Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Since I am on a quest to read the Great Books, I decided to download the audio version of Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. I think because it's audio, it got a bit confusing, plus there are characters with the same name and it goes back and forth in time. Certainly a recipe for confusion.

After looking up a summary in order to get everyone straight, I got the gist of it. There are three children being raised together by the Earnshaw family. Two, Hindley and Catherine are biological brother and sister. Heathcliff is adopted as a young lad. Hindley becomes bitterly jealous of the new addition, while Catherine and Heathcliff grow very close. There is another family that lives nearby, the Lintons. They have two children, Edgar and Isabella. Eventually Hindley marries and his wife dies giving birth to Hareton. Catherine marries Edgar, much to Heathcliff's enduring disappointment, yet she also dies in childbirth with Catherine (called Cathy). Heathcliff marries Isabella to spite Edgar who hates him. While she doesn't die in childbirth, she leaves Heathcliff shortly after giving birth to a son, Linton. When she dies about 15 years later, he is sent to live with the father he never knew. Heathcliff is now more bitter than ever, abusively raising Hindley's son, Hareton, after Hindley dies as a form of long-term revenge. When a pale, sickly Linton comes to live with him, Heathcliff only cares so that he may marry the boy off to Cathy and thereby inherit for himself the Linton property.

Everyone in the novel is a pretty unimpressive human being. The entire story is told by the housekeeper to a visitor. No one looks good. Even the housekeeper has fallen victim to the selfish mentality. All are narcissistic and extreme versions of awful, selfish people. I suppose this is what "love" looks like when there is absolutely no thought of another. Even Cathy, who seems untainted by the drama of her parents, eventually falls prey to Heathcliff's bitterness after going to live with him upon her marriage to Linton. It's two in-bred generations of self-centered self-pity. It's not unusual for the cause of death to be a broken and embittered heart. Odd.

I guess I didn't really identify with any of the characters, except as a cautionary tale. What not to do. No one is happy. Everyone lives their entire lives full of anger, bitterness, and regret. The book ends with Heathcliff being buried in the same grave as Catherine, literally on top of her so he can be with her in eternity.

Really.

Maybe it's me, but I really did not like the book. I'm not sure of the point. I'm sure better minds than I can get far more out of it.

Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse

Looking for something lighter than usual, I suggested Wodehouse's Jeeves books to my book club. Since there are so many, we decided we would each choose whichever one we wanted. I decided on Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse. I'd already read Right Ho, Jeeves, (my post here) and although Carry On was written before, it refers to events from the latter book as having already happened. Hmmmm.No matter, the book was delightful. This time, it is up to Bertram Wooster, the young playboy, to patch up the engagement of Gussie Fink-Nottle to Madeline Basset lest the young woman come after Wooster. Of course Bertie makes a mess of all and Jeeves swoops in to rescue him as only Jeeves, the "gentlemen's gentleman" can.

I love the subtle and not-so-subtle humor of the books. I love Wooster's inner monologue and self-awareness while having lack of self-awareness. I love Jeeves, while being always agreeable, manages to finesse events to his will. Wodehouse is a genius and his books, although light-hearted and very funny, are so well-written they deserve the accolades given him.

One particularly clever bit after Wooster has narrowly avoided being seen by Plank, a man who has it out for him:

Wooster: You may be happy, but I haven't been for the last quarter of an hour or so, nestling behind the sofa and expecting Plank at any moment to unmask me. It didn't occur to you to envisage what would happen if he met me?
Jeeves: I was sure that your keen intelligence would enable you to find a means of avoiding him, sir, as indeed it did. You concealed yourself behind the sofa?
Wooster: On all fours
Jeeves: A very shrew manoeuvre on your part, if I may say so, sir. It showed a resource and swiftness of thought which it would be difficult to overpraise.

Gotta love that Jeeves!

Manalive by G.K. Chesterton

I've never read anything by G.K. Chesterton. I know Orthodoxy is a favorite of Regan's, but for some reason I decided to start with his fiction. What a strange, unexpected, little book is Manalive by G.K. Chesterton.

The setting is a boarding house in London (I believe), with its requisite odd group of characters. As they are standing out in the garden one day, discussing the day's news and philosophizing, a strange man bursts over the fence and changes their lives. His strange, child-like behavior proves very off-putting at first, but within a short time, he grows on them. When he, however, desires to propose to one of the group's friends, they are thrown into a conundrum. How can their sweet, innocent friend possibly marry a man as silly and guileless as Mr. Innocent Smith. 

To simply consider the possibility of living a simple, care-free life, throwing caution to the wind and taking a chance suddenly begins to open up new ways of living that they had never imagined. Just as they are considering the implications, a doctor and an officer show up looking for Mr. Smith who appears to be quite the conman and criminal. 

The group commences an in-house trial and the prosecution gets to work. Yet every single example, be it of burglary or even adultery, can be explained by the defense. 

It turns out that Mr. Innocent Smith has decided that he will LIVE as long as he is alive. To the unsuspecting world who spends most of their time just waiting to die, this can look quite unorthodox. (Ironic for the man best known for Orthodoxy.) 

At the end of this delightful book, Chesterton says, “There is but one answer, and I am sorry if you don't like it. If Innocent is happy, it is because he is innocent. If he can defy the conventions, it is just because he can keep the commandments. It is just because he does not want to kill but to excite to life that a pistol is still as exciting to him as it is to a schoolboy. It is just because he does not want to steal, because he does not covet his neighbour's goods, that he has captured the trick (oh, how we all long for it!), the trick of coveting his own goods. It is just because he does not want to commit adultery that he achieves the romance of sex; it is just because he loves one wife that he has a hundred honeymoons. If he had really murdered a man, if he had really deserted a woman, he would not be able to feel that a pistol or a love letter was like a song—at least, not a comic song.” (p. 183)

It's a sweet book with a sweet (however probably highly impracticable) lesson.

Leisure: The Basis of Culture by Josef Pieper

There are a few book that those interested in Classical Education are told they HAVE to read. Leisure: The Basis of Culture by Josef Pieper is one of them. For such an impactful book, it is surprisingly short: only about 50 pages. Yet every word is packed with insight and wisdom. It is one of those very rare books in which I was marking just about every paragraph for further reflection.

His thesis is simply that without intentional leisure, culture withers and dies. He worries that in our too-hurried and work-focused world, leisure will be lost and culture along with it. He returns to the ancients, as so many of us do for wisdom. For while leisure is decidedly not work, it is in fact its opposite, it is not sloth either. It is divine contemplation. It is knowing God. This the ancients understood.

“It should, however, be added that even the philosophers of antiquity (which here and elsewhere always means the philosophers of Greece and the Middle Ages) looked upon the active effort of discursive thought as the properly human element in our knowledge; it is the ratio, they held, which is distinctively human; the intellectus they regarded as being already beyond the sphere allotted to man. And yet it belonged to man, though in one sense ‘superhuman’; the ‘purely human’ by itself could not satiate man's powers of comprehension, for man, of his very nature, reaches out beyond the sphere of the ‘human’, touching on the order of pure spirits. ‘Although the knowledge which is most characteristic of the human soul occurs in the mode of ratio, nevertheless there is in it a sort of participation in the simple knowledge which is proper to higher beings, of whom it is therefore said that they possess the faculty of spiritual vision.’ That is how the matter is put by Aquinas in the Quaestiones disputate de veritate. It means to say that man participates in the angelic faculty of non-discursive vision, which is the capacity to apprehend the spiritual in the same manner that our eye apprehends light or our ear sound. Our knowledge in fact includes an element of non-activity, of purely receptive vision—though it is certainly not essentially human; it is, rather, the fulfilment of the highest promise in man, and thus, again, truly human (just as Aquinas calls the vita contemplativa ‘non proprie humana sed super humana’, not really human but superhuman, although it is the noblest way of life).” (p. 10)

Pieper gives a wonderful example of the beauty that results when we no longer have to work hard to do the right thing, when our contemplation simply becomes who we are.

