..."had much in common with our own distracted times, and his vivid awareness of the deeps and heights within the soul comes home poignantly to us who have so recently rediscovered the problem of evil, the problem of power, and the ease with which our most God-like imaginings are 'betrayed by what is false within.'" -- The Divine Comedy: Hell, Sayers' intro, p. 10

"We must be prepared, while we are reading Dante... We must abandon any idea that we are the slaves of chance, or environment, or our subconscious; any vague notion that good and evil are merely relative terms, or that conduct and opinion do not really matter; any comfortable persuasion that, however, shiftlessly we muddle through life, it will somehow or other all come right..." ibid, p. 10-11

"Dante's allegory is more complex. It differs from the standard type in two ways: (1) in its literal meaning, the story is -- up to a certain point and with a great many important qualifications -- intended to be a true story; (2) the figures of the allegory, instead of being personified abstractions, are symbolic personages.".... "The poem is nevertheless an allegory. The literal meaning is the least important part of it: the story with its images is only there for the sake of the truth which it symbolizes." ibid, 12 &14.

"To the fourteenth-century Italian, the personages of the Comedy were familiar." ibid, 17

"The poem is an allegory of the Way to God - to that union of our wills with the Universal Will in which every creature finds its true self and its true being. But, as Dante himself has shown, it may be interpreted at various levels. It may be seen, for example, as the way of the artist, or as the way of the lover. -- both these ways are specifically included in the imagery. Since there is not room for everything in one small volume, I have concentrated chiefly upon two levels of interpretation: the way of the Community ("the City") and the way of the individual Soul." ibid, 19

"By this time, however, the power of the Papacy was no longer purely spiritual." ibid, 21

Ghibellines, Guelfs; Blacks, Whites; Dante, Popes, Emperors, Kings; Beatrice, Virgil

"The authority to which Dante looked for the unification of the civilized world was the Roman Empire, which had, in fact, once gone near to achieving that very thing. A study of it history persuaded him that the Roman people had been divinely called and miraculously guided to this great secular destiny...of government by law." ibid, 43 [peace, unity]

"He has been scolded also for his love of puns..." ibid, 62