Purgatorio, Canto 25 with Dr. Agnes Howard
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 30 ก.ย. 2024
- Dr. Agnes Howard of Valparaiso University introduces us to Canto 25 of Dante's Purgatorio.
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Canto 25: As they climb the staircase from Gluttony to Lust, Dante asks how can the shades of Gluttons become emaciated when all souls exist without corporal organs and there is no need for nourishment? Virgil defers to Statius, indicative that a description of the development of body and soul requires both reason and faith. The “perfect blood” of the heart (sangue perfetto) provides the “formative power” (virtute informative) of the human, whereas the blood of the vessels nourishes the body’s organs. The perfect blood of the male travels to his genitals where it becomes the seed to be planted in the passive female soil derived from her perfect blood. The two bloods congeal to bring forth life. The active force (virtute attiva) of the father becomes the soul (anima) of the person. Under divine influence the vegetative-like fetus takes on aspects of a sea-sponge (spungo marino) capable of movement and feeling as well as becoming a human (fante) with an intellect in the image and likeness of God, i.e., with reason and free will. God breaths into this body a new spirit full of power (spirit novo, di vertu replete) so that the person becomes a body with soul (sustanzia, e fassi un’alma sola) capable of self-reflection. Upon death, the body with its soul are separated into a body and a soul. The lower abilities of the body become inert while those higher faculties of memory, intellect and free will, previously breathed into it by God, remain active in the shade and, in fact, become keener in their capabilities. As soon as the soul recognizes it is in a new environment, the “formative power” sends out rays and new “supernatural organs” are formed in a manner similar to that of sunlight forming a rainbow in falling rain. These supernatural organs found in the shade (ombra) now undertake functions resembling those previously held by the natural body. Thus, the supernatural organs of a gluttonous shade can feel hunger and crave food. However, the repentant shade makes purgation by not taking in any supernatural food and, therefore, becomes emaciated as it is purified of its former desire. Upon leaving the Sixth Terrace of gluttons, the Triad enters the Seventh Terrace of those whose sin was lust. Flames engulfing the shades found there are kept away from the edge of the terrace by high winds. The pilgrims walk carefully along a narrow path between the flames and the cliff which drops off dramatically on the other side. As they enter this terrace, surrounding voices intone, “God of supreme clemency ....” along with Mary’s reply at the Annunciation: “Virum non cognosco.”
Thank you for your comments and interpretations. I find them MOST HELPFUL
Oh my!!! How beautiful!!! I think our scientific jargon can sometimes rob our imagination of the wonder of it all! I love the glad visitations of God!!! And the gift of speaking! He the word himself, sharing it with each of us afresh! Like in Narnia, the beasts were gifted with ability to speak, and lost it when they turned "beastly", or anti God. Our wonder makes us humble and childlike. Our knowledge sometimes makes us proud, a n d drips us from wonder. I love this! There's a beautiful picture drawn by a sister, of pregnant Mary comforting Eve, setting her hand on her womb, and smashing her foot on the serpent's head which winds around Eve's legs. Thank you so much for opening this up!!!
LECTURE TRANSCRIPT
What relationship might there be between the way we experience the body on earth and the kinds of bodies we may become? In canto 25, Dante, Virgil and Statius continue through Purgatory and see souls being purged from sins of the flesh. They have seen those being purged from gluttony-and Dante is puzzling over the appearance of these shades. He’s nervous about asking what he wonders out loud, but Virgil encourages him to speak. Just before the group approaches the fiery ledge of those being purged from lust, then, we get what some call a scientific digression.
Interrupting talk of poetics is this lecture on embryology. Surprising as it might be it makes sense coming between treatments of disordered indulgence of these appetites. It comes in response to the really good question Dante asks. Dante asks whey the shakes look skinny though they don’t actually have bodies. It shouldn’t happen that way. As happens often in the Comedia, the puzzle helps draw us forward. The question about why the disembodied seem lean when they no longer have physical flesh leads to an answer that mulls the relationships between body and soul, earthly body and heavenly body, memory and intellect, and finally how sensitive parts of the soul connect to intellectual ones which mirror the Triune God.
Some scholars have striven to unpack this embryology as a metaphor to authorize an interpretation of poetry or memory. Maybe Dante is saying something here about how God breathes inspiration for poetry? That’s a reasonable metaphor. But I think we should start by thinking about human generation, that oldish term for the whole process of reproduction, gestation, birth-on its own terms first. Unless you have a particular interest in antique reproductive biology, or medieval ensoulment theories, the Commedia reader may never meet these ideas outside of the pages here. Perhaps we can get from thinking about this to a bigger metaphor, when we first understand better what human becoming is all about.