“The tendency to overvalue hard work and the effort of doing something difficult is so deep-rooted that it even infects our notion of love. Why should it be that the average Christian regards loving one's enemy as the most exalted form of love? Principally because it offers an example of a natural bent heroically curbed; the exceptional difficulty, the impossibility one might almost say, of loving one’s enemy constitutes the greatness of the love. And what does Aquinas say? ‘It is not the difficulty of loving one’s enemy that matters when the essence of the merit of doing so is concerned, excepting in so far as the perfection of love wipes out the difficulty. And therefore, if love were to be so perfect that the difficulty vanished altogether—it would be more meritorious still.’” (p. 15)

Yet we are so defined by work.

“This implies nothing against training and nothing against the official. Of course specialized and professional work is normal, the normal way in which men play their part in the world; ‘work’ is the normal, the working day is the ordinary day. But the question is: whether the world, defined as the world of work, is exhaustively defined; can man develop to the full as a functionary and a ‘worker’ and nothing else; can a full human existence be contained within an exclusively workaday existence?” (p. 20) 

No, Pieper answers. There is more to being human than working.

“In the Middle Ages the same view prevailed. ‘It is necessary for the perfection of human society’, Aquinas writes, ‘that there should be men who devote their lives to contemplation—nota bene, necessary not only for the good of the individual who so devotes himself, but for the good of human society.’” (p. 23)  

Yet, as stated earlier, Pieper is definitely not advocating for sloth or laziness.

“Idleness, in the medieval view, means that a man prefers to forgo the rights, or if you prefer the claims, that belong to his nature. In a word, he does not want to be as God wants him to be, and that ultimately means that he does not wish to be what he really, fundamentally, is. Acedia is the ‘despair from weakness’ which Kierkegaard analysed as the ‘despairing refusal to be oneself’. Metaphysically and theologically, the notion of acedia means that a man does not, in the last resort, give the consent of his will to his own being; that behind or beneath the dynamic activity of his existence, he is still not at one with himself, or, as the medieval writers would have said, face to face with the divine good within him; he is a prey to sadness (and that sadness is the tristitia saeculi of Holy Scripture).” (p. 24) 

And what is behind this all-pervasive desire to truncate humans into simple workers? Pieper sees an insidious intent to enslave humanity to the power of the state by depriving them of the very means to be free.

“This inner constraint, the inner chains which fetter us to ‘work’, prompts a further question: ‘proletarianism’ thus understood, is perhaps a symptomatic state of mind common to all levels of society and by no means confined to the ‘proletariat’, to the ‘worker’, a general symptom that is merely found isolated in unusually acute form in the proletariat; so that it might be asked whether we are not all of us proletarians and all of us, consequently, ripe and ready to fall into the hands of some collective labour State and be at its disposal as functionaries—even though explicitly of the contrary political opinion.” (p. 39) 

Therefore, leisure is no luxury or superfluous pursuit. It is the very essence of a fully-formed human.
It is, in fact, a gift from God.

“All this is true too of leisure: its possibility, its ultimate justification derive from its roots in divine worship. That is not a conceptual abstraction, but the simple truth as may be seen from the history of religion. What does a ‘day of rest’ mean in the Bible, and for that matter in Greece and Rome? To rest from work means that time is reserved for divine worship: certain days and times are set aside and transferred to ‘the exclusive property of the Gods’. (p. 45) ... cut off from the worship of the divine, leisure becomes laziness and work inhuman.” (p. 48)

Becoming Mrs. Lewis by Patti Callahan

Our book club chose the book Becoming Mrs. Lewis by Patti Callahan. I wasn't there for the discussion as to why. I'm curious about the reason given for the selection.

Now, I'm a huge C.S. Lewis fan, and because of that, I kind of wish I had not read this book. Becoming Mrs. Lewis is the fictionalized account of Joy Davidman's relationship with C.S. Lewis that eventually ended in their marriage. The problem from the start was that she was already married and had two little boys. Instantly, I was thinking that there's no way this ends well. Either her husband dies (probably through suicide at he threatens) or there's a divorce. Either way, the two boys are irrevocably harmed. It was hard to image the C.S. Lewis I thought I knew becoming a part of this train-wreck.

Joy writes to Lewis after reading several of his books—he's already a famous author—to ask him questions about her newfound "foxhole" faith. He writes her back and they begin a two-year letter-writing correspondence. Inappropriately, in my opinion, she begins to discuss her marital woes with him.

After suffering from health issues, she believes taking a few months off of her life with her erratic, cheating, and alcoholic husband and visiting England is just what the doctor ordered. Leaving her boys with this awful husband and her gorgeous cousin, off she sets for the adventure of a lifetime, meeting Lewis face-to-face, as well as the other Inklings, including Tolkien. After spending Christmas with him, she returns home for the new year. All the while she claims despair at being away from her boys and is slightly concerned when her husband stops writing.

In an "how could you not have foreseen this" moment, she is told her husband and cousin are in love and want to start a life together with the boys if she will only give him a divorce. She refuses, telling us once again that her marriage and family are the most important things to her. Finally, with Lewis urging her on, she divorces her husband and takes the boys across the Atlantic Ocean. But not to him. Not right away.

However, Lewis has never shown a romantic interest in her, and actually has hurt her feelings several times by letting her know it is her mind he enjoys. So there is no romantic climax as they create a new family and solve all her problems. Rather, it takes a visa crisis to propel him to offer a platonic marriage in order to secure her ability to stay in England. It is not until her health takes a rapid turn for the absolute worst that they decide to make their marriage a real one based on love. And this takes place as she lays dying in the hospital.

In a miraculous turn of events, Lewis is somehow able to take her physical pain upon himself and give her a three-year reprieve. The boys are denied all access to their father and after she dies Lewis takes custody. Yet he dies three years after that. We are told in an epilogue that one boy is now a Christian and the other is a Jew.

I don't know if it was the reader's tone (I listened on audiobook), the author, or if it was the character of Joy Davidman, but I really didn't like her and I never saw what C.S. Lewis saw in her. The writing certainly suffers from a desire to tell and not show. We are repeatedly told that Joy loves her husband and wants it to work, but we see no evidence. Instead it is clear she is having an emotional affair with Lewis through the letters. Her boys are supposedly the most important thing to her, but she leaves them with an abusive and alcoholic husband and her single, gorgeous cousin for months. If her mind is what attracted Lewis, I see no evidence of it in this decision. Joy also makes it clear that she is a WRITER, and as such, she MUST write. Yet at the same time, very little of her work is published and she struggles her whole life to scrape together enough money to survive. Her husband is likewise caught up in his own illusions of grandeur in that he, too is a WRITER. In fact, as he loves to remind her, he is a better writer than she. And yet, neither are able to make a living at it. I kept telling the characters, "Writing is your HOBBY. Get a real job!" In fact, each chapter begins with an original Joy Davidman couplet, as try as I might, I was never as convinced as she by her greatness. Also, she was apparently a committed, militant atheist and Communist before her conversion. We are told.

