“Midway in our mortal life,
I found me in a dark wood,
Gone astray from the direct road . . .”
Wednesday, February 18, was the start of Lent, the liturgical season in Christianity leading up to Easter. Lent is a time for personal reflection.
In the Catholic Church the three pillars of Lent are Prayer, Fasting, and Almsgiving. Other Christian churches have guidelines and traditions for the season. I am writing this piece because I believe that the value of Lent and Lenten exercises (mental, physical, and spiritual) can be helpful to anyone and everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike.
The potential benefits of spiritual prayer and physical self-control are for health of body, mind, and soul, with a purpose of healing and maintaining those three elements of one’s self. Described that way, it sounds a little like Western yoga, but with no dress code and more positions.
In Lenten exercises, one can pray and reflect in both formal and informal ways: petitioning, repenting, or giving thanks; standing, sitting, or lying down; running or walking; inside a chapel or outside in nature; alone or in a crowd of others, all of whom are like you and me in similar ways because we are all imperfect human beings who do not always care for ourselves as we should physically, mentally, or spiritually.
At the beginning of the Church year we reflected on the Four Last Things: Life, Death, Heaven, and Hell. Around that time, I got the idea to read Dante’s The Divine Comedy. It is not about textbook religion. It is a poem, written at the turn of the 13th century and beginning of the 14th, that its author entitled a “comedy” because it was not a “tragedy.” It has a happy ending: after circuitous routes, Dante gets to Heaven. A second reason for writing my piece comes from recognition of the ageless significance of this book that has endured for seven centuries and that it may be helpful to pilgrims in today’s world.
The Divine Comedy is divided into three Parts: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso - - Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. It was written before the Protestant Reformation when most Christians accepted the existence of those three distinct places in eternity. Belief in purgatory was widely rejected by Protestant religions but maintained in the Catholic Church after 1540. I recently learned, however, that the least-read of the three parts is Paradiso. This is strange, since just about every philosophy and religion in the world, if not all of them, solemnly proclaim and recommend a place and goal variously called Paradise, Heaven, New Jerusalem, Promised Land, Nirvana, Valhalla, Beaulah, Zion, Kingdom Come, Elysian Fields, Happy Hunting Ground, etc.
The referenced 1909 edition’s Introduction, quoted here in part, gives a concise summary of the whole work, as follows:
The poem is the narrative of a journey down through Hell, up the mountain of Purgatory, and through the revolving heavens in to the presence of God. [It fits] the medieval literary types of Journey and Vision. It is also an allegory, [symbolically representing] the history of a human soul, painfully struggling from sin through purification to the Beatific Vision. [It] is also an encyclopedia, a poem in praise of Women and an autobiography . . . not a narrative of the external events of Dante’s life, but of the agony of his soul. [The encyclopedic nature lies in the content that describes] much of what Dante knew of theology and philosophy, of astronomy and cosmology, and fragments of other branches of learning. (Harvard Classics, Collier 1909)
Of historical significance, as I learned in Miss Hazel Ruff’s 10th grade Western Civilization class, the Comedy was the first widely published composition written in the vernacular, not in Greek or Latin.
In 2021, the celebrated seven-hundred-year anniversary of The Divine Comedy’s completion, I bought “the authoritative translation in one volume” at Lemuria. You may be thinking that I procrastinated reading. That’s not the half of it. Forty years ago, at a garage sale, I bought a complete set of the Harvard Classics (“Dr. Eliot’s Five-Foot Shelf of Books”), an edition copyrighted in 1909 by the publisher PF Collier & Son. One of the volumes was the Comedy. My penciled notes and underlines show evidence of an earlier effort.
The 21st century edition of the work makes for easier reading. It has better introductions and explanatory notes than the 20th century one. But even with the improved translation, reading The Inferno was difficult for me because of its many references to unfamiliar names of ancient figures, humans and gods. And, aside from the caution of Saint Paul (“The love of money is the source of all evil”), it relies principally on pagan Greek and Roman mythology to explain how and why punished souls, called “shadows,” came to be eternally condemned.
Lent has just begun, but I am finished with Inferno, where Dante convincingly described darkness and punishment. I am happy to be over it and glad to be in Purgatorio (reading Part Two). In faith and hope, I look forward to Paradise.
Some people play golf, but never improve their score. Some read, but never increase their I.Q. In that respect, I am not the brightest light and certainly no church scholar. But I will offer my opinion that the tradition of Lent, like Christianity itself, is important to the health of Western Civilization and every citizen in it. Like a multi-level self-improvement course, Lenten exercises can make a person spiritually, mentally, and physically healthier than before one began. The Divine Comedy can be helpful in that exercise for self-reflection to recognize personal changes needed for the good of our bodies, minds and souls including, maybe, the right path to repentance should you find yourself in a dark wood.
Chip Williams is a Northsider.
