Dante as Homo Viator: The Journey of Transformation

How this series came about.

“Dante’s ascending journey through the concentric spherical bodies of the universe…
is a journey of knowledge.”
Alison Cornish, A Worldview Requires a Center

“We only make sense of facts as part of a narrative.”
Alison Cornish, Believing in Dante

Dear Travelers,

In appreciation for your support, I thought a short “behind the scenes” glimpse at what I’m up to conceptually in this series would be fitting. More specifically, I’m keen to share with you a sense of what inspired this series, to give you some insight into the inner workings of the project as it unfolds.

Is it possible to pinpoint the genesis of anything? I don’t know, but the germ of inspiration for From Homer to Dante probably began last winter in conversation with my dear friend Walter who writes at The Dove and Rose. We were chatting about the striking thematic congruences between Dante’s spiritual journey and his own. I realized then that the older I get, the more convinced I become that the metaphor of “life as a journey” is an inescapable one, though it may strike us first as only a cliché. Whatever way we conceive of the 70, 80, or 90 years of our life (should we tarry that long), the fact of a clear beginning and end inherently implies movement along a trajectory—one completed only through our daily choices and actions. Hence, it is a journey (from Old French, jornee: ‘day, a day's travel, a day's work’). It is for this reason that the medievals were fond of describing our race as Homo Viator, man the traveler.

We begin life in media res, in the middle of a play that has already begun (to borrow from Chesterton), and we hope to get somewhere by the end. Along the way we make friends, have adventures, sing, love, cry, get lost, take detours, pray, rage, reconcile, feast in plenty, and fast in want—but we’re always on the move. The question is, “where are we going?”