Finally we are repeatedly told that C.S. Lewis was absolutely enthralled by her original mind and ability to keep up with and challenge one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century. Yet we never see this. Not once does she say or argue anything remotely interesting, much less of the caliber of Lewis. I'm tempted to think, since the author largely relied on Joy's papers and her son's recollections, that Joy was mistaken in the esteem in which Lewis held her. We are told the marriage was platonic because, being divorced, Lewis couldn't marry her in the church. Yet this rings false. The love of your life, your intellectual equal, the woman you cannot live without, and you set her up in home down the street and keep the marriage a secret? Tolkien didn't warm to her and I'm inclined to side with him on this.

One final irony. Joy tells us repeatedly that she doesn't want to be "someone's wife." She wants an identity as a writer and an intellectual. Yet again, that whole, "my marriage and my boys are my world" trope makes a repeated appearance. And yet, not really. Lewis becomes her world, even physically taking her away from her family. (Again, not on his recommendation but of her own suggestion.) Yet the book is titled, "Becoming Mrs. Lewis." I thought that at some point, her pride and budding feminism were finally brought under the loving submission to a great man for whom she would gladly be known as "Mrs. Lewis." Nope. We see nothing of this. It is clear that she desperately loves him, but their marriage is initially secret, so she is not actually Mrs. Lewis. And at the end, it's a brief 3-year honeymoon in which they don't really have a life as a traditional husband and wife. I'm not clear that anyone knew her as Mrs. Lewis. It's a bad title and actually the opposite of what happens. If anything, she becomes the ex-wife of Bill Gresham, and the biggest fan girl of Lewis the world has known. She never moves beyond her own sense of victimhood or even into a deep relationship with Christ. It's almost like the whole book is fan fiction and the real C.S. Lewis gallantly chose not to sue.

Unfortunately, I didn't like Mrs. Lewis, and through her eyes, I didn't like C.S. Lewis much either. I'm going to try to forget I read this and remember him with the esteem he deserves.

Something They Will Not Forget by Joshua Gibbs

Joshua Gibbs is my hero and my mentor teacher. He has never met me and has no idea I exist, but that doesn't stop me from referring to him as my mentor. When it was announced that he had written Something They Will Not Forget, I put in a pre-order and anxiously awaited its arrival. In typical Joshua Gibbs fashion, he blows away all the detritus that has gathered around teaching and reveals precious nuggets.

The book is basically an apologetic for his idea of a catechism. Well, a catechism is not exactly his idea, but an old one, resurrected and used to great benefit within a classical classroom. But in the process of making his argument, he first needs to demolish some strongholds.

He first tackles the teacher and student's natural aversion to subjectivity. He brilliantly points out that even the most objective question, "What date was the Divine Comedy written?" is still very subjective. The fact that the questions even exists is a subjective call on the part of the teacher. In fact, if we do it right as teachers, we will find that the "subjective" topics withstand the test of time far better than the seemingly objective ones will. The Pieta is beautiful. While that is subjective, it is true and defensible and will continue to be true for another millennia. Whether or not Pluto is a planet seems to change daily. Yet at one time, "List the 9 planets" seemed a perfectly reasonable objective question. A beautiful example is stated, "Seven hundred years later, the world still attends to Dante's Comedy, even though every page of the book is shot through with Dante's [false] geocentric beliefs." (p. 14) Often, the subjective things are the important things. Besides, the objective things are often forgotten and need to be looked up later anyways.

Which brings him to why and how we remember. After quizzing his students on what they remember from previous classes and being repeatedly disappointed with how little they remember, he tried to understand why it was that certain things stuck. When asking his students how they memorized the things they still recalled, "They answered this question one by one, all their answers began with the same two words: We all... Simply put, everything they remembered years later had been memorized as a group." (p. 26) He recognized a power in memorizing as a group, at a certain time and location. The students seemed to instinctively realize that the teacher had found something worthy enough of precious class time to devote the necessary minutes and hours to the recitation of a piece of text. "In fact, students do not learn what the teacher tests on, they learn what he lavishes his minutes and hours on." (p. 27)

Joshua Gibbs' idea of a catechism is to start each class period with a set of questions and answers recited by the whole class which covers all the most important material for the year. This 5-7 minute exercise involves reciting from primary sources in answer to universal and virtue-inducing questions. The benefits are manifold. As for time, Gibbs reminds us that the first few minutes of class are usually a waste anyways. But beyond that, the catechism shifts the student's mind and puts him in a place where he is ready to discuss the big ideas and read hard texts. The rest of the class becomes a continuation of the catechism. New material is being introduced that relates to and is informed by the material already quoted in recitation.

To the skeptic, he states,

Those teachers who are most happy with [the catechism], and most convinced of its worth, have not tried to skimp on the time they commit to daily recitations. On the other hand, those who report only mild success say they use a catechism "once a week," or that their own catechisms are much shorter than the kind I recommend. So, too, some readers of this book may be tempted to write a three-minute catechism for their own classes to save time; however, it is unlikely the short catechism will reference all the significant material from the curriculum. Neither is the short catechism all that imposing, and students will not be inclined to respect something quick and perfunctory. The shorter the catechism, the less of an accomplishment it is. (p. 34)

Describing its most impactful benefit, Gibbs says,

While the recitation of a catechism involves speaking, it is paradoxical speaking, for it is also silence—a slowly accruing silence. Pagans repeat their prayers because their gods have thick skulls, and Christians repeat their prayers because they have thick skulls. Pagans believe they will be heard for their many words, but Christians believe they themselves will hear for their many words—and they will hear because they are silent, but God is speaking through them. Repetition clears the path from distractions. (p. 40)

I have found this to be true in my own classroom. The catechism clears the mind of the distractions of the hallway and the other students. It "cleanses the pallet" so to speak.

Moving on to the Classical Curriculum, Gibbs turns the spotlight on me, specifically. He states that "Classical" is not a curriculum, although we'd like to think it's that easy. Rather than present something that has stood the test of time as an ego-gratifying exercise, we need to be careful to put the author in the position of authority. It is not me and it is certainly not the student. Never read something deep and meaningful and ask, "What do you think?" It gives the students an authority over the text he has not earned. The catechism helps establish the authority set down by the author by quoting an author in his own words as the the answer to some moral important question.

Steps for writing a catechism:
1. Foundational Questions: Gibbs begins all of his catechisms with these seven questions:

1. Gentlemen, what are you?
2. Ladies, what are you?
3. What does it mean to rule yourself?
4. Who has made you kings and queens?
5. What is bondage to decay?
6. What does it mean to be human?
7. Why should we seek virtue?

These questions literally set the foundation for why we are doing education at all.
Then he moves onto questions with answers answered by the content of the class. But even these should have some distance between the question and the answer. Ideally, a catechism question will ask a moral question like, "What do we believe?" rather than, "What is the Nicene Creed?"

2. Curriculum Condensed: Gibbs calls us to use those parts from the texts we will study to

"convey a strong moral vision, not merely a summary of content. It is a catechism, after all, and not a survey. If the catechism would prove inoffensive to men who embrace falsehood and preach deception, then the catechism is worthless...The catechism is a preparation for life, a preparation for the Judgment, not a preparation for the SAT." (p. 72) 

3. Presentation: When the teacher first presents the idea of a catechism, he may have to first own up to the system's failure to inculcate true and resilient knowledge. Ask the students what they remember from the "cram and spit it out" days, and then compare that to things they truly remember. What is the difference. Apologize for wasting their time asking them to memorize things everyone know will be forgotten in a few weeks.

