Dante: The Central Man of All the World

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

John T. Slattery, et al
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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
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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 imaginative, moral and intellectual faculties, all at their highest." Other writers are not so dependent upon their times for our clear understanding of their books. Dante to be intelligible to the modern mind, cannot be taken out of the thirteenth century. "Its contemporary history and