Paradiso: Canto XXXII -- The Thrones

We've spoken a lot about love in these past 99 cantos, but the concept has always been nebulously defined. What is love, we must ask, that we would invest so much energy in its pursuit? Love is nothing more than the orientation of the will to God, and God's love is an invitation for us to come home, or, in the words of Fr. Edward James Richard, "Divine love is, by definition, friendship with God." This friendship, this orientation toward the good, is what we've gone through hell and climbed purgatory to discover, and if the road to perdition is paved with the rejection of virtue, in the focus on one part of the senses here and on another part of the senses there, then the road to salvation is a total orientation to the good, the totus tuus embraced by St. Louis Mary de Montfort and Karol Wojtila, where the whole being rejoices not in the chimera of piecemeal pleasures but in the sweetness and light of God's love. Our move toward God has been an evolutionary one as we have changed by subtle degrees in our orienting ourselves to the beatific vision, in our exercising the capacity each of us has to perceive and engage the good.



While we've experienced this evolution on a microcosmic level, St. Bernard explains it diachronically on a macrocosmic level. "In the first centuries of man's creation" (76), he writes, the innocence of children born into this world and "the true faith of their parents" in their orientation toward God, "was all they needed to achieve salvation" (77-8). This first age was followed by a second, which required of man his circumcision to mark himself as a child of God. The third age, though, inaugurated by Christ and preached by his disciples, gave us to understand that "unless perfectly baptized in Christ,/ such innocents went down among the blind" (83-4). In these three tercets, then, St. Bernard explains the evolution of God's covenant, not because God changed, but because man was evolving in his capacity to receive the good in the same way that Dante has been evolving from the moment he entered the Gate of Woe.

Even at the footsteps of God, in fact, Dante still cannot look upon Christ without first looking "on her who most resembles Christ,/ for only the great glory of her shining/ can purify your eyes to look on Christ" (85-7). No one, then, can come before God except through Christ, and no one can come to Christ except through Mary.

S.