The Bridge to the Divine: Was the Crucifixion Necessary?

(Paradiso, Canto VII): Dante's Doubts, the Sack of Jerusalem

It is dangerous to explain too clearly to man how like he is to the animals without pointing out his greatness. It is also dangerous to make too much of his greatness without his vileness. It is still more dangerous to leave him in ignorance of both, but it is most valuable to represent both to him.

Man must not be allowed to believe that he is equal either to animals or to angels, nor to be unaware of either, but he must know both.

~ Blaise Pascal

Welcome to Dante Read-Along! ✨

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Welcome to Dante Book Club, where you and I descend into Hell and Purgatory to be able to ascend to Paradise. Our guide in Paradise is Beatrice, and in this seventh Canto of the Paradiso, Beatrice answers three theological questions for Dante. You can find the main page of the read-along right here, reading schedule here, and the list of chat threads here.

In each post you can find a brief summary of the canto, philosophical exercises that you can draw from it, themes, character, and symbolism explanations.

All the wonderful illustrations are done specially for the Dante Read-Along by the one and only Luana Montebello.

This Week’s Circle ⭕️

The celestial sphere of Mercury, continued - Justinian’s speech ends with a song - He and other souls ascend to the heights of the heavens - Beatrice knows Dante’s doubts and questions - Does just revenge deserve just punishment? - Why this method of atonement for the reparation of sin? - How are things made from the four elements immortal?

Canto VII Summary:

Hail, holy God of hosts,
doubly illumining with thy brightness
the happy fires of these kingdoms.
vii.1-3

So Justinian, Roman Emperor and inhabitant of the celestial sphere of Mercury, sang in a mix of Latin and Hebrew as he and the other souls around him flew through the atmosphere, like sparks, upward toward the Empyrean realm. His double light, as Roman Emperor and as illumined soul in the heavens, had the qualities of natural intelligence and of illuminating grace.

Doubt filled Dante, and the depth of it was indicated through his triple call to himself to tell Beatrice of what he was thinking and the questions that he had. So assured was he by her presence, that even syllables of her name—Be and Ice—filled him with reverence. But of course she, like Virgil before her, could divine his thoughts before he even spoke them.

By reputation, canto 7 is the most dauntingly doctrinal canto in the whole of the third cantica. Any such judgement tends to overlook the features of the canto which give to it its narrative and poetic character…the canto is Dante’s most explicit and extended account of the central doctrines of Christian belief and undoubtedly drew from him some of his most vigorously argumentative poetry.¹

Beatrice, in her knowledge of his question, smiled with such pure light that even a man on fire would be comforted by it.

According to my never-erring judgment,
the question that perplexes you is how
just vengeance can deserve just punishment;

but I shall quickly free your mind from doubt;
and listen carefully; the words I speak
will bring the gift of a great truth in reach.
vii.19-24

‘The Active Good’ (from The Divine Comedy, Paradise ), 1 May 1807 After John Flaxman RA (1755 - 1826)

What is this ‘just vengeance’ and ‘just punishment’? Justinian had spoken of the destruction of Jerusalem under Titus in canto vi; he referred to Titus’ actions as avenging Christ’s death and justifying the destruction, fulfilling ‘just punishment’. Even if this logic, to our modern minds, seems faulty, Dante takes this idea to its conclusion based on the theological evidence he is promoting, so it will do us well to follow this challenging argument for the sake of understanding the minutia that he is unpacking here.

Beatrice went back to the beginning of things. Adam, ‘the man who was not born’ (26), in using his free will to act in error, cursed all of humanity who came after him: this is the notion of original sin.

For this, mankind lay sick, in the abyss
of a great error, for long centuries,
until the Word of God willed to descend

to where the nature that was sundered from
its Maker was united to His person
by the sole act of His eternal Love.
vi.28-33

Here she referred to the atonement made when Christ became human and was sacrificed through the crucifixion. This act of atonement assumes a prior assumption: that satisfaction of the debt of sin was necessary, but that a being of finite nature, as a human, could never repay a divine offence, and thus needed a divine repayment in the form of Christ made man.

Beatrice told Dante to use his inner sight—even within the celestial realm, that inner sight knew more than the mind—to grasp these ideas.

She went on to explain that even though the crucifixion was a necessary action, it was still the greatest wrong that a divine being should be thus punished. From this action, with the two ways of looking at it—just and unjust at the same time-also then came two effects.

Thus, from one action, issued differing things:
God and the Jews were pleased by one same death;
earth trembled for that death and Heaven opened.
vi.47-48

At no point in the Paradiso is it possible to detach any particular piece of doctrine from its narrative and imaginative context…But in one (now deeply regrettable) respect, the passage dealt with below-which serves to connect the themes of canto 6 with those of canto 7-while reflecting Dante’s rigorous concern with justice, also produces an unmistakably anti-semitic argument.²

This is Beatrice’s answer to his first question then, that the unjust—but necessary—killing of Christ was met in kind by the necessary destruction of Jerusalem.

