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Dante, The Means Of Her Conversion

A reader sends this amazing column by Peggy Rosenthal, in which she talks about how reading The Divine Comedy led to her religious conversion. I found myself reading along thinking, “Yes! That’s how it is!” Rosenthal says a long time ago, she and her husband and their child were moving to another city. It was […]

A reader sends this amazing column by Peggy Rosenthal, in which she talks about how reading The Divine Comedy led to her religious conversion. I found myself reading along thinking, “Yes! That’s how it is!” Rosenthal says a long time ago, she and her husband and their child were moving to another city. It was going to be a tough move; she decided she needed to read a big, challenging book to find a sense of stability in the process. Though a “firm agnostic” at the time, she took up Dante’s masterpiece. And it worked its magic. Excerpt:

The Divine Comedy did just what I’d hoped and more. Not only did it give me something coherent to hold onto during the dislocating move; it gave me a fully envisioned cosmic worldview to move into and live within. I felt securely enfolded within the Divine Comedy, despite not believing at all in its Christian assumptions.

I was reminded of this episode in my life when I read Professor Carol Zaleski’s column “Rhymes and Reasons” in the February 19 issue of Christian Century. Zaleski traces the history of interpretations and translations of the Divine Comedy, coming to focus on the extraordinary number of translations in the past century.

This past century is known as the Age of Secularism, and most of Dante’s English translators during this era have not been “believers.” Zaleski asks: “What is Dante saying to readers who love the poem but reject the message? What is their devotion to Dante saying to us?”

Her tentative answer is that Dante’s continued popularity is “a sign that God is longed for and subliminally known.” A translator or reader cannot, she goes on, surrender to this poem and remain unchanged by it. “It seems unlikely that imagination and sympathy can be so deeply engaged without leaving traces in memory and planting seeds in reason.”

I strongly encourage you to read the whole thing, to see how the seeds the Commedia planted within Rosenthal ultimately bore fruit. What happened, basically, is that the Commedia opened up within her a sensitivity to beauty as an icon. That Carol Zaleski column is behind the Christian Century paywall, so I can’t link to it, but that line about Dante’s continuing popularity being “a sign that God is longed for and subliminally known” is terrifically insightful. It’s what a literature professor who teaches Dante told me about his undergraduates: that very few if any of them are religiously observant, but they all love reading Dante because the Commedia gives them a way to talk about God. That is, they have their defenses up against conventional Christianity, but the Commedia, though written by a faithful Roman Catholic, is so mind-blowingly beyond the Christianity most contemporary Americans know that it’s like encountering something very old as something astonishingly knew.

The Commedia really and truly can change your life. It can even save it.  I’ve never read anything like it, ever.

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