George Corbett's Dante's Christian Ethics is a bold reappraisal of the intertextual foundations of the classifications and hermeneutics of vices and virtues in the second canticle of the Commedia. Continuing the scholarship of Carlo Delcorno and Siegfried Wenzel, which highlights the affinity of Dante's moral organization of purgatory with the Summa de vitiis et virtutibus by William Peraldus (ca. 1200–71), Corbett enumerates how Dante's poem more closely echoes that “older, more conservative tradition” of conceptualizing vices than Thomas Aquinas's apparently more innovative Summa Theologicae (101). The volume is arranged in nine parts: a brief introduction, seven main chapters grouped into three sections, and a conclusion. Corbett's tone is straightforward and economical, presenting his topics, arguments, and primary and supporting texts with invigorating efficiency throughout. While the primary focus of the volume is specifically Purgatorio, the author provides an overview of the moral structure of the entire poem, starting with a summary of the organization of vices in Inferno, the correlation of these with their complementary virtues in Purgatorio, and then, finally, a review of the virtues represented in Paradiso.
Corbett's stated objective is to help orient the reader of the Commedia by providing a bird's-eye view of the moral structure of Dante's itinerary in its entirety before focusing on Purgatorio proper, recognizing that the poet intentionally delays providing such a context in the interest of challenging readers “to find our own ethical bearings” (18). Corbett is able to accomplish this task with an engagingly glossed intertextual discussion of the Aristotelian model of the typology of each section of hell delivered by Dante's guide in Inferno 11, as well as a comparative look at his disquisition on the organization of purgatory at the center of the second canticle.
In the volume's central chapter 4, Corbett enumerates the differences between how Aquinas and Peraldus conceptualize vices. This distinction then serves to demonstrate the Commedia's closer proximity to Peraldus in the moral organization of the seven terraces of Purgatorio. Corbett's discussion reveals an underlying presumption that the success of Dante's poetic treatment is, in his estimation, contingent upon the poem's fidelity to this source text: for while Aquinas uses Aristotelian anthropology “to treat vices and virtues together in terms of their shared good objects, either to be desired or avoided,” Virgil has the merit of describing the moral order of purgatory in line with the way Peraldus classifies the vices “according to disordered love by excess or deficiency . . . or to love of an evil” (101). Corbett subsequently proceeds to correlate the four cardinal and three theological virtues in Peraldus's De virtutibus to Dante's Paradiso.
Among some of the other notable discussions in the volume, Corbett engages the much-vexed question of the significance of the metonymically cited “Sodomma” (Inf. 11.50, Purg. 26.40, 79) through the lens of Peraldus's various classifications of the peccatum contra naturam (chapter 1). Even more engaging, perhaps, is Corbett's argument that Dante's principal sin at the beginning of his journey is not, as conventionally cited, avarice or concupiscence, but rather sloth, acedia (chapter 6).
The natural consequence of Corbett's historico-biographical approach to the poem is to narrow the poetic breath of the text by minimizing its explicitly universalizing program. There are a few instances where Corbett is quick to note Dante's poetically inventive divergence from his source material or conventional approaches, but he does not interrogate the hermeneutic function of the poet's fiction, preferring to maintain the historico-biographical specificity of his reading. By ignoring the inclusive “nostra” of the poem's first line, to say nothing of the “nostra” of the poet's final vision in “nostra effige,” the specificity of the historico-biographical lens limits the breath of an intrinsically poetic text to the particular histories of individuals in specific places and times, rather than offering a mirror to the human experience writ large.
Corbett has identified a significant deficiency in the commentary tradition and makes efficiently economical use of relevant source materials to offer a compact, stimulating gloss of the moral rationale for Dante's Purgatorio. Readers and researchers interested in an intertextually empirical hermeneutic instrument to supplement their exploration of the Commedia, be they students or seasoned scholars, will find this volume invaluable.
