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Rainbow Bodies The Erotics of Diversity in Dante’s Catholicism James Miller Ascending from one level of enlightenment to another is Dante’s chief ritual action and constant mystical aim throughout Purgatorio and Paradiso . It is also the insidious goal of heretical doomsday cults bent on escaping the erotic complexities of life in the body. Does the pilgrim who achieves liftoff from the Holy Mountain ultimately succeed in escaping the vortex of sexual passions unleashed in Inferno 5? If so, then a theological question urgently arises in the field of Christian apologetics and must be addressed in light of Beatrice’s prophecies. Does the poet who descends from the Empyrean to claim Catholic orthodoxy for his poem in the name of St. Peter (Inf. 1.134) succeed in preventing his spiritually buoyant project of trasumanar from falling into the Gnostic fissure between flesh and spirit?1 For anyone seeking a way out of the storm of fleshly passions—as Dante reveals in his uphill battle to distinguish true from false prophets— it’s no easy matter figuring out whose levels of enlightenment are to be trusted as stages in the ascent to perfection, as steps on the “ladder erected on high” [scaleo eretto in suso] (Par. 21.29).2 While St. Paul repeatedly advised the faithful to seek heavenly bliss by exercising self-restraint through sexual repression—an ascetic counsel that established his incontestable moral authority among the Orthodox as a prophet of salvation— Beatrice perversely urges Dante-pilgrim not to lose but to loose his “hot desire” [Solvi il tuo caldo disio] (Par. 21.51) in questioning her prophetic wisdom.3 Any true understanding of her exalted life, she insists, must be an amorous vision arising from intimate communication between herself and her repentant lover. Accordingly, Dante-poet sets his self-implicating struggle to affirm her prophetic wisdom, not just on the political PART III TRASUMANAR  249 battleground of Truth (where the Church Fathers had ritually waged war against heresy) but also on the psychological hunting ground of Love. HERETICS AT HEAVEN’S GATE Following a prophet who promises a shortcut to Heaven through the extinction of desire can have fatal consequences for the Unorthodox. In March 1997, for instance, thirty-nine members of Heaven’s Gate—an organization of Cyber-Gnostics based in San Diego County, California— thought they could rise to the “Next Level” (or the “Evolutionary Level Beyond Human” as they called the Kingdom of Heaven) by committing suicide in tandem with a rare astronomical event, the approach of the comet Hale-Bopp to its orbital point nearest earth. Their leader, Marshall Applewhite, claimed to be an extraterrestrial who had been transported to earth long ago on an alien spacecraft and briefly incarnated as Jesus Christ. In his Second Coming, as the Prophet “Do,” he had returned to earth in the 1940s as the captain of a UFO expeditionary force whose members had “moved into” human bodies and subsequently scattered throughout the world. As the new millennium approached, he felt it was high time for his long-lost crew to gather with a select group of earthlings and beam themselves up with him to Heaven. A video tape made shortly before their souls were scheduled to leave their “body-containers” reveals how excited the prophet and his chosen people were by the concurrence of the comet’s advent with the arrival of Easter.4 In the aftermath of the Heaven’s Gate suicides, the American media responded to the apparent death of orthodoxy in the free-thinking era of the Internet by absurdly assuming the heresy-exposing role of the Inquisition .5 Public fears that the Internet had fallen to the Dark Side of the Force were certainly not dispelled by the eerie sight of the corporatestyle logo flashing at the cult’s homepage. By beaming the Heaven’s Gate logo into innocent living rooms via the nightly news, the television networks repeatedly tempted their viewers to peep through the cult’s apocalyptic keyhole into the unorthodox world of the cult members: a world where Exodus prefigures Star Trek, and Captain Kirk beams up the Saved, and suicide becomes a class trip to Heaven on an alien spaceship hidden in a comet’s tail. Hale-Bopp, full of grace. Instead of revealing Heaven on the other side of the keyhole, the TV cameras flagrantly exposed what the police camcorders had chillingly scanned at the beam-up site. How often that Holy Week was the public compelled...

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