Beware of him. If once you come under the spell he will
haunt your imagination, lay violent hands on your theology,
intrude into your sermons and seep through your most
casual conversation like a dye.1
So wrote Dorothy Sayers of Dante in a letter of 1946; Crystal Downing claims the same could be said of Sayers.2 The resemblance between the two explains Sayers’s preoccupation with translating Dante’s Divine Comedy (or Commedia) for Penguin Books in the final decade of her life. The resemblance between Dante’s time and Sayers’s also drove her interest: the corruption in Dante’s day which drove his Inferno Sayers found in her own day, as she began reading Dante’s work from a World War 2 bomb shelter and envisioning
the whole lay-out of Hell as something actual and contemporary;
something that one can see by looking into one’s self, or into the pages
of tomorrow’s newspaper. I saw it, that is, as a judgment of fact,
unaffected by its period.3
Sayers’s other project in her final years was participating in the Society of St. Anne which hosted lectures on Christ and culture as well as debates with skeptics. Engaging culture with truth, in whichever age, was the final legacy left by Dorothy Sayers.
Sayers was not alone in being enchanted by Dante’s monumental work which chronicles the soul’s journey through Hell (Inferno), Purgatory (Purgatorio), and Heaven (Paradiso), written between 1308 and 1321. “Dante was in the air” back in 1921, the six-hundredth anniversary of Dante’s death, accompanied by various essays and reprints of the famous work.4 Christian literary figures such as Owen Barfield and Charles Williams of “Inklings” fame (the reading and discussion group at Oxford which included J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis) were similarly taken. Owen Barfield explained Dante’s relevance in the essay “The Inspiration of the Divine Comedy” (1934), though it was Charles Williams’s The Figure of Beatrice: A Study in Dante (1943) which inspired Sayers. Sayers corresponded voluminously with Williams on Dante’s work in a series of letters from August 1944 until his death in May 1945, translating and sending Williams the first nine cantos of Inferno while plotting which would write the introduction for a completed translation someday.
Sayers published Inferno (titled Hell) in late 1949 (with the newly formed Penguin books), selling out the initial 50,000 copies and a million and a quarter copies in the half-century which followed. Reviews were positive, but Sayers’s goal was not to impress reviewers but engage the popular audience. Her stated aim was
To present Dante . . . to the (literally) thousands and ten-thousands of my countrymen to whom he is a sealed book. Most of them are incredibly lacking in literary background. They know no Catholic theology, no history, no classic mythology to speak of. Many have even lost touch with the Bible. They are brought up on science and psychiatry and television — the new reading public of an illiterate age. At all costs he must be shown to them as a living poet, who has something vital to say to them here and now.5
After Inferno, Sayers translated and published Purgatory in 1955 and Paradise posthumously in 1962.6 Barbara Reynolds, Lecturer in Italian at Cambridge, finished translating the final thirteen cantos of Paradise after Sayers passed on December 17, 1957, and chronicles much of Sayers’s inspiration for the project in The Passionate Intellect: Dorothy L. Sayers’ Encounter with Dante (1989). Using these sources alongside Sayers’s own introductions to The Divine Comedy we can appreciate how, like Dante, Sayers pointed towards the journey to not just redemption but its source, the ineffable love and light of God.7
Dante the Subversive
Dante had “game” in his day, as Sayers proclaimed he “was anything but a docile member of the flock, and was quite prepared to teach orthodoxy to the Vatican.”8 Sayers had the same spunk, as Crystal Downing shows in Subversive by assembling the following declarations. Of the Christian faith, Sayers claimed that “Christianity does and will challenge almost every conviction you have. That is its business. So don’t blame me — you have been warned!”9 Sayers was thus not afraid to forcefully but imaginatively expound on basic doctrines like hell, heaven, free will, and even purgatory. Of free will, Sayers stated in the introduction to Inferno that “We must try to believe that man’s will is free . . . and that his choice can be decisive to all eternity.”10 Of hell, she explained that
God sends nobody to Hell; only a wicked ignorance can suggest that He would do to us the very thing He died to save us from. But He has so made us that what in the end we choose, that in the end we shall have. If we enter the state of Hell, it is because we have willed to do so.11
Of purgatory, she notes that it is “not a system of Divine book-keeping — so many years for so much sin — but a process of spiritual improvement which is completed precisely when it is complete. God is satisfied when we are satisfied.”12 13 Otherwise, Sayers adds that “if one is drawn to the Purgatorio at all, it is by the cords of love, which will not cease drawing till they have drawn the whole poem into the same embrace.”14
But the insights into Dante’s depiction of heaven are arguably the most inspirational. Barbara Reynolds drew from discussions with and notes by Sayers when writing the Paradise introduction, and explains,
Heaven has, of course, always been inconceivable, “Passing man’s understanding.” Of the few poets or prophets who have undertaken to describe it, even fewer have dared to keep us there for long . . . of all the poets of fulfillment, Dante alone has had the astonishing courage to take us into Heaven and keep us there for thirty-three long cantos, building it to his ecstatic climax.15
Despite the time Dante gives us in heaven, Sayers argues that “if we are to understand the Christian doctrine about what happens at death, we must first rid ourselves of every concept of time and space as we know them.”16 Or as Downing summarizes, “Eternity, Sayers makes clear, is not about time. Heaven is about being in the presence of God, whereas hell is utter separation from God. Both are outside the space-time continuum, and both are the result of choosing to accept a gift, like that accepted by the man born blind.”17
Finally, of salvation, Sayers summarized from Dante that
What counts for salvation is the direction of the will . . .
God always puts mercy above justice.
