"Midway Upon the Journey of Our Life"

Dante began his The Divine Comedy with these words:

Midway upon the journey of our life

            I found myself in a dark wilderness,

            for I had wandered from the straight and true.

How hard a thing it is to tell about,

            that wilderness so savage, dense, and harsh,

            even to think of it renews my fear!

The wilderness into which Dante wandered, says translator Anthony Esolen, “represents the confusion of choices in a life not obedient to reason and thus not oriented toward man’s happiness.” That is, the wilderness is a life that has gotten out of control pushed about by whims, emotion, desires, and by the demands, expectations, and wishes of others. The wilderness is also the threshold to Hell, the subject of the first book of The Comedy, the Inferno.

Dante attempts to climb out of the dark wilderness to obtain the happiness he can see in the distance, but is driven back in despair by beasts representing his uncontrolled urges and cravings “to where the sun is silent evermore.”

There is only one way out of the wilderness and that is through self-discovery and a reordering of life his. For that, Dante must descend into the depths of the Inferno and climb the mountain of the Purgatory before he can enjoy the good, the true, and the beautiful in the Paradise.

The Comedy like other spiritual classics such as John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and Hannah Hurnard’s Hinds Feet in High Places is at its core an allegory of the inner life. It’s a comedy not because it’s funny (it’s not), but in the classical sense that it’s a story that, despite all manner of suffering and sadness, has a happy ending. And even though thinking about the wilderness renews Dante’s fears, he goes on:

It is so bitter, death is hardly more—

            but to reveal the good that came to me,

            I shall relate the other things I saw.

In Pears, Grapes, and Dates: A Good Life After Mid-Life, I call the journey of self-discovery being a pear and the older of the two main characters is, like Dante, generous in sharing what he has learned in life.

My publisher has okayed the galley of the book and, with a bit more work on my part, it will be available next week.

In the meanwhile, I’ve reposted an article about Dante’s journey to Hell on my website and will follow up by posting about the Purgatory and the Paradise.

(The quotes are from Anthony Esolen’s translation of the Inferno, Canto I, Lines 1-9)