Dante Integral

Salvador Dali - The Meeting of Dante and Beatrice

Dante Integral

These are the outlines to my Dante studies. When the writing went past 3,000 pages and one million words I thought it might be wise to stop. It’s not remotely finished, though. I had eye tests recently, and these show retinopathy. So I am under orders to get health, diet, exercise under control, cut out stress, and drastically reduce reading and writing time. This has been a wretched year with all manner of impossible circumstances conspiring to lay me low. It is a minor miracle that I got this far with the work.

Ciaran Carson writes that we rarely, if ever, get a glimpse of the Dante envisioned by the great Russian poet Mandelstam:

"If the halls of the Hermitage were suddenly to go mad, if all the paintings of all the schools and the great masters were suddenly to break loose from their hooks, and merge with one another, intermingle and fill the rooms with a Futurist roar and an agitated frenzy of colour, we would then have something resembling Dante's Commedia."

- Osip Mandelstam

I think I've just written that very thing. But not by design. The work I have is a beautiful madness, immense but unreadable at the moment to all but fanatics and obsessives. I have the vision in my head, and it coheres in its truth. But it needs further work. Since all things are interconnected, they are present and visible at once to me. I suspect that the work I have in mind can be accomplished only by mathematicians, musicians, and poets.

Dante is worth the effort. Dante is sublime. I have been reading since ever. I have read all manner of works, reaching a level of expertise with respect to the work of Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Leibniz, Rousseau, Hegel, Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Wittgenstein, Habermas and many more. These thinkers offer plenty and can take us far. But always, at some point, I reach a limit beyond which these thinkers cannot, or will not, go. At that point, thinking negates itself, undercuts itself, turns back against itself, or has nothing more to say (on the important things on which nothing meaningful can be said, if you catch my drift). Dante gives me more – he has the ability to say the unsayable, even if he doesn’t always say it in words. He conveys the meanings and, most importantly, incites the thoughts. And I think I know why – the slenderest knowledge of the highest things is worth more than the most certain knowledge of the lesser things. Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote that ‘An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it.’ Dante walks that walk and invites us to follow.

The whole argument I set out here is framed in terms of a musical model – numbers, music, metaphysics – emphasising harmony as attunement. The simple-complex theme is one of diverse elements concordant with an overarching and orienting oneness, a diversity that proceeds in accord with a cohering unitarian principle, thus avoiding tendencies to division and dissolution. That’s the foundational first volume on Dante’s musical model – the sweet symphony of Paradise. That volume is packed with good material, but needs a lot of hard work. That will take me a year, health allowing.

The volume that is currently being edited into shape is volume 2, “Dante's Politics of Love." Love and friendship. Amity. This advances a politics and ethics that is premised on the innate sociability and rationality of human beings, qualities which are incited within by wonder at the world without. Cleaving to the Love that is without end in order to satisfy the longing for meaning, truth, and belonging.

The theme of this volume is the journey from loss and separation in the ‘dark wood’ to homecoming in the Eternal Rose with the golden heart. It’s a simple theme of disconnection, reconnection, unity, – the journey from the dark wood to the Eternal Rose with the golden heart. The argument shows how Dante integrates the institutional framework (forms of contract, communion, and community) with a social and moral infrastructure to establish the authoritative framework of a just rule which enfolds, protects, and nourishes civic community. The result is global governance grounded in the restoration of social proximity, the recovery of citizenly experience, small-scale practical reasoning and love of home and place. The local and global are established on a continuum in accordance with ascending associative purpose. Public life is established as a communion of hearts.

The ideal is supported by a muscular social and moral infrastructure, establishing social connection and civic responsibility within a habitus in which the virtues can be known, acquired, and exercised. There is a character-forming culture of discipline, a paideia, rather than pious wishes based on empty ideals. And a systematic critique of the vices. In short, I combine the institutional framework of the common peace with the moral and social infrastructure that enables individuals to practice the way of peace.

Lewis Mumford recalls that when he asked Ananda Coomaraswamy to define the three gunas (qualities) described in the Bhagavad-Gita, "he replied with illustrative passages from Dante's Divine Comedy." (Mumford The Transformations of Man 1957 ch 5 p 83). The comparison makes it clear that the virtues are the qualities that human beings need in order to live well.

Volume 3, Dante and Rational Freedom, develops Dante in terms of a philosophical understanding and sociological application of ‘rational freedom.’ Here, I relate Dante’s ideas of an infernal production to the alienation thesis of Marx and the rationalisation thesis of Weber. I also set Dante’s journey to God in the context of Nietzsche’s ‘death of God.’ I also examine attempts to found ethics and politics on Nature. As against the God/Nature of Einstein and Spinoza, unfolding harmoniously in indifference to human affairs, I show why the personal God, the God of Love and human relationships, is essential.

Volume 4, Walking and Talking with Dante, discusses the various ways in which Dante has been regarded since his death, both public and personal engagements with the poet. This volume is an entertaining Dante dialogue. There is not only a Dante for every age, but a Dante for every person. 700 years after the death of the peerless poet-philosopher, Dante Alighieri continues to light the way.

And on that note, I shall finish giving the rationale and instead go through the headings and sub-headings to give an idea of contents.

These are the outlines of my Dante Alighieri studies.

1, 003, 314 words, 3, 173 pages divided into four volumes.

Volume One

DANTE’S SWEET SYMPHONY OF PARADISE

202, 209 words, 664 pages

The Musical Model – The Foundations of Dante’s Rational Freedom

Metaphysics and Music – and numbers

The right order of things; Objective reality and objective morality; Transcendent Standards.

The Way of Love – Trinitarian Communion; The Threefold Pattern

The Virtues of Numbers

The Pythagorean tradition: truth and beauty; The One and the Many; ratio and proportion.

Numerology: Plato; St Augustine; Boethius; Bonaventure; numerology in Dante; the innate love.

The Musical Model: the Metaphysics of Music; Music measures the relation to God; The well-tempered harmony; the musical journey.

Philosophical and Religious Perspectives on Music

The Origins of Music

Music as the Profoundest Expression of Nature

The Physiological and Psychological Qualities of Music.

The music of poetry: the musical origins of language and poetry; the Singing Neanderthals; the singing body; The Spirit of Song; the attunement of mind and body; The musical anthropology: music, responses, emotions; the failure to hear the music; The centrality of music to the universe.

Dante and Music

Dante’s love of music; The structure of the musical transition in the Comedy; The musical structure of the Comedy; The structure of the musical transition in the Comedy.

Dante and the Music of the Spheres

The Fathers of the Church; Aristotelianism, or the Silent Cosmos; The Music of the Spheres and Dante’s Works.

The Ethical Definition of Music

Harmony and Political Order; Platonic Ecology; Dante’s Physics and Politics of Harmony; music and good connotation – Confucius; beautiful music and the harmonious society; attunement as harmony; deep harmony as open and participatory.

