“Beatrice’s Provocative Perspective on Freedom and Moral Responsibility in the Divine Comedy”

“Beatrice’s Provocative Perspective on Freedom and Moral Responsibility in the Divine Comedy” outlines both philosophical and the theological analyses of the Divine Comedy’s treatment of the relationship between freedom and moral responsibility. Based on these analyses, I then discuss why the poem itself models the exercise of human freedom on a poietic process of interpretation that is occasioned by the recognition of a tension between implicit and explicit meanings of a text. In light of this examination, I argue that the Divine Comedy mythologizes its own treatment of the question of human freedom in order to activate and cultivate the psychological processes within us that would be the only possible grounds for any genuine capacity we have for moral agency.

Published in: “Make It New: The Many Dantes of the Twenty-First Century,” edited by Maria Luisa Ardizzone. Special Issue, Studj romanzi. Nuova serie 19 (2023): 17-46.