released 11/14/2025

In discussing his monograph The Infinite Beauty of the World (Peter Lang, 2020), Jason Baxter explains that the title refers to Dante Alighieri’s attempt in his Divine Comedy to create “an icon of the world.” Dante includes a panoply of characters and creatures in the Comedia, offering a prismatic view of all of Creation in its glory. In the Paradiso, this Dionysian view of beauty represented in an infinite number of things is married to the Pythagorean and Boethian idea of beauty as harmonic. Baxter also discusses the influence of both the scholarly Dominicans and the humble, spiritual Franciscans on the poet’s religious and aesthetic sensibilities. In what felt to Dante to be an apocalyptic time of faithlessness among Christians, he attempted to weave together in his writing a tapestry of the whole Church, to the glory of God. Baxter’s translations of Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio were published by Angelico Press in 2024 and 2025, respectively.

20 minutes

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