¹ John Haldane, ‘Current Engagements’, in P. J. Fitzpatrick and John Haldane, ‘Medieval philosophy in later thought’. in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Philosophy, ed. by McGrade, A. S. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 300–27 (pp. 316–24)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

² Ibid., pp. 321–22.

³ Ibid., p. 321. However, Haldane calls for a ‘synthesis [of these approaches] analogous to that achieved by the medievals themselves’, a synthesis made possible, he suggests, by considering the way that the medievals combined more effectively ‘the scientific and sapiential dimensions of philosophy’ (p. 324).

⁴ MacIntyre, Alasdair, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006Google Scholar; first published 1990), p. 80.

⁵ In his genealogy of secularization, Charles Taylor suggests that an ‘exclusive humanism was undoubtedly available […] in Epicureanism’ but he explicitly excludes such a worldview as ‘virtually impossible’ before 1500 (let alone in 1300!) See Taylor, Charles, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 27; pp. 374–76Google Scholar.

⁶ Alasdair MacIntyre directly cites Dante at the following places: After Virtue (London: Duckworth, 2006Google Scholar; first published 1981), pp. 176; 243; Three Rival Versions, pp. 61; 80–1; 142–5; 147; 164; 197; 203. The only other reflection on MacIntyre's treatment of Dante, as far as I am aware, is found in Kirkpatrick, Robin and Corbett, George, ‘“E lascia pur grattar…” Language, Narrative and Ethics in the Commedia’, in Dante the Lyric and Ethical Poet, ed. by Barański, Zygmunt G. and McLaughlin, Martin (Oxford: Legenda, 2010), pp. 56–71Google Scholar.

⁷ MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions, p. 80.

⁸ Ibid., p. 80.

⁹ Ibid., p. 80.

¹⁰ Ibid., pp. 80–1.

¹¹ Ibid., p. 81.

¹² MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 70.

¹³ MacIntyre's contribution to the rehabilitation of Aristotelian ethics within the academy is inestimable, but this should not sideline his achievement in translating into modern terminology, and with popular every-day examples, some key practical features of the landscape of contemporary moral philosophy and of a teleological understanding of virtues.

¹⁴ For Martha Nussbaum's championing of Aristotelian ethics through a literary perspective, see The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001; first published 1986). For her specific interest in Dante, see, for example, her chapter on Dante in Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) pp. 557–590. Nussbaum has distanced herself, however, from what she considers the ‘antireason’ and ‘antitheory’ of MacIntyre: ‘in commending novels as cultivators of […] an Aristotelian perception, I insisted that they would only yield ethical insight if read in connection with the systematic study of ethical theory’ (‘Preface to a revised edition’, in Nussbaum, Fragility of Goodness, p. xxvii).

¹⁵ MacIntyre defines his own mature philosophical standpoint – ‘I write now with the intentions and commitments of a Thomistic Aristotelian’ – in MacIntyre, Alasdair, The Tasks of Philosophy, Selected Essays, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. xiCrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a useful survey and discussion of some key corroborating criticisms of MacIntyre's project, and a bibliography, see D'Andrea, Thomas D., Tradition, Rationality, and Virtue: The Thought of Alasdair MacIntyre (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 403–34; 434–52Google Scholar.

¹⁶ MacIntyre, Alasdair, ‘How can we learn what Veritatis Splendor has to teach?’, in The Thomist, 58 (1994), pp. 171–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘Truth as a good: a reflection on Fides et Ratio’, in MacIntyre, Tasks of Philosophy, I, pp. 197–215.

¹⁷ MacIntyre, Alasdair, Dependent Rational Animals (London: Duckworth, 1999), p. xGoogle Scholar: ‘I now judge that I was in error in supposing an ethics independent of biology to be possible’. See also Intractable Disputes about the Natural Law. Alasdair MacIntyre and Critics, ed. by Cunningham, Lawrence S. (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2009), pp. 1–52 and pp. 313–51Google Scholar. MacIntyre concludes the essay opening the volume (to which the other essays are responses) with the statement: ‘The best defence of natural law will consist in radical philosophical, moral, and cultural critques of rival standpoints’ (p. 52).

