http://dante.georgetown.edu/
by Frank Ambrosio
Inferno
Chapter 1, 2
Terror that what we hope will not and cannot occur because of something within us. Sin. Hope lost.
Grace is the metaphoric name Christianity gives to the experience of another person promising to help and so restore one's ability to hope.
Hope only as strong as the faith into the one promising help.
Grace has nothing to do with worthiness. The gift of the hope is beyond the horizont of the living self.
Freedom requires that each person take full responsibility for his/her own identity.
Crystallise new ID.
You must become your own hero.
Analysis paralysis between two possibilities.
We are god's love.
Voice of God can only reach Dante in feminine forms. So be a man in a way that every man has to be heroic.
When we come to the end, we realize we have returned to the beginning.
All is contained in the center. Find it - find all truth.
Annunciation. By saying yes she opens the door that allows grace which has long been excluded from the world to reenter it.
You've been chosen. And it is your job to say yes.
Chapter 3
Sin = refusal. A final decisive "NO" to the mystery paradox of Freedom offered as the gift of absolute intimacy and mutuality of relational identity.
-> abandon hope. Hope = hope of help of another.
All are responsible for all.
? Ultimate (source) hope is possible only only through unconditional forgiveness = I recognise God can and wants to help only if I know that I'm forgiven.
Freedom - possibility of refusal.
It is only through the journey that identity is reached.
Hell is fashioned by Divine Love: to give real choice and genuine responsibility for the finality of the consequence.
Hell is not a place of punishment, hell is the state of refusal. This is the only consequence of sin.
Hope is always the hope in the freedom of another - of help. Otherwise lost forever in the shadow of the Other.
Hell is the place for those who have said NO.
Neutrals refused to say neither YES or NO -> no journey to make, no story to tell.
Paradox - inescapable consequence of mystery. Knowing that you don't know.
What makes a city is the gates. Hell's gate - one way.
Founding a city: sacrifice by making something that was present absent points to hopeful future.
Language, stories in our heads make a gate that keep us inside. One way only. Therefore react from moment to moment.
Art - richest vocabulary is contained in the human body.
Great art doesn't tell, great art shows. By human body language.
Divine and human personas.
Forgiveness - not action or event it is that is changed, but it's meaning
Chapter 5
The other, divine or human, is always an existential threat if allowed to enter into the question "who am I".
It is who you chose to be, not so much in regarding actions but in terms of being willing to take responsibility for oneself
Adultery - a private relationship that pits itself against the social world
Becoming identified fully with the relationship instead of looking further. Form of idolatry, like all the other sins of hell.
Substitute for divine mystery, god of Amor, does not require a final and total "sacrifice of the individual self", instead like all the idols in the Hell, allows desire to come to rest in an illusion of wholeness.
Challenge of having a relationship that can grow beyond itself. Triangle with god (he being the third person).
Love, act of achieving mutuality with another, still cannot afford to become fixated in the pleasure of that fulfillment. This love, because it is need, needs to go on needing
Victimhood. Irresponsibility. Not because I choose to do, but I cannot because God has chosen... Love portrayed as something divine taking the freedom away. Force that makes people do things.
Sin of Francesca and Paulo not the carnal sin but "reading no further" (how it turned out for Lancelot and his lover). Not knowing/learning about the consequence. Francesa refuses to change the meaning of her story - of her victimhood.
Endless vampiric dying: substituting an experience for a perceived and convicted meaning
Conversion, hope: sometimes we have to be dragged, either kicking and screaming, or unconscious, by somebody who knows better. (saved)
Chapter 6: gluttony
Personal freedom is your response to what is not you.
Idol - substitute for divine mystery.
The lower down the hell, the more limited the idol.
Sentimental romanticism and emotional co-dependence (lust)
Chapter 7: hoarding
People who allow the value of money to make all judgements for them are basically ignoring their responsibility to consider the worth of things.
Financial responsibility replacing other forms of responsibility.
Group of people linked only by their mutual dependence on each other's selfish desires is unstable; eventually the violence that implicitly occurs when people blindly subscribe to any set of beliefs erupts into actual violence.
Chapter 8
Hardening one's heart. Transition from simple abuse to direct violence - trying to destroy what we cannot control.
Just as Francesca calls for the same easy pity that betrays her to lust ... The wrathful have rejected pity and chosen cruelty. Therefore they can receive no pity, and goodness can only manifest itself to them as wrath, since they have chosen to know it so.
