Prelude
I teach the history of political philosophy. For most of my career, the syllabus of my introductory course leapt from the ancients to the moderns. Medieval texts were mentioned in passing, if at all. There is some justification for this neglect; in a time dominated by Christianity and Neoplatonism, both of which diminish the significance of politics, political philosophy was a peripheral concern.Footnote 1 But teaching in a common core with Inferno on the syllabus, I saw an exception to that view. Politics permeates Dante’s imagined world. His intellectual milieu diminishes politics’ significance. The Comedy does not.Footnote 2
When he explicitly veils the Comedy’s meaning; when he refers to it as “polysemous”; and when, at the heart of Paradiso, he worries about how candidly he should tell readers the truth, Dante signals the poem’s distance from accepted views (Purg. VIII. 19–21, XXVIII; Ep. XIII; Par. XVII. 100–142).Footnote 3 The possibility that the Comedy may be less than strictly orthodox arose contemporaneously with its circulation – as did the need to justify the numerous irregularities in so captivating a work. Yet some commentators have always sought to explain rather than explain away Dante’s unorthodoxy, to regard the Comedy on its own terms rather than as a particularly enthralling expression of the “medieval mind.” In this book, I build on the foundation laid by these commentators.Footnote 4
More specifically, I show Dante to be the thinker who revives political philosophy for the Christian world.Footnote 5 Its revival is made necessary by an understanding of philosophy as neither a set of doctrines nor as instrumental to faith but rather as a life, one that includes the ongoing scrutiny of the community’s most cherished beliefs.
Paradiso is the locus of this revival. It may seem paradoxical to find Dante’s political philosophy in the Comedy’s most abstract, most metaphysical canticle. But Dante shares the classical view that one aim of political philosophy is to defend the philosophic life against the reigning beliefs of the culture in which the philosopher resides, and he prosecutes this task in Paradiso.Footnote 6 Here, Dante confronts the challenge to philosophy posed by its subordination to Christian faith, a task that requires him to take specific aim at his culture’s intellectuals, whether identified as theologians or philosophers.
Dante roots the alternative in the work of the thinker he calls “the master of those who know,” applying to Aristotle the appellation Maimonides reserves for Moses (Inf. IV. 131).Footnote 7 Dante’s debt to Aristotle, though widely acknowledged, has not been fully understood.Footnote 8 Reading Aristotle as carefully as he himself wants to be read, Dante discerns the aporetic Aristotle, known to the Islamic and Jewish Aristotelians.Footnote 9 This Aristotle resists assimilation to the Neo-Aristotelianism which, viewing him largely through a theological lens, enlists Aristotle in the service of faith.Footnote 10 Nor should Dante’s Aristotle be lumped together with the so-called radical Aristotelians such as Siger of Brabant or Boethius of Dacia.Footnote 11 Unlike those thinkers, Dante takes with utmost seriousness what Aristotle calls “the philosophy of human affairs,” a purpose of which is to consider the conditions, theoretical and practical, of the philosophic life.Footnote 12 This self-reflective inquiry shapes not only the Comedy’s content but its form, prompting Dante’s turn to the wholly poetic.Footnote 13
Aristotle recommends this inquiry in what Dante’s Virgil, explaining Inferno’s structure, calls “la tua ‘Etica’” (Inf. XI. 80). Akin to Aristotle’s text, in Dante’s Letter to Can Grande, he designates the Comedy, a work of “philosophy,” specifically, of “ethics” (Ep. XIII. 40). And in Monarchia, he writes that the touchstone of ethics, “happiness in this life,” is attained “through the teachings of philosophy, provided that we follow them putting into practice the moral and intellectual virtues” (Mon. III. xvi. 8).Footnote 14 This happiest life “consists in the exercise of our own powers” (Mon. III. 7).Footnote 15 It is the life, Dante adds, figured in the earthly paradise” (Mon. III. 7).Footnote 16
In Dante’s Philosophical Life: Politics and Human Wisdom in “Purgatorio,” I follow the arrow Dante lets fly in Monarchia to a study of Purgatorio, the home of “earthly paradise” (Purg. XXVIII–XXXIII).Footnote 17 In that work, I argue that Purgatorio makes the case for the philosophic life, one devoted to reasoned inquiry, as the happiest life. My aim in the present volume is to show that Paradiso’s purpose is to defend this view against the alternatives, to demonstrate, more particularly, that in Paradiso Dante liberates philosophy from its role as faith’s “handmaiden.”Footnote 18 It thus paves the way for those readers able and willing to lead the life “figured” in Purgatorio’s “earthly paradise,” contributing in this way to the fulfillment of the Comedy’s purpose.
