Discussion 7

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Seeds of the secular state: Dante's political Philosophy as seen in

the De Monarchia.

Davis, Derek

Journal of Church & State. Spring91, Vol. 33 Issue 2, p327. 20p.

Literary Criticism

DE Monarchia (Book)

DANTE Alighieri, 1265-1321

POLITICAL science -- Early works to 1800

CRITICISM

Examines the background, content, and implications of Dante

Alighieri's `De Monarchia' as a classical treatise on political theory.

Evaluation of Dante's political philosophy; Historical context in which

the treatise was written; Dante's life in Florence, Italy during the

Renaissance; Church and state tension; Content description of the

`De Monarchia.'

8003

0021-969X

9605010101

Religion and Philosophy Collection

SEEDS OF TE SECULAR STATE: DANTE'S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY AS SEEN IN

THE DE MONARCHIA

Dante Alighieri is among those rare poets who have profoundly stirred the imaginations of people

everywhere since he penned works like The Divine Comedy and Vita Nuova seven centuries ago. Few

people today, however, know Dante as a political philosopher whose seminal thinking in many ways set the

course for the development of Western political theory. This essay examines the background, content, and

implications of Dante's classical treatise on political theory, De Monarchia, a work that today must be

recognized for its significant contributions to the birth and growth of the secular state as a viable model of

political order.

De Monarchia was written at a transitional time in history--the shift from the Middle Ages to the

Renaissance. In fact, historians have frequently debated the question of whether Dante (1265-1321)

belongs to the Middle Ages or the Renaissance.[1]

This question becomes especially pronounced in the evaluation of Dante's political philosophy. In De

Monarchia, he wrote as one still committed to the centuries-old Gelasian theory of the cooperation of the

two sovereign spheres, spiritual and temporal, yet he went farther than any of his predecessors in claiming

for the state its true independence. Dante, therefore, may rightly be called a medieval man foreshadowing

the Renaissance, a true watershed between two eras. While the formulation of the new ideology advancing

the secular state as the primary political unit was reserved for,the Renaissance, developed most notably by

Dante's fellow Florentine in the sixteenth century, Niccolo Machiavelli, it was Dante, in his De Monarchia,

who began to close the door on the medieval view of a unitary commonwealth under the dual authority of

the pope and the emperor.

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The De Monarchia, examined in the context of the papal imperial struggles of Dante's day, shows Dante's

goal to be a statecraft that would provide for world peace. His solution, a world monarchy under a world

emperor, would minimize the principal impediment to peace--papal intervention in political maters--but

Dante's own commitment to a Christian commonwealth prohibited him, in the end, from denying to the

church an ultimate supremacy. Nevertheless, the De Monarchia contains groundbreaking thought on the

theory of the secular state, such that Dante may rightly be called a significant figure in the development of

Western political theory. Before addressing the De Monarchia, however, it is necessary to examine the

historical context in which it was written, as it was Dante's own particular experiences in Italian politics that

motivated him to write De Monarchia.

DANTE'S LIFE IN FLORENCE

It was at Florence, the cradle of the Renaissance,[2] that Dante Alighieri was born in May of 1265. The city

was then under its first republican constitution and was sharply divided between the partisans of the pope,

the Guelfs, and the partisans of the emperor, the Ghibellines. The Guelfs gained control of Florence in

1266, an event which greatly pleased Dante's family who, though of noble ancestry, were neither wealthy

nor particularly prominent. Guelf control marked the beginning of a thirty-year period of relative peace and

prosperity in Florence, sometimes elusive conditions in the great city already known for its artistic and

intellectual life.[3] During this time, Dante received his education, owing much to the influence of Brunetto

Latini, a scholar and philosopher who figured largely in the councils of the Florentine commune. Dante

married in 1295 and the following year became actively involved in the political life of a prospering

Florence.[4]

But success, it seems, made the proud Florentines more quarrelsome than ever. As Dante wrote years

later, "The new people and the sudden gains have generated pride and excess."[5] Struggles for power

became commonplace among Florentine Guelfs, and the two factions that developed, the Blacks led by the

Donati family and the Whites led by the Cerchi, eventually fought a ruthless civil war in 1300. Dante's part in

these troubles cannot be traced with any certainty, but it is known that he held a number of communal

offices after 1295 and that he was elected as one of six priors to the city's governing body, the Signoria, in

1300.[6]

The Florentine political events of 1300 proved to be fateful for Dante. The Signoria, with Dante as one of its

priors, sought to lessen factionalism among the Blacks and Whites by banishing several of the leading

members of each faction. Despite the opposition of Dante and the White leaders to papal interference in

Florentine affairs, Pope Boniface VIII invited Charles of Valois, brother of King Philip of France, to enter

Florence in 1301 to settle the differences between the two rival factions. Seeking to enhance his own

control over Florence, Boniface unwittingly assisted the Blacks to seize power, and more than six hundred

Whites were condemned to exile.[7] In 1302, Dante, with a number of other Whites, was charged with

corruption in office. Refusing to pay a fine of five hundred florins on moral principles, he was permanently

exiled and was to be burned alive if he should ever come within the jurisdiction of the republic.[8] Dante

never returned to Florence.

Dante's political philosophy was related both to his exile as well as to the endless dissensions between the

papal and imperial parties before and during his lifetime. For a period of roughly one hundred fifty years

prior to Dante's exile from Florence, the Italian city-states had been the focus of imperial territorial designs.

