How did you get involved with the Lumen Christi Institute?
I first got involved in Lumen Christi almost a decade ago, when I started my Masters at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School. The Institute’s reputation had preceded it: at a conference, a professor from a Catholic college had advised me to acquaint myself with the Institute’s work and especially with its founder, Thomas Levergood. I benefited enormously from Lumen Christi’s programs and the friendships I developed through them in those formative years of my scholarly life – most of all, from Thomas’s mentorship, support, and example. May his memory be a blessing.
Why did you choose Dante for your reading group?
In my view, this text is the crowning achievement of the Catholic imagination, perhaps even more so than Augustine’s Confessions. It is a work of astounding erudition, humanity, faith, and scale. Every time I’ve read it, there is some passage that moves me to tears. In his Comedy, Dante synthesizes and sets to a fever pitch the entire world of medieval European spirituality – a spirituality that, for me, must play a key role in the handing-down of an authentically Christian culture. It was a desire to do this “traditioning” with my friends and colleagues that inspired me to organize this reading group.
How is the approach that Dante encourages to the faith unique?
Three themes stick out to me. First, eros. Dante is convinced that our particular, physical desires, when properly directed, lead us to the love of God. The courtly romance between Dante and Beatrice is the paradigmatic tie that binds the saints of the Church together, even across the gulf of death. Second, patriotism. The sights, sounds, and smells of Italy suffuse Dante’s descriptions of the afterlife, almost as if he is consecrating his earthly homeland by promising to remember it in our heavenly one. Even his violent criticisms of a Florence turned away from Christian virtue must be read in the light of his longing to return there. Third, the mystery of providence. Inferno and Purgatorio are morality plays, but when Dante enters the Earthly Paradise, everything changes. What he thought he’d earned by his own moral striving, Beatrice reveals to have been wholly the act of grace.
Do you think the reading group was a success?
I wanted to build intellectual friendships between students and faculty and between ‘town and gown’ by bringing all of these demographics together over a shared “great book.” Considering that professors, grad students, and community members attended regularly, I daresay the reading group achieved this aim.
Some participants shared with me that Dante had proved an invaluable companion to them over the course of a challenging academic year, which drives home one of reading’s greatest gifts. In the midst of life’s difficulties and history’s vicissitudes, the classics give us a reprieve, lifting us up into that contemplative space where we touch divinity for a moment. If this reading group was able to facilitate that experience for even just a few people, it was absolutely worth it.
Do you have a favorite moment from the reading group?
The most awesome part of discussing any text is when you collectively come to a flash of interpretive insight, facilitating a contemplative moment. Two such moments stand out to me.
The first was when we realized why Dante keeps agonizing over Odysseus’s fate and ties his poem so closely to the Aeneid. It’s because he sees the Commedia as the imperial epic of a Christendom-to-come – playing, in a biblical key, the same tune Homer and Virgil strummed for their respective civilizations. We thus had to grapple with the fact that Dante’s baptism of antiquity is a political project, inseparable from his apocalyptic criticism of the Church’s temporal power and his utopian dream of a united Europe.
The second ‘a-ha’ moment was when we saw the inverse picture between God’s judgment and human knowledge that the autobiographies of the damned and the blessed paint, respectively. The damned know why they are being punished but cannot accept it; the blessed do not know why they were saved – that is the mystery of providence – but they freely accept it, “willing all as He wills.”