Dante’s Spiritual Journey

A Reading of the Divine Comedy

FAIRACRES PUBLICATIONS 191

This book is the fruit of nearly six decades of engagement with the Divine Comedy, a poem that has captured and held the imagination of Christians for seven hundred years. The author describes how Dante’s journey through the three realms, Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso maps onto the inner spiritual journey of all Christians. The dark wood in which the poem begins sums up Dante’s own mid-life crisis—moral, political and financial—and the beginning of a sometimes humiliating journey to self-knowledge. The questions that Dante addresses, attempting to explain the consequences of the death and resurrection of Jesus, are questions that still concern us today. This book accompanies us on our quest to a greater understanding of the relationship between Christian faith and human life.

Tony Dickinson was born in 1948 in Liverpool. After reading Classics at New College, Oxford he worked in university administration in Durham and then for the Open University. In 1980 he began training for ministry in the Church of England and was ordained a priest in 1983. He has served in a number of dioceses, acting latterly as Anglican Ecumenical Officer for Buckinghamshire and Diocesan European Officer and is currently chaplain to the Anglican/Episcopalian congregation in Genoa and a Canon Emeritus of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford. He is a spiritual director and occasional retreat leader.