Customer Reviews

The Metaphysics of Dante's Comedy (Reflection and Theory in the Study of Religion)

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Moevs poses a critical warning: you cannot "understand the Comedy simply because (you) are familiar with Christian or Scholastic Doctrine". What is needed, Moevs convincingly demonstrates, is to rid ourselves of "post-Renaissance, empiricist" assumptions; e.g. mind-body dualism, creation/causation as a series of temporal events, idealism versus realism/Neo-Platonism versus Aristotle.

The path that Moevs provides is a rigorous but clearly written intellectual and comparative history of the ideas that informed late-medieval understandings and make them radically different than those of "modern" philosophy. Do not assume that you have walked this path. Neither Ozanam's beautifully written "Dante and Catholic Philosophy", written to assert Dante's orthodoxy, nor Gilson's "Dante and Philosophy", written to "define Dante's attitudes ... not to...look for their sources", provide the historical and analytic depth of Moevs' text. Moevs' text is indeed "the first sustained treatment of the metaphysical picture that grounds and motivates the Comedy".

Moevs has reproduced his own journey to a fuller understanding of Dante's Comedy and the philosophies that inform it and make it meaningful to us. His readers owe Christian Moevs a gracious and sincere Thank You!

short description:

This is the first book on Dante's metaphysical understanding of reality, and on how that understanding, centered on the concepts of creation, non-duality, and self-knowledge, grounds the Comedy's poetics, cosmology, and travelogue, gives meaning to its claims to be true or revelatory, and dissolves the distinction between poetry and theology in the poem.

longer description:

Christian Moevs offers the first sustained treatment of the metaphysical picture that grounds and motivates the Comedy, and of the relation between those metaphysics and Dante's poetics. He carries this out through a detailed examination of three notoriously complex cantos of the Paradiso, read against the background of the Neoplatonic and Aristotelian tradition from which they arise.

Dante's metaphysics--his understanding of reality--is very different from our own. To present Dante's ideas about the cosmos, or God, or salvation, or history, or poetry within the context of post-Enlightenment presuppositions, as is usually done, is thus to capture only imperfectly the essence of those ideas. The recovery of Dante's metaphysics is also essential, Moevs argues, if we are to resolve what has been called "the central problem in the interpretation of the Comedy." That problem is what to make of the Comedy's claim to the "status of revelation, vision, or experiential record--as something more than imaginative literature."

Moevs finds the key to the Comedy's metaphysics and poetics in the concept of creation, which implies three fundamental insights into the nature of reality: 1) The world (finite being) is radically contingent, dependent at every instant on what gives it being. 2) The relation between the world and the ground of its being is non-dualistic (God is not a thing, and there is nothing the world is "made of"). 3) Human beings are radically free, unbound by the limits of nature, and thus can come to experience themselves as encompassing all space and time. These insights are the foundation of the pilgrim Dante's journey from the center of the world to the Empyrean which contains it.

For Dante, in sum, what we perceive as reality, the spatio-temporal world, is a creation or projection of conscious being, which can only be known as oneself. Moevs argues that self-knowledge is in fact the keystone of the Aristotelian and Neoplatonic philosophical tradition, and the essence of the Christian revelation in which that tradition culminates. Armed with this new understanding, Moevs is able to shed light on a series of perennial issues in the interpretation of the Comedy. In particular, it becomes clear that poetry coincides with theology and philosophy in the poem: Dante poeta cannot be distinguished from Dante theologus.

And the book is definitely worth 5 stars! (That's not on the book jacket.) : )

Thomas Aquinas said of allegory that it is useful both to present spiritual truths to those accustomed to thinking only in the terms of sensual reality and, simultaneously, to hide them from the unworthy (St. I.1.9 res 3). In the first two canticles of the Comedy (Inferno and Purgatorio) Dante has a strong physical-sensual image: the Earth. Spiritual realities are described in terms of movement in physical space. In Inferno the pilgrim descends into a pit, in Purgatorio, he climbs a mountain. In Paradiso, the central image is light, which is, no doubt, sensual but not really physical. It is, in fact, psychical. In Paradiso, Dante's mystical-metaphysical concerns come to the fore.

He begins Paradiso 2 with a warning: those struggling to follow him (who have not partaken of the "bread of angels") should put the book down NOW (he will not be responsible for lost luggage). Moreover, those who think themselves capable of following had better keep up (there are no maps to where he is going and no place ask directions). Then, to reenforce his warning, the canto continues with Dante and Beatrice landing on the moon and getting into an abstruse disputation about the "moonspots" including a Fourteenth Century map of the cosmos and experiments you can do at home. I admit to my shame and chagrin that I have, more than once, been forced to submit and put the book down.

Which is why I recommend this book. The point of allegory, after all, is its subtext and this book shines in conveying you past the surface conversation to what Dante and Beatrice are really talking about (if you believe they are "really" discussing "moonspots," Moevs can't help you).

Also, if you like, you can check out my author's pageDante's Journey: A Field Guide to the Infernal Regionsand keep a look out for my new book on Purgatorio which will be out shortly.

This book, for me, was like a cold shower, ridding my mind of much academic dross and re-installing The Comedy to a beloved place in my inner library. It's a great pity more of us "outside the walls" don't know of it.