On March 25, 1300, a 35-year-old Florentine poet and politician set out on a long journey afoot in search of redemption. His destination was the eternal city. The poet in question, of course, was Dante Alighieri, and the city was not heaven, but Rome.
During the months leading up to that centenary year, pilgrims had begun to converge on the city, paying visits to the tomb of Saint Peter in hopes of earning a jubilee, a plenary indulgence that would eliminate the temporal punishment due for sins. This mass pilgrimage had begun as a spontaneous act of popular piety; but in February, Pope Boniface VIII issued a bull establishing jubilees as church doctrine. In a time of political fragmentation, Boniface’s pronouncement reaffirmed a spiritual unity that transcended it. But such a move also advanced his hopes of drawing the various national monarchies and city-state communes of Europe (that had emerged with the decline of the Roman Empire) into a new “theocratic” order.
The lowborn son of a small-time moneylender, Dante had already established himself as a leading vernacular poet, a distinguished student of philosophy, a gifted Latin rhetorician, and a reliable politician among the White Guelph party of Florence. Later that year, he would serve as a prior to the governing council of his city. Even as he made his way to Rome, Dante could look back on his life as one of modest but definite success.
Within two years, however, he would flee Florence, an exile under a death sentence. Unprotected by any right of citizenship, he would be forced to search not only for work and patronage, but for the security of his life, in an age marred by family vendettas and factional warfare.
Most of us know Dante for having undertaken a different kind of journey on that day. For while the date of Dante’s pilgrimage to Rome is in dispute, March 25 is definitely the day on which his visionary epic, The Divine Comedy, begins. In that poem, Dante, lost in a dark wood, undertakes a spiritual pilgrimage through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, a journey of conversion that will instruct him and his reader in the moral structure of God’s providence and the intended order of human history.
Guided by his poetic forefather Virgil and, later, the saintly love of his youth, Beatrice Portinari, Dante’s soul would be reordered to the way of virtue, and his mind would enter into the deep mysteries of heaven and earth until it became fitted for a final ecstasy at the height of heaven, the vision of God. The world through which he moves is what Dante himself will call a “polysemous” one, where we see layer upon layer of literal and allegorical significance disclose itself in such a way that every line of the poem becomes a kind of epiphany.
The Divine Comedy‘s vision of the world has an intellectual depth and integrity that has yet to be exhausted even after 700 years of serious scholarship. Dante’s is a story about the changing of his own life, and his hope for a regeneration of the corrupt, bellicose, and chaotic Christendom of his day. But Dante’s poem has changed many lives over the centuries, and encountering the world of his vision—which is at once intellectual and passionate, dramatic and yet sculpted with a fine logic—has led innumerable converts to the Roman Catholic church.
In this studious, authoritative, but reductive new biography, Marco Santagata seeks to fill in the literal details of Dante’s life as the poet shuttles between triumphs and disappointments on the road to the completion of his great poem. Santagata depicts a Dante who feels himself to be “different and predestined” from the very beginning, and one who persists, despite personal disappointment and the failure of his political hopes, in “a stubborn faith in his own mission, the conviction that he, alone, would triumph in the end, and that his poem would reverse” the course of history.
Florence was a center of commerce and Dante a son of the rising bourgeoisie. But he was a strident opponent of the new wealth of finance, because it undermined what he saw as the true conditions of nobility, which Aristotle’s Politics defined for him as “virtue and ancient wealth.” Dante spared no effort to ennoble himself and to overcome the liability of his father’s reputation as a usurer. He joined the Florentine aristocracy in serving as a cavalier during Florence’s continuous skirmishes with hostile cities.
Military service qualified him for a role in Florentine politics, but Dante turned initially to the study of poetry and philosophy. By 1295, when he published his book of prose and verse, the Vita Nuova, he had already won a reputation as a learned vernacular—as opposed to Latin—poet. That work would show him as a philosophical poet of love, as well, whose great discovery is that of a new theme, the praise of his lady. Beatrice had died in 1290, but the figure of her spiritual beauty inspired the poet to the pursuit of virtue.
Only then did he enter public life. He sought to become what we would now call a public intellectual, his “civic” poems arguing for two things: first, to define nobility as a consequence of spiritual and moral virtue, rather than a product of birth; and second, to show himself as just such a spiritual aristocrat. It seems to have worked. Eric Voegelin used to argue that spiritual order was the necessary source of political order. The virtuous poet therefore became a worthy politician. Unfortunately, the rest of his White Guelph party showed a singular lack of prudence at every turn; they would be routed and exiled by a rival faction and never regain power.
Dante’s gifts as a Latin rhetorician made him a far more important figure in exile than he had been as municipal philosopher. His fine words negotiated and secured alliances for his White party, but every battle ended in defeat. As Santagata has it, after only two years, Dante would feel the call of study luring him away from increasingly hopeless partisan activities, and so he retired to the ancient university city of Bologna to undertake two major prose works.
