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Epilogue
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297 Epilogue In the quietude and tranquility of peace, humanity attains most freely and easily to its proper function, which is almost divine. So wrote Dante Alighieri in his controversial De monarchia of 1318, deemed heretical by Pope John XXII and preserved only through camouflage.1 Refuted by proxy, mistitled, bound within unrelated manuscripts, the authorized edition only emerged in Protestant Basel in the middle of the sixteenth century.2 Written as the pope debated radical Franciscans over ecclesiastical property and asserted his sovereign right to rule in the absence of an emperor, De monarchia argues for clerical obedience to secular powers. Echoing the late twelfth-century canonist Huguccio of Pisa, Dante claimed that temporal principalities were divinely instituted, that the empire preceded the papacy, and that the monarch was sovereign in all affairs of the world.3 He predicated 1. Dante Alighieri, De monarchia 1.4, ed. E. Moore (Oxford, 1916), 343: “patet quod genus humanum in quiete sive tranquillitate pacis ad proprium suum opus,quod fere divinum est . . . liberrime atque facillime se habet.” 2. Anthony Cassell, The Monarchia Controversy (Washington, DC, 2004), 41–43. 3. For Huguccio’s part in fourteenth-century discussions of sovereignty and jurisdiction, especially his elaboration on Rufinus, see Francesco Maiolo, Medieval Sovereignty: Marsilius of Padua and Bartholomew of Saxoferrato (Delft, 2007), 149. 298 THE SLEEP OF BEHEMOTH these arguments on the axiom that humanity’s greatest benefit was to live in peace,a state that he equated with tranquility and harmony. This peace could be achieved only if society were ordered under a single, principal authority that ruled exceptionally, a ruler in whom justice could be maximized through the power of charity and the divine gift of human will exercised most freely.4 Taking its motion from the prime movement of this single ruler, or mono-arch, humanity could attain to the semblance of God, the function toward which it had been designed. Dante noted that Christian history conveyed this message of peace. A moment of perfect and universal tranquility, the singular rule of Augustus had inaugurated the age of the Son.5 On the other hand, Constantine’s donation of the West to the papacy, a violation of his imperial office, had rendered the world open to conflict, chaos, and disunity.6 By inference, then, monarchy and peace were one: the essential condition for obtaining the best of humanity. Dante identified the fundamental needs of humanity in the same terms as reformers of the church had in the late eleventh century: peace and liberty, the two inseparable from each other. However,for him only earthly government could secure these benefits. The peace of which Dante spoke was a singularity of dominion that subjected persons, communities, and kingdoms according to a hierarchy of who should serve and who should govern—not an absorption within a body at peace but rather a dispersal of peacemaking momentum from its prime cause, the monarch, to the rest of the world. If the terms had been changed, Pope Gregory VII might not have disagreed with these ambitions for peace, nor might pontiffs like Innocent III or Boniface VIII, who had insisted on papal sovereignty as an antidote to the church’s worldly captivity. But the impossible vision of peace that had ignited Gregory’s reform had long ceded to an accommodation with secular government ; pope and emperor could be assigned an equal divine ordination only because they could also be assigned an equivalent temporality. 4. Dante, Monarchia 1.4–8, 343–345. 5. Dante,Monarchia 1.11,345. Like clerics who rejoiced at treaties between towns and proclamations of the Truce of God, Dante also uses Vergil’s pastoral to signal the cessation of hostilities,but he links it directly to the age of Augustus, in which the poet wrote. A likely influence here is Origen’s Contra Celsum. See a discussion of Origen’s association between the moment of Christ’s birth and the culmination of the Pax Romana under Augustus in Gerard Caspary, Politics and Exegesis: Origen and the Two Swords (Berkeley, 1979), 131–132 and 138. 6. Dante, Monarchia 3.10: 370–372. Note that the Donation of Constantine has long been exposed as a forgery. In fact, Renaissance humanists, the heirs of Dante, played an important role in its exposure. [54.221.26.137] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 07:19 GMT) EPILOGUE 299 In Monarchia, Dante dismissed the papal argument that the two swords that Peter found in the garden of Gethsemane...