"The institution of the catechism ought to come as a relief to everyone, then, and the teacher should express this relief when moving students from a system which wastes everyone's time to a system wherein canonized texts are memorized for life. If some kind of joy, liberty, and emancipation does not accompany the institution of the catechism, the teacher does not know what the catechism really is." (p. 75)

Finally, Gibbs summarizes up his apologetic for a catechism with the following:

For a moment, imagine the classical school where all classes began with a catechism. Consider the staggering volume of the canon which might be memorized before graduation. Imagine commencement ceremonies where the graduates could recite great literature and Scripture for an hour before receiving their diplomas. Imagine the weight of all that glory." (p. 117)

Letters to a Diminished Church by Dorothy Sayers

Anyone who is in the field of Classical Education will know that Dorothy Sayers', "Lost Tools of Learning" is a required text. Since I already owned Letters to a Diminished Church I figured I should read that as well. She is witty and sharp and I can see why C.S. Lewis loved her.

The book is a series of essays making "Passionate arguments for the relevance of the Christian doctrine." while she touches on everything from "What Do We Believe?"  to "Why Work?" her real passion is for literature and the Christian esthetic.

The Greatest Drama Ever Staged
— is the official creed of Christendom

"The Christian faith is the most exciting drama that ever staggered the imagination of man—and the dogma is the drama." (p.1) Sayers laments that somehow we have managed to make the greatest drama dull. "So that is the outline of the official story—the tale of the time when God was the underdog and got beaten, when he submitted to the conditions he had laid down and became a man like the men he had made, and the men he had made broke him and killed him. This is the dogma we find so dull—this terrifying drama of which God is the victim and hero." (p. 4)

What Do We Believe?

Now, there does exist an official statement of Christian belief, and if we examine it with a genuine determination to discover what the words mean, we shall find it is a very strange one. And whether, as Christians declare, man was made in the image of God or, as the cynic said, man has made God in the image of man, the conclusion is the same-namely, that this strange creed purports to tell us the essential facts, not only about God, but also about the true nature of man. (p. 10)

• I believe in god the Father Almighty, Maker of all things.
• And in the only-begotten Son of God, by whom all things were made. He was incarnate; crucified, dead and buried; and rose again.
• I believe in the Holy Ghost, the lord and life-giver.
• And I believe in one Church and baptism, in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting.

The Dogma is the Drama

We have done a poor job of communicating our dogma and so the world has an incorrect view of what we believe is true. The unbeliever might say God is "always ready to pounce on anybody who trips up over a difficulty." (p. 17) Or that Jesus is needed to calm God down when he's angry and "if we try to live like him, God the Father will let us off being damned hereafter and only have us tortured in this life instead." (p. 18) Christian virtues are, "Respectability, childishness; mental timidity; dullness; sentimentality; censoriousness; and a depression of spirits." (p. 19)

The response deserves an extended quote:

Let us, in heaven's name, drag out the divine drama from under the dreadful accumulation of slipshod thinking and trashy sentiment heaped upon it, and set it on an open stage to startle the world into some sort of vigorous reaction. If the pious are the first to be shocked, so much worse for the pious— others will pass into the kingdom of heaven before them. If all men are offended because of Christ, let them be offended; but where is the sense of their being offended at something that is not Christ and is nothing like him? We do him singularly little honor by watering down his personality till it could not offend a fly. Surely it is not the business of the Church to adapt Christ to men, but to adapt men to Christ.

It is the dogma that is the drama—not beautiful phrases, nor comforting sentiments, nor vague aspirations to loving kindness and uplift, nor the promise of something nice after death—but the terrifying assertion that the same God who made the world, lived in the world and passed through the grave and gate of death. Show that to the heathen, and they may not believe it; but at least they may realize that here is something that a man might be glad to believe. 

The Image of God

What does it mean to be created "in the image of God"? Sayers answers, "The characteristic common to God and man is apparently that: the desire and ability to make things." (p. 25) Specifically we can create almost ex nihilo using language. 

"The creation is not a product of the matter and is not simply a rearrangement of the matter. The amount of matter in the universe is limited, and its possible rearrangements, though the sum of them would amount to astronomical figures, is also limited. But no such limitation of numbers applies to the creation of works of art. The poet is not obliged, as it were, to destroy the material of a Hamlet in order to create a Falstaff, as a carpenter must destroy a tree form to create a table form. The components of the material world are fixed; those of the world of imagination increase by a continuous and irreversible process, without any destruction or rearrangement of what went before. This represents the nearest approach we experience to creation out of nothing, and we conceive of the act of absolute creation as being an act analogous to that of the creative artist. Thus Berdyaev is able to say: 'God created the world by imagination.'" (p. 31)

Creative Mind

Creative minds have the ability to tell the truth through creative means. 

"A work of fiction, for example, possesses poetic truth, provided that the author has rightly seen which things can so be related as to combine into a convincing unity—provided, as Hard says, the work is an act of consistent imagination. If the imagination is consistent, the work will produce effects as if it were actually true." (p. 39)

Creed or Chaos?

Sayers begins the essay with, "It is hopeless to offer Christianity as a vaguely idealistic aspiration of a simple and consoling kind; it is, on the contrary, a hard, tough, exacting and complex doctrine, steeped in a drastic and uncompromising realism." (p. 49)

"Today, if we could really be persuaded that we are miserable sinners—that the trouble is not outside us but inside us, and that therefore, by the grace of God, we can do something to put it right—we should receive that message as the most hopeful and heartening thing that can be imagined...But once we have established the true doctrine of man's nature, the true nature of judgment becomes startlingly clear and rational. It is the inevitable consequence of man's attempt to regulate life and society on a system that runs counter to the facts of his own nature." (p. 65)

Strong Meat

"The story of Passiontide and Easter us the story of the winnowing of that freedom and of that victory over the evils of time.  The burden of the guilt is accepted (“He was made Sin”), the last agony of alienation from God is passed through (Eloi, lama sabachthani); the temporal body is broken and remade; and time and eternity are reconciled in a single person. There is no retreat here to the paradise of primal ignorance; the new kingdom of God is built upon the foundations of spiritual experience. Time is not denied; it is fulfilled. 'I am the food of the full-grown.'"

The Other Six Deadly Sins

Our culture has decided that sex encompasses all sin. Therefore to speak of sin is to speak of sex. And while there is sexual immorality and ought to be called out as such, we whitewash away the other sins far too easily.

Anger: "But we do not always recognize this ugly form of possession when it cloaks itself under a zeal for efficiency or a lofty resolution to expose scandals—particularly if it expresses itself only in print or in platform verbiage. It is very well known to the more unscrupulous part of the press that nothing pays so well in the newspaper world as the manufacture of schisms and the exploitation of wrath. Turn over the pages of the more popular papers if you want to see haw avarice thrives on hatred and the passion of violence." (p. 85)

 Gluttony: "The gluttonous consumption of manufactured goods had become, before the war, the prime civic virtue. And why? Because the machines can produce cheaply only if they produce in vast quantities; because unless the machines can produce cheaply nobody can afford to keep them running; and because, unless they are kept running, millions of citizens will be thrown out of employment, and the community will starve." (p. 88)

Covetousness: "It was left for the present age to endow covetousness with glamor on a big scale and to give it a title that it could carry like a flag. It occurred to somebody to call it enterprise. From the moment of that happy inspiration, covetousness has gone forward and never looked back. It has become a swaggering, swash-buckling, piratical sin, going about with its head cocked over its eye, and with pistols tucked into the tops of its jack boots. Its war cries are “Business Efficiency!” “Free Competition!” “Get Out or Get Under!” and “There's Always Room at the Top!" It no longer works and saves; it launches out into new enterprises; it gambles and speculates; it thinks in a big way; it takes risks. It can no longer be troubled to deal in real wealth and so remain attached to work and the soil." (p. 93)

