Passion and Passionless Love in Dante: From Epistola 3 to the Commedia

Regarding the seat of the passions, especially love, Dante alternates between Aristotelian physics and Augustinian anthropology. As a material phenomenon of Aristotelian natural science, Dante defines love as un accidente in sostanza, subject to generation and corruption and accompanied by bodily alteration. As an Augustinian spiritual reality, love produces the joy, satisfaction, and union of the will with its highest Good, with God. This question—whether love is seated in l’appetito sensitive or l’appetito razionale—in the movement of sensuous desire or the motion of the will toward God—touches the heart of the soul/body problem in Dante and informs his recourse to Aristotle and Augustine as authorities. In Dante’s own time, as he attests in Epistola 3, the nature of the passions was “widely debated” (omnium dubitate). Undiscussed by previous scholarship, the Florentine quodlibeta and Sentences Commentary of Petrus Trabibus (who held the lectureship at the studium at Santa Croce during the years of Dante’s intellectual formation) illustrate the contemporaneity of the debate on the passions and indicate how Aristotle and Augustine were evoked as authorities in Dante’s milieu.