Richard Hughes Gibson. The Way of Dante: Going Through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven with C.S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Charles Williams. IVP Academic, 2025. $24.99. 248 pp.
Christmas has come and gone, and if your loved ones are anything like mine, they probably gave you some very sensible gifts—the kind of things normal people could use. But I am not a normal person, and neither are you, so it’s time to get ourselves what we really want in our odd little hearts. I went looking for gifts related to Dante’s Inferno, and the internet did not disappoint.
You can trade your traditional peppermint sticks for Dante’s Inferno Hot Candy Canes or enjoy a cup of hot cocoa from your Charon’s Ferry Service mug. Welcome members of your family home for future holidays with this helpful sign. If your price range is a bit higher, perhaps you would enjoy a clutch from Olympia Le-Tan designed to look like a Gustav Doré illustrated copy of the Inferno? (Not that you’ll have any money left to store inside.)
It is one of those unfortunate inevitabilities of history that Dante Alighieri should be remembered even by those who know nothing of medieval poetry, but only in association with the macabre. The fullness of Dante’s achievement in his Comedy and Vita Nuova is beyond my ability to express but T.S. Eliot said it perfectly in his volume The Poets on Poets: Dante: “Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them; there is no third.”
Eliot did not mean Shakespeare and Dante were responsible for the electric light bulb or the atomic bomb, but that the breadth of their works provided the supreme description of the human experience. “And gradually we come to admit that Shakespeare understands a greater extent and variety of human life than Dante; but that Dante understands deeper degrees of degradation and higher degrees of exaltation.” (emphasis mine)
It is those positive aspects of Dante’s work—the quest for virtue and entrance into glory—that chiefly interested the literary trio of Charles Williams, C.S. Lewis, and Dorothy Sayers. In his new book, The Way of Dante, Richard Hughes Gibson examines the interactions between these three authors, the ways in which they helped each other understand Dante, and the spiritual truths they uncovered.
Through his analysis of documents held at Wheaton College’s Marion E. Wade Center, Gibson found that, “Sayers, Williams, and Lewis must be understood as a cohort of Dante readers whose invocations of Dante—public and private, conspicuous and covert—comprise a network of allusions, quotations, and citations.” They were “translators of Dante to their generation,” endeavoring “to bring readers, auditors, students into Dante’s poem, Dante’s mentality, Dante’s cosmos.” Gibson takes us on a journey through their engagements with Dante in the hope that it will inspire us to seek out the old master ourselves. “Reading Dante just might change your life. It changed theirs.”
Williams found his love for Dante early, while Lewis first studied Dante seriously around 1930 while in the process of converting to Christianity. Their mutual love for the Tuscan bard brought them together. When Williams first read Lewis’ work The Allegory of Love, a meditation upon medieval chivalric literature, he “felt he had found a kindred spirit among the living—just as he had in Dante among the dead.”
Sayers was latest to the party, picking up a volume of Dante while sheltering in the family bunker during World War II. She immediately longed to bring its magic to a general British audience. “She sought to enlist Williams because his method set historical trivia aside. She wanted him to close the temporal gap between medieval and modern and reveal the poem’s continuing relevance to ordinary reader’s lives.”
This is a critical point, for the trio’s interest in Dante’s work was not merely literary. They believed it was of genuine spiritual importance in an age when evil had been put on such terrible display. Gibson concludes that “my authors’ truly outstanding contribution in the wartime and postwar contexts in which they were publishing was to argue that the Comedy is true.” Crucially, this meant not only that its descriptions of the worst of humanity were true, but also its predictions of what humanity would be at its best.
The trio sought to affirm the reality of hell not as the torture chamber of a wrathful God, but the self-made torment of those given over to evil. “With Dante, Sayers and Lewis depict hell as the choice to remain forever in the ‘dungeon’ of one’s own mind. Hell is the fierce embrace of unreality.” In the Inferno, “they beheld the sins we coddle within ourselves bearing their poison fruit.” The purpose of Dante’s journey to the underworld, they concluded, was not to scare readers straight, but to make them long for another way of being. “By contemplating the kingdom of hell and recognizing that it is within and around us, we may yearn for another kingdom.”
Therefore, the Comedy truly gets to work on the purgatorial mount, where human beings shed the evil desires that hold them in chains. “All three members of my cohort preferred the Comedy’s second canticle to its first,” Gibson notes. “Yet the reading public didn’t share their esteem of Purgatorio because, for the most part, the common reader hadn’t read it.” Here again we see how most people are attracted to Dante’s descriptions of evil rather than those of goodness. Desiring and seeing the good, according to the trio, requires a change of vision brought about by God himself. “Purgatorio, on this understanding, presents the arduous journey to clearsightedness—regarding the self, one’s neighbors, creation, and the Maker of all of these.”
The storytelling becomes more difficult when Dante arrives in paradise itself, for nothing sinful lends drama to the story. C.S. Lewis admitted that the concept of glory—of being transfigured into a luminous being—fails to capture the imagination of the modern person. He explained that in his day “the artist doesn’t just have to help us to see the latent glory in creation; the artist also has to make Dante’s sort of glory desirable.” The awakening of that desire occurs through encounters with blessedness that point us toward the beatific vision we will behold in eternity. Again, God must remake our vision for us to see clearly.
Beatrice played this role for Dante in real life and in the Comedy, but it can be taken up by all manner of persons, for “as Lewis had learned from reading Williams, anyone can be a Beatrice.” This concept was clearly portrayed in Lewis’ book The Great Divorce, where we find “a series of Beatrician encounters in which figures of glory try to coax hellions out of their self-enclosed shadows and into the life-renewing light. The book, simply stated, is about the ever-present opportunity for glory that lies before us all.” That pursuit of glory was the chief objective of Williams before his sudden death in 1945, of Sayers as she penned her translations of the Comedy, and of Lewis as he applied its principles to his fiction and non-fiction works.
In The Way of Dante, Gibson takes us on a journey with Sayers, Williams, and Lewis, as they journey with Dante. Even so, we all look back to the inspirational figures of the past as we walk the pilgrim way, some of whom play the same role for us that Beatrice did for Dante and Dante did for the trio. As Gibson explains,
Dante took Dorothy Sayers, Charles Williams, and C.S. Lewis through hell, and they thanked him for his infernal instruction in how not to live. But they loved the medieval poet because the pit is only the first stage of his epic pilgrimage. Dante made ‘art for seeing evil.’ My trio testified that the Comedy is also, and to a far greater extent, art for experiencing glory.
The Way of Dante is an academic work based in part on Gibson’s Hansen lectures. The writing is generally clear and engaging, and the best thing I can say for this book is that it fulfilled one of its author’s primary goals: it made me want to read Dante again. The afterword by Nicole Mazzarella is an interesting addition that will help readers engage with the second volume of the Comedy, Purgatorio. This is an ideal book for fans of both Dante and the Inklings.
