Why<\/p>\nDante Damned Francesca da Rimini<\/a>,"<\/b> I argue that there are<\/p>\n
two explanations for Dante’s decision to place Francesca in Hell (even<\/p>\n
though her real-life nephew was his patron and benefactor). First, he<\/p>\n
may have sympathized with this fellow lover of poetry who tells her own<\/p>\n
sad story so movingly, but he realized that she had committed the mortal<\/p>\n
sin of adultery. Thus he damned her because his philosophical reason told<\/p>\n
him that she was guilty, and he wanted to suggest that moral reasoning<\/p>\n
is a safer guide than stories and the emotions that they provoke. For<\/p>\n
the same reason, the whole Divine Comedy<\/i> moves from emotional,<\/p>\n
first-person, concrete narrative toward abstract universal truth as Dante<\/p>\n
ascends from Hell to Heaven.<\/font><\/p>\n
But there is also another,<\/p>\nsubtler reason for his decision. Francesca loves poetry, but she reads<\/p>\n
it badly. Her speech is a tissue of quotations from ancient and medieval<\/p>\n
literature, but every one is inaccurate. In general, she takes difficult,<\/p>\n
complex texts and misreads them as simple cliches that justify her own<\/p>\n
behavior. Meanwhile, she says nothing about her lover or her husband—not<\/p>\n
even their names—which suggests that she cannot "read"<\/p>\n
them well or recall their<\/i> stories. Her failure as a reader suggests<\/p>\n
that Dante was not necessarily against poetry and in favor of philosophical<\/p>\n
reason. Instead, perhaps he wanted to point out some specific moral pitfalls<\/p>\n
involved in careless reading.<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I looked at statistics for this site recently and was surprised to see that the most popular search terms that take people here include "Dante," "Paolo," "Francesca," and "Inferno." I am surprised because I think of myself as a civics, democracy, and political-reform guy; I have not contributed much to the study of Dante, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4193"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4193\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}