Dante and the Deflation of Reason

Note: Because this paper has a large number of footnotes and end notes a PDF file has been made available. A longer version of the paper covering through the end of the Paradiso, with more discussion, can be found here.


Introduction: The Deflation of Reason

Note: This paper is a bit on the long side. If it seems like too much of a commitment, I recommend reading either just the first three introductory sections, for some interesting information on pre-modern notions of reason, or skipping right to “Hell - Reason in Bondage:” for the summary of Dante; both will hopefully prove interesting.

In The Discarded Image, C.S. Lewis notes the dramatic deflation of conceptualizations of “reason” in the modern era. In Guillaume de Lorris's Roman de la Rose (1230), we see: “Reason the beautiful, a gracious lady, a humbled goddess…plead[ing] with the lover as a celestial mistress, a rival to his earthly love.”(1) Likewise, in his De Consolatione Philosophiae, Boethius’s Lady Philosophy seems semi-divine, her head effortlessly “pierc[ing] within the very heavens.”(2) This is Reason as “intelligentia obumbrata…the shadow of angelic nature in man.”(3) Nor were these lofty notions confined to the Middle Ages. Aristotle saw man’s “rational soul” as “the most divine element in us.”(4) Plato likewise saw the “golden cord” of reason as “holy.”(5)

By 1755 however, Samuel Johnson could define “reason” in his influential Dictionary of the English Language as merely “the power by which man deduces one proposition from another, or proceeds from premises to consequences.”(6) That is, reason had become a mere faculty of “calculation.” Such a faculty could obviously have no desires or ends of its own. Hence, in 1740, David Hume could note confidently that “reason alone can never be a motive to any action of the will.”(7) Reason might allow us to connect irrational sensations of pain and pleasure with different sense objects, but “it [could not] be by [reason’s] means that… objects are able to affect us.”(8) This is a far cry from Plato, whose understanding dominated pre-modern thought. For Plato the“desires of the rational part of the soul” played a central role in man’s freedom, and even his “divinity.”(9)

Yet despite this deflation of reason—and of man’s “intellect,” which is often collapsed into “reason”—reason has nonetheless continued to play a dominant role in modern psychology. It could hardly be otherwise. Our rational thought processes and the phenomenology of understanding are both ostentatious elements of human experience. Hence, reason has to remain a defining element of the “self,” even as it is deflated. As a result, the modern epoch gave birth to what Charles Taylor calls the “buffered self,” a conception of the “reasoning self” as autonomous, self-contained, and insulated from external forces. This is a conception of the self that is, to varying degrees, estranged not only from the “external world,” but also from its own passions, appetites, and embodiment (e.g. the much criticized, but often subtly reproduced “Cartesian Homunculus”). In his A Secular Age, Taylor argues that this “buffered self” in turn helped to give rise to Max Weber’s “disenchanted cosmos,” a view of the world where meaning and identity arise from “within the human mind.”

As C.S. Lewis notes, this shift in meaning has tended to make the romantic appeals to Reason in pre-modern literature almost unintelligible. One can hardly rejoice in a calculator, much less see it as divine. However, the consequences of this shift go far deeper than our appreciation of classic literature. They paint a dramatically different picture of the human being, the human experience, and the proper role of “rationality” in human life. Of course, reason generally retains its role as our primary means of accessing truth.(10) Yet this no longer gives reason the proper authority it held over the appetites and passions in prior epochs, in part because it lacks its own rational ends. Instead, modern thought tends to follow Hume in seeing reason as chiefly an enabler of the passions (e.g., the image of Homo oeconomicus).(i)

This deflation plays an explanatory role in many of the seismic shifts that have come to define modern thought. For instance, the dominance of skepticism and epistemic concerns can themselves be seen as arising, at least in part, from this narrower view of reason. Likewise, conceptions of reason—and thus man’s ability to know—that leave it imprisoned “in our heads,” or trapped like a fly within the fly-bottles of discrete “language games,” rely on a picture of human knowing as entirely discursive. So too, Hume’s Guillotine (the “is-ought gap”), is based presupposition that man cannot possess “rational appetites.”(11) Perhaps nowhere is this shift more obvious than in the move to define freedom in terms of power, “the ability to choose anything,” as opposed to the earlier view of freedom as: “the self-determining capacity to actualize the good.”