Powerlessness of reason or courage or any noble human virtue to open the gates of Dis. -> desire triumphs easily over reason -> guilt.
Sinners are eager to tell Dante their story to escape their feelings of guilt. Only to show how much in denial they are. Self-denial.
Chapter 9
It is only in the dream that we come close to real awakening - that is to the Real of our desire. -- Slavoj Zizek
Chapter 10
All violence is ultimately domestic violence.
Outside violence only manifestation of inner division.
Chapter 11 and 12
Transition from intellectual violence (heresy) to physical (later from physical to fraud). From here on the sinners will more and more willfully deny their need for other human beings and for God. Violent refusal of the Other.
Minotaur. Gates of Dis are wide open for him.
All kinds of violence spring from the blind mingling of the bestial with the ego consciousness, from the refusal to relate objectively to the instinctive forces from within.
Chapter 13
Suicide: life no longer holds any promise. Leaving one's heart broken in one way or the other.
Lack of pity in someone does self-harming. Excuse: because it's my body.
It's about carrying the burden of freedom.
There is a difference between facts (rooted in physical world) and meanings. Forgiveness can change the meaning of facts that can not be changed. There is more to the freedom and the identity than the facts.
We need others and we are needed by others (in a relational world).
Suicide is the chosen image for a person, who, when he awakes in the Dark Wood, would respond to his terror at his own freedom by hanging himself from the trees.
Ego cannot swallow mystery and contain it in its grasp. Therefore they kill themselves to kill that very same ego.
Chapter 14
Violence is a social sin
Metastasis of violence involves a greater and greater imposition of your desires onto the world around you -> symbolized by desert.
Blasphemer - deny reality to anything beyond ego-consciousness and so play God in their environment.
Chapter 15
Sodomites. Sexuality - pro-CREATIVE purpose.
Sterility (of adulation)
Personal "hero project" by which they seek to elevate themselves, in their own eyes at least. Any individual who invests in a hero projects needs others to believe in his greatness. The image of man eclipses the image of God.
Medusa's threat: harden the heart so that you can do violence, verbally at least.
One can and must take responsibility only for himself and seeking to avoid responsibility for judging himself by instead judging others -> bitterness and hate driven violence.
All the violent - attempt to forcibly impose personal desires onto reality under the guise of some greater project.
Chapter 16
Strategy of leopard - abuse. Use the others instead of having to deal them on the basis of freedom.
There is a violence in making the promises - desire to control not only the future but the relationship who's future is being shaped. Even promises made by real, sincere hope - contain the underbelly of a monster.
Ad leopard: Franciscan girdle - attempt to control pleasure seeking, lust, incontinence by means of noble, conscious resolution. "It is extremely hard thing to give up finally and completely the delusion that if we only try hard enough, we will be able to alter ourselves by consciously taken decision alone. It is impossible to do so without cooperation from the forces of the unconscious. Otherwise it is mere repression with its inevitable swing into the opposite."
Dante threw his girdle down to call Geryon up from the depths to be able to descend.
Chapter 17
Deceiving others begins by deceiving ourselves. Falling down imagined as magic carped ride that can master and control - monstrosity of a colossal ego that can pass itself off as righteous while decking itself out in party clothes to celebrate the exultation of feasting on its prey.
Reptile represents fraud. Geryon - face of a good man, body of a reptile. Geyron is the gay leopard in more menacing form.
As long as we "cling" to the good intentions rope girdles, we are actually being "usurious" with ourselves - "good, we tacitly assume, is due because we mean well". The way to Hell is paved with good intentions.
The moment with the rope girdle is one we will experience many times. It must be encountered again and again before it is fully assimilated. Sooner or later we must find the courage to throw away the rope girdle -> terrible fear "finding myself in the void of falling". If we face this fear, with the wise guide within, the swimming beasts sets us down at the last beyond the Great Barier, where we learn the true nature of dishonesty and of ultimate betrayal, and pass beyond it to the light of day.
Resolutions, promises ... -> expressions of will to power. We want to be in charge, to decide who we are. Born out of desire to control our lives and IDs.
You can't get rid of the other no matter how violent you are. More effective strategy than abuse and violence = deception.
Predator. Feeding own freedom with the freedom of other.
You can't say to other that you value other's freedom and feed with it at the same time.
