May 22, 2020 | By Hannah Loomis

Where are you from? 

I am originally from Guatemala city, Guatemala. 

Which book did you write on? 

Dante’s Commedia (The Divine Comedy). 

What is the title of your essay? 

“Erosophy: The Doctrines of Love and Wisdom in Dante’s Commedia.” 

What was the essence of your argument? 

I asked, “How does love stimulate Dante’s journey and to what end?” The inquiry led me to discover many things in and beyond Dante’s work. For one, I became convinced that the subject matter of all three of his major works, Vita Nova, Convivio, and Commedia, is one and the same: love, learning, and wisdom. Secondly, it solidified a suspicion I had about how one ought to approach a great work. It turns out that learning requires as much of an emotional engagement as it does an intellectual one. Thirdly, I wanted to understand the role Beatrice plays in Dante’s becoming. She is essentially Dante’s own Christ figure and helps him bridge his Eros, that strong sense of longing and desire, with his Wisdom, that high exalted, divine, object he wishes to attain. The project is a difficult one, and one that will meet with many paradoxes and ambiguities. I ended my essay with one of Dante’s transformations at the end of Purgatorio, at the moment he meets his Beatrice. This is when his intellectual maturity finds a way to coalesce with his passions. This unison, however, needs a lot of explaining and meets many more challenges in Paradiso. My main argument was pointing out that a transformation of the kind described above does indeed take place.

How did your essay connect to the different aspects of the Program throughout your four years? 

My paper found its inception long ago, freshman year, when I wrote on Plato’s Phaedrus and Symposium. The title of that paper was the same as my senior paper, “Erosophy.” It turns out Dante himself, however unknowingly, is a platonist. He shares Plato’s understanding of Love, particularly that illustrated by the famous metaphor of the chariot. Essentially, the idea is all about finding a harmony to the soul, by giving Eros (black horse), Gallantry (white horse), and the intellect (charioteer), their rightful places. This theme has followed me throughout my four years at St. John’s College. It is my belief that the value of an education like this is primarily that of learning what it means to be human and what it means to be free—and, yes, I believe these things are learned. Dante is a liberal artist. He is both a philosopher and a poet. In his work, one finds a way to traverse the manifoldness of human discovery and creation. To me he stands as an epitome, in both word and deed, of what a learner is and looks like. 

What was the writing process like? 

Writing a senior paper, or anything for that matter, requires some preparation. In the case of the senior essay, first you have to commit to an author and a book. Believe it or not, I had a list of about fifteen possible paper topics and nowhere did I have Dante or any of his works. The Commedia has remained my favorite book since I was fourteen, but I was too intimidated by the vastness of the project to pursue writing a senior paper on it; plus I had done so already for my enabling paper. I met with my advisor and looked over my list. After a while, Dante came up, and as I talked passionately about it, it was evident for both he and I that I had to write on his Commedia. And so that is what I did. 

The decision came last summer and with it I started reading Dante’s work. I read his Vita Nova, his Convivio, and re-read the Commedia. I looked up lectures and essays online, commentaries and references, I immersed myself in Dante’s world. My work was later put on hold once the semester started. I resumed late winter break. By then, I had only notes. As I expected, it was all too overwhelming and I was lacking a sense of direction. My first draft was really all my notes clamped together, little canto analysis’ with no real thread. Soon, it became clear that I was lacking an argument. Now came the moment of frustration and stress. I felt lost. I had read so much and written so little. I had three to five different paper topics and the deadline was getting closer and closer. I had to make serious choices. After a couple of days, I sat myself down with my computer and started writing and rewriting. After an hour, I found my topic. Four hours later, I had half a draft. The next day, I had a full draft of eighteen pages. I send it to my advisor and got it back with a lot more to work on. This was about a week and a half before the deadline. I wrote again and produced a second draft. As the ideas and the argument became clearer, it was easier to write. I had to butcher many flourishes and points of interest that were simply irrelevant. That was hard. Finally, I had a decent third draft. I spent the next days before the deadline working on it. These were long days and nights. I ended up with 26 pages after formatting the entire thing. Something felt very right about that number. 

What is the most important lesson you’ve learned during your time at St. John’s? 

There are many things I learned during my time at St. John’s College, but I will focus on what I consider the three most important lessons, all related to each other: 1.) spiritual change always comes from within; 2.) while working on things don’t be afraid of letting the things work on you; 3.) know thyself. 

When I first came to St. John’s, I thought moving to a different location with different people would help me change the things that were haunting me. I was wrong. Soon, I noticed that the problems were in me and no amount of external diversions would help me heal. These diversions came to be temporary fixes, but sooner or later I had to face myself. 

This brings me to the second lesson. When reading great books, one must allow oneself to be transformed by the reading. I believe the same applies to every experience we have. This is often difficult if you don’t already have some kind of an attachment to the subject in hand. this is the paradox: how do you get someone to read Plato if they don’t value it, and if for them to value Plato they need to read it first? My advice: find something, somewhere, however dim, that you find interesting or appealing, and see where that may take you; try. It is easier said than done, but I for one had that experience with math before coming to St. John’s. I said I hated it, and now, thanks to Euclid, I have come to love it. My regret is failing to learn the mechanics of algebra, calculus, and trigonometry. So, we must allow ourselves to be touched by these great books, whether it is Kant or Wordsworth, Hegel or Mozart, Hume, Smith, Leibnitz, Newton, or Davinci. This is also one of the major lessons I came to while reading and writing on Dante. We must allow ourselves to be vulnerable, we must allow ourselves to be moved by the work itself, otherwise we will miss its beauty and consequently and important part of its truths.