Dr. Junius Johnson

that as this blessed person has this particular image, this way of understanding God that nobody else has, the angels become the means by which that gets spread around the rose to everyone else.

It's a really, really beautiful image.

And when the resurrection of the body happens, this is where the bodies are going to be.

The bodies are all going to come and they're going to find a place in that rose.

So this, unlike what we've seen up to that point, this is not a pageant or a show.

This is the thing.

This is where heaven really happens.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, the romance of the Rose...

The rose is an allegory, and the rose is an allegory for the beloved woman, but more specifically for physical union with the beloved woman.

And the allegory, after thousands and thousands of lines, it breaks down and gets almost crass at the end.

Yeah, it kind of is.

Yeah, that's right.

And then for Dante to be able to take that and effortlessly just flip it into this image of beatitude, it's an image of the way the divine works, right?

Dante is, you keep talking about Lewis and Tolkien, which I love, Dante is a sub-creator.

He's doing what he sees his master doing.

which is to take these things that are there and that are good and that have been abused in the Augustan sense and to bring them back to their proper uses.

That's what redemption looks like.

Redemption isn't just doing something good.

Redemption isn't just doing something good that's better than something bad that happened.