15 May 1265 A.D. Dante Alighieri Born
15
May 1265 A.D. Dante
Alighieri Born.
The story is told by The
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy with, as expected, an excellent bibliography.
Wetherbee, Winthrop, "Dante
Alighieri", The Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition), Edward N.
Zalta (ed.), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/dante/
Dante Alighieri
First published Mon Jan 29,
2001; substantive revision Mon Jan 6, 2014
Dante's
engagement with philosophy cannot be studied apart from his vocation as a
writer, in which he sought to raise the level of public discourse by educating
his countrymen and inspiring them to pursue happiness in the contemplative
life. He was one of the
most learned Italian laymen of his day, intimately familiar with Aristotelian
logic and natural philosophy, theology (he had a special affinity for the
thought of Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas), and classical literature.
His writings reflect this in their mingling of philosophical and theological
language, invoking Aristotle and the neo-Platonists side by side with the poet
of the psalms. Like Aquinas, Dante wished to summon his audience to the
practice of philosophical wisdom, though by means of truths embedded in his own
poetry, rather than mysteriously embodied in scripture.
- 1. Life
- 2. Early Poetry
- 3. Philosophical
Training
- 4. The Convivio
- 5. The Monarchia
- 6. The Commedia (The
Divine Comedy)
- Bibliography
- Academic Tools
- Other Internet
Resources
- Related Entries
1. Life
Dante was born in 1265 in Florence. At the age of 9 he met
for the first time the eight-year-old Beatrice Portinari, who became in effect
his Muse, and remained, after her death in 1290, the central inspiration for
his major poems. Between 1285, when he married and began a family, and 1302,
when he was exiled from Florence, he was active in the cultural and civic life
of Florence, served as a soldier and held several political offices.
Since
the early thirteenth century two great factions, the Guelfs and the Ghibellines, had competed
for control of Florence. The Guelfs, with whom Dante was allied, were
identified with Florentine political autonomy, and with the interests of the
Papacy in its long struggle against
the centralizing ambitions of the Hohenstaufen emperors, who were
supported by the Ghibellines. After Charles of Anjou, with the blessing of the
Papacy and strong Guelf support, defeated Hohenstaufen armies at Benevento
(1265/6) and Tagliacozzo (1268), the Guelfs became the dominant force in
Florence. By the end of the century, the Guelfs were themselves riven by
faction, grounded largely in family and economic interests, but determined also
by differing degrees of loyalty to the papacy and to Guelf allegiances.
In
1301, when conflict arose between the “Blacks,” the faction most strongly
committed to Guelf and papal interests, and the more moderate Whites, Pope
Boniface VIII instigated a partisan settlement which allowed the Blacks to
exile the White leadership, of whom Dante was one. He never returned to
Florence, and played no further role in public life, though he remained
passionately interested in Italian politics, and became virtually the prophet
of world empire in the years leading up to the coronation of Henry VII of
Luxemburg as head of the Holy Roman Empire (1312). The development of Dante's
almost messianic sense of the imperial role is hard to trace, but it was
doubtless affected by his bitterness over what he saw as the autocratic and
treacherous conduct of Pope Boniface, and a growing conviction that only a
strong central authority could bring order to Italy.
During
the next twenty years Dante lived in several Italian cities, spending at least
two long periods at the court of Can Grande della Scala, lord of Verona. In
1319 he moved from Verona to Ravenna, where he completed the Paradiso, and where he died in
1321.
Dante's
engagement with philosophy cannot be studied apart from his vocation as a writer—as
a poet whose theme, from first to last is the significance of his love for
Beatrice, but also as an intellectual strongly committed to raising the level
of public discourse. After his banishment he addressed himself to Italians
generally, and devoted much of his long exile to transmitting the riches of
ancient thought and learning, as these informed contemporary scholastic
culture, to an increasingly sophisticated lay readership in their own
vernacular.
This project was Dante's contribution
to a long-standing Italian cultural tradition. His reading in philosophy began,
he tells us, with Cicero and Boethius, whose writings are in large part the
record of their dedication to the task of establishing a Latinate intellectual
culture in Italy.
The Convivio and the
De vulgari eloquentia
preserve also the somewhat idealized memory of the Neapolitan court of
Frederick II of Sicily (1195–1250) and his son Manfred (1232–66), intellectuals
in their own right as well as patrons of poets and philosophers, whom Dante
viewed as having revived the ancient tradition of the statesman-philosopher
[Van Cleve, 299-332; Morpurgo]. Dante himself probably studied under Brunetto
Latini (1220–94), whose encyclopedic Livres
dou Tresor (1262–66), written while Brunetto was a political exile
in France, provided vernacular readers with a compendium of the Liberal Arts
and a digest of Aristotelian ethical and political thought [Meier; Imbach
(1993), 37–47; Davis (1984), 166–97].
But
the fullest medieval embodiment of Dante's ideal is his own writings. In them
we see for the first time a powerful thinker, solidly grounded in Aristotle,
patristic theology, and thirteenth-century scholastic debate, bringing these
resources directly to bear on educating his countrymen and inspiring them to
pursue the happiness that rewards the philosopher.
2. Early Poetry
Though
he evidently did not begin serious study of philosophy until his mid-twenties,
Dante had already been intellectually challenged by the work of a remarkable
group of poets, practitioners of what he would later recall as the dolce stil novo, in whose
hands a lyric poetry modelled on the canso
of the Provençal troubadours became a vehicle for serious enquiry into the
nature of love and human psychology. A generation earlier Guido Guinizzelli
(1230–1276) had puzzled contemporaries with poems treating love in terms of the
technicalities of medicine and the cosmology of the schools, while celebrating
in quasi-mystical language his lady's power to elevate the spirit of her
poet-lover:
Splende in la intelligenzïa del
cielo
Deo crïator, più che ‘n nostri occhi ‘l sole;
ella intende suo fattor oltra ‘l cielo,
e ‘l ciel volgiando, a lui obedir tole;
. . .
così dar dovria, al vero,
la bella donna, poi che ‘n gli occhi splende
del suo gentil, talento,
chi mai da lei obedir non si disprende.
Deo crïator, più che ‘n nostri occhi ‘l sole;
ella intende suo fattor oltra ‘l cielo,
e ‘l ciel volgiando, a lui obedir tole;
. . .
così dar dovria, al vero,
la bella donna, poi che ‘n gli occhi splende
del suo gentil, talento,
chi mai da lei obedir non si disprende.
[Al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore,
41–44, 47–50]
Translation:
God the creator shines in the intelligence of heaven more than the sun in our eyes, and this [intelligence] understands her maker beyond the universe. Making the heavens turn, she submits to obey Him . . . So truly should the beautiful lady, when she shines on the eyes of her gentle [lover], impart the desire that his obedience to her never fail.
