Dante Today

Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture

“The Fractal Consciousness of Dante’s Divine Comedy”, Essay by Mark Vernon (2021)

By

mark_vernon_essay_screenshot

“Dante Alighieri was early in recognizing that our age has a problem. He was the first writer to use the word moderno, in Italian, and the difficulty he spotted with the modern mind is its limited capacity to relate to the whole of reality, particularly the spiritual aspects. This might sound surprising, given that his masterpiece, the Divine Comedy, is often described as one of the most brilliant creations of the medieval imagination. It is taken to be a genius expression of a discarded worldview, not the modern one, from an era in which everything was taken to be connected to the supreme reality called God. But Dante was born in a time of troubling transition. He realized that this cosmic vision was being challenged, and he didn’t seek to reject it or restore it, but to remake it.

“This brings us to the heart of why Dante still matters today. He stresses ways of knowing about life based on experiencing and undergoing, as opposed to studying or inspecting. They bring an understanding that isn’t about accumulating information and sorting data but trusting feeling and following insights.

“The vision is tremendous and simple and is a gloriously articulated reflection on everyday human consciousness. We are aware and can be aware of being aware. And this is Dante’s message for now: in a way, all we have to do to rediscover the essence of our intelligence, and the capacity to relate to the whole of reality – particularly in its spiritual aspects – is turn towards our felt experience, and examine what we find. There is presence and freedom, intention and imagination, truth in stories and transformations of time. To grow in this sense is to get better at being alive.”[. . .]    –Mark Vernon, Aeon, July 20, 2021 (retrieved April 11, 2022)

Read the full text of psychotherapist and writer Mark Vernon’s essay here.

See our other post relating to Mark Vernon and his work here.

Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere (1929-1935)

By

Scholars Marco Grimaldi and Milena Russo have argued that Dante’s works—especially his depiction of Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti in Inferno 10—played pivotal role in the political philosophy of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Grimaldi and Russo gathered Gramsci’s Dante-related works in their edited collection Il canto decimo dell’inferno e altri scritti su Dante, published by Castelvecchi in 2021, the year of the seventh centenary of Dante’s death.

From the publisher’s website: “Dante è al centro degli interessi di Gramsci fin dall’inizio della scrittura dei Quaderni del carcere. La Commedia è uno dei libri richiesti subito dopo l’arresto; è dantesco uno degli «argomenti principali»; Dante è spesso associato a Machiavelli come rappresentante della corrente laica della letteratura italiana; la penultima nota è una riflessione sulla «quistione della lingua» a partire dal De vulgari. Ma all’interno dell’opera di Gramsci è possibile individuare un nucleo più definito che ruota attorno al canto decimo dell’Inferno e a Cavalcante Cavalcanti, padre di Guido, che prende avvio da uno scritto del 1918 e si concretizza in una sezione del Quaderno IV e in un gruppo di lettere. In tutte queste pagine – che qui si raccolgono – Gramsci usa Dante per riflettere su alcuni dei temi fondamentali dei Quaderni: il rapporto tra poesia e struttura, il ruolo degli intellettuali, la ‘popolarità’ della letteratura italiana.”   —Castelvecchi Editore

“Dante died – why should we worry?”

By

Forty-South-Tasmania-Banner“Dante Alighieri died on September 14, 700 years ago. You could ask why this should be noted; why it should be at all important? What follows is an attempt to answer that question. As I hope you will see, Dante is important; art is important; life must be examined.

[. . .]

“[A]lthough Boccaccio revered Dante, and Dante wrote in the Florentine vernacular, Dante Alighieri was different. He was from a slightly earlier generation. Boccaccio was just eight when Dante died. And the Commedia is completely a work of Dante’s imagination and his lived experience. It is not recycled stories. Yes, he draws on philosophical, and more importantly, theological concepts for his construction of Purgatorio (where Aquinas is important) Inferno and Paradiso, but the fabulous construction of the nether-world is his alone, and it is populated by historical figures or by Dante’s contemporaries. They all receive their punishment or reward according to his moral judgement of them as he journeys through Purgatory and Hell, first guided by Virgil, then – at last, in Paradise – by his platonic love and muse, Beatrice. Dante meets everyone and sees their torment, their equanimity or their reward.

The really important moral message of the Commedia, for me, is that actions matter. You will be judged, so try to do good. [. . .]”    –James Parker, Forty South Tasmania, Sep. 30, 2021

James Parker is a Tasmanian historian and is the creator of the Van Diemen Decameron. Read his full essay here.

Vision Magazine’s, “Dante Alighieri and The Divine Comedy“

By

vision-magazine-on-dante“The Comedy demonstrates the significant influence of Greek philosophy. Dante didn’t read Greek; it seems his philosophical grounding came from religious convent schools founded by Dominican or Franciscan monks. Scholars suggest that the Dominicans would have instilled in their pupil the methodology of Thomas Aquinas’s magnum opus, Summa Theologica. They would likewise have grounded him in the writings of Aristotle and the church Fathers. The logic of Aristotle, which had been out of vogue for centuries, regained popularity in the decades preceding Dante’s birth, giving rise to Christian rationalism. Thus, even though the Bible is by far the most dominant source for the Comedy, in Dante’s hands Scripture became materia poetica, reshaped through an Aristotelian moral system.

“In terms of the idea of the human soul, for example, Dante ‘follows the dominant Western tradition,’ namely ‘that each human soul is created by God, destined for union with a particular human body, and infused by God into the embryo before birth’ (The Cambridge Companion to Dante. This Western tradition owes much not only to Aristotle’s ideas but to his mentor Plato’s concept of the eternal soul, denying only its preexistence. Yet Dante was not a dualist in the Cartesian or Neoplatonic sense. According to Dante scholar Robin Kirkpatrick, ‘his very conception of a human soul denies that he could be. For Dante—as for Aristotle—the soul, or (in Italian) anima, is neither more nor less than the animating form of the body.'” [. . .]    –Daniel Tompsett and Donald Winchester, Vision Magazine, 2013.

John Took, Why Dante Matters: An Intelligent Person’s Guide (2020)

By

“The year 2021 marks the 700th anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri, a poet who, as T. S. Eliot put it, ‘divides the world with Shakespeare, there being no third.’ His, like ours, was a world of moral uncertainty and political violence, all of which made not only for the agony of exile but for an ever deeper meditation on the nature of human happiness.

“In Why Dante Matters, John Took offers by way of three in particular of Dante’s works – the Vita Nova as the great work of his youth, the Convivio as the great work of his middle years and the Commedia as the great work of his maturity – an account, not merely of Dante’s development as a poet and philosopher, but of his continuing presence to us as a guide to man’s wellbeing as man.

“Committed as he was to the welfare not only of his contemporaries but of those ‘who will deem this time ancient,’ Dante’s is in this sense a discourse overarching the centuries, a discourse confirming him in his status, not merely as a cultural icon, but as a fellow traveller.”   —Bloomsbury

See also the Virtual book launch event held at UCL’s Institute for Advanced Study, November 24, 2020.

Recent Dante Citings

Categories

Submit a Sighting

All submissions will be considered for posting. Bibliographic references and scholarly essays are also welcome for consideration.

How to Cite

Coggeshall, Elizabeth, and Arielle Saiber, eds. Dante Today: Citings and Sightings of Dante’s Works in Contemporary Culture. Website. Access date.

Creative