A few years back I reviewed for Commonweal a fine collection of essays on Dante Alighieri. One of the essays in Dante's Commedia: Theology as Poetry spoke of Dante's debt to Neoplatonic metaphysics and said:

This is an ontology of the "image" or "icon," in which the sensible cosmos is viewed as a likeness of the intelligible reality that is its source.

Yesterday's New York Times made an intriguing reference to Dante's "ontology" – though a different Dante, in a different city, not Florence, but the Big Apple. The Times reports:

Dante’s parents, the mayor and his wife, Chirlane McCray, came out on Saturday to watch some of the preliminary rounds of the tournament, held at Stuyvesant High School by the New York State Debate Coaches Association.

The issue was environmental preservation, and Dante and his debate partner prevailed with an appeal to – ontology! The report continues:

Dante and Samuel argued that people should stop viewing the ocean as only a resource to be exploited. To make their case, they leaned heavily on ontology, a branch of metaphysics, as high schoolers will do. Though their argument was far too deep to be encapsulated in a newspaper article, suffice it to say that the judges, unlike some parents, followed it just fine.

Now, though readers of the Times may find themselves befuddled by such esoteric metaphysics, it should be well within the comfort zone of dotCommonwealers. So how about signing Dante up to comment on the Pope's forthcoming Encyclical on the Environment? An ontological mindset may move us beyond the predictable polarizations it's bound to produce.