Dr. Jonathan Juilfs

I had them read the passage out of The Weight of Glory where Lewis says, the problem here is not that we desire too much.

It's that we've never desired anywhere near enough.

Dare to imagine that the life of the world to come could be so much more extraordinary than what we already know.

I mean, I've got as my backdrop here, this is a part of Eastern Oregon that my family and I went to visit.

We call this the Alps of the Pacific Northwest.

It's stunningly beautiful.

This is a shadow of what is still to come.

And so I think some of what the verbal play that actually excites me, and I can't remember, Julius, if we talked about this at any point, but I love in Paradiso I, I love the neologism Trasumanar.

And this has been really, in some senses, the obsession of the last 30 years for me.

What is Dante getting?

And I was reviewing one of the great writers about this, Stephen Butterall,

1994, wrote a book on Dante and the mystical tradition, and he closes with Bernard.

And what is the connection here between the idea of tressuminar, perhaps, and the idea of deificare, of being made a god?

And Botterill is actually very reserved in his opinion and says, actually, I don't think the two are the same word at all.

He says, I think the idea of trassuminar, which in Italian is literally to transhumanize, is not the same thing as saying theosis or becoming a divinity.

What I think works in my own mind as I was reviewing that essay is that there is a stage in between trassuminar

divinity and humanity, something that Augustine calls a kind of souped up humanity, our prelapsarian selves, something of that sort, right?

And so Dante comes into paradise needing a jazzed up

system of response so that he can even perceive and enjoy and listen to and see.

I mean, these are things, not only is there a kind of, I don't know if we want to call it a magic show, that might be a little bit dismissive, but there's a certain amount of artifice behind this that Dante is seeing because the things he's looking at aren't material.