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.

Reading Dante Alighieri

Dante Alighieri: Dante is shirt firm of Durante. Alighieri was not, in fact, Dante’s surname. It was part of a pen name derived from his full name, Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri. Dante did not have a proper family name in the modern sense. Rather, the “di Alighiero” was a patronymic, indicating he was the son of Alighiero. (source: Quora)

Journey with Dante in his vision of hell, purgatory and Paradise dated 9-9-21

Why should we read the Divine Comedy?

• It would help us when life goes wrong.
• We could be dragged down in desperation or we could throw a hand up and call for help and look for the assistance of a wise thoughtful friend and guide us. Or we could call out for divine grace and hope that help is there and that we avail ourselves of it. So that you know to think practically about the capricious universal draw of the text.
• It helps to think about what happiness and flourishing look like individually and corporately.
• It would make us live better.

“Start midway in the journey of our life, I woke to find myself in some dark wood of error…”

– how do I get out?

– how do I come to myself?

– how do I come to reorder my life?

– via affirmative as affirming for the glory of God?

These are words that I have taken note of as I listened to the lecture.