One of the main and interesting discoveries in Dante’s Comedy is how essential the faculty of structure is in his storytelling, cosmology, theology, philosophy and in the nature of thinking in itself. This at times feels very much like an adoption and tribute to the basic approach of Aristotle – that thinking needs to contain several different elements in a well balanced composition adapted to the subject matter one is thinking about. But Dante is inserting structure deliberately at several emotional and close to ecstatic moments in the Comedy as a reminder of the necessity of this – to achieve clear and profound insights.
After reading about 60-70 cantos, this rhythm and pattern becomes well established as a habit and underlines a basic claim: that reason should never be excluded from an overall assessment of a topic, concept, emotion or even spiritual experience. One of his explicit statements on this is in Canto 18 of Purgatory, on the Terrace of the Slothful:
you have the innate faculty of reason,
which should defend the threshold of consent.
As a tool and guiding principle in exploring the intellectual and spiritual realms – this is at times a surprising discovery. But it does unite the whole of experience, in a harmony. It provides a foundation from which to explore the world. And perhaps that partly also laid the groundwork too, for the earliest beginnings – of the new and at the time slowly emerging, Great Florentine Renaissance.