“Now open your eyes to what I say here, and see that your thought and my words form one truth, like the center and circumference of a sphere. All things that die and all that cannot die are the reflected splendor of the Form our Father’s love brings forth beyond the sky.” (Dante, Paradiso, XIII, trans. John Ciardi) 

I was wrong. And for a long time. 

Until very recently, I found the third book of Dante’s magisterial Divine Comedy, Paradiso, of little interest. Specifically, I found it lacking in drama. 

Often I have argued that all of the action is in the Inferno, and to a lesser degree Purgatorio. And still I would challenge anyone to find a book more drenched in the grace, the mercy, the divine sympathy of an author than is the Inferno.  Dante feels for so many of the damned the compassion of a fellow traveler who has himself stumbled and fallen. He knows in himself the deep urge to have burned from him, as in a purging refiner’s fire, that which would makes him less than the person he longs to be. 

What could paradise offer? I asked. In comparison with the Sturm und Drang of human frailty played out on the stage of eternity, how could heaven compare? Wouldn’t it just be static, like those terrible often tyrannical nineteenth and twentieth century human utopias multiplied by the power of infinity? 

What I failed to comprehend was the role Beatrice played in Dante’s spiritual imagination. And, more crucially, the role she played in his redemption. I had become so fixated on the details of drama, I failed to see the Divine Comedy as a whole. Beatrice, the one who introduced Dante to the power of beauty, guides him to the source of all beauty. From Beatrice he learns that, yes, “beauty is truth and truth is beauty” (as Mr. Keats famously agreed), but that both are inseparable from goodness (as Aquinas and Benedict knew). 

Paradiso, it turns out, is not a static arrival point for the bland and mediocre who never dared to live large and failed; Paradiso is where humanity meets its source in the humanity of God, and finds, to its everlasting surprise, that all it loved best (the ten thousand things that shine amongst the dust of the earth) originate and culminate in the One, the Nameless, the Mysterium Tremendum who is Love, who is never a bare singularity, but is a pulsing living passionate communion itself always complete but never finished, always creating, sharing itself, its love, its being. 

Surrounded by the voices of the wise to whom Beatrice has led him, Dante sees that losing himself in such love is not a loss but the most sublime gain. Below, in the Inferno, its denizens fear losing their grasp on so many things (wealth, passion, fame, privilege); below, in Purgatorio, inhabitants struggle anxiously to learn to let go of what they had convinced themselves they could not be without; in Paradiso, by contrast, perfect Love casts out all fear, all anxiety, the struggle to cling, to grasp, to reject that which offers grace, and vanquishes the ignorance, the delusions to which the damned hold. 

When Beatrice surrenders to the light, Dante sees that which he has always loved in Beatrice. Some interpret the climactic moment of Beatrice’s transformation as something that offends Dante. There is no evidence in the text for this interpretation. Rather, in light of the transformation of Beatrice into transcendent love, Dante is now ready to return to his world, to live and to tell his tale, in the consciousness that his own eventual and full surrender to that same light unites him not only with Beatrice, but with that which (or whom) enlivened her and now completes her humanity. 

Paradiso is charged with the lightening of transformation — transformation, a word we throw around with so little consideration. Like Dante, perhaps it is time to consider the heavens (not as just an upper story in his medieval cosmology, but in its full reality, what we call space, the universe), and to try to imagine the power of supernovas and black holes, the majestic nurseries where stars are born, the deep emptiness that never ceases to bring about new things.

Then let us try to imagine what we cannot, powers so explosive in creative might they make supernovas pale in comparison. If each human is made up of the remnants of dead stars, the ash of past worlds, as physicists tell us, Dante wants us to consider that our destiny lies in a power that holds galaxies in its hand. And it is there that Beatrice shines.