Dear Everyone,

There is a scene in “Gabriel’s Inferno” in which the main character gives a lecture at the University of Toronto on the topic of Lust in Dante’s Inferno. Professor Emerson is very familiar with lust and its various forms and some of his expertise emerges during his presentation.

In an interview that I did recently with Tigris Eden, (which you can read here), I identified Gabriel as a sensualist. He’s obsessed with the pleasures of the body – taste, touch, sound, smell, sight. You can see this in his choice of Scotch, food, sex, art, music, fine clothing and writing instruments, etc.

Julia is very different from Gabriel. She is a product of her upbringing and circumstances, but also of her choices. Rather than focusing on the pleasures of the body, she has favoured the pleasures of the soul – education, friendship, and love.

Throughout the course of the novel, the topic of sex is raised by different characters who espouse different views of it. Last week’s post was a glimpse into the music and ideas associated with Julia and her past. Several readers commented on the music and lyrics of the song. I enjoyed reading their reactions and so this week I welcomed readers to contact me via Twitter, Facebook or email to share their ideas about the connection between sex and God.

The response was overwhelming.

Many readers emphasized the connection between partners that emerges through sex – a connection of knowledge, intimacy, and giving. Some readers emphasized the transcendence or the sublime as it’s experienced in sex.

Readers identified themselves as coming from various different perspectives – some religious, some not. In all, I was surprised at the similarity among the comments and how reader’s reflections overlapped with my own views.

Over the course of writing a story that presents the redemption of sex as much as the redemption of a man, I’ve wondered about the relationship between sex, love and God. I’ll never be able to do justice to these connections in this short post, but I’ll present some of my reflections so far.

My suspicion is that sex offers human beings a glimpse of the transcendent in the way nature or human creations caused the Romantic poets to think of the sublime, or what Wordsworth termed “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.”

If a Grecian urn, frost, or the ruins of an old abbey can inspire such reactions, how much more can sex? And if the powerful feelings elicited by nature or artifacts provoke us to think about our place in the world, how much more can sex provoke us to think of similar things and beyond?

What I have in mind here is the way that sex is all-consuming during the act and especially, during orgasm. Sex focuses all attention on the attainment of its goal – satisfaction. But one can also think of sex as a symbol of something else. The greatest of bodily pleasures could be seen as a foretaste of Dante’s Paradise,where one is known and loved intimately by the Divine and all one’s desires are satisfied, not just for moments but for eternity.

When Dante visits Paradise, he meets St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153). In description of the meeting Dante writes, “Though he had been absorbed in his delight, that contemplator freely undertook the task of teaching.” [Canto 32.1]