“Evil Enchantment” versus Platonic Vision: Dante, Lewis, and the Weight of Glory

C. S. Lewis was convinced that, in the modern world, goodness often strikes us as bland and diluted, a kind of spiritual neutral. What we need, especially in the modern world, he thought, is a positive vision of the good, a vision of beauties that “pierce like swords or burn like cold iron,” as he once said of Tolkien’s work. We need a positive picture and we need to have positive desire, as opposed to thinking of goodness primarily in negative terms, as “not being bad.” Lewis thought we need to have a sense of the gravity and heaviness and, even, viscosity , if I may, of goodness: in other words, we need to feel the “weight of glory,” the title of his famous sermon. As I will argue in the remainder of this paper, no author taught him more about the gravity of goodness or the “weight of glory” than the medieval poet Dante Alighieri