Analysis of Canto XVI of Dante’s Purgatorio. We are HALFWAY THROUGH !!
Books mentioned:
"Spiritual Direction from Dante", Paul Pearson of the Oratory, [ Ссылка ]=
"Convivio", Dante Alighieri [ Ссылка ]
TEXT FROM DANTE's "IL CONVIVIO", Book 4, Chapter 12:
"And so I say that human desire is increased not only by the acquisition of knowledge and of riches, but by every kind of acquisition, although in different ways. The reason is this: that the supreme desire of each thing, and the one that is first given to it by nature, is to return to its first cause. Now since God is the cause of our souls and has created them like himself (as it is written, “Let us make man in our own image and likeness”), the soul desires above all else to return to him.(52)
And just as the pilgrim who walks along a road on which he has never traveled before believes that every house which he sees from afar is an inn, and finding it not so fixes his expectations on the next one, and so moves from house to house until he comes to the inn, so our soul, as soon as it enters upon this new and never travelled road of life, fixes its eyes on the goal of its supreme good, and therefore believes that everything it sees which seems to possess some good in it is that supreme good.(53)
Because its knowledge is at first imperfect through lack of experience and instruction, small goods appear great, and so from these it conceives its first desires. Thus we see little children setting their desire first of all on an apple, and then growing older desiring to possess a little bird, and then still later desiring to possess fine clothes, then a horse, and then a woman, and then modest wealth, then greater riches, and then still more.
This comes about because in none of these things does one find what one is searching after, but hopes to find it further on. Consequently it may be seen that one object of desire stands in front of another before the eyes of our soul very much in the manner of a pyramid, where the smallest object at first covers them all and is, as it were, the apex of the ultimate object of desire, namely God, who is, as it were, the base of all the rest.
And so the further we move from the apex toward the base, the greater the objects of desire appear; this is the reason why acquisition causes human desires to become progressively inflated."
English translation used for this video:
Allen Mandelbaum, Purgatorio, Second Book of the Divine Comedy (California Dante) [ Ссылка ]
