Dante and the Deflation of Reason

This is a shorter version of the paper. The longer version can be found under "Dante, the Deflation of Reason, and Education in Virtue." In the book he developed from his lectures on medieval and renaissance literature, The Discarded Image, C.S. Lewis notes the dramatic deflation of conceptualizations of “reason” since the dawn of 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.” Likewise, in his De Consolatione Philosophiae, Boethius’s Lady Philosophy seems semi-divine, her head effortlessly “pierc[ing] within the very heavens.” This is Reason as “intelligentia obumbrata…the shadow of angelic nature in man.” Nor were these lofty notions confined to the Middle Ages. Aristotle saw man’s “rational soul” as “the most divine element in us.” Plato likewise saw the “golden cord” of reason as “holy.” 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.” 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.” This deflation plays an explanatory role in many of the seismic shifts that have come to define modern thought. This paper paints a portrait of an earlier, and in my opinion much richer, view of “reason” and man’s “intellect.” My goal is to lay out a less familiar vision of rationality, and to show where it intersects with fault lines in modern thought. 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 his Divine Comedy.