This is continuously symbolised by Dante’s increasing ability, in each sphere, to see yet more of Beatrice’s beauty and the ever-more-pervading light of the Lord, as he is successively prepared for higher visions. Dante, with Beatrice, must visit each of the ten Heavens in turn, from lowest to highest, as his comprehension expands and he passes through each stage of revelation. In Dante’s theology, the Earth is at the centre of the Universe, surrounded by a series of heavenly spheres like the layers of an onion. Back to Dante Summary Part 1: Inferno Back to Dante Summary Part 2: Purgatorio ![]() After the horrors of Hell and the hardships of Purgatory, we finally understand the secrets of the Christian Universe. And at the same time, Beatrice explains more and more about the workings of God and the Universe, so everything that Dante has seen makes more and more sense, and the reader is gripped by the idea that they are receiving the same revelation as Dante. Dante’s joy is his reward for the hardships of his journey up to this point. ![]() Every time Dante seems to have reached his limit, he finds a way to make his next description even more extraordinary. In Paradiso, for example, Dante and Beatrice ascend through the nine spheres of the Universe and then pass into the Empyrean beyond the boundary of time and space – and Dante makes every sphere feel more joyful and radiant than the previous one. Dante’s poetry still feels intense and immediate, even after seven hundred years, even when it’s talking about the planets in a way that seems strange to modern readers. And in a time like ours, when the Western Church appears to be dissolving before our eyes, to save again what Dante himself saved out of the great medieval Christian synthesis has never been so timely.The Divine Comedy is much more than just an interesting medieval text about Christianity. In its direct application of metaphysical principles to ‘infernal psychology’, it is unique among Dante commentaries. As both a traditional re-presentation and a contemporary revisioning of the ‘examination of conscience’, individual and collective, Dark Way to Paradise is at once an exegetical masterpiece and a handbook of demonology of concrete use to any true physician of the soul. It is the record of the struggle of the human mind, will, and emotions to discover and name, by the grace of God, the sins resident in the human soul. ![]() Based on the works of a number of the Greek Fathers, on the writings of several members of the Traditionalist School, notably Frithjof Schuon and Rene Guenon, and on the kind of wide personal experience of the violation of the human form that is available to anyone in these times with both the requisite discernment-rooted in love-and the courage to keep his or her eyes open, Jennifer Doane Upton has once again seen Dante’s Inferno as it really is. The human passions, and the Mystery of Iniquity of which they are expressions, are fundamentally the same in any place and time the Inferno presents not so much a history of sin as a catalogue of the archetypes of sin, the fundamental ways in which all of us are tempted to betray the human form. ![]() But the Inferno, and the Divine Comedy as a whole, are much more than that. Alternately, it is taken as merely a cultural and political commentary on Dante’s own place and time, cast in allegorical terms. Dante’s Inferno is often presented today in lurid ‘gothic’ terms as if it were no more than an entertaining demonic freak-show.
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