Paradiso Translated by Sayers and Reynolds

All roads lead to Dante.

History, Philosophy, Science, and Theology unite to make this piece and then it tangles its way into the the rest of Western literature - from Umberto Eco to Charles Williams. When you read Dante, you find him everywhere. In an odd twist he becomes your Virgil leading you to God through Hell. I expect to discuss him everywhere else, but he is hard to write about here because there is so much worth saying.

Say all or say nothing.

I will stick to a few impressions.

I’m comfortable in Inferno. I’ve read it several times. I read Purgatory for the first time last year and it opened my eyes to the long work of sanctification - the next time I read it I want to discus it as a gift modern Christians avoid because they are scared of his imagination.

Paradiso. Paradiso is like a rosy summer breeze. You find yourself unexpectedly smiling over something you have only grasped a small piece of.

On Translation

I read the Musa translation for the majority of the Comedy, but my husband let me finish with his copy - Sayers/Reynolds - because the closer you get to the central all encompassing point, the more allegorical and incomprehensible the imagery becomes. You need notes and not just signposts. Sayers translates the languages, explains the allegory and the story, holds you in that point and addresses the historical and mythical references in the canto. She is a wonder. God bless her.

On the Work:

Providence, the movement of God through his understanding and predestination, is brought to its wild glory when Dante explains the man in Africa who never heard God’s name and the entire spiritual realm as existing to support that. His argument was so clear by the time I arrived at it that I could express it before reading and it deals with Lewis’s Emith in the Last Battle. Lewis takes the argument a bit further, instead of having an ignorant man you have one trained towards spiritual belligerence, but that is nothing in the face of the symphony of the cosmos.

Every person is a unique creation with the image of God in them reflecting a unique facet of God’s totality. And these facets are not scattered at random, but placed intentionally throughout time and space to be in the location where they can best lift to God the creational glory He has placed for them to reflect. Because of the fall, they lack the ability to reflect initially (outside of baptism) and also are capable of completely refusing to - but a man can hear the creational glory intended for him and reflect it appropriately without knowing the name - this is grace. We loved God, for He loved us first. His second grand overture (after making us and doing it in His image) is placing us so completely in the time ripe for us to reflect him.

There is only one way, through Christ, but there are a million ways to realize you are a fallen sinner in need of a savior and each person is  uniquely placed to bring forth that understanding. Like Abraham they can put their hope in something the do not see. And like Pharaoh they can be hardened by God and have already chosen in their station to refuse to reflect God through them and instead try to be one.

The Heavens

Cosmology is a big buzzword right now in my circles. We are all awash in getting a good metaphysic and regaining a medieval cosmology. It is real great and I am so there.

First we had Michael Ward unlocking Narnia, then Jason Farley talking about singing stars and Roman farming to appease Mars, then Jason Baxter tracking down the Medieval Mind of CS Lewis. Even my great (18x) grandfather wrote a treatise of the astrolabe noting that no son of his should sight by Mars, Saturn, or the tail of the Dragon. I solemnly swear.

Dante has us beat. The seven heavens are the location of Paradise, moving through them and their spiritual and allegorical meaning brings us closer to the central point where God resides.

He discusses stars as shepherds moving times under their wings, trellises bringing along growth in the right directions, and the misattribution to false gods names which causes us to occult their meaning by our frail understanding. Each star has a place and calls a people through time (through the facet of God’s image placed in them) leading them to the right sphere for them where they can shine best in the color diffused from the central radiance of God. It makes you understand why Lewis cared more about his stars than his Myers Briggs.

To that end - I now know my planets and Dante’s framework is spot on. I definitely would not be sitting next to St Lucy and Mary. I like the idea of heavenly seating arrangements.

The Stars

The angelic spheres in all their array

are in their totality meant to overlay

all of the rest of the spheres,

fulfilling the role as a system of secondary causes working out and reflecting Providence.

There was one note in the Reynolds/ Sayers version on this

It works back throught the text where he looks and sees the stars, charting towards them. They surrounded him in the dark wood.

Music

Inferno was silent. It left you to hear the grind and crunch of every move, the shrieks and laughter. There was no gloss over every sound of pain or every trudging foot.

Purgatorio began with chanting and running over hills up the side of the mountain. There was hardship, but there was the glimmering reflection of the glory to come.

They chanted and sang and worked, but then like Vivaldi's Spring, the first tones spilled out and filled up the garden at the top of the mountain.

And Paradiso is full of the music of the spheres.

Everything else will probably come up in other books - from Leaf by Niggle to Foucault’s Pendulum.

