5 Inferno 9–11
CHAPTER 5
Inferno 9–11
Now Dante and Virgil are moving, and we with them, away from the area of incontinence and toward the gates of the city of Dis, where the pilgrim experiences a serious impediment, an impasse. He cannot go any farther. The guidance of Virgil fails him, and we are going to examine why it fails him along with the problem that the pilgrim will have to solve.
Once he is within the city of Dis in Canto 9, the first sinners he meets are the heretics, heresiarchs, chief among whom is Epicurus, the Epicureans, and already it is possible to establish a link between the city and Epicurean philosophers. To clarify this connection, one should be aware that Dante acknowledges, in a philosophical text that he wrote called the Convivio, three schools of philosophy: the academics or Aristotelians, the Stoics, and the Epicureans. In Inferno he examines who these Epicureans are, and for him they appear as those who are guilty of a form of intellectual pride, since heresy is a question of intellect and not of will. They deny the immortality of the soul, but in a certain sense it’s still a problem to figure out why Dante should think of them as sinners at all. In antiquity the Epicureans were viewed as simply one more school of philosophical opinion, so why should they be punished? Dante’s answer is that they should be punished for their intellect, although the logic of Dante’s own idea of sinfulness is that the will has to be involved. The will is at the center of the habit to sin.
Let us return, though, to the crisis of Canto 9 as Dante is progressing in this journey. He reaches the gate of Dis, and three Furies, the three Erinyes of Greek mythology—Alecto, Tisiphone, and Megaera—appear and stop him. They tell him that he cannot go into the city, which is described as very similar to a medieval city. (In fact, it’s built near a kind of swamp for reasons that have nothing to do with ecology but with the medieval idea that the land was always more malleable near swamps and had an easy supply of water.) At any rate, the three Furies call on Medusa, who doesn’t come, but they threaten the pilgrim with the sight of Medusa all the same. They make a threat of petrifaction, of course, because according to the myth, if you gaze at the face of Medusa, you turn to stone. Medusa was a great virginal beauty, a vestal in the temple of Neptune, but then Neptune violated her, and Minerva took revenge on her by metamorphosing her into this ugly, repulsive figure with her hair turned into snakes. And yet she has a magic power to turn all onlookers into stone. The drama here involves the pilgrim directly; this threat is aimed at him. Virgil intervenes: “Turn your back and keep your eyes shut; for should the Gorgon”—Medusa—“show herself and you see her, there would be no returning above.”1 The guide offers his guidance, but then a fundamental shift occurs.
Dante continues: “Thus said the master, and he himself turned me round and, not trusting to my hands, covered my face with his own hands as well.” Then the poet interrupts the narrative and talks to us as a poet. This is the first address to the reader. That is to say, this is no longer part of the action, no longer the story of the pilgrim, but the poet who is sitting in his study. He says, “O you who have sound understanding, mark the doctrine that is hidden under the veil of the strange verses!”2 The poet, assuming authority, turns to us readers, and in a sense, he needs readers so that his authority can be constituted, and he warns us. He admonishes us to engage in what clearly appears as an allegorical operation. We have to know how to read underneath the veil of language, there’s something hidden underneath this. So, what is the allegory about?
To better lift the veil, we return to the myth of Medusa. In another part of that tale, Medusa is conquered. She is defeated by the poet Perseus, who rides upon Pegasus, the winged horse of poetry. Perseus uses the mirrored shield Minerva has given him, and by not looking at Medusa directly but at a reflected image in this shield, he manages to see her and slay her. Within the Ovidian narrative, this is clearly a means to evoke for us the need for a mediated vision. Only through the mediation of the shield can Perseus be victorious and take flight on the back of Pegasus. For us, the shield of Minerva is the text, because at this point there is a direct divergence between what the pilgrim is enjoined to do and what we as readers are asked to do. Virgil tells him to shut his eyes, and not trusting the pilgrim, who must have been awed by this situation, Virgil covers the pilgrim’s eyes for him. In turn, the poet addresses us and tells us to open our eyes. We can do this because we have the shield of Minerva, this textual mediation that will allow us to escape the direct threat of Medusa. After this command is issued, Mercury, who is the messenger, the figure of the interpreter, comes and manages to make a breach in the wall of the city so that the pilgrim and the guide can continue their descent. But we are still left wondering what this allegory really is.
