One does not need to be intimately acquainted with Dante’s work to notice that he gave political philosophy a privileged place among the human sciences. He spoke of it repeatedly, with such insistence as would seem excessive had he not explained at length the reasons why he thought it indispensable. As we have seen, it was for him the master discipline, too long forgotten, which more than any other taught men how to live well, a kind of first philosophy that could provide the desired remedy for the ills that ravaged medieval Christendom.1
Does this mean that Dante never thought of any other blessings apart from the ones brought by political life? To think that he did would be to set aside a whole side of his thought whose importance only grows as we go more deeply. The majority of men cannot do without life in society and have no needs beyond what it provides, but there will always be a small number of elect enamored of a higher happiness that is defined not by moral action but by theoretical knowledge and the complete detachment from worldly goods it demands. The Letter to a Florentine friend reveals another Dante, very close to the Dante of the Comedy, who, in order to be happy, does not need to return to a homeland that would only welcome him under conditions he found ignoble.2 Was it not possible for him to “look upon the face of the sun and the stars everywhere” or to “meditate anywhere under the heavens upon the sweetest truths”?3 In exile a “new way” was opened to him that led to his goal without his having to betray his honor or his reputation.
Not only Florence, but in the end the earthly globe itself makes the pilgrim smile and seems paltry to him when, from the eighth heaven, he looks down upon it from afar:
My eyes returned through all the seven spheres
and saw this globe in such a way that I
smiled at its scrawny image: I approve
that judgment as the best, which holds this earth
to be the least; and he whose thoughts are set
elsewhere, can truly be called virtuous.4
The earth promises only human happiness, which often misleads.5 In taking stock of its limitations, man succeeds in surpassing himself, in passing beyond the human, “trasumanar,” as the neologism of the Comedy puts it.6 He discovers within himself a life that is more divine than human.7
It is one thing to know this philosophic ideal, but to live it is another matter. On this point practical considerations will once again take precedence. Such is the conclusion one draws from the story of Ulysses, for whom Dante invents a new fate that makes him resemble the poet more than the hero of the legend. After overcoming “a hundred thousand dangers,”8 Ulysses finally came to what was to be the end of his long voyage. But, instead of returning to Ithaca, Ulysses goes off toward the “world that is unpeopled” that lies where the sun sets, beyond the boundaries of the West.9 Neither fondness for his son nor pity for his old father nor the love he owed Penelope, which would have gladdened her, could quench his longing “to gain experience of the world and of the vices and the worth of men.”10 His only companions are a handful of faithful friends already grown old, whom he exhorts by reminding them of their origin or seed: “You were not made to live your lives as brutes, but to be followers of worth and knowledge.”11 The venture ends badly, however; just when they see in the distance a high mountain, which commentators usually take to be Mount Purgatory, a whirlwind arises and causes the ship to sink.
The lesson is worth noting. Whether he likes it or not, the thinker can never dissociate himself completely from his social milieu. He does not attain truth by escaping society, but by facing it and transcending it. Ulysses’s “wild flight”12 only ends in failure; Dante will be careful not to imitate him. He will first have to go to the depth of hell before undertaking the slow ascent that leads to the “godly realm”13 to which his steps take him. Only once he has “seen everything”14 and penetrated to the root of the evil that afflicted his time will he have any hope of success. There is no direct route to the desired end. Even though he has lost all attraction for the goods of this world, the philosopher is not free to turn his back on political philosophy, that is, the part of philosophy that has most to do with human things.
The problem as we have sketched it was already familiar, but it took on a new twist from the fact that medieval society was ordered not by one sole power as was the case with ancient society, but by two powers, one spiritual and the other temporal, whose rapports still evoked lively discussions from the viewpoints of both the Church and the civil authorities. This question at all cost had to be resolved in order to put an end to the conflicts that exercized men’s minds, and it was this question that absorbed Dante’s attention in great part. His thinking on the matter is known to us through two works, the Monarchy and the Comedy, yet between their teachings many historians have detected important differences.
The Monarchy is a fervent plea for the autonomy of the Roman emperor in the temporal domain. It is directed chiefly to the theory of Boniface VIII, whose Unam Sanctam of 1302 called for the total submission of princes to the sovereign pontiff and so brought to its logical outcome the doctrine of the plenitude of papal power (plenitudo potestatis) that had developed gradually since the ninth century and especially since the time of Gregory VII.15
Boniface’s document in fact did not introduce any new element to the debate. Its import lies rather in that it presents itself not as a decree, nor a decretal, nor even as a bull, though it is usually referred to as such, but as a doctrinal declaration of a kind that was rare until then and whose intent, it seems, was to react against the decentralizing tendencies that were emerging within Christendom.16 The presentation draws, according to custom, on the old theory of the two swords, the symbols of the dual authority that divine providence had endowed the human race. According to Boniface, these swords, once entrusted to the apostles, are both in the hands of the Church, which, as repository of revealed truth and grace, retains the power to use them as seems good to her.17 In the hierarchical order established by God, temporal authority is thus by its nature subordinated to ecclesiastical authority, which has the right to oversee it and to depose it if it ever fails in its duties. The Church is the judge of all and is itself judged by no one, save God. Boniface, of course, does not go so far as to state as such that temporal authority is created by the Church, but it is clear that he regards it as at least conferred by it. The prince thus has no other power than the one that is delegated to him by the Church, and he exercizes it only “at the will and suffrance of the priest.”18 Ultimately the two authorities are but one, for there is no area of human life that is not the domain of the Church and with which it could not concern itself if it wished to do so, although in principle the Church prefers to have recourse to the secular arm for certain kinds of business that do not befit clerics such as the waging of war and punishing of criminals.19 The upshot of this theory is that every human being is subject, under pain of damnation, to the authority of the Roman pontiff, as Unam Sanctam concludes: “Therefore we declare, state, define, and pronounce that it is altogether necessary to salvation for every human creature to be subject to the Roman Pontiff.”20
Although in this case we may not know all the motives that led Boniface to publish this document, it has to be said that the conclusions it articulates go well beyond the biblical and historical foundations on which it claims to rest. Dante has no more pressing concern than to show that the emperor receives his authority directly from God and that consequently he exercises it by his own sovereign right and not in the name of the Church.21 His argument begins from the principle that man has two ends: one natural and the other supernatural. The knowledge required for him to attain them comes to him through two bodies endowed for this purpose by divine wisdom: the imperial authority and the Church. The first leads to happiness in this world through philosophical instruction, the second to eternal happiness through spiritual teaching.22 The big question is to find out how these two powers are related, and on this thorny question the Monarchy in the final analysis remains vague. Chapter 11 of Book III says only that the two cannot be dealt with either as subordinated one to the other or as equal members of the same species since the papacy and the imperial government (which Dante designates by the novel word imperiatus, no doubt to underline its special character) are rooted in two different and irreducible orders: one of paternity and the other of sovereignty. There remains only one solution: they are united in a common dependence either on God Himself “or else under some substance lower than God, but including in its particular being all those whose particular form of being it is to be superiors.”23 However, it is not clear how in practice such a principle could ensure their harmonious collaboration or resolve potential conflicts between them. The conclusion of the treatise merely states that, since happiness in this life is linked to happiness in the next, the Roman emperor is always in some ways subject to the Roman pontiff and always owes to him “the piety which a first-born son owes to his father.”24
Based on this declaration, Michele Barbi concluded that, in spite of its novelty and his fierce opposition to Boniface’s demands, Dante’s thought remains fundamentally Christian and conforms with what he elaborated later in the Comedy.25 Barbi rejects the thesis of Bruno Nardi, for whom the final words of the treatise are not to be taken at face value but as an ironic concession to contemporary taste.26 According to Nardi, it is hardly conceivable that Dante would have taken such pains in calling for the independence of temporal power and then turn around at the last moment and in one sentence destroy the whole thrust of his argument. The Monarchy is not content to distinguish the two powers; it separates them radically. Therein lies its great originality. But there is more, for, once it is admitted that the temporal authority is not subject to control by ecclesiastical authority, one must recognize that in turn philosophy, on which it is founded, is not subject to control by divine revelation. The teaching of the Monarchy is thus akin to what is known as Averroism and accordingly is not orthodox at all.27 For good reason Dante would have abandoned this teaching in the Comedy, which consequently must be read as a tacit but unquestionable repudiation of the ideas he still held at the time he was writing his treatise.28
A few years later, Étienne Gilson sought to assess the situation and maintained that the Monarchy is neither as traditional nor as revolutionary as it had been thought to be. He acknowledges that the emancipation of the temporal domain from the spiritual domain logically entails the emancipation of philosophy from revealed truth, and he is equally persuaded that “the doctrine of the separateness of the orders which Dante upheld is quite in accordance with the spirit of Averroism,”29 but it seems to him unthinkable that Dante himself would have drawn from his premises such a bold conclusion as Nardi imputes to him. Dante never subscribed to “the Averroistic thesis of the unity of the intellect and the eternity of the human race,”30 and, like St. Thomas, he always believed firmly in the perfect harmony of reason and faith.31 That is enough to absolve him of any suspicion of heresy. But if his attitude toward philosophy presupposes the existence of Thomism, it is nevertheless not identical to it.32 “When Saint Thomas distinguishes and ranks the orders his purpose is to unite them; Dante separates the orders in the hope of reconciling them,”33 without taking into account that such an accord requires, as its essential condition, the magisterium of theology over philosophy as well as of the Church over the Empire.
