European Muslims Need Dante; So Does Everyone Else

The Italians are not requiring Muslim students to study Dante because of the way he treats Muhammad. Will they do the same for non-Muslim teens because of the way he treats lust or obese students because he calls gluttony a sin?

From The European Conservative

By Rod Dreher

The great Tuscan poet can save our lives.

Last week, an Italian news outlet reported that two Muslim high school students had been exempted from the required study of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Why? Because they were offended by Dante’s treatment of the Prophet Muhammad, whom Dante places in Hell as a sower of discord. The school allowed the students to study Boccaccio instead.

This is infuriating. If you wish to live in Italy—or anywhere in the West—you should study Dante, a poet of almost peerless stature. The poet T.S. Eliot said, “Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third.” 

Though appreciating Dante and his Commedia has fallen into scandalous neglect in the Anglophone world, Eliot spoke truth. You cannot know what it means to be Italian, you cannot know what it means to be Western—indeed, you may not know fully what it means to be human—without encountering Dante. That the Italians—Italians!—have given Muslim students the option of skipping Dante is a shocking sign of the loss of self-confidence, and the acceptance of dhimmitude—Bat Ye’or’s term for the voluntary second-class citizen status weak-minded Westerners accept when confronted by strong-willed Muslims in their midst. 

What’s next? Queer students claiming exemption because they resent the fact that Dante has created in Hell a Circle of the Sodomites? In fact, homosexuality is not really discussed in those cantos. Dante uses homosexuality as a symbol of creative infertility. In it, the pilgrim Dante (the character traveling through the afterlife, as distinct from the poet Dante) encounters his old mentor, Brunetto Latini, in one of the Commedia’s most moving moments. Brunetto encourages his former charge to keep writing poetry for his own personal glory. As we see later, in Purgatorio, this is bad advice; the poet Dante wants us to know that the kind of glory that lasts comes when an artist creates in service of higher ideals.

But even if you think of Dante as a homophobe, so what? Who has a right to expect Tuscans of the 13th century to hold the social values of 21st century Europeans? It’s arrogant and absurd. To be truly cosmopolitan is to be able to encounter values different to one’s own, indeed strongly opposed to them, and not flinch. Besides, if one was raising secular or Christian kids in an Islamic society, it would be perfectly fair to expect them to know the texts that inform Islamic civilization, even if those writings condemn non-Muslims.

That said, there is an immensely practical reason to read Dante in the 21st century, one that has nothing to do with upholding cultural standards or enriching one’s literary knowledge. Reading Dante can save your life. I mean that literally. It happened to me, in a tale I recount in my 2015 book How Dante Can Save Your Life, recently reissued by Regan Books. 

This medieval masterpiece, perhaps the greatest poem ever written, reached me when I thought I was unreachable, and lit the way out of a dark wood of depression, confusion, and a stress-related autoimmune disease that, had it persisted, likely would have led to lymphatic cancer.

Dante helped me understand the mistakes and mistaken beliefs that had brought me to this dead end. He showed me that I had the power to change, and revealed to me how to do so. Most important of all, the poet gave me a renewed vision of life, and brought me closer to God than I had ever imagined possible. 

Even if you don’t believe in God, there are profound lessons in the Commedia about life and how to live it. A masterpiece like this doesn’t endure for eight centuries if it doesn’t speak to the depths of the human condition. The Commedia shows us a way of regarding life and ourselves—a way that draws us away from egotism and toward selfless love.  Who doesn’t need that?

In the middle of the journey of my life, I returned to my rural hometown in south Louisiana, after the untimely death from cancer of my younger sister. Growing up there had not always been easy for me. I was the only son of a father who was disappointed in me. Dad was physically strong, athletic, a gifted hunter and fisherman, and an all-around man of the countryside. His son, by contrast, was weak and bookish and preferred to live inside books. My teenage years with him were a time of constant clash. After I finished college, I moved away to the East Coast, and worked as a journalist, thriving in a milieu better suited to my personality and my gifts.

Yet ours was a close family all the same. Wherever I lived, I talked to my folks every couple of days by phone. It wasn’t difficult to maintain a good relationship from a distance, but for over two decades, I longed to return home and be united with my family. 

My sister was just like our father. She loved country life. She married her high school sweetheart. They built a house across the gravel path from our parents, and raised their three daughters there, under the oak trees. I married and had three kids too, but my wife and I brought our children up in New York City, Dallas, and finally Philadelphia. My Louisiana family disapproved of our big-city ways, but we still managed to get along, seeing each other in person several times a year.

Cancer killed my sister in 2011. Moved by the compassionate way my hometown (population 2,000) responded to Ruthie’s illness, and seeking to be a help to my grief-stricken Louisiana family, my wife and I packed up our things and moved there in the waning days of 2011. Moreover, after David Brooks of The New York Times wrote a column about my online chronicle of my sister’s death—a logbook that became a testimony to the power of loving community—I found myself in the first weeks of 2012 with a big book deal to write about Ruthie and our town. I was going to tell the whole world how wonderful she was.

