The medieval understanding of Creation is no longer accessible to the West in its original form. Even most believing Christians don’t understand our world today as a created world in which every aspect of the universe has a God-given meaning that it wears on its face. Still, Dante’s general idea, that we are free to retrain our desires so that they are directed toward what ultimately sustains and fulfills them— so that they become attuned, in other words, to the meanings that are already out there in the world—will turn out to hold an important clue for our nihilistic age.
