Whether said by Dante himself or by an early glossator, that the Commedia should be thought of as a work of ethics guides Dr George Corbett's original, tightly argued, and in various ways surprising study. Ethics is to be combined with politics, and the Purgatorio is given prominence precisely because purgatory, of all the regions of Dante's afterlife, most fully enacts his poetics of conversion. Corbett's stated intention is to make a distinct contribution to the reappraisal of Dante's theology, the re-examination of his intellectual formation, and the renewed investigation of the Commedia’s narrative structure. The prefix ‘re‘, attached by Corbett to these three topics, signals the extent to which Dante (1265-1321) continues to be debated even as to fundamentals.
The surprises are multiple. As announced by its title, this book's emphasis is on Dante's ethics as Christian and, another surprise to some readers, on the popular visceral contexts of the practical Christianity of the time. This is not going to be a journey for detached aesthetes; Dante's sublime artistry cannot be severed from pressing moral concerns. Alison Morgan's Dante and the Medieval Other World (1990) is a valuable complement to Corbett's book because they have a related hermeneutical trajectory. To find a discussion of St Thomas Aquinas (d.1274) is expected, to see him contrasted with a contemporary Dominican, William Peraldus (d.1271), is surprising, as is the weighty influence on Dante attributed to the now relatively obscure Peraldus. The first critical edition of Peraldus's Summa de vitiis is announced.
Corbett's argument is buttressed by a close reading of Dante's text combined with knowledge of the main influences on it and of the secondary literature. The length and detail of the footnotes impress even as they slow down reading. When discussion of the Purgatorio begins in earnest, its centrality, in more than one sense, is soon made clear. Two chapters, respectively on Dante's ethical agenda and on his political polemic, are preparation for the resumption of the specifically purgatorial theme. Possibly surprising is Corbett's argument in favour of the fundamental unity between Dante's Commedia and his Monarchia. The foundational character of Kenelm Foster OP's scholarship concerning Dante's approach to the relationship between the order of nature and that of grace and the approach taken by others, including Aquinas, is acknowledged. Read in the light of the inherited traditions about the afterlife, Dante's treatment of pagans and of contemporary popes is described by Corbett as novel and surprising.
Corbett is now in a position to reframe Dante's Christian ethics (Part II), and then to focus in Part II on the terraces of pride, sloth, and avarice. The chapter heading ‘Dante's Theological Purgatory’ may seem unremarkable, yet it is in fact a controversial position when contrasted with the alternative of a ‘political purgatory’. Corbett considers that Dante based himself on the newly crystallised doctrine of purgatory and the tradition of the seven capital vices in penitential ethics. He makes the pivotal statement (p. 77) that Dante projected the familiar ethical material concerning the capital vices onto the unfamiliar context of Purgatory. He concludes that for Dante it is the limbo of the virtuous pagans that represents the journey by philosophical teaching to moral and intellectual flourishing in this life; the seven terraces of purgatory, however, represent the spiritual journey to eternal beatitude. Corbett's analysis of Dante's presentation of Hugh Capet (Purgatorio XX) is a good example of the limitations of primarily political approaches to the detriment of more spiritual readings such as his. Would that Corbett had said more about the functions of the Earthly Paradise in the Purgatorio.
Even when a distinctively Christian interpretation of the ethics of the Purgatorio has been accepted, it is Corbett's further contention that typically this has looked to Aquinas's Summa Theologiae to gloss Dante's approach to the seven capital vices. Instead one should look to Peraldus's very different approach in his treatment of the vices and virtues. Peraldus's approach might be characterised as the older and more conservative tradition when contrasted with the innovations of Aquinas. For Corbett, Dante followed Peraldus in terms of the parallel organisation of ethical content, and in terms of form. It is but a step, and Corbett takes it with the aid of some fascinating references to art, to envisage Dante-poet in the Purgatorio as a vernacular preacher against vice. In discussing Dante's knowledge of Peraldus's works, Corbett gives no evidence for asserting that Dante had contacts amongst the Dominican friars at S. Maria Novella in Florence, except to refer to an article by Siegfried Wenzel. There Wenzel provided no evidence either. Dante himself said in the Convivio that he frequented ‘le scuole de li religiosi’; it is unlikely we shall ever reconstruct fully what this meant for Dante.
The brief allusions to art turn out to be the prelude to the next chapter on the terrace of pride, with its repeated references to church architecture and art. Unlike for pride, Dante is not self-accusing in considering sloth; yet Corbett's chapter title indicates it as the sin of scholars, in particular of Statius, one of the important autobiographical ‘cyphers’ for Dante. Corbett's treatment again points to Peraldus (rather than Aquinas), and to good effect. Peraldus also provides the gloss for understanding avarice in Dante's ethics and his own life, while Statius is again a poetic cypher for Dante himself. We should notice that avarice can be avarice with respect to knowledge, not wanting to communicate to others the light of wisdom. Yet more than being guilty of avarice as such, it might be that Statius and Dante sinned through its subspecies ‘prodigality’ (understood as a vice).
Dante has been studied and commented on for centuries, including by two of his sons. His daughter became a nun, taking the name of Sr. Beatrice; an enigmatic comment of a sort. The interpretations of Dante have become so numerous and can be so discordant as to constitute a fascinating subject in themselves, and to be numbered among them are those of two popes. Benedict XV in 1921 and Paul VI in 1965 chose centenaries of Dante's death and birth respectively to honour him and to offer, with a firmly Catholic stamp, substantial assessments of his significance. J.F. Makepeace, writing in this journal almost a century ago (1921, p. 92), could hardly have been more challenging; ‘no one who has not an inner knowledge of the Catholic Church can fully understand the Commedia’. Whether or not twenty-first century readers are receptive to the immediate urgency of Dante's Christian ethics, Corbett hopes that his book has demonstrated, even to a predominantly secular academy, that approaching the poem as a work of ethics (as it was originally envisaged) leads to a greater appreciation of Dante's eschatological innovations and his literary genius.