God the creator shines in the intelligence of heaven more than the sun in our eyes, and this [intelligence] understands her maker beyond the universe. Making the heavens turn, she submits to obey Him . . . So truly should the beautiful lady, when she shines on the eyes of her gentle [lover], impart the desire that his obedience to her never fail.
The
Lady, exerting on her lover a power derived from the participation of her
understanding in the divine, plays the role of the celestial intelligenze, who transmit the
influence of the First Mover to the universe at large. The poet is thus caught
up in a circular process through which his understanding, like theirs, is drawn
toward the divine as manifested in the lady's divinely inspired radiance. For
Guinizelli this exploitation of the idea of celestial hierarchy is perhaps only
a daring poetic conceit. For Dante it will become a means to the articulation
of his deepest intuitions.
Guido
Cavalcanti, Dante's older contemporary and the single strongest influence on
his early poetry, was renowned not only as a poet, but for his knowledge of
natural philosophy. His great canzone,
“Donna mi prega,”
which became the subject of learned Latin commentaries, deals with ideas
commonly associated with the “radical
Aristotelianism” or “Averroism” of his day. The purpose of this
astonishing poem is to describe in precise philosophical terms (“naturale dimostramento”) the
experience of love.
For
Guido there is an absolute cleavage between the sensory and intellectual
aspects of the response to a loved object. Once the phantasma of the object
becomes an abstracted form in the possible intellect, it is wholly insulated
from the diletto of
the anima sensitiva
(21–28). This has seemed to modern commentators to imply an Averroist view of
the intellect as a separate, universal entity [Corti (1983), 3–37], and the
lines which follow (30–56), where the vertú
of the sensitive soul displaces reason and “assumes its function,” presenting
to the will an object whose desirability threatens a fatal disorientation,
sustain this impression. Love is still the aristocratic vocation of the
troubadours, and Guido acknowledges that noble spirits are aroused by it to
prove their merit. But they work in darkness, for the force that moves them
obscures the light of intellectual contemplation (57–68). The canzone is so exclusively an
exercise in “natural philosophy,” so centered on biological necessity, that
consciousness itself is wholly excluded from consideration. The ethical
dimension of love consists in the challenge its blind urgency presents to
reason. “Nobility” is a matter of self-control, and the precarious happiness
that such love affords has no ideal dimension.
Guido's
influence on Dante was profound. But the Vita
nuova, an anthology of Dante's early poetry interspersed with a
narrative combining commentary on his poetic development with the history of
his devotion to Beatrice during her earthly life, reveals a growing realization
that his own conception of poetry and love differ fundamentally from Guido's
[Ardizzone]. Like Guido Dante accepted love as being, for better or worse,
fundamental to the noble life, and his early lyrics express a sense like
Guido's of the internally divisive power of desire. But as the Vita nuova unfolds there is a
gradual shift of focus: having failed to win his lady's favor by dramatizing
his own sufferings, Dante resolves to devote his poetry henceforth wholly to
praise of her [VN, c. 18.4–6]. The result of this new resolve is a canzone, “Donne ch'avete intelletto d'amore”
(“Ladies who have intelligence of love”), which returns to the source of his
inspiration and Guido's in the poetry of Guinizelli, and makes a wholly new
departure. For Guido, the “heavenly” allure of the lady is a deception
perpetrated by the senses, all the more dangerous as the lover's gentilezza responds more fully
to the attraction of her beauty and subjects itself to the “fierce accident” of
passion. Dante, too, sees that the experience his early, tormented lyrics
depict is “an accident occurring in a substance” [VN 25.1–2], but the “fiery
spirits of love” which strike the eyes of those on whom his lady bestows her
greeting are not just goads to desire:
E quando trova alcun che degno
sia
di veder lei. quei prova sua vertute,
ché li avvien, ciò che li dona, in salute,
e sì l'umilia ch'ogni offesa oblia.
Ancor l'ha Dio per maggior grazia dato
che non pò mal finir chi l'ha parlato.
di veder lei. quei prova sua vertute,
ché li avvien, ciò che li dona, in salute,
e sì l'umilia ch'ogni offesa oblia.
Ancor l'ha Dio per maggior grazia dato
che non pò mal finir chi l'ha parlato.
[Donne ch'avete intelletto d'amore,
37–42, VN 19.10]
Translation:
And when she finds one who is worthy to behold her, he feels her power, for what she bestows on him is restorative, and humbles him, so that he forgets any injury. Moreover God has made the power of her grace even greater, for no one who has spoken with her can come to a bad end.
And when she finds one who is worthy to behold her, he feels her power, for what she bestows on him is restorative, and humbles him, so that he forgets any injury. Moreover God has made the power of her grace even greater, for no one who has spoken with her can come to a bad end.
Pursuit
of the lady's favor has become a test, not just of nobility, but of virtue. Her
beauty is perfect, the fullest possible exampling of nature's power to reveal
God's creative love. The climax of the Vita
nuova occurs when Dante encounters Guido's lady, Giovanna, followed
by his own Beatrice, “one marvel,” as he says, “following the other” [VN 24.8].
At once he realizes that Giovanna's beauty, like the prophecy of the biblical
Giovanni, is a precursor, heralding the “true light” of Beatrice, just as
Guido's poetry of earthly love is finally a foil to his own celebration of the
transcendent love revealed to him in Beatrice.
3. Philosophical Training
The
philosophical content of the Vita
nuova is minimal, a skeletal version of contemporary faculty
psychology and a few brief references to metaphysics. But while finding his
orientation as a poet Dante was also engaged in the study of philosophy, and spent “some thirty months”
frequenting “the schools of the religious orders and the disputations of the
philosophers” [Conv.
2.12.7]. This period must have included study in the Dominican school at Santa
Maria Novella, where Dante could have learned logic and natural philosophy, and
heard Fra Remigio de'Girolami (d. 1319) expound a theology based on Thomas and
Aristotle [Panella; Davis (1984), 198–223]. Remigio, like Dante, read widely in
classical literature of all sorts, and he was fond of drawing lessons in
political and ethical conduct from his reading. For both Remigio and Dante,
moreover, Thomas was primarily the author of the Summa contra Gentiles and the commentary on the Ethics, concerned, like
Aristotle himself, to demonstrate the capacities of human reason as a means to
truth.
Dante
cites a dozen works of Aristotle, apparently at first hand, and shows a
particularly intimate knowledge of the Ethics,
largely derived, no doubt, from Thomas [Minio-Paluello]. But his
Aristotelianism was nourished by other sources as well. Bruno Nardi has argued
persuasively that his attitude toward the study of philosophy also owes a great
deal to the more eclectic
Albert the Great [Nardi (1967); 63–72; (1992), 28–29; Vasoli (1995b);
Gilson (2004)]. In Albert he encountered a wide-ranging encyclopedism which
included original work, experimental and theoretical, in natural science, and
treated Aristotelian natural philosophy and psychology in the light of a
neo-Platonism derived from Arabic philosophers and such Greco-Arab sources as
the Liber de Causis,
as well as the Christian neo-Platonist tradition of the Pseudo-Dionysius.
