Dante in Paradise – Sublime . . . and Petty

Just a brief note that in my study of Dante’s Divine Comedy, I am struck by how sublime and profound he was . . . and by how petty he could be at the same time, particularly in how he just could not let go of factional politics in his home city of Florence. Of course, he was exiled from Florence so one can hardly blame him.

But just one example from Paradiso, Canto XXXI.  Dante writes of how amazed he was to see Heaven, and he makes a profound statement about time, or the lack of it, there:

I, who had come to things divine from man’s estate,

to eternity from time . . .

This is a brilliant observation on a topic I have begun thinking about: God and the eternal state in which He lives and into which He brings His people is not bound by time, but is instead timeless. (Or at least that is the way many Christians have historically seen it.)  Thus eternity is not so much a very long time or infinite time as it is a departure “from time” and from its bounds.

But then look at the very next line:

...from Florence to a people just and sane,…

The man just could not let go of Florence and its politics that had driven him out!  Even in his magnum opus, as soon as he expounds something so deep and profound as the timelessness of the eternity of God’s kingdom, he just could not resist immediately taking one of his many pot shots at Florence.  It is funny really.

But such humanity is part of the fun, if you will, of Dante and part of why I keep returning to him.

Armistice Centenary: Tolkien and the Great War

With the 100^thanniversary of the end of World War I this Sunday, there are so many heartrending stories about the Great War I’ve come across the past few weeks – mothers who lost all their sons, battalions that lost so many men they were disbanded, soldiers who died just weeks or days before the Armistice, and more – too much more.

But the story that has most drawn my attention is the war experience of J. R. Tolkien.

Orphaned at 12, Tolkien had experienced deep loss years before.  The War would pile loss upon loss.  The recent Tolkien exhibition here in Oxford and John Garth’s book, Tolkien and the Great War, brought that home to me.  Both quoted this from his preface to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings:

By 1918, all but one of my close friends were dead.

When I first read that at the exhibition, I had to stand aside for a moment to regain my composure.

A theme of Tolkien and the Great War is how the war tore apart what was an inseparable society of four friends at King Edward’s School, one of which was Tolkien.  Two died.  The other two drifted apart.  Tolkien survived because he came down with trench fever after front combat in 1916.  As a result, he had chronic bad health the rest of the war and served on the British coast instead of being sent back to the front.

Having just finished that book, I highly recommend Tolkien and the Great War to anyone interested in Tolkien’s experience of the war, including his literary output and evolution during those years. I also highly recommend the Oxford exhibition book, Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth, part of which deals with the war years and is very reasonably priced given how lavishly it is illustrated.

We can be thankful that J. R. Tolkien, along with his future friend and Inkling, C. S. Lewis, somehow got through the Great War. (Lewis was taken out of combat by a shell shrapnel injury.  Such was rightly considered good luck back then.)  Yet one can hardly imagine what great minds and writers we lost in that cataclysm.  That is all the more reason to remember them this Armistice Centenary.  We shall remember them.  We shall remember them all.