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Paradise LostWhy doesn't anyone read Dante's Paradiso?

By Robert P. Baird
Posted Monday, Dec. 24, 2007, at 8:10 AM ET
Illustration by Charlie Powell. Click image to expand.

Dante's Paradiso is the least read and least admired part of his Divine Comedy. The Inferno's nine circles of extravagant tortures have long captured the popular imagination, while Purgatorio is often the connoisseur's choice. But as Robert Hollander writes in his new edition of the Paradiso, "One finds few who will claim (or admit) that it is their favorite cantica." (A cantica, or canticle, is one of the three titled parts of the poem.) The time is ripe to reconsider Paradiso's neglect, however, since three major new translations of the poem we know as the Divine Comedy are coming to completion. (Dante simply called it his Comedy; in what was perhaps the founding instance of publishing hype, divine was added by a Venetian printer in 1555.) Hollander's edition, produced with his wife, Jean, was published this summer, and two more are due out next year: one by Robin Kirkpatrick and the other—the one I'm holding out for—by Robert M. Durling and Ronald L. Martinez.

What keeps people from the Paradiso? For one, it lacks the Inferno's irony. The characters Dante meets in hell know the circumstances of their sins, but with few exceptions, they can't see the justice in their punishments. The tension between their knowledge and ours generates a kind of dramatic irony familiar to modern readers: the irony of the unreliable narrator. Another problem is narrative: The Purgatorio is almost too successful in wrapping things up, so that by the end of the second canticle, Dante has done almost everything that seemed worth doing. He's crossed hell and climbed Mount Purgatory, he's purged himself of his own sins, and he's come face to face with Beatrice, the woman on account of whom his whole journey was undertaken. It doesn't help matters that for most of the Paradiso, Beatrice acts more like a schoolmarm than a lover, delivering long speeches that read like lectures in Scholastic theology.

When it comes down to it, though, the real problem modern readers have with the Paradiso is the idea of heaven itself. T.S. Eliot noted almost 80 years ago that "we have (whether we know it or not) a prejudice against beatitude as material for poetry." As the quote suggests, our trouble with heaven is less a problem of belief than it is a problem of imagination. From the opening lines of Anna Karenina on down, all our best literature teaches us that narrative thrives on adversity, and so heaven presents itself as little more than a blank screen of beatific blandness, eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. (Consider, by contrast, how successfully hell has been deployed as a metaphor for modern life: Under the Volcano, The Invisible Man, The Descent of Alette, not to mention "The Waste Land.")

At first glance, Dante's nine spheres of heaven look to be exactly the kind of bright, boring place we'd expect. When the pilgrim meets Piccarda in the heaven of the moon, the lowest of the nine, he asks why she doesn't wish to be higher up, to be nearer to God. Piccarda replies (in Jean Hollander's translation), "Brother, the power of love subdues our will/ so that we long for only what we have/ and thirst for nothing else." A statement like this would seem to drain the Paradiso of all possible interest: wanting only what one has may be admirable in life but it hardly bodes well for literature.

Dante's heaven is certainly bright—light is the central metaphor of the canticle—but it's far from boring. In fact, one of the major achievements of the Paradiso is that Dante is able to create drama out of people getting along. Contrary to the individualist slant of many contemporary visions of the afterlife, Dante's heaven is insistently social, and the souls of the blessed take great pains to show what a happy society they have up there, even to the point of performing stunning audiovisual choreographies like this one, which spells out the opening words of the biblical Book of Wisdom:

… radiant within their lights, the holy creatures
sang as they flew and shaped themselves
in figures, now D, now I, now L.
…
DILIGITE IUSTITIAM—these letters,
placed together, verb and noun, came first,
QUI IUDICATIS TERRAM, last.

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Robert P. Baird is a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago and the co-editor of Chicago Review.
Illustration by Charlie Powell.
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Remarks from the Fray:

As a longtime Dante fan, when I've had the opportunity to host Blawg Review, the carnival of legal blogging, I drew my themes from the Comedy. The first two were based on Inferno and Purgatorio; the third, published recently, was based on Paradiso. In preparing that most recent Blawg Review, I found that my memory of Paradiso was pretty hazy and I took the opportunity to reread it for the first time in several years.

It struck me how different modern readers are from Dante's contemporary intended audience. Whereas we're looking for entertainment or intellectual stimulation, he wrote these works not to entertain but to enlighten. Dante meant these works as serious testaments rather than as fictional poetry.

Hell has become more fascinating for us for the reasons you've outlined. Our culture has made us less literal-minded, particularly where spiritual matters are concerned. Without a strong interest in Catholic spirituality or in Dante's poetry, there's simply not as much to capture a modern reader's attention in Paradiso. For non-Catholics in particular, it's far easier for us to (superficially) contemplate our own behaviors and what clever punishments might await us in Hell than to relate to the saved souls who reside in the spheres of Dante's Heaven.

To modern sensibilities, viewing these works as works of literature rather than religious works, things just get less interesting the higher you go.

--Colin Samuels

(To reply, click here.)

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