by A. N. Wilson
When he came to study philosophy in an informal way in Florence, Dante was perhaps inevitably made aware of the dichotomy between the two stances. There was no university in Florence, but it was not long since the arrival in the city of two comparatively new religious orders – the Franciscans, started by St Francis of Assisi some forty years before Dante was born,20 and the Order of Preachers, which had taken shape at Bologna in 1220–21 under the direction of St Dominic.
Both these saints, and their orders, played an enormous part in Dante’s life, and in his vision of what the Church had a chance to become. Both their orders were departures from the traditional pattern of Western monasticism, in which a man or woman took a vow to remain in one place for life. The friars, Franciscan and Dominican, were roving preachers, missionaries, lecturers, ascetics and, especially in the case of the Dominicans, intellectuals. Dominic and his order are forever associated with two movements, or episodes, which suggest a somewhat dualistic nature in his outlook and that of his friars. On the one hand, Dominic, a Spaniard who, in his thirties, toured the South of France rooting out Cathar heretics, was the leading voice in excoriating the Cathars, and one of the principal functions of the order he founded was to convert them to Catholicism.
Yet while this part of Dominic’s work must be seen by posterity as an exercise in intolerance (however calamitous we might see it would have been if the fanatical Cathars had come to outnumber Catholics or dominate the religious climate of Europe), the other aspect of the Dominican intellectual life seems to be of an opposite colouring. For with Dominic’s order will always be associated the cult of Aristotle and the growth of Catholic intellectualism based upon debate and inquiry. In Dominic’s spiritual war against the Cathars (which, as we have seen, turned into an actual war in which many were massacred), the Church authorities were only too happy to tap into his order’s resources of ascetic and intellectual strength. With his friars’ love affair with the new learning, the authorities were less happy. Above all they were suspicious of the revival of interest in Aristotle, who denied the Resurrection of the Body and the Life Everlasting. In 1215, Aristotle’s works had been banned by the statutes of the University of Paris. ‘But largely through the labours of one supremely great and saintly intellect, Aristotle’s thought was saved for the Christian church.’21 This figure, ‘whose gigantic intellect rolls like thunder through the centuries reducing the tentative speculations of our modern theologians to so many squeaks on the margin’,22 was an early recruit to Dominic’s order known to posterity as Thomas Aquinas. He was gigantic in every sense.
When Dante meets him in Heaven, Thomas is immediately recognizable because he is so enormously fat.
I was a lamb among the holy flock
that Dominic leads on the path where one
may fatten well if one does not stray off.
[Par. X.94–6, Mandelbaum]
He was in all senses a giant, immensely tall, and rotund. His brother friars nicknamed him the Sicilian Ox.
This intellectual Friar Tuck was one of the most brilliant and influential of all European philosophers. Like Dante, he was viewed with considerable distrust in the Church during his lifetime. In Spain, the philosophy of Aristotle had been brought by the Arab conquerors and at last translated into Latin. So too had the works of the Arab metaphysicians and mathematicians themselves. Naturally enough, the Church viewed with disquiet the arrival of so much new learning, much of which appeared to be incompatible with traditional Catholicism. Thomas Aquinas was supreme among those intellects of his age in absorbing the new wisdom and seeing whether a synthesis of Greek and Arab insights could not be drawn into the Christian way of looking at the world. He was not alone. It was an extraordinary age, with such giants as Roger Bacon, Albert of Cologne, known as Albert the Great, Siger of Brabant, Duns Scotus and Meister Eckhart all at work over a fifty-year period in Paris. Older Dante scholars liked to imagine that Dante must have studied in Paris at some stage, though, in fact, no evidence can be found which demonstrates that he ever left Italy. But what could be truthfully said of the period of the second decade of the fourteenth century when Dante began to write his Comedy, when Duns Scotus had just finished and Meister Eckhart was still teaching at Paris, was that Dante was ‘far removed from Paris in body but very much there in spirit’.23
