2009--The Year of Dante

So I've decided that 2009 shall be my year of Dante's Divine Comedy.  Or at least, January through May will be devoted to Dante.  Over the past couple of days, I've been reading various introductions and background-type essays.  But this morning, I sat down and read Canto I of the Inferno in a couple of different translantions (Sayers and the Hollanders) and then read all kinds of commentary and notes just on that first Canto.  And I've read Dante before, but I feel like for the first time I'm not just studying Dante but am really understanding Dante.  It's not that I'm just getting it intellectually; it's more that I feel like the whole thing is actually speaking to me, you know?, on many levels at once:  imaginative, emotional, spiritual.  And it seems to me, right now anyway, that that's the whole thing about Dante.  Yes, it's allegory, but it's more than "just" allegory.  It operates at the literal level, but it's operating at all these different levels of human experience all at the same time.  And none of these levels or meanings is exclusive of the others; rather, each informs the others and enriches the others.  I know that what I'm getting at is maybe obvious--it's what I've known intellectually about Dante all the time.  But I feel like for the first time I'm experiencing it, rather than just understanding how it's supposed to work.  And I marvel at the skill of it all.  I'm not just understanding, but I'm being moved, changed.

But really, what's motivated this particular look at Dante is that I'm teaching Dante next semester.  And as I've been reading about Dante and thinking about Dante and finally reading Dante's work, all I think, in reference to the course, is, "How are my students going to deal with this?  How are they going to respond?"  More specifically, I'm concerned that they might not respond at all, that they might just shut down.  Reading Dante is no easy task.  And I'm afraid that the room will be filled with apathetic students who don't really know how to work at this task.  The translators and commentators I've been exploring seem to agree that reading Dante requires participation and work on our part, and in my experience, many of my students just seem interested in a passive reading experience, if they are willing to read at all.

But really more significant, I think, that the necessity of our being active readers is that Dante's way of thinking about the world is simply so alien to so much of postmodernity.  Dorothy Sayers says, "We must also be prepared, while we are reading Dante, to accept the Christian and Catholic view of ourselves as responsible rational beings. . .The Divine Comedy is precisely the drama of the soul's choice."  This way of thinking about the self and the world seems to me to be so foreign to much of our culture.  In Dante's world, sin matters; it enslaves us in the present world and for all eternity.  As a culture, we can think in terms of sex addiction, but most of us don't really buy the idea that lust, one of the seven deadly sins, can destroy our soul.  I, for one, am willing accept Dante's general scheme of things; the choices we make do matter, and maybe what matters the most is how our inner selves are affected.  Sin and evil do exist.  But in a world where absolutes are eschewed and a notion of the soul is thought of as simply out dated, what place does Dante have?  And how can I convey to my students that these questions matter, or that at least to make sense of Dante, we have to suspend our disbelief?  I'm feeling so inadequate to the task at hand.

But Dante.  He's like my Beatrice, at least for the moment, a bright ray of light, leading the way to some sort of Truth.