The desire to escape the nightmare aspects of modernity, Birzer warns, is not the same thing as wanting to escape from reality—quite the opposite, in fact.

Fairy Tales and Holy Week

by Daniel McInerny

One of my favorites passages in Dante’s Purgatorio is when Dante finally reaches the summit of Mount Purgatory and enters the Earthly Paradise—that is, the Garden of Eden. It makes good theological sense that Dante imagines the topography of Purgatory this way. For having purged his intellect, will and passions from the ill effects of his sin, Dante is now wholly innocent again. He is like Adam and Eve before the Fall. And so it is appropriate that, before he ascends to the celestial Paradise, he be given a glimpse of heaven on earth.

In the Earthly Paradise Dante meets a beautiful lady named Matelda, who tells him that he has come to the place “fashioned to be the natural nest for man.” Matelda explains:


“The Highest Good, pleased in Itself alone,
made man good, and for Good, and gave him this
place as an earnest of eternal peace.

By his own fault, man did not dwell here long.
by his own fault, he took up grief and toil,
pawning his honest laughter and sweet play.”