EVERYTHING BEGINS WITH A VOYAGE. One day, when I was eight or nine, in Buenos Aires, I lost my way coming back from class. The school was one of many that I attended in my childhood, and stood a short distance from our house, in the tree-lined neighborhood of Belgrano. Then as now, I was easily distracted, and all sorts of things caught my attention as I walked back home in the starched white pinafore all schoolchildren were obliged to wear: the corner grocery store that before the age of supermarkets held large barrels of briny olives, cones of sugar wrapped in light-blue paper, blue tins of Canale biscuits; the stationer’s with its patriotic notebooks displaying the faces of our national heroes and shelves lined with the yellow covers of the Robin Hood children’s series; a tall, narrow door with harlequin stained glass which was sometimes left open, revealing a grim courtyard where a tailor’s mannequin mysteriously languished; the sweet seller, a fat man sitting at a street corner on a tiny stool, who held, like a lance, his kaleidoscopic wares. I usually took the same way back, counting off the landmarks as I passed them, but that day I decided to change course. After a few blocks, I realized I didn’t know the way. I was too ashamed to ask for directions, so I wandered, more astonished than frightened, for what seemed to me a very long time.
I don’t know why I did what I did, except that I wanted to experience something new, to follow whatever clues I might find to mysteries not yet apparent, as in the Sherlock Holmes stories, which I had just discovered. I wanted to deduce the secret story of the doctor with a battered walking stick, to reveal that the tiptoeing footmarks in the mud were those of a man running for his life, to ask myself why someone would be wearing a groomed black beard that was no doubt false. “The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes,” said the Master.
I remember becoming aware, with a feeling of pleasurable anxiety, that I was engaging in an adventure different from the ones on my shelves and yet I experienced something of the same suspense, the same intense desire to find out what lay ahead, without being able (without wanting) to foretell what might take place. I felt as if I’d entered a book and was on the way to its undisclosed final pages. What exactly was I looking for? Perhaps this was when for the first time I conceived of the future as a place that held together the tail-ends of all the possible stories.
But nothing happened. At long last, I turned a corner and found myself on familiar ground. When I finally saw my house, it felt like a disappointment.
But we hold several threads in our hands, and the odds are that one or other of them guides us to the truth. We may waste time following the wrong one, but sooner or later, we must come upon the right.
—SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE,
“The Hound of the Baskervilles”
Curiosity is a word with a double meaning. The etymological Spanish dictionary of Covarrubias of 1611 defines curioso (it is the same in Italian) as a person who treats something with particular care and diligence, and the great Spanish lexicographer explains its derivation curiosidad (in Italian, curiosità) as resulting because “the curious person is always asking: ‘Why this and why that?’” Roger Chartier has noted that these first definitions did not satisfy Covarrubias, and in a supplement written in 1611 and 1612 (and left unpublished) Covarrubias added that curioso has “both a positive and a negative sense. Positive, because the curious person treats things diligently; and negative, because the person labors to scrutinize things that are most hidden and reserved, and do not matter.” There follows a quotation in Latin from one of the apocryphal books of the Bible, Ecclesiasticus: “Do not try to understand things that are too difficult for you, or try to discover what is beyond your powers” (3:21–22). With this, according to Chartier, Covarrubias opens his definition to the biblical and patristic condemnation of curiosity as the illicit yearning to know what is forbidden.1 Of this ambiguous nature of curiosity, Dante was certainly aware.
Dante composed almost all, if not all, of the Commedia while in exile, and the account of his poetic pilgrimage can be read as a hopeful mirror of his forced pilgrimage on earth. Curiosity drives him, in Covarrubias’s sense of treating things “diligently,” but also in the sense of seeking to know what is “most hidden and reserved” and lies beyond words. In a dialogue with his otherworldly guides (Beatrice, Virgil, Saint Bernard) and with the damned and blessed souls he encounters, Dante allows his curiosity to lead him on towards the ineffable goal. Language is the instrument of his curiosity—even as he tells us that the answer to his most burning questions cannot be uttered by a human tongue—and his language can be also the instrument of ours. Dante can act, in our reading of the Commedia, as a “midwife” of our thoughts, as Socrates once defined the role of the seeker of knowledge.2 The Commedia allows us to bring our questions into being.
