Letter #8

Dear Flannery,

"For my money, Dante is about as great as you can get."

You wrote that in a letter to “A” in 1955. I was chatting with a visitor in my home two days ago and mentioned that I had just finished reading Dante's Divine Comedy as part of my attempt to fill in some gaping holes in my literary education. (I mentioned this ongoing project to you earlier. I have been making some progress lately through my book stacks and although I grasp very little I find myself miraculously becoming a bit less confused which I constantly remind myself is all I can hope for.) This visitor whom I believe is college-educated mumbled quite humbly that she never even heard of Dante. I strove to hide my disappointment. Never heard of Dante? How can this happen? This is the unsettling and sometimes astonishing state of modern affairs.

You saw this in your time and it has become much, much worse. Not many are interested in the accumulated wisdom of the world anymore. The great majority of teachers don’t teach it so students never hear of it. Or is it that teachers don’t instill a love of learning so people grow up with no interest in it? Or could it be that our “advanced technological age” makes both entertainment and learning equally and instantly accessible and we humans characteristically choose mindless amusements over knowledge? It could just be the pervasive new-age attitude that old is valueless, new is best (or what people perceive as old and new). If the ancient or old is referred to at all, it is often twisted to suit shallow and misguided modern sensibilities. And that’s sad, wrong, and ignorant. As if just because we are living in the present time we are smarter, better human beings than those who came before. Since when has that ever been true?

I was thrilled to find at the touch of my fingertips, glowing on my computer screen, a lengthy paper from 1989 called “Flannery O’Connor and Dante’s Divine Comedy” by Benjamin B. Alexander, a lecturer and assistant university professor of English and Religion. This I printed out at another touch for perusal at my convenience. Incidentally, all this amazing modern facilitation I enjoy makes me think of you laboriously typing and retyping your stories and novels on a mid-20th century typewriter, painstakingly making corrections--with what, an ink eraser? And then sending out precious copies to editors and publishers. (I think I remember reading that you eventually got an electric typewriter which must have been nice but not much technical help.) Beyond that, it makes me think of Dante himself, writing in the Middle Ages . . . with what? (Wait, I’ll look it up on Google.) Wax tablets, perhaps (he was probably too poor to employ a scribe), and then pen and parchment. In elegant script. No, we have no excuse nowadays, for any sort of laziness in learning or writing, do we?

You may be surprised and pleased that Alexander finds striking similarities between your writings and our esteemed 14th Century Italian’s. Both of you wrote to illuminate the divine life, or the Holy Spirit, in everyday people’s lives. He says you parallel Dante in the crafting of your stories. Yes, I believe I can see that. He goes on to acknowledge that while Dante lived in a time when he could take for granted that the people around him shared his view of heaven and hell as “unquestionable truth,” you lived in a world of “pluralistic options and existential dilemmas” when all things God had become “a conditional alternative.” There was no longer a universally shared faith. In other words, you had extenuating circumstances Dante did not have to contend with.

A world losing both its faith and its certainties was the world you wrote for, an “age with doubts both fact and value, and which is swept this way and that by momentary convictions.” Even so, you would not recognize the world we live in today. You would see those momentary convictions flowing mainstream from our new god, Secularism, the new fountain of “truth,” decorated with demonic distortions, violence, and filth right out of the Inferno. Dante’s readers recognized the hellish as “deformed and perverse, whereas contemporary culture increasingly equates hellish iconography with the normative and chic.” Alexander wrote these words over 20 years ago, and in the last outrageous and unprecedented 20 years, things have gotten worse.

It’s really become quite unfriendly here for those who believe this world is not our real home, who care about the welfare of immortal souls, who exercise faith that there is a spiritual universe we can begin to explore and know here and now. Even churches of every denomination have been caught up in the popular secular current. Their once firm doctrines are now diluted and watery and swirl among shallow, liquid, ever-changing sophistries. As a result, for some, sitting in a crowded chapel on a Sunday feels like the loneliest place on earth.

Glimpsing light from Dante’s “dark wood,”

J.