To appreciate how this interpretation differs from accepted notions of that purpose, it’s helpful to consider the poem’s palinodic character.Footnote 19 As is evident from its opening lines, the Comedy means to rectify an error. One widespread view holds that Dante atones for the misguided rationalism of his unfinished Convivio with the Comedy’s return to faith.Footnote 20 This view does pinpoint Dante’s error. But it mistakes his response. The Comedy, I argue, does indeed mount a critique of rationalism, most intensely in Paradiso. But its recommended remedy is not faith. It is, instead, reason itself in a form that rejects dogmatism of every stripe. The Comedy recants the extravagant and unfounded claims for the comprehensive scope of the unaided intellect in favor of the life of rational inquiry, an autonomous existence justified and guided by reason’s own limits.Footnote 21
The form of philosophy Dante rejects makes central the vison of unity between mind and whole attained. Primarily a form of Neoplatonism, with roots reaching into the Platonic dialogues, its seed is found in Plato’s Theaetetus where the philosopher is urged to “assimilate to a god.”Footnote 22 In its philosophical, non-Christian form, Neoplatonism looks to the natural capacity of the philosopher to achieve this goal. “[A] heaven of reason,” in Peter Dronke’s words, awaits the properly prepared mind.Footnote 23 But it can be doubted that unaided efforts alone suffice for the liberation of the intellect from all corporeal constraint, that transcendence of everything contingent and mutable necessary to attain this end. Accordingly, from Christianity’s viewpoint, the Neoplatonist philosopher can “see what the goal is but not how to get there.”Footnote 24 When to their agreement about the goal is added shared doubt about reason’s inability to attain it, Neoplatonism and Christianity join hands, their accord “natural, almost inevitable.”Footnote 25 The goal is then thought achievable only by supranatural means, the journey to the shared end attainable by faith alone. In this case, it becomes possible to assert, in Etienne Gilson’s formulation, that “in the long run the conclusions of metaphysics always agree with those of theology.”Footnote 26 It’s this theological enterprise, prominent in his time, that Dante, it is claimed, means to enshrine.Footnote 27 I argue that Dante means instead to challenge it.
Dante’s replacement of the “Donna Gentile” by a newly loquacious and fiercely inquisitive Beatrice marks his progress from dogmatically asserted rationalism to a life that eschews every dogmatism (Conv. II. ii. 1–2). He thus rectifies the error committed when, as Beatrice charges, “he took himself from me and gave himself to another” (Purg. XXX. 126). Hence, Dante depicts the life in “earthly paradise,” when reunited with Beatrice, as one of doubts and questions, of seeking rather than possessing wisdom, a life of never-ending desire (Purg. XXVIII. 43–66, XXX. 34–48, 103–145, XXXI. 1–90, XXXIII. 31–102).
This understanding of the Comedy’s aim alters Paradiso’s role. Understandably, the poem’s final canticle is usually taken to be the poem’s culmination in every sense.Footnote 28 Dante does present his journey as an ascent from Hell’s lowest depths to the peak of Mount Purgatory and then, as portrayed in Paradiso, up through the Heavens to the Empyrean. But early in Paradiso, Dante warns readers that turbulent intellectual waters lie ahead, and the rough seas persist to the poem’s conclusion. In the Heavens that lead up to and include his ascent’s endpoint, the pilgrim’s perplexity deepens rather than abates. In particular, his hunger to know justice remains unsated. With his ascent, Dante poses the question whether to regard the insuperable limits of reason as a spur to faith or as an insight that justifies further inquiry. Reflection on this question animates the activity depicted in earthly paradise. Paradiso maps the way back to Purgatorio.