!In order to engage in the sins of the world a person has to be able to deceive themselves into thinking something which they know is not true. Specifically that their freedom and ID is more important than the freedom and ID of another being. Total denial of empathy, of seeing yourself in the other person. Seeing the other as food to prey upon.
Chapter 18
Flattering - perverted intellect. Deliberate manipulation of he other person accompanied by a total lack of concern for that person. Flatterers - abuse the language so much that it destroys communication between mind and mind.
Chapter 19
Simoniacs - fracture of society when trust in gaining access to what people take to be holy is betrayed.
Subordination of the heavenly to the earthy - turning the things upside down.
Image of a city in corruption - disintegration of every social relationship - sexuality, language, ecclesiastical office... All the media of community's exchange are perverted and falsified, till only the descent into the final abyss remains where faith and trust are forever extinguished.
Chapter 20
Diviners.
Looking to the self (ego) instead of God or the source of direction and power.
Who is more guilty than he who makes the divine council subject to his will?
Progression of degree of fraud:
- emotions of others
- manipulate different truths
- trafficking in the anxiety people have about the future (diviners, astrologers). Praying on people's hopes, dreams and conceptions of both morality and reality by offering knowledge without limit, and therefore without the weight of responsibility for judgement.
Chapter 21, 22
"Selling truth" in public offices.
In a consumer society everything has its price.
Chapter 23
Hypocrisy presenting a brilliant show and weighting like lead so as to make spiritual progress impossible Show - trying to be something others than we are - miserable sinners in need of forgiveness.
Chapter 24
In middle ages people's property was considered an extension of their body. Robing not only robs of possessions but also of identity.
Every sin of the wolf, of malicious fraud, involves staling the other's freedom. Anyone who attempts to rob another human's identity loses his or her own in the process.
Chapter 25
If you did it theft to one of these, the least of my brethen, you did it also onto me.
Stealing - hellish parody of the human exchange of "I" and "Thou".
Worst type of frauds - those capable of most empathy (e.G. Debt collector)
Chapter 26
Freedom in a mutual relationship. Dance between initiative and response. Initiative doesn't dictate the response
Mystery of freedom requires us to remain in a state of constant questioning, vigilance. Is this act authentic? Or is it an act of ego seeking pride? Is this the holy spirit or is this the tempter, false counselor, ego, who always wants to be in charge? Keep the question of truth open, we don't know if this is the right thing or not.
In the end conscience is questioned. Question of inspiration.
Power of Ulysses to seduce minds and hearts with his rhetorics. Choose between responsibility or not (and rob him of his freewill) for the other. In the end he's fooling himself.
Chapter 28
Sowers of discord.
Perversion of "word made flesh made word again". By destroying the social fabric with words, they engender mass violence, which in turn sows further hatred and blind ideology -> society and human activity eventually break down (perhaps this is why these sinners are so close to the giants of canto 30).
The dignity of a human being inheres in the responsibility to answer the question "who am I" for oneself.
On personal level, sowing discord is also something "we do daily when we evade our own shadow and project it onto another".
Chapter 29
Falsifiers of words, money, things and persons, typified by the alchemists. Malarial ditch.
Society and individuals indulging in "magical thinking" ignoring the constraints of reality. Society infected with the poison of "packaging". Where image substitutes for the substance. Manipulation of public through advertising, cult of celebrity, virality of social media, debasing of public and political rhetoric, and obscurantism of "big data".
Helen Luke: it is so common we hardly see it anymore. Almost everyone evades the pain of loneliness by copying someone else, evading consciousness of his own truth; while few are shocked anymore by the all pervasive prostitution of language which clouds reality and substitutes verbiage for fact. As for such things as the evasion of taxes and faking the expense accounts, these have become matters for boasting.
Chapter 30
Dante listens to the wrangling of two falsifiers and begins to enjoy it ... Luke: reminder of a danger of looking upon evil, of its power to drag us away from consciousness into identification with itself, through some seemingly small "vulgarity".
"Do not imagine, that your growth in discrimination, your increase in consciousness means that you are safe from such despicable emotions."
The greater degree of awareness, the more damaging are the vulgarities, which in the past were hardly noticeable. Having wakened up, however, remorse is foolish.
Chapter 31
Giants (blind forces that remain in the souce when the general 'bond of love' is dissolved) as the only way to the lowest levels of freezing, motionless hell. Reserved for traitors of country, guests and dearest friends.
