By
Rod Dreher
I’m not a big fan of self-help books. To be fair, of
course, there’s nothing wrong with them, and I’m sure they help a lot of
people. But none of them, however valuable they look like they might be, ever hold my attention long
enough for me to get anything of worth out of them. This book is not, strictly
speaking, a “self-help book,” but the extended title rightly hints that it does share a lot
in common with that genre, taking the novel approach of describing how a 700-year-old
medieval Italian poem helped modern conservative commentator Rod Dreher to put
his life back on track after what I would term (he does not) a nervous
breakdown, a total emotional meltdown that was wrecking even his physical
health, which readers of the quasi-prequel memoir, The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, would not have expected as
imminent.
You do not have to have read Ruthie Leming before taking up How
Dante Can Save Your Life, but even though, as described in my review of the
former book [LINK],
I first really learned about it – and Rod Dreher himself – in the context of an
interview about the latter book, I am glad I did. The essence of Ruthie Leming is related in the first
few pages of Dante, but useful depth
and context to the story is necessarily lacking when reviewed merely as
background.
In a nutshell, even as Rod Dreher was engaged in the
requisite promotional tour for the tale of his sister’s life and her losing
battle with cancer, and the spiritual lessons to be drawn from it, revelations
that came near the very end were driving him into a deep, potentially
life-threatening depression. But a chance visit to what he claims as the
unlikeliest corner of the Baton Rouge Barnes & Noble – Poetry! – led to him picking up and perusing the first few lines of
Dante Alighieri’s Inferno – and
perceiving in the medieval wanderer, lost in a wood, weak and weary … himself.
As he proceeded into the poem, he was able to relate the sins for which the
lost souls suffered to the causes for his own troubles, and – with the help
both of a therapist and his confessor – turn his realizations into a journey of
self-healing. What makes this book so compelling, for me at least, is how
Dreher takes us along with him on that journey, alternating the narrative of
his life and emotional deterioration in the months after moving back to
Louisiana at the end of 2011 with insightful spiritual commentary on Dante. We
follow him as he follows Vergil in the descent toward the depths of hell, then
(more briefly – but isn’t that how it always is? Dante may have written the
three parts of The Divine Comedy [Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso]
as almost exactly equal in length, but that’s not how they loom in peoples’
consciousness!) through purgatory and heaven. It is the journey on which he
takes us as it gradually unfolds that, in my judgment, makes this “self-help book”
so effective. The reason is actually given on pp. 53-54:
“Neuroscientists
have found that the telling of a story, no matter how simple, lights up parts
of our brains that lie dormant when we process language. In fact, research has
shown that the brain reacts to stories in the same way it responds to actual
events. When a story fully enters into your imagination, it is as if you
experience it yourself. The more vivid and sensual the descriptions within a
story, the more powerfully its lessons, moral and otherwise, lodge in the
brain.
“Annie Murphy
Paul, writing about these discoveries in The New York Times, observed: ‘Reading
great literature, it has long been averred, enlarges and improves us as human
beings. Brain science shows this claim is truer than we imagined.’
“Stories tell us
how to think and what to do. They teach us what to love, what to fear, what to
hope for, and whom to trust. Stories reveal to us how we differ from others and
how we are the same. They tell us where we came from, where we stand, and where
we are going. Stories impose order on chaos. From grand cosmic myths to
intimate family tales, it is in stories that we find meaning, purpose, and the
truths by which we live – or if we are unlucky, the lies that lead us astray.”
In Dreher’s case, we are with him as Dante’s spiritual
journey helps him to examine the story of his own life and work out ways to
deal his demons and come to peace with his life as he adjusted his idyllic
expectations about returning to the small-town Louisiana of his upbringing to
reality. And he builds on his own experience to draw out the life-lessons to be
found in Dante. Each of Dreher’s chapters ends with a short boxed summary
plainly stating the main point. I quote from the end of chapter six, “Into the Black Hole,” which highlights a
thesis of this book, that even the worst of sins is ultimately misdirected love:
“You cannot control other
people, but you can control your reaction to them. That is a key principle to
your healing. Sin is not the breaking of moral rules, but a failure of love. We
love the wrong things, or we love the right things in the wrong way. All of us
do this; it is the human condition. Nevertheless, you are responsible for your
own sin. It’s why you are in crisis. Thinking of sin as law-breaking, as many
of us do, disguises the way it works on our hearts and minds, and keeps us from
dealing with it effectively. Here’s a better model: Think of love as light, and
sin as gravity, a force that bends light. The stronger the gravitational field,
the farther love will fall from its mark. Hell is a black hole, where the light
of love goes to die. Your goal in life: to put as much distance between your
heart and the black hole’s deadly gravity field as you can. Passing too close
to it will make even your most sincere acts of love land far from their
intended destination. Don’t worry about the hearts of others; you are captain
of your own.”
I highly
recommend this book on several levels: As a continuation of the Dreher family’s
story post-Ruthie Leming; As a running commentary on perhaps the greatest poem
of western civilization; and yes, As a “self-help book” applying age-old
lessons from the Christian foundations of that western civilization to life in
the modern world.
No comments:
Post a Comment