Let me say a few things about the technique of allegory. Whenever you read the Divine Comedy, many scholars will tell you that the text is a vision, which it is, and that it’s allegorical, which at times it is, and this allegory is supposed to explain everything that the pilgrim finds while lost in the woods. They’re not just woods, though; they are also said to be a state of sin, and there he meets three beasts that stand for pride, and wrath, and whatnot. But the significance of that initial landscape, as you may recall, is not all that clear, and that’s part of the problem. That’s what I call the land of unlikeness, as John Freccero called it, within which the pilgrim will find himself. There is a marked inability to join together signs and their significations, an awareness that there are no signs so self-transparent as to be understood or decoded in a particular way. What is this idea of allegory? Dante is clearly telling us that it is an allegory at work: “You readers, who have good understanding and healthy minds, open your eyes and look beneath the veil of the strange verse.” Why is it strange? What’s going on here?
What is allegory, first of all? Allegory means “to speak otherwise.” It’s a figure related to, but not quite the same as, the enigmas found in rhetorical primers from medieval and classical times: enigmas, irony, when you say one thing and you mean another. But to define allegory in this way is to say very little because Dante has been very thoughtful. He has probed this issue very deeply in a couple of his works: in the letter to Cangrande that he sends as an introduction to the first ten cantos of Paradiso, Cangrande being the lord of Verona where Dante had lived for a while, and also in the Convivio, where he explores the idea of how one can arrive at meaning. He has been saying to himself: “I have a statement. How can I go on drawing a particular significance, or more than one significance, out of a statement?”
Dante ultimately distinguishes two types of allegory in answer to this question. One is the allegory of poets, the other the allegory of theologians. How does he distinguish them? The allegory of poets is an allegory that, in the literal sense, is a fable, a fiction. For example, Dante refers to Orpheus, who moved stones with the power of his language. This story really means that the power of the voice of the poet manages to edify cities. Orpheus also tamed lions with the power of his words. What that means is that whatever ferociousness we have inside us can partly be tamed by music, song, poetry, and so forth. That’s an allegory of poets.
An allegory of theologians is completely different. The example that Dante gives sends us to the biblical story of Exodus. This is the story where the Jews escape the bondage of Egypt, go through the desert, and reach the Promised Land. According to Dante, this happened historically, it’s true. This is not a fiction. The Red Sea did open up, and the Jews could pass through the Red Sea that way. In the allegory of theologians, the literal level must be historical. It must be an event. This is the distinction.
Within the allegory of theologians, they distinguish four levels of exegesis, a term that means interpretation. Four levels: the literal we have covered. Then there is the allegorical or figurative. An allegory tells you what to do, it teaches you. It has an ethics involved. The third level is the tropological, telling you what the story means in terms of your whole life, not just an action in a particular case. Finally, there is the anagogical or eschatological level, wherein the last spiritual realities are historically figured through the story of the Jews crossing the wilderness and reaching Jerusalem, which means having a kind of spiritual conversion. It means that this is really the way that life ought to go. You go from sin to glory or the peace of the city, and then anagogically, this is the story of the soul. It prefigures what the soul ought to be. In the case of the allegory of poets, you instead only have two levels, the literal and the moral.
There are a lot of difficulties with this way of distinguishing between the two types of allegory because even if the allegory of theologians refers to events, it’s still words that we are reading. As a result, there is a way in which Dante seems to dodge the whole issue of how one can distinguish between the two modes. He will say that the true difference is in how you take the literal sense. You may, as an act of faith, take the literal sense of the Bible as the word of God, and then you are reading it theologically. But if you decide instead to say that the Bible is actually a collection of extraordinary poetic stories, then you are reading it according to the allegory of poets.
