Philosophy, Mysticism, and the Political

Nine masterful essays on Dante’s Divine Comedy and his political theology by one of today’s leading Italian philosophers.

Among today's Italian philosophers, Massimo Cacciari is perhaps the most assiduous commentator of Dante.Philosophy, Mysticism, and the Political collects all of Cacciari's writings on Dante to this day, from his masterful analysis of St. Francis of Assisi in Dante'sParadiso and Giotto's frescoes to a new consideration of Dante's "European" idea of empire as a federation of nations, peoples, and languages. Cacciari does not force Dante into any philosophical straitjacket. Rather, he walks with Dante, takes notes, asks questions, raises issues, and tries to understand theDivine Comedy in Dante's terms. Cacciari approaches Dante's Ulysses and the theologico-philosophical vertigo ofParadiso not as a critic but from the point of view of a faithful, assiduous, perceptive, sometimes perplexed, and sometimes worshipful reader. Cacciari's analysis shows once more that Dante does not belong to the past. Dante creates his own age and stays with us whenever we wish to follow his path.

Introduction: Nostalgia for the Empire, or Dante's Metapolitics
Alessandro Carrera

1. Double Portrait: Saint Francis of Assisi in Dante and Giotto

2. The "Sin" of Ulysses

3. Dante's Divine Perception (Aesthesis Theia)

4. The Concrete Ineffable: The Last Cantos of theCommedia

5. Dante'sIntellectual Love

6. Latin and Vernacular in theDe vulgari eloquentia

7. On Dante's Political Theology

8. A Brief Note on the German Reception of Dante

9. Schelling's Dante

Notes
Chapter Sources
Index