This evening I came across a letter dating back a few years. Part of it may be worth posting...
. . . I feel wonderfully "mellowed out" after spending quite some time yesterday in Dante. Actually I wasn't so much "in" him as simply reading summaries of the various cantos in Dorothy L. Sayers' edition/translation and the Ciardi, together with some of the notes. You may recall that it was Charles Williams' enthusiasm for Dante that got Dorothy Sayers interested. She read Dante for the first time at age 51 and got so taken up with "The Divine Comedy" that she learned Italian and got herself hired by Penguin to do a fresh translation.
What the "Comedy" does is help give content to the moral imagination. The word "sin" by itself is too barren. We need to be reminded more specifically of pride, envy, wrath, sloth, covetousness, gluttony, and lust in order to long for deliverance. I'm making no case for the Roman Catholic conception of purgatory. I'm simply saying that in being "saved" we are to be "saved" from all these contortions and deformations of the soul. It's a long, slow process but the result is liberty -- actual experienced liberty -- as we enter more and more into the "glorious liberty of the children of God." These are halting attempts to express what I grasp more in theory than know in practice. but I'm convinced that we (the church, culture, and individuals) suffer gravely from the lack of a developed moral imagination.