In these advances, the ally of the Italian cities was usually the papacy.[9] On imperial advances against

such cities as Allesandria (1167), Barbarossa (1174), Genoa and Venice (l238), Verona, Padua, and Ferrara

(1240s), Padua (1256), Adda (1259), Benevento (1266), and Tagliacozzo (1267), papal forces intervened

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and sought to impede, usually successfully, the imperial armies.[10]

The alliances with the popes had their cost, however, as the Italian cities soon discovered. The popes

increasingly aspired to rule the Italian city-states themselves, and especially the Regnum Italicum.[11]

Resistance to these advances frequently led to the excommunication of kings and rulers of the Italian cities.

Eventually, by the last quarter of the thirteenth century, the papacy controlled politically much of Italy, save

Tuscany and other areas of central Italy. Yet the popes sought to expand their influence there as well. It was

the interference of Boniface VIII in 1301 in Florence that, when protested by the city's Signoria, resulted in

the excommunication of the entire Signoria of "Whites," including Dante, who, as already mentioned, also

was exiled. The popes managed during the same period to win control of the Romagna (east-central Italy),

traditionally the major pro-imperial stronghold. As Quentin Skinner has observed, "The outcome was that by

the end of the thirteenth century, the Papacy had succeeded in winning direct temporal control over a large

area of central Italy, as well as a considerable measure of influence over most of the major cities of the

Regnum Italicum."[12] In all of this, Dante observed again and again the elusive nature of civil peace and

was already becoming increasingly resentful of what he considered to be an excessive role of the church in

political affairs.

THE CHURCH-STATE TENSION OF DANTE'S DAY

The aggressive papal tendencies just described were matched by the formation of an ideology to legitimate

the papal claims to temporal rule.[13] The primary feature of medieval political thought, as it grew to

maturity in the eleventh century under the direction of Pope Gregory VII (1075-1084), was the conception of

a single universal society, unified under the divine will, expounded in the last resort by a single authority.

The Roman Catholic Church, endeavoring to enthrone itself over all the peoples of the world, made the

determined attempt to unify all life, in all its reaches--political, religious, social, economic, intellectual--under

the control of the divinely appointed head, the pope. Thus there arose the doctrine of hierarchy in which

God's heavenly authority was passed to an ecclesiastical hierarchy on earth. In this worldview the

legitimacy of a civil ruler depended not on consent from below, but on a position in a hierarchy ordained

from above.[14]

Along with this idea of a universal, all-embracing hierarchy, its severance between two orders of life, the

spiritual and the temporal, was generally accepted by theorists in the Middle Ages as the eternal counsel of

God. Pope Gelasius I (492-496), who drew heavily on Augustine's De Civitate Dei, had already laid the

foundation for this perspective by postulating that the temporal and spiritual powers, each divinely ordained

and sovereign in its own sphere, were to cooperate in the realization of the "City of God" on earth.[15] In the

words of Gelasius: "There are two things, most august emperor, by which the world is chiefly ruled: the

sacred power of the priesthood and the royal power. Of these, the priests carry the greater weight, because

they will have to render account in the divine judgment for the kings of men."[16]

The conflict inherent in this dualism and the requisite unity became the starting point for speculative

discourse between church and state. Most theorists of the Middle Ages would not accept the dualism as

final; reconciliation for the sake of divine unity was always believed to be attainable. The conflict arising out

of this tension between the temporal and the spiritual was continuous through the Middle Ages, and the

discourse frequently pitted the ecclesiastical and the secular authorities in a struggle for the free exercise of

their divinely perceived functions.[17] In the event of an irreconcilable clash of interests, however, the pope

usually would have the final word; such an arrangement was best calculated to achieve, in theory, what

most rulers and subjects wanted most--order and unity in society.[18]

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Beginning in the ninth century under the Frankish King Charlemagne, a long and disastrous struggle

developed between the kings and emperors on the one hand and the pontiffs on the other over the issue of

ultimate supremacy. Until the middle of the eleventh century, the temporal rulers were the dominant

members of the imperial-papal partnership that sought as its end a Christian society. During this period, due

largely to the logistical problems attendant in administering a geographically large empire, the papacy

generally was powerless to enforce its claimed authority over emperors and feudal lords.[19]

The papacy, however, through spiritual renewal and renewed boldness in challenging the temporal authority

of the emperors, subsequently achieved new heights of power, especially under the pontificates of Gregory

VII and Innocent III (1198-1216). Brilliant, shrewd, and well-versed in ecclesiastical tradition, Innocent

claimed for the papacy "the plenitude, so in the extent of his power, [he] is pre-eminent over all, since he is

the vicar of Him whose is the earth and the fullness thereof, the whole world and all that dwelleth

therein."[20] Boniface VIII affirmed Innocent's triumphant proclamation, especially in his famed Bull of 1302,

Unam Sanctum, which asserted that in a Christian society "there are two swords, the spiritual and the

temporal one . . . it is necessary that one should be below the other and thus that the temporal should be

subordinate to the spiritual power."[21]

Confronted with these all-embracing claims which the popes backed up with considerable military might, the

Italian cities sought to retaliate. But what was needed was a political ideology to legitimate their attack on

the powers and immunities being claimed by the church. Florence, the self-appointed guardian of "Tuscan

liberties,"[22] would produce in the person of Dante (albeit while in exile) the most formidable attack on the

church's claims to temporal power by arguing for an imperial counterbalancing of the pope.