Clearly, we will not have space to consider all the issues listed above. What I would like to do instead is paint a portrait of an earlier, richer view of “reason.” My goal is to lay out a less familiar vision of rationality, and to show where it intersects with the aforementioned fault lines in modern thought. Good philosophy requires us to question our presuppositions. A consideration of the earlier view of reason can bring to light some of the hidden assumptions that give modern thought its unique shape. To make this contrast all the more stark, we shall not use one of the great pre-modern philosophers of mind for our comparison. Rather, we shall look to the greatest poet of the Middle Ages—and perhaps any age—to Dante Alighieri and hisDivine Comedy, following his pilgrimage through the afterlife as far as the top of Mount Purgatory.

Dante is a particularly apt choice for several reasons. First, he has an extremely wide role for rationality in human life. For Dante, man’s rational soul, far from being a mere tool, is central to what man is and how he “lives a good life.” Second, reason plays a central role in Dante’s conception of self-determination and human freedom. Finally, whereas today we are apt to see “love” as something irrational, and perhaps just one element of “a good life,” Dante sees love as the central thread running through the human experience (and indeed the entire cosmos). Dante’s vision, which sees reason primarily engaged within the context of love, and finding its purpose in love, offers us the most vibrant possible contrast to highly deflationary views such as eliminitive materialism.

The Medieval View of Truth and Knowledge:

Before we delve into the narrative details of the Commedia, some preliminaries are in order. Dante is a poet, and while the Commedia has great philosophical depth, it is not a systematic treatise. Dante, like all thinkers, takes many of the assumptions of his era for granted. Key concepts related to reason do not receive specific elucidation in the poem. Hence, we must clarify exactly what Dante (and we ourselves) mean by “truth” and “reason.”

The modern period has seen a proliferation of different “theories of truth” (e.g. coherence, pragmatic, etc.). In Dante’s context, truth was “the adequacy of thought to being.” It would be easy to label this a “correspondence theory” and move on, but there are crucial differences between the medieval understanding and most modern “correspondence theories.” Truth is primarily “in the intellect” for medieval thinkers.(12) Hence, truth is not primarily a property of “propositions” if this is to mean “abstract objects existing outside the mind.” Nor is truth primarily about language. Linguistic utterances are signs of truth in the intellect. Utterances are acts, yet it is substances—things—that primarily possess being, and so it is people (and God) who primarily possess truth. Since the human intellect is “moved by things,” it is “measured by them.” (13) There is an ontological truth in things (their correspondence to the divine intellect). In this context, concerns about truth being confined to disparate language games make little sense. Truth is not primarily about discursive justification; discursive justification is merely a means of attaining and communicating truth.(14),(ii)

Second, in both the “Neo-Platonic” and rediscovered Aristotelian traditions Dante was exposed to, there are elements of the conception of truth that hew closer to modern “identity theories” of truth. The human mind is capable of “becoming all things.”(15) When man comes to know something, the form of the thing known is present in his mind. This is not a representation of form. The intellect dematerializes the thing known, resulting in the mind becoming identical with the object of knowledge. Of course, this does not imply that when we know an apple our minds “become apples,” for the two exist in distinct modes.(16) However, it does mean that many of the epistemic issues that dominate modern thought and tend to impose a sense of unbridgeable distance between knower and known are absent from Dante’s conception. Knowing involves a union of knower and known.

The importance of this sort of “union in knowing,” which is both a “being penetrated” by what is known and an ecstasis, a “going out beyond the self to the known,” for Dante cannot be overstated. Indeed, the antiquated term “carnal knowledge,” with all its erotic connotations, gets far closer to the older view than the sterile formulation of “justified true belief.”(17),(iii) The goal of Dante’s pilgrimage, and of all mankind, is ultimately to know God, which is also to love and be in union with God.