Gilson’s compromise received support from several historians, who nonetheless continued to see a profound discrepancy between the Monarchy and the Comedy. Thus, according to A. P. d’Entrèves, Dante’s itinerary consists of three successive stages in which the poet at first was interested exclusively in the city, then embraced the idea of empire (Convivio, Monarchy), and finally went on to the strictly religious solution that the Comedy brings to the great political problem of the Middle Ages.34 The opposition between the Monarchy and the Comedy is accentuated even more forcefully by J. Goudet, for whom the latter work marks a regression that falls back upon a unitary conception of society which practically annuls all of the social and economic advances attained in the course of the century preceding its composition. 35 Dante, who had been in the vanguard of the intellectual and political movement of his time, in the end revealed himself to be a reactionary or a traditionalist, desperately struggling for the restoration of an ideal that was by then outdated and consigned to oblivion by the inexorable march of events.36
Did Dante retract in the Comedy and did he truly renounce the position to which he inclined not long before, when he was finishing the Monarchy and already taken up with composing his poem? This is not a simple question to answer, but upon examination the distance that separates the two works may in the end seem less than it is ordinarily thought to be, from the viewpoint of both their moral teaching and their political ideas.
Of the three parts of the Comedy, none has a frankly more rational character than Purgatorio. Not that it is lacking in religious language; as everywhere else it lies in wait at every turn, but almost always in such a way as to raise new doubts on its import. The pilgrim has now to undergo the moral purgation that is the prelude to his entry into paradise, for only once he is completely regenerated can he be initiated to the splendors of the heavenly court.37 Nonetheless, a careful analysis reveals that the tenor of this regeneration is generally more natural than supernatural and more philosophical than penitential.
The first canto places this “second kingdom” under the aegis of the pagan Cato, whose forehead shines with the rays of four stars, figures of the moral order and the virtues that epitomize it.38 These stars, we learn, have been seen by no one “except by the first people,”39 which we should take to mean the first people of the Comedy, that is, the poets, heroes, and philosophers gathered in the first circle of Inferno, unless one imagines that the word “people” can apply to Adam and Eve,40 which does not seem very plausible. Since they lived before the coming of Christ, these pagans knew no other virtues than those that are commonly characterized as natural, and they were guided by these virtues alone.41 Yet it seems that these are the very vritues that Dante must acquire now that he has come to this point in his journey.
Indeed, it has perhaps not always been noted sufficiently that his own purification bears only a faint resemblance to that of the devout souls he encounters along the way. To convey his thought more concretely, the poet employs, as he had done previously, a sort of lex talionis, which the Comedy calls contrapasso42 and which calls for a compensation that is not only the equal of the fault committed but also of the same nature. The prideful are bent over against the ground under a heavy burden, their chests next to their knees, “like the imperfect grub, the worm before it has attained its final form.”43 The envious have their eyelids sewn with an iron thread, such that they can see nothing of what goes on around them.44 The wrathful have their gaze shrouded by dense black smoke that prevents them from seeing things as they are.45 The avaricious have their hands and feet tied and remain motionless, their heads bowed downward.46 The same obtains among other categories of sinners: the slothful, whose pace is now quickened;47 the gluttonous, who are now emaciated;48 the lustful, who expiate their culpable passions in fire.49 Their punishments are lighter than those of the damned in hell and they accept them willingly,50 but they are no less subject to the pains of repentance, accomplishing genuine mortifications by which they merit their redemption.
Altogether different is the condition of the pilgrim, who does not have to subject himself to such a discipline to work out his salvation. His righting does not entail obedience to any law whatever and he does not rid himself of his evil inclinations by doing penance himself. There is no doubt that he knows how to humble himself among the humble and is quick to bend toward them to speak with them.51 He shows himself equally filled with delicacy and compassion for the envious once he perceives that he seems to be insulting them when gazing on them while remaining unseen.52 But it is not by bending to the ground, closing his eyes, or running with the slothful that he overcomes his pride, envy, or sloth. Healing comes rather through an effort of reflection that reveals to him the folly rather than the malice of such behavior. Thus, earthly glory is too ephemeral to be attached to it beyond measure or to be proud of it. It “wears the color of the grass that comes and goes; the sun that makes it wither first drew it from the ground, still green and tender.”53 Guinizelli believed himself to be the best of poets; nevertheless his fame paled before the brilliance of his successor, Cavalcanti, and who knows whether some day both will not be surpassed by one yet greater, for “he perhaps is born who will chase both out of the nest.”54 The reader thinks spontaneously of Dante, whose fame would surely eclipse his predecessors’. This is just what he himself implies, with finesse and without excessive humility, 55 but also without altering anything of the lesson that is being taught. Let us note parenthetically that Dante is alone with Virgil in contemplating the scenes of pride and humility carved in relief on the marble wall that surrounds the enclosure.56 The penitents who are bent over cannot see them. They are incited to the practice of humility, not to a meditation on the irrationality of pride of the sort to which the poet gives himself.
The same is the case with the other vices, when the contrast between the intellectual approach of the pilgrim and the moral behavior of the aggrieved penitents is no less accentuated. The envious, saddened by the happiness of others and rejoicing at their misfortune, displays a deranged mind by coveting goods that are diminished when they are shared.57 He would be happier if, instead of looking at the ground, he would raise his eyes toward heaven, which calls out “and lets [you] see its never-ending beauties.”58 The wrathful does himself harm by allowing himself to be blinded by a passion that his overexcited imagination continuously feeds.59 The slothful deprives himself of the greatest goods by giving in to idleness; to shed his lethargy he has only to hear Virgil’s philosophic discourse on love and what gives rise to it.60 The gluttonous and the lustful are thoroughly mistaken when they indulge without measure in the pursuit of pleasures that will never satisfy them and will someday have to renounce.61 In each instance the sin is conceived less as an offense against God than as a disorder of the mind or a simple error of judgment.62 Thus Dante’s victory over sin is always rooted in knowledge, as though every moral virtue were in the end reducible to intellectual virtue.
It has sometimes been said that the angel who holds the keys to Purgatory represents the Church, to which the pilgrim must submit before proceeding further.63 As we have seen, however, these keys, which are destined to open for us the secrets of the poem, are not necessarily the keys of religious authority. In fact, Dante does not receive any of the sacraments and nowhere submits to the rites by which sacraments are normally conferred. When he comes to recognize his guilt, he does so in a manner that compromises him so little that commentators are forever asking just what he is confessing.64 His one fault is to have allowed himself to be distracted by present things (“le presenti cose”) and to have abandoned all hope for the good beyond all other goods, which in the context could just as well be understood as a reference to his political setbacks.65 To be reborn, he will only have to cross the Lethe and Eunoe, the two rivers whose pagan names hardly evoke the idea of baptismal regeneration.66 Everything unfolds as if he did not have to go through the intermediary of the Church, outside which, Boniface VIII declared, “there is no salvation or remission of sins.”67 However one sees it, Dante’s initiation remains strictly “para-ecclesiastical” and “para-liturgical.”68
The Monarchy had earlier pointed out that Eden, where the pilgrim finds himself at this point, was a figure of the natural order and, more precisely, of the happiness that man can expect from the practice of the virtues proper to his nature.69 There also one finds again the four moral virtues, which were highlighted in the opening canto, in the form of nymphs clothed in imperial purple and accompanied this time by the three theological virtues, to which they are juxtaposed, without it being possible to say precisely how the two groups are ordered in relation to one another.70 In this same Eden Dante, forgetting past evil and remembering only the good, comes into possession of what the Comedy not long after calls nature pure and good, “natura sincera e buona,”71 as it existed in the beginning, before the intrusion of the disorder introduced by man. He becomes, as Kantorowicz has aptly remarked, “a member, not of the ‘corpus mysticum quod est ecclesia,’ but of the ‘corpus mysticum Adae quod est humanitas,’” a kind of Adam subtilis who embodies the natural perfection of his species.72 Thus Virgil, in his final words, can say that he crowns him emperor and pope over himself: “te sovra te corono e mitrio.”73 Imperial government and ecclesiastical authority have no other function than to guide man to the happiness that his evil inclinations ordinarily prevent him from attaining.74 At last he delights in the spiritual freedom of which Cato was the image par excellence, but without having purchased it at the cost of his life.75 Dante himself has no further need of either the one or the other. The perspective established in the Monarchy so far appears to have undergone no substantial change whatsoever.
