How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-changing Wisdom Of History's Greatest Poem

Ane of my honors higher students asked me last calendar week to place my favorite epic. Though I take a deep and abiding love for the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid, I answered without hesitation: Dante's Divine One-act. Nothing, not even Milton'sParadise Lost, comes close to the monumental scale of Dante'due south three-office journey through hell, purgatory, and paradise. And notwithstanding, despite its ballsy scale, few works have the power to touch their readers on the most personal and intimate of levels.

So Rod Dreher discovered, to his great and continuing surprise, when he picked up a re-create of La Divina Commedia in a Barnes & Noble bookstore in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Upwardly until that moment, his life hadn't been going well. He had returned from a sojourn in large city America to his rural Louisiana hometown to tend to his cancer-stricken sister, Ruthie Leming. After her death, he stayed on with his family unit in hopes of consoling his parents and his nieces, only to detect that his conclusion led to an increase, rather than a resolution, of his sense of estrangement and isolation. To brand matters worse, Dreher came down with stress-induced chronic fatigue syndrome, leaving his family to fend for themselves.

In short, Dreher, senior editor atThe American Bourgeois and writer of Crunchy Cons (2006) and The Little Way of Ruthie Leming(2013) [interview], entered a Nighttime World, not all that unlike from the one Dante finds himself in at the showtime of Inferno. The journey toward that crisis moment had been a long and painful one for poet and journalist alike, and Dreher shares his with us in a prose style that balances local color with incisive analysis, sentiment with reflection, pop self-assist with painful confession.

Existential Frustration

Though I was naturally eager to get to Dante, I enjoyed, if non savored, the opening capacity in which Dreher recounts the cycle of existential frustration that has dominated his life. Simply the coldest of readers could not be moved by Dreher's attempts to please his good begetter, who truly loves his son but cannot see him as a different person with his ain views, desires, and dreams.

When the sensitive, bookish lad kills a squirrel and is troubled by the sight, his father scorns him and calls him a sissy. When he leaves Louisiana to seek a career, his male parent sees him equally a traitor who has rejected the life he had planned for him. When he and his wife attempt to impress his family past cooking a fancy bouillabaisse, he is accused of being "uppity" and "inflicting his snooty cosmopolitan tastes on them" (19). To add insult to injury, in all 3 cases Ruthie sides with her father. Indeed, after Ruthie'southward decease Dreher learns she'due south convinced her daughters that their uncle is a user who cares merely almost himself and his career and is fundamentally disloyal to his family.

How Dante Can Salvage Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History's Greatest Poem

How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Irresolute Wisdom of History'due south Greatest Poem

Rod Dreher

Regan Arts (2015) . 320 pp.

Given his life experiences, information technology would have been piece of cake for Dreher to pigment himself every bit a victim and blame anybody else for his woes. But neither God nor Dante allows him to practice so. Rather, as he descends the levels of the inferno and then ascends the cornices of purgatory aslope the Florentine poet, he comes face to face with his own propensity to make golden calves out of his family unit and his tradition: in a word, southern ancestral worship. Yes, his father and sister must bear some guilt, but Dreher alone allows himself to get bound to these imitation idols.

Merely as Dante, standing before the Gate of Dis (lower hell), is nigh turned to stone by the confront of the Medusa, then Dreher'southward memories of his childhood paralyze him and impede his spiritual progress. "My sins," he comes to realize in a moment of Dantean enlightenment, "e'er emerged from anger at the unjust way I had been treated and impotent rage at my inability to change my family unit'southward minds or to overcome the power of these memories over my emotions" (112).

Recurring Refrain

In what becomes a recurring refrain throughout the volume, Dreher learns what exactly he tin can and cannot change. "Y'all cannot control other people, just you can control your reaction to them" (66). And that goes for family besides as church. Though raised Methodist, Dreher, whose render to Christian faith was initiated by a visit to Chartres Cathedral in French republic, converted to Roman Catholicism in his 20s. A decade later, though, he left the Roman Catholic Church for the Orthodox when his journalistic work on the priestly sex scandals caused him to lose faith in the Roman Catholic clergy and bureaucracy.

While non regretting his cover of Orthodoxy, Dreher is convicted by Dante'due south ability to rage against the corruption of the medieval church while remaining firmly loyal to its leadership and rule of faith. For Dreher, the Divine Comedy becomes, in part, a long search for a proper male parent effigy. Indeed, Dreher'due south analysis is most acute when he takes up Dante's conversations with the heretic Farinata and the sodomite Ser Brunetto Latini.

Both of these anti-fathers lure Dante into a false kind of adoration that promises to supply him with a pseudo-purpose for his existence that doesn't take into account his true Male parent in heaven. In the case of the magnificent but big-headed Farinata, Dante must resist the temptation of "keeping up appearances" (119), of acting as if merely the earth mattered. As for the literary Brunetto, maybe the nigh deceptive speaker in the Inferno, Dante must guard against two erroneous beliefs: that "the purpose of writing is to win worldly fame" and that one "should plot his course through life not by following the divine plan but by seeking his ain interests" (142).

Once free from the self-imposed shackles of hell, Dreher moves upward through purgatory, seeking to disentangle himself from the hold of the seven mortiferous sins. Here, as he does throughout How Dante Can Salve Your Life, Dreher gets to the eye of Dante's understanding of sin as a distortion of dear that cuts us off from our true potential and causes us to "worship the thing itself rather than to see the transcendent reality that lies behind the matter" (261).

Though Dreher has far less to say near Paradiso, he correctly highlights one of the chief characteristics of Dante'due south heaven: that information technology is a place where "nosotros are perfected co-ordinate to our own natures" (273). By the stop of his journey, Dreher is empowered to allow get of the false "idealized past" (260) he's carried around with him for years and to accept his own limitations and those of his family unit.

Just as importantly, he realizes that his childhood abode cannot completely cure his feeling of exile. For that he must, like Dante, take a longer and more painful journeying to his "true and just dwelling house: unity with God, in eternity" (281).