Nielsen’s Nook

I thank God that he has given us literature, which stokes the imagination and even returns refreshing fervor and dimension to theology. The Inclings met again last night and continued our study of Dante together, by reading chapter XI “The Paradiso” from The Figure of Beatrice by Charles Williams, who is stylistically quite different from Dorothy Sayers and every bit as profound.

The Paradiso is concerned to exhibit beatitude; that is — proper relationship between men and men and men and God. So full of derivation and nourishment are these that they may well be named the in-othering of men and the in-Godding of men. It is not an exterior but an interior relationship which is in question. It is also, in a sense, the absolute relationship, or at least it is one than which nothing more can be imagined or expressed.¹

In the world as it is, outside the universe of Dante’s Commedia, there is resonance with the mystery of the Incarnation itself. Like Dante, every human being is on a pilgrimage in one of two directions either plunging to the Inferno of our own desire or processing humbly to the perfect union, uninhibited communion with God through his Incarnate Son, Jesus. In the case of the former direction, the relationships of “men and men” are cut loose from the moorings of the relationship between “men and God” and the plunge deepens as that rift digresses. In the case of the latter, the relationship between “men and men” is exposed in its weakness and recalibrated on the basis of the New, the Incarnate relationship between “men and God.”

Even in this there is unquantifiable mystery wrapped up in an enigma. It is in this Beatitude of communion of men and God that we find the great joy of love. “[W]e love; we love the divine will, we love as that chooses to love, we are in-willed to will, in-loved to love.”²

Perhaps the most difficult part of the mystery of the Incarnation and the Christian’s mystical union to the incarnate and resurrected Christ is that it transcends us. When the Almighty God comes near we should expect the ineffable and immeasurable and I think that underscores much of our problem today in the contemporary church. We want what we can measure and then exhaust when God has given us himself with out end. It is precisely because the union we have with God in Jesus is eternal and immeasurable that “we should more expressly long to understand the union of our nature with God’s, that is, the Incarnation.” ³ For Jesus alone is our Beatitude, the place in which our relationship to God is put to rights and becomes far more than we can eternally imagine.

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¹ Williams, Charles. The Figure of Beatrice (Berkeley: Apocryphile Press, 2005), 190.

²_____, 196.

³_____, 195.