Nimrod (personified nonsense as giant). Jargon is born out of primitive mass thinking and never of the true feeling - intellect. When we hear it we may be sure of the emptiness it covers.
Luke: we never get to the bottom and so start up again unless we press into our service our own personal vanities. How often do we find energy to work on our problems because we can't bear to appear lazy or indifferent in the eyes of our friends, guides, of ourselves. Provides we are always concious of the motive it can be a powerful help along the way. Antaeus (personified gigantic vanity) can lift us over an otherwise insuperable barrier. On that other descent into the hell of complete meaninglessness, the mass emotion, the giants, do indeed precipitate men into ultimate betrayal.
Comment 2019-04-07: close to the end of hell - start of "save the world" project.
The three giants represent nonsense, violence and triviality. These are the forces that overtake civilization when all decency is finally abrogated.
Chapter 32
A traitor because he severs the most basic bond each of us has to the world - trust of the loved ones - also completely destroys her relationship to reality, leaving her with nothing to respond but her own rejection.
Sin is not about right and wrong. Sin is paralysis.
Trapped in paralyzing cold - price for denial of all the values of human exchange.
Chapter 33
Ugolino refuses to feed his children with compassion. With heart turned to stone he has no word for his children. Give us your self in the bread of your word. Make it possible for us to remain in communion. Feed and be fed on meaning.
All the foundation of a relationship is trust.
Desire to be alone. Desire not to take the freedom of the other as equally to our own. Not acknowledging the need for the Other. Even when one has finally said no to the Other, the Other is still present. And it is this futility of his decision that freezes him here, gnawing in insatiable hunger.
Purgatorio
Chapter 1
Purgatory is made out of the same stuff (displaced earth after Satan's fall) as hell. But it is inverse. Same dynamics, working inversely.
Continuation of the same journey that began in hell.
Chapter 2
Luke: purgatory is an immediate reality in the life of every man who chooses the way to consciousness.
Angel meets souls gathered at the delta of the river Tiber, which symbolizes earthly dimensions of human existence, and escorts them to the isle of Purgatorio - God's world.
Struggle for maturity for which the mountain now invites. Growing zeal to do penance. No time is to be lost, this must be his one and only priority. Pilgrim's failures have been serious.
Chapter 3
Antepurgatory - before one can enter the "School of Contemplation", where on 7 terraces behind St. Peter's gate healing of the wounds of sin occurs.
Time and space situate us in the world of relationships and allow each of us identify the situation that is "my own". Thus they are the most basic differential matrix by which we begin to respond to the question "who am I?"
Christians in the face of mystery of Christ's birth as well as the mystery of the Trinity should be content with the "what" and not the "why".
Pure reason looks down to earth. Hope up to the heaven.
Excommunicates. Symbolising wrong kind of individualism. Those who will not listen in humility to any traditional wisdom or to anyone else's experience or accept any authority, and so reject the fellowship here on this earth, because they imagine this is the one way one becomes a free person.
If I accept my need of forgiveness only at the "last moment" of my life, then all my previous relationships have been marked by the failure to do so sooner. Something has been permanently lost in such case. Time spent in the that situation of self exposed exile (from family, society, or any other way in which people try to sustain bonds of solidarity with each other) is time lost.
In middle ages tears were considered a gift God.
Chapter 4
True freedom means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from your experience.
Indolent and harried. People futilely trying to possess time. Not acting according to the need of the moment.
Hope is needed to transcend the certainty of death.
Antepurgatory - metaphor for Dante's conviction that a person must recognize and accept the real constraints of time and space imposed on her if she is begin taking responsibility for who she is.
Chapter 5
Antepurgatory has to do with adapting to the human situation. Willingness to suffer. Learning patience (basic meaning from latin - suffer). Ability to deal with the limits of time, space and freedom of other people.
Dante needs to heal his wounds so his soul will be sane, whole, healthy when he meets Beatrice.
People change by finding it in them to be patient with the limitations of being human. And learning that the capacity to be human requires the help of others. Prayer.
Chapter 6
Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.
Offering and seeking compassion is at the heart of Dante's purgatory.
Chapter 7
Law of the mountain. Expression of the rhythm of the music to which the dance of the repentance must be performed. Action vs. Rest (being receptive). Initiative vs response.
