Introduction: a Comedy for Non-Christians 1

NOTES Introduction: A Comedy for Non-Christians 1. George Holmes, “Monarchia and Dante’s Attitude to the Popes,” in Dante and Governance, ed. John Woodhouse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 46. 2. For this point and a brief account of the reception of Monarchy, see Anthony K. Cassell, “Monarchy,” in The Dante Encyclopedia, ed. Richard Lansing (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 2000), pp. 618–623. 3. The consequences of positing the virtual identity of Dante and Aquinas, a strategy of neo-Thomism, are still with us today, manifest in the “theological” reading of Dante that has dominated mainstream American Dante criticism since about 1960 (see below, note 6). The great historian of medieval philosophy Etienne Gilson, emphasizing the substantial difference between Dante and Aquinas, considers Dante’s Monarchy “one of the gravest dangers that have ever threatened” the Thomistic universe (Dante the Philosopher [New York: Sheed & Ward, 1949], p. 201). On the question of the relation between church and state, for instance, “the essential thing is. .for us to notice the profound gulf that sep- arates the actual nature of the problem propounded by Dante from the appar- ently similar problem in St. Thomas Aquinas to which it is often compared” (Gilson, Dante the Philosopher, p. 179). Another truly eminent medievalist, Ernst H. Kantorowicz, has also insisted on the dissimilarity of Dante and Aquinas, as well as on Dante’s radical novelty: “Dante. .was anything but a Thomist although he used the works of Aquinas constantly. .The difficulty with Dante is that he, who reproduced the general knowledge of his age on every page, gave every theorem which he reproduced a slant so new and so surprising that the evidence proving his dependency on other writings serves mainly to under- score the novelty of his own approach and his own solutions.” (The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957], pp. 451–452.) 4. Father John A. Zahm, as described by Christian Dupont in his “Collecting Dante in America: Lessons from Library History,” Access no. 81 (Fall 2002), pp. 10–11. 5. For a well-informed recent account of that ideological struggle, see Gilberto Sacerdoti, Sacrificio e sovranità: Teologia e politica nell’Europa di Shakespeare e Bruno (Torino: Einaudi, 2002). Sacerdoti shows the seminal role played by 284 NOTES Dante and, before him, Arabo-Islamic rationalism (al-Farabi, Averroes, and Maimonides) in the secularization of the European political order. 6. In broad outline, American Dante criticism since 1960 has been dominated by theological/Christianizing readings. Of course there have been numerous important exceptions—perhaps most notably Joan Ferrante’s The Political Vision of the “Divine Comedy” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984) and John A. Scott’s Dante’s Political Purgatory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996). But the major authorities in American Dante scholarship—Charles Singleton, John Freccero (whose widely influential approach to the Comedy I discuss at the beginning of part I), Robert Hollander—despite variations and differences in approach, all read the poem theologically. Collectively, they have trained more than a generation of American scholars to do the same, so that the hyper-theologizing of Dante shows little sign of waning. They all view the crucial relation between Virgil and Beatrice as marked by the subordination of the former to the latter. But what makes Dante different from Aquinas is precisely his refusal to subordi- nate those things represented by Virgil (philosophy, secularism, practical reason, ethics, virtue, politics, the earth, the community, the common good, nature, innate wisdom, peace on earth, etc.) to those things represented by Beatrice (theology, faith, theoretical reason, metaphysics, knowledge, heaven, the eternal salvation of the individual soul, grace, revealed wisdom, peace in heaven, etc.). Dante insists that these two spheres of concern are of equal priority; he even strongly suggests that (in the final analysis—if one were absolutely forced to choose between two sets of values that are in fact inter- twined and both essential) Virgil outranks Beatrice. But the main “theologizing” stream of American Dante criticism has spun out endless variations on a single theme: Beatrice outranks Virgil, which is another way to say that the message of the Comedy is: “Thou shalt be Christian!” Hollander’s remark, “Poor Virgil!”—indicating that Christians are supposed to feel a sort of self-complacent sense of sorrow that the great pagan poet was not blessed to have been Christian—may be taken as the motto of the “theologizing” school of American Dante criticism. (For this “Poor Virgil!” see p. 637 of Purgatorio, trans. Jean Hollander and Robert Hollander [New York; Doubleday, 2003].) 7. Benedetto Croce, The Poetry of Dante, trans. Douglas Ainslie (Mamaroneck, NY: Paul P. Appel, 1971), p. vi. 8. Ibid., p. 2. 9. Teodolinda Barolini, The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 16–17. 10. Ibid., pp. 11, 13. 