For me, it was what the Greeks call a nostos journey—a homecoming. At long last, I was sure that my family—especially my father—would receive me. I wasn’t the Prodigal Son, exactly, because I hadn’t lived a bad life out in the world. But I was a prodigal in my Louisiana family’s eyes, in that I wasted the chance to embrace their way of life, my inheritance. 

Things did not turn out like I expected. They were all polite—we are all Southerners after all, and know our manners—but my parents as well as my sister’s kids all rejected us. My sainted sister, it turned out, had raised her children to turn their backs to my wife and me as city people—and my parents had reinforced that judgment. Now that she was gone, fidelity to Ruthie’s memory was the guiding star of their lives. 

It was as if the Prodigal Son story from the Bible had ended with the father taking the side of the jealous older brother, and refused to let his long-lost son cross the threshold into his home.

I fell into a depression, but I also became physically ill. I developed chronic mononucleosis. A rheumatologist did a bunch of testing, and said the only explanation for it is deep and chronic stress. He asked me why I was stressed, and I told him. 

He said well then, you have to leave Louisiana, or you’re going to destroy your health. I can’t leave, I said. I have made my wife and kids move too often. Besides, my folks might be difficult, but I’m the only child they have left.

 “You had better find some way to inner peace, then,” the doctor said. “Or you’re not going to make it.”

Shortly after this news, in the late summer of 2013, I was in a bookstore, when a volume on the top shelf in the poetry section caught my eye: a translation of the Commedia. “Ah, I wish I had read that when I was in high school or college,” I thought. But it’s too late for me now. I’m 46 years old, and I’m sure I couldn’t understand it. It would be like trying to scale a literary Mount Everest.

Still, I opened up the book and read these words:

Midway in the journey of our life

I came to myself in a dark wood,

for the straight way was lost.

It hit me like a bolt of lightning: he’s talking about me!

I read on, through the first two cantos, and was instantly caught up in the drama. Here was a man who was trapped in a thicket of fear and confusion, powerless to escape. Dante’s verse captured the feeling of my own depression and anxiety precisely. 

I did not buy the Commedia that day, but could not stop thinking about it. Eventually I succumbed, and began to read—not as a literary exercise, but as if I were a castaway on a desert island who had found a message in a bottle that just might be a map leading me back to the world.

The Commedia is Dante writing himself out of his own dark wood. As a young man, Dante Alighieri had become a celebrated poet. He was even elevated to be one of the governors of his hometown, Florence. But he found himself on the wrong side of the cutthroat politics of Tuscany, and in 1302, suffered permanent exile from the city. Overnight Dante went from being on top of the world into a deep pit. 

His exile, which lasted until he died in Ravenna in 1321, afforded Dante the chance to examine how his life had gone wrong. In so doing, he explored how all human lives go wrong. In his three-part poem, his fictional self goes through the Inferno, where he rediscovers the nature of sin; Purgatory, where his soul is rebuilt through repentance and asceticism; and finally through Paradise, where he is perfected in holiness and approaches the throne of God Himself. 

The journey through the afterlife, which takes place during the Easter Triduum, is plainly an allegory of the Christian life. If that’s all it was, the Commedia would not be such a towering landmark of world literature. The poem is a psychologically and spiritually profound accounting of human brokenness, and a guide to healing it. 

The core lesson of the Commedia: we fail by failing at love; we either love the wrong things, or love the right things in the wrong way (too much or too little). Dante learns that he left the straight path by treating finite things as ultimate goals. Or, to put it plainly, he treated worldly concerns—especially romantic love, as embodied by his idol Beatrice—as if they were God.  

This is what reading Dante revealed to me about my own faults. In walking through the precincts of Hell, and up the mountain of Purgatory with Dante, and then soaring through the heavens in his company, I discovered my own fundamental mistakes that had delivered me into my own dark wood.

As he argued pointlessly in Hell with Farinata, a proud Florentine of a rival political party, I saw the emptiness of perpetuating my lifelong argument with my father. In the Inferno, Farinata’s nature was fixed; he could not change. But Dante could walk away from the fight. So could I.

In Hell’s Circle of the Suicides, Dante heard the testimony of Pier della Vigna, who had in real life been secretary to the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. He fell from favor, and went to prison on false corruption charges. Unable to bear life without Frederick’s esteem, Pier killed himself. Reading that canto, I realized that I was, in a sense, killing myself out of desperate longing for my father’s approval.

And then, at precisely the halfway point in the entire poem, Dante the pilgrim finds himself on the Terrace of Wrath in Purgatory, the place where the tendency to anger is purged. Dante converses with Marco, a Lombard who advises him that all the troubles of Tuscany are rooted in unrestrained wrath. You don’t have the power to control the world, Marco says, but you do have free will—and that means you can control your reaction to it. If you want to heal the world, he says, start with your own heart.

