In Canto XVIII of Paradiso, Dante sees thirty-five letters of Scripture - LOVE JUSTICE, YOU WHO RULE THE EARTH - 'painted' one after the other in the sky. It is an epiphany that encapsulates the Paradiso, staging its ultimate goal - the divine vision. This book offers a fresh, intensive reading of this extraordinary passage at the heart of the third canticle of the Divine Comedy. While adapting in novel ways the methods of the traditional lectura Dantis, William Franke meditates independently on the philosophical, theological, political, ethical, and aesthetic ideas that Dante's text so provocatively projects into a multiplicity of disciplinary contexts. This book demands that we question not only what Dante may have meant by his representations, but also what they mean for us today in the broad horizon of our intellectual traditions and cultural heritage.

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) is one of the greatest European writers, whose untrammelled imaginative capacity was matched by a huge base in embracing the science of his era. His texts also paint compelling visual images. In Visions of Heaven, renowned scholar Martin Kemp investigates Dante's supreme vision of divine light and its implications for the visual artists who were the inheritors of Dante's vision. The whole book may be regarded as a new Paragone (comparison), the debate that began in the Renaissance about which of the arts is superior. Dante's ravishing accounts of divine light set painters the severest challenge, which took them centuries to meet. A major theme running through Dante's Divine Comedy, particularly in its third book, the Paradiso, centres on Dante's acts of seeing (conducted according to optical rules with respect to the kind of visual experience that can be accomplished on earth) and the overwhelming of Dante's earthly senses by heavenly light, which does not obey his rules of earthly optics. The repeated blinding of Dante by excessive light sets the tone for artists' portrayal of unseeable brightness.

IT is a true saying, and one experienced and proved by us all, that we rise to higher things on the stepping stones of our dead selves. The life of man is a continual change of vision; as experiences come to him one after another, it is as if he rose from one level to another as he climbs up a mountain side, and therefore his vision steadily changes. We recognise that there are two kinds of vision possible for us, that of the ordinary man of the world, and that other vision which is presented to us by the great leaders of humanity, the founders of the religions. But we are apt to imagine that that lofty vision of the great teachers is something reserved for them alone, that we men in these lower levels are not capable of a divine vision. Yet the whole purpose of the message of Theosophy is to show that what the greatest of mankind has achieved shall some day be the achievement of every human being. In the course of these three lectures I shall try to show how there is possible for us a divine vision of man, of nature, and of God.