In De vulgari eloquentia, Dante flashes a speculative genius regarding the nature and origins of language, all in the vain effort to convince Italian academics of the worth of vernacular poetry. In the Convivio, a second book of prose and verse, Dante shows his exhaustion with the continuous strife produced by bourgeois finance and the meddling of the church in politics so that no unified political order could emerge. He proposes that true aristocrats—those, that is, who come from “ancient wealth”—reform themselves in virtue and reassert themselves once more to bring back an empire that can rein in both local factionalism and ecclesiastic corruption.
Alas, in 1306, Bologna fell to the same civil war that had ruined Florence, and Dante was forced to flee, his treatises never finished. In the coming years, however, three remarkable events would give Dante cause for hope. First, friends in Florence would help him to seek a personal pardon that he might return home in exchange for repudiating the White Guelph cause. (That was easy; the Whites were the party of the pope.) Second, Henry VII was crowned king of Germany (1308) and proposed to assume the mantle of Holy Roman emperor. And finally, it seems that someone smuggled out of Florence the manuscript to a poem Dante had begun just before his exile.
Dante resumed work on that poem, called Inferno. Its early cantos, argues Santagata, are in the voice of a Dante still seeking to act as a spiritual aristocrat for his fellow citizens. Its later ones decry Florence’s moral failings—but in a way that would show to the Florentines in power that Dante merited a return from exile.
Santagata’s account of the rest of the comedy—Purgatorio and Paradiso—is similarly structured. His attentions are given over almost entirely to Dante’s geographical movements at a given time: whom he needed to flatter to advance his personal fortunes or political hopes, and how those things are reflected in the poem. Indeed, at times, his priorities seem to be backwards, as if the purpose of interpreting a passage of the poem is to determine where Dante happened to be living when he wrote it rather than how Dante’s geographic and political position might help us better understand the poem.
No one can read the Comedy and doubt that Dante’s hope for Henry VII, or someone else, to reunite Christendom under a temporal empire capable of reforming church and society alike was close to his heart. But Santagata’s interpretation of the poem does not so much capture Dante’s local, political concerns as it does reduce the poem to a disjointed series of such items, so that one canto is about the absence of a noble emperor, while another constitutes Dante’s attempt to remake his pedigree as that of an aristocrat by birth.
At one moment, he is writing merely to praise a patron, while at the next, he has left that man behind and is in search of other support for his work. Paradiso XVI seems to be about setting up shop at Verona, while a few cantos on, in Paradiso XXI, Dante is reflecting on the “peace” he finds after settling under new patronage in Ravenna.
All these elements are to be found in the poem, to be sure: Dante, even as he stares into the divine light of God, cannot help but glance back to berate Florence for its degeneracy. But most readers of the poem will see these local political concerns as subordinate to Dante’s spiritual vision, and Santagata has almost nothing to say about all that.
The scholarship here is so careful and balanced that I hesitate to take issue with any of it. But at one point, Santagata’s interpretation seems so obviously misguided as to give symbolic expression to the limited view of Dante offered in the book as a whole.
One of Dante’s most important prose works is a letter dedicating the still-unfinished Paradiso to Cangrande della Scala. The opening paragraphs lavish praise on the patron; those that follow propose to interpret the poem in terms of its “polysemous” literal and allegorical, or “mystical,” meanings. In brief, Dante shows us that his poem merits the kind of complex exegesis proper to works of Scripture, and that, like Scripture, it will reveal depths of philosophical and prophetic meaning to reward such attentions.
Whether Dante actually wrote the letter has long been contested. So how does Santagata solve the question? By chopping the letter in half. The early, politic words to Cangrande are authentic, he tells us; the rest was probably fabricated by later admirers of Dante who wanted to use allegorical interpretations to “soften” the political and antipapal edges of his poem by refocusing it on purely spiritual matters.
This conclusion is improbable. The letter’s discussion of mystical exegesis and philosophy are not (as Santagata claims) unworthy “commonplaces” but indications that Dante knew the Parisian scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas, which still constituted the controversial forefront of modern learning. Furthermore, the account of spiritual interpretation elaborates ideas found in the Convivio, of which Dante’s authorship is undisputed. It is as if Santagata cannot accept that Dante’s letter could be, at once, both a piece of political rhetoric and a brilliant spiritual document; or that the Comedy, for all its immanent political anguish, finally sublimates every detail to the spiritual vision of the poem as a whole.
Everyone who already loves Dante is in Marco Santagata’s debt for his establishing, and with such rigor, the precise literal movements of the poet’s life. But this will lead no one to discover why Dante is worth loving. For that, one needs to have an eye for the rich “polysemous” cosmos of spiritual pilgrimage that Dante fashioned out of the wreckage of a life spent walking the steps of an exile. ¨
James Matthew Wilson teaches literature at Villanova. His new book The Vision of the Soul: Truth, Beauty, and Goodness in the Western Tradition will be published in June.
