The Patristic, Medieval, and Renaissance

Conference
Villanova University, 2008

Aquinas, Dante and the Poetics of the Middle Ages

Brendan Thomas Sammon, Ph.D.

When George Elliot wrote, “many have the heart of a poet without the voice,”
she1 recognized the abundance of poetic spirit, which always stands in excess of the
voicing through which it is communicated. In contrast with Elliot’s astute observation, it
seems that we today tend to lay the onus of poetic evidence on the voice, failing to discover
the heart of poetics in that which does not inspire with vocal immediacy. Even one as
brilliant as Hegel seemed unable to overcome this when, characterizing the thought of the
Middle Ages, he called it “as prolix as it is paltry, terribly written and voluminous … a
total confusion of dry reason in the gnarledness of the Nordic-Germanic nature.”2 Anyone
who has discovered the riches of the Middle Ages and compared them to Hegel’s own
writings might agree that, in response to Hegel’s assertion, the proper comeback can be
found in that old adage, as timeless as it is true: They are rubber, and you are glue…

I
The thesis advanced in this presentation is intended to give greater visibility to
this poetic heart of the Middle Ages and can be summarized concisely in this way: the
Middle Ages harbored a poetic richness that permeated the minds and hearts of the
schoolmen with such abundance that the attempt to order this richness, while seemingly
unpoetic to contemporary sensibilities, constituted a continuum that found fullest
expression in Dante’s great La Divina Commedia. The poetic inheritance that was
bequeathed to the medieval world was vast. It included not only ancient pagan and Biblical
literature, but a new mode of mindfulness, a Denkform, generated from the meeting of
pagan philosophy and the Christian logos. It was a mindfulness that, early on gave rise to
new genres of literature as seen, for example, in Augustine’s Confessions, an
unprecedented literary journey of introspection, as poetic as it was philosophical. It was a
mindfulness fertilized by the novelty of Dionysius the Areopogite, whose vision gave birth
to new ideas like divine super-goodness beyond goodness, or super-being beyond being, as
well as new terms like hierarchy.3 It was a mindfulness whose poetic spirit was so robust
that it found its way into the high Middle Ages not only through the ‘secular lyric’ of
troubadours like Guiraut Riquier and Folquet of Marseilles,4 but through the organization
of learning, which developed over a long period of time.
Beginning as early as 27 b.c.e, Terentius Varro, whose Disciplinarum libri IX
made a decisive contribution to liberal arts development, explained the nature and object of
the nine fundamental sciences to which the Latins soon applied the name artes liberales.
Some time later in the early fifth century, Martianus Capella, in his Satyricon libri IX, used
Varro’s system but dropped medicine and architecture resulting in the seven arts, which
were divided into the well known trivium and quadrivium.5 These found their way to later
centuries primarily through the efforts of Boethius, who also handed on the Aristotelian
divisions of philosophy, which included logic, theoretical philosophy, practical philosophy
 2
and poetic philosophy. The harmony between the artes liberales and philosophy was
never an easy one, and the impact this had on the place of poetics resulted in assigning it to
a variety of positions; sometimes it was considered a part of logic,6 sometimes ethics,7 and
sometimes it was considered the completion of the trivium alongside grammar and
rhetoric.8 But it may have been Augustine’s De doctrina Christiana, with its emphasis on
the limits of human reason and the need for reason’s transcendent other, or ‘faith’, that
influenced the elevation of poetics to its highest perch as a characteristic of theology. As
some historians of literary criticism have noted, “Alexander of Hales and his successors
discussed theology as poetry; Albertino Mussato discussed poetry as theology; [and] Pico
della Mirandola evolved a poetic theology.”9
To speak of the poetics of the Middle Ages, then, is to speak less of a definitive
literary genre and more of a mode of mindfulness, which was brought to concrete form
through a variety of genres. For this reason, the poetics of the Middle Ages embody a
multitude of themes, the exposition of which would require a great deal more time than
allowed here. Consequently, in this presentation I would like to focus on what I believe to
be one of the most salient themes of medieval poetics, namely, the intellect as an act of
love, as put forth in the thought of Thomas Aquinas and Dante Alighieri. For if, as
Ozanam has noted, one finds in Dante “a philosophy expressed in the most melodious
language of Europe,”10 it is because this melody was always gestating in the womb of
scholasticism, waiting for the proper conditions to enter the world. And if Thomas
Aquinas was central in forging these conditions, it was less because he was the “prince of
the Scholastics,” and more because his thought, as Thomas Gilby has noted, “far from
being opposed to poetry, allows for a real experience of things, which, by its closeness and
wholeness, is above and not below the life of reason.”11 Both Aquinas and Dante would
endorse that splendid observation of Pascal, at once poetic, philosophical and theological:
“the heart has reasons for which the reason knows nothing.”

