Talking Tuesday: Dante and the Image of the Soul

I finally broke open Rod Dreher's latest book, How Dante Can Save Your Life, and am finding it surprisingly accessible.  I found a lot of his blog writing on Dante to be a bit beyond me, but the book is very readable.  Another reader noted that it forms a kind of capstone to his previous two books, Crunchy Cons and The Little Way of Ruthie Leming.  How Dante Can Save Your Life is not an exegetical text--the story picks up where The Little Way of Ruthie Leming left off, and goes from there.  It is an intensely personal story, but I'm finding much to apply to my own life and approach.  I find myself dog-earing pages pretty often, to go back and think about them again.  

 

I'm nearly half-way through the book after a few nights of reading, and have just finished the chapter on Medusa, and the ways that Dante uses imagery to make his point about our basic sinful nature. The following passage stood out to me last night:

"Dante's purpose is to demonstrate to the reader the disfiguring nature of sin.  What they chose to be in life, they became in the afterlife.  When Dante shows his readers the terrifying punishments of the damned in hell and the penitents in purgatory, he is trying to shock us into recognizing what our souls look like when we sin.

For Dante, the power of images is supremely important.  Dante shows us like nobody else that good and evil are not abstractions but that they take particular forms.  An image is never just an image; it always points to something else. 

In the realm of Dante's afterlife, images are reality.  The pilgrim's movement toward unity with God is measured by his increasing ability to see things as they really are.  Believing is seeing.  Not so in the mortal life, when images can serve as a veil hiding the true nature of the evil men do."

~Rod Dreher, How Dante Can Save Your Life, New York: Regan Arts, 2015, pp 107-108.



I'm a strongly visual person, and images have often spoken truth to me.  I find much to think about in movies and paintings and find I have to be careful about what I watch, as it tends to stay with me. (Dreher quotes Nieztche at the end of the chapter in saying: "Be careful when you stare too long into the abyss, for the abyss stares back at you"--a useful reminder indeed that what we put into ourselves becomes part of us).  Icons in particular are very powerful to me, and I've had some otherworldly experiences with them.

Those of us on the Old Calendar have just begun the Nativity Fast, the 40 days of preparation before the Church celebrates the birth of Christ.  I think it is useful to keep in mind the ways that imagery can obfuscate sin, or make it seem benign or even appealing, but also the ways that imagery can point us toward God, and prepare our hearts to receive Him.  Like many things, imagery is a tool that can be used to to separate us from or bind us to God.  In the case of Dante, it is a good reminder that what we seek after in this life, we shall find in the next.