By courtesy of P. Levine
The vast majority of Dante's
readers have found Francesca da Rimini an acutely sympathetic figure-a tragic
heroine.
Yet Dante damned her, pronouncing a stern and challenging moral judgment.
His decision to place her in Hell is especially surprising when we consider that she is almost chaste compared to the other souls in the Circle of the Lustful.
All she did was to fall in love with her brother-in-law, after being tricked into marriage, if we believe Boccaccio's commentary.
And her husband murdered her before she had a chance to repent.
Compare Semiramis, the Assyrian queen, who legalized incest in order to justify her own obsession.
Or the Paris of medieval legend, who lured Achilles into a temple by arranging a sexual encounter and then killed him.
Dante'sjudgment is especially surprising when we learn that Francesca MINORE DA POLENTA was a real woman, probably an actual murder victim, and that Dante was closely connected to her family.
Late in life, banished from Florence, he found shelter in the home of Guido Novello da Polenta,
who was a love poet and Francesca's nephew.
Dante thus finished the Divine Comedy in the very household where Francesca was born, as part
of her family.
In the text, she is portrayed vividly and sympathetically, as
if Dante had heard much about her.
She even utters a phrase that
appears in one of Guido Novello's sweet, ingenuous love sonnets.
We
cannot be sure who originally wrote this phrase, but its appearance in
the Divine Comedy suggests one of two theories.
Either Guido so admired
Dante's portrait of his murdered aunt that he quoted her speech from
the Inferno, or else Dante placed Guido's words in Francesca's mouth as
homage to his friend.
Why then did Dante damn Francesca?
Perhaps he was thinking like a
philosopher.
Actually, philosophers might reach many conclusions
about this case, and few would sentence Francesca to eternal torture.
But even though philosophers would reach different conclusions, they
would all begin reasoning in the same way.
They would first analyze the
story of Paolo and Francesca until the particular detail, of character
and situation could be assessed by a general theory.
One of Dante's
most important philosophical influences was St. Thomas Aquinas, who
argued that adultery was a distinct type of lust, and that lust was a
mortal sin (Summa theoligiae, II, ii, 154, 8) .
In fact, adultery was wrong
secundum se or intrinsically, and not merely because of any harm that it
might do in a particular case.
Did Paolo and Francesca commit
adultery?
We could apply the definition that Aquinas borrowed from
Pope Leo I.
Adultery is committed when by impulse of one's libidinousness
or consent of the other party a couple lie together in breach
of the marriage vows.
We don't know from Dante's account whether
Paolo and Francesca "lay together," but Aquinas quotes the Gospel,
"Whosoever shall look at a woman to lust after her has already
committed adultery with her in his heart."
Aquinas adds:
"Much
[worse], then, are libidinous kisses and suchlike mortal sins" (ibid., 4).
So it seems that Paolo and Francesca were guilty of adultery, and
therefore Minos wrapped his tail around himself twice, categorizing
them as lustful sinners, and condemned them to the second circle of
Hell.
Perhaps Dante felt a personal connection with Francesca, but he
disregarded this sentiment, because philosophy told him where she
belonged.
His moral theory could, however, be challenged on purely
philosophical grounds.
At the most general level, we could object to his
habit ofjudging each person by one deed that reflects his or her eternal
character and that is punished retributively in Hell.
Again, Dante's
inspiration may be Aquinas, according to whom we develop dispositions
(costume, in Italian) that incline us toward particular actions .
In
turn, all of our acts either reinforce or undermine our existing
dispositions, so that our characters develop.
In the mature behavior of
each soul, Dante finds evidence of its costume.
Francesca professes an alternative philosophy.
She never uses the
word "adultery" but explains that her story is one of love, which "soon
takes hold in the gentle heart" (Inf. v, 100) .
If sensitive people
naturally and easily fall in love, then their behaviour is excusable.
Paolo,
for example, could not resist Almighty Love once he beheld Francesca's
belly persona .
She argues, further, that "Love excuses none who're loved
Yet Dante damned her, pronouncing a stern and challenging moral judgment.
His decision to place her in Hell is especially surprising when we consider that she is almost chaste compared to the other souls in the Circle of the Lustful.
All she did was to fall in love with her brother-in-law, after being tricked into marriage, if we believe Boccaccio's commentary.
And her husband murdered her before she had a chance to repent.
Compare Semiramis, the Assyrian queen, who legalized incest in order to justify her own obsession.
Or the Paris of medieval legend, who lured Achilles into a temple by arranging a sexual encounter and then killed him.
Dante'sjudgment is especially surprising when we learn that Francesca MINORE DA POLENTA was a real woman, probably an actual murder victim, and that Dante was closely connected to her family.
Late in life, banished from Florence, he found shelter in the home of Guido Novello da Polenta,
who was a love poet and Francesca's nephew.
Dante thus finished the Divine Comedy in the very household where Francesca was born, as part
of her family.
In the text, she is portrayed vividly and sympathetically, as
if Dante had heard much about her.
She even utters a phrase that
appears in one of Guido Novello's sweet, ingenuous love sonnets.
We
cannot be sure who originally wrote this phrase, but its appearance in
the Divine Comedy suggests one of two theories.
Either Guido so admired
Dante's portrait of his murdered aunt that he quoted her speech from
the Inferno, or else Dante placed Guido's words in Francesca's mouth as
homage to his friend.
Why then did Dante damn Francesca?
Perhaps he was thinking like a
philosopher.
Actually, philosophers might reach many conclusions
about this case, and few would sentence Francesca to eternal torture.
But even though philosophers would reach different conclusions, they
would all begin reasoning in the same way.
They would first analyze the
story of Paolo and Francesca until the particular detail, of character
and situation could be assessed by a general theory.
One of Dante's
most important philosophical influences was St. Thomas Aquinas, who
argued that adultery was a distinct type of lust, and that lust was a
mortal sin (Summa theoligiae, II, ii, 154, 8) .
In fact, adultery was wrong
secundum se or intrinsically, and not merely because of any harm that it
might do in a particular case.
Did Paolo and Francesca commit
adultery?
We could apply the definition that Aquinas borrowed from
Pope Leo I.
Adultery is committed when by impulse of one's libidinousness
or consent of the other party a couple lie together in breach
of the marriage vows.
We don't know from Dante's account whether
Paolo and Francesca "lay together," but Aquinas quotes the Gospel,
"Whosoever shall look at a woman to lust after her has already
committed adultery with her in his heart."
Aquinas adds:
"Much
[worse], then, are libidinous kisses and suchlike mortal sins" (ibid., 4).
So it seems that Paolo and Francesca were guilty of adultery, and
therefore Minos wrapped his tail around himself twice, categorizing
them as lustful sinners, and condemned them to the second circle of
Hell.
Perhaps Dante felt a personal connection with Francesca, but he
disregarded this sentiment, because philosophy told him where she
belonged.
His moral theory could, however, be challenged on purely
philosophical grounds.
At the most general level, we could object to his
habit ofjudging each person by one deed that reflects his or her eternal
character and that is punished retributively in Hell.
Again, Dante's
inspiration may be Aquinas, according to whom we develop dispositions
(costume, in Italian) that incline us toward particular actions .
In
turn, all of our acts either reinforce or undermine our existing
dispositions, so that our characters develop.
In the mature behavior of
each soul, Dante finds evidence of its costume.
Francesca professes an alternative philosophy.
She never uses the
word "adultery" but explains that her story is one of love, which "soon
takes hold in the gentle heart" (Inf. v, 100) .
If sensitive people
naturally and easily fall in love, then their behaviour is excusable.
Paolo,
for example, could not resist Almighty Love once he beheld Francesca's
belly persona .
She argues, further, that "Love excuses none who're loved
from loving" (Inf. v, 103).
So Francesca's requital is no more voluntary
than Paolo's desire.
It is an equal and opposite reaction.
Francesca thus
deduces a moral principle (love is beyond criticism) from a theory
about reality (love is omnipotent and natural).
Applied to her own case,
her philosophy serves as a defense.
But it contradicts Christian doctrine,
according to which the soul is free to fall and the only irresistible
power belongs to God's Love, "which moves the sun and all the other
stars" (Par. xxxiii, 145) .
For the sake of argument, let's assume that this
Christian moral theory is right.
Francesca's story, as it is told by the
chroniclers and early commentators on Dante, is a clear instance of
adultery; and adultery is a voluntary act of immoral love.
On that ground,
Dante, the author of the Divine Comedy, assigns the couple to Hell.
But Dante-the-character has a different reaction : he topples headfirst
and faints from pity.
Not only does he feel compassion for the two
wind-blown spirits, but perhaps he realizes that God condemns his pity.
His moral reaction clashes with the order of the universe .
Although
Francesca's case is an example of sin, presumably we are expected to
pity her, as Dante does, because of the details that he sees and hears.
Francesca is first described as resembling a mother dove-a sweet
image that predisposes us to like her.
When she speaks, she appeals to
Dante's "courtesy and compassion," thus requesting the same from us.
Anyone who turns a deaf ear to her story is not like Dante: a "gracious
and benevolent creature ."
After this captatio benevolentiae, she describes
her fate.
She has been abandoned by the Lord of all Creation (not a
gracious creature, apparently), and sentenced to aplace where noxious
purple air drowns out all conversation .