Albert aimed to discover Aristotle's own meaning, with the help of Greek and
Arab commentators who led him into disagreement with other Latini, including at certain
points his pupil Thomas, and he asserts more than once that philosophy and
theology are separate spheres of knowledge. It was doubtless this willingness
to pursue philosophy on its own terms that appealed to Dante, who also sought
to distinguish philosophical and religious knowledge without simply subordinating
the former to the latter.
Albert's
view of the procession of the universe from the “substantial light” of the
divine intellect through the operation of a hierarchy of lesser intelligences
is clearly perceptible in Dante's treatment of the cosmic intelligenze or sostanze separate in the Convivio [Conv. 2.4–5; Nardi (1992),
47–62]. It shows up again in his treatment of the growth of the human embryo,
which seems to imply, not a sequence of animations by nutritive, sensitive and
intellective powers, as for Thomas, but the continuous operation of a single virtus formativa, whose
operation Albert compares to that of the prima
intelligentia in the soul [De
intellectu & intelligibili 2.2], and which is responsible not
only for the development of the human creature but for effecting its union with
an essentially external anima
intellectiva [Boyde (1981) 270–79; Nardi (1960), 9–68; (1967),
67–70].
Albert
is thus a likely conduit for seemingly Averroist elements in Dante's thought.
He regards intellectual activity as the operation of the intellectus agens, through
which the human soul is illumined by the divine Intelligence. Each soul
possesses its own intellect, but this intellect is a “reflection” (resultatio) of the light of
the primal mind, which thus, in effect, becomes itself the true agent
intellect. Albert explicitly rejects the Averroist view of the active intellect
as itself a celestial intelligence, a single, separate substance which
actualizes in the passive intellect phantasms supplied by individual human
minds. But he argues that only an intellect universal in nature can produce an
understanding of universal forms. The intellect and the soul of which it is a
function thus partake of the character of the separate intelligences. Soul is
not the actualizing essence of the human creature, as in Thomas, but is related
to body through the mediation of its organic faculties. In itself, through its
agent intellect, the soul is drawn to contemplate the intelligences which order
the universe at large, is informed by them with the transcendent knowledge they
manifest, and finally “stands” in the divine intellect. In this way certain men
are enabled to fulfil the innate human desire for understanding and attain a
natural beatitude, “substantiated and formed in the divine being” [Albert, De intellectu & intelligibili
2.2–12; Nardi (1960), 145–50].
That
this fulfillment is attained through natural understanding, with no recourse to
the theology of grace and revelation, marks a crucial difference between Albert
and Thomas, who devotes several chapters of the Summa contra gentiles to a forceful refutation of
the notion that final happiness as defined by Aristotle is possible in this
life [SCG 3.37–48]. For Thomas the desire to know is one and the same at all
levels, and philosophy, seeking the causes of things, is ultimately “ordered
entirely to the knowing of God” [SCG 3.25.9] Dante's own position on this
question is difficult to define precisely. The poet of the Paradiso is at one with Thomas
on the value of philosophy as consisting finally in its power to prepare the
mind for faith [Par.
4.118–32; 29.13–45], but he shares Albert's fascination with natural
understanding, and in earlier writings his willingness to grant philosophy a
“beatitude” of its own hints at a latent dualism in his thought [Foster (1965),
51–71; (1977), 193–208; de Libera (1991), 333–36]. How far this reflects his
responsiveness to neo-Platonism as mediated by Albert or in such works as the Liber de causis is hard to
determine. Nardi, who argued successfully for seeing Dante as an eclectic
thinker [Diomedi (2005), 1–23], stressed the importance of the Liber de Causis. But recent
studies have argued that Nardi, in his zeal to free Dante from the constraints
of the orthodox Thomism that scholars like Pierre Mandonnet and Giovanni
Busnelli claimed to find in him [Maierù, 128-35; Stabile (2007), 359-70],
exaggerates the neo-Platonist strain in his thinking [Iannucci (1997); Moevs,
17–35].
Dante
was surely aware also of a “radical” Aristotelianism centered in Bologna, where
masters influenced by Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia were affirming the
autonomy of human reason and its capacity to attain happiness through its own
powers [Corti (1981), 9–31; Vanni Rovighi]. But these thinkers, too, were following
paths first taken by Albert, and his influence, together with that of Thomas,
is sufficient to account for the distinctive features of Dante's use of
philosophy [Imbach (1996b), 399–413]. Whatever the precise channels, Dante was unquestionably
one of the most learned Italian laymen of his day, aware of the issues
contested in the schools, and at home with the modes of discourse in which they
were discussed.
But
there is also an old-fashioned strain in Dante's thinking, an idealistic,
Platonizing view of the mental universe which recalls not just the
neo-Platonized Aristotle of the Liber
de causis, but the more primitive encyclopedism of twelfth- century
thinkers like Bernardus Silvestris and Alan of Lille, poet-philosophers whose
world view, inherited from late-antique neo-Platonism, was defined by the
Liberal Arts and the cosmology of Plato's Timaeus
[Vasoli (1995a, 2008); , 83–102; Garin, 64–70]; Stabile, 173-93]. In Bernardus'
Cosmographia and
Alan's Anticlaudianus,
the unfolding of the secrets of nature by the enquiring mind generates an
allegory of intellectual pilgrimage toward truth. Dante's experience of
philosophy, though defined in more dynamic and sophisticated terms, is a
version of the same journey. The experience of love becomes a means to self-realization,
and an awareness of the hierarchy of forces operative in the universe at large,
which makes possible an ascensus
mentis ad sapientiam, to that “amoroso uso della sapienza” which
enables the human mind to participate in the divine.
4. The Convivio
The record of Dante's thirty months of
study, and the fullest expression of his philosophical thought, is the Convivio, in which commentary
on a series of his own canzoni
is the occasion for the expression of a range of ideas on ethics, politics, and
metaphysics, as well as for extended discussion of philosophy itself. Dante
describes the genesis of his love of philosophy, and reflects on the ability of
philosophical understanding to mediate religious truth, tracing the desire for
knowledge from its origin as an inherent trait of human nature to the point at
which the love of wisdom expresses itself directly as love of God.
Philosophy
itself is the “love of Wisdom,” and Dante's central metaphor for representing
it is the poetic celebration of a noble lady, a donna gentile, an act which, like Guinizelli, he
sees as involving the influence of cosmic powers. His poetry, “materiated” out
of love and virtue [Conv.
