Out of the Dark Wood

I confess that I approached this book warily. “How Dante Can Save Your Life” is the sort of title that reminds one of the abundance of volumes about the power of “Great Books”: How Proust Can Change Your Life; How to Live — or, a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer; Why Homer Matters; My Life in Middlemarch. Happily, many of these books have been quite good. But a lover of literature can be forgiven for being wary. After all, few things threaten a Great Book more than a lesser one that seeks to make it — gulp — “relevant.”

Dante is dangerously vulnerable to this treatment. Just consider his reputation. “Among the many celebrated geniuses of whom the Catholic faith can boast who have left undying fruits in literature and art especially, besides other fields of learning, and to whom civilization and religion are ever in debt, highest stands the name of Dante Alighieri.” So wrote Pope Benedict XV in his 1921 encyclical In Praeclara Summorum. A few years later, T. S. Eliot declared that “Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them; there is no third.”