Status Updates From LA DIVINA COMEDIA: Tres cán...

Paradiso XXIV imagines Heaven as an oral exam. St. Peter doesn’t ask Dante if he believes. He asks what faith is and why he believes. I appreciated that Dante refuses to pit faith against reason. For him, faith isn’t the end of thinking; it’s what carries us beyond where reason alone can go. They work together.

Paradiso XXIII reminds me that the closer Dante gets to God, the less he tries to explain and the more he simply stands in awe. When Christ finally appears, Dante barely describes Him at all and instead, he describes the effect His presence has on Heaven. Maybe some of the most important things in life aren’t meant to be explained, but experienced.

One of the most powerful moments in Paradiso comes in Canto XXII when Dante finally looks back at Earth from the heavens. The world that consumed so much of the Comedy—its politics, rivalries, ambitions, and pride—has shrunk to a tiny speck. Perspective may be the greatest gift of Paradise: the higher Dante climbs, the smaller his ego and the world’s obsessions become.

Canto XXI quietly challenges that the most important people are the busiest, loudest, or most influential. Dante enters a silent heaven where the heroes are monks, where the dominant image is a ladder disappearing into infinity, and where greatness is measured not by accomplishments but by closeness to God. After all the debates about justice & power, this canto suggests that the highest ascent begins in stillness.

Paradiso XX is Dante at his most humbling. The people we expect to find in Heaven are there but so are a pagan emperor and an almost-forgotten Trojan from the Aeneid. Dante’s point isn’t that justice is arbitrary; it’s that God’s vision is far larger than ours. History remembers the famous. God remembers the just.

The Catholic Church would not dare ban The Divine Comedy because to try to burn a painting, to tear down an artwork, would be to go against God.

Truth and Beauty. First and foremost, art is an intense, emotional experience. It then goes into you, opens you, and allows for the entry of ideas into you. Over time. Your perception of reality changes. That is why the Divine Comedy was proof of God. Because God could enter you, and God could transform the way you saw the world.

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