Dante Beholds the Angelic Hierarchy
Now summer can proceed.? After brief delays on account of VBS and travel, I’ve finished this summer’s reading of Dante.? Once again, although Mark Musa is a professor and John Ciardi a poet, the latter still offers far better reading notes throughout, and I noticed things this time through that I hadn’t before.
Those bits aside, the recurring move that I noticed on this trip through Paradise were the moments, as Dante ascended to each successive sphere, in which his intellect proved inadequate to the reality before him.? Sometimes he faints, sometimes goes blind, but over and over he finds the richness of Heaven’s reality too much to handle.
My favorite such moment is when Dante ascends to the sphere of Saturn, the home of contemplatives.? For the first time in his journey, Beatrice does not smile, and he hears no music.? His immediate assumption is that this part of Heaven must be like a monastery to suit all the monks present, but Beatrice quickly points out to him that the brilliance of her own smile and the sound of the music would destroy him utterly, his own capacity for beauty overwhelmed by the rarefied goodness of contemplating God.? To prove the point, Heaven allows him to apprehend the music just for a moment, and he passes out from it.
Theologically, I find this vision of Heaven immensely satisfying, far more so than the “just like earth, but more so” visions of Heaven that I often encounter when folks talk about the afterlife.? This is no eternal youth rally, no everlasting Ponderosa buffet.? When one has Purgatory as the gateway, Heaven can truly be a different order of Being, something that humanity cannot rise to save by Grace.? I know that Protestants love to talk about Grace, but more often than not (in what I’ve read–I’m hardly the last word, remember?), we tend to make Grace a gate-pass rather than something that suits us for Heaven itself.? We spend so much of our time talking about what does and does not get one past the sheep-and-goats bit that we don’t take much time at all to think that what comes after the gate might be even more magnificent than what gets us through it.? In other words, it tends to save from penalties more than it elevates us to the real stuff of divine reality.? Once again, I’d point to that as something that Dante can teach us that we need teaching.
I also found myself amused this time around with all the times that Dante the poet uses Dante the pilgrim as an authority to settle theological disputes.? Do angels have the faculty of memory?? No.? Does Dante provide an argument for that statement?? Yes, but only after Heaven declares such.? Did Pope Gregory or Dionysius the Areopagite get the angelic hierarchy right?? Dionysius.? How does Dante know?? Why, he saw ‘em, of course!
I’ll maintain, having completed yet another pilgrimage with Virgil and Beatrice and Bernard, that the Comedy is the best poem that I’ve ever read.? Some day, I’ll learn Italian so that I can read the original, but even in translation, there’s nothing quite like it.? I write this as someone who loves Beowulf and Paradise Lost and Homer and Virgil and Ovid, so that’s no small claim.
“Theologically, I find this vision of Heaven immensely satisfying, far more so than the ?just like earth, but more so? visions of Heaven that I often encounter when folks talk about the afterlife.”
Interesting perspective. Correct me if I understand you incorrectly here, but to be honest, one of the things that reignited my excitement for Heaven (and for the whole subject of eschatology) was in fact the idea that it will be indeed “like Earth, only more so”. Not that it wouldn’t have the characteristics Dante describes, but that it would have some sort of continuity with the present heavens and Earth, just as the world before and after the Flood had continuity. What I mean is, if the physical world means anything now, it will mean even more in the coming age. The Scriptures speak (both the Old and New Testaments), after all, far more about a “new heavens and new earth”, than they do some sort of ethereal, abstract, or mystical concept of heaven. I apologize at this point if I’m reading too much into what you are saying; I’m basically asking for clarification.
In my experience, most Christians I come across have a vision of Heaven that is rather abstract and ethereal, which in my opinion is not as biblically grounded as a vision of Heaven that is a true physical realm, one in which God comes down to us and His presence saturates everything, rather than us coming up to him. I almost never hear the “just like Earth, only more so”, idea. I think my perspective is most in line with C.S. Lewis’ view of Heaven being more “real” in some sense, than the present situation.
Again, this is a subject that absolutely fascinates me, so I don’t mean to pick apart your statement too much. I’m curious to know what you think about this.
I think you’re right to hold to an embodied Resurrection over against a disembodied afterlife; in fact, the eventual bodily Resurrection is something upon which Dante insists over and over.
In ethical terms, I think that evangelicals (and Protestants in general) often make the afterlife more of a penalty-avoidance question than a celebration of a new order, one in which there is no Temple because God dwells among the people and in which the lion lays down with the lamb and the child fiddles about in the viper’s nest (my paraphrase on both of those, of course). We tend to focus so heavily on the penalty for not passing the gate and returning so frequently to the gate that folks do or do not pass that Heaven is not so much a different order of being (with continuities, you’re right, with our own) as a default “you didn’t go to Hell” relief. I think that Dante, spending a third of his poem on the process of preparing human beings for that reality and a third intimating the shape of that reality (that more often than not evades description), offers a healthy antidote to “fire and brimstone” Christianity that has little to say of the consummation of Christ’s salvation beyond the obvious “It ain’t Hell.”
Nate,
Thanks for clarifying, and I see where you are coming from better now. It’s been a long time since I’ve read Dante, so I had forgotten much of how he treats Heaven. I totally agree with you that Protestants tend to focus more on avoiding Hell than really looking forward to and enjoying Heaven. As Randy Alcorn writes in his book “Heaven”, this phenomenon has become so pervasive in our culture that many Christians actually see Heaven as barely better than Hell. For many Christians, the only vision of Heaven they get is something like a drab, endless church service where all people do all day long is sing hymns over and over again. Instead, the vision the Bible offers of heaven is a much more rich, dynamic experience where God fills everything and is “all in all”; it is a final consummation, as you put it, of what He began in Christ and the Church. This is why I firmly believe that when believers truly fellowship under Christ and do work for His Kingdom, that is part and parcel of what Heaven will be like, in a very tangible way. We can enjoy a piece of it right now, in our daily lives. That, to me is exciting!
Regarding the Alcorn book, I highly recommend it as a truly fresh perspective on what Heaven means in a biblical context. I don’t agree with all of his conclusions, by any stretch, and at times I think he spends a little too much time speculating (though he admits as much), but I found it very helpful nonetheless.
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