A hundred years ago, between the First and Second World Wars, there was a great revival of interest in the Divine Comedy in light of the political upheavals following the first and second World Wars, the rise of totalitarianism in Europe, and the concomitant secularization of society. Unsurprisingly, some Christians looked to Dante in analyzing the errors of their own day. Among those who did was Dorothy Sayers. Sayers translated and interpreted the Divine Comedy and wrote a number of essays on it as well. I use her work when teaching Dante in class, along with another book, The Figure of Beatrice by Anglican writer Charles Williams. Sayers’ commentaries as well as Williams’ work (and his somewhat Dantesque novels, such as Descent into Hell) offer wonderful insight into Dante’s thought. Images and ideas from the Divine Comedy inform the apologetical fiction of C. S. Lewis and the poetry of T. S. Eliot.
The particular appeal of Dante, I argue, lies in the fact that the Divine Comedy is not only a great work of poetry but also autobiographical. Dante tells the story of his conversion to Christ as an allegory of the soul seeking God; he tells the reader of how he regained faith and hope in God in the face of his despair. To someone who thinks there is reason to despair in our day, Dante’s hope becomes his or her hope. Dante relates how he lost his faith in God and found it again, and at every moment he attributes his redemption to God’s gracious love, which is, in the words with which he closes the Paradiso, ‘the love that moves the sun and the other stars’.
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