Dr. Jonathan Juilfs

And mom had placed a rose in a vase on the table in the kitchen.

And somehow I had gotten up on the table and I'm sitting there sniffing the rose.

And I have always loved the rose as a kind of classic Western image of love, of desire, of beauty.

There's literally hundreds of love poems and song lyrics and things that touch on this.

And for we medievalists,

It's a rich intertextual place with one of the great, the great bestseller, the New York times bestseller, the 13th century, the romance of the rose baby.

Right.

And, and part of the reason that I love teaching the sticks, I do a course specifically on medieval romance is that we look at the secular romances, but I like to close with this because this to me is one of Dante's most genius moves, which is to transform the,

secular, strictly oriented human love by now seeing it in the relationship to the divine.

And I have to take a Lewisian kind of detail here because in the marvelous book, The Four Loves, and I always have my students read the chapters on Eros and Charity,

He defines eros there, not as something to be ashamed of or something prurient, but he talks about it as the desire for something singular.

And he genders it and says it's a man's desire for not for any woman, but for one woman.

And if we take that as an analogy for our spiritual lives, it's about our pursuit of God, also about his pursuit of us.

and something about the way that that works.

And so the rose to me is marvelous.

It's living, it's alive.

It's the inversion, it's the anti-image of what we saw in Kositis at the end of Inferno and all of the static quality of the ice and souls that are cannibalizing one another.

Here we have real community.

It's vibrant.

And like you talked about the angel, I love that image of the angels.