Dante and Catholic Philosophy in the Thirteenth Century

The work which produced this volume began when the author, only twenty years old at the time, found himself standing in the Camera della Segnatura before Raphael’s Disputa del Sacramento. Among the adoring Church—popes, monks, scholars and pastors—one head stood out from all the rest, crowned not in miter or tiara, but with laurels. Why should the painter bestow such august honor on the poet exile? This book is an attempt to answer that question. Unlike many who comment upon the poet’s work, Ozanam stresses the fidelity of Dante to the Catholic tradition and his filial devotion to the Church. Far from the revolutionary anti-Papal anarchist found in the passages of most commentaries, the portrait which Ozanam, following the Raphael’s lead, paints is the visage of a man who has set his mind on higher things and his hands on the lower: "Here is a poet who appeared in a tumultuous age, who lived as if enveloped in storms. Yet, behind the moving shadows of life, he divined immutable realities. Led by reason and by faith, he outstrips time, penetrates into the invisible world, there takes possession and establishes himself as if in his native land—he who has no longer a country here below. From that lofty station, when his eyes fall upon human things, he is able to see at once the beginning and the end; consequently, he measures and judges them."