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Sunday
Today’s Old Testament reading, which is from The Book of Wisdom (a.k.a. The Wisdom of Solomon), works as a poem in its own right. It also brings to mind the discourse that Dante has with Solomon in Paradiso. Here’s the reading:
Wisdom is radiant and unfading,
and she is easily discerned by those who love her,
and is found by those who seek her.
She hastens to make herself known to those who desire her.
One who rises early to seek her will have no difficulty,
for she will be found sitting at the gate
To fix one’s thought on her is perfect understanding,
and one who is vigilant on her account will soon be free from care,
because she goes about seeking those worthy of her,
and she graciously appears to them in their paths,
and meets them in every thought.
Wisdom here is not just being smart but being willing to submit our lives to God, who in turn gives us the gifts we need to have rich and spirit-filled lives. The gifts differ from person to person, of course. Solomon, for instance, asked God for wisdom to be able to govern Israel and administer justice. I have always prayed to be a good teacher, with the literature I teach nurturing, guiding and embiggening (Lisa Simpson’s word) my students. It’s always a good exercise to identify our gifts and determine the best ways to share them with the world.
When Dante speaks of wisdom, he adds another component, which is opening ourselves to God’s love. In Paradiso’s final line, Dante speaks of the love that “moves the sun and the other stars,” and this love is so powerful that Dante, upon first entering Paradiso, cannot look directly at it. This fact leads to questions that he directs to Solomon, who resides in the sphere of the Sun.
When we reassume corporeal form on the last day, Dante asks Solomon how we will be strong enough to look upon that love that we commune directly with in heaven.
I’ll explain in a moment why this is an important question, even if you don’t believe that all will rise again in some mystical end time. Let’s first look at how Solomon responds.
It all depends on how humans interact with God’s love, Solomon tells Dante. The more one is able to open oneself to divinity, the brighter one shines. As the prophet king explains it, “the soul’s brightness takes its measure from our ardor,/our ardor from our vision.”
So instead of being overwhelmed by the light of God’s love when we return to earth, we will, as more perfect beings (now that we are rejoined with our bodies), be able to open ourselves to God’s love more fully than we did in our previous lives:
When, glorified and sanctified, the flesh
is once again our dress, our persons shall,
in being all complete, please all the more . . .
And
[T]herefore, whatever light gratuitous
the Highest Good gives us will be enhanced—
the light that will allow us to see Him;
that light will cause our vision to increase,
the ardor vision kindles to increase,
the brightness born of ardor to increase.
In short, we will be able to love more perfectly. In a rather extraordinary vision, Dante shows all the heavenly host longing to be reunited with their earthly bodies, when they can interact again with those they loved on earth:
One and the other choir seemed to me
so quick and keen to say “Amen” that they
showed clearly how they longed for their dead bodies—
not only for themselves, perhaps, but for
their mothers, fathers, and for others dear
to them before they were eternal flames.
Dante even goes so far as to say that the flesh that we will regain will overpower the effulgence—the bright light—that surrounds the celestial spirits. It will do so in the same way that the light from a burning lump of coal overpowers the coal itself:
But even as a coal that sends forth flame,
And by its vivid whiteness overpowers it
So that its own appearance it maintains,
Thus the effulgence that surrounds us now
Shall be o’erpowered in aspect by the flesh,
Which still to-day the earth doth cover up…
I think of Robert Frost’s line in “Birches,” “Earth’s the right place for love, I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.”
I wrote last week about how the early Christian church imagined Paradise occurring on earth, not in some ethereal future, and one can see Dante thinking along these lines as well. Just as one can read Inferno as being more about the hell that we make for ourselves in this world than in the next, I think the same can be said of Paradiso: the more we open ourselves to God’s love, the brighter we will shine and the more we bring God’s kingdom to earth. Or as the Lord’s Prayer’s puts it, “on earth as it is in heaven.”
The 17th century metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan puts it this way in his poem “The World.” (The “fools” he mentions are those who is lose themselves in their own ego-driven desires.):
O fools (said I) thus to prefer dark night
Before true light,
To live in grots and caves, and hate the day
Because it shews the way,
The way, which from this dead and dark abode
Leads up to God,
A way where you might tread the sun, and be
More bright than he.
In past posts about Inferno I’ve compared Dante’s damned souls with Vaughan’s account of those who make their own hells here and now. For instance,
The fearful miser on a heap of rust
Sate pining all his life there, did scarce trust
His own hands with the dust,
Yet would not place one piece above, but lives
In fear of thieves…
So Solomon, in his wisdom, suggests we choose love of God over love of Self. We could tread the sun if we wanted, outshining Dante’s celestial flames. Why do we so often settle for darkness instead?