In Dante’s Divina Commedia (Divine Comedy), the journey through the universe represents the integration of the human intellect into the cosmos as it was envisaged at the fourteenth-century apogee of the Classical worldview. The cosmic ladder of Dante’s work stretches fully from the top to the bottom of that universe. Characteristically of afterlife narratives, there are two types of space in Dante’s Commedia. The universe that is traversed in Dante’s journey is also set forth in a revelatory vision toward the end of the work, at Paradiso XXVIII. In our final chapter, we concentrate on this vision, which is both a culmination of the afterlife vision we’ve seen elsewhere in the book, and a departure from it. Whereas the vision we see earlier is a vehicle toward psychic harmonization, the vision in Dante explores not merely the need for psychic harmonization but the difficulties of it. This is done through a series of complexifying and interlocking images, of mirror and reflection, music, rhythm and note. All of these images fall short in expressing the goal of harmony of soul and universe. Psychic harmonization can only be achieved, finally, at the price of silence. When the soul is harmonized with the universe, it is undifferentiated from it. We can no longer speak of the universe as of something outside ourselves. Thus Dante’s poem falls silent.
Music as Mirror: Dante's Treatment of Music in the Divine Comedy