Lucy Bamboo · July 21, 2026
By Lucy Bamboo Why does Dante place some souls in Paradise and others in Hell? The answer hinges on a medieval theological puzzle: How do grace and free will coexist? This tension shapes the poem’s architecture and defines who gets saved. The Problem Dante Inherited Dante follows Thomas Aquinas, the greatest medieval theologian. Aquinas insisted … Read more
Lucy Bamboo · July 13, 2026
Dante’s Comedy is a theological poem. You can enjoy it without understanding the theology, but you’ll miss the architecture of the entire work. The 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia — free, public domain, available at newadvent.org — is the single best tool for filling those gaps. I discovered this by accident. While reading Paradiso, I hit a … Read more
Lucy Bamboo · July 12, 2026
I spent months reading Paradiso without understanding where the poem was actually going. Canto after canto of Dante ascending through spheres of light, meeting saints and theologians—it felt magnificent, but untethered. Then I grasped the Beatific Vision, and everything clicked. The entire Divine Comedy—all three canticles—points toward this one moment: standing face-to-face with God. What … Read more
Lucy Bamboo · June 25, 2026Ask what a poem gave the world and you usually get a reading list. Dante’s case is stranger. He didn’t just influence writers — he handed eighty million people the language they currently think in. That’s the concrete version. The more unsettling versions go deeper: a picture of the afterlife that quietly overwrote scripture in … Read more