¹⁸ Although MacIntyre acknowledges the objection to his standpoint (‘might not its effect be to promote moral skepticism, to undermine belief in any moral standard?’), he considers this inevitable if we are to engage credibly with modern thinkers. As he puts it ‘if the precepts of natural law are indeed precepts established by reason, we should expect to find agreement in assenting to them among rational agents. But this is not what we find […] Many intelligent, perceptive, and insightful agents either reject what Catholics take to be particular precepts of the natural law or accept them only in some very different version, or, more radically still, reject the very conception of a natural law. And these disagreements seem to be intractable’ (Intractable Disputes, pp. 1–2). For a perspective sympathetic to MacIntyre's project but insistent on the rational basis of the Arisotelian-Thomist tradition, see, for example,Kossel, Clifford G., ‘Natural Law and Human Law’, in The Ethics of Aquinas, ed. by Pope, Stephen J. (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 2002), pp. 167–93Google Scholar: ‘Alasdair MacIntyre has pointed out the disarray in many post-Enlightenment moral philosophies and the breakdown of traditions. But beyond appealing to an older tradition (Aristotelian-Thomist), one must show that this tradition has a sounder basis and can deal with the issues raised by modern moral philosophy and by life in large and diverse communities. This can be done only by returning in some way to human nature, not necessarily as antecedently known by speculative science, but as revealed in our natural knowledge of our natural inclinations. But this knowledge can, and for better understanding should, be related to the speculative knowledge of human nature and to the universal teleology of the universe and divine providence’ (p. 178).

¹⁹ Dante, Monarchia, I.i. 4.

²⁰ The influence of MacIntyre's early Marxism on the structure of this aspect of his thought is emphasised by D'Andrea who usefully highlights, in this context, MacIntyre's 1995 Introduction to the reissuing of Marxism and Christianity. MacIntyre's ‘rational ideology’ is a ‘successfully vindicated overall philosophical conception […] or in MacIntyre's words, “philosophy as a form of social practice embedded in and reflective upon other forms of social practice”’ (D'Andrea, p. 407). See also D'Andrea, pp. 87–122.

²¹ MacIntyre, Alasdair, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

²² D'Andrea, p. 403.

²³ Ibid., p. 404.

²⁴ Ibid., p. 404. D'Andrea compares this to Bernard Williams’ strategy, and the goal of ‘a rationally credible moral outlook’ (p. 405)

²⁵ ‘[MacIntyre] has always rejected the Cartesian-style portrayal about how its claims to universality are justifiable: they are justifiable, he holds, not by intuitable, self-justifying moral principles, but by dialectically discovered and hypothetico-deductively corroborated such principles […] the process of reflective dialectical discovery of first principles is crucially affected by one's prior moral habits and prior moral instruction in a nurturing and sustaining moral community’ (Ibid., p. 404).

²⁶ MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions, pp. 144–45.

²⁷ In an earlier work, MacIntyre appeals to a Christian framework in the context of ‘different forms of moral vocabulary’ (anticipating rival versions of moral enquiry): ‘The distressing fact about our own society is that we are in just this situation: the effective and honest use of moral predicates does presuppose a shared moral vocabulary in an established moral community, but we do not as a whole community share a single moral vocabulary’ (MacIntyre, Alasdair, Secularization and Moral Change (London: Oxford Univeristy Press, 1967), pp. 51–52Google Scholar). See also Ibid., p. 75: ‘The inability of men to discard Christianity is part of their inability to provide any post-Christian means of understanding their situation in the world’.

²⁸ See Milbank, John, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990)Google Scholar and Ward, Graham, ‘John Milbank's Divina Commedia’, in New Blackfriars (June 1992), vol. 73, pp. 311–18 (p. 311)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁹ Milbank, p. 327; p. 339.