One comes to the same conclusion in passing from the ethical to the political domain. The problem that concerns us here arises in the very first scene of the poem, which shows Dante lost in a dark forest, just barely come to himself and attempting to climb a mountain whose shoulders are bathed by the rays of sun.76 His efforts are contravened by the sudden appearance of three wild beasts, a leopard, a lion, and a wolf, which bar his way and force him to turn back. The leopard “covered with a spotted hide”77 has long been seen as the image of Florence and its two political parties, the Whites and the Blacks, who were then rivals for the control of the city. The lion and the wolf may be taken to symbolize, as they usually are, the king of France and Rome or the papacy, the two foreign powers that were the most closely entwined in the internal affairs of Florence. The text purposely associates them as partners of some sort in a series of intrigues that was to end in the triumph of the Blacks, who were more open to the influence of the Holy See, over the Whites, who were more inclined to join with the emperor.78 Dante has “good cause for hopefulness”79 on seeing the leopard with its speckled skin, but he is gripped with fear at the sight of the wolf and “abandoned hope of ever climbing up that mountain slope.”80 Virgil then emerges to tell him that if he wishes to escape this dangerous place he must take “another path,” for the beast that causes him the most fear, that is, the famished wolf, “allows no man to pass along her track, but blocks him even to the point of death.”81
What follows in the Inferno is nothing else than a detailed analysis of the situation in Italy and in Florence since about the middle of the thirteenth century and a barely camouflaged account of the salient events in the life of the poet. The cause of the innumerable woes the reader witnesses will be examined at great length and in great detail in the Purgatorio with the help of data borrowed, here again, much more from Aristotle’s philosophy than Christian theology. As canto 16, the climax of this whole section, explains, men should not ascribe the disorders to which they fall victim to chance or to their stars; they are themselves responsible for them. Only the practice of the virtues could restore their health. The principle of the virtues was placed in them at birth, but it will bear fruit only if their free will trains itself.82 The fact that there are so few virtuous people in the world is not because human nature is vitiated but because the world is badly governed.83 The laws are always there and they are good. The sad thing is that there is no longer anyone to make them observed and to punish wrongdoers.84 The last emperor was Frederick II,85 who died excommunicated in 1250. His successors, whom the Comedy gathers in the valley of the princes, were emperors in name only. Either they were never invested, or they did not rise to the height of their task. We see them all idle or preoccupied with their own well-being rather than their subjects’.86 Everyone feels the conseuqences, as Sordello laments: “Ah, abject Italy, you inn of sorrows, you ship without a helmsman in harsh seas, no queen of provinces but of bordellos!”87
The problem, however, has deeper roots, for if the princes no longer govern and do not even have the possibility of governing, it is in large part because of the interference of the papacy in the temporal domain. The world formerly had the good fortune of being ruled by “two suns,” the pope and the emperor.88 By monopolizing power, the first has usurped the latter’s and “fouls itself and its new burden.”89 Of all the vices plaguing human life, none is more widespread than avarice and none to which the Church is more prone because of its material insufficiency.90 Rome’s habit of forging political alliances for its own aggrandizement has the double effect of giving a bad example to its own followers and of neutralizing any effort which the temporal power could make to moderate its subjects’ worldly ambitions.91 It is no wonder, then, that valor and courtesy have vanished and the West, “stripped utterly of every virtue,”92 has gone downhill.
Just as the cause of the current degeneracy is not original sin but bad government, so the remedy is not to be found in divine grace but in the return to wholesome political life. Nothing obviously prevents preaching the observance of the ancient virtues of courage and moderation, to which the Comedy exhorts in many places. But since persuasion does not succeed with everyone, it is necessary to add the support of some public authority which knows how to make recalcitrants behave properly. On this point the Monarchy brought a much more precise solution. It recommended the reestablishment of a universal monarchy whose task would be to ensure peace among the different nations of the world and establish the reign of justice and liberty. 93 It does not seem that the situation envisaged in the Comedy has changed much. Such at least is the impression one gathers from the many passages that deal with the papacy and in particular with Boniface VIII, “the prince of the new Pharisees,”94 whom Dante always saw as a “usurper” whose enemies were all Christians, who had no respect for either his holy orders or his pontifical dignity, who prided himself on opening and closing the gates of hell to anyone,95 and who himself deserved the worst punishments.96
What Dante thought of his adversary is nowhere to be seen better than in the portrait he sketches at the beginning of canto 17 of the Inferno, in which we see appear Geryon, the fabulous beast on whose shoulders Dante and Virgil pass from the seventh to the eighth circle of hell. The monster is invested with the most extraordinary features: he crosses mountains, pierces the thickest walls, destroys powerful armies, and afflicts the whole world.97 What does he represent? Fraud perhaps, as the text suggests in speaking of him as a “filthy effigy of fraud.”98 Sins of fraud are in fact punished in the infamous Malebolge the two travelers are about to enter. But the author seems to have something else in mind. If there is any institution in the Middle Ages whose power penetrates everywhere, shatters weapons and fortresses, and makes itself felt beyond mountains, it is the Church. Could it be that in the monster’s features Dante sought to depict the abomination that the medieval papacy had become for him? We are here in the realm of pure conjecture, at least until further details attract our attention.
The Geryon of classical mythology, known to us above all through Virgil, Ovid, and Horace, was ordinarily conceived as a giant with three heads and three bodies, though the description varies slightly form one author to another.99 Dante simplifies the depiction by giving the Geryon one body, surmounted by a human head. At first only the face and bust are visible; the rest of the body, which is that of a reptile, has not yet come to rest on the bank.100 The text adds that his look was “benign,” his two paws had “hair up to the armpits,” and his back, belly, and flanks were marked with “knots” and “circle”:
La faccia sua era faccia d‘uom giusto,
tanto benigna avea de fuor la pelle,
e du’un serente tutto l‘altro fusto;
due branche avea pilose insin l’ascelle;
lo dosso e ‘l petto e ambedue cose
dipinti avea di nodi e di rotelle.
[The face he wore was of a just man,
so gracious was his features’ outer semblance;
and all his trunk, the body of a serpent;
he had two paws, with hair up to the armpits;
his back and chest as well as both his flanks
had been adorned with twining knots and circlets.]101
Why all this detail? We can see once it occurs to us to join two words that belong together but that Dante cautiously separated with an interpolated clause, faccia and benigna, or, to put it more clearly, benigna faccia—“Boniface,” the “serpent” who according to the author had only the name and the appearance of goodness but all the rest of whom was only fraud, avarice, and disguised cruelty.102 Once this is understood, there is no mistaking the description of the animal’s body, which recalls very nicely the papal vestments of the time, the sleeves of which were covered with ermine and the sides decorated with knotted strips and medallions. As though by chance, the author had just before this spoken of his poem for the first time as a “comedy.”103 The scene that follows, one has to admit, is consummately comic.
Many other data would confirm this conclusion if need be. The end of the preceding canto aimed at putting the reader on the alert by reminding him how one must be prudent in the presence of those who not only see what we are doing but who also read our thoughts.104 Faced with a truth which seems a lie, to avoid giving rise to unmerited reproaches Dante will “close his lips as long as he can.”105 But then the Geryon surfaces from the abyss, like a diver coming up to the surface of the sea after plunging into the depths to loosen an anchor caught on a rock:
si come torna colui che va giuso
talora a solver l‘ancora ch’aggrappa
o scoglio o altro che nel mare e chiuso,
che’n su si sende e da pie si rattrappa.
