Dante and Thomism

DANTE AND THOMISM By DANIEL SARGENT " DANTE, are you a Thomist poet? " Dante does not answer our question from the next world, nor would he answer it were he in this, for he never turned his head to foolish questions. Yet some Thomists do crowd round Dante, and they will ask questions. " I make a party by myself," he said, yet they follow him as he goes off to be alone, and they have plenty of questions in their hearts: "He must be a philosopher, mustn't he? He has been to the thirteenth-century Sorbonne. From his verses we can see that he knows of our quarrels." "Perhaps he is celebrating Thomism in his Divine Comedy?" "At any rate, isn't he ours, our poet, for he is a living refutation of the claim of the men of the Renaissance that no Aristotelian could be a poet? They took the name of poet for each and all of them, but the world has forgotten it. Dante took the name, and the world still accords it to him. He defined Aristotle as the ' Master of those who know ' and the world quotes even the definition as a verse of poetry." So they discourse; and I would make a few comments. Dante was not a philosopher. He cannot be patronized by professional philosophers as one who might have made a name among them if he had not failed and slunk off into th~ domain of poetry where he could not be contradicted. Dante began to " ragionar " in verse as soon as he could speak " per isfogar la mente." He was a poet. Nor was he a poet who did not know his vocation and in false ambition wished to excel as a philosopher. He made it very clear in the Divine Comedy that what he wanted was the laurel wreath. In fact, the title philosopher he accorded without much ceremony exclusively to the unbaptized thinkers, the whole 256 DANTE AND THOMISM ~57 family of whom he placed in Limbo. Their inability, in spite of all their talents, to arrive anywhere without faith was something which he had carefully explained to him in Paradise. He put in Limbo not only Democritus, who could find no rhyme or reason anywhere, but also Aristotle, who detected a scheme in things. Dante had a high esteem for Saint Thomas Aquinas, so high that he did not even call him a philosopher. He encountered him in Heaven as one of the burning suns that around him circled in a crown. He was grouped with Saint Bonaventure, who was not a Thomist, and Siger of Brabant, who was even less a Thomist. He was one of the wise, one of the prudent, and the one of them of whom Dante asked the most questions, and from whom he received an explanation of form and matter. He inveighed against rash judgment. Yet he was not in the highest sphere of Heaven. Above him were the courageous, and higher still the just, and higher again the contemplatives, Saint Peter Damiani and Saint Benedict. Neither in his life nor in his poem did Dante show any predilection for the company of philosophers. In the Divine Comedy he chose four guides from those personally dear to him. They were Virgil, Statius, Beatrice, and Saint Bernard. No one of these was a philosopher. It might be claimed that he changed these characters into philosophers in his poem. Virgil, for instance, is usually referred to by commentators as representing natural Reason, and it can be conceded that he does become more of a moralizer in the Divine Comedy than he is in the Aeneid; but he remains even then the celebrator of the unbaptized yet to-be-baptized Roman Empire, which Dante prized even over-highly, and in the praising of it shows to Dante the way to celebrate the Eternal Empire, love-commanded, of which God is the Imperator. Virgil did not become transmuted into a philosopher. Saint Bernard, furthermore, became less of a philosopher in the Divine Comedy than he was on earth. He became the poet of our Lady," Vergine Madre." Certainly Dante was not celebrating in his poem any...