Dante died in exile in Ravenna on 13 or 14 September 1321, after having recorded in the last verses of his Commedia his vision of the everlasting light of God. He was fifty-six years old. According to Giovanni Boccaccio, Dante had begun writing the Commedia sometime before his banishment from Florence, and had been forced to abandon in the city the first seven cantos of the Inferno. Someone, Boccaccio says, searching for a document among the papers in Dante’s house, found the cantos without knowing they were by Dante, read them with admiration, and took them for inspection to a Florentine poet “of some renown,” who guessed that they were Dante’s work and contrived to send them on to him. Always according to Boccaccio, Dante was at the time at the estate of Moroello Malaspina in Lunigiana; Malaspina received the cantos, read them, and begged Dante not to abandon a work so magnificently begun. Dante consented and began the eighth canto of the Inferno with the words: “I say, carrying on, that long before …” So goes the story.3
Extraordinary literary works seem to demand extraordinary tales of their conception. Magical biographies of a phantom Homer were invented to account for the power of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and Virgil was lent the gifts of a necromancer and herald of Christianity because, his readers thought, the Aeneid could not have been composed by an ordinary man. Consequently, the conclusion of a masterpiece must be even more extraordinary than its inception. As the writing of the Commedia advanced, Boccaccio tells us, Dante began to send the completed cantos to one of his patrons, Cangrande della Scala, in lots of six or eight. In the end, Cangrande would have received the entire work with the exception of the last thirteen cantos of Paradiso. For the months following Dante’s death, his sons and disciples searched among his papers to see if he had not perhaps finished the missing cantos. Finding nothing, says Boccaccio, “they were enraged that God had not allowed him to live in the world long enough to have the chance of concluding what little remained of his work.” One night, Jacopo, Dante’s third son, had a dream. He saw his father approach, dressed in a white gown, his face shining with a strange light. Jacopo asked him if he was still alive, and Dante said that he was, but in the true life, not in ours. Jacopo then asked whether he had finished his Commedia. “Yes,” was the answer, “I finished it,” and he led Jacopo to his old bedroom, where, putting his hand on a certain place on the wall, he announced, “Here is what you were searching for for so long.” Jacopo woke, fetched an old disciple of Dante’s, and together they discovered, behind a hanging cloth, a recess containing moldy writings which proved to be the missing cantos. They copied them out and sent them, according to Dante’s habit, to Cangrande. “Thus,” Boccaccio tells us, “was the task of so many years brought to its conclusion.”4
The first portrait of Dante to appear in a printed book. Hand-colored woodcut in Lo amoroso Convivio di Dante (Venice, 1521). (Photograph courtesy of Livio Ambrogio. Reproduced by permission.)
Boccaccio’s story, which today is regarded less as factual history than as an admiring legend, lends the creation of what is perhaps the greatest poem ever penned an appropriately magical frame. And yet neither the initial suspenseful interruption nor the final happy revelation suffice, in the reader’s mind, to account for the invention of such a work. The history of literature is rich in stories about desperate situations in which writers have managed to create masterpieces. Ovid dreaming his Tristia in the hellhole of Toomis, Boethius writing his Consolation of Philosophy in prison, Keats composing his great odes while dying of tubercular fever, Kafka scribbling his Metamorphosis in the public corridor of his parents’ house contradict the assumption that a writer can write only under auspicious circumstances. Dante’s case is, however, particular.
In the late thirteenth century, Tuscany was split into two political factions: the Guelphs, loyal to the pope, and the Ghibellines, loyal to the imperial cause. In 1260, the Ghibellines defeated the Guelphs at the Battle of Montaperti; a few years later, the Guelphs began to regain their lost power, eventually expelling the Ghibellines from Florence. By 1270 the city was entirely Guelph and would remain so throughout Dante’s lifetime. Shortly after Dante’s birth in 1265, the Guelphs of Florence divided into the Blacks and the Whites, this time along family rather than political lines. On 7 May 1300, Dante took part in an embassy to San Gimigniano on behalf of the ruling White faction; a month later he was elected one of the six priors of Florence. Dante, who believed that church and state should not interfere in one another’s spheres of action, opposed the political ambitions of Pope Boniface VIII; consequently, when he was sent to Rome in the autumn of 1301 as part of the Florentine embassy, Dante was ordered to stay at the papal court while the other ambassadors returned to Florence. On 1 November, in Dante’s absence, the landless French prince Charles de Valois (whom Dante despised as an agent of Boniface) entered Florence, supposedly to restore peace but in fact to allow a group of exiled Blacks to enter the city. Led by their chief, Corso Donati, for five days the Blacks pillaged Florence and murdered many of its citizens, driving the surviving Whites into exile. In time, the exiled Whites became identified with the Ghibelline faction, and a Black priorate was installed to rule Florence. In January 1302, Dante, who was probably still in Rome, was condemned to exile by the priorate. Later, when he refused to pay the fine imposed as penalty, his sentence of two years’ exile was changed to that of being burned at the stake if he ever returned to Florence. All his goods were confiscated.
