Philosophy
1265 to 1321, Florence, Italy
Contrapasso, love as the engine of all action, the two suns of empire and church, and the dignity of the vernacular - a poet who made philosophy sing in Italian.
Start learning Dante →Dante’s law of Hell - that every punishment mirrors the sin it answers, so the soul’s eternal condition is nothing but the sin itself made visible. Hell is less a place God sends you than the shape the soul…
The doctrine at the heart of the Purgatorio : that every action a creature performs springs from love, so that virtue is love rightly ordered and every sin is love gone wrong - misdirected, too weak, or too strong. To b…
Dante’s two guides are a philosophy in miniature. Virgil, the pagan poet, is human reason - able to lead the pilgrim through Hell and up all of Purgatory, but no further. Beatrice, descending from Heaven, is revel…
Dante’s political philosophy from De Monarchia : that humanity needs both a universal empire and a church, each deriving its authority directly from God and sovereign in its own sphere - the emperor securing earth…
Dante’s revolutionary choice to write his masterpiece not in scholarly Latin but in Italian - and his argument, in De Vulgari Eloquentia and the Convivio , that the living mother tongue is nobler than Latin. Behin…
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