With the help of certain applications, like Photoshop and Deskscan, and imported and/or created images, have students in groups posit their own physical representation of the medieval hierarchy on which Dante relies to structure the Comedy. Students may want to create literal maps of Scholastic or Dionysian doctrine, structural maps that recreate ladders of a gradually brightening light leading to the pure being of God or a series of mirrors reflecting images of lesser and lesser creatures distorting the first image, or rather the divine "thing" itself -- God. A more difficult model might be a in the form of a circle, with God in the middle and the various creatures in which God manifests Himself placed at different distances from the center, showing the two paths of divine love, the one that God gives, and the other that God inspires. Lucifer might be placed on the loneliest fringe of this circular universe.

Creatures in the medieval hierarchy of the universe, whether they be angels, human beings, turtles, or vermin -- You'll recall Lucifer, who once had "il bel sembiante," imitating the inimitable beauty of God, Dante calls the "damned worm that pierces through the world" -- love God and seek union with the divine in relative degrees. However, though there is union, the hierarchical order of creatures is always maintained. For Dionysus the Areopagite, from whom we draw Aristotelian/Thomistic doctrine, creatures reach their supreme goal in a fixed place. This order never collapses. It is important to distinguish the concept of mystic union in modern religion, that is, the dissolution of identity in God, from medieval "bliss," "the perfect correspondence between the created world and its divine archetypes." While modern religious stress self-surrender and the loss of identity, the medieval world view seeks "identity," "identity" with God.