Who Could Think Beyond Nature? Allegories of Intellection

Part Four (“Who Could Think Beyond Nature? Allegories of Intellection”) amounts to a dossier of evidence challenging any notion that there is a discontinuity between Donna me prega and Cavalcanti’s love poems, a discrepancy—whether of philosophical themes or intensity of philosophical commitment—between the famous treatise-poem, on the one hand, and Guido’s enigmatic, bewitching, and bewildering lyric gems, on the other. We will see that Cavalcanti’s scientific manifesto and his beautiful love poetry are part of a single coherent project of thinking; insofar as there are differences, these involve the fact that the same set of notions is approached from different angles and the fact that Donna me prega’s meaning is virtually entirely literal, while in the love poems Guido uses figural language that points to latent philosophical meaning. These poems, haunted by the prospect of the lover’s death, give poetic expression to the Averroist distinction between human thinking, which is an operation of the rational animal’s imaginative power of soul, and the eternal locus of metaphysical truth, which remains always above and beyond the rational animal’s reach.