Dante’s exile took him first to Forlì, then, in 1303, to Verona, where he stayed until the death of the city’s lord, Bartolomeo della Scala, on 7 March 1304. Because the new ruler of Verona, Alboino della Scala, was unfriendly, or because Dante thought he could enlist the sympathies of the new pope, Benedict XI, the exile returned to Tuscany, probably to Arezzo. For the next few years his itinerary is uncertain—perhaps he moved to Treviso, but Lunigiana, Lucca, Padua, and Venice are also possible halting places; in 1309 or 1310 he may have visited Paris. In 1312, Dante returned to Verona. Cangrande della Scala had become, a year earlier, the city’s sole ruler, and thereafter Dante lived in Verona under his protection, until at least 1317. Dante’s final years were spent in Ravenna, at the court of Guido Novelo da Polenta.
In the absence of irrefutable documentary evidence, scholars suggest that Dante began the Inferno either in 1304 or 1306, the Purgatorio in 1313, and the Paradiso in 1316. The exact dating matters less than the astonishing fact that Dante wrote the Commedia during almost twenty years of wandering in more than ten alien cities, away from his library, his desk, his papers, his talismans—the superstitious bric-à-brac with which every writer constructs a working theater. In unfamiliar rooms, amidst people to whom he owed polite gratitude, in spaces that, because they were not his intimate own, must have seemed relentlessly public, always subject to social niceties and the conventions of others, it must have been a daily struggle to find small moments of privacy and silence in which to work. Since his own books were not available, with his annotations and remarks scribbled on the margins, his main recourse was the library of his mind, marvelously furnished (as the countless literary, scientific, theological, and philosophical references in the Commedia show) but subject, like all such libraries, to the depletions and blurrings that come with age.
What were his first attempts like? In a document preserved by Boccaccio, a certain Brother Ilario, “a humble monk of Corvo,” says that one day a traveler came to his monastery. Brother Ilario recognized him, “for though I had never once seen him before that day, his fame had long before reached me.” Perceiving the monk’s interest, the traveler “drew a little book from his bosom in a friendly enough way” and showed him some verses. The traveler, of course, was Dante; the verses, the initial cantos of the Inferno, which, though written in the vernacular of Florence, Dante tells the monk he had at first intended to write in Latin.5 If Boccaccio’s document is authentic, then Dante had managed to take with him into exile the first few pages of his poem. It would have been enough.