1.1.14] comes into being because his nature is responsive to the influence of
the “movers” of the universe, the intelligences, whose loving understanding
determines “the most noble form of heaven” as they in turn respond to “the love
of the Holy Spirit” [2.5.13, 18]. Their cosmic activity is a continual
translation of understanding into love and natural process, and it is this
which causes Dante to sing [2, Canzone, 1–9]:
Voi che ‘ntendendo il terzo ciel
movete,
udite il ragionar ch'è nel mio core,
ch'io nol so dire altrui, sì mi par novo.
El ciel che segue lo vostro valore,
gentili creature che voi sete,
mi tragge ne lo stato ov'io mi trovo.
Onde ‘l parlar de la vita ch'io provo,
par che si drizzi degnamente a vui:
però vi priego che lo mi ‘ntendiate.
udite il ragionar ch'è nel mio core,
ch'io nol so dire altrui, sì mi par novo.
El ciel che segue lo vostro valore,
gentili creature che voi sete,
mi tragge ne lo stato ov'io mi trovo.
Onde ‘l parlar de la vita ch'io provo,
par che si drizzi degnamente a vui:
però vi priego che lo mi ‘ntendiate.
Translation:
You who by understanding move the third heaven, hear the discourse which is in my heart, and which seems so strange to me that I know not how to say it to others. The heaven which responds to your power, noble creatures that you are, draws me into the state in which I find myself, and so it seems that speech about the life I am experiencing is most appropriately addresses to you. Therefore I pray that you will understand me.
You who by understanding move the third heaven, hear the discourse which is in my heart, and which seems so strange to me that I know not how to say it to others. The heaven which responds to your power, noble creatures that you are, draws me into the state in which I find myself, and so it seems that speech about the life I am experiencing is most appropriately addresses to you. Therefore I pray that you will understand me.
The
intellective power or intendimento
of the intelligences moves Dante to an utterance which only these same powers
can fully understand. Thus there is a continuum, a process of circulazione which begins in
the mind of God and descends through the work of the intelligenze to draw Dante's
nature into that praise of the donna
gentile which constitutes the fulfillment of his own nature, the
highest expression of which his desire and intellect are capable [2.5.15, 18;
2.6.5, Diomedi (1999)].
Of
the four books or trattati
of the Convivio the
first is largely a defense of Dante's decision to write his prose commentaries,
as well as the poems they expound, in the Tuscan vernacular rather than in
Latin. The second book provides a delineation of the Ptolemaic universe which
the intelligenze
govern, capped by a description of the Empyrean Heaven [2.3.8–11]:
. . . outside all of these
[spheres, heavens] the Catholics place the Empyrean heaven, which is to say,
“the heaven of flame,” or “luminous heaven”; and they hold it to be motionless
because it has in itself, with respect to each of its parts, that which its
matter desires. This is why the Primum Mobile has the swiftest movement; for
because of the most fervent desire that each part of the ninth heaven has to be
conjoined with every part of that divinest, tranquil heaven, to which it is
contiguous, it revolves beneath it with such desire that its velocity is almost
incomprehensible. Stillness and peace are the qualities of the place of that
Supreme Deity which alone completely beholds itself. This is the place of the
blessed spirits, according to the will of the Holy Church, which cannot lie.
Aristotle, to anyone who rightly understands him, seems to hold the same
opinion in the first book of Heaven
and the World [i.e. De
caelo]. This is the supreme edifice of the universe in which all
the world is enclosed and beyond which there is nothing; it is not itself in
space but was formed solely in the Primal Mind, which the Greeks call Protonoe.
This is that magnificence of which the Psalmist spoke when he says to God:
“Your magnificence is exaltled above the heavens.”
The
role of the Empyrean in thirteenth-century thought is equivocal. Some thinkers
attempt to explain it scientifically, as a comprehensive cosmic principle,
while for Thomas and Albert any such realm must be spiritual in nature, and can
bear no natural relation to the astronomical universe, though both at times
seem to grant it a certain influence on the natural order [Nardi (1967),
196–214; Vasoli (1995a), 94–102]. Dante's account reflects these uncertainties.
He begins by citing “the Catholics,” or orthodox belief, as authority for his
account of this “abode of the supreme deity,” but then goes on to treat the
Empyrean as a created thing, “formed in the Primal Mind,” and as the motionless
cause of motion in the physical universe. If God dwells in this place, the
Empyrean resides equally in Him, and the universe at large is encompassed,
causally and locally, by the Empyrean. Dante deploys the Aristotelian physics
of desire to explain the relationship of the Empyrean to the lesser heavens, yet
it is at the same time beyond space, a wholly spiritual realm where blessed
spirits participate in the divine mind. Dante seems to emphasize this double
status by mingling theological and philosophical language, and invoking
Aristotle and the neo-Platonists side by side with the poet of the Psalms. In
the Paradiso the
problems raised here will be implicitly resolved by a brilliant recourse to the
“metaphysics of light”; when Dante and Beatrice, emerging from the “greatest
body,” the crystalline sphere or Primum Mobile, pass on “al ciel ch'è pura luce, / Luce
intellettual piena d'amore” [Par.
30.39–40], we know that we are at the precise point at which the bonum diffusivum sui that is
God's love transforms itself to cosmic energy, “the love that moves the sun and
the other stars.” But poetry is perhaps the only means of defining this
threshold [Bonaventure, Sent.
2. d. 2, a. 2, q. 1, c. 4; Thomas, Quodl.
6, q. 11, a. unicus 19].
Similar
ambiguities appear in Dante's discussion of the intelligenze themselves. Since in governing the
several heavens the intelligences engage in a kind of civil life, they must
enjoy an active as well as a contemplative existence. But the latter is of a
higher order than the former, and no single intelligence can partake of both.
Influenced perhaps by Thomas's commentary, Dante imputes to Aristotle in the Ethics the view that such
divine beings must know only a contemplative life [2.4.13; cp. Aristotle, NE
10.8, 1178b; Thomas, Exp. Eth.
10, lect. 12, 2125]. Dante's attempt to resolve the issue is oddly
unpersuasive. He argues that the circular motion of the heavens, by which the
world is governed, is really a function of the contemplative activity of the
intelligences [2.4.13]. Here, as in the case of the Empyrean which they inhabit,
we can see Aristotle's celestial movers undergoing a neo-Platonizing
transformation, but Dante ends this stage of his discussion by noting that the
truth concerning the Intelligences can not be fully grasped by our earthly
understanding [2.4.16–17].
The
second book concludes with an extended allegory in which the concentric
“heavens” or planetary spheres are identified with the seven Liberal Arts, the
“starry sphere” with physics and metaphysics, the Primum mobile with moral philosophy, and the
Empyrean beyond with theology. This synthesis of the natural and the
intellectual universe expresses an ideal of education which harks back to the
late-antique sources of twelfth-century Platonism, but which Dante has imbued
with new life. His emphasis on the ordering function of moral wisdom, and on
the happiness attainable through intellectual contemplation, reflects an
engagement with the philosophical tradition, and a commitment to philosophy as
such, which belong to the later thirteenth century. The final chapter of Book
Two affirms the beauty that consists in seeing the causes of those “wonders”
which, as the opening of the Metaphysics
declares, draw us to philosophy.