Dante has dreams each night of the purgatory. Dream is a sacrament. Liturgy in which something happens to Dante that transforms him. Dream of hope, in which gifts are given and received in gratitude.
Preoccupied. Overworked psychologist, doctors ... All those who take refuge from themselves in an unreflective pursuit of good, pouring all their energy into the redemption of society of the succor of other people, are blind to their personal darkness.
Chapter 8
Two angels in green with broken swords. Green, the colour of hope.
Here the serpent does not necessarily suggest that souls in ante-purgatory are in danger of backsliding into sin. But they are still subconsciously vulnerable to temptation, even though they've chosen God. Thus the intervention of Divine Grace is needed to protect their wills from assault.
Don't panic: there are times, when we must simply fix our eyes on the emissary, the angel, i.E. Our desire to become whole, rather than reacting with self-hatred or with panic that descends into frantically searching out and analyzing every detail of the shadow contents of the unconscious.
Explore the conscious and unconscious motives, but reacting with blind panic won't help the slightest.
The darkness of the night binds the will with helplessness.
Chapter 9
Luke: Dante reminds us that the Gate of Purgatory is in each man's own psyche ... When we know this, we knock, and the door is open.
Luke: to be a cup-bearer of the gods, at this stage of the journey, doesn't mean a peaceful waiting upon the gods beyond the conflicts and tensions of the conscious and unconscious; it means, on the contrary, to enter the fire and suffer the purging of these conflicts until out of them is born a love freed from all concupiscence.
On the seven terraces of the mountain, all the souls the pilgrim meets will be struggling with the tension borne of competing desire.
No dreams for Dante in the inferno. Before he had only in Vita Nuova.
Dream with eagle (= St. Lucy., name from the root lux). It brings him to fire - purgatory. Eruption of fire, eruption into consciousness.
Analogy to the story of Ganymede. To be the chosen one. His cup-bearer. The one him trusts that what is in his cup is not poisoned. Terror (cold, deadly thread), burn, passion (heat) of what Dante/Ganymede/... must bear. His new ID of cup-bearer.
Heart opened, mind broken.
Three stairs before the gate out of the hardest stones: white marble (reflecting = process of confession, looking at oneself), dark purple (Christ's passion on the cross), blood red (sacrifice blood of Christ). Gate is attended by an angel in gray - penitential color. He warns: "I bid you know that he who looks back returns outside" - "No man putting his hand to the plough and looking back is fit for the Kingdom of God".
Angel sit on the stairs on a diamond. Symbol for constancy. Being firm. Hardness. He has got one sword (not two) - symbol of spiritual power. Knowledge.
Dante did not found st. Peter at the gate. Mt. Purgatory except at the very top is not a purgatorial fire.
Chapter 10
Seven terraces of purgatory. School of contemplation. Help to practice freedom. To say yes or no. Change the inner person. Heal the wounds of the sin.
Dealing with three types of "love": self-preferential, ineffectual and possessive and obsessive.
Christ: word turned flesh. Purpose of art according to Dante: turn the flesh to word. And repeated to God with affirmation - YES.
It is the relationship that makes the miracle happen. And human freedom is the capacity to say YES to the initiative that calls that person into existence and then proposes taking on an unique identity. YES or NO is the key. With a NO God is locked out.
Pride is the head and root of all sin, actual and original, i.e. making the self, instead of God, the center about which the will and desire revolve.
Story of the annunciation -> Marry has the key to the heaven. Be like Marry (meaning earth, dirt - humus) in her humanity. Be down to earth. Be realistic. Necessity and opportunity which the Other offers making your will part of the will that moves heaven and earth and all the stars. Pride vs. Humility -> "piu non posso" (Italian "I can't anymore").
Atlas carrying the world on his shoulders as punishment for being proud. Illusion. You have to be able to learn to bear the weight of reality willingly.
Worm -> angelic butterfly
Chapter 11
Aeschylus: "pathein mathein - by suffering we learn.
Penitents choose to remain in suffering because now they realize that by avoiding it in life they have lost a precious opportunity to grow into mature responsibility for themselves. Sustain human suffering with the conscious acceptance.
Your renown (fame) is but hue of grass, which comes and goes, and the same sun that makes it spring green from the ground will wither it.
Chapter 12
Men, born as worms, can become angelic butterflies, but for a little wind (the wind of fame) they fall back.
Chapter 13
Sin ... Is a turning of our eyes in the wrong direction.
