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Paradiso, Canto V

Yesterday in the Orthodox Church, the third Sunday after Pascha, was the Sunday of the Paralytic, in which the Church meditates on Christ’s healing of the paralyzed man by the pool of Bethesda. In his sermon, my priest noted that Jesus first asked the man if he wanted to be healed. The man, the Gospel […]
Illustration by Michael Hogue
Illustration by Michael Hogue

Yesterday in the Orthodox Church, the third Sunday after Pascha, was the Sunday of the Paralytic, in which the Church meditates on Christ’s healing of the paralyzed man by the pool of Bethesda. In his sermon, my priest noted that Jesus first asked the man if he wanted to be healed. The man, the Gospel of John tells us, had been paralyzed for 38 years. Why did Jesus ask him if he wanted to be healed, when the answer should have been obvious?

Because the answer to that question isn’t obvious for everybody at all times. Our priest said that many people don’t really want to be healed of their brokenness. People sometimes build entire identities around their sickness, and are afraid to know what it’s like to be made whole. This is true of the spiritual sicknesses all of us bring into the Church, he said. We don’t really want healing if it means we’re going to have to change.

Listening to the sermon, naturally I thought of the damned in Dante’s Inferno. They are in hell forever because they defined themselves by their sin, and refused the grace of healing in their mortal lives. Now, in the pit for eternity, they blame everybody and everything else for their suffering except themselves. They would not take responsibility for their souls in life, and they won’t in the afterlife.

The entire Commedia is a pilgrimage toward healing, toward wholeness. When he was in the dark wood in the first canto of the Inferno, lost and terrified, Virgil appeared to him like Christ at the pool of Bethesda. Virgil asked Dante why he stayed there in all that wretchedness. Dante said he wanted to leave, but couldn’t find his way out. Virgil said, essentially, “You’d better come with me if you want to live.” And so Dante did. The first steps of our own journeys toward healing, toward being made whole, must be made from a deep desire to be delivered from our misery, a desire so strong that we’ll walk into the fearful unknown for the sake of saving our souls.

Inferno shows us what happens to those who never took even the slightest step in life toward healing. Paradiso, though, shows us what the fully restored soul is like. It reveals what we are aiming for. My priest told us, “God doesn’t want you to be St. Seraphim. He wants you to be you.” He meant by this that God wants all of us to be the fullest expression of the person He created each of us to be. This is more or less what Piccarda Donati tells the pilgrim Dante about why she holds a lesser position in the Kingdom of Heaven: she was the perfected expression of what God made her to be, in the sense that she didn’t have within herself the capacity to hold as much of the Divine Light as other souls. We’ll find as we go along through Paradiso that this principle of hierarchy and harmony keeps coming up.

I thought a lot about Piccarda for the rest of the liturgy, and as I stood in line at communion, prayed that I would be given the grace to be like her: to desire nothing more than God, and to find peace in conforming my own will to His. That is, to want what God wants, not what I want. This is what it means to be healed, to be made whole: to be able to say, with the joyful Piccarda, “In His will is our peace.”

It is hard. I find I’m having to do things that I don’t want to do, mostly because of my pride, and mostly in answer to the question, “Is love more important than justice?” And: “What does it mean to choose love over justice in my situation?”

I’ve come to accept that the answers to these questions aren’t something you can read about in a book. You have to live the questions. You have to walk the walk and find your way forward, however much you stumble. The farther you go, the clearer the path becomes. We see this in the gorgeous opening lines of Canto V, when Beatrice says to Dante:

“If I flame at you with a heat of love

beyond all measure known on earth

so that I overcome your power of sight,

 

“do not wonder, for this is the result

of perfect vision, which, even as it apprehends,

moves its foot toward the apprehended good.

 

“I see clearly how, reflected in your mind,

the eternal light that, once beheld,

alone and always kindles love, is shining.

 

“And, if anything else beguiles your mortal love,

it is nothing but a remnant of that light, which,

incompletely understood, still shines in it.”

Beatrice is saying that she burns so brightly in love because she has been perfected. The more we understand the Good, the more strongly we are drawn to it. Once you’ve seen the Divine Light — that is, experienced the love of God — it imparts a flame into your own heart that cannot be forgotten. The love remains, but your flawed comprehension could mistake a lesser thing for God. The thing to understand about pilgrimage is that the more Dante progresses in loving God in the right way, the more clear his own vision will become. Love and understanding are inseparable in the Kingdom of God.

If you think about it from a Christian point of view, this is what God is telling us in the Incarnation — when He, in his second person, chose to reveal Himself as a flesh-and-blood human. Recall that earlier in Paradiso, Beatrice explained to Dante the difference between what things seem to be, and what they are. She said that divine realities are so hard for us finite humans to comprehend that God allows us to grasp them metaphorically. This, she said, is why Scripture speaks of God having hands and feet, even though He doesn’t really have hands and feet. Some things we cannot grasp any other way. God communicated to humankind through the Law and the Prophets, whose teachings were set down in Scripture, but for Christians, His most complete revelation was as a man. You don’t know a man as you know a book. That is, you don’t know a man as an object, but as a subject. Books can tell you about a man, but they are not the man. You cannot really know a man without loving him. Through the Incarnation, God is telling us how we are to relate to Him. He is also telling us that we cannot stand still in one spot and hope to see Him and apprehend Him; we have to move, we have to walk, we have to love and keep loving. In that way, and only in that way, do we grow in the understanding of God, which is to say, of ultimate reality.

In this sense, like Kierkegaard said, Truth Is Subjectivity. That doesn’t mean that we can believe whatever we want. It means that some truths — like belief in God — can only be known through the development of a passionate relationship to them. You demonstrate their truth by the life you live, by freely committing yourself to living them out. Beatrice continues:

“The greatest gift that God in His largesse

gave to creation, the most attuned

to His goodness and that He accounts most dear,

 

“was the freedom of the will:

all creatures possessed of intellect,

all of them and they alone, were and are so endowed.”

We are free to reject God and His love. Only then could love mean anything. From this point until the end of the canto, Beatrice instructs Dante on the value of a vow. It strikes me as a somewhat technical discussion, one that I confess I don’t fully understand, at least not much beyond her teaching that vows are much more important than people think. My sense is that a vow, freely made, is a solemn promise — a pact with God — in which one yields one’s free will to another person or institution, out of love and devotion. If vows are disregarded lightly, love is cheapened, and the order of the entire universe is weakened. If free will was God’s greatest gift to humankind, the gift “most attuned to His goodness,” then to pledge that gift to another (one’s spouse, one’s religious order, etc.) is something of the greatest importance. This is why Piccarda’s consent, however limited, to abandon her religious vows under pressure of her vile brother Corso was taken so seriously by God, such that she holds a lesser place in Paradise. In this canto, the poet is telling us that when we hold our vows lightly — that is, when we enter into them without proper deliberation, or set them aside rashly — we weaken the power of love and goodness in the world. This is how our free will, the gift most precious to God, the gift that tells us the most about His nature, becomes a source of disharmony and debilitation within ourselves and the community.

If we thought of our vows in this way — as a gift we make of God’s greatest gift to us — and lived by that conviction, how much different would our world be today?

The canto ends with Beatrice and Dante speeding towards the next sphere of Heaven, the planet Mercury, where Dante will have one of the most important meetings of the entire Commedia.

 

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