Christ Crucified by Diego Velazquez

Beatrice saw another question forming within Dante, and one which has plagued minds throughout the ages: why was this the necessary path to redemption? Why did it unfold in this way?

You say: ‘What I have heard is clear to me;
but this is hidden from me—why God willed
precisely this pathway for our redemption.’
vi.55-57

As Beatrice answered this question, she stated up front that it could not make sense to those who had not ‘matured within the flame of love’ (60).

In reply to Dante’s unspoken question concerning the means of redemption, Beatrice goes back to the act of creation, to which God was moved by love, having no envious reserve in communicating to His creation what He might well have retained as His own.³

God created an eternal goodness that was devoid of the envious nature of withholding, so everything that comes from the goodness created from such pure intention is imprinted with that original design, and therefore is everlasting. There is no constraint in that goodness.

Of this goodness granted, there were three components; immortality, freedom, and likeness to God. The Angelic beings, having been created first and directly by God, held all of these elements in perfection, and so shine back God’s radiance onto him. But what of humans, how could they, being made of earthly, changeable elements, be immortal?

The human being
has all these gifts, but if it loses one,
then its nobility has been undone.

Only man’s sin annuls man’s liberty,
makes him unlike the Highest Good, so that,
in him, the brightness of Its light is dimmed;

and man cannot regain his dignity
unless, where sin left emptiness, man fills
that void with just amends for evil pleasure.
vi.76-84

The only possible choices of satisfaction then, were that God would pardon, or that humanity could give satisfaction for the error. But here was the caveat for Christians; it was impossible for that debt to be repaid of humanity’s own ability, due to the limitations of the human being;

Man, in his limits, could not recompense;
for no obedience, no humility,
he offered later could have been so deep

that it could match the heights he meant to reach
through disobedience; man lacked the power
to offer satisfaction by himself.
vii.97-102

Through mercy and justice, Beatrice explained, God restored humans to their first estate through this atonement, hence, the necessity of the life and crucifixion of Christ.

For God showed greater generosity
in giving His own self that man might be
able to rise, than if He simply pardoned.
vii.115-117

Having resolved Dante’s second question, Beatrice returned to a former point for clarification, having to do with corruption and immortality.

You say: ‘I see that water, see that fire
and air and earth and all that they compose
come to corruption, and endure so briefly;

and yet these, too, were things created; if
what has been said above is true, then these
things never should be subject to corruption.’
vii.124-129

The angels, created directly and as perfect beings, complete as they were and needing no change or modification, could hold onto that perfection. Yet the elements, while still part of creation, were indirect creations brought into manifestation by angelic beings, and the subsequent mixing of these elements.

The four elements named and their ‘mixture’ are formed indirectly by operation of the informing virtues of the spheres, the planets, and the stars, over which the angelic Intelligences preside. These things, therefore, are not created directly by God.⁴

Then even beings made through this ‘secondary’ act of creation, the eternal soul placed within humanity would forever long to be reunited with that immortality of God. With this in mind, Beatrice said, Dante could now understand how the body could be resurrected; if God first made Adam and Eve directly, and all of humanity is in the lineage of Adam and Eve, their bodies also hold that first matter which will be made immortal.

So did the very basis for the structure behind the architecture of the Divine Comedy become clear. Paradise had become, rather than a realm of primarily visual sights, one of understanding the nature of things.

Dante the poet, Dante the pilgrim, is increasingly becoming Dante the theologian.

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💭 Philosophical Exercises

“Just when the gods had ceased to be, and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone.

~ Gustave Flaubert

The Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man by Jan Brueghel the Elder & Peter Paul Rubens

Blaise Pascal famously said that it is dangerous to show a man his baseness without also showing him his divine nature. Equally, it is dangerous to show him his divine nature without also telling him of his baseness. A balance of the two is important. In Paradiso VII we see this balance: the entanglement of the human and the divine.

Justinian, in the previous canto, showed us how earthly laws were merged with divine wisdom. And now this canto begins with a liturgy, with a singing that itself has a twofold nature: half Latin, half Hebrew, dividing history into two parts.

Beatrice, as she so often does, gets ahead of Dante and answers the question in his mind before he has a chance to ask it. She recalls how humankind was severed from God by Adam’s transgression. It is worth pausing here to ask: what exactly did Adam do? There was once a unity between Adam and the divine, but his action deprived us of it. For millennia, humanity walked in ignorance of that wisdom.

The only way such a deep division could be healed was through an equally profound act. Only the crucifixion of the God-Man — fully divine and fully human — could restore what Adam’s sin had broken. This crucifixion became the bridge between the earthly and the divine.

Carl Jung once remarked that religion is based on paradox. The paradox here is stark: the infinite being killed on a cross. How can the eternal die? And yet, this paradoxical death becomes the bridge that unites earth and heaven once again.

As we remember from the previous canto, Justinian traced the history of Rome, showing how human law and empire prepared the stage. In Paradiso VII, Beatrice explains the theological necessity: for humankind to be restored, work had to be done, and only the paradox of the Cross could accomplish it.

