Paradiso: Canto XIX -- The Just and Temperate

That the Lord converts us in many various ways (like the Blessed Peter Gonzalez who fell from his ass and onto it) is as unparalleled a truism as the fact that no one, not even the soul itself, knows the human heart as well as does God. Whomsoever God touches, and whomsoever responds to that touch, is saved from the infernal night even if, in life, that person had never professed a belief in the Messiah to come or in the Risen Messiah. What kind of justice is this for he who spent his life in the service of Christ, the priest of half a century might ask upon meeting the Muslim or Hindu in heaven or upon seeing prayers raise up from the shore of Purgatory a soul who should have remained below the gate ten thousand years and more. Perhaps Christ's parable of the wage-earners who worked varying lengths of the day and received the same payment is revelatory, and, as we have seen, is echoed by Gaudium et Spes's 22nd paragraph.



Just as evil has no mean, no excess, and no deficit, neither, too, does the good. It is the end in and of itself and cannot be thought to have a mean without giving it room for defect in either excess or deficit. This does not detract from the idea we already experienced in climbing the mountain of the fact that deficits in virtue were being filled. The fact that there is the presence or absence of good in a soul, and that this presence and absence works to varying ends in the pursuit of a good, is merely nothing more than that, for God wills us to the good but allows us to will ourselves away from it. The presence of the good, then, would make itself known by the fullness of its release onto society, the fullness of its drawing the just back into itself, like this eagle of lights and souls that speaks to Dante as with one voice. Beyond that, only God knows.

S.