George Corbett.
Dante’s Christian Ethics: Purgatory and Its Moral Contexts.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. X + 233 pp. $99.99.

In this book, George Corbett presents Dante’s Commedia as a work of ethics. In writing the poem, as the author states at the outset, “Dante’s primary aim was neither to produce an innovative depiction of the three realms of the Christian afterlife nor to write a poetic masterpiece for Christendom to rival the epics of Classical antiquity”. Rather, he goes on, “Dante’s imaginative vision and poetic genius served more important ethical and, I would argue, political goals: to transform people’s moral lives and to reform the institutions that governed them” (p. 2). The notion that the Commedia is to be viewed as a moral work was stated very clearly also in the Epistle to Cangrande, where the work is described as dealing with the “morale negotium sive ethica”. Even if the letter was not actually written by Dante, as some scholars claim, it is still noteworthy that an early interpreter of the Commedia thought it natural to classify the poem in this way, as Corbett rightly points out. The ethical nature of the Commedia is clear from the poem’s narrative too, for Dante the character is commanded by Beatrice to write “in pro del mondo che mal vive” (Purg. XXXII, 103), meaning for the benefit of those living badly, who will find in the Commedia a path to moral education and self improvement. If we avoid the poem’s ethical content, Corbett argues, “we potentially jeorpardize not only the poem’s status as a work of ethics and its function (to lead humankind to salvation) but even its genre as a ‘Comedy’” (p. 2). In fact, if the poem is called a comedy it is also because the narrative trajectory Dante the character undergoes in his journey (from Hell up to Paradise) is intended to reflect the moral trajectory Dante the poet wants his readers to follow, that is from evil to good – as also pointed out in the Epistle to Cangrande.

The book is divided into three main parts. In Part I, comprising two chapters, Corbett’s overarching goal is to present the Commedia as an ethical and political manifesto. In Chapter 1, he shows that Dante relies on different ethical criteria in each of the three regions of the afterlife. For Hell, he adopts a philosophical (that is, mainly Aristotelian) taxonomy of good and evil. In Purgatory, he incorporates a more pastorally-oriented kind of ethics, for he structures the seven terraces of Purgatory according to the scheme of the seven capital vices, a common framework for medieval Christian confession. Finally, the overarching moral theme of Paradise is Christian asceticism, which Dante incorporates in his account of the four cardinal and three theological virtues. In Chapter 2, Corbett moves from ethics to politics, his aim being to demonstrate that there is perfect unity between the ethical-political theories presented in the Monarchia on the one hand, and in the Commedia on the other. Both works served “as a potent propaganda for the Imperial faction in Italy, and as a controversial manifesto for the radical reform of the Roman Church” (p. 7). The harmony between the two works is now further corroborated by recent philological evidence, according to which the Monarchia was composed when most of the Commedia was already completed (1317-1318). In view of this, Corbett argues, the notion that the Monarchia represents a formative (and later to be abandoned) stage in Dante’s political theology is no longer sustainable. In fact, Dante’s political views remained fundamentally consistent throughout his intellectual arc.

Part II, also comprising two chapters, is entitled “Reframing Dante’s Christian Ethics”. In Chapter 3, Corbett demonstrates that Dante shaped his vision of Purgatory by combining two different areas of Christian theology, that is the new doctrine of Purgatory and the tradition of the seven capital sins. The chapter thus presents a “theological Purgatory”, a realm that “embodies an explicit re-orientation from natural to supernatural ethics, from pagan to Christian exampla, and from this world to the heavenly city” (p. 8). In Chapter 4, the author delves deep into Dante’s treatment of the seven capital sins. He makes the convincing point that, although scholars have traditionally associated Dante’s approach to the issue with the account provided by Thomas Aquinas in his Summae theologiae, Dante was actually relying on a different source, that is Guglielmo Peraldo’s (1200-1271) De vitiis et virtutibus. Not only was this work more influential than Aquinas’ Summa in the early fourteenth century, but Corbett’s close textual analysis also shows very clearly that Dante elaborates on Peraldo in both Purgatory and Paradise, structurally as well as thematically.

Part III includes three chapters, which are all strictly dependent upon the argument presented in chapter 4, that is Dante’s reliance on Peraldo’s De vitiis et virtutibus. In Chapters 5 through 7, the author shows that Dante drew significantly on Peraldo’s work to inform his conception of Christian ethics in Purgatory. He does that by focusing on three different sins, each one corresponding to a terrace in Purgatory: pride, sloth, and avarice. Corbett justifies his choice of focusing on these particular vices by arguing that interpreting Dante’s Purgatory through the narrative units of its moral structure presents many hermeneutical advantages: that Dante gives special emphasis to these sins in Purgatory; that they are representative of three different kinds of vices as categorized by human psychology (respectively, envy, wrath, lust); that Dante himself sees pride as one of his gravest vices; that Dante associates sloth and avarice with the moral corruption of the Church.

Corbett’s book is a great scholarly contribution. It adds much to our knowledge of the markedly ethical dimension underpinning Dante’s Commedia. The book focuses on aspects of Dante’s work that have been traditionally downplayed by the scholarship, if not denied altogether, in part because of the disciplinary boundaries within which scholarship on Dante tends to move – Italian Studies and Comparative Literature in the first place. Thus, as the historical and literary elements of the Commedia have traditionally taken the lion’s share, only a handful contributions have been devoted to the investigation of the ethical foundations of Dante’s masterpiece. In addition, Corbett shows in a very convincing way the extent of Dante’s debt to Guglielmo Peraldo’s De vitiis et virtutibus, as opposed to Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae. He thus supports a partial reorientation of the origin of Dante’s ethical discourse in the Commedia. The book contributes therefore to three main currents in contemporary Dante scholarship: it provides a reappraisal of Dante’s theology, it proposes a new assessment of his intellectual sources, and it promotes a new investigation of the narrative structure of the Commedia. Written in a very economical and clear style, Dante’s Christian Ethics provides a truly original and solid study of the ethical bearings of the Commedia.

Tommaso De Robertis, University of Pennsylvania