(June 20, 2023 at 7:56 am)emjay Wrote:(June 20, 2023 at 2:31 am)Belacqua Wrote: Dante, following Thomas Aquinas and the general ideas of Neoplatonic philosophers, says that there is no time or space in heaven. It is not in the material world.
The experience of heaven, according to those guys, is like a single instant of extreme bliss. But there would be no chronoperception because time would not be passing.
Presumably not in The Divine Comedy? So why does he in that describe heaven, hell, and purgatory, in this other much more vividly imaginative sense... of a realm in space and time... of various levels and with distinct and imaginative 'sin-centric' punishments etc. If he really views heaven as a single everlasting moment of bliss, and presumably hell as something like the opposite (? ie something like a single moment of everlasting pain/suffering), then even if not literal how could the description in Divine Comedy be considered in any way analoguous, allegorical or symbolic (ie of a single, everlasting moment)?
Part of the punishment of hell is the awareness of passing time, and that the punishments won't stop. The souls the pilgrim speaks to there act out their punishments in repetitions, which require time passing.
Purgatory is still in the world of space and time. Souls are separated from their original bodies at death but, since a soul is a form which requires matter to complete it, they form new bodies of less substantial material while ascending Purgatory. The bodies have extension and location, though -- characteristics of space and time.
Most of the final canticle takes place not in heaven proper but in the planetary circles as the pilgrim ascends. Souls from heaven descend to an appropriate level to greet him and explain things to him, before returning to their proper place in heaven. Heaven itself is outside of the sphere of space and time.
Dante understands that describing something that's outside of space and time in human language requires elaborate metaphor. Language itself requires time, and descriptions of relations require space. So he is at pains to say that what he is describing is "a manner of speaking," and translated into concepts that we can grasp. The nearer he gets to heaven the more he makes use of the ineffability topos, repeatedly describing something by saying it's indescribable.
No one is exactly sure whether Dante thought he was describing the actual conditions of the afterlife or whether the whole thing is elaborate symbolism. Since it is largely a travel story meant to exemplify Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, it's very possible that the whole thing is allegory. Certainly the attempt to describe heaven in spatial terms, as rose-like, is symbolism.
