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Dante, Ovid, and the Transformation of Metamorphosis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 July 2016

Warren Ginsberg
Warren Ginsberg*
Affiliation:
State University of New York at Albany
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Extract

In the seventh bolgia of the Inferno, Dante encounters the thieves, who are punished by undergoing an horrific series of Ovid-like metamorphoses in which men are changed into snakes or unidentifiable amalgams of matter. Since theft violates particular justice, which is a dynamic process that coordinates relations, I will argue that Dante properly makes metamorphosis and the lack of relation it creates between the forms that are changed the fitting punishment for thieves. Ovidian metamorphosis, however, can only image the mutations they experience because Dante's sinners have undergone a transformation even before they are changed into snakes. For particular justice, as Aristotle says, is only part of a more general kind of justice which is complete excellence. In the Inferno, this global justice is the final cause of Hell (‘Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore,’ Inf. 3, 4), and the principle of retribution that establishes the balance between the punishment and crime of those in it. This general justice, I shall argue, also effects a metamorphosis in the damned prior to their particular punishments, a metamorphosis of unbecoming which makes each of them a perverse parody of what God had originally made them. Every sinner in Hell is undergoing a deformation, a disordering movement away from form which unbalances the vital relationship between body and soul that had made him or her human. More precisely, even though we learn from Statius in the Purgatorio that the damned retain the rational soul, it no longer functions as the form of the body, for it has ceased to be that determining element which allows us to understand the one it is in is a member of the species man. Indeed, as the particular transformations of Agnello and Buoso will make clear, the substantial form of all the damned has become less the intellectual soul than the shape of their matter, from which the intellect can no longer abstract any intelligible form. And as their increasing corporeality suggests, the sinners throughout Hell are being transformed into creatures of ever greater density, who lack inner depth, creatures devoid of an animating essence whose powers persist despite outer change.

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Traditio , Volume 46 , 1991 , pp. 205 - 233
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Copyright © The Fordham University Press 

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References

1 Nicomachean Ethics V 1 30 (1129b): particular justice bears the same relation to complete justice as the part to the whole. All quotations are from The Complete Works of Aristotle (ed. Barnes, J., 2 vols.; Princeton 1984).Google Scholar

2 The damned in effect can engage only in the meaningless transformations of chaos (‘Nulli sua forma manebat / obstabatque aliis aliud,’ Ovid says of the elements in primal matter (‘No element kept its form, and each was at odds with the others,’ Met. 1.17–18). All quotations are from P. Ovidii Nasonis Metamorphoses (ed. Anderson, W. S.; Leipzig 1977). All translations, unless otherwise indicated, are mine.Google Scholar

3 My text is Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy (ed. Singleton, C.; Princeton NJ 1970–75); I have altered Singleton's translation in a few places throughout the essay.Google Scholar

4 The school of Orleans is, of course, the notable exception to the tendency to read Ovid allegorically. There is a large literature about the medieval traditions of Ovidian commentary, but see esp. the work of F. Ghisalberti, ‘Arnolfo d'Orléans: un cultore di Ovidio nel secolo xii ,’ Mem. R. Istit. Lombardo 246 4 (1932) 157–234; ‘L’ “Ovidius Moralizatus” di Pierre Bersuire,’ Studi Romanzi 23 (1933) 5–136; ‘Giovanni del Virgilio espositore delle “Metamorfosi,”’Il Giornale Dantesco 34 NS 4 (1933) 3–110, and Demats, P., Fabula (Geneva 1973). For Ovid as ethical poet, see Allen, J., The Ethical Poetic of the Later Middle Ages (Toronto 1982), 9–10 et passim.Google Scholar

5 Nardi, B., Studi di filosofia medievale (Rome 1960) 46–58, provides the definitive commentary on Statius' lines. Nardi says, ‘Secondo il concetto aristotelico, l'alimento non si converte nella sostanza del corpo nutrito se non dopo una serie di trasformazioni o digestioni, attraverso le quali cessa di essere dissimile ed è reso perfettamente assimilabile' (47).Google Scholar

6 The terms ‘matter and form’ derive from Aquinas, S. T. I 118 1 ad 4 (see Nardi 49). Google Scholar

7 All quotations are from Il Convivio (ed. Busnelli, G. & Vandelli, G., 2 vols.; Florence 1964).Google Scholar

8 Unless otherwise noted, all quotations and translations from Aquinas are from the Blackfriars edition of Aquinas, Thomas St., Summa theologiae (London and New York v.d.).Google Scholar

