lang=EN>IV. Imagination and Love
Aristotle thought our intellect only knows what we perceive through our senses and what we reach through the imagination. When we contemplate the transcendent divine order, which is the most valuable of human acts, we do so by a divine aspect of intellect that does not belong to us by virtue of our human nature.
Aquinas agreed that contemplation of divine things most deeply characterizes human beings, but he thought the intellectual and moral efforts of philosophy are simply part of the knowledge that occurs in the natural order.1 Dante is closer to Aristotle on this point, though the basis for his position is quite different: the contemplative life requires transcendent revelation of divine reality, rather than being merely a natural human act. When Dante converted the platonic forms into the pure intelligences of angels, the starting points of Western philosophy were subsumed into contemplative intelligences that we cannot know through our senses and only through faith. The poetic challenge was to discover images that evoked such ideas.We can reject or affirm the value of images in our exploration of divine reality. Dionysius the Areopagite chose the way of rejection, renouncing all images other than the final image in God. Dante chose the way of affirmation. He believed images bring us to God though a kind of analogical work in which they reveal the differences between God and creation but also illuminate the likenesses that transform our understanding of both. Like Thomas, he was filled with wonder before the incomprehensibility of God, and he understood the humility at the heart of the via negativa. St. Bonaventure, writing around the same time as Dante, said that God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.2 Intellectual images of this sort suffuse Dante’s poem, bringing together the way of affirmation and the way of rejection.
Whatever the poem’s philosophical frame for knowledge might be, Dante was motivated by the image of Beatrice, a real woman who died and left him bereft.
He experienced a moment of seeing eternity through her image. She communicated both love and humility, to the extent that Dante was able to receive them. She gave him knowledge of love that sprang from, and revealed, a deeper well of love. Many of us occasionally experience this in our love for a few people, but if we were able to see better, we would find a glimpse of this deeper reality in every person. Dante’s poem portrays what most of us experience in a confused way. We glimpse the eternal, but we become attached to the portal of glory and misplace our veneration, which leads to the distortions imagined in the Inferno.After death took away the locus of Dante’s ecstasy so that she was accessible only through imagination, he looked for consolation in philosophy, which transiently relieved him of his obsession. His turn to philosophy was an important choice of remedies, because it too was grounded in love—not only philia, the love fitting to friendship but also eros, which Socrates claimed was the kind of love that drove him toward wisdom. Dante was not the first man to fall in love with philosophy as a way to relieve the pain of heartbreak, nor was he the last. In his canzone, Voi che ‘ntendo il terzo ciel novete, he sang about philosophy—the daughter of God, the queen of the universe.3 This Lady, whose home is the divine mind, is a true friend to journeyers like Dante. For a time, he directed the fire of his passion toward this wonder-filled world of philosophical imagination that illuminated both visible and invisible things. He came to see that wisdom and love in the act of philosophical speculation are one with the faculty of imagination. But this was not enough, and eventually Dante was compelled to write his great poem. By the time he did so, he had concluded that the arts exist primarily to help the soul move more rapidly toward heaven.
Aquinas taught that love determines a person’s share in the light of glory, because great love is accompanied by great desire, and desire prepares us to receive the one who is desired: “The greater a man’s charity, the more perfectly will he see God.”4 Such love transforms the way we see and the way we imagine.