That way, however, must not contravene Dante’s own premises, a requirement that elicits his deepest reflections on the alternative, faith or reason. Recognizing that a completely rational account is unavailable, Dante knows that to preclude faith on the basis of its irrationality would be to fall back into dogmatic rationalism. To avoid this outcome, he must locate a ground that faith and reason share. He finds that ground in the question of the meaning of happiness, the question that stands before faith and reason, to which both therefore respond. The intensity of passion that surrounds this alternative testifies to the deep human desire to be in the right regarding this most significant matter.Footnote 29 It is this question that in Paradiso Dante seeks to recover.
The classical political philosophers understand that to defend the philosophic life they must respond to the divine directives regarding the happiest, most choiceworthy life.Footnote 30 Dante revives political philosophy to undertake this same task. Yet, as a student of Aristotle, he recognizes that this work cannot be wholly archaeological, merely unearthing and restoring the classical view; prudence, that capacity of judgment employed when particulars resist seamless comprehension by a general principle, dictates that new circumstances call for a new approach. And, in Christianity, the philosophic life faces a novel and formidable obstacle. For the classics, the path to the question of happiness emerges from what Plato characterizes as the “cave” of political life; when each political community has a notion of how best to live, articulated in its distinctive norms and substantiated by its gods, the question of how best to live presents itself more evidently as a question.Footnote 31 This variety of answers sparks the reasoned search for a natural standard by which to judge the many conflicting possibilities. But in Dante’s world the question of how best to live has been answered once and for all by the Creator and Ruler of the whole. Accordingly, because the Heaven of the Sun, the theologians’ realm, partially obscures the Heaven of Mercury and the political glory it celebrates, there’s a step in the recovery of the decisive question that must precede consideration of serious politics (V. 128–129). Paradiso, through its form as well as its content, meets that demand.
Dante aims neither to master nor eliminate the challenge of faith. He seeks, more modestly, to engage in a form of reason that remains open to that challenge, persistently aware, therefore, of reason’s limits. In Paradiso, he shows how these limits themselves justify the life of reasoned inquiry. At the core of this inquiry, Dante places the enigma of our nature which makes happiness a question. This focus on human affairs does not, as some argue, circumscribe Dante’s view.Footnote 32 Puzzling over the question of how best to live cannot ultimately be separated from reflection on being as a whole. For our nature is enigmatic precisely in that we are both individuals subject to the same necessities as all other things yet able also to conceive of the whole. But this enigma does leave the character of the whole itself a mystery, the power to conceive the whole rendering a comprehensively determinate understanding of it elusive.
Because he judges self-knowledge to be the key to understanding this mystery, Dante takes politics seriously; the tensions manifest in political life, especially in the noble politics that strives to address the range of human desires, best illuminate human nature’s perplexity.Footnote 33 At the heart of Paradiso Dante shows the link between his political concerns and Christianity in the form of his ancestor, Cacciaguida who, as noble citizen and Christian martyr, comprises both. In explicating that link, and contrasting both with the philosophic life, Paradiso fulfills its role as the portal to the Comedy’s central canticle.
To fulfill this role, Paradiso must raise the question of human good in the broadest possible way. Beyond asking which of the many goods should take precedence, Dante considers whether it is even good to be human – a matter whose urgency grows with the burgeoning of our technological prowess. Dante’s premodern perspective, rather than disqualify him as a guide through this contemporary concern, makes his guidance more trustworthy. His understanding of the philosophic life, in its clear-eyed appreciation of reason’s limits, lets him stand apart from and judge with prudence any proposal for the comprehensive transformation of human existence. Accordingly, Dante can help us reflect on the proper goal of our immense and expanding power. With his guidance we can think more clearly about just what we should mean by paradise.
