One of my honors college students asked me last week to identify my favorite epic. Though I have a deep and abiding love for the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid, I answered without hesitation: Dante’s Divine Comedy. Nothing, not even Milton’s Paradise Lost, comes close to the monumental scale of Dante’s three-part journey through hell, purgatory, and paradise. And yet, despite its epic 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 copy of La Divina Commedia in a Barnes & Noble bookstore in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Up until that moment, his life hadn’t been going well. He had returned from a sojourn in big 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 in hopes of consoling his parents and his nieces, only to find that his decision led to an increase, rather than a resolution, of his sense of estrangement and isolation. To make matters worse, Dreher came down with stress-induced chronic fatigue syndrome, leaving his family to fend for themselves.
In short, Dreher, senior editor at The American Conservative and author of Crunchy Cons (2006) and The Little Way of Ruthie Leming (2013) [interview], entered a Dark World, not all that different from the one Dante finds himself in at the beginning 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-help with painful confession.
Existential Frustration
Though I was naturally eager to get to Dante, I enjoyed, if not savored, the opening chapters in which Dreher recounts the cycle of existential frustration that has dominated his life. Only the coldest of readers could not be moved by Dreher’s attempts to please his good father, who truly loves his son but cannot see him as a different person with his own 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 father sees him as a traitor who has rejected the life he had planned for him. When he and his wife try to impress his family by 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 three cases Ruthie sides with her father. Indeed, after Ruthie’s death Dreher learns she’s convinced her daughters that their uncle is a user who cares only about himself and his career and is fundamentally disloyal to his family.
How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History’s Greatest Poem
Rod Dreher
How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History’s Greatest Poem
Rod Dreher
Given his life experiences, it would have been easy for Dreher to paint himself as a victim and blame everyone else for his woes. But neither God nor Dante allows him to do so. Rather, as he descends the levels of the inferno and then ascends the cornices of purgatory alongside the Florentine poet, he comes face to face with his own propensity to make golden calves out of his family and his tradition: in a word, southern ancestral worship. Yes, his father and sister must bear some guilt, but Dreher alone allows himself to become bound to these false idols.
Just as Dante, standing before the Gate of Dis (lower hell), is nearly turned to stone by the face of the Medusa, so Dreher’s memories of his childhood paralyze him and impede his spiritual progress. “My sins,” he comes to realize in a moment of Dantean enlightenment, “always emerged from anger at the unjust way I had been treated and impotent rage at my inability to change my family’s minds or to overcome the power of these memories over my emotions” (112).
Recurring Refrain
In what becomes a recurring refrain throughout the book, Dreher learns what exactly he can and cannot change. “You cannot control other people, but you can control your reaction to them” (66). And that goes for family as well as church. Though raised Methodist, Dreher, whose return to Christian faith was initiated by a visit to Chartres Cathedral in France, 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 hierarchy.
While not regretting his embrace of Orthodoxy, Dreher is convicted by Dante’s 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 father figure. Indeed, Dreher’s 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 Father in heaven. In the case of the magnificent but arrogant Farinata, Dante must resist the temptation of “keeping up appearances” (119), of acting as if only the earth mattered. As for the literary Brunetto, perhaps the most 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 own 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 deadly sins. Here, as he does throughout How Dante Can Save Your Life, Dreher gets to the heart of Dante’s understanding of sin as a distortion of love 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 thing” (261).
Though Dreher has far less to say about Paradiso, he correctly highlights one of the chief characteristics of Dante’s heaven: that it is a place where “we are perfected according to our own natures” (273). By the end of his journey, Dreher is empowered to let go 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.
Just as importantly, he realizes that his childhood home cannot completely cure his feeling of exile. For that he must, like Dante, take a longer and more painful journey to his “true and only home: unity with God, in eternity” (281).