Dante's Inferno is often presented today in lurid "gothic" terms as if it were no more than an entertaining demonic freak-show. Alternatively, it is seen as a mere cultural and political commentary on Dante's own place and time, cast in allegorical terms. But the Inferno, and the Divine Comedy as a whole, are much more than that. The human passions, and the Mystery of Inieqity they express, are fundamentally the samein any place and time; consequently the Inferno presents not so much a history of sin as a catalogue of the archetypes of sin, the fundamental ways in which all of us are tempted to betray the human form.

Based on the works of the Greek Fathers, on the writings of the Traditionalist School, notably Frithjof Schuon, Titus Burckhardt and René Guénon, and on the kind of wide personal experience of the violation of the human form taht is available to anyone in these times - anyone who has both the necessary discernment, rooted in love, and the courage to keep his eyes open - Jennifer Doane Upton has once again seen Dante's Inferno as it truly is: as a record of the struggle of the human mind, will and emotions to discover the name, by the grace of God, of the sins infesting the fallen human soul. As both a traditional re-presentation and a contemporary revisioning of the "examination of the conscience", individual and collective, Dark Way to Paradise is at once an exegetical masterpiece and a handbook of demonology of concrete use to any true metaphysician. In its direct application of metaphysical principles ot "infernal phychology" it is unique among Dante commentaries. And in a world like ours, where the Western Church appears to be dissolving before our eyes, to save again what Dante himself saved out of the great medieval Christian synthesis has never been so timely.