DANTE SEES GOD

The importance of Dante Alighieri goes beyond the literature and his ability to reunite all the dialects and various languages that were spoken across Italy in the XIV century under the current Italian language. His divine comedy suggested to the Catholics the structure and organization of what happens after our death and in the very last “canto” of the Paradise he described that God is ourselves which to me is beyond literary genius. I can’t believe that someone who lived 700 years ago could write something like this:

And for what I saw

My words are not enough to call them meager.

O everlasting Light, you dwell alone

In yourself, know yourself alone, and known

And knowing, love and smile upon yourself!

That middle circle which appeared in you

To be conceived as a reflected light,

After my eyes had studied it a while,

Within itself and in its coloring
Seemed to be painted with our human likeness
So that my eyes were wholly focused on it.As the geometer who sets himself

To square the circle and who cannot find,

For all his thought, the principle he needs,

Just so was I on seeing this new vision

I wanted to see how our image fuses

Into the circle and finds its place in it,

Yet my wings were not meant for such a flight —

Except that then my mind was struck by lightning

Through which my longing was at last fulfilled.

.

Here powers failed my high imagination:
But by now my desire and will were turned,
Like a balanced wheel rotated evenly,

By the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.

Dante’s description of God having “our human likeness” has not had the impact that the rest of his comedy has been having for hundreds of years and this makes me believe that human kind prefers to believe that something superior and not human can control our lives because it’s much easier hoping in this to solve our problems rather than working very hard to figure out what to do about them by ourselves.
The existence of a God and having a soul are themes that have generated some of the best thoughts and pieces of literature since the invention of print and thinkers like Leibnitz and Averroè have produced parts of literature that still today in this second millennium are magnificent, I like very much their distinction between soul and intellect where the first is mortal unlike the second one. There exist very much to read and learn on the subjects that I just mentioned but only having an open intellect and mind is worth going further than what I’m writing here.