Prof: With Canto XII--
from Canto XII to Canto XIV we
are still in what is known the
middle ground,
which is a moral ground:
the middle ground of Hell.
We are between the area of
incontinence,
that we saw in the last few
weeks and the area of malice:
this middle ground,
which is a ground of violence
or bestiality,
as it is also called.
What I want to draw your
attention to first of all is the
fact that Dante's presiding
symbols,
the presiding figures in this
area are all figures--
hybrid figures,
figures of doubleness:
the Minotaur and the Centaurs
in Canto XII.
You have the Harpies,
the filthy, foul figures,
monsters with the face of women
devouring the foliage and the
trees in Canto XIII.
 
And then, this will go on with
other emblems of,
again, monsters and the figure
of--but that's the figure of
fraud.
 
I don't want to get into that.
 
Figures of--again,
Minotaurs and Centaurs in XV.
What is the importance of these
figures?
There are neo-Platonic
images--figures of Centaurs,
Minotaurs--understood to
signify the doubleness of human
beings.
 
The capacity of human beings to
join within themselves both the
human and the bestial,
or the animal experiences,
possibilities of being.
 
In neo-Platonic thinking,
especially in the twelfth
century,
to give you the historical ring
to it,
we are saying the twelfth
century, the so-called
Chartrians,
and more so in the
fifteenth-century Florence,
with Pico, the figures--the
whole idea is that human beings
are really a kind of copular or
neutral entities capable of--
;who have the potential of this
doubleness within them.
They're capable of becoming
fully rational or descending
into bestiality.
 
The position in the ladder of
being is one of utter
indeterminacy.
 
In the twelfth century,
this is not the case.
They still believe in these
images.
They are fixed images of
entities, creatures capable of
being, at the same time,
expressing these dual impulses,
the bestial and the human
impulse.
This is--Dante seems to be
quite aware that somehow--
that these symbols do not
completely characterize what
human beings really are,
that the ability of human
beings to redeem themselves,
to free themselves out of a
certain state or fall,
plunge, into the opposite state.
There's a difference between
the symbols and what human
beings are going to be able to
do.
This is really the--these are
why I focused on canto--I asked
you to read Canto XII,
where Dante places tyrants.
It's really an anonymous canto.
 
There are no great figures,
no great personalities.
We do know, and Dante gives a
list of all the tyrants of his
time and the tyrants:
Dionysius of Syracuse,
Alexander, the Ezzolino of his
own time, in Padua,
etc.
 
They are figures of tyranny,
but at the same time he places
next to them figures of
educators, figures of teachers,
such as, for instance,
Chiron.
And this is a little bit
ironic, because he says,
come straight after Dante's
exemplary representation of
Virgil's own teaching in Canto
XI.
You remember when Virgil goes
on explaining in great detail
the shape of Inferno.
 
Here now, once again Dante
takes the other perspective,
that which he takes to be the
tyranny of teaching.
That is to say,
a sort of teaching does not
allow that freedom,
that the very symbols,
the very presiding figures of
this canto, also seem to deny.
They are forever man and beast.
 
And Dante claims,
clearly, that there is a
teaching that has to allow the
sort of the freedom to move,
either in the direction of
rationality or the freedom,
or the choice,
to move in its opposite
direction.
 
This is the substance,
I think, of Canto XII.
We come, though,
to Canto XIII which is one of
the most remarkable cantos of
Inferno,
it's the canto of the suicides,
and Dante encounters here a
figure--
a poet, a very well-known poet,
a very well-known figure of
maybe the late--
the middle part of the
thirteenth century called Pier
delle Vigne.
 
And as you read through the
canto, you will see that he puns
on both terms of the name.
 
Peter and he thinks of himself
as a figure of Peter,
one who holds the keys,
the two keys of the kingdom,
the keys of power,
but also the last name Pier
delle Vigne,
meaning of the vineyard.
And this is--of course we are
going to witness now a
metamorphosis of a human being:
the metamorphosis of a human
being,
from being human to becoming a
vegetable, a plant.
 
This is the story of suicides
and we shall see what Dante
thinks about suicides.
 
What he--why does he think that
such an evil as to be condemned
in this area of violence against
the self?
We do know that Dante--I don't
have to go over this but you do
know that Dante distinguishes
violence against self,
violence against others as in
Canto XII,
violence against nature and
violence even against the
divinity in Canto IV.
 
Let's look at Canto XIII and a
little bit of some textual
details and then we'll discuss
some of the issues of the canto.
"Nessus had not yet
reached the other side again
when we set out through a wood
which was not marked by any
path."
 
Here, there seems to be no
directions at all,
almost as if Dante were
revisiting Canto I of
Inferno.
 
The same idea of--a sense of
loss of self and adumbrating
what suicide may also be at some
level.
A loss of--some idea of one's
own being, some idea of what one
is or should be.
 
We are not told anything more
but then--
rather Dante shifts to a
description of the natural
landscape,
the world of nature,
the landscape and you--
as you read you must be struck
by how he's highlighting a
peculiar style and I want to
emphasize this style,
this figuration of style.
"No green leaves,
but of dusky hue,"
a series of antithesis.
 
First of all,
a series of antithesis,
but also anaphoras,
negatives.
"No smooth bows,
but knotted and warped,"
antithetical but at the same
time repetition of this
"no,"
anaphoric, "no,
no."
 
"No fruits were there,
but poisonous thorns.
No breaks so harsh and dense
have these savage beasts that
hate the tilled lands between
Cecina and Corneto."
We are in what--in a place,
in a landscape where this is
the style called,
there is a technical term for
the rhetoric Dante deploys,
it's called privatio
which simply means a privation.
 
Emphasizing,
there's nothing positive here
but it's a way of subtracting
from what is missing rather than
what is there.
 
That is really a negation,
the style of a negation,
but at the same time through
the antithesis,
making us think about how the
world might be,
"no green leaves,
but of dusky hue."
This is a style of taking away
and again taking away from any
substantial description of the
landscape.
"No breaks so harsh and
dense," etc.
"Here make their nests,
the loathsome Harpies,"
again hybrid figures,
just as we had the Centaur in
the previous canto,"
from the Strophades with dismal
presage of future ill;
they have wide wings and human
necks and faces,
feet clawed and their great
bellies feathered,
and they make lamentations on
the strange trees."
 
So we are in the world--we're
in the world of negation,
a world of monstrosities,
and a world of privation.
What is happening to human
beings here?
That's really the question that
he seems to be raising,
but let me just proceed even
more carefully here.
The whole scene recasts an
important scene in Book III of
the Aeneid.
 
