Can We Inhabit the Moral Universe of Dante's Divine Comedy?

Abstract

This paper maintains that, for all his ethical interests, his philosophical and theological essays, political treatises and linguistic studies, Dante was primarily a poet; a poet who, moreover, believed that poetry could change the world, and that the Comedy must be read, first, as a poem. This is not a trivial point, because the Comedy remains a text that is endlessly fascinating to philosophers and theologians as well as moralists who read it for its philosophy, theology and ethics and who sometimes fail to see that a poet's imagination, even one as egregiously rational as Dante's, is synthetic rather than analytic. This paper offers an examination of the moral universe of the Comedy, paying particular attention to his presentation of the virtues. It endeavours to show how Dante's entry into the moral universe is by way of beauty through the operation of love, and considers how, for Dante, the inevitability of beauty, when properly understood, opens out on to truth and goodness, which, in turn, fold back upon beauty as the Beatific Vision is reached.