How does Dante circumvent this issue? By saying that his story may well be taken as an allegory of poets, but it’s also an allegory of theologians because the literal sense is encapsulated in the “I” of the text. The historical sense is in Dante himself. “I” am the historical cipher moving through these experiences, and therefore, it is my life to which they will give a particular sense. I am the history that will give a particular truth-value to the poetic fables I relate.
Still, at this point we have only taken care of one little problem here, very external to the story, the allegory of poets or the allegory of theologians. It is time to decide what is really going on here, how we are to understand this threat of petrification. The fact is that Dante had written in his youth a number of poems for a so-called stone lady, donna petra in the Italian. They describe a love that was unrequited, but the passion for this woman was such that Dante felt that his intellect would be petrified by it. It’s a statement of despair, a sense that death is going to take over and he is going to be paralyzed in his will, petrified. This is what I think is happening here as well. Dante is engaged in retrospection to an experience of his past, and that experience of his past is now ahead of him threatening him once again. What can he do? He has to cleanse himself, and he has to move beyond it.
To better explain this concept and to prepare us all to move beyond the wall and into Canto 10, I will turn to a little scene from The Confessions of Augustine, a book that Dante knew very well. Dante quotes it at very strategic places, so there’s no issue of bringing it in gratuitously to explain this passage. Forgive the reversal, but it could even be viewed as a gloss on what Dante will write next.
The Confessions is an intellectual autobiography, the story of a young man who is fascinated by various schools of philosophy. He’s a Manichean, and then he turns into a Neoplatonist, very flattered by the skeptical, rhetorical mode. He’s a professor of rhetoric, and he has a rhetorical way of dealing with values and the world around him. Augustine also reflects a great deal about his love of shows, his love of theater, and his critique of the theater. He asks how to explain the fact that there may be some well-meaning young man who sees the maid in distress on stage and jumps into the scene to free her. He asks what it means to be a spectator. These are some of his primary concerns.
But let us turn to a specific little scene in the text involving a friend of his, Alypius, who is a Greek intellectual in the best sense of the word, a man who believes in intellectual self-mastery, a young man who witnesses Augustine’s own experiences. In narratives you always have a Sancho to accompany Don Quixote; there’s always the Other, more or less skeptical, who gives authenticity and makes claims for the truth-value of what the narrator or the protagonist experiences. In this case, the Sancho figure is Alypius, who grew up with Augustine and who is about to meet back up with his friend.
Augustine goes to Rome, where Alypius will rejoin him, and from there they will go to Milan. When in Rome, the first thing that Alypius wants to do is to go and watch the games played at the amphitheater at the Colosseum, but the games are horrifying to Augustine. He asks, “How can an intellectual such as you want to go to games where actual human beings are being thrown, for the delight of the crowds, to beasts?” Alypius, of course, tries to justify himself: “I will go but because I’m an intellectual, I promise that at the crucial moment when the sign is given for the animal to devour the human being lying there I will not watch. I’m going to turn my eyes away and I will shut my eyes.” But what actually happens?
