What a beauty!

In this year in which the seventh centenary of Dante's death is commemorated, it is right that we apply ourselves to getting to know our great poet.
For this reason, there was also an event in my monastery. We wanted to remember Dante's great walk in the three worlds of the afterlife and, given that the stream that flows at the bottom of our valley is called "Infernotto", it was normal to go down to Hell, and then climb up the mountain Purgatory with difficulty, to get to the monastery and praise God with songs that were meant to be echoes of the songs of the saints and angels. Everyone received a character from Hell to comment on and I was lucky enough to come across Ulysses with his famous verse: "Consider your seed: you were not made to live like brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge" (sic!) .

Life sometimes weighs on us, as well as, let's face it, people's wickedness; a psalm recognizes that sometimes we are just like beasts (brutes), but we keep our greatness because God remains with us even in our worst abjection: we think of the death of Jesus on the Cross. Ulysses urges his friends, remembering their past heroic deeds, to challenge the impossible, even the forbidden by the gods. Dante seems to share this sense of prohibition, of the prohibition of the challenge to human limits. Yet all of his poem is a hymn to the greatness of man and certainly not the praise of the mediocre and fearful. Aspiring to conquer impossible things, or apparently such, has always been the engine of human progress and this, even if sometimes man has tried to steal it from God, is what we have as a duty. We can make beautiful victories out of infernal zones, of torture due to illnesses, even of cruel enmities into beautiful friendships; and it seems to me that we can never find the excuse that it is too hard or high. We may never reach the goal, but we will have walked.

I know too well that advancing years slow down the march, but the important thing, as usual, is not the quantity or the distance reached, but the joy of moving forward, even if in very small steps. Ulysses, who wanted to go beyond the pillars of Hercules, is seen by Dante as the one who does not take into account the creatural limits and who poses as the one who has no limits. Certainly the true fear of God places us in a healthy realism, but he does not want to clip our wings; the acceptance of our limits is manifested in the humility of those who do not get angry and do not rage against the obstacle, but not in the renunciation of having grandiose projects. Sometimes we hide beautiful things in the drawer of humility, while we leave out what forgets charity, respect, readiness to help. If, as Saint Irenaeus says, "the living man is the glory of God", we must really live to the end. Irenaeus explains that man's life is to contemplate God to admire his greatness and his goodness and to reflect it on the whole world.
I don't think we are all required to compete for great prizes, but the beauty of God is reflected in the great works of man, albeit in a hidden way, in every good attempt to make the world more wonderful and more glory than God. Then we will reach well beyond the columns of Hercules, which we have already largely surpassed, indeed we have arrived on the Moon and Mars! But the beauties that the Creator put into nature we have not yet all discovered and there is the risk that, looking for things that make us ugly and demean, we hide or destroy them.

The world has always advanced thanks to seekers of the beauties that God has hidden in creation and they have sought them in the beauty of respect and in the courage not to stop at small conquests, but always desiring more.

Cesare Falletti
NP November 2021