Rod Dreher claims that’s what it did for him:
[K]illing time in a Barnes & Noble one hot south Louisiana afternoon, I opened a copy of Dante’s Inferno, the first of his Divine Comedy trilogy, and read these words (the translation I cite in this essay is by Robert and Jean Hollander):
Midway in the journey of our life
I came to myself in a dark wood,
For the straight way was lost.I read on in that first canto, or chapter, and stood with Dante the pilgrim as wild beasts—allegories of sin—cut off all routes out of the terrifying wood. Then, to the frightened Dante’s aid, comes the Roman poet Virgil:
‘It is another path that you must follow,’
he answered, when he saw me weeping,
‘if you would flee this wild and savage place.’So Dante follows Virgil—and I followed Dante. I did not know it in that moment, but those were the first steps of a journey that would lead me through this incomparable 14th-century poem—all 14,233 lines in 100 cantos—through the pits of Hell, up the mountain of Purgatory, beyond space and time to the zenith of Paradise—and out of my own dark wood of depression.
Dreher describes how that journey begins with a tour of Hell – and how we can learn to see ourselves in Dante’s vivid depictions of sin:
The Inferno is not an exhaustive taxonomy of sins (though it sometimes feels like it), but rather an allegory of the condition of sinfulness. For Dante, the worst sins are not those of the appetite—Lust and Gluttony, for example—but sins against the things that make us most human. In Dante’s spiritual geography, Hell is like a vast pit mine, with least corrupt sins punished near the top, the middling sins—sins of Violence and sins of Fraud—punished in the central regions—and the foulest sin of all—Treason—punished at the bottom, where Lucifer dwells.
Dante uses this categorization as a method of exploring the nature of sin as a perversion of the Good. To give oneself over wholly to lust, gluttony, or greed is damnable, but not as damnable as the higher—or rather, lower—sins, which involve not only the disordered bodily passions but also disordered passions of the mind.
The pilgrim Dante comes slowly to recognize elements of each sinner’s fault in his own character. The purpose of this tour of the infernal regions is to awaken the pilgrim to the reality of sin—how it separates men from God, from their better natures, and from each other—and of his own responsibility for the disorder in the world and in his own soul.
The Dish 