What did C.S. Lewis and Dorothy Sayers see in the Inferno?

It isn’t much of an exaggeration to call Dante Alighieri the greatest poet in human history. Alongside Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, and Milton, he belongs to that rare class of authors whose profundity survives all attempts to rationalize or destroy it. He’s timeless, made more potent by the depth of his religious philosophy as a High Medieval philosopher. Within him was the best of the Roman Catholic worldview, so much so that many people have converted just because his grasp of the Beatific Vision felt like a sincere interaction with God.

To this day, “Dante’s Inferno” is cultural shorthand for our pop-culture understanding of hell and the Christian afterlife, where people suffer ironic punishments for the sins in their lives, whereas Purgatorio and Paradiso are largely forgotten poems.

Regardless, devotees of Dante recognize him for his brilliance. This view was also very much the case for the Inklings, the famous group of 20th-century English intellectual Christians who formed C.S. Lewis’ Oxford social group. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Inklings associate Dorothy L. Sayers all had their own journeys discovering Dante at different points in their lives and slowly coming to recognize the heights of his poetic skill. Sayers, in particular, would dedicate the final decade of her life to translating and lecturing on Dante.

This fascination has become the thesis of the newest book to emerge out of Wheaton College’s remarkable Inklings scholarship. Having delivered the prestigious Hanson Lecture Series at the Marion Wade Center in Spring 2024, Wheaton College English Professor Richard Hughes Gibson has now reworked his lectures into a single volume called The Way of Dante (IVP Academic, 248 pp.).

This brisk work is useful for correlating the thoughts of these three great Christian thinkers into a single place. Lewis, Williams, and Sayers all wrote a great deal on Dante, but much of it is scattered or buried in dense analysis. Gibson doesn’t merely do the reader a favor through convenience. Remarkably, he synthesizes three streams of thought by showing the ways that these three friends and colleagues worked together in their analysis.

As he writes, “Sayers, Williams, and Lewis must be understood as a cohort of Dante readers whose innovations of Dante—public and private, conspicuous and covert—comprise a network of allusions, quotations, and citations.” In short, “they motivated each other,” but their appreciations emerged “for very different reasons” and produced differing conclusions.

Indeed, all three authors interacted with The Divine Comedy at different stages of life. Lewis discovered it as a young man, while Sayers discovered it as a middle-aged woman, having brought a copy of Inferno to pass the time in a bomb shelter during World War II. Williams wrote a lengthy analysis of the poem during the war, which was largely maligned by other Dante scholars despite inspiring both Lewis and Sayers. Lewis himself would quote Dante dozens of times in his scholarly masterpieces The Allegory of Love and The Discarded Image.

As Lewis wrote to Sayers in a 1949 letter, the power of Dante came from the way in which the reader forgets the poet and the translator thinks only of hell and heaven. Dante manages the feat of being both rigid and fluid, capturing the intense hierarchies of the medieval mind, while constantly dialoging with the reader about the nature of what they’re seeing. It’s didactic, but also matter-of-fact. Its most thematically and poetically remarkable stretch comprises its final cantos, even though “nothing bad happens.”

The trio saw that the remarkable heights of Dante came from his ability to paint an image that pointed directly to God, reaching “altitudes no other poem could touch.”

Gibson’s task, as he acknowledges in the introduction, is unenviable, having to unpack one of the densest poets and his scholarship in a single volume. However, his accomplishment in doing so is remarkable, and he points to streams of thought flowing in and out of this trio through the themes of love, evil, glory, image, allegory, and William’s esoteric concept of the “Beatrician encounter.”

Gibson acknowledges that the rabbit holes Sayers and Williams dug in their scholarship were even fairly controversial among academia. Sayers and Lewis wanted to make Dante more accessible to the masses, but Williams didn’t mind being esoteric and obscure. Sayers even disagreed with Lewis on just how lucid the poem’s difficulty was, claiming the famously difficult poem was completely clear, eliciting a chuckle from Lewis.

That Gibson was able to chart such a coherent pathway with the challenging premise of explaining three writers’ views on Dante is impressive, and he produces scholarship that any Inklings or Dante obsessive would greatly benefit from.