[like one returning from the waves where he
went down to loose an anchor snagged upon
a reef or something else hid in the sea,
who streches upward and draws in his feet.]106
The reader who is not content to observe Dante’s actions alone but scrutinizes his thoughts will not overlook the “appa” rhyme that ends the canto without detecting a further reference to the pope, “papa,” Dante’s constant preoccupation. But it is possible to be still more precise and see in the traveler’s face to face meeting with the Geryon a veiled allusion to Dante’s encounter with Boniface VIII in October or November 1301. Dante, whose term as prior was ending, had gone to Rome with two Florentine dignitaries to obtain from the pope a cessation of hostilties between the Whites and the Blacks. The embassy failed miserably. Boniface soon dismissed the emissaries, but did not allow Dante, whom he had reason to fear more, to depart with his companions. With the support of the pope, Charles of Valois, brother of Philip the Fair, in the meantime marched into Florence and executed his plan to expel the Blacks and install the Whites in power. When he was summoned to answer the charges made against him, Dante did not dare to return home. He was then condemned to death in absentia and divested of his property. 107
With these facts in mind let us read again the beginning of the scene. At the moment when they prepare to descend to the eighth circle, Virgil borrows the cincture Dante wore and casts it into the precipice. At this signal Geryon quits his haunt and shows himself to the pilgrims. The text is laconic in the extreme, saying only that Dante was wearing a “cord” with which he had in the past attempted to tame the leopard with the spotted hide and, after coiling and knotting it, handed it to his guide:
lo avea una corda intorno cinta,
e con essa pensai alcuna volta
prender la lonza a la pelle dipinta.
Poscia ch’io l’ebbi tutta da me sciolta,
si come ‘l duca m’avea comandato,
porsila a lui aggroppata e ravvolta.
[Around my waist I had a cord as girdle,
and with it once I thought I should be able
to catch the leopard with the painted hide.
And after I had loosed it completely,
just as my guide commanded me to do,
I handed it to him, knotted and coiled.]108
One can suppose that this cord, which has nowhere yet been mentioned, refers to some attempt on which Dante had once founded his vains hopes which he subsequently had to abandon.109 If the monster it conjures is in fact Pope Boniface, the symbolism of the cord becomes obvious. The expression “UNA CORDA... e CON essa” contains a kind of wordplay that immediately brings to mind the accord or concord that Dante had sought in vain.110 The whole scene thus acquires a remarkable coherence. The leopard, as we saw earlier, represented Florence and its political parties, which Dante had at first tried to reconcile. Unable to resolve the matter at home, he went on a mission to Rome, the source of the divisions that ravaged his native city, to negotiate with the pope an accord which unfortunately he failed to obtain. Assuming that this is the hidden meaning of this episode, Dante had good reason to say that his cord was “coiled” and “knotted.” But we should not look for this knot in the cord itself. If it exists anywhere, it is rather in the enigma it invites us to resolve.
Boniface VIII was not the only one to stir the poet’s wrath. Dante was no less harsh on his successor, Clement V, the “lawless shepherd . . . uglier in deeds,” who transferred the papacy to Avignon and whom the Comedy also destines to the pains of hell.111 Of all the medieval popes, only one was judged worthy of the Comedy’s paradise, the philosopher Peter of Spain, who was known under the name of John XXI.112
If the papacy remains ever so powerful and its activity is always so perni-cous, will there ever be a way to bring it back to order? As the following will show, the solution to which the Comedy inclines bears a strange resemblance to the solution that the author of the Monarchy advocated. To understand it, we have only to examine the role played by the angels, first in canto 3 of Inferno and later in cantos 28 and 29 of Paradiso.
The first of these two texts deals with the crowd of the lukewarm shades or more precisely the “neutrals” that Dante and Virgil skirt at the moment they are getting ready to enter hell.113 The individuals belonging to this troop are condemned to remain eternally nameless. Grouped around a banner that belongs to no one and only goes around in a circle, they are prey to a feverish agitation devoid of any purpose.114 The only thing one can hold against them is that they distinguished themselves neither in doing good nor in doing evil, for which reason they languish before the gate of hell deprived of the praises or the reproaches they failed to earn in their lifetime.115 If their fate appears lenient in comparison to the pains which the damned in hell suffer, it is no less pitiable than anyone else’s. Since they never lived, so to speak, they are incapable of dying and find themselves forever destined to total anonynim-ity. 116 For companions Dante has joined to them the angels who remained undecided at the time of the revolt against God. Since these angels were neither “faithful” nor “rebellious,” no one wants them, for which reason they are now disdained by both heaven’s pity and hell’s justice, envious of everyone but equally ignored by all.117 Virgil, too, has no intention to concern himself with them. Thus he counsels Dante to pass right by without deigning to speak a word to them.118
It is hardly necessary to point out that the situation described in this canto cannot properly be understood from the perspective of medieval theology, which foresees in all and for everybody only four places to which souls are destined at the time of death: heaven, purgatory, hell, or limbo. Dante himself will henceforth speak of only two categories of angels, the good and the bad,119 without ever mentioning again the third category he was pleased to note in the first place. What we have before us is evidently something of the poet’s coinage, inoffensive in appearance and full of savor, but devoid of any theological foundation.
But then why did Dante, who was so concerned to be precise and who, it seems, could have done very well without this detail, highlight it by giving it a special place at the beginning of his poem? This has not been an easy question to answer. The annotated editions refer, not without some justification, to chapter 3 of the Apocalypse, in which there is mention of the angel of the church of Laodicea, who is neither hot nor cold and who will be spewed from the mouth of God if he persists in being lukewarm.120 The connection between the passages is nonetheless quite tenuous. In the first place, lukewarmness does not necessarily mean neutrality, and in any case the Apocalypse speaks of only one angel, no doubt with reference to the bishop of the city. It does not say at all that when God rejects him, hell will also reject him. Finally, the harsh admonition addressed to him is aimed only at inciting him to regain his fervor, which shows that his fate is not yet fixed.121 Other possible comparisons have been suggested, such as with Clement of Alexandria’s Stromata, the Life of Saint Brendan, and the legend of Parsifal, but never with much success, since the disparity between the contexts does not permit any conclusion to be drawn on their score.122
A more original explanation has been proposed by John Freccero, who finds a possible model for the poet in a theory of thirteenth century theology. 123 Freccero first notes with reason that the expression the Comedy uses to charaterize the behavior of the neutral angels is equivocal and has not always been well understood. Dante in fact says of this “bad choir” of angels that they were neither faithful to God nor rebellious against God, but “per se fuoro.” Most modern translations take the preposition “per” to mean “for” and interpret the passage to mean that these angels were neither for God nor against him but “for themselves.” But such is not the thought of the author. It seems, from what we know of the Comedy, that the expression “per se” means instead “apart.” Since they did not remain faithful to God but also did not want to join with those who rebelled against Him, these angels became a group apart. It is this isolation or separation that defines their present situation. The “per se” of the neutral angels would correspond to “da se” in modern Italian. The same expression appears also in canto 17 of Paradiso, in which Cacciaguida predicts that in his exile Dante will come to detach himself from all political parties and will form his own party by himself: “a te fia bello averti fatta PER TE stesso.”124
How is this possible? According to Freccero, medieval theology distinguished two moments in the angels’ revolt against God. In the first the angel would have turned against God as his final end. No more was needed to sunder the bond of charity that united him to his creator and thus for him to be excluded from the beatific vision. Since this privation presupposes the absence of a good that is proper to him, it would be in itself an evil, but it would not entail any guilt. For there to be a fault, a second act must occur, in which the angel attaches himself to an inferior good, that is, to himself or some other created being. Only this second act would be morally culpable, the more so the further away the chosen object is from God.125
This information makes it possible to make some sense of the doctrinal anomaly the neutral angels seem to present. In effect, a neutral angel would not have committed any positive act in rejecting the happiness promised him. When a choice had to be made, he would have renounced the beatific vision, but without allowing himself to be attracted by another good, as though he were allowed to forge for himself a destiny other than the one God had foreseen for His creatures. His existence could be characerized by a “double negation,”126 and this double negation would have made him stand out by losing him the place that was proper to him in the order of creation.
