Luciana,
I'm so glad you refer to Dante's volition, and to his using his own
reasoning. To me, the most striking thing about the Commedia is the
originality of Dante's reasoning. He'll take a Biblical verse and see things
in it that nobody noticed, or it will be a verse to which nobody else pays
much attention. For this reason, one can't just run to the theologians and
ask what Thomas or Augustine can tell us. In some cases, not very much,
because Dante has found a new way of expressing an old idea, and it's in
terms that the theologians never thought of. Maybe this is why he's
sometimes read as a kind of proto-Protestant, although he actually strikes me
as a very pious and orthodox Catholic who was also a great poet.
My favorite example is when David appears as the pupil of the eye of the
eagle of justice, and Singleton asks why David is accorded that honor. I
think the primary reason is that Dante is literalizing Ps. 17.8, where David
asks to be kept as the pupil (apple) of God's eye. In 2 Samuel (23.2-3),
there's some intimation that David's wish must have been granted, at least
in some figurative or allegorical sense. If we assume this might be how Dante
read the Psalm verse (David becomes the pupil of an eye), then it's difficult
to ask if this is a "theologically correct" way of reading it. Augustine
never addresses whether David's wish is granted, and may not have thought the
wish was meant literally. Also, nobody seems to have paid much attention to
this Psalm verse. There isn't even an iconography: one can't say "show me a
dozen examples of paintings or literary texts in which David is portrayed as
the pupil of an eye."
I'm thinking that the Psalm verse appealed to Dante, but most people don't
notice it, which is probably why Singleton overlooked it. And of course it's
a lovely and unusual verse. What David is asking in a flowery way is to
extinguish himself to be of service to God: the pupil of an eye is a
nothingness, an emptiness, a hole in the iris of the eye. Dante sees so
many things in familiar and unfamiliar Biblical verses or passages that I
hadn't noticed before. Maybe he was the kind of person who not only
"accepted" his faith but thought about what it meant to him from every
possible perspective. And of course that's what we're told to do in the First
Psalm--that the blessed meditate "on the law of the Lord."
pat sloane
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In a message dated 01/18/2000 7:37:33 AM Eastern Standard Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:
> Luciana Cuppo Csaki
> Societas internationalis pro Vivario
> e-mail: [log in to unmask]
> http://www.geocities.com/athens/aegean/9891/
> ****************************************
> "e anche la ragione il vede alquanto,
> che non concederebbe che i motori
> sanza sua perfezion fosser cotanto (Par.29.43-45)
> Was Dante really repeating "a scholastic commonplace" on "Jerome's
> error" on the creation of angels? I am not so sure. First, the opinions
> of the scholastics seem not to have been totally monolithic: St. Thomas
> Aquinas, citing specifically Jerome (Summa I.Q.61 art.3) pointed out
> that the Fathers' opinions are divided: Jerome followed the Greek
> Fathers, while the Latins, as Otfried Lieberknecht showed us, thought
> differently. Thomas also added that, although the opinion that angels
> were created at the same time as corporeal creatures is more probable
> (translation of the Dominicans of the English Province), the other is
> not erroneous. It would be interesting to know if Dante was aware of
> this passage, and if he deliberately disregarded the Summa.
> Second, Dante rejects Jerome's opinion not because the scholastics
> said so, but on the authority of the inspired writers (li scrittor dello
> Spirito Santo) and of his own reasoning: a mover with nothing to move
> did not make much sense, to Dante's thinking (verse 43-45).
> Luciana Cuppo Csaki
>
>
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