Dr. Jonathan Juilfs

I love bees.

And so there's something about that that just feels elementally good.

Dare we call it catastrophic in Tolkienian terms, right?

it's the unexpected, unlooked for, never to be looked for again, turn of events for good.

And in a strange way, I might say that the romance of the rose is the deviation.

It took the ideal and took it in a different place.

But in that sense, Dante is recovery.

So I like that too.

That's another Tolkienian word that we could play with.

And I think part of the beauty of this is getting, I love that the image is organic.

The images of Revelation are of a city, right, that is built in the New Jerusalem, and it's magnificent.

It's also, in some senses, for me, far more difficult to imagine than this rose is.

A rose has, again, a simplicity that I love.

Anybody who gardens will know, hopefully, what a rose is, and there's something about its

It's beauty, it's simplicity, it's life-givingness.

It's the perfect image, I think, for the divine.

Yeah.

Or what the community of the divine will look like.

It's also a wonderful, as I've prepared for this podcast, thinking for several months about Paradiso.

I see Paradiso, this is true of Inferno and Purgatory, but I think especially true of Paradiso.