Richard Hughes Gibson

Review: The Way of Dante

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The Way of Dante

The Way of Dante (Hansen Lectureship Series), Richard Hughes Gibson, afterword by Nicole Mazzarella. IVP Academic (ISBN: 9781514013380) 2025.

Summary: Lectures exploring how C.S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Charles Williams read Dante’s “Divine Comedy.”

This book is not a work of literary criticism of Dante’s The Divine Comedy. At least not directly. Rather, it is a study of how three literary friends interacted over their mutual love for Dante. In this book, Richard Hughes Gibson retraces the conversations, correspondence, and scholarship of C.S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Charles Williams about Dante. And that fits the purpose of the Hansen Lectureship Series of the Marion E. Wade Center, at which these lectures were first given. The Center houses a collection of the papers of these three authors as well as those of J.R.R. Tolkien, George MacDonald, G.K. Chesterton, and Owen Barfield. Each year, the Hansen Lectureship features scholars highlighting some aspect of the thought and work of these writers.

Hughes introduces this study by describing what he found in his study of the papers. What he found was “a cohort of Dante readers whose invocation of Dante–public and private, conspicuous and covert–comprise a network of allusions, quotations, and citations” (p. xxiv, italics in the original). Each picked up on different things–Sayers his narrative and humor, Lewis, his cosmology and the language he used to describe it, and Williams, the portrayal of romantic love and Dante’s use of allegory.

Hughes then gives a prehistory of each author’s encounter with Dante. This is followed by a brief summary of the genesis of how the three came together around their shared love of Dante. It can be summarized in the six subtitles of the chapter:

  1. Williams reads Lewis (or the Allegory of Love affair)
  2. Lewis reads Williams and recommends his book (The Figure of Beatrice)
  3. Sayers reads Williams (and then Dante)
  4. Williams reads Sayers (reading and rendering Dante)
  5. Lewis reads Sayers’ Dante criticism and translation
  6. Sayers reads Lewis (and writes him and Williams into her translation)

Besides the fact that these people did a lot of reading, it was particularly illuminating to learn of the role Williams played in encouraging Sayers to read Dante, and then his (and Lewis’s) warm response to her critical essays and translation of Inferno. He even agreed to write an Introduction to her work. However, Williams died in 1944, unable to fulfill that commitment. Hughes then follows their interactions through the three parts of The Divine Comedy.

Firstly, with Hell, we see the perception of all three that this is more than political commentary. Rather, it is a serious reflection on evil in all its forms. Secondly, Hughes focuses on how all three saw in Purgatory an ascent of increasing love. Finally, in Paradiso, we see the three wrestle with the nature of glory in the encounter with Beatrice. Hughes spends two chapters on this in “The Problem of Glory” and “The Patterns of Glory.” In between the chapters on Hell and Purgatory, Hughes inserts a lengthy chapter on allegory. In this case, the three understood allegory and symbol in different ways and Hughes teases out the nuances of difference between them.

The work left me regretting that I never got beyond Inferno in my reading of Dante. It also underscored what a rich experience might be found in reading (and re-reading) Dante with “a cohort of readers.” However, even if we are unable to do so, we are able to listen in on the discussions of these three Dante readers. Hughes work of mining their papers reveals another facet of our indebtedness to these three beyond the considerable gift of their published works. They also shined a spotlight on one of the greatest works of literature and its abiding significance.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: Charitable Writing

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Charitable Writing, Richard Hughes Gibson and James Edward Beitler III, Foreword by Anne Ruggles Gere, Afterword by Alan Jacobs. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2020.

Summary: Two writing professors explore how Christian faith ought shape both how one writes and how one teaches students to write, shaped by the virtues of humility, love, and hope.

When many of us think of writing in our present time, we think of contentious writing, angry writing, divisive writing. Whether in academic discourse of a scroll through your social media feed, one doesn’t have to go far to find examples of a “scorched earth” approach to writing. Charitable writing? Not so much.

Actually, the authors of this work only have this indirectly in mind. As writing professors at a Christian college, they realized that their approach to writing wasn’t any different than when they had taught in secular settings. If as Christians your aspiration is “whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him” (Colossians 3:17), then what might this look like in both the practice of writing, and the teaching of students to write? It is a question about which I think. This is the question out of which this book arose.

The authors propose that virtuous actions manifesting charity ought to shape our writing. They organize the book around three threshold virtues or concepts: humble listening, loving argument and hopeful time keeping. They devote several chapters to each of these ideas. One of the striking features of this book is that they explore these ideas through visual art as well as their own writing.

Humility begins in humbling oneself before God in prayer as one enters one’s study or workspace to write. Humility is the openness to God and denial of self of Mary at the annunciation. Other images point toward humility as an abiding virtue of writing. The authors go on to discuss humility in writing communities, including writing classes, and in discourse communities, where humility means careful listening to the community and attentive use of that community’s language as one communicates.

They turn to loving argument, beginning with a painting of Augustine symbolizing the triangle of head, heart, and tradition or logos, pathos, and ethos in writing. They explore our metaphors for argument, mostly warlike, explaining both our aversion to argument and why they often end badly. They propose different metaphors. One metaphor is the table, a place of hospitality, a feast together. We can share the meal with generous care for each other or we can feast in a “beastly” fashion, where we seek to get ours at the expense of others. Do we make space for the writing of others at our table?

Finally Gibson and Beitler talk about keeping time hopefully. One aspect of this is writing slowly. As others have observed, there is no good writing, only good re-writing. They walk us through pre-writing, drafting, and revising. Writing is an exercise in hope as one engages the slow, patient work involved. Slow writing allows others to join in, helping with revisions and edits, making our ideas better. But writing in hope also incorporates “liturgies” that invite God in, to inform our writing and to point it toward his telos for life.

As they draw to conclusion, we are reminded that these virtues are social virtues. Writing is social and not solitary. Charitable writing reaches out, it converses and disputes, it holds, embraces and releases. Writing in this way reminds us of our call as disciples to love God and each other, even when we argue. As bonuses this book offers an afterword by Alan Jacobs, a guide to discussion with writing prompts, an essay on teaching charitable writing, and one on the spiritual discipline of writing.

I deeply appreciated this book. For someone who never thought of himself as a writer, I’ve done quite a bit of it in the past decade. It can be hard and humbling and drive you to prayer as you look for the words to get past a block. To send one’s ideas out to others invites both community and criticism. Most of the time I’ve written with great love, and sometimes unlovingly. One writes with hope that your words will connect with others, that long deliberated ideas will give encouragement and light to others. If nothing else, writing changes us, and hopefully for the better. Gibson and Beitler show us how that may be so, to the end of loving God and others.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.