PREPARATION FOR THE DE MONARCHIA

The election in November 1308 of Count Henry IV of Luxembourg as emperor of the Holy Roman Empire

and the events in the years immediately following motivated Dante to pen the De Monarchia. Upon his

election, Henry VII promptly allied himself with Pope Clement V, declared his subordination to the spiritual

authority, and vowed a crusade to restore peace to Italy. Under the Hapsburgs, Rudolph and Albert, Italy

increasingly had become divided and unstable politically. With aspirations of uniting his kingdom's subjects

everywhere, Henry turned his attention toward Italy. In 1310 he entered Italy at Turin with five thousand

troops; finally an emperor was coming into Italy, one who was prepared to cooperate with the pope.[23]

An exultant Dante saw the event as the advent of a golden age, as God's hand working in human history to

bring about world peace. In a letter written to Italy's kings, dukes, marquises, and civil leaders, Dante

proclaimed that a divine moment had arrived: "[God] has raised up another Moses, who will catch away his

people from the oppressions of the Egyptians and lead them to a land flowing with milk and honey."[24] For

Dante, Henry was the "bridegroom Caesar," and Italy, which heretofore had been pitied, would soon be the

envy of the world.[25] Moreover, Dante was ecstatic in likening the emperor to the Savior: "Behold the Lamb

of God, behold him who hath taken away the sins of the world."[26] Dante's fervent use of religious

language was not intended to ascribe deity to the emperor; it was designed merely to underline a point that

he would later make in the De Monarchia, namely, that the independent authority of the emperor derives not

from the pope, or from God through the pope, but from God himself.

Making peace in Italy, however, required more than the divine authority ascribed to the emperor by Dante.

Moreover, the announced alliance between Henry and Clement seemed of little importance to the Italian

people. Guelfs in the various cities, drawing on traditional Guelf stances, were frequently hostile to the

emperor. Yet Ghibelline uproars became a common experience in the northern cities when, for example, the

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emperor, in the effort to appease Guelf factions, would authorize the return of Guelf exiles. The Ghibelline

contingents in various cities generally gave the emperor warm receptions, but welcoming celebrations were

sometimes disrupted by Guelfs, thus destroying the political equilibrium so delicately and precariously

maintained already.[27]

In a separate letter to Henry, Dante urged the emperor to continue through Italy, even to Florence, the pin

holding together the entire Guelf League. Then, in a letter addressed to the Florentines, Dante bemoaned

the turbid consequences of the absence of the emperor in his own region: "When the throne of Augustus is

vacant, the whole world loses its way."[28] Henry had requested of Florence that it desist from its advance

against neighboring Arezzo. In his letter to Henry, Dante was enraged by Florence's denial of Henry's

request. The Florentine mayor, Betto Brunelleschi, asserting his proud city's ancient rights, declared,

without reservation, that Florence never had lowered its horns for any lord. With such an attitude, it was not

surprising that in early 1311, Florence began making military preparations and fortifying its walls to defend

itself against the emperor.[29]

All of this seemed mad to Dante, who in his scathing letter to the Florentines, addressed them as "the arrant

scoundrels within the city."[30] In his letter, Dante claimed that Florence was making a show of its defense

of liberty, yet was acting in violation of the will of God, of nature, and of all mankind.[31] The military

preparations paid off, however, as the Florentines were later able to rebuff what they considered to be an

imperial siege of their city.[32]

In the spring of 1312, Henry left friendly Pisa and marched on Rome. What he met there instead of the

friendly welcome promised by Clement was an armed camp, with Robert of Sicily (still smarting from his

failure to be chosen emperor instead of Henry) blocking his way. Almost literally Henry's men had to fight

their way to the basilica of St. John Lateran, where, instead of at St. Peter's, as Clement had promised,

Henry VII was crowned emperor. Henry's rapidly deteriorating relationship with Clement suffered further

damage when Clement demanded that Henry refrain from attacking Naples and that he make a truce with

Robert of Sicily. This turnabout was unexpected by Henry, but he responded with his own defense of his

independence from papal authority. Henry dispatched encyclicals declaring that his government of the

empire was a direct gift from God, and that the pope ruled in spiritual matters only.

In his encyclicals, Henry likened earthly government to the celestial hierarchy and declared that all men and

kingdoms ought to be subject to the emperor. Henry further refused the pope's request to take an oath not

to invade Robert's kingdom in Sicily. The pope responded to all of this by commanding Henry to leave

Rome and to never return to church lands.[33] It was into this melee of renewed antagonisms between

church and state that Dante stepped in with his De Monarchia.[34]

THE DE MONARCHIA

De Monarchia was written to defend the proposition that the emperor had the right to absolute power over

the world's people and governments in temporal affairs, a right ordained by God and subject to no limitation

by the pope. Though it was written in a moment of political crisis, Dante's purpose apparently was to write a

philosophical treatise that would transcend his own day, since he made no direct references to

contemporary people or events.

