Dante, the Soul, and Learning to See Again
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Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
— Dante Alighieri, Inferno I.1–3
In Part I, I argued that many Christians find themselves in something like Dante’s dark wood. We continue to confess God, soul, angels, resurrection, Heaven and Hell, while increasingly inhabiting the flattened imaginative world of modernity. Meanwhile, our neighbors have not stopped searching for transcendence. They have simply begun looking elsewhere.
Diagnosis, however, is not enough. If Christians have forgotten how to see a mysterious world, how do we learn to see again? Dante is one place to begin.
Fittingly, Dante opens in darkness. The straightforward pathway has been lost. That is a fitting image for the West at present. There is renewed interest in the spiritual, the transcendent, consciousness, mystical experience, AI, neo-paganism, and the unseen, but we do not know where to go or how to navigate it. Dante helps diagnose the problem, but more importantly, he helps us recover a Christian way of seeing.
Dante Does Not Invite Us into Fantasy
Dante does not invite us into fantasy. He invites us into a thicker vision of the world. He invites us back into a Christian frame in which the transcendent is not added onto an otherwise closed universe. It is the larger reality within which creation, human life, sin, love, death, worship, and redemption make sense.
Dante serves as a guide situated within the Christian tradition, retraining and enlivening our perception. In his world, creation is morally ordered; angels and demons belong to creation rather than to the realm of fantasy; worship teaches us how to perceive, and sin and love alter the way we see.
Dante’s genius is not that he imagines another world, but that he teaches Christians how to see this one.
Throughout the Divine Comedy, the visible world is never merely visible. It bears meaning. Desire has direction. Sin has shape. Love can be ordered or disordered. Heaven is not an eternal retirement community but the perfection of the soul in the vision and enjoyment of God. The journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven is the journey of a soul learning to see rightly, desire rightly, and love rightly.
That is discipleship at the level of the imagination.
The Soul Is Not Merely Something We Defend
Dante’s world requires a Christian anthropology. It requires something more than blood and guts and neurons firing. It requires us to recover, with conviction, the fact that we are souls.
I wrote “Why Souls?” in part for this reason. Recovering the soul is not simply retrieving an old doctrine because it happens to be traditional. The soul is central to a vision of the universe. It is a sign of the Divine, a pointer beyond a closed material frame toward meaningful transcendence and toward a layered, ordered universe populated not merely by objects but by persons, spirits, angels, demons, and, yes, perhaps even ghosts.
Yet Part I leaves us with a further question. It is one thing to ask whether the soul exists. It is another to ask what the soul is for. So, what is the soul made for?
That question changes the discussion. We can spend considerable time debating what explains consciousness, and that is an important philosophical discussion. But the Christian tradition does not finally give us the soul merely as an explanatory posit. The soul is made for God, to enjoy communion with him, and ultimately to know, love, worship, and see him.
If that is right, then recovering the soul requires more than winning an argument about dualism. It requires learning how an ensouled person inhabits an ensouled world.
Christian Imagination Is Formed
The imagination is something that is formed, not invented.
This is one of the things modern Christians easily miss. We sometimes assume that if we have the correct propositions in our heads, then we will naturally see the world correctly. But Christian vision is not automatic. It takes time and practice, and it requires inhabiting a life conducive to the soul.
How do we do this? By imbibing Scripture rather than merely extracting information from it; by living into the liturgy; through prayer, confession, and sacrament; and through beauty, music, friendship, community, and the example of the saints. These practices train us to recognize transcendent goods rather than merely talk about them.
These are not decorations around the Christian life, but among the means by which the Christian imagination is formed.
The older contemplative tradition understood this better than we often do. Augustine’s turn inward is not a retreat into private subjectivity but an attending to the soul as created by and restless for God. Descartes, indebted in important ways to Augustine, also takes up this inward movement. Jonathan Edwards likewise reminds us that true knowledge of God involves more than bare cognition: it includes rightly ordered affections, a sense of the heart, and ultimately a life oriented toward God.
The point is not to collapse these thinkers into one another, but to recover the older conviction that knowing is personal and formational. The knower is changed by what he loves and by what he learns to attend to.
Attention Is a Spiritual Practice
This is where the language of attention becomes especially helpful. Ian McGilchrist has made much of the importance of attending to reality without reducing the world to isolated parts and abstractions. One need not accept every aspect of his neurological argument to find the larger insight useful: how we attend shapes what we are capable of seeing.
Christians should already know this.
