Trouble in Paradiso

My first exposure to Dante was in the eleventh grade. We read through the Inferno and may have touched pieces from the second and third parts of the comedy. My second reading was in the second semester of the Honors program at Union University. We read through Purgatorio in its entirety, with selections from Inferno and Paradiso. After a research essay on music in Dante’s Purgatorio, I remember having a half-formed opinion that Purgatorio was the superior poem, although Inferno portrayed the most vivid images. Paradiso I thought ethereal and even a little pretentious. Why did Dante bother writing about things which “ἃ ὀφθαλμὸς οὐκ εἶδεν καὶ οὖς οὐκ ἤκουσεν?”¹ His descriptions of heaven were, at best, inaccessible high poetry; at worst, unhelpful speculation.

This experience formed in me the opinion that Paradiso was the least engaging of the three because it speaks of things with which we have little experience. In this life, we experience suffering, anxiety, difficulty, and so on. These are the experiences of Inferno, albeit greatly exaggerated in the poem. Purgatorio offers insight into the Christian experience on earth. We suffer, yes, but our suffering mingles with hope; we suffer together, rejoice together, sing together, labor together in our ascent towards God. But Paradiso? Perfection is a dream––Dante’s vision of incandescently happy souls dancing around planets is far from relatable. If anything, it almost confirms that suspicion you have as a child, that heaven is just a really long church service.

These suspicions congealed into a standing theory: Paradiso is less engaging because it deals with things less accessible to human experience. Dante set himself the task of describing perfection, which is something we only see “δι᾿ ἐσόπτρου ἐν αἰνίγματι.”² It could be said that Dante’s hell and purgatory are equally as speculative as his heaven. This is true; however, the human imagination has a proclivity for contemplating things as worse, not better. We have plenty of horror films; we don’t have an opposite (hope films)? We can imagine all manner of monstrosities, tortures, and violence. The most hopeful films we have rest on a glorification of the normal things, or on fantastical images which do not elicit as strong a response as a graphic horror film. 

I kept this theory for the next few years in college. Later, as a first-year teacher, I was assigned to teach Dante to a group of ten high-schoolers. It took the better part of two quarters, but by the end, we had faithfully followed the Great Poet through the streets of Florence in Vita Nuova, down into the bolgia of Inferno, up the mountain of Purgatorio, and through the divine spheres of Paradiso. This time through, I was humbled by the majesty of Paradiso. Surely Lewis was right when he called Paradiso the highest to which poetry has attained. But what had I missed the first two times? As Wiman asked of the old tree, “Why should it seem so much fuller now?”³

In the year after reading through these four works, I picked up Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety, in which his protagonist ponders the challenge of expressing paradise regained:

Well, Milton had tried it, both sides of it. We had all read Paradise Lost. Had any of us read Paradise Regained? …And Dante. What better example? The Inferno boiled with hot life, but the Paradiso was a theological meringue. The wicked and unhappy stole the show because sin and suffering were the most universal human experiences. Technically, Christ was the hero of Paradise Lost; actually, Satan was. Fallen grandeur was always more instructive than pallid perfection. Or look at painting, all those Christs whose bland faces belied their bloody wounds, all those characterless angels…And if you were walking down the Tornabuoni and saw, at the same instant, Beatrice with her beneficent smile and Ugolino gnawing on Ruggieri’s skull, which would catch your eye?⁴

Stegner confirmed my theory; that Inferno and Purgatorio matched human experience more than Paradiso. My latest encounter with La Commedia, while opening the gates to literary heaven, did not discount the substance of the argument which I shared with Stegner. However, my philosophy of art had shifted between my second and third reading of Dante.

         In college, I held to the theory that art aims to reflect reality. In this system, Inferno and Purgatorio’s proximity to human experience makes them not only more understandable, but inherently better poems. Furthermore, in this scheme, Paradiso seems to be unfounded optimism. Yes, heaven is the aim, but can you not speak about it in a more accessible way? Because Paradiso failed the test of relatability and proximity to human experience, it was, by my aesthetic theory, a lesser work.