The
third book is perhaps the most important for the student of Dante's knowledge
and use of philosophy. Its
central theme is praise of philosophy's power, as “l'amoroso uso della
sapienza,” “the loving use of wisdom,” to impart the highest happiness to those
who love her, perfecting their natures and drawing them close to God, of whose
majesty and wisdom her beauty is the expression. It is largely a
meditation on love, understood as Dante's response, intellectual, poetic and
psychological, to his enlightenment at the hands of the beautiful lady whom he
celebrates as Philosophy.
Early
in the third book Dante cites the Liber
de Causis: Every “substantial form” proceeds from the first cause,
God, and participates in His divine nature according to its nobility [3.2.4–7;
LC 1.1]. The human soul, noblest of all created forms, loves all things to the
degree that they manifest the divine goodness, but desires above all to be
united with God. Philosophy is the expression of this desire: Its “form” is “an
almost divine love of knowledge” [3.11.13] which leads to “the spiritual
uniting of the soul with what it loves” [3.2.3]. It is through philosophy that
humanity perfects its “truly human or, better, angelic nature, that is to say
the rational [nature]” [3.3.11], discovering in itself “that distinguished and
most precious part which is deity” and “participating in the divine nature as
an everlasting intelligence” [3.2.14, 19]. As such it mirrors the nobility,
wisdom and love of the divine essence and its “loving use of wisdom” becomes by
participation “marriage” with God [3.12.11–14].
All
of this may appear sheer fantasy, but we should remember that the aim of
philosophy as the Convivio
pursues it is to attain,
through natural reason, the greatest happiness of which we are capable in our
earthly state. Such felicity is of course circumscribed by our
mortality, and the Dante who can celebrate philosophical understanding as a
quasi-mystical union with God knows at the same time that true union is granted
only through grace, to a soul made receptive by the infusion of virtues which
wholly transcend the workings of rational, natural virtue. For as Thomas says,
the rational virtues “are dispositions by which man is fittingly disposed with
reference to the nature by which he is a man. But the infused virtues dispose
man in a higher way, and in view of a higher end; and also, it follows, with
reference to some higher nature” [ST 1.2.110.3r]. This “higher nature” is of
course the divine nature “through participation in which we are reborn in
grace.”
Dante
acknowledges Thomas's distinction when he speaks of the soul after death as
“more than human” [2.8.6], and asserts that to perceive God is not possible for
our nature [3.15.10]. For both Dante and Thomas humanness is defined by the
conjoining of soul and body, and human knowledge depends on the evidence of the
senses [Foster (1965), 69–71; Thomas, ST 1.89a1]. Aristotle had similarly
argued that a life of pure contemplation is beyond our strictly human capacity;
we can live in this way only to the extent that we have in us “something
divine” [NE 10.7, 1177b]. Thomas argues more subtly that the modus essendi of the soul
joined to the body differs from that of the soul in separation; though they are
the same in nature, the separated soul understands, not by means of sensory
images, but “through species which it participates in by virtue of the divine
light” [ST 1.89.1r]. In the meantime, as Dante acknowledges, there are truths
which we can apprehend only as if in a dream, “come sognando,” [Conv. 3.15.6; Nardi (1944), 81–90], and our
desire for perfect understanding is necessarily limited, “proportionate to the
wisdom which can be acquired here”; for to desire what is beyond the capacity
of our intellectual nature would be ethically and rationally incoherent, a
desire for imperfection rather than perfection of understanding [3.15.8–10].
But
the Convivio
continually strains against these limits. For Dante, first and foremost a poet
of love, the experience of acquiring philosophical understanding has an
important psychological component. By enabling us to analyze the processes of
perception, philosophy brings us into contact with the true nature of things,
and for Dante, as Kenelm Foster observes, the slightest such contact could have
a metaphysical value [Foster (1965), 59–60]: “It did not in one sense matter to
Dante what the particular object of his knowing might be, since the joy of
knowing it was already a foretaste of all conceivable knowledge and all joy;
and this precisely because, in knowing, the mind seized truth. . . . once
intelligence, the truth-faculty, had tasted truth as such, that is, its own
correspondence with reality, it could not help desiring truth whole and entire,
that is, its correspondence with all reality.” At this point knowledge and the
joy of possessing it combine to prepare the ground for faith. By explaining
phenomena which without her guidance would merely astonish us, philosophy
inspires us to believe “that every miracle can be perceived by a superior intellect
to have a reasonable cause” [3.14.14]:
Our
good faith has its origin in this, from which comes the hope that longs for
things foreseen; and from this springs the activity of charity. By these three
virtues we ascend to philosophize in that celestial Athens where Stoics and
Peripatetics and Epicureans, by the light of eternal truth, join ranks in a
single harmonious will.
Philosophy
thus conceived can still be regarded as the handmaid of theology, but as Dante
develops his philosophical ideal metaphorically in terms of the beauty of the
Donna Gentile, it assumes a religious value of its own. Since the wisdom she
embodies is the consummation of human self-realization, the Donna Gentile
resides in the divine mind as “the intentional exemplar of the human essence”
[3.6.6]. In desiring her we desire our own perfection, for she is “as supremely
perfect as the human essence can be.” When at this point Dante adds a reminder
that nothing in our human experience can fully satisfy this desire, he seems to
be acknowledging that what Thomas' Ethics
commentary calls “the ultimate end of desire's natural inclination” is
unattainable in this life, since it would require an understanding more
complete than any human being can possess [Thomas, Exp. Eth. 1, lect. 9, 107; SCG 3.48.2].
But
having provided this caution, Dante seems to ignore it, as if unable to resist
the conviction that philosophy satisfies our desire in a manner proper to
itself. Everything naturally desires its own perfection, and for human beings
this is “the perfection of reason” [3.15.3–4; cp. Thomas, Exp. Eth. 9, lect. 9, 1872].
But philosophy, as embodied in the Donna Gentile, is not just the consummation
of natural understanding. For Dante, as for Aristotle, the human intellect as
such is somehow more than human, and he is at times similarly unclear on the
question of whether human beings can attain happiness through the exercise of
virtue, and to what extent it is a gift of the gods [Foster (1977), 198–201].