As for whether he is better or worse than the other angels, the question does not come up, since it cannot even be said that he has sinned. In avoiding any positive act, he deprived himself of the one element that could ensure his position in the cosmos as God willed it. Henceforth he finds himself completely separated from both God and all other created beings. Nothing any longer distinguishes him from the nothingness out of which he was drawn. Dante would thus have good reason to relegate him to this vestibule that is not strictly speaking part of the Comedy’s spiritual universe. The total indifference of these neutrals who are neither hot nor cold would complete the range of possibilities Dante sought to place before our eyes by spreading the created beings along a ladder stretching from the glacial cold of hell to the intense ardor of the heavenly spheres.127
Freccero’s thesis has the advantage of linking the problem to the discussions taking place in intellectual circles concerning the sin of the angels, but it also poses serious difficulties from the point of view of both theology and the Comedy. It is not at all evident what would constitute an act of the will, whether of an angel or any other being, that would have no object and that would come down to an “irreducible negation.”128 The scholastics did indeed distinguish between a negative aspect of an evil act, by which a creature turns away from its supreme good, and its positive aspect, by which it turns toward an inferior good that deflects it from its ultimate end. This is not, however, a matter of two consecutive acts, but of two distinct formalities of one and the same act.129 The will has the good for its object and it is only attracted by the good. Even when it seeks evil, it does so only because it appears as a particular good to which it turns without considering its overall good.130 It is therefore inconceivable that an angel can posit an act that would not have any positive object to specify it and that would be defined by sheer nothingness. The angel was not free to evade the choice that lay before him. If he renounced God, it was because he first chose himself. That was already enough to ban him from the society of heaven and to merit him the pains of hell. Dante would have had good reason to complete the spectrum of the Comedy by adding the neutrals if they constituted a real class, but since no trace of them is to be found in medieval theology, the argument seems to lose all of its force.131
There is another kind of neutrality, however, which one cannot help think of and which makes sense of what we have just heard of the neutrals’ double refusal or double negation in a way that is at once more simple and more in keeping with the historical facts of the poem. The great question of the day was without doubt the bloody quarrel that had been raging between the Whites and the Blacks in Florence. At the time where we are, the situation had worsened to the point where nearly everyone felt obliged to side with one or the other of the two factions. We can nonetheless surmise that, as always in such a circumstance, some minds would have felt ill at ease. The choice was not an easy one to make, the more so since the Whites seemed weak and ill equipped for the fight. Despite his opposition to the Blacks, Dante himself did not side with the Whites except because he dreaded even more the victory of their adversaries. For motives that could be more or less laudable, others simply preferred to stay out of the debate.
The problem went well beyond the narrow confines of a local conflict that recent events had just then incited. Since at least the time of Frederick II, all Italy was in prey to endless conflicts which shaky relations between the empire and the papacy only aggravated.132 Resentment toward the Germanic emperor was constantly growing and inciting new revolts, but it was often accompanied by no less acute disdain for the temporal aims of the Holy See. Caught between these two great powers, the Italian communes tried to extricate themselves as best they could. It is thus not out of place that some among them would have attempted to remove themselves from imperial control without transferring their allegiance to the Church.133 The Comedy seems to allude to them under the figure of the neutrals, whom it reproaches for following a policy of nonalignment, halfway, one might say, between revolt and fidelity. The God they forsook is not the biblical God, toward Whom one cannot be neutral, but the one who embodies God’s supreme power in the natural order, that is, the emperor. Likewise, the angels joined with the humans in this place are not literally angels; instead, in accord with established and widespread usage we shall presently examine, they are the leaders of those communities neither glorious nor infamous, who, by cowardice or indecision, kept to the sidelines of events and did not leave behind any mark. One can thus understand why they have no right to any place in the poet’s Inferno, Purgatorio, or Paradiso, in which, as he says later, we see only those souls who distinguished themselves in good or in evil.134
The word “angel” appears in only one other passage of Inferno, concerning the “black angels” who populate the fifth bolge of the eighth circle and who have been thought to signify, under deformed names, some of the notable Guelphs who opposed the poet’s return to Florence.135 In a similar way, canto 8 uses the circumlocution “more than a thousand who once had rained from Heaven”136 to designate the masters or guardians whose watchful eyes Dante and Virgil needed to elude before they could penetrate to the interior of the City of Dis. It should be noted that all of these creatures are called angels by virtue of their political function rather than their specifically angelic nature.
The theme of the angels returns for its own sake and in detailed fashion in cantos 28 and 29 of Paradiso, devoted to describing the Primum Mobile, where, according to the poem’s arrangement, the angels have their proper dwelling. No part of the Comedy risks appearing more naively medieval than this ample dissertation on the nature of separated substances, their number, attributes, hierarchy, and operations, as well as various points of doctrine about which the theology of the time used to argue.
Along with many other things, we discover that, of all the beings who circulate in the heavenly spheres, none is closer to the “the Point on which depend the heavens and the whole of nature”137 and none has received a greater share of love or wisdom.138 Their activity, which is symbolized by the speed of the movement that carries them, is more intense than any other creature’s. Contrary to what the evil angels whom pride pushed to revolt, these angels were modest, “aware that they were ready for intelligence so vast, because of that Good which had made them.”139 This goodness is poured forth in them in diverse ways according to the their degree of natural perfection, without the least resistance interfering. Since their sole desire is to resemble as much as possible the Point around which everything turns, no new object intercepts their gaze, so much that their will is henceforth reaffirmed and fully satisfied. Since they never turned from the sovereign good, they have no need to recall anything to mind. The scholastic theologians, or at least some of them, are mistaken to think they are endowed with memory. 140 Set over the rest of creation, they are forever looking above and attracting to God all that is placed beneath them.141 As to their number, the text points out, not without some equivocation, that it is hidden beneath the “thousands” cited in the Book of Daniel, “who gives no number with precision,” 142 which could mean that it could be either an indeterminable number or a yet unknown determined number. Finally, the Comedy, correcting St. Jerome on this point, assures us that no time elapsed between their creation and that of the other creatures. Had God done things otherwise, they would have been deprived for a certain time of their due perfection, which consists in making the lower spheres move.
“To the modern reader,” as Grandgent thought, “such speculations seem otiose; and we are perhaps justified in believing that they did not appear very important to Dante”143—unless, under pretext of revealing to us the splendors of the angelic world, he had in mind to describe the princes and magistrates who remained faithful to the imperial authority, to which he wanted to restore the temporal power which had been so unjustly taken from it, as the end of the preceding canto pointedly recalls.144 They are the ones, in fact, who maintain the closest relations with the emperor, execute his orders, extend the benefits of his rule to all parts of the universe, and watch over the welfare of the subjects to whom their own lives are inseparably linked. Their number is very great, given that we meet them at all levels of society, the diverse political entities of which are joined through the intermediary of ever larger units, to the first principle of the entire temporal order. They are ever faithful to the supreme authority, live lives that are beyond reproach, and have no need to reestablish ties that have never been sundered. They have their sight constantly set on the supreme authority and never turned to any other object. Above all they do not fall prey to preachers who falsify or abandon the gospel, the same ones that Beatrice denounces in a lengthy digression that is closer to the subject at hand than it may seem.145
The analogy, as we noted, was not new with Dante. It had occupied a considerable place in the literature of the Hellenistic period and could find a warrant in the Bible, which speaks of King David as “like the angel of God to discern good and evil.”146 In the same vein, medieval authors continued to ascribe quasi-divine attributes to the prince and to acclaim him as an image of the “blessed spirits.”147 In his physical being, he is subject as all men are to the laws of mortality, but in his corporate being he surpasses the human order and assumes in some fashion an “angelic character.”148 In the Convivio , when Dante himself deals with the hierarchy of beings, he does so less to affirm the specific distinction among brutes, men, and angels, and more to point out that it is not given to all men to participate in the same measure in divine goodness and that, in each case, their behavior makes them resemble either the beasts or the angels.149 If then the neutral angels and the black angels of Inferno stand for the leaders of communities that are independent of or rebellious against Christendom, it is probable that the angels of Paradiso for their part represent the princes whose loyalty is vowed to the emperor in the new order which the Comedy sketches.
