Dante's Divine Comedy

Journey to Joy: Paradise

Dorothy Sayers said, "People who tackle Dante in [a] superficial way seldom get beyond the picturesque squalors of the Inferno. This is as though we were to judge a great city after a few days spent underground among the cellars and sewers; it would not be surprising if we were to report only an impression of sordidness, suffocation, rats, fetor, and gloom. But the grim substructure is only there for the sake of the city whose walls and spires stand up and take the morning; it is for the vision of God in the Paradiso that all the rest of the allegory exists."

In 1957 C.S. Lewis read my thesis about him and congratulated me: "You are in the centre of the target everywhere. For one thing, you know my work better than anyone else I've met.... If you understand me so well you will understand other authors too. I hope we shall have some really useful critical works from your hand."

With Dante's Divine Comedy: A Journey to Joy, Lewis's hope seems to be fulfilled. Nothing could be more useful today than enabling people to understand Dante. And nothing could be a better tribute to C. S. Lewis than the clearest, most accurate, and most readable edition of Paradise ever published in English.

"C. S. Lewis and Dante's Paradise," the introduction to this edition, reveals for the first time how pivotal Paradisewas in Lewis's life and thought. The year after he first read Paradise, he became a believing Christian; and he was clearly influenced by Dante for the rest of his life. There are traces of The Divine Comedythroughout Lewis's writing, from The Pilgrim's Regress,his first Christian book, to Letters to Malcom,his last.

Unfortunately, few Americans today have read Dante's Paradise, and fewer yet have understood it -- because it is the most complex and obscure part of the trilogy. There are parts that even leading Dante scholars have not understood. It is my privilege to fill in some of these gaps with new discoveries while leading ordinary readers up through the circles and spheres of Heaven.

Here are the titles I have given to the cantos of Paradise:

1. Toward a Golden Target
2. The First Heaven: the Moon
3. Piccarda's Face
4. The Sacred Stream
5. The Second Heaven: Mercury
6. The Roman Eagle
7. Just Vengeance
8. The Third Heaven: Venus
9. A Ruby Struck by the Sun
10. The Fourth Heaven: the Sun
11. Remembering St. Francis
12. The Double Rainbow
13. The Wisdom of Solomon
14. The Fifth Heaven: Mars
15. Meeting an Ancestor
16. Fine Families
17. Footnotes on the Future
18. The Sixth Heaven: Jupiter
19. The Eagle's Beak
20. The Eagle's Eye
21. The Seventh Heaven: Saturn
22. St. Benedict's Answer
23. The Eighth Heaven: Stationary Stars
24. St. Peter's Questions about Faith
25. St. James's Questions about Hope
26. St John's Questions about Love
27. The Ninth Heaven: A Crystalline Sphere
28. Rings of Fire
29. All about Angels
30. The Empyrean
31. The Celestial Rose
32. The Saints Assembled
33. A Vision of God

In his 1997 book A History of Heaven, Jeffrey Burton Russell says "To the modern mind heaven often seems bland or boring, an eternal sermon or a perpetual hymn. Evil and the Devil seem to get the best lines. Dante knew better; nothing could possibly be as exciting as heaven itself. The human idea of heaven is a complex tapestry shot with flashes of glory."

"Kathryn Lindskoog's retelling of the Comedy is an English rendering of poignant, poetic beauty. The greatest insight Lindskoog has, not only into Paradise but into the entire Comedy, is that is is a "journey of joy." The joy of the redeemed was Dante's great gift to his time, and Lindskoog has made it new for our own, which has desperate need of it."
--The Living Church

Not only has Lindskoog done an admirable job of rendering Dante's Italian poetry into clear English prose, but for each volume she has provided helpful notes to further facilitate the reading of the text.
--Christopher Mitchell, Seven: An Anglo-American Literary Review, vol. 16

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