9 S.T. I-II 113 1, quoted in Dante Studies 2: Journey to Beatrice (Cambridge, Mass. 1967) 60.Google Scholar

10 Freccero, J., ‘The Sign of Satan,' in Dante: The Poetics of Conversion (ed. Jacoff, R.; Cambridge MA 1986) 173.Google Scholar

11 At the beginning of active purgation in the Purgatory, the spiritual generation of saved souls which Dante imagines as both a metamorphosis and a movement toward form particularly recalls the metamorphoses of the thieves: ‘non v'accorgete voi che noi siam vermi / nati a formar l'angelica farfalla, / che vola a la giustizia sanza schermi?’ (‘Are you not aware that we are worms, born to form the angelic butterfly that flies to justice without defenses?’Purg. 10.124–26). The damned, having denied their birthright, in some form all undergo a transformation into vermi. Google Scholar

12 S.T. I 76 3. The passage is quoted by C. Singleton in his note to the line, and I follow his translation, which is closer to Thomas than the one given in the Blackfriars' edition. See Dante, The Divine Comedy (trans. with a commentary by C. Singleton) Purgatory: Commentary 611–13.Google Scholar

13 Indeed, , alma sets in even greater ironic contrast the ‘figs’ (fiche) Vanni Fucci aims at God at the beginning of 25 Inferno, which by itself, in conjunction with the snakes that prevent him from speaking further, is enough to make us recall the Fall and the transformations it brought about, not only in the serpent, but in Adam and Eve, and the world as well. The full implications of Dante's imagery, however, are revealed, as we shall see, in Cantos 24–25 of the Paradiso.Google Scholar

14 Paratore, E., Tradizione e struttura in Dante (Florence 1968) 273.Google Scholar

15 See S.T. I 85 1 ad 2. See also Copleston, F., A History of Philosophy. II. Medieval Philosophy part 2 (Garden City NY 1962) 46. For matter as the principle of individuation in Dante, see Mattalia, D., Il Canto XXV dell'Inferno (Florence 1962) and Paratore, Tradizione 273ff. For another reading of the damned in terms of their loss of identity, see Skulsky, H., Metamorphosis: The Mind in Exile (Cambridge, MA 1981) 114–20.Google Scholar

16 Compare: ‘vivere ne l'uomo è ragione usare, ragione usare è l'essere de l'uomo, e così da quello uso partire è partire da essere’ (4.7.10–12). Cf. Conv. 2.7.3. Google Scholar

17 ‘Secundum eas [i.e., man's external deeds and things] unus homo alteri coordinatur’(S.T. II 58 8). Google Scholar

18 De officiis, 1.7.22. The text and translation are from Cicero, De officiis (ed. and tr. Miller, W.; London & New York 1928).Google Scholar

19 Here Aquinas argues that the damned cannot want good actually, yet their wills are still naturally inclined toward good. Google Scholar

20 From a different perspective, John Freccero has concluded that the soul's bodies are fictive; the damned are there in Hell only, as it were, as a reified irony or through the irony of reification. In one sense, all Freccero says is a presupposition of my argument here, but I would maintain that the souls' corporeality is real, in the same way that evil is real. The mode of representing the privative reality of nonexistence, however, would, as Freccero holds, necessarily be ironic. See ‘Infernal Irony: The Gates of Hell,’ now in Dante (cited, n. 10, supra), 93–109. In ‘Dante's Prologue Scene,’ in Dante, 1–28, Freccero points out that matter in essence is a metaphor in the Inferno. I would not deny this; but in the prologue scene, the matter is there as matter as well. As A. Wingell says in ‘The Forested Mountaintop in Augustine and Dante,’ Dante Studies 99 (1981) 11, the regio dissimilitudinis, in which Freccero locates the prologue scene, besides its moral aspect as vice also had an ontological aspect as primal matter, even for Augustine. But in Hell proper, insofar as the damned are concerned, matter is ‘there’ as the souls' corporeality, joined however to a form unable to realize its potential as a member of the human species.Google Scholar

21 De Trinitate 10 11 (PL 42 983) quoted and commented on by Thomas in S.T. I 79 6 sc. Since Statius' insistence that the intellectual soul after it is freed from the body in death retains virtually the human powers of the vegetative and sensitive soul comes directly from this section of the Summa (I 77 8), Thomas' comments here will have special pertinence.Google Scholar

