3 - Bernard of Clairvaux in the Commedia

Summary

LIFE AFTER BEATRICE (PARADISO XXXI)

The narrator of Northanger Abbey famously remarks, in that novel's final chapter, that the ‘tell-tale compression’ of its pages reveals how little of her story remains to be recounted, and that she, her characters, and her reader are ‘all hastening together to perfect felicity’. Unseasoned readers of Paradiso XXXI very probably approach that canto in a similar frame of mind. At this point the mighty narrative edifice that is Dante's Commedia seems, in fact, to be almost ready for topping-out; all the expectations created by the poem itself, beginning with Virgil's own explanation of his mission and its inspiration (Inf., II. 49–74), seem to have been fulfilled, or at least to be self-evidently on the verge of fulfilment.

Virgil has led his timorous admirer, Dante personaggio, down to the lowest point of Hell, and up again through Purgatory to the Earthly Paradise, only to be supplanted there by the noisy, colourful, and psychologically shattering advent of Beatrice; and Beatrice herself has then accompanied Dante upwards, through the nine concentric spheres that make up the heaven of Christian–Ptolemaic cosmology, to arrive (Par., XXX. 38–45) ‘al ciel ch'é pura luce’ (39), in a place that is really no place, a realm that exists beyond the spatial and temporal limits of the universe, and thus offers access to unmediated experience of divine reality – the Empyrean. From here there is, literally and allegorically, nowhere else to go; the journey seems to be over, the traveller to have reached his destination, Beatrice to have kept her promise.