BUSNELLI, GIOVANNI. - Jesuit writer, born at Cassina Ferrara (Milan) on 16 March 1866, died in Rome on 31 March 1944. Having completed his sacred studies at the seminary of Milan and taken a degree in letters and philosophy at the University of Padua, he went to Rome to join the writers of La Civiltà Cattolica. He distinguished himself through accurate and learned theological, philosophical, theosophical, literary, and critical publications. He was particularly noted as a Dante scholar and was a member of the Academies of Arcadia and of S. Tommaso.
Among his writings on Dante, in addition to his contributions to the Giornale dantesco and Studi danteschi, may be mentioned: The Symbol of Dante’s Three Beasts (Rome, 1909), Nicomachean Joy and the Moral Ordering of Dante’s Inferno (Bologna, 1907), Dante’s Virgil and the Great Old Man of Crete (Rome, 1919), The Moral Ordering of Dante’s Purgatory (ibid., 1908), Cosmogony and Anthropogenesis according to Dante Alighieri and His Sources (ibid., 1922), The Origin of the Rational Soul according to Dante and Alberto M. (ibid., 1929), The Concept and Ordering of Dante’s Paradise (Città di Castello, 1911), and the two volumes of the monumental commentary on the Convivio entrusted to him by the Società dantesca italiana (Florence, 1934–37). He wrote extensively on Manzoni; worthy of mention is The Conversion of Alessandro Manzoni from His Correspondence (Rome, 1913). Among his noteworthy philosophical writings are The Foundations of Contemporary Idealism Examined (ibid., 1926), The Cartesian Method and the Aristotelian Method (Milan, 1937), Philosophy and Pedagogy (Rome, 1932), The Independence and Novelty of Art and Modern Idealism (ibid., 1933), and the four volumes of the Manual of Theosophy (ibid., 1911, 1915, 1932).