22 See S.T. I 79; see also appendix 7 of vol. XI of the Blackfriars edition. See also on Aquinas' theory of knowledge, Copleston, Medieval Philosophy (cited n. 15 supra) 108–17. Google Scholar

23 The reason is that knowable objects are proportioned to knowing faculties (‘objectum cognoscibile proportionatur virtuti cognoscitivae'). The object of every sense faculty is a form existing in corporeal matter, and so, since this sort of matter is the principle of individuation, the senses know only particulars (S.T. I 85 1). Google Scholar

24 The quotation is from Copleston, Medieval Philosophy 110; in the Summa the relevant passages are S.T. I 84 7 and I 89 1 and 2. See Durbin, P., ed. and trans. of Summa Theologiae, Vol. XII Human Intelligence (I. 84–89). He calls the turn to phantasms a metaphor in his glossary, p. 196.Google Scholar

25 For the connection of this to Inferno 10, 99 ff., see Parodi's, E. G. review of G. Surra, ‘Studi du Dante: La conoscenza del futuro e del presente nei dannati danteschi,’ 1911, in Bulletino della Società Dantesca Italiana NS 19 (1912) 169–83.Google Scholar

26 For a reading of this simile as the expression of a double mutation, the simultaneous corruption of an old form and generation of a new one, see Freccero, ‘The Sign of Satan,’ in Dante 174. From another point of view, one could argue that we do gain positive knowledge of each sin the damned have committed, not from the sinners themselves, but from the good they are bound to, which is to say from the justice of their punishments. As Aquinas says, the equality justice requires must be between diverse beings capable of acting for themselves (‘necesse est quod aequalitas ista quam requirit justitia sit diversorum agere potentium,” S.T. II–II 58 2). But the souls in perdition have lost not only their ability to do anything for themselves, but also the capacity to be diverse as human beings, as opposed to numbers. They have nothing to bring to that act of commensuration with another which defines justice. The sinners therefore participate in making intelligible the nature of their sin and the equity of their punishment only in the shadowiest of ways, by making apparent that justice in the Inferno is entirely other to those it orders and gives a place; we can understand it only insofar as we realize that it starts, ends and takes its whole measure from the virtue which corresponds to each sin. Google Scholar

27 On this article, see Maritain, J., St. Thomas and the Problem of Evil (The Aquinas Lecture, 1942; Milwaukee 1942) 20–46.Google Scholar

28 On the ironic implications of Paul's statement, which Dante renders as the speed with which the transformations of the thieves take place, see Derby-Chapin's, D. L. reading of the allusion to Io, ‘Io and the Negative Apotheosis of Vanni Fucci,’ Dante Studies 89 (1971) 19–31.Google Scholar

29 Compare Par. 25.24: when Peter is joined by James, who examines Dante on faith, the Apostles rejoice, ‘laudando il cibo che la su li prande’ (‘praising the food which feeds them there above'). Google Scholar

30 A point noted in Chiampi, J., ‘The Fate of Writing: The Punishment of the Thieves in the Inferno,’ Dante Studies 102 (1984) 51–60, perhaps the most suggestive of all the recent articles on these cantos.Google Scholar

31 See also S.T. II-II 8 8, in which Thomas argues that faith, among the fruits of the Holy Spirit, responds to the gift of understanding. Google Scholar

32 See Gross, K., ‘Infernal Metamorphoses: An Interpretation of Dante 's Counterpass,’ MLN 100 (1985) 42–69. Gross finds a number of parallels between Ovidian metamorphosis and the contrapasso. Both, for instance, are at once a kind of death and a kind of survival, a perverse form of stasis and a grotesque sort of self-realization (52).Google Scholar

33 I have outlined both the political and the linguistic implications of Daphne's metamorphosis in particular in two articles, ‘Ovid and the Politics of Interpretation,’ Classical Journal, 84 (1989) 222–31; and ‘Ovid and the Problem of Gender,’ Mediaevalia 13 (1989) 9–28.Google Scholar

34 Most recently, for instance, see Gross, ‘Infernal Metamorphoses’ 45ff. Google Scholar

35 All quotations are from Confessions (ed. de Labriolle, P.; Paris 1945–46).Google Scholar

36 In human beings the will can be lasting only with respect to the object it desires, as when someone wills to do something always (S.T. II–II 58 1 ad 3). Google Scholar

