Paradiso, Dante

“The glory of Him, who moves all things, penetrates the universe, and glows in one region more, in another less.”

Dante’s Paradiso, the final part of The Divine Comedy, follows Dante and Beatrice through the celestial spheres toward the direct vision of God. Its ontology presents reality as a divinely ordered hierarchy: God is the eternal, unmoved source of Being, goodness, truth, and love; creation receives and reflects these qualities to different degrees. Angels, human souls, the heavens, and the material world occupy different places within this order, while all creation ultimately tends toward God as its highest good.

Unlike Inferno, which depicts disordered love, and Purgatorio, which purifies it, Paradiso explores perfectly ordered love. Its major philosophical themes include free will, divine justice, grace, providence, the relationship between reason and revelation, the limits of human knowledge, and the nature of true happiness. Dante repeatedly asks how finite human intelligence can understand infinite reality.

The celestial spheres ultimately function less as physical destinations than as stages in Dante’s intellectual and spiritual education. As he ascends, his capacity to perceive truth increases until knowledge gives way to direct contemplation. The poem culminates in the Beatific Vision, where intellect, desire, and will become perfectly aligned with “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.”

We will be at the Central Library, room 3-10B from 11:00am - 12:30pm.