Yale open courses by Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta
Here are some paragraphs of the Transcripts that amazed me......

"It's the--it's a journey, it's a quest from nothing less than seeing God face to face and come back to talk about it. Not just seeing God and be overwhelmed by it and dazzled by it, as probably is the--what do we know and it's most of the--the tradition of visionary literature, this is really about writing the poem about this fundamental experience. So we'll be reading this poem, and if I had to give you something of a genre -- it's very difficult to speak of genres. Is it an epic? Is it an autobiography? Is it a romance? I think it's all of the things above. It's all of these things and probably the best way to talk about it is that it is an encyclopedia. What does the word mean? The word means a circle of knowledge. It's an old classical idea, it was made--I could tell you it was made available in times--in--by an architect by the name of Vitruvius wrote actually and talked about encyclopedia. It really means this, as I said, the circle of knowledge, in the sense that to know you have to have a point of departure. And that the point of departure will take you along all the various disciplines of the so-called liberal arts, and then they take you right back to where you started. The beginning and the end in a liberal education will have to coincide. You are going to find out things that now you will see with a different view, from a different standpoint, a different perspective."

- from Trans1


"One reduces love to a question of bodies, the physician, as if it were just a disease, the other one reduces it to a question of love's danger vis-a-vis the stability of the mind. Dante will go neither with one and will not listen neither to one nor to the other. The rest of the poem will be that of trying to understand what this love really is.......So that love is not reusable only to bodies. There must be some kind of animation, there must be some kind of soul that is--or life that accompanies it. In Chapter XII finally, Dante seems to be moving a little bit away from this Provençal -- this way of describing love in terms of conventional terms that I have to describe to you, and he has this other dream about the god of love who comes to him and says it's time for you to put aside all simulacra, all fictions and all emptiness.

Let me just say a little bit about more of this point about love and a kind of questions that Dante raises. Whenever we think about love in the modern era, as you know, these are not my ideas, but particularly I believe in them. Others have formulated these ideas. Whenever we think about love in modern times that--the formulation of love is as we understand it today is essentially medieval. The Greeks do not have the understanding of love the way--the romantic idea of love the way we do. They understand love as an intellectual pursuit, as an ascent up the ladder of being. That it's the work of philosophers that the minds can go on from degrees--through the various degrees of reality and intellectual reality and one can grasp it. There is friendship of course, but there's not the idea of the love of a man for a woman which is so crucial to the romantic understanding of love. The Romans had no understanding at all about either, what the Greeks knew, what we know. The most important Latin voice of--about love is, for instance, I think, Catullus, who talks about love as something to be slightly embarrassed about. It's a weakness, a serious guy does not involve oneself in this kind of pursuits, this kind--you have to do the serious work of living: the political issues, going to the forum, negotiate, etc."
- from Trans2