The inner music of The Comedy.

Dante’s Musical Model; The music that is beyond rational comprehension; the metaphysical attributes of music - notions of true order, relations and reality; the distinction between the natural and the human, and the artificial and the instrumental.

The diabolic music of the Inferno; a world of disorder and disharmony, chaos and cacophony.

Purgatory – the place where poetry – and music - comes back to life; the renewal of life; Purgatorio: Musical Liturgy as Pharmakon; Healing Songs: Music as Pharmakon; In exitu Israel de Aegypto; Casella’s Song; The Siren Song; Poetry in Purgatory; Purgatory as the place of dreams; Hymns in the Valley of the Princes; Te lucis ante is sung as part of a twilight mass; Te Deum laudamus; Entrance into Purgatory proper; Beatitudes and the Songs of the Earthly Paradise; The Earthly Paradise; The restoration of Earth to Edenic Golden Age; The mystic procession.

Paradiso: The Attuning of the Sky; The Impenetrable Song; Plato and the creation of the universe; divine emanation in Paradise; the idea of a heavenly harmony setting a template for harmony on Earth; polyphony as an allegory of harmony on Earth; Paradise as a realm beyond the normal senses; Polyphony as Political Harmony.

The Musical Cosmology

Polyphony in Paradise; Song and dance; Polyphonic performance; The special love of each in their natural movements; Creation; God the craftsman; Imagery of Water and Light. The Prime Archer.

Unity and diversity; Rational vs Libertarian Freedom.

Music as liquid light; Love permeates the multitude of spheres constituting the universe; The God of Love; the Love that brings eternal joy.

Climate accord; fire and ice – Dante’s Inferno and Max Weber’s ‘iron cage’ of capitalist modernity; attunement with the grammar of harmony – the ordered world

Physics, Facts, and the Greatest Love of All; Love Beyond Proof.

Volume Two

Dante’s Politics of Love

Chapter One

Dante’s Politics of Hope; The Politics of Love and Amity. Introduction of Themes

The Interconnection of Ethics, Politics and Justice in Dante; politics at human scale; Freedom, Agency, and Alienation; disconnection and reconnection; loss and recovery; communitarianism – reconnecting society.

Poetics and Persuasion: mode of persuasion/communication – association of the heart and justice; political significance of language and its unifying potential; language and small scale reasoning and action; politics and ethics intertwine in the humanly scaled context of the city commune.

The Ecology of the Heart; Recovering the Unity of Theoretical and Practical reason; universal authority; rational freedom vs the twin poles of libertarianism and authoritarianism; Holding justice in the heart; City, citizen, and community; The vision beyond institutions; The roots of community.

The Desire to Know: Human Beings as truth-seekers; Rational Freedom as a ‘Free Necessity’; Necessary freedom against determinism; freedom as voluntary submission; The vision of integration and harmony: union against the isolated individual; facing consequences; the re-binding of people and things; The healthy need for community as against the neurotic need for control.

The Desire for Communion: Love and wholeness; civic community; A Story of Companions: human beings as companiable beings; friendship and justice the fulfilment of social being; The way of love is the invitation to hope; the symbols of binding and holding come alive in love.

Chapter Two Popular Art and Public Intent

The relationship between contemplation and action (Plato); public concern and democratic intent; Rhetoric, Poetics, and Politics – modes of persuasion; Dante the earthly citizen: the participant and communicant; Dante the educator, the man with a moral and instructive purpose.

Chapter Three: From Poetry to Philosophy

The philosophy of courtly love; Dante as love poet - ordering love to its true object; The sweet new style; love and intellect; the lover of wisdom.

Boethius’ Lady Philosophy; Beatrice and the Vita Nuova; philosophy as mediator; the new life; the theme of renewal; healing as self-knowledge.

From wonder to knowledge; Knowledge and causation – the search for root causes;– Aristotle’s four causal explanation; expressiveness – bringing ideas to life.

Philosophical anthropology; knowledge about man and human happiness; The foundation of ethics – love of truth and truth-seeking.

Marvel and wonder; The Desire for Knowledge – Dante’s philosophy of truth-seeking; Dante the lover of myth, wisdom, and wonder; the need to stimulate truth seeking; inciting the desire to know by way of marvel and wonder.

Chapter Four: The Florentine Background

Dante and his City; The Urban Example of Florence; Civics; Political Rhetoric and concepts of the city; the divided city and the civic ideal; the Popolo and Roman political morality; politics and rhetoric: good speech as the key to civic governance; The origins of political life; the self-determination of the commune; The orderly vision of good governance; non-partisan civic values; the need to transcend convention and discord.

Dante’s Political Career and Exile; Dante’s experiential view; exile brings objectivity.

Poetics and Politics; rhetoric/persuasion – political aspects of language - vernacular language; The Curial Conception.

Chapter Five: The Unifying Potentials of Language – De Vulgari Eloquentia

Linguistic survey; natural language; From Edenic Unity to Babelic Diversity.

First principles: the rational animal; the need for language and communication; Linguistic Change, Babelic Fragmentation, and Political Conflict; The illustrious, cardinal, aulic, and curial vernacular; municipal language.

Chapter Six: Invitation to a Banquet – the Convivio

The Public Intent of the Convivio; communicating knowledge in digestible form; Dante’s goal: to lead human beings to virtue and happiness, the true science of man; The invitation to learning; the vernacular; knowing your audience – communication and education; The desire for knowledge and happiness; the soul as traveller in search of the right path.

Dante’s philosophical anthropology: Human Rationality - the ultimate goal and first principle directing the search for unity; reason and freedom as innate; rationality as a defining essential human characteristic; philosophy as ethos – practice leading to transcendent truth; divine emanation – love and desire.

The Rule of Reason: Governing the Civil Order; philosophy and rule: establishing the unity of philosophic and imperial rule; all are philosophers in becoming pilgrim-citizens, citizen-lawyers who internalize the civil and moral law.

Truth and Freedom; physical philosophy; freedom and determinism; against philosophical materialism.

The Human Likeness to God: Intellect, Freedom, and Will; essential nature: man in society in union with God; knowledge and freedom; knowing and doing – the faculty of willing.

The Radical Uniqueness of the Human Person; The goodness of natural human functions; earthly happiness; freedom and ethics; Natural and Rational Love; the natural propensity which inheres in all created things.

Chapter Seven: Nobility, Virtue And Happiness

The positive definition of nobility; the soundness of mind; the concern with character.

Chapter Eight: Injustice and Avarice

Tre Donne: The torn robe of justice; The loss of transcendent standards; The greed for money and possessions; the moral constraint of law; the limitations of hereditary monarchy; virtue and nobility as not inherited; virtue ethics and character formation as the key to a civic republic; the conditions of monarchy as the ideal civic republic.

