Dante: The Central Man of All the World

A free download from http://www.dertz.in


Dante: "The Central Man of All
the World", by

John T. Slattery, et al
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

Title: Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" A Course of Lectures
Delivered Before the Student Body of the New York State College for
Teachers, Albany, 1919, 1920
Author: John T. Slattery

Release Date: November 1, 2005 [eBook #16978]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DANTE:
"THE CENTRAL MAN OF ALL THE WORLD"***
E-text prepared by David Garcia, Bethanne M. Simms, and the Project

Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
(http://www.pgdp.net/)

DANTE: "THE CENTRAL MAN OF ALL THE WORLD."
A Course of Lectures Delivered Before the Student Body of the New
York State College for Teachers, Albany, 1919, 1920
by
JOHN T. SLATTERY, Ph.D.
With a Preface by John H. Finley, L.H.D.

New York P. J. Kenedy & Sons 1920 Copyright, 1920, by P. J. Kenedy
& Sons, New York Printed in U.S.A.

DEDICATION
THIS MODEST WORK OWES ITS PUBLICATION TO THE
ENCOURAGEMENT OF
PRESIDENT ABRAM R. BRUBACHER
AND
DEAN HARLAN H. HORNER
OF THE STATE COLLEGE FOR TEACHERS, ALBANY, N.Y.
WHERE MANY PLEASANT HOURS WERE PASSED IN
DELIVERING THESE LECTURES. TO THESE FRIENDS AND TO
THE STUDENT-BODY OF THE COLLEGE THE AUTHOR HAS
THE HONOR OF DEDICATING THIS BOOK

PREFACE
I stand as does the reader at the entrance to this book which I have not
as yet entered myself. I have before me the journey through the Inferno
and Purgatorio, into Paradise, with a new companion. I have made the
journey before many times with others, or with Dante and Virgil alone,
but I know that I shall enjoy especially the companionship and
comment of one with whom I have had such satisfaction of
comradeship in our journey as neighbors for a little way across this
earth. I invite others, and I hope they may be many, to make this brief
journey with us, not because I know specifically what Dr. Slattery will
say along the way, but because whatever he says out of his deep and
reverent acquaintance with the Divine Comedy will help us all who
follow him, whether we are of his particular faith or not, to an
appreciation of the meaning of this immortal poem, and make us desire
to go again and again in our reading through these spaces of the
struggles of human souls.
A world-literary-movement will commemorate in 1921 the six
hundredth anniversary of the death of the immortal Dante. That a
medievalist should call forth the homage of the twentieth century to the
extent of being honored in all civilized lands and by cultured peoples
who, for the most part, do not know the language spoken by him, or
who do not profess the religion of him who wrote the most religious
book of Christianity, is a marvel explainable by the fact that the Divine
Comedy is a drama of the soul,--the story of a struggle which every
man must make to possess his own spirit against forces that would
enslave it. The central interest of the poem is in the individual who may
be you or I instead of Dante the subject of the work, and that fact exalts
the personal element and gives the spiritual value which we of modern
times appreciate as well as did the thirteenth century.
The Divine Comedy is attractive for other reasons. It may appeal to us
as it did to Tennyson, because of "its divine intensity," or it may affect
us as it did Charles Eliot Norton by "its powerful exposition of moral
penalties and rewards," showing that righteousness is inexorable; or it

may interest us because of its solid realism, its pure strength of
conception, its surpassing beauty, its vivid imaginative power, its
perfection of diction "without superfluousness, without defect."
Whatever be the reason of our interest in Dante, the study of his Divine
Comedy will ever be both a discipline "not so much to elevate our
thoughts," says Coleridge, "as to send them down deeper," and a
delight calling forth the deepest emotions of our being.
JOHN H. FINLEY.

CONTENTS
PAGE
Dante and His Time 1
Dante, The Man 49
Dante's Inferno 101
Dante's Purgatorio 151
Dante's Paradiso 219

DANTE AND HIS TIME

DANTE AND HIS TIME
To know Dante we must know the age which produced Christianity's
greatest poet, he whom Ruskin calls "the central man of all the world,
as representing in perfect balance the