If we imagine ourselves in the
same condition-forever-we instinctively rebel against the injustice.
Francesca says that she has been cursed because her actions stained
the world with blood .
She thereby takes some responsibility for her sins ;
but far from making us distrust her, this confession suggests that she has
repented .
It's also an allusion to the story of Pyramus and Thisbe from
Ovid's Metamorphoses.' If Francesca is like the hapless, naive Thisbe,
then she is to be pitied, not blamed.
The allusion, then, is an efficient
rhetorical device that may persuade us to feel favorable emotions, just
as Dante's dove simile encouraged us to think tenderly ofFrancesca.
By the end of the canto, FRANCESCA has alluded to Ovid's "Ars amatoria", Boethius's Consolation, the "Confessions" of St . Augustine, the Old French
Lancelot Du Lac, Andreas Capellanus, Guido Guinizelli, Dante's own lyric
poetry, and possibly Guido Novello.
This habit reveals something about
her character: she's not an abstract example of "sinner," but a concrete
human being with a passionate interest in love poetry.
Only now do we learn that Paolo fell in love first, compelled by the
potent combination of his "gentle heart" and Franchca's "fair body."
And then, she says, love "seized me for his charm" (Inf. v, 104-105) .
Francesca's sin was minor, practically chaste, and the immediate cause
seems innocent enough.
She was carried away while reading the
Romance of Lancelot with the charming Paolo.
Dante too was the author
of love poetry-specifically, poetry about forbidden love.
So how could
he not pity someone whose fault was to be moved by a romance?
It seems, then, that the message of Francesca's story conflicts with the
conclusions of philosophy.
Even if we employed a different philosophical
theory, one that exonerated Paolo and Francesca, there are surely
some stories with which this theory would conflict. In such cases, we
must decide whether to listen to philosophy or to literature, to theories
or to stories.
We should first concede that it's impossible to distinguish between
philosophy and literature in general terms, given the enormous diversity
within both disciplines over three thousand years. There have even
been self-conscious efforts at synthesis, from Plato's dialogues to
Kierkegaard's pseudonymous worksand Thomas Mann's novels .
Dante's
son introduced him as "phylosofo poeta Dante Alighieri," and many
subsequent critics have seen him as either a philosophical poet or as a
poetic philosopher. I will return to the question of synthesis later, but
for now it will be illuminating to pose a stark alternative. Certainly,
Dante was aware of the firm distinction between philosophy and poetry
that both Augustine and Aquinas stressed .' According to their (ultimately
Platonic) theory, poems show what their narrators see from
where they stand, and how it makes them feel . Poets imitate or invent
concrete, particular objects, representing them either accurately or
with deliberate distortion, using rhetorical devices such as metaphor,
allusion, irony, and hyperbole both to describe and to stimulate
emotions. Philosophers, on the other hand, seek the underlying
structure of the universe, its laws and principles. Philosophy thus
exemplifies reason, with its abstract, objective rules and its dispassionate,
third-person style. Hell, says Dante, is for those who "place reason
below desire" (Inf. v, 39) . Therefore, it is a sin is to favor poetry
overSo Francesca's requital is no more voluntary
than Paolo's desire.
It is an equal and opposite reaction.
Francesca thus
deduces a moral principle (love is beyond criticism) from a theory
about reality (love is omnipotent and natural).
Applied to her own case,
her philosophy serves as a defense.
But it contradicts Christian doctrine,
according to which the soul is free to fall and the only irresistible
power belongs to God's Love, "which moves the sun and all the other
stars" (Par. xxxiii, 145) .
For the sake of argument, let's assume that this
Christian moral theory is right.
Francesca's story, as it is told by the
chroniclers and early commentators on Dante, is a clear instance of
adultery; and adultery is a voluntary act of immoral love.
On that ground,
Dante, the author of the Divine Comedy, assigns the couple to Hell.
But Dante-the-character has a different reaction : he topples headfirst
and faints from pity.
Not only does he feel compassion for the two
wind-blown spirits, but perhaps he realizes that God condemns his pity.
His moral reaction clashes with the order of the universe .
Although
Francesca's case is an example of sin, presumably we are expected to
pity her, as Dante does, because of the details that he sees and hears.
Francesca is first described as resembling a mother dove-a sweet
image that predisposes us to like her.
When she speaks, she appeals to
Dante's "courtesy and compassion," thus requesting the same from us.
Anyone who turns a deaf ear to her story is not like Dante: a "gracious
and benevolent creature ."
After this captatio benevolentiae, she describes
her fate.
She has been abandoned by the Lord of all Creation (not a
gracious creature, apparently), and sentenced to aplace where noxious
purple air drowns out all conversation .
If we imagine ourselves in the
same condition-forever-we instinctively rebel against the injustice.
Francesca says that she has been cursed because her actions stained
the world with blood .
She thereby takes some responsibility for her sins ;
but far from making us distrust her, this confession suggests that she has
repented .
It's also an allusion to the story of Pyramus and Thisbe from
Ovid's Metamorphoses.' If Francesca is like the hapless, naive Thisbe,
then she is to be pitied, not blamed.
The allusion, then, is an efficient
rhetorical device that may persuade us to feel favorable emotions, just
as Dante's dove simile encouraged us to think tenderly ofFrancesca.
By the end of the canto, FRANCESCA has alluded to Ovid's "Ars amatoria", Boethius's Consolation, the "Confessions" of St . Augustine, the Old French
Lancelot Du Lac, Andreas Capellanus, Guido Guinizelli, Dante's own lyric
poetry, and possibly Guido Novello.
This habit reveals something about
her character: she's not an abstract example of "sinner," but a concrete
human being with a passionate interest in love poetry.
Only now do we learn that Paolo fell in love first, compelled by the
potent combination of his "gentle heart" and Franchca's "fair body."
And then, she says, love "seized me for his charm" (Inf. v, 104-105) .
Francesca's sin was minor, practically chaste, and the immediate cause
seems innocent enough.
She was carried away while reading the
Romance of Lancelot with the charming Paolo.
Dante too was the author
of love poetry-specifically, poetry about forbidden love.
So how could
he not pity someone whose fault was to be moved by a romance?
It seems, then, that the message of Francesca's story conflicts with the
conclusions of philosophy.
Even if we employed a different philosophical
theory, one that exonerated Paolo and Francesca, there are surely
some stories with which this theory would conflict. In such cases, we
must decide whether to listen to philosophy or to literature, to theories
or to stories.
We should first concede that it's impossible to distinguish between
philosophy and literature in general terms, given the enormous diversity
within both disciplines over three thousand years. There have even
been self-conscious efforts at synthesis, from Plato's dialogues to
Kierkegaard's pseudonymous worksand Thomas Mann's novels .
Dante's
son introduced him as "phylosofo poeta Dante Alighieri," and many
subsequent critics have seen him as either a philosophical poet or as a
poetic philosopher. I will return to the question of synthesis later, but
for now it will be illuminating to pose a stark alternative. Certainly,
Dante was aware of the firm distinction between philosophy and poetry
that both Augustine and Aquinas stressed .' According to their (ultimately
Platonic) theory, poems show what their narrators see from
where they stand, and how it makes them feel . Poets imitate or invent
concrete, particular objects, representing them either accurately or
with deliberate distortion, using rhetorical devices such as metaphor,
allusion, irony, and hyperbole both to describe and to stimulate
emotions. Philosophers, on the other hand, seek the underlying
structure of the universe, its laws and principles. Philosophy thus
exemplifies reason, with its abstract, objective rules and its dispassionate,
third-person style. Hell, says Dante, is for those who "place reason
philosophy.
Socrates bans the poets from the ideal state because their work can
incite morally inappropriate emotions. Above all, tragic poems can
make the world look sorrowful. They often suggest that some situations
have no rational solution or meaning and that only pity or fear is
appropriate. But Socrates argues that there is a rational solution to
every moral dilemma. No matter how awful a situation might be, if we
respond rationally by choosing the best available option, then we have
nothing to be upset about (Republic x, 604b-d) . Beatrice adopts the
same view in Dante's Paradise (Par. iv, 103-108) .
If Dante considered tragedies while he was writing his own Commedia,
he might have thought of Tristan and Yseult.
In fact, Tristan blows in
the same infernal storm that buffets Francesca.
According to the
Romance, he and Yseult fell in love because of a "love" potion that they tasted
in error.
Their irresistible, mutual passion clashed with Yseult's marriage
vows and Tristan's feudal oaths.
This conflict could only be
resolved by their simultaneous and voluptuous expiration .
The cause of
their sin was bad luck, and death was the only solution-a common
tragic formula.
In Francesca's case, another Arthurian romance is the
potion that engenders adultery and death .
So literature evidently has
the potential to be a poison.
Dante heightens his critique by daring to imagine what tragic lovers
would experience beyond the grave.
Whereas Tristan and Yseult clung
together for a few moments in death's embrace, Paolo and Francesca
"will never be parted."
They are for ever panting, and for ever young.
By
making their death scene infinitely long, Dante heightens the pathospushes
it to such an extreme, in fact, that he deflates the whole
romantic-love tradition .
In romantic verse, lovers commonly yearn for
perfect union, just as religious mystics sometimes strive to lose their
separate identities altogether and merge with God.
