Dante’s Hell encodes the divided loyalties of a transitional age

Evidence

I would suggest that the discrepancy is to be understood in terms of the contradictions in Dante’s own ideology, and that these contradictions stem from the fact that Dante powerfully represents that transitional moment in European thought wherein the medieval episteme is still there but on the verge of being broken up and superseded by the humanist intellectual revolution. Muhammad is eternally undergoing the most aweful punishment because predominant strands in medieval Christianity treated Islam as the most dangerous of all heresies and pronounced the Prophet of Islam the worst of all heretics. Ibn Rushd, condemned by the authority of that same medieval Christianity through the powers of the Inquisition, was nevertheless greatly respected in circles sympathetic to rationalist disputation; his book were copied and smuggled from one monastery to another. Still mired in the religious metaphysic but unable to resist entirely the strain that was eventually to blossom into a fully fledged intellectual Renaissance, and knowing that it was through their encounter with the labours of men like Ibn Rushd and Ibn Sina that a great many European thinkers were able to find their way back into Greek thought in the first place, Dante tried to devise a topography of his Hell that might do justice to these divided loyalties. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 348

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that a poetic topography literalizes an intellectual-historical transitional moment — the medieval episteme cracking open toward humanism — is a dense, paradigm-level argument that rewards sitting with.
• XREF: Ahmad’s use of ‘episteme’ is Foucauldian, and the whole chapter is a methodological critique of Orientalism; connects to Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge. — connects to: Dante’s Hell punished heresy and rationalism severer than Muslim identity — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 773

Related

• Dante’s Hell punished heresy and rationalism severer than Muslim identity (similarity 0.87)
• Dante judged belief against heresy, never Occident against Orient (similarity 0.87)
• Dante ranked by heresy and belief, not by Occident versus Orient (similarity 0.86)
• Dante’s contradictory treatment of Muslims reflects a transitional medieval-to-humanist ideological moment (similarity 0.85)
• Dante placed the great Muslim philosophers in mild Hell despite their post-Christian status (similarity 0.85)
• Dante mistook Muhammad for a lapsed Christian rather than a foreign figure (similarity 0.81)
• Dante’s Muhammad was a schismatic Christian subplot, not an infidel outsider (similarity 0.79)