Defending Philosophy Poetically
The Comedy’s wholly poetic form is particularly suited to convey a notion of philosophy that involves deeds as well as words. With its capacity for personification, poetry can depict philosophy as a lived existence, engaged in by individuals, living with others in a particular place and time. Dante’s poetic art also responds to the diversity of intellect and motivation in his audience, enticing the potentially philosophic and assuaging the ire often engendered by the rational scrutiny of deeply held beliefs. More fundamentally, its depictions of conversations with a variety of interlocutors can illuminate the contours of the human soul, to test those premises that justify the philosophic life in the only laboratory where such tests can be run.Footnote 34
Dante’s use of poetry to articulate and defend the philosophic life emulates another philosophic poet, whose work Beatrice cites early in Paradiso. Speaking of the Timaeus, Beatrice states that what Plato means to convey in this dialogue may be “different from what the words express” (IV. 55–56).Footnote 35 Dante, too, employs poetry to speak in a “polysemous” manner, “the words … addressed to one person and the meaning to another” (Ep. XIII. 20; Conv. III. x. 6). He, too, engages in the dissimulation that poetry makes possible (Inf. XVI. 124). In this way he meets the resistance that confronts deeply inquisitive thinkers of every age. To exemplify the danger, Dante calls attention to Siger’s sad fate, traceable to his all-too-public philosophizing, which Bishop Tempier, in his “Condemnation of 1277,” calls Siger’s “unguarded speech” (X. 133–138).Footnote 36 Dante thus shrouds his meaning with a “veil,” adding another layer of insulation to the poetic form that already makes its deepest teaching unmanifest (e.g., Purg. VIII. 19–21, XXIX. 22–30).
Notably, however, Dante’s use of the veil is explicit; he encourages readers to see in his work the multilayered character Beatrice finds in the Timaeus. Were safety Dante’s only concern, rather than make his dissimulation explicit, he would erect a more opaque screen. But this would thwart the Comedy’s pedagogical aim (Ep. XIII. 39–40). As in Purgatorio’s dominant image, there must be an unbroken path, however steep and treacherous, from the poem’s valleys to its peaks. Otherwise, rather than educate readers, it would speak only to initiates, those already convinced – an outcome at odds with the Comedy’s philosophic destination. Accordingly, the poem’s multiple layers connect with one another, each leading to a deeper, more comprehensive level of meaning. In this way, the poem itself is just, educating its readers heedful of their diversity.Footnote 37 Boccaccio recognizes Dante’s pedagogical success when he characterizes the Comedy as “a river, gentle and deep, in which the little lamb may wade and the great elephant may easily swim.”Footnote 38
Dante’s explicit use of the veil leads to the poem’s depths. It encourages reflection on the deep and abiding differences among us that underlie poetic form’s protective and pedagogical functions. In his discussion with Cacciaguida, Dante indicates that these differences include the extent to which each is able and willing to exercise the distinctive human ability to discern the truth (XVII. 103–142). Dante’s self-proclaimed superiority in this regard suggests that the differences among us are so great as to cast doubt on whether the highest good is available to each and all (II. 1–15).Footnote 39 In depicting how vast is the array of human types, Dante’s poetry substantiates the judgment that “it is not possible to define [humans’] ultimate perfection through their essential principles,” that, in other words, human excellence or fulfillment, happiness, may not be simply deducible from human nature (Conv. IV. xvi. 9–10).Footnote 40 Our ultimate perfection or good is thus a matter for inquiry.
The questionability of the ultimate good reflects the perplexity of human nature. The differences among us are rooted in the fact that we are ensouled individuals, not pure but embodied minds. In what Dante calls Averroes’ “great commentary,” he deems the consequent scope of human diversity “the most formidable” of all difficulties: How can there be vast differences among us, even though, all possessing the distinctively human cognitive capacity, we are all human (Inf. IV. 144)?Footnote 41 The difficulty arises most concretely as each community attempts, with always partial success, to reconcile the differences between those goods that are universally shared with those enjoyable by a relative few; the problem of the One and the Many, present throughout Paradiso, is encountered first in the political realm.Footnote 42 Poetry’s capacity to depict “persons,” beings that think, act, and think about acting, keeps in view the perplexed relationship of the diverse aspects of our nature and the communal tensions these create.Footnote 43
Not only does it differentiate among individual capacities, embodiedness imposes limits on all human cognition, which Dante explores most intensely in Paradiso.Footnote 44 Just prior to her reference to Timaeus, Beatrice states that, as with Scripture, which “condescends to your faculties, attributing feet and hands to God,” so also do the heavenly spirits appear as they do, for “your understanding … takes from sense perception alone what later it makes worthy of intellection” (IV. 43–44, 40–42). As embodied, our initial access to the world is through sense-perception. Understanding “takes from sense-perception” the image, the form in the mind, on which “intellection,” thinking, depends.Footnote 45 This dependence dictates limits on human cognition. In its detachment from immediate sense-perception, the image affords the latitude required for thinking, but it accounts thereby also for the partiality of knowledge that makes possible both error, such as that with which the Comedy begins, as well as its corrigibility, depicted in Dante’s ascent.