II
If it seems strange to speak of the intellect as an act of love in the thought of
Aquinas, it must be because one either has in mind the Thomas who “had been elevated
incorrectly and mistakenly to being the key spokesmen for neo-Scholasticism,”12 which,
reacting to Cartesian and Kantian problems of certitude,13 created an overly analytic
Thomas conceived as a cold, calculating systematician, or because one is herself too
invested with Kantian theories of knowledge. Now Kant claimed that, because cognition is
constituted by intuitions and conceptions,14 which are capable of providing only a
representation of the thing to the mind, it is not possible for the mind to know the thing-in-
itself. And, as far as Kant’s system is concerned, he was entirely correct; thought turned in
on itself, seeking the categorical purity of its source, must in the end abandon the dirty
adulteration of the concrete thing.
But Aquinas had no such aspirations to purity, and would have viewed theories of
pure reason as absurd as theories of pure nature.15 In fact, he explicitly rejected the
Platonic doctrine that posited an ideal realm where the universals of reason exist in a pure
state.16 For Aquinas, the concrete world of sense and experience held too much
significance to be abandoned for the sake of systematic reasoning. The world and all its
diversity, so Thomas taught, is God’s way of analogically giving Himself – His goodness,
truth and beauty – to the person in her wholeness. This wholeness consists of more than
the act of reason, more than even the imagination and the will.17 Human wholeness
 3
indicates the person’s fulfillment and happiness in what Gilby has called the ‘poetic fact’:
“the destiny to be united in perfect closeness with the being of God.”18 In the concrete
world of things God gives Himself to the entirety of the person, which is why for Thomas
the proper response is a mode of cognition consisting of not only the necessary structure of
reasoning, with its deliberate use of universal and abstract conceptualizations, but also, and
perhaps more so, an act of love. As Aquinas puts it, “loving draws us into things more than
knowing does.”19 The human act of knowing something is simultaneously an act of loving
just as loving is also an act of knowing. This may require a bit of unpacking.
St. Thomas believed that the common act of reasoning, by which a form is
abstracted and presented for the mind’s judgment, was the result of a defect in the
intellect.20 The process of discursive reasoning, though necessary in this life, remains
incomplete since it provides to the mind, through signs, symbols and systems, the meaning
rather than the substance, the thought of a thing rather than the thing itself. The mind can
certainly find some satisfaction in this. Indeed, as Kant exemplifies, the mind can fall so
madly in love with reason that it becomes willing to forsake everything else at the altar of
reason’s purity of thought. But as Aquinas knew, the one who is drawn to a desirable thing
“does not desire to have it as a thought, but as a thing.”21 Reasoning can only go so far
before it is confronted by its own intrinsic limitations. For Aquinas, these limits do not
portend the end of the innate quest for the concrete since, as he states, “love begins
immediately where knowledge ends.”22 This is why Aquinas believed that “a thing is
loved more than it is known,”23 and why love is simpler, nobler and more powerful than
knowledge.24
But what exactly does Aquinas mean by love? Clearly it is more than romantic
passion and feeling, though at times it may involve these. Rather, love is better understood
here as desire, though we should hasten to add that desire is not to be conceived, as so often
happens today, as mere want. For Aquinas, desire is the momentum of the particular being
for its unique goal in the good, the true and the beautiful. This momentum derives from
two sources: from nature, as created and sustained by God, and from volition, as directed
by the freedom and will of the person. In scholastic terms, love is distinguished as
appetitus naturalis, the ‘natural appetite’ as the foundation of a thing’s drive to completion,
and appetitus elicitus, the ‘emergent appetite’ as the more specified drive to particular
goods.
The natural appetite is, we might say, the ‘desire beyond desire,’ the origin, or
principle, of the emergent appetite, while the emergent appetite is the point of contact
between the natural appetite and the concrete world of things.25 Conceived in these terms,
love is both an act of nature and an act of the will. As an act of nature, love precedes
conscious willing, and because it is implicated in all human activity, it is more universal
and comprehensive. In this way, it is related to reason and its activity. As an act of the
will, love draws the mind toward the particular, individual thing it perceives to be good.