Envy: "Envy is the great leveler. If it cannot level things up, it will level them down; and the words constantly in its mouth are “my rights” and “my wrongs.” At its best, envy is a climber and a snob; at its worst, it is a destroyer; rather than have anybody happier than itself, it will see us all miserable together.
"...The difficulty about dealing with envy is precisely that it is the sin of the have-nots, and that, on that account, it can always find support among those who are just and generous minded. Its demands for a place in the sun are highly plausible, and those who detect any egotism in the demand can readily be silenced by accusing them of oppression, inertia, and a readiness to grind the face of the poor." (p. 99, 100)

Acedia or Sloth: "In the world it calls itself tolerance; but in hell it is called despair. It is the accomplice of the other sins and their worst punishment. It is the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, loves nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive only because there is nothing it would die for. We have known it far too well for many years. The only thing perhaps that we have not known about it is that it is a mortal sin."

Pride: "[T]he head and origin of all sin is the basic sin of superbia or pride. In one way there is so much to say about pride that one might speak of it for a week and not have done. Yet in another way, all there is to be said about it can be said in a single sentence. It is the sin of trying to be as God. It is the sin that proclaims that man can produce out of his own wits, and his own impulses, and his own imagination the standards by which he lives: that man is fitted to be his own judge. It is pride that turns man's virtues into deadly sins by causing each self-sufficient virtue to issue in its own opposite, and as a grotesque and horrible travesty of itself. The name under which pride walks the world at this moment is the perfectibility of man, or the doctrine of progress; and its specialty is the making of blueprints for utopia and establishing the kingdom of man on earth.
"For the devilish strategy of pride is that it attacks us, not on our weak points, but on our strong. It is preeminently the sin of the noble mind—that corruptio optimi that works more evil in the world than all the deliberate vices. Because we do not recognize pride when we see it, we stand aghast to see the havoc wrought by the triumphs of human idealism. We meant so well, we thought we were succeeding—and look what has come of our efforts!" (p. 105)

Christian Morality

Sayers says the church has worked very hard since Christ's ascension to remove the foul stench of the charge that he was "a gluttonous man and a winebibber" by being wholly against those sort of things.

Now, if we look at the Gospels with the firm intention to discover the emphasis of Christ's morality, we shall find that it did not lie at all along the lines laid down by the opinion of highly placed and influential people. Disreputable people who knew they were disreputable were gently told to go and sin no more; the really unparliamentary language was reserved for those thrifty, respectable, and sabbatarian citizens who enjoyed Caesar's approval and their own. And the one and only thing that ever seems to have roused the meek and mild Son of God to a display of outright physical violence was precisely the assumption that “business was business.” (p. 112)

The Triumph of Easter

In answer to the age-old question regarding the existence of evil in world made by a supposed all-loving, all-knowing, and all-benevolent God, Sayers answers, 

... we must look at Christ. In Him, we shall discover a Mind that loved his creation so completely that He became part of it, suffered with and for it, and made it a sharer in His own glory and a fellow worker with Himself in the working out of His own design for it...We find God continually at work turning evil into good...He takes our sins and errors and turns them into victories, as He made the crime of the Crucifixion to be the salvation of the world. "O felix cupla!" exclaimed St. Augustine, contemplating the accomplished work. (p. 121)

Why Work

In this beautiful essay, Sayers advocates for what she says is nothing less than revolutionary. Work for the sake of the work, not for the utility of it or the benefits to society, but as a God-honoring activity.

What I urged then was a thoroughgoing revolution in our whole attitude to work. I asked that it should be looked upon—not as a necessary drudgery to be undergone for the purpose of making money, but as a way of life in which the nature of man should find its proper exercise and delight and so fulfill itself to the glory of God. That it should, in fact, be thought of as a creative activity undertaken for the love of the work itself; and that man, made in God's image, should make things, as God makes them, for the sake of doing well a thing that is ell worth doing. (p. 125)

Toward a Christian Esthetic

Sayers contemplates the "Christian Esthetic" and finds there isn't one, saying, "...oddly enough, we have no Christian esthetic—no Christian philosophy of the arts." (p. 147) She begins with the analysis of art by both Plato and Aristotle and finds them wanting because of their lack of Truth to inform them. But we, being made in the image of a creating God, can follow in His footsteps.

“The true work of art, then, is something new; it is not primarily the copy or representation of anything. It may involve representation, but that is not what makes it a work of art. It is not manufactured to specification, as an engineer works to a plan—though it may involve compliance with the accepted rules for dramatic presentation and may also contain verbal ‘effects’ that can be mechanically accounted for. We know very well, when we compare it with so-called works of art that are turned out to pattern, that in this connection neither circumcision availeth anything nor uncircumcision, but a new creature. Something has been created.” (p. 159)

In fact, true art reveals Truth.

“This recognition of the truth that we get in the artist's work comes to us as a revelation of new truth. I want to be clear about that. I am not referring to the sort of patronizing recognition we give to a writer by nodding our heads and observing: ‘Yes, yes, very good, very true—that's just what I'm always saying.’ I mean the recognition of truth that tells us something about ourselves that we had not been always saying, something that puts a new knowledge of ourselves within our grasp. It is new, startling, and perhaps shattering, and yet it comes to us with a sense of familiarity. We did not know it before, but the moment the poet has shown it to us, we know that, somehow or other, we had always really known it.” (p. 164) 

The Faust Legend and the Idea of a the Devil

Sayers reflects on the difficulty we have in portraying the Devil in art and literature. The problem is that we have bought a lie that good and evil are in some sort of conflict. She calls that a heresy.

“The orthodox Christian conception is more subtle and less optimistic; it is also much less involved in the time process. For it, the light and the light only is primary; creation and time and darkness are secondary and begin together. When you come to consider the matter, it is strictly meaningless to say that darkness could precede light in a time process. Where there is no light, there is no meaning for the word darkness, for darkness is merely a name for that which is without light. Light, by merely existing, creates darkness, or at any rate the possibility of darkness. In this sense, it is possible to understand that profound saying, “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things” (Isaiah 45:7). But it is at this point that it becomes possible for the evil and the darkness and the chaos to boast: “We are that which was before the light was, and the light is a usurpation upon our rights.” It is an illusion; evil and darkness and chaos are pure negation, and there is no such state as “before the light” because it is the primary light that creates the whole time process. It is an illusion; and that is the primary illusion inside which the devil lives and in which he deceives himself and others...That is the Devil's claim, the exact statement of the pride by which he fell from heaven. It sounds extremely fine; and when it is set forth in attractive language, it is sometimes difficult to remember that the Devil is a liar and the father of lies. In Paradise Lost, we find Satan making the same claim; he “feels himself impaired” because of the authority of the Son of God. He believes, or affects to believe, that he himself is anterior to the Son, and ought not, therefore, to be subject to him. In the subsequent argument with Abdiel, he shows himself a poor logician, but we may, if we like, suppose that by this time he really believes in his own claim, or has argued himself into the illusion of belief—for the corruption of the will saps the intellect, and the Devil is ultimately a fool as well as a villain. He is, let us believe by all means, the victim of his own illusion. But Milton is not; Milton knows, and says, that the Son is anterior to Satan, and is, in fact, the very power by whom Satan was created. In the orthodox Christian position, therefore, the light is primary, the darkness secondary and derivative; and this is important for the whole theology of evil.” (p. 173)

I particularly love her conclusion:

"Evil is the soul's choice of not-God. The corollary is that damnation, or hell, is the permanent choice of the not-God. God does not (in the monstrous old-fashioned phrase 'send' anybody to hell; hell is the state of the soul in which its choice becomes obdurate and fixed; the punishment (so to call it) of that soul is to remain eternally in the state it has chosen." (p. 176) 

Problem Picture

 Sayers final essay reflects on the "problem" as she sees it, although that term gives her pause. 

