Commentary Par IV 1-3

Bruno Nardi (Nard.1944.1), pp. 301-3, has argued that the widespread notion that these lines are a recasting of Buridan's famed paradox (starving donkey between two equally distant piles of straw) should be rejected.  As Nardi and others have shown, the more certain source lies in the Summa theologica (I-II, q. 13, a. 6): 'If any two things are absolutely equal, a man is not moved to the one more than to the other; just as a starving man, if he has food equally appetizing in different directions and at an equal distance, is not moved to the one more than to the other' (English text as found in Carroll's commentary (DDP Carroll.Par.IV.1-9).  Further, and as Fallani (DDP Fallani.Par.IV.1-3 ) points out, Buridan's ass was posterior to Dante's Paradiso.  A rare early commentator who finds a source for this material locates it in Thomas's usual source, Aristotle (De caelo II.xiii.28); see Francesco da Buti (DDP Buti.Par.IV.1-12).  Beginning with Lombardi (DDP Lombardi.Par.IV.1-3), and continuing into the twentieth century, one finds insistence on Thomas as source, neglecting Aristotle.  Tommaseo (DDP Tommaseo.Par.IV.1-3); Andreoli (DDP Andreoli.Par.IV.1-3); Scartazzini (DDP Scartazzini.Par.IV.1-2); Poletto (DDP Poletto.Par.IV.1-6); and Carroll (DDP Carroll.Par.IV.1-9), among others.  The first commentators to put the two together, as is in our day fairly commonplace (e.g., Mattalia [DDP Mattalia.Par.IV.1-2], Singleton [DDP Singleton.Par.IV.1-3]), were apparently Tozer in 1901 (DDP Tozer.Par.IV.1-3) and Torraca in 1905 (DDP Torraca.Par.IV.1-3).  However, if one reads further in Thomas's passage, it is striking, as Sapegno points out (DDP Sapegno.Par.IV.1-9), citing Nardi (Nard.1944.1), pp. 297-303, that Thomas has proposed this paradox only to refute its relationship to practical reality -- as might any sensible person.  Zeno's arrow and Buridan's ass (and Thomas's starving man, as Thomas himself insists) are the sort of logically developed paradoxes that 'philosophers' enjoy creating and that poets generally enjoy mocking.  Here Thomas, Dante's 'philosopher,' rejects philosophical nonsense while Dante, our poet, seems to sponsor it.