Why Dante Matters by John Took

Author:John Took
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472951045
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

problems of perspective and a civic ontology

What, then, are we to say about the Convivio – about the nothing if not magnanimous or ‘large-souled’ Convivio – in the round? Something along these lines: that, for all its magnanimity – its fervent commitment, that is to say, to the well-being of the next man – the Convivio is at its most eloquent when it comes to the as yet unresolved structure of Dante’s own being, this in turn, and indeed in the very moment of its conception, making for its inevitable incompletion, for its foundering upon a tension operative from out of the depths.

Taking first, then, this latter aspect of the text, we may say this, that, if on the one hand the Convivio bears witness in something approaching its pure form to Dante’s faith in philosophy precisely as such – as but the love of wisdom – as the way of man’s properly human happiness, then his even so, and indeed in one and the same moment, is a characteristic toing and froing between the immanent and the transcendent poles of his inspiration, between the kind of happiness proper to man in consequence of his status as a creature of free moral and intellectual determination and the kind accruing to him by way of a gracious assimilation of self to the other and greater than self. True, both at the beginning and at the end of his career as a poet and philosopher, both in the Vita nova and in the Commedia as the expression of his respectively youthful and seasoned spirituality, there is a coalescence of these things within the economy of the whole, grace and its power to transfiguration entering into nature and its power to significant self-determination as but its quickening, as that whereby it is confirmed and perfected in its proper operation. But here in the Convivio they subsist to the point of threatening the unity, the consistency and, again, the completability of the text. On the one hand, then, we have the ecstatic moment represented by Books II and III, ‘ecstatic’ in the sense of – the busy lives of his chosen readership notwithstanding – Dante’s launching upon an account of philosophy as but a participation in the life and light of the Godhead, as that whereby those enamoured of wisdom are fashioned afresh in the likeness of their maker; so, for example – and more than ever rapt in point both of conception and of expression – these lines on the sweet ‘demonstrations’ and ‘persuasions’ of Wisdom (her eyes and her smile respectively) as but the vesture and outshining of her inner and abiding light, and, as far as the beholder is concerned, of these things as but the principle of his or her proper perfection:

Dice adunque lo testo “che ne la faccia di costei appariscono cose che mostrano de’ piaceri di Paradiso”; e distingue lo loco dove ciò appare, cioè ne li occhi e ne lo riso. E qui si conviene sapere che

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