Dr. Jonathan Juilfs

This is from The Weight of Glory.

And if you haven't ever read The Weight of Glory, it is absolutely worth a half an hour or an hour to sit down and read the entirety of this thing.

It's absolutely amazing.

But this is, he's talking about

about beauty and about desire and about how these two things are related.

And he says, we as human beings want so much more, something the books on aesthetics take little notice of, but the poets and the mythologies know all about it.

We do not merely want to see beauty, though God knows even that is bounty enough.

We want something else which can hardly be put into words to be united with the beauty.

To pass into it, to receive it, into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it, to have angelic honey dripped on us in the road.

Like, this is the heart and soul of what our faith is driving towards.

The incorporation of ourselves with the things that are beautiful.

Not yet, but still to come.

There's a power, I think, and one of the things about Canto 33 that I think is so moving, and I didn't pick these things up in my initial reads of it.

There's several references in there to leaves, to folia.

And for those of us who know the manuscript culture of the Middle Ages, leaves are a sign, if you will, of books and of learned writing.

And he uses in that moment another Virgilian metaphor.

I mean, it's so appropriate that he ends, in some senses, with a Virgilian metaphor there as well.

About the leaves, when the Sybil gives her prophecies, and especially the one that she will give to Aeneas about his future,

we get this sense that what Virgil talks about is how the musings of the Sybil are like scattered pages.

And I think Dante's book gets scattered here at the very end because what he is seeing is so magnificent.