Paradiso: structure

Dante's vision of the Afterlife

Dante’s concept of paradise is like a rose–earth in the center, with concentric heavenly spheres radiating outward like petals on a rose. All of the heavenly spheres have a planetary theme: the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun (yes, it was the 1300s and Dante was a poet), Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the “fixed stars”, i.e. the Zodiac, and the “Primum Mobile”. All of these spheres are sort of floating around in a concept of space called the Empyrean, a.k.a. God.

Many things have been said about Dante’s vision of heaven, with emotions ranging from reverence to rage. I agree with commentator Mary Campbell when she rages against the strict order of Paradiso.

“This narrator is an implacable taxonomist, who knows exactly how much heaven to dole out to whom, who can only imagine the sublime of transcendence as a set of gradations and promotions, of places we will know and keep.”*

I see her point, and to some extent brush it off on the grounds that the Dante narrator is pretty much a self-righteous jerk throughout the Commedia, putting his enemies in Hell and his benefactors in Heaven, that sort of thing.

What I appreciate about Paradiso is its contribution to Dante’s overall structure of the afterlife/otherworld. Hell is a concentric ring, too, but each ring gets deeper and more painful with more souls squashed in tighter together. At the centermost ring, the bottom of the pit of Hell, lies Satan, arguably the most tormented soul in the entirety of Hell. Dante’s Heaven is built in reverse: Still concentric circles, but the further out you get, the closer you get to God or Divine Revelation. In terms of structure, I think it’s a beautiful image, a constant cosmic expansion as a way to touch the divine.

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On another note entirely, transcribing is hard. I salute the fine people who do it for a living. I have transcribed about 1.2 of the Paradiso interviews, and will post the first part of the first one tomorrow. In deference to Dante, I am choosing one of the planets to be the theme of each interview. In deference to my own schedule, I am not posting them in order of Dante’s rings. I am starting out with an interview that I decided most closely matches the theme of Justice, which Dante explores in the sphere of Jupiter.

And so! Tomorrow: Justice.

*from an essay by Campbell originally published in The Poet’s Dante; ed. Peter S. Hawkins and Rachel Jacoff; Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001.