You would not accept a last minute repentance;
God will accept anything: His humility is infinite.18
A couple of observations are in order before beginning the journey into Dante with Sayers. First, just as Dante wrote his Commedia in the vernacular Italian language rather than the church’s Latin, so did Sayers intend with her translation to revive Dante’s insights for a popular audience. The same can be said of how Sayers read Dante. Dante’s work has often been compared with John Milton’s Paradise Lost of 1674, the epic tale of man’s fall in the Garden of Eden. Milton’s work was criticized by Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot among others in the 1930s until being rehabilitated by Charles Williams in 1940 with The English Poems of John Milton in 1940 and by C.S. Lewis in A Preface to Paradise Lost in 1942.19 Dante was immune to the key indictment of Milton’s writing, that it simply allegorized theology, as Dante was lauded for his humane way of telling a story; Sayers declared him “simply the most incomparable story-teller who ever set pen to paper.”20 Sayers found Dante to be humorous and even satirical (the terza rima, or triple rhyme, scheme even reinforced the practice of such terse wit she observed), allowing the poet to connect with his popular audience, just as Sayers herself endeavored with such popular adaptations as her radio broadcast The Man Born To Be King.21
Secondly, while Dante is best known to most readers for Inferno with its twists of ironic punishments in Hell for sinners (in Canto VII, the greedy are condemned to an eternal rat race of pushing boulders back and forth, uphill), Dante is most strongly driven by an earthly then heavenly paradise of surpassing beauty and of love, as seen in Purgatory and Paradise. In her introduction to Hell, Sayers explains that, beyond imagining Dante as a “peevish political exile who indulged his petty spites and prejudices by putting his enemies in Hell and friends in Paradise,” we must see him as not only
sublime, intellectual and, on occasion, grim [but also as] simple, homely, humorous, tender, and bubbling over with ecstasy. . . [not] only a poet of “period” interest; he is a universal poet, speaking prophetically of God and the Soul and the Society of Men in their universal relations . . . For The Divine Comedy is precisely the drama of the soul’s choice.22
Sayers explains,
the grim substructure [of Hell] is only there for the sake of the city whose walls and spires stand up and take the morning; it is for the vision of God in the Paradiso that all the rest of the allegory exists. Bulk for bulk, there is in Dante’s work as a whole more joy than grief and far more charity than hatred; his abiding characteristic is not gloom but ‘pure intellectual light fulfilled with love.’23
Inkling Dantes I: Owen Barfield
Barfield’s Dante is nearly as anthroposophic as Barfield himself, unsurprisingly; nevertheless, Barfield’s review, “The Inspiration of the Divine Comedy,” elucidates the thirteenth century poet in a manner that would impress Goethe and Rudolf Steiner, the Romantic thinkers upon which Barfield’s anthroposophic musings relied. Barfield’s anthroposophy reduces to the simple component words, anthropos (human) and sophia (wisdom). His goal was simply to provide some means of intellect by which to comprehend the spiritual world (aside from that of revealed religion), in the spirit of German idealists like Goethe.
Barfield opens his essay by mentioning a request made by a spirit from one of Steiner’s Mystery Plays to “redeem the spirit of his youth,” a task that Barfield claims Dante achieved in his epic poem. For Dante, the journey of the soul from its sinful origins (Inferno, hell) through purification (Purgatory, “the country of the soul”) to heaven (Paradise, “the home of the spirit”) is the solution to the human quest to regain the innocence of youth.24 Dante himself is the soul who journeys, led first by Virgil, a pagan but virtuous poet living on the outskirts of Hell, who guides him through hell and purgatory before Beatrice, a girl Dante knew in his youth, takes over the tour as it moves into the heavens of paradise.
Barfield explains that the structure of the Dante-verse sets the stage for such a journey. Instead of the medieval notion of an “everlasting bonfire,” hell is located in the interior of the earth, with nine concentric circles carved out as one descends.25 Early on, Dante encounters three animals depicting the stages of sin: a leopard symbolizing how at first sin simply distracts us, a lion showing how it gathers strength, then wolves showing how it preys on victims. The nine levels of hell follow these categories: sins of incontinence (lack of control: lust, gluttony, greed) lead to more powerful sins of violence (anger, heresy, and violence itself) and finally to malicious, predatory sins (fraud and treachery). At the bottom level of hell, in the center of the earth, is the head of Satan, as he has fallen through the south pole and is stuck; but it is not a lake of fire in which he is stuck but one of ice, the flapping of his mighty wings, in autonomy and defiant rebellion of God, actually causing the lake to freeze around and imprison him, one of Inferno’s most profound images. Sayers comments that
Beneath the fires of Hell, here at the center of the lost soul and the lost city, lie the silence and the rigidity of and the eternal frozen cold. It is perhaps the greatest image in the whole of Inferno. “Dante,” says Charles Williams, “scatters phrases on the difference of the place. It is treachery, but it is also . . . cruelty; the traitor is cruel.” A cold and cruel egotism, gradually sinking inward till even the lingering passions of hatred and destruction are frozen into immobility — that is the final state of sin.26
Purgatory, Barfield proceeds to describe, is a mountain comprising a series of seven concentric terraces, as it is the remainder of earth carved out by hell and fallen out beneath the southern pole. The seven plateaus correspond to the seven deadly sins, though grouped according to their abuse of love. Thus, levels of misdirected love (Pride, Envy, and Wrath) lie beneath those of deficient love (Sloth) and excessive love (Avarice/Prodigality, Gluttony, and Lust), upon which stands the Garden of Eden, “for at the end of its path of purification the soul regains the pristine innocence from which it fell through Adam’s transgression. This is the earthly paradise,” Barfield explains.27
It is in the Garden of Eden that Dante meets Beatrice, descended from heaven and taking over as guide to lead Dante through the levels of Paradise. She is a beatific vision of both personal and spiritual significance for Dante: he knew her when they were children of eight and nine years old, then heard of her death at age twenty-five, but she arrives on a chariot drawn by a griffon, the animal symbol of Christ. He feels shame when he recounts what he had become since last knowing her as a child, but after emerging from the river Lethe which cleanses him of such memories, he focuses on Beatrice gazing on the griffon, the image of Christ reflected in her eyes. Dante is now prepared for the journey to Paradise, as he discovers “a thousand desires hotter than the flame held my eyes fast bound to the shining eyes, which remained ever fixed upon the griffin.”28
Paradise begins as the cosmos of Ptolemy — Earth at the center surrounded by the planets (the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn) — wrapped by the levels of the fixed stars, the Primum Mobile, and the Empyrean. The planets illustrate the classical, secular virtues of prudence or wisdom, courage, justice and temperance or self-control. The Moon, Mercury, and Venus depict the lack of such virtues: the Moon lacks courage as it wanes as those who break their vows to God, Mercury lacks justice as it seeks glory, and Venus lacks self-control in its pursuit of love rather than God. The Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn embody the virtues in a positive way: the Sun exhibits the light of wisdom, Mars the courageous who died for their faith, Jupiter the kings who were just, and Saturn the monks who exercised self-control. The eighth level of Paradise, the Fixed Stars, includes the Church Triumphant, humanity which achieves the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love. The ninth level, the Primum Mobile (the unmoved Prime Mover, a concept originated by Ptolemy to account for the appearance of the daily motion of the heavens about the earth) contains the angels never corrupted by original sin. It is at the final level of Paradise, however, that the beauty and power of Dante’s construction is most manifest, in the Empyrean, the highest heaven, in which Aristotelian cosmologies envisioned fire (or aether) as the ultimate cosmic essence, but for Dante it is the level at which the essence of God resides.
