IT IS COMMONLY said that the Divina Commedia ends with Dante's vision of the Trinity. This will pass as a generalization, but it is not precisely true; and it is not merely a scholarly quibble to note why. When, as his journey is coming to an end, Dante sees the Trinity in the form of three differently colored circles, he notices that an image of man is depicted on the second circle, and his attention is drawn entirely to that fact; at the last he strains to understand how the circle and the image can be united, how God and man can form a unity. It is when this desire is fulfilled, through the granting of a momentary flash of intuition, that the vision comes to an end and Dante acknowledges finally the inability of his imagination to mediate what he understood.

It is entirely apt that the final vision should end in this way, for it may be said that the central quest of Dante's understanding in the poem, and indeed in his œuvre as a whole, was to grasp how the divine is present in the human. Behind the thirst for that knowledge lay the conviction, permeating all his works, that God is supremely to be discovered in human nature.