Dante's Divine Comedy (redux)

[vash88]

I did a search for the Divine Comedy on this forum and found that all the threads for it are years old and thus closed. So… starting a new one, with a question, and hopefully to get some conversation going on this again.

It’s been years and years since I read Dante’s Inferno (before I even thought about becoming a Catholic even), and I’ve never read Dante’s Purgatorio or Paradiso. I did just recently buy all three of them though after something piqued my interest. Unfortunately I didn’t do a very good job of looking into what I was buying exactly because I ended up buying versions that didn’t have any cliff-notes. So, while they’re translated decently well, I’m left up to my own interpretation. So I haven’t really gotten into reading them yet.

But what got me interested in the poems again was that I had heard reading Dante’s Inferno on its own gives a very warped view of what Dante’s view is. Can someone who knows more elaborate on that? Considering that it’ll take me a while to read all of them (especially without cliff-notes, since they’re not exactly something you just pick up and read on a whim), it’ll be a while before I’m able to get the full scope of what his view is.

 

[Limoncello4021]

First, get a good translation. I taught Dante for many years on the university level, and I always used Mark Musa’s.
Second, get a good companion volume–not cliff notes. I’d recommend Robert Royal’s Divine Comedy, Divine Spirituality (although it has some flaws). Royal interprets the work from a Catholic perspective, as it was meant to be read.
Third, read the entire Comedy. Do several cantos/day, at the very least, reading the commentary side by side. It is not difficult. That’s why I like Musa for beginners–his is a down to earth, simple yet accurate translation that reads beautifully. Meditate on what you read.
Why read the whole thing? Because Catholicism doesn’t end with with sin and damnation. Rather, it starts there, but then gives us a Savior who leads to our purgation and our heaven. To read only Inferno is to get a very skewed idea of both Dante’s work and of our life–as if God was simply vindictive in throwing people into hell. As you read on into Purgatorio and Paradiso, you soon realize God throws no one in hell–hell is a choice the soul itself makes. Purgatorio is much like our journey on earth, working out our salvation but suffering too. It is full of lessons on right living. Paradiso is beautiful, marvelous, ethereal, mystical–my favorite book!–but hard to comprehend because we’re not there yet.
As Royal states in his book, you can’t read the Comedy without it changing you,
But DO get a good translation. A bad translation can be very off-putting from the get-go.