Top Highlights

• Throughout the world we witness a broad array of nation states, cultures and language groups, each with their own unique and rich past.  National sovereignty and cultural heritage are inviolable principles within human society, and they must not be violated.  Yet, they need not divide us.  The issue presented here, in this discussion of Dante, is t...
• By the time that Dante was first elected to public office in 1295, Italy and most of Europe had become a speculators paradise, dominated by Venice, the Lombard bankers and a corrupt and venal papacy.  By 1290 the European population had begun to decline.  Agricultural and woolen production collapsed, food disappeared in many
• areas, and many smaller and medium sized towns were abandoned.  It was within this downward spiral that Dante waged his war.  The economy and the society of Europe all came crashing down in the horrors of the 14th century, but then, in the midst of unspeakable human suffering, at what seemed the nadir of human existence, the mind of Dante would res...
• ....The case of the individual in “Purgatory” helps to instruct us, that to realize the higher self-interest in the Good, it is not sufficient to be able to recognize the Good descriptively, or even to be inspired by the desire to achieve what he describes as Good.  We must become Good;  we must be governed in impulses respecting our immediately pe...
• ....Reason itself cannot define sanity. Without the motive to submit one’s will to Reason, the individual’s will will be submitted more or less fully to the bestial ordering of impulses of wretches of the “Inferno” – or, perhaps, of “Purgatory.” Without a love for Reason more powerful than the infantile hedonism to which one is born, Reason will no...