³⁰ Milbank, p. 330. For an anthology which questions the genealogy upon which Milbank's position is based, see Deconstructing Radical Orthodoxy: Postmodern Theology, Rhetoric and Truth, ed. by Hankey, Wayne J. and Hedley, Douglas (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005)Google Scholar. Graham Ward, however, uses the Commedia as an apology for Milbank's methodological procedure and for the historical inaccuracies of his genealogy: ‘Analyses of individual secular thinkers and schools of thought only become meaningful within the movement of the whole book […] Each analysis is subservient to this grand narrative. Because of this there emerges an element of distortion’ (Ward, p. 311). Ward appears to suggest that just as one might distinguish, say, the Statius of the Commedia (whom Dante presents as a secret convert to Christianity) from the Statius of history and yet still recognise the useful function of Dante's Statius within the overarching narrative of the poem, so Milbank's ‘Aquinas’ might serve a productive function in his metanarrative even though he may bear little resemblance to the Aquinas of history. See, John Marenbon ‘Aquinas, Radical Orthodoxy and the Importance of Truth’, in Deconstructing Radical Orthodoxy, pp. 49–63: ‘The Aquinas of Radical Orthodoxy is a fine monument to the arbitrary power of postmodern hermeneutics: a totem, erected by Milbank and Pickstock for their own ideological purposes, which has almost nothing to do with the Aquinas of history’ (p. 63).

³¹ Inferno, X. 14–15: ‘hanno da questa parte con Epicuro / tutti i suoi seguaci che l'anima col corpo morta fanno’.

³² Foster, Kenelm, The Two Dantes and Other Studies (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), p. 11Google Scholar.

³³ Robin Kirkpatrick cites I. A. Richards’ impassioned perplexity ‘in the face of a work which he admits to be a masterpiece: “Minds that accept, totally or in part, the concepts of the cosmos set forth in the Commedia and minds that reject them totally, how can they sufficiently read alike a poem so unified and precise. […] how can a poem so dependent on such principles be read by those who think them among the most pernicious aberrations that men have suffered?”’. See Kirkpatrick, Difficult and Dead Poetry, pp. 1–2; see also Richards, I. A., Beyond (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1974), pp. 107–8Google Scholar.

³⁴ The prominence given to Epicurus by Dante has led to a number of articles within Dante studies. For a bibliography, see George Corbett, Dante and Epicurus: A Dualistic Vision of Secular and Spiritual Fulfilment (Oxford: Legenda, 2013), p. 4, n. 1. The more general reception of Epicurus in the medieval period has been under treated by medievalists and historians of philosophy. For example, Howard Jones, documenting the history of Epicureanism, tellingly entitles the medieval chapter ‘Medieval Interlude’ (Jones, Howard, The Epicurean Tradition (London: Routledge,1989), pp.117–41)Google Scholar. Two recent exceptions, however, are John Marenbon's important study ‘The Hellenistic Schools and Thinking about Pagan Philosophy in the Middle Ages’ (Basel: Schwabe, 2013) and Aurélien Robert's article, ‘Épicure et les épicuriens au Moyen Âge’, in Micrologus xxi (2013), pp. 3–46Google Scholar.

³⁵ The Epicureans are, Kenelm Foster concludes, ‘not even, theologically speaking, heretics at all but unbelievers; for in strict theology a heretic is still a sort of Christian’ (Foster, The Two Dantes, p. 11).

³⁶ Thus, according to Aquinas who explicitly cites the Stoics and the Epicureans in his example, he who errs as to the goal of life (‘finis vitae humanae’), just as he who errs with regard to the Christian faith, is a heretic: ‘Si vero erraret circa ea quae sunt ad finem vitae humane, semper est haereticus. Et dico finem vitae humanae, quia apud antiquos erant sectae ponentes diversum finem, ut patet de Stoicis et Epicureis’ (Aquinas, Super Epistolam Beati Pauli ad Titum lectura, cap. 3, l. 2). Augustine similarly cites the Epicurean and Stoic schools as heresies: see Augustine, Contra Cresconium grammaticum donatistam, I. 12. 15 and Epistola, LXXXV. 10.

³⁷ Dante, Inferno, IV. 136: ‘Democrito che ‘l mondo a caso pone’.

³⁸ Dante, Inferno, IV. 131. For a summary of other interpretative approaches to the problem of Dante's contrasting treatment of Epicurus (a heretic in Inferno, X) and Democritus (a virtuous pagan in Inferno, IV), see Lucchesi, Valerio, ‘Epicurus and Democritus: The Ciceronian Foundations of Dante's Judgement’, Italian Studies, 42 (1987), pp. 1–19 (pp. 14–19)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁹ Moore, Edward, Studies in Dante, Second series (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), p. 178Google Scholar.

