Heaven Imagined in Literature: Dante’s Paradiso Reimagined in the Works of C.S. Lewis and Olaf Stapledon

Abstract

This dissertation will examine the reception and transformation of Dante’s Paradiso, meaning, the reception of the medieval imaginative vision of the Heavens by two modern artists, C.S. Lewis and Olaf Stapledon. In The Discarded Image, C.S. Lewis presents the medieval cosmological model to a modern audience as the “supreme medieval work of art,” the artistic backdrop and assumed context of Dante’s Comedy, particularly the Paradiso. In the Paradiso, Dante creatively reinterpreted both classical and medieval texts. Likewise, both Lewis and Stapledon were twentieth-century British artists and academics who reinterpreted Dante’s Paradiso within their own contemporary cosmic fictions. Both Lewis and Stapledon recaptured the medieval poetics of the cosmic narrative of the Heavens, the medieval mystic quest, and the theme of transfiguration in Dante’s Paradiso. However, morally and philosophically, Lewis’ and Stapledon’s literary transformations produced two very different outcomes. Lewis, attempted to recapture the emotional effect or the comedy of the medieval Heavens, and therefore challenged the reader’s expectations of the medieval Heavens and proposed by his experiment to try and recapture as much of the medieval imagination as possible. On the other hand, Stapledon completely transformed his reading of Dante, just as Dante transformed the classical works before him, and thereby produced a tragic reception of Dante’s Paradiso. And yet, although Stapledon does preserve Dante’s image of a direct encounter with the Divine, he instead presents an apathetic Creator, the complete reversal of Dante’s and Lewis’ depiction of the Divine as Love. Still, both Lewis and Stapledon wrote modern myths which aimed to recapture the medieval interior quest or the soul’s journey towards the Divine