We know that early on in his travels, Dante had begun to send friends and patrons copies of a few of the cantos, which were then often copied and passed along to other readers. In August 1313, the poet Cino da Pistoia, one of Dante’s friends in the early years, included glosses of a few verses from two cantos of the Inferno in a song he wrote on the death of the emperor Henry VII; in 1314 or perhaps somewhat earlier, a Tuscan notary, Francesco da Barberino, mentions the Commedia in his Documenti d’amore. There are several other proofs that Dante’s work was known and admired (and envied and scorned) long before the Commedia’s completion. Barely twenty years after Dante’s death, Petrarch mentions how illiterate artists recited parts of the poem at crossroads and theaters to applauding drapers, innkeepers, and customers in shops and markets.6 Cino, and later Cangrande, must have had an almost complete manuscript of the poem, and we know that Dante’s son Jacopo worked from a holograph copy to produce a one-volume Commedia for Guido da Polenta. Today not a single line in Dante’s hand has come down to us. Coluccio Salutati, an erudite Florentine humanist who translated parts of the Commedia into Latin, recalled seeing Dante’s “lean script” in some of his now lost epistles in the Chancery of Florence, but we can only imagine what his handwriting looked like.7
How the notion of writing the chronicle of a journey to the Otherworld came to Dante is, of course, an unanswerable question. A clue may lie at the end of his Vita nova, an autobiographical essay structured around thirty-one lyric poems whose meaning, purpose, and origin Dante attributes to his love for Beatrice: in the last chapter, Dante speaks of an “admirable vision” which makes him resolve to write “what has never been written of any other woman.” A second explanation may be the fascination felt for popular tales of otherworldly journeys among Dante’s contemporaries. In the thirteenth century these imaginary voyages had become a thriving literary genre, born perhaps from anxieties to know what lies beyond the last breath: to revisit the departed and learn whether they require the weak hold of our memory for their continued existence, to find out whether our actions on this side of the grave have consequences on the other. Such questions, of course, were not new even then: ever since we started telling stories, in the days before history, we began to draw up a detailed geography for the regions of the Otherworld. Dante would have been familiar with a number of these travelogues. Homer, for instance, allowed Odysseus to visit the Land of the Dead on his delayed return to Ithaca; Dante, who had no Greek, knew the version of that descent given by Virgil in his Aeneid. Saint Paul, in his Second Epistle to the Corinthians, wrote of a man who had been to Paradise and “heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter” (12:4). When Virgil appears to Dante and tells him that he will lead him “through an eternal place,” Dante acquiesces, but then hesitates.
But why should I go? And who allows it?
I am not Aeneas, nor am I Paul.8
Dante’s audience would have understood the references.
Dante, voracious reader, would have also been familiar with Cicero’s Scipio’s Dream and its description of the celestial spheres, as well as with the otherworldly incidents in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Christian eschatology would have provided him with several more accounts. In the Apocryphal Gospels, the so-called Apocalypse of Peter describes the saint’s vision of the Holy Fathers wandering in a perfumed garden, and the Apocalypse of Paul speaks of a fathomless abyss into which the souls of those who did not hope for God’s mercy are flung.9 Other journeys and visions appear in such best-selling pious compendia as Jacop de Voragine’s Golden Legend and the anonymous Lives of the Fathers; in the imaginary Irish travel narratives of Saint Brendan, Saint Patrick, and King Tungdal; in the mystic visions of Peter Damian, Richard de Saint-Victoire, and Gioachim de Fiore; and in certain Islamic Otherworld chronicles, such as the Andalucian Libro della Scala (Book of the Ladder), which tells of Muhammad’s ascent to heaven. (We will return to this Islamic influence on the Commedia farther on.) There are always models for any new literary venture: our libraries repeatedly remind us that there is no such thing as literary originality.
The earliest verses Dante wrote were, as far as we know, several poems composed in 1283, when he was eighteen years old, later included in the Vita nova; the last work was a lecture in Latin, Questio de aqua et terra (Dispute on Earth and Water), which he delivered in a public reading on 20 January 1320, less than two years before his death.
The Vita nova was finished before 1294: its declared intention is to clarify the words Incipit Vita Nova, “Here Begins the New Life,” inscribed in the “volume of my memory,” and following the sequence of poems written for love of Beatrice, whom he saw for the first time when both were children, Dante nine and Beatrice eight. The book is presented as a quest, an attempt to answer the questions elicited by the love poems, driven by a curiosity bred, Dante says, in “the high chamber where all the sensitive spirits carry their perceptions.”10
Dante’s last composition, the Questio de aqua et terra, is a philosophical inquiry into several scientific matters, following the style of “disputes” popular at the time. In his introduction, Dante writes: “Therefore, nourished as I have been since my childhood with the love of truth, I suffered not to leave myself out of the debate, but chose to show what was true therein, and also to dissolve all contrary arguments, as much for love of truth as for hatred of falsity.”11 Between the first mention of a need for questioning and the last lies the vast territory of Dante’s masterwork. The entire Commedia can be read as the pursuit of one man’s curiosity.