11. Ibid., p. 17. 12. Ibid., p. 20. 13. Dante, Monarchy 1.4.2–4. Translation from Monarchy, trans. and ed. Prue Shaw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 8–9, emphasis added. 14. Marsilius of Padua, Defensor pacis 1.1.5. Translation from Marsilius of Padua, The Defender of Peace (The Defensor Pacis), trans. Alan Gewirth (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), p. 6. NOTES 285 15. Saint Augustine, On Christian Doctrine 1.36, trans. D.W. Robertson (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958). For a good account of the recognition of the importance of “reception” in the hermeneutics of late antiquity and the Middle Ages, see Pier Cesare Bori, L’interpretazione infinita: l’ermeneutica cristiana antica e le sue trasformazioni (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1987). 16. On the Statius episode in particular, and Dante’s hermeneutics in general, see William Franke, Dante’s Interpretive Journey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 17. Purgatory XXII, 70–72. Trans. Charles S. Singleton, The Divine Comedy: Purgatorio, Part 1: “Text” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973). Unless otherwise noted, all translations of the Comedy will be from Singleton’s edition, slightly modified when necessary. Italicized emphasis of Dante’s text is added, except in cases where it indicates a Latin phrase in the original. 18. This point is made by Ernest L. Fortin in his Dissidence et philosophie au moyen âge: Dante et ses antécédents (Montreal: Bellarmin, 1980), p 138. My understanding of the Statius episode, as well as my general sense of Dante’s “skepticism,” is partly indebted to Fortin’s very valuable book, which has recently been issued in English as Dissent and Philosophy in the Middle Ages: Dante and His Precursors (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002). 19. Dante, “Epistle VII.” See John A. Scott, “Henry VII of Luxembourg,” in The Dante Encyclopedia, ed. Richard Lansing (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 2000), pp. 479–481. 20. See Gewirth’s introduction to Marsilius of Padua, The Defender of Peace, pp. liv–lix. Dante is a dualist or “separatist” on the issue of church and state, while Marsilius, reversing the logic of the papacy, nonetheless supports, like the papacy, a monist absolutism. Dante imagines a state entirely free from church control and, in turn, a church entirely free from state control. Dante’s ideal church has absolutely no possessions, no property, no power (above all, no power to coerce). But it is free to teach its doctrines and to offer humankind spiritual guidance. For Marsilius, both “church” and “state” really mean “the people” (the entire community), and it is “the people” who, through their proper representatives, themselves rule all aspects of this single “state-church,” one aspect of which is its official religious institutions. But while this monistic state-church (“the people”) can and ought to regulate and legislate in matters concerning the doctrines and practices of official ecclesiastical institutions (so as to ensure that those doctrines and practices are conducive to the highest goal of peace or civil tranquility), it cannot however coerce the religious beliefs and practices of laymen in any way whatsoever: individuals enjoy complete religious liberty, while the state’s religious institutions are restricted by the will of “the people.” 21. Ibid., p. xix. 22. Ibid., p. xlvi. 23. Averroes, The Decisive Treatise, Determining What the Connection is Between Religion and Philosophy, in Ralph Lerner and Muhsin Mahdi, eds., Medieval Political Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972), p. 181. Averroes 286 NOTES is the name by which the great Islamic rationalist Ibn Rushd (1126–1198 AD) was known in the Latin West. The chief jurisprudent of Cordoba in Muslim Spain, Averroes also served as physician to the caliph. He was often referred to in the Latin West as “the Commentator” for his voluminous explanations of almost the whole corpus of Aristotle (who, for his part, was known as “the Philosopher”), which had previously been almost entirely unknown in Europe. In the Comedy Dante honors Averroes by placing him in Limbo, alongside such intellectual luminaries as Aristotle, Socrates, and Plato. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that the whole edifice of Scholastic philosophy is built on the accomplishments of Averroes. 24. Marsilius of Padua, Defensor pacis 1.1.1; trans. Gewirth, pp. 3–4. 25. For a somewhat detailed discussion of this phrase from the Epistle to Cangrande, see below, part I. Some scholars have questioned the Epistle’s authenticity. It is fair to say that the question remains unresolved, although probably the majority accept that Dante wrote the letter—which, as Albert Russell Ascoli points out in his excellent treatment of the various issues surrounding this text (“Epistle to Cangrande,” in The Dante Encyclopedia, ed. Lansing, pp. 348–352), is really more a treatise in literary criticism than it is a “letter” in the normal sense.

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