Dante’s Divine Comedy: What Love Makes of Life and Learning

Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, written during his 20-year exile from Florence and finished in 1320, is a vast, encyclopedic study of world history, scientific knowledge, political theory, poetics, and Christian metaphysics in medieval Europe. This learned adventure of the mind discovering reality is also an intimately personal love story, showing how Dante's life went disastrously wrong when he lost his beloved, Beatrice, and how he put it right again by traveling, alive, through the three realms of the afterlife—inferno, purgatory, and paradise—to find her again. One life and the life of the world coincide in that redemptive journey. In every encounter with every soul he meets in the afterlife, Dante portrays the soul flourishing when desire aligns with reality and perishing when it does not. Analyzing Dante's epic, systematic portrayal of the soul's choice for bliss or woe is the main work in this course.