Philosophy and Theology

Volume 20, Issue 1/2, 2008

Equivocations of “Metaphysics”
A Debate with Christian Moevs’s The Metaphysics of Dante’s Comedy

Western intellectual tradition is brought to focus through the lens of Dante’s Comedia around the idea of the identity of being and intellect. All reality is dependent on God as pure Being, pure actuality of self-awareness (“thought thinking itself ”); everything else is or, equivalently, has form by its participation in this Being which is Intellect. The human soul can experience itself as divine by realizing this identity of Being with Intellect through its own being refined to pure intellect and form. This is arguably the seminal idea of Western metaphysics relayed by Dante, but he transforms it so that it is no longer “metaphysics” in the sense current in Western thought.