Modern readers sometimes fear that a medieval portrayal of heaven will involve ghostly souls flitting around with harps trying to convince themselves that they are not bored. Dante had other ideas. The magnificent third part of his Comedy is justly famous for its wildly inventive use of language, its endlessly imaginative account of travel to all the planets known in Dante's time (and the stars and “spheres” beyond), and above all for the depth of its thought about human life in a universe suffused with the divine. Far from an exercise in vapid piety, the Paradiso actually intensifies the withering attacks of Inferno and Purgatorio on the misdeeds of the contemporary church -- while simultaneously putting forward a deeply rooted and deeply serious “itinerary” for a mind’s journey into God.
Join us! This fall we’ll read the poem at an even slower pace than usual (two 3-page cantos most weeks, occasionally only one). Our discussions will be guided by a recognized scholar of Dante who’s led groups on this journey through outer space nearly every year since 2013. And we’ll work together toward forming a small community of readers whose different backgrounds and interests deepen our common understanding of one of the greatest spiritual books Western culture has ever produced.
Twelve weekly sessions beginning week of September 15. Meeting times TBD, so please contact us ASAP to express your preferences!
Among scholars no less than among everyday readers, questions about how to read the Bible are in high ferment. Not only outside Christianity but within it, and frequently within individual denominations, readers disagree about such fundamental things as the historical accuracy of various parts of the Bible, the number of possible meanings that a single passage might have, and even what it means to say that a biblical passage is “true.”
We can’t claim that a discussion group will solve such deep questions in a few months, but it can offer an acquaintance with some people who might help us on the way. This fall we’ll start with Augustine and move forward toward one of the most creative (and most thorough) epochs of biblical interpretation, the high Middle Ages. Thus we’ll hear from figures like Jerome, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory the Great, Rabanus Maurus, and eventually Hugh of St. Victor, Peter Lombard, and Thomas Aquinas -- while occasional interventions from recent scholars (Guardini, Ratzinger, perhaps insightful secular observers like Frank Kermode) will clarify and challenge older assumptions, making the contemporary relevance of our readings clear. Our goal throughout will be understanding how best to encounter, in our own relatively new historical situation, this most challenging, provocative, and haunting of texts.
Seven sessions, every other week, starting mid-September. Here too the meeting times are TBD, so contact us to express a preference!
TheTreasures.org hosts online reading groups designed to provide access to texts that are endlessly engaging, thought-provoking, possibly life-transforming — and typically texts that few people would work their way through on their own.
When one no longer has to work on one’s own, what once seemed a daunting task changes into a joyful experience, a highlight of the week: discovering that a “classic” like Dante’s Divine Comedy or Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy is not a far-off block of impenetrable literary marble, but a living, changing artwork that has vital things to say to us, and perhaps to do to us, in our twenty-first-century lives.