As we travel with Dante through the Divine Comedy, we see that he uses earthly images to embody the spiritual world. In the Inferno, Dante climbs down under the earth. In Purgatory, he ascends a tall mountain. In Paradise, he is flying through the planets and stars. These physical settings might be a little surprising to readers. But Dante is using key material realms to reveal the spiritual dimensions that are often hidden from our eyes. 

Each of the three settings in Dante’s work convey an important truth about the spiritual realities he is writing about. Hell is underground. It is dark, cold, distant. The underworld has no way to see the sun, moon, or stars. It is cut off from the real world. Purgatory is a mountain that Dante must climb. As a Protestant, I do not believe purgatory exists as a real spiritual place after death, but I can appreciate this stage as a picture of our spiritual growth in this life. Our sanctification is a mountain that requires effort, perseverance, and a guide. 

The last realm in the work, Paradise, is the heavens where Dante flies through the stars and planets. C.S. Lewis once wrote, “To construct plausible and moving other worlds you must draw on the only real “other world” we know, that of the spirit.” (1) I would add that the reverse is also true. When we want to capture something of heaven, the only world we can draw upon to embody that idea is the one over our heads. 

In this way, Paradiso is one of the first sci-fi stories. In the heavens, we can see strange and distant worlds that are just beyond our grasp. But this is what the spiritual world is: a reality that we sense and know in a variety of ways but can never fully see, just glimpses that we occasionally catch out of the corner of our eyes. Sometimes our physical world is interrupted with these spiritual realities like with Moses and the burning bush but that is not often. To journey among the stars is to walk where angels tread.