This is indeed also a major
confrontation between Dante--
the whole canto dramatizes a
major confrontation between
Dante and Virgil,
the author of the
Aeneid--about some of
these issues.
What is a metamorphosis?
 
What is nature?
 
What is the place of human
beings within nature?
Because Dante and Virgil think
in sharply different ways.
For the metamorphosis,
for instance,
the scene that Dante here is
recalling,
is the scene of Book III of the
Aeneid,
where Polydorus,
a cousin of Aeneas,
has been killed and he's--you
remember there is this speaking
tree seen there too.
 
Aeneas arrives in Thracia,
which is Asia Minor,
he thinks that his--that is the
place which the gods have
assigned to him,
and he does that which he feels
is,
that which he knows has to be
done,
whatever and whenever you want
to build a city:
consecrate the ground.
Hallow the ground by building
an altar and by purifying the
ground through fire.
 
As he tries to do this,
the altar is always at the
center in the Aeneid,
at the center of the human
community he's pulling,
he's plucking a bough and he
hears a voice;
mysterious.
He shudders,
he's scared and the voice
comes.
 
It's Polydorus,
his cousin, who tells the story
that he has been killed because
of the sacrileges that have been
committed.
 
Whatever consecration Virgil
wants us to believe,
to think of cannot be really
carried out because a sacrilege
has been that of the killing of
Polydorus on account of the gold
that he carried--
they wanted to plunder him of;
they want to rob him of.
 
Aeneas hears a voice,
'Why do you pull me out of
this?'
 
And Polydorus simply asks that
a proper burial be given to him
so that he can descend
peacefully into Hades.
Aeneas complies and leaves that
place in the knowledge that is
not the place assigned to him.
 
The sacrilege was such that he
cannot really quite found the
city on the place of the crime,
of such an atrocious crime.
Dante's revisiting that
particular scene.
In fact, I repeat,
Canto XIII recasts that scene
and it's a major encounter with
Virgil and Virgil's whole
pattern, whole system of values.
 
And let's see how this is going
to continue.
We have the background with
some--stylistics of negativity,
styles of negation,
as if suicide were this
fundamental sacrilege that
denies the--
some reality that we don't know
yet.
"And the good master began
to speak to me,"
so Virgil intervenes reminding
us that this is indeed Book III
of the Aeneid,
which by the way,
another little detail,
Book III of the Aeneid
is the book of the Aeneid
Dante draws from the most.
If some of you want to write a
paper on how many scenes
Dante--and why--you should go
and--go ahead and write that
kind of paper.
 
One reason is that Book III of
the Aeneid is the book of
Aeneas' exile,
the homelessness of Aeneas.
Aeneas was still nowhere.
 
He is just--has just left Troy,
he is going to--
about to leave Carthage,
Dido's home,
and about to get into Sicily,
but never really quite being
able to say,
'this is really where I belong.'
This is really the place where
one can call home,
whatever that may be for him.
 
"The good master began to
speak to me,"
Virgil interrupts,
"'Before thou go farther,
know that thou art in the
second round and shalt be until
thou come to the horrible sand;
look well therefore,
and thou shalt see things which
will discredit my telling of
them."
 
This is a hyperbole on the part
of Virgil.
You are going to see what I
have been describing.
In a sense, this is the reason
why I'm the--
an authority and why I'm
guiding through--
you--through this because I
have seen,
imaginatively at least,
I have seen some of the things
that you are experiencing and
what you will see,
the reality of it all,
will exceed my own abilities to
tell of it.
 
A stance of humility on the
part of the teacher.
Therefore, a mild correction of
the claims about teaching in
Canto XII.
 
We said this is one theme that
seems to be running through and
then Dante continues.
 
"I heard from every side
wailings poured forth,
and saw none that made them,
so that,
all bewildered I stopped"--
and now another conceit that we
should come back to:
"I think he thought I
thought."
 
It's clearly--we call it an
amplification,
a way of playing with one verb,
but also inferring what the
thought of the other would be.
 
It's a descent into a
kind--into the boundaries of
one's own mind;
a way in which Dante dramatizes
the fact that there's no real
conversation now going on
between him and Virgil.
 
It's a way of descending into
the, what I call exactly,
the loneliness of Dante's own
thoughts.
"I think,"
and then reiterated once again.
Anaphoric: "I think he
thought, I thought."
More of this later--"that
all these voices among the
trunks came from people who were
hiding from us,
so the Master said:
'If thou break off any little
branch from one of these trees,
all thy present thoughts will
prove mistaken.'
 
Then I put out my hand a little
and plucked a twig from a great
thorn and its trunk cried."
 
This is Aeneid III,
lines 39 and following,
that's the way the Book III of
the Aeneid,
begins.
 
"'Why dost thou tear me?
 
When it turned dark with blood
it began again,
'Why manglest thou me?
 
Hast thou no spirit of pity?
 
We were men and now are turned
to stalks, thy hand might well
have been more pitiful had we
been souls of serpents.'
As a green brand that is
burning at one end drips from
the other and hisses with
escaping wind,
so from the broken splinter
came forth words and blood
together;
at which, I left for the tip
and stood as one afraid."
 
And Virgil intervenes:
"'If he could have
believed before,
wounded soul,
what he had never seen but in
my lines,"
my Aeneid,
"he would not have
stretched forth his hand against
thee,' my Sage replied 'but the
thing being incredible made me
prompt him to the deed which
grieves myself.
 
But tell him who thou wast,
so that, for some amends,
he may revive thy fame in the
world above when he is permitted
to return.'"
The irony of reviving the fame
in a place where there is no
possibility of revival;
there is no possibility of
coming back to life.
Indeed, where the natural world
is not capable of behaving
naturally, where there is no
real growth, no real change
here.
 
It's always going to be--it's
the most unnatural of places.
So the shadow of this
unnaturalness is going to be
cast over the scene with the
encounter with Brunetto Latini.
What is this idea here?
 
In a sense, this is already the
confrontation between Virgil and
Dante: "if he could have
believed that which he had
discovered."
 
It is as if Dante wants to test
the truth value of what he had
read in the Aeneid.
 
He had read the scene of the
Aeneid,
let me see how this is,
and finds out that that which
he sees is entirely different
from Virgil's account.
In a way we are really--he is
really drawing his--our
attention to what we call the
act of reading.
How do we read?
 
