E-text prepared by David Garcia, Bethanne M. Simms, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net/) DANTE: "THE CENTRAL MAN OF ALL THE WORLD." A Course of Lectures Delivered Before the Student Body of the New York State College for Teachers, Albany, 1919, 1920 by JOHN T. SLATTERY, Ph.D. With a Preface by John H. Finley, L.H.D. New York P. J. Kenedy & Sons 1920 Copyright, 1920, by P. J. Kenedy & Sons, New York Printed in U.S.A. DEDICATION THIS MODEST WORK OWES ITS PUBLICATION TO THE ENCOURAGEMENT OF PRESIDENT ABRAM R. BRUBACHER AND DEAN HARLAN H. HORNER OF THE STATE COLLEGE FOR TEACHERS, ALBANY, N.Y. WHERE MANY PLEASANT HOURS WERE PASSED IN DELIVERING THESE LECTURES. TO THESE FRIENDS AND TO THE STUDENT-BODY OF THE COLLEGE THE AUTHOR HAS THE HONOR OF DEDICATING THIS BOOK PREFACE I stand as does the reader at the entrance to this book which I have not as yet entered myself. I have before me the journey through the Inferno and Purgatorio, into Paradise, with a new companion. I have made the journey before many times with others, or with Dante and Virgil alone, but I know that I shall enjoy especially the companionship and comment of one with whom I have had such satisfaction of comradeship in our journey as neighbors for a little way across this earth. I invite others, and I hope they may be many, to make this brief journey with us, not because I know specifically what Dr. Slattery will say along the way, but because whatever he says out of his deep and reverent acquaintance with the Divine Comedy will help us all who follow him, whether we are of his particular faith or not, to an appreciation of the meaning of this immortal poem, and make us desire to go again and again in our reading through these spaces of the struggles of human souls. A world-literary-movement will commemorate in 1921 the six hundredth anniversary of the death of the immortal Dante. That a medievalist should call forth the homage of the twentieth century to the extent of being honored in all civilized lands and by cultured peoples who, for the most part, do not know the language spoken by him, or who do not profess the religion of him who wrote the most religious book of Christianity, is a marvel explainable by the fact that the Divine Comedy is a drama of the soul,--the story of a struggle which every man must make to possess his own spirit against forces that would enslave it. The central interest of the poem is in the individual who may be you or I instead of Dante the subject of the work, and that fact exalts the personal element and gives the spiritual value which we of modern times appreciate as well as did the thirteenth century.