Dante’s “Divine Comedy” conveys timeless wisdom about the human person and the ugly reality of sin. This magnificent poem can help many of us overcome the sin of lust and escape the dark forest that in one way or another ensnares us all. “Midway along the journey of our life / I woke to find [...]
As with Dante’s glimpse of the beatific vision in the final Canto of the “Divine Comedy,” we are all ultimately rendered speechless in the presence of ineffable Beatitude. We do not have the words to describe the Word. And yet Lewis gives us in the final lines of “The Last Battle” glimpses of glory which [...]
C.S. Lewis depicts Hell in "The Great Divorce" as the Grey City, a place where Pride is given enough rope and spends eternity hanging itself. The damned get everything they want by just imagining it, which seems like “heaven,” which is why they don’t desire to leave. In last week’s essay I surveyed the manner [...]
Heaven is an unreality for contemporary physicalists of all schools of thought who preach that matter is the only reality and that everything in the world can be explained solely in materialist terms. Yet for those who are open to the sacramental dimension of our diurnal existence, heaven is here, there, and everywhere. Paradise Mislaid: [...]
Throughout “Paradiso,” Beatrice is Dante’s companion, his light in the darkness, his first fruit guide to Divine Love itself. Dante is transfigured and transformed in Beatrice’s presence and through Beatrice’s wisdom. In this way, she mirrors the typological and sacramental reality of the messiah. Dante sees Beatrice, but hears Love itself in her voice and [...]
I could never again go home to Florence. Still, out of that dark beginning, God brought great good. What he allowed me to learn on my feet was a simple but life-altering truth: that my primary citizenship is not in Florence, nor in Rome, nor in any other earthly city. My true citizenship is in [...]
In a world ringing with noise and suffused with the more or less artful idolizing of passions divorced from objective goods, where are we to find melodies capable of penetrating our hardened hearts with spiritual truths? In Plato’s Republic, Socrates leads a group of ambitious young Athenians on a search for the best way of [...]
I had always thought it nonsense to believe in love at first sight. But that sophomoric conceit sank with that setting sun over the Venetian church spires that summer day in 1973. And with it was washed away that companion conceit that falling in love was something that could only happen between two humans… The [...]
An understanding of progress and its adherents was not just of academic curiosity to Christopher Dawson. It was central to understanding the good life and preventing those who misunderstood history from gaining control and imposing the will of man upon the creation of God… “What has happened will happen again, and what has been done [...]
In a world ringing with noise and suffused with the more or less artful idolizing of passions divorced from objective goods, where are we to find melodies capable of penetrating our hardened hearts with spiritual truths? In Plato’s Republic, Socrates leads a group of ambitious young Athenians on a search for the best way of [...]
Did God gamble everything in the Garden of Gethsemane, the second Adam facing a real, existential, and eternal choice of going through with the Father’s will or backing away from it? God’s Gamble: The Gravitational Power of Crucified Love, by Gil Bailie (384 pages, Angelico Press, 2016) Few thinkers have stormed the post modern world [...]
Let us picture a woman thrown into a dungeon. There she bears and rears a son. He grows up seeing nothing but the dungeon walls, the straw on the floor, and a little patch of the sky seen through the grating, which is too high up to show anything except sky. This unfortunate woman was an artist, and [...]
“All Hell is smaller than one pebble of your earthly world: but it is smaller than one atom of this world, the Real World. Look at yon butterfly. If it swallowed all Hell, Hell would not be big enough to do it any harm or to have any taste.” Editor’s Note: In The Great Divorce C.S. Lewis [...]
One thing in this world is different from all other. It has a personality and a force. It is recognised, and (when recognised) most violently loved or hated. It is the Catholic Church. Within that household the human spirit has roof and hearth. Outside it, is the Night. —Essays of a Catholic by Hilaire Belloc (1931). [...]