Modern conceptions that make both love and knowledge an entirely internal affair cannot capture this erotic element of knowing the other as other. As Byung-Chul Han notes in The Agony of Eros, the modern “crisis of love… derives from… the erosion of the Other... Eros concerns the Other in the strong sense, namely, what cannot be encompassed by the regime of the ego.”(18) The beatific vision at the climax of the Commedia is fundamentally an encounter with the other, not the conquest of the other by the self. It is not the “grasping” and “possession” of the other that Han finds in the modern ethos, but rather a union, an offering of the self to the other as a gift.(iv) (v)

Yet this knowing does involve an internal dimension, a penetration of the self by the other. To know God requires “knowing by becoming.”(vi) As Dante rises higher into the Heavens in the Paradiso, and comes closer to God, he is increasingly able to bear the overwhelming brightness of Beatrice’s (revealed truth’s) smile, due to a continuous internal transformation (as opposed to cumulative acquisition). In this conception, the world is not held at arm’s length while we inspect our own mental representations of it. Rather, there is a sense in which we become what is known. Thus, to know God is “to attain the very best,” to become “like onto God” as much as we are able—the theosis or deification that is man’s ultimate telos in the Christian tradition.(vii)

The Medieval View of Reason and the Intellect:

Part of the deflation of reason has involved a dramatic synecdoche in which one of the faculties of man’s intellect, ratio (through which we get the English “reason”) comes to be associated with the whole of man’s rational faculties. By contrast, in Dante’s context, ratio refers specifically to discursive reason, the step-by-step thinking by which we move through arguments, or plan future actions. In Hume’s Treatise for instance, it is obvious that this faculty is primarily what Hume takes as encompassing the whole of “reason.” It is perhaps instructive that this mode of the intellect, to which the whole of man’s rationality is now often reduced, was the lower of two faculties.

The higher faculty is intellectus (noesis in Greek). Intellectus is the faculty of intuitive understanding; it is contemplative, receptive, and rooted in insight. For the medievals, reasoning must begin with this sort of understanding, otherwise it would simply be a sort of rule following divorced from intelligible content.(19) Ratio is the means by which we move from truth to truth and come to “encircle” new truths. The acquisition of human knowledge begins and ends in intellectus, but proceeds by discursive ratio. The difference between ratio and intellectus is thus the difference between motion towards some end and rest in that end, between acquisition and possession,(20) or as “time is to eternity” and “circumference is to center.”(21),(viii) Dante will play off this circular imagery in Cantos X-XIV of the Paradiso, in the Heaven of the Sun, where Dante meets the souls of the wise (e.g. St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventure). Here, the wise men move in a joyful, circular dance which has an immobile Beatrice (a symbol of revealed truth) as its center.

To be sure, some modern thinkers do still have a role for intuition and understanding in human reasoning, yet this generally falls far short of a “direct grasp of truth.”(ix) Indeed, as Mark Burgess documents in his Transcendent Apriorism: Pure Reason's Quest for the Noumenal, Kant’s arguments against the “dogmatism” of pre-critical metaphysics have tended to motivate a cursory dismissal any understanding of intuition as the direct apprehension of truth, much less as “the co-identiy of knower and known.” Yet he also argues that this move has been motivated by error, prejudice, and a lack of substantial engagement with the extremely wide tradition that is, quite often, being rejected in a perfunctory manner. We do not have space to engage this topic here, except to point out that differences on this issue lead to many key differences in how major epistemic problems are approached.(x)

Crucially, this transposition in modern thought goes further than ratio merely superseding (or in some cases swallowing up) intellectus. In the philosophy familiar to Dante, the intellect capable of both ratio and intellectus was itself just one of two components of the “rational soul,” which was composed of intellect and will. Modern English faces a challenge here in that “reason” and “rationality” are often used interchangeably to refer to this “rational soul,” the intellect (whereby we know), and “reason” as ratio, whereby we acquire discursive knowledge. This collapse of three distinct concepts into one word is itself a sign of the deflation we are investigating. Because Dante has this larger “rational soul” in focus, he sees reason playing an extremely rich and essential role in human life. Indeed, on the medieval view, the intellect plays an essential, rather than merely enabling role in human happiness. As St. Thomas writes: “The essence of happiness consists in an act of the Intellect, but the delight that results from happiness pertains to the will.”(22)

Whereas contemporary thought has often drawn no distinction between the sensible and rational appetites, such a distinction would have been obvious to Dante.(23) The animal hunger by which a starving man is impelled towards food was seen as distinct from the way in which a man self-consciously desires and acts towards some end because it is understood by him to be good. For both medieval Aristotelians and the moderns, man is an animal. Yet, for the Aristotelian, man is “the rational animal,” and this makes all the difference.

