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Evangelical

Bowels of Hell, Heights of Heaven: Preaching Dante Alighieri

May 30, 2011 by Daniel Harrell

Continued from Page 1

And I, my head enwreathed with wayward doubts,
Asked, "Master, what is this that I am hearing?
Who are these people overwhelmed by pain?"

And he told me: "This way of wretchedness
Belongs to the unhappy souls of those
Who lived without being blamed or applauded.

"They are now scrambled with that craven crew
Of angels who elected neither rebellion
Nor loyalty to God, but kept apart.

"Not to mar its beauty, heaven expelled them,
Nor will the depths of hell take them in there,
Lest the damned have any glory over them."

And I: "Master, what is so burdensome
To them that they should wail so dismally?"
He answered, "Very briefly, I will tell you.

"These people have no hope of dying again,
And so deformed has their blind life become
That they must envy every other fate.

"The world will not allow a word about them;
Mercy and justice hold them in disdain.
Let us not discuss them. Look and pass on."

You can hear echoes of Jesus' own words in Revelation: "because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth."

From hell, Dante is led up the mountain of Purgatory. A uniquely Catholic doctrine rejected by Protestants as non-biblical, purgatory derives from the verb to purge and refers to an after-death purging of evil which, while insufficient to condemn you to hell, remains sufficient to keep you out of heaven. As Wheaton College literature professor Rolland Hein writes,

Whether one believes that the soul can be purified after death or that Christian maturity is pursued only on earth, the steps of growth that Dante experiences in purgatory are necessary for drawing nearer to God. While climbing Mount Purgatory, Dante learns to desire God and his good above all else, then to see all things in relation to him, and to act accordingly. To achieve this knowledge he must be freed from the Seven Deadly Sins: pride, envy, anger, sloth, greed, gluttony, and lust. These natural tendencies must be replaced with the Christian virtues of humility, [contentment], meekness, zeal, generosity, temperance, and chastity—all components of that holiness without which no one will see God.

Dante makes this clear in a Purgatory passage regarding pride:

O haughty Christians, wretched and weary,
You, diseased in the vision of your minds,
Who misplace all your trust in backward steps,

Are you not aware that we are worms,
Born to form the angelic butterflies
Which soar toward the judgment without defense?

Why does your mind float proudly far aloft
When you are merely like imperfect insects,
Just as the larva lacks its final form?

Sometimes, in support of roof or ceiling by way of a corbel
One sees a figure joining its knees hunched up against the chest,

Which, while unreal, gives birth to real distress
In someone seeing it: that's how I did see these,
When I took good heed, how these souls were stooped.

True, some were more pressed down and some were less
If they had more or less weight on their backs,
Yet even one who suffered most patiently

Appeared to say through tears, "I can no more."

At the end of Purgatory, Virgil gets replaced by Dante's long-lost love, Beatrice, who represents the illumination of divine revelation. In real life, Dante met Beatrice once when both were children and then only once more nine years later; yet her idealized image inspired him throughout his life as a type of sacred love.

Allegorically in The Divine Comedy, Beatrice combines love as both desire and as self-sacrifice. She leads Dante into Paradise, a world centered on God where images of light, dance, and music abound. Dante also receives significant theological instruction, mostly following the thought of Thomas Aquinas, but also with glimpses of Pseudo-Dionysius. He converses with saints who, no matter if they disagreed with one another on earth, are now perfectly united. Rising into the ultimate heights, Dante imagines at the delightful end a momentary vision of the Triune God:

Article Continued On Next Page

Page: 2 of 4

5/30/2011 4:00:00 AM

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About Daniel Harrell

Daniel M. Harrell is Senior Minister of The Colonial Church, Edina, MN and author of How To Be Perfect: One Church's Audacious Experiment in Living the Old Testament Book of Leviticus (FaithWords, 2011). Follow him via Twitter, Facebook, or at his blog and website.

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