The stated theme of Paradiso is the coevality of unity and multiplicity. This theme and its many variants appear frequently in Biblical scripture, frequently as the Trinitarian formulation and as the concept of the indivisibility of the mortal and the divine, which congruence contains the absolute interrelationship of the bond of fate in its manifestation first on earthly terrain and thereafter heavenward. Bach treats of this often in his cantatas, a notable example being cantata 148, at Trinity XVII.
Dante struggles to present this coevality, the one and the many, but he did not have the plainness of fact of one earth—one compromised earth—comprising many living things and many organic interdependencies. Today, the physics have displaced and explained the metaphysics.
At first reading of Dante’s discovery that free will impedes and diverts us from unity may jar modern intellect, but today it is clear that the careless application of will is not only error but also destruction.
This theme then easily slips into the idea of transmutation, a state in which, in this canto, we find both Dante and Beatrice. If, unlike the poet, you’ve not travelled to the Empyrean, you’ll have to use your imagination of preference. Transmutation also easily moves further to rapture, and from rapture to the desire to go beyond doubt to certitude of knowledge; bearing in mind, this is not exploration but the beginning of an immediacy of awareness of what God has wrought. It is His universe.
The Pauline raptus referred to is also treated in the Bach cantatas. See cantata 48, at Trinity XIX, which discusses how the journey makes one new and whole. Structurally, Bach, like Dante, often favours the dialectic of question and answer to advance the argument; for music can also be metaphor, a formulation Bach employed long before Wagner’s quintessential use of it.