Dante first spies the Divine essence as a point of light, intense and concentrated, in Beatrice’s eyes. The nine hierarchies of the Primum Mobile swiftly swirl about this point, the innermost moving the fastest, being the Seraphim and thus those closest to God. Dante becomes confused about the relation between the physical and spiritual levels of reality, between the planets and the realm containing the Fixed Stars, Primum Mobile, and Empyrean levels of reality. Beatrice explains that he has left the spatial world once he reached the Fixed Stars, and has entered the divine mind, encompassed in love and light which envelops the spatial world as well, “with the point of light God Himself, the non-spatial center of the universe, just as Satan is found at its spatial center” Barfield explains.29
God being the center of the universe which is yet everywhere is a key insight for Barfield, declaring
the conception, or rather the experience, of the Universe as composed of
two interpenetrating contrasted worlds, one of them spatial and the other
non-spatial, is one of the most striking characteristics of the Paradiso.30
That we can experience and know both worlds simultaneously can be seen in various passages, Barfield argues. The spirit of Justinian in paradise claims he can literally see what he had only believed on earth (“I believed Him and now I see clearly what was contained in this faith”), and the entire creation is described as “all things that turn through mind or space.”31 32 The knowledge of God is a physical experience in Dante’s epic, as Barfield characterizes passages as “perfect wedding of lyrical emotion with intense, concentrate and (we should say) abstract thought.”33 Other passages are literally brilliant and dance, inundated with similes of light, color, and music, such as when St. Thomas Aquinas and a group of wise church doctors approach in the sphere of the Sun and are described as being “like ladies interrupted in the dance, listening silently, until they can catch the notes of the music again,” when twin rainbows born of each other “In fashion of her wistful voice whom love / Consumed like vapors that the sun drinks in” remind of God’s promise to never flood the earth again.34 35
The experience of the Divine Comedy nourishes what Barfield refers to as “the intellectual soul.” Barfield claims that the age from the founding of the Roman Empire to the fifteenth century is one of the Intellectual Soul, of an aesthetic fusing of “cosmic intelligence into the human being . . . the union of thinking with feelings.”36 The Divine Comedy, like much of the rest of medieval literature, thus infuses abstract thought with “a living and even poetic quality” in a way that later periods, such as the Idealistic, would lose.37 And just what does this Romantic-style intellectual soul accomplish for the Divine Comedy? For Barfield, it makes the tale of the interlinked material and spiritual universes into a journey of the soul, a moral tale. Graduating from hell to purgatory requires an act of the soul known as “repentance.”
But beyond this, Dante’s work is one of initiation, the journey of the soul to a higher sphere. There is an increase in joy, as “intense, youthful feeling — not extinguished but purified, but redeemed — becomes a grail into which the light of the world is poured,” Barfield describes, citing Beatrice’s claim that
We have won beyond the worlds, and move
Within that heaven which is pure light alone
Pure intellectual light, fulfilled with love
Love of the true Good, filled with all delight
Transcending sweet delight, all sweets above.38
Barfield thus makes his case that Dante’s poem allows us to journey along with its author, as “The spirit of Dante’s youth, redeemed, no longer wanders in the shadows, but carries the poet with him into the light,” a light “made firm with the philosophy of Aristotle and filled with color and music and with an inspiration as intense as it is sustained.”39
Inkling Dantes II: Charles Williams
The influence of Charles Williams, author of The Figure of Beatrice which compelled Sayers into serious study of Dante, is seen in the epigraphs, quotes from Dante, that Sayers places at the opening of Inferno and Purgatory:
To the Dead Master
Of the Affirmations
Charles WilliamsI am so grateful that while I breathe air
My tongue shall speak the thanks which are your due;40
and
“What cause thou hast to hold me — as I think
Thy words and looks attest — thus lief and dear.”
Then I: “Your verse, forged sweetly link by link,
Which while our modern use shall last in song,
Must render precious even the very ink.”41
A decade before authoring The Figure of Beatrice, Williams began a literary friendship as fellow playwrights with Sayers. His play, Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury, written for the Canterbury Festival of 1937 along with T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral,was joined by Sayers’s The Zeal of Thy House (a play about rebuilding the cathedral in the twelfth century) at Williams’s suggestion that she write a play for the event. Barbara Reynolds explains that Sayers’s image of a divine artist (per her 1941 Mind of the Maker) naturally flowed from her producing of theater plays. Adapting The Zeal of Thy House for a technically challenging cathedral performance, along with other plays for the London theater as well as radio productions (the BBC’s He That Should Come and The Man Born to be King), led to her combining the Trinity with a theory of the arts, or aesthetics. Reynolds explains
The embodiment of the words of a playwright in the flesh and voice of the actors, in the skills of producers, stage managers, scenographers, costume designers, and stage carpenters, and the impact of their combined creativity upon the audience was seen by her as an earthly instance, in the world of art, of the Incarnation of the Word and the power of the Holy Ghost . . . [such that] Every creative act is three-fold, “an earthly trinity to match the heavenly.”42
Being thus aware of interactions between various levels of meaning, Reynolds concludes, Sayers was better prepared in her translation of Dante, as it moves between not just worlds and historical references but allegorical levels of meaning as well.
