A midlife crisis is cured by The Divine Comedy

How Dante Saved My Life

By ROD DREHER

Modern people who are lost in the cosmos pick up all kinds of self-help manuals in search of guidance, or, if they are Christian, buy books bubbling over with godly therapeutic psychobabble. Don’t do it. Take up and read Dante, because Dante is deep, and Dante is right.

What is a midlife crisis? The pop-culture notion is something like Kevin Spacey’s folly in the film “American Beauty”: a period in the middle of a man’s life in which he finds himself mired in an “Is that all there is?” malaise. He seeks to regain his mojo by acquiring mistresses, fast cars, or other totems of youth. Pathetic, right? What kind of chump has a mid-life crisis?

Well, for one, a 46-year-old chump like me—and I didn’t see it coming. Happy marriage? Check. Great kids? Check. Good job, good church, good health? Check, check, and (mostly) check. True, my only sibling died in 2011, but that event turned into an occasion of grace, one that brought me the unexpected blessing of returning to my hometown after a lifetime of wandering. And the book I wrote about that journey had for the first time given me financial security. What’s not to like?

Yet last summer I was mired in despair. The cause was the failure of the expectation I had over my return home—a happily-ever-after hope that grace would forever bridge the fault lines between my family and me that had driven me to leave as a young man. It had not happened, even though I had done everything in my power to make it so. The disappointment was crushing, especially because I believed that the path to my own inner peace depended on taking the road back to my father’s house—not as a prodigal but as a son all the same.

No matter how far I had strayed from home, I never felt the pain of exile as I did last year—a pain exacerbated by my felt inability to steel my mind and marshal my will to master it.

I was lost, but lost in a familiar way. When I was 17, as a restless, anxious teenager, I wandered unawares into the Gothic cathedral at Chartres. The wonder and beauty of that medieval masterpiece made me realize that life was far more filled with joy, with possibility, with adventure and romance than I had imagined. I did not walk out of the cathedral that day a Christian, but I did leave as a pilgrim who was onto something.

“I need to see Chartres again,” I recently wrote to a friend. What I meant was that I needed my vision renewed, my spirit revived, my world re-enchanted by what I perceived there in 1984 as a world-weary American teenager who thought he had seen it all, but who in truth had no idea how blind he was until he beheld the most beautiful church in the world.

And then, killing time in a Barnes & Noble one hot south Louisiana afternoon, I opened a copy of Dante’s Inferno, the first of his Divine Comedy trilogy, and read these words (the translation I cite in this essay is by Robert and Jean Hollander):

Midway in the journey of our life
I came to myself in a dark wood,
For the straight way was lost.

I read on in that first canto, or chapter, and stood with Dante the pilgrim as wild beasts—allegories of sin—cut off all routes out of the terrifying wood. Then, to the frightened Dante’s aid, comes the Roman poet Virgil:

‘It is another path that you must follow,’
he answered, when he saw me weeping,
‘if you would flee this wild and savage place.’

So Dante follows Virgil—and I followed Dante. I did not know it in that moment, but those were the first steps of a journey that would lead me through this incomparable 14th-century poem—all 14,233 lines in 100 cantos—through the pits of Hell, up the mountain of Purgatory, beyond space and time to the zenith of Paradise—and out of my own dark wood of depression.

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