Paradiso

Although the historical background of Beatrice is uncertain, she is commonly identified with Beatrice Portinari (c. 1266-c. 1290), a Florentine noblewoman. Dante recounts how he first saw Beatrice at the age of nine and immediately fell in love. Although he and Beatrice saw each other only a few more times and both of them married other people, Beatrice remained for Dante his ideal of womanhood and the principal inspiration for his poetry. Dante’s relationship with Beatrice continued the traditions of medieval courtly love, in which the lover (poet or knight) fostered a lofty—and often unrequited—love for a noble woman from afar.

Dante, as both poet and character, treats the figure of Beatrice as a muse. In his earlier work, La Vita Nuova (“The New Life”), Dante details his romantic obsession with Beatrice from childhood, using his feelings for Beatrice as a catalyst for exploring the experience of love, desire, and longing. When Beatrice reappears in The Divine Comedy, she is once again central to Dante’s conception of his selfhood and feelings—only this time, she enables Dante to explore spirituality and theology, leading him to a deeper understanding of his personal faith. His prior earthly love for Beatrice is therefore sublimated into a higher, spiritual one.

As a character in the Paradiso, Beatrice represents beauty, faith, theology, and divine grace. As a soul in Heaven, she is presented as a repository of heavenly wisdom and frequently instructs Dante about the things they see. Dante is willing to be instructed and even, at times, reproved by her. At the moments when Dante and Beatrice ascend to a higher sphere of Heaven, Dante typically fixes his gaze on Beatrice’s face, which becomes more beautiful at each stage of Heaven. Dante is so enraptured by Beatrice’s beauty that at one point she has to remind Dante to turn his attention to God, their true goal. Beatrice also fulfills at times a motherly role for Dante, in Cantos 22 and 23, comforting and reassuring him along his journey. Beatrice is portrayed as having preternatural knowledge: as Dante says, she “knew me as I knew myself” (1: 7), and with her heavenly insight, she is able to read his thoughts and questions before he states them.

Piccarda Donati is the first soul whom Dante meets in Heaven, in Canto 3. Due to her inconstancy during her earthly life, Piccarda occupies the moon, or the lowest sphere of Heaven; yet in spite of this, she and her fellow souls of the first sphere are perfectly happy and enjoy beatitude no less than the souls in the other heavenly spheres. Piccarda’s importance in the narrative is to introduce Dante to the idea that Heaven exists as a hierarchy and that imperfection does not preclude attaining Heaven. Piccarda’s story of breaking her monastic vows leads to Beatrice’s discourse about vows and free will, one of the major theological speeches of the poem.

Cacciaguida degli Elisei is Dante’s great-great-grandfather, whose story occupies three cantos, 15-17, thus marking him as one of the significant characters. Cacciaguida serves as a father figure and a link to Dante’s family history and the history of Florence, bringing a very personal connection to Dante’s journey in Heaven. He also serves as a link to the future by providing predictions of Dante’s fate as an exile and the political future of Italy.

The character of Cacciaguida shows that the souls in Heaven take an interest in affairs on earth, often lamenting the decline of institutions they knew during their earthly life. The Paradiso provides the only information we have on Cacciaguida as a historical figure. As someone who fought on crusade, Cacciaguida embodies a chivalrous ideal of serving and sacrificing oneself for a just cause, in contrast to the self-serving political and religious authorities Dante criticizes throughout Paradiso.

The historical St. Thomas was in many ways the inspiring intellectual force behind The Divine Comedy. Although Dante was still a child when Aquinas died, he corresponded with one of the theologian’s students, and his work shows that he absorbed Thomism. In the Paradiso, Aquinas serves as the chief representative of the heavenly sphere of the sun, reserved for Christian sages, in Cantos 10-13. By placing him in this sphere, Dante implies that the brilliance of Aquinas’s work illuminates believers and shines forth God’s truth.

Aquinas is portrayed as humble and self-effacing, speaking of his fellow theologians more than himself or his own work. Yet Aquinas’s thinking—emphasizing the compatibility of faith and reason in reaching God and beatitude—permeates the Paradiso from beginning to end.