In our ongoing tour of Dante’s Paradiso on this blog, one of you the other day, Liam, said you can see the seeds of nominalism within these late cantos of Paradiso, by which he meant (correct me if I’m wrong, Liam) that the metaphysical system Dante constructs here is so complex and baroque that it collapses under its own weight. That is, it makes sense that people would be attracted to a simpler way to understand the relationship between God and the world than the “metaphysical realism” of Dante and the Scholastics.
I can see the point, but what if metaphysical realism is true? Yes, Dante’s construct in Paradiso is quite complicated, but is there a way to make it simple enough to be understandable, and in a way that the ordinary reader can make use of in his life? This is a question I’m going to have to face when I sit down this fall to write my Dante book.
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