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Peter Critchley

Dante and the Baptistry


I am noting the identification in some parts of the contemporary political culture of medievalism and Dante with white supremacy, far right politics, and anti-liberal authoritarianism. Such identification is a direct challenge to the views I shall be setting out in my book on Dante and therefore merit a response. I intend to keep the response brief, lest the positive presentation of my argument come to be lost in the endless and fruitless controversialising of a sophist age which reduces the true, the good, and the beautiful to functions of power and power relations. In this reductionism and deconstructionism, this age is systematically divisive, opening up or intensifying fractures whilst lacking the means of and will for reconciliation. This age is so out of kilter with any truth other than the one that its divided tribes choose, that someone like me – seeking to unify in love – is in exile.


That says everything about this age and what Max Weber referred to as its ‘warring gods’ and nothing about the past. It was one short step from the idea that individuals are free to choose the good as they see fit, to individuals choosing the truth in like manner. Weber sought to retain the science whilst conceding the relegation of ethics to the status of mere value judgements. Nietzsche knew it to be untenable. The true, the good, the beautiful all go the same way for the same reason,


The capacity of this age to poison everything it draws into its endless rivalries that know no bounds is infinite. In The Comedy, Dante has Adam define original sin as going beyond the limits set, the ‘trespass of the boundary,’ ‘il trapasser del segno’, (Par 26: 117). That definition which any and all activities that go beyond the bounds of a healthy and flourishing life, but particularly applies to political activities in the current age. It’s an age of transgression within the entire social, moral, and cultural ecology. What kind of society destroys itself by transgressing planetary boundaries? This one.


Cacciaguida’s speech in The Comedy contrasts Florence’s past with its present. The passage emphases the virtuous quality of the city’s ancient citizenship (Par 15: 130-132):


Florence, within her ancient ring of walls—

that ring from which she still draws tierce and nones—

sober and modest, lived in tranquillity.


Par: 15: 97-98


In canto 16, reference to two great monuments of civic patriotism, ‘Mars and the Baptist,’ highlight the destructive unnaturalness of expansion beyond appropriate limits (16: 47), and establish the sacred barriers to Florentine expansion. Dante’s point here applies generally, whether we refer to God’s plan of justice or planetary boundaries (all things are enfolded within God). The recovery of the sacred cultivates due recognition of the cosmic, natural, social, and civil limits and serves to constrain transgressive behaviour.


Florence Baptistry Restoration – behind the scenes in pictures


"My beautiful San Giovanni," as Dante describes the Baptistry in The Comedy.


These words present an image of a physical simplicity and modesty that is contained within a small geographical space, indicating a geometrical, circle-based purity of appropriate size and scale. It is an image of proportion, balance, and symmetry. The reverence for the human-made monuments is part of a greater reverence for those things beyond human creation. The city walls, the Baptistry, etc define the space contained within the walls to the eye, and train the vision on a respect for boundaries.


In his speech, Cacciaguida describes how excessive civic expansion disturbs and even destroys the:


Not yet had your Uccellatoio’s rise

outdone the rise of Monte Mario,

which, too, will be outdone in its fall.


Par 15: 109-111


The proportions of the city in its entirely ought to be visible from a nearby hillside with a commanding view of the whole, from whose heights its size and scale can be measured. Cacciaguida’s image of the integration of cityscape and landscape cautions against the commercially expanding Florence’s attempts to rival and even outdo her mother-city of Rome.

The view that Dante expresses is Aristotelian in origin. In Book Seven of the Politics, Aristotle addresses the question of quantity and size, going into detail on the appropriate scale of the ideal polis. Aristotle is clear that the greatness of a public community is determined not by quantity and size but by scale. Aristotle rejects the view that equates demographic and territorial size with greatness. Quantity in terms of numbers and resources is important but not decisive. Quantity and size must be evaluated in relation to appropriate scale. As Aristotle argues, a polis with too large a population and an area cannot have a ‘good legal government … Law [nomos] is a form of order, and good law must necessarily mean good order, but an excessively large number cannot participate in order: to give it order would surely be a task for divine power, which holds the universe together. Hence the polis also must necessarily be the most beautiful with whose magnitude it combines the above-mentioned limiting principle; for certainly beauty is usually found in number and magnitude, but there is a due magnitude for a polis as there is for all things – animals, plants, tools’, otherwise it will lose ‘its true nature’ as well as its functional efficiency. Aristotle’s conclusion makes it clear ‘that the best limiting principle for a polis is the largest expansion of the population with a view to self-sufficiency that can be taken in one view’. It would fail to do justice to the magnificence of Aristotle’s conception here to state that these views anticipate the work of social ecologists by hundreds of centuries. That this social ecology is also a moral and political ecology is made clear in Dante’s presentation.


Dante develops this theme in many ways. His notion of the city-limits is something that is expressed aurally as well as visually, its extent marked by the sound of the bells of Badio, the abbey-church set next to the walls of the cerchia antica, and their carrying power. In striking the hours, the bells measure out the civic and religious day. This regular patterning of sound harmonises the day-to-day activities of the inhabitants of the virtuous city, whose orderly rhythms of life are described in terms of a moderation and propriety that proceeds within moral, civil, and natural bounds.


Dante’s sense of Florentine patriotism, loyalty, and citizenship is manifested in the wish he expresses to return to the sheepfold and to receive the crown of a poet laureate in the Baptistry Church that lies at the symbolic civic and religious heart of the city. But he is prepared to wait on Providence for the fulfilment of his wish, expressing it as he does with a hypothetical, subjunctive ‘continga’ (‘should it come to pass’). The implication is that the return is conditional upon the triumph of truth and justice. Dante’s civic patriotism is not blind to greater realities.


