A Brill Calendar: September 13

Few aphorisms on philosophy are as well-known as the saying as the whole of Western thought is little but one oversized footnote to the work of the Greek author Plato.

This is an opinion ventilated, it seems, by the British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947). In a similar vein, it might be said that the whole of European literature is but one oversized footnote to the work of Dante Aighieri (Florence, between May 15 and June 15 1265 – Ravenna, 1321). In both cases we are left with a rather gross slogan; after all it is seldom that profound genius is interpreted in and summed up in a handful of words.

Refraining from the urge to tame a sea of beauty and significance into a catchy phrase, it is perhaps as well to commemorate in Florence’s greatest son a universal existential endowment. It is totally impossible to separate in Dante the poet, the politician, the lover, the scholar, the academic, the historian, the linguist. As a creator of language he stands alone, preceding in historical time all other designers of a new vernacular.

But the miracle is - may be – than Dante’s oeuvre, fathomed as a whole can never be reduced to one single dimension: it is always a completion and a beginning at the same time; T.S. Eliot’s line, written some seven centuries later, somes to mind: “In my end is my beginning”. Dante’s quest through the universe of Western civilization, literature and scholarship did become ’timeless’ in almost any sense of the word; whilst the growth of the Dante legend developed as part of the evolution European civilization.