Lafferty, Roger Theodore. “The Philosophy of Dante.” Annual Reports of the Dante Society, no. 30 (1911): 1–34.

Excerpt:

More than any other poet Dante was a philosopher. It is impossible to understand his work as a whole, and especially the Divine Comedy \ unless it is studied as philosophy. While it is of supreme aesthetic in- terest, holding the attention of the world primarily by its striking imagery, its depth of feeling, and its matchless phrasing, its real significance, on which depends its final value, lies in its philosophy. It is indeed nothing but an expression of that philosophy. The whole literary work of Dante is a development of his philosophy. To be rightly understood and appre- ciated, therefore, Dante should be approached from the point of view of philosophical studies, rather than of literary scholarship. That scholar- ship, of course, is necessary to edit the writings, but is entirely inade- quate to show the real meaning of the work. The preparation for a genuine study of Dante requires a knowledge of the history of thought, especially of that of the Middle Ages. For Dante gave poetic expression to the standard philosophy of his time, and this philosophy is thus the substance of his whole work.

As a philosopher, however, Dante was not himself an original creative thinker, but the poet of the philosophy which had been making for centuries. His mission was not to make, but to express. He brought together all the previous philosophies and welded them again – for the welding, too, had been done before him – into one great system. It is the poetic expression and the poetic, rather than the intellectual, value of the philosophical content that is so great.

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