Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 268 - To Hell and Back - Dante Alighieri.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, To Hell and Back, Dante Arrigieri. You never forget your first love, and that goes for intellectual loves too. Mine was Dante Arrigieri, whose marvelous poem The Divine Comedy entranced me so much when I was about 19 years old that it got me into the study of medieval intellectual culture. From there I got curious about medieval philosophy, in both Latin Christendom and the Islamic world, and the rest is history, or at least history of philosophy. It was an unusual way to get into the philosophy business, but I'm confident that Dante himself would have approved. He made a concerted effort to spread philosophical knowledge to as wide a readership as possible, not by producing a podcast, which given the technical limitations of his age is excusable, but by writing in Italian. Dante himself was an outsider to the world of the so-called clerk or cleric. He did however possess enough Latin and sufficient knowledge of scholasticism to engage with its teaching in a vernacular language, not least in The Divine Comedy. philosophy was only Dante's second love though. His first love was Beatrice. The poems she inspired are gathered in Dante's first major work, La vita nuova, or The New Life, written in 1292, two years after Beatrice's tragic early death. La vita nuova also offers a running commentary on the poems, marked by an obsession with numerical structure that will stay with Dante throughout his career. He associates Beatrice with the number 9, and later constructs his comedy in light of numerological structures. For example, it has a total of 100 chapters or cantos with lengths that are sometimes symmetrically arranged. Dante's fusion of the personal with the poetic is also common to both La vita nuova and the later comedy, as is his well-justified confidence in his own genius. That confidence is on full display in the rather pedantic commentary he devotes to his own poems in La vita nuova. He would go on to use the technique again in the convivio, or banquet. It is here in the convivio that Dante reveals how he fell in love all over again with the new object of his affections being lady philosophy. Already in La vita nuova, Dante mentions a gracious lady, Dona Gentile, who caught his eye after Beatrice's death. There, this new lady seemed to be a distraction from Dante's pure and faithful love for the departed Beatrice. In the convivio, Dante again suggests that there has been a struggle for his affections, with his new enthusiasm for philosophical learning, pushing all other considerations from his mind. Many scholars have seen this as a passing phase, with Dante later repudiating philosophy in favor of a higher pursuit, a poetical theology personified yet again by Beatrice. It is she who sends the ancient poet Virgil to guide Dante through hell in Inferno, the first of the three canticles of the comedy, and then appears in person to show Dante through the spheres of the heavens in Paradiso. We'll return later to the question of whether Dante came to regret his flirtation with philosophy, but first let's help ourselves to some of the morsels served at Dante's convivio. You can hardly miss its philosophical mission, given that he starts the work by quoting the famous beginning of Aristotle's metaphysics, By Nature All Humans Desire to Know. You'll usually see this translated as All Men Desire to Know, but Dante most definitely has women in mind. They form a significant section of his intended audience, since they are shut out of the learned discourse conducted in Latin by the schoolmen. Yet women and others unversed in Latin share the universal human appetite for knowledge. Dante wants to help them to satisfy that hunger. He compares himself to someone providing crumbs of bread fallen from the table of the wise. Hence his decision to write the poems and commentary of the convivio in Italian, something he says he has done out of compassion for a relatively uneducated audience. This is something Dante feels he must defend, and for good reason. Just consider a story preserved in the 13th century Italian collection called the Novellino, in which a vernacular author dreams that the muses appear to him and accuse him of prostituting himself. Anticipating such concerns, Dante goes on at some length justifying his use of Italian in the convivio. Here he is venturing into territory explored in another work, On the Eloquence of the Vernacular, which Dante chose to write in Latin. There he goes so far as to praise vernacular language as being in some respects better than Latin. Effectively, Latin has become an artificial language, in fact more a grammar than a real natural language like Italian. Latin has become universal and unchanging, a kind of antidote to the multiplying of human languages after the Tower of Babel. But Dante prefers his mother tongue, or rather a loftier version of it, appropriate to such exalted topics as human virtue. This would be a sort of idealized discourse to be used by all Italians, with a purity that raises it above their local dialects. Ironically, in the convivio which is actually in Italian, Dante is less confident of the superiority of the vernacular. He even argues that if he had written a Latin explanation for his Italian poems, then the commentary would be more noble than the poems they comment upon, whereas in fact the commentary should serve the text it expounds. Later on, he does mention the idea that language should match the theme at hand, clearly a fundamental assumption of his literary aesthetics, but in this case he explains to the reader that his writing is deliberately harsh because of the seriousness of his philosophical theme. That theme is, indeed, the exalted topic of virtue. Unfortunately, the convivio is unfinished, it was probably supposed to go through the virtues one by one, but we really only have a discussion of virtue in