This book argues that Paradiso – Dante’s vision of Heaven – is not simply affirmative. It posits that Paradiso compensates for disappointment rather than fulfils hopes, and where it moves into joy and vision, this also rationalises the experience of exile and the failure of all Dante’s political hopes. The book highlights and addresses a fundamental problem in reading Dante: the assumption that he writes as a Catholic Christian, which can be off-putting and induces an overly theological and partisan reading in some commentary. Accordingly, the study argues that Dante must be read now in a post-Christian modernity. It discusses Dante's Christianity fully, and takes its details as a source of wonder and beauty which need communicating to a modern reader. Yet, the study also argues that we must read for the alterity of Dante’s world from ours.

Self-reflection, as the hallmark of the modern age, originates more profoundly with Dante than with Descartes. This book rewrites modern intellectual history, taking Dante’s lyrical language in Paradiso as enacting a Trinitarian self-reflexivity that gives a theological spin to the birth of the modern subject already with the Troubadours. The ever more intense self-reflexivity that has led to our contemporary secular world and its technological apocalypse can lead also to the poetic vision of other worlds such as those experienced by Dante. Facing the same nominalist crisis as Duns Scotus, his exact contemporary and the precursor of scientific method, Dante’s thought and work indicate an alternative modernity along the path not taken. This other way shows up in Nicholas of Cusa’s conjectural science and in Giambattista Vico’s new science of imagination as alternatives to the exclusive reign of positive empirical science. In continuity with Dante’s vision, they contribute to a reappropriation of self-reflection for the humanities.

Dr Kirkpatrick analyses Dante's Paradiso through the language, organisation of the poem, and religious and philosophical belief.

Desirable Belief: A Theology of Eros is a work of critical and constructive theology informed by the phenomenon of erotic love. Within the Christian tradition, passion has long been associated with sinful lust, incurring shaming and accusations of narcissism. Contemporary theologies of eros, on the other hand, extol sexual desire as God-given, even sacred. This book eschews these two extremes through an examination of the complexities of love and desire, as narrated in biblical texts, allegorized by church fathers, manifested in the lives of mystics, analyzed in psychodynamic theory, and depicted in poetry, literature, and Christian art. The volume pairs writers on love as different as Augustine and Jane Austen or Angela of Foligno and Simone de Beauvoir. Desirable Belief argues that eros is human and, as such, informs the Chalcedonian claim of Christ as fully God and fully human. A christological perspective that takes eros into account, in turn, affects the doctrine of the bodily ascension of Christ, the nature of resurrected bodies in heaven, and whether trinitarian impassibility is still a coherent concept.

`In the world of Dante scholarship, there is a real need for studies such as The Poetics of Dante's Paradiso, which challenge our notions of the principal souls of the Paradiso. Rooted in a close analysis of the poem, Massimo Verdicchio's intelligent interpretation is supported by relevant textual evidence and provides an important counterpoint to the canonical readings of the cantica. Traditional readings of Dante's Paradiso have largely considered this third cantica of the Commedia as a poem apart. It deals with those blessed souls in Paradise who are free of sin and beyond punishment, in contrast to the sinners in the previous two cantica, and is thus no longer based on the principle of contrapasso. At the literal level this is true in that all the characters one encounters are either those who have been saved, religious leaders, or saints. However, at the allegorical level, as Massimo Verdicchio argues in The Poetics of Dante's Paradiso, the blessed souls still have something to hide, something shameful in their past earthly life, which is revealed nonetheless. In this book, Verdicchio provides a canto-by-canto analysis of Paradiso. He maintains that the cantica can allegorically be seen as a commentary on the political and religious establishment, framed as the punitive action of the DXV announced at the end of Purgatorio, denouncing the illicit and destructive alliance between the House of Anjou and the Church. Verdicchio focuses on the relationship that Dante establishes among the ten heavens, into which the poet divides the cantica and their equivalent in the Arts and Sciences of the Trivium and Quadrivium, as outlined in the Convivio. This approach provides the key to interpreting the cantos and the discourse of the inhabitants of Paradise who appear, on the surface, blameless. However, it is the earthly and human side of the blessed souls that captures Dante's attention, and this dichotomy is revealed in his characterization of the heavens. Poetic allegory and irony are the two principal modes of this cantica, and the source of much of its comedic complexity. As one of the characters puts it, in Heaven `we do not repent but we smile.' A highly original and comprehensive reading, The Poetics of Dante's Paradiso demonstrates that the intricacies of Dante's text reveal subversive undercurrents and a subtle irony, employed to deliver a critique of the Church and Empire of his own time.

With his journeys through Hell and Purgatory complete, Dante is at last led by his beloved Beatrice to Paradise. Where his experiences in the Inferno and Purgatorio were arduous and harrowing, this is a journey of comfort, revelation, and, above all, love-both romantic and divine. Robert Hollander is a Dante scholar of unmatched reputation and his wife, Jean, is an accomplished poet. Their verse translation with facing-page Italian combines maximum fidelity to Dante's text with the artistry necessary to reflect the original's virtuosity. They have produced the clearest, most accurate, and most readable translation of the three books of The Divine Comedy, with unsurpassable footnotes and introductions, likely to be a touchstone for generations to come.

A bold study that reveals Dante's medieval vision of Scripture as theophany through pioneering use of contemporary theory and phenomenology.

A Stanford University Press classic.

In The Paradiso, Dante explores the goal of human striving: the merging of individual destiny with universal order. One of the towering creations of world literature, this epic discovery of truth is a work of mystical intensity? an immortal hymn to God, Nature, Eternity, and Love.