Envy. In Dante's times envy was strongly associated with ill will, i.e. desiring someone to fall prey to misfortune. Decoration of the terrace is blue-gray colour of a bruise. Envy - from in + videre - 'not seeing' or 'seeing against'. Punishment blinding as in life they were blind to the joy of others.
Physics of freedom: with regard to understanding matters of human meaning and identity, the choice is never "either/or" but always "both/and". Also, judgement of another is always primarily a judgement of the self.
Chapter 14
A prideful and an envious person may seem like opposites on the surface, but both are characterized by debilitating self-preoccupation.
Chapter 15
Mysterious joy of the Paradiso - everything can be shared without being divided. Physics of freedom rather than of material energy.
Inferno - unrelentingly dark. Paradiso - blindingly ecstatic. Purgatorio is everything in between.
Consider how hard it is to love people who don't give us pleasure. Idea of Christian love - loving your enemy, the poor, depressed, socially inept, the sick - truly miraculous.
Pour the water of peace upon the fires of wrath in the heart.
Chapter 16
Anger - smokescreen, which we use to avoid having to face that which threatens us. Avoidance tactic. Think smokes impedes seeing. Anger impedes judgement.
Evil arises from humans reacting irresponsibly to their immaturity.
Absence of conscious awareness of what one is really doing.
Because we are ignorant, our free will is a curse.
Chapter 17 - until the end of heaven
Description of human pilgrimage (from one point, to several places, isolation, back to the roots).
Inner and outer world are different but made of the same stuff. Whole.
Reality/law of freedom.
Eternity. Not a static sameness. But an always beginning over again, always returning back to where one has already been. But returning there changed. Able to do the same thing again differently. Because one is different. One's relationship to everything around on. So the same is never the same.
Fantasy (pretending) vs imagination: seeing more deeply into the mystery of what is present so that it can appear to us in its full possibility to be different. To happen again differently. This poem lets us imagine every possibility of human existence from the extreme no to the extreme yes. And every gradation and variation of colour on the spectrum. The light of freedom illuminates all the possibilities. Contemplative reading -> imagination.
Freedom (generative force) promises newness. Transformed life.
Beginnings are mysterious.
Freedom identifies itself with the other by forgiveness of every difference. Entirely responsibility to everyone for everyone.
Original malformed love: cupid, me, female. Holy trinity: spirit of god, creation, experiencer.
Children - predestined. Lack the power of free will.
Dantes poem - 100 step pilgrimage.
Vitruvian man. Squares the circle. Square represents time and space. Human describes that. (he is in the middle). Circle symbolizes that which is not in time and space. Union of heaven and earth.
God cannot be named in hell.
Seeing both good and evil as exactly what each is - without urgent need to consume evil in revenge, and allowing it to be different while rejecting it for oneself.
Dimensionless point of light that encloses all that encloses it - love. God "creates" because he loves. "Freedom" but remember who we are.
Time function of motion. Primum Mobile.
Redemption is conscious discovery of that wholeness. Restoring of the world to the innocence and wholeness. Resolution of all conflict.
Dante: life gives you what it wants. In your writing you can be yourself in your exile.
Hope is not hope for success. Hope is not hope that insists of fulfilling in a way that we desire it. Hope rests on faith. Will be true even in the case it never occurs.
Hope is certain expectation of future glory springing for heavenly grace and merit we have won. Beyond any question. Certainty of faith, it will be realized as truth, whatever shape, form and timing it might take. All shall be well. Everything is as it should be if we allow it to be so.
Original sin - haste and pride. Knowledge of evil itself was not forbidden. Man was just not mature enough for it. Patiencia
Love is blind. You'll see the real love only when you are ready for it. Paradise.
Meanings are real. Different kind of reality as material things. Love knowing enlightened by faith and hope.
Love pulls me to heavenly kingdom. I see myself in the object but can never capture it. I have to go for myself. She is the lure. Twisted love -> just love.
Faith: evidence of things that are not seen,substance of things hoped for. Faith makes the reality of the mystery it binds us to. First solid step above the experienced words to the light from the shade. Encapsulated light before we become it. All preaching is reenactment, not affirmation, of the incarnation. Word -> flesh. Flesh -> word. Faith is like a coin. Word - bread of angels - providing faith. I've become it now. You are what you eat. Testimony to the certainty I am, not I have. Manna.