Within the mind itself nature and will maintain their respective powers: natural
love is the “primitive impulse of the mind toward the concrete,”26 driving the will beyond
the comfort of systematic and conceptual control to the thing in its recalcitrant, and thus
discomforting, particularity. As Thomas observes, “love is a particularizing force which
joins another to itself, holding to that particular thing as it would to itself.”27 In this way,
the will determines the mind to act in the here and now, to direct the universal principles of
reason to the particular individual. “And so love may be said to discern,” Aquinas tells us,
“by causing discernment in the reason.”28 The native promise of the mind for the poetic
fact, for a complete union with God, cannot be fulfilled by reason’s power alone. Against
 4
many in his time who, like John Pecham, held that human nature consisted of spiritual
and corporeal form,29 Thomas insisted on one principle of life, maintaining that the body
was part of human nature. Consequently, the happiness arising from knowledge requires
not only union with the spiritual, abstract, concept, but also the material, concrete,
composite. And since the limits of the mind prevent matter from entering, it is love that
drives the mind ecstatically beyond these limits. “Not only does the desire of the will now
impel the mind to know,” Gilby explains, “but in its passion for the concrete it overflows
into the mind, to produce a reaction above and beyond the logic of the situation, a
mysterious experience which is not so much a rational judgment as a sympathy, a
knowledge by affinity, nature, compassion.”30 It is love that completes the natural
inclination of the human person for unity with the world of concrete things as it aspires for
its final happiness in union with God.
We can see now how for Aquinas the substantial union sought in all acts of
knowing requires the partnership of reason and love, working in harmony at every point,
each feeding the other its necessary sustenance. Love wills the mind to the good, the true
and the beautiful, impregnating it with knowledge, informing it as a formal cause of
reason’s activity, while reason, welcoming what is given to it, reflects and judges, always
strengthening its ability to encounter the world. Love directed to the good, the true and the
beautiful enables the act of knowing to bring about a true substantial union between
knower and known, wherein, like the Incarnation itself, two natures become one without
relinquishing their particular identities, fulfilling the native promise of the mind for the
poetic fact.
Unfortunately, the intellectual act does not always operate in this way. Corrupted
by sin, the will too often strays away from the good, the true and the beautiful uprooting
the mind from the soil of the natural appetite, leaving the reason to feed itself its own
abstractions, concepts and systems. Thus malnourished, the mind becomes less and less
able to feed from the natural order and instead begins to suffer the debt of punishment
when that very order refuses to assimilate the disordered will.31 Reason suffers its own
consequence, so Aquinas thought, in the form of guilt.32 In this life, the will is capable of
reasoning, or rationalizing, its way out of guilt, but as both Aquinas and, more vividly,
Dante understood, there is an ontological component to guilt that cannot be escaped and
that is unmasked at death. It will be helpful at this point, then, to turn to Dante in order to
examine his contribution to the development of this theme of medieval poetics.

III
By the time that Dante had linked together the poems of the Vita Nuova, he had
already been studying Aquinas and demonstrated a considerable knowledge of Aristotle’s
work, having most likely studied them with the aid of Aquinas’s commentaries.33 In light
of this fact, Dante’s choice in La Divina Comedia to personify human reason in the poet
Virgil, as opposed to Aristotle, is evidence of the poetic sense of reason that had been
permeating his scholastic context.34 Virgil personifies a sense of reason that knows
Dante’s mind “beyond his spoken word,”35 or as Sermonti comments, “fully understands
what is not spoken to him.”36 Through Virgil, Dante’s own reason is being expanded
poetically beyond its intrinsic limitations, beyond its own vision. “You are still too far
back in the dark,” Virgil tells Dante, “to make out clearly what you think you see; it is
natural that you should miss the mark.”37 As Bosco and Reggio understand it, more than
merely confused vision, Dante, in trying to see from too far away, risks forming his
 5
imagination in error.38 Poetic reason may not be able to provide the correct vision itself,
but as Virgil depicts, it is able to recognize the limits of reason’s vision. And the fact that
Virgil’s guidance ends where Beatrice’s begins confirms Dante’s concession to Aquinas
that “love begins where knowledge leaves off.” Poetic reason naturally comes into alliance
with love, and the propaedeutic character it harbored with Virgil now opens itself to the
amorous instruction of Beatrice.
Dante’s entire Commedia can be read as a narrative of the intellect as an act of
love within an eschatological context, with each of the three phases depicting the three
major consequences: the Inferno depicts the failure of the intellect to act in love; the
Purgatorio depicts the opportunity to unlearn the habits of an intellect that failed to love
and to relearn the act of love proper to the intellect; and the Paradiso depicts the
community of intellects acting in the fullness of love. Within each phase, Dante provides
vivid imagery of the modes of union that result from the relative acts of intellect.

