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On Reading Dante II




Yesterday I discussed an incident from my teen years when a neighbor lady (NL) interrupted my effort to provide an impromptu exegesis of Dante's Divine Comedy.


Today I'll see if I can finish that exegesis.


Well, Dante was writing at a time when the Papacy and the Holy Roman Emperor were engaged in a struggle for power. He used the three afterlife destinations to suggest his own take....


That's when I was interrupted. I'm not sure where I would have gone from there, or how effectively, at 14: but here is my effort to finish the thought more than 40 years later.


He used the three afterlife destinations to suggest his own take on the power struggle.


His take, roughly, was that the Church should renounce any claim to temporal power and be a more purely spiritual organization. It could do this by making clear its subservience to the Holy Roman Emperors in temporal matters.


On a related point, Dante was not happy with the behavior of the Italian city-states, which were autonomous regions at this time, often acting quite independently of either Church or Empire. This struck Dante as chaotic and ungodly.


These political views were sometimes stated quite explicitly, sometimes manifest by who he located in hell, who in heaven, and were sometimes present in a more coded form.  


For an example of explicit statement, see for example Dante's regret that one Emperor, Constantine, had donated great wealth to the Church, thus inadvertently subverting its true mission.


"Ah, Constantine! what ills were gendered there --
No, not from thy conversion, but the dower
The first rich Pope received from thee as heir!"


Constantine's own intentions were good, and indeed we eventually meet him in Heaven.


Speaking of heaven, observe there the bitter denunciation of the contemporary Church that Dante puts into the mouth of Peter Damian, an 11th century Cardinal. Damian contrasts the present Church with that of Peter the Apostle, and says:


"Pastors today require to be propped up
On either side, one man their horse to lead
(So great their weight!) and one their train to loop...."


As to placement: there are a lot of Popes in Hell (and only one Emperor). And the Popes punished forever in the Inferno are there for what one can properly call political reasons. They are there for challenging Emperors -- or in one case for "making the great refusal," for sitting on the sidelines and refusing to engage in the reforms the Church needs in its parlous condition.


As I mentioned a minute ago, there is only one Emperor in Dante's Hell. That's Frederick II. Frederick, one of the many Holy Roman Emperors who came into quite direct conflict with the Papacy, might have been expected to be one of Dante's heroes.


There are a couple of things we should note about Frederick's infernal fate, though. First, Dante makes no fuss about it. One of the damned, speaking to Dante the traveler, mentions "the second Frederick" as another of those to be found in his circle of hell. That is it. So Dante as poet clearly doesn't want to make much of Frederick's damnation.


The other critical point here: this mention of Frederick II takes place in the circle of Hell devoted to punishing heretics. What heresy Frederick advocated we aren't told. Based on the history of the Emperor's reign we can make a fair guess that Dante saw him as tampering in the real (spiritual) role of the Church. Dante's sympathy was with Emperors only insofar as they opposed the Church's temporal claims.


Beyond matters of explicit statement and placement, there is the broad coding of Dante's imperialist agenda into the structure of the work. That is a more difficult matter to explain, and I've surely tried your patience already, NL, but I will say this. At the very bottom of Hell, the innermost core of evil, there are only three sufferers. They are: Satan himself, Judas, and Brutus. Satan of course rebelled against God the Creator, Judas against God incarnate, Brutus killed the man who was creating the Roman Empire.


This was staggering to me when I first read it, shortly before you and I spoke: Judas is punished no more severely than is Brutus.


Now there is a peculiar historical point here, although it would not have been seen as especially controversial in Dante's milieu. Why did Dante see the Germanic "Holy Roman" Emperors of his time as continuous -- as deriving legitimacy from -- those pagan Romans such as Julius and then Augustus Caesar.  Didn't the Emperors in Byzantium have a better claim to continuity?


To answer that we'd have to get into the issue of Dante's understanding of Charlemagne, and the re-creation of the Empire in the west.


But Dante did see continuity there, so that the Germanic Emperors of his own time were in a line from the Emperors for whom Pontius Pilate had once performed his administrative duties in Roman Palestine. And that gave them a place in the history of salvation, a place that  (oddly, given Pilate's portrayal in the gospels) confirms for Dante their right to rule.


So: NL, what was the book about? It was about a power struggle, and it was an example of the unfortunate tendency of human beings to give to the power struggles in which they are engaged a foundational metaphysical significance.




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