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By Root 5241 0

is quizzed by St Peter, St James and John on the meaning of the three supreme Christian virtues, Faith, Hope and Love. When they ascend to the ninth heaven, guarded by Seraphim, the highest angelic order, representing Divine Love, this turns out to be the prelude to their ascent onto yet another level, incomparably different from all those which have preceded it. First they see a point of intense light, surrounded by nine concentric rings, which Beatrice explains is a vision of God, surrounded by the nine orders of angels. Dante sees her beauty now so transfigured that it is beyond his powers to describe, and bathed in such light that he is temporarily blinded. She tells him they have come into the Empyrean and, as he recovers his sight, he sees rising above them a great shining mystical rose. Here, in the snow-white petals of this mighty symbol of heavenly totality are tier upon tier of the souls of the blessed, bathed in peace and love. Dante turns to Beatrice for an explanation, to find she has gone and been replaced by a figure who looks on him with immense benevolence. It is St Bernard, his third and final guide, who shows him Beatrice now enthroned in the rose, crowned in glory, while higher up sits the Queen of Heaven herself, the Virgin Mary, attended by countless angels.

Dante is then confronted with a final astonishing vision: three spheres of radiant light, all distinct, but all occupying the same space: an emblem of the Trinity and of that number which is the archetype of growth and transformation. While he is gazing at it, trying to puzzle out with his intellect how the three spheres can be separate yet one, he suddenly feels he is able to let go. He no longer has any separate will or mind or existence. Dante feels his entire being taken over, by the power of a love so total that it is beyond all comprehension.

So the story ends, on this breathtaking image in which Dante sees love as the power which ultimately gives purpose, meaning and connection to everything in the universe. What is particularly striking about this vision is that the `love that moves the sun and the other stars' is seen not just as a force which can bind animate creatures together, but as the all-uniting power which shapes and impels all inanimate matter as well. For Dante, at the end of his mighty inner journey, imagines his own separate existence finally dissolving into the light of that single mind which called everything into being in the first place. He is portraying the entire universe as a just a single great thought, based on unimaginable love. In all storytelling it is the supreme example of a hero finally merging into the One.

`Man is the measure of all things'

Immeasurably remote though it now seems to us, the world-picture developed by mediaeval Christendom was one of the most remarkable achievements of the human imagination. For the peoples of Christian Europe it provided a psychological framework which could explain and give meaning to the entire way in which they viewed their existence. The picture of the world it presented was made up of two separate but interfused dimensions, one material, the other spiritual. On the outward, worldly plane, the earth was the centre of the universe. Europe stood at its centre. Its secular society, with its feudal system, was built around a hierarchy which gave each person an allotted place, owing loyalty to their lord and their king (even, in parts of Europe, to that ghostly echo of a long-vanished political unity, the `Holy Roman Emperor'). But this outward world was subordinate to the unseen eternal dimension which was viewed as the true reality. Although this was visibly represented by the Church, with its ranks of priests, monks and bishops rising to the Pope at its head, these were mere earthly intermediaries for the heavenly hierarchy of saints and angels, centred on the power which had created the universe and which ruled over all earthly existence. In itself such a power might have seemed so immense as to be unimaginable. Yet it had become possible for people to relate to it