Of all these great thinkers, Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) stands out as the most far-reaching and ambitious. He did not live fifty years in the world, but he left Christianity with an intellectual armour which it had not altogether possessed before. This was not because he supplied the Church with a set of answers, so much as because he taught it – hence the extreme suspicion with which he was regarded in some quarters – the robustness to ask questions, to take the Aristotelian habit of asking questions into every single area of life, including the most basic questions about God – namely, is His existence self-evident? Can His existence be demonstrated? And does He, in fact, exist?24 He also, in a way which anticipated the work of mid-twentieth-century philosophers, explored the problems of existence/Being itself, questions of language and meaning from an epistemological point of view, as well as the philosophy of ethics, of aesthetics and of politics. In fact, in the post-classical world it is hard to think of any philosopher, with the possible exception of Hegel, who gave his mind to a wider range of issues. Certainly, he must have been one of the most prolific of the philosophers. His works consist of many millions of words, many or most of them dictated. As has been said by one of his fellow-Dominicans, ‘He worked himself literally to death. He had a nervous breakdown and a complete writing block in 1274 and died a few months later.’25 This writer clearly discounts the sensationalist medieval rumour, repeated by Dante and Villani, that Thomas was poisoned at the behest of Charles of Anjou.26
Thomas was of noble, very nearly of royal, stock. He was a cousin of the Emperor Frederick II and of the Kings of France. Though regarded by Popes and traditionalist thinkers as a radical who was prepared to question everything, he was by no stretch of the modern imagination radical in politics. ‘Aquinas accepted in toto the traditional hierarchy of aristocratic Europe, as it had existed from Homeric times up to his own day; slavery, warfare, capital punishment were all a natural part of it.’27 For this very reason, he was distrustful of what we can see as the origins of capitalism – not merely usury, but the very notions of property were ones which he held up to question. Like most Christians of the Middle Ages, he was anti-Semitic. He believed that Jews should be forced to wear special clothing, that their money was tainted, and should not be used by Christians and that, by virtue of their having urged the Crucifixion of Christ, they were subject to a ‘perpetual servitude’.28 He denounced Jewish usurers because they were usurers, not because they were Jews. A modern defender of Aquinas, presumably seeing him as less rabidly anti-Semitic than some of his medieval contemporaries, pleaded that, ‘On the issue of Jewish worship as on forced conversion and baptism of Jewish children, Aquinas adopted a relatively tolerant position.’29
He was born, either in 1225 or 1227, at Roccasecca, in the region of Naples, the castle belonging to his father, Count Landulf of Aquino. At the age of five, he was placed in the monastery founded by St Benedict (c.480–c.544), father of Western monasticism, at Monte Cassino in the sixth century. In all the intervening years, between the life of Benedict and the life of Thomas Aquinas, European philosophy had slept. (‘There is no philosophy between the end of the third century after Christ, which saw the death of Porphyrius, and the middle of the thirteenth century, which witnessed the appearance of the “Summa contra gentiles”.’30)
At Monte Cassino, Thomas was given the equivalent of a boarding-school education, following the medieval pattern of the Trivium and the Quadrivium. In 1239, he had what was a lucky break. The monks were forced to abandon the monastery, and Thomas was sent to the newly founded University of Naples. Frederick II, deemed by orthodox Catholics to be the child of Satan, had founded this university to train civil servants in del
iberate opposition to the papal-chartered universities of Bologna and Paris.31 It was in every sense a freethinking university which, because of its links with Sicily where Frederick had his court, was in touch with the new learning brought to Europe by the Arabs. It was at Naples that Thomas encountered an Irishman, Petrus Hibernicus, who introduced him to the works of Aristotle. After nearly a millennium of philosophical stagnation, Europe was again reminded of what philosophy was. Latin Europe had possessed a few bits of Aristotle – a translation of the Physics was known at Chartres, for example – but it was in the Arab world that Aristotle was known, and in the ecumenical climate of late twelfth-century Toledo that Aristotle was translated into Latin and came to be known by such intellectuals as Peter the Irishman.