Williams, a literary critic, poet, biographer, novelist, and playwright admired by the likes of T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden and C.S. Lewis was fundamentally inspired by his faith, producing four books on theology to complement works such as his novels, described as “metaphysical thrillers . . . in which the supernatural and the natural intermingle with startling but believable effect.”43 Sayers’s attention was arrested by a review of Williams’s Figure of Beatrice, which explained how Williams’s handling of Dante
Brought home to me the rationality of Dante . . . That poem ostensibly began with a personal experience, a falling in love in childhood . . . But having recognized that Beatrice was to his childhood mind what the ideals of religion became to his mature mind, he identified the two experiences not only as a poet, but as an interpreter of the nature of God and man.44
That was exactly as Williams had intended. Central to his Figure of Beatrice was Dante’s “intense personal experience” of the woman he had known as a youth (only to discover she had passed away in their twenties) and came to regard as “an image of nobility, of virtue, or the Redeemed Life, and in some sense of Almighty God himself.”45 Williams’s notion of an image corresponded to Coleridge’s idea of a symbol, something or someone which exhibits a greatness sourced from something beyond itself. Dante’s Beatrice was not just an image of the Divine in herself, Williams claims, but nearly every character or philosopher or poem in the epic is related to God through her image. By this tactic, Williams declares Dante’s Commedia to be “the greatest expression in European literature of the way of approach of the soul to its ordained end;” “it is, we all agree” Williams continued, “one of the marks of his poetic genius.”46
Dante’s particular genius lies in using Beatrice as an incarnational pointer to God, Williams argued. There are basically two ways to approach God in our understanding: by negating and finding insufficient any earthly image which falls short of God (the “Way of Rejection”), and by seeing within every image a trace which leads one to God (the “Way of Affirmation”).47 Each approach has its place: U2’s song “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” illustrates the Way of Rejection, similar to Augustine’s famous confession that “our heart is restless until it finds its rest in You.”48 49 “The Way of Affirmation,” by contrast, has its ultimate fulfilment in Christ being fully man and fully God, though other any pointers towards God qualify, such as C.S. Lewis’s notion of longing or joy as such pointers, as when in his address “The Weight of Glory” he declares “The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through was longing,” or the entire argument of his autobiography Surprised by Joy.50 51 WIlliams considered Dante’s Divine Comedy as “the greatest record of the Way of Affirmation of Images . . . in the literature of Western Europe.”52
Of Williams’s Figure of Beatrice, Sayers friend and chronicler Barbara Reynolds admits that “Indeed, to those who find The Figure of Beatrice obscure, it may seem surprising that [Sayers] found it so illuminating.”53 Nevertheless, Sayers dedicated both Hell and Purgatory to Williams, as she undoubtedly would have with Paradise, declaring him the “Master of the Affirmations,” an ode to his beatific Beatrician imagery. Reynolds explains that Sayers was so taken with “Williams’s definition of Dante as the poet of the Affirmative Way” because of her Catholic background with its “sacramental concept of reality,” as well as her own theories of The Mind of the Maker grounded in the Divine Creator “making” in His own image.54
The influence of Dante on Sayers, however initially inspired by Williams, was immense. Besides her translation work, lectures and volumes of essays on Dante, his message seeped into Sayers’s creative productions. After reading The Divine Comedy and beginning her correspondence with Williams in 1944, she produced a play for the 750th anniversary of Lichfield Cathedral in Staffordshire, The Just Vengeance, with strong Dantean elements of justice and atonement. In it, a soldier dies in an airplane crash, deciding at the moment of his death to place his faith in humanity’s inevitable progress, despite his confusion about suffering in the world. Just as The Divine Comedy, the “drama of the soul’s choice,” shows that deathbed decisions have eternal consequences, so did Sayers in the play. The unfortunate Airman is shown a series of images (a motif in the redemption process of Purgatory), with a chorus of previous generations declaring the guilt of those before them, which brings him to a realization of the history of sin. The figures of Adam and Eve in Eden were included as well as Christ to lend theatrical power to the Dantean insights. It was not just the fact of sin that Sayers drew from Dante, but that of atonement, vengeance committed for the crime of sin, that she illustrated. In her correspondence with Charles Williams about Paradise, she claimed to find in Canto VI an “extraordinarily interesting” and “absolutely central” insight uttered by the spirit of the Roman Emperor Justinian:
For in that land, the life which I respire,
The Living Justice, granted it to win
The glory of wreaking vengeance for His ire . . .
