Dante’s Aesthetics of Being by Warren Ginsberg (review)

REVIEWS WARREN GINSBERG. Dante's Aesthetics ofBeing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999. Pp. ix, 175. $42.50. This absorbing study seeks to recuperate the aesthetic as a useful cate­ gory in the critical and historical study of medieval literature. To do so, it must wrest the aesthetic from the embrace of three suitors: first, the New Critical celebration ofpoetic form per se; second, the Robertsonian celebration of order and serene hierarchy per se; and third, the more suspicious New Historical and/or psychoanalytic disenchantments of the aesthetic as a mystification ofthe really Real. Ginsberg is well aware of medieval uses of the aesthetic (with the three estates, for instance) as a "placatory ideology of political identity" (p. 3), and indeed astutely explains how Aquinas's intellectual and Suger's quasi-mystical treat­ ments of the order, harmony, and proportions of beauty work to limit its fundamentally sensual and earthly dimensions, and thus its potential social power. The danger Aquinas and Suger sought to foreclose is the subject ofthis book: that vernacular "love poetry [would} sit down at the same table as metaphysics" (p. 3), as indeed happens in Dante's efforts to join love and knowledge in poetry that speaks at once to the senses and to the mind. Rather than demystifying aesthetic discourses to ferret out what they might hide, Ginsberg sympathetically unfolds the scholastic psychology of perception, imagination, and intellection to show how Dante uses it to underwrite his vernacular poetry of analogy. In the Vita Nuova, the aesthetic is a form of knowledge between sensory experience and intel­ lectual abstraction. In the Commedia, it is more than epistemology; it is an essentially poetic and analogic discourse of being in which divine love expresses itself in terms appropriate to the unique human condi­ tion, midway between animals and angels. It is also essentially vernacu­ lar: Ginsberg correlates Dante's developing poetic vision, traced through the signature modes ofthe stil novo and the tenzone, with his growing use of the aesthetic as an arena of cultural contestation in which he chal­ lenged and reformed Latin authority and learning, not only ofscholastic psychology and theology but also of the literary tradition defined by Ovid and Virgil. The introduction defines the aesthetic as a form ofknowledge mediat­ ing between sensation and the intellect by means of analogy. Originat­ ing in the scholastic synthesis of neo-Platonism and Aristotelian meta493 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER physics with Christian theology, it was taken over by the vernacular stilnovist poets, who used analogy as the philosophers did: to claim the universal (rather than particular) beauty of their ladies, and to make analogies (for instance) between direct angelic intellection and a lover's immediate desire to obey his lady. In this first stage of cultural contesta­ tion, analogy enabled poets like Guinizelli and Cavalcanti to appropriate the disciplines of Latin learning-the liberal arts, philosophy, and the­ ology-for vernacular love poetry. This is the basis for Dante's vast expansion in the scope of aesthetics in the Commedia, where it becomes not just epistemology, but a mode of existence itself. The long second chapter anchors the Vita Nuova in a detailed treat­ ment of scholastic perception, pneumatology, and the process of intel­ lection. The explications are not easy reading-the material is formida­ bly abstract-but they are as clear an account as I have encountered. The background is crucial to aesthetics because it conceives of knowledge as based in a series of likenesses-analogies-by which the outside world is made available to the rational soul. It is also the stuff from which the Vita Nuova-a book of analogies-is made. Tracing Dante's ascent and descent through the hierarchies of knowing, this chapter precisely lays out how the work conceives Beatrice as the being in which the physical and the transcendent are assimilated as analogies of one another. It also shows precisely why Dante parts ways with Cavalcanti. In the central canzone "Donne, ch'avete intelletto d'amore" ("Ladies, who have under­ standing of love"), Dante's understanding of Beatrice as the principle of aesthetic knowledge who embodies transcendental beauty breaks deci­ sively with Cavalcanti's phenomenology of...