This modest work does not pretend to be exhaustive. It seeks to do no more than draw attention to a specific problem which contemporary scholarship has at times overlooked or has not always made sufficiently clear: the reaction of certain medieval thinkers whose orthodoxy was suspect to the threats or censures that weighed on them.
Until recently the problem and the terms in which it was formulated were almost completely unknown to us. Modern historians have been much taken up with the innumerable doctrinal quarrels which engaged philosophers and theologians in the Middle Ages. They have also been taken up with the great political debates of the time and in particular with the acute struggles which for centuries pitted the spiritual and temporal powers against one another. They have devoted a great deal of attention to the measures the Church took to uproot heresy or prevent the diffusion of teachings it deemed false and harmful. On the other hand, to date they have shown little interest in the way many philosophers and poet-philosophers were able, without abandoning their position, if not to resolve, at least to attenuate the conflict that opposed them to their religious or social milieu. This oversight on the part of historians is such that the true nature of this conflict remains in large part obscure. It may be nonetheless that we have here one of the strangest and most remarkable contributions of this entire period.
Among the authors we could have examined closely, there is one particularly suited to our inquiry—Dante, first of all because the problem that concerns us attained its greatest breadth in the Christian world during his time, and second because he supplies the most helpful information for understanding it. Some of the conclusions we have come to will seem daring, even implausible, to scholars formed according to different methods or accustomed to more common ways of thinking. The reader can decide for himself what to think, with the help of the information provided. Accordingly, it is incumbent to lay bare the general principles which have inspired our work, even if in broad strokes and in a still provisional fashion.
In the wake of so many and such brilliant studies on the whole of the medieval tradition and its various representative figures, we must wonder whether there could be anything new to discover in this domain. Yet it would be unfair to the authors of the Middle Ages to think that their thought has been exhausted and that for all practical purposes they have no further secrets to yield. If, as happens from time to time, we feel out of place in their presence, it is not just because their works are often subtle and call for interpretation, but above all because we no longer read them as they wished to be read. Under the influence of Hegel it was long held that they had now been assimilated; that our own perspective was much broader; that, coming as we do after them, we knew more than they did on all the fundamental questions; and that, consequently, we understood them better than they understood themselves.1
Our contemporaries show more reserve in this matter. In the wake of the collapse of Hegelian historiography, many among them have renounced the ideal of objectivity or have formed a quite novel conception of this ideal. Our knowledge of authors of the past is neither identical nor superior to their own knowledge, but always “other” than theirs.2 Each period would thus have its own perspective which would allow it to interpret the works it examines in an original or creative fashion. The intellectual content of these works would not be limited to what the author himself consciously inserted: it would already hold all the meanings that countless generations of readers could draw out over time. No more is needed for us to think that we too have the right to return to that content to examine its unmined riches from a point of view that could only be our own.
This is not the kind of reasoning that justifies our inquiry, however. It was premature to assert, in the name of the experience of history, that our understanding of our predecessors is necessarily different from theirs, or that the reader’s thought is fatally confined to a hermeneutic circle from which it can never escape. History teaches us that the interpretation of works of the past often varies from one period to another, but it does not prove in any way that none of the interpretations that have been given or that could be given do not conform substantively to the thought of the author.3 To assert confidently that it does not, one would have to possess that thought already and thus know in advance what in principle we are deemed incapable of knowing. This is why, all things considered, we have found it preferable to hold to the old maxim that does not allow us, pending proof to the contrary, to think ourselves wiser or more clever than the authors we will be dealing with and that assigns us as our first task to attempt to understand them quite simply as they understood themselves.
Although modern hermeneutics has not yet succeeded in demonstrating the impossibility of understanding ancient or medieval authors exactly, it has nonetheless once again brought to light the obstacles besetting such an undertaking, and, at the same time, put the finger on the limits of positivist history as it has been practiced since the nineteenth century. To ensure that his inquiry is scientific, a scholar must not merely agree once and for all to abstract from the prejudices that are forever harming the purity of his gaze, as if it were in his power to forget himself or to efface himself completely before the object of his comtemplation. These prejudices would not be what they are, that is, mere prejudgments, if he had already reflected on them and if he were fully aware of them. Whether he wills it or not, his view of the past will be colored from the start by convictions which, without being necessarily or completely false, are rooted in attachments that are stronger than his inclination for the truth ordinarily is. This is tantamount to recognizing that the objectivity he seeks is never or almost never the initial condition of historical research. It could, however, be its fruit and reward. The modern historian, who has so much to unlearn before he can learn anew, most of the time will have to be content with some measure of approximation.
