From Free Will To Love: The Augustine Tradition And Its Transformation In Divine Comedy

In Divine Comedy,Augustine only appears at the end of Paradise,and is just a passing writing.But this does not mean that Dante is not interested in Augustine,nor does it indicate that there is no connection between them.According to Divine Comedy,Confession and City of God,this article mainly explores Dante how to inherit and transform ideological tradition of Augustine from free will and love.The main content of this article includes the following chapters:In the first chapter,based on the research status at home and abroad,we preliminarily clarify the possibility,necessity and importance of studying correlative ideas of Dante and Augustine.This research not only helps understand Divine Comedy thoroughly in the background of a wealthier Christian history,but also helps to highlight the basic evolutionary clues of the literary ideas,religious thoughts and even political thoughts of the end of the Middle Ages from the beginning(Augustine)to the end(Dante)in Europe.The second chapter analyzes the relationship between Divine Comedy and Augustine's concept of free will.Divine Comedy particularly lays emphasis on that people do good deeds and eliminate evil things in line with free will and continues to follow God,which inherits Augustine's early thought of affirming free will;Augustine gradually denies the possibility of free will in his later years because of the strict original sin concept.Correspondingly,in Divine Comedy,Dante discusses the weakness of free will and presents that right love can help overcome the weakness of free will,thus correcting Augustine's deny to free will in his later years.In the third chapter,love originates will and represents the tendency of the soul.According to the choice of free will,Augustine divides love into natural love towards nature and love toward God.The thesis introduces these two kinds of love in Confession and Divine Comedy respectively,and discusses the author's attitude towards love hidden in these two works.According to C.S.Lewis' division of human love in Four Loves,natural love includes love,kindness and fraternity.The specific manifestations can be shown in following: Augustine being trapped in love in his early life,and his mother Monica's dual kindness of ethics and beliefs.The accident “stealing the pear” reflects his negative attitude towards friendship,which is called the harmful friendship by him.Love and kindness of faith between Dante and Beatrice sublime.He believes that fraternity is to be shared but not deprived.The fourth part,through comparing Augustine and Dante's two times weeping,analyzes their different attitudes towards two kinds of love.Dante learnt from Augustine,and makes weeping as a point of penetration to discuss the literary methods of love in depth.Being similar to Augustine,Dante also focused on the relationship between self and homosexual close friends and the opposite sex.In terms of ego and homosexual close friends,Augustine's cry for the death of a close friend named Nebb Leigh tiwusi in Confession was mainly inherited by Dante's cry for the departure of Virgil in Divine Comedy.The two weepings are both the result and expression of the love for nature,but Augustine's love for nature is overcome in weeping;while Dante's love for nature is still preserved and praised with certain correction.In terms of the love between ego and the opposite sex,Dante's cry when facing Beatrice can correspond to Augustine's cry when facing the death of his mother Monica,and the two weepings both developed from no tears at first to bursting into crying.It is obvious that Augustine and Dante both recognize the love of nature were deep and hard to cut off.More importantly,the weepings here together constitute an important ceremony for Augustine and Dante to purify their own love for nature and to love God.Since then,Augustine has devoted himself to the Christian faith,and Dante has been taken to the Kingdom of Heaven.In fifth part,the paper explains that only the love for God is the real happiness.With this prerequisite,Augustine denies the realistic significance of the earthly happiness brought by natural love,while Dante believes that the natural love could be amended;the modified natural love can enable people to obtain happiness,which is recognized by God,and it can also make the earthly happiness reasonable.All the above can be seen in Augustine's Two Cities Theories and Dante's ideality of world empire.In other words,the transformation of the Two Cities Theories into the World Empire is a practical example of Dante's belief that natural love can be revised.To summarize,Dante inherited the literary tradition of writing beliefs at the individual level from Augustine,and also obtained Augustine's distinction between the City of God and the Earthly City from the grand perspective of cosmology,from which he not only made clear cosmological division of Hell,Purgatory and Paradise,but also combined the good wishes and thoughts of the World Empire in the Divine Comedy.With the help of free will and love,the divisions at the individual level and the cosmological level are perfectly connected,and it is also at these crucial levels that Dante has both inherited and transformed Augustine's ideas.