But why would Dante have chosen to speak of them in this precise place? The context will put us on the right track. In the section immediately preceding the two cantos devoted to the angels, Dante and Beatrice cross the heaven of the fixed stars, where they assist at the triumph of Christ and Mary and where Dante undergoes an examination on the theological virtues in the presence of the apostles Peter, James, and John. This long section, which goes from cantos 22 to 27, deals explicitly with the Church, of which the fixed stars were a common symbol in the Middle Ages.150 In canto 30, which follows the treatise on the angels, Beatrice and her disciple reach the Empyrean or heaven of pure light. Their dazzled eyes rest on the vast city in the form of an amphitheater that opens before them and where “God governs with no mediator.”151 Its stalls are already so filled that only a few people have yet to arrive.152 In the midst of them, they gaze upon a throne surmounted by a crown, the place intended for “the soul of noble Henry, he who is, on earth, to be imperial; he shall show Italy the righteous way—but when she is unready.”153
The abrupt appearance of this emblem of worldly sovereignty in the highest heaven has sometimes seemed offensive to scholars. It could be said, as some have said, that since for Dante imperial power is of divine origin, it was normal for it to be represented even there.154 But one would expect it to be accompanied by a corresponding image of ecclesiastical authority, which is no less ordained by God. The image is in fact there, although in a rather off-hand way, since at this moment Beatrice makes her last speech, in which she not only exalts the virtues of the emperor but also chastizes the duplicity of his rival, Pope Clement V, who betrayed him through deceit.155 The scene may seem out of place, but only if one thinks that the Comedy constitutes a reversal of the Monarchy. But it is in the right place once it is seen in the context of the author’s vision of a regenerated Roman empire, over whose worldly destiny presides an emperor installed in his capital and finally freed of all that could impede the exercise of his legitimate authority.156
This is not, moreover, the first time the idea is enunciated in the Comedy. It was already foreshadowed in the cryptic words Virgil spoke to Dante in the first canto of Inferno:
that emperor who reigns above,
since I have been rebellious to His law,
will not allow me entry to His city.
He governs everywhere, but rules from there;
there is His city, His high capital;
o happy those whom he chooses to be there!157
Without a doubt the emperor who “rules” without any intermediary in his own city and who “commands” the rest of the world is the same as the one who appears again in canto 30 of Paradiso, as is also shown in the allusion in both passages to the imperial throne, which is not found anywhere else in the Comedy.
By placing the angels of Paradiso above the Church and below the Emperor, Dante seems to insituate once more that, with regard to the temporal domain at least, they come under the emperor only and answer to him alone. From this point of view, the Comedy changes nothing of the perspective adopted in the Monarchy. In spite of its surface conservatism, it brings us back once again to the idea of a monarchy that is more or less decentralized and emancipated from all ecclesiastical control. No one could deny that there is a sharp difference in tone between the Monarchy and the Comedy, but in light of what has just been said, the two works complement one another much more than contradict each other. The Monarchy boldly proclaims the emperor’s autonomy in the temporal order while speaking of the pope only with extreme deference. The Comedy, on the other hand, seems to reaffirm the supremacy of the ecclesiastical power, but it is very harsh on the medieval papacy and does not spare it any criticism. Everything happens as though by proceeding this way Dante wanted to keep for himself some elbow room to chastise the abuses of the Holy See.
To complete the picture we should add that even in the Monarchy the idea of a universal empire modeled on the papacy is more abstract that it appears on a first reading.158 One does not need to reflect much to recognize that Dante’s monarch goes much beyond anything that has ever been seen or that one could expect to see in reality. Filled with wisdom and virtue, he combines in his person all of the qualities of Plato’s philosopher-king, whom he sometimes brings to mind.159 This was also noted by Guido Vernani, who rightly objected that such perfection is not to be found anywhere.160 What Vemani did not say is that Dante himself no doubt did not think otherwise. His imaginary sovereign remains, on the whole, a distant figure who cannot be identified concretely and whose purpose rather is to serve as an ideal standard for all judgments to be made in the natural order. Only by means of such a fiction was it possible for Dante to give credence to the notion of a supreme political authority that could be a counterweight to the universal authority of the pope and in this way bring about, in the current situation in the West, what no local prince had the power to accomplish by himself.161
See Dante, Letter VI, 2, 6–8, cited in chapter IV n. 11.
By a decree of May 19, 1315, Dante and other exiles were allowed to return to Florence on condition they acknowledge their guilt and pay a fine. See Letter XII, 12, 2–3.
Dante, Letter XII, 4, 9, in A Translation of Dante’s Letters, tran. Charles S. Latham (Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside Press, 1891), 185–186.
Dante, Paradiso 22, 133–138.
See Dante, Paradiso 10, 135; and 15, 146.
See Dante, Paradiso 1, 70.
See Dante, Paradiso 31, 37.
Dante, Inferno 26, 113.
Dante, Inferno 26, 116–117.
Dante, Inferno 26, 97–99.
Dante, Inferno 26, 118–120.
Dante, Inferno 26, 125; see Paradiso 27, 82–83.
Dante, Paradiso 2, 20.
Dante, Inferno 34, 69.
See Monarchy III, 3, 7, in which Dante mentions among his adversaries in the first place the sovereign pontiff, at the time Clement V. Then come those who opposed the Holy Empire out of greed and, lastly, the “decretalists.”
See W. Ullmann, Scholarship and Politics in the Middle Ages: Collected Studies (London: Variorum, 1978), 86; and, on the doctrinal rather than legal character of Boniface’s text, M. D. Chenu, “Dogme et théologie dans la Bulle Unam Sanctam,” Recherches de science religieuse 40 (1952): 307–316.
See Luke 22.38. Boniface interprets Christ’s reply to the apostles, “It is enough!” as meaning that two swords suffice and no other is needed.
Boniface VIII, Unam Sanctam, in The Crisis of Church and State 1050–1300, trans. Brian Tierney (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1956), 188–189.
Boniface’s ideas are in large measure derived from the De ecclesiastica potestate of Giles of Rome. As W. Ullmann notes, this is one of the first times a pope drew on the work of a theologian rather than a jurist in a document of this kind. See Scholarship and Politics in the Middle Ages (London: Variorum, 1978), 79. On the political ideas of Giles of Rome, see Edward A. Goerner, Peter and Caesar: The Catholic Church and Political Authority (New York: Herder and Herder, 1965), 26–57.
Boniface VIII, Unam Sanctam, in Crisis, ed. Tierney, 189.
See Dante, Monarchy III, 1, in On World-Government, trans. Herbert W. Schneider (New York: Macmillan, 1957), 72. All subsequent citations from Monarchy are taken from this translation.
See Dante, Monarchy III, 15, 8.
Dante, Monarchy III, 12, 10–11.
Dante, Monarchy III, 15, 17–18.
“Io non so vedere contradizzioni tra il poema e la Monarchia” (Michele Barbi, “Nuovi problemi della critica dantesca,” Studi danteschi 23 [1938]: 51).
“La conclusione della Monarchia non puo esser considerata, in uno spirito cristiano come Dante, opinione di un momento piuttosto che persuasione ferma e permanente” (M. Barbi, “Nuovi problemi,” 71). Barbi argued against Nardi, who said of the conclusion to the Monarchy:
Ma questa a tutta l’aria, se non proprio di una tardiva giunta di chi rilegge suo sritto di vecchia data, di una scusa di chi, ritomando sui suoi passi, si accorge di averla fatta grossa o, per lo mero, di aver passato il segno, e cerca quindi di remperare il tono troppo assoluto delle sue parole. Senonché la scusa e magra, e non basta ad attenuare la sostanza di quanto era stato affermato. (Bruno Nardi, Saggi di filosofia dantesca [Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1967], 256–257)
Col rivendicare l’autonomia dell’Impero, e per esso della communnità inferiori che a quelllo met-ton capo, di fronte alla Chiesa ..., Dante rivendicava implicitamente l‘autonomia della ragione e della filosofia di fronte alla fede e alla teologia, e giumgeva, così, con un’affermazione arditissima, a quella specie di averroismo politico che doveva essere, invece, il punto di partenza, poco piú d‘un decennio piú tardi, delle dottrine politiche di Marsilio de Padova. La Monarchia, come a ben detto il Gentile, ‘e il primo atto della ribellione alia trascendenza scolastica.’ (Nardi, Saggi, 255–256)
“Nel Poema, infatti, pur ribadendo, ad accentuando, anzi, la tesi politica della missione assegnata all’ Impero. Dante, ristabilisce, fra la ragione e la fede, qual rapporto di subordinazione che è proprio del pensiero medievale e che era implicitamente negato nella Monarchia” (Nardi, Saggi, 256).
Etienne Gilson, Dante the Philosopher, trans. David Moore (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1949), 300.
Gilson, Dante, 299.
Universal order, as conceived by Dante, presupposes and requires perfect and spontaneous harmony between reason and faith, between philosophy and theology, as a guarantee of the harmony which he aims to see established between the Empire and the Church. If, then, as is inevitable, we seek to understand his position by placing it in its historical relationship to others, it seems very difficult to connect it with that of the Averroists, whose doctine was founded on the established fact that, on a certain number of important questions, the teachings of faith and reason are not the same. (Gilson, Dante, 305; see also 214–215)
See Gilson, Dante, 306.
Gilson, Dante, 307; see also 221–222.
See A. P. d‘Entrèves, Dante as a Political Thinker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952). The author’s view of Dante’s itinerary are indicated in the titles of the book’s three chapters: “Civitas,” “Imperium,” and “Ecclesia.”