Here the answer Statius gives to Dante’s good question proceeds through this logical sequence. In order to explain aerial bodies you first have to understand the creation of the earthly body. Here Dante is reflecting his awareness of contemporary debates about generation and ensoulment. When he makes these comments, he says something quite different from what we think. We think we know how babies are made, but people in Dante’s time also thought they knew. We think that sperm meets egg and DNA fuse and the newly distinct genetic package multiplies and grows. This was not their explanation. The puzzle they had to explain was this: how, from liquid emitted by man and woman, a solid arose; from this fluid, undifferentiated mess came specific body parts, pointy and distinct and functional, like elbows, noses, and thumbs but also a unity, a whole new person and not just parts: and-this was key-how a person with a soul emerged and not just a physical body. Where did the spirit and/or soul come from and how did it arise in the body? And then, what happened to that when a person entered the realm where Dante travels?
Medieval embryology may not be right, that is, an accurate explanation of fetal growth as we understand it, but it perceptively answers the problems they at least knew were interpretive problems. The theory we see here is that babies are made through some essence that comes from the father. This essence is made from the hyper-digested or perfected blood from his body, because it has been so refined this blood becomes powerful to generate a new creature. It becomes what Dante’s calls ‘seed.’ When, through contact of man and woman, this ‘perfected blood’ is delivered to what Dante calls ‘the natural vessel’, it makes a new thing, a body, by coagulating her much less perfected blood, and then quickening it.
But how does that body become alive? And how did it get a soul? Medieval theorists striving to understand the soul borrowed from Aristotle and others, systematized by Thomas Aquinas. They recognized, as we do, that humans share some features with other living creatures and also that each creature has a soul appropriate to its kind of body. The soul and body come together, thus, at first, this creature would be able to grow, kind of like a plant, and so it would have a soul suitable to that stage, such as a plant possesses. As it keeps on working, it would become able to move and feel, like an animal, like a sea sponge, with soul suitable for animal. Then it would grow to the next stage-and remember it’s still the man’s perfected blood powering these metamorphoses.
Dante admits that this is all hard to understand. How did this animal become a child, in the words of the text. Statius here reveals that at this point God breathes into it an immortal soul. Let’s pay attention to the words here and I quote, “know at the moment in the fetus when the brain’s articulation is complete, the first mover in gladness at that hour, breathing a new spirit replete with power, drawing the active virtues it may find into its own substance, making them one soul.” That’s the way the text puts it.
God’s visitation does not just add another in the developmental line of souls but integrates into one a soul and makes a human child. That word here for the human child made by God is ‘fante’ literally means one that speaks-God’s breath allows the human to speak. What strange ideas these are to us. It’s quite an amazing power to ascribe to a human man, to contribute this essence that not only start the new creature but keeps it morphing on ahead from one stage to another. Still, notice where all this thrilling transformation happens: in the body of a woman! If the belly of a woman is where the fetus is when God comes to give it a soul, then that must mean that God comes in gladness to the woman in order to enliven the child. Ensoulment imagined this way implies visitation of God to each woman, who is working along on her part of the gestational project while God does what God does.
Much more could be said about this account of human generation. I treasure it less for its answers than for its questions. It seems not a rude scientific interruption but a really fruitful imagination of who and how we are. It wonders about our bodies and souls, how they come to be and what becomes of them in a way that connects to other big categories, the nature of memory, the relationship of moral development to physical development. In the way of human becoming, as Statius describes it, the order on earth was that the body grew with the soul appropriate to the physical stage. In this other world with “the lesser power mute” memory, intelligence and will grow more acute and stamp the air with our human faculties. Body and soul matter together, parts and whole, through this journey.
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The information in these talks including Dr. Howard's is, typically excellent. But this particular talk was a great example of something that has bedeviled me since the beginning of the hundred days of Dante series. I know it's possible that there is a student team doing the production of these talks, but who is making the repeated decision to have speakers look askew on the camera not talking to the people ostensibly being spoken to? I actually began to wonder if Dr. Howard is blind because of the distracting gaze away from the camera. In addition, this particular talk was clearly filmed at night in front of a window with busy traffic going past. Maybe it's just me being ADHD. But that seems like a poor choice for a production that is supposed to be focusing. Our thoughts on the matter at hand. When I'm watching these talks, inevitably these odd choices of production technique repeatedly distract from the message. It's a shame because if you just bear down, requiring, of course, the ignoring of distracting production choices, the content is excellent.
It's a complaint and probably one that is not as common as I would hope. But it is my own observation. I found myself struggling not to think about the cars driving by in the background or why the doctor was not looking at the camera. And this was not the first time I've had this experience with 100 Days of Dante. Somehow, I imagine I am not alone in this.
