Got this in the mail from reader Brett Tohlen in Dallas. I pass it on with his permission:

I want to thank you for all your reflections on Dante’s Commedia.  Watching someone equally transformed by the truth, wisdom, and beauty has been both a joy and a kind of affirmation.  I am starting my fifth year teaching Inferno and Purgatory to ninth graders at the Covenant School in Dallas.  Each year, I am amazed at the power Dante has over their imagination.  Richard Weaver in an essay entitled “To Write the Truth” claims that “every teacher is for his students an Adam.  They come to him trusting in his power to bestow the right names on things.”  Dante’s power is in his ability to do this, to name the animals for us.  Through him, we see the variety and power of sin.

But, like a good teacher, he does not leave us in Inferno.  Jesus has told us that “everyone who sins is a slave of sin;” Purgatory shows us how to be free of those sins.  There, freedom is found not only in the atoning work of Christ but also through humility, reliance on others, God’s daily grace, as well as, virtuous habits.

What I love about teaching at least the first two books of the Commedia is that I continue to learn too. Learning alongside students is a real joy.  In fact last week, I was discussing the organization of hell, and I began to muse on why pastors focus so much on sins of incontinence (with a special devotion to lust) while not so much on violence and even less on fraud.  As a class, we concluded that the sins of incontinence are like “gateway drugs.”  The incontinent love a good, but it is a good easily perverted with an excessive or diminished love.  Dante notes that hell’s population increases as he descends, suggesting that excessive or diminished loves can lead to perverted love (love with malice as its end) – perhaps, because these sins are easily hidden from others or easily excused.  This might explain the focus pastors have on sins of incontinence.  Although I am uncertain Dante sees sins of incontinence as “gateway drugs,” the conversation is a valuable exercise, especially for freshman in high school.

Conversations like this happen every day while reading the Commedia.  By the way, after reading Dante, the students watch Tree of Life as a bridge from Purgatory to Milton’s Paradise Lost.  Dante has primed them to be more aware of the film’s imagery, and the film, itself, sets them up to pursue questions of theodicy.

I pray God will allow you to finish the book you are describing.  I find too many people are overwhelmed by Dante; this would go a long way towards helping.

I love this letter; it expresses exactly my feelings during and after reading the Commedia. I had never thought to approach it because I thought it would be too dense and too difficult, and quite possibly too boring. If it’s dense, it’s not because the language is too hard, but rather because the journey the pilgrim and his guide take through the afterlife forces you to stop so often to consider what they’re learning — and, if you linger long enough to reflect, what you’re learning about yourself, and who you might become.