According to patristic tradition, curiosity can be of two kinds: the curiosity associated with the vanitas of Babel, which leads us to believe ourselves capable of such feats as building a tower to reach the heavens; and the curiosity of umiltà, of thirsting to know as much as we can of the divine truth, so that, as Saint Bernard prays for Dante in the Commedia’s last canto, “joy supreme may be unfolded to him.” Quoting Pythagoras in his Convivio, Dante defined a person who pursues this wholesome curiosity precisely as a “lover of knowledge . . . a term not of arrogance but of humility.”12
Though scholars such as Bonaventure, Siger de Brabant, and Boethius deeply influenced Dante’s thought, Thomas Aquinas, above all, was Dante’s maître à penser: as Dante’s Commedia is to his curious readers, Aquinas’s writings were to Dante. When Dante, guided by Beatrice, reaches the Heaven of the Sun, where the prudent are rewarded, a crown of twelve blessed souls circle around him three times to the sound of a celestial music, until one of them detaches itself from the dance and speaks to him. It is the soul of Aquinas, which tells him that, since true love has at last been kindled in Dante, Aquinas and the other blessed souls must answer his questions out of that same love. According to Aquinas, and following the teachings of Aristotle, the knowledge of the supreme good is such that once perceived it can never be forgotten, and the soul blessed with such knowledge will always yearn to return to it. What Aquinas calls Dante’s “thirst” must inevitably be satisfied: it would be as impossible not to try to assuage it “as it is for water not to flow back to the sea.”13
Aquinas was born in Roccasecca, in the Kingdom of Sicily, heir to a noble family related to much of the European aristocracy: the Holy Roman emperor was his cousin. At the age of five, he began his studies at the celebrated Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino. He must have been an insufferable child: it is told that after remaining silent in class for many days, his first utterance to his teacher was a question, “What is God?”14 At fourteen, his parents, wary of political divisions in the abbey, transferred him to the recently founded University of Naples, where he began his lifelong study of Aristotle and his commentators. During his university years, around 1244, he decided to join the Dominican order. Aquinas’s choice to become a Dominican mendicant friar scandalized his aristocratic family. They had him kidnapped and held confined for a year, hoping he would recant. He did not, and once set free he settled for a time in Cologne to study under the celebrated teacher Albertus Magnus. For the rest of his life he taught, preached, and wrote in Italy and France.
Aquinas was a large man, clumsy and slow, characteristics that earned him the nickname “Dumb Ox.” He refused all positions of power and prestige, whether that of courtier or abbot. He was, above all, a lover of books and reading. When asked for what he thanked God most, he answered, “for granting me the gift of understanding every page I’ve ever read.”15 He believed in reason as a means of attaining the truth, and constructed, along Aristotelian philosophy, laborious logical arguments to reach some measure of conclusion to the great theological questions. For this he was condemned, three years after his death, by the bishop of Paris, who maintained that the absolute power of God could do without any quibbles of Greek logic.
Aquinas’s major work is the Summa Theologica, a vast survey of the principal theological questions, intended, he says in the prologue, “not only to teach the proficient, but also to instruct beginners.”16 Aware of the need for a clear and systematic presentation of Christian thought, Aquinas made use of the recently recovered works of Aristotle, translated into Latin, to construct an intellectual framework that would support the sometimes contradictory fundamental Christian canonical writings, from the Bible and the books of Saint Augustine to the works of the theologians of his own time. Aquinas was still writing the Summa a few months before his death in 1274. Dante, who was only nine when Aquinas died, may have met some of the master’s disciples at the University of Paris if (as legend has it) he visited the city as a young man. Whether through the teachings of Aquinas’s followers or his own readings, Dante certainly knew and made use of Aquinas’s theological cartography, much as he knew and made use of Augustine’s invention of the first-person protagonist to recount his life’s journey. And certainly he knew both their arguments concerning the nature of human inquisitiveness.