Chapter Nine: Political Philosophy - Politics and Ethics

Factionalism and Tottering Thrones; the loss of universalism; the age of collapsing institutions and assumptions; establishing the conditions of recovery; The empire and the church; salvation within and without as political and spiritual; The principles of government – reconciling order and liberty; The long and short sight in politics.

The Need for Public Authority; The Infernal Politics of Separation and Division; the restoration of good society is Dante’s key concern; Dante’s commitment to universal government; recovering the political and ethical commons; beyond systems to practical reasoning in genuine public community; citizens as commoners in public community.

Chapter Ten: The Civic Politics of Imperial Rule

The Empire – redemption from within; empire and church: the universal theme as more important than its institutional manifestation; the case for monarchy as universal government;; the civil context underpinning imperialism; proximity, practical reasoning, and civic participation; the ideal city state as the ideal human habitat – the universal as a constellation of well-formed city-states – the municipal spirit – civics; The humanly scaled polity and practical reasoning; The structural and institutional conditions of justice and the common peace; The empire as the overarching framework encompassing and sustaining civic realities and civic pride; political engagement and the imagery of the city at its best and worst; the interest in small community and practical reasoning.

The Principles and Institutions of the Political Peace

Dante identified the remedy for the division and disorder of his time in the principle of universal peace and in its institutional embodiment; Establishing unity out of conflict is the central political problem.

The divine origins of imperial peace; the emperor as guardian and tutor: the divine origins of tutelage; Peace and government; God’s eternal peace; perfect peace is the eternal bequest of God.

Chapter Eleven: The Principles of the State

Rational Freedom as an ethic of unity for the long range good; the common good and the common peace.

Chapter Twelve: The Social Philosophy of the Common Peace

The goal of human life; Rational freedom in ancient philosophy; The Origins of the State : Aristotelian Enquiry; republican virtues – community as a union of hearts.

Dante’s Political Philosophy: The state as a natural moral entity; city and politics – reconciling universal and self interest; the need for universal government to overcome particularism and factionalism; the political peace of imperial justice creates the habitus for ethics as the rational science; Dante’s Aristotelianism: expanding associative purpose and the social animal; The state as natural rather than coercive – the innate instinct to pursue happiness.

Chapter Thirteen: The Civic Politics of a Loving and Just Authority

The politics and ethics of sociability; Aristotelian metaphysics and method: happiness the end of human society; authoritative universal government based on law and the politics of sociability: human beings as the social and companionable animal; breaking bread; the need for the Emperor to declare and enforce law for all; government and social ethics; achieving unity against dissension; Dante’s affirmation of a transcendent hope and standard; world peace under the imperial authority; the single ruler to bring peace and reconciliation and to rule in justice; The political hierarchy of ascending purposes leading to happiness and preserving peace – empire – mutual love and social support.

Chapter Fourteen: The Political Letters

The institutions required for the delivery of peace; the ruler is charged with securing the temporal peace; need for law and universal justice and government; truth vs realpolitik; Dante and Henry VII.

Chapter Fifteen: The Monarchia

The Universal Monarchy: the Guarantor of Peace, Freedom, and Happiness; The government of the world; The concern with civil life; Common Human Reason; The actualisation of reason; Definition of Monarchy; Dante’s communitarianism.

What Makes the World Hang Together?; economics and calculations of self-interest as the most ephemeral of ties; The Universal Peace; Social Philosophy; sociality and rationality a defining essential human characteristic; collaboration of all humankind according to an overarching ordering principle – the need for a universal ruler.

Chapter Sixteen: To Be Citizens of the World Monarchia

Universal Monarchy and Citizenship; Dante on place; The citizen of the world; The empire as overarching framework: the imperial peace; Universal Monarchy; The Monarch as the Guarantor of Earthly Happiness; for all humankind; The Jurisdiction of the Emperor; The common good, law and love overcome greed; the spiritual grounds; transcendent standards over positive law.

The Institutional-Legal Framework and Moral-Social Infrastructure of the Political Peace: authoritative and legitimate power; the Emperor as disinterested ruler; the political peace of the universal ruler established and maintained by law; the universal emperor has the power to enforce but is bound by the transcendent ideal and by law.

The Common Good: Justice, Free-Will, and Greed; imperial authority rooted in community; The imperial peace based on law; law as written form of reason – law as the rider of the human will; rational authority as loving and liberating – universal authority as fulfilling; rationality and sociality leads the peace and law of the unified world polity.

Chapter Seventeen: Unity and Universal Rule

Universal Empire ruling in diversity; universal rule in accordance with law; the imperial peace as an ideal – transcendent standards vs conventionalism; appropriate scale: the extension of the polis to the world stage – the supreme community; universal rule as a differentiated public community – integrating the universal and the particular; the unity of a universal ruler and the collaboration of all humankind; the state as ethical agency of the universal good – politics as difference and particular interests – the disinterested ruler; the formation of particular wills and groupings into the one common government.

Beyond the Yes/No of Social Constructivism; beyond politics as endless contention.

Chapter Eighteen: The enduring importance of Dante’s world government

Dante as prophet of universal peace; the first principles of political welfare; the ideal of political peace as an object of future willing; Dante and Jacques Maritain; The relevance of Dante’s ideal of world government in a democratic age; the peace that enables natural growth of the diverse parts as a mutual growth; The universal ideal transcends uncontrolled national and sectional rivalry.

Chapter Nineteen: Covenants, contracts, and community

The Church and State as Covenant and Contract; The restoration of communion and community; Love, communion, and community as a new vision of truly human religion and politics; The Universal Monarchy as the Moral Union of all Humankind; the universal Empire as a moral community: the moral union of all humankind; church and empire – the unity of inner and outer realities; the two beatitudes; The need for guidance and direction.

THE COMEDY

Chapter Twenty: Introduction to The Comedy

The Dialectic of Heaven and Earth; reconciling objectivity and subjectivity in the shift from theoretical to practical reason; poetic and philosophical intent; poetic method built on sensory experience and everyday life: intellect and senses; Dante embodied the entire gamut of human emotion in an encyclopaedic theological and philosophical work of poetry: poetry as moral art; Dante as artist-ethicist-poet; vivid rendering of concrete detail; intensity of feeling for suffering and misery in the Comedy; the motivational economy; dialogic public space; politics as practical reason; Existential reality: happiness attained through a series of personal engagements; The Comedy is rooted in experience; polysemous levels of meaning; personal realism: abstractness of conception and concreteness of representation; free will and the disciplined life.

Journey to self-knowledge; Dante brings us to ourselves; soul and longing: true self/god/heart; The hopeful journey; The inclusive narrative of holy place; personal journey: the story that speaks to need and situation in order to bring us to truth; The moral framework for the common life; Love’s wholeness.

