What is heaven for? The last third of Dante's Divine Comedy has been seen as the most alien to the modern mind-set. Paradise is often understood as somewhere else, which can make its relevance to the here-and-now seem tangential, even suspect. Just as all stories are illuminated from their end, Paradiso gives us not only a vista in retrospect, but also a glimpse of the underlying pattern of the phenomenal world. It is, therefore, not "elsewhere" so much as another way of reading what appears before us. What heaven is for is analogous to what literature is for.

Alison Cornish is currently Professor of Italian Studies at New York University and President of the Dante Society of America. Before that, she taught at the University of Michigan for 23 years. Her latest book, Believing in Dante, was published by Cambridge University Press this past year (2022).