But the coming of the Lord may be likened to the coming of heat, which takes
place in spring, when heat joins itself with light, the earth is softened, and
seeds sprout and bring forth fruit. Such is the parallelism between the spiritual
things which are the environment of man’s spirit, and the natural things which
are the environment of his body.
(WEO)
beyond emmaus: another easter journey
One of the great classics of literature – and an enduring allegory of the Easter
story – is Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy. This is the tale – told in
beguiling free-form verse – of Dante’s tour through the Inferno, Purgatory
and Paradise, beginning on Good Friday and culminating on Easter Sunday.
This 700-year-old masterpiece was revolutionary on two fronts. It was
written in the vernacular of commoners, not in the traditional Latin so
inaccessible to them, and was regularly chanted and passed on by the masses.
Indeed, Dante encouraged the people to take part for “a taste of the afterlife.”
(Bryn Athyn College staged such an around-the-clock reading in 2010.)
Also revolutionary was Dante’s concept that we must repent of our sins
before we can achieve paradise. And he stood against the prevailing faithalone dogma, insisting that it is good lives that elevate us to heaven. There is
much in Dante’s vision, in fact, that resonates with the revelation given in the
Writings some 300 years later.
He said that the goal of his trilogy was “to remove those living in this
life from a state of misery and lead them to the state of bliss.” He does this by
inviting us to reflect on our own failings, find a new sense of direction, and
come to live in harmony with God and each other.
This is an heroic quest – for moral knowledge, for truth, for hope – and its
enduring value is that it speaks for all our journeys. That is why it resonated so
well with the men and women in the streets 700 years ago, and why it still does.
Dante’s search for deliverance – from chaos to order, despair to hope, darkness
to light – speaks to our own pilgrimage.
The Divine Comedy is perhaps best known for the sadistic tortures of
Inferno, but these are just chilling portrayals of what sin is and its power to
enslave us. Dante sees sin as the perversion of love and that the lost souls are
there because of their own free-will choice of sin over righteousness. Because
he comes to see his own freely chosen sins as a form of enslavement he is able
to see – and show his readers – the way to salvation.
He comes to realize in Purgatory that we must repent – purify our own
will – before we can be fit to enter Paradise.
When he asks a character named Marco why the world is in such sad
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