All things among themselves possess an order, and this order is the form that makes the universe like God.

Sunday, 4/29/18

In the year 1300 A.D. Dante, a year-five year-old citizen of Florence, Italy, began worrying about having fallen into sinful ways. Now, this Dante had two great loves in his life: one was for a girl named Beatrice, who had died just ten years earlier; the other was for the Roman poet Virgil, who had died seven-hundred years earlier.

In 1300 A.D. Dante launched on composing an epic poem based on the idea that Beatrice in heaven, looking for  a way for saving Dante from his sinfulness, called Virgil up from the abode of great  unbaptized scholars.

In Book One of Dante's epic, Virgil led Dante through the Inferno, bringing him to hate the sinful ways that lead men to unending torture. In Dante's Book Two, Virgil showed Dante the prolonged  punishments that kept sinners from entering Paradise.

Virgil, as an unbaptized sinner, was not allowed to accompany Dante into Paradise. So Dante, left to his own, began puzzling over two seeming contradictions in heaven. For one thing, everything in heaven was new; but for another thing, there was something pleasingly familiar but everything in heaven.

Dante approached Beatrice in heaven, asking her how, with everything in heaven being new, it could also be somewhat familiar. Beatrice  replied,  

 "All things among themselves possess an order, and this order is the form that makes the universe like God."

So, if you ask what God is like, you may answer that he is like the musical scale that always rings true. He is like the series of ninety atomic weights that distinguish our ninety separate elements.
He is like the orderly mathematical progress of color to color in our rainbow,