Aspects of Dante’s Theology of Redemption: Eden, the Fall, and Christ in Dante with respect to Augustine Debora Marletta University College London PhD in Italian I, Debora Marletta confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. Signed 2 Abstract My thesis offers an account of salvation theology in Augustine and Dante under three main aspects: prelapsarianism, the fall, and the redemptive work of God in Christ. Resting on an analysis of the precise doctrinal position in these authors, the thesis is historical in conception, but is arranged in such a way as to allow the patterns of thought advanced by Augustine and Dante to enter into a dialogue one with the other, its overall purpose, therefore, being a species of conversation transcending the historical pure and simple. In keeping with this, the thesis is in three chapters, the first chapter exploring the notion of man’s original righteousness in Augustine and Dante, the second their respective senses of the fall in its essential substance and meaning, and the third their understanding of the redemptive work of the Christ. More precisely, the first chapter compares and contrasts Augustine’s sense of how it is that man stands in need of grace for the purposes of good works even prior to the fall with Dante’s sense of his direct creation in the image of God and of the implications of this for his persisting in good works without God’s further assistance. The second chapter addresses the origins of sin, and, more particularly, compares Augustine’s sense of evil as a matter of privation with Dante’s account of it in terms of dysfunctionality on the plane of properly human loving. In Chapter Three I take up the question of the relationship between nature and grace, and, in consequence of the fall, the indispensability of the latter as that whereby man is brought home once again to God. But where in Augustine (and especially in the later Augustine) it is always a question of nature as moved by grace to its proper good, I argue that for Dante grace enters into nature for the purposes of empowering it from within itself to its proper righteousness and likeness to God. Basing my argument on a strict reading of the text, and taking care in the introduction to identify the main historical and contemporary approaches to the question of Dante and Augustine (and thus to preserve at every stage a properly scholarly perspective), I nonetheless aim in my thesis to recreate in a manner over and beyond the purely historical something of the dialogue which is taking place here, a dialogue at every point informed, for all its distribution and re-distribution of 3 emphases, by a common existential intensity, a shared preoccupation with what it might mean for man to be both for self and for God. 4 Acknowledgements My most heartfelt thanks go to my supervisors, Professor John Took and Dr Catherine Keen. John Took has been with me each step of the way, guiding my intellectual growth from my undergraduate years to the day of my PhD viva. He has been witness to my successes and my stumbles, and has unfailingly and generously offered me his time whenever I called on him. I thank him for the care in which he has engaged with the various drafts of my thesis, the attention to detail he has paid to my writing, and the clarity he has always requested from it, which has forced me to constantly assess and reassess the coherence of my thought. For all these reasons this thesis is his as much as mine, although if mistakes remain they are entirely of my own making. I am especially grateful to Catherine Keen for helping me to develop and consolidate questions regarding methodology and assisting me in ordering my findings into a coherent piece of writing. I thank her for allowing me to freely show my fears and shed some tears in the coffee bars of the British Library and RADA. This project would not have been possible without her. I would like to thank the external examiners, Professor Robin Kirkpatrick and Dr Mark Davie for making the viva voce an intellectually engaging and enjoyable experience. I would like to thank my loving parents Nino Marletta and Rosa Parisi who, from a very early age, have instilled in me a curiosity for the world that motivated my move to the UK and my desire to study in a non-Italian university. I thank them for their financial but, primarily, emotional support, which has never failed to sustain me in life. I thank my sister Simona for her resilience, her passionate love for life, her laughter, her sense of humour and for always telling me to put my chin up, no matter what. I thank my wonderful mother and father in-law, Dave and Chris Westwell, for loving me unconditionally and making me the fourth of their children. I thank Rick Crownshaw and Debbie Slaughter for being the best of friends ever and introducing me to good quality wine! I thank my manager, Hazel Ingrey, for allowing me to be 5 flexible at work in the last stages of writing up and for offering calm and sensible advice at moments of stress. My deepest thanks go to my loyal friends and colleagues, Gaetano Mangiameli, Cinzia Cimino, Serena Luisi, Luca Baldoni, Simona Valenti, Anun Rodriguez, Pam Clarke, Catherine Sharp and Bernadette d’Almeida. Last but not least, I shall be eternally grateful to my husband, Guy Westwell, for putting up with me in the course of so many difficult years. His unfailing love and generosity, his fortitude towards the many obstacles we encountered in our journey together, and his loud and heartfelt laughter have been source of great inspiration and comfort to me. I also thank him for introducing me to surfing, an activity that compares to a PhD for the sheer amount of time, commitment and perseverance required for its accomplishment! 6 For Guy and Simona 7 Table of Contents Abstract .............................................................................................................................. 3 Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................ 5 List of Abbreviations ....................................................................................................10 Introduction....................................................................................................................11 1 ‐ Augustine in Dante: Critical Perspectives until 1931........................................................ 13 2 ‐ Critical Perspectives from 1931 to the Present................................................................... 16 2.1 ‐ The Historical or Doctrinal Approach .................................................................................. 18 2.2 ‐ The Confessional or Existential Approach ......................................................................... 31 2.3 ‐ The Intertextual Approach........................................................................................................ 38 3 ‐ Augustine and Dante: Sameness and Otherness ................................................................. 45 4 ‐ Methodology ....................................................................................................................................... 46 5 ‐ Chapter Division................................................................................................................................ 51 Chapter 1 ­ Prelapsarian Righteousness ...............................................................61 1.0 ‐ Introduction..................................................................................................................................... 61 1.1 ‐ Original Righteousness: Man’s Freedom and Grace in Eden...................................... 66 1.2 ‐ Original Righteousness: The Grace of Perseverance ..................................................... 74 1.3 ‐ A Comparison between Augustine and Dante .................................................................. 77 1.4 ‐ Man in Eden: Purgatorio 28...................................................................................................... 81 1.5 ‐ Man’s Likeness to God: Paradiso 7......................................................................................... 89 1.6 ‐ Conclusion........................................................................................................................................ 97 Chapter 2: The Question of Evil and Adam’s Fall............................................. 101 2.0 ‐ Introduction...................................................................................................................................101 2.1 ‐ Privatio Boni: Evil and Human Responsibility................................................................105 2.2 ‐ The Effects of Sin .........................................................................................................................118 2.3 ‐ Dante and Augustine and the Question of the Order of Love...................................124 2.4 ‐ Purgatorio 16‐18: Man and the Origin of Evil.................................................................129 2.5 ‐ Original Sin.....................................................................................................................................148 2.6 ‐ Hubris and Humility: The Tree in the Garden ................................................................153 2.7 ‐ The Consequences of Sin..........................................................................................................159