What do we believe when we read
the story?
When we read a story we yield,
in many ways to the story,
its part.
 
We want the story that we read
to read us as much as we want to
read it.
 
We want the story to explain us
to ourselves,
to hold a mirror up to us to
see who we are;
but Dante is literally also
implying the need to violate the
letter of the Aeneid.
 
He had to do because whatever
Virgil had described exceeded
believability,
it was just an incredible
account and he has to test the
reality of that scene.
So that's really the part of
the confrontation between the
two.
 
And now, let's see what he
hears: "and the trunk said,
thou so allurest me with thy
gentle speech."
It's what we call
captatio.
I won't have to write it here
on the board,
the captatio
benevolentiae.
You know, it's a great
rhetorical trick:
whenever you give a speech,
or whatever people speak to you
in public,
especially, or privately,
they will engage in this,
a way of capturing your
benevolence by telling a story,
playing something about their
modesty or whatever.
 
Now you saw "allurest
me."
It's so--fascinates,
so I--the lure of your
rhetorical language or your
rhetorical powers.
We are dealing with rhetoric,
first of all,
with style and now with the
language of the text,
and now with the language of
the exchange.
So it is as if the suicide has
a lot to do with this trait of
language, this characteristic of
language.
"Thou so allurest me with
thy gentle speech that I cannot
be silent, and let it not burden
you if I am beguiled into talk
for a little.
 
I am he that held both the
keys."
Here is the pun on Peter.
 
Now it's as if he were St.
 
Peter who holds the two keys of
the kingdom of Frederick's
heart.
 
Now the--you can see that all
the language of believing,
faith, that has been going
around in the previous lines of
the canto seem to be gravitating
around the figure of Frederick,
the king, who is a kind of,
let's call him the god of the
city,
because his name that's what it
means.
 
In Italian especially,
it's not--in English we say
Frederick.
 
In Italian, you say
Federico which really
repeats the idea of faith within
it.
As if all faith,
all beliefs,
really have to converge and go
toward this emperor of Sicily.
He's a Hohenstaufen,
he's a famous--
a German king,
ruling over Sicily and Pier
delle Vigne was the chancellor
of the Empire and also the
founder, by the way.
 
Let me say something more about
him.
He's the founder,
he's the one who conceived the
first university--
the first state university in
Europe,
the University of Naples,
because Frederick wanted a
university that would prepare
lawyers,
diplomats, people who could go
on state missions,
who could write papers for the
state.
 
And it would not be at all one
of the schools that the way
universities were under the
aegis of, for instance,
the canon lawyers,
the theologians.
So, this was the first lay,
secular school in Europe.
It was an imperial see;
unlike, for instance,
the University of Paris,
which was under
the--simultaneously under the
dominion of both the Bishop of
Paris and the King of France and
hence a lot of conflicts between
the two.
 
So, he's chancellor,
he is the founder of the
university.
 
He was a poet and he also
compiled the so-called
institutes of justice for the
kingdom where--
which is all inspired--his
institutes are all inspired by
the language of moderation,
the language of idealistic
language of order,
and natural law that could
follow--that could organize the
state.
And clearly the reality is
that, by his act,
Pier delle Vigne shows that
there's no such a thing,
or that he doesn't really
believe in what he claims to be
the principle of the legal
organization of the state,
which is natural law.
 
"I am he that held both
the keys to Frederick's heart
and turned them,
locking and unlocking,
so softly that I kept nearly
every other man from his
secrets."
 
He is the secretary of the
emperor.
A word, as you know,
which becomes very crucial
throughout the Renaissance.
 
He's a counselor,
but a secretary means--comes
from the--it's a word that comes
from the Latin,
from 'to secrete.'
 
That this is as if--he's the
figure who distills,
that's secreting,
distills that which the emperor
keeps hidden in his heart.
 
Some of his--he has this power
of distillation,
and knowing also and through
this distillation,
what has to be shared and what
has to be kept concealed from
all others.
 
Quite a figure of prestige,
he views himself as a
strict--and he was--collaborator
of the emperor.
"And I brought,"
again, "such
faithfulness."
 
Now that question of fidelity
in the way we read the text,
in the way we believe what we
read is brought into a sort of
refracted--
into the language of
fidelity--loyalty as
faithfulness to the emperor,
"to the glorious office
that I lost for it for sleep and
strength."
 
The causes of the suicide--the
causes of his tragic--
of Pier delle Vigne's tragic
downfall,
are going to be "the
harlot,"
the personification for envy.
 
The sin--there is--that Aquinas
for instance views as the worst
possible sin because it is a
really very close to hatred.
And close to hatred in the
sense that it has nothing--
all sins have some positivity
to it and all you--
you are a glutton--it's because
that piece of cake,
there's something about it that
lures you to it.
You are--you have this--you are
proud, it's because you really
have some sense of your
excellence, or some,
which is a real sin,
contempt for others;
you believe that others are not
as good as you think you are.
It's not so much that you look
at yourself as stretching the
hand toward the divinity,
the pride of Lucifer,
right?
 
The real sin is that you kick
around those who you perceive
are below you.
 
All sins have some kind of
positivity except for one,
and that's envy,
because envy only likes
nothing.
 
It's not jealousy,
you do have the kind of story.
All of you, I'm sure are
readers of Othello,
because that's really a
confrontation between envy and
jealousy.
 
There is the envy of--Othello
may be jealous,
but the one who is really
envious is Iago,
one wants nothing--he doesn't
want this Desdemona,
himself.
 
He can't stand the idea that
the other guy is happy:
that's envy.
 
Jealousy is the fear of losing.
 
Jealousy is almost an
ingredient of love,
Andreas Cappellanus says.
 
If you really are in love there
must be some rational aspect to
have jealousy in it but here are
the cause of the court,
the court which is always--that
little microcosm,
right?
 
Even for Dante who writes a
treaty from language,
even the theorists of--about
the function of language in the
court,
because the court is a place of
laws,
is the place of poetry,
is the place of political
persuasion.
These are the various
dimensions of the powers of
language.
 
And then you do know about the
court from Andreas Capellanus,
that's another topic for you to
explore: Dante's figuration of
the court and from all possible
points of view.
Here Dante views--now the
court, this microcosm of
political order and idealism has
been literally poisoned by the
presence of--
contaminated by the presence of
envy.
 
"The harlot that never
turned her shameless eyes,"
and you understand that
metaphor.
It's not so much that it
belongs to the harlot,
the fact is that the word envy
as you know is a word that in
Italian or in English,
"invidious."
It's invidia,
which is etymologized as non
video.
 