Since actual union
is impossible on earth, the Tristan myth and similar stories suggest that
death alone can bring lovers together.'
But for orthodox Christians,
love is always an ethical relationship among distinct souls. Even in
heaven, the saved retain their identities as their relationships with God
become perfect. Dante indicates what ideal love is like when he
explains how his Lady, Beatrice, would treat him in Purgatory. Far from
merging her soul with his in ecstasy, she chides him for his sinsthereby
showing concern for his specific history and the future of his
soul (hers is already saved) .' Meanwhile, down in Hell, Paolo and
Francesca must remain separate characters for all eternity, but their
punishment for having wanted to merge is to be permanently coupled.
Dante suggests that death is not a satisfactory resolution to the pathos
of romantic love, so it's better to do what reason and m4Jrality demand.
There would be no tragedy, only the happy-ending of salvation, if
people would avoid sin in the first place. And this is always possible for
rational agents .
Literature clashes with philosophy whenever it depicts inappropriate
pathos-a serious danger, since skilful storytellers can make us sympathize
with almost anyone. Poets and novelists also differ from most
philosophers in their attitude toward metaphors, similes, and symbols
that are not literally true. Aquinas writes, "To go forward with various
similes and representations is proper to poetry, which is the feeblest of
all disciplines. Thus to use similes is not suited to [theology] ." According
to Aquinas, only God has license to write metaphorically, as He does
in Scripture (Summa theol. I, i, ix .) . Dante uses literary tropes, but with
an important qualification that aligns him with Aquinas. "It would," he
writes, "be a great embarrassment if someone wrote apoem and placed
something under the cover of a figure or a rhetorical coloring, and
then, when asked, didn't know how to strip his words of this cover so as
to reveal the intended truth."' Apparently, each rhetorical figure points
to a meaning that could be stated in plain words. If this is true, then
metaphors (which are half-lies) are illegitimate unless their moral or
spiritual meaning is both true and obvious.
Butwhat about the Divine Comedy, a concrete story that is not literally
true, and that is full of pathos? No one can read the accounts of human
beings under eternal torture without feeling some sympathy for the
damned and some anger at the God who contrived this Hell. Such pity
fills Dante's eyes with intoxicating tears and forces him to block his ears;
it pains him even in recollection; and it tempts him to write without
moral restraint (Inf. xxix, 44; xvi, 12; xxvi, 19) . But all this is quite
immoral. Hell was made by the "divine authority, highest wisdom, and
first love" (Inf. iii, 5-6) . As Virgil asks, "Who can be more nefarious than
he who brings compassion to bear on God'sjudgment?" (Inf. xx, 29-30) .
Dante learns better as he ascends toward heaven; his language grows
less vivid and concrete as his subjects become more virtuous. He's on
the right track in Purgatory, where he "consoles himself' at the sight of
God's "just punishment," and tells his readers, "I do not want you to
stray from your good purposewhen you hear how God requires debts to
be paid; attend not to the form of correction, but to the outcome"
(Purg. xxi, 6; x, 106-110) . Already, the narrative dwells less on
sinners'Socrates bans the poets from the ideal state because their work can
incite morally inappropriate emotions. Above all, tragic poems can
make the world look sorrowful. They often suggest that some situations
have no rational solution or meaning and that only pity or fear is
appropriate. But Socrates argues that there is a rational solution to
every moral dilemma. No matter how awful a situation might be, if we
respond rationally by choosing the best available option, then we have
nothing to be upset about (Republic x, 604b-d) . Beatrice adopts the
same view in Dante's Paradise (Par. iv, 103-108) .
If Dante considered tragedies while he was writing his own Commedia,
he might have thought of Tristan and Yseult.
In fact, Tristan blows in
the same infernal storm that buffets Francesca.
According to the
Romance, he and Yseult fell in love because of a "love" potion that they tasted
in error.
Their irresistible, mutual passion clashed with Yseult's marriage
vows and Tristan's feudal oaths.
This conflict could only be
resolved by their simultaneous and voluptuous expiration .
The cause of
their sin was bad luck, and death was the only solution-a common
tragic formula.
In Francesca's case, another Arthurian romance is the
potion that engenders adultery and death .
So literature evidently has
the potential to be a poison.
Dante heightens his critique by daring to imagine what tragic lovers
would experience beyond the grave.
Whereas Tristan and Yseult clung
together for a few moments in death's embrace, Paolo and Francesca
"will never be parted."
They are for ever panting, and for ever young.
By
making their death scene infinitely long, Dante heightens the pathospushes
it to such an extreme, in fact, that he deflates the whole
romantic-love tradition .
In romantic verse, lovers commonly yearn for
perfect union, just as religious mystics sometimes strive to lose their
separate identities altogether and merge with God.
Since actual union
is impossible on earth, the Tristan myth and similar stories suggest that
death alone can bring lovers together.'
But for orthodox Christians,
love is always an ethical relationship among distinct souls. Even in
heaven, the saved retain their identities as their relationships with God
become perfect. Dante indicates what ideal love is like when he
explains how his Lady, Beatrice, would treat him in Purgatory. Far from
merging her soul with his in ecstasy, she chides him for his sinsthereby
showing concern for his specific history and the future of his
soul (hers is already saved) .' Meanwhile, down in Hell, Paolo and
Francesca must remain separate characters for all eternity, but their
punishment for having wanted to merge is to be permanently coupled.
Dante suggests that death is not a satisfactory resolution to the pathos
of romantic love, so it's better to do what reason and m4Jrality demand.
There would be no tragedy, only the happy-ending of salvation, if
people would avoid sin in the first place. And this is always possible for
rational agents .
Literature clashes with philosophy whenever it depicts inappropriate
pathos-a serious danger, since skilful storytellers can make us sympathize
with almost anyone. Poets and novelists also differ from most
philosophers in their attitude toward metaphors, similes, and symbols
that are not literally true. Aquinas writes, "To go forward with various
similes and representations is proper to poetry, which is the feeblest of
all disciplines. Thus to use similes is not suited to [theology] ." According
to Aquinas, only God has license to write metaphorically, as He does
in Scripture (Summa theol. I, i, ix .) . Dante uses literary tropes, but with
an important qualification that aligns him with Aquinas. "It would," he
writes, "be a great embarrassment if someone wrote apoem and placed
something under the cover of a figure or a rhetorical coloring, and
then, when asked, didn't know how to strip his words of this cover so as
to reveal the intended truth."' Apparently, each rhetorical figure points
to a meaning that could be stated in plain words. If this is true, then
metaphors (which are half-lies) are illegitimate unless their moral or
spiritual meaning is both true and obvious.
Butwhat about the Divine Comedy, a concrete story that is not literally
true, and that is full of pathos? No one can read the accounts of human
beings under eternal torture without feeling some sympathy for the
damned and some anger at the God who contrived this Hell. Such pity
fills Dante's eyes with intoxicating tears and forces him to block his ears;
it pains him even in recollection; and it tempts him to write without
moral restraint (Inf. xxix, 44; xvi, 12; xxvi, 19) . But all this is quite
immoral. Hell was made by the "divine authority, highest wisdom, and
first love" (Inf. iii, 5-6) . As Virgil asks, "Who can be more nefarious than
he who brings compassion to bear on God'sjudgment?" (Inf. xx, 29-30) .
Dante learns better as he ascends toward heaven; his language grows
less vivid and concrete as his subjects become more virtuous. He's on
the right track in Purgatory, where he "consoles himself' at the sight of
God's "just punishment," and tells his readers, "I do not want you to
stray from your good purposewhen you hear how God requires debts to
be paid; attend not to the form of correction, but to the outcome"
emotions than on general questions, such as the taxonomy of sin
and
the relationship between freedom and evil . By the time Dante reaches
Paradiso, the poem is largely an excuse for theological treatises by dead
saints .
Finally, at the highest point in Heaven, Dante beholds Divine Love
itself. What he sees is a metaphysical theory articulated in the vocabulary
of scholastic philosophy, although it is paradoxical and beyond the
power of human minds to grasp:
In that profundity I saw confined,
sewn with love into a book's cohesion
tha~which in the universe is unbound:
substances, accidents, their dispositionall
but combined in such a way
that what I say gives scant illumination.
(Par. xxxiii, 85-90)
Augustine, Aquinas, and other medieval authorities had warned
about the dangers of metaphor. But Dante's description of the universe
as a book justifies his own poetry. Viewed from Paradise, all of the
concrete, emotional details that he has seen are mere parts of a divine
whole that exceeds human reason or speech .
This is true, for example,
of Francesca da Rimini, whose disposition (costume) was that of a
romantic lover. She should not be pitied as an individual, but viewed as
a necessary component of a perfect totality.
The whole Comedy, then, is a journey from literature to philosophy,
from emotion to reason, from metaphor to abstract language, from
concrete instance to general rule, from fictional memoir to speculative
theology, from perspective to the thing-in-itself. If Dante has synthesized
narrative and philosophy, it is by telling a story about overcoming
all stories.
I have argued that Dante equates reason with philosophy, and desire
with poetry, and consequently he condemns his own pity for Francesca.
