The Story Ends: Divine Comedy

(Paradiso, Canto XXXIII): Mary, Argonauts, Sybil, and the unity of everything

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.

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:

- Nihil nos Deus habere voluit, quod per Mariae manus non transiret -
God wills that we should have nothing that does not pass through Mary’s hands.
St. Bernard, In Vigilia Nativitatis Domini III.1

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

[Dante] has thus far not ventured to look directly up into that light nor to seek to see God through it, something he will now do, on Bernard’s urging, and through the grace that comes from Mary’s granting and God’s granting of the saint’s prayer. The remainder of this journey is up through the downpouring light of glory, up along its beam…Is the wayfarer merely to approach God? Is he not actually to attain to God, move upwards all the way to Him? The answer is yes, of course—otherwise this journey could not be said to reach its goal.¹

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

Vision through the descending light of glory is an upward ascent reaching, for each creature, the limit of the individual capacity given at birth by God. Mary’s limit in this regard is thus the highest of any creature, including even that of the highest angel.²

Our Lady of Sorrows by Giovanni Battista Salvi da Sassoferrato, 17th century

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.

The essential nature of this last stretch of the journey is thus declared, from the wayfarer’s point of view. He (i.e., his gaze) penetrates farther and farther upwards through the descending light of glory, which sheds greater and greater grace upon him (i.e., greater and greater revelation). It is essential to follow this double movement: upwards on the part of the mortal man’s seeing (penetration to the highest mystery) and downwards on the part of the divine revelation.³

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:

When you’ve arrived there and made your approach to the city of Cumae,
Lakes dedicated to gods and Avernus’s echoing forests,
Then you’ll observe a mad seer who sings, from the depths of a cavern,
Fate’s decrees, using leaves to record all names and all details.
Each word this virgin writes upon leaves as her song of the future,
She then arranges in sequence and stores in her cave, behind locked doors.
These all stay unmoved, and in place, never fall out of order.
But, just the slightest draught, as the door rotates on its hinges,
Blows them away. For its opening scatters the featherlike foliage.
All through her hollow cave leaves flutter, but she never bothers,
After this happens, to catch, to replace, or assemble the verses.
Aeneid III.441-451

Virgin’s First Steps, Mosaic from Chora monastery

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.

The final vision, the crown and climax of the whole work, consists of two revelations. First, Dante perceives in the Divine Light the form, or exemplar, of all creation. All things that exist in themselves (substance), all aspects or properties of being (accident), all mutual relations (mode) are seen bound together in one single concept. The Universe is in God. Next, having glimpsed the whole of creation, Dante beholds the Creator. He sees three circles, of three colours, yet of one dimension. One seems to be reflected from the other, and the third, like flame, proceeds equally from both (The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost). Then, as he gazes, the reflected circle shows within itself the human form, coloured with the circle’s own hue. As Dante strives to comprehend how human nature is united with the Word, a ray of divine light so floods his mind that his desire is at rest.⁴

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

That which is here seen “bound” in God are the substances and accidents and their relationships which are scattered throughout the universe. A “substance” is that which subsists in itself (a creature, a person, or an angel, for example), whereas an “accident” is that which subsists, not in itself, but as a quality in some substance.⁵

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.

My heart is fixed, O God, my heart is fixed.
Psalm 57:7

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

Good is the object of the will, of volition, even as knowledge or seeing is the object of the intellect. Will and intellect, and their respective objects, must be kept in mind for a proper understanding of the end of the poem. We are now told that all good is contained in the Godhead, therefore it is impossible for the will to turn away from such an object. It is the end or goal of all desires.⁶

Tenth Heaven, or Empyrean

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.

It is important to conceive the concrete image so: the three “giri” are not motionless, but are spinning and are thus completely active, not stationary; and spinning in this instance (as everywhere in the Paradiso) symbolizes intellection and perfection in complete actualization. All is active in God, nothing is passive.⁷

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.

All things are delivered unto me of my Father: and no man knoweth the Son, but the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him.
Matthew 11:27

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.

The circle, because of its curve, is impossible to square perfectly.
Dante, Convivio II.xiii.27

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Just as a circle is immeasurable in terms of a square, so is the deity inexpressible in terms of humanity.⁸

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.

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.
John 1:14

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.

‘Velle’ is Latin and as such expresses the fact that the attainment of the will (thus matching the desire of the intellect)is made possible from above, by grace descending. Thus desire (of intellect) and will to attain (of ‘velle’, a will that is both human and divine) emerge, at the end of this poem, as equally balanced as a wheel that evenly turns.⁹

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

Thus, was his journey complete.

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💭 Philosophical Exercises

‘The Virgin Mary’ (from The Divine Comedy, Paradise)), 1 May 1807 After John Flaxman RA (1755 - 1826)

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.

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This Week’s Sinners and Virtuous 🎭

(Themes, Quotes, Terms and Characters)

Gustave Dore - Virgin Mary

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.

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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

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1. Charles S. Singleton, Commentary on Paradiso 565

2. Singleton 568

3. Singleton 570

4. Dorothy L. Sayers, Paradise 348

5. Singleton 577

6. Singleton 580

7. Singleton 582

8. Sayers 349

9. Singleton 587