I’ve received lots of great feedback from all over about my related Dante essays for TAC (that one is here) and for the Wall Street Journal (that one is here). One of my favorite e-mails is from a college professor and eminent Dantist with whom I’ve been exchanging letters since the Journal piece appeared last week. I mentioned to him in an e-mail last night that a New York publishing friend told me a couple of days ago that there is less interest in Dante’s popular appeal than there ought to be in American publishing because the Commedia is all mixed up with God. “It is impossible to overstate how anti-God New York has become,” said my friend, who is neither Christian nor pious.

I passed that observation along to the Dantist, who responded:

We are in the middle of Paradiso in my Dante class.  Yesterday I talked about the Trinity, about Francis and the Stigmata, about the virtues of poverty and humility, about apocalyptic readings of history–it would be hard to find a space in the class where we were not doing hardcore God talk, as indeed it is hard to find a place in Paradiso where there is no hardcore God talk.  This at a very secular state university with kids who wouldn’t be caught dead in church (along with some kids who are observant.  More of the former than the latter.)  But they are all dying to hear this kind of stuff and talk about it. Dante gives them a free pass, the way nothing else does. This is what tone-deaf editors don’t get. These tone-deaf editors need to know, by analogy, that this is the stuff folks who buy books want to read and talk about.  They really don’t respond to Dante because they want to know more about Guelfs and Ghibellines.

Man, does that ever make me excited about the book I’m planning to write, which I’ve tentatively titled, How Dante Can Save Your Life. I really like theology and philosophy, but Dante opened up avenues of thought and insight about God, the good life, and the nature of reality that I never would have considered had I not stumbled into the Commedia. My task in this book is to help ordinary readers, religious and secular, connect Dante with their own lives and struggles, and to show them what I learned in my own journey through the Commedia: that the walk Dante took is the walk we all must take, in some sense, and that it is a journey that can and will change you, if you open your mind and your heart to the joy, the beauty, and the wisdom in this amazing poem.

Dante keeps paying dividends. Just yesterday I happened across this essay about quantum entanglement and time. It has nothing at all to do with Dante, but it did make me reflect on the phenomenon of quantum entanglement. Ever heard of it? An interview with science historian Brian Clegg illuminates it for laymen. Excerpt:

What is quantum entanglement?

Entanglement is a strange feature of quantum physics, the science of the very small. It’s possible to link together two quantum particles — photons of light or atoms, for example — in a special way that makes them effectively two parts of the same entity. You can then separate them as far as you like, and a change in one is instantly reflected in the other. This odd, faster than light link, is a fundamental aspect of quantum science. Erwin Schrödinger, who came up with the name “entanglement” called it “the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics.”

What does this have to do with Dante? Yesterday, thinking about quantum entanglement, I recalled the way the souls in Dante’s Paradiso, who are filled with God, are completely transparent to each other, such that they can read each other’s thoughts instantaneously. You might say that that they are entangled in a way analogous to quantum entanglement. (Note well that I’m talking in poetic, literary terms; I don’t think the Commedia is a science text.)

You read this in Paradiso, and you think back to Canto V of Inferno, one of Dante’s first encounters in Hell. It’s the famous canto in which the pilgrim Dante meets Francesca and Paolo, two adulterous lovers condemned to Hell for their affair. For her damnable affair, Francesca blames overwhelming passion, stoked by her and Paolo reading amorous literature — including Dante’s love poetry. It is clear to the reader that Francesca is trying to dodge accountability for her actions. What is not so clear, at least not yet, to most readers is that Dante himself is implicated in her damnation, through his poetry. He is not at fault, to be clear, but he is entangled with her wretched fate.

The Commedia is about Dante’s journey into ultimate reality, into a state — in Paradise — in which the true nature of all things is unveiled. Over the long arc of the poem, Dante grows in awareness of how sin blinds us all. For Dante, sin is anything that separates us from God, which is to say, from Reality. When we love created things more than we love God, or in a disordered way, that is sin. One characteristic of sin is its way of separating us from God and from each other. In Hell, all of the damned are horribly, eternally alone, even if they dwell in the company of others — because in life, they chose themselves over God. In Heaven, the blessed are blissfully present to each other, and live with and inside each other, because they are all united in the fullness of God. This is why they exist in Heaven in a state of paradox: fully themselves, yet fully united to God, and therefore to each other.

Heavy stuff, I know! I bring it up here simply to point out broadly how reading Dante gives rise to fruitful speculation by making connections that aren’t immediately apparent, and to point out in particular how quantum physics helped me better understand Dante’s message. By considering the thought that all of us, every created being, is entangled with other created beings, and entangled with the Ultimate Being, one may perceive something deeply true about the nature of reality. That same Dante prof with whom I’ve been corresponding strongly recommended to me a book by Notre Dame professor Christian Moevs, called The Metaphysics of Dante’s Comedy. I bought it on Kindle last night and have read the first chapter.

Moevs says that we can’t really understand the Comedy‘s message unless we understand Dante’s metaphysics, which are so alien to those of our own post-Enlightenment age. Moevs:

For Dante, truth cannot be a set of beliefs or ideas; nor can it ultimately be a claim about how things are in this world, or in another. In Dante’s understanding, truth must transcend language, concepts, history, facts, all finite being, or else it would be contingent and relative: not truth.

In Dante, Moevs continues, all reality exists in God; there is no existence apart from God. Within space-time — that is, outside of the realm of the eternal — we finite creatures are “alienated from or opaque to the reality that gives (us) existence.” In other words, our mortality, our fallenness, keeps us from seeing and accepting reality as it is: divine, and the fruit of divine love. Moevs again:

If, hypnotized by their spatiotemporal form, humans experience themselves only as ephemeral bodies and identities, they are lost in eternal night and desire; if, following Christ, they turn their mind or awareness back on itself, surrendering all worldly attachment and greed (cupidigia), they can come to experience themselves as (one with) the reality that spawns all possible experience, immune to birth and death. Awakening to the morning of an eternal springtime, they return to their true home, the light-being-bliss-awareness-love that is the Empyrean, where all saved souls “reside.”

Translation: only if you lose your life (in Christ) will you gain it. Anything you love that is not God, or that you love without reference to God, is deception, is darkness.

Furthermore, for Dante, to be saved is to know God, but that does not mean affirming doctrine or holding ideas about God.  To know God in a saving way is to encounter Him personally, and to be changed by that encounter. If you read the Commedia and come away from it only with a new set of ideas to think about, Dante will have failed on his own terms. You must come away changed.

So says Moevs in his first chapter. Look, as I said, this is very heavy stuff, but thrilling, at least to me. The important thing to keep in mind here is that it all comes from a beautiful poem that is also an adventure story. A 700-year-old poem! It was a poem that captivated my imagination and did what Dante intended it to do: changed my life. The Commedia was an icon for me through which divine light flowed into my darkened heart and mind.

I am convinced that it can and will do the same for many others who are bored by (or at least unattracted to) conventional approaches to God and the big questions. My professor friend teaches literature, not philosophy or theology, but he sees undergraduates, most of whom are not churchgoers, coming alive intellectually and spiritually through their encounter with Dante.

These are my people. I want to tell them what I saw in Dante, and help them see the same thing. I cannot wait to get started on this book!