Paradise is the memory in gratitude of all things ruined and past, of all things. Forgiven. Paradise is written in gratitude in the book of memory, the book written in the holy face.
Faith in totality of our life, no matter how limited our knowledge. Accepting every experience of the psyche, without identifying with it.
Surfing on the wings on desire.
Complete the journey and return into the middle of his own life in the full freedom of responsibility.
All things in heaven spring from righteous zeal. The sword of heaven never cuts in haste, nor in delay
Contemplation is the way in which human existence makes itself at home in both worlds through the acceptance of reality, freed from the demand we might wish to make it, driven by either fear or desire. Listening, looking, attending to one's life without demands. Without consuming. Without needing to eat the other to make it your self. Tension between fear and desire -> contemplation is to move beyond. Ladder to heaven. Reach the point beyond desire and fear. Vow -> no. Openness to what shall come without clinging. Beautiful thing - mirror that leads us to experience our own bliss. Looking and eating are two different operations. Contemplative sees the still center at the heart, between fear and desire. Look, love, desire without insisting on consuming. Looking with acceptance. Let reality be in what it is without the demand it to be what we want to.
Heaven - all it as it should be. You don't have to say yes or no. You simply have to let it be. = Contemplative role. To know to have a center in the middle of action.
First obligation - setup a ladder between man and god, between earth and beyond, between conscious and unconscious.
St. Augustine: thus a man supported by faith, hope and charity with an unshaken hold upon them, does not need the Scriptures except for the instruction of others.
As to who they were and where they came from (forebears), it is more modest to be silent than to speak.
Hope. Motivation to keep going. Not because of the motivation that all will keep well. Hope that required success is not hope. It is optimism. Ability to judge what would be real success is not available to us. Hope is not dependent on success.
Pursuit of justice is not directed towards the success of achieving that success. It is directed for the recognition of the impossibility of the human beings to achieve justice. Forgiveness includes and transcends all justice.
Hope that keeps is going is not predicated on any specific outcome. It is predicated on the hope on remaining united to that mystery which is the source of our ID and our joy. Perfect contentment - it is my happiness that hides me from you. The blessed spirits are hidden by the splendour produced by their own bliss. God's will is human freedom. Exercise responsibility for our identity.
See Lord everywhere = my food. Meaning - food of the intellect. Nurtures and feeds and satisfies desire.
!Unity is fundamental to perfection. In Christ I lack nothing. Opposite of partiality. The higher you go the less you recognize the individual. Differing voices make sweet music. Differing ranks in our life create sweet harmony among these wheels.
As you get nearer to the object of desire the intellect begins to stutter...
Paradise works according to physics of freedom. Allows differences to occur. Differential physics of freedom vs. differential physics of energy Quality vs. quantity. Different but not more or less.
Freedom as a gravitational force of itself, if not checked or hindered, cannot do otherwise than fly to the fulfilment of its desire. Freedom comes from the Other and freedom naturally moves to the Other.
His will is our peace. I gladly pardon in myself the reason for my lot. Adam's sin - felix culpa, because of the joy of resurrection. "She is perfectly content with the place alloted to her and does not grieve" (Canto 9, Paradiso) Love by which they formerly erred is discerned as manifestation of the power that governs the universe.
Charity gives to all. Partiality to a 'few special'. Being at peace equally with all. Impartiality. Giving oneself and herself to anybody whom encountered, Who needed it. Without any personal preference. Generosity. Love - we are all one. Seeing and acting like that.
I am glad to have all this (I might regret) in my life because it had led me precisely here. To what I am. I am at peace with all people, with myself, with God. Wishing it (anything) might have been different -> gone.
Sun - Self generating life. Living light.
Father (creator) = son (experiencer) = holy ghost (background/existence). (love, primal power) ONE = SON = OTHER. The mutual gaze of the One and son "creates" energy = love. It itself is a third, the Other. Marriage -> "generation" of the third.
Divine moves in circle and centers itself in the principle of its movement. Imitate - everything that imitates the divine is then a revelation of the divine.
Failed guidance is the cause the world is steeped in vice. Because we are ignorant, our free will is actually a course. Freeing the will: intellect, skill -> moral maturity -> freedom, pleasure. Now you are responsible for your self. Doing what you most want. Most want to be.
Lust - claiming to one too close - to the exclusion of others. Learning to let go.