To avenge the vengeance of the ancient sin.55 56
Justinian thus references Christ’s death on the cross as “vengeance of the ancient sin,” as well as the sack of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. as “aveng[ing]” that act, given the Christ as God was innocent but Christ as man bore the sin of all mankind. Roman soldiers and Christ depicted this double atonement in A Just Vengeance, the dramatic power of which garnered hushed audiences (including the Queen of England and Archbishop of York, and ten thousand viewers in total from its extended run), high praise from actors, reviewers, and even from Sayers herself, declaring her wartime era production (1947) of the Dantean masterpiece “the best thing I’ve ever done.”57
The Inferno of Hell in Sayers’s Own Words
The lengthy letters (typically a dozen or more pages each) Sayers fired off to Williams in her initiation into Dante provided the basis for the introductions she wrote for Hell and Purgatory, as well as for Reynolds’s introduction to Paradise completed and published five years after Sayers’s death. Introducing Hell, Sayers states that the journey by Dante (as the character in the poem accompanied by the nobel pagan poet Virgil in the first two books and Beatrice in the third) from finding himself midway through his life “in a dark wood” unsure of a path to follow through Purgatory to Paradise, beyond planets and stars to the Empyrean, the essence of God Himself, requires of the reader some “critical apparatus” to allow them to keep up.58 The apparatus is not just the personal and political details of Dante and his world, but is theological and literary too. Dante’s “vivid awareness of the deeps and heights within the soul” due to his depiction of the problem of evil, and his fusion of “passionate flesh and passionate intellect, affords him the status of a “universal poet, speaking prophetically of God and the Soul and the Society of Men.”59 Essential to this work of The Divine Comedy, however, is the awareness of personal responsibility, “we must try to believe that man’s will is free, that he can consciously exercise choice, and that his choice can be decisive to all eternity.”60 Further, relishing the poetic moments of the work is insufficient, for “if we ignore[s] the theological structure” of the poem we will miss “the architectural grandeur of the poem as a whole” as “the grim substructure is only there for the sake of the city whose walls and spires stand up and take the morning; it is for the vision of God in the Paradiso that all the rest of the allegory exists.”61
Sayers deftly summarizes the essence of the issue of Hell, and of Paradise, when she explained in her introduction to Hell that Dante
share[d] the belief of all Catholic Christians that every living soul in the world has to make the choice between accepting or rejecting God, and that at the moment of death it will discover what it has chosen: whether to remain in the outer darkness of the alien self, knowing God only as terror and judgment and pain, or to pass joyfully through the strenuous purgation which fits it to endure and enjoy eternally the unveiled presence of God.62
Sayers added Dante could be read at both the individual and societal levels, and she concentrated on both.63 Her introductory notes thus include a lengthy discussion of fourteenth century Italian politics, necessary knowledge for reading Dante, though the poem is admittedly “an allegory of the Way to God — to that union of our wills with the Universal Will in which every creature finds its true self and its true being.”64 Sayers admitted that both levels “loomed large in Dante’s mind, and they interpenetrate and complete one another.”65
Sayers on Purgatory
“Of the three books of the Commedia, the Purgatorio is, for English readers, the least known, the least quoted — and the most beloved” Sayers began in her introduction of Purgatory. Besides the Protestant general ignorance of and discomfort with the doctrine of Purgatory (the Anglo-Catholic Sayers penned), and the popular recognition of Dante’s Inferno, Dante’s Purgatory has further disadvantage as it is where “the sermons begin.”66 But Purgatory is in fact better constructed and written than Inferno, Sayers argues, adding that “there is in Dante’s work as a whole more joy than grief and far more charity than hatred; his abiding characteristic is not gloom but ‘pure intellectual light fulfilled with love.’”67 Sin and its gloom do appear in Purgatory, but there is a repentance not found in Hell, a “freeing of the judgement and the will” where Hell could only offer “fleeing deeper into iron-bound prison of the self.”68 Sayers cited a Catherine of Genoa in summarizing the realities of sin unbound and sin repented, of hell and purgation,
It has been well said by a great saint that the fire of Hell is simply the light of God
as experienced by those who reject it; to those, that is, who hold fast to their
darling illusion of sin, the burning reality of holiness is a thing unbearable. To the
penitent . . . they welcome the torment, as a sick man welcomes the pains of
Surgery, in order that the last crippling illusion may be burned away.69
Or perhaps more simply, echoing C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce (written nine years earlier, in 1946) in which he stated “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in Hell, choose it,” Sayers explained,
Whether in Hell or in Purgatory, you get what you want — if that is what you really do want. If you insist on having your own way, you will get it: Hell is the enjoyment of your own way forever. If you really want God’s way for you, you will get it in Heaven, and the pains of Purgatory will not deter you, they will be welcomed as a means to that end.70 71
The journey through Purgatory to Paradise is not just one of redemption but of sublime beauty. While theologians have traditionally cast purgatory as bordering on hell, for Dante it is a shining suburb of heaven, the “Great Mountain of Purgatory rises in a pure sunlit solitude” Sayers declared.72 The dark wood in Inferno where Dante began his journey thus gets replaced by the refreshing and verdant, redeemed, Garden of Eden, an earthly Paradise, at the top level of Purgatory. Paradise is regained on Earth in Purgatory as the seven classic roots of sin are corrected to express and embody love completely. Following Augustine’s argument that evil is merely a privation of the good, Sayers explains that Dante lumps the seven sins according to their perversion of love (pride, envy, anger), defect of love (sloth), excess of love (greed, gluttony, and lust).
Dante’s guide through Purgatory (Virgil) — does not exactly fit the image of the virtuous pagan guide who can only approach the gates of Paradise, Sayers argued. Instead, he is at the outset (in Hell) commissioned by Beatrice, and at several places along the journey requires divine assistance, reflecting the deeper point that “Virgil without his heaven-born commission is only ourselves; and we cannot long venerate the familiar self.”73 Even when Virgil gives his discourse on love (as the seven types of sin are categorized by as deficiencies in love), he relies on the premise of the Christian Augustine which casts evil as simply the absence, or distortion, of good. Thus perverted loves (pride, envy, anger) are directed to false objects, while the rest are exercised in either excess or deficiency to otherwise worthy objects.
