“Just as Dante had Virgil, we have Mark Vernon: the perfect guide to Dante’s epic and fantastic journey. This is not just a description of what happens and who we meet, it’s an invitation to read The Divine Comedy as a way to change our own consciousness and embrace a more spacious reality: everything is bigger on the inside. I started highlighting sentences I wanted to think about, but ended up with yellow stripes everywhere: there are insights on every page. A marvelous book that blew away a lot of my assumptions about The Divine Comedy.”
—SUSANNA CLARKE
author of Piranesi and Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
"There has long been need for a scholarly but deft guide to Dante’s masterpiece, not just as a literary curiosity but as a profound examination of the meaning of life in a world less material than ours. Here at last is one for which we can be grateful. Like Virgil guiding Dante, Vernon accompanies the reader on the fascinating journey from hell through purgatory to paradise; he is a delightful companion, and I for one learnt a great deal from the experience.”
—IAIN MCGILCHRIST
author of The Master and His Emissary
“As late modern readers and writers, we live at an unfortunate remove from much of the greatest literature of earlier epochs principally in thinking of it solely as literature, whose chief meaning and value can be exhaustively described in strictly critical categories. We scarcely remember how to see poetry—or any of the arts—as belonging to a fuller vision of reality, with spiritual as well as purely aesthetic dimensions. This is an unfortunate state of affairs in regard to any literary text of consequence, but in regard to a work of the magnitude and splendor of The Divine Comedy it is tragic. An approach like Mark Vernon’s is precisely the remedy required if one wants truly to see the poem for what it is, and to see through the poem to what it adumbrates.”
—DAVID BENTLEY HART
author of Roland in Moonlight
“Dante’s spiritual pilgrimage through hell, purgatory, then up through the seven heavens to a vision of the Mystic Rose is one of the masterpieces of human imagination. Mark Vernon guides us through the great poem, giving light, gathering insights from other commentators, granting us a sensitive, fresh perspective. Whether the Comedy is a familiar favorite or forbiddingly foreign, readers will here find companionship, nourishment, and assistance as they traverse the Dantean soul-scape.”
—MICHAEL WARD
author of Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis
“Mark is a wise, warm, and humane guide through Dante's hell, purgatory, and paradise. His remarkable book reveals The Divine Comedy as a transformative reading experience, as urgent and relevant today as it was 700 years ago, perhaps even more so.”
—HENRY ELIOT
Creative Editor, Penguin Classics
MARK VERNON is a writer and psychotherapist who lives in London. His journalism has been published on both sides of the Atlantic, and his books—on subjects from love and friendship to the history of Christianity—have found readers from around the globe. He has a PhD in Ancient Greek philosophy, and degrees in theology and physics. He works with the research group Perspectiva, which champions the place of soul in society, and the International Society for Science and Religion, which is currently
investigating spiritual intelligence.