The treatise is divided into three books with chapter divisions. In all three books, Dante marshaled his

arguments from Holy Writ, as well as from the writers of antiquity, and in particular, Aristotle, Cicero, Livy,

and Virgil. In Book I, Dante sought to prove his basic assumption that a universal empire is indispensable to

the well-being of mankind. The proper goal of the peoples of the earth, individually or collectively

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considered, Dante maintained, drawing from Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, is the realization of their

intellectual potentialities. Yet civil strife impedes mankind from the realization of this goal. Seeking to find

the root of the fundamental evil of civil strife, Dante discovered it in the sin of cupidity to which all of God's

creatures are prone. Cupidity can be removed from any person only when he or she already possesses

everything, and only a universal monarch, possessing all, could qualify. Dante wrote:

But when there is nothing to be desired there can be no cupidity, because the passions cannot remain when

their objects have been eliminated. But the Monarch has nothing to desire, since the ocean alone is the limit

of his jurisdiction--unlike other princes. . . whose jurisdictions are limited by one another's frontiers. It follows

that of all mortals the Monarch can be the purest incarnation of justice.[35]

Dante diplomatically avoided the direct accusation of cupidity in the papacy, although it does appear

resoundingly in The Divine Comedy, where he accused the papacy, whose "avarice afflicts the world,"[36] of

taking from Constantine that which was not its own, as well as of joining the "sword. . . to the crook,"[37]

that is, invading the civil sphere at every turn.

World peace and, conversely, the avoidance of civil strife, Dante argued, can be maintained only through a

world empire. The form of such a universal empire is monarchy--the rule of a single prince who alone can

achieve unity of mankind. Dante elevated the argument for universal monarchy above the level of civil

necessity to that of cosmic and divine perfection. God is the first cause of all creation and singly rules all.

Moreover, humanity comes nearest to achieving its goal when it most resembles God: "Therefore, when

mankind is subject to one Prince it is most like God and this implies conformity to the divine intention, which

is the condition of perfection."[38]

In arguing for a universal monarch, Dante acknowledged the existence of lower forms of body politic. As

John Morrall has insightfully noted, Dante believed with the other Aristotelians of his time in the city as the

ideal unit in which to live and find felicity; however, as Morrall observed, Dante also believed the existence

of wars between cities demanded the creation of a yet higher political authority that would govern the world

peacefully.[39]

In Book II, Dante sought to prove that the Roman Empire was the only true empire that ever existed. This

was no mere Italian prejudice surfacing; for Dante, "the Roman people was ordained to rule."[40] It mattered

not that at the time, through a transitory delegation of powers, the German princes were the electors of the

emperor. The empire, by a historic and natural right, was Roman, and the emperor therefore a Roman

prince, just as the supreme pontiff was a Roman bishop.[41] Rome, and no other, was to hold the seat of

Caesar and the chair of Peter.

Dante's argument for the primacy of the Roman Empire was historical as well as theological. Historically, he

argued at length that the Roman conquest of the world happened lawfully. The Roman people were a most

noble people,[42] a theme borrowed from Virgil. Dante further asserted that whoever wills the good of the

community thereby wills the advancement of what is good. By bringing many peoples under their rule, the

Romans acted for the benefit of the community of mankind because common rule might result in world

peace.[43] Moreover, "that holy, pious, and glorious people" repressed their greed in order to bring peace to

the world community.[44] He agreed with Aristotle's argument in his Politics that some peoples are born to

rule, while others are born to be ruled, and moreover, he asserted that history bears witness to the reality

that nature ordained the Romans to rule.[45]

Theologically, Dante argued that God is always acting providentially in history and, therefore, God ordained

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the Romans to rule.[46] In an interesting and novel line of reasoning, Dante addressed the relationship

between the Roman Empire and the coming of Christ, arguing that Christ's choosing to be born under the

authority of Rome proved the legitimacy of the empire. Thus the chronological sequence of Christ's birth

and the ascendancy of the Roman Empire was no coincidence; it was the stamp of God's approval upon the

legitimacy of the Empire.[47]

Having proven in Book I that a world emperor is essential to peace among men and in Book II that the

worldwide Roman Empire is the jurisdiction of the emperor, Dante proceeded to the most polemical, if not

the most crucial, part of his treatise. In Book III, Dante framed a most important question: "Whether the

authority of the Roman Monarch . . . is immediately dependent on God, or whether his authority comes

indirectly from some other, a vicar or minister of God (I [Dante] am referring to the successor of Peter) who

is entrusted with the keys of the kingdom of heaven."[48] Dante's familiarity with Scripture was his main

weapon in Book III. As a source of authority, Scripture was to be primary, not the traditions of the church as

the decretalists maintained. In chapters 3 to 10 he sought to refute specific papal arguments that included

allegorical interpretations of the Old and New Testaments. He also considered extensively a major text

which the proponents of papal superiority relied upon, Matthew 16:19, where Christ leaves the keys of the

kingdom to Peter, concluding that the kingdom refers only to heaven and that, therefore, Peter's office has

jurisdiction over only spiritual matters (i.e., showing the way of salvation), not temporal matters.

In the final chapters of Book III, Dante turned to the positive arguments for imperial independence. In

Chapter 12, he argued that since the empire existed before the papacy, it is not possible that its

prerogatives are derived from the papacy. In Chapter 13, he argued that natural law as well cannot support

papal claims of supremacy because the church is not a creation of nature, as is the temporal order, but is

rather a supernatural creation with limited purposes.

The weightiest chapter in Book III is the last, where Dante contended that the authority of the empire

derived from God, not the papacy. The argument is relatively straightforward: man has two natures, one

physical and the other spiritual, which have profound political consequences. He declared:

Unerring Providence has therefore set man to attain two goals: the first is happiness in this life, which

consists in the exercise of his own powers and is typified by the earthly paradise; the second is the

happiness of eternal life, which consists in the enjoyment of the divine countenance (which man cannot

attain to of his own power but only by the aid of divine illumination) and is typified by the heavenly paradise.

