Serena Sigillito turns to Dante for an example of how to change people’s minds and bring them to truth. It starts with love. Excerpt:

Dante needed to acquire the rational understanding of love imparted by Virgil and learn to conform his will to reason. But there is something much more mysterious going on over the course of his journey: Dante is also learning the art of love. As the poem demonstrates, this is an art that requires a community. Dante can’t learn the right way to love alone, or all at once. He must begin by loving the people and things whose beauty he can apprehend, because, although desire for God is the source of all attraction to beauty, God’s unmediated goodness and glory would overwhelm Dante’s senses if he attempted to behold them too soon.

The Paradiso is overflowing with sublime imagery of light. In fact, one of Beatrice’s most important roles is to act as a reflector of God’s light, dimming it down enough so that Dante isn’t blinded by its intensity. Gradually, in his journey through the Paradiso, Dante’s sight is conditioned and his ability to love expanded until he is finally able to gaze upon and participate in the indescribable mystery of God’s eternal love. It is only when the entire communion of saints turns to Mary and pleads for Dante, that his “sight, becoming pure / [is] able to penetrate the ray of Light more deeply – that Light, sublime, which in Itself is true.” With the aid of their prayers and the intercession of Mary, he finally reaches the goal of all humanity: contemplation of “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.”

Just like Dante, every person has the capacity to open himself to truths that are bigger than our minds can initially fathom. We can often lose sight of the fact that the answers to political questions on abortion or marriage, for example, are based on understandings of the nature of human life and love that are just too big and too profound for us to grasp all at once. The process of changing someone’s mind on such questions will probably be slow, but it can be helped along by relationships that, in love, persistently ask others to reconsider the philosophical foundations of their beliefs.

This is such a good piece; please do read the whole thing. I was explaining to one of my children yesterday that the Virgin Mary sent St. Lucia to Beatrice, who sent Virgil to Dante, because in his condition in the dark wood, Dante couldn’t have received anyone but Virgil. In order to accomplish Dante’s own salvation, and the renewal of his soul and mind, Dante had to have his understanding of love rebuilt from the ground up. As I mentioned here the other day, many people today who haven’t encountered the Commedia think of it as a catalogue of sins, and nothing but. Not true! It is a poem about Love and its working. As Sigillito writes in her essay, one philosophical heart of the poem is the view that the source of all good things and all evil things is love — love perfected, or love corrupted. Dante’s rebirth comes when he learns how to discern between the two, and to rightly order his own love.

Reading Dante helped save my life by pulling me out of my own dark wood, and doing so not by giving me a lecture about how I ought to re-order my way of seeing the world. Had I read all these philosophical points in a non-fiction book, I would have nodded along approvingly, but I wouldn’t really have taken them into my moral imagination the way I was able to by going on the journey with Dante the pilgrim. It is a journey of conversion; the drama is in what happens to Dante’s own soul as he makes this pilgrimage. If it were merely a matter of teaching moral, theological, and metaphysical principles, the Commedia would still stand as a stellar example of medieval moralistic literature, but that would be about it. The Commedia is much, much more than that. I wouldn’t have been able to bear gazing directly on the truths I needed to encounter to turn my own life around — not because they were too intense and painful, but because without realizing it, I had built up certain defenses against allowing them to penetrate deeply. The Commedia evaded my defenses by taking the long way home.

Anyway, Sigillito’s essay will be controversial because she uses it to talk briefly about why our contemporary understanding of homosexuality is wrong, but also why so many attempts by social and religious conservatives to argue against it go wrong as well.

[H/T: Prufrock, to which if you don’t subscribe (for free!), you’re missing out]