Dialogue and Doctrine in Leone Ebreo's Dialoghi d'amore

Abstract

ON ITS LITERARY LEVEL Leone Ebreo's Dialoghi d'amore (Rome, 1535) is presented as a long courtship between an ardent lover, Filone, and his reluctant mistress, Sofia. At one point the clever lady summarizes their respective attitudes by the casual observation that, while she is more interested in the theory of love, Filone is more bent on the practice thereof.1 This wry comment is a capsule of the entire work, for it explains not only the constant narrative shift between amorous language and philosophical approfondissement, but also the basic paradox that pervades the entire Dialoghi, that of theoria versus action, which appears as the tension between Filone's amorous involvement and Sofia's aloofness but especially as the opposition between the via contemplativa and the via activa!1 In this paper we shall suggest that Leone Ebreo's work may be defined as a dialogue between two philosophies of life or “kinds of people,” the contemplative man and the active man, and that these two human types are represented by the two interlocutors, Filone and Sofia. This view will require revision of the usual critical approaches to the Dialoghi. For one thing, if we take Leone's title seriously and consider the work as a true dialogue, as a confrontation of two substantially divergent points of view, then it is difficult to describe it as essentially a monologue in which only one of the characters—Filone—expresses the author's ideas. Moreover, in addition to the purely philosophical argument, we shall have to pay close attention both to the psychological nature of the characters and to the precise levels of their allegorization. In short, we shall no longer be able to neglect the work's literary nature.3 vient thin