Three Intertwined Journeys
A Review of
The Way of Dante: Going Through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven with C. S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Charles Williams
Richard Hughes Gibson
Paperback: IVP Academic, 2025
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Reviewed by Philip Irving Mitchell
Richard Hughes Gibson sets out to convince his readers that Dante is worth their time, and he trusts C. S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Charles Williams to help him do that. Lewis is the most renowned, with Sayers known mostly for her detective fiction and Williams for his involvement with the Inklings. Gibson shows that the three were a community or “cohort” of readers. In the archives of their work, he found “a dense clump of relations” (xxiii). The three praise aspects of the poet to one another, critique each other’s work, and work together to revitalize interest in Dante. Their example can model for contemporary readers how sharing a common love does not require that they always agree.
Gibson also wants us to see how Lewis, Sayers, and Williams experienced Dante. Dante is entertaining, not always “grimth” (Sayers’s word) (xxxiii), and he enlarges us by offering a wide scope of experiences. Likewise, Dante is addictive: one wants to share the encounter with others. But Gibson especially praises the three because they ask: Is Dante true? It is truth that draws us in, widens our horizons, and urges us to share it with kindred souls. Something is lost if Dante is just diversionary literature.
Gibson’s book is written to be enjoyable and accessible, though not every chapter equally delivers this. The chapter on allegory (chapter Four) may be less interesting to some readers, although it does ask us to consider why its distinctions would be important to some. In chapters one and two, we learn how each author first came to Dante: Lewis as a teenager, Sayers as an adult, and Williams seemingly always, and we discover how each read and responded to the others’ approaches to him—whether as scholars, novelists, poets, critics, or translators. We see the impact Williams had on the imagination of Sayers and Lewis. Yet, despite the influence of his book The Figure of Beatrice, Williams is the least discussed in the book, with Sayers having the lion’s share in her translations and essays on Dante. Lewis’s letters offer insights into his work as a critic and historian of literature. Gibson also spends time tracing allusions to Dante in their own books—Lewis’s The Great Divorce and Perelandra, and Williams’s Taliessin Through Logres, among others.
The chapters on Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise are the center of The Way of Dante. Here, Gibson tells us not only how each author responded to Dante’s chief work but also why we should care. This is especially helpful for those readers who have not yet read The Divine Comedy, or who have read only the Inferno. We learn from Sayers that Hell is monotonous, and from all three writers that Dante’s journey through its depths is a call to self-examination, not to dwell there but to behold its dangers and turn away. The logic of the Divine Comedy begins with its end—the beatific experience of love and goodness. The journey only starts from the damnable for dramatic purposes.
Gibson tells us, “If Inferno furnishes an education in evil, Purgatorio offers a corresponding open-air schoolroom in such salutary themes as repentance, holiness, and community” (101). Lewis, Sayers, and Williams each preferred the second part of the Comedy to the first, and they complained it was too often unread because Dante was known only as a poet of Hell. They also recognized that the latter two parts of the Comedy set out to teach, and modern readers have little practice in appreciating this: “Then the sermons begin,” as Sayers said (104). But what if the sermons are true? Williams particularly wanted readers to understand that allegorical and symbolic works may be more realistic, if reality is actually thick with meaning to begin with. Sayers, in turn, stresses Dante’s lucidity and clarity of thought.
Dante’s Paradise also offers a potential challenge for modern readers: it has almost no evil to move its plot along. Instead, readers follow Dante on “an intellectual and spiritual quest” (126). Dante’s attempt to represent the tangible splendor of heaven is one all three writers were committed to replicating. Lewis’s essay “The Weight of Glory” even shaped other translators of Dante, such as John Sinclair. Gibson also traces how Williams’s stress on the Affirmative Way in Christian mysticism, which he learned from Dante, shaped both Lewis and Sayers’s own writings. One delightful discovery in The Way of Dante is Sayers’ unfinished novel, Dante and His Daughter Bice (143ff.), so far tucked away in the archives at Wheaton’s Wade Center. (Someone needs to work up an edition of the chapters that she did finish.)
All in all, Gibson offers us three intertwined journeys and invites us to learn from them and enjoy the results in their wide canon of writings.
I do have one concern: I question the author’s choice not to discuss Williams’s problematic actions towards women, especially since Williams used his reading of Beatrice to excuse his emotional manipulations and abuses. It might be beneficial for readers to first encounter what Williams has to offer without that knowledge, but once one does know, it cannot be ignored, and it undermines any attempt Williams made to develop a romantic theology or to rhapsodize about the Beatrician moments he experienced. That he could so positively shape Lewis and Sayers (along with other writers, such as T.S. Eliot and W. H. Auden) raises questions with which any reader may have to wrestle. It remains an open question whether Williams’s actions poison the good he had to offer.
Philip Mitchell
Philip Irving Mitchell has taught humanities at Dallas Baptist University for 25 years. His courses include writers like C. S. Lewis, J.R. R. Tolkien, and Dorothy L. Sayers. He is the author of The Shared Witness of C. S. Lewis and Austin Farrer: Friendship, Influence, and an Anglican Worldview.
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