Further up and Further in

Oddment and Tweak: Unforeseen Grace, Grandfathers, and Boethius

I found my eighteenth great grandfather’s (on my mother’s side) translation of Boethius into Middle English- on my own shelves

Let’s walk this further back to my teen years in the surge and resurgence of ancestry tracking. Someone once told me that the Mormons had their hand in tracking all the people back for reasons, and whatever reason that was is inconsequential to this story because the people who track things tracked them back. I have benefited from these hobbyist records more than once, but where later they would return a lost brother, here they gave me a huge great grandfather. I don't know if he would own me. I am adopted and the internet might be wrong.

Geoffrey Chaucer.

When I found that out at fourteen or fifteen, I lighted on it with the delight of one who found out their father was a prince. Then I found out how scandalous he was and I delighted in having a scandalous grandfather, but I still didn’t know him very well. Then I didn’t talk about it because I was Growing Up and one didn’t speak of mysterious scandalous Grandpapas.

Finally I knew some of what he wrote and was not courageous enough to own it except in excerpt.

But in the last couple years I was encouraged to read him through and see what he was doing before judging the content, so I did. And I came to love my grandfather. He has a whole lot more common sense than most people did teaching purity seminars in the early twenty-oughts. He is a saint.

I have read a lot of men, and count many of them as fathers, but with Chaucer I came to know him, and love him, and own him as family and a storyteller at the same time which does things to a person.

I picked up the Riverside Chaucer and gave it to my husband for his birthday in a stack of cosmology shaping books last October and forgot about it in the course of picking up stakes and moving to Troy.

Around the same time I decided to read off my own shelves and lean into Lewis’s asides on developing a proper self. It is the academic’s version of clean living.

Lewis’s list involved ten or so books and sent me on a hunt to run down Latin. Boethius was at the top of the list right under Dante. I began combing my shelves because I have the Britanica classics set, some Harvard Classics, random Penguin, Puffin, and Norton editions. No Consolation.

I did have a copy on my phone. So I resigned myself to reading on my phone. In all of the digging I found Chaucer translated Boethius and I really wanted to read it. But as it was not on my shelves, it was out of reach.

Yesterday night I was cleaning up books and the Riverside Chaucer was unearthed. I moved it towards its shelf and the page just happened to turn open to read Boece. And that was that. Unforseen grace - my grandfather will walk me through Boethius and to his own teachers who encouraged his own translations.

Further Up and Further In

Love In The Ruins by Walker Percy

This is a book like an ice water bath you are being held in by a vise grip.

I read it for a bookclub and when I questioned the picker:

“ How could you pick a book that I can not talk with my mother about?”

His response was he wondered how many people would be bothered by it and that it was the right kind of ruffling.

Love in the Ruins is fleshy. It goes out of the way to mark every physical detail and every personal response and note the depravity and sentimentalism running around hand in hand. The main character is plagued by lust and alcohol in a world that is more than happy to give him that even though he is going to destroy himself, possibly with allergic reactions to gin, possibly by ticking off the wrong girl’s father. But he has achieved the ability to adjust the soul and bring it into harmony with the switch of a button.

Percy’s theory is we disengage with reality, moving outside ourselves like deforming your muscles around an injury. But in this we deform the shape of our soul. Percy’s solution is to make you confront the world as it is, trying to yank you, the reader, into the reality of the way God made the world. And I really want him to stop - it is acutely uncomfortable and does not stop.

We get by through not thinking about the way the world is - turning ourselves into the angel (pure rationality) or the beast (pure impulse) - Sherlock Holmes or Sigmund Freud.

I know who I would rather be on that list.

Percy argues that is a deformity of the creational order of the soul. We are meant to bring both together, ruling the beasts and judging the angles.

But you can not do either if you will not see.

I get it. It is the occupational therapy of the soul, awkward and unnatural with the goal of making the natural wake up.

I made notes about Albion, Gone With the Wind, and Mark Twain, but that may have been trying to escape the bloodbath.

“Don't tell me the U.S.A. went down the drain because of Leftism, Knotheadism, apostasy, pornography, polarization, etcetera etcetera. All these things may have happened, but what finally tore it was that things stopped working and nobody wanted to be a repairman.”

“Books matter. My poor wife, Doris, was ruined by books, by books and a heathen Englishman, not by dirty books but by clean books, not by depraved books but by spiritual books! God, if you recall, did not warn his people against dirty books. He warned them against high places. My wife, who began life as a cheerful Episcopalian from Virginia, became a priestess of the high places.”

Further up and Further In

Let’s not look back at this one again.