Before we dive into Canto VIII of Dante’s Paradiso, I want to share with you all a remarkable thing I’ve run across in the past few days. As you know, I’ve been blogging about Patricia Pearson’s new book Opening Heaven’s Door, a journalistic account of what we know about the experiences of the dying. In one chapter, Pearson explores the reported experiences of people who, in their near-death experiences, have gone “into the Light.” I found the commonality of these stories with Dante’s conception of Paradise to be striking.

For one, like the pilgrim Dante, those who have come back from the Light find the experience impossible to capture adequately in language. For another, they experience it as all-knowing, all-powerful Love. This particular story, from a man who drowned but came back to life, was particularly resonant with me as a reader of Dante:

“As I got closer, I started feeling the light.” This utterly unexpected sensation intensified as the luminescence grew all the more radiant. “The Light was brighter than any light I had ever experienced. As a chief engineer on a ship, I had many occasions to use an arc welder. The light emitted from the arc is so bright you have to wear protective eye gear to look at it without burning your eyes. This light was brighter than that, yet I could still view it comfortably.” (This is a common remark made by people who have these experiences. Light that ought to make them squint or flinch, like sunlight on snow, is painless to gaze at.)

You Paradiso readers will know by now that pilgrim Dante’s progress through Heaven is measured by his ability to receive the overwhelmingly bright Light. More:

He has reflected on the difference between this numinous experience of love and what we more typically feel: “In the light without a body I could handle that level of love because I had left the physical side of emotion behind … in our physical body, we feel excitement in our stomach and love can make us light-headed. In the light, I felt love, joy, passion, and excitement without the physical sensations. I ahd no physical reaction that might cause one to say, ‘This is something I want to distance myself from.’ ‘I am not ready.’ Or ‘I am not worthy.'”

In Paradiso, the blessed dwell in the paradoxical experience of having merged entirely with God, but also maintaining their individual identities. It’s not like their identities have been replaced, but rather fulfilled. Here’s Pearson:

Another reaction we might have is terror at losing ourselves, at surrendering autonomy and identity in this merging. Most dystopian fiction, from Orwell to Koestler to Madeleine L’Engle, frightens readers by dwelling on the prospect of forced conformity and group-think. To become ants in a colony, fish in the sea, drops in an ocean of light — these are alarming fates to highly individualistic Westerners. Yet in the unio mystica, the loss of self isn’t experienced as frightening. On the contrary, separateness is suddenly understood to be the illusion we have been living with our whole lives.

The goal of life, Dante teaches us, is to achieve that mystical union with God — called theosis by Orthodox Christianity. It does not begin in Heaven, Dante shows, but rather in this mortal life, when we empty our own souls of egotism, and make room for the Holy Spirit to dwell within us. Through prayer, fasting, repentance, and deeds of love, we gradually cleanse our souls so that they become ever more transparent to the Divine Light, that it might radiate through us. As we become gradually more united to God, and to His will, so too will the world, one soul at a time.

The Commedia is preoccupied with right order. All sin, as we have seen, comes from disordered love. We fail to love, or we love the wrong things, or we love the right things in the wrong way (too much, too little). The core of this disorder is egotism: we, in our God-given freedom, choosing ourselves over God, in a million ways, big and small. Salvation begins when we, in humility, put God first, and ask for His mercy. That begins the journey of our souls back to Him, towards the unio mystica. When you have a mortal who has made unusual advances on the road to mystical union in this life, you have a saint, canonized or not. When Dante begins the Commedia by telling us that “the straight path was lost” to him, he’s saying that the road toward mystical union had slipped from his vision, because of his own vain wanderings.

Again and again on his pilgrimage, Dante discovers not only how we fail ourselves in this way, but how our own failings can lead others to fail. Remember, one of the key lessons of the Commedia is that we are all implicated, to a lesser or greater degree, in each other’s fates. As Pearson put it talking about the mysticism of near-death experiences, those who experience Paradise learn that “separateness is suddenly understood to be the illusion we have been living with our whole lives.”

