Dante famously honors Aristotle—whom both he and Aquinas call The Philosopher—with the title il maestro di color che sanno (the master of those who know). The Florentine poet’s most famous work owes much to Aristotle and to those influenced by him. From canto to canto and line to line, Dante’s masterpiece bears the mark of Aristotle’s thought and insights into questions natural, human, and divine.

This two-semester course is a deep dive into The Divine Comedy as seen through the eyes of Dante, the philosopher, and his master teacher. Students will work their way through the Comedy slowly, reading small groups of cantos, each clustered around a feature or distinction found in passages from Aristotle’s own works. Where the distinction between vice and incontinence is of importance, passages from the Nicomachean Ethics shed needed light. And where the joys of Heaven are an occasion for Dante to fall silent in respectful awe, Aristotle stands by his side, observing only that

“…such a life would be too high for man; for it is not in so far as he is man that he will live so, but in so far as something divine is present in him; and by so much as this is superior to our composite nature is its activity superior to that which is the exercise of the other kind of virtue. If reason is divine, then, in comparison with man, the life according to it is divine in comparison with human life. But we must not follow those who advise us, being men, to think of human things, and, being mortal, of mortal things, but must, so far as we can, make ourselves immortal, and strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us; for even if it be small in bulk, much more does it in power and worth surpass everything.”