The first influence is not to be credited to Dante exclusively but to the medieval and renaissance writers and their worldview in general. In this post I will outline three ways in which Dante’s influence can be seen in the Ransom Trilogy.ġ. The influence of The Divine Comedy can be clearly seen in one of Lewis’s finest, and yet frequently overlooked, works-the Ransom Trilogy (commonly but erroneously called the Space Trilogy). While we might never know just how large a role Dante played in his actual conversion, it is clear that Dante had an incredible effect on Lewis’s life and writings. The year after reading Paradiso, Lewis became a believing Christian. Can you imagine Shelley at his most ecstatic combined with Milton at his most solemn & rigid? It sounds impossible I know, but that is what Dante has done.” He thought that it felt “more important” than any poetry he had ever read. It is a pity I can give you no notion what it is like. At this point, he was still very much conflicted as to the nature of God and whether or not there was an afterlife.Īfter finishing Paradiso, he told a dear friend, Arthur Greeves, that “it reaches heights of poetry which you get nowhere else an ether almost too fine to breathe. He finally read Paradiso for the first time in 1930, before he became a Christian, but after he had reluctantly decided that there was a God. Lewis first read Dante’s Inferno in the original Italian when he was in his teens and later read Purgatorio while he was in the hospital recovering from wounds received in World War I. Lewis’s love for Dante Alighieri and The Divine Comedy was no great secret.

Space Trilogy by C.S. Lewis