How Dante is the culmination of a journey I took in public, on this blog, and in private. It is a sequel, or sorts, to The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, but you don’t have to have read Little Way to get into How Dante. And if you did read Little Way, you’ll want to read the second to find out how the conflict that emerged at the end of the Ruthie story was resolved.
How Dante began with a TAC cover story last year. And here are the opening paragraphs of the book:
I don’t much like poetry. never have. which makes what happened to me when I stumbled into Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy all the more miraculous.
Dante’s epic saved my life.
This medieval masterpiece, perhaps the greatest poem ever written, reached me when I thought I was unreachable, and lit the way out of a dark wood of depression, confusion, and a stress-related autoimmune disease that, had it persisted, would have dangerously degraded my health.
Dante helped me understand the mistakes and mistaken beliefs that brought me to this dead end. He showed me that I had the power to change, and revealed to me how to do so. Most important of all, the poet gave me a renewed vision of life.
Maybe you think about the Divine Comedy — if you think of it at all — as one of those great books you ought to have read but never got around to. Or maybe you did read it in high school or college and didn’t really understand what the big deal was. This was me in the summer of 2013: a middle-aged man, lost and struggling, who never imagined a fourteenth-century poem would have anything to do with his twenty-first-century life.
Little did I know that Dante Alighieri, the failed Tuscan politician beggared by exile, knew me better than I knew myself. The Commedia, as his poem is called in the original Italian, is radical stuff. You will not be the same after reading it. How could you be? All of life is in there.
Dante’s tale is a fantasy about a lost man who finds his way back to life after walking through the pits of hell, climbing up the mountain of purgatory, and ascending to the heights of heaven. But it’s really a story about real life and the incredible journey of our lives, yours and mine.
The Commedia is a seven-hundred-year-old poem honored as a pinnacle of Western civilization. But it’s also a practical guide to life, one that promises rescue, restoration, and freedom. This book, How Dante Can Save Your Life, tells the story of how the treasures of wisdom buried in the Commedia’s 14,233 lines gave me a rich new life.
Though the Commedia was written by a faithful Catholic, its message is universal. You don’t have to be a Catholic, or any sort of believer, to love it and to be changed by it. And though mine is a book that’s ultimately about learning to live with God, it is not a book of religious apologetics; it is a book about finding our own true path. Like the Commedia it celebrates, this book is for believers who struggle to hold on to their faith when religious institutions have lost credibility. It’s a book for people who have lost faith in love, in other people, in the family, in politics, in their careers, and in the possibility of worldly success. Dante has been there too. He gets it.