In Canto VIII, Dante and Beatrice visit the sphere of Venus, of love (caritas). One of the blessed approaches Dante and says:

“All of us desire to bring you pleasure

so that you may in turn delight in us.”

This is love between souls perfected in reciprocity and mutual delight. The pilgrim is learning that in Paradise, that is to say, in our purified state, separateness really is an illusion. For the first time, the poet reveals that in Paradise, the blessed, because all have achieved mystical union with God, can read the thoughts of each other. Dante addresses a soul he meets:

“Since I sense that the deep joy

your words have filled me with, my lord,

is seen by you as clearly as it’s seen by me

‘there were every good begins and ends,

my joy is greater. And I also hold it dear

that you discern this as you gaze on God.’

Dante is speaking to Charles Martel — not the famous one who defeated the Muslim armies in 732, but rather an Angevin prince who was a contemporary of Dante’s. The two had met in life, when Charles visited Florence, and had struck up a friendship. Charles died early, and tells Dante here that had he lived, much of the warfare plaguing Italy today — instigated in part by his own family, meddling in Italian affairs — would not have occurred. Dante wants to know “how from sweet seed may come a bitter fruit?” — that is, how could someone as good as you have come from such a rotten family?

Note well the obvious: that the poet Dante has no knowledge of genetics, and believes that if not for the influence of nature, sons would be exactly like their fathers. Still, his answer is instructive. Charles tells the pilgrim, basically, that nature provides for different qualities in children of the same father because man is a social being, and human society requires diversity to thrive. Diversity is part of God’s plan. But we humans thwart that plan by working against nature. Charles:

“Always, if nature meets a fate

unsuited to it, like any kind of seed

out of its native soil, it comes to a bad end,

 

“and if the world below paid more attention

to the foundation nature lays

and built on that, it would be peopled well.

 

“But no, you force into religion one born

to wear the sword, and make a king

of one more fit for sermons,

so that your path departs from the true way.”

Charles here alludes to his brothers Louis and Robert. Louis was meant to be king, but entered the Franciscans, thus opening the throne to Robert, who was more suited to theology than to government. Disorder in the world resulted from humans exercising their free will against the decrees of nature.

There’s great wisdom in this. I think of my dad, who to this day is bitter that he did what his parents expected of him and went to college instead of pursuing trade school, which was more suited to his nature, which is to say, his God-given talents. I think of myself, and how staggeringly ill-suited I was and am to country life and its requirements, and how the tension over the years between my father and me (and between my sister and me) emerged from their rigid expectations of the kind of person I should be, versus who I am, and my own internal anxiety over this gap. I felt guilt for not wanting for myself what they wanted for me, and indeed not being able to want for myself what they wanted for me, and I resented them for making me feel that I had failed them.

What Dante did to resolve this within myself was to convince me of something I had already almost wholly grasped the hard way: that diversity is part of God’s plan, and that we do God’s work when we restrain ourselves from imposing our own will on others, but rather work to help them become the person God intended them to become. I’ve taken this lesson to heart in raising my own two sons, who are as different from each other as Ruthie and I were. Cerebral, contemplative Matthew, and physical, active Lucas. My role as their father is to provide the soil in which each can flourish, according to their natures.

I discovered through reading Dante that I had made an idol of my family’s expectations of me, and without realizing what I was doing, put them in the place of God. Recognizing that, and repenting of it, was a key point on getting me back to the straight path. But what about the future? Things haven’t changed with my family; the change was within me. How do all of us live in harmony with a world in which perfect justice and perfect understanding is not possible to achieve?

There is an answer, I’ve found, and it is located in humilitas and caritas, working to allow them to cleanse our souls so that the Divine Light can shine through us to reveal to us the world and its people as they really are.

More on this  soon.