Dr. Jonathan Juilfs

This is the best of Dante's library.

We get a sense of what he was reading and interacting with.

And it's one of the reasons why I always say to my students,

first-year humanities students.

Dante is really the patron saint of the liberal arts because in order to read him, it requires the liberal arts.

You must come from several different disciplines and several different kind of conversations that thinking people have had over many centuries.

And I think the beauty of that kind of encapsulated here at the end, not only because he's chosen to remake a literary image that was well known in his day and age, I think he's also, he's setting up for his future reader, I think this is one of the interesting things about the letter to Cangrande, is that Dante was imagining the reception of his text.

He cared about what people did with

And in a day and age, certainly in Dante's own time, because one of his later successors, Chaucer, the English tradition would actually talk about the problems of once you let a manuscript go, anything can happen to it, right?

Go little book.

So there's this fear, not only about how a text is transmitted, but also about the interpretive community that develops around a particular text.

I think what it demonstrates is Dante's, the singularity of his vision.

He really did understand what he was trying to construct here.

When we get to the beatific vision, we can talk about where it breaks down, because ultimately those desires as an author, I think, break down.

And they break down beautifully in the light of the true author, the author of all things, right?

But there's this sense that as he's working here, showing us the picture of what the celestial community looks like,

the Celestial Commonwealth, which is a different thing in Lewis's Paralandra, but it has a similar kind of ring to me, the sense that all of the cosmos is involved here.

There's a sense that this is what it means.

I'm going to read a little passage from Lewis.

I can't help it.