by Will Durant
It was during the first decade of his exile that he gathered together some of the poems he had written to the gentil donna, and added to them a prose commentary transforming her into Dame Philosophy. The Convivio {Banquet, c. 1308) tells how, in the disappointments of love and life, Dante turned to philosophy for solace; what a divine revelation he found in the seductive study; and how he resolved to share his findings, in Italian, with those who could not read Latin. Apparently he had in mind to write a new Summa or Tesoro, in which each part would pretend to be a commentary on a poem about the beautiful lady; it was a remarkable scheme for redeeming the sensuous with the arid. The little book is a hodge-podge of weird science, farfetched allegories, and snatches of philosophy from Boethius and Cicero. We must mark it as a credit to Dante’s intelligence that after completing three of fourteen intended commentaries he abandoned the book as a total loss.
He took on now the modest task of re-establishing the rule of the Holy Roman emperors in Italy. His experience had convinced him that the chaos and violence of politics in the Italian cities were due to an atomistic conception of freedom—each region, city, class, individual, and desire demanding anarchic liberty. Like Machiavelli two centuries later, he longed for some power that would co-ordinate individuals, classes, and cities into an orderly whole within which men might work and live in security and peace. That unifying power could come either from the pope or from the head of the Holy Roman Empire, to which northern Italy had long been subject in theory. But Dante had just been exiled by a party allied with the papacy; an uncertain tradition says that he had taken part in an unsuccessful embassy from Florence to Boniface VIII; and for a long time the popes had opposed the unification of Italy as a danger to their spiritual freedom as well as their temporal power. The only hope of order seemed to lie in the restoration of Imperial control, in a return to the majestic pax Romana of ancient Rome.
So, at a date unknown, Dante wrote his provocative treatise De monarchia. Writing in Latin as still the language of philosophy, Dante argued that since the appropriate function of man is intellectual activity, and since this can proceed only in peace, the ideal government would be a world state maintaining a stable order and uniform justice over all the earth. Such a state would be the proper image and correlate of the celestial order established throughout the universe by God. Imperial Rome had come nearest to being such an international state; God’s approval of it was made manifest by His choosing to become man under Augustus; and Christ Himself had bidden men accept the political authority of the Caesars. Obviously the authority of the ancient Empire had not been derived from the Church. But the Holy Roman Empire was that older Empire revived. It is true that a pope crowned Charlemagne, and thereby appeared to make the Empire subordinate to the papacy; but the “usurpation of a right does not create a right; if it did, the same method could show the dependency of ecclesiastical authority on the Empire after the Emperor Otto restored Pope Leo and deposed Benedict.”21 The right of the Empire to govern was derived not from the Church but from the natural law that social order requires government; and since natural law is the will of God, the state derives its powers from God. It is indeed proper that the emperor should acknowledge the superior authority of the pope in matters of faith and morals; but this does not limit the sovereignty of the state in “the earthly sphere.”22
The De monarchia, despite a scholastic mechanism of disputation no longer appetizing to the fashions of thought, was a powerful argument for “one world” of government and law. The manuscript was known only to a few during the author’s lifetime. After his death it was more widely circulated, and was used as propaganda by the antipapal Louis the Bavarian. It was publicly burned by order of a papal legate in 1329, was placed on the papal Index of Forbidden Books in the sixteenth century, and was removed from that Index by Leo XIII in 1897.
According to Boccaccio,23 Dante wrote the De monarchia “at the coming of Henry VI.” In the year 1310 the King of Germany invaded Italy in the hope of re-establishing over all the peninsula except the Papal States that Imperial rule which had died with Frederick II. Dante welcomed him with excited hopes. In a “Letter to the Princes and Peoples of Italy” he called upon the Lombard cities to open their hearts and gates to the Luxembourg “Arrigo” who would deliver them from chaos and the pope. When Henry reached Milan Dante hastened thither and threw himself enthusiastically at the feet of the Emperor; all his dreams of a united Italy seemed near fulfillment. Florence, heedless of the poet, closed her gates against Henry, and Dante publicly addressed an angry letter Scelestissimis Florentines—“to the most criminal Florentines” (March, 1311).
