The Divine Comedy, Volume 3, Paradise
1320
The Divine Comedy, Volume 3, Paradise
1320
Translated by Charles Eliot Norton
The final movement of one of literature's most audacious spiritual journeys. Having traversed Hell's circles and climbed Purgatory's mountain, Dante now ascends through the nine celestial spheres with Beatrice as his guide, from the Moon to the Empyrean, toward the ultimate vision of God. The poetry transforms: the darkness and bone-white bones of Inferno give way to light unbearable and beautiful, as Dante encounters souls blessed in perfect communion with divine love. This is not punishment or purification but fulfillment. Beatrice, radiant with divine wisdom, explains the architecture of heaven, the order of the cosmos, the nature of vows and their sanctity, while Dante moves ever closer to that blinding point where all love and all knowledge converge. The Paradiso asks what the Inferno and Purgatorio only hinted at: what does it mean to see? What remains when the self dissolves into the infinite? For readers who have followed Dante's entire journey, this volume offers the culmination of a promise made in the first canto of the Inferno. For newcomers, it stands alone as a meditation on transcendence, on the possibility that love is the very fabric of the universe.
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“Love, that moves the sun and the other stars””
— Dante Alighieri
“ma gia volgena il mio disio e'l vellesi come rota ch'igualmente e mossa,l'amor che move: i sole e l'altre stelle...as a wheel turns smoothtly, free from jars, my will and my desire were turned by love, The love that moves the sun and the other stars.””
— Dante Alighieri
“The Love that moves the sun and the other stars.””
— Dante Alighieri
“As one who sees in dreams and wakes to find the emotional impression of his vision still powerful while its parts fade from his mind - Just such am I, having lost nearly all the vision itself, while in my heart I feel the sweetness of it yet distill and fall.””
— Dante Alighieri
“Fate's arrow, when expected, travels slow.””
— Dante Alighieri
“Open your mind to what I shall disclose, and hold it fast within you; he who hears, but does not hold what he has heard, learns nothing.””
— Dante Alighieri
“all things created have an order in themselves, and this begets the form that lets the universe resemble God.””
— Dante Alighieri
“O grace abounding and allowing me to dareto fix my gaze on the Eternal Light,so deep my vision was consumed in it!I saw how it contains within its depthsall things bound in a single book by loveof which creation is the scattered leaves:how substance, accident, and their relationwere fused in such a way that what I nowdescribe is but a glimmer of that Light.””
— Dante Alighieri
“From a little spark may burst a flame.””
— Dante Alighieri
