So what I'm going to do, although this will take us a little bit outside of the purgatory proper,

is I want to lay out just a little bit about the larger structural questions about the Divine Comedy,

which have something to do with the meaning of it.

Because Dante, if you've read any of him, you recognize that everything

is very carefully calibrated. We talked last night about how even the terseurima, the

way the three rhymes intertwined with one another, is a kind of a symbol of the Trinity that's

woven into the very verse of the divine comedy.

So to get a sense of this, what I'd like to do is to begin by talking just a little bit about

what the difference is between presenting material in a poem and presenting material in a kind

of an expository way, the way you would find it in St. Thomas or in, say, Augustine. Okay.

And Dante tells us that he, well, we know that he deliberately stopped writing a treatise,

which was a commentary on his own poems.

It's called the convivio or the banquet. He's thinking back to, although he doesn't know Plato.

He knows that Plato wrote something called the symposium, which is a banquet. And he's writing

a commentary on his poems, which is something he tends to do. He did that in the Vita Nualva,

which is his very first work when he talks about meeting Beatrice and falling in love with her,

and then everything that happened. And the Vita Nualva is a bit like the Constellation

philosophy, if you know Boethius, where there are poems and then there are commentaries on

them and the two things kind of meshed together.

So we know that he deliberately decided not to write a treatise and to write instead a poem.

We also know, because he wrote a book called Devolcarre Eloquencia on the common tongue or on the vernacular,

in which he actually begins to set down the rules that become modern standard Italian.

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