Mais, de plus haut, ce qui est saissisant dans la conception de l’Empire telle qu‘elle apparaît dans La Divine Comédie, c’est le reflux vers le Moyen Age qu’elle représente. Au cours du XIIIe siècle, les éléments novateurs ont marché dans le sense d’une autonomie de plus en plus marquée de la société civile, de la pensée simplement rationnelle—les deux éléments, comme Dante l‘a lucidement perçu, sont liés-par rapport à l’ordre religieux. La Monarchia est vérita-blement dans la ligne et à l‘avant-garde de ces tendances. A son propos, on a parlé, souvent, de laïcisme. . . . Mais, en revanche, dans La Divine Comédie, l’Empire est au rhythme non pas des temps modemes qui alors se construisent, mais du Moyen Age le plus authentique, antérieur au grand renouveau économique et social aussi bien qu’à la Scolastique. (Jacques Goudet, Dante et la politique [Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1969] 190–191)
En un mot, si la Monarchia et le Convivio, cella-là plus lucidement mais déjà plus fragilement et comme en parte-à-faux, celui-ci plus instinctivement, comportaient quelque chose de progressif et de progressiste, un dépassement des idéaux les plus anciens et une participation aux idées les plus nouvelles, c’est par contre dans le sense d’une récession vers une idéologie ancienne, paléomédiévale, préscolastique que s‘incrit le pensée politique de La Divine Comédie. Que l’on s’en réjouisse où qu’on le deplore, il faut en prendre son parti: La Divine Comédie est une oeuvre réactionnaire ou traditionaliste. . . . Ce qui marque fonçièrement, désormais, La Divine Comédie, en particulier dans sa conception politique, c‘est le Traditionalisme. . . . Le passéisme sentimental, souvent perceptible, ne trompe pas. Dante a choisi de penser sa cite à l’heure du XIIe siècle, [aboutissant dans la Comédie] à une vue politique non seulement en retrait par rapports à ses précédentes conclusions, mais archaïque. (Goudet, Dante, 191, 195, 221–222)
See Dante, Purgatorio 1, 4–6.
Dante, Purgatorio 1, 31–39.
Dante, Purgatorio 1, 23–24.
This is suggested, for example, by Henri Longnon, trans., La Divine comédie (Paris: Garnier, 1966), 576 n. 327; C. Singleton, The Divine Comedy, Purgatorio 2: Commentary (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973), 9; and Scartazzini, La Divina Commedia, Testo critico della Società Dantesca Italiana riveduto col commento Scratazziniano rifatto da Giuseppe Vandelli (Milan: U. Hoepli, 1965), 301.
See Dante, Inferno 4, 34–39; and Purgatorio 7, 34–36.
See Dante, Inferno 18, 142.
Dante, Purgatorio 10, 127–129.
Dante, Purgatorio 13, 70–71.
Dante, Purgatorio 16, 1–6; and 34–36.
Dante, Purgatorio 19, 118–126.
Dante, Purgatorio 18, 97–98.
Dante, Purgatorio 23, 22–23.
Dante, Purgatorio 25, 136–138.
Dante, Purgatorio 23, 71–72.
See Dante, Purgatorio 11, 73–78.
See Dante, Purgatorio 13, 73–74.
Dante, Purgatorio 11, 115–117.
Dante, Purgatorio 11, 98–99.
In the phrase just cited, Dante spells out his own name, as he often does, but this time in reverse: “E forse e naTo chi l’uNo e l’altro cacerA del niDo.” The presence of the cryptogram is signaled by the coincidence of the first and the last letter (or if necessary of the first letter of the last syllable) of the phrase. Of course, all the other letters of the name are found in sequence within the phrase. The anomaly in this instance is that the cryptogram must be read in reverse, as Dante himself indicates in the verses that follow: “Worldly renown is nothing other than a breath of wind that blows now here, now there, and changes name when it has changed its course” (Dante, Purgatorio 11, 100–102).
See Dante, Purgatorio 12, 22–63.
See Dante, Purgatorio 14, 86–87.
Dante, Purgatorio 14, 149.
See Dante, Purgatorio 17, 13–18.
See Dante, Purgatorio 18, 16–75. It should be noted that Virgil insists on man’s natural or spontaneous reaction to the various goods available to him (see 22–27). Freedom means the power to not allow oneself to be seduced by the mere appearance of good (see 34–39, 70–72). It is a seed in the human being that can be attained fully through education. As a good pagan, Virgil avoids speaking of “free will” in the sense understood by the Christian tradition (see 18, 73). See also Monarchy I, 12, 2–4.
See Dante, Purgatorio 23, 55–66.
On the distinction between the philosophical and theological conceptions of sin, Thomas Aquinas observes that “theologians define sin as an act against God; moral philosophers define it as contrary to reason” (Summa Theologiae I-II, q.71, art. 6, ad 5).
See Dante, Purgatorio 9, 115–132. “There he [Dante] beholds, seated on the steps, an angelic guardian who represents Ecclesiastical Authority.” Dante, La Divina Commedia, ed. and annot. C. H. Grandgent, rev. Charles S. Singleton (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), 388. “Cet ange est la figure allégorique du prêtre, portier de la pénitence” (H. Longnon, La Divine Comédie, 586 n. 417).
On this subject see the prudent remarks of Grandgent, La Divina Commedia, 591–593.
See Dante, Purgatorio 31, 22–36. According to Gilson, Dante reproached himself above all for his debauchery with Forese, but also perhaps for certain doctrinal errors, notably the “more or less acute spell of ‘philosophism’” by which he was supposedly affected at the time of the Convivio. See Gilson, Dante, 62–70, esp. 68 n. 1.
See Dante, Purgatorio 28, 121–135; and 33, 127–145.
Boniface VIII, “Unam Sanctam,” in Tierney, Crisis, 188.
See Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957), 485.
See Dante, Monarchy III, 15, 7.
See Dante, Purgatorio 29, 121–132. See Kantorowicz, The King’s, 469. According to Singleton, Dante robed the moral virtues in purple to signify they were infused virtues informed by charity rather than natural virtues, following the teaching of Thomas Aquinas in Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 65, art. 2, ad 2. See Singleton, Purgatorio 2: Commentary, 273.
Dante, Paradiso 7, 36.
Kantorowicz, The King’s, 492, 494.
Dante, Purgatorio 27, 142. For a more Christian interpretation of this idea, see Kantorowicz, The King’s, 491ff.
See Dante, Monarchy III, 4, 12; and 16, 9–10.
See Dante, Purgatorio 1, 71–72.
See Dante, Inferno 1, 16–18.
Dante, Inferno 1, 33.
See Dante, Inferno 1, 44–51, in which the two beasts make their appearance together.
Dante, Inferno 1, 41.
Dante, Inferno 1, 52–54.
Dante, Inferno 1, 91–96.
See Dante, Purgatorio 16, 66–84.
See Dante, Purgatorio 16, 103–105.
See Dante, Purgatorio 16, 94–97; and also Paradiso 27, 129–131.
See Dante, Purgatorio 16, 117; and also Paradiso 3, 120; Convivio IV, 3, 6; and Letter VI, 1, 3.
See Dante, Purgatorio 7, 91–136.
Dante, Purgatorio 6, 76–78.
Dante, Purgatorio 16, 107. By speaking of “two suns,” Dante is clearly reacting against the standard interpretation according to which the sun stands for ecclesiastical power and the moon for temporal power; see Monarchy III, 4.
Dante, Purgatorio 16, 127–129.
See Dante, Purgatorio 16, 100–102; and also Paradiso 18, 188–126; and Goudet, Dante, 185ff.
See Dante, Purgatorio 16, 109–116.
Dante, Purgatorio 16, 58–59.
See Dante, Monarchy I, 5–16. The idea of a universal monarchy is first enunciated, it seems, in Convivio IV, 4–5.
Dante, Inferno 27, 85.
See Dante, Inferno 27, 88–102; and Paradiso 27, 22.
See Dante, Inferno 19, 557; and Paradiso 30, 145–148.
See Dante, Inferno 17, 1–3.
Dante, Inferno 17, 7.
See Virgil, Aeneid VI, 289; and VIII, 202; Ovid, Heroides IX, 91–92; and Horace, Carmina II, 14, 7–8.
Dante’s description also incorporates borrowings from Revelation 9.7–11.
Dante, Inferno 17, 10–15.