A scholar of romance philology by the name of Eric Auerbach wrote a book called Mimesis, in which he reflects on this scene in Augustine, though he doesn’t connect it with Dante. Auerbach says that this story marks the end of Hellenic rationalism. With that in mind, let’s consider the story itself before seeing how it applies to Dante:
[Alypius] had gone before me to Rome to study law, and there he was carried away incredibly with an incredible eagerness after the shows of gladiators. For being utterly adverse to and detesting such spectacles, he was one day by chance met by diverse of his acquaintances and fellow students coming from dinner, and they with a familiar violence, haled him, vehemently refusing and resisting, into the Amphitheatre, during these cruel and deadly shows, he thus protesting, “Though you hale my body to that place, and there set me, can you force me also to turn my mind or my eyes to those shows? I shall then be absent while present, and so shall overcome both you and them.” They, hearing this, led him on nevertheless, desirous perchance to try that very thing, whether he could do as he said. When they were come thither, and had taken their places as they could, the whole place kindled with that savage pastime. But he, closing the passages of his eyes, forbade his mind to range abroad after such evils; and would he had stopped his ears also! For in the fight, when one fell, a mighty cry of the whole people striking him strongly, overcome by curiosity, and as if prepared to despise and be superior to it whatsoever it were, even when seen, he opened his eyes, and was stricken with a deeper wound in his soul than the other, whom he desired to behold, was in his body; and he fell more miserably than he upon whose fall that mighty noise was raised, which entered through his ears, and unlocked his eyes, to make way for the striking and beating down of a soul, bold rather than resolute, and the weaker in that it had presumed on itself, which ought to have relied on Thee. For so soon as he saw that blood, he therewith drunk down savageness; nor turned away, but fixed his eye, drinking in frenzy, unawares, and was delighted with that guilty fight and intoxicated with the bloody pastime. Nor was he now the man he came, but one of the throng he came unto, yea, a true associate of theirs that brought him thither. Why say more? He beheld, shouted, kindled, carried thence with him, the madness which should goad him to return not only with them who first drew him thither, but also before them, yea and to draw in others. Yet, thence didst Thou with a most strong and most merciful hand pluck him, and taught him to have confidence not in himself but in Thee.3
So, that’s the story, but what does it mean? In The Confessions, Augustine is very clear about its meaning: the failure of the mind to master its own will. It’s about that crisis. It’s about the weakness of the will to begin with, but it’s also about pride: the belief that one can rise above the contingency of temptations and be in control of oneself. Yet, it’s also a story of a temptation that Alypius cannot quite resist. And I think that this is exactly what’s happening in Canto 9. Dante is dramatizing not only the failure of the intellect, which he’s already discussed in the early part of the canto with the failure of Virgil to guide him, but also the failure of his will, at least as an event of the past but probably also as something that can happen to him again.
The passage to the city can take place after this scene, and now he enters into the City of Dis and finds the Epicureans, those who do not believe in the mortality of the soul. Let me gloss the Epicureans a little bit more than I did before. There are two types of Epicureans. Whenever we think about the Epicureans, we tend to think about those vulgar Epicureans who worship their stomachs and the pleasures of food. I think that Dante has already dramatized that kind of Epicurean in Canto 6 when he meets, as you may remember, Ciacco, whose name means “pig.” But then there is the noble version of the Epicureans here in Canto 10, those who are interested in intellectual pleasures, the pleasures of conversations, friendship, and meditation. They are those who remove themselves to the garden in the belief that they should cultivate their soul and their own pursuits. These are the noble, philosophical Epicureans, not the vulgar sort that believe in the supremacy of bodily pleasures.
Nonetheless, personal pleasure is always the aim of an Epicurean ethics. Virgil continues, “In this part Epicurus with all his followers, who make the soul die with the body, have their burial-place.”4 How fitting is the punishment for this crime, this sin. It’s perfect because these people never really believed in the immortality of the soul, and they are condemned to be dead forever. They dwell in sarcophagi, entombed. Sometimes we may wonder about the appropriateness of a punishment for a particular sin, but here we have no reason at all to be surprised by this destiny reserved for the Epicureans.
“Therefore, to the question which you ask me,” Virgil explains, “you shall soon have satisfaction here within, and also to the wish which you hold from me.”5 Then they’re interrupted. All of a sudden, Dante is once again involved in what’s happening in Hell. And we are no longer truly discussing the immortality of souls, but rather the political implications of believing in the immortality of the soul. How is this refracted onto the political scene? Again, therefore, this is almost a Platonic conceit, the relationship now no longer between bodies and cities, as we saw in Inferno 6, but here between souls and cities. The resultant considerations abound. Is this a soulless city? How do we experience it? Is it livable? What is the relationship between the various people who inhabit it? Dante will soon seek answers to his myriad questions.