Repeatedly he draws a distinction between merely human happiness and that
attainable through grace, only to seemingly disregard it in subsequent
discussion. Thus in the final chapter of the third treatise he acknowledges the
“strong misgivings” that one might have about the happiness attainable through
philosophy. Since certain things—God, eternity, and primal matter are
named—exceed the capacity of our intellect, our natural desire to know must
remain unfulfilled in this life [3.15.7]. Dante answers this by affirming, as
noted above, that the natural desire for perfection is always proportionate to
our capacity to attain it; for to desire the unattainable would be to desire
our imperfection [3.15.8–11]. Human happiness, then, consists in the attainment
of Aristotle's “human good,” through the exercise of the virtues. This is what
Dante calls “l'umana operazione,”
and its end is the highest that human beings can attain through their own
powers.
Yet
philosophy offers the promise of more. The same chapter is climaxed by the
vision of Wisdom as “the mother of all things,” the origin of all motion and
order in the created universe, guiding the quest of human wisdom by the light
of the divine intellect. When the human mind is fully informed by philosophy,
it would appear, it becomes virtually one of the intelligenze, who know both what is above them
and what is below, God as cause and the created universe as effect [3.6.4–6].
Thus Dante can speak of our rational nature as our “truly human, or, to speak
more exactly, our angelic nature” [3.3.11], as if it enjoyed a more or less
mystical existence of a higher order as well as that of the “merely” human
nature that pursues the active life of virtue [Moevs, 83–86].
The
Liber de causis says
that each cause infuses into its effect the goodness it receives from its own
cause, or, in the case of the soul, from God [Conv. 3.6.11; LC 4.48]. When in gazing on the
body of the Donna Gentile we behold maravigliose
cose, we are perceiving the effect of a cause which is ultimately
God, and thus, Dante asserts [3.6.12–13]:
it
is evident that her form (that is, her soul), which directs the body as its
proper cause, miraculously receives the goodness of God's grace. Thus outward
appearance provides proof that this lady has been endowed and ennobled by God
beyond what is due to our nature . . .
Thus
in effect the Donna Gentile is the perfection we desire. Through her we
experience the divine goodness, by an outflowing, a discorrimento which Dante glosses with a further
reference to the Liber de Causis
[3.7.2; LC 20.157], in terms of the hierarchical emanation of the divine
goodness. In the quasi-continuous series of gradations that descends from angel
to brute animal, there is no intervening grade between man and angel, so that
some human beings are so noble as to be nothing less than angels [Aristotle, NE
7.1, 1145a]. Such is the Donna Gentile; she receives divine virtue just as the
angels do [3.7.7]. She is a thing visibilmente
miraculosa, ordained from eternity by God in testimonio de la fede for us
[3.7.16–17; Foster (1965), 56]. Philosophy has “wisdom for her subject matter
and love for her form” [3.14.1], and God, by instilling his radiance in her,
“reduces” that love as nearly as possible to his own similitude [3.14.3; cp.
Thomas, SCG 1.91].
Philosophy
has clearly become far more than the means whereby human nature achieves
self-realization, though this ideal continues to provide a framework for
Dante's praise of her. She has assumed the status of Wisdom, sapientia, the divine mind as
expressed in the order and harmony of creation. Her beauty can only be
described in terms of its effects, like the separate substances and God
Himself. The true philosopher “loves every part of wisdom, and wisdom every
part of the philosopher, since she draws him to herself in full measure” [3.11.12].
Here we may recall Dante's account of how the swift motion of the Primum Mobile
expresses its desire for total participation in the divinity of the Empyrean
[2.3.8]. And it is in such terms that Dante ends his account of
philosophy-as-wisdom. In the final chapter of the third treatise she is
explicitly identified with the all-creating Wisdom of God [3.15.15], and Dante
concludes in prophetic exhortation [3.15.17]:
O worse than dead are you who
flee her friendship! Open your eyes, and gaze forth! For she loved you before
you existed, preparing and ordering your coming; and after you were made, she
came to you in your own likeness in order to place you on the straight way.
The
fourth treatise of the Convivio
seems to have been written later than the first three, and it is markedly
different in orientation. The principal theme of its canzone is the true nature of
nobility. Introducing his prose discussion, Dante gives a curious account of
how an interruption in his philosophical studies, caused by what the canzone calls “disdainful and
harsh” behavior on the part of the Donna Gentile, provided an occasion for
taking up this topic [4.1.8]:
Since
this lady of mine had somewhat altered the tenderness of her looks at me,
especially in those features at which I would gaze when seeking to learn whether the primal matter of the elements
was intended by God—and for this reason I refrained for a short
period of time from coming into the presence of her countenance—while living,
as it were, in her absence, I set about contemplating the shortcoming within
man regarding the above-mentioned error [i.e. a false perception of the bases
of human nobility].
That
God is the creator of prime matter was an article of faith, and Thomas had
dealt decisively with the role of divine will and intellect in the creative act
[SCG 2.20.7, 21–24]. That Dante should admit to having entertained doubts about
such a question is perhaps a way of indicating his awareness of a danger
inherent in his philosophical studies. Deeply concerned to affirm the dignity
of reason and the truth embodied in material creation, he may have sensed
himself idolizing the secondary powers in whose hierarchical circulazione he felt himself,
as poet, to be in a special sense participant, and allowing these preoccupations
to cloud his awareness of God's omnipotence. The anger of the Donna Gentile
would then express his sense of a corresponding loss of focus, a failure to
affirm her unique and transcendent role in the expression of the divine will.
Whatever
the precise nature of the dilemma to which Dante alludes, the fourth treatise
is marked by a noticeable shift away from metaphysics in the direction of
ethics and rhetoric. Philosophical knowledge is redirected to the purposes of
social and political life, and the treatise, while punctuated like the others
by numerous digressions, pursues a single sustained argument. Dante begins by
explaining that social order as a condition of human happiness, and that it
requires a single governor whose authority embraces that of all particular
governors and directs their several efforts to a single end [4.4]. After a long
digression on the role of Rome in the providential design of human history, he
turns from political to philosophical authority, citing Aristotle as in effect
the governor of the mind, “master and leader of human reason insofar as it is
directed to man's highest work” [4.6.8]. He then proceeds to qualify both
political and philosophical authority, justifying himself at length as he does
so. Imputing to Aristotle the statement that “whatever appears true to the
majority cannot be entirely false” [Topica
1.1, 100b? NE 1.9. 1098b?], he explains that this must be understood to apply,
not to sense perception, but only to acts of the mind [4.8.6]. An emperor's
authority, too, must be circumscribed; the art of ruling and the laws it
creates cannot overrule rational judgment based on the laws of nature [4.9].
On
this basis Dante proceeds to refute the view that nobility consists in wealth
and ancestry, a view which he here attributes to Frederick II, “the last
emperor of the Romans,” and for which he will elsewhere cite Aristotle's Politics [Mon. 2.3.4; Pol. 4.8, 1294a].
