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:
- Williams reads Lewis (or the Allegory of Love affair)
- Lewis reads Williams and recommends his book (The Figure of Beatrice)
- Sayers reads Williams (and then Dante)
- Williams reads Sayers (reading and rendering Dante)
- Lewis reads Sayers’ Dante criticism and translation
- 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.