Notes on the intellect in Dante's Inferno
Meandering sporadically through the relation of faith, intellect and will.
Early in Inferno’s first canto, Dante employs a striking and philosophically rich visual analogy in the prologue scene:
The way resumed I on the desert slope,
So that my firm foot [piè fermo] ever was the lower.1
This image has stayed with me ever since I first read it. At first gloss, the line is unremarkable – is it not simply depicting the act of limping? Nay. In these two lines, Dante paints a picture of the soul’s inner struggle between intellect and will. The movement of the body is analogous to the movement of the soul.
There is a great body of literature focused on this very line and question, on “the firm foot.” John Freccero’s (1959) paper on the subject does the best, that I’ve seen, at elucidating the meaning behind this peculiar turn of phrase.2 The left foot, “the firm foot,” is analogized to the appetite (or the will, which is “rational appetite”3), as it drags behind the right foot, which stands in for the intellect. Intellect leads because it is able to “see the goal clearly” but our fallen nature, our discordant desire, inhibits the journey.4
Allow me to liberally quote Freccero:
For Dante, imbued with the study of Aristotle, the analogy was an analogy in a very strict sense, and not a mere comparison. The figure of a man in the act of walking was quite literally the incarnation of the act of choice, for walking was simply choosing brought down to the material plain. The vital spirit residing in the heart has for its entire function the transmission of the soul's commands, and the concatenation of thoughts and desires produced by the intellect and the will is reproduced, in the act of walking, by the succession of right and left. What better way to represent a struggle which goes on in the soul, than to observe the effects of that very struggle upon a body.5
Reaching back to classical antiquity, the right foot was referred to as “agile” while the left known as the “firm” foot, because the left-sided heart poured its spiritus into the right side.6 The scholastics adopt such a view with their recovery of Aristotelian philosophy. Furthermore, all motion originates on the right for the Philosopher. (As Freccero notes, this may go as far as influencing why Christ sits at the right hand of God.7) The scholastics similarly adopt the view of locomotion, including for the action in question – that is, a step beginning on the right side. It becomes clear on a deeper level that the similarity of Dante’s piè fermo and the scholastics’ pes firmior is no accident. Freccero brings further clarity to the relation (and hierarchy of action) between the left and right feet in analogy to the intellect and will: “The mind's last movement is the first movement of the appetite, or the moment of choice, the ‘actus intellectus appetitivi, vel appetitus intellectivi.’”8
(An aside: Through reason, St. Thomas says, man is able to understand and attain truth and that orders him toward his final end. Aristotle similarly argues that when natural things act in accord with their nature – he gives reproduction as one paradigmatic example – they do so “that they may share as much as possible in the eternal and divine.”9 For St. Thomas, reason and intellect are not two distinct powers but the same, and through the rational faculty the person is able to “advance from one thing understood to another, so as to know intelligible truth.”10 Moreover, he agrees with Aristotle that the intellect is “something in the soul” and that we must also “suppose a superior intellect, from which the soul acquires the power of understanding.”11 Thereby, the human soul “participat[es] in that superior intellect, by which power the human soul makes things actually intelligible.”12)
But now to tie it together, Freccero frames the problem on the relation well, showing how the single line summarizes not just Dante’s journey but the human condition. Since the first sin of our common parents, our judgement has been clouded, our intellect and participation imperfect. It is through the grace we receive in faith may we hope to order ourselves rightly:
The traveler's problem, then, is that his body will not respond perfectly to his mind, for his fear has been only somewhat allayed. If it were only a question of an interior action, one of the mind alone on the purely literal level, he would have no problem. This pilgrim, unfortunately, has a mountain to climb, difficult for anyone, let alone for a man half struck with fear, and therefore only half able to walk — limping in one leg.13
Throughout the Inferno, Dante makes the case that intellect must be guided by the light of faith or otherwise it becomes disordered. (The misguided intellect is one not ordered toward the Highest Good, the final cause, the cause of causes.14) For the human intellect to participate in what St. Thomas called the superior intellect, to attain the most perfect harmony, the person must accept faith as the guiding light – otherwise the intellect becomes subservient to the whims and desires of the fallen man.
Dante encounters the sin of lust in the fifth canto. Traversing the second circle of Hell, he describes these sinners as those “[w]ho reason subjugate to appetite.”15 Dante here brings to the forefront the concept of the intellect as superior to the will, as having dominion over the will in the proper natural order. Following St. Thomas, the intellect, considered in itself, or absolutely, is the higher power.16 Reason must point toward the divine and thereby order the temporal life in the way that pleases Him.
Dante describes Semiramis, the hedonistic legendary queen of Assyria: “To sensual vices she was so abandoned, / That lustful she made licit in her law, / To remove the blame to which she had been led.”17 Here, Dante is describing an intellect corrupted by desire. Law is, after all, “an ordinance of reason for the common good,” and instead of a properly ordered intellect being guided by the light, Semiramis ordered the intellect to sinful, base desire.18
Moreover, in the Assyrian queen’s dissociation from guilt, Dante brings to light another problem that arises when the will overpowers the intellect (or when a disordered intellect guides astray): the dimming of the person’s recognition of their own responsibility and agency. This is shown to be true once more in the unfortunate case of Francesca da Rimini, who finds herself in Hell for eternity yet continues to deny agency for her sins.
