The Decline and Fall of Logos in Western Literature – Part I: The Ascent of the Logos Narrative in Homer, Virgil, and Dante

This paper traces the development of what it terms the "Logos Narrative" — the Western tradition's answer to the questions of human flourishing, virtue, and the proper ordering of the person — across three foundational works of epic literature: Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, and Dante's Divine Comedy. Employing the moral psychology of Saint Thomas Aquinas as its interpretive framework, the paper argues that these texts collectively chart a progressive movement from the insufficiency of purely martial virtue (aretē) in Homer, through Virgil's transitional but ultimately pessimistic vision of pietas ordered toward historical and political ends, to the mature Logos Narrative in Dante, where the proper hierarchical ordering of the appetites — concupiscible, irascible, and intellectual — finds its completion in an orientation toward a transcendent Good. The paper further argues that Virgil's pessimism, epitomized in Aeneas' ascent through the Ivory Gate, is not merely a literary posture but a philosophical position: the inability to sustain hope in a telos that lies beyond history. It is precisely this deficiency that Dante's Comedy corrects, and which the paper proposes as a diagnostic lens for understanding the trajectory of modern thought. The paper is the first in a two-part study; the second will examine how the Logos Narrative was subsequently undermined in modern literature through the estrangement of human reason from any transcendent Logos.