II.

Gustave Flaubert once wrote:

“There was a moment in history when the old pagan gods were dead and Christ was not yet born. At that very moment, man stood alone.”

Perhaps Dante, through the lips of Justinian, tells a similar truth: that the Roman Empire, in its foundation and in what it stood for, was the vessel chosen to bring the divine back to earth. The death of the pagan gods became the foundation for the birth of a new faith.

Beatrice now introduces a theme that took me several days to even begin to comprehend. This is the beauty of Dante’s Paradiso: its wisdom is not instantly accessible but must be uncovered layer by layer. Here we encounter the paradox of the “just vengeance justly avenged.”

The Crucifixion is just because the punishment is borne in human nature. Humanity had to offer up its earthly self in order to gain the bridge back to the divine. But equally, the Crucifixion is unjust because it is also the killing of God Himself. Christ is both human and divine; therefore, in putting Him to death, humanity both pays its debt and commits its greatest crime.

This is why Dante interprets the fall of Jerusalem as God’s just revenge. The most unjust act in history the murder of God in human flesh demanded a reckoning in earthly history. In this way, the paradox stands: one act that is at once supremely just and supremely unjust, both the healing of the breach and the greatest offense against the divine.

III.

The next theme that Dante introduces arises from a natural question: why did God pardon human beings the descendants of Adam, the children of Cain? Why not simply abandon us?

Beatrice explains that God’s very nature is both justice and mercy. It was fitting, therefore, that His creation should be brought back into His realm. When Adam transgressed, he chose not the will of God but the will of knowledge. In response, God restores humanity by giving back the truth, so that we might unfold once more in eternal beauty.

The Incarnation becomes the perfect expression of God’s nature: justice is satisfied because the debt is truly paid, and mercy overflows because God Himself pays it. This is what Dante calls convenientia, or fittingness. It was not strictly necessary that God save us in this way, but it was most in keeping with His nature for in the Incarnation His mercy and justice shine together without contradiction.

And here lies another beauty: God does not simply cancel our debts; He gives more than was taken. The redemption does not merely return us to our former state — it opens a new way of enjoying His presence, if we freely choose it. It is as though He draws us once again to the well and invites us to drink, offering us greater gifts than Adam ever knew.

IV.

What this canto reveals most deeply is that Adam’s fall was not simply a loss of paradise’s comfort. His true fall was an act of will: he turned his desire away from God, away from the source of divine power. From that moment, humanity has lived in estrangement, and across the centuries some among us have tried to realign ourselves with the truth. The great thinkers of antiquity - Cicero, Seneca, and others - wrote of virtue, striving to approach wisdom, though the full truth had not yet been revealed. This is why we felt sad when Virgil, noble though his striving was, could not enter paradise: he reached for the stars, but the wound of Adam’s transgression barred him from the ultimate truth.

Here again the paradox emerges. Carl Jung said that religion is rooted in paradox, and the most shocking of all is this: an all-powerful God nailed to a cross. And yet within this paradox lies wisdom. To awaken humanity’s divine potential, the divine Himself had to descend into human suffering. For Michelangelo to one day carve works that seem the hand of God Himself, Christ first had to endure the nails of the cross. In this way, the crucifixion becomes not only the reconciliation of justice and mercy but also the fountain of our creativity, our striving, and our hope.

The great art reveals to us the divine spark, but that spark is only possible because (to use the Jungian idea) the paradox of the Cross united earth and heaven once more.

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This Week’s Sinners and Virtuous 🎭

(Themes, Quotes, Terms and Characters)

Salvador Dalí, Dante’s Men Doubt (Paradise: Canto 7), 1960-64

I. Duplex Ratio

This canto is full of paradoxes. Beatrice’s paradox rests on what Hollander calls the duplex ratio: two ways of measuring the Crucifixion. Judged by Christ’s assumed human nature, the punishment is just; judged by His divine person, it is supremely unjust. Both truths stand together in the same act.

II. The Symbolism of Titus and Sack of Jerusalem

In 70 CE, the Roman general Titus besieged and destroyed Jerusalem, ending the Jewish revolt and razing the Temple. Dante reads this not as mere politics but as divine justice unfolding in history. For him, Rome’s sword became the earthly instrument of Heaven’s court and the avenging of the supreme injustice of crucifying God Himself.

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Quotes 🖋️

(The ones I keep in my journal as reminders of eternal wisdom):

You say: ‘What I have heard is clear to me;
but this is hidden from me—why God willed
precisely this pathway for our redemption.’

Brother, this ordinance is buried from
the eyes of everyone whose intellect
has not matured within the flame of love.

Nevertheless, since there is much attempting
to find this point, but little understanding,
I shall tell why that way was the most fitting.

~ lines 55-63, Paradiso, Canto VII

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1. Robin Kirkpatrick, Paradiso 353

2. Kirkpatrick 354

3. Dorothy L. Sayers, Paradise 113

4. Charles S. Singleton, Commentary on Paradiso 145