And his notion of authority is one of its proper constitution.


There is a massive war going on in US Catholicism, and someone writing on Dante is in an awfully vulnerable position. The far right are at war with the liberals, and in the public world these are the only options. I affirm other, richer, possibilities that integrate authority and autonomy, rejecting the ontology that, in separating individuality and sociality, has us crashing on the twin reefs of libertarianism and authoritarianism. Massimo Fagglioli is very much on the side of liberal Catholicism side here, aligning Joe Biden with Pope Francis and castigating the re-emergence of Catholic anti-liberalism (also presented as a post-liberalism).

Can Joe Biden save American Catholicism from the Far Right?


At the same time, right wing conservatives are presenting the case for authoritarian rulers – philosopher kings - against a liberalism that is failing. This from Michael Warren Davis in The American Conservative: ‘Neither a fascist nor a communist, the benevolent dictator was practical, and his cornerstone was "depoliticization." Portugal's 20th-century philosopher-king may be the ideal model of a leader for our times.’


Waiting for our Salazar


Many are wondering how seriously we should be taking such views. The view expressed in The American Conservative seems marginal, and has been criticised by conservatives as well as liberals. But there is a growing tendency towards authoritarian solutions that are not merely anti-liberal, but anti-democratic most of all. The tensions within liberal democracy are exploding, and pressuring people into making the wrong choices. Liberalism and democracy are very uneasy partners, and have been since John Stuart Mill warned of the dangers of the ‘tyranny of the majority.’ Liberalism is agnostic on the good, creating a neutralised public sphere which allows individuals to choose the good as they see fit, so long as it does no harm. Since human beings are social beings, individuating themselves only in community with others, it has always been well-nigh impossible to draw the line on harm. It is a fragmented view based on the notion of the discrete, pre-political/pre-social individual. That individual is an abstraction, and generates a libertarianism in practice that, in dissolving boundaries, has a tendency to incite an equally abstract authoritarianism by way of reaction. As liberalism that has shed its metaphysical assumptions and become an explicitly conventional and political doctrine can work only within stable moral and socio-economic conditions. It does nothing to establish such stability through social support networks. The character of individuals was central to an older doctrine which saw human life in holistic terms. This tradition was discarded in favour of the right of the individual to choose the good as he or she sees fit. Liberalism can survive on that basis only so long as the moral, civic, and social stabilizers are in place. Without support, these erode and disappear, leaving public life as a battleground of rival goods, what is defined as a conflict pluralism. The character of individuals and the quality of their decisions – the goods the individuals pursue – doesn’t matter, so long as there is non-interference and non-harm in any immediate sense. The sense of the whole and the long term is lost, and with it the sense of the harm caused by the aggregate of uncoordinated subjective choices. Hence the way in which the antinomies of liberal democracy are being exposed, and destructively so. Liberals clearly hold a notion of the good, and yet lack the holistic and authoritative framework that enables them to defend and advance that good. Democratic challenges to the failures of the liberal order are being castigated as populism, and liberals can do little in response other than defend liberalism against a democracy that is summing an awful lot of bad choices. There is no way out of this dilemma, other than straightjacketing or discarding democracy and hence embracing an outright authoritarian imposition. In resisting authoritarians, liberals either stand and fall on their failing principles, or assert them in more explicitly authoritarian forms.


In a democracy, the character of the individuals composing the demos matters. Hence the need to bring back an older tradition and cultivate the moral and intellectual virtues. That is not liberalism. It may be post-liberal, retaining the rights – which themselves draw on a pre-liberal tradition of natural law – and the achievements and emancipations, but buttressing them within an integral moral habitus.


I would suggest we take the views being expressed very seriously indeed, not by defending a liberalism that is palpably failing but by identifying what it takes to establish a flourishing humanity. I would also be inclined to take this increasing taste for philosopher kings very seriously, for the reason that it is present not only on the right – whose motivations are all too transparent – but also on the environmental left and its repeated insistence that the climate is ‘beyond politics’ and ‘beyond left and right.’ That’s a prominent depoliticizing drive in contemporary politics and, with its motto of ‘follow the science,’ has a ready-made mass audience.


I’m currently writing on Dante and his notion of a universal monarchy. His emperor can easily be portrayed as a depoliticised and authoritarian philosopher-king. There are enough similarities to make it easy for critics to dismiss the view as authoritarian and illiberal. But that would be superficial. This is the book that this age, lost in its own dark wood, needs. The contemporary terrain is about as unreceptive to the message as it could be. But that’s precisely why the book is needed – the age has lost its bearings and can’t find its way back home without guidance. I wouldn't bank on winning any popularity stakes. After from the opening chapter, I'm avoiding any attempt to address contemporary political issues directly and am going for a straight presentation without juxtaposition.


"He rarely spoke unless addressed and then with sudden and clear eloquence. He liked solitude where his thoughts would not be interrupted, though he had an exceptional aptitude for concentration, whatever his circumstances. Once in an apothecary's shop in Siena, when handed a book he had very much wanted to read, he propped it up on a counter. Outside a great festival was held, with displays of horsemanship and dancing before a noisy crowd. He was there from midday to sunset, never lifting his eyes from the book, and when afterwards he was asked how he could have missed such a festival, it appeared he had known nothing of it. Like Coleridge, he was obviously 'a library cormorant.'"

-William Anderson, Dante the Maker



Gustav Dore, The Angel of Peace indicating where to ascend.


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