the conclusion of Paradiso

Instruct my tongue to utter for those to come
one memorable ember from your glorious fire!

Help me piece it together, just enough
to make an echo reverberate
through my verses
so those who read can understand
how complete, O God, is your victory.

So intense was that ray of light
I know I would have been lost if I hadn’t
focused close and held on with both eyes.

I’d have looked away
only if I’d been blown away
by the onrush of illumination.

But as the very fear of falling
makes a climber hardy, my terror lent me
impudence to go on staring
until I saw the limitless, the Real.

How generous is God, who permitted me,
unentitled, presumptuous,
to peer into bright eternity
till, looking, I truly saw

how love binds in a single volume
all the pages of the universe,

the raw stuff of reality
and all that happens to it,
the laws and the logic of what must come to be,
all overlaid, aligned, to show their coherence
—of which this description is a flickering dim hint.

The universal form, the archetype
of all existence, the total that sums up
all its meanings and ties them together
neat as a knot—I believe
I really did see it, for now, just to tell of it
makes me feel enormous joy.

To describe that single instant is more exhausting
than to retell the entire voyage of the Argo,
from the instant that first of all ships touched brine
(till then too sacred for man’s passage),

it’s wearier than it would be
to start that ancient story anew,
from its pre-beginning,
from the moment of Neptune’s amazement
at learning ship’s timber had paved his waves—

to re-create my moment is more laborious
than to reach back thirty centuries
to the days of Jason and retrace the maze
of his search for the fleece at the center of the world.

My mind was transfixed by the vision,
attentive, unthinking, contemplative,
always more eager to see
what in fact it already saw.

The light was such as you’d never willingly
look away from, for the good which is
the ultimate object of all longings
was fully there: all else presents
blurred and faulty copies of what was completely
and perfectly then present.

I’ve only a few more words to stutter;
an unweaned infant lisping first syllables
is an orator compared with me
dumbstruck by even the little I do recall.

Not because what I saw was complicated.
There couldn’t be a purer simplicity and unity
than what I witnessed in the living fire
that is and will be what it always was,

but its appearance seemed to undergo
alteration as my sight, becoming more capable,
transformed me even as I watched.

In the lofty depths of its brilliant substance
there appeared three circles of different colors,
but equally capacious: they contained the same.

One circle looked like the reflection of its fellow,
a visual echo, like a double rainbow,
while the third was like a ring of fire
exhaled by the other two.

How short my words fall, how weakly they repeat
the idea—and my idea, compared
to what I saw—to call it small
would vastly exaggerate its worth.

O eternal light, who are yourself
your only location, for nothing could contain you,
Father, whose self-awareness is the Son,
whose pleasure in your own sentience
is the Holy Spirit, your being is completed
in a threefold unity
which is the dialectic of joy—

the second circle in sequence,
conceived by the first,
which seemed a round reflection of the original,
more carefully examined, seemed to show within itself,
and of one color with itself, a human form—
a mystery commanding my complete attention.

Like the mathematician who studies the circle,
attempting to calculate exactly
the ratio of diameter to circumference,
the ever eluding exactitude
we can never quite express
however far the decimals extend,
a failure we mark with the letter pi—

that was exactly my predicament,
confronted by this unexpected image,
this vision; trying to determine
the exact relation of the figure to the circle,
how could this fit be befitting?
It was like an architect’s rendering
of the mystery of the Incarnation,
a truly vitruvian man!

By what perfect proportion could God be encompassed
by man, without either abandoning Godhead
or forfeiting humanity?

I would have lacked the wings for this farthest flight
but a flash of illumination,
surpassing understanding,
answered the question as magically
as the granting of a wish.

I can’t show you what I saw, but I’ll tell you what I felt.

My heart and mind were fully united
in a single movement truthwards.
Although in diametrically
disagreeing places,
they advanced together—
like two opposed spokes in a wheel

turned by the love that directs the cycles
of the sun and the planets and the stars.