Walking With Dante

Beatrice continues her rectification of Dante's doubts by using a passage from Plato's TIMAEUS to turn her argument from accommodation to free will. This passage contains perhaps the heart of Beatrice's second grand...

Beatrice begins to take apart the two questions (or doubts) that she has intuited the pilgrim Dante is holding in silence. She first takes on the one with more "poison" in this passage, in which she reveals that the...

Piccarda may have vanished but questions remain. The pilgrim Dante is caught between them, unable to voice them. Beatrice to the rescue! She voices what he cannot say . . . or perhaps what he is afraid to say. She...

Piccarda Donati doesn’t stop her monologue with the cryptic line about her life after the convent. She turns to another figure in the lunar landscape: Constance I of Sicily, the Holy Roman Empress and mother of...

Piccarda Donati finally answers the question about who she is. She's given her name but not much else about her. In twelve lines (or four tercets) she brings her personal story to its violent yet elliptical conclusion...

Piccarda has confessed to her more humble place in the heavens. Our pilgrim Dante then wants to know if she wants more. Her answer leads her to an apotheosis of the will. Everything in the universe is in harmony; all...

At long last, the first soul--or "shade"--steps forward in Paradise. She's Piccarda Donati, a figure we've already encountered once (maybe even twice) in COMEDY. Dante flatters her to speak and she begins, not with...

Dante is about to meet the first souls in Paradise, emerging from the liquid light of the moon. The poetry is lush and sensuous. The metaphors are complex and compounded. And Beatrice is a bit chilly, full of Latinisms...

Beatrice concludes her explanation for moon spots by veering away from them specifically to talk about the nature of the universe. Blessed movers turn the spheres. Or perhaps inhabit them. Or are bound to them. Or maybe...

Beatrice now launches into the true explanation for moon spots, found not in folklore, not in natural philosophy, but in metaphysics. Her explanation pushes her to disclose the parts of the universe we could never see...

Beatrice continues in her scientific and Scholastic explanation for moon spots by taking apart a secondary argument . . . and proposing an optical experiment. She voices an objection Dante might have: perhaps there are...

Beatrice begins her destruction of Dante's explanation for moon spots by taking apart his notion of dense and rare spots on the lunar surface . . . with a dizzying display of mixed metaphors. Her argument lofts to the...

Now that our pilgrim Dante is standing in the moon, he has a fundamental question: Why are there spots on the moon? And he thinks he knows the answer, right out of natural philosophy. They're caused by rare and dense...

After Dante's warning to his readers (or perhaps some of his readers), we return to the plot, ascending through the heavens to arrive at the moon . . . or really, in the moon. Dante and Beatrice find themselves inside...

Our poet steps out of the shadows with an important message: "Go home." Because PARADISO is hard. Because we might get lost. Because we're not prepared. The stark address to all readers--or perhaps to a much more...