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Canto 32
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
St. Bernard beseeches the Virgin Mary to grant Dante grace to be able to behold God directly, strengthening his sight for this and purifying his heart for the life he will lead thereafter. At Bernard’s beckoning, Dante looks, his sight “becoming pure and wholly free,” into the light. His seeing outstrips his ability to see or even to remember what he sees.
With Mary’s intercession, the story is brought full circle—it was because of Mary’s pity that Beatrice initially summoned Virgil to lead Dante through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. Mary’s intercession allows Dante, at last, to look upon the light of God directly—an experience that transcends intellect, language, and memory.
Themes
As he writes about this experience, Dante prays for grace to convey some “spark” of what he saw. When he gazed into the eternal light, Dante felt that he saw, contained within the light, all the pages of a single book, scattered throughout the universe, yet now bound together. When that light strikes a soul, that soul cannot choose to look elsewhere—for the light gathers up all goodness.
Dante’s vision of God has two parts. In this first part, Dante sees all of diverse creation gathered up and bound together within God. In this way, Dante sees how God’s providence holds creation together with the ultimate purpose of uniting all things in himself. This also means that all goodness—the ultimate desire of the will—is contained within God, and when a soul fixes its gaze on that goodness, it can’t desire anything else.
Themes
The longer Dante gazes, he begins to perceive, deeper within the light, three mutually encircling spheres of the same size and different colors—one mirrored by the second (appearing like twin rainbows), and the third appearing as fire, flaming out from the other two. Deep inside this “inter-circulation,” in the second sphere that reflects the first, Dante thinks he perceives the human form. Dante finds that although his mind reaches its limits, his desire is satisfied. His will and desire now move in harmony with the “love that moves the sun and other stars.”
In this second part of Dante’s vision of God, he gets a fleeting glimpse of God himself. He sees three interconnected circles—the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (the Trinity). In the second circle, he briefly perceives Christ’s human nature united to his divine nature—but at this point, the light of God overwhelms him, and he can neither see nor desire to see anything more. Though Dante’s ability to fully convey such a transcendent vision must fail, he has achieved the goal of such vision—perfect harmony with God. Paradiso, like Inferno and Purgatorio, ends with the word “stars,” with Dante now having attained the heavenly goal he sought all along.
Themes
