 However, even if these two complications both hinder any straightforward assessment of the the Divine Comedy’s understanding of the nature of philosophy, they permit a more modest conclusion about one of the fundamental features of the poem. That is, if it is safe to say that the dramatic context that unfolds in the relationship between Beatrice and the pilgrim troubles our attempts to understand the Divine Comedy’s treatment of philosophy, then it is nevertheless also safe to say that there is a philosophical lesson to be derived from the way in which the text troubles our attempts to understand it. In particular, even while the Divine Comedy explicitly defends the superiority of a contemplative path to salvation, nevertheless the poem also stimulates the will of the reader by confronting her with the unsettling realization that the doctrinal content defended in the poem’s explicitly philosophical register is to a certain extent illusory in its veracity and therefore of questionable value to the attempt to follow the intellectual path that is mapped out in that register. Fortunately, this illusory nature of the doctrinal content may be irrelevant to the way in which the reader’s engagement with the poem actually generates meaning through a process that does, in any case, always demand rigorous philosophical thinking. This is because the poem is structured by the conviction that there can be no hope of achieving any of our possible perfections without constantly exposing ourselves, especially in our shared activity of reading, to the anxious experience of wonder—an experience that is heightened and sustained by simultaneously striving for philosophical rigor and acknowledging it limitations.