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The Beatific Vision: What Dante Sees at the End of Paradiso and Why It Matters

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The Beatific Vision: What Dante Sees at the End of Paradiso and Why It Matters

I spent months reading Paradiso without understanding where the poem was actually going. Canto after canto of Dante ascending through spheres of light, meeting saints and theologians—it felt magnificent, but untethered. Then I grasped the Beatific Vision, and everything clicked. The entire Divine Comedy, all three canticles, exists as a single arrow pointing toward this … Read more

Count Ugolino: Cannibalism, Betrayal, and the Darkest Scene in the Inferno

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Count Ugolino: Cannibalism, Betrayal, and the Darkest Scene in the Inferno

By Lucy Bamboo I first read Canto XXXIII of Dante’s Inferno on a winter afternoon. Three weeks later, I was still thinking about it—not in the academic way literature often haunts us, but in the way genuine horror does. Count Ugolino della Gherardesca gnawing the skull of Archbishop Ruggieri is the image that broke something … Read more