general. He has good reasons for concentrating on this ethical topic. Traditionally, Aristotelians had taken metaphysics to be chief among the human sciences. For Dante, this place is instead assumed by ethics. For one thing, ethics directs us to pursue the other sciences by teaching us that we ought to pursue rational perfection. This, of course, is a fundamental teaching of Aristotle's ethics. For another thing, even in the grip of his philosophical enthusiasm, Dante is convinced that reason can take us only so far. We cannot come to know God in this life by engaging in philosophical theory. That is the knowledge that would constitute perfect happiness reached through contemplation. Since such ultimate bliss is unattainable for now, we have to make do with the lesser practical happiness attained through ethical virtue. If this sounds familiar, it should. Dante is reiterating the two-level theory of happiness we found in Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas. But he goes further by making ethics completely central to the sort of philosophy possible for human reason. This goes hand in hand with Dante's decision to speak to an unlearned Italianate audience. The rarified truths of contemplative theoretical philosophy are beyond our earthly reach. So if philosophy here and now is mostly about being ethically virtuous, and if we are all potentially virtuous, then why not think that philosophy is for everyone? Yet Dante also gives voice to elitism of a different sort. Those who refuse to be guided by reason are bound to remain vicious and are no better than animals. His words are not directed to such reprobates. Given Dante's fascination with virtue and vice, with sorting the pure wheat from the rotten chaff, what could be a more natural project for him than a vast poem in the vernacular language describing the fates of those who have been good and evil in this life? That is, of course, what we get in The Divine Comedy, a work more deserving of a podcast series of its own than the brief coverage I'm going to give it here. As you probably know, in the comedy Dante depicts himself as a pilgrim traveling through the three realms of the afterlife, Hell, Purgatory, and the Heavenly Paradise. We've seen this sort of device before, with Jean de Meun in his Romance of the Rose and Marguerite Poet in her Mirror of Simple Souls, both adopting the dual roles of author and protagonist. Dante exploits the resulting ironic distance, as when he has a character in Paradise predict what is in store for Dante the pilgrim, naming events that have already befallen Dante the author by the time he is writing his poem. My favorite example of this sort of thing comes in Inferno 15. Here, Dante the pilgrim expresses shock upon finding his mentor, Brunetto Latini, being eternally punished for sodomy, the decision to put him there having, of course, been taken by Dante the author. It's not the only case in which Dante the pilgrim feels sympathy for those damned by God. He even swoons in a faint out of pity for the star-crossed lovers Paolo and Francesca. What Dante the author thinks, or wants us to think, about such sympathetic sinners is a difficult question. For us, the most relevant such case comes when Dante visits Limbo, the first circle of Hell, which is reserved for virtuous people who were pagans or unbaptized. Their plight is made more vivid by the fact that Dante's guide at this stage is Virgil, himself a pagan and thus resident in Limbo when he is not taking Italian poets on a tour of the afterlife. While the denizens of Limbo are spared the horrific punishments the pilgrim will see later in Hell, like being turned into bleeding trees, having their bodies torn asunder or being embedded in ice, the virtuous non-Christians do suffer from their unfulfilled longing for God. This, of course, fits perfectly with the convivio. The perfect happiness envisioned there is forever forbidden to the unbaptized. The role Call of Disappointed Spirits in Limbo reads like an excerpt from the episode list of this podcast series. Dante mentions the pagans Socrates, Plato, Democritus, Diogenes, Empedocles, Zeno, Thales, Anaxagoras, Heraclitus, Seneca, Ptolemy, Hippocrates, and Galen, as well as two Muslim thinkers Avicenna and Averroes. Pride of place is, however, given to the man described simply as the master of those who know, who is, of course, Aristotle. Despite this praise, the knowledge attained by Aristotle and the rest was insufficient. Dante speaks of This may seem rather unfair. How can it be just for God to punish pagans for not embracing Christ when they lived centuries before Christ was even born? Dante is sensitive to the problem. In Paradiso, he considers the fate of the man born on the banks of the Indus River who has no way of knowing about Christianity. It's a problem that will seem yet more urgent in coming centuries when Europeans grapple with the discovery of previously uncontacted peoples in the New World. The scene in Limbo is not the only philosophical gathering in the Divine Comedy. Much later, as Dante is ascending through the celestial spheres on his tour of paradise, he reaches the Circle of the Sun. This is the section of the poem most frequently discussed by historians of philosophy, in part because Dante makes Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas the two chief spokesmen of this circle. Dante puts a speech of praise for St. Francis into the mouth of the Dominican theologian Aquinas, while the Franciscan Bonaventure speaks of the virtues of St. Dominic. The rivalry between the orders on earth is replaced by harmony and mutual admiration here in paradise. Both Aquinas and Bonaventure are accompanied by other spirits who appear as dancing lights in two rings. They include such familiar medieval figures as Anselm, Peter Lombard, Gracian, and Hugh of St. Victor. But one name has raised the eyebrows of many a reader, CJ of Brabant. Dante has Aquinas introduce him with the words, What is this