Bernard's prayer to the Virgin is one of the supreme achievements of Latin Christian poetry — a sustained hymn of praise and petition that builds steadily to its request. He addresses her as Virgin Mother, daughter of her Son, humble and exalted above every creature; the fixed point that gave human nature such nobility that its Maker did not disdain to become its making. Her womb was the furnace that ignited the love that has flowered into this Rose. Here below, she is the living noon; in Heaven, the living fountain. Bernard asks her to grant Dante the final grace of vision — that these eyes still mortal may see through to the highest joy; that after he returns to earth, his heart may preserve something of what he has seen; that his will may be guarded from all further temptation. Mary's eyes, turned toward Bernard's prayer, show that she finds it pleasing; then she turns them to the Eternal Light, and Bernard gestures: look now, Dante.
The vision. Dante looks into the light and finds, as he penetrates deeper, that all things scattered across the universe — all substance, accident, and their relation — are bound together in one volume, one book, by love. The universe is not a collection of separate objects; it is a single utterance of love, differentiated into apparent multiplicity. In the depth of that light he begins to see three circles — the Trinity: Father, Son, Spirit — each reflecting the others, each distinct, each the same substance of light. In the second circle — the Son — he glimpses, within the divine, the image of the human face: the Incarnation, the mystery that joins divinity and humanity in one Person. He cannot fathom how it fits together. He reaches for it with all the force of his mind and fails — and at that moment of failure, something from outside strikes him like lightning. Not his mind reaching up, but the divine love reaching down. And at that touch — the very last words of the Comedy — his desire and his will are already moving in the direction of love, as a wheel turns evenly, with no friction, in perfect motion: l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle — "the Love that moves the sun and all the other stars."