Texts: Chrétien de Troyes, The Knight of the Cart; Dante: Inferno; selections from supporting documents
Please examine the brief excerpts from other documents carefully; I expect you to refer to them as evidence as you craft your responses.
TEXTS FROM SUPPORTING DOCUMENTS
from the document “Hum 302 Dante Essentials”:
2 kinds of love (from St. Augustine, De doctrina Christiana 1.4):
uti (“use”: directed; love of things in the world for their relation to God)
frui (“enjoyment”: intransitive; God alone its proper object; love of anything else for its own sake is considered idolatrous).
Moral progress in the poem:
The speaker, representing all humanity in its quest for God, undergoes a process of reformatio animi (reformation of the soul): the soul becomes more godlike (and thus more like itself–cf. Augustine Confessions 7.10, regio dissimilitudinis) as it proceeds. [Dante starts his journey reacting like a man to God’s judgment; eventually, his soul’s reformation will allow him to accept and embrace the rigor of Divine Justice]
from the document “Hum 302 Dante Love in Christian Theology”:
Wisdom 13:5-10
For from the greatness and the beauty of created things
their original author, by analogy, is seen.
But yet, for these the blame is less;
For they indeed have gone astray perhaps,
though they seek God and wish to find him.
For they search busily among his works,
but are distracted by what they see,
because the things seen are beautiful
But again, not even these are pardonable.
For if they so far succeeded in knowledge
that they could speculate about the world,
how did they not more quickly find its LORD?
But doomed are they, and in dead things are their hopes . . .
ASSIGNMENT
In Inferno Canto V, the Dante Pilgrim encounters the Carnal, the souls of those who have succumbed to their passions and sinned in the flesh; he spends most of the Canto in an encounter with two famous lovers, Paolo and Francesca.
Writing at least 400 words but NO MORE THAN 500 WORDS, compose three coherent and roughly equal-length paragraphs, in response to each of the following three questions (I realize this gives you a lot to do in 500 words, so be concise, and only write what you need to):
1) Consider the concept of the two forms of love described in Augustine’s De doctrina Christiana and the lines from the Book of Wisdom (above) that illustrate this doctrine. How can you interpret these writings as informing Dante’s response to the sin of Paolo and Francesca?
2) Keeping these same doctrinal pronouncements in mind, consider the vast differences between the fates of the damned souls in Canto V and the treatment of characters in Chrétien de Troyes’s courtly romances (from the previous Lesson). Think of Lancelot, for example, who relentlessly pursues and literally adores another man’s wife. What kind of “religion” is the basis for Lancelot’s love of Guinevere in the romance? Is Lancelot condemned or celebrated for his “observance” of courtly love? Finally, how would Dante’s system of divine retribution deal with Lancelot and Guinivere?
3) With reference to the concept of reformation animi, briefly explain why the Dante Pilgrim reacts the way he does in Canto V to the sufferings of Paolo and Francesca.
