Banning Dante's Divine Comedy is a human tragedy

Of course we cannot condone this imagery today. If it were included in a contemporary literary work it would be disrespectful and wrong. But historical texts should be read with understanding.

Take for example The Book of Travels by the 17th century Ottoman traveller Evliya Celebi in which he refers to Christians he encounters as 'pigs' or 'swine' snuffling around for food, ready for slaughter. Celebi's literary work is nevertheless a wonderful, vivid experience - it depicts a beautifully imagined world open to those Christian readers who can forgive their forebears being compared to bacon.

Rather than being 'saved' from these works, children in schools and students at universities should be taught to enter into their historical visions of life, visions that are also religiously shaped. The exercise of the imagination is the first step towards appreciating the complexity of history, of art and, indeed, of our contemporary cultural condition.

Against the selective and reductive reading proffered by Gherush 92, Dante'sComedy acts as an entry point for students to think about how religion pervaded the world of the Italian Renaissance, how people's vision of the universe was bound up with biblical imagery.

It also conveys the complexity of religious culture in this period - it is none other than the poet Virgil who leads Dante through the circles of hell. Here one can see the blending of classical and Christian themes that characterised Christian art and philosophy of the day. Only look at the façade of Siena Cathedral and you can see the figures of Aristotle and Plato alongside those of Solomon and Moses.

When the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam was banished by Stalin from St Petersburg to Voronezh, he took with him a copy of The Divine Comedy. As Seamus Heaney has written, by the time Mandelstam 'came to dwell with the Commedia, his powers as a lyric poet had been tested and fulfilled, and his destiny as a moral being ... was tragically embraced'.

Mandelstam found in The Divine Comedy a lyric beauty and a powerful message of humanity's moral state, and future redemption. While one can call to mind Gherush 92 staffers in their offices scouring Dante, checking the juicy bits, I prefer to think of Mandelstam in the midst of his despair, reading The Divine Comedy expansively, hopefully - just as students today might be taught to read it.