The glory of Him who moves all things
pervades the universe and shines
in one part more and in another less.
These are the very first lines of the Paradiso, and they establish a number of significant motifs that will run throughout the canticle. First, we should note that Dante literally centers "Him," God, in the very first line, signally the centrality of God's glory to Dante's movement through heaven. Second, Dante focuses on God as the primum mobile or "first mover"; this is a concept taken from the theology of Thomas Aquinas, whose argument for the necessary existence of God depended on "Him" being the one who first set the world into motion. And third and finally, this stanza also focuses on differing levels of light. The motif of light is ever-present in the Paradiso, but it is a motif that is constantly changing, as the heavens become brighter (and thus more divine) as Dante and Beatrice ascend.
And, as a second ray will issue from the first
and rise again up to its source,
even as a pilgrim longs to go back home,
so her gaze, pouring through my eyes
on my imagination, made itself my own, and I,
against our practice, set my eyes upon the sun.
These lines take place as Beatrice is gazing at the sun, a symbol for God, at the end of canto one. Through them, Dante ties together the motif of light with the themes of imagination and guidance; note how strangely Dante seems to see and "imagine" the divine light through Beatrice's "gaze." If you have trouble parsing who is looking where here, that may be because Dante creates a dynamic interplay of eyes that evokes the important role Beatrice places in directing Dante towards God. And note, too, that this is achieved through a simile that combines a "ray" of light" with "a pilgrim," connecting Dante's poetic pilgrimage with the movements of light.
"I shall now reshape your intellect,
thus deprived, with a light so vibrant
that your mind will quiver at the sight."
These lines, spoken by Beatrice in response to Dante's confusion concerning the dark spots on the moon, are extremely important insofar as they establish Beatrice's role in the Paradiso. Rather than merely be a figure of virtue, Beatrice takes an active role as Dante's guide, literally ascending through the heavens with him. But, on an allegorical level, she is guiding Dante's intellect towards divine understanding. That she suggests "a light" is what will "reshape" Dante connects this intellectual reshaping with divine light, and even further, we should note that "intellect" was considered a particularly divine form of understanding in the Middle Ages.
“Brother, the power of love subdues our will
so that we long for only what we have
and thirst for nothing else.”
These lines are spoken after Dante wonders if these souls desire to ascend higher into heaven, but they do much more than answer Dante's question. They also suggest the importance that the fulfillment of desire plays into Dante's vision of heaven. In it, Dante suggests that the "will" which is subdued by divine love is ultimately fulfilled, its desires met by its state of being. Significantly, Dante does not couch this in abstract language but instead turns to the language of "thirst," a deeply bodily need, to figure what this divine fulfillment is like.
Thus did Beatrice begin this canto and,
like a man who does not interrupt his speech,
continued thus her holy discourse:
These lines, which come after Beatrice's opening speech, might be considered somewhat strange. Not only does Dante refer to Beatrice's speech self-referentially, as a part of "this canto," but he even suggests that she is "like a man"! This strange way of framing Beatrice, though, has much value. It poses Beatrice as the one writing this canto, aligning her with both Dante and Virgil, who served as guide for the Inferno and Purgatorio. And, for a largely misogynistic medieval audience, presenting her as "like a man" likely strengthened her character in the eyes of Dante's readers, pushing them to consider her speech as closely as they might Virgil's.
"Then, as the time approached when Heaven willed
to bring the world to its own state of peace
Caesar, by the will of Rome, laid hold on it."
Here, Justinian creates a link between Roman imperial history and providential history that should not be ignored. Note how he aligns "Heaven" willing for "peace" and "the will of Rome," which is controlled by Caesar. The repetition of words relating to "will" draws Rome and "Heaven" together and suggests that empire is important for the creation of "peace." In the context of Dante's poetics and politics, this reflects both his desire to connect his own "holy poem" to Virgil's Roman epic and his desire to support the Holy Roman Empire; in Justinian's speech, these two desires meet in imperial violence.
I turned, and the great love I saw then,
in her holy eyes, I have to leave untold,
not just because I cannot trust my speech,
but because memory cannot retrace its path
that far unless Another guide it.
This quotation adds complexity to the theme of guidance as well as the theme of the limitations of language. In it, Dante suggests that he cannot fully describe the "love" in Beatrice's "eyes" because of his limited language, but he adds the notion of his own limited "memory" as well. Notably, memory's "path" works with Dante's motif of travel or movement, but we should focus on the notion that Dante needs guidance from "Another" to re-follow this path. In the theology of Augustine, God is directly aligned with memory (memoria); for Dante to retrieve help guiding his memory is thus to be guided by God, in whom Augustine believed all things were remembered.
"O company of the elect chosen to feast
at the great supper of the blessed Lamb
who feeds you so that your desire is ever satisfied
since by God's grace this man enjoys a foretaste
of whatsoever falls beneath your table,
before death sets a limit to his time,
heed his immeasurable craving and with dewdrops
from that found where you drink forever
refresh him at the very source of all his thoughts."
Beatrice says these lines to the host of heaven as they stand in the starry sphere. Two significant literary devices are working in these stanzas: first, Beatrice develops an extended metaphor that consistently turns to the imagery of food and banqueting to figure the fulfillment of Dante's "craving" for knowledge. Second, Beatrice's lines include an allusion to Matthew 15:27, when a woman says that "the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from the masters' table." Here, Dante becomes the dog, who is satisfied even with heavenly scraps; thus, through these lines, Dante humbles himself and venerates the host.
Were I as rich with words as in my store of images,
I still would never dare attempt to tell
the least of these delights that came from her.
These lines occur when Dante looks at Mary and basks in her beauty. They call to the mind many of the moments, earlier in the poem, when Dante looked at Beatrice and struggled to describe her, and as such, they connect Mary with Beatrice. But these lines also introduce an important distinction: Dante suggests that there is a sharp distinction between what one can imagine (what is in one's "store of images") and what one can say. Thus what is spoken, even if it creates images, is separate from those images themselves. When we return to the poem as a whole, we might then see why Dante focuses so much on vision rather than speech, imagination rather than description.
I tried to see how the image fit the circle
and how it found its where in it.
But my wings had not sufficed for that
had not my mind been struck by a bolt
of lightning that granted what it asked.
Appearing immediately before the final stanza of the poem, these lines show Dante attempting to understand the "where" in the strange image he sees of God; in other words, Dante is attempting to understand this God spatially. But instead of working it out himself, Dante's "wings" must rely on "a bolt/of lightning." The association between "lightning" and Zeus suggests that it is God who gives Dante this final bit of guidance. Ultimately, in Dante's ascent towards understanding the divine, he must rely on the divine for his "wings," a symbol for this ascent, to make the final leap. Thus, Dante's poem ends with a recognition of his own limitations and a gesture towards his belief in the need for divine, rather than human, guidance.
