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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

The Accessible Dante

The Divine Comedy is a lot more readable than you might think
big dante copy

On the Oxford University Press blog, Peter Hainsworth writes:

Modern scholarship often gives the impression of being a hotbed of internal dissent, but it seems united in presuming that to understand Dante you have to know the Bible, Aristotle, the byways of Medieval thought and much more. If that’s the situation, maybe Dante really is unreadable for most people.

The opposite is true. With a modest amount of patience the busy modern reader, Italophone or not, should be able to get a long way into Dante and to enjoy him. There isn’t an end-point, any more than there is with Shakespeare. Dante presses his readers to think (and to enjoy thinking) in a way Shakespeare doesn’t, and he has some very clear ideas he wants us to accept and assimilate. But he provides fewer definitive answers to the problems he obviously raises than we might expect. That is one of the reasons for dissent among scholars, and also one of the reasons why every reader, given a certain amount of information about the context, idiom, and history, can think things through for himself or herself, and up to a point to construct his or her own Dante. And what we think about regards not just the fate of souls after death but even more human life on this earth. The idiom may be foreign, the world view long vanished, but, though Dante is not our contemporary, much of what he says about morality, politics, language and love bears in on our lives today (for instance, his insistence that organised religion and the secular state must not interfere with each other).

Read his whole (short) post. 

I have spent much of today talking about Dante to high school classes at The Covenant School in Dallas. I found myself surprisingly — what is the word? — evangelical about all this. What I mean is that I found myself sitting in front of these kids wanting so much to communicate to them how revolutionary Dante can be for them, if they give themselves over to the poem. What I ended up doing was telling my story, and showing how the dilemmas and the situations faced by the characters in the poem speak directly to things all of us deal with in our lives. The Divine Comedy gives us a framework for approaching them. Hainsworth is right: Dante is not a source of easy answers to hard questions. He makes you think, and feel, and imagine in ways that may never have occurred to you.

The thing about Dante is that he is not satisfied with comforting lies. He’s lived with those all his life, and they landed him in the dark wood. He wants the truth, no matter what it costs him. He discovers on his journey that the truth is not a proposition; the truth is a Person, is a mode of living. The truth is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived.

We were talking about suffering in the final class of the day, and I said to these kids, some of whom have suffered terribly (e.g., one boy lost a leg to cancer), that they will not find in Dante the secret teaching that will make suffering disappear. What they will find is wisdom about how to approach suffering so that it is not only bearable, but can, through love, be transformative and redemptive. But these are truths that come hard.

I looked out and saw kids who might well be like myself at that age: skeptical of received truth. I encouraged them to be skeptical, but I warned them against the mistake I made at their age, which was to assume that the shallow, anesthetizing version of Christianity that I had encountered to that point was the entirety of Christianity. What’s more, just as it’s possible to be too accepting and too unquestioning, it is possible to be too skeptical — if the skepticism leads you to doubt that truth exists, and is knowable.

Dante is so terrific, and so trustworthy, because he is so realistic about these things. And as Hainsworth says, he is a lot more accessible than people may think. This I tried to convey to the students: that the Commedia is not just a “Great Book” to be studied in class and admired as a cultural artifact, but a doorway through which ordinary people can enter into a new life. Remember, Dante wrote for the common man, in their language. In my book, How Dante Can Save Your Life (out April 16) I hope I have told a story about how this great man of the Middle Ages saw deeper than nearly anybody who ever lived, and revealed to us the pathway to healing and restoration and harmony. It is not the path to comfort. It is not the road to a realm where pain is no more. It is a road to hope, where our suffering has meaning, and can lead to the greatest joy possible in this fallen world.

If you live in the Dallas area, I hope you’ll come hear my talk at Covenant tonight. Details here. I love talking about this stuff. I’m no scholar of Dante, but I am a witness.

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