Perhaps as significant as the arguments he musters to show the treacherous
nature of riches and the uncertain course of nobility from one generation to
another is the assertion of Dante's own authority, as philosopher and citizen,
that is implied by his elaborate apology for speaking as he does [Ascoli,
35–41]. The gesture nicely epitomizes the project of the Convivio, a vernacular
discourse which defines for its lay audience the limits of political and
scholastic authority, and affirms the autonomy and potential dignity of
individual human reason.
The
later portions of the fourth treatise are grounded in another Aristotelian
definition of nobility, as the perfection of a thing according to its nature [Conv. 4.16.7; Physics 7.3.246a]. The human
expression of this perfection is virtue, moral and intellectual. Electing to
address the moral virtues, as more accessible to a lay understanding, Dante
begins by describing how nobility is implanted in the nascent soul as the seed
of virtue, from which spring the two branches of the active and the
contemplative life. The final chapters of the Convivio show how the virtues that stem from
nobility can direct “the natural appetite of the mind,” enabling it to evolve
through love of them to the happiness which is the end of virtue [Conv. 4.17.8–9; NE 1.13,
1102a].
In
the final stanza of the canzone analyzed in the fourth treatise, Dante
addresses the poem itself as “Contra-li-erranti mia,” “my song
against-the-erring ones,” and the final chapter of the commentary explains this
as an allusion to the Summa
contra gentiles of Thomas, written “to confound all those who stray
from our faith” [Conv.
4.30.3]. By thus declaring himself the follower of so fine a craftsman, Dante
suggests, he hopes to “ennoble” his own undertaking.
The
Contra gentiles may
seem an odd choice of model. Bruno Nardi considers that Dante had at most a
superficial knowledge of this work at the time when he wrote the Convivio, and it is certainly
the case that he is fundamentally at odds with Thomas over such specific
matters as the origin of the soul, the role of the celestial intelligences in
creation, and, more important, in claiming for philosophy the power to fulfil
the human desire for knowledge in this life [Nardi (1992), 28–29]. On all of
these matters Dante is closer to the position of Albert.
On
the broader question of the nature of the human desire for knowledge, and the
extent to which this desire can be fulfilled by the rational intellect, Dante
remains, throughout the Convivio,
sharply at odds with Thomas. The fourth treatise offers what we may take as his
final word, as philosopher, on this question. Having dwelt at length on the
insatiability of the base desire for riches, Dante addresses the question of
whether our desire for knowledge, too, since it continues to grow as knowledge
is acquired, is not similarly base. Dante begins his answer by asserting that
“the supreme desire of each thing, and the one that is first given to it by
nature, is to return to its first cause,” and illustrates this proposition by
the images of a traveller on an unfamiliar road, who imagines each house he
encounters to be the inn he seeks, and the desires of youth, which focus first
on an apple or a pet bird, then evolve to encompass love and prosperity [Conv. 4.12.15–16]. But while
this may seem to evoke Thomas's view of a single desire which seeks to grow
continuously toward union with God, Dante's point is that the path to
fulfillment involves multiple desires and the attainment of multiple
perfections [Conv.
34.13.2]:
For if I desire to know the
principles of natural things, as soon as I know them this desire is fulfilled and
brought to an end. If I then desire to know what each of these principles is
and how each exists, this is a new and separate desire. Nor by the appearance
of this desire am I dispossessed of the perfection to which I was brought by
the other, and this growth is not the cause of imperfection but of greater
perfection.
Thomas
can speak of the natural desire to know as a force like gravity, whose
attraction intensifies as it approaches its object [SCG 3.25.13]. In contrast
Dante's insistence on types and stages of knowing may seem almost perverse, a
matter of emphasizing the stages of the mind's ascent rather than the desire
that leads it forward from stage to stage. But what is at stake for Dante is
the need to acknowledge human ends as having a definite value of their own, and
this need will play an equally important role in Dante's other major
philosophical work, the Monarchia.
Before
leaving the Convivio,
however, I would like to suggest a way in which Dante's citation of the Summa contra gentiles is,
after all, an appropriate way of labelling his own undertaking. The Contra gentiles is unique
among medieval summae
in aiming to demonstrate, not just the compatibility of Aristotelian physics
and metaphysics with revealed truth, but the extent to which the invisibilia Dei can be
understood without recourse to that truth. In Norman Kretzmann's phrase it is
“a risky tour de force”
that actively engages unbelievers in metaphysical argument, and spends more
time undoing mistakes than affirming Christian doctrine. Revealed truth
provides a means of determining the topics to be discussed, and the harmony of
natural demonstration with revelation is repeatedly noted, but the basis for
demonstration is provided by Aristotle, and what the first three of Thomas's
four books present is a case, not for Christianity, but for theism [Kretzmann,
pp. 43–53].
Dante
seems to acknowledge the pioneering aspect of Thomas's undertaking. Like
Thomas, he is testing philosophy, privileging Aristotle as a unique resource
capable of helping him discover truth by natural means. Gauthier sees Thomas
“nel mezzo del cammin” as he composes the Contra
gentiles, adopting the position of the Aristotelian sapiens to reflect on his own
ongoing work and justify it to contemporaries [Gauthier, 179–81]. Dante, too,
is deeply concerned to define and justify his own position as a voice of wisdom
for his contemporaries. The truths he affirms are encoded in his own poetry,
rather than mysteriously embodied in Scripture, and he addresses a cultured but
non-Latinate audience unschooled in philosophy. But in substituting the Donna
Gentile of philosophical wisdom for Beatrice beata, the “authentic,” salvific
Beatrice who will reemerge as the voice of truth in the Commedia, Dante is
establishing a relationship between secular knowledge and the truth that
Beatrice embodies analogous to the relation Thomas establishes between
philosophy and theology proper.
5. The Monarchia
The
Monarchia is in its
own way as idiosyncratic as the Convivio.
Its purpose, foreshadowed in the discussion of empire in Convivio IV, is to demonstrate
the necessity of a single ruling power, reverent toward but independent of the
Church, capable of ordering the will of collective humanity in peace and
concord. Under such a power the potential intellect of humanity can be fully
actuated—the intellect, that is, of collective humanity, existent throughout
the world, acting as one. For just as a multitude of species must continually
be generated to actualize the full potentiality of prime matter, so the full
intellectual capacity of humanity cannot be realized at one time nor in a
single individual [Mon.
1.3.3–8]. Here Dante adds his own further particularization of this
Aristotelian doctrine [De Anima
3.5, 430a10–15], asserting that no single household, community, or city can
bring it to realization. The ordering of the collective human will to the goal
of realizing its intellectual potential requires universal peace [1.4], and
this in turn requires a single ordering power through whose authority humanity
may achieve unity and so realize the intention and likeness of God [1.8].
