The great French historian Jacques Le Goff credited Dante with doing more than any theologian to make purgatory a meaningful part of Christian tradition, and, more recently, Jon M. Sweeney has argued that Dante practically invented the modern idea of hell. Whatever the merits of these claims, I would like to suggest that Dante exercised a similar influence on the Christian understanding of heaven—and that this influence is not what Dante’s many modern devotees might suspect.
Indeed, I would go so far as to say that Dante contributed decisively to the disappearance of heaven in modern theology. That will seem counterintuitive to those who associate Dante with a carefully structured cosmos that provides for levels and degrees of sanctification and glorification. In fact, however, Dante’s vision of heaven not only vaporizes the afterlife but also annihilates matter. For all of his poetic greatness, he gives us a heaven that is little more than an idea to be contemplated, since he thinks it is our destiny to become one of the ideational objects of God’s self-awareness.
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