I’m not being faithful to my Dante posting these days. I wish I had put myself on a schedule: one per day, no matter what. My problem is that once I go down the Dante trail, I can’t seem to stop writing, except when I force myself to. I have never encountered a writer, or a work of art, that seems fathomless.

It’s better for me to think about Dante. My wife returned from 12 days in Alaska yesterday. At bedtime last night, I mentioned to her that I hadn’t written about Dante for a while, and that I missed him. “I can always tell when you’re feeling bad, or in a bad mood,” she said. “Your blog is so negative.”

That’s a fair comment. The news has been so contentious and depressing over the past week or so. It’s too easy for me to lose sight of eternal things. Yet there is no clear demarcation between the things of this moment, and the things of eternity. Because of the current arguments over Hobby Lobby (which are really disputes over sex, religion, and the ultimate meaning of reality itself), I thought yesterday about the metaphysical gulf that separates us from Dante. A reader who has become a friend gave me last week a book by Prof. Louis Markos, called Heaven And Hell: Visions Of The Afterlife In The Western Poetic Tradition.  In the section that begins his Dante discussion, he has a lovely passage that starkly divides Dante’s time from our own:

Dante, along with his fellow medievals, lived in a sympathetic universe that was fraught with meaning and purpose. The stars were not dead and cold, cut off from the lives of men; their positions and movements rained down influence on the Earth, even as great upheavals in the earthly realm were reflected and broadcast in the heavenly. The medievals, like the ancients before them, referred to the universe by the Greek word kosmos — a word whose root meaning is “ornament” (as in our modern word, cosmetics). The cosmos was considered by ancients and medievals alike to be ordered and harmonious, because it was created by a God of order and harmony. It was, in fact, God’s ornament. Both humanity and nature were part of God’s cosmic order and harmony, and thus it was only natural that the two should exist in sympathy with one another. Dante’s universe did not simply exist; it meant, and it meant intensely. The universe was less a thing to be studied than a poem to be loved and enjoyed.

None of us live in the imaginative world of the medievals, of course, but I strongly believe that there is a cosmic order, and that the universe means. My suspicion is that few of us really believe that there is no intrinsic meaning in the universe, aside from the meaning we impose upon it. We may not believe that our fates are written in the stars, but I have met few people who wholly affirm that there is no essential meaning to existence. I know people who forswear religion but who do not accept the full moral and philosophical implications of materialism. This, I think, is why you don’t have to be a Catholic or even a Christian to profit deeply from reading the Commedia (though it certainly magnifies the experience). The Commedia is a masterpiece written by a man on whom nothing was lost, and who saw more clearly the beauty, the pathos, and the grandeur of life that the rest of us intuit, but can’t quite articulate. If you open yourself to him, Dante will show you what you already knew, but didn’t know you knew.

When last we spoke of Paradiso, Dante was in the heaven of Justice. Giuseppe Mazzotta’s commentary on the Justice cantos draws out the geometrical qualities of Dante’s discussion of divine justice. In short, he shows how the poem speaks of justice as being implicit in the order of the material world, though as you will recall, the pilgrim learns that we finite creatures cannot hope to see into the depths of divine justice.

Writing about Canto XIX, Mazzotta says that the Eagle takes Dante on a “tour” of Europe, denouncing the injustices of various European kingdoms. The point of this discourse, says Mazzotta, is to show that the boundaries of justice do not run between kingdoms and peoples — and further, we can’t be entirely sure where they are. If you’re looking to the princes of this earth to draw the lines of justice, you look in vain. The Eagle, remember, tells the pilgrim Dante that just as we mortals cannot fathom God’s justice, so too are we unable to say for certain who is and who is not saved. Or, as some contemporary Christians like to say, “We know where the Church is, but we do not know where it is not.”

It is interesting and, I think, important to Dante’s purposes, to contemplate the difference between man’s geometry of justice, and God’s. Like all the medievals, Dante believed that God’s nature is written in nature. The Eagle puts it like this:

“He Who with His compass drew

the limits of the world and out of chaos

brought order to things hidden and revealed,

 

could not impress his quality so much

upon the universe but that His Word

should not remain in infinite excess. …”

In other words, Creation, being separate from God, could not bear the fullness of its Creator. Yes, God brought forth order from chaos, and we can see the divine imprint in nature — that is, in the material world — but we cannot expect perfection in this realm. That is not to say, however, that the fallenness of this world makes justice, or any other quality of God, impossible to discern or to realize. It is only to say that true justice can only be approximately perceived and approximately realized.

In Canto XX, the Eagle introduces Dante to holy souls — note well: two Jews, two Christians, and two pagans — who were exemplars of justice on the earth. The first is King David, the Psalmist; the second is the Roman emperor Trajan. We have encountered their images before in Canto X of Purgatorio, in carvings meant to teach sinners repenting of Pride what Humility looks like (go back and read that entry here). Interesting to think about the connection between humility and justice when you consider that, from a Christian perspective, the One who will at the end of time be the Judge of the world allowed himself to be judged by man, and did not protest against the terminal injustice of the verdict. Why not? Because He trusted in the Father’s plan.

