Dreher, reaching the end of Dante’s Purgatorio, is moved by what awaits the poet at the summit of the Mount of Purgatory – Beatrice in the Garden of Eden:
Dante saw the light of God in Beatrice, but by his own weakness, lost that vision, and fell into darkness and despair. We learn here that it took many tears and prayers of Beatrice in heaven, as well as the devotion of Virgil, to get Dante to the top of that mountain. As he told the shades in Purgatory, “I climb from here no longer to be blind.” He desires to see. When Beatrice asks him why he “condescended” to approach joy, she means that everlasting joy only comes to those who sacrifice their all-too-human pride humble themselves in profound repentance, so that they can at last see God, or to put it in more theological terms, attain the Beatific Vision.
I am thinking of the incident in the Gospel of John, Chapter 5, in which Jesus approaches the chronically ill man at the Bethesda pool. He asks the man, “Do you want to be healed?” It’s a strange thing to ask; of course the man wants to be healed, right? But on second thought, it is by no means clear that we really want to be healed. Many of us think we want to be healed of our afflictions — I’m speaking in the spiritual sense here — but the truth is, we have made icons of our passions, and even our brokenness, and are frightened by the prospect of life without them. The sicker we are, the stronger the medicine to restore us must be. Dante is not sentimental about this. We face an arduous climb to overcome ourselves and our passions. Longing for Divine Grace — in the Divine Comedy, represented by the figure of Beatrice — propels us forward; note that in Purgatory, we can only move as fast as we desire to move. God, in His infinite love for us, will not compel us to come to him. We have free will. We have to have within our own breasts the desire to see ourselves as we really are, and God as He really is, so that we can at last renounce that which separates us from Him.
We must climb so that we will no longer be blind.
The Dish 