The Way of Dante: Going Through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven with C. S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Charles Williams, by Richard Hughes Gibson. IVP Academic, 2025, xxxviii + 202 pages, $20.88, paper.

Recent years have seen the publication of book biographies—biographies not about the author, but about the author’s book and its reception and influence on future generations. Richard Hughes Gibson’s The Way of Dante is a contribution to this genre. It tells the story of how three twentieth-century authors—C. S. Lewis, Dorothy Sayers, and Charles Williams—came to write and lecture on Dante’s Divine Comedy (hereafter, the Comedy).

Gibson’s “chief historical claim” is “that Sayers, Williams, and Lewis must be understood as a cohort of Dante readers whose invocations of Dante—public and private, conspicuous and covert—comprise a network of allusions, quotations, and citations” (xxiv). Each labored to introduce a general readership to the Comedy.

The author weaves two strands—the relationship between the three Dante commentators—chapters1, 2, 4 and 6—and their exposition of the Comedy—chapters 3 (Inferno), 5 (Purgatorio), and 7 (Paradiso). For simplicity’s sake, I will treat the strands separately.

First, the relationship between the three Dante commentators. For Williams, sustained studies in Dante began early in his academic career. Lewis’s interest came incrementally—first translating a few hundred lines of Inferno as a teenager, then reading Purgatorio while convalescing from his Great War injuries, and finally to an extended conversation on Paradiso with Owen Barfield in 1930. A latecomer to Dante, Sayers began her earnest explorations of Dante in her early fifties.

Chapter 2 traces how each became familiar with the other’s work. Gibson mines the bibliographical sources and private correspondences of his subjects. To no one’s surprise, spirited exchanges were common. Williams’s death in 1945 removed him from the conversation. Sayers’s ambition was extraordinary; she translated almost the entire Comedy prior to her death in 1957, her work shaped in part by her interactions with Williams and Lewis.

Among the issues of interpretation that the trio faced, few would be as consequential as the definition and nature of allegory—a controversial subject that the author takes up in chapter 4. In chapter 6, “the problem of evil” in Paradiso is scrutinized. The author asks: “A story in which nothing bad happens and whose cast consists exclusively of saints doesn’t promise much, does it? Where’s the adventure? Where’s the conflict? Where’s the drama? . . . Glory, simply put, is a problem” (126).

Before reading The Way of Dante, I had little exposure to the studies of the trio on the great medieval poet. As I read the summary expositions of Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso in chapters 3, 5, and 7, I was grateful for the helpful overview of the structure of each of the three cantiche and for a general introduction to how the cohort sought to orient modern readers to Dante’s world. At the same time, the book has little to say about their understanding of the historical and theological foundations of the Comedy. I was left to wonder what Williams, Sayers, and Lewis would have to say about the struggles between the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire, the figures and events of Florentine politics contemporary to Dante, the hostilities between the Ghibellines and the Guelphs, and the internecine conflicts of the latter party. What about the theological controversies of thirteenth and fourteenth-century Roman Catholicism? How did Dante’s exile from Florence shape his work? What of his view of monasticism and Church reform? How much knowledge of these historical forces is necessary for an informed reading of the Comedy?

Gibson claims that

to read Inferno under Sayer’s guidance is thus not to be ferried off to the distant world of medieval Italy, where Guelphs and Ghibellines carry on their petty quarrels at a safe remove from us; it is to be invited to read oneself and one’s city against the background of increasingly bleak pictures of evil in its true form. (62, emphasis his)

I am not sure what to make of this. Should I treat the battles and bloodshed of the era as petty? After all, they are part of the historical soil from which the Comedy emerged and there would be no Comedy without them.

With these questions noted, I recommend The Way of Dante. For older readers of Ordained Servant who never dipped into the Comedy, it is not too late. After all, Sayers was a not-so-young fifty-one when she began to study it seriously. A few years later, she wrote a friend: “The trouble with Dante is that, if one gets a taste for him, one is liable to become a Dante-addict” (1).

My introduction to the Comedy came during the second semester of my sophomore year in college. The lectures were brilliant, and I cannot imagine a student finishing the course without a desire to revisit Dante’s great work—as I have from time to time during the past five decades. Most recently, I have enjoyed the translation of Robert and Jean Hollander and its treasure trove of copious historical and literary notes.

Unlike Sayers, I will never be tempted to Dante-addiction, nor will I be a Dante scholar. Nevertheless, I can at least enjoy a taste of serious Dante scholarship, a pleasure given me by The Way of Dante. More importantly, the book has prompted my desire to read again the Comedy, an outcome that I feel would please its author.

Charles Malcolm Wingard is minister of shepherding at the First Presbyterian Church of Jackson, Mississippi (PCA), and professor of pastoral theology at Reformed Theological Seminary. Ordained Servant Online, September–October, 2026