So, it's always an idea,
it's a kind of blindness to the
world outside and here Dante's
punning with his "turned
the shameless eyes."
 
It would seem to be a sort of
representation of the harlot and
the seduction of the harlot,
but it also plays on this
notion of what envy really
means."..
.the common bane and the vice
of courts, inflamed all minds
against me...
 
" Look how the language
now sort of takes over.
It takes over and Dante is just
playing with and multiplying
these terms, the same terms
repeated over and over
again." ..
 
and those inflamed,
so inflamed Augustus,
the name for the emperor,
or Caesar, "that happy
honors turned to dismal
woes."
This is the formula for--the
formulaic definition of tragedy
that he's giving:
"happy honors turn to
dismal woes."
 
Pier delle Vigne is aware of
his own tragic destiny,
his own tragic downfall,
and seals his fate as a tragic
fate.
 
And, "now,
my mind in scornful temper
thinking by dying to escape from
scorn, made me,
just, unjust to myself."
 
And once again the style of
repetitions--
anaphoric--Pier delle Vigne
constitutes himself into a
closed circuit and the doubling
of language reflects the
self-babbling.
 
Let me just go on and tell you
what I think is going on here.
When you read the sentence:
"...
by dying ...
 
made me, just,
unjust to myself."
And the obvious question that I
think you should really ask,
if I gave you a chance to ask,
you would ask,
how many selves are there in
him?
"..
 
.made me, just,
unjust to myself..."
How many persons are there?
 
How many figures are there in
one, in Pier delle Vigne?
The text that best glosses this
scene, this tragic of carentia,
appears in The City of
God, of St.
Augustine, Book I,
where Augustine is telling the
story of Rome and the death
of--and the end of the period of
the monarchy.
 
You know the seven kings, right?
 
The story goes and with
the--the story of the seven--
the expulsion of the Tarquins,
the last king,
is attributed to the fact that
the famous matron of Rome by the
name of Lucretia,
whom Dante by the way,
mentions in Limbo though.
 
He has a lot of ideas about
who, or what,
is the guilt of a suicide.
 
We shall see that a great
figure from an antiquity,
Cato, a suicide,
will appear and will inaugurate
the Purgatorio in Canto
I,
so Dante's always making some
crucial discriminations,
crucial distinctions.
 
At any rate,
they are the story that
Augustine tells in Book I of the
City of God is that of
the rape of Lucretia.
 
The rape of Lucretia and
Augustine is fierce about the
fact that she commits suicide.
 
How does she die?
 
She commits suicide out of the
guilt and shame that she had
been violated in rape by the--by
Brutus.
And he says,
how does she dare to take her
own life,
because here is the chaste
Lucretia who is embarrassed of
the unchaste Lucretia,
this is a sin of false
transcendence;
the belief that I can be not
completely--I do not coincide
fully with who I am,
so that I have to double
myself.
 
I have to see myself as
different from what I am.
I can do justice against myself.
 
By doing this for Dante,
and I'll go into Dante's text,
this doubling of Pier delle
Vigne, is a sin of false
transcendence.
 
The way a suicide is playing
God to oneself and this
punishing oneself for wrongs
that he, the suicide,
perceives.
 
Lucretia, she that perceived,
as her--as fouling her reality.
You see what I mean?
 
This is the kind of a--a kind
of doubleness that seems to be
running through and Dante's
rendering through this idea of
style.
 
"By the new roots of this
tree I swear to you,
never did I break faith with my
lord, who was so worthy of
honor;
and if either of you return to
the world, let him establish my
memory, which still lies under
the blow that envy gave
it."
The story of Pier delle Vigne
exemplifies the story of--
or dramatizes the story of the
tragic experience of suicide,
and Dante here gives of suicide
an exactly theological and
Augustinian account.
 
He views it,
looks at it from an Augustinian
point of view.
 
We skip Canto XIV and we go now
to another memorable canto,
a memorable Canto XV:
a memorable encounter with
Dante's teacher,
Brunetto Latini,
who was probably 50 years his
senior,
who was a translator who
adapted in the vernacular
Cicero's rhetorical works,
also who was a teacher of the
Florentines.
 
So he was a teacher of Dante,
and who really stands for the
great values of the rhetorical
humanistic, or Ciceronian,
tradition.
 
The idea of--he opposed the
idea of the republic of
Florence.
 
He's a Guelf because he does
not want--
you do know that the
Ghibellines are those who are in
favor of the imperial control of
the state,
and for him to be a Guelf is
really to claim that he's on the
side of the republic,
that he wants the Florentine
republic.
 
He was sent to an embassy--he
went to Toledo by the way,
which at the time was the
center of great translations.
And he may have brought from
Toledo translations of--
that Dante knew,
such as, perhaps,
the account of the Mohammad's
vision and the ascent to
Paradise.
 
That's really a very doubtful
question, but it circulates
increasingly within Dante
studies, the perimeter of Dante
studies.
 
Brunetto, while he was going on
an embassy to France,
was banned from Florence.
 
He eventually returned to
Florence;
but he's a figure that Dante
really tries to pattern himself
after.
 
Effectively,
it's the teaching of Brunetto
is what guides him,
at least in the initial phase
of his political concerns--
that other experiences,
intellectual experiences that
will intervene and will change
radically Dante's thinking.
 
What I'm trying to do in this
class is also to give you a
sense of the shifts in his
perceptions and his
understanding of the world.
 
I will be telling you at some
point that there were
extraordinary encounters that he
had with some theologians and
some philosophers within
Florence,
that gave him a completely
different view from the one that
Brunetto Latini instilled in
him.
Let's see what happens between
the two of them.
We are in the area once again
of violence.
This time violence against
nature, and there is
an--Brunetto Latini is damned,
is condemned for a sin of
sodomy.
 
There is no evidence at all
from any other sources that that
is what he was.
 
And I have to tell you that
Dante also has a different
understanding of sodomy,
when he comes to Purgatory;
for instance,
in Canto XXVI,
where the sodomites are in the
process of redeeming,
of seeking some kind of
redemption, and cleansing.
Anyway, this is the canto here.
 
Let's see how he proceeds.
 
"Now one of the hard
margins bears us on and the
vapor from the stream makes a
shade above that shelters the
water and the banks from the
fire."
The focus of the canto is once
again the natural world.
A natural world which is one of
sheer chaos and the natural
world which is one of violence,
and look at this image:
"as the Flemings between
Wissant and Bruges,"
the Netherlands,
he's describing literally the
Netherlands.
 
