Understanding Dante’s Paradiso

Dante’s Divine Comedy is the greatest work of Christian literature, one of the greatest epic poems ever construed by human hands, and perhaps the …

Understanding Dante’s Paradiso

—— and, some of my own comments.

It is a woman who meets the traveler in hell; and I’m pretty sure it is Virgil, a man who meets Dante, another man, who is traveling a road of spirituality and first goes through hell.

So, a man on a spiritual journey conversing with another man Hass to go through hell first before the pilgrim then meet a woman who then escorts him and directs him to “turn his face to God”. And God, in the classical sense, is really this completely unknowable, beyond gender or sex, ultimate ideal that is beyond any idea. Yet the spiritual forces that guide the person on their spiritual journey is indeed quitehuman, male and female.

Also consider in some more esoteric kind of beliefs that the devil is often portrayed as a hermorphodite. A creature that has both male and female genitals.

What crossed my mind this morning was The difference of a Christianity which is particular Lee patriarchal, and perhaps the original kind of “Christianity” which was not even having to do with any sort of man at all except that incidentally it was a man called “Jesus”, which gave the western world the idea manifest. Yet, it is not difficult when we look east that there is much of Christ going on without using the word “christ”. But even before Jesus, there was a Christianity, as we see here, but without the negating figure of definite proper identities, namely, that there is this dude God who is a man up there, that there is not a path but indeed just this one other dude that you have to believe in to get to God, namely Jesus Christ. And really there’s no process, no road to travel, in there at all but only an event, a moment, where one gets to ultimately decide to “believe”. 

And then further that indeed when it is a man leading a man to a patriarchal “God”, where God is taking it in specific mail form as some sort of dude up there with a beard dispensing strange justice ,. Then the motivating force toward that God is actually another dude, or, like I said, a hermorphodite, the devil, in one instance, and Satan in the next instants, which directs the person back to a very tangible and specific male figure of God through taboo And threat, and actually in a very real sense through casting ones Eyes downward, which is to say, toward the earth, and do not look at God.

One might be reminded of Moses encountering God and the burning bush; Moses doesn’t obey this inherent command but indeed “turns aside to see” what this incredible feature of the burning bush actually is.

Yeah Beatrice actually tells Dante to look up at God and as she guides him out of Hell to the paradise. 

Love.
x