He singles out two people to question, one a Guelph and one a Ghibel-line. We are in the middle of the civil war of Florence once again. It’s going to be Farinata, a Ghibelline, and the elder Cavalcanti, a Guelph. The two souls are also related to each other because Cavalcanti’s son, Dante’s best friend—you may remember that he dedicates his Vita nuova to Guido and calls him “my first friend Guido Cavalcanti”—had married Farinata’s daughter. In Hell they lie in their tombs, ignoring each other, ignoring the other’s pangs, worries, and perplexities. It’s a symbolic picture of what could be “any city.” But this is the city in the beyond, where everybody’s squabbling. Nobody’s paying attention to anybody else, and everybody believes that one’s own passion is paramount. It’s a canto that, interestingly enough, is marked by interruptions: one soul is speaking, and the other says to quit it because it’s his turn now. And so the scene enacts a little vignette of Florence in the year 1300 (possibly later, but 1300 is a good estimate).
Virgil and Dante are the first to be interrupted here, by Farinata, who appears from the navel up in his tomb and says, “O Tuscan, who go alive through the city of fire speaking thus modestly, may it please you to stop in this place. Your speech clearly shows you a native of that noble fatherland to which I perhaps did too much harm.”6 A little historical detail will help to explain Farinata’s physical position here. When Dante went on an embassy to Rome, he could have seen the Church of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem, which, according to the legend, was built with stones from Jerusalem that had been brought to Rome by Constantine’s mother, Helena. In the basement of that church, which would be opened only once a year around the Easter season, there was a mosaic showing the rising Christ from the navel up, and the representation of Farinata from the navel up is clearly meant as a caricature of the belief in the Resurrection. This is the story of a man who doesn’t believe in the Resurrection, but iconographically Dante will go on focusing on the counterpoint. The description of Farinata is clearly meant to evoke these contradictions.
So, there is a great exchange between Dante and Farinata: who defeated whom, the continuous battles between Guelphs and Ghibellines, and Dante’s claim that his own family managed to take good revenge when the time came, with a clear implication that more revenge will be necessary. But then they’re also interrupted, this time by the old man Cavalcanti. This is what happens, an extraordinary scene: “Then there arose to sight alongside of him a shade, visible to the chin: I think he had raised himself on his knees. He looked round about me as though he wished to see whether someone was with me, but when his expectation was quite spent, he said, weeping, ‘If you go through this blind prison by reason of high genius, where is my son, and why is he not with you?’”7
The reference is to Dante’s best friend, Guido, whose name implies that he should be the one guiding Dante. The old father was hoping that his son, according to his name, could really be leading the younger poet, as he had led him in his early poetic experiments in Florence. Ultimately, then, Farinata worries about his ancestors, and Cavalcanti worries about his son. These are Epicureans with a sense of dynastic continuity, all within the immanence of personal concerns and family. They move beyond the fragmentations of the self from the Other. They seem to have an extended idea of themselves, in spite of themselves, in spite of their beliefs.
Dante answers Cavalcanti, “I come not of myself. He who waits yonder, whom perhaps your Guido had in disdain, is leading me through here.” “His words and the manner of his punishment had read his name to me,” Dante continues, “hence was my answer so full. Suddenly straightening up, he cried, ‘How? Did you say ‘he had’?” Dante uses the past preterite, “he had,” and the old man infers from the verb tense that his son is already dead, which is a mistake, an equivocation: “‘He had’? Does he not still live? Does the sweet light not strike his eyes?’ And when he perceived that I made some delay in answering, he fell supine again and showed himself no more.”8 While Cavalcanti is no longer present, his conversation with Dante lingers beyond his disappearance.
Farinata, meanwhile, is utterly unconcerned with the whole discussion. He persists in arguing that the two sides of the Florentine civil war were engaged in a continuous back-and-forth. He keeps the subject strictly political, speaking only of Guelphs and Ghibellines, so that Dante has to ask him before leaving to reassure the old man Cavalcanti that his son is still alive, because in the year of Dante the pilgrim’s journey, Guido was still alive, though he would die very soon afterward.
What is the meaning of this story of political disarray in Florence? And what are we to make of the story of the memory of Dante’s friend, whose friendship with Dante had just come to an end? One of the early and toughest decisions Dante had to make was to banish Guido Cavalcanti from Florence because he thought that Guido was the cause of some unrest in the city. Guido went into exile and never made it back. He died three months later in the swamps of Liguria, a little bit north of Tuscany. Dante lives in many ways with a sense of personal guilt about what happened. He won’t talk openly about it, but the guilt exists, and his relationship with Guido will become a key to understanding the canto.
