Paradiso: Canto XXV -- Sts. James and John

As Fr. Earl as already noted, St. James is represented by Dante as the apostle of hope, basing his identification on the ideas held by medieval commentators on Scripture, who "cited them as the three pillars of the church and had them representing the Christian Graces" (Ciardi 822). St. James's examination of Dante on the pillars of hope is met with the same scholastic zeal used by Dante in responding to his examination on faith, quoting St. James's own epistle -- he answers that hope is "the certain expectation/ of future glory. It is the blessed fruit/ of grace divine and the good a man has done" (67-9). That expectation is the result of our orienting our wills to that of God's, for it is only in having made that conscious choice that we can expect, that we can hope for, the promised land, as choice, according to Aristotle, is "deliberate desire of things in our own power" to achieve, and heaven is a conscious choice because God made it so.



The definition Dante provides about hope is even more important to us considering that 88 cantos ago we learned that those who pass through the Gate of Woe must abandon all hope, must abandon the vision of Isaiah that promises a "double raiment in their native land;/ and that land is this sweet life with the blest" (92-3). Dante, who passed through this gate, has discovered that the message does not apply to anyone who consciously chooses salvation. The conscious choice for the good frees us from bondage to sin. As Chesterton wrote in Orthodoxy, "The moment we have a fixed heart, we have a free hand," something which St. Conrad of Parzham exemplified. Hope, then, something that hell cannot offer and heaven does not need, something that we experienced in every canto of the Purgatorio as souls strove toward God, is here presented as a promise. In heaven, that promise is fulfilled; heaven's hope is a product, not a process, an always-already happening completion of Christ's soteriological mission.

S.