Called such because they are
lower,
the surface of the land is
lower than that of the water,
and have to protect the land
from the violence of the water
and the floods.
 
So, they build these dykes
around.
"As the flames between
Wissant and Bruges,
fearing the flood rushing in on
them make their bulwark to drive
back the sea,
and as the Paduans do along the
Brenta to protect their towns
and castles before the
Chiarentana feels the heat,
these were made of the same
fashion,
except that the builder,
whoever he was,
made them neither so high nor
so broad."
 
So the natural world can hardly
be contained.
That's the idea,
the natural world that is
always is going to overwhelm all
efforts to--all barriers trying
to impede its violence.
 
By the way, this is an image,
for those of you who are
readers of literature even
beyond the Middle Ages;
it's a famous image that
Machiavelli will use in Chapter
XXV of The Prince.
 
Remember when he talks about
virtue and fortune,
and that the virtue of human
beings,
virtue--the word character,
arete,
the virtue of human beings is
to build shelters which are
too--
whenever we expect a flood,
but in the full knowledge that
we are never really going to
succeed and yet we need these
shelters just in case we might
succeed.
 
Virtue is always as little bit
less powerful than fortune in
his--in that world.
 
It's an image that--in one of
the history plays,
Shakespeare also uses them.
 
I'm not saying that he takes it
from Dante.
We don't know whether he
actually read Dante or not.
"Already,"
so this is the background of
this encounter,
"already we had gotten so
far from the wood that I should
not have seen where it was if I
had turned backward,
when we met a troop of souls
who were coming alongside the
bank,
and each looked at us as men
look at one another under a new
moon at dusk."
 
It seems to create this kind of
strange world of--the night
world.
 
"And they puckered their
brows on us like an old tailor
on the eye of his needle."
 
What an extraordinary image.
 
Dante will use something like
this, not quite the same image,
the tailor when he's
arriving--when he is to describe
his own vision of Paradise.
 
It is as if the most--the
humblest experience in the city,
in Florence,
of all the artists and the
tailor can only help him--
the only thing he can think
about as he's approaching the
most sublime of experiences,
that's Paradiso XXXIII.
 
And here this most
extraordinary story has also the
ring of familiarity.
 
That is really the image--of
the way I think this image
works, the sense of a
familiarity and with a familiar
image of the tailor;
and the tailor also a figure
that takes your measure.
 
The tailor is a figure of the
artisan who in order to fit you
properly has to have your
measures, your idea of who you
are.
 
"Eyed thus by that
company, I was recognized by one
who took me by the hem and
cried: 'How marvelous!'
And I, when he reached out his
arm to me,
fixed my eye on his baked looks
so that the scorched features
did not keep my mind from
recognizing him and,
bending my face to his,
I answered: 'Are you here,
Ser Brunetto?'"
Are you here, Ser Brunetto?
So he--this is the scene of the
recognition.
In Inferno that's what
you have, scenes of recognition,
more than first encounters.
 
It is as if,
literally, recognizing means
knowing people that you thought
you knew,
and you knowing them and you,
all the figures that you
thought you had--
knew something about,
recognition.
 
It means also giving a kind of
understanding,
giving a kind of view to them,
recognizing in that sense too.
"And he:
'O my son, let it not displease
thee if Brunetto Latini turn
back with thee a little and let
the train go on.'"
Twice Brunetto will refer to
Dante as "Oh my son."
 
It's sort of acknowledged in
this affiliation,
acknowledging a kind of
familiarity that goes beyond
even--any form of discipleship.
 
Dante will resist that
solicitation,
that affectionate solicitation,
that familiarity.
He will always refer to him as
the image of a father,
but twice.
 
And then he says,
"I said to him:
'With all my heart I beg it of
you,
and if you wish me to sit with
you I will,
if it please him here with whom
I go,'" meaning Virgil and
unmentioned,
as if Dante now were
concealing, pro forma to
be sure,
the shifted loyalty from one
teacher to another,
and were concealing it from
Brunetto Latini.
Once again Brunetto:
"O son whoever of this
flock stops,"
etc.
"Go on,
therefore; I shall come at thy
skirt," which some critics
have seen as the sign that this
is--
that really Dante may have
known something about Brunetto
Latini that nobody else knew,
"and later rejoin my band
who go mourning their eternal
loss."
 
Look at the spatial
configuration of the scene.
I think it's very significant.
 
The disciple is above,
the teacher is below;
so that the disciple has to bow
in order to be able to speak to
the teacher,
which would be a sign of his
reverence for the authority of
the master,
but at the same time,
it indicates that the hierarchy
between them is both.
 
The hierarchy between them
really has completely altered
from the days that there they
were on--in the city--in the
streets of Florence.
 
And then he tells the story:
"'Up above there in the
bright life,' I answered
him," no,
I'm sorry, "I durst not
descend from the track,"
etc.
 
And he says,
"what chance or
destiny,"
Brunetto says,
"brings thee down here
before thy last day and who is
this that shows the way?"
 
Chance?
 
Destiny?
 
Brunetto has no understanding
of the trajectory of Dante's
life and adventure.
 
This is really the beginning of
a series of misunderstandings
between the teacher and the
disciple.
Two different value systems are
being deployed and they are
going to be in collision with
each other.
Brunetto speaks like a true
humanist,
a man who belongs to the
Ciceronian and espouses the
Ciceronian ethics,
for whom here the world is one
indeed of chance encounters,
destiny that takes us one way
or the other,
and there is nothing indeed
providential about it.
 
Dante responds by really giving
a kind of pithy summary of his
experience in the last few
hours.
"'Up above there,
in the bright life' I answered
him,
'before my age was at the
full," he repeats
Inferno I,
"I lost my way in a
valley..
.He appeared to me when I was
returning to it,
and by this road he leads me
home."
These are extraordinary words
because what home means for the
politically-minded,
Florence-centered,
sense of existence of Brunetto,
is not the idea of what home
means for Dante.
 
For Dante, home is the place of
the soul, and the place where
the soul is at its most
distended, the distension of the
soul occurs.
 
For Brunetto,
home can only be city of
Florence.
 
One has a political frame of
reference, the other one has a
theological frame of reference,
and the two are colliding with
each other.
 
