What We’re Reading

Dante, The Inferno. A great joy and hidden benefit of teaching is when you get to revisit great texts because they are part of your teaching load. This is true for Dante, where we began our classroom journey in The Divine Comedy beginning with The Inferno. One student asked: Why does Dante have to begin his journey in hell? When you think about it, it is odd – why start in a place without hope? “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE.” While there are many things one can say about The Inferno, and I am bringing up many different threads and themes that dot the landscape of the poem, the most fundamental reality to The Inferno’s importance is that The Divine Comedy is the pilgrimage of love to the Author of Love – and this begins by learning the most basic affections of the heart: mercy, pity, and forgiveness, in order to avoid the jaws of death and the loveless reality of hell. Dante, with the company of Virgil, learns love in hell in order to escape hell, to avoid the fate of those souls trapped in the inferno of their own making. This learning of love culminates in a single act of forgiveness between Dante and Virgil right before the ninth and final circle of hell, thus permitting them to pass through the darkest reality of hell and begin their ascent to paradise where beauty and love exist forever and ever.

~ Paul Krause

Vigen Guroian. Rallying The Really Human Things: Moral Imagination In Politics, Literature, and Everyday Life. Due to a current writing project, I have been thinking these days about the concept of the “moral imagination” and the importance of the humanities in helping to foster it. This has led me to read a wonderful book by Vigen Guroian called Rallying the Really Human Things: The Moral Imagination in Politics, Literature, and Everyday Life. Although this book is a collection of essays, some common themes unite each chapter—especially the “moral imagination” and “Christian humanism.” Guroian discusses three figures in particular—G.K. Chesterton, Flannery O’Connor, and Russell Kirk—as representative Christian humanists in the twentieth century. He also discusses the wisdom of earlier figures, ranging from St. John Chrysostom to Edmund Burke. Each of these men and women, he shows, sheds light on the tradition of Christian humanism and offers a compelling vision for the defense of human dignity and the renewal of culture.

The modern world, believes Guroian, can be characterized by its continual assault on the moral imagination. What Irving Babbitt called the “idyllic imagination” and what T.S. Eliot called the “diabolic imagination” have instead thrived. Ours is an age of cultural crisis, in which the human person risks being tossed into a morass of ideology and technological indignity. More than ever, therefore, we need books and writers who can point us to what Chesterton called “really human things.” That is, we need to be reminded of “certain perennial powers and attributes of human existence, perennial because they express the given nature of that creature whom God has created in his own image.”

Published in 2005 by ISI Books, this book is now almost 20 years old. Still, it is remarkably insightful, well-written, and relevant to our current political and cultural troubles. Lovers of the arts and humanities who frequent the online pages of VoegelinView will find it worth their time.

Next, I plan to read Guroian’s Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child’s Moral Imagination, recently republished in a second edition by Oxford University Press.

~ Darrell Falconburg

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick. A story of adventure, trust, and optimism runs through Melville’s writing style throughout Moby Dick. Despite its various and unnecessary whaling facts that stretch for hundreds of pages, it is safe to say readers grow quite fond of this peculiar relationship between Captain Ahab and Moby Dick. Captain Ahab sails the Pequod, and risks everyone’s life on board, to avenge the loss of his leg some years ago on another voyage. His resulting wooden peg leg may not seem problematic to outsiders, but Captain Ahab insists his manhood cannot be found until Moby Dick is dead. Melville’s persistent references to Moby Dick as “the white whale” guides readers through the author’s Christian background, making Captain Ahab resemble a Christian’s walk with Christ and His purity. “Show me the way,” Captain Ahab says under his breath. It’s almost as the captain longs for Christ, even if it makes him a martyr. And as the novel unfolds in its final chapters, Captain Ahab goes down with the white whale in final victory. Moby Dick is not just a novel. It’s the novel of American Literature.

~ Sarah Tillard

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