Introduction

The opening lines of The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri launched Rod Dreher on a journey that rescued him from exile and saved his life. Dreher found that the medieval poem offered him a surprisingly practical way of solving modern problems.

Following the death of his little sister and the publication of his New York Times bestselling memoir The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, Dreher found himself living in the small community of Starhill, Louisiana where he grew up. But instead of the fellowship he hoped to find, he discovered that fault lines within his family had deepened. Dreher spiraled into depression and a stress-related autoimmune disease. Doctors told Dreher that if he didn’t find inner peace, he would destroy his health. Soon after, he came across The Divine Comedy in a bookstore and was enchanted by its first lines, which seemed to describe his own condition.

In the months that followed Dante helped Dreher understand the mistakes and mistaken beliefs that had torn him down and showed him that he had the power to change his life. Dreher knows firsthand the solace and strength that can be found in Dante’s great work, and distills its wisdom for those who are lost in the dark wood of depression, struggling with failure (or success), wrestling with a crisis of faith, alienated from their families or communities, or otherwise enduring the sense of exile that is the human condition.

Inspiring, revelatory, and packed with penetrating spiritual, moral, and psychological insights How Dante Can Save Your Life is a book for people, both religious and secular, who find themselves searching for meaning and healing. Dante told his patron that he wrote his poem to bring readers from misery to happiness. It worked for Rod Dreher. Dante saved Rod Dreher’s life—and in this book, Dreher shows you how Dante can save yours.

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Excerpt

This was my life now, and I thought I must be in a kind of paradise. In retrospect, I think this is when I began to lose my sister.

The following is an excerpt from How Dante Can Save Your Life by Rod Dreher.

One Friday night, after I had been there for about six weeks, Daddy and I were out driving down a country lane. “I’m so glad you came home, son,” he said. “You finally realized that I was right.”

I didn’t say a word, afraid of what might come out. I thought about what I had given up to come home. A journalism job in the capital. Good friends. Bookstores, coffee shops, movie houses, a city life I had long dreamed of. I hid my panic for the rest of the evening, but that night in bed I tossed until I could no longer stand it. I arose, dressed, and drove my old blue Chevy pickup into Baton Rouge, where I sat in an all-night coffee shop near the LSU campus and pondered my future.

The sun came up on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. I was the first one in the church of St. Agnes downtown for the morning mass. I knelt at the communion rail and prayed for deliverance from this mistake. After mass, I drove back to Starhill and went to Ruthie’s house, which she and Mike had recently completed in a grove across the yard from our folks’ place. I found her and baby Hannah still under the covers on that chilly morning. I sat on the edge of their bed.

“What’s wrong?” Ruthie said.

I told her, and broke down over the mess I had made of my life, trying to do right by my family. I told her I now knew I could never live around Daddy, because he could not keep himself from trying to control me.

“Why can’t he just accept me like I am?” I said.

Ruthie just shook her head and cried. She and Daddy were quite close, but she was aware of how strong-willed and demanding he was. She knew that my situation was impossible.

Two months later, I was back at my desk in Washington, grateful for a second chance. Four years later, I was newly married and a film critic at the New York Post. My wife, Julie, and I were discovering the joy of married life and falling head over heels for New York: film screenings, picnics in Central Park, the Union Square Greenmarket, mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, our favorite French café on Madison Avenue. This was my life now, and I thought I must be in a kind of paradise.

In retrospect, I think this is when I began to lose my sister. She was teaching math now to middle schoolers; I was going to movies for a living, interviewing Hollywood stars, and turning up on cable TV shows. When Julie and I visited Starhill, Ruthie would be polite, but she was increasingly on edge the longer we lingered. “How much did you pay for that fancy haircut?” she might say snippily. Or “I guess y’all aren’t worried at all about buying a house”—as if renting were no better than throwing our money on the sidewalk and setting it on fire.

On the first Christmas after Julie and I were married, we returned from Manhattan to spend it with my Starhill family. I phoned in advance to ask if Julie and I could make a bouillabaisse for them one night. I explained that it was a fish and shellfish stew with tomato, garlic, and onion, just like they’re used to in Louisiana. It was the first fancy dish Julie and I had learned to cook together, and we were eager to make a pot of it for them if they were game.

My folks said yes. Julie brought special stock from New York on the plane; and once down in Louisiana, we drove into Baton Rouge and spent an entire morning buying the fish, shrimp, and crabs. We cooked all afternoon, and even made the traditional roasted red pepper mayonnaise the French serve with it.

And then it was dinnertime. We set down the black iron cauldron on a trivet in the middle of the table, aromatic steam rising from the rich, saffron-tinted broth. Nobody would eat it. My father tried a couple of spoonfuls, but he was the only one who would go that far. Ruthie took the opportunity to praise a family friend for being “a good cook—a good country cook.” Mama sat quietly.

They saw this gift of love my wife and I had prepared for them as nothing more than uppity Rod inflicting his snooty cosmopolitan tastes on them.