Let's continue and see how this
is extraordinary.
"And he said to me:
'If thou follow thy star,"
now again an extension of the
language,
the metaphor,
picks up the metaphor of
chance,
or destiny, a kind of astrology.
Follow your star,
the astrology of the
destiny--in the destiny of
Dante, "thou canst not fail
the glorious heaven."
 
In other--Dante is dramatizing
the radical ambiguity of words
that seem to be so bland like
glorious: what glorious means to
a humanist is not what glorious
means to a theologically-minded
thinker.
 
In theology,
one thinks of nature,
grace, and glory.
 
And Dante begins
Paradise I,
the first word with which it
begins is the glory of him,
la gloria,
of him who moves all things,
and glory for Brunetto means
the happy ending,
fame, and whatever.
 
"The glorious haven,
if I discerned rightly in the
fair life,
and had I not died too soon,
seeing heaven so gracious to
thee," again,
this is 'glorious' and 'grace'
once again,
"to thee,
I would have strengthened thee
in thy work.
 
But the thankless and malignant
folk which came down of old from
Fiesole,
and still keeps something of
the mountain and the rock shall
become,
for thy well-doing thine
enemy--and with reason,
for among the bitter sorbs,
it is not natural the sweet fig
should come to fruit.
 
Old fame..."
 
So, from Brunetto's point of
view, the reference of all the
crisis, the spiritual crisis,
the loss of self of Dante can
only be political.
 
That Brunetto makes an
incredible mistake of believing
that Dante's experience is
exactly the replica of his own.
He lost the city,
where he was by the way,
at Roncesvalles,
the place where the great
paladin of Charlemagne,
or Roland, was--it's a symbolic
place he chooses--
was defeated and now this is
exactly what he thinks is
happening also to Dante,
to the pilgrim.
 
"Among the bitter sorbs,
etc...
Old fame in the world calls
them blind, a people avaricious,
envious and proud..."
 
This is the three sparks that
have set the hearts of the
Florentines on fire and this:
pride, envy-- avaricious,
envy and pride.
 
"Thy fortune holds for
thee such honor that the one
party and the other shall be
ravenous against thee..."
So then, the language--the
prophecy of Dante's exile:
the two parties,
Guelfs and Ghibellines will
turn against him,
etc.
And Dante answers:
"'Were all my prayers
fulfilled!'
 
I answered him,
'you had not yet been banished
from humanity;
for in my memory is fixed,
and now goes to my heart,
the dear and kind paternal
image of you when many a time in
the world you taught me how man
makes himself immortal;
and how much I am grateful for
it my tongue,
while I live,
must needs declare.
 
That which you tell of my
course, I write and keep with
another text for comment by a
lady who will know,
if I reach her..."
 
Clearly an illusion to
Beatrice, though it will not be
Beatrice who will make the
prophecy of Dante's exile,
but in the symmetrically
connected cantos XV and XVI of
Paradise it will be
Dante's real grandfather.
So the distinction between this
fictional figure of a
self-claimed spiritual father
Brunetto and the heroic
grandfather,
Cacciaguida,
the antithesis is very clear.
 
In the acknowledgement that
Dante gives of Brunetto's
teaching when he says,
"for in my memory is fixed
and now goes to my heart the
dear and kind paternal image of
you were many time in the world,
you taught me how men makes
himself immortal."
 
There is also a little bit of a
critique, a little bit of a
distance that Dante establishes
between himself and Brunetto.
For the true poet,
the real authentic poet,
of Dante's experience is that
man does not make himself
immortal.
 
Of course, when a bold stroke
works, maybe there are many
other forms of achieving some
degree of immortality.
One can make children to become
immortal,
one--at least in provisional
immortality,
a continuity,
but from Dante's point of view,
the immortality that he is
seeking is not manmade.
It can only be a question of
the salvation of his soul.
In the very great
acknowledgement the form in
which is a disciple who just
loved making these claims of
indebtedness to the teacher,
there is also a sense of a
difference between them and
misunderstandings,
and this will be in fact the
trait of this encounter.
To a teacher,
who has been shaping the
disciple and the disciple who
has been going his own way,
who somehow thinks that
education means also--
is tantamount to the experience
of freedom.
It's what we--this is the way
we began when I spoke about the
figures of doubleness in Canto
XII.
And this is the theme that
seems to be going through even
in the encounter with Brunetto.
 
Let's see now exactly then what
is Brunetto's sodomy or a way of
understanding Brunetto's sodomy.
 
Clearly linked to violence,
we're in the world of violence,
and so Dante wants to know
about who the other sinners are
and Brunetto will comply and
says that all clerks and great
and famous scholars.
 
And he mentions them all,
"who defiled the world by
one and the same sin."
 
Priscian, a famous grammarian,
Francesco d'Accorso,
who also is--by the way,
I think he's a lawyer--
and "if thou has a craving
for such scurf..."
etc.
 
Now then, he says,
"I would say more,
but I can go no further talking
with thee, for I see there a new
cloud rising from the sand;
people are coming with whom I
must not be.
 
Let my Treasure,
in which I yet live,
be commended to thee;
and I ask no more."
A true teacher,
I say, who gives the
bibliography at the end.
 
He says, okay now you go and
read my book,
not just read anybody's book,
but I recommend to you my
Treasure,
"in which I yet live,
be commended to thee.
 
Then he turned about and seemed
like one of those who ran for
the green cloth in the field at
Verona,"
a ludic image,
an image of a race which is run
in Verona,
"and he seemed not the
loser among them,
but the winner."
So he leaves with the illusion
that he is a precursor,
as it were.
 
Do you understand what I mean?
 
That he is in a race,
he's so far behind everybody
else, that he's seems not be
ahead of them.
He's really behind one circle.
 
That's the image with which
Dante ends this encounter.
Brunetto recommends this
Treasure which is a
French text that he wrote.
 
It's an encyclopedia that he
wrote--while in France and he
wrote it in French so much
that--and it's so important this
text.
 
It's one of the most important
encyclopedias in the vernacular.
Encyclopedias being--I may
have--I even gave you--
I remember you--I don't expect
you to remember it but I gave a
definition of the Divine
Comedy as a poetic
encyclopedia in the sense that
it tries to gather together the
broken pieces of knowledge,
of experience and at the same
time,
unlike the technical
encyclopedias such as the
Britannica give you--
dramatize the presence of
someone who is being educated
through them,
a process of education.
Dante is the one who is in the
middle of learning,
so this is an encyclopedia with
a path about how to learn,
not the abstract one that
Brunetto had written.
It's written in French and
its--and I stress this fact
because elsewhere,
in one of his philosophical
reflections,
Dante goes on saying that we
are all bound by natural
affection for our own language,
and because on account of that,
there are those who have put
forth the interpretation that
Brunetto is here for violating
the natural bonds of affection
that we have,
that human beings have,
to their own natural language,
to their own mother language
let's call it that.
It could be.
 
