Canto XXV. As the poets proceed up the pass to the final cornice Dante asks Virgil how it is that the souls of the gluttonous can appear emaciated when they are not embodied. Virgil asks Statius to explain, and much of the canto is Statius’s discourse, which sets out an Aristotelian account of the human soul. The poets then reach the cornice of the lustful, where the souls run through fire, reciting classical and scriptural examples of chastity.

Statius gives Dante an extended account of the origin of the human soul. This is based on Aristotle’s account of substances (hylomorphism), as Christianized in the writing of St Thomas. It is important to remember that, in Aristotle’s account of form and matter, these are not components of a substance (as gin and tonic are components of a drink), but rather are the substance considered under different aspects: what constrains the substance to be this kind of thing, rather than another (form), and what makes a particular substance this instance, subject to change, rather than another instance of the same thing (matter). The human soul is pure form. It gives the individual human capacity to grow (the vegetative soul) and to respond actively to its environment (the animal soul), but also gives it the rational attributes: memory, mind and will. None of these can be adequately explained in material terms (although they require our bodies for their functioning). The human being is a unity of soul and body, again not as two components but rather a whole considered under two aspects. The souls that Dante meets are ‘shades’, less than fully human in that they are not embodied humanly, but only in a perturbation of the light. ‘My soul is not me’ in St Thomas’s slogan. At the same time, I cannot fully account for the capacity of the rational soul in material terms. This is not an argument for a ‘ghost in the machine.’ Rather it is the recognition that, for example, my sense of the meaning of a word cannot depend on some internal, privately-owned, sensation, if it is to be a shared meaning with others.

Our devotional reading of Dante need not become hung-up on the Aristotelian and medieval account of substance, or its details of embryology. What matters is the recognition that to be human is to be a particular kind of creature with special capacities and potentials, which can be exercised for good or ill. It is the movement of the will, directed by the mind, which develops vice and virtue in the whole person; and we, having come from God our creator, can impede or co-operate with His eternal will which draws us back to Himself.


Statius speaking to Dante

http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/dept/scwmss/wmss/medieval/jpegs/holkham/misc/48/1000/04800484.jpg