Who is Guido really? Guido is what we call an Averroist. Averroes, actually mentioned by Dante in Limbo, was an Arab philosopher and a famous commentator of Aristotle. And in the Middle Ages they would read the great classics of philosophy, especially very difficult texts like Aristotle’s On the Soul, by following the commentators. In his interpretation of the text, Averroes argues that Aristotle does not believe in the immortality of the soul. He’s going to be challenged by Aquinas and by many others, but Guido Cavalcanti follows Averroes’ understanding of the soul. Thus, the one who is here among the heretics is not just the old man, but also Guido Cavalcanti himself.
What does heresy even mean? I did indicate that in antiquity it was never really thought of as a sin because it’s a question of the mind. The word comes from the Greek haeresis, meaning “to choose.” One who is a heretic is someone who makes a particular intellectual choice. To be viewed as a sinner, you also have to indicate an element of pride behind a particular belief, and so Guido is held responsible for disseminating this idea of Averroism.
What is Averroism? One of the ideas in his commentary on On the Soul is that we human beings are not even intrinsically capable of thinking. We are concupiscent entities and sensitive entities. We’re also rational entities, but rationality occurs to us intermittently. Averroism emphasizes the fact that we don’t think all the time, that occasionally thought comes to us. And when we think, we are existing in a discontinuity from the world of feeling. So, there’s a fairly tragic understanding here, making human beings the object, rather than subjects, of thought. We live like animals more often than not: we eat, we drink, we sleep, and so on. Then occasionally we manage to disengage ourselves from all of this and become capable of contemplative thoughts. At that point we no longer really live, we are abstracted from ourselves.
Not only did Guido believe in these ideas, they also shape one of his poems, one of the most beautiful poems written in that epoch, a poem called “A Lady Asks Me.” It’s a poem where there’s a fiction: the poet Guido Cavalcanti imagines that a woman asks him to define love. She says that poets are always talking about love, and she doesn’t understand what they mean by love, nor what the effects of love are. Cavalcanti responds with a long song talking about the nature of love, the function of love, and the effects of love. He proceeds almost scholastically, taking one case after the other. He begins by saying, in the exposition, that love is a passion that comes from Mars, not from Venus. That is to say, the nature of love is always to be one of conflict, of war and chaos, not one of order. He continues in this vein, saying that love induces death and is characterized by deliriums of the mind. It’s a very grim idea of love that Cavalcanti offers this curious woman.
What Dante is ultimately doing in Canto 10 is connecting these Cavalcantian ideas of love with the politics of civil war. He finds that there is a strict, necessary correlation between them. And he opposes Guido Cavalcanti’s thoughts on love. As you know from the Vita nuova, he believes that Beatrice can lead him to God and to the knowledge of God, in the persuasion that it is not by truth that you come to the knowledge of God. If you cannot come to the knowledge of God by truth, then how do you come to the knowledge of God? By love, by thinking about love: that’s the way of the ascent. Furthermore, Dante will have this idea that civil disorder, the civil war, is nothing else but the phenomenon of a theory put forth by the Aver-roist, by Guido Cavalcanti. This is the double focus of this canto: love and politics and the connection between them, a connection that, by the way, the Averroists whom Dante links with the Epicureans, deny. Dante makes this connection imaginatively, for it is a connection refuted by the philosophers themselves.
With Canto 11 Dante juxtaposes to the disorder of the city a rational reflection on the order that sustains Hell. It is as if there’s a logic even to the disorder of evil. And the idea is that there is a tripartite division to the plan of Hell. All of the sins are divided into three parts: the area of the sins of incontinence, the middle area, which is called the area of violence, and then the third area, which contains the sins of fraud. Dante calls fraud the sin peculiar to human beings because it’s not just a sin of the will, but there is also the premeditation of the mind, the complicity of the mind. Dante sees the conjunction of will and, at the same time, the order of reason in the performance of that evil.
