Aristotle's matta bestialitade in Dante's Inferno Author(s): Anna Hatcher and Mark Musa Source: Italica, Vol. 47, No. 4 (Winter, 1970), pp. 366-372 Published by: American Association of Teachers of Italian Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/478455. Accessed: 06/05/2011 10:12 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at. http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at. http://www.jstor.org/action/showpublisher?publishercode=aati.. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. American Association of Teachers of Italian is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Italica. http://www.jstor.org
ARISTOTLE'S MATTA BESTIALITADE IN DANTE'S INFERNO Dante the Pilgrim begins his journey through Hell without having been offered a detailed itinerary of this journey, without having received instruction about the sins he will see punished along the way. But after he has seen the Heretics in the Sixth Circle, when he and his guide are on the edge of the abyss of Lower Hell, having paused to accustom themselves to the stench rising up from the pit (Canto XI), Virgil proceeds to describe the terrain they must still pass through, and offers him a classification of the sins they will encounter there. Three more circles lie ahead, the pilgrim is told, in all of which some form of malizia is punished. The various types of malizia, all having injustice as their end, fall into two main types according to whether the injustice is committed by means of forza or of frode. Forza being the less offensive to God, the Violent are punished in the first of the three Circles (the Seventh), the last two being reserved for the Fraudulent. In the Eighth Circle the Pilgrim will find those whose fraud did not involve treachery, while in the last Circle are the Traitors. He is also given a classification of the varieties of Violence, of Simple Fraud and of Treachery. Virgil's outline of the last three Circles is a masterpiece of clear, careful exposition. And nothing is omitted of the sins the Pilgrim will actually see there. When Virgil has finished his description of what lies ahead inside the City of Dis, the Pilgrim asks him about the sinners they had met before arriving at the gates of Dis, being apparently confused as to the way their sins and their punishments fit into the over-all penal system of Hell. He asks specifically about those in the Second, Third, Fourth and Fifth Circles, designating them not in terms of their sins but of their punishments. Virgil asks him to remember that these are the Incontinent, and since Incontinence is less heinous than Malice (as Aristotle himself had insisted), the punishment is 366
ARISTOTLE'S MATTA BESTIALITADE IN DANTE'S INFERNO 367 less grave. Thus, with this answer to the Pilgrim's question, we are offered a twofold picture of the sins being punished in Upper and Lower Hell, which may be summed up broadly as follows: Sins of { Incontinence f through Violence Malice through Fraud If the Pilgrim had not asked his question, the reader would hardly have been any the worse off: who could not see that the sins punished in the Second through the Fifth Circles are those of Incontinence? (And we are still never told how the Pusillanimous, or those in Limbo, or the Heretics fit into this system with its two poles of Incontinence and Malice). It is also true that if the Pilgrim had not asked his question, scholars would have been spared one of the most controversial problems that has arisen in Dante criticism-arisen, because of the way Virgil happened to begin his answer to the Pilgrim's simple question: Non ti rimembra di quelle parole Con le quai la tua Etica pertratta 80 Le tre disposizion che 'I ciel non vuole: Incontinenza, malizia e la matta Bestialitade? e come incontinenza Men Dio offende e men biasimo accatta? Se tu riguardi ben questa sentenza, E rechiti a la mente chi son quelli 85 Che su di fuor sostegnon penitenza, Tu vedrai ben perche da questi felli Sien dipartiti, e perche men crucciata La divina vendetta li martelli. 90 The lines in italics (79-83) are surely startling: after his clear and detailed outline of the last three Circles which contain supposedly only the sins of Malice, Virgil is suddenly adding a new sin-that is, if the threefold Aristotelian classification (incontinenza, malizia, bestialita) also belongs to Dante's own moral system, as most scholars believe.
