Philosophical lessons from the Divine Comedy
When I left school, around the time I decided for no reason other than lack of a better idea that I was going to study English at university, I went through a frenzied period of reading. I read every classic I could find, I raided Waterstones for every black and white penguin classic, I read Homer to Jane Austin to Chinua Achebe to John Steinbeck, and as much in between. It was also during that time that I found a love of poetry in spite of having hated it at school, I found a lifelong affection for Seamus Heaney, first encountered the scintillating strangeness of T. S. Eliot and the mastery of W. H. Auden.
Yet one book I bought during that time but never got around to reading was Dante’s Divine Comedy. I bought a copy because I felt it was significant and I should read it, but for some reason it never appealed to me, it always moved down the pile of books to read until it ended up on the shelf gathering dust.
I think looking back the main reason it didn’t grab me was its apparently obvious religiousness. I was brought up a Christian, and Dante just felt too on the nose, too clumsy an articulation of the medieval afterlife that I wondered why I should bother. I was raised in religion that was both literal and of a particular reformed tradition that looked with cynicism at any religious…