I agree with you -- the camera angles can be very distracting.
It seemed to me in this video that she was reading her talk, and so looking at that on a screen. I found the information interesting, but her delivery was flat.
Dr. Howard, Thank you for your presentation on a difficult and sensitive topic. I have a question: Why is there a noticeable scarcity of women in the Divine Comedy? Is it because women were considered less than fully rational beings at the time of Dante (and Thomas Aquinas) when it was thought that main purpose of women in the reproductive cycle was as a vessel to nurture the seed passed down from Adam and that they did not participate in conception other than to nourish and protect the "hominization" as it were? Did this make women less culpable of deliberate sin? If this isn't the case then one might assume that the approximate 50/50 male to female split in the Inferno and Purgatorio to equal that on Earth as it is now and probably was then or might it be, as we were made to believe as children, that "girls are sugar and spice and everything nice" and so the overwhelming majority of women go to Heaven without climbing the seven story mountain of Purgatorio? Is Dante being noble in leaving out the fair sex or is it a sign of male superiority in that he may have felt that women were not worthy of mention, or was it something else, fear of offending Beatrice perhaps, or will this be addressed in cantos yet to come?
Great question, I would agree with your first interpretation
Meeting Agnes Howard on my way up Purgatorio made me feel like Dante the pilgrim, meeting friends and acquaintances along the way. Thank you Agnes for guiding me through Canto 25.
For the first time reader, you may have summed up our entire experience by your statement that you treasure this scientific explanation more for the questions it raises than the answers it provides. For many of us, that sums up our entire experience with 100 Days of Dante - we are able to be more excited by the questions Dante and you guides cause us to ask than the answers we arrive at. Answers may take another reading or two to come for some of us. Thank you, Dr. Howard, for taking the time to raise these questions and share your views on what the best questions to ask of this canto are.
These are such fascinating questions that Dante raises and ideas that he contemplates. Thank you Dr. Howard for your thoughtful insights!
Can someone help me understand the definition Dr. Howard mentions of the (I presume) Italian word used for "human child"? I have listened multiple times and cannot understand what she is saying. Thank you...and blessings.
Just like you Dr. Howard, I'm more intrigued by the questions Dante raises not so much as the answers. Although I find the answers, God's visitation to each woman, delightful as well as they align with biblical text, such as the visitation of Mary. Thank you for bringing this to light, I've never thought of it that way before.
Thank you. This little lecture is worth watching a few times. The canto itself is quite dense and dry, on first reading. I thought it was just a scientific digression on renaissance theory of embryology. But as you said, it is more of a question of the ensoulment in the body of a woman, with the visitation of God at the time of conception, and the growth and development of the body and soul together, and all that entails: memory, moral development, order of societies. Body and Soul matter together. God bless the work of Baylor HonorsCollege for bringing us the 100 Days of Dante.
Thank you, Dr. Agnes Howard! What an intriguing Canto. Embryology and ensoulment are just the type of subjects that I imagine would occupy much of many a scholastic's mind. The idea of the blood is really central. Blood of man and woman become one flesh and God breathes the soul into it: the body's form.
Two key implied ideas are the visitation of God and the place this digression has between the penultimate and ultimate rings of Purgatory. Each woman is visited by God in a special way during pregnancy. Their child truly is a gift, and their gestation truly is a blessed service in cooperation with the Divine. It is important to see Aristotle's ideas (at the side of Thomism) on the active role of man and the receptive role of woman. Between two rings, this union of body and soul is emphasized. Misuse of the nutritive and misuse of the sexual serve as frames for this exposition. Theology of the body is especially important today!
The "air bodies" of shades between death and resurrection feels like a stretch. It seems to be an ontological stretch for the sake of poetry and the physical setting of Purgatory. The theology of Purgatory may be more important to examine for a straight answer. Nonetheless, Dante puts this here for a reason and gives a decent, internally consistent answer. Props to him.
Thank you!
Thank you, Dr. Agnes Howard, for your thoroughly interesting and challenging presentation which I enjoyed very much.
As much as I am enjoying this series, I feel at times that the lecturers gloss over some of the meatier aspects of Dante's poem. I thought Dr. Howard did a terrific job on this canto, but she did not address verses 67 to 75. In these verses, Dante says that "ensoulment" (my word not his) does not occur until the brain is developed.
Further research led me to Thomas Aquinas who said that immaterial substance cannot be caused through generation, but through the creation of God and that occurs when the necessary elements of the brain have formed. This has significant impact on those who say that "ensoulment" occurs at conception or even a beating heart, both of which are illogical. Rather it is when the fetus is conscious.
While some may not agree with this position, it should at least be addressed.