One often-cited passage from T.S. Eliot's poem "The Four Quartets" is:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time
One of Eliot's most important influences was Dante's "Comedia,"or "The Divine Comedy" as it came to be known.
Very early in his set of Yale University lectures entitled "Reading Dante," professor Giuseppe Mazzotta depicts "Comedia" as encyclopedic in nature, which he says means "a circle of knowledge" as originally conceived by Marcus Vitruvius, a Roman architect and engineer.
Vitruvius most famously wrote a book known as De Architectura that was a lot more than the title might suggest. "Much more than a book on buildings and machines, the contents of De Architectura reveal the ancients' much wider concept of what exactly is 'architecture' and it describes such topics as science, mathematics, geometry, astronomy, astrology, medicine, meteorology, philosophy, and the importance of the effects of architecture, both aesthetic and practical, on the everyday life of citizens." That's from "The Ancient History Encyclopedia."
Picking up on that notion and applying it to "Comedia," Mazzota says:"
This idea of circularity is crucial, in the sense that to know something you have to have a point of departure, from which you will pass through all the various disciplines of the liberal arts, only to arrive right back where you started. The beginning and the ending in a liberal education must coincide, but you will find out things along the way that allow you to see with a different viewpoint or perspective."
The arts in question are called "liberal" for a couple of different reasons, Mazotta explains. First, to distinguish them from knowledge known in medieval times as mechanical arts. But far more importantly, knowledge gives mankind important freedoms.
That could be a topic for another day. The point of this posting is simply to illustrate some important linkage between Dante and Eliot.
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