A Short Biography Dante Alighieri
Who is Dante Alighieri (1265–1321)?
Italian poet. For Dante, the role of
the poet included the moralist, the philosopher and, in his Divine
Comedy, the prophet. Convinced by his brief but traumatic political
career in his native Florence that the society which it represented
required fundamental moral reform Dante, in the last twenty years of
his life, gradually arrived at a vision of an ideal society where
individuals would be free to follow the path of virtue leading to
ultimate salvation, and it is in this essentially religious context
that his political thought must be seen.
Dante's Florence was the wealthiest and
most self-confident, but also the most turbulent, of the
self-governing Italian cities. It acknowledged a nominal allegiance
to the Holy Roman Emperor, but in practice took advantage of the
ineffectuality of imperial authority in Italy to expand at the
expense of its Tuscan neighbours, while keeping at arm's length the
power which had sought to supplant the empire in Italy, the papacy.
In November 1301 the governing party,
to which Dante belonged, was overthrown in a coup with the connivance
of Pope Boniface VIII, who hoped thereby to increase his influence
over the city's affairs. Dante, who was in Rome on an embassy to
Boniface at the time, was among those condemned in their absence by
the new government, and so never returned to the city.
This experience left him profoundly
disillusioned both with Florence and with its economic and social
values, and with a politically aggressive papacy; the conviction that
both must be made to accept constraints on their political power
underlies all his subsequent thought.
The works of the early years of his
exile show Dante exploring the implications of this conviction, as it
develops into the comprehensive vision of social and moral order of
the Divine Comedy. These shorter poems and unfinished prose treatises
reveal a marked preference for lay as against clerical institutions,
and more sympathy than would have been normal in Guelph Florence for
the last Hohenstaufen claimants to the imperial title.
What is missing until the last book of
the Convivio (c. 1307) is that sense of the sacred destiny of Rome as
the capital of the universal empire, which is evidently derived from
Dante's re-reading of Virgil's Aeneid, and which is proclaimed as an
article of faith throughout his mature works.
The Divine Comedy (begun about 1304)
reflects the widening scope of Dante's political concerns. In the
Inferno, Florence and its problems dominate the picture: a community
where family and civic loyalties conflict, whose prevailing
philosophy is materialism and whose prosperity rests on the socially
sterile activity of usury, is shown as fundamentally unstable and
corrupt.
At the same time, the church is
incapable of exercising its proper spiritual function because of the
worldliness of its leaders; and the DONATION OF CONSTANTINE, whereby
the first Christian emperor supposedly bestowed his temporal power in
the West on the papacy, is seen as a fateful mistake which marked the
beginning of the church's decline from its primitive faith.
In the Purgatorio Dante turns to the
larger political order which allows such developments to take place.
There should ideally be two powers or 'suns' which should guide man's
spiritual and temporal aspirations; but 'one has extinguished the
other' (Purg. xvi, 106 ff), the church having trespassed on the
competence of the empire, while the nominal emperors (the Habsburgs,
since 1272) are too preoccupied with consolidating their power in
Germany to challenge the papal usurpations in Italy.
Finally, the Paradiso reflects the rise
and fall of Dante's hopes with the career of Henry of Luxemburg,
elected emperor as Henry VII in 1308, who briefly seemed to give
substance to Dante's dream of an emperor claiming his crown and
asserting his authority in Italy.
But Guelph resistance led by Florence
and King Robert of Naples revealed Henry's vulnerability, and he
died, still leading the remnant of his army, in 1313. The
turning-point in his fortunes was the withdrawal of support by the
French pope, Clement V, under pressure from Philip IV of France.
Dante's scorn for what he considered
this act of treachery, and for the obduracy of the Florentines, is
violently expressed in the Paradiso, and almost the last political
reference in the poem (Par. xxx, 133 ff.) promises a throne in heaven
for Henry and a place in hell for Clement.
The ideas underlying the political
judgments of the Comedy are expounded in the prose treatise De
monarchia, whose three books argue three uncompromising theses: that
only a universal monarch can administer justice impartially between
lesser powers; that special signs of divine favour have marked out
the Roman Empire as the institution destined to exercise such a role;
and that the emperor's authority is derived directly from God, not,
as the church had long claimed and as Boniface vigorously reasserted,
mediated through and hence subject to that of the church.
CHURCH AND STATE were separate and
autonomous; though in a much discussed conclusion, Dante argues that
the emperor nonetheless owed to the pope 'that reverence which an
eldest son should show to his father' (Mon. III, xv), since the
spiritual realm was ultimately superior to the temporal.
The Monarchia makes no explicit
reference to Henry VII, and so probably predates at least the
Paradiso. Indeed, Henry's failure, and Clement's failure to support
him in his prosecution of Robert of Naples for lèse-majesté,
finally showed the untenability of Dante's notion of a universal
monarch. In another respect too, the treatise stops short of Dante's
definitive synthesis of his religious and political convictions in
the Comedy: namely—and paradoxically—in that very insistence on
the autonomy of the secular state, with its implied separation of the
realms of nature and grace, which readers have always found its most
strikingly modern feature.
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