Thomas Aquinas

Investigations in recent decades on Dante’s thought have helped to rectify the image of him as an orthodox Thomist, convincing scholars of the need to consider the Albertinian, Averroist, and Augustinian dimensions of Dante’s eclectic, or rather, complex, ideological system. It remains nonetheless true that Thomas Aquinas’ role in Dante’s intellectual development was decisive. Dante always showed great admiration for his theological knowledge and for his pastoral activities, as demonstrated by Thomas’ centrality in the heaven of the Sun in Paradiso. Dante’s knowledge of Aristotle’s works was in fact mediated mainly by the commentaries by Thomas, frequently referred to, explicitly or otherwise, in the Convivio. Besides the content of Thomas’ works, Dante appreciated his discursive rigour and clarity, his intellectual finesse and conceptual precision, his discreto latino (“discerning language”), namely, his clear and precise explanation, in Par., XII 144. Besides, especially when one considers that Dante was not a philosopher by profession, and therefore that certain subtle distinctions between different speculative models, emphasized by modern scholars, would have seemed irrelevant to him, one cannot avoid recognizing that Dante’s thought is in keeping with that of Thomas’ Christian Aristotelianism on many basic issues. It should suffice to point out the convergence between Dante and Thomas in rejecting the Averroist concept of the single intellect, thereby maintaining the oneness of the individual soul. Moreover, they both recognize the subordination of the will to the intellect, as opposed to the voluntarism of the mystical-Fransciscan tradition, with the inevitable corollary for Dante in Par., XXVIII 110-11 that the essence of beatitude is based … ne l’atto che vede, / non in quel ch’ama che poscia seconda (“on the act of vision, not on that of love, which follows after”), exactly as in Thomas’ Summa Theologica, I II 3 4: “the essence of beatitude consists of an act of the intellect […] in fact one cannot love before knowing”[1].

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[1] “essentia beatitudinis in actu intellectus consistit …. non enim diligitur nisi cognitum”.