We readers should ignore all the pretty similes and the language about
"gentle hearts," "sweet sighing," and "deep passion." The text is a moral
test . We will pass if we feel no pity except when reason tells us that
someone deserves it . Francesca, having committeda mortal sin, is fit for
punishment, not for sympathy.
It is possible to adopt exactly the opposite posidon, preferring
personal emotion over dispassionate reason, narrative over theory, and
particular cases over abstract generalizations .
Longfellow baldly stated
the Romantics' preference : "It is the heart, and not the brain / That to
the highest doth attain."
The story of Paolo and Francesca became very
popular in Longfellow's century, because the Romantics sympathized
with the doomed lovers .
Keats dreamt that he had kissed Francesca, and
when he awoke, he turned his dream into a sonnet:
"Pale were the lips
I kiss'd, and fair the form / I floated with, about that melancholy
storm."
The Romantics deliberately ignored the overall lesson of the
Divine Comedy-that it is sinful to allow desire to prevail over reason.
"O
for a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!" Keats wrote.'
Like Dante, I think that our moral judgments should be rational.
We
shouldn't assess people as we want to, but should look for reasons and
explanations for every judgment. Our emotions can obviously be
improper, whereas our reasons can be tested, considered, debated with
other people, and thereby improved . So it is wrong to make reason a
slave of the passions .
But I don't agree that philosophy is necessarily more reasonable than
literature . Why should we rely only upon thought that happens to be
abstract, general, and theoretical?
Consider Francesca's greeting:
O gracious and benevolent creature,
moving through mulberry air to visit
us, who dyed the world a bloody color,
if we had a friend in the universe's lord
we'd pray to him to grant you peace,
since you took pity on our bitter plight.
(Inf. v, 88-93)
Here she uses several logical connectives to link concrete images,
references, and ideas into asingle sentence whose deliberate purpose is
to move us .
This is surely evidence of a rational intellect. Like her, we
can tell stories or use metaphors with good sense-or we can apply
general rules in a completely irrational way. For example, just when
King Lear is losing his mind, he starts to make broad philosophical
pronouncements: "Man's life's as cheap as beast's," and so on (II.iv.271) .
Moral philosophy aims to tell us in advance what facts are going to be
morally relevant in any case that we may encounter. Benthamite
the relationship between freedom and evil . By the time Dante reaches
Paradiso, the poem is largely an excuse for theological treatises by dead
saints .
Finally, at the highest point in Heaven, Dante beholds Divine Love
itself. What he sees is a metaphysical theory articulated in the vocabulary
of scholastic philosophy, although it is paradoxical and beyond the
power of human minds to grasp:
In that profundity I saw confined,
sewn with love into a book's cohesion
tha~which in the universe is unbound:
substances, accidents, their dispositionall
but combined in such a way
that what I say gives scant illumination.
(Par. xxxiii, 85-90)
Augustine, Aquinas, and other medieval authorities had warned
about the dangers of metaphor. But Dante's description of the universe
as a book justifies his own poetry. Viewed from Paradise, all of the
concrete, emotional details that he has seen are mere parts of a divine
whole that exceeds human reason or speech .
This is true, for example,
of Francesca da Rimini, whose disposition (costume) was that of a
romantic lover. She should not be pitied as an individual, but viewed as
a necessary component of a perfect totality.
The whole Comedy, then, is a journey from literature to philosophy,
from emotion to reason, from metaphor to abstract language, from
concrete instance to general rule, from fictional memoir to speculative
theology, from perspective to the thing-in-itself. If Dante has synthesized
narrative and philosophy, it is by telling a story about overcoming
all stories.
I have argued that Dante equates reason with philosophy, and desire
with poetry, and consequently he condemns his own pity for Francesca.
We readers should ignore all the pretty similes and the language about
"gentle hearts," "sweet sighing," and "deep passion." The text is a moral
test . We will pass if we feel no pity except when reason tells us that
someone deserves it . Francesca, having committeda mortal sin, is fit for
punishment, not for sympathy.
It is possible to adopt exactly the opposite posidon, preferring
personal emotion over dispassionate reason, narrative over theory, and
particular cases over abstract generalizations .
Longfellow baldly stated
the Romantics' preference : "It is the heart, and not the brain / That to
the highest doth attain."
The story of Paolo and Francesca became very
popular in Longfellow's century, because the Romantics sympathized
with the doomed lovers .
Keats dreamt that he had kissed Francesca, and
when he awoke, he turned his dream into a sonnet:
"Pale were the lips
I kiss'd, and fair the form / I floated with, about that melancholy
storm."
The Romantics deliberately ignored the overall lesson of the
Divine Comedy-that it is sinful to allow desire to prevail over reason.
"O
for a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!" Keats wrote.'
Like Dante, I think that our moral judgments should be rational.
We
shouldn't assess people as we want to, but should look for reasons and
explanations for every judgment. Our emotions can obviously be
improper, whereas our reasons can be tested, considered, debated with
other people, and thereby improved . So it is wrong to make reason a
slave of the passions .
But I don't agree that philosophy is necessarily more reasonable than
literature . Why should we rely only upon thought that happens to be
abstract, general, and theoretical?
Consider Francesca's greeting:
O gracious and benevolent creature,
moving through mulberry air to visit
us, who dyed the world a bloody color,
if we had a friend in the universe's lord
we'd pray to him to grant you peace,
since you took pity on our bitter plight.
(Inf. v, 88-93)
Here she uses several logical connectives to link concrete images,
references, and ideas into asingle sentence whose deliberate purpose is
to move us .
This is surely evidence of a rational intellect. Like her, we
can tell stories or use metaphors with good sense-or we can apply
general rules in a completely irrational way. For example, just when
King Lear is losing his mind, he starts to make broad philosophical
pronouncements: "Man's life's as cheap as beast's," and so on (II.iv.271) .
Moral philosophy aims to tell us in advance what facts are going to be
morally relevant in any case that we may encounter. Benthamite
utilitarians advise us to concentrate on only one fact in all cases : the
net
change in happiness. But philosophers need not be monomaniacs like
Bentham. Aquinas wrote thousands of pages, carefully distinguishing
the virtues, vices, sins, sacraments, meritorious acts, and other categories
that could be relevant in select circumstances. Nevertheless, he
sought a finite list of moral concepts.
If such concepts were clearly defined, and each one ruled a separate
territory, then we could solve any ethical problem by correctly analyzing
the case at hand and applying the appropriate concept.
Given the
morally relevant facts of her case, Francesca's story would either be an
example of "adultery" or an instance of "love."
Or both words might
apply, blot one would outrank the other. I don't believe, however, that
most moral terms are clearly defined ."
"Love" is hopelessly vague and
polysemous.
As for "adultery" we can understand it in one of two ways.
First, it can mean "sexual relations outside of an existing marriage ."
Then the word will deserve a negative ring, because we will often use it
along with other pejorative terms: "betrayal," "egoism," "hurt," "deceit."
However, alternative vocabulary, such as "love," "liberation," or even
"duty," might be more appropriate under specific circumstances.
Twelfthand
thirteenth-century theologians noted that God sometimes commands
or excuses particular instances of sexual infidelity, as He did in
the cases of Reuben, Gideon, and other righteous Israelites . Perhaps,
then, the prohibition on adultery is a rule-of-thumb generalization,
derived from the majority of concrete stories about infidelity, and not a
categorical principle.
The scholastics adopted a different approach, however. They argued
that "adultery" meant unjustified sex out ofwedlock. Thus, even though
the Ten Commandments forbade adultery secundum se, some cases of
extramarital sex could be excused." If we follow this second route,
then we can declare adultery (and murder, lying, theft, and other sins)
to be wrong in all cases, but we will have achieved this result by using
the words only when the acts are unjustified. We will possess a moral
theory composed of prohibitions, but their definitions will be circular.
Kant reasons much the same way when, following scholastic practice, he
distinguishes between a "lie" (mendacium), which always violates moral
law, and a mere "untruth" (falsiloquium), which is permissible ."
No matter which of these approaches we take to defining "adultery"
we must admit that philosophy gives us little guidance . By reading the
Bible or by applying the Categorical Imperative, we can discover that
adultery, lying, and murder are wrong intrinsically. But we cannot tell
which acts are murders instead ofhomicides, or lies instead of untruths,
or cases of adultery instead of examples of love, ,Rity, freedom or
happiness. So there is no escaping our responsibility to make concrete
judgments of particular cases. We make such judgments by devising
detailed, perceptive stories, metaphors, and analogies that show us what
considerations are salient, and what moral words we ought to use to
describe the events in question . To be sure, more than one story can be
told about most situations . Indeed, several stories should be told, and
then we must deliberate . This requires weighing narratives, considering
their perceptiveness, accuracy, completeness, consistency, impartiality,
and other values that we are accustomed to citing when we evaluate
literature . The results, unfortunately, are rarely certain. But certainty is
purchased only at the price of simplification .
Philosophy asks us to apply general rules, and in the process we may
forget details that are morally relevant.
So, for example, if we define
Francesca's behavior as "adultery" we lose sight of the unusual circumstances,
such as the fact that she was murdered before she could repent.
And even if she was guilty of adultery, that's not all that we could say
about her. She was unfaithful, perhaps, but also spirited, passionate,
tender. Philosophy can make us too quick tojudge (or to excuse)-too
apt to reduce complex individuals to simple formulas."
