ABSTRACT
Western intellectual tradition is brought to focus through the lens of Dante’s Commedia 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 virtue of 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 through a discipline of unselfing and recentering on God. This is arguably the seminal idea of Western thought relayed by Dante, but he transforms it so that it is no longer “metaphysics” in the sense current in Western thought but in a more experiential and existential sense that can be realized concretely in the act of reading and writing poetry.
