Dante's Second Love

The Originality and the Contexts of the Convivio

Peter Dronke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780952590125
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351199414
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

"Three essays on the nature of the bonds between Vita Nuova and Convivio; the nature and significance of the Donna Gentile, Dante's 'second love'; and the imaginative and intellectual coherence of the third and fourth treatises of the Convivio . An excursus comments on the Donna Gentile's fate at the hands of scholars."

II
The Donna Gentile:

Obscuris Vera Involvens

The song Amor che nella mente mi ragiona, with which the third treatise of the Convivio opens, has its recognized place among the splendours of Dante’s lyric poetry. It is one of his supreme achievements in the canzone form. That it is the song which his musician-friend Casella chooses to sing for Dante on the shore of Purgatory,¹ casting a spell over him and Vergil and all the souls that had come in the angel’s ship, indicates how potent a place it held for Dante among his rime² In Amor che nella mente there is intellectual fullness, but also tautness and compression; a controlled excitement underlies the verses and impels them. There is likewise an expressive fullness, the language moving towards hymnody in the central strophes, then passing gently into witty reflection in the concluding one. The song conjoins, in Coleridge’s phrase, ‘a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual order’.³

Yet there is another, quite different reason why I would see Amor che nella mente as occupying a unique place in the history of poetry: it is the only lyric I know, in any language, that finds its complete resplendence not alone but in the setting of its commentary. It is the imbrication in Convivio III of images and concepts, personal and metaphysical reminiscence, lyricism and ardent speculation, on which I wish to focus in some detail here. For it is through this imbrication that Dante achieves a structure, texture and design such as no poet working alone, and no philosopher working alone, has attempted or attained.

It is easy to say, easy to see, that Dante’s Donna Gentile is, at least to some extent, a fusion of two earlier personified beings: Philosophia, who consoled Boethius, and Sapientia, who is celebrated in the ‘Solomonic’ books of the Old Testament. Naturally I shall not neglect or belittle either of these illustrious ancestors of Dante’s Donna, and I hope to bring certain new insights about how she is related to both. At the same time I should like to emphasize, far more than has been attempted hitherto, some of the ways in which the Donna Gentile differs from her Boethian and Solomonic prototypes: it is in these differences that Dante’s originality gleams.

For the Donna Gentile is set in a profound and unusual metaphysical structure, which is not to be found in Boethius, and even less in the biblical passages, and which, notwithstanding all the learning that scholars — especially Nardi and Vasoli — have lavished on it,⁴ cannot be reduced to any of the metaphysical sources that Dante cites, or to any combination of earlier source-materials. Dante’s mind, moving in the midst of those materials unpredictably and eclectically, creates an astonishing personal conception. If we come with ready categories — Neoplatonic, Hermetic, Aristotelian; Avicennist, Averroist, Thomist; philosophical, theological, poetic — we gradually perceive that the vision underlying the canzone Amor che nella mente, and the whole third treatise of the Convivio, admits elements of all these, yet in its individuality also continually eludes them.

Boethius’ Philosophia is a quasi-celestial consoler and instructress, yet ultimately she must be called human rather than celestial. If at times her head seems to touch heaven or even to penetrate heaven,⁵ she is not, like Dante’s projection, the being ‘thought by him who moved the universe’.⁶ Peter Abelard and Jean de Meun were at least partly right when they interpreted Philosophia as an aspect of Boethius’ own consciousness⁷ — its most commanding aspect, divinely irradiated, but not in her own right a cosmic figure, or a sharer of the divine mind, such as the Donna Gentile becomes in the canzone.

There, and throughout the Convivio commentary, the Donna Gentile is summoned up with an iridescent plenitude of detail; yet there is no dialogue with her, such as Boethius has with Philosophia. Dante imagines her too loftily to present her as his interlocutrix. The dramatic vivacity of dialogue between the poet-protagonist and his heavenly beloved — who can solace and instruct, but also show herself reproachful, scornful, possessive, or impatient at his mental slowness, as well as at times radiantly loving and tender, perfecting her devotee in sensibility and understanding — this range of dramatic possibilities, which Boethius adumbrated in his dialogues with Philosophia, was to be transformed and intensified with the figure of Beatrice in the Commedia. We are told that the Donna Gentile can, through her flames of beauty, create all good thoughts and shatter innate vices like a flash of lightning —

Sua bieltà piove fiammelle di foco,
animate d’un spirito gentile
ch’è creatore d’ogni pensier bono;
e rompon come trono
l’innati vizii che fanno altrui vile. (63-67)

Yet here in the Convivio there is nothing comparable to the narrative-dramatic parts of Boethius‘ Consolation: we are not shown how such effects come about.

Another difference from Boethius’ figure is that the Donna Gentile’s cosmic aspect — ‘every Intelligence on high gazes upon her’, ‘she was established eternally’⁸ — is accompanied by allusions to her specifically courtly qualities and allure: the sighs that her beauty arouses, the graciousness of her actions, the way she becomes an exemplar for the rest of womankind —

gentile è in donna ciò che in lei si trova,
e bello è tanto quanto lei simiglia. (49 f.)

noble in woman is what is found in her,
and beautiful whatever resembles her.