The beginning point of all quests is, for Aquinas, Aristotle’s celebrated statement “All human beings, by nature, desire to know,” to which Aquinas refers several times in his writings. Aquinas proposed three arguments for this desire. The first is that each thing naturally desires its perfection, that is to say, to become fully conscious of its nature and not merely capable of achieving this consciousness; this, in human beings, means acquiring a knowledge of reality. Second, that everything inclines to its proper activity: as fire to heating and heavy things to falling, humans are inclined to understanding, and consequently to knowing. Third, everything desires to be united to its principal— the end to its beginning—in that most perfect of motions, that of the circle; it is only through intellect that this desire is achieved, and through intellect we each become united to our separate substances. Therefore, Aquinas concludes, all systematic scientific knowledge is good.17
Aquinas remarks that Saint Augustine, in a sort of appendix of corrections to much of his work titled Retractions, observed that “more things are sought than found, and of the things that are found, fewer still are confirmed.” This, for Augustine, was a statement of limits. Aquinas, quoting from another work by the prolific Augustine, remarked that the author of the Confessions had warned that allowing our curiosity to inquire about everything in the world might result in the sin of pride and thereby contaminate the authentic pursuit of truth. “So great a pride is thus begotten,” Augustine had written, “that one would think they dwelt in the very heavens about which they argue.”18 Dante, knowing himself guilty of the sin of pride (the sin for which, he is told, he will return to Purgatory after his death), may have had this passage in mind when visiting the heavens in Paradiso.
Aquinas took Augustine’s concern farther, arguing that pride is only the first of four possible perversions of human curiosity. The second entails the pursuit of lesser matters, such as reading popular literature or studying with unworthy teachers.19 The third occurs when we study the things of this world without reference to the Creator. The fourth and last, when we study what is beyond the limits of our individual intelligence. Aquinas condemns these species of curiosity only because they distract from the greater, fuller impulse of natural exploration. In this, he echoes Bernard of Clairvaux, who a century earlier had written: “There are people who want to know solely for the sake of knowing, and that is scandalous curiosity.” Four centuries before Clairvaux, Alcuin of York, more generously, defined curiosity in these terms: “As regards wisdom, you love it for the sake of God, for the sake of purity of soul, for the sake of knowing truth, and even for its own sake.”20
Like a reverse law of gravity, curiosity causes our experience of the world and of ourselves to increase with the asking: curiosity helps us grow. For Dante, following Aquinas, following Aristotle, what draws us on is a desire for the good or the apparent good, that is to say, towards what we know is good or appears to us to be good. Something in our capacity to imagine reveals to us that something is good, and something in our ability to question propels us towards that something through an intuition of its usefulness or danger. In other cases, we aim towards that ineffable good simply because we don’t understand something and demand a reason for it, as we demand a reason for everything in this unreasonable universe. (In my own case, these experiences come often through reading—for instance, wondering with Dr. Watson about the meaning of a candle burning in the moors on a pitch-dark night, or asking with the Master why one of Sir Henry Baskerville’s new boots was stolen from the Northumberland Hotel.)
As in an archetypal mystery, achieving the good is always an ongoing search, because the satisfaction of one answer merely leads to asking another question, and so on into infinity. For the believer, the good is equivalent to the godhead: saints reach it when they no longer seek anything. In Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, and Sikhism, this is the state of moksha, or nirvana, of “being blown out” (like a candle) and it refers, in the Buddhist context, to the imperturbable stillness of mind after the fires of desire, aversion, and delusion have been extinguished, the achievement of ineffable beatitude. In Dante, as the great nineteenth-century critic Bruno Nardi defined it, this “end of the quest” is “the state of tranquility in which desire has subsided,” that is to say, “the perfect accord of human will with divine will.”21 Desire for knowledge, or natural curiosity, is the inquisitive force that impels Dante from within, just as Virgil and, later, Beatrice are the inquisitive forces that lead him onwards from without. Dante allows himself to be led, inside and out, until he no longer requires any of them—not the intimate desire or the illustrious poet or the blessed beloved—as he stands confronted at long last with the supreme divine vision before which imagination and words fall short, as he tells us in the Commedia’s famous ending:
To the high fantasy here all power failed;
But already my desire and my will were turned
Just like a wheel in even measure turned
By love that moves the sun and the other stars.22
Common readers (unlike historians) care little for the strictures of official chronology, and find sequences and dialogues across the ages and cultural borders. Four centuries after Dante’s high peregrinations, in the British isles a very curious Scotsman imagined a system, “plan’d before [he] was one and twenty, & compos’d before twenty five,” that would allow him to set out in writing questions that arose from his brief experience of the world.23 He called his book A Treatise of Human Nature.
