In Dante’s famous epic poem Paradiso, which imagines the poet’s last leg of his journey through the afterlife, Heaven is depicted as a place where souls gravitate inwards, perhaps existing in certain “levels” or rings that revolve around a specific center. The closer you get to this center, the holier the souls are and the holier the space is. Past the spaces where saints reside is the space of the angels called the Primum Mobile, which is moved directly by God. Getting even closer to the center, Dante enters into the Empyrean, which is the dwelling place of God; he describes this place in Heaven as a rose, with petals that flow from the very center of Heaven. It is only in this center of the rose that Dante comes face-to-face with God. Dante’s Divine Comedy is unspeakably beautiful, a true pinnacle in human achievement that could only be described as divinely inspired to a certain extent. However, we only say this because Dante is painstakingly diligent in constructing his entire work through the lens of God’s signature element in creation - order and hierarchy.

Everything touched by God falls into the Divine Order of the Cosmos, which is merely reflected in Dante’s work. Everything that we experience as a Church revolves in different levels around Christ. We have the disciplines, the precepts, the sacraments, the Magisterium, the charitable works, and every other detail of the Church which flows from Christ at its center, just as Dante describes the celestial rose. What happens when we get to that center, just as Dante did in his poem? We experience exactly what he did in that moment: we come face-to-face with the human figure of Christ, the manifestation of God according to the limits of what we know and experience as human beings. But when Christ lived among us, he did not merely gaze at us as we gazed back at him in infinite silence. He lived with us, worked with us, ate with us, played with us, prayed with us, sang with us, danced with us, and most importantly, talked with us. When we enter into Heaven, God will speak to our hearts for the rest of eternity while we are nourished eternally by His words. So when faithful Jews, regardless of their intention, approached Christ and asked him what is at the center of their faith, what is it like to be in that center of the celestial rose and what does it take to get there, Christ’s response to them is very simple: you shall love God with all your heart, soul, and strength, and your neighbor as yourself. This one teaching, the Great Commandment, is at the very center of the very center of all things Divine.

The Law is the ultimate manifestation of Divine Order, the “calling card” of divine involvement in creation. When God gave the Jews the Law, he began with the words we hear in Leviticus: “Be holy for I, the Lord, your God, am holy.” But God makes sure to show us how to do this, by following the commandments of His Law that pertain to our fellow neighbors. He encapsulates this message by ending with the words, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.” When Christ expounds on this in his teachings in the Gospel, he tells us why it is so important to love God first through our neighbors: there is a reflection of divinity within every human person we encounter because we are made in God’s image and likeness. When Dante peered into the center of Heaven, he saw the Trinity forming in such a way that the three persons accentuated the human form of Jesus Christ. If we want to participate in Heaven and experience God in his fullest form, we need to see Christ in our fellow human beings. All of creation is ordered around and flows from this command - to love God by loving our neighbors.