Join the world’s largest Dante reading group.

Starting September 8th and ending on Easter 2022, we will read three cantos a week, learning from teachers who know and love Dante well. (Full site coming soon) — 100 Days of Dante

Baylor University’s Honors College is hosting what it call “the world’s largest Dante reading group” at the address above, where you can sign up for future updates. My understanding is that they will go through the entire Divine Comedy, three cantos a week, presenting videos and reading guides in conjunction with other universities…five are listed as supporting the effort. Starting in 2021 coincides with the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death in 1321.

As the short clip says at the link, “This is a story of being lost and being found.” The video highlights the religious aspect of the work, but there are other reasons to read it and this seems to be a great opportunity to do so.

I’ll provide a quote from recent article on Dante that I found interesting. It’s by Daniel Mark Epstein the the April 2021 issue of The New Criterion (link may be behind a paywall):

The artistic triumph of the Commedia comes at the expense of the hero’s vision. And his testament in the last canto of the poem is poignant. As he promised us at the beginning of the Paradiso, he was bound to fail, and he does fail. Whatever he managed to see, as beautiful as it was, has escaped him, and he is unsure how much was of his own making. The longed-for vision of the Supreme Light, and then the Holy Trinity, is merely apparent. “Credo ch’i’ vidi,” (“I think I saw it”) because it has left him a residue of joy, like a man who wakes smiling from a dream about which he can recall no details. At the end he sees puzzles within puzzles, chiefly the Incarnation, which he compares to a geometer’s squaring of a circle, framing a human image. He longs to see how that square accords with the circle; then a blazing light strikes his mind, “in che sua voglia venne,” he says, ambiguously—“wherein came its wish.” Reaching the limits of his vision he no longer has the strength for “this high fantasy”—i.e., the details of the Trinity. The most he can say for himself is that his will and his desire are at last revolving in accordance with the love that moves the sun and stars.

This is not a resounding Christian conclusion, and Christian contemporaries, then and now, might find it disturbing. We admire irony and ambiguity in poetry from Sophocles to Shakespeare because life is not simple, there are no easy answers, and great literature is an inexhaustible reflection of life. The Commedia is a timeless critique not only of politics but of religious faith. What does Dante think of the Christian Paradise? You may or may not be surprised to discover that when Dante arrives at the amphitheater of the Rose of Paradise he sees his beloved Beatrice seated with numerous Jews. We already know that there are pagans that have crept in by grace or predestination. And one would suppose, if Dante has anything to say about it, there will be more. His work as a poet has been to challenge the orthodoxy of his time and open up the Kingdom of Heaven to all sorts of people.

I have yet to watch the full hour-long video of “Reading Dante Together: Why the Divine Comedy matters and how to read it well” on YouTube, but I’m slowly working on it. Hopefully you’ll find the project and the info as appealing as I do.