Where the Donna Gentile is, like the biblical Sapientia, the companion of God from eternity, Boethius’ heroine demarcates herself clearly from God and the divine sphere. The one time that she uses words borrowed from those describing Sapientia in the Book of Wisdom, it is precisely to designate not herself but the Supreme Good, the summum bonum, which she apprehends but which lies beyond her. Where Sapientia (Wisdom 8, 1) ‘spans mightily from one end to the other and disposes all things gently’, Philosophia tells Boethius: ‘It is the Supreme Good which rules all things mightily and disposes them all gently’.⁹

There is in fact a passage at the opening of another of Boethius’ works where briefly he comes far closer to evoking and celebrating a figure comparable to the Donna Gentile and exalted in the manner of the biblical Sapientia. Since I cannot find that Dante scholars have taken account of this text — it opens Boethius’ first commentary on Porphyry (not perhaps prima facie the most promising place to search) — I shall cite it in some detail:¹⁰ Philosophy is the love and pursuit and in a sense friendship of Wisdom — not of this wisdom which is found in certain arts and in the knowledge and notions of crafts, but of that great Wisdom who, in need of no one, is the vivacious mind and sole primordial reason of things.

Here love of Wisdom is the illumination of the understanding mind by that pure Wisdom, in which she in a sense draws and summons the mind back to herself, so that the pursuit of wisdom seems rather to be the pursuit of divinity and the friendship of her pure mind.

In every kind of soul this Wisdom therefore imprints the reward of her divinity, and leads each kind back to the power and purity inherent in her own nature. From this is born the truth of speculations and thoughts, and a holy and innocent purity of actions.

Here the divine aspect of Sapientia’s rôle, and the human moral perfection achievable through the loving bond with her, emerge in a way that has no precise parallel in the more celebrated Consolation of Philosophy.

Let us now turn to consider how ‘that great Wisdom’ is introduced into Dante’s argument.

At the opening of the canzone, the ‘Love which speaks to me fervently in my mind about my lady’ is no longer that personified Amore, that ‘lord of dread aspect’,¹¹ who had dominated the visions and dialogues in the Vita Nuova. Love here, and especially in the twofold commentary on the opening verses, becomes a key concept in Dante’s new metaphysical structure, which, for all its learned range of reference, is strikingly individual in its total expression.

Love, the argument in the prose begins, is nothing other than the spiritual union of the soul and the object loved. Such a definition can be at home in various contexts, including a strictly Aristotelian one — there is a closely similar wording, for instance, in Thomas Aquinas’s commentary on Aristotle’s passage about Eros as a universal principle, at the beginning of the Metaphysics.¹² Dante, however, moves from this definition to an evocation of the Neoplatonic cosmos implied by the axioms in the Liber de causis, the gnomic compilation based on Proclus, translated from the Arabic in the twelfth century, to which Dante turns as an authority on no fewer than five occasions in the Convivio.¹³ There we are shown how all forms proceed from God, the transcendent first cause, by way of the Intelligences, who effect the human soul and the sublunary world. Each form, Dante explains, shares in some measure in the divine nature, the more so the nobler it is — the human soul most of all among sublunary things. The soul longs for being, and its being depends on God, so it longs to be united with God, and with the goodnesses that show themselves in nature.¹⁴ The plural ‘goodnesses’ (Dante’s bontadi, Latin bonitates) is one of the heart-words of the Liber de causis: from the highest to the lowest reaches of its cosmos, the Intelligences transmit divine effects, or bonitates, by which the unknowable divine being reveals itself to whatever degree created beings can receive its revelation. The union with the divine bonitates is love. And for Dante this love is the union of his soul with the Donna Gentile. This love, he therefore explains, is the speaker at the opening of his song, telling ‘of this lady who had spiritually become one with my soul’.¹⁵

Here the pursuit of Wisdom, conceived in terms of a love-union through which a human being can attain divinity, is set within a universe in which all beings strive in their own modes to return to the first cause, to become ‘as divine as possible’. This expression too is Aristotelian, yet the fervent vision of an ordered creation proceeding from a primal divine source and returning to it is unmistakably Neoplatonic. Boethius was no stranger to this notion: in the prayer O qui perpetua, set at the centre of his Consolation of Philosophy^¹⁶ Philosophia evokes the cosmic procession and return unforgettably for the poet-prisoner. Yet it is important to remember that there she is voicing a prayer to God on Boethius’ behalf— there is no question of Philosophia herself being the divine bonitas with whom Boethius will be united.

The mind, Dante declares soon afterwa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• I FROM BEATRICE TO THE DONNA GENTILE
• II THE DONNA GENTILE: OBSCURIS VERA INVOLVENS
• III ‘ETHICS AND AESTHETICS ARE ONE’
• EXCURSUS: THE ‘REJECTION’ OF THE DONNA GENTILE