“It has become abundantly clear of late years that something has gone seriously wrong with our conception of humanity and of humanity's proper attitude to the universe. We have begun to suspect that the purely analytical approach to phenomena is leading us only further and further into the abyss of disintegration and randomness, and that it is becoming urgently necessary to construct a synthesis of life. It is dimly apprehended that the creative artist does, somehow or other, specialize in construction, and also that the Christian religion does, in some way that is not altogether clear to us, claim to bring us into a right relation with a God whose attribute is creativeness.” (p. 241)

She goes on to state:

“But if we do—if we conclude that creative mind is in fact the very grain of the spiritual universe—we cannot arbitrarily stop our investigations with the man who happens to work in stone, or paint, or music, or letters. We shall have to ask ourselves whether the same pattern is not also exhibited in the spiritual structure of every man and woman. And, if it is, whether, by confining the average man and woman to uncreative activities and an uncreative outlook, we are not doing violence to the very structure of our being. If so, it is a serious matter, since we have seen already the unhappy results of handling any material in a way that runs counter to the natural law of its structure.” (p. 245)  

Finally, she beautifully concludes:

 “As for the common man, the artist is nearer to him than the man of any other calling, since his vocation is precisely to express the highest common factor of humanity—that image of the creator that distinguishes the man from the beast. If the common man is to enjoy the divinity of his humanity, he can come to it only in virtue and right of his making.” (p. 275)

Killer Angels by Michael Shaara

Like any lover of history, I feel a good historical fiction is like dessert. Killer Angels by Michael Shaara is just such a book. He describes the thoughts and feelings of those on both sides of Gettysburg in such an intimate way, you really do get to know the actors. I believe this is such a valuable way to learn history.

While the author admits to fictionalizing events, he uses the basic factual outline to guide his story. Telling the story in excruciating detail as he proceeds day by day really brings the horror of the battle home.

I would say that Shaara makes the argument that war is hell, yet because of our human nature, unavoidable. In particular regards to the Civil War, there seems to be a confusion among the soldiers about what the war is actually about, although the union officials make it clear that the war IS about slavery. The people seem to be going through motions inexorably cast upon them. Everyone feels trapped and forced to respond. Robert E. Lee is treated with great deference and understanding. He is a very sympathetic participant forced to pay for the sins of those he happens to live with. He is unfailingly loyal to his people, if not the cause of slavery. As such, he is a deeply sympathetic character, and yet, through the voice and words of General Longstreet, we get a sense that the author is saying that it is all unnecessary. And at the same time unavoidable.

This tragic novel ends, as is fitting, with more tragedy. There is no happy ending to the Civil War.

Paradise by Dante

I'm on a perpetual quest to give myself a Classical Education. Obviously one of the required texts is The Divine Comedy. I have already read Inferno and Purgatory, so it was time for Paradise by Dante. I especially love that it was translated by the great thinker, Anthony Esolen.

Esolen begins with a must-read introductory essay which explores Dante's purpose for the whole Comedy: Who gets into Heaven. Dante has again and again surprised the reader with the inhabitants of Hell and who is working through Purgatory. He will surprise us again with the residents of Paradise. In order for this book to be a fitting companion of the others, it must address the issues of justice raised by Inferno and mercy raised in Purgatory to a beautiful conclusion. Therefore Dante uses as his examples stories in which mercy and justice work together. In the end, Dante believes that all God does, He does out of perfect love. To ask why does God love us so much is the wrong question. Love just loves.

When confronted with the age-old question of who goes to Heaven and who goes to Hell, Esolen, using Dante's reasoning, responds,"God in his dangerous love has created something infinitely more lovely: a world peopled by beings free to love or to hate. A man's free choice to walk smugly by the beggar on the bridge may have no consequence to speak of, or eternal consequences. It is a world into which, to save a race gone awry, the Author himself has entered in a particular way at a particular place, to atone for men's sins and to reveal particular things about the world and its Father, ultimately to return to that world and restore its lost innocence. God did not create a philosophy. He created, as Dante saw, a comedy." (p. xxxvii) God will not be duty-bound to save anyone. He will love with a wild untamable love and we are to love Him back, as best we know how. Only then are we fit for Paradise and eternal bliss.

By the time we get to Paradise, Dante's guide Virgil has returned to Limbo. He is not allowed to see Heaven. Dante's true love Beatrice joins him and will guide him the rest of the way. She has been praying for him this entire time and is the reason he is on this journey to begin with. She wants to get answers to his questions and to help him finally find his hope in God. In his real life, Dante has been banished from the city of his birth, Florence, and the injustice of it all has been an enormous issue for him.

Here is a summary, given by Esolen, at the beginning of each canto, followed in some cases by commentary and quotations from the text:

CANTO ONE 

Dante and Beatrice are at the threshold of Heaven. She explains to him that it is the nature of the human soul to rise. 

CANTO TWO 

Rising to the first sphere, the moon, Dante asks Beatrice about the markings, and learns that they are due to the diversity of gifts with which God has endowed all creatures. 

CANTO THREE 

Dante and Beatrice enter the first circle of Heaven, the circle of the moon. Here, among the souls of those who neglected their vows, Dante encounters Piccarda, who explains to him the diversity of blessedness among the saints. 

Dante describes the nature of Paradise:

"For it is of the essence of this bliss 

to hold one's dwelling in the divine Will,  

who makes our single wills the same, and His,

So that, although we swell from sill to sill

throughout this kingdom, that is as we please,

as it delights the King in whose desire

We find our own. In His will is our peace:" (p. 29)

CANTO FOUR 

Beatrice explains to Dante the true location of the blessed, and then, distinquishing absolute from conditional will, asserts the sanctity and inviolability of holy vows. 

Dante wrestles with who deserves to be in which level of Paradise, when the breaking of their vows was forced:

"You argue, 'If my good intent endures,

how can another's violence diminish 

the measure of my merited reward?'" (p. 35)

Beatrice replies that there is our will and our will, that is although we may be seemingly forced to sin, God knows the heart and can determine what our actual will was.

As Dante begins to understand what he is being told, he rejoices,

"I see our intellects cannot be filled

unless the one Truth floods them with its light,

beyond which nothing true can find a place.

Like a beast in its den, we rest in it

when we have reached it, as we can indeed—

if not, our longings would be all in vain." (p. 41)

CANTO FIVE 

Beatrice explains to Dante the irrevocability of sacred vows. They enter the second sphere and meet spirits, represented by Mercury, who paid too much attention to worldly honor when on earth. 

Beatrice continues to explain why sacrificing your will to God through holy vows is the most precious gift you can give and cannot be easily or carelessly revoked.

"You'll see, then, from this line of argument,

the high value of vows if they're so made

that God consents as soon as you consent.

For when both God and man have sealed the pact

they slay this treasure in a sacrifice,

and do so, as I say, by a free act."

