Dante enters the Empyrean and Prepares to see the Beatific Vision in Paradiso, Photo Credit: Posterazzi: Dante Paradiso 1861
“O you who are within your little bark,
eager to listen, following behind
my ship that, singing, crosses to deep seas,
turn back to see your shores again: do not
attempt to sail the seas I sail; you may,
by losing sight of me, be left astray.” – Dante, (Paradiso 2, vv. 1-6).
Almost everything is characterized by a beginning and ending, and as Seniors get ready to graduate from Columbia, and the underclassmen and Juniors prepare to move into new courses next year, we can get the sense that while new beginnings are exciting, they may also be nerve racking or challenging as we seek to set out onto new waters. For the pilgrim in the beginning of Dante’s Paradiso, the shift to a vision of heaven and the celestial heavens presents its own challenges of forcing one to confront his fears that are often associated with change and asking us whether we’re ready to be led into new places that will force us to change. The reassuring yet also demanding reality is that it is ultimately within our power to adapt well or poorly to the new circumstances that life throws our way.
This semester, I had the privilege of taking a course on Dante Aligiheri’s Divine Comedy with Professor Teodolinda Barolini in the Italian department, and we had the chance to read through the latter half of Dante’s Purgatorio and also Dante’s Paradiso. Dante’s work covered a wide range of remarkable topics including unity and difference, the highest good and justice, and man’s search for the satisfaction of all of his desires. Dante did all of this with a remarkable synthesis of political, historical, theological, literary, and poetic criticism combined into one impressive text. But, while the text can be analyzed in many different ways, I think it is Dante’s theology of love, his vision for how the world is both united and differentiated by love and how all things are to be made new in love, that has the most to teach us about how to move on to new beginnings and to say goodbye to those things that are fleeting, transitory, and which must pass as we move on to greater things.
At the end of Purgatorio, Dante enters the Earthly Paradise or the Garden of Eden, where he prepares to enter the final stage of his quest in the last cantiche of the poem, Paradiso. Here, Dante comes across Beatrice, his long-awaited love at whose call, Virgil proclaims at the beginning of the story in Inferno 2, prompted Virgil to lead Dante through hell and purgatory for the sake of Beatrice’s desire to bring him back to the right path. But, Dante’s admiration for the paternal figure of Virgil has become so fixed by the end of Purgatorio that Virgil’s sudden departure leaves Dante yearning for his “sweetest father” once again (Purg. 30, v. 50). Beatrice, in a moment of dramatic reversal of expectations, tells Dante to “man up,” faulting him for his failure to fix his eyes on God alone after her death and his choice to return with undue attachment to the “secondary goods,” and Dante’s weeping for a damned pagan, however virtuous he is, is the surest sign of his lack: “Look here,” she says, “For I am Beatrice! I am!/How were you able to ascend the mountain?/Did you not know that man is happy here?” (Purg. 30, vv. 73-75). As harsh as these words may sound, Beatrice’s adamant stance reveals the need for Dante to recalibrate his affections toward the God to whom Beatrice is meant to point: thus her subtle insistence that it was only by the grace of God that Dante was able to ascend Mount Purgatory and enter into that place where no one should weep.
Paradiso is in large part a continuation of Dante’s personal meditation on this theme of the
poignancy of the challenges of letting go of the attachments to things that might not lead one to God, and yet recognizing that those personal attachments and man’s capacity for memory are also things that help to define us in the world and characterize the way that we live. Paradiso 6 features an extended monologue of the Byzantine emperor Justinian’s recounting of the history of the Roman Empire, which feeds into a personal invective against the abuses of the factionalism in Italy and the corruption and injustices that had resulted in Dante’s exile from Florence. Indeed, one gets the sense as the Paradiso continues that Dante, in reflecting on his life and the challenges he had faced, gained a new appreciation for the things that would never pass away even as he yearned so vigorously for a return to his beloved city of Florence. In a particularly touching episode, Dante runs into his supposed crusader ancestor Cacciaguida, who foretells to Dante in the setting of the poem in 1300 what Dante would endure in the coming years due to his exile: “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” (Par. 17, 55-60). Dante, a poet of love, had to experience the sadness of leaving behind the circumstances of his own boyhood, youth, and maturity.
But, the theology of love for Dante doesn’t merely lead to a kind of melancholic approach to the passing goods of the world – it supplements this recognition of the ephemeral nature of the world with an insistence that God’s will will be done. Dante eventually asks a question of how God can be just for those who never had the chance of knowing Christ but otherwise lived a virtuous Christian life. The eagle answering this question invokes the divine justice and the inscrutability and ineffability of God, telling Dante at one point in response: “ Only the light that shines from the clear heaven/can never be obscured—all else is darkness/or shadow of the flesh or fleshly poison” (Par. 19, vv. 64-66). For the pilgrim on a quest for the good, the only assurance is that God will be with him, and that this will allow him to endure whatever suffering or tribulation he must for the sake of eventual justice. It also forces Dante to reflect on even the passing nature of
the goods of things that we should find pleasing and enjoyable and beautiful. These in
themselves can never fully satisfy, for “all else is darkness/or shadow of the flesh or fleshly
poison.” Because Dante as the emblematic pilgrim on the path to God desires the completion of his desires, he eventually receives it at the end of Paradiso, where Dante enters into the Empyrean, the highest level of heaven, and there, after an encounter with St. Bernard of Clairvax and with the meditation of the Virgin Mary, declares his own inability to fully grasp the nature of the fully-satisfying God: “O Highest Light, You, raised so far above/the minds of mortals, to my memory/give back something of Your epiphany” (Par. 33, vv. 67-69), he begs God. Here, the dialectic of desire and of love that defined the Divine Comedy reaches its apotheosis as we encounter the eternal yearning of the beatific vision. Dante, with his purified eyes, can see the unity and differentiation of creation, the structure of the cosmos, and, perhaps in eternity, the reasons for his suffering and for the ephemeral nature of the things of the world. Our lives, Dante seems to say in this last poetic flourish, only really make sense in the context of the highest good that is God, and the hope that new beginnings bring and the mourning that comes with a conclusion to a stage in our lives here reaches its fulfillment in where what always was is.
The Core is a school of life, and how best to live our lives. I think in periods of transition we would do well to ponder the trajectory of where we lead our lives, whether we’re leading them oriented toward the finality of all things, and whether what we do is leading us closer to where we should be. This is a collective call-to-action in some sense – Dante required illumination from countless souls and at least two guides in order to reach this point of contemplation. But, it is a welcome one because it leads us to ponder the love that grips the reader of Dante in the final words of the Divine Comedy: “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” (Paradiso 33, vv. 142-145).
May that Love move us as well.