ABSTRACT
Is the Commedia intended to be an accurate account of how our lives in eternity will eventually be lived? Critics have been so inclined to applaud the descriptive precision of Dante’s poetry that one might indeed suppose the author to have intended such an account. Yet, in the perspectives of Christian belief, that can hardly be a plausible view. Faith assures the believer that divine existence is eternal. The same faith requires (and enables) us to live with the truth that the divine existence, on which our own depends, is wholly transcendent to our temporal understanding. As revealed in Christ, the new creation promised by the Creator will be entirely new in being entirely different from anything we know through our experience of earthly realities.
