Love and desire as natural forces

Love and desire as natural forces is a theme that unsettles the supposed boundaries between worldly life and religious retreat. Dioneo introduces Alibech’s story to show that love can make its power felt even in remote deserts and hermits’ cells: neither poverty nor devotion places human desire outside nature’s reach.

Desire Beyond the Desert

Dioneo presents the tale as an answer to the day’s preceding stories and as a demonstration that love is not confined to luxurious rooms or prosperous households. Its setting makes the point sharply. Alibech, a rich man’s daughter from Capsa in Barbary, is not Christian; after hearing Christians praise their faith, she asks how she might serve God with the least difficulty. Told that desert hermits serve God by withdrawing from worldly things, she leaves secretly, alone, for the Desert of Thebais. Her journey begins in an innocent, childlike impulse rather than a considered plan, but it carries her into a place where worldly desire will prove impossible to exclude.

The hermits she encounters first recognize the danger that her youth and beauty pose to their own constancy. One gives her food—roots, wild apples, and dates—and directs her onward to a supposedly better teacher. After receiving the same redirection from another holy man, she reaches Rustico, a young hermit who decides to test his resistance rather than send her away. The test quickly collapses: he abandons prayer and mortification, dwells on her beauty, and seeks a way to satisfy his desire without appearing debauched. The desert has removed Alibech from ordinary society, but it has not removed the body from human life.

Rustico turns religious language into an instrument of seduction. Having learned that Alibech has never known a man and is exceptionally simple, he describes the devil as God’s enemy and recasts intercourse as the service of putting the devil back into hell. His explanation does not extinguish desire; it disguises Rustico’s purpose in terms Alibech has come to trust. The episode’s comic conceit therefore carries a pointed contrast: the hermit’s religious vocabulary claims to master appetite even as appetite determines how he uses that vocabulary. Desire crosses the boundary of the cell, while the language meant to govern it becomes part of its operation.

The Green Geese and Nature’s Argument

The story of Alibech is followed by another desert-born encounter with desire. Filippo, a hermit who sometimes travels to Florence for help from his friends, eventually brings his eighteen-year-old son to the city. The young man has been raised in solitude with his father and has never seen the palaces, churches, and other sights of the city. As they walk, he asks about what he sees; when a company of well-dressed young women passes, Filippo warns him to look down and calls them green geese rather than naming them as women. The disguise fails at once. Though the young man has shown little interest in the other wonders of the city, he urgently asks his father to take one of these green geese back with them. Filippo’s attempt to protect him from carnal appetite instead makes visible how little isolation and instruction can govern it.

Dioneo uses this episode to widen the implication of Alibech’s tale. A youth formed in a hermit’s cell, far from worldly company, responds immediately to the sight of women; the impulse appears before he can understand his father’s warning or the category concealed by its comic name. The parallel does not depend on the same circumstances: Alibech enters the desert seeking religious service, while Filippo’s son is brought from it into the city. Yet each encounter unsettles the idea that desire can be excluded by withdrawal, ignorance, or moral instruction. The contrast between the son’s indifference to palaces and his sudden longing for a green goose makes bodily attraction the force that interrupts his father’s account of the world.

Dioneo then turns the tale toward the women listening and toward his own position as their storyteller. He acknowledges that he delights in them and deliberately seeks to please them, defending that attachment through the very example he has just told: even the inexperienced hermit’s son, raised without other company, desires women as soon as he sees them. Dioneo describes his own responsiveness as natural rather than shameful, invoking women’s beauty, manners, grace, courtesy, kisses, embraces, and sexual delights as reasons for his devotion. His argument carries the tale’s comic lesson into the storytelling frame: the force that defeats Rustico’s attempt at celibacy also supports Dioneo’s refusal to be ashamed of writing for women.

The defense is also directed against critics who condemn him for pleasing women or for seeking their approval. Dioneo treats such reproach as resistance to nature, arguing that efforts to oppose its laws demand great strength and may prove both futile and harmful. He says he has neither possessed nor desired such strength for this purpose, and declares his intention to continue pleasing his female audience. The hermit’s cell, the young man’s startled request, and the storyteller’s avowal thus form a sequence: desire appears where discipline expects its absence, then becomes a principle by which Dioneo defends both human attachment and his own literary practice.

Nature, Age, and the Defense of Desire

Dioneo strengthens his appeal to nature by insisting that resisting love is not simply a matter of choosing stricter discipline: opposing nature’s laws demands extraordinary strength, and the effort may be futile as well as harmful to the person who makes it. He says he has neither that strength nor any wish to use it against his own desire. His image of dust caught in a whirlwind gives the argument a social edge: critics may stir and condemn him, but their attack cannot push him below his original place and may instead carry him upward, even onto the heads of kings and emperors. The image turns reproach into an uncertain force, unable to guarantee the humiliation its authors intend.

He also answers those who make his age a reason for shame. The leek, he observes, has a white head but a green tail; the jest makes age and continuing desire coexist rather than cancel each other out. More seriously, he points to Guido Cavalcanti and Dante Alighieri, already advanced in years, and to Messer Cino da Pistoja, very old, as men who honored women and valued their approval. Dioneo thus presents the desire to please women not as an indulgence disqualified by age, but as an attachment shared by respected poets. His defense leaves the story’s comic contrast in place while extending its claim: neither the hermit’s retreat nor the passage of years, in his account, makes natural affection disappear.

Return to the Storytelling Order

After declaring that the company had strayed far enough from its starting point, Dioneo yields the floor back to the day’s appointed order. The sun has driven the stars from the sky and cleared the night’s damp vapors when Filostrato leads the company into the garden; after dining and resting, they gather beside the fountain, where he asks Fiammetta to begin. The return to the shared ritual of storytelling places Dioneo’s defense of natural affection within the frame that has carried it: his argument ends, but the conversation about love continues through another tale.