Know ye not God hath ordained that the human race be under the rule of one emperor for the defense of justice, peace, and civilization, and that Italy has always been a prey to civil war whenever the Empire lapsed? You who transgress laws human and divine, you whom the awful insatiability of avarice has led to be ready for any crimes—does not the terror of the second death harass you, that ye, first and alone … have raged against the glory of the Roman prince, the monarch of the earth and the ambassador of God? … Most foolish and insensate men! Ye shall succumb perforce to the Imperial Eagle!24
To Dante’s dismay Henry took no action against Florence. In April the poet wrote to the Emperor like a Hebrew prophet warning kings:
We marvel what sluggishness delays you so long…. You waste the spring as well as the winter at Milan…. Florence (do you perchance know it not?) is the dire evil…. This is the viper … from her evaporating corruption she exhales an infectious smoke, and thence the neighboring flocks waste away…. Up, then, thou noble child of Jesse!25
Florence responded by declaring Dante forever excluded from amnesty and from Florence. Henry left Florence untouched, and passed via Genoa and Pisa to Rome and Siena, where he died (1313).
It was a crowning disaster for Dante. He had staked everything on Henry’s victory, had burned all bridges to Florence behind him. He fled to Gubbio, and took refuge in the monastery of Santa Croce. There, apparently, he wrote much of The Divine Comedy.26 But he had not yet had his fill of politics. In 1316 he was probably with Uguccione della Faggiuola at Lucca; in that year Uguccione defeated the Florentines at Montecatini; Florence recovered, and included Dante’s two sons in a sentence of death—which was never carried out. Lucca revolted against Uguccione, and Dante was again homeless. Florence, in a mood of victorious generosity, and forgetting its forevers, offered amnesty and safe return to all exiles on condition that they pay a fine, walk through the streets in penitential garb, and submit to a brief imprisonment. A friend notified Dante of the proclamation. He replied in a famous letter:
To a Florentine friend: From your letter, which I received with due reverence and affection, I have learned with a grateful heart… how dear to your soul is my return to my country. Behold, then, the ordinance … that if I were willing to pay a certain amount of money, and suffer the stigma of oblation, I should be pardoned, and could return forthwith….
Is this, then, the glorious recall wherewith Dante Alighieri is summoned back to his country after an exile patiently endured for almost fifteen years? … Far be it from a man who preaches justice … to pay his money to those inflicting injustice, as though they were his benefactors. This is not the way to return to my country…. If another way may be found … which does not derogate from the honor of Dante, that will I take with no lagging steps. But if Florence is not to be entered by such a path, then never will I enter…. What! Can I not look upon the face of the sun and the stars everywhere? Can I not under any sky contemplate the most precious truths?27
Probably toward the close of the year 1316 he accepted the invitation of Can Grande della Scala, ruler of Verona, to come and live as his guest. There, apparently, he finished—there he dedicated to Can Grande—the Paradiso of The Divine Comedy (1318). We may picture him at this period—aged fifty-one—as Boccaccio described him in the Vita of 1354: a man of medium height, “somewhat stooped,” walking
with grave and measured gait in somber dignity; dark hair and skin, long and pensive face, furrowed projecting brow, stern deep eyes, thin aquiline nose, tight lips, a pugnacious chin.28 It was the face of a spirit once gentle, but hardened to bitterness by pain; the Dante of the Vita nuova could hardly have affected all the tenderness and sensibility there expressed; and something of those qualities appears in the pity with which he hears Francesca’s tale. He was grim and austere as became a defeated exile; his tongue was sharpened by adversity; and he became imperious to cover his fall from power. He prided himself on his ancestry because he was poor. He despised the money-making bourgeoisie of Florence; he could not forgive Portinari for marrying Beatrice to a banker; and he took the only revenge open to him by placing usurers in one of the deepest pits of hell. He never forgot an injury or a slight, and there were few of his enemies who escaped damnation from his pen. He had less use than Solon for those who remained neutral in revolution or in war. The secret of his character was a flaming intensity. “Not by the grace of riches but by the grace of God I am what I am, and the zeal of His house hath eaten me up.”29
He poured all his strength into his poem, and could not long survive its completion. In 1319 he left Verona and went to live with Count Guido da Polenta at Ravenna. He received an invitation from Bologna to come and be crowned poet laureate; he answered no in a Latin eclogue. In 1321 Guido sent him to Venice on a political mission, which failed; Dante returned with a fever caught from the marshes of the Veneto. He was too weak to fight it off, and it killed him on September 14, 1321, in the fifty-seventh year of his age. The Count planned to raise a handsome tomb above the poet’s grave, but it was not done. The bas-relief that stands above the marble coffin today was carved by Pietro Lombardo in 1483. There, as all the world knows, Byron came and wept. Today the tomb lies almost unnoticed around the corner from Ravenna’s busiest square; and its old and crippled custodian, for a few lire, will recite sonorous beauties from the poem that all men praise and few men read.