This explains why two guides have been appointed for man to lead him to his twofold goal: there is the

Supreme Pontiff who is to lead mankind to eternal life in accordance with revelation; and there is the

emperor who, in accordance with philosophical teaching, is to lead mankind to temporal happiness.[49]

Was Dante committing himself to two completely independent planes of existence? His statements seem to

postulate two separate goals (earthly and heavenly) attained by two separate means (philosophy and

revelation). Yet herein lies the distinctiveness of Dante's political thought. In order for mankind to achieve

happiness in this earthly life, which requires peace among all peoples, the political ruler must not, as a ruler,

be subordinated to the pope. Previous scholastic philosophy had regarded man's heavenly goal of salvation

as the all-sufficing end to which the secondary goal of earthly happiness might be a useful aid. As one

scholar has noted, "Dante seems to have been the first thinker to elevate the earthly destiny of Man, in

particular his political and philosophical development, into an end in itself."[50]

Dante's effort was to forge a carefully balanced dualism in which church and state were independent of

each other. But could he sustain this separation right through the end of the De Monarchia? In a word, no.

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In the end, Dante was overtaken by his Christian commitment to the Catholic Church, the medieval

admission that conflict between the realms of church and state are inevitable, and the belief that in the

event of a clash of competing interests, the emperor must bow before the pontiff. Dante concluded: "Caesar,

therefore, is obliged to observe that reverence towards Peter which a first-born son owes to his father; so

that when he is enlightened by the light of paternal grace, he may the more powerfully enlighten the world,

at the head of which he has been placed by the One who alone is ruler of all things spiritual and

temporal."[51] Dante's determined effort to create an absolute division between the spiritual and temporal

spheres gave way, in the end, to the Gelasian view-- papal supremacy. In the words of Marjorie Reeves,

Dante "at the last opens a door through which the ecclesiastics could once more invade the political

territory."[52]

One might logically ask at this point how Dante's view of imperial independence was any different from that

of the line of imperial rulers, from Charlemagne to Henry VII, who sought for the emperors a right of

temporal rule free from papal interference. The answer is complex, but Dante's view must be seen as

adding something fresh to the medieval debate about how the spiritual and temporal spheres were to

cooperate in ruling a Christian commonwealth.

Medieval theory generally held that ecclesiastical and civil governments were two activities of a single

whole.[53] The goal was a Christian society ruled by a partnership; if the partnership crumbled, it was

believed, all of society would crumble with it.[54] Each generation faced the same disagreements over the

allocation of responsibility between the popes and the emperors; the divisions generally were attempted

along the lines of sacred and secular, spiritual and temporal, earthly and heavenly, and the like. The greater

debate, however, focused on the issue of supremacy in the partnership. Because society was to be a

Christian one, the overlap in spiritual and temporal duties of the partners was seen as natural; the claim to

supremacy was merely the consequent attempt to stabilize society by giving to either pope or emperor the

final say when the lines of division of responsibility were blurred or when clearly competing interests

surfaced. Some emperors, like Charlemagne and Otto I (936973), saw themselves as the coordinating and

sovereign head of society, whose jurisdiction extended to spiritual as well as temporal interests. Others, like

Frederick II (1215-1250), grudgingly gave in to papal supremacy but asserted the imperial jurisdiction over

temporal concerns.[55] Henry VII, according to William Bowsky at least, seems to have fallen in the latter

category, asserting principally his God-given right to rule in temporal matters free from papal

interference.[56]

For Dante, though, supremacy was not the ultimate issue. He, like Henry VII, held to the ideal of the papal-

imperial partnership but argued for the imperial authority in temporal matters in a unique way. He focused

on a divinely created dual nature in mankind--one nature seeking a temporal enjoyment in this life and the

other nature seeking a spiritual enjoyment to be cultivated now but ultimately enjoyed in the afterlife.

Temporal enjoyment was the God-granted jurisdiction of the emperor; spiritual enjoyment was the

God-granted jurisdiction of the pope. He was willing to grant to the pope an ultimate supremacy, but only as

a formality. For Dante, supremacy did not need to be an issue if the independent authority of the emperor

was recognized.

Dante's real contribution, then, as seen in the De Monarchia, lay in his unique theoretical justification for the

emperor's authority--the isolation of mankind's temporal from his spiritual makeup--which gave to the state,

exercising its rightful authority over mankind's temporal makeup, an independent and elevated position.

REFLECTIONS ON DANTE'S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

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A number of additional observations' can be made regarding the impact and implications of Dante's political

thought. To begin with, one might reflect upon the accuracy of a statement offered by the British historian

and statesman, Lord Bryce (1838-1922), who called De Monarchia an epitaph rather than a prophecy.[57]

To be sure, Dante's call in the early fourteenth century for a world empire ruled by a world emperor has not

yet been heeded In fact, some critics have termed Dante's vision of a universal monarchy an idle and

idealistic dream.[58] Actually, however, Dante's proclamation was only the bold revival of a great ideal that

had guided Western rulers for many centuries--in the empire of Constantine, of Charlemagne, and of the

German emperors. Echoes of the same utopian dream of a oneworld government remain alive today. These

echoes represent only the dream of a strong central controlling power that can keep human greed in check

and provide a lasting peace. Dante merely was able to express the dream with more passion and more

eloquence than any who preceded him. Perhaps the De Monarchia, in its identification with an idealistic

passion for a world government that might usher in world peace, a passion that persists to this day, as well

as in its identification with the more secular thought that would help produce the nation-state of the future,

was much more prophetic than Lord Bryce could envision.

