Free will and the exercise of reason

The concept of personal responsibility, or free will, is decisive in Dante’s ideology and especially in the conception of his poem. In his view, man is ordained to beatitude or to eternal damnation depending on whether he exercises his free will towards good or evil. It is no coincidence that the subject of the Commedia, if taken allegorically, is “man, either gaining or losing merit through his freedom of will, subject to the justice of reward or punishment” (Ep., XIII 25)[1]. Equally non-coincidental is Dante’s assigning his central ideas to cantos XVI and XVIII of Purgatorio, namely, to the cantos in a central position within the structure of the poem. In these cantos he describes the ability of the stars to influence only the initial impulses of individuals, without admitting any other form of predestination. The responsibility for distinguishing between good and evil and for pursuing one or the other, also by controlling innate tendencies, is assigned to the intellect and to individual free will. This view seems perfectly in keeping with Thomistic thought on the subject of free will. A specific feature of Dante’s ideology, however, is his emphasis on the part played by the exercise of reason in the act of individual choice. Reason is free will: it is granted by God as an illuminating guide for man in his own moral choices; as he writes in the Convivio, it is a divine creation (III 7 16: “he who was crucified – he who created our reason”), a trait defining human beings (II 7 3-4: “when it is said that man lives, this must be understood to mean that he uses his reason […]. So anyone who sets reason aside […] lives not as man but as beast”). In the Commedia, however, this exaltation of the exercise of reason is accompanied by a painful and frequently reiterated awareness of the limits of reason in penetrating the mysteries of faith.

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[1] “homo prout merendo et demerendo per arbitrii libertatem iustitie premiandi et puniendi obnoxius est”.