Vox Christi
On The Way to Paradise: Journeying with
Dante into the Beatific Vision
Dr. Sebastian Mahfood, OP
Dr. Sebastian Mahfood is an adjunct professor at Kenrick and former Head of Office of the Institute for Technology.
Though an educational technologist with a doctorate in
postcolonial literature, I have, for half my life, had a passion
for the imaginative journey of Dante Alighieri as he makes
his way from the Dark Wood of a philosophy uninformed
by divine revelation through all of hell, up all of Purgatory,
and across all of heaven in pursuit of the source of his being.
This passion was inspired by my first literature teacher, Dr.
Simone Turbeville, who in the spring of 1991 led me through
the Nicomachean Ethics into that Dark Wood and engaged me
in La Vita Nuova so that I could meet Beatrice in the flesh.
While Aristotle would later inspire me to complete a second
master’s in philosophy, it was Dante who gave me a reason to
complete my first master’s in literature. I owe Dante a debt,
which I can only repay in part whenever I lead my own tour
groups of pilgrims through his Comedy. This is the impetus
behind my creation of a hundred short videos,1 one on each
of Dante’s hundred cantos, which were developed in the spring
of 2010 when the course was offered for the first time through
the Catholic Distance Learning Network.2 The journey of the
pilgrim who seeks his home in the beatific vision is everyone’s
journey, and it is an excellent demonstration of the relationship
between the intellectual and the spiritual life.
To provide a brief synopsis of the work, I can relate how
Dante the Pilgrim finds himself in the Dark Wood of Error
on Good Friday in the year 1300. He sees before him the
Mount of Joy that leads to Paradise, but his path is blocked
by three beasts, a leopard, a lion, and a she-wolf. Each beast
represents a different set of vices – the leopard, fraud, the lion,
violence, and the she-wolf, incontinence – who themselves each
represent a different stage of the hell through which Dante will
have to travel in the first leg of his journey. The she-wolf of
incontinence represents the second through fifth circles – the
concupiscible and irascible appetites out of conformity with
the rational appetite. The lion represents the seventh circle –
the violent against neighbor, self, God, nature, and art. The
leopard represents the 8th and 9th circles – the malicious, the
fraudulent, and the traitorous. The first and sixth circles deal
with something different from these animals – the former deals
1 The video lectures are available online at http://www.
kenrickparish.com/dante.
2 The Catholic Distance Learning Network was founded in the
fall of 2006 at a convocation for academic deans sponsored by
the Seminary Department of the National Catholic Educational
Association. Its purpose was to train seminary faculty in online
teaching and learning to enable them to offer online classes for crossregistration purposes. The Wabash Center in Crawfordsville, IN,
supported the initiative with a grant in the spring of 2007.
74
with non-belief and the latter with disbelief.
In order to renounce the vices that father these sins, Dante
has to first recognize them for what they are, hence the reason
for his journey through the gates that warn those who enter
to abandon all hope. Dante’s mission, though, is precisely one
of hope, which is made evident over and again as he makes
his way past the mythological beasts and demons who serve as
hell’s guardians and climbs Satan’s shanks up to the mountain
of Purgatory. It is on that great mountain that Dante sees all the
vices purged in a mirror image of what he experienced within
the Inferno on the other side of the earth through which he has
just traveled. The souls he meets here endure a salvific suffering,
an explanation of which is provided by Forese Donate in Canto
XXIII of the Purgatorio. Forese is undergoing purification of
the vice of gluttony on the sixth ledge of Purgatory, and he
catches himself in his description of the pain involved in that
process: “Did I say ‘pain’? I should say ‘gift of grace.’”3 What is
happening to him is happening to all souls on that mountain.
Each is being purified of a given vice through the process of
his or her being filled with the corresponding virtue. The way
in which God’s grace works within the soul is confirmed by
the angels who stand ready to point souls in the direction of
each new stairway. Each recites a Beatitude that shows how
the virtue works within the soul. The Angel of Abstinence,
for instance, softly explains, “Blessed are they . . ./ who take
pleasure/ in keeping every hunger within measure,”4 a good
reminder for all of us as we set aside our Lenten promises to
retain something of the spiritual growth we have received
through God’s participation in our observances.