Apart from Dante’s great imaginative act of love in the Divine Comedy, Beatrice would have been remembered by others merely as a young woman from Florence who met Dante a couple of times, who became the second wife of Simone dei Bardi, and who died in June, 1290. But Dante was a witness to a different part of her truth, because he desired her and saw her with the eyes of love. From their dim, unlikely encounter on a small street in Florence, he realized that the key to grasping the whole of reality is love, and his imagination explored the massive cavern of treasure lit up by that love. Beatrice’s transfiguration was not wrought by mere imagination; it was wrought by imagination shaped by faith. Dante was a Christian, and his spiritual and intellectual community included the dead. He did not treat this aspect of the universe as fiction. Beatrice—along with the others who populate the poem—continued to exist on the other side of death, even as he wrote his poem in Florence, daily walking past the Chapel of Santa Margherita de Cerchi. To read the poem well, our imaginations must be open to the same possibilities to which Dante’s imagination was open, including the possibility of experiencing a love so great that it requires all of Earth, hell, purgatory, and heaven, along with the treasures of philosophy, poetry, and theology, to express itself.Dante began his poem on the threshold of hell with images of savage forces, both inside and outside himself—the leopard of lechery, the ravenous lion of manhood, and a horrid She who always craves. These images drove him into his own dark past of treachery. His guide, Virgil, served as an image for both poetry and philosophy, an image of all human learning. But neither poetry nor philosophy were sufficient to answer the chaotic powers Dante met in the forest before passing through the gate into the inferno. When Dante and Virgil passed into hell they witnessed images of disordered affirmations, frozen into patterns forever fixed beyond the power of intellect and will to change—images of the petrified consciousness in an unchanging infinity.
Dante’s poetic imagination lit up the grayness of the gloom in the Inferno, and revealed hell as a work of art that is as old as the world itself, constructed with the same wisdom and goodness God used to create heaven and earth.5 Hell’s impoverished version of love is neither nimble nor responsive. It is fixed and static, and the only form it takes is a singular kind of justice—punishment. God’s love shows up only as punitive justice, and beauty shows up only in the symmetry and proportion between a sin and its punishment.6 But it is there, because all communication requires at least a diminished act of love. As Dante and Virgil descended the funnel of hell, the character of that stunted, abbreviated communication is reified. This mirthless glimmer of form in the gloom of hell began with the episode of Paulo and Francesca, right after what Charles Williams calls the Limbo of the suspended imagination.
Paulo and Francesca were lovers who committed adultery. At least, that is how the sin reads on the tablets of the Ten Commandments. The deeper truth of their sin was that they did not embrace the glory of the kind of love into which we are meant to grow. The elements of their love were good in themselves, but the goodness was not preserved. Their act led to disintegration. Their punishment occurs at the top of the funnel that is hell, and like all of the punishments in hell, the only change is the movement of infinite duration: all sins move toward the sameness of eternal fixity. The sin is sterile. It produces no fruit, no spiritual growth. Dante’s images show sin for what it is, including its eternal dimension. But the eternal is not discovered from within the truncated and fixed imaginations of the damned, which are diminished by infinite repetition of the particular consequences of particular sins. It is discovered by imaginations expanded through repentance and faith.
Repentance and faith train the imagination to see properly, rather than simply seeing images as it chooses to see them. The mind learns to see as it relinquishes evil and embraces goodness. As Dante’s imagination surrendered and emerged from hell, it began the ascent and saw the stars in a new way. It was ready to climb toward the source of true joy and happiness.The images in hell are sickening and repulsive. Dante intended them to be so. But in our warped perception of the sins that constitute hell, we also find something attractive about them. Neither attraction nor repulsion alone would do for Dante’s poem. Both were needed to capture the nature of hell’s agony. This was Dante’s genius in the Inferno. When he turned to the Purgatorio, he still had to show pain, but the pain was mingled with the joy that comes from paradise. In stark contrast to the fixed and ice-cold infinity of hell, Purgatory is a realm of preparation where everything functions to help souls move toward heaven. This includes the arts. When souls orient themselves toward lesser images in the arts, they are better prepared to act in a fitting way toward higher images.7
As the poem moves into the Paradiso, images light the path. In the radiant presence of God, everything is known in a new way that deepens our ability to see beauty. This is especially true of Beatrice’s beauty, which Dante worships in line after line, Canto after Canto. Then, eventually the poem comes to a threshold beyond which Dante’s imagination cannot reach, however intensely he wishes to understand:
In all heaven, the essence most aglow,
the Seraph that has God in closest view,
could not explain what you have asked to know.
The truth of this is hidden so far down
in the abyss of the Eternal Law,
it is cut off from all created vision.8
In canto XXX the perfect height of the perfect image is reached, showing both the possibilities and the limits of imagination, along with a hope that the threshold of our finitude will forever continue to change.