Still, if philosophy presents moral dangers, aren't there also risks
inherent in story-telling? There are many, including the possibility that
any narrative maybe too ambiguous to guide action, may be misunderstood
by careless readers, or may deliberately advance pernicious
doctrines. Even if fiction teaches us empathy for concrete characters,
this is not necessarily a moral advantage, because sadists as much as
saints want to know how other people think." But philosophy has also
failed to make its adepts into good people, and has taught immoral
doctrines . Aristotle condoned slavery, gentle Hume was a racist, and
Heidegger was beneath contempt. Nor are philosophical arguments so
clear that everyone must interpret them alike . It seems, then, that no
mental discipline will guarantee moral results . At best, literature helps
us to understand the interior life of concrete fictional characters,
thereby cultivating an interpretive and empathetic skill that is useful if
we want to act sensitively in our own lives . This skill will prove equally
useful if we choose to act cruelly, playing on the weaknesses of our
fellow human beings. Still, when people behave viciously, it is sometimes
because of a philosophical or theological doctrine.
The best solution, then, is not to replace stories with theories, but to
build fair procedures ofjudgment. In law courts, for example, we
allowchange in happiness. But philosophers need not be monomaniacs like
Bentham. Aquinas wrote thousands of pages, carefully distinguishing
the virtues, vices, sins, sacraments, meritorious acts, and other categories
that could be relevant in select circumstances. Nevertheless, he
sought a finite list of moral concepts.
If such concepts were clearly defined, and each one ruled a separate
territory, then we could solve any ethical problem by correctly analyzing
the case at hand and applying the appropriate concept.
Given the
morally relevant facts of her case, Francesca's story would either be an
example of "adultery" or an instance of "love."
Or both words might
apply, blot one would outrank the other. I don't believe, however, that
most moral terms are clearly defined ."
"Love" is hopelessly vague and
polysemous.
As for "adultery" we can understand it in one of two ways.
First, it can mean "sexual relations outside of an existing marriage ."
Then the word will deserve a negative ring, because we will often use it
along with other pejorative terms: "betrayal," "egoism," "hurt," "deceit."
However, alternative vocabulary, such as "love," "liberation," or even
"duty," might be more appropriate under specific circumstances.
Twelfthand
thirteenth-century theologians noted that God sometimes commands
or excuses particular instances of sexual infidelity, as He did in
the cases of Reuben, Gideon, and other righteous Israelites . Perhaps,
then, the prohibition on adultery is a rule-of-thumb generalization,
derived from the majority of concrete stories about infidelity, and not a
categorical principle.
The scholastics adopted a different approach, however. They argued
that "adultery" meant unjustified sex out ofwedlock. Thus, even though
the Ten Commandments forbade adultery secundum se, some cases of
extramarital sex could be excused." If we follow this second route,
then we can declare adultery (and murder, lying, theft, and other sins)
to be wrong in all cases, but we will have achieved this result by using
the words only when the acts are unjustified. We will possess a moral
theory composed of prohibitions, but their definitions will be circular.
Kant reasons much the same way when, following scholastic practice, he
distinguishes between a "lie" (mendacium), which always violates moral
law, and a mere "untruth" (falsiloquium), which is permissible ."
No matter which of these approaches we take to defining "adultery"
we must admit that philosophy gives us little guidance . By reading the
Bible or by applying the Categorical Imperative, we can discover that
adultery, lying, and murder are wrong intrinsically. But we cannot tell
which acts are murders instead ofhomicides, or lies instead of untruths,
or cases of adultery instead of examples of love, ,Rity, freedom or
happiness. So there is no escaping our responsibility to make concrete
judgments of particular cases. We make such judgments by devising
detailed, perceptive stories, metaphors, and analogies that show us what
considerations are salient, and what moral words we ought to use to
describe the events in question . To be sure, more than one story can be
told about most situations . Indeed, several stories should be told, and
then we must deliberate . This requires weighing narratives, considering
their perceptiveness, accuracy, completeness, consistency, impartiality,
and other values that we are accustomed to citing when we evaluate
literature . The results, unfortunately, are rarely certain. But certainty is
purchased only at the price of simplification .
Philosophy asks us to apply general rules, and in the process we may
forget details that are morally relevant.
So, for example, if we define
Francesca's behavior as "adultery" we lose sight of the unusual circumstances,
such as the fact that she was murdered before she could repent.
And even if she was guilty of adultery, that's not all that we could say
about her. She was unfaithful, perhaps, but also spirited, passionate,
tender. Philosophy can make us too quick tojudge (or to excuse)-too
apt to reduce complex individuals to simple formulas."
Still, if philosophy presents moral dangers, aren't there also risks
inherent in story-telling? There are many, including the possibility that
any narrative maybe too ambiguous to guide action, may be misunderstood
by careless readers, or may deliberately advance pernicious
doctrines. Even if fiction teaches us empathy for concrete characters,
this is not necessarily a moral advantage, because sadists as much as
saints want to know how other people think." But philosophy has also
failed to make its adepts into good people, and has taught immoral
doctrines . Aristotle condoned slavery, gentle Hume was a racist, and
Heidegger was beneath contempt. Nor are philosophical arguments so
clear that everyone must interpret them alike . It seems, then, that no
mental discipline will guarantee moral results . At best, literature helps
us to understand the interior life of concrete fictional characters,
thereby cultivating an interpretive and empathetic skill that is useful if
we want to act sensitively in our own lives . This skill will prove equally
useful if we choose to act cruelly, playing on the weaknesses of our
fellow human beings. Still, when people behave viciously, it is sometimes
because of a philosophical or theological doctrine.
The best solution, then, is not to replace stories with theories, but to
both sides to call and question witnesses; we exclude interested
parties
from juries; and we separate the roles ofjudge, juror, and counselor.
Similarly, in moral discussions, we can strive to make the procedures
fair and rational, so that many perspectives can be considered without
prejudice. One of our goals should be to identify the best stories and
interpretations, and here Dante has useful advice .
Francesca is depicted as a person who thinks almost entirely in the
terms of romantic literature .
Practically every word she says is quoted
from the popular fiction of her day, whether the dolce stil nuovo of Dante
and Guido Guinizelli, or such French prose romances as Lancelot du lac.
Given the popularity of these works, Francesca is like a modern person
who speaks entirely in lines borrowed from top-forty songs.
In other words, she speaks in cliches.
Cliches are generally seen as
the opposite of good writing-as an aesthetic failing-but Hannah
Arendt has described their power to produce (or to excuse) true evil .
On trial in Jerusalem, Adolf Eichmann remarked that the Holocaust
was "One of the greatest crimes in the history of humanity.""
He also
said that he wanted "to make peace with his former enemies" and that
he "would gladly hang [himself] in public as a warning example for all
anti-Semites on this earth."
Arendt writes that these remarks were "selffabricated
stock phrases" popular among Germans after 1945.
They
were as "devoid of reality as those [official Nazi] cliches by which the
people had lived for twelve years; and you could almost see what an
, extraordinary sense of elation' it gave to the speaker the moment
[each one] popped out of his mouth. His mind was filled to the brim
with such sentences" (p. 53) . In fact, she writes, "he was genuinely
incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliche" (p. 48) .
When Eichmann told a "hard-luck story" ofslow advancement within
the SS, he apparently expected his Israeli police interrogator to show
"normal, human" sympathy for him (p . 50) . Similarly, when he visited a
Jewish acquaintance named Storfer in Auschwitz, he recalled: "We had
a normal, human encounter. He told me of his grief and sorrow: I said :
`Well, my dear old friend, we [!] certainly got it! What rotten luck!"' He
arranged relatively easy work for Storfer-sweeping gravel paths-and
then asked:
"`Will that be all right, Mr. Storfer? Will that suit you?' Whereupon he was
very pleased, and we shook hands, and then he was given the broom and
sat down on his bench . It was a great innerjoy to me that I could at least
see the man with whom I had worked for so many long yhrs, and that we
could speak with one another." Six weeks after this normal, human
encounter, Storfer was dead-not gassed, apparently, but shot . (p . 51)
If Arendt is to be believed, Eichmann's total reliance on cliches
permitted him to ignore the smoke from the Auschwitz ovens and to
believe that Storfer was "very pleased." Eichmann's "inability to think,"
she writes, was an "inability to look at anything from the other fellow's
point ofview" (pp. 48-49) . Since the circumstances were extraordinary,
we shouldn't immediately conclude from this example that cliches are
pernicious. It's one thing to rely on stock phrases when you're in love,
and quite another thing when you're the logistical mastermind of the
Holocaust. Nevertheless, there is always a risk that cliches will prevent us
from exercising judgment and seeing the details of the world around
us. Banal stories can be at least as harmful as philosophical generalizations.
And even Hamlet or the Gospels can be misread as treasuries of
cliche.
Consider Francesca.
She is not in love with Paolo, for she hardly
knows him.
Her speech to Dante tells us nothing about his character
except that he has "a gentle heart" -- a medieval commonplace -- and that
he is attracted to her.
She doesn't even utter his name.
She thinks she's
in love with Paolo because she has been soaked in the platitudes of
romantic poetry.
Francesca is really in love with the idea of a courtly suitor, not
with the actual human being who's reading the story of Lancelot with her.
