Dante's Idea of Friendship: The Transformation of a Classical Concept by Filippa Modesto
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: Dante's Idea of Friendship: The Transformation of a Classical Concept by Filippa Modesto Michael Calabrese Filippa Modesto, Dante's Idea of Friendship: The Transformation of a Classical Concept ( Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2015), 255 pp. In this warm and welcoming book, without jargon and without any particular theoretical burden, Filippa Modesto traces the history of friendship from Classical, Early Christian, and medieval times in order to understand its importance in Dante's Convivio, Vita Nuova, and Commedia. The book is well focused, clearly printed, and handsomely produced (though it is glued and not sewn). Modesto writes in a very humane style, as if enjoying her subject and the intimacy inherent in it, and speaks to readers in a friendly and engaging mode. Modesto seeks to remedy what she sees as a dearth of scholarship on friendship in Dante, despite the obvious importance of personal relationships in his works, and she makes thorough use of David Kastan's Friendship in the Classical World, "the only history of friendship in classical antiquity written in English" to help her lay a foundation for Dante (6). In Modesto's bold reading "the Commedia is itself a gift of friendship" (9), because the pilgrim relies on others for his very survival throughout his universal journey. As she explains: [m]an can find a justification of his own existence only in the existence of other men," and Dante told Can Grande that one intention of the Commedia is to lead others "to a state of happiness" (9). Accordingly, Modesto interprets Dante's advancements in the Commedia in terms of evolving friendships: "the pilgrim's rite of passage from a lower to a higher and more enlightened self parallels a passage from the finite and imperfect friendship (human friendship with Virgil) to a more complete and [End Page 239] perfect friendship (spiritual with Beatrice)," since "[f]riendship reveals a loving bond among those united in one purpose… love of God" (19). By contextualizing Dante's journey within the history of ideas about friendship, Modesto allows for a new appreciation of the emotional, intellectual, and political relationships that animate the Commedia and other works. The themes are also, as students say, very "relatable" to modern readers, something that can enhance classroom discussion of Dante, since everyone has some theory and feeling about what friendship is. The book is always working, much as the Commedia itself, to unite us with Beatrice, Dante's most radical and important depiction of friendship, for the notion, argues Modesto, that "an individual should reach ultimate happiness by means of his union with a woman will be shown to be revolutionary, as inconceivable for the poets and thinkers of antiquity as for Dante's contemporaries" (10). One feels a certain warmth whenever Beatrice appears—in poetry and criticism. The book is not "a comprehensive study of the history of friendship" (3) but a tailored version designed to focus on Dante's inheritances and sources. The introduction surveys the contents of the book and summarizes its argument, which promises to examine the Classical ideas of friendship and their adaptation by Christian culture and their particular manifestation in Dante, for whom "friendship is no longer the union conceived of by the ancients and grounded in human reason and virtue, nor is it the Christian union grounded in divine love. Friendship as understood by Dante is both of these and more: it is a union grounded in both human virtue and divine grace, philosophy and theology, particular and universal truth" (10). After this overview, Chapter 2 engages with "Classical Friendship" focusing on Aristotle and Dante's Convivio. The background material unfolds clearly, beginning with an overview of the expanding availability of Aristotelian texts and noting how Dante's "understanding of Aristotle was influenced by the various sources and interpretations from Albertus, Aquinas, and Averroes" (21). "In embracing Aristotelian philosophy," with its focus on reason, Modesto observes, "Dante embraces earthy happiness as a preparation for and a prefiguration of celestial happiness" (24). The extended summary of friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics reads a bit workmanlike, if not informative, as Modesto traces the Classical doctrines that inform Dante's nonetheless innovative engagement. Treatment of the...
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".