Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy and Divine Spirituality

by Robert Royal - published by Crossroad, l999

A Book Review by Father John McCloskey

Before a squash match recently in the century past, my opponent, an author and critic himself, mentioned a pre-millennial survey taken by the prestigious Times Literary Supplement in which prominent literary critics were asked to name the greatest works of literature of the millennium just past. "Guess which one won," he asked. I replied, without hesitation, "Dante's Divine Comedy." I was right. I only wish the games that followed had gone as well.

If such a survey had been done about spiritual works, The Divine Comedy would have been rated equally high. Robert Royal, former Vice president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and currently the president of the newly formed Faith and Reason Institute, has considered it so in Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy and Divine Spirituality. (Crossroad, New York, l999) This book, the author's most important, clearly reflects the labor of years of reading Dante and also of commitment to the interior life. It is part of the excellent Crossroad Spiritual Legacy Series, edited by John Farina. Dante fits well with other authors examined in the series, such as Benedict, Augustine, and Francis of Assisi, C.S. Lewis, and Thomas Aquinas.

As our own particular guide to the spiritual guidance of the Divine Comedy, Royal begins with a summary: "The Comedy recounts how, in the middle of his life, the poet finds himself lost in a dark wood of sin and error. In desperation, he seeks to return to the right path and true life in God. His quest takes him through the realms of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise to the beatific vision. Along the way, Dante encounters sinners, penitents, saved souls–some great and well-known figures from history or from his own time, other humble spirits never known beyond the small circle of their friends and acquaintances."

Then Royal traces Dante's spiritual pilgrimage through Last Things of Purgatory and Hell to the pinnacle of the Beatific Vision in heaven, explaining the historical, theological, philosophical and personal circumstances of both the author and the times in which he lived. Always, however, the primary emphasis is on the "divine spirituality" which imbues the great poem and makes it "Divine," a title chosen by later poets who stood in awe of its achievement. He makes use of a technique, normally applied to Sacred Scripture of explicating the various "senses" of the text: literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical.

The serious Christian must live in this world in such a way as to prepare for the next. Dante gives us a sneak preview. In reading the book, I came to think that Royal believes that spiritual pilgrimage of the poem may have been not imaginary but real. Royal says: "The literal meaning of this poem may indeed be about a journey that Dante somehow took beyond our usual world." If so, Dante is a true mystic, who can be included among the great spiritual authors and synthesizers of the High Middle Ages, such as St. Thomas and St. Bonaventure.

The ultimate question is whether you live for this life or the next. If you believe in and live for the next life with its rewards promised by God, you are unconquerable in this life. You realize it is passing and that at the end, after the Final Judgement, only God, heaven and hell remain: "to live is Christ; to die, a gain." In part, this is why The Divine Comedy and Royal's treatment of it are so important. If all our life is simply a preparation for the next, which is eternal, we desperately need guides to help us achieve our end. As Dante himself says in what may be the most famous opening in Christian literature "Midway upon the journey of life, I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost." (Longfellow translation) He finds his guides in Vergil and, later Beatrice. We have many guides, principally, of course, Christ's Church.

Having now survived various millennial scares, in this new century so fraught with promise yet increasingly prone to elite manipulation, world citizens are presented a series of binary choices: for God, against God: life as gift of self or life as selfishness; belief in objective truth to which one must submit or private judgement in creating one's own "truth," for Christ and his Church, or against, and the list goes on. We know the Pope foresees "a new evangelization" and "a civilization of love and truth." On the other hand, after a century of slaughter and genocide, the purveyors of evil who would be gods have turned to the final step in the rebellion. They want to interfere with God's creation itself through genetic manipulation to reverse the effects of original sin, primarily death, without God's help.

The theological science of eschatology, the study of the Last Things, certainly has not received much emphasis in the last forty years. In the documents of the Second Vatican Council scant mention is made of death, judgement, heaven, hell, and purgatory though they take up more space in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. John Paul II, however, recently examined them in a series of Wednesday catechetical talks, causing no little controversy by the misinterpretation of his words that "hell is more than just a place."

At the end, what is so important about both poem and this fine book is the emphasis on free will and the importance of our moral choices. With God's grace, we determine our own destiny. The ultimate spiritual direction imparted by the Divine Comedy, Royal tells us, is the meaning Dante took back with him into his normal life after his supernatural journey: "the love that pervades the universe and how we either find harmony in that love or by opposing God's love damage the creation, ourselves, and others around us."

At the beginning of a new Christian era and what we hope will be a "new springtime of the Church," Dante, and Royal, remind us once again of the beauty of Christian truths and their application to our lives, both temporal and eternal. Only a prayerful life based on the sacraments can effect our one day seeing face-to-face "the love which moves the sun and the other stars."

First appeared in Crisis Magazine in the March 2000 issue.