What I think this is,
is it dramatizes an incredible
self-delusion on the part of
Brunetto.
Here he is, dead.
 
Here he is, circling around
under the reign of fire,
and he thinks he still lives in
his own text.
He mistakes,
first of all,
the symbolic life that he has
within a text with reality.
That's really--that's the first
confusion.
The language of images,
the language of seeming that
pervades this canto has to be
understood in these terms of
this confusion of the part of
Brunetto, but there is more to
it.
 
The mistake that Brunetto
makes, is to believe that
Dante's own life is a replica of
his own.
Read my text because whatever
it is that you have to know,
it's already available to you
in my own book.
That is to say,
he faces the difference between
Dante and himself,
and Brunetto.
He refuses to see that Dante's
own life can have its own
development and its own
destination, a destination which
he cannot understand at all.
 
That's the end of Canto XV;
this sodomy then is also a
confusion between the real and
the imaginary,
the way of drawing the real
world into one of fictional
fictions and imaginations.
 
There is one scene before I
stop and give you a chance to
ask a question.
 
Now we'll go into Canto XVI.
 
It's the end really.
 
We are reaching the end of the
intermediate area,
the moral, the ground of
violence which to us,
of course, I just presume that
you may be surprised at this.
So we are--our culture seems to
view violence really as the
worst possible crime and
violence in all of its forms and
its expressions.
 
And there are several:
psychological,
physical, political and so on.
 
For Dante the real--the worst
crimes are the crimes of fraud,
as you know.
 
These are bad enough,
to be sure, but the--and
Dante's about to enter in Canto
XVII and he will see a strange
figure.
 
They are--they have to go over
a huge ravine,
there's no way that they can do
this,
but then miraculously a figure,
a strange figure,
a monster stands at the edge of
the pit and a figure appears.
This is the figure of Geryon,
at the end of Canto XVI.
Let me read this image,
the figure of Geryon.
Dante will mount on Geryon and
Virgil will sit behind him;
and the descent takes place
into the area of fraud.
So this is the--these are
the--this is the sequence of
happenings in the canto.
 
And now let's see what Dante
says.
It's an experience of--we could
even call it wonder,
in Hell.
 
This experience from the
sublime, an infernal sublime.
"A man,"
I'm reading from XVI,
line 130, around line 130 and
following.
"A man should always close
his lips, as far as he can to
the truth that has the face of
the lie."
That's fraud.
 
A mixture of truth and
deception, truth and lies,
now that's what literature
seems to do.
"Since without fault it
brings him shame,
but here I cannot be silent;
and by the strains of this
Comedy,"
this text, called 'comedy.'
It is the story,
a moment of an experience of
descent.
 
'Comedy' also captures this
rhetoric of descent,
of lowering oneself,
not just an ascetic experience.
"I swear to thee,
reader,"
another, the second address to
the reader.
And you may remember that we
saw one in Canto IX and I tried
to explain it to you as the
address to the reader as part of
the strategy of authority on the
part of Dante,
in the measure in which I need
readers and I may have readers,
then I'm constituted into an
author and understand that kind
of strategic move.
 
"I swear to thee, reader,
that I saw come swimming up
through that gross and murky
air,
a figure amazing to the
stoutest heart,
even as he returns and goes to
down sometime to loose the
anchor that is caught in a reef
or something else hidden in the
sea,
stretching upward and drawing
in his feet."
 
This is the story;
this is the approach of Geryon.
What I want to point out is a
number of metaphors here.
This is an aerial journey;
Geryon is flapping his wings
and going through the murky air.
 
Dante describes it as if it
were a journey by sea.
The metaphor he uses is
swimming.
"I saw come swimming up
through the gross and murky
air," and by the way,
when Dante is to describe the
story of a mythic sailor,
mythic mariner,
Ulysses, whom we are going to
encounter,
hopefully next week,
I think it's going to be next
week or next time,
he describes this journey by
sea of Ulysses as if it were a
journey by air.
And he does this because for
Dante it doesn't matter how you
are traveling.
 
If you fly or you go by water,
it doesn't matter,
because all journeys are
journeys to the same
destination.
 
All journeys are really
journeys to the absolute.
Here, Geryon seems only to come
to play a ministerial function,
he's going to minister,
to serve, Dante and his guide,
and at the same time Dante
says, here too there is some
plan,
here too there's some kind
of--something of the absolute
that I have to see.
That's the first image.
 
The second image is this idea
of--which will be described a
little later,
there will be rotatory movement
of Geryon through the air and I
have been describing the circle,
the spiral, the movement in a
spiral,
the spiral motion of all
movement in Inferno.
The third is this idea of
swearing by Dante's own text.
The text is given now the value
of a sacred object.
Something that has something
one can swear by.
If we began with a violation of
the Aeneid in Canto XIII,
now in Canto XVI,
Dante opposes to the
Aeneid and it replaces,
therefore the new text for us
is this comedy.
 
Let me stop here and let me see
that we have a few minutes for
questions which I will welcome
and try to answer for about five
or ten minutes.
 
Student:  Yeah I have a
quick thing I want to clear up,
Canto XIII, at the end,
when Pier delle Vigne is
talking about Augustus,
he's referring to Frederick
instead of Augustus?
 
Prof: Yes the--it's what
we call a typological use of the
emperor has to be--it's Augustus
or Caesar.
These are the two terms used
for the emperor.
So it's a type,
it's the kind of abstract type
of the czar, or the kaiser;
old versions of the Caesar myth
in modern languages.
 
That's it, Augustus.
 
Yes?
 
Student:  You talked
about those people who are
guilty of
>?
Prof: They are guilty of?
 
Student:  They're guilty
of lust, the thing that shows
the pleasure over rationality
and they're in the second
circle.
 
The sodomites are in the
seventh circle and there's a
difference there because of--
were serious violations of
natural law,
or is this really an
intellectual choice on their
part to engage in behavior both
intellectual and physical which
is much more serious than the
incontinence of the people in
the second circle.
Prof: The question is,
is meant to have me think about
the relationship between the
sinners of lust and the sinners
of sodomy,
and the premise of the question
is that the sinners of lust,
we have sinners who invert the
order of reason and pleasure.
 
