Me with Dante’s Statue in Florence
All of my friends know how much I rave about Dante’s The Divine Comedy, and how much I have been urging people to read it.
This year, I decided to follow my own advice and I have started to re-read the Comedy. The idea came from Pope Francis, who has been recommending the Comedy as a reading for the Year of Mercy.
The Comedy is literature, not theology. It is no substitute for the Bible or the Catechism of the Catholic Church. However, it powerfully demonstrates a lot of theological truths.
When I was in college, for the three-credit course I took on the Comedy, I wrote a term paper about “what the poet can do that the theologian cannot”. I wrote that the poet is capable of telling the story of salvation in a manner that engages the entire human being – senses, sentiments, intellect, and will. Now that I am re-reading the story of Dante’s fictional journey through hell, purgatory, and paradise, I re-assert my original insight. The Comedy, while telling the story, illustrates truths about sin, love, free will, mercy, and hope in a manner that changes the reader. There is no reason why Holy Spirit cannot use the Comedy to speak personally to anyone who reads it.
Rather than recount the further insights I currently gain as I re-read the Comedy, I prefer to encourage readers to read the Comedy for themselves and carry their own conversation with its author. I do want to give a few tips for those who want to read it but feel daunted at the prospect of engaging the medieval work.
1. Have a reading plan, dividing the work into smaller chunks, like two Cantos every week.
2. Before reading the Comedy itself, familiarize yourself with the context of the work – Dante’s exile, the politics between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, who Virgil and Beatrice are, etc. – as well as with general ideas permeating the work, such as the notion of symbolic retribution. Any general introduction will help. This is optional, as some readers might prefer to discover these things as they go along in the Comedy.
3. Read the footnotes or endnotes, so as to familiarize yourself with the obscure references to classical mythology, medieval Florentine politics, etc. These commentaries may also help.
4. For this re-reading of the Comedy, I decided to keep a journal of my thoughts while reading it. The contents of my journal are not all profound nor academic nor original; I just use it as a record of things I notice while re-reading the Comedy. Later on, as I go over my entries, I may decide to consider any of these thoughts in a more prayerful reflection.
5. It would be a good idea to form a Comedy reading group to discuss it. It would be great if the group had members who are more familiar with it, so that they can guide the other members throughout the reading, but the lack of access to such resource persons should not be a reason to not form the reading group. Any group of friends who wants to read the Comedy together and discuss it will do. They may decide to get together at a chosen frequency, maybe over food and drink – that is, except when discussing the more revolting punishments in the Inferno!
I wish readers the best of luck in reading the Comedy. I am almost certain many readers will not be able to stop talking about it after reading, just like me.
2 thoughts on “Dante’s The Divine Comedy and the Year of Mercy”
It would be interesting to hear your own thoughts on the specifics of moving our of
purgatory as opposed to the other two static realms. Those who dwell on the very outer periphery of hell and heaven must have had interesting lives I would guess.
Great reference to the Holy Spirit’s power to use fiction as motive.
Dante had quite an insight into the human condition. Witness his consigning various types of virtuous and heinous persons to the appropriate stations in the afterlife. He would probably make a good scriptwriter today except for the fact that people hate to be reminded of sin and the consequences that follow.