Dante as inherently political being; The heart of the city: difference is as required in the social sphere as it is in the metaphysical; constituting community; The mutuality of heavenly experience: learning mutuality; The three realms of the afterworld as three cities; Paradise is other people; Purgatorial hope: the learning community; The communal journey is undertaken with the help of guides; Dante explicates universal truths through personal experience.

From disconnection to reconnection - cognitio experimentalis Dei; Old moral maps, the same moral geography; Happy homecoming; humanizing restraints and the morally aware being – beyond the false fixities of hell to God – a cosmic love story; The comedic view; Exile, lostness, and homecoming.

Chapter Twenty One: The Comedy: The Structure and the Story.

Moral architectonics and educative intent; Communion, Community, and Communication; Poetic leadership; Sacred Poem educates by power of language; affirming the human factor over abstract theory and definition; speech as unifying force but also divisive; The unifying force of language: Dante as traveller and messenger; words unite souls in common expression.

Justice as the purpose of the Comedy; The theology of Dante: God is to be discovered in human nature; The design of The Comedy: the outline of the narrative – continuous motion.

The inner music of the Comedy; The beautiful linkage of verse and language; the naturalistic and humanistic realities of the story reveal the transcendental substance; the reality of the Comedy: the poem is rooted in the psychic and historic facts of life; the appeal of the poem: the reality of the story; Exile and separation.

The education of desire; love and the longings of the heart; being human as a discipline; The earthly concern with actions and responsibility; The socio-political framework of sin – the intertwining of politics and ethics.

Political concerns in The Comedy; religious experience and the earthly; church and empire: theory and practice; from isolation to union: reconciling unity and diversity; The social ethic of the Comedy: mutual aid; The central political and moral message of the Comedy: the need for the help of others; Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise as political models.

Chapter Twenty Two: The Critique of Church and Empire.

The bride of Christ; father and shepherd; the shepherd cannot replace the emperor.

Chapter Twenty Three: Commerce and communication money and language

Dante’s attitude to commerce; spiritual and corporate usury; The world of commerce as positive public responsibility; money as language – abuse of commerce as human traffic; The abuse and use of money and language; the shift from corporeal to spiritual usury; Paradise and the paying of debt.

Chapter Twenty Four : The Inferno

Order and Structure in the Inferno; In the Enclosure of Hell; The moral system; The seven deadly sins; The anti-social city; The City as a Social Hell; The city as wilderness; the anti-city: inverted order and structure; the city turned into a wasteland and wilderness; The experience of the city: social proximity; political structure; The ‘dark wood’ and the transcendent vision of urban beatitude; The loss of right relations; The divided acquisitive society as a Hell on Earth; The anarchy of Hell; the objects of love and sin – social disorder.

The Socio political framework of sin; the betrayal of trust: the need for trust relationships; ways of relating; Our responsibility for actions and their effects – for our own salvation and for the good of others; moral taxonomy – the structure of Hell; Healing the wounded community.

The Politics of the Inferno; The Dark Wood; The dark wood is our life - Dante funnelled everything through the first-person singular, the famous ‘I’; the city vs wasteland – Comedy opening: prelude to disorder; the dark wood of discovery; our journey; The threshold of the whole journey – to find hope within the lost way; the social nature of the journey; Hell - where it all went wrong.

The structure of Hell; three divisions – the three beasts as archetypes; Hell’s loss of connection – coldness; the ways of committing error are many; Law as the hound that will destroy greed.

Virgil – The Public Guide; law as the earthly reformer; Beatrice’s concern for a friend; Paul and Aeneas – the nature of guidance.

Chapter Twenty Five: The Gates of Hell.

justice and truth; the hope beyond distrust and cowardice; Discord and Disorder; the transcendent standards behind the chaos - the moral structure of love and wisdom; Hell is incoherence, discord and disunity; personal responsibility – the good of intellect.

The Inferno – the world of anti-music; disharmony and estrangement.

The neutrals; The importance of making a commitment; Boniface and the Great Refusal.

Chapter Twenty Six: Limbo

Reason without God; the rational society; the peaceful society constituted by natural human reason; is reason self-sufficient?

Chapter Twenty Seven: The Taxonomy of Moral Order

Virtues and Vices; The difference between Punishment and Penalty; the virtues as qualities for living; eternal damnation easy to imagine in an age of organised barbarism; The positive message beyond the doom and damnation is one of eternal joy.

Chapter Twenty Eight: The Incontinent

Lust; the queens; Francesca and Paolo; the humanity that transcends dogma, the love that escapes reason; the clash between emotion and dogma – to be cut off from mercy by logic; Gluttony; overaccumulation and transgression; Greed; cupidity: one of the most ruinous of sins; The Love of Money.

Chapter Twenty Nine: The City of Dis

Beyond sympathy and weak permissiveness; The categories of socially destructive sin; City of Dis as the city of inorganic wealth.

Chapter Thirty: Violence

Violence Fraud and Treachery; the sins of the last three circles; The three lowest sins pervert reason; The lower sins of malice.

The descent into aggression towards others; indulgence becomes aggressive; Heresy; The critique of Epicurean materialism; Heresy as factionalism.

The projection of violence; The Minotaur: the mingling of the human and the non-human as the alienation of men as gods; Hell is the place of petrified powers; alienation and inversion.

The Old Man of Crete; the fall from innocence; The need for self-control/virtues

Violence against others; tyrants; suicides; civic suicide: The self-destructiveness of the city; violence against God and Nature

Blasphemers; supplanting of God by reason, morality by autonomy – libertarianism; Sodomy as civic sterility; The concern with civic life; Sterility; the idolatry of words: Latini; Usury; the usurers who commit violence against Nature and against God; the use others as means – exploitation and alienation.

Chapter Thirty One: Fraud

The Malebolge; Fraud and Geryon; fraud as a betrayal of trust; The evil dispositions; The social consequences of sin; Seducers, pimps, and flatterers; Simoniacs; universal justice: recovering the principles of justice by which the world should be ordered and governed.

False prophets; fraud – the selling of non-commercial items/public goods; Barrators; money from public office; Hypocrites; Piety for profit; Theft; Commerce and theft.

Counsellors of Fraud; Ulysses; pressing knowledge and power beyond limits; Guido and evil counsel; counsel to tyrants.

Schism; the spreaders of war and discord; Falsifiers; falsifying social intercourse.

Chapter Thirty Two: The Towering Giants of Pride and Power

Towers of alien power; giants as alien blocks of primitive emotion – the external force of alienation/rationalisation/mechanisation; Ephialtes as the image of senseless violence – the chains of the eternal prison; Antaeus.

Chapter Thirty Three: Treachery

Ugolino; the last souls before Satan evince the deadening of feeling; The Hellish nature of revenge as a self-perpetuating and self-consuming cycle; the revenge of Hell – God is not here; the paradox of revenge: Nietzsche as wrong on hell, hope, and eternal love and hate.