The poem reaches a point of climax when Dante achieves
his first goal of coming face-to-face with Beatrice, the woman
of whom he wrote in La Vita Nuova, the one who descended
into Limbo to commission Virgil to serve as his guide through
Hell and Purgatory. Beatrice’s entrance is dramatic, and Dante’s
first response is to tremble in her presence and fall in love all
over again. He is, after all, in the presence of not only divine
love, but also divine revelation through whose eyes Dante will
soon be able to see Christ. A flashlight, when exposed to the
light of day, will dim so completely that its light will vanish;
likewise, Virgil, who represents human reason uninformed by
divine revelation, will vanish when Beatrice arrives. To better
grasp this pivotal moment in the Comedy, we can reach to a
3 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. by John Ciardi (New
York: New American Library, 2003), 483. This passage is found in
Canto XXIII of the Purgatorio, line 72.
4 Aligheiri, 494. Purgatorio, Canto XXIV, lines 152-155.
Dr. Sebastian Mahfood, OP
document much nearer our own age in Pope John Paul II’s
Fides et ratio, where he explains that
Based upon God’s testimony and enjoying the
supernatural assistance of grace, faith is of an
order other than philosophical knowledge which
depends upon sense perception and experience and
which advances by the light of the intellect alone.
Philosophy and the sciences function within the
order of natural reason; while faith, enlightened
and guided by the Spirit, recognizes in the message
of salvation the ‘fullness of grace and truth’ which
God has willed to reveal in history and definitively
through his Son, Jesus Christ.5
It is for this reason that Virgil has to vanish at this point,
for faith builds upon and perfects reason in the way that grace
perfects nature. Divine revelation and love are able, once the
appetitive movements within the soul have conformed to
the spiritual power of the intellect, to take over completely.
Beatrice, ultimately, will be able to lead Dante to God in this
way, and after the two have progressed through the ten spheres
of heaven to the empyrean, Dante sees within God’s depth
“how it conceives all things in a single volume bound by love, of
which the universe is the scattered leaves.” Dante’s final prayer
is to “know how our image,” then, “merges into that circle, and
how it there finds place” – and God grants it, “cleaving [his]
mind in a great flash of light,” thus squaring the circle at the
point at which Dante the Pilgrim meets Dante the Poet back
at his writing desk, his powers resting from his “high fantasy.”6
Resting from my all-too-brief description of the poem,
7 Holy Apostles College & Seminary is located in Cromwell, CT,
and can be found online at www.holyapostles.edu. It currently hosts
two online Master of Arts programs in philosophy and theology.
8 Seminary Journal is the flagship publication of the Seminary
Department of the National Catholic Educational Association,
where I first began my work facilitating collaborative relationships
among programs of priestly formation.
9 The Technology in Theological Education Group can be found
online at www.tteg.org. Its mission is to facilitate the development
of theological teaching and learning environments that use
communicative media.
Scripta Magistrorum
5 John Paul II, Fides et ratio (14 September 1998), §9. Available
online at www.vatican.va.
6 Alighieri, 894. Paradiso, Canto XXXIII, lines 137-141.
I give my own thanks to Kenrick-Glennon Seminary, which
taught me in my twelve years working among the pilgrims
within this community the real meaning and importance of
the sacraments, especially of the Eucharist, which is the source
and sum of Christian life, in preparing the soul for its eternal
destiny in joyful communion with God. This, too, is part of
Dante’s journey, and I will carry this gift with me into my
retirement, which is occurring at the end of this academic year,
as I enter into a new stage of my life as Director of Distance
Learning at Holy Apostles College & Seminary,7 as the copy
editor for Seminary Journal,8 and as a distance learning
consultant to seminaries and theological schools in partial
fulfillment of my role as chair of the Technology in Theological
Education Group of the Association of Theological Schools.9
I thank not only my colleagues among the faculty for what
they taught me about relationship, identity, and mission, but
also the students who have comprised three ordination cycles
for what they taught me about life and community. May God
continue to bless us and may the peace of Christ continue to
rule in our hearts.
Agnolo Bronzino (1503-1572), Allegorical portrait of
Dante National Gallery of Art, Washington
75