The Decameron: On the Possibility of Love During Self-Isolation

Abstract

This article in the genre of the consolation of philosophy deals with the COVID-19 pandemic as a new superphenomenal experience marked by an extremely intense experience of one’s vulnerability and finiteness as well as by problematization of our previous ideas of a human being. The author offers a way to understand our situation and find solace by starting with the performative paradox of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, which contains one of the most famous descriptions of the plague and remains one of the most cheerful and life-enhancing texts in European literature. The article shows that, contrary to the common belief, the consolation offered in the The Decameron is not reduced merely to telling stories that entertain and distract us from tales of grief. Nor is it reduced to the invention of social practices for building a new and more perfect society, although all this, as the author shows, is undoubtedly there in the text and has a beneficial effect. The Decameron’s consolation ultimately consists of the assumption that man himself has metaphysical depths in his incomprehensible (although it is fully embodied in the Decameron) and impossible potential for lovingly accepting the reality of the world as a blessed Gift, to think of eventfulness itself as a gift. The article argues that the anthropology on which Boccaccio’s utopia is based is that of the feast or symposium understood in the spirit of the Platonic-Christian tradition. The author hopes that Boccaccio’s anthropological optics, designed to overcome the pessimism of reason and affirm the optimism of will and faith, can help the reader find meaning and joy in the midst of the suffering and death which are the irrevocable framework of life. This consolation can be heard in the cheerful voice of Boccaccio, which comes to us from faraway plague-ridden Florence and offers us his prescription for healing the “wounds of being.”