Dauntless Dante

So I'm taking this PhD class in Dante. Until this semester I had never read The Divine Comedy. To tell you just how unfamiliar I was with his stuff, I'll confess that, until I read it, I thought the Comedia was a synonym for "full of laughs." I missed that it was a comedy as opposed to a tragedy, where everybody dies at the end. This one ends with Dante fully alive.

In the spiritual sense.

In the world of non-fiction, when Dante was nine, he glimpsed a girl named Beatrice and fell in love. Yet it was not like Hollywood love. It was far more elevated than that. It had a spiritual element, and I don't mean the pluralistic spiritual like Oprah uses it. To borrow a term from Anne Lamott, it was a "Jesusy" love--the kind that makes you want to be gloriously good out of love for a Triune God and thus worthy of such an exalted earthly creature.

Well, Beatrice dies while in her twenties, so Dante envisions this lovely one in heaven. Now comes the part where it gets fictiony. Dante writes this vision of how he gets to the afterlife, but he is prevented by three raging animals from getting into heaven the easy way. Normally that would mean he's cooked. Literally. But Beatrice makes a way. He can get in through the back door, so to speak, but he has to traverse through hell (Inferno) and purgatory (Purgatorio) with the help of the poet, Virgil. And his journey must lead him to repentance first. Virgil begins by taking Dante on a pilgrimage in which he meets those being punished for committing the seven vices and never repenting. After that, he gets to purgatory.

Purgatorio is the world in which "shades," as they are called, purge themselves of their vices. So those who were gluttonous, for example, suffer hunger. Drunkards suffer thirst. The prideful carry a load on their backs that makes them bend over and stare at the ground. The list of vices is the same. The difference is that these repented when they had the chance. All in purgatory suffer, yet they feel no misery. Only anticipation. And the Almighty has not sent them there. They remain voluntarily so they can prepare to meet the One for whom they long with all their might: a perfectly holy, just God who is the very person of mind-blowing love. So their suffering is real but their misery is not. It's sort of like what happens when we fast on earth to devote ourselves to prayer. Yes, we feel hunger, but the hunger is by choice as an offering, so the suffering differs significantly from that experienced when craving sustenance while helplessly stuck in traffic.

Virgil delivers Dante to the ante-room of heaven, and Beatrice takes over as guide. Paradiso is a journey through the spheres of heaven during which Beatrice provides philosophical and theological answers to Dante's questions. And this woman has powers of intellect that could put Mensa members to shame. (I marvel at the genius of her creator!) In cantos six and seven, she answers the question about why Jesus had to die.

And that leads me to what happened in class on Wednesday night. There I sat in the classroom of a university in which it is generally socially acceptable to insult Christianity and Christ-followers publicly, and the prof gave us this question for a quiz: Why does Beatrice say Jesus had to die.

The short answer, which all of us had to read and figure out to articulate, is that free will is the greatest gift from God to us. But our first ancestors forfeited the freedom to be perfectly good. So to restore us to Himself, God had to somehow satisfy His own perfect justice. (He couldn't just pardon us like a judge pardoning someone with 450 traffic violations/year. That wouldn't be just.) And He could not satisfy His own justice by giving us penance to do, as no penance we could ever do with the corrupt wills we have could bridge the gap between our wrong and His perfect holiness. So He paid our debt Himself to satisfy His own justice. The second person of the Triune Godhead, in expressing perfect love and mercy, took on human flesh and sacrificed Himself so God could appease His own wrath. And in doing so He restored us to Himself with the will to do righteousness.

I believe.