Tra il ,Convivio‘ e la ,Commedia‘: Dante e il „forte dubitare“ intorno al desiderio naturale di conoscere le sostanze separate

The transition between the ‘Convivio’ and the ‘Commedia’ represents the shift from a purely philosophical project to a different one. Dante’s Epistula to Cangrande identifies this new project with the “status animarum post mortem simpliciter sumptus.” To state that this shift is from philosophy to theology is to oversimplify things. Yet it is beyond doubt that when Dante interrupts the first project, he starts with a new one consisting of the attempt to redefine the boundaries between philosophy and theology and their respective tasks. The present study tackles this shift from the point of view of Dante’s understanding of the natural desire to know God and the separate substances – a desire which Dante denies in the  ‘Convivio’ and accepts in the ‘Commedia’ – and its background in late thirteenth–century and early fourteenth–century Scholastic debates. Particular attention is given to the different ways Henry of Ghent and Godfrey of Fontaines interpret Averroe's argument (In Metaph. II, 1, comm. 1) according to which, if our intellect were not able to grasp the knowledge of separate substances, it would have been formed for a goal which it could never grasp by nature. The context of Henry's and Godfrey's divergent interpretations, however, does not concern the relation between philosophy and theology, but rather between two different ways of understanding theology and above all the possibility of acquiring a scientific knowledge of divine things (a possibility conceded by Henry and denied by Godfrey). Philosophy enters this debate either in a negative role – in that, for Henry, it errs through excess (Averroes) or through defect (the other philosophers) – or only incidentally – in that, for Godfrey, its scientific status is left untouched, whereas it is the status of theology which is undermined.