Hell - Reason in Bondage:

In his letter to Cangrande, Dante describes the core topic of the Commedia as man’s progress from slavery in sin (spiritual Egypt) to freedom in the promised land.(24) Dante’s pilgrimage in the Commedia begins in the “Dark Wood of Error,” where he has “wandered off from the straight path.”(25) His initial despair at finding himself lost is lifted when he spies the sun lit hill above him (a symbol of goodness). He knows where he needs to go. The Pilgrim possess synteresis, an innate knowledge that the good is preferable to evil (and truth to falsity). However, as he attempts to climb the hill under his own power he is forced back by the three beasts representing sin. His mounting terror only subsides when he is greeted by the great Roman poet Virgil, who tells the Pilgrim that he will be leading him on a tour through the afterlife—through Hell and Purgatory, before Beatrice, the great love of Dante’s life, leads Dante through Heaven.(26)

While we will learn in Canto II that Virgil’s rescue mission was set in motion through divine grace and the activity of the beatified souls in Paradise, it is important to note the Virgil—a symbol of “human reason” and classical philosophy—will be able to lead Dante as far as the top of Mount Purgatory, a utopian “heaven on Earth.” That Virgil can get the Pilgrim so far (although not without divine aid (27)), is emblematic of the crucial role Dante sees for reason in human life.

The purpose of Dante’s descent through Hell is to instruct him in the true nature of sin. Sin is the bondage of man’s rational nature to the irrational passions and appetites.(xi) Sin is a misordering of loves. It is to fail to know things as they are, to be attracted to the worse over of the better. This condition arises when the rational soul (intellect and will)—the part of man that can know and desire the Good as Good (28)—is subjugated by man’s lower faculties. Hence, as Dante enters the Gates of Hell, Virgil remarks that the Pilgrim will now observe the “suffering race of souls who have lost the good of intellect.”(29),(xii)

Throughout the early parts of the descent, Dante the Pilgrim is often sympathetic to the damned in Hell. He calls the words emblazoned on the Gates of Hell, which claim to be moved by “highest wisdom and primal love,” “cruel.”(30) He swoons in sympathy after Francesca explains how she was led into adultery “by love,” and oftentimes his expressions of pity or respect for the damned seem at odds with acceptance that their punishment is just.(31) This “question of sympathy” will come to a head in Canto XX, where the Dante addresses the reader directly: “ask yourself how I could keep my eyes dry when, close by,” the souls of diviners and sorcerers were being punished by having their heads grotesquely turned around backwards.(32) At first glance, this would seem to be Dante the Poet asking us to justify his own graphic depictions of divine justice. The question may seem to be: “how can God be the author of such cruel punishments?”

However, we must recall here that we are supposed to take the Inferno’s punishments seriously, but not as factual descriptions. The punishments of the Inferno are aligned to the nature of each sin. For instance, the lustful are blown about in an unending gale, as they themselves were blown about by their passions in life. Suicides are deprived of the bodies they rejected in life. Thieves who transgressed the boundaries of other’s property are condemned to spend eternity stealing each others’ bodies. Each contrapasso is meant to symbolize the nature of the sin itself—what it does to others, and even more what it does to the sinner themselves.

Hence, Dante’s question is not so much about God’s role as an extrinsic actor executing punishments upon the damned, but is rather: “how can God allow his image bearers to disfigure themselves in the ways we see dramatized and concretized in the Inferno?” Dante’s answer isn’t fully revealed until the Paradiso. Free, rational beings, by their very nature, must possess a capacity to disfigure themselves in this way. Otherwise, they would lack agency. To be truly self-determining, they must turn themselves towards the Good, transcending their own finitude with the aid of grace, whereas a turn towards finite goods is a turn towards “nothingness.” Finite goods are nothing apart from God; all goodness is ultimately participation in the Divine Goodness.(33)

Hell is much more diverse than Purgatory and Paradise. It has more divisions and more unique settings. By contrast, it is revealed to Dante early in the Paradiso that all the blessed are actually in one place (indeed, “within” a single dimensionless point), and merely condescend to appear in different spheres of the heavens.(34) This is because the damned pursue multiplicity rather than the unifying First Cause and First Principle. Rather than seeking the Good on account of its goodness (because it is known by the intellect as good), the damned allow their desires for finite goods to triumph over the pursuit of the necessary telos of all rational creatures (the Good and the True, sought as such).(xiii)