For the five years after the Battle of Campaldino, we can infer that Dante was writing poetry, composing the Vita Nuova, and laying the foundations of his career as a negotiator and politician. This was the period when he began his informal absorption in philosophy, with the ideas of contemporary philosophers forming part of the imaginative process which would eventually fructify in the Comedy. When Dante began to study philosophy in Florence, the prime philosophical school – in the absence of a university – was at the newly built Dominican church of Santa Maria Novella, where a pupil of Aquinas, Remigio de’ Girolami, gave lectures.32 It was almost certainly at Remigio’s feet that Dante revived his interest in the classical past. The points of overlap between Remigio’s teaching and Dante’s writings suggest that the Dominican lectures went deep. With Remigio, Dante learnt to see Cicero as the great defender of the res publica, and to perceive in history the Divine Mission of Rome. Quite how much Aquinas himself influenced Dante, and how much of his work Dante had read remains a matter of debate.
From the point of view of the mature Dante, who wrote the Comedy and turned much of Aquinas’s hyper-energetic dialectic into deeply charged poetry, three things above all others need to be mentioned out of the whole eight-million-word conversation which Aquinas was having with the world.
First, the notion of ecstasy. Dante’s great poem is about a man who journeys out of the dark wood of middle life into the Empyrean itself. He is transported from earth to Paradise. Few human beings have ever claimed to do this, but one who seems to have made the claim is the Apostle Paul who, in 2 Corinthians 12:2–4, wrote to his converts in Corinth in the late fifties of our era, ‘I know a person in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third Heaven – whether in the body or out of the body I do not know. And I know that such a person – whether in the body or out of the body, I do not know: God knows – was caught up into Paradise and heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat.’33 This was an important Scriptural passage for Aquinas. He interpreted the ‘third Heaven’ to mean the Empyrean (as Dante would do). It is the ‘spiritual Heaven where angels and holy souls enjoy the contemplation of God’. This contemplation could, says Thomas, either be seen as an imaginative vision, such as Isaiah enjoyed (in his sixth chapter) or such as was seen by the New Testament seer in the Apocalypse. Or it could be seen, as the last great philosopher of the Latin world before the Dark Ages (St Augustine of Hippo) saw it, as an intellectual vision. The point which Thomas emphasizes is that it is not natural for human beings to see God. St Paul was in ecstasy, a word which means being taken out of your normal state, a word which even, says Thomas, ‘implies a certain violence’.34 A mere man cannot see the essence of God.35
In a sense, Thomas’s reflections on this strange passage from Paul anticipate the whole problem of knowledge post-Descartes, that is, how can you escape your own sense-impressions into a world of objectivity? As far as our knowledge of God is concerned (and perhaps as far as our knowledge of anything else), Aquinas, who appears to be one of those thinkers who has thought of everything, says you need to leave yourself, in the Cartesian sense, in order to know anything. In order to know God, you need to do something like violence to nature. But although God is the beginning and the end of our intellectual journey, He is irreducible. ‘The ultimate happiness of man consists in his highest activity, which is the exercise of his mind. If, therefore, the created mind were never able to see the essence of God, either it would never attain happiness, or its happiness would consist in something other than God. This is contrary to faith [alienum a fide], for the ultimate perfection of the rational creature lies in that which is the source of its being – each thing achieves its perfection by rising as high as its source.’36
There is a paradox, therefore, at the heart of human intellectual endeavour. The thing which brings the human mind its ultimate happiness, the knowledge of God, cannot be enjoyed by the mere pursuit of the intellect. (This is why Thomas, after his ‘nervous breakdown’, described all his philosophical works as mere straw.) ‘Mere thinking about God, however exact and sustained, remains incomplete theology unless charged with dilectio, or choosing to be in love with God himself.’37 Bishop Berkeley took scepticism in the eighteenth century to its ultimate extreme by refusing to believe in matter itself. We can have no certainty of the material existence of bodies outside ourselves, only the mind of God can keep such things in existence. As a good Aristotelian, Aquinas would have thought this was nonsense, which it is, and he would no doubt have approved of another large, fat Christian man, Samuel Johnson, responding to Berkeley’s difficulty literally with a kick against a material object. (‘Striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded for it, “I refute it thus”.’38)