It's not his
character that makes her love him, but the "story of Lancelot" that they're reading
together.
In her mind, Paolo becomes "Sir Lancelot of the Lake", and she become the adulterous queen Guinivere.
Love ought to be a bond between two whole human beings.
This
requires some mutual knowledge of the other's thoughts, plans, and
values, without which we cannot act sensitively.
It is not an automatic
"fit" between people, as in the case of Pyramus and Thisbe, nor an
accident, like the potion-induced passion of Tristan and Yseult, but
rather something that we create through effort and adjustment.
When
people are attracted only physically, we call it "lust"-the sin that is
punished in the second circle of Dante's Hell.
Far
from loving Paolo, Francesca feels for him a kind of lust.
It's not his
body that attracts her, but his superficial resemblance to characters
from romantic fiction.
from juries; and we separate the roles ofjudge, juror, and counselor.
Similarly, in moral discussions, we can strive to make the procedures
fair and rational, so that many perspectives can be considered without
prejudice. One of our goals should be to identify the best stories and
interpretations, and here Dante has useful advice .
Francesca is depicted as a person who thinks almost entirely in the
terms of romantic literature .
Practically every word she says is quoted
from the popular fiction of her day, whether the dolce stil nuovo of Dante
and Guido Guinizelli, or such French prose romances as Lancelot du lac.
Given the popularity of these works, Francesca is like a modern person
who speaks entirely in lines borrowed from top-forty songs.
In other words, she speaks in cliches.
Cliches are generally seen as
the opposite of good writing-as an aesthetic failing-but Hannah
Arendt has described their power to produce (or to excuse) true evil .
On trial in Jerusalem, Adolf Eichmann remarked that the Holocaust
was "One of the greatest crimes in the history of humanity.""
He also
said that he wanted "to make peace with his former enemies" and that
he "would gladly hang [himself] in public as a warning example for all
anti-Semites on this earth."
Arendt writes that these remarks were "selffabricated
stock phrases" popular among Germans after 1945.
They
were as "devoid of reality as those [official Nazi] cliches by which the
people had lived for twelve years; and you could almost see what an
, extraordinary sense of elation' it gave to the speaker the moment
[each one] popped out of his mouth. His mind was filled to the brim
with such sentences" (p. 53) . In fact, she writes, "he was genuinely
incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliche" (p. 48) .
When Eichmann told a "hard-luck story" ofslow advancement within
the SS, he apparently expected his Israeli police interrogator to show
"normal, human" sympathy for him (p . 50) . Similarly, when he visited a
Jewish acquaintance named Storfer in Auschwitz, he recalled: "We had
a normal, human encounter. He told me of his grief and sorrow: I said :
`Well, my dear old friend, we [!] certainly got it! What rotten luck!"' He
arranged relatively easy work for Storfer-sweeping gravel paths-and
then asked:
"`Will that be all right, Mr. Storfer? Will that suit you?' Whereupon he was
very pleased, and we shook hands, and then he was given the broom and
sat down on his bench . It was a great innerjoy to me that I could at least
see the man with whom I had worked for so many long yhrs, and that we
could speak with one another." Six weeks after this normal, human
encounter, Storfer was dead-not gassed, apparently, but shot . (p . 51)
If Arendt is to be believed, Eichmann's total reliance on cliches
permitted him to ignore the smoke from the Auschwitz ovens and to
believe that Storfer was "very pleased." Eichmann's "inability to think,"
she writes, was an "inability to look at anything from the other fellow's
point ofview" (pp. 48-49) . Since the circumstances were extraordinary,
we shouldn't immediately conclude from this example that cliches are
pernicious. It's one thing to rely on stock phrases when you're in love,
and quite another thing when you're the logistical mastermind of the
Holocaust. Nevertheless, there is always a risk that cliches will prevent us
from exercising judgment and seeing the details of the world around
us. Banal stories can be at least as harmful as philosophical generalizations.
And even Hamlet or the Gospels can be misread as treasuries of
cliche.
Consider Francesca.
She is not in love with Paolo, for she hardly
knows him.
Her speech to Dante tells us nothing about his character
except that he has "a gentle heart" -- a medieval commonplace -- and that
he is attracted to her.
She doesn't even utter his name.
She thinks she's
in love with Paolo because she has been soaked in the platitudes of
romantic poetry.
Francesca is really in love with the idea of a courtly suitor, not
with the actual human being who's reading the story of Lancelot with her.
It's not his
character that makes her love him, but the "story of Lancelot" that they're reading
together.
In her mind, Paolo becomes "Sir Lancelot of the Lake", and she become the adulterous queen Guinivere.
Love ought to be a bond between two whole human beings.
This
requires some mutual knowledge of the other's thoughts, plans, and
values, without which we cannot act sensitively.
It is not an automatic
"fit" between people, as in the case of Pyramus and Thisbe, nor an
accident, like the potion-induced passion of Tristan and Yseult, but
rather something that we create through effort and adjustment.
When
people are attracted only physically, we call it "lust"-the sin that is
punished in the second circle of Dante's Hell.
Far
from loving Paolo, Francesca feels for him a kind of lust.
It's not his
body that attracts her, but his superficial resemblance to characters
from romantic fiction.
propose
a normative definition.
Such love should not always
generally produces better results, but that it is better-more admirable.
This is a philosophical theory.
But it will mean nothing to people who
don't already know what a loving relationship is .
We gain that kind of
knowledge from narratives, both real and fictional, and not from
abstract arguments.
Furthermore, one can freely doubt a philosophical
opinion. But well-told, concrete stories are highly persuasive.
Francesca has read a great deal, including many excellent works that
she can quote at will .
Thus, if literature can help make readers morally
sensitive, we would expect Francesca to be a fine person.
Unfortunately,
she has misread every literary work that she cites, and her poor
interpretations reflect badly on her character.
Take the passage from " Lancelot du Lac" that she blames for her fall .
In
the Roman, Lancillotto is so nervous that he becomes mute and almost
faints .
Meanwhile, Galleotto engages in a long, coy colloquy
with Ginevra.
The actual kiss (Ginevra's kiss -- never Lancillotto's) is studied and awkward.
Galleotto
shields Ginevrfa and Lancillotto so that the Lady of Maloalto won't see
them, but she does -- and coughs -- "and knew that she had kissed him."
In the known versions of the Roman, Lancelot is
bashful and passive to the point of foolishness, and the Queen makes all
the advances.
But Francesca recites the text as she remembers it:
"the desired smile then was kissed by the ardent lover" ("da cotanto
amante")
thereby making the initiator clearly male.
Surely, Francesca must have kissed Paolo and is trying, through false
citation, to obliterate her initiative.
We cannot be sure of this, because we don't know how Dante
imagined the original scene (if indeed he had anything precise in
mind).
But Francesca certainly seems unwilling to read the romance
correctly.
At least in recollection, she confuses it with other episodes
from the courtly-love tradition, such as the one in which Tristan kisses
Yseult while they play chess together.
The details of the Lancelot story
fade in her mind, to be replaced with a generic formula:
damsel taken
by ardent knight.
Perhaps this is because she wants to shift the blame
from Ginevra to Lancillotto and from herself to PAOLO.
Or perhaps it is because she reads
literature as a set of cliches.
Part of the definition of a cliche is that it is portable and recyclable-
"ready-made sentiment that shows up in many contexts .
When we read
a text as a series of cliches, we often commit what Alfred North
Whitehead called the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness."" This is the
fallacy of taking something specific that belongs in one context and
applying it elsewhere . It is particularly easy to commit this errorwhen a
text contains conventional sentiments and scenarios, or when we
misread it that way.
Francesca treats the love scene between Lancillotto
and Ginevra as a cliche, suppressing the peculiarities of that rather
odd episode so that it can justify her own behaviour.
Strangely enough, Lancillotto also commits the fallacy of misplaced
concreteness .
Before the momentous kiss, Ginevra asks him what
originally caused his love.
Dante asks Francesca the same question at
Inf. v, 118-120.
Lancillotto recalls the moment when he left Arthur's
court.
"I said, `Adieu, lady.' And you said, `Adieu, sweet handsome
friend [ amis] .'
Never after that did courage forsake me. . . .
These words
comforted me in all my anguish, these words protected me from my
evils and guarded me in all perils ; these words satisfied all my doubts;
these words made me rich in all my great poverty.""
The Queen replies
that she's glad about the results.
But actually she didn't mean anything
serious, she adds.
She just uttered a conventional parting to a young knight who
was leaving on a mission for her husband.
But Lancelot, wrongly, understood
amis to mean "amante," or lover (which is one of its senses) -- that Ginevra is here DISIMPLICATING.
Like
Francesca, Lancillotto believed himself loved, and so loved in return .
He
thereby transformed an utter commonplace into a specific expression
of passion for himself.
Francesca does roughly the opposite.
She
transforms a rather idiosyncratic scene into a paradigm of courtly love,
and then uses it to give her own adultery an aura of romance.
When Francesca quotes one of Dante's own sonnets to him in Hell,
she chooses a poem that he wrote as a young man and then included in
his Vita nuova.
This book has traditionally been seen as an anthology of
excellent verse and a serious autobiography.
We see it as a critique of the author's own youthful love poetry.