Dante also meets the Emperor Constantine, who gave control of the Western Roman Empire to the pope, an act through which “all the world has been destroyed.” (The so-called “Donation of Constantine” was shown after Dante’s time to have been based on a forged document.) Recall Dante’s ardent belief that the spiritual and political ruin of Europe occurred in large part by the Holy See taking on temporal power. Though Constantine’s purported act had tragic consequences, Dante’s placing him in the heaven of Justice demonstrates that God judges not on results, but on what was in the heart at the time of the act.

Then there is King Hezekiah of the Hebrews, who was given 15 more years of life by God after asking for it in prayer. His presence in the heaven of Justice indicates that God does not alter his plan, but anticipates our needs and requests and provides for them. (Again, it’s one of the things we cannot understand about divine justice — though it must be conceded that this may understandably strike skeptics as a sort of “God of the gaps” dodge, attributing to God’s mysterious ways divine acts that seem illogical or paradoxical.)

Finally, we see William II, the king of Naples and Sicily, and Ripheus, a hero called by Virgil in the Aeneid “the most just of all the Trojans.” You will wonder how on earth a pagan emperor and a Trojan hero are here in heaven. The Eagle knows that the pilgrim Dante is asking the same thing — and the great bird’s answer is one of great hope, I believe, if also fairly absurd.

The poet has the Eagle say that both Trajan and Ripheus became secret Christians. Trajan had been in Limbo, but fervent prayers for his salvation brought him back to life for a short enough time to accept Christ before returning to the abode of the dead. Ripheus “was baptised more than a thousand years before baptism was,” says the Eagle, because he lived by faith, hope, and charity.

As I said, this is an extreme example of poetic license, but Dante’s point is sound. Here are the words of the Eagle:

Regnum celorum [the Kingdom of Heaven] suffers violence

gladly from fervent love, from vibrant hope

— only these powers can defeat God’s will:

 

not in the way one man conquers another,

for That will wills its own defeat, and so

defeated it defeats through its own mercy.

The first line repeats what Jesus said in Matthew 11 (“The Kingdom of Heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force”). The meaning of this passage is that God is so filled with mercy that He is willing to go to extraordinary lengths for the salvation of a single soul. He is even prepared to suspend the laws of logic and of time to save souls. The Eagle’s final words to Dante before the pilgrim passes into the next heaven:

You men who live on earth, be slow to judge,

for even we who see God face to face

still do not know the list of His elect,

 

but we find this defect of ours a joy,

since in this good perfected is our good;

for whatsoever God wills we will too.”

Recall the nun Piccarda’s line: “In His will is our peace.” Dante leaves the sphere of Jupiter — that is, the heaven of Justice — seeing those two pagans, impossible Christians, pulsating in harmony with the music of heaven.

Like Robert Hollander, I find it hard to believe that Dante actually believed that Trajan and Ripheus had been secret Christians. It seems more likely to me that Dante had these figures jump through Scholastic hoops for reasons particular to his time. We mustn’t miss the lesson here, though: that we must not presume to know whom God has chosen for salvation. Only God, who is all just and all merciful, can pass judgment. We should pray always for the salvation of others, and leave the rest up to God, trusting in His perfect love.

In Canto VI of Purgatorio, Dante reflected on the travails of war-ravaged Italy, and prayed to Christ addressing Him as Jove (Jupiter), symbol of Justice:

O Jove Supreme, crucified here on earth

for all mankind, have I the right to ask

if Your just eyes no longer look on us?

 

Or is this part of a great plan conceived

in Your deep intellect, to some good end

that we are powerless to understand?

Now, as he leaves Jupiter, the sphere of Justice, Dante has his answer. God has not forgotten those who suffer, but we on earth are so limited in our vision that we cannot understand the workings of the eternal God. It is a reworking of the answer God the great Geometer gave to Job in Job 38, which begins:

Then the Lord spoke to Job out of the storm. He said:

“Who is this that obscures my plans with words without knowledge?

Brace yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer me.

“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand.

Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!

Who stretched a measuring line across it?

On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone

—while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?

Dante is nearing the end of his pilgrimage, a journey in which he has been trying to make sense of his exile, and the calamity that had happened to him, the crisis that led him from the Straight Way into the Dark Wood. And now he begins to understand what he couldn’t have grasped when he first chose to follow Virgil out of the dark wood. God had a plan for his salvation. Dante’s salvation depended on his losing everything that he held dear, and having to go deep into himself to repent of the faults that had led him astray. Only in exile, only by being made to wander as an outsider, unable to return home, was Dante able to turn to God, and be saved.

I can hardly tell you how much this meant to me to read it last year, when I was so lost in my own exile, and unable to go home, even though I was back in my hometown. The lines of justice do not correspond to geography, nor do they correspond to familial lines. There was in this tangle a plan that I was powerless to discern, but I believed that I lived in a universe fraught with meaning and purpose, and that there must be a reason for this pain and confusion which was taking the life out of me.

And then God sent Dante to me, and off we went, on a pilgrimage that saved my life. I did not see the justice in any of it until I reached the end. And then I not only saw the justice of God, but I felt His love, for the first time ever.