Here Dante exalts learning and the use of reason to the highest, for only through knowledge can man hope to attain virtue and God. The Convivio seems to be the connecting link between the Vita nuova and the Divine Comedy, since a love that at first has earthly associations turns out to have religious significance. Furthermore, just as Dante praises reason in this work, we know that in the Divine Comedy, reason in the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom is man’s sole guide on earth, except for the intervention of divine grace.
One might say that the Convivio is the philosophical counterpart of the Vita nuova. Even from a quick reading of the canzone that opens book II, “ Voi che ’ ntendendo “ (“You who by understanding”), the reader easily sees that, given the appropriate prose background, it might well have fitted into the Vita nuova. But when Dante begins the exposition of this ode it is “the sail of reason” that bears him on.
In the preamble to the Convivio Dante suggests reform in his declaring the vernacular suitable for ethical subjects as well as amorous ones. He was a leader in considering the vernacular a potential medium for all forms of expression, and his impassioned defense and praise of it manifest his awareness of its value in scientific interpretation as he comments at length on its uses.
He tells his reader that writings should be expounded in four senses. The first is the literal level. The second is the allegorical; for example, when Ovid tells his reader that Orpheus moved both animals and stones with his music he is signifying the power of eloquence over what is not rational. In this case the literal level of the story or poem need not be true. If it is not true, it is known as the allegory of poets; if the literal level is taken to be the truth, it is known as the allegory of theologians, because the literal level of the Scriptures was considered to be true. The third is the moral level, and this has a didactic purpose: when Christ took only three of his disciples with him on the occasion of the Transfiguration, it was another way of saying that for those things that are most secret we should have little company. The fourth sense is the anagogical, as when Scripture signifies certain spiritual or mystical truths. When we read, for example, that the people of Israel came out of Egypt and that Judea was made free, we must take this to be literally true, but the statement also signifies the spiritual truth that when a soul turns away from sin it becomes holy and free.
The literal level of a writing must always be exposed first, for it is impossible to delve into the “form” of anything without first preparing the “subject” upon which the form is to be stamped—you must prepare the wood before you build the table. Dante, in book II, chapter I of the Convivio, proposes to expound the literal level of his canzone first and then the allegorical, bringing into play the other levels or senses when it seems appropriate. There are very few passages in Dante’s work where all four senses are at work; in fact, of the three canzoni expounded in the Convivio he manages to treat only the first two poems on two levels, while the third he discusses only on the literal level. And when Dante talks about the literal sense he means, of course, not the words but what the words mean. We must bear in mind that the literal sense contains all the other meanings.
In the third book Dante expounds the canzone “Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona” (“Love that converses with me in my mind”), which Casella in the Divine Comedy will sing to the newly arrived souls on the shores of Purgatory. In discussing the literal level of this ode he gives most of his attention to the meaning of amor (love).
Dante begins the fourth book, which treats the third and final canzone, “ Le dolci rime d’amor ch’i’solìa “ (“Those sweet rhymes of love that I was wont”), by stressing the fact that. his love of philosophy has led him to love all those who pursue the truth and despise those who follow error. He also tells us in chapter 1 of this book that in order to have the utmost clarity he will discuss the poem only on the literal level. The lady involved, however, is still Philosophy.
Critics have proposed a number of theories on why Dante completed only four of the projected fourteen books of the Convivio. Thomas Bergin goes as far as to suggest that the Convivio might be thought of as the selva oscura (dark wood) of the Divine Comedy, from which the poet’s lady, Beatrice, in a more graceful and harmonious work of art, felt obliged to rescue her poet-lover. I tend to agree with Rocco Montano, who suspects that it was some kind of personal crisis or “conversion” that made Dante stop working on this project. Montano assigns such a conversion and the writing of the Divine Comedy to the insight that resulted from Dante the poet’s great disappointment at the failure of Henry VII’s expedition into Italy. In any case, whatever Dante’s reason for cutting short his work on the Convivio, whether it was personal or political, if this meant he could get on with the Divine Comedy and complete his masterpiece, we should be grateful that he did.
In all his works Dante shows his concern for words and the structure of language. In chapter XXV of the Vita nuova he takes time to explain and illustrate the use of personification, as he does in the early chapters of the Convivio, where he defends the use of Italian rather than Latin. But this concern is most evident in his Latin treatise De vulgari eloquentia. Before it there was no such scholarly treatment of a language. Dante completed only the first and second books, but he refers to a fourth; it is not known if that one was to be the last.
In book I Dante deals with the origin and history of the Italian language. The first five chapters cover the basic definitions of human speech while a good deal of the rest is given over to a discussion of dialects and the principles of poetic composition in the vulgar tongue, which he calls the “illustrious” vulgar tongue—the language of Guido Guinizzelli and, most perfectly, of Guido Cavalcanti, Cino da Pistoia, and Dante himself.
