Dante's metaphysics — his understanding of reality — is very different from our own. To present Dante's ideas about the cosmos, or God, or salvation, or history, or poetry within the context of post-Enlightenment presuppositions, as is usually done, is thus to capture only imperfectly the essence of those ideas. This book argues that the recovery of Dante's metaphysics is essential if we are to resolve what has been called “the central problem in the interpretation of the Comedy. ”That problem is what to make of the Comedy's claim to the “status of revelation, vision, or experiential record — as something more than imaginative literature.” This book offers a sustained treatment of the metaphysical picture that grounds and motivates the Comedy, and of the relation between those metaphysics and Dante's poetics. The book carries this out through an examination of three notoriously complex cantos of the Paradiso, read against the background of the Neoplatonic and Aristotelian tradition from which they arise.