Another observation concerning Dante's political thought arises from the suggestion made earlier in this

essay that Dante, while belonging to the Middle Ages, also was a forerunner of the Renaissance. This

should here be affirmed. Humanism, which became a dominant intellectual force during the movement now

known as the Renaissance, emphasized the fundamental belief in the dignity and value of man.[59]

Humanism was neither religious nor antireligious at its core, as Paul Kristeller, among others, has rightly

argued,[60] but as an intellectual movement, it certainly brought to bear a competition between religious and

nonreligious concerns.[61] In Dante's isolation of the temporal dimension from the spiritual dimension in

human beings, asserted for the purpose of demonstrating that the emperor held absolute power over the

peoples of the world in temporal affairs as a right ordained by God and subject to no limitation by the pope,

one can easily see the essentially nonreligious concerns of mankind (political affairs) competing with the

essentially religious concerns (submission to the pope) in the mind of Dante. This reveals in Dante a

dawning humanism[62] seeking to break with the medieval religious orientation of political life. E. H.

Kantorowicz has argued that Dante indeed made a clean break:

Dante's metaphysical surgery exceeded that of others who before him had separated the empire from the

embrace of the Church . . . by appropriating, as it were, the intellect for the state and leaving the care of the

soul to the Church. Dante did not turn humanitas against Christianitas, but thoroughly separated the one

from the other; he took the "human" out of the Christian compound and isolated it as a value in its own

right.[63]

While Kantorowicz's perception of the degree of Dante's separation of the religious element from the

political domain might be overextended, if only slightly, Dante's bifurcation of the temporal and the spiritual

in the political domain at the least foreshadowed later developments in political theory. As Felix Gilbert has

shown, the Renaissance humanists adopted historical example as the basis for political theory, a marked

shift from the abstract theoretical (and vitally religious) foundations used by the medievalists.[64] Moreover,

as the political thinking of the humanists progressed after Dante's day, the religious orientation of political

life began to wane and almost disappeared altogether.[65] But Dante, possessing features of medieval

thought and fore shadowing, if not introducing, the new humanist thought, might appropriately be called in

terms of his political theory a bridge between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. This thesis, moreover,

is supported by Christopher Dawson who discovered in Dante a synthesis between the tendencies of

medieval thought and certain newly emerging patterns of Western culture. Dawson wrote: "While on the one

hand it [this synthesis] looks back to the medieval idea of a universal society and to the tradition of

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Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire; on the other, it looks forward to the Renaissanee, to the national

monarchy and to the new humanist culture."[66]

Finally, although Dante's political hopes were fixed on the universal empire of the past and not the national

monarchy of the future, his De Monarchia, in its foretelling of the break with the unitary conception of society

that had for so long dominated European political theory, paved the way for the development of secular

political theory Despite the seriousness of Dante's proposal for rescuing society from the domination of the

pope, Skinner is probably correct in asserting that Dante's proposal was less than satisfactory for certain

republics, like those in Lombardy and Tuscany, which were forever jealous of their liberties. Skinner has

suggested that while Dante's proposal would have allowed those republics to deny the right of the pope to

interfere in their affairs, it did so at the expense of branding them once again as vassals of the Holy Roman

Empire. In Skinner's own words, "What they needed most of all was a form of political argument capable of

vindicating their liberty against the church without involving them in ceding it to anyone else."[67]

Other Italian thinkers were to resolve this problem. The first to press his claims for the new autonomy of the

state was Marsilius (1275-1342) of Padua who argued in Defensor Pacis that each city republic is an

independent kingdom and not a vassal of any empire or superior civil structure. This framework, when

joined with the conception (already seen in Dante's De Monarchia) that the church has no temporal

jurisdiction, was quite satisfactory as the needed intellectual basis for separation by the republics from the

papacy.[68] But while it was intellectually possible for the republics to entertain thoughts of freedom from

papal domination and control of their affairs, it was practically impossible, in an age thoroughly dominated

by the principle of church-state partnership, for the republics to accord Marsilius's revolutionary treatise the

high praise it would receive in subsequent times--outside of the Italian republics.[69]

Two centuries later, Machiavelli (1469-1527) would reject the entire medieval theory of a universal society

and devote his keen intellect to the task of formulating the policy of the new secular national state. For

Machievelli, the state was a distinctly human institution with no formal ties to religion.[70]

Religion, however, was not easily extracted from the Italian political tradition or from the makeup of the

European national monarchies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The complete divorce of church

and state was, therefore, to be first attempted only in a virgin nation on foreign soil; it was in the eighteenth

century that the separationist principles found in the political theories of Marsilius and Machiavelli were to

find their fullest expression in the United States Constitution.[71] While it would be going too far to give

credit to Dante for formulating lasting principles which later would provide the framework for the secular

state, it should not be an overstatement to say that both Marsilius and Machisvelli, as original thinkers who

broke new ground by calling for a secular state, were indebted to the Florentine political poet, Dante

Alighieri, for laying much of the essential foundation upon which they would build.

