Abstract

This study explores Dante's metaphysical understanding of reality, in the effort to understand the project of the Comedy. It focuses on the Primo Mobile , the nexus between unqualified being and the world of finite form; that nexus is the crucible of artistic inspiration, and the fulcrum of christic revelation. The first chapter discusses Aristotelian cosmology, and the notion of ontological causality; it defines the empyrean through the distinction between essence and existence. The second chapter analyzes the concept of matter in Aristotelian and medieval hylomorphism, and in Dante. It seeks to resolve a number of confusions which have arisen in Dante criticism over the tension between Augustinian materia informis and peripatetic materia prima. The third chapter studies the Aristotelian and Scholastic conception of form, and its relation to intellect and being. It analyzes Dante's conception of philosophy against the background of ancient and medieval noetics, the concepts of possible and agent intellect, and Augustinian neoplatonism. ;The fourth chapter seeks to resolve the argument over Dante's presumed "emanatistic" concept of creation. It demonstrates the extent to which neoplatonism and Aristotelianism coincide in later medieval thought, and in Dante. Sections of this chapter discuss the identity between unity and diversity, the distinction between creation and generation, self-subsistence and contingency, and the interrelated concepts of space and time. In Chapter Five these discussions culminate in a philosophical analysis of the imagery of Pd 27-29, focusing on the opening simile of Pd 29, which is seen to represent the metaphysics of the act of creation, both of the world and of the Comedy. ;The Conclusion defines Dante's metaphysics as nondualistic idealism, and argues that Dante's "incarnational" poetics, the identity of theologus and poeta, and the medieval concepts of figura, anagogy, and literal truth, can only be fully understood in that context, foreign to modern materialist psycho-physical dualism. The Epilogue connects these conclusions to Eastern and Western mystical traditions, to recent work in theoretical physics, and to Wittgenstein