She then urges Dante to,

"Open your mind to what I now make plain,

hold it within, for there's no knowledge when

you understand a thing you don't retain." (p. 47)

True words to inform a teacher's heart!

CANTO SIX 

Justinian describes the history of the eagle of Rome, its most glorious victory the avengement of the death of Christ. After decrying the corruption of both Guelphs and Ghibellines, he points out the soul of the honorable courtier Romeo. 

In the commentary, Esolen says, "The eagle was the symbol of Roman rule... Dante believed that monarchy was ordained by God as the most natural and fitting form of government for mankind, and the most analogous to God's own rule and the most consonant with human freedom." (p. 412)

CANTO SEVEN
Beatrice explains the necessity of Christ's atoning sacrifice and the justice of God's vengeance against the Jews who put Christ to death. 

CANTO EIGHT 

Dante and Beatrice rise to the third sphere, Venus, where they meet souls who were too ardent in their attachment to fleshly love. Here Dante speaks with Charles Martel of Anjou, who discusses the cause of degeneracy among noble families and the evils wrought by confusion of vocations. 

CANTO NINE 

Still in the third sphere, Dante speaks with Cunizza da Romano, who proph esies woe for her homeland, and with the bishop and troubadour Folquet; he shows to Dante the brightest soul in the sphere of Venus, that of Rahab. 

CANTO TEN 

Dante and Beatrice have risen to the fourth circle, the sun, the dwelling of the wise. Dante is addressed by Thomas Aquinas, who names for him the eleven other spirits in the heavenly garland. 

CANTO ELEVEN 

Thomas Aquinas recounts for Dante the life of Francis of Assisi, and concludes by decrying the corruption of the Dominicans of the present day. 

CANTO TWELVE 

Out of a second garland of spirits another soul speaks: it is the soul of Bonaventure, who describes the life of Dominic and concludes by decrying the corruption of the Franciscans of the present day. 

CANTO THIRTEEN 

Thomas Aquinas explains what Scripture means and what he meant in describing Solomon as the wisest man who ever lived. He concludes by condemning the rashness of human judgment. 

CANTO FOURTEEN 

King Solomon answers Dante's last question to the wise, a question about the resurrection of the body. Then Dante and Beatrice ascend to Mars, the fifth sphere, the place for the warriors for Christ. 

Dante is bothered because the saints in Paradise are simply lights. He wonders about their bodies and why they don't have them. He finally realizes that they currently enjoy the beauty and harmony of the "bodies" they have but that they will be reunited with their physical bodies at the end of time and will experience even more beauty and harmony. Overwhelmed with the joy and love as the saints dance and sing around him, Dante exclaims,

"As dancers dancing in a merry reel,

will raise their voices in a rush of glee,

all of their gestures lighter in the heel,

So, to that most devout and ready plea,

the holy circlings showed me a new joy

in their revolving and their wondrous song.

Whoever on earth laments that we must die

to live above in Heaven, does not see

the sweet refreshment of the eternal rain." (p. 145)

CANTO FIFTEEN 

Dante speaks with his ancestor Cacciaguida, who describes the courtly virtues of the Florentines of old. 

CANTO SIXTEEN 

Cacciaguida discourses on the rise and fall of noble Florentine families. 

CANTO SEVENTEEN 

Cacciaguida foretells Dante's exile from Florence, revealing the patronage he will enjoy from Cangrande della Scala. When Dante suggests that his poetry may give scandal to many on earth, Cacciaguida recommends absolute honesty, for the poet's mission depends upon it. 

Esolen adds in the commentary, "Whether Dante rejoiced in his exile is not clear, but it is certain that no single event in his life has gained for him such glory. Indeed, were it not for the unjust banishment from his . native land, and the seizing of his goods by a political enemy, and the foolish pride of those men banished with him—were it not, in short, for the hard look a human evil that Dante was forced to take—we might not have the Comedy. But He who can bring good out of evil can bring good out of Florence." (p. 447)

CANTO EIGHTEEN 

Cacciaguida names for Dante the flames of other warriors of God. Then Dante and Beatrice ascend to Jupiter, the sixth sphere, where Dante sees stars form the constellation of the Eagle of justice. 

CANTO NINETEEN 

The Eagle addresses Dante's unspoken question on the fate of the virtuous pagans, insisting upon the inscrutability of divine providence and decrying the wickedness of rulers in Christendom in Dante's day. 

As Esolen is claiming, an integral purpose of the Comedy is to explore who will be rewarded or punished, how, and why. At this point in Paradise, the eagle tells Dante,

"Never unto this reign

climbs any man without belief in Christ,

before nor since they nailed Him to the wood.

But here, behold: many now cry,'Christ, Christ!'

who'll be less near to Him on Judgment Day

than will the one who never know of Christ." (p. 207)

In the commentary, Esolen goes on an extensive explanation well worth repeating at length here,

"It is the great doubt of a good and unsentimentally honest Christian man, and it is the last great doubt that Dante's character will express. If faith is necessary for salvation, what happens to those virtuous men and women who did not know about Christ? If they had no opportunity to hear the word of God preached, how can they be punished for their lack of faith? 

It appears to me that there are three ways to answer this question, and that Dante tentatively, and with great humility, approaches the third. The first way is that of Calvin, recalling that Augustine had called the virtues of the great republican Romans “splendid vices,” or as Milton put it, “close ambition varnished o'er with zeal” (Paradise Lost 2.485). This is to grant only a specious virtue to the pagan (and Augustine himself was more generous than that; cf. City of God 5.11-14), to attribute selfish or at best quite impure motives to all those without the faith...Strictly speaking, we need not worry about the virtuous pagans, since there are no virtuous pagans, or if there are virtuous pagans, their virtue is merely human and not in itself pleasing to God: “All our righteousnesses are as filthy rags” (Is. 64:6). But that is to universalize and absolutize what Isaiah says, taking it out of context; and it is an assertion flatly contradicted by the evidence of our senses and by the plain meaning of the word “virtue.” Dante clearly did not accept it, as the presence in Limbo of the virtuous pagans shows. 

The second way is that of modern man, who, if he is not busy denying the very possibility of salvation, is busy comfortably assuring himself that everyone (or at least everyone not below his own modest level of virtue) will be saved. Everyone will be saved, by that kind and loving God he keeps in an old chest of drawers along with a watch fob and a couple of silver dollars...As long as we love one another (and by “love” we mean not the theological virtue nor even a good hearty pagan eros but the ability to get along passably well with the more likable of our fellows…), we will be saved. Therefore all the virtuous pagans will be saved, including the virtuous pagans who are ourselves. 

The third possibility is that indeed some of the virtuous pagans may be saved, not by their own merits but by faith; while Calvin argued that the virtuous pagans only appeared virtuous, a holder of this third possibility would leave open the hope that some of the truly virtuous pagans only appeared pagan. When Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one cometh to the Father but by me” (John 14:6), he may well be interpreted as saying, “All those who come to the Father do so by my work, my merits, my virtue infused into their hearts.” What form this faith might take was left unclear by the Church Fathers. Augustine, for instance, said that the Hebrews who kept the faith believed in Christ to come, along with all those other individuals, perhaps far away, to whom this faith was mysteriously revealed (City of God 3.1). Aquinas attempted to specify what faith was sufficient for so mysterious a baptism. The testimony of reason assures a man that God exists and is a providential God; the testimony of the senses and of his conscience assures him that he is a sinner, unworthy of approaching a God most holy; by reason he therefore concludes that he needs a mediator, an intercessor, to approach God on his behalf (cf. Summa theol. 2.2.2.7). Elsewhere Aquinas states that at the dawn of the age of discretion, every human being faces a fundamental decision for good or for evil—for good, that is, enabled by the grace of God. If the person at that moment throws himself upon the mercy of God, he receives baptism, what is called the “baptism of desire," and on the day of doom will be judged accordingly. If, however, he does not do so, he rejects the assistance of faith and will inevitably fall into mortal sin... Who is saved and who is not rests hidden in the secrets of divine providence, but that there might be Christians whom Christians do not recognize as such is suggested by Christ himself: “And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also must I bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one fold, and one shepherd” (John 10:16). 

