How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History's Greatest Poem

by Rod Dreher

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781682450734
Publisher:	Regan Arts
Publication date:	03/07/2017
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	673,946
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.70(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Rod Dreher is a writer and journalist who has written three New York Times bestsellers, including ‘The Benedict Option’ (2017) and ‘Live Not By Lies’ (2020). He is a columnist for The European Conservative and a senior fellow at the Danube Institute in Hungary. He lives in Budapest.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Why Dante? xiii

Part I From the Garden to the Dark Wood 1

1 The Child Is Father to the Man 3

2 There and Back Again-Twice 16

3 The Super Tuscan 36

4 The Rides of the Road 43

Part II Inferno, Or, Why You Are Broken 51

5 The Stories of Our Lives 53

6 Into the Black Hole 64

7 The Tempest 72

8 Uncle Jimmy Versus the Golden Calf 85

9 The Life of Books, the Books of Life 95

10 The Power of the Image 106

11 False Gods and Heretics 117

12 Is Life Ever Not Worth Living? 128

13 The Great and the Good 137

14 Sins of the Fathers 149

15 The End of All Our Exploring 160

16 Out of Egypt 170

Part III Purgatorio, Or, How to Be Healed 181

17 Stand Up and Walk 183

18 The Will to Love 195

19 The Ghost in You 207

20 Pride 215

21 Envy 224

22 Wrath 231

23 Sloth 237

24 Gluttony 246

25 Lust 253

Part IV Paradiso, Or, the Way Things Ought to Be 267

26 Into the Light 269

27 Down by the Riverside 282

Conclusion: How to Make Your Own Dante Pilgrimage 293

Acknowledgments 297

Bibliography 299

Editorial Reviews

03/30/2015
After Dreher's sister's untimely death, Dreher (The Little Way of Ruthie Leming) returns with his wife and children to live in the Louisiana parish where he was born. He hopes to reconnect with his family, but they regard him as different and arrogant. Grieving and frustrated that his family won't accept him, Dreher is nearly overcome by a stress-exacerbated illness. Reading Dante's Divine Comedy sets him on a path to healing, and he decides that to seek ultimate satisfaction in anything but God is to pursue a fool's errand. Though the writing is often beautiful and sometimes wise, the book doesn't live up to the virtues it extols. Each chapter ends with a how-to box of occasionally anodyne self-help advice (“Find the dragons hiding , slay them, and bring back the treasure that will help you live well"). Such platitudes undermine Dreher's insistence that narratives, particularly Dante's, are uniquely life-changing. It's clear that reading Dante—and getting some good counseling—helped Dreher overcome despair and learn the meaning of love and forgiveness, but his personal solution is far from universally applicable. Agent: Gary Morris, David Black Agency. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"Sometimes a book comes along that you want to press into the hands of everyone you know. A brilliant, searingly honest account of one man's path to real healing, and an invitation to the rest of us to join him."

—Eric Metaxas, New York Times bestselling author of Miracles and Bonhoeffer

"In a word, marvelous."

—Robert Royal, First Things

"Now everyone can find in Dreher's book the wit, wisdom, and application of the great poem to your life."

—John Mark Reynolds, provost of Houston Baptist University and author of When Athens Met Jerusalem

"Dreher has assimilated what is most urgent in Dante and makes the Divine Comedy passionately real."

—Ronald B. Herzman, SUNY, Geneseo, and co-teacher of The Great Courses lectures on The Divine Comedy

"This book, quite unexpectedly, gave me hope about my own suffering and showed me a way forward, at the same time that it affirmed and deepened my love of literature. It can do that for you too. I hope that this book falls into your hands at exactly the right moment."

—Angelina Stanford, The Circe Institute

"Dreher deftly links his own spiritual quest and Dante's journey down to the depths of hellish sin, up the steep mountain of moral cleansing, and into the glorioius precicnts of paradise, of life with God."

—Ralph C. Wood, Christianity Today

"Not simply important, but very engaging . . . the book's beauty and evangelical sincerity are quite powerful, and likely to be of benefit to one's own spiritual life."

—Carl Eric Scott, National Review Online

From the Publisher

"By weaving his own pilgrimage into Dante's, Rod Dreher makes Dante accessible and, more important, compelling. He has assimilated what is most urgent in Dante and by grafting it to his own story he makes the Divine Comedy passionately real. This is certainly the book for those who previously have only come across Dante as a name. Equally important, it provides fresh insights to those of us who are already hooked."

Ronald B. Herzman

"We will use How Dante Can Save Your Life in our classrooms because it makes the Divine Comedy live in a person—and students need to experience this. I look forward to the rest of you finding in Dreher’s book the wit, wisdom, and application of the great poem to a small life."

When Athens Met Jerusalem - John Mark Reynolds

"Sometimes a book comes along that you want to press into the hands of everyone you know. A brilliant, searingly honest account of one man's path to real healing, and an invitation to the rest of us to join him."

Miracles and Bonhoeffer - Eric Metaxas

2015-03-01
American Conservative senior editor Dreher (The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life, 2013) shares his search for his family's acceptance, looking for answers from his church, his therapist, and Dante's Divine Comedy.The author likens his decision to return with his wife and children to his home in the Louisiana parish of West Feliciana as the return of a prodigal son. Reading Dante, canto by canto, helped him find the way to reconnect. He never took to his father's traditions of hunting, fishing, and other outdoor activities; the author was bookish and lived in his own world. He left for a career in journalism far from home—New York, Texas, Washington, D.C.—but the visits home, short and cool, are his real story. His conversion to Catholicism and eventually Orthodox Christianity expanded the gulf ("the family has always been Methodist"). Dreher mostly avoids preaching or navel-gazing, but he seems to be butting his head against a wall trying to get his family to change. His description of the death of his sister is poignant, and that event prompted him and his wife to return home to help her children. Though their help was not wanted, it was accepted begrudgingly. His descriptions of Southerners' deep attachment to the land and family are enlightening, and the author allows readers to see how his family felt he had forsaken them. The stress of homecoming caused chronic illness, and this book is his fight for resolution. A serendipitous selection of Dante in the bookshop and sessions with his therapist and priest began his reconciliation. As a well-written chronicle of choice between the "success" of big cities and life in the far simpler world of old traditions and deep family ties, the book is both heartwarming and frustrating—certainly more confessional memoir than guide to Dante (a fact the author readily admits).

Kirkus Reviews