[1.] For example, William R. Estep, Renaissance and Reformation (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1986),

22, has raised the question, calling Dante medieval in his philosophical and theological presuppositions, but

Renaissance in his literary style. Edward Huline, The-Renaissance, the Protestant Revolution and the

Catholic Reformation (New York: Century Books, 1915), 91, assigns Dante to the Renaissance. George

Sellery, The Renaissance: Its Nature and Origins (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press,

1962), 36, feels that Dante represents the last and the best of the Middle Ages. Finally, Luigi Sturzo, Church

and State (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1962), 127, assigns him to two "epochs"-the

Middle Ages and Humanism. The author is aware of Marvin Becker's suggestion that the depiction of Dante

as occupying a middleground between past and future political thought has become a worn-out scholarly

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cliche. See Marvin B. Becker, "Dante and His Literary Contemporaries as Political Men," Speculum

41(1966), 665. But however frequent its use, it remains a valid depiction as indicated by the number of good

authors who have made its application, only a few of which have been noted here. Yet if this author

correctly reads Becker, he is not denying the accuracy of the depiction, only the fact that it does not tell the

whole story. Dante, argues Becker, had political sentiments which were concretely an expression of his own

time so that his position contained "more than the fruits of the past and the embryo of the future." The

present essay would affirm Becker in some of its particulars, but has as its theme a broader perspective

than Becker's, namely, the political views of Dante, especially as they refute to church and state, as seen in

the context of the historical development of Western political thought, and from such a perspective, Dante

indeed must be seen as an important link between two eras.

[2.] Estep, Renaissance and Reformation, 22.

[3.] Ferdinand Schevill, History of Florence From the Founding of the City Through the Renaissance (New

York: Frederick Ungar, 1961), 133-78; Francis Fergusson, Dante (New York: The MacMillan Company,

1966), 4-7. For a very brief but succinct description of the origin and nature of the Guelf and Ghibelline

parties, see p. 6 of Fergusson's work.

[4.] Dante, vol. 21 of Great Books of the Western World (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1952), v.

[5.] Quoted in Fergusson, Dante, 26, from The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Canto XVI, 73.

[6.] Ibid., 26-29. The struggle between "Blacks" and "Whites" was not, of course ethnically oriented. Rather,

the struggle centered on the degree of authority the pope should have in Florentine politics: the Blacks

advocated greater papal authority, the Whites lesser.

[7.] A good account of this episode is given by a nineteenth-century historian, R. W. Church, Dante and

Other Essays (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1888), 42-47.

[8.] Ibid.

[9.] Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1978), 1:12.

[10.] Ibid., 12-14.

[11.] The term Regnum Italicum refers to that part of Northern Italy which corresponds to the Lombard

kingdom of the Dark Ages, which Otto I reincorporated into the German Empire in 962. See Skinner, The

Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 1:4, n.1.

[12.] Ibid., 1:14.

[13.] Ibid.

[14.] Brian Tierney, Religion, Law, and the Growth of Constitutional Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1982), 42; F. J. C. Hearnshaw, The Social and Political Ideas of Some Great Medieval

Thinkers (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967), 15; Christopher Dawson, "Church and State in the Middle

Ages," in Medieval Essays (Garden City, N.Y.: Image Books, 1959), 70-71.

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[15.] James E. Wood, Jr., E. Bruce Thompson, and Robert T. Miller, Church and State in Scripture, History,

and Constitutional Law (Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 1958), 61.

[16.] Ibid. The emperor being addressed by Gelasius was Anastasius, who ruled from 491 to 518.

[17.] Raymond C. Gettell, History of Political Thought (New York: The Century Co., 1924), 13.

[18.] Wood, Church and State in Scripture, History, and Constittutional Law, 62.

[19.] Ibid., 62-63.

[20.] Quoted in ibid., 64.

[21.] Quoted in Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 1:15. 22.

[22.] Ibid., 16.

[23.] William M. Bowsky, Henry VII in Italy: The Conflict of Empire and City-State, 1310-1313 (Westport,

Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1974), 54-60; Ricardo J. Quinones, Dante Alighieri (Boston: Twayne Publishers,

1979), 89.

[24.] Letter V (of the usual numbering of thirteen political letters ascribed to Dante); reprinted in Dante:

Monarchy and Three Political Letters, trans. with an Introduction by Donald Nicholl (London: Weidenfeld

and Nicolson, 1954), 97. Dante's political letters are classics of political polemic and should be read by

students of Dante's political thought. They supplement, but in no way contradict, the De Monarchia.

[25.] Ibid., 99.

[26.] Ibid., (Letter VII), 110.

[27.] Bowsky, Henry Vll in Italy, 54-158; Quinones, Dante Alighieri, 89-91.

28. Letter VI as reprinted in Nicholl, Dante: Monarchy and the Three Political Letters, 103 (see note 24).

29. Quinones, Dante Alighieri, 9091.

30. Letter VI as reprinted in Nicholl, Dante: Monarchy and the Three Political Letters, 103.

31. Ibid., 104.

32. Quinones, Dante Alighieri, 91.

[33.] Bowsky, Henry VII in Italy, 159-70; ibid., 91-92.

[34.] The date of authorship of the De Monarchia is a thorny problem. It was written, according to some who

have studied the subject, as early as 1309. However the most trustworthy critics give it a date of 1312 or

1313, during or shortly after Henry VII's expedition through Italy. A good discussion of the dating of the De

Monarchia is found in Cesare Foligno, "Notes on the Date of the Composition of the De Monarchia," in

Dante. Essays in Commemoration 1321-1921, ea., Antonio Cippico, Harold E. Good, Edmund C. Gardner,

W. P. Ker, and Walter Seton (London: University of London Press, 1921),141-56.

[35.] De Monarchia, Book I, 11. All references from the De Monarchia are taken from Donald Nicholl's

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translation (see note 24).