Julie was taken aback. Within me, confusion turned into humiliation, and then to anger. I held it in. It was Christmastime, and I did not want to fight with my family. All I wanted was to get back to New York as soon as I could.

Despite occasional incidents like that, we had a good relationship with the family back in Louisiana. It was much easier to love each other if we didn’t have to be in one another’s company more than two or three times a year. Distance made it possible for all of us to believe the stories we wanted to tell ourselves about our family, and not test them against reality.

Ruthie and Mike had another daughter, Claire, and a third, Rebekah. Julie and I had our first child, Matthew—Daddy’s first grandson. I thought about how much Matt would miss by growing up far from his grandfather. That old familiar longing came over me again, but there was no moving to Starhill now, not with a wife and a child to take care of.

Although we loved New York, we knew we couldn’t afford to raise a growing family there. A year after 9/11, I landed a job at the Dallas Morning News, and we moved to Julie’s hometown. This delighted my folks, who would be seeing a lot more of us now that we were within driving distance.

Over the next six years, we had two more children, Lucas and Nora, and spent a lot more time in Starhill. Still, an uncanny distance persisted between Ruthie and me.

In the fall of 2009, not long before we were to move to Philadelphia for my new job, we were in Starhill sitting down to Sunday dinner. “Rod, you say the blessing,” Ruthie announced. “You’re so holier-than-thou.”

I chose not to respond, but after lunch I asked Daddy, with whom I was getting along well now, what Ruthie’s problem was. “I don’t know, son,” he said, “but there’s something there.”

Maybe she was feeling bad; she had developed a persistent cough. Still, I hated moving far away again with this unacknowledged hostility between us. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

1. Do you have to fall to be saved? Dreher writes, “to save yourself from the dark wood, you have to first believe that you are lost” (pg. 57). Can spiritual awakening only happen during times of crisis?
2. Now more than 700 years since Dante wrote The Divine Comedy, how has the concept of sin changed? How does Dreher address Dante’s levels of hell/sin and what is his explanation as to why Dante believed fraud to be the worst sin of all? Were you to write your own inferno, would you choose the same sins (lust, gluttony, heretics, etc.) to define humanity? Why or why not?

3. Dreher struggles to reconcile his feelings of admiration and resentment towards his father and sister. In light of his comparison to Dante’s interactions with Brunetto, what does Dreher say about our role-models? Like Dreher does with Ulysses in The Divine Comedy, discuss some of today’s societal heroes and how they have evolved from the classical archetype.


4. Dreher claims that the artist is “the creator of others’ dreams” (pg. 83). Discuss the responsibility of the artist and the impact of their work on society. What kind of ‘dreams’ are promoted in modern/contemporary art and are these unique to the current generation?

5. A book focusing on the power of literature, why does Dreher feel that Dante’s poem is an appropriate and useful tool for navigating his own life? What are some pieces of literature that you feel have greatly impacted your life and why?

6. Both Dreher and Dante confuse passion and true love. How does Dreher explain the difference between the two and what is there to learn from this? What does it mean to become a “slave to our own passions” (pg. 54)?

7. After Ruthie’s death Dreher has the epiphany that “the same tight familial and community bonds that felt so constricting to [him] as a teenager had held Ruthie and the others in [his] Louisiana family together” (pg. 23). What does he mean by this and what does this realization reveal to him about the importance of love and faith?


8. What is the importance of a guide? Dante is guided by Virgil, Dreher by Dante, and now Dreher guides his own readers. Is it possible to guide oneself on one’s own spiritual pilgrimage or might this be dangerous? Why or why not?
9. Dreher is surprised to discover that truths he could only accept intellectually made emotional sense to him when he encountered them in Dante's poem. Is fiction a better conveyor of truth than non-fiction? Why or why not?

10. Dante -- and Dreher -- find consolation in Piccarda's words in Paradiso: "In His will is our peace." Is it a sign of strength or weakness to accept inexplicable suffering by chalking it up to the mysterious will of God?

11. In Canto 26 of Inferno, we learn that Ulysses' restlessness led him away from home in Ithaca, where he belonged, to his doom. It seemed to Dreher that when he came back to his childhood home, he unexpectedly met a kind of doom -- but the experience healed him. Like Ulysses, Dreher returned from his travels in the world expecting too much from home. Discuss the difference in their responses to dissatisfaction with home.

12. The penitents on the mountain of Purgatory have to don a reed as a sign of their humility before they can proceed up the mountain. Why is humility necessary for moral and spiritual growth?

13. Compare and contrast the two father figures in the book: Dreher's father, and his priest Father Matthew.

14. In his encounter on the mountain with Marco the Lombard, Dante protests that his world back in Tuscany has come apart socially because everyone is looking out only for his own interests, not the common good. Is this an accurate diagnosis of our own society? To what extent is Marco's advice to the pilgrim Dante -- to start repairing the world by turning from his sins and repairing his own heart -- relevant today?

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