We can’t save the world from itself, counsels Marco, but we can change our own hearts ...

Dante and Holy Week

by Rod Dreher

The Divine Comedy is the most practical Great Book ever written.

In the graveyard, I saw two men arguing. One of them, a proud older man, stood inside a flaming open tomb, trying with his authoritative manner to put the younger man in his place. His opponent could have walked on, but he stood there arguing pointlessly about their families and the place they came from.

I couldn’t take my eyes off those two. The older man was dead, but didn’t seem to know it. The younger man was alive, but seemed to have forgotten it.

Suddenly it struck me: I am observing this scene from Dante’s Inferno, the book I’m holding in my hands, but in truth, I am watching my father and myself.

This unforgettable moment, in which the pilgrim Dante spars with Farinata, a damned Florentine aristocrat, revealed the hidden source of the anxiety that had plunged me into my own midlife crisis. Over 30 years of struggle between a father and a son is not exactly news, but this episode from the Inferno showed me something more profound: that both my dad and I had made false idols of Family and Place.

We were both professed Christians, but the true religion of our Southern culture is ancestor worship. Daddy, like Farinata, was not capable of recognizing that none of that really mattered. I, like the pilgrim Dante in the poem, had the power to turn away from the idol and walk on, toward the living God.

This was the first breakthrough in a spiritual, emotional, and physical healing that God worked in me, chiefly through this miraculous 14th-century poem called the Divine Comedy. It was by no means the last. The poet Dante Alighieri composed it while he was in exile from Florence, trying to reconcile his suffering with his belief in a loving God.


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