Chapter Thirty Four: Lucifer and the closed cold heart of Hell

The Frozen Lake; Satan and hell as one’s own creation – the cruelty of a society torn apart; The betrayal of friendship; underlying order and rediscovery of transcendent standards - Dante’s realistic ontology of evil - Satan as lifeless and loveless – the petrification of life and love; Lucifer embodies isolation as the ultimate and universal pain of Hell - separation from source and the overcoming isolation; Exquisite poetry – the poetry of love, healing, and communion beyond political contention and retribution; putting the human world under human jurisdiction – learning to do better.

Chapter Thirty Five: Introduction to the Purgatorio

Clearing the mind and opening the heart; Purgatory is a creative forgetting beyond infernal notions of revenge, retribution and punishment; The social components of love; repentance; The community of trust; purgation as the restoration of the senses; irrational freedom: consumptive greed over liberty and justice; the purgatorial questions of love and freedom.

Chapter Thirty Six: The System of Purgation

Mount Purgatory as Church; The need of mercy and forgiveness for freedom; Confession as truth telling; The road to freedom; absolution, transformation, and restoration; The redemptive doctrine of Purgatory: the overcoming of sinful innate tendencies; Penalty; Reeducation: The Discipline of the Mountain; The education of desire: language for the soul; Law, authority, and civility; the common good: the need for an ontology of the good; divine desire holds all things together; Purgatory clears and cleanses the mind; Learning to become citizens; The restoration of community; the realm of opposing forces and tendencies: balance and control; The mutual aid society: reconnection and the restoration of community; The expansion of joy – harmony.

Chapter Thirty Seven: Purgatory as Place and Structure

The Moral geography of the Earthly Paradise; the path to the realization of happiness in the earthly paradise; The highest mountain; poetry comes back to life: the renewal of life; Poetry and the arts; poets as curial guides; The love of place is felt once more in Purgatory: the warmth of connection; Political episodes, existential details, and moral examples.

Chapter Thirty Eight: Liberty and Law

The Centrality of Liberty; The relation between microcosm and macrocosm; horse and rider: the need for the guidance of inclinations; Cato and the Moral Law; The process of rebuilding; active obedience to the Law; Entrance into Purgatory proper; The ship of singing souls.

Chapter Thirty Nine: Ante-Purgatory

Poets and politicians in the community of ante-Purgatory; Sordello and Farinata; The lament for enslaved Italy: division and disorder; political organisation falls short of valid legislation: transitory standards; transcendent standards vs conventionalism and truth as a function of power relations and struggles; factionalism and the unifying force of language; The Restoration of fellowship, peace, and community.

The Excommunicate; The preoccupied; End of Day and the Dawn of a New Day; The Theological Virtues and the Cardinal Virtues; training for the contemplative life.

Chapter Forty: Peter’s Gate and the Seven P’s

Confession at Peter’s gate; The seven sins and purgation as a social process; the ascent requires both human effort and divine support; the need for guidance and instruction; social harm; the process of purification sheds the weight of sin.

Chapter Forty One: Pride, envy, and wrath

The Three Divisions of Purgatory; the social sins of disordered love; the need for ordering of love and desire to proper ends; love is the basic element of harmony: a socio-relational quality; Pride countered by humility; Envy countered by love; Mutual support and fellowship over factionalism; self-destructiveness of political envy – Guido.

Chapter Forty Two: Sloth

Sloth is transitional between two opposing sins.

Chapter Forty Three: The shift to spiritual wealth

Beyond Possession: the covetous and the gluttonous; sharing in the highest good - Dante’s vision of a common humanity; property and true community; from ‘I’ to ‘we’; moral and civic love: divine longing; The community of God: the new life as our life in community.

Chapter Forty Four: The Distinction between Natural and Rational Love

Virgil on Love and Free Will; Love is the seed of every virtue and every vice; the ordering and direction of love; Disordered love; The need to properly order love.

Chapter Forty Five: Marco Lombardo and Free Will

Fulfilment beyond restraint and containment through proper direction and use of energies; Commerce and greed in a public context; Language and Money; words and money as alternative currencies connecting people and places in different ways; the idea of words functioning as guides; nature and nurture: the human appetite requires education; the restraint of law, guidance by ethical models.

The Community of Virtue: the habitus of virtuous practice; the need for law and the supreme good; character formation and virtue ethics; the need for moral as well as civic formation; empire and papacy; God as measure; the distinction between the natural order and the order of God; the dream of the siren.

Chapter Forty Six: The Passage of Fire

Avarice; Statius earthquake; The Gluttonous; The Lustful; poets as representatives of the community of change and conversion; The final stage of the purgatorial process – love and the noble heart.

Chapter Forty Seven: The Meeting at the Two Rivers

Leah and Rachel: active and contemplative lives; Dante’s Crowning in the Earthly Paradise; closing encounters - poetic and political identity; Dante’s divine poetic mission; The sacred wood and the passage of waters; Matelda; The Earthly Paradise; the city of divine love; The philosophy of restoration; Transcendence and reality; idolatry and power; The path to communion.

The Mystical Pageant; intellect restored; The departure of Virgil.

Justice and the human potential; Beatrice’s role in the narrative is also to predict Dante’s ultimate salvation; The history of the church: the procession in the Earthly Paradise; justice and its restoration; God's plan of justice – the Gryphon; Mystical Procession church and state relation; music beyond mortal understanding - announcing the qualitatively different nature of the music to be enjoyed in Paradise.

The Two Rivers of Restoration; purgation as a regaining of the right order of being; proper direction.

Chapter Forty Eight: The challenges and rewards of the Paradiso

Hell and Paradise as opposites; Uncharted waters and transgressive poetry; Paradise hard to visualize and conceptualize.

Chapter Forty Nine: Transcendent standards: the otherworldly world of the Paradiso.

Existential penetration to essential truths; placing worldviews under the species of eternity; the ascent into the sphere of the unintelligible; transcendence beyond the immediate senses.

The Transcendent Perspective; Beatrice in Paradise; Beatrice as transcendent Donna Mia; accessing true reality.

Love and justice in the ideal society; Paradiso as the embodiment of rational freedom; unchanging perfection; the interwoven whole; Paradise as the ideal society: the model for earth: individuals acting for the common good to achieve individual self-actualisation; The ideal society as a society moved by love; citizen-pilgrim in the holy commonwealth; earthly political questions; the transcendent standards of political order, justice, authority; closing the gap between ideal and real through moral and social freedom; free will and the appreciation of transcendent standards.

Two complementary destinies: secular and spiritual life; earthly ecclesiastical communities; the just commonwealth: church and state as unity of human faculties; The ideal on earth: empire/justice/active life and church as spiritual and contemplative; The transformative spiritual path over dogmatic instruction.

Cosmological reality; Interweaving within the Transcendent; the theological questions of Paradise; The special love of each in their natural movements; the divine glory that is reflected back through the universe; the return to origins; The possibility of vision transcending senses; the sacramental significance of a reality that is beyond the capacity of human expression; Plato on the creation of the universe.

