Sodomites are from Mars: Deconstructing Rhetoric in the Commedia

The political tension at the heart of Dante’s Commedia may be most easily observed in the discrepancy between its author’s ideological commitments and the plot of the story he decided to write. The narrative structure of the Commedia is simple enough: a man leaves the sin-sodden world for the righteous community of the Blessed, traveling “from Florence to a people just and sane.”¹ One might plausibly conclude on the strength of this summary alone that the Commedia is less than sanguine about the course of human history, as the proper response to disagreeable political circumstances would be, apparently, to flee the world entirely. At the same time, even the poem’s most casual readers cannot fail to observe its incessant political advocacy: for the restoration of the Empire, the peace of Italy, and the purification—by which is meant sanctifying impoverishment—of the Church. More importantly, the pilgrim does not simply escape the world. He must return, we find, and the substance of his tale—the hundred canti recounting his experience in the hereafter—becomes a prophetic message, which he is commissioned to deliver “for the benefit of the wicked world.”² But what is it that he must communicate? Is the chief burden of the Commedia political, making it a rhetorical performance designed to stimulate civic virtue in its audience? Or is it a predominantly religious work, summoning the faithful to fix their eyes on heaven? To put it another way, is the Commedia principally theology or poetry?

Even to pose the question may seem a false step. After all, is not Dante the poet who above all represents the fusion of theological and poetic discourses, the uniquely authoritative theologuspoeta?³ But even if the critical consensus in our day tends to grant Dante’s poem this hybrid status with respect to genre, modern analyses of his politics insist on admitting the two alternatives in a strictly hierarchical arrangement. Erich Auerbach argued in the mid-twentieth century that Dante’s interest in terrestrial affairs ultimately swept away the theological underpinnings of his poem; in Auerbach’s striking turn of phrase, “the image of Man replaces the image of God.”⁴ Dante thus comes to be defined as an anti-Augustinian writer, politically engaged precisely to the extent, as Peter Hawkins has suggested, that he subordinates his Augustinian Christian faith to the concerns of this world.⁵ Rather than approaching the world of history and politics through a figural lens as a means of apprehending spiritual truths, Dante is understood to instrumentalize heaven itself, the better to make his point about the proper functioning of political communities on earth. As Charles Till Davis puts it, “Dante’s other world is a symbol for this one.”⁶ Joan Ferrante agrees, carrying the argument so far as to construct a kind of reverse allegorization: hell becomes a vision of corrupt society, purgatory an account of social reformation, and paradise “the model for…political and moral life on earth.”⁷ Ugo Dotti deftly draws out the rhetorical implications of so closely aligning the Commedia with the civitas terrena:⁸

The reader, listening to [Dante’s] voice, quickly comes to realize that it also speaks of him, and not in connection with the salvation of his soul, but rather with reference to those great cultural and ethico-political themes that are ever relevant, in the search for new bearings in the world of men.

(130)

Dotti is perhaps more absolute than most in drawing the dichotomy between the otherworldly discourse of salvation and questions of culture, politics, and ethics that find their fulfillment in the “the world of men” (he will go on to enlist it among the great republican treatises of Cicero and Plato),⁹ but every proponent of a politicized Commedia shares, implicitly or otherwise, the view that Dante’s text owes more to Cicero than to Augustine, that (to put it another way) his poem functions chiefly in the role of civic oratory, exhorting its readers to live well in the polis.¹⁰

Another way to describe this politically inscribed poetics is...