The organisation of part four

In the second and third parts of this book, we have made ourselves familiar with the nature and activity of the sensitive and the mental powers of the human psyche – as these were known to Dante – treating the two sets of powers as far as possible in isolation from each other. In this fourth and final part, we shall be studying some of the most significant representations of human behaviour in the Comedy; and we shall therefore be concerned with the interaction of all the powers.

In the Comedy, as in life, no single affection of the soul is dominant for long at a time, because the passions ‘are enwrapped one within another’, as Francis Bacon so charmingly put it, and ‘do fight and encounter with another’. Characters in the poem rarely give vent to a passion without some element of rational calculation as to its likely effect on the interlocutor or reader. Conversely, the process of deliberation is sometimes shown to be perverted by a prior commitment on the part of the sense-appetites. It is made clear, further, that the passions may be stimulated not only by the present perception of other bodies in the immediate vicinity, but also by the faculties of memory and imagination, or by processes of thought. We are shown that the words of another intelligent being - human, angelic or demonic – may excite feelings such as pity, love, hope, desire and fear. Indeed, it is essential to Dante's concept of rhetoric and poetry that words may convey not only information, but also an ‘affective charge’ which is capable of arousing the passions and thereby leading to action.