Francesca overlooks Dante's self-criticism, and thereby proves herself to
be a careless reader of poetry.
Indeed, she selects the very poem that
Dante thinks is his worst.
On the first page of the Vita nuova, Dante's narrator calls Beatrice
"the glorious woman of my mind" (VN, ii) .
This phrase aptly describes
the subject of his poems, because he does not come to know Beatrice's
real character or her desires.
Instead, he becomes love-sick, swooning at
her distant sight, and asking his friends for a definition of the mighty
force, Love, that has appeared to him in allegorical visions.
As if to
indicate his own solipsism, he offers no descriptions of places, physical
objects, clothes, or people other than himself."
When he encounters Beatrice again in The Divine Comedy, she says
insistently: "Look well! I am, I am Beatrice" (Purg. xxx, 73) . Such love should not always
generally produces better results, but that it is better-more admirable.
This is a philosophical theory.
But it will mean nothing to people who
don't already know what a loving relationship is .
We gain that kind of
knowledge from narratives, both real and fictional, and not from
abstract arguments.
Furthermore, one can freely doubt a philosophical
opinion. But well-told, concrete stories are highly persuasive.
Francesca has read a great deal, including many excellent works that
she can quote at will .
Thus, if literature can help make readers morally
sensitive, we would expect Francesca to be a fine person.
Unfortunately,
she has misread every literary work that she cites, and her poor
interpretations reflect badly on her character.
Take the passage from " Lancelot du Lac" that she blames for her fall .
In
the Roman, Lancillotto is so nervous that he becomes mute and almost
faints .
Meanwhile, Galleotto engages in a long, coy colloquy
with Ginevra.
The actual kiss (Ginevra's kiss -- never Lancillotto's) is studied and awkward.
Galleotto
shields Ginevrfa and Lancillotto so that the Lady of Maloalto won't see
them, but she does -- and coughs -- "and knew that she had kissed him."
In the known versions of the Roman, Lancelot is
bashful and passive to the point of foolishness, and the Queen makes all
the advances.
But Francesca recites the text as she remembers it:
"the desired smile then was kissed by the ardent lover" ("da cotanto
amante")
thereby making the initiator clearly male.
Surely, Francesca must have kissed Paolo and is trying, through false
citation, to obliterate her initiative.
We cannot be sure of this, because we don't know how Dante
imagined the original scene (if indeed he had anything precise in
mind).
But Francesca certainly seems unwilling to read the romance
correctly.
At least in recollection, she confuses it with other episodes
from the courtly-love tradition, such as the one in which Tristan kisses
Yseult while they play chess together.
The details of the Lancelot story
fade in her mind, to be replaced with a generic formula:
damsel taken
by ardent knight.
Perhaps this is because she wants to shift the blame
from Ginevra to Lancillotto and from herself to PAOLO.
Or perhaps it is because she reads
literature as a set of cliches.
Part of the definition of a cliche is that it is portable and recyclable-
"ready-made sentiment that shows up in many contexts .
When we read
a text as a series of cliches, we often commit what Alfred North
Whitehead called the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness."" This is the
fallacy of taking something specific that belongs in one context and
applying it elsewhere . It is particularly easy to commit this errorwhen a
text contains conventional sentiments and scenarios, or when we
misread it that way.
Francesca treats the love scene between Lancillotto
and Ginevra as a cliche, suppressing the peculiarities of that rather
odd episode so that it can justify her own behaviour.
Strangely enough, Lancillotto also commits the fallacy of misplaced
concreteness .
Before the momentous kiss, Ginevra asks him what
originally caused his love.
Dante asks Francesca the same question at
Inf. v, 118-120.
Lancillotto recalls the moment when he left Arthur's
court.
"I said, `Adieu, lady.' And you said, `Adieu, sweet handsome
friend [ amis] .'
Never after that did courage forsake me. . . .
These words
comforted me in all my anguish, these words protected me from my
evils and guarded me in all perils ; these words satisfied all my doubts;
these words made me rich in all my great poverty.""
The Queen replies
that she's glad about the results.
But actually she didn't mean anything
serious, she adds.
She just uttered a conventional parting to a young knight who
was leaving on a mission for her husband.
But Lancelot, wrongly, understood
amis to mean "amante," or lover (which is one of its senses) -- that Ginevra is here DISIMPLICATING.
Like
Francesca, Lancillotto believed himself loved, and so loved in return .
He
thereby transformed an utter commonplace into a specific expression
of passion for himself.
Francesca does roughly the opposite.
She
transforms a rather idiosyncratic scene into a paradigm of courtly love,
and then uses it to give her own adultery an aura of romance.
When Francesca quotes one of Dante's own sonnets to him in Hell,
she chooses a poem that he wrote as a young man and then included in
his Vita nuova.
This book has traditionally been seen as an anthology of
excellent verse and a serious autobiography.
We see it as a critique of the author's own youthful love poetry.
Francesca overlooks Dante's self-criticism, and thereby proves herself to
be a careless reader of poetry.
Indeed, she selects the very poem that
Dante thinks is his worst.
On the first page of the Vita nuova, Dante's narrator calls Beatrice
"the glorious woman of my mind" (VN, ii) .
This phrase aptly describes
the subject of his poems, because he does not come to know Beatrice's
real character or her desires.
Instead, he becomes love-sick, swooning at
her distant sight, and asking his friends for a definition of the mighty
force, Love, that has appeared to him in allegorical visions.
As if to
indicate his own solipsism, he offers no descriptions of places, physical
objects, clothes, or people other than himself."
When he encounters Beatrice again in The Divine Comedy, she says
In the
Italian text-"Guardaci ben! Ben son, ben son Beatrice" she repeats
the
word ben three times (meaning "well" and then "I am") .
She thereby
emphasizes Dante's moral obligation: he must see her as she is .
This is
just what he fails to do in the Vita nuova. He resolves to devote all his
verse to praising Beatrice, but there isn't much he can say about a
person whom he doesn't know.
Consider, for instance, the sonnet that
Francesca cites when she meets its author in Hell:
Love and the gentle heart are one
As the sage in his canzon writes ;
Who dares to be either thing alone
Is like a soul that reason quits.
Nature makes them when amorous:
Love the master and the heart as home,
In which the lord when latent sleeps
For the longest season or the briefest term.
Then beauty arrives in wise woman's form
That pleases the eyes until in the heart
A desire for the pleasing thing is born,
Which fixes there so firmly that
A loving spirit is aroused.
And ladies alike to worthy men respond.
(Vita Nuova, xx)
Francesca presumably admires this poem because its doctrine supports
her case : love is inevitable between gentle hearts.
Musa, however,
finds it "weakly imitative"-its staleness "unmitigated," its lack of
inspiration "obvious," and its last line "sheer bathos."
Dante says that
this is one of his praise-poems, but he has neither found anything
concrete to say about Beatrice, nor has he discovered an allegorical
language that can explicate Christian doctrine .
Instead, he has offered
platitudes from the profane Courtly Love tradition .
At the end of the
Vita nuova, Dante seems to realize that his story has been an ethical and
aesthetic failure.
Like Francesca, he has loved without reason.
The fact
that she quotes from his weakest poem shows that she has not absorbed
the critical message of the Vita nuova.
Faced with failure, Dante has a choice.
First, he could renounce the
effort to praise Beatrice's beauty as an aspect of her personality or her
body; it could "become spiritual" and "spread the light of love across
the sky" (VN, xxxiii) . In other words, Dante could allegorize Beatrice,
making her symbolize some general truth.
He ends the Vita nuova with
an account of a "miraculous vision": Beatrice appears transfigured and
speaks words that Dante cannot grasp (xlii, xvli) . Most commentators
think that this vision is spelled out in the Divine Comedy, where Beatrice
is Dante's guide to theological wisdom.
But another course is open to Dante: to write about someone in
particular.
His subject could be the dead Beatrice, a living person, a
historical character, a figment of his imagination, or himself. But he
would have to use reason to describe this person well.
The necessary
type of reason would not comprehend general truths; it would understand
individuals in their specificity. And no one could do that better
than the perceptive, inventive, compassionate, judgmental, humorous,
earthy author of the Inferno.
It seems, then, that there are two explanations for Dante's decision to
damn Paolo and Francesca.
Perhaps he was thinking like a philosopher,
suspicious of passion and of narrative.
His abstract reason told him that
Francesca was guilty, and he wanted to warn us that stories can mislead
by making us sympathize with particular people who have violated
general laws.
But it's also possible that Dante was thinking like a great
poet, one who saw literature's capacity to describe concrete individuals
perceptively and revealingly.
Literary descriptions encourage us to feel
appropriate emotions, whether sympathy and fear or scorn and anger.
We can thereby learn empathy andjudgment, which are indispensable
skills if we want to act morally. But if stories have value, they also have
risks. Whereas philosophy can prevent us from thinking by giving us
abstract laws to apply by rote, so bad fiction contains cliches and
stereotypes that get in the way of thinking and judging accurately. In
that case, the moral of CantoVis to use stories for moral guidance : but
only good stories, well and carefully read .