David Hume was born in Edinburgh in 1711 and died in 1776. He studied at Edinburgh University, where he discovered the “new Scene of Thought” of Isaac Newton and an “experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects” by which truth might be established. Though his family wished him to follow the career of law, he found “an insurmountable Aversion to every thing but the pursuits of Philosophy and general Learning; and while they fancyed I was pouring over Voet and Vinnius, Cicero and Virgil were the Authors which I was secretly devouring.”24
When the Treatise was published in 1739, the reviews were mostly hostile. “Never literary Attempt was more unfortunate than my Treatise of human Nature,” he recalled decades later. “It fell dead-born from the Press, without reaching such distinction as even to excite a Murmur among the Zealots.”25
The Treatise of Human Nature is an extraordinary profession of faith in the capacity of the rational mind to make sense of the world: Isaiah Berlin, in 1956, would say of its author that “no man has influenced the history of philosophy to a deeper and more disturbing degree.” Decrying that in philosophical disputes “’tis not reason, which carries the prize, but eloquence,” Hume eloquently proceeded to interrogate the assertions of metaphysicians and theologians, and to inquire as to the meaning of curiosity itself. Prior to experience, Hume argued, anything may be the cause of anything: it is experience and not the abstractions of reason which helps us understand life. Hume’s apparent skepticism, however, does not reject all possibility of knowledge: “Nature is too strong for the stupor attendant on the total suspension of belief.”26 The experience of the natural world, according to Hume, must direct, mold and ground all our inquiries.
At the end of the second book of his Treatise, Hume attempted to distinguish between love of knowledge and natural curiosity. The latter, Hume wrote, derived from “a quite different principle.” Bright ideas enliven the senses and provoke more or less the same sensation of pleasure as “a moderate passion.” But doubt causes “a variation of thought,” transporting us suddenly from one idea to another. This, Hume concluded, “must of consequence be the occasion of pain.” Perhaps unwittingly echoing the previously quoted passage of Ecclesiasticus, Hume insisted that not every fact elicits our curiosity, but occasionally one will become sufficiently important, “if the idea strikes on us with such force, and concerns us so nearly, as to give us an uneasiness in its instability and inconstancy.” Aquinas, whose concept of causality raised serious objections in Hume regarding its cogency, had made the same distinction when he had said that “studiousness is directly, not about knowledge itself, but about the desire and study in the pursuit of knowledge.”27
This keenness to know the truth, this “love of truth” as Hume calls it, has in fact the same double nature that we saw defined in curiosity itself. “Truth,” Hume wrote, “is of two kinds, consisting either in the discovery of the proportions of ideas, consider’d as such, or in the conformity of our ideas of objects to their real existence. ’Tis certain, that the former species of truth, is not desir’d merely as truth, and that ’tis not the justness of our conclusions, which alone gives us pleasure.” Pursuit alone of the truth is, for Hume, not enough. “But beside the action of the mind, which is the principal foundation of the pleasure, there is likewise requir’d a degree of success in the attainment of the end, or the discovery of that truth we examine.”28
Barely ten years after Hume’s Treatise, Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert began in France the publication of their Encyclopédie. Here, Hume’s definition of curiosity, explained in terms of its outcome, was cleverly reversed: the sources of the impulse, rather than its goals, were explained as “a desire to clarify, to extend one’s understanding” and “not particular to the soul itself, belonging to it from its start, independent of sense, as some persons have imagined.” The author of the article, the chevalier de Jaucourt, approvingly referred in it to “certain judicious philosophers” who have defined curiosity as “an affection of the soul brought on by sensations or perceptions of objects that we know but imperfectly.” That is to say, for the encyclopédistes, curiosity is born from the awareness of our own ignorance and prompts us to acquire, so far as possible, “a more exact and fuller knowledge of the object it represents”: something like seeing the outside of a watch and wanting to know what makes it tick.29 “How?” is in this case a form of asking “Why?”
The encyclopédistes translated what for Dante were questions of causality, dependent on divine wisdom, into questions of functionality, dependent on human experience. Hume’s proposed examination of the “discovery of truth” meant, for someone like Jaucourt, understanding how things worked in practical, even mechanical terms. Dante was interested in the impulse of curiosity itself, the process of questioning that led us to an affirmation of our identity as human beings, necessarily drawn to the Supreme Good. Stemming from an awareness of our ignorance and tending towards the (wishful) reward of knowledge, curiosity in all its forms is depicted in the Commedia as the means of advancing from what we don’t know to what we don’t yet know, through a tangle of philosophical, social, physiological, and ethical obstacles, which the pilgrim has to surmount by willingly making the right choices.