notorious so-called Avarowist doing in paradise, and why is it Aquinas of all people who is made to present him to Dante? It clearly fits with the broader harmonizing theme of the Circle of the Sun. Here, whether we are Dominicans or Franciscans, moderate or radical followers of Aristotle, we can all finally get along. Aquinas's heavenly reconciliation with CJ is matched by Bonaventure's introduction of Joachim of Fiore, a controversial 12th century thinker who commented on the book of Apocalypse and looked ahead to the coming of the Antichrist. In real life, he was powerfully criticized by Bonaventure just as CJ was attacked by Aquinas. Many have suspected though that Dante's choice to include CJ may be more than an instance of heavenly reconciliation. Mightn't it be a sign of his deeper intellectual sympathies? Was Dante himself attracted by the radical teachings of the Avarowists? It's certainly plausible that he knew about their ideas. Guido Cavalcanti, Dante's friend and fellow exponent of the sweet new style in poetry, could have been a conduit for radical ideas from Paris. On the one hand, we've already seen that in both the Convivio and the Divine Comedy, Dante places limits on what pure reason can achieve. He sounds more like Aquinas than like Boethius of Dacia when he emphasizes that perfect happiness is achieved only through a contemplation of God that is impossible in this life. On the other hand, the place of honor given in paradise to CJ and his controversial demonstrated truths suggest that Dante did think there is a place for pure rational inquiry outside of theology. On both counts, Dante's attitude in the Convivio seems to be retained in the Divine Comedy. Reason can tell us a lot, but it can't tell us everything or make us completely happy. An influential French scholar of medieval philosophy, Etienne Gilsan, wrote that CJ appears in Paradise to, "...symbolize the independence of a definite portion of the temporal order, that portion which we call philosophy." For Gilsan, Dante's choice has to do only with the role of reason in general, not with specific Averroist teaching. Yet there are signs that Dante may have flirted with at least one notorious teaching associated with the so-called Averroists, the unity of the intellect. In the Convivio, Dante says quite clearly that each individual human has his or her own potential intellect which he understands as a power for receiving understanding through an illumination from God. And in Purgatorio, he has the ancient poet Statius tell Dante the Pilgrim that Averroes's theory, according to which there is only one potential intellect for all of humankind, is in error. But Statius also admits that it was an easy mistake for Averroes to fall into and refers to the great Muslim commentator as, "...one wiser than you are." Quite a contrast to the invective aimed at Averroes and his theory by Aquinas and others. But the plot doesn't really thicken until we turn to Dante's treatise on political rule, On Monarchy. Written at about the same time Dante was working on The Divine Comedy, this is a defense of the idea of a unified and universal political rule. As he elaborates on this idea, Dante explains that the fulfillment of intellectual potential is something the whole human race must do together. He speaks as if it is a single power that is being exercised not individually, but collectively. Given his rejection of Averroes's theory in the comedy, most interpreters have taken this to be merely a loose way of speaking. But, friend of the podcast, John Marronbon, has argued that for Dante, rational argument left to its own devices would confirm that Averroes was right. Rational argument would suggest that since there is no bodily organ for intellect of thought, such thought cannot belong to one individual at a time, it is universal and shared by all. There are sound theological reasons to reject the idea though. In light of these concerns, Averroes's theory of the single shared human mind must in the end be abandoned, even if it makes sense within the confines of the Aristotelian system. This is the philosophical issue that seems most telling when it comes to determining Dante's attitude towards Averroism, but it is far from the only philosophical issue explored in the comedy. There is for instance a discussion of free will in Purgatorio which affirms that the heavenly bodies do have influence on human affairs, but do not constrain our freedom. Dante also has much to say about the heavens in Paradiso, which only stands to reason. The celestial realm after all serves as the setting of this final part of the poem. While visiting the sphere of the moon, Dante is treated to a discussion of Plato's idea that souls go to be with the stars after the death of the earthly body. Echoing 12th century interpreters who sought to put the most favorable possible interpretation of Plato's Timaeus, Dante has Beatrice suggest that Plato's words are not literally true, but may be valid in an allegorical sense. Elsewhere in Paradiso, Beatrice adds some further thoughts on free will, brings the pilgrim to the so-called Empyrean, an immaterial realm beyond the heavens where blessed souls dwell, and even describes a kind of scientific experiment involving candles and mirrors while refuting the pilgrims idea that spots on the moon are caused by variations in density. Such disquisitions are a characteristic feature of this part of the poem. They make Paradiso a rich source for Dante's philosophical ideas, even if most readers seem to prefer reading about the sadistic tortures meted out to the damned in Inferno. The Paradiso also has quite a bit to say about political philosophy. For this topic though, the essential reading is Dante's aforementioned treatise entitled On Monarchy. We'll look at it next time as we consider ideas about political authority in the early 14th century. I'll be damned if you shouldn't join me again for that, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.