Paradiso: Canto XX -- Raising up on Eagle's Wings

All human attitudes and dispositions have a mean, Aristotle shows us, and it is in the mean that we find the good. Those who achieve the mean in life show themselves worthy of virtue, and we've seen where reside the bulk of humanity's virtuous souls who had not the vision or the grace of Christ. Christ, though, saves whom he will through a form of justice that can only be known as divine, and this is why we find Ripheus, who died a thousand years before the incarnation, and Trajan, who died unbaptized, enjoying the sweetness and light of heaven's sixth sphere.



Trajan, who was resurrected and baptized by none other than Pope Gregory I, whom we know as St. Gregory, fell back to death immediately thereafter but to the river Tiber instead of Acheron and was translated instantly into heaven. Ripheus, saved by faith, hope, and love, was converted by a vision of the incarnation, understanding fifty generations before the fact the nexus of the material and spiritual worlds as they would be manifest in Christ and, through Christ, in all of us. Dante's ending of the canto with the idea of the opaqueness of the divinity is instructive -- no matter how close he will get (or how hard he might try), man cannot become God, and this is the difference between Christ and us. We can always and only be the image and likeness, and we should be content, as the Blessed Caesar de Bus might tell us, with being as much as that.

S.