The canto ends with a question. Dante says that this is all from the Ethics of Aristotle and then Dante turns to Virgil for more information: “O sun that heal every troubled vision, you do content me so, when you solve, that questioning, no less than knowing, pleases me.” Then Dante asks him to say something about usury. Virgil’s response: “Philosophy, for one who understands it . . . points out, not in one place alone, how Nature takes her course from divine Intellect and from Its art; and if you note well your Physics”—another Aristotelian text—“you will find, after not many pages, that your art, as far as it can, follows her, as the pupil does his master; so that your art is as it were grandchild to God. By these two, if you remember Genesis at the beginning, it behooves man to gain his bread and to prosper. But because the usurer takes another way, he contemns Nature in herself and in her follower, for he puts his hope elsewhere.”9 So, to explain the sin of usury, Dante puts forth a theory of art, as if usury were a violation of art.
But how does he understand art? What is art for Dante? He sees art as work, that’s the best way to explain it. At the beginning of Genesis when Adam was thrown out of the Garden of Eden and was told that in order to recover the garden, he had to go back to work, that work becomes an ascetic exercise, not a punishment. Here, similarly, Dante doesn’t see work as a punishment, but rather as an ascetic exercise whereby one can transform the wilderness into paradise. That’s really the general thrust of the canto, but I believe more can be made of this connection.
What is art in the Middle Ages? Art is understood by the Scholastics as a virtue of the practical intellect, in the order of making. What is the practical intellect? How many intellects do we have? Well, there’s a speculative intellect. When Dante talks about the immortality of the soul and those who do not believe in the immortality of the soul, that’s a question of the speculative intellect. Suppose that I had this intellectual trait of indulging in thinking about justice, for instance, an abstract idea of justice, not particular cases of justice, then I’m involved in an exercise of the speculative intellect. Dante instead ends the canto with an emphasis on the practical intellect, which is the mind that worries about doing or making, and these, too, are not the same thing. To say that it’s a virtue of practical intellect in the order of doing would be to worry about prudence: a virtue of doing, because it’s not the artisan’s work. To say that it’s a virtue of practical intellect in the order of making means that the work of art is a thing that one elaborates. From this point of view, the issue is never really one of whether art tells the truth. It has its own “thingness”; it’s a thing, the work of art is something made, and therefore as made, it has its own reality, its own laws, its own rigor.
We can use the metaphors in Virgil’s explanation of usury to see more clearly how Dante understands art. On the face of it, he’s saying that art must be an imitation of nature. Does Dante then have a mimetic idea of art? Not at all, because if you look more closely, you note that he’s using two metaphors. “Your art, as far as it can, follows her, as the pupil does his master; so that your art is as it were grandchild to God” because art follows nature, which is the child of God, so art is a grandchild. The whole image is one of fecundity and fertility. You can finally see why Dante opposes art to usury. Usury is viewed as a sterile activity, an activity that produces only symbols, money out of money. It’s a symbolic operation, and Dante opposes to it the virtue of art as work, one of production, one of generation: the “grandchild” of God.
Then there is this other metaphor, as the pupil follows the master, which is not gratuitous because, after all, within the context, Dante has Virgil teaching him, so there is almost a kind of flattery here. He implies the educational aspect of art. Art educates, in the sense that it leads us out of a particular state of barbarity, ignorance, and darkness, so it has an educational and a nonmimetic role because art imitates the productive rhythms of the natural world. Dante believes in an art that is open to beginnings, to life. This idea comes from Genesis, an art that always leads us back to the thought of origins because only then can we understand the endings, only then can we arrive at our goals.
In the course of moving from Canto 9 to Canto 11, then, we have moved from concerns about the pride of the mind—which we could even call the wound of the intellect and the weakness of the will—to an idea of art. And I think that this idea of art is also, in Dante’s eyes, a remedy for the evils to which we are prone. Dante thinks that should we apply to ourselves the same kind of care and rigor with which an artist produces the work of art, and then the cultivation of our souls may indeed begin to take place. Thus, Dante’s attention to art is part of an ascetic exercise that he advocates as an escape from an infernal fate.