Transcendence; the pattern takes final form in Paradise.

Chapter Fifty: Trasumanar

To soar beyond the human; the end of natural law – dangers of transgression - forbidden knowledge; transformation as transposition and transfiguration; the infinite in Paradise; the poetry of spiritual gravitation; the contemplation of the beyondness of things.

Formative Principles; Doctrine and Example.

Chapter Fifty One: Into the Spheres of Paradise

The grouping of the souls; The return to source in the last three heavens.

Chapter Fifty Two: The Sphere of the Moon

Word, will, and intention; Piccarda and the nature of the vow; God’s plan of just order; the peace of voluntary submission; all souls share beatitude to the extent of which each are capable; equality and hierarchy – diversity and unity; freedom of the soul – intellectual love of God; The Thirst for Knowledge – the Enamoured Mind.

Chapter Fifty Three: The Sphere of Mercury

Fame and glory for a just cause; living justice; empire and justice: laws and unified government; Roman Apologetics in the Paradiso; Roman empire and human redemption; the central problem of political philosophy: how to reconcile particular interests within a political community; Rebutting Blake’s charge that Dante is an atheist and Caesar’s man.

Justinian in Mercury; the harmony that reigns among the different levels of beatitude - different voices rendering sweet harmony.

Chapter Fifty Four: The Sphere of Venus: The Lovers

The fusion of beings through love; Charles Martel; principles of political order; Diversity within unity; The Bonds of Civic Fellowship; difference is as required in the social sphere as it is in the metaphysical; The necessity of social existence, diversity, and citizenship; free will; Folco; Dante goes beyond words and metaphor to portray reality through visual symbols and music.

Chapter Fifty Five: The Sphere of the Sun: The Wise

The leaders responsible for the common good in the higher heavens; the hymn to love and order; Aquinas and Bonaventure; interconnection and the dialectical method; polyphony; the glorious wheel: the dance of the wise men in the heaven of the sun; singing is governed by concordance and harmony; truth accords as sweet harmony; vision of spiritual harmony: love and knowledge reconciled; rational freedom as deliverance from senseless servitude; in Heaven, all contention is resolved.

Apostolic poverty; the inadequacy of reason; Solomon; Resurrection of the Body; Wisdom as Sophia and Sapienza – prudence opens to Ulysses and transgression – the masters of power/knowledge.

Chapter Fifty Six: The Sphere of Mars; The Fighters for Justice in the World

The Sun teaches, Mars does; Cacciaguida’s Florence as an enabling ideal and living tradition; Restoring the Civic Order: Exile and Homecoming in the Political Imagination.

The Family Circle – the Domestic grounds of Civic Virtue; examples make principles live; Public Affairs: the Exercise of Civic Virtue; City, Church, and Empire; Mars the paradox of free will and fate: free necessity; the tree of justice.

Chapter Fifty Seven: The Sphere of Jupiter

The Love of Justice; the Foundations of a Loving Authority; Peace and justice; Politics and ideal justice; law and justice; Love Justice Ye Who Judge the Earth; earthly and heavenly conceptions: living under the aspect of divine truth; the troubling question of the virtuous unbaptized.

Chapter Fifty Eight: The Sphere of Saturn: the Contemplatives

The monastic life; The monastery as microcosm of the world – return to the Golden Age; Monasteries as ideals on Earth; transcendent standards and monasticism; Beatrice’s smile; contemplation as looking; The little threshing floor – focusing on earth with transcendent vision.

Chapter Fifty Nine: The Eighth Sphere: The Fixed Stars: Faith, Hope, and Love

The Cult of Mary. Cantos XXIII to XXXIII; Theological examination on faith, hope, and love; the garden of the church triumphant: unity in diversity; the restoration of the Earthly Paradise; The garden as fellowship; The theological virtues in concrete practice; Dante sees the universe smile; The Trespass of the boundary – Adam; St Peter’s denunciation of the church on Earth; The shift to a legal and corporate church: the critique of legalism, alienation, and abstraction; peace and reconciliation.

Chapter Sixty: The Primum Mobile : The Ninth Sphere

The Angels; the God point setting forth a brilliant light; the passage from time to eternity; The Prime Archer: combining intellect and love in the One; the point that overwhelms; The condemnation of earthly trespass; The recognition of limits – the need to be modest with the gifts of created being.

The Empyrean; The revelation that God is Love restores Dante’s sight; perceptions beyond the rational and beyond imaginative and creative powers; The difficulties of approaching transcendence – making the intangible vision tangible.

The Eternal Rose with the Golden Heart.

Chapter Sixty One: Approaching Journey’s End

Mysticism in the final one hundred lines.

Chapter Sixty Two: Into the Light

St. Bernard the contemplative and mystic as the final guide; the final Canto, 33; the prayer to the Queen of Heaven: Mary as Nostra Regina; Mary the mediatrix; Mary as the personal embodiment of the supreme virtues.

The Vision of the Trinity; the climax in mystical vision; The entire universe is contained in all its diversity in God; Dante comes face to face with God the Creator; Poem’s end: into the light; the impossibilities of squaring the circle; The turning of will and desire by the circular motion of divine love.

Chapter Sixty Three: The Sacred Poem as Real Fiction

Dante’s Poetic Invention; a sacred poem beyond fiction; going beyond words and music to the spiritual centre of the universe; Dante’s tale unfolds within concrete reality in accordance with rational and moral parameters; Dante succeeds in maintaining the real and the rational in close relation right until the very moment he brings us to the sight of God; the real over the fictional; poetic transcriptions of contemplative truth; Love is the spiritual centre of the universe.

Paradise language conveys a vision beyond words; Paradise transcends limits of language to convey an ideal beyond experience; the virtues of words and the worth of the poet; Dante’s Poetic Creation; the divine glory that is reflected back through the universe; the return to origins; imaginative collaboration; making meaning; to gaze lovingly; the happiness of creation; Poetry as real: the power of Dante’s poetry; Dante as storyteller: the power of words to move, motivate, and inspire.

Chapter Sixty Four: Paradise and Love

Dante succeeds in putting the two concepts of God together, the God of physical creation and the God of human relationships, the impersonal and the personal; Dante is a poet philosopher by profession: knowledge is prior to love; What Dante sees; the ‘something’ beyond the nothingness of disenchanting science; The recognition of the limits of our knowledge; Love and Light: the spiritual centre of the universe

Dante’s Heartleap; love as the unifying force; The Ecology of the Heart; The centrality of the heart in the poetic process ; transformative space; sensuous connection to the world.

The Eternal Love of the Living Liquid Light; Dante’s conception of God as light and liquid.

Chapter Sixty Five: From Careless to Endless Love

The Happy Ending that is Without End; the choices we make.