III. A
Dante’s Inferno is a world full of souls whose power, which on earth was used in
willful domination of the created order, has been revoked. These souls are, in Dante’s
words, “souls who have lost the good of intellect.”39 Similar to Aquinas, Dante depicts a
hell where the order of creation imposing itself over and against the disordered will is
experienced as rejection, pain and torment. Here, punishment is not merely the
consequence of a vengeful divine will viewed as absolute power, but rather the anti-
experience of the unity between divine will and the order it creates. We encounter this
‘unity of divine willing and being’ when, for instance, Virgil reprimands Charon: “bite
back your spleen,” he tells the beast, “this has been willed where what is willed must
be…”;40 or when the Angel-presence opens the gates of Dis proclaiming to the demons
“Why do you set yourselves against that Throne whose will none can deny?”41 Dante’s
God is not the God of the voluntarists, whose absolute power stands over and against
creation waiting to impose a punishment that can only appear arbitrary to those at an
infinite distance. “O power of God! How dreadful is thy will!”42 echoes the only thought
of God possible for those damned souls who, while alive, saw power only in the will. In
contrast, for Dante, God’s will manifests itself in the created order of nature and,
subsequently, is always giving itself to the human desire for unity.
The Inferno, then, is not the table-turning of retributive justice, but the unmasking
of the ontological effects consequent upon the pain of love eternally rejected – effects that
were always present, but hidden through rationalization.43 The Inferno is a place where the
concrete reality of nature can no longer be hidden by the camouflage of abstractions,
conceptions and systems so easily dominated by the mind whose will is guided not by love
of the good, the true and the beautiful, but only love of self. And the union that arises out
of the intellectual act devoid of proper love is a perverse union where knower and known
lose their identities in a fusion forced against nature’s own momentum. Dante’s
description of this union is revealing: “The two heads had already blurred and blended; /
now two new semblances appeared and faded, / one face where neither face began nor
ended”;44 “…their former likenesses mottled and sank / to something that was both of them
and neither…”;45 transforming them “in such a way that both their natures yielded their
elements each to each…”46 As Bosco and Reggio point out, Dante’s use of the word
“perduti” conveys the double sense of “damned” and “lost:” the damned are those whose
intellectual act, motivated by love of self, results in the loss or “annulment” of their
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identity.47 They are in Dante’s words, “neither two nor one.” There is no substantial
union here, but only a losing of one’s substance more and more into the formless abyss of
nothingness.

III. B
If Dante’s Inferno can be characterized as a realm where the ontological reality of
guilt vanquishes its psychological effect enabling a real recognition of sin, the Purgatorio
depicts a realm where this guilt may be purged,48 and where love, so absent from those
souls in Hell, may be strengthened.49 Here the souls allow torment to change them from
what they’ve become, acquiescing to a form of knowledge above their own arising from
“That Will which does not will that all Its ways be told.”50 This is reason guided by love,
opening itself to its other, and Dante’s own journey up the mount, marked by a decreasing
dependency on Virgil, reflects this process. But this decreasing dependency occurs, not
because Virgil becomes unnecessary, but because he reaches his limits, and Dante’s desire
overflows Virgil’s capacity. After attempting a response to Dantes’ inquiry about how God
answers prayers, Virgil concludes: “But save all questions of such consequence / till you
meet her who will become your lamp / between the truth and mere intelligence.”51 The
intellectual act is at all times confronted by a plenitude of being so in excess of the
intellect’s capacity to receive it, that love alone can provide the required mediating power.
But Dante is careful to distinguish between that “perverse love that makes a
crooked path seem straight,”52 that is, the natural love that falls into error either by seeking
bad ends, or being influenced by imbalanced fervor,53 and true love, which “desires the
Eternal Good and measures its will to secondary goods in reason.”54 In the person of
Beatrice, we see that, for Dante, true love is particular without becoming familiar, concrete
without becoming ordinary. It is the kind of love that strengthens the intellect enabling the
soul undergoing the pain of purgatory to see “Heaven’s Light,” and to be “already certain
of [the] heart’s desire.”55 United with love, the intellectual act enables one to drink the
living waters of truth and so satisfy the “The natural thirst that nothing satisfies.”56 As
Dante illustrates in his own person, with true love as its guide, the intellect arrives at a
point where, purged from all disordered willing, it may follow the spontaneous pleasures of
its own impulses.57 No longer requiring the systematic process of abstractions and
conceptualizations, the soul is free to fly to the lofty heights of Paradise and become one
with all things.