Whereas, in the sin of--the
question then is why are the
sinners of sodomy placed in a--
further down in Hell and if
this is because there's a
question of an intellectual
choice.
 
This has been a--my answer is
the following that the--
No, there is no indication in
this canto,
in Canto XV,
that the sin here is that there
is some--
there are intellectual
perversions,
which you are right,
your question is well taken
that all clerics,
in the sense of clerics,
meaning not just where we today
think as man of the cloth,
but meaning intellectuals,
Priscius, Accursius,
who is also mentioned,
a famous crusader of the laws
then Brunetto Latini himself.
The sin here is a sin of
violence.
Just as we had the idea that
education, the educators in
Canto XII, are those who
are--who could pervert the very
process of teaching.
 
Just as in Canto XIII we had a
stoic,
Pier delle Vigne,
is really stoic who--
a stoic who now reflects that
suicide is not a virtue and the
virtuous choice.
 
But these are sinners who have
yielded to--whether it is
anger--they have yielded to the
impulses of violence within
them.
 
Dante I think is condemning
sodomy,
because I think this is also
part of the question you're
asking,
it may not be the central part,
but because there is whatever--
there has been violence
connected to their activity.
 
This is the--why would he place
them in the circle of violence?
Unlike, for instance,
what happens to Guido
Guinizelli in Canto XXVI,
or Caesar by the way,
there is also an illusion to
Caesar in Canto XXVI of
Purgatorio.
 
So there is a difference there,
a teacher who uses violence,
so that's the link between
teaching of violence in Canto
XII.
 
The man of reason,
the stoic believer in the
logos and the order of
rationality exasperates that
principle and believes that he
can be both judge and victim,
executioner and the executed
one.
And now, in Canto XV is this
idea of an--the way in which
violence has taken over and
obfuscated their order of
rationality.
 
I don't see the element of
choice in that.
Yes?
 
Student:  Can you
briefly discuss how Dante
differentiates various
representations of suicide,
since Lucretia is in Limbo,
Dido is
>
 
in the circle of the lustful,
and then you have Pier delle
Vigne within the actual circle
of suicide,
and how is it that he makes the
distinction between the
different forms of suicides?
 
Prof: Excellent,
the question is,
is it possible to differentiate
within different forms of
suicide since Dante--
and that's exactly right,
exactly true,
Dante would have Lucretia in
Limbo;
we have Dido in Canto II among
the lustful souls;
we have Cato in Purgatory,
etc., and why here in Canto
XIII the suicides are punished?
Is there some kind of rationale
that we can see behind the
various--that's the question,
the various forms of suicide.
The answer that I would give is
the following,
Dante knows so well that there
are--
that the phenomenology of acts,
of various acts,
is vast and cannot quite ever
be brought to one common
element.
 
So much that at the beginning
of Canto XIV,
if you turn to Canto XIV,
Dante is going through the hot
sands,
because it's the burning sands
of Hell and he remembers--
he recalls there,
this must be exactly the
burning sands of the Libyan
desert that Cato crossed,
which is a way of saying don't
be surprised--
I think--if you are going to
encounter Cato a little further
down.
I know that you expect him to
be here.
So the question then is,
how does Dante go on
determining the particular--the
value of a particular act?
When we sin,
this may be a little bit--I
have to be very clear about
this.
When we sin we usually can say,
well,
how can it be--I'm going to
give you a kind of--
I'm going to take a little bit
of distance from this whole
question.
 
It's easy to say,
how can Dante be so ruthless:
that someone,
for all we know,
may have been a good human
being,
and then they committed one
crime and they are in Hell
forever, for eternity.
 
And that, on the face of it,
would seem to be a reasonable
query;
a sort of indirect,
oblique way of asking for a
little bit more tolerance and
benevolence from this man who
claims to be the supreme judge
of all that human beings have
been perpetrating.
The fact is that whenever we
sin, all sins are involved.
We think that it's only one,
but all sins are involved.
Dante highlights one specific
aspect.
In the case of Dido,
her lust is more important
than--in the sense,
more decisive and determines
the character of that
figure--than the suicide.
This suicide is seen as an
extension of her lust.
In the case Lucretia,
put in Limbo,
there is a way in which Dante
really wants to make that clear
distinction and even it's--
an anti-Augustinian moment that
Lucretia's virtues seem to have
been--
limited as they are,
she's not saved in any way,
but there is a kind of
exemplary virtue that allows him
to sort of remember,
but not punish her for a crime
which is really to be understood
as a consequence of an excessive
way of understanding virtue.
 
Do you see what I'm saying?
 
In the case of Cato,
and we are going to see that,
he sees the sacrifice of self
for freedom.
That's really the great
understanding:
Cato dies for the sake of
freedom and all the canto of
Purgatory is a--
the Canto I of Purgatory
is a reflection on the question
of freedom.
Roman freedom,
and by the way,
the biblical Jewish
understanding of freedom,
too.
 
I'm preparing you for that
canto, so maybe I'll save myself
the trouble of repeating these
things when we get there.
Dante will talk about Roman
freedom through Cato and
immediately after a troop of
angels will arrive,
and they sing one song which is
In exitu Israel de
Aegypto,
which is to say the Jewish,
the famous Psalm 113.
 
That's the Psalm of David,
where David is reflecting about
the epic of Exodus.
 
The lyrical reflection about
the idea that getting from Egypt
on the way to Jerusalem was--
which only some got to,
for instance,
Moses never did--is really a
quest for freedom.
 
There are two ideas of freedom:
a political,
civil freedom and a theological
idea of freedom.
And that's really the key to
understanding Cato and
understanding the way Dante
connects these two traditions:
the Roman and the Jewish
traditions.
Other questions?
 
We have one minute,
the tape probably lasts just
about 45 seconds to get the
question and answer.
Questions?
 
Student:  Well,
>
it seems like you're saying
here that Dante is almost
finding a kind of sin when
virtue is taken to an excess,
in people like Lucretia and
Cato, he's saying you can go too
far,
you can be too obsessed with a
certain--
almost a misdirection of virtue.
Prof: Yes.
 
It's not a question because I
said 'yes' and I would agree.
The reflection is it seems,
I don't like that,
it seems that I'm saying--but
I'm saying that actually--
that in Dante,
Dante views the excess of
virtue also as part of a sin and
I would agree,
I would agree yes.
 
Okay.
 
Thank you.
 
See you next time.
 
