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  • Experiencing the Afterlife: Soul and Body in Dante and Medieval Culture
  • Francesco Ciabattoni
Manuele Gragnolati. Experiencing the Afterlife: Soul and Body in Dante and Medieval Culture. U of Notre Dame P, 2005. xvii + 279 pp.

The William and Katherine Devers Series in Dante Studies has been enriched with a precious contribution. Proceeding from Auerbach's contention that Dante's masterpiece is a milestone in the discovery of the individual, Gragnolati analyzes the relation between body and soul in the Commedia. At the turn of the fourteenth century, eschatological interest shifted from the soul's state after the Judgment to its state between death and Judgment Day. Since at death the soul is separated from the body and waiting to regain it, the problem arose of how to define individual identity in absentia corporis.

Chapter 1 expounds the works of Uguccione, Giacomino and especially Bonvesin's Libro delle tre scritture and the tension between the notion of a fully embodied soul, capable of experiencing the punishments of hell and purgatory, and the expectation of the end of time as the climactic event of a soul's existence, producing a "somatization of the soul." Bonvesin's soul is a somatomorphic entity with all the defects and qualities of a real body, a notion that Dante explres in depth, engaging in scholastic debate.

Dante's position in this dispute is treated in Chapter 2. Among the salient themes of scholastic discourse was whether the rational soul consisted of a plurality of forms, each possessing different faculties, or whether there was instead a single form, a forma simplex, possessing all of the faculties. While Bonaventure, Roger Bacon, John Peckam and Richard of Middleton advocated plurality, Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas and Giles of Rome defended unity.

The decision would affect the understanding of how the soul unites with the body, and therefore would influence the importance of the body in defining personhood. For Bonaventure, for example, the soul's desire for its body is essential to the union of the person, while Thomas maintained that if the rational soul is the only substantial form of man, then once the soul reaches beatitude, there is nothing more to be desired.

Each of these theories presents a set of philosophical problems. Pluralism could hardly account for the unity of any compound, such as the unity of the soul (divided by the Aristotelians into the vegetative, the sensitive and the rational) and the soul-body compound, which also meant accounting for the unity of personhood. Unicists had difficulty explaining the necessity for reincarnation. Because the state of being in paradise must be one of fulfillment of all desires, how can one explain a soul's desire to reunite with its body at the end of time?

Gragnolati argues, against Bruno Nardi and Giovanni Busnelli, that when Dante broaches the matter of the human soul's origin he combines both doctrines. In Purgatorio 25 the pilgrim is startled at how emaciated the gluttons have become from fasting when they do not need to eat, since they have no body. How can the souls experience physical pain and changes if [End Page 211] they are divided from their bodies? Dante has Statius describe the formation process as continuous, thus nearing the position of the pluralists, but when he comes to the crucial point of how the fetus becomes endowed with intellectual faculties, he switches to the doctrine of unity. This ideological syncretism shelters Dante from falling into the radical Aristotelian notion that the rational soul is a completely separate substance and that there is only one for all of humankind.

The aerial body in the other world still carries the features—although distorted by penance or obfuscated by the light of beatitude—that the person had in life, thus allowing recognition. The recognizableness of human features reflects the importance of individuality in Dante's conception of the afterlife. Thus, the body becomes "an essential component of the person."

Chapter 3 highlights the differences between the Libro delle tre scritture and the Commedia. While previous criticism ruled out the fruitfulness of such a comparison, Gragnolati, envisioning the Purgatorio as a journey of the soul to and as Christ...

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