Significance Of Light In Dante's Paradiso

‘To Make Still Finer Mirrors of My Eyes’: Transformative Light in Dante’s Paradiso

In medieval thought every star in the cosmos took its light from the sun, the brightest light in the universe. In Paradiso Dante engages in this belief, allegorizing it to represent God as the sun and the rest of creation as the stars. By using overt theological metaphors for light, mirrors, and reflections, he constructed a hierarchy of light in which God, the Living Light and the source of all light in the universe, is the purest form of light and as such reflects divine light on to the rest of creation. The eyes of Beatrice, Dante, and God are metaphorical and literal mirrors, vehicles for divine light. Through close readings of the use of mirrors, the river

Everything within the universe is part of this hierarchy because everything has its own “impulse”—its own inclination that is either earthly or celestial (Pa.I.101-102, 114). This hierarchy of light suggests that Dante’s transition from earth to heavenly paradise is possible because his impulse originates from God, or from the Light. Within the universal order, Beatrice says, “[E]very nature has its bent, according to a different station, nearer or less near its origin” (Pa.I.109-111). Thus, earthly creatures like Dante, at least until the moment he and Beatrice ascend from purgatory to paradise, have impulses toward earthly light because they are closer to the earth than they are to the divine. Dante can change his impulse from earthly to divine through the transformative light that initially touches him on his ascent to

“A mirror,” Allen Tate writes, “is an artifact of the practical intellect, and as such can be explained by natural law: but there is no natural law which explains man as a mirror reflecting the image of God” (Tate 275). Dante, Tate concludes, gives mirrors their transformative symbolism rather than uses their preexisting symbolism. One of the most important moments that mark the beginning stages of Dante’s transhumanisation is the three mirrors experiment first mentioned in Canto II. Dante’s fascination with mirrors originates from Pseudo-Dionysius, who structured the cosmos “into a cascade of illuminations by presenting the angelic hierarchies as mirrors which received and transmitted divine light” (Gilson 245). The extent of Dante’s direct contact with Dionysius’ works is not known, but Dionysius’ preoccupation with angelic intervention had become popular by the time Dante was writing the Commedia (Gilson 245). Medieval mirrors themselves were markedly different than the smooth glass reflectors common today, with most of the mirrors Dante would have had access to more closely resembling polished pieces of metal that gave distorted reflections rather than perfectly clear ones (Miller 264). In contrast, Beatrice’s proposed three mirrors experiment is meant to bring clarity and not distortion to Dante’s question about the dark spots on the moon. This doubling of meaning is characteristic of mirrors