Paradiso
© trans. 2007 Anthony Esolen, original 14th century by Dante Alighieri
544 pages including notes & appendices

I’ve gotta hand it to Dante, at least the character Dante. I though I’d fallen hard for a woman, but against him there is no parallel. Even Menelaus, who led a fleet to Troy to reclaim Helen, must bow before Dante’s fixation on Beatrice — for in Paradise, we follow our intrepid narrator who has been into the innermost bowels of Hell, and strenuously climbed the heights of Mount Purgatory, now rising through the various spheres of heaven and meeting all manner of sainted ones, from medieval figures to the father of humanity himself. The higher he rises the more he witnesses, including the Earth itself surrounded by the celestial spheres and layer upon layer of transcendant joy, of beauty that overwhelms the soul (set to the music of the Tannhauser Overture, surely) — and yet Dante again and again is enraptured by his fair Beatrice, whose rescuing presence in the dark wood started this comedy divine. All the glory of creation is before him, and yet he can only marvel how it makes her face all the more beautiful, so much so that she rebukes him gently — “There is more to paradise than my eyes!”. (She finally departs towards the end so he can focus on contemplating the mysteries of the Creation, the Incarnation, and the Resurrection.) Paradise marks the end of the Divine Comedy, and it’s arguably the hardest for contemporary readers to tackle because it’s so overwhelmed by medieval cosmology, very much unlike our own. The Inferno and Mount Purgatory followed relatable geographies, but the heavenly realm of the medieval world almost unimaginable to we impoverished post-Copernicans, living as we do on a bit of wet rock doing circles around a larger bit of exploding gas. When Dante can pry his eyes away from his beloved, he’s engaging in theological discourse with those above — asking Adam about his sin, being grilled on the virtues by Saints Peter and James — but the author-Dante’s temporal concerns are still very much present, as we witness rebukes of the warring Italian factions who are spilling blood, or of the increasingly corrupt Dominican and Benedictine orders — the last scolding delivered by St. Benedict himself. There’s noticably more rhyming here, presumably because we have moved from the chaos of hell into the perfect harmony of heaven. As usual, Esolen’s in-text notes and notes are superb. I think it’s high time to read C.S. Lewis’ Discarded Image to better understand medieval cosmology.

Related:
How Dante Can Save Your Life, Rod Dreher. Selected quotes thereof.