But Aquinas, as a fellow-philosopher of Berkeley’s, would have sympathized with the absurdity more than Johnson did. Aquinas devised what he called Five Ways to prove God’s existence. In asking the question whether God is self-evident, he refutes the so-called ontological proof of Anselm. God’s self-evidence can never be self-evident to us. It can only be self-evident to God. Even when Paul had been up to the ‘third Heaven’ and had his vision, he did not know whether his experience was in the body or not. He lacked something, which is the full and perfect knowledge which is the lot of angels, says Thomas.39
Our minds can operate – here he is an Aristotelian, not an eighteenth-century empiricist – to grasp their own limitations. We can see that there are things which, with mental equipment, cannot be known. But whereas a Cartesian philosopher would be tempted to subject God Himself to the same set of criteria by which we judge the knowability of material objects, or objects within nature, in a Thomist view of things this is the wrong way round. It is only because of God that anything exists at all. God is the ultimate reality, and our reality only begins to take shape, like the coming into vision of material objects with each sunrise, in His light.
Later philosophers have been divided about the extent to which Thomas was successful in ‘proving’ the existence of God. For the present purpose – drawing a picture of the mind of Dante Alighieri, and attempting to assess the effect upon it of reading the philosophy of Aquinas – the validity of the arguments is secondary to their imaginative power. One would note three things. First, then, the importance Thomas attaches to ecstasy, and his interest in the journey (whether in the body or not) supposedly made by the Apostle Paul to the ‘third Heaven’. Dante was to make such a journey – the journey in the Comedy is a journey to Heaven in the body – and what Thomas says about this must be relevant. Dante’s journey is one of sanctification. He himself is journeying to blessedness, and he hopes his readers will accompany him. When he has been uplifted out of the present life, it is no accident that he meets Thomas Aquinas.
Secondly, having said that – and this is crucial for any understanding either of Dante’s, or of his contemporaries’, way of thinking – what Aquinas was exploring in his philosophy (as was Aristotle) was objective knowledge. There is no scepticism about the possibility of knowledge (as there would be for Berkeley and Hume). The world is that which is the case. This will pose critical, as well as philosophical, problems for the modern reader of Dante. The ‘story’ – of
Dante starting out in the middle of a dark wood and ending up in the Empyrean gazing upon God Himself – is surely an invention, a fiction? Along the way, he will meet mythological creatures such as the Minotaur and the Centaurs; he will also meet real, historical characters; and he will meet angels and figures from the Bible. How much of his vision are we to take as fiction, and how much is real? How we answer this question will depend upon how we read the whole of Dante’s life and age. Thomas Aquinas, a rigorously realist, Aristotelian philosopher, will help us here.
Third – Thomas’s philosophy of politics and law. They are not the only influence upon Dante, but they are a significant part of it. In much of his prose work, Dante is trying to explore the idea of the Good City, and the idea of the ideal political condition of the world. In this, as in other areas of life, he would change his mind radically, at least three times. When living in Florence, he was a Guelf, a supporter of the papal party against the domination of the Emperor. In exile, he became a sort of Ghibelline, and in his book on monarchy he saw the Emperor Henry VII as a universal Emperor.
Dante would have first come across these ideas in the church of Santa Maria Novella at the lectures given by Dominican followers of St Thomas. I mention them here because they clearly will emerge in his work when it comes to maturity and there is a case for noting when the seeds of an idea are planted in a writer’s imagination even if we cannot be sure when those seeds gestated.