The
basis of this argument for empire is evidently the first sentence of the
Prologue to Thomas' literal commentary on the Metaphysics, where he declares that when several
things are ordered to a single end, one of them must govern, “as the
Philosopher teaches in his Politics”
[Thomas, Exp. Metaph.,
Proemium; Aristotle, Politics
1.5, 1254a-55a]. For Thomas this is only an analogy, a way of introducing the
theme of order as it applies to the soul and its pursuit of happiness. The
passage he cites from the Politics
is concerned only with the rudiments of hierarchy; the idea of “ordering of
things to one end” is present only by implication, and Aristotle makes no
attempt to develop its metaphysical implications. Dante, however, seems clearly
to associate with Aristotle, or with Thomas' reference to Aristotle, the idea
of “a political organization which leads in its way to ‘beatitudo’ for the
whole human race” [Minio-Paluello, 74–77]. One may wonder if Dante's erroneous
impression of the Aristotelian passage, which he cites directly with no
reference to Thomas in both the Convivio
and the Monarchia [Conv. 4.4.5; Mon. 1.5.3], is not a symptom
of his intense need to draw the Philosopher into support of his view of world
empire.
The second of the Monarchia's three books deals
with the great example of Rome, describing the city's providential role in
world history, largely by way of citations from Roman literature aimed at
demonstrating the consistent dedication of Roman power to the public good, and
the conformity of Roman imperium
with the order of nature and the will of God. The third book deals with the
crucial issue of the relationship between political and ecclesiastical
authority. Dante argues on various grounds that power in the temporal realm is
neither derived from nor dependent on spiritual authority, though it benefits
from the power of the Papacy to bless its activity. These arguments consist
largely in refutations of traditional claims for the temporal authority of the
Papacy, but the final chapter makes the argument on positive grounds. Since man
consists of soul and body, his nature partakes of both the corruptible and the
incorruptible. Uniting two natures, his existence must necessarily be ordered
to the goals of both these natures [Mon.
3.16.7–9]:
Ineffable providence has thus
set before us two goals to aim at: i.e. happiness in this life, which consists
in the exercise of our own powers and is figured in the earthly paradise; and
happiness in the eternal life, which consists in the enjoyment of the vision of
God (to which our own powers cannot raise us except with the help of God's
light) and which is signified by the heavenly paradise. Now these two kinds of
happiness must be reached by different means, as representing different ends.
For we attain the first through the teachings of philosophy, provided that we
follow them putting into practice the moral and intellectual virtues; whereas
we attain the second through spiritual teachings which transcend human reason,
provided that we follow them putting into practice the theological virtues,
i.e. faith, hope, and charity. These ends and the means to attain them have
been shown to us on the one hand by human reason, which has been entirely
revealed to us by the philosophers, and on the other by the Holy Spirit . . .
This
is Dante's most explicit, uncompromising claim for the autonomy of reason,
reinforced by the entire world-historical argument of the Monarchia and constituting its
final justification for world empire. Dante here goes well beyond Augustine's
sense of the stabilizing function of empire, and eliminates any hint of the
anti-Roman emphasis in Augustine's separation of the earthly and heavenly
cities. In the final sentences of the Monarchia
the temporal monarch becomes, like the aspiring intellect of the Convivio, the uniquely
privileged beneficiary of a divine bounty which, “without any intermediary,
descends into him from the Fountainhead of universal authority” [Mon. 3.16.15]. Like the
Averroistic reasoning of his earlier claim that only under a world empire can
humanity realize its intellectual destiny, this crowning claim shows Dante
appropriating Aristotle to the service of a unique and almost desperate vision
of empire as a redemptive force. But whether we consider the world view of the Monarchia an aberration
[D'Entreves, 51] or take it as Dante's straightforward exposition of his views
on the relations of secular and religious authority, its categorical definition
of the twofold purpose of human life is impossible to explain away. In the Paradiso [8.115–17] as in the Monarchia, to be a “citizen”
is essential to human happiness, and the idea of an imperial authority
independent of papal control remained fundamental to his political thought.
6. The Commedia
(The Divine Comedy)
The
Monarchia's crowning
vision is not Dante's last word on the subject of human happiness, nor on the
possibility of achieving happiness by natural means. The “earthly paradise”
which we attain for ourselves through philosophy is certainly not the paradise
Dante the pilgrim will discover at the summit of Purgatory. To the philosopher
the Commedia
promises only the cold light and enamelled greenery of Limbo, the somber
Elysium where Dante encounters Aristotle and the “philosophic family” who look
to him as their master, living out an eternity, not of happiness, but of desire
without hope [Inf.
4.111–20, 130–44, Iannucci (1997)].
The
contrast expresses the difference in orientation between the Commedia on the one hand and
the Convivio and Monarchia on the other. The Commedia is concerned always
with the ultimate, eternal destiny of human life, with the transcendence,
rather than the fulfillment of human understanding. When Beatrice at the summit
of Purgatory utters prophetic words which “soar” far beyond Dante's power to envision
her meaning, she explains that his limitations are those of “that school which
you have followed,” whose teachings are as far from the divine way as the earth
from the Primum Mobile
[Purg. 33.82–90].
The “school” in question is the study of philosophy as Dante had pursued and
celebrated it in earlier writings. It is his training in this school that makes
possible the luminous precision of the great doctrinal passages in the Purgatorio and Paradiso [Purg. 17.90–139; 25.37–87; Par. 2.112–48; 7.64–77;
13.52–78; 29.13–45; 30; 97–108], but it is a training that harbors the danger
of rationalism and intellectual pride. The Commedia
has its moments of significant intellectual independence [e.g. Imbach (2002)].
But as Christian Moevs makes plain, in what is surely the best book ever
written on the philosophical aspect of the Commedia
[Moevs, 11–12, 82–90], the fact that the celebration of truth in the Convivio is interrupted by the
‘radical revelatory poetics’ of the Commedia
expresses Dante's recognition that the experience the Convivio records had finally
involved no inner change, no ‘awakening.’ In the Convivio God is the highest good, but remains the
distant, unchanging focus of the aspiring mind. In the Commedia God assumes an
active, transformative role as the dispenser of that grace without which the
intellectual quest is futile:
Io veggio ben che già mai non si
sazia
nostro intelletto, se ‘l ver non lo illustra
di fuor dal qual nessun vero si spazia.
nostro intelletto, se ‘l ver non lo illustra
di fuor dal qual nessun vero si spazia.
[Par. 4.124–26]
Translation:
I see well that never is our intellect satisfied, unless that truth illumines it beyond which no truth may soar.
I see well that never is our intellect satisfied, unless that truth illumines it beyond which no truth may soar.
Bibliography
Editions of
Italian Texts
·
Contini,
Gianfranco, ed., Poeti del
duecento, 2 volumes, Milan and Naples, R. Ricciardi, 1960. Volume
II contains the poetry of Guido Guinizzelli and Guido Cavalcanti.
·
Dante,
Opere minori, 2
volumes, Milan and Naples: R. Ricciardi, 1979-88. Includes copiously annotated
editions of the Vita nuova,
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