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2. Dante in the Eye of the Storm
- The Catholic University of America Press
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Dante in the Eye of the Storm We know from the poet’s affirmation in Monarchia : that he had, by the time of its writing, completed the Paradiso at least up to canto : where he had dealt with free will, “de la volontà la libertate”: “This liberty, or this principle of all our liberty, is the greatest gift to human nature conferred by God—as I have already said in the Paradiso of the Comedy.” As recent scholars have concluded , we cannot disregard the remark or treat it, as many editors once did, as a mere scribal interpolation.1 The passage, attested by all the manuscripts, is the only concrete internal evidence that we possess for dating the Monarchia’s composition post- and, most compellingly, for its completion in the last months of . Leaving the earlier political fervidness of the Epistles written in support of Henry VII’s descent into Italy for coronation as Holy Roman Emperor (–), and the elegaic, tragic, and, occasionally, fulminating verses of the Commedia, the reader approaching this treatise is struck by Dante’s authorial strategy of divorcing it as far as possible from the contingencies of contemporary history.2 Except for one cause célèbre, the reference in Monarchia :: to the unremitting controversy (–) caused by the split among the German electors in ,3 the treatise differs from most of his works by its shrouding of references to contemporary affairs. Nowhere does the poet identify himself. No central players on the political scene, past or present, such as Innocents III or IV, Gregory IX, Frederick II of Hohenstaufen (d. ), Henry VII of Luxembourg, Boniface VIII, Nicholas III, Clement V, or John XXII ever appear directly. Most extraordinary is the absence of any reference to the strife that Henry VII had met in unsuccessfully asserting his overlordship over King Robert III, “the Wise,” of Naples to gain full imperial power.4 Reduced to accepting his crown from a bishop other than the pope in the “Sancta Sanctorum” chapel of the burned-out basilica of St. John the Lateran as a result of King Robert’s machinations, Henry had ultimately lost his quest to be recognized as “dominus mundi,” “lord of the world,” as the law books haughtily proclaimed. By the event of his untimely death at Buonconvento in , he had failed to maintain his jurisdiction as emperor over the different communes and kingdoms that made up the Holy Roman Empire. Dante passes in silence over both the Pastoralis cura, Pope Clement V’s bull that formally repudiated the supremacy of the medieval empire over the papal curia,5 and passages of the Corpus juris civilis that validated kings of new national states as de facto and de jure independent of the emperor.6 Although in Dante’s own lifetime the emperor had ceased to be “lex animata,” law and justice personified,7 the poet likewise ignores his contemporaries’ bewailing of the juristic and actual —material and fiscal—weakness that threatened the empire’s imminent demise. In addition to the syllogistic method, we catch in the Monarchia’s more tempered style other results of the poet’s study of Aristotle in Moerbeke’s staid translations, along with his reading of the dispassionate Latin commentaries of St. Thomas Aquinas.8 He takes to heart Aristotle’s specific warning in the Nicomachean Ethics that immature emotions can render the study and experience of political science profitless.9 Most especially, Dante reflects the more rigidly impersonal tractates of the decretalists that had clearly been a constant study, perhaps from the inception of his exile. Critics have noted that the prose of the Monarchia bears an intimate similarity to the style and content of the Epistola [], the Letter to Can Grande, in which Dante dedicates the last canticle of the Commedia to his patron in April or May of .10 Wielding this polemical pretense of aloof objectivity, the author manipulates his reader into a sense of a text discarnate, creating the impression of a message beyond time, derived from man’s divine reason and inspired by God’s revelation. The author’s own tactics thwart all historians’ and critics’ struggles to place the treatise at a date different from that indicated by the allusion to the fifth canto of the Paradiso. But this calmer tone is one of maturer degree. Dante’s aim in the Monarchia is overtly propagandist, as it was in his fiery political Epistolæ.11 In those lay encyclicals he had not only...