III. C
Where the Purgatorio depicted a realm of preparation in which desire is purged of
its inclination to sin, the Paradiso depicts the concreteness of the union that follows this
purgation. In Paradise, as the “intellect draws near its goal” it is opened to a “depth of
understanding”58 so profound that the power to write, to think and even to know, falls
away. What remains is the giving of one’s whole being, through which one in turn receives
back the gift of the whole of Being, and poverty becomes a wealth and a plenitude.59
Dante describes this union early on as he becomes one with the moon: “We were received
into the elements / of the eternal pearl as water takes / light to itself, with no change in its
substance.”60 This is the substantial union that only true love enables as it drives one’s
being beyond its limits where it harmonizes with other beings. Within such a union, the
mediation of reason, once necessary to that unity that comes about in intellectual acts, is
replaced with the self-evidence of Truth that, in life, was held by faith: “There we shall
witness what we hold in faith,” proclaims Dante, “not told by reason but self-evident; / as
 7
men perceive an axiom here on earth.”61 Love enables a relation to truth analogous to
sensing, which Dante calls one’s “sense of the true fact.”62 It is a mode of knowing truth
that, analogous to the spontaneous and intuited act of sensing, instinctively receives what is
good, true and beautiful without hesitation. The intellectual act of reason is opened to a
more powerful mode. It is not, for Dante, that in itself reason is, as Beatrice calls it at one
point, a “childish act” (il tuo püeril coto) but that reason only thrives in its continual unity
with love. Reason that refuses its divine destiny does remain childish. But through Dante’s
journey in the Commedia we witness reason passing from the scientific, beyond even the
poetic, into Paradise where it becomes deific: an intellectual act that, unified with love,
enlightens the eyes “with such new-given sight / that they [are] fit to look without distress /
on any radiance, however bright.”63 It is an intellect that, being ruled directly by God, no
longer requires the agency of nature’s laws64 since the “universal form that binds”65 all
things is beheld with such desire that, in Dante’s words, “Experiencing that Radiance, the
spirit / is so indrawn it is impossible / even to think of ever turning from It.”66
Dante’s Paradise is the consummation of the intellect’s desire to know, the
consequences of which are complete union with all things. It occurs not by abandoning the
concrete thisness of the world for the sake of a removed, spiritual encounter, where
intellect dominates instinct and sense. Rather, it occurs when one relinquishes the kind of
control that comes with the inner world of abstraction and concepts. As Dante expresses it
so eloquently: “Here my powers rest from their high fantasy, / but already I could feel my
being turned – instinct and intellect balanced equally // as in a wheel whose motion nothing
jars – by the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.”67

IV
The intellect as an act of love is a fundamental principle of the poetic mindfulness
of the Middle Ages. This paper has aspired to demonstrate that this poetic mindfulness
pulsates from scholasticism’s poetic heart, voicing itself in both the ordered system of
Thomas’s thinking as well as the rhythm and rhyme of Dante. Consequently Dante does
not simply poeticize scholastic thought, but rather consummates the unity of its content.
Both Aquinas and Dante conceive of the human person as an intellect whose fundamental
activity is a harmony of knowing and loving. The intellect as an act of knowing involves
the process of discursive reasoning, which abstracts, formulates concepts and
representations, and renders judgments.
Much of the contemporary world is well-versed and well-practiced in this act of
the intellect, perhaps a result of our Kantian inheritance. Fewer, it seems, are as well-
versed and well-practiced in the intellect as an act of love, in which the human aspiration
for unity with the world of concrete things is sought, not for power, pleasure or personal
profit, but for the beauty, joy and happiness that these concrete things have to offer.
Indeed, ours seems to be an age that, having so fiercely fragmented the human mind into so
many isolated cognitive enterprises, has domesticated, even quarantined, poetry to a corner
of Soho where Beatniks and Bohemians freely utter eccentricities. In such a world, the
poetic heart that alone holds the power to ascend from the depths of tormented, infernal
isolation to the happiness of substantial unity with all creation beats with little more than a
murmur. But the world was not always thus. As Aquinas and Dante teach us, the intellect
guided by love harbors the potential to transfigure all human endeavors into a poetic
achievement where the universal lives in the particular, the abstract in the concrete, and
where the native promise of the mind for the ‘poetic fact’ finds its fullest fulfillment.
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1
“George Elliot” was the pen name of Mary Ann (Marion) Evans.
2
G. F. W. Hegel, Sämtliche Werke (Jubiläumsausgabe), vol. 19. H. Glockner
(ed.) (Stuttgart: F. Frommann, 1930) 149, 199.
3
Cf. William Riordan, Divine Light, The Theology of Denys the Aropogite (San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2008) 47; John Dillon and Sarah Klitenic Wear, Dionysius the
Aropogite and the Neoplatonist Tradition, Despoiling the Hellenes (Aldershot and
Burlington: Ashgate, 2007) 11 – 13.
