The concluding chapter of Dante Aligheiri's "The Divine Comedy" is both the most practical but also the most impenetrable. Following the journeys through the "Inferno" and "Purgatorio," his final stop finds him taking a leap into the heavens. In this case, it's a journey through space as he sees celestial bodies that force him to use his most creative descriptions. Whereas the prior entries can be chalked up to recognizable iconography, this is a chance to exist among the stars, citing religious figures and virtues. This is his most optimistic and passionate, but it's also the most ellusive. For those more attracted to a spiritual realm, this poem may resonate more. For everybody else, there is this odd sense of detail and cryptic meaning that is compelling to read, but ultimately ends with the strangest happy ending of ancient literature.
The end of "Purgatorio" features Dante jumping into the heavens with his loved one. Together they wander for the rest of the story, seeing sights that appeal to an altruistic worldview. Having suffered through the conflicts of humanity, seeing Dante's perspective of the otherworldly allows for a sense of peace to emerge. Like everything else in the trilogy, the biggest success is in his ability to create images out of these ideas through descriptions that come to life with awe. It may all seem silly, especially as Dante sometimes seems self-congratulatory on surviving his own journey, but this is the only way that things were going to end. Everything was leading to pure and absolute splendor. It just so happens to require a lot of personal trust on the reader's part to envision a lot of very odd celestial bodies.
That, in itself, is the pros and cons of "Paradiso." It is the most adventurous chapter in a trilogy about curious embarkment. It's the most nakedly passionate example of religious literature that connects the sublime with the self and questions the reader's place within its larger framework. While it's underwhelming in the sense of departing from the "grounded" nature of the first two, it's the swing for the fences that make "The Divine Comedy" one of the most essential works that mankind has ever created. This may be an odd and sometimes incomprehensible chapter, but like faith itself it requires some personal interpretation to fully appreciate.
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