The creator withdraws from visibility so that Beatrice is utterly present. She is poised as she marshals images to speak about each state of being, including intellectual light full of love, a living light beyond which he cannot see. In paradise, the voice of Beatrice—the young woman born in Florence in 1266, who once called to Dante’s heart in love—has become the sign of a greater, truer love. Dante’s entire life and imaginative work were required to grasp the distinction between Beatrice as the beckoning of love and Beatrice as the sign pointing beyond herself toward the One who is love. There was no shortcut. From his first glimpse of the nine-year-old girl on a small street in Florence, Dante’s desire to understand love was inseparable from his imagination’s growth into the true meaning of the image of Beatrice. She was the bearer of God for him. At the height of imaginative transport, the presence of Beatrice gave way to the presence of Mary, the God-bearer in the fullness of holy flesh. Through the knowledge of God, Mary led him to the final goal—the love of God. He began to forget Beatrice once he encountered the ecstasy of divine love toward the end of the poem, and this is a source of joy for her. Virgil’s role was completed at one threshold, as Dante moved toward things that can only be seen in faith. The role of Beatrice was completed at another threshold, when the Virgin Mary allowed Dante to see things that will not fit into written language but that can only be known through grace.Possibility and hope continue past any work the imagination can do. The presence of the One is felt in Plato’s allegory of the cave, Aristotle’s account of the love that moves the celestial spheres, and Dante’s final vision of the luminous image of Mary with her piercing eyes. But the presence remains beyond the reach of any image. The glory shown forth by the sun and the stars must finally serve an unseen creator who is accessible only in another mode, to which imagination and the created universe gladly subjugate themselves. Dante concludes:
Here my powers rest from their high fantasy,
but already I could feel my being turned—
instinct and intellect equally balanced
as in a wheel whose motion nothing jars—
by the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars.9
Everything has its place. As the imagination grows, it sees more clearly how each part of creation plays a part in the act of love that opens the wondering mind to God, other people, and the themes of the universe. Dante’s great poem reveals what love is through its images, leading to a great act in which Beatrice is the knowing, and God is the known.
The poem tells a story about how love awakens our souls to the beauty of creation and the creator. But—we must not miss the intensely erotic nature of the love Dante portrays, nor the way this love was enlivened by a very particular girl, on a very particular street, in a very particular town. It might sound strange to say that this is part of why, in striking contrast to Aristotle and Aquinas, Dante gave moral thought a higher place than metaphysical thought. Moral practice fosters the perfection of an individual, including the divine aspect that God provides through nature and grace as an act of distinctly erotic love: love’s union with wisdom is the supreme principle of the world. This erotic movement does not occur in metaphysical abstractions of being. It occurs in the particular beings who actually exist. It is bound to action rather than theory, and it is expressed in the concreteness of personal existence rather than in the universal essences that often populate scholasticism. The power of eros draws us higher, and for the sake of the ultimate love, which is love of God, we become humble and we renounce any obstacles to this love.
Philosophy—the erotic union of love and wisdom—shapes us in a way that leads us to love what God loves, which is the fulfillment of what we witness in erotic love between two people. This is why Beatrice is the key to understanding Dante’s journey in the Divine Comedy. The journey most certainly, and concretely, began in the poet’s imagination the moment he saw, and desired, one particular girl in front of the chapel doors in Florence. But as he moved toward the poem’s final vision of the ineffable and unutterable love of God, he saw the deepest truth of Beatrice: she was loved by God. Because she was utterly loved by God, she was utterly herself, and she could no longer be lost in the way we sometimes are when we try to love in the fog of this world. She was moving toward a vision of perfect participation in the eros of God. Philosophy is always on the way toward this highest love, but on its own it can never bring us to that complete enjoyment. In the Convivio, Dante even goes so far as to call philosophy prostitution, though this prostitute is adored.