IV. THE DIVINE COMEDY
1. The Poem
Boccaccio relates that Dante began it in Latin hexameters, but changed to Italian to reach a broader audience. Perhaps the ardor of his feelings affected his choice; it seemed easier to be passionate in Italian than in a Latin so long associated with classic urbanity and restraint. In youth he had restricted Italian to the poetry of love; but now that his theme was the highest philosophy of human redemption through love he wondered dared he speak in the “vulgar” tongue. At some uncertain time he had begun—and then had left unfinished—a Latin essay De vulgari eloquentia (On Vernacular Eloquence), aspiring to win the learned to wider literary use of the vernacular; he had praised the compact majesty of Latin, but had expressed the hope that through the poetry of Frederick’s Regno and the stil nuovo of the Lombard and Tuscan trovatori an Italian language might rise above its dialects ‘to be (as the Convivio put it) “full of the: sweetest and most exquisite beauty.”30 Even Dante’s pride could hardly dream that his epic would not only make Italian a language fit for any enterprise of letters, but would raise it to such dolce bellezza as the world’s literature has seldom known.
Never was a poem more painstakingly planned. A weakness for triads—as reflecting the Trinity—molded its form: there were to be three “canticles,” each of thirty-three cantos, to correspond with the years of Christ’s earthly life; an extra canto in the first canticle would make a neat round hundred; each canto was to be written in groups of three lines; and the second line of each group was to rhyme with the first and third of the next. Nothing could be more artificial; yet all art is artifice, though at its best concealed; and the terza rima or triple rhyme binds each stanza with its successor, and weaves them all into a continued song (canto), which in the original flows trippingly on the tongue, but in translation limps and halts on borrowed feet. Dante in advance condemned all translations of Dante: “Nothing that hath the harmony of musical connection can be transferred from its own tongue to another without shattering all its sweetness and harmony.”31*
As number dictated the form, so allegory planned the tale. In his dedicatory epistle to Can Grande,32 Dante explained the symbolism of his canticles. We might suspect this interpretation to be the afterthought of a poet who longed to be a philosopher; but the addiction of the Middle Ages to symbolism, the allegorical sculptures of the cathedrals, the allegorical frescoes of Giotto, Gaddi, and Raphael, and Dante’s allegorical sublimations in the Vita muova and the Convivio suggest that the poet really had in mind the outlines of the scheme that he described in perhaps imaginary detail. The poem, he says, belongs to the genus philosophy, and its concern is morality. Like a theologian interpreting the Bible, he assigns three meanings to his words: the literal, the allegorical, and the mystical.
The subject of this work according to the letter … is the state of souls after death…. But if the work be taken allegorically its subject is Man, in so far as by merit or demerit… he is exposed to the rewards or punishments of justice…. The aim of the whole and the part is to remove those living in this life from a state of misery, and to guide them to a state of happiness.