368 ANNA HATCHER and MARK MUSA A number of them apparently see nothing strange in Virgil's procedure and simply accept the task of tracking down, within the framework of the sins just established, the sin of bestialita. There are two theories that have won adherence. Mazzoni believes that matta bestialita is to be identified with the four types of Treachery punished in Cocytus; and the same idea was presented again recently by Triolo in a lengthy article. Reade proposed, and his proposal was adopted by Grandgent and others, that Bestiality is to be found in the Seventh Circle: it corresponds to two of the various types of Violence punished there, Sodomy and Tyranny.' Reade simply takes his own proposal for granted, whereas the identification of Bestiality with the Treachery of the Ninth Circle was based by Triolo on a vast number of quotations from ancient and medieval authors: one each from Augustine, the Prophet Baruch, Philo Judeus, Averroes, Vincent of Beauvais; Job, Gregory the Great, Prudentius, Peter Comestor; two from Egidio Colonna, three from Aristotle, four from Albertus Magnus and ten from St. Thomas. But none of the quotations concerned with Bestiality connects this with Treachery, and none of those concerned with Treachery connects this directly with Bestiality. And apart from the few or the many arguments of detail offered by the proponents of these two theories, both of them, representing as they do attempts to connect the vice of bestialita with the sins explicitly named in Dante's Hell, suffer from three flaws of what might be called a systematic nature. The gravest one, from which can stem only other flaws, is the assumption that Virgil, having offered his inclusive picture of the sins and sub-sins punished in Lower Hell, would then, because the Pilgrim was perplexed about conditions in Upper Hell, drag in casually a new category-which could be punished only in Lower Hell (to judge by its position at the end of the list). Secondly, both theories imply that certain sins will have two official names.2 Finally, if these scholars believe that Dante's reference to the sin of Bestiality treated in Aristotle means that Dante adopts the same distinctions, then the Bestiality that they look for in Dante's Hell should correspond to what Aristotle has
ARISTOTLE'S MATTA BESTIALITADE IN DANTE'S INFERNO 369 defined as Bestiality. And this they have made no serious attempt to do.3 For no one could possibly believe that Aristotle's varieties of Bestiality can find a clear correspondence with Dante's system; and even less can one believe that when Aristotle speaks of Bestiality it is Tyranny plus Sodomy that he means, or Treachery (or Heresy!). The term bestialit& is treated somewhat differently by the proponents of the so-called " criss-cross " theory (Baldini, Barlozzini, Flamini, Montanari). They do not seek to ferret out this or that plump vice, proclaiming it to be the one which appears in disguise as bestialita. They simply assume that the term is self-evident: it refers, obviously, to the sin of Violence, being only a synonym for the forza of line 24.4 This, of course, means that the word malizia in our passage must be taken not as the compound of Force plus Fraud, as it had been defined in line 22, but only as Fraud designated earlier by frode.5 But though this theory has the advantage of discouraging wild-goose chasing through the Inferno, it presents a number of difficulties: first, the sin of Violence, represented now as forza, now as bestialiti; the term malizia, used now of Malice, now of Fraud! How can we understand such a lack of terminological precision in an analysis necessitating the utmost of precision (and up to this point revealing only consistency)? 6 Moreover, if Dante wanted a synonym for forza, why not a harmless one such as violenza, rather than the philosophically-loaded term bestialita, which meant so much for Aristotle (as it did for St. Thomas)? Finally, even granted that the terms used by Virgil in our passage might be inter- preted as incontinenza, frode, forza, there is surely something awkward in the placing of the two subdivisions, frode and forza, on the same level as the major division, incontinenza -to say nothing of the fact that the less grave of these subdivisions would enjoy final position. Surely the triad incontinenza, malizia and matta bestialitade must be interpreted as representing a distinction that is Aristotelian and only Aristotelian. Virgil's response to the Pilgrim's question had only one purpose: that of clearing up his confusion concerning the sinners he will see punished in
370 ANNA HATCHER and MARK MUSA Dis and those he had seen punished in the Second through the Fifth Circles; and he does this by distinguishing Incontinence from Malice as the less grave of the two sins. The burden of his message is contained in the lines beginning with 83. That the list of sins mentioned in 81-83 should not be forced into Dante's own system has been proposed by a few other scholars (Moore, Sapegno).7 And if their " hands-off" attitude has not been popular it is perhaps because they did not attempt to explain why Virgil chose to refer to Aristotle's threefold system if he was interested only in the latter's distinction between Incontinence and Malice; moreover, in the Nicomachean Ethics, the list containing Bestiality (Book VII, ch. 1) is separated by many chapters from the distinction in question (Book VII, ch. 8). Why does Virgil apparently go out of his way to quote Aristotle's tripartite classification, except to remind us of it, and approve it, as he had done in the case of the distinction between incontinenza and malizia?8 But it seems to me that this objection can be easily dismissed, and that we can take the first reference to Aristotle simply as an introductory device. It is not without importance that Virgil is quoting precisely the first sentence of Book VII; what better way to let the Pilgrim see which Book of the Ethics he has in mind? For it is only in this Book (which opens with a classification in which Bestiality has a place) that the sins of Incontinence and Malice are discussed. Thus Virgil's words could be paraphrased: " In that Book of his Ethics in which he classifies and compares the moral states to be avoided (presented by him as Incontinence, Malice and Bestiality), Aristotle says that Incontinence is less grave than Malice. If you examine carefully that judgment, and remember who those sinners are in the circles you mentioned, you will see why..." If this interpretation of lines 80-83 is correct, and it is difficult to imagine any serious objection that could be brought against it, then it follows that all scholars who saw in these lines a reflection of Dante's system are wrong-whatever the specific form assumed by their solution. Their " wrongness "