Chapter Sixty Six: Exile and Homecoming

Quest for soul and meaning; stories of longing and aspiration; The pilgrimage of hope; the myth of objectivity and poetic imagination: the need for moral appreciation; restoring wonder and trust and connection; beyond therapy; honouring experience beyond the false certainties of fundamentalisms and surrogacies; choosing love over fear.

Coming Home to the Endless Love; love and knowledge; intellect and will: choosing freedom; Inferno and domination – freedom for each and all; Satisfying the longing for transcendence.

Chapter Sixty Seven: The Ideal Polity

The cry of justice from the wilderness; institutional crisis; The model of the ideal society and how to attain it; Rome the ideal city of Paradise; public and personal considerations – virtues the key to political order.

The vision of the Rose; Paradise is conviviality; reordering public: importance of institutions nurturing and sustaining possibilities for freedom; heaven as communion; personality and community; the community of each and all bound by love; love is expanded by being shared; the heart’s desire: sacred ecology and human solidarity.

Chapter Sixty Eight: Homecoming to a Sacred Ecology

The Eternal Feminine; relations and mediation: the web linking each to all; Homecoming to a Divine Ecology; order and freedom; to be partners in Creation; the erotic education of desire: love and you will know; love’s mediating function; the need to will the good; to be embodied and engodded; The engodded universe; Journey’s end.

Volume 3

DANTE AND RATIONAL FREEDOM

Dante and Transcendent Standards

Metaphysics and Politics in Hobbes and Locke; Hobbes’ Materialism; The Ontology of Locke’s Natural Law

Materialism and Platonism; Transcendence and Contingency in Relation to the ‘Real World’

Metaphysics and Morality; Rousseau and the Platonism of the Savoyard Vicar.

Transcendent standards and eternal ideas; Free Will; The Soul

Transcendent Truth, Power, and Representation; Reason, Culture and Transcendent Truths; Culture, Power, and Truth

The Best Account

Rational Freedom, Right Relationships, alienation and idolatry

Dante and Marx; Contextualizing Marx's Criticism of Commercial Society; Dante’s sins as capitalist imperatives

Order Unity Diversity

Medievalism, the Hierarchical order and Fascism; The Danteum of Giuseppe Terragni; the Danteum – the freezing of the music; frozen music as immobility of the Inferno – Paradise as music, light and love – critique of the Danteum.

Dante’s Heartleap; The Love Beyond Proof

The Physical and Moral Universe; putting fact and value together; Against naturalism and scientism.

The Danteum – the petrification of Paradise; physicist and Dantista Margaret Wertheim’s critique of Platonic abstraction and disembodiment.

The Two Concepts of God; The Physical and Moral Universe as One; the dissolution of morality into value judgements – the simplicity and unity of God; disenchantment and despiritualization; Creator God or Natural Creativity? the Einsteinian "God"

Forbidden Knowledge; the sacred beyond human invention; Dante the transgressor in desire to see the face of God; Bacon and science; apprehending our invented symbols – living as if we knew; philosophical reason undercuts itself; the secret – against reinventing the sacred; Nietzsche and disenchanting analysis.

Transcendent Reason and Pragmatism

fulfilment of the soul’s desire – eccentricity beyond control; the illusions of being in control and of being in charge – letting go of neurosis; the dancer and the dance – getting in tune; the musical model in politics

Unity and Diversity; a world in union and in motion; P.B. Shelley – unity and diversity

Poetic Invention and Real Fiction

The Politics of Love and Justice

functional order – differentiated power; the ascending theme of power and government; diverse ranks coming to render sweet harmony; functional order – the just society and love divine; unity in diversity – the politics of the common good.

Alienation and Rationalisation; Dante and Marx; Freedom rationalized; Dante and the disenchanted world of Max Weber

Alienation Rationalisation and Religion; From Corporeal Usury to Spiritual Usury

Dante’s Catholicism invites non-believers to return home

Volume 4

WALKING AND TALKING WITH DANTE: THE ENDLESS LOVE ON THE UNENDING ROAD

Chapter 1: Dante’s Infinite Way: Endless Conversations

The centennial of Dante’s death approaches in 2021.

The need for non-academic multidisciplinary approach.

Exile and homecoming - Quest for Meaning, Calling back the Soul

The poetics of social encounter; bringing Dante to new audiences; diversity of experience - multi-levelled mode of approach; mediation – practical reason – modes of communication and dissemination.

Exile and homecoming

The Quest for soul and meaning

The loss of spirit; stories of longing and aspiration; the pilgrimage of hope; the drama of moral engagement and the invitation to puzzle; the myth of objectivity and poetic imagination – the need for moral appreciation; Dante restores wonder, trust, and connection; love over fear, humility over power; something to trust in and cleave to; the Homo Viator and Lost Traveller; the dialectic of earth and heaven; self-actualisation and self-knowledge.

Chapter 2: WHY STUDY DANTE TODAY?

Why Dante? Which Dante?

Dante in the age of ecology – need for collaboration; the endless writing of our obituary as the planet unravels; Who are we to justify the writing on the wall?

Confronting the charge that Dante is ‘out of date’; truths are not a function of time and place; Dante has continued to intrigue and inspire; timeless ideals; the human comedy – existential crisis; Dante encompasses all life; Dante’s enduring significance.

The spiritual path leading pilgrims back to God – metaphors and the human journey

The influence of Dante upon Lewis Mumford; Dante inspires the new life – Mumford points to the new society; Dante’s influence on Eliot’s The Waste Land; the content and range of The Comedy; Dante’s contemporary relevance as an analyst of the soul.

The universal significance of self-conscious exploration; Dante’s universal genius; imagination against the worship of numerical quantity; disintegrating force and transcendent hope; the sickness of society – the breakdown of the symbolic life; poetic beauty.

Dante’s invention; a realistic fiction that is grounded in facts; Paradise beyond reason and beyond the

written form.

Chapter 3: RESPONSES AND REACTIONS OVER THE CENTURIES: THE AFTERLIFE OF DANTE

Public enthusiasm; Dante as a global figure; responses to Dante; public initiatives.

Dante’s Poetics of Love as an Ethics of Friendship; reception, both popular and controversial; Dante’s influence; Dante the psychologist and therapist – words for healing; the strangeness of reading Dante for the first time – Dante plunges us into reality; Dante as unorthodox in swimming against times and tides; the uncanonical Dante – Dante the interweaver; Dante’s uneven reputation over the centuries.

Dante has the bedrock of personal human truth – Beckett, Wilde, and Mandelstam

Dante as Longfellow’s great liberator

Dante’s subversive unorthodoxy against Victorian stiff-necked moralism

Establishing an Italian canon: Dante and the politics and poetics of national culture; nationalism and populism; co-opting Dante; the political appropriation of Dante.