The damned are also cut off from all communion with others. We see no sympathy or repentance in Hell. Indeed, the damned are often seen actively tormenting one another. This is not incidental to sin, but its very nature, the curvatus in se that disfigures the sinner’s soul. As the Pilgrim will learn from Guido Del Duca in the Canto XIV of the Purgatorio (on the terrace where the envious endure purgation), it could not be otherwise. To seek finite, material goods is to seek goods that diminish when they are shared. The pursuit of such goods sets up a dialectic of envy and competition between men. It is only as regards spiritual goods that our own good increases when others partake in them.(xiv)

Purgatory - Love and Reason:

If the core lesson of the Inferno is the true nature of sin, which drives us downward and dissolves the person in multiplicity, then the key lesson of the Purgatorio is the nature of love, which unifies the person, and ultimately the entire whole cosmos. During his ascent up Mount Purgatory, the Pilgrim learns that it is through the shedding of vice and attainment of virtue that we become free. Ultimately, this transformation comes down to possessing “the proper loves.” As Dante famously declares at the outset of the Paradiso:

“The glory of the One Who moves all things
penetrates all the universe, reflecting
in one part more and in another less.” (35)

Every finite thing is a partial likeness of God’s eternal wisdom. Any good it possesses it possesses by participation in the Divine Goodness.(36) Finite things are good precisely to the extent that they reflect the divine light. Hence, finite things are all stepping stones, rungs on a “ladder up to God.” As St. Augustine says in De Doctrina Christiana, finite goods are meant to be used, not enjoyed for their own sake. To descend down the ladder in order to possess one of its rungs is thus a confusion of what is truly most worthy of love. This is a failure of the intellect to recognize worth, or of the will to follow the guidance of the intellect. That is, it is a failure of our rational nature to be rational.(xv)

Love runs throughout the Pilgrim’s entire journey, from the “primeval love” that erected the Gates of Hell (37), to “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars” at the end of the poem.(38) In the discourses on love that occupy the center of the poem, the Pilgrim comes to understand love, and so to understand love’s relation to the rational soul and the role of reason in human life.

This explanation is given most explicitly in Canto XVII of the Purgatorio. For Dante, love is what motivates everything we do. Through Virgil’s teaching, the Pilgrim comes to “understand how love must be the seed of every virtue growing in [us], and every deed that merits punishment.”(39) Virgil begins this discourse with a distinction:

“Neither Creator nor his creatures ever,
my son, lacked love. There are, as you well know,
two kinds: the natural love, the rational.

Natural love may never be at fault;
the other may: by choosing the wrong goal,
by insufficient or excessive zeal.(40)

This “natural love” is will’s natural inclination towards the Good and the intellect’s natural inclination towards Truth, or, ultimately, the orientation of both towards God (the Good and the True themselves). This is “that innate and never-ending thirst,” by which Dante and Beatrice will later be drawn up through the heavens.(41) As Virgil will point out in the next Canto:

“The soul, which is created quick to love,
responds to everything that pleases, just
as soon as beauty wakens it to act.”(42)

This beauty can lead us upwards, towards virtue and God. However, we can also fall prey to finite beauties and be led downwards, towards vice. Indeed, it is the very tendency to ascend itself—a habit—in which virtue consists. Likewise, vice is a habitual orientation towards descent. Such habits involve both moral and epistemic virtues, virtues we can be trained in or intentionally habituate ourselves to. Since the will always desires “what is truly better” through its “natural love,” an attraction to the “worse over the better,” involves a projection of goodness onto what lacks it. This is a failure of the “rational love” that is conditioned by the intellect. It is to love things more or less than they are worthy of being loved. Of course, Dante does not subscribe to a simplistic notion where things are simply “good or bad” in themselves. The intellect must guide the person precisely because goodness is defined in terms of proper ends, ends which must ultimately be oriented towards man’s final end, ascent.(xvi) This point is dramatized in the Pilgrim’s dream of the siren in Canto XIX of the Purgatorio, where a hideous siren is transformed into an alluring women by Dante’s gaze.

This highlights another important element in the pre-modern vision of reason. For Dante, man cannot slip into a dispassionate state of “buffered reason” where he “lets the facts speak” whenever he chooses. We are either properly oriented towards Truth and Goodness or we are not; we cannot chose to pivot between finite and spiritual ends as suits us. Rather, man’s intellect and will is subject to the pernicious influence of the unregenerated passions and appetites until “the rule of reason” has been positively established.