ARISTOTLE'S MATTA BESTIALITADE IN DANTE'S INFERNO 371 involves not the way in which they carried out their task, but their very conception of the task: the need to search for bestialiti in Dante's system. And this warped conception surely has sprung from inadequate confidence in Dante's mastery-or even, so it would seem, in his simple, common sense. To imagine that Dante would allow Virgil first to offer a clear-cut and complete outline of the sins punished in Lower Hell - then to introduce, without comment, a new category, is imagining him to be capable of an unpardonable and inexplicable blunder. ANNA HATCHER and MARK MUSA Indiana University 1 See Francesco Mazzoni, Studi danteschi (1953), 209-214; Alfred Triolo, "Matta bestialita in Dante's Inferno...," Traditio XXIV (1968), 247-292; W. H. V. Reade, The Moral System of Dante's " Inferno," Oxford, 1909. There are two other theories, so far as we know, that have not met with acceptance: according to Triolo, Ferretti believes that the matta bestialita of our passage is intended to characterize those of the sixth circle, the Heretics. Bersani believes that this vice is not located in any single division of Hell but may be found in combination with other vices throughout. Cf. Stefano Bersani, C.N.: Dottrine allegorie e simboli della "Divina commedia," Rome 1931. 2 The theories of Bersani and Ferretti would not be guilty of this particular flaw: Ferretti's, because the Heretics had not been included in Virgil's outline, and Bersani's, because he does not recognize bestialita as a distinct unit of sin but only as a possible extra ingredient attaching to many of the specific sins. Incidentally, these two differ from the others scholars mentioned, also because they have found bestialiti outside of Lower Hell. 3 There are at least two points of view underlying Aristotle's use of 09lQ6t0Tg in his threefold system: on the one hand it represents a certain degree (perhaps the extreme degree) of the two other sins: he speaks of " bestial incontinence " and " bestial malice." On the other hand, Bestiality is treated as a third separate category including abnormalities characteristic of barbarians or those sick in body or mind. In Book VII. Ch. 5 of the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle lists the varieties of the latter type (translation of C.I. Litzinger, O.P.): " I call bestial the pleasure of the man who is said to have slit pregnant women so he could devour fetuses; of anyone who delights in the brutish practises ascribed to certain savages near the Black Sea: some of whom eat raw meat, others human flesh, and still others, one another's children at their feasts; or Phalaris, according to what is related of him. Men delighting in such pleasures are like beasts. But some people become bestial because of particular ailments, for example, insanity. Laboring under this affliction one man sacrificed his mother and ate her, another murdered his fellow slave and
372 ANNA HATCHER and MARK MUSA ate his liver. These persons are pathological. Others become bestial because of habit, for instance, certain men who take pleasure in plucking out their hair, biting their nails, eating coal and earth, and having sexual intercourse with males. People act in these ways from the condition of their bodily temperament, or from usage to which they have become accustomed since childhood." Incidentally, it may well have been this description of strange vices which inspired Dante to characterize the sin in question as " matta bestialita." As for the use of the term to refer to a degree of incontinenza or of malizia, he may have felt that this was already contained in the two categories that he shared with Aristotle. 4 Accordingly the proponents of the " criss-cross " theory believe that all the sinners in Circle 7 are guilty of Bestiality - not only the Tyrants and the Sodomites. 5 Some of the " criss-crossers " fail to complete the cross, e.g. Momigliano and Chimenz, who accept bestialita as the equivalent of forza, without troubling to reinterpret the malizia of line 82 (i.e. as equal to frode). 6 The only " flaw " that could possibly be ascribed to Virgil's outline is his failure to include the sins being punished in the ante-inferno, in Limbo and in the circle of the Heretics. But this is not a flaw of inconsistency. Dante wished to include the three groups in question in his Hell, fully aware that he could not fit them into the overall system of Incontinence and Malice; in fact, the last two groups are guilty of wrong beliefs rather than wrong actions, the first, of failing to choose between right and wrong actions. And he indicates their oblique relationship to the system by the location of their places of punishment: the first two are outside Hell proper and the third, though within the gates of Dis, is on a level high above the abyss, separated both from the Incontinent and the Malicious. And these distinctions are evidently understood by the Pilgrim, who, in asking about the non-malicious, specifies only those in the Second through the Fifth Circles. 7 See Edward Moore, Studies in Dante, second series (Oxford, 1899), and Sapegno's commentary. Already in 1899 Moore had complained about the " commentators, both ancient and modern, [who] have vexed their souls in the search for OTQLO6lSq in Dante's system of classification." But seventy years later Triolo was quoting from more than a dozen sources to substantiate his (and Mazzoni's) application of the term. 8 In fact, this question has been raised by W. H. V. Reade, The Moral System of Dante's ' Inferno', p. 404. He also asks: "... why bring in Aristotle at all? The difference between deliberate sins and sins of impulse was recognized by every moralist known to Dante, and unless the whole scheme of the Inferno was meant to be Aristotelian, there could be no reason for appealing to the authority of Aristotle for so common a doctrine." But there could be a very good reason for mentioning Aristotle in connection with a generally accepted belief: the supreme authority carried by his name. And note the implicit non-sequitur of the last two clauses (" since in this passage Dante happens to appeal to the authority of Aristotle, therefore the whole scheme of the Inferno was meant to be Aristotelian ").