One particular example in the Commedia richly illustrates, I believe, the complexity of this multifaceted curiosity. As Dante, led by Virgil, is about to leave the ninth ditch of the eighth circle of Hell, where the sowers of discord are punished, an unexplained curiosity draws his gaze back to the obscene spectacle of the sinners who, because of the rifts they caused during their lifetime, are now themselves slashed, beheaded, or cloven. The last spirit who speaks there to Dante is the poet Bertran de Born, holding up by the hair his severed head “like a lantern.”
Because I parted persons who were united
I carry, alas, my own brain parted
From its source which is this trunk of mine.30
At the sight, Dante weeps, but Virgil reproaches him severely, telling him that he has not grieved as they passed through other ditches of the eighth circle, and nothing warrants his increased attention here. Dante then, almost for the first time, challenges his spirit guide and says to him that had Virgil paid more attention to the cause of his curiosity, he might have allowed Dante to stay longer, because there among the crowd of sinners he thinks he has seen one of his kinsman, Geri del Bello, murdered by a member of another Florentine family and never avenged. This is why, Dante adds, he supposes that Geri turned away without saying a word to him. God’s justice must not be questioned, and private revenge is contrary to the Christian doctrine of forgiveness. With this, Dante intends to justify his curiosity.
So where do Dante’s tears come from? From pity for the tortured soul of Bertran or from shame at having been given a cold shoulder by Geri? Has his curiosity been prompted by the arrogance of assuming to know better than God himself what is just, by a base passion deviant of his quest for the good, by sympathy for his own unavenged blood, by nothing more than wounded pride? Boccaccio, whose intuition of the sense behind the story is often very keen, noted that the compassion Dante feels at times during the journey is not so much for the souls whose woes he hears but for himself.31 Dante does not provide the answer.
But earlier on he had addressed the reader:
Reader, if God allows you to profit
From your reading, now think for yourself
How I could keep my face dry.32
Virgil does not respond to Dante’s challenge but leads him on to the edge of the next chasm, the last before the core of Hell, where falsifiers are punished with an affliction similar to dropsy: fluid accumulates in their cavities and tissues, and they suffer from a burning thirst. The body of one of the sinners, the coin forger Master Adam, is “shaped like a lute,” in a grotesque parody of Christ’s crucifixion, which, in medieval iconography, was compared to a stringed instrument.33 Another sinner, burning with fever, is the Greek Sinon, who in the second book of the Aeneid, allows himself to be captured by the Trojans and then persuades them to take in the Trojan Horse. Sinon, perhaps taking offense at being named, hits Master Adam in his swollen belly, and the two begin a quarrel to which Dante attends enraptured. It is then that Virgil, as if he had been waiting for an opportunity for summing up his reproof, chides him angrily:
Just keep looking
A little longer and it is with you that I will quarrel!
Dante is so overwhelmed with shame that Virgil excuses him and concludes: “the desire to listen to such things is a vulgar desire.”34 That is to say, fruitless. Not all curiosity leads us on.
And yet . . .
“Nature gave us an innate curiosity and, aware of its own art and beauty, created us in order to be the audience of the wonderful spectacle of the world; because it would have toiled in vain, if things so great, so brilliant, so delicately traced, so splendid and variously beautiful, were displayed to an empty house,” wrote Seneca in praise of curiosity.35
The great quest which begins in the middle of the journey of our life and ends with the vision of a truth that cannot be put into words is fraught with endless distractions, side paths, recollections, intellectual and material obstacles, and dangerous errors, as well as with errors that, for all their appearance of falsity, are true. Concentration or distraction, asking in order to know why or in order to know how, questioning within the limits of what a society considers permissible or seeking answers outside those limits: these dichotomies, always latent in the phenomenon of curiosity, simultaneously hamper and drive forward every one of our quests. What persists, however, even when we surrender to insurmountable obstacles, and even when we fail in spite of enduring courage and best intentions, is the impulse to seek, as Dante tells us (and Hume intuited). Is this perhaps why, of all the possible modes offered to us by our language, the natural one is the interrogative?
