DANTE'S VISION OF GOD

Abstract

A keen interest in the philosophy of the Middle Ages is not uncommon today, even among philosophers; and it has, fortunately, been prepared and nourished by a great deal of purely historical research. For half a century now historical scholarship, sometimes quickened by a more or less philosophical motive, has been busy with the great Schoolmen—with Aquinas and Bonaventure, Scotus and Siger—and with the cultural epoch which both fed them and was formed by them. A vast amount of manuscript material has been systematically sifted, and an immense network of developments and influences, especially in the thirteenth-century field, has been explored and elucidated. All this has naturally affected the study of Dante; and yet not as much perhaps as one might have expected. For the nineteenth-century cult of Dante—of which we are the heirs—was already active and productive long before the modern historical study of his scholastic background really got under way. Nor has this study fully caught up yet with contemporary work on the poet. Despite the spade-work of Bruno Nardi, Busnelli and others, and the brilliant essay of Gilson, there is still no commentary on the Divine Comedy that would satisfy a specialist in medieval philosophy or theology. Such specialists are doubtless inclined to overrate their own importance; yet, certainly, Dante's poetry and the scholastic formation of his mind are so closely interrelated that either aspect of his personality may lead one into the other, and indeed must do so (I should say) for any but the superficial reader; and this even apart from those general questions about the relation of poetry to abstract thought to which the study of the Comedy tends to give rise.