Prayer, liturgy, and contemplation all train our attention. Confession requires us to attend truthfully to ourselves; the Eucharist directs us toward gift, presence, dependence, communion, and thanksgiving; and the Christian calendar teaches us to inhabit time differently. Scripture, too, trains us to notice a world filled with creation, providence, angels, judgment, grace, resurrection, and glory.
Seeing God requires formation; it is neither immediate nor automatic. And it certainly does not happen by osmosis while we neglect the practices that have historically formed Christian people.
The recovery of Christian imagination is therefore ecclesial. We do not think our way back into an enchanted world so much as learn, through worship, how to inhabit the world we have been given.
Why Neo-Paganism Has Something to Offer—and Why It Is Not Enough
Meanwhile, people are becoming disenchanted with disenchantment. The old materialist frame does not seem large enough. The New Atheist moment has largely passed, while neo-paganism, manifestation, psychedelics, occult practices, and other forms of alternative spirituality have become culturally interesting again.
Much of the culture has not become less spiritual so much as it has begun seeking spirituality somewhere else.
One reason is that many people have lost the Christian vision while many churches have failed to reclaim the rich resources of the Christian world. People still long for transcendence. If the Church offers them little more than propositions, morality, political identity, or a motivational event on Sunday morning, we should not be surprised when they go looking elsewhere for mystery.
The decline of Christian belief does not necessarily leave atheism behind. Increasingly, the vacuum is filled instead by alternative spiritualities.
Christianity offers something these fragmented spiritualities cannot finally give: an ordered account of mystery. The Christian world is no less mysterious than the worlds offered by neo-paganism, psychedelics, manifestation, or the occult; indeed, its account of reality is more mysterious. But its mysteries are ordered toward the personal God who creates, sustains, judges, redeems, and draws creation toward communion with himself.
Christianity does not offer techniques for manipulating reality or discovering the secret power of the self. It tells us instead that the human person is a created, embodied, ensouled creature: dependent upon God, morally responsible, and made for communion. It calls us not toward mastery of hidden forces but toward holiness.
Recovering Christian Knowing
Knowing, then, cannot be reduced either to facts and propositions or to the accumulation of unusual experiences. Christian knowing is formational and shaped by love.
It involves an inward turn, but one that cannot terminate in the self. It must lead toward the God who created the soul and entered creation in the Incarnation. “Christian experience therefore requires an epistemology richer than naturalism, scientism, or materialism can provide, and deeper than the self-directed spirituality of the New Age.
For this we need guides: Dante and Augustine, the contemplatives, Edwards, and above all the liturgical and sacramental tradition of the Church. They remind us that the world is not merely a collection of things to analyze. It is creation to be received, discerned, loved, and finally offered back to God.
The soul finds a hospitable home here because the soul is not merely an explanation for consciousness. The soul locates the human person within a created order directed toward communion with God.
The Church’s Opportunity
Here the Church faces a real opportunity. Our culture is again asking questions about consciousness, spiritual experience, AI, death, mystery, and the unseen. We should not answer by chasing every mystical experience, nor by dismissing them as embarrassing leftovers from a pre-scientific world.
We should recover truth, knowledge, mystery, and imagination in a way consistent with the Christian confession. We should be able to say that spiritual hunger points to something real while also insisting that not every spiritual path leads to the same place.
The Church doesn’t need to chase mystical experiences nor dismiss them. Our task is older and more demanding: to recover the habits of worship, doctrine, sacrament, discernment, and discipleship that teach Christians how to understand such experiences in the first place, to recover a Christian way of knowing and seeing.
Here Dante matters because he does more than give us a poetic picture of a rich and thick world: he trains our desire. He teaches us that the deepest problem is not merely ignorance. It is disordered love. Simply gaining “more information about the unseen” will leave us empty. We need to become the kind of people capable of seeing creation truthfully because we have learned to love its Creator rightly.
We began in Dante’s dark wood, and that remains an apt image for the modern West. The culture is asking questions in the darkness, sensing that the visible world is not enough, but often not knowing how to navigate what lies beyond it.
The Church already possesses resources for that journey, though we have too often forgotten our own tradition.
Every civilization lives by some vision of the unseen. The question is not whether we will inhabit such a world, but which world we will inhabit: the fragmented spiritualities of late modernity, or a Christian cosmos alive with grace, ordered toward communion, and culminating in the Beatific Vision.
Recovering the soul, then, means more than retrieving a doctrine; it means recovering the world God has given us.
And perhaps, with Dante as one of our guides, learning how to see it again.
