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The Commedia's Metaphysics of Human Nature: Essays on Charity

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The Commedia's Metaphysics of Human Nature: Essays on Charity The Commedia’s Metaphysics of Human Nature: Essays on Charity, Free Will and Ensoulment Humberto Ballesteros Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2015 © 2015 Humberto Ballesteros All rights reserved Abstract The Commedia’s Metaphysics of Human Nature: Essays on Charity, Free Will and Ensoulment Humberto Ballesteros This dissertation aims to show that the Commedia develops an original and coherent philosophy of human nature. Deploying the methodologies of two separate disciplines, the history of philosophy and literary criticism, it places the poem’s ideas in the intellectual context in which they developed, and analyzes the learnedness, freshness and validity of its conclusions. The topic is divided in three themes, discussed in the same number of chapters: 1) Love and desire. After following Arendt in tracing a tension in Augustine’s works between the theological primordiality of dilectio Dei and the biblically endorsed importance of love for one’s neighbor, I argue that the Commedia develops a concept of social charity that seeks to reconcile that seminal Christian paradox. 2) Free will. Based on a study of the theory of free will advanced by Purgatorio and Paradiso, I advance the idea that Dante’s metaphysics and psychology of human freedom, particularly in regards to his description of the workings of absolute and relative will, contrast in a fundamental way with Aquinas’ in the Appendix of the Summa theologica; and based on that conclusion, and on an analysis of the example of Piccarda Donati, it is possible to conclude that the Commedia not only postulates a hierarchy of volitions as a necessary condition for human freedom, but also defines free will as the ability to formulate a self-forming action. 3) Body and soul. Based on the account of the creation of the universe found in Paradiso XXIX, I argue that the Commedia’s cosmos is strictly hylomorphic, and postulate that this theory also applies to the relationship between body and soul. Thus the transumanar depicted by the last canticle, far from a rejection of worldly existence, rather implies a reencounter with those inalienably human characteristics, but on a higher plane. Table of contents Acknowledgments ______________________________________________________ii Dedication______________________________________________________________iv Introduction ___________________________________________________________1 Chapter 1. Caritas in Augustine, Aquinas and Dante: From dilectio Dei to disio degli altri cari 9 1.1. A seminal paradox in Augustine 9 1.2. A partial rehabilitation of desire: Thomas Aquinas 22 1.3. The Commedia, or the poem of social caritas 39 1.3.1. A causal chain of desire, love and word: Inferno II 42 1.3.2. Dilectio of the Other, prison or deliverance? Inferno V 50 1.3.3. Dante’s interpersonal charity: Paradiso XXVI 56 1.3.4. Disio degli altri cari: social caritas in Heaven 79 1.4. Visual representations of a universe in love 83 Chapter 2. Augustine, Aquinas and Dante on freedom: From an intuition of liberty to a self-forming absolute will 92 2.1. Purgatorio XVI, XVII and XVIII: To be freely subjected 98 2.2. Second order volitions in Frankfurt, Aquinas and Dante 112 2.3. Dante on the paradox of Buridan’s ass 121 2.4. Dante’s self-forming absolute will: The Piccarda Donati experiment 130 2.5. Cato of Utica as the epitome of absolute will 158 Chapter 3. Dante’s hylomorphic ontology and embryology: Body, soul and the crux of transcendence 160 3.1. Dante’s strictly hylomorphic universe: Paradiso XXIX 160 3.2. Aristotle’s hylomorphic understanding of the human soul and its Christian reinterpretation 173 3.3. Dante’s hylomorphic embryology: Purgatorio XXV, 1 – 75 182 3.4. An account of human identity across birth, time and death: Purgatorio XXV, 79 – 108 196 3.5. Embodied salvation in Paradiso XXXII 205 Chapter 4. Conclusion: The point that contains the sea 208 Bibliography 214 i Acklowledgments It is a trite but undeniable truth that a doctoral dissertation is the product of a long journey. Before approaching its end, however, I had never realized how much my intellectual path coincides with il cammin della mia vita. I thank Professor Jorge Yui of Universidad de Los Andes, as well as several of my fellow students in his Dante seminar: Diana Alvarado, Jerónimo Pizarro, Norman Valencia, Andrea Lozano, Laura Quintana and Andrés Manosalva. I recall with affection the meeting with Dr. Cristo Figueroa in which he told me that he foresaw Dante in my future. I must acknowledge Marcela Castillo for overcoming my stubborn resistance to the fact that I, too, can be a philosopher. At NYU, Professors John Freccero, Jane Tylus, Rita Copeland, Haruko Momma and Thomas De Zengotita provided bases without which this study would have been impossible. At Columbia, their colleagues Achille Varzi, Jo Ann Cavallo, Andrea