STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN: A GUIDE THROUGH DANTE’S PURGATORIO

Dr Jamie McGregor, lecturer, Department of Literary Studies in English, Rhodes University

This course charts Dante’s journey in the second part of the Divine Comedy (following his harrowing descent into Hell in the Inferno): his redemptive ascent of the antipodean mountain that is Purgatory. Here spiritual progress consists in overcoming the Seven Deadly Sins, understood as corrupted or disordered forms of the love that animates the universe – a love Dante is thereby enabled to encounter in the blessed figure of Beatrice, who will guide him beyond the Garden of Eden to the celestial spheres and on to the poem’s sublime culmination in the Beatific Vision. 

LECTURE TITLES

1. To hell and back: Inferno revisited

2. Ante-purgatory

3. Love perverted: vanity, envy and anger

4. Love deficient and excessive: sloth, greed, gluttony and lust

5. The earthly paradise and beyond