...The reader should note that Dante approaches the third way but rejects, in part, Aquinas's analysis. For Dante has clearly maintained that there are many who are both unbaptized and virtuous, at least according to the four natural virtues of fortitude, prudence, temperance, and justice. Aquinas's analysis would clearly depopulate Dante's Limbo of all but, perhaps, the unbaptized infants. On the other hand, Dante does save three pagans... 

I used to believe that all three cases were exceptional—like punctures of grace [erupting] into an otherwise universal rejection of the unbaptized. Yet grace itself is exceptional, in that it is an unmerited and absolutely free gift of God. There is no predicting the acts of providence, and thus no predicting the gift of grace… [J]ust as an awareness of providence should prevent us from judging God's sentences too hastily, so too it should prevent us from forgetting that we cannot know God's pardons, either. And finally we might remember the words of the eagle's Book of Wisdom: “For God made not death, neither hath he pleasure in the destruction of the living. (Wis. 1:13)” (p. 452-454)

CANTO TWENTY 

The Eagle names the most exalted spirits in its sphere. These include, as amazing instances of the unknowability of God's plan, the pagans Trajan and Ripheus. 

Describing God's love in the most beautiful language, Dante proclaims,

"The kingdom of Heaven suffers violence

     from living hope and burning charity

that overcome the will of the divine,

Not as a man will overcome a man—

     the divine wins because it would be won,

and won, it wins with its benignity." (p. 219)

"O predestination, how remote

your root is from those sights that cannot see

the fullness of the primal cause! And you

Mortals, withhold your judgment; even we

who see the face of God do not yet know

the number chosen from eternity—" (p. 221)

CANTO TWENTY-ONE 

Dante and Beatrice rise to Saturn, the seventh sphere, the sphere of the contemplatives, who scale a ladder to and from the heaven of heavens. Peter Damian descends to greet Dante and speak of the degeneracy of the monastic orders. 

CANTO TWENTY-TWO 

Still in the sphere of Saturn, Dante speaks with Saint Benedict, who decries the corruption of the Benedictines. Then Dante and Beatrice ascend to the eighth sphere, that of the fixed stars. 

CANTO TWENTY-THREE 

Dante witnesses the triumph of Christ and the blessing of the souls in Heaven, irradiated by His light. After the coronation of Mary, Christ and the Blessed Mother return to the Empyrean. 

Canto TWENTY-FOUR  Saint Peter examines Dante on faith. 

CANTO TWENTY-FIVE 

Saint James examines Dante on hope. After the appearance of Saint John, Dante is struck blind. 

CANTO TWENTY-SIX 

Saint John examines Dante on love. When Dante answers appropriately, he finds himself before the spirit of Adam, who answers four of Dante's questions regarding his life in Eden. 

CANTO TWENTY-SEVEN 

Saint Peter denounces the corruption of the papacy and the Church. After he instructs Dante to tell what he has heard, the poet and Beatrice rise to the ninth sphere, the Primum Mobile. 

Dante begins this chapter with such a beautiful description of the joy he feels in Paradise,

"'To Father and to Son and Holy Ghost,'

sang all the heavens, 'glory!'—filling me

with drunken joy; it seemed what I beheld

Was laughter of the universe the glee

of laugher whose inebriating swell

enters by what you hear and what you see.

O joy! O Happiness ineffable!

O riches safe, no worry of desire!

O life of love and peace, perfect and full!" (p. 287)

CANTO TWENTY-EIGHT
Dante is granted a distant vision of the cosmos:a single brilliant point of light surrounded by the nine heavenly spheres, whence comes the song of the angelic hosts, whose hierarchies Beatrice enumerates. 

CANTO TWENTY-NINE 

Beatrice reveals to Dante various truths about the angels: their creation, their powers, their number, and the fall of the rebels. She rebukes errant philosophers on earth who pretend to know more than they do about heavenly things. 

In the commentary, Esolen states, "God saw that it was good. Dante answers the question “Why did God create?" by referring us back to the first chapter of Genesis. In polytheistic systems the world is always created to fulfill the motive of some god or other, or as an after effect of some conflict in the immortal regions. Genesis gives no motive, implying that there was none, none that we would call a motive anyway, since God is not moved, not troubled, as there is nothing prior to God. If we wished, we could say, instead of “God created,” “God loved,” and leave it at that—for perfect love is its own motive." (p. 478)

This beautifully comes through in the words of Beatrice as she explains to Dante the reason that God created anything at all, including the angels,

"Not (for it cannot be) that He should gain

good for Himself, but that resplendence of

His light should utter, 'I exist,' beyond

All time in His eternity, beyond

confining space, according to His will

into new loves burst the Eternal Love.

Before he did not lie adrowse and still—

neither 'before' nor 'after' can precede

the hovering of God above these waters." (p. 309)

I believe that it is here that we err so often in our theology when we speak of God doing something "before" or "after." It is all an eternal "now" for Him.

CANTO THIRTY 

Dante and Beatrice rise to the Empyrean, the tenth circle. Here all Heaven is revealed as a river of light, and as a celestial rose. 

CANTO THIRTY-ONE 

Beatrice takes her place again in the celestial rose, and Dante is now led by the mystic Bernard of Clairvaux. 

CANTO THIRTY-TWO Bernard names for Dante the various souls in tiers along the petals of the rose. He ends by urging Dante to pray with him for the intercession of Mary, that Dante may be able to see the highest Good. 

CANTO THIRTY-THREE

Saint Bernard entreats the intercession of the Virgin Mary that Dante may behold the beatific vision. The great journey and the poem ends with the vision of the three great mysteries: the Creation, the Trinity, and the Incarnation of Christ. 

In the final canto, we finally reach God, Himself. Esolen beautifully summarizes, "I am the Bread of Life. God creates what is not God. That is a mystery of love. This creator God is Himself a Trinity of Persons. That is a mystery of love. The Second Person united Himself with human flesh to redeem mankind. That is a mystery of love. He rose from the dead and sits at the right hand of the Father, both God and man. That is a mystery of love. The final Christian mystery, implicit in the whole of Paradise, is that this Christ is with us still, abiding within the faithful, making them like unto Himself, giving them His very flesh in the Eucharist, as once he gave it on the Cross. This is the love that moves the sun and the other stars." (p. 488)

Like Inferno and Purgatory, Paradise has "levels." Here they are:

The Spheres of Heaven
     First Sphere (The Moon: The Inconstant)
     Second Sphere (Mercury: The Ambitious)
     Third Sphere (Venus: The Lovers)
     Fourth Sphere (The Sun: The Wise)
     Fifth Sphere (Mars: The Warriors of the Faith)
     Sixth Sphere (Jupiter: The Just Rulers)
     Seventh Sphere (Saturn: The Contemplatives)
     Eighth Sphere (The Fixed Stars: Faith, Hope, and Love)
     Ninth Sphere (The Primum Mobile: The Angels)
The Empyrean (a region beyond physical existence which is the abode of God)