Chapter 4: Wilde in Paradise: Oscar Wilde’s Dante

Sorrow as the supreme emotion; suffering; the spirit that flows in the ethical stream; Christ’s place with the poets; against harsh legalities; the living of flower-like lives; De Profundis; Dante and The Romantics.

Chapter 5: Dante Between the Wars

Dante’s International Reception; Resistance during World War Two: Dante gives hope and lights the way in dark times.

Chapter 6: Osip Mandelstam’s conversation with Dante

Introduction: Dante Lights the Way; Dante is more known than understood; dialogical and monological authority.

Biography: poetry, politics, and repression; Mandelstam shares Dante’s fate in exile; arrest and death; posthumous fame; to learn by experience the truth poets deliver by art.

Architectonics: Mandelstam always carried the essentials on his person – a copy of Dante’s Comedy; Acmeist school - compactness of form and clarity of expression; Mandelstam demands formal elegance; against Dante as ‘frozen music’ – against the tuneless noise of sculpture and architecture as mechanized form without content; form and content – the Comedy as a single unifying stanza; Dante against mysticism and for clarity – the concern to inform and educate; seeing with clear eyes; knowledge beyond reason – Kant and the scandal of reason – the clash between reality and intellect; Dante fashions the tools to deal with the challenge; the analogical method – comparison and simile; Dante is the Descartes of metaphor and simile; Dante’s dialogic and conversational method in the participatory universe; Mandelstam’s ‘Conversation’ is an elaboration of a poetics inspired by Dante – the dialogic against the diabolic; the need for metaphor to apprehend Dante’s metareal vision; Dante’s erudition as ‘unceasing sound’; The musicality of the Italian language; poetic discourse - the mutation of instruments into harmony; Dante’s organic holism - diversity through unity; diversity through unity : the bee analogy pointing to the ceaselessly creative universe; Dante’s similes are never descriptive; Dante and the natural sciences bringing us to reality – visionary materialism; heraldic symbols – Dante a friend of painters; The cello – diversity by way of analogy with the orchestra.

The Distinction Between Authority and Authoritarianism

The prison; The political world as Hell on Earth – Dante and the city - the diabolical nature of politics; authority and authoritarianism – Mandelstam’s fate; to be herded in a herd – the compartmentalisation of atrocity and the inability to see beyond the particularity of plight; the aim was to destroy not merely people but hope and the idea; Mandelstam on authority: a society properly ordered in accordance with justice; Dante looks forwards to a new universal authority – Dante’s words are missiles for capturing the future; Dante’s subversive demand for a true form of authority; authority over the cacophony of different voices.

Word Return to Music

Mandelstam as a love poet – the architectonic infused with love; composers set Dante to music; music as divine fullness, divine nature of music; wedding poetry and music – engaging all the senses; silence is music, music is silence – word is to return to music; Bach and Beethoven - the organized resistance of the spirit against the elements, the primal abyss.

Walking with Dante

Dante the walker in exile – Dante’s ‘endless labour’; measuring the woods and fields; the high value placed on musicality in poetry – poetry’s origins are in song; poetry as the song and dance of the universe.

The Creative Universe

dialogue – the conversation that runs through The Comedy; the experimental dance at the heart of The Comedy – refer back to natural science - the unfreezing of Dante, the detheologizing and denumbering of Dante rather than the deconstructing; music and stone – unfreezing the music; Dante as conductor the master of dialogic transformation - the most powerful chemical conductor of the poetic composition; Dante’s dance – Paradiso as a kinetic ballet; Dante’s puts writing on a par with painting and music; recovering Dante, unfreezing Dante – Dante as conductor of music; simile as articulated impulse; Dante calls us to the future; Dante as the creation of impulses rather than forms; Dante’s music as the transformations of power flow; seeing the most tragic occurrences in the light of beauty.

Mandelstam’s fate – poetry can be fatal; Mandelstam’s last poem, This Constant Wish.

Chapter 7: Dante’s influence on the contemporary arts and entertainment

Dante in the arsy versy world; weaving reality and unreality – contents and sources – Dante’s realism; music and the arts – composers put the Comedy to music; Pasolini - the abhorrence of materialism and consumerism as well as of opportunism in politics.

Chapter 8: Mikhail Bakhtin and the dialogical nature of artistic creation

Language an expression of social identity; social and dialogic nature - an appreciation of the religious and the metaphysical; the subtle materialism of immanence; doing justice to our dialogic natures – dialogue and monologue; the inescapably dialogical quality of human life at its best; the poetic art as heroic activity – sub-creation in a creative universe; Where does value lie?; salvation by surrender as against cosmic heroism; liminal space and paradox; The Generosity of Infinite love in an act of love; transference to the most transcendent thing imaginable; the need for faith – faith is a matter of grace – we created God to save the world from nothingness; Love is a contradiction if there is no God; the inadequacy of self-created gods in the endlessly creative universe; Dante’s hopeful attitude amidst the worst of times; Dante’s sense of renewal and transcendence making available uncharted territory – Dante a man for all time.

Chapter 9: Dante Now

reception and assimilation; Dante the universal poet; the plurivocal Dante; Contemporary Dante: afterlife and future prospects; Dante and the civil rights movement; African American Interpretations of Dante’s Divine Comedy; responses; morality and social justice; gravitas and popular appeal; the anniversary – new audiences and renewed readings; Dante: the citizen of the world.

Concluding Thoughts

The book I have is "Dante's Politics of Love." And friendship. Amity. Politics and Ethics premised on the innate sociability and rationality of human beings, qualities which are incited within by wonder at the world without. Cleaving to the Love that is without end in order to satisfy the longing for meaning, truth, and belonging. From separation to homecoming, the institutional embodiment of communion and community, the authoritative framework of a just rule which enfolds, protects, and nourishes the civic community, the restoration of social proximity, recovering citizenly experience at the core of public life, the journey from the dark wood to the Eternal Rose with the golden heart. A communion of hearts. And a heck of a good critique of the vices and their social consequences. Usurers beware!

I see a loss of connection and communion, a void that is metaphysical as well as social. Whilst people see the social void clearly, they see the metaphysical void much less clearly. They feel it all the same, though. That void is being filled by surrogate communities. It’s easy to be drawn into the unwinnable war of surrogates, not least when it encroaches on your own space (as it inevitably must in a social environment). My take on this follows an insight of Marx’s. Rather than dismiss religion as simply an illusion, Marx described it as ‘the heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions.’ When Marx wrote ‘all that is holy is profaned,’ I take him to protest profanity in the name of some kind of holiness. If there were forms of belonging and of meaningful activity that divided societies could coalesce around, giving people a sense of purpose and direction, then the lesser differences that divide us would dissipate in favour of the greater things that unite us. And that means recovering the heart and the soul of the world in its myriad connections. Dante checks the heartlessness and soullessness of an infernal to return us to a sacred ecology, the ecology of the heart and soul.