37 As does any act that is virtuous: for Aquinas, ‘it must be voluntary, and spring from a firm and stable disposition’ (S.T. II–II 58 1). Google Scholar

38 On Augustine's commentary, see Newman, F. X., ‘St. Augustine 's Three Visions and the Structure of the Commedia,’ MLN 82 (1967) 56–78.Google Scholar

39 See, for instance, most recently Ellrich, R., ‘Envy, Identity, and Creativity: Inferno XXIV–XXV,’ Dante Studies 102 (1984) 61–80 and Gross, ‘Infernal Metamorphoses’ 66.Google Scholar

40 On the final vision as a metamorphosis, see e.g. Priest, P., ‘Looking Back from the Vision: Trinitarian Structure and Poetry in the Commedia,’ Dante Studies 91 (1973) 114; Ellrich, ‘Envy’ 70–72.Google Scholar

41 Musa, M., Dante's Inferno (tr. with notes and commentary Bloomington IN 1971) 201; see as well L. Baldassaro, ‘Metamorphosis as Punishment and Redemption in Inferno XXIV,’ Dante Studies 99 (1981) 89–112, who provides a summary of the comment on the simile. The following studies are of special note in that they, as I, relate the simile to Dante's own idea of writing: Baker, D., ‘The Winter Simile in Inferno XXIV,’ Dante Studies 92 (1974) 77–91; Chiampi, (cited n. 30 supra); Derby-Chapin, (cited n. 28 supra); Hawkins, P. S., ‘Virtuosity and Virtue: Poetic Self-Realization in the Commedia,’ Dante Studies 98 (1980) 1–18; Frankel, M., ‘Dante 's Anti-Virgilian Villanello,’ Dante Studies 102 (1984) 81–109; Hollander, R., ‘Dante's “Georgic” (Inferno XXIV 1–18),’ ibid. 111–21.Google Scholar

42 In the exegetical tradition, the giving of manna was also associated with justice. Augustine comments on the Jews' murmuring after Jesus says that he is the living bread which came down from heaven (John 6.41–59), an incident which closely follows the multiplication of the fishes and loaves (John 6.5–14). These Jews, Augustine says, did not know how to hunger after the bread of heaven, which seeks the hunger of the inner man (interioris hominis quaerit esuriem). Thus Matthew says (5.6): ‘Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after justice [iustitiam], for they shall have their fill.’ Paul, Paul, however (1 Cor. 1.30), says that Christ is justice (iustitiam … esse Christum). Therefore he who hungers for this bread hungers for justice (iustitiam). Augustine, In Iohannis Evangelium tractatus CXXIV 26.1 (CCL 36; Turnhout 1954 ). Cf. Maurus, Maurus, Commentaria in Exodum, PL 108 79, who also associates the manna with justice: ‘Si quid enim hic boni operis acquiras, si quid justitiae … hoc tibi in futuro saeculo erit cibus.’Google Scholar

43 See Augustine, , Confessions, 7.10: ‘It was as though I were in a land where all is different from your own and I heard your voice calling from on high, saying, “I am the food of full-grown men. Grow and you shall feed on me. But you shall not change me into your own substance, as you do with the food of your body. Instead you shall be changed into me.”’ On this passage, see Freccero, ‘Dante's Prologue Scene’ (cited n. 20 supra) 7.Google Scholar

44 Augustine says the manna was only a shadow, which becomes an injunction to participate in the Incarnation. The faithful only know the body of Christ if they do not neglect to be the body of Christ (‘… si corpus Christi esse non negligant. Fiant corpus Christi, si uolunt uiuere de Spiritu Christi'). Augustine then continues in terms that recall those I have argued must be applied to the thieves: just as all have a spirit and a body, and the body lives by the spirit, so to live by the spirit of Christ, one must be in the body of Christ (In corpore esto Christi) (In Iohannis … tractatus, 26.13). Google Scholar

45 For manna as a figure for the Incarnation and the Eucharist: in addition to Augustine, see e.g. Maurus, Maurus, Commentaria, PL 108.81.Google Scholar

46 In regard to the worms which begin to teem in the hoarded manna, Rabanus' comment (PL 108.81) is revealing: They stand for the unbelievers, ‘those who hoard [thesaurizant] for the present life and out of love of this world … for avarice and blind desire for riches generate these worms. They are those who have wealth, who see brothers in need, yet close off their inner selves to them [claudunt ab eis viscere sua].’ Rabanus comes close to describing a thief. Google Scholar

