Dante's View
Ed Izquierdo
"You can really only be a photographer when your passion for taking pictures somehow transcends photography, and engages or meshes with other concerns, interests, and passions. Being 'just' a photographer is a way to keep yourself from being a photographer, you might say."
Mike Johnston/The Online Photographer
Dante’s View, Death Valley, California
In the vast desolation of Death Valley, the eternal suffering in the fire and ice of the descending circles of hell described in Dante Alighieri's "Inferno" can fill the mind.
The valley was named long ago by pioneers crossing the unforgiving California desert– determined to avoid the tragic fate of the westward-bound Donner Party in the High Sierra–
Dante also wrote about his great crossing in his detailed account of his visionary trip to hell in a quest to understand how sin separates us from God.
Ultimately, it is about the path which he must choose– a journey home to God.
The "Inferno" is part of the complete work known as "The Divine Comedy". A comedy– not as humor, but a story that ends in elevation and triumph; the classical opposite of tragedy.
It was Dante's elaborate warning to a decaying and corrupt society– a warning to reject the path of evil and pursue righteousness. How far have we come in almost seven-hundred years since this stern admonition to the abusive and self-serving power-brokers of his day?
In the end, Dante gets to heaven but the story unfolds without a clear understanding nor full expression of the good news of the Gospel: the unmerited gift of the completed work of salvation by our Lord Jesus Christ in His victory over sin and death; the perfect gift of redemption and the restoration to Paradise– the finished work of Jesus on the Cross.
Discordantly, Dante’s epic literary work illustrates salvation as an elaborately segregated destination.
For Dante, the environment of the celestial afterlife is a progressive spiritual hierarchy of various distinctive levels of heaven which form an Orwellian scheme wherein some souls appear to be more saved than others. Those in all but the single highest level fall short of being in the presence of the Lord.
In the end, Dante encounters the presence of God beyond all space and time– ensconced behind nine orders of angels.
For those living in the days of Dante, many centuries had already passed since Augustine's clarity on the nature of the gift of salvation. Martin Luther was still more than two-hundred years away from offering his own discovery and evangelical remediation regarding this perfect gift of the Creator God’s grace– a gift misplaced and unclarified by many teachers for a millennium.
Nevertheless, Dante's vision of heaven fit well with the prevailing understanding of his time. It was widely accepted that our lot in life was to endure a constant struggle to develop spiritually for achieving a more desirable level of salvation. Dante imagines various stages of the afterlife including a time for the purging of sin followed by the soul's assignment to one of more than nine exclusive ranks of salvation– which more closely mirrors the frustrated journey of a soul still struggling in the flesh rather than express the truth of the singular and eternal joy of unbroken fellowship with God, made possible by one's own faith in the finished work of His Son Jesus Christ, which was recorded at the dawn of the Church Age, as shown below:
Then one of the criminals who were hanged blasphemed Him, saying, “If You are the Christ, save Yourself and us.”
But the other, answering, rebuked him, saying, “Do you not even fear God, seeing you are under the same condemnation? And we indeed justly, for we receive the due reward of our deeds; but this Man has done nothing wrong.” Then he said to Jesus, “Lord, remember me when You come into Your kingdom.”
And Jesus said to him, “Assuredly, I say to you, today you will be with Me in Paradise.”
Luke 23:39-43 NKJV
There is no condemnation for this criminal after his repentance and conviction at Calvary. We know– that by the Lord's Word, in that very moment, this condemned man is saved.
Though Dante's vision of a graded plan of redemption falls short of expressing the completed work of the Lord and our own sinful equality among ourselves at the foot of the Cross, the reader can certainly heed the merciful warning: Hell is real.
This prideful world holds its head high above conviction and embraces the destructive, costly, and futile pursuit of a self-sufficient and secular utopia. The world celebrates and holds fast to Dante's role as an individual artist, poet, and ethical thinker and ignores the Christian significance of a such a work for the reader.
My message is that we can know and we can do much better than to stop short merely at what Dante and the fallen world has concluded about the afterlife– we can embrace a level of understanding that far exceeds even the greatest insights of any epic work of man:
We can know the Bible.
We can know the Word– and we can trust the Author.
We need only to convict ourselves and submit to the Lord in full confidence and belief in His accomplished salvation for each of us. We can know that we are saved and reborn to go forth to choose to do the will of God. Salvation is not a feeling, it is the loving gift, to each of us, from God:
For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.
John 3:16 NKJV
There is never a moment of coercion- only you can let the Lord into your life to change and shape your heart. This is only a message.
Only God can do this work– if you will allow Him.
Only His work, the grace of salvation, restores us to His presence.
Only the blood of Jesus can cleanse us of our sins.
All of the good that we do flows from the gift of God's grace.
Any good that can be done by an individual who has rejected the work of our Lord on the Cross, though still a blessing to the recipient, does nothing for the giver because the good being provided is steeped in prideful self-sufficiency. Such a giver chooses not to recognize our sinful state and will deny that the life-giving air, and our capacity to breathe it, has been prepared and provided by the Lord.
There is no amount of good we can ever hope to perform to deserve, qualify for, or otherwise earn His grace.
We must earnestly tear down this wall of pride, the first sin, and realize that we have absolutely nothing to offer to anyone which God has not provided.
We must focus our attention upon the promise of the eternal life that is to come and reflect this in the choices which we make and in the stewardship of our gifts.
The life of worship is to hunger for the Lord without worry for what others think. The world embitters us with lies and condemns us to a self-imposed deprivation of God's joy from our lives– fooling us into choosing the darkness Dante so aptly described.
Like the pioneers determined not to perish in the desolation of the desert, we must rebuke the world's pervasive culture of death and its failed definition of the meaning of life. We need to understand that we exist to know God, the creator of each of us and of everything, and glorify Him.
The prayer I make is that the Lord be ever-increasing within each of us such that we might not be critical, cynical nor prideful in our ways with each other–
and that we may genuinely embrace humility, love one another as the Lord has commanded, fill the aching hole in our hearts that only God can fill, and find the joy that we could never dream to build for ourselves.
I hope that some of the moments in time captured and collected here may help us or remind us to see ourselves, always, as being in the presence of God. On these pages you will find images of creation from some places that I have been blessed to see– as well as documentation of some of the works of the mind of man, the artificer.
Of course, there is much more to see than can ever be seen– and with every breath, and in every moment, with Jesus at the center of our lives, I believe we can learn to see beyond the life of the world to come– clear and bright– through the glass of eternity.
There is no camera for this lens, yet each of us has been created for it and to realize what God has done for each of us–
and to be a light in this present darkness.