Because the image, the basis of knowledge, is akin to the thing but not the thing itself our cognition is mediated.Footnote 46 We think and learn through commensuration, discerning with varying accuracy likenesses and differences between and among the kinds of things, an effortful and ongoing process expressed also in the predicative nature of speech. Accordingly, that which is unique eludes such commensuration, another limit on our knowing.Footnote 47 The upshot is that nothing speaks immediately for itself; as suggested by Dante’s distinction between words and meaning, the speeches are always open to interpretation and revision. Insofar as our understanding proceeds through commensuration, all reasoning and speaking is metaphorical.Footnote 48 Though all poetry is suffused by metaphor, Dante’s distinctively self-reflective poetry makes this character thematic.Footnote 49
The partiality inherent in human cognition, unresolved by appeals to the transhuman, opens the door to further sources of error as it permits passion to distort understanding (Conv. IV. i. 8–9).Footnote 50 Dante is alert to the temptation to replace how things are with how we wish them to be, to trade truth for certitude, especially about concerns that most emphatically impact our lives. Thus, though he seeks still to know the whole, however problematic it might be, Dante recognizes that that search must proceed from an undistorted assessment of our cognitive situation.Footnote 51 Dante’s personifying poetry addresses this temptation by populating the Comedy with figures who articulate general ideas, not as abstract statements but as their heartfelt views, shaped by their distinctive experiences.Footnote 52 Each individual presents a mirror for readers’ own self-reflection. We can ask of them as we ask of ourselves, whether speech and deed cohere, whether the stated views express self-knowledge or self-delusion, whether the yearned-for good is consistent with the yearning. Nor does Dante exempt himself from this test. Appearing in the Comedy as both pilgrim and poet, Dante spotlights the deed of the poem itself, inviting readers to ask whether it accounts for its own possibility, its own good.
Dante’s poetry is itself the product of and an argument for the prudence that he juxtaposes to a strictly deductive account of humanity.Footnote 53 The coherence of speech and deed becomes a question because aspects of our nature can and often do conflict. Dante makes dubious that we can account for this conflict, for our nature, with precision, an imprecision that poetry precisely conveys. The interlocking stories of Francis and Dominic explicate human nature more accurately than could any treatise (XI. 28–XII. 129).Footnote 54 Dante complicates his poem not simply to obscure its meaning but to express an enduring perplexity. It’s by showing that it’s this perplexity that makes the good a question, a question that stands before both faith and reason, a question all yearn to answer, that Dante justifies the life of inquiry.
Yet the novel and daunting obstacle posed by Christianity impedes this question’s reconsideration. The obstacle is, as indicated, affective as well as intellectual. Passionate yearning for assurance regarding the permanent security of one’s own motivates the alternative to the life Dante offers. That alternative promises to dispel all uncertainty, to resolve all difference as it provides in bodily resurrection the good for which individuals as such most deeply long. The satisfactions of the life Dante has in view pale in comparison. Rather than harmony and security, it offers incessant doubts and questions, with no guarantee that further inquiry might resolve them.
Dante’s insight concerning human difference moderates his expectations of pedagogical success. He makes clear that few will be able or willing to follow him as he navigates the turbulent sea the voyage must cross (II. 1–15). Readers who accompany Dante to the end should not expect the placid waters of reason and faith synthesized. What awaits is, instead, a choice, a choice between a life of inquiry or obedience. Inseparable as it is from affect or passion the choice can only be made by each individual alone. Dante cannot supply a reasoned argument to compel assent. But his poetry can provide the experience that brings readers to the crossroads, to choose for themselves how best to live – as Dante himself once did (Purg. XIX. 1–33; Conv. IV. i. 8–9).Footnote 55
Though only a minority of his readers may choose to live as he has done, Dante affords each the opportunity to make that decision. The justification of the choices that Dante’s characters have made helps readers weigh the cost and benefits of these lives. And, though the attractions of difference-resolving harmony are clear, the poem also conveys the satisfactions on the other side of the ledger. Most manifest of these is the delight afforded by the poem itself, which must elicit gratitude for the image-dependent cognition that makes such poetry possible. The more pleasure the Comedy gives its readers, the less compelling is the desire to overcome the limits inherent in that dependence.