Otherwise expressed, the Inferno is man passing through sin, suffering, and despair; the Purgatorio is his cleansing through faith; the Paradiso is his redemption through divine revelation and unselfish love. Virgil, who guides Dante through hell and purgatory, stands for knowledge, reason, wisdom, which can lead us to the portals of happiness; only faith and love (Beatrice) can lead us in. In the epic of Dante’s life his exile was his hell, his studies and his writings were his purgation, his hope and love were his redemption and his only bliss. It is perhaps because Dante takes his symbolism most seriously in the Paradiso that this canticle is the hardest to enjoy; for the Beatrice who was a heavenly vision in the Vita nuova becomes in Dante’s vision of heaven a pompous abstraction—hardly a meet fate for such impeccable loveliness. Finally Dante explains to Can Grande why he calls his epic Commedia*—because the story passed from misery to happiness, and because “it is written in a careless and humble style, in the vulgar tongue, which even housewives speak.”33
This painful comedy, “this book on which I have grown thin through all these years,”34 was the work and solace of his exile, and was finished only three years before his death. It summarized his life, his learning, his theology, his philosophy; if it had also embodied the humor and tenderness and full-blooded sensuality of the Middle Ages it might have been “a medieval synthesis.” Into these hundred brief cantos Dante crowded the science that he had gathered from Brunetto Latini, and perhaps from Bologna; the astronomy, cosmology, geology, and chronology of an age too busy living to be learned. He accepted not only the mystic influences and fatalities of astrology, but all the cabalistic mythology that ascribed occult significance and powers to numbers and the alphabet. The number nine distinguishes Beatrice because its square root is the three made holy by the Trinity. There are nine circles in hell, nine levels in purgatory, nine spheres in paradise. By and large Dante adopts with awe and gratitude the philosophy and theology of Thomas Aquinas, but with no servile fidelity; St. Thomas would have winced at the arguments of the De monarchia, or the sight of popes in hell. Dante’s conception of God as light and love (l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle—“the love that moves the sun and the other stars”)35 is Aristotle carried down through Arabic philosophy. He knows something of al-Farabi, Avicenna, al-Ghazali, Averroës; and though he assigns Averroës to limbo, he shocks orthodoxy by placing the Averroist heretic Siger de Brabant in heaven;36 moreover he puts into the mouth of Thomas words of praise for the one man who had stirred the Seraphic Doctor to theological wrath. Yet Siger seems to have denied that personal immortality on which Dante’s poem rests. History has exaggerated either the heterodoxy of Siger or the orthodoxy of Dante.
Recent studies have stressed Oriental, and especially Islamic, sources for Dante’s ideas:37 a Persian legend of Arda Viraf’s ascension to heaven; the descriptions of he
ll in the Koran; the story of Mohammed’s trip to heaven; the tour of heaven and hell in Abu-l-Ala al-Ma’arri’s Risalat al-Ghufran; the Futuhat of Ibn Arabi…. In the Risalat al-Ma’arri pictures Iblis (Satan) bound and tortured in hell, and Christian and other “infidel” poets suffering there; at the gate of paradise the narrator is met by a houri or beautiful maiden, who has been appointed his guide.38 In the Futuhat Ibn Arabi (who wrote love poems with pious allegorical interpretations) drew precise diagrams of the hereafter, described hell and heaven as exactly beneath and above Jerusalem, divided hell and heaven into nine levels, and pictured the circle of the Mystic Rose, and choirs of angels surrounding the Divine Light—all as in The Divine Comedy.39 So far as we know, none of these Arabic writings had by Dante’s time been translated into any language that he could read.
Apocalyptic literature describing tours or visions of heaven or hell abounded in Judaism and Christianity, not to speak of the sixth book of Virgil’s Aeneid. An Irish legend told how St. Patrick had visited purgatory and hell, and had seen there tunics and sepulchers of fire, sinners hanging head downward, or devoured by serpents, or covered with ice.40 In twelfth-century England a priest-trouvère, Adam de Ros, recounted in a substantial poem St. Paul’s tour of hell under the guidance of the archangel Michael; made Michael expound the gradation of punishments for different degrees of sin; and showed Paul trembling like Dante before these horrors.41 Joachim of Flora had told of his own descent into hell and ascent into heaven. There were hundreds of such visions and tales. With all this damning evidence it was hardly necessary for Dante to cross linguistic barriers into Islam in order to find models for his Inferno. Like any artist he fused existing material, transformed it from chaos to order, and set it on fire with his passionate imagination and his burning sincerity. He took the elements of his work wherever he could find them—in Thomas and the troubadours, in Peter Damian’s fiery sermons on the pains of hell, in his brooding over Beatrice living and Beatrice dead, in his conflicts with politicians and popes; in the scraps of science that crossed his path; in the Christian theology of the Fall, the Incarnation, sin and grace, and the Last Judgment; in the Plotinian-Augus-tinian conception of the graduated ascent of the soul to union with God; in Thomas’ emphasis on the Beatific Vision as the final and only satisfying goal of man; and out of these he made the poem in which all the terror, hope, and pilgrimage of the medieval spirit found voice, symbol, and form.