Paradiso 14 begins with a geometric structure, captured in the rhetorical pattern known as chiasmus . The word pattern is reflecting, or ...

Paradiso 14 provokes questions - here are just a couple: The canto unfolds in two segments of 33 lines each. The first segment has Beatri...

A brief look back at the Sun, and a quick look ahead to Mars. The main story of the five cantos of the Sun delineates in great detail the...

As the cantos of the Sun come to an end with Paradiso 13-14, the density and richness of the text seem to grow exponentially. There is sim...

Dante devotes five cantos to the Sun - Paradiso 10-14. We've looked at the first three to some extent ( here , here , and here) , and t...

In Paradiso 12 , a second wheel appears, encircling the first. We do not yet know who belongs to this group, and the other day we had diffi...

We look at Francis's  Povertà  and see lack, vacancy. As when we try to look at the logic and conclusions of Providence: La provedenz...

This scene from book 5 of Lucan's Pharsalia is placed here for ease of reference for the discussion in this blog post . It's the s...

The five cantos of the Sun (Par. 10-14) open with the Trinity, and with the chiastic (X-shaped) intersection of the celestial equator and t...

One is lost in conjecture as to the motive which impelled Dante , the admirer of Thomism , to place in the mouth of St. Thomas Aquinas th...

Between the address to the reader in Paradiso 10 and the next line, which begins Lo ministro maggior della natura The greatest of the ...

Paradiso 10 begins a new moment in this canticle. We are in the Sun, and no shadow from Earth reaches this far -- as such, it is a place ...