The ineffability of mystical experience is an ancient commonplace. Not surprisingly, Dante alludes to it often with baffled exasperation throughout his Paradiso. In Canto 3, he states that “the sweetness of eternal life” can never be understood by the intellect; rather, it must be “tasted.” This is a reference to a verse from Psalm 33, often cited by medieval mystics, “Taste and see that the Lord is good.” A century before Dante, Richard of St. Victor, among others, had adduced it to illustrate “the tasting of inner sweetness,” that dulcedo Dei which is the sweetness of God Himself. For such mystics, the experience of God was not verbal but gustatory, at once intimate and incommunicable. Hearing and seeing, touching and smelling, might play a part but they too were “spiritual senses.” God can be seen but only with “the eyes of the heart.” For Dante, when he set about composing the Paradiso, sometime around the year 1317, the inexpressibility of blessedness presented a seemingly insoluble difficulty. For the final cantica of the Divine Comedy is above all, and avowedly, a narrative of intellect; its drama arises from the struggle of “a mind emparadised” first to conceptualize, and then to articulate, the inherently indescribable. By now, Inferno and Purgatoriostood complete (though he continued to revise them), but there Dante had traversed readily imaginable terrains. We all have