When you go to high school in Rome, Italy and your school is called Notre Dame International and is run by the Brothers of the Holy Cross, there’s a good chance you will end up reading Dante Alighieri. Dante lived from 1265-1321AD. That period falls during the Late Middle Ages (also called the High Medieval period, transitioning into the Late Medieval period), and marks the early stages of the Italian Renaissance. When you travel around Italy on your very first “Grand Tour”, you inevitably hear about the “Quatrocento”, referring to the Fourteenth Century. The Quatrocento represents the Early Renaissance in Italy, particularly centered in Florence, and is considered one of the most revolutionary periods in Western art history. The influence can be seen in art, architecture and the notable growth of humanism, realism, science and revival of the classics. So Dante was a major force that led up to this start of the great rebirth of mankind.
This was still fundamentally the medieval era in Europe, characterized by feudalism, the dominance of the Catholic Church, scholastic philosophy, and the social structure of the Middle Ages. However, Dante’s lifetime coincided with significant cultural shifts in Italy, particularly in Florence and other city-states. This period saw the rise of banking and merchant classes, growing humanism and interest in classical learning, the development of vernacular literature (referring to works written in the everyday spoken language rather than in Latin, Classical Greek, or Sanskrit). Dante is often seen as a bridge figure, rooted in medieval Christian theology and worldview, yet anticipating Renaissance humanism through his use of the vernacular, the way he integrated both pagan and Christian thought, his focus on the human condition and emotions and his influence from the classics of Virgil and Ovid. Dante lived right at the dawn of the Italian Renaissance and preceded the greats like Petrarch, da Vinci and Michelangelo. So while Dante was technically a medieval poet, he’s considered a founding figure of Renaissance literature and thought.
Dante is best known for The Divine Comedy (La Divina Commedia), an epic poem that narrates his imaginary journey through Hell (Inferno), Purgatory (Purgatorio), and Paradise (Paradiso). Written in Italian, it became a cornerstone of world literature and helped establish the Tuscan dialect as the basis for modern Italian. Born in Florence, Dante was deeply involved in the city’s turbulent politics. He was exiled from Florence in 1302 due to political conflicts and never returned, spending his remaining years wandering Italian cities. This exile profoundly influenced his writing. His work explores theology, philosophy, politics, and morality, blending classical learning (especially Virgil and Aristotle) with Christian doctrine. He wrote about divine justice, human sin and redemption, and the soul’s journey toward God. Beyond The Divine Comedy, Dante wrote philosophical treatises, love poetry (including works about his idealized love, Beatrice), and political writings. His influence on Western literature, language, and culture is immeasurable—he shaped how later writers approached allegory, the afterlife, and the relationship between the secular and sacred.
After my fall from grace on Wall Street, I was cast into the bowels of my own version of purgatory. Purgatory is an interesting concept in Catholic theology referring to a temporary state of purification after death where souls undergo cleansing before entering heaven. It exists between earthly life and heaven, not as a permanent destination like heaven or hell. Souls there are being purified of remaining sins and imperfections that aren’t serious enough to merit hell but prevent immediate entry to heaven. Unlike hell, purgatory is not eternal; souls eventually move on to heaven once purified. Only those ultimately destined for heaven go to purgatory; it’s for people who died in God’s grace but still need cleansing. While baptized a Catholic and educated in high school in a Catholic school, I was raised a rather ordinary Protestant, so was never fully catechismed in the ways of purgatory. For instance, I didn’t realize that it was, as Dante put it, a mountain that souls must climb. My climb from the earthly world of Wall Street to my own hilltop Eden of innocence and repose involved 13 years of teaching. That teaching began with the tenets of Alpha, that fabled lucre of investment outperformance, and ended in the feeble attempt to teach ethical balance to a roomful of warriors chomping at the bit to do battle on the commercial plains of earth. That thirteen years in the Academy was my cleansing.
The concept of the Academy is only somewhat understood in the general public. The Academy of which I speak is the Academy of higher education. The origins of it come from Ancient Greece, where Plato’s Academy was the first institution called “academy”. It was named after the grove of Akademos (a Greek hero) where it was located and it focused on philosophy, mathematics, and dialectic reasoning. This seeking of truth through dialogue, debate, and the examination of opposing viewpoints involves exploring contradictions and tensions between ideas to arrive at deeper understanding. It’s funny that Plato was the student of Socrates and my Ithaca days of teaching were overseen by my own stone statue of Socrates.
To bring this full circle, it was the rebirth of learning in the time of Dante that there was a revival of classical learning and a return back to the term “academy” in higher education. Indeed, it was the Accademia Platonica in Florence (1460s) that revived Platonic philosophy. In modern parlance, the Academy might be more often referenced to a prep school or military school, or perhaps even an honorary society or professional association. I’m betting the Academy Awards would rank as a top recognition for the term. But to me, the Academy is that place in human existence that transitions from earth to heaven, where, as John Milton described in his epic poem Paradise Lost, the long-suffering struggles of man play out in the battle between mundane and spiritual, the evil and the good, all by means of seeking enlightenment through the search for truth.
This morning, my friend Gary and I sat on my deck with a cool ocean breeze in our faces and the visage of my own piece of Eden on this hilltop all around us. Gary has been writing fiction for several years now on the topic of modern lifestyle, fashioned from his life’s journey. We have both collaborated on memoirs with other friends. His worldly pursuit was academic administration as a provost of several universities. We are very like-minded about the state of the world despite our very different life paths. But we have bonded over the past decade probably because of our connection to the world of the Academy. We both have degrees from Cornell and I sat as a Trustee on the board of his last provosted institution on Staten Island (a little slice of hell in its own right). So, it was perhaps inevitable that we would eventually hit on an idea to collaborate on a writing project.
We are in transition as a world, more so than ever before during our lifetimes. Like Dante, we live figuratively in the political vortex of modern day Florence and we want desperately to return to the light that only a renaissance of the soul can bring forth. The world around us struggles between nature and grace and the battle becomes more epic each day. We seem to have lost paradise and are in search of our souls in that rubble. So, Gary and I have decided that we must find an allegorical vehicle to describe this state of disrepair for posterity sake. Our answer…a new collaborative project we will call The Academy….perhaps a path for us out of purgatory.