Dante’s poem portrayed the reciprocity of erotic forces coming from God and ascending back to God from the created world. This theological aesthetic, reaching past death and transforming day-to-day encounters with the particulars of the world, is possible only to a philosophical imagination embedded within a created cosmos filled with spiritual powers. Faith-shaped imagination lends a vividness to life by renewing our ability to see radiance in the smallest parts of creation, from the slightest struggling worm to the ecstasy of earthly erotic love. The meaning of everything is converted by the reality of God’s creative glory. If philosophy is, in some sense, a beloved prostitute, she is still the servant of God, aiding the incremental transformation of our finite imaginations on the journey. From inside our limits we are called to patience, called to hope. All desire, finally, will find its fulfillment beyond the immediacy of what is desired. But this does not diminish the value of any particular person or thing we desire. Far from it. In the light of a love greater than we can put into words, the particulars are unveiled as part of the glory of creation. But through obedience, they are also prevented from usurping the greater for the sake of the lesser—a usurpation that can only lead to the frozen and repetitive remnants of reality imagined in the Inferno.
The final image in the poem is the Celestial Rose, formed of men, women, and the souls of children, with angels like bees bringing God’s love to the blessed. Love is God’s truest name, and in this love, eros and agape have a nuptial reciprocity. They are finally, for Dante, the same thing. The fullness of this love would not fit into Dante’s words, but what he could not say, the archangel made visible, as “the divine eros itself, which by the mediation of the angel glowing with love, rushed down upon the Virgin.”10
Where Dante embraced the power of images to bring our imaginations to the threshold of divine knowledge, Dionysius the Areopagite rejected the idea that images have analogical power to reveal God’s nature. Though every created being has some similarity to its divine exemplar, however faint, and can light our path toward the transcendent, Divine nature ultimately exceeds every thought in mind and therefore must remain unknown. St. Hilary of Poitier likewise described the way the mind falters when it tries to use language to scale the incomprehensible reality of an invisible, ineffable God and finds itself slipping with no secure conceptual hold. We see in a glass darkly. Divine truth appeals to us through faith expressed in images and words, but because these images and words originate in what we perceive through our senses, our knowledge of God always falls short of reality.
Of course, one might also view such imaginative work as nothing more than human deification of the celestial realm. Perhaps imaginations shaped by the false idea of a creator impose so-called “glory” and “radiance” on the universe. But we are still left with a conundrum. Why would humans attribute divinity to the heavens in the first place? Why does humanity seem compelled to deify anything at all? If there is no God, deification of the heavens is merely an imposition of errant imagination. If there is a God, celestial deification arises from something deeper than reason or myth, deeper than logic or mytho-logic. If there is a God, this reality has a structural place in human thought, and the deification of anything is neither purely literal nor purely fictional but rather analogical. We use our intellect to achieve concepts, and these concepts must be chosen, revised, and corrected as we think about the reality of a transcendent God. But we cannot consciously affirm the possibility of transcendent reality unless the possibility seems compelling to us.
Philosophical imagination must be shaped by a habit of the mind to explore the possibility of transcendent reality, just as certain habits of the mind prepare us for investigation in mathematics or poetry. If there is a God, our encounters with this God will not be the same as the passive reception of data. The adventure of seeking the divine is less like a security camera panning the horizon for analyzable information and more like the discovery of a lover. Illumination is the inkling that God is both hidden and revealed in everything we perceive and everything we know. St. Bonaventure described nature as a book written from outside the world: the experience of radiance in the natural world that lights up creation also points us beyond it. Likewise, our thoughts about God, which always fall short, prod us to move beyond our thoughts. Every creature provides a glimpse of its divine exemplar, but its light is always mixed with shadows.