4
Cf. Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz, History of Aesthetics, vol. 2, Medieval Aesthetics,
Adam and Ann Czerniawski (trans.), C. Barrett (ed.)(New York: Continuum International
Publishing Group, 2005) 114, 115.
5
Cf. Fernand Van Steenberghen, The Philosophical Movement in the Thirteenth
Century (London: Nelson, 1955) chpt. 2.
6
C.C. Greenfield, Humanist and Scholastic Poetics, 1250 – 1500 (London and
Toronto: Bucknell University Press, 1981) 49 – 53.
7
Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism c. 1100 – c. 1375, A. J. Minnis and A.
B. Scott (eds.) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) 11.
8
Cf. Van Steenberghen, op. cit., 30 – 31.
9
Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, 9; cf. also Tatarkiewicz, op. cit., 72.
10
Fredéric Ozanam, Dante and Catholic Philosophy in the Thirteenth Century,
Lucia D. Pychowska (trans.) (New York: The Cathedral Library Association, 1897) 53.
11
Thomas Gilby, O.P. Poetic Experience, An Introduction to Thomist Aesthetics
(New York: Sheed an Ward, Inc., 1934) 18.
12
Otto Herman Pesch, “Thomas Aquinas and Contemporary Theology,” in
Aquinas as Authority, Paul vanGeest, Harm Goris, Carlo Leget (eds.) (Leuven: Peeters,
2002) 127.
13
Cf. Fergus Kerr, “Thomas Aquinas: Conflicting Interpretations in Recent
Anglophone Literature,” Aquinas as Authority, op. cit., 165 – 186.
14
Cf. Critique of Pure Reason, Part II, 1, On Logic as Such.
15
For a thoughtful analysis of the doctrine of natura pura in Thomas, see Henri de
Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural, Rosemary Sheed (trans.) (New York: The
Crossroad Publishing Company, 1998).
16
Though Thomas frequently repeats this opposition, the best explanation can be
found in Summa Theologiae (hereafter = ST) I, 85, 1.
17
Cf. ST I, 84 – 89; II-II, 49, 5 ad. 3.
18
Gilby, op. cit., 39.
19
This is Gilby’s translation of ST I-II, 22, 2: “Magis autem trahitur anima ad rem
per vim appetitivam quam per vim apprehensivam.”
20
Cf. ST II-II, 49, 5 ad. 2: “certitudo rationis est ex intellectu, sed necessitas
rationis est ex defectu intellectus, illa enim in quibus vis intellectiva plenarie viget ratione
non indigent, sed suo simplici intuitu veritatem comprehendunt, sicut Deus et Angeli.”
 9
21
De Veritate 22, 3, ad. 4: “appetens bonum non quaerit habere bonum secundum
esse intentionale, qualiter habetur a cognoscente, sed secundum esse naturale; et ideo per
hoc quod animal habet bonum ut cognoscens ipsum, non excluditur quin possit eum
appetere.”
22
ST II-II, 27, 4 ad. 1: “quamvis incognita amari non possint, tamen non oportet
quod sit idem ordo cognitionis et dilectionis. Nam dilectio est cognitionis terminus. Et ideo
ubi desinit cognitio, scilicet in ipsa re quae per aliam cognoscitur, ibi statim dilectio
incipere potest.”
23
ST I-II, 27, 2 ad. 2: “aliquid requiritur ad perfectionem cognitionis, quod non
requiritur ad perfectionem amoris. Cognitio enim ad rationem pertinet, cuius est distinguere
inter ea quae secundum rem sunt coniuncta, et componere quodammodo ea quae sunt
diversa, unum alteri comparando. Et ideo ad perfectionem cognitionis requiritur quod
homo cognoscat singillatim quidquid est in re, sicut partes et virtutes et proprietates. Sed
amor est in vi appetitiva, quae respicit rem secundum quod in se est. Unde ad perfectionem
amoris sufficit quod res prout in se apprehenditur, ametur. Ob hoc ergo contingit quod
aliquid plus amatur quam cognoscatur, quia potest perfecte amari, etiam si non perfecte
cognoscatur. Sicut maxime patet in scientiis, quas aliqui amant propter aliquam
summariam cognitionem quam de eis habent, puta quod sciunt rhetoricam esse scientiam
per quam homo potest persuadere, et hoc in rhetorica amant. Et similiter est dicendum circa
amorem Dei.”
24
Cf. De Veritate 22, 11, ad. 5 and ad. 7.
25
Cf. ST II-II, 155, 2; 26, 3, 7, 8.
26
Gilby, op. cit., 32.
27
ST I, 20, 1 ad. 3: “Et pro tanto dicitur amor vis concretiva, quia alium aggregat
sibi habens se ad eum sicut ad seipsum.”