The second book of the De vulgari eloquentia is devoted to a more thorough discussion of Italian, which, Dante asserts, is just as appropriate for works of prose as for poetry. Early in this book (chapter II) he discusses what kind of subject is worthy of this vernacular and concludes that it is suited for only the most elevated subjects. And they are three: war (or prowess of arms), love, and virtue (or direction of the will). He states that the greatest writers using a vulgar tongue wrote only on these three subjects. Among Provencal poets, Dante cites Bertran de Born, who wrote about war, Arnaut Daniel on love, and Guiraut de Bornelh on virtue; he also mentions that in Italian Cino da Pistoia wrote about love and “his friend” (Dante), about virtue, citing an example of verse from each poet and including one of his own. Then he admits that he can find no Italian poet who has written on the topic of war. In chapter III of this book we learn that while poets have used a variety of forms (canzoni, ballate, sonnets, and other irregular types), the most excellent form remains the canzone, and it is this form that is most suited to lofty subjects. In the remaining chapters of book II the author goes on to discuss style and the rules and form of the canzone; the work ends abruptly with the incomplete chapter XIV, in which he intended to treat the number of lines and syllables in the stanza.
Most scholars agree that the De vulgari eloquentia is not a finished work, but is rather an unfinished first draft. There are three basic reasons for this belief: the paucity of manuscripts (there are only three), the way the work breaks off in chapter XIV, and the fact that references to points the author promises to discuss in coming chapters are never followed up. Perhaps Dante stopped writing the work, as Aristide Marigo suggests, because he was not certain of the direction he was taking. There is an obvious difference between the wide, humanistic scope of book I and the dry, manual-like approach of book II. Or could Dante simply have become bored with it?
The date of composition of the De vulgari eloquentia has not been definitively resolved. Boccaccio claims that it was written in Dante’s old age. Marigo, who has done the standard edition of the work (Florence, 1938), dates it between the spring of 1303 and the end of 1304. And because in the Convivio Dante makes an allusion to this work in progress we must assume, at least, that he had the project in mind during this t
ime.
It is also difficult to assign a date of composition to Dante’s De monarchia (On Monarchy), primarily because it contains no references to the author’s contemporaries or to events taking place at the time. Some say that it was written before Dante’s exile because the work contains no mention of it; others tend to think that it was written even later than the Convivio, because a number of ideas appearing in an embryonic stage in that work are fully developed in the De monarchia. Nevertheless, it was probably written between 1312 and 1313 (sometime before or after the coronation of Henry VII) to commemorate Henry’s advent into Italy.
The treatise is divided into three books. In the first book Dante attempts to prove that temporal monarchy is necessary for the welfare of the world. Temporal monarchy, or the empire, means a single command exercised over all persons; that is, in those things that are subject to time as opposed to eternal matters. In the opening sentence of the De monarchia the author pays tribute to both God and Aristotle while he establishes the reason for undertaking the present work: “All men whom the higher nature has imbued with a love of truth should feel impelled to work for the benefit of future generations, whom they will thereby enrich, just as they themselves have been enriched by the labors of their ancestors. ” According to Dante (and we find the idea throughout his writings), the man who does not contribute to the common good fails sadly in his duty.
Clearly Dante is convinced that he is doing something new in his treatise. There is nothing new, however, in his ideas of justice, freedom, and law—they are very much in line with the medieval philosophy of his day. The idea so elaborately set forth in book I, that a higher jurisdiction is necessary whenever there is a possibility of discord or strife, was an argument that had already been used by Pope Boniface VIII and his followers. The originality of the De monarchia, the new element that Dante brings to the old idea of empire, rests precisely in its main premise, upon which and around which the treatise is constructed: Dante’s justification from a philosophical point of view of a single ruler for all the human race. It is in his concern with founding a “universal community of the human race” (“ universalis civilitas humani generis “) that he is new and even daring—daring because in Dante’s day this idea of a universal community existed only as a religious one, in the form of the church. His new idea, then, took its shape from universal Christendom; it is, in a sense, an imitation of it elaborated from a philosophical point of view. Working from the Averroistic concept of the “possible intellect, ” Dante affirms that the particular goal of mankind as a whole is to realize to the fullest all the potentialities of this intellect (to have all the intellectual knowledge it is capable of having); this can happen only under the direction of a single ruler, under one world government. And the most important essential, if we are to secure our happiness and if the human race is to fulfill its proper role, is universal peace.
Dante considers the monarch to be the purest incarnation of justice, for there is nothing for him to desire, nothing more to be greedy about. He is a man who has everything, having authority over all territories. Dante also tells us that the human race is at its best when it is most free—meaning self-dependent. Under the monarch the citizens do not exist for his sake; on the contrary, it is the monarch who exists for his citizens.
