Dante Today

Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture

“God’s love that moves the sun and other stars,” Christian History 112 Heaven in the Christian Imagination

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“The most sublime expression of heaven in the medieval church was not argument but poetry: the Paradiso of Dante Alighieri (1265–1321; see CH issue 70, Dante’s Guide to Heaven and Hell). Dante’s Inferno is today more widely known: it seems to be easier for readers to grasp evil and its consequences than to understand the shining pure love that God pours out into his cosmos. While a summary of the Paradiso is wholly inadequate to the glory of the poetry itself, in it Dante ascends upward from the round earth through the lunar and planetary spheres until he reaches the primum mobile, the outermost sphere, which moves all the spheres below it.

“As he ascends, each sphere is more suffused with light, beauty, love, and majesty than the one beneath. Throughout this journey he can look down to the earth far below at the apparent center of the universe. But at the primum mobile, he turns so that his gaze shifts from the geographical center of the universe to the true center of the universe, which is God in his heaven.

“Journeying closer to this perfect light of love, Dante in his burning desire and enlightened intellect sees God himself—to the extent that human limitation permits. The experience is so perfectly awesome (in the word’s original sense of creating awe) that when he returns to earth, he can no longer remember or express it fully, but says ‘I do remember that my vision bore the intensity of the divine ray until it joined Infinite Being and Good itself. Oh, the overflowing grace through which I could presume to fix my gaze on the Eternal Light so fully that I used up all my sight.’

[. . .]

“After Dante, such heights of reflection on heaven were few and far between. The leaders of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther and John Calvin, followed established tradition about heaven with only one essential difference, though an important one. They abolished the idea of purgatory on the grounds that it is not biblical and that God knows who is in heaven so that there is no need to pray for the spiritual welfare of the deceased (‘“Another stop on the glory train?’).

“In the end, while human ideas of heaven are limited, Christian tradition gives us some idea of what we might expect. Early and medieval Christians teach us that heaven is the state of being in which all who love God are united in community with him and with one another in the brightness of glory; the fabric of love uniting all in a pattern whose beauty passes understanding.”   —Jeffrey Burton Russell, “God’s love that moves the sun and other stars,” Christian History 112 Heaven in the Christian Imagination, Christian History Institute, November 17, 2014 (retrieved on March 28, 2024)

“Love that moves the sun and the other stars,” a Market Gallery Night School Programme

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“This participatory talk is about adjustment as viewed through the practice of yoga. Yoga in this context is the therapeutic practice largely made up of yoga poses or postures referred to by the Sanskrit word asana. Adjustment has a specific meaning, where the teacher physically moves the students’ bodies using their hands and sometimes other parts of their body. Rather than just focus on hands-on adjustment, this talk practically emphasises that all actions we undertake can be adjusted and be part of an adjustment process. With continual repetition of the yoga postures habitual movements are unlearned and replaced with different patterns: there is a material alteration of the person as the practice becomes embodied.”   —Anna McLauchlan & Sarah Tripp, “Love that moves the sun and the other stars,” Market, February 13, 2014 (retrieved March 20, 2024)

“Models and the Making of Violet Oakley’s Dante Window”

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“The papers of Violet Oakley contain primary sources that reveal some of what she required of her models. She called on her friend, the illustrator Mills Thompson, as she prepared the stained glass Dante Window. (The Smithsonian American Art Museum owns a scale model; the work is in the Apostolic Nunciature of the Holy See to the United States.) Draped in cloth resembling Renaissance garb, donning a laurel wreath, and wearing a prosthetic nose, Thompson posed for a series of reference photographs that Oakley used in creating the window which was based on the Dante Alighieri’s fourteenth-century poem The Divine Comedy.

[. . .]

“Like the epic poem, the window is divided into three parts with four medallions each: the left panel represents the Inferno, (meant to be read from top to bottom), the right panel, Purgatorio, (read from the bottom), and the center section, Paradiso (also read from the bottom). In this group of twenty photographs, an animated Thompson personifies the character of Dante as he ponders, prays, attempts to ward off beasts, travels through Hell and Purgatory with Virgil, and ascends to Heaven with Beatrice. (Henrietta Cozens, who likely posed as Virgil for the image in medallion two of the Purgatorio panel, is not quite as vigorous in her expression.)”   —Elizabeth Botten, “Models and the Making of Violet Oakley’s Dante Window”, Smithsonian Blog, June 17, 2014 (retrieved February 29, 2024)

St. Agrestis Liqueurs: Inferno and Paradiso

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“There’s a Brooklyn-based distillery called St. Agrestis that’s been around since 2014. They made their name with an amaro, but have since delved into other spirits. Notably for our purposes, they have a Campari-like bitter called ‘Inferno’ that’s pretty good and an aperitivo called ‘Paradiso.’ They also make bottled Negronis and Spritz using Inferno and Paradiso, respectively.

“Interestingly, the label design hints at a Dantean topography. Inferno and the Negroni both have labels that evoke layers or concentric circles. Paradiso and the Spritz both have a geometric pattern that uses triangles (Trinity?). The batched Negroni also comes in a 1.75L Franzia-style box with a spout (’20 Negronis in every box!’) and the canned spritz comes in a triangular 10-pack case.”   –Contributor Alex Cuadrado

Learn more about St. Agrestis’s products here.

Contributed by Alex Cuadrado (Ph.D., Columbia University)

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Coggeshall, Elizabeth, and Arielle Saiber, eds. Dante Today: Citings and Sightings of Dante’s Works in Contemporary Culture. Website. Access date.

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