Virgil gives way to Beatrice as the sun sets and they pass through the Sacred Wood, as she stands on the other side of the River. Williams’s Figure of Beatrice influence on Sayers is apparent simply in the number of pages that Sayers discourses on her. The “transhumanized” Beatrice shows her love for Dante, though it “expresses itself, woman’s fashion, in a mixture of exasperated reproach and practical charity,” as perhaps only Sayers (more than male commentators anyway) could best explain.74 And just as Virgil could be construed as a loving FAther figure, Beatrice could likewise be understood as a Mother figure. But she is more than that to Dante who lived in the age of Courtly Love, in which devotion was “part amorous and part worshipful.”75 Though Dante the author was in his fifties with a wife and children, both aspects of his regard for Beatrice served the poem’s purpose, to make “Dante’s encounter with an individual living woman [into] the image of the soul’s encounter with a personal living God.”76 This “Beatrician vision,” not unlike lovers who declare “Darling, you’re marvellous!” Sayers explains, invokes a “quality of wonderful adoration,” an ecstatic moment, which in The Divine Comedy becomes
the beholding of the universal hierarchy in the “intellectual light” of the
ecstatic moment. The Beatific Vision is the eternalizing of that moment
in the contemplation of the Perfection beyond which nothing greater
can be conceived for desiring.77
In a 1952 lecture titled “Dante and Milton,” Sayers claimed that this complicated, transcendental relation between Dante and Beatrice provided “the sacramental mystery, and the taking up of all love into the one Love” was what Milton’s epic lacked, so that “MIlton was a Dante deprived of Beatrice — of Beatrice, that is, in the whole range of her significance, literal and allegorical.”78
Sayers in Paradise
Perhaps ironically, Sayers entered Paradise while in the midst of translating Dante’s Paradise, passing in late 1957 after having translated just twenty of the book’s thirty-three cantos. The introduction to Paradise, the final book of the translated Divine Comedy trilogy, was provided by Barbara Reynolds, who translated its final thirteen cantos. Drawing on notes, letters, and lectures by Sayers, Reynolds wrote the introduction in the style of Sayers’s previous two introductions. Reynolds declares of the finale of the Commedia that
It has been said [by C.S. Lewis] that the joys of heaven
would be for most of us, in our present condition,
an acquired taste. In a sense, Dante’s Paradise
Is a story about the acquisition of that taste.79
Sadly, many fail to make it as far as this third book Reynolds claims, in which Dante’s “mind and soul have comprehended the nature of heavenly joy . . . for our understanding.”80 Reynolds continues, claiming that
His Heaven is at first sight almost disconcertingly lucid; it is only as it piles up, line upon line, dogma upon dogma, sphere upon sphere to the exquisite and
Mathematical exactitude of the final vision, that its power to convince is precisely in its lucidity. Of the light of Heaven he saysPure intellectual light, fulfilled with love,
Love of the true Good, filled with all delight,
Transcending sweet delight, all sweets above.”81
Dante’s guide in this “world of Reality” is “Beatrice, who represents his own personal experience of the immanence of the Creator in the creature . . . the eternal Beauty shining through the created beauty” Reynolds adds.82
To say that the journey through Paradise is illuminating would be only partly true. Of the “intellectual light” of Heaven (introduced above), Reynolds declares
the word ‘intellectual’ is significant; the light is that of reality. It is in the Paradiso that we find affirmed with the utmost clarity and consistency the fundamental Christian proposition that the journey to God is the journey into reality. To know all things in God is to know them as they really are.83
Journeying through the levels of Paradise is thus a venture through “at best the types and mirrors, at worst the shadows and distortions” of God.84 As Dante, guided by Beatrice, traverses the planetary levels of Heaven, he experiences partial glimpses into the nature of God, beings, their variety “provided by the changing colour and intensity of the lights and by the abstract patterns which they trace against a background, itself of pure light.”85 He finds feint reflections of beings on the Moon, on Mercury dwellers who “gleam out for a moment from the light of joy which partly shrouds them,” a heaven of lovers on Venus, of warriors on Mars “who figure with Christ in a cross formed of two bands of white light constellated with radiances like rubies,” and the “intellectual Heaven of the Sun, where the great doctors of the Church, some of whom had disagreed upon earth, find all their partial truths reconciled in the One Truth and lead their shining and joyous dance in an ecstasy of mutual courtesy.”86 Ever the Italian (“nee Roman”), in the Heaven of Jupiter Dante “beholds the form of the perfect Empire,” as souls gather together in the shape of an eagle, and speak in unison in love and will, reflecting that with “perfect Empire” there is “perfect Justice.”87 Heavens of Contemplatives, Friends of Christ (Adam, Apostles, Mary), and the Primum Mobile of Angels ensue, followed by the River of Light (and of Time) as “the flowing of time is turned into the circle of Eternity, the Mystic Rose.”88 Blessed saints rise up, “tier upon tier, into the light of God,” no longer seen as mere bright radiances but wearing their bodies of glory put on at the Resurrection.89
Dante’s vision then approaches the very being of God. Even Beatrice is no longer adequate to this task, and leaves him. He sees the entire universe as God does, its various aspects “co-inhering in one simultaneous whole . . . a single and perfect lucidity.”90 This vision of all of recorded history (though not its memory) escapes him in an instant, though he next gazes into the light, a vision of God Himself, a tri-unity of Father, begotten Son, and Spirit proceeding from both, and expressed in the “famous image of three distinct spheres occupying a single multidimensional space.”91 Reynolds eloquently describes Dante’s final vision:
But there is one thing still to come. All his life he had known that
the key to reality was somehow connected with that God-bearing
image which was Beatrice, and yet not she, but which shone through
and made her, as the vision of God shines through and makes the
vision of the universe.92
Reynolds continues with her eloquent summary
So now he searches the Godhead for the sight of the Master-Image, the Reality of which Beatrice was the figure, the union of Creator and created in the person of Christ. He sees it, but cannot understand it, and then in a flash it comes to him, beyond all understanding and yet known. In that supreme moment, “high fantasy” reaches its limit and leaves him, but in that moment he feels his whole being re-orientated and turning upon God as its true centre, as the heavens turn upon their poles.93
Reynolds indeed succeeded in honoring the insights and eloquence of both Dante and Sayers in her summary.