NOTES
Compare Inf. v, 135, "che mai da me nonfia diviso, "and Guido Novello's Sonnet XII,
line 13, "che gik da me non fia diviso. "This similarity, writes Eugenio Chiarini, "by itself
seems to establish a very special rapport between the lord of Ravenna and the poet of
Francesca" (Chiarini, "Ravenna" in the Encidopedia Dantesca [Rome: Istituto della
Enciclopedia Italiana, 1970-1973], vol . 4, p . 860) .
John F. Dedek, "Intrinsically Evil Acts
We translate the Divine Comedy from the edition of Emilio Pasquini
and Antonioword ben three times (meaning "well" and then "I am") .
She thereby
emphasizes Dante's moral obligation: he must see her as she is .
This is
just what he fails to do in the Vita nuova. He resolves to devote all his
verse to praising Beatrice, but there isn't much he can say about a
person whom he doesn't know.
Consider, for instance, the sonnet that
Francesca cites when she meets its author in Hell:
Love and the gentle heart are one
As the sage in his canzon writes ;
Who dares to be either thing alone
Is like a soul that reason quits.
Nature makes them when amorous:
Love the master and the heart as home,
In which the lord when latent sleeps
For the longest season or the briefest term.
Then beauty arrives in wise woman's form
That pleases the eyes until in the heart
A desire for the pleasing thing is born,
Which fixes there so firmly that
A loving spirit is aroused.
And ladies alike to worthy men respond.
(Vita Nuova, xx)
Francesca presumably admires this poem because its doctrine supports
her case : love is inevitable between gentle hearts.
Musa, however,
finds it "weakly imitative"-its staleness "unmitigated," its lack of
inspiration "obvious," and its last line "sheer bathos."
Dante says that
this is one of his praise-poems, but he has neither found anything
concrete to say about Beatrice, nor has he discovered an allegorical
language that can explicate Christian doctrine .
Instead, he has offered
platitudes from the profane Courtly Love tradition .
At the end of the
Vita nuova, Dante seems to realize that his story has been an ethical and
aesthetic failure.
Like Francesca, he has loved without reason.
The fact
that she quotes from his weakest poem shows that she has not absorbed
the critical message of the Vita nuova.
Faced with failure, Dante has a choice.
First, he could renounce the
effort to praise Beatrice's beauty as an aspect of her personality or her
body; it could "become spiritual" and "spread the light of love across
the sky" (VN, xxxiii) . In other words, Dante could allegorize Beatrice,
making her symbolize some general truth.
He ends the Vita nuova with
an account of a "miraculous vision": Beatrice appears transfigured and
speaks words that Dante cannot grasp (xlii, xvli) . Most commentators
think that this vision is spelled out in the Divine Comedy, where Beatrice
is Dante's guide to theological wisdom.
But another course is open to Dante: to write about someone in
particular.
His subject could be the dead Beatrice, a living person, a
historical character, a figment of his imagination, or himself. But he
would have to use reason to describe this person well.
The necessary
type of reason would not comprehend general truths; it would understand
individuals in their specificity. And no one could do that better
than the perceptive, inventive, compassionate, judgmental, humorous,
earthy author of the Inferno.
It seems, then, that there are two explanations for Dante's decision to
damn Paolo and Francesca.
Perhaps he was thinking like a philosopher,
suspicious of passion and of narrative.
His abstract reason told him that
Francesca was guilty, and he wanted to warn us that stories can mislead
by making us sympathize with particular people who have violated
general laws.
But it's also possible that Dante was thinking like a great
poet, one who saw literature's capacity to describe concrete individuals
perceptively and revealingly.
Literary descriptions encourage us to feel
appropriate emotions, whether sympathy and fear or scorn and anger.
We can thereby learn empathy andjudgment, which are indispensable
skills if we want to act morally. But if stories have value, they also have
risks. Whereas philosophy can prevent us from thinking by giving us
abstract laws to apply by rote, so bad fiction contains cliches and
stereotypes that get in the way of thinking and judging accurately. In
that case, the moral of CantoVis to use stories for moral guidance : but
only good stories, well and carefully read .
NOTES
Compare Inf. v, 135, "che mai da me nonfia diviso, "and Guido Novello's Sonnet XII,
line 13, "che gik da me non fia diviso. "This similarity, writes Eugenio Chiarini, "by itself
seems to establish a very special rapport between the lord of Ravenna and the poet of
Francesca" (Chiarini, "Ravenna" in the Encidopedia Dantesca [Rome: Istituto della
Enciclopedia Italiana, 1970-1973], vol . 4, p . 860) .
John F. Dedek, "Intrinsically Evil Acts
Quaglio (Milan : Garzanti, 1987) .
That Dante associates the story of Pyramus and Thisbe with the staining power of
blood is clear from Purg. xxvii, 37-39, and Purg. xxxiii, 69 .
See, e.g ., De doctrina christiana, IV, 4-7; Summa theol. I, i, ix .
This is the theme of Denis de Rougement, Love in the Western World, trans. Montgomery
Belgion (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1983) .
See Martha C. Nussbaum, "Beatrice's 'Dante' : Loving the Individual?" Apeiron 26
(1993) :170-71.
Dante Alighieri, Vita nuova (VN), XXV, pp. 57-58, in Vita nuova, rime, edited by Fredi
Chiappelli (Milan : Mursia, 1978) .
Keats to Bailey, November 22, 1817, in Hyder Edward Rollins, ed ., The Letters ofJohn
Keats (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1958), vol. I, p. 185.
For a much fuller version of the following argument, see Peter Levine, Living
Without Philosophy: On Narrative, Rhetoric, and Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998),
chap . 1.
Dedek, pp. 408-9.
Lectures on Ethics, trans. Louis Infield (New York : Harper & Row, 1963), p. 229. For
the scholastic background, see Dedek, p. 412.
On the dangers of quickjudgment, see Aquinas's speech to Dante at Paradiso xiii,
In Paradise, this systematic theologian becomes a biographer of St . Francis.
For this and other arguments, see Richard A. Posner, "Against Ethical Criticism,"
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in ferusalem : A Report on the Banality ofEvil, rev. ed . (New
York: Penguin, 1994), p. 22 .
See Anna Hatcher and Mark Musa, "The Kiss: Inferno V and the Old French Prose
Lancelot," Comparative Literature 20(1968) : 97-109 and Barbara Vinken, "Encore: Francesca
da Rimini ; Rhetoric of Seduction-Seduction of Rhetoric," Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift fiir
Literaturwissenschaft and Geistesgeschichte 3(1988) : 404. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and theModern World (NewYork: Free Press, 1967),
pp. 58-59.
We translate from H. Oskar Sommer, ed., The Vulgate Version ofthe Arthurian Romances,
vol. 3, Le Livre de Lancelot del lac (Washington: Carnegie Institution, 1910), part I, p. 261 .
(See p. 131 for the scene that Lancelot is recalling.)
Mark Musa, Dante's Vita Nuova: A Translation and an Essay (Bloomington : Indiana
University Press, 1973), p. 100. Much of the following discussion relies on Musa.
That Dante associates the story of Pyramus and Thisbe with the staining power of
blood is clear from Purg. xxvii, 37-39, and Purg. xxxiii, 69 .
See, e.g ., De doctrina christiana, IV, 4-7; Summa theol. I, i, ix .
This is the theme of Denis de Rougement, Love in the Western World, trans. Montgomery
Belgion (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1983) .
See Martha C. Nussbaum, "Beatrice's 'Dante' : Loving the Individual?" Apeiron 26
(1993) :170-71.
Dante Alighieri, Vita nuova (VN), XXV, pp. 57-58, in Vita nuova, rime, edited by Fredi
Chiappelli (Milan : Mursia, 1978) .
Keats to Bailey, November 22, 1817, in Hyder Edward Rollins, ed ., The Letters ofJohn
Keats (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1958), vol. I, p. 185.
For a much fuller version of the following argument, see Peter Levine, Living
Without Philosophy: On Narrative, Rhetoric, and Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998),
chap . 1.
Dedek, pp. 408-9.
Lectures on Ethics, trans. Louis Infield (New York : Harper & Row, 1963), p. 229. For
the scholastic background, see Dedek, p. 412.
On the dangers of quickjudgment, see Aquinas's speech to Dante at Paradiso xiii,
In Paradise, this systematic theologian becomes a biographer of St . Francis.
For this and other arguments, see Richard A. Posner, "Against Ethical Criticism,"
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in ferusalem : A Report on the Banality ofEvil, rev. ed . (New
York: Penguin, 1994), p. 22 .
See Anna Hatcher and Mark Musa, "The Kiss: Inferno V and the Old French Prose
Lancelot," Comparative Literature 20(1968) : 97-109 and Barbara Vinken, "Encore: Francesca
da Rimini ; Rhetoric of Seduction-Seduction of Rhetoric," Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift fiir
Literaturwissenschaft and Geistesgeschichte 3(1988) : 404. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and theModern World (NewYork: Free Press, 1967),
pp. 58-59.
We translate from H. Oskar Sommer, ed., The Vulgate Version ofthe Arthurian Romances,
vol. 3, Le Livre de Lancelot del lac (Washington: Carnegie Institution, 1910), part I, p. 261 .
(See p. 131 for the scene that Lancelot is recalling.)
Mark Musa, Dante's Vita Nuova: A Translation and an Essay (Bloomington : Indiana
University Press, 1973), p. 100. Much of the following discussion relies on Musa.
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