Dante Alighieri is the only “secular” author in praise of whom a Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church has written an encyclical letter. His Holiness 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.” Simply interpreted, 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.

Dante teaches us what it means 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. The Comedy provides a vision of eternity in order to teach man how to live in time, in his brief excursus before forever. Outside of the writings of the Saints, the Paradiso is the most beautiful vision of the vast energy and glory of the fully achieved Christian life. It liberates our emotions and our souls toward the beautiful and good, making a mockery of the 21st-century’s slanderous view of the Christ-centered life as passive or narrow. Instead we see the armies of love gathered in all eternity, having done the work of creating all that is best in civilization here on earth. No one can lay claim to liberal education until he has made a serious beginning on understanding The Divine Comedy.