28
ST II-II, 47, 1 ad. 1: “Dicitur autem amor discernere, inquantum movet rationem
ad discernendum.”
29
Cf. Jean-Pierre Torrell, O.P., Saint Thomas Aquinas, Vol. 1, The Person and His
Work, Robert Royal (trans.) (Washington D.C.: CUA Press, 1996) 187 – 190; Joseph
Pieper, Scholasticism, Personalities and Problems of Medieval Philosophy, Richard and
Clara Winston (trans.) (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2001) 120 – 121.
30
Gibly, op. cit., 42.
31
Cf. ST I-II, 87, 1.
32
Cf. ST I-II, 87, 4- 8.
33
Cf. Philip H. Wicksteed, Dante & Aquinas (London and Toronto: J.M.Dent &
Sons LTD., 1913) 124 – 125.
34
Against the claim that the condemnations of 1270 would have discouraged
Dante from using Aristotle to represent human reason two things may be said. First,
history had shown that such condemnations do little to curtail interest. Already in 1210, the
Council of Paris had issued prohibitions of studying Aristotle at the Arts Faculty, which in
1215 were reaffirmed by Robert of Courcon. Mandonnet has demonstrated that by 1230,
these prohibitions had fallen into oblivion as a result of the multitude of infringements that
had taken place from the moment the prohibitions had been issued. For this reason, in
1231 Pope Gregory IX absolved all violations. Some, like Fernand Van Steenberghen,
recognize the period between 1240 – 1255 to have been one of Aristotelian expansionism.
Consequently, it is unlikely that more condemnations would have been a major concern to
a poet. Second, the condemnations of 1270 were not targeted toward Aristotle as such, in
 10

the way that the prior prohibitions had been. Rather, they were targeted toward the kind of
Aristotelianism being advanced, especially by those associated with Siger of Brabant’s so-
called Radical Aristotelianism, and even some of Aquinas’s own interpretations.
Consequently, Dante could very easily have used Aristotle to depict human reason in such
a way to make a contribution to the whole debate within the controversy, and to exonerate
what he would have considered to be authentic interpretations. The fact that he made no
such choice indicates a conscious decision to use a poet rather than a philosopher to
represent human reason.
35
Inferno, Canto XIX, 37 – 39: “Ed io: «Tanto m’è bel, quanto a te piace: / tu
se’segnore, e sai chi’i’ non mi parto / dal tuo volere, e sai quel che si tace.»” Ciardi’s
translation, although at times giving priority to poetic structure rather than theological or
philosophical content, remains brilliant and thoughtful: “And I: ‘What you will I will. You
are my lord / and know I depart in nothing from your wish; and you know my mind beyond
my spoken word.” The Divine Comedy, The Inferno, The Purgatorio, and the Paradiso,
John Ciardi (trans.) (New York: New American Library, 2003) 150 – 151. Italics added.
Unless otherwise stated, his translation will be used.
36
Vittorio Sermonti, L’Inferno di Dante (Milano: Rizzoli, 1988) 279. Giving his
own interpretation, Sermonti says that Dante is saying “E capisci benissimo anche quel che
non ti si dice.” It is Sermonti’s interpretation that allows us to understand Dante’s
expression as an ontological claim about knowledge rather than a rhetorical claim about
Virgil’s ability to cleverly decipher Dante’s reticence.
37
Inferno, Canto XXXI, 22 – 24: “Ed elli a me: «Però che tu trascorri / per le
tenebre troppo da la lungi, / avvien che poi nel maginare abborri.”
38
Dante Alighieri, La Divina Commedia. Inferno, a cura di Umberto Bosco e
Giovanni Reggio (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1979) 456: They maintain that the sense of ‘Però’
used has the force of ‘because’ or ‘for the fact that’ (“per il fatto che”, “poiché). Regarding
the formation of the imagination, they write: “afèresi di imaginare, qui col senso di
«percepire, discernere», in quant oil verbo vale «formare l’immagine».”
39
Inferno, Canto III, 18: “c’hanno perduto il ben de l’intelletto.”
40
Inferno, Canto III, 91 – 92: “E ‘l duca lui: «Caron, non ti crucciare: / vuolsi così
colà dove si puote / ciò che si vuole, e più non dimandare.»”
41
Inferno, Canto IX, 91 – 92: “Perché recalcitrate a quella voglia / a cui non puote
il fin mai esser mozzo, / e che più volte v’ha cresciuta doglia?”
42
Inferno, Canto XXIV, 119: “Oh potenza di Dio, quant è severa / che cotai colpi
per vendetta croscia!”
