Know, the freedom of Ulysses | Mauro Bonazzi’s book

It is proved by the very recent essay by Mauro Bonazzi, The shipwreck of Ulysses. A journey into our crisis (Einaudi). As you know, Ulysses narrating his “last journey”ended tragically even though aroused by his very high desire for knowledge, is the monumental and admired protagonist of the XXVI canto of theHell dantesque. His figure is: you were not “made to live like brutes”, the very end of existence is “knowledge”. The fact that a nod, certainly not marginal, to the “flight”, i.e. to the audacious journey of Ulysses, also appears in a very relevant point of the Paradise (XXVII, 82-83) means the centrality of the story of Ulysses, reinvented by Dante, in the structural and conceptual economy of the poem. Bonazzi arrives at an effective synthesis: the two “journeys” – that of Ulysses who, despite the noble premises, leads to defeat, and that of Dante, who arrives at the acknowledgment that knowledge will have to be subordinated to faith (this is the lesson of Virgil already in the II del Purgatory
and then of Beatrice) – they are two parallel journeys, with opposite outcomes. In turn, this presentation of one of the main threads of the poem serves Bonazzi as a problematic metaphor for today. It is not an invitation to fideistic retreats, it is, rather a question that invests the effectiveness, or only partial effectiveness, or even impotence of “knowledge” in the face of the civil and political problems of our time (but perhaps it should be said: of all times). The sci-fi scene with which the book ends – the gigantic computer in which all human knowledge is collected and which, when interrogated, defines itself as “god” while the scientist who would like to turn it off is electrocuted – constitutes an aporetic conclusion (an intentional non-conclusion ) which rightly presents the reader with the equal dignity of the two journeys: that of Ulysses and that of Dante.

But this equal dignity is within the poem itself: with all due respect to those who limit themselves, unlike Bonazzi, to the surface, and therefore are satisfied with the banal conclusion according to which Dante “condemns” Ulysses. If everything were that simple, the poem would be little more than a super catechism for adults. But Dante is not just any Escrivá. Dante performs the brilliant act of having Thomas Aquinas pronounce the fulminant praise of Sigieri di Brabant (“eternal light”!) and his Parisian teaching (Paradise X, 136) centered on Aristotle. On the Aristotle ofNicomachean ethics: ethically unsurpassed book because it states and argues – as Bonazzi explains well – that happiness is achieved here on earth through “knowledge” and by indulging the drive towards it. Concept that is also included in the first line of the Metaphysics of Aristotle: «All human beings by nature desire to know». Where that «by nature» is the conceptual antecedent of the «facts to follow virtue and knowledge» of the «little oration» of Dante’s Ulysses. Dante is that giant we still talk to (and we will continue) because he sculpts, in the Paradise, the greatness of Sigieri and pays an imperishable tribute to the desire to know Ulysses (and all the Ulysses in the history of thought) even when he lets himself be admonished by a sorrowful master like Virgil and a demanding teacher like Beatrice. But he does not hesitate to define Aristotle – that is, the anti-creationist thinker par excellence and advocate of the eternity of the world and perhaps also of the mortality of the soul, the profound inspirer of Sigieri – as “master of those who know”.

Did you look for a summary? Certainly. But perhaps not in the contemplative satisfaction of the superiority of faith, but rather in a mature and arduous conception of “freedom”. Indeed, about him Virgil explains to Cato (Purgatory I, 71) that “freedom is seeking”; of Beatrice, Dante himself would later say that he had «drawn him to freedom»; and Virgil when he takes his leave of Dante in the XXVII del Purgatory he will say with just pride that he – in the course of the journey undertaken starting from the remote “dark forest” – taught him the intrinsic nature of two seemingly antithetical concepts of “freedom” and “necessity”: «free, straight, healthy is your will» and therefore – he continues – «io te sopra te corono e mitrio» (verses 140-142). It is freedom which, understood in this way, brings knowledge and faith together.

With great competence Bonazzi describes the struggle of Catholic orthodoxy, especially of the faculty of theology in Paris, against the irruption of Aristotle in the second half of the XIII century: finally accessible in Latin. And the reaction was to proclaim, in the name of Augustinian extremism (Sermon 36), that the will to knowledge, downgraded to curiosity (remote model the Pauline burning of books in Ephesus), is “scandalous”. Christianity had already been shaken by a similar opposition when the patriarch Photius, opposed by the Pope of Rome, was condemned by the VIII Ecumenical Council (869/870) with the accusation, among other things, of having wanted to impart, to a circle of adepts, the knowledge of profane science “which instead was made foolish by God” (IX canon of that Council).

In the following century it fell to Sylvester II, the “pope of the year 1000”, to be suspected of magic for the same reasons for which Photius had been condemned and for which, perhaps – as Bonazzi well points out – Sigieri died a “suspicious” death . It is from this long history of conflict that the Comedy
. It will certainly not be a coincidence that one of the two letters from the Roman Pope Clement was suspected of heresy precisely because it claimed there was land (and life) beyond the Pillars of Hercules.