Reading Dante by Giuseppe Mazzotta

Author:Giuseppe Mazzotta
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2014-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

Purgatorio 18–22

Dante has finished one stage in his movement toward self-knowledge and knowledge of the world, and in Canto 18, we’re moving into a different moral realm, toward what Dante and medieval theorists of vices call acedia. Acedia is a Latin term, which in English we can describe as a sort of despondency, indecisiveness, sluggishness, or sloth. In a sense it’s a parody or inversion of contemplation, tied to a sense of loss of the outside world. It describes the condition of the mind that has found itself indifferent to objects of desire, which have lost their consistency, their attractiveness, their luster. It’s the so-called noonday devil, the temptation that the monks experienced in their cloisters when they no longer found the idea of turning their minds toward the divine appealing in that moment. It’s the indifference to anything outside of oneself and indicates an equally intellectual and dreamy state of mind.

Canto 18 is the most intellectual canto in Purgatorio. Dante faces theoretical issues that flow out of the problems that we saw in Canto 17 with an imagination that is somehow vagabond. It breaks out of any particular confines and dislodges us, taking the ground out of our own certainties about the way we see the world. Dante has the same problem in Canto 18, which begins with a question that he asks of Virgil regarding the theory of love proposed in Canto 17: “Master, my sight is so quickened in your light that I discern clearly all that your discourse distinguishes or declares; wherefore, dear and gentle father, I pray that you expound love to me, to which you reduce every good action and its opposite.”1 In other words, what you told me before is not enough. So Virgil explains the very philosophical theory of perceptions. Your perception takes from outward reality an impression and unfolds it within you, so it makes the mind turn to it. Love is simply the unfolding of one such perception.

He goes on to criticize the belief that all love is inherently good. He’s attacking the view of the Epicureans, who believe that every pleasure, without any particular judgment attached to the object of pleasure, is praiseworthy. Instead, according to Dante’s mouthpiece, Virgil, we have to exercise some moral judgment. We have to create distinctions. We have to discriminate between good and bad love, “because perhaps its matter appears always to be good: but not every imprint is good, although the wax be good.”2 I would go so far as to say that when Dante says this through Virgil, he’s really thinking of his friend Guido Cavalcanti and Guido’s Epicurean leanings. Cavalcanti’s Epicurean ethics, the idea that pleasure is the only object worthy of any pursuit, is so hedonistic that Dante has to renounce it.

Dante responds confusedly: “Your discourse and my understanding which has followed it . . . have revealed love to me; but that has made me more full of doubt; for if love is offered to us from without, and if the soul walks with no other foot, it has no merit whether it go straight or crooked.

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