And there it was. I knew what I had to do. My father, and my Louisiana family, would not likely change. But I could change by repenting of my chronic need for my father’s approval, and working to conquer my anger at my family. My priest at the time told me, in confession, that even if my anger is justified, I have to learn how to love my family as Christ loves us. This is God’s will, he said. I found that hard to accept, until I read the line in Paradiso from the nun Piccarda: “In His will is our peace.” As difficult as it was, I committed to living by that maxim.

It worked. Slowly but surely, my anxiety left me, and so did my mononucleosis symptoms. The months passed, and my father descended towards death. On Easter weekend of 2015, he said the words I never thought I would hear from him: that he was sorry for the way he treated me. In the wake of that shocking but welcome gesture, I reflected that if I had known what was awaiting me in Louisiana, I never would have left Philadelphia. But if I had not gone on that journey, I never would have been able to let go of my agonized need for my father’s approval, and I would not have been there to hear him say, in the twilight of his long life, “I’m sorry.”

Late that summer, he lay dying at home. I lived with him in his bedroom for the final week of his life, giving him his medicine, reading to him, praying with him, and just sitting quietly. When he took his last breath, I was holding his hand. All my adult life I had feared that moment, anticipating that I would shatter into a million pieces. But in the event, an overwhelming calm descended on me, a God-given sense of harmony. Later that night, alone in my kitchen at home, I wondered why what I had long expected to be the worst day of my life had turned out to be golden. 

Then it hit me: Because I believed what Dante had told me, through the words of Piccarda: In His will is our peace. I had willed to love my father despite it all, not because I wanted to, but because I knew that only in obeying God would I find peace. I burst into tears, the only tears I ever shed over my father’s death—but they were tears of gratitude, for what God had given me in Dante.

Funnily enough, I learned little or nothing from reading Dante that I hadn’t also heard from both my priest and a therapist I was seeing at the time. Yet there was something about encountering these same truths within a narrative—indeed, a narrative unspooled over 14,000 lines of beautiful poetry—that made them resonate in my heart like nothing else. 

When I entered into the world of Dante, I found myself in a realm of a different kind of knowing. At some point on this pilgrimage, I couldn’t say when, I forgot that I was an outside observer reading about this character named Dante going through the pits of hell and up the mountain of purgatory, but I felt that I was experiencing it myself. 

Here’s something interesting: neuroscientists have evidence that when a person reads moral instruction presented as non-fiction, and reads the same moral point presented as a story, they are more likely to be changed by it in story form. Why? It seems that when you read a story about a man walking up a mountain, the parts of your brain that light up when you walk also light up. There is something in the architecture of our brains that incarnates ideals in our own bodies when they come to us as stories or works of art, as opposed to in the form of abstract principles.

Dante’s poem—this work of staggering beauty—saved me by engaging my imagination, and helping me to see things that I could not grasp in a transformative way in the form of a proposition. We so often think that if we just discover the right facts, or the perfect argument, we will solve our problems. What if the problem is not so much a failure of cognition, but one of imagination? The Commedia is one of the most philosophically, theologically, and aesthetically complex works of art ever created by a human mind, but in the end, its message is: you must convert your heart.

This is how Dante saved my life. He lost the world, but saved his soul. He showed me that by trying to control the world, and despairing over my failures, I had lost my health, and might even lose my soul. He can save the lives of every reader who trusts him by unmasking their true selves, beneath the myriad self-deceptions. He shows us that change is difficult, but change is possible. He shows us that love—real love—is at the heart of human existence, and only needs to be rightly directed away from ourselves and towards others—especially God—to flourish.

As I said earlier, Dante Alighieri never returned to Florence, and died in exile. Yet he had found his heart’s true home in God. This has been a comfort to me as I now find myself living in a kind of exile. The ordeal of my years of illness opened fractures in my marriage that never healed, though I did. My wife and I divorced in 2022, and today I live in Europe with our older son. These days, pondering my next move in my shadowy copse on the banks of the Danube, I find myself wondering: “Should I walk with Dante again? What would he show me this time?”

A divorced man in late middle age is a different reader than a sick and confused family man in middle age. And they are different readers than high school students, many of whom have not really suffered in life. Nevertheless, Dante and his Commedia are guides for life, because nearly all of human existence can be found in its pages. Dante is one of Italy’s greatest gifts to humanity. 

What a pity that the Italians, in their cowardice, are denying these two prideful Muslim teenagers the opportunity to walk with Dante through the land of the dead, and back to a life worth living.

---

Rod Dreher’s How Dante Can Save Your Life is out in a new edition from Regan Books

Pictured: Dante Meditating on the “Divine Comedy” (1843), a 42.3 x 36.1 cm pen and ink on graphite by Jean-Jacques Feuchère (1807-1852), located at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.