The Comedy’s protagonist provides another source of that pleasure. Dante’s casting himself as the poem’s hero, his audacious claim regarding his poem’s veracity and sacredness, express the prideful self-assertion that makes the classical epic hero so compelling; traversing Purgatorio’s Terrace of Pride did not cure Dante of that sin (Inf. XVI. 124–136; XXIII. 62, XXV. 1). But, unlike those heroes, Dante’s courage is intellectual not martial; as the identity of author and protagonist suggests, the Comedy is an epic of self-reflection. Dante exhibits his courage in his willingness to question every premise, to highlight his own errors, and to extol a beloved who, from the moment she re-enters his life, challenges his beliefs at every turn. Dante’s self-admiration shows there to be worth and satisfaction in rethinking, from the ground up, the most deeply held beliefs, to follow the path of reason wherever it goes.
These are exactly the qualities needed to confront his world’s most imposing obstacle to the philosophic life. To do so, Dante turns to his own purpose the doctrinal and thus discursive character of Christian revelation. In drawing a starker line between faith and reason than did the classical world, Christianity summons as its counterpart the dogmatic rationalism that Dante rejects.Footnote 56 But the use of reason to patrol that border does make Christianity vulnerable to reason’s incursions. Doctrines as such want to be understood and be regarded as true. Reasoning about God, theology, assists in this effort. But it also calls forth heresy, controversy within the faith, as, in competing texts, revered authorities argue and err (XXVIII. 130–135, XXIX. 37–45, 97–102).Footnote 57 Doctrinal revelation gives rise, in fact, to a text-permeated world.Footnote 58 The number and variety of commentaries that orbit the Holy Scriptures show that these texts, as such, are not self-explanatory. Whether used to deepen theological reflections or repel the arguments of the faithless, works of the philosophers and poets, pagan and contemporary, also inhabit this textual world. In place of the classical conflict of city with city, Dante stages a battle of books, bringing into contention, pagan and Jew, Muslim and Hindu; theologian and saint, mystic and philosopher; warrior and poet, priest and politician – all in the light of Christianity. His poem’s oft-noted encyclopedic character aims not merely to catalogue the knowledge available in his world.Footnote 59 Rather, the equally authoritative arguments and counterarguments, the doctrines and heresies, the tensions between the classical and Christian understanding all provide readers inlets to the question of happiness – as a question. Dante’s “sacred poem” places each reader in the seat of judgment, face to face before this teeming diversity of perspectives. Some may wonder which is true, wondering what the good can be for a being that can and must wonder about its good.
Dante’s frequent reflections on the activity intrinsic to this text-permeated world directs readers to this wonder’s source. With his frequent apostrophes, with the sky-writing eagle’s visible speech, Dante makes reading itself thematic.Footnote 60 He installs us as characters in the poem, calling upon us to think of ourselves as readers and, in accord with his own inquisitive spirit, to reflect on the premises of this activity. Doing so, opens the way to those perplexities of human cognition that compel happiness to be a question. Built into its very structure, the poet reflecting on his pilgrimage, the Comedy invites readers to emulate its hero, to reflect on our own deeds, to ask how beings capable of this self-activity, with its inherent limitations, should live.
The Comedy thus fulfills the epic’s purpose, founding a community with a distinctive way of life. And, in the inquisitive conversations that urge Dante’s interlocutors to explain who and what they are; in Beatrice’s intellectual ferocity as she chides Dante for following a school; in Dante’s unending hunger for the truth about justice; in delight at his mind’s power to conceive so many unresolved streams of thought; it gives its members models for emulation. The “citizens” of the Comedy’s community are readers who “[share] in a community of speeches and thoughts.”Footnote 61 In that sharing, which calls for the full exercise of our powers, there is available a truly common good. Through his art Dante conveys this benefit of unsurpassed worth well beyond the bounds of his own existence, even to us who “call [his] time ancient” (XVII. 120).