For the idea of the papacy afflicting the whole world, see also Dante, Inferno 19, 104; Purgatorio 8, 130–132; 16, 82–129; 20, 8–15. On Dante’s use of the metaphor of stones to designate the papacy, see Inferno 16, 134; 17, 134; 18, 2; 19, 13; etc.
Dante, Inferno 16, 128.
See Dante, Inferno 16, 118–120.
Dante, Inferno 16, 124–126. Boniface is a lie which appears to be a truth; the Comedy , a truth which appears to be a lie. There was no better place to recall the discrepancy that sometimes exists between a gesture and the secret thought that lies behind it.
Dante, Inferno 16, 133–136.
See Boccaccio, Life of Dante, ch. 4.
Dante, Inferno 16, 106–111.
See Grandgent, The Divine Comedy, 142. “S‘il y un symbole, il demeure obscur. Tout ce que l’on sait, c‘est que le monstre qui va se montrer à l’appel de ce signal représente la fraude” (A. Pézard, Oeuvres complètes de Dante [Paris: Gallimard, 1965], 983).
“Dante in questo tempo non era in Firenze, ma era in Roma, mandato poco avanti imbasciadore al Papa, per efferire la concordia e la pace de’ cittadini” (L. Bruni, Della vita, studi e costumi di Dante, ch. 7, Le vite di Dante, ed. G. C. Passerini [Florence: Sansoni, 1917], 215).
See Dante, Inferno 19, 83–87; and Paradiso 30, 142–148. For John XXII, see Paradiso 18, 130–132.
See Dante, Paradiso 12, 134.
See Dante, Inferno 3, 22–69.
See Dante, Inferno 3, 28; and 52–57.
See Dante, Inferno 3, 24–26.
See Dante, Inferno 3, 46–48, 64.
See Dante, Inferno 3, 37–42; and 49–50.
See Dante, Inferno 3, 51.
See Dante, Paradiso 29, 50–54.
“I know your works; you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were cold or hot! So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth” (Revelation 3.15–16).
“Those whom I love, I reprove and chasten; so be zealous and repent” (Revelation 3.19).
See M. Mellone, “Gli angeli neutrali,” in Enciclopedia dantesca, ed. Umberto Bosco, I (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 1970), 270–271.
See John Freccero, “The Neutral Angels,” Romanic Review 51 (1960): 3–14.
See Frecerro, “Dante and the Neutral Angels,” 4–5; and also J. Freccero, “Dante’s ‘per se’ Angel: The Middle Ground in Nature and in Grace,” Studi danteschi 39 (1962): 36–38.
See Freccero, “Neutral Angels,” 12–13.
Freccero, “Neutral Angels,” 13.
“The latter [i.e., the neutral angels] were at the zero point in a scale of action extending from the highest angel to Satan himself” (Freccero, “Neutral Angels,” 11).
Freccero, “Neutral Angels,” 14.
See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 19, art. 1; and I-II, q. 8, art. 1.
See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 19, art. 1; and Summa Contra Gentiles III, 6, 10.
The source of the misunderstanding at the root of Freccero’s thinking is to be found elsewhere, in the more specific problem that arises from the sin of the angel or of the first man. How could either stray from the prescribed path if both were created in a state of perfection? It is not difficult to conceive that. Once fallen, nature is inclined to sin, but that is not the case in the beginning. A good tree does not produce bad fruit, yet this is what happened. We stand here before the impenetrable mystery of moral evil. It is not enough to say that, since angel and man were endowed with free will, it depended on them to make the proper use of their will, since this is precisely what needs to be explained. As long as they kept God in mind, it was impossible for them to sin. Thus there had to be a moment when the angel, who had not yet been raised to the beatific vision, could act without reference to God as his final end. But that is only a matter of simple inattention or acting “without due regard” for the divine will on his part. To speak of rejecting divine grace or renouncing the beatific vision as Freccero does is to say too much, since no act has been posited. The momentary inadvertence that the first moral fault presupposes is obviously not culpable. If it were, it would in turn have to be explained by something else. This inadvertence does not entail any denial, though it makes denial possible by diverting the creature’s sight from its highest good. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 63, art. 1, ad 4; I, q. 49, art. 1, ad 3; I-II, q. 75, art. 1, ad 3. For the history of the interpretations of the episode of the neutral angels, see Franceso Mazzoni, Saggio di un nuovo commento alla ‘Divina Commedia’ (Florence: Sansoni, 1967), 355–390.
On the politics of the Lombard municipalities a short time later, at the time of Frederick II, see Ernst Kantorowicz, Frederick the Second, 1194–1250, trans. E. O. Lorimer (New York: Ungar, 1957), 146–154.
See Kantorowicz, Frederick, 141–142.
See Dante, Paradiso 17, 136–138.
Dante, Inferno 23, 131. See Grandgent, La Divina Commedia, 185. See, however, the reservations on the identification of these black angels expressed by Scartazzini-Vandelli, La Divina Commedia, 173.
Dante, Inferno 8, 83.
Dante, Paradiso 28, 41–43.
See Dante, Paradiso 28, 72.
Dante, Paradiso 29, 58–60.
See Dante, Paradiso 28, 100–102; and 29, 70–81.
See Dante, Paradiso 28, 127–129.
Dante, Paradiso 29, 130–135.
Grandgent, La Divina Commedia, 884.
“That you not be amazed at what I say, consider this: on earth no king holds sway; therefore, the family of humans strays” (Dante, Paradiso 27, 139–141). See also in verses 136–138 the allusion to the cupidity of the Church, to which Dante attributed the victory of the Blacks over the Whites: “Just so, white skin turns black when it is struck by direct light—the lovely daughter of the one who brings us dawn and leaves us evening.”
See Dante, Paradiso 29, 82–126.
II Samuel 14.17.
See Guibert of Tournai, Eruditio regum et principum III, 2, ed. A. dePoorter (Louvain: Institut supérieur de philosophie, 1914), 84.
See Kantorowicz, The King’s, 8, 45, 271–271.
See Dante, Convivio III, 7, 6. On the difficulties this passage presents and the attempts to resolve them, see Guiberteau, Le Banquet (Paris: les Belles Lettres, 1968), 12–16. The Comedy compares the man who does not use his reason to a beast; see, for example, Inferno 26, 119–120; and Paradiso 19, 85.
See Giovanni Busnelli, Il concetto e l’ordine del Paradiso dantesco, Parte I: II concetto (Citta di Castello: S. Lapi, 1911), 118–119.
Dante, Paradiso 30, 122.
See Dante, Paradiso 30, 131–132.
Dante, Paradiso 30, 133–138.
See Singleton, The Divine Comedy, Paradiso 2: Commentary (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975), 505.
See Dante, Paradiso 30, 139–148; see 17, 82. Henry was elected emperor at the urging of Clement V, who later abandoned him for political reasons.
The empyrean of the Comedy bears some resemblance to the Coliseum. In describing it Dante seems to be thinking of Rome, the ideal seat of empire, as suggested by Paradiso 31, 32–40. See Thomas Caldecot Chubb, Dante and His World (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), 583–584. Dante elsewhere laments that the emperor was never able to rule in Rome, which the papacy occupied thanks to the Donation of Constantine, whose authenticity he does not deny but which he always deplored. See Purgatorio 6, 112–114; Inferno 19, 115–117; Paradiso 20, 55–60; and Monarchy II, 11, 8; III, 10–14; 12, 7.
Dante, Inferno 1, 124–129.
On Dante’s universal monarchy as a secularized version of the Church, see E. Gilson, Dante, 165–167 and especially 79: “By a curious paradox, Dante was able to raise up a universal Monarch vis-à-vis to the universal Pope only by imagining this Monarch himself as a kind of Pope.” See also D’Entrèves, Dante as a Political Thinker, 50; Kantorowicz, The King’s, 463 and 484. Dante applies the traditional image of the seamless garment, taken from John 19.23, to the Empire rather than to the Church; see Monarchy I, 16, 3; and III, 10, 6.
See Monarchy III, 11 ,7, in which the perfect man becomes the measure of both the pope and the emperor inasmuch as they are men. See also Monarchy III, 15, 8–10, which presupposes that the imperial power and philosophy are identical or closely linked.
Contra Dante Vernani upholds the position of St. Augustine, that there never was a true empire or emperor among the pagans. See Guido Vernani, De reprobatione Monarchiae, ed. N. Matteini, Il più antico oppositore politico di Dante: Guido Vernani da Rimini (Padua: Il Pensiero medioevale, 1958), 98, 7; 99, 16; and 116, 1.
This also seems to have been the position of Frederick II. See Kantorowicz, Frederick , 519–526.