The Metaphysics of Dante's Comedy

Christian Moevs

AAR Reflection and Theory in the Study of Religion

In this book 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. Moevs argues that for Dante--in radical divergence from the modern view--the world of space and time is not self-subsistent, but a projection or creation of conscious being, which can only be known as oneself. Armed with this new understanding, Moevs is able to shed light on a series of perennial issues in the interpretation of the Comedy.

The Metaphysics of Dante's Comedy

Christian Moevs

AAR Reflection and Theory in the Study of Religion

Description

The recovery of Dante's metaphysics - which are very different from our own - is essential, argues Christian Moevs, 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. In this book Moevs offers the first sustained treatment of the metaphysical picture that grounds and motivates the Comedy, and the relation between those metaphysics and Dante's poetics. Moevs arrives at the radical conclusion that Dante believed that all of what we perceive as reality, the spatio-temporal world, is in fact a creation or projection of conscious being. Armed with this new understanding, Moevs is able to shed light on a series of perennial issues in the interpretation of the Comedy.

The Metaphysics of Dante's Comedy

Christian Moevs

AAR Reflection and Theory in the Study of Religion

Author Information

Christian Moevs is Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Fellow of the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame.

The Metaphysics of Dante's Comedy

Christian Moevs

AAR Reflection and Theory in the Study of Religion

Reviews and Awards

Winner of the Best Book Prize of the American Association for Italian Studies, 2006.
Winner of the Howard R. Marraro Prize from the Modern Language Association

"Christian Moevs has written a work of astonishing audacity profound learning, lucid style, and acute critical sensibility. No serious student of Dante can afford to ignore this book." --Renaissance Quarterly

"Christian Moevs's Metaphysics of Dante's Comedy is a brilliant book. From beginning to end Moevs compels us to rethink Dante's poem. The Metaphysics of Dante's Comedy is a remarkable book and a major contribution to our understanding of Commedia. --Warren Ginsburg, University of Oregon

"Christian Moevs has written the first truly comprehensive account of Dante's metaphysics. All the theories about creation, separate substances, relation between the intellect and the world of contingencies are finally put in their proper relationship with his poetic vision. This fresh, careful, and lucid examination of three notoriously complex cantos of Paradiso (XXVII, XXVIII, and XXIX) dismantles formalist accounts of the poem and it amounts to a persuasive argument in favor of its deeper theology."--Giuseppe Mazzotta, Charles C. and Dorathea S. Dilley Professor of Italian Language and Literature, Yale University

"...one of the most beautiful and original works that American Dantism has produced in recent years.... A text written with elegance, verve, and precision, which one cannot put down until the end."--Il Sole-24 Ore

"This is a wonderful book, integral, ordered, developed, culminating, like Dante's poeticized universe, in the point of it all, the apprehension of Being. Moevs writes beautifully: he is clear--elegantly clear--in a prose that nonetheless expresses complex ideas. This is a major contribution that makes us appreciate how, in Dante, being relates to Being. One of my colleagues told me that he considered this a dangerous book. I told him that I considered that one of its strengths. Insisting on, even magnifying, the metaphysical/mystical side of Dante, Moevs is trying to set the Commedia into relation with other great thinkers and other religions."--Robert Hollander, Emeritus Professor in European Literature, Princeton University

"It would be difficult to summarize all the lines of dazzling argument presented by Moevs...The implications of these principles for reading the Commedia are explored through senstive close reading, leading to fresh interpretations of passages from all three cantiche. The consequences of Moevs' analysis of Dante's metaphysics not only bear upon readings of individual passages. They touch some of the most important and controversial questions surrounding the Commedia as a whole."--Vittorio Montemaggi, Churchill College, Cambridge.