43
Cf. Inferno, Canto XV, 40 – 42.
44
Inferno, Canto XXV, 70 – 72: “Già eran li deu capi un divenuti, / quando
n’apparver due figure miste / in una faccia, ov’eran due perduti.”
45
Inferno, Canto XXV, 76 – 78; “Ogne primaio aspetto ivi era casso: / due e
nesun l’imagine perversa / parea; e tal sen gio con lento passo.”
46
Inferno, Canto XXV, 100 – 102: “ché due nature mai a fronte a fronte / non
trasmutò sì ch’amendue le forme / a cambiar lor matera fosser pronte.”
47
Bosco and Reggio, op. cit., 370: “Perduti non significa solo genericamente «
dannati »: I due esseri si « perdono », si annullano uno nell’altro in una faccia sola: « due e
nessun l’imagine perversa / parea » (v. 77). Italics in original text.
48
Cf. Purgatorio, Canto I, 5: “…e canterò di quell secondo regno / dove l’umano
spirito si purga / e di salire al ciel diventa degno.” Admittedly, Ciardi’s rendering of
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‘l’umano spirito’ with the word ‘guilt’ seems overly inferential, but given the themes of the
Inferno, theologically it makes sense.
49
Purgatorio, Canto I, 19: “Lo bel pianeto che d’amar conforta / faceva tutto rider
l’orïente, / velando I Pesci ch’erano in sua scorta.”
50
Purgatorio, Canto III. 31 – 33: “A sofferir tormenti, caldi e geli / simili corpi la
Virtù dispone / che, come fa, non vuol ch’a noi si sveli.” Italics added.
51
Purgatorio, Canto VI, 43 – 45: “Veramente a così alto sospetto / non ti fermar,
se quella nol ti dice / che lume fia tra ’l vero e lo ’ntelleto.”
52
Purgatorio, Canto X, 3: “…fa parer dritta la via torta.”
53
Cf. Purgatorio, Canto XVII.
54
Purgatorio, Canto XVII, 97 – 102: “Mentre ch’elli è nel primo ben diretto, / e
ne’ secondi sé stesso misura, / esser non può cagion di mal diletto; / / ma quando al mal si
torce, o con più cura / o con men che non dee corre nel bene, / contra ’l fattore adovra sua
fattura.”
55
Purgatorio, Canto XIII, 86: “O gente sicura”, / incominciai, “di veder l’alto
lume / che ’l disio vostro solo ha in sua cura, / / se tosto grazia resolva le schiume / di
vostra coscïenza sì che chiaro / per essa scenda de la mente il fiume”
56
Purgatorio, Canto XXI, 1: “La sete natural che mai non sazia…”
57
Purgatorio, Canto XXVII, 130 ff.
58
Paradiso, Canto I, 7: “perché appressando sé al suo disire, / nostro intelletto si
profonda tanto, / che dietro la memoria non può ire.”
59
Cf. Paradiso, Canto XI, 82.
60
Paradiso, Canto II, 34 – 36: “Per entro sé l’etterna margarita / ne ricevette,
com’acqua recepe / raggio di luce permanendo unita.”
61
Paradiso, Canto II, 43 – 45: “Lì si vedrà ciò che tenem per fede, / non
dimostrato, ma fia per sé noto / a guisa del ver primo che l’ uom crede.”
62
Paradiso, Canto III, 25 – 28: “ “Non ti maravigliar perch’io sorrida”, / me disse,
“appreso il tuo püeril coto, / poi sopra ’l vero ancor lo piè non fida, / / ma te rivolve, come
suole, a vòto:” The exact wording “sense of the true fact” is not here, but Ciardi’s
translation phrases it thus to convey the meaning most poetically, and, in this case,
theologically fitting.
63
Paradiso, Canto XXX, 58 – 60: “e di novella vista mi raccesi / tale, che nulla
luce è tanto mera, / che li occhi miei non si fosser difesi;”
64
Cf. Paradiso, Canto XXX, 122 – 124.
65
Paradiso, Canto XXXIII, 91 – 93: “La forma universal di questo nodo / credo
ch’i’ vidi, perché più di largo, / dicendo questo, mi sento chi’i’ godo.”
66
Paradiso, Canto XXXIIII, 100 – 102: “A quella luce cotal si diventa, / che
volgersi da lei per altro aspetto / è impossibil che mai si consenta;”
67
Paradiso, Canto XXXIII, 142 – 145: “A l’alto fantasia qui mancò possa; / ma
già volgeva il mio disio e ’l velle, / sì come rota ch’igualmente è mossa, // l’amor che move
il sole e l’altre stelle.”