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!
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.