Join Dr. Russell and your fellow students to learn why Dante is the greatest author of the greatest book on the greatest subject of any ever written by a man not known by the Church to be directly inspired by God!
Total number of class meetings: 12
Prerequisite: Ability to enjoy reading the work
Suggested grade level: 10th to 12th grade
Suggested credit: One full semester Literature
Instructor: Dr. Henry Russell
Instructor Email: maryshire@gmail.com
Course description: Dante Alighieri is the only “secular” author in praise of whom a Pontiff has written an encyclical letter. Pope Benedict XV’s “In Praeclara Summorum” of 1921 rightly says, “We admire in him not only supreme height of genius but also the immensity of the subject which holy religion put to his hand. If his genius was refined by meditation and long study of the great classics it was tempered even more gloriously, as We have said, by the writings of the Doctors and the Fathers which gave him the wings on which to rise to a higher atmosphere than that of restricted nature.”
Dante teaches us what it might mean to be a Catholic in every element of our thought and culture. His work is not only sublimely beautiful, but filled with the most important truths. He was a complete Catholic in an age of political and heretical turmoils, but an age blessed with the influence of towering saints like Bernard, Francis, Dominic, and Thomas Aquinas. His Divine Comedy intends to teach us how to harmonize the demands of Church and State, community and individual, authority and conscience, divine and natural knowledge, intellect and emotion. The Comedy provides a vision of eternity in order to teach man how to live in time in his brief span before forever. The Inferno provides the greatest examination of our conscience as we come to see our own affinities to the souls who have chosen Hell. Again, as Benedict XV wrote, “The more profit you draw from study of him the higher will be your culture, irradiated by the splendours of truth, and the stronger and more spontaneous your devotion to the Catholic Faith.”
Course outline:
Class 1: Biography and Medieval Thought
Class 2: Cantos 1-2
Class 3: Cantos 3-4
Class 4: Cantos 5-9
Class 5: Cantos 10-12
Class 6: Cantos 13-15
Class 7: Cantos 16-18
Class 8: Cantos 19-21
Class 9: Cantos 22-24
Class 10: Cantos 25-27
Class 11: Cantos 28-30
Class 12: Cantos 31-34
Course Materials: We will use the Dorothy Sayers edition, ISBN: 9780140440065 (https://amzn.to/3p1HUAa)
Homework: Approximately 26 pages of poetry and notes per week. About an hour’s reading. There will be computer-graded quizzes available after each class, a mid-term and a final.
- Teacher: Henry Russell