Reading with Dante‘s The Divine Comedy

Robin Bates wrote Do Not Let Your Anger Drown You. Dante understands the emotions well.

In Inferno, Dante the pilgrim encounters those are thrashing around in anger. Of these, there are “the wrathful” who outwardly vent their anger on others and “the sullen” who keep it within, where it boils ceaselessly.

Those who inhabit Dante’s Inferno are those whose sin so consumes them that they are blind to God’s light. In other words, they create their own hells.

Gustave Dore – The wrathful

Notes: This book is universal in scope whether the reader is a pagan, non-Christian or Christian. Gripping in its vision, human feeling and possibility of ignominious ways in which we can engage self-destructive behaviour as an individual people or as a society, the book offers hopes and graces that are needed to knit us back together. It’s possible to read the text and leave aside the theological and spiritual edifying aspects of the text. To read it as a political has been done before. If you read it as a spiritual text and forget about the history, culture and politics, etcetera, then, I may be missing something, too.