Dante’s Vision

I had to be part of this symposium. I have known Gil Meilaender for 30-some years, during all of which I have treasured him as a friend, a much admired friend. We first spent serious time together in Princeton. Paul Ramsey put together a seminar on theology and public policy as a first manifestation of the barely nascent Center of Theological Inquiry—to provide evidence for possible donors that the project really existed. Gil and I were among those summoned. The others were Ron Thiemann, Richard Mouw, Hans Frei and Stan Hauerwas. With Ramsey as chair, some of you can imagine the conversation.

To my shame, I confess I had not read Gil’s beautiful, and surely at least mostly true The Way that Leads There until this assignment jogged me. I have now, with much profit. And the opening and foundational chapter on desire, to which this panel seems more specifically directed, is in my view the finest part of the work.

There is of course in the tradition a prestigious maxim that seems to be a direct answer to the question posed to this panel: Gratia non tollit naturam sed perficit, ‘Grace does not remove nature but rather perfects it’—if only we could be sure what it means. As just a taste of the maxim’s ambiguities and complications: Grace is what is not nature, and is thus in part detrained by how nature is construed; nature is what needs grace, and is therefore in part determined by how grace is construed. This is a circle, and one that is even reliably vicious. I will not here venture into that jungle. Instead, I will consider the aspect of the matter that is discussed in Gil’s chapter on desire. Nor will I try to sort out grace-enabled love for God and possible natural love for him.

Crudely stated, the problem taken up by the chapter is the relation between our restless heart’s desire for God and our natural desires for other goods, most notably for certain other humans. Must not the one—either one—spoil the other? If we love God with everything in us, as the first great commandment demands, what desiring can be left in us, to fasten on a created other? Or if we love both God and another beloved other, can this God who shares us really be the biblical God? Appropriately, the chapter ends in heaven and indeed in the highest heaven, where the problem will doubtless disappear. But the present visionary prospect of heaven presents us with a dilemma that regularly stymies our thinking.

Gil crowns his discussion of heaven with Dante’s depiction of the ranks of those who most nearly behold the Love that moves all things, and who just so find perfect rest in him. Dante’s beloved Beatrice has left her place among them to guide him through the ranks of heaven, up to the last stage of his journey. Now, with one more smile for him, she turns back to her vision of God. At least in Gil’s reading—a little pressured by Augustine—she does not thereby turn away from Dante, for he will join her in contemplation of God, and they will know one another in him, as he is the one who gave and eternally gives them to each other.

Dante’s vision is wondrously beautiful, and like Gil I am compelled by its austerity and manifest truth. And yet I cannot get rid of the feeling that something is missing. May it be just a bit too austere to be quite appropriate to so earthy a faith as Christianity? Perhaps I am indulging in that fatal move of insisting on finding my own antecedent desires in God—I do not seem to want a heaven that does not include that head now on the next pillow—but I do not see much to do about that trap but confess the possibility, perhaps throw an ink well or two more or less at random, and carry on, relying on His mercy.

Do Gil and I part ways a little here? We have done that once or twice on other occasions—just a little. I will not here try to decide whether we do this time. Indeed, I am not absolutely sure just how content Gil himself is with Dante.

According to Dante according—maybe—to Gil, we will in the beatific vision find our other true loves in God, whom we will love with everything in us and whom we will know precisely as those God variously loves. And that is certainly right. But inquiring minds may ask—perhaps impertinently—how that works.

And then we may remember that those who in the Christian creeds enjoy eternal life are persons. And there is my worry, for it belongs to a community of persons that they are bound together by what we might call crosstalk with one another, and not only by joint direction to someone else, even to God insofar as he is someone else. Beatrice’s parting smile does not seem to contemplate such messy complications in her eternal relation to Dante.

For consider how our converse with one another works in the church, that is, after all, the very body of the risen Christ. At the Eucharist we engage his body as the bread and cup we contemplate and—the very same body—as the assembly amidst which we find ourselves. Thus our discourse, exactly as discourse with and in God, is more like a web than a joint orientation, a web not all strands of which need to make an arc from me through God to you, and back, for them to occur within God. And since this church is the body of the risen Christ, its structure surely will determine the communal structure of risen life with and in him. No such complication appears in Dante’s picture, so far as I can see.

Indeed the heavenly scene as reported by Dante has in general a tad too much the style of an array of intrinsically bodiless spirits wholly to suit what the Bible promises to us essentially embodied creatures.

Another way of getting at what I miss perhaps also suggests how that style might be tweaked a little.

So I ask: Where is Jesus, the Christ of Israel, in Dante’s picture? In Scripture’s various apocalyptic scenarios Jesus the Christ regularly has some constitutive place. (And in one later theology of beatifying vision, he even figures as the one through whose eyes we are to see God the Father!) Surely he should be somewhere heading up the ranks of the blessed also in Dante’s vision, leading and just so mediating the beatific host’s tuneful adoration and joy?

It is not that the Paradiso lacks christological teaching and piety. Far from it. But Jesus the Christ, the particular person who is that God-man so much talked about in the Paradiso, does not appear in the vision of heaven.

And then: what about the One whom the blessed adore? (Gil is expecting what comes now, something about the Trinity.)

Again, it is not that the Paradiso is lacking in trinitarian teaching and piety—it is shot through with them. And when we come to Dante’s final glimpse of what Beatrice and the others are adoring, he descries an image of Trinity that is surely unsurpassable as a sheer object of adoration: one shining love in three perichoretic circlings.

What seems just ever so slightly off, however, is that there is no way to relate to this Trinity except to adore it. To be a vision of Christian final blessedness, we perhaps should see ourselves from within the light, joining in the threefold dance.

We will indeed find each beloved other in God. And that can happen because the Father and his Son the Christ find each other, and we are there in what Augustine called the totus Christus, ‘the complete Christ’, the church-body of those without whom the incarnate Son would not be himself, and which preserves also in the Fulfillment our eucharistic-style presence to God and one another.

So have I tweaked Dante—and Gil?—for the better? Or have I just wrecked a beautiful thing? That is another question I do not know how to answer.