quickly lost with the passing of the years. Allegorically, Beatrice’s words signify that theology, while enlightening man as to the unimportance of the world in relation to the universe, can also awaken him to a recognition of the purpose of creation.6
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
Through an inaccuracy in the Julian calendar, which made the year of 365 days and 6 hours, the solar year gained over the standard year about one day in a century; in the course of something less than 90 centuries, then, January would have been pushed into the spring, if the error had not been corrected (as it was in 1582 under Gregory XIII, when the present calendar was adopted. The line means: ‘But before 9000 years have gone by,’ i.e., ‘within a little while’” The statement thus represents a familiar form of irony, through overstatement.7
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
Charles S. Singleton, Commentary on the Paradiso 426
Dorothy L. Sayers, Paradise 295
Singleton 434
Singleton 435
Singleton 442
Sayers 296
Singleton 445
“The blessed cannot be moved by the passions.” — Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 26–28
Saint Peter: “I redden and spark.” (John Ciardi’s 1970 translation of Paradiso)
It’s taken me far too long to realize what should have been intuitively obvious by now, and has become crystal clear in this beautiful canto: Dante meets no evil in Paradiso. Yes, evil is an ongoing concern, but it has no positive existence — in Paradise, it’s now an object of scorn and denunciation. The Bête noire is defanged and banished. Grasping Dante’s genius in this audacious and courageous shift from darkness to light was aided by Richard Hughes Gibson’s new book, “The Way of Dante, Going Through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven with C. S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Charles Williams” (December 2, 2025). In it, he says: “In Paradiso, I am proposing, Dante attempted something far more audacious than he had in Inferno and even Purgatorio: to write a story in which evil does not move the plot along.”
How then, does Dante move it? Gibson says it’s “…not the glory of heroes but the glory of the cosmos’s Maker and Sustainer.” But can something as esoteric as cosmic glory (divine radiance, hierarchy, and ultimate fulfillment) cause the poem to sparkle for a reader who, until Paradiso, has been fed a steady diet of demons, Dis, and eyes sewn shut?
Again, Gibson: “In his 1941 sermon “The Weight of Glory,” Lewis takes up the topic of glory reluctantly: “There is no getting away from the fact that this idea”—the idea of glory—“is very prominent in the New Testament and in early Christian writings,” Lewis writes. “Salvation is constantly associated with palms, crowns, white robes, thrones, and splendor like the sun and stars. All this makes no immediate appeal to me at all, and in that respect I fancy I am a typical modern.” Glory, he goes on to note, suggests two more troublesome ideas: “fame” and “luminosity.” The first seems to him “wicked,” since it sounds like a “competitive passion,” a grasping to be higher than others better suited to hell than heaven. “As for the second,” he suggests, “who wishes to become a kind of living electric light bulb?”
If it means joining Saint Peter’s legions of Miles Christi, then light me up! Dante has made ferocious indignation a bedfellow of ethereal glory, and it’s delivered by none other than the princeps militiae ecclesiae — the first and supreme captain of the Church Militant, Peter, who takes a righteous pole-axe to corrupt pontiffs. His is the language of a commander rallying the soldiers of Christ. His abrupt detonation avoids an anticlimactic crash (in spite of a procession of stolid test proctors and dancing light bulbs) and transforms “glory” into both beautiful transcendence and a dynamic force of stern judgement.
How, you ask, can a perfectly beatified soul speak with such furor? Let’s start by remembering what his reddened visage actually embodies: he was crucified upside down; the fiery redness symbolizes the blood rushing to his head. This scene is not a display of martyr’s blood, human passion, or disordered anger, though; Dante colors it with Peter’s zeal rather than his blood. That’s right — feel the burn of red hot zeal — holiness does not mean passive serenity. The blessed are not emotionally lobotomized, and beatitude does not erase the capacity for holy hollering. Perfect love is fierce, luminous and judicial. God cannot be indifferent to a wolf (clerical greed) tearing at the throat of the lamb (the Church). Dispensing holy heck is “ira per zelum (zealous, rational anger) and reflects God’s severe charity. C.S. Lewis reminded us not to mistake kindness for love; there’s no contradiction between beatitude and vehemence when Peter is assaulting the deformity of earthly evil. Charles Williams, in his novel Descent Into Hell, said “Good…contains terror, not terror good” during a discussion of salvation as a “frightening good.” This is terror as in tremble-inducing awe and purifying force when confronting human brokenness.
What’s Saint Peter’s message to those still on the “threshing floor”? For God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. Step out into the light…or else.
P.S. I couldn’t help but think of G.K. Chesterton when I read Beatrice’s line “For innocence and trust are to be found only in little children...” Chesterton and his wife were childless, and their engagement with children of family, friends and neighbors was charming and gracious. He spoke of his house as “unexpectedly invaded by infants of all shapes and sizes”. Although playing with children was “a glorious thing”, it reminded him, “not of watering little budding flowers, but of wrestling for hours with gigantic angels and devils”; there’s moral dilemmas they posed taxed even his formidable intellect:
“Moral problems of the most monstrous complexity besiege him incessantly. He has to decide before the awful eyes of innocence, whether, when a sister has knocked down a brother’s bricks, in revenge for the brother having taken two sweets out of his turn, it is endurable that the brother should retaliate by scribbling on the sister’s picture book, and whether such conduct does not justify the sister in blowing out the brother’s unlawfully lighted match.”
Your philosophical exercise for this canto was very helpful. You put into words something that helped illuminate what was revealed in the canto while letting it be mysterious. The distinction between what can be quantified and what can’t is an important one.