Many times over, Francesca blames an abstraction instead of admitting her own fault. “Love has conducted us unto one death” she says, in one instance.19 Maybe this is only poetic or dramatic flourish on Dante’s part. But the reality remained that she had subjected her reason to her desire, and the sower of sin was not some third-party agent, nor the abstraction she painted in ‘Love.’ At this allusion to the dimming of the rational faculty, as if a fog had blurred knowledge of the good, St. Thomas would balk. In this instance, it becomes further clear the intellect must be rightly ordered, to tame the excesses of the will.
In the same episode, Dante considers the responsibility of the artist in relation to the work they produce – naturally a product of the intellect. Francesca appeals to Dante, saying:
Love, that on gentle heart dothly swiftly seize,
…
Love, that exempts no one beloved from loving,
…
Love, that has conducted us unto one death20
She intentionally echoes Dante’s own words from his Vita nuova in beginning the three tercets, thereby broadly invoking the corpus of his earlier romantic poetry. Francesca’s attempt to justify herself using Dante’s own work, to his face, and may indeed be the explanation for his fainting spell at the end of the canto – the pilgrim is overwhelmed to witness his artistic works being lauded in, and possibly even leading one to, Hell.
This potentially causes a moment of introspection for Dante that once again clarifies the purpose of the human intellect is to do good, pointing the citizen toward man’s final end. Doing otherwise would be a debasement of the gift that is the rational faculty. When Dante finds himself in a “forest dark” at the beginning of Inferno, where the “straightforward pathway had been lost,” Francesca’s usage of his past writing may at least partially indicate why he felt so.21 The poet then brings this epiphany into the world of Dante the pilgrim when exercising a bit of self-criticism of his past work, exhorting the artist to be guided by faith in his work instead of by passions.
That being said, in Dante’s hierarchy of Hell, the sins of the flesh – those concerning the imbalance in emotion, desire or passion (of the will, we may say) – are considered less serious than those of the intellect. The intellectual sins are damned deeper into Hell; they are placed in lower Hell, in the City of Dis. They are especially offensive because “the human soul derives its intellectual light from Him,” as St. Thomas wrote.22
The counselors of fraud in the eighth bolgia of Dante’s Inferno are found in Canto XXVI. There, Dante meets the great Ulysses. Dante the pilgrim prefaces his encounter by saying “When I direct my mind to what I saw, / And more my genius curb than I am wont, / That it may run not unless virtue guide it.”23 Dante once again takes the occasion to caution against an unbridled intellect that divorces from faith (or virtue, as he says here). Ulysses goaded his men to join him on an expedition beyond what were understood to be the ‘boundaries’ of man, counseling them that “Ye were not made to live like unto brutes, / But for pursuit of virtue and knowledge.”24
Ulysses earlier remarks that nothing – not his duty, responsibilities, family or love – could overcome his desire to journey to the edges.
Nor fondness for my son, nor reverence
For my old father, nor the due affection
Which joyous should have made Penelope
Could overcome within me the desire
I had to be experienced of the world,
And of the vice and virtue of mankind25
The problem of the intellect is two-fold for Ulysses. He cannot quench the desire to be “experienced of the world,” and thus escapes the eminently reasonable bonds of duty. This whirlwind of passion provokes Ulysses to impress upon his men the attainment of “vice and virtue of mankind” as the goal of this journey – knowingly falsely counseling and misguiding them in order to capture their spirits. Falsely counseling, moreover, because escaping duty, family and responsibility are not virtuous. His journey, truthfully, abandons virtue while ostensibly seeking it out (if the mention of having to experience “vice” did not make this clear).
While virtue was not present in this journey, knowledge may conceivably have been. But the pursuit of knowledge, when not enlightened by faith, runs astray. Ultimately, it was a journey to tempt God, and so it naturally “quickly turned to weeping.”26 So goes the disordered intellect.
Inferno I, 29-30
Freccero, John. “Dante's Firm Foot and the Journey Without a Guide.” H. Theolo. Review, vol. 52, no. 4, 1959, pp. 245–281., doi:10.1017/S0017816000026821.
ST I-II, q.8, art.1
See 1n30. Alighieri, Dante, transl. Robert M. Durling, and Ronald L. Martinez. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Volume 1: The Inferno. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Freccero, John. “Dante's Firm Foot and the Journey Without a Guide.” p. 264
Ibid, p. 253
Ibid, p. 252
Ibid, p. 263
De Anima II.4, 415a26-b2
ST I, q.79, art.8
ST I, q. 79, art.4
Ibid.
Freccero, p. 265
“The final cause is realized last in time, but it must be present in intention first. It is the cause of the other causes because the form is given to the material by the agent, but the agent cannot act unless he has some purpose for acting. The final cause, the good, is thus the cause of causes.” Waldstein, Edmund. “The Good, the Highest Good, and the Common Good.” The Josias, 15 Jan. 2019. https://thejosiasdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/the-good-the-highest-good-the-common-good.pdf.
Inf. V, 38-39
ST I, q.82, art.3
Inf. V, 55-57
ST I-II, q.90, art.4
Inf. V, 106
Inf. V, 100-106
Inf. I, 2-3
ST I, q.79, art.4
Inf. XXVI, 19-22
Inf. XXVI, 118-119
Inf. XXVI, 94-99
Inf. XXVI, 136