Summary
As dawn rises, Dante again turns his eyes to Beatrice. The poet now feels especially “defeated” by his theme: the beauty of Beatrice. Only God, “its maker,” can fully comprehend her, he admits, and adds that he has reached his limit and can “no longer follow[] her beauty in [his] verse.” She tells him that they have arrived at “light intellectual, full of love,/love of true good, full of joy,/joy that surpasses every sweetness.” A “living light” begins shining around Dante, pouring and moving like “a river,” and a series of complicated descriptions work to capture this “marvelous flood.” Beatrice tells Dante that he must “drink first of these waters” before he can fully see the host of Paradise. He drinks, and he sees a great light “that makes the Creator/visible to every creature.” Even though it is immensely vast, Dante is not confused or overwhelmed. All the souls of Paradise are present, and Beatrice ends the canto with a political prophecy concerning the emperor Henry.
In canto thirty-one, the church, described as the “soldiery” of Christ, appears in the form of “a luminous white rose.” Souls move about it like bees. All aim at “a single goal.” Dante compares his amazement to a “barbarian” seeing Rome; he is “as a pilgrim,” looking around so that he can return home and “tell his tale.” When he turns to see Beatrice, an old man has taken her place. Dante asks where she is, and he tells her that Beatrice is now “below the highest tier,” and Dante addresses her with words of praise, saying that she has always “drawn [him] forth from servitude to freedom.” She smiles, and the old man tells him that he is Saint Bernard. Bernard tells him to raise his eyes upward, and he sees an intense brightness: this is Mary. There are “more than a thousand angels” surrounding her, and Dante is overwhelmed by her beauty. Bernard turns to look as well.
At the beginning of canto thirty-two, Bernard, now taking up “the teacher’s role,” explains that Eve is the one at Mary’s feet. “Rachel sits with Beatrice,” and Sarah, Rebecca, Judith, and Ruth are there as well. They are divided between those who came before and after Christ. John the Baptist is there as well, along with “Francis, Benedict, Augustine, and others,” and Bernard continues to guide Dante’s sight to other presences, including those of babies who died before becoming Christians. Sensing his confusion, Bernard explains that these infants are saved based on “the keenness of the vision they were born to.” In other words, God’s providence organizes which children will be saved.
Dante watches as Gabriel appears before Mary and sings Ave Maria; the court of heaven sings, and Dante asks who the angel is. Bernard answers him and further directs him to see Adam, Peter, Saint Anna, and Saint Lucy. Knowing “time runs short,” Bernard tells Dante to “fix our eyes on Primal Love,” and he instructs him to pray for grace if he feels himself unable to advance. Dante ends the canto by pointing towards the next, which will begin with Bernard’s “holy supplication.”
In the final canto, Bernard praises Mary, directly addressing her: “more humble and exalted than any other creature,/fixed goal of the eternal plan,//you are the one who so ennobled human nature/that He, who made it first, did not disdain/to make Himself of its own making.” He continues to praise her charity, her kindness, her clemency, and states that all virtues are joined in her. He then asks her that she give Dante the power to “rise higher” to his salvation. Mary moves “her gaze to the eternal Light.” Dante is filled with longing, to the limit of desire, and his sight is now “becoming pure” as it rises into the Light; his sight far exceeds his power of speech, but Dante the poet addresses God in order to ask that he be given the power to describe it even in its most minor form.
Now Dante’s gaze has “reached the Goodness that is infinite.” Describing it as “a single volume bound,” Dante sees in Love “the pages scattered through the universe,” though the poet’s memory of it fails him. Still, even though his “words will come far short/… like a babe’s/who at his mother’s breast still wets his tongue,” he describes the “Light” of God as like “three circles” of three colors, reflecting one another as rainbows and fire. The poet exclaims “O eternal Light, abiding in yourself alone,/knowing yourself alone, and, know to yourself/and knowing, loving and smiling on yourself!” Dante the pilgrim tries to understand it, as if it is a difficult geometry problem, but this is only possible through being “struck by a bolt/of lighting.” It is at this moment that his vision fails. Still, Dante ends the canto—and the Commedia—by stating, “now my will and my desire, like wheels revolving/with an even motion, were turning with/the Love that moves the sun and all the other stars.”
Analysis
As Dante comes nearer to the divine, even he admits to having more difficulty representing it. But we should note that he uses a number of devices to affect his reader with some sense of what "the divine" may be. One device especially present in this canto is a sort of synesthetic description. This means that Dante confuses different senses—here sight, sound, and smell especially—to overwhelm the reader. The river of light, for example, mixes different sensory details and changes throughout the passage. Another device is his use of interlocking repetition. The lines “light intellectual, full of love,/love of true good, full of joy,/joy that surpasses every sweetness” weave light, joy, intellectuality, good, and sweetness into a tight knot, all of it creating a lofty tone that seems to lift the reader up, attempting to create in them the same “joy” and “sweetness” described in the passage.
In canto thirty-one, we see Dante make explicit the connection between Dante the pilgrim and the actual medieval practice of pilgrimage, but his simile does more than simply liken Dante to a pilgrim. It also suggests the relationship between pilgrimage and writing, as Dante evokes the excitement of “telling his tale” of travel up to heaven, a tale materialized in his holy poem. This canto also is significant in its direct praise of Beatrice, who has now been placed among figures as important as Mary; she becomes the literal source of his freedom and, in part, the reason for his pilgrimage.
Perhaps the most notable aspect of the penultimate canto is the sheer quantity of women in it. Beyond Beatrice and Mary, Dante makes a clear effort to focus on the women of the Bible, giving them a particularly exalted place in heaven. Of course, this does not make him a feminist hero, but even his description of Eve places her as a “lovely woman” rather than the cause of all sin, and the stanza describing her uses delicately balanced sentence structure to suggest that Mary has healed “the wound” caused by Eve.
In the final canto, we see yet again Dante’s emphatic praise of Mary; it is she who allows him to attain a higher sight and to nearly finish his ascent towards God, completing his journey. Note too that as he does this, he again emphasizes the strength of his desire, never letting the reader lose sight of the place it plays in faith. Other significant moments include his describing seeing God as like seeing “pages,” seemingly connecting creation to the practice of creating a book.
The most important lines in this canto may be the final ones. These lines emphasize that Dante’s “will” and “desire” now move in concern with the “Love” that moves the stars. Indeed, in the Italian, “will” (velle) actually rhymes with stars (stelle), emphasizing that Dante has now achieved a sort of concord with God, corrected his will, and joined the “revolving” motion that has been such a persistent motif throughout the Paradiso. And with that notion of harmony and joint motion, Dante’s long holy poem ends—still spinning with desire.
