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The second principle in Dante is Truth. Having read and taught Dante’s Hell, I understand that the spiritual state defined in the work is a real human spiritual state. Add Purgatory and Heaven and you have an Idea of the complete human self with its loves fully and completely ordered. You can experience in reading the poem the artist’s insight into the meaning and mystery of the human self.
The Truth we experience best in literature, I think, is intuitive truth (intellectus), insight, not moral truth; we may indeed discover moral truths in literature, but I do not believe that is literature’s real purpose. We come to literature knowing, for the most part, moral truths, but if literature is only about telling stories that have morals, there is no point to reading great literature. We can get morals anywhere, mostly, even from the Internet, or from that old sinner Ben Franklin, if you wish. We know, for the most part, what we ought to do and ought not to do; we do not, however, know how to see into the human self unless the artist or poet really shows us, because he or she discovered it or saw it in the course of writing the work. Real Art then gives us something we can get nowhere else—an intuitive grasp of truth about the human condition, the human self. To put it another way, real Art lets us experience the mystery of our humanity whether we realize it or not.
Need an example? Read Henry James’ The Real Thing. The title of the short story is true in a number of ways, but it is especially true in pointing to what the story is really accomplishing. While I’m at it, the work of art that best embodies the Idea of Art that I will always have foremost in mind is Henry James’ The Figure in the Carpet. Perhaps more about both of these works later.
