Abstract

The relation between the moral account of the capital vices and the philosophical analysis of the passions of the human soul undergoes an important turning point from the 11th century onwards during the recovery of medical knowledge in the medieval West. In this wave of fervour towards a physiological approach in the investigation of the nature of man, the vice of acedia - as described by the Christian moral tradition - and the melancholic temperament - the result of a millenary reworking and technicalisation of medical knowledge - found a point of contact in the passion of sadness. If authors such as Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, following the Christian heritage, characterised acedia as an escalation of the passion of sadness, the medical tradition from Hippocrates and Galen to Avicenna and Constantine recognised sadness as one of the most distinctive manifestations of the melancholic temperament. The aim of this study is to demonstrate, by retracing some aspects of this interweaving of traditions after the year 1000, how Dante’s description of the sinners of acedia in Canto VII of the Inferno takes up the legacy of this hybridisation between the Christian description of acedia and the physiological description of melancholy.