The “rule of reason” can only be attained through repentance and a transformation accomplished through purgation and penance (something the Pilgrim must accomplish during his ascent of Mount Purgatory). By contrast, if reason is merely something akin to computation, then we all have the same power of reason, albeit some of us may have access to more facts, or might be quicker thinkers than others. On the modern view, asceticism and penance aimed at freeing the mind from the control of sensible desires are unnecessary. Here, it is worth noting why repentance is a prerequisite for the health of reason. Repentance represents a self-aware reflection on our own thought processes and choices, the ways in which they fall short, and a renewed commitment towards the pursuit of “what is really true” and what “is truly best” for their own sake.

Since this healing relies on divine grace, we might suppose that this leaves a smaller role for reason in Dante’s conception of freedom However, the opposite is true. Man’s rationality is emancipatory in Dante’s narrative. Throughout the Commedia, it is through questioning that Dante makes progress. It is only by questioning what is “really true” and “truly good” that man moves beyond his current beliefs and desires, and so transcends what he already is. Without this transcendent capacity of reason, man would be like the sinners at the bottom of Dante’s Hell, frozen in place, unable to move beyond the finitude of what he already is. Without this capacity of reason, we cannot turn around to question if the ends we pursue are truly good, and so we cannot properly align our loves through a turn to repentance and healing.

Indeed, in the Commedia, it is precisely the damned who appear to possess something like the Humean notion of reason. The damned are motivated by inchoate desires, impulses they do not attempt to master or understand. Count Ugolino will gnaw his rival’s brain for eternity, never questioning this act. The intellect of the damned has become a “slave to the passions,” and this is why we never see any gesture of repentance from them.

This is also what puts sinners in conflict with one another. The pursuit of what is “truly good” and “really true” unifies us with others. Knowledge of the true and the best is not something that diminishes when shared.(43) Rather, the more people share in this knowledge, the less they are attracted to finite goods for their own sake, and the more they are able to forgo their desires for those goods in order to pursue higher, common goods. It is better for everyone when this knowledge is attained by anyone.

For Dante, as for most pre-moderns, man has a natural desire to know the truth.“Man's mind cannot be satisfied unless it be illumined by that Truth beyond which there exists no other truth.”(44) This is another desire that unifies, just as it also purifies. As noted above, contemplation of this truth involves both a union and a becoming. Just as Plato thought that the “whole person” must be turned towards the Good before a person could properly know it, the Christian tradition sees asceticism, good works, the sacraments, and other aspects of the spiritual life as necessarily preceding such a contemplative vision.(45) Hence, it is precisely in pursuing his highest joy that a man will also be led to be a better father, neighbor, and citizen. First, because he is no longer ruled over by his appetites and passions, nor dependent on finite goods that diminish when shared. Second, because greater knowledge of the Good is transformative, such that the knower comes to love creatures as signs and manifestations of the Divine.(46)

Conclusion:

The modern tendency to make no distinction between the rational and sensible appetites obfuscates that Hume’s dictum that “reason is, and ought only be, the slave of the passions,”(47) is an inversion of Virgil’s last words to Dante: "now is your will upright, wholesome and free, and not to heed its pleasure would be wrong."(48) For Dante, our pursuit of our own pleasure only becomes good (and ultimately, properly “good for us”) after the soul’s faculties have been purified through repentance and purgation and the higher faculties have asserted their proper authority over the lower. Indeed, since the lower faculties are also regenerated through intentionally directed habituation, they no longer draw man towards vice in this state. Only once this is accomplished is pleasure a proper guide for human flourishing.

In the last book of the Commedia, the Pilgrim, his will and intellect now cleansed and aided by divine illumination, begins his ascent towards the ultimate goal of all willing and knowing. It is appropriate then that the Paradiso is the most philosophical of the three books, since it is only after this regeneration that Pilgrim is prepared to learn about the nature of man and the cosmos. Here, we see a marked contrast with the empiricist ideal, where there is only “the evidence” and “the analysis one can derive from it.” Yet, for the last leg of the journey, Dante must be led by Beatrice, by ecstatic eros and divine illumination. He must be drawn outside himself, beyond his finitude. He must, in a new term Dante coins for the poem, be “transhumanized.”(49) This is not a knowing we can strive for. We can only prepare ourselves to accept it as a gift. Thus, Dante’s most important lesson to us might be that such a gift can only be accepted freely. That is, it is only when we acknowledge our rational appetites, our desire for Goodness and Truth, that a proper ordering of our loves and true freedom is possible.*