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Paradiso, Canto XXI

In church yesterday, my priest talked about patience and diligence in the spiritual life. We often expect instant, or at least quick, results from our spiritual labors, and when those results don’t come on our timetable, we grow discouraged. The spiritual life seems fruitless. Why is it, we may think, that we keep coming back […]

In church yesterday, my priest talked about patience and diligence in the spiritual life. We often expect instant, or at least quick, results from our spiritual labors, and when those results don’t come on our timetable, we grow discouraged. The spiritual life seems fruitless. Why is it, we may think, that we keep coming back to confession with the same old sins? Why isn’t this doing any good? Why don’t I feel God’s presence? And so forth.

This, he says, is a trap. We don’t stop taking medicine because our healing is taking longer than we think it should. Perhaps we don’t understand our condition as well as we think we do. Doctor, we may think, give me stronger medicine. I’m tired of being in pain. The doctor knows what we don’t: that we are too weak to take medicine any stronger than what we’re being given now. A more potent draft may do us good later, but if we receive it too soon, it may kill us.

This is not a prescription for spiritual self-satisfaction, but rather for measure, and patience, and diligence on the long pilgrimage to restoration.

Hearing this, I thought of the opening lines from Canto XXI. Dante and Beatrice have ascended to the realm of Saturn, the heaven of the contemplatives. The pilgrim says:

By now I had my eyes fixed once again

upon my lady’s face, and with my eyes,

my mind, which was oblivious of all else.

 

She was not smiling, but, “Were I to smile,”

she said to me, “What Semele became

you would become, burned to a heap of ashes:

 

my beauty, as you have already seen,

becomes more radiant with every step

of the eternal palace that we climb,

 

and if it were not tempered, such effulgence

would strike your sight the way a bolt of lightning

shatters the leafy branches of a tree.

In Greek mythology, Zeus appeared to his priestess Semele, in the guise of an eagle. He promised to grant her anything she desired. She asked to be allowed to see his face, as proof that he was a god, indeed, the king of all the gods. Zeus pleaded with her to withdraw the request, but she would not; his oath required him to grant it. When Zeus revealed himself, the power of his majesty destroyed her. She was a mere mortal, and mortals cannot gaze upon divinity without being consumed.

The lesson is that God, like love, must be concealed or shrouded for us to relate to it. To take it pure is to court annihilation. There are limits built into our nature.

Beatrice, who can read Dante’s mind, is telling him not to be overeager to know what he shouldn’t know, what he isn’t capable of knowing, and seeing, without being destroyed. In Canto XXVI of Inferno, the wayfarer Odysseus goes to his own death because he ignored warnings not to journey beyond the edge of the known universe, lest he perish. Beatrice has been telling Dante as they rise through the heavens that his spiritual strength is growing with each new level, and that he will, in the end, be able to bear the weight of God’s glory.

But not just yet — and some things will forever be unknowable, even when our nature is perfected in Paradise. In the Seventh Heaven, Dante sees Jacob’s Ladder, and down it radiant souls ascending. In the Benedictine tradition, Jacob’s Ladder symbolizes humility as the way to God. Here, the contemplatives are so humble and full of love that they do not wait for the pilgrim to ascend, but rather come down to meet him.

He first meets St. Peter Damian, a renowned 11th-century Benedictine ascetic, reformer (he wrote a book scathingly condemning sexually corrupt priests, especially those who corrupt boys), and Doctor of the Church. Dante asks him to explain the mystery of predestination. The saint tells him that some questions are beyond the ability of created beings, even in their perfected heavenly state, to answer. He instructs Dante to return to earth and tell others not to ask questions that cannot ever be satisfactorily answered. We see that the saint is absolutely radiant with love, indicating the clarity of his spiritual vision and the purity of his unity with God. The point here is that to know God fully is to know what God knows — an impossibility for a finite creature — but rather be united with Him in love, which means accepting His will perfectly. If He has willed some things to be beyond the ken of man, then we will not know peace until we accept that with joy.

Peter Damian — again, a great ascetic — goes on to lament the corruption of the Church on earth, which he describes as fat:

Your modern pastors need all kinds of help:

one here, one there, to lead, to prop and hold

up their behinds — they are so full of food…

Dante arrived in this heaven asking St. Peter Damian why the heaven of the contemplatives is so silent, when all the other heavens ring out with glorious music. The saint explains that there is no music there for the same reason that Beatrice does not smile: the blessed withhold sound because Dante is not strong enough to hear it as it is. They are trying to teach Dante that sometimes, God is better known in silence, in solemnity, in asceticism. The sound of the contemplatives’ silence is, in a spiritual sense, deafening.

We receive an intimation of this at the end, after the saint has denounced the corrupt clergy, this happens:

As he spoke these last words, I saw more flames

descending, whirling rung to rung, and they

grew lovelier with every whirl they made.

 

Around this light they came to rest, and then,

in one voice all those lights let out a cry

the sound of which no one on earth has heard —

 

nor could I hear their words for all the thunder.

See what happened here? The glory of God as manifested through these saints was so aurally overwhelming that communication between the pilgrim and the saints became impossible. “For all the thunder” recalls Beatrice’s warning about Semele and the lightning (she was incinerated by Zeus’s thunderbolt). Dante has gotten off light here; he simply could not understand what the contemplatives were shouting in unison. As Beatrice explains at the beginning of the next canto, they were calling out for justice to be delivered to the corrupt pope, bishops, priests and monks.

This is such a rich set of imagery because the contemplatives are generally understood to be committed to silence. The spiritual lesson for us is that we should not mistake silence for a lack of activity. Spiritual realities are not always apparent, and in fact are usually hidden from our eyes. Even those who have given themselves over to prayer, contemplation, and a life of apparent tranquility can be doing tremendous work. Still waters, as they say, run deep, and their currents can be extraordinarily potent on a culture beyond the cloister. By seeming to be disconnected from the life of the world, contemplatives may in fact be thoroughly engaged with it. No contemplative exemplifies this more perfectly than St. Benedict of Nursia, the founder of Western monasticism, whom Dante will meet in the next canto.

So, we must keep in mind as we deal with frustration at what seems to us like our own lack of spiritual progress, that we may, in fact, be making real gains, despite our weakness and poverty. And we may be proceeding exactly as fast and as far as we can, given our spiritual state. I suggested this to my priest, who said yes, this is true. In the same way, however, it’s also true that we often cannot perceive the depths of spiritual corruption of our own hearts, because that too would be unbearable. God’s mercy to us consists in part of keeping us shielded to a certain degree from our actual condition, because, so to speak, the shock of it might kill us.

Reading this canto, I think of how I sought to know everything I could about the same kind of clerical scandal that St. Peter Damian fought so hard against … and I got my wish. I didn’t seek that knowledge out because of curiosity. I sought it to join the fight against it. To do good. But I was not spiritually prepared for it, and it very nearly destroyed my faith. As I’ve said many times before, if I had spent all the years prior to that in prayer, study, and contemplation instead of busying myself with Church politics, and thinking that marked me as an engaged Christian, I would have been much better prepared to face the true spiritual darkness within the Church, and to combat it. That’s a mistake that God willing, I won’t make again. One who rushes into battle without training and conditioning, and without a sure knowledge of his own limitations, is a fool. A brave fool, perhaps, and certainly an ardent fool. But a fool.

If it’s true that you shouldn’t ask questions that are unanswerable, it’s also the case that you shouldn’t ask questions the answers to which you’re not prepared to hear. Likewise, you shouldn’t seek to see things, the unveiled reality of which could turn you to stone.

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