Dante must travel through Hell because there is that of Hell in himself. But his journey through Hell is not for him infernal, for Hell exists only for those eternally condemned there, and he, with Virgil, is but passing through. But it is still a transforming journey for Dante, and necessarily so. For him, the journey is purgatorial, not infernal, ascetical, not punitive. Is Dante’s journey possible? If Aquinas is right then no: For Hell’s condemnation is eternal and irreversible, and what you can make a fixed-time journey through cannot be Hell.

Here Dante, not yet dead, is in Paradise. His participation premortem in the knowledge and love of Heaven, and so in its community, is experienced as the “mystical,” which, earthbound, points to the reality that transcends the earth. And if Paradiso is by way of its narrative the articulation of Dante’s mystical theology it is so in a style that seems to owe much to that of St. Bonaventure, a distinctive feature of which is that he brings together all the steps on the way to a mystical union from the lowest “purgative” disciplines of the senses and through the reform of intellect, memory, and will, into the final vision of God. This theological epistemology allows Dante to conceive of Paradise as holding together the two dimensions of Heaven as at once an eternal journey of learning, an ultimate paideia, and a vision finally achieved.

With Purgatory we readers are at home. It is a place of hope, less a place of punishment due and more a place of conversion. And a comparison between Dante’s conversion in Purgatory in the hands, ultimately, of Beatrice, and Augustine’s conversion as recorded in Confessions allows us to see Purgatorio as moving progressively out of a place of moral reform and the rejection of the vices that formed the structure of Hell, and more a place of an wholesale transformation, a place of illumination.

Some find the theology of an eternal punishment to be morally repugnant and theologically without warrant. But even if such is true of traditional doctrines of Hell, typified by those of Aquinas, it is not implausible to read Inferno as an “anti-narrative,” among other reasons because the literatures that write of a truly infernal mentality – for example,that of Dr. Faustus in Marlowe’s play – are vastly significant and their significance would not be lost even were Hell as an eternal condition impossible. For an infernal will is psychologically possible, even if the Hell willed is impossible as an existent state of affairs.

In Purgatory where Dante learns how all the purposes of the journey thus far which had progressed from the terrifying dark mountainside, through Hell and into Purgatory, are achieved in his finally passing beyond the whole purgatorial mentality itself into a place of the recovery of the original innocence of Eden. Here Dante learns from Beatrice that the burdens of sin can be finally laid down in the Earthly Paradise, and that he should now have learned, at last, how to smile. For here, she says, sin no longer has any place on the agenda of Dante’s recovery, which takes the form of a redemptive act of memory, recalling the innocence lost in Eden; and now, with the recovery of that true memory, he is now able truly to narrate the journey thus far. Now he can write the Comedy.

Bodily images – smiles (especially those of Beatrice), music, and silences – are key elements of the language of this celestial pedagogy that are also those of Heaven’s essential nature. Smiles: It was in Purgatory that Beatrice reprimanded Dante for his grim seriousness (see Chapter 5). In Paradiso 33 Dante learns why: It is that smiles originate in the Trinity itself: They are what make God to be a trinity. And silence: Now Satan’s silence is seen as the opposite of Heaven’s and the two “apophaticisms,” of Heaven and Hell, embrace the whole of language, and all poetry, that finds its place between those two silences. And for Peter Damien Heaven’s silence is that of music, reflecting Boethius’s belief that each of the cosmic spheres emit a note, the conjunction of which is a celestial silence. And the last of word of all, Dante says, the word that moves his will, is the Word made flesh. For what moves his will is what that moves the sun and the other stars, the Word made human.

Dante’s Comedy is a work of theology, done by way of a fictional journey through Hell and Purgatory to Paradise. Did Dante really make that journey? Of course he did. The journey is made by way of the fictional narrative describing it, and this way of enacting a truth by way of its description shares something with the sacramental act that makes to be so that which it signifies, or perhaps better, in the sort of way that the interpretation of Scripture is part of the efficacy of the scriptural word. Dante needed poetry to record that journey, and the poetry was how he traveled. In this way his poetry is a lived interpretation of a Christian journey, and the journey recorded is the journey made.