C.S. Lewis in Paradise: Dantean Light
Dante’s reliance on the imagery of light to depict the essence of reality, of God Himself (Themselves, one might say of the Trinity) finds an echo in C.S. Lewis’s depiction of ultimate reality. In Perelandra, the middle book from his sci-fi series, Lewis describes the cosmic “Great Dance” in terms of radiating bands of light,
woven out of the intertwining undulation of many cords or bands of light, leaping over and under one another and mutually embraced in arabesques and flower-like subtleties . . . wherever the ribbons or serpents of light intersected, minute corpuscles of momentary brightness . . . [representing] peoples, institutions, climates of opinion, civilizations, arts, sciences, and the like . . . far above these in girth and luminosity and flashing with colours from beyond the spectrum were the lines of personal beings . . . [and] universal truths.94
Just as Dante’s Paradise ends in the light of God, three lucid spheres in one space, the Trinity, Lewis follows as his construction terminates in “a simplicity beyond all comprehension, ancient and young as spring, illimitable, pellucid, [which] drew him with cords of infinite desire into its own stillness,” or into the reality of God Himself, as Reynolds described.95 Lewis elsewhere speaks of the desire this light evokes in us, as Perelandra’s protagonist Ransom finds “The starvation for light became very painful. He found himself thinking about light as a hungry man thinks about food.”96 In The Great Divorce, like Dante’s Commedia, a journey from Hell to Heaven, Lewis has the guide George MacDonald explain to an artist that “When you painted on earth — at least in your earlier days — it was because you caught glimpses of Heaven . . . Light itself was your first love: you loved paint only as a means of telling about the light.”97
Paradise After Sayers
The beatific vision, of not just Dante nor of Beatrice but of Paradise and the very Being of God which lay behind and beyond it, endures for those who seek it. The reality of Paradise and of God Himself, described in the cantos which Sayers did not endure to translate but received the greater blessing, her life eternal commencing so that she could experience them directly, can be seen in retrospect to have been the driving force behind her lifetime of work. Her detective novels, her plays, her lectures and essays, and even her journey through Hell and Purgatory, all breathed the hint that Paradise lurked behind and lay beyond all such works. The easy sermon point from Dante, “His will is our peace,” Sayers warned, could hardly communicate the full, astonishing beauty of Dante’s vision.98 Dante has inspired many throughout history (noting that Barnes & Noble is set to release Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s translation in March, 2025, the first translation by an American), not just characters from Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles, but even a poetry sequence from Malcolm Guite interpreting the classic from a personal perspective, and two articles by this author.99 This chronicle of Sayers’s efforts must, at long last, finally end, just as Dante concluded his own vision, with lines one can hardly imagine a more brilliant and inspiring competitor:
High fantasy lost power and here broke off;
Yet, as a wheel moves smoothly, free from jars,
My will and my desire were turned by love,
The love that moves the sun and the other stars.100
Notes:
1 Dorothy L. Sayers to James Welch, July 25, 1946, The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, vol. 3, 1944 to 1950: A Noble Daring, ed. Barbara Reynolds (Cambridge: Dorothy L. Sayers Society, 1998), 249. Cited in Crystal Downing, Subversive: Christ, Culture, and the Shocking Dorothy L. Sayers (Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2020), Ch.1. Digital Edition.
2 Crystal Downing, Subversive: Christ, Culture, and the Shocking Dorothy L. Sayers (Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2020), Ch.1. Digital Edition.
3 Dorothy L. Sayers, Introductory Papers on Dante (London: Methuen, 1954), 128.
4 Barbara Reynolds, The Passionate Intellect: Dorothy L. Sayers’ Encounter with Dante (Eugene: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 1989), xii.
5 Letter to Foligno, in Reynolds, Passionate Intellect, 117.
6 In Barbara Reynolds “Fifty Years On: Dorothy L. Sayers and Dante,” VII: Journal of the Marion E. Wade Center vol. 16, 1999, 3-6, Reynolds further adds that Sayers “resolved to read Dante right through. A year went by before she did so. As she said, ‘fourteen thousand lines are fourteen thousand lines, especially if they are full of Guelfs and Ghibellines and Thomas Aquinas.’”
7 Sayers’s separate writings of Sayers on Dante, the trilogy Introductory Papers on Dante: The Poet Alive in His Writings, Further Papers on Dante: His Heirs and Ancestors, and The Poetry of Search and the Poetry of Statement: On Dante and Other Writers, published by Wipf & Stock, 2006, is not included in this review.
8 Sayers to Father Herbert Kelly, July 24, 1947, Letters, 3:319.
9 Sayers to L.T. Duff, May 10, 1943, The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, vol. 2, From Novelist to Playwright, ed. Barbara Reynolds (Cambridge: Dorothy L. Sayers Society, 1997), 404. This quote and the previous are found in Downing, Subversive, Ch. 1.
10 Dorothy Sayers, Introduction to The Comedy of Dante Alighieri the Florentine, Cantica I: Inferno, trans. Dorothy Sayers (London: Penguin, 1949), 11.
11 Dorothy Sayers, “My Belief about Heaven and Hell,” The Sunday Times, January 6, 1957, 8.
12 Dorothy Sayers, Introduction to The Comedy of Dante Alighieri the Florentine: Cantica II: Purgatory, trans. Dorothy L. Sayers, (London: Penguin, 1955), 58.
13 Origen interpreted Matt. 5:26, “you will never get out of there until you have paid the last penny,” from Jesus admonition to settle disputes quickly, as implying the doctrine, Augustine extrapolated older Jewish-Christian beliefs regarding the time between death and judgment, and Thomas Aquinas discussed differences between punishment and penance, Sayers notes, in explaining the origins of the doctrine. Sayers, Introduction to Purgatory (London: Penguin, 1955), 54-61.
14 Sayers, Introduction to Purgatory, 9.
15 Barbara Reynolds, Introduction to The Comedy of Dante Alighieri the Florentine, Cantica III: Paradise, trans. Dorothy Sayers and Barbara Reynolds (London: Penguin, 1962), 15-16.