47 The connection between the passages in Exodus and Numbers was often noted. See for example the Book of Wisdom, 16.1–7; Rabanus Maurus (PL 108.78). Google Scholar

48 Roba means fodder here, but generally can be extended to food of any sort, as is clear from Purgatorio 13.61.Google Scholar

49 See Singleton, . Inferno 2: Commentary 409.Google Scholar

50 See Psalm 77.25: panem angelorum manducavit homo, where the bread of the angels is an explicit reference to the manna. Compare Par. 2.11 and Convivio, 1.1.7: ‘O beati quelli pochi che seggiono a quella mensa dove lo pane de li angeli si manuca! e miseri quelli che con le pecore hanno comune cibo!’ (‘Oh how blessed those few who sit at that table where the bread of the angels is eaten. And how wretched those who have common fare with sheep'). In this respect, as in many others, as we shall see, the simile that begins Inferno 24 revises previous assertions of the Convivio. A number of studies have recently pointed out how the Comedy stands as a palinode to the Convivio. See, for instance, Frankel (cited n. 41 supra), 101–102 and the bibliography she provides. Google Scholar

51 We should note that in the exegetical tradition the giving of the manna was seen as a call to allegorical interpretation. Rabanus speaks of those whose hearts were too dense and thick to feel what was minute, subtle and spiritual in the word of God, which is what the manna stands for (‘Nihil enim in verbo Dei minutum, nihil subtile, nihil sentiunt spirituale, sed totum pingue, totum crassum. Incrassatum est enim cor populi illius,’ PL 108.79). Augustine (In Iohannis Tract. 26.11) speaks of those who ate manna, yet died (John 6.49). But there are many who ate and are not dead because they understood the visible food spiritually (‘uisibilem escam spiritualiter intellexerunt'). Google Scholar

52 One might in fact say that in its allegorical and moral senses, allegory deals with particular justice: how one disposes oneself within to deal uprightly with others. Dante gives two examples, both of which, significantly enough, involve metamorphoses. In the Convivio, Dante says that Jesus took only three Apostles up the mount on which he was transfigured to teach that we should take few companions in the most secret things. In the Epistle to Can Grande, Dante says the moral sense of Psalm 113 is the conversion of the soul from the grief and misery of sin to a state of grace. The anagogic sense, on the other hand, deals with general justice: how each participates in the common good. Dante's example again is Psalm 113, which foretells the greatest metamorphosis of all: the departure of the sanctified soul from the servitude of this corruption to the liberty of eternal glory. Dante recalls here Romans 8.21: ‘Ipsa creatura liberabitur a servitute corruptionis in libertatem gloriae filorum Dei.’ As Aquinas says in his commentary (ad. q.1, quoted in Busnelli [ed. Convivio 100], for creatura we should read homo iustus. Google Scholar

53 As Dante's reading of Orpheus in the Convivio (2.1.3) shows, Ovid's metamorphoses could never be more than metaphors. According to Augustine, however, metaphors are signs where ‘things that we signify by proper terms are usurped [usurpata] by others signifying something else' (De doctrina Christiana 2.10.15). Metaphor therefore bears an inherent resemblance to theft, which Thomas, as we have seen, defined as the ‘usurping’ of someone else's property in violation of justice (‘contrariatur justitiae, quae unicuique tribuit quod suum est, et ex hoc competit ei quod usurpat alienum,’ S.T. II–II 66 3). But as a figure for justice, metamorphosis must be more than a metaphor. The equality which Ovidian metamorphosis suggests between two things is essentially convertible; like metaphor, it is a trope of the surface. For Dante, however, metamorphosis is an allegory of inner change. Dante therefore refashions Ovid's literal sense, giving metamorphosis the depth of history, so that it can figure the condition of the thieves. And in so doing, he would deny as inappropriate the allegorical readings of Ovid that were so common in the Middle Ages, just as he would in the next canto deny the traditional allegories that had been attached to Ulysses. See, for instance, Freccero, J., ‘Dante 's Ulysses: From Epic to Novel,’ Dante 136–151 and Mazzotta, G., Dante, Poet of the Desert (Princeton NJ 1979) 70–106.Google Scholar

54 For another reading of the association of this passage from the Convivio with the thieves, see Peter Hawkins, ‘Virtuosity and Virtue’ (cited n. 41 supra). Google Scholar