In Canto XI of Dante's Inferno, Virgil carefully explains the layout of hell to his student, Dante. Towards the end of his speech, Virgil says that “Sodom and Cahors” “speak with passionate contempt for God” (XI, 50-51), and the divine will thus relegates them to the seventh circle. The sin of the Sodomites is clear to Dante, who asks no questions about it, sodomy being perhaps an obvious affront to God to which the Bible addresses directly. However, the sin of "Cahors", namely usury, is not clear to Dante. He asks Virgil to "untie" the "knot" in his mind, because there is no obvious reason why a usurer - a money lender essentially - deserves any punishment for a crime that does not involve necessarily dishonest and is certainly not violent. in nature. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay Regardless of the question itself, the very fact that Dante is comfortable enough to ask Virgil anything reveals a certain intimacy between the two characters. The student-teacher relationship does not need to be interactive. An interaction implies equality. Dante could very well have written a Virgil who speaks but does not listen, a bit like the Virgil who wrote the Aeneid; there is no dialogue when reading an epic poem. Dante's Virgil allows Dante to enter his intellectual circle, both by listening to Dante, as he does here, and by introducing Dante to other master poets, as he does in Canto IV. Virgil even says that “the student imitates his master”, which, as we will see, has a completely different meaning, but also refers to the relationship between this student and his master. Virgil responds to Dante's question: he is at first condescending. Beginning with “Philosophy, for him who understands…” Virgil is indeed mocking Dante, since Dante certainly knows classical literature (as evidenced by the Divine Comedy itself). Thus, Dante is on Virgil's level in one sense, and well below him in another, which is true in the grand scheme of the work: Dante only begins to understand the workings of the divine order through the Song XI, while Virgil borders on omniscience. throughout. Furthermore, Dante has not yet eclipsed Virgil as a poet, for at this point Hell has barely begun, while the Aeneid presents Virgil's vision of Hades from top to bottom. In Dante's Inferno in particular, the reason why usury is a mortal sin is very confusing, which is why Dante calls it a "knot". Unlike other sins, usury is not, at first glance, a terrible immorality. Virgil first addresses the issue philosophically, profoundly esoterically asserting that "nature follows...divine intellect and divine art." The idea “nature” is therefore composed of these two abstract elements. “Intellect”, coming first, must be at the root of “Art”, since intellect must precede production, as in the Platonic doctrine of the “essence” of a thing preceding existence of one thing. “Intellect” is potential; art is the result. Concretely, “intellect” must therefore be the primordial “matter” from which everything is made, and “art” must therefore be the process of making it into something tangible or usable. From this we can therefore infer that "intellect" is literally what God provides to enable us to live - the earth, the fruits, the animals - and "art", the process which allows us to sustain ourselves. needs using this material, work. This interpretation fits perfectly with the rest of the passage. Virgildevelops the idea of ​​nature as the process of moving from intellect to art by citing Aristotle's Physics, in which Aristotle apparently proves that "when possible, your art would follow nature." Our “art”, so to speak, is not very different from Divine Art, since God is the source of everything we do (as Saint Augustine said again and again). Our “art” is our method of self-sufficiency as determined by God, since God has given us the tools we need to use our method (“the intellect”). We therefore learn from God “just as a student imitates his teacher”. We are therefore “God’s students,” which is an apt analogy since self-sufficiency is actually a type of creation: planting and harvesting crops is the human version of creating the universe. Virgil goes on to say that our “art” or production “is almost the grandchild of God.” This analogy summarizes everything Virgil has said previously and foreshadows his later comments, because it works in several different ways. First, if Divine Intellect leads to Divine Art, and if our art is a derivative of Divine Art, then our art is indeed the “grandchild” of nature, since it is the offspring of 'Intellect and Art, which are, in some way, the offspring of nature itself. Second, we are all, in some sense, grandchildren of God, just as we are all sons or daughters of Adam. Finally, the idea that our "art" is "almost the grandchild of God" reveals the magnitude of all sin, for we can all more easily imagine a child being disrespectful to his grandfather than a man being disrespectful to the abstract “God”. Thus, we are more prepared for all the terrible punishments we will encounter in the songs to come. Additionally, the idea of ​​our art being “the grandchild of God” is clearly an allusion to the biblical concept that we are created in the “image of God,” as it says in Genesis. It is therefore entirely appropriate that Virgil makes this allusion, asking Dante to “remember” how Genesis “begins.” What Virgil asks us to focus on, however, is not how we were created, but what Adam had to do to "make [his] way" and therefore what "men" in general are supposed to do. do “to earn a living”. The Genesis story teaches that Adam must “eat of [the tree] all the days of [his] life…” and must “eat plants of the field.” (Genesis, 2.17). To be moral is therefore to obtain wealth (subsistence) through work, by transforming the “divine intellect” through “art” or human labor into life-giving food. Finally, the “knot” was “untied” for Dante. The usurer “prefers another way,” meaning that a money lender does not seek to support himself using “stuff” to “live.” A loan shark, by definition, uses money to make money. Thus he is cut off from both "Intellect" and "Art", or, as Virgil says, "he despises both nature in itself and art", because "his hope is elsewhere.” A banker, for example, charges a fee in exchange for lending money. Nowhere does he work to produce anything, unlike Adam who is a “producer” in the most basic sense of the term. Instead, he uses others as a means of subsistence: in Dante's pre-capitalist economic system, he is a parasite. This is fraud of the highest order because, at first glance, he appears to be doing nothing wrong. As we see in the punishment of moneylenders in Canto XVII, their “outward appearance” is completely normal. It is only on closer inspection that we realize that they are "decorated with knots.