16 Sayers, “My Belief about Heaven and Hell,” 8.
17 Downing, Subversive, Ch. 3.
18 Sayers to H.S. Vere-Hodge, December 12, 1956, The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, vol. 4, 1951-1957: In the Midst of Life, ed. Barbara Reynolds (Cambridge: Dorothy L. Sayers Society, 2000), 353.
19 Reynolds, The Passionate Intellect, 33.
20 Reynolds, The Passionate Intellect, 19, citing Dorothy Sayers, “. . . And Telling You a Story,” Essays Presented to Charles Williams (Oxford University Press, 1947), 1.
21 Reynolds, The Passionate Intellect, 27.
22 Sayers, Introduction to Hell, 10-11.
23 Ibid.
24 Barfield, “The Inspiration of the Divine Comedy,” 51.
25 Ibid. 50.
26 Sayers, The Divine Comedy: Hell, 275. Sayers cites Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice, p.143 in the quote.
27 Barfield, “The Inspiration of the Divine Comedy,” 51.
28 Ibid., 53, citing Dante, Purgatory, Canto XXXI, 118-120.
29 Ibid., 55.
30 Ibid.
31 Dante, trans. Dorothy Sayers and Barbara Reynolds, Paradise, VI:19-21, 98, cited in Barfield, 55.
32 Ibid., Paradise X:4, 135, cited in Barfield, 55.
33 Barfield, “The Inspiration of the Divine Comedy,” 55.
34 Dante, trans. Dorothy Sayers and Barbara Reynolds, Paradise, X:79-81 137, cited in Barfield, 58.
35 Ibid., Paradise, XII: 14-15, in Barfield, 157.
36 Barfield, “The Inspiration of the Divine Comedy,” 55.
37 Ibid., 60.
38 Dante, trans. Sayers, Reynolds, Paradise XXX: 40-42, in Barfield “The Inspiration of the Divine Comedy,” 63.
39 Barfield, “The Inspiration of the Divine Comedy,” 64.
40 Dante, trans. Sayers, Reynolds, The Divine Comedy 1: Hell, 5, citing Canto XV: 86-87.
41 Dante, trans. Sayers, The Divine Comedy 2: Purgatory, 5, citing Canto XXVI: 110-114.
42 Barbara Reynolds, The Passionate Intellect, 12.
43 Reynolds, The Passionate Intellect, 15.
44 Desmond McCarthy, Sunday Times, August 29, 1943, 3 cited in Reynolds, The Passionate Intellect, 16.
45 Charles WIlliams, The Figure of Beatrice (Victoria: Reading Essentials, first published 1943), 3-4, Digital Edition.
46 Ibid., 4.
47 Ibid., 4-5.
48 U2. 1987. “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” on The Joshua Tree, Island.
49 Augustine, The Confessions Book I.1 (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 3.
50 C.S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory” in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (New York: HarperOne, 2009), 30.
51 C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (New York: HarperOne, 2017).
52 Williams, The Figure of Beatrice, 6.
53 Reynolds, The Passionate Intellect, 171.
54 Ibid., 172.
55 Ibid., 84.
56 Dante, Paradise VI.88-93.
57 Reynolds, The Passionate Intellect, 97.
58 Sayers, Introduction to Hell, 9.
59 Ibid., 10.
60 Ibid., 11.
61 Ibid.
62 Ibid., 14.
63 Reynolds remarks how Sayers was heavily influenced by Williams in many ways, including his notion of “the City” as reflective of human society as a whole, in Reynolds, The Passionate Intellect, 90, 98.
64 Sayers, Introduction to Hell, 19.
65 Ibid.
66 Sayers, Introduction to Purgatory, 11.
67 Ibid., 10, citing Paradise XXX.40.
68 Ibid., 16.
69 Ibid., 16.
70 C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (New York: HarperOne, 2017), 75.
71 Sayers, Introduction to Purgatory, 16.
72 Ibid., 17.
73 Ibid., 23.
74 Ibid., 28.
75 Ibid., 32.
76 Ibid., 37.
77 Ibid., 44.
78 Reynolds, The Passionate Intellect, 189.
79 Reynolds, Introduction to Paradise, 12.
80 Ibid., 15.
81 Ibid., 16, citing Paradise XXX.40-42.
82 Ibid.
83 Ibid.
84 Ibid.
85 Ibid., 17.
86 Ibid.
87 Ibid.
88 Ibid.
89 Ibid.
90 Ibid., 18.
91 Ibid.
92 Ibid.
93 Ibid.
94 C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (New York: Scribner, 2003), Ch. 17, 187.
95 Ibid., 188.
96 Ibid., 151.
97 C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, Ch. 9, 83-84.
98 Sayers, Introduction to Purgatory, 9. T.S. Eliot used the insight in his poem Ash Wednesday, and apparently claimed it to be the most profound insight from the entire Commedia. See David Franks, March 1, 2017, “Our Peace in His Will: On T.S. Eliot’s ‘Ash Wednesday,’” New City Rising, http://www.newcityrising.com/blog/2017/3/1/our-peace-in-his-will. The exact location of the phrase is left as an exercise for the reader, and seems to be in Paradise.
99 Malcolm Guite, The Singing Bowl (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2013). Guite’s lecture on Dante, accompanied by Michael Ward’s lecture on the “Planet Narnia” theme, “Dante and Lewis: The Music of the Spheres,” can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9Fbb4aYtEo. It helped inspire Dante-themed articles by the author, “Dante for Moderns,” An Unexpected Journal 3, no. 3 (2020), https://anunexpectedjournal.com/dante-for-moderns/ and “Chesterton at the Movies,” An Unexpected Journal 2, no. 4 (2019), https://anunexpectedjournal.com/chesterton-at-the-movies/.
100 Dante, Paradise XXXIII.142-145.