The order we have followed has imposed itself for reasons that can be understood only from the starting point of the treatment’s specific object, which is to clarify the mode of expression, at one time called “political,” that consists in letting pass beneath a more or less orthodox exterior, thus somewhat deceiving, a teaching or set of teachings whose heterodoxy would otherwise be immediately evident. It would without doubt have been easy to consider Dante’s case alone and to leave aside all that did not deal directly with him, but Dante would risk appearing at once more original and less original than he was in reality. In fact, although he is one the few philosophers of his time who practiced this political mode in the Christian world and did so with more imagination than anyone else, he did not invent it whole cloth. It was already known to the Arab and Jewish philosophers who had ably adapted it to their milieu. They seemed of even greater interest to us, since they constitute the only other notable example of philosophic dissimulation up to that point in time in the Middle Ages. By their mode of expression, if not always by their content, their works bear much greater resemblance to Dante’s than has been observed, whatever historical ties there may have been among them. Accordingly, after a first chapter that seeks to situate the problem in its broadest context, it seemed to us useful to articulate the essentials of their thought on this precise point.
To be sure, Dante’s Comedy presupposes a cultural milieu that is very different from those of his Arab and Jewish precursors. It is hard to imagine that medieval Islam and Judaism could ever have given rise to a work so strongly imbued with Greco-Latin humanism. This originality derives in part from the specific character of Christian civilization, which had long been open to numerous classical influences, traces of which are to be found everywhere in the Middle Ages. But one still had to account for the difficulties which this always precarious alliance between ancient wisdom and Christian faith would once again present. In chapter 3 we deal with this challenge as have so many others, but in rather summary fashion and with the sole aim of showing the extent to which the “political” expression of certain ideas held to be dangerous was absent among philosophers of the thirteenth century.
All of these considerations should bring out the political import of Dante’s work, to which the remaining chapters are devoted. It would be rash to pretend that we have succeeded in piercing the secret of this work which, like all works of genius, remains in the final analysis inexhaustible. Dante himself was careful to avoid giving his thought the dogmatic character to which other times closer to our own have accustomed us. To speak of him as a thinker is to recognize that he sought to do nothing else than to invite the reader to rethink for himself, in ever new circumstances, the problem of a general order with which, without appearing to, he constantly seeks to engage us. The quarrels between Guelphs and Ghibellines now are only of historical interest to us and would not live on in our imagination if they had not found a powerful echo in the Comedy. But this is not the case with the passions that these quarrels bring into play and that go well beyond the narrow confines of the civilization in which they arose.
I would be remiss if I did not take the opportunity to thank the many colleagues or friends who helped me in this inquiry and, in a more particular way, those who had a more immediate part in it: Guy H. Allard, Allan Bloom, Stephen F. Brown, Edouard Jeauneau, Muhsin Mahdi, Betty T. Rahv, and Kathy Yaeger. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Boston College for a grant that enabled me to put the finishing touches on the manuscript.
On the history of this formulation, see O. F. Böllnow, Das Verstehen: Drei Aufsätze Theorie der Geisteswissenschaften (Mainz: Kirchheim, 1949); and for the new meaning it acquires as early as Schleiermacher, see H. G. Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Garrett Barden and John Cumming (London: Sheed and Ward, 1975), 55–63. The phrase appears for the first time, it seems, in Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B370, and Fichte, Werke, VI, 337, but in a still traditional sense. According to this usage, an author is understood better than he understood himself when what remains unclear in him is discerned and resolved. This procedure is not the same as mere interpretation, which seeks to explain an author’s thought as precisely as possible. It goes without saying that his thought could never be transcended or “critiqued” unless one is certain of having understood it well. On the distinction between “interpretation” and “critique” or “explanation,” see Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1952), 143–144. At the highest level, the two procedures are joined, since it is impossible to understand an author completely without at the same time perceiving his limitations.
The decisive influence in this matter is without question Nietzsche’s untimely meditation “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.” For this essay’s influence on Heidegger, see D. C. Hoy, “History, Historicity, and Modern Philosophy,” in M. Murray, ed., Heidegger and Modern Philosophy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1978), 329–353.
On this question, see the exchange between Leo Strauss and Hans Georg Gadamer, “Correspondence Concerning Wahrheit und Methode,” The Independent Journal of Philosophy 2 (1978): 5–12.