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Canto 29
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Paradiso, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Earthly and Heavenly Justice
Creation and God’s Providence
God’s Character and Will
Vision, Knowledge, and the Pursuit of God
Language and the Ineffable
Summary
Analysis
The spheres Dante has been studying fade from his sight, and when he turns to look at Beatrice, he is overwhelmed anew by her beauty. (In fact, her smile’s sweetness is now impossible for Dante to remember as he writes.) Beatrice explains that they have left the “material spheres” behind and risen to “pure light of intellect, all love.” They are entering the Empyrean. Here Dante will see all the angels and saints.
Dante and Beatrice enter the Empyrean, which is where God, the saints, and the angels reside; it is above the nine heavenly spheres, but beyond both space and time. Dante’s inability to remember Beatrice’s beauty suggests that, in the Empyrean, a soul’s beauty is derived directly from God (“pure light”) and is therefore impossible for a mortal, like Dante, to fully absorb, much less retain in memory.
Themes
Dante finds himself enveloped in brilliant light, lifting him above his natural capacities. He now possesses strength to look at any light. He looks and sees a dazzling river of light flowing amidst springlike colors. Sparks of colors swirl, coming to rest on flowers beside the river. Beatrice encourages Dante to drink from the river in order to have his thirst for knowledge further satisfied.
Dante is about to see God directly—what’s known as the Beatific Vision. Because he is still a mortal soul, his vision must be transformed in order to make this seeing possible. In the Earthly Paradise in Purgatory, Dante had to drink from the river Lethe in order to cleanse his memories of the past. In parallel, he now drinks from a heavenly river in order to be able to understand what he is seeing now. His approach to the vision of God is gradual, requiring multiple transformations of his senses and intellect.
Themes
Dante drinks eagerly, and when he looks up again, the flowers and sparks of light have been transformed—he now sees the saints and angels before him. The river of light now takes the form of a great sphere. This light, he comes to understand, is reflected by the Primum Mobile and from there to angels, throughout the heavenly spheres, and thence to all creation. Above the sphere, Dante sees thousands of tiers of saints, forming the shape of a white rose. Beatrice shows Dante that certain long-expected souls are still to come—including that of Henry VII. Pope Clement V, meanwhile, will soon be in Hell.
At first, Dante could only see the Empyrean symbolically. Now that he’s drunk from the river of light, he sees flowers as saints and the sparks of light as ministering angels. He also sees firsthand how the light of God is distributed, by God’s providence, throughout the universe. In other words, Dante is now seeing reality as it truly is. Souls are seated on thrones arranged in the shape of a vast rose—the rose being a medieval symbol of love. Dante had great hopes that the pious Emperor Henry VII would liberate Florence and Italy from the chaos of misrule. It was under Pope Clement V that the papal see was relocated from Rome to Avignon, France, the much-lamented “Babylonian Captivity.”
Themes