Malaguti, Pier Mattia Tommasino and Christia Mercer have unselfishly devoted their time, effort and considerable intellectual resources to my project, and they have my heartfelt gratitude; and perhaps even more influential have been my friends, Jenny Rhodes, Akash Kumar, Seth Fabian, Patrizio Ceccagnoli, Davide Bolognesi, Matthew Hacker, Savannah Cooper-Ramsey, Grace Delmolino, Nassime Chida, Alessia Palanti and Isabella Livorni, who may have never suspected that the many passionate conversations we had about the Commedia provided the lifeblood of my work. Principal among them is Luke Rosenau, to whom I owe several of the intuitions that I have tried to weave into a coherent pattern in these pages. I thank him in particular for convincing me of drawing delirious maps of Dante’s theory of caritas. In a place of privilege, and with the deepest admiration and gratefulness, I must mention Professor Teodolinda Barolini, quella savia gentil che tutto seppe. It has been an honor and a ii blessing to study the Trecento under her guidance. Lastly, back when the applications to Ph.D. programs were driving me insane, I had the unexpected and undeserved fortune of meeting Evelyn Ochoa. I married her a few days after my first nervous attempt to teach Italian to undergraduates. Our baby boy was born a couple weeks before my M.Phil exams. The quotidian magic of life in their company has sustained me through numberless days and nights of drudgery, self-pity, vainglory, euphoria, boredom, mania and despair. My dissertation, like each and every line that I manage to write despite myself, is theirs. iii For Evelyn and Agustín, lo fondo de la mia grazia e del mio paradiso iv Ballesteros 1 Introduction In his Defence of Poetry, contributing to a debate as old as literary culture, Percy Bysshe Shelley argues that the distinction between philosophers and poets is fabricated and pernicious. In his view, “supreme poets” are not to be considered “less capable of perceiving and teaching the truth of things, than those who have omitted that form.” He considers it evident that “Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton (…) are philosophers of the loftiest power.”1 Despite his passionate stance, as well as the foundational efforts of scholars like Bruno Nardi, Patrick Boyde, Teodolinda Barolini, Maria Corti, Christian Moevs, Allison Cornish and Manuele Gragnolati, among others, some contemporary Dantists remain hesitant to overcome the detrimental preconceptions founded on a misperceived radical distinction between philosophy and poetry. As recently as 2001, in a study of Dante’s treatment of the issue of free will, Enzo Girardi states that the critic must refrain from dwelling on the question of whether the Commedia privileges the will or the rational principle as the seat of human freedom. His argument is that “indagini del genere, del tutto legittime ai fini di una miglior conoscenza della persona di Dante e della cultura del suo tempo, se si propongono invece come mezzo per arrivare a una miglior conoscenza del poema sono del tutto inadeguate” [inquiries of that sort, entirely legitimate when their goal is to attain a better knowledge of Dante as a person and of the culture of his time, are instead entirely inadequate if they are proposed as a means to arrive to a better knowledge of the poem]2. In Girardi’s defense, one of the most influential and erudite Italian readers of Dante was 1 SHELLEY, Percy Bysshe. A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays. Text file produced by Steve Harris, Charles Franks, et. al. A Project Gutemberg Ebook, April 2004. [http://www.gutenberg.org/files/5428/5428-h/5428- h.htm] 2 GIRARDI, Enzo Noé. “Al centro del Purgatorio: il tema del libero arbitrio” (21 – 22). In GHISALBERTI, A., Ed. Il pensiero filosofico e teologico di Dante Alighieri. Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 2001. Pages 21 – 38. Ballesteros 2 of the same opinion. Much of the established practice of Dantists in the past century stems from Benedetto Croce’s argument that the underlying structure of the Commedia is not only irrelevant, but also damaging to the interpreter who seeks to understand it as poetry. In the seminal text of this view, Croce goes so far as to decry the originality of Dante’s philosophical thought, in order to fortify his conviction that what matters in the Commedia is the poetry, understood as a category radically distinct from its philosophy and ideological content3. This dissertation originates from a diametrically opposed understanding of the relationship between philosophy and poetry in the Italian vernacular tradition, and particularly in the mature work of Dante Alighieri. In an essential study of the latter, Patrick Boyde has recognized that “Dante is first and foremost a poet of the intellectual life”, and added that “most of the distinguishing features of his mature poetry derive from his study of philosophy”4. In the same tenor, a second seminal moment in Dante criticism must also be mentioned in this introduction.
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