Lante And Dante's Influence

Dante was born in 1256 in Florence. He was a creative writer and a philosopher. He was a powerful thinker; familiar with the Aristotelian reasoning, philosophy, theology, and literature thus it all inspired his writing. It was revealed through Dante's writing, his love for Beatrice whom he met at age 9; her love had inspired most of his writing especially his love poems. However, his family choose another woman for him, although he still was in love with Beatrice. After Beatrice's unexpected death, he wrote (The New Life) that depicts his love for her. Then, Dante became involved in Florence's politics and held many important public positions at the time of Italy's chaotic politics. During that time, Dante was an ally with the Guelfs who competed with Ghibellines over the control of Florence. As a result, In the year of 1302, Dante was exiled from Florence. Although Dante was very passionate about his love to Italy and its politics, after his exile, he never returned to Florence. He, nevertheless, served as a diviner of the world's most important empire as a poet whose poems are inflamed by Beatrice's love, and as an intellectual whose goal was to raise the public discourse transmitting his knowledge through writing. In the mean while, Dante held a grudge against Pope Boniface because of his inability to bring stability to Italy during its rough times. Dante traveled through several cities in Italy, and resided in the city of Ravenna at last where her completed "Paradiso" the last of three sections, "Inferno, Purgatorio, and Pardiso of The Devine Comedy." He died there in 1321. (the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). The Divine Comedy is considered one of the most important works of Italian literature and the gre...

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...pher Ibn Rushd to put into practice a theory of religious imagination. Ibn Rushd uses reason and revelation to deal with similar average truths, philosophy is only understandable to the select few, while religion was supposed to have an advantage of stimulating communities of people. George B. Stone, a Professor of Comparative Literature at Louisiana State University looks at Dante’s writing differently. Stone states that Dante uses in his writing an Islamic imagery as a philosopher as rhetorical strategy that could be found in the Andalusian Muslin Philosopher Ibn Rushd.

This paper proves that it is possible that Dante could have used the Isra and Mairaj imagery in his poem to write a new literature. And it is also possible that he had knowledge about Arab scholars that he might have used their ideas and referecces to introduce new poetry to the world.