Are you one of the multitudes who always meant to read Dante’s Comedy, but have never quite gotten to it? Or have you gone through the Inferno but never made it to the other two parts? Or maybe you’ve read the whole epic, but would like to return at a slower pace, in community, in order to discover more of the poem’s riches?
This group is for all of you! This fall we’ll read the magnificent second part of Dante’s poem even more slowly than we usually do, taking only two cantos (6-7 pages) most weeks, and occasionally only one. For newcomers it’s a chance to discover why so many readers of the whole epic name Purgatory as their favorite part; for returning voyagers the slow pace will allow deep engagement with the poem’s philosophy, psychology, and theology. And for everyone it will be what it always is: a story of human ascent toward the divine, a deep consideration of the relations between Christianity and “pagan” philosophy, and an adventure-tale narrated so concretely that you may leave feeling ready to lead pilgrims up Dante’s seven-story mountain yourself.
Weekly, beginning mid-to-late September. Meeting time TBD, so please contact us ASAP to express interest!
Probably almost everyone knows of Paradise Lost as a standout Christian epic from modern-period Europe — and also as a virtual encyclopedia of western culture. (Who was it who said that the mark of a cultured person was the ability to read Milton without looking at the footnotes?) But it is also much more. It is a searching confrontation with perennial questions about evil and “theodicy,” or why a just God permits evil to persist. It is the poem that launched a thousand reactions: the poem whose presence is inescapable, whether as model or as target, in much of the Romantic poetry that followed it. It is a statement of a personal understanding of God and world that has sometimes been taken as typical of modern Christianity, but has equally often (especially recently) been seen as rejecting some of the religion’s central tenets. It is a commentary on
material and intellectual events of Milton’s time, not least the thought of the scientific circles that produced his near-contemporaries Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton. And it is, finally, a stirring narrative told in matchless English verse — an ambitious and challenging work that offers excitement and joy to the reader who approaches in the right spirit.
This year we aim to read it joyously, by providing the context that puts the joy within reach: a pace as slow as is practicable (two or three group meetings for each of the epic’s twelve “books”) and a supportive group of readers. Join us!
Also weekly, beginning mid-to-late September. Here too meeting time will be set by group needs, so contact us ASAP !
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.