⁴⁰ See Marchesi, Simone ‘“Epicuri de grege porcus”: Ciacco, Epicurus and Isidore of Seville’, Dante Studies, 117 (1999), pp. 117–31Google Scholar. For a development of this thesis, see Corbett, Dante and Epicurus, pp. 27–33. Corbett underlines that Dante, despite setting up this unmistakable parallel, at no point labels Ciacco as an Epicurean: ‘Ciacco is a porcus (he is the personality-type defined by Isidore) but he emphatically is not, for Dante, ‘de grege Epicuri’ (p. 32).

⁴¹ See Marenbon, The Hellenistic Schools, pp. 6–39 and Robert, ‘Épicure et les épicuriens’, pp. 3–46.

⁴² For a survey of four literary fields of influence – the Roman writers, the medieval encyclopaedias, the patristic and popular traditions, and the scholastic treatment – which may have informed Dante's understanding of Epicureanism, see Corbett, Dante and Epicurus, pp. 8–18 (with notes, pp. 33–37). Some of these sources include quite sophisticated accounts of Epicurean ethics. Dante does not seem to have been concerned, however, with the actual content of Epicurus’ ethics. Rather ‘Epicurean’ serves as a more general tag to denote someone who pursues an ethical life but with no thought to the afterlife.

⁴³ In the famous opening chapter ‘A Disquieting Suggestion’ of After Virtue (1970), MacIntyre compares the modern state of philosophy with an imagined future in which, after ‘a series of environmental disasters blamed by the general public on the scientists’, a ‘Know-Nothing’ revolution successfully abolishes scientific knowledge leaving only ‘fragments’ of a system for future generations to revive: ‘bits and pieces of theory […] instruments whose use has been forgotten […] very partial knowledge of each’ (MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 1).

⁴⁴ Wilson, Catherine, Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Wilson, Catherine ‘Epicureanism in early modern philosophy’ in The Cambridge Companion to Epicureanism, ed. by Warren, James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp.266–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Jacques Maritain, in his history of philosophy, similarly highlights the rejection of hylomorphism as the defining characteristic of mechanistic philosophy: ‘mechanists – whether in their doctrine of the human soul they are materialists (Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius, among the ancients, Hobbes in the seventeenth century, etc.) or spiritualists like Descartes – reduce corporeal substance to matter’. Mechanistic philosophy attempts ‘to explain all things mechanically, that is to say as the result of a simple aggregation of material elements effected by local motion’. However, it is clear that – for Maritain at least – this rejection of hylomorphism and the adoption of a narrow mechanistic worldview is not altogether a good thing! See Maritain, Jacques, An Introduction to Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2005), p. 102Google Scholar; p. 21.

⁴⁵ Maritain comments that ‘nothing less than age-old Christendom was singing its last song in Dante’ (Maritain, Jacques, Creative Intuition in art and poetry (New York: Pantheon Books, 1953), p. 383Google Scholar.

⁴⁶ Pope Benedict XV, Encyclical Letter, ‘In Praeclara Summorum’ (Rome, April 30th, 1921), par. 4 and 9.

⁴⁷ For the most recent appraisal of the Dante-Aquinas relationship, and its history in Dante scholarship, see Gilson, Simon A. ‘Dante and Christian Aristotelianism’, in Reviewing Dante's Theology, ed. by Honess, Claire and Treherne, Matthew (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2013), pp. 65–110Google Scholar.

⁴⁸ Marking the Dante sexcentenary in New Blackfriars, J.F. Makepeace exhibits at once the connaturality of Dante's work to an intellectual life informed by catholicism and the concomitant tendency to over-simplify Dante's thought (as, in this case, a simple mouth-piece for the ‘catholic standpoint’). See Makepeace, J.F. ‘The Dante Sexcentenary’, in New Blackfriars (1921), 2, pp. 92–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁹ Pègues, R.P. Thomas, Catechism of the Summa Theologica of Saint Thomas Aquinas, trans. by Whitacre, Ælred OP, (Chorley: Christian Books Today, 2009)Google Scholar. Whitacre's preface is dated 6th December, 1921. Benedict XV's preface to the work, appended to the French and English editions, was given on 5th February, 1919.

⁵⁰ Pègues, p. v.

⁵¹ Pègues, pp. 173–74.

⁵² Pègues, p. 174.