Besides its status as the greatest poetic work of Western culture, Dante’s Divine Comedy is a storehouse of theological insights. The Divine Comedy is an imaginative tour of the afterlife in which Dante as a pilgrim observes the nature of evil (Inferno), the regeneration of fallen humanity (Purgatory) and the joy of the beatific vision and how to prepare for it (Paradise). The course tracks a number of key themes in the Comedy: the nature of sin, the promise of human natality, friendship, the relation of aesthetics to the moral life, and Dante’s insight into a theologia ludens (a theology of God’s playfulness), which embraces an ethic of risk and the joyful essence of the divinity.
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