In the closing paragraph of the first book we hear the desperate voice of Dante the poet warning all humanity. Rarely do we hear this voice in the poet’s Italian or Latin prose works, where his intention is to remain as objective as possible. It is a preview of what is to come, for Dante makes frequent and effective use of this device of authorial intervention in the Divine Comedy. After presenting his case for the necessity of a monarch in a logical and scholastic fashion, as Saint Thomas Aquinas or Aristotle might have done, Dante the poet bursts forth:
O humanity, in how many storms must you be tossed, how many shipwrecks must you endure, so long as you turn yourself into a many-headed beast lusting after a multiplicity of things! You are ailing in both your intellectual powers and heart. You pay no heed to the unshakable principles of your higher intellect, nor tune your heart to the sweetness of divine counsel when it is breathed into you through the trumpet of the Holy Spirit: “Behold how good and pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity. ”
In book II Dante is primarily concerned with showing that the Romans were justified in assuming imperial power. He attempts to prove his thesis first by a number of arguments based on rational principles, then by the principles of the Christian faith.
In book III the poet proposes the question he has from the start wanted to ask and can ask only now that he has prepared the way in books I and II: whether the authority of the Holy Roman emperor is directly dependent on God or whether his authority comes indirectly from another, a vicar or minister of God, meaning the pope. Dante ignores the vast historical distance between the Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire, preferring to see the two governments joined by historical and political continuity. First Dante must refute those scriptural arguments (based on Genesis 1:16: “And God made two great lights: the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night”) used by his opponents to show the dependence of the emperor on the pope. Having done this, he turns to those historical arguments that must be refuted. The main one he must deal with is the very one that up to this point in his treatise he has been able to cope with only in a rather subjective, emotional, and even poetic way: the painful reality of the Donation of Constantine, a document that purported to prove that the emperor Constantine had invested Pope Sylvester with temporal authority. Dante proceeds by means of his two preferred sources: Scripture and philosophy (from Matthew and, on this occasion, Aristotle).
Man, who participates in two natures—one corrupt (the body), the other incorruptible (the soul)—has a twofold goal, and since he is the only being who participates in both corruptibility and incorruptibility, he has a goal for his body and a goal for his soul. God, who never errs, has, then, given man two goals: happiness in this life and happiness in the eternal life. The pope leads mankind to eternal life in accordance with revelation, while the emperor leads mankind to temporal happiness in accordance with philosophical teaching. The temporal monarch, who must devote his energies to providing freedom and peace for men as they pass through the “testing time” of this world, receives his authority directly from God.
Intellectual perfection, the happiness of this world, can therefore be attained without the Church. With proper guidance from the universal monarch, man can regain the happiness of the earthly paradise—this is a dangerous conclusion that can easily follow from Dante’s arguments in his treatise, and one that Dante himself does not draw. Not surprisingly, the book was placed on the Index of Forbidden Books. Unfortunately for Dante, what he wished and wrote for in the De monarchia did not come about. It is for this reason that the poet’s main political focus shifted from the empire to the Church when he wrote the Divine Comedy. With the death of Henry VII, Dante’s hopes for the empire and the universal monarch began to fade; he was forced to put aside his ideal and face facts: a monarch and an empire would not overcome the power of the pope and the Church.
While Dante divides temporal and spiritual authority in the De mon- archia by means of ingenious logic and scholastic arguments (and in the Divine Comedy by its larger allegorical structure), his masterpiece reveals the sad truth that temporal and spiritual authority are often in the same hands. There are many passages that lament this fact. In the Purgatorio (canto XVI), to cite one of the more famous passages, Marco Lombardo tells the pilgrim why the world has gone bad (“ la cagion che ‘l mondo ha fatto reo”: 106-112):
On Rome, that brought the world to know the good, once shone two suns that lighted up two ways: the road of this world and the road of God.
The one sun has put out the other’s light, the sword is now one with the crook—and fused together thus, must bring about misrule,
since joined, now neither fears the other on
e.
No one is quite sure if Dante is the author of a pedantic little essay written in Latin with the title Questio de aqua et terra (Discourse on the Nature of Water and Earth). According to a statement attached to the original manuscript, the essay is in essence a lecture delivered at Verona in 1320. It consists of twenty-four brief chapters that debate in detail the question of whether or not the water of the sea anywhere rises higher than land emerging from it. The document was first published in 1508 by G.B. Moncetti, who claimed that he had copied it from an autograph manuscript of Dante’s; the manuscript, however, was never found.
Among Dante’s other minor works we find his two pastoral odes in Latin, addressed to Giovanni del Virgilio, who was a professor of Latin at the University of Bologna, where Dante at one time had probably studied. The exchange of Latin hexameters between the two men took place when Dante was staying in Ravenna some two years before his death. In his verses Giovanni del Virgilio reprimands Dante for writing his great poem in Italian rather than Latin. The eclogues are interesting insofar as they reveal Dante’s mood toward the end of his life: he seems to be playful, happy, and at peace with himself. Also evident in these verses is the poet’s pathetic wish to return to his fair city to receive the laurel crown, as well as his feelings and hopes for the Divine Comedy.