Lovers often quarrel during the uncertainty of mutual discovery, but the quarrels uncover new aspects of mind, heart, and body, especially as the lovers, and the quarrels, mature. Artists and prophets also quarrel. Idols are formed by sculptors who try to express something about God, and iconoclasts destroy these idols, since an infinite God cannot fit into a statue made from one half of a log, while the other half is thrown in the fire to keep the sculptor’s workshop warm. Intellectuals create theological and philosophical systems to sum up all that can be said about God, until musicians lay bare the incompleteness of these systems by expressing a mystery through feelings beyond words. Poets write epics populated with the gods, and prophets write revelations they receive from God. Prophets receive their messages from God and stand against the poets who mistake the visions and dreams of their own hearts for truth from above. But prophets still need the poets because prophecy is proclaimed in language, and like Henri de Lubac has pointed out, we must conceive even the objects of revelation.11
As the imagination grasps its place and purpose in a created universe, it becomes nimbler in its use of its primary instruments of discovery—metaphor, simile, symbol, harmony, arrangement of form. The roots of imagination, through which it draws its life and light, are planted in the living substance and invisible dynamism of first things, which the imagination expresses through the artifacts of poems, stories, music, paintings, and dance. The poetic apriori is the art of discovering and expressing these ineffable first things, which always appear on the surface of our reality, what we call the world.
Our imaginative responses are evoked by our experiences of what is most real, but our expressions of these experiences are always partial, incomplete, and fallible. Nonetheless, experience must be given the contours of imaginative form if they are going to be shared with others. Imaginative forms objectify our subjective experiences in philosophy, poetry, painting, music, liturgy, Scripture, and law. Though transcendent reality exists beyond our images and concepts, it nonetheless enters them, and by doing so it becomes the foundation of our knowledge.12
Justifying confidence in our knowledge of the world is difficult enough. Justifying confidence in our knowledge of God is much more difficult. We lower the plumb line of philosophical imagination into the depths of God. As it drops, with no hint of reaching bottom, the endlessness itself becomes part of the knowledge. When images seem to get us closer to reality, they have done the beginning, middle, and end of their work. But our minds must move past the image, or else the image will become an idol. Idolatry interrupts the only force that can take us closer to reality, which is love. St. Bernard imagined the mind—continually forming and reforming knowledge—as a swimmer who must move to stay afloat, aware that the movement itself is the support and that to stop is to sink. Imagination is not made of final harbors. It is the energy of mental and spiritual motion that moves from the known into the unknown and back again. We are imaginative creatures who stop imagining at our peril. But if we make our images into fixed idols, we mistake local and transient delights for the true object of desire. It is an ancient temptation.
Dionysius the Areopagite and St. Augustine each found a middle way between the images, which are the servants of God, and the true presence of God as God is. Even when our best knowledge of God carries us further along the path of discovery, it nonetheless might later be denied, or at least revised, once we learn more of the truth. This does not mean our knowledge is not valuable. It only means that it is partial and fallible. When philosophical imagination compels us to move beyond our most cherished ideas about God, we sometimes feel like we are losing God. But if we trust in the central reality of love, we can relinquish our fears. Aquinas drew on Augustine’s De Trinitate to describe our dynamic and ever-growing awakening to the image of God. Our imaginative journey toward the imago dei has three stages. We begin with images of creation residing in all human beings. These enable our creative minds to know and love God. Grace leads us to the next stage in which we develop, however imperfectly, the habits of knowing and loving God. The last stage is beatitude, in which the saints know and love God perfectly through glory: “The final solution of the human problem lies in adoration. It can only be found in ecstasy.”13
1 Aquinas, Summa Theologica IaIIae, q3, a5, resp.
2 Many have borrowed this description of God. It originates in the Liber XXIV philosophorum, attributed to the mythical figure Hermes Trismegistus, in which 24 philosophers come together, each giving a definition of God.
3 Dante Alighieri, Il Convivio (The Banquet), trans. Richard H. Lansing, Garland Library of Medieval Literature, Ser. B. N (1990).
4 Aquinas, Summa Theologica I, 12, 6, resp.
5 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. John Ciardi, W.W. Norton, New York (1970), 10–12.
6 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, III, Studies in Theological Style: Lay Styles, Ignatius Press, California (1986), 91.
7 Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice, D.S. Brewer, Cambridge (1994), 177.
8 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, 91–96.
9 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, 142–46.
10 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, III, 81.
11 Henri De Lubac, The Discovery of God, trans. Alexander Dru, William B. Eerdmans, Michigan (1996), 97.
12 De Lubac, The Discovery of God, 106.
13 De Lubac, The Discovery of God, 192.