[36.] Inferno, Canto XIX, Line 104, taken from The Divine Comedy, trans. H. R. Huse (New York: Holt,

Rinehart and Winston, 1968).

[37.] Purgatory, Canto XVI, Lines 109-10.

[38.] De Monarchia, Book 1, 8.

[39.] John B. Morrall, Political Thought in Medieval Times (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1958), 97.

[40.] De Monarchia, Book II, 6.

[41.] John A. Abbo; Political Thought: Men and Ideas (Westminster, Md.: The Newman Press, 1960),130.

[42.] De Monarchia, Book II, 3.

[43.] Ibid., Book II, 5.

[44.] Ibid.

[45.] Ibid. Book II, 6.

[46.] Ibid. Book II, 3.

[47.] Ibid., Book II, 2. One author has discovered a parallel line of reasoning in Dante's Convivio: even

before the birth of Christ, the Roman citizens were infused with divine love rather than human love, which is

why Luke can say in his Gospel that the world was at peace at the time of Christ's birth. See Michael

Richter, "Dante the Philosopher-Historian in the Monarchia," in Dante Soundings, ed. David Nolan (Dublin:

Irish Academic Press, 1981), 170.

[48.] De Monarchia Book III, 1.

[49.] Ibid., Book III 16.

[50.] Morrall, Political Thought in Medieval Times, 101.

[51.] De Monarchia, Book III, 16.

[52.] Marjorie Reeves, "Marsiglio of Padua and Dante Alighieri," in Trends in Medieval Political Thought, ed.

Beryl Smalley (New York: Basil Blackwell and Mott, Ltd., 1965), 92.

[53.] Wood, Church and State in Scripture, History, and Constitutional Law, 65.

[54.] Brian Tierney and Sidney Painter, Western Europe in the Middle Ages, 300-1475, 4th ed. (New York:

Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), 476.

[55.] Generally, see E.H. Kantorowicz, Frederick the Second, 11941260 (New York: F. Ungar Pub. Co.,

1957), 90-95

[56.] Bowsky, Henry VII in Italy, 187-88.

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[57.] Heranshaw, The Social and Political Ideas of Some Great Medieval Thinkers. 135.

[58.] Abbo, Political Thought: Men and Ideas, 134.

[59.] Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic, and Humanist Strains (New York:

Harper and Row Publishers, 1961), 22, 125.

[60.] Ibid., 74.

[61.] Ibid., 70-91.

[62.] Kristeller has opined that humanism arose in medieval Italy about the end of the thirteenth century.

Ibid., 116.

[63.] E. H. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1957), 465.

[64.] Felix Gilbert, "The Humanist Concept of the Prince and The Prince of Machiavelli," in Niccolo

Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. and ed. Robert M. Adams (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1977),156.

[65.] Ibid.

[66.] Dawson, "Church and State in the Middle Ages," 85.

[67.] Skinner, The Foundations of Modem Political Thought, 1:18.

[68.] Ibid., 18-21. The extent of Marsilius's reliance upon the De Monarchia cannot be determined with any

certainty. Although Marsilius rnakes no direct references to the De Monarchia in his treatise, at least one

translator of Defensor Pacis has found a number of parallel features in the two works, so that it is not at all

unreasortable to suppose that Marsilius was quite familiar with the De Monarchia. Marsilius of Padua, The

Defender of Peace, trans. Alan Gewirth (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), 42, n. 24; 82, n. 3. 83,

n. 6; 99, n. 2; 278, n. 14. For an analysis of Defensor Pacis, see Charles Wellborn, "Marsilius of Padua: A

Modern Look," Journal of Church and State 4 (November 1962): 191-204.

[69.] H. Hearder and D. P. Waley, eds., A Short History of Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1963), 49-120.

[70.] Getell, History of Political Thought, 145.

[71.] In his classic treatise on the development of religious freedom in America, Sanford H. Cobb asserted

that "this revolutionary principle, declarative of the complete separation of Church and State, so startlingly in

contrast with the principles which had dominated in the past--ths pure Religiow Liberty--may be confidently

reckoned as of distinctly American origin .... Here, among all the benefits to mankind to which this soil has

given rise, this pure religious liberty may be justly rated as the great gift of America to civilization and the

world ...." Sanford H. Cobb, The Rise of Religious Liberty in America: A History (New York: MacMillan Co.,

1902), 2.

One additional clarifying point might be made here. It is suggested here only that the framers of the United

States Constitution formally endorsed the notion of a secular state, free from any formal ties to religion, a

notion clearly advocated by both Marsilius and Machiavelli, and not that the United States adopted broader

Machiavellian principles in the sense that Leo Strauss has described Machiavellianism, as "government of

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the sword" which leads to tyranny. Indeed, the United States should be regarded as having been founded

on principles of moral theory, universal peace, freedom and justice, as Strauss argues. Leo Strauss,

"Machiavelli the Immoralist," in Machiavelli, The Prince, 183-84.

~~~~~~~~

By DEREK DAVIS

DEREK DAVIS (B.A., M.A., J.D., Baylor University) is associate director of the J.M. Dawson Institute of

Church-State Studies at Baylor University. He is author of Original Intent: Chief Justice Rehnquist and the

Course of American Church-State Relations and co-editor of The Role of Religion in the Making of Public

Policy (forthcoming). Special interests include religious liberty, intellectual history, and taxation of exempt

organizations.

Copyright of Journal of Church & State is the property of Oxford University Press / UK and its content may

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