Dante and the Blessed Virgin

Epilogue

143 E p i l o g u e The great French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal had a mystical experience, a kind of private revelation, that changed his life. He wrote down a description in French and Latin and wore a copy next to his heart for the rest of his life. It is known as Pascal’s Memorial:1 Fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and the learned. Certainty, certainty, feeling, joy, peace. God of Jesus Christ, My God and your God. Your God will be my God. The world and everything but God forgotten. He can be found only by the paths taught in the Gospel. The grandeur of the human soul. The Just Father whom the world has not known, but I have known Him. Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy. I have separated myself from him: They have forsaken me, the fount of living water. My God, do not abandon me Lest I be eternally separated from you. 144 Dante and the Blessed Virgin This is eternal life, that they should know the one true God and the one whom He has sent, Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. I have abandoned him, fled him, renounced and crucified him. May I never be separated from him. He can be had only by the paths taught in the Gospel. Total and sweet renunciation. Etc. Total submission to Jesus Christ and to my director. Eternally in joy for a day of testing on earth. May I not forget your words. Amen. We notice the reference in the first line to fire to express the vision , perhaps similar to Dante’s reliance on light in canto 33 of the Paradiso. The message in these disconnected and fragmentary lines may let us down, but we must remember that the Memorial was a private note, addressed to himself. Pascal never intended it to be published . Pascal was attempting to record what cannot engage the mind or heart of just any passerby, any scholarly voyeur. Kierkegaard once quoted a remark of Lichtenberg on Scripture: “Such works are like mirrors. If a monkey looks in, no apostle looks out.” Dante makes similar demands. Unlike Pascal in the Memorial, Dante was not writing for himself alone. And we know who his intended readers were: all those who by their free acts are justly earning an eternal reward or punishment. Few readers can fail to respond to the exquisite art with which he has put before us his imaginary pilgrimage—imaginary only in a sense. Human life and its destiny provide the spine of this story, and Dante was not making that up. Keen as our aesthetic enjoyment of the Commedia may be, intriguing as are the intellectual elements of the narrative , we know that Dante was after a deeper response than those. He wanted to move us from the misery of sin to eternal happiness. And he shows us the inescapable centrality of the Blessed Virgin Mary in that conversion. ...