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7/3/2025, 7:38:32 PM
>>24507059
IDK, but Dante actually coins the term "transhumanize" (in Italian of course) at the opening of the Paradiso to describe what he must achieve to ascend with Beatrice.
IDK, but Dante actually coins the term "transhumanize" (in Italian of course) at the opening of the Paradiso to describe what he must achieve to ascend with Beatrice.
6/30/2025, 1:55:38 PM
First, I will say that pic related is excellent, and that both the Modern Scholar and Great Courses classes on Dante are also excellent. Moevs is more advanced obviously. I had the good fortune to get to attend an entire graduate seminar on the Commedia as a philosophy text, and these were still helpful.
>>24506240
No one. But consider the gap between Virgil and Dante.
Homer starts by showing us the emptiness of the pursuit of arete for its own sake, the way the drive of thymos ultimately turns cannibalistic. Achilles tells Odysseus he would rather be the servant of a nobody than "lord it over all these exhausted dead." Achilles' shield is terrifying because it displays how the world of Homer is ultimately meaningless, the cities at peace and war endlessly cycling, the cycles consuming their heros and sending them down to Hades to become nothing. Yet he also shows us why we ought to strive for excellence. This is the "bright despair" C.S. Lewis speaks of.
Virgil is an advance in that he sees how thymos must be ordered to logos for it to avoid collapsing inward on itself. Only logos has access to transcendence, which is divine and so its own ground. Pietas replaced arete. Virgil's gods are half anthropomorphic, half principles. Humans only see them for what they are when they turn their backs to leave; only when history is behind us do we see the Logos at work. History has a telos embodied in Rome.
Yet Virgil is a skeptic. Aeneas ascends from the underworld through the lying Ivory Gate. He doesn't fulfill Anchises commands but rather slays Turnus in thymotic rage to end the narrative. For Virgil, man can be oriented to the Logos, but he forever oscillates between purgatory and a hell enslaved to the passions and appetites.
Dante is able to resolve this though hope and faith and the breaking in on history of Christ, the Logos Itself. Mary offers the model for man, whose collective historical mission is to give birth the the Logos in the immanent plane of history in thought and deed, being His body, the Church, and Bride at the end of history.
What comes after thymos and epithumia ordered to logos? Modernity largely focuses on pathologies of logos, the fear that it lacks the capacity to rule. This comes in two main forms, volanturism (elevation of the will) and a straight jacket intellectualism that absolutizes human logos as a tool, ignoring that it is a participation in transcendent Logos.
Hence, we get portraits of sickness:
Volanturism:
Milton's Satan
Macbeth
Smerdyakov Karamazov, etc.
And intellectualism:
Hamlet
Ivan Karamazov, etc.
Dostoevsky might come the closest to plumbing these across his works, but he leaves things not fully resolved. The world is still waiting for its next Dante, a poet who can heal Reason and return here to her rightful place as ruler, the return of Sophia. I think Solovyov is a good first step though.
>>24506240
No one. But consider the gap between Virgil and Dante.
Homer starts by showing us the emptiness of the pursuit of arete for its own sake, the way the drive of thymos ultimately turns cannibalistic. Achilles tells Odysseus he would rather be the servant of a nobody than "lord it over all these exhausted dead." Achilles' shield is terrifying because it displays how the world of Homer is ultimately meaningless, the cities at peace and war endlessly cycling, the cycles consuming their heros and sending them down to Hades to become nothing. Yet he also shows us why we ought to strive for excellence. This is the "bright despair" C.S. Lewis speaks of.
Virgil is an advance in that he sees how thymos must be ordered to logos for it to avoid collapsing inward on itself. Only logos has access to transcendence, which is divine and so its own ground. Pietas replaced arete. Virgil's gods are half anthropomorphic, half principles. Humans only see them for what they are when they turn their backs to leave; only when history is behind us do we see the Logos at work. History has a telos embodied in Rome.
Yet Virgil is a skeptic. Aeneas ascends from the underworld through the lying Ivory Gate. He doesn't fulfill Anchises commands but rather slays Turnus in thymotic rage to end the narrative. For Virgil, man can be oriented to the Logos, but he forever oscillates between purgatory and a hell enslaved to the passions and appetites.
Dante is able to resolve this though hope and faith and the breaking in on history of Christ, the Logos Itself. Mary offers the model for man, whose collective historical mission is to give birth the the Logos in the immanent plane of history in thought and deed, being His body, the Church, and Bride at the end of history.
What comes after thymos and epithumia ordered to logos? Modernity largely focuses on pathologies of logos, the fear that it lacks the capacity to rule. This comes in two main forms, volanturism (elevation of the will) and a straight jacket intellectualism that absolutizes human logos as a tool, ignoring that it is a participation in transcendent Logos.
Hence, we get portraits of sickness:
Volanturism:
Milton's Satan
Macbeth
Smerdyakov Karamazov, etc.
And intellectualism:
Hamlet
Ivan Karamazov, etc.
Dostoevsky might come the closest to plumbing these across his works, but he leaves things not fully resolved. The world is still waiting for its next Dante, a poet who can heal Reason and return here to her rightful place as ruler, the return of Sophia. I think Solovyov is a good first step though.
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