         My appreciation of Paradiso was only possible through a change in my philosophy of art. The first major shift came with reading C. S. Lewis’ The Discarded Image. Lewis’ description of the “Medieval Model” was the first time I had seen a worldview all at once which stood in contrast to the modern view. This model presented the cosmos as a perfectly ordered universe with God as its Mover, keeping all things in harmony through a mutual love between himself and created things. The modern idea of  “outer space” would be foreign to the medieval mind; instead, space was interpreted as distinctly finite, rather than expanding endlessly. The moon separated earth (in the center) from the rest of the universe. The sublunar realm was the only realm affected by sin; beyond the moon, each planetary sphere moves in perfect harmony with God. Beyond the planets are the stars, then the Primum Mobile. God moves the universe according to Augustinian doctrine, where the Lover moves toward the beloved. All things are meant to move in perfect harmony with God’s will. Excepting the earth, which contains rebellious angels and men, the universe still moves in perfect harmony according to God’s will.

         A full exposition of the Medieval Model would take too much of our time. I mention the system briefly because it is key to understanding why Dante structures heaven the way he does. He is not inventing a new system all on his own; rather, his Paradiso represents the culmination of medieval theology, philosophy, and literature in poetic form. In other words, Dante’s heaven is the peak of medieval imagination. 

On the one hand, simply recognizing Dante as a result of the longstanding medieval world made much more sense of his writing. But there is more. Central to the medieval way of thinking is the belief of an ideal world, which is more real, not less real, than our world. Remember Lewis’ The Great Divorce, where passengers from hell cut their feet on the sharp reality of heavenly grass. We tend to interpret the spiritual as non-physical. For medievals, the spiritual is, we might say, super-physical. Furthermore, the physical is patterned after the spiritual. Earthly kingdoms ought to reflect heavenly kingdoms. Earthly music ought to reflect heavenly music (music is about harmony and proportion––as is planetary motion). Earthly man ought to reflect heavenly man. Art ought to do more than reflect nature… it ought to establish the Ideal through nature. 

Dante’s Commedia reflects the conviction of the Ideal throughout. However, it becomes more apparent in Paradiso precisely because heaven is more ideal than earth. Inferno takes place within the earth. Purgatorio likewise stretches toward heaven from earth. But in Paradiso, Dante goes beyond the moon (the boundary between corrupted and uncorrupted creation). Man’s access to the Ideal is primarily intellectual rather than empirical. As such, Paradiso’s subject matter is explicitly more intellectual. 

The medieval assumptions of the structure of creation provide a distinct contrast to modern philosophy. Modern philosophy assumes the empirical and nothing else. Unfortunately, this has affected Christians as well. When Nietzsche declared the death of God, he merely indicated what philosophy has already done: removed the necessity for God. As history develops, this of course results in man who must make the Ideal in his own image. Man becomes the reference point for everything, including art. 

This explains the error shared between Wallace Stegner and myself. Paradise Lost, Inferno and Purgatorio are better works of art in a system which values art in absolute reference to man. Truth is suffering. Truth is struggle. Truth is hope in the midst of pain. Once again, we fall prey to Lewis’ diagnosis “that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us.”⁵ We are satisfied with empirical imagery of mangled bodies, tortured victims and hellish music when Dante offers us an intellectual feast which takes up these images into the astounding whole.  La Commedia is great because it does not work first from the ‘relatable,’ but because it wrestles to present the inaccessible to our imagination. Dante follows the paradigm of the incarnation, where the Ideal comes to us in bodily form. 

In Second Space, the poet Miłosz writes:

It is poetry, precisely,

With its behavior of a bird thrashing against the transparency 

Of a windowpane that testifies to the fact 

That we don’t know how to live in phantasmagoria.

Let reality return to our speech. 

That is, meaning. Impossible without an absolute point of reference.⁶

Dante writes with an absolute reference point in mind––further, Dante wrote from a long medieval tradition which had codified the Absolute’s relationship with the created world into an holistic imaginative worldview. Dante’s poetry thrashes against the windowpane because it can see the world beyond. Divorced from an absolute reference point, poetry can only thrash against transparencies with nothing behind them. Only an absolute, consistent reference point allows art to have any permanence of truth, meaning, significance, goodness, beauty.

1.  1 Corinthians 2:9; “no eye has seen, nor ear heard” 

2.  1 Corinthians 13:12, “in a mirror, darkly”

3.  Christian Wiman, “From a Window,” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57358/from-a-window-56d23acc9b231

4.  Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety (New York: The Modern Library, 1987), 255.

5.  C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory https://www.wheelersburg.net/Downloads/Lewis%20Glory.pdf

6.  Czeslaw Miłosz, “A Young Man” from Second Space: New Poems, translated by Robert Hass and Czeslaw Miłosz (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2004), 47.