Dr. Jonathan Juilfs

Dante's vision isn't going to end simply with Visio Dei, with the beatific vision of God, and then there's nothing else.

Dante will return.

In fact, the whole premise of the fiction here is that he returns in order to write the great poem that this becomes.

Yeah.

I agree.

I agree completely.

And some of this I was thinking about because I end the Lewis class with my students with Perilandra.

And I get giddy when I teach that text anymore.

It's really such an extraordinary space.

And one of the elements that's there, I think, in the character of Ransom, one of the conversations that Ransom ends up having with the voice in my favorite chapter 11 of that text, I think is just the most extraordinary thing maybe that I've ever read.

He's wrestling with the question of what is the before and the after of the incarnation of Jesus?

What powers did we not have before and what powers do we have after?

And in part, Ransom's looking for just simple validation about should I intervene in this potential fall on a foreign world?

And what he comes to the conclusion, and I love this, is that

the fall and before the incarnation, there was a simple problem.

Humanity, Christ hadn